Some Iraq scientists are cooperating in the hunt for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, including leading searchers to sensitive sites, according to David Kay, the CIA's adviser on the search for weapons.
After appearing this morning for three hours before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Kay told reporters, "We are gaining the cooperation, the active cooperation of Iraqis who were involved in that program. We are, as we speak, involved in sensitive exploitation of sites that we are being led to by Iraqis."
While Kay said "solid evidence" is being produced, it would not be made public "until we have full confidence it is solid proof of what we're to talk about."
Kay took issue with a story in today's Washington Post that quoted administration sources as saying the Iraqi Survey Team, which Kay is helping direct, is studying documents but not visiting sites.
Kay said sites being visited are new and "almost every one of them is one that we did not know about until we were led to it by Iraqis or the documentation we have seized."
Six elderly Iraqi Jews were airlifted on a Jordanian jet from Baghdad to Israel in a secret immigration mission this weekend.
The mission, entitled Ezra Me'Zion [Help from Zion], was jointly coordinated by the Jewish Agency and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which have been investigating the status of the Jewish community in the country since the American war against Iraq. [...]
Jews were exiled 2,700 years ago by King Nebuchadnezzar to Babylonia, where they formed one of the most influential Jewish Diaspora communities whose crowning achievement was the compilation of the Babylonian Talmud. In the early 1950s some 130,000 Iraqi Jews immigrated to Israel during the "Ezra and Nehemiah" campaign, named after the Babylonian Jewish leaders referenced in the Bible. An additional 10,000 Jews gradually the country gradually left the country during the ensuing years. [...]
Although the remnant of the once-flourishing Diaspora community now live in poverty and fear, 29 Iraqi Jews declined the offer to relocate to Israel.
The remaining Jews do not function as a community, do not attend services in Baghdad's Meir Tweig Synagogue, and have almost no contact with each other. Most rarely leave their homes in fear that their Jewish identity will be discovered.
HIA Vice President Rachel Zelon described the poor living conditions of Iraqi Jews, whose possessions were confiscated by the state during Saddam Hussein's regime: "Most of them live in bitter poverty in subhuman conditions...The small Jewish community has been living in a society that hates Israel and despises Jews. Most of them tried to hide their Jewish identities, telling only close friends."
The observer I write of is a liberal, even though he is very bright and has been extensively educated (Yale, Rhodes scholar, Supreme Court clerk). What brought him to utter despair was the nomination a fortnight ago of Janice Rogers Brown to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. What is wrong here, in his view, is the following:
-- The D.C. Circuit is the second most influential court in the United States. Its decisions are often if not themselves dispositive, way stations to the Supreme Court on constitutional issues. An ill-advised nomination to a relatively obscure court of appeals is less damaging, potentially, than a nomination to this court.
-- Ms. Brown's deliberative qualifications are inconspicuous. She sits now on the California Supreme Court, where she has done nothing of note. Before that she was legal affairs secretary to Gov. Pete Wilson. There she exercised administrative responsibilities and served as legal liaison between the governor's office and the executive departments. Before that, she practiced law, specializing in transportation and housing.
-- She has ruled against affirmative action and against abortion rights.
-- Ms. Brown is an African-American. She would be the third woman appointed to the Supreme Court, if she traveled from the D.C. Court upstairs, that being the implicit logic in her nomination. To filibuster against a black woman would test the mettle of the hardiest liberal, leaving us with a journey undertaken that would land an(other) ideologue on the Supreme Court of the United States.
King Mohammed of Morocco has declared that Islamic parties will be banned, insisting he is the North African country's only representative of Islam. [...]
On the eve of King Mohammed's anniversary, Algeria offered to end decades of tension with its neighbour, and to re-establish links. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika told Morocco that he wanted "to close ranks and strengthen relations ... between our two countries".
Both countries want to please the US and are likely to be responsive to American desires to secure oil and gas supplies, and to guarantee stability in the region. The rapprochement is thought to augur a possible solution to the Western Sahara conflict...
North Korea now appears to be ready to talk to the United States and four other nations about its nuclear weapons program in what could be a significant diplomatic thaw, Bush administration officials said today.
The North Korean government has long insisted on one-on-one talks with Washington on nuclear issues, but the Bush administration has always rejected that idea, saying it would not give in to what it called "blackmail."
So if North Korea has indeed shifted its stance, and if the shift is more than momentary, the way could be open for talks that would include not only diplomats from Pyongyang and Washington but representatives from China, South Korea, Russia and Japan as well. There was no immediate word on where or when these new talks might take place
West African leaders committed Thursday to deploy the first peace troops to warring Liberia by the start of next week, and said President Charles Taylor would go into exile three days later.
The leaders, meeting in Ghana, agreed to send a vanguard of 1,500 peacekeepers, expected to be two battalions from Nigeria. Ghana, Mali, Benin, Senegal and Togo also have promised 3,250 soldiers for an eventual 5,000-strong force. [...]
In Monrovia, tens of thousands of Liberians emerged from hiding places Thursday to welcome a West African-U.S. advance team they hoped signaled the imminent arrival of peacekeepers.
People in Liberia's capital passed one of the quietest nights in the last two months of rebel offensives against government forces. Gunfire rattled, but there was some relief from the rocket and mortar volleys of recent days, allowing starving families to scurry out in search of food.
The advance team of 10 West African and U.S. officials, which is led by a Nigerian commander and has one American, set off jubilant celebrations in Monrovia as it passed shacks with tin roofs peeled back by explosives. Unexploded shells laid in the streets.
''This is a sign of peace coming,'' refugee Hamilton Woods said with a smile.
"I think it is very important for our society to respect each individual, to welcome those with good hearts, to be a welcoming country," Mr. Bush said....
"I am mindful that we're all sinners, and I caution those who may try to take the speck out of the neighbor's eye when they got a log in their own," the president said, invoking a biblical passage from the Gospel of St. Matthew....
Gay-rights activists took offense at Mr. Bush's comment that "we're all sinners," interpreting the remark as directed at them.
"While we respect President Bush's religious views, it is unbecoming of the president of the United States to characterize same-sex couples as "sinners,'" said Matt Foreman, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's executive director. "It's also sad that, at a moment in history that cries out for leadership and moral courage, President Bush has instead opted for the divisive, anti-gay politics of the past."
Former Vice-President Al Gore is coming under pressure from political supporters and friends to jump into the 2004 presidential campaign even though he ruled himself out in December.
Gore’s spokesperson denied that there was any change of plans, but a former Democratic National Committee official close to Gore told The Hill he believes the former vice president may enter the Democratic primary this fall. [...]
A Time/CNN poll conducted between May 21 and 22 showed that if Gore changed his mind and ran for president, 40 percent of Democrats and Independents who lean Democratic nationwide would vote for him. The Democratic runners-up, Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.), Sen. John Kerry (Mass.), and Rep. Dick Gephardt (Mo.), would each draw 7 percent of that vote. [...]
The fluid situation has apparently kept a core group of Democratic fundraisers who played key roles in Gore’s 2000 campaign to remain aloof from the current candidates despite being courted intensely.
Since the Enlightenment, rationalists have liked to cite witch-burning as a prime example of medieval ignorance and religious (usually Catholic) bigotry run amok. (Leftists today still denounce it as a cynical plot by the strong against the weak.) Writing history that way was simple: Historians catalogued horrors, disparaged religion (or at least someone else's religion), and celebrated the triumph of science and liberal government. The history of witchcraft seemed a settled issue in 1969 when Hugh Trevor-Roper published his classic essay, "The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries."
[H]istorians have now realized that witch-hunting was not primarily a medieval phenomenon. It peaked in the 17th century, during the
rationalist age of Descartes, Newton, and St. Vincent de Paul. Persecuting suspected witches was not an elite plot against the poor; nor was practicing witchcraft a mode of peasant resistance. Catholics and Protestants hunted witches with comparable vigor. Church and state
alike tried and executed them. It took more than pure Reason to end the witch craze.
Nor were witches secret pagans serving an ancient Triple Goddess and Horned God, as the neopagans claim. In fact, no witch was ever executed for worshiping a pagan deity. Matilda Gage's estimate of nine million women burned is more than 200 times the best current estimate of 30,000 to 50,000 killed during the 400 years from 1400 to 1800-a large number but no Holocaust. And it wasn't all a burning time. Witches were hanged, strangled, and beheaded as well. Witch-hunting was not woman-hunting: At least 20 percent of all suspected witches were male. Midwives were not especially targeted; nor were witches liquidated as obstacles to professionalized medicine and mechanistic science.
This revised set of facts should not entirely comfort Catholics, however. Catholics have been misled-at times deliberately misled-about
the Church's role in the witch-hunts by apologists eager to present the Church as innocent of witches' blood so as to refute the Enlightenment theory that witch-burning was almost entirely a Catholic phenomenon. Catholics should know that the thinking that set the great witch-hunt in motion was developed by Catholic clerics before the Reformation. [...]
Slowly, the critics were vindicated, and ashes cooled all across Europe during the 18th century. This was no simple triumph of Enlightenment wisdom. Witch beliefs persisted-as they do today-but witches no longer faced stakes, gallows, or swords. The great witch-panics had left a kind of psychic weariness in their wake. Realizing that innocents had been cruelly sent to their deaths, people no longer trusted their courts' judgments. As Montaigne had written 200 years earlier, "It is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have a man roasted alive because of them."
After a 20th century unmatched for bloodshed, the world today is in no position to disparage early modern Europe. Witch-hunts have much in common with our own political purges, imagined conspiracies, and rumors of ritualized child abuse. Our capacity to project enormities on the enemy Other is as strong as ever.
The truth about witch-hunting is worth knowing for its own sake. But the issue has added significance for Catholics because it has provided
ammunition for rationalists, pagans, and radical feminists to attack the Church. It is helpful to know that the number of victims has been grossly exaggerated, and that the reasons for the persecutions had as much to do with social factors as with religious ones.
But although Catholics have been fed comforting errors by overeager apologists about the Church's part in persecuting witches, we must face our own tragic past. Fellow Catholics, to whom we are forever bound in the communion of saints, did sin grievously against people accused of witchcraft. If our historical memory can be truly purified, then the smoke from the Burning Times can finally disperse.
Proponents of school choice today find themselves in much the same position that the social-engineering Left inhabited after LBJ's sweep a generation ago. Their ideas are ascendant, they stand on the side of social justice, they have strong allies and spokespersons, and are winning prominent legal battles. Yet amidst the fruits of victory, something is missing: full approval from the mass of the American middle class.
Like the architects of LBJ's Great Society, voucherites express puzzlement as to why many suburbanites don't share their enthusiasm for school choice. Increasingly, I find myself in education reform meetings where voucher advocates end up quietly berating white suburban families for showing insufficient regard for the education of disadvantaged urban children. Conservative school choice proponents nod along as compelling advocates for the urban underclass--like Howard Fuller, Robert Aguirre, and Floyd Flake--voice frustration that suburban whites have not fully embraced choice as a way to free minority children from failed urban schools.
That's no way to win a policy fight. Thirty years ago, the Great Society's champions berated and nagged middle-class America smack into the arms of the opposition. Enthralled by their own virtue and the elegance of their domestic policy prescriptions, Great Society liberals forgot about simple democratic notions like self-interest, concern about unintended consequences, and the public's natural risk aversion. They tried to guilt-trip the public into supporting their bold reforms. But showing the caution and good sense typical of a democratic majority, voters eventually opted for Republicans and moderate Democrats who were less likely to belittle their reservations.
Conservative advocates for school vouchers risk repeating this mistake. The dominant wings of the voucher movement are free-marketers on the one hand, and urban minorities tired of waiting for public school improvement on the other. The result has been a sometimes awkward marriage that has permitted conservatives to claim the potent language of civil rights, and tempted Republicans into believing they could make political inroads with black and Latino voters.
What these advocates have overlooked is the resistance to vouchers and other choice plans among suburban homeowners. While vouchers routinely win the support of 70 percent or more of urban populations, support levels are barely half that in the suburbs, even in favorably worded polls. This resistance has made voucher proponents increasingly frustrated. Are suburbanites just too naive and timid to see the problems with today's inefficient school monopolies? Or do they not care about issues of equity and equal opportunity?
It's time for choice proponents to recognize that suburban resistance to school choice is entirely rational, based largely on self-interest, and unlikely to go away. Otherwise the political clumsiness of voucherites could eventually create an unfortunate suburban backlash against school choice--in much the same way that ramrodding the Great Society programs through did in the late 1970s.
This Article examines the political economy of school choice and focuses on the role of suburbanites. This group has received little attention in the commentary but is probably the most important and powerful stakeholder in choice debates. Suburbanites generally do not support school choice pol- icies either public or private. They are largely satisfied with the schools in their neighborhoods and want to protect the physical and financial independence of those schools, as well as suburban property values, which are tied to the perceived quality of local schools. School choice threatens the independence of suburban schools by creating the possibility that outsiders, especially urban students, will enter suburban schools and that local funds will exit local schools.
When suburbanites face threats to their schools, they fight back, and they usually win. As this Article documents, sub- urbanites succeeded in insulating their schools from prior education reforms, including efforts to integrate schools and alter school funding regimes. A similar pattern is emerging in school choice plans, almost all of which work to protect the physical and financial autonomy of suburban schools and residents. If this pattern continues, school choice plans will be geographically constrained, will tend to be intradistrict, and will exist primarily in urban districts. These constraints will limit the ability of school choice to stimulate student academic improvement, racial and socioeconomic integration, and productive competition among public schools. Simply put, limited school choice plans will have limited impact, so that school choice will be neither a panacea, as its proponents argue, nor a serious threat to traditional public schools, as its opponents contend. To achieve the full theoretical benefits of school choice, we suggest that the choices offered to students must be broadened, especially in ways that will pro- vide greater opportunities for socioeconomic integration. In the final Part of the Article we consider ways to do so, including through increased access to government-funded, though not necessarily government-operated, preschools.
Abstract:
There is some evidence, from past social science studies, that school finance reform is seen by citizens--and especially white parents--through a racial lens. This Article picks up that point--which is nothing more than a hint, really--and tries to explore the role of race in school finance reform by surveying the history and success of minority districts in school finance reform litigation. The Article examines how predominantly minority districts have fared in school finance litigation (and subsequent legislative reforms) as compared to predominantly white districts, and concludes that minority districts fare worse than their white counterparts both in court and before the legislature. Based on this and other evidence, this Article contends that there are strong reasons to believe that the racial composition of the school district plays an influential role in determining success or failure in school finance litigation and legislative reform.
As the Article explains, this evidence has important academic, historical, and practical implications. Indeed, if the Article is correct in asserting that race plays an influential role in school finance reform, school finance scholars and practitioners should begin paying closer attention than they have to the dynamics of race relations and school desegregation; historians and legal scholars should recognize with added confidence the wisdom of the NAACP's desegregation strategy; and civil rights attorneys, courts, critical race theorists, and conservative critcs of desegregation should hesitate before abandoning the goal of desegregation.
In "The Political Economy of School Choice," James Ryan and Michael Heise make a compelling argument that suburbs have little tolerance for anything that impinges on their safe haven. Through white-flight and bright-flight they chose to live in the suburbs and send their children to better public schools. They are not about to relinquish the advantage and, under the law, they cannot be forced to take part in another district's school choice program. It's each district for itself. "Suburbanites, by and large, are not wild about school choice, either public or private. Suburban parents are generally satisfied with the public schools their children attend, and they want to protect both the physical and the financial sanctity of these schools." It is a position, say the authors, that contributed to the failure of school finance litigation which sought to shift education dollars away from the local tax base to a uniform system of allocation; and it will likely make school choice little more than a passing trend. Pockets of intra-district choice may appear, but the movement will remain isolated and do nothing to encourage soci-economic mixing and inter-district choice programs.
Ryan and Heise make another insightful political observation that could prove quite important. There are gaps between the leadership and the core constituents of the Democratic and Republican parties on the matter of school choice. The leadership of the Democratic Party remains opposed to school choice while African Americans, especially the younger generations, consistently express strong support for vouchers. Republican leaders support more competition in public education and more school choice, but white collar suburb constituents tend to oppose the idea. It is classic "not in my backyard" (NIMBY), to be sure. It appears to be an incongruity, say the authors, that will not soon go away and that comports with the idea that "crisis exists in the cities but not in the suburbs and that some efforts should be made to address those crises, provided that doing so does not simultaneously threaten suburban school autonomy."
In New York, as in other states, Republican voters are concentrated in the suburbs. Although vouchers have been a bedrock conservative issue, suburban voters support their public schools, and Republican candidates may find support for vouchers politically risky.
"I think it's ripe if you have that minority voice come forward in New York," said Joseph P. Viteritti, director of the program on education and civil society at New York University. "It's going to emerge from the cities, not the suburbs, and it has to be a Democratic issue, not a Republican issue."
In Cleveland and Milwaukee, which have voucher programs, a similar dynamic has been at work. In both cities, the impetus for vouchers came from urban minority communities.
In Milwaukee, the fight for school vouchers was led by Polly Williams, a black single mother forced by unemployment to go temporarily on welfare. Drawn into politics by her unwillingness to have her child bused to a school outside her neighborhood, she was elected to the Wisconsin Assembly from the predominantly black Near North district of Milwaukee.
In Cleveland, one of the leaders of the voucher movement was Fannie Lewis, also the black mother of a school-age child, who was elected to the City Council from the low-income community of Hough.
Virginia Walden-Ford grew up a true believer in public schools. Her father was a top administrator in the District of Columbia school system and her sisters taught there.
But she now thinks blacks should get government financial aid to attend private schools. On Thursday, she joined a group of black parents, educators, pastors and politicians to launch an ad campaign for the idea that's been championed by Republican presidential candidate Gov. George W. Bush. [...]
Critics have little to worry about, said David Bositis, an expert on black voting patterns with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington.
"The Republican Party is not viewed by African Americans as a viable alternative, and vouchers are not going to change that," he said.
Even if more blacks do support voucher initiatives, that wouldn't be enough to get them enacted, he said. "Look at who will vote against it ... senior citizens, white suburbanites and the teachers unions. That's a winning combination."
Johnnie's pep talk uses basketball as a metaphor for the game of life. It's part of an intensive program to show these kids what it takes to succeed. Around the room are other adult mentors who have volunteered their time to shoot hoops with the kids, take them to sporting events, and supply informal coaching on the game of life. Many are teachers or principals in the Toronto school system, and all of them are black. One of the principals wears his hair in dreads, tied up in a ponytail. The school system is definitely doing something right.
But this program wasn't started by a bureaucrat. It's the brainchild of Chris Spence, a remarkable educator who is now, lucky for us, a school superintendent. He's an education entrepreneur, a passionate, committed leader determined to make a difference. The program he founded is called Boys to Men, and it's really about values, not just education. Its most important message is what it means to be a man. And the three key words are Pride, Dignity, Respect. [...]
Before this program, some of these kids have never been out of their own neighbourhoods. And far too many of them believe they'll live there all their lives. And doing well in school attracts suspicion, not respect.
"People say, 'You're selling out,' " says Andre Patterson, the school principal with the dreadlocks. "But I say, 'You're negotiating the system.' "
The other message the kids get drummed into them is that they will not wind up in the NBA. "The first thing black males identify with is their athletic ability," says Mr. Patterson. "We have to break down that image. The fact is that they have a better chance of becoming a doctor or lawyer than an NBA player. We need more mentors to come out and say it and do something about it."
Chris Spence always knew he wanted to teach in what are known as "special-needs" schools. When he walked into his first classroom 12 years ago, he recalls, the kids could scarcely believe their eyes. "I told you, I told you. . . . He is black and he is our teacher," they marvelled. The kids were in middle school, but some of them could barely write their names. He and some of the other teachers were deeply dismayed. They also were unwilling to settle for the status quo. "I never made peace with the fact that these kids were almost out of the race of life at such an early age because they lacked an education," he writes in his recently published school memoir. (It's called On Time! On Task! On a Mission!) "Our response to this was to have school on Saturdays, during vacations, and at night to make up the difference -- whatever it takes."
This was the start of Boys to Men, a program that has now expanded to two dozen schools. No bureaucrat dreamed it up. No one waited for a government grant to get it going. It's entirely a grassroots movement, and Chris Spence believes that's its strength.
The Iowa Electronic Markets, www.biz.uiowa .edu/iem/, has been predicting election results for 12 years using a system very much like the one that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon proposed.
One of the markets the Iowa exchange offered was in vote shares: what fraction of the vote went to the Democratic or Republican candidate. It is particularly easy to assess the outcome of such a market and to compare it with alternative forecasts, like public opinion polls.
As it turns out, these political stock markets provided somewhat better forecasts than polls right before the election--and they provide much better (and less volatile) forecasts several months before the elections. Thus, markets do best exactly where the public opinion polls and expert opinion polls are weakest.
This is not an isolated example. Similar markets have been organized to predict shifts in Federal Reserve monetary policy, the outcome of political conventions and sales of consumer products. The results are that markets typically perform at least as well, and generally better, than feasible alternatives, and they are much cheaper to organize. [...]
There is good reason to believe that a market set up to forecast the sort of political instability that leads to terrorism might work well, too. At least, there is enough reason to warrant an experiment, given the high payoff to having better forecasts of these events.
This is why the Pentagon thought it was important to finance research in this area.
The objections raised by politicians and opinion writers were generally based on misunderstandings of what was actually proposed.
It is people who trade, not countries, and people trade because it makes them better off. This is true if someone in Virginia trades with someone in Maryland, and it is also true if someone in Kansas trades with someone in Singapore.
Protectionists usually will admit that free trade is a good idea, at least in theory, but then argue that the "trade deficit" shows there's an imbalance that must be corrected. Yet, they offer no evidence for this hypothesis. I have trade deficits with my local supermarket, movie theater and gas station: I buy lots of things from them and they never buy anything from me. Why is that bad? Should politicians and bureaucrats be allowed to limit my freedom to make these purchases in order to "protect" me from a trade deficit?
The same analysis applies to the overall economy. At any given point in time, Virginia may have a trade deficit with Maryland and the United States may have a trade deficit with Germany. But these deficits are merely the result of millions of voluntary transactions between producers and consumers. And unless we're willing to assume that people are idiots, those transactions benefited both buyers and sellers. Would these people be better off if politicians and bureaucrats used quotas and trade taxes to hinder trade?
The evidence clearly says no. The 1930 Smoot-Hawley legislation was supposed to protect American jobs, but instead it helped cause record unemployment and the Great Depression. Countries today with high trade barriers - like Japan - suffer from anemic growth, while free-trade jurisdictions prosper. Unfortunately, protectionists won't heed economic arguments. They seem convinced that a trade deficit is like cancer, something that's always bad news.
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Wednesday that she feels responsible for the questionable statement in President Bush's State of the Union address about Iraqi plans to buy uranium in Africa.
"I certainly feel personal responsibility for this entire episode," she said in an interview on PBS' "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." "What I feel most responsible for is that this is detracting from the very strong case the president has been making."
Rice was the latest administration official, including CIA Director George Tenet and the president himself, to take responsibility for the
now-discredited claim. Rice has come under mounting criticism in connection with the speech, and has also been accused of making misleading remarks about what the White House knew before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
As WMD hysteria reaches a frenzied pitch, comments by the head of the U.S. team searching Iraq for WMD evidence should give pause to the "Bush lied" crowd.
Dr. David Kay--the 63-year-old former U.N. weapons inspector now heading up the American WMD team--recently remarked that the United States will be "starting to reveal" WMD evidence in six months.
Though he was circumspect at best, Dr. Kay?s comments could indicate that U.S. investigators know quite a bit more than they have revealed thus far.
Buzz inside the beltway has been intensifying in recent days that the administration may have significantly more evidence than it has publicly
released, and Dr. Kay's comments have triggered even more chatter. Some of it may be wishful thinking, but considering that some of the people doing the talking are administration officials, declarations that there are no WMDs may be premature.
Why would the Bush folks keep such politically high-value information secret?
The refund checks have started arriving, and for many residents here, the $400-a-child tax credit, part of President Bush's latest effort to stimulate the economy, could not come at a better time.
Matt Ross, a father of two, said he intended to pay a few bills and, with school starting in a few weeks, buy new clothes for his children. Robert and Sharee McCutcheon, who also have two children, said their money would go for school supplies and Christmas presents. Roger Kintz, father of two girls, including an aspiring Olympic gymnast who is competing this week in Detroit, said his money would help pay for the trip.
Bridgett Bedwell, the mother of two boys, was thinking about her family dentist. "I'm fixing to have braces for my kids' teeth," she said. "That check really helps me out, especially when the braces are costing me $4,000."
Spend. Spend. Spend. This is precisely what President Bush and Republican lawmakers were hoping for in enacting tax cuts that included an increase to $1,000 from $600 in the tax credit for children. Against concerns about the rising federal deficit (now projected at a record $455 billion) or the cost of maintaining troops in Iraq (almost $1 billion a week), supporters of the tax cuts, which passed the House largely on a party-line vote, argued that a sluggish economy was best improved by Americans' keeping more of their money so they could spend it. On Friday, the Treasury Department began mailing out the first of more than 25 million checks, $400 for each child who was 16 or younger in 2002.
Record producer Sam Phillips, who discovered Elvis Presley and helped usher in the rock 'n' roll revolution, died Wednesday. He was 80.
Phillips died at St. Francis Hospital, spokeswoman Gwendolyn McClain said. No details were immediately available about the cause of death or how long he had been hospitalized.
Phillips founded Sun Records in Memphis in 1952 and helped launch the career of Presley, then a young singer who had moved from Tupelo, Miss.
In the summer of 1953, Presley went to the Sun studio to record two songs for his mother's birthday. Phillips noticed him and decided Presley deserved a recording contract.
Phillips produced Presley's first record, the 1954 single that featured "That's All Right, Mama'' and "Blue Moon of Kentucky,'' and nine more.
"God only knows that we didn't know it would have the response that it would have,'' Phillips said in an interview in 1997.
"But I always knew that the rebellion of young people, which is as natural as breathing, would be a part of that breakthrough,'' he said.
Phillips was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. In 2000, the A&E cable network ran a two-hour biography called "Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock and Roll.'' [...]
Born Samuel Cornelius Phillips in Florence, Ala., Phillips worked as an announcer at radio stations in Muscle Shoals, Ala., and Decatur, Ala., and Nashville, Tenn., before settling in Memphis in 1945. Before founding Sun Records, he was a talent scout who recommended artists and recordings to record labels such as Chess and Modern. He also worked as an announcer in Memphis.
They control no statewide offices and are the minority party in both legislative chambers.
But for one month in California -- including a dramatic and exhausting 29-hour finale -- political strategists, lawmakers and others agreed: Republicans held all the cards.
"They won," declared a weary Democratic assemblyman, Lloyd Levine of Van Nuys, after the Assembly on Tuesday afternoon approved an overdue budget following an all-night session.
The central victory was simple. The $100 billion plan that will be sent to Gov. Gray Davis does not include the tax increases that Democrats, including Davis, had previously said they would insist upon to help fill the $38.2 billion budget deficit. [...]
[H]anging over this year's debate was the ongoing effort to recall Davis, focused largely on what his critics call his mishandling of state spending. Just as the Senate leaders finished a deal last week, state officials announced that the recall had qualified for the ballot and that an Oct. 7 election would be held.
"There was a political cloud over the whole debate," said Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento.
Then came a stumble that many considered key to pushing lawmakers into a budget deal.
A group of liberal Democrats were caught discussing the potential political gain from holding up a budget and the implications of the delay on the recall race.
Before the incident, observers say, Democrats may have been persuasive in their complaints that Republicans were holding up the budget to help the recall.
"I think that exposed Democrats," said Assemblyman John Campbell, R-Irvine. "I think it made a difference for them."
[U]S hostility to Cuba does not stem from the regime's human rights failings, but its social and political successes and the challenge its unyielding independence offers to other US and western satellite states. Saddled with a siege economy and a wartime political culture for more than 40 years, Cuba has achieved first world health and education standards in a third world country, its infant mortality and literacy rates now rivalling or outstripping those of the US, its class sizes a third smaller than in Britain - while next door, in the US-backed "democracy" of Haiti, half the population is unable to read and infant mortality is over 10 times higher. Those, too, are human rights, recognised by the UN declaration and European convention. Despite the catastrophic withdrawal of Soviet support more than a decade ago and the social damage wrought by dollarisation and mass tourism, Cuba has developed biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries acknowledged by the US to be the most advanced in Latin America. Meanwhile, it has sent 50,000 doctors to work for free in 93 third world countries (currently there are 1,000 working in Venezuela's slums) and given a free university education to 1,000 third world students a year. How much of that would survive a takeover by the Miami-backed opposition?
The historical importance of Cuba's struggle for social justice and sovereignty and its creative social mobilisation will continue to echo beyond its time and place: from the self-sacrificing internationalism of Che to the crucial role played by Cuban troops in bringing an end to apartheid through the defeat of South Africa at Cuito Cuanavale in Angola in 1988. But those relying on the death of Castro (the "biological solution") to restore Cuba swiftly to its traditional proprietors may be disappointed, while the Iraq imbroglio may have checked the US neo-conservatives' enthusiasm for military intervention against a far more popular regime in Cuba. That suggests Cuba will have to expect yet more destabilisation, further complicating the defence of the social and political gains of the revolution in the years to come. The greatest contribution those genuinely concerned about human rights and democracy in Cuba can make is to help get the US and its European friends off the Cubans' backs.
Presidential rivals Howard Dean and John Kerry, who have been at odds over national security, quarreled Wednesday over what Democrats should do with President Bush's tax cuts.
Poised to deliver remarks on the economy in Iowa and New Hampshire later in the day, the primary foes rushed to criticize each other, even if it meant upstaging their own speeches. Kerry fired the first salvo.
"Real Democrats don't walk away from the middle class," the Massachusetts senator said. "They don't take away a tax credit for families struggling to raise their children or bring back a tax penalty for married couples who are starting out or penalize teachers and waitresses by raising taxes on the middle class."
The Kerry campaign provided an advanced text of his remarks to The Associated Press, assailing Dean's call for a repeal of Bush's tax cuts.
Kerry's speech did not mention Dean by name, but aides made sure the speech was provided to the media before Dean addressed the Plumbers and Steamfitters Union in Iowa. Contacted for a response, Dean answered back in an interview.
"Real Democrats don't make promises they can't keep," the former Vermont governor said. "Working Americans have a choice: They can have the president's tax cuts or they can have health care that can't be taken away. They can't have both." [...]
Dean contended that Kerry's plan to retain some of the tax and provide health coverage will make him vulnerable to the other common complaint about Democrats: Big spender.
"That's one of the problems of the Democratic Party," Dean said in his speech.
Kerry's response: "Real Democrats are straight about who they'll fight for."
[A] touching relationship, long known to students of Camus's work, can be traced more fully now with the publication of Albert Camus & Jean Grenier: Correspondence 1932-1960 (University of Nebraska Press), translated by Jan F. Rigaud. These letters record a lifelong intellectual and spiritual friendship. Grenier began it by going out of his way as Camus's teacher to visit him in his poor home. Camus was encouraged by this show of respect to exert himself in order to become a worthy conversation partner. More concretely, Grenier convinced Camus's poor family to let him continue his education.
This had intellectual as well as personal dimensions. Grenier oversaw Camus's thesis on "Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism," a subject that attracted master and pupil alike for its intrinsic interest--a comparison of two high points of the human spirit, one Christian, one pagan--but also because it was a subject that had engaged a great ancient predecessor in the region, St. Augustine. Both were open to a larger horizon than was typical among contemporary intellectuals. Or as Camus was to formulate it later, Grenier "prevented me from being a humanist in the sense that it is understood today--I mean a man blinded by narrow certainties. ' Contrary to almost the whole of modern French thought, Camus believed that it was better to be "a good bourgeois than a bad intellectual or a mediocre writer," and he and Grenier strove to avoid the vanity and self-deception endemic to French intellectuals.
Both had intermittent attractions to Christianity, especially Catholicism, because, as Grenier put it, it reflected the principle that there is "no truth for man that is not incarnated." And Grenier could be merciless toward what he believed was a "dilettantism of despair" among many French intellectuals. But they were also put off by the harsh tone of many people in the French Church at the time, which seemed particularly offensive because of the Church's historical failings, as they saw it. Camus confesses at one point: "Catholic thought always seems bittersweet to me. It seduces me then offends me. Undoubtedly, I lack what is essential." That may be true, but it is also a sad commentary on Catholic history in France that these two good men, flawed and perhaps blinded as they may have been by certain modern intellectual currents, felt such ambivalence. The sense of guilt (personal and universal) in the later Camus is so palpable and profound that many people believe that had he not died at age 47, he would have eventually become a Christian. It1s a pious wish, but I have always thought it ignored certain invincible circumstances. These letters have not changed my mind.
But what a wonderful record of human honesty and affection they offer, especially for our time. Both had seen the results of murderous philosophies of human perfection, and Camus would be pilloried by the French intellectual establishment, particularly Jean-Paul Sartre, for his deep critique of Marxism in his L'Homme Revolte (The Rebel). In it, Camus argued that we have an obligation to rebel against injustice but must never allow that just impulse to become absolute revolution against the human condition. Because when we do, we turn into perpetrators of injustices worse than those we seek to eliminate. Or as he put it in the opening sentence of that work, a line that could almost serve as a motto for his and Grenier's work in the face of so much that was--and is--simply mad among French intellectuals: "There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic."
One of the unchallenged axioms of American civic religion is that each and every group of people on earth must consist of an "overwhelmingly vast majority of decent, hard-working, honest people, who want peace and are tolerant and freedom-loving and anti-violence."
It is an unchallengeable presumption of this theology that "vast majorities" of not only each and every racial/religious/ethnic group may be so described, but even vast majorities of each and any subgroup within society. Hence, we even sometimes hear assertions that the vast majority of prisoners, prostitutes, drug users, gang members, etc. are also decent, honest, peace-loving, honorable people.
The one imponderable in American civic theology is the idea that somewhere out there someplace there just might be a group of people - the majority of whom are not peace-loving or honest or tolerant. This belief in universal peacefulness in the minds of Americans is the main obstacle to Americans ever understanding the Middle East. The simple fact of the matter is that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Arabs, and the overwhelmingly vast majority of Moslems, are not peace-loving and are not opposed to violence. [...]
The vast majority of Moslems do not personally engage in violence and terror in their daily lives. The vast majority of Germans did not take personal part in the Holocaust. Indeed, as a blanket statement regarding Arabs in Israel, I would say that most Arabs behave in a far more polite daily manner than Jews, exhibiting on average far better manners and more consideration than do Jewish Israelis. But, of course, that is hardly the point.
Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards today proposed mandating government-subsidized health care coverage for all Americans under 21 and providing assistance to millions of lower-income adults.
The North Carolina senator, seeking to boost a campaign trailing badly in the polls, called for a new tax credit that parents could use to help buy health insurance for their children, either through private plans or the government's existing program for children. Every child would be required by the government to have insurance, which would be heavily subsidized for the poorest Americans. A family of four making around $60,000 would pay $30 per month to cover both children, Edwards said.
"If we are going fix this broken health care system, the responsible place to start is with the greatest injustice -- uninsured kids," Edwards said after touring a children's health facility here. More than 9 million Americans under the age of 18 do not have health coverage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The Foreign Office has again defended the Government's contraversial claim that Iraq had tried to acquire uranium for its nuclear weapons programme from the west African state of Niger.Now, on NPR this afternoon, they said (I'm paraphrasing) that "the President had taken responsibility for a widely discredited statement included in the State of the Union. The President had justified the war on Iraq largely on the basis the it had weapons of mass destruction."
In a letter to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC), it insists that there had been no need to include a 'health warning' on the claim in the Government's dossier on Iraqi weapons as it was confident in the underlying intelligence.
There has been growing controversy over the claim since the US Central Intelligence Agency publicly cast doubt over its validity, saying it should not have been included in President George Bush's State of the Union address.
Even before the war, the International Atomic Energy Authority said that documents it had received relating to the allegation had been crude forgeries.
Britain, however, has insisted that it received separate intelligence from a third country - widely assumed to be France - which it could not share with the Americans.
On the economy, we're all dunces. There's so much conflicting evidence that almost any story -- hopeful, dismal or in between -- can be told with conviction. You, too, can play Alan Greenspan. Although he's better informed, your story could turn out right. [...]
One problem is that we don't always know which numbers to believe. Consider jobs. Two government surveys disagree sharply. One asks businesses how many workers are on their payrolls; the other questions households about who's employed. Since early 2001 the payroll survey shows a job loss of 2.6 million; that figure is widely quoted. But the household survey shows a loss of only 108,000 since early 2001 and a gain of 1.9 million over the past year. Most economists trust the payroll survey, but David Wyss of Standard & Poor's thinks the household survey may be more reliable. He suspects that companies have hired "contract" workers who aren't on firms' payrolls but who count themselves as employed.
Who knows? Everyone's guessing. Confusion is the only honest conclusion.
The latest complaint regarding the habit of television news networks describing liberal political lobbyists as typical retirees complaining about the cost of prescription drugs comes from one of the lobbyists herself.
Barbara Kaufman, president of the senior citizen lobbying group, the Minnesota Senior Federation, was featured on ABC World News Tonight Friday, complaining about the high cost of prescription drugs. But there was no mention about her affiliation with organizations currently advocating a federal prescription drug entitlement, according to a Media Research Center transcript of the program.
Kaufman calls ABC's decision "misleading."
"I would have preferred it if [ABC News] had...identified me as the president of the Minnesota Senior Federation because I think that lends more credibility," Kaufman told CNSNews.com.
The US president, George Bush, today accepted personal responsibility for citing a controversial claim that the former Iraqi regime tried to obtain nuclear material in Africa.
"I take personal responsibility for everything I say, absolutely," the president said at a White House news conference when asked about the now discredited accusation.
For President Bush and the press corps that covers him, the month of July has been one long cat-and-mouse game. Five times, questioners have invited the president to take responsibility for the Iraq-uranium allegation that found its way into his State of the Union address. Five times, Bush has deflected the question.
QUESTION: Thank you, sir. Mr. President, many of your supporters believe that homosexuality is immoral. They believe that it's been given too much acceptance in policy terms and culturally. As someone who's spoken out in strongly moral terms, what's your view on homosexuality?
BUSH: Yes, I am mindful that we're all sinners. And I caution those who may try to take the speck out of the neighbor's eye when they've got a log in their own.
I think it's very important for our society to respect each individual, to welcome those with good hearts, to be a welcoming country.
On the other hand, that does not mean that somebody like me needs to compromise on an issue such as marriage. And that's really where the issue is headed here in Washington, and that is the definition of marriage. I believe in the sanctity of marriage. I believe a marriage is between a man and a woman. And I think we ought to codify that one way or the other. And we've got lawyers looking at the best way to do that. [...]
QUESTION: Mr. President, you often speak about the need for accountability in many areas.
I wonder then why is Dr. Condoleezza Rice not being held accountable for the statement that your own White House has acknowledged was a mistake in your State of the Union address regarding Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium? And also, do you take personal responsibility for that inaccuracy?
BUSH: I take personal responsibility for everything I say, of course. Absolutely. I also take responsibility for making decisions on war and peace. And I analyzed a thorough body of intelligence--good, solid, sound intelligence that led me to come to the conclusion that it was necessary to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
We gave the world a chance to do it. We had--remember, there was--again, I don't want to get repetitive here but it's important to remind everybody that there was 12 resolutions that came out of the United Nations because others recognized the threat of Saddam Hussein. Twelve times the United Nations Security Council passed resolutions in recognition of the threat that he posed. And the difference was is that some were not willing to act on those resolutions. We were, along with a lot of other countries, because he posed a threat. Dr. Condoleezza Rice is an honest, fabulous person, and America is lucky to have her service. Period.
QUESTION: Mr. President, with no opponent, how can you spend $170 million or more on your primary campaign?
BUSH: Just watch.
(LAUGHTER)
You know, let me talk about Al Qaida just for a second. I made the statement that we're dismantling senior management, and we are. Our people have done a really good job of hauling in a lot of the key operators. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Abu Zubaida. Ramzi--Ramzi alshibh or whatever the guy's name was.
(LAUGHTER)
Sorry, Ramzi, if I got it wrong.
(LAUGHTER)
Binalshibh. Excuse me.
After weeks of struggling to choose a leader, Iraq's American-picked interim government Wednesday named its first president -- a Shiite Muslim from a political party banned by Saddam Hussein. He will be the first of nine men serving one-month rotations leading postwar Iraq. [...]
Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite Muslim and chief spokesman for the Islamic Dawa Party, will serve as council president for August. The party once was based in neighboring Iran.
Bush's goal is a big one--to make the Republicans the natural, default party of government. Karl Rove, the president's chief political strategist, frequently mentions durable GOP dominance as a major goal of the Bush presidency. Bush seeks lasting conservative rule over American politics, completion of the rightward revolution begun by Ronald Reagan. The Bush administration is working steadily to create conservative dominance over political institutions, party and interest group alignments and the terms of policy debate.
In the terms of Yale University political scientist Stephen Skowronek, Bush is an "orthodox innovator" trying to adapt the Reagan approach for the 21st century. As James K. Polk restored the Democratic Party in the 1840s and Teddy Roosevelt reinvigorated the GOP at the turn of the 20th century, so Bush hopes to create a new Republican political coalition than can dominate national politics long after he leaves the White House.
The risk for such orthodox-innovators, according to Skowronek, is that their innovations split their coalitions and end their party's dominance, as Roosevelt's progressivism divided the GOP in 1912. So far, Bush has avoided that fate.
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
After a tremendous double explosion, believed caused by one or two torpedoes fired by an undetected Japanese submarine in a moonlit sea, the Indianapolis sank within fifteen minutes near Peleliu just past midnight July 30 [East Longitude date].
The 315 survivors were picked up 100 hours and more later after an unparalleled battle with the sea in which the only armor for most of the men were kapok lifejackets and courage. At least 200 lost the battle and drowned, some insane from exhaustion and the effects of sea water, sun and thirst. The remainder went down with the ship.
The ship's commander, Captain McVay, son of a retired admiral, was saved by one of the rescue vessels summoned to the scene when a Navy plane on routine anti-submarine patrol happened to sight some of the men in the water three and a half days after the ship had gone down. Captain McVay was one of the fortunate few in a life raft; the vessel sank so rapidly that only six rafts were released in time.
The Indianapolis was traveling without escort. This had been her frequent practice, and the men aboard were in the habit of saying to each other, three-fourths in jest, that "some day she was going to get it."
And "Get it she did," a haggard survivor, his skin blotched with the great running scabs of "immersion ulcers," remarked grimly today.
While many of the international and domestic problems of Gulf Arab monarchies have been building for years, the US overthrow of Iraq's government puts these issues in a different context. On the regional scene, this change has improved the security of these countries yet it has also opened new pressures - or opportunities - for domestic reform.
There were few states in the world that looked on the 2003 war in Iraq with greater fear and anticipation than the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC): Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). On one hand, the US-led military operation promised to overthrow a regime that had occupied one of their fellow states and repeatedly threatened the region's stability. On the other hand, it strained an already difficult situation for GCC states in balancing their need for close ties with Washington with the opposition of their peoples and the wider Arab-Islamic world to US policies in the Middle East. [...]
The GCC benefits as well from the new balance of power in the Gulf, in which the United States dominates without deployments to a set of sensitive regional bases. An Iraq that is stable, unified, democratic, wealthy, and in which Shi'ites participate in government in proportion to their demographic majority, could be a real force for stability in the region and a long-term check on Iranian power. Finally, recent US government commitments to reinvigorate the Palestinian-Israeli peace process and negotiate free trade treaties between the United States and the Middle East could help GCC states justify their close ties to Washington.
The new dynamic created by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's government also presents a number of long-term challenges to GCC states. Many of these challenges may exacerbate the long-standing problems that each GCC state faces, to differing degrees, in foreign affairs (military weakness in relation to neighboring states and the desire to balance domestic views on foreign policy with close US ties), domestic politics (reconciling tribal and autocratic governance with demands for liberalized, consultative political institutions; politically-inspired violence and Islam; and succession), and social-economic affairs (heavy dependence on petroleum exports and expatriate works, privatization, population growth, and the budgetary issues).
Serious economic and political disputes among GCC states have already exacerbated these problems and limited the ability of the states to speak in a single voice on international affairs. Any of the following scenarios - US failure to both rebuild Iraq and form a legitimate government in a timely manner, sustained Iraqi resistance to the US administration, a significant increase in Iranian influence with Iraq, and the emergence of a Shi'ite theocratic state in Iraq - together or individually could lead to a degree of instability in Gulf Arab societies larger than that of any period since the Iranian revolution in 1979.
The impact of such a future might even be worse than that of past impacts because of the ability of Arab satellite news networks and the Internet to deliver uncensored news rapidly and the close ethnic, tribal and religious linkages between the Gulf Arabs and Iraqis. A democratic Iraq would also be a more compelling client for the United States in the Gulf than the monarchies of the GCC, as well as a very potent symbol for Shi'ites and other groups pushing for change in Arab Gulf societies.
While it is still too early to make any definitive judgments as to what form the long-term impact of the war in Iraq will have on Gulf Arabs, this essay will argue that the governments of the GCC states and their peoples have an enormous amount at stake in the development process in Iraq and the need to reform their own societies generally. Though no GCC state is threatened by invasion or economic collapse in the near or medium term, Gulf Arabs must begin to reform their societies and develop new collective, integrated institutions with their allies to guarantee a secure and prosperous future.
WITH Lake Michigan sparkling in the distance and long beards flapping in the evening breeze, they clutched their turbans or ties and vowed to unite behind Chirinjeev Singh Kathuria. An assembly of Sikhs and Hindus and even a token Muslim set aside their differences and turned out on July 22nd on the roof of a posh downtown high-rise to endorse the first American from the Indian subcontinent ever to run for the Senate.
It is not going to be easy for Mr Kathuria, a millionaire Sikh businessman and a Republican. He remembers the insults he faced in airliners and on street corners after the terrorist attacks of 2001, when his Sikh turban and beard got him mistaken for a Muslim. He still carefully keeps an American flag pinned to his lapel.
There is also the fact that he is a Republican. Grover Norquist, a Republican anti-tax campaigner with influential friends in the White House, claims that “Indian-Americans are natural Republicans and natural conservatives.” They are on the whole well-educated and well-to-do; they respect family values, and like working for themselves. Bobby Jindal, a young Indian-American, is the leading Republican candidate for the governorship of Louisiana. Still, about 70% of them voted Democrat in the 2000 election.
The Indian-American community more than doubled in size in the 1990s, and now totals over 1.6m. That makes it America's third-largest Asian group. Mr Norquist and Karl Rove, George Bush's main strategist, have urged their party to embrace Muslim-Americans and Americans with roots in other parts of Asia. At the moment all seven Asian-Americans in Congress—five in the House and two senators—are Democrats.
"There will be a filibuster and we will prevail," Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said following a weekly luncheon meeting of Senate Democrats. "I would be surprised if there was not a filibuster." [...]
Meantime, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) scheduled cloture votes throughout this week in an effort to allow the Senate to vote on several other federal appeals court nominees. A cloture motion, which requires 60 votes, failed yesterday to overcome the filibuster of Judge Priscilla Owen of Texas. The Senate will take a cloture vote on Pryor Thursday; its failure would signal that the filibuster has begun.
[Alabama Attorney General William Pryor Jr.]'s nomination has been slowed because of an ongoing investigation into whether he lied about his fundraising activities while he led the Republican Attorneys General Association.
The Judiciary Committee voted 10 to 9, along party lines, last Wednesday to advance the 41-year-old Pryor's nomination. All nine Democrats voted "no, under protest."
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a former U.S. attorney for whom Pryor once worked, ignited the firestorm over religion at last week's committee vote.
"Can a person with orthodox Catholic views on abortion be affirmed as a federal judge? [Pryor's nomination] raises that question," he told The Hill yesterday.
in a deliberate act of political bigotry, the Democratic National Committee is daily telling Catholic voters to get lost. Do you think I exaggerate? Then go to the Democratic National Committee website. There you will finds "links of interest from the Democratic National Committee."
If your interests include the environment or veterans or Gay and Lesbian or Jewish-American or pro-choice or African-American, the DNC will happily suggest dozens of places for you to spend time. There is under "Catholic" only one Democratic Party-endorsed site to visit: the absolutely unflinching champions of abortion on demand, "Catholics for a Free Choice." [...]
It does make you wonder if any national Democrat even bothered to read the Los Angeles Times national exit poll taken on Election Day 2000, which found that 14 percent of the electorate -- that translates into14.7 million live voters -- named abortion as the most important issue in deciding their presidential vote.
That same group of voters chose Bush over Gore by 58 percent to 41 percent, which translates into a Bush advantage on the abortion issue of 2.5 million votes in an election in which Gore nationally won 540,000 more votes. [...]
Uncritical, unrestricted access to abortion for all has become the litmus test for the national Democratic Party. The DNC may be run by single-issue voters. But Catholics, as they have shown to the consternation of conservatives time and again, are anything but single-issue voters. Will any national Democratic leader have the decency and the intelligence to apologize to Catholic voters for the Democratic National Committee's insults? I wonder.
The Pentagon has scrapped its plans to operate the Policy Analysis Market, which would have allowed online traders to wager on the likelihood of future terrorist attacks. Aside from commodities like pork bellies, what sorts of futures can wannabe brokers buy and sell?
A whole galaxy, thanks to the proliferation of Internet-based prediction markets, also known as decision markets. These online bazaars allow punters to plunk down money, real or imagined, on the potential of films, ideas, or the U.S. military's success in snagging Saddam Hussein. It may sound like nothing more than glorified sports gambling, but many economists believe that such markets can suss out vital, hidden information about future events—much in the same way that a soaring stock on Wall Street can indicate that good things are afoot for the company in question. That's why the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been funding so much research on the topic, hoping that prediction markets can assist military planners.
The granddad of online prediction markets is the Iowa Electronic Markets, which was started in 1988 to forecast the fortunes of presidential candidates; the market now covers the Fed's interest rate decisions as well. IEM participants can use real money, with starting accounts capped at $500. The market is regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. [...]
The Foresight Exchange Prediction Market allows traders to bet on the likelihood of a range of events, from the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld by October to a devastating earthquake in the western United States by 2010. (A celebrity version of the Foresight Exchange is Long Bets, where pundits are encouraged to lay down a few thousand bucks on such outré prophecies as whether there'll be a four-day work week in the year 2070.)
If you ever had trouble making sense of the blogosphere, Blogshares may help separate the wheat from the chaff. No money's exchanged on this market—though there is a $500 contest taking place right now—but it does give bloggers bragging rights as to the popularity of their daily thoughts among Web surfers.
President Bush will spend most of August at his Crawford ranch, but frequent trips will take him to key electoral states in the Midwest and on the West Coast.
Bush will be in Crawford's "Western White House" from Aug. 2 to 31, but at least seven of those days will be spent outside Texas on trips that combine fund-raisers with events promoting two key policy areas - conservation and the economy.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco is holding up the parade. The parade of justice, that is. A review of the significant decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court this last term reveals that an inordinate amount of judicial attention was directed to correcting bad decisions from the Ninth Circuit. Although sympathetic court commentators have skewed the particulars in order to make the Ninth Circuit appear mainstream, in terms of criminal law the court could hardly be worse.
Of 72 cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2002-03 term, 28 of them were criminal cases or directly related to issues of criminal law. Ten of these 28 were from the Ninth Circuit and all 10 were reversed. That means the Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit 100 percent of the time when considering criminal cases. The Supreme Court had to expend more than one third of its attention in criminal law just curing judicial defects from the Ninth. Two of these cases were reversed summarily, meaning the decisions were so obviously wrong that the high court did not even need to hear oral argument.
By comparison, the Supreme Court took 10 criminal cases from the remaining 10 U.S. circuit courts of appeal and reversed nine of them. From state courts, the Supreme Court took eight criminal cases, reversing five. While these reversal rates are nearly as high, bear in mind that the cases came from the rest of the nation. The Ninth Circuit contributes as much trouble as all the other circuits -- and more than all the states combined. [...]
While other circuits have had cases reversed, none have even come close to the magnitude of 10 for 10. The Supreme Court took no criminal cases from the First, Third, Tenth or Eleventh circuits. The court took only one criminal case from each of the Fourth, Seventh and Eighth circuits and two criminal cases each from the Second, Fifth and Sixth circuits. Evidently, all the other circuit courts of appeals are deciding criminal cases with legal consistency. It is the Ninth that is so frequently rewriting criminal law that the Supreme Court must step in and correct the problems.
African American men who are on the D.L., "down-low," have sex with men unbeknownst to their girlfriends (if they have one) and families. They don't consider themselves gay, and they identify with hip-hop despite the music's homophobia. They've been a source of controversy in the black community.
Black Entertainment Television ran an entire special on the "growing" presence of D.L.s, complete with "how-to-know" guides for black women questioning their man's sexuality. A recent episode of "E.R." featured an HIV-positive D.L. brother who "risked" infecting his girlfriend. The black literary world is rife with D.L characters, subplots and sensibilities. Author James Earl Hardy's" B-Boy Blues" and "The Day Eazy-E Died" got things started. E. Lynn Harris' series -- "Invisible Life," "Just as I am" and "Any Way the Wind Blows" -- is still insanely popular.
The controversy swings from seeing the D.L. brother as the primary spreader of AIDS in the "mainstream" black community to an insistence that they "come out of the closet" so they can be "out and proud." But as the brother at the train station told me, he was out, but in a new kind of way. Moreover, he was going to get his groove on at the sex party, safely.
Behind these AIDS fears lies the heterosexist assumption that AIDS is born and bred in gay communities and then venomously spread outward. Much of the anti-D.L. rhetoric from the black media hides the painful fact that many straight black women and men are HIV-positive and spread the disease among themselves, without any help from "evil" gay black men.
In the spring of 1999, as the monarchs embarked on their return flight north, a young Cornell University entomologist named John Losey reported in the journal Nature that the monarch's future appeared to be endangered; not from urban sprawl or toxic waste, but from eating the pollen of genetically-modified corn. At the time, 20m acres of American farmland, representing a quarter of the US corn crop, had been planted with seeds that included a toxin-producing gene from the common soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt. The insect-poisoning power of Bt had been known for over a century and the first commercial spray was developed in Europe during the second world war. It even became a favourite of organic farmers. Half a century later, there were 182 Bt products registered by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Two other big crops-cotton and potatoes-had also been fitted out with the Bt gene. But in corn, the Bt toxin was designed primarily to kill the European corn borer, a caterpillar that destroys more than $1bn worth of the crop each year. The toxin punctures the delicate membranes of the caterpillar digestive tract, causing it to wither and die.
Most of the monarchs born in the midwest corn belt start life on a milkweed leaf in or around the edges of a farmer's land. When the corn sheds its pollen during July and August, pollen grains containing the Bt toxin are blown by the wind onto milkweed leaves. From earlier studies, Losey knew that Bt toxin could harm butterflies and moths, and he wondered if the monarch larvae might also suffer.
In a no-frills experiment at his laboratory at Cornell in upstate New York, he fed monarch larvae with Bt pollen. If they showed signs of harm, he intended to do more research in the field. In his lab, he misted milkweed leaves with water and sprinkled on the Bt corn pollen to a density that looked like the pollen he had observed on the milkweed in a cornfield. He then placed five three-day-old monarch larvae-caterpillars no bigger than a raindrop-on each milkweed leaf and watched them feed. The experiment was repeated five times. After four days, nearly half of the larvae were dead. Those that survived were half the weight of his control group feeding on milkweed leaves with no pollen. Larvae fed on leaves sprinkled with conventional hybrid corn pollen were still munching away, apparently no worse off. [...]
To test public reaction to their experiment, Losey and his co-researchers at Cornell first shared the results with colleagues. All were in favour of publication. However, a senior entomology professor at Cornell, Anthony Shelton, warned the younger researcher that he didn't have a "story." Shelton, a believer in biotech, would become increasingly unhappy that Losey's experiment had been confined to a laboratory. The results, he would complain, were "not pertinent to the real world." [...]
In a Cornell University press release, Shelton attacked Losey's experiment: "If I went to the movies and bought a hundred pounds of salted popcorn, because I like salted popcorn and then I ate those salted popcorn all at once, I'd probably die," Shelton was quoted as saying. "Eating that much salted popcorn simply is not a real-world situation, but if I died it may be reported that salted popcorn was lethal. The same thing holds true for monarch butterflies and pollen. Scientists need to make assessments that are pertinent to the real world... Few entomologists or weed scientists familiar with the butterflies or corn production give credence to the Nature article."
[M]ost of those involved-academics, industry and other environmentalists-thought the monarch case was a "blueprint" for how to do research in the public interest. Margaret Mellon of the UCS agreed. "It brought scientists, environmental and government folks together with industry, found a pot of money, set a research agenda and got it done."
Even now, after the arrests and the anger and the world media spotlight, the mystery for neighbors in this old steel town remains this: Why would six of their young men so readily agree to plead guilty to terror charges, accepting long prison terms far from home?
"These knuckleheads betrayed our trust, and we're disgusted with their attendance at the camps in Afghanistan," Mohammed Albanna, 52, a leader in the Yemeni community here, said of the six men who have admitted to attending an al Qaeda training camp two years ago. "But the punishment doesn't fit the crime, or the government's rhetoric. It's ridiculous."
But defense attorneys say the answer is straightforward: The federal government implicitly threatened to toss the defendants into a secret military prison without trial, where they could languish indefinitely without access to courts or lawyers.
That prospect terrified the men. They accepted prison terms of 6 1/2 to 9 years.
The Church of England sought to shed its puritanical image on sexual issues yesterday in a report that could pave the way for further liberalisation.Is the Church of England allowed to be Puritanical?
Its Doctrine Commission admits that the Church has 'acquired a reputation for being negative about sex'. It should celebrate it as 'a wonderful gift from God'.
Pejorative language, such as the phrase 'living in sin', is absent from the report, which instead encourages 'covenanted relationships'.
The Rt Rev Stephen Sykes, the commission's chairman, says that any man and woman who make a lifelong commitment to each other are in such a relationship, whether or not they are married.
1) The administration was not bent on war with Iraq from 9/11 onward. [...]
2) The invasion of Iraq was based on a reasonable belief that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat to the U.S., a belief supported by available intelligence evidence. [...]
8) Saddam was involved with bin Laden and al Qaeda in the plotting of 9/11. [...]
9) The U.S. wants democracy in Iraq and the Middle East. [...]
11) The United States is waging a war on terror. [...]
12) The U.S. has made progress against world terrorist elements, in particular by crippling al Qaeda. [...]
13) The Bush administration has made Americans safer from terror on U.S. soil. [...]
15) U.S. air defenses functioned according to protocols on September 11, 2001. [...]
23) The Bush administration is seeking to create a viable Palestinian state. [...]
24) People detained by the U.S. after 9/11 were legitimate terror suspects. [...]
25) The U.S. is obeying the Geneva conventions in its treatment of terror-related suspects, prisoners, and detainees. [...]
39) "The Iraqi people are now free." [...]
40) God told Bush to invade Iraq.
Not long after the September 11 attacks, neoconservative high priest Norman Podhoretz wrote: "One hears that Bush, who entered the White House without a clear sense of what he wanted to do there, now feels there was a purpose behind his election all along; as a born-again Christian, it is said, he believes he was chosen by God to eradicate the evil of terrorism from the world."
No, he really believes it, or so he would like us to think. The Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz that Bush made the following pronouncement during a recent meeting between the two: "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East."
Oddly, it never got much play back home.
We live in a world in which events -- whether they be jumps in the price of Microsoft or blizzards in the Midwest or Super Bowl victories for the Cowboys -- are caused by certain things and not by others. The nature of those causal relationships, though, often remains obscure. We may feel comfortable drawing some conclusion about the market from a rise in Microsoft's stock price, but we would probably feel much less comfortable saying that one thing had caused that rise.
More importantly, even if we can state with some certainty why something happened, that leaves us a long way from being able to state with similar certainty what will happen. We can read the past for portents of the future, but we can never be sure that we're looking at the right evidence, which is just another way of saying that we can never be sure we're looking at the right past. Those disclaimers at the bottom of mutual fund ads are not, in the end, there simply to keep the funds from getting sued. Past performance is no guarantor of future performance, either for the market or for money managers. Things change. Things always change.
The problem, then, is that we want -- and have -- to make decisions about the future, but we do so without perfect knowledge. Peter Bernstein's new book, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, takes on this problem by constructing a kind of history of risk management. [...]
In a curious way, in fact, Bernstein has written a history of risk management that ends by leaving us more aware than ever of the impossibility of fully managing risk or comprehending the workings of complex systems. There's always something just beyond our grasp, something of which we will be unable to make sense. Risk itself, after all, is the product of uncertainty. That said, some risks are better than others.
How, then, can one know which risks are better? We can take a pretty good stab at predicting, for example, where the Dow Jones Industrial Average is going to be in five years, and we can base that prediction on specific reasons. If we could actually foresee those reasons and those results, we could either make an enormous amount of money or protect ourselves against losing an enormous amount of money. Bernstein quotes a fund manager's thoughts about information as it pertains to investing:
The information you have is not the information you want.
The information you want is not the information you need.
The information you need is not the information you can obtain.
The information you can obtain costs more than you want to pay.
But sometimes the information you have is precisely the information you need, and sometimes the information you can obtain is priced perfectly, and you catch a glimpse of what the market is going to do.
The problem is that you don't know you've caught a glimpse until after it's all over. The hope is that the more information you have, the more work you do, and the better attuned you are to the underlying realities of the businesses in question, the better your chances of prediction.
Alabama's new governor is trying to persuade voters to approve the biggest tax increase in state history by telling them it is their Christian duty. And for a state in the Bible Belt, that might seem like a winning strategy.When Jesus said, "Render unto Caesar", He wasn't praising Caesar.
Instead, Republican Gov. Bob Riley's $1.2 billion tax package is alienating even the Christian Coalition and other supporters, who see Riley as a Judas. Riley had consistently opposed new taxes while in Congress. . . .
Riley, a Southern Baptist, says Alabama has taxed its poorest too harshly for too long.
"According to our Christian ethics, we're supposed to love God, love each other and help take care of the poor,'' he said. "It is immoral to charge somebody making $5,000 an income tax.''
It is in the arts and literary pages of our newspapers that the elite's continuing demand for the erosion of restraint, and its unreflective antinomianism, is most clearly on view. Take for example the June 8 arts section of the Observer, Britain's most prestigious liberal Sunday paper. The section's two most important and eye-catching articles celebrated pop singer Marilyn Manson and writer Glen Duncan.
Of the pop singer, the Observer's critic wrote: "Marilyn Manson's ability to shock has swung like a pendulum in a high wind . . . . He was really scary at first, when [he] burst out of [his] native Florida and declared war on all Middle America holds dear. Manson spun convincing tales of smoking exhumed bones for kicks. . . . But . . . Manson's autobiography revealed a smart, funny man-even if he did enjoy covering hearing-impaired groupies in raw meat for sexual sport. He turned into an artist, rather than the incarnation of evil. Church groups still picketed his gigs, which often echoed Nazi rallies (they still do). But any fool could see that Manson was making a valid point about rock `n' roll gigs and mass behavior, as well as flirting with fascist style."
The author of this review...fastidiously balks at using the word "deaf" for the hearing-impaired but appears not to mind too much if they are exploited for perverted sexual gratification...
My basic problem with the Derrida-Habermas proclamation is neither their concern about unrestrained American power, nor their real hope that Europe should have greater unity, identity and common policies. My problem is that their document isn't practical enough; that is to say, the authors hardly ever indicate what an alternative (European) superpower would do if it existed and, more importantly, what should be done-apart from constitutional "deepening" measures-to get there. The American plans for a Middle East may be floundering right now, but at least they have a "road map." The way to a powerful Europe is not even sketched out. It is an aspiration, not a policy. [...]
But the real issue raised by the Derrida-Habermas appeal is the extent to which the movement should be defined by the mass anti-White House protests that burst out on February, and are seen as historic and symbolic (in fact, the title of their article reads, in English, February 15th, or What Binds Europeans Together). For if the real aim is to create a deliberate counterweight to the United States, the policy is unlikely to succeed-it will lose Britain and Spain, possibly Italy and the Netherlands, and certainly most of the Central and East European states. And here is another obvious problem. The fact that this call for a "core Europe" comes from a French and a German scholar-a sort of philosophical echo of the Chirac and Shroeder criticisms of the White House-will not only amuse or irritate the Americans, but it also will seem to other Europeans like a rehash of the de Gaulle-Adenauer axis, which was not popular outside of Paris and Bonn. All the rather thoughtless assertions by their successors today that France and Germany have a special, elevated and "core" role, with the other European states following, just gives ammunition to the anti-federal critics within Europe itself. To add that this Franco-German biumverate will lead the charge against America will make the discontents all that stronger.
Moreover, all this misses the point. The fact is that, whether Europe is to become an effective counterweight to a unilateralist America in the years to come, or an amiable and near-equal world partner, it really has to make some tough practical decisions, and achieve tough practical policies, in order to move ahead. Constitutional decisions, like creating the office of a single foreign minister, go part of the way, but that is almost like the icing on the cake if Europe itself is not made stronger.
So, here, for consideration, are a half-dozen nettles that might be grasped in order to make Europe stronger, to raise her in the eyes of the world, and to contribute to the greater sense of European identity which professors Derrida and Habermas yearn for: [...]
But, here's the rub, and why the Derrida-Habermas and Chirac-Schroeder strategies look doubtful. The resistance to these tough reform fields is deepest, not in the so-called "new Europe" and pro-American countries like Britain, Spain and Poland but precisely in the "old" or "core Europe" countries like France, Belgium and Germany.
Though it may have been bad for the filmmakers, there is at least one good thing for audiences in the fact that Miramax had to postpone the release of Buffalo Soldiers after the events of September 11th, 2001 - and then again the following spring when focus groups tested badly, and then again earlier this year as the Iraq war loomed. For two years ago it would have been just a routine example of Hollywood's bashing of the American armed forces and military life in general. Now it is a perfect time capsule from a vanished era of movie history.
You will never again see a picture quite as bad as this one, or at least not bad in the same way.
It's easy to forget, now, the unrelieved bleakness of the cinematic prospect when it came to soldiers and soldiering between M*A*S*H (1970) and September 11. For more than three decades there was hardly a military hero to be found, unless he was first and foremost a victim of the time-servers, thugs and psychopaths that were supposed to have made up the preponderance of any military organization, or of the alleged insanity of military discipline itself.
To be sure, by the 1990s the anti-war, anti-military ethos showed signs of degenerating into a parody of itself in such preposterous idiocies as The Rock or The General's Daughter, but even the otherwise pro-military Saving Private Ryan was marred by a depiction of war as fundamentally senseless, apart from its eponymous rescue mission. Buffalo Soldiers, adapted from a book by Robert O'Connor and directed by the Australian Gregor Jordan, is solidly in the tradition of the preposterous idiocies.
I began my return to Bible study with the notion that the liberal left had allowed the term "Christian" to be hijacked. I believed that the word ought properly to describe someone who was more like - well - me. Then I actually reread the Gospels, only to discover that they made me squirm. [...]
Regarding the issues that threaten Episcopalian schism, the presumed challenge to marriage is the more easily addressed. The convention is being asked only to ratify blessing of same-gender unions, a rite distinct from its official marriage ceremony. In addition, the Gospels refer only obliquely to marriage, which in Jesus' time was generally a private transaction arranged between families and individuals. Western Christianity did not institutionalize marriage until more than 1,000 years after Jesus' death, at which point it defined marriage as a sacrament consummated by the couple, with sex as its sine qua non. Technically, the Christian church does not marry anyone; rather it officiates at marriages that the couples themselves create. To do so, it employs rites that emerged for reasons that had as much to do with enhancing ecclesiastical power as encouraging stable households.
Homosexuality presents a greater challenge, since here the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are explicit in their prohibitions. Prominent Christians, notably Harvard Memorial Church minister Peter J. Gomes, have constructed elaborate arguments that these passages have been mistranslated or misinterpreted, but their arguments miss the point. Once the Bible passed from oral tradition into writing, religion faced the task of keeping its traditions alive, rather than treating them as preserved in stone at some date shortly before Jesus (for Jews) or in the late Roman era (for Christians).
The Jews developed the Talmud and, later, ongoing rabbinic commentaries that in effect keep the Hebrew Bible alive. Christians have no equivalent and must work instead to keep Jesus' teachings alive by seeking to recognize how each generation challenges their reinterpretation. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Christians struggled with and rejected the Bible's condoning of slavery. Now we are struggling to reinterpret pronouncements about sexual behavior.
The Great Wall of China, roughly defining the northern contours of the Chinese empire, has stood in the same place for 2,200 years. The Great Wall of America--the barrier of bases set up around the world to define the contours of the free world and hold back the Soviet empire--is about to disappear after just 50 years.
We are living a revolution, and hardly anyone has noticed. In just the three months since the end of the Iraq war, the Pentagon has announced the essential evacuation of the U.S. military from its air bases in Saudi Arabia, from the Demilitarized Zone in Korea and from the vast Incirlik air base in Turkey--in addition to a radical drawdown of U.S. military personnel in Germany, the mainstay of the Great American Wall since 1945.
For a country that is seen by so much of the world as a rogue nation, recklessly throwing its weight around, this is a lot of withdrawing. The fact is that since 9/11, when America awoke from its post--cold war end-of-history illusions, the U.S. has not, as most believe, been expanding. It has been moving--lightening its footprint, rationalizing its deployments, rearranging its forces, waking from a decade of slumber during which it sat on its Great Wall, oblivious to its immobility and utter obsolescence. [...]
We are in the midst of a revolution, and it has two parts. The first is leaving places where we are not wanted. America is moving out of old Europe, which sees its liberty as coming with the air it breathes, and being welcomed in the new Europe of Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, which have a living memory of tyranny and a deep understanding of America's role in winning their liberty. South Koreans regularly demonstrate against the U.S. presence in their country. Since the reason for that presence is for Americans to die in defense of Seoul, one has to ask oneself at what point strategic altruism becomes strategic masochism.
The second part is leaving places that mark the battle lines of a long-dead war.
With rising doubts over whether Arnold Schwarzenegger will run for governor, another moderate Republican, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, edged closer Monday to becoming a candidate to replace Gov. Gray Davis.
Noelia Rodriguez, press secretary to First Lady Laura Bush and Riordan's former close aide, spent Monday at his house in Brentwood helping him assemble a possible campaign team, sources said.
President Bush supported Riordan when he ran for governor last year. But until now, White House officials have kept their distance from the recall.
For Riordan, the Oct. 7 recall election offers a chance at revenge against the Democratic incumbent. Davis' scathing television ads helped to crush Riordan's candidacy last year in the gubernatorial primary.
For moderate Republicans, a Riordan campaign would also be a boost. They often have blamed the power of conservatives in GOP primaries for their party's repeated losses to Democrats. [...]
Schwarzenegger and Riordan had planned to hold a news conference Monday to make a joint announcement: Schwarzenegger would not run, but Riordan would, according to a top Republican, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified. But the event did not occur.
Schwarzenegger "wants to pass the baton to Riordan, but Riordan doesn't seem to be quite ready for that," the Republican said.
The state Assembly today approved a compromise budget that alleviates a record deficit by slashing spending, raising fees and relying on borrowing, but still leaves the state facing a big deficit to solve next summer.
The deal approved in the house's longest session in history avoids raising sales and income taxes, but counts on a $4 billion annual car tax increase that state officials triggered earlier this year and on the elimination of a tax break for manufacturers.
After more than 27 hours of negotiations, the budget bill passed 56-22 after $300 million was added in spending to benefit local governments, law enforcement, schools and farmers. [...]
Republican Leader Dave Cox claimed victory, saying his party was "able to get a budget that didn't increase taxes for Californians. It was a victory for our side." [...]
The monthlong deadlock was caused by a disagreement between Democrats and Republicans over tax increases and spending cuts. The final vote received support from 45 Democrats and 11 Republicans. Two Assembly members, one from each party, were excused and did not vote. Two Democrats voted against the budget.
Democrats, who hold big majorities in both houses but need Republican help to muster budget-approving two-thirds votes, wanted a half-cent sales tax to help close the budget gap. Republicans said the gap could be closed using existing revenues and deep cuts.
IN ORDERING GAY MARRIAGE on June 10, 2003, the highest court in Ontario, Canada, explicitly endorsed a brand new vision of marriage along the lines Wolfson suggests: "Marriage is, without dispute, one of the most significant forms of personal relationships. . . . Through the institution of marriage, individuals can publicly express their love and commitment to each other. Through this institution, society publicly recognizes expressions of love and commitment between individuals, granting them respect and legitimacy as a couple."
The Ontario court views marriage as a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval that government stamps on certain registered intimacies because, well, for no particular reason the court can articulate except that society likes to recognize expressions of love and commitment. In this view, endorsement of gay marriage is a no-brainer, for nothing really important rides on whether anyone gets married or stays married. Marriage is merely individual expressive conduct, and there is no obvious reason why some individuals' expression of gay love should hurt other individuals' expressions of non-gay love.
There is, however, a different view--indeed, a view that is radically opposed to this: Marriage is the fundamental, cross-cultural institution for bridging the male-female divide so that children have loving, committed mothers and fathers. Marriage is inherently normative: It is about holding out a certain kind of relationship as a social ideal, especially when there are children involved. Marriage is not simply an artifact of law; neither is it a mere delivery mechanism for a set of legal benefits that might as well be shared more broadly. The laws of marriage do not create marriage, but in societies ruled by law they help trace the boundaries and sustain the public meanings of marriage.
In other words, while individuals freely choose to enter marriage, society upholds the marriage option, formalizes its definition, and surrounds it with norms and reinforcements, so we can raise boys and girls who aspire to become the kind of men and women who can make successful marriages. Without this shared, public aspect, perpetuated generation after generation, marriage becomes what its critics say it is: a mere contract, a vessel with no particular content, one of a menu of sexual lifestyles, of no fundamental importance to anyone outside a given relationship.
The marriage idea is that children need mothers and fathers, that societies need babies, and that adults have an obligation to shape their sexual behavior so as to give their children stable families in which to grow up.
Which view of marriage is true?
Americans have become significantly less accepting of homosexuality since a Supreme Court decision that was hailed as clearing the way for new gay civil rights, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll has found. After several years of growing tolerance, the survey shows a return to a level of more traditional attitudes last seen in the mid-1990s.
Asked whether same-sex relations between consenting adults should be legal, 48% said yes; 46% said no. Before this month, support hadn't been that low since 1996. [...]
Conservative social activists see a backlash to those developments and the growing visibility of gay characters in entertainment, including such TV shows as Will & Grace. "The more that the movement demands the endorsement of the law and the culture, the more resistance there will be," says Gary Bauer, president of American Values. [...]
Those making the biggest shifts included African-Americans. On whether homosexual relations should be legal, their support fell from 58% in May to 36% in July. [...]
By 49%-46%, those polled said homosexuality should not be considered "an acceptable alternative lifestyle." It was the first time since 1997 that more people expressed opposition than support.
Thanks to the billions that flow in from its oil reserves, most of the citizens [of Kuwait] live comfortable, well-subsidized, fairly cool lives (even when the thermometer reaches 120 degrees). There are no taxes, the state pays for male and female citizens' educations through the university level and the government gives out other generous subsidies. Citizens' life expectancies are comparable to those in the West, and no one, aside from the 1.5 million guest workers, has to labor too hard.
However, that prosperity has seemingly had a downside. Because citizens don't have to work very hard, not many do, instead being content with quasi-sinecures. Ninety-five percent of Kuwaitis are employed by the government--postal service jobs with exponentially better pay scales. Yet pushing paper is not necessarily any more meaningful than stamping envelopes, and it seems to show. Many of the Kuwaitis I talked to spoke of national stagnation. They didn't attribute it to their sudden, easy oil wealth, but it's a likely reason.
That wealth has brought modernization and Westernization. The former trend seems to have cemented into the foundations of the Burger Kings and designer clothing stores that dot the cityscape. The society seems largely liberated, even though women don't have the vote. Kuwait City's streets are lively despite the ban on alcohol. However, the winds of Westernization could turn into a stiff breeze Eastward, if Islamists continue to grow in strength or the ruling Sabah family abandons its tack towards reform.
Yet, more than the pragmatic ideology of Islamists or the hopes of progressives, Kuwait's dependence on oil seems likely to be the most dominant force driving the nation's politics. Oil wealth is the central fact of the Kuwaiti economy and the fundamental support of its successful welfare state. Time will tell how all of the contradictions resolve themselves.
With two daughters already, Liu Yihong was crystal clear several years back about what he would do if his pregnant wife was carrying yet another girl.
"You can take medicine to end the pregnancy," he explained matter-of-factly. "Otherwise you have the baby and if it's a female, you try to find another family who will take it, or you just put it up for sale."
This practical philosophy is deeply ingrained in this rural backwater in southern China, a lush but poor area where the preference for sons overwhelms all other impulses, and family planning laws strictly limit how many children a farmer may have.
In March, the police here in Guangxi Province found the shocking fallout of son worship packed away in the back of a long-haul bus: 28 unwanted baby girls from Yulin, 2 to 5 months old, being transported like farm animals, for sale. [...]
Because of the selective abortion of girls in China, some researchers estimate there are 111 males for every 100 females in the country, making it difficult for poor farmers to persuade women to marry into their villages.
The belated efforts of the US to sign bilateral agreements with Chile, Singapore and a few other small partners threaten, we are told, to destroy the entire trading system. A "selfish hegemon", as Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya call it (Bilateral trade treaties are a sham, FT, July 14), is conspiring with special interests to distort the global system. Such arguments themselves distort reality.
To begin, the US is hardly treading on new ground. The multilateral system makes room for free-trade areas through Article 24 of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The World Trade Organisation's charter allows customs unions or free-trade agreements between members, recognising "the desirability of increasing freedom of trade by the development, through voluntary agreements, of closer integration between the economies of [those] countries". More than 250 such agreements have been negotiated; if the Chile and Singapore agreements become law, the US will be party to exactly five.
Beyond their economic impact, free-trade agreements of the sort the US is pursuing can benefit the parties involved, the global trading system, and the world at large in many ways.
THE past year has been one to relish for fans of burgernomics. Last April The Economist's Big Mac index flashed a strong sell sign for the dollar: it was more overvalued than at any time in the index's history. The dollar has since flipped, falling by 12% in trade-weighted terms.In a comment below, I wrongly stated that the Economist had stopped following the Big Mac index. As this article shows, not only do they still keep track of it, but it continues to be predictive. Given the generally poor quality of most economic statistics, the corruption endemic to most third world govermental statistics and the lag in announcing more precise statistics, the Big Mac index might actually be the world's most useful predictive economic indicator.
Invented in 1986 as a light-hearted guide to whether currencies are at their “correct” level, burgernomics is based on the theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP). This says that, in the long run, exchange rates should move toward rates that would equalise the prices of an identical basket of goods and services in any two countries. To put it simply: a dollar should buy the same everywhere. Our basket is a McDonald's Big Mac, produced locally to roughly the same recipe in 118 countries. The Big Mac PPP is the exchange rate that would leave burgers costing the same as in America. Comparing the PPP with the actual rate is one test of whether a currency is undervalued or overvalued. . . .
Many readers complain that burgernomics is hard to swallow. We admit it is flawed: Big Macs are not traded across borders as the PPP theory demands, and prices are distorted by taxes, tariffs, different profit margins and differences in the cost of non-tradables, such as rents. It was never intended as a precise predictor of currency movements, but as a tool to make exchange-rate theory more digestible. Yet in the early 1990s, just before the crisis in Europe's exchange-rate mechanism, it signalled that several currencies, including sterling, were markedly overvalued against the D-mark. It also predicted the fall in the euro after its launch in 1999.
Academic economists are taking burgernomics more seriously, chewing over the Big Mac index in almost a dozen studies. Now a whole book has been written about the index . . . .
The moderate Democratic group that helped elect Bill Clinton to the White House in 1992 warned today that Democrats were headed for defeat if they presented themselves as an angry "far left" party fighting tax cuts and opposing the war in Iraq. [...]
"It is our belief that the Democratic Party has an important choice to make: Do we want to vent or do we want to govern?" said Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, chairman of the organization. "The administration is being run by the far right. The Democratic Party is in danger of being taken over by the far left."
When a reporter asked a panel of council leaders whether Democratic woes were a result of Republican attacks or Democratic mistakes, Senator Bayh responded with a curt two-word answer that silenced the room.
"Assisted suicide," he said. [...]
Mark J. Penn, a Democratic pollster who worked for Mr. Clinton and is now advising Senator Lieberman, offered polling data to show that Mr. Bush was vulnerable but that the Democratic Party was also in a politically perilous position.
"We're at a postwar historic low of Democratic Party membership," he said.
Mr. Penn said that the Democratic Party now trailed the Republicans among people who earn more than $20,000, and that just 22 percent of white men called themselves Democrats.
"Among middle-class voters, the Democratic Party is a shadow of its former self," Mr. Penn said.
The perception, he said, is that Democrats "stand for big government, want to raise taxes too high, are too liberal and are beholden to special interest groups."
Most important, Mr. Penn said, the party has to prove itself credible on the issue of national security--something that many Democrats attending the conference here said would be impossible to do if the party were perceived as opposed to the war on Iraq.
Outspoken Pentagon advisor Richard Perle recently called for Iraq's debt to be cancelled as a way of teaching banks about the "moral hazard of ... lend[ing] to a vicious dictatorship."
Fair enough. Other countries with "odious debt" incurred under nasty regimes may be granted debt forgiveness. Why not Iraq?
Why not indeed. A war profiteer like Perle lecturing on morality is doubtful enough, but who in today's occupied Iraq will really profit from debt forgiveness, the Iraqi people or companies like Halliburton?
At stake is more than $184 billion of pending contracts and debts against Iraq, many of which transpired before the 1991 invasion of Kuwait. In other words, even deals inked when Saddam Hussein was considered a US ally could now be considered odious debt.
No small coincidence that the countries slated to lose most from an Iraqi write-off include Russia, France and Germany: Bush's axis-of-just-as-evil for opposing the recent invasion of Iraq. [...]
Bottom line, until a stable government is in place, truly representative of the Iraqi people, there should be no debt cancellations - reschedulings or delayed payment allowances perhaps, but no write-offs.
The Pentagon office that proposed spying electronically on Americans to monitor potential terrorists has a new experiment. It is an online futures trading market, disclosed today by critics, in which anonymous speculators would bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups.
Traders bullish on a biological attack on Israel or bearish on the chances of a North Korean missile strike would have the opportunity to bet on the likelihood of such events on a new Internet site established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The Pentagon called its latest idea a new way of predicting events and part of its search for the "broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks." Two Democratic senators who reported the plan called it morally repugnant and grotesque. The senators said the program fell under the control of Adm. John M. Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser.
One of the two senators, Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota, said the idea seemed so preposterous that he had trouble persuading people it was not a hoax. "Can you imagine," Mr. Dorgan asked, "if another country set up a betting parlor so that people could go in--and is sponsored by the government itself--people could go in and bet on the assassination of an American political figure?" [...]
The Pentagon, in defending the program, said such futures trading had proven effective in predicting other events like oil prices, elections and movie ticket sales.
"Research indicates that markets are extremely efficient, effective and timely aggregators of dispersed and even hidden information," the Defense Department said in a statement. "Futures markets have proven themselves to be good at predicting such things as elections results; they are often better than expert opinions."
The first time I heard Johnny Cash, I had nightmares for weeks.
When his granite-hard voice poured out of my grandmother's radio, it arched my 10-year-old spine. He sang of a wild young man who, though he had murdered 20 men by the age of 10, was due to hang for a killing he didn't commit. As serious and sobering as a news dispatch, the song sounded like nothing I had ever heard before, and I was completely unnerved as it cut through the gummy summer air.
What most affected me -- other than the grim, sharp thunk of the gallows' trapdoor swinging open as the warden sang ''Happy Birthday'' to the condemned man who turned 20 the day he died -- was Cash's voice. Every syllable sounded like a cold truth, as real and stirring as a Sunday sermon. It both frightened me and made a fan for life. Years later, I would learn the name of the song was ''Joe Bean,'' and it remains a favorite, especially since the nightmares have subsided.
Now, the MTV generation has discovered what I learned on that summer night three decades ago: Johnny Cash rules.
And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder:
One of the four beasts saying: "Come and see."
And I saw.
And behold, a white horse.
There's a man goin' 'round takin' names.
An' he decides who to free and who to blame.
Everybody won't be treated all the same.
There'll be a golden ladder reaching down.
When the man comes around.
The hairs on your arm will stand up.
At the terror in each sip and in each sup.
For you partake of that last offered cup,
Or disappear into the potter's ground.
When the man comes around.
Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers.
One hundred million angels singin'.
Multitudes are marching to the big kettle drum.
Voices callin', voices cryin'.
Some are born an' some are dyin'.
It's Alpha's and Omega's Kingdom come.
And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree.
The virgins are all trimming their wicks.
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree.
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks.
Till Armageddon, no Shalam, no Shalom.
Then the father hen will call his chickens home.
The wise men will bow down before the throne.
And at his feet they'll cast their golden crown.
When the man comes around.
Whoever is unjust, let him be unjust still.
Whoever is righteous, let him be righteous still.
Whoever is filthy, let him be filthy still.
Listen to the words long written down,
When the man comes around.
Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers.
One hundred million angels singin'.
Multitudes are marchin' to the big kettle drum.
Voices callin', voices cryin'.
Some are born an' some are dyin'.
It's Alpha's and Omega's Kingdom come.
And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree.
The virgins are all trimming their wicks.
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree.
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks.
In measured hundredweight and penny pound.
When the man comes around.
And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts,
And I looked and behold: a pale horse.
And his name, that sat on him, was Death.
And Hell follwed with him.
Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that the man widely considered as the top investigative journalist in the United States is persona non grata in his own country's media. For Greg Palast, an accidental journalist, this is not upsetting. "Our news is like Pravda," he stated matter-of-factly from his New York office in a recent interview with Asia Times Online.
Palast is content to continue his investigative reports into what he perceives as an American oligarchy - a nexus between politicians and corporations in which the line between the two is increasingly blurred - an endeavor which he pursues across the Atlantic in the British media. However, he is gradually being "discovered" by Americans tired of channel surfing only to find the same version of events coming out of the mouths of different talking heads. [...]
Finished with the book tour, and working on an edited US version of his investigation into the Bush dynasty which aired on the BBC under the name "Bush Family Fortunes" ("America can't take it straight up," he said), what is Palast up to next?
"I have a document from before the war, an official State Department document about the plan for Iraq's economy. This includes the privatization of the oil industry. The plan is essentially to turn Iraq into a corporate Disneyland," Palast said.
One of the demonstrators peeled off to rest by the curb, and I edged over to ask him what the mourners were shouting.
'Death to America,' he said.
'Oh.' I reached for my notebook as self-protection and scribbled the Farsi transliteration : Margbar Omrika.
'You are American?' he asked.
'Yes. A journalist.' I braced myself for a diatribe against the West and its arrogant trumpets.
'I must ask you something,' the man said. 'Have you ever been to Disneyland?'
'As a kid, yes.'
The man nodded, thoughtfully stroking his beard. 'My brother lives in California and has written me about Disneyland,' he continued. 'It has always been my dream to go there and take my children on the tea-cup ride.' With that, he rejoined the marchers, raised his fist and yelled 'Death to America!' again.
One man, Dr Faud Masum, has emerged nationally in the post-Saddam period as a powerful political personality.
He is also the most prominent figure in Kurdistan right now and is tipped as the president of its next joint parliament. (He was the first prime minister of the joint parliament, but resigned immediately because the Kurdish factions could not develop consensus on issues). Currently he is a member of a committee in Baghdad which is pondering a constitution for Iraq.
Masum, 65, has had a dynamic career. A PhD in Islamic Philosphy from Cairo University, he wrote his thesis on Iqwan-u-Sifa (a group of sufis in 10th century Iraq who believed in secularism). He was a teacher at Basra University but later he chose to be a peshmerga , a member of a Kurdish volunteer force and which means "a person who faces death" in the Kurdish struggle. He says that he fought for Kurdistan and carries many old wounds, but he never wounded anybody.
This correspondent had a chance to speak to Masum at his modest house in a middle-class district of Sulaimaniya, in Iraqi Kurdistan, where he outlined his political perspective on post-Saddam Iraq. [...]
ATol: The US' aims in the Middle East seem to be obvious. It plans to change the dynamics of Middle Eastern society and wants broad democratic and economic reforms in the region. How do you see these developments?
Masum: Of cource, the situation in Iraq will have a direct impact on neighboring countries, and that is why these countries are afraid. Interestingly, they already have US troops on their land, but they are afraid of US designs for political and economic reforms in the region. The US has a clear line of interest behind these policies, but we too have our interests. Let's see what happens in the future.
ATol: There is an impression that the US would not allow a big local army and it would continue to dominate the region through its presence. Do you think this is part of its colonial thinking on Iraq?
Masum: I do not think so. Colonialism is history now. The US cannot directly rule in Iraq. I think they will keep their presence through some of their bases in Iraq.
What are we to get in return for the higher costs (and, presumably, more limited food choices) that will come with the labeling and phasing out of trans fats? The government estimates that perhaps 250 to 500 coronary heart disease deaths (out of the total 500,000 that occur annually in the U.S.) will be prevented. But those numbers are purely hypothetical: The real number of lives saved might be zero.
Prester John was not, despite what you might think from the name, a circus performer nor the founder of a chain of fried-food restaurants. Nor was he a magician, though he did have the trick of vanishing only to reappear in unexpected places. And if his name, once you say it a few times, seems at once both obscure and familiar, there may be a reason. For nearly half of the last millennium, Prester John was a genuine celebrity in Western Europe: the mysterious ruler of an impossibly rich and powerful kingdom just over the horizon, somewhere in Asia, or maybe Africa. He was, as the saying goes, the stuff of legends, like Elvis or Brando or the Sultan of Brunei. He was wealthy, he was powerful, and--best of all--he was a Christian.
His first authenticated appearance is in the twelfth-century chronicle of Otto of Freising, who tells of the military victories of a priest-king living in the far east. This king, known as Prester John, had defeated a combined force of Persians, Medes, and Assyrians in a glorious three-day battle and then marched to the aid of Jerusalem, which had lately been recaptured by Saracen Muslims. The journey didn’t go well for Prester John. He marched his army to the Tigris and, unable to cross it, followed the river north in hopes it would freeze during the winter. After waiting several years for the promised ice to appear, he decided that the climate was too temperate, and, his army decimated “on account of the weather to which they were unaccustomed,” the priest-king headed home. Though not much for boats or bridges, Prester John was nonetheless, even in this early account, an intriguing character: “He is said to be a descendant of the Magi of old,” Otto’s chronicle reports. “He governs the same people as they did and is said to enjoy such glory and such plenty that he uses no scepter save one of emerald.”
A couple of decades later, the story got even more impressive. In 1165, copies of a letter from Prester John to the emperor of Byzantium started making the rounds in Europe. The letter, reconstructed from later copies, began something like this: “I, Johannes the Presbyter, Lord of Lords, am superior in virtue, riches and might to all who walk under Heaven,” and went on from there. Seventy-two kings paid him tribute. Thirty thousand subjects dined daily at his table. When he rode into war, he was proceeded by three crosses of gold. On other occasions, he went forth behind a single cross of plain wood—that he might recall the humble death of Jesus Christ, whom he served.
As for the kingdom he ruled, it was a storehouse of wonders: elephants, dromedaries, mute griffins, wild oxen, and wild men. There were pygmies, giants, Cyclopes and their wives, not to mention a more or less complete collection of natural resources: emeralds, sapphires, carbuncles, topazes, chrysolites, onyxes, beryls. There was a plant whose very presence in the realm frightened away demons. A spring which, if you drank from it three times, would keep you thirty years old for the rest of your life. And since it wouldn’t be the East without spices, of course there was lots of pepper.
Now it seems obvious enough, given certain details, that the letter was at least partly fictitious. And, as the novelist Evan S. Connell notes in his delightful essay on Prester John (collected most recently in The Aztec Treasure House), the leading men of Europe—being no more or less gullible than we—were doubtful even at the time. A translation of the letter by one of Richard Lionheart’s knights included a caveat familiar to anyone who has received a forwarded e-mail: This might not be true, but I thought you’d want to read it anyway. The letter was most likely seen as a veiled dressing-down of the rulers of the day, or perhaps as an attempt to revitalize the Crusades with the hope of an inter-empire coalition. Nevertheless, twelve years later Prester John and his epistle were still on everyone’s minds, so to quiet the murmurings and instruct the masses Pope Alexander iii penned a response praising John for his apparent piety and gently restating the Christian duty of submission to papal authority. Sealed and signed, the letter was entrusted to the pope’s personal physician who, as Connell dryly notes, “obediently marched off in the direction of Asia and right off the pages of history.”
Roll Call and the Hill ... serve as community newspapers for Capitol Hill ...
This year, both newspapers boosted the number of times they publish, deployed more reporters to the Capitol and stepped up their competition for the lucrative market in advocacy advertising....
[I]n January ... Roll Call, under editor Tim Curran, added a third day, Wednesday, to its weekly publication schedule ... Roll Call added about nine employees in the process, publisher Laurie Battaglia-Skinker said.
The Hill countered by bringing in new executive editor Hugo Gurdon, 46, a veteran of London's Fleet Street ... Gurdon has increased publication to two days a week, redesigned the newspaper's appearance, nearly doubled the reporting staff to 13 people and is ready for more....
Now Roll Call plans by September to publish four times a week when Congress is in session, Monday through Thursday, and the Hill said by the end of the year it will be up to three issues per week.
Fueled by the large market for advocacy advertising, both newspapers are profitable and their expansions typify the explosion of journalistic coverage on Capitol Hill.
In each case this stubbornness seems to me against their best interest. Gore would have had a leg up in 2000 as a sitting President; the Democrats would have seemed more moderate and less dangerous. Similarly any number of California Democrats would be more attractive to the voters than Gray Davis, who is widely regarded even among Democrats as corrupt. Likewise the Times would have more credibility and influence on the big issues if it were occasionally willing to retreat from tendentiousness on small issues.
The Democrats resemble a general who is incapable of ordering a retreat, or indeed of issuing any order except "Attack!" Why is this? It may be evidence in support of John Jay Ray's psychological theory of leftism.
[N]othing science has come up with challenges our inner experiences of the divine. Most scientific arguments against these experiences boil down to the mistaken idea that if the mechanics of an internal phenomenon - the mind, say, or religious ecstasy - can be detailed, the phenomenon itself has been explained away. That is, if the "mind" is caused by the behavior of brain cells, then our experience of our selves is an illusion. If religious ecstasy can be photographed in a scan, then there's nothing real to be ecstatic about.
This line of reasoning is what physicist-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead termed "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness," in which the abstract understanding of an event is mistaken for the event itself. "This is the ultimate irony of some modern science," British theologian Keith Ward says, "that it begins by trying to explain and understand the rich, particular, concrete world as experienced by humans, and ends by seeing that phenomenal world as an illusion."
It is this fallacy that ultimately confounds MIT psychologist Steven Pinker in his book "The Blank Slate." Pinker derides the notion that human nature might be part of anything like a soul - the "ghost in the machine," as he calls it.
Yet even he can't finally disentangle his materialistic explanations from the mysterious phenomena they supposedly explain.
"These puzzles have an infuriatingly holistic quality to them," he writes with touching frustration. "Consciousness and free will seem to suffuse the neurobiological phenomena at every level. Thinkers seem condemned either to denying their existence or to wallowing in mysticism."
Some scholars, primarily liberal Protestants but also some evangelicals, insist the Hebrew Bible presents an integrated picture of the self that does not draw sharp distinctions between soul and body. This has led some of them to reject the concept of the soul as a separate substance.
"What we are saying is that there is no such thing as a soul," said Murphy. She and Warren S. Brown, a neuropsychologist and director of Fuller's Travis Research Institute, are coeditors of Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, a provocative collection of essays.
They say they are committed to evangelical Christian teachings, yet believe developments in cognitive science and evolutionary biology call into question a dualistic definition of humans.
"As neuroscientists associate more and more of the faculties once attributed to mind or soul with the functioning of specific regions or systems of the brain, it becomes more and more appealing to say that it is in fact the brain that performs these functions," Murphy writes in the book's introduction.
"Nearly all of the human capacities or faculties once attributed to the soul are now seen to be functions of the brain." [...]
Brown, whose research has focused on the structure connecting the left and right brain, said, "I basically believe that humans are physical beings and would not think that the soul is a psychical entity, a little ghost in the machine."
He defends a complex position called "non-reductive physicalism," which holds that human beings are physical through and through. But he also maintains that we have developed cognitive and emotional capacities that cannot be reduced to biological or chemical processes.
These capacities, which he calls our "soulishness," enable us to be relational beings. "Soul language in traditional religious talk is suggestive of relationship with one another and our internal self-relationship, and our relationships with God," he said.
Shortly after The Economist magazine first produced its signature Big Mac index, in 1989, the Japanese yen, at 145 yen to the dollar was 38 percent overvalued against the dollar, by the index; a Big Mac cost 38 percent more in Tokyo than in New York. This overvaluation increased to 100 percent by 1995, at which point the yen touched its all time high of 80 yen to the dollar. Today, at 119 yen to the dollar, it is by the Big Mac index 19 percent undervalued compared to the dollar; a Big Mac is 19 percent cheaper in Tokyo than in New York.
At first sight, this is very strange. The yen has appreciated by about 18 percent against the dollar since 1989, at a time when inflation in both countries has been modest, yet a Big Mac has moved from being 38 percent more expensive in Tokyo to 19 percent less expensive.
The explanation for it is not the alleged evil monster of deflation, or at least it is only deflation in the purely technical sense of prices dropping. The Japanese distribution system was in 1989 the most inefficient in the developed world, particularly for foreign goods, with layer upon layer of importers and wholesalers each charging a markup on the goods that moved through their hands, and price competition at the retail level being hopelessly restricted by the highly protectionist Large Scale Retail Store Law. Consequently, an item such as the Big Mac, which was partly imported, partly sourced from inefficient Japanese agriculture, and wholly distributed to the consumer through retail outlets, was far more expensive in Tokyo than it needed to be. Any foreign visitor paying a Japanese restaurant bill in the 1980s will confirm this; the place was outrageously costly, through excessive costs at all levels including and notoriously the real estate on which the restaurant rested, which was so expensive that the Emperor's palace grounds in central Tokyo were in 1989 worth more than the entire state of California.
All that has now changed. [...]
The Japanese economy is now poised to move forward. By U.S. standards, its rate of GDP growth may appear unexciting, for demographic reasons -- unlike the U.S., whose population is growing by about 1.2 percent per annum, thorough births and immigration, Japan's is shrinking, by about one percent per annum, because of tight immigration policies and a low birth rate. But for the Japanese people, this is a good thing; it means that a 2 percent per annum growth rate in the Japanese economy can in the long run translate into a 3 percent per annum improvement in Japanese living standards. And of course, with low immigration, the social tensions of immigration are also very largely absent, with violent crime rates in Japan far lower than those in the U.S. or Western Europe
A JAPANESE Government white paper on crime released last week has demolished the myth that Japan is the safest country in the world.
According to the document compiled by the Justice Ministry, the number of criminal cases in 2001 was a post-war record.
Excluding traffic offences, the number of crimes rose to 2.73 million, up 12 per cent from the previous year.
The white paper attributed the rise in violent crime to moral degeneration among Japanese people and to decline in the crime prevention functions traditionally provided by the family, schools and local communities.
Gogi Topadze, a beverage magnate who leads the Industry Will Save Georgia party, says he wants to stimulate growth by simplifying the tax code. He spoke to EurasiaNet about his platform, the upcoming elections, and his willingness to work with the Shevardnadze government.
EurasiaNet: Dissatisfaction with the tax code has characterized the Industrialists. In your opinion, what is wrong with it?
Topadze: It's not possible to point at one or two paragraphs in the tax code that we're not happy with. The whole code is detrimental to the Georgian economy. It is oriented towards the import of goods and kills possibilities in Georgia to start businesses that could successfully compete with Western products.
The tax code, which reflects recommendations from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and [others], doesn't allow for the opportunity to modernize the industry and agriculture of the country. We have proposed to parliament three different variants of the tax code that would stimulate Georgian business. Their main principles were liberalization, the use of more understandable language in the code and a simplification of taxes. Instead of the current 80 different taxes there would be only four, three of which would be national and one local.
With such a simplified code, you could fight corruption. The current code is so cumbersome and opaque that it is easy for bureaucrats in the tax department to take what they want if they are inclined to do so. Therefore, the [Ministry of Tax and Finance] doesn't want to [simplify] the law. Big companies have a whole group of lawyers to fight back. But small businesses don't.
In his political views, David Cameron is on the real-world Right of the Tory party. A Eurosceptic, he believes in smaller government and personal freedom; he abominates political correctness and the nanny state. But he also understands that most people depend on public services and do not necessarily trust the Tories to look after them. David Cameron is a modern Tory, who sees the need to adapt old principles to new circumstances. Without being a populist, he has a feel for public opinion. He likes pop music as well as opera; football as well as deer-stalking.
Above all, he has a robust and incisive mind. I have rarely met a politician who can expand a complex issue with such clarity while spotting every political nuance. He is also a good speaker, who charms audiences without condescending to them and who makes jokes while remaining serious.
If there is a fault, it is an unconcealed impatience. One or two of David Cameron's Tory contemporaries, not negligible figures themselves, have complained that he does not take enough trouble with the likes of them. In the febrile world of competitive politics there may be an element of jealousy in that criticism, but it is something which he will have to watch. The day will come when he needs his fellow Tory MPs' votes.
A column in the Guardian might be the wrong place to ask this question. But does anybody out there ever feel sorry for us Tories? We may be in our fifth year of opposition, languishing in the polls and virtually invisible in the media, but we're still getting blamed for everything. And I mean, everything. The state of the railways. Privatisation. Hospital waiting lists. Two decades of under-investment. Shortage of housing. The Tory sale of council houses. When will anyone start blaming the government?
Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, an academic study is showing that the suicide rate tends to rise during Tory governments. No, seriously. According to the study, if Labour or the Liberals had ruled uninterrupted this century, 35,000 fewer people would have died. [...]
But I think I have the key. On election night in 1997, when I crashed and burned as the Tory candidate in Stafford, an old lady came to me in tears and said: "I don't want to die under a Labour government." Perhaps there were thousands of others like her who didn't wait for the final results and took pre-emptive action.
Another look at the figures over the past century would seem to back up this thesis. There was a spike in the figures just before the first Labour government in 1924 and another in 1945. Churchill may not have expected the Labour landslide, but others clearly did.
The figures were relatively flat during Ted Heath's premiership, presumably on the basis that people thought (quite rightly as it turned out) that a Labour government couldn't be much worse. On this basis, the rise in the early 1980s wasn't down to Margaret Thatcher's tough policies, but simply because, before the Falklands war, people couldn't see how she could win another election.
[Richard Clarke, the country's first counter-terrorism czar,] said that in October, 2000, when the U.S.S. Cole was bombed, off the coast of Yemen, Clinton demanded better military options. The Department of Defense prepared a plan for a United States military operation so big that it was dismissed as politically untenable; meanwhile, General Hugh Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, concluded that, without better intelligence, a smaller-scale attack would be too risky. (Indeed, according to the Congressional Report on September 11th, Shelton said, "You can develop military operations until hell freezes over, but they are worthless without intelligence.") The Navy tried stationing two submarines in the Indian Ocean, in the hope of being able to shoot missiles at bin Laden, but the time lag between the sighting of the target and the arrival of the missiles made it virtually impossible to pinpoint him accurately.
The first promise of an intelligence breakthrough came in the fall of 2000, when Clarke, and a few allies in the C.I.A. and the military, recognized the potential of the Predator, a nine-hundred-and-fifty-pound unmanned propeller plane being tested by General Johnny Jumper, the Air Force's head of air combat at the time. It could supply live video surveillance-day or night, and through cloud cover. Clarke said that the plane, which was tested in Afghanistan, supplied "spectacular" pictures of suspected Al Qaeda terrorists, including one of a tall, white-robed man who closely resembled bin Laden and was surrounded by security guards as he crossed a city street to a mosque. At the C.I.A.'s Global Response Center, analysts who were used to receiving fuzzy satellite photographs and thirdhand reports were now able to watch as live video feeds captured the daily routines inside Al Qaeda training camps. They watched as men did physical exercises, fired their weapons, and practiced hand-to-hand combat. Two or three times that fall, intelligence analysts thought they might have spotted bin Laden himself. The man in question was unusually tall, like bin Laden, and drove the same model of truck that bin Laden preferred, the Toyota Land Cruiser. (The images weren't clear enough, however, to allow analysts to discern facial features.) The C.I.A. rushed the surveillance tapes over to the White House, where the President, like everyone else, was stunned by their clarity. Later that fall, however, fierce winds in the Hindu Kush caused the Predator to crash. The accident led to recriminations inside the C.I.A. and the Air Force and quarrels about which part of the bureaucracy should pay for the damage.
By early 2001, Clarke and a handful of counter-terrorism specialists at the C.I.A. had learned of an Air Force plan to arm the Predator. The original plan called for three years of tests. Clarke and the others pushed so hard that the plane was ready in three months. In tests, the craft worked surprisingly well. In the summer of 2001, an armed Predator destroyed a model of bin Laden's house which had been built in the Nevada desert. But Clarke said, "Every time we were ready to use it, the C.I.A. would change its mind. The real motivation within the C.I.A., I think, is that some senior people below Tenet were saying, `It's fine to kill bin Laden, but we want to do it in a way that leaves no fingerprints. Otherwise, C.I.A. agents all over the world will be subject to assassination themselves.' They also worried that something would go wrong-they'd blow up a convent and get blamed."
On September 4, 2001, all sides agree, the issue reached a head, at a meeting of the Principal's Committee of Bush's national-security advisers, a Cabinet-level group that includes the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the director of the C.I.A., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Attorney General, and the national-security adviser. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz also attended that day. As Clarke, who was there, recalled, "Tenet said he opposed using the armed Predator, because it wasn't the C.I.A.'s job to fly airplanes that shot missiles. The Air Force said it wasn't their job to fly planes to collect intelligence. No one around the table seemed to have a can-do attitude. Everyone seemed to have an excuse."
"There was a discussion," the senior intelligence official confirmed. "The C.I.A. said, `Who's got more experience flying aircraft that shoot missiles?' But the Air Force liked planes with pilots." In looking back at the deadlock, Roger Cressey, Clarke's deputy for counter-terrorism at the N.S.C., told me, "It sounds terrible, but we used to say to each other that some people didn't get it-it was going to take body bags."
Tony Blair was accused yesterday of 'crimes against humanity' in a lawsuit lodged at the International Criminal Court in The Hague by Greek lawyers.Where would Washington get a silly idea like that?
The Athens Bar Association filed 22 charges against the Prime Minister and senior Cabinet members, alleging that they invaded a sovereign country on a dubious pretext.
'The repeated, blatant violations by the United States and Britain of the stipulations of the four 1949 Geneva conventions, the 1954 Convention of The Hague as well as of the International Criminal Court's charter constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity,' said the group.
The case is based on press clippings and news reports, many from Greece's anti-American media.
Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, and Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, were among those named, but the Bush administration was spared because America has refused to sign up to the ICC.
Washington fears the court could degenerate into a political circus and subject US officials to constant harassment.
The root of the problem is that America has always been a low-saving country. The fraction of our incomes that we put aside, together with the fraction of earnings that our companies retain rather than paying out in dividends, adds up to a smaller share of our national income than what the typical European country saves, and a smaller share than what some of the fast-growth countries in East Asia normally save.
When the government spends more than it takes in from taxes-that's what running a deficit means-the Treasury has to borrow in the financial markets to cover the overage. This borrowing absorbs some of the saving done by families and firms, saving that otherwise would have remained available to finance investment in productive new plant and equipment. People who put their savings into banks, or money-market mutual funds, don't think of themselves as financing the government's deficit. But when these institutions use the deposited funds to buy Treasury securities, that's exactly what they are doing.
If we had a saving rate like Italy's (11 percent) or Korea's (above 13 percent), having the Treasury absorb an amount of our saving equal to a few percentage points of our national income would be of little concern. But over the last 10 years the total amount of saving done by the private sector of our economy, beyond the amount needed merely to replace the factories and houses that are wearing out (in other words, the saving that is available to enable the economy to do more than just keep running in place), has averaged not even 6 percent of US national income. If the government's deficit averages 2 percent of national income later this decade, as the latest Bush administration predicts, it will therefore take up more than one-third of America's net saving. More likely, the deficit will be larger and so will the share of our national saving it absorbs.
When a similar situation occurred during the Reagan administration (when the deficit averaged 4.2 percent of national income), defenders of the president's policy offered a variety of stories about how the saving rate would rise, or how business could be productive and wages rise without new investment, or how some other break with prior experience would solve the problem. Those ideas were intellectually interesting. But they also proved wrong. During the big-deficit years of President Reagan and the first President Bush, the share of US national income devoted to net new investment in plant and equipment fell to the lowest average level in the postwar period, and real wages-and therefore the income of the typical US family-stagnated.
To make matters worse, in order to finance even the meager investment we were able to make during the Reagan-Bush years, with the government absorbing so much of our saving, America borrowed so much from abroad that we became the world's most highly indebted country. During the last few years, the United States has again been running a large trade deficit, and consequently has been borrowing heavily from foreign lenders, for reasons having little to do with the budget deficit. Business here may be weak, but it is stronger than in Europe or Japan or Latin America. We buy more than $100 billion in goods each year from China, but sell the Chinese little in return. If our government is still running a sizable budget deficit after our economy returns to full employment, that will only make the situation worse.
What's wrong with continual large budget deficits, maintained year after year even at full employment, is that they take away the economy's means of achieving economic growth.
Equal education is one of the most pressing civil rights of our day. Nearly half a century after Brown versus Board of Education, there's still an achievement gap in America. On the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, on the reading test, 41 percent of white 4th graders were proficient and better readers, but only 12 percent of African-Americans met that standard. That means we've got a problem. Both numbers are too low.
I think too many of our schools are leaving too many children unprepared. And so we acted. I worked with Congress to pass what we call The No Child Left Behind Act. It says every child can learn. We must challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations. And you know what I'm talking about.
And as Rod Paige will brief you, states are beginning to respond. We said, in return for record levels of education spending at the federal level, we expect results.
You see, if you believe every child can learn, then you ought to be asking the question to those who are spending our money: are you teaching the child? That's what we ought to be asking all across America. And now there's accountability plans being put in place in 50 states, plus Puerto Rico and the District. I know people are concerned about testing. I've heard this debate a lot. They say it's discriminatory to measure and compare results. I say it is discriminatory not to measure. I think it's important to know whether or not our schools are succeeding. We simply have got to stop shuffling our children from grade to grade without asking the question, have they been taught to learn to read and write and add and subtract?
I believe it is those who believe certain [children] can't learn that are willing to shuffle them through. And the No Child Left Behind Act ends that, in return for record levels of money, you've got to show us whether or not the children can read and write and add and subtract. And when schools don't measure up, parents must have more options. It's one thing to measure, but there has to be consequences for failing schools. So in that Act parents are able to send their children to a different public school or a charter school, or get special tutorial help.
I also believe it makes sense to explore private school choices, so I'm working with the leadership in Washington, D.C. This isn't a Democrat issue or Republican issue, this is an issue that focuses on children. [...]
Our opportunity in society must also be a compassionate society. As Americans, when we see hopelessness and suffering and injustice, we will not turn our backs. And one of the best ways to build hope is to recognize where some of the great works of compassion are done. You see, a government can hand out money -- and sometimes we do a pretty good job of it -- but what it can't do is put hope in people's hearts or a sense of purpose in people's lives. That happens when people who have been called to love a neighbor interface with a neighbor in need.
You see, every day across America, faith-based and community groups are touching people's lives in profound ways -- give shelter to the homeless and provide safety for battered women; they bring compassion to lonely seniors. America's neighborhood healers have long experience and deep understanding of the problems that many face. And many of them have something extra besides experience. They have inspiration, as they carry God's love to people in need.
I like to call the neighborhood healers America's social entrepreneurs. And they need the support of foundation America and corporate America. They need the support of individuals and, of course, congregations. And, when appropriate, they deserve the support of the government.
Government has no business endorsing a religious creed, or directly funding religious worship. But for too long, government treated people of faith like second-class citizens in the grant making process. Government can and should support effective social services provided by religious people, as long as those services go to anyone in need. And when government gives that support, faith-based institutions should not be forced to change the character of their service or compromise their principles.
Neighborhood healers have not been treated well by the federal government, so I signed an executive order banning discrimination against faith-based charities by federal agencies. I created a special offices in my key Cabinet departments to speak up for faith-based groups, and to help them access government funding. I've asked the departments to report to me on a regular basis to make sure the old days are gone, to make sure we challenge and harness the great strength of the country, the heart and soul of our citizens. We're changing the focus of government from process to results. Instead of asking the question, is this a faith-based program? We're now asking the question, does the program work? And if so, it deserves our support. [...]
Our journey toward justice has not been easy and it is not over. Yet I am confident that we will reach our destination. We have been called to great work in our time, and we will answer that call. We will defend our freedom, and we will lead the world toward peace. And we will unite American behind the great goals of opportunity for all, and compassion for those in need.
I want to thank each of you for serving this cause in your own lives. May God bless your work, may God bless the Urban League, and may God continue to bless the United States of America.
Should Americans be able to buy American-made prescription drugs from other countries at cheaper prices than they would have to pay in the US? Of course, the answer is yes. All that free traders are asking is that US firms be willing to let Americans buy US drugs at market prices when they are imported from other countries. The only possible reason to pay more would be if you want to dump vast sums of money on the US drug industry for no good reason. Consumers might want to-they can send Eli Lilly a fat check--but they shouldn't be forced to.
And yet some free traders have gotten on board with the desire to use protectionist means to boost prices and thereby add fuel to the fire of socialized medicine. It's expected that politicians sell their souls. But what about think tanks? The American Enterprise Institute, Cato, Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the National Center for Policy Analysis, National Review, and many other organizations and "free market" publications have come out for banning re-importation. Why? They say that re-imported drugs are unsafe, would undercut US drug makers, dry up research funds, and make drugs more difficult to regulate.
Doug Bandow of Cato, for example, argues that because foreign countries do not have free markets for drugs, they shouldn't be permitted to export to the US which does. Of course that is precisely the same rationale used by the catfish and textile industry to ban competitive products. If anything, the claim is even more absurd since we are not talking about competitors but the very same firms that already sell in the US. So hysterical has been the campaign that re-imported drugs are said (by Michael Krauss) to be "an
invitation to terrorists."
As with other protectionist schemes, it is really about taxing Americans and imposing price floors to benefit a politically influential industry. Krauss actually admits this when he says: "Do we want pharmaceutical progress? Then we must pay for these goods, even if other nations don't do their part." But protectionist profits are not the reason for pharmaceutical progress. The reason is innovation, which depends in no way on patents and protectionism in drugs any more than with any other form of innovation. The proof is precisely that American firms are willing to sell at such low prices to foreign nations; they must be making a profit.
Gerhard Schroeder’s unpopular government has acted decisively ... to protect the humble German ant from the nation’s over-zealous gardeners ...
German homeowners and gardeners who attempt to destroy an ant hill or subterranean nest will be subject to hefty fines if caught.
They must now apply for a permit from their local forestry office to have the ants carefully moved to local woods.
"People with an ant hill in their garden must under no circumstances resort to the use of poison," said ant officer Dieter Kraemer.
A small alternative public school program has been expanded into a full-fledged school for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students.
The Harvey Milk High School, an expansion of a 1984 city program consisting of two small classrooms for gay students, will enroll about 100 students and will open in the fall.
''I think everybody feels that it's a good idea because some of the kids who are gays and lesbians have been constantly harassed and beaten in other schools,'' Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a briefing Monday. ''It lets them get an education without having to worry. It solves a discipline problem. And from a pedagogical point of view, this administration and previous administrations have thought it was a good idea and we'll continue with that.''
The number of gay and bisexual men diagnosed with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, climbed for the third consecutive year in the United States in 2002, fueling fears the disease might be poised for a major comeback in this vulnerable group.
Overall AIDS diagnoses rose 2.2 percent to 42,136 last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also said on Monday at the 2003 National HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta.
Some AIDS experts worry that the increase could indicate a more complacent attitude toward the disease and a willingness to engage in riskier behavior by some vulnerable groups, such as young gay and bisexual males.
"We think almost all of the child tax credit payments will get spent," said Sung Won Sohn, chief economist at Wells Fargo in
Minneapolis. "Those checks will be arriving just when families will need the money for back-to-school items."
By giving Americans more disposable income, the tax cuts are also expected to help lift consumer confidence. Analysts believe that Tuesday's report on consumer confidence could show a gain to around 85 for June, up from 83.5 in May. That would be the highest reading since last fall and an indication that consumer optimism is rebounding from the jittery days before the Iraq war. [...]
David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's in New York, said he expected the sub-par GDP growth of the past nine months will be replaced with much stronger growth of around 4 percent in the second half of this year. Many analysts believe that growth in the first half of next year will hit 4.5 percent or better, given the kick expected from the new tax cuts.
Even with growth improving, it will still take time to make much of a dent in unemployment rate. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com, said the country isn't likely to see a significant rebound in employment until next year. But the improvement should still come in time to give Bush a boost in his 2004 re-election campaign.
Out of frustration, various groups have turned to the reform tools established in California's progressive history. But these tools were not designed to substitute for governing, they were developed to protect against abuses.
Instead, in the last 25 years, the initiative process has fundamentally changed the governing structure of the state. Between 1978 and 2000, more than 600 statewide initiative petitions were circulated, 118 appeared on the ballot and 52 passed. Policies from prison terms to car insurance rates to property taxes to dedicated funds for education and conservation have been enacted not by the governor and Legislature but by the initiative process.
And if groups and partisan interests can afford to put their particular initiative on the ballot, then why not use the same process as a partisan weapon to go after unpopular political leaders regardless of when they were elected? The current recall effort is in many ways the culmination of direct democracy run amok.
But the initiative and recall processes are not the real problem. They are merely symptoms of a much larger problem: the breakdown in trust that is essential to governing in a democracy.
The more the elected leadership of California engages in partisanship and gridlock, the more the public will take governing into its own hands regardless of the consequences.
The only way to avoid runaway initiatives and recalls is for the elected leaders and the voters to recognize their common responsibility to effective self-government.
America's prison population grew again in 2002 despite a declining crime rate...
Captain Cook and cricket caps. The review of the National Museum of Australia, with its heartfelt yearning for the return of great-white-bloke stories, makes for rather vexing reading.
Predictably, the review team's maiden voyage of museum discovery washes them up onto the familiar shore of great male discovery narratives. This lost white Australian dreaming doesn't get messed up by facts about the usurpation of Indigenous land and human rights and doesn't foreground women. In their proposed upstairs/downstairs narrative of Australia, terra nullius stays downstairs where it belongs. Captain Cook and other ocean-going discoverers get reified upstairs. Non-British immigrants go altogether, unless they can make good cappuccinos.
The panel's plan starts with Circa, the multimedia introduction to contemporary Australia that's extremely popular with all age groups. Circa is criticised on various grounds but mainly for presenting a diverse range of opinion. The three majority panelists recommend replacing the two major galleries Nation and Horizons with two chronological "white history" exhibitions - "European discovery to Federation" and "Federation to contemporary Australia".
The first would begin with Burke and Wills; the second with a 1961 world record Test crowd at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The previous track record of such themes at inspiring Australians is weak. Remember the Centenary of Federation? Maybe not. While making Federation a central framing device for two main gallery treatments, even the review panel suggests that Federation is a bit too boring.
The review's findings are influenced by an undisguised yearning for a grand, if somewhat schoolboyish, national narrative. Commending the "courageous warrior hero" stories of Homer's Iliad or the American Wild West, they mistakenly believe coloniser cowboy epics are deeply unifying narratives. Although few references are cited, the report's intellectual underpinnings conform with Keith Windschuttle's Quadrant article of September 2001, which lamented the absence of grand historical narratives in the National Museum. The review panel has obligingly filled in the dots with the outlines and textures of a highly exclusionary and tired formula.
In its vision of nation, the panel does not reject differing versions of history, but it certainly rejects multiple identities, contested identities, interrelated identities of nation.
After three years of Palestinian violence, the prevalent attitude among Jews in this country is that the less Palestinians have to be seen, heard from and dealt with, the better. No wall that keeps them out can be too high, no obstacle too thick. Let's draw a curtain on the Arab world, turn our backs to it, and face across the sea to Europe and the West: Put that in a petition and you could get a million signatures in a month.
There is something to be said for this. The Middle East has not, in the 125 years since Zionist settlers first tried striking roots in it, been very
hospitable to us. It continues to be one of the most backward regions of the world, ruled by despotic regimes and fundamentalist clerics. We Jews, on the other hand, have been, for the past century and a half, at the cutting edge of Western civilization. Backs to the Arab world and faces to the West seems a natural posture for us--at least until that world undergoes basic changes that are not in the offing right now.
And yet think of the price, the diminishment.
The real question we now have to answer--that we have not answered since 1967--as prepared or unprepared for answering it as we may be, is quite simply this: Do we, assuming a degree of choice exists, want to live with the Palestinians in a Land of Israel or Palestine that is open to us all, or do we want to live without them and in only part of it?
Curiously, as I have said, the immediate logic of both a "yes" and a "no" answer to this question is the same: Get on with The Fence, as awful and ugly as it is, and go on building it as fast as possible. Only as it nears completion will we and the Palestinians have to decide. But the decision, when it comes, will be radical and drastic. Both sides had better start thinking, as hard and deeply as we can, about its implications right now.
Veterans have two gripes.
One is a longstanding complaint that some disabled vets, in effect, have to pay their own disability benefits out of their retirement pay through a law they call the Disabled Veterans Tax.
Since 1891, anyone retiring after a full military career has had their retirement pay reduced dollar for dollar for any Veterans Administration checks they get for a permanent service-related disability. However, a veteran who served a two-or-four-year tour does not have a similar reduction in Social Security or private pension.
A majority of members of Congress, from both parties, wants to change the law. A House proposal by Rep. Jim Marshall, D-Ga., has 345
co-sponsors.
But it would cost as much as $5 billion a year to expand payments to 670,000 disabled veterans, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld earlier this month told lawmakers that the president would veto any bill including the change.
The proposal is stuck in committee. A recent effort to bring it to the full House of Representatives failed, in part because only one Republican signed the petition.
"The cost is exorbitant. And we are dealing with a limited budget," said Harald Stavenas, a spokesman for the House Armed Services Committee.
The second complaint is over medical care. After decades of promising free medical care for life to anyone who served for 20 years, the government in the 1990s abandoned the promise in favor of a new system called Tricare. The Tricare system provides medical care, but requires veterans to pay a deductible and does not cover dental, hearing or vision care.
Angry residents of this northern city yesterday warned Nawaf al-Zaidan, the tribal chief who owned the mansion where Uday and Qusay Saddam Hussein died in a blistering gunbattle, that revenge is coming to him.
"He's a traitor to his country and religion," said a shopkeeper across from Mr. Zaidan's gutted home, destroyed in the long but one-sided battle between Saddam Hussein's sons and U.S. forces last Tuesday.
And whether they loved Saddam's regime or not, many here view Mr. Zaidan, the suspected informer who tipped off the Americans, as a traitor for the sake of a US$30-million pricetag on Uday and Qusay's heads.
"Nawaf and his son and the money he received will all end up in a grave," predicted Mr. Zaidan's old neighbourhood shopkeeper.
The Americans will not say whether Mr. Zaidan is the man who turned in Saddam's sons, but neither will they deny it.
Asked yesterday about the fate of the informant, a senior officer from the U.S. Army's 101 Airborne Division in Mosul said: "We'll take care of our sources."
In a much discussed recent book, Walter Russell Mead identifies four strands of American foreign policy: Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian, Wilsonian and Jacksonian. Jacksonians follow the ideas of President Andrew Jackson, the archetype of ante-bellum, aggressive southern honour, who fought more than a dozen duels. They see the pursuit of national honour as the prime purpose of policy. Right now, Jacksonianism reigns triumphant in the halls of American power. The South’s political influence has possibly never been greater. It was Al Gore’s failure to win a single state in the old Confederacy that lost him the presidency, and George Bush Sr’s nemesis came in the form of Ross Perot, a Texan who in 1953 almost singlehandedly devised the current Honour Code of the US Naval Academy at Annapolis.
Jacksonian rhetoric has spearheaded America’s recent wars. The word ‘honour’ is rarely used, but substitutes such as ‘credibility’ abound in official speeches. Nato had to bomb Yugoslavia because the ‘credibility of the alliance was at stake’. Coalition forces had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein was ‘undermining the credibility of the UN’. Saddam was not a threat to the USA, but he was a living insult to its honour. Despite all the efforts of the most powerful state on earth, he had for ten years continued to survive and defy America’s wishes. For an administration driven by sentiments of honour, such an insult could not be permitted. Just as the South could not allow Lincoln to become their President, so George W. Bush could not allow Saddam to continue humiliating his country. Only war could satisfy honour.
As the ancient Greeks knew, the pursuit of honour often leads people to attack others, to drive them down, in order to inflate themselves. The Greeks called such behaviour hubris, and believed that hubris inevitably resulted in disaster. It certainly did for the Confederacy.
Democratic presidential candidates are following the politically risky strategy of embracing tax increases as key parts of their economic agendas, hoping to make mounting federal deficits and President Bush's economic stewardship major issues in the 2004 campaign.Fritz Mondale, yesterday, today and tomorrow.
When Bush signed his third tax cut into law last month, the legislation was supposed to put Democratic candidates in a political bind. They could no longer say they favored delaying or canceling future tax cuts, because the legislation put those planned cuts into law immediately.
But the candidates have shown little reluctance to reverse tax cuts already in force. Although they couch it as 'rolling back' Bush's tax policies, virtually all the major Democratic candidates say they would raise taxes on some or all of those who pay income tax. The proposals range from repealing all the tax cuts enacted in the past three years to raising taxes only on the wealthiest Americans.
The Democratic National Committee tomorrow will appoint two minorities, including New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, to leading roles in its national convention in Boston next summer, in a response to concerns among local blacks that people of color would not share prominently in all facets of the event.The Republicans could do worse than make sure that this article is reprinted in every newspaper in the country.
Richardson, the highest-ranking elected Hispanic official in either party and a possible vice presidential candidate, will be nominated as convention chairman. Alice Huffman, president of the California NAACP, will chair the convention committee.
The appointments come after African-American leaders in Boston late last week questioned the expected naming of Rod O'Connor as convention chief executive, or the person to run daily events. O'Connor, a one-time aide to former Vice President Al Gore, is white and has no Boston ties, even though Democratic Party officials have insisted that the convention will showcase the emergent racial diversity of Boston.
It's very difficult keeping up with Mideast news due to the Orwellian newspeak coming from Washington.
So here's a handy list of key terms, translated into simple English.
+ Liberation - Invasion.
+ Coalition - The U.S. and British invaders, plus some troops from rent-a-nations like Romania and Poland. In the past, "the coalition" would have been called imperial forces and mercenary auxiliaries.
+ Dictator - A ruler you don't like, or who does not cooperate.
(1) Saddam Hussein?
(2) Qusay and Uday Saddam?
(3) Ba'athism?
(4) Halabja?
(5) Scud missile?
(6) The invasion of Iraq by the United States, Britain, and a very few others?
(7) The pre-invasion form of government in Iraq and the form that will exist in a year's time?
(1) A homicidal dictator
(2) Sociopaths
(3) Totalitarianism
(4) An act of genocide (a mass killing based on ethnicity)
(5) a WMD
(6) An essentially unilateral war to depose a homicidal dictator, prevent his sociopathic sons from following him to power, and dispose of WMD--with a more than incidental liberation and democratization thrown in.
(7) pre-war: Totalitarianism
post-War: that's for the people of Iraq to decide.
When I told friends about my pilgrimage to Iraq to thank the U.S. troops, reaction was underwhelming at best. . . .Ms. Ferer's husband Neil was killed in the World Trade Center on September 11.
But the reason seemed clear to me: 200,000 troops have been sent halfway around the world to stabilize the kind of culture that breeds terrorists like those who I believe began World War III on Sept. 11, 2001. Reaction was so politely negative that I began to doubt my role on the first USO/Tribeca Institute tour into newly occupied Iraq where, on average, a soldier a day is killed. . . .
One mother of two from Montana told me she enlisted because of Sept. 11. Dozens of others told us the same thing. One young soldier showed me his metal bracelet engraved with the name of a victim he never knew and that awful date none of us will ever forget. . . .
What I was not prepared for was to have soldiers show us the World Trade Center memorabilia they'd carried with them into the streets of Baghdad. Others had clearly been holding in stories of personal 9/11 tragedies which had made them enlist. . . .
One particular soldier, Capt. Vargas from the Bronx, told me he enlisted in the Army after some of his wife's best friends were lost at the World Trade Center.
When he glimpsed the piece of recovered metal from the Towers that I had been showing to a group of soldiers he grasped for it as if it were the Holy Grail. Then he handed it to Kid Rock who passed the precious metal through the 5000 troops in the audience. They lunged at the opportunity to touch the steel that symbolized what so many of them felt was the purpose of their mission -- which puts them at risk every day in the 116 degree heat, not knowing all the while if a sniper was going to strike at anytime.
File this one under "Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it."
The people of Puerto Rico are facing some unanticipated consequences from a victory they won in 2001.
For several years, Puerto Rican protesters demanded that the U.S. Navy leave the island of Vieques. Groups staged violent protests outside the main gate of "Camp Garcia," saying they were sick and tired of the live-fire bombing exercises.
The violence resulted in the gates of the base being torn down. Several U.S. troops and police dogs were injured in the demonstrations.
In response to the years of protest, former President Clinton agreed to stop Navy exercises there. Congress and President Bush ratified the deal and live-fire exercises were halted last May. But with its mission muzzled after 60 years, the Navy has decided to pull out of Puerto Rico completely.
That means the largest employer on the island, the Roosevelt Roads Naval Station, is now slated for closure that could come as early as October.
Island workers are accusing the Navy of economic revenge.
"You dedicate all your talents, all your efforts. You're loyal to your employer, this case being the U.S. Navy, and what do you get in return? A kick in the you-know-what," said Ana Angelet of the Puerto Rican chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees.
Two-year old Khalil Shehada plays with a real gun as Palestinians mark the first anniversary of his uncle, military leader Sheik Salah Shehada's assassination, in Gaza city, Friday, July 25, 2003. Arabic writing on headband reads Arabic ' No God but God and Mohammed is the Prophet of Allah, Izz el-Deen al-Qassam brigade, military wing of Hamas'. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)
As the war in Iraq recedes, the challenges of occupying and rebuilding the country seem to grow more daunting with every passing day. It is becoming clear, though, that Iraq's devastation is not primarily the result of American bombing during the war or of the looting that followed it, but of the economic crisis that befell the country before the first shot was fired. There is still little consensus about what happened in Iraq during the years before the war or who is to blame. But the quest for answers has reawakened a fierce and bitter controversy over Iraq policy in the 1990's.
For officials in Washington and London and for American administrators now in Iraq, that country's postwar woes are essentially the legacy of Saddam Hussein's tyrannical, cruel and corrupt rule. As L. Paul Bremer III, the civilian administrator of postwar Iraq, recently said of Hussein, ''While his people were starving -- literally, in many cases, starving -- while he was killing tens of thousands of people, Saddam and his cronies were taking money, stealing it, really, from the Iraqi people.''
But others argue that the fundamental reason Iraq is in such terrible shape is not Hussein's brutality but rather the comprehensive regime of economic sanctions that the United Nations Security Council imposed on Iraq for almost 13 years, sharply restricting all foreign trade. It was these sanctions, they claim, that brought this once rich country to its knees.
For many people, the sanctions on Iraq were one of the decade's great crimes, as appalling as Bosnia or Rwanda. Anger at the United States and Britain, the two principal architects of the policy, often ran white hot. Denis J. Halliday, the United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Iraq for part of the sanctions era, expressed a widely held belief when he said in 1998: ''We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that.'' Even today, Clinton-era American officials ranging from Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of state, and James P. Rubin, State Department spokesman under Albright, to Nancy E. Soderberg, then with the National Security Council, speak with anger and bitterness over the fervor of the anti-sanctions camp. As Soderberg put it to me, ''I could not give a speech anywhere in the U.S. without someone getting up and accusing me of being responsible for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children.''
The end of the war has at last made it possible to find out what the effects of sanctions on Iraq really were.
[Q:] What should we be doing differently in Iraq?
[A:] I'm concerned that we have the world's best-trained soldiers serving as policemen in what seems to be a shooting gallery. It's hard to see how the situation will improve, unless the President is willing to involve NATO. There are 2 million troops in NATO with some of the most impressive and well-trained police units in the world--units that understand rioting, explosives, crowd control, and maintaining law and order.
Just weeks ago, Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, made a trip to the Middle East that was widely seen as advancing the peace process. There was speculation that she would be a likely choice for secretary of state, and hopes among Republicans that she could become governor of California and even, someday, president.Are we supposed to believe that it's just a coincidence that the Democrats are always attacking blacks, women and Catholics?
But she has since become enmeshed in the controversy over the administration's use of intelligence about Iraq's weapons in the run-up to war. She has been made to appear out of the loop by colleagues' claims that she did not read or recall vital pieces of intelligence. And she has made statements about U.S. intelligence on Iraq that have been contradicted by facts that later emerged.
The remarks by Rice and her associates raise two uncomfortable possibilities for the national security adviser. Either she missed or overlooked numerous warnings from intelligence agencies seeking to put caveats on claims about Iraq's nuclear weapons program, or she made public claims that she knew to be false. . . .
Democrats, however, see a larger problem with Rice and her operation. "If the national security adviser didn't understand the repeated State Department and CIA warnings about the uranium allegation, that's a frightening level of incompetence," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (Calif.), who as the ranking Democrat on the Government Reform Committee has led the charge on the intelligence issue. "It's even more serious if she knew and ignored the intelligence warnings and has deliberately misled our nation. . . . In any case it's hard to see why the president or the public will have confidence in her office.
APRIL GLASPIE: I thank you, Mr. President, and it is a great pleasure for a diplomat to meet and talk directly with the President. I clearly understand your message. We studied history at school That taught us to say freedom or death. I think you know well that we as a people have our experience with the colonialists.This is an Iraqi transcript and cannot be taken at face value. Ambassador Glaspie claims that it is not complete and, in parts, not accurate. But it in no way supports the argument that April Glaspie on her own, or on behalf of the US government, gave Saddam Hussein the green light to invade Kuwait. Rather, she is saying that the US has no position on the proper outcome of the border dispute between Iraq and Kuwait, other than that it should be resolved peacefully. This came in the context of a written communication to the Iraqis stating that we were committed to the territorial integrity of our friends in the Gulf and a statement by Dick Cheney, a few days earlier, that the US would defend Kuwait.
Mr. President, you mentioned many things during this meeting which I cannot comment on on behalf of my Government. But with your permission, I will comment on two points. You spoke of friendship and I believe it was clear from the letters sent by our President to you on the occasion of your National Day that he emphasizes --
HUSSEIN: He was kind and his expressions met with our regard and respect.
Directive on Relations
GLASPIE: As you know, he directed the United States Administration to reject the suggestion of implementing trade sanctions.
HUSSEIN: There is nothing left for us to buy from America. Only wheat. Because every time we want to buy something, they say it is forbidden. I am afraid that one day you will say, 'You are going to make gunpowder out of wheat.'
GLASPIE: I have a direct instruction from the President to seek better relations with Iraq.
HUSSEIN: But how? We too have this desire. But matters are running contrary to this desire.
GLASPIE: This is less likely to happen the more we talk. For example, you mentioned the issue of the article published by the American Information Agency and that was sad. And a formal apology was presented.
HUSSEIN: Your stance is generous. We are Arabs. It is enough for us that someone says, 'I am sorry. I made a mistake.' Then we carry on. But the media campaign continued. And it is full of stories. If the stories were true, no one would get upset. But we understand from its continuation that there is a determination.
GLASPIE: I saw the Diane Sawyer program on ABC. And what happened in that program was cheap and unjust. And this is a real picture of what happens in the American media -- even to American politicians themselves. These are the methods the Western media employs. I am pleased that you add your voice to the diplomats who stand up to the media. Because your appearance in the media, even for five minutes, would help us to make the American people understand Iraq. This would increase mutual understanding. If they American President had control of the media, his job would be much easier.
Mr. President, not only do I want to say that President Bush wanted better and deeper relations with Iraq, but he also wants an Iraqi contribution to peace and prosperity in the Middle East. President Bush is an intelligent man. He is not going to declare an economic war against Iraq.
You are right. It is true what you say that we do not want higher prices for oil. But I would ask you to examine the possibility of not charging too high a price for oil.
HUSSEIN: We do not want too high prices for oil. And I remind you that in 1974 I gave Tariq Aziz the idea for an article he wrote which criticized the policy of keeping oil prices high. It was the first Arab article which expressed this view.
TARIQ AZIZ: Our policy in OPEC opposes sudden jumps in oil prices.
HUSSEIN: Twenty-five dollars a barrel is not a high price.
GLASPIE: We have many Americans who would like to see the price go above $25 because they come from oil-producing states.
HUSSEIN: The price at one stage had dropped to $12 a barrel and a reduction in the modest Iraqi budget of $6 billion to $7 billion is a disaster.
GLASPIE: I think I understand this. I have lived here for years. I admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. I know you need funds. We understand that and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.
I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60's. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via Klibi or via President Mubarak. All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly. With regard to all of this, can I ask you to see how the issue appears to us?
My assessment after 25 years' service in this area is that your objective must have strong backing from your Arab brothers. I now speak of oil But you, Mr. President, have fought through a horrific and painful war. Frankly, we can see only that you have deployed massive troops in the south. Normally that would not be any of our business. But when this happens in the context of what you said on your national day, then when we read the details in the two letters of the Foreign Minister, then when we see the Iraqi point of view that the measures taken by the U.A.E. and Kuwait is, in the final analysis, parallel to military aggression against Iraq, then it would be reasonable for me to be concerned. And for this reason, I received an instruction to ask you, in the spirit of friendship -- not in the spirit of confrontation -- regarding your intentions.
Classical beefsteak meat is carved off the shell, a section of the hindquarter of a steer: it is called "short loin without the fillet." To order a cut of it, a housewife would ask for a thick Delmonico. "You don't always get it at a beefsteak," Mr. Wertheimer said. "Sometimes they give you bull fillets. They're no good. Not enough juice in them, and they cook out black." While I watched, Mr. Wertheimer took a shell off a hook in his icebox and laid it on a big, maple block. It had been hung for eight weeks and was blanketed with blue mold. The mold was an inch thick. He cut off the mold. Then he boned the shell and cut it into six chunks. Then he sliced off all the fat. Little strips of lean ran through the discarded fat, and he deftly carved them out and made a mound of them on the block. "These trimmings, along with the tails of the steaks, will be ground up and served as appetizers," he said. "We'll use four hundred tonight. People call them hamburgers, and that's an insult. Sometimes they're laid on top of a slice of Bermuda onion and served on bread." When he finished with the shell, six huge steaks, boneless and fatless, averaging three inches thick and ten inches long, lay on the block. They made a beautiful still life. "After they've been broiled, the steaks are sliced up, and each steak makes about ten slices," he said. "The slices are what you get at a beefsteak." Mr. Wertheimer said the baskets of meat he had prepared would be used that night at a beefsteak in the Odd Fellows' Hall on East 106th Street; the Republican Club of the Twentieth Assembly District was running it. He invited me to go along."How's your appetite?" he asked.
I said there was nothing wrong with it.
"I hope not," he said. "When you go to a beefsteak, you got to figure on eating until it comes out of your ears. Otherwise it would be bad manners."
That night I rode up to Odd Fellows' Hall with Mr. Wertheimer, and on the way I asked him to describe a pre-prohibition stag beefsteak.
"Oh, they were amazing functions," he said. "The men wore butcher aprons and chef hats. They used the skirt of the apron to wipe the grease off their faces. Napkins were not allowed. The name of the organization that was running the beefsteak would be printed across the bib, and the men took the aprons home for souvenirs. We still wear aprons, but now they're rented from linen-supply houses. They're numbered, and you turn them in at the hat-check table when you get your hat and coat. Drunks, of course, always refuse to turn theirs in.
"In the old days they didn't even use tables and chairs. They sat on beer crates and ate off the tops of beer barrels. You'd be surprised how much fun that was. Somehow it made old men feel young again. And they'd drink beer out of cans, or growlers. Those beefsteaks were run in halls or the cellars or back rooms of big saloons. There was always sawdust on the floor. Sometimes they had one in a bowling alley. They would cover the alleys with tarpaulin and set the boxes and barrels in the aisles. The men ate with their fingers. They never served potatoes in those days. Too filling. They take up room that rightfully belongs to meat and beer. A lot of those beefsteaks were testimonials. A politician would get elected to something and his friends would throw him a beefsteak. Cops ran a lot of them, too. Like when a cop became captain or inspector, he got a beefsteak. Theatrical people were always fond of throwing beefsteaks. Sophie Tucker got a great big one at Mecca Temple in 1934, and Bill Robinson got a great big one at the Grand Street Boys' clubhouse in 1938. Both of those were knockouts. The political clubs always gave the finest, but when Tammany Hall gets a setback, beefsteaks get a setback. For example, the Anawanda Club, over in my neighborhood, used to give a famous beefsteak every Thanksgiving Eve. Since La Guardia got in the Anawanda's beefsteaks have been so skimpy it makes me sad.
"At the old beefsteaks they almost always had storytellers, men who would entertain with stories in Irish and German dialect. And when the people got tired of eating and drinking, they would harmonize. You could hear them harmonizing blocks away. They would harmonize 'My Wild Irish Rose' until they got their appetite back. It was the custom to hold beefsteaks on Saturday nights or the eve of holidays, so the men would have time to recover before going to work. They used to give some fine ones in Coney Island restaurants. Webster Hall has always been a good place. Local 638 of the Steamfitters holds its beefsteaks there. They're good ones. A lot of private beefsteaks are thrown in homes. A man will invite some friends to his cellar and cook the steaks himself. I have a number of good amateur beefsteak chefs among my customers. Once, during the racing season, a big bookmaker telephoned us he wanted to throw a beefsteak, so we sent a chef and all the makings to Saratoga. The chef had a wonderful time. They made a hero out of him."
In post - Civil War America, politics was a brutal sport played with blunt rules. Yet James Garfield's 1881 dark horse campaign after the longest-ever Republican nominating process (36 convention ballots), his victory in the closest-ever popular vote for president (by only 7,018 votes out of over 9 million cast), his struggle against feuding factions once elected, and the public's response to its culmination in violence, sets a revealing comparison with America approaching a new campaign year in 2004. Author and Capitol Hill veteran Kenneth D. Ackerman re-creates an American political landscape where fierce battles for power unfolded against a chivalrous code of honor in a nation struggling under the shadow of a recent war to confront its modernity. The murder prompted leaders to recoil at their own excesses and changed the tone of politics for generations to come. Garfield's own struggle against powerful forces is a compelling human drama; the portrait of Americans coming together after his assassination exemplifies the dignity and grace that have long held the nation together in crisis.
Lance Armstrong did it.
Riding in heavy rain on a slick course with traffic circles and some tight curves, Armstrong played it safe and virtually sewed up his fifth successive victory in the Tour de France today.
"It was extremely dangerous," he said after finishing the 30-mile individual time trial in third place. "It wasn't necessary for me to take any risks."
That was because his closest rival, Jan Ullrich, skidded and crashed at a left turn on the treacherous road and lost a dozen seconds, more than twice his lead on Armstrong at that point in the time trial. Shaken, he turned prudent and lost even more time.
Officials of the United States Postal Service team, which Armstrong leads, relayed news of the fall by radio to the earpiece he wears. "When I heard that Ullrich fell," Armstrong said, "I said: `Take it easy. Ride safely.' "
He coasted the rest of the way...
The starting point of this summer's Medicare prescription-drug debate should cause concern for Republicans with any political memory. The drug bill that hit the Senate floor was the offspring of a deal between President Bush and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), the "liberal lion" of the U.S. Senate. This seems an odd partner for a Republican president to choose. Kennedy, after all, is the most straightforward advocate in Washington of a universal health-care system mandated and funded by the federal government. Bush and the Republican Party believe this would be a disaster.
But the White House appears to believe that it can get political mileage out of Rose-Garden signing ceremonies with Ted Kennedy in attendance. We've seen this play before, with Bush's premiere policy initiative: the "No Child Left Behind Act."
In the eyes of conservative education reformers, policy-wise, this bill started off as a bad one with some good elements and ended up a disaster. From a fiscal perspective, it was a disaster from the start. Politically, it was no better. But Bush had campaigned as "The Education President," and he needed a bill to live up to that reputation. Congressional Republicans gave his education bill a top spot on the agenda, with the bills in the two chambers garnering the numbers H.R. 1 and S.1 in the 107th Congress. (In the 108th Congress, those numbers adorn the prescription-drug bills.)
In the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, liberal Democrat George Miller (Calif.), the ranking member, effectively took control of the bill markup. This shouldn't have been surprising-drafting a bill on expanding the federal role in education is moving the ball onto the Democrats' turf. The committee, effectively under Democratic control, stripped out Bush's school-choice provisions, added to the costs, and passed it with a five-year cost of $132 billion. It grew to $135 billion before Capitol Hill was done.
On Jan. 8, 2002, Bush signed his prized education bill into law with a grinning Kennedy and Miller over his right shoulder. A week later, at a rally in Boston, Bush said, "I told the folks at a coffee shop in Crawford, Texas that Ted Kennedy was all right. They nearly fell out." Those shocked folks at the Crawford diner very likely had their suspicions confirmed just a few weeks later, when Kennedy and Miller launched an attack on Bush for not providing even more money in his education budget. "The President's budget deals a severe blow to our nation's schools," Kennedy said in a March press release.
In October, as the midterm elections approached, Kennedy smacked around Bush and the GOP a little more. "Today, the President and the Republican leaders in Congress are cutting funding for our schools," Kennedy said. Since Republicans took over Congress, Department of Education funding has risen by 132 percent. The White House seems to hope it can feed the liberal lion to keep him quiet. The story of the education bill should have shown that Republicans can never spend enough to satisfy Kennedy or even to keep him from attacking them.
The attempt to disarm the Left by co-opting their issues fails in the end.
Anyone who wishes to know about American politics has much to learn from contemporary events; but there is no substitute for careful reflection on the founding. Everything begins from the founding, and the subsequent changes have occurred to America as founded. Even the attributes of our politics said to have changed since 1787--democratization, heterogeneity, complexity, centralization, bureaucracy--were either set in motion then or took their particular character from the founding. Even when ineluctable necessities such as bureaucracy are imposed on us, we submit to them in our own way, creating an American bureaucracy. Here I have been speaking in Aristotelian terms because the American regime is not simply a theoretical, impartial republic modeled on mankind's necessities. It has its own character and has made its own culture.
Abraham Lincoln described the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in biblical language (Proverbs 25:11) as the apple of gold in the frame of silver. The apple is the natural principle of human equality; the frame surrounding it is the conventional or cultural structure that displays the principle, gives it life, and makes it ours. The two together are a whole, necessary to each other. But they are also separate parts: one that in 1776 declared the principle, another that in 1787 made it work politically. Their separateness makes a point of the act of constituting, done with calm and, despite the heated words, with a certain noble elevation in both the deliberation of the Constitutional Convention and the debate over ratification afterward.
We can be glad that the Federalists won the debate. As I said above, by the standards of contemporary political debate the argumentation was unattainably higher on both sides. But the Federalists were clearly superior. The essential question between Federalists and Anti-Federalists was over the source of great danger to republics: does it come from the many or the few? The Anti-Federalists consistently (if variously) maintained the traditional republican opinion that the few are the main enemy of republics. But the Federalists disagreed with this bromide. They offered the paradoxical judgment that the many are their own worst enemy, that the bane of popular government, in the statement of Federalist 10, is "majority faction"--a phrase that sounds like a contradiction in terms to traditional republicans. The ambitious few are also dangerous, but mainly because they can get the backing of an aroused majority. For their innovative view the Federalists were accused by their opponents during the constitutional debates, by Thomas Jefferson in the 1790s, and by later historians of lacking faith in the people, of being unrepublican. But they were intelligent republicans looking for ways to make republics more viable, and so raise them in the esteem of respectable opinion in the civilized world.
The Federalists accepted the risk of appearing to be doubtful republicans; they were a party concerned to reduce the partisanship of republics. In their Constitution they created an introspective republicanism not preoccupied with denouncing the enemies of republics but alive to the dangers from within the principle. In their view the worst faction in a republic was the one that looked like a republican majority, and they fashioned a republic that could defend itself against the republican danger, using "republican remedies."
[W]e shall also find, at the very heart of the Anti-Federal position, a dilemma or a tension. This is the critical weakness of Anti-Federalist thought and at the same time its strength and even its glory. For the Anti-Federalists could neither fully reject nor fully accept the leading principles of the Constitution. They were indeed open to Hamilton's charge of trying to reconcile contradictions. This is the element of truth in Cecelia Kenyon's characterization of them as men of little faith. They did not fail to see the opportunity for American nationhood that the Federalists seized so gloriously, but they could not join in the grasping of it. They doubted; they held back; they urged second thoughts. This was not however a mere failure of will or lack of courage. They had reasons, and the reasons have weight. They thought--and it can not be easily denied--that this great national opportunity was profoundly problematical, that it could be neither grasped nor let alone without risking everything. The Anti-Federalists were committed to both union and the states; to both the great American republic and the small, self-governing community; to both commerce and civic virtue; to both private gain and public good. At its best, Anti-Federal thought explores these tensions and points to the need for any significant American political thought to confront them; for they were not resolved by the Constitution but are inherent in the principles and traditions of American life.
While College Democrats of America has disappeared altogether from 20 states, its chapters dwindling from 500 in 1992 to fewer than 300 now, the College Republican National Committee has 1,148 campus chapters, and its membership has tripled since 1999. [...]
Studies have shown that campus conservatives are increasingly female and middle class. They admire Ronald Reagan and are more patriotic since 9/11.
They oppose speech codes, set-aside student government seats for racial minorities, and lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender groups, and what they see as political correctness.
Increasingly, they are for school prayer and the public funding of church groups and against abortion, a recent study by University of California Berkeley and University of Alabama professors found.
More of them are hawks than doves, the Harvard University Institute of Politics reported in May, noting that support for the war in Iraq outpaces opposition 66 percent to 30 percent. The Harvard study also found that 61 percent of college students like the way President Bush is doing his job.
They aren't into casual sex, according to the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute, which has been surveying incoming freshmen since 1966. Only 42 percent of freshman approve of it, down from 51 percent in 1987.
Farber...examines Lincoln's record with respect to civil liberties. Again, he is supportive of many of the president's contested actions. And he concludes that "[m]any of the acts denounced as dictatorial - the suspension of habeas at the beginning of the war, emancipation, military trials of civilians in contested or occupied territory - seem in retrospect to have reasonably good constitutional justifications under the war power."
Farber does acknowledges that, on occasion, the actions of Lincoln or the military were excessive. As examples, he cites measures to suppress free speech - and in particular, a case in which a gentleman opposed to the Civil War was convicted and sentenced to death for what may have been no more than associating with another individual who wanted to take armed action against the Union. After the war, in Ex Parte Milligan, the Supreme Court granted the gentleman's habeas corpus petition. [...]
Lincoln's Constitution concludes with a brief discussion of the current relevance of the constitutional questions surrounding Lincoln's Presidency.
Farber believes that Lincoln's conduct of the war demonstrates the need for a strong federal government in wartime. But he also contends that it is strong evidence that we need not circumvent the rule of law, or ignore constitutional protections, in dealing with such a crisis.
During our greatest constitutional crisis, Farber demonstrates, the nation was extremely fortunate to have Lincoln as its leader. He recognized the significance of the challenge posed by secession; acted decisively in responding to it; and nevertheless maintained a sense of perspective about the proper institutional role of the presidency.
In the midst of the war on terrorism, at least one disputed issue in the Civil War - how to balance individuals' constitutional rights against governmental claims of national security - remains quite germane. Regardless of one's political affiliation, it is undisputed that Lincoln set the bar rather high for his successors.
This essay is one of many recent efforts, by myself and others, to challenge two critical schools popular through much of this
century: those who think ethical judgments have nothing to do with genuine "literary" or "aesthetic" criticism, and those who think that ethical judgments about stories can never be anything more than subjective opinion. My thesis is thus double: ethical criticism is relevant to all literature, no matter how broadly or narrowly we define that controversial term; and such criticism, when done responsibly, can be a genuine form of rational inquiry. It is true that it will never produce results nearly as uncontroversial as deciding whether it rained in New York yesterday, or even whether President Clinton lied. What's more, many of its judgments, such as Plato's exaggerated attacks on Homer, will be rejected by most serious ethical critics. Yet when responsible readers of powerful stories engage in genuine inquiry about their ethical value, they can produce results that deserve the tricky label "knowledge." [...]
Why did the authors of the Bible choose mainly to be storytellers rather than blunt exhorters with a moral tag at the end of each story? They did not rest with the laying down of bare codes, like a list of flat commandments. Though they sometimes tried the brief commandment line, they more often told stories, like the one about a troubled abandoned-child-hero who, as leader of his liberated people, almost botches the job of obtaining some divine rules printed on a tablet, and about a people who largely botch the job of receiving and abiding by them. The pious preachers did not just print out the sermons of a savior; they placed the sermons into a story, and they surrounded them with other stories, especially the one about how the hero himself grappled with questions about his status as savior, and about how he told scores of radically ambiguous parables that forced his listeners into moral thought. They did not openly preach that for God to be incarnated as a man entails irresolvable paradoxes; they told a story about how the God/man at the moment of supreme moral testing is ridden with doubt and cries out, as any of us would have done, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
All those biblical authors must have known, perhaps without knowing what they knew, that serious stories educate morally - and they do so more powerfully than do story-free sermons. Just imagine how little effect on the world John Bunyan would have had if he had put into non-narrative prose the various messages embodied in Pilgrim's Progress.
In short, the great tellers and most of us listeners have known in our bones that stories, whether fictional or historical, in prose or in verse, whether told by mothers to infants or by rabbis and priests to the elderly and dying, whether labeled as sacred or profane or as teaching good morality or bad - stories are our major moral teachers. Some stories teach only a particular moral perspective, one that can be captured with a moral tag, as in some of Aesop's fables and the simpler biblical tales. Many of them teach a morality that you and I would reject. But all of them teach, and thus in a sense they are open to moral inquiry, even when they do not seem to invite or tolerate it.
In the face of this general acknowledgement of the power of stories, how could it happen that entire critical schools have rejected criticism that deals with such power? One obvious answer is that critics have wanted to escape the threatening flood of controversial judgments we land in as soon as ethical judgments are invited into aesthetic territory. Ethical judgments are by their nature controversial: the very point of uttering them is to awaken or challenge those who have missed the point. Consequently whenever a feminist critic, say, judges a novel or poem to be sexist, she can be sure to be attacked by someone who sees her values as skewed. To praise or condemn for political correctness is widely scoffed at as absurd: political judgments are merely subjective. To judge all or part of a poem according to religious values is seen as even more absurd, since religious views are widely seen as even less subject to rational argument.
A second powerful reason for suppression is the fear already mentioned: that ethical criticism of any kind, even when critics agree with the proclaimed values, is an invasion of "aesthetic" territory. As Charles Altieri reports in "Lyrical Ethics and Literary Experience" (above), to be seen as an ethical critic can trigger thoughtless responses from purists who fear that the "lyrical" or the "beautiful" will be sacrificed to preaching.
Alan Bookbinder, the corporation's head of religion and ethics and a self-confessed agnostic, has sparked outrage by dispensing with some of the programme's most popular voices.
Among those who say that they have been unseated are Lavinia Byrne, the former Roman Catholic nun who has presented the popular two-minute slot on more than 100 occasions, and the Rev Eric James, a former chaplain to the Queen. [...]
Other regular presenters such as the Rev Annabel Shilson-Thomas, the chaplain of Robinson College, Cambridge, fear that they have also been discarded as the station has not been in contact for some time. "I won't say I am not disappointed by it," she said. "But, from speaking to Christine Morgan, the executive producer of the programme, and one or two other people in the BBC, I hear that they are trying to give it a more secular, more multi-cultural and more multi-faith approach."
Gov. Gray Davis is so unpopular that his advisers don't plan to persuade voters to like him. And he may face so many rivals in the Oct. 7 recall election that he won't be able to win the way he's always won before, by attacking his opponent.
So, to save his job, the governor, his wife, campaign staff and supporters have begun to march in rhetorical lock step, trying to taint the recall as a vast right-wing conspiracy -- in Hillary Clinton's famous phrase -- to take over the state. Davis advisers say Bill Clinton may even come to California soon to make the argument himself. [...]
Instead of defending the governor, his longtime pollster Paul Maslin said, the Davis team will try to shift the blame by putting the heat on Republicans, including Bush in the weeks ahead, accusing them of trying to orchestrate a "right-wing coup.''
In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq, the president was too popular to touch, Maslin said. But with doubts swirling about Bush's reasons for taking the nation to war, it will be easier to pin blame on the president and his friends in the energy business for California's energy crisis -- and whip up fears of a Republican takeover.
"He ain't riding high anymore,'' Maslin said, noting that Bush's approval rating slipped to 49 percent in California, the lowest point since Sept. 11. "His policies are getting more unpopular every day.''
The thought of U.S. forces being drawn into a guerrilla war in Iraq may send shudders through many Americans and give the Pentagon public relations jitters. But military historians and counterinsurgency experts say that the United States has excelled at battling guerrillas throughout its history--the Vietnam War an obvious exception--and that the Marines wrote a manual on how to fight such wars that continues to be used by friends and foes alike.
The manual, written in 1941, says occupying forces must stay on the offensive, hunting down rebels wherever they hide. At the same time, the economic welfare of the local population has to be improved, repression should be avoided and native troops should be used as soon as possible.
U.S. troops followed that advice with a great deal of success in battling guerrillas in 20th century wars in the Philippines, Nicaragua, Haiti, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, as did the British in Malaysia after World War II. In Vietnam, by contrast, the lessons were mostly ignored in favor of a big-unit approach coupled with poor relations with the native population. [...]
Stan Florer, a retired Army colonel and Special Forces instructor, says that if there is a guerrilla war in Iraq right now, it is an unusual one. He describes the Iraqis as a smart, well-educated people who want to embrace democracy and therefore are unlikely to support guerrillas ideologically or materially in attacks against U.S. troops in large numbers.
"I don't think you're going to find the cooperation a nationalist (guerrilla) movement would have," Florer says.
In a recent newspaper advertising campaign, run by groups supporting the Bush administration's judicial nominees, a closed courtroom door bears the sign "Catholics Need Not Apply." The advertisement argues that William Pryor Jr., the Alabama attorney general and a conservative, anti-abortion nominee to the federal appeals court, was under attack in the Senate because of his "deeply held" Catholic beliefs. [...]
Republicans and their conservative allies argue that the Democrats have created a de facto religious test by their emphasis on a nominee's stand on issues like abortion. "It's not just Catholics," said Sean Rushton, executive director of the Committee for Justice, one of the groups that paid for these advertisements, which are running in Maine and Rhode Island. "I think there's an element of the far left of the Democratic Party that sees as its project scrubbing the public square of religion, and in some cases not only religion but of religious people." [...]
Behind the anger of many Democrats is the suspicion that this advertising campaign is part of the Republican Party's courtship of Catholics, an important swing vote. In general, Andy Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said Mr. Bush was "doing pretty well with white Catholics" lately.
It is all part of a politics that has changed radically since 1960. Among the nine Democrats on the Judiciary Committee accused of working against the interests of Catholic judicial nominees is, of course, John Kennedy's brother, Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
Four years ago a review showed that 20-year old Americans can expect to live 6.6 years longer if they attend religious services at least once a week. Now Harold G. Koenig, who teaches psychiatry at Duke University, reports that elderly people who are not disabled run a 47 percent greater risk of dying before long if they are not engaged in regular prayer, meditation or Bible study.
Koenig is the director of the Center for the Study of Religion, Spirituality and Health and editor-in-chief of Research News in Science and Theology. Discussing his long-term study with a sample group up 4,000 men and women above the age of 65, he related in an interview that praying and attending divine service regularly seem to result in a "40 percent reduction in the likelihood of high blood pressure."
Of course, science cannot prove divine intervention or miracles. But it can point to more tangible causes. Religiously active Americans of advanced age smoke and drink less than others, feel more at peace with themselves and - as Koenig phrased it -- "at least perceive to have more social support."
"When people pray, their fear of death goes down," Koenig went on. Equally important, active faith mitigates the grief over the death of a husband, wife, relative or friend. "The believer can cope better with a loss because he knows the loved one to be in God's good care."
Loneliness is perhaps the most horrible experience in old age. Here again, a life of worship helps, according to Koenig: "When you know that God is present you no longer feel that lonely."
O almighty God, infinite and eternal, thou fillest all things with thy presence; thou art everywhere by thy essence and by thy power; in heaven by glory, in holy places by thy grace and favour, in the hearts of thy servants by thy Spirit, in the consciences of all men by thy testimony and observation of us. Teach me to walk always as in thy presence, to fear thy majesty, to reverence thy wisdom and omniscience; that I may never dare to commit any indecency in the eye of my Lord and my Judge; but that I may with so much care and reverence demean myself that my Judge may not be my accuser but my advocate; that I, expressing the belief of thy presence here by careful walking, may feel the effects of it in the participation of eternal glory; through Jesus Christ. Amen.
-Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), Holy Living
MOYERS: President Bush's recent speech to the American Enterprise Institute, he said, let me quote it to you. 'The danger posed by Saddam Hussein and his weapons cannot be ignored or wished away.' You agree with that?OK, but he didn't buy yellowcake from Niger, right?
WILSON: I agree with that. Sure. I…
MOYERS: 'The danger must be confronted.' You agree with that? 'We would hope that the Iraqi regime will meet the demands of the United Nations and disarm fully and peacefully. If it does not, we are prepared to disarm Iraq by force. Either way, this danger will be removed. The safety of the American people depends on ending this direct and growing threat.' You agree with that?
WILSON: I agree with that. Sure. The President goes on to say in that speech as he did in the State of the Union Address is we will liberate Iraq from a brutal dictator. All of which is true. But the only thing Saddam Hussein hears in this speech or the State of the Union Address is, 'He's coming to kill me. He doesn't care if I have weapons of mass destruction or not. His objective is to come and overthrow my regime and to kill me.' And that then does not provide any incentive whatsoever to disarm.
MOYERS: All of us change in 12 years and obviously Saddam Hussein has changed since you last saw him. But what do you know about him that would help us understand what might be going through his mind right now?
WILSON: [G]iven that his worldview is limited, there is a tendency to develop a logical argument where the premise is skewed. . . . So he will, for example — four days after he invaded Kuwait when I saw him in August of 1990 — he said that the United States lacked the intestinal fortitude and the stamina to confront his invasion in Kuwait. And it was clear to me that he was drawing upon his interpretation of our experiences in Vietnam, Beirut and possibly Tehran. And he had drawn exactly the wrong lessons from that.
We, in fact, stayed in Vietnam far longer than we should have perhaps. We were there for 15 years. And we suffered 50,000 casualties. We did not cut and run. We did spill the blood of our soldiers for many, many years. Give you another example, the whole decision to go into Kuwait was, from his perspective, rational based upon his understanding of the region and of what the international community would do.
The Faustian bargains Castro made then in the aftermath of widespread popular unrest have resulted in the abandonment of the revolution's once vaunted egalitarian principles. The legalization of dollars in 1993, for example, has created a caste system in which Cubans with access to dollars live vastly better than the much larger numbers who have none. Parallel economies have developed, with an ever-deepening polarization between rich and poor, urban and rural, black and white. By some accounts, Cuba now ranks near the bottom in income distribution among the Latin American countries.
The often desperate competition to somehow acquire dollars from Western visitors has also led to other social and moral distortions that Castro previously deplored. University enrollment is less than half of what it was in 1990 because young Cubans see greater advantage in hustling tourists. Prostitution is rampant. Crime has increased. Resentments are growing too, because average Cubans, even those with dollars, are prohibited from visiting most tourist locations. But Castro's greatest concern, and a major source of his wrath, is that over the past few years a large and determined pacifist opposition has developed on the island. The Varela Project, operating entirely within Cuban law, gathered more than 11,000 signatures on petitions seeking democratic opening. Many of its leaders are now serving long prison sentences.
Several librarians and independent journalists also have been incarcerated. All "prisoners of conscience," according to Amnesty International, they were guilty of lending books from their private collections to neighbors or of writing cultural and other articles and then sending them abroad for dissemination. None of those imprisoned advocated violence, organized anti-regime demonstrations, conspired or uttered inflammatory language against the regime. They know better than to ridicule Castro on the record in any way at all.
This opposition is an entirely home-grown phenomenon with few connections to the Cuban Diaspora. The activists came to oppose Castro's regime in the early 1990s after its compromises, economic failures and refusal to reform as other closed societies evolved. Many were inspired by Pope John Paul II during his 1998 visit. "Don't be afraid," he told a large Cuban audience. It is their persistence and spiritual detachment in the face of repression that especially angers Castro. But most of all he fears that the leaders of a democratic Cuba will emerge from this new opposition after he departs.
On January 22, 2001, President Bush swore in the commissioned officers who would serve in the White House. He reminded us, "We are not here just to mark time."
From his first days as a candidate to his first term as President, George W. Bush has done much more than mark time. He has seized the moment.
His leadership has transformed challenges into opportunities. Because President Bush has confronted great challenges, our nation has overcome some of the greatest tests in our history. Because he has insisted on solving those problems—not just passing them on, future generations will have more security, prosperity and opportunity. And because our President has developed solutions based on compassionate conservative principles, our party today has the greatest opportunity in generations.
Victory November 2, 2004 would be the first time in 80 years the party of Lincoln has re-elected a President and returned majorities to the House and Senate. The last time this happened Calvin Coolidge was running for re-election. [...]
Just as the Truman doctrine provided a roadmap to contain communism, President Bush has put forward principles to protect our nation and the world by defeating terrorism where it grows.
First, we will treat terrorists and those who support, harbor, finance, and assist terrorists the same. All will be brought to justice.
Second, that justice will be done where the terrorists gather. We will bring the battle to them, not wait until they attack our homeland. As long as George W. Bush is President, the front lines on the war on terror will be Baghdad and Kandahar, not Boston and Kansas City.
Third, America will lead global efforts to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. We will strengthen our intelligence and law enforcement to look for and break the links between dangerous regimes, weapons of mass destruction and terrorist organizations.
And, finally, we will confront terror with hope, fear with freedom. Our President will work to bring freedom and democracy throughout the world.
The President has done more than just talk principles. He has made these our national policies. While much work remains to be done, al Qaeda's leaders are now hiding in caves, and Afghan girls can attend school.
The dictator of Iraq has been deposed, and his cruel sons no longer torment the Iraqi people. Twenty-four million once captive Iraqis now taste freedom.
Some criticize this war on terror as unilateral or pre-emptive. But didn't September 11 teach us that we cannot wait while threats gather? That we must connect the dots, even if other nations refuse to see the pattern? That pre-empting terrorists before they acquire weapons of mass destruction, before they come to our shores, before they can harm America is the goal?
The President has transformed the federal government to protect our homeland.
Our President has turned challenges into opportunities at home as well. To confront a recession and protect jobs, our President passed two of the three largest tax cuts in history. To ensure prosperity in the future, these tax cuts encourage investment and assist those trying to enter the middle class.
The President's plan allows America's working families to keep more so they can do more for themselves and their communities.
The most comprehensive corporate responsibility reforms since the New Deal are now the law of the land. For the first time in a decade, our President has fast track authority to negotiate free trade.
We've passed the most significant education reforms in a generation with high standards and testing to make sure every child is learning. We're relying on programs that work like phonics.
Presidential leadership is making prescription drug coverage a real possibility for seniors, not just a campaign tactic used to frighten our parents and grandparents.
President Bush is working for a more compassionate America. From helping AIDS victims in Africa to faith-based initiatives and welfare reform at home, President Bush has helped make sure the party of Lincoln has an agenda worthy of our party’s founder.
The American Dream has always rested on the twin pillars of ownership and opportunity. Our President has an agenda to accomplish both: closing the gap between minorities and non-minorities in home ownership, promoting small business development, allowing younger workers to own a portion of their retirement if they choose. [...]
Last year, President George W. Bush's leadership, your efforts and the incredible Republican candidates transformed this political landscape. The President's party approaches its first midterm election as a challenge to be overcome. We approached it as an opportunity to be seized.
Despite how closely our country is divided, last year, the President's party won back the U.S. Senate in a first midterm election for the first time in history. While the White House party usually loses House seats, we won them in our first midterm -- the only other time a President's party has done that was 1934.
Despite having to defend 23 out of 36 governor’s mansions, Republicans still maintain a majority of Governor's mansions. And while the President's party loses an average of 350 net seats in state legislatures in midterm elections, we won 175. There are more Republican legislators than Democrats for the first time since 1954.
Republicans broke the 49% nation barrier in 2002. Republican candidates received 51% of the vote in the House and nearly the same in races for the Senate, and for governor. [...]
Ladies and gentlemen: this next election will be tough. It will be an incredible challenge. It will include difficult days.
But think about how our President has handled the unbelievable challenges he's faced. By leading on principle, by doing what's right, and by insisting on solving tough problems, not just passing them on, our President has transformed challenge into opportunity.
In his seminal work, The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk wrote the need for conservatives to embrace change. "Conservatives inherit from Burke," Russell Kirk wrote, "a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the time."
By applying conservative principles to take on challenges like global terrorism, a recession, a school system that was leaving too many children behind and so many other challenges, President Bush has made history and ensured a better tomorrow.
He's also provided our party and all who share our convictions with an opportunity--one that we realized in 2002 and we must work for again in 2004.
Members of the RNC: we have an opportunity not seen in our lifetime or our parents' lifetimes. Let us work together to seize this incredible moment. And let us start today.
"I'm finally able to do the things that I've always wanted to do," [Summer Hymns leader Zachary] Gresham says. "I started doing this because I liked being in front of people, and it's something that I guess I've gotten good enough at to pursue. I try not to think about it too much. I try not to analyze it."
Talking to Gresham, it seems impossible to believe that he loves being in front of a crowd. He mumbles and stutters with an endearing mountain of nervous energy. He doesn't suffer from the pretentious, typically self-important hubris of a burgeoning cult hero; he bears the weight of a wealth of humility. At one point he even fields a compliment with a bashful "geez Louise." But Gresham's candor defies the slack-jawed naivete of his country-boy demeanor.
"I grew up in a Baptist church. That's enough to make anyone not religious by the time they are 21," he says directly. "Music is my religion. Creativity is my communion."
His work fronting Summer Hymns makes this statement immediately evident. With the band's latest, Clemency, Gresham's high-pitched narratives are confessional and literate, and--like the name of his band--constantly hinting at the ethereal. Sonically, Gresham leads the band through poppy psyche-country that places him alongside like-minded contemporaries like Clem Snide, Sparklehorse and Centro-matic.
Opting out of the band's usual home-recorded tradition, they migrated to Nashville to record Clemency with Mark Nevers, a member of Lambchop whose production credits include Vic Chestnutt and the Silver Jews. Under Nevers' guidance they abandoned some of the spacey elements of their two earlier efforts and built the record on simple sounds: weepy pedal steel licks, swaying beats, acoustic guitars and lofty vocal melodies. In "Be Anywhere" he croons, "I don't want to believe," again and again over a wash of pedal steel. It's one of the most defining moments of the record, rich with emotional weight and simple, disarming sincerity. Think of it as Neil Young and Crazy Horse for the Starbucks generation. Or maybe not.
Like many Americans, I struggle with the voucher question. I admire public school teachers and support unions. My late mother taught in public schools and so, early in her career, did my sister. They cared passionately about the kids in their classrooms. The often-maligned teachers' unions have fought to bring up the pay of a profession whose importance to our future is not matched by the compensation its members receive.
But it should also bother us that liberals who send their kids to private schools would tell poor parents who want their children to escape failing public schools: "Sorry, our principles require your kids to stay right where they are."
For years, I have argued with my friends in the teachers' unions that they should support voucher experiments. Doing so would prove that they are on the side of the poor kids they teach. And if their unions are so certain that vouchers will fail, why not allow experiments that in all likelihood will prove that vouchers are no substitute for fixing the public schools?
Listen to Kati Haycock, director of The Education Trust, a group dedicated to the proposition that poor and minority kids deserve much better teaching.
Vouchers, she says, are "a sideline, a marginal issue." Vouchers could help some inner-city kids get "tickets into Catholic schools" and those kids would be "better off, though not hugely better off." The problem, she says, is that "there's not a lot of excess capacity" in Catholic schools or "in the non-Catholic school sector, and no excess capacity in the really high-end, independent schools."
In any event, Haycock adds, "tony private schools don't want to submit to the requirements that policy-makers are attaching to voucher programs." Not to mention that tony schools cost more than most voucher programs would provide.
And the notion that vouchers would create a large supply of new schools is nonsense.
Dean's weakness is the weakness of every Democrat in the last 30 years-a tepid appeal to working- and middle-class white voters, especially males, especially in the South and border-states. The Vermonter has acknowledged the need to "get white males to vote Democratic again," but federal health insurance and balanced budgets, which he brings up when the question is raised, won't do it. What could?
The obvious choice is immigration.
THE elimination of Saddam Hussein's evil sons Uday and Qusay was the biggest success in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad, but the Democratic 2004 presidential wannabes just didn't want to talk about the good news.
They're all quick to fire off a statement to every reporter on the Internet at the drop of a hat, but for some reason only Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) thought this was worth a statement. And his was grudging, with a focus on the "unfinished" work in Iraq.
Oh yes, other Dem wannabes did comment when asked, but it wasn't an issue they sought to raise on their own. That's particularly odd, considering that four of the five would-be presidents now in Congress actually voted for the Iraq war. You'd think they'd be happy.
The danger for Democrats now is that their strategies all seem to count on bad news from Iraq.
In fact, the buzz in Dem circles was how unlucky it was for Rep. Dick Gephardt (Mo.) that he gave his big Iraq-gone-wrong speech on Tuesday, choosing the day that Saddam's sons were killed to claim President Bush has made America "less safe."
American forces in Iraq are insisting that the noose is tightening around Saddam Hussein following the deaths of his two sons.
The number of raids carried out by troops hunting the deposed dictator has increased dramatically across the country.
The US says more people are coming forward with information now that Uday and Qusay are dead, tempted by the huge rewards on offer.
It has been confirmed that the informant - believed to be Saddam's cousin - who led forces to the house in Mosul where they made their last stand will get the full 20m reward.
Democrat strategist James Carville released a memo through his organization, Democracy Corps, which claims that President Bush has suffered "major political
damage" on "multiple fronts." According to the memo, "dramatic changes" are now taking place in the "electoral landscape."
The Democracy Corps memo from Carville, along with Stan Greenberg and Bob Shrum, says that President Bush is "taking so much water" because he is "losing ground" on three fronts: the economy, the war and foreign policy, and on trust." The memo goes on to state that the scope of the losses "should produce a Democratic Party much more confident of its ability to challenge and win on its ideas." [...]
The memo does note that, according to their poll, 64 percent of the respondents still want to continue the "Bush direction" when it comes to the war on terror. "Similarly, on homeland security, by two-to-one, voters think the Bush administration is providing the resources necessary for homeland defense," the memo states.
Lawmakers voted Friday to send Japanese forces to Iraq to help with reconstruction, despite delaying tactics by the opposition that deteriorated into a wild shoving match. [...]
Opposition parties criticized the legislation, saying such peacekeeping missions could violate Japan's pacifist constitution and put troops in the line of enemy fire.
During an upper-house committee meeting--during which the bill passed--outraged opposition legislators shouted and tried to push their way through a ring of ruling party lawmakers to get at the committee chairman, who had cut short the debate. The chairman called a vote amid the grappling and tackling.
Even though the Koran teaches that Christians and Jews are ''people of the book,'' and therefore to be respected, there is no question but that Christians in Egypt today are facing increasing discrimination and rising fear since the Islamists have not explained where nonbelievers would fit into an Islamic state. As for Jews, whereas historically Islam was much more tolerant of Jews than Christendom ever was, this has been reversed since the advent of Israel. [...]
What happens in Egypt is important, because almost one in three Arabs is an Egyptian, and Cairo is the traditional capital of Arab learning. What happens to religious tolerance in Egypt will speak libraries about the future of tolerance in the Middle East. But Christians in other Middle East countries have had it as bad or worse. Christians have been pouring out of the occupied West Bank for years, and the irony is that Christians will probably come under more pressure from Islamists in the new Iraq than they did under Saddam Hussein. Christians fare best in Syria, where religious tolerance is, ironically, enforced by dictatorship.
Further afield, Pakistan's tiny Christian minority finds itself under increasing discrimination from Islamic groups, and Christians are under assault in Indonesia, too. The trouble doesn't all come from Islam either. In India, Hindu nationalists are making life difficult not only for Muslims, but for Indian Christians as well, many of whom trace their arrival on the subcontinent to the third century.
Unfortunately, there is no reason for Western society to feel smug. Muslims are being daily demonized in the United States by Christian right groups, and our traditional tolerance is being tested.
A giant catfish that ate a dog and terrorized a German lake for years has washed up dead, but the legend of "Kuno the Killer" lives on.
A gardener discovered the carcass of a five-foot-long catfish weighing 77 pounds this week, a spokesman for the western city of Moenchengladbach said on Friday.
Kuno became a local celebrity in 2001 when he sprang from the waters of the Volksgarten park lake to swallow a Dachshund puppy whole. He evaded repeated attempts to capture him. [...]
Several fishermen identified the carcass as Kuno, but doubts linger.
"That's not the Kuno we know," said Leon Cornelius, another member of "Kuno's Friends." He said he had seen several huge catfish in the lake.
The new nationwide survey of 2,002 adults, conducted June 24-July 8 by the Pew Research Center and the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, shows that there has been an important shift in public perceptions of Islam. Fully 44% now believe that Islam is more likely than other religions "to encourage violence among its believers." As recently as March 2002, just 25% expressed this view. A separate study by the Pew Research Center in June 2003 found a similar change in the number of Americans who see Muslims as anti-American: 49% believe that a significant portion of Muslims around the world hold anti-American views, up from 36% in March 2002.
In the new survey, most Americans continue to rate Muslim-Americans favorably, though the percentage is inching downward. A declining number of Americans say their own religion has a lot in common with Islam--22% now, compared with 27% in 2002 and 31% shortly after the terrorist attacks in the fall of 2001. Views of Muslims and Islam are influenced heavily by a person's ideology and religious affiliation. White evangelical Christians and political conservatives hold more negative views of Muslims and are more likely than other Americans to say that Islam encourages violence among its followers.
As the presidential campaign takes shape, religious divisions over some controversial social issues--homosexuality in particular--are as wide as ever. Overall, 53% oppose allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally compared with 38% who support the idea. Opposition to gay marriage has decreased significantly since the mid-1990s, from 65% in 1996. But notably, the shift in favor of gay marriage is seen in nearly every segment of society with two significant exceptions--white evangelical Protestants and African-Americans. While a higher percentage of white evangelicals (83%) than blacks (64%) oppose legalizing gay marriages, neither group has changed its views significantly since 1996.
It has been three decades since the untimely death on July 20, 1973 of Bruce Lee, the martial-arts expert and movie star. The "dragon" (as he is known for his starring role in the film Enter the Dragon) has long been a cult hero to fans of martial-arts movies. But Lee deserves broader recognition for his contributions to American culture and society.
Lee served, in fact, as an important counterpoint to some of the negative cultural and social trends that were ascendant in the years when he attained fame. At a time when crime was soaring, Lee developed and popularized techniques that ultimately would help millions improve their self-defense abilities. In the face of a counterculture that derided self-discipline, Lee stood as a veritable embodiment of that virtue. In contrast to the pious (and often hypocritical) pacifism that arose against the Vietnam War, Lee's films were a reminder that force can be legitimate depending on how and why it is used.
It's the frequency that makes this different. Harvard and Yale joust on the gridiron only once a year. The Democrats and Republicans bite one anothers ankles hourly, but their defining moment comes on a Tuesday in November every fourth year.
What we have here is more of a Hatfields vs. McCoys feud. Blood-Crips, Sharks-Jets, and all that.
Last month, Penn State University officials learned something about professor Paul Krueger that wasn't on his resume — he is on parole for a triple murder committed in Texas nearly 40 years ago. . . .Now here's a nice little hypothetical for looking at the death penalty. Does this show that we shouldn't put murderers to death, because of the chance that they might become business professors? Or does it show that we have to put murderers to death, because we're just not going keep even the most heinous murderers in jail if they show themselves to be no further threat? I say that there's nothing wrong with this story that a couple of amps of electricity couldn't have solved.
In 1965, when he was 18, Krueger and a 16-year-old friend, left San Clemente, Calif. The two passed through TeTexas and rented a motor boat hoping to travel to Venezuela, where they intended to become "soldiers of fortune," according to a 1979 story in the Austin American-Statesman.
Along the Intracoastal Waterway near Corpus Christi, they encountered a fishing boat with a crew of three, John Fox, 38; Noel Little, 50; and Van Carson, 40. As night fell on April 12, 1965, all five went to shore and put in for the night.
For reasons Krueger never made public, he shot the three fishermen that night, unloading 40 bullets into their bodies. Sam Jones, then the district attorney for Nueces County, later referred to the shooting as "the most heinous crime in the history of the Gulf Coast."
Krueger pleaded guilty in 1966 to three counts of murder and was sentenced to three life terms, to be served concurrently.
Corrections officials described Krueger as a model inmate. He earned his diploma and an associate's degree, volunteered with alcohol and drug rehabilitation programs and reported for the prison newspaper.
Two parole commissioners, in 1977, called Krueger, "probably the most exceptional inmate" in the entire state. "There is nothing further he can do to rehabilitate himself," they said. Two years later, he was paroled to West Covina, Calif., where he enrolled in graduate school.
Shepherd in the flesh is not young, lean, and wisecracking, as his disembodied radio voice implies, but, middle-aged, stocky, with a Mephistophelean goatee that is starting to turn gray, and a surprisingly earnest and polite manner. He regularly telephones his mother, who is "real" and really lives in Hammond, Indiana, a place-name that has the same mythical importance for Shepherd as Hannibal had for Mark Twain. "I'd still be there," Shepherd reflects, "working in the steel mills and chewing Mail Pouch, if it hadn't of been for the second world war." The Signal Corps snatched him out of the mills at age seventeen and infected him with the radio bug. Several times he tried to shake it off, taking up Volkswagen dealership and sportscar racing, but without long-term success.
When he came to WOR ten years ago, fresh from running a hillbilly jamboree and interviewing wild animal acts for a Cincinatti station, Shepherd began by broadcasting records and random talk all night. His public then was mostly "night people"-- cabbies, students cramming on No-Doz, transatlantic pilots flying in on WOR's 50,000 watt signal. Now he has a larger (100,000 on a good night) and, to judge from his mail, more diversified audience. Hip adolescents are particularly sympatheic to him. A girl in a Quaker prep school based her valedictory speech on a Shepherd bit about false values created by advertising; a Scarsdale kid, quoting Kierkegaard, tried to explain to Shepherd why parents are mystified by his programs. Within the trade, too, Shepherd has achieved a measure of fame. "Official-type guys see me on an elevator," he says, "and they tell me I'm a great black humorist. Whatever that is."
But the devotion of his fans and recognition of fellow professionals has not been enough to make Shepherd as well known as a crowd of lesser performers. He remains essentially an "underground" phenomenon. The reason is no mystery: he is on radio, and he is himself. While national reputations are made on television, with help from the press agent's art, Shepherd works in a local medium, and his work is a rare kind that PR men wouldn't know what to do with.
Undoubtedly it is too bad that more people can't hear Shepherd. Outside the Northeast, which is covered by WOR, his only outlet until recently was a small listener-sponsored station in Seattle whose apt call-letters are KRAB. It remains to be seen whether he can win audiences in San Francisco and Boston as well. On the other hand, it is gratifying that he is heard at all, and that many of his programs have been taped. Very soon, when the genetic race has run its course and everyone is born with a portable T connected to his navel, archaeologists will find these tapes, and they will call Shepherd's flights of fact and fancy the final good moments of a lost form of communication.
After the Cold War we may seem an imperial power of sorts. But it is a funny sort of hegemony that seeks foreign input, pays dearly for bases, extends aid, encourages the spread of often noisy and cranky democracies, and intervenes in distant places like Serbia to stop mass murder when others more proximate and calculating would not. The shrillness of South Korea, Jordan, Egypt or the Palestinians is explicable not because of their anger at our intrusiveness but due to worries that we may in fact either pull out troops, cut off aid or simply wash our hands of the whole mess.
And for our part in this brave new world? The real danger is not that the allies, neutrals and international organizations are tiring of us, but rather that we are tiring of many of them. In consequence, our troops will be redeployed in South Korea, removed from Germany and Saudi Arabia, and downsized in Turkey, as we seek alternatives: more carriers, arms depots and caches, and smaller bases with new Eastern European hosts. America, in fact, is fashioning a policy that neither undermines international accords, but is not captive to them either.
Call the new American rethinking "engaged independence" if you will, but we are neither withdrawing from the world nor going back to working in quite the same way under the old protocols that so often proved themselves both impotent and amoral.
The "soft budget constraint" is an idea familiar to students of central and eastern Europe in the late years of communist rule. It described the condition of state-owned heavy industry under the communist regimes: entities that could not make profits, could not compete on international markets, and yet were so central to the social fabric of the system in which they were embedded, including its provision of social services, that they could not be allowed to fail. These entities became widely-deplored dependencies of the state budget and the state banks. Yet to millions, they provided the rudiments of a comfortable and secure life, the threads of which have not been picked up in the post-socialist orders that since emerged.
A brief examination of key American institutions shows that the concept goes very far toward explaining the structure and conduct of the US economy in the past twenty years, and particularly in the prosperous period of the late 1990s. But the institutions to which it is best applied in America are very different from those in eastern Europe. Indeed, the keys to the American model lie not in industry, but in those sectors providing social amenities to the middle class: health care, education, housing and pensions.
Health care, in the United States, consumes some 13% of GDP. A typical figure in Europe is 8-10%; in the UK the number is 7.3%. What few Europeans understand is that health expenditures within the direct US government budget consume 5.8% of GDP.
But whereas in (say) France a not-much-larger proportion of total output supplies medical services to the whole population, in the United States the direct public commitment is only to the elderly and disabled, the poor, and to veterans. For the rest of the covered population, medical care is paid out of private insurance, which enjoys tax advantages.
Overall, the tax-financed share is just under 60% of total health expenditure, or nearly 8% of GDP. The scandals of American health care do not lie in insufficiency of care (quite the reverse!), but rather in two notorious facts.
The first is that some 44 million persons lack either public or private insurance. This part includes many Latinos, who tend to avoid contact with the welfare system, as well as younger working people. Hence, deficient pre- and peri-natal care is an important problem.
The second is the rapacity of the private actors in the system - drug producers, doctors, nursing home operators, and insurance companies notably. Nevertheless, it is precisely the presence of those actors, and their political power, that has made the American health care system into the economic powerhouse that it is.
Higher education in the United States consumes about 2.25% of GDP. The figure for European countries is typically closer to 1%. Again the US spends more on public higher education as a share of GDP than do most Europeans: 1.07% as compared to 0.97% in Germany or 1.01% in France. But then in addition there is the private share, another 1.22% of GDP, centred on institutions whose multi-billion dollar endowments are highly motivated by the tax system. Many of these are to be found in the east, near traditional centres of capital wealth. Fully public institutions however dominate the scene in most of the country, including Texas and California.
The United States maintains two alternative public systems for keeping otherwise difficult-to-employ young people away from unemployment. These are the armed forces, with 1.4 million members, which consumes 4% of GDP and provides competent mechanical training to its members (including to virtually the whole of the population of commercial pilots, for example). And there is the prison system, whose much-expanded role in recent years is deplorable, but whose economic function also reduces unemployment. A major difference, of course, is that these three institutions provide very different levels of access to credit and other participatory mechanisms in later life.
Consumption of housing services accounts for about 9% of US GDP, while residential construction accounts for another 4%. The housing sector exists on its present scale thanks to a vast network of supporting financial institutions, subject to federal deposit insurance and to the secondary mortgage markets provided by quasi-public corporations (Fannie Mae, Ginnie Mae, Freddie Mac).
Despite continuing problems of discrimination against black neighbourhoods particularly, known as redlining, the fact remains that most Americans grow up in their own homes, and for the present moment home equity remains the major collateral against which middle class Americans are able to borrow to support their consumption.
Finally, social security payments to the elderly and disabled together with public pensions account for 8% of US GDP, on the reasonable assumption that these transfers are substantially spent rather than saved by their recipients. Some of this has been counted already in expenditures for health care and housing - but arguably not all that much. The American elderly live in paid-off homes and pay only a fraction of their medical (as distinct from pharmaceutical) expenses out of pocket. And social security funds a great deal of their ordinary consumption.
To be precise, social security alone provides the major source of disposable income of 60% of American elderly; only the top 40% of that population group has substantial other sources of income, public or private. The typical social security payment for an elderly couple in moderate health can reach $18,000 per year, which when combined with Medicare is adequate for modest comfort in most of the country. Pockets of elderly poverty remain, but overall, poverty among the old in America has fallen dramatically since the early 1970s, and is now lower than among the general population. This is the accomplishment substantially of expanded public pensions.
The point to emphasise is not merely that the United States is full of hospitals, universities, housing and pensioners, but that in the US these sectors are funded by a bewildering variety of financial schemes, involving public support in myriad direct and indirect ways, including direct appropriations, loans, guarantees, and tax favours. Some of these are on budget, some are off-budget, some are "discretionary", some are "non-discretionary". But there exists a broad political constituency behind them, which gives them political staying power - despite continuing assaults on them and some erosion under a right-wing congress, president and court system. The control of the scale of these activities has, to some extent, slipped away from those who ostensibly control the public budget.
And this is the genius, if one may call it that, of the American Model. The soft budget constraint (which as recently as the 1960s was entirely the province of the military) has come to apply precisely where it can do the least harm. And that is in providing income and employment in sectors that provide universally demanded human services to the population. In other words, powerful political constituencies exist to keep these sectors at the forefront of American life, and it is very likely that they will remain there.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury.
Battle damage assessment in Iraq is no longer measured in terms of tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery. It is now measured more in terms of HVT's or "high value targets," the American military lingo for the men who used to run the Saddam Hussein regime.
This is a bitter and deadly contest. It is not a fight over terrain but a battle over Iraq's future and the Iraqis who will shape it. [...]
The insurgents have been trying to destroy the human capital that the United States needs to run the country. Recent targets have included the pro-American mayor of Hadithah, who was shot along with his son, and seven Iraqi police recruits who were killed by a bomb in Ramadi. They have also been trying to sabotage efforts to rebuild Iraq's electrical system, oil sector and other infrastructure. Coupled with the audiotapes from Mr. Hussein that have exhorted Iraqis to continue resistance, the attacks are designed to create the impression that the regime has not been destroyed but has survived to fight another day--against the Americans and any Iraqis who align themselves with them.
The American strategy for rebuffing this challenge does not depend on military force alone. It requires the restoration of electricity and other basic services, the establishment of an effective Iraqi police force and other steps to gain the support of the Iraqi people. The Iraqis have to be persuaded that they have a stake in the new order and can benefit from it.
"The Iraqi population has exceedingly high expectations, and the window for cooperation may close rapidly if they do not see progress on delivering security, basic services, opportunities for broad political involvement, and economic opportunity," noted a recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies that was commissioned by the Defense Department.
But military power is still key. The aim of the American military campaign is not only to break up the cells of guerrilla fighters who have been
ambushing American forces but also to deprive the insurgents of the former leaders who serve as a symbolically important rallying cry.
Whether the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein were self-inflicted or not, the military operation to capture them was immaculate. There were no American deaths, 10 minutes of warnings were given over loudspeakers, and it was the Iraqis who opened fire. So sensitive was the American approach, they even rang the bell of the house before entering.
The neat operation fits squarely with the tenor of the whole American campaign, contrary to the popular negative depiction of its armed forces: that they are spoilt, well-equipped, steroid-pumped, crudely patriotic yokels who are trigger-happy yet cowardly in their application of overwhelming force.
Former President Bill Clinton's advice that Democrats should quit harping on President Bush's disputed statement that Iraq had pursued nuclear material from Africa was well-received by many Democrats on Capitol Hill - but not his wife.
"Everybody makes mistakes when they are president," Mr. Clinton said Tuesday night on CNN's "Larry King Live," adding that "the thing we ought to be focused on is what is the right thing to do right now."
The comments were widely interpreted as a message to Democratic presidential candidates that their constant criticism of Mr. Bush's Iraq policy is pushing the party too far to the left and away from mainstream voters who still largely support the U.S.-led campaign that deposed Saddam Hussein. [...]
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York Democrat, ... didn't seem to be on the same page as her husband. She repeated her call yesterday for an investigation into the Iraq-Africa nuclear link.
"I think there should be an independent investigation," Mrs. Clinton said. "I've called for it. How credible are these claims? What else do we need to find out about other claims?"
Jack Kemp, the Republican vice presidential nominee in 1996, emerged Thursday as a possible candidate on the Oct. 7 ballot to recall California Democratic Gov. Gray Davis.
Several of his supporters called Kemp on Thursday urging him to put his name on the ballot, according to three GOP officials with ties to the former Housing and Urban Development secretary. After one of the
calls, Kemp chuckled and told an associate, "Oh, my God."
The associates said Kemp was flattered by the requests, but it was unclear how seriously he was considering the race. At least one senior Republican official close to Kemp began seeking advice from friends
in GOP circles in case Kemp decides to run.
A giant statue of a naked man with a two-foot erection has caused a row in Salzburg after it was unveiled on the eve of a visit by Prince Charles. [...]
Called Arc de Triomphe, the statue by artists Ali Janka, Wolfgang Gantner, Tobias Urban and Florian Reither shows a naked man bending over backwards with his hands on the ground and a two-foot erection thrusting into the sky.
The statue was described as a tribute to Viagra and was unveiled in front of the Rupertinum Modern Art Gallery, one day before Charles was due to fly in for a visit to the Salzburg Festival.
If the Democratic presidential candidates weren't paying attention last Thursday, they missed a powerful lesson in both the shortcomings of their own foreign policies and in how best to attack the Bush administration's handling of international affairs. To date, the national-security platforms of the top Democratic contenders have run the gamut from muddled critiques of Bush's hawkish conduct (John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Lieberman) to straightforward rejection of American power (Howard Dean). What these strategies fail to take into account is that Americans remain genuinely concerned about their country's safety. Voters intuitively understand that September 11 was a signal of our vulnerability; they want a president with a long-term plan for guaranteeing our country's security in the world. No Democrat has even hinted at a foreign-policy platform that would address this concern. Few Americans believed during the 1980s that Star Wars alone would keep us safe from the Soviet Union; how many voters in 2004 will really believe that beefing up homeland-security funding -- the current catch-all of Democratic anti-terrorism policy -- is a substitute for a real strategy of defeating terrorism before it reaches our shores?
Bush and his advisers are well aware that Americans continue to fear terrorism. But they have cynically used this fear only to beget more fear. Think about Bush's two primary justifications -- the Iraq-al-Qaeda link and the weapons of mass destruction claim -- for invading Iraq. One looked dubious from the start; the other is looking more so by the day. Both justifications for the war were designed to take the very rational, reasonable fears of average Americans and turn them into less rational, more unreasonable fears -- the kind that could justify war. Bush seems to have bet that the Democrats would have no answer for his strategy of fear. And so far, he is being proven right. While Bush is telling Americans to indulge and incubate their fears, the Democratic candidates -- in offering little strategic vision for combating terrorism -- are implicitly telling Americans that their fears are illegitimate, even silly. And no one wants to be told that.
Enter Tony Blair. In his address to Congress last week, Blair told Americans to take their very concrete fears and turn them to hope. He told them that their desire to secure their own country complements -- indeed demands -- an effort to remake the world in a more humane, more democratic mold. Blair's message was one of determined optimism: To defeat the threat of terrorism once and for all, he said, Americans must use both the strength of their military and the power of their ideas to build a better world. "The spread of freedom is the best security for the free," he said in the speech's most powerful line. "It is our last line of defense and our first line of attack." (The line raised the question of whether Blair, or his speechwriter, has been reading Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, which ends with the admonition that "freedom for others means safety for ourselves. Let us be for the freedom of others.")
Blair's brand of idealism stands in stark contrast to what can only be described as the growing surliness of Bush's approach to world affairs. Bush has flirted with foreign-policy idealism during the last two years, but since the start of the reconstruction of Iraq, he has seemed increasingly satisfied to settle, both in rhetoric and policy, for a cheap brand of realism rather than a broad commitment to midwifing democracy in the Middle East. Bush's most memorable pronouncement about postwar Iraq to date has been his goading of fedayeen to attack U.S. soldiers. Blair, by contrast, said on Thursday, "We promised Iraq democratic government; we will deliver it. We promised them the chance to use their oil wealth to build prosperity for all their citizens, not a corrupt elite, and we will do so. We will stay with these people so in need of our help until the job is done."
If a Democrat were smart enough to adopt the Blair formula as his own, he could create a number of advantages for himself in the presidential race.
President Bush concluded his Rose Garden speech about the Middle East on Monday by calling the moment "a test to show who is serious about peace and who is not." Given how naive his plan is -- how astonishingly far it is from any foreseeable reality -- he may have failed his own test. It's not that Bush's goals aren't noble or correct, but real diplomacy takes more than wishful thinking.
Bush's fuzzy logic, to borrow a term, is weakest with regard to what he calls the "Palestinian leadership." By refusing even to name Yasir Arafat, the president showed that he's just not ready for an honest attempt at peacemaking.
It's not that Arafat is a stand-up guy, or even a credible negotiator. Revelations in recent months all but conclusively unmasked Arafat as a financial supporter of terrorism. It's quite possible the peace process would fare better in his absence. But there's no guarantee. And that's because there's not yet a viable replacement for him -- that we know of, at least. Presumably Bush wouldn't call for Arafat's removal without an idea of who he wants in Arafat's stead. The Bush team is not made up of amateurs, so it's unlikely it would create a power vacuum without some idea of how best to fill it.
But if Bush administration officials know who should lead the Palestinians, they should alert the public. Bush's candidate -- if indeed there is one -- should be scrutinized openly by the world community and the people he would presumably govern. And if there is no candidate, calling for Arafat's ouster is an even bigger mistake. With the radicalization of the Palestinian people since the onset of the second intifada, Arafat's replacement could be even worse than the decrepit guerilla himself. The next Palestinian head of state may not be so ambivalent in his desire to wipe out Israel.
Nor should Arafat be replaced without democratic elections, which are scheduled for January.
Then there is the media. Mr. Schwarzenegger plots publicity blitzes with the zeal of a Clauzewitz. Sheri Annis, press secretary for his initiative last year, notes that "the entertainment media tends to coddle their subjects while political reporters are going to keep nudging him. How he handles that will really determine the outcome." Mr. Schwarzenegger may emulate Mr. Reagan by transcending the media and challenging Gov. Davis to one-on-one debates. A good showing might dispel doubts about his experience. If Mr. Davis ducked debates it would only reinforce his image as a weak leader.
Mr. Schwarzengger is being bombarded with advice. Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan told me his friend needs to make moderate women comfortable with him. Some urge him to talk Sen. McClintock, a budget expert, out of the race by making him a key adviser. Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform thinks he should campaign as the Tax Terminator and endorse sunsetting all new taxes after four years. Steve Moore of the Club for Growth wants him to favor a flat tax.
All this ideological tugging occurs because the actor hasn't spent a dozen years honing a crystal-clear message the way Mr. Reagan did before he first ran. Does the Terminator want to run primarily to scale another seemingly impossible career mountain or to transform California's dysfunctional government? The answer is probably both, but he must convince voters his primary motive involves them, not him.
Just when it looked like we might be in for the ride of our lives in California, Arnold Schwarzenegger appears to be getting cold feet.
I feel like a jilted bride. Please, Arnold. Say it ain't so.
Dan Schnur, the state's preeminent Republican strategist, admits that Arnold appears to be backpedaling, based on the sudden waffling of his political guru. If the Terminator chickens out and decides not to challenge Gov. Gray Davis in the Oct. 7 recall election, the GOP may find itself all dressed up with nowhere to go.
"When rumors started circulating on Tuesday that he wasn't running," says Schnur, "a lot of Republicans began to panic."
George W. Bush could end up realigning partisan loyalties and redefining what his party stands for. [...]
"If you can get fundamental reform," the administration official says, "he's willing to put up the dollars to get it." That about sums up the Bush
approach to domestic policy. [...]
"The Republican Party in 1994 tested a proposition," says a White House aide: "that people wanted government to be radically reduced. And they found out that people didn't want government to be radically reduced." Bush saw this, and he saw that the anti-government conservatism of Goldwater and Reagan had reached a dead end; and if there is a single characteristic that distinguishes Bush, it is his willingness to meet a dead end with a bulldozer. In 2002, "he really did set out to have the Republican Party stand for something different," says Michael Gerson, who signed on with Bush in 1999 and is now his chief speechwriter.
Bush's view, expressed in his book and in the 2000 campaign, is that government curtails freedom not by being large or active but by making choices that should be left to the people. Without freedom of choice, people feel no responsibility, and Bush insists again and again, as he put it in the book: "I want to usher in a responsibility era." [...]
The plan, therefore, has both tactical and strategic elements. In the short run, give people things they want; in the longer run, weaken the Democrats' base while creating, program by program, a new constituency of Republican loyalists who want the government to help them without bossing them around. Most important of all, however, is what might be thought of as the meta-strategy. [...]
Conservatives, for their part, believe that today they are the ones who stand for progressive change, in the face of "reactionary liberalism," but they have never been able to convince the public. That is what Bush seeks to do, both by rejecting the mantra of minimal government and by passing reform after reform. Never mind how you feel about any one of his initiatives; as a group, they seek to establish that it is Republicans who now "stand for the idea that the old ways will not work." If the Democrats dig in their heels and fall back on stale rants against greed, inequality, and privatization, so much the better. The voters will know whom to thank for the empowering choices that Republicans intend to give them. As for which is the "party of nostalgia," the voters will also remember who defended, until the last dog died, single-payer Medicare, one-size-fits-all Social Security, schools without accountability, bureaucratic government monopolies, static economics, and Mutually Assured Destruction. [...]
In the book, Bush returns again and again to his theory of political capital. Page 123: "I believe you have to spend political capital or it withers and dies. And I wanted to spend my capital on something profound." Page 218: "I had earned political capital... Now was the time to spend that capital on a bold agenda." His aversion to hoarding approval seems to flow as much from his personality as from his political experience. On page 2 he recounts hearing a sermon that "changed my life." It was, he writes, "a rousing call to make the most of every moment, discard reservations, throw caution to the wind, rise to the challenge." A few pages later: "I live in the moment, seize opportunities, and try to make the most of them."
Bush's mentality seems more like that of an entrepreneurial CEO than of a conventional politician: He tends to look for strategies that cut to the heart of the problem at hand, rather than strategies that minimize conflict. "He doesn't like 'small ball' -- that's his term," one of his aides says.
"My faith frees me," Bush writes, early in his book. "Frees me to make the decisions that others might not like. Frees me to try to do the right thing, even though it may not poll well. Frees me to enjoy life and not worry about what comes next." He clearly is not a man who fears failure.
It is hard not to succeed in politics here when your name is Napoleon.
The sun-baked city of Ajaccio is the birthplace of Napoleon Bonaparte. It is also the place from where his great-great-grandnephew, Charles Napoleon, has decided to begin his political career.
Two years ago, Mr. Napoleon, a 52-year-old political economist, set out from Paris, where he was born, raised and educated, to run in Ajaccio's municipal elections, giving up a career in planning and finance that had taken him to Asia and Africa .
But Mr. Napoleon did not join the Parti Bonapartiste, the right-wing party dedicated to preserving the emperor's name and legacy that had controlled the city for a century and whose ideas had dominated the political landscape for 50 years before that.
Instead, Mr. Napoleon teamed up with a left-wing coalition that included Socialists and even Communists and ran on a platform of lowering taxes, improving public services and developing local projects.
The coalition won a stunning upset victory, and Mr. Napoleon now serves as second deputy mayor, a post that puts him in charge of the city's tourism industry. The position is a jumping-off point for his next political contest: running for the European Parliament next year.
"I wanted to build something by myself," he said, adding: "I am very free about my political views. I don't feel constrained to reproduce Napoleon in the 21st century."
Joel I. Klein, the accomplished attorney who was Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's unconventional choice as schools chancellor last year, understands he can effectively educate the 1.1 million students in his care only if he shatters the cozy arrangements that have kept the New York City school system focused more on providing jobs for adults than on opportunities for kids. After 11 months on the job, Klein has the scars to prove his commitment to that cause.
But he also recognizes that decisions in Washington can tip the odds for or against success.
Mostly, Klein's a fan of the education reform bill that President Bush signed into law last year. The law provides a powerful tool for local reformers, like Klein, by requiring states to more precisely measure student performance and then intervene in schools that fail to improve it. That should pressure the entire system to demand results.
Uday Hussein's personal bodyguard broke a three-month silence yesterday to give the first authoritative account of how Saddam and his sons spent the war. [...]
During a three-hour interview in a house in a town an hour northwest of Baghdad, the bodyguard said that Saddam and his sons had remained in the capital throughout the war, convinced they could hold the city.
When the first bombs fell on a house in a southern suburb, where the Americans believed Saddam and his sons were meeting, he and Uday were on the other side of the city in one of dozens of safe houses belonging to trusted friends and relatives through which the three men were to pass in the weeks to come.
The bodyguard said the Americans’ next “decapitation” strike came a lot closer, and that Saddam survived only because several safe houses had come under attack and he suspected there was an informant within his camp.
Saddam asked the suspect, a captain, to prepare a safe house behind a restaurant in the Mansour district for a meeting. They arrived, and left again, almost immediately, by the back door. “Ten minutes after they went out of the door, it was bombed,” the bodyguard said.
Saddam had the captain summarily executed while the Pentagon was claiming that the strike had probably finished off Saddam and Uday. [...]
The bodyguard said that Saddam and his sons had remained in Baghdad in the genuine belief that they could hold the city. Only later, when they believed they had been betrayed by their commanders, did they consider an alternative. “The resistance was not factored in before the war,” he said. “There was a closed meeting five or six days after the war, and that is when they began to discuss the resistance.”
It cannot be mere coincidence that Mr. Holmes--as well as fellow disputed nominees like Mr. Pryor, Carolyn Kuhl (in the Ninth Circuit), Bob Conrad (eastern district of North Carolina) and three of the four stalled nominees from Michigan (Sixth Circuit)--is a practicing Catholic. For Catholics, Purgatory may very well be the judicial nominations process. Then again, Charles Pickering, a nominee for the Sixth Circuit who once served as president of the Mississippi Southern Baptist Convention, and Priscilla Owen, a filibustered Fifth Circuit nominee and Episcopalian Sunday school teacher, are also under attack.
What seems to have escaped the skittish senators is that, regardless of what these nominees believe personally, as constitutionalists and strict constructionists they recognize that their role as federal judges is to apply the Constitution and the law as they find it--no matter how contrary it may be to their personal belief system. It is judicial activism, whether on the left or the right, that is cause for concern, and the nominees under suspicion are opposed to it.
This should matter but doesn't seem to. Maybe the Senate should just print a sign that reads: "Believers Need Not Apply."
[T]he best evidence of Texas GOP leaders' devotion to theocracy is their 22-page party platform, which is less a political document than a fundamentalist encyclical. It declares the United States "a Christian nation" founded "on the Holy Bible." It repudiates "the myth of separation of Church and State." It supports a "school prayer" amendment to the Constitution. It backs "a character education curriculum" in public schools "based upon biblical principles." On and on it goes in that fashion.
When it comes to gays, the state party platform lapses into obsessed rage. References to "homosexuals" or "homosexuality" (14) even outnumber invocations of "God" (10).
Needless to say, the platform opposes gay marriage and gays in the military. It goes further, opposing domestic partners benefits and allowing gays to adopt kids or even have custody of their own children. It urges stripping AIDS sufferers of any legal protection from discrimination.
Here is the Texas GOP on gay sex:
"The Party believes that the practice of sodomy tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the family unit, and leads to the spread of dangerous, communicable diseases. Homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God," blah, blah, blah.
The Bush administration's decision this week to send 12 Cuban migrants back to the island has unleashed a wave of anger among exile leaders who, for the first time, are openly questioning their commitment to the Republican president.
The fury has created a public feud between top leaders of the influential Cuban American National Foundation, who say their loyalty to Bush in the 2000 election is proving worthless, and Miami-Dade County's three Republican Cuban-American members of Congress, who have aligned themselves closely with the president. [...]
The mounting tensions underscore the widening differences within the Miami exile community over how a changing but still-powerful voting bloc can influence decisions in Washington.
Typically, Florida's 400,000 Cuban-American voters align almost uniformly behind Republicans.
More than eight in 10 backed the president and his brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, in 2000 and 2002 -- a bloc that many activists say is responsible for handing the president Florida's critical electoral votes three years ago and putting him into office.
Rep. Charlie Rangel slammed ex-President Bill Clinton yesterday for hyping the Iraqi nuclear threat five years ago - though when he leveled the criticism he was under the impression that Clinton's comments had actually been uttered by President Bush.
"There's no evidence to support what the president has said," Rangel told nationally syndicated radio host Sean Hannity, who had asked the Harlem Democrat to react to a series of quotes coming from a person he identified only as "the president." [...]
HANNITY: When the president said to the nation that the mission was to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons program; when the president said that Saddam must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas or biological weapons; when the president said we've got to act now and we can't allow Iraq to be free to retain and begin to rebuild its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs in months and not years - When the president said all that to the American people, was the president lying?
RANGEL: There's no evidence to support what the president has said. Now whether - lying means that you knew it wasn't true and you said it anyway. Clearly the president said that Saddam Hussein was involved in al Qaeda. The president said there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. The president said they had weapons of mass destruction. And the president said the United States of America was in imminent danger. There's no evidence supporting any of that.
HANNITY: All right, now. Charlie, I hate to do this to you because you're an old friend but I just set you up, Charlie. You know how I set you up? What I just read to you were Bill Clinton's words from 1998 when he addressed the nation the day that he bombed Iraq.
This worldwide campaign began after the attacks of September 11th, 2001, a watershed event in the history of our nation. We lost more people that morning than were lost at Pearl Harbor. And this was the merest glimpse of the violence terrorists are willing to inflict on this country. They desire to kill as many Americans as possible, with the most destructive weapons they can obtain. They target the innocent as a means of spreading chaos and fear, and to shake our national resolve. This enemy holds no territory, defends no population, is unconstrained by rules of warfare, and respects no law of morality. Such an enemy cannot be deterred, contained, appeased, or negotiated with. It can only be destroyed, and that's the business at hand.
For decades, terrorists have attacked Americans - and we remember every act of murder, including 17 Americans killed in 1983 by a truck bomb at our embassy in Beirut; and 241 servicemen murdered in their sleep in Beirut; an elderly man in a wheelchair, shot and thrown into the Mediterranean; a sailor executed in a hijacking; two of our soldiers slain in Berlin; a Marine lieutenant colonel kidnapped and murdered in Lebanon; 189 Americans killed on a PanAm flight over Scotland; six people killed at the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; 19 military personnel killed at the Khobar Towers; 12 Americans killed at our embassies in East Africa; 17 sailors murdered on the USS Cole; and an American diplomat shot dead in Jordan last year.
All of these were terrible acts that still cause terrible grief. Yet September 11th signaled the arrival of an entirely different era. We suffered massive civilian casualties on our soil. We awakened to dangers even more lethal - the possibility that terrorists could gain weapons of mass destruction from outlaw regimes and inflict catastrophic harm. And something else is different about this new era: Our response to terrorism has changed, because George W. Bush is President of the United States. For decades, terrorists have waged war against this country. Now, under the leadership of President Bush, America is waging war against them. [...]
Events leading to the fall of Saddam Hussein are fresh in memory, and do not need recounting at length. Every measure was taken to avoid a war. But it was Saddam Hussein himself who made war unavoidable. He had a lengthy history of reckless and sudden aggression. He bore a deep and bitter hatred for the United States. He cultivated ties to terrorist groups. He built, possessed, and used weapons of mass destruction. He refused all international demands to account for those weapons.
Twelve years of diplomacy, more than a dozen Security Council resolutions, hundreds of UN weapons inspectors, and even strikes against military targets in Iraq - all of these measures were tried to compel Saddam Hussein's compliance with the terms of the 1991 Gulf War cease-fire. All of these measures failed. Last October, the United States Congress voted overwhelmingly to authorize the use of force in Iraq. Last November, the UN Security Council passed a unanimous resolution finding Iraq in material breach of its obligations, and vowing serious consequences in the event Saddam Hussein did not fully and immediately comply. When Saddam Hussein failed even to comply then, President Bush, on March 17th, gave him and his sons 48 hours to leave Iraq. Saddam's decision to defy the world was among the last he made as the dictator of that country.
I have watched for more than a year now as President Bush kept the American people constantly informed of the dangers we face, and of his determination to confront those dangers. There was no need for anyone to speculate what the President was thinking; his words were clear, and straightforward, and understood by friend and enemy alike. When the moment arrived to make the tough call - when matters came to the point of choosing, and the safety of the American people was at stake - President Bush acted decisively, with resolve, and with courage.
Now the regime of Saddam Hussein is gone forever. And at a safe remove from the danger, some are now trying to cast doubt upon the decision to liberate Iraq. The ability to criticize is one of the great strengths of our democracy. But those who do so have an obligation to answer this question: How could any responsible leader have ignored the Iraqi threat? [...]
Critics of the liberation of Iraq must also answer another question: what would that country look like today if we had failed to act? If we had not acted, Saddam Hussein and his sons would still be in power. If we had not acted, the torture chambers would still be in operation; the prison cells for children would still be filled; the mass graves would still be undiscovered; the terror network would still enjoy the support and protection of the regime; Iraq would still be making payments to the families of suicide bombers attacking Israel; and Saddam Hussein would still control vast wealth to spend on his chemical, biological, and nuclear ambitions.
All of these crimes and dangers were ended by decisive military action. Everyone, for many years, wished for these good outcomes. Finally, one man made the decision to achieve them: President George W. Bush. And the Iraqi people, the people of the Middle East, and the American people have a safer future because Saddam Hussein's regime is history. [...]
The United States of America has been called to hard tasks before. Earlier generations of Americans defeated fascism and won the long twilight struggle against communism. Our generation has been given the task of defeating the purveyors of terrorism, who are a direct threat to our liberty and our lives. We will use every element of our national power to destroy those who seek to do us harm. But, as in the past, we will do far more than merely defeat our enemies. In Afghanistan and Iraq and in other places where tyranny has been a fertile breading ground for terror, we will help those who seek to build free, more tolerant, and more prosperous societies.
America's commitment and generosity in rebuilding ravaged lands in Europe and Asia was a hallmark of our foreign policy in the 20th century. It was a good investment for America then -- it is just as wise now. We do this not only because it is right, but because it is essential to our own security, the security of our friends and allies, and to our eventual victory in the war against terrorism. Our soldiers serving so bravely in Iraq and Afghanistan today know they are ensuring a safer future for their own children and for all of us.
In the 22 months since that clear September morning when America was attacked, we have not lost focus, or been distracted, or wavered in the performance of our duties. We will not rest until we have overcome the threat of terror. We will not relent until we have assured the freedom and security of the American people.
John Hawkins: What are some of the blogs you read regularly or semi-regularly?"Esoteric"? I can live with esoteric.
Hugh Hewitt: All the ones that I goto at least weekly are at http://hughhewitt.com/. I think I start every day with Lileks, the guy is the new Mark Twain w/ bad spelling. I wrote a Weekly Standard piece about him because I want to make sure everyone knows about him. Of course, I do the big 4, Volokh, Glenn Reynolds, Virginia, Mickey Kaus, & a bunch of others. I read Right Wing News every day and I read Little Green Footballs every day because you guys have good breaking news and there are some esoteric ones like Joyful Christian or Brothers Judd that are right down my alley, that I found recently or have been going to for a while. Patrick Ruffini and then Rich Galen over at Mullings have some real good Republican stuff, excellent stuff.
The United States government has just added a final flourish of hypocrisy to its efforts to crush the Vietnamese catfish industry under a mountain of protectionism. The Vietnamese, after doing well enough to capture a fair share of the American market, have been declared trade violators deserving permanent, prohibitive tariffs by the United States International Trade Commission.
The case against the Vietnamese was brutally rigged by American fishing and political interests. It stands as an appalling demonstration to striving commercial nations that all the talk of globalization has not reined in the old power politics of marketeers in the United States, Europe and Japan. Their thumbs remain all over the scales of free trade.
No convincing evidence was presented that Vietnam is dumping its fish on the American market at prices below cost.
The Bush administration's drive to open world markets to American goods and services gained momentum with House approval of free trade agreements with Singapore and Chile.
While the Senate is expected to give its quick endorsement, some lawmakers worried about the loss of jobs in the United States.
The deal would bring the first East Asian and South American nations into such trade accords with the United States. Singapore and Chile would join Canada and Mexico, participants in the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993, and Israel and Jordan as the only other free trade partners.
The new deal will "not only create American jobs and save American money, but also reaffirm our commitment to countries who value the free market," said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas. [...]
The House on Thursday passed both measures by unusually strong votes, reflecting the lack of resistance to deals with prosperous countries that have good labor and environmental records. The deal with Chile passed by 270-156 and Singapore's pact by 272-155.
Labor groups and their supporters in Congress said the labor standards in the two agreements, which leave it to Singapore and Chile to enforce their own laws, must not be used in future negotiations with less developed countries where protections are weaker. [...]
"The real gold ring here is to have a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas," said Bill Morley, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's vice president for legislative affairs. He said closer U.S.-Chile trade relations would soften the resistance of Brazil and others to a hemisphere-wide trade pact.
The Chile and Singapore deals are the first since Congress, after an eight-year lapse, last year granted the president authority to negotiate trade agreements that Congress can accept or reject but cannot change.
As soon as the photographs of Uday and Qusay Hussein appeared on the television screen tonight, arguments erupted in the Zein Barbershop downtown. Half the men present exulted that their former oppressors were dead, while the others dismissed the images as forgeries because the dictator's sons were elsewhere when the attack occurred. In Spain, in fact. [...]
"In a few days they will show us another fat body with a beard and say it's Saddam," said Zohair Maty, a 30-year-old laborer. "Everyone says they are in Spain."
The conversation was interrupted by the rat-a-tat-tat of what seemed like celebratory gunfire. The sound was uncomfortably close, though, and several customers either retreated to the back of the store or dove to the floor.
"It's the first time I've ever seen people happy because somebody died," said the barber, Atheer Odeish, who continued his clipping.
Recently a wealthy Chicago couple named Drobney announced their plan to bankroll a left-wing talk radio station. They needn't bother: the Left already has a multimedia star-and even without a radio station, he's bigger than Rush, has more fans than O'Reilly, and sells books faster than Coulter. Followers plead with this "folk hero for the American people" to run for president. Reviewers compare him to Twain, Voltaire, and Swift. Unlike Rush and company, the appeal of this blue-collar megastar extends far beyond the hoi polloi. Hollywood and Manhattan agents wave gazillion-dollar contracts in front of his face. He wins prestigious awards that will never grace the Limbaugh or O'Reilly dens-Oscars, Emmys, Writer's Guild Awards, and jury prizes at Cannes (where his latest movie received a record 13-minute standing ovation). People stop him on the streets of Berlin, Paris, and London-where, according to Andrew Collins of the Guardian, they consider him "the people's filmmaker."
He is, of course, Michael Moore [...]
In May, I went to see Moore give a talk to graduating seniors at a liberal arts college outside New York City, and it was easy to see why the kids went nuts. Moore recalled the Left as I remembered it in the "you-can-change-the-world" sixties-funny, confident, passionate, idealistic, full of possibility. As you might expect, he poked fun at conservatives, but also at liberals, those long-suffering targets of political satirists. "You must have a conservative in your family-an uncle or someone," he said confidingly. "That person never loses his car keys. He has every key marked: this SUV, that SUV. Our [the liberal] side goes [in a timid, whiny voice], `Do you know where my car keys are? . . . Where do you want to go to dinner?' `Gee, I don't know. Where do you want to go to dinner?' Right-wingers go [slamming the podium] `GET IN THE CAR! WE'RE GOING TO SIZZLER!' "
The Cubans who converted a 1951 Chevy pickup into a boat and got within 40 miles of Florida said Thursday they were sure that the audacity of their act would guarantee entry into the United States.
But a U.S. Customs plane spotted their unusual, bright-green craft in the Florida Straits and they were sent back to the island.
"We thought that they would let us in because it was so outrageous," Ariel Diego Marcel told Associated Press Television News.
The truck-raft was kept afloat by empty 55-gallon drums attached to the bottom as pontoons. A propeller attached to the drive shaft of the green vintage pickup was pushing it along at about 8 mph.
The Lexington Avenue Crunch isn't just a gym, it's a vat of eye candy. This is the joint that invented "Cardio Striptease." All the personal trainers are out-of-work models or actresses-this is Manhattan, after all-and even the members look like they got a discount for doling out a head shot. There are lots of pretty people here. I'm not one of them. But being in their company fools me into thinking I could be, and that's all the difference I need for that last set of squats.
Today, though, after six months of Crunch, I'm finding the normal scenery suddenly monotonous and unmoving. I'm sucking wind on the treadmill, needing some inspiration for that final stretch. Jane Sixpack hitting the pull-up bar usually suffices, but today I'm literally calling on a higher power. I look up (no, not that far) to a set of flashing monitors and spot a press conference on CNN. OK, so it's only another White House stiff ruminating on yellowcake, aluminum tubes, and bombs over Baghdad. But it's also my latest crush, and when I see her there I find everything that halters and spandex could never give. Suddenly those tortured laps are a stroll through mountain meadows, and I owe it all to my muse, my one, my Condoleezza Rice.
As always, Rice is sporting meticulous hair and makeup. As always, she's bulldogging through the press corps in a way that belies her dainty veneer. Not that I can make out a damn word she's saying (the volume's off), or follow the swiftly scrolling captions while finishing up. Still, I've seen this act play out so many times, I know how the script goes. My treadmill session ends before the press conference. But I'm left standing there, quite silent, quite smitten.
And smitten by what? No one confuses Rice with Beyonce Knowles, and she's a little thin for me anyway. Furthermore, she's Lex Luthor evil, man. How else to explain doing the bidding of a mental paralytic like George Bush? Or being the adopted daughter of the clan that brought us Willie Horton, "read my lips," and the slur "evildoers"? Meanwhile, I'm one part lefty, one part race-man. If you cut me I'd bleed green-then red and black, too. What could a Black Panther-sired, Malcolm X-worshiping, People's History of America-toting idealist see in a battle-ax like Condi Rice? Simply put, Rice, with her commanding presence and steely confidence, is the ultimate black woman.
This is the summer of conservatives' discontent. Conservatism has been disoriented by events in the past several weeks. Cumulatively, foreign and domestic developments constitute an identity crisis of conservatism, which is being recast -- and perhaps rendered incoherent.
George W. Bush may be the most conservative person to serve as president since Calvin Coolidge. Yet his presidency is coinciding with, and is in some instances initiating or ratifying, developments disconcerting to four factions within conservatism.
"George Bush has left us less safe and less secure than we were four years ago."
--Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), July 22 [...]
I suppose it's technically possible that things could turn out worse for the Iraqi people, or for us, post-Hussein (though I'd be happy to take that bet, and I'm
sure the Bush campaign would too). But Gephardt has laid down an extraordinarily clear marker for judging the Bush administration: He claims we're less safe and less secure than we were four years ago.
Is this the case? Were we safer and more secure when Osama bin Laden was unimpeded in assembling his terror network in Afghanistan? When Pakistan was colluding with the Taliban, and Saudi Arabia with al Qaeda? When Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq? When demonstrations by an incipient democratic opposition in Iran had been crushed with nary a peep from the U.S. government? When we were unaware that North Korea, still receiving U.S. food aid, had covertly started a second nuclear program? When our defense budget and our intelligence services were continuing to drift downward in capacity in a post-Cold War world?
Are we not even a little safer now that the Taliban and Hussein are gone, many al Qaeda operatives have been captured or killed, governments such as Pakistan's and Saudi Arabia's are at least partly hampering al Qaeda's efforts instead of blithely colluding with them, the opposition in Iran is stronger, our defense and intelligence budgets are up and, for that matter, Milosevic is gone and the Balkans are at peace (to mention something for which the Clinton administration deserves credit but that had not happened by July 1999)?
In their zeal to retroactively rebut the argument for the Iraq war, critics of President Bush have tried to discredit a British intelligence report -- cited by the president in his State of the Union address -- that concluded Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa.
The most important evidence against the British report is the undisputed conclusion by Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), that documents purporting to show an Iraq-Niger uranium deal were forgeries.
What Bush's critics have ignored is that ElBaradei and the IAEA also presented evidence that tends to support the British report -- and that the IAEA may not have adequately investigated.
On March 7, ElBaradei appeared at the U.N. Security Council to report on the IAEA's investigation of Iraq's nuclear-related activities. It was here he revealed that the Iraq-Niger documents were "not authentic." But at the same time he also revealed -- in vague terms -- that Iraq had sent an official to Niger in 1999.
"For its part," said ElBaradei, "Iraq has provided the IAEA with a comprehensive explanation of its relations with Niger, and has described a visit by an Iraqi official to a number of African countries, including Niger, in February 1999, which Iraq thought might have given rise to the reports (of a uranium deal)."
Much attention has been focused on President George W. Bush's problems relating to Iraq, including the controversy over the origins of the now famous statement included in Bush's State of the Union Address about Iraq's possession of uranium from Africa.
But recent Gallup polling data indicate that many Americans are not as concerned about this and other aspects of the Iraqi situation as media coverage might suggest. Gallup's latest assessment of the public's views of the most important problem facing the country, completed July 7-9, shows that concerns about the economy are much more prevalent than concerns about war or Iraq. Perhaps as a result, the polling finds that public views of the Iraqi situation and how Bush has handled it have remained relatively stable over the last few weeks, even in the face of the heightened news coverage.
In 680, the Shias of Kufa in Iraq called for the rule of Ali's son, Husain. Even though the caliph, Yazid, quashed this uprising, Husain set out for Iraq with a small band of relatives, convinced that the spectacle of the Prophet's family, marching to confront the caliph, would remind the regime of its social responsibility. But Yazid dispatched his army, which slaughtered Husain and his followers on the plain of Kerbala. Husain was the last to die, holding his infant son in his arms.
For Shias the tragedy is a symbol of the chronic injustice that pervades human life. To this day, Shias can feel as spiritually violated by cruel or despotic rule as a Christian who hears the Bible insulted or sees the Eucharistic host profaned. This passion informed the Iranian revolution, which many experienced as a re-enactment of Kerbala--with the shah cast as a latter-day Yazid--as well as the Iraqi arba'in to Kerbala.
Shi'ism has always had revolutionary potential, but the Kerbala paradigm also inspired what one might call a religiously motivated secularism. Long before western philosophers called for the separation of church and state, Shias had privatised faith, convinced that it was impossible to integrate the religious imperative with the grim world of politics that seemed murderously antagonistic to it. This insight was borne out by the tragic fate of all the Shia imams, the descendants of Ali: every single one was imprisoned, exiled, or executed by the caliphs, who could not tolerate this principled challenge to their rule. By the eighth century, most Shias held aloof from politics, concentrated on the mystical interpretation of scripture, and regarded any government--even one that was avowedly Islamic--as illegitimate.
The separation of religion and politics remains deeply embedded in the Shia psyche.
With all the hoopla and fascination surrounding the latest addition to the Harry Potter series, you would think that all this supernatural stuff about wizards, Hogwarts, and strange freaky things like The Letters From No One and Quidditch, were something new! Well, I have to tell you that I just picked up a book in which I found described some of the strangest, almost magical, supernatural things--just the type of stuff you'd expect to find in a Harry Potter adventure. In it, you'll read about a totally red cow whose ashes have the ability to purify those who have come in contact with the dead, a mysterious roving rock that provides water whenever you hit it or talk to it, a copper serpent on a flagpole that cures people who were bitten by a serpent merely by looking at it--only this book is well over 3000 years old!
That's right, it's the Torah. The best-selling book of all time (until Harry Potter came along!) [...]
So where am I going with all this? The great medieval commentaries explain that the entire purpose of the overt miracles that the Jewish people experienced in the desert, and that were subsequently recorded in the Torah for us to read about and study, was in order that we should realize that, ultimately, everything that happens in this world, including all of nature, is an expression of God's will, and that God is very much a part of our lives.
On Tuesday we noted that Reuters had published an anti-American screed about the Jessica Lynch story:
Jessica Lynch, the wounded Army private whose ordeal in Iraq was hyped into a media fiction of U.S. heroism, was set for an emotional homecoming on Tuesday in a rural West Virginia community bristling with flags, yellow ribbons and TV news trucks.
But when the 20-year-old supply clerk arrives by Blackhawk helicopter to the embrace of family and friends, media critics say the TV cameras will not show the return of an injured soldier so much as a reality-TV drama co-produced by U.S. government propaganda and credulous reporters.
It turns out even the byline was a lie. Reuters attributed the story to Deanna Wrenn, who we later learned is a reporter for the Daily Mail, an afternoon paper in Charleston, W.Va. Out of curiosity, we went to the Daily Mail's Web site and read Wrenn's account of Pfc. Lynch's homecoming. It reads nothing at all like the Reuters piece:
Jessica Lynch looked and sounded great, residents and visitors said after she rode through town on a Mustang convertible.
But many wanted to get a longer glimpse of the 20-year-old Army private they consider a hero.
"She looked absolutely beautiful," said Angie Kinder, who came from Huntington with her two girls, Grace, 4, and Caroline, 1. "I expected her to look worse."
The piece continues in this vein, without a hint of Reuterian anti-Americanism. In a column in today's Daily Mail, which the paper generously permitted us to reprint, Deanna Wrenn explains what happened.
Some say it's the way she cuts through high seas in gale-force winds, spilling nary a drop of tea. Others say it's the stubbornness of her supporters, who sank about $25 million into a ship some say is worth only $3 million. Either way, the Jeanie Johnston has captured hearts and minds across Ireland and in Boston, where the replica of a 19th-century Irish emigrant barque is due to arrive Thursday.
''It's kind of like the Big Dig in Boston -- that's the Jeanie Johnston in Ireland,'' said Victoria Breglio, a planner with Conventures, the Boston company arranging the ship's reception here. ''Everyone knows the ship.''
Between 1848 and 1855, the original Jeanie Johnston carried 2,500 emigrants during 16 voyages from Tralee in County Kerry, Ireland, to Quebec, Baltimore, and New York City. Many were fleeing the Great Famine at home.
Passengers were crammed four and five to a bunk, rations often consisted of rice cakes ridden with weevils, and fresh air was a rare commodity.
Still, the Jeanie Johnston never lost a life.
''It wasn't a typical vessel,'' said Boston College historian Thomas H. O'Connor.
Tomorrow at 11 a.m., cannons will sound, a Boston Fire Department boat will spray plumes in the harbor, and Irish dancers will high-step on Rowes Wharf as the barque reaches the harbor. Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, Massachusetts House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran, and Irish Consul General Isolde Moylan all will be there to greet her.
PreambleI try not to pick on the Communitarians, because if there have to be leftists, these are the kind of earnest, ineffectual leftists I prefer and because, other than a few dim jokes, I have nothing particularly new to say about them. This position paper on sex education, though, is such a perfect example of the policy wonk belief that serious and engaged means dry and humorless -- a belief shared by people on the left and right -- that I had to post it.
From a wide variety of backgrounds, viewpoints, and experiences, we have come together to examine a complex set of issues that deeply affects our entire society: the rise of teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and sexual exploitation, and the related moral, social, and psychological factors. Instructed by different religious and secular perspectives and by divergent political and social philosophical persuasions, drawn from academic and practical backgrounds, we join here to focus our examination on what is commonly referred to as 'sex education' in public schools, our task as part of a broader communitarian project on character education. Our purpose is not to review data for research purposes or to spell out specifics for classroom implementation. Rather, our goal is to chart a morally sound course and design a moral framework for programs that are too often constructed in the absence of such concern.
As life goes, it doesn't get much better than for male Zeus bugs. The tiny water bugs that are common along Australia's east coast have an easy life. Their female partners provide free food, transport and unlimited sex whenever they want it.We've all known couples like this.
'All the advantages in this relationship seem to fall to the male with no obvious advantage for the female, yet the female Zeus bug seems a willing partner in this one-sided affair,' Mark Elgar of the University of Melbourne in Australia said. . . .
The male Zeus bug is half the size of the female and hitches a piggy back ride on the female which also feeds him.
'The male can ride the female, feeding and mating for up to a week,' said Elgar, who reported his findings in the August 24 edition of the science journal Nature.
Anyone who has sought an interview with Yasir Arafat learns the drill--agree with his lieutenants on a range of days, pick a nearby hotel and wait. At some point after midnight, you will be summoned. The old man, dressed in battle fatigues with his headdress folded in the diamond shape of mandatory Palestine, a pistol attached to his hip, will arrive in a hurricane of aides and hangers-on. He will grab your hand for emphasis but ignore many of your questions.
It is against such a background that one measures an appointment with the new Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen), who will hold his first White House meeting with President Bush on Friday. The hour for our interview last Saturday in his functional Ramallah office was set in advance--7 p.m. At two minutes past, dressed in a dull brown suit, he walked in accompanied by two aides. There is no bravado, no hand grabbing. When asked if the Palestinian Authority has the strength to take charge of West Bank cities that he wants the Israeli military to evacuate, the 67-year-old prime minister replies that it will be hard, but we will try to manage. Asked about Palestinian terror, he says there is no role for violence in the Palestinian national struggle.
Humility is not a trait associated with political leadership, and many of Mr. Abbas's supporters fear it is not serving him well among his people. Mr. Abbas is not a man of public charisma. He is a serious person of decency and integrity who has emerged as the No. 2 in the Palestinian political structure largely because he knows how to get things done behind the scenes.
The result is a kind of prime-minister-despite-himself, a reluctant leader who dislikes the spotlight.
The killing of Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, is a tactical victory for the American occupation of Iraq. But it is not a strategic one. By not capturing these odious symbols of the old regime alive and putting them on display, the American occupation authority has denied itself the chance to give absolute proof of their demise to a society that rejects authority and thrives on conspiracy theory. It has also lost an opportunity to give Iraqis a chance to purge their bitterness, and satisfy a deep-seated need for revenge, by confronting their tormentors in court.
Moussaoui--intent on defending himself--undid the government by using transparency and due process to embarrass the prosecution and allegedly compromise national security. The man refused to go quietly, insisting on challenging the evidence against him and exercising his full range of rights as a criminal defendant. The prosecution--applying a broad new theory of conspiracy law--didn't help matters by filing an indictment shot through with circumstantial evidence and unsupported speculation. And so Moussaoui, considered nuttier than a Snickers bar when this trial began almost a year ago, suddenly looks like a Jeremiah. His ongoing contention--that the proceedings are nothing more than a "death show trial" jiggered to result in his execution--suddenly looks to be true.
Democrats may have applauded British Prime Minister Tony Blair's speech to the joint session of Congress. But in their hearts, they and the entire left must have loathed his speech.
To understand why, let us enter the minds of leftists and observe their thoughts on comments made by Mr. Blair.
"Thank you, Mr. President, for your leadership."
Leadership!? Tony, are you kidding? [...]
"In the end, it is not our power alone that will defeat this evil. Our ultimate weapon is not our guns, but our beliefs."
Enough with this talk about "evil" and "beliefs." You sound like Bush and all these other fanatics who talk about "Judeo-Christian values."
"Just as the terrorist seeks to divide humanity in hate, so we have to unify it around an idea, and that idea is liberty."
Liberty? That proves you are not one of us, Tony. We believe in equality, not liberty.
Summer is the Democratic season of hope.
Last year around this time, they launched a campaign against the impending war in Iraq. President Bush was in Crawford, Tex., playing cowboy when a front-page New York Times headline announced, "Top Republicans Break With Bush on Iraq Strategy."
According to The Times, Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser under Bush's father, thought the U.S. should be more unilateral. So did Henry Kissinger. House Majority Leader Dick Armey had voiced similar concerns. A mutiny was brewing.
It soon emerged that Kissinger was actually in favor of the war. The posse of critics never grew. Still, many Democrats convinced themselves in the summer of 2002 that Bush was in trouble.
For weeks, nobody could talk about anything else. Nobody that is, on the TV talk shows. The rest of the nation pursued its normal summer activities, which did not include an impassioned analysis of the opinions of Brent Scowcroft.
In September, Bush came back from Crawford, put on a business suit and went to the UN. In short order he gave the critics of the war what they said they wanted, a UN Security Council Resolution, and, in November, what they did not want - a thrashing in the congressional elections. Then, popularity soaring, the President took the country to war.
Now it's summer again...
There is little political or sectarian unity in the state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). While the broad regional divide - Kashmir Valley, Jammu and Ladakh - and the religious divide between Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists in J&K has been commented on, little attention has been paid to the sectarian divide. Analysts, and especially the media, have tended to view perceptions of each religious community as largely homogenous. As a result, the sharp differences that exist within each religious community have been ignored.
Muslims constitute 95 percent of the population in the Kashmir Valley, 30 percent of Jammu and 46 percent of Ladakh. However, they do not speak with one voice. The Shi'ite-Sunni divide, while not as deep and bloody as it is in neighboring Pakistan, exists. Tensions simmer beneath the surface. The fissures have erupted in the open on several occasions and have the potential of exploding seriously in the future.
Around 13 percent of the Muslim population in the Valley is Shi'ite. In J&K's summer capital, Srinagar, Shi'ites - as do other minority communities - prefer to live in clusters, resulting in almost exclusive Shi'ite neighborhoods in the city.
There is little love lost between Shi'ites and Sunnis. Several Sunnis, even those who otherwise seem liberal, refuse to eat food cooked in a Shi'ite home. The antagonism between the two seems, strangely, far more serious than the Muslim-Pandit enmity. The Shi'ites, otherwise more conservative, especially with regard to the treatment of their women, are opposed to attempts by Sunni militant groups to impose the burqa (a full veil) on women. Shi'ites complain that after Friday prayers in the mosque, Sunni boys throw stones at their houses. Shi'ite-Sunni trouble in Iraq reverberates in Srinagar.
Joe Lieberman had the most support from Democratic voters in a national poll released Thursday, followed closely by Dick Gephardt, John Kerry and Howard Dean. But if Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York is added to the field, she dominates, taking 48 percent to 11 percent for Lieberman, with others in single digits.I'm pretty skeptical of these results, and all polling this early (say, before Labor Day) is useless, but it does underscore how driven political reporters are to find a new, hot story and ride it into the ground.
Lieberman, a Connecticut senator, was at 21 percent and Gephardt, a Missouri representative, was at 16 percent - just within the error margin of plus or minus 5 percentage points in the Quinnipiac University poll. Kerry, a Massachusetts senator, was at 13 percent and Dean, a former governor of Vermont was at 10 percent. . . .
When President Bush is matched head-to-head against top Democrats in the poll, he leads by margins ranging from 7 points over Clinton to 16 points over Dean. Bush's lead against Kerry, Gephardt and Lieberman was about 10 points.
LXII
Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye
And all my soul and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account;
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
'Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy days.
Talk of breeding humans may remind readers of the eugenic practices of the 20th century, which involved forcibly sterilizing thousands of Americans classed as mentally impaired or criminally inclined, in the service of "improving the gene pool." In recent years, three states have issued formal apologies to the victims of these programs. Of course, many people recall Nazi Germany's obsession with eugenics, and later in the century American foreign policy encouraged sterilizations of men and women in the Third World as the best means to deal with population and poverty problems. [...]
One new twist that's particularly disturbing is that advocates of this free-market eugenics are twisting the language of women's rights to push their agenda.
James Hughes, the chair of the Transvision conference planning committee, has argued in a scholarly article that "the right to a custom-made child is merely the natural extension of our current discourse of reproductive rights. I see no virtue in the role of chance in conception, and great virtue is expanding choice.... If women are allowed the 'reproductive right' or 'choice' to choose the father of their child, with his attendant characteristics, then they should be allowed the right to choose the characteristics from a catalog."
But clearly there's a huge difference between being pro-choice and pro-designer babies.
Facing the biggest decision of his career, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante said Tuesday he will likely take no more than 24 hours from the day the choice is his to set the date for the recall election of Gov. Gray Davis.
But he said he will leave to an independent commission and the California Supreme Court a decision on whether he becomes governor himself -- without an election to determine a successor -- if Davis is recalled. [...]
Bustamante said he would not run to succeed the governor if a successor election is held. But sources say he has also been calling supporters and friends around the state seeking advice about whether he should enter the race.
Last month, Bustamante joined the state's other high-ranking Democrats in denouncing the recall effort and said he did not "intend" to put his name on the ballot.
Yet privately, some Democrats singled out Bustamante as the most likely member of the party to break ranks.
Bustamante is not a prolific fund-raiser, they said, pointing out that the recall's short campaign could be his best shot at becoming California's first Latino governor.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The House voted Wednesday to prevent federal regulators from letting individual broadcast companies own television stations serving nearly half the national TV market, ignoring the preferences of its own Republican leaders and a Bush administration veto threat.A perfect example of the Republicans standing up to the powerful multinationals -- acting entirely in their self-interest and against the public interest.
By a 400-21 vote, lawmakers approved a spending bill with language blocking a Federal Communications Commission decision to let companies own TV stations serving up to 45 percent of the country's viewers. The current ceiling is 35 percent.
Despite GOP control of the White House, Congress and the FCC, the House vote set the stage for what may ultimately be an unraveling of a regulatory policy that the party strongly favors. The fight now moves to the Senate, where several lawmakers of both parties want to include a similar provision in their version of the bill.
Top Republicans are hoping that, with leverage from the threat of a first-ever veto by President Bush, the final House-Senate compromise bill later this year will drop the provision thwarting the FCC."
Task Force 20, the special forces team that has been hunting down Saddam Hussein and his supporters, played a key role in the raid that ended in the deaths of the former dictator's sons.
Allied special forces are organised into Joint Special Operations Task Forces wherever they operate. JSOTF 20 includes members of Delta Force, the American equivalent of the SAS, Devgru, the US navy special forces team previously known as Seals, the SAS and the SBS.
It is not yet clear whether British personnel were involved in the raid that killed Uday and Qusay Hussein.
AN AIRPORT used by hundreds of thousands of tourists and business travellers each year could be sitting on top of thousands of live bombs.This in no way excuses the administration's failure to find Iraq's WMD in four months.
Papers among thousands of files captured from the Stasi, the secret police of East Germany, claim tons of live Second World War munitions were buried in concrete bunkers beneath the runways of Schoenefeld airport in East Berlin. It is now the main destination for discount airlines, such as Ryanair, and numerous charter companies.
Not only did the commissars intern munitions beneath the runways, but also entire Nazi fighter planes, all fuelled and fully bombed-up, according to the Stasi.
The captured files of Interflug, the former East German government airline and the airport authority of the DDR, are now being examined to see if the Stasi claim is true."
After weeks of difficult searching for the top targets on the U.S. government's list of most-wanted Iraqi fugitives, U.S. military commanders two weeks ago switched the emphasis of their operations, focusing on capturing and gathering intelligence from low-level members of former president Saddam Hussein's Baath Party who had been attacking American forces, according to military officials.
That shift produced a flood of new information about the location of the Iraqi fugitives, which came just before today's attack in which Hussein's two sons were killed by U.S. forces in the northern city of Mosul, the officials said.
"We shifted our focus from very high-level personalities to the people that are causing us damage," Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander of the U.S. military in the Middle East, said in an interview last weekend. Later, he told reporters in Baghdad: "In the past two weeks, we have been getting the mid-level leadership in a way that is effective."
The captured Baathists provided much new detail about their organization and contacts, officials here said. Some gave information about their financing and their means of communication, they added. Others identified members of their networks. Some described the routes and contacts that fugitive leaders were using. Threats to ship the recalcitrant captives to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay on the eastern end of Cuba were especially helpful in encouraging them to talk, officials said.
In a study that ponders the similarities between former President Ronald Reagan, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Rush Limbaugh, four American university researchers say they now have a better understanding of what makes political conservatives tick.
Underlying psychological motivations that mark conservatives are "fear and aggression, dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity; uncertainty avoidance; need for cognitive closure; and terror management," the researchers wrote in an article, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," recently published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin.
"From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination," they wrote, according to a press release issued by the University of California at Berkeley.
The researchers also contend left-wing ideologues such as Joseph Stalin and Fidel Castro "might be considered politically conservative in the context of the systems that they defended." [...]
The researchers said the "terror management" tendency of conservatism is exemplified in post-Sept. 11 America, where many people appear to shun and even punish outsiders and those who threaten the status of cherished world views.
Likewise, they said, concerns with fear and threat can be linked to another key dimension of conservatism, an endorsement of inequality.
That view is reflected in the Indian caste system, South African apartheid and the conservative, segregationist politics of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, the researchers wrote.
A current example of conservatives' tendency to accept inequality, he said, can be seen in their policy positions toward "disadvantaged minorities" such as gays and lesbians.
A broad range of conservatives share a resistance to change and acceptance of inequality, the researchers said, linking Reagan, Hitler, Mussolini and talk show host Rush Limbaugh.
Can you sue the person in the pulpit for preaching hellfire - at least if it gets personal?
That's only one of the questions raised by an unusual lawsuit filed last month against a priest in northern New Mexico and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of the family of Ben Martinez, charged that at the funeral for Mr. Martinez, the parish priest declared that the deceased, an 80-year-old former town councilor in Chama, N.M., had been a lukewarm Catholic who had been living in sin and was going to hell.
Besides accusing the priest of other abusive statements and demeaning behavior, the suit detailed psychological pain, physical afflictions, anxiety, depression and humiliation allegedly suffered by Mr. Martinez's family in the months after the funeral, which occurred over a year ago and had been attended by more than 150 relatives and townspeople. [...]
This might be a simple dispute over defamation. Preaching at a religious service is not a license to say anything about anyone. But if hard words are a recognized part of a religious doctrine to which someone has voluntarily subscribed, the matter becomes more complicated.
The Texas Legislature has added a rider to its appropriations bill that denies public funding for family planning to any abortion provider, even if it performs abortions with private funds. And even though Corsicana Health Services does not perform abortions itself, the fact that it is an affiliate of Planned Parenthood of North Texas, which does provide abortions, will be enough to deny it family-planning funds.
Six of Planned Parenthood's regional affiliates, including North Texas, have taken this rider personally and filed a federal lawsuit claiming that this legislation amounts to the state levying an unlawful penalty on a woman's constitutionally protected right to choose. Because the state also is placing greater restrictions on the use of the federal government's money than the federal government is, Planned Parenthood alleges these restrictions (no family-planning funds if the organization performs abortions) are also unconstitutional. Its petition has received some favorable play from an Austin federal judge, who has granted a restraining order preventing the state from requiring Planned Parenthood affiliates to either sign a pledge to stop providing abortions or be disqualified from the state family-planning program. He will consider extending the injunction at a hearing scheduled for July 25.
The legislation is far too sweeping, argues Kathryn Allen, senior vice president for community relations for Planned Parenthood of North Texas, and "risks depriving 115,000 low-income women of their health-care needs at 33 clinics across the state." The $13 million in federal dollars helps fund family planning and reproductive health services, not abortions, which are offered at only seven clinics and account for only 2.3 percent of the medical visits to its 85 clinics in Texas.
The legislative sponsors of the rider--Senate Republicans Steve Ogden from Bryan and Tommy Williams from The Woodlands--say their legislation was not meant to target Planned Parenthood in particular or family planning in general. They just want government out of the business of subsidizing abortion providers, whether that means directly for the procedure itself or indirectly for the expenses--staff, rent, utilities--of its family-planning clinics or services.
At the risk of sounding paranoid, Planned Parenthood also believes that this rider is part of a "pernicious web of assault" that is bent on destroying its organization--as well as family planning. "Abortion is just the ideological tip of the iceberg," says Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "The hard right--which has found a spokesperson in President Bush--has long been opposed to reproductive health care and is making an orchestrated attack on family planning and sex education."
It is noteworthy that today's liberals, the ideological heirs of the Progressives, aren't always pleased with direct democracy in action. The most divisive and decisive ballot initiatives in California have been championed by conservatives: eliminating affirmative action, government largesse to illegal aliens, and bilingual education; preempting the recognition of same-sex marriage; and-granddaddy of them all, Proposition 13-capping property taxes, to change California politics ever since.
Given the overwhelming liberal majorities in Sacramento-no Republican holds statewide office, and Democrats control close to two-thirds of the legislature-it's easy to see why the recall has gained momentum. For many Californians, anything that unsettles the status quo must have some merit. Yet the constant recourse to direct democracy may undermine a healthy, representative constitutionalism. Conservative critics of the recall have pointed to the possibility of "blowback." Once the nuclear weapon of recall is used, it could become a regular tool of both parties.
The recall is one of the Progressives' sharpest instruments. By turning its edge against the liberal establishment at its most spendthrift, the present recall effort could have the paradoxical effect of prompting new debate about the purpose and limits of government. At the very least, it should remind voters that elections matter.
Committees organizing the 2004 Republican and Democratic national conventions would be able to continue raising and spending "soft money" -- much of it from businesses -- under a recommendation by the Federal Election Commission's staff. The full commission is scheduled to vote on the matter Thursday.
Officials of the host committee in Boston, where the Democratic convention will be held next July, have complained that fundraising was proceeding poorly because many prospective corporate and trade association donors feared the FEC would ban soft-money gifts. Soft money is the term for unlimited and largely unregulated donations that the national political parties were allowed to collect until
the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law took effect eight months ago. Politicians and lawyers have debated whether the ban applies to the committees that are host to the presidential nominating conventions.
The Boston Globe reported this week that the Democratic host committee had raised $1.7 million, $6.3 million less than it had expected to collect by now. Overall, the committee hopes to raise $28.5 million from private sources, $10 million in "in-kind" or non-cash gifts, and $11 million from various government sources.
Officials of the host committee in New York, where the Republican convention will be held in late August 2004, have reported no difficulty raising large sums. They say they have raised $61 million, just $4 million short of the overall $65 million goal.
What alarms these conservatives, young and old, is not so much the specific policies of the Bush administration as its appetite for an ever-enlarging, all-powerful government, a post- 9/11 version of statism, the bete noire of conservatism and the subject of one of the movement's founding texts, Albert Jay Nock's "Our Enemy, the State."
Published in 1935, this manifesto analyzes centralization in the federal government under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with its
expanding bureaucracies and new entitlements. In Nock's view, the New Deal bore disturbing resemblances to new dictatorships arising overseas. The connection seemed remote, because FDR was so genial and because Americans were "the most un-philosophical of beings," immune to doctrines of the kind espoused by Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini.
But Americans suffer from a different weakness, Nock said. Our national temper is that of "an army on the march." Susceptible to grandiose
crusades, we respond with emotion rather than thought and are easily swayed "by a whole elaborate paraphernalia of showy etiquette, flags, music, uniforms, decorations and the careful cultivation of a very special sort of camaraderie."
Nock had in mind World War I - a war he opposed. But his description also applies to the mood created by the Bush administration since
9/11.
Currently, conservatives of various stripes are beginning to complain about: large deficits, prescription drug entitlement legislation, excessive regulations (including education regulations driven by Mr. Bush's No Child Left Behind legislation), weak opposition to quotas, acceptance of the Supreme Court's anti state's right overthrowing of anti-sodomy laws, and -- for the substantial Pat Buchanan wing of the conservative house -- what they would call military adventurism and imperialism.
It is hard to measure the potential breadth and intensity of these complaints because President Bush's exemplary leadership in the war on terrorism continues to trump these and other concerns for most Americans -- whether conservative or otherwise. But, although that factor will probably continue to buoy up his support through the next election, Mr. Bush should not rely on it. Should the anti-terrorism factor slip in the public mind, it could reveal a dangerously weak base of enthusiasm for the president. [...]
But on the war front, he should not compromise an iota. He must do what he judges to be in the national interest, whatever the electoral effect. Not that he needs my advice on that point. He is a patriot and would gladly sacrifice his career, and even his life, on behalf of his nation's safety. That is why, as a conservative, I will vote for him, no matter what. We are damned lucky to have this man at the helm in these perilous times.
I met Celia in 1991, during the filming of "The Mambo Kings," in which she played a Cuban chanteuse, Evalina Montoya. Her
character, a nightclub diva, is something of a kindly surrogate mother to the Puerto Rican and Cuban musicians who populate 1950's New York. As such, Celia grounds the film with her very Cuban presence, that mixture of compassion and warmth and spirituality that we, as Latinos, so value in our friends and family.
If Celia was superb in that role it is because she, in essence, played herself, a woman of worldly charms, good humor and much wisdom, the kind of gracious lady that we would love to have for an aunt, a fairy godmother whose tender-heartedness works a healing magic on even the most troubled of souls.
Celia Cruz was buried yesterday at a cemetery in the Bronx. In life, she was as glamorous as any movie star, regal in her bearing (in her natural dignity she reminded me of another great singer, the soprano Leontyne Price) yet accessible to people. By all accounts she treated everyone on the set, from the principal actors to the lowliest gaffer, with courtesy and respect. She knew me as that fellow, the "son of Cubans" who had written "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love," that book about los m?sicos locos on which the film was based. Even though Celia was the world-famous singer, she went out of her way to congratulate me for my small accomplishments. And she did so with affection, as if I were a member of her extended family, the Cubans--and all Hispanics--to whom she often referred as "mi gente." My people.
Each British baby born after last Sept. 1 will receive a trust fund worth at least $400, and up to $800 for the poorest one-third of children. The government will make smaller supplementary payments when the child turns 5, 11 and 16 years old--and relatives or friends can contribute limited amounts tax-free over the years. Add to this the magic of compound interest, and the account could be worth $7,000 when it matures on the child's 18th birthday. In large part, the idea is to help the 16 million Britons--out of 60 million--who have no savings or equity at all to join the middle class.
Mr. Blair's initiative is the latest example of a concept that political scientists call "stakeholding." In postwar Japan, land was redistributed to millions of farmers, laying the foundation for the country's economic renaissance. Singapore has achieved one of the highest rates of savings and home ownership in the world largely because of laws requiring workers to put a portion of their earnings (and making employers contribute a matching amount) into a trust called the Central Provident Fund. And in the United States, a quarter of adults today can trace their family legacy of asset ownership to the Homestead Act that, beginning under Abraham Lincoln, awarded land in the American West to those pioneers with the courage to settle it.
Why not, then, some version of stakeholding here in the United States, a Homestead Act for the 21st century? [...]
Here's how such a system might work in the United States. Each of the four million babies born every year would receive a deposit in an American stakeholder account. Initial deposits could range from, say, $1,000 to $6,000. Yes, it would be difficult to free up this money in a time of deficits, but as a long-term investment it would be money well spent.
U.S. News has learned that a document prepared by Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, at almost exactly the same time as the State of the Union address omitted any reference to Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium from Niger. The chronology of events is puzzling--even to insiders: On Saturday, January 25, just three days before the address, officials gathered in the White House Situation Room to vet intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs and its links to terrorism. Libby made the presentation. After several hours, Libby summarized the conclusions of the meeting and turned them into a written case for war against Saddam.
Libby's document was sent to Secretary of State Colin Powell; it was intended as the "script" for his presentation to the United Nations on February 5. The puzzler: The charge that Iraq sought uranium from Niger was not in Libby's paper. Why not? "The agency had so discredited it," says one participant, "they didn't want to bring it up."
Sen. Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate intelligence panel, says "the process was broken" and complains of "sloppy coordination" among national security agencies.
If California voters decide to recall Gov. Gray Davis, most expect that they would also get the opportunity to decide who will replace him, but that may not be the case.
According to the state Constitution, once the recall qualifies, the lieutenant governor calls for a replacement election, and "if appropriate," a vote to elect a successor. Some say that gives Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante wiggle room to decide that if Davis is ousted, a replacement vote is not appropriate and he could keep the job for himself.
"Why should it be any different if the governor is recalled than if the governor were to become president or were to become ill or for some other reason couldn't serve?" said political consultant Susan Estrich.
Recall organizers say such a move would be a serious abuse of power, and clearly violates the will of more than 1.6 million Californians who have signed the recall petition.
The 19-year-old woman who accused Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant of rape was named on Tuesday by a nationally syndicated talk-show host and on the Internet, pushing her into the spotlight despite pleas for privacy from her family.
Rape counselors and mental health experts were outraged by the exposure of the young Colorado woman, saying that a victim of sexual assault would be further traumatized by public scrutiny.
"That's like being raped again," if her accusations against Bryant are true, said Dr. Patricia Saunders, director of Graham Windham Manhattan Medical Center in New York City. "It's an intrusion. It's an utter violation of her right to privacy. It's a sadistic thing to do."
News organizations, which typically have policies against naming sexual assault victims, have not identified the woman. But her name, address, telephone number and possibly her picture have surfaced on the Internet.
Meanwhile Tom Leykis, host of a radio talk-show based in Los Angeles and aimed mostly at young men, began using her name on the air and told Reuters that he has no plans to stop.
"We're told that rape is violence, not sex, and if that's true there's no reason she should feel shame or embarrassment," Leykis said, adding that he felt it unfair to name Bryant but not his accuser.
When Dean's official campaign organization, Dean for America, opened its door with six staffers and $157,000 in the bank last winter, organizers knew that they would have to tap the grassroots to have any hope of being taken seriously. "We just didn't know how we were going to do it," remembers campaign manager Joe Trippi. He didn't realize it was already being done -- by students. Earlier this year, two D.C. area college kids, Michael Whitney and Ari Mittleman, heard Dean speak and, two weeks later, put up the first Dean student website. By that date, students from dozens of colleges and universities had launched ten pro-Dean groups; before March was out, they had started a national organization, Students for Dean, with 30 campus chapters. By early July, Students for Dean had 184 chapters, all working without any official connection to the Dean campaign. As many as a third of their coordinators had never done anything political before in their lives. Now Dean has his grassroots army, and the campaign's playing it for all it's worth. "They want to work 18, 20 hours a day," Trippi says of the young interns Dean has attracted to Burlington. And it's blowing Trippi's mind. "As somebody who's been through seven presidential campaigns" -- beginning, in 1980, with Ted Kennedy -- "I feel like I'm in my first one."
This could mean far more for American politics than an unexpected boost for a single candidate. For over 20 years, the Democratic Party has worked successfully to structure the nominating system to give the advantage to the "safest" candidate as early as possible in the process. The current system -- a direct response to George McGovern's youth-centered, but disastrous, general election campaign against Richard Nixon in 1972 -- has brought some remarkable political successes, but at the price of stripping the party of the qualities associated with youth at its best: intensity, energy, commitment, momentum. [...]
One consultant to a rival Democratic hopeful, who insists on anonymity, dismisses Dean as a new McGovern. "Maybe they need to run a guy so that people remember what it's like to really lose," he says. "To really lose bad."
The students, for their part, suspect another motive behind the backlash: fear of losing power. Dean foot soldiers are overwhelming the front-loaded nominating season that was put in place by DLC partisans, they note. Says Ruth Link-Gellis, an activist at D.C.'s George Washington University, "The party structure that they've worked so hard to design is falling down around them."
Fresh from a four-week run on The New York Times best-seller list, Sidney Blumenthal can now focus attention on his magazine idea.
But not just any magazine.
Blumenthal would be the editor of a weekly U.S. mag planned by The Guardian, the liberal and influential British newspaper. [...]
Blumenthal, who was the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker before he joined the Clinton administration in 1997, said: "I've been talking about that [magazine idea] for 25 years with my friends."
Without indicating that his idea has since become linked with The Guardian, he added: "I think there's a big vacuum."
Both sides in the Civil War contemplated acts beyond traditional warfare, according to legal documents, court testimony, historical records, books and newspaper accounts of the day. Artillery shells filled with chlorine for use on the battlefield were proposed by New York schoolteacher John Doughty early in the war. Lincoln refused to consider such chemical weapons, viewing them as being outside the laws of war. Sure that the Confederacy would rapidly overpower its enemies, President Jefferson Davis initially shied away from such measures as well.
But as the internecine conflict lengthened from months to years, and the casualties mounted from the thousands to the hundreds of thousands, the South's desperation spawned a largely untold story: a series of terrorist plots against Washington and New York that eerily foreshadowed September 11, 2001, and its aftermath.
Hatched by politicians, rogue scientists, saboteurs and foot soldiers fanatically loyal to the Confederacy, the plans included spreading yellow fever to Washington and the White House; burning New York City to the ground; poisoning New York's water supply; and attacking Northern ports with a newly developed chemical weapon. There was even a scheme in the war's waning days to blow up the White House, though Lincoln refused to take it seriously. "I cannot bring myself," he said when told of the threat, "to believe that any human being lives who would do me any harm."
While most of the plots failed, their intent was clear. Then as now, they were designed to kill, terrify and demoralize civilians.
"It is a matter of no importance whether the acts proposed to be done . . . accord with the usages and principles of modern civilized warfare," Williamson Simpson Oldham, a senator in the Confederate Congress, wrote in an unpublished memoir after the war. In 1865, he had urged Davis to unleash a chemical weapon developed by a former Columbia University chemistry professor, Richard Sears McCulloh.
"I have seen enough" of Professor McCulloh's weapon, Oldham wrote to Davis, "to satisfy me that we . . . can devastate the country of the enemy and fill its people with terror and consternation."
Many of the plots against Washington and New York were dreamed up in Canada, a haven for Confederate agents throughout the Civil War. In fancy hotels, over good cigars and better brandy, they considered -- and embraced -- all kinds of acts of terrorism.
Their schemes took on even greater urgency after a one-legged colonel named Ulric Dahlgren led a Union cavalry force on a mission to take Richmond, the Confederate capital, in the winter of 1864. When Dahlgren was ambushed and killed just outside the city, papers found on his body included detailed instructions for the assassination of Davis and his cabinet. The failed raid jolted Richmond, increasing its resolve to use whatever means necessary to destroy the North. Increasingly, Confederate funds flowed north to plotters in Toronto.
Luke Blackburn, a well-born Kentuckian and dyed-in-the-bones Rebel, had already made his way to Canada. At one time, according to a biography of Blackburn by Kentucky historian Nancy Disher Baird, he'd lobbied Confederate leaders to make him "General Inspector of Hospitals and camps . . . willing to take this position without pay or rank." When that suggestion was ignored, he volunteered to aid the supply ships defying the Northern blockades of Southern ports.
In his forties, Blackburn, too old to fight and too fired up not to, became Mississippi's agent in Toronto. It was there that he hit on his plan to inflict a yellow fever epidemic on the North.
The Secret Service is studying a pro-Bush cartoon in the Los Angeles Times, showing the president with a gun to his head, as a possible threat, U.S. officials said on Monday.
Cartoonist Michael Ramirez said the drawing, which ran in Sunday's paper, was only meant to call attention to the unjust "political assassination" of Bush over his Iraq policy.
The cartoon, based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph from the Vietnam War, depicts Bush with his hands behind his back as a man labeled "Politics" prepares to shoot him in the head. The background of the drawing is a cityscape labeled "Iraq." [...]
"Those with political motivations are using the uranium story as a method to attack the president," Ramirez said.
A spokesman for the Times said the cartoon represented the cartoonist's opinion and not that of the paper.
Everybody has seen this picture or the film of the incident. A cruel and angry South Vietnamese General executes what appears to be a defenseless Vietcong prisoner. Eddie Adams, The AP photographer who snapped the photo, earned a Pulitzer Prize for the picture. That picture helped galvanize the anti-war effort in the United States. Hubert Humphrey, at the time the photo was taken, was on the verge of challenging President Johnson for the Democratic nomination for president. The photo (and subsequent NBC film) helped stir sentiment to the point that Johnson announced he would not seek a second term only two months later. It is one of the most powerful icons for everything that was supposedly wrong with that war. It is precisely the sort of professional coup that a reporter who's "Dying to Tell the Story" dreams of getting.
Except Eddie Adams wishes he never took the picture.
After the photo was seen around the world, the AP assigned Adams to hang out with General [Nguyen Ngoc] Loan. He discovered that Loan was a beloved hero in Vietnam, to his troops and the citizens. "He was fighting our war, not their war, our war, and every - all the blame is on this guy," Adams told NPR (in what may have been the most surprisingly courageous NPR interview I've ever heard). Adams learned that Loan fought for the construction of hospitals in South Vietnam and unlike the popular myths, demonstrated the fact that at least some South Vietnamese soldiers really did want to fight for their country and way of life.
Just moments before that photo had been taken, several of his men had been gunned down. One of his soldiers had been at home, along with the man's wife and children. The Vietcong had attacked during the holiday of Tet, which had been agreed upon as a time for a truce. As it turned out, many of the victims of the NC and North Vietnamese were defenseless. Some three thousand of them were discovered in a mass grave outside of Hue after the Americans reoccupied the area. The surprise invasion, turned out to be a military disaster for the Vietcong, but a huge strategic victory because of its effect on American resolve.
But at the time, all of this was irrelevant to people like Loan. It was an ugly, shocking assault. The execution of the prisoner was a reprisal. It was an ugly thing to be sure, but wars, civil wars especially, are profoundly ugly things.
We had an amazing day on Saturday. We were invited to the public viewing and mass for Celia Cruz. There was somewhere around 100,000 people who began lining up the night before for the viewing. We went first to Bongo's, which is a Cuban restaurant inside the American Airlines Area (owned by Gloria and Emilio Estefan). The place was filled with a who's who of politics, charity work, entertainment and Cuban community in Miami. We were taken by bus over the the viewing, which was held in the Freedom Tower, an old landmark building which is the "Ellis Island" of Miami, where over 500,000 Cuban immigrants were processed by the INS back in the early 60's. We were brought in to the front of the line for the viewing (my wife and I felt bad about this, but, realistically, had we gotten on line with la gente, we would have never gotten in.) I've never been to a viewing before. The casket was open, and she looked like she was sleeping. The casket was surrounded by flowers and pictures of Celia and her husband. Celia's music played over loud speakers. From time to time, the somber procession of mourners would begin to shout "Azucar!" or "Celia, Celia" and start clapping to the music. Then, after a few minutes, the respectful silence would return. It was very moving...although I didn't know Celia well, you only had to be with her for a few moments to feel the force of her personality and her warmth. Also, as we passed by the casket, I became very sad because I realized that I didn't have the chance to say goodbye to Benny Carter (who I've known for so long) in the same way.
After the viewing we were bought into a room to pay respects to her husband and family. I was introduced to 2 of the legends of Afro-Cuban music/salsa/latin jazz, Johnny Pacheco and Israel Lopez (aka Cachao) and actually had a nice conversation with them in Spanish.
We then left the viewing for a walking procession (behind the hearse) to the church where the Mass was to be held. This led to the scariest moment of the day. The procession was supposed to be for the invited guests, but the police did not have barricades all along the way, and many of the spectators started pushing into the line, causing some people to trip and fall and creating a "soccer riot is about to start here" concern. The problem wasn't the people who merely wanted to join in the walk, but the people jostling with cameras and note books, trying to get pictures and autographs of the various celebrities in line. I was concerned about my wife , but she trooped through the whole thing fine... After about 3 blocks of the crush, the Miami police restored order and we continued easily to the church.
This was only the third mass I had ever attended. (The other 2 were both funerals....I've now heard 1 in English and 2 in Spanish). The priest was Padre Alberto (who used to have a talk show on Telemundo). He's a young guy, very dynamic speaker...and, facially, a dead ringer for the rabbi who did our wedding. He gave a beautiful eulogy, talking about Celia's humility and charitable works. Everything he said rang absolutely true with everyone who knew her. He also talked about her love for Cuba and her importance as a symbol of Cuban culture and identity (like politicians in Florida, priests have also got to be on the right side of the Castro issue). He told a story I didn't know: Whenever Celia visited Miami, she would go to a hospital where she had done a lot of charity work, and visit a large, glass-enclosed room there that faced south across the Straights of Florida. She would stay there for awhile looking towards her homeland and saying a prayer for her parents (whose graves Castro would never let her visit) and for her family left behind. When her body was flown in to Miami on Friday night, per her wishes, the first place the casket was taken was to that room, so she could have one last look.
Of course, a number of dignitaries and entertainers spoke, including Mel Martinez, the Secretary of Housing, who read a letter from the the President. The whole day (and night...we didn't get home until after 11) had the feeling of a state funeral...I'm told by people who have lived here for a long time that it was one of the most important days in the history of Miami. Either today or tomorrow, they are repeating the viewing, procession (down 5th Avenue) and mass (St. Patrick's) in NYC [ed. note: it was today], followed by a burial.
They crammed the quiet block along East 81st Street with the fervor of a pilgrimage thousands strong, waving flags and white roses - her favorite - and chanting the verses of her songs like a Pan-American anthem.
Alternately dancing, weeping and bickering about who was first in a line that began forming at 10 the night before, Ecuadoreans, Puerto Ricans, Venezuelans, Jamaicans, Cubans and others claimed Celia Cruz as their own. They swarmed yesterday at the Frank E. Campbell funeral home to bid her goodbye.
But as they passed through the doors to her open coffin, a hush fell. The Cuban queen of salsa lay in a swirl of cream velvet, her head crowned by a golden-blond wig. Her eyelids shimmered with silver shadow, her hot-pink lips were tweaked in a faint smile. [...]
It was the final farewell for Ms. Cruz, who died at 77 last Wednesday, at her home in Fort Lee, N.J. In a postmortem tour, her body was flown first to Miami over the weekend for a wake that drew thousands of mourners, and then back to New York.
Onstage, Ms. Cruz was a petite woman who wore tight, glittering dresses and towering wigs, dancing in high heels and belting songs that she punctuated with shouts of "Azucar!" ("Sugar!"). She was a vocal powerhouse, with a tough, raspy voice that could ride the percussive attack of a rumba or bring hard-won emotion to a lovelorn Cuban son.
"When people hear me sing," she said in an interview with The New York Times, "I want them to be happy, happy, happy. I don't want them thinking about when there's not any money, or when there's fighting at home. My message is always felicidad - happiness." [...]
Ms. Cruz was born in Havana to a poor family, and she regularly sang her brothers and sisters to sleep. She won a radio talent contest after a cousin took her to the radio station Garcia Serra; first prize was a cake. She went on to study at the Havana Conservatory and to sing on radio programs. In 1950, she joined La Sonora Matancera, Cuba's most popular band. "I wanted to be a mother, a teacher and a housewife," she told The New York Times. "But when I began to sing with La Sonora Matancera, I thought, `This is my chance, and I'm going to do it.' "
She toured with the group constantly, sometimes singing five sets a day; they were also headliners at Havana's most celebrated nightclub, the Tropicana, and performed on radio and television. But in 1960, a year after Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, she was touring Mexico with La Sonora Matancera and decided not to return to Cuba. Years later, Cuba refused permission for her to attend her father's funeral.
No administration before George W. Bush's ever claimed such sweeping powers for an enterprise as vaguely defined as the "war against terrorism" and the "axis of evil." Nor has one begun to consume such an enormous amount of the nation's resources for a mission whose end would be difficult to recognize even if achieved.
Like previous forms of totalitarianism, the Bush administration boasts a reckless unilateralism that believes the United States can demand unquestioning support, on terms it dictates; ignores treaties and violates international law at will; invades other countries without provocation; and incarcerates persons indefinitely without charging them with a crime or allowing access to counsel.
The drive toward total power can take different forms, as Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union suggest.
The American system is evolving its own form: "inverted totalitarianism." [...]
Americans are now facing a grim situation with no easy solution. Perhaps the just-passed anniversary of the Declaration of Independence might remind us that "whenever any form of Government becomes destructive ..." it must be challenged.
A fire broke out on the top of the Eiffel Tower on Tuesday, sending black smoke pouring from the 1,069-foot Paris landmark and forcing the evacuation of a stream of visitors. The fire - which broke out in an area housing television and radio equipment, just below the tower?s antenna - was put out after about an hour, police said.
The tale of what went wrong is one of agency infighting, ignored warnings and faulty assumptions.
An ambitious, yearlong State Department planning effort predicted many of the postwar troubles and advised how to resolve them. But the man who oversaw that effort was kept out of Iraq by the Pentagon, and most of his plans were shelved. Meanwhile, Douglas J. Feith, the No. 3 official at the Pentagon, also began postwar planning, in September. But he didn't seek out an overseer to run the country until January.
The man he picked, Garner, had run the U.S. operation to protect ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Based on that experience, Garner acknowledged, he badly underestimated the looting and lawlessness that would follow once Saddam Hussein's army was defeated. By the time he got to Baghdad, Garner said, 17 of 21 Iraqi ministries had "evaporated."
"Being a Monday morning quarterback," Garner says now, the underestimation was a mistake. "But if I had known that then, what would I have done about it?"
The postwar planning by the State and Defense departments, along with that of other agencies, was done in what bureaucrats call "vertical stovepipes." Each agency worked independently for months, with little coordination.
Even within the Pentagon there were barriers: The Joint Chiefs of Staff on the second floor worked closely with the State Department planners, while Feith's Special Plans Office on the third floor went
its own way, working with a team from the Central Command under Army Gen. Tommy Franks.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's civilian aides decided that they didn't need or want much help, officials in both departments say.
Central Command officials confirmed that their postwar planning group - dubbed Task Force Four, for the fourth phase of the war plan - took a back seat to the combat planners. What postwar planning did occur at the Central Command and the Pentagon was on disasters that never occurred: oil fires, masses of refugees, chemical and biological warfare, lethal epidemics, starvation.
The Pentagon planners also made two key assumptions that proved faulty. One was that American and British authorities would inherit a fully functioning modern state, with government ministries, police
forces and public utilities in working order - a "plug and play" occupation. The second was that the resistance would end quickly.
Some top Pentagon officials acknowledged that they have been surprised at how difficult it has been to establish order.
"The so-called forces of law and order [in Baghdad] just kind of collapsed," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said in an interview. "There's not a single plan that would have dealt with that.... This is a country that was ruled by a gang of terrorist criminals, and they're still around. They're threatening Iraqis and killing Americans."
The military's sprint to Baghdad initially vindicated Rumsfeld's prime directive to transform the U.S. armed forces into a lighter, more mobile force. It shortened the war, probably prevented many of the
disasters the Pentagon had been planning for and saved lives during the takeover of Iraq. One senior Central Command official said the still-classified battle plan called for as many as 125 days of
combat. Baghdad fell in just 20.
But the quick victory also created what Franks called "catastrophic success." It left large areas of the country and millions of Iraqis under no more than nominal allied control, with a force considerably
smaller than some experts inside and outside the military had warned would be needed to stabilize and occupy the country.
"I would not for a minute in hindsight go back and say, 'Gee, we should have gone slower so we could have had more forces built up behind us to control areas that we went past,' " Wolfowitz said.
One result, he acknowledged, is "it leaves you with some holes you fill in behind."
But could those unfilled holes have been foreseen? Many outside the Pentagon say yes.
Adapted from A New Way to Cook by Sally Schneider (Artisan, 2001).
Serves 4
8 ounces pasta
1/2 cup pesto sauce (recipe follows)
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
1/4 cup minced fresh herbs (flat-leaf parsley, chives, or basil), if desired
1/4 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
Bring a large pot of water to a boil and salt well. Add pasta and cook until al dente (tender but still slightly firm to the bite). Using a measuring cup, scoop out about 3/4 cup of the pasta cooking water.
Drain the pasta, return to the pot, and set over high heat. Add about 1/2 cup pesto and then add enough of the reserved cooking water, 1 tablespoon at a time as you toss the pasta, until it is coated with the pesto. Season generously with pepper, add salt if necessary, and toss with 1/4 cup minced fresh herbs. Pass 1/4 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese at the table.
MORTAR-MADE PSETO SAUCE:
2 large bunches of small-leafed basil
1 garlic clove
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt, or more to taste
3 tablespoons Italian pine nuts (pignoli)
3 tablespoons finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
1/4 cup fruity extra-virgin olive oil
Remove enough of the smallest and most tender basil leaves to make 4 cups loosely packed. If the leaves are gritty, wash them gently in several changes of water and dry them well in a salad spinner.
Cut the garlic clove lengthwise in half and remove the green sprout in the center, if any. In a large heavy mortar, combine the garlic and salt and crush to a paste. Gradually add the basil and, using a circular stirring motion, grind the leaves until they are almost a paste.
Add the pine nuts and continue grinding the mixture against the sides and bottom of the mortar until it is a coarse puree. Work in the cheese; the mixture should have the texture of a thick paste. Dribble in the olive oil a little at a time, using the same circular motion, until the pesto is creamy. Adjust the salt if necessary.
The pesto is best when freshly made, but it can be refrigerated, with a sheet of plastic wrap pressed directly against the surface, for up to 3 days.
: Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., who surprised a number of Democrats last fall by appearing in the Rose Garden with President Bush in support of his Iraq policy, is now slamming the Bush administration’s approach to foreign policy. In a broad-ranging speech in San Francisco on Tuesday, Gephhardt touches on the war against Iraq, the war on terror and the United States’ contentious relationship with some of its longtime allies. Gephardt’s comments are some of the harshest to date from the top-tier Democratic presidential candidates on the White House’s foreign policy.
In prepared remarks, Gephardt said the president "has left us less safe and less secure than we were four years ago." The Bush administration’s "bravado has left us isolated in the world – fracturing 50 years of alliances, calling into question our credibility, squandering the global goodwill that was showered on us after 9/11."
"No matter the surge of momentary machismo – gratifying as it may be for some – it’s short-sighted and wrong to simply go it alone," Gephardt said. He said the Bush administration’s lackof planning for post-war Iraq could mean U.S. troop spending “the next 50 years dodging bullets there."
"I submit to you today: we won the war in Iraq, but we’re in serious danger of losing the peace," he said.
Gephardt took a swipe at Mr. Bush’s appearance this spring aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier off the California coast where he declared the end of major hostilities in Iraq. "He chose the wrong backdrop for his photo-op. If you ask me, if he really wanted to show us the state of affairs in Iraq, he should have landed on a patch of quicksand," Gephardt said.
Saddam Hussein's sons Odai and Qusai were killed Tuesday when U.S. soldiers stormed a house in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, U.S. military officials said Tuesday.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez of U.S. Central Command announced late Tuesday night in Baghdad that Odai and Qusai were two of the four people who died in a firefight between U.S. troops and Iraqis at the house earlier in the day.
The state's budget crisis took a surreal turn Monday after a frank discussion by a group of Democrats on the budget and its impact on their re- election was accidentally broadcast throughout legislative and reporters' offices.
Members of the Assembly Democrats' progressive caucus were heard making candid, if not intemperate, statements such as one by Los Angeles Assemblyman Fabian Nunez that they may want to "precipitate a crisis" over the budget this year. That might persuade voters to lower the two-thirds vote threshold needed to pass a spending plan, he reasoned.
"It seems to me if there's going to be a crisis, the crisis should be this year," Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, said during the meeting. "What you do is you show people that you can't get to this without a 55 percent vote."
The unintentional broadcast was interrupted when someone informed the group that a microphone was on. "Oh s--," Goldberg said as the sound was cut.
U.S. officials were examining the bodies of two men killed in a shootout in the northern city of Mosul on Tuesday to see if they are Saddam Hussein's sons Odai and Qusai.
The men were among four Iraqis reported killed in a firefight involving troops from the 101st Airborne Division at a house owned by a cousin of Saddam who is a key tribal leader in the region.
U.S. officials stressed there was no confirmation of their identities, but indicate that early reports from the scene suggest the possibility that Saddam's sons were among the dead.
A bill that would make it easier for Americans to import inexpensive prescription medicines from Canada and Europe is gathering support among some Republicans in the House of Representatives, prompting a furious effort by the pharmaceutical industry to defeat the legislation when it comes up for a vote later this week. [...]
For the industry, the financial stakes in the reimportation fight could hardly be greater. The Gutknecht bill estimates that widespread drug importation could reduce average drug prices in the United States by 35 percent and drug spending by $635 million over 10 years. If passed, the bill could wreck the industry's carefully constructed worldwide pricing systems.
Last year, average drug prices in the United States were 67 percent higher than those in Canada and about twice those of Italy and France, according to a report by the Patented Medicine Prices Review Board, a Canadian health agency. The United States spends 1.6 percent of its gross domestic product on drugs, compared with 0.6 percent in Germany and 0.9 percent in Canada, according to the report. The drug industry now gets more than half of its worldwide revenues from American consumers.
Not long ago, Nisohachi Hyodo, the author of a four-year plan for nuclear armament of Japan, was part of the lunatic fringe, his ideas so far from the pacifist mainstream that he was published only in obscure journals.
These days, though, he has his own program on a major Tokyo radio station and is a popular speaker on college campuses. With everyone from the academic establishment to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi advocating that Japan become more assertive militarily, Mr. Hyodo scarcely stands out.
More than a half-century after two atomic blasts forced Japan's surrender in World War II, talk of acquiring nuclear weapons--long one of the country's most sacred taboos--is but one illustration of how Japan is grappling openly with the challenge of becoming what is known here as a "normal nation," one armed and able to fight wars.
By no means do all Japanese support nuclear armament. But the world has changed since Japan accepted a Constitution, written by the United States during its postwar occupation, that renounces war as a tool of diplomacy. The question now is, can Japan change too?
The country's 13-year economic slump is pushing forward a host of issues--immigration, the role of women, a steep decline in population--that are testing whether this tradition-bound society will adapt or face inevitable decline.
The United Nations secretary general and West African countries implored the Bush administration today to send peacekeepers to Liberia as fighting intensified there and the American Embassy came under mortar fire.
But administration officials resisted the appeals, countering that Liberia's neighbors should act first in helping stabilize the country. The administration called on rebels and the government of President Charles G. Taylor to respect a cease-fire.
A report by internal investigators at the Justice Department has identified dozens of recent cases in which department employees have been accused of serious civil rights and civil liberties violations involving enforcement of the sweeping federal antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act.
The inspector general's report, which was presented to Congress last week and is awaiting public release, is likely to raise new concern among lawmakers about whether the Justice Department can police itself when its employees are accused of violating the rights of Muslim and Arab immigrants and others swept up in terrorism investigations under the 2001 law.
The report said that in the six-month period that ended on June 15, the inspector general's office had received 34 complaints of civil rights and civil liberties violations by department employees that it considered credible, including accusations that Muslim and Arab immigrants in federal detention centers had been beaten.
The accused workers are employed in several of the agencies that make up the Justice Department, with most of them assigned to the Bureau of Prisons, which oversees federal penitentiaries and detention centers.
"I don't think of myself as a classic conservative," says Miller. "I think of myself as a pragmatist. And these days, pragmatism falls into the conservative camp. We have to depend on ourselves in this country right now because we can't depend on anyone else. We are simultaneously the most loved, hated, feared, and respected nation on this planet. In short, we're Frank Sinatra. And Sinatra didn't become Sinatra playing down for punks outside the Fontainebleau [Hotel]."
September 11 marked the turning point of Miller's voyage to the right, but as far back as 1996 he was referring to himself as a conservative libertarian. Increasingly, Miller couldn't stomach the left's many attempts to demonize politicians like Rudy Giuliani and, later, Attorney General John Ashcroft. "With Giuliani, I was preconditioned to think he was heavy-handed. When actually examining him for myself, I said, 'Wow, New York seems to be running so well.' The guy has a good sense of humor when he talks. I dug him. And then obviously everything was borne out after 9/11 what a great man he is. And with John Ashcroft, the main civil liberty I'm looking to protect is the 'me not getting blown up' one. I don't know if it's written down anywhere in Tom Paine's crib sheets, but that's my big one." [...]
While he waits for freedom to spread through the Middle East, Miller's ready to see democracy in action in his home state of California. "We've got a $38 billion deficit. I look at the California budget, and I see that we're paying to remove tattoos. It's the petri dish for untethered liberalism. I'm telling you, this place is turning into Sweden. Except, at least there the blondes are authentic." Not only does Miller support the effort to recall the governor, Gray Davis, he's already picked out a candidate: Arnold Schwarzenegger. "I would vote for him, and I would work for Arnold in a second. You know, it's no longer the San Andreas Fault. It's become Gray Davis's fault."
The folks at the American Enterprise Institute -- that bastion of Washington power-networking and neoconservative theorizing -- apparently don't take kindly to the whimsical ways of youth.
A group calling itself the Shirts Off Coalition (because President Bush "is paying for his war by taking the shirts off our backs") was staging protests last week outside AEI's downtown headquarters. So on Thursday, when Shirts Off tried to infiltrate a debate about whether the United States is an empire, security personnel barred some of them, interrogated others and ejected a couple from the audience after calling the cops. And when toilets in the 12th-floor men's room suddenly clogged and overflowed, drenching the hallway carpets, guerrilla plumbing was suspected.
"AEI is always interested in featuring different points of view," spokeswoman Veronique Rodman explained. "However, we don't want our conferences disrupted by people looking to do publicity stunts."
In the 300-person audience were neocon gurus Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb and their pundit son, Bill, and journalist David McGlinchey. "Two attendees were preemptively thrown out by AEI proctors and an armed policeman," McGlinchey recounted. "Proctors then sifted through the audience, seemingly questioning everyone who looked under 30 or was not wearing a suit. When they got to me, I asked what criteria they were using. . . . The proctor said, 'If you cause any trouble, there are police waiting outside.' "
A remarkable feature of President Bush's pronouncements is his unashamed use of the "L" word. Mr. Bush calls his political philosophy "compassionate conservatism," but he is not afraid to say the older, stronger word that gives that philosophy its meaning. The word is love.
Mr. Bush used the word when, during the presidential campaign, he was confronted by a man who spoke loosely and negligently of illegitimate children and the welfare system. When the man uttered the word "bastards," Mr. Bush became angry. "First of all, sir," he said, "we must remember that it is our duty to love all the children." The president was similarly unflinching in his inaugural address, in which he spoke of "failures of love." In that address Mr. Bush spoke, too, of "uncounted, unhonored acts of decency," an allusion to Wordsworth's lines describing
that best portion of a good man's life;
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.
Many conservatives are skeptical of the notion of mixing love and politics. Memories of the sloppy radicalism of the 1960s, with its "Summer of Love," can sour almost anyone on love's "significance as a principle of order in the human soul, in society and in the universe," as T. S. Eliot put it. But the taint goes deeper than the sixties. Long before the hippies exhorted a now-defunct counterculture to "make love, not war," the parties of the Left sought to make love a first principle of politics. The socialists invoked the idea of love in their struggle against market liberalism: they believed that the modern system of loveless labor could be replaced by a model of community grounded not in competition but in mutual care. In their idea of the "communal" or "social" man, the socialists disclosed the deeper image of their hearts, the idea of the loving man, the man who is not alienated either from himself or the things and people around him.
In the twentieth century, many liberals adopted this vision of love's place in society. They embraced the modest socialism of the welfare state partly because they hoped to stave off more draconian forms of socialist organization, but also because they genuinely sympathized with the plight of the less fortunate, whose condition they hoped to improve through social legislation. In nationalizing almsgiving, the liberals were motivated, too, by the belief, so characteristic of the last century, that compassion exercised under the supervision of government experts is more likely to be effective than the charitable impulses of private individuals. Charity would no longer be a gift but a right. The liberals hoped, through this change of terms, to make taking alms less humiliating to the taker. They failed to see that the taking of charity is always humiliating-except, perhaps, when the gifts are accompanied by an affection so palpable as to diminish the shaming quality of the transaction.
The error the socialists and the welfare-state liberals made was to suppose that love's efficacy can be gradually extended beyond the bounds of the family and the tribe, where it spontaneously creates desirable patterns of order, into larger communities, where it does not. Wherever we see love required to perform a large, public role, we find that it almost always degenerates into pity.
[I]ndividual alms-giving established valuable ties between the rich and the poor. The deed itself involves the giver in the fate of the one whose poverty he has undertaken to alleviate. The latter, supported by aid which he had no right to demand and which he had no hope to getting, feels inspired by gratitude. A moral tie is established between those two classes whose interests and passions so often conspire to separate them from each other, and although divided by circumstance they are willingly reconciled. This is not the case with legal charity. The latter allows the alms to persist but removes its morality. The law strips the man of wealth of a part of his surplus without consulting him, and he sees the poor man only as a greedy stranger invited by the legislator to share his wealth. The poor man, on the other hand, feels no gratitude for a benefit that no one can refuse him and that could not satisfy him in any case. Public alms guarantee life but do not make it happier or more comfortable than individual alms-giving; legal charity does not thereby eliminate wealth or poverty in society. One class still views the world with fear and loathing while the other regards its misfortune with despair and envy. Far from uniting these two rival nations, who have existed since the beginning of the world and who are called the rich and poor, into a single people, it breaks the only link which could be established between them. It ranges each one under a banner, tallies them, and, bringing them face to face, prepares them for combat.
I've described myself as a compassionate conservative, because I am convinced a conservative philosophy is a compassionate philosophy that frees individuals to achieve their highest potential. It is conservative to cut taxes and compassionate to give people more money to spend. It is conservative to insist upon local control of schools and high standards and results; it is compassionate to make sure every child learns to read and no one is left behind. It is conservative to reform the welfare system by insisting on work; it's compassionate to free people from dependency on government. It is conservative to reform the juvenile justice code to insist on consequences for bad behavior; it is compassionate to recognize that discipline and love go hand in hand.
What motivates the one-state idea -- and explains why Israelis overwhelmingly reject it -- is demography. Israel already has more than one million Arabs, aside from the 3.1 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. High Arab birth rates mean there will soon be as many Palestinians as Jews living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Arnon Soffer, professor of geography at Haifa University, predicts the proportion of Jews in that area will fall to 39% by 2020. In these circumstances, if Israel annexed the occupied territories and granted all Arabs living there citizenship and voting rights, there would soon be enough of them to elect a Palestinian to run Israel. [...]
"Either we give the Palestinians equal rights, in which case Israel ceases to be Jewish, or we don't, in which case Israel ceases to be democratic," says Uri Dromi, of the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem. "The only way for Israel to remain both Jewish and democratic is for it to pull out of the territories."
The first signs of a shift in high-level Palestinian thinking emerged in October, when a delegation led by Salam Fayyad, Palestinian finance minister, presented the U.S. with a report saying expanding Jewish settlements could make a future Palestinian state unviable. If settlement growth didn't stop, the report read, Palestinian policy makers might be forced to "re-evaluate the plausibility of a two state solution."
Later, Diana Buttu, a legal adviser to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, went a step further. "One cannot unscramble an egg," she said in an online interview published in October. The Palestinian leadership, she said, should give up its quest for an independent state and push instead for equal citizenship in Israel and "an antiapartheid campaign along the same lines as South Africa."
Democrats say the inquiry's format is designed to sideline them. [Committee Chair Pat] Roberts has created four separate areas of inquiry into possible failures of Iraq intelligence: WMD, Al Qaeda links, human rights, and regional threat. The latter two, of course, are not matters of public dispute--and, not coincidentally, are the two topics Roberts has allowed Democratic staffers to oversee. The first two--politically explosive--areas are being managed by GOP staffers. The team investigating WMD issues includes three Republican aides and just one Democrat. Such is Roberts's idea of a "bipartisan" effort. What's more, at least two of the committee's GOP staffers are former officials at the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, a focal point of the current controversy, creating a potential conflict of interest if they're called upon to investigate their own past analyses or those of former colleagues.
Roberts, however, doesn't seem particularly interested in a dispassionate analysis of how the administration developed its claims about Iraq's weapons programs.
There seems to be a new spat developing in the Democratic presidential field that could threaten John Kerry and Howard Dean's spot as top contenders for the Most Acrimonious Award.
The latest brouhaha is between Rep. Dick Gephardt and Sen. Joe Lieberman. It stems in part, from Lieberman’s speech on Friday outlining his pro-free trade plan to bolster the sagging U.S. manufacturing sector. In the speech, Lieberman criticized, without too much subtlety, Democrats like Gephardt for wanting to "build walls around our economy" by opposing free trade policies, specifically NAFTA.
Before Lieberman even made his speech, however, Gephardt had put out a pre-emptive press release criticizing Lieberman for backing NAFTA and favorable trade status with China, which, he said, "have caused at least one million American manufacturing jobs to disappear in recent years," the Concord (N.H.) Monitor reports. Gephardt press secretary Erik Smith also threw this bomb Friday: "The difference between Dick Gephardt and Joe Lieberman is that Dick Gephardt knows a good trade deal from a bad one."
Lieberman’s campaign, of course, responded in kind, charging that "Gephardt was wrong then and is wrong now not to have faith in America’s workers." In a statement late Friday, Lieberman spokesman Jano Cabrera said, "We welcome Rep. Gephardt’s difference of opinion, but wish he would take the more constructive step of actually sponsoring the American manufacturing bill before the House of Representatives."
Lance Armstrong routed two rivals in a riveting climb in the Tour de France on Monday, recovering from a fall to stamp his authority on the race after two difficult weeks.
His victory in the misty mountains of the Pyrenees bolstered his chances of equaling Miguel Indurain's record of five straight Tour victories.
Jan Ullrich, the 1997 Tour winner, is now 67 seconds back overall, giving Armstrong a more comfortable lead with five stages left. Ullrich, grimacing near the finish, started the day trailing by just 15 seconds. [...]
The fall came with about 6 miles left in the 99-mile stage. Armstrong slammed to the road after a spectator's outstretched bag caught his handlebars.
He grazed his left elbow and dirtied the left shoulder of his yellow jersey when he drove into a spectator. He then climbed back on his bike and got back in the race.
The Texan also grazed his left hip but was otherwise unhurt, said Jogi Muller, spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service team.
''After the fall, I had a big, big rush of adrenaline,'' Armstrong said. He said he then told himself, ''Lance if you want to win the Tour de France, do it today.'' [...]
Ullrich had to swerve to avoid the crash. He waited with other riders while Armstrong and Mayo got back on their bikes and caught up.
''Jan is a good guy, he's an honorable guy,'' Armstrong said.
A flower taller than a man, stinking strongly of putrefying roadkill and colored deep burgundy to mimic rotting flesh, sounds like
something from a low-budget science fiction movie. But Indonesia's titan
arum-or "corpse flower," as known by locals-is a real, if rare, phenomenon, pollinated in the wild by carrion-seeking insects.
But corpse flowers are not only found in the wild and many have bloomed in recent years in botanical gardens worldwide from England to Arizona.
The latest to stir up a buzz is the first public blooming of a titan arum in Washington, D.C. The flower, in the United States Botanic Garden, on the National Mall next to the U.S. Capitol, is expected to open-and release its fetid odor-any time from today. Public interest is so high that the Botanic Garden has a hotline with recorded updates about the flower's progress. [...]
A mature, bucket-shaped corpse flower emerges from a huge underground storage tuber once every one to three years. Producing that enormous,frilly inflorescence takes a lot of effort. In young specimens, and in non-flowering years, the plant unfurls a single leaf which can reach the size and appearance of a small tree with many "leaflets." However, in preparation for just a few days of flowering, the plant must shed its leaf and sit dormant for up to four months to muster its energy reserves.
The "flower" is in fact a structure known as an inflorescence. In members of the Aroid family, the inflorescence is composed of a petal-like outer spathe, and the spadix, a central column dotted with hundreds of inconspicuous flowers.
Emboldened by a popular president, key fund-raising advantages and an opposition party plagued by divisions, Republicans are heading into the 2004 campaign eyeing a goal that extends far beyond the election: They want to establish political dominion for years to come. [...]
Toward that end, Republicans have pressed their cause with bold--some say hardball--tactics. They launched an effort to redraw state political maps to favor GOP candidates. They are laying claim to issues--such as improving education and health benefits--traditionally associated with Democrats. They are trying to turn Washington's lobbying establishment into an army of GOP loyalists. And they are building up campaign treasuries that dwarf the Democrats'.
"It is breathtaking," said Thomas Mann, an expert on politics at the Brookings Institution think tank. "It's the most hard-nosed effort I've seen to use one's current majority [to try] to enlarge and maintain that majority."
The effort may not succeed, but the sheer exuberance of the GOP drive stands in stark contrast to the pessimism that pervades Democratic
circles.
Southwest Virginia Republicans may be turning to NASCAR to try to wrest the 9th District congressional seat from 21-year Democratic incumbent Rick Boucher.
Kevin Triplett of Abingdon said he is exploring a candidacy and said, if he runs, he will bring NASCAR principles to the congressional race.
Triplett recently resigned as managing director of business operations for the auto-racing association.
In a brief interview, Boucher said he knows nothing about Triplett and expects several Republicans will try to take him on when he seeks re-election
next year.
Triplett said he has learned from NASCAR a sense of urgency.
"Time is of the essence" in trying to reverse the fortunes of Southwest Virginia, he said.
He said he also has learned the value of teamwork and responding to a constituency, whether it be fans, drivers or pit crews.
Both candidates announced last week that they were altering their fund-raising practices -- and in Lieberman's case, his fund-raising staff -- over their money-raising performance during the past three months.
Both candidates had to change their schedules and deliver mea culpas to the NAACP after its president, Kweisi Mfume, chastised them last Monday for planning to skip appearances at the minority group's convention in Miami. And both candidates engaged in a fresh round of backbiting that is on a pace to surpass that which has been occurring between two of their rivals, Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and Howard Dean, a former governor of Vermont.
Voters who hear Gephardt and Lieberman speak are sometimes not overwhelmed with the emotion that usually accompanies meeting and listening to a political celebrity.
Democrats have invested heavily in making this President Bush's economy.
According to Democratic legend, Bush inherited an economy in the best shape since the Flood, and he promptly wrecked it. [...]
The economy, however, has actually done OK since the end of the recession, growing at a 1.5 to 2.5 percent rate. Of course Bush hasn't wanted to argue that, given his father's experience.
Unemployment has risen, but household incomes have held steady. Over the past year, household net worth increased 4.5 percent.
From a political standpoint, projections for a fairly robust economic pickup between now and the next election are particularly interesting.
Democrats tend to regard Alan Greenspan as an infallible economic soothsayer. The Federal Reserve is projecting economic growth of 2.5 to 2.75 percent in 2003, meaning a decent increase in the second half of this year, and 3.75 to 4.75 percent in the 2004 election year.
Estimates by private economists tend to be as strong or stronger.
Perhaps Democrats just don't believe these projections. But assuming they don't think Greenspan has gone completely off his rocker, why wouldn't they be hedging their bets politically, rather than still trying so hard to pin the entire economy on Bush? And what will Democratic politicians say about the economy if it is rocking along at 4 to 5 percent growth come fall of 2004?
I have no idea.
But it would be fun to watch.
[T]he top commander of American and international troops in Iraq said Sunday he is establishing an Iraqi "civil defense force,'' or armed militia, of about 6,800 men to help American forces combat the violence and sabotage that he and others believe is being spearheaded by remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime.
Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of U.S. Central Command, said he will establish eight battalions of armed Iraqi militiamen, each with about 850 men. They will be trained by conventional U.S. forces - a job usually handled by American special operations forces - and are expected to be ready to begin operating within 45 days, he said.
The shifted schedule -- with scores of races being held earlier than usual -- has Democratic campaign advisers plotting creative strategies about where to send their candidates to campaign, where to seek endorsements, and where to buy television ads, no longer certain that a strong showing in Iowa or New Hampshire will build enough momentum to sweep the rest of the race.
At the same time, strategists are looking beyond the first two contests to a much larger degree than in the past, assuming that Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri has a next-door advantage in Iowa and Howard Dean of Vermont and Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts have an edge in New Hampshire. [...]
A key piece of the strategy for Senator John Edwards of North Carolina -- with no automatic advantage in Iowa or New Hampshire -- is to perform well in the first two races but focus intently on the Feb. 3 races, in the hope of sweeping two Southern states (South Carolina and Oklahoma) and two Western states (Arizona and New Mexico) on a single day. His approach also targets Feb. 10, when both Virginia and Tennessee hold their primaries.
U.S. soldiers killed about two dozen suspected Taliban militants in southern Afghanistan after their convoy came under attack, the military said Sunday.
The suspected militants ambushed the convoy Saturday near the town of Spinboldak, said U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Douglas Lefforge.
The American troops returned fire, killing five attackers and pursuing the rest into the surrounding hills, Lefforge said.
U.S. Apache helicopter gunships chased the group and killed an estimated 19 of the suspected Taliban, he said. There were no coalition casualties.
Hundreds of Taliban fighters have crossed into Afghanistan from Pakistan and are claiming large swathes of the country, the American commander of coalition forces in Kabul said yesterday.
As the Taliban intensified their attacks on American and Afghan forces over the weekend, Gen F L "Buster" Hagenbeck said the Taliban and its allies have regrouped in Pakistan, recruiting fighters from religious schools in the city of Quetta in a campaign funded by drug trafficking.
Groups of fighters have crossed the porous border and divided eastern Afghanistan into three zones for launching attacks, he said.
They have been joined by al-Qa'eda commanders who are establishing new cells and who are sponsoring the attempted capture of American troops.
"There are large numbers of Taliban coming back into southern Afghanistan but there have been some recent successes in resisting them," said Gen Hagenbeck, acting commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan.
"We have a very robust intelligence feed out there and we have a continuing strategy in which we will go to all the places that we need to track down the Taliban," he added.
"There are three groups made up of between 25 to 100 Taliban operating in Helmand province and they are facilitating the drugs trade."
The BBC's credibility was called into question today after the corporation named David Kelly as the BBC's main source for Andrew Gilligan's Iraq dossier story which sparked the ferocious row with the government.
In a statement, the director of news Richard Sambrook revealed that the Ministry of Defence microbiologist, who committed suicide on Friday, was the principle source for reports that intelligence on Iraq was "sexed up". [...]
The effect of the statement was to immediately shift focus from Tony Blair and onto the BBC with several politicians lining up to call for resignations at the top of the corporation.
Within an hour of the statement, a series of politicians casts further doubt on the report by defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan and questioned whether he had hyped up the conversation with the Iraqi weapons inspector.
Dr Kelly's local MP, Tory Robert Jackson, said BBC Chairman Gavyn Davies should go and director general Greg Dyke should "consider his position" while Gerald Kaufman warned that the latest development raised "serious questions" about the future of the BBC as a licence-funded organisation.
Both believe that the confirmation that Dr Kelly was their source clears Alastair Campbell.
"This raises extremely serious questions about the way the BBC is run; its credibility and its future as a public sector, publicly funded organisation," said Mr Kaufman.
He said it was vital to know whether the BBC chairman Gavyn Davies knew the identity of the source and if he did he would have known that he was too junior to have been responsible for the claim under dispute - that Alastair Campbell had "sexed up" the Iraq dossier.
Robert Jackson launched a scathing attacked on the BBC - he accused Gilligan of "sexing up" his own report and says the reporter is partly to blame for Dr Kelly's death.
No country in the world today is as ripe for democratic regime change as Iran. Societal discontent with the conservative clerics who rule the country has been building for years and now pervades the society. This broad disaffection has produced splits within the ruling regime. Periodic outbursts of public discontent, like the student protests last month, are putting extreme pressure on the government. The regime's legitimacy is spent. [...]
The Iranian people deserve clarity. Bush should deliver a major speech on Iran, outlining his objectives there and his strategy for achieving them. He should make clear that while we don't plan to invade Iran and overthrow the current regime, neither do we want detente with it. Instead, the U.S. should support peaceful democratic change in Iran. Our strategy should be to provide moral and political assistance to the internal movement for democracy in Iran, not to anoint a future leader.
There are modest but tangible things we should do to aid Iranians' struggle for democracy. We should accelerate the flow of independent and accurate information, and of democratic ideas and theories, through international broadcasting. We should support Iranian reformers intellectually and practically as they ponder options for constitutional reform in Iran. We should confront the regime - both directly and in international forums - on its nuclear weapons program and its violations of human rights.
But most of all, we should make clear to the mullahs - and thus to the anxious and hopeful people of Iran - that there will be no lifting of the embargo and no geopolitical deals with a repressive, unrepresentative, irresponsible regime. The U.S. will negotiate, but only with an Iranian government that is chosen by the people in truly free, fair and open elections.
We have seen throughout history the power of one simple idea: when given a choice, people will choose freedom. As we have witnessed over the past few days, the people of Iran want the same freedoms, human rights, and opportunities as people around the world. Their government should listen to their hopes.
In the last two Iranian presidential elections and in nearly a dozen parliamentary and local elections, the vast majority of the Iranian people voted for political and economic reform. Yet their voices are not being listened to by the unelected people who are the real rulers of Iran. Uncompromising, destructive policies have persisted, and far too little has changed in the daily lives of the Iranian people. Iranian students, journalists and Parliamentarians are still arrested, intimidated, and abused for advocating reform or criticizing the ruling regime. Independent publications are suppressed. And talented students and professionals, faced with the dual specter of too few jobs and too many restrictions on their freedom, continue to seek opportunities abroad rather than help build Iran's future at home. Meanwhile, members of the ruling regime and their families continue to obstruct reform while reaping unfair benefits.
Iran is an ancient land, home to a proud culture with a rich heritage of learning and progress. The future of Iran will be decided by the people of Iran. Right now, the Iranian people are struggling with difficult questions about how to build a modern 21st century society that is at once Muslim, prosperous, and free. There is a long history of friendship between the American people and the people of Iran. As Iran's people move towards a future defined by greater freedom, greater tolerance, they will have no better friend than the United States of America.
One day, this Iraq War will be thought of as the Intellectuals' War. That is, it was a war conceived of by people who possessed more books than common sense, let alone actual military experience.
Disregarding prudence, precedent and honesty, they went off -- or, more precisely, sent others off -- tilting at windmills in Iraq, chasing after illusions of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and false hope about Iraqi enthusiasm for Americanism, and hoping that reality would somehow catch up with their theory. The problem, of course, is that wars are more about bloodletting than book learning.
Tilting at windmills is what Don Quixote did. When I left for Iraq in June, I took along a copy of The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote, the comic/epic/tragic novel by Miguel de Cervantes. I had never read the book, but I knew of critic Lionel Trilling's recommendation: ''All prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.'' And since much of what was said about Iraq was so obviously fiction, I figured that the work would be an enlightening travel companion. [...]
Quixote's obsession was chivalry -- that is, the medieval knightly code of etiquette and martial arts that supposedly prepared a man for a quest or a crusade. The fact that not much of it had any basis in reality was no deterrent to an active fantasy life. So when Quixote rode off, accompanied by his sidekick, Sancho Panza, he did far more harm than good.
And so it is with the book-fed brainiacs who helped talk George Bush into the Iraq War. These people are commonly known as neoconservatives, or ''neocons'' for short, but they are anything but conservative. [...]
[I]n a world that's mostly gray, ''moral clarity'' becomes a synonym for tunnel vision. To see something complicated as simple requires that the seer leave out critical details. And thus amid all the intellectual intoxication, a lionized, neocon-ized Bush didn't worry about such variables as the world reaction to America's plan, not to mention the Iraqi reaction.
Cervantes would have seen it coming. The tales of chivalric righteousness that Quixote read ''took full possession'' of his brain, filling the knight-errant with the belief that ''the world needed his immediate presence.'' And so the Man from La Mancha went off to his adventures, plunging into gratuitous battles with the innocent and the harmless -- innkeepers, friars, puppeteers, shepherds and their sheep, and, most famously, windmills. [...]
And so there will be a reckoning, just as there was for Quixote. After 1,000 pages of adventures, Quixote takes sick with a fever. But as his temperature rises, his mind finally clears. ''I have acted as a madman,'' he laments. And he realizes that his nuttiness was brought on by ''reading such absurdities.'' Now, at last, on his death bed, he has come to ''abominate and abhor'' the books he wasted his life reading.
Ah, sir, may God forgive you for the damage you've done to the whole rest of the world, in trying to cure the wittiest lunatic ever seen! Don't you see, my dear sir, that whatever utility there might be in curing him, it could never match the pleasure he gives with his madness? But I suspect that, despite all your cleverness, sir, you cannot possibly cure a man so far gone in madness, and, if charity did not restrain me, I would say that Don Quijote ought never to be rendered sane, because if he were he would lose, not only his witticisms, but those of Sancho Panza, his squire, any one of which has the power to turn melancholy into happiness.
To dream the impossible dream,
to fight the unbeatable foe,
to bear with unbearable sorrow,
to run where the brave dare not go...
To right the unrightable wrong,
to love pure and chaste from afar,
to try when your arms are too weary
to reach the unreachable star!
This is my quest --
to follow that star
no matter how hopeless,
no matter how far --
To fight for the right
without question or pause,
to be willing to march into hell
for a heavenly cause!
And I know
if I'll only be true
to this glorious quest
that my heart
will be peaceful and calm
when I'm laid to my rest.
And the world will be better for this
that one man, scorned and covered with scars,
still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable stars!
At first glance, it appears that deficits, a sign that the government is living beyond its means and borrowing money that would otherwise be available for more productive private investments, must be a bad thing.
"There's something deeply emotional about federal budget deficits," said Jim Grant, the editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer. "People seem forever inclined to latch onto government profligacy as the cause of higher rates."
Yet most economists do not think deficits are bad in principle, especially when the economy is weak, as it has been since 2001.
When growth is slow, increases in government spending can play an important role in taking the place of private demand, they say. Larger expenditures for unemployment and Social Security increase the deficit, but provide a cushion to people who have lost work. Tax cuts and rebates can also be useful, giving people more money to spend.
Besides, as a percentage of America's economy, the current deficit is still smaller than those run up in the 1980's.
So there is no reason to be alarmed, said Donald H. Straszheim, president of Straszheim Global Advisors and the former chief economist at Merrill Lynch.
"Count me on the side that says don't worry," Mr. Straszheim said. "This is largely the result of weakness in the economy."
Some analysts go further, arguing that deficits have very little impact even in the long run. If big deficits are really a sign that the government is borrowing money that private businesses need, than interest rates should rise when deficits rise, because the government would be competing with business for the same pool of money. But Japan has run enormous deficits for the last decade, swelling its national debt to more than $5 trillion, the world's largest, while Japanese interest rates have fallen close to zero.
Similarly, in the last two years, interest rates on United States Treasury bonds have fallen to their lowest levels since the 1950's, despite the free-fall from surplus to deficit.
"You can't convincingly correlate the rate of growth in the federal debt with the level of rates," Mr. Grant said.
Based on those experiences, Mr. Grant and others argue that interest rates are much more closely related to inflation and the broader health of the economy than to the year-to-year change in government deficits.
At every stage of the growth of the debt the nation has set up the same cry of anguish and despair....[After the Napoleonic Wars] the funded debt of
England...was in truth a fabulous debt; and we can hardly wonder that the cry of despair should have been louder than ever. Yet like Addison's valetudinarian, who continued to whimper that he was dying of consumption till he became so fat that he was shamed into silence, [England] went on complaining that she was sunk in poverty till her wealth showed itself by tokens which made her complaints ridiculous....The beggared, the bankrupt society not only proved able to meet all its obligations, but while meeting these obligations, grew richer and richer so fast that the growth could almost be discerned by the eye.
National Democrats might hope the political waters of this Republican region would be more unsettled in hard economic times. Since Bush came to office, unemployment in the Grand Rapids-Muskegon-Holland triangle of Western Michigan has risen to 6.9 percent in May from 5 percent. Manufacturing -- especially the hard-hit business furniture, auto parts and tool-and-die industries -- have hemorrhaged jobs, nearly 53,000 since 2000, according to Michigan statistics. More than 10,000 of those jobs, many of them in management, came from the office furniture industry, which has long kept the area afloat while other parts of the state have sunk.
White-collar managers have found themselves on assembly lines or in temporary jobs. Fortunes have been lost on the stock market. And specific policies of the administration -- such as steel tariffs, budget cuts for manufacturing programs and job training -- have come under criticism from workers and businessmen alike.
But in the political realm, such tumult seems remarkably absent. Instead, the battle lines remain drawn along issues that have long favored Republicans here, including religion, abortion and gun rights. At his June 30 fundraising appearance here, Vice President Cheney made no mention of the region's economic woes and only a glancing reference to the national economy. He did pocket $500,000 for the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign.
"Bush has immense appeal on non-economic issues in that area," said Robert Teeter, a prominent Republican pollster based in Michigan. "The question is whether the economy is enough to offset their strong social and cultural affinity for him."
So far, it would appear that economic issues are not affecting the president's standing here or in the nation at large. A CBS News poll taken this month -- before the administration announced the projected deficit is $455 billion -- found that slightly more than one-third of those questioned said the economy's problems had "a lot" to do with Bush's policies.
The Grand Rapids area could be a harbinger. Michael Johnston, a Grand Rapids high school history teacher and ardent Democrat, said the second largest city in Michigan has long been a test marketing area for business. "Read West Michigan, you read the nation," he said.
Republican strategists are counting on what they call a new sophistication in the electorate, an understanding that the economy's course is determined by forces far greater than the president. They have cause for confidence.
Richard Gephardt strolled under the "Beef and Booze" greeting at the Boathouse bar here, shook a few hands and positioned himself by an inflatable Budweiser beach ball. With 50 or so Democratic faithful assembled to sip happy hour beer and size up this fellow Midwesterner running for president, he spoke about family, values and, most passionately, his personal and "moral" mission to provide health care to every American.
His son, Matthew, might be dead today from a rare form of cancer if it weren't for his family's generous health insurance policy. "He's a gift of God," said Gephardt, a House member from Missouri. Now, he adds, it's his duty to provide similar insurance to every American -- and pay for it by taking away their "Bush tax cuts." "It is immoral for anybody in this country to be out there without health insurance," Gephardt told them.
Gephardt -- a Baptist who recently toyed with the idea of writing a book about religion and God's love -- is not a weekly churchgoer, yet he prays often and is well versed in the New Testament. From it, he said in a recent interview, he gleans a much different message than the one he believes is taken away by the man he wants to replace: George W. Bush.
In short, Gephardt said, Bush focuses on the rich, while he, like Jesus, focuses on the less fortunate. Bush, he said, "seems to read a different message out of the Bible than the rest of us."
As an adviser to leading Democratic politicians and an activist on women's issues, Joanne Symons helped Rep. Richard Gephardt negotiate the tricky political waters of switching positions on abortion in 1986 as he planned his first presidential campaign.
Symons told him back then that liberal constituencies that flex their muscle in Democratic Party primaries would find it hard to swallow his
anti-abortion stance.
But she warned Gephardt that he likely would face a backlash from jilted anti-abortion forces if he made the switch. She was right.
On top of that, Gephardt had to deal with suspicion from abortion-rights leaders who wondered about his motives, Symons recalled during an
interview shortly before her death in March.
"He kept churning things up inside and listening and asking questions until he came to a place where he could be. I think that when you approach things like that, you can change and evolve. Of course there was a political payoff," Symons said.
Gephardt entered Congress as a passionate opponent of abortion, taking to the House floor shortly after moving into his office in 1977 to declare support for a Right-to-Life amendment to the Constitution.
"Life is the division of human cells, a process which begins at conception," he asserted. By that spring, he had become a sponsor of legislation to ban spending federal funds on most abortions.
But in 1986, he met in St. Louis with Loretto Wagner and leaders of Missouri Citizens for Life to tell them he was defecting from their movement.
There's a wonderfully grisly story by WW Jacobs, "The Monkey's Paw", in which an old couple are granted three wishes. What they want most is to see their long-lost son again. The son, however, has just been killed by a piece of heavy machinery in a ghastly factory accident. The climactic moment comes when they hear his mangled corpse sloshing horribly toward their front door, and the old man uses the last of the three wishes to send him back to the grave.
I detect a curious parallel here to my own recent experience. Having devoutly hoped for many years to acquire American citizenship, now that I have it there's a sense that something monstrous attaches to the fulfilment of the wish. That monstrous thing is of course the Bush administration, and becoming an American at this precise moment in history feels not exactly like a poisoned chalice, but it certainly leaves a bittersweet taste in the mouth.
Funder relates the statistics: "At the end, the Stasi had 97,000 employees -- more than enough to oversee a country of seventeen million people. But it also had over 173,000 informers among the population. In Hitler's Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin's USSR there was one KGB agent for every 5830 people. In the GDR [German Democratic Republic] there was one Stasi officer or informant for every sixty-three people. If part-time informers are included, some estimates have the ratio as high as one informer for every 6.5 citizens."
One of the worst aspects of culture shock for the East Germans who, overnight, found that their country no longer existed, was dealing with the revelation that the state's spies were their neighbors, family, friends, lovers, co-workers. That's what East Germans have learned from Stasi documents -- and what they are still learning in a steady, painful trickle. When the Berlin Wall fell, one of the Stasi's immediate concerns was to shred their voluminous files. Since then, a group called the "puzzle women" have been working to piece together the shredded files. Their story provides Funder with one more daunting statistic: With 40 workers reconstructing 400 pages a day between them, it will take 375 years to reconstruct all the files.
Like all the stories and statistics Stasiland relates, those numbers bespeak a paranoia that's both comic and horrible. One former Stasi official tells Funder that by the end of East Germany, 65 percent of the clergy were working as informers. And 65 percent of the members of one particular East German resistance group were informers. The delicious irony was that these informers swelled the public support for these groups, making it look like there were more East Germans openly against the government than there were.
So we have here the ultimate absurdist spectacle, a state spying apparatus so far-reaching that it nearly ran out of things to spy on. Which isn't a problem in terms of a totalitarian mind-set that can see enemies anywhere. The function of the Stasi was, as Funder relates, to arrest, imprison and interrogate anyone it chose, to open all mail, intercept phone calls, bug hotels, spy on diplomats, run its own hospitals and universities, and to train Libyan terrorists and West German members of the Red Army Faction.
TONY Blair faces the biggest political crisis of his six-year premiership with calls for him to resign while in Oxfordshire the body of Dr David Kelly was formally identified and it was said that he took the powerful painkiller coproxamol and then slit his left wrist with a knife.
The government's chief bio- warfare expert and former weapons inspector in Iraq took his own life after finding he had been outed by Whitehall as the possible source behind BBC claims that the government "sexed up" reports that Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction in just 45 minutes.
Yesterday afternoon, Kelly's family--wife Janice and grown-up daughters Sian, Rachel and Ellen--issued a statement through Thames Valley Police which was both a thinly-veiled attack on the government and the media, and a tribute to a man described routinely by friends and colleagues as a scientists of "impeccable integrity". [...]
Clearly feeling the pressure, a tired-looking Tony Blair fielded rough questioning from journalists at a press conference in Tokyo. Asked if he felt Kelly’s death was on his conscience, Blair expressed his sorrow for the family but said, referring to the planned independent inquiry into Kelly's death: "I think we should make our judgement after we get the facts."
Looking gaunt and with a tremble in his voice, the PM was then accused by reporters of hiding behind the inquiry and dodged questions about whether he had discussed the possible resignations of his communications director, Alastair Campbell, and Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary and ultimately Kelly's boss.
He then blanked a reporter who asked: "Have you got blood on your hands Prime Minister? Are you going to resign?" The Prime Minister earlier described Kelly's suicide as a
"terrible tragedy", adding: "I am profoundly saddened for David Kelly and for his family." Members of Kelly's family have said that Blair's commiserations came "a bit late in the day".
Barzan Ahmed Aziz is an elementary school teacher. He came over to my place, very fed up, to tell me about his feelings on the current situation and his expectations in life. He is teaching in Aruzar, a village about 150 kilometres outside Sulaimaniya.
"It is not encouraging. A few months have gone past now since the conflict ended in Iraq, and everything is worse than ever. Whether from an economic or social or security point of view - whichever way you look at it, the prospect is bleak. By now I expected some clear signs of a better life, especially for government employees - since most Iraqi people work for the government one way or another. And for many years we have been deprived of everything that makes for a good and comfortable life. What we urgently need is a government to be set up which can redress the situation, and make amends for all these years of hardship.
For myself, why should I want a lifestyle which is less than an American citizen or the citizen of any other country? I also want to be free, to travel and see foreign places and raise myself up in life. I am an elementary school teacher and I love my job, but I am not at all satisfied with the salary and the living I can make from it. To be honest, I can't see any future with this job in this situation. If post-war Iraq makes some change to my life and job prospects, I will carry on teaching and serving the country in this way. But with no hopes, I just feel it isn't worth the effort."
The Boston Red Sox really want to beat the Yankees. The team's president and C.E.O., Larry Lucchino, has declared the Yanks an "evil empire," and the principal owner, John Henry, speaks of being "destined to knock off Goliath." Last winter, after a season in which the Sox won ninety-three games-but nonetheless fell short of New York for the seventh straight year-Boston installed a new general manager and replaced more than forty per cent of its roster. Perhaps the club's most significant personnel move was the signing, to a one-year contract, of a big, lumbering fifty-three-year-old right-hander from Kansas (six feet four, and well over two hundred pounds) who spends far more time on the Little League diamond, where he keeps the stats, than at any big-league ballpark. He is Bill James, a former boiler-room attendant who, almost thirty years ago, set out to debunk the conventional wisdom proffered by television and radio commentators-"baseball's Kilimanjaro of repeated legend and legerdemain," as he called it-by using statistical evidence. [...]
James wrote that he wanted to approach the subject of baseball "with the same kind of intellectual rigor and discipline that is routinely applied, by scientists great and poor, to trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe, of society, of the human mind, or of the price of burlap in Des Moines." His books proceeded simply, directly, empirically. He responded to every new statement or unearthed fact with a dozen questions: If this is true, then what must also be true? What are the conditions under which it might not be true? And, if it is true, so what-why should we care? What does it all mean? Reading Bill James was like taking an advanced course in extemporaneous-debating technique. The prose was colloquial-"manneristically unmannered," the writer Veronica Geng called it-and full of non-baseball analogies ("The Astros are to baseball what jazz is to music"; "The way that managers have tested the limits of starting pitchers for the last century is quite a bit like the way they used to test for witches, by pond dunking"). Each essay or chapter was clearly outlined, and rife with italics-James's effort to create what he called "a lighted pathway between the question and the answer." He could write descriptively, such as when he addressed Pete Rose's late-career style: "the mad dash to first which has slowed to a furious waddle, the slight, tense quickening of his practice strokes at a key moment of the game, which passes sotto voce a sense of urgency to the dugout behind him, a sense of danger to the one across the way." And he was almost always funny, if a little cruel. In 1979, James wrote that Art Howe (the current manager of the Mets) "pivoted on the double play almost as well as Bobby Doerr. Doerr was one of the greatest pivot men ever, but he is now sixty-one years old, and he gave up the game some years ago, when he began to pivot like Art Howe."
But what set the writing apart-and put the Abstract on the Times' best-seller list-was the accessibility of the logic, the insistence on eliminating biases and ignoring illusions, the practical tone. James's approach seemed distinctly American, descended from the nineteenth-century pragmatist tradition exemplified by his namesake, the philosopher William James. Our James brought barstool argument to the page, and enforced a rigid sobriety. He set forth rational, elaborate methods for evaluating greatness, for example, and when he released his "Historical Baseball Abstract," in 1985, he established a new pecking order for the celebrated baseball players of our time. (Sorry, Catfish Hunter. Step on up, Bobby Grich!) More important, however, James treated his readers to an egghead's theory of winning baseball, in which outs-the only finite resource-are to be avoided at all costs, and walks (which are outproof) are considered more than just acceptable. Walks are admirable, and on-base percentage, not batting average, is the bedrock of a productive offense.
Baseball insiders-people who played and coached baseball every day-had a tendency to view outs as a necessary by-product of scoring runs. Experience showed them that a sacrifice bunt, properly executed, could lead to a game-tying base hit. They could see it right in front of them. They also remembered instances when the count was three-and-oh and a wanna-be hero, rather than take the walk, delivered a bloop single on a junk pitch, driving the go-ahead run home from second. What they couldn't see from the dugout-but what James tended to "see" without watching at all, from the boiler room, even-were the things that didn't happen, or that might have happened, but for the bunt, or for the lunge at a pitch outside the strike zone: the rallies that could put the game out of reach if you'd let the batters hit away instead of handing your opponents an out in the service of a lone score; the batters who accepted a walk, and then came around themselves to score, without risking the lazy fly out that was perhaps five times as likely as the lucky Texas leaguer. [...]
Theo Epstein, the new Red Sox G.M., was a fourth grader at Brookline Elementary School in Brookline, Massachusetts, when he discovered James, in 1984. "I remember reading the Abstract and thinking, God, after reading one book I've changed the way I look at the game on the field," he said the other day, while watching batting practice at Fenway Park. "I never thought that could happen from reading a book."
The phone message is one of 10 waiting for Sylvain Zenouda at the local office of the Jewish Community Council of greater Paris: A gang of 15 North African teenagers, some of them wielding broom handles, had invaded the grounds of a Jewish day school on Avenue de Flandre in northeast Paris the previous evening. They punched and kicked teachers and students, yelled epithets and set off firecrackers in the courtyard before fleeing.
Zenouda is a commandant and 30-year veteran of the Paris police, but on this day, he is performing a different role: coordinator for the Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism, a volunteer group. He phones the school, makes certain the principal has called the authorities and has insisted that the attack be recorded as a hate crime in the police report, then scribbles the details of the attack in his own battered blue notebook and on a red-and-white declaration form for the Jewish Community Council's burgeoning file of anti-Semitic assaults.
Elsewhere on this steamy July afternoon, he will meet with a businessman whose kosher restaurant was torched recently, a young man assaulted for wearing a Star of David necklace and a congregation of frightened synagogue-goers, some of whom are talking seriously of emigrating to Israel.
The file grows almost daily: 309 incidents in the past 15 months in the Paris region, according to Jewish council officials, and more than 550 since the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, broke out in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in September 2000. The National Consultative Committee on Human Rights, a government-funded body, reported a sixfold increase in acts of violence against Jewish people and property in France from 2001 to 2002.
Many incidents involve verbal assaults -- a taxi driver making an anti-Jewish remark to a passenger, a student harassed at school -- but nearly half involve violent acts of some kind. Most of the perpetrators are not the ultra-rightists and neo-Nazis who once were responsible for anti-Semitic acts, but young North African Arabs of the banlieues, the distant blue-collar suburbs where Muslims and Jews live and work in close proximity. Many of the victims are Sephardic Jews who themselves originally came from North Africa.
"We have our own kind of intifada here," says Zenouda, a Jew who immigrated here from Algeria. "But instead of attacking Israelis, they're attacking the Jews of France."
As the European Union moves toward a fledgling confederation modeled partly after the United States, Europeans are striving to adapt to another reality of the American experience -- multiculturalism, along with all its attendant promise and problems.
Muslims have a new name for their predicament; they call it "Islamophobia." Jews say they are victims of the ancient scourge of anti-Semitism, spread by radical Arab Muslims with French acquiescence.
"The anti-Semitic incidents in Europe are ominous," Beate Winkler, director of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia in Vienna, said at a recent conference on anti-Semitism.
"Old images reappear. The anti-Islamic sentiment after September 11th is ominous, too. In both cases, it is the symbols of other religions -- synagogues, Jewish cemeteries, mosques and headscarves -- that become the cause of violence."
A group that promotes sex between men and boys asked a federal judge yesterday to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the parents of 10-year-old Jeffrey Curley, who was murdered by one of the group's members.
Curley was killed on Oct. 1, 1997. Salvatore Sicari, of Cambridge, was convicted of first-degree murder in the case, while Charles Jaynes, of Brockton and Manchester, N.H., was convicted of second-degree murder and kidnapping.
Last year, the boy's parents, Barbara and Robert Curley, filed a $200 million wrongful death lawsuit against the North American Man/Boy Love Association, claiming Jaynes was incited by the group.
In court yesterday, lawyers with the Massachusetts chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is defending NAMBLA in the lawsuit, said that even though many people may find the group's beliefs repugnant, its publications and Web site are protected under First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech.
"We contend that the First Amendment was intended to apply exactly to organizations like this. If we can't protect their rights, then the rights of other organizations are all at risk," said John Reinstein, legal director of the Massachusetts ACLU chapter.
Lawrence Frisoli, a lawyer for the Curleys, said the boy's death was a direct result of the encouragement Jaynes received from NAMBLA to sexually attack young boys.
"The lawsuit is about NAMBLA training Charles Jaynes to rape kids," Frisoli said.
U.S. Sen. Jerry Springer of Ohio. Once impossible. Now improbable. Ever so slowly, Springer seems to be clawing his way to legitimacy as a Democratic candidate. How could this be? How could a man everybody dismissed just a few months ago as the "King of Sleaze" even be mentioned with the title senator? How could a candidate who doesn't live in Ohio, vote in Ohio or pay taxes in Ohio become the darling of a growing cadre of Ohio Democrats? Surely Springer would have no chance against Republican Sen. George V. Voinovich, the most popular Ohio politician of the past decade. Heck, early polls show Springer getting trounced in a Democratic primary by little-known state Sen. Eric Fingerhut of Cleveland.
But across the Ohioscape, Democratic activists are beginning to buzz about Springer. On the county rubber-chicken circuit, they are drawn by his celebrity and then wooed by his rhetoric. Starved for someone, anyone, who can articulate a message and can go toe-to-toe with the Republicans, downtrodden Ohio Democrats are not summarily rejecting Springer.
"I don't think anyone has a chance to beat him for the nomination if he wants to go for it," said Charles R. Gray, first vice-chairman of the Defiance County Democratic Party.
[Ann Coulter] arrived for an interview on "Scarborough Country" on MSNBC last week swinging a pink Betsey Johnson shopping bag. Inside was a gift for a reporter, a Barbielike Ann Coulter action figure, which is in development. "When they're finished with it, it will talk," she said. Of course it will.
The possibility of adventure hangs near when Ms. Coulter appears on mainstream television, and Diane Sawyer looked nervous at the end of last month to see Ms. Coulter seated beside her. On "Today" last year to promote "Slander," Ms. Coulter tangled with Katie Couric, a television personality she had christened in her book as "the affable Eva Braun of morning television." Ms. Couric introduced her guest as a "right-wing telebimbo," and things went downhill from there. The segment ended just about when Ms. Couric, America's sweetheart, seemed ready to leap from her chair and choke Ms. Coulter, America's other woman.
Ms. Sawyer all but used a tongs to pick up "Treason" and struggled for something polite to say about the author, finally concluding, "She is, of course, so successful."
Ms. Coulter batted aside the compliment and corrected Ms. Sawyer's introduction, pointing out that she had mixed up the subtitles of the two books. "This book is about treachery," she said. "The last book was about lies," she added, leaving out "Duh," but implying it with a laugh.
The interview ended with Ms. Sawyer observing that Ms. Coulter would be slugging it out on the best-seller lists with Senator Hilary Rodham Clinton. "She has a three-to-one pound advantage over me," Ms. Coulter pointed out. Ms. Sawyer looked as if her head might fly off. (Ms. Coulter later said that she was mostly referring to Ms. Clinton's hefty book.)
Benjamin Netanyahu is racing to revolutionize Israel's economy, and he considers it a sprint, not a marathon.
In just over four months as Israel's finance minister, he has cut the top income tax rate to 49 percent from 60 percent, winning cheers from the wealthy.
He is making sweeping reductions in social programs, provoking protests from the poor. He is trying to raise the retirement age to 67 for all, from the current age of 60 for women and 65 for men, prompting demonstrations by older workers, and he has revamped the pension system, drawing praise from economists.
The national airline, El Al, is being privatized, and Netanyahu plans to reduce greatly the state's role in the telephone, electricity and banking industries.
"We are doing two things -- making drastic reductions in the public sector and stimulating the private sector," Netanyahu said in an interview. "The country will undergo a short period of hardship as we
decelerate from the old system, and then there will be a great spurt of growth." [...]
Israel's economy is an odd combination of the socialist ethos, which dates to the country's founding in 1948, and an entrepreneurial, high-tech sector that flourished in the late 1990s.
The government sends a monthly check directly into the bank accounts of all families with children, regardless of financial circumstances. But Netanyahu has reduced financing for the child-allowance program -- perhaps his most controversial cost-cutting move.
A family with five children -- not uncommon in Israel -- has been receiving $440 a month. That will fall soon to $340 and eventually to $167.
Such programs are part of a public sector that accounts for 55 percent of the Israeli economy, and has been growing, compared with the 45 percent for the shrinking private sector. Netanyahu has compared it to a lean, fit man obliged to carry a heavy man on his back.
"The guy on top needs to go on a diet, and the guy on bottom needs to be cut loose," he said. "If we don't change the scenario, pretty soon we would collapse."
American air war commanders carried out a comprehensive plan to disrupt Iraq's military command and control system before the Iraq war, according to an internal briefing on the conflict by the senior allied air war commander.
Known as Southern Focus, the plan called for attacks on the network of fiber-optic cable that Saddam Hussein's government used to transmit military communications, as well as airstrikes on key command centers, radars and other important military assets.
The strikes, which were conducted from mid-2002 into the first few months of 2003, were justified publicly at the time as a reaction to Iraqi violations of a no-flight zone that the United States and Britain established in southern Iraq. But Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley, the chief allied war commander, said the attacks also laid the foundations for the military campaign against the Baghdad government. [...]
The disclosure of the plan is part of an assessment prepared by General Moseley on the lessons of the war with Iraq. General Moseley and a senior aide presented their assessments at an internal briefing for American and allied military officers at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada on Thursday.
Among the disclosures provided in the internal briefings and in a later interview the General Moseley:
* New information has shown that there was not a bunker in the Dora Farms area near Baghdad, where American intelligence initially believed Mr. Hussein was meeting with his aides. The site was attacked by F-117 stealth fighters and cruise missiles as the Bush administration sought to kill Mr. Hussein at the very onset of the war. Still, Iraqi leaders were believed to be in the Dora Farms area, General Moseley said.
* Air war commanders were required to obtain the approval of Defense Secretary Donald L. Rumsfeld if any planned airstrike was thought likely to result in deaths of more than 30 civilians. More than 50 such strikes were proposed, and all of them were approved.
* During the war, about 1,800 allied aircraft conducted about 20,000 strikes. Of those, 15,800 were directed against Iraqi ground forces while some 1,400 struck the Iraqi Air Force, air bases or air defenses. About 1,800 airstrikes were directed against the Iraqi government and 800 at suspected hiding places and installations for illicit weapons, including surface-to-surface missiles.
* Allied commanders say precision-guided weapons made up a greater percentage of the strikes than in any previous conflict. But the military experienced great difficulty in obtaining reliable battle damage assessment about attacks against Iraqi ground forces. There were also differences between Army and Air Force commanders about the best procedures for carrying out the strikes. As a result, airstrikes against Iraqi forces that fought the Army were not as effective as commanders would have liked.
KARL ROVE is a genius. No--Rove probably gets more credit than he deserves for political smarts, and the president gets too little, so let's rephrase that: George W. Bush is a genius.
Almost two weeks ago, the president ordered his White House staff to bollix up its explanation of that now-infamous 16-word "uranium from Africa" sentence in his State of the Union address. As instructed, and with the rhetorical ear and political touch for which they have become justly renowned, assorted senior administration officials, named and unnamed, proceeded to unleash all manner of contradictory statements. The West Wing stood by the president's claim. Or it didn't. Or the relevant intelligence reports had come from Britain and were faulty. Or hadn't and weren't. Smelling blood, just as they'd been meant to, first the media--and then the Democratic party--dove into the resulting "scandal" head first and fully clothed.
Belatedly, but sometime soon, the divers are going to figure out that they've been lured into a great big ocean--with no way back to shore. Because the more one learns about this Niger brouhaha that White House spokesmen have worked so hard to generate, the less substance there seems to be in it. As we say, George W. Bush is a genius.
For both the former Vermont governor and the Democratic Party, this unusual situation--a surging insurgent before there's an establishment favorite--affords opportunities and pitfalls.
The Dean base largely is what pollster Stan Greenberg calls the "secular warriors"--largely white, middle- to upper-middle-class, non-churchgoing, non-gun-owning voters. With his singular--among major candidates--opposition to the Iraq war, he became the favorite of more Democrats who intensely dislike and mistrust George W. Bush, dating back to the 2000 election controversy. Dean campaign chief Joe Trippi argues his camp's growing band of supporters are not only anti-Bush and antiwar, and anti-Washington insider, but are willing, even eager, to make sacrifices for a greater good.
The candidate behind all this is considerably less ideological than often depicted; he's a reformer, not a liberal or a progressive. His priorities are fiscal discipline, health care, children and, he says, foreign policy; social issues are secondary. Even on national security, this isn't a left-winger. The war, he argues, was wrong, but it would be a huge mistake to pull out of Iraq and he acknowledges the defense budget can't be cut.
Mr. Trippi doesn't worry about the "Birkenstock liberal" rap; when reporters go to Vermont, they'll discover the real Dean.
For all they share economically and culturally, Canada and the United States are increasingly at odds on basic social policies - to the point that at least a few discontented Americans are planning to move north and try their neighbors' way of life.
A husband and wife in Minnesota, a college student in Georgia, a young executive in New York. Though each has distinct motives for packing up, they agree the United States is growing too conservative and believe Canada offers a more inclusive, less selfish society.
"For me, it's a no-brainer," said Mollie Ingebrand, a puppeteer from Minneapolis who plans to go to Vancouver with her lawyer husband and 2-year-old son.
"It's the most amazing opportunity I can imagine. To live in a society where there are different priorities in caring for your fellow citizens."
For decades, even while nurturing close ties with the United States, Canadians have often chosen a different path - establishing universal health care, maintaining ties with Cuba, imposing tough gun control laws. Two current Canadian initiatives, to decriminalize marijuana and legalize same-sex marriage, have pleased many liberals in the United States and irked conservatives.
New York executive Daniel Hanley, 31, was arranging a move for himself and his partner, Tony, long before the Canadian announcement about same-sex marriage. But the timing delights him; he and Tony now hope to marry in front of their families after they emigrate to British Columbia.
"Canada has an opportunity to define itself as a leader," Hanley said. "In some ways, it's now closer to American ideals than America is."
[A]merican intelligence officials and senior members of the administration have acknowledged that there was little new evidence flowing into
American intelligence agencies in the five years since United Nations inspectors left Iraq, creating an intelligence vacuum.
"Once the inspectors were gone, it was like losing your G.P.S. guidance," added a Pentagon official, invoking as a metaphor the initials of the military's navigational satellites. "We were reduced to dead reckoning. We had to go back to our last fixed position, what we knew in '98, and plot a course from there. With dead reckoning, you're heading generally in the right direction, but you can swing way off to one side or the other."
Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, said today that the question of new evidence versus old was beside the point. "The question of what is new after 1998 is not an interesting question," she said. "There is a body of evidence since 1991. You have to look at that body of evidence and say what does this require the United States to do? Then you are compelled to act.
"To my mind, the most telling and eye-catching point in the judgment of five of the six intelligence agencies was that if left unchecked, Iraq would most likely have a nuclear weapon in this decade. The president of the United States could not afford to trust Saddam's motives or give him the benefit of the doubt," she said. [...]
"Intelligence doesn't necessarily mean something is true," Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a Pentagon news briefing after major combat ended in Iraq. "You know, it's your best estimate of the situation. It doesn't mean it's a fact. I mean, that's not what intelligence is."
How can Democrats be so ineffectual in the media in which they would seem to have a home-court cultural advantage? The talk-show playing field is littered with liberal casualties: Mario Cuomo, Alan Dershowitz, Phil Donahue. Why waste money on more broadcasting flops? The conventional wisdom has it that liberals will never make it in this arena because they are humorless, their positions are too complicated to explain, and some powerful media companies (whether Mr. Murdoch's News Corporation or the radio giant Clear Channel) want to put up roadblocks.
Others argue that liberals are so down and out that they don't even know what they believe any more. "The reason conservative media outlets work is that they have a mass audience united by a discrete ideology," says Tucker Carlson, who affably represents the right on CNN's "Crossfire" and is one of those I've queried about this topic in recent months. "They believe in nine things. They all know the catechism." In Mr. Carlson's view, Democrats are all over the ideological map in the post-Clinton era, and there can be no effective media without a coherent message.
But the case against liberal talk success isn't a slam-dunk. After all, conservatives have their talk-show fiascos too, as evidenced by MSNBC, the lame would-be Fox clone that, as the comedian Jon Stewart has said, doesn't "deserve all those letters" in its name. MSNBC's just-canceled right-wing star, Michael Savage, drew smaller audiences on the channel than Mr. Donahue did. What's more, there actually are liberals who retain a sense of humor (witness Mr. Franken, Mr. Stewart and Michael Moore), while conservative stars are not infrequently humor-free (witness Mr. O'Reilly).
Norman Lear goes so far as to argue that liberals are intrinsically funnier than conservatives. "Most comedy comes from those who see humor in the human condition," he says. "Most who traffic in the stuff could be called humanists. The far-right talk hosts spew a kind of venom and ridicule that passes for funnybone material with the program executives that hire them."
If humor doesn't bring liberals talk-show success, is the problem that they lack rage?
Despite the public perception of conservatives as prissy schoolmarms and bible-thumping Puritans, nothing more clearly distinguishes the Right from the Left than the latter's complete humorlessness. It's oft been noted--perhaps too often by me--that to a liberal life is a tragedy, to a conservative it's a comedy. There are several causes of this. The most important is that conservatives hold to the Judeo-Christian worldview of Man as Fallen. We believe that Man is sinful by his nature and that this capacity for evil precludes the possibility of ever perfecting the species or society. Liberals (like Libertarians) are utopians. They believe that Man is naturally good but that he has been corrupted by money and the artificial stratification of society that accompanies it. They believe in the possibility of perfecting the species once again and of perfecting society. Thus, the two politics, of Left and Right, diverge even at their conception of human nature and of the purpose of life.
Now humor is a difficult thing to define, but one would hope we could all agree that it by and large consists of our taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others. Comedy occurs, always, at someone's expense. This is difficult enough for liberals, with their more tender hearts to accept--with their greater empathy they are naturally more deeply affected by the pain of others. But even worse, even as the fact that the bad things happen serves as a challenge to their utopianism, the fact that we all enjoy it when these bad things happen to others serves as challenges to their benevolent view of our nature. If we were truly "good" would we take such pleasure in observing the sado-masochism of the Three Stooges?
On the other hand, for a conservative these things serve merely serve as a confirmation of our dismal view of Man and of life. Pop in a Porky's movie and then try to tell us that mankind is perfectible. Heck, try to tell us that God wouldn't be justified in scrapping the whole mess and starting over.
And so, all great comedy is fundamentally conservative. There simply is no such thing as liberal humor.
Two months after he arrived in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer III, the American interim ruler of Iraq, has confounded doomsayers by creating an interim Iraqi authority as the first step towards democratisation in that war-torn land.
The new authority, presented as a governing council, is the most representative that Iraq has seen since its creation as a state in 1921.
With 13 out of the 25 seats on the council, the Shiites, who form 60 per cent of the population, have their demographic strength reflected for the first time. The Kurds have five seats, again reflecting their linguistic, religious and cultural diversity. Sunni Arabs get five seats, slightly higher than their demographic strength, reflecting their long tradition of ruling Iraq. The Christians, accounting for three per cent of the population, get one seat just as ethnic Turcomans with one per cent of the population.
Bremer Pasha's council, however, must not be seen as a parade of Iraqi ethnic and religious diversity.
Beyond ethnic and religious identities, the council members represent a rich spectrum of political traditions.There are liberals, socialists, Communists, moderate and hard line Islamists, pan-Arab nationalists, and even dissident Ba'athists.
Nowhere else in the Arab world is there a possibility of reflecting such a rich diversity in any governing organ.
But this is only the first step.
Democrats thanked soccer moms for their success in the 1990s. But "office park dads" could spell their doom in 2004, warns Democratic pollster Mark Penn.
Penn told a June meeting of the New Democrat Network that white males prefer the GOP 2-to-1. Just 24% of white males consider themselves Democrats; 53% call themselves Republicans.
That's even worse for Democrats than Al Gore did in 2000. Gore got 36% of white male votes--less than Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996.
President Bush won 61% of white men with college degrees, 63% of white men without degrees and 62% of white men making more than $75,000 a year.
The growing GOP pull among white men is a double blow to Democrats. White men are still 39% of the electorate. Men also give more money to political causes than women do--three times more in the 1990s, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. [...]
Democrats still do well with single women, blacks and Hispanics. In 2002, 88% of blacks, 60% of Hispanics and 69% of single women voted Democratic, says Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg.
But Republicans raised their take of the female vote in congressional races from 45% in '00 to 48% in '02.
"The big news since last time isn't really what's happened to men so much as what's happened to women," said William Galston, professor of public affairs at the University of Maryland and an adviser to presidential candidate Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn.
"For a lot of women--soccer mom types, women with families--Sept. 11 has turned national security into a domestic security issue," Galston said. [...]
Even on some women's issues, the trend favors the GOP.
In a recent poll by the pro-choice Center for the Advancement of Women, 51% of women favored limits on abortion, up from 45% in 2001. Just 30% said abortion should face no restrictions.
David Hampton's pursuit of a fabulous Manhattan life ended last month in the early-morning hush of a downtown hospital. No
celebrities keened by his bedside, no theatrics unfolded in the hall; there was no last touch of the fabulous. Just the clinical cluck that follows the death of a man who dies alone at 39.
His name may not resonate, but his story will. David Hampton was the black teenager who conned members of the city's white elite 20 years ago with an outsized charm. He duped them into believing that he was a classmate of their children, the son of Sidney Poitier, and a victim of muggers who had just stolen his money and Harvard term paper--a term paper titled "Injustices in the Criminal Justice System."
The scam yielded a modest payoff: temporary shelter, a little cash, and the satisfaction of having mocked what he saw as the hypocritical world of limousine liberalism. He also briefly experienced the glamorous Manhattan life that had first seduced him from his upper-middle-class home in Buffalo, a city that he once said lacked anyone "who was glamorous or fabulous or outrageously talented."
"New York was the place for him," Susan V. Tipograph, a lawyer and close friend, said. "In his mind, the fabulous people lived in New York City."
But Mr. Hampton paid long-term costs for his New York conceit and deceit. For beguiling the affluent under false pretenses--the formal charge was attempted burglary--he received 21 months in prison. And for being such a distinctive character, he received eternal notoriety as the inspiration for "Six Degrees of Separation," a 1990 play by John Guare that became a hit and then a movie.
I WAS OUT OF TOWN on a reporting trip a couple months ago, hanging around with a group of people I thought might make a good story.
They had gathered near dawn on a bluff by a river. It was a striking site and I wanted to record its details in my notebook, as a way of splashing a little color into my narrative. Far below us, a wooden footbridge arched across the ice-blue water. White caps rose and fell. Poised at the crest of the bluff was some kind of big tree, its mighty limbs overspreading our little group, and when the wind picked up, a gentle spray of its leaves would flutter to the ground, layering a lush carpet of leaves from some other kind of tree nearby. Yet another, different kind of big tree commingled its branches with the first big tree that I just mentioned, and as the light passed through, it fashioned a cathedral effect framing the hillside beyond, where lots and lots of other big trees formed ghostly shapes in the rising mist, the way this kind of tree sometimes does, the kind of tree that has those scraggly, gnarled limbs and the tiny, pointed leaves. Maybe you know the kind of tree I mean.
Or maybe you don't. My stab at colorful description came to nothing. Wherever I scanned the intricate arrangement of this sun-dappled tableau, trees formed the essential element, and God only knew what kind of trees they were. When I got back home and paged through my skimpy notes, I thought: A writer needs to know his trees. You can't use phrases like "sun-dappled tableau" unless you're ready to say what kind of foliage is causing the sun to dapple the tableau. It constitutes a professional transgression of some sort--a cheat. It's not Jayson Blair, but a whiff of bunco clings to it just the same.
This is how I came to the work of Dr. George A. Petrides. He is the author, now deceased, of "Eastern Trees," an illustrated field guide I bought soon after my frustration on the bluff. I've never met him but feel an intimacy with him, the way a reader does with writers who deliver. Dr. Petrides knows everything about Eastern trees, and as a literary man his chief distinctions are his lack of pretense and his distaste for obfuscation--almost unheard-of in an expert of any kind, but indispensable in anyone trying to get his thoughts down straight and clear. Clarity is a high principle with him. "This book avoids technical botanical terms," he writes. "There seems to be little point in describing a leaf shape as 'cordate,' for instance, when a botanical glossary defines the word as meaning merely 'heart-shaped.' One might as well say 'heart-shaped' from the beginning."
And where there is clarity--if the subject is trees--there is beauty.
Hard to believe, but this fall those two accented icons, Greek-born Arianna Huffington and Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger, may well be battling to the wire to take the California governorship away from sad sack Gray Davis, who has embarrassed himself to near unanimous public contempt in the state. [...]
Huffington's former husband, conservative Congressman and Texas oil heir Michael Huffington, narrowly lost in a bid to unseat Diane Feinstein in the 1996 Senate race. Michael Huffington came out as gay after that election loss, the two separated, and Arianna has undergone a very visible transformation from the right to the populist left. She was a regular guest on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, where she moved out of the right-wing seat, due in part to what she has said was Robert Scheer's political persuasion.
The reason a Huffington candidacy would need to be taken seriously is that sooner or later, California labor and progressive leaders and Democrats are going to have to come up with a candidate to support should Davis lose. Naturally, they will advise voting against the recall, but the second question on the ballot remains: If the governor is recalled who should be the new governor?
If the Dems don't provide an option and Davis is recalled they are guaranteeing a Republican takeover in Sacramento -- either Schwarzenegger or someone much worse, such as the inept Bill Simon, who despite his inexperience and failure on the campaign trail lost to Davis by only a relatively small margin.
A new Orthodox basilica has been consecrated in Yekaterinburg, on the site where, 85 years ago, on July 17, 1918, the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, together with his wife, son, four daughters and four servants who had been allowed to remain with them, were shot by the Bolsheviks.
The consecration ceremonies began on the morning of July 16 and continued through the day, culminating in a midnight procession to the site where the Bolsheviks tried to destroy the bodies so that- in their own words-- "no one would ever know what happened." (Their efforts were unsuccessful; the remains of the imperial family and their servants were located in 1991, verified by DNA matching, and eventually re-interred in St. Petersburg).
The new Yekaterinburg church, to be called the Basilica of the Blood in the name of All the Saints of Russia, stands on the site of the "Ipatyev house" where the imperial family was confined and eventually
shot. The house itself was destroyed on the orders of Boris Yeltsin, during his term as Communist Party boss there: a decision which, as Russia s first post-Communist president, he came to regret. However, stones from the foundations of the Ipatyev house have been built into the basilica, and a special side-chapel replicates the cellar where the shooting took place.
Liberal minds flocked to the USSR in an unending procession, from the great ones like Shaw and Gide and Barbusse and Julian Huxley and Harold Laski and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, down to poor little teachers, crazed clergymen and millionaires, drivelling dons, all utterly convinced that, under the aegis of the great Stalin, a new dawn is breaking in the world, so that the human race may at last be united in liberty, equality and fraternity forevermore . . . These Liberal minds are prepared to believe anything, however preposterous, to overlook anything, however villainous, to approve anything, however obscurantist and brutally authoritarian, in order to be able to preserve intact the confident expectation that one of the most thoroughgoing, ruthless and bloody tyrannies ever to exist on earth can be relied on to champion human freedom, the brotherhood of man, and all the other good Liberal causes to which they had dedicated their lives . . . They are unquestionably one of the marvels of the age . . . all chanting the praises of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and of Stalin as its most gracious and beloved figurehead. It was as though a Salvation Army contingent had turned out with bands and banners in honour of some ferocious tribal deity, or as though a vegetarian society had issued a passionate plea for cannibalism.
-Malcolm Muggeridge (Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim)
Momentum is building behind legislation that would make it a federal crime to harm the fetus of a pregnant woman, spurred in part by outrage over the slaying of Californian Laci Peterson and her
unborn son, Conner.
The measure, dubbed the "Laci and Conner's Law," seeks to treat fetuses in such cases as victims separate from their mothers, with all the rights of individuals. It would apply to federal crimes, which take place in areas such as national parks, military installations and Indian reservations, and would carry a sentence of up to life imprisonment. [...]
While the legislation may affect the outcome of only a handful of trials each year -- Peterson is charged under state law -- it has symbolic significance for antiabortion advocates, who have tried for
several years to pass the measure but have encountered resistance in the Senate and the White House.
Republican control of the White House and Congress has given antiabortion bills the best chance of passage in years.
Though the Republican Party prides itself on being a champion of state sovereignty, one need only mention phrases like "medical marijuana" or "drug law reform" to see how quickly the Administration of George W. Bush becomes hostile to the notion of the autonomy of states. The latest--and perhaps most egregious--example of this enmity is about to become manifest via a new appointment: that of veteran Justice Department official Karen Tandy, soon to be new chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Already approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee after an all but unnoticed, if not farcical, confirmation hearing late last month, the Administration evidently hopes Tandy's nomination will next clear the full Senate with as little attention or debate as possible. Lost in the shuffle has been any meaningful examination of dubious policy initiatives and prosecutions Tandy has been involved in over the past twenty years.
According to drug-reform activists, the nomination of Tandy--a career Justice Department prosecutor and administrator whose most recent assignments have included busting mail-order bong sellers and those involved in Oregon and California's state-sanctioned medical marijuana programs--is a clear signal from the Administration that it will give no quarter on any aspect of marijuana policy.
I recently attended a lecture entitled "Cosmic Richness" at the University of Western Australia given by John Polkinghorne, one of the Cambridge scientists who, together with Arthur Peacock, left science to study theology and become ordained Anglicans. Polkinghorne and Peacock have both won the Templeton prize for their contribution towards the science/religion debate. Apart from which, I lump them together because, it seems to me, they are broadly on about the same thing.
I must admit that I attended the lecture with some foreboding because I have in the past found the arguments put forward by these two to be unconvincing and, indeed, to threaten the very thing they are attempting to prop up: Christianity besieged by natural science. [...]
My point is that the God we find in the bible, the God that Moses met before the burning bush and whose name was "I am", the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the God of Jesus Christ, Father, Son and Holy Spirit is so peculiar and so foreign to our natural theism that He cannot simply be joined with the scientist/theologians speculation about divine agency, a sort of force hiding in the shrubbery of the universe. What has this agency to do with the child in the manger, the man in despair in the garden and dying abandoned on the cross?
What happens to Christian theology when it finds its foundation in the sort of theism that comes from scientific arguments for the existence of divine agency? Karl Barth recognised that the God of natural theology is a far preferable creature than the one revealed nailed to the cross. The romantic mood will always discount the abundant examples of natural evil and concentrate on the spectacular sunset, the lovers' embrace or the child's smile. In the face of these the crucified God is bound to come off second best and be seen as a spoil-sport of the celebration of life. Likewise the God that is speculated to exist behind the fabric of the universe, especially when backed up by prestigious advocates of the dominant culture (natural science), looks a far better bet than the God revealed in the peculiar and haunting narratives of the bible. The latter is a dangerous God whose presence is fearful and life changing whereas the god of science/theology is an intellectual curiosity whose existence we can assent to but who will never call us and challenge us and dispose us.
A Christian theology that finds its foundation or warrant in the speculation of scientists is as fragile as scientific hypothesis...
On the screen, an animated figure takes a step forward and tries to walk. Instead it collapses immediately, falls on its back, and flails its legs helplessly. Then it reappears at the left of the screen, takes a few delicate baby steps, and falls again. Returning to the screen, it raises its knees, takes six or so confident strides, and drops on its side. After trying over and over again to walk, the figure finally marches successfully across the screen as though its motions had been captured directly from videos of a human walking.
This little film won't win an Oscar for Best Animated Short, but the software that generated it stands as a small miracle of computer programming. The figure was not taught how to walk by an offscreen animator; it evolved the capacity for walking on its own. The intelligence to do so came from some clever programming that tries to mimic nature's ability to pass along successful genes.
The idea is called a genetic algorithm. It creates a random population of potential solutions, then tests each one for success, selecting the best of the batch to pass on their "genes" to the next generation, including slight mutations to introduce variation. The process is repeated until the program evolves a workable solution.
In the Descent [of Man (1871)], Darwin offered an evolutionary account of the rise of morality and religious belief, solely in terms of natural selection. He also drew out the obvious moral implications. Since human nature is the product of evolution, as with any product of natural selection, it can be improved on by artificial selection. Just as a pigeon fancier takes what nature gives him and selectively breeds for traits he desires, so also human beings should take their own evolution into their own hands. It's no accident, then, that Descent's finale is a call to eugenics, a science to which Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, gave the name but to which Darwin gave the foundation.
Nor is it an accident, at present and for the foreseeable future, that evolution provides the support for genetic manipulation and the removal-via the combination of screening and abortion-of the genetically unfit. Once human nature is understood to be an accident of chance, it can no longer be the inviolable locus of moral claims. We, the clay, now lay claim to be the potters as well. To repeat, Darwinism inevitably leads to moral Darwinism. The lesson? NOMA is nonsense.
A sure sign that Darwinism knows no moral bounds is that nearly all the moral controversies we face today (and we will face tomorrow) hinge on a single disagreement: whether human beings are fundamentally distinct from all other animals or whether human beings are simply one more kind of animal; that is, whether we have an immortal, immaterial soul as created in the image of God, or whether we're one more indistinct and unintended form of animal life provisionally occupying the ever-changing evolutionary landscape.
To take a most illustrative moral quandary, if we're merely another kind of animal, then euthanasia should not be a moral issue at all. Rather, euthanasia would merely be the long-overdue application to human beings of a service long-available at all veterinary clinics for our pets. We don't let our pets suffer when they've contracted some painful, irremediable malady or are ravaged by old age. We consider it humane to put them down, and that's why advocates of euthanasia consider its prohibition not only irrational but inhumane.
Nor again do we become morally queasy when we only let the best horses, cattle, sheep, and goats breed. Further, farmers and breeders do not coddle retarded or malformed animals, supplying them with comfortable pasturage. They eliminate the unfit without delay and without remorse. Why should the biologically challenged be a drain on already strained resources?
Well, why not? The only support for the "why not" in regard to human beings is the conviction that we are indeed fundamentally distinct, created in the image of God, and not fashioned as an unintended effect of natural selection. This truth claim grounds our moral arguments against euthanasia and eugenics, and it is a claim about reality that directly overlaps [Stephen Jay] Gould's cherished evolutionary magisterium.
In 1972, my campaign for president was buried in a landslide. I lost everywhere except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Richard Nixon was reelected with more than 60% of the vote.
But have I ever wanted to trade places with him? Not for one minute. Were the voters of the 49 states who went for Nixon wiser than the people of our national capital and Massachusetts who voted for me? Not in my book.
These days, my name is back in the news. I'm being held up as some kind of sober warning to Democratic candidates. Don't be another George McGovern, the warning goes. Don't be too liberal. Don't be too outspoken. Watch what you say and play to the middle, so that you don't end up losing 49 states, too.
It may not surprise you that I regard this as political baloney. I said exactly what I believed in 1972. I told the truth while my opponent betrayed the American public and violated the law repeatedly, engaging in campaign finance dishonesty and illegal wiretapping, invading the confidential files of a doctor, urging the CIA to halt an FBI investigation--to say nothing of running unethical and unlimited campaign advertising that distorted my positions on major issues. These kinds of tactics got him elected--but they also made him the only president in our history forced to resign in disgrace. [...]
Of course, we all like to win--especially against great odds. And I think it's extremely important for the Democrats to win in 2004. But not at the price of their souls.
This fear of being "gobbled up", of becoming a 51st state and the cries of "cultural genocide" and "free to be Australian" seem to suggest an inner anxiety. They create an impression of an immature Australian society and a culture not yet developed and seemingly unable to fend for itself.
This is hardly surprising giving the desperate teenage conformity of Australian writers and artists. David Marr in his rather unsurprising Colin
Simpson lecture said "the role of the writer is always to surprise". But the problem with Australian writers is they rarely do.
In the course of writing his latest book, Christopher Hitchens stumbled across some notes George Orwell had made on Brideshead Revisited before he died. He wrote:
Within the last few decades, in countries like Britain or the United States, the literary intelligentsia has grown large enough to constitute a world in itself. One important result of this is that the opinions which writers feel frightened of expressing are not those which are disapproved of by society as a whole… The daring thing, or at any rate the unfashionable thing is to believe in God or to approve of the capitalist system.
For Orwell the essence of totalitarianism was the attack it waged against freedom. After Spain he lived with a permanent dread that the liberal civilisation into which he had been born was gradually being destroyed. This was the source of 1984, the most important warning he wrote about the abuse of absolute state power in the technological age.
But Orwell did not love only liberty. He also loved equality. In Republican Spain he fleetingly experienced a world where "the working class was in the saddle". This was the kind of world in which Orwell wanted to live. His great Russian Revolution fable, Animal Farm, is essentially the story of the hope for equality cruelly betrayed.
The mere mention of the f-word - fundamentalism - cues a certain kind of Texas Baptist to stop thinking and start firing. Extremism in the defense against Baptist fundamentalism is no vice, they might say. Which explains the smear job some Baylor partisans have done on university president Robert Sloan and his Baylor 2012 plan.
At the heart of the controversy is Dr. Sloan's intent to strengthen Baylor's identity as a Christian institution, even as he pushes to make it a nationally ranked research university. Some faculty and alumni have sounded the alarm that this is an attempt by religious fundamentalists - having been decisively defeated in the early 1990s, when Baylor changed its charter to prevent the possibility of a fundamentalist takeover - to conquer from within.
It's a groundless charge. Though described by this newspaper as a "Baptist preacher," as if he had dragged himself in from some piney-woods backwater, Dr. Sloan, an ordained minister, holds a doctorate in New Testament theology from Switzerland's University of Basel, which isn't quite the same thing as a Bible college. He scandalized some on the Baptist hard right by ending Baylor's prohibition on dancing, and, worse, Dr. Sloan has been hiring admitted Roman Catholics to teach at the Texas Baptist university. Some fundamentalist.
What Dr. Sloan actually is undertaking is an audacious and much-needed experiment in American higher education and religious life. The tide of 20th-century secularism washed away entirely the religious identities of historically Protestant universities like Harvard, Yale, Duke and Vanderbilt and dramatically eroded the distinct vision of Catholic colleges. That was likely to be Baylor's future, too. As Dr. Sloan told me, "If you're not intentional about your identity, you can't maintain it. I've never seen a
school slide into Christian orthodoxy."
Echoing a scholarly Christian conviction as old as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, Dr. Sloan refuses to accept the dominant post-Enlightenment view that faith and reason are mutually exclusive. Baylor 2012 is his bold attempt to show how they are complementary and how a religious university can speak to the broader culture from an intellectually sound but morally distinct vantage point.
Got the munchies at Fenway Park, but too lazy to get your own hot dog? Now, technology has made life easier for fans, at least those in some of the park's priciest seats.
No longer must the 400 privileged people with ''dugout seats'' along first and third base wait on lines or search out the Crackerjack guy. When the urge comes for a beer, nachos, or whatever's at the concession stand, all they have to do is flip out their cell phones, and in minutes, a server will appear with the chow.
''You don't have to worry about bumping into someone and wearing the salsa from your nachos,'' said Neil Exter of Lexington, at a recent game with his wife and son.
The ''in-seat service,'' increasingly a part of life at ballparks around the country, began this week at Fenway -- slowly. Only a few fans have used the service, which began at Thursday's game. The team sent fans with the dugout seats letters about the service, and advertised it on menus.
No, it's not a line from the Roberta Flack/Fugees' song, it's from an internal memo sent by Republican strategist Frank Luntz. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the July 10 memo, outlining several ways to oust Gov. Gray Davis, encourages Republicans to "kill Davis softly."
The 17-page letter warns recall proponents that ousting Davis will be difficult saying, "Anyone who thinks this is a slam dunk is nuts." Voter uncertainty will be a significant impediment for the recall activists as they attempt to lure voters away from the unpopular governor. However, the memo includes 17 ways to discredit Davis and increase Republican support.
Luntz advocates concentrating on Davis' lack of leadership rather than policy failures. "Voters are more likely to throw out Gray Davis for his inability to lead than for allowing too much spending." The memo urges recall supporters to repeat such messages to "destroy whatever's left of Gray's credibility."
Also hoping to capitalize on Davis' low approval ratings, Luntz asserts that the governor's unpopularity is one of the recall's greatest advantages. "The fact is, the more Davis speaks, the lower his popularity goes--the more he talks, the easier the recall becomes," states the memo.
A new Las Vegas game gets thrill-seekers out of the casinos and into the great wide open - to shoot naked women with paintball guns.
In "Hunting for Bambi," men pay $10,000 each for the challenge of tracking the women, who are nude except for sneakers, and trying to blast them with colored paint.
The White House today set out its most detailed explanation yet of how disputed intelligence about Iraq's weapons program made it into President Bush's State of the Union address, contradicting a crucial element of the version of events provided by the Central Intelligence Agency.
In a briefing for reporters, a senior administration official said the White House had changed an initial draft of the speech to make it more credible by attributing the assertion that Iraq had been trying to acquire uranium in Africa to a public British intelligence dossier.
The official said the change had been made after internal White House deliberations about the best way to present the information and not, as intelligence officials have said, in response to concerns raised by the C.I.A. about the credibility of intelligence reports that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium in Niger.
As part of today's briefing, the White House declassified part of its main prewar intelligence summary on Iraq's weapons programs. The document, a National Intelligence Estimate, encompasses the findings of the main intelligence agencies. The document noted reports that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium in Africa but included a warning from the State Department that the reports were "highly dubious."
White House officials said the document was one of those drawn on by speechwriters as they put together the State of the Union address. The official who gave the briefing today said Mr. Bush was unaware of the State Department's skepticism.
The president "is not a fact checker," the official said.
The document also noted that the intelligence agencies had "low confidence" in some of its conclusions, including when Saddam Hussein might use weapons of mass destruction, whether he would try to attack the United States and whether he would provide chemical or biological weapons to Al Qaeda. Administration officials had cited all those possibilities in building a case for the war.
After being pressed by Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, President Bush said today that his administration was reconsidering whether and under what circumstances to bring any British subjects captured in the Afghanistan war before American military tribunals.
Mr. Bush, in a statement released in Texas where he was traveling today, also said that anyone from Australia subject to a military tribunal would similarly have his case reconsidered. He said that delegations of legal experts from Britain and Australia would go to Washington next week to negotiate with American officials about the disposition of those prisoners.
[A] British official said today that his country's legal delegation would discuss options with their American counterparts, including sending back to the United Kingdom the nine Britons in custody. But a problem with such repatriation, the official acknowledged, is that the British government may not then be able to guarantee that the nine would be prosecuted there. Those decisions are made independently by law enforcement agencies and the crown prosecution service.
An Australian official noted today that the government had been generally supportive of the military tribunals and said the Australian delegation would most likely seek assurances of procedural steps to guarantee a fair trial. The official said Australia was unlikely to seek repatriation of its two citizens.
The recall has changed things so significantly over such a short period of time that we have to look at our 2003 and 2004 goals, not just our 2006 goals," said George M. Sundheim III, who became chairman of the state Republican Party in February, promising to make it competitive by expanding its base, enlisting volunteers and quelling the infighting. "It has accelerated the process."
Republican voter registration drives have moved into high gear. Conservative talk radio is filled with excited conjecture about possible Republican successors to Mr. Davis. Hollywood is abuzz over the possible political ambitions of the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican.
And for the first time in years, the conservative and moderate wings of the state party are so focused on winning that they are rarely at each other's throats publicly.
"The recall has been a huge shot in the arm for California Republicans," said Tony Quinn, a veteran political analyst and an editor at California Target Book, a nonpartisan survey of elections in the state. "It has motivated their voters." [...]
Other Republicans in the state are concerned that it is too soon for the party to sustain a meaningful rebound. Attention should be focused instead on recruiting strong candidates to challenge Democrats in next year's elections for the state's Legislature and the race against Senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat who is seeking a third term.
Capitol Police were called Friday to a contentious House committee meeting marked by a Democratic walkout and accusations of name-calling, vulgarity and physical threats.
Witnesses described flaring tempers. One GOP lawmaker said he almost came to blows with a Democratic colleague he said was threatening him.
The police told lawmakers to work things out themselves and took no action.
The partisan bickering later spilled over onto the House floor, where Democrats and Republicans offered conflicting accounts about what happened in the Ways and Means Committee meeting on a pension plan bill.
The whole thing blew up, witnesses said, when Democrats complained of the way committee's Republican chairman, Rep. Bill Thomas of California, was running the session.
The Democrats said they needed more time to review some changes in the legislation after getting them only the night before.
When they could not to get a line-by-line reading of the bill, a common parliamentary tactic, they walked out and gathered to talk in a library at the back of the meeting room. Thomas, who has a reputation for being blunt, had his staff call the cops.
Democrats said Thomas called police to get them out of the room. Republicans said the police were called because one Democrat, Rep. Pete Stark of California, got out of hand.
Stark, they said, stayed behind after his colleagues left the committee room to berate Thomas and other committee Republicans. [...]
Stark "threatened me with physical harm," said Rep. Scott McInnis of Colorado, a Republican who sits on the committee.
"I think it was entirely appropriate for the chairman of the committee to call the sergeant at arms and the Capitol Police," McInnis said. "I considered that a bodily threat and I fully intended to defend myself. To calm this down -- that is why the chairman did that."
Rep. Kenny Hulshof, a Missouri Republican who sits on the committee, read what he described as a transcript of the meeting.
In it, he quoted Stark as saying to McInnis, "You little fruitcake, you little fruitcake, I said you are a fruitcake."
And, according [to] a Republican leadership aide, the 72-year-old Stark called Thomas a vulgarity.
Karen Tandy, expected to be confirmed soon as the new head of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), did not face many tough questions when her nomination was considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee. One of the few exceptions came from Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), who asked her about a problem he was instrumental in creating.
Biden referred to an incident in Billings, Montana, on May 30, when a DEA agent brought a copy of the Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act to the local Eagles Lodge. The agent warned the lodge's manager that a fund-raising concert sponsored by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and Students for a Sensible Drug Policy might violate the law if anyone attending the event lit up a joint.
The law, which Biden sponsored, makes it a federal crime to "knowingly and intentionally" make a place available "for the purpose of manufacturing, distributing, or using any controlled substance." Violators are subject to $250,000 or more in civil penalties, a criminal fine of up to $500,000, and a prison sentence of up to 20 years.
The threat of these penalties "freaked me out," the Eagles Lodge manager told the Drug Reform Coordination Network. She said the DEA agent "didn't tell us we couldn't have the event, but he showed me the law and told us what could happen if we did. I talked to our trustees, they talked to our lawyers, and our lawyers said not to risk it, so we canceled."
Biden pronounced himself "troubled" by this application of his law. He pressed Tandy to explain how she planned to "reassure people who may be skeptical of my legislation that it will not be enforced in a manner that has a chilling effect on free speech." [...]
There is a broader issue here than freedom of speech. The rule of law requires that people be given adequate notice of which actions will get them into trouble. In seeking to hold property owners and managers liable for other people's drug use, Biden's law fails that basic test.
Some people began using the acronym shortly after Democratic Gov. Bob Holden went into debt with a $1 million inaugural party. Soon, opponents were chanting it at Capitol rallies.
The not-so-flattering acronym is "OTB" -- "One Term Bob."
Now, as Holden gears up for a 2004 re-election campaign, even some fellow Democrats are working to make the acronym reality.
Sensing Holden is politically weakened, Democratic State Auditor Claire McCaskill has banked more than $1 million and begun touting herself as a viable alternative for Democrats disgruntled with Holden. Supporters say she is inching closer to making her candidacy official. [...]
The Democratic primary winner is likely to face Republican Secretary of State Matt Blunt, son of high-ranking Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Missouri, known for his fund-raising prowess.
Republican Party consultant John Hancock, who works on behalf of Blunt, is delighted at the prospect of a Democratic primary.
"The Democrats have raised about $3 million to fight amongst themselves," Hancock said. "Every penny that Matt Blunt has raised is going to be used to communicate with the whole state."
After a hard day's jousting, what a medieval English knight needed was .... a plate of lasagna.
And he apparently could have it, according to British researchers who claim to have found a British recipe for lasagna dating from the 14th century - long before Italian chefs came up with the delicious concoction of layers of pasta topped with cheese.
"This is the first recorded recipe for a lasagna-based dish," David Crompton, one of the researchers, said Tuesday. "The Italian dish has tomatoes, which were only discovered two centuries later in the New World." [...]
To create loseyns (pronounced lasan), "The Forme of Cury" advises the cook to make a paste from flour of "paynedemayn," a substance that hasn't been identified; roll it thin and cook it with grated cheese and sweet powder. [...]
The recipe in full:
"Take good broth and do in an erthen pot. Take flour of paynedemayn and make erof past with water and make erof thynne foyles as paper with a roller; drye it harde and see it in broth."
Next, "take chese ruayn grated and lay it in dishes with powder douce and lay eron loseyns isode as hoole as you myght and above powdour and chese; and so twyse or thryse & serue it forth."
On Sunday morning all were punctual except Blackie, even Mike. Mike had a stroke of luck. His mother felt ill, his father was tired after Saturday night, and he was told to go to church alone with many warnings of what would happen if he strayed. Blackie had difficulty in smuggling out the saw, and then in finding the sledge-hammer at the back of No. 15. He approached the house from a lane at the rear of the garden, for fear of the policeman's beat along the main road. The tired evergreens kept off a stormy sun: another wet Bank Holiday was being prepared over the Atlantic, beginning in swirls of dust under the trees. Blackie climbed the wall into Misery's garden.
There was no sign of anybody anywhere. The lav stood like a tomb in a neglected graveyard. The curtains were drawn. The house slept. Blackie lumbered nearer with the saw and the sledge-hammer. Perhaps after all nobody had turned up: the plan had been a wild invention: they had woken wiser. But when he came close to the back door he could hear a confusion of sound hardly louder than a hive in swarm: a clickety-clack, a bang bang, a scraping, a creaking, a sudden painful crack. He thought: it's true; and whistled.
They opened the back door to him and he came in. He had at once the impression of organization, very different from the old happy-go-lucky ways under his leadership. For a while he wandered up and down stairs looking for T. Nobody addressed him: he had a sense of great urgency, and already he could begin to see the plan. The interior of the house was being carefully demolished without touching the walls. Summers with hammer and chisel was ripping out the skirting-boards in the ground floor dining-room: he had already smashed the panels of the door. In the same room Joe was heaving up the parquet blocks, exposing the soft wood floorboards over the cellar. Coils of wire came out of the damaged skirting and Mike sat; happily on the floor clipping the wires.
On the curved stairs two of the gang were working hard with an inadequate child's saw on the banisters - when they saw Blackie's big saw they signalled for it wordlessly. When he next saw them a quarter of the banisters had been dropped into the hall. He found T. at last in the bathroom - he sat moodily in the least cared-for room in the house, listening to the sounds coming up from below.
'You've really done it,' Blackie said with awe. 'What's going to happen?'
'We've only just begun,' T. said. He looked at the sledgehammer and gave his instructions. 'You stay here and break the , bath and the wash-basin. Don't bother about the pipes. They come later.'
Mike appeared at the door. 'I've finished the wires, T.,' he said.
'Good. You've just got to go wandering round now. The kitchen's in the basement. Smash all the china and glass and bottles you can lay hold of. Don't turn on the taps - we don't want a flood - yet. Then go into all the rooms and turn out the drawers. If they are locked get one of the others to break them open. Tear up any papers you find and smash all the ornaments. Better take a carving knife with you from the kitchen. The' bedroom's opposite here. Open the pillows and tear up the sheets. That's enough for the moment. And you, Blackie, when you've finished in here crack the plaster in the passage up with your sledge-hammer.'
'What are you going to do?' Blackie asked. 'I'm looking for something special,' T. said.
It was nearly lunch-time before Blackie had finished and went in search of T. Chaos had advanced. The kitchen was a shambles of broken glass and china. The dining-room was stripped of parquet, the skirting was up, the door had been taken off its hinges, and the destroyers had moved up a floor. Streaks of light came in through the closed shutters where they worked with the seriousness of creators - and destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had seen this house as it had now become.
Mike said, 'I've got to go home for dinner.'
'Who else?' T. asked, but all the others on one excuse or another had brought provisions with them.
They squatted in the ruins of the room and swapped unwanted sandwiches. Half an hour for lunch and they were at work again. By the time Mike returned they were on the top floor, and by six the superficial damage was completed. The doors were all off, all the skirtings raised, the furniture pillaged and ripped and smashed - no one could have slept in the house except on a bed of broken plaster. T. gave his orders - eight o'clock next morning, and to escape notice they climbed singly over the garden wall; into the car-park. Only Blackie and T. were left: the light had nearly gone, and when they touched a switch, nothing worked - Mike had done his job thoroughly.
'Did you find anything special?' Blackie asked.
T. nodded. 'Come over here,' he said, 'and look.' Out of both pockets he drew bundles of pound notes. 'Old Misery's savings,' he said. 'Mike ripped out the mattress, but he missed them.'
'What are you going to do? Share them?'
'We aren't thieves,' T. said. 'Nobody's going to steal anything from this house. I kept these for you and me - a celebration.' He knelt down on the floor and counted them out - there were seventy in all. 'We'll burn them,' he said, 'one by one,' and taking it in turns they held a note upwards and lit the top corner, so that the flame burnt slowly towards their fingers. The grey ash floated above them and fell on their heads like age. 'I'd like to see Old Misery's face when we are through,' T. a said.
'You hate him a lot?' Blackie asked.
'Of course I don't hate him,' T. said. 'There'd be no fun if I hated him.' The last burning note illuminated his brooding face. 'All this hate and love,' he said, 'it's soft, it's hooey. There's only things, Blackie,' and he looked round the room crowded with the unfamiliar shadows of half things, broken things, former things.
On Thursday, the House of Representatives--with seven Democrats absent, including presidential candidate Richard Gephardt-voted 213 to 210 to approve new regulations that would cut off a universe of Americans--anywhere from 1 million to 8 million-from guaranteed overtime pay. Under the new rules, backed by the Bush administration and campaigned for heavily by business lobbyists, those employees would still have to put in extra hours. They just wouldn't get any extra pay. Instead, some would qualify for comp time--try paying the rent with that--and others would simply be reclassified as executives, even if they wield little managerial authority.
Where were the Democrats? Nowhere to be found. Gephardt was in Iowa getting an endorsement from the International Order of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, promising veterans of the picket line they'd be part of a new American prosperity. Among the leading Democratic contenders, neither Gephardt nor senators John Edwards, John Kerry, or Joe Lieberman returned repeated Voice calls for comment. The office of Representative Dennis Kucinich, a staunch labor supporter who voted against the measure, at least returned a call, as did former Vermont governor Howard Dean's office. Dean spokesperson Tricia Enright says of Gephardt's absence, "It's disgraceful. . . . Don't votes like this keep people off the picket lines?"
It's fine for Dean's people to take a shot at Gephardt on this issue, but the fact of the matter is that none of the presidential candidates made this into a major national issue. Neither did any of the Democrats in Congress. Yet all are counting on support from labor, and they're likely to get it.
Even more mind-boggling is the reaction from organized labor. Bill Samuels, the legislative director of the AFL-CIO said he "was disappointed by the vote in the House." Just disappointed? Is that all? He went on to say the next step was to try to win a vote in the Senate, a vote that hasn't yet been scheduled, and about which labor leaders can only hope. Because if Kerry, Edwards, Lieberman, or Bob Graham decide not to be present, the unions are bound to lose. With such a narrow margin in the Senate-Republicans hold a one-vote majority--the chances of labor winning a vote there are viewed as very slim. And with the House vote sealed, the general consensus is that the new regs are a done deal.
The sweeping No Child Left Behind education law is a centerpiece of President Bush's domestic agenda. But Kansas Rep. Dennis Moore says without money to pay for it, the law itself should be left behind.
The point of the No Child Left Behind Act is to improve student and school achievement. The law expands testing, toughens teacher qualifications and checks up annually on student progress. [...]
Josh Holly, a spokesman for the Republican-controlled House Education and the Workforce Committee, called efforts like Moore's "fresh excuses for those who don't want to be accountable for ensuring that America's children learn." [...]
"Anything that's going to weaken high standards and accountability provisions is going to face tough resistance," Holly said. "For the first time, public education is not about money, it's about results. It's not about funding levels, it's about holding schools accountable."
The charm of Joaquin Lavin, whose ever-present smile is both genial and avuncular, is that he doesn't do politics, or so he claims. The agonizing debate in Chile over the Iraq War, which Lavin skirted, was politics. Instead of politics, Lavin solves problems: He does cosas, or "things," and he claims to be neither a leftist nor a rightist but a cosista, a "thing-ist."
The "things" Lavin has done vary from implementing common-sense solutions to everyday problems (a series of underpasses replacing traffic lights on a congested roadway) to the application of standard conservative prescriptions (the privatization of middle schools) to idiosyncratic measures defying the right's sacred principles (a system of neighborhood physicians copied from Cuba).
And by doing these "things," Lavin -- the public face of the Independent Democratic Union (UDI) party -- has become so popular that he is treated almost as a president-elect. Fifty-six percent of Chileans polled in December 2002 by the Chilean Center for Public Studies said Lavin will be the next president; Alvear, who by then had already signed trade deals with the European Union and South Korea, was predicted to be president by only by 4 percent of those surveyed. Since last year, the Concertacion's poll numbers have recovered, but Chileans of all political stripes continue to treat the prospect of a Lavin presidency as a fait accompli.
Many on the left have criticized Lavin's entrepreneurial solutions as short-term, superficial fixes or as populist patronage schemes. And some allege Lavin's emphasis on "things" masks his intention to remake Chile in ways that would increase authoritarianism and income inequality -- a fear that some on the right quietly share. But regardless of whether Lavin, as president, would enact his party's right-wing agenda or hew to more centrist positions, his ascent seems to represent the triumph, 13 years after its fall, of the ideals of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship: a depoliticized politics, free of ideology and even argument, and a dedication on the part of government officials to treating citizens as clients.
The Lavin phenomenon also illustrates the strange durability of Chilean exceptionalism -- the country's historic propensity to be out of sync with the rest of Latin America.
The world's most influential medical journal has pledged to aggressively seek out and publish research on embryonic stem cells to boost the controversial field's standing among politicians and the public.
The declaration by the Boston-based New England Journal of Medicine, in an editorial printed today, marks the publication's most significant foray into a broad societal debate perhaps since the 1980s, when its editors sought out papers on the then-controversial AIDS virus.
Three Democratic presidential candidates who were chastised by the N.A.A.C.P. for skipping the group's political forum in Miami on Monday upended their schedules today to fly south and make elaborate apologies. Earlier this week, all the candidates were summoned to a forum before gay leaders, where they were pressed to endorse gay marriage.
These two events illustrated what has emerged as one of the most critical and, for some Democrats, perplexing differences between the modern-day Democratic and Republican Parties: How they accommodate constituencies that are at the base of their political foundation but endorse views that are not always popular with the broader electorate.
President Bush has proved to be highly effective in his dealing with groups on the right. His appearances as candidate and as president before, say, the Christian Coalition, were far and few between. But the Democrats are finding themselves increasingly commandeered before groups that tend to highlight the very positions the White House would like highlighted, like the support of gay groups. That is taking place despite the efforts of Democratic Party leaders to protect the candidates from this situation. [...]
Some Democrats said they had winced at the image today of Representative Richard A. Gephardt, Representative Dennis J. Kucinich and Senator Joseph I.
Lieberman racing to Miami to apologize profusely after they had been scolded by the N.A.A.C.P. president for missing the organization's forum, one of close to 100 such meetings that various constituencies have tried to press on the presidential calendar. They suggested it reinforced precisely the image Democrats had been trying to erase: of caving in to pressure from a constituency group.
"Leadership also means being able to admit you're wrong," Mr. Lieberman, who delayed a trip to Iowa to go to Miami, told the group. "I was wrong. I regret it and I apologize for it."
Backed by the tribes in the past, Davis angered them this year by trying to get them to help with the state budget crisis by sharing more revenue from their burgeoning casino operations. With them balking and, alarmingly, talking with recall advocates, Davis backed off. He signaled his acquiescence by attending the opening of a new Morongo casino in the Southern California desert, site of an earlier meeting between Indian casino reps and recall champion Congressman Darrell Issa, in early May, then released the May revision of his budget, which dropped the heavy revenue demands on the tribes.
Recall-campaign coordinator David Gilliard says the Indian casino interests stopped talking with the recall forces right after Davis made his May pilgrimage to the Morongo casino. But Davis may have been alarmed by Bustamante getting center stage at the CNIGA summit. Bustamante was the last of the potential Democratic candidates to say he doesn?t intend to run to replace Davis in a recall election. Many expect that statement not to hold.
In any event, Democratic sources say that Davis is turning to the casino tribes to help defeat the recall. "We're taking a hard look" at helping fund the drive against the Davis recall, confirms Howard Dickstein, attorney for a half-dozen of the casino tribes. [...]
Democratic insiders buzz angrily about Davis being taken to the cleaners by signature-gathering firms that sold them on a meaningless counterpetition drive, which not only failed to block or even delay the recall-petition drive, but also wasted more than $1 million on a purported 1.1 million unverified signatures expressing vague support for Davis' positions, for which gatherers were paid a dollar a head. Davis campaign officials won't say exactly how much they spent on the effort, which was designed to siphon off enough workers to delay the recall's qualification. "A complete failure," a ranking Democratic adviser calls it, "and Gray no longer has that kind of money to burn."
Britain will hold an independent judicial inquiry if Dr David Kelly, the official named as the suspected source of allegations that
Downing Street "sexed up" intelligence on Iraq, is confirmed dead, a spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Friday.
Police searching for Dr Kelly have found a body matching his description.
An official from Thames Valley police, which is conducting the investigation into Dr Kelly's disappearance, said the body had not been formally identified but it was found just a few miles from his home.
Earlier this week MPs on the foreign affairs committee accused ministers of "poorly treating" Dr Kelly, a Ministry of Defence expert on chemical and biological weapons, after he said he was not the main source of a hotly disputed BBC report.
Dr Kelly had come under intense pressure after admitting that he had met BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan several times, including in a London hotel on the same day as Mr Gilligan says he interviewed the main source for the report.
Thames Valley police said Dr Kelly had gone missing from his home near Abingdon, Oxfordshire, on Thursday afternoon after telling his wife he was going for a walk at 3.00pm. The body of a man had been found face down on Harrowdown Hill, five miles from Dr Kelly's home at 9.20am on Friday. There was no note left either near the body or at Dr Kelly's home.
"The obligation of the United States government is to rapidly internationalize the effort in Iraq, get the target off of American troops, bring other people, particularly Muslim-speaking and Arab-speaking Muslim troops, into the region," Kerry said.
It's only a matter of getting two candidates to drop out and the pundits will haul out the "seven dwarves" line.
It's strange that the peace plan known as the road map, which is a very detailed document, doesn't mention the 90-mile fence/wall that Israel is building right now. This barrier--which is a fence at some points and a wall at others--is not being built on the Green Line (the only internationally recognized border of Israel) but is instead cutting deeply into the West Bank in many places, affecting thousands of acres of Palestinian land in the process.
"Barrier" doesn't quite capture the scope of what's being built. It's a whole barrier system, with successive layers, each of which takes a bit more land. It includes: a motion-sensitive electronic fence (and sometimes a wall); a service road running alongside the fence (on the Palestinian side, but Palestinians will not be able to use this road); a barbed-wire fence; "a trench or other means intended to prevent motor vehicles from crashing into and through the fence" (as the Israel Defense Forces described it in response to a recent, unsuccessful lawsuit to halt construction); three roads on the Israeli side of the fence and another barbed wire fence.
So far, about 24,000 acres of Palestinian land have been cut off from the rest of the West Bank and are now on the western (Israeli) side of the barrier.
Washington cannot resign itself to a North Korea free to threaten its neighbors with nuclear destruction and sell plutonium to rogue states and terrorists. Nor can it consider military action, which could ignite a new war on the Korean peninsula and possibly lead to a North Korean nuclear attack on Japan. Diplomacy is the only acceptable alternative, and time may be running short.
Former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, not seen since he was toppled in April, appeared to call on Iraqis to mount a jihad, or holy struggle, to oust occupying U.S. troops in an audiotape aired Thursday. [...]
The speaker described as "baseless" U.S. and British allegations that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the main justification for the war which overthrew Saddam. No such weapons have been found.
He accused President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair of fabricating lies.
"What will the two liars Bush and Blair say to their people and to humanity? What will they tell the world? What they said was wrong and baseless. The lies were known to the president of the United States and to the prime minister of Britain when they decided to wage war on Iraq," the tape added.
The speaker also attacked Iraq's new U.S.-backed Governing Council, saying it was a puppet of Washington and could not serve the Iraqi people. [...]
The speaker on the tape vowed that resistance against U.S. occupation would intensify.
"The foreign occupier occupied Iraq to weaken it and destroy its resources, that is why the only solution...is to resist the occupation to make the enemy fail."
"I am confident that our people who rejected the occupation will resist them," the voice said.
Earlier in the day, Bush gave a 25-minute speech at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building to about 120, mostly black, community leaders from across America. Most of his speech underscored his belief that taxpayers' money should be used to fund effective faith-based programs, but he also talked about his recent trip to five African nations. Afterward, the group was briefed on the trip by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who was with Bush at Goree Island.
"Those who were chained, sent in those ships ... never lost their desire for freedom and hope, stood strong in the face of the oppressor, finally made the oppressor feel guilty and, in fact, made us realize what it meant: liberty and justice for all," Bush said.
With that, one of the urban leaders shouted out "amen" and the group applauded. [...]
When his "faith-based initiative" stalled in Congress amid this controversy, Bush began sidestepping lawmakers with executive orders and regulations to give religious organizations equal footing in competing for federal contracts.
Government officials are not only privately disputing the genesis of Wilson's trip, but publicly contesting what he found. Last week Bush Administration officials said that Wilson's report reinforced the president's claim that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa. They say that when Wilson returned from Africa in Feb. 2002, he included in his report to the CIA an encounter with a former Nigerien government official who told him that Iraq had approached him in June 1999, expressing interest in expanding commercial relations between Iraq and Niger. The Administration claims Wilson reported that the former Nigerien official interpreted the overture as an attempt to discuss uranium sales.
"This is in Wilson's report back to the CIA," White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters last week, a few days before he left his post to join the private sector. "Wilson's own report, the very man who was on television saying Niger denies it...reports himself that officials in Niger said that Iraq was seeking to contact officials in Niger about sales."
Wilson tells the story differently and in a crucial respect. He says the official in question was contacted by an Algerian-Nigerien intermediary who inquired if the official would meet with an Iraqi about "commercial" sales--an offer he declined.
The chairman of the Democratic National Committee vowed Thursday that no Democrat will run to replace Gov. Gray Davis if a Republican-led recall drive reaches the ballot.
"I want the folks here in California to know that we are not going to have another Democrat on the ballot. I think that is the single biggest message I can give today," DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe said at a downtown news conference.
(4 servings)
Some nights -- most nights -- there's no time to marinate.
That's when we turn the marinade into a paste that clings to the entree during cooking.
Here we use it on quick-cooking, boneless, skinless chicken breasts. This approach also works for bone-in, skin-on chicken parts if you rub the paste beneath the skin, though the flavor doesn't have a chance of permeating these larger pieces of chicken.
Adapted from "Grilling & Barbecuing" by Denis Kelly (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2003).
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup chopped fresh basil (may substitute other fresh herb)
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
Olive oil to taste, plus additional for the grill
Few drops lemon juice (optional)
4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (about 11/2 pounds)
In a food processor or a mortar, process or mash the garlic together with the salt. Add the basil and pepper and continue to mix until well combined. Add just enough oil to make a paste. If desired, add a few drops of lemon juice. Set aside.
Pat the chicken dry. Place the chicken between 2 sheets of wax paper or plastic wrap and, using your hand, a skillet or a rolling pin, gently flatten it to an even thickness of about 1/2 inch. Transfer to a resealable plastic bag or a plate, add the basil paste and shake or smear to coat the chicken evenly.
Preheat the grill or place a grill pan over medium-high heat. Lightly oil the rack or pan.
Grill the chicken, turning once, just until cooked through, 3 to 5 minutes per side. Serve hot.
The State Department obtained the fraudulent documents alleging Iraq sought uranium in Africa months before President Bush made the claim, but U.S. intelligence analysts did not examine them closely enough to determine they were forgeries until after the president's disputed speech, U.S. officials say.VILIFY, \Vil"i*fy\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Vilified; p. pr. & vb. n. Vilifying.] [L. vilis vile + -fly; cf. L. vilificare to esteem of little value.]
The account provided by the officials Thursday suggests a disconnect between the CIA and the State Department over the handling of what turned out to be a crucial but faulty piece of intelligence used to make the Bush administration's case for war.
Had the documents been analyzed sooner, they might have been determined to be forgeries before the information was used as fodder for Bush administration statements vilifying Iraq, the officials acknowledged.
1. To make vile; to debase; to degrade; to disgrace. [R.]Is it possible to vilify the Ba'athists?
When themselves they vilified To serve ungoverned appetite. --Milton.
2. To degrade or debase by report; to defame; to traduce; to calumniate. --I. Taylor.
Many passions dispose us to depress and vilify the merit of one rising in the esteem of mankind. --Addison.
3. To treat as vile; to despise. [Obs.]
I do vilify your censure. --Beau. & Fl.
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
Once, I remember, I ran across the case of a boy who had been sentenced to prison, a poor, scared little brat, who had intended something no worse than mischief, and it turned out to be a crime. The judge said he disliked to sentence the lad; it seemed the wrong thing to do; but the law left him no option. I was struck by this. The judge, then, was doing something as an official that he would not dream of doing as a man; and he could do it without any sense of responsibility, or discomfort, simply because he was acting as an official and not as a man. On this principle of action, it seemed to me that one could commit almost any kind of crime without getting into trouble with one's conscience. Clearly, a great crime had been committed against this boy; yet nobody who had had a hand in it -- the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, the complaining witness, the policemen and jailers -- felt any responsibility about it, because they were not acting as men, but as officials. Clearly, too, the public did not regard them as criminals, but rather as upright and conscientious men.
The idea came to me then, vaguely but unmistakably, that if the primary intention of government was not to abolish crime but merely to monopolize crime, no better device could be found for doing it than the inculcation of precisely this frame of mind in the officials and in the public; for the effect of this was to exempt both from any allegiance to those sanctions of humanity or decency which anyone of either class, acting as an individual, would have felt himself bound to respect -- nay, would have wished to respect. This idea was vague at the moment, as I say, and I did not work it out for some years, but I think I never quite lost track of it from that time. [...]
As for the people around me, their attitudes seemed strangest of all. They all disparaged politics. Their common saying, "Oh, that's politics," always pointed to something that in any other sphere of action they would call shabby and disreputable. But they never asked themselves why it was that in this one sphere of action alone they took shabby and disreputable conduct as a matter of course. It was all the more strange because these same people still somehow assumed that politics existed for the promotion of the highest social purposes. They assumed that the State's primary purpose was to promote through appropriate institutions the general welfare of its members.
This assumption, whatever it amounted to, furnished the rationale of their patriotism, and they held to it with a tenacity that on slight provocation became vindictive and fanatical. Yet all of them were aware, and if pressed, could not help acknowledging, that more than 90 per cent of the State's energy was employed directly against the general welfare. Thus one might say that they seemed to have one set of credenda for week-days and another for Sundays, and never to ask themselves what actual reasons they had for holding either.
I did not know how to take this, nor do I now. Let me draw a rough parallel. Suppose vast numbers of people to be contemplating a machine that they had been told was a plough, and very valuable -- indeed, that they could not get on without it -- some even saying that its design came down in some way from on high. They have great feelings of pride and jealousy about this machine, and will give up their lives for it if they are told it is in danger. Yet they all see that it will not plough well, no matter what hands are put to manage it, and in fact does hardly any ploughing at all; sometimes only with enormous difficulty and continual tinkering and adjustment can it be got to scratch a sort of furrow, very poor and short, hardly practicable, and ludicrously disproportionate to the cost and pains of cutting it. On the other hand, the machine harrows perfectly, almost automatically. It looks like a harrow, has the history of a harrow, and even when the most enlightened effort is expended on it to make it act like a plough, it persists, except for an occasional six or eight per cent of efficiency, in acting like a harrow.
Surely such a spectacle would make an intelligent being raise some enquiry about the nature and original intention of that machine. Was it really a plough? Was it ever meant to plough with! Was it not designed and constructed for harrowing? Yet none of the anomalies that I had been observing ever raised any enquiry about the nature and original intention of the State. They were merely acquiesced in. At most, they were put down feebly to the imperfections of human nature which render mismanagement and perversion of every good institution to some extent inevitable; and this is absurd, for these anomalies do not appear in the conduct of any other human institution. It is no matter of opinion, but of open and notorious fact, that they do not. There are anomalies in the church and in the family that are significantly analogous; they will bear investigation, and are getting it; but the analogies are by no means complete, and are mostly due to the historical connection of these two institutions with the State.
Everyone knows that the State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime that I spoke of a moment ago, and that it makes this monopoly as strict as it can. It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien. There is, for example, no human right, natural or Constitutional, that we have not seen nullified by the United States Government. Of all the crimes that are committed for gain or revenge, there is not one that we have not seen it commit -- murder, mayhem, arson, robbery, fraud, criminal collusion and connivance. On the other hand, we have all remarked the enormous relative difficulty of getting the State to effect any measure for the general welfare. Compare the difficulty of securing conviction in cases of notorious malfeasance, and in cases of petty private crime. Compare the smooth and easy going of the Teapot Dome transactions with the obstructionist behaviour of the State toward a national child-labour law. Suppose one should try to get the State to put the same safeguards (no stronger) around service-income that with no pressure at all it puts around capital-income: what chance would one have? It must not be understood that I bring these matters forward to complain of them. I am not concerned with complaints or reforms, but only with the exhibition of anomalies that seem to me to need accounting for. [...]
Speaking for a moment in the technical terms of economics, there are two general means whereby human beings can satisfy their needs and desires. One is by work -- i.e., by applying labour and capital to natural resources for the production of wealth, or to facilitating the exchange of labour-products. This is called the economic means. The other is by robbery -- i.e., the appropriation of the labour-products of others without compensation. This is called the political means. The State, considered functionally, may be described as the organization of the political means, enabling a comparatively small class of beneficiaries to satisfy their needs and desires through various delegations of the taxing power, which have no vestige of support in natural right, such as private land-ownership, tariffs, franchises, and the like.
It is a primary instinct of human nature to satisfy one's needs and desires with the least possible exertion; everyone tends by instinctive preference to use the political means rather than the economic means, if he can do so. The great desideratum in a tariff, for instance, is its license to rob the domestic consumer of the difference between the price of an article in a competitive and a non-competitive market. Every manufacturer would like this privilege of robbery if he could get it, and he takes steps to get it if he can, thus illustrating the powerful instinctive tendency to climb out of the exploited class, which lives by the economic means (exploited, because the cost of this privilege must finally come out of production, there being nowhere else for it to come from), and into the class which lives, wholly or partially, by the political means.
This instinct -- and this alone -- is what gives the State its almost impregnable strength. The moment one discerns this, one understands the almost universal disposition to glorify and magnify the State, and to insist upon the pretence that it is something which it is not -- something, in fact, the direct opposite of what it is. One understands the complacent acceptance of one set of standards for the State's conduct, and another for private organizations; of one set for officials, and another for private persons. One understands at once the attitude of the press, the Church and educational institutions, their careful inculcations of a specious patriotism, their nervous and vindictive proscriptions of opinion, doubt or even of question. One sees why purely fictitious theories of the State and its activities are strongly, often fiercely and violently, insisted on; why the simple fundamentals of the very simply science of economics are shirked or veiled; and why, finally, those who really know what kind of thing they are promulgating, are loth to say so. [...]
It has sometimes been remarked as strange that I never joined in any agitation, or took the part of a propagandist for any movement against the State, especially at a time when I had an unexampled opportunity to do so. To do anything of the sort successfully, one must have more faith in such processes than I have, and one must also have a certain dogmatic turn of temperament, which I do not possess. To be quite candid, I was never much for evangelization; I am not sure enough that my opinions are right, and even if they were, a second-hand opinion is a poor possession. Reason and experience, I repeat, are all that determine our true beliefs. So I never greatly cared that people should think my way, or tried much to get them to do so. I should be glad if they thought -- if their general turn, that is, were a little more for disinterested thinking, and a little less for impetuous action motivated by mere unconsidered prepossession; and what little I could ever do to promote disinterested thinking has, I believe, been done.
According to my observations (for which I claim nothing but that they are all I have to go by) inaction is better than wrong action or premature right action, and effective right action can only follow right thinking. "If a great change is to take place," said Edmund Burke, in his last words on the French Revolution, "the minds of men will be fitted to it." Otherwise the thing does not turn out well; and the processes by which men's minds are fitted seem to me untraceable and imponderable, the only certainty about them being that the share of any one person, or any one movement, in determining them is extremely small. Various social superstitions, such as magic, the divine right of kings, the Calvinist teleology, and so on, have stood out against many a vigorous frontal attack, and thrived on it; and when they finally disappeared, it was not under attack. People simply stopped thinking in those terms; no one knew just when or why, and no one even was much aware that they had stopped. So I think it very possible that while we are saying, "Lo, here!" and "Lo, there!" with our eye on this or that revolution, usurpation, seizure of power, or what not, the superstitions that surround the State are quietly disappearing in the same way.
My opinion of my own government and those who administer it can probably be inferred from what I have written. Mr. Jefferson said that if a centralization of power were ever effected at Washington, the United States would have the most corrupt government on earth. Comparisons are difficult, but I believe it has one that is thoroughly corrupt, flagitious, tyrannical, oppressive. Yet if it were in my power to pull down its whole structure overnight and set up another of my own devising -- to abolish the State out of hand, and replace it by an organization of the economic means -- I would not do it, for the minds of Americans are far from fitted to any such great change as this, and the effect would be only to lay open the way for the worse enormities of usurpation -- possibly, who knows! with myself as the usurper! After the French Revolution, Napoleon!
Great and salutary social transformations, such as in the end do not cost more than they come to, are not effected by political shifts, by movements, by programs and platforms, least of all by violent revolutions, but by sound and disinterested thinking. The believers in action are numerous, their gospel is widely preached, they have many followers. Perhaps among those who will see what I have here written, there are two or three who will agree with me that the believers in action do not need us -- indeed, that if we joined them, we should be rather a dead weight for them to carry. We need not deny that their work is educative, or pinch pennies when we count up its cost in the inevitable reactions against it. We need only remark that our place and function in it are not apparent, and then proceed on our own way, first with the more obscure and extremely difficult work of clearing and illuminating our own minds, and second, with what occasional help we may offer to others whose faith, like our own, is set more on the regenerative power of thought than on the uncertain achievements of premature action.
Q. Is the public commentary from folks like yourself [Fed governor Ben Bernanke, a former Princeton economics professor who is highly regarded not only for his keen intellect but for his expertise in combating tough economic problems with unconventional measures] part of an educational process to get people to think a little bit differently about how the Fed will operate going forward?
A. I began to talk about deflation because I heard, in the media and among the public, the concern that the Fed would run out of ammunition once the federal funds rate [the short-term interest rate that the Fed targets when it wants to stimulate or dampen economic growth] came down to zero. I was interested in educating the public that there were other tools the Fed could use to counteract deflationary pressures even if the federal funds rate were zero. We don't think that deflation is likely, but we want the public to be reassured that we're alert to the possibility, because it's important that it be prevented in the first place.
Q. What are those tools?
A. The Fed's normal operations involve purchases of government securities, which affects the federal funds rate. If we got to a point where short-term interest rates were at or near zero, then the next line of defense would probably be to try to lower longer-term government bond interest rates--for example, interest rates on five-year Treasury bonds.
There are several ways to approach doing that. One way would be to try to explain to the public that we intended to keep the short rate at a low level for a long period of time, which in turn would persuade holders of bonds that medium-term interest rates would remain low. That policy can be supplemented, if necessary, by a program of buying medium-term bonds at the targeted interest rate, as well as by other measures. [...]
Q. We haven't seen deflation in the U.S. since the Great Depression in the 1930s, but Japan has been mired in a deflationary spiral for a long time now. Why is deflation so intractable there?
A. Even though very short-term nominal [not adjusted for inflation or deflation] interest rates in Japan are zero, because of deflation real [adjusted] interest rates are still 1% to 2%. Given the very weak level of aggregate demand in Japan, arguably real interest rates ought to be negative. Monetary authorities in Japan are being prevented by the so-called zero bound [the inability of interest rates to fall below zero] from easing policy as much as would be desirable under other circumstances to support investment and consumption in Japan.
Q. What's the central bank to do when interest rates hit zero and its traditional method of influencing the economy isn't effective anymore?
A. Again, the first option is to try to lower medium-and long-term interest rates. Then there's a series of other options one can undertake, including buying other kinds of assets besides Treasury bonds. The Japanese have explored some of those possibilities as well, purchasing asset-backed commercial paper, for example. The ultimate option, as I recently suggested to the Japanese, is for the central bank to cooperate with fiscal authorities and combine tax cuts with increased money supply. Essentially that amounts to handing out money to consumers, which will generate increased spending and ought to raise prices within the economy.
Politically opportunistic Democrats are invoking preposterous comparisons with Watergate because of the president's statement that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Democrats smell blood because the administration has admitted that its own findings about Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium in Niger were based on forged documents. But it's quite a leap to go from faulty information to charges that the president deliberately lied. The real problem is that intelligence seldom provides certainty; it can only offer hints or clues that policymakers have to interpret as best they can.
That's precisely what Bill Clinton and his national security advisors did in 1998. In August, after Al Qaeda bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, they launched preemptive attacks
on Sudan and Afghanistan because they didn't want to risk having poison gas released in the New York City subway. Even though the evidence was hardly conclusive that the
Sudanese plant was working for Bin Laden, they decided to err on the side of safety. Based on the same precautionary principle, the administration bombed Iraq a few months
later, even though there was no hard proof that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. [...]
A leading senator was absolutely right when he fumed: "I find it outrageous. What have we come to? What in the hell is going on here? These guys seem like they are possessed by their desire to undo this guy."
No, that's not a Republican defending Bush today. That was Joseph Biden defending Clinton in 1998.
President Bush plans to nominate Janice Rogers Brown, a justice of the California Supreme Court, to a seat on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, according to Republican sources familiar with the Bush administration's judicial nominations process.
An eloquent conservative whose sometimes sharply worded writings include a ruling against affirmative action and a dissenting opinion in favor of a state parental-consent law for teenage abortions, Brown, 54, would add to the recent rightward tilt of a court whose current roster of nine judges is made up of five Republican appointees and four Democratic appointees.
Brown, who has served on the California high court for seven years, would also become the second African American woman judge on the D.C. Circuit, which is often considered second only to the Supreme Court in the federal judicial hierarchy. Judith W. Rogers, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, was the first.
Brown has been frequently mentioned as a possible Bush nominee for the Supreme Court, and legal analysts said that her elevation to the D.C. Circuit could mean that the president is grooming her for the high court. Three current members of the Supreme Court -- Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg -- served on the D.C. Circuit.
Lieberman's actual speech took things way too far. After offering the NAACP another apology for skipping the candidates' forum and then ticking off his own civil rights credentials, Lieberman praised the NAACP for its work during the Florida recount. That's when things became absurd. "We didn't realize at the time, Al Gore and I, that we not only needed Kweisi Mfume fighting for justice here in Florida counting votes," Lieberman said, "we need him on the Supreme Court where the votes really counted. Maybe that'll happen some day."Sometimes you really hope politicians are lying.
If your interest in the subject of trade is a casual one, you might think George W. Bush is a true free-trader. To hear him talk, he sounds not only like he believes free trade is a good thing, but that it can save the world. Last week in Africa, he touted the virtues of free trade to that continent, saying in Senegal, "We will ensure that the nations of Africa are full partners in the trade and prosperity of the world." In May, he proposed a free-trade deal with Middle Eastern countries that are willing to adopt basic standards of good government, in the hope that it would lead them toward democracy. True, the president did slap big tariffs on foreign steel last year--but, his trade-loving supporters explain, that was only to build up capital in Congress for bigger, more comprehensive trade deals down the road. And, yes, the monstrous farm subsidies that the president approved in 2002 badly distort trade and hurt the world's poorest countries, but the president diverts attention from this by saying (correctly) that European farm policy is even worse.
Still, as frustrating as it is that George W. Bush caves to protectionist pressure whenever the going gets tough, there's an even larger problem with his approach to trade: Rather than accept the rules of an organized global system, he systematically undermines that system--by pursuing individual deals with individual countries and regions--when it doesn't suit short-term American interests. Bush, in other words, has apparently decided do go down the same unilateralist path in trade negotiations that his administration favors on international security. Over the long term, the result could be to deprive American workers of the benefits of new markets abroad, and American consumers of the benefits of cheaper goods at home.
The big loser of the Bush divide-and-trade strategy is the World Trade Organization (WTO), the only organization that can guarantee free trade. [...]
As a reflection of its members, the WTO is not unlike another international organization created largely by the United States to monitor compliance with global rules written largely by the United States: the United Nations.
The political character of the nation could change profoundly as a result of next November's election. In 2004 it will be 10 years since the Republican Party, riding atop the crest of a wave created by the "Contract with America," rode into the majority in the U.S. House, the Senate, the governorships and, for the first time in decades, reached parity with the Democrats in the number of state legislative chambers the party held.
There have been ups and downs for the GOP in the decade since. In 1996 it failed to win the presidency. In 1998 the Republicans, though they held on to the majority, suffered an unexpected net loss of seats in the U.S. House that led Speaker Newt Gingrich to resign.
In 2000, George W. Bush won the White House by the narrowest of margins, taking the Electoral College while losing the popular vote to former Vice President Al Gore. The GOP also lost its working majority in the Senate, thanks in part to the victory of a dead man in Missouri. Later in the year, a defecting Republican became an independent, giving the plurality Democrats control in a left-of-center coalition.
Nevertheless the past 10 years have been the brightest for the Republicans since Calvin Coolidge was president. They have, after 40 years out of power in the U.S. House Representatives and contrary to most predictions, maintained their majority.
They have defied expectations and maintained their lead in the number of Republican governors in office across America. To be sure, swapping Pennsylvania's governor's mansion for Maryland's or Michigan's for Hawaii's is not an even trade but the party has shown surprising strength in unexpected areas. For example all the governors in New England, currently with New York the anchor of East Coast liberalism, are Republicans.
The competition between the two parties has also remained vigorous at the state level. The GOP emerged from elections in 2000 and 2002 as the majority party in a majority of state legislative bodies; the current split is GOP 54, Democrats 44 among the chambers organized along partisan lines.
The story of the GOP advance has, in most quarters, been under-written and under-reported. The smart political reporting, especially since 2000, has tended to focus on the idea that the two parties are at parity and stuck there. The slim GOP majorities in the U.S. House and Senate and the narrowness of Bush's 2000 win are cited as proof of that assertion.
This may be true, if recent elections are used as the baseline. If the longer view is taken into account, the GOP has undeniably made significant gains and may well be on its way to becoming the natural majority party even as some analysts predict the political pendulum is about to swing to the left.
The demand from Democratic die-hards for a hard line against Bush seems to have at least three distinct roots. One is tactical. The principal lesson most Democrats took from the 2002 midterm election was that the party lost ground because it failed to challenge Bush aggressively enough, especially on his tax cuts and foreign policy. Dean
encapsulates that conviction when he declares, always to loud applause, that "the way to beat this president is not to try to be like him."
Some of the anger toward Bush also reflects the lingering belief among many Democrats that he won the White House illegitimately in 2000. But far more of the passion has
been generated by what Bush has done since he arrived in Washington. [...]
Like all candidates challenging an incumbent, the Democrats face legitimately conflicting pressures. To convince the country to change course, they must make a forceful case against Bush's direction. But they might also remember that even most Americans who disagree with a president, any president, usually don't consider him malevolent or stupid, just wrong or ineffective.
Dozens of leading Republicans forgot that truth during the Clinton era and indulged in public contempt that hurt them more than their target. One who remembered the lesson was Bush. In 2000, he firmly made his case against the record of Clinton and Al Gore on education, entitlement programs and foreign policy.
And yet, faced with a base that loathed Clinton and Gore at least as much as the Democrats today loathe him, Bush demonstrated a light touch on the Clinton administration's ethical problems, saying only that he would restore honor and integrity to the White House. No one misunderstood his meaning. Yet he never seemed consumed by anger or zealotry.
The Democrats might learn from the man they are trying to unseat that, when dealing with a sitting president, usually less is more.
Fertility rates across Europe are now so low that the continent's population is likely to drop markedly over the next 50 years. The UN ... predicts that ... by 2050 ... the population of the 27 countries that should be members of the EU by 2007 ... [will] fall by 6%, from 482m to 454m. For countries with particularly low fertility rates, the decline is dramatic.... Germany, which currently has a population of around 80m, could find itself with just 25m inhabitants by the end of this century, according to recent projections by Deutsche Bank ...
Combine a shrinking population with rising life expectancy, and the economic and political consequences are alarming. In Europe there are currently 35 people of pensionable age for every 100 people of working age. By 2050, on present demographic trends, there will be 75 pensioners for every 100 workers; in Spain and Italy the ratio of pensioners to workers is projected to be one-to-one. Since pensions in Germany, France and Italy are paid out of current tax revenue, the obvious implication is that taxes will have to soar to fund the pretty generous pensions that Europeans have got used to. The cost is already stretching government finances. Deutsche Bank calculates that average earners in Germany are already paying around 29% of their wages into the state pension pot, while the figure in Italy is close to 33%....
A recent report from the French Institute of International Relations ... gloomily concludes [that the EU] faces a "slow but inexorable 'exit from history'."
It is a good sign that the Economist is calling attention to the problem; perhaps that will encourage Europeans to the liberalization that Europe so desperately needs. Much depends on the character of today's Europeans. If they are motivated by personal selfishness, they will maintain the welfare state and leave future generations to fend for themselves through social collapse. If they love the future countrymen, on the other hand, they will sacrifice now to avoid the nightmare scenario in 2050.
At BrothersJudd, we have often argued that Judeo-Christian morals are essential to the lasting survival of free nations. While economists have shown that selfish individuals, in the absence of transaction costs, will negotiate a socially optimal solution, economists also recognize that in the presence of transaction costs, Judeo-Christian moral norms, such as a willingness to sacrifice for others and a willingness to forgive others for wrongs and affronts, grease the way toward a satisfactory agreement. A selfish society, on the other hand, is prone to failure in the presence of transaction costs. Society-wide bargaining through the political process is subject to the greatest possible transaction costs, and therefore is most likely to fail to reach a successful bargain.
Without a widespread willingness to sacrifice for others, Europe is unlikely to find a political solution to its demographic crisis. It is not at all clear that Europeans are willing to sacrifice for future others. The abandonment of Christianity and its ideal of self-sacrifice on the Cross may prove to be Europe's final, and fatal, error.
President Bush recently called on Congress to make it easier for religious charities that get federal money to hire people based on their religious affiliation. His action is certain to further inflame civil liberties groups, which for two years have assailed his faith-based initiative as a violation of antidiscrimination laws. They may want to rethink their opposition.
Just as religious groups want staff members to share their most deeply held beliefs and values, secular nonprofit organizations want employees who believe fervently in their mission ? everything from environmental protection to abortion rights. In this sense, the hiring policies of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay organization, are no different from those of the evangelical Salvation Army. Some say the receipt of federal money changes the rules of the game. But if that's true, then Planned Parenthood--which got $240 million last year in government funds--could be forced to staff its clinics with pro-life Catholics. [...]
True, there's a danger that some organizations will use their religious exemption as an excuse to fire people they simply don't like. Some will turn away otherwise qualified applicants because of differences over sexual orientation. But these concerns don't trump the freedom of all religious groups to live out their moral vision in a pluralistic society. Indeed, Americans of faith are likely to punish lawmakers who attack their religious institutions. That fact alone might, in the end, inspire a little more charity toward the nation's Good Samaritans.
Paul DesCombaz has a Southern Gothic mind and a comic book soul. Or vice versa. Though his countenance tends toward a smile and his temperament toward an affable nonchalance, DesCombaz takes to the works of Flannery O'Connor, Kelly Link, Tony Millionaire, Alex Robinson--writers and artists who thrive on gut-churning themes of violence, morality, and redemption. What he distills from these humid worlds, it seems, is a sense of paused beauty, a shaky toehold on love. As the auteur behind local band the First Prize Killers (whose name evokes Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery"), he writes power-pop tunes filled with pure Midwestern romance and idealism. On the band's new album, The Powdery Parade, he aims to capture either your heart or your indie eardrums, whichever surrenders first.
You may have heard the First Prize Killers' anthem "City Won't Let You Down" blasting out of Radio K recently. It's a crash-and-slur sing-along that sounds like 1982 resurrected, the cry of a sincere Everydude selling records at Cheapo, living without the blindfolds on. DesCombaz breathlessly shouts lyrics like "In the first year that I moved on/Every penny I earned weighed a ton," as simple chords pounce on him and a trumpet skirts the backdrop.
The anthem hits hard, but the rest of The Powdery Parade is different. It's a jangling, resonating pop stream--the candid pastorale that indie rock has been promising ever since Steven Malkmus started copping Jim Croce melodies. The twin guitars of Mike Andrew (a.k.a. Mandrew) and Tony Mogelson alternately tumble and soar, while DesCombaz's earnest voice often recalls a young Eric Bachmann (minus the screams) or J. Mascis (minus the beer bong). The mood of these hooks is that of a tight sunbeam shifting past your head on an air-conditioned MetroTransit bus. The Powdery Parade is summer in the Twin Cities.
I woke up at 3:45 this morning to watch the Moon occult (pass in front of) Mars. Very cool. Mars is quite bright right now...but only half as bright (and big) as it will appear in about a month, when it makes its closest pass to Earth in 60,000 years.
The occultation was only visible in the US from South Florida (just my luck). In other parts of the country, Mars appeared to slide very closely by the Moon. Since the moon is most of the way towards full (and, therefore, very bright), you probably would have needed at least binoculars to see Mars graze by. Anyway, Mars disappeared behind the bright side of the Moon (at about the 12:00 position) at about 4:15 am, and emerged from behind the dark limb (that is, east side of Moon, about 2:30 or 3:00 position) at about 4:40....I got lucky because just after Mars emerged, a huge dark cloud passed over, blocking out the Moon completely. From the time Mars "touched" the surface of the Moon on the way in, it took about a minute and a half or two minutes to disappear completely; once it appeared on the side, it slid completely into view in less than a minute. (I know, a more scientifically inclined astronomer would be timing these things precisely, but I'd rather just enjoy the view.)
Particularly cool observation: as Mars slid behind the Moon, I couldn't see the silhouette of any lunar features against the orb of Mars. However, when Mars re-emerged from the dark limb (that is, it looked like Mars was rising out of black space, not from over the surface of the Moon), the trailing edge of Mars (the side closest to the Moon) had a zig zag, rather than straight, edge....the outline of a lunar mountain against Mars!
For those of you getting this who have telescopes: Mars is now big enough to be interesting to look at. It rises at about 11 or 1130 pm and is high up in the south by 3:30 and well above the horizon before dawn (for you early risers). Don't worry, by next month it will be up so you can look at it after dinner.
At about 100x, you'll see a small disc (maybe 1/2 or 1/3 the size of Jupiter at the same magnification), tan or maybe slightly terra cotta in color (since the moon will be bright as it approaches and then waxes from fullness, the color will be more washed out....what I saw this morning was essentially tan). I saw some dark areas on the surface (don't know if they were clouds or surface features....again, it's tough when the Moon is so bright and close by), and the ice cap of the South Pole is pointed towards Earth and is very large and noticeable....a big white patch of ice....just what you expect the South Pole to look like...it's now Spring on Mars, so the ice cap should shrink noticeably over the next couple of months...
You'll also see that Mars is not yet completely round....because of it's position vis a vis the Sun, it looks like an almost, but not quite, full moon. If you push the magnification, you'll see the surface and cloud features more clearly, but Earth's atmospheric disturbances will also be greater...so keep looking for moments of stillness...a red or orange filter may help bring out some features.....
We didn't actually have sixty items on our list. We could only manage fifty-two and a half, even after considering Madonna for special mention. We could honestly admit we're just lazy, but we're not that honest. The truth is (insert winks and elbow nudges here) the dog-days of summer induced a heat stroke epidemic in our Hotlanta-based headquarters and we resorted to our natural states -- feeble-minded, horny men. Just kidding.
So here it is, for you our dear readers, the official smokin' not-quite-60 hottest people and things in the Jewish universe this year in absolutely no particular order. Any decidedly attractive celebrities or pseudo-celebrities who made this list, feel free to shower us with your appreciation in whatever illicit manner you desire.
1. Alicia Silverstone: "Judaism turned me into who I am today, and I definitely feel I live a very spiritual life. I got that from my parents," says the 26-year-old actress. How nice is this blonde bombshell who's got the upcoming TV show, Miss Match, and has been wooing many a young man since she cropped up in those Aerosmith videos way back when. A brief dip off the celebrity radar following some ill-advised career moves (Batgirl anyone?) is a thing of the past as Ms. Alicia touts her "chosen" credentials onto the small screen this fall. We couldn't be more pleased.
2. Las Vegas: Sin City is turning into a virtual Sinai for American Jews. Believe it or not, the city of many casinos is the fastest growing Jewish community in the United States, which may or may not say something about how hot we Jews really are. Biased as we may be, we'll err on the side of assuming Jews are taking on a Rat Pack cool and moving to the desert accordingly. Temperature or trendy, it's hot any way you roll those dice. [...]
52. Krispy Kreme: The once forbidden fruit which we all salivated after is now becoming kosher. Across the nation, like SARS spreading across a crowded Toronto rock concert audience, Kosher Krispy Kreme (KKK) locations are sprouting up. And the Jewish community couldn't be happier. Pass the coffee.
52.5 God: Classically cool Hashem, otherwise known as the Lord, the Almighty, and the original Miracle Maker is still around and styling. World leaders, including one grammatically challenged cowboy from Texas, are enamored with citing Him for authority, which reminds us of those good ol' days of divinely anointed kings. Obviously God transcends all cultural cliques. Even Osama is a big fan, and while we would like very much to quibble with Mr. Bin Laden, we'll toast God with a He'Brew anytime.
Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.
What do John Ensign, Bill Nelson, Dianne Feinstein, Jim Talent, Norm Coleman, Gordon Smith, Ben Nelson, Richard Lugar, Susan Collins, Jim Bunning, Byron Dorgan and George Voinovich all have in common besides being sitting senators? All lost major statewide races (i.e. Senate, gubernatorial or at-large House) before eventually winning their current Senate seats. For this cycle, Democrats are putting a lot of stock in finding recruits who may want to have their "warm-up" race before gunning for another post in 2006.
That's right, more than 10 percent of the Senate is made up of senators who, at first, did not succeed, but they tried (and in some cases tried and tried) again.
Ask any consultant. There's nothing they like more than a client who has "done this before." That was something then-National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Bill Frist preached in the 2002 cycle when talking up five of his key recruits (John Thune, Elizabeth Dole, Lamar Alexander, Talent and Coleman). All had either run statewide before or, in the case of Dole and Alexander, run nationally. Not surprisingly, four out of those five recruits won.
For this cycle, Democrats are putting a lot of stock in finding recruits who may want to have their "warm-up" race before gunning for another post in 2006.
There is a moment in all his books when Mr. Krakauer turns the story on himself and presents an imperfect human--an author as guilty of the hubris, doubt and foolishness that push his nonfiction characters to extremes. So it is in his latest book, "Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith," which Doubleday is bringing out this week, complete with a publicity agent's dream controversy--loud condemnation of the book by his primary target, the Mormon Church.
"I don't know if God even exists, although I confess I find myself praying in times of great fear, or despair, or astonishment at a display of unexpected beauty," he writes. "In the absence of conviction, I've come to terms with the fact that uncertainty is an inescapable corollary of life." [...]
In the book, Mr. Krakauer examines Mormon fundamentalists, the tens of thousands of true believers living mostly in Utah who broke away from the original Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The splinter groups are the American Taliban, Mr. Krakauer says, living in desert theocracies where pubescent girls are forced into marriages with old graybeards who rule with an iron fist. These polygamous communities are against the law, but usually tolerated by officials who see a little bit of great-grandpa's pioneering ways in the modern sects.
The biggest of these communities, Hildale/Colorado City, on the Utah-Arizona border, is full of houses the size of a Days Inn motel, stuffed with dozens of wives married to self-styled Mormon fundamentalist patriarchs. The community is in open violation of the law, Mr. Krakauer and others have noted, but faces little legal sanction and also manages to have one of the highest ratios of welfare recipients in the country.
His main focus is on Dan and Ron Lafferty, a pair of Utah brothers who believed they were ordered by God to kill their sister-in-law and her
15-month-old daughter. Brenda Lafferty had her throat slit with a 10-inch boning knife, and her daughter, Erica, was also stabbed. Dan Lafferty is serving a life sentence and his older brother, Ron, is on death row. The brothers said they did it because Brenda opposed their plan to take multiple wives.
Mr. Krakauer draws a connection between the revelations the Lafferty brothers claimed guided them and early Mormon acts of "blood atonement," in which followers targeted victims because of purported divine inspiration. Ron Lafferty, Mr. Krakauer notes, was a Republican city councilman and devout Mormon, who came to believe that his religion had lost touch with its roots, which allowed men to practice polygamy and to receive divine revelation.
Mr. Krakauer faults the modern Mormon Church, perhaps the fastest growing religion in America, with worldwide membership approaching 12 million, for failing to honestly address a past where taking young wives, killing on behalf of God and open disdain for the Constitution are papered over in place of a more Osmond-friendly image. Often overlooked by mainstream historians, the story of how a church founded by radicals who practiced an early form of communism and sanctioned sexual promiscuity through multiple wives has come to be known for white-bread conservatism is a compelling American tale.
The church officially renounced polygamy in 1890, and excommunicates members who openly practice it. But officials in Utah say up to 60,000 people continue to live in polygamous families there.
Betraying his oft-repeated promise to expand opportunities for meaningful national service, President Bush has not lifted a finger to secure the extra money needed to avoid devastating cuts to AmeriCorps, the federal government's flagship domestic volunteer program.
Australian scientists at the Cancer Council Victoria have found that young men who masturbate frequently are less likely to develop prostate tumours. Their study shows that the more men ejaculate between the ages of 20 and 50, the less likely they are to suffer from the most common male cancer. The protective effect is greatest for men in their twenties, with those ejaculating at least five times a week being one third less likely to develop aggressive prostate cancer in the future.
Masturbation, rather than sexual intercourse, was responsible for the beneficial effect, the scientists said. Graham Giles, who led the research, said regular ejaculations probably flushed out the prostate gland, preventing the build-up of dangerous carcinogens. ?The more you flush the ducts out, the less there is to hang around and damage the cells that line them,? he said.
A majority of Baghdad residents feel US and British troops should stay in Iraq for at least a year, according to the first attempt at an opinion poll.
The You.Gov poll results were released as news emerged that a ground-to-air missile was fired at a US military plane near Baghdad airport.
The poll said 31% wanted troops to stay "a few years", while 25% said "about a year."
Only 13% said they should leave now, while 20% said they should go "within 12 months".
SANDERS: [...] [T]oday you have reached a new low, I think, by suggesting that manufacturing in America doesn't matter. It doesn't matter where the product is produced. We've lost 2 million manufacturing jobs in the last two years alone; 10 percent of our work force. Wal-Mart has replaced General Motors as the major employer in America, paying people starvation wages rather than living wages, and all of that does not matter to you -- doesn't matter.
If it's produced in China where workers are making 30 cents an hour, or produced in Vermont where workers can make 20 bucks an hour, it doesn't matter. You have told the American people that you support a trade policy which is selling them out, only working for the CEOs who can take our plants to China, Mexico and India. [...]
Does any of this matter to you? Do you give one whiff of concern for the middle class and working families of this country? That's my question.
GREENSPAN: Congressman, we have the highest standard of living in the world.
SANDERS: No, we do not. You go to Scandinavia, and you will find that people have a much higher standard of living, in terms of education, health care and decent paying jobs. Wrong, Mister. [...]
GREENSPAN: The major focus of monetary policy is to create an environment in this country which enables capital investment and innovation to advance. We are at the cutting edge of technologies in the world. We are doing an extraordinary job over the years.
And people flock to the United States. Our immigration rates are very high. And why? Because they think this is a wonderful country to come to.
SANDERS: That is an incredible answer.
It's remarkable, looking back, how much of a vacuum existed from late July through the end of August last summer, and how quickly it filled when the White House re-engaged after Labor Day. Now, if one wants to tune out in this fashion, one must accept what looks to be a difficult-to-avoid consequence: a drop in presidential job-approval ratings. In 2002, Mr. Bush's rating dropped significantly, especially in the period from late June to the end of August - in CBS News polls, from 70 percent to 61 percent. In 2003, we are also seeing an emerging decline, with Mr. Bush dropping from 68 percent to 59 percent in the ABC News/Washington Post poll. And in 2001, Mr. Bush came down as well, from 57 percent in the Gallup/USA Today/CNN poll down to 51 percent.
Now, in 2002, Mr. Bush had little trouble boosting his numbers in the fall (which in turn was important for Republicans in the November election). Conventional wisdom is that Mr. Bush was adrift in summer 2001 and that September 11 saved him. I would like to point out that that proposition hasn't really been tested. We don't know what Mr. Bush might have done in the absence of the September 11 attacks, and he had enjoyed approval ratings as high as 65 percent or so in April 2001.
Which, in turn, points us to another generalization. In each case, Mr. Bush's critics, as well as some neutral observers, have pointed to the summer declines as an indication that Mr. Bush's approval was dropping to a new, permanently lower level. In summer 2001, the drop was often attributed to a lack of administration focus after passing its big tax cut. In summer 2002, it was the supposedly mounting uncertainty about the administration's Iraq case finally taking the post-September 11 bounce out of Mr. Bush's numbers. In summer 2003, it's disenchantment with Iraq and the economy all over again.
Could be. But it could also be that the White House is leaving the field for the summer. We should know about that within a couple weeks. And by mid-September, we should know if the current decline indicates a genuine decrease in confidence in Mr. Bush or if it is simply a recurring seasonal effect.
The Bush administration is considering admitting thousands of North Korean refugees into the United States in an effort to increase pressure on the government in Pyongyang during the standoff over its nuclear weapons programs, officials said yesterday.
Officials have not yet settled on how many refugees the United States would be willing to accept a year. One faction is pushing for as many as 300,000 refugees, while officials who believe such a step would hurt relations with China have countered with a proposal to limit the number to 3,000 in the first year, an official said. [...]
Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) has pressed the administration to make it easier to accept North Korean refugees. Last week, at Brownback's urging, the Senate voted to change a legal technicality that has made it difficult for North Koreans to claim refugee status. A provision in South Korean law automatically extends South Korean citizenship to refugees fleeing North Korea, but that status makes them ineligible to assert they are refugees in the United States.
Airport security screeners don't have the right to unionize, according to the agency handling labor issues for the federal government.
The Federal Labor Relations Authority ruled that the screeners' boss, Transportation Security Administration chief James Loy, has discretion to decide the terms and conditions of their employment. [...]
Collective bargaining rights were a sticking point in the debate over creating the Department of Homeland Security. Congress decided to let the president take away collective bargaining rights from department workers, though that decision would be revisited every four years.
Eugene Volokh's co-blogger Phillipe de Croy has called for a Republican primary challenge to President Bush. Paul Cella, blogging on the topic of the impending prescription drug benefit disaster, wrote "This must be why I voted for a `conservative' presidential candidate: so I can reap the glorious benefits of socialized medicine, and an expansion in the size of the federal government unlike anything since Lyndon Baines Johnson." He notes that Bush faces a lack of pressure from the organized right, which has seemed content to function as "a set of court intellectuals for a ruling party," "the handmaidens of servitude," and "the functionaries of the Servile State." Steve Sailer has been all over Bush's response to the Supreme Court's awful affirmative action ruling in the University of Michigan case. Bush can forget about libertarian bloggers; even many who normally vote Republican are so fed up with his lack of interest in limited government that they are musing about voting for the unspeakable Howard Dean.
Why this outpouring of criticism of the man many conservatives breathlessly predict will usher in an enduring national Republican majority? As a sequel to dropping serious conservative education reform in favor of giving Ted Kennedy the big-government education bill he wanted, Bush is dropping serious conservative Medicare reform in favor of giving Kennedy the big-government Medicare bill he wants. (The latter promising to be a massive boondoggle that will impose staggering costs on future generations to come.) To follow up on his decision to cave on the free speech-strangling McCain-Feingold campaign finance travesty, he is caving on Second Amendment rights by backing a renewal of the assault weapons ban. He has apparently decided that as long as the Sandra Day O'Connor pays lip service to color-blindness 25 years from now, ruling in favor of a more surreptitious regime of racial preferences is A-OK. He's willing to spend federal money on constitutionally dubious "marriage promotion" initiatives but has yet to take any proactive steps to curb the growing judicial threat to traditional marriage.
Then of course there is the steel and lumber tariffs, the PATRIOT Act, the decision to sign ridiculously bloated farm and transportation bills and the refusal to veto wasteful federal spending. Rather than address porous borders and an immigration policy that lends itself more to balkanization than Americanization, the administration treats us to Karl Rove's schemes for illegal alien amnesties. The list goes on.
Moral relativism is at first glance the easiest of all philosophical positions to defend. The defense consists of a single tactic, remorselessly and impartially applied to any and all ethical precepts: deny their truth and insist that the proponent show the logical contradiction that arises from that denial. The consistent skeptic does not have the unpleasant obligation of showing how one moral precept ties into another; nor does he face the difficult task of squaring moral principles that seem to be individually attractive but mutually repellent (i.e. a defense of individual autonomy with duties of benevolence for those in need). Instead the skeptic need respond only with a dismissive wave of the hand, and move on to other business capable of greater logical precision or empirical verification. Ethical discourse remains an empty vessel into which no content can be poured.
At the most abstract level, countless people consider themselves to be moral skeptics, and rejoice in seeing through a form of discourse that all should regard as empty and uninformative. But here the professions of faith, or rather the lack of it, are in most cases, only skin deep. No one lives by that skeptical precept in practice; nor could they and hope to make decisions that involve punishment, blame, credit, commendation or disapproval. The moment that something, anything, in our daily lives turns on an appeal to principle, the most determined skeptic is transformed, as if on cue, into a traditional moral practitioner, lacking only the candor of his new found enterprise.
Hard to imagine, but with more than half of California voters most likely to participate in a recall vote saying they’d vote to remove Gray Davis, things are looking up for the governor. In a new Field poll released Wednesday, the split between the two sides dropped from 15 points (54 percent in favor to 39 percent opposed) to eight points (51 percent in favor to 43 percent opposed) when the sample was changed from all registered voters to voters likely to vote in the recall.
With recall organizers saying they’ve collected more than 1.6 million signatures from Californians who want to see Davis out of the Governor’s Mansion, and making the assumption that Republicans are more likely to vote in the recall election than Democrats, the numbers seem plain wrong.
One explanation is that older voters, who tend to be more cautious and more wary of rocking the boat, are more likely to vote than their younger counterparts, explains poll director Mark DiCamillo in the California Insider.
Another possible explanation is that voters don’t know who will replace Davis should he be ousted. So far, the only candidates officially running are the head of the recall effort, Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, and Green Party candidate Peter Miguel Camejo. The most popular name being thrown around by kids and politicians alike, however, is Hollywood star Arnold Schwarzenegger, who still hasn’t said whether he’ll join the race.
I have developed a habit when confronted by letters to the editor in support of the Israeli government to look at the signature to see if the writer has a Jewish name. If so, I tend not to read it. . . .This is astonishingly stupid. Mr. Ingrams is not only assuming that all Jews have a bias towards Israel -- which is demonstrably false -- but he apparently also believes in magic. That is one of only two explanations for his fear of reading powerful words from those he considers impure.
The other day, for example, the Canadian journalist Barbara Amiel wrote a long denunciation of the BBC in the Daily Telegraph, accusing the Corporation of being anti-Israel in its Middle East coverage.
Many readers of the Daily Telegraph may have been impressed by her arguments, assuming her to be just another journalist or even, as she was recently described in another newspaper, an 'international-affairs commentator'.
They might have been less impressed if the paper had told them that Barbara Amiel is not only Jewish but that her husband's company, in which she has an interest, owns not only the Daily Telegraph but the Jerusalem Post .
In other words, when it comes to accusing people of bias on the Middle East, she is not ideally qualified for the role.
Iraq's U.S. administrator said today that U.S. and British troops would leave the country once a constitution and a democratic
government are in place--setting a rough timeline for ending the military occupation.
L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. official in Iraq, said that with the establishment of the Governing Council on Sunday--the first national postwar Iraqi political body--it is now up to Iraqis to write a new constitution and send it to voters for approval in a referendum.
''Then our job, the coalition's job, will be done,'' Bremer told reporters. ''We have no desire to stay any longer than necessary.''
The Governing Council is meant to be the forerunner of a 200-250 member constitutional assembly that is planned to start in September drawing up a draft constitution. That process is expected to take nine months to a year and free elections to pick a government are expected to follow.
Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) has already begun to air election ads in a move some analysts say suggests he sees a need to repair his home-state image.
The $31,000 ad buy, which began with TV slots last week in South Dakota, avoids open criticism of President Bush and the Republicans. Rather, the ad seeks to burnish Daschle’s standing as a key member of Congress who works tirelessly for his constituents.
Daschle plans to seek a fourth term next year. He has yet to draw a formal GOP opponent.
“You run early ads to earn name recognition,” said Democratic political consultant Peter Fenn, citing something Daschle does not need, or “to inoculate yourself against something you think they’re going to use against you, and to reduce your negatives.”
He added, “Are the Daschle folks panicked? No. Are they running a smart campaign to get out front? Yeah.”
If natural selection had been discovered in India, China or Japan, it is hard to imagine it making much of a stir. Darwin's discovery signalled a major advance in human knowledge, but its cultural impact came from the fact that it was made in a milieu permeated by the Judaeo-Christian belief in human uniqueness. If - along with hundreds of millions of Hindus and Buddhists - you have never believed that humans differ from everything else in the natural world in having an immortal soul, you will find it hard to get worked up by a theory that shows how much we have in common with other animals.
Among us, in contrast, it has triggered savage and unending controversy. In the 19th century, the conflict was waged between Darwinists and Christians. Now, the controversy is played out between Darwinism and humanists, who seek to defend a revised version of Western ideas about the special nature of humans.
In Freedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett has produced the most powerful and ingenious attempt at reconciling Darwinism with the belief in human freedom to date. Writing with a verve that puts to shame the leaden prose that has become the trademark of academic philosophy, Dennett presents the definitive argument that the human mind is a product of evolution, not something that stands outside the natural world.
Making full use of his seminal writings on consciousness, he contends that we do not need to believe in free will to be able to think of ourselves as responsible moral beings. On the contrary, moral agency is a by-product of natural selection. In that sense, it is an accident; but once it has come about, we can "bootstrap ourselves" into freedom. The evolution of human culture enables us to be free as no other animal can be. "Human freedom," Dennett writes, "is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species, us."
The ringing tone of Dennett's declaration of human uniqueness provokes a certain suspicion regarding the scientific character of his argument. After all, the notion that humans are free in a way that other animals are not does not come from science. Its origins are in religion--above all, in Christianity.
Eric Voegelin claims that the Peloponnesian War wasn't known as such until after Thucydides' book was published, after his death. It had not been conceived of by its principle players as a single and unified war. Rather, because of its length and its dispersal over many fronts, it had generally been considered a series of conflicts. The specificity of this particular "situation"—both its own internal coherence and its external differentiation from prior conflicts—was lost on Thucydides' contemporaries. This is why Thucydides begins his work by distinguishing it from that of Homer and Herodotus, in the same way that one would need to distinguish an account of the present conflict from both World War II and Viet Nam in order to be able to think it clearly and responsibly. [...]
It is possible that people in the future will consider the present conflict as a part of a larger conflict that began, perhaps, with the Gulf War: "The Arab-American War" or something of the sort. Americans have been able to forget the Gulf War or to say that it "never took place," but to the people in Iraq it has not yet ended. Reading Thucydides may give us a chance to uncover the lost horizons of our own history, extending in every direction.
Tony Blair's hopes of improving relations with Ariel Sharon suffered a blow last night when the prime minister was forced to rebuff an attempt by his Israeli counterpart to persuade Britain to sever all contact with Yasser Arafat.
In a sign of Britain's fragile relations with Israel after a series of rows, Mr Blair told Mr Sharon over dinner in Downing Street that Britain would continue to deal with the democratically elected president of the Palestinian Authority.
On the first day of a three-day visit to Britain, Mr Sharon tried to win British support for his policy of isolating the Palestinian president when he asked Jack Straw and Mr Blair to prevent officials meeting Mr Arafat. A senior Israeli official accompanying Mr Sharon told the news agency Reuters: "Any contact with Arafat weakens [the Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud] Abbas."
But Mr Straw rejected Mr Sharon's request during a mid-morning call on him at his hotel. "We made clear that the UK position, which is also that of the European Union, is that we will continue to have dealings with Mr Arafat, who is the democratically elected president of the Palestinian
Authority," said a Foreign Office spokeswoman.
Mr Blair believes privately that Mr Arafat has become a liability, unlike Mr Abbas, better known as Abu Mazen, who is fully committed to the US sponsored "road map" which charts the way to a Palestinian state. But Britain takes exception to being told who its officials should
meet.
Iowa union leaders say Gephardt, who ran for president in 1988 with substantial labor support, is familiar to many of their members. But many say their support for him is not assured, and that Kerry, Dean and U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich are friendly to workers' issues.
The candidate who wins support from the state's auto workers, public employees and other key unions will have a significant advantage going into the leadoff Iowa caucuses, they say.
"Dick Gephardt, John Kerry, our members are very favorable about, but they know who these guys are," said Jan Corderman, president of the Iowa Association of State, County and Municipal Employees, a proven force in Iowa politics. "I think that probably the up-and-comer . . . is Dennis Kucinich."
Kucinich has "had a real presence here in Iowa recently" and has received an enthusiastic reception, said Corderman, whose 13,000-member union is the state's second largest.
"Our folks are impressed with his position on issues," she said. "He's definitely a man of the people. But he's also one that people need to hear more about."
About 70,000 workers belong to Iowa's six largest unions, according to the Iowa Federation of Labor. Union activists make up about a third of Democratic caucus activists, according to party officials. [...]
While winning support from Iowa's union Democrats is key, labor officials in the state say many activists take their cues from the national union's endorsement.
Kucinich also voted against NAFTA and includes in his standard stump speech the promise that, if elected, he will cancel the treaty, which usually earns him cheers from union crowds.
In 1964, in the midst of so-called Swinging Lon-don, Charles McColl Portis had Karl Marx's old job. Portis (who turns seventy this year) was thirty at the time, not yet a novelist, just a newspaperman seemingly blessed by that guild's gods. His situational Marxism would have been hard to predict. Delivered into this world by the "ominous Dr. Slaughter" in El Dorado, Arkansas, in 1933, Charles Portis--sometimes "Charlie" or "Buddy"--had grown up in towns along the Arkla border, enlisted in the Marines after high school and fought in the Korean War. Upon his discharge in 1955, he majored in journalism at the University of Arkansas (imagining it might be "fun and not very hard, something like barber college"), and after graduation worked at the appealingly named Memphis Commercial Appeal. He soon returned to his native state, writing for the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock.
He left for New York in 1960, and became a general assignment reporter at the now defunct New York Herald-Tribune, working out of what has to be one of the more formidable newsroom incubators in history--his comrades included Tom Wolfe (who would later dub him the "original laconic cutup") and future Harper's editor Lewis Lapham. Norwood's titular ex-Marine, after a fruitless few days in Gotham, saw it as "the hateful town," and Portis himself had once suggested (in response to an aspersion against Arkansas in the pages of Time), that Manhattan be buried in turnip greens; still, he stayed for three years. He apparently thrived, for he was tapped as the Trib's London bureau chief and reporter--the latter post held in the 1850s by the author of The Communist Manifesto (1848). (More specifically, his predecessor had been a London correspondent for the pre-merger New York Herald.) Recently, in a rare interview for the Gazette Project at the University of Arkansas, Portis recalls telling his boss that the paper "might have saved us all a lot of grief if it had only paid Marx a little better."
Indeed, as Portis notes in his second novel, the bestselling True Grit (1968), "You will sometimes let money interfere with your notions of what is right." If Marx had decided to loosen up, Portis wouldn't have gone to Korea, to serve in that first war waged over communism, and (in the relentless logic of these things) wouldn't have put together his first protagonist, taciturn Korea vet Norwood Pratt, in quite the same way. Perhaps the well would have run dry--fast. Instead of writing five remarkable, deeply entertaining novels (three of them surely masterpieces, though which three is up for debate), Portis could be in England still, grinding out copy by the column inch, saying "cheers" when replacing the phone.
In any event, Portis left not only England but ink-stained wretchdom itself--"quit cold," as Wolfe writes in "The Birth of the New Journalism: An
Eyewitness Report" (1972), later the introduction to the 1973 anthology The New Journalism. After sailing back to the States on "one of the
Mauretania's last runs," he reportedly holed up in his version of Proust's cork-lined study--a fishing shack back in Arkansas--to try his hand at fiction.
Ten years ago, I think, or perhaps a little less or perhaps a little more, I came in the Euston Road - that thoroughfare of Empire - upon a young man a little younger than myself whom I knew, though I did not know him very well. It was drizzling and the second-hand booksellers (who are rare in this thoroughfare) were beginning to put out the waterproof covers over their wares. This disturbed my acquaintance, because he was engaged upon buying a cheap book that should really satisfy him.
Now this was difficult, for he had no hobby, and the book which should satisfy him must be one that should describe or summon up, or, it is better to say, hint at - or, the theologians would say, reveal, or the Platonists would say recall - the Unknown Country, which he thought was his very home.
I had know his habit of seeking such books for two years, and had half wondered at it and half sympathised. It was an appetite partly satisfied by almost any work that brought to him the vision of a place in the mind which he had always intensely desired, but to which, as he had then long guessed, and as he is now quite certain, no human paths directly lead. He would buy with avidity travels to the moon and to the planets, from the most worthless to the best. He loved Utopias and did not disregard even so prosaic a category as books of real travel, so long as by exaggeration or by a glamour in the style they gave him a full draught of that drug which he desired. Whether this satisfaction the young man sought was a satisfaction in illusion (I have used the word "drug" with hesitation), or whether it was, as he persistently maintained, the satisfaction of a memory, or whether it was, as I am often tempted to think, the satisfaction of a thirst which will ultimately be quenched in every human soul I cannot tell. Whatever it was, he sought it with more than the appetite with which a hungry man seeks food. He sought it with something that was not hunger but passion.
That evening he found a book.
Today, in Europe, Sarah is again old, and Hagar is again fertile. Islam is, as we would theologically expect, at the forefront of the reinvigoration of the tired demography of a continent which, in living memory, has seen terrible nightmares. Ishmael, the refugee, uncontaminated by Europe’s crimes, is now settling in Europe. He has, in fact, already become Europe’s most significant Other. He thus brings hope that Europe’s appalling history may find an alternative path, a vision of God and society that can heal the continent’s wounds.
There is a universalism implicit in Islam which can help accelerate Europe’s current relaxation of ancient tribalisms, which have been scored so deeply into the political map. As the Koran says, ‘O mankind, we have created you of male and female, and have made you peoples and tribes, that you might come to know one another.’ Europe’s tragic history of racism and genocide can only benefit from exposure to our own, universal, vision of human unity. Mark Mazower, the historian, entitled his recent book on 20th century European history The Dark Continent. As people of faith, we are called upon to help with the process of illumination.
We come, however, at an awkward time. Minoritarian zealot movements in the Islamic world, and their diasporas in Europe, have provided
ammunition to xenophobes who seek to draw a veil over Europe’s record by claiming that Islam is represented by its margins and its extremes. That claim may be dismissed with the same contempt which we deploy when we hear that Judaism is defined by the behaviour of radical rabbis on the West Bank. Our experience of our religion and our communities is that we are here as peaceful citizens; and we reject as alien and frightening the media’s apparent desire to focus only on our outlandish and freakish margins.
At present, asylum seeking, and the often related issue of immigration, are near the top of the political agenda across the European Union. Ishmael is here, and here in significant numbers; and we find ourselves at the centre of Europe’s current debate about itself. We are to integrate ourselves; and all the polls indicate that most of us have no problem with this idea, if it signifies an enhancement and addition to what we already are, rather than an erasure and destruction.
Yet this demand is being made at a time when no-one, except the maniacs on the extreme right, can clearly describe to us the culture into which we are to integrate. Europe, and its member states, form a patchwork of historically different cultures and religious landscapes. Europeanness, as a concept, seems extraordinarily vague.
Geert steers me towards a stocky figure who looks like a kindly old schoolmaster: dark-haired, bearded, with a friendly grin, glasses, and a tweed jacket. His trousers are tucked into his socks. “What’s your name, again?” I shout over the din, as we shake hands. “Oh, my name will be double-dutch to you!” he jokes, in decent English. “Francis Van den Eynde. Here, have one of my cards. I’m Vice President of the parliamentary party, and what you call an MP for the town of Ghent.” He smiles, but I can’t read his eyes.
“How did you get involved with the party?” I shout over the sound of generators and the helicopter. Something whizzes past my head: a piece of paving stone. “I’m involved since 30 years,” he says. “Since I was 14 years old. At first I was in the old nationalist party – the Volksunie,” a more liberal independence movement, from which the Vlaams Blok split in 1977. I explain I’m an outsider. “Why does the party have such a controversial reputation?” “In my opinion, because we are the only party that asks the independence of Flanders.”
“But they try to catch us about the problem of the foreigners in this city. Well, not only this city, this country. Because we have a big problem with, ah, immigration. In our opinion, enough is enough. We don’t want to take all the multicultural society.” I ask him what this means. “The problem for us is that they never mention what is a multicultural society. Our opinion is that everybody who lives here has to respect our language and our culture. And if they do that, they are welcome. No less, no more.” “Are other parties elsewhere similar?” “A lot of them are similar in different ways. If you ask me which parties I admire, hmmm…then in the East, the Legas (Lega Nord/Northern League) in Italy. And Sinn Fein in Ireland.” These two groups encompass the political spectrum: extreme right and left, I point out. “For us, both very interesting,” says Van den Eynde, adjusting his spectacles with a thick finger.
Although he maintains that independence is their original aim, others claim immigration/foreigners is really their first issue. “In fact, our first aim is to save our own identity. And that’s the reason why we have problems with the immigration. We have no home rule, at all. We have a kind of federalism in this country. We want independence. In this time of globalisation and mongrelisation, we try to save our own identity. Everybody in the world, even when he is black or yellow, who is struggling to save his own identity, is our ally.” He seems fired up. “This is the world of McDonald’s and Coca Cola. It’s very important to be against globalisation. It’s one of the major problems. In the future, that will be more and more the big problem. What is it?” he asks, rhetorically. “It’s the One World philosophy.”
There are generally considered to be three Shi'a scholars whose views are the most influential within the broader Shi'a community: Grand Ayatollahs Khamenei, Fadlallah and Sistani.
Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah 'Ali Khamenei was the designated successor to Ayatollah Khumayni. Whilst Khamenei's scholarly credentials are not that of either Fadlallah or Sistani, his official position, control of the Iranian security forces and the allegiance shown to him by Lebanon's Hizbullah mark him as a figure of enormous importance to the future of Iraq. Given the history of Iraqi-Iranian relations, Khamenei was obviously opposed to the regime of Saddam Hussein, but has been equally opposed to American intervention to overthrow him, fearing the long-term consequences of a pro-US government as his neighbour. Many of his public sermons, as well as those of other influential ayatollahs within the Iranian government, have sought to portray United States actions with respect to Iraq as part of a wider US-Israeli conspiracy.
Another cleric who may influence communal attitudes to any occupying forces is Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah. He is an extremely influential scholar within Lebanon, and has a wide following amongst Shi'a outside the country. Some claim that he is particularly influential amongst Iraqi members of the Islamic Call Party (Hizb al-Da'wa al-Islamiyyah), a product of late 1950s Najafi activism and which advocates Islamic, as distinct from clerical, rule. Although based in Lebanon for nearly 40 years, Fadlallah's links with Iraq are significant. He was born in Najaf to Lebanese parents, and lived there until he was 31 years of age before moving to Lebanon. His attitude to both the Ba'thist regime and the coalition forces was declared publicly during Friday prayers on March 28 this year in Beirut. During his sermon, he denounced the coalition attack, saying that "…Shi'ites have always been against the oppression of internal dictators and the slavery of external occupiers..(the Iraqi Shi'a) should all take the same stand and be unified against occupation, for this..determines our destiny."
The last of the influential clerics, and the only one living within Iraq, is the highly regarded Grand Ayatollah 'Ali Sistani, who possesses impeccable scholarly credentials. He is not an advocate of clerical activism, preferring the traditional quietist approach to politics.
During the invasion, he issued a direction to his followers directing them not to interfere with the US-led invasion troops. This followed an earlier claim that Ayatollah Sistani had directed his supporters to stand together against any invasion. Whilst hailed as a significant victory for the United States in the hearts and minds campaign, the words used by Ayatollah Sistani should be carefully examined. If true, his call indicates that Sistani has chosen a form of neutrality for the Shi'a in the best interests for the survival of his community. Sistani did not provide any endorsement for the invasion despite the treatment accorded him by Saddam Hussein's regime during the past two decades. Ayatollah Sistani has so far refused to meet the American administration, and his subsequent pronouncements will be crucial in determining the attitude of a large part of the Shi'a community towards the occupying power. [...]
With President Bush having declared the end to major combat operations in Iraq, the attitude of the majority Shi'a to any extended period of military governance by the United States will determine to a large degree the success of the post-conflict operation. The Shi'a 'ulama are split between three methods of governance for the Shi'a: clerical rule in accordance with Khumayni's concept of wilayat al-faqih, a less public but more advisory role as advocated by the Islamic Da'wa Party, or a politically quiescent approach as advocated by Grand Ayatollah Sistani. One thing they are largely united on, however, is a rejection of the United States as a long-term occupation force. Although happy at the demise of Saddam Hussein's regime, leading Shi'a clerics both inside and outside Iraq are less well disposed to a post-conflict political role for the United States or its Iraqi exile allies. The United States should be prepared for resistance to their presence from many of the Iraqi Shi'a clerics, particularly the longer their forces remain in the country.
Through an unusual set of circumstances, I have been given documentary evidence of the names and positions of the 600 closest people in Iraq to Saddam Hussein, as well as his ongoing relationship with Osama bin Laden.
I am looking at the document as I write this story from my hotel room overlooking the Tigris River in Baghdad. [...]
The document shows that an Iraqi intelligence officer, Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, assigned to the Iraq embassy in Pakistan, is ''responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group.''
The document shows that it was written over the signature of Uday Saddam Hussein, the son of Saddam Hussein. The story of how the document came about is as follows.
Saddam gave Uday authority to control all press and media outlets in Iraq. Uday was the publisher of the Babylon Daily Political Newspaper.
On the front page of the paper's four-page edition for Nov. 14, 2002, there was a picture of Osama bin Laden speaking, next to which was a picture of Saddam and his ''Revolutionary Council,'' together with stories about Israeli tanks attacking a group of Palestinians.
On the back page was a story headlined ''List of Honor.'' In a box below the headline was ''A list of men we publish for the public.'' The lead sentence refers to a list of ''regime persons'' with their names and positions.
The list has 600 names and titles in three columns. It contains, for example, the names of the important officials who are members of Saddam's family, such as Uday, and then other high officials, including the 55 American ''deck of cards'' Iraqi officials, some of whom have been apprehended.
Halfway down the middle column is written: ''Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, intelligence officer responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group at the Iraqi embassy in Pakistan.'' (For more about the list, see accompanying article on this page.)
The lawyer who brought the newspaper to me, Samir, and another lawyer with whom I have been working, Zuhair, translated the Arabic words and described what had happened in Baghdad the day it was published.
Samir bought his paper at a newsstand at around 8 a.m. Within two hours, the Iraqi intelligence officers were going by every newsstand in Baghdad and confiscating the papers. They also went to the home of every person who they were told received a paper that day and confiscated it.
The other lawyer, Zuhair, who was the counsel for the Arab League in Baghdad, did not receive delivery of his paper that day. He called his vendor, who told him that there would be no paper that day, a singular occurrence he could not explain.
For the next 10 days, the paper was not published at all. Samir's newspaper was not confiscated and he retained it because it contained this interesting ''Honor Roll of 600'' of the people closest to the regime.
The only explanation for this strange set of events, according to the Iraqi lawyers, is that Uday, an impulsive and somewhat unbalanced individual, decided to publish this honor roll at a time when the regime was under worldwide verbal attack in the press, especially by us. It would, he thought, make them more loyal and supportive of the regime.
His father was furious, knowing that it revealed information about his supporters that should remain secret.
Former defense secretary William Perry warned that the United States and North Korea are drifting toward war, perhaps as early as this year, in an increasingly dangerous standoff that also could result in terrorists being able to purchase a North Korean nuclear device and plant it in a U.S. city.By pumping up the importance of the Nigerian uranium sentence, have the Democrats implicitly conceded that a rogue nuclear program is a legitimate grounds for war, if reliably established? Was this reaction sufficiently predictable for us to infer that this was the administration's plan?
"I think we are losing control" of the situation, said Perry, who believes North Korea soon will have enough nuclear warheads to begin exploding them in tests and exporting them to terrorists and other U.S. adversaries. "The nuclear program now underway in North Korea poses an imminent danger of nuclear weapons being detonated in American cities," he said in an interview.
Viewed from this angle, the threat posed by the DeLay-Santorum-Norquist "K Street Project" doesn't seem particularly great. Is it sleazy? Absolutely. Chatterbox would prefer that DeLay be indifferent not only toward business lobbyists' political affiliations, but also toward their campaign contributions and—most especially—toward their opinions about how legislation should be written. But that isn't going to happen. (Setting aside the job-placement component, it didn't happen when the Democrats controlled the House, either.) If one side in this transaction is going to give orders to the other, Chatterbox would much prefer that democratically elected members of Congress be the ones giving the orders. Better that K Street bend over for DeLay than that DeLay bend over for K Street.People who think that businessmen control politicians because of where the money flows must think that cows control farmers because of where the milk flows.
Does any of this ring alarm bells? Of course not. After all, this is America, officially a democracy with the rule of law, a constitution, a free press, honest elections, and a well-informed public constantly being put on guard against evils. Historical comparisons like these are just exercises in verbal gymnastics. Maybe, maybe not.
With phrases like "weekend of turmoil inside the campaign," "Joe Lieberman is in big trouble in the African American community" and "continuing problems raising money and keeping his finance staff organized" popping out of newspaper stories this morning, the Connecticut lawmaker and presidential hopeful probably wishes he’d stayed in bed.
Shari Yost, Lieberman’s top fundraiser, resigned on Monday after a weekend of discussions on how best to cut costs and "put Lieberman into position to compete with better-funded rivals," the Washington Post reports. Yost’s deputy, Jennifer Yocham, plans to resign as well. Several mid-level staffers also might quit. [...]
The staffing moves might indicate deeper problems for Lieberman, the Post reports. One Democratic source said: "Nobody’s been running (the) campaign." [...]
Spending is also a major problem for the campaign. Lieberman is fifth among the nine Democratic candidates when it comes to cash on hand, with about $4 million in the bank, and Cabrera said Yost’s departure was in part based on a disagreement on how to cut overhead. Craig Smith, the campaign director, wanted to save some money by cutting Yost’s approximately $200,000 annual salary. Yost felt her department was bearing the brunt of the cuts, the Post reports, and wanted the pain spread throughout the campaign. Smith also objected to Yost’s reliance on traditional fundraising methods and wanted to try and focus on raising money over the Internet, a move Yost reportedly resisted.
Another bone of contention among some Lieberman staffers is apparently the six-figure salaries of two of Lieberman's children, who are working full-time for their Dad. The campaign announced Monday that each will take a 20 percent pay cut and said it was not unusual for candidates to hire their children as staffers.
Some court watchers have called Lawrence the most momentous civil rights decision since Brown v. Board of Education outlawed school segregation in 1954. What hasn't been explained is the basis for Kennedy's landmark ruling. What has changed since Bowers was decided in 1986? The answer: nothing less than the historical understanding of laws regarding sexual conduct.
In the Bowers case, Justice Byron R. White wrote simply and assuredly that since "Proscriptions against [homosexual] conduct have ancient roots," an attempt to claim that such conduct was protected by the Constitution was "at best, facetious." [...]
What happened to make assumptions that were obvious to one judicial generation so obviously wrong to the next? Credit the scholarly efforts of a group of history professors, toiling away in the nascent and controversial field of gay studies.
A careful reading of the majority opinion shows that it relied heavily on three amicus curiae ("friend of the court") briefs. These briefs are arguments submitted by parties interested in the case detailing why the justices should decide it their way. Many cases attract such briefs, which often play little role in the outcome. But these three -- filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Cato Institute and a coalition of history professors -- are singled out by name in the majority opinion. Skip these briefs and you've skipped the essence of what is remarkable about Kennedy's ruling.
To follow the briefs' argument, the best thing to do is to quote directly from Kennedy's opinion. "At the outset," Kennedy writes, "it should be noted that there is no longstanding history in this country of laws directed at homosexual conduct as a distinct matter."
That's a stunning repudiation of what White, Burger and the rest of the majority stated so matter-of-factly in Bowers. On what did Kennedy
base that statement? On the historical research outlined by George Chauncey of the University of Chicago, and nine other professors in the historians' brief.
[T]hroughout American history, the authorities have rarely enforced statutes prohibiting sodomy, however defined. Even in periods when enforcement increased, it was rare for people to be prosecuted for consensual sexual relations conducted in private, even when the parties were of the same sex. Indeed, records of only about twenty prosecutions and four or five executions have surfaced for the entire colonial period. Even in the New England colonies, whose leaders denounced “sodomy” with far greater regularity and severity than did other colonial leaders and where the offense carried severe sanctions, it was rarely prosecuted. The trial of Nicholas Sension, a married man living in Westhersfield, Connecticut, in 1677, revealed that he had been widely known for soliciting sexual contacts with the town’s men and youth for almost forty years but remained widely liked. Likewise, a Baptist minister in New London, Connecticut, was temporarily suspended from the pulpit in 1757 because of his repeatedly soliciting sex with men, but the congregation voted to restore him to the ministry after he publicly repented. They understood his sexual transgressions to be a form of sinful behavior in which anyone could engage and from which anyone could repent, not as a sin worthy of death or the condition of a particular class of people.
The relative indifference of the public and the authorities to the crime of sodomy continued in the first century of independence. For instance, only twenty-two men were indicted for sodomy in New York City in the nearly eight decades from 1796 to 1873. The number of sodomy prosecutions increased sharply in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century. This was made possible by the decision of many States to criminalize oral intercourse for the first time. But it resulted in large measure from the pressure applied on district attorneys by privately organized and usually religiously inspired anti-vice societies, whose leaders feared that the growing size and complexity of cities had loosened the constraints on sexual conduct and increased the vulnerability of youth and the disadvantaged. The increase in sodomy prosecutions was only one aspect of a general escalation in the policing of sexual activity, which also included stepped-up campaigns against prostitution, venereal disease, and contraception use. Although in this context a growing number of sodomy prosecutions involved adult males who had engaged in consensual relations, most such relations had taken place in semi-public spaces rather than in the privacy of the home, and the great majority of cases continued to involve coercion and/or minor boys or girls.
In colonial America, regulation of non-procreative sexual practices - regulation that carried harsh penalties but was rarely enforced - stemmed from Christian religious teachings and reflected the need for procreative sex to increase the population. Colonial sexual regulation includedsuch non-procreative acts as masturbation, and sodomy laws applied equally to male-male, male-female, and human-animal sexual activity. [...]
Proscriptive laws designed to suppress all forms of nonprocreative and non-marital sexual conduct existed through much of the last
millennium.
Dusty Baker, the (black) Chicago Cubs manager recently voted by players in a Sports Illustrated poll as the best manager in the game, said last week:
"[The heat] is a factor in Atlanta, it's a factor in Cincinnati, it's a factor in Philadelphia. We have to mix and match and try to keep guys fresh and try to have different lineups . . . I've got a pretty good idea [how it's done]. My teams usually play better in the second half than they do in the first half. I think that's because the way we spot guys and use everybody."
He then went on to violate all sorts of the rules of political correctness by opining:
"Personally, I like to play in the heat. It's easier for me. It's easier for most Latin guys and easier for most minority people. You don't find too many brothers in New Hampshire and Maine and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, right? We were brought over here for the heat, right? Isn't that history? Weren't we brought over because we could take the heat? Your skin color is more conducive to the heat than it is to the light-skinned people, right? You don't see brothers running around burnt and stuff, running around with white stuff on their ears and nose and stuff."
A huge controversy erupted. Numerous sportswriters and broadcasters demanded Baker's scalp: "Making dumb racial comments is inexcusable and has no place in society," said a columnist in Buffalo. On Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, when my friend Jon Entine, author of Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid to Talk About It, explained that Baker's comments were not scientifically implausible, Righteous Rightwinger Sean Hannity exploded: "Your science is a silly science, Jon. It's absolutely idiocy!"
Let's review Anthropology 101. Population groups have distinct body types. Elite football players, dependent on speed and jumping ability, are disproportionately of West African descent. Why? Because, as dozens of studies have shown, they have (on average) smaller and more efficient lungs, higher oxidative capacity, more fast-twitch muscle fibers, and a muscled but lean body type.
Note that sprinters of West African ancestry, including African-Americans, hold 494 of the top 500 100-meter times. Their genetically prescribed morphology and physiology is a disaster for endurance events--there are almost no elite endurance runners of West African ancestry--but a goldmine for sprinting and jumping. Allowing for individual variation, Snyder was intuitively right.
Mr. Baker's observations are common sense. Does anyone really think an Eskimo would perform as well in Wrigley Field in July as someone of African ancestry who has spent all but a speck of his evolutionary history along the equator? "The single most important factor in heat toleration is body proportions," says David Brown, a University of Hawaii anthropologist and morphology expert. "If the relative fitness levels are similar, those with more skin surface area to overall body mass--those with relatively longer limbs--are more heat efficient. It's easier to sweat, dissipate heat and keep core body temperature steady." Check that anthropology textbook: Africans have longer limbs and more skin surface area than whites, who have more than Asians. Stout-and-short Eskimos, who are of Asian ancestry, don't perform as efficiently in scorching weather as whites or blacks. Is it racist to acknowledge this?
Now, skin color alone is not the explanation for heat tolerance, as Mr. Baker implied. And Hispanics descended from Europeans are no more heat-tolerant than other whites. But those of African ancestry do have an advantage.
The only unknown is whether small differences translate into athletic advantages.
The [Washington] Post notes that ".... countries with shrinking populations may stagnate economically, intellectually and militarily. If future generations are to carry on the American vibrancy and dynamism, the country must be prepared to embrace more babies, and more adults from around the world."
I seldom compliment the Post, but well said! And welcome to the real world!
In light of these facts, which have always been there for those who would see, what is the United Nations doing? Why, it is busy preparing for its once-in-a-decade conference on population. In past decades, this conference was at the forefront of promoting population control. Much of the utter nonsense being taught in the public schools about this issue originates from the UN. I've got news for the UN. There is a population problem but it isn't the overpopulation the UN has preached, at least not in the non-Muslim states. The states of Western Europe, Japan and the good old USA, which have traditionally paid the bill so the UN could preach its false doctrine, aren't going to have the money for that luxury anymore. Even in China the population has stabilized, for all the wrong reasons, but the fears expressed about China are no longer valid. What is of great concern in China is too many boys. Where the one child policy is brutally enforced, couples choose boys over girls. Perhaps the UN can pontificate on that subject.
If the UN is to retain any credibility at all, it must admit its past mistakes and use its conference next year to, once and for all, smash the ideas of the Club of Rome. Then it can prepare new materials for the public schools reflecting the reality of the situation. If the Washington Post can come around to a sensible point of view, so can the UN.
Zoe Romanowsky recommends:
Einstein's Dreams by Alan P. Lightman
Penned by a professor of physics and writing at MIT, Einstein's Dreams presents, in fictional form, 30 different concepts of time. Each chapter
illustrates the concept by describing the world in which it would exist. One chapter shows life in a world where time is circular... another where time slows down in the mountains and speeds up in the valleys. A wonderful book for thought and discussion.
R&L: In your latest book, you compare economics to religion. Why?
Nelson: Because economics is a belief system with powerful moral implications. I use the term religion in a broad sense, as something that provides a framework for one's values or some purpose to one's life. I am convinced that people must have some sort of religion, that no one can live entirely free from a framework of meaning. Of course, not all religions require a God, as Judaism or Christianity do.
Further, I refer to economic theology because many economists explain the nature of the world in economic terms. In this way, the members of the economics profession function as the “priests” of economic progress. In fact, economic progress has been the leading secular religion of the modern age, especially since the late nineteenth century and the Progressive Era.
R&L: What is the origin of American economic religion?
Nelson: Through the latter part of the nineteenth century, there was a powerful secular Calvinist strain in American life, especially in Social Darwinism. In this perspective, successful businessmen--the Andrew Carnegies and so forth--were the "elect," as revealed through the results of the competitive market system. Successful entrepreneurs were God's agents and the advocates of progress leading to heaven on earth.
In the twentieth century, the progressive movement had closer affinities with the Roman Catholic tradition. Each placed a great emphasis on helping the poor, for example. And in terms of the structure of authority, the welfare state is similar to the Catholic Church, with a central authority in Washington, D.C., rather than in Rome. There are obviously crucial differences, but Thomas Huxley did once describe socialism as “Catholicism minus God.”
However, American progressivism was a watered-down, Milquetoast version of European socialism, because progressivism had to accommodate itself to the very powerful democratic traditions in the United States. For example, the government could not nationalize most industries, such as transportation, communications, and electricity. The government, through regulation, did tell businessmen in these industries what to do, but it did not actually seize their property, as often happened in Europe.
Now that the Democratic presidential candidates are almost all on the same page on the war with Iraq - or at least on attacking President Bush on it - some domestic issues have become matters of contention.
According to the Des Moines Register, on Saturday in Iowa, Rep. Dick Gephardt accused both Sen. John Kerry and Howard Dean of supporting trade policies that cost jobs and reduced workers' rights. Gephardt made the remarks at a meeting of the machinists union, which had endorsed his candidacy.
In a press release to the group, Gephardt says he is responding to Kerry on trade. "Yesterday John Kerry put out a flyer that had my trade policy on it and I'm glad he did because we need to have a debate on this issue," Gephardt said. "But there was one omission I was for another trade treaty, the U.S.-Jordan Trade Treaty … Senator Kerry and Governor Dean, who I respect, supported NAFTA. They thought it was the right thing to do. Just understand that when I'm President I will work against and I will never sign a trade treaty of any kind that will send our jobs our money and our welfare off to the highest bidder."
"My opponents in the race may say they'd do the same but you have to check the record. Because the record counts. When the chips were down where was everybody?" Gephardt told the anti-NAFTA union.
Republicans appeal "to the dark underside of American culture, to that minority of Americans who reject democracy and equality," NAACP Chairman Julian Bond said yesterday at the civil rights group's 94th annual convention.
"They preach racial neutrality and practice racial division ... their idea of reparations is to give war criminal Jefferson Davis a pardon," Mr. Bond said during his welcoming remarks. "Their idea of equal rights is the American flag and Confederate swastika flying side by side."
Frightened by Bush's rapidly accruing personal power and the Democrats' inability and/or unwillingness to stand up to him, panicked lefties worry that he might use the "war on terrorism" as an excuse to declare a state of emergency, suspend civil liberties and jail political opponents.
People who have spoken out against Bush are talking exit strategy--not Alec Baldwin style, just to make a statement, but fleeing the U.S. in order to save their skins. "Do you or your spouse have a European-born parent?" is a query making the rounds. (If you do, you can obtain dual nationality and a European Union passport that would allow you to work in any EU member nation.) Those whose lineage is 100 percent American are hoping that nations like Canada and France will admit American political refugees in the event of a Bushite clampdown.
To these people, whether or not the 2004 elections actually take place as scheduled is the ultimate test for American democracy. At Guantanamo Bay the United States is converting a concentration camp into a death camp where inmates will be executed without due process or legal representation. Never before in history has a U.S. president contemplated the denaturalization of native-born citizens-thus far even people executed for treason have died as Americans--but Bush has drafted legislation that would allow him to strip anyone he calls an "enemy combatant" of their citizenship and have them deported. By any objective standard he has already gone way too far, but for many it would take the cancellation or delay of the elections to confirm that we are trading in our wounded democracy for a fascist state. [...]
It's easy to come up with a scenario in which canceling the 2004 election could be made to appear reasonable. Imagine that, a few weeks before Election Day, "dirty bombs" detonate simultaneously in New York and Washington. Government, media and political institutions and personnel lie ruined in smoking rubble and ash; hundreds of thousands of people have been murdered. The economy, already teetering on the precipice, is shoved into depression. How could we conduct elections under such conditions?
That Crouch had become impossible to work with squares with his reputation, but his accusations of racism are anything but predictable. Crouch has called Louis Farrakhan "insane" and Al Sharpton a "buffoon." He has denounced black nationalism, Afro-centrism, and "the balkanization of America." He writes columns with titles like "It's Not Profiling, It's Good Policing." These are not the positions of a reverse racist, and this is not a man who plays the race card lightly.
So why now?
Crouch's position has less to do with color than it does with sound. He defines jazz within famously narrow limits--a music that doesn't stray far from the blues or the techniques that have traditionally produced it, musicians who never, ever forget where and how the sound was born. One doesn't have to be black to find a groove (though some critics have taken him to mean this), but one must be willing to bow to the "Negro aesthetic." He is convinced that the white establishment resents a musical history from which it can't help but feel alienated, and so champions jazz that sounds "white" instead of jazz that looks backward. In this view, the desire to innovate past swing is tantamount to fearing its origins and the people who created it. The lines between the advancement of a music and the rejection of its history become entangled in the vast mire of racial politics. [...]
What some see as the degeneration of the music is, to others, its inherent forward motion. To try to stem the flow of creativity, to establish a canon and declare all else "not jazz," is to alienate the very population Crouch seeks to engage. But Crouch insists that definitions shape reality. "If you can't define jazz," he declares, "it doesn't exist." [...]
It is a lonely place that Crouch inhabits at the moment, outside of an "establishment" that largely embraces the music of free jazz, ethno fusion, and, to a lesser extent, crossover. As long as it stays that way, the critic's caustic rants and purist diatribes are just another welcome sound.
Democrats on the left see Republicans winning by catering to their right-wing base and taking positions that are to the right of American public opinion, and they wonder why their party can't do the same instead of playing to focus groups. Why, they wonder, shouldn't their party coddle them in the same way that Republicans indulge the religious right?
The problem is that Democrats and Republicans aren't simply mirror images of each other. "When you give people the option of identifying as liberal, moderate or conservative, a majority of Republicans identify themselves as conservatives," says Kilgore. Liberals, though, make up only a slice of the Democratic Party. Kilgore quotes a Gallup poll showing that only 33 percent of Democrats say they're liberals, while 43 percent are moderate and 23 percent conservative.
No one really represents liberals, which many of them find intolerable. That's why there was an exodus to the Green Party, and that's why there's now so much talk among leftish Democrats of "taking back" the party. Even if Dean doesn't share all their views, he courts liberals rather than trying to marginalize them.
While the DLC sees the ghost of McGovern in this strategy, liberals have a different analogy -- Ronald Reagan.
"Elections create what is acceptable or what is the center," says Borosage. "When Ronald Reagan started running in 1980, he was widely dismissed even among Republicans as a nutcase. But he changed politics in America and created the conservative era we've been living in ever since. I don't think these things are a given. They are forged. The DLC tends to think polls are written in stone and people have specific ideas that can't be overcome."
Michael Franc, vice president for government relations at the conservative Heritage Institute, actually agrees with parts of Borosage's analysis.
In the short run, he says, liberal rage is good news for Bush. "In the long run it may not be bad news for Bush," Franc says, "but it might be bad news for a successor. The [Democratic] Party, in order to realign itself in the right direction, may need to undergo some self-examination and a reorientation of what it's all about. Republicans reacted very, very well to their 1964 loss to Lyndon Johnson. Even though Johnson beat Goldwater by an enormous margin, Goldwater had more people out on the streets working for him. It was an early indication of a nascent conservative resurgence that was possible with right kind of nurturing and direction.
"This conservative movement really grew out of that," he continues. "It took a while -- first we had Nixon to deal with -- but it finally led to Reagan's election in 1980. There was kind of a 16-year walk in the wilderness, where people who worked on the Goldwater campaign hung together and formed organizations, formed magazines and journals and helped develop foundations for what was to come."
Liberals, he says, are now walking in their own wilderness. "Getting the most passionate members of the party to do something about that is either going to be a death wish or the beginning of a resurgence, depending on how effectively they deal with themselves."
I am going to talk of controversial things. I make no apology for this.
It's time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, "We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self government."
This idea? that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream-the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, "The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits."
The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing.
Public servants say, always with the best of intentions, "What greater service we could render if only we had a little more money and a little more power." But the truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector.
Yet any time you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we're denounced as being opposed to their humanitarian goals. It seems impossible to legitimately debate their solutions with the assumption that all of us share the desire to help the less fortunate. They tell us we're always "against," never "for" anything.
We are for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we have accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem. However, we are against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments....
We are for aiding our allies by sharing our material blessings with nations which share our fundamental beliefs, but we are against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world.
We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward I restoring for our children the American Dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him.... But we can not have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure....
Have we the courage and the will to face up to the immorality and discrimination of the progressive tax, and demand a return to traditional proportionate taxation? . . . Today in our country the tax collector's share is 37 cents of -very dollar earned. Freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp.
Are you willing to spend time studying the issues, making yourself aware, and then conveying that information to family and friends? Will you resist the temptation to get a government handout for your community? Realize that the doctor's fight against socialized medicine is your fight. We can't socialize the doctors without socializing the patients. Recognize that government invasion of public power is eventually an assault upon your own business. If some among you fear taking a stand because you are afraid of reprisals from customers, clients, or even government, recognize that you are just feeding the crocodile hoping he'll eat you last.
If all of this seems like a great deal of trouble, think what's at stake. We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars. There can be no security anywhere in the free world if there is no fiscal and economic stability within the United States. Those who ask us to trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state are architects of a policy of accommodation.
They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right. Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits-not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.
The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.
Your imagination, your initiative and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.
The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.
The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.
It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.
So I want to talk to you today about three places where we begin to build the Great Society -- in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms.
Many of you will live to see the day, perhaps 50 years from now, when there will be 400 million Americans -- four-fifths of them in urban areas. In the remainder of this century urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes, highways and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled. So in the next 40 years we must rebuild the entire urban United States. [...]
These are three of the central issues of the Great Society. While our government has many programs directed at those issues, I do not pretend that we have the full answer to those problems.
But I do promise this: We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of White House conferences and meetings -- on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.
The French secret service is believed to have refused to allow Britain's MI6 to give the United States "credible" intelligence showing that Iraq was trying to buy uranium ore from Niger, U.S. intelligence sources said yesterday.
Britain's Secret Intelligence Service had more than one "different and credible" piece of intelligence to show that Iraq was attempting to buy the ore, known as yellowcake, British officials insisted. But it was given to them by at least one and possibly two intelligence services and, under the rules governing cooperation, it could not be shared with anyone else without the originator's permission.
U.S. intelligence sources believe the most likely source of the MI6 intelligence was the French secret service, the DGSE. Niger is a former French colony, and its uranium mines are run by a French company that comes under the control of the French Atomic Energy Commission.
The CIA secretly dispatched a US envoy, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to Niger in 2002 to investigate the British claim. He reported to the CIA there was no evidence to support the British intelligence, but Mr Straw said that the report - which had not been shared with London by Washington - in fact had confirmed that a delegation from Iraq did go to Niger in 1999.
One Foreign Office official said: "Niger has two main exports - uranium and chickens. The Iraqi delegation did not go to Niger for chickens."
The British claim was also challenged by the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) which found that documents on which it was based were forged. However, a senior Downing Street official said: "We are sticking by our claim. We received intelligence from another country and we cannot share that with the US."
Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory, wrote in 1871: "As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed."
Experts have proposed various explanations for the universality of music. Darwin suggested it evolved in our animal ancestors as a sexual system, designed to attract mates. "In this view, animal song became part of courtship, and then part of human nature," Hauser said.
Others observe that music creates social cohesion, strengthening group bonds against outsiders. School pep songs or military marches are obvious applications.
Many assert that the most important function of music is to regulate or influence emotions. "Some sequences of notes are happy, some are sad," Hauser said. "Music affects our emotional response."
It isn't clear which of these theories about the origin of music is correct. "We really can't distinguish between these hypotheses," Hauser
acknowledged. "Everything is open to debate."
Researchers are particularly interested in studies comparing the musical abilities of adults with those of human babies and animals. For example, experiments with very young infants showed that they react differently to harmonious and discordant chords, demonstrating that a sense for music is inherited.
According to [Sandra Trehub, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto], 4-month-old infants are content to listen to unfamiliar folk
melodies, but show signs of distress - fussing, squirming, turning away - when dissonant notes are introduced into the melody.
"Toddlers commonly invent songs before they can reproduce conventional songs," she noted. "Similarly, school-age children create songs and chants, such as 'eenie-meenie-miney-mo,' that share a number of features across cultures, including repetition, rhythmic patterning, rhyme and alliteration."
Even monkeys apparently sense the concept of a musical octave.
According to Anthony Wright, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, rhesus monkeys, like humans, tended to judge a tape-recorded song, such as "Old McDonald Had a Farm," to be the same when it was shifted up or down by one or two octaves.
But when the melody was transposed by a half-octave, thereby changing its key, the monkeys no longer recognized the tune, a fact they showed by failing to turn their heads toward the speaker.
Comparisons between music and language offer fresh insights into brain function.
[Marc Hauser, a neuroscientist at Harvard University] pointed out that music resembles language in that most people in all cultures instinctively know whether a sentence in their language is grammatical or not. Similarly, almost everyone can tell whether certain patterns of sound are music or mere noise, even if these sounds have never been heard before.
"There are other stimuli that nearly everyone recognizes as unmusical, such as a 'sour' note in a melody," he said.
"For too long, the neuroscience of language has been studied in isolation," wrote Aniruddh Patel, a scholar at the Neuroscience Institute in San Diego. "Music is now stepping into this breach, and via comparative analysis with language, providing a more complete and coherent picture of the mind than can be achieved by studying either domain alone."
This is the month of Christmas, but December is also the end of the centennial year of the birth of British composer href=http://www.musicweb.uk.net/finzi/>Gerald Finzi (d. 1956), a self-professed agnostic. Can I reconcile my duty to reflect on the Nativity, while at the same time celebrating Finzi? Several Christmases ago, I was able to accomplish a similar feat in CRISIS with Ralph Vaughan Williams (another agnostic) and his magnificent Christmas cantata, Hodie Christus Natus Est. Like Vaughan Williams, Finzi seems to have been that special breed of believing agnostic who can write sublime, religiously inspired music.
How could this be? In my own experience with agnostics, I have found that they are often particularly close to God-intimate enough to hold a personal grudge. Usually, it has to do with a misunderstanding as to who He really is or what He has done. Frequently, their objections to God concern things to which God Himself objects, like the suffering of children or death. [...]
Finzi's frequent encounters with death easily explain his attraction to the poetry and pessimism of Thomas Hardy, another English agnostic, many of whose poems Finzi set to music. During the latter part of his relatively short life, Finzi lived under the death sentence of Hodgkin's disease, which carried him off at age 55. It's only natural that he should have been fixated on the transitory nature of things. It's harder to explain Finzi's love for the works of 17th-century English metaphysical poets and his penchant for setting explicitly religious texts. What was the source of hope for this pessimist?
The answer comes from Finzi's profound appreciation for and immersion in the beauty of nature. Haunted by death and enflamed by nature's beauty-where could Finzi go to deal with the dichotomy between death and beauty? Ineluctably, he turned to traditional Christian texts. He wrote a Magnificat, In Terra Pax, For St. Cecelia, Lo, the Full, Final Sacrifice, and other such religious works. What creates the tension in Finzi's works is the intense experience of beauty juxtaposed with the looming presence of death. Beauty and death do not comfortably coexist. Beauty signals a certain message that death denies.
That is the conundrum of human existence that Finzi's music so movingly captures with a kind of melancholy grandeur.
Finzi is the composer of beginnings and endings, of birth and death. The two musical bookends of his work in a thematic, if not a chronological, sense are his two masterpieces, Dies Natalis, Op. 8, and Intimations of Immortality, Op. 29. In Dies Natalis, Finzi set the text of Thomas Traherne's poem of that name for tenor and orchestra. [...]
As the texts he set demonstrate, Finzi held the Platonic view that we come from the divine, are soiled by this world, and "forget" our origins. He humorously remarked on this in one of his Crees Lectures in 1953: "We all know that a dead poet lives in many a live stockbroker. Many of these people, before they fade into the light of common day, have had an intuitive glimpse which neither age, nor experience, nor knowledge, can ever give them."
In our experience of beauty, Finzi thought, we "recollect" and gain a dim intimation of our immortality. In fact, this is exactly how Finzi describes the process of his creative work and the nature of its rewards: "The essence of art is order, completion and fulfillment. Something is created out of nothing, order out of chaos; and as we succeed in shaping our intractable material into coherence and form, a relief comes to the mind (akin to the relief experienced at the remembrance of some forgotten thing)."
What is the gravest threat to the lives and liberties of Europeans and Americans today? Europeans and Americans differ profoundly in their answers to this fundamental question. Recent conversations with 100 security experts at NATO in Brussels and in Berlin, London and Athens underscored for me just how profoundly.
The American security community is unanimous. Democrats as well as Republicans agree with the Bush administration that the gravest threat to civilization as we know it is the marriage of terrorism with weapons of mass destruction. The specter is not just 9/11, but a nuclear 9/11.
Europeans disagree. Many express a mixture of skepticism and bemusement with what they imagine is a peculiar Bush fixation. Even as good a friend of America as Czech President Vaclav Klaus summarized his own view of the matter in what he called "a fundamental question: Was 9/11 an isolated act, or typical of phenomena the world will face in the first half of the 21st century?"
Beneath the headlines, deeper trendlines point to the latter.
Prior to developing nuclear weapons, Israel fought 5 conventional wars against its Arab neighbors in 26 years. Since developing nuclear weapons, Israel has fought not one conventional war, but a continuous battle against terrorism, in which its hostile neighbors fight by deception and stealth, using secretive private armies whom they pretend are not their own.
In a nuclear-armed world, only the most powerful nations can conduct war openly. Weaker nations will wage war by deception and stealth, working through proxy states and proxy organizations. The goal of such clandestine warfare is to hurt the enemy while deflecting his blame. This method of war is particularly effective against democracies, which typically need firm evidence of guilt before fighting back. It is this reluctance to go to war which has made Israel so helpless. Ultimately, terrorism will end only with a commitment from civilized nations to wage war -- nuclear war if necessary -- against any nation that aids, sponsors, or supports terrorism.
Because half the world, including the European Union and the United Nations, aids anti-Israeli terrorist groups, Israel has been poorly placed to initiate such a policy themselves. The Europeans have no excuses: blind to the threat civilization faces, they continue to feed that threat. The United States, on the other hand, must once again choose whether "We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth."
Benny Carter, whose combination of highly developed talents as composer, arranger, bandleader and soloist on a variety of instruments was unmatched in the jazz world, died Saturday at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 95.
Benny Carter's career was remarkable for both its length and its consistently high musical achievement, from his first recordings in the 1920's to his youthful-sounding improvisations in the 1990's. His pure-toned, impeccably phrased performances made him one of the two pre-eminent alto saxophonists in jazz, with Johnny Hodges, from the late 1920's until the arrival of Charlie Parker in the mid-1940's. He was also an accomplished soloist on trumpet and clarinet, and on occasion he played piano, trombone and both tenor and baritone saxophones. [...]
In 1962, when Mr. Carter was only 54, the critic Whitney Balliett wrote in The New Yorker that "few of his contemporaries continue to play or arrange or compose as well as he does, and none of them plays as many instruments and arranges and composes with such aplomb."
"Carter, indeed, belongs to that select circle of pure-jazz musicians who tend to represent the best of their times," the piece continued.
His public fame did not always match his accomplishments, and his only major hit of the big band era was "Cow-Cow Boogie," a novelty tune sung by Ella Mae Morse. However, early in his career his fellow musicians nicknamed him simply the King, and among them he was held in universally high regard.
The trumpeter Doc Cheatham recalled that "we broke our backs to get into Benny's band" because musicians learned so much from performing with him. Sy Oliver, whose brilliant arrangements gave the Jimmie Lunceford orchestra of the 1930's and the Tommy Dorsey band of the 1940's their distinctive cachet, said Mr. Carter was "the most complete professional musician I've ever known."
And John Hammond, the record producer who nurtured the careers of Count Basie, Billie Holiday and Benny Goodman, said Mr. Carter was "one of the great influences in American music, one of its unsung heroes."
Benny Carter (1907-), one of the great figures in jazz history and one of my heroes, turns 95 on Thursday (DOB: 8/8/07). To put his career and longevity in some perspective, he was a world-famous musician while Babe Ruth was still playing for the Yankees, and to my knowledge he's the only person to have recorded on every technology from Edison's wax cylinder to DVD's. He's now retired from playing, although he still composes.
Here's a decent piece on him by the LA Times' jazz critic (who's not much of a writer). But a sense of what Benny is like comes through. (As the writer points out, it's hard to see why Ken Burns didn't make more use of him in "Jazz.") Also, the article mentions the last gigs he played (when he was 90 1/2, he did a week at Catalina's). Mom and Dad were visiting on the first night, and we went to the show. Benny played as well as I'd heard him in years, and in fact, his playing got stronger as the weekend went on. I took Mom around to meet him afterward, and he was even more than his usually gracious self. I remember having the weird sensation of watching Mom meet someone who's music she listened to when she was a kid.
There's also a great bio of Benny written by the late Princeton professor Morroe Berger. The second edition was just released, with an update (the first edition is almost 20 years old) by Ed Berger, Prof. Berger's oldest son and a curator/librarian at The Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers.
If Carter made a bad record, I haven't heard it, but Further Definitions, the 1961 album that teamed him with Coleman Hawkins and Jo Jones, two of his peerless contemporaries, captures him at close to his absolute best. I listened to "The Midnight Sun Will Never Set" when I got the news of his death in Los Angeles last Saturday. It seemed a proper way to say goodbye.
The tensions within our field have reached the media and even our own journals in the distorted form of a culture war, with a clear cleavage between a traditionally humanist right and an antihumanist left. In the middle, but without a base, are people like this woman who are not traditionalists but nonetheless have convictions about "what sustains people" that in the current environment would be discounted as conservative, humanist illusions. (She might for example be asked, "Which 'people' are you presuming to speak for?") Such scholars survive by putting a part of themselves into hiding, and their voices aren't heard....
When I was writing my first book I was so concerned about getting tenure that I adhered to the theoretical norms of the moment. It was alienating at times, but I did it. After that, though, I became paralyzed, because I couldn't make myself observe certain omnipresent intellectual taboos that came under the heading of poststructuralism--taboos that I thought were oppressive but that I couldn't challenge without courting disgrace. I felt I had to hide or smuggle in my humanist convictions about "what sustains people"--my faith for example in some quality of shared humanity that makes literary experience meaningful. And my anger and sadness about this feeling of constraint were preventing me from writing with conviction at all....
[Y]ou may or may not find the fear and defensiveness I'm describing odd. Maybe you too have experienced an exhausting internal debate between the ordinary self that has something it cares about and the piped-in voice of the profession that can only coldly approve or blame....
[A]s I started to rethink what I was about intellectually, I initially feared developing my own perspective because I thought I might become someone who would alienate old friends and acquire some new "friends" from the right, as well as new enemies....
Every profession binds its initiates to itself by inducing a subtle spiritual depletion-what the legal theorist Duncan Kennedy, in his 1983 manifesto Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy, called "'the sneaking depression of the pre-professional," and what Jeff Schmidt, again in Disciplined Minds, describes as an "emotional numbness" and a "loss of vitality and authenticity" common among professionals. I think that the theoretical models that have dominated English and the related disciplines in the last two decades are especially effective tools for creating this kind of demoralization, because in their depletion of the meaning of such words as authenticity and humanity they eat away at a person's sense of having a vital interior life apart from his or her professional identity.... The message we send ... is: there's no real authenticity anywhere, there's no humanity you can count on ...
I was talking with a medievalist friend about these ideas, which I'm in the midst of developing into a book, and he said something that made me stop and think, namely that "there is no growth without ascesis." He was using the religious term ascesis to describe the discipline of meaningful self-questioning or self-abnegation. He was making a powerful point: you can't educate without asking students to renounce much of what they formerly took for granted, including some dimensions of their younger selves. But there are environments in which ascesis, or renunciation, shades over into a kind of hazing, and people lose sight of what exactly is being relinquished and what is being grown there. In these environments ascesis can become mere self-flagellation and self-alienation: rather than the surrender of fixed assumptions that's necessary for building suppleness and awareness, there is the crushing and unproductive experience of coming to despise what one still carries within oneself from the period before one merged with a group identity....
What I would wish to see is a profession that did a better job of teaching everyone who comes here how to distinguish for himself or herself ... between the ascesis or self-transformation that produces integrity, flexibility, and intellectual strength, and the sham ascesis, too common in the professions, that is really a loss of self.
Acedia and its companion sins are "Deadly" not because they kill immediately: they are also known as the "Capital Sins," because they lead to other sins. They are deadly because they corrupt. Acedia in particular leads to relativism and to a lack of energy, to an unwillingness to strive for any worthy goal. It leads to demoralization, in which nothing seems good enough to struggle for.
I doubt the left developed its program consciously, but it has become very effective at spreading demoralization and Acedia. Professor Ruddick wisely connects "loss of morale" to "loss of moral conviction"; the two go together, as Forrest Gump would have said, like peas and carrots.
It is interesting that, apparently by consensus among the English professoriate, humanist values are now associated with the right, anti-humanist values with the left. To me this indicates the decline of liberalism as I once understood it: it shows that liberalism's crisis has proceeded to the point of its virtual destruction. In pursuit of power, liberals have allied themselves with the anti-humanist left and joined the effort to demoralize conservatives and those who share conservative values. But this essentially anti-human enterprise corrupts liberalism and poisons its humanist elements, with the result that liberalism as it once was vanishes. Liberals have been absorbed almost insensately into the radical left.
There is a profound need in modern society for a moralizing force: for people who can give encouragement to those who love, who embrace a worthy moral vision with gusto and passion. Professor Ruddick states our need quite well in the final lines I have quoted: and it is a fundamentally religious need. Sadly, religious institutions whose purpose is precisely to lead such a moralization -- for instance, the Catholic bishops -- have become demoralized themselves. I don't know where the moral energy to re-moralize society will come from. But I am sure we need it.
"Now at the feast the governor was accustomed to release for the crowd any one prisoner whom they wanted. . . . The governor again said to them, 'Which of the two do you want me to release for you?' And they said, 'Barabbas.' Pilate said to them, 'Then what shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?' They all said, 'Let him be crucified.' And he said, 'Why what evil has he done?' But they shouted all the more, 'Let him be crucified.' So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd . . . Then he released for them Barabbas and having scourged Jesus, delivered him to be crucified."
Thus, Matthew's dramatic rendering of Pilate's accession to the demand of the crowd for the crucifixion of Jesus raises the fundamental dilemmaof democratic governance: the relative claims of the wishes of the public and the wisdom of public officials in making policy. That is, what is the appropriate balance between the preferences of citizens and the considered judgment of policymakers?
Some four centuries earlier the same issue had arisen in a society with a more democratic tradition, ancient Athens, and the people had ruled, if less passionately, similarly unwisely. With Athens recovering from a protracted war and experiencing some political turmoil, Socrates stood accused of introducing novel religious practices and corrupting the young. He chose trial rather than voluntary self-exile. As reported by Plato, Socrates was, despite an eloquent self-defense, found guilty by a jury of 500 citizens and sentenced to die. Although his friends contrived for him to escape from prison, he opted to remain in chains, arguing that while he believed himself innocent, he did not wish to violate a lawful process. Eventually Socrates drank the hemlock.
That we can attribute the condemnation of two men who influenced so profoundly the course of Western civilization to the myopia and suggestibility of ordinary citizens acting collectively might lead us to be skeptical of the capacity of the people for self-government and to infer that we should trust instead in the wisdom of their leaders.
The merit of our Constitution was, not that it promotes democracy, but checks it.
-Horatio Seymour (1810-86)
Any administration will be tempted to trumpet the conclusions of science when they justify actions that are advantageous politically, and to ignore them when they don't. Democrats, for instance, are more than happy to tout the scientific consensus that human activity contributes to climate change, but play down evidence that drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (which they oppose) probably will have little impact on the caribou there. But Democrats will only go so far down the path of ignoring scientific evidence because they don't want to alienate their scientific supporters. Increasingly, the Republicans feel little such restraint. Hence the Bush administration's propensity to tout scientific evidence only when it suits them politically. For instance, though numerous studies have shown the educational benefits of after-school programs, the Bush administration cited just one recent report casting doubt on those benefits to justify cutting federal after-school funding. Meanwhile, the White House has greatly increased the federal budget for abstinence-only sex education programs despite a notable lack of evidence that they work to reduce teen pregnancy. The administration vigorously applies cost-benefit analysis--some of it rigorous and reasonable--to reduce federal regulations on industry. But when the National Academy of Sciences concluded that humans are contributing to a planetary warming and that we face substantial future risks, the White House initially misled the public about the report and then dramatically downplayed it. Even now, curious reporters asking the White House about climate change are sent to a small, and quickly diminishing, group of scientists who still doubt the causes of global warming. Many scientists were shocked that the administration had even ordered the report, a follow-up to a major report from the 2,500-scientist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world's leading climate research committee. Doing that was like asking a district court to review a Supreme Court decision.
This White House's disinclination to engage the scientific community in important policy decisions may have serious consequences for the country. One crucial issue that Congress and the Bush administration will likely have to confront before Bush leaves office is human cloning. Researchers distinguish between "reproductive cloning," which most scientists abhor, and "therapeutic cloning," which may someday allow researchers to use stem cells from a patient's cloned embryo to grow replacement bone marrow, liver cells, or other organs, and which most scientists favor. When the President's Council on Bioethics voted on recommendations for the president, every single practicing scientist voted for moving therapeutic cloning forward. Bush, however, decided differently, supporting instead a bill sponsored by Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) to ban all forms of embryonic cloning.
John Marburger, the president's current scientific adviser--a longtime Democrat who says that he has good relations with Bush and is proud of the administration's science record--wrote in an email statement which barely conceals his own opinion: "As for my views on cloning, let me put it this way. The president's position--which is to ban all cloning--was made for a number of ethical reasons, and I do know that he had the best, most up-to-date science before him when he made that decision." Jack Gibbons, a former head of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, calls Bush's proposed ban "an attempt to throttle science, not to govern technology." Harold Varmus, the former NIH director, believes that "this is the first time that the [federal] government has ever tried to criminalize science."
[I]ntelligence is an excellence of mind that is employed within a fairly narrow, immediate, an predictable range.... Intelligence works within the framework of limited but clearly stated goals, and may be quick to shear away questions of thought that do not seem to help in reaching them. [...]
Intellect, on the other hand, is the critical, creative, and contemplative side of mind. Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, re-order, adjust, intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines.
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge - even to ourselves - that we've been so credulous.
Reason #6,177 why John Forbes Kerry will never be President of the United States.
If you know people who are wondering why the 2004 election matters, or about the difference between the two political parties, the following two statements about American exceptionalism might provide some food for thought:
*Senator John Kerry's Remarks to Georgia Democrats, March 1, 2001
We Democrats believe this nation is more than gleaming buildings and the gated communities with their swimming pools and finely-manicured lawns. We do not see America as a finished product; a city established upon the hill. We see an America still in the process of becoming; a dream not yet fulfilled; a promise not yet kept.
*President Ronald Reagan's Farewell Address, January 11, 1989
The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the `shining city upon a hill.' The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free. I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.
The State of the Union message is one of America's greatest inventions, conceived by the Founders to force a powerful Chief Executive to report to a public suspicious of kings. Delivered to a joint session of Congress in democracy's biggest cathedral, it is the most important speech a President gives each year, written and rewritten and then polished again.
President Thomas Jefferson changed the procedure followed by his predecessors with his first annual message (December 8, 1801). His private secretary delivered copies of the message to both houses of Congress, to be read by clerks in the House and Senate. Jefferson's change was intended to simplify a ceremony that he believed to be an aristocratic imitation of the British monarch's "Speech from the Throne," and thus unsuitable to a republic. Furthermore, preparing a response in Congress consumed valuable time during short legislative sessions.
One of my political rules of thumb: No reform that has any chance of actually working can be approved without squeals of protest from the elite opinion-makers. The converse is true: Anything that moves forward in a bipartisan fashion and is widely admired in the mainstream media is bound to be a disaster.
That's because America's elites - and California's in particular - are liberals who believe in bigger government, higher taxes, more regulations. Promote an idea that threatens that tax-spend-regulate status quo, and the howls of protest begin.
In 1978, California voters rejected the dire predictions of the state's newspapers and politicians and voted for Proposition 13, which limited the increases in property taxes that were driving people out of their homes and imposed two-thirds voting requirements for the passage of most bonds and tax increases.
How do we know Prop. 13 struck paydirt?
Twenty-five years later, media pundits, legislators and academics are still whining about it, blaming it for every bad thing that ever happened in California from heinous crimes to crumbling infrastructure. But the public knows better, and still strongly backs Prop. 13's provisions.
Another Prop. 13-style revolt is shaping up in California. And judging by the cries and moans of editorialists and politicians, one would think the world is coming to an end. But this is good news. Their upset is a sign that something serious is taking place.
Hamas activists in Gaza City attacked cars belonging to the Palestinian Authority's Preventive Security Service Friday night after Minister of Security Muhammed Dahlan's bodyguards shot and wounded a Hamas member.
Palestinian sources said the bodyguards opened fire at Muhmamed Sumari, a Hamas activist, after suspecting him of planning to assassinate Dahlan. Sumari was wounded in the leg and was in critical condition, the sources added. [...]
On Friday night Dahlan summoned Palestinian journalists in the Gaza Strip to a meeting, where he called for holding new elections for Fatah's central council. Members of the council last week strongly criticized Dahlan and Abbas for their handling of talks with Israel, prompting the PA prime minister to resign from the body. They also called for cutting down Dahlan's powers, arguing that he was seeking to take control over al the security forces.
Dahlan lashed out at the Fatah central council, saying it was inconceivable that its members, who were appointed 13 years ago, have remained in their posts without elections.
From the day land agent Henry W. Hicks gave this northwestern Ohio village his name in the 1830s, townsfolk proudly have defended it against the inevitable and tiresome jokes.
But they never envisioned their farming community becoming the punch line for a national political fund-raising campaign, effectively casting them as unwilling guests on a Jerry Springer show entitled "Slack-jawed yokels, hicks, weirdos, pervs and whatnot."
Said Mayor Janis Meyer: "I've always thought it would be good to put Hicksville on the map, but not this way."
Springer, host of a popular television talk show that routinely features misfits and miscreants, is using Hicksville as a metaphorical rallying post for his Democratic U.S. Senate campaign for Ohio, selling autographed photos of himself pointing to a Hicksville corporation-limit sign. Featured on Springer's campaign Web site - runjerryrun-.com - the photos sell for $100 and are superimposed with words that Republican pundit Jonah Goldberg uttered on a CNN politics program this year: "If Jerry Springer shows up, he'll bring all these new people to the polls. They will be slackjawed yokels, hicks, weirdos, pervs and whatnot."
The photo was snapped after Springer delivered a speech May 5 at a fund-raising dinner in Hicksville for the Defiance County Democratic Party. [...]
But the 3,600 residents of Hicksville do not appear to be amused, judging by interviews conducted in the town on Friday.
"I've got a sense of humor, but this makes us look like a bunch of . . .," said Village Administrator Kent Miller, trailing off before the "H" word tumbled out.
"If Springer's running for office, I don't know why he'd want to tick off 3,600 people." [...]
Mike Hurni, 30, who lives in Detroit but grew up in Hicksville, was in town visiting his parents. Crossing his legs in the barber chair, he listened to the banter quietly, waiting for a lull to make an observation:
"I didn't know I was a slackjawed yokel."
U.S. President George W. Bush is the most unpopular American president in recent memory among Canadians, with more than 60 per cent saying they have an unfavourable opinion of him, according to a new poll by Environics Research Group Ltd.
Relations between Mr. Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien have been strained over the U.S. decision to invade Iraq, among other issues, but most Canadians blame the American President for the worsening climate, Environics said in a poll released exclusively to The Globe and Mail.
Environics senior associate Derek Leebosh said that, while Canadians maintain a favourable attitude toward the United States, Mr. Bush is deeply unpopular here. That's in contrast to his still high, though declining, approval ratings among Americans.
"George Bush as president will probably be the best thing that ever happened to Canadian nationalism," Mr. Leebosh said. "He totally personifies the essence of the side of the United States that Canadians tend to dislike--the anti-intellectual Texan in a Stetson, social conservative."
Tony Blair arrives here in Washington next week, an occasion which is sure to spark an outpouring of emotion. The British press will be awash with poodle cartoons. The American Congress will ring with his praises. And practically no one will ask how on earth it is possible that the British and the Americans have lately conceived such different views of the hoary old "special relationship", and come up with such different valuations of its worth. [...]
As far as we are concerned, Blair received everything he asked for, in return for his support on Iraq. After all, what he really, really wanted, as practically no one in Britain seems to remember now, was for the US to stick with the convoluted United Nations weapons inspection process, and for America to request a second UN resolution, in the run-up to the Iraqi invasion.
Even if you don't remember this episode in Britain, we recall quite vividly the humiliating spectacle of American diplomats grovelling before Cameroon's UN delegation, and the sight of Colin Powell, our dignified Secretary of State, begging and pleading and nevertheless failing to get the Mexicans, our next door neighbours, to sign on - and all in order to pass a resolution that we thought, quite frankly, completely pointless. But the Prime Minister's lawyers told him he needed it, and, despite the embarrassment, we dutifully tried.
What is to be my 15th book, a collection of short stories, has just--to use the unnecessarily masculine verb--hit the bookstores, which means this is a difficult time for me. I can take (fairly well) insulting reviews. I can accept (barely) not being a huge bestseller. I can live (sadly) with close friends and family not always reading what I have written. But what I cannot bear--and up to now, as you will discover, have not borne--is seeing my books given a dismal display in bookshops.
What of course every author wants is the Big Book Treatment: multiple copies in the window, posters and special displays, vast quantities of the sacred volume stocked at the counter, or point of purchase, as we pros like to call it, with perhaps a modest television commercial during halftime at the Super Bowl. What we usually find instead is one copy, shelved in the back under Sociology. So many rainy days in the Republic of Letters.
Early in my career as an author, I became a secret stockboy for my own books. I would take that copy or two of my new books away from Sociology or Religion and, oh so cleverly, slip them onto the bestseller table as I left the shop. If some of my newer books were, briefly, on the New and Current tables, I would gently see to it that they were positioned there more prominently. An acquaintance who works in a bookshop tells me that I am not alone as a nonunion stockboy for my own books. Lots of authors, apparently, go in for it. When they see it happen, bookshop clerks add to their knowledge of the pathos of human nature and, after the self-starting author has departed, quietly return his books to Sociology.
They have circled one another warily for months, a study in political contrasts. One is the tall, cool Bostonian who exudes stature and experience in the world; the other the short, intense Vermont transplant who projects energy, passion and a determination to upend the politics of his own party.
Now Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and former Vermont governor Howard Dean are on a collision course in their bids for the Democratic presidential nomination. They skirmished briefly in the spring over patriotism, courage and the qualities required of a commander in chief in an age of terrorism. With Dean's sudden emergence, a decisive clash appears inevitable, one that will have a significant impact on the outcome of the Democratic race.
Along with Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), Kerry and Dean make up the top tier of the Democratic field of nine candidates, but by dint of geography and demography, the two New Englanders often find themselves fishing in the same pond, fighting over the same voters: white, liberal, moderately affluent, well-educated, mostly antiwar, vehemently anti-President Bush.
These prospective Democratic voters find themselves in a head-vs.-heart debate over whether to support Kerry or Dean. In Kerry, they see someone with the credentials to be president, but they worry about his passion and ability to excite an electorate. In Dean, they see the opposite, a blunt and inspirational politician willing to challenge Bush, but they wonder whether someone with his experience and views can win.
He is the last of the generation that made Israel, an endangered species. And with men around him all half his age, Sharon insists it is only he who can solve the Palestinian problem. He says he is optimistic and that in his next four years in office he will bring it about. But his ideas have become thickets through which sometimes he seems to grope.
'The right thing will be if someone from our generation who has seen everything we saw. You remember well now ... I remember well. From the age of five ... I remember those years well now, everything that happened here. And ... it is our generation's role to try to achieve this peace. It is a result of things we have seen. I think that makes it ... easier to do, that we will make that, and we will make less mistakes knowing what really happened here. And that is how I see. How I see it. There are many things I would like to do, but it was something I had to try to solve.'
It is a constant thread in the Sharon story, this history. A favourite theme is of his responsibility to 3,000 years of Jewish history, and the responsibility for the next three centuries. The present, he has said, is important only in the way it guarantees a Jewish future in a Jewish state in the cradle of the Jewish people's birth. He reminds us this is the Promised Land. Promised to the Jews - no one else. [...]
If there is another absolute constant in Sharon's universe, beyond his identification of his own and Israel's destiny, then it is in his obsession with his great enemy - Yasser Arafat - whose physical decline has hurried on before his own.
'The problem is that Arafat is undermining the new government. It is a good thing Mahmoud Abbas was nominated as Prime Minister. I met him several times. He is one of those who has understood that Israel cannot be defeated by terror and that he understood very early that the suffering of the Palestinians was caused by Arafat and his strategy.'
He is scathing, too, about the continued contact with Arafat by European governments, including Britain, calling it a brake on progress. But, in the end, it seems Sharon believes that, despite the partnership with Abbas, this is a process that will fail despite his alleged desire for a deal. And then what?
'I'll tell you what we will be doing, what we are doing now, what my grandfather and my parents have done, myself, my sons, and families here facing Arab terror for five, six generations, I tell you what they're going to do. First, they are going to hold the sword in one hand, and they're going to carry on, that's what we've been doing up to now.'
A faded, nearly shredded picture of Iranian President Mohammad Khatami peers at customers from the back of Mitra Azad's computer in a travel agency in central Tehran. Pen marks on the smiling president's salt-and-pepper beard and the curled-up edges of the sticker offer evidence of a hasty attempt to remove it.
Azad, 28, once a devoted supporter of the president who called for greater political and social freedoms and what he termed Islamic democracy, admits taking a pen to the sticker. "He has disappointed me," Azad said. "I truly believed in him, but he and his reformist group are simply not effective. He is not willing to fight for us. So I no longer want him on my computer." [...]
Students and democracy activists recently called for Khatami's resignation in nationwide protests that included blistering anti-government slogans. In details of a speech made public yesterday, Khatami said he would step down if the people wanted him to, the Associated Press reported.
"We are not masters of people but servants of this nation. If this nation says 'we don't want you,' we will go," Khatami was quoted as saying.
Many members of the politically active student groups recall with bitterness the impotence that reformists displayed in 1999 during a crackdown on nationwide student protests that left at least five people dead and hundreds in jail. On Wednesday, some of the Iranians who gathered to commemorate the fourth anniversary of those protests dismissed the reformist movement as irrelevant.
"They are useless," said Mehrnaz, 33, a homemaker who attended the rally and who, like many of the people interviewed, gave only one name. "They just speak nice words but do little."
At one time we dared not even to whisper. Now we write and read samizdat, and sometimes when we gather in the smoking room at the Science Institute we complain frankly to one another: What kind of tricks are they playing on us, and where are they dragging us? gratuitous boasting of cosmic achievements while there is poverty and destruction at home. Propping up remote, uncivilized regimes. Fanning up civil war. And we recklessly fostered Mao Tse-tung at our expense-- and it will be we who are sent to war against him, and will have to go. Is there any way out? And they put on trial anybody they want and they put sane people in asylums--always they, and we are powerless.
Things have almost reached rock bottom. A universal spiritual death has already touched us all, and physical death will soon flare up and consume us both and our children--but as before we still smile in a cowardly way and mumble without tounges tied. But what can we do to stop it? We haven't the strength?
We have been so hopelessly dehumanized that for today's modest ration of food we are willing to abandon all our principles, our souls, and all the efforts of our predecessors and all opportunities for our descendants--but just don't disturb our fragile existence. We lack staunchness, pride and enthusiasm. We don't even fear universal nuclear death, and we don't fear a third world war. We have already taken refuge in the crevices. We just fear acts of civil courage. [...]
The circle--is it closed? And is there really no way out? And is there only one thing left for us to do, to wait without taking action? Maybe something will happen by itself? It will never happen as long as we daily acknowledge, extol, and strengthen--and do not sever ourselves from--the most perceptible of its aspects: Lies.
When violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self-confidence, as if it were carrying a banner and shouting: ``I am violence. Run away, make way for me--I will crush you.'' But violence quickly grows old. And it has lost confidence in itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face it summons falsehood as its ally--since violence lays its ponderous paw not every day and not on every shoulder. It demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies--all loyalty lies in that.
And the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, but not with any help from me. [...]
So in our timidity, let each of us make a choice: Whether consciously, to remain a servant of falsehood--of course, it is not out of inclination, but to feed one's family, that one raises his children in the spirit of lies--or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect both by one's children and contemporaries.
And from that day onward he:
Will not henceforth write, sign, or print in any way a single phrase which in his opinion distorts the truth.
Will utter such a phrase neither in private conversation not in the presence of many people, neither on his own behalf not at the prompting of someone else, either in the role of agitator, teacher, educator, not in a theatrical role.
Will not depict, foster or broadcast a single idea which he can only see is false or a distortion of the truth whether it be in painting, sculpture, photography, technical science, or music.
Will not cite out of context, either orally or written, a single quotation so as to please someone, to feather his own nest, to achieve success in his work, if he does not share completely the idea which is quoted, or if it does not accurately reflect the matter at issue.
Will not allow himself to be compelled to attend demonstrations or meetings if they are contrary to his desire or will, will neither take into hand not raise into the air a poster or slogan which he does not completely accept.
Will not raise his hand to vote for a proposal with which he does not sincerely sympathize, will vote neither openly nor secretly for a person whom he considers unworthy or of doubtful abilities.
Will not allow himself to be dragged to a meeting where there can be expected a forced or distorted discussion of a question.
Will immediately talk out of a meeting, session, lecture, performance or film showing if he hears a speaker tell lies, or purvey ideological nonsense or shameless propaganda.
Will not subscribe to or buy a newspaper or magazine in which information is distorted and primary facts are concealed.
Of course we have not listed all of the possible and necessary deviations from falsehood. But a person who purifies himself will easily distinguish other instances with his purified outlook. [...]
And if we get cold feet, even taking this step, then we are worthless and hopeless, and the scorn of Pushkin should be directed to us:
"Why should cattle have the gifts of freedom?
"Their heritage from generation to generation is the belled yoke and the lash.''
Why do they hate them? That is the question to ask in the wake of the slaughter of 53 people by Islamic suicide attackers in a mosque in Quetta, Pakistan, on July 4.
This was no isolated local atrocity, no jihad against Zionist oppressors, no blow delivered by the underdog against American crusaders. These victims were poor Shiite Muslims. As with the bombs set off in Saudi Arabia and Morocco a few weeks ago, this assault in southwestern Pakistan involved Muslims killing Muslims in the name of religion. It was part and parcel of an expanding civil war within Islam that is being fought across an extended region vital to U.S. interests. [...]
Those who hate in this way hate much more than us. Their fury is part of a bigger picture that is succinctly and expertly treated by historian Bernard Lewis in his new book, "The Crisis in Islam." As Lewis points out, the radicals have an entire world to destroy before their apocalyptic design of restoring the Islamic caliphate can be realized.
Instead of asking with embarrassing, self-referential introspection why they hate us, American politicians and pundits should be pointing out that the first, most important line of this battle must be fought by Muslims in the battle for the soul of Islam.
The key to winning that battle lies in the mobilization of a revitalized Islamic mainstream that will reassert and protect itself from the extremists. Islam, like other great religions, has periodically had to rescue itself from movements that would hijack an entire faith. This is such a moment. [...]
The United States on its own cannot reform the Muslim world. Only Muslims can do that.
But Washington can be a catalyst to introduce change into the grim stalemate that now exists between the two main branches of Islam: the Sunni majority, which controls the governments and commerce of most Arab countries, and the Shiites, who govern Iran but are downtrodden elsewhere.
VISITING TORONTO RECENTLY, Governor Jeb Bush of Florida extolled Canada for resembling the United States. ''If I were blindfolded and landed in Toronto and didn't have to go through customs, I wouldn't know I was in a foreign country,'' Bush noted. Evidently, the governor hasn't been paying attention to the press coverage Canada has recently been getting in the United States, which has focused on how the two nations are rapidly diverging politically and culturally.
Whereas the United States has been moving to the right over the last few years, Canada has become increasingly progressive. Earlier this year, two-thirds of Canadians supported Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien's decision to sit out the Iraq war. And polls show that roughly 55 to 60 percent are lining up behind the governing Liberal Party's push to pass federal laws legalizing same-sex marriage and relaxing marijuana restrictions. To the chagrin of US drug czar John Walters, some Canadian localities are going even further: Vancouver, for example, plans to open up North America's first police-free ''safe injection sites'' where heroin addicts can inject themselves using free, clean needles under the supervision of a nurse.
To American conservatives, Canada is going to pot in more ways than one. The right-wing political columnist Pat Buchanan denounced America's largest trading partner as ''Soviet Canuckistan.'' But to some American leftists, Canada is a progressive mecca. The superiority of Canada, with its generous social welfare programs and comparatively low rate of gun violence (despite widespread gun ownership), formed the subtext of Michael Moore's Oscar-winning film ''Bowling for Columbine.'' Ralph Nader, in a mildly goofy 1992 book called ''Canada Firsts,'' extolled worthy Canadian achievements from universal health care to the ''first rotary snowplow and snowblower.''
What is it, or was it, to curse? Two elements are essential to the action, properly understood. A real curse is, first, more than a strong expression of antipathy; it is an attempt to harm its object, or put them in fear of harm. Second, it involves more than the curser and the cursed, for there is a third party: to curse is to invoke - or at least call upon - an external power to do the harm.
Of course much of what we call "cursing" amounts to little more than the verbal shell of what was once an inhabited belief. "Damn you" or "Go to Hell" no longer express anything but anger or rejection, but they express it through a sort of metaphor: a metaphor which would have no meaning shorn of its reference to an underworld or place of damnation. We do not, most of us, believe in Hell any longer; still less that any spell, incantation or form of words could assist another soul?s passage there. But we know what the idea means. When in the Old Testament Job curses his fate, curses life and curses God himself, the words still prickle the back of the neck. A Jewish curse against enemies - used as part of the Passover ceremony and too long to quote here - is chilling. [...]
"Bless you" still has, to me, great beauty both as a phrase and as an idea. I find some of the Christian blessings among the most moving passages in literature, as is that old Irish blessing "May the road rise to meet you," etc., which people love to quote. But if we entirely lose our sense of even the possibility of a power outside ourselves which might be called upon to help and protect those we love, then these words and phrases may one day come to seem as meaningless as the casting of bones or invocation of tree-spirits in pagan cultures: an amusing, senseless oddity.
To call upon a great external power - supernature itself - to intercede to protect or to harm another is just about the most thrilling expression of love or hate that has been available to human beings. As belief in the very existence of such a power diminishes, so does the taproot of both the blessing and the curse: different flowers on the same tree. A tree can survive for some time after its root is cut but it must wither in the end; and perhaps our age finds itself in just such a case. Curses and blessings retain their vigour for us, but the philosophical energy that created and sustained them may be drying up.
If so, I am sorry. As George Dobell drily observed, it is not an argument for the existence of a force that if we ceased to believe in it there would be adverse consequences; but a world without blessings or curses would seem a flatter, deader, greyer place.
Blair has been consistent in his belief that 'concrete evidence' of weapons of mass destruction will be found by the US-led Iraq Survey Group. An independent inquiry could give the government breathing space while the survey group delivered, and would also allow Blair to insist that nothing was being hidden.
Downing Street is also anxious to end what one source called 'the current open season on Tony Blair' from his backbench critics. This was a clear reference to the sustained attack by former Cabinet minister Clare Short, who this morning on GMTV advised Blair that there were 'two good years until the next general election' and that he should leave office 'before the situation got nastier'.
Although Short publicly attacked Blair's handling of the euro debate, claiming the Prime Minister had manufactured a 'great big division' between himself and the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, Downing Street knows Short's private attacks contain far more venom. One of her claims centres on an alleged attempt by Blair to renegotiate a deal between himself and the Chancellor about succession, involving an agreed date.
Yesterday Downing Street dispatched the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, to defend Blair. Blunkett focused on his despair over what he called the 'plot' to eject Blair from Number 10. He said Short was being 'typically self-indulgent' and added: 'I do not understand why people would plot to try and change the most successful leader in Labour's history.'
Asked if he regretted using the Niger claim, Mr. Bush replied: "There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a threat to world peace. And there's no doubt in my mind that the United States, along with allies and friends, did the right thing in removing him from power. And there's no doubt in my mind, when it's all said and done, the facts will show the world the truth."
I'm happy that Mr. Bush's mental landscape is so cloudless. But it is our doubts he needs to assuage.
From Iowa to New Hampshire to South Carolina, the Democratic candidates for president these days are scrambling for issues: denouncing President Bush's tax cuts, bemoaning his deficit, decrying the chaos in Iraq. And all too often, those issues bring restrained applause from their crowds.
But there is one subject that has proved to be a surefire tonic for members of the somewhat dispirited party, and it is not the man they are trying to oust from the Oval Office.
"In my first five seconds as president, I would fire John Ashcroft as attorney general," Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri said the other day, bringing cheers from Hispanic leaders in Phoenix.
"We can not allow people like John Ashcroft to take away our rights and our freedoms," Senator John Edwards of North Carolina declared in a sweltering library in Concord, N.H., on Monday, drawing a nearly instantaneous standing ovation.
Or, as Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts put it in a speech on domestic security in Lowell, Mass., last month: "When I am president of the United States, there will be no John Ashcroft trampling on the Bill of Rights." [...]
"I think he might be the most loathed man in America," said Janos Marton, 20, a Dartmouth student who pressed Mr. Edwards on the subject of Mr. Ashcroft's civil liberties record at a town hall meeting the other night. "The way he is undermining civil liberties is disgraceful."
"How do you rate the job Attorney General John Ashcroft is doing: excellent, pretty good, only fair, or poor?" (The Harris Poll, June 10-15, 2003):
Excellent/Pretty Good
54%
Only Fair/Poor
32%
In selecting Mr. Bremer for the job of winning the peace in a country that has known only iron-fisted totalitarian rule for a quarter-century, Mr. Bush settled on the candidate who appears, up to now, to have straddled the ideological divide between the State Department and Pentagon over the kind of crisis management needed to protect the allied victory here.
To Pentagon conservatives, Mr. Bremer has strong credentials as the tough counterterrorism chief in the Reagan administration and as a longtime prot?g? of Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state. With Mr. Bremer's 23-year career as a diplomat, his conservatism is leavened with a strong pragmatic instinct.
"As forceful as he is, he certainly is not dogmatic," said S?rgio Vieira de Mello, the United Nations special representative in Baghdad.
Barham Salih, a senior aide to another Kurdish leader, Jalal Talabani, said: "He came with some very definite ideas on what needed to be done," adding that Mr. Bremer "believed that Iraq needed to be rebuilt along free-market principles."
Mr. Salih said Mr. Bremer initially resisted a more nuanced assessment.
"I told him that Iraq is a welfare state and its government is dependent on oil revenues and the people have gotten used to be given handouts," Mr. Salih said. "I told him it would be disastrous policy if he is thinking of ending the welfare state overnight."
It took less than a decade for the sub-Sahara's estimated HIV-positive population to jump from 8 million to today's 30 million. There is still no reliable means for accurate long-term HIV projections, but expert opinion is already contemplating mind-numbing totals for Eurasia in the years immediately ahead. By 2010, the intelligence council study argues, there could be nearly 50 million people living with HIV in just three of Eurasia's countries. Just seven years hence, in this grim imagining, as many as 8 million Russians could be stricken with HIV--more than one-tenth of the reproductive-age population. In China, the corresponding number for 2010 might be as high as 15 million. India's HIV count in 2010 could be 25 million.
If one looks a bit further into the future, the reverberations of HIV in Eurasia could be even worse. Even a relatively "mild" HIV epidemic could result in suffering of an entirely new magnitude. For the quarter-century spanning 2000-25, projections based on this "mild" scenario envision more than 40 million AIDS deaths just for Russia, India and China. That would be almost twice the death toll from the worldwide AIDS pandemic up to this point. In sub-Saharan Africa, the AIDS catastrophe has been mainly humanitarian; the economic and political repercussions of the disaster have been minimal because Africa is marginal to the modern world economy and the global power balance.
Not so Eurasia, which is a major and growing center of economic and military power. The now-unfolding HIV epidemics in Russia, India and China could directly and tangibly darken economic prospects for any and all of these countries. For the outside world, the costs of local AIDS disasters in each of these Eurasian centers would certainly be measured in terms of lost trade opportunities. And perhaps in other terms as well: We cannot forget that these three states maintain massive conventional armies and nuclear arsenals.
Some Jews and Christians suggest that the New Testament itself is anti-Semitic. So concerned are some over the continuing impact of historical interpretation that an October 2001 article in the Jewish magazine, Moment, asked, "Can Christianity be purged of anti-Semitism without changing the Gospels?"
While most people dismiss that idea, some Catholic scholars say the Gospels' human origins and historical context need to be emphasized more for regular churchgoers. Others researching the historical Jesus assert that the Romans, not Jews, killed him for political reasons.
Paul Maier, professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University, suggests the pendulum has swung from one extreme to the other - from blaming all Jews to claiming no Jews were involved. "That's wrong, too," he says. The final responsibility lay in Rome's hands, but historical sources support the Gospel narrative that some Jewish leaders were involved in the prosecution.
"Flavius Josephus is one of the sources, and in fact, he reports a similar event, when Jesus' half-brother was brought before the Sanhedrin in AD 62," Dr. Maier adds. "In that case, they stoned him without waiting for the Roman governor to arrive."
The way out of interpretations that provoke anti-Semitism, he says, is to point out that "a tremendous number of Jews never turned against Jesus during Holy Week," as Luke reports.
It also helps to clarify that the Gospel use of the phrase "the Jews" referred to Jesus' Jewish opponents, not all Jews. It was a common construction of writing of the time, Maier says.
The New Testament is about many things, principally God?s covenant with man. But if one wished to reduce it to its anti-Jewish argument, the sentence would run: God used to love the Jews, but they became fixated on law and sacrifice, refusing to attend to God?s will and His prophets, and so God decided to replace Torah with Jesus, and Jews with Christian gentiles, and the Jews then killed God?s son who had been sent to bring this news to the world, and that is why God destroyed the Temple and scattered the Jews and condemned them to suffering on earth and in eternity.
This is the virus at its most powerful, distilled to its essence. Breathing it, however, is no guarantee of illness. Some Christians come away from scripture readings with philo-Semitic feelings. Many others have human hearts that simply and naturally find specious hatred of other human beings suspect. Over lunch recently, a Jesuit priest who is a friend of mine told me that while he certainly took note of cultural anti-Semitism in his youth in the 1940s, the anti-Jewish messages of the New Testament never registered with him. ?It was like hearing news stories about a sport that doesn?t mean anything to you.î He shrugged. ?It just didn?t trigger anything.î
Whether it catches or not, however, anti-Judaism is in the plain reading of the New Testament; and, generally speaking, the later the book, the stronger its presence. John?s gospel, for example, generally accorded a date ranging from 90 to 120 C.E., contains 71 references to ?Jewsî compared to 16 in the three earlier gospel recountings of Jesus? life. This is so because the author of John preached at a time (and in a place) when it was becoming increasingly clear that the Jewish rejection of Christ was probably absolute, and that the only hope for the survival of a fledgling ?unofficialî faith within the Roman Empire lay with winning over gentiles to the cause. So why not turn ?the Jewsî into the historic opposition to Jesus? And while you?re at it, why not score some points with Roman authorities by setting up ?the Jewsî to take the fall for Jesus? execution? [...]
At the simple end of things, context here means that a Christian believer must be taught to set aside, as invalid, certain scriptural sentiments?approval of slavery, for example?that we 21st century sojourners now know to be wrong-headed. A 1993 Vatican commission declared illegitimate any interpretation of scripture that could promote anti-Judaism. If you draw anti-Semitic ideas from scripture, the Roman Catholic Church now teaches, you have read it wrong. Period.
At the complex end of things, context means understanding that whatever the malignant import and consequences of certain New Testament passages as they were read in 1095 or 1933, the true intent of those words, when they were first set down in 70 or 110, was neither anti-Jewish nor threatening to Jews. Why? Because these sentences were written by Jews arguing with other Jews about an internal matter: what form their faith should take after the loss of the Jewish Temple. Secondly, the words these Jews used against their brothers and sisters, no matter how powerful they may seem to us, were in fact examples of standard issue polemic drawn right from the pages of Samuel, Psalms, and the later prophets?as common in ancient Israel as date palms, and nearly as banal. And finally, those Jews who, as Jews, believed in Yeshu ben Yosef as God?s moshiach numbered about 100,000 at the turn of the first century in contrast with an estimated five million Jews within the Roman Empire, and so had no more prospect or intent of drawing serious blood from their co-religionists than the Michigan Militia has today of bringing down the U.S. Supreme Court.
"Christianity begins as a kind of Judaism," says John Stendahl, a Lutheran pastor who serves on a national panel that advises his church on relations with Jews, "and we must recognize that words spoken in a family conflict are inappropriately appropriated by those outside the family." Eugene Fisher, who represents the American Catholic bishops in their relations with American Jews, compares New Testament polemics to Israeli parliamentary debate. "What people sling back and forth in the Knesset," he told me, "cannot be anti-Jewish, though in Nebraska those would be fighting words."
This is an argument, of course, for the integral innocence of the New Testament?a matter of some importance for Christians, certainly, and probably a historic truth. But it does not, of course, render the New Testament benign. A Christian who opens his Bible this evening after dinner and reads Matthew 27:15-25 (Pilate's unsuccessful attempt to release Jesus rather than Barabbas, that concludes with Pilate's statement, "I am innocent of this man's blood," followed by, "Then the people as a whole answered, 'His blood be on us and on our children!') has read a curse upon Jews and will sleep with its damning echoes. Will these dreams be filtered by an awarene's that the author of Matthew almost certainly believed himself to be as faithful a Jew as Moses? Will those dreams be gentled by an understanding that the author of Matthew may have had a beloved mother or aunts who put money in the pushke every Friday to support the rabbis at Yavneh?
The Samaritan woman said, "Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain; and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship." Jesus responded, "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews." (John 4:19-22) [...]
"Salvation is from the Jews." Few thinkers have pondered that idea, if not that specific passage, more deeply than Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), who was, as it were, reconverted to Judaism after a very close brush with becoming a Christian. Rosenzweig's view is frequently, if too simply, summarized in the proposition that Christianity is Judaism for the Gentiles. Moreover, Rosenzweig was centrally concerned with salvation, as is evident in the title of his major work, The Star of Redemption. This touches on a perduring, and perhaps necessary, ambivalence in Jewish attitudes toward Christians and Christianity. In the historic statement of November 2000, Dabru Emet ("Speak the Truth"), signed by almost two hundred notable Jewish scholars, it is said that "through Christianity hundreds of millions of people have entered into relationship with the God of Israel." Then, toward the end of Dabru Emet, it is said: "We respect Christianity as a faith that originated within Judaism and that still has significant contacts with it. We do not see it as an extension of Judaism. Only if we cherish our own traditions can we pursue this relationship with integrity."
Yet it would seem that, if through Christianity hundreds of millions of people have entered into relationship with the God of Israel, Christianity must be, in some important sense, an extension of Judaism. Moreover, Dabru Emet makes clear that this relationship is one of worshiping "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," underscoring that the God of Israel is not separable from the people of Israel. It follows that to be in relationship with the God of Israel is to be in relationship with the people of Israel. As is well known, in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, a favored phrase for the Church is the People of God. There is no plural for the people of God. Certainly there are distinct traditions that must be cherished and respected, but one may suggest that they are traditions within the one tradition, the one story, of salvation. That story is nothing less than, in Robert Jenson?s happy phrase, "the story of the world."
Our distinct traditions reflect differences within the one tradition of witness to the God of Israel and his one plan of salvation. It is misleading, I believe, to speak of two peoples of God, or of two covenants, never mind to speak of two religions. While it was not specifically addressed to Jewish-Christian relations, this was the truth underscored also by the statement in 2000 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus. It is not Christian imperialism but fidelity to revealed truth that requires Christians to say that Christ is Lord of all or he is not Lord at all. From the Jewish side, when after the Council the Catholic Church was formalizing its conversations with non-Christians, the Jewish interlocutors insisted that they not be grouped with the Vatican dicastery designed to deal with other religions but be included in conjunction with the secretariat for promoting Christian unity. There were political reasons for that insistence, not least having to do with the politics of the Middle East, but that arrangement has, I believe, much more profound implications than were perhaps realized at the time.
The salvation that is from the Jews cannot be proclaimed or lived apart from the Jews. This is not to say that innumerable Christians, indeed the vast majority of Christians, have not and do not live their Christian faith without consciousness of or contact with Jews. Obviously, they have and they do. The percentage of Christians involved in any form of Jewish-Christian dialogue is minuscule. Not much larger, it may be noted, is the percentage of Jews involved. In addition, significant dialogue is, for the most part, a North American phenomenon. It is one of the many things to which the familiar phrase applies, "Only in America." In Europe, for tragically obvious reasons, there are not enough Jews; in Israel, for reasons of growing tragedy, there are not enough Christians. Only in America are there enough Jews and Christians in a relationship of mutual security to make possible a dialogue that is unprecedented in two thousand years of history. The significance of this dialogue is in no way limited to America. The significance is universal. There is one people of Israel, as there is one Church. Providential purpose in history is a troubled subject, and the idea of America's providential purpose is even more troubled, but I suggest that we would not be wrong to believe that this dialogue, so closely linked to the American experience, is an essential part of the unfolding of the story of the world. Isaiah 43:19: "Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?" [...]
Christians believe that the redemption that is surely yet to come has appeared in the Redeemer, Jesus the Christ--although, to be sure, the appearance of the Kingdom, and therefore of the Messianic King in the fullness of glory, is not yet complete. Christians speak of the first advent and the second advent of the Christ, but there is another sense in which we may speak of his advent in the singular. And, if we think of his advent in the singular, we are still awaiting the final act. In the End Time, however, the Messiah will not appear as a stranger. Along the way, we have known his name and named his name. Yet Novak's sense of heightened expectation of something new--as distinct from the confirmation of a completely foregone and foreknown conclusion--seems to me the appropriate mode of eschatological hope also for Christians. Knowing that we do not yet know even as we are known, we know that there is more to be known. Dialogue between Jews and Christians should be marked by an element of curiosity, by shared exploration of what we do not know, and perhaps cannot know until the End Time.
For this reason, too, I believe our passage from John 4--"Salvation is from the Jews"--should have a more prominent place in the dialogue than has been the case. The passage nicely combines the "now" and "not yet" of life lived eschatologically. The "now" is unequivocal. The woman said to him, "I know that Messiah is coming and when he comes he will show us all things." Jesus answers, "I who speak to you am he." The "now" and "not yet" are then exquisitely joined in the words of Jesus: "The hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. . . . The hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship Him."
Here one can agree with Bultmann in recognizing in these words an intimation of the vision of Revelation 21:22-26: "And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light shall the nations walk; and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it, and its gates shall never shut by day--and there shall be no night; they shall bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations." That is the mission of Israel fulfilled as lumen gentium.
Along the way to that fulfillment, Christians and Jews will disagree about whether we can name the name of the Lamb. And when it turns out that we Christians have rightly named the Lamb ahead of time, there will be, as St. Paul reminds us, no reason for boasting; for in the beginning, all along the way, and in the final consummation, it will be evident to all that the Lamb--which is to say salvation--is from the Jews. There will be no boasting for many reasons, not least because boasting is unseemly and there will be nothing unseemly in the Kingdom of God. But chiefly there will be no boasting because then all glory will be to the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus for His inclusion of us, all undeserving, in the story of salvation. Salvation is from the Jews, then, not as a "point of departure" but as the continuing presence and promise of a point of arrival--a point of arrival that we, Christians and Jews, together pray that we will together reach.
Israel could deport or arrest Palestinian President Yasser Arafat if he holds up his prime minister's efforts to implement a U.S.-backed "road map" to Middle East peace, Israeli diplomatic sources said Saturday.
"Israel conveyed to Washington that if Arafat continues to undermine Abu Mazen, we will reconsider his location and status," a source said, using Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas's nom de guerre. "By status we mean immunity."
It is obvious that there is a great deal of difference between being international and being cosmopolitan. All good men are international. Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan. If we are to be international we must be national. And it is largely because those who call themselves the friends of peace have not dwelt sufficiently on this distinction that they do not impress the bulk of any of the nations to which they belong. International peace means a peace between nations, not a peace after the destruction of nations, like the Buddhist peace after the destruction of personality. The golden age of the good European is like the heaven of the Christian: it is a place where people will love each other; not like the heaven of the Hindu, a place where they will be each other. And in the case of national character this can be seen in a curious way. It will generally be found, I think, that the more a man really appreciates and admires the soul of another people the less he will attempt to imitate it; he will be conscious that there is something in it too deep and too unmanageable to imitate. The Englishman who has a fancy for France will try to be French; the Englishman who admires France will remain obstinately English.
When a tough-talking, scar-faced convict named David R. Waters died of lung cancer in January in a federal prison hospital in North Carolina, an unusual flurry of coverage followed.
The news hook was Waters' role as evil mastermind of the infamous kidnapping and murder of Austin-based atheist leader Madalyn Murray O'Hair and two family members in 1995. Two years before his death, Waters had finally confessed to the crimes and led federal authorities to a shallow grave in the Hill Country that contained the dismembered and burned bodies of the O'Hairs.
The caliche hole near Camp Wood also contained the head and hands of Danny Fry, a con man from Florida who played a supporting role in the brazen abduction in Austin in August 1995. It was Fry who ended up as the headless, handless corpse that was found on the bank of the Trinity River near Seagoville on October 2, 1995, three days after the O'Hairs were dispatched in San Antonio.
After the identification of the remains was confirmed, they were given to Bill Murray for burial, and he announced that, in accordance with his own beliefs and his late mother's wishes, he would not pray at the burial site.
As an evangelical, I do not pray for the dead. Baptists believe that upon death the fate of the soul is sealed. The deceased person is in Glory with God, or in Hell. In either event, prayer is fruitless at that point.... The group (at the burial site) removed themselves... (and) said a prayer for the remaining family members and for the law enforcement officers who had worked on the case and suffered emotionally as a result.
One of the law enforcement officials was close to tears on several occasions. The details of the last days and hours of my mother, brother and daughter were so brutal that even men accustomed to violence were emotionally shaken.
Of the many ironies involved in the O'Hair story, one is that Madalyn O'Hair battled the government all her life and conscientiously avoided paying taxes. She was especially suspicious of the FBI, believing Hoover's organization to be the malevolent agent of the evil theocracy that was the United States. But it was the FBI and the IRS who finally avenged her murder. And some of those agents involved in the case, those who searched for her, found her, and attended her burial, expressed the deepest sorrow over the horrors that she and her family had endured at the hands of David Waters, Gary Karr and Danny Fry.
''I hope I live my life in such a manner that when I die, someone cares - even if it is only my dogs. I think I want some human being somewhere to weep for me.''
-- Madalyn Murray O'Hair
American intelligence organizations and military forces, once forbidden from attempts to assassinate foreign leaders by the executive orders of two recent presidents, have now embarked on an open, all-out effort to find and kill Saddam Hussein in a campaign with no precedents in American history. [...]
American officials in the White House and Iraq have argued that Mr. Hussein's survival encourages resistance, and killing him is therefore a legitimate act of war. But the United States has never before openly marked foreign leaders for killing. Treating it as routine could level the moral playing field and invite retaliation in kind, and makes every American official both here and in the Middle East a target of opportunity. [...]
It is impossible to know how, or if, Mr. Hussein's supporters will find a way to retaliate for the American campaign to kill the deposed Iraqi leader, but that effort inevitably reopens a long-simmering American argument over assassination, never embraced openly in so many words but never repudiated once and for all. Despite much tough talk of killing enemies since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration still shrinks from using the word assassination, and much of the public continues to oppose it as both dangerous and wrong--dangerous because it commits the United States to a campaign of murder and countermurder, and wrong because hunting people down, however it plays in the movies, excuses murder by calling it something else.
Mr. Hussein himself doubtless understands the first argument, since the man leading the effort to kill him now--President Bush--is the son of a man Mr. Hussein tried to have murdered a decade ago.
Here are two anecdotes about the great American suspense novelist Patricia Highsmith. When she heard President John F. Kennedy launch into his “Ask not what your country can do for you . . .” speech on television, she left the room and went into the kitchen to feed the cats. And when she was drawing up her will, she wavered between bequeathing her fortune to the Yaddo Arts Colony and the Palestinian Intifada. Yaddo got it, but it’s hard to imagine any other major American novelist of the late-20th century considering the latter as a legatee. Even William Burroughs wasn’t that alienated from mainstream American life.
People are strange, as Jim Morrison once sang, but Patricia Highsmith was a lot stranger than most. Like Paul Bowles and Gore Vidal, her fellow novelists-in-exile (with whom she corresponded), she stood at a slight angle to the American universe. In Andrew Wilson’s fascinating — if a bit too long--new biography, Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith, there are photographs of the young author in 1949, standing on the deck of a ship about to sail from New York to Europe. She looks radiantly happy. The Old World was where she, and her heroes (they were almost always men), wanted to be.
Six years later, Tom Ripley, the Europhile antihero of The Talented Mr. Ripley, would make the same journey. Highsmith described his feelings about the city as he prepared to leave:
The atmosphere of the city became stranger as the days went on. It was as if something had gone out of New York--the realness or the importance of it--and the city was putting on a show just for him, a colossal show with its buses, taxis and hurrying people on the sidewalks . . . As if when his boat left the pier on Saturday, the whole city of New York would collapse with a poof like a lot of cardboard on a stage.
As a writer, Highsmith is pretty much sui generis. She wrote whydunits rather than whodunits, and her novels are closer in spirit to those of her literary heroes--Dostoyevsky, Camus, Poe--than to most books filed under “Mystery.” Graham Greene dubbed her “the poet of apprehension,” and Will Self said that reading Strangers on a Train brought him face to face with an almost physically palpable sense of evil. What has most disturbed readers--particularly of the Ripley novels--is the feeling that not only does Highsmith refuse to judge her murderous hero, but she approves of him as well--goading him on, in book after book, to kill and get away with it so he can live the good life in the French countryside.(The name of Ripley’s country home, Belle Ombre--Beautiful Shadow--is where Wilson gets his title.) This amorality is probably why she did better in Europe than in the States.
2:00 P.M. RICKEY AND ROBINSON: THE MEN WHO BROKE BASEBALL'S COLOR LINE Book Talk
Blending exclusive interviews with Rachel Robinson, Mack Robinson (Jackie's brother), Hall of Famers Monte Irvin, Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Roy Campanella, Ralph Kiner and others, celebrated author Harvey Frommer evokes the lives of Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey and Hall of Fame baseball player Jackie Robinson to describe how they worked together to shatter baseball's color line. Rickey and Robinson is a dual biography that traces the lives of two of baseball's most influential individuals in a special moment in sports and cultural history.
3:00 P.M. A YANKEE CENTURY Book Talk
Enjoy a talk by A Yankee Century (Berkley Publishing Group, 2002) author Harvey Frommer, exploring the history of the New York
Yankees-including famous quips and quotes, facts and figures, anecdotes, and personal profiles revealing what has made the Yankees the most celebrated team in baseball history. "Yankee Fans who can't learn enough about their team will think they died and went to heaven." Publishers Weekly.
Book signings to follow.
Let's start with the leader of this writer's homeland, Germany. Having just excelled in the Iraq crisis as postwar Germany's premier diplomatic underperformer, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has now slipped into the role of what we call "beleidigte Leberwurst," or miffed liver sausage.
Because a demented undersecretary in Italy's ministry of tourism badmouthed Germans roasting their bellies on beaches along the Adriatic coast, Chancellor Schroeder, ever the populist, cancelled his holiday in that man's land, where leading German leftists have been summering ever since the late 1960s - chiefly in enchanting Tuscany.
Instead, Herr Schroeder will relax among his garden dwarves, if indeed he has some of those on the plot of land surrounding his Hanover home. Anyway, that's where he'll be, and other prominent Social Democrats have threatened to follow his example.
In other words, they vowed: Let's engage in virtual combat. Let's punish Italian pizza bakers, hoteliers and waiters vicariously for the nasty stuff tourism official Stefano Stefani has said about his German ex-wife's fellow countrymen.
He labeled them beer-swilling nationalistic boors. Acually, this characterization does in fact apply to some of the hordes manning the beeches of Rimini, where you won't exactly find Germany's elite in July and August. Still it doesn't make much sense to insult a nation providing Italy with 40 percent of its tourism revenues.
Of course, the most suave member of Schroeder's cabinet, foreign minister Joschka Fischer, will not stay home in order to avenge the Fatherland; like eight million other Germans he will travel to Italy to rest up.
What we don't know, though, is this: Had he originally planned to vacation in Sweden? If so, a ranking Stockholm politician' thoughts for the summer might have put him off. She labeled him a terrorist. That description was blatantly unfair. We all know that back in the revolutionary late 1960s Fischer was a nasty thug battling cops -- but a terrorist? No, surely not - not a terrorist!
The wind was blowing through Malibu's Decker Canyon on the day Millie Decker stepped out onto her back porch and heard the distant clatter of helicopters. Moments later, several wide-bellied prop planes roared overhead. Millie could not yet smell the smoke or see the flames, because the wind was at her back, but she knew that a fire was coming, and she was determined to fight it. She moved quickly across her property, checking the shovels and gunnysacks and barrels of water with which she would save her ranch, just as her extended family has been doing it since the 1880s.
At 83, Millie Decker is Malibu's dust-strewn memory. She remembers when Point Dume was just a grassy mesa, the Pacific Coast Highway just a rutted trail, and Malibu was home to more cowboys than people who played them in the movies. Millie has known her share of danger - taming wild horses, riding crazed bulls, detonating dynamite - but nothing has tested her nerve like the wildfires that periodically ravage the area. Like the one that was burning its way up Decker Canyon that day last January. But this time, something unusual happened: Millie's son, Chip, called to say that she would have to evacuate; minutes later, a family friend named Kim Tipper arrived to escort her to safety. "I know you're going to give me hell," she told her, "but I have to do this." Of course, Millie objected, said she wasn't going, reminded Kim that she had never once fled from a fire. But when it was clear that Kim would not back down, she gathered up her two dogs, climbed into her 1969 powder-blue Chevy pickup truck and headed up the canyon to a neighbor's ranch, where she waited out the fire.
"That was the first time I ever left for a fire," Millie told me, "and it gave me a bad feeling. I guess my kids think I am getting too old, but I would have liked to stay and
fight. I am not as fast as I used to be, but I think I could have handled myself - the way I always have."
Millie Decker is the last of a kind. She is known by many as the last of the Malibu hillbillies. She is also the last of the Decker clan, though only by marriage - her husband Jimmy, who died in 1991, was the last of the bloodline Deckers to live in the canyon. At one time, Decker Canyon was inhabited almost entirely by the Decker family. The original family members were homesteaders - most likely a mix of war veterans, tenant farmers and disgruntled Midwesterners looking for a better life and a bit of free land. Under the 1862 Homestead Act, they were entitled to as much as 160 acres, and they found it in the dusty canyons above Malibu. The children attended the Decker Schoolhouse, where they allegedly referred to one another as "cousin." Like the Scottish clans of old, the Deckers melded family and place until both had just one name. No one in the family spoke of "Decker Canyon," or "Decker Road," just "Decker." Yet as wealthy industry types began migrating to Malibu in increasing numbers, property taxes went through the roof, and the Deckers slowly moved away. All that remains now is Millie's ranch.
The United States defines its global "war on terrorism" as a defensive effort to protect its way of life, beyond attacks from enemies with alien cultural and religious motives, to attacks from those who reject modernity itself. This definition is derived from the views of historian Bernard Lewis, a scholar of Islamic culture at Princeton University, who traces Islamic opposition to the West beyond hostility to specific interests or actions or policies or even countries, to rejection of Western civilization for what it is. To
Lewis, Western civilization stands for modernity. This anti-modernity attitude, he warns, is what lends support to the ready use of terror by Islamic fundamentalists.
Samuel Huntington in his The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order argues that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War will bring neither peace nor worldwide acceptance of liberal democracy. Huntington rejects Francis Fukuyama's prematurely optimistic "end of history" theme that the collapse of communism means Western civilization is destined to spread as people elsewhere seek the benefits of technology, wealth, and personal freedom it offers. Instead, because technology has been reserved for exploitation, wealth obscenely maldistributed, and freedom selectively denied to the powerless, narrow ideological conflict will transform into conflicts among people with different religions, values, ethnicities, and historical memories. These cultural factors define civilizations. Nations will increasingly base alliances on common civilization rather than common ideology; and wars will tend to occur along the fault lines between major civilizations.
Huntington points out that embracing materialist science, industrial production, technical education, rootless urbanization, and capitalistic trade does not mean the rest of the world will embrace the culture of the West. On the contrary, he argues that economic growth is likely to increase the aspiration for cultural sovereignty, breeding a new commitment to the values, customs, traditions, and religions of native cultures. The struggle is not capitalism against communism, but backward civilization against modern civilization.
The fault in both these views is the assumption that modernity is an exclusive characteristic of the West. On the surface, such views appear self-evident, since science and technology have been the enabling factors behind Western ascendance and dominance. But the "modern world" can be viewed as a brief aberration on the long path of human destiny, a brief period of a few centuries when narcissistic Western thinkers mistake technological development as moral progress in human civilization. Many barbaric notions, racism being the most obvious, appear under the label of modernity, rationalized by a barbaric doctrine of pseudo-science. The West takes advantage of the overwhelming power it has derived from its barbaric values to set itself up as a superior civilization. The West views its technical prowess as a predatory license for intolerance of the values and traditions of other advanced cultures.
Promoters of this Western version of modernity see its birth in the West through a radical transformation of its past. [...]
Yet this view of modernity misreads history. Thomas Aquinas (1225-71) benefited intellectually from his exposure to translations of works of Aristotle from Greek into Latin by Arab scholars to whose world view he became much indebted. He also profited intellectually from the rise of universities in Europe during 12th and 13th centuries, notably the University of Bologna (1088), known for its studies in law, the University of Padua (founded by dissidents from Bologna), the University of Paris, and Oxford University, all founded as centers of learning in theology, not science. In this new intellectual milieu in Europe, Aquinas applied Aristotelian syllogism as interpreted by Arab minds to medieval mysticism of revelation. His Summa Theologica (1267-73) was a systematic exposition of theology on rational philosophical principles worked out by the ancient Greeks as modified by Arab precision and algebra, which pioneered the use of variables in problem-solving in logic. [...]
St Thomas Aquinas, nicknamed Dumb Ox because of his slow and deliberate manner of speech, brilliant father of Neo-Scholasticism, aiming to resolve the dispute between Averroists and Augustinians, would hold that reason and faith constitute two harmonious realms in which the truth of faith complements that of reason, both being gifts of God, but reason having an autonomy of its own. The existence of God could therefore be discovered through reason, with the grace of God.
The theological significance of this momentous claim by Thomas Aquinas cannot be over-emphasized. It would save Christianity from falling into irrelevance in the Age of Reason, sometimes referred to as the Enlightenment, and preserve tolerance for faith among rational thinkers in the scientific world. The Thomist claim remained unchallenged for five centuries until David Hume (1711-86) pointed out in his Inquiry into Human Understanding that since the conclusion of a valid inference could contain no information not found in the premise, there could be no valid conclusion from observed to unobserved phenomena.
Hume let the logic air out of the Thomist natural-theology balloon, and in the process showed that even general laws of science could not be logically justified beyond their own limits, perhaps even including his own sweeping conclusion. Hume, the empiricist, would logically determine that logic is circular and goes nowhere: a classic position of Taoist skepticism.
In his quest for a seat in the U.S. Senate, Rep. Mark Foley has rankled a group that is barely covered in most elections: nudists.
Foley, of West Palm Beach, has hit the national TV and radio talk-show circuit in recent weeks to bash a Tampa-area summer camp not unlike most camps -- except that the boys and girls, ages 11-18, are naked.
Foley, a Republican hoping to replace Sen. Bob Graham, says that letting naked teenagers play together is immoral and potentially dangerous.
But ''naturists'' who say the camp exposes their children to a perfectly healthy and wholesome education see something more calculated: A candidate with a reputation as a social moderate on issues such as gay rights and abortion has found a convenient target to boost his reputation among conservatives who decide GOP primaries.
A group of camp representatives and officials of the American Association for Nude Recreation is scheduled to meet with Foley today in West Palm Beach. ''We're going to tell him that what he's doing is irresponsible and malicious,'' said Shirley Mason, a Miami naturist and former association board member. ``The fact is these children are naturists and have grown up with naturists.''
I just saw Finding Nemo. Trusted friends (adults and children alike) told me it is a must-see. But my wife and I still emerged from the theater wondering what, exactly, we had just received for our investment of $15 and two hours of our life.
"To praise, exalt, establish, and defend." The great Roman Catholic journalist and author G. K. Chesterton, in one of his gem-like short essays, urged all Christians to do these things when they came across worthy literary or artistic expressions. Modern literature, media, and culture contain little that is positive or edifying, said Chesterton. Those that don't major on the degraded, the corrupt, and the dysfunctional still blow an uncertain trumpet. They haven't much to offer that can build up audiences.
Chesterton argued that it's our job as Christians to seek out cultural products that say something worth saying-and then to recommend them to others. "Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable-if anything is excellent or praiseworthy-think about such things" (Philippians 4:8).
Certainly, Finding Nemo is artistically well done, sweetly humorous, untainted by any of the decadence that so disturbed Chesterton. But the problem my wife and I had with it is this: We've seen it all before. It's the Disney formula. Despite the (tired) theme of love between father and son, in the end it's just well produced mind-candy. Its message is pasteurized. It does not feed much in us beside the desire to be entertained.
The basketball sneakers worn by Larry Bird and Michael Jordan will find themselves on the same team after Nike Inc. said last night it has agreed to acquire Converse Inc. of North Andover.
Nike, based in Beaverton, Ore., valued the deal at $305 million, saying it consisted of an undisclosed amount of cash as well as the assumption of debt.
Founded in 1908, Converse's simple canvas Chuck Taylor high-tops became one of the most storied athletic products and were worn by many Boston Celtics, including Bird. But beginning in the 1980s the company failed to keep up with the emergence of Nike's new shoe technologies, not to mention the marketing machine it developed behind Chicago Bulls star Jordan.
The investment group that bought Converse out of bankruptcy in 2001 for $117 million had put a management team in place, and those managers will stay on, including chief executive Jack Boys, Joani Komlos, a Nike spokeswoman said. Nike will run Converse as a separate unit.
Question: Since you are a satirical novelist and since the main source of the satirist's energy is anger about something amiss or wrong about the world, what is the main target of your anger in The Thanatos Syndrome?
Answer: It is the widespread and ongoing devaluation of human life in the Western world--under various sentimental disguises: "quality of life," "pointless suffering," "termination of life without meaning," etc. I trace it to a certain mind-set in the biological and social sciences which is extraordinarily influential among educated folk -- so much so that it has almost achieved the status of a quasi-religious orthodoxy.
If I had to give it a name, it would be something like the "Holy Office of the Secular Inquisition." It is not to be confused with "secular humanism," because, for one thing, it is anti-human. Although it drapes itself in the mantle of the scientific method and free scientific inquiry, it is neither free nor scientific. Indeed, it relies on certain hidden dogma where dogma has no place.
I can think of two holy commandments which the Secular Inquisition lays down for all scientists and believers. The first: In your investigations and theories, thou shalt not find anything unique about the human animal even if the evidence points to such uniqueness. Example: Despite heroic attempts to teach sign language to other animals, the evidence is that even the cleverest chimpanzee has never spontaneously named a single object or uttered a single sentence. Yet dogma requires that, despite traditional belief in the soul or the mind, and the work of more recent workers like Pierce and Langer in man's unique symbolizing capacity, Homo sapiens sapiens be declared to be not qualitatively different from other animals.
Another dogma: Thou shalt not suggest that there is a unique and fatal flaw in Homo sapiens sapiens or indeed any perverse trait that cannot be laid to the influence of Western civilization. [...]
It is easy to criticize the absurdities of fundamentalist beliefs like "scientific creationism" --that the world and its creatures were created six thousand years ago. But it is also necessary to criticize other dogmas parading as science and the bad faith of some scientists who have their own dogmatic agendas to promote under the guise of "free scientific inquiry." Scientific inquiry should, in fact, be free.
The warning:
If it is not, if it is subject to this or that ideology, then do not be surprised if the history of the Weimar doctors is repeated. Weimar leads to Auschwitz. The nihilism of some scientists in the name of ideology or sentimentality and the consequent devaluation of individual human life lead straight to the gas chamber.
Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive story-telling. And, in fact, the somewhat ferro-concrete fairy tale the author pours here is, basically, the old one known as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides of it are caricatures. [...]
So the Children of Light win handily by declaring a general strike of brains, of which they have a monopoly, letting the world go, literally, to smash. In the end, they troop out of their Rocky Mountain hideaway to repossess the ruins. It is then, in the book's last line, that a character traces in the air, "over the desolate earth," the Sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross, and in token that a suitably prostrate mankind is at last ready, for its sins, to be redeemed from the related evils of religion and social reform (the "mysticism of mind" and the "mysticism of muscle").
That Dollar Sign is not merely provocative, though we sense a sophomoric intent to raise the pious hair on susceptible heads. More importantly, it is meant to seal the fact that mankind is ready to submit abjectly to an elite of technocrats, and their accessories, in a New Order, enlightened and instructed by Miss Rand's ideas that the good life is one which "has resolved personal worth into exchange value," "has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment.'" The author is explicit, in fact deafening, about these prerequisites. Lest you should be in any doubt after 1168 pages, she assures you with a final stamp of the foot in a postscript: "and I mean it." But the words quoted above are those of Karl Marx. He, too, admired "naked self-interest" (in its time and place), and for much of the same reasons as Miss Rand: because, he believed, it cleared away the cobwebs of religion and led to prodigies of industrial and cognate accomplishment.
The overlap is not as incongruous as it looks. Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent. And as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is a sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the state of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel. Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc. etc. (This book's aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned "higher morality," which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.
At that point, in any materialism, the main possibilities open up to Man. 1) His tragic fate becomes, without God, more tragic and much lonelier. In general, the tragedy deepens according to the degree of pessimism or stoicism with which he conducts his "hopeless encounter between human questioning and the silent universe." Or, 2) Man's fate ceases to be tragic at all. Tragedy is bypassed by the pursuit of happiness. Tragedy is henceforth pointless. Henceforth man's fate, without God, is up to him. And to him alone. His happiness, is strict materialist terms, lies with his own workaday hands and ingenious brain. His happiness becomes, in Miss Rand's words, "the moral purpose of his life." Here occurs a little rub whose effects are just as observable in a free enterprise system, which is in practice materialist (whatever else it claims or supposes itself to be), as they would be under an atheist Socialism, if one were ever to deliver that material abundance that all promise. The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence on "man as a heroic being" "with productive achievement as his noblest activity." For, if man's "heroism" (some will prefer to say: "human dignity") no longer derives from God, or is not a function of that godless integrity which was a root of Nietzsche's anguish, then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness. And this, of course, suits the author's economics and the politics that must arise from them.
For politics, of course, arise, though the author of Atlas Shrugged stares stonily past them, as if this book were not what, in fact it is, essentially- a political book. And here begins mischief. Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world's atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In a age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them. [...]
Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left, first surprisingly resemble, then in action tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purposed, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler's National Socialism and Stalin's brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?
Something of this implication is fixed in the book's dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind, which finds this one natural to it, shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: " To the gas chambers- go!"
I'd stopped listening to the actual lecture. But there are more ways than one of listening. I shut my eyes for a moment. The effect was curious. I seemed to see the fellow much better when I could only hear his voice.
It was a voice that sounded as if it could go on for a fortnight without stopping. It's a ghastly thing, really, to have a sort of human barrel-organ shooting propaganda at you by the hour. The same thing over and over again. Hate, hate, hate. Let's all get together and have a good hate. Over and over. It gives you the feeling that something has got inside your skull and is hammering down on your brain. But for a moment, with my eyes shut, I managed to turn the tables on him. I got inside his skull. It was a peculiar sensation. For about a second I was inside him, you might almost say I was him. At any rate, I felt what he was feeling.
I saw the vision that he was seeing. And it wasn't at all the kind of vision that can be talked about. What he's saying is merely that Hitler's after us and we must all get together and have a good hate. Doesn't go into details. Leaves it all respectable. But what he's seeing is something quite different. It's a picture of himself smashing people's faces in with a spanner. Fascist faces, of course. I know that's what he was seeing. It was what I saw myself for the second or two that I was inside him. Smash! Right in the middle! The bones cave in like an eggshell and what was a face a minute ago is just a great big blob of strawberry jam. Smash! There goes another! That's what's in his mind, waking and sleeping, and the more he thinks of it the more he likes it. And it's all O.K. because the smashed faces belong to Fascists. You could hear all that in the tone of his voice.
[M]ost surprising . . . were Truman's remarks on Jews, written on July 21, 1947, after the president had a conversation with Henry Morgenthau, the Jewish former treasury secretary. Morgenthau called to talk about a Jewish ship in Palestine -- possibly the Exodus, the legendary ship carrying 4,500 Jewish refugees who were refused entry into Palestine by the British, then rulers of that land.These passages from Harry Truman's diaries raise lots of interesting questions, but I think I'll focus on making fun of the left.
"He'd no business, whatever to call me," Truman wrote. "The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement [sic] on world affairs. Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed."
Truman then went into a rant about Jews: "The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes."
In terms of brutality, systematic repression, number of killings, relish for torture, sum total of human misery caused, Charles Taylor is a piker next to Saddam Hussein. That is not to say that Charles Taylor is a better man. It is only to say that in his tiny corner of the world with no oil resources and no scientific infrastructure for developing instruments of mass murder, Taylor has neither the reach nor the power to wreak Saddam-class havoc. What is it that makes liberals like Dean, preening their humanitarianism, so antiwar in Iraq and so pro-intervention in Liberia?
The same question could be asked of the Democratic Party, which in the 1990s opposed the Persian Gulf War but overwhelmingly supported humanitarian interventions in places like Haiti and Kosovo.
They all had a claim on the American conscience. What then was the real difference between, say, Haiti and Gulf War I, and between Liberia and Gulf War II? The Persian Gulf has deep strategic significance for the United States; Haiti and Liberia do not. In both Gulf wars, critical American national interests were being defended and advanced. Yet it is precisely these interventions that liberals opposed.
The only conclusion one can draw is that for liberal Democrats, America's strategic interests are not just an irrelevance, but a deterrent to intervention. This is a perversity born of moral vanity. For liberals, foreign policy is social work. National interest - i.e., national selfishness - is a taint. The only justified interventions, therefore, are those which are morally pristine, namely, those which are uncorrupted by any suggestion of national interest.
Hence the central axiom of left-liberal foreign policy: The use of American force is always wrong, unless deployed in a region of no strategic significance to the United States.
For more than 30 years, the Mujahedeen Khalq, or People's Mujahedeen, has survived and operated on the margins of history and the slivers of land that Saddam Hussein and French governments have proffered it. During the 1970's, while it was still an underground Iranian political movement, you could encounter some of its members on the streets of New York, waving pictures of torture victims of the shah's regime. In the 80's and 90's, after its leaders fled Iran, you could see them raising money and petitioning on university campuses around the United States, pumping photographs in the air of women mangled and tortured by the Islamic regime in Tehran. By then, they were also showing off other photographs, photographs that were in some ways more attention-grabbing: Iranian women in military uniforms
who brandished guns, drove tanks and were ready to overthrow the Iranian government. Led by a charismatic husband-and-wife duo, Maryam and Massoud Rajavi, the Mujahedeen had transformed itself into the only army in the world with a commander corps composed mostly of women.
Until the United States invaded Iraq in March, the Mujahedeen survived for two decades under the patronage of Saddam Hussein. He gave the group money, weapons, jeeps and military bases along the Iran-Iraq border -- a convenient launching ground for its attacks against Iranian government figures. When U.S. forces toppled Saddam's regime, they were not sure how to handle the army of some 5,000 Mujahedeen fighters, many of them female and all of them fanatically loyal to the Rajavis. The U.S soldiers' confusion reflected confusion back home. The Mujahedeen has a sophisticated lobbying apparatus, and it has exploited the notion of female soldiers fighting the Islamic clerical rulers in Tehran to garner the support of dozens in Congress. But the group is also on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations, placed there in 1997 as a goodwill gesture toward Iran's newly elected reform-minded president, Mohammad Khatami.
With the fall of Saddam and with a wave of antigovernment demonstrations across Iran last month, the Mujahedeen suddenly found itself thrown into the middle of Washington's foreign-policy battles over what to do about Iran. And now its fate hangs precariously between extinction and resurrection. A number of Pentagon hawks and policy makers are advocating that the Mujahedeen be removed from the terrorist list and recycled for future use against Iran. But the French have also stepped into the Persian fray on the side of the Iranian government -- who consider the Rajavis and their army a mortal enemy.
Out on the long, lonely highways of the West, the mythical backdrops for countless car commercials and millions of summer family vacations, the speed limits make criminals of everyone -- minor revolutionaries, even. Up ahead, nothing but sky and flattened jack rabbits. In the rearview mirror, ditto. How many more hours to Yellowstone National Park? With only the road signs themselves for landmarks, there's often no way to judge. And so, to convince himself that he's making progress, Dad kicks it up to 80, 85, and then -- as the kids start whining for a bathroom break -- to a solid 90; 90 feels right. Sure, it's against the law, but what's the law, particularly to an American with a V-8, an empty cooler and a full bladder? The law is a nag. The law is petty, irrelevant. Speed kills -- of course it does. But slowness tortures, particularly when the next town on the map (which may or may not turn out to be a town, in the sense of having a gas station or a store) is exactly 216 miles away.
For anyone who has ever undergone such Western automotive agonies and reacted by putting human law aside and heeding natural law instead (Thou Shalt Reach Old Faithful Before Dark), no news could be more intriguing than the following: according to a recent academic study, raising speed limits to 70 miles per hour, and even higher, has no effect whatsoever on the death rates of young and middle-aged male drivers. That's right, guys: if you're under 65 and you find yourself cruising the great wasteland somewhere between Denver and Portland, say, you can rev things up with a clear conscience -- soon maybe even in Oregon, whose Legislature is considering upping its maximum speed limit from a poky, painful 65 to a brisk and wholesome 70.
Like most studies that seem to grant us leave to indulge our lazy, bad habits, this one comes with an asterisk, unfortunately, that it would be cruel not to disclose (despite the fact that as a young male Westerner I'd love to bury the finding in a footnote): higher speed limits do increase the death rates of women and the elderly.
Now that the Senate has blocked President Bush's plan to cap jury awards in medical malpractice cases, the battle will only intensify during next year's elections. At its essence, the fight comes down to doctors versus lawyers.
In Washington politics, that means Bill Frist versus John Edwards.
Dr. Frist, a heart-lung transplant surgeon who relishes his role as the Senate's only physician, has deftly used his new job as Republican leader to press Mr. Bush's case that frivolous lawsuits are driving up malpractice premiums, putting doctors out of business and patients at risk. The quashing of the bill Wednesday by Democrats was expected, but now Republicans plan to take their argument on the road, especially in states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, Florida and West Virginia, where the malpractice crisis is acute.
Senator Edwards, a Democratic presidential contender, is precisely the kind of man Mr. Bush and Dr. Frist rail against: a plaintiff's lawyer who has made millions representing victims of malpractice. Following Wednesday's Senate vote, Republicans in his home state, North Carolina, are already attacking him as a "lackey for trial lawyers" - a message Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster, calls "the political subtext" of the malpractice debate.
Republicans, who have been pressing for tort law changes since long before Dr. Frist and Mr. Edwards joined the Senate, are now using the malpractice debate to stake a claim to voters' concerns about rising health care costs. But with the debate intensifying, these two men stand as convenient symbols, almost as if the conflict has come to life inside the Capitol in the person of the senators from North Carolina and Tennessee.
Whatever the spin, and whatever the cost - at least in the short to medium term - in US casualties, the game plan remains to occupy and control Iraq for years. Iraqi sources inside the country and in Jordan and Egypt have confirmed information already circulated by the Israeli website DEBKA-Net-Weekly that the Americans are spending US$500 million to build two giant intelligence facilities: one north of Mosul, in Kurdish territory, and another in Baghdad's middle-class Saadun neighborhood on the Tigris River's east bank. This massive military presence may be a throwback to when the United States had a faithful regional gendarme, the Shah of Iran. But the facilities are necessary in order to enforce the economic agenda that really matters to Washington: the privatization of Iraq's economy and most of all the exploitation of its immense oil reserves.
This will mark the end of an era, and will be the ultimate graphic demonstration by the United States of what happens to regimes that dare to defy the superpower - or outlast their usefulness, as was Saddam's case. The Iraq Petroleum Co was nationalized in June 1972. It was a progressive nationalization: first the oilfields in the northeast, then - during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war - what was controlled by Exxon, Mobil and Shell. Finally, in 1975, what was controlled by British Petroleum and the Compagnie Francaise des Petroles. From 1975 until the embargo applied in response to the invasion of Kuwait, in 1990, Iraq controlled 100 percent of the exploitation of its oil resources.
Anglo-Americans have never forgiven Iraq for this move. The British have never forgiven the Ba'ath Party for ending their more than half a century of influence in Mesopotamia - and making it even worse by opening the doors of Iraq and the Persian Gulf to France. The United States for its part has never forgiven Iraq for setting an example to the developing world and for taking the lead in a sort of front of Arab export countries when the Organization of Petroleum Export Countries (OPEC) was created in 1973.
What the High Court decided was that the United States Constitution does not allow for laws that prohibit a particular sort of private behavior. That is no small matter, to be sure, and in fact raises the unsettling prospect of the High Court similarly declaring unconstitutional laws prohibiting things like incest between consenting adults, or polygamous and polyandrous (multi-husband) arrangements, or bestiality (which has its advocates, like Princeton Professor Peter Singer).
But the recent High Court decision, in the end, we must remember, speaks to the Constitution, not the Torah; to the law of mortals, not the Creator; to the police powers of the state, not the moral power of our faith.
Nor, for that matter, does the ongoing "culture war" to which Justice Scalia made reference have any bearing on ultimate truth - at least not for a people whose peoplehood was forged at the foot of Mt. Sinai.
Society all around us may be moving in a direction where the stigma once attached to homosexual activity may be astonishingly disappearing, but the words of Leviticus remain beyond even Houdini's reach. [...]
The societal and jurisprudential acceptance of homosexual relationships is troubling enough. But when acts the Torah clearly forbids in the strongest terms are embraced, or even considered for embrace, by Jewish religious leaders who exercise their leadership by consulting "where society is" rather than where it should be, adjectives simply fail.
Jews faithful to the Torah -- to the Jewish laws and ideals that have been transmitted carefully and zealously over the ages -- would do well these days to remind themselves that, no matter how larger society may evolve or devolve, we are heirs to a timeless religious tradition.
The current American cultural milieu will redefine morality as it sees fit. So, for better or worse, will religious organizations and movements. But Jews, whatever their affiliation or lack of one, or whatever their "pressure point"-sensitive rabbis may tell them, are a people chosen to show the world what it means to bend human wills to that of the Creator of all.
It stands to reason that Canadians who grew up 200 miles from Detroit are a better bet to navigate America's anti-terror tripwires than, say, native-born Kuwaitis or Yemenis. That's why the FBI and CIA were so concerned about Abdulrahman Mansour Jabarah, 24, an al-Qaeda suspect killed on July 3 by Saudi authorities in a firefight near the Jordanian border. Jabarah is the older brother of Mohammed "Sammy" Jabarah, who is currently in U.S custody and has, according to U.S. officials, admitted involvement in a series of al-Qaeda plots in Southeast Asia. What marks the Jabarah brothers as somewhat unique among al-Qaeda operatives is their background as Canadians - their Iraqi father and Kuwaiti mother had emigrated to St. Catherines, Ontario, about 200 miles north of Detroit, in 1994. The boys are believed to have traveled to Pakistan and joined Al Qaeda in the late 1990s, and despite his relative youth, one U.S. official describes the brother killed last week as "a nasty, nasty man."
The FBI believes that al-Qaeda recruiters are aggressively enrolling youths like the Jabarahs, with U.S., Canadian or Western European passports and good command of the English language and the North American interior. While the network had always tried to recruit people with U.S. and other Western passports, FBI counter-terrorism chief Larry Mefford recently revealed that al-Qaeda was "refocusing its efforts" to sign on disaffected Americans, green-card holders and Muslims who had spent time
in the U.S. as students or visitors who had a good command of English and a working knowledge of American society and culture. This effort comes in response to the Bush administration's tightening up the supply of visas available to would-be visitors from nations such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, Pakistan, Egypt and Southeast Asian countries where al-Qaeda has a strong presence. Recruits with greater access to and knowledge of the U.S. have a better chance of navigating some of the traps set by U.S. and Canadian authorities to catch terrorists coming from abroad.
The time has come for us brights to come out of the closet. What is a bright? A bright is a person with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist world view. We brights don't believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny - or God. We disagree about many things, and hold a variety of views about morality, politics and the meaning of life, but we share a disbelief in black magic - and life after death.
The term "bright" is a recent coinage by two brights in Sacramento, Calif., who thought our social group - which has a history stretching back to the Enlightenment, if not before - could stand an image-buffing and that a fresh name might help. Don't confuse the noun with the adjective: "I'm a bright" is not a boast but a proud avowal of an inquisitive world view.
You may well be a bright. If not, you certainly deal with brights daily. That's because we are all around you: we're doctors, nurses, police officers, schoolteachers, crossing guards and men and women serving in the military. We are your sons and daughters, your brothers and sisters. Our colleges and universities teem with brights. Among scientists, we are a commanding majority. Wanting to preserve and transmit a great culture, we even teach Sunday school and Hebrew classes. Many of the nation's clergy members are closet brights, I suspect. We are, in fact, the moral backbone of the nation: brights take their civic duties seriously precisely because they don't trust God to save humanity from its follies.
This past century, the bloodiest in all of human history, should have lain to rest two of the most cherished theories about mankind postulated by the Enlightenment and Secular Humanism.
One was the idea that all moral questions, all issues of right and wrong, good and evil, were subject to being correctly decided on the basis of man's reason alone, without the necessity (better put, without the interference) of divine revelation or organized religion. Man, and man alone, would be the final and autonomous arbiter of morality.
This idea brought with it, as a necessary corollary, the firm belief that man left to his own reasoning devices would invariably choose to do what is right, what promotes life and fairness and the common good.
This second idea of man's innate choice of goodness was aided and abetted by an arrogant belief that an educated person was more likely to do good than an illiterate one - that a Ph.D. graduate would be less likely to kill, harm, maim and destroy than a poor, hardscrabble, backwards farmer.
But none of these theories have proven true. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Milosevic and the entire slew of other murderers of the 20th century have all given the lie to these fantasies about human morality and rectitude. One-third of all of the commandants of the Nazi death camps held either a Ph.D. or M.D. degree. Man, left to his own reason, will not choose right. Reason, by itself, is death and destruction, oppressive theories and murderous social engineering. No faith and no belief have led us to the brink of the social abyss of self-destruction.
Fearful of losing ground to Republicans on the potent issue of Medicare, House Democrats today began broadcasting television commercials attacking Republican lawmakers around the country for their support of the House-passed plan to create a new prescription drug benefit.
Democrats, who have long considered the health plan for the elderly one of their signature programs, say they are so determined to protect their legacy that they have taken the step of starting an advertising campaign more than a year before Election Day and even before the final version of the legislation has cleared the House and Senate. [...]
The early commercials illustrate the central role that the drug plan is likely to play in next year's campaigns. The advertisements are also a clear sign that Democrats are worried that Republicans and President Bush, with their support for a new $400 billion benefit, are poised to get credit on the issue.
"I think it is essentially a fact that the historic advantage that we have had as a party on this issue has significantly eroded," said Carter Eskew, a Democratic strategist. "In the short term, Democrats are behind the message eight ball, at least temporarily."
The Rev. Al Sharpton is telling friends he welcomes the sudden rise of Howard Dean to the top tier of Democratic presidential candidates because the former governor of Vermont dilutes the white vote without attracting African-Americans.
Sharpton's strategy is to capture black voters while seven white candidates split the white vote. Off all top tier candidates, Dean has the least African-American support but now is near the lead of the largely white electorate in the first two tests of Iowa and New Hampshire. Sharpton counts on Dean to divide white voters in important primaries in South Carolina and Michigan, where African-Americans play a potentially decisive role.
State and local officials Wednesday discounted forthcoming population estimates that the federal government contends show Minneapolis and St. Paul losing residents at about the same rate as Rust Belt disaster zones such as Detroit and Cleveland.
According to U.S. Census figures to be released today, Minneapolis lost nearly 4,000 residents between 2001 and 2002. That may not sound like much in a city of 380,000 people. But in an era of central-city revival, a 1 percent drop gives Minneapolis the 10th-worst performance out of 242 U.S. cities of more than 100,000 people.
St. Paul wasn't much better, with an estimated loss of 2,300 people, 0.8 percent, tying it in percentage terms with Gary, Ind., as well as Pittsburgh.
But local experts pooh-poohed the federal estimates.
"There's a growing gap between what they are saying and what we believe is going on," said Tom Gillaspy, the state demographer.
And Minneapolis Planning Director Chuck Ballentine said he finds it "hard to believe" the figures show his city shrinking.
For Habermas, 9-11 is the result of a fundamentalism born of the clash of pre-modern and modern societies. Pre-modern societies ground their way of life in a faith or tradition whose coherence depends on core beliefs that remains unquestioned. Modernity rejects tradition in favor of reason to make sense of the natural world and human society. The pluralism of views unleashed by modernity need not result in chaos, according to Habermas, so long as we remain committed to one another as rational beings engaged in a constitutional process designed for the structured resolution of differences. But some traditionalists may reject the modern world, and potentially violent fundamentalist countermovements may result.
Habermas emphasizes that the modern-pre-modern conflict happens at any point in history in which reason seriously threatens tradition, although he acknowledges that globalization has radically exacerbated the modern-pre-modern divide and that between a callously prosperous West and a desperately poor and disenfranchised third world. A modernist himself, Habermas believes these problems to be soluble, but only through a global commitment to international institutions such as the UN, a will to repair gross economic inequalities, and a willingness to intervene in the internal affairs of sovereign nations. [...]
Both Habermas and Derrida remain heirs to the Kantian project of strengthening our international institutions and enlarging the spheres of human rights and economic equality. And so both--even Derrida--remain moderns. We may still be able to save ourselves, not by relying on the crutch of science, but by reinvigorating the political universalism of the Enlightenment and by radically rethinking the limits of law, nationality, and international relations.
There are grave obstacles to such an endeavor, and while Habermas and Derrida note some potential challenges, they sometimes seem smug in the view that Europe or the UN is somehow better adapted to global responsibility than the arrogant United States. For example, why should the U.S., or any nation, give up any of its sovereignty in favor of a UN that failed so dismally to protect the Tutsis of Rwanda or the Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica? And wouldn't a more muscular UN risk becoming a planetary dictatorship? And doesn't a stronger system of international laws imply a far more aggressive, and thereby potentially imperialistic, mandate to interfere in the domestic affairs of wayward nations?
Speaking of Iraq as a single, integrated country is a form of lying. Its borders were drawn by grasping European diplomats almost a century ago, with no regard for the wishes - or rivalries - of the local populations.
Today, the Iraq we're trying to herd back together consists of three distinct nations caged under a single, bloodstained flag. Our problems are with only one of those nations, the Sunni Arab minority west and north of Baghdad. [...]
The break-up of Iraq should proceed in two stages.
First, we should provisionally divide the country into a federation of three states, giving the Sunni Arabs one last chance to embrace reform.
* One state would encompass the Shi'ite region in the south, encompassing all of the southern oil fields.
* The second would be an expanded Kurdistan, including historically Kurdish Kirkuk and Mosul, as well as Iraq's northern oil fields.
* The third would be a rump Sunni Arab state sandwiched between the other two.
* Baghdad would become an autonomous district.
Detective fiction shares many concerns with religion: the contest between good and evil, the struggle of right with wrong. Back in the 1920s and '30s, the mystery genre included several noted practitioners also well-known for writing on spiritual matters: G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, Father Ronald A. Knox. But in our secular age, when it's even money if God will be capitalized (let alone mentioned) in a crime novel, mystery writers who admit to an interest in things of the spirit seem as rare, as Ross Macdonald once wrote, as the cardinal virtues in Hollywood.
Yet we now have Seeking Enlightenment . . . Hat by Hat (Putnam), a charming and thought-provoking spiritual memoir by Nevada Barr, the award-winning author of the mystery series featuring National Park Service ranger Anna Pigeon. This trim book--subtitled "A Skeptic's Path to Religion"--may be even more of a surprise to readers familiar with the adventures of Ms. Barr's heroine: Anna is an avowed atheist.
"But I don't think there's any such thing as a true atheist," says Ms. Barr from her home in Mississippi. "It's more that anything you're told doesn't make sense, so you just sort of bumble along assuming there's no cohesive higher power . . . even if there's one that occasionally will throw an earthquake your way." [...]
And the author--married now for eight years to her second husband, a retired park ranger--says she has no intention of forcing her series heroine toward some concept of monotheism akin to her own. "She just doesn't seem to be leaning that way. . . . And if you break your own character rules, it's bad art."
But that doesn't mean that Nevada Barr is letting Anna Pigeon off the hook: "I have been bringing religious people across her path, just to see what happens. . . . I think I will enjoy tormenting her with Christians."
It’s impossible to watch Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines without thinking about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s potential race for California governor. Many of the laugh lines he delivers in his signature killer-robot style could play a role in his upcoming campaign, as he emphasizes the faithful nature of his public service (“I’m programmed to follow your commands”), encourages righteous indignation against the Democratic incumbent (“Anger is more useful than despair”), justifies his own jokes as an aspiring politician (“Levity is good--it relieves tension and fear of death”) and even proclaims victory over his most entrenched and formidable opponent (“You’re terminated”).
“Enescu was the greatest musical phenomenon since Mozart.” Thus said Pablo Casals, no mean musician himself. Stokowski agreed: “I have known very many great musicians, and very few geniuses. Enescu was a genius.” Yehudi Menuhin, Enescu’s student from 1927, confessed, “Every time I play music, I still feel the presence of that most inspiring man, the greatest musician I’ve ever known.”
One hears the phrase “well-rounded musician” fairly regularly. But the tales of George Enescu’s musicianship invite disbelief. He made his living principally as a violinist, of course—one of the world’s finest in the era of giants like Kreisler, Flesch, and Heifetz. He was good enough a conductor to have been considered as Toscanini’s successor at the New York Philharmonic in 1936. He was an outstanding pianist—Alfred Cortot, one of his closest friends and perhaps the most important French pianist of his generation, asked Enescu why he, a violinist, had a better piano technique. He was at home with the cello and the organ.
In Bucharest, in 1937, Enescu was conducting a rehearsal of Act 3 of Wagner’s Siegfried when it was learned that the bass who was to sing Wotan was ill and couldn’t attend. Enescu sang the part from the podium, in a voice described as “incomparably full and exact,” and repeated the feat at the next day’s rehearsal. [...]
Perhaps the most astonishing illustration of the capacity of Enescu’s mind comes from a story Menuhin used to tell. He and his father were with Enescu when Ravel popped by with the score of his newly completed Violin Sonata; could they play it through?, he asked. Afterward, Enescu sought clarification on a few points, and they decided to play it again. Enescu closed his music and did the whole thing from memory.
From time to time, parents write to ask how they can counter all the steady diet of slanted political correctness their children are getting in the schools and colleges. The summer vacation is probably as good a time as any to get them something to read to let them know that there is another side of the story, other than the one that classroom propagandists keep forcing down their throats.
One book that every American ought to read is "The Federalist," also known as "The Federalist Papers," since it is a collection of popular 18th century essays written to explain to the general public why the government of the United States was being created the way it was in the Constitution. It is a gem. [...]
A landmark experience is reading "Life at the Bottom". by Theodore Dalrymple, about the effect of the welfare state on poor people and the social degeneracy to which it has led in Britain.
While readers in Sao Paulo or Kobe can simply enjoy the books' strong characters and plots, readers in this country can perceive a political bandwagon being pushed. Despite all of the books' gestures to multiculturalism and gender equality, Harry Potter is a conservative. A paternalistic, One-Nation Tory, perhaps, but a Tory nonetheless.
What the series portrays is a nostalgic and "small-c" conservative view of Britain. It's no coincidence that Rowling herself is an honorary member of the British Weights and Measures Association - which defends the ounce and pint, and calls the metric system "a political philosophy". Rowling's fellow members include Norris McWhirter, faithful friend of apartheid.
To the delight of the Daily Telegraph, the Harry Potter series is a priceless advertisement for traditional English public schools. Hogwarts is little more than the Rugby of Tom Brown's Schooldays with spells added. An indication of how closely it fits the archetype comes when Justin Finch-Fletchley tells Harry: "My name was down for Eton, you know, I can't tell you how glad I am I came here instead. Of course, mother was slightly disappointed."
Hogwarts' curriculum doesn't include teaching foreign languages, geography or overseas trips, despite the ease of magical travel. Naturally, there are no wizard comprehensives.
Reforming Social Security is almost certain to figure prominently in President Bush’s reelection campaign next year, pitting pro-privatization Republicans against Democrats worried about the ups and downs of a market-based pension system.
A source close to the president’s reelection campaign said Bush will run “big time” on revamping the Social Security system, a longstanding conservative goal.
And last month White House spokesman Ari Fleischer buttressed that remark, saying Social Security reform “remains a very important priority for the president.”
Fleischer indicated that now may not be the right time for that debate, given that Congress has been preoccupied with Medicare and AIDS legislation.
Asked if the right time is after the 2004 elections, Fleischer said: “I think the president will make that judgment as he works with the congressional leaders to determine when they believe the time is right so that it can actually do more than be debated but actually can be enacted.”
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), a member of the House Social Security Subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee, said reform could come in the 109th Congress. “What we’d like to do is run on it … so we have moral authority to act on it in ’05,” Ryan said.
A staffer for Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas), who also sits on the Social Security Subcommittee, agreed. “It will be, I predict, the big issue in the presidential campaign, on domestic [issues].”
Presidential politics and overhauling Medicare have stymied any genuine reform in 2003, Ryan said. And no one expects Congress or the White House to tackle a huge entitlement program such as Social Security in 2004, an election year.
The early money says that George W. Bush's primary legacy to the federal government will be his creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the largest reorganization of government resources in 50 years. Even though the government's top law enforcement agency, the FBI, was left out, and even though the department's pieces won't become an effective whole for many years, the stitching together of the Homeland Security Department is reshaping Washington -- again.
But in a decade or two, the verdict on Bush's legacy to government might well be a little different. Not because the creation of Homeland Security will seem less important, but because another Bush initiative promises to remake the government in even more fundamental ways. The president's radical aim is to eventually make upwards of 850,000 federal workers -- nearly half of the civilian workforce now protected by bureaucratic tradition and civil service rules -- compete against private contractors for their jobs every three to five years. So far, Bush has demanded that 425,000 face competition in the next few years, but he's also said that number won't be a ceiling for his administration. The administration seeks both to reduce the federal workforce by hundreds of thousands of workers and to force half of the government to justify why it should even be part of the government.
Past administrations' attempts to control the growth of government have been piecemeal -- defunding programs, or consolidating or eliminating agencies. Almost all have foundered on Capitol Hill, where committee chairmen derive power from the size of the bureaucracies they oversee. Significantly, Bush can put his plan into place through policy changes, without a moment of debate in Congress.
Nicolle Devenish, the spokesperson of the Bush-Cheney campaign, tells The Note that on Tuesday the 15th, Bush-Cheney will put up two categories of data on its web site: all the FEC-required stuff, plus more more more.
The campaign plans to post just under 20,000 donors who gave $200 or more, with close to 80% of those donors having complete information (occupation/address/etc.) listed, and the campaign is working all weekend trying to get higher compliance, which is admirable on at least two levels.
In addition, the campaign will put up all the donors who gave less than $200, and there will be about 80,000 of those (and, remember, that listing those donors is NOT required by the FEC), and the campaign will get to about 80% of those listed in that category with full information, which is extraordinary.
There will be no listing for Rangers and Pioneers yet, although some donors have amazingly hit Pioneer status already.
The bills that the House and Senate have sent to the conference committee would legislate two irreconcilable visions of health insurance and the roles of the state and the market. House Republicans, who passed their bill on almost a straight party-line vote, authorized tax subsidies to seniors who choose to opt out of Medicare to join HMOs. Those seniors whom the HMOs don't want -- the sicker ones, with chronic conditions -- will be left behind in Medicare, which will perforce become a more rickety, less sustainable program unable to compete with the private insurers.
The Democrats, by contrast, want to expand Medicare's reach by having it pay for seniors' prescription drugs. In the Senate, led by liberal warhorse Edward Kennedy, most of them voted for a bipartisan bill that did create that benefit, but in a fashion so spotty that it would cover only a quarter of seniors' drug expenses.
Two equal but opposite wagers have been made. Kennedy, noting that every universal benefit the government has created has gradually been expanded to meet the public's demands, is betting that the fragmentary coverage offered by the current bill would grow in time to a comprehensive universal program. His right-wing counterparts, meanwhile, believe that by subsidizing HMOs to pick apart the senior market, they can forestall Medicare's expansion and weaken government's role in health insurance.
Historically, major social legislation in America hasn't emerged from the melding of fundamental differences. Social Security and Medicare were enacted by Democrats who believed in those programs; the Civil Rights Act wasn't written by segregationists. Today, however, the public demand for prescription drug coverage has peaked when Congress is controlled by Republicans opposed to public insurance.
Any bill emerging from conference that includes elements of both visions, then, will not resemble our landmark social legislation. If anything, it will look like the Missouri Compromise -- the 1820 act in which the free states of the North and the slave states of the South tried to work out a formula for expanding their rival societies into the territories west of the Mississippi River.
Antonin Scalia is raging against the coming of the light.
Scalia's dissent from last week's epochal Supreme Court decision striking down Texas' anti-sodomy statute confirms Ayatollah Antonin's standing as the intellectual leader of the forces arrayed against equality and modernity in the United States. In establishing the deep historical roots of anti-gay sentiment in America, for instance, Scalia took pains to note the 20 prosecutions and four executions for consensual gay sex conducted in colonial times. He noted, approvingly, that even today, "many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children's schools or as boarders in their home."
Actually, back in 1978, a California electorate far more conservative than today's massively repudiated an initiative seeking to ban gays from teaching school, but this inconvenient fact -- and other evidence of a massive shift in public sentiment on gay rights -- doesn't have quite the legal majesty of those four colonial executions. (Scalia is uncharacteristically short on detail here. Were they hangings or burnings?) Scalia's justifications for discriminatory conduct sound terribly familiar. Change "homosexual" to "Negro" and Scalia is at one with the authors of Plessy v. Ferguson's mandate for "separate but equal" schools, and the judges who upheld anti-miscegenation statutes. Indeed, of the 13 states whose anti-sodomy statutes were struck down last Thursday, 10 were once slave states of the South. In what has always been the main event in American history -- the battle to expand the definition of "men" in Jefferson's mighty line on who's created equal -- these are the states that have had to be dragged along kicking and screaming.
[W]here, in the panoply of American presidents, do we situate Bush? He's not the first president to try to reconstruct the economic order. But the president who really attempted a general fix -- Franklin Roosevelt -- did so because the old order was plainly collapsing. No such situation exists today. Worse yet, what Bush is proposing is to erect a new economy by giving more power to the shakiest element -- the private-sector safety net -- of the old.
Just over a century ago, William McKinley set America on the course of acquiring a colonial empire, setting off a debate over America's proper role in the world every bit as impassioned as the one raging today. McKinley's path was a radical departure from past practice, but the United States was still a second-tier power. The shift did not destabilize the world. A half-century before that, James Polk plunged us into war with Mexico over considerable northern-state opposition (including, in the later phases of the war, that of Congressman Abraham Lincoln), but at that point, America was a third-tier power.
The three presidents who sought to build a multilateral framework for international affairs were Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Wilson's plan was killed in its crib when Congress refused to ratify our entry into the League of Nations. Roosevelt's and Truman's contributions -- setting up a structure of international law, bringing prosperity and freedom to Western Europe, cementing alliances with other democracies, containing and eventually defeating Soviet communism -- are the enduring triumphs of U.S. foreign policy. Bush seems bent on destroying Roosevelt's and Truman's handiwork, however, and substituting a far more grandiose version of Polk's and McKinley's, in what is distinctly a postcolonial world. As with his assault on Roosevelt's New Deal order, he professes to replace an architecture that may be flawed but certainly isn't broken -- in this case, with an empire not likely to be backed up by the consent of the governed.
None of these presidents, great or awful, seems quite comparable to Bush the Younger. There is another, however, who comes to mind. He, too, had a relentlessly regional perspective, and a clear sense of estrangement from that part of America that did not support him. He was not much impressed with the claims of wage labor. His values were militaristic. He had dreams of building an empire at gunpoint. And he was willing to tear up the larger political order, which had worked reasonably well for about 60 years, to advance his factional cause. The American president -- though not of the United States -- whom George W. Bush most nearly resembles is the Confederacy's Jefferson Davis.
Yes, I know: Bush is no racist, and certainly no proponent of slavery. He is not grotesque; he is merely disgraceful. But, as with Davis, obtaining Bush's defeat is an urgent matter of national security -- and national honor.
From the folks who brought us preemptive war, here comes preemptive peace.
The Defense Department intellectuals who have emerged as the dominant force in U.S. foreign policy had it all mapped out. While the debate raged over whether to go to war in Iraq, they dispatched a couple of hundred thousand troops to the region, establishing a fact on the ground that ultimately made the war unstoppable. Now, while the debate is just beginning over the nature of the interim government in postwar Iraq, they have dispatched a postwar government of their choosing to the Kuwait Hilton.
With the assistance of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, George W. Bush has emerged as an apt pupil of Nathan Bedford Forrest. In war and now in peace, he gets there first with the most men. Deployment precedes -- and damn near obviates -- debate.
Critics say the Third Way is empty of content - an invention of spin-doctors. But exactly the opposite is true. Third Way thinking is driven by policy innovation and the need to react to social change. Its outlines are as relevant as ever: the restructuring of the state and government to make them more democratic and accountable; a shake-up in welfare systems to bring them more into line with the main risks people face today; emphasis on job creation coupled with labour market reform; a commitment to fiscal discipline; investment in public services but only where linked to reform; investment in human capital as crucial to success in the knowledge economy; the balancing of rights and responsibilities of citizens; and a multilateralist approach to globalisation and international relations.
The right's recent electoral successes were not born from a new political ideology that can rival Third Way thinking. Compassionate conservatism may have helped George W. Bush to scrape into power but it is hardly a developed political philosophy. In Europe, the right has been propelled back to government on a wave of far-right populism. The universal themes of this "populist revolt" are anxieties about immigration, multiculturalism and crime. It is anti-establishment, reflecting disquiet about orthodox democratic mechanisms, and it taps into worries about loss of national identity in the EU and more generally about the impact of globalisation. The centre right has normalised some of these populist themes and incorporated them within its own perspectives. Its successes have been largely opportunistic.
The centre left remains in a strong position. But no one should doubt that there is a good deal of rethinking to do. Progressives must respond not only to the issues brought into focus by the populist right but also to wider global changes. The world has changed enormously since the early 1990s. At that time, the global environment seemed relatively benign, with the end of the cold war and the prospect of steady long-term economic growth. After September 11, 2001, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, mass protests against globalisation, the bursting of the stock market bubble and the subsequent corporate scandals, and with economic growth stuttering almost everywhere, things look more difficult.
Despite sometimes hysterical commentary that Bush has been ignoring North Korea's manufactured nuclear "crisis" and perhaps even escalating it with his "Axis of Evil" talk, Bush has been pursuing an assertive but low-key strategy that seems to be working. While panicky commentators continue to demand that the US engage Korean despot Kim Jong-il directly to avoid a worsening situation, Bush is staying the course of multilateral pressure and diplomatic isolation.
Unfortunately, all too-easily frightened analysts and editorialists fail to realize that caving in to blackmail is never a good negotiating tactic -- even more so when the threats are nuclear.
Fortunately Bush understands this and has avoided making the same strategic mistake Clinton made in 1994. Then Clinton, with Jimmy Carter's help, simply rewarded North Korea's threatening behavior, appeasing Kim Jong-il's equally belligerent father - Kim il-Song -- with economic incentives and ''peaceful'' nuclear technology. [...]
While some argue that going to the negotiating table is not the same as capitulating, Bush realizes that the North Korean goal is to engage the US in a restrictive process. Simply getting America to the table with threats continues the North Korean game, and allows them to put more pressure on the US to make concessions. Regardless of how aggressively the US was to negotiate, the North Koreans would continue their nuclear program and weapons proliferation while the US simply responded diplomatically - a no-win situation.
So Bush isn't playing this defensive game.
Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate whom Democrats blame for costing Al Gore the last presidential election, said today that he would decide later this year whether to seek the White House again, as a Green Party candidate or an independent. [...]
Mr. Nader also blamed the lack of news coverage of third-party candidates as one reason that Republicans and Democrats dominate the political process and that more than half of registered voters do not cast ballots. He cited Ross Perot, the Reform candidate in 1992 and 1996, as a rare exception, generating coverage largely because of his wealth and message.
"Perot shows that the American people are ready for a three-way race," he said, before referring to Mr. Perot's 18 percent showing in 1992. "He got 19 million votes, and that ain't chickenfeed."
Faced with failure rates that could bar tens of thousands of students from graduating, the California State Board of Education voted yesterday to postpone the consequences of its high school exit exam for two years.
The 9-to-0 decision came in the wake of a state-sponsored study showing that even if students continued to improve on the exam, as they typically do each year, about one of every five seniors would still have failed next year, when it was supposed to take effect.
By the state's own reckoning, that means as many as 92,000 students would have been denied diplomas in 2004. Now, the exit exams will take effect in 2006.
"From a moral and ethical point of view, our focus is on zero failure," said Reed Hastings, the board's president, adding that the extra time would allow the state's new curriculum to become "further penetrated into the school system."
The reprieve in California is the latest example of the reticence some states have shown when it comes time to impose the significant consequences of the testing movement they have pushed so avidly in recent years. More than two dozen states now have some form of make-or-break exams.
With academic standards being ratcheted up, and principals increasingly being held accountable for producing good results on statewide tests, most high schools in New York City will not accept young people who are over 17, have a history of school troubles, speak little English, or otherwise seem unlikely to be able to pass the Regents exams and graduate in a reasonable amount of time.
The [Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day High School] was created specifically to serve the students whom other high schools do not want, to give older students with adult responsibilities a second chance.
The school, in Gramercy Park, goes to great lengths to help its 800 students earn a high school diploma. Depending on their academic needs and personal circumstances, the students, who range in age from 17 to 21, can attend classes during the day, at night or on Sundays. In the school's basement, a nonprofit social service agency, Comprehensive Development Inc., uses more than $1 million in private donations to provide tutors, lawyers, social workers and help with anything students might need, like eyeglasses, jobs or a place to live.
While graduation is a milestone at every high school, it was especially precious for the 149 graduates who marched across the stage last week in hand-me-down caps and gowns from the Dalton School, to get diplomas that once seemed beyond their reach.
KENNETH CLARKE upset the Conservative Party's truce on Europe last night by accusing Iain Duncan Smith of pursuing a policy that would mean withdrawal from the European Union.
The former Conservative Chancellor alleged that the man who defeated him for the Tory leadership wanted to reduce the EU to a "free trade area and little more", and that his European stance was "in flat contradiction" to everything the Conservative Party had stood for when it was in government.
Mr Clarke's intervention, played down last night by the Tory leadership, came as Mr Duncan Smith made his most important speech so far on
European policy.
He went to Prague to call for a "democratic revolution" to achieve his vision of a "new Europe" of national democracies, and not of "soulless
supranational institutions".
In a fierce attack on the Franco-German axis, he accused "old Europe" of trying to bully the rest into believing that they had to accept their cherished ambitions, such as the euro and the new constitution, or else.
But Mr Duncan Smith tried to put himself at the head of a campaign by Europe's Centre Right to rally the incoming entrants to the EU to a future in which they did not have to sign up to the euro, the constitution or the common foreign and defence policies of the EU.
Mr Duncan Smith declared the Conservatives' commitment to membership of the EU. Although his speech was strongly Eurosceptic it did not point to withdrawal and aides said that members of the Shadow Cabinet were entirely happy with his address.
Liberia attained its independence as a republic in 1847. The Americo-Liberians, or Congos as they came to be called, stood in more or less the same relation to the native population as white colonists in Africa were later to do. Only three per cent of the population, they believed themselves to be in possession of a superior civilisation whose advantages it was their duty to spread to the benighted tribes around them.
The Americo-Liberians remained in power, through the influence of their all-pervasive True Whig Party, until 1980. Under the leadership of President Tubman (who died in 1971 after a cataract operation at the London Clinic), Liberia enjoyed for some years the highest growth rate of any country in the world.
At that time, the country seemed almost a fiefdom of the Firestone Rubber Company, Harvey S Firestone having planted 1,000,000 acres of Liberia, granted on easy terms, with rubber in the 1920s to break the British world monopoly on rubber production. To the American cultural influence was now added economic predominance.
Moreover, Liberia had suddenly become politically important to America. During the Second World War, the airfield at Robertfield was granted to the Americans as a re-fuelling station; and during the Cold War, Liberia became America's principal strategic listening-post and satellite station.
As the economy developed, the Americo-Liberians were forced by reality to co-opt more of the "native" population into the elite. Ever more students were sent to America for higher education, where many of them picked up the radical ideas of the time, and became rabble-rousers and demagogues.
After the violent and destructive riots in 1979 about a rise in the price of rice, fomented and fanned by the demagogues, William Tolbert, the last True Whig president of Liberia (who was also a Baptist minister, and was soon to be disembowelled in his bed), felt constrained as a sop to the demagogues to distance himself from Liberia's traditional policy of alliance with America, and turned, rhetorically at least, to the Left.
When Tolbert was overthrown in 1980 by a group of NCOs, of whom the semi-literate Samuel K Doe was soon to emerge the leader, and his cabinet massacred on the beach, there was popular rejoicing, and the demagogues thought they had come into their own. It appeared for a time as though the people had taken power from the top-hatted and tailed Americo-Liberian elite.
But Doe's idea of a popular revolution was soon revealed to be a clan-based kleptocracy, with himself as kleptocrat-in-chief.
On March 24, Halliburton, the giant energy-services company once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, announced that a subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, had signed a contract with the Army Corps of Engineers to put out oil fires in Iraq, as well as to evaluate and repair the Iraqi oil infrastructure. The announcement set off an angry reaction in some circles on Capitol Hill. On March 26, California Democratic representative Henry Waxman wrote a letter to the Corps demanding to know why the contract was signed "without any competition or even notice to Congress." On April 8, Waxman, joined by Democratic representative John Dingell, requested a General Accounting Office investigation, writing that "ties" between Cheney and Halliburton "have raised concerns about whether the company has received favorable treatment from the administration." On April 10, Waxman wrote the Corps again, demanding more information. More Waxman letters followed on April 16, May 6, and June 6.
Liberal voices in the press followed Waxman's lead. Writing in the Washington Post, columnist Michael Kinsley called the Halliburton contract "nation-building, Republican-style, with huge contracts awarded in secret to politically connected companies." The New York Times editorialized that the contract "looks like naked favoritism" and "undermines the Bush administration's portrayal of the war as a campaign for disarmament and democracy, not lucre."
One element missing from all the criticism was a serious examination of what the Halliburton contract actually involved and how it came to be signed. For example, was it really reached without competition, as Waxman charged? As it turns out, the evidence that is publicly available (some of it remains classified) suggests that Waxman's accusations are misleading at best and flat wrong at worst. It appears not only that there was not "naked favoritism" at work in the Halliburton contract, but that the Corps of Engineers, and the Bush administration, acted reasonably and properly in awarding the contract - no matter what Waxman says. [...]
The problem, from Henry Waxman's perspective, is that the investigation will likely show that both the government and Halliburton/KBR acted properly. Such a conclusion won't help Waxman's ongoing campaign to suggest that there is something inherently corrupt in the relationship between the Bush administration and Halliburton. Nor is the New York Times likely to editorialize about it. But if the president's critics really want the truth, they'll have to accept the results of the investigations they have demanded.
Mahmoud Abbas, prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, found his toughest battles this week weren't with Israelis, but with fellow Palestinians.
Tuesday, Mr. Abbas came under heavy fire from members of his Fatah party who mocked and denigrated his performance to date. On Wednesday, Fatah officials proposed curbing the power of Abbas's security minister, Mohammed Dahlan.
"People are clarifying where they stand, with the old school or the new school," says Mahdi Abdul-Hadi, director of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs in Jerusalem. "This is the chapter where people begin to change their seats. It's a dangerous time."
Mr. Abdul-Hadi, who describes the events of this week as an "open storm," describes the Palestinian political culture clash as one between incremental success and total victory. New polls suggest that the Palestinian public could throw its weight behind either camp, depending on events in the coming weeks and months. [...]
Most Palestinians see little difference in their lives since the US-backed road map peace plan was launched June 4. While Israeli troops pulled back from northern Gaza and from Bethlehem, they remain just outside those areas.
Freedom of movement, dismantling settlements and the outposts used to expand them, along with further troop withdrawals would make a difference to Palestinians and to Abbas' fortunes.
"If Abu Mazen is able to deliver on some or most of these elements, I believe he will regain the support he has lost," says Shikaki, using Abbas's popular nom de guerre.
As a new report demonstrates with the no-nonsense zing of the phrase "I do," humans often seek in a spouse the sort of person they know best: themselves. Beautiful people want beautiful partners. The well-heeled covet Prada-clad companions. Those who are devoted to kith, kids and unabridged Passover seders expect no less from the person who adorably snores beside them each night.
And while the notion that like-seeks-like may not surprise anybody who has scanned the newspaper wedding announcements and wondered if a few of the couples weren't inadvertently committing incest, the new results contradict some important claims about male-female differences in mating strategies that lately have emanated from the niche of neo-Darwinism called evolutionary psychology. [...]
Instead, in analyzing the results of a questionnaire about who wants what in a long-term relationship, the researchers found that the men who were most likely to seek beauty in a woman were not the trust-fund sons, but those men who considered themselves quite handsome; while men who rated themselves as wealthy and ambitious were much likelier to focus on the wealth and status of a prospective mate than on her physical charms.
Similarly, women who viewed themselves as attractive ranked the toothsomeness of a potential husband above the particulars of his stock portfolio; while women from privileged backgrounds wanted a groom who knew the purpose and position of all four forks in a formal table setting.
The same "Why not make more of me?" principle held for each of the 10 traits that were listed on the survey, including devotedness, faithfulness, strength of family bonds, health, desire for children and qualities for raising children. The biggest predictor of whether a person rated the characteristic low or high on a partner-picking scale depended above all on where the respondent placed himself or herself on the same gradient from one to nine.
We have just witnessed Hong Kong's finest hour. To defend their freedoms, half a million people marched peacefully through the streets on July 1, and forced the handpicked satrap of the People's Republic of China, Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa, to blink. At the last minute Mr. Tung indefinitely delayed passage of his "antisubversion" law, which threatens Hong Kong's liberties. And while Mr. Tung and his communist backers in Beijing ponder their next move in this showdown between freedom and tyranny, the debate has reopened in Hong Kong on political reform that might finally permit Hong Kong's people to directly elect their own governor.
Before the next shoe drops--which it will--our job in the free nations of the world is to grasp the huge importance of these events, and keep faith with the message the people of Hong Kong have sent.
The government whose dictates Hong Kong's people are protesting is not, ultimately, that of the cornered Mr. Tung in Hong Kong, but that of the People's Republic in Beijing. Rest assured that the dissatisfactions in relatively idyllic Hong Kong are shared in spades by many of the 1.3 billion Chinese under the direct sway of Beijing, who for generations have suffered miseries and indignities far worse than anything Hong Kong has yet endured. Should protests flare up inside China proper that even begin to approach the proportions of those in Hong Kong last week, it could spell the disintegration of the communist regime. As Gordon Chang, author "The Coming Collapse of China" (2001), reminded me this week, "when dictatorships fall, they fall very quickly."
The last time people inside China's borders demonstrated for freedom on such a massive scale was 1989, in the uprising named for its geographic center, Tiananmen Square--though the protests were actually nationwide. Demonstrations also took place in Hong Kong, which was at the time a British colony, but slated to be handed back to Beijing.
Then, too, for a euphoric spell the suffocating lies of China's communist regime were swept aside. Briefly, China's dictators seemed in full retreat. The world applauded the courage and the ideals of the demonstrators. When the regime murdered its way back into control, sending tanks and troops against its own people, we had shock and horror in the free world, and many vows that the nature of China's crude and brutal government, so nakedly exposed, would not be forgotten.
But in many quarters of the free world it has not exactly been well remembered...
When Harper's sent Kurt Vonnegut to cover the 1972 Republican Convention, our bounciest misanthrope came back with his wiry hair standing on end. "The two real political parties in America are the Winners and Losers," he growled. "The single religion of the Winners is a harsh interpretation of Darwinism, which argues that it is the
will of the universe that only the fittest should survive."
Well, things have changed slightly the last 30 years: Thanks to the Christian Right, none of our leaders would ever dare mention Darwin, except to say he shouldn't be taught in schools. Beyond that, the Winners' agenda is now far harsher than it ever was under Richard Nixon. The Bush administration has pushed through dividend tax cuts for the rich, while attempting to exclude millions of ordinary Americans (including U.S. troops) from other forms of tax relief. Even as it gives $80,000 write-offs to businesses that buy Humvees (gee, I wonder who in the company will be driving those puppies?), it's proposing to change the Fair Labor Standards Act in a way that will cost several million hourly workers their overtime. Why, you can just re-define their work as administrative and the extra hours are free!
Although it's fun to think so, such Darwinian social policies didn't spring fully formed from Bush's skull. They embody our reigning cultural ethos. Where America was once a country that took pride in backing the underdog, it now has no time for Losers. Citizens have learned to step over the homeless on streets, politicians ignore the dispossessed in favor of middle-class swing voters (have you ever heard Bush even mention "the poor"?), and pop culture has gentrified the idea of the outsider. Forget Norma Rae. Hollywood's current notion of a populist heroine is Legally Blonde's Elle Woods, a rich girl who (assisted by co-star Sally Field!) must rise above the stigma of her hair color and Chihuahua.
On March 9, 1995, in remarks at the National Press Club, as chairman of the pro-corporate Democratic Leadership Council, Lieberman denounced the case for affirmative action as "an un-American argument because it's based on averages, not individuals," and went on to praise Ward Connerly's Proposition 209, the misnamed "California Civil Rights Initiative," which outlawed affirmative action: "I can't see how I could be opposed to it, because it basically is a statement of American values." The year before, the New Haven Advocate's excellent Paul Bass - who's covered Lieberman for 22 years - wrote, "After meeting with racist scholar [and Bell Curve author] Charles Murray, Lieberman promoted Murray's idea of taking children away from mothers on welfare and putting them in new government-run orphanages (rather than, for instance, boosting support for agencies seeking to keep together families in crisis)."
Lieberman didn't always talk that way - he started out in politics as a supporter of Robert F. Kennedy and an opponent of the Vietnam War. When he represented a
half-African-American New Haven district in the state Senate, he paraded himself as a liberal friend to the poor. What changed?
Ambition, pure and simple. In the Reagan-landslide year of 1980, Lieberman ran for Congress - and lost to a GOPer who cut Lieberman's 17-point lead in the polls by attacking him as "too liberal." "After he lost, Joe was advised by party stalwarts he couldn't continue to be a progressive across the board if he wanted to move up," recalls Irv Stolberg, the liberal former speaker of the Connecticut House, and later the founder of the state's progressive Caucus of Concerned Democrats. It's hardly surprising that Lieberman listened to the party bosses: His undergraduate thesis - published in 1966 as a book, The Power Broker - was a hagiography of the tough and cynical John Bailey, Connecticut's legendary ham-fisted Democratic boss, whose creed was "You do whatever you have to do to win." [...]
All in all, as a Democrat, Lieberman makes a great Republican.
Pittsburgh first baseman Randall Simon was questioned by sheriff's officers after hitting one of the Milwaukee Brewers' sausage mascots with his bat during a game.
Deputy District Attorney Jon Reddin said he was reviewing tape of Wednesday night's sausage race and would decide later Thursday whether to file charges.
"Right now it's in the hands of the authorities," Major League Baseball spokesman Rich Levin said. "We'll wait and see what happens."
Simon was cited by the sheriff's department for disorderly conduct and fined $432. He can contest the citation at a Sept. 3 hearing, Sheriff David Clarke said.
Simon maintains he did not deliberately try to knock down the female mascot.
"That wasn't my intention in my heart for that to happen," he said before Thursday's Brewers-Pirates game. "I was just trying to get a tap at the costume and for her to finish the race." [...]
Four people in sausage costumes race around the infield warning track between the sixth and seventh innings at Brewers' games to entertain fans.
When the group went past the Pirates' dugout, Simon took a half swing at the Italian sausage character, hitting her from behind and causing her to tumble. When she fell, she knocked over the woman dressed as the hot dog.
With Korea's total fertility rate, or births per woman, dropping rapidly, experts say the nation's population will top out in 20 years and then begin to shrink.
Korea's birth rate is in a steeper fall compared with what other advanced countries have experienced, and economists say it may hurt the nation's potential for economic growth.
The National Statistical Office said Thursday that Korea's total fertility rate was at 1.30 in 2001, down from 4.53 in 1970. [...]
According to the statistical office, it will take only 19 years for Korea to move from an "aging society," when 7 percent of the population is 65 or over, to an "aged society," when 14 percent of the population is 65 or over; that compares with 115 years for France and 24 years for Japan.
That solution is to end the institution of marriage. Or rather (he hastens to clarify, dear) the solution is to end the institution of government-sanctioned marriage. Or, framed to appeal to conservatives: End the government monopoly on marriage. Wait, I've got it: Privatize marriage. These slogans all mean the same thing. Let churches and other religious institutions continue to offer marriage ceremonies. Let department stores and casinos get into the act if they want. Let each organization decide for itself what kinds of couples it wants to offer marriage to. Let couples celebrate their union in any way they choose and consider themselves married whenever they want. Let others be free to consider them not married, under rules these others may prefer. And, yes, if three people want to get married, or one person wants to marry herself, and someone else wants to conduct a ceremony and declare them married, let 'em. If you and your government aren't implicated, what do you care?
Paul Wilson Brand, the pioneering missionary surgeon who wrote a series of books connecting the Christian faith and medicine, died Tuesday after several weeks in a coma following a fall in his Seattle home.
Born to missionary parents in the mountains of southwestern India in 1914, Brand attended London University, where he met his wife, Margaret Berry. The two surgeons returned to Vellore, India, to teach at the Christian Medical College and Hospital.
While working as the school's first professor of orthopaedics and hand research, Brand pioneered surgical work with those suffering from Hansen's disease, a bacterial infection more commonly known as leprosy. He was the first surgeon to use reconstructive surgery to correct deformities caused by the disease in the hands and feet, and developed many other forms of prevention and healing from the disease.
Before Brand, it was widely believed that those suffering from Hansen's Disease lost their fingers and feet because of rotting flesh. Instead, Brand discovered, such deformities were due to the loss of ability to feel pain. With treatment and care, he showed, victims of the disease could go indefinitely without such deformities. [...]
Many will remember Brand as mentor to Christianity Today Editor at Large Philip Yancey. The two men wrote several books together, including In His Image, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, and The Gift of Pain.
"I see the world largely through his eyes," Yancey said. "My father died just after my first birthday, and in so many ways Dr. Brand became a father figure to me in the best way. I have never known anyone more brilliant, nor anyone more humble.
"I have written often of bad doses of the faith I got here and there. Truly, I believe that God brought Paul Brand into my life so that I could take all the time in the world to examine one human being and learn what God had in mind with the whole creation experiment. No one has affected my faith more. You need only meet one saint to believe, and I had the inestimable privilege of spending leisurely hours on visits, trips, and phone conversations picking apart a saint piece by piece. He stood up to scrutiny."
[Q:] Let's talk for a moment about your concept of omnipotence. As I understand it, you view omnipotence in terms of the potential power, not the process it describes. For example, I can describe a Russian weightlifter as the most powerful man in the world. But his task of lifting the weights he attempts is not easier for him than lifting the weights that challenge me; he still has to grunt and sweat and exert. Is there an analogy there to the way you interpret God's omnipotence?
[A:] There may be. I don't even like the word omnipotence. The word conveys a simplistic view of the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe, as if he merely had to wave a magic wand and it all came into being. Man's creative effort in producing the Sistine Chapel or the lunar lander required tremendous planning and forethought, and I can envision God going through a similar process of planning and experimentation in his act of creation. The more I delve into the natural laws-the atom, the universe, the solid elements, molecules, the sun, and, even more, the interplay of all the mechanisms required to sustain life-I am astounded. The whole creation could collapse like a deck of cards if just one of those factors were removed. To build a thing like our universe had to require planning and thought, and that, I believe, is the strongest argument for the presence of God in creation.
From the chance collision of molecules you may sometimes derive a sudden, exciting pattern, but it quickly disperses. Some people really think that all the design and precision in nature came by chance, that if millions of molecules bombard each other for long enough, a nerve cell and sensory ending at exactly the right threshold will be bound to turn up. To those people I merely suggest that they try to make one, as I did, and see what chance is up against.
I see God as a careful, patient designer, and I don't think that the fact that I call him God makes it easy. There are billions of possibilities of ways in which atoms could combine, and he had to discard all but a very few as being inadequate. I don't think I can fully appreciate God unless I use the word difficult to describe the creative process.
I like to think of God developing his skills, as it were, by creating amoebae and then ants and cockroaches, developing complexity until he comes to people, the zenith of creation. Again, he was confronted with options at every decision. A person who breaks his leg skiing could wish for stronger bones. Perhaps bone could have been made stronger (though scientists have not been able to find a stronger, suitable substance for implanting) but he would have then made the bones thicker and heavier. If it were heavier you probably wouldn't be able to ski, because you would be too bulky and inert.
Take a model of the human skeleton and look at the tiny size of the bones in the fingers and toes. Those bones in the toes support all your weight. If they were larger and thicker, many athletic events would be impossible. If fingers were thicker, so many human activities-such as playing stringed instruments-would be impossible. The Creator had to make those difficult choices between strength and mobility and weight and volume.
[Q:] And animals were given different qualities, based on their needs. Some are stronger and faster than man, and can see and hear better.
[A:] Right, you can only call creation perfect in relation to other options available. Even human types differ. Is an American better than a Vietnamese? The American is bigger, but it takes more food to sustain him. If food becomes short, the Vietnamese will survive because they can get by on a bowl of rice and the Americans will die out. So physical qualities are not good or bad but good in certain circumstances. I have tremendous admiration for the balance by which the world has come out with evidence of thought behind it. But every stage of development-moving from the inanimate to the animate, single-cell to multi-cell, developing the nervous system-required thought and choice. That's why I define omnipotence the way I do.
[Q:] When you speak of pain, and even death, you seem to include these within God's overall design for this planet. These are generally seen as evidence of the twisted, or fallen, state of the world. How do you reconcile these elements with your belief in a wise, loving Creator?
[A:] I cannot easily imagine life on this planet without pain and death. Pain is a helpful, essential mechanism for survival. I could walk with you through the corridors of this leprosarium and show you what life is like for people who feel little pain. I see patients who have lost all their toes simply because they wore tight, ill-fitting shoes that caused pressure and cut off circulation. You or I would have stopped wearing those shoes or adjusted our way of walking. But these patients didn't have the luxury of pain to warn them when they were abusing their flesh.
You're familiar with the stereotyped image of leprosy, with its loss of fingers. That abuse comes because the leprosy bacillus destroys pain cells, and the patients are no longer warned when they harm their bodies through normal activity. On this world, given our material environment, I would not for a moment wish for a pain-free life. It would be miserable. I mentioned earlier that 99 of 100 hands are perfectly normal. The statistics are exactly reversed for those people insensitive to pain: Nineteen of each twenty of them have some sort of malformity or dysfunction, simply because their pain system is not working properly.
As for death, when I look at the world of nature, its most impressive feature as a closed system is the lavish expenditure of life at every level. Every time a whale takes a mouthful he swallows a million plankton. Every garden pond is a scene of constant sacrifice of life for the building up of other life. Death is not some evil intruder who has upset beautiful creation; it is woven into the very fabric and essence of the beautiful creation itself. Most of the higher animals are designed so that they depend for their survival on the death of lower levels of life. Having created this food pyramid, and placed man at its apex, the Creator instructed him to enjoy and to use it all responsibly. In modern, Western culture, we tend to see a certain ruthlessness and lack of love in nature, but I believe that viewpoint comes from a civilization whose main contact with animal life is through domestic pets and children's anthropomorphic animal stories.
[Q:] Just a minute, now. It is true that pain and death fit into the present system of life on earth, but weren't these factors introduced as a result of man's rebellion and fall? Are you saying that the Garden of Eden contained pain and death?
[A:] Well, anything I say about the Garden of Eden must be conjecture, because we've been given very little data about it. I feel reasonably sure that Adam felt pain, if his body was like mine. If there were sharp rocks on which he could have hurt himself, I hope he had a pain system to warn him. The pain network is so inextricably tied to the functions of the body-it tells you when to go to the bathroom, how close you may go to the fire, and carries feelings of pleasure as well as pain-that I could not imagine a worthwhile body in this world without it.
And I believe physical death was present before the fall also. The very nature of the chain of life requires it. You cannot have soil without the death of bacteria; you couldn't have thrushes without the death of worms. The shape of a tiger's teeth are wholly inappropriate for eating plant matter (and even vegetarians thrive off the death of plants, part of the created order). A vulture would not survive unless something died. I don't see death as being a bad thing at all.
If the U.S. Forces Korea withdraws its troops from the peninsula or the military alliance with the United States crumbles, Seoul would have to double its defense spending, up to 5-6 percent of gross domestic product, a local military expert said Tuesday. Also, the defense minister gave a bleak report on the supplies and resources the military needs for training and preparedness.
The White House is nurturing a cadre of Generation X Republican Jewish activists, many of them Orthodox, as part of a concerted strategy to boost Republican strength among Jewish voters - and Jewish political donors - in the run-up to the 2004 election.
In private conversations recently, Bush aides have voiced hopes that the president's image as a leader in the war against terrorism will help bring the Republicans a record share of the Jewish vote next year, with some citing figures as high as 40%.
Many observers insist that the president faces an uphill task building a solid base among Jews. New polling data indicates that most Jewish voters around the country continue to identify themselves as Democrats and are more ready to criticize the president than other ethnic or religious groups. (See sidebar) Analysts say the GOP's dilemma is compounded by the president's new drive for Israeli-Palestinian peace, which risks alienating the conservatives who form the president's most solid support in the Jewish community.
The emergence of an enthusiastic new support base consisting of movers and shakers in their 30s and 40s appears to fly in the face of those analyses, however. While its numbers are not yet large, it has taken on an oversized role in Republican strategy and fundraising in New York and a few other locations, and activists are already talking about mobilizing Jews as a swing vote that can deliver some key Democratic states to the GOP column in 2004.
Republicans are targeting North Carolina Democrat John Edwards' Senate seat, which is up in 2004, and now the Democrats are putting pressure on Edwards, too.
Edwards, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, has not been definitive about whether he plans to stay in the Senate race. On Wednesday, according to the Raleigh News and Observer, he met behind closed doors with
Erskine Bowles, a possible Democratic Senate candidate, to discuss the upcoming elections. Bowles and Edwards left the meeting with their lips sealed.
State law allows Edwards to keep his name on the ballot for both the Senate and the White House, but political insiders don't think that will wash. North Carolina Democrats are asking him to give a clear sign of his plans so the party?s
candidate will have enough time to prepare for the election and raise adequate funds.
As a vague indication, Edwards' presidential campaign press secretary Jennifer Palmieri said Edwards has no intentions at this time to meet with any other potential Senate candidates.
IN RECENT BROADCASTS of his cable TV show "The 700 Club," watched by an estimated 1 million households, [The Reverend Pat] Robertson has defended Taylor as a fellow Baptist and Liberia's "freely elected" leader. The "horrible bloodbath" taking place in Liberia, he has repeatedly said, is the fault of the State Department.
"So we're undermining a Christian, Baptist president to bring in Muslim rebels to take over the country. And how dare the president of the United States say to the duly elected president of another country, `You've got to step down,' " Robertson said to his viewers on Monday.
What Robertson, 73, has not discussed in these broadcasts is his financial interest in Liberia. In an interview yesterday, he said he has "written off in my own mind" an $8 million investment in a gold mining venture that he made four years ago under an agreement with Taylor's government.
Yet, he added: "Hope springs eternal. Once the dust has cleared on this thing, chances are there will be some investors from someplace who want to invest. If I could find some people to sell it to, I'd be more than delighted."
Other Baptist and evangelical Christian leaders said they do not share either Robertson's support for Taylor or his criticism of President Bush's call for the Liberian leader to go into exile. "I would say that Pat Robertson is way out on his own, in a leaking life raft, on this one," said Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention's public policy arm.
As an adviser to leading Democratic politicians and an activist on women's issues, Joanne Symons helped Rep. Richard Gephardt negotiate the tricky political waters of switching positions on abortion in 1986 as he planned his first presidential campaign.
Symons told him back then that liberal constituencies that flex their muscle in Democratic Party primaries would find it hard to swallow his
anti-abortion stance.
But she warned Gephardt that he likely would face a backlash from jilted anti-abortion forces if he made the switch. She was right.
On top of that, Gephardt had to deal with suspicion from abortion-rights leaders who wondered about his motives, Symons recalled during an
interview shortly before her death in March.
"He kept churning things up inside and listening and asking questions until he came to a place where he could be. I think that when you approach things like that, you can change and evolve. Of course there was a political payoff," Symons said.
Gephardt entered Congress as a passionate opponent of abortion, taking to the House floor shortly after moving into his office in 1977 to declare support for a Right-to-Life amendment to the Constitution.
"Life is the division of human cells, a process which begins at conception," he asserted. By that spring, he had become a sponsor of legislation to ban spending federal funds on most abortions.
But in 1986, he met in St. Louis with Loretto Wagner and leaders of Missouri Citizens for Life to tell them he was defecting from their movement. [...]
He has said that as president, he would sign a measure banning the mid- and late-term abortion procedure that opponents call "partial-birth abortion" only if it included a life and health exception for the woman.
But in past years, Gephardt has voted to ban the procedure. He supported both the Democratic version of the ban, which included an exception for the health of the woman, and the more stringent Republican version, which included an exception only for the woman's life.
During the 2002 debate, a statement by Gephardt in the Congressional Record noted that the Supreme Court had struck down a Nebraska state law banning the procedure.
"Banning this procedure without such an exception (for the health of the mother) is unconstitutional," Gephardt said in the statement.
Gephardt then voted in favor of the bill he had criticized as unconstitutional.
While seeking to refine his position, Gephardt rekindled criticism that he lacked consistency, judging by a Republican National Committee e-mail sent around the country this year under the headline: "Gephardt modifies position on partial birth ban."
That on abortion Gephardt continues to duck and run was demonstrated as recently as last week.
The House of Representatives voted last month on a compromise version of the partial-birth abortion ban, one that would have permitted the
procedure when the woman's life was in danger because of a physical disorder, illness or injury caused by the pregnancy.
Gephardt was campaigning the day the issue came before the House and missed the vote - not an unusual event, especially for politicians running for president.
What is unusual is that Gephardt and his staff decline to say how he would have voted - despite daily queries last week from the Post-Dispatch.
If the Bush administration had wanted to make the case for going to war against Iraq on purely humanitarian reasons, it could have done so. Saddam Hussein was one of the world's truly bad guys, a horrific leader who brutalized and terrorized his own people. But the administration likely would have found much resistance from conservatives who have long argued that the United States should not try to act as the world's police department.
So the administration made national security its strongest case for launching an exceedingly rare, historically discouraged, internationally
frowned-upon preemptive war.
Fast forward to the present: The administration that had 100 percent certainty that there were weapons of mass destruction has zero percent certainty as to where they are now. The White House and the president's defenders have reverted to their fall-back humanitarian position -- that the removal of Hussein was justification enough for the war. [...]
It could be argued that the administration had justification enough to invade Iraq based on Saddam Hussein's human rights record. So why did it emphasize the national security angle? After the war, evidence for the national security argument is sparse while mass graves in Iraq give proof of genocide and political assassinations. Perhaps Bush didn't push the human rights rationale harder because it would have created a precedent of intervention that would have been more politically perilous for Bush than the potential of exaggerating claims about Iraq's direct threat to Americans.
Whatever the case, the argument that it is a good thing that Hussein is gone and the argument that the Bush administration may have lied to or
misled the public on the issue of weapons of mass destruction are not mutually exclusive. Both could be true. And if they are, the former fact won't exonerate the president if the latter is true as well.
Q: Was that one of the arguments that was raised early on by you and others that Iraq actually does connect, not to connect the dots too much, but the relationship between Saudi Arabia, our troops being there, and bin Laden's rage about that, which he's built on so many years, also connects the World Trade Center attacks, that there's a logic of motive or something like that? Or does that read too much into --
Wolfowitz: No, I think it happens to be correct. The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but -- hold on one second --
(Pause)
Kellems: Sam there may be some value in clarity on the point that it may take years to get post-Saddam Iraq right. It can be easily misconstrued, especially when it comes to --
Wolfowitz: -- there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people. Actually I guess you could say there's a fourth overriding one which is the connection between the first two.
Sorry, hold on again.
Kellems: By the way, it's probably the longest uninterrupted phone conversation I've witnessed, so --
Q: This is extraordinary.
Kellems: You had good timing.
Q: I'm really grateful.
Wolfowitz: To wrap it up.
The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it. That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there's the most disagreement within the bureaucracy, even though I think everyone agrees that we killed 100 or so of an al Qaeda group in northern Iraq in this recent go-around, that we've arrested that al Qaeda guy in Baghdad who was connected to this guy Zarqawi whom Powell spoke about in his UN presentation.
The darlings have been fretting for some years now that they may be rendered unnecessary if women get financial and biological independence, learning how to reproduce and refinance without them....
[M]y jittery male friends are not paranoid ...
Dr. Judson writes about powerful babes, noting that females in more than 80 species, like praying mantises, have been caught devouring their lovers before, during or after mating. "I'm particularly fond," she told me, "of the green spoon worm. . . . The male is 200,000 times smaller, effectively a little parasite who lives in her reproductive tract, fertilizing her eggs and regurgitating sperm through his mouth."
And then there's the tiny female midge, who plunges her proboscis into the male midge's head during procreation. As Dr. Judson told the journalist Ken Ringle, "Her spittle turns his innards to soup, which she slurps up, drinking until she's sucked him dry."...
The news that Dolly the sheep had been cloned without masculine aid sent a frisson through the Y populace, [Steve Jones] writes, because men began to fear that science would cause nature to return to its original, feminine state and men would fade from view.
At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.
The Court has not yet addressed whether this Constitutional right extends to the bio-engineering of small parasites that can generate sperm from within a woman's reproductive tract, or to the production of quasi-males who can be eaten during procreation. But is there any doubt that imagining these possibilities sends a frisson through Maureen Dowd?
The news this summer has been rather bleak for conservatives. The Supreme Court first decided to write "diversity" into the
Constitution. A few days later, it issued a ruling on sodomy laws that called into question its willingness to tolerate any state laws based on traditional understandings of sexual morality. In neither case was there much pretense that the Court was merely following the law. At this point it takes real blindness to deny that the Court rules us and, on emotionally charged policy issues, rules us in accord with liberal sensibilities. And while the Court issued its edicts and the rest of the world adjusted, a huge prescription-drug bill made its way through Congress. That bill will add at least $400 billion to federal spending over the next ten years, and it comes on top of already gargantuan spending increases over the last five years. The fact that a pro-growth tax cut is going into effect this summer hardly compensates for these developments--especially since expanding entitlements threaten to exert upward pressure on tax rates in the future.
Republicans have been complicit in each of these debacles. Both the affirmative-action and sodomy decisions were written by Reagan appointees. President Bush actually cheered the affirmative-action decision for recognizing the value of "diversity." Bush has requested spending increases, and not just for defense and homeland security. He has failed to veto spending increases that went beyond his requests. But let it not be said that the president has led his party astray. Many congressional Republicans have strayed even more enthusiastically. Bush originally wanted to condition prescription-drug benefits on seniors' joining reformed, less expensive health plans. When the idea was raised, House Speaker Denny Hastert called it "inhumane." Congressional appropriators--the people who write the spending bills--have been known to boast that they would beat the president if ever he dared to veto one of their products.
We have never been under any illusions about the extent of Bush's conservatism. He did not run in 2000 as a small-government conservative, or as someone who relished ideological combat on such issues as racial preferences and immigration. We supported him nonetheless in the hope that he would strengthen our defense posture, appoint originalist judges, liberalize trade, reduce tax rates, reform entitlements, take modest steps toward school choice. Progress on these fronts would be worth backsliding elsewhere. We have been largely impressed with Bush's record on national security, on judicial appointments (although the big test of a Supreme Court vacancy will apparently not occur during this term), and on taxes. On the other issues he has so far been unable to deliver.
The Medicare prescription drug issue -- a staple of Democratic campaigns -- has not gone away, despite passage by the
Republican-controlled House and Senate early Friday of major bills promising help to seniors in obtaining their medicines.
But analysts in both parties agreed that President Bush has strengthened his hand on the issue and put his party in a better position to compete for votes from the 40 million politically powerful senior citizens who benefit from Medicare.
Medicare, enacted in 1965 as part of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society program, and Social Security, created in the New Deal, have been the twin pillars of countless Democratic campaigns -- the bottom-line issues for the most attentive and energized segment of the electorate, the elderly.
Success for the Republicans in swiping that issue -- or even sharing it -- has a political potential scary to many Democrats.
Donna Brazille, the manager of Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign, said, "No question, the Republicans will cut into the traditional Democratic advantage on this issue. Right now, the seniors don't know the details of this bill, and they may not like it when they do. But in the short term, at least, it adds to the notion that he (Bush) can get things done."
Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who has studied health care issues for more than a decade, said that if the substantially different House and Senate bills can be reconciled and sent to the president for his signature -- no certainty -- "it has the potential to be as transformational for our party as the 1996 welfare bill was for Bill Clinton and the Democrats."
In both cases, he said, the party in power benefited politically by "having people see it do something they never thought it would do."
Why have so many Republican appointees turned out to be more liberal than the presidents who picked them? One reason is the difficulty of getting known conservatives through the Senate. President Reagan chose Kennedy, then a fairly moderate appellate judge, only after the Senate had rejected the far more conservative Robert H. Bork by 58-42. The first President Bush chose Souter, the so-called stealth nominee, because his ideological leanings were such a mystery that there was little for Democrats to attack.
Stevens and O'Connor, on the other hand, both appear to have "evolved," to borrow the approving term of liberal law professors and journalists for the migration of the late Justice Harry A. Blackmun from right to left on the ideological spectrum. Seen as a solid conservative for a couple of years after his 1970 appointment by President Nixon, Blackmun had become the Court's most liberal member by the time of his retirement in 1994. (The late Justices William J. Brennan Jr. and Thurgood Marshall, who were even more liberal, had retired in 1990 and 1991, respectively.) [...]
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? To bitterly disappointed conservatives, it is an engine for undermining democratic governance by writing liberal political views into the Constitution. To The New York Times, it reflects "the best instincts of the American people." To me -- as one who joins liberals in despising discrimination against gays, and conservatives in despising discrimination against whites and Asians -- it's better to have justices taking their cues from the Establishment than from, say, the Rev. Jerry Falwell or the Rev. Al Sharpton.
But it would be nice if they were a bit less confident that they know better than anyone else how to run the country. "It would be most irksome," as Judge Learned Hand wrote in 1958, "to be ruled by a bevy of Platonic Guardians, even if I knew how to choose them, which I assuredly do not."
Ten years after Bill Clinton proclaimed a centrist "New Democrat" revolution, the left is once again a driving force in the party.
They do not call themselves "liberals" anymore; the preferred term today is "progressives." But in other ways, they are much the same slice of the electorate that dominated the Democratic Party from 1972 to the late 1980s: antiwar, pro-environment, suspicious of corporations and supportive of federal social services.
In recent weeks, the progressive left has: lifted a one-time dark-horse presidential candidate, former Vermont governor Howard Dean, into
near-front-runner status; dominated the first serious Internet "primary"; and convened the largest gathering of liberal activists in decades.
The liberal MoveOn.org is the fastest-growing political action committee in the Democratic Party. Left-leaning labor leaders, such as Andrew L.
Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, are taking a more assertive part in mapping the all-important union role in party
operations.
In a sense, it was all foreshadowed by the shake-up of the House leadership after the Democrats' dismal showing at the polls last November. Liberal Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) easily defeated several more conservative Democrats to become the new minority leader.
"There is a coming together of forces to try to resurrect the Democratic Party in the progressive realm," said political strategist Eric Hauser, who helped to organize the recent Take Back America conference of left-leaning activists. "What the Democratic Party stands for hasn't really been looked at for a while. The issues that people care about seem pretty clearly to be solid progressive issues."
In a party that seemed almost comatose after November's poor showing at the polls, any energy at all might be welcome by Democrats, no matter where it comes from. And the progressives themselves certainly do not feel as though they are weighing in from the margin. "We are the base," said veteran organizer Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America's Future.
I HAD THOUGHT I had little interest in reporting on wars again. After I covered Bosnia and wrote a book about it, I was satisfied with what I had written and wanted to move on to other subjects. Still, I continued to venture into zones of conflict, though I did so with caution. The circumstances in Iraq did not allow for caution. I like to be in control of my life, and I learned that in war, the notion of control reveals itself as a hoax.
I saw, again, the killing of civilians and soldiers. I experienced, again, the strange mix of humor and friendship that is created when stress and
absurdity and terror come together. On the first day I met Colonel McCoy, he'd said that at the start of his march on Baghdad, he told his men that they would undergo a great experience they would hope to never have again. He was right; he studied and knew war. It has been going on for quite some time, after all. The tools of warfare have changed over the millennia, but its nature has not. Terms like "surgical strikes" and "collateral damage" distort a vital truth. War is killing.
Well," said Mr. Dooley, "I see be th' pa-apers that th' snow-white pigeon iv peace have tied up th' dogs iv war. It's all over now. All
we've got to do is to arrest th' pathrites an' make th' reconcenthradios pay th' stamp tax, an' be r-ready f'r to take a punch at Germany or France or Rooshia or anny counthry on th' face iv th' globe.
"An' I'm glad iv it. This war, Hinnissy, has been a gr-reat sthrain on me. To think iv th' suffrin' I've endured! F'r weeks I lay awake at nights fearin'
that th' Spanish ar-rmadillo'd lave the Cape Verde Islands, where it wasn't, an' take th' thrain out here, an' hur-rl death an' desthruction into me little store. Day be day th' pitiless exthries come out an' beat down on me. Ye hear iv Teddy Rosenfelt plungin' into ambus-cades an' Sicrity iv Wars; but d'ye hear iv Martin Dooley, th' man behind th' guns, four thousan' miles behind thim, an' willin' to be further? They ar-re no bokays f'r me. I'm what Hogan calls wan iv th' mute, ingloryous heroes iv th' war; an' not so dam mute, ayther. Some day, Hinnissy, justice'll be done me, an' th' likes iv me; an', whin th' story iv a gr-reat battle is written, they'll print th' kilt, th' wounded, th' missin', an' th' seryously disturbed. An' thim that have bore thimsilves well an' bravely an' paid th' taxes an' faced th' deadly newspa-apers without flinchin' 'll be advanced six pints an' given a chanst to tur-rn jack f'r th' game.
"But me wurruk ain't over jus' because Mack has inded th' war an' Teddy Rosenfelt is comin' home to bite th' Sicrety iv War. You an' me, Hinnissy, has got to bring on this here Anglo-Saxon 'lieance. An Anglo-Saxon, Hinnissy, is a German that's forgot who was his parents. They're a lot iv thim in this counthry. There must be as manny as two in Boston: they'se wan up in Maine, an' another lives at Bogg's Ferry in New York State, an' dhrives a milk wagon. Mack is an Anglo-Saxon. His folks come fr'm th' County Armagh, an' their naytional Anglo-Saxon hymn is 'O'Donnell Aboo.' Teddy Rosenfelt is another Anglo-Saxon. An' I'm an Anglo-Saxon. I'm wan iv th' hottest Anglo-Saxons that iver come out iv Anglo-Saxony. Th' name iv Dooley has been th' proudest Anglo-Saxon name in th' County Roscommon f'r many years.
"Schwartzmeister is an Anglo-Saxon, but he doesn't know it, an' won't till some wan tells him. Pether Bowbeen down be th' Frinch church is formin' th' Circle Francaize Anglo-Saxon club, an' me ol' frind Dominigo that used to boss th' Ar-rchey R-road wagon whin Callaghan had th' sthreet conthract will march at th' head iv th' Dago Anglo-Saxons whin th' time comes. There ar-re twinty thousan' Rooshian Jews at a quarther a vote in th' Sivinth Ward; an', ar-rmed with rag hooks, they'd be a tur-r-ble thing f'r anny inimy iv th' Anglo-Saxon 'lieance to face. Th' Bohemians an' Pole Anglo-Saxons may be a little slow in wakin' up to what th' pa-apers calls our common hurtage, but ye may be sure they'll be all r-right whin they're called on. We've got together an Anglo-Saxon 'lieance in this wa-ard, an' we're goin' to ilict Sarsfield O'Brien prisidint, Hugh O'Neill Darsey vice-prisidint, Robert Immitt Clancy sicrety, an' Wolfe Tone Malone three-asurer. O'Brien'll be a good wan to have. He was in the Fenian r-raid, an' his father carrid a pike in forty-eight. An' he's in th' Clan. Besides, he has a sthrong pull with th' Ancient Ordher iv Anglo-Saxon Hibernyans.
"I tell ye, whin th' Clan ah' th' Sons iv Sweden an' th' Banana Club an' th' Circle Francaize an' th' Pollacky Benivolent Society an' th' Rooshian Sons of Dinnymite an' th' Benny Brith an' th' Coffee Clutch that Schwartzmeister r-runs an' th' Turrnd'ye-mind an' th' Holland society an' th' Afro-Americans an' th' other Anglo-Saxons begin f'r to raise their Anglo-Saxon battle-cry, it'll be all day with th' eight or nine people in th' wurruld that has th'
misfortune iv not bein' brought up Anglo-Saxons."
"They'se goin' to be a debate on th' 'lieance at th' ninety-eight picnic at Ogden's gr-rove," said Mr. Hennessy.
"P'r'aps," said Mr. Dooley, sweetly, "ye might like to borry th' loan iv an ice-pick."
Officials who worked on the Democrats' agenda acknowledged that it did not represent a significant number of new proposals. Its importance lies, they said, in its thematic approach, tying together ideas, for example, on small business aid, work force language training,
government-provided health coverage and providing money that has not been forthcoming for promised education programs.
"What is important here is pulling programs together in a comprehensive fashion and showing the Hispanic community we are with them on the issues they care most about," a senior Democratic aide involved in developing the agenda said. A group of Democratic senators were briefed today on recent poll findings that show both opportunities and risks for Democrats when it comes to Hispanic voters.
"Democrats can no longer consider the Hispanic electorate as a base vote," Maria T. Cardona, director of the Hispanic Project at the New Democrat Network, said.
The network helped the party create the agenda, and it financed the poll of 800 Hispanic voters conducted May 27 through June 3, with almost half the interviews conducted in Spanish.
"They are increasingly looking at the Republican Party as an option," Ms. Cardona said.
The survey findings and other data assembled by the New Democrat Network reflect that. In a hypothetical 2002 presidential matchup performed by the group, President Bush--who won 35 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2000--was at 44 percent among Hispanic voters. The president's brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, whose wife is a Mexican native, won the Hispanic vote outright in the governor's race last year, even among Hispanics outside South Florida's generally conservative Cuban-Americans.
The use of military tribunals is preferred under the Geneva Conventions even for prisoners who are lawful combatants. The rationale is that military fact-finders will understand and share the interest in a protective law of war. So, too, the Geneva treaties allow criminal proof involving sensitive operational information to be presented behind closed doors. The rules of evidence under Geneva also permit the consideration of any relevant evidence.
The procedural rules for the Guantanamo war crimes trials were debated for 18 months in the light of the Geneva principles and the particular
problems presented by al-Qaeda's "learning organisation", which has proved adept at exploiting disclosures of US intelligence methods. The basic framework was settled only after Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, sought the advice of bipartisan wise men (people who might once have been called elder statesmen). These included Lloyd Cutler (White House counsel to President Bill Clinton), Bernard Meltzer (a Nuremberg prosecutor and University of Chicago law professor) and William Webster (a judge, and chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under President Jimmy Carter and of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Ronald Reagan). [...]
The rules respect the common law's presumption of innocence in favour of the defendant, burden of proof on the government, right to
cross-examination of witnesses, right to call defence witnesses, mandated disclosure of any exculpatory evidence and requirement of proof beyond reasonable doubt. A defendant is given his choice of military counsel and can engage any civilian counsel who qualifies for security clearance. Any finding of guilt must be rendered by a two-thirds vote. All convictions will be reviewed by an independent appellate panel - with one or more civilian members endowed with authority to reverse judgments for serious errors of law. Members of the press are entitled to witness the full trial proceedings, except when classified or sensitive information is presented.
In ordinary civilian trials, there is no significant cost to sharing everything the government knows. But this does not hold against the background of al-Qaeda's stated ambition of mounting new attacks. In partial concession, the tribunal rules provide that discrete pieces of evidence may be presented in closed court and, indeed, may need to be examined by the military defence counsel rather than the defendant.
This is not ideal and there may be good reasons for delaying some trials until the operational backbone of al-Qaeda is broken. But the call for timely trials must make its peace with the equal right of civilians to be guarded against al-Qaeda's violence. As Winston Churchill aptly noted in October 1940: "I do not relish laying bare to the enemy all our internal resources."
I have no idea what the stats are, but I know this perverse peer pressure to do less than your best in scholarly and intellectual pursuits is holding back large numbers of black Americans, especially black boys and men. The other day I had a long conversation with a 15-year-old named David Blocker, who also happens to be from Washington. Until January, when he was expelled, David was a student at the Hyde Leadership Public Charter School.
"We were so lackadaisical," he said. "One-third of our school was failing three or more classes. The pressure from my friends was mostly to chill and, like, do what you want to do. People were not doing their work, just coming to school for fun, coming to school high, just playing sports, not really knowing what school was for."
David said he went right along with the crowd. "It's hard to come in and really do work when everybody is just chillin' and playin' around. If
everybody's doing that, then you're going to want to chill and play around, too."
What was interesting was that David took a summer math course at a highly regarded private prep school and got an A-minus. But when he came back to Hyde, which was not as rigorous academically, he promptly failed math.
"I guess I'm responsive to how my environment is," he said. [...]
David's older sister, Nomoya Tinch, who lives in Brooklyn and is an intern at Essence magazine, said there was a time when she so craved the approval of her peers that she had turned into "this all-out wild child, this ponytail honey who was out there cursing and being bad and just didn't care."
Then comes the flip side: the all-out wild child has to walk onto a college campus or into a professional environment, and suddenly the feelings of inadequacy swell up like a wave that is about to overwhelm you.
These are not small issues. They are the day-to-day reality for millions of people, in most cases good and talented people who have had an already tough road made tougher by self-imposed roadblocks, and bad advice from their peers.
They say that history repeats itself. And so it does.
Two years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency released reams of intelligence documents on the former Soviet Union that had been classified for nearly 30 years. The findings were damning: the CIA for more than 10 years greatly exaggerated the nuclear threat the communist country posed to the world.
The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Raymond Garthoff, a longtime CIA military analyst, admitted in 2001 "there were consistent overestimates of the threat every year from 1978 to 1985."
Fast forward to 2003 and the CIA finds itself in a similar pickle.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has cancelled his Italian summer holiday after a Rome minister labelled German tourists
"hyper-nationalistic blondes".
Silvio Berlusconi, his Italian counterpart, responded by saying he felt "sorry" for Mr Schroeder.
A row between the two countries was re-ignited this week when Italian Tourism Minister Stefano Stefani of the far-right Northern League refused to apologise for his outspoken attack, in which he also accused Germans of being rowdy beach invaders.
It follows last week's European parliament outburst by Mr Berlusconi, who compared a German MEP to a Nazi prison guard.
Mr Schroeder will now spend his holiday in his home town of Hanover.
The great poets have nearly all been conservatives, even if, like Wordsworth, they took a little time to recognise the fact. It is not
surprising. Their task, since the composition of The Iliad, has been to encapsulate emotions, stories and myths as they fade from consciousness: an essentially conservative exercise.
David Jones (1895-1974), calligrapher, painter, visionary and author of those two transcendent masterpieces, In Parenthesis and The Anathemeta, has a firm band of admirers; yet he
remains outside the canon of literature studied for A-level or university courses.
No doubt this is because a year or two spent studying Jones's work, as well as filling the student's head with Jones's two masterpieces, would also bring so many other things into focus: the First World War and its terrible consequences; but also, those things from which young minds are nowadays protected - the Christian liturgy and the whole history of our islands, filtered through Roman archaeology, classical literature and Celtic myth.
Jones's work is a palimpsest. As you read, you find layers of memory and reference peeping through one another. One of the templates that he uses to understand experience is the shape of the liturgy, that Mass of the Western Church whose destruction in the late Sixties caused him so much grief.
Both In Parenthesis and The Anathemeta quote frequently from the Mass, not merely its words but its rubrics - meaningless now, one presumes, except to a handful of faddists:
Here, in this high place,
into both hands
he takes the stemmed dish
as in many places
by this poured and that held up
Wherever their directing glosses read
Here he takes the victim. [...]
Like his two Modernist masters, Pound and Eliot, he was passionately conservative.
In Parenthesis, like Pound's Cantos or Eliot's The Waste Land, quotes snatches of liturgy, legend, history and literature because it shares the sense of the First World War having blown "Old Europe" to smithereens - its buildings, artefacts, values and shrines.
David Jones's work helps us to know whether we can still use the word "sacred", and if we do so, what it means. Unlike our Prime Minister, and so many modern Christians, this artist-visionary takes it for granted that to break away from the past is tragic.
Following are President Bush's statements on Iraq at a news conference on Wednesday in Pretoria, South Africa, as transcribed by the Federal News Service:
QUESTION: Yes, Mr. President. Do you regret that your State of the Union accusation that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear materials in Africa is now fueling charges that you and Prime Minister Blair misled the public?
BUSH: There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the world peace. And there's no doubt in my mind that the United States, along with allies and friends, did the right thing in removing him from power. And there's no doubt in my mind, when it's all said and done, the facts will show the world the truth. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind. And so there's going to be a lot of attempts to try to rewrite history, and I can understand that. But I am absolutely confident in the decision I made.
QUESTION: Do you still believe they were trying to buy nuclear materials in Africa?
BUSH: Right now?
QUESTION: No, were they? The statement you made...
BUSH: One thing is for certain, he's not trying to buy anything right now. If he's alive, he's on the run. And that's to the benefit of the Iraqi people. But, look, I am confident that Saddam Hussein had a weapons of mass destruction program. In 1991, I will remind you, we underestimated how close he was to having a nuclear weapon. Imagine a world in which this tyrant had a nuclear weapon. In 1998, my predecessor raided Iraq, based upon the very same intelligence. And in 2003, after the world had demanded he disarm, we decided to disarm him. And I'm convinced the world is a much more peaceful and secure place as a result of the actions.
Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney interrupted a quiet vacation to help rescue six people and a dog from a sinking boat in Lake Winnipesaukee over the weekend.
But some Democrats complained that Romney was vacationing while lawmakers debate vetoes he imposed cutting dozens of human service programs.
"There are lots of people drowning in the commonwealth right now who would certainly welcome a rescue," said Rep. Jay R. Kaufman (D-Lexington).
It's not just Howard Dean that worries Democratic elders. It's the fundamental problems the party has down the ballot in so many states. [...]
* California Recall: The party has a real chance of losing its grip on the governor's seat. The signatures are in, and the recall election looks like a go. Democratic Gov. Gray Davis is the least popular chief executive of any state in the nation. If the job falls into GOP hands, the president's party would then control all four governorships in the country's four largest electoral prizes. But while Davis' problems can be explained away on a micro level, it would sting the Democratic Party nationally to see one of its elected officials booted out of office. It's just not a morale booster. Of course, there is the "be careful what you wish for" argument -- why on Earth anyone would want to try and govern California at this point is beyond us. (And if the governor ends up being Arnold Schwarzenegger, we say, "Good luck." If you thought Jesse Ventura was in over his head, you ain't see nothing yet.)
* Texas Redistricting: As it stands now, the GOP's grip on the U.S. House is fairly firm, though a strong wind at the Democrats' back could be enough to get the minority party back in power. But that assumes House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas isn't able to gerrymander a new map out of his home state. We think it's a bit silly that Texas, a very Republican state, has a 17-15 Democratic congressional delegation advantage. It doesn't compute. Rules are rules, but the rules in Texas are made to be changed. When the GOP saw success in 2002 state legislative races, the GOP seized its chance at righting what DeLay viewed was an original wrong. Despite the Democrats' previous high-profile attempt to kill this power grab (the trip to Oklahoma), it seems less likely the Democrats will be able to stop DeLay this time. A four-seat swing is very possible, making the Democratic hopes for retaking the House tougher in not just this election cycle, but for the rest of the decade. These types of outlooks are what make House members (such as Democrat Joe Hoeffel in Pennsylvania) seek shelter in an uphill statewide race rather than an even steeper race for House control.
* Southern Senate Retirements: There's a very real possibility that Democrats will be defending as many as five open seats in the South. Georgia is already open with Zell Miller retiring. Florida and North Carolina are likely to be open regardless if Bob Graham or John Edwards makes it to Boston as the White House nominee. South Carolina (Fritz Hollings) and Louisiana (John Breaux) both host senators who are openly considering retirement. And Bush carried all five states in 2000. Translation: Every one of these races is going to be tough, so to expect Democrats to hold all of them is an incredibly tall order. Holding three of the five would be considered a moral victory. The bigger message out of these retirements (if they all happen) is the message it sends to the party donors and activists nationally -- these guys don't see themselves in the majority anytime soon. The retirements could be a cause of keeping a good Democratic recruit in another state (Dan Glickman in Kansas, for instance) from running.
* Not-So-Loveable Rogues: Finally, the party is finding itself in the unenviable position of being home to some not-so-popular statewide candidates in states where they could be responsible for other electoral losses. In Kentucky's gubernatorial contest, term-limited Gov. Paul Patton's public affair will be the sole excuse (and we think it's legitimate) if Ben Chandler loses the Democrats' once-solid grip on the governor's mansion. In West Virginia -- one of the states Democrats desperately need back in their presidential column -- the party's leading 2004 candidate, Gov. Bob Wise, has his own personal problems that are being aired publicly. And in Ohio -- a state where Democrats should perform better but for some reason do not -- voters could be on the verge of seeing a Democratic ballot led by Jerry Springer. These may look like isolated problems for individuals, but imagine the 30-second TV spots the GOP could run in these states.... Perhaps morphing of the presidential nominee into any of these three embattled Democrats. Or tossing in a third morph of Clinton with Wise and Patton? We wouldn't be shocked if those ads were already cut.
One of Florida’s top radio jocks told listeners on Tuesday that Rep. Katherine Harris, R-Fla., had died in a plane crash the previous day, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
Radio talk show host Neil Rogers announced on WQAM Miami on Tuesday that "Katherine Harris is dead!"
"I’ve got the news story right here, it’s on the Internet. A plane crash. Yes!" Rogers said.
He went on to say that Harris had been killed near Toronto, "while in clandestine rendezvous with Florida Gov. Jeb Bush," according to United Press International.
However, while Rogers was reporting her premature death, Harris was on the floor of the House of Representatives being broadcast live on CSPAN.
Rogers reportedly got the story from the Web site, www.tomflocco.com, which posted a retraction early yesterday saying, "We were misinformed on this matter, as an unidentified staffer in Harris’ office told us this morning that the Florida legislator was in her office."
In August 1920, more than a dozen men and one woman gathered here to make their own telescopes. The men were mostly machinists, toolmakers, and pattern makers at the Jones and Lamson Machine Co. in Springfield. [...]
In 1923, the group built a clubhouse atop Breezy Hill and called it Stellafane, from stella, Greek for ''star,'' and fane, old Anglo-Saxon for ''temple.'' The Stellafane Society meets there to this day, and holds a convention every summer (Aug. 1-2 this year). The enthusiasm for the group by bigwigs like Hartness and Ralph Flanders (a machinist who went on to become a mechanical engineer and, in the '40s, a US senator) as well as Porter, drew the attention of Albert Ingalls, a writer for Scientific American who penned two feature articles and then a regular column about making telescopes.
''In those days, you had two choices,'' says Tom Spirock of the Stellafane Society, which now boasts 70 to 80 members and hosts close to 2,000 people at its annual convention. ''You had to build a telescope yourself or pay someone to build it for you. Porter said, ` It's not hard to build.' He was the founder of the amateur telescope-making movement.''
Today, the Stellafane clubhouse, painted hot pink, is a national historic monument. This year's convention features telescope-making demonstrations, telescope competitions judged on mechanical and optical expertise, talks on telescopes and on astronomy, and, of course, stargazing. The society also holds all-day monthly meetings, free mirror-grinding classes in the winter, and occasional star parties.
These days, you can buy a decent telescope for about $1,000. The Springfield Amateur Telescope Makers still build their instruments for the fun of it, something those first members discovered back in the '20s.
''For it is true that astronomy, from a popular standpoint, is handicapped by the inability of the average workman to own an expensive astronomical telescope,'' Porter wrote in 1923. ''It is also true that if an amateur starts out to build a telescope just for fun he will find, before his labors are over, that he has become seriously interested in the wonderful mechanism of our universe. And finally there is understandably the stimulus of being able to unlock the mysteries of the heavens by a tool fashioned by one's own hand.''
A man regained consciousness after spending 19 years in a coma as the result of a car crash, greeting his mother who was waiting at his bedside.
"He started out with 'Mom' and surprised her and then it was 'Pepsi' and then it was 'milk.' And now it's anything he wants to say," Stone County Nursing and Rehabilitation Center social director Alesha Badgley said Tuesday.
Terry Wallis, 39, had been at the center since the July 1984 crash. [...]
While in a coma, Wallis spent most of his time at the rehabilitation center, but his family took him out for weekends and special occasions.
"The doctor said that's why he remembers things; we might have kept his mind going," Sandi Wallis said.
Journalist James Bennet of The New York Times. He's been in the Middle East covering how the crisis there is affecting both Israelis and Palestinians.
At a time when President Bush has lavished billions of dollars in tax cuts on the richest Americans, his trip to Africa presents him with the perfect opportunity to call on them to take some responsibility for the dire state of the world's poorest citizens.
In Pamplona, Spain, this week, brave men are being gored and trampled in the traditional running of the bulls. [...]
Meanwhile, here in the States, another ritual is being played out: The traditional running of the dwarfs through the quaint newsrooms and meeting halls of Iowa and New Hampshire. In this tradition, the running dwarfs--who are usually drunk only on their delusions of grandeur--dash about
desperately for a full year before one of them reaches the national bullring, where he will meet the professional bullfighter, George W. And, in our tradition, the Des Moines Register and Manchester Union Leader, whether rolled up or not, can take a terrible toll on the cattle.
With the former vice president out of the race, at least none of the participants are going to be gored. But there is still the danger that late in the year the wandering dwarfs may yet be trampled by the late entry of Hillary "Cattle Futures" Clinton. From the seat of her pants to the crowning hair on her head, she is no dwarf. In every poll of every sample of Democrats in every state that has polled, she would win every election against every other Democratic candidate. In short, the Democratic nomination is hers for the asking.
As he joined the Democratic leadership in Congress and began to eye the presidency, Gephardt moved left - especially on issues like abortion and the environment that were litmus tests for party activists. [...]
When Gephardt ran for president in 1988, Al Gore and other rivals spared no mercy in shining the light on his "flip-flops" on social issues over the years. In a debate in Des Moines in 1987, Gore skewered Gephardt by saying he was reminded of the politician who ended every speech with the line: "'Well, them's my views. If you don't like 'em, I'll change 'em.'"
Former Illinois Sen. Paul Simon, who also ran for the Democratic nomination in 1988, said he believed that Gephardt would make a good president - but:
"I think Dick's vulnerability is that he appears to some people that he's not strong on the courage quotient. This may or may not be accurate, but it is something that he's going to have to deal with."
Ex-Rep. Dan Glickman, of Kansas, who came to Congress in the Watergate class of 1977, recalled that he, too, supported abortion limits early in his congressional career and cast other votes that he later regretted.
"We evolve, depending on where you came from, your background, your neighborhood. Some of these issues, like abortion, are tough. If you're not conflicted, you're not human," said Glickman, who heads the Institute of Politics at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Joe Lieberman, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination for 2004, isn't breaking any records for collecting campaign contributions from fellow Jews. Some of them argue this isn't the right time for a Jewish candidate.
Potential Jewish donors fear a Jewish president could stir up anti-Semitism in the middle of the war on terrorism and the military occupation of Iraq, Jews in both parties say.
"To be Jewish is to sometimes feel insecure in the world," says Hank Sheinkopf, a New York-based Democratic presidential-campaign consultant.
In theory, the senior senator from Connecticut has a lot going for him as the only Jew among the nine Democrats in the intensifying hunt for the 2004 nomination.
But some of his co-religionists also say Jewish donors feel drawn to President Bush, who is turning out to be the best friend Israel has ever had in the Oval Office.
"The smart political money in the Jewish community right now is sitting on the sidelines or supporting the president," says Lee Cowen, a
Washington-based Jewish fund-raiser.
After six months of aggressive fund-raising but sparse campaigning, presidential contender John Edwards sought yesterday to energize his New Hampshire political operation with a get-tough speech decrying corporate greed and proposing rules on stock options and executive pay.
Edwards, a first-term Democratic senator from North Carolina, also launched a scathing attack on the Bush administration's domestic agenda last night, at the first of 11 ''town hall'' meetings this summer. He said the president ''pretended'' to act like an average American, but had enacted policies that harmed public schools, the environment, civil liberties, and America's standing in the world. Edwards praised his fellow Democratic candidates, but said he was the only contender with a ''forward-looking, optimistic, positive'' message that could defeat Bush.
''He's a phony. He is a complete phony. The way you tell a counterfeit and the way you tell a phony, you put the real thing beside it in 2004,'' Edwards said.
Edwards said his campaign must still court donors but is pivoting to "retail politics," going to voters in person.
"We spent most of the first six months raising money so that we had the resources to run a serious presidential campaign," he said. "... The fund raising will become a less significant part of what we're doing."
Kerry and Dean consistently top the polls, draw more media attention and live in states next door. An added leg up is that the Democrats involved this early in the campaign are "the party activists and people that turn out all the time," said Michael Kitch, a former state Senate aide to both Republicans and Democrats who now writes for a Laconia newspaper. Those Democrats are more liberal, Kitch said, and more likely to back Dean or Kerry over Edwards, who, despite a relatively liberal voting record, advances a moderate image.
The moderates, suburbanites and independents who could boost Edwards' campaign have yet to focus on the race, said Dante Scala, a political analyst at St. Anselm College in Manchester.
Veteran campaign strategist Ed Turlington, who chairs Edwards' operation, said the campaign's plan is long term, not a month-to-month scramble for New Hampshire poll numbers even if they are low now.
Microfinancing is a grass-roots development tool that works best when run as a viable business, independent of government. While the emphasis once was solely on making loans, the latest trend is to offer clients a range of financial services. Governments are rightly being exhorted to regulate microfinancing institutions as a legitimate part of the financial sector. The Philippines has done so, and the Mindanao foundation's clients participate in a savings plan, too.
Remittances, the private flows of money sent home to developing nations by workers overseas, are fast becoming the cherished "El Dorado" for microfinancing promoters, as they are for plenty of other development schemes. It is estimated that last year the amount of money sent home by migrant workers--some $80 billion--overshadowed for the first time the amount of total aid and credit (both private and public) extended to poor countries. In the case of the Philippines, long known for exporting labor, remittances are one of the few things the nation's economy has going for it these days, amounting to some $7 billion a year.
Outfits like the Asian Development Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank see a natural fit between remittances and microfinancing. The challenge for them, and for policy makers from Manila to Bogota, is to find ways to deliver on this promise, both by enabling microfinancing groups to help speed the transfer of funds to remote villages at a lower cost and by providing a pool of working capital for microfinancing.
If microfinancing can indeed tap into these flows of capital in a significant way, overseas workers sending money home will have given their
communities a "hand up" in more ways than one.
In short, when the Federal Reserve Board talked in late June about "labor and product markets that are stabilizing," it was making an important point--in its characteristically obscure and understated manner. The rates of change in recent Labor Department surveys, reinforced by the optimism in the recent set of chief executive surveys, strongly suggest that the job market is about to turn the corner. The trend in these surveys may mean an end to the "jobless" recovery as more Americans find work outside manufacturing--in areas like education, health care and credit services.
[I]f PBR and Rheingold are too hip or too hip replacement for your tastes, a new breed of swanky imported brews has infiltrated the scene this summer. Hefeweizen, a Bavarian wheat beer with a yeasty taste, is leading the way for the growing niche market.
Brian Yost, vice president of beverages and restaurants at Marriot, said his company has added a hefeweizen, Ayinger Brau Weisse, to its summer lineup of beers in 2,000 bars and restaurants.
"They just happen to be a great summer beverage," he said. "They're full-flavored, but they also happen to be refreshing and easy-drinking." [...]
Dave Pollack, a sales manager for beer importer B. United International, said that beer aficionados, male and female, are looking for the newest thing.
"We've seen a constant demand for something new, something interesting," he said.
Normal people, when taking to the streets, march against their own governments, while a very idealistic and very small minority might sometimes march to protest the most awful things that may be happening elsewhere. But this is not how things happen in Europe....
The Europeans' worst crimes always took place in their own continent ... And, as in some way, European unification or pasteurisation goes on, instead of seeing the French turn against the Germans and the Germans against the French, what we have been witnessing is how they’ve managed to direct their common or mutual hatred against the next best target, the Europeans overseas, that is, America.
The Europeans don't care for the other, darker, peoples, they do not even hate them because, in their view, those belong to another, lower, species. Obviously it is not love for the Palestinians (not even cynical self interest) that explains their anti-Israeli animosity. No. The trouble with the Jews is that they look so much like the Europeans themselves that the wish to see them erased from the face of the earth cannot be repressed. Their hatred, directed ultimately against themselves, is naturally the other side of the perpetual European self-admiration, their almost unbelievable narcissism.
American leftists are cultural Europeans. It is not just that they admire Europe, love to vacation there, adopt Europe's academic fashions, share its secularism, and seek to import its politics. They also exhibit the symptoms Ascher describes: the narcissism, the indifference to genuine foreigners, and the hatred toward cultural fellows. Consider how often American leftists praise their own compassion, their intelligence, their selflessness and altruism. Consider how rarely suffering of non-European peoples enters their political decisions - how little, for instance, the travails of Iraqis under Saddam influenced the left's willingness to dethrone him. And consider how passionate is their hatred for Republicans, those callous conservatives who do not admire leftists sufficiently.
On July 4, we celebrated our declaration of political independence; but cultural independence is another matter. The Old Country still seeks to dominate, and victory in the American Revolution still has to be won.
For hundreds of years on this island peoples of different continents met in fear and cruelty. Today we gather in respect and friendship, mindful of past wrongs and dedicated to the advance of human liberty.
At this place, liberty and life were stolen and sold. Human beings were delivered and sorted, and weighed, and branded with the marks of commercial enterprises, and loaded as cargo on a voyage without return. One of the largest migrations of history was also one of the greatest crimes of history.
Below the decks, the middle passage was a hot, narrow, sunless nightmare; weeks and months of confinement and abuse and confusion on a strange and lonely sea. Some refused to eat, preferring death to any future their captors might prepare for them. Some who were sick were thrown over the side. Some rose up in violent rebellion, delivering the closest thing to justice on a slave ship. Many acts of defiance and bravery are recorded. Countless others, we will never know.
Those who lived to see land again were displayed, examined, and sold at auctions across nations in the Western Hemisphere. They entered societies indifferent to their anguish and made prosperous by their unpaid labor. There was a time in my country's history when one in every seven human beings was the property of another. In law, they were regarded only as articles of commerce, having no right to travel, or to marry, or to own possessions. Because families were often separated, many denied even the comfort of suffering together.
For 250 years the captives endured an assault on their culture and their dignity. The spirit of Africans in America did not break. Yet the spirit of their captors was corrupted. Small men took on the powers and airs of tyrants and masters. Years of unpunished brutality and bullying and rape produced a dullness and hardness of conscience. Christian men and women became blind to the clearest commands of their faith and added hypocrisy to injustice. A republic founded on equality for all became a prison for millions. And yet in the words of the African proverb, "no fist is big enough to hide the sky." All the generations of oppression under the laws of man could not crush the hope of freedom and defeat the purposes of God.
In America, enslaved Africans learned the story of the exodus from Egypt and set their own hearts on a promised land of freedom. Enslaved Africans discovered a suffering Savior and found he was more like themselves than their masters. Enslaved Africans heard the ringing promises of the Declaration of Independence and asked the self-evident question, then why not me?
Dean's astonishing success at pulling in such a large haul of online contributions so early in the campaign is revolutionary. It gives Democrats an alternative to their addiction to raising big money from rich people and rich interests. Most of that fundraising will be against the law if the Supreme Court upholds the Campaign Reform Act passed last year. So the Dems had better figure out something.
In the old soft money system, the most efficient way to raise $100 million was through a small number of very rich people. One hundred people giving $100,000 each quickly gets you to $10 million.
But Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager and an evangelist for the gospel of online politics, describes the alternative: You can raise $100 million if a million people contribute an average of $100 each. If Democrats can't find a few million people willing to part with a couple of bucks a week, they're in trouble.
Dean shocked the political world by raising more money -- roughly $7.5 million -- in the last quarter than any of his more established opponents, and, according to his campaign, he raised nearly half of that in the eight days before the June 30 filing period ended, largely through online contributions. In one day, noted Trippi, Dean took in $800,000 online. Dean's figures show that 80 percent of his first-time donors gave less than $250; 60 percent gave less than $100.
In private conversations with Bush administration officials this past week, I was favorably impressed by their realism about the U.S.-sponsored "road map" plan to stop Palestinian-Israeli violence. But I worry nonetheless that things could go awry.
Those worries stem from the seven years (1993-2000) of the Oslo round of Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy, when well-intentioned Israeli initiatives to resolve the conflict only worsened it. I learned two main lessons about Palestinian-Israel negotiations:
* Unless Palestinians accept the existence of Israel, the agreements they sign are scraps of paper.
* Unless Palestinians are held to their promise of renouncing violence, agreements with them reward terrorism and therefore spur more violence.
My caution today concerns both points. Palestinian ambitions to destroy the Jewish state remain alive. And the U.S. government's ability to enforce Palestinian compliance more effectively than did the Israelis remains in question.
Questioned again and again on these issues of Palestinian intentions and American monitoring, the senior officials I spoke with offered impressively hard-headed analyses:
* On Palestinian intentions to destroy Israel, they echo Secretary of State Colin Powell's recent statement, that he worries about "terrorist organizations that have not given up the quest to destroy the state of Israel."
* On the need to enforce signed agreements, both officials insist that the road-map diplomacy would screech to a halt if the Palestinians fail to keep their word. One of them also volunteered that Israel would not be expected to fulfill its promises if the Palestinians betrayed theirs.
I was especially pleased by the modesty of their aspirations. As one official puts it, "We have a shot at peace."
And thus the table was set for the final course, which came on 9/11/01. Osama bin Laden provided Christopher the carnage-strewn opening he was waiting for, and soon after the Towers fell and the Pentagon's fires were put out, Hitch went off like he's never gone off before. Everybody to his left was a terrorist stooge. America was no longer an imperialist power. George W. Bush was a Noble Warrior for Enlightenment Values. From the wreckage of 9/11 came a new American Dawn, and Hitch soaked in its rays.
At first I was flabbergasted by the venom Hitch directed at people like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn (though, curiously enough, not at his old friend Edward Said, who didn't join Christopher's Liberation Squad). Then, after reading his arguments for smashing the Taliban and their al Qaeda "guests" in Afghanistan, along with Ahmed Rashid's fine book Taliban, I eventually came out in favor of the U.S. hitting those who backed the 9/11 attacks, if only to scatter them and knock them off balance.
When I explained my hesitant conversion to Hitch over the phone, he seemed delighted, and told a mutual friend that I was moving to "the right side."
Hmmm.
It's true I was pissed about the attacks on New York, my adopted hometown. And it's true that I took (and take) al Qaeda seriously and support undermining if not destroying them through international cooperation and effort. But I'm not a supporter of Bush's regime by any stretch, and was adamantly against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, knowing full well that plans for that attack predated 9/11 and had nothing to do with "liberation" or democracy, much less self-defense. Whatever goodwill the U.S. garnered after al Qaeda's hit was squandered by the administration's lust for expansionist war on its narrow terms. Can't support that.
The other difference is that, unlike Christopher, I do not revel in blasting apart strangers. There was a mean streak in me during the Afghan campaign where I did make light of Taliban and al Qaeda dead. But inside I knew that plenty more noncombatants were getting butchered, which bothered me. Plus I wasn't as gung-ho or dismissive about torturing prisoners at Guantanamo as were many of the war's supporters. Hitch has written about weapons that "shame us" and shown some concern for those chopped up by the U.S. Yet, more often than not, he's celebrated Bush's military attacks, and is critical when he thinks Bush isn't ruthless enough.
D.C. has finally gotten to him. That must be the main explanation. Yes, there are other factors to consider, but the D.C. Beast frames and distorts the thinking. Few on the Beltway's A List fret about crushing other countries. They enjoy it. They like the view from atop the growing pile of bodies. Always have. You can't live among these types for 20-plus years without some of their madness infecting your brain. And I'm afraid this madness, and the verbiage that covers it, is becoming more evident in Christopher.
I can barely read him anymore. His pieces in the Brit tabloid The Mirror and in Slate are a mishmash of imperial justifications and plain bombast; the old elegant style is dead. His TV appearances show a smug, nasty scold with little tolerance for those who disagree with him. He looks more and more like a Ralph Steadman sketch.
He was originally signed to play the Scarecrow in the MGM classic "The Wizard of Oz." But in a late casting switch, Ray Bolger pushed him out of the part, and Mr. Ebsen was recast as the Tin Woodman. After weeks of rehearsal, however, a severe allergy to the aluminum-based makeup forced him to relinquish that part to Jack Haley.
The Beverly Hillbillies was an instant success when it first aired in 1962, and Nielsen continued to rank it among the top twelve programs for the following six years. Its ability to appeal to various sectors of the audience contributed to its staying power. Liberals could see the above episode as a jab at the business establishment, while more conservative viewers might have taken it as a confirmation of traditional morality. Furthermore, the program is as much a joyful celebration of America's material pleasures as it is a satire of them. Like Rip Van Winkle, the Clampetts stumble upon a society that delights as well as repulses them. They enjoy what their wealth can do but always temper their spirited liberality with common sense. Granny's passions are lusty but never illicit. The younger Clampetts (television's early attempt to portray flower children) are intent upon using their wealth for the betterment of society and nature. Jethro experiments with modern art (as well as women), and Ellie Mae looks after a menagerie of woodland creatures. Sheared of inhibitions and devoted to art and nature, these ersatz hippies, however, never stray from the hearth nor contradict their stern elders.
This balance of liberality and common sense appealed to a wide audience in the early I 960s, but by the end of the decade, when liberal and conservative as well as generational factions had grown apart, the balance shifted, a fact apparent in public statements made by the program's actors. For Irene Ryan and Buddy Ebsen, who played Granny and Jed, the program was as much an affirmation of their own conservative politics as it was a satire of American materialism. In interviews conducted in 1968, both announced their support of Ronald Reagan's candidacy for Governor of California, their contempt for the welfare system, and distaste for protestors. As Ebsen put it, "Hippies are the greatest conformists." Interviewer Edith Efron perceived these real-life political remarks as extensions of the actors' roles. Granny, like Ryan herself, notes Efron, is a symbol of America's individualism and strength.
In short, as the gap between blue-collar worker and student, between Silent Majority and young militants, grew, The Beverly Hillbillies came to represent in the public mind a form of individualism that contrasted sharply with the putative conformism of anti-war and civil rights dissidents. Nielsen and TVQ ratings confirm the shift. As one might expect, rural comedies fared well in the South, but by 1968, the motif had become more popular among blue-collar workers throughout the nation than Southerners
On the president's economic policy, [Dean] compared America to Argentina and got laughs.
"I say Argentina and people laugh," Dean said. "When you have a Republican president who promises tax cuts and has middle class people pay for them, sooner or later we do get to be like Argentina. It isn't really that funny."
Bush, Dean said, is not a conservative, but a radical.
Borrow and spend, Dean said, is "exactly what happened in Argentina and the same kind of politics: Promise them everything."
So far, Dean appears to be the only Democrat finding themes that get traction with the left and with moderates and conservatives. And while he is likely to lose, I'm beginning to think he'll get the nomination and put a little bit of pressure on George.
All of the major contenders attended a January NARAL event in an attempt to shore up their pro-abortion credentials. Congressmen Richard Gephardt (D-MO) and Dennis Kucinich both abandoned their pro-life positions to support abortion when their ambitions led them to run for higher office. Though he later recanted and admitted he was wrong, Sen. John Kerry was so eager to make his pro-abortion stance known, he told attendees at several campaign events that his first speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate backed abortion.
Yet many Hispanics are wondering why the Spanish-language version of the web sites of some Democratic presidential candidates mention nothing about abortion, while the English versions tout their pro-abortion positions.
The Spanish-language site of Gephardt's makes no mention of abortion, whereas his English site has an "issues" section where "Right to Choose" is one of the categories, and also has a link to a January speech titled "One thing must be certain: The freedom to choose."
A Gephardt spokeswoman confirmed that the site doesn't currently have any reference to abortion.
Kim Molstre of the Gephardt campaign claimed the lack of abortion references on the candidate's Spanish site is simply because not all the English items have been translated.
The Spanish site of pro-abortion Sen. Joe Lieberman -- which is much less extensive than Gephardt's -- also makes no mention of abortion. Jano Cabrera, a spokesman for Lieberman, also claimed the omission is because not all the English content has been translated.
The rub is that while a candidate like Dean can certainly score points by venting Democrats' frustration and contempt for Bush, these views bear little resemblance to those of the independent and other swing voters who, by and large, determine who wins and loses in general elections.
In those same two June Ipsos/Cook surveys, 55 percent of all independent registered voters approved of Bush's overall performance, while 25 percent strongly approved. Thirty-seven percent disapproved, but only 17 percent strongly disapproved.
On the economy and domestic issues, a somewhat stronger case can be made for more specific attacks. On the economy, 44 percent of independent voters approved and 12 percent strongly approved -- while 49 percent disapproved, and 29 percent strongly disapproved. On the handling of domestic issues, 48 percent approved and only 8 percent strongly approved; 45 percent disapproved, with 30 percent strongly disapproving.
On foreign policy, however, independents are generally supportive of Bush. Sixty percent of independents approved of Bush's performance and 38 percent strongly approved -- while 35 percent disapprove, with 21 percent strongly disapproving.
In short, exhibiting personal contempt and voicing broadside condemnations of Bush can generate considerable short-term enthusiasm within the Democratic Party, but it can easily be counterproductive among independent voters.
Now a good many arguments have been made accusing George W. Bush of being a pale aristocrat; a complacent, ill-governed man whose success was inherited. I leave that dreary question aside and say here just this; that when President Bush recently responded to a question about attacks on American troops in Iraq with the defiant goad, "bring 'em on," he was uttering as profoundly democratic a sentiment as has been uttered by a high official in recent memory. "Bring 'em on" is the foreign policy of an infuriated democracy; it embodies the feelings of ten million firemen and electricians and miners, especially firemen and electricians and miners who knew men that died on September 11; and George W. Bush's popularity rests on this embodiment.
Naturally, the foreign policy oligarchy is appalled; because for it democracy is at best an annoyance, at worst a monster. The oligarchy likes to manage, cajole, maintain, occasionally adjust, but rarely disturb, the status quo; it is almost wholly dependent on the status quo, whereas democracy, once aroused, cares nothing for it. Likewise, the Democratic Party is genuinely horrified as well, for reasons which can be sufficiently suggested by asking how the Democrats can possibly secure the union vote when a Republican makes public statements of this nature. President Bush is popular with precisely the constituency that the Democrats claim to represent: the common man.
And thus the democracy is happy; indeed it is grimly amused and even heartened. It hears, "bring 'em on," followed by a predictable round of hand-wringing and fatuous commentary, and it thinks, "He's one of us"; or at least, and perhaps equally appealing, "He's not one of them." And I think it is this naturally democratic camaraderie (and it is important to note that it is quite natural) conveyed by President Bush, which immunizes him to charges of aristocratic irresponsibility by his opponents. The charges are too discordant with reality. To believe that Mr. Bush is a foolish aristocrat, men have to almost believe that they themselves are foolish aristocrats; and if Mr. Bush is indeed irresponsible, which he may well be, it is far nearer to the truth to say that he is a foolish democrat.
One of the saddest results of our war in Iraq is that it may finish off Tony Blair before Saddam Hussein.
Everywhere I go in Britain, people dismiss Mr. Blair as President Bush's poodle. Mr. Blair's Labor Party has fallen behind the Conservatives in the latest poll, for only the second time in 11 years. "The Iraq critics think that the prime minister has betrayed his country to a Texas gunslinger," William Rees-Mogg noted in The Times of London.
So it'll sound foolish when I suggest that President Bush should study Mr. Blair and learn a few things. [...]
Mr. Blair dignifies his opponents by grappling with their arguments in a way that helps preserve civility--and that we Americans can learn
from.
Seven months before the presidential primary in South Carolina, the state Democratic Party doesn't have the money to pay for it, raising doubts about whether the first-in-the-South primary will take place....
The most recent state filing, from April 10, showed the state party with $288.93 on hand ...
Whatever the cost, the Democratic National Committee had said it would not step in to finance the primary despite the embarrassment of a canceled primary. The DNC wants to avoid the precedent of bailing out one state party, knowing that if it does, others would come calling.
James Watson would have aborted his son if a genetic test had been available at the time warning that his child would be born with severe epilepsy.
Declaring "I'm not a sadist", the man who co-discovered DNA said that parents, especially mothers, should have a right of genetic veto over the make-up of their child.
"Any time you can prevent a seriously sick child from being born, it is good for everyone," Dr Watson told The Sunday Age. "Most mothers wouldn't want to have dwarfs." [...]
Dr Watson's refusal to oppose what he concedes could lead to eugenics takes him on to sensitive ethical ground.
For instance, he believes abortions are acceptable where a foetus is found to be genetically inclined to homosexuality.
"If they want to, let them," he said. "My wife really wants a grandchild."
Dr Watson said there is likely to be a genetic component to homosexuality, but the major cause may be hormonal surges during pregnancy. [...]
He also disagrees with the dark predictions of the science-fiction film Gattica, in which genetics determine each person's role in society.
Ozzy Osbourne may have weathered the lowest lows that drug addiction has to offer, but the news that his son Jack was seeking treatment for substance abuse taught him a lesson that his own decades of addiction never did.
"I used to think they should legalize pot, but you know what? They should ban the lot," Osbourne told MTV News, addressing Jack's battle for the first time. "One thing leads to another. Coffee leads to Red Bull, Red Bull leads to crank.
"When I found out the full depth of him getting into OxyContin, which is like hillbilly heroin, I was shocked and stunned," Osbourne continued. "The thing that's amazing was how rapidly he went from smoking pot to doing hillbilly heroin."
All those Greenies and Naderites who grumble about the permanent duopoly on political power in Washington, D.C., can take heart: It's over, according to an emerging consensus. The bad news: It's been replaced by a near-permanent monopoly. Of Republicans.
At least, that's the bad news for liberals if the new presumption of perpetual Republican dominance in Washington turns out to be correct. Although it's only a theory, it's one with a surprising number of adherents. Even parts of the left have begun to embrace it. But the idea's leading proponent is, unsurprisingly, a conservative: Grover Norquist, the longtime Rasputin of the right. "The Republicans are looking at decades of dominance in the House and Senate, and having the presidency with some regularity," Norquist told the New York Times last week. A few days earlier, he made the same point, with slightly less confidence, to CNBC Washington bureau chief and Wall Street Journal columnist Alan Murray: "For the next 10 years in the House and Senate, we're looking at Republican control." In the Washington Post last month, Norquist wrote of a "guarantee of united Republican government" that "has allowed the Bush administration to work and think long-term."
The bill would require Head Start employees to teach early reading, writing and math skills, much like many state-financed and private preschool programs. "We want Head Start to set higher ambitions for the million children it serves," Mr. Bush said.
The president also promised that there would be safeguards to ensure that Head Start money sent directly to a state would, in fact, be used for Head Start. "What we really don't want to do is say we're going to focus on Head Start, the Head Start money goes for, you know, the prison complex," Mr. Bush said.
Head Start advocates and the president's opponents said they remained skeptical about the administration's motives and worried that the eight-state pilot program would be, as one education expert put it, "the camel's nose." Critics say that states cannot be counted on to uphold the quality of Head Start programs and that the centers, which are often staffed by former Head Start mothers and operate like neighborhood centers, will lose their character and close ties to their communities.
Other Head Start advocates said they were worried that the nurturing approach of Head Start would change if there was increased emphasis on early literacy skills.
"There's a big tension in the early childhood community between huggers and teachers," said Amy Wilkins, the executive director of the Trust for Early Education, a lobbying and research group. "There's still this fear, despite all this brain research about how eager children are to learn, about the hurried child and too much, too soon."
"It's the most cold-blooded and efficient way of raising money in the history of politics," Charles Lewis, head of the Center for Public Integrity, says in Canada's National Post. "These aren't your average Americans. They're the most well-heeled interests, with vested interests in government."
Bob Herbert of the New York Times calls Bush's fundraising dinners "events at which the fat cats throw millions of dollars at the president to reinforce their already impenetrable ring of influence around the national government."
That's the kind of rhetoric that was used when rich people and corporations gave seven-figure soft-money donations. Now, with contributors limited to $2,000, all of it hard money, the critics are still using the fat cat argument.
But by any standard of measurement, they're simply wrong. George W. Bush's GOP is the party of the little guy.
A new study by the Center for Responsive Politics found that in the last election cycle, people who gave less than $200 to politicians or parties gave 64 percent of their money to Republicans. Just 35 percent went to Democrats. On the other hand, the Center found that people who gave $1 million or more gave 92 percent to Democrats - and a whopping eight percent to Republicans.
Which would you call the party of fat cats?
As a young political reporter trying to plumb the dynamics of voter behavior, I did an interview 16 years ago with a regular Joe Voter from Ohio that has stayed with me ever since.
DURING THE COURSE of our chat, he wanted to know why the Iran-contra scandal was such a big deal inside the Beltway for then-President Ronald Reagan? I tried my best to explain: In secretly trading arms for hostages, the Reagan Administration had deliberately misled Congress and precipitated a Constituional crisis. But the puzzled listener just furrowed his brow: "Yeah, but Reagan is trying to do a good job," he blurted out. "Leave him alone."
That may not sound profound. But the more I followed politics over the years, the more I came to realize the man was posing the essential judgment most voters make in deciding whether to stick with their Commander-in-Chief. Not "Is he doing a good job?" mind you. "Is he trying to do a good job?" Ever since FDR, U.S. Presidents generally have enjoyed a deep reservoir of good will with the electorate -- even among those who didn't vote for them. Get on the wrong side of this question, however, and it's over. [...]
The average approval rating in the third year of every President's first term since Dwight Eisenhower has been 55 percent -- Bush's remain in the mid-60s. Almost two out of three voters are still sold on the notion that he's trying to do a good job.
Deep in New Hampshire's north woods, up past Lake Winnipesaukee's bustling resort towns, stands a verdant mountainside that may soon be buzzing with the latest trend in America's love affair with cars. Sprawled on 320 acres would be a members-only "car country club" - complete with clubhouse, swimming pool, weekend villas, and a 3.3-mile racetrack winding through the woods.
Forget leisurely golfing on the back nine: This place would be about testosterone, octane, and speed - so much of it, in fact, that some locals worry the club would forever spoil their picturesque town.
Still, the car-club concept is catching on. Plans are afoot for members-only tracks near the Appalachian Trail in eastern Pennsylvania and in Joliet, Ill. And existing tracks are offering pricey memberships and country-club amenities They're all signs of an American cultural convergence - NASCAR meets the Hamptons. It's a kind of upscale go-kart track in a gated community, a place where wealthy and increasingly footloose baby boomers can live out their fast and furious fantasies.
"Country-club-type racetracks are going to become established in America," predicts Alan Wilson, a legendary racetrack designer involved in the three projects. Golf clubs have prospered as spots for elites to socialize, play, and do business. So will car country clubs, he says. "But instead of playing with a five iron, they'll play with a Ferrari."
Antonin Scalia is raging against the coming of the light.
Scalia's dissent from last week's epochal Supreme Court decision striking down Texas' anti-sodomy statute confirms Ayatollah Antonin's standing as the intellectual leader of the forces arrayed against equality and modernity in the United States. In establishing the deep historical roots of anti-gay sentiment in America, for instance, Scalia took pains to note the 20 prosecutions and four executions for consensual gay sex conducted in colonial times. He noted, approvingly, that even today, "many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children's schools or as boarders in their home."
Actually, back in 1978, a California electorate far more conservative than today's massively repudiated an initiative seeking to ban gays from teaching school, but this inconvenient fact -- and other evidence of a massive shift in public sentiment on gay rights -- doesn't have quite the legal majesty of those four colonial executions. (Scalia is uncharacteristically short on detail here. Were they hangings or burnings?) Scalia's justifications for discriminatory conduct sound terribly familiar. Change "homosexual" to "Negro" and Scalia is at one with the authors of Plessy v. Ferguson's mandate for "separate but equal" schools, and the judges who upheld anti-miscegenation statutes. Indeed, of the 13 states whose anti-sodomy statutes were struck down last Thursday, 10 were once slave states of the South. In what has always been the main event in American history -- the battle to expand the definition of "men" in Jefferson's mighty line on who's created equal -- these are the states that have had to be dragged along
kicking and screaming.
Unemployed and running out of money, Brad Hoegler is back where he never thought he would be -- home with his parents.
The 26-year-old lost his job last year as a financial consultant for Charles Schwab in Austin, Texas. His severance package dwindled within weeks. Jobs were nowhere to be found, and the few hundred dollars he collected each week in unemployment benefits didn't make ends meet.
Hoegler, who left home eight years ago, said his only option was moving in with his parents in Southern California.
"It puts a little crimp in my social life," Hoegler said. "But it certainly helps me, there's no two ways about that. I couldn't have made it paying rent somewhere."
Hoegler is part of an unhappy trend -- frustrated job seekers forced to move in with relatives and friends because they can't pay rent. Others are depleting savings or maxing out credit cards before taking minimum-wage jobs.
By global standards, the prevalence of HIV/AIDS remains relatively low in Kazakhstan, but the country is suffering from one of the fastest infection rates in the world.
In 2002, the Kazakh government estimated some 25,000 persons were living with HIV/AIDS. Kazakhstan is believed to have more than double the number of persons with HIV/AIDS than the other four Central Asian nations combined.
According to UNAIDS, which coordinates UN AIDS programs, 85 percent of new HIV/AIDS cases in Kazakhstan involve intravenous drug users, of which there are some 200,000 in the country.
In a report released recently, New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) says the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Kazakhstan is being fueled by human rights abuses against intravenous drug users and sex workers.
Marie Struthers is a Moscow-based consultant for HRW on Central Asia and Russia and was a co-researcher of the report, titled "Fanning the Flames."
She says, "Routine police abuse, including instances of violent police brutality, a lack of due process, and constant harassment and stigmatization drive injecting drug users and sex workers -- who are among the persons most vulnerable to contracting the HIV virus -- underground. And this means that it increases their reluctance to approach services, which could result in saving their lives."
The struggle to find compatibility between the materialist world of science and the faith-based metaphysical claims of religion has a very long history. According to Maimonides in his Guide of the Perplexed, for example one might consider a science without religion, but religion without science is an oxymoron. His suggestion that you need to understand how creation works before delving into the role of the Creator within creation, though, was such anathema to theologians of his time that his books were burned by Jews and Christians alike.
To bring this controversy up to date, editor Paul Kurtz has drawn together 39 essays under the title Science And Religion: Are They Compatible?
Sounds like the makings of a good debate. Unfortunately the title is woefully misleading. Kurtz is the founding chairperson of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and the Council for Secular Humanism (CSH). The essays in this book are taken from a conference co-sponsored by, among others, CSICOP, CSH and to round off the potential for a secular bias, the publisher of Free Inquiry Magazine. [...]
Unbelief in God and religion turns out to be a sign of maturity. And so Arthur C. Clarke of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame opines that "The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion. The association is now counterproductive."
And yet a study of longevity on Israeli kibbutzim revealed quite the contrary. Published in the highly respected American Journal of Public Health, (March 1996), Dr. Jeremy Kark et al reported on the 16-year tracking of 3,900 secular and religious kibbutznikim. Kibbutz members tend to have longer life spans than the general population. The surprise of the study was that members of religious kibbutzim outlived their secular counterparts, to the extent that religious men lived longer than secular women.
It seems that Proverbs (10:27) got it right: "The fear of the Lord prolongeth days."
The basic question boils down to whether or not there is place for the metaphysical within the structure of what until recently was a purely materialist science. Plato found abhorrent the idea of Democritus and Aristotle, that only the physically perceptible exists. The Bible, a thousand years earlier, expressed similar sentiments.
J. A. Wheeler, former president of the American Physical Society, Princeton professor of physics, recipient of the Einstein Award, portrays the stance of today's science.
"When I first started studying I saw the world as composed of particles. Looking more deeply I discovered waves. Now after a lifetime of study, it appears that all existence is the expression of information."
The Bible agrees.
"I am wisdom. God made me the first of all creations" (Proverbs 8:12,22).
If the seemingly divergent fields of quantum physics and Bible are correct, then indeed we may literally be the idea of God, Mr. Kurtz and his 91% atheist colleagues notwithstanding. And that would answer the ultimate question with which both science and religion struggle. Why is there an "is"? Why is there something rather than nothing? For that answer both science and religion must turn to the metaphysical.
Washington's position, which is more desirable and flexible than Islamabad's, sees Pakistan more as a means to a mid-term end - the creation of a Middle Eastern/South Asian anti-terror infrastructure that would allow Washington to squash all threats to its regional hegemony - rather than as a long term and permanent relationship.
Though Musharraf has announced there will be elections held in five years, that doesn't mean that either he or stability will remain until that time: he recently spoke of his own endangerment at the hands of such groups as the MMA in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). Subsequently, as Pakistan moves towards uncertainty, Washington will take great interest in the political situation there. If Pakistan were to enter into a period of significant instability it would endanger the US agenda for the region and possibly be the forebear of a realigned Pakistan, one more along the lines of a Taliban era Afghanistan. It is the understanding of this possibility that fuels Musharraf to pledge that Pakistan will not undergo a process of "Talibanization." Washington's fear of a destabilized Pakistan is to Islamabad's advantage, though it may be one neutralized by the fact there's really no alternative for Musharraf.
It is also Washington's need of the continued presence of the Musharraf regime - and the political and military context it offers - that essentially renders criticism of the Pakistani leader and the relationship in general moot: the Bush administration has no intention of disciplining Musharraf over his human rights problems or his, at times at least, lackadaisical approach to far-reaching counterinsurgent efforts.
The United States and Pakistan will remain strategic allies for the time being, though Washington's long term plans for the region see a radicalized and populous Muslim country led by an unelected military figure at odds with the vision of the widely-discussed "reshaping" of the Middle East.
This summer, a group of computer scientists-including [Moshe] Koppel, a professor at Israeli's Bar-Ilan University-are publishing two papers in which they describe the successful results of a gender-detection experiment. The scholars have developed a computer algorithm that can examine an anonymous text and determine, with accuracy rates of better than 80 percent, whether the author is male or female. For centuries, linguists and cultural pundits have argued heatedly about whether men and women communicate differently. But Koppel's group is the first to create an actual prediction machine.
A rather controversial one, too. When the group submitted its first paper to the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the referees rejected it ''on ideological grounds,'' Koppel maintains. ''They said, `Hey, what do you mean? You're trying to make some claim about men and women being different, and we don't know if that's true. That's just the kind of thing that people are saying in order to oppress women!' And I said `Hey-I'm just reporting the numbers.'''
When they submitted their papers to other journals, the group made a significant tweak. One of the coauthors, Anat Shimoni, added her middle name ''Rachel'' to her byline, to make sure reviewers knew one member of the group was female. (The third scientist is a man, Shlomo Argamon.) The papers were accepted by the journals Literary and Linguistic Computing and Text, and are appearing over the next few months. Koppel says they haven't faced any further accusations of antifeminism
With many Democrats unenthusiastic about the nine presidential candidates, two more are sizing up the race and could join the bid to take on President Bush by September. A top Democratic official says that Delaware Sen. Joe Biden is at least 50-50 on joining "and some days is 70-30." A family member says it's closer to "80 percent" a go. Biden thinks his experience in foreign affairs is a plus in the post-9/11 world. Two hurdles, say allies: How does Biden deal with his speech plagiarism, which helped doom his 1988 bid? And will the public believe that he's healthy despite suffering two aneurysms? Then there's retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, the beneficiary of a vast "Draft Clark" effort. A close aide tells Whispers Clark will decide whether to run within the next two months. "He feels he owes an answer to all of the young people who are trying to draft him," we're told. In fact, some aides are already getting in place to run his campaign if he gives the green light, and potential allies, like Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor, say the fellow Arky is an "intriguing" and attractive candidate.
A plausible scenario for the 2004 presidential election is beginning to emerge. It is set out in a recent memo by Republican pollster Bill McInturff titled "A Coming Bush Landslide in 2004?" McInturff's numbers are not much different from those in Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg's recent Democracy Corps memo titled "Hunting Season Is Here: A Time for Boldness." When a pollster calls for boldness, you know that he means that his side must turn opinion around. McInturff is careful to say that his scenario is not inevitable, just likely. Consumer confidence is high, and voters express warmer feelings toward Republicans than Democrats--a first since polling started in 1935. National security, a Bush issue, remains a paramount concern--and is likely to remain so through 2004.
The two parties have responded in different ways. Republicans in Washington are confident but aware that their majorities are small and conceivably vulnerable. They have passed a big tax cut, and both houses have passed Medicare/ prescription drug bills. Republicans around the country are united as they have not been since 1984 and are pouring record amounts of money into the Bush campaign. State-by-state and district-by-district analysis suggests that Republicans will probably win more seats in the Senate and House next year. [...]
Core Democrats have an emotional investment in the idea that George W. Bush is an idiot; if conservatives believe they are conservative because they have more common sense than other people, liberals believe they are liberal because they are smarter than other people. At the heart of their hatred of Bush is snobbery. Gephardt, Lieberman, Graham, and Edwards don't exude this snobbery. Dean and Kerry do. This could give whichever of them survives New Hampshire an edge with core Democrats. The Democrats' problem is that at least 70 percent of voters do not share their contempt for Bush and find it off-putting. Outside a Bush fundraiser last week one protester's sign read, "France was right." That is not a winning slogan in an American election.
Georgia is not the only Southern state where the Democrats face problems. It is unclear whether Democratic incumbents will be on the ballot in South Carolina, where 81-year-old Ernest F. Hollings has hinted at retirement, or North Carolina and Florida, where Senators John Edwards and Bob Graham are running for their party's presidential nomination. Their decisions on whether to seek re-election to the Senate will help determine how many open seats Democrats will have to defend in a region where President Bush is riding high.
"In that part of the country in a presidential year it is kind of a perfect storm coming together for the Democrats, and it could get ugly for them," said Stuart Rothenberg, a nonpartisan analyst of Congressional races.
Nationally, Democrats have more Senate seats in play than Republicans, 19 to 15, and they concede that the South poses a challenge given Mr. Bush's strong showing in most Southern states in 2000.
"Does Spengler know, for instance, that in the last century 2,000 distinct ethnic groups have gone extinct?" Eric Garrett asks in his June 12 riposte, A question of identity, to an earlier article of mine, Neo-cons in a religious bind.
Garrett's organization, the World Conservation Union, is devoted to preserving fragile cultures. As a matter of fact, I reported in this space that in the next decade, yet another 2,000 distinct ethnic groups would go extinct (Live and Let Die of April 13, 2002). Ignore the endangered Ewoks for a moment, Mr Garrett, and explain why the imperial peoples of the past two centuries - Germans, Japanese, French, Italians, Russians, and so forth - have elected to disappear, through failure to reproduce (Why Europe chooses extinction, April 8). [...]
Which brings us to the threat of radical Islam. "You are decadent and hedonistic. We on the other hand are willing to die for what we believe, and we are a billion strong. You cannot kill all of us, so you will have to accede to what we demand." That, in a nutshell, constitutes the Islamist challenge to the West.
Neither the demographic shift toward Muslim immigrants nor meretricious self-interest explains Western Europe's appeasement of Islam, but rather the terrifying logic of the numbers. That is why President Bush has thrown his prestige behind the rickety prospect of an Israeli-Palestinian peace. And that is why Islamism has only lost a battle in Iraq, but well might win the war.
Not a single Western strategist has proposed an ideological response to the religious challenge of Islam. On the contrary: the Vatican, the
guardian-of-last-resort of the Western heritage, has placed itself squarely in the camp of appeasement. Except for a few born-again Christians in the United States, no Western voice is raised in criticism of Islam itself. The trouble is that Islam believes in its divine mission, while the United States has only a fuzzy recollection of what it once believed, and therefore has neither the aptitude nor the inclination for ideological warfare. [...]
Grim men of faith - Loyola, Oldebarnevelt, Richilieu, Mazarin - led the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, while the Florentines amused the tourists (The sacred heart of darkness, February 11). The trouble with Strauss, I reiterate, is that he was an atheist, rather a disadvantage in a religious war. The West has no armed prophet. It doesn't even have an armed theologian.
The words "future of Christianity" are no casual combination of words like the future of motoring, or the future of Europe. Christianity is the founder and trustee of the future.
-Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973)
[Mr. Rosenstock-Huessy] had two phrases he repeated so often they remained in a student's mind.
He would say, "History must be told." He explained in various ways that history is to a civilization what personal memory is to an individual an essential part of identity and a source of meaning.
He also said that the goal of education is the citizen. He defined the citizen in a radical and original way arising out of his own twentieth-century experience. He said that a citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-create his civilization.
Anthony A "Tony Poe" Poshepny, a decorated former official of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who collected enemy ears, dropped decapitated human heads from the air on to communists and stuck heads on spikes, was buried on the weekend in California. Poshepny, who waged failed secret wars for the United States in Indonesia, Tibet and Laos, was often compared to the Marlon Brando character Kurtz in the movie Apocalypse Now.
"The posting of decapitated heads obviously sent a powerful message - especially to North Vietnamese troops seeking to invade the homelands of the Hmong and Laotian people," Philip Smith, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Public Policy Analysis, said in an e-mail interview after Poshepny's death on June 27.
"He successfully fought terror with terror. He strove to instill courage and respect in the tribal and indigenous forces that he recruited and trained as well as fear in the enemy. In the post-September 11 security environment, fearless men like Tony Poe are what America needs to combat and counter terrorism and the new unconventional threat that America faces from abroad in exotic and uncharted lands," Smith said. [...]
Said Smith of the Center for Public Policy Analysis: "Tony Poe epitomized what the late Theodore Shackley, former CIA station chief in Laos, called the 'Third Option'. America - to avoid the potential twin options of using nuclear or conventional forces to defend its interests - should instead rely on special, elite clandestine forces to recruit, train and arm indigenous, or tribal forces, to project power, protect its interests and counter guerrilla movements, terrorism or other attacks.
"Clearly, Tony Poe symbolized America's decision to exercise its 'Third Option' in Laos."
After retiring in 1975, Poshepny and his Hmong wife lived in northern Thailand until 1992, when they moved to the United States. He remained close to the Lao community in the San Francisco Bay Area, advising their sons to join the US Marines, financing Laotians in need and petitioning Washington for aid to Laotian veterans.
"One evening coming in with a candle I was startled to hear him say a little tremulously, 'I am lying here in the dark waiting for death.' The light was within a foot of his eyes. I forced myself to murmur, 'Oh, nonsense!' and stood over him as if transfixed.
"Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror -- of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision -- he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:
"'The horror! The horror!'
"I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in the mess-room, and I took my place opposite the manager, who lifted his eyes to give me a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored. He leaned back, serene, with that peculiar smile of his sealing the unexpressed depths of his meanness. A continuous shower of small flies streamed upon the lamp, upon the cloth, upon our hands and faces. Suddenly the manager's boy put his insolent black head in the doorway, and said in a tone of scathing contempt:
"'Mistah Kurtz -- he dead.'"
"'Forgive me. I -- I have mourned so long in silence -- in silence.... You were with him -- to the last? I think of his loneliness. Nobody near to understand him as I would have understood. Perhaps no one to hear....'
"'To the very end,' I said, shakily. 'I heard his very last words....' I stopped in a fright.
"'Repeat them,' she murmured in a heart-broken tone. 'I want -- I want -- something -- something -- to -- to live with.'
"I was on the point of crying at her, 'Don't you hear them?' The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. 'The horror! The horror!'
"'His last word -- to live with,' she insisted. 'Don't you understand I loved him -- I loved him -- I loved him!'
"I pulled myself together and spoke slowly.
"'The last word he pronounced was -- your name.'
"I heard a light sigh and then my heart stood still, stopped dead short by an exulting and terrible cry, by the cry of inconceivable triumph and of unspeakable pain. 'I knew it -- I was sure!'... She knew. She was sure. I heard her weeping; she had hidden her face in her hands. It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn't he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark -- too dark altogether...."
Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. "We have lost the first of the ebb," said the Director suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky -- seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
New Hampshire Governor Craig Benson entered office pledging to shake things up, CEO-style. Government was going to run like a business - specifically his own, Cabletron Systems, the now-defunct computer networking company.
Six months into his tenure, a corporate imprint is unmistakable in Concord, N.H. The state's office of Citizen Affairs is now dubbed the Customer Service Team. Efficiency is a favorite watchword, with weekly department head meetings closed to latecomers, doors locked at 8 a.m. It is not Governor, but ''Craig,'' to his aides and other office-holders, a nod to his days steeped in high-tech's culture of informality.
Benson has also exercised what some describe as heavy-handed executive preogative. He requires his department heads to regularly e-mail him their whereabouts, and with great pomp and ceremony last month he used an oversized veto stamp to reject lawmakers' many-months-in-the-making budget, forcing a showdown in the Republican-dominated Legislature and prompting some lawmakers to complain that he refused to engage in the back and forth that typically accompanies the spending plan's drafting. [...]
Politically, many observers say, Benson has been shrewd. He has delivered to his conservative base - signing the abortion bill into law and fending off tax increases, a move that particularly resonates in famously antitax New Hampshire. A University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll released last week found that 53 percent of residents approve of his performance.
''It's clear he's had some missteps, but on the big things he's managed to have successes,'' said Dante Scala, professor of politics at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH and his Republican allies, following a course of avid partisanship and truth-be-damned rhetoric, have changed the rules of American politics. Would-be Democratic presidential candidates in 2004 therefore face a dilemma. They can play by the new rules and increase their chance of winning, but at the risk of weakening the country. Or they can opt for responsible, moderate proposals that would strengthen American society-and almost certainly consign themselves to immediate electoral defeat.
Politicians are intensely partisan creatures. Still, they have typically agreed to practices that placed restraints on win-at-any-cost tactics. Three such practices in particular once played an important role in Washington life but no longer seem much in evidence.
The first is that sometimes a leader ought to do the right thing rather than the politically advantageous thing. No better example can be provided than Lyndon Johnson's decision to back effective civil-rights legislation in the 1960s. LBJ knew that his action would doom his party to electoral defeat (as it did, in 1968). Yet he also understood how poisonous segregation had been to American democracy. His choice, however politically suicidal at the time, is now widely admired; even conservatives who oppose affirmative action proclaim their allegiance to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. [...]
Forced to choose between the responsible course and the winning course, Democrats may be better off insisting on doing the right things in the right way, no matter what the immediate political disadvantage. For only then can they position themselves to become the governing party when Americans begin to care about the unhappy state of their country.
For most residents, an effective segregation still cuts across society in Northern Ireland. Overwhelmingly, the two sides attend separate schools and live in neighborhoods that are religiously and politically homogenous. This reality has been barely altered by the Good Friday agreement, political leaders on both sides say.
Some analysts have suggested that the Good Friday agreement's veneer of success for the middle and upper classes is hiding a deepening sectarianism, one that only reveals itself in the violence of the interface areas.
Cecelia Clegg, codirector of a project called Moving Beyond Sectarianism funded by Trinity College's Irish School of Ecumenics, said: ''It seems all the strain of the unresolved aspects of our communities are playing out on the interfaces. What we are seeing is that the Good Friday agreement dealt with the wider, structural cooperation between the two communities. But there has not been enough planning on how to help the two communities come together to live in peace.''
Although Springfield Road has been plagued by sporadic outbreaks of violence over the years, the community work there done by the likes of Gorman and Large has had some important success. Clegg and political leaders on both sides see the work on Springfield Road as a model for efforts at conflict resolution in Belfast's other pockets of violence, such as Short Strand and Tiger's Bay.
''The intensification of sectarianism is about a failure of political leadership,'' McGlone said. ''There hasn't been enough acceptance by both sides that they are both equally responsible for the violence. We have to make people accountable to each other; that is what we are trying to do here along this wall. And that is the missing piece of the Good Friday agreement, or as we around here call it, `the missing peace.' ''
The ball is smaller than a baseball, made of hard plastic, with 22 holes and raised seams, and somehow this design enables a
transformation which, if not remarkable, is at least very cool. Throw it, and it curves, knuckles, and flutters like a Wiffle ball. Hit it, however, and it takes off from the plastic bat like a baseball, flying true, straight, and fast.
The ball represents a key advancement to a game that has been played in backyards for decades, and if its maker, Yomega Corp. of Fall River, has its way, its new, somewhat faster version of the old standard will be just as popular. Tested by former major leaguer Bill Ripken, and endorsed by his brother, future Hall of Famer Cal Ripken Jr., the game, which Yomega calls Ripken Quickball, should be on the shelves of sporting goods and specialty stores next month, complete with plastic bat, rule book, and six of the newfangled balls. Ripken Quickball is just the latest product for a company that has made its mark by adding innovation to time-tested toys and games. Yomega started in 1983 with the yo-yo, advancing the state of the art with centrifugal clutches, roller bearings, and other patented technology. It has followed in recent years by reengineering the Frisbee, so the flying disc flies farther with less wobble, and introducing several advancements to paddle ball that make it easier to hit the ball attached to the paddle by a rubber band.
Next year, the company plans to bring out a top -- under top-secret development -- which Yomega founder and owner Alan Amaral promises will almost certainly revolutionize both the art and science of top throwing.
The other day I chanced to meet
An angry man upon the street--
A man of wrath, a man of war,
A man who truculently bore
Over his shoulder, like a lance,
A banner labeled “Tolerance.”
And when I asked him why he strode
Thus scowling down the human road,
Scowling, he answered, “I am he
Who champions total liberty--
Intolerance being, ma’am, a state
No tolerant man can tolerate.
“When I meet rogues,” he cried, “who choose
To cherish oppositional views,
Lady, like this, and in this manner,
I lay about me with my banner
Till they cry mercy, ma’am.” His blows
Rained proudly on prospective foes.
Fearful, I turned and left him there
Still muttering, as he thrashed the air,
“Let the Intolerant beware!”
Since passion is about fantasy and marriage is about reality, passion and marriage are the oddest of odd bedfellows. My own experience has been that passion ebbs and flows in marriage. It is far more dependent on romantic vacations and child-free weekends than we like to admit. And when we do check into a fancy hotel with our spouse, as the women’s mags recommend, we’re likely to start talking about whether the roof needs fixing or the car needs tuning. After all, marriage with work and children leaves little time for adult conversation. You might get to that hotel room in the sky and use the time just to converse with your spouse. And you might consider that a perfect evening.
Perhaps the problem is not in our marriages but in our expectations. In our post-sexual-revolution era, we expect carnality and familiarity wrapped up in the same shiny gift package. We would be much happier and much more fulfilled if we changed those unrealistic expectations. And our glossy mags would do well to stop teasing us while pretending to be helping us.
The truth is that ziplessness has always been a Platonic ideal rather than a daily reality. Yes, wild passionate sex exists. It can even exist in marriage. But it is occasional, not daily. And it is not the only thing that keeps people together. Talking and laughing keep couples together. Shared goals keep couples together. If this were not true, how would some couples survive illnesses, deaths of beloved family members, even holocausts? The pair bond is strong. We are pair-bonding creatures--like swans or geese. We can also be as promiscuous as baboons or bonobos. Those are the two extremes of human sexuality, and there are all gradations of chastity and sensuality in between. The glue that holds couples together consists of many things: laughter, companionship, tenderness--and sex. The busyness of marriage is real, but we also use it to protect us from raw intimacy, from having to be too open too much of the time. Pleasure is terrifying because it breaks down the boundaries between people. Embracing passion means living with fear. “Love is a breach in the walls, a broken gate,” wrote the poet Rupert Brooke. “Love sells the proud heart’s citadel to fate.” Amen.
The prime minister of France certainly knows, as the French say, how to put his foot in the serving platter.
But in Strasbourg last Tuesday, the center-right prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, outdid himself. He said France would be headed for heaven--if only it did not have Socialists.
"France is not yet on the road to heaven, only in purgatory, since we still have Socialists," Mr. Raffarin said during a meeting of European center-right
leaders and politicians.
The offhand remark touched off cries of anger and outrage and even calls for President Jacques Chirac to fire his loyal head of government.
"Today, the prime minister went beyond all the limits of stupidity by suggesting that France's salvation would come from the elimination of
Socialists," Jean-Marc Ayrault, the leader of the Socialist Party caucus in the National Assembly, said that day.
"Mr. Raffarin no longer deserves the title of prime minister of the Republic," he added.
Manufacturing jobs matter in these five so-called ``battleground'' states -- Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin -- where the percentage of factory jobs are above the national average, according to West Chester, Pennsylvania-based Economy.com.
Bush could win these states in 2004 if voters there view him as doing everything he can to pull the region out of a manufacturing recession.benefits of a weaker dollar on the U.S. export sector could be in full swing.
Bush won the 2000 election in the electoral college by five votes, and each of these factory-laden states has more than five electoral votes up for grabs. [...]
Typically, a decline in the dollar's value will result in higher U.S. exports only after some six to nine months. This is part of an economic phenomenon known as the ``J-curve'' effect, which predicts that after a country's currency depreciates it initially sees a worsening in its trade balance because imports cost more right away, while exports are slower to take off.
So far, the second part of that effect has not begun, largely because the rest of the world is in an economic slump, limiting the appetite for U.S. goods.
Count nine months ahead from the time Snow's commitment to the strong dollar policy was questioned, Upadhyaya argues, and that's when the second part of the J-curve effect kicks in -- in other words, just in time for the primaries.
Even if the economy strengthens before the election, helped by the stimulative effects of Bush's tax cuts, interest rates at or near four-decade lows and a record trade gap are likely to keep the dollar stuck in its downtrend, analysts said.
If a fall in the dollar helps lift exports and prompts corporations to either stop slashing jobs or even add some back, these states could feel the positive effects to their economies earlier than the rest of the nation.
Rising business sentiment and a still-strong consumer sector would send Bush into the 2004 election cycle with favorable economic winds at his back.
The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defence intellectuals (they are called 'neoconservatives' because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right). Inside the government, the chief defence intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. He is the defence mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defence secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, the number three at the Pentagon; Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, a Wolfowitz protégé who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the US to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned from his unpaid defence department advisory post after a lobbying scandal. Most of these 'experts' never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defence secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.
Most neoconservative defence intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such as Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for 'democracy'. They call their revolutionary ideology 'Wilsonianism' (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians.
The neo-con defence intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual Pentagon, are at the centre of a metaphorical 'pentagon' of the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think-tanks, foundations and media empires. Think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) provide homes for neo-con 'in-and-outers' when they are out of government (Perle is a fellow at AEI). The money comes not so much from corporations as from decades-old conservative foundations, such as the Bradley and Olin foundations, which spend down the estates of long-dead tycoons. Neoconservative foreign policy does not reflect business interests in any direct way. The neo-cons are ideologues, not opportunists.
The major link between the conservative think-tanks and the Israel lobby is the Washington-based and Likud-supporting Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish defence experts by sending them on trips to Israel. It flew out the retired General Jay Garner, now slated by Bush to be proconsul of occupied Iraq. In October 2000, he co-signed a Jinsa letter that began: 'We . . . believe that during the current upheavals in Israel, the Israel Defence Forces have exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.'
The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings. Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby. Wolfowitz, who has relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organisation of America, citing him as a 'pro-Israel activist'. While out of power in the Clinton years, Feith collaborating with Perle, co-authored for Likud a policy paper that advised the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories and crush Yasser Arafat's government.
Such experts are not typical of Jewish-Americans, who mostly voted for Gore in 2000. The most fervent supporters of Likud in the Republican electorate are southern Protestant fundamentalists. The religious right believes that God gave all of Palestine to the Jews, and fundamentalist congregations spend millions to subsidise Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
The final corner of the neoconservative pentagon is occupied by several right-wing media empires, with roots - odd as it seems - in the Commonwealth and South Korea. Rupert Murdoch disseminates propaganda through his Fox Television network. His magazine the Weekly Standard, edited by William Kristol, the former chief of staff of Dan Quayle (vice-president, 1989-93), acts as a mouthpiece for defence intellectuals such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Woolsey as well as for Sharon's government. The National Interest (of which I was executive editor, 1991-94) is now funded by Conrad Black, who owns the Jerusalem Post and the Hollinger empire in Britain and Canada.
Strangest of all is the media network centered on the Washington Times - owned by the South Korean messiah (and ex-convict) the Reverend Sun Myung Moon - which owns the newswire UPI. UPI is now run by John O'Sullivan, the ghost-writer for Margaret Thatcher who once worked as an editor for Conrad Black in Canada. Through such channels, the 'Gotcha!' style of right-wing British journalism, as well as its Europhobic substance, have contaminated the US conservative movement.
The corners of the neoconservative pentagon were linked together in the 1990s by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), run by Kristol out of the Weekly Standard offices. Using a PR technique pioneered by their Trotskyist predecessors, the neo-cons published a series of public letters, whose signatories often included Wolfowitz and other future members of the Bush foreign policy team. They called for the US to invade and occupy Iraq and to support Israel's campaigns against the Palestinians (dire warnings about China were another favourite). During Clinton's two terms, these fulminations were ignored by the foreign policy establishment and the mainstream media. Now they are frantically being studied.
As a scholar researching for several decades the migration of United States intellectuals from Left to Right, I have been startled by the large number of journalistic articles making exaggerated claims about ex-Trotskyist influence on the Bush administration that have been circulating on the internet and appearing in a range of publications. I first noticed these in March 2003, around the time that the collapse of Partsian Review magazine was announced, although some may have appeared earlier.
One of the most dismaying examples can be found in the caricatures presented in Michael Lind's "The Weird Men Behind George W. Bush's War" that appeared in the April 7, 2003 issue of the New Statesman. Lind states that U.S. foreign policy is now being formulated by a circle of "neoconservative defence intellectuals," and that "most " are "products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s...." Moreover, Lind claims that their current ideology of "Wilsonianism" is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism."
However, I am not aware that anyone in the group of "neoconservative defence intellectuals" cited by Mr. Lind has ever had an organizational or ideological association with Trotskyism, or with any other wing of the Far Left. Nor do I understand the implications of emphasizing the "Jewish" side of the formula, although many of these individuals may have diverse relations to the Jewish tradition--as do many leading U.S. critics of the recent war in Iraq.
The Straussian movement split long ago into "East Coast Straussians" and "West Coast Straussians." In addition, there are a few neoconservatives who know little or nothing about Leo Strauss. A defender of the neoconservatives as intellectually dishonest as Mr. Wald could use these facts in denouncing any scholar or journalist who mentions the influence of Straussianism on the distinctive political culture of the neoconservative faction of the Republican Party. If he were as disingenuous as Mr. Wald, he could argue that since there are East and West Coast Straussians, Straussianism therefore does not exist, and anyone who talks about a distinctive Straussian intellectual culture, or Straussian influence on neoconservatism is a) unscholarly and b) a paranoid conspiracy theorist who probably believes that the Shriners control the Council on Foreign Relations.
I happen to know a little about conspiracy theorists. At the cost of my career as a rising intellectual on the American Right, I exposed Pat Robertson's conspiracy theories about international Jewish bankers, Freemasons and Satanists in the New Republic, the Washington Post and the New York Review of Books between 1992 and 1995. My criticism of Robertson's anti-semitic conspiracy theories was the major factor in my expulsion from the neoconservative movement, in which I had taken part as the Executive Editor of the National Interest, published by Irving Kristol. Irving and Bill Kristol, of course, knew that everything that I said about Robertson was true--but my exposes were inconvenient for their personal political ambitions, which required an alliance of convenience rather than conviction with the religious right activists who dominated the Republican Party. For a similar tactical reason, Commentary, the flagship neocon magazine, began publishing articles in the 1990s claiming that Darwin, the bete noire of Southern Baptist creationists since before the Scopes "Monkey Trial," was wrong and that "biblical" creation science has been vindicated, something that Norman Podhoretz, Neal Kozodoy and other neocon intellectuals know very well is nonsense.
But wait--I used the word "neoconservative." Mr. Wald says not only that neoconservative originated as a pejorative used by Michael Harrington (true, if irrelevant) but that there never really were any self-identified "neoconservatives" (false). This line that there never really were any neoconservatives has long been used by Irving Kristol in interviews. I used to laugh about it with other of Kristol's employees. The non-existence of neoconservatism, except in the minds of conspiracy-mongers, certainly would have come as news to me and my fellow neoconservatives when I worked for Kristol and attended conferences and dinner parties with Gertrude Himmelfarb, Bill Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Peter Berger, and other self-conscious neocons. Unaware that we were not supposed to exist, according to Mr. Wald, we neocons were well aware of the shared views on the Cold War, race, and other topics that distinguished us from the Buckley Tories and the Buchananite Old Right. If Mr. Wald knew more about the neoconservative intellectual network of the 1980s and 1990s, as opposed to the long-defunct Workers' Party of the1930s, he would know that there was a bitter war in the conservative press between "neoconservatives" (many of them former Trotskyists, as he has confirmed) who reluctantly or enthusiastically accepted the term to describe themselves and the "Old Right" of Patrick Buchanan. Mr. Wald's quibbles about the term "neoconservative" are therefore either a deliberately dishonest debating trick (my guess) or evidence of a profound ignorance of what was (and remains) one of several self-conscious factions on the American Right.
After four months, Michael Lind is still unable to produce even one piece of credible evidence to prove the exaggerated and unhelpful claims made in his widely-quoted New Statesman article of April 7th. So he issues a lengthy rant discussing a wide range of other matters. Some of his new arguments are too general to be controversial. Other statements, perplexingly, are attributed to me even though they are nowhere to be found in my critique of his original essay. [...]
My objection to Mr. Lind's argument is first of all that he gave no evidence that "most" of this "small clique" that is "in charge" of U.S. foreign policy has any significant connection, personal or ideological, to what he calls the "largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement." In his answer to my critique, Mr. Lind still refuses to provide documentation of such a sensational charge. Instead, he attributes to himself a different claim: "I stand by the observation that there is a distinct Trotskyist political culture, which shows residual influence on individuals who renounced Trotskyism or who were never Trotskyists but inherited this political culture from their parents or older mentors." But nowhere does he show us how a single member of the "small clique" either "renounced Trotskyism" or "inherited this political culture" from anyone.
I would be the last person to dispute that the political cultures of Trotskyism, Communism, anarchism, New Deal Liberalism, etc., can exist and be transmitted. For example, in regard to Trotskyism, it can be demonstrated that critiques of Stalinism from Marxist premises, a sympathy for the radical potential of literary modernism, and an internationalist view of Jewish identity together comprise a subcultural tradition that might be passed on. One might even write a whole book about the subject. (We might call it, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left) Moreover, such a study would point out that the original group coalescing as "neoconservatives" in the 1970s included a few prominent intellectuals who had passed through a wing of the Trotskyist movement, especially an anti-Shachtmanite tendency known as the "Shermanites" (led by Philip Selznik, aka Sherman). But even in the 1970s, among the strands of ideological DNA that formed to create "Neoconservatism," Trotskyism was very much a receding one. Now, thirty years later, in regard to a group of mostly younger people that some are also calling "Neoconservatives," it is close to non-existent.
ARE the Jewish people in America so blind, so forgetful, so dulled to the meaning of history that they themselves will not ask certain questions? Can they avoid asking why a Jewish prosecutor and a Jewish judge were assigned to this case? Can they avoid asking why the first peace-time death sentence for espionage in all the history of the United States was reserved for these two people who are Jews?
Can they avoid asking why this death sentence was pronounced for an alleged espionage in favor of a country which was not only our ally in the Second World War, but to the valor of whose troops thousands and thousands of American soldiers owe their very lives?
If American Jews cannot and do not ask these questions, if they are willing to accept with all its hideous implications this terrible judicial murder of two innocent, brave, and good people, then indeed one can only hang one's head with shame and look into the future with fear and misgiving. For it would mean that the great mass of the Jewish people in America have chosen supinely to accept the fate which fascism historically reserves for Jewish people everywhere, and which has been shared by Jews wherever fascism triumphed.
However, I do not and cannot believe that the Jewish masses of America will accept the decision on the Rosenberg case in any such manner. Plainly and specifically I raise the following propositions for consideration.
It would seem to me that there was a most deliberate choice in this case of the Rosenbergs. Consider the whole pattern again. An ex-progressive, a lawyer who has become a servant and tool of American reaction, is chosen to make a deal for David Greenglass. Under his counseling, Greenglass confesses to espionage and implicates the Rosenbergs. We have good reason to believe that immediately after their arrest, the Rosenbergs had no knowledge of what crime they had been charged with or why they were arrested. Then the Jewish prosecutor is chosen. The case is tried amidst the worst hysteria and jingoism of the first part of the Korean war. The Jewish judge makes the incredible statement that he communed with God before passing the death sentence. The Jewish community is told, "See, it is one of your own members who sentences these two to death." In his sentencing, the judge charges Julius and Ethel Rosenberg with responsibility for the Korean war. The compounded insanity becomes diabolically sane, and all over America Jews sense the implication of the new order, thus:
"For the Jewish people, as for the Negro people, death will be the penalty for the struggle for peace."
This to me is the content and the purpose of the Rosenberg case. All too little has been made of it, both here and in other lands. It is a case with profound implications for all the people of all the earth, and with very special and immeasurably tragic implications for the Jewish people everywhere, and most of all of course, for the five million Jewish people of the United States.
IN A SPECIAL way, the Rosenberg case defines the epoch we live in. Through the Rosenberg case the Truman administration squarely and undisguisedly uses the death penalty for those who stand in opposition to it. More subtly, perhaps, than Adolph Hitler proceeded, more cleverly, perhaps, but with the same tactic, the Truman administration seeks to inflame anti-Semitism.
At heart, the Great Case was this critical conflict of faiths; that is why it was a great case. On a scale personal enough to be felt by all, but big enough to be symbolic, the two irreconcilable faiths of our time--Communism and Freedom--came to grips in the persons of two conscious and resolute men. Indeed, it would have been hard, in a world still only dimly aware of what the conflict is about, to find two other men who knew so clearly. Both had been schooled in the same view of history (the Marxist view). Both were trained by the same party in the same selfless, semisoldierly discipline. Neither would nor could yield without betraying, not himself, but his faith; and the different character of these faiths was shown by the different conduct of the two men toward each other throughout the struggle. For, with dark certitude, both knew, almost from the beginning, that the Great Case could end only in the destruction of one or both of the contending figures, just as the history of our times (both men had been taught) can end only in the destruction of one or both of the contending forces.
But this destruction is not the tragedy. The nature of tragedy is itself misunderstood. Part of the world supposes that the tragedy in the Hiss Case lies in the acts of disloyalty revealed. Part believes that the tragedy lies in the fact that an able, intelligent man, Alger Hiss, was cut short in the course of a brilliant public career. Some find it tragic that Whittaker Chambers, of his own will, gave up a $30,000-a-year job and a secure future to haunt for the rest of his days the ruins of his life. These are shocking facts, criminal facts, disturbing facts: they are not tragic. Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy--not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation. That is why this terrible book is also a book of hope For it is about the struggle of the human soul--of more than one human soul. It is in this sense that the Hiss Case is a tragedy. This is its meaning beyond the headlines, the revelations, the shame and suffering of the people involved. But this tragedy will have been for nothing unless men understand it rightly, and from it the world takes hope and heart to begin its own tragic struggle with the evil that besets it from within and from without, unless it faces the fact that the world, the whole world, is sick unto death and that, among other things, this Case has turned a finger of fierce light into the suddenly opened and reeking body of our time.
In a brief brilliant essay, "The 'Happy Convention,'" William Quirk, author of Judicial Dictatorship, describes how Americans now live under a "convention" that is a fraud upon the Constitution our forefathers crafted.
Our original Constitution divided the powers of the government and put restrictions on those powers, in a Bill of Rights, and in the retention by the states of much of their sovereign power. [...]
Why did Congress cede its powers? For the most basic of reasons: survival. Decisions on war, peace, race, religion, morality, culture and gender, divide us deeply and emotionally. These are issues where one vote could cost scores of congressmen their seats. Why not turn them over to justices, appointed for life, who never face the voters and who relish remaking our society according to their own vision and beliefs?
"Conservatives and liberals fight like cats and dogs and disagree on almost everything," writes Quirk, "but, oddly, agree the Court should have the authoritative role the unwritten constitution provides for. They just disagree on who should control the Court."
Why do conservatives and liberals agree that the court should decide such issues? Because both "share an abiding fear and distrust of American majority culture."
According to the research, which will be published in the October edition of the Journal of Personality, most people can fit comfortably into a leadership role, but not everyone is cut out to be a subordinate. [...]
Bosses, said [Judith Hall, a Northeastern psychology professor who conducted the stud], should not take offense at the study, which finds just about everyone could step into their shoes.
"We didn't actually measure the quality of the performance," Hall said.
Morning
To Abigail:
[...]
Yesterday the greatest question was decided, which ever was debated in America, and a greater, perhaps, never was or will be decided among Men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony "that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states, and as such they have, and of right ought to have, full power to make war, conclude peace, establish commerce, and to do all the other acts and things which other states may rightfully do." You will see in a few days a declaration setting forth the causes which have impelled us to this mighty revolution and the reasons which will
justify it in the sight of God and man. A plan of confederation will be taken up in a few days.
When I look back to the year of 1761 and recollect the argument concerning writs of assistance in the superior court, which I have hitherto considered as the commencement of the controversy between Great Britain and America, and run through the whole period from that time to this, and recollect the series of political events, the chain of causes and effects, I am surprised at the suddenness as well as greatness of this revolution. Britain has been fill'd with Folly and America with Wisdom, at least this is my Judgment. Time must determine. It is the will of Heaven that the two countries should be sundered forever. It may be the will of Heaven that America shall suffer calamities still more wasting and distressing yet more dreadful. If this is to be the case, it will have this good effect, at least: it will inspire us will many virtues, which we have not, and correct many errors, follies, and vices, which threaten to disturb, dishonor, and destroy us. The furnace of affliction produces refinement, in states as well as individuals. And the new governments we are assuming, in every part, will require a purification from our vices and an augmentation of our virtues or they will be no blessings. The people will have unbounded power. And the people are extremely addicted to corruption and venality, as well as the great. I am not without apprehensions from this quarter, but I must submit all my hopes and fears to an overruling Providence, in which, unfashionable as the faith may be, I firmly believe.
John Adams
Philadelphia
July 3, 1776
Evening
To Abigail:
Had a declaration of independence been made seven months ago, it would have been attended with many great and glorious effects. We might, before this hour, have formed alliance with foreign states. We should have mastered Quebec, and been in possession of Canada.
You will, perhaps, wonder how such a declaration would have influenced our affairs in Canada; but, if I could write with freedom, I could easily convince you that it would, and explain to you the manner how. Many gentlemen in high stations, and of great influence, have been duped, by the ministerial bubble of commissioners, to treat; and, in real, sincere expectation of this event, which they so fondly wished, they have been slow and languid in promoting measures for the reduction of that province. Others there are in the colonies, who really wished that our enterprise in Canada would be defeated; that the colonies might be brought into danger and distress between two fires, and be thus induced to submit. Others really wished to defeat the expedition to Canada, lest the conquest of it should elevate the minds of the people to much to hearken to those terms of reconciliation which they believed would be offered to us. These jarring views, wishes, and designs, occasioned an opposition to many salutary measures which were proposed for the support of that expedition, and caused obstructions embarrassments, and studied delays, which have finally lost us the province.
All causes, however, in conjunction, would not have disappointed us, if it had not been for a misfortune which could not have been foreseen, and perhaps could not have been prevented - I mean the prevalence of the smallpox among our troops. This fatal pestilence completed our destruction. It is a frown of Providence upon us, which we ought to lay to heart.
But, on the other hand, the delay of this declaration to this time has many great advantages attending it. The hopes of reconciliation which were fondly entertained by multitudes of honest an well meaning, though short-sighted and mistaken people, have been gradually, and at last totally, extinguished. Time has been given for the whole people maturely to consider the great question of independence, and to ripen their judgment, dissipate their fears, and allure their hopes, by discussing it in newspapers and pamphlets - by debating it in assemblies, conventions, committees of safety and inspection - in town and country meetings, as well as in private conversations; so that the whole people, in every colony, have now adopted it as their own act. This will cement the union, and avoid those heats, and perhaps convulsions, which might have been occasioned by such a declaration six months ago.
But the day is past. The second day of July, 1776, will be memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations, as the great Anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp, shews, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of the continent to the other, from this time forward forever.
You will think me transported with enthusiasm; but I am not. I am well aware of the toil, and blood, and treasure, that it will cost us to maintain this declaration, and support and defend these states. Yet, through all the gloom, I can see the rays of light and glory; I can see that the end is more than worth all the means, and that posterity will triumph, although you and I may rue, which I hope we shall not.
John Adams
Every weekday at 6.30 a.m., Edward McSweegan climbs into his Volkswagen Passat for the hour-long commute to the National Institutes of Health. He has an office in Bethesda, a job title -- health scientist administrator -- and an annual salary of about $100,000.
What McSweegan says he does not have -- and has not had for the last seven years -- is any real work. He was hired by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in 1988, but says his bosses transferred the research grants he administered to other workers eight years later, leaving him with occasional tasks more suitable for a typist or "gofer."
Whatever be our conception of the universe we must, it is obvious, start somehow; we must begin with something; and the something with which we begin, from the very fact that we do begin with it, must itself be without explanation, since, if something else were invoked to explain it, then the "something else" must needs be logically prior to that which it is invoked to explain. Thus the "something" being explained by a logically prior "something else" could not have been ultimate.
-C. E. M. (Cyril Edwin Mitchinson) Joad (1891-1953), God and Evil (1942)
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's labour reforms and apparent plans to bring forward tax cuts will not provide any fast relief for Germany's economy--currently the weakest in the eurozone, analysts say.
With zero growth projected for this year, Norbert Walter, chief economist of Deutsche Bank, warns that despite the moves there will no recovery in Germany before 2005.
"There are unfortunately factors leading us to believe the worst is still ahead of us," said Walter in an interview this week with the Evangelische Tageblatt aus Bayern newspaper.
In almost every phase of life, this doctrine of political altruists is equally impracticable and pernicious. In its social results, it involves the substitution of the community in the family's present position. In its political aspects, it involves the absolute dominion of the State over the actions and property of its subjects. Thus, though claiming to be an exaltation of the so-called natural rights of liberty and equality, it is in reality their emphatic debasement. It teaches that thoughtless docility is a recompense for stunted enterprise. It magnifies material good at the cost of every rational endowment. It inculcates a self-denial that must result in dwarfing the individual to a mere instrument in the hands of the State for the benefit of his fellows. No such organization of society-no organization that fails to take note of the fact that man must have scope for the exercise and development of his faculties-no such organization of society can ever reach a permanent success. However beneficent its motives, the hypothesis with which it starts can never be realized. The aphorism of Emerson, "Churches have been built, not upon principles, but upon tropes," is as true in the field of politics as it is in the field of religion. In a like figurative spirit, the followers of communism have reared their edifice; and, looking back upon the finished structure, seeking to discern the base on which it rests, the critic finds, not principles, but tropes. The builders have appealed to a future that has no warrant in the past; and fixing their gaze upon the distant dreamland, captivated by the vision there beheld, entranced by its ideal effulgence, their eyes were blinded to the real conditions of the human problem they had set before them. Their enemies have not been slow to note such weakness and mistake; and perhaps it may serve to clear up misconceptions, perhaps it may serve to lessen cant and open the way for fresh and vigorous thought, if we shall once convince ourselves that altruism cannot be the rule of life; that its logical result is the dwarfing of the individual man; and that not by the death of human personality can we hope to banish the evils of our day, and to realize the ideal of all existence, a nobler or purer life.
While the U.S. ambassador to Canada insists cross-border relations remain strong, officials from both countries say Prime Minister Jean Chretien struggled to get phone time with President George W. Bush.
Sources from the federal government and the U.S. State Department said Friday that Mr. Chretien lobbied for days to chat about mad-cow disease with his U.S. counterpart.
The Blair government has provided the trade union movement with a platform for growth in membership: low inflation, low
unemployment, low interest rates, sustained growth, more jobs, rights to representation and recognition, the minimum wage, membership of the European Union's Social Chapter and increasing investment in the public services.
The problem - some would say the crisis - for the trade union movement is that it has not yet been able to take advantage of this more favourable environment (much of which would not survive a change of government) to rebuild membership and, with it, influence.
A returning Conservative government would undoubtedly renew its hostility to trade unionism and repeal or weaken as much of the present
government's employment legislation as possible, including the statutory rights to trade union representation and recognition. The minimum wage would be unlikely to rise, assuming it survived at all, and the significant increases in expenditure that have been aimed at improving Britain's public services and the position of the less well off would be reversed.
To pursue trade union objectives in a way that could undermine the Labour government is to score an avoidable own goal. This cannot be in the best interests of trade unions and our members, whatever the immediate short-term attraction of extra media coverage. That is why the TSSA conference voted against moves to disaffiliate from Labour. We will stay in the party and will make our case as forcefully as we can.
A Labour government and the Labour party need the support, human and financial, provided by the trade union link. But the trade union movement would do well to take stock for a moment, look beyond the short term and recognise that it needs a Labour government just as much as, if not more than, a Labour government needs trade unions.
As Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas pose side by side for the cameras, Hamas hovers unseen in the background, confident that it made this event possible and can easily bring it crashing to an end. By joining with lesser terrorists in a dubious and ill-defined truce, Hamas has put itself in a position to play a pivotal role in the politics of the near future. Without giving away anything serious, it has begun the long march from lunatic fringe to power broker. Any day now, some damn fool will call it "moderate," unless it decides not to be.
Its leaders are likely astonished that this first step was so simple. They merely signed on to a hudna, an Arabic word for truce or ceasefire that Israelis claim can be translated as "I need to pause for breath." Israelis are accustomed to sudden changes in their prospects but they understandably fear yet another hideously failed "peace process," so they have received the latest news with the skepticism it deserves. They enthusiastically welcome any pause in the killing, and realize that any road to peace is worth considering. But at the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya the other day, Jonathan Fighel, a retired Israeli colonel and now a resident scholar, explained why he sees this latest development as just about the nicest thing that ever happened to Hamas.
It has agreed to stop sending suicide bombers to murder Israeli civilians, but only if Israel reciprocates appropriately. Israel must refrain from
assassinating Hamas leaders, close down some settlements in the occupied territories, and release some Palestinian criminals from jail. How many settlements must be dismantled, and how fast? How many prisoners must be set free?
That's for Hamas to say. It will judge Israel's performance and act accordingly. If it decides the Sharon government hasn't kept its part of the bargain, Hamas can reopen hostilities, without advance notice, by fitting up a few teenagers with suicide belts and sending them to Jaffa Street. And who imagines that Hamas will be satisfied for long? It has always been, as Israelis say, rejectionist. It doesn't want a better Israel, or a smaller Israel. It wants no Israel at all.
Prior to World War II, for instance, it was widely believed that slavery had not been profitable, says Barbara Solow, an economic historian retired from Boston University. Americans held to images of Pilgrims landing and intrepid frontiersmen pushing West, while largely ignoring the economic underpinnings of plantation slavery.
But in recent decades, historians have shown that slavery provided the primary financial support of the Colonies and the United States in its first 50 years, she says. "If you look at what was moving across the Atlantic [during the Colonial period], it was either slaves, the products of slaves, supplies to sustain slaves, or things bought with the earnings of slave labor. Seventy-five percent of Colonial New England's exports went to the Caribbean to support the slave system."
From 1807 to 1865, adds Harvard economic historian Sven Beckert, "the center of our economy was cotton," and both North and South profited.
"The old history separated 'American capitalism' and 'democracy' from 'slavery.' " Dr. Beckert says. "In the 'new history,' the three are organically connected."
Much of this scholarship is not yet widely appreciated outside the realm of economic historians themselves, Solow says. But it is getting more attention, especially from advocates of the slavery-reparations movement.
Nash agrees that only in this generation have historians come to accept the idea that "Slavery allowed there to be liberty.... There could not have been as much liberty as the colonists gained had there not been enslavement of a fifth of the population."
The central focus of Williams' work, beginning with the essays which foreshadowed his Tragedy of American Diplomacy, was how some Americans' understanding of the role of the frontier in US history contributed to a foreign policy of overseas empire. Here, the emphasis is so much on ideas and interpretations of history that "economic determinism" recedes to rather un-Marxist dimensions. Of course, the ideas of the individuals and elites in question aimed at dealing with felt economic crises. Like the men of 1898, whom he was criticizing, Williams believed that the crisis was built into the market economy. They chose the path of domestic corporatism and overseas expansion (Open Door empire). Charles Beard, who shared the same critique of capitalism, sought to square the circle with a program of non-aggressive "continentalist" corporatism. Williams chose to reject the empire in the name of "decentralized socialism."
Williams believed that the men who brought America into the Spanish-American War had a well-developed Weltanschauung, or "world-outlook," based on a particular reading of American frontier history. This reading owed much to Frederick Jackson Turner's famous "frontier thesis." The existence of a moving frontier of contiguous land for over two centuries had accustomed Americans to a certain level of prosperity and individual freedom. With the "closing" of the frontier in the 1890s, some new means must be found to prevent the economy from running down - a fear underlined by the Panic of 1893. To members of the northeastern elite it seemed obvious that a neo-mercantilist foreign policy in pursuit of ever-new foreign markets answered the case.
This "solution" to the perceived problem was soon repackaged as the Open Door - unlimited access of US companies to markets everywhere, to be achieved, where necessary, by political and military pressure on foreign states, peoples, and revolutionary movements (where they existed). The frontier-expansionist theory of history and the Open Door underlay US foreign policy from 1898 on. Disagreements - within policy-making circles, at least - took place within that framework and dealt with such details as tactics, timing, cost, and so on. Thus, from 1898 to Vietnam and beyond, there had never been a real debate on the purposes and bases of US foreign policy. And, of course, the "problem" the elites claimed to be solving was itself misconceived at several steps in the argument. And, here, we need to go beyond Williams' analysis and integrate his historical materials with the insights of Austrian economic theory. [...]
By writing the story of the American establishment's long-standing interest in, and obsession with, foreign markets, Williams provided us with one of the keys to understanding the origins and growth of the American empire. By his stalwart example of opposition to the empire and its works he inspires us all. This achievement, embodied in the many books he left us, makes it easy to forgive him his misunderstanding - as some of us see it - of the market economy and his resulting conviction that socialism provided a viable alternative to empire. In our time, mainstream scholars, whatever the inane radicalism of their views on domestic policy, glide along blissfully unaware of the empire or in active support of it (as we saw recently). As for the so-called "radicals," many of them imagine themselves critics of empire because they add "US imperialism" to their long checklist of ills to be dealt with by complete destruction of existing American society and its replacement by an envy-driven egalitarian bellum omnium contra omnes. In such times, it is a help to recall a radical scholar who was an American opponent of an empire which merely wears the American label.
The neo-cons now see West Africa as America's next target for control. One of their chicken hawk columnists, National Review's Rich Lowry, recently suggested that West Africa is of such strategic interest to America, the U.S. should set up military bases in the region with a U.S. military headquarters on Sao Tome, in the Gulf of Guinea, a potental future "American lake." More U.S. colonies. After years of exploitative European colonization, Sao Tome and Principe, Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, and other African countries may soon become virtual American colonies as part of a Greater West Africa National Economic Sphere. It is a page right out of the Japanese fascist playbook from World War II. So for our mentally challenged president, his neo con advisers tell him, "West Africa = diamonds + oil." That's all he has to hear. He authorizes sending in U.S. troops, building U.S. bases, and makes a trip there to Africa to cement the deals.
The Pentagon is planning a new generation of weapons, including huge hypersonic drones and bombs dropped from space, that will allow the US to strike its enemies at lightning speed from its own territory.
Over the next 25 years, the new technology would free the US from dependence on forward bases and the cooperation of regional allies, part of the drive towards self-sufficiency spurred by the difficulties of gaining international cooperation for the invasion of Iraq.
The new weapons are being developed under a programme codenamed Falcon (Force Application and Launch from the Continental US).
Tony Blair is facing his biggest internal challenge since being elected Labour leader nine years ago, with leftwing MPs and trade union "awkward squad" leaders having privately agreed to produce an "alternative manifesto".
A confidential document obtained by the Guardian shows how the prime minister's critics in and out of parliament have formed a coalition in a concerted attempt to push the government left.
The paper - agreed by the 40-strong socialist campaign group of MPs (SCG) and prominent members of the awkward squad, who style themselves Fuwl (Fed up with losing) - sets out a joint programme.
"It is proposed that via discussions between Fuwl and the SCG, we work together to play a more effective role in engaging in parliamentary lobbying, with better coordination and investment in lobbying and campaigning resources," says the document. [...]
Mick Rix, general secretary of the Aslef train drivers' union, and convener of the awkward squad, said yesterday: "This is about working within and building up, rather than working away from, the Labour party. We want to reclaim Labour as a mass party of working people."
President Bush is sending military experts to Africa to assess whether U.S. troops should help enforce a fragile cease-fire in war-torn Liberia. He was considering an offer by the country's leader to step down.
Suddenly, in 1997, amid a growing inability to speak or read, Ms. Chang produced some of her wildest and most original paintings. The constraints of her formal
training slipped away. She splashed large swatches of red, turquoise and purple acrylics on paper.
She painted male nudes with distinctly sexual overtones. One piece, of two sumo wrestlers locked in struggle, showed an emotional side, as though in existential conflict for her mind.
In a way, they were.
In 2000, Ms. Chang's family brought her to see Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University of California in San Francisco. Dr. Miller put her through a series of
tests, including an MRI scan, and diagnosed her with frontotemporal dementia, or FTD.
In plain terms, the brain cells between her left eye and ear were dying, taking away her powers of language, social graces and reasoning. As many as 400,000 North
Americans suffer varying degrees of FTD. In its most advanced form, dementia strips away the brain's ability to function. There is no cure.
Ms. Chang's case, described last month in Neurology magazine, raises a series of questions: Where in the brain does artistic creativity reside? Can the "damaged" mind give rise to true art?
On the first day of May 1839 a group of 16 armed and mounted men rode up to the courthouse in the town square of Peoria, Illinois, bowed their heads, pledged themselves never to desert one another, turned and rode west to the cheers of local citizens who had turned out to see them off. Their stated intent was to colonize the Oregon country on behalf of the United States and drive out the English fur trading companies operating there. Their organizer and elected captain was a Peoria lawyer, Thomas Jefferson Farnham and he called his men the Oregon Dragoons. They carried with them a flag emblazoned with the motto Oregon or the Grave, a gift from Mrs. Farnham.
The seed for the expedition had been planted the previous fall when Rev. Jason Lee visited Peoria on a national speaking tour about the Oregon country. Lee was a Methodist missionary who had been living and working among the Native Americans in the Willamette Valley since 1833. Lee was in the vanguard of missionaries that were sent to Oregon in response to an 1831 visit to the United States by a delegation of four Native Americans representing the Flathead and Nez Perce tribes of the Pacific Northwest. These tribes had contact with Catholic Iriquois Indians who were working with French-Canadian trappers in the Northwest.
These meetings aroused the Northwest tribes' curiosity about the white man's religion practiced by the Iriquois. Their delegation was dispatched to seek counsel from the trusted white men who had visited the Oregon country some 25 years earlier: Merriweather Lewis and William Clark. Lewis was long dead, but Clark was Superintendent of Indian Affairs in St. Louis. News of the meeting between Clark and the Northwest Indian delegation was sensationalized in East Coast newspapers, and churches mobilized to send missionaries in response. Lee's Methodists were the first to arrive in the Oregon region.
Many California Republicans, unable to find a viable candidate to oppose Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer for a third term next year, are urging Pete Wilson to consider a comeback.
Wilson is widely blamed for the party's precipitous decline in the state because of his support as governor for an anti-immigration referendum that alienated Hispanic voters. However, he has never lost a general election, winning two terms each as U.S. senator and governor after serving as mayor of San Diego and a state assemblyman.
Today imbecility seems to be making a comeback, and the success of the "Dumb and Dumber" movies isn't the only evidence. Consider a 46-year-old lapsed academic named Matthijs van Boxsel who has been campaigning full time on imbecility's behalf in the Netherlands for the last five years. In 1999 he published "The Encyclopedia of Stupidity." The book was an unexpected success. Mr. van Boxsel became a sought-after figure on the local lecture circuit, and avid fans went on to found stupidity clubs in Amsterdam and Groningen, where, he says, members "give accounts of their own stupidity and try to outwit each other."
Now American readers can see what the fuss is about: "The Encyclopedia of Stupidity" has been translated into English and has just been published by Reaktion Books. An illustrated hodgepodge of ruminations, anecdotes, aphorisms and esoterica, the book attacks its subject obliquely, spinning a theory of stupidity while cataloging its sightings. [...]
But Mr. van Boxsel is hardly mocking such lethal haplessness. "On the one hand, stupidity poses a daily threat to civilization," he writes. "On the other it constitutes the mystical foundation of our existence. For if man was not to fall victim to his own stupidity, he had to develop his intelligence." Or as he put it in a telephone interview from his home in Amsterdam, "Stupidity is the engine that drives our society."
In this latest action TransAfrica's president and other prominent black Americans from Africa Action, an advocacy group here; Howard University; and church and labor unions wrote a public letter to Mr. Mugabe, assailing what they described as the "increasing intolerant, repressive and violent policies of your government."
But the decision to condemn Mr. Mugabe publicly - which was hailed as long overdue in some quarters - has also touched off an outcry among some black intellectuals, activists and Africa watchers. Mr. Mugabe, who has led Zimbabwe since white rule ended in 1980, is still considered a hero by some African-Americans. And in some e-mail messages and on radio talk shows, the signers of the letter have been described as politically naive, sellouts and misguided betrayers of Africa's liberation struggle.
Angry critics have sent e-mail messages to those who signed the letter, saying in one instance that they "do not represent African-Americans." On a left-leaning radio station in New York City, WBAI-FM, several people have called to complain. "Whatever black Africans in Zimbabwe decide to do," said a caller who identified herself as Missy from Queens, "I think black Africans here, we should join them."
The furor has highlighted a long-simmering debate about how to respond to authoritarian leaders in Africa when those leaders happen to be black.
The USA, the first nation to be founded on principles of liberty and justice, is fueled by freedom, particularly the rights guaranteed in the First Amendment to the Constitution. But how well do we understand these basic rights? To find out, USA WEEKEND Magazine and the First Amendment Center commissioned a scientific online poll consisting of a series of hypothetical scenarios. Each was designed to challenge one of the five freedoms set out in the First Amendment: freedom of speech, press and religion, and the right to assemble and to petition government for constructive change.
The poll results clearly show some serious confusion among Americans about their First Amendment protections and how they apply to a diverse and sometimes divided society. [...]
1 A high school student wears a T-shirt to public school with the words "International Criminal" framing President Bush's picture on the front. The principal tells the student to put on a different shirt, turn the shirt inside out or go home. If those requests are refused, the student will face immediate suspension.
Does the principal have the right to ban the T-shirt?
America says:
Yes 62%
No 38%
The expert says: The majority has it wrong.
2 A town strapped for funds enters an agreement with the community's largest church by which the church will operate the town's failing convention center. The church agrees to raise the money itself to run the center and promises it will not discriminate against any religious, political, racial or other groups that might want to rent it for a fee.
Do you think such an arrangement is allowed under the First Amendment?
America says:
Yes 70%
No 30%
The expert says: The answer is no.
Why are the Democrats so much more willing than the Republicans to make political sacrifices in the name of procedural fairness or of good government? Maybe Democrats are just nicer, but a more philosophical view is that liberals are committed to, are in fact bedeviled by, ideals about process that do not much preoccupy conservatives, at least contemporary ones. Liberals put their faith in such content-neutral principles as free speech, due process, participatory democracy. Is that too lofty? Then maybe we should say that today's liberals, unlike today's conservatives, don't believe in any particular set of ends ardently enough to blind themselves to the means they are using to achieve them. [...]
The Democrats are essentially devoted to tempering the harm caused by the Bush administration, which is not much of an agenda at all, though it certainly makes a virtue of moderation. Ruthlessness is just not in the party's DNA.
It's an odd reversal, if you think about it. The Republicans used to be the party of the First Methodist Church, and the Democrats of the great unwashed. Now the Republicans are the hellions, and the Democrats are the ones you want to bring home to mother. The G.O.P. is making such inroads among younger voters for the same reason that Fox News is making inroads among younger viewers. We live in a culture that values brazen certainty and loud conviction, no matter how wrongheaded. Pity the Democrats, stuck with the wrong set of virtues.
Hundreds of students at the City University of New York are quietly being bounced out of college because they could not pass a test intended to gauge whether they have reading, writing and thinking skills appropriate for students halfway through college.
CUNY started the test two years ago to demonstrate that it was not letting students steal through without mastering skills widely expected of college graduates. But the test - sometimes referred to as a "rising junior exam" because it is usually taken by college students finishing their second year - is only beginning to have bite. [...]
"Rising junior exams have become very politically popular," said Peter T. Ewell, a vice president at the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, a nonprofit consulting firm in Boulder, Colo., that studies higher education policy. [...]
"This, to me, is tough love," said Matthew Goldstein, CUNY's chancellor. "This is not an easy exam. But the university has an obligation to make sure that our students write clearly and that they are good analytical thinkers. If they can't do that after so many attempts, they ought to be thinking about doing something else with their lives."
[I]t is probably enough to observe here that in the nature of things the exercise of personal government, the control of a huge and growing bureaucracy, and the management of an enormous mass of subsidized voting-power, are as agreeable to one stripe of politician as they are to another. Presumably they interest a Republican or a Progressive as much as they do a Democrat, Communist, Farmer-Labourite, Socialist, or whatever a politician may, for electioneering purposes, see fit to call himself. This was demonstrated in the local campaigns of 1934 by the practical attitude of politicians who represented nominal opposition parties. It is now being further demonstrated by the derisible haste that the leaders of the official opposition are making towards what they call "reorganization" of their party. One may well be inattentive to their words; their actions, however, mean simply that the recent accretions of State power are here to stay, and that they are aware of it; and that, such being the case, they are preparing to dispose themselves most advantageously in a contest for their control and management. This is all that "reorganization" of the Republican party means, and all it is meant to mean; and this is in itself quite enough to show that any expectation of an essential change of regime through a change of party-administration is illusory. On the contrary, it is clear that whatever party-competition we shall see hereafter will be on the same terms as heretofore. It will be a competition for control and management, and it would naturally issue in still closer centralization, still further extension of the bureaucratic principle, and still larger concessions to subsidized voting-power. This course would be strictly historical, and is furthermore to be expected as lying in the nature of things, as it so obviously does.
[Barry] White, who had suffered kidney failure from years of high blood pressure, died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center around 9:30 a.m., said manager Ned Shankman. He was 58.
White had been undergoing dialysis treatment and had been hospitalized since last September. [...]
Born Sept. 12, 1944, in Galveston, Texas, to a single mother, White and his younger brother, Darryl, spent most of their childhood in south central Los Angeles. He said he had a lifelong love for music. During his early teenage years, he began singing in a Baptist church choir and was quickly promoted to director.
In 1990, White told Ebony magazine that his voice changed overnight from the squeaky tones of a preadolescent to the rumbling bass that made him famous.
"It scared me and my mother when I spoke that morning," he said. "It was totally unexpected. My chest rattled. I mean vibrations. My mother was staring at me, and I was staring at her. The next thing I new, her straight face broke into a beautiful smile. Tears came down her face and she said, 'My son's a man now."'
When Roy Thomas looks at the young elm trees surrounding the village green, he can imagine both the past and the future. [...]
In the late 1980s, people in Woodstock and a few other towns around the Upper Valley began planting “Liberty” elms, descendants of American elms that had proved resistant to Dutch elm disease. The fungus is estimated to have wiped out half the American elms in the United States after reaching this country in 1930.
About 50 of the Liberty elms were planted around the edges of the Woodstock green, which had been ringed by mature elm trees before the fungus hit the town in the 1950s. Two of the Liberty elms subsequently died of Dutch elm disease, but the rest are going strong.
“They're working out beautifully,” said Thomas.
The young trees have just barely started to arch out towards the street, hinting at the tall, vase-shaped form that helped make the American elm a favorite choice for streetside planting. Thomas, a professional horticulturist who trained at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew in London, spread his hands in an expansive wave as he described the beautiful canopy they'll eventually make.
A similar passion for the beauty of the American elm is evident in the voice of Dartmouth College tree warden David DiBenedetto when he talks about his charges.
“It's a great look,” one that just can't be matched by other species, he said.
Add to the species' visual impact its vigor in the face of air pollution and the ground compaction that accompanies street and building construction, and you have “the perfect street tree,” DiBenedetto said.
A massive Dartmouth tree known as the Parkhurst elm, located in front of the administration building of the same name, actually sits partly in the roadway of North Main Street. The fact that the pavement went around the tree over the years instead of the tree coming down is a testament to the affection elm trees engender, DiBenedetto said. [...]
The Liberty strains of American elm were developed by the Elm Research Institute, a New Hampshire nonprofit organization formed in the 1960s with the “Johnny Elmseed” mission of bringing back the species. The institute grows Liberty seedlings at its nursery in Westmoreland, N.H., and says it has distributed 250,000 of them.
On July 4, 1776, our Founders adopted the Declaration of Independence, creating a great Nation and establishing a hopeful vision of liberty and equality that endures today. This Independence Day, we express gratitude for our many blessings and we celebrate the ideals of freedom and opportunity that our Nation holds dear.
America's strength and prosperity are testaments to the enduring power of our founding ideals, among them, that all men are created equal, and that liberty is God's gift to humanity, the birthright of every individual. The American creed remains powerful today because it represents the universal hope of all mankind.
On the Fourth of July, we are grateful for the blessings that freedom represents and for the opportunities it affords. We are thankful for the love of our family and friends and for our rights to think, speak, and worship freely. We are also humbled in remembering the many courageous men and women who have served and sacrificed throughout our history to preserve, protect, and expand these liberties. In liberating oppressed peoples and demonstrating honor and bravery in battle, the members of our Armed Forces reflect the best of our Nation.
We also recognize the challenges that America now faces. We are winning the war against enemies of freedom, yet more work remains. We will prevail in this noble mission. Liberty has the power to turn hatred into hope.
America is a force for good in the world, and the compassionate spirit of America remains a living faith. Drawing on the courage of our Founding Fathers and the resolve of our citizens, we willingly embrace the challenges before us.
Laura joins me in sending our best wishes for a safe and joyous Independence Day. May God bless you, and may God continue to bless
America.
"Is this democracy?" has become the query that precedes all complaints about occupation. A typical example came from Rafiq Hamdani, former director of the international department at the Ministry of Information. He was demonstrating outside the ministry because he had been fired by U.S. officials for being a Saddam henchman who helped thwart the foreign press.
"Is this democracy?" he railed to me (someone to whom he had refused a visa). The right to demonstrate didn't strike him as particularly valuable; he thought democracy meant he got to keep his job.
In fact, most Iraqis seem to view the notion of democracy in terms of "give me - or my tribe, or my sect - mine." Pluralism and tolerance are still alien concepts. To many, "give me mine" means "don't give the others theirs." [...]
Iraqis would probably be better off with the time to acquire some experience with tolerance. But long before then, many will get impatient to shake off occupation.
Having dumped a dictator, U.S. officials now have no choice but to solve this conundrum: how do you build democratic traditions swiftly in a place that has nearly none?
The communists' accusers, meanwhile, are portrayed as narrow-minded persecutors, boors and probably bigots. This has become almost axiomatic in the popular imagination, standard fare in Hollywood flicks and spy thrillers. Novelist Joseph Kanon took this tack in The Prodigal Spy, about the son of an accused American communist spy who flees to Czechoslovakia. In Kanon's world, the anti-communists are the villains, lacking the humanity of their culturally sophisticated and emotionally sensitive quarry.
In real life, Meeropol has actively sought to discredit the Rosenbergs' judge, and in his book reserves his harshest words for his uncle, David Greenglass, who co-operated with the prosecution. Similarly, Tony Hiss' memoir paints a warm, personal picture of his father, while vilifying
Chambers. (Interestingly, not a drop from the left's deep well of sensitivity was reserved for Radosh and Weinstein. The reward for their courageous scholarship was to be treated as apostates.)
On a personal (though superficial) level, one can sympathize. What son wouldn't instinctively defend his parents, however strong the evidence? But did Meeropol learn anything from their misadventure? That, say, spying for Stalin was bad? Far from it: "My parents' experience taught me that it was dangerous to be at war with the most powerful forces of your society." So it wasn't wrong to spy, just inconvenient.
In Meeropol's mind, as in Kanon's, being an anti-communist appears worse than working for Stalin. Today Meeropol runs an institute dedicated to helping the wrongfully accused, eloquent testimony to what he thinks of the U.S. judicial system.
It's important that history doesn't view the era of America's communist spies through the apologists' lens of narcissism and self-pity. The spies may have been well-educated and intelligent, sensitive and esthetic, plus erudite dinner companions. Some of their accusers may have been louts or opportunists. But this wasn't all about the perpetrators' personalities. It was about what they did.
The central fact is that the "integrity" of the Rosenbergs, Hiss and the many other American communists who became traitors led them to betray a great, if flawed, democracy. Their "righteous ideals" materially aided history's worst mass-murderer, who racked up a body count of 20 million, according to the definitive Black Book of Communism. When you think about it, this also says a lot about what kind of people they were.
Let tyrants shake their iron rods,
And slavery clank her galling chains:
We [fear] them not; we trust in God:
New England’s God forever reigns.
Israeli officials are expressing growing confidence that after 33 months they have defeated the Palestinian uprising, or intifada.
The Israeli chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, told Israeli reporters on Wednesday that the developments this week might eventually be seen "as the end" of the conflict. "It is certainly a victory" for Israel, he was quoted as saying.
Some Israeli analysts criticized that conclusion as premature, if not hubristic. Yet for now, the American-brokered talks between the adversaries are being held on what appear to be largely Israeli terms.
Negotiators who three years ago were discussing how to divide Jerusalem are debating how to return partial control of cities that were then under Palestinian authority.
"When the intifada began, the demand was, `End the occupation, because the negotiations led to nothing,' " said Samir al-Mashharawi, a leader of the mainstream Palestinian faction, Fatah. "Now, Palestinian demands are to return back to the situation right before the intifada, and we are negotiating about this."
Buoyed by panoramic spectacles that included a unique armada of tail-masted ships, a massive fireworks display and a series of festivals that took over downtown Manhattan, millions of New Yorkers and visitors in a happy mood observed the nation's Bicentennial yesterday.
It was a day of mammoth presentations.
Uncounted crowds lining the waterfront of the magnificent but underused harbor saw a virtually unbroken bridge of small craft that reached from the shores of Brooklyn to the coast of New Jersey.
More than 225 sailing ships under 31 flags paraded up the Hudson, a river that foretold their doom in 1807 when Robert Fulton's smoky little Clermont started steamboat service on it.
A 22-nation fleet of 53 naval units gray and grim -- even ships festooned with pennants- lined the upper Bay and the Hudson for the International Naval Review, which had Vice President Rockefeller as the chief United States official present.
President Ford flew onto the hulking 79,000-ton aircraft carrier Forrestal, the host ship of the review, and later went by helicopter to the U.S.S. Nashville, anchored in mid-Hudson. [...]
The Coast Guard estimated that there were 10,000 small craft in the Lower Bay alone while the parade ships shaped up. Most of these went north with the vanguard of the parade, although they were kept efficiently to one side of the route by Coast Guard and police boats that constantly nipped at them, like sheep dogs guarding their flock.
The police estimated that there were six million people who viewed Operation Sail from the New York shores, and there were large numbers who also viewed it from New Jersey. [...]
As each sailing ship crossed the bow of the Forrestal, crews dressed ship, on the port side. They were deployed in a bewildering variety of designs. On the Amerigo Vespucci, the elegant Italian full-rigged ship, they stood like beads up the ratlines to the masts and along the long bowsprit.
The Nippon Maru, Japan's four-masted bark, provided perhaps the livliest salute. Her crew cheered simultaneously, on cue, and waved their yellow caps. It was a roar that could be heard, but not understood, across the water.
One of the proudest ships in procession was also one of the largest, the Soviet Unions 378- foot-long, four-mastered bark, Kruzenshtern. Built as a German sailing ship in 1926, she was known as the Padua and is the last of the cargo-carrying Cape Horners still in service. She carried grain from Australia and nitrates from Chile in record-making runs to Europe.
Aboard the Sagres II, Portugal's three-masted bark, the cadets stood like silhouettes in a cut-out dolly pattern, arms stretched out, man almost touching man, along the bare masts. They waved their hats in unison as they went past the Forrestal.
Similarly, aboard Spain's Juan Sebastian de Elcano, the crew was spaced, not bunched, along the yardarms and bowsprit, etched against the sky in impressive formation.
All of the 16 tall ships were built after the age of sail. The oldest and smallest, the Gazela Primeiro, was built in 1883 and was, until recently, a working Grand Banks Portuguese fisherman; she now belongs to a Philadelphia museum and is the only one with a wooden hull. The Dar Pomorza, a Polish vessel, was launched in 1909. [...]
There were ships of character among the other sailing vessels in the show: the Sir Winston Churchill, with her all-woman crew; the towering four-masted sloop, Club Mediterraneo, which can be handled by one man; the Chinese junk Mon Lei, the oldest ship afloat in the harbor, built in Fukien in 1855.
While Germans are seething over the damage done to European unity by the intemperate remarks by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy at the European Parliament this week, the bigger threat to unity may come from Germany and its red-ink-stained finances.
By announcing that it would move up a sweeping tax cut to recharge its economy, Germany is almost certain to violate a treaty-imposed ceiling on budget deficits for a third consecutive year.
Germany's decision was far less provocative than Mr. Berlusconi's words, likening a German member of the European Parliament to the leader of a Nazi concentration camp. (He apologized today.) But it may have broader long-term ramifications, according to economists and political experts here.
A chronic violation of the rules by Germany ? which has Europe's biggest economy and insisted its neighbors cap their deficits as a precondition of adopting a single European currency ? could effectively vitiate the agreement, known as the Stability and Growth Pact.
France this year will also breach the deficit ceiling, which is set at 3 percent of gross domestic product, while Italy and Portugal are skirting the edge. All told, countries representing 71 percent of the total economic output of the euro zone no longer comply with its fiscal rules.
"The pact has basically been put on ice until the Germans and the French get their act together," said Daniel Gros, the director of the Center for European Policy Studies, a research institute in Brussels. Once Europe's torpid economies recover, the pact, Mr. Gros predicts, "will rise like a Phoenix from the ashes."
Sid Mercer, the Master of ceremonies, announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, Lou Gehrig has asked me to thank you all for him. He is too moved to speak."
"We want Lou! We want Lou!" the chant was a plea for Gehrig to speak.
Coaxed by manager Joe McCarthy, Gehrig wiped his eyes, blew his nose. On unsteady feet, the seven time All Star moved towards the microphone to speak the speech he had written the night before.
"Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break I got. Yet today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and I have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans. "Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn't consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure I'm lucky. Who wouldn't have considered it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball's greatest empire, Ed Barrows? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I'm lucky. When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat and vice versa, sends you a gift, that's something. When everybody down to the groundskeeper and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies, that's something. When you have a father and mother work all their lives so that you can have an education and build your body, it's a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed, that's the finest I know. So I close in saying that I might have had a bad break, but I have an awful lot to live for."
THE BBC was preparing for defeat last night in its battle with Downing Street as it became apparent that a report by MPs will clear Alastair Campbell of “sexing up” the intelligence dossier on Iraq.
Corporation executives have acknowledged to The Times that “heads may roll” after such a verdict from the Foreign Affairs Committee and that they will have to broadcast a correction over the most contentious charge levelled at Downing Street.
This was a report by the defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan that Downing Street forced the intelligence services to include “unreliable”
information about Iraq’s capacity to deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.
Mr Gilligan’s position is immediately under threat, not least because of an article he wrote for the Mail on Sunday alleging that Mr Campbell had personally ordered that the claim be inserted.
"Is Lawrence worse than Roe?" read an e-mail message sent by Crisis, the conservative Catholic journal, after the Supreme Court last week struck down every sodomy law in America. And the answer, for liberal and conservative defenders of judicial restraint, should be unequivocal. Yes, as a constitutional matter, Lawrence is worse than Roe. The Court could have struck down Texas's sodomy law on the narrow grounds that it violated the equal protection of the laws by forbidding homosexual but not heterosexual sodomy. But instead the Court embraced and extended a sweeping and amorphous right to sexual liberty that is even harder to locate in the text or history of the Constitution than the right of reproductive autonomy that the Court discovered in Roe. By resurrecting an unprincipled and unconvincing constitutional methodology, the Court will energize the conservatives who have lost the culture wars, and will allow them to cast themselves as judicial martyrs rather than political losers. [...]
The most unsettling implication of the Court's expansive new right of sexual autonomy relates to the question of gay marriage. Justice O'Connor tried to preserve laws limiting marriage to opposite sex couples by announcing tersely that "preserving the traditional institution of marriage" is a legitimate state interest. But as Justice Scalia was quick to observe, "'preserving the traditional institution of marriage' is just a kinder way of describing the State's moral disapproval of same-sex couples." Since allowing homosexuals to marry has no impact at all on the willingness of heterosexuals to marry, it's hard to think of a reason for courts to avoid extending the Court's new right to "define the meaning" of intimate relations to include a right of all people to marry, regardless of their sex. Of course, the arguments on behalf of a judicially created right of gay marriage--whether located in the right to equality or the right to privacy--are not frivolous. But they are also not constitutionally restrained--not well rooted, that is, in text, history, or tradition. For the Court so glibly to put its finger on the scales of favoring a judicially created right to gay marriage, in a case where this sort of activism was unnecessary, seems cavalier in the extreme. And, as a pragmatic matter, defenders of equal civil rights for gays and lesbians will rue the day that lower courts begin to follow the example of their Canadian counterparts and recognize a right of gay marriage on a national scale. For the political backlash against a judicially created right to gay marriage would be so swift and dramatic--at least in the immediate future--that it would set back the cause of gay and lesbian equality rather than advancing it.
Indeed, the grandiosity of the Lawrence decision reveals how little liberal and conservative justices have learned about the hazards of activism in the 30 years since Roe was decided. There were moments on the Rehnquist Court when it seemed as if the justices had gotten out of the business of reading broad rights of personal autonomy into the Constitution--most notably in the right to die case in 1997, where they unanimously refused to create a broad right of physician-assisted suicide. But in a single, unnecessarily dramatic gesture, those bipartisan murmurings of restraint went out the window. The fact that the Court is likely to get away with its activism--as a political matter, few Americans will march to the barricades on behalf of sodomy laws--can't undo the damage of another self-inflicted wound. For when the next confirmation conflagration comes, the conservative minority that has lost the culture war in the political arena will be able to attack the Supreme Court for having turned them into victims, rather than being forced to acknowledge their failure to convince their fellow citizens of the rightness of their cause. "The Court has taken sides in the culture wars," Scalia charged in a foreshadowing of the conservative attacks to come. Absent Lawrence's muddled reasoning, on the other hand, the truth would have been impossible for conservatives to ignore: Far from taking sides in the culture wars, the Court only ratified a national consensus in favor of sexual autonomy after it was too obvious to be denied.
One of the unanticipated consequences of the genetic revolution in a highly individualised society is that it has helped foster a cultural preoccupation with genetic origins. A secure loving home is the foundation of any child's well-being. Yet the questions of who am I, who are my "real" parents, are ones many much-loved adopted children still ask. This longing is being recognised by a gradual shift in which it is seen as desirable for sperm donors to lose their invisibility. Legislation increasingly gives adopted children the right to know their birth parents.
Such shifts acknowledge that the longing to know our genetic identity has become more acute in the age of genetics. So consider the existential crisis faced by a child who learns that she is the product of a fertilised ovum harvested from a long-dead foetus and frozen sperm from an unidentifiable source.
Like only a naturalized U.S. citizen could be, I'm devoted to grilling. I get a lot of chances to do it, living in Southern California's endless summer. But even if I lived somewhere that had a real winter, I swear I'd be out there in the snow, building a fire and throwing burgers on the grill.
Hamburgers are one of my favorite things to cook outdoors, and the reason is no surprise. Hamburgers let me get creative. I can season the beef as inspiration strikes me. So can you. And the great thing is that ground meat gives you the perfect opportunity to mix the seasonings right in, so that every bite comes out well-seasoned.
Spicy Asian beef burgers, which include fresh garlic, chili peppers and curry powder, will show you how easy it is to create excitingly seasoned burgers. [...]
Spicy Asian beef burgers with shiitake mushrooms
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 10 minutes
Yield: 4 servings
2 pounds ground beef
2 small hot chili peppers, stemmed, seeded, minced
2 to 4 tablespoons minced garlic
2 1/2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro leaves
4 teaspoons thinly sliced green onions
1 teaspoon each: curry powder, ground cumin, sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
Freshly ground black pepper
2 bunches green onions, cut into 3-inch pieces
8 fresh shiitake mushrooms, stemmed
3 tablespoons olive or vegetable oil
1/4 cup bottled teriyaki sauce, plus more if desired
4 hamburger buns
1. Lightly combine beef, chilies, garlic, cilantro, onions, curry powder, cumin, sugar, salt and pepper to taste in a mixing bowl. Form mixture into 4 equal patties slightly wider in diameter than the buns. Cover with plastic wrap; refrigerate until ready to cook.
2. Prepare a charcoal or gas grill for direct cooking. Combine onions and mushrooms in a bowl; drizzle with 2 tablespoons of the olive oil. Toss. Brush grill's grate with the remaining tablespoon oil to prevent sticking.
3. Place burgers on the grill. Cook 4-5 minutes on one side; turn. Add the onions and mushrooms to the grill, using a grill basket if needed. Brush the burgers and the vegetables with teriyaki sauce. Cook burgers 4 minutes on second side for medium. Brush buns with oil; place cut side down on the grill to toast. Remove buns to a platter; place burgers on buns. Top with green onions and mushrooms.
Ever since Lyndon Johnson introduced Medicare in 1965 as one of the edifices of his “Great Society”, Democrats have been taunting the Republicans as hard-hearted bastards who don't give a damn about the elderly. What better way to shut the Democrats up than a new $400 billion drugs benefit? Congress still has to reconcile the Senate and the House versions of the bills, a procedure that could take until the autumn. But few people doubt that the law will eventually pass—and that Mr Bush will enthusiastically sign it. This will also reinforce the Republicans' claim that they are better at getting things done than Democrats (who, in Republican lore, ran Congress for decades without doing anything about drug prices).
Republicans are already bragging that Mr Bush's embrace of Medicare reform is the same as Bill Clinton's embrace of welfare reform back in 1996—a manoeuvre that magically transforms a liability into a strength.There is, however, one tiny difference. Welfare reform was an admirable policy that led to a sharp reduction in welfare rolls. Medicare reform is lousy policy. The Republicans have given up any pretence of using the new drug benefit as a catalyst for structural reform. They are doing nothing to control costs or to target government spending on people who really need it. They are merely creating a vast new entitlement programme—a programme that will put further strain on the federal budget at just the moment when the baby boomers start to retire. Every year Mr Bush has either produced or endorsed some vast new government scheme: first education reform, then the farm bill, now the prescription-drug benefit. And every year he has missed his chance to cut federal pork or veto bloated bills. Federal spending has increased at a hellish 13.5% in the first three years of the Bush administration. It has risen from 18.4% of national income in 2000 to 19.9% today. Combine this profligacy with huge tax cuts, and you have a recipe for deficits as far ahead as the eye can see.
Why has the self-proclaimed party of small government turned itself into the party of unlimited spending? Republicans invariably bring up two excuses—the war on terrorism and the need to prime the pump during a recession; and then they talk vaguely about Ronald Reagan (who sacrificed budget discipline in order to build up America's defences). None of this makes much sense. The war on terrorism accounts for only around half the increase in spending. The prescription-drug entitlement will continue to drain the budget long after the current recession has faded. As for Mr Reagan, closer inspection only makes the comparison less favourable for Mr Bush. The Gipper cut non-defence spending sharply in his first two years in office, and he vetoed 22 spending bills in his first three years in office. Mr Bush has yet to veto one.
The real reasons for the profligacy are more depressing. Mr Bush seems to have no real problem with big government; it is just big Democratic government he can't take. This opportunism may win Mr Bush re-election next year, but sooner or later it will catch up with his party at the polls. The Republicans are in danger of destroying their reputation for managing the economy—something that matters enormously to the “Daddy Party” (which sells itself as being strong on defence and money matters). The Democrats can point out that Bill Clinton was not only better at balancing the budget than Mr Bush. He was better at keeping spending under control, increasing total government spending by a mere 3.5 % in his first three years in office and reducing discretionary spending by 8.8%.
The Republican Party's conservative wing stands to lose the most from this. Some conservatives credit Mr Bush with an ingenious plan to starve the government beast: the huge tax cuts will eventually force huge spending cuts. But this is rather like praising an alcoholic for his ingenious scheme to quit the bottle by drinking himself into bankruptcy. There is no better way to stymie the right's long-term agenda than building up the bureaucracy (government being a knife that only cuts leftwards). And there is no better way to discredit tax cuts than to associate them with ballooning deficits. For the moment Mr Bush is still the conservatives' darling. Will they still love him a decade from now?
"There are some who feel that the conditions are such that they can attack us there," Bush said. Extending his right hand for emphasis, he added: "My answer is: Bring 'em on. We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation." He promised to "deal with them harshly" if attacks continue. [...]
Though Congress is in recess, some Democrats criticized Bush's "bring 'em on" statement. "I am shaking my head in disbelief," said Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.). "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the
commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops." Lautenberg's statement said Bush's words were "tantamount to inciting and inviting more attacks against U.S. forces."
In addition, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), a presidential candidate, said he had heard "enough of the phony, macho rhetoric" from Bush. Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor also mounting a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, said Bush "showed tremendous insensitivity to the dangers" troops face.
Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said Bush was not inviting attacks. "I think what the president was expressing there is his confidence in the men and women of the military to handle the military mission that they still remain in the middle of," he said.
Berlusconi's election in May 2001 caused jitters throughout social democratic circles in Europe - much greater than Le Pen's success in France or the rise of rightwing extremism across Europe. Berlusconi, after all, had actually come to power, and with a big majority, thanks to the unpleasant allies in his rightwing coalition: the "post-fascist" National Alliance, under Gianfranco Fini, and the Northern League, headed by the foul-talking Umberto Bossi, whose party was described in April in a Council of Europe report as "racist and xenophobic". Both are now ministers in the cabinet. [...]
For public consumption, Berlusconi said, "I never intended to be a politician, but out of love for Italy I felt I had to save it from the left, which is built around the former communist party." [...]
Berlusconi's friend Ferrara says, "Either it will be the Piazza Loreto [where Mussolini's body was hanged upside down] or a happy ending, and I think that, if he achieves only 10% of what he promised, Mr B's is the classic happy ending."
The midyear financial results trickling in this week are solidifying a sense among party insiders that Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean have moved into the strongest positions, with Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri hanging onto the edge of the top tier.
Yet all three face major hurdles as they try to increase their support. And the obstacles looming before Sens. John Edwards of North Carolina, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Bob Graham of Florida now look to many even more imposing.
Here, distilled into four paragraphs, is the liberal interpretation of the last 10 years. After a long and in some ways well-earned stroll in the wilderness, Democrats finally elect one of their own to the presidency. He is a prodigiously talented man. He has flaws, to be sure, and some of them are important. But far more important is the way the rules of the game change upon his ascension. On election night, the nation's leading Republican goes on television and snorts that the victory is illegitimate; from that point on, a campaign is waged to destroy -- not tarnish or discredit or soften up, but destroy -- the new president and his wife. This campaign has no precedent in American political history. (Please spare us the Alexander-Hamilton-and-his-mistress parallel; the 1790s are not parallel to today's world, and Hamilton was attacked by one yellow journalist, not a network of operatives with tens of millions of dollars to spend.) Finally, he is caught in flagrante. Even then, the public asserts directly and repeatedly that it does not consider the offense a high crime or misdemeanor.
But no matter. Against the clear will of the people, impeachment proceeds. It fails, but the hounding, again mostly over pseudo-scandals (like a West Wing ransacking) that never happened but are endlessly hyped by a frivolous media, continues. And in its way, this technique succeeds: What was objectively a bountiful and comparatively humane period in American history -- prosperity, peace, low crime, reduced poverty, international goodwill; an era that should have demonstrated that Democrats knew how to run the country and left the GOP badly marginalized -- is successfully tarnished.
So the vice president seeks the presidency. He runs a soggy campaign, true. But again, it's beyond dispute that the majority of Americans who go to the polls intend for him to be the president. Yet he loses -- according to the rules, at least. But somehow the experience of the previous eight years has left us with the distinct feeling that, had the situation been reversed, other rules would have been found to ensure the same result. We are admonished to "get over it" by people we know would not have gotten over it if things had gone the other way.
The Republican takes over. For eight months, he convinces precious few who didn't vote for him that he's the man for the job. But then unprecedented tragedy occurs. Americans, the vast majority of liberals included, rally around their country; by and large we support War No. 1. We have serious reservations about War No. 2. But by now something more disturbing than a mere policy dispute has occurred. By now, simply asking questions, or refusing to accept the government's assertions at face value, is denounced as something tantamount to treason. We find this, um, troubling: Open debate and vigorous dissent, we were raised to believe, were once considered the quintessential American values. Now, they are taken as prima facie evidence of anti-Americanism. (We note also how ardently the other side seemed to believe in vigorous dissent when its members were the dissenters.) In Georgia, a man (and sitting senator) who sacrificed his body for his country is labeled unpatriotic. The president has it well within his power, by simply uttering a few morally forceful sentences, to put an end to this madness. But the demonization of the other side is what keeps him afloat politically, and he refuses to do so -- and, in the Georgia instance, goes so far as to implicitly play along.
Like many similar stage productions and movies of the past, The Passion focuses on the death of Jesus. Historically, passion plays have been a fetid source of anti-Jewish images.
An ad hoc group of seven prominent New Testament scholars -- four Catholics and three Jews -- recently reviewed an early version of the screenplay along with representatives of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Anti-Defamation League. In the spirit of full disclosure, all nine panel members are my colleagues in interreligious relations. However, I have not read the screenplay or the group's 18-page report.
The scholars were unanimous that The Passion script contained enormous problems because of its toxic negative portrayal of Jews and Judaism and because it runs counter to authoritative "magisterial" Catholic teachings about the proper presentation of the death of Jesus. [...]
The Passion is an important matter because movies transmit potent images throughout the world. The Crucifixion story is radioactive
material.
Shannon Sarna is an anomaly as she walks along the devoutly liberal Smith College in Massachusetts. Diminutive in height but overflowing with passion, she's pro-Israel and conservative on foreign policy. She's helped bring figures like uber right-winger Ann Coulter to campus. She's also an observant Jew, which means she's more than anomalous to her college. She's a minority within the Jewish community as well.
Nevertheless, she's finding more and more like-minded Jews throughout America. Their increasing acceptance in Jewish political discussion is marking a new generation of chosen people. Today, young Jews are struggling with the issue of political priorities and are turning up more conservatives in a community that has traditionally been a liberal bulwark. In contrast to their parents and grandparents, such conservatives are increasingly welcomed and even expected.
The buzz over a conservative shift in the Jewish community has made political headlines ever since President Bush began flexing some serious pro-Israel muscle, but a recent survey, released by Ipsos Public Affairs in conjunction with the respected Cook Political Report, has attempted to debunk that argument. Its results show that Jews remain staunchly Democratic and criticize the president at levels far beyond that of the average electorate.
By the numbers, New Hampshire remains one of the country's wealthiest states, with a per capita income of $34,334, the sixth highest, according to the most recent figures released in 2002. There is no personal income tax or general sales tax, which makes it attractive to its growing population of 1.3 million.
In 2000, New Hampshire was like many states, enjoying the economic good times with a surge in high-paying, high-tech jobs and a low
unemployment rate of around 2 percent. Today, the unemployment rate is nowhere near the national figure of 6.1 percent, but it has increased to 3.9 percent.
Since 2000, the state has lost 20,000 manufacturing jobs. The fastest declining occupations are the blue-collar jobs of textile machine operators, shoe and leather workers and sewing machine operators -- a factor for Democratic candidates such as Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, whose strength is his appeal to the party's union voters.
Gephardt, who sought the party's nomination in 1988, drew most of his support in that year's primary from working-class voters. "His challenge is, assuming he's got the working class base, that base is shrinking," said Dante Scala, a political scientist at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown. [...]
After studying census data and patterns in the last three Democratic primaries, Scala recently concluded that Democrats who appeal to both working-class Democrats and the party's "liberal elite" are much more likely to eventually win the nomination than candidates who appeal mainly to one faction. He cites Gore, Bill Clinton, and Michael Dukakis as examples.
Benjamin Wiker teaches theology and science at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, and is a fellow at Seattle's Discovery Institute. His book, Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists, was published last summer by InterVarsity Press.
[Q:] How did this book come about?
[A:] I just happened to have been working both on Epicurus, an ancient Greek philosopher, and Charles Darwin. I suddenly recognized that they looked surprisingly similar in their views. Epicurus is in a way the great-great-great-grandfather of Darwin's account of human nature and cosmology.
What's very surprising for people is that the first account of evolution didn't come in the middle of the 1800s with Darwin. A man named Lucretius, a Roman, wrote about 50 years before the birth of Christ a book called De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). And in it you find this really long evolutionary passage. And you say, "How could this get here? I thought Darwin invented this or discovered this." And he really didn't. It's simply a deduction from materialism itself. If you don't have a God, and you think that matter just bangs around forever and eventually creates things, that view isn't at all modern. It's very ancient. Darwin just picked up on it.
[Q:] And, as you note in your book, that view has consequences for moral behavior. As you quote Darwin, "Every distinct view of the universe, every theory about nature necessarily entails a view of morality." In your view, the degree to which you embrace materialism is the degree to which your moral behavior will decline.
[A:] Exactly. But if you're a materialist, it's not a decline. It's what materialism demands.
[T]he dissent is ultimately incorrect in its conclusion that the Court's decision means the end of morals legislation. Paradoxically enough, the decision confirms that morality is a viable basis for law. The Court's decision was all about morality, the justices' morality. There is no other way to explain the result. As noted above, the Constitution's text and this country's history and traditions do not recognize a right to homosexual sodomy. And Supreme Court precedent is equally unsupportive, as less than 20 years ago the Court reached the opposite conclusion to the one it formed last week. Finding no basis for its decision in the Constitution, history, or precedent, the Court majority had no choice but to rely on its own collective moral judgment.
Hence the great irony of the Supreme Court's decision: Morality was the only reason for holding that public morality is irrelevant to the
constitutionality of a law. In effect, what the Court held was not that morality has no place in constitutional jurisprudence, but only that public morality is irrelevant. The justices' own morality is decisive. Morals laws--such as prohibitions on bestiality, adult incest, polygamy, and, yes, gay marriage--pass constitutional muster if, and only if, five Supreme Court justices say so. The Court's holding does not signal the end of morality, but merely the transfer of decision-making power. Instead of permitting the public to enforce its moral views--as it should in a democracy--the Court (or, more aptly put, six members of it) surmised that it was the final moral arbiter. Because the law was "silly" (as Justice Thomas accurately described it in his dissent), the Court struck it down.
The bell thus tolls, not for morality, but for government by the people, an outcome that is neither "liberal" nor "conservative." Judicial fiat can be--and has been--used to serve the goals of both sides of the ideological spectrum. At the beginning of the last century, for example, the Supreme Court invalidated worker-welfare laws to benefit industry. The constitutional provision ostensibly relied on to reach that conclusion, the Due Process clause, is precisely the one used by today's Court to create a right to gay sex. And the next invocation of "Due Process" (depending on what alleged rights become acceptable to the legal elites in future years) may very well be equally "conservative"--perhaps at the expense of environmental programs or other social-welfare legislation. Alternatively, "Due Process" could be used for ends that are neither liberal nor conservative, but just plain-old wrong. For example, in Dred Scott, the decision that sparked the Civil War, the Supreme Court imposed its view of morality in finding a constitutional right to own slaves as property, immune from federal government interference.
Judicial activism can thus work in many directions, so until the high Court refrains from second guessing the moral choices of the democracy, the loser is not the Right or the Left, but the American people at large.
"I'm not a preacher and I'm not a pastor," Gibson said. "But I really feel my career was leading me to make this. The Holy Ghost was working through me on this film, and I was just directing traffic. I hope the film has the power to evangelize."
Although the film won't be released until March, Gibson brought it to Colorado Springs--a national hub of evangelical Christianity--for one day to make sure its depiction of the Gospel was acceptable to leaders at Focus on the Family and to hundreds of church leaders, including Ted Haggard, New Life's pastor and president of the National Evangelical Association.
"It conveys, more accurately than any other film, who Jesus was," Haggard said based on clips he viewed at New Life. "You can't help but be upset when you realize the gravity of what Jesus went through." [...]
"I was very impressed," said Don Hodel, president of Focus on the Family. "It's certainly the most powerful portrayal of the passion I've ever seen or heard about. The movie is historically and theologically accurate."
California's charter schools typically perform as well as their traditional counterparts, despite facing persistent financial obstacles and relying on far more uncertified teachers, according to a state-sponsored study released yesterday.
Because charter schools enroll a higher percentage of poor and academically troubled students than traditional public schools, their students tend not to do as well on standardized tests, the study found. [...]
That the scores should be so similar could be considered surprising. Charter schools are much less likely to receive money in at least eight major categories of educational spending, the study found, including federal poverty programs, special education dollars, staff training and efforts to reduce class size.
And only about 76 percent of teachers in charter schools are fully credentialed, compared with 88 percent in traditional ones.
In a study earlier this year, researchers from the University of California and Stanford University raised the issue of whether the relative inexperience of charter school teachers put their students at a disadvantage. The RAND study did not appear to bear out that concern.
The demonstrations that shook Iran for the better part of two weeks have died down, but the aftershocks continue to unnerve the mullahs in the run-up to the general strike called for the 9th of July. [...]
This administration clearly has no stomach for any sort of campaign against the mullahs, at least for the moment. But it can no more avoid the showdown with the mullahs than it can cause Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein to surrender; this is a fight for survival, and they will not permit us the luxury of setting the timetable at our convenience.
That means there must be regime change in Tehran. In their hearts, or perhaps at a somewhat lower level, our leaders know that. Even the admittedly limited information in the hands of our intelligence community shows the pattern of Iranian skullduggery, and it is only a matter of time before the mullahs pull off some murderous assault large enough to compel us to act. They still fondly remember their glory days in Lebanon, when they killed hundreds of Americans in a single suicidal stroke, an event incautiously recalled by Bashar Assad in the first days of Operation Iraqi Freedom. That is what undoubtedly awaits our fighting men and women if we do not move first to support the freedom fighters in Iran.
But even if Iraq were peaceful and flourishing and headed towards democracy in the near future, indeed even if there had been no September 11 and thus no war against the terror masters, our refusal to call for regime change in Tehran would still be a disgrace. Blair and Bush have warm words for the demonstrators, but no Western government has called for an end to the Iranian tyranny. Heck, they haven't even called for the release of the thousands of political prisoners or for the release of the many journalists rounded up during the demonstrations of the past two weeks.
July 9 is coming soon.
Why in creation did Joe Delaney jump into that pit full of water that day?
Why in the world would the AFC's best young running back try to save three drowning boys when he himself couldn't swim?
Nobody -- not his wife, not his mother -- had ever seen him so much as dog-paddle. A year and a half earlier, when he went to the Pro Bowl in Hawaii as the AFC's starting halfback and Rookie of the Year, he never set even a pinkie toe in the ocean or the pool. "Never had," says his wife, Carolyn, who'd known Joe since they were both seven. "In all my years, I never had seen him swim."
So why? Why did the 24-year-old Kansas City Chief try to save three boys he didn't know with a skill he didn't have?
He'd been sitting in the cool shade of a tree on a tar-bubbling afternoon at Chennault Park, a public recreation area in Monroe, La., when he heard voices calling, "Help! Help!" He popped up like a Bobo doll and sprinted toward the pit.
What made Delaney that kind of person? Why did he mow that lonely woman's lawn when he was back home in Haughton, La., rich as he was? Why did he check in on that old man every day he was in town? Why did he show up on the Haughton streets one day with a bag full of new shoes and clothes for kids whose names he'd never heard?
Why could he never think of anything that he wanted for himself? Why didn't he even make a Christmas list? The man never cashed a paycheck in his life. He would throw his checks on top of the TV for his wife. "Don't you want nothing for yourself?" Carolyn would ask Joe.
"Nah," he'd say. "You just take care of you and the girls."
"Nothing?"
"Well, if you could give me a little pocket change for the week, I'd appreciate it."
Why didn't he ask somebody else to help those three kids that day? After all, there were hundreds of people at the park, and not another soul dived into that pit. Nobody but Delaney, one guy who shouldn't have.
Anti-Satellite Attack (Karl P. Mueller & Elwyn D. Harris)
Within the next five years not only Russia and China but also Pakistan, North Korea, and even Iran may acquire the ability to carry out a nuclear attack against satellites. Launching such an attack would be much simpler technically than launching a nuclear attack against a distant city; only a primitive nuclear program and basic missile technology are required. And as the importance of satellites grows, so will the destructive potential of such an attack, adding a significant new dimension to the politics of preventing nuclear war.
An anti-satellite attack could be mounted in a variety of ways, but a high-altitude nuclear detonation would create by far the most extensive effects. It would destroy satellites near the detonation point, of course; but, more significant, it would also expand and intensify the power of the Van Allen radiation belts, clouds of high-energy particles that encircle Earth. Satellites passing through the region after a nuclear attack--among them hundreds of low-orbiting communications, weather, imaging, and scientific satellites, including the International Space Station and the Hubble space
telescope--would be subjected to greatly increased levels of radiation, against which civil and commercial systems are not protected. (The satellites of the Global Positioning System are not nuclear-hardened either--but they operate in higher, less vulnerable orbits.) Such radiation would progressively degrade the satellites' solar panels and onboard electronic systems, and within months, or even weeks, after a nuclear explosion every satellite orbiting at the affected altitudes--aside from a few military systems that are protected against nuclear attack--could be disabled. It would take many months for the excess radiation trapped in the Van Allen belts to dissipate.
A nuclear anti-satellite attack would do the most harm to the United States, which owns most of the more than 250 satellites that might be affected, and which depends more than any other country on space systems. Such an attack would substantially damage the U.S. and world economies (replacing the ruined satellites could cost tens of billions of dollars, in addition to the costs of losing their services) and would seriously inconvenience the U.S. military, which relies heavily on civil and commercial satellites for functions such as communications and weather forecasting. Although no nation is likely to attack satellites as a short-term military strategy (the full effects would take too long to accumulate), someone might well consider using the tactic as a deterrent, as a coercive threat, or to strike a painful blow against the United States and its allies without the difficulties or obvious risks of attacking a target on American soil.
Dean argued his position on the use of force is not out of line with his opposition to the war in Iraq.
"The situation in Liberia is significantly different from the situation in Iraq," he said. [...]
Dean argued there's no inconsistency in opposing the war in Iraq while backing intervention in Africa. He said Bush never made the case that Iraq posed a threat to the world.
"The situation in Liberia is exactly the opposite," Dean said. "There is an imminent threat of serious human catastrophe and the world community is asking the United States to exercise its leadership."
Italy's flamboyant prime minister launched his country's leadership of the European Union on Wednesday by telling a German lawmaker he should play the part of "kapo" in a film about a Nazi concentration camp.
Silvio Berlusconi's remark, which he later dismissed as a harmless joke, raised new questions among critics about his fitness to represent Europe on the world stage. Italy's richest man has been dogged by legal problems and accused of having conflicts of interest because of his vast media holdings.
Berlusconi appeared before the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, to outline his plans during the six months Italy serves as the European Union's presidency.
Italy assumed the post Tuesday, one day after an Italian court suspended Berlusconi's bribery trial following the Italian Parliament's passage of a law granting him and other senior leaders legal immunity.
During a question-and-answer session following Berlusconi's speech, Martin Schulz, parliamentary leader of the German Social Democrats, alluded to the Italian leader's legal problems.
Berlusconi, speaking Italian, snapped: "Mr. Schulz, I know there is a producer in Italy who is making a film on the Nazi concentration camps. I will suggest you for the role of `kapo.' You'd be perfect."
The seeming inability of a large part of mankind to see in what legitimate personal liberty consists is a little curious. That each individual member of society should be left free to seek his own good in the way he may deem best, and required only not to interfere with the equal rights of his fellow-men, is an idea so simple that it might be supposed that a man could not misundersatand it, whether he accepted it or not. It must be admitted that few misunderstand it in its application to themselves, when their natural liberties are interfered with. When, however, the principle is to be applied to the case of others, many advocates of liberty seem in practice to think that if they grant their fellow-men entire liberty to act as they the grantors think proper, they concede all that can be reasonably asked. . . .Newcomb was the Richard Posner of his day. Self-taught, he became one of the foremost astronomers of his time, and a professor at John Hopkins, bringing mathematical rigor to his science. Later, he did the same for economics. Among many other things, including a lunar crater, a martian crater and a minor planet, the USS Simon Newcomb was named after him.
In passing judgment on the principle from the first point of view, it is necessary to begin with some considerations respecting the natural rights of man, and the manner in which these rights are modified by the existence of society. The first argument which will be urged against the ethical basis of the principle is the familiar doctrine, that, in becoming a member of society, the individual gives up some of his natural rights, in order to secure more effectually the enjoyment of the remainder. The prevailing tendnecy, it seems to us, in greatly to exaggerate the extent of this surrender. There is undoubtedly a sense in which the individual may be said to give up all his rights to society. Practically, the individual is powerless in the hands of society, which will do with him as it pleases. He must therefore yield whatever society chooses to demand of him, and the liberty which may be left him he enjoys only on sufference. In a sense, therefore, that which is thus enjoyed is not so much a right as a favor, and the individual has strictly no rights at all left. Such a theory of the relation of the individual to the state was not unfamiliar to the ancients, but we conceive that no one will now desire to carry the doctrine of a surrender of rights so far. We must therefore admit that the power of society over the individual is limited by some moral law, binding on the former. When we speak, therefore, of the rights of the individual, we do not mean his legal rights, as defined by the legislative power of society, but his natural and moral rights as defined by the reason and the conscience of enlightened and civilized man.
Next is the notion that performance in sport gives honor to God. People who say this usually have good intent; they are trying to set a good example for the positive effects that faith can have in a person's life. George W. Bush tells anyone who will listen that he was once a pretty crummy guy, until Jesus took his hand and gave him the strength to face things about himself he was too weak to face alone. If faith caused George W. Bush to change from crummy guy to decent man -- personally, let's leave politics out of this -- then honor is given to God, and people should know.
But this is delicate, especially in the superficial context of the sports interview. Maybe faith made Reich a better athlete or Bush a better person, but forces that have nothing to do with higher power can make you a better athlete or a better person, too. There are some terrific athletes who are unprincipled, contemptible human beings; Nautilus machines and Nike shoes made them better athletes, not God. At the same time there are some saintly, soulful human beings who believe in no divinity; ethical philosophy made them better people. To praise God when things go well for you does not necessary mean much, since things might just as easily go poorly for you, or might go well without any involvement of the divine.
Praising God for success in sports can be not only grating but a form of self-flattery. When an athlete says, in effect, "God helped me catch that touchdown pass," he's saying that in a world of poverty, inequality and war, higher powers thought his touchdown catch so vastly important that God intervened on Earth to make sure that both feet came down inbounds, while doing nothing to prevent slaughter in Africa or the Middle East. Though meant to suggest humility, praising God for success in sports often becomes a form of vanity: God wanted me to catch that pass! When I hear athletes imply that this is what the divine is like, I think: No thanks.
Finally, does God show favor or disapproval by causing us to perform well or poorly in sports? Maybe, but it seems unlikely. Could Frank Reich really have been a fine, admirable human being worthy of God's favor on Jan. 3, 1993, day of the 35-3 comeback, and then have become a despicable person deserving of divine retribution by Jan. 31, 1993, day of Reich's embarrassment in the Super Bowl? It seems a lot more likely he just had a really good outing in one game and a really bad outing in another.
[T]he Japanese armies had rounded up all enemy nationals for internment in Weihsien in the province of Shantung, North China.
Sent to this same camp in Weihsien in August 1943 with many other missionaries' children, I will forever share with all the other hero worshippers of my age that vivid memory of the first sight of the man whom other prisoners described excitedly as the Olympic gold medallist who wouldn't run on a Sunday. [...]
Eric Liddell helped organize athletic meetings. Despite the weakening physical condition of people as the war dragged on, the spirit of competition and camaraderie in sports was very good for us. Young and old watched excitedly, basking in the aura of Olympic glory as Eric Liddell ran in the race for veterans, his head thrown back in his characteristic style, sailing through to victory. [...]
But for Eric Liddell death came just months before liberation. He was buried in the little cemetery in the Japanese part of the camp where others who had died during internment had been laid to rest.
You know, gentlemen, you yearn for victory just as I do. But achieved with the apparent effortlessness of Gods. Yours are the archaic values of the prep school playground. I believe in the relentless pursuit of excellence and I'll carry the future with me!
The cuneiform inscription that serves as our logo and as the design motif of our endpapers is the earliest-known appearance of the word "freedom" (amagi), or "liberty." It is taken from a clay document written about 2300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash.
Developments in the industrial sphere meanwhile shifted the focus of his interest to labor, big business, and finally to Marxism. Responding to the bloody summer of railway strikes in 1877, he penned an angry response meant for but not finally published in the North American Review, following it with several other essays on labor and strikes throughout the 1880s. Although the secretive formation of the Standard Oil trust in 1882 heralded a new phase of industrial combination, Sumner, like most of his contemporaries, realized its implications only gradually. In a series in the Independent in 1887, however, he took direct aim at the emerging "plutocracy," a concept that joined middle class fear of industrial combination and the patrician dislike of vulgar wealth he had earlier expressed in his sermons. Narrowly defined, plutocracy referred to "a political form in which the controlling force is wealth," he explained. But more generally it enshrined the "increasing thirst for luxury" and the acquisitive appetites of the man "on the make." "The principle of plutocracy is that money buys whatever the owner of money wants," Sumner concluded with disgust.
He also gradually realized that Karl Marx was not just another socialist. Initially he knew Marx only as the leader of the International who wanted "to carry the war into the arena of scientific economy." But Marx's treatment of "capital" was soon at the center of his indictment of the entire socialist movement. When in 1886 the visit of Marx's daughter and son-in-law to the United States stimulated new interest in his theories, Sumner took aim at such concepts as "proletariat" and "bourgeoisie." "No American artisan" can understand these terms, he charged. "Such ideas are a part of a foreign dress of a set of ideas which are not yet naturalized."
Socialists are filled with the enthusiasm of equality. Every scheme of theirs for securing equality has destroyed liberty. The student of political philosophy has the antagonism of equality and liberty constantly forced upon him. Equality of possession or of rights and equality before the law are diametrically opposed to each other. The object of equality before the law is to make the state entirely neutral. The state, under that theory, takes no cognizance of persons. It surrounds all, without distinctions, with the same conditions and guarantees. If it educates one, it educates all-black, white, red, or yellow; Jew or Gentile; native or alien. If it taxes one, it taxes all, by the same system and under the same conditions. If it exempts one from police regulations in home, church, and occupation, it exempts all. From this statement it is at once evident that pure equality before the law is impossible. Some occupations must be subjected to police regulation. Not all can be made subject to militia duty even for the same limited period. The exceptions and special cases furnish the chance for abuse. Equality before the law, however, is one of the cardinal principles of civil liberty, because it leaves each man to run the race of life for himself as best he can. The state stands neutral but benevolent. It does not undertake to aid some and handicap others at the outset in order to offset hereditary advantages and disadvantages, or to make them start equally. Such a notion would belong to the false and spurious theory of equality which is socialistic. If the state should attempt this It would make itself the servant of envy. I am entitled to make the most I can of myself without hindrance from anybody, but I am not entitled to any guarantee that I shall make as much of myself as somebody else makes of himself.
The newest socialism is, in its method, political. The essential feature of its latest phases is the attempt to use the power of the state to realize its plans and to secure its objects. These objects are to do away with poverty and misery, and there are no socialistic schemes yet proposed, of any sort, which do not, upon analysis, turn out to be projects for curing poverty and misery by making those who have share with those who have not.
When Democrats in the Texas Legislature ran away to Oklahoma to prevent a vote on a Republican redistricting plan, they attracted considerable press attention. Most focused on the escape of the Democrats, the pursuit by the Republicans, and the odd boundaries of some of the proposed districts. No article I saw had anything to say about the substantive case. Are the Republicans getting a fair share of the Congressional seats, given the popular vote in Texas? As it happens, they are not.
There's a serial cat killer on the loose in the West. Has anyone checked Bill Frist's alibi?
In his 1989 memoir, Dr. Frist, the heart surgeon and Senate majority leader, confessed that at Harvard Medical School, he used to adopt stray cats at shelters, take them home and slice and dice them for practice.
"It was, of course, a heinous and dishonest thing to do," he wrote. "And I was totally schizoid about the entire matter. By day, I was little Billy Frist, the boy who lived on Bowling Avenue in Nashville and had decided to become a doctor because of his gentle father and a dog named Scratchy. By night, I was Dr. William Harrison Frist, future cardiothoracic surgeon, who was not going to let a few sentiments about cute, furry little creatures stand in the way of his career. In short, I was going a little crazy."
Now Dr. Frist is not going to let any sentiments about those cute lesbians on the new cover of Newsweek--headlined "Is Gay Marriage Next?"--stand in the way of his career.
During oral arguments, he had told Michigan's counsel that if the law school was so hellbent on including more minorities, it should simply lower its admission standards -- a stunningly patronizing and insulting comment. Having lost, he now said scornfully that the lessons of mutual understanding and tolerance Michigan was seeking to provide by building a diverse student body were more appropriately learned by "people three feet shorter and 20 years younger than the full-grown adults at the University of Michigan law school, in institutions ranging from Boy Scout troops to public-school kindergartens."
As if that ridiculous contention were not enough, Scalia then said that the O'Connor opinion opens the way to "racial discrimination" in public and private employment, adding sarcastically that he was sure that "the nonminority individuals who are deprived of a legal education, a civil service job or any job at all by reason of their skin color will surely understand."
That's uncomfortably close to the infamous television ad Jesse Helms ran in 1990, when the then-senator from North Carolina was running for reelection against Harvey Gantt, the African American former mayor of Charlotte. Helms's narrator said, "You needed that job. And you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of racial quotas." Scalia's scare-tactic scenario constitutes almost as naked an appeal to racial antagonism. It's not what you expect to hear from a justice of the Supreme Court.
Fear of things going too far -- of people of color being helped at white expense -- is behind the fight against affirmative action, too. It's almost as old as America.
The new peace process, just like its predecessors, is premised on the notion that Israelis and Palestinians need to make mutual concessions to end their war: The Israelis need to give up the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the Palestinians need to stop terrorism. The problem is that most Israelis are willing to meet their obligations, but most Palestinians aren't.
Polls show that more than 60% of Israelis are willing to give up the West Bank and recognize a Palestinian state. Even Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon, a longtime supporter of the settler movement, now says he is willing to end Israel's "occupation." This will require overcoming opposition from a hard-core minority, but democracies have a long history of doing just that, as we saw during our own civil rights movement. Neither Sharon nor any other Israeli leader, however, will accede to a "right of return" for millions of Palestinian refugees, which would effectively end Israel's existence as a Jewish state.
The continued harping of Palestinian leaders on this point suggests they still are not reconciled to Israel's existence. Indeed, a recent survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that 80% of Palestinians don't believe "that a way can be found for the state of Israel to exist so that the rights and needs of the Palestinian people are met." Another poll found only 25% of Palestinians support "cutting off funding for groups engaged in terror and violence against Israelis."
Successful negotiations are impossible when one side won't recognize the other's right to exist. No wonder the peace talks ended in frustration two and a half years ago: Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat rejected Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offer of more than 95% of the West Bank, because he couldn't reconcile himself to living alongside a Jewish state. [...]
However well intentioned, the latest peace process is likely to backfire as badly as its predecessor did. The only long-term hope for peace
is that the Palestinians will weary of this war--as the Israelis already did when a majority came to support the creation of a Palestinian state--and give real power to leaders intent on stopping the suicide bombers. Bush recognized this necessity in his June 24, 2002, speech, which made regime change in the Palestinian Authority a pre-condition for progress. Abbas' appointment is a step in the right direction, but the process is a long way from being complete. Until it is, the road map is unlikely to lead anywhere.
The Middle East road map is yet another testimony to the traditional, bipartisan and, may I add, admirable commitment of all U.S. administrations to bring peace to the region. However, with the complex nature of the conflict, it is not totally absurd to assume that for all the American good will, unrest may still continue, maybe as far as the year 2015.
What's so special about 2015? Well, according to a recently published survey by the Jewish Policy Planning Institute, in that year there will be more Arabs than Jews between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Arabs here just happen to have more kids than Jews do.
This dry statistic has only one meaning. If Israel keeps the West Bank and Gaza under its control, it will have to choose between two painful options: either losing its Jewish character or ceasing to be a democratic state. In other words, if Israel wants to remain both Jewish and democratic, it has to pull out of the territories.
With more pressing threats like suicide bombing and other terror attacks, Israelis tend to ignore the ticking of the demographic clock. Fighting terror come first. Yet others, including Palestinians, listen carefully to the ticking.
The Palestinian poet-in-exile, Mahmoud Darwish, in a recent interview with Yediot Ahronot, wondered about what Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was actually doing: "If you don't want a Palestinian state on 22 percent of the land today, in 20 years there will be a Palestinian state on the whole land."
Israel declared over the weekend that it is cutting off ties with the BBC to protest a repeat broadcast on non-conventional weapons said to be in Israel.
The program was broadcast for the first time in March in Britain, and was rerun Saturday on a BBC channel that is aired all over the world.
The boycott decision was made by Israel's public relations forum, made up of representatives from the Prime Minister's Office, the Foreign Ministry and the Government Press Office.
It was decided that government offices won't assist BBC producers and reporters, that Israeli officials will not give interviews to the British network, and that the Government Press Office will make it difficult for BBC employees to get press cards and work visas in Israel.
Before the broadcast Saturday, Israeli officials tried to pressure the BBC to cancel the broadcast, saying that the program was biased and presented Israel as an evil dictatorship, ignoring the existential threat it was facing.
Today, the people of Hong Kong are set to hold the biggest street demonstration since the territory's handover to China in 1997. According to a report in the Hsin Pao newspaper, the government has conducted a survey on the matter. The authorities were shocked to find out that 18 percent of the territory's residents said they would participate in the demonstration.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's trip to Hong Kong was moved ahead a day in order to avoid the demonstration and the embarrassment. Wen will not get to see the Hong Kong people's anger against Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa and his government. The organizers estimate that 100,000 people will show up for today's demonstration, but the authorities have made preparations for 200,000.
The demonstration is primarily aimed at the legislation mandated by Article 23 of the territory's Basic Law. Tung's government has stubbornly insisted on enacting the law, ignoring the opinions of residents and displaying an extremely thuggish and arrogant attitude. On top of this, the government has -- by its obstinacy and incompetence over the past six years -- caused Hong Kong to sink to the status of the worst-off among the "four Asian dragons." [...]
The seeds of the Hong Kong people's current predicament were sowed 20 years ago, when China and the UK started negotiations on the territory's future. At the time, the people were deprived of any opportunity to state their opinions. Beijing rejected the participation of residents' representatives in the negotiation, on the grounds that it opposed a "three-legged stool." Nor did Beijing allow the people to express their wishes through a referendum. The so-called "China experts" in Britain dared not oppose Beijing.
As a result, the opinions of the people were ignored. Six million Hong Kong residents were handed over to China's authoritarian regime along with the land.
The idea of building a dam in the Three Gorges was conceived by Sun Yat-sen in 1919. After Sun’s death, in 1925, the vision was kept alive by dictators and revolutionaries, occupiers and developers, all of whom saw the project as an important step in modernizing the nation. Chiang Kai-shek promoted the idea, as did Mao Zedong. When the Japanese occupied parts of the river valley in 1940, their engineers performed surveys; when the Kuomintang regained control of China, officials from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation helped the Chinese continue the planning. After the Kuomintang was defeated, the Communists turned to the Soviet Union for technical assistance. But the Russian advisers left after the Sino-Soviet split in 1960, and during the political chaos of the next two decades the project was put on hold. (The dam’s history is explored in a recently published book, “Before the Deluge,” by Deirdre Chetham.)
By the time construction finally began, in 1994, the era of big dams had passed in most parts of the world. Both the United States government and the World Bank refused to support the project, because of environmental concerns. Many critics of the dam believed that one of its main goals—protection against the floods that periodically ravage central China—would be better served by the construction of a series of smaller dams on the Yangtze’s tributaries. Engineers worried that the Yangtze’s heavy silt might back up behind the Three Gorges Dam, limiting efficiency. Social costs were high: an estimated 1.2 million people would have to be resettled, and low-lying cities and towns would have to be rebuilt on higher ground. Once completed, the dam would be the largest in the world—as high as a sixty-story building and as wide as five Hoover Dams. The official price tag was more than twenty-one billion dollars, roughly half of which would be funded by a tax on electricity across China. [...]
In the new cities I rarely heard criticism of the dam. Even in rural areas, where people have received far fewer benefits, complaints tend to be mild and personal. Generally, people felt that they hadn’t received their full resettlement allowances, often because of the corruption of local Communist Party cadres. But those who complained almost never questioned the basic idea of the dam. When I asked Huang Zongming what he hoped his children would do when they became adults, he said he didn’t care, as long as they used their education and didn’t fish. He told me that the dam was “good,” because it would bring more electricity to the nation. In Wushan, I met a cabdriver who told me that his home town had leapfrogged a half century. “If it weren’t for the dam, it would take another fifty years for us to reach this stage,” he said.
But later in the same conversation he told me that the city wouldn’t last another half century, because of landslides. The new Wushan, which has a densely concentrated population of fifty thousand, is a vertical city: high buildings on steep hillsides that have never been heavily settled. Concrete erosion controls prop up many of the neighborhoods. The cabbie drove me to Jintan Road, where there had been a recent landslide. An apartment building had been evacuated; piles of dirt still pressed against the street. I asked the cabbie if he was concerned about the fifty-year limit. “Why worry about it?” he said. “I’ll be eighty by then.”
During my years along the Yangtze, I had always been impressed by the resourcefulness of the people, who responded quickly to any change in their surroundings. They took the revolution of the market economy in stride; if a product became available and was in demand, shops immediately stocked it. But there was almost no long-term planning. When people spoke of the future, they meant tomorrow.
One afternoon last year, I discussed this shortsightedness with Jiang Hong, a Chinese-born geographer who teaches at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She has studied communities in the deserts of northern China where generations of government policies have been implemented to convert the region into arable land. Many of these practices were environmentally unsound, and local residents generally resisted them. But she had noticed that in recent years there has been less opposition to such schemes, partly because free-market reforms gave people more incentive to try to change their environment. In the past, government campaigns often touted abstract goals, like the attempt to surpass the United States and Britain in steel production in the late nineteen-fifties. Such a target can inspire a peasant for only so long; nowadays everybody wants a better television set. And the lack of political stability has kept people from developing long-term expectations.
“Since 1949, policy has changed so often,” Jiang Hong told me. “You never knew what would happen. In the nineteen-eighties, people saw the reforms as an opportunity. And you had to seize the opportunity, because it might not last.”
Whenever I travelled along the Yangtze, I sensed that the dam’s timing was perfect, because the parallel drives of Communism and capitalism had bent just enough to intersect. Building the world’s biggest dam appealed to the dreams of the Communist leaders, but they never could have achieved it in the days of isolation and chaos, before the market reforms. And if the reforms had been around long enough for locals to get their bearings and look beyond satisfying today’s immediate desires, they would have questioned and possibly resisted the project. In the future, when people look back at China’s transition period, one of the lasting monuments may well be an enormous expanse of dead water in central China.
The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. The radical vice of all these schemes, from a sociological point of view, is that C is not allowed a voice in the matter, and his position, character, and interests, as well as the ultimate effects on society through C's interests, are entirely overlooked. I call C the Forgotten Man. For once let us look him up and consider his case, for the characteristic of all social doctors is, that they fix their minds on some man or group of men whose case appeals to the sympathies and the imagination, and they plan remedies addressed to the particular trouble; they do not understand that all the parts of society hold together, and that forces which are set in action act and react throughout the whole organism, until an equilibrium is produced by a re-adjustment of all interests and rights. They therefore ignore entirely the source from which they must draw all the energy which they employ in their remedies, and they ignore all the effects on other members of society than the ones they have in view. They are always under the dominion of the superstition of government, and, forgetting that a government produces nothing at all, they leave out of sight the first fact to be remembered in all social discussion - that the State cannot get a cent for any man without taking it from some other man, and this latter must be a man who has produced and saved it. This latter is the Forgotten Man.
The friends of humanity start out with certain benevolent feelings toward "the poor," "the weak," "the laborers," and others of whom they make pets. They generalize these classes, and render them impersonal, and so constitute the classes into social pets. They turn to other classes and appeal to sympathy and generosity, and to all the other noble sentiments of the human heart. Action in the line proposed consists in a transfer of capital from the better off to the worse off. Capital, however, as we have seen, is the force by which civilization is maintained and carried on. The same piece of capital cannot be used in two ways. Every bit of capital, therefore, which is given to a shiftless and inefficient member of society, who makes no return for it, is diverted from a reproductive use; but if it was put into reproductive use, it would have to be granted in wages to an efficient and productive laborer. Hence the real sufferer by that kind of benevolence which consists in an expenditure of capital to protect the good-for-nothing is the industrious laborer. The latter, however, is never thought of in this connection. It is assumed that he is provided for and out of the account. Such a notion only shows how little true notions of political economy have as yet become popularized. There is an almost invincible prejudice that a man who gives a dollar to a beggar is generous and kind-hearted, but that a man who refuses the beggar and puts the dollar in a savings bank is stingy and mean. The former is putting capital where it is very sure to be wasted, and where it will be a kind of seed for a long succession of future dollars, which must be wasted to ward off a greater strain on the sympathies than would have been occasioned by a refusal in the first place. Inasmuch as the dollar might have been turned into capital and given to a laborer who, while earning it, would have reproduced it, it must be regarded as taken from the latter. When a millionaire gives a dollar to a beggar the gain of utility to the beggar is enormous, and the loss of utility to the millionaire is insignificant. Generally the discussion is allowed to rest there. But if the millionaire makes capital of the dollar, it must go upon the labor market, as a demand for productive services. Hence there is another party in interest - the person who supplies productive services. There always are two parties. The second one is always the Forgotten Man, and any one who wants to truly understand the matter in question must go and search for the Forgotten Man. He will be found to be worthy, industrious, independent, and self-supporting. He is not, technically, "poor" or "weak"; he minds his own business, and makes no complaint. Consequently the philanthropists never think of him, and trample on him.
. As this publisher seems almost incapable of bringing out an uninteresting book, one thumbs through the text: On Liberty, Society, and Politics: The Essential Essays of William Graham Sumner. Who?Sumner, William Graham (InfoPlease)
Sumner, William Graham, 1840–1910, American sociologist and political economist, b. Paterson, N.J., grad. Yale, 1863, and studied in Germany, in Switzerland, and at Oxford. He was ordained an Episcopal minister and from 1872 was professor of political and social science at Yale. In economics he advocated a policy of extreme laissez-faire, strongly opposing any government measures that he thought interfered with the natural economics of trade. As a sociologist he did valuable work in charting the evolution of human customs--folkways and mores. He concluded that the power of these forces, developed in the course of human evolution, rendered useless any attempts at social reform. He also originated the concept of ethnocentrism, a term now commonly used, to designate attitudes of superiority about one's own group in comparison with others. His major work was Folkways (1907).
Many critics quoted a few phrases concerning "fittest" and "unfittest" as the sum of his social thought. Focusing on his views of government and the economy, most failed to place his work within the broader context of the effort of several generations of American intellectuals to ground morals and public policy in science rather than Protestant Christianity. A member of the "generation of 1840" who initiated this change, Sumner shared in this enterprise with the sociologist Lester Ward and the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., among others, even though he did not share their politics. As these intellectuals debated the meaning of science, the charge of misapplied Darwinism (including the epithet "social Darwinist"), as I have argued in Social Darwinism: Science and Myth (1979), was essentially a battle strategy, more caricature than accurate characterization. Critics also assumed that Sumner's ideas remained unchanged throughout his career. Quotations from lectures of the 1870s or from Folkways became interchangeable evidence of a monolithic ideology.
Whatever the reasons, the resulting image of Sumner seriously misrepresents him. Although he launched his career in a decade with more than its share of corruption and fraud--the scandals of the Grant presidency and New York's Tweed Ring, the financial buccaneering of Jay Gould, the "corrupt bargain" that gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency in 1876--he was no less a critic of these developments than were the self-styled "reformers" whose proposals, in his view, only compounded the problems. During the 1880s and 1890s, he continued to defend free markets, individual enterprise, and the accumulation of capital. But he was acutely aware of mounting problems, from the rise of plutocracy (defined broadly as the influence of wealth on politics) to the excesses of consumerism and of democracy. The United States was entering its "glory days," he lamented shortly before his death, referring to the "corruption and extravagance which ultimately have ruined all the republics of the past." In sounding these warnings, he seemed to his admirers to be the epitome of the "old Roman," a defender of the republican tradition of the Founders, not the business "hireling" or the spirit of individualism past.
Sumner's "conservatism" was accordingly complex. As he moved from clergyman to sociologist, he struggled to reconcile two contradictory impulses: a desire for organic community, historical continuity, and traditional values as antidote to unfettered individualism and materialistic progress; and a commitment to individual freedom that fueled this progress. Complicating this dilemma was the specter of cultural relativism wherein all truth appeared relative to conditions. In freeing the individual from past custom and tradition, cultural relativism appeared to rule out any common standard for individual behavior or public policy. In his early sermons, Sumner confronted these issues in repeated attempts to balance "tradition" and "progress." In Folkways, he discussed them in terms of the relation between the "mores" and "science," the former the encoded customs and traditions that shape all human activity, the latter the objective attitude that allows limited escape from them.
In this quest, Sumner's conception of science was crucial. Since the 18th century, science had been seen as a means of freeing humanity from the burdens of the past, while providing for one or another type of social engineering. Inspired by Darwin, many of Sumner's contemporaries found in evolution the basis for an instrumental view of reason that justified governmental activism and a relativism that rejected established institutions and beliefs. Sumner, in contrast, distinguished the "methods" of science from its "speculations," viewing the former in terms of the narrowly inductive procedures of what American intellectuals of his generation termed "Baconian" science (dubiously claiming lineage from the celebrated 17th century English scientist Francis Bacon). Science, so viewed, was not some "ism," but a matter-of-factness that stressed classification over hypothesis. The property of a relatively small minority ("the classes"), the scientific attitude, as Sumner's biographer Donald Bellomy has put it, allowed "a critical, scientific, and modernized elite [to] modify and correct traditional attitudes."
Although on the surface Sumner shared his generation's faith in science, he thus diverged from a majority of his fellow social scientists in rejecting the notion that science taught a conception of truth as merely a consensus of trained observers. Sumner's "expert" was not a credentialled member of a social scientific community that drew up social blueprints to meet changing conditions--the model that was increasingly in American sociology in the decades after Sumner's death. Rather, he was the tough-minded individual who viewed current mores objectively in the light of history. In grasping the essence behind appearance, science provided an absolute standard for individual behavior and social policy, and hence an escape from a debilitating relativism and moral anarchy.
Sumner defended private property, individual enterprise, and laissez faire. But he was not therefore an uncritical "apologist" for American business. Rather he joined a tradition of American thinkers who championed republicanism against democracy, hard work and self-denial over material luxury, and public good over individual gratification. Unlike the Founding fathers, Sumner grounded his conservatism, not in the classical Republicanism of Greece or Rome, but in scientific method and an ethos of professionalism that sought in discipline, denial, and detachment the equivalents, as it were, of public virtue. Although some contradictions remained, he thus took more seriously than many of his contemporaries the problems of change and tradition, cultural relativism and common standards, that continue to dominate our discourse more than a century later.
Ms Pierre-Louis plans to go into immigration practice, where she expects to be busy fighting "the post-9/11 erosion of civil rights". Ms Oriental plans to work in criminal law. Mr Gibson will go into corporate law, a field where he can reasonably expect to make a six-figure income within the next five years. Any one of them could conceivably end up as a top US official one day.
Among all black people, one would think these three confident, well-educated, highly opinionated, upwardly mobile Americans would be optimistic about the course of US black-white relations. One would be wrong.
It was widely reported last week that the US Supreme Court upheld the core of affirmative action - consideration of race as a factor in college admissions. Not as widely reported was its hope that this practice would eventually no longer be needed, or that a large number of black people - including Ms Pierre-Louis, Ms Oriental and Mr Gibson - strongly disagree.
The court's majority decision said that "racial classifications, however compelling their goals, are potentially . . . dangerous", that "all government use of race must have a logical end point" and that "we expect 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary".
It expressed the hope that victory would eventually be declared in America's long, painful, awkward, halting, complex struggle toward a colour-blind meritocracy.
Ms Pierre-Louis laughs at the sentiment.
"That may be the ideal of Utopia America, but it's not the case . . . and will not be for the foreseeable future," she said. "You have to understand how the American mind has progressed: First it was . . . we weren't humans at all. Then it became, we're quasi-humans, maybe three-fifths. Then it became, well, they're human, but they're still not as intelligent. Now it's, they're human, they might be as intelligent, but their culture is somehow deficient, so they can't make it anyway. All the way through, we're still widely perceived as inferior."
The U.S. birthrate is at its lowest level since data collection started in 1909, primarily because fewer young women are having children, the federal government said on June 25. [...]
A nation needs 2.1 children per woman to maintain its population, Mr. Hamilton said. The United States is below replacement level, with 2.0 children per woman.
: Dr. Ruth is not one to disappoint a friend, and on Monday she proved just that. Dr. Ruth Westheimer, a pronounced Democrat known for her sex therapy, crossed party lines to make an unlikely appearance at a Bush fundraiser according to the AP.
Event goers, who paid a pricy $2,000 per head, were happy to see the sex therapist, but not necessarily for advice. Attendees snagged pictures not only with the president, but also with Dr. Ruth. Mr. Bush himself hopped into line for a picture. Westheimer, who stands tall at a petite 4 feet 7 inches, laughed when the president got down on his knees for the snap shot.
For the uninitiated, HGTV is one of those niche cable stations we all heard so much about back in the early '90s that sounded preposterous at the time--who'd watch round-the-clock gardening, remodeling, and house-hunting tips?--but seems perfectly reasonable today alongside the dozens of specialty channels devoted to cooking, pets, sci-fi, soaps, books, and--on my cable system--one click below the NASA channel, which on weekends broadcasts continuous footage of the earth rotating. (Really.) Since its 1994 launch, HGTV has grown from a tiny startup to a cable colossus that reaches nearly 80 million households in the United States alone, broadcasts its programs to viewers as far away as Latvia and Brunei, and is even available to U.S. service personnel in 175 countries and on board Navy ships. The idea of rugged naval aviators, fresh from sorties over Iraq or Afghanistan, choosing to unwind before Home and Garden Television's design and decorating tips is testament to the strange power this channel holds over its viewers.
At first blush, HGTV is a benign--even an edifying--form of entertainment that's centered on a can-do ethos for the current or expectant homeowner. Instead of patrician decorating tips, HGTV shows like "Weekend Warriors'' champion a Calvinist work ethic in which determined homeowners charge headlong into demanding-but-reasonably-priced projects that typically leave them spent, but never broke, and with a spectacular new veranda or stunning hardwood floors to show for their efforts. There are shows about improving your home's appearance ("Curb Appeal''), tending to your home's yard ("Landscapers' Challenge''), decorating your home cheaply ("Design on a Dime'') or even more cheaply ("Designing Cents''), home-centric extreme-sports knockoffs ("inter Gardener,'' 'Extreme Homes'') and others, like "Help Around the House,'' that extol the life-enhancing practicalities of previously mundane tasks like caulking or grout work.
Many HGTV shows feature a subtle, battle-of-the-sexes leitmotif that adds to the intrigue, while reinforcing and pandering to its audience's prejudices in a way that surely boosts viewership. On the popular "Designing for the Sexes,'' most men are of the hapless variety, puzzled as to why their wife is upset over the moose head they'd like to mount over the dining room table; most women display an alarming fondness for pink chenille or French country style or doilies. Viewers therefore identify quickly, privately relieved to discover that their own situation isn't nearly as outlandish as they'd first imagined. They receive further encouragement from the show's denouement, which invariably features a designer or decorator of Christ-like patience who steps in to mollify the warring factions by curbing even the tackiest excesses and delivering a touch of class and taste that both can live with. This men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Venus format presents itself merely as decorating help. But the effect upon the addled participants--and viewers, too--is not unlike that of a good marriage counselor, convincing couples that any problem can be overcome. I believe it is no coincidence that HGTV is the one channel my fiancee and I can agree on. It accomplishes a feat previously thought to be impossible, bridging the chasm between "Oprah'' and "SportsCenter.''
The students' demand for constitutional change seems to have some support within the establishment. More than two-thirds of the members of the Islamic Majlis (parliament) have published an open letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the spiritual leader, to endorse the call for the separation of mosque and State. Another open letter, signed by 250 intellectuals with impeccable Khomeinist credentials, calls for the establishment of a Western-style democratic system.
A consensus may yet emerge for change through a referendum. One popular idea is to amend the Constitution to separate the mosque from the State: The position of Supreme Guide, held by Ayatollah Khamenei, would be abolished, letting Iran become a "normal" republic with a president and parliament elected by and accountable to the people.
Today hardly anyone, even within the establishment, is prepared to defend the principle under which the Supreme Guide is regarded as the embodiment of divine will on earth and given absolute powers. Even Khamenei's associates now admit that the pro-democracy movement is too broad-based to be dismissed as part of the pressure that the Bush administration is exerting on the regime.
For most of the past century, redistricting has been a fairly predictable though often contentious ritual. Every 10 years, state legislators would use the new census data to redraw Congressional district lines, and the party in power would usually manage to draw maps that gave it an advantage.
Now, thanks to a determined effort by United States Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, with the quiet support of the White House, that tradition may be crumbling, as legislatures draw new districts whenever they have a partisan advantage. [...]
Some Texas Republicans--including Governor Perry and Tom Craddick, who became speaker of the state House in January when the party took control for the first time in 130 years--argue that the state's Congressional delegation, with 17 Democrats and 15 Republicans, does not reflect Texas voting patterns, in which nearly 60 percent of the votes cast for Congress last year were for Republicans.
They say the current Congressional map is just an old Democratic gerrymander. And they say that although the Constitution requires the legislature to draw district boundaries, the current map was drawn by a panel of federal judges.
Others note that Republicans chose at the time to let the judges redraw the Congressional districts rather than compromise with Democrats who still held the majority in the state House.
John R. Alford, a professor at Rice University who was an expert witness for Governor Perry in the 2001 redistricting litigation, said the Republican Party knew at the time that the state Legislature, with its own new district map, was about to swing to Republican control in 2002.
"Republicans used the court-drawn plan as a place to park redistricting until they could address the issue when they were in control of the House and obviously better off in the Senate," Professor Alford said. "You give it to the courts knowing that, after 2002, you'll take it back."
Visiting a public charter school in Washington on Tuesday, Bush planned to push Congress to pass legislation that would create a $15 million voucher program for District of Columbia public school students, spokesman Scott McClellan said. [...]
As the setting for Tuesday's event, the White House selected the KIPP DC: Key Academy in Washington, a college prepatory middle school. The KIPP (which stands for Knowledge is Power Program) schools scattered around the country have won praise for raising test scores among low-income students.
The schools set rigorous behavior and academic effort standards, have nine-hour days and operate 11 months a year.
Bush's target is legislation sponsored by Rep. Thomas Davis, R-Va., that would provide $7,500 a year to lower-income D.C. children enrolled in targeted public schools.
Davis says the program could reach at least 2,000 of the city's about 67,000 public school students.
Bush has proposed $75 million for a national school choice incentive plan to be open to several cities in his 2004 budget.
Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all. Sloth may not seem that enjoyable, nor anger either, but giving way to deep laziness has its pleasures, and the expression of anger entails a release that is not without its small delights. In recompense, envy may be the subtlest--perhaps I should say the most insidious--of the seven deadly sins. Surely it is the one that people are least likely to want to own up to, for to do so is to admit that one is probably ungenerous, mean, small-hearted. It may also be the most endemic. Apart from Socrates, Jesus, Marcus Aurelius, Saint Francis, Mother Teresa, and only a few others, at one time or another, we have all felt flashes of envy, even if in varying intensities, from its minor pricks to its deep, soul-destroying, lacerating stabs. So widespread is it--a word for envy, I have read, exists in all known languages--that one is ready to believe it is the sin for which the best argument can be made that it is part of human nature.
Want to know why Europe is falling disastrously behind the U.S. in productivity and wealth?
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the writings of Dutchman and IndyMedia Crank, Paul Treanor, the Stupidest Man in the World:...
Robert McCloskey, whose storytelling and drawing talents made him a cherished guest at bedtime stories for generations of families, died yesterday at his home in Deer Isle, Maine. He was 88.
His second book was first in fame. In ''Make Way for Ducklings,'' Mr. McCloskey told the tale of Mr. and Mrs. Mallard and their quest to find a safe place to raise their eight hatchlings. In doing so, Mr. McCloskey gave readers a duck's-eye view of Boston: of flying over the State House and Louisburg Square, of swimming in the Charles River and Public Garden pond, of waddling along Mount Vernon Street. [...]
According to an interview with The New York Times in the early 1990s, the author finished a story of Mr. and Mrs. Mallard and their brood of ducklings, with such names as Tom, Dick, and Harry. And Genevieve.
Mr. McCloskey didn't think it was much of a story, but he showed it to his editors at Viking Press. They told him the story was fine and he should go ahead with the illustrations. But, they said, he needed to rename those ducklings - the names he had chosen were too adult.
In creating the illustrations, Mr. McCloskey took a page from naturalist John Audubon, but in a most peculiar setting. He bought four mallards and for weeks let them run free in his apartment in New York. He would crawl next to them, at their level, to see how they waddled; he would plop them in the bathtub to see how they swam. After running out of patience - and Kleenex, according to Mr. McCloskey - he freed the ducks and finished his illustrations.
Annoyed at the suggestion to change the ducklings' names, Mr. McCloskey used in his final manuscript alphabetical nonsense names, from Jack and Kack to Pack and Quack.
To the post-war generation of baby boomers, these names would become as much a part of their childhood lore as Paul Bunyan and Oliver Twist were to generations before them.
Wolfe demanded during dying (Emily Dickinson)
Wolfe demanded during dying
"Which obtain the Day"?
"General, the British" -- "Easy"
Answered Wolfe "to die"
Montcalm, his opposing Spirit
Rendered with a smile
"Sweet" said he "my own Surrender
Liberty's beguile"
If the conventional wisdom holds that presidential candidates can at least expect to win their home states in elections, then maybe the whole Democratic ticket had better give up. That's because local polls show all the leading candidates losing to President Bush. The biggest gap--18 points--is in the home state of Sen. John Edwards, of North Carolina. The smallest is in Massachusetts, where Sen. John Kerry would lose to Bush 43 percent to 49 percent. "It's pretty bad," says a GOP official, "when rank-and-file Dems look at the field and say, `Man, no one excites me; let's bring back Al Gore.' "
In high-tech, gizmo-rich Japan, mobile phones able to take digital photos have fast become mandatory accessories. They have also quickly become the latest tool for a new crime - digital shoplifting.
The crime is deceptively simple. In the crowded bookstores, the digital shoplifter is deftly able to record images from magazines to be viewed later.
Japan has a long tradition of allowing people to leaf through publications, a tolerance made easier because thumbed copies can be returned to the publishers.
It's an intriguing quandary: how do you address $1 torts with a legal system in which it costs $10,000 to sneeze? Our legal system is competent at awarding billions to smokers harmed by their cigarettes and hundreds of millions to drunk drivers harmed by their car's proneness to crash, but how to address lesser harms? Perhaps record company shareholders and Japanese bookstore owners should just go eat at McDonald's, so they can experience a genuine tort worth some real money.
Editorials worldwide denounced the U.S. president for attacking Iraq. In Britain, The Financial Times deemed the attack “hard to justify in terms of international law, or any conception of a new world order.” In Jordan, Al Dustur called it a “cheap attempt” to divert attention from the White House’s failed economic plan. In Italy, La Stampa said the president “finds himself at the center of a domestic and international debate over his personality and his capacity for decision-making, in other words, his leadership.”
Harsh words for an American president. Or more specifically, harsh words for Bill Clinton. Those editorials were published following a U.S. airstrike against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 1993. Ten years later, the international community waxes nostalgic about Clinton, often forgetting that during the early part of his presidency they routinely derided him as inexperienced, indecisive, and obsessed with the U.S. economy at the expense of global affairs.
Will the world learn to love President George W. Bush? As he enters the second half of his term in office, FOREIGN POLICY continues our
long-standing tradition of asking noted contributors to grade the president and interpret the prevailing mood in their respective corners of the globe. Together, these commentaries—from nine regions and countries—form a mosaic far more nuanced than the familiar global caricature of Bush as a shoot-from-the-hip cowboy. While Bush’s “axis of evil” speech provoked scorn in Western Europe, the president found a sympathetic audience among East Europeans still traumatized by decades of dictatorial rule. South Asians and the Arab world resent Bush’s penchant for unilateralism, yet they confess a grudging admiration for his ability to advance U.S. interests. Even as Bush’s free trade policies have raised expectations for a better life in Latin America and China, his failure to liberalize immigration has left many policy elites desolate and embittered. Africa and Southeast Asia see Bush as a throwback to the Cold War, yet Russia, the United States’ former Cold War adversary, sees Bush as a pragmatic partner.
In the aftermath of the war in Iraq, Bush faces many crucial decisions about how the United States will engage the world. Judging from these essays, the world hasn’t quite made up its mind how it will engage George W. Bush.
The communist opposition to President George W. Bush has begun. On Friday, June 27th, President George W. Bush arrived in Burlingame, California for a fundraising lunch, and the communist Workers World Party was there to protest, with the help of their allies in the labor unions and on the far-left of the Democratic Party. It's a scene we'll see again and again in the next year and a half - through their anti-war International ANSWER, the Workers World Party has vowed to follow President Bush wherever he goes. Supporters of Democrat Dennis Kucinich and the leaders the Service Employees International Union and the Communication Workers of America trade unions believe that their cooperation with the Workers World Party will weaken President Bush's presidency and defeat him in 2004. After attending this latest protest, I'm convinced that the opposite is true - the protestors have been reduced to an abrasive spectacle, only harmful to their own cause. That's not to say the Workers World Party and their friends won't be able to draw large crowds in the future, but if they truly want George W. Bush out of office, they're being self-defeating.
There's no doubt that the Workers World Party has gained influence, thanks to International ANSWER's recent string of anti-war protests. The San Francisco branch of the Workers World Party won the support of much of San Francisco's Left, and their long list of backers reflects this. Friday's protest was backed by, among others, the San Francisco Labor Council, AFL-CIO; the San Francisco branch of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee; the California branch of the National Organization of Women; the San Francisco branch of Al-Awda (the Palestinian Right of Return coalition); Global Exchange; Peninsula Peace & Justice Center (a Palo Alto-centered anti-war group); the South Bay Mobilization (a San Jose-centered anti-war group); the Children's Defense Fund; and the other major anti-war coalition, the Revolutionary Communist Party-controlled Not in Our Name Project. [...]
Both the crowd and the speeches were so extremist that any news coverage could only help the President. I'm beginning to suspect that this is the Secretariat of the Workers World Party's secret intention; in terms of resources, publicity, and membership, they're faring far better under the Bush administration than they did under Clinton, or would under the administration of any left-leaning Democrat. Therefore, another term for President Bush is in the Workers World Party's interests; therefore Workers World Party demonstrations against President Bush are going to be as angry and militant as possible. This allows them to recruit the truly radical while alienating the nation's undecided swing voters, giving them street credibility.
As next year's campaign heats up, and the number of television cameras at these protests grows, the speakers are going to get angrier and angrier. The Democratic Party has put itself in this unenviable situation by refusing to denounce the Stalinists in its midst, in their efforts to generate "mainsteam" opposition to President Bush. In the future, these party hacks should take note: when you cooperate with the communists, you always get
burnt.
Chicken Little's Tale
To the Editor:
Re "Liz Phair's Exile in Avril-ville" by Meghan O'Rourke [June 22]:
Once upon a time there was a writer named Chicken Little. Chicken Little worked very hard and took her job very seriously. Often, she even wrote. One day, just as Chicken Little was about to have an idea, she heard something falling on her roof. "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" she shrieked, spilling green tea and vodka all over her work station. This commotion awoke her three readers, who lived with her in her hut, and all three rushed outside to see what had happened to the sky. After enduring several anxious minutes alone, Chicken Little was relieved to see her readers return. "Oh, Chicken Little, it was just the trees dropping their buds on a beautiful spring day," they said. Chicken Little tried not to show her disappointment. [...]
"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" Chicken Little screeched, terrified they would not heed her and would be found the next morning, buried among the intellectual debris. She pecked and pecked at them with her sharp little beak until they finally agreed to be awakened. The three readers rose up and shuffled outside to be greeted by a warm, summer rain falling steady as a heartbeat, wondrous and quiet as unexpected relief from pain. "Why, Chicken Little," said one reader, "it's only a summer shower come to feed the land. It feels great!" Chicken Little cowered in the corner as a fork of lightning licked the trees. "It's dangerous!" she cried, "you could slip on the wetness! You could catch a nasty cold! You could get electrocuted!" The three readers laughed, and went back out to experience the mystery of the storm, without thinking, without deconstructing, without checking what the other would do first. "Listen to me! Listen to me!" cried Chicken Little, as she watched their backs turn. The three readers stopped at the door and called out before leaving: "C'mon, Chicken Little. Hurry up, you're gonna miss it!"
LIZ PHAIR
Manhattan Beach, Calif.
Meghan O'Rourke's review of Liz Phair's new album, "Liz Phair," is online at www.nytimes.com/lizphair.
It is 17 months before the next national elections, and Republicans already smell victory in the air. In Capitol Hill watering holes and the halls of congressional office buildings, members and aides are whispering about the prospects of a major power shift in favor of the GOP come November 2004. Senate strategists are daring to predict a possible six- or even seven-seat pickup, which would strengthen the majority party's currently undependable 51 votes. More Republican senators would make significant changes in policy possible exponentially, and prevent legislative logjams, such as the stalling on President Bush's tax cuts. At this early date, however, it is prudent to keep in mind that everything would have to go right to bring about such a lopsided outcome.
Providing fuel for GOP optimism is the list of senators up for reelection. The Democratic Party has four more Senate seats to defend than do Republicans, and 10 of the 19 in play are reasonably possible turnovers. Particularly exciting to Republicans is the opportunity to knock off Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle with former Rep. John Thune, who lost by only 524 votes to Sen. Tim Johnson last year. As South Dakota's only House member, Mr. Thune was elected statewide three times, and a recent poll has him leading Mr. Daschle by two points. Democratic recruiters already are considering presidential candidate Bob Graham's seat vacant because Florida law prevents him from running two races at once, and he seems intent on seeking national office. Homeland Security Department undersecretary Asa Hutchinson, a former House member, is said to be eager to take on Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas, which should worry her.
Geography can play an important role in horse races. As National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman Dan Allen told us, "Many of the competitive races fall in Bush country, where the president was strong in 2000, which bodes well for our candidates in 2004." Ten of the contested Democratic seats are in states Mr. Bush won in the close 2000 race. For example, Bush-Cheney won North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia by 13, 15 and 17 points respectively. Georgia's Zell Miller announced his retirement in January, and South Carolina's Ernest Hollings isn't raising any money and is expected to announce that he's stepping down too. Numerous polls have shown that first-term North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, whose attention is focused on running for president, would get beaten by Mr. Bush by between 15 and 20 percentage points in his own state, and would face an uphill battle defending his seat. Perhaps the most intriguing rumor is that Louisiana Sen. John Breaux is increasingly dissatisfied as a moderate in an increasingly liberal party--and might duck out of a reelection bid. Mr. Bush won the state by 13 points in 2000.
The United States appears to be on the brink of sending troops to end the brutal civil war in Liberia.
Officials in Washington met round the clock over the weekend to plan a possible armed response - its first mission to Africa since the disastrous intervention in Somalia almost a decade ago.
A statement is expected within the next few days, possibly as early as this evening.
President George W Bush has come under pressure from Britain and France to lead an emergency combat force to the Liberian capital, Monrovia, where at least 700 people were killed when rebels attacked a fortnight ago.
It is understood that the State Department and Pentagon are keen for action but have met opposition from the White House.
In the wake of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, a former San Francisco monsignor was released on his own recognizance Monday after being charged with 244 child molestation counts involving 12 alleged victims.
Monsignor Patrick O'Shea, 70, is scheduled to return to San Francisco Superior Court July 16 for a hearing on whether the charges against him should be dismissed in light of the high court's ruling last week that struck down a California law which had allowed accused child molesters to be prosecuted years after the crimes allegedly occurred.
Foreign ministers of the Group of Eight leading industrial nations met in Paris on Monday to affirm that terrorism remains a "pervasive and global threat." Just three days earlier, the State Department had announced that terrorism is at its lowest level in 33 years.
One wonders if anything would have changed had that news reached the G-8 foreign ministers. The war against terrorism, like the war against Iraq, functions in all but total indifference to facts.
