Film Review: The Stoning of Soraya M.

By: David Forsmark
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Monday, July 06, 2009

The Stoning of Soraya M.
Directed by by Cyrus Nowrasteh
Starring Mozhan Marno and Shohreh Aghdashloo

No matter how much you may have researched, discussed, or even protested the ways in which Sharia Law oppresses women forced to live under its dictates-- and even if you have read every word written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Nonie Darwish— the masterful new film, The Stoning of Soraya M., is invaluable viewing.

Like The Passion of the Christ, (which a number of the Stoning film makers were also involved with) The Stoning of Soraya M. comes harrowingly close to adding experience to something which can be too often relegated to the intellectual.

In his Cairo speech, President Barack Obama proved he needs to take the time to watch this film. While he might admire empathy as a quality for Supreme Court justices, he expressed it in all the wrong places while discussing the role of women in the Muslim world.

Rather than point out that the majority of American military conflicts in the past two decades have protected Muslims from invasion and even genocide-- and brought expanded rights to tens of millions of Muslim women-- Obama bafflingly grabbed this obscure ACLU talking point to illustrate our goodwill:

"The U.S. government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab, and to punish those who would deny it. I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal,…’’

To pretend the wearing of the hijab is largely a choice for women that must be defended against Western cultural imperialism goes far beyond the usual crock of diplo-speak. The hijab is merely the outward manifestation of the seamless garment, if you will, of Sharia Law’s enslavement of women, which ultimately results in brutal acts such as the title atrocity of The Stoning of Soraya M.

Obama did have one criticism for the Sharia system, one which (coincidentally, of course) happens to cut close to home for one of his most loyal union constituencies-- “but I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality. And it is no coincidence that countries where women are well-educated are far more likely to be prosperous."

A major problem, to be sure. But what about the right of a woman to marry—or not—whom she pleases, to speak and associate with whom she pleases, to make a living, and yes, to dress as she pleases, including not to wear a hijab? How about the right of a woman not to be beaten for neglecting to cater to every whim of a man—and sometimes even when she does?

And ultimately, as this movie so memorably illustrates, to be allowed to at least defend herself in court when her own life is at stake; and not to be killed when she becomes inconvenient to her family or husband?

While many will understandably focus on the climactic act of brutality in The Stoning of Soraya M., the film’s plot, as it unfolds, subtly provides a detailed look at Sharia’s systematic subjugation of women in every aspect of life-- from her place in the home to her place in the public square.

With all the vital issues raised by the film, it seems almost crass to discuss its artistic or commercial merits, as one would Star Trek, or Up. But it is nonetheless important. As the deserved tanking of films like Lions for Lambs and Redacted proves, Americans don’t buy tickets for crude propaganda; and as important as murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh’s Submission may have been, (mainly by bringing world attention to Ayaan Hirsi Ali) the film itself is basically unwatchable.

It might seem shallow to rate Stoning as a piece of “entertainment,” but it must be said that this is a compelling and gripping piece of storytelling that compares favorably to William Wellman’s 1943 anti-lynching classic, The Ox-Bow Incident. Audiences seem to agree. The Stoning of Soraya M. took the Audience Prize at the recent Los Angeles film festival—and not because of any media hype that made it the Thing To Do.

Stoning is based on the 1994 book by French-Iranian journalist Freidoune Sahebjam, who accidentally uncovered the story while stranded by car trouble in a remote Iranian village in the mid-1980s.

Sahebjam, (played by James Caveziel) is approached by Zahra an older, well-off widow who seems to have some stature in the town that protects her from harm. Zahra is powerfully played by Shohreh Aghdashloo, who was an Academy Award nominee for Best Supporting Actress in House of Sand and Fog, and memorably played a conflicted jihadist mother in Season 4 of 24.

Zahra is determined to tell the world the story of her niece, Soraya, who was falsely accused of adultery by her corrupt husband, Ali, the town jailer who was trading mercy to a condemned prisoner in exchange for taking the man’s 14 year old daughter as his next wife. While Sharia Law allows a man four wives, Ali cannot afford two, and Soraya refuses to give him a divorce as he plans to leaver her and their daughters destitute, taking only their boys with him.

Ali manipulates the corrupt town Mullah, the weak-willed mayor, and intimidates a crucial “witness,” into supporting his plot to legally murder his wife with the consent and participation of the town—and even Soraya’s family.

As encouraging as it may be to see young Iranians marching in the street, they have a lot more to overcome than just the rulers at the top of their culture. The Stoning of Soraya M. reveals the insidious nature of Sharia Law by showing the way everyone is forced or drawn to participate in Soraya’s murder, from officials to her own sons. It takes a village to stone Shorayah.

And that is not the only gutsy decision made by director Cyrus Nowrasteh and his screenwriter wife, Betty Giffen Nowrasteh. Showing the stoning in detail has caused some to cringe; but it is important to show that this is not a quick death, and to realize the savagery of the group mentality necessary to carry this slow torture to its conclusion. Allowing us to look away with a fade to black would not convey the true brutality of what Sharia requires.

The Nowrastehs also had a tough artistic choice to make. A straightforward chronological telling of the story with its inevitable conclusion might have made the film too much to bear. By employing the devise of framing the tale of Shorayah with the efforts of Zahra to get the truth out, they opened themselves to the charge of trivializing the story by giving it a thriller element; but because of this element, the audience is given some glimmer of hope to hang onto.

The device works beautifully. While the film certainly has an agenda, it is a compelling story, not merely a sermon.

I should also say a word about the courage of actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, who has certainly not flinched from taking politically charged—and politically incorrect—roles. She gives another magnificent performance here, giving the film its moral center and keeping it from being just a grim story of victimhood.

Cyrus Nowrasteh, who also was the screenwriter for The Path to 9/11, and The Day Reagan Was Shot, is quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with in Hollywood. But how big a force depends on the support of everyone who has ever complained about the lack of moral vision in Hollywood.

Don’t be intimidated by the somber subject matter. Get out and see The Stoning of Soraya M. Too many people have risked too much to get the truth out, if we ignore it, their efforts are in vain.

The Gun I Didn't Have

by Robert M. Engstrom
http://www.humanevents.com/
07/03/2009


I was walking home a few weeks ago when two young men, one with a knife in his hand, blocked the sidewalk and demanded my wallet and camera. I’m accustomed to having a means of defense other than my fist and an umbrella at hand. I’ve been in Washington, D.C. for three months and had almost gotten used to not having a weapon handy. At home in Arizona, I regularly, and legally, carry a concealed pistol and reluctantly left my guns at home and trusted on instincts and awareness to stay out of trouble.

The hoodlum who tried to rob me was unprepared for resistance and expected compliance to his demands because thugs know that the District of Columbia’s firearm laws and security measures punish law-abiding people who might otherwise carry a defensive weapon. My umbrella didn’t survive the confrontation, but I left the scene with my wallet, camera and the punk’s knife, a cheap piece of junk that is now in a storm sewer.

Foolhardiness on my part and a bit of good luck protected me, but there have been a few nightmares of emergency rooms, lacerated livers, and worse since that night. Training, practice and preparation for carrying a concealed firearm helped me recognize the potential threat before the knife appeared, but having my .45 along that night would have eliminated the danger of the physical contact that ensued.

There are many opinions as to which firearm and accessories is the best choice to carry as there are varieties of pistols and holsters on the market. The choice between a revolver or a semiautomatic pistol depends on the activities I expect to engage in, where I am going, and the weather. It’s difficult to conceal a large semiautomatic and extra ammunition during T-shirt and shorts weather. I do not intend to endorse any manufacturer’s products over another. Each person must make those decisions for themselves based on their requirements. I made my decision to carry a gun after seeking advice, handling and shooting a variety of firearms and testing the accessories available. This is what works best for me.

In urban settings I most often carry a Kimber .45-caliber semiautomatic based on Colt’s Combat Commander version of the 1911 model. The pistol fits my hand and has twice the capacity of the Colt’s seven-round clip. Those, and a good price on a used gun, are the reasons I chose the Kimber to replace a Combat Commander I carried for many years. It is a tried and proven caliber the majority of firearms experts and 100 percent of knife-wielding street punks agree is an effective defense weapon. Because of the size and weight of the gun and two additional magazines, I prefer a shoulder holster. A shoulder rig is, for me, easiest to conceal, comfortable, accessible and protects the pistol from wear and tear and snagging in seatbelts or clothes. I chose a Bianchi shoulder holster because of the way it places the gun in a secure position. I carry the gun loaded, cocked and locked, and after a fair amount of practice, I can release the snap on the holster’s strap, draw the weapon and disengage the safety lock with one hand just as quickly as I can from a side holster. When seconds count, the police are minutes away and there is no time to be fumbling with an ill-fitting holster regardless of whether it’s on my hip or under my arm.

My .380 Walther semiauto fits easily into my back pocket in a wallet holster with a spare magazine. It’s a lighter caliber gun that holds only seven rounds, but is accurate and effective at close range. I carry this double-action gun with a full clip, a round chambered and the de-cocker safety on. Access is slower than a belt or shoulder holster, but the gun is out of sight and on my person. Not a gun for engaging in a prolonged firefight with targets outside of 20 feet away, but a reasonable alternative to being unarmed. Besides, if I’ve got more than twenty feet of space between me and trouble, I’ll be exercising my fundamental right to run away.

Both of my semiautomatic pistols are factory stock guns except for the sights. As a concession to aging eyes, I have tritium dot sights installed. They are highly visible in low light and glow in the dark. Laser-dot sights and frame-mounted flashlights are great innovations and if I were actively hunting troublemakers, I’d consider them, but they do have drawbacks. They change a gun’s contours and balance, and how it fits into and comes out of a holster. Gadgets require batteries, extra complications and expenses I don’t need. Worse, lasers and flashlights work both ways. Shine a light source around and the target can see where you are. If I can’t retreat and a gunfight in the dark is unavoidable, I would prefer that the first indication of my location be announced by the muzzle flash of a well-placed shot.

In rural environments, I carry a double-action revolver. Either a.357 snub nose that holds seven rounds, or a Taurus five-shot pistol that chambers either .410 shot shells or.45 long Colt ammunition. Despite the power of these small cannons, they fit my hand and are comfortable to shoot. Ammunition for both guns is readily available, accurate at close range, and will discourage an assailant, human or otherwise. Revolvers are reliable, even after days of being carried around in adverse conditions that a semiauto might not tolerate. Semiautos require regular cleaning and attention, but revolvers loaded with good ammunition fire every time the trigger is squeezed.

I carry a revolver in an external belt holster set up for a cross-body draw. A belt holster is generally recognized as the fastest draw and when out in the boondocks there is less need for the gun to be concealed. I expect any holster to securely contain the pistol, but readily release it for a one-handed draw.

Fanny packs and shoulder bags are convenient for concealing a weapon, but the physical control of a loaded gun is lost if I am separated from the bag for any reason. That is unacceptable unless secure lockers are available. In public places, you might get to chat with some very nice law enforcement people for inquiring about lockers. Be polite when that happens, because those folks, who are generally decent sorts doing a necessary and hazardous job, get shot at more often than the rest of us average people and they are correctly concerned about people carrying guns.

Shooters are aware of the current shortage of ammunition that appears to be the result of the fear of the change that began after November’s elections. Ammo for the .45, .357, .380, and .410 buckshot rounds have, so far, been readily available. I load the pistols I carry with jacketed, hollow point ammunition and I practice with the same ammunition. That way, I know what to expect in terms of accuracy, noise and recoil should I ever have to discharge the gun in self defense.

The most street-wise punk knows it is stupid to bring a knife to a gunfight. I followed the laws, stayed legal, and left my guns at home when I came here. The gun regulations of our nation’s capitol put me face to face with a criminal who ignores the laws. Law enforcement was not there to protect me and the rules I followed stole my right to protect myself. Where’s the justice in that?


- Robert M. Engstrom graduated Magna Cum Laude with honors from the University of Arizona School of Journalism. He was an award-winning reporter, photographer and editor with The Tombstone Epitaph and part owner, political reporter and photography editor for The Casas Adobes Courier in Tucson. He is an intern at HUMAN EVENTS through the National Journalism Center.

Cap and Trade Dementia

By Peter Ferrara on 7.1.09 @ 6:09AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/

Barack Obama called for House passage of the cap and trade tax bill last Friday by calling it a jobs bill. The bill is designed to raise the price of energy in the U.S. so much that it will reduce the use of fossil fuels by 17% by 2020 and by 83% by 2050. Sentencing the U.S. economy to high cost energy is not a particularly good strategy for creating jobs. The Charles River Associates, a Harvard based economics consulting firm, estimates a net loss of jobs from the bill of about 2.5 million each year.

This is surely a gross underestimate of the net job losses from a bill designed to reduce the use of fossil fuels to the level in 1907. All those soccer moms better get used to riding their horses to the grocery store and back. And their husbands better get used to working the farms again, by hand, as high cost energy will chase remaining American manufacturing out of the country to India and China, which do not suffer from Al Gore's delusions about supposed global warming.

Yet Barack Obama calls it a jobs bill. This reflects a by now well-established pattern of deceptive, misdirection rhetoric, raising broadly appealing ideals in promotion of policies that would do just the opposite. For example, Obama is also trying to sell us a new health care entitlement, larger than any of our already grossly overgrown entitlements we can't finance, with the argument that it will actually reduce costs, even while CBO estimates that it will increase Federal spending by $1.6 trillion (woefully underestimated).

Earlier this year, Obama released his budget with great fanfare about how it would supposedly reduce the federal deficit in half in five years. Hidden in the fine print was the awful truth that his budget, now passed by the overwhelmingly Democrat Congress, explodes this year's deficit to a record busting $1.8 trillion, four times bigger than Bush's largest deficit, and seven times bigger than Reagan's largest, which caused so much caterwauling among liberals. The deficit in the last budget passed by a Republican controlled Congress was $162 billion, less than 10% as much.

Last year, Obama campaigned on proposals to raise the top two income tax rates by over 10%, the capital gains tax rate by 33%, and the tax rate on dividends by 33%, while restoring a permanent death tax rate of 45%, and raising taxes on corporations that already pay virtually the highest tax rates in the industrialized world, all the while focusing on his promise to cut taxes for 95% of Americans. That tax cut turned out to be a puny $400 per worker tax credit that is phased out after next year, when his tax increases will become effective to sink the still sputtering economy.

During the campaign, Obama also pledged that he would never raise taxes in any form on Americans making less than $250,000 per year. But his cap and trade tax is estimated to cost American families almost $2,000 a year when it becomes effective, growing to almost $7,000 a year for a family of four by 2035. That will be paid through higher prices for electricity, oil, gasoline, natural gas, home heating oil, coal, food, and every product that is produced or transported using energy. Remember: when the first President Bush violated his oft-repeated campaign pledge not to raise taxes, voters booted him out in the next election.

Democrats have suggested that the legislation would cost American families only $175 a year, or as little as $80. But fossil fuel use is not going to be reduced by 17%, growing to 83%, through added costs of $80 to $175 per year.

The rationale for this bill is to counter global warming by sharply reducing greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide. But even if the bill works exactly as envisioned, the most radical environmentalists admit that it will only slow temperature increases by 2050 by a ridiculous 9/100th of one degree Fahrenheit! Even after all the costs of reducing the use of fossil fuels by 83%, that is all that would result.

That is because all humans across the planet produce less than 5% of all carbon dioxide emissions. So slashing U.S. emissions won't have much effect in any event. Moreover, don't expect other nations to follow us in this foolhardy policy. Even the Europeans never really enforced their own cap and trade regulations, so their carbon dioxide emissions have actually increased more than ours over the last 10 years. Now nations from France to Poland, Japan, the Czech Republic, Australia, New Zealand and others are turning away from cap and trade policies, and souring on the whole notion of global warming. China, now the world's number one carbon dioxide producer, India, Russia, Africa, and South America have shown no interest in the suicidal economics of global warming fantasy. But the left-wing extremists now running America are too close-minded and religiously dogmatic to even consider an alternative course.

As the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) recently asked:

Does it really make sense to eliminate between 2.3 million and 2.7 million jobs each year, and force families, farmers, and drivers to pay higher power bills, higher heating and cooling bills, higher food and goods prices, and higher gasoline and diesel prices, all for the promise of slowing temperature increases by merely hundredths of a single degree Fahrenheit by 2050?

The Global Warming Hoax

Worst of all, the science behind global warming is now collapsing. The most reliable satellite weather data shows that global atmospheric temperatures have declined over the last 11 years, with the trend downward accelerating. Even global warming advocates are now conceding that this trend may continue for decades.

Moreover, the latest and best science shows that the temperature patterns of the 20th century correlate with natural causes, not global warming theory. Temperatures did not increase steadily throughout the last century, even though carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases did. Temperatures in the U.S., which has the most thorough and consistent temperature record and historically the most CO2 emissions, were stable until 1920, increased some in the 1920s, and then soared to produce the hottest decade of the century during the 1930s (before the later, more rapid increases in greenhouse gas emissions). The climate then cooled during most of the period from 1940 until about 1977. Temperatures climbed upward from 1977 until 1998, except for a sharp downturn from about 1988 until about 1995. Temperatures are down again over the past decade.

This record is more consistent with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a long-term pattern of ocean currents that turns from cold to warm back to cold every 20 to 30 years, and with variations in solar activity, particularly sunspots. Indeed, our current accelerating temperature decline correlates with an extended trend of slowing sunspot activity, which may portend another Little Ice Age, as happened from the early 1400s to the late 1800s. Indeed, a full-blown ice age is now overdue based on historical patterns.

Democrat political rhetoric labels carbon dioxide as pollution, arguing that the bill sharply reduces such pollution, and targets "polluters." But carbon dioxide is a natural substance essential to all life on the planet, not pollution. All plants must take in carbon dioxide to survive, and emit oxygen. Humans and all other animal life need that oxygen to survive, and breathe out carbon dioxide. Moreover, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were several times higher in the past than today, for hundreds of millions of years, with only beneficial effects in the flowering of plant and animal life recorded.

Despite what you have heard from the Democrat party controlled media, the polar ice caps are not melting. The melting of glaciers still going on due to the end of the last ice age, and, therefore, not due to global warming, has caused sea levels to rise by roughly 400 feet over the last 18,000 years! That rise has been decelerating over the past 5,000 years, settling into a stable rate of increase over the last century of about 1.8 mm per year, regardless of global temperature fluctuations. That would result in a sea level rise over the next 100 years of less than 9 inches.

Finally, the latest science shows that the theory of significant man-made global warming has now been definitively proved false. The UN's own climate models, the top source of global warming hysteria, project that if man's emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were causing global warming, there would be a particular pattern of temperature distribution in the atmosphere, which scientists call "the fingerprint."
Temperatures in the troposphere portion of the atmosphere above the tropics would increase with altitude, producing a "hotspot" near the top of the troposphere, about 6 miles above the earth's surface. Above that, in the stratosphere, there would be cooling.

All scientists, both the alarmist warm-mongers and the pacifist cooler heads, agree that this temperature pattern would result if man were causing global warming, reflecting the pattern of CO2 and other greenhouse gases that would prevail in the atmosphere. Warming due to solar variations or other natural causes would not leave such a fingerprint pattern. Higher quality temperature data from weather balloons and satellites now enable us to settle the man-made global warming debate definitively.

The observed result is just the opposite of the modeled global warming fingerprint pattern. The data from weather balloons show no increasing warming with altitude, but rather a slight cooling, with no hotspot. The satellite data confirms this result: no increasing temperature with altitude, no hotspot, no fingerprint.

These arguments are now increasingly accepted by scientists all over the world. Those who argue there is a scientific consensus to the contrary are posturing fakers. As Kimberley Strassel wrote in the Wall Street Journal last Monday:

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming….Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion."

Even a suppressed study from inside the EPA concludes, "Given the downward trend in temperatures since 1998 (which some think will continue until at least 2030), there is no particular reason to rush into decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data." Investors Business Daily reports in a June 26 editorial regarding that study:

What the report says is that the EPA, by adopting the United Nations 2007 "Fourth Assessment" report, is relying on outdated research by its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The research, it says, is "at best three years out of date in a rapidly changing field" and ignores the latest scientific findings….

We have noted frequently the significance of solar activity on earth's climate and history. This EPA draft report not only confirms our reporting but the brazen incompetence of those "experts" that have been prophesying planetary apocalypse.

"A new 2009 paper by Scafetta and West," the report says, "suggests that the IPCC used faulty data in dismissing the direct effect of solar variability on global temperatures. Their report suggests that solar variability could account for up to 68% of the increase in the Earth's global temperatures."

One of the best sources for the true science of global warming is the operation of Dr. Fred Singer at SEPP. Singer is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science at the University of Virginia, and the founder and first Director of the National Weather Satellite Service. Another top source is the Heartland Institute. There is no collection of scientists in the world smarter and better than those who speak at and attend their regular international conferences on climate change. Heartland has just published the definitive rebuttal to the theory of significant man-made global warming, the 880-page Climate Change Reconsidered.

Probably the most articulate and informed single advocate countering global warming hysteria is Marc Morano. The Competitive Enterprise Institute also does top drawer work on the fallacies of global warming.

Global warming has nothing to do with science. It is about cover for massive increases in government power and taxes at all levels, including UN dreams of becoming a world government with global taxing powers. This is the only reason it is so heartily embraced by liberal/left interests. These people don't know anything about science.

The American People Get It

Recent polls show the truth about global warming has broken through to the American people. A recent Zogby poll found Americans oppose cap and trade 57% to 30%. The latest Rasmussen poll finds that 42% think the House passed cap and trade bill will hurt the economy, with only 19% agreeing with President Obama that it will help the economy. Another Rasmussen poll found that only 34% now believe humans cause global warming, the lowest polling yet and a reversal from a year ago. Gallup says a record high 41% of Americans now say global warming has been exaggerated, and "Gore has failed -- the public is just not that concerned" about global warming. Other surveys find Americans ranking global warming dead last among issues of concern.

In fact, this is the perfect issue to rally around with your own grassroots organizing. Anyone can get up to speed by checking the sources above. Get your friends and neighbors together and lead a discussion on the issue, aimed at taking political action. The 1,300-page bill also includes some shocking hidden provisions. The bill mandates that all houses must pass an energy conservation inspection by a government auditor before they can be sold. It also mandates use of new light bulbs containing poison mercury gas. It includes $300 billion in additional foreign aid spending from 2012 to 2019 for climate change adaptation, clean technology, and forest protection in countries such as Brazil. Maybe you can organize your neighborhood to ask your congressional representatives, "Why are you voting for a bill that will have hugely negative effects on the economy, jobs, and our standard of living, but will not have a measurable impact on the climate?"

Finally, some Democrats insist that the cap and trade bill does not really involve a tax at all. The best answer to them was given by Newt Gingrich at this year's CPAC,

Now I listened carefully to the President's speech the other night… the final educational lesson of the evening came when the President having promised he would not raise taxes on anyone below $250,000 mentioned…that he is for [the cap and trade tax]…. I said to myself, let me get this straight, we are not going to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 per year, unless you use electricity. And we are not going to raise taxes on anyone under $250,000 per year, unless you buy gasoline, …[or] unless you buy heating oil, …[or] unless you use natural gas…. And I thought to myself how dumb do they think we are that they can pretend that an energy tax is not an energy tax and … that every retired American who uses electricity is not going to pay it, and every person in New Hampshire who uses heating oil is not going to pay it, and every person who drives a car isn't going to pay it. I just want to report to Attorney General Holder and President Obama that this is a nation of people courageous enough…to insist that we not be governed by people who won't tell us the truth.

When considering potential future candidates for President, Republicans and conservatives should think, who do we want on the stage debating Obama in 2012?

- Peter Ferrara is director of budget and entitlement policy at the Institute for Policy Innovation and General Counsel of the American Civil Rights Union. He formerly served in President Reagan's White House Office of Policy Development, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the first President Bush. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

Film Reviews: Public Enemies

Seduction by Machine Gun

By MANOHLA DARGIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
Published: July 1, 2009

This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.


Peter Mountain/Universal Pictures

Johnny Depp plays the outlaw John Dillinger in “Public Enemies.”

Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” is a grave and beautiful work of art. Shot in high-definition digital by a filmmaker who’s helping change the way movies look, it revisits with meticulous detail and convulsions of violence a short, frantic period in the life and bank-robbing times of John Dillinger, an Indiana farm boy turned Depression outlaw, played by a low-voltage Johnny Depp. Much of what makes the movie pleasurable is the vigor with which it restages our familiar romance with period criminals, a perennial affair. But what also makes it more than the sum of its spectacular shootouts is the ambivalence about this romance that seeps into the filmmaking, steadily darkening the skies and draining the story of easy thrills.

The thrills are certainly there in the sensationally choreographed prison break that opens the movie under a bright blue Midwestern sky that stretches across the wide screen like a cathedral ceiling. Dappled by fluffy white clouds, it is the kind of sky that tends to show up as a backdrop in paintings of the Madonna and Child, but here offers a sharp contrast to the long-distance image of Dillinger and his friend Red (Jason Clarke), quickly striding toward an enormous, looming prison. Mr. Mann goes in closer once the men enter the prison, where they help disarm the guards, and he pulls back again for the long view as Dillinger fires on the prison with a machine gun while the escapees make a run for the getaway car.

By force of Hollywood habit, you might expect that this vision of the suddenly lone gunman would serve as a prelude to another exciting joy ride about living fast and dying young. Instead it’s followed by a striking short scene of a wounded escapee being dragged alongside the speeding car while Dillinger and another man struggle to pull him up. In the most startling shot, Mr. Mann places the camera right next to the fallen man, pointing it up at Dillinger’s dark, ominous figure as he almost blots out that blue sky. Dillinger holds on until the man’s grip wilts, the dead body slipping away in one direction as the car races off in the other. Laying the blame elsewhere, he next tosses another man out of the moving car.

This, then, is Mr. Mann’s Dillinger: brave enough to stand his ground, loyal, ruthless. There’s a hint of the demonic in this portrait, particularly when the outlaw is gliding through a bank, his long, dark coat fanning around him and a tommy gun in one hand. This is the stuff of legends, of shoot-’em-ups and matinee gangsters with jaunty smiles. Mr. Mann loves this apparition of calculated bravura and initially he frames the first few heists as seamlessly choreographed set pieces. During the first robbery he shows Dillinger and two accomplices from high overhead, the camera peering straight down as the men fan across a black-and-white bank floor like MGM dancers. When Dillinger leaps across a railing, he soars.

It’s a seductive moment — the bad man seems to be defying gravity, not just the law — and much like the other action scenes, it gives the movie a jolt. It also, perhaps in homage, mirrors a similar shot of the escaping serial killer in David Fincher’s “Seven.” Like Mr. Fincher, Mr. Mann makes big-budget art movies that because of their complex pleasures and ambiguities, don’t always hit the box office sweet spot (“Seven” and “Collateral,” Mr. Mann’s movie with Tom Cruise, being exceptions). Despite Mr. Mann’s mainstream bona fides, notably with the 1980s hit TV show “Miami Vice,” and preference for muscular cinematic genres, there’s something resolutely noncommercial about his movies. Among other things, they’re deeply serious (at times to the edge of parody), which is why they rarely pop.

And “Public Enemies” is nothing if not serious, a vividly realistic if fictionalized portrait of a country deep in depression and jumping with bad men. The story centers on two dramatic antagonists, Dillinger and Melvin Purvis (a remote Christian Bale), the F.B.I. agent who doggedly, if often ineptly, led the hunt for America’s most wanted. At first the bureau’s young chief, J. Edgar Hoover (a terrific Billy Crudup, his neck thickened and delivery clipped), ignored Dillinger, deeming him a state problem. Hoover would have been spared embarrassment if the outlaw had remained out of federal jurisdiction because, when the chase was on, it was with agents who didn’t know how to conduct a stakeout or properly fire their guns.

Like Dillinger, Hoover cultivated a public profile that looked good on paper and later up on the screen. They had a lot of competition. Bonnie and Clyde were running wild, as were Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and other hoods with marquee-ready stories, some of whom make appearances here.
Banks made for easy targets, logistically and otherwise, and, as the writer Bryan Burrough points out in a book about America’s inaugural war on crime, these outlaws took advantage of the public’s hatred of those recently failed institutions. Dillinger raided bank vaults and staged prison breaks to increasing approval. He shot one man to death, though didn’t always own up to the killing. It was bad for his image.

He became another kind of America’s most wanted: a star. “Get me the money, Honey,” he instructed one female teller with his crooked smile. The press raised his profile with screaming headlines, and the comic Will Rogers joked about the ineptitude of the authorities. (They were going to shoot Dillinger, Rogers joked, but “another bunch of folks came out ahead; so they shot them instead.”) Mr. Mann, working with incidents drawn from Mr. Burrough’s “Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the F.B.I., 1933-34,” underscores the celebrity angle. But that’s only part of the big picture sketched out in his ambitious screenplay, written with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, which also makes room for a love story amid the blazing guns and tabloid glory.

The relationship between Dillinger and a hatcheck girl named Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard, holding her own in this man’s world) eats up considerable time, sometimes winningly, though both actors are better when they’re apart. When not in pirate drag, Mr. Depp can be a recessive, even inscrutable screen presence, which is crucial to his strengths and performative limits. He’s a cool cat, to be sure: veiled and often most memorable when he’s staring into space while the camera soaks in his subdued but potent physical charms. He might have made a great silent star, as earlier roles suggest. Part of his initial appeal was that he seemed almost Garboesque in a movie world that increasingly makes no room for sacred idols.

Mr. Depp looks good as Dillinger — few contemporary actors can wear a fedora as persuasively — but the performance sneaks up on you, inching into your system scene by scene. The same holds true of “Public Enemies,” which looks and plays like no other American gangster film I can think of and very much like a Michael Mann movie, with its emphasis on men at work, its darkly moody passages, eruptions of violence and pictorial beauty.
Mr. Mann’s digital manipulations, in particular, which encompass almost pure abstraction and interludes of hyper-realism, is worthy of longer exegesis, one that explores how this still-unfamiliar format is changing the movies: it allows, among other things, filmmakers to capture the eerie brightness of nighttime as never before.

“Public Enemies” doesn’t look like the usual gangster picture, not only because it’s been shot in digital, but also because Mr. Mann is searching for a new kind of gangster story to fit the times, one that makes room for greater ambivalence, and lawmen and outlaws who are closer to one another in temperament and deed. If he doesn’t fully succeed, it’s because he knows that the gangster’s rakish smile is at once a fiction of cinema and one of its great, irresistible lies. During the big finish, Dillinger grins wryly at a black-and-white Hollywood picture with Clark Gable as the kind of gangster who could only have been invented by the movies, a gangster who is as false as the bullets that finally stopped Dillinger were real.

“Public Enemies” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Bloody gun violence.

Public Enemies

Opens on Wednesday nationwide.

Directed by Michael Mann; written by Mr. Mann, Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, based on the book by Bryan Burrough; director of photography, Dante Spinotti; edited by Paul Rubell and Jeffrey Ford; music by Elliot Goldenthal; production designer, Nathan Crowley; produced by Mr. Mann and Kevin Misher; released by Universal Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 13 minutes.

WITH: Johnny Depp (John Dillinger), Christian Bale (Melvin Purvis), Marion Cotillard (Billie Frechette), Billy Crudup (J. Edgar Hoover), Stephen Dorff (Homer Van Meter), Jason Clarke (Red Hamilton) and Stephen Lang (Charles Winstead).


Public Enemies

John Dillinger ignored the future and focused on his work ethic

By Roger Ebert

Release Date: July 1, 2009
Ebert Rating: ***½
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage
Jun 29, 2009

"I rob banks," John Dillinger would sometimes say by way of introduction. It was the simple truth. That was what he did. For the 13 months between the day he escaped from prison and the night he lay dying in an alley, he robbed banks. It was his lifetime. Michael Mann's "Public Enemies" accepts that stark fact and refuses any temptation to soften it. Dillinger was not a nice man.

Here is a film that shrugs off the way we depend on myth to sentimentalize our outlaws. There is no interest here about John Dillinger's childhood, his psychology, his sexuality, his famous charm, his Robin Hood legend. He liked sex, but not as much as robbing banks. "He robbed the bankers but let the customers keep their own money." But whose money was in the banks? He kids around with reporters and lawmen, but that was business. He doesn't kid around with the members of his gang. He might have made a very good military leader.

Johnny Depp and Michael Mann show us that we didn't know all about Dillinger. We only thought we did. Here is an efficient, disciplined, bold, violent man, driven by compulsions the film wisely declines to explain. His gang members loved the money they were making. Dillinger loved planning the next job. He had no exit strategy or retirement plans.

Dillinger saw a woman he liked, Billie Frechette, played by Marion Cotillard, and courted her, after his fashion. That is, he took her out at night and bought her a fur coat, as he had seen done in the movies; he had no real adult experience before prison. They had sex, but the movie is not much interested. It is all about his vow to show up for her, to protect her. Against what? Against the danger of being his girl. He allows himself a tiny smile when he gives her the coat, and it is the only vulnerability he shows in the movie.

This is very disciplined film. You might not think it was possible to make a film about the most famous outlaw of the 1930s without clichés and "star chemistry" and a film class screenplay structure, but Mann does it. He is particular about the way he presents Dillinger and Billie. He sees him and her. Not them. They are never a couple. They are their needs. She needs to be protected, because she is so vulnerable. He needs someone to protect, in order to affirm his invincibility.

Dillinger hates the system, by which he means prisons, that hold people; banks, that hold money, and cops, who stand in his way. He probably hates the government too, but he doesn't think that big. It is him against them, and the bastards will not, can not, win. There's an extraordinary sequence, apparently based on fact, where Dillinger walks into the "Dillinger Bureau" of the Chicago Police Department and strolls around. Invincible. This is not ego. It is a spell he casts on himself.

The movie is well-researched, based on the book by Bryan Burrough. It even bothers to try to discover Dillinger's speaking style. Depp looks a lot like him. Mann shot on location in the Crown Point jail, scene of the famous jailbreak with the fake gun. He shot in the Little Bohemia Lodge in the same room Dillinger used, and Depp is costumed in clothes to match those the bank robber left behind. Mann redressed Lincoln Avenue on either side of the Biograph Theater, and laid streetcar tracks; I live a few blocks away, and walked over to marvel at the detail. I saw more than you will; unlike some directors, he doesn't indulge in beauty shots to show off the art direction. It's just there.

This Johnny Depp performance is something else. For once an actor playing a gangster does not seem to base his performance on movies he has seen. He starts cold. He plays Dillinger as a Fact. My friend Jay Robert Nash says 1930s gangsters copied their styles from the way Hollywood depicted them; screenwriters like Ben Hecht taught them how they spoke. Dillinger was a big movie fan; on the last night of his life, he went to see Clark Gable playing a man a lot like him, but he didn't learn much. No wisecracks, no lingo. Just military precision and an edge of steel.

Christian Bale plays Melvin Purvis in a similar key. He lives to fight criminals. He is a cold realist. He admires his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, but Hoover is a romantic, dreaming of an FBI of clean-cut young accountants in suits and ties who would be a credit to their mothers. After the catastrophe at Little Bohemia (the FBI let Dillinger escape but killed three civilians), Purvis said to hell with it and made J. Edgar import some lawmen from Arizona who had actually been in gunfights.

Mann is fearless with his research. If I mention the Lady in Red, Anna Sage (Branka Katic), who betrayed Dillinger outside the Biograph when the movie was over, how do you picture her? I do too. We are wrong. In real life she was wearing a white blouse and an orange skirt, and she does in the movie. John Ford once said, When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. This may be a case where he was right. Mann might have been wise to decide against the orange and white and just break down and give Anna Sage a red dress.

This is a very good film, with Depp and Bale performances of brutal clarity. I'm trying to understand why it is not quite a great film. I think it may be because it deprives me of some stubborn need for closure. His name was John Dillinger, and he robbed banks. But there had to be more to it than that, right? No, apparently not.

Behind the Times

There’s nothing cool about Obama.

By Mark Steyn
http://www.nationalreview.com/
July 04, 2009, 7:00 a.m.

President Obama was supposed to be “cool.” But he isn’t. He’s square. Not just mildly so, but embarrassingly square. He’s squaresville squared. It’s like you’re having a party with your friends and he’s the cringe-making middle-aged parent who wants to show he digs where the young people are at by grooving around in the middle of the dance floor all night long.

How do I know? I’ve been there and I’ve been square. By “there,” I mean I’ve been in places that have tried all the cool Obama dance moves and eventually wised up to what utter clunkers they are.

A week ago, the House of Representatives passed some gargantuan “cap-and-trade” bill designed to “save” “the environment.” Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, accused those Neanderthals who voted against the bill of committing “treason against the planet.” By that standard, most of the planet is guilty of treason against the planet. I don’t mean just in the sense that China, already the world’s Number One CO2 emitter, and India and other rising economic powers have absolutely no intention of doing what the Democrats have done, no way, no how — because they don’t see why they should stay poor just because New York Times columnists think it’s good for them.

No, I mean that most of the developed world has already gone down the paved road of good intentions and is now frantically trying to pedal up out of it. New Zealand was one of the few western nations to sign on to Kyoto and then attempt to abide by it — until they realized they could only do so by destroying their economy. They introduced a Dem-style cap-and-trade regime — and last year they suspended it. In Australia, the Labor government postponed implementation of its emissions-reduction program until 2011, and the Aussie Senate may scuttle it entirely. The Obama administration has gotten to the climate-change hop just as the glitterball’s stopped whirling and the band’s packing up its instruments.

The Congressional cap-and-trade shtick would be tired even if it weren’t the familiar boondoggle of tax hikes, big-government micro-regulation, and pork-a-palooza pay-offs to preferred clients of the Democratic party. Granted that carbon credits were already a dubious racket equivalent to the sale of “indulgences” in medieval Europe, the decision by Congressional power-brokers to give away credits to well-connected Democratic party interests surely represents the environmental movement’s formal Jumping of the Endangered Great White Shark.

Back at the New York Times, Thomas Friedman agreed the bill “stinks” and says “it’s a mess” and he “detests” it, but nevertheless says we need to pass it because his “gut” tells him to. Maybe his gut’s really telling him the New York Times canteen’s daily specials have been adversely affected by the company’s collapsing share price. Who knows? At any rate, for reasons not entirely obvious from his prose style, the eminent columnist believes himself to have a special influence on the youth of today and so directed the grand finale of his gut’s analysis to them especially: “Attention all young Americans,” he proclaimed. “You want to make a difference? Then get out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. Get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon.”

Perhaps it’ll work. Getting into Thomas Friedman’s face, I see the ruddy bloom of late middle-age has not yet faded from it, so maybe, as his command of the lingo shows, he’s hep to the scene. Maybe the kids’ll abandon their Tweet cred for street cred. Maybe they’ll get outta MySpace and into Sen. Robert C. Byrd’s parking space.

I don’t know how Mr. Friedman defines “young” but let’s be generous: If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. There has been no global warming this century. None. Admittedly the 21st century is only one century out of the many centuries of planetary existence, but it happens to be the one you’re stuck living in. Alan Carlin, in a report for the Environmental Protection Racket — whoops, Environmental Protection Agency — that they attempted to suppress, says:

Fossil fuel and cement emissions increased by 3.3 percent per year during 2000-2006, compared to 1.3 percent per year in the 1990s. Similarly, atmospheric C02 concentrations increased by 1.93 parts per million per year during 2000-2006, compared to 1.58 ppm in the 1990s. And yet, despite accelerating emission rates and concentrations, there’s been no net warming in the 21st century, and more accurately, a decline.


The Obama administration is getting into the global-warming beads and kaftan just as everyone else is beginning to toss ‘em into the recycling bin. Same with government automobiles: Been there, drove that — from Eastern Europe to Northern Ireland.

There’s something weirdly parochial about Obama, the supposed “citizen of the world.” A recent piece of mine about “the Europeanization of America” prompted Randall Hoven of The American Thinker to respond that this was unfair . . . to Europeans. He has a point. While the U.S. is going full throttle for Scandinavia-a-go-go, the Continentals have begun to discern to the limits of Europeanization. In 2007, government spending in Europe averaged 46.2 percent of GDP; in America it was 37.4 percent, of which 20 percent was federal. A mere two years later, federal spending is up to 28.5 percent, so, even if state and local spending stand still, we’re at 46 percent:
the European average. But, as Randall Hoven points out, the real story is that we’re at 46 percent and climbing, the Continentals are at 46 percent and heading down. In 1993, government spending averaged 52.2 percent in Europe, and 70.9 percent in Sweden. The Swedes have reduced government spending (as a fraction of GDP) by almost a third in the last 15 years. Their corporate tax rates are lower than ours. And that’s before Obama’s raised them. Last week, the donut chain Tim Hortons, which operates on both sides of the border but is incorporated in the state of Delaware, announced that it was reorganizing itself as a Canadian corporation to take advantage of Canadian tax rates.

“To take advantage of Canadian tax rates”? What kind of cockamamie phrase is that? And who’d have thought any columnist south of the border would ever have cause to type it?

The Europeans have figured out you can be too European for your own good, and are trying to re-acquaint themselves with the real world. But not Obama. Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! Male unemployment has hit ten percent? The stimulus is a bust? It’s stimulating nothing but non-jobs like Executive Stimulus Coordinator for Community Organization Stimulus Assistance Programs? Hey, let’s spend even more, even faster, even less stimulatingly!

President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and their chums are spending at a rate that threatens American stability. And, except for the scale and the dollar figure, it’s all been tried before, and it’s all failed before. There’s nothing cool about Obama. He’s a non-stop square dance, swinging us around till we’re dozy and he’s got all the dough. Happy Independence Day.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone.

© 2009 Mark Steyn

SO MUCH FOR WISE LATINAS

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
July 1, 2009

With the Supreme Court's decision in Ricci v. DeStefano this week, we can now report that Sonia Sotomayor is even crazier than Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

To recap the famous Ricci case, in 2003, the city of New Haven threw out the results of a firefighters' test -- which had been expressly designed to be race-neutral -- because only whites and Hispanics scored high enough to receive immediate promotions, whereas blacks who took the test did well enough only to be eligible for promotions down the line.

In as much as the high-scoring white and Hispanic firemen were denied promotions solely because of their race, they sued the city for race discrimination.

Obama's Justice-designate Sotomayor threw out their lawsuit in a sneaky, unsigned opinion -- the judicial equivalent of "talk to the hand." She upheld the city's race discrimination against white and Hispanic firemen on the grounds that the test had a "disparate impact" on blacks, meaning that it failed to promote some magical percentage of blacks.

This strict quota regime was dressed up by the city -- and by Sotomayor's opinion -- as a reasonable reaction to the threat of lawsuits by blacks who were not promoted.

That's a complicated way of saying: Racial quotas are peachy.

According to Sotomayor, any test that gets the numbers wrong -- whatever "wrong" means in any given context of professions, populations, applicants, workers, etc. -- is grounds for a lawsuit, which in turn, is grounds for an employer to engage in race discrimination against disfavored racial groups, such as white men.

Consequently, the only legal avenue available to employers under Sotomayor's ruling is always to impose strict racial quotas in making hiring and promotion decisions.

Say, if the threat of a lawsuit permits the government to ignore the Constitution, can pro-lifers get New Haven to shut down all abortion clinics by threatening to sue them? There's no question but that abortion clinics have a "disparate impact" on black babies.

This week, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 for the white and Hispanic firefighters, overturning Sotomayor's endorsement of racial quotas.

But all nine justices rejected Sotomayor's holding that different test results alone give the government a green light to engage in race discrimination. Even Justice Ginsburg's opinion for the dissent clearly stated that "an employer could not cast aside a selection method based on a statistical disparity alone."

Indeed, the dissenters argued that the case should be returned to the lower courts to look for some hidden racial bias in the test. For Sotomayor, the results alone proved racial bias.

The one advantage Sotomayor's talk-to-the-hand opinion has over Justice Ginsburg's prolix dissent is that brevity prevented Sotomayor from having to explain why quotas aren't quotas.

That was left to Ginsburg.

Liberals desperately want race quotas -- as long as quotas never come to their offices.

But they can't say that, so instead they talk in circles for 10 hours straight, until everyone else is exhausted, and then, when no one is paying attention, they announce: So we're all agreed -- we will have racial quotas.

Based on her lifetime of experience working as a firefighter, Ginsburg said: "Relying heavily on written tests to select fire officers is a questionable practice, to say the least." Liberals prefer a more objective test, such as race.
Isn't excelling on written tests how Ruth Bader Ginsburg got where she is? It's curious how people whose entire careers are based on doing well on tests find them so irrelevant to other people's jobs.

In the middle of a fire, it can either be a great idea or the worst possible idea to open a door. An excellent method for finding out if your next fire chief knows the correct answer is a written test.

Unleashing the canard of all race-obsessed liberals, Ginsburg observed that courts have found that a fire officer's job "involves complex behaviors, good interpersonal skills, the ability to make decisions under tremendous pressure, and a host of other abilities -- none of which is easily measured by a written, multiple choice test."

So does a lawyer's job. And yet attorneys with absolutely no "interpersonal skills" get cushy jobs and extravagant salaries on the basis of their commendable performance on all manner of written tests, from multiple choice LSATs and bar exams to written law school exams.

I note that Ginsburg has not shown any particular interest in rectifying the "disparate impact" of legal exams: She never hired a single black law clerk out of the dozens she employed in more than a decade as an appeals court judge. (Her hiring practices on the Supreme Court are a state secret, but I can state with supreme certainty that her clerks do not reflect the racial mix of Washington, D.C.)

But liberals think other people's jobs are a joke, so the testing must also be a joke. That is -- other than their preferred test: "Is the applicant black, female or otherwise handicapped?"

There is no test that can prove all things about an employee and so there is no test that can't be derided by the race-mongers. Which is exactly the point. Get rid of all tests -- except for lawyers who graduated at the top of their law school classes at Columbia, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Then liberals are free to impose racial quotas on other people's jobs without limit.

As crazy as this is, even Ginsburg and the other dissenters made a big point of pretending there was some flaw in this particular test. None adopted Sotomayor's position that unequal test results alone prove discrimination.

This suggests that a wise Jewess, due to the richness of her life experiences, might come to a better judgment than a Latina judge would.

Today's Tune: U2 - In God's Country

(Click on title to play video)

Desert sky, dream beneath the desert sky.
The rivers run but soon run dry.
We need new dreams tonight.
Desert rose, dreamed I saw a desert rose
Dress torn in ribbons and bows
Like a siren she calls (to me).

Sleep comes like a drug in God's country
Sad eyes, crooked crosses, in God's country

Set me alight, we'll punch a hole right through the night.
Every day the dreamers die to see what's on the other side.
She is liberty, and she comes to rescue me.
Hope, faith, her vanity
The greatest gift is gold.


Sleep comes like a drug in God's country
Sad eyes, crooked crosses, in God's country

Naked flame, she stands with a naked flame
I stand with the sons of Cain
Burned by the fire of love
Burned by the fire of love.

Obama's EPA Quashes Climate Change Science

Posted by John Hinderaker at 7:28 AM

http://www.powerlineblog.com/

June 28, 2009

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has obtained an EPA study of the "endangerment" to human well-being ostensibly caused by carbon dioxide emissions, together with a set of EPA emails indicating that the study, which concludes that carbon dioxide is not a significant cause of climate change, was suppressed by the EPA for political reasons.

You can read the comments that the CEI submitted to the EPA on EPA's proposed endangerment finding here, along with the emails. The censored report, by Alan Carlin and John Davidson, is here.

In their report, Carlin and Davidson point out that the EPA has not done its own evaluation of the global warming theory. Rather, it has relied on analyses by others, mostly the U.N.'s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report. That report, however, was a political document, not a scientific one. Knowing that current scientific research disproves the anthropogenic global warming theory, the U.N. ordered that no recent research be considered in the IPCC report. This is a scandal of which too few people are aware. As science, the U.N. report is a bad joke.

Carlin and Davidson go on to recite the scientific work that shows rather clearly that human activity is a minor factor, at most, in climate change--which has, of course, been occurring from the beginning of Earth's history to the present. Their report is a useful summary of the evidence for those who are not familiar with it.

If the Obama administration gets its way, Americans will not become aware of the scientific evidence: Obama's EPA suppressed the Carlin/Davidson report and tried to keep it secret for political reasons. The emails obtained by the CEI are revealing. Here, the two scientists' superior declines to make their report public because "the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment." Click to enlarge:

Here, Carlin and Davidson are ordered not to communicate to the public their conclusion that the global warming theory is bunk:

Global warming zealots are a bit like Iran's mullahs. They are fanatically devoted to a series of false propositions. Unable to win an open scientific debate, they consistently resort to bullying and brute force to suppress their opposition. Once again, we see the Obama administration taking the lead in this regard, putting political ideology above scientific truth and demanding that all others do likewise.

Via the Examiner.

UPDATE: Newsbusters notes the almost complete media blackout of this story, and contrasts it with the news media's treatment of the Bush administration.

The Stoning of Soraya M.: An Unflinching Look at the Unconscionable

A courageous film — based on a true story — unveils a brutal Islamic custom still practiced in Iran and elsewhere.

by Christian Toto

http://pajamasmedia.com/
June 26, 2009

The pivotal scene in director Cyrus Nowrasteh’s new film unfolds slowly, letting the audience absorb every soul-crushing second.

First, a hole is dug in the ground. Then, the accused adulterer is lowered into the empty space and workers bury her up to her waist in dirt.

Then, the woman’s neighbors, young and old — as well as her immediate family — start collecting stones to throw at her until she dies.

The Stoning of Soraya M. is unlike any film we’ve seen before. It’s an unflinching glimpse at the very worst side of Iranian culture, an indictment of a barbaric ritual defended and embraced by an entire village.

And it’s based on a real-life incident.

Nowrasteh, best known for writing the ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11, gives away the story in the film’s title. That he keeps the audience engaged up until the final scene is a testament to his measured approach.

In clumsier hands, like Oliver Stone circa 2009, Soraya M. would have played out with thunder, brimstone, and more than a few overt political messages.

Nowrasteh — who also co-wrote the film with his wife, screenwriter Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh — tackles the material in a straightforward fashion. The only razzle dazzle on display is the powerhouse performance by House of Sand and Fog actress Shohreh Aghdashloo as the doomed woman’s confidante.

Aghdashloo plays Zahra, an Iranian woman who corners a journalist (Jim Caviezel) when his car breaks down in her dusty village. She insists he listen to the story she must tell an outsider. Their discussion serves as the film’s perfunctory framing device.

Soraya (Mozhan Marnò) is married to Ali (Navid Negahban), a cruel partner with a wandering eye. Local customs won’t allow him to follow said eye, so he conjures up an adultery charge against Soraya in the hopes the scandal will set him free. The male dominated legal system — aided and abetted by Sharia law, which demands a public execution of the guilty — does the rest.

The townsfolk aren’t the black and white lot one might fear from a film of this nature. Even the man responsible for overseeing the stoning does so from a deeply conflicted place.

The film’s unabashed villain is Ali — the story’s depiction of him is almost totally inhuman. He might as well twist his moustache and cackle toward the heavens with glee as his hateful plot falls into place.

The performances are more or less solid throughout Stoning, with Aghdashloo being a remarkable exception. She’s flat-out terrific as Zoraya’s closest friend and protector, a feminist in the truest sense of the word.

It’s likely the film’s creators will defend the extended stoning sequence — it’s meant to convey the full brutality of the event. But even taking that into account doesn’t justify its length. If audiences don’t grasp the horror of what they’re witnessing during the first ten minutes, then nothing will illuminate them after that.

Just the sight of young children picking up stones for the execution is horrifying enough.

A scene from The Stoning of Soraya M. with Shohreh Aghdashloo

The movie’s final scenes succumb to some unnecessary Hollywood theatrics, but the small, humane touches spread through the rest of the movie more than make up for the excess. Before the stoning begins, the mullah in charge of the process is seen trimming his beard in a gross display of misplaced egotism. Earlier in the movie, the death of a kindly village woman sets in motion a wave of visitors to her home, each eager to pilfer what they can from her belongings.

Film critics are mostly embracing Nowrasteh’s approach to the challenging material. But not everyone thinks it’s wise to remind audiences that such atrocities exist in the Muslim world. Film critic Cole Smithey faulted the director for not blaming the West at some point in the narrative:

But there is something condescending and judgmental in the filmmaker’s subtext that seems to exonerate Western culture as somehow less complicit in the atrocious murders that it commits against innocent and guilty citizens alike.

Nowrasteh remains one of Hollywood’s more reliable envelope pushers, although in a perfect world revealing the atrocities depicted here wouldn’t be such a courageous act.

His Path to 9/11 shook a former president from his slumber. Bill Clinton rallied an entire broadcast network against releasing the film on DVD.
Nowrasteh’s Stoning dares to call into question a barbaric act defended by some Muslims … and doesn’t separate the act from their faith. It takes a village to stone an innocent.

- Christian Toto is a freelance writer and film critic for The Washington Times. His work has appeared in People magazine, MovieMaker Magazine, The Denver Post, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and Scripps Howard News Service. He also contributes movie radio commentary to three stations as well as the nationally syndicated Dennis Miller Show and runs the blog What Would Toto Watch?

'Oldest' image of St Paul discovered

Archaeologists have uncovered a 1,600 year old image of St Paul, the oldest one known of, in a Roman catacomb.

By Nick Pisa in Rome
The London Daily Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
Published: 5:46PM BST 28 Jun 2009

The fresco, which dates back to the 4th Century AD, was discovered during restoration work at the Catacomb of Saint Thekla but was kept secret for ten days.

During that time experts carefully removed centuries of grime from the fresco with a laser, before the news was officially announced through the Vatican's official newspaper L'Osservatore Romano.

There are more than 40 known Catacombs or underground Christian burial places across Rome and because of their religious significance the Vatican's Pontifical Commission of Sacred Archeology has jurisdiction over them.

A photograph of the icon shows the thin face of a bearded man with large eyes, sunken nose and face on a red background surrounded with a yellow circle – the classic image of St Paul.

The image was found in the Catacomb of St Thekla, close to the Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, which is said to be built on the site where he was buried.

St Thekla was a follower of St Paul who lived in Rome and who was put to death under the Emperor Diocletian at the beginning of the 4th Century and who was subsequently made a saint but little else is known of her.

Barbara Mazzei, the director of the work at the Catacomb, said: "We had been working in the Catacomb for some time and it is full of frescoes.

"However the pictures are all covered with limestone which was covering up much of the artwork and so to remove it and clean it up we had to use fine lasers.

"The result was exceptional because from underneath all the dirt and grime we saw for the first time in 1600 years the face of Saint Paul in a very good condition.

"It was easy to see that it was Saint Paul because the style matched the iconography that we know existed at around the 4th Century – that is the thin face and the dark beard.

"It is a sensational discovery and is of tremendous significance. This is then first time that a single image of Saint Paul in such good condition has been found and it is the oldest one known of.

"Traditionally in Christian images of St Paul he is always alongside St Peter but in this icon he was on his own and what is also significant is the fact that St Paul's Basilica is just a few minutes walk away.

"It is my opinion that the fresco we have discovered was based on the fact that St Paul's Basilica was close by, there was a shrine to him there at that site since the 3rd Century.

"This fresco is from the early part of the 4th Century while before the earliest were from the later part and examples have been found in the Catacombs of Domitilla."

Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican's culture minister, said:"This is a fascinating discovery and is testimony to the early Christian Church of nearly 2000 years ago.

"It has a great theological and spiritual significance as well as being of historic and artistic importance."

The Catacomb of St Thekla is closed to the public but experts said they hoped to be able to put the newly discovered icon of St Paul on display some time later this year.


Basilica of St. Paul's Outside the Walls, Rome

St Paul was a Roman Jew, born in Tarsus in modern-day Turkey, who started out persecuting Christians but later became one of the greatest influences in the Church.

He did not know Jesus in life but converted to Christianity after seeing a shining light on the road to Damascus and spent much of his life travelling and preaching.

St Paul wrote 14 letters to Churches which he founded or visited and tell Christians what they should believe and how they should live but do not say much about Jesus' life and teachings.

He was executed for his beliefs around AD 65 and is thought to have been beheaded, rather than crucified, because he was a Roman citizen.

According to Christian tradition, his body was buried in a vineyard by a Roman woman and a shrine grew up there before Emperor Constantine consecrated a basilica in 324 which is now St Paul Outside the Walls.

St Paul's Outside the Walls is located about two miles outside the ancient walls of Rome and is the largest church in the city after St Peter's.

His feast day is on Monday along with St Peter and it is a bank holiday in Rome where they are patron saints of the city.

Officials are considering opening the tomb below St Paul's in the Basilica's crypt which is said to hold his remains.

For Radical Islam, the End Begins

By Joshua Muravchik
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
Saturday, June 27, 2009 7:41 PM

Is history ending yet again?

Much as the hammers that leveled the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the end of the Cold War, so might the protests rocking Iran signal the death of radical Islam and the challenges it poses to the West.

No, that doesn't mean we'll be removing the metal detectors from our airports anytime soon. Al-Qaeda and its ilk, even diminished in strength, will retain the ability to stage terrorist strikes. But the danger brought home on Sept. 11, 2001, was always greater than the possibility of murderous attacks. It was the threat that a hostile ideology might come to dominate large swaths of the Muslim world.

Not all versions of this ideology -- variously called Islamism or radical Islam -- are violent. But at the core of even the peaceful ones, such as that espoused by Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, is the idea that the Islamic world has been victimized by the West and must defend itself. Even before the United States invaded Iraq, stoking rage, polls in Muslim countries revealed support for Osama bin Laden and for al-Qaeda's aims, if not its methods. If such thinking were to triumph in major Muslim countries beyond Iran -- say, Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia -- violent extremists would command vast new stores of personnel, explosives and funds.

This is precisely the nightmare scenario that is now receding. Even if the Iranian regime succeeds in suppressing the protests and imposes the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by force of bullets, mass arrests and hired thugs, it will have forfeited its legitimacy, which has always rested on an element of consent as well as coercion. Most Iranians revered Ayatollah Khomeini, but when his successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, declared the election results settled, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets, deriding his anointed candidate with chants of "Death to the dictator!"

"Even if they manage to hang on for a month or a couple of years, they've shed the blood of their people," says Egyptian publisher and columnist Hisham Kassem. "It's over."

The downfall or discrediting of the regime in Tehran would deal a body blow to global Islamism which, despite its deep intellectual roots, first achieved real influence politically with the Iranian revolution of 1979. And it would also represent just the most recent -- and most dramatic -- in a string of setbacks for radical Islam. Election outcomes over the past two years have completely undone the momentum that Islamists had achieved with their strong showing at the polls in Egypt in 2005 and Palestine in 2006.

This countertrend began in Morocco in 2007. The Justice and Development Party (PJD), a moderate Islamist group that had registered big gains five years before, was expected to win parliamentary elections. But it carried only 14 percent of the vote, finishing second to a conservative party aligned with the royal palace. And in municipal elections earlier this month, the PJD's vote sank to 7 percent.

Jordanians also went to the polls in 2007 and handed the Islamic Action Front "one of its worst election defeats since Jordan's monarchy restored parliament in 1989," as The Washington Post reported. The party won only six of the 22 seats it contested in the parliamentary vote -- a precipitous drop from the 17 seats it had held in the outgoing legislature.

Forged from diverse ethnic groups linked only by Islam, Pakistan would seem fertile soil for radical Islamism. Nonetheless, Islamist parties had not done well until 2002, when -- with military strongman Pervez Musharraf suppressing mainstream political forces -- Islamists won 11 percent of the popular vote and 63 seats in parliament. But in a vote last year, on a more level field, the Islamists' tally sank to 2 percent and six out of 270 elected seats. Moreover, they were turned out of power in the North West Frontier Province, previously their stronghold.

In April, Indonesian Islamist parties that had emerged four years earlier to capture 39 percent of the vote lost ground in parliamentary elections this time around, falling to below 30 percent. "You can't pray away a bad economy, unemployment, poverty and crime," one voter, a 45-year old shop assistant, told Agence France Press.

Then in May came parliamentary elections in Kuwait, where women had won the right to vote and hold office in 2005 but had never yet won office. Even though the Islamic Salafi Alliance issued a fatwa against voting for female candidates, four captured seats in parliament. Adding insult to injury for the Islamists, their representation fell from 21 seats to 11. "There is a new mindset here in Kuwait," the al-Jazeera network reported, "and it's definitely going to reverberate across the Gulf region."

Finally, Lebanon held a tense election earlier this month that many expected would result in the triumph of Hezbollah and its allies over the pro-Western March 14 coalition. Instead, the latter carried the popular vote and nailed down a commanding majority in parliament.

Of course, each election featured its own dynamics, reflecting local alignments and issues, but they all point in the same direction for radical Islam -- a direction reinforced by recent opinion polls in the Muslim world.
Last year, the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that from 2002 to 2008, the proportion of respondents saying that suicide bombing was sometimes or often justified dropped from 74 percent to 32 percent in Lebanon, from 33 percent to 5 percent in Pakistan, from 43 percent to 25 percent in Jordan and from 26 percent to 11 percent in Indonesia. As a food stand operator in Jakarta put it: "People are less supportive of terrorist attacks because we know what terrorism does, we're afraid of attacks."

Military and social developments in Iraq and Pakistan also seem to be bending to the same wind. Whatever the contribution of the U.S. military "surge" of 2007, the tide of battle shifted in Iraq when broad swaths of the Sunni community that had supported or participated in the resistance to U.S. occupation turned their guns against the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq. And this year, the moderate government in Pakistan finally seems to have turned decisively against the Taliban. Although many critics believed that the central government lacked the will and the ability to subdue the radicals, it has suppressed them in the Swat region and is now carrying the battle into their Waziristan heartland.

What explains this broad reversal for the forces of Islamic extremism?

Clearly, citizens in Pakistan and Iraq were repelled by the brutality of the radicals, as have been many in such other Muslim countries as Jordan, Egypt and Indonesia, which have suffered domestic terrorism attacks. Nor has the Islamists' performance in power in Afghanistan, Sudan and Gaza won any admiration. The Internet and other communications technology is entangling the younger generation of Muslims more thoroughly with their Western counterparts than their elders, making appeals to turn away from the West ring hollow.

Others point to U.S. influence as well. As developments in Iran have unfolded over the past weeks, a minor Washington debate has emerged -- along partisan lines -- over whether President George W. Bush's tough policies blunted the force of the radicals, or whether President Obama's open hand has assuaged anti-American anger and inspired anti-regime forces. Both might be true. Or neither.

Regardless of the underlying causes, a defeated or merely discredited Islamic Republic of Iran could mark the beginning of the end of radical Islam. Until now, Iran has offered the only relatively successful example of Islamist rule, but the bloody events there are strengthening the momentum against radicalism and theocracy in the Muslim world. If the regime hangs on, it will depend increasingly on the militia and other security forces and less on its religious stature.

Of course, the fading of radicalism would not necessarily mean the disappearance of Islamic politics. The Egyptian intellectual Saad Edin Ibrahim noted in the Wall Street Journal last week that Islamist parties are being "cut down to size," and he hopes that they "evolve into Muslim democratic parties akin to the Christian Democrats in Europe."

That would be a result the West could live with.

jmuravc1@jhu.edu

Joshua Muravchik is a Foreign Policy Institute fellow in the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and the author of "The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East."

A Health 'Reform' To Regret

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
Sunday, June 28, 2009

"In the beginning," says a character in a Peter De Vries novel, "the earth was without form and void. Why didn't they leave well enough alone?" When Washington is finished improving health care, Americans may be asking the same thing. Certainly the debate will compel them to think more clearly about this subject.

Most Americans do want different health care: They want 2009 medicine at 1960 prices. Americans spent much less on health care in 1960 (5 percent of gross domestic product as opposed to 18 percent now). They also spent much less -- nothing, in fact -- on computers, cellphones, and cable and satellite television.

Your next car can cost less if you forgo GPS, satellite radio, antilock brakes, power steering, power windows and air conditioning. You can shop for such a car at your local Studebaker, Hudson, Nash, Packard and DeSoto dealers.

The president says that his health plan is responsive "to all those families who now spend more on health care than housing or food." Well. The Hudson Institute's Betsy McCaughey, writing in the American Spectator, says that in 1960 the average American household spent 53 percent of its disposable income on food, housing, energy and health care. Today the portion of income consumed by those four has barely changed -- 55 percent. But the health-care component has increased while the other three combined have decreased. This is partly because as societies become richer, they spend more on health care -- and symphonies, universities, museums, etc.

It is also because health care is increasingly competent. When the first baby boomers, whose aging is driving health-care spending, were born in 1946, many American hospitals' principal expense was clean linen. This was long before MRIs, CAT scans and the rest of the diagnostic and therapeutic arsenal that modern medicine deploys.

In a survey released in April by National Public Radio, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard, only 6 percent of Americans said that they were willing to spend more than $200 a month on health care, and the price must fall to $100 a month before a majority are willing to pay it. But according to Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute, Americans already are paying an average of $400 a month.

Most Americans do not know this because the cost of their care is hidden. Only 9 percent buy health coverage individually, and $84 of every $100 spent on health care is spent by someone (an employer, insurance company or government) other than recipients of the care. Those who get insurance as untaxed compensation from employers have no occasion to compute or confront the size of that benefit. But it is part of the price their employers pay for their work.

The president says that the health-care market "has not worked perfectly." Indeed. Only God, supposedly, and Wrigley Field, actually, are perfect. Anyway, given the heavy presence of government dollars (46 percent of health-care dollars) and regulations, the market, such as it is, is hardly free to work.

As market enthusiasts, conservatives should stop warning that the president's reforms will result in health-care "rationing." Every product, from a jelly doughnut to a jumbo jet, is rationed -- by price or by politics. The conservative's task is to explain why price is preferable. The answer is that prices produce a rational allocation of scarce resources.

Regarding reform, conservatives are accused of being a party of "no." Fine. That is an indispensable word in politics because most new ideas are false and mischievous. Furthermore, the First Amendment's lovely first five words ("Congress shall make no law") set the negative tone of the Bill of Rights, which is a list of government behaviors, from establishing religion to conducting unreasonable searches, to which the Constitution says: No.

The president may have been too clever when he decided, during an economic crisis that was sending federal expenditures soaring and revenue plummeting, to push the entire liberal agenda on the premise that every item on it is essential to combating the crisis.

Now the health-care debate is coming to a boil just as public anxiety about the deficit is, too. As cost estimates pass the $1 trillion mark, the administration is reduced to talking about financing its reforms with mini-measures such as a 3-cent tax on sugary sodas. The public, its attention riveted by the fiscal train wreck of trillion-dollar deficits for the foreseeable future, may be coming to the conclusion that we should leave bad enough alone.

georgewill@washpost.com

70 Years Later, Gehrig’s Speech Still Resonates With Inspiration

By RAY ROBINSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
June 28, 2009

In any anthology of memorable farewell speeches, the brief oration by the humble baseball player Lou Gehrig on July 4, 1939, still rates considerable mention.


Lou Gehrig says goodbye on July 4, 1939.

I was at Yankee Stadium on that melancholy afternoon, an 18-year-old sitting in the faraway right-field bleachers, and I was deeply touched by his words. But I thought only that Gehrig’s long career with the Yankees had come to an end. It never crossed my mind that his death was imminent.

How many in that attentive audience of 60,000 suspected that Gehrig’s speech would be forever etched in the game’s history?

Marvin Miller, the former chief of the baseball players union, said he saw Gehrig play many times.

“It’s clear to me that a player today who played in 2,130 straight games, as Lou did, might immediately be suspect,” he said. “But that never would have been the case with Lou.”

Major League Baseball will honor the 70th anniversary of Gehrig’s farewell at 15 games on Saturday, when his speech will be read during the seventh-inning stretch.

“It’s an honor to pay tribute to this American legend,” Commissioner Bud Selig said in initiating the leaguewide celebration.

The purpose is to raise awareness and money for research of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., the incurable neurological disease that took Gehrig’s life and now commonly bears his name.

Gehrig chose to remain with the team after retiring as a player. As the 1939 summer wore on, he found it increasingly difficult to walk from the dugout to home plate, where, as the Yankees’ captain, he would present the lineup card to the umpire.

After the World Series, in which the Yankees defeated Cincinnati as Gehrig watched from the bench, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York offered him a job with the city’s parole commission. Gehrig’s wife, Eleanor, encouraged him to accept. Gehrig’s salary was $5,700 a year — not bad for the times and about what he had received for his nonplaying role in the Series.

A year later, Gehrig’s body was failing. His mobility was increasingly limited. He could not sign his name, tie his shoelaces or grip cards to play bridge. Reluctantly, he resigned from his parole job.

Gehrig died June 2, 1941, about two years after he received the A.L.S. diagnosis and 17 days short of his 38th birthday. The nation was stunned. Gehrig had been the seemingly indestructible Iron Horse. People from all walks of life, from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the hot dog vendors at Yankee Stadium, shared their grief.


Associated Press

Lou Gehrig, who played in 2,130 consecutive games, made a 277-word farewell speech at Yankee Stadium.

Today, Gehrig’s 277-word speech, immortalized by Gary Cooper in the 1942 movie “The Pride of the Yankees,” continues to have an effect on the American psyche. Gehrig’s words have become more meaningful as time goes on.

They have also had a profound effect on many of those who have A.L.S.

“He taught me that the human spirit can transcend any affliction,” said Chris Pendergast, a former schoolteacher in Miller Place, N.Y., who has battled A.L.S. for more than 16 years. Communicating through his wife, Pendergast said: “I am now a quadriplegic, using a feeding tube and an external ventilator for part of the day. But with Lou as a model, I still feel I have an awful lot to live for.”

Those who face other challenges have also found inspiration in Gehrig’s life. Joshua Prager, a journalist and author, sustained a disabling spinal cord injury in a 1990 bus accident when he was 19. Prager, who wrote “The Echoing Green,” about Bobby Thomson’s 1951 home run at the Polo Grounds, said he admired Gehrig before the accident. In time, his appreciation of Gehrig, who like Prager attended Columbia University, grew deeper.

“In the face of death, he remained defiant,” Prager said. “He hated any maudlin displays, and as he said in his July 4 speech, he still considered himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

The broadcaster and baseball historian Bob Costas has reflected on Gehrig’s legacy as a role model.

“His qualities as a person were always admired,” Costas said. “But that admiration grows when contrasted with the graceless, self-regarding personas of so many present-day public figures.”

Ray Robinson is the author of “Iron Horse: Lou Gehrig in His Time.”

Dillinger Captured by Dogged Filmmaker!

By MARK HARRIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
June 28, 2009

IT’S a Hollywood truism that for every movie that sees the light of day, a hundred others languish in the purgatory (or worse) of development. But how many movies owe their very existence to a roster of films that never happened? Such is the case with Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies,” a dual portrait of the bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), the young, ambitious F.B.I. agent who took him down.


Frank Connor/Universal

Johnny Depp and Marion Cotillard star in Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies.”

The film, which opens Wednesday, is unusual on many fronts. Its Depression-era setting, R rating and dense storytelling make it an anomaly, an Oscar hopeful planted in the middle of a season traditionally more accommodating to the shape-shifting robots of “Transformers” than to J. Edgar Hoover. It refurbishes a genre — the 1930s gangster movie — that studios have left largely unexploited in the two decades since Brian De Palma’s “Untouchables.” And, appropriately, it leaves a trail of cinematic corpses in its wake: two feature films, an HBO mini-series and a prison epic starring Mr. Depp. With its portrayal of two men clenched by obsession and its meticulous visual sheen, “Public Enemies” plays as if it were intended to be a Michael Mann movie all along. But it got there the hard way.

The project began its life, sort of, in the mind of Mr. Mann before he had even embarked on his directorial career, which now runs to 10 movies over 29 years. Mr. Mann, 66, grew up in Chicago, not far from where Dillinger spent his last months hiding out. In the 1970s, he recalled, “my wife and I used to go to art films at the Biograph,” the movie house where Dillinger spent his last night watching the Clark Gable gangster film “Manhattan Melodrama” before F.B.I. agents gunned him down on the street outside.
Fascinated by the period, Mr. Mann began work on a screenplay, not about Dillinger but about Alvin Karpis, one of the last of that era’s criminals to be captured.

The Karpis project “got me into the period,” Mr. Mann said, “trying to understand the history, imagining the tough, tough existence of these guys being pressed on both sides by twin evolutionary forces — on the one hand, J. Edgar Hoover inventing the F.B.I., and on the other, organized crime evolving rapidly into a kind of corporate capitalism” that had no room for independent criminals either. But despite several attempts to get the screenplay into filmable shape, Mr. Mann said he was never satisfied enough to proceed. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, as he directed several films that showcased his strong interest in cops and criminals — “Thief,” “Manhunter,” “Heat” — he began shifting his attention from Karpis to Dillinger, whose clean-cut looks and savvy control of his publicity made him a more movie-friendly subject.

Years later, in 1999, the author and journalist Bryan Burrough (“Barbarians at the Gate”) was at home in Maplewood, N.J., watching a documentary about another set of outlaws from the period, the Ma Barker gang. Intrigued, Mr. Burrough started reading everything he could on the subject and realized that he had found a great story: the astonishing chronological convergence from 1932 to 1934 of a rogue’s gallery comprising Dillinger, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly and the Barkers, just as Hoover was attempting to create America’s first centralized law enforcement system.

Mr. Burrough said he loved the idea of “a joint narrative of the period,” but not as a book. “I had two young sons, 7 and 5 at the time, and I didn’t relish the idea of spending the next five years of my life crisscrossing the Midwest in a rental car with McDonald’s bags piling up.” So he pitched it to Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal’s Tribeca Films, which sold the idea to HBO as a multicharacter eight-hour mini-series, with Mr. Burrough as executive producer and writer.


Michelle Litvin for The New York Times

The director Michael Mann in Union Station at Chicago.

Mr. Burrough said he quickly figured out that he didn’t “know the first thing about writing screenplays.” Beyond that the F.B.I. case files on those crimes and investigations had now become public in Washington and had made a book (and less travel) possible. By 2000 he had amicably left the HBO project, which continued in development without him, and begun researching a manuscript about the same material. Enter Kevin Misher, the studio executive who in 2001 left his job as president for production at Universal Pictures to become an independent producer.

Like Mr. Burrough and Mr. Mann, Mr. Misher was an aficionado of the era. “The cars are cool, the guns are cool, the girls are beautiful, the guys are dressed” in sharp suits, he said. “It has much more cool factor than just a quaint sepia-toned history.” Eager to revive the genre, Mr. Misher acquired the life rights to Purvis, the agent who, under Hoover’s mentorship, led the pursuit of Dillinger but broke with Hoover soon after Dillinger’s death and, disillusioned, resigned from the F.B.I. in 1935, when he was 31.

While Mr. Misher began work on a Purvis project, Mr. Burrough’s book “Public Enemies” was coming together, and the HBO mini-series was falling apart. HBO returned the rights to be resold by Mr. Burrough’s agents at the Creative Artists Agency, and Mr. Mann and Mr. Misher, now working together, quickly jumped in with an offer. Their plan: to jettison any material that didn’t concern Dillinger or the formation of the F.B.I. and use what remained as what Mr. Misher called a “research bible” for a Dillinger film. In mid-2004 they sold the project to Universal, thanks in some measure to a powerful partner: Appian Way, Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, which stepped in when Mr. DiCaprio expressed a desire to play Dillinger.

Over the next three years Mr. Mann supervised several drafts of the script written by Ronan Bennett, the Irish novelist (“The Catastrophist”) whose qualifications for the job included time spent in Long Kesh prison as a teenager for an I.R.A. bank robbery. (The conviction was later overturned.) Eventually Mr. Mann and Ann Biderman (the creator of “Southland” on NBC) took over; the final screenplay is credited to all three.

Mr. Burrough assumed the film would never happen. “There are a million different ways for a Hollywood project to die,” he said, “and this had already died once. Then, in December 2007, I get an e-mail from C.A.A. saying not only that the movie had been green-lit, but that it was going to star Johnny Depp. I thought it was a joke.”

It was no joke. The now-or-never mentality under which every studio was operating at the end of 2007 had cost the project Mr. DiCaprio. Production of “Public Enemies” — in fact, of all movies — had to finish by June 30, 2008, before the start of an anticipated Screen Actors Guild strike. With Mr. DiCaprio committed to Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” (opening this fall), Universal turned to Mr. Depp, whose own project, an adaptation of Gregory David Roberts’s novel “Shantaram,” about a robber and heroin addict who escapes from prison, was about to be postponed.

Mr. Bale signed on soon after, fascinated, “not only by Purvis’s pursuit of Dillinger,” he said, “but by his pursuit to achieve the vision of Hoover, and his reaction when Hoover seemed to compromise his vision of how to enforce the law.”

Despite its tortuous history, “Public Enemies” looks, on screen, as if Mr. Mann intended all along to reshape the material as a fresh chapter in his remarkably cohesive body of work. Like “Heat” (1995), which paired Mr. De Niro as a master thief and Al Pacino as a police lieutenant, the new film positions two A-list stars on opposite sides of the law — and like “Heat,” it’s a film in which the two stars barely share a scene. Like “The Insider” (1999), Mr. Mann’s most acclaimed film, “Public Enemies” looks closely at two skilled professionals who each struggle with personal codes of honor. And as in “Manhunter” (1986) Mr. Mann seems enthralled by the subject of a lawman so willing to pursue a criminal that he endangers his sense of himself.

“Honestly, no,” Mr. Mann said, laughing when asked whether the thematic consistencies are deliberate. “From my point of view, which is maybe not other people’s, it isn’t a mano-a-mano movie. What I was taken with was the love affair between Dillinger and Billie Frechette,” his girlfriend, played by the Oscar-winning French actress Marion Cotillard. “They’re symbiotic. He didn’t have a mother and was desperate for love of women. She needed a father. They were preformed for each other.”


Peter Mountain/Universal

Mr. Mann with crew on the set of "Public Enemies."


His movies are known for many things, from technological virtuosity to narrative complexity, but prominent roles for women are not among his trademarks. The character of Billie is something of an exception. Several American actresses wanted the part; Ms. Cotillard won it even though her English was less than rock steady. “But she’s ferocious,” Mr. Mann said. “She’s so focused and artistically ambitious that you knew that come hell or high water she was going to get there.”

Her character features prominently in a memorable scene, the film’s most overt nod to contemporary issues, specifically the use of torture to obtain information. That resonance, Mr. Mann said, was intentional. “In the movie when Hoover says, ‘Take off the white gloves,’ what he means is, turn informants using extortion, round up innocent family members and make their lives miserable, set aside habeas corpus, be pre-emptive,” he said. “And when Purvis, who doesn’t believe that, starts to go against his native self, it’s disastrous.”

As the start date of “Public Enemies” neared, Mr. Mann was coming off the exhausting experience of writing, directing and producing the 2006 film adaptation of “Miami Vice,” the 1980s television series that made his reputation. That film, plagued by production difficulties, threatened to spiral out of control, and disappointed at the box office, where it brought in just $63 million domestically (less than half its estimated production budget). This time Mr. Mann had to cram preproduction into 11 weeks, an unusually short time for a $100 million period movie that would be shot largely on Midwestern locations. “And then we had radical weather,” he said. “Hailstorms. So the movie became a race, in a way. Not a rush, but a race to get what I had to get.” He finished with a couple of days to spare.

Mr. Mann is known as a perfectionist, someone who wants every visual and technical detail nailed down. Surprisingly, he said that wasn’t the primary challenge on “Public Enemies.” “The biggest struggle, for me is always: Get the story to land,” he said. “Get it to work.

“You know John Dillinger is going to die in front of the Biograph. So by then the story has to have hijacked the show-and-tell nature of the plot. The story has to be about the inner experience of the guy, so that by the end, it’s not about him getting shot. Do you understand his inner experience? Is your heart with him? Do you know him? That’s the battle.”

Jackson, Sanford and weirdness

Big government more or less guarantees rule by creeps and misfits.

By Mark Steyn
Syndicated columnist
Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/opinion
Friday, June 26, 2009

In a lousy week, Mark Sanford had one stroke of luck: Michael Jackson chose the day after the governor's news conference to moonwalk into eternity, and thus gave the media's pop therapists a more rewarding subject to feast on – or at any rate one of the few stories whose salient points are weirder than Sanford's. Not that the governor didn't do his best to keep his end up on the pop culture allusions: "I've spent the last five days crying in Argentina," he revealed, in presumably unconscious hommage to Evita.

The plot owed less to Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber than to one of those Fox movies of the early Forties in which some wholesome All-American type escapes the stress and strain of modern life by taking off for a quiet weekend in Latin America, and the next thing you know they're doing the rhumba on the floor of a Rio nightclub surrounded by Carmen Miranda and 200 gay caballeros prancing around waving giant bananas. In this case, the gentlemen of the South Carolina Press were the befuddled caballeros and Gov. Sanford was bananas.

There is a rather large point to all this. As my National Review colleague Kathryn Jean Lopez observed, a sex scandal a week from the Republicans will guarantee us government health care by the fall – in the same way that the British Tories' boundlessly versatile sexual predilections helped deliver the Blair landslide of 1997. And once government health care's in place the game's over: Socialized medicine redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in all the wrong ways, and, if you cross that bridge, it's all but impossible to go back. So, if ever there were a season for GOP philanderers not to unpeel their bananas, this summer is it.

At the news conference, the governor rationalized his unfaithfulness to Mrs. Sanford by saying that he needed to get out of "the bubble." Tina Brown, proprietrix of The Daily Beast, hooted in derision: "The bubble's where you're s'posed to be, Mark. That's what all the rubber-chicken fundraisers you put her through were for." But a more basic question is: Why does the minimally empowered executive of a midsize state with no particular national prominence need to be in "the bubble" in the first place?
Evidently he is. Much of the charade involved in the scandal arose from the need to throw off his "security detail": The Chevy Suburban pulling up outside the Governor's Mansion, Sanford casually tossing his running shoes, a pair of green shorts and a sleeping bag in the back, turning off the GPS locator… Although staffers kept up his ghostwritten tweet of the day on Twitter, by Monday state senators were revealing that they hadn't heard from the Governor since Thursday.

And we can't have that, can we?

Even Charles Krauthammer on Fox News professed to be concerned at a governor wandering off incommunicado. What would happen if there was a hurricane or a terrorist attack on South Carolina? Well, I'd imagine that state agencies would muddle through to one degree of competence or another, and that the physical presence of the governor would make absolutely zero difference – any more than, on the day, George Pataki made a difference to New York's response to 9/11 (good) or Kathleen Blanco to Louisiana's response to Katrina (abysmal and embarrassing, but deriving from the state's broader political culture rather than anything Gov. Blanco did or didn't do on the big day). In a republic of limited government, the governor, two-thirds of the state legislature and the heads of every regulatory agency should be able to go "hiking the Appalachian Trail" for a lot longer than five days, and nobody would notice.

Instead, we have the governor of South Carolina resorting to subterfuge worthy of one of those Mitteleuropean operettas where the Ruritanian princess disguises herself as a scullery maid to leave the castle by the back gate for an assignation with a dashing if impoverished hussar garbed as a stable lad. Perhaps some enterprising producer would like to option a Carolinian update of "Prince Bob," the hit of the 1902 theatrical season in Budapest, in which the eponymous hero, a son of Queen Victoria, escapes "the bubble" of Buckingham Palace by getting out on the streets and wooing a Cockney serving wench.

Of course, being nominally a republic of citizen-legislators, we have inaugurated the post-modern pseudo-breakout from "the bubble," in which the president and his family sally forth to an ice cream parlor in Alexandria, Va., accompanied only by 200 of their most adoring sycophants from the press corps. These trips, explained The New York Times, enable the Obamas to "stay connected" with ordinary people, like White House reporters.

The real bubble is a consequence of big government. The more the citizenry expect from the state, the more our political class will depend on ever more swollen Gulf Emir-size retinues of staffers hovering at the elbow to steer you from one corner of the fishbowl to another 24/7. "Why are politicians so weird?" a reader asked me after the Sanford news conference. But the majority of people willing to live like this will be, almost by definition, deeply weird. So big government more or less guarantees rule by creeps and misfits. It's just a question of how well they disguise it. Writing about Michael Jackson a few years ago, I suggested that today's A-list celebs were the equivalent of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria or the loopier Ottoman sultans, the ones it wasn't safe to leave alone with sharp implements. But, as Christopher Hitchens says, politics is show business for ugly people. And a celebrified political culture will inevitably throw up its share of tatty karaoke versions of Britney and Jacko.

I was asked the other day about the difference between American and British sex scandals. In its heyday, Brit sex was about the action – Lord Lambton's three-in-a-bed biracial sex romp; Harvey Proctor's industrial-scale spanking of rent boys; Max Mosley's Nazi bondage sessions, with a fine eye for historical accuracy and the orders barked out in surprisingly accurate German; Stephen Milligan's accidental auto-erotic asphyxiation while lying on a kitchen table wearing fishnet stockings…. With the exception of the last ill-fated foray, there was an insouciance to these remarkably specialized peccadilloes.

By contrast, American sex scandals seem to be either minor campaign-finance infractions – the cheerless half-hearted affair with an aide – or, like Gov. Sanford's pitiful tale (at least as recounted at his news conference and as confirmed by the e-mails), a glimpse of loneliness and social isolation, as if in the end all they want is the chance to be sitting at the bar telling the gal with the nice smile, "My wife, and my staffers, and my security detail, and the State House press corps, and the guy who writes my Twitter Tweet of the Day, don't understand me."

Small government, narrow responsibilities, part-time legislators and executives, a minimal number of aides, lots of days off: Let's burst the bubble.

©MARK STEYN

Today's Tune: Michael Jackson - Beat It

(Click on title to play video)

They Told Him Don't You Ever Come Around Here
Don't Wanna See Your Face, You Better Disappear
The Fire's In Their Eyes And Their Words Are Really Clear
So Beat It, Just Beat It

You Better Run, You Better Do What You Can
Don't Wanna See No Blood, Don't Be A Macho Man
You Wanna Be Tough, Better Do What You Can
So Beat It, But You Wanna Be Bad

Just Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It
No One Wants To Be Defeated
Showin' How Funky Strong Is Your Fight
It Doesn't Matter Who's Wrong Or Right
Just Beat It, Beat It
Just Beat It, Beat It
Just Beat It, Beat It
Just Beat It, Beat It

They're Out To Get You, Better Leave While You Can
Don't Wanna Be A Boy, You Wanna Be A Man
You Wanna Stay Alive, Better Do What You Can
So Beat It, Just Beat It

You Have To Show Them That You're Really Not Scared
You're Playin' With Your Life, This Ain't No Truth Or Dare
They'll Kick You, Then They Beat You,
Then They'll Tell You It's Fair
So Beat It, But You Wanna Be Bad

Just Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It
No One Wants To Be Defeated
Showin' How Funky Strong Is Your Fight
It Doesn't Matter Who's Wrong Or Right

Just Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It
No One Wants To Be Defeated
Showin' How Funky Strong Is Your Fight
It Doesn't Matter Who's Wrong Or Right
Just Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It

Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It
No One Wants To Be Defeated
Showin' How Funky Strong Is Your Fight
It Doesn't Matter Who's Wrong Or Right

Just Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It
No One Wants To Be Defeated
Showin' How Funky Strong Is Your Fight
It Doesn't Matter Who's Wrong Or Who's Right

Just Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It
No One Wants To Be Defeated
Showin' How Funky Strong Is Your Fight
It Doesn't Matter Who's Wrong Or Right

Just Beat It, Beat It, Beat It, Beat It
No One Wants To Be Defeated
Showin' How Funky Strong Is Your Fight
It Doesn't Matter Who's Wrong Or Right
Just Beat It, Beat It
Beat It, Beat It, Beat It

Words and music by Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson's life was infused with fantasy and tragedy

He owned a statue of Marilyn, studied Chaplin and married Elvis' daughter. It seemed the perennial man-child would cease to exist if the applause ever stopped.

By Geoff Boucher and Elaine Woo
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com
June 26, 2009

Michael Jackson was fascinated by celebrity tragedy. He had a statue of Marilyn Monroe in his home and studied the sad Hollywood exile of Charlie Chaplin. He married the daughter of Elvis Presley.


Jackson performs at the 1996 World Music Awards.(Craig Sjodin / ABC)

Jackson met his own untimely death Thursday at age 50, and more than any of those past icons, he left a complicated legacy. As a child star, he was so talented he seemed lit from within; as a middle-aged man, he was viewed as something akin to a visiting alien who, like Tinkerbell, would cease to exist if the applause ever stopped.

It was impossible in the early 1980s to imagine the surreal final chapters of Jackson's life. In that decade, he became the world's most popular entertainer thanks to a series of hit records -- “Beat It,” "Billie Jean," “Thriller” -- and dazzling music videos. Perhaps the best dancer of his generation, he created his own iconography: the single shiny glove, the Moonwalk, the signature red jacket and the Neverland Ranch.

In recent years, he inspired fascination for reasons that had nothing to do with music. Years of plastic surgery had made his face a bizarre landscape. He was deeply in debt and had lost his way as a musician. He had not toured since 1997 or released new songs since 2001. Instead of music videos, the images of Jackson beamed around the world were tabloid reports about his strange personal behavior, including allegations of child molestation, or the latest failed relaunch of his career.

A frail-looking Jackson had spent his last weeks in rehearsal for an ambitious comeback attempt and 50 already-sold-out shows at London's O2 Arena. A major motivation was the $300 million in debt run up by a star who lived like royalty even though his self-declared title of King of Pop was more about the past than the present.

"It's one of the greatest losses," said Tommy Mottola, former president of Sony Music, which released Jackson's music for 16 years. "In pop history, there's a triumvirate of pop icons: Sinatra, Elvis and Michael, that define the whole culture. . . . His music bridged races and ages and absolutely defined the video age. Nothing that came before him or that has come after him will ever be as big as he was."

Jackson "had it all. . . . talent, grace, professionalism and dedication," said Quincy Jones, Jackson's collaborator on his most important albums and the movie "The Wiz." "He was the consummate entertainer, and his contributions and legacy will be felt upon the world forever. I've lost my little brother today, and part of my soul has gone with him."

Jackson was born Aug. 29, 1958, in Gary, Ind. His mother, Katherine, would say that there was something special about the fifth of her nine children. "I don't believe in reincarnation," she said, "but you know how babies move uncoordinated? He never moved that way. When he danced, it was like he was an older person."

Katherine Jackson, who worked for Sears, Roebuck and Co., taught her children folk songs. Her husband, Joseph, a crane operator who once played with the R&B band the Falcons, played guitar and coached his sons. The boys were soon performing at local benefits. Michael took command of the group even as a chubby-cheeked kindergartner.

"He was so energetic that at 5 years old he was like a leader," brother Jackie once told Rolling Stone magazine. "We saw that. So we said, 'Hey, Michael, you be the lead guy.' The audience ate it up."

By 1968, the Jacksons had cut singles for a local Indiana label called Steeltown. At an engagement that year at Harlem's famed Apollo Theater, singer Gladys Knight and pianist Billy Taylor saw their act and recommended them to Motown founder Berry Gordy. So did Diana Ross after sharing a stage with the quintet at a "Soul Weekend" in Gary.


Michael Jackson, center, with brothers, from left, Tito, Jermaine, Jackie, Marlon and Randy were signed as the group Jackson 5 by Motown Records in the late 1960s. (ABC)

Ross said later that she saw herself in the talented and driven Michael. "He could be my son," she said. Another Motown legend, Smokey Robinson, would describe the young performer as "a strange and lovely child, an old soul in the body of a boy."

Motown moved the Jacksons to California, and in August 1968 they gave a breakthrough performance at a Beverly Hills club called The Daisy. Their first album, "Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5," was released in December 1969, and it yielded the No. 1 hit "I Want You Back," with 11-year-old Michael on the lead vocals. "ABC," “I’ll Be There” and other hits followed, and the group soon had their own television series, a Saturday morning cartoon and an array of licensed merchandise aimed at youngsters.

There was a price: childhood.

"I never had the chance to do the fun things kids do," Jackson once explained. "There was no Christmas, no holiday celebrating. So now you try to compensate for some of that loss."

Joseph Jackson ruled the family, by most accounts, with his fists and a bellowing rage. In a 2003 documentary by British journalist Martin Bashir, Jackson said his father often brandished a belt during rehearsals and hit his sons or shoved them into walls if they made a misstep.

"We were terrified of him," Jackson said.

In the Bashir interviews, the singer said his father ridiculed him for his pug nose and adolescent acne. He also described, with obvious discomfort, having to listen to an older brother have sex with a woman in the hotel bedroom they shared.

Onstage, Jackson seemed to know no fear.

"When we sang, people would throw all this money on the floor, tons of dollars, 10s, 20s, lots of change," an adult Jackson once told Newsweek. "I remember my pockets being so full of money that I couldn't keep my pants up. I'd wear a real tight belt. And I'd buy candy like crazy."

By 1972, Jackson had his first solo album, "Got to Be There," which included the title hit as well as "Rockin' Robin." His first solo No. 1 single came the same year -- the forlorn theme song from the movie “Ben.”

He struggled to understand a world that he saw mostly while staring into spotlights and flashbulbs. Standing ovations greeted him onstage; parental slaps awaited him in the dressing room. Like his mother, he became a Jehovah's Witness, forswearing alcohol, cigarettes and foul language. He fasted on Saturdays and went door-to-door, wearing a disguise, to spread the faith. (He ended his association with the religion in the late 1980s.)

In 1978, Michael made his film debut as the Scarecrow in "The Wiz," a black-cast adaptation of "The Wizard of Oz." The movie launched a creative and commercial partnership with "Wiz" music director Quincy Jones.

The first fruit of their collaboration was "Off the Wall" (1979), Jackson's debut album on the Epic label. It sold 5 million copies in the United States and 2 million abroad and generated four Top 10 singles.

It was with Jones (as well as often-overlooked songwriter Rod Temperton) that Jackson shaped "Thriller," which was released near the end of 1982 and became the best-selling studio album in history and a cultural landmark. Its effect on the music industry and the music videos that came to define the then-nascent MTV was huge.

In a Motown TV special in 1983, Jackson, then 24, electrified the nation with his Moonwalk, a dance step that created the illusion of levitation. He took the stage in a black sequined jacket, silver shirt, black fedora and black trousers that skimmed the tops of his white socks. The final touch was a single white glove, studded with rhinestones.

Times critic Robert Hilburn, who observed the performance live at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, said the broadcast marked Jackson's "unofficial coronation as the King of Pop. Within months, he changed the way people would hear and see pop music, unleashing an influence that rivaled that of Elvis Presley and the Beatles."

His dance style combined the robotic moves of break-dancers, the quicksilver spins and slides of James Brown and the grace of Fred Astaire, whose routines he studied. The aging Astaire called him "a wonderful mover."

Not only did "Thriller" smash sales records as the bestselling album of 1983, but it made Jackson the first artist to top four charts simultaneously: It was the No. 1 pop single, pop album, R&B single and R&B album. It earned five Grammy Awards. Jay Cocks wrote in Time magazine that Jackson "just may be the most popular black singer ever."

The "Thriller" success enabled Jackson to negotiate what were believed to be the highest royalty rates ever earned by a recording artist. But it also put him in a cage of his own anxieties and obsession.

Jackson bonded with past pop-music royalty by marrying Lisa Marie Presley in 1994 and grabbing a major interest in the Beatles' catalog, an asset worth $500 million. The marriage was short-lived, however, and his wealth was imperiled by an extravagant lifestyle that included the 2,700-acre Neverland Ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley, where he lived with a menagerie of exotic pets.

Jackson became a prisoner of his own celebrity. He became so accustomed to bodyguards and assistants that he once admitted that he trembled if he had to open his own front door. He compared himself to "a hemophiliac who can't afford to be scratched in any way."


Jackson, in his signature single glove and embellished military jacket, stands with President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan in 1984 before receiving an award for his contribution to a drunk driving awareness program.(Scott Stewart / Associated Press)

Notoriously shy offstage, onstage he was electric and acutely attuned to what his fans craved. Commenting once on a sotto voce note at the end of a ballad, he said: "That note will touch the whole audience. What they're throwing out at you, you're grabbing. You hold it, you touch it and you whip it back -- it's like a Frisbee."

"I hate to admit it, but I feel strange around everyday people," he said on another occasion. "See, my whole life has been onstage, and the impression I get of people is applause, standing ovations and running after you. In a crowd, I'm afraid. Onstage, I feel safe. If I could, I would sleep on the stage. I'm serious."

In better days, his wealth allowed him to fulfill personal fantasies -- including building his own amusement park -- and bankroll charities, particularly those involving children. Then came the dark whispers about the nature of his relationship with boys.

He was often seen with youngsters, both famous and those plucked from the mundane world to visit his playground estate. In 1993, he was accused of molesting a 13-year-old boy who was a frequent overnight guest in his home. On tour in Asia when the charges were filed, he canceled his performances, citing exhaustion and addiction to painkillers as the reasons.

Jackson's attorney charged that the boy's father, a would-be screenwriter who had tried to obtain Jackson's backing for a project, was trying to extort money. The criminal investigation was closed after the boy refused to testify. A civil lawsuit was settled for a reported $20 million.

"I am not guilty of these allegations," Jackson, then 35, said after the settlement was reached. "But if I am guilty of anything, it is of giving all that I have to give to help children all over the world. It is of loving children of all ages and races. It is of gaining sheer joy from seeing children with their innocent and smiling faces. It is of enjoying through them the childhood that I missed myself."

He lost a Pepsi endorsement as well as a deal to develop several films. The Jackson-themed Captain EO attraction at Disneyland was scrapped.

A second case unfolded in November 2003, when Santa Barbara authorities, acting on accusations by a 13-year-old cancer patient who had stayed at Jackson's ranch, arrested the star. The 14-week trial featured celebrity witnesses such as Jay Leno and Macaulay Culkin and Jackson's own bizarre antics, such as showing up for court in pajama pants and a tuxedo jacket. It ended June 13, 2005, with his acquittal on all counts.

Jackson acknowledged in the interview with Bashir that, despite the earlier cases, he still invited children to share his bedroom and saw nothing wrong with it.

"It's not sexual," he insisted. "I tuck them in, have hot milk, give them cookies. It's very charming, it's very sweet."

He added that his own children "sleep with other people all the time."


Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley at Neverland ranch in Santa Ynez, Calif., where they welcomed children for the World Children's Conference, April 18, 1995.(Lee Celano / Reuters)

By then, Jackson was a figure of pop music's past, not its present. When The Times, in 2001, asked top recording executives to name the most valuable acts in the business, Jackson failed to make the top 20.

In 2003, he settled a lawsuit by his former financial advisors after legal documents portrayed the singer as near bankruptcy.

At the same time, he was waging legal battles against his 1970s recording label, Motown Records, and his current label, Sony's Epic Records. He stirred speculation about his mental state when he contended that the latter company, and in particular Mottola, had inadequately promoted his work because of racism.

He celebrated his 45th birthday in August 2003 at a curious public event that seemed to underscore the decline of his career. Hundreds of fans paid $30 each or more for admission to an old downtown Los Angeles movie palace, where largely amateur or obscure performers sang, lip-synced or danced to the fallen idol's hits. Most of the seats reserved for A-list guests went begging.

When the honoree took the stage at the end to join in a rendition of "We Are the World," he was flanked not by the likes of Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder, as he was when the famous song was first recorded, but by several Jackson impersonators.

Such impersonators usually model themselves on his "Thriller" persona, but the singer himself looked nothing like that in recent years.

There was intense public curiosity about his physical metamorphosis. Jackson often insisted that his wan complexion was the result of treatment for a skin disorder called vitiligo, but that did not explain why his once-broad nose became long, sleek and pertly tipped.

He publicly admitted to two nose operations, but cosmetic surgeons who studied his photographs surmised that he had undergone far more, possibly so many that he had destroyed the cartilage.

In 1996, Jackson married his former nurse, Debbie Rowe, who bore two of his three children, Prince Michael Jr. and Paris Michael Katherine. He did not disclose the identity of the mother of his third child, Prince Michael II.

He raised the children without their mothers and had them wear elaborate masks whenever they went out with him. Several months after Prince Michael II's birth, Jackson dangled the baby outside an upper-story hotel window in Berlin to show the child to fans assembled below. The incident led to accusations that the singer was an unfit father. He later acknowledged that he had shown poor judgment.

He is survived by his children; his parents; and siblings Maureen, Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, Randy, LaToya and Janet.

geoff.boucher@latimes.com

elaine.woo@latimes.com

Times staff writer Chris Lee contributed to this report.

Tricky Steps From Boy to Superstar

An Appraisal

By JON PARELES
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
June 26, 2009

Which Michael Jackson will be remembered? The unsurpassed entertainer, the gifted and driven song-and-dance man who wielded rhythm, melody, texture and image to create and promote the best-selling album of all time, “Thriller”? Or the bizarre figure he became after he failed in his stated ambition to outsell “Thriller,” and after the gleaming fantasy gave way to tabloid revelations, bitter rejoinders and the long public silence he was scheduled to break next month?

In the end, the superstar and the recluse were not so far apart.


Mr. Jackson sang and danced with his brothers at Rich Stadium in Buffalo in August 1984.
Photo: Associated Press

Mr. Jackson built his stardom on paradox. As a child star he was precocious; as an adult he was childlike. His only competition was himself. Within the razzle-dazzle of his songs, he sang about fears and uncertainties in that high, vulnerable voice: flinching from monsters in “Thriller,” wishing he could just “Beat It” when trouble began.

He was a racial paradox, too: an African-American whose audience was never segregated, but whose features grew more Caucasian and whose skin grew lighter through his career, to discomfiting effect. His own face had become a mask.

All of Mr. Jackson’s show-business skills — the ones he learned under his father’s sometimes brutal instruction and then within the Motown Records hitmaking assembly line — were at once a way to please the broadest possible audience and to shield himself from them, safe within his own spectacle.

Despite all his time onstage and on the air, Mr. Jackson stayed remote: styled, rehearsed and choreographed. He had one of history’s largest audiences, and it never really knew him.

There was no denying his talent. His voice leaped out of the radio in Jackson 5 songs like “I Want You Back,” even for those who didn’t see how he danced on television. He internalized Motown’s philosophy of making music for a broad audience — not just a black or white audience as pop grew increasingly segmented in the 1970s — and when he took over his own career, with “Off the Wall” in 1979, he applied that philosophy to the newest sounds he could find, in and out of discos.

His ambition was seductive when he urged “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough.” He offered something to everybody on “Thriller,” which may have been the most strategic crossover album to date: a duet with a Beatle in “The Girl Is Mine,” dizzying electronic beats in “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” rock guitar in “Beat It.”

His established stardom helped get his African-American face onto MTV, breaking what seemed like a color line, in what was a hugely beneficial step for both. Mr. Jackson wasn’t just an old-school show-business expert who could sing and dance onstage in real time; he was also more than ready for the music-video era, turning his songs into high-concept video clips that fit the chorus-line production of old Hollywood musicals into television-sized nuggets.


In November 1991, Mr. Jackson performed in his video "Black or White," his first release from his "Dangerous" album.
Photo: Associated Press

His dance moves were angular and twitchy, hinting at digital stops and starts rather than analog fluidity — except, of course, for his famous moonwalk, the image of someone striding gracefully without ever leaving center stage.

The world-beating success of “Thriller” was Mr. Jackson’s triumph and burden. He had the sales, the Grammy Awards, the screaming audiences in every country he toured. And he would spend the rest of his career trying to repeat the experience working many of the same maneuvers into his music: another duet, another rock guitar, another ratcheting dance track. Mr. Jackson never stopped being catchy, but behind the sheen some of the songs grew darker and stranger, like “Smooth Criminal,” with its intimations of violence, on the 1987 album “Bad.”

Mr. Jackson labored; his albums came four, five, six years apart. The hip-hop era had arrived, with its bluntly candid lyrics and quick-and-dirty productions, both contrary to Mr. Jackson’s style; he tried to keep up the crossover with raps from the Notorious B.I.G., but that didn’t buy him street credibility.

The songs grew increasingly divided between benevolent messages like “Heal the World” and spiteful ones like “Why You Wanna Trip on Me” on his 1991 album “Dangerous.” On his 1995 album “HIStory” — which started out as a greatest-hits collection but added a second album of new songs — Mr. Jackson’s fury boiled over in new songs like “They Don’t Care About Us” and “Tabloid Junkie.”

Part of the pop audience — and critics, too — took pleasure in Mr. Jackson’s setbacks. He had long been billing himself as the King of Pop, and the cover of “HIStory” shows him as a giant statue, the kind that gets toppled when tin-pot dictators (or pop idols) are overthrown.

The underlying sweetness that had made Mr. Jackson endearing, even at his strangest, had curdled, and he couldn’t resuscitate it for his final album, “Invincible,” in 2001. All the pieces he had put together, all the paradoxes that he had been able to resolve with sheer musicality, started to fall apart. He was working on a stadium spectacle for shows in London this summer, and we will never know if all his skill and showmanship could have given him a new start.

Michael Jackson (1958-2009)

BY DAVID BROWNE
http://www.rollingstone.com/
Posted Jun 25, 2009 8:46 PM


Michael Jackson, one of the most talented and eccentric performers in pop history, died of apparent cardiac arrest at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles at 2:26 p.m. PT today, June 25th. According to reports, he collapsed in his Los Angeles-area home and paramedics arriving on the scene found the superstar with no pulse; he was immediately rushed to the hospital. Although confusion about his status lingered (a spokesman for Sony Music, Jackson's one-time home, said he was just hearing "rumors" at 3:20 p.m. PT), Jackson was reportedly in a coma, and his death was confirmed just before 3:30 p.m. PT.

Jackson's health, which has been the source of speculation for nearly two decades, had recently returned to the headlines. Next month, Jackson was set to start a series of 50 sold-out concerts at London's O2 arena, but the singer postponed the first four shows of the "This Is It!" run in May and had reportedly not shown up for some rehearsals.

Over the course of a career that started 40 years ago, with the Jackson 5's first hit, 1969's "I Want You Back," Jackson was a towering and constantly enigmatic presence in pop music — a giant on the level of Presley, Sinatra and Dylan. He set an almost impossibly high standard in pop music on numerous levels: as a record maker (the silky funk and R&B on albums like Thriller and Off the Wall), dancer (his Moonwalk remains one of the most imitated steps), fashion icon (sequined gloves), video auteur (lavish clips for "Beat It" and "Thriller") and record seller (1982's Thriller was the Number One selling album of all time until it was recently deposed by the Eagles' Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975). His singing and music took in gospel, hard rock, funk, and middle-of-the-road balladry, and his vision of himself as an all-around entertainer propelled him to heights rarely seen in pop history.

At the same time Jackson's career was riddled with scandal (a 2005 trial on charges of child abuse allegations, during which he was found not guilty), ego (he demanded that MTV refer to him as "King of Pop") and bizarre publicity stunts (buying the remains of the Elephant Man). He reached an out-of-court settlement with at least one other child-abuse case, for $25 million, which contributed to the other dominating news about him over the last decade: his shaky finances. At various times he was on the verge of losing his Neverland Ranch. He retained an aura both of childlike wonder and canny business instincts (buying the Beatles' song catalog in the '80s).

Born August 29th, 1958, in Gary, Indiana, Jackson first blasted onto the pop scene with his brothers Tito, Jermaine, Jackie and Marlon in the Jackson 5. The quintet, overseen by their domineering father Joseph, was signed to Motown Records by Berry Gordy in 1969 and scored three immediate Number One hits with "I Want You Back," "ABC" and "The Love You Save."

"I'll never forget when Berry called me up and said we just signed this new act, the Jackson 5, five brothers," recalls their former manager, Shelley Berger. "He said, 'I want you to manage them, so come down to the studio and meet them.' It was 10 or 11 o'clock at night. I went to Cherokee recording studio, on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles, and I was introduced to these five young men. It was the first time I saw Michael Jackson and I thought, 'Oh my lord.' My favorite entertainer at the time was Sammy Davis Jr., and I thought, 'This is the new Sammy Davis.' "

Jackson was far more than a new Rat Pack heir, though. Although he began recording on his own shortly after the Jackson 5 broke through ("it's quite amazing that a young man can do a love song to a rat and have a Number One record," says Berger of Jackson's 1972 smash "Ben"), Jackson truly established himself as a consummate performer and (with Quincy Jones) record maker with his 1979 solo album Off the Wall. With it, he became a ubiquitous presence on the pop charts, MTV (after breaking through their racial barricade in '82) and in the culture, with a string of hits that included "Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough" (1979), "Rock With You" (1979), "Billie Jean" (1983), "Beat It" (1983), "Wanna Be Startin' Something' (1983), "Human Nature" (1983), "Say Say Say" with Paul McCartney (1983), "Bad" (1987), "The Way You Make Feel" (1987), and "Black or White "(1991). Although his speaking voice retained its airy breathiness, his singing voice could caress ("She's Out of My Life") or seethe ("Scream").

Starting with 1991's Dangerous, Jackson's record sales began to fall off, and his mix of pop and R&B was supplanted by hip-hop, a genre Jackson never appeared to be comfortable with. By the time of his last studio album, 2001's relative flop Invincible, Jackson's music had taken a back seat to the nonstop oddities in his private life. He was briefly married Lisa Marie Presley in 1993 and then to Debbie Rowe, with whom he had two children; a third, Prince Michael, was born via artificial insemination from an unidentified woman. His London concerts were intended to be the start of his latest attempt at a comeback, and he was reportedly in the midst of recording a new album.

Although his life and music (and even facial appearance) appeared to be a mess over the last decade, Jackson's contributions to pop were undeniable. At a time when black and white audiences were increasingly separated on the radio and charts, albums like Off the Wall and especially Thriller proved that a rainbow coalition of fans was still possible, as it had been in the pre-disco era. With Jackson, musical togetherness was never as off the wall as many thought.

More Michael Jackson:
Michael Jackson: The Rolling Stone Covers
1992 Cover: Michael Jackson's Dangerous Mind
Music World Mours Jackson's Death
Rolling Stone's Essential Michael Jackson Coverage

Tilting at Green Windmills

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Thursday, June 25, 2009

The Spanish professor is puzzled. Why, Gabriel Calzada wonders, is the U.S. president recommending that America emulate the Spanish model for creating "green jobs" in "alternative energy" even though Spain's unemployment rate is 18.1 percent -- more than double the European Union average -- partly because of spending on such jobs?

Calzada, 36, an economics professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, has produced a report that, if true, is inconvenient for the Obama administration's green agenda, and for some budget assumptions that are dependent upon it.

Calzada says Spain's torrential spending -- no other nation has so aggressively supported production of electricity from renewable sources -- on wind farms and other forms of alternative energy has indeed created jobs. But Calzada's report concludes that they often are temporary and have received $752,000 to $800,000 each in subsidies -- wind industry jobs cost even more, $1.4 million each. And each new job entails the loss of 2.2 other jobs that are either lost or not created in other industries because of the political allocation -- sub-optimum in terms of economic efficiency -- of capital. (European media regularly report "eco-corruption" leaving a "footprint of sleaze" -- gaming the subsidy systems, profiteering from land sales for wind farms, etc.) Calzada says the creation of jobs in alternative energy has subtracted about 110,000 jobs elsewhere in Spain's economy.

The president's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, was asked about the report's contention that the political diversion of capital into green jobs has cost Spain jobs. The White House transcript contained this exchange:

Gibbs: "It seems weird that we're importing wind turbine parts from Spain in order to build -- to meet renewable energy demand here if that were even remotely the case."

Questioner: "Is that a suggestion that his study is simply flat wrong?"

Gibbs: "I haven't read the study, but I think, yes."

Questioner: "Well, then. [Laughter.]"

Actually, what is weird is this idea: A sobering report about Spain's experience must be false because otherwise the behavior of some American importers, seeking to cash in on the U.S. government's promotion of wind power, might be participating in an economically unproductive project.

It is true that Calzada has come to conclusions that he, as a libertarian, finds ideologically congenial. And his study was supported by a like-minded U.S. think tank (the Institute for Energy Research, for which this columnist has given a paid speech). Still, it is notable that, rather than try to refute his report, many Spanish critics have impugned his patriotism because he faulted something for which Spain has been praised by Obama and others.

Judge for yourself: Calzada's report can be read at http://tinyurl.com/d7z9ye. And at http://tinyurl.com/ccoa5s you can find similar conclusions in "Yellow Light on Green Jobs," a report by Republican Sen. Kit Bond, ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee's subcommittee on green jobs and the new economy.

What matters most, however, is not that reports such as Calzada's and the Republicans' are right in every particular. It is, however, hardly counterintuitive that politically driven investments are economically counterproductive. Indeed, environmentalists with the courage of their convictions should argue that the point of such investments is to subordinate market rationality to the higher agenda of planetary salvation.

Still, one can be agnostic about both reports while being dismayed by the frequency with which such findings are ignored simply because they question policies that are so invested with righteousness that methodical economic reasoning about their costs and benefits seems unimportant. When the president speaks of "new green energy economies" creating "countless well-paying jobs," perhaps they really are countless, meaning incapable of being counted.

For fervent believers in governments' abilities to control the climate and in the urgent need for them to do so, believing is seeing: They see, through their ideological lenses, governments' green spending as always paying for itself. This is a free-lunch faith comparable to that of those few conservatives who believe that tax cuts always completely pay for themselves by stimulating compensating revenue from economic growth.

Windmills are iconic in the land of Don Quixote, whose tilting at them became emblematic of comic futility. Spain's new windmills are neither amusing nor emblematic of policies America should emulate. The cheerful and evidently unshakable confidence in such magical solutions to postulated problems is yet another manifestation -- Republicans are not immune: No Child Left Behind decrees that by 2014 all American students will be proficient in math and reading -- of what the late senator Pat Moynihan called "the leakage of reality from American life."

georgewill@washpost.com

Today's Tune: Steve Earle - Someday

(Click on title to play video)

There ain't a lot that you can do in this town
You drive down to the lake and then you turn back around
You go to school and you learn to read and write
So you can walk into the county bank and sign away your life

I work at the fillin' station on the interstate
Pumpin' gasoline and countin' out of state plates
They ask me how far into Memphis son, and where's the nearest beer
And they don't even know that there's a town around here

Someday I'm finally gonna let go
'Cause I know there's a better way
And I wanna know what's over that rainbow
I'm gonna get out of here someday

Now my brother went to college cause he played football
I'm still hangin' round cause I'm a little bit small
I got me a 67 Chevy, she's low and sleek and black
Someday I'll put her on that interstate and never look back

Someday I'm finally gonna let go
'Cause I know there's a better way
And I wanna know what's over that rainbow
I'm gonna get out of here someday

Words and music by Steve Earle

The State of Kansas vs Frank Schaeffer in the Murder of Dr. George Tiller

By George C. Michalopulos
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/index.shtml
June 11, 2009

Recently, the notorious abortionist Dr George Tiller was gunned down in his church in Wichita, Kansas. The killer was a man who appears to be a dysfunctional loner with grave psychological problems. Nobody in the pro-life movement has stepped forward to applaud him or his actions; routine condemnation has been the order of the day.


Frank Schaeffer

One man however, has bravely stepped forward to take responsibility for this act. Frank Schaeffer, a self-described former member of the “Republican Party hate machine,” a group that included his father Francis Schaeffer, Jerry Falwell, and Ronald Reagan among many others, recently offered a mea-culpa in the left-wing journal The Huffington Post. Schaeffer believes that his life’s work as a young man in the Evangelical movement directly led to this incident because he helped create a "climate of fear" with his documentary (Whatever Happened to the Human Race?) and other work that made such atrocities like Tiller's murder inevitable. As such, he puts himself in the pantheon artists like J. D. Salinger and Jodie Foster, whose ouvre inspired the murder of John Lennon and the attempted assassination of President Reagan.

On closer reading however, Schaeffer’s credibility is suspect from his first paragraph. He states that he “got out of the religious right (in the mid-1980s) and repented of [his] former hate-filled rhetoric.” Actually, he did no such thing. Sure, he may have abandoned the Evangelical Right, but as a new convert to Orthodoxy, he helped create an “Orthodox Right.” As for his abandonment of “hate-filled rhetoric,” one can read his various books and writings or view any of the numerous books and DVDs he produced since that time. There is more than enough venom against the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and secular humanism in the Schaeffer canon to choke a horse.

To be fair, it is possible that Schaeffer’s recollection of the “mid-1980s” extends to the years 2000-2002, in which he traveled the country barnstorming Orthodox Churches, telling them that America was going to hell in a hand-basket. One of his bugbears was abortion and the degradation of man. The other was the threat of Islamo-fascism. I first heard the term "Islamo-facism" in 2002 and it was from his lips. Schaeffer’s grave disappointment in President Bush actually started then, when he rightly saw Bush’s phrase that Islam was as a “religion of peace” as a sham. I got the impression sitting in the pews at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma that in Schaeffer's mind, Bush should have taken up the Cross instead of placating the Islamic masses who were “an implacable enemy” of our civilization.

It’s impossible to get into a man’s heart and judge him. That belongs to God alone. All I can do is look at his words and actions and note the inconsistencies. In earlier times there was a coherence to his message. Now I am not so sure. Not to put too fine a point on it but his recent writings don’t square with Orthodox teaching concerning abortion which appear to be increasingly liberal.

Unfortunately for Schaeffer, the Gospel and the historical record stands in his way (not that this matters to those who inhabit the febrile precincts of The Huffington Post). The Orthodox Church has preserved the deposit of the faith uninterrupted and inviolate. It was only the Orthodox Church that was both right-teaching but more importantly right-acting. These were Schaeffer’s words, not mine. I’ll never forget his analogy of Orthodoxy as a tripod, one leg was Scripture, the other was worship, and the third was praxis. It did no good, he told us, if we went to church on Sunday and to our abortion clinic jobs on Monday.

He woke us up from our sleepy, Greek Orthodox ghetto thinking in a startling fashion, telling us that the abortion wars were not about the Evangelicals and the Catholics only, but about us. He reminded us that these shocking words were in fact the common witness of the Church which it has maintained for 2000 years, and that we as Orthodox Christians would have to give an account to the Lord for our apathy in this matter. Maybe Schaeffer didn’t believe this right-wing hokum then, but he sure made us think that he did. A lot of other people who came to hear him speak believed it as well. Schaeffer’s “street cred” among Evangelicals contemplating Orthodoxy was significant. If they thought that he was a political liberal — especially regarding abortion — they would not have given Orthodoxy a second look.

The Orthodox Church may be miniscule in the United States, but our witness is greater than our numbers. The teachings which mandate against the murder of innocent life is one of Orthodoxy's gifts to Christendom. It was the Orthodox Church Fathers — with whom we are still in communion — who condemned abortion as a grave evil. It was the Orthodox Church which preserved the Didache, which still influences many non-Orthodox about correct Christian praxis, including the condemnation of abortion, even today.

Schaeffer not only appears less reticent about the moral prohibition against abortion, he seems to advocate it — at least in terms of supporting the arguments that blunt the moral objections against abortion. He holds back only about partial-birth abortion, that grisly procedure performed by Tiller that doesn't even qualify as a method of execution of those guilty of heinous war crimes. But even here his complaint is not moral but tactical. Partial-birth abortion makes the entire abortion regime “too all or nothing” Schaeffer says, and gives legitimacy to the anti-abortion crowd. We can’t have that. The enemy must be deprived of any moral standing whatsoever. In order to keep abortion legal, Schaeffer feels that we should “re-regulate [abortion] according to fetal development.” (Gee Frank, why didn’t we think of that?)


Frank Schaeffer and Francis Schaeffer

Moreover, wiser heads tell us that we should instead opt for a more sensible regime in which “sex education and condom distribution” would mitigate the number of abortions. Maybe we should listen to Levi Johnston, Bristol Palin’s baby Daddy who told Larry King that “condoms should be mandatory.” This position may be sensible to Schaeffer and his new friends who think Christians are, well, icky, but it is not Christian. It certainly isn’t Orthodox. To my knowledge, no Orthodox theologian believes that human beings are animals operating without any autonomy and that abortion is necessary to either cull the lesser orders or emancipate a woman from the results of one too many drinks. Maybe Schaeffer still hasn’t shaken off the Calvinism of his youth. I challenge him to find the Scripture, the canon, or the Church Father that makes these facile distinctions.

To be sure, we Orthodox share culpability in the advance of the culture of death because many of our leaders are silent and many laity are complicit. We even rewarded two Greek Orthodox Senators with Church honors although they voted to uphold President Clinton’s veto of the partial-birth abortion ban (Tiller's specialty); a procedure so gruesome and morally abhorrent that only three doctors in America perform it (and are very well-compensated for it).

This silence plays to Schaeffer’s advantage as the newly found “voice of reason” on the Left. Honest liberals who don’t know any better tend to look at Schaeffer and think, “here’s a Christian who makes sense.” Since Schaeffer jumped ship from the Religious Right to Orthodoxy, this must mean that the Orthodox are far more "tolerant" about the issues that matter to the Secular Left, they reason. (On the Left of course, "tolerance" is defined as any position that supports the Secular Left). Schaeffer's kitchen makeover doesn't just stop at abortion either. Support for homosexual marriage is also moving from the back to the front burner. Although cozying up to the Camp of Tolerance has won Schaeffer plaudits from secular elites, he will eventually have to make a decision — either own up to the true teachings of the faith or renounce them.

I began this essay commenting on Schaeffer's admission of guilt in the murder of Tiller. Besides himself, he mentions other culprits as well, such as the Roman Catholic Church, the Republican Party, and the pro-life movement. So what’s a man of real conviction to do? Schaeffer tries to make it all better by ending this essay with the words “I am sorry.”

I'm sorry? That's it? That's the best he can do?

Let me suggest a more principled way. If Schaeffer really feels guilty about Tiller’s murder, let him go to Wichita and turn himself in to the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s office. After all, the shooter was just the trigger-man. Rather, Schaeffer, along with his father, Reagan, Falwell and other miscreants are the real culprits because they created the "climate of hate" that caused the killing.

Will this happen? Not likely. The truth is that Schaeffer doesn't really feel guilty about the killing. The apology is merely a tactical ploy calculated to win favor from the secular left. Schaeffer isn’t intellectually honest. And he certainly isn’t true to the precepts of his faith either.

George C Michalopulos, is a layman in the Orthodox Church in America. He was born in Tulsa, OK where he resides and works. George is active in Church affairs, having served as parish council president at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church and as Senior Warden at Holy Apostles Orthodox Christian Church. Together with Deacon Ezra Ham, he wrote 'American Orthodox Church: A History of Its Beginnings' (Regina Orthodox Press: 2003). He is married to Margaret and has two sons, Constantine and Michael.

Bet on Neda's Side

By David Ignatius
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Wednesday, June 24, 2009


On one side you have all the instruments of repression in Iran, gathering their forces for a crackdown. On the other you have unarmed protesters symbolized by the image of Neda Agha Soltan, a martyred woman dying helplessly on the street, whose last words reportedly were: "It burned me."


A woman identified on Flickr as Neda Agha-Soltan is seen in an undated headshot uploaded to the site on June 22, 2009.
REUTERS/Flickr

Who's going to win? In the short run, the victors may be the thugs who claim to rule in the name of God: the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Basij militia and the other tools of an Islamic revolution that has decayed and hardened into mere authoritarianism. They have shown they are willing to kill enough of their compatriots to contain this first wave of change.

But over the coming months and years, my money is on the followers of the martyred Neda. They have exposed the weakness of the clerical regime in a way that Iran's foreign adversaries -- America, Israel, Saudi Arabia -- never could. They have opened a fundamental split in the regime. The rulers will try to bind this wound with force, and salve it with concessions, but neither approach will make the wound heal.

We are watching the first innings of what will be a long game in Iran. President Obama has recognized that with his gradually escalating rhetoric. Yesterday, he was using powerful language to describe the "timeless dignity" of the protesters and the "heartbreaking" images of Neda. He suggested that the mullahs cannot win a war of repression against their own people. "In 2009, no iron fist is strong enough to shut off the world from bearing witness to peaceful protests," he said.

Behind Obama's cool but confident talk is a judgment that, as one senior White House official puts it, the mullahs "can't put the genie back in the bottle." The official explained: "Iran will never be the same again. You don't have to know how this will end to know that. The regime has been challenged. They are now back on their heels."

A weakened Iran may seek the validation and legitimacy that would come from negotiations with the United States, presenting a diplomatic dilemma for Obama. Several American officials have told me that before the June 12 election, Tehran signaled Washington that it was ready for talks. Obama has tried to keep this door open, stressing at his news conference yesterday: "We have provided a path whereby Iran can reach out to the international community, engage and become part of international norms." But as long as the Basijs are clubbing and shooting protesters in the streets, negotiation will be a nonstarter.

As the mullahs' grip on power weakens, there are new opportunities to peel away some of their allies. The United States is moving quickly to normalize relations with Syria, and there's talk of working with the Saudis to draw elements of the radical Palestinian group Hamas away from its Iranian patrons, toward a coalition government that would be prepared to negotiate with Israel. Observes a White House official: "Iran's allies in the region have to be wondering, 'Why should we hitch our wagon to their starship?' "

Iranians light candles in front the image of Neda Agha Soltan, who was reportedly killed when hit by a bullet during a protest in Tehran two days ago, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Monday, June 22, 2009. Hundreds of supporters of reformist presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi attended a silent rally today.
(AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili)

The White House views the internal situation in Iran now as "a power play," in the words of one official. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have staged what amounts to a pro-regime coup. The Revolutionary Guard Corps is in the vanguard. There's talk that Ahmadinejad may appoint a fierce hard-liner, Ruhollah Hosseinian, as his new minister of intelligence. This hard-line group reminds me of Saddam Hussein's henchmen in Iraq.

But the opposition has tough leaders, too, with deep roots in the 1979 revolution. Mir Hossein Mousavi, the defeated presidential candidate, is no starry-eyed democrat. As prime minister, he supervised the Department of Investigations and Studies, which ran some Iranian operations in Lebanon in the early 1980s. Mousavi followers may move in coming weeks from street demonstrations to strikes and other economic protests. And behind the scenes is former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who has been dickering over the past week to build a coalition of mullahs for a collective leadership to replace Khamenei.

How will the conflict proceed? Jack Goldstone, a professor at George Mason University who studies revolutions, sees a three-stage process that leads to regime change. First, members of the elite defect and form an opposition; then the nation polarizes and coalitions are formed; and then the mass mobilization. These three elements of the revolutionary process are already present. The ferment will ripen as the regime tries to avert step four -- its demise.

The writer is co-host of PostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues. His e-mail address is davidignatius@washpost.com.

Ed McMahon dies at 86; Johnny Carson's sidekick on 'The Tonight Show' for 30 years

The television pioneer also was the host of 'Star Search' for 12 years and did commercials for hundreds of products and services.
By Dennis McLellan
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/
June 24, 2009

Ed McMahon, a television pioneer who warmed "The Tonight Show" couch for nearly 30 years as Johnny Carson's jovial sidekick and announcer, died early Tuesday. He was 86.


McMahon, shown in 1986, bolstered Johnny Carson with guffaws and "Hey-yo" and a resounding "H-e-e-e-e-e-ere's Johnny!" for 30 years.

McMahon died at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, according to his publicist, Howard Bragman. The cause of death was not announced, but McMahon had been in failing health for some time, with a number of issues that required his hospitalization.

Initially unable to work after breaking his neck in a fall in 2007, McMahon made news a year later when he defaulted on $4.8 million in mortgage loans and was facing the possible foreclosure of his multimillion-dollar Beverly Hills estate, which had been on the market for two years. An outside party purchased the mortgage and the McMahons were still living in the home.

"If you spend more money than you make, you know what happens. A couple of divorces thrown in, a few things like that," McMahon, in a neck brace, said in June 2008 on CNN's “Larry King Live,” where he was accompanied by his wife, Pam.

In 2008, McMahon filed a lawsuit against Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, two doctors and the owner of the home where he fell. The lawsuit was settled out of court last month, but the terms were not announced.

McMahon's health and financial woes marked an unexpected turn of events for the high-profile TV celebrity whose career began in 1949 and spanned more than half a century. During that time, he was rarely absent from the screen.

He was the host of the syndicated “Star Search” for 12 years and a co-host of "TV's Bloopers and Practical Jokes" with Dick Clark on NBC for nine years.

He also played a clown for eight years on the "Big Top" live circus show on CBS in the 1950s, and co-starred with Tom Arnold in a sitcom, "The Tom Show," on the WB network in the late 1990s.

And there were stints as host of the game shows "Missing Links," "Snap Judgment" and "Whodunnit?" in the 1960s and '70s.

In between, McMahon did commercials for Budweiser beer, Alpo dog food and hundreds of other products and services.

At one point in the early 1980s, he reportedly was the spokesman for no fewer than 37 banks around the country. And for years he served as the spokesman for American Family Publishers' national sweepstakes, famously informing Americans that "You may already have won $10 million!"

More recently, McMahon turned up in commercials for FreeCreditReport.com that poked fun at his financial woes. And he appeared with MC Hammer in a Cash4Gold commercial that aired during the 2009 Super Bowl.

But McMahon will be best remembered as the prototypal late-night talk-show announcer and second banana, who enthusiastically boomed out in his rolling baritone the familiar words, "And now, heeeeere's Johnny!"

As Carson's loyal, quick-to-laugh sidekick and comic foil, McMahon had so many catchphrases he could have done a medley of them in his nightclub act.


From left; Doc Severinsen, Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon in 1974.

And as a sign of his effect on pop culture, McMahon was the inspiration for Jeffrey Tambor's late-night talk-show sidekick Hank ("Hey, now!") Kingsley on Garry Shandling's 1990s sitcom "The Larry Sanders Show."

When Carson died in 2005 at 79, McMahon described his longtime friend and colleague as being "like a brother to me."

This is "very sad for me," Doc Severinsen, the longtime bandleader of "The Tonight Show" during the Carson era, told The Times. "Ed was one of those guys who was bigger than life and full of joy. Always lots of laughs around him. We worked together for 30 years and went through a lot of layers of life together."

Edward Leo Peter McMahon Jr. was born in Detroit on March 6, 1923.

As a boy, he fell in love with radio. But it wasn't the stars of the shows he most identified with; it was the announcers -- men like Paul Douglas, Bill Goodwin, Harry von Zell and Don Wilson.

By age 10, having made up his mind that he wanted to be a radio announcer, McMahon would practice doing commercials and creating his own radio shows using a flashlight for a microphone.

At 15, he landed his first announcing job of sorts: manning the microphone in a sound truck to promote a small circus that had come to town. From the start, McMahon displayed a natural talent for creating his own sales patter, which would pay off handsomely after World War II.

By then he had married his first wife, Alyce, and served four years as a stateside fighter pilot instructor in the Marine Corps. After the war, he majored in drama at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He returned to the service during the Korean War as a pilot of spotter planes.

After graduating from Catholic University in 1949, McMahon was offered a $75-a-week job at WCAU, a new television station in Philadelphia. He was co-host of a live program called "The Take Ten Show," which quickly became his own show, "Take Ten," named after the station's channel number. The show's guests included singers and dancers, fire-eaters and even Girl Scouts on roller skates selling cookies.

Within two years, McMahon was Philadelphia's "Mr. Television," serving as host of 13 programs, including a cooking show, a quiz show, the "Million Dollar Movie" and a pioneer breakfast-hour show called "Strictly for the Girls."

In 1958, McMahon met the man who would forever alter his career and fortunes: Johnny Carson, a rising young comedian, who hired him to be his announcer on a half-hour afternoon comedy quiz show on ABC.

McMahon's job consisted of introducing the contestants, doing the commercials and occasionally talking briefly to Carson at the beginning of the show. From the start, Carson made McMahon his comedy foil, and in so doing established an on-air relationship that would continue for nearly 34 years.

McMahon quickly became "Big Ed," the good-time guy who ate and drank too much.

"Ed is the announcer on the show," Carson once told his viewers, "only because he never passed the bar. In fact, Ed has never passed any bar."

When Carson moved to NBC to be host of “The Tonight Show” in October 1962, he took McMahon with him.


Among guests on the late-night show: comedian Bill Cosby.
February 5, 1968

McMahon did the audience warmups and commercials, and he performed in sketches. But his primary job, McMahon wrote in his 1998 autobiography, "For Laughing Out Loud," was to be Carson's straight man.

"I had to support him, I had to help him get to the punch line, but while doing it I had to make it look as if I wasn't doing anything at all. The better I did it, the less it appeared as if I was doing it," he wrote.

McMahon said, however, that his role on the show was never strictly defined: "I was there when he needed me, and when he didn't, I moved down the couch and kept quiet."

One night, however, he didn't keep quiet when he should have.

During the show, Carson was explaining to McMahon that scientists had just completed a multimillion-dollar study about mosquitoes and had discovered that for some reason, mosquitoes were particularly attracted to extremely "warm-blooded, passionate people."

Hearing that, McMahon instinctively slapped his wrist and said, "Whoops, there's another one."

As the audience roared, Carson glared icily at McMahon.

"Well, then," Carson said, picking up a comically oversized can of insect spray, "I guess I won't be needing this $500 prop then, will I?"

The audience laughed again, but McMahon knew he had ruined the bit by stepping outside his role as straight man and stealing Carson's laugh. It was, McMahon later wrote, the only time Carson was angry with him.

Carson was so upset, biographer Laurence Leamer wrote in "King of the Night: The Life of Johnny Carson," that he told his manager the next day to get rid of McMahon.

"Johnny was very angry," Mary Stark, the wife of "Tonight Show" producer Art Stark, told Leamer. "Art went to bat for Ed and said it would be absolute suicide to fire him. There would be no way to keep it quiet."

Despite the on-air misstep, Carson paid tribute to his sidekick on the duo's last "Tonight Show" broadcast on May 22, 1992.

"Ed has been a rock for 30 years, sitting over here next to me. . . . We have been friends for 34 years. A lot of people who work together on television don't necessarily like each other. This hasn't been true. . . . We're good friends; you can't fake that on television."

During his years on "The Tonight Show," McMahon did a nightclub act that he took to Las Vegas and appeared in plays and in several films, including the original "Fun With Dick and Jane," starring George Segal and Jane Fonda.

He also served as co-host of the United Negro College Fund's telethon with singer Lou Rawls for many years and as co-host of Jerry Lewis' annual Muscular Dystrophy Assn. telethon for more than three decades.


Carson and McMahon on set in 1963.

Down-to-earth and approachable, McMahon was known to respond freely to fans' questions -- as well as to the inevitable requests from fans such as the tourist in Florida who took his picture and then pleaded with him, "Say it for me."

"What's your name?" McMahon inquired.

After being told, he boomed, "Heeeeere's Debbie!"

McMahon's first two marriages ended in divorce.

In addition to his wife, McMahon's survivors include his children Jeffrey, Lex, Claudia, Katherine and Linda.

Memorial services are pending.

dennis.mclellan@latimes.com


AN APPRECIATION

Ed McMahon: A salute to the king of sidekicks

The late TV personality did other things, yes, but his greatest accomplishment may have been his partnership with Johnny Carson. 'My role was to make him look good while not looking too good myself.'

By ROBERT LLOYD, Television Critic
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/
June 24, 2009

Although he did other things in his 86 years, Ed McMahon, who died Tuesday in Los Angeles, will be remembered mostly as the man who sat next to Johnny Carson, except when more important celebrities came between them.


Carson and McMahon perform one of "The Tonight Show's" classic skits: Carnac the Magnificent.

Notwithstanding the dozen years of hosting "Star Search," a role in the 1997 Tom Arnold sitcom "The Tom Show," a high-profile Cash4Gold ad during the last Super Bowl and all that knocking on people's doors in the name of American Family Publishers, McMahon was a professional sidekick, a less-than-equal partner in an enterprise of which he was nevertheless a vital part: Thinking of Johnny, one proceeds quickly and naturally to Ed, who by dint of association was almost as famous as his boss -- I say "almost" to include that fraction of the world that may have seen or heard of Carson but never watched his show.

It's easy to underestimate his accomplishment -- or even to wonder whether it should be called an accomplishment at all. We live in a nation of aspiring quarterbacks, pitchers, lead singers and presidents, where we are told to dream big and have it all. (The vice presidency of the United States is regarded as a rarefied form of failure.) But in a world where everyone is innately a star, what does it mean to settle for life as a mere moon?

And yet, just as the moon plays upon the Earth, animating its tides and its werewolves, the sidekick is not without power of his (or her) own. His very presence is the proof that his presence is required. He may come as a straight man, a stooge, a teacher, an apprentice, a servant or pal, but he completes the star-hero in some way to their mutual advantage -- as a counterweight, an anchor, a witness, a frame for the picture, a setting for the stone. Like Jiminy Cricket, a conscience. Who is Prince Hal without Falstaff, Don Quixote sans Sancho Panza? Little John and Robin Hood, Horatio and Hamlet, Friday and Crusoe, Watson and Holmes, Tinker Bell and Peter Pan, Ethel and Lucy, Barney and Fred, Barney and Andy, Ed and Ralph, Rhoda and Mary, Willow and Buffy, and all those traveling companions to Doctor Who -- unequal, perhaps, yet inextricable.

We may reflexively regard him as slower, dumber, less handsome than the hero he shadows, but in practice the sidekick may be the smarter, funnier, faster, better-looking or more practical one. Less bound by convention or expectation, flexible rather than stiff-necked, he is free in ways forbidden the hero. His life is simpler, his soul less troubled. Ed Norton may be a dimwit, but he isn't tormented, like Ralph Kramden, by desperation and desire. Spock is cooler than Kirk. It seems like the better job.


A long run

Not every talk-show host has employed a sidekick in the McMahon mold. Merv Griffin had Arthur Treacher, a very tall British character actor who earlier specialized in butlers, appropriately, and, after McMahon, the best of the breed. Regis Philbin played second banana to Rat Packer Joey Bishop on his short-lived 1960s late-night show. But Dick Cavett was a solo act; Mike Douglas relied on changing celebrity co-hosts; and Jay Leno had no one on his couch. Still, it seems a sign of respect to McMahon (and to the institution he served) that when Conan O'Brien took the reins of "The Tonight Show," he had a partner in place, original "Late Night" sidekick Andy Richter.

Ed and Johnny were "as close as two non-married people can be," as McMahon wrote in his book, "Here's Johnny: Memories of Johnny Carson, 'The Tonight Show' and 46 Years of Friendship." McMahon, who was only two years older than Carson, began working as his announcer in 1957 on the game show "Who Do You Trust?" and accompanied him to "The Tonight Show" in 1962, where they kept on for 30 years.

An uncharitable or undiscerning critic might say McMahon had an easy job: Laugh at the boss' jokes, read a few cue cards, sell a little dog food, cheerfully absorb whatever cracks are made at his expense, slide further down the couch as the evening's guests arrive. (Phil Hartman's "Saturday Night Live" impression of him -- the over-hearty laugh, the booming "You are correct, sir" -- has replaced the actual McMahon in the minds of a couple of generations of viewers.) But the way McMahon told it, that was the point: "My role was to make him look good while not looking too good myself," he wrote, and "to get Johnny to the punch line while seeming to do nothing at all." Carson, for his part, left the air saying, "This show would have been impossible to do without Ed."

There is a kind of genius in knowing how to live with a genius. Did anyone want to grow up to be Ed McMahon? Maybe not. (Though I would rather be Illya Kuryakin than Napoleon Solo.) But they also serve who only sit and laugh -- and cry "Hey-yo!" once in a while. Of all the things Ed provided Johnny, continuity was perhaps the most meaningful: Guests came and went; wives came and went; the world turned. But where there was Johnny, there was always Ed, the witness, the audience, one of us.

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

Murder Boys -- Not Flies! Says PETA

by Humberto Fontova (more by this author)
http://www.humanevents.com/
Posted 06/23/2009 ET

“Human beings often don't think before they act,” laments PETA while explaining their reaction to President Obama's unthinking fly "execution." "We believe that people, where they can be compassionate, should be, for all animals.”

Close on the heels of their consciousness-raising campaign for fly compassion, PETA has launched a vegetarian campaign using Che Guevara's 24 year old granddaughter, Lydia, dolled up in commie beret and topless, though strategically covered by twin bandoliers of carrots. “Join the Vegetarian Revolution!” reads the campaign's slogan which will debut in Argentina (no less!, where lamb is considered a vegetable) this fall, then goes international.


Lydia Guevara poses on the set of her PETA photo shoot. (AP)

“Revolution runs in my blood,” chirped Lydia in a recent interview with Spain'sEl Mundo. “I will never soil the great things achieved by my grandfather.”

“It's a homage of sorts to her grandfather,” explains PETA publicity chief, Michael McGraw about their ad.

Swatting a fly involves "a lack of thinking," according to PETA. But paying homage to a Stalinist mass-murderer who craved “millions of atomic victims for the victory of socialism!” and reveled in shattering the skulls of teen-aged boys convulsed in death throes, apparently involves ratiocination of the highest order. Lydia Guevara's attire and raised fist, a tribute to the totalitarian movement that killed more people in the 20th century than the Black Death killed in the 14th , apparently also shows topnotch cerebral acuity by PETA .

For the sake of this report let's overlook the mass-murder of humans, which doesn't seem to trouble PETA. Animal rightists, however, might be interested in Lydia's grandad's treatment of puppies. After all, by their own admission, this PETA ad campaign is "a homage" to Che.

"Kill the dog, Felix, But don't shoot him--strangle him," writes Che in his diaries about an incident during the Anti-Batista skirmishing in Cuba's hills. "Very slowly Felix pulled out his rope, made a noose and wrapped it around the little animals neck--then he started tightening," writes Che.

"When Felix had picked him up, the puppy's tail had been wagging happily. Naturally, as was the usual case with these men, the puppy had expected the usual petting and caresses. Now Felix grimaced as he tightened the noose on the agonized puppy. "That happy wagging of the tail turned convulsive," writes Che. "Finally the puppy let out a smothered little yelp. It seemed a long time till the end finally came," recounts Che. "Finally after one little spasm the puppy lay still, his little head resting over a branch."

For some reason Che saw fit to describe such stuff in loving details.

More worrisome for PETA, they should be aware that the regime Lydia's granddad co-founded is in hot-water with animal rightists for their enslavement and torture of dolphins.

"Cuba has become the world's leading exporter of live dolphins for "dolphinariums" and other controversial "swim-with-dolphin" tourist projects," reported the latin american news agency Noticias Aliadas back in August 2003.

"Newly captured Atlantic bottlenosed dolphins bring $40,000 to $70,000 on the international market, though park owners recoup that investment quickly by charging tourists up to $150 to swim with and touch the popular creatures...According to media reports, a key figure in Cuba's dolphin trade is Celia Guevara, the 39-year-old daughter of the famous revolutionary. Havana's National Aquarium, where Guevara is chief marine mammal veterinarian, recently provided six dolphins to Dolphin Fantaseas....The dolphins' conditions at that park were recently investigated by Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society chief executive Niki Entrup, and are now the subject of protests orchestrated by Toronto activist Gwen McKenna and the German Dolphin Conservation Society."

In the interest of the objectivity that characterizes my writing, I'll point out that not that all dogs within Che's Cuban circles were brutalized. In fact one was pampered shamelessly. This dog belonged to Herman Marks, one of Che Guevara's very, very few trusted friends in Cuba. Marks was a U.S. ex-convict, Marine-deserter, rapist and mental-case, who at age 30 was convicted of raping a teenage girl and sent to the state prison in Waupun, Wisconsin for 3 1/2 years. Then he slipped into Cuba and joined Che's band of rebels, whereupon his zeal as executioner saw him catapulted to captain in short order.

“In La Cabana, Marks would bring his pet dog to work with him,” recalls former political prisoner, Robert Martin Perez, who suffered 28 years in Castro's Gulag. "A huge dog that looked like a German shepherd/ hound cross of some kind. He followed Marks everywhere."

“Whatever his pedigree, the dog's specialty was happily bounding up after the firing squad volley and lapping up the blood that oozed from the shattered heads and bodies of the firing squad victims.”

PETA and Lydia might get a tingle up their leg to learn how Cuban blackbirds also benefited from Lydia's granddad's policies."Those firing squads had been going off daily since January 7, 1959, the day Che Guevara entered Havana,” recalls former political prisoner Hiram Gonzalez. “ It didn't take long for the birds to catch on. Flocks of them had learned to perch atop the wall that surrounded La Cabana Fortress and in the nearby trees. The firing squad volleys became their dinner bell. After each volley they swooped down to peck at the bits of bone, blood and flesh that littered the ground. Those birds sure grew fat."

- Mr. Fontova is the author of Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant

Persian Paranoia

Iranian leaders will always believe Anglo-Saxons are plotting against them.

By Christopher Hitchens
http://www.slate.com/
Posted Monday, June 22, 2009, at 12:43 PM ET

I have twice had the privilege of sitting, poorly shaved, on the floor and attending the Friday prayers that the Iranian theocracy sponsors each week on the campus of Tehran University. As everybody knows, this dreary, nasty ceremony is occasionally enlivened when the scrofulous preacher leads the crowd in a robotic chant of Marg Bar Amrika!—"Death to America!" As nobody will be surprised to learn, this is generally followed by a cry of Marg Bar Israel! And it's by no means unknown for the three-beat bleat of this two-minute hate to have yet a third version: Marg Bar Ingilis!

Some commentators noticed that as "Supreme Leader" Ali Khamenei viciously slammed the door on all possibilities of reform at last Friday's prayers, he laid his greatest emphasis on the third of these incantations. "The most evil of them all," he droned, "is the British government." But the real significance of his weird accusation has generally been missed.

One of the signs of Iran's underdevelopment is the culture of rumor and paranoia that attributes all ills to the manipulation of various demons and satans. And, of course, the long and rich history of British imperial intervention in Persia does provide some support for the notion. But you have no idea how deep is the primitive belief that it is the Anglo-Saxons—more than the CIA, more even than the Jews—who are the puppet masters of everything that happens in Iran.

The best-known and best-selling satirical novel in the Persian language is My Uncle Napoleon, by Iraj Pezeshkzad, which describes the ridiculous and eventually hateful existence of a family member who subscribes to the "Brit Plot" theory of Iranian history. The novel was published in 1973 and later made into a fabulously popular Iranian TV series. Both the printed and televised versions were promptly banned by the ayatollahs after 1979 but survive in samizdat form. Since then, one of the leading clerics of the so-called Guardian Council, Ahmad Jannati, has announced in a nationwide broadcast that the bombings in London on July 7, 2005, were the "creation" of the British government itself. I strongly recommend that you get hold of the Modern Library paperback of Pezeshkzad's novel, produced in 2006, and read it from start to finish while paying special attention to the foreword by Azar Nafisi (author of Reading Lolita in Tehran) and the afterword by the author himself, who says:

In his fantasies, the novel's central character sees the hidden hand of British imperialism behind every event that has happened in Iran until the recent past. For the first time, the people of Iran have clearly seen the absurdity of this belief, although they tend to ascribe it to others and not to themselves, and have been able to laugh at it. And this has, finally, had a salutary influence. Nowadays, in Persian, the phrase "My Uncle Napoleon" is used everywhere to indicate a belief that British plots are behind all events, and is accompanied by ridicule and laughter. ... The only section of society who attacked it was the Mullahs. ... [T]hey said I had been ordered to write the book by imperialists, and that I had done so in order to destroy the roots of religion in the people of Iran.

Fantastic as these claims may have seemed three years ago, they sound mild when compared with the ravings and gibberings that are now issued from the Khamenei pulpit. Here is a man who hasn't even heard that his favorite conspiracy theory is a long-standing joke among his own people. And these ravings and gibberings have real-world consequences of which at least three may be mentioned:

1. There is nothing at all that any Western country can do to avoid the charge of intervening in Iran's foreign affairs. The deep belief that everything—especially anything in English—is already and by definition an intervention is part of the very identity and ideology of the theocracy.

2. It is a mistake to assume that the ayatollahs, cynical and corrupt as they may be, are acting rationally. They are frequently in the grip of archaic beliefs and fears that would make a stupefied medieval European peasant seem mentally sturdy and resourceful by comparison.

3. The tendency of outside media to check the temperature of the clerics, rather than consult the writers and poets of the country, shows our own cultural backwardness in regrettably sharp relief. Anyone who had been reading Pezeshkzad and Nafisi, or talking to their students and readers in Tabriz and Esfahan and Mashad, would have been able to avoid the awful embarrassment by which everything that has occurred on the streets of Iran during recent days has come as one surprise after another to most of our uncultured "experts."

That last observation also applies to the Obama administration. Want to take a noninterventionist position? All right, then, take a noninterventionist position. This would mean not referring to Khamenei in fawning tones as the supreme leader and not calling Iran itself by the tyrannical title of "the Islamic republic." But be aware that nothing will stop the theocrats from slandering you for interfering anyway. Also try to bear in mind that one day you will have to face the young Iranian democrats who risked their all in the battle and explain to them just what you were doing when they were being beaten and gassed. (Hint: Don't make your sole reference to Iranian dictatorship an allusion to a British-organized coup in 1953; the mullahs think that it proves their main point, and this generation has more immediate enemies to confront.)

There is then the larger question of the Iranian theocracy and its continual, arrogant intervention in our affairs: its export of violence and cruelty and lies to Lebanon and Palestine and Iraq and its unashamed defiance of the United Nations, the European Union, and the International Atomic Energy Agency on the nontrivial matter of nuclear weapons. I am sure that I was as impressed as anybody by our president's decision to quote Martin Luther King—rather late in the week—on the arc of justice and the way in which it eventually bends. It was just that in a time of crisis and urgency he was citing the wrong King text (the right one is to be found in the "Letter From a Birmingham Jail"), and it was also as if he were speaking as the president of Iceland or Uruguay rather than as president of these United States. Coexistence with a nuclearized, fascistic theocracy in Iran is impossible even in the short run. The mullahs understand this with perfect clarity. Why can't we?

- Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, now out in paperback.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2221020/

A Call for American Boldness in Iran

By Daniel Pipes
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Tuesday, June 23, 2009

In a striking coincidence, two very different expressions of Iranian dissent took place exactly simultaneously on two continents on Saturday, June 20. Between them, the Islamic Republic of Iran faces an unprecedented challenge.

One protest took place on the streets of Iran, where thousands of Iranians fed up with living under a religious tyranny defied Supreme Leader Ali Khamene'i's diktat that they accept the results of the June 12 presidential election, whereby President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad supposedly defeated his main challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi by a lopsided margin.

The protestors and Mousavi have both shown bravery but the former seem more radical than the latter. Mousavi's website announces that he does not seek confrontation with the "brothers" in Iran's security forces nor does he wish to challenge the "sacred system" instituted by Ayatollah Khomeini. Rather, the website declares, "We are confronting deviations and lies. We seek to bring reform that returns us to the pure principals of the Islamic Republic."

This timidity stands in contrast to the bold stance of the street protestors who shout "Death to the dictator" and even "Death to Khamene'i," an echo of the regime's perpetual slogans "Death to America" and "Death to Israel," implying a wish not just to correct Khomeini's "sacred system" but an aspiration to terminate the regime dominated by mullahs (Iran's clerics).

The other protest took place in a vast exhibition hall just north of Paris, where the largest and best organized Iranian opposition group, the Mujahedeen-e Khalq or the People's Mujahedeen of Iran (MeK or PMOI) joined with smaller groups to hold their annual meeting. About 20,000 people attended it, including me.

The assembly's most emotional moment came when the anxious crowd learned that their peaceful counterparts marching in Iran had been killed or wounded. At that moment, freedom of assembly in France contrasted most starkly with its denial in Iran. Later that day came confirmation of the regime's obsessive fears of the MeK, when deputy police chief, Ahmad Reza Radan, blamed MeK "thugs" for his own government's violence against the peaceful demonstrators.

The MEK mounted an impressive display in France, as it did at the last meeting I attended, in 2007, with dignitaries, made-for-television pageantry, and a powerful speech by its leader, Maryam Rajavi. Like the street protestors, she also called for the demise of the Khomeinist regime.
In a 4,000-word speech, she steered blessedly clear of attacks on the United States or Israel and excluded the conspiracy-theory mongering so common to Iranian political life. Instead, she:

* Ridiculed the regime for portraying the demonstrators as Western agents.
* Bitterly complained that corpses of demonstrators were "wrapped in American flags" and then trampled upon.

* Condemned the regime's "crimes" in Iraq and its "export of terrorism" to Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, and Afghanistan.

* Predicted that "the beginning of the end" of the Islamic Republic of Iran is underway.

* Critiqued the Obama administration for giving yet another chance to the regime, noting that the Bush administration had met its representatives 28 times to no avail.

Rajavi has rightly called for a stronger U.S. policy toward Tehran, explaining in a recent interview that "The West can stop the nuclear program if it stands up to the mullahs."

Sadly, standing up to the mullahs has never been American policy. Jimmy Carter meekly accepted their rule. Ronald Reagan sent them arms. To win their favor, Bill Clinton put the MEK on the terrorism list. George W. Bush did not foil their nuclear weapons project. And Barack Obama hopes to gain concessions from Tehran on the nuclear weapons issue by distancing himself from the dissidents.

Instead, flux in Iran should invite boldness and innovation. It is time, finally, for a robust U.S. policy that encourages those yelling "Death to Khamene'i" and that takes advantage of the hyperbolic fear the MeK arouses in Iran's ruling circles (first step: end the MeK's preposterous listing as a terrorist organization).

As Rep. Peter Hoekstra (Republican of Michigan) notes, regime change in Iran becomes the more urgent if the mullahs will soon deploy nuclear weapons. The vital and potentially victorious movement building both on the streets of Iran and in the halls of Europe better represents not only Western values but also Western interests.

Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Misremembering Reagan

The Gipper still has lessons to teach — just not the ones we usually hear

RAMESH PONNURU
National Review
July 6, 2009 Issue
http://www.nationalreview.com

'Republicans have attempted to lead with one eye on the rear-view mirror, gazing at the fading reflection of Ronald Reagan. . . . But Ronald Reagan cannot win the victory for Republicans in [the next election], and the party had best get busy finding fresh ideas and new leaders.” Ralph Reed wrote those words after the Republicans lost the election — the election of 1998.

Since then, Reagan’s reflection has faded still more. Yet the tendency Reed lamented has only gotten stronger. Reagan’s death, the reevaluation of his presidency by historians (including liberal historians), and, above all, the political failure of George W. Bush have made conservatives cling to Reagan’s memory more fiercely. In 2008, during the first presidential-primary campaign since Reagan died, each of the Republican candidates presented himself as his reincarnation. After Republicans lost the election, conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly offered familiar advice: “Republicans should follow Ronald Reagan’s example.” Conservative congressman Patrick McHenry is running a PAC that seeks “to return the Republican party to its Ronald Reagan roots.” The Heritage Foundation’s website seeks to resolve today’s policy debates by asking, “What would Reagan do?”

Much of the debate over the Republican party’s future concerns Reagan. Should the party return to Reaganism, as the “traditionalists” argue, or move beyond it, as the “reformers” say? At a recent party gathering, Jeb Bush was reported to have thrown in his lot with the reformers and urged the party to let go of Reagan’s memory. (There are conflicting accounts of what Bush said.) Several conservatives who had previously been fans of the former Florida governor attacked him lustily and in public for the alleged slight.

Liberals deride the Right’s fixation with Reagan, and even some conservatives roll their eyes about it. When invoking Reagan, conservatives are prone to two characteristic vices: hero-worship and nostalgia. To hear some conservatives talk, you would forget that Reagan was a human being who made mistakes, including in office. You would certainly forget that movement conservatives were frequently exasperated with Reagan’s administration.

Nostalgia is the more serious charge. Conservatives may be looking for a presidential candidate to present himself as “the next Reagan” — the Republican field in 2008 certainly thought so — but the public at large is not. It has, after all, been more than 20 years since Reagan held office. The country has changed, and many observers say that his agenda and even his political vision are now obsolete. “I love Reagan too,” Republican strategist Mike Murphy recently wrote in Time. “But demographics no longer do.”

Liberals may disdain what they call the “cult of Reagan,” but Republicans’ affection and respect for the man who won the Cold War seems a lot less cultish than their own infatuation with President Obama. Reagan was the most consequential president of the last 35 years, the most successful Republican president of the last century, and the president most associated with the conservative movement. Of course conservatives should try to learn from his example.

If, that is, they can decide which Reagan to learn from. There are quite a few on offer. There is the sunny, irenic Reagan. At a reception following the unveiling of a statue of Reagan in the Capitol, RNC chairman Michael Steele said, “You never heard a harsh word come out of his mouth.” (What about the “evil empire” and “welfare queens”?) There is the libertarian Reagan: Former congressman and media personality Joe Scarborough recently complained that Republicans had gone astray by forgetting the maxim, which he attributed to Reagan, that the government is best that governs least. (This was right after Scarborough complained that Republicans had gone too far in deregulating Wall Street.) The liberals’ Reagan, meanwhile, is defined less by his principles than by the compromises he made to them: less by the large tax cuts he won than by the smaller tax increases he accepted.

The conservatives who summon Reagan’s ghost for use in today’s arguments usually use him as a stand-in for doctrinal purity. He illustrates the alleged axiom that true-blue conservatism — these days we would probably have to say true-red — wins elections. His leadership of his party was bookended by moderate-Republican failure. Presidents Nixon and Ford brought their party so low that in their aftermath it considered changing its name. The elder President Bush wasn’t just a one-termer; his vote in successive elections dropped more than that of any president since Hoover (another moderate Republican, as historically minded conservatives will inform you). Many conservatives draw the lesson that the GOP is better-off without its non-Reaganite politicians, now dubbed RINOs, for “Republicans in name only.”

Such Republicans regularly put up roadblocks in President Reagan’s path, and he was frequently tart about them in his diaries. Yet he never supported primary campaigns against them. He challenged an incumbent Republican in a primary himself, of course, in 1976. But he did not support his former aide Jeffrey Bell in his 1978 primary against New Jersey senator Clifford Case. His White House even supported Jim Jeffords of Vermont. After he won the battle over the basic direction of the party, he seems to have concluded in practice that further intra-party fighting was counterproductive. He may have been on to something. It is melancholy for conservatives to contemplate that yesterday’s liberal Republican senators have been replaced far more often by liberal Democrats than by conservative Republicans.

Reagan’s practice ran counter to our superficial impressions of him in other respects, too. “It’s true hard work never killed anyone,” he famously quipped, “but I figure, why take the chance?” Reagan had his reasons for wanting his political career to seem effortless. It can be useful for a politician to be underestimated, and for his utterances to sound like pure expressions of common sense. But we now have an extensive documentary record that shows that Reagan worked extremely hard both on his policies and on his rhetoric.

As a conservative spokesman, the governor of the largest state, and then a presidential-candidate-in-waiting, Reagan had taken and defended positions on a multitude of issues. Compared with some later Republican leaders, such as the first Bush and Sen. John McCain, Reagan cared about a broader range of policies and knew more about them. He didn’t make up positions on the fly or go with his gut. He had also honed his explanations of why he sought some reforms and rejected other proposals. Steven Hayward, the second volume of whose excellent history The Age of Reagan appears this summer, points out that it took practice and attention as well as talent for Reagan to become the Great Communicator. Reagan could ramble through responses to questions and even occasionally flub his lines. But he concentrated on getting his most important messages across, and doing it succinctly.

Are Reagan’s would-be successors willing to follow this example? Bush, Dole, Bush, and McCain didn’t. None of them could talk, and some of them seemed to disdain the enterprise. One hopes that Sarah Palin is doing her homework on national policy issues behind the scenes, prepared to reemerge with an unquestioned mastery of them. In her career in national politics, she has given one fine speech, at last year’s party convention. Nothing as good has followed.

Contemporary Republican politicians might find two features of Reagan’s rhetoric instructive. The first is that when he was not appearing before movement audiences, his conservatism was rarely explicit. He did not advertise his conformity to a school of thought even when he did, in fact, conform. He did not, that is, sell his policies on the basis of their conservatism. Rather the reverse: He used attractive policies to get people to give his conservatism a look. Hayward notes that Reagan’s televised speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign was “quite ideological,” but that Reagan presented the choice before Americans as “up or down” rather than “left or right.”

The second is that the American Founding loomed large in Reagan’s rhetoric. The political scientist Andrew Busch has found that during his presidency Reagan mentioned the Founders more than his four immediate predecessors combined. He mentioned the Constitution ten times in his memoirs, compared with zero for those predecessors. Those of us who believe that our political inheritance from the Founders is what conservatives ought to be trying to conserve will naturally find this fact heartening. No serious student of Reagan can believe that his constitutionalism was other than sincere. It also served him well politically. It promoted unity among his sometimes fractious supporters. It rooted him in American tradition even as his opponents called him a radical. It provided a connective thread, a coherence, a seriousness, and even a nobility to his politics that it might otherwise have lacked.

Reagan’s constitutionalism puts him squarely in the “traditionalist” camp of today’s intra-conservative debates. Taken in full, though, his record shows how misconceived those debates are. Some of his current admirers make him out to be a supremely gifted exponent of a timeless conservative platform, as though he were merely Barry Goldwater with better public-relations skills. Yet Reagan differed in both his program and, especially, his emphases.

John O’Sullivan has written that “Reaganism was not an innovation in political thought”:

It was conservative common sense applied to the problems that had developed in the 1960s and 1970s. To the stagflation of the economy, it applied tax cuts and the monetary control of inflation; to the market-sharing cartel of OPEC, it applied price decontrol and the “magic of the marketplace”; and to the revived threat from the Soviet Union it applied a military build-up and economic competition.

These policies were what most conservatives would have recommended as answers to these problems at most times in [the 20th] century. The only novel thing about them is that they were actually carried out.

That is not quite right. Reagan was an innovator in key respects. It is true, for example, that most conservatives harbored a preference for lower spending and lower taxes. But the previous conservative orthodoxy was content to wait until some future day when spending was lowered to embark on tax cuts. Hence Goldwater voted against Kennedy’s tax reductions. Reagan redefined the conservative orthodoxy on this issue.

I quote O’Sullivan at length because he nonetheless grasps something that other admirers of Reagan have scanted: Reaganism succeeded as statecraft because it applied characteristically conservative insights to the challenges of his time. Reagan wanted to reform entitlement programs, just as Goldwater did; but he saw that the country had more pressing needs, such as for tax reduction. The tight connection between Reagan’s agenda and the nation’s circumstances tends to elude us these days — so much so that we misquote one of his signature lines. Everyone remembers that he said in his first inaugural address that “government is not the solution, government is the problem.” Everyone forgets that the line began “In this present crisis.” He wasn’t saying that government was always “the problem,” let alone that it would always be the problem in the same way that it was in 1981.

It is thus a mistake to assume that keeping true to the spirit of Reaganism requires contemporary conservatives to press forward with his administration’s program: to keep trying to reduce the top income-tax rate, for example, with the same urgency he brought to the task. A conservative today should share Reagan’s conservative preference for lower taxes and a less socially harmful tax code. But he might conclude that, in part because Reagan changed our circumstances, the tax that most needs lowering today is the payroll tax. Or he might conclude that a free-market reform of health care is more important now than any changes to the tax code.

Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana says that Republicans must be the party of hope, not the party of memory. Reagan managed to lead both parties simultaneously. George Will, correcting a widespread misunderstanding at the time Reagan took office, said that he did not wish to take the country back to the past: He wanted to restore the past’s way of facing the future. Conservatism must constantly adapt. Burke knew it. So did Reagan. He was simultaneously a traditionalist and a reformer. Let all conservatives be so.

Today's Tune: Patti Scialfa - Lucky Girl

(Click on title to play video)

I never wanted nothing
Baby you know it's true
I never wanted nothing
The way I wanted you
I kept me hands clean
I walked a good line
I knew someday baby
Someday you'd be mine
And when fortune came to town
I was standing in with the unsatisfied
So I lay my wishes down
For the things that money can't buy

Oh I guess I'm a lucky girl
Oh baby you know it's true
Oh I guess I'm a lucky girl
I've been lucky since I found you

I used to play it safe
Yea that's what I'd do
I never wanted nothing
Nothing I could lose
I was just frightened of
Of the price you pay
For every good thing
That ever comes your way
I'm going to lay my worries down
Lay them down baby
Yeah I can't complain
'Cause I'm shining (shining) down
Like a new link in an old chain

Oh I guess I'm a lucky girl
I've been lucky since I found you
I'm a lucky girl
I'm a lucky girl
I'm a lucky girl
I'm a lucky girl

Yeah I got lucky baby
Yeah 'cause I got wise
You can run but you can never hide
Build a house of steel
Raise a cross of stone
When that cold wind blows
It finds you all alone
And when fortune came to town
I was standing in with the unsatisfied
So I lay my wishes down
For the things that money can't buy

Oh I guess I'm a lucky girl
Oh baby you know it's true
Oh I guess I'm a lucky girl
I've been lucky since I found you
Oh I guess I'm a lucky girl
Mmmm baby you know it's true
Oh I guess I'm a lucky girl
I've been lucky since I found you
I've been lucky since
I've been lucky since
I've been lucky since I found you
I've been lucky since
I've been lucky since
I've been lucky since I found you
Oh guess I'm a lucky girl
Oh such a lucky girl
Oh yes I'm a lucky girl
Oh such a lucky girl

By Patti Scialfa and Mike Campbell