Pakistan on the Brink

By: Steve Schippert
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Wednesday, May 06, 2009

The White House revealed last week that General David Petraeus had given a stark and urgent warning about Pakistan. The embattled and torn nation now finally finds itself upon the precipice and the next two weeks, the General assured, are critical for the very survival of Pakistan. And if the nuclear power fails to meet the challenge laid before it by al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the dire consequences require little elaboration: Terrorists with direct or indirect control over nuclear weapons.

The situation is critical and the consequences both dire and realistic enough to command the American public’s greater attention. It is therefore important for us to understand the coming news cycles before they get here rather than being left to the mercy of a dizzying flurry of information when time is critical.

Pakistan has spent the better part of the past eight years denying the necessity to confront and eliminate the extremist elements within its borders and, especially in the case of its intelligence services, within its institutions.

The more moderate and democratic among Pakistanis have deferred the conflict sought actively by the Taliban and al-Qaeda by instead identifying the United States and former president Pervez Musharraf as the greater threats to a peaceful and democratic Pakistan. Pakistan’s military, which must do the dirty work of actually fighting the violent terrorists who have designs on the Pakistani state, has likewise deferred direct conflict by projecting greater ire and suspicion onto India. Unfortunately for this thinking of convenience, neither the United States nor India has designs of conquest within Pakistan. Such cannot be said of the Taliban-al-Qaeda alliance, which is now barely 60 miles from Islamabad.

With the Pakistani surrender in February, where the Taliban and al-Qaeda were ceded the Swat district and permitted to enforce their strict Sharia law there, the terrorists were not eased by the Pakistani relenting nor impressed with favorable negotiations. They were, as terrorists in conquest are, emboldened by the clear display of fear and weakness. And instead of laying down their arms as the terms of the co-signed ‘peace’ agreement called for, they raised them and stormed into the neighboring Buner district and took it, too, by force.

This seems to have woken some in Pakistan from their fearful slumber of procrastination. Pakistan has fought back to re-take Buner. But thus far, the manner of its fight still leaves much room for doubt about their commitment to defeating the terrorists among them. Rather than employ its most professional military forces in what must now be recognized as a fight for its very survival, Pakistan has chosen instead to again rely on less capable paramilitary forces and imprecise area weapons such as field artillery barrages fired from miles away and helicopter gunships.

They have made gains, but the reluctance to fully employ its professional military is cause for concern. This is why General David Petraeus has said that the next two weeks are critical for Pakistan’s very survival. It is in a fight for its life, yet the military remains reluctant to commit fully while the fractured and divided civilian government teeters ever closer to outright collapse as the assault from the terrorists exacerbates internal chasms between the two leading political forces inside Pakistan.

The United States has confidence in the Pakistani military as an institution, with little doubt it could survive a Pakistani political collapse. It is the one institution within Pakistan that has remained relatively strong through all of Pakistan’s internal trials over the decades. While the military is divided into two camps, the religious and the secular, the decade under Musharraf has assured that the secular generals have ascended to many important positions of power. And it is lead by Chief of Army Staff, General Kiyani, who is an American-trained general. This is critical because America’s top priority is not the democratic functioning of Pakistan, but rather the security of its nuclear arsenal.

But while American officials are confident that the Pakistani military can survive an internal political collapse, the Pakistani generals are not confident it can survive an all-out putsch against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In fact, top Pakistani military officials stated last week that pushing the Army to forcefully into conflict with the Pakistani Taliban would likely lead to the disintegration of the military.

And there lies the rub. It appears that Pakistan seems doomed; damned if they do, damned if they don’t. If the Taliban are not confronted and defeated, they will succeed in bringing about the collapse of the Pakistani government and likely assume the reigns of control, directly or indirectly, over the government that – on paper – oversees the military tasked with the security of the nuclear arsenal. And, according to Pakistani top brass, if they do confront the Taliban in a headlong fight, the military itself will disintegrate with parts siding with the Taliban, parts remaining loyal and others just melting away with no stomach for the fight either way.

President Zardari is hapless and useless. He is president simply because his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated by the Taliban and al-Qaeda during her campaign. He doesn’t even command the support of his entire party, with half of it despising him and supporting Bhutto’s son rather than her widower. His political opposition, Nawaz Sharif, comes with all the blessings and financial of Saudi Arabia and the support of many of the powerful lawyers. But he is a political snake and commands absolutely zero loyalty from – nor ascribes any to – the Pakistani military establishment. This is essentially the state of (and prospects for) the Pakistani civilian government.

In short, no one has confidence in the Pakistani civilian government as it regularly feeds and grows its own divisions. The Taliban have political assets in place to capitalize on a political vacuum should it collapse. The United States has confidence in the stability of the Pakistani military establishment and knows that it can provide security for the nuclear arsenal, which is priority #1. But it does not want to risk its possible direction to any extent under a government in whole or in part controlled by the Taliban. The Pakistani military lacks the confidence that it can survive a full-frontal assault on the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or the North West Frontier Province.

That’s quite a stew. What seems to be brewing, considering all of these factors? If, with an American nod of approval, Kiyani can lead a coup and reinstall an at least stable and strong military atop the Pakistani government, the United States and the rest of the West can be assured of the security of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. All other immediate priorities pale in comparison. Such a coup would pre-empt the natural collapse of the Pakistani civilian government, thus preventing a Taliban usurping.

This does not mean that the military will defeat the Taliban in the short term. In fact, for the military, it may mean that they can entertain procrastination for a bit longer, putting off the inevitable. Nor does it mean that the threat posed by the Taliban-al-Qaeda alliance will be abated or that the Pakistani people will react favorably. But it will mean that the nightmare scenario of terrorist access to and/or control of a nuclear arsenal will be at least forestalled for another day.

Welcome to Pakistan.

WATCHING MSNBC IS TORTURE

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
May 6, 2009


The media wail about "torture," but are noticeably short on facts.

Liberals try to disguise the utter wussification of our interrogation techniques by constantly prattling on about "the banality of evil."

Um, no. In this case, it's actually the banality of the banal.

Start with the fact that the average Gitmo detainee has gained 20 pounds in captivity. There's even a medical term for it now: "the Gitmo gut." Some prisoners have been heard whispering, "If you think Allah is great, you should try these dinner rolls."

In terms of "torture," there was "the attention grasp," which you have seen in every department store you have ever been where a mother was trying to get her misbehaving child's attention. If "the attention grasp" doesn't work, the interrogators issue a stern warning: "Don't make me pull this car over."

Farther up the parade of horribles was "walling," which I will not describe except to say Elliot Spitzer paid extra for it.

And for the most hardened terrorists, CIA interrogators had "the caterpillar." Evidently, the terrorists have gotten so fat on the food at Guantanamo, now they can't even outrun a caterpillar.

Contrary to MSNBC hosts who are afraid of bugs, water and their own shadows, waterboarding was most definitely not a "war crime" for which the Japanese were prosecuted after World War II -- no matter how many times Mrs. Jonathan Turley, professor of cooking at George Washington University, says so.

All MSNBC hosts and guests were apparently reading "Little Women" rather than military books as children and therefore can be easily fooled about Japanese war crimes. (MSNBC: The Official Drama Queen Network of the 2012 Olympics.)

Given what the Japanese did to prisoners, waterboarding would be a reward for good behavior.

It might be: waterboarding PLUS amputating the prisoner's healthy arm, or waterboarding PLUS killing the prisoner. But waterboarding on the order of what we did at Guantanamo would be a reward in a Japanese POW camp.

To claim that the Japanese -- architects of the Bataan Death March -- were prosecuted for "waterboarding" would be like saying Ted Bundy was executed for engaging in sexual harassment.

What the Japanese did to their POWs made even the Nazis blanch. The Japanese routinely beheaded and bayoneted prisoners; forced prisoners to dig their own graves and then buried them alive; amputated prisoners' healthy arms and legs, one by one, for sport; force-fed prisoners dry rice and then filled their stomachs with water until their bowels exploded; and injected them with chemical weapons in order to observe, time and record their death throes before dumping them in mass graves.

While only 4 percent of British and American troops captured by German or Italian forces died in captivity, 27 percent of British and American POWs captured by the Japanese died in captivity. Japanese war crimes were so atrocious that even rape was treated as only a secondary war crime in the Tokyo trial, similar to what happens during an R. Kelly trial.

The Japanese "water cure" was to "waterboarding" as practiced at Guantanamo what rape at knifepoint is to calling your secretary "honey."

The Japanese version of "waterboarding" was to fill the prisoner's stomach with water until his stomach was distended -- and then pound on his stomach, causing the prisoner to vomit.

Or they would jam a stick into the prisoner's nose so he could breathe only through his mouth and then pour water in his mouth so he would choke to death.

Or they would "waterboard" the prisoner with saltwater, which would kill him.

Meanwhile, the alleged "torture" under the Bush administration consists of things like:

-- "failing to respect a Serbian national holiday"; or

-- "forgetting to wear plastic gloves while handling a Quran."

Finding out who started the tall tale about "waterboarding" being treated as a war crime after World War II would take the talents of a forensic historian, someone like Christina Hoff Sommers.

After years of hearing the feminist "fact" that emergency room admissions for women beaten by their husbands soared by 40 percent on Super Bowl Sundays, Sommers traced it back to an unsubstantiated rumination erupting from a feminist rap session.

But the lunatic claim was passed around with increasing credibility until it ended up being cited as hard fact in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and on "Good Morning America."

One of the earliest entries in the "waterboarding as war crimes" myth must be this October 2006 article in The Washington Post, citing a case raised by Sen. Teddy Kennedy -- and heaven knows Kennedy understands the horrors of a near-drowning:

"Twenty-one years earlier, in 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk."

Even if that description of what Asano did were true -- and it isn't -- the only relevant word in the entire paragraph is "civilian."

Any mistreatment of a civilian is a war crime. So every other part of that paragraph is utterly irrelevant to the treatment of prisoners of war, much less non-uniformed enemy combatants at Guantanamo, who could have been shot on sight under the laws of war.

What Americans need to understand is that under liberals' own "laws of war," they will invent apocryphal incidents from history in order to give aid and comfort to America's enemies and to undermine those who kept us safe for the past eight years.

Trickle-Down Corruption

The real scandal.

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com
May 06, 2009, 0:00 a.m.

Some days you have to ask yourself: My God, what if these people were Republicans?

Democrats took back Congress in 2006 and the presidency in 2008 in no small part because of their ability to bang their spoons on their high chairs about what they called the Republican “culture of corruption.” Their choreographed outrage was coordinated with the precision of a North Korean missile-launch pageant. And, to be fair, they had a point. The GOP did have its legitimate embarrassments. California Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham and lobbyist Jack Abramoff were fair game, and so was Rep. Mark Foley, the twisted Florida congressman who allegedly wanted male congressional pages cleaned and perfumed and brought to his tent, as it were.

Of course, it wasn’t as if Democrats were without sin. Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson was indicted on fraud, bribery, and corruption charges in 2007, after an investigation unearthed, among other things, $90,000 in his freezer. Then–New York governor Eliot Spitzer was busted in a prostitution scandal.

But that’s all yesterday’s news. Let’s look at the here and now. Barack Obama, who vowed he’d provide a transparent administration staffed with disinterested public servants with the self-restraint of Roman castrati, appointed an admitted tax cheat to run the Treasury Department — and he’s hardly the only one in the administration.

New York representative Charles Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is under investigation for, among other things, failing to report income from his Caribbean villa. Meanwhile, Sen. Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, got sweetheart deals from subprime lender Countrywide and has yet to adequately explain his too-good-to-be-true deal on his million-dollar “cottage” in Ireland, which he may have gotten in exchange for finagling a pardon (from President Clinton) for a felon. Oh, Dodd also secretly protected those AIG bonuses that raised such a ruckus.

Rep. Jack Murtha of Pennsylvania, Nancy Pelosi’s moral authority on military matters during the Iraq war, has been revealed as a kleptomaniac of sorts, delivering as much of the federal budget as possible to various cronies and lobbyists.

Former senator John Edwards, who had an affair even as he was scoring Oprah-points as the supportive husband during his wife’s battle with breast cancer, is being investigated by the feds for the improper use of campaign funds. It looks like the silky-haired champion of the little guys may have used their donations to bribe the alleged “baby mama” into silence.

And it would be a shame to let it pass that Obama’s Senate seat was put up for sale by the then-governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich. A congressional ethics board is investigating whether Illinois Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. tried to buy it.

But you know what? We ain’t seen nothing yet. For starters, the real corruption isn’t what the media are ignoring or downplaying as isolated incidents. It’s what the media are hailing as strokes of bold, inspirational leadership. The White House, as a matter of policy, is rewriting legal contracts, picking winners (mostly labor unions and mortgage defaulters) and singling out losers (evil “speculators”), while much of the media continue to ponder whether Obama is already a greater president than FDR.

If a Republican administration, staffed with cronies from Goldman Sachs and Citibank, were cutting special deals for its political allies, I suspect we’d be hearing fewer FDR analogies and more nouns ending with the suffix “gate.”

Take Obama’s “car czar,” Steven Rattner. According to ABC’s Jake Tapper, Rattner is accused of threatening to use the White House to smear a Chrysler creditor if it refused to back the administration’s Chrysler bankruptcy plan. He’s also connected to a massive pension-fund scandal involving the investment firm he used to run. It’s alleged that Rattner’s firm bought the less-than-worthless DVD distribution rights to the achingly awful film Chooch — produced by the brother of an official in the New York comptroller’s office — as a thinly veiled bribe to gain access to New York pensions funds. Chooch, by the way, is Italian slang for “jackass,” which just happens to be the Democrats’ mascot.

More to the point, political corruption is inevitable whenever you give hacks — of either party — too much discretion over public funds. Businesses look to Washington for profits instead of to the market. The thing is, this has become the governing philosophy of the Democratic party, from banking and cars to health care and now student loans. The federal government is taking over, and the culture of corruption inevitably trickles down. That in itself should be a scandal. Call it “Choochgate.”

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
© 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

‘Empathy’ vs. Law

When you buy words, you had better know what you are buying.

By Thomas Sowell
http://www.nationalreview.com/
May 5, 2009 12:00 AM

Justice David Souter’s retirement from the Supreme Court presents Pres. Barack Obama with his first opportunity to appoint someone to the High Court. People who are speculating about whether the next nominee will be a woman, a Hispanic, or whatever, are missing the point. That we are discussing the next Supreme Court justice in terms of group “representation” is a sign of how far we have already strayed from the purpose of law and the weighty responsibility of appointing someone to sit for life on the highest court in the land.

That President Obama has made “empathy” with certain groups one of his criteria for choosing a Supreme Court nominee is a dangerous sign of how much farther the Supreme Court may be pushed away from the rule of law and toward even more arbitrary judicial edicts to advance the agenda of the Left and set it in legal concrete, immune from the democratic process.

Would you want to go into court to appear before a judge with “empathy” for groups A, B, and C, if you were a member of groups X, Y, or Z? Nothing could be farther from the rule of law. That would be bad news, even in a traffic court, much less in a court that has the last word on your rights under the Constitution of the United States.

Appoint enough Supreme Court justices with “empathy” for particular groups and you would have, for all practical purposes, repealed the 14th Amendment, which guarantees “equal protection of the laws” for all Americans. We would have entered a strange new world, where everybody is equal but some are more equal than others. The very idea of the rule of law becomes meaningless when it is replaced by the empathies of judges.

Barack Obama solves this contradiction, as he solves so many other problems, with rhetoric. If you believe in the rule of law, he will say the words “rule of law.” And if you are willing to buy it, he will keep on selling it.

Those people who just accept soothing words from politicians they like are gambling with the future of a nation. If you were German, would you be in favor of a law “to relieve the distress of the German people and nation”? That was the law that gave Hitler dictatorial power.

He was just another German chancellor at the time. He was not elected on a platform of war, dictatorship, or genocide. He got the power to do those things because of a law “to relieve the distress of the German people.”

When you buy words, you had better know what you are buying.

In the American system of government, presidential term limits restrict how long any given resident of the White House can damage this country directly. But that does not limit how long, or how much, the people he appoints to the Supreme Court can continue to damage this country, for decades after the president who appointed them is long gone.

Justice John Paul Stevens virtually destroyed the Constitution’s restrictions on government officials’ ability to confiscate private property in his 2005 decision in the case of Kelo v. New London — 30 years after President Ford appointed him.

The biggest danger in appointing the wrong people to the Supreme Court is not just in how they might vote on some particular issues — whether private property, abortion, or whatever. The biggest danger is that they will undermine or destroy the very concept of the rule of law — what has been called “a government of laws and not of men.”

Under the American system of government, this cannot be done overnight, or perhaps even during the terms in office of one president — but it can be done. And it can be done over time by the appointees of just one president, if he gets enough appointees.

Some people say that whomever Barack Obama appoints to replace Justice Souter doesn’t really matter, because Souter is a liberal who will probably be replaced by another liberal. But if no one sounds the alarm now, we can end up with a series of appointees with “empathy”— which is to say, with justices who think their job is to “relieve the distress” of particular groups, rather than to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Review: 3-hour show rocks 'Steensboro'

By Parke Puterbaugh
Special to the Greensboro News & Record
http://www.news-record.com/life
Monday, May 4, 2009

For one night, Greensboro became “Steensboro,” according to a fan-made banner held aloft by Bruce Springsteen during his concert at the Greensboro Coliseum on Saturday.

It sure seemed that way, as Springsteen and the E Street Band were received like conquering heroes during an exhilarating three-hour show that repeatedly drove the adoring, near-sellout crowd into fist-thrusting, sing-along frenzies.

As he has in the past, Springsteen gave Greensboro a particularly energetic show partly because the audience accorded him such an enthusiastic reception.

During his encore, Springsteen made a comment I’ve heard echoed over the decades by other touring musicians: “Greensboro is consistently one of the best audiences in the United States.”

He performed nonstop for three hours in a show that mixed older classics (“Badlands,” “Growin’ Up,” “Promised Land”) with relative rarities (“Seeds,” “Johnny 99,” an electric “Ghost of Tom Joad”) and songs drawn from recent albums (“Radio Nowhere,” “Outlaw Pete,” “Working on a Dream.”)

One particularly moving section linked the inspirational “Lonesome Day” and “The Rising” — songs about dealing with and rising above the events of Sept. 11, 2001 — with the still-anthemic “Born to Run,” which brought the trilogy to a thrilling crescendo.

Springsteen and the E Street Band also paid homage to their roots in garage-rock and soul music of the 1960s with a three-song interlude of Eddie Floyd’s “Raise Your Hand,” Johnny Rivers’ “Seventh Son” (written by bluesman Willie Dixon) and the McCoys’ “Hang On Sloopy.”

The latter two were part of a “Stump the Band” section that elicited printed entries from audience members. Springsteen ventured into the crowd to collect a pile of banners and posters. Although he quickly handed back one that read “Helter Skelter,” he honored the request of a fan who flew down from New York hoping to hear him perform “I’m on Fire” (from “Born in the U.S.A.”)

Noticeably missing from the E Street Band was Springsteen’s wife, Patti Scialfa; he explained she was still sore after falling from a horse. But E Street was still plenty crowded, with two guitarists (Nils Lofgren and longtime Springsteen foil Steve Van Zandt), two keyboardists, and violinist Soozie Tyrell (who also doubled on mandolin and acoustic guitar).

Happily, saxophonist Clarence Clemons — who also played percussion and pennywhistle — appeared considerably more ambulatory and involved than on the previous tour.

There also was some new blood on hand, as drummer Max Weinberg’s 18-year-old son, Jay, pounded the skins for roughly half the concert, including the entire six-song encore.

He brought fresh energy to the E Street Band, loosening up and lighting a fire under the band. No disrespect to his dad, but Jay Weinberg was a phenomenal spark plug.

The encore was a miniconcert in itself, including an old lament by Stephen Foster (“Hard Times”), two chestnuts from “Born to Run” (“Thunder Road,” “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out”) and a rousing, topical Irish jig (“American Land”).

Springsteen exited with “Glory Days,” leaving fans satisfied and exhausted.

There’s not much more to say but, “Come back to Steensboro anytime, Bruce.”

Setlist:
Badlands (w/ Jay Weinberg)
Radio Nowhere (w/ Jay Weinberg)
Outlaw Pete (w/ Jay Weinberg)
No Surrender (w/ Jay Weinberg)
Working on a Dream (w/ Jay Weinberg)
Seeds (w/ Jay Weinberg)
Johnny 99 (w/ Jay Weinberg)
The Ghost of Tom Joad (w/ Jay Weinberg)
Raise Your Hand (w/ Jay Weinberg)
Seventh Son
Hang on Sloopy
Growin' Up
I'm on Fire
Waitin' on a Sunny Day
The Promised Land
Human Touch
Kingdom of Days
Lonesome Day
The Rising
Born to Run
Cadillac Ranch
* * *
Hard Times (w/ Jay Weinberg)
Thunder Road (w/ Jay Weinberg)
Tenth Avenue Freeze-out (w/ Jay Weinberg)
Land of Hope and Dreams (w/ Jay Weinberg)
American Land (w/ Jay Weinberg and Frank Bruno, Jr.)
Glory Days (w/ Jay Weinberg)

May 2 / Greensboro, NC / Greensboro Coliseum

From Backstreets.com

http://backstreets.com/index.html

Notes: "We're in Steensboro now!" Bruce shouted at the end of the show, as the crowd roared. "We're in Steensboro now!" He and Steve had just finished dancing across the stage, each holding an end of a long STEENSBORO banner as a roisterous "Glory Days" brought this 27-song set to a close. "They must be putting something in the water," Springsteen said during the encore, "because Greensboro is consistently one of the best audiences in the United States. But I don't know why! Why?! Damn!" Who knows why, but he's absolutely right, the whole old-school building was rocking, and Bruce repaid in kind, loading the setlist with treats.

Things didn't begin so promisingly. Cool to get Jay Weinberg opening the show, playing from "Badlands" to "Raise Your Hand," but otherwise a slow start. Lots of air hankies from the Boss, suggesting he might have been under the weather, and he seemed to be working hard to get things in gear. After the sign collection, though, we achieved liftoff with the first request, an out-of-left field cover of Willie Dixon's "Seventh Son," a 1965 hit for Johnny Rivers. "I don't know where some of this stuff comes from!" Bruce laughed, paying special attention to the kid who had requested it via a small sign from way off on the side. "Is it hard?" he asked, conferring with Steve, "It is. Steve says it's hard." But they pulled it off, the backup singers walking out on the wire with the rest of the band, and followed it with a raucous "Hang on Sloopy," house lights up and the whole place going nuts. Encore-level nuts, mid-show. A "bar band special," Bruce called this one: "People come here asking for things they think we can't play... this is easy stuff!"

"Growin' Up" was followed by a third sign request, "Flew from NYC to hear 'I'm on Fire' with my Dad." Real nice, particularly Bruce's haunting, high-register vocals at the end as the crowd was bathed in red light. A few songs later, Springsteen finally remembered some records he made in the early '90s, giving "Human Touch" the rare E Street treatment. "We haven't played this one in a long time.... We'll see if we can get through it for you, we used to know it!" We can only hope songs like this, "Better Days," "Living Proof" and others from the era get more play, because it was a breath of fresh air tonight: a blistering lead from Bruce, lovely backing vocals from Soozie (alas, no Patti tonight), building to monster intensity at the end. More, please. (Hell, while we're at it, "The Long Goodbye"! "All or Nothing at All"!)

"Cadillac Ranch" was a surprise set-closer after "Born to Run," Bruce grabbing a cowboy hat from the crowd and singing about the "woods of Caroline" and driving "through the Carolina night." House lights up, the roof practically came off the place. It's no exaggeration to say that folks were swooning; by "Tenth Avenue" in the encore, Bruce had to bring some water down front, and Steven helped get a gal out of the pit who was clearly in danger of passing out. Good to see the Session Band's "Cousin" Frank Bruno, Jr. back in the fold for "American Land," sharing the mic with Soozie once again and not having forgotten a lick of it. And then the high-watt "Glory Days," Steve calling for "Steensboro Boss Time," with its "Louie, Louie" finale as the icing on the cake.

"I don't want to be sacrilegious," said an out-of-towner after the show, "But that crowd was better than Philly." And shucks, right here in Backstreets' backyard. Color us proud. Color us impressed. Color us all the moreso after such a middling start. An inspired turnaround, an inspiring show.

- Chris Phillips reporting - photographs by Guy Aceto

The Final Completion

In Memoriam

By Quin Hillyer on 5.4.09 @ 6:10AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/

Jack Kemp was, in the words of Hendrik Hertzberg of the liberal flagship the New Republic, "a species of miracle I don't pretend to understand."

Well, conservatives of my age understood Kemp very well, in the very marrow of our bones, but even for us he seemed a species of miracle. Nobody this side of Ronald Reagan ever inspired us so, and nobody then alive (i.e., nobody short of James Madison) so shaped our thinking. Nobody, not even Reagan himself, infused our cause with such infectious energy as Kemp did. And nobody did more to make clear that conservative ideals, if rightly enunciated and understood, are aimed at serving not a narrow slice of the public but the whole electorate, including the poor, the black, the Hispanic, the day laborers, and the low-income workers striving for a better life.

For years I kept a huge file labeled simply "Kemp" that moved with me from job to job. It was filled with written copies of Kemp's speeches, articles about Kemp, list of policy proposals by Kemp -- and even a lengthy letter from me to Kemp in late February of 1992, never mailed (political developments overtook it before I actually sent it), outlining in great detail a strategy for him to gently shove then-President GHW Bush aside and wrest the Republican nomination from both Bush and challenger Pat Buchanan. (Kemp rejected similar entreaties that year from numerous people who actually had the political "stroke" to help back it up.)

There was, of course, no similar "Dole" file or "Quayle" file or "Lott" file or even a "Gingrich" file.

And I was far from alone in my enthusiasm. Young conservatives from the late 1970s through the early 1990s had no doubt, none at all, that Kemp was -- philosophically and attitudinally -- Reagan's obvious heir. It wasn't just that Kemp (way back in the fall of 1976) had been the first one to sell Reagan on supply-side economics. It was that in his views on the Cold War, on the sanctity of life, on the eradication of poverty, and of America's greatness and exceptionalism and unlimited future, Kemp and Reagan were on the same page -- and Kemp had an ability to sell those views to communities that sometimes would not listen to Reagan at all.

Sure, Reagan's diaries showed that he felt Kemp could be a real annoyance at times. And that was fine: Kemp could annoy almost everybody. Even his public failings, and they were significant, were the failings of a great man and a great spirit -- somebody too enthused about admirable ideals for his own good. He had a need to be the center of attention. He had a nervous energy about him that could be off-putting. He often spoke at too great a length, turning meetings into his own personal filibusters. He could get way too preachy and, especially after 1992, too apt to insinuate that his listeners were less morally or philosophically enlightened than he. When he was the Republican nominee for vice president in 1996, for instance, he did his ticket no favors by doing things like going into private, big-donor meetings at Georgia country clubs and hectoring them about their collective racial insensitivity or even outright racism.

But Kemp's lack of discretion about causing needless offense also manifested itself in a willingness to dare giving offense for purposes both worthwhile and timely. At the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, for example -- the one caricatured by the establishment media as being filled with fear and hate -- he had the almost impish gall to tell the assembled delegates that history is "on the side of those liberal democratic ideals which gave birth to our nation." Of course, conservative ideals are indeed "liberal" and (broadly speaking) "democratic," at least in the classical sense of the words. But to use those words approvingly at a conservative Republican convention was to risk being terribly misunderstood and even unpopular. Only Kemp could get away with such a bold -- and appropriate -- turn of phrase.

By that speech's end, though, he was using "liberal" and "Democrat" in their modern political senses: "My fellow Americans, the liberal Democrats just don't get it. They don't understand that you can't create more employees without first creating more employers, that you can't have capitalism without capital, and we can't expect people to defend property rights when they're denied access to property."

Good stuff, that.

In the same speech, he fought the dominant media narrative that Soviet Communism just faded out of existence of its own accord. "Communism didn't fall," Kemp insisted. "It was pushed. It was our ideas that did the pushing."

And that is what Jack Kemp was, more than anything else: a pusher of ideas. Urban homesteading. Enterprise zones. Tenant management of public housing. Capital gains tax cuts. Welfare reform based on work incentives and incentives for families to stay together. Housing tax credits. Escrow savings accounts. Housing vouchers and portable rent subsidies. "Weed and Seed." School choice. Health savings accounts. Across-the-board tax cuts. Rollback of Communism -- including particular Kemp leadership against Communists in Latin America. (Kemp once cleverly described his and Reagan's approach as "'supply-side' foreign policy: the liberation of Grenada, the Strategic Defense Initiative and support for the Contras in Nicaragua.")

Mostly, though, Kemp was dedicated to creating more wealth not due to love of lucre but for the right reasons. He was fond of noting that free-market progenitor Adam Smith was a professor of moral philosophy. And, in a 1985 speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he explained what economics had to do with moral concerns:

[Our] vision relies on free enterprise because of the possibilities for fulfillment that it opens for ourselves and our children. American has always been the one place on Earth where you could climb as high or as far as your efforts and God-given talent could take you. To be sure, this is not the only aspect, or even the most important aspect, of life, because man does not live by bread alone. But he does not live without it. Material prosperity frees us to turn our attention to higher things. Opportunity means more than individual self-fulfillment: not just good work, but also good works. Wages and the saving of wages are not just the means of amassing personal comforts. They mean being able to meet your obligations to our family, provide your children with hope for a better life, and pass on the fullness of life to others. They mean better homes -- and better family life. Better schools -- and better education. Loving your neighborhood -- and loving your neighbor.

Jack Kemp, with his unmatched generosity of spirit, loved his neighbors more thoroughly and palpably than almost any public figure of recent generations. And he did it with a deep [Presbyterian] faith in higher things. Saturday night, his family put out this statement:

Jack Kemp passed away peacefully shortly after 6 o'clock this evening, surrounded by the love of his family and pastor, and believing with Isaiah, "My strength and my courage is the Lord."

For nearly 74 years, the Lord blessed us all with the life of Jack Kemp -- a man whose own strength and courage must have pleased the Lord he loved.

Quin Hillyer is a senior editorial writer at the Washington Times and senior editor of The American Spectator. He can be reached at qhillyer@gmail.com.

The ADL: Wrong About Geert Wilders

By: Robert Spencer
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Monday, May 04, 2009

After the heroic Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders spoke in Florida last week, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) condemned his remarks, saying: “In his speeches, he claimed that ‘Islam is not a religion’ and ‘the right to religious freedom should not apply to this totalitarian ideology called Islam.’ Mr. Wilders also stated that the Koran is a book of hatred, and that Mohammed was both ‘a pedophile and a warlord.’”’

These are serious charges, but they don’t stand up to close inspection. In light of the fact that the hadith collection that Muslims consider most reliable, Sahih Bukhari, reports no less than five times that Muhammad (then in his fifties) consummated his marriage with Aisha when she was nine years old, Wilders would have little difficulty making the charge of pedophilia stick. And given that Muhammad participated in numerous battles during his prophetic career, all but one of them offensive, the “warlord” charge can easily be established from texts that Muslims consider accurate in reporting the details of Muhammad’s life.

And the Koran a book of hatred? Again, the book itself gives the answer in passages like these and many others:

“Strongest among men in enmity to the believers wilt thou find the Jews and Pagans; and nearest among them in love to the believers wilt thou find those who say, “We are Christians”: because amongst these are men devoted to learning and men who have renounced the world, and they are not arrogant.” -- Qur’an 5:82

“The Jews call ‘Uzair a son of Allah, and the Christians call Christ the son of Allah. That is a saying from their mouth; (in this) they but imitate what the unbelievers of old used to say. Allah’s curse be on them: how they are deluded away from the Truth!” -- Qur’an 9:30

“Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” -- Qur’an 9:29

“Therefore, when ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), smite at their necks. At length, when ye have thoroughly subdued them, bind a bond firmly (on them): thereafter (is the time for) either generosity or ransom, until the war lays down its burdens.” -- Qur’an 47:4

“Those who reject (Truth), among the People of the Book and among the Polytheists, will be in Hell-Fire, to dwell therein (for aye). They are the worst of creatures.” -- Qur’an 98:6

But when Wilders speaks of restricting Muslims’ religious freedom, his words appear more problematic. Wilders’s full statement on this, however, elucidates what he meant: “Stop pretending that Islam is a religion. Islam is a totalitarian ideology. In other words, the right to religious freedom should not apply to Islam.”

I disagree with Wilders’s statement that Islam is not a religion. Islam is certainly a religion -- a belief-system that, like other religions, purports to relate human beings to the divine. But at the same time, I understand why he says that Islam is not a religion -- because the strictly religious aspects of Islam are actually of no concern to unbelievers at all. It makes no difference to me if a Muslim wants to pray five times a day, or read the Qur’an, or believes that Muhammad is a prophet -- except insofar as it impinges me as a political program that demands my conversion, subjugation, or death.

There are precedents for how America can deal with this threat. The U.S. did not outlaw the Communist Party of the USA, but it did move actively to suppress Communist activity, driving the party almost completely underground after World War I and always working energetically against Communist subversive activity in the United States. The religious aspects of Islam obscure the fact that Islamic jihadists are pursuing a political program that seeks, no less unmistakably than did the Communists, to replace the U.S. Constitution with a system that would deny many basic rights guaranteed by that Constitution.

The political program of Islam is generally not recognized in the U.S. today, but nonetheless there are many groups dedicated to carrying it out. They should not be allowed the protection of a religious cover to obscure their criminal and seditious activity. Section 2385 of the federal criminal code states that “whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government…shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.”

This already existing law -- revised as of January 2, 2006 -- could and should be applied to Islamic groups that call for implementation of Sharia in the U.S., and work toward that implementation. In short, just as freedom of religion was not deemed to be a sufficient justification for Mormon polygamy in the late nineteenth century, so now freedom of religion should not be deemed to be sufficient justification for agitation on behalf of a system of laws that would deny freedom of speech and the equality of rights of all people before the law. The ADL has unfairly maligned Geert Wilders, and in doing so, has placed itself on the wrong side of the great battle to defend free speech and free societies against the advancing global jihad.

- Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of eight books, eleven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs, is available now from Regnery Publishing.

Caveat Parens

One family’s adventures in gender-neutral housing.

By Karin Venable Morin
http://www.nationalreview.com/
May 04, 2009, 4:00 a.m.

If sharing a bedroom with a student of the opposite sex is not your idea of appropriate college housing for your son or daughter, beware. The college or university to which you have just sent a deposit may have other ideas.

“Poor Maria,” I said to my husband. We were reading the paper at the breakfast table during Christmas week.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“The University of Chicago has sent a letter to parents announcing that they’ll allow men and women to room together next year — and they won’t necessarily be informing parents about their children’s room arrangements.” My friend Maria has a child at the University of Chicago.

“I thought they were a conservative school,” said my husband.

“Evidently not,” I replied.

It never occurred to me that the parents of Chicago students were lucky to be getting that letter.

A few weeks later, I called my daughter at Stanford to see how her course selection had worked out for the winter quarter. “And how’s the new room?” I asked. She had told us over Christmas break that her current dorm — a “co-op,” where the students cook and clean for themselves — required students to change rooms every quarter.

That’s how it began. And, as I explained to my astounded mother-in-law when the dust had settled, it just got worse and worse.

“She’s sharing a room with one other girl and two boys,” I said.

“You mean a suite.”

“No,” I said. “I mean a bedroom.”

My mother-in-law couldn’t believe it.

“But wait,” I said. “It gets worse. She didn’t ask for this room arrangement. She missed the room meeting because she had a friend visiting from the East Coast. She appointed a proxy, and said she wanted a room with no smoking and no sex in the room, but she didn’t ask for a single-sex room.”

“Should she?” asked my mother-in-law.

“Well, apparently. But she says she didn’t think it was necessary.”

“So she asked to get out, right?”

“Wrong. Her dorm had a seven-hour room meeting, and she doesn’t want to upset everyone’s consensus arrangements. Plus, she says it’s no big deal.”

“So where does she get dressed?”

“That’s the same question I asked,” I said. “She says she gets dressed in the bathroom.”

We told her this arrangement was unacceptable to us. She asked around, she later reported, and she couldn’t find anyone willing to swap with her. So she proposed that she sleep on a futon in one of the two or three all-girl rooms in the dorm, and we accepted that proposal. (When I explained this situation to my very liberal, hip, LA sister, she said, “So she’s paying board money for a closet?”)

“Who are the boys?” my mother-in-law asked. “Does she know them?”

“Well, she thinks she knows them,” I said. “She knows them from the dorm, from this year. Knowing how closely related inappropriate sexual behavior and substance abuse are, I asked her if they drink, and she told me that one of them doesn’t drink, but the other one is a ‘happy drunk.’ She thinks that makes her safe.”


My mother-in-law snorted.

“But wait,” I told her, “it gets worse.”

“What did Stanford have to say about all this?” she asked.

“That’s the worse,” I answered.

I had looked at the Stanford “Parents’ Guide: The Residential System” the day my daughter told me about her room arrangement. It stated clearly that upperclass dorms were almost all co-ed — “some within floors, some floor by floor.” I later pressed my daughter about this statement, and she said that Stanford did, in fact, know about and accept her housing arrangement, which I began to describe as “co-ed within the room.” My husband and I wrote a letter to the president of the university, asking where exactly the Stanford “co-ed within the room” policy might be found (if it existed) and why there was no indication that men and women are permitted to room together in the undergraduate dorms.

I read further and learned about Stanford’s cooperative housing on the Stanford website. The website specified that co-ops are university housing and functionally dorms; however, nowhere did Stanford state that “within the room” co-ed living arrangements were possible in the co-ops.

After some more digging, I found both the “Gender Neutral Housing Policy” and the Stanford housing contract, which all undergraduates must sign in advance of the academic year.

According to the Stanford website, in order to create a more welcoming atmosphere for transgender and homosexual students, a “pilot program” for “gender neutral housing” has been implemented for this academic year.

“The Gender Neutral option will be available in four diverse upperclass undergraduate residences.” They were named; my daughter’s dorm was not one of them.

“These residences were chosen . . . [because they] have rooms available which allow each gender roommate to have a separate private sleeping space.”
“Students must state that they commit to the gender neutral rooming option.”
“Students must have a specific roommate or roommates in mind prior to the in house draw.”
“Students will not be matched with a random opposite gender roommate through this process.”

Thus Stanford claimed to be implementing, for a specific, narrow purpose, a carefully delineated pilot program. However, my daughter’s situation clearly did not meet the terms of this housing policy.

Stanford’s actions created not one but two problems of institutional ethics.

To begin with, Stanford had failed to inform parents adequately of the change in its housing policy. I do not know when the web page on the “gender neutral” pilot program appeared, but it is not included in the information to which parents are directed. Nor, to my knowledge, was any letter or other communication sent to parents informing them about the “gender neutral” housing.

And if parents actually managed to find out about this policy, Stanford deceived them concerning the extent of “gender neutral” housing, which is not, in fact, limited to the stated terms of the pilot project. If we had been aware of the “gender neutral” pilot project when we agreed to our daughter’s return to Stanford in the fall, we would have been falsely reassured by her assignment to a dorm that is not included in the list of dorms designated for the pilot program.

We wrote to the Stanford housing office several times, and it took a month before we received a definitive response. We were informed that no change in the housing arrangements in our daughter’s dorm would be required by the university, unless an individual student made a complaint and requested an individual change. Evidently Stanford considered itself off the hook if students violated the housing contract and then ran into trouble. And, legally, it is probably right.

But failure to change the housing arrangements is not mere tolerance of a slight oversight. The rooms in her dorm, according to our daughter, while large, do not “allow each gender roommate to have a separate private sleeping space.” No student “commit[ted] to the gender neutral rooming option” by choosing to live in this dorm, since it is not part of the pilot program. Our daughter did not have “a specific roommate or roommates in mind prior to the in house draw.” And she was certainly “matched with a random opposite gender roommate.”


By its own terms, Stanford is failing to live up to its housing contract. As parents, Stanford holds us responsible for payment of our daughter’s bill. We, in turn, expected Stanford to enforce the terms of its own housing contract. It should not be acceptable for any group of students to alter the conditions of that contract. Furthermore, it should not be up to individual students to determine whether to protest a housing arrangement which so obviously violates this contract. There would clearly be social difficulties for any student who protested. Thus, it is Stanford that should rectify the situation.

Of course, there is a more significant problem. We, like many parents, do not consider a “gender neutral” housing arrangement morally acceptable. We don’t consider such an arrangement consistent with common sense. We would never have consented to pay for our daughter’s enrollment as a freshman if we had been aware that she might be placed in such a rooming arrangement. As we told the president of the university, if Stanford had informed us that it was allowing such housing, we would have required her either to transfer out or to find another source of funding. Perhaps, since she was a senior, we would have made an agreement with her concerning acceptable off-campus housing. But Stanford never gave us the chance.

I could talk about conspiracy theories, and how the modern university is trying to change society’s norms. I could talk about how the university caters to the “edgy” — whatever that is at the moment. I could talk about how I have new sympathy for my parents’ concerns about rooming arrangements at Yale when I arrived there 30-some years ago. I could talk about mother-guilt, and how I have failed to convey my moral values to my daughter.

My hope, looking forward, is to warn other parents: Stanford and many other colleges and universities do not respect their common-sense values. The university seeks to undermine those values. If parents don’t want “gender neutral” housing for their children, they need to talk with their money, the only voice the university will allow them. Otherwise, parents will have to resign themselves to the risk of paying a heavier cost than they expect for their children’s education.

Stanford and at least 50 other colleges and universities are promoting through their dormitory arrangements an ideology of gender that we personally reject and oppose. There will probably be plenty of families willing to bet their children’s happiness on the prestige of a Stanford degree. We, however, are not among them. We told our daughter that we would not pay for her final quarter — if she wanted to stay at Stanford, she would have to take out a loan. When she protested that we were changing the terms of her attendance at the university, we told her that as far as we were concerned, it was Stanford that had changed the deal. Our morality is not for sale.

— Karin Venable Morin is a graduate of Yale College and the Harvard Law School. She works as a writer and educator in the Boston area.

Roberts’ book on A-Rod should be questioned

By Jason Whitlock
The Kansas City Star
http://www.kansascity.com/
May 3, 2009

Not long ago, sports writer Selena Roberts compared the Duke lacrosse players to gang members and career criminals.

She claimed that the players’ unwillingness to confess to or snitch about a rape (that did not happen) was the equivalent of drug dealers and gang members promoting antisnitching campaigns.

When since-disgraced district attorney Mike Nifong whipped up a media posse to rain justice on the drunken, male college students, Roberts jumped on the fastest, most influential horse, using her New York Times column to convict the players and the culture of privilege that created them.

Proven inaccurate, Roberts never wrote a retraction for the columns that contributed to the public lynching of Reade Seligmann, Colin Finnerty and David Evans.

Instead, she moved on to Sports Illustrated, a seat on ESPN’s “The Sports Reporters” and a new target, baseball slugger Alex Rodriguez.

Last week, the New York Daily News and The New York Times acquired “leaked” copies of Roberts’ soon-to-be-released biography, “A-Rod.” In it, according to the two New York newspapers, Roberts paints a highly unflattering picture of Rodriguez as a human being and, among other things, speculates that Rodriguez used steroids in high school.

Roberts’ speculative opinions are deemed as so credible by ESPN and others that the Worldwide Leader ran all-day updates stating that Selena Roberts believes that it’s “irrefutable” that Rodriguez used performance-enhancing drugs while a teenager.

At no point did ESPN’s TV anchors or radio broadcasters mention that Roberts was the same person who led the media charge against the Duke lacrosse players. I listened to Roberts’ interview on Dan Patrick’s radio show. Patrick never asked her about Duke lacrosse or why we should trust her reporting.

In its news story about her book, The New York Times failed to allude to her position on the Duke lacrosse case. I’ll give the Times credit for including one sentence of clarification in its news story:

“Some of the accusations in the book are based on anonymous sources, and others are simply presented as knowledge the author has without an explanation of how the information was obtained.”

Translation: the majority of the stuff written in her book is information the National Enquirer might reject.

The national media anti-snitching campaign is twice as pervasive and effective as anything put together by the Bloods, Crips and LAPD. For the most part, we refuse to squeal on each other.

Roberts’ book is a long-winded blog. Why it’s being treated as an unimpeachable piece of journalism can only be explained by the cushy position she’s been handed by The New York Times, ESPN and Sports Illustrated and the unchallenged institutional bias found within the elite sports media institutions.

Like the Duke lacrosse players, the elite media have decided that Alex Rodriguez is fair game for abuse. Rules of fairness do not apply.

In a rush to prove its racial even-handedness, the media initially chose to swallow the accusations of a black stripper over white college students. Roberts and others made fools of themselves. They were given the leeway to do so only because lacrosse players aren’t part of the NCAA money-making machine and unlikely to be future subjects of high-profile stories.

The players were convenient, vulnerable targets.

So is Rodriguez. Like Barry Bonds, A-Rod is a threat to surpass Babe Ruth (and Hank Aaron) on the home run chart. A-Rod, a Dominican, is the dominant player in a sport that is almost solely analyzed and defined by white American sports writers and broadcasters.

It is not a coincidence that Bonds and Rodriguez have been portrayed as the worst teammates in the history of professional sports while Roger Clemens’ and Mark McGwire’s teammate shortcomings were largely overlooked. When Clemens skipped games and road trips it was because he was a dedicated family man rather than a bad teammate.

I am not asserting a nationwide racial conspiracy against minority baseball players. I’m in no way stating that Roberts’ pursuit of Rodriguez is motivated by race. I’m asserting that the media’s unwillingness to publicly and aggressively challenge itself breeds unequal and unfair coverage.

We all have biases that must be contested. We’re all capable of getting swept up in the biases of our peers and friends.

The allegations in Roberts’ book might very well be true. But I’m not going to trust her, not without some on-the-record reporting, not after what she wrote about the Duke lacrosse players.

To reach Jason Whitlock, call 816-234-4869 or send e-mail to jwhitlock@kcstar.com. For previous columns, go to KansasCity.com.

Posted on Sat, May. 02, 2009 10:15 PM

Jack Kemp, R.I.P.

[Rick Brookhiser]

http://corner.nationalreview.com/
Sunday, May 03, 2009

FILE - In this Oct. 14, 1996 file photo, Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole joins hands with his running mate Jack Kemp during their rally on a pier in San Diego.
(AP Photo/Eric Draper, File)

Was there ever a man of such high spirits as Jack Kemp? Reagan was sunny; Kemp was a perpetual solar flare. He had an athlete's energy and an optimist's expectation that all would come out well. He also felt the respect for learning that only those who come to it late and under their own steam have. Ideas, he believed, really could save the world. Some of his ideas were half-baked—he put far too much credit in his friend Jude Wanniski—and his timing was bad. He offered himself in 1988 as Reagan's heir, but he was crushed between George H.W. Bush, who as Veep was the heir of record, and Pat Robertson, the GOP's Jesse Jackson, the cleric who wanted the White House because of who he was, not because of anything he had done. In Right Time, Right Place I tell the story of how John O'Sullivan and I went to DC to urge Jack to challenge President Bush for the nomination in 1992, but he had just been kicked in the head three years earlier, and had no desire to risk another drubbing. Bob Dole's picking Kemp as his runningmate in 1996 shocked everyone; his career had seemed over. He had a bad debate with Al Gore (Wanniski gave him terrible advice beforehand, which he followed). He was a great friend of National Review, and there was nothing more exhilirating than Jack at full speed: a combination of riding a great horse, and a roller coaster. RIP.

05/03 12:47 AM

Paving the Way for Reagan

Jack Kemp's enduring influence.

by Kenneth Tomlinson
The Weekly Standard
02/16/2009, Volume 014, Issue 21
http://www.weeklystandard.com/

FILE - In this July 3,1967 picture, California Gov. Ronald Reagan, right, and his special assistant Jack Kemp, discuss football in his office in Scaramento, Calif. Kemp, who had been working as member of the governor's staff since February, will leave California the following week to begin training for his 11th year in pro football.
(AP Photo/WJZ, File)

Editor's note: Jack Kemp passed away May 2, 2009. R.I.P.

There are some people you cannot imagine ill. One such person is Jack Kemp, the onetime Buffalo Bills quarterback, longtime House Republican leader and godfather to the supply-side -economics movement. Whatever he was doing, Jack always has been in perpetual motion.

But the shock of his serious battle with cancer has prompted many of us to reflect on one indisputable fact. Without Jack Kemp, there would have been no Reagan Revolution. He was John the Baptist to "the Oldest and Wisest"--and in doing so became one of the most influential political figures of our time.

Had it not been for the radical 30 percent across-the-board tax rate cut that Kemp sold to candidate Reagan, America never would have realized the prosperity of the Reagan era and beyond. (Looking back, can you imagine a society that had accepted the legitimacy of 70 percent tax rates on our best producers?) By the sheer force of his evangelistic personality, he brought supply-side economic theories to influential journalists and politicians--and also to Ronald Reagan--legitimizing the concept that tax rate cuts were essential to unleash the creativity and innovation of the American dream.

Considering the crushing egos of the brilliant band of volatile individuals who constituted the supply-side movement, it is hard to imagine how anyone kept them in the same room long enough to influence mainstream political thought. But Kemp was, after all, the old quarterback who knew the importance of molding all sorts of individuals into a team.

The economic and political establishment mocked him. Alice Rivlin predicted Kemp's tax cuts would produce economic disaster. Howard Baker called his policies a "riverboat gamble." George H.W. Bush derided Kemp's plan as "voodoo economics."

Yet it was Kemp's tax-cut economics that prevailed, revitalizing the American work ethic, putting paid to the stagflation of the 1970s. Even today--unlike at critical times in the 20th century--there are few leaders ready to turn to tariffs and tax increases to battle economic stagnation.

But Kemp brought more to the table than supply-side tax cuts. During the Carter administration, it was Kemp's congressional operation that constituted a virtual shadow cabinet for the Defense Department, with Bill Schneider pushing defense concepts that were the seed corn of the Strategic Defense Initiative that helped force an end to the Evil Empire.

Kemp also was obsessed with making sure minorities were important to the Republican party. Wherever he traveled (including throughout the South), he constantly recruited blacks to his party. He saw increasing the Jewish Republican vote as equally important.

As right as he was in concept, that passion would betray him politically. In 1980, New York senator Jacob Javits was wasting away with Lou Gehrig's disease, and Kemp was his natural successor. But Javits's wife convinced her husband to run again. Kemp refused to challenge Javits in the GOP primary because he didn't want to be known for ending the political career of this longstanding Jewish Republican. Conservatives turned instead to an obscure Long Island politician named D'Amato--and the rest is history.

Politics can be an up-or-out game. Meanwhile, the graybeards around Reagan had no interest in Kemp for the vice presidency. In the 1980s, without the clout of the New York Senate seat, the influence of the Buffalo congressman who had done so much to create Reaganism began to wane. The Pat Robertson operation helped derail his dream of the Republican nomination in 1988. As HUD secretary, Kemp was one of the few conservative activist elements of the George H.W. Bush administration, and in 1996 he ended up running for vice president on the Dole ticket. But the era in which he commanded the supply-side movement was no more.

FILE - In this Saturday, Oct. 12, 1996 picture, Republican vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp and his wife Joanne wave before boarding their plane in Portland, Ore. (AP Photo/John Vincent), File)

During the recent presidential campaign, I happened to attend a McCain fundraiser that featured Kemp as the speaker. The Kemp of that evening was the old Jack Kemp--delivering a remarkable lecture that focused on the folly of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. At one point, someone turned to me to express the wish that it had been Kemp debating Obama instead of McCain.

Now comes word of his serious illness. Eighteen years ago when my son suffered from cancer, Jack Kemp inscribed a football poster to him that has remained over his bed ever since. Across the jersey of old number 15, he inscribed the words of Churchill: "Never, never, never give in."

You can bet those words continue to guide him today.

Kenneth Tomlinson is the former editor in chief of Reader's Digest.

No More California Dreaming

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Sunday, May 3, 2009

California's increasingly severe and largely self-inflicted economic crisis will deepen May 19 if, as is probable and desirable, voters reject most of the ballot measures that were drafted as part of a "solution" to the state's budget deficit. They would make matters worse. National economic revival is being impeded because one-eighth of the nation's population lives in a state that is driving itself into permanent stagnation. California's perennial boast -- that it is the incubator of America's future -- now has an increasingly dark urgency.

Under Arnold Schwarzenegger, the best governor the states contiguous to California have ever had, people and businesses have been relocating to those states. For four consecutive years, more Americans have moved out of California than have moved in. California's business costs are more than 20 percent higher than the average state's. In the past decade, net out-migration of Americans has been 1.4 million. California is exporting talent while importing Mexico's poverty. The latter is not California's fault; the former is.

If, since 1990, state spending increases had been held to the inflation rate plus population growth, the state would have a $15 billion surplus instead of a $42 billion budget deficit, which is larger than the budgets of all but 10 states. Since 1990, the number of state employees has increased by more than a third. In Schwarzenegger's less than six years as governor, per capita government spending, adjusted for inflation, has increased nearly 20 percent.

Liberal orthodoxy has made the state dependent on a volatile source of revenue -- high income tax rates on the wealthy. In 2006, the top 1 percent of earners paid 48 percent of the income taxes. California's income and sales taxes are among the nation's highest and its business conditions among the worst, as measured by 16 variables directly influenced by the Legislature. Unemployment, the nation's fourth-highest, is 11.2 percent.

Required by law to balance the budget, the Legislature has "solved" the problem by, among other things, increasing the income, sales, gas and vehicle taxes. This, although one rationale for the federal government's gargantuan "stimulus" was to spare states the need to raise taxes that, in California, will more than vitiate the stimulus.

Proposition 1A would create a complicated -- hence probably porous -- spending cap and a rainy-day fund. Realists, however, do not trust the Legislature to obey the law, which may be why some public employees unions cynically support 1A. Another May 19 proposition, opaquely titled the Lottery Modernization Act, would authorize borrowing $5 billion from future hypothetical lottery receipts. The title is a measure of the political class's meretriciousness.

If voters pass 1A's hypothetical restraint on government spending, their reward will be two extra years (another $16 billion) of actual income, sales and vehicle tax increases. The increases were supposed to be for just two years. Voters are being warned that if they reject the propositions, there might have to be $14 billion in spending cuts. (Note the $15 billion number four paragraphs above.) Even teachers might be laid off. California teachers -- the nation's highest-paid, with salaries about 25 percent above the national average -- are emblematic of the grip that government employees unions have on the state, where 57 percent of government workers are unionized (the national average is 37 percent).

Flinching from serious budget cutting and from confronting public employees unions, some Californians focus on process questions. They devise candidate-selection rules designed to diminish the role of parties, thereby supposedly making more likely the election of "moderates" amenable to even more tax increases.

But what actually ails California is centrist evasions. The state's crisis has been caused by "moderation," understood as splitting the difference between extreme liberalism and hyperliberalism, a "reasonableness" that merely moderates the speed at which the ever-expanding public sector suffocates the private sector.

California has become liberalism's laboratory, in which the case for fiscal conservatism is being confirmed. The state is a slow learner and hence will remain a drag on the nation's economy. But it will be a net benefit to the nation if the federal government and other state governments profit from California's negative example, which Californians can make more vividly instructive by voting down the propositions on May 19.

Remember the story of the mule that paid attention only after being walloped by a two-by-four? The Democratic-controlled Legislature is like that. Fortunately, it has handed voters some two-by-fours -- the initiatives. Resounding rejections of them should get Sacramento's attention.

georgewill@washpost.com

Today's Tune: The Raveonettes - You Want the Candy

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The Price of a Porcine Panic

By Michael Fumento
http://www.townhall.com/
May 1, 2009

There's absolute panic over an outbreak of swine flu. "Projections are that this virus will kill 1 million Americans," the nation's top health official has warned.
But the date is 1976. And the projection proves off by 999,999 deaths. However, a hastily-developed vaccine went on to kill or crippled hundreds. Sadly, the current hysteria outbreak threatens devastation on a worldwide scale.

A calm perspective of the current outbreak of the virus now known as influenza A (H1N1) would compare it to seasonal flu. According to the CDC, the seasonal flu infects between 15 to 60 million Americans each year (5% to 20%), hospitalizes about 200,000 and kills about 36,000. That comes out to over 800 hospitalizations and over 250 deaths each day during flu season.

Worldwide deaths are 250,000 to 500,000, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), or about 700 to 1,400 per day spread out over the year.

No matter that few bothered to make this comparison during the 2003 SARS hysteria, which caused only 8,096 cases and 774 deaths worldwide with no U.S. deaths.

There's no hint that influenza A (H1N1) is either easier to transmit than seasonal flu or more lethal. The symptoms are the same, and swine flu cases so far have generally been quite mild.

As of this writing 13 countries have officially reported 365 cases of influenza A(H1N1), yet the only deaths have been Mexican. It’s not a “puzzle” as to why. All infectious diseases strike much harder in underdeveloped countries, partly because of poorer health care but primarily because the people are less healthy to begin with. Only 322 of those 8,096 SARS cases were in developed nations.

The moniker "swine flu" clearly spooks many. But pigs, with the help of birds, routinely transmit seasonal flu to humans. "Swine flu" simply means it contains some pig flu genetic material. If this eccentricity made it that inherently more dangerous than a pure human flu, the 1976 strain wouldn't have caused merely 500 infections with a 0.02% death rate.

No, influenza A (H1N1) won’t become "another Spanish Flu of 1918-19," as pig flu panic purveyors claim. Nothing will. It’s been 90 years. Back then we were hobbled by a world war, general health in developed nations was much poorer than in Mexico today, and we’ve since developed things called "antibiotics" – as well as antivirals, pneumonia vaccines and other medical tools. In all flu outbreaks, including the Spanish one, the vast majority of deaths come from secondary bacterial infections.

Not coincidentally, one of the "worrisome" similarities between Spanish flu and swine flu is that both strains are of the H1N1 subtype. But--ahem!--So is one of the major subtypes of the latest seasonal flu.

Another panic prompter is that so far influenza A (H1N1) appears to disproportionately affect younger people. Assuming this holds up, one explanation would be that older persons have received some immunity from previous exposure to a similar strain. Alarming? In any case, the stronger immune systems of younger people could explain the apparent mildness of symptoms outside of Mexico.

It's true we have no vaccine for this flu. But two years ago, the seasonal flu shot proved ineffective against the primary strain and one of the two secondary strains. There was no appreciable increase in cases or deaths. That said, it would make sense to include swine flu as one of the three strains in this fall's seasonal flu vaccine.

It's also truly reassuring to see self-important health officials grasping for straws to make the outbreak appear more serious. Keiji Fukuda, a top WHO official, invoked the dreaded "M" word (mutation). "It's quite possible for this virus to evolve," he said, whereupon it "can become more dangerous to people." Actually, evolution favors mutations that make a virus less harmful; better to adapt to a host than to kill it.

The last time a flu mutation perceptibly increased the U.S. death rate was the Hong Kong flu of 1968-69 (34,000 in a smaller population) and before that the Asian flu 1957-58 (70,000). They were bad, but hardly apocalyptic. For neither were antivirals or pneumonia vaccines available.

But influenza A (H1N1) hysteria is even now delivering a gut punch to a global economy, posing a serious risk of a recession within the recession.
It was SARS hysteria, and not the relatively tiny number of cases, that cost the economies of East and Southeast Asia 0.6 percentage points of 2003 GDP, according to the Asian Development Bank. And a World Bank report last year estimated that just the costs of avoiding infection during a flu pandemic--not the illness itself--would shave off 1.9% off world GDP. Some poorer parts of the world--including that containing Mexico--would lose 2.9% of GDP.

Ironically, because as we've seen in Mexico, wealth translates into health, poorer nations could lose far more lives to the hysteria than to the virus. Such are the wages of our swine flu fright fest.


- Michael Fumento is a, journalist, and attorney specializing in science and health issues as well as author of BioEvolution: How Biotechnology is Changing Our World .

Obama looks moderate, acts radical

By Mark Steyn
Syndicated columnist
Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/opinion
Friday, May 1, 2009

We're still in the first hundred days of the joyous observances of Barack Obama's first hundred days, and many weeks of celebration lie ahead, so here are my thoughts:

President Obama's strongest talent is not his speechifying, which is frankly a bit of a snoozeroo. In Europe, he left 'em wanting less pretty much every time (headline from Britain's Daily Telegraph: "Barack Obama Really Does Go On A Bit"). That uptilted chin combined with the left-right teleprompter neck swivel you can set your watch by makes him look like an emaciated Mussolini umpiring an endless rally of high lobs on Centre Court at Wimbledon. Each to his own, but I don't think those who routinely hail him as the greatest orator since Socrates actually sit through many of his speeches.

On the other hand, if you just caught a couple of minutes of last Wednesday's press conference, you'd be impressed. When that groupie from The New York Times asked the president about what, during his first hundred days, "had surprised you the most … enchanted you the most … humbled you the most and troubled you the most", Obama made a point of getting out his pen, writing it down and repeating back the multiple categories: "Enchanted," he said. "Nice." Indeed. Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger, you may see a stranger across a crowded room, but then he scribbles down your multipart question to be sure he gets it right, and he looks so thoughtful, and suddenly he's not a stranger anymore, and the sound of his laughter will ring in your dreams.

The theater of thoughtfulness is critical to the president's success. He has the knack of appearing moderate while acting radical, which is a lethal skill. The thoughtful look suckered many of my more impressionable conservative comrades last fall, when David Brooks and Christopher Buckley were cranking out gushing paeans to Obama's "first-class temperament" – temperament being to the Obamacons what Nick Jonas' hair is to a Tiger Beat reporter. But the drab reality is that the man they hail – Brooks & Buckley, I mean; not the Tiger Beat crowd – is a fantasy projection. There is no Obama The Sober Centrist, although it might make a good holiday song:

"Obama The Sober Centrist

Had a very thoughtful mien

And if you ever saw it

You would say it's peachy keen …"

And it is. But underneath the thoughtful look is a transformative domestic agenda that represents a huge annexation of American life by an ever more intrusive federal government. One cannot but admire the singleminded ruthlessness with which Obama is getting on with it, even as he hones his contemplative unhurried moderate routine on prime time news conferences. On foreign affairs, the shtick is less effective, but mainly because he's not so engaged by the issues: He's got big plans for health care, and federalized education, and an eco-friendly government-run automobile industry – and Iran's nuclear program just gets in the way. He'd rather not think about it, and his multicontinental apology tours are his way of kicking the can down the road until that blessed day when America is just another sclerotic Euro-style social democracy, and even your more excitable jihadi won't be able to jump up and down chanting "Death to the Great Satan!" with a straight face.

It would seem to me that reality is more likely to intrude on the Obama project from overseas than domestically. But if he's lucky it won't intrude at all, not until it's too late. Thirty years ago this month, a grocer's daughter from the English Midlands became Britain's female prime minister – not because the electorate was interested in making (Obama-style) history, but just because nothing worked any more. The post-1945 socialist settlement – government health care, government automobile industry, government everything – had broken down: Inflation over 25 percent, marginal taxes rates over 90 percent, mass unemployment, permanent strikes. The country's union leaders were household names, mainly because they were responsible for everything your household lacked. Even moving around was hard: The nationalized rail network was invariably on strike, and you had to put your name on a waiting list months in advance for one of the "new" car models. The evening news was an endless parade of big beefy burly blokes picketing some plant for the right to continue enjoying the soft pampering workweek of the more effete Ottoman sultans.

Margaret Thatcher was a great leader, who reversed her country's decline – to the point where, two decades later, the electorate felt it was safe to vote the Labour Party back into office. And yet, in the greater scheme of things, the Thatcher interlude seems just that: a temporary respite from a remorseless descent into the abyss. In its boundless ambition, the Left understands that the character of a people can be transformed: British, Canadian and European elections are now about which party can deliver "better services," as if the nation is a hotel, and the government could use some spritelier bellhops. Socialized health care in particular changes the nature of the relationship between citizen and state into something closer to junkie and pusher. On one of the many Obama Web sites the national impresario feels the need to maintain – "Foundation for Change" – the president is certainly laying the foundation for something. Among the many subjects expressing their gratitude to Good King Barack the Hopeychanger is "Phil from Cathedral City, Ca.":

"I was laid off in mid-January from a job I had for 12 years. It's really getting hard to make ends meet, but this month I got some great news. This week I received in the mail official notification that my COBRA monthly payments for medical, dental and vision insurance will decrease from $468 to only $163, all due to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This is a $305 in savings a month!

"I can't tell you how much of a weight off my shoulders this is. I am living proof of how the president's bold initiatives are beginning to work!"

But just exactly how do these "bold initiatives" work? Well, hey, simple folk like you and I and Phil from Cathedral City don't need to worry about the details. Once these "bold initiatives" really hit their stride maybe the cost of everything over four hundred bucks can be brought down to $163. Wouldn't that be great?

The problem in the Western world is that governments are spending money faster than their citizenry or economies can generate it. As Gerald Ford liked to say, "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have." And that's true. But there's an intermediate stage: A government big enough to give Phil from Cathedral City everything he wants isn't big enough to get Phil to give any of it back. That's the stage the Europeans are at: Their electorates are hooked on unsustainable levels of "services," but no longer can conceive of life without them.

Margaret Thatcher has a terrific line: "The facts of life are conservative." Just so. Alas, while the facts are conservative, everything else – the culture, the media, the institutions in which we educate our children, the language of public discourse, the societal air we breathe – is profoundly liberal. Phil is "living proof" of something, but it's not good news for conservatives.

©MARK STEYN

Torture? No. Except . . .

By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Friday, May 1, 2009

Torture is an impermissible evil. Except under two circumstances. The first is the ticking time bomb. An innocent's life is at stake. The bad guy you have captured possesses information that could save this life. He refuses to divulge. In such a case, the choice is easy. Even John McCain, the most admirable and estimable torture opponent, says openly that in such circumstances, "You do what you have to do." And then take the responsibility.

Some people, however, believe you never torture. Ever. They are akin to conscientious objectors who will never fight in any war under any circumstances, and for whom we correctly show respect by exempting them from war duty. But we would never make one of them Centcom commander. Private principles are fine, but you don't entrust such a person with the military decisions upon which hinges the safety of the nation. It is similarly imprudent to have a person who would abjure torture in all circumstances making national security decisions upon which depends the protection of 300 million countrymen.

The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives. This case lacks the black-and-white clarity of the ticking time bomb scenario. We know less about the length of the fuse or the nature of the next attack. But we do know the danger is great. (One of the "torture memos" noted that the CIA had warned that terrorist "chatter" had reached pre-9/11 levels.) We know we must act but have no idea where or how -- and we can't know that until we have information.
Catch-22.

Under those circumstances, you do what you have to do. And that includes waterboarding. (To call some of the other "enhanced interrogation" techniques -- face slap, sleep interruption, a caterpillar in a small space -- torture is to empty the word of any meaning.)

Did it work? The current evidence is fairly compelling. George Tenet said that the "enhanced interrogation" program alone yielded more information than everything gotten from "the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together."

Michael Hayden, CIA director after waterboarding had been discontinued, writes (with former attorney general Michael Mukasey) that "as late as 2006 . . . fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al-Qaeda came from those interrogations." Even Dennis Blair, Obama's director of national intelligence, concurs that these interrogations yielded "high value information." So much for the lazy, mindless assertion that torture never works.

Could we not, as the president repeatedly asserted in his Wednesday news conference, have obtained the information by less morally poisonous means? Perhaps if we'd spoken softly and sincerely to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, we could equally have obtained "high-value information."

There are two problems with the "good cop" technique. KSM, the mastermind of 9/11 who knew more about more plots than anyone else, did not seem very inclined to respond to polite inquiries about future plans. The man who boasted of personally beheading Daniel Pearl with a butcher knife answered questions about plots with "soon you will know" -- meaning, when you count the bodies in the morgue and find horribly disfigured burn victims in hospitals, you will know then what we are planning now.

The other problem is one of timing. The good cop routine can take weeks or months or years. We didn't have that luxury in the aftermath of 9/11 when waterboarding, for example, was in use. We'd been caught totally blind. We knew there were more plots out there, and we knew almost nothing about them. We needed to find out fast. We found out a lot.

"We have people walking around in this country that are alive today because this process happened," asserts Blair's predecessor, Mike McConnell. Of course, the morality of torture hinges on whether at the time the information was important enough, the danger great enough and our blindness about the enemy's plans severe enough to justify an exception to the moral injunction against torture.

Judging by Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress who were informed at the time, the answer seems to be yes. In December 2007, after a report in The Post that she had knowledge of these procedures and did not object, she admitted that she'd been "briefed on interrogation techniques the administration was considering using in the future."

Today Pelosi protests "we were not -- I repeat -- were not told that waterboarding or any other of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used." She imagines that this distinction between past and present, Clintonian in its parsing, is exonerating.

On the contrary. It is self-indicting. If you are told about torture that has already occurred, you might justify silence on the grounds that what's done is done and you are simply being used in a post-facto exercise to cover the CIA's rear end. The time to protest torture, if you really are as outraged as you now pretend to be, is when the CIA tells you what it is planning to do "in the future."

But Pelosi did nothing. No protest. No move to cut off funding. No letter to the president or the CIA chief or anyone else saying "Don't do it."

On the contrary, notes Porter Goss, then chairman of the House intelligence committee: The members briefed on these techniques did not just refrain from objecting, "on a bipartisan basis, we asked if the CIA needed more support from Congress to carry out its mission against al-Qaeda."

More support, mind you. Which makes the current spectacle of self-righteous condemnation not just cowardly but hollow. It is one thing to have disagreed at the time and said so. It is utterly contemptible, however, to have been silent then and to rise now "on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009" (the words are Blair's) to excoriate those who kept us safe these harrowing last eight years.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com