Eucatastrophe: The Ennobling Fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien Part 3

by Leo Grin
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/
March 5, 2011

At heart, the works of J.R.R. Tolkien — The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and even the often bleak and sad Silmarillion — are kindly works, not bitter and cynical ones. He was not interested in leaving his readers holding onto the last page of his books feeling empty, hopeless, cheated, or confused. Nor did he leave vast parts of his plots deliberately obfuscated and unresolved in order to claim an unearned depth and complexity for his work and thoughts. Quite the contrary: Tolkien took immense pains to give his tales not only spiritual and literary but dramatic satisfaction. He attempted — at great expense of time and effort, over a period of many years — to fill his work not just with questions but with answers, right down to carefully detailing the fate of Sam’s horse Bill (although, alas!, not the Entwives or Radagast!).

By graciously satisfying his readers’ insatiable curiosity in as many ways as possible, Tolkien puts himself at odds with many of today’s authors who, in an attempt to be ostentatiously arty and edgy, delight in leaving their readers with a sense of dramatic emptiness and thematic pointlessness. Just like in the film world, stories that ultimately resolve nothing and leave important plot threads hanging are in increasing vogue. Providing a paying reader with such basic dramatic tenets as resolution and closure is so last century, dont’cha know? Many books are so egregious in this regard that they leave readers saying, “Forget about happy endings, I’d be willing to settle for an ending of any kind — just tell me what happens!”

In the fantasy arena, a reader can easily wade through the swampy sludge of three books, five books, ten books, and even more, all spaced out over a period of many, many years, without ever reaching that terminus. Many fans die every year waiting for our fallen fantasists to achieve some sort of climax in their work worthy of the name.

As we have seen, Tolkien’s goal was to create “heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history, of which there is far too little in the world (accessible to me) for my appetite.” The good professor and his voracious literary appetite didn’t live to see Terry Brooks usher in the first of what would eventually be a tidal wave of slavish-yet-shallow Lord of the Rings copycat series, nor the later crop of nihilists who have reacted against that phenomenon with their tedious reliance on the artistic, cultural, and moral dead-ends of anti-heroes and torture-porn. But my guess is that — despite the abundance of fantasy choices on bookshelves, and the common refrain among fans that there is “something for everybody” out there — none of it would have satisfied the hunger that originally drove him to write his own books in the first place.

“My work is not a novel,” he insisted, “but an heroic romance, a much older and quite different variety of literature.” The writers of modern-day fantasy soap opera — their novels chock-full of dozens of point-of-view characters all trapped in bewildering plots so lengthy and complex that, quite often, not even the authors are able to successfully keep track of them — don’t seem to have a clue about what this means. The answer, I believe, can be found in a little-quoted letter of Tolkien’s.

When a fan once called Tolkien “a believer in moral didacticism,” the author blanched and replied huffily that “I neither preach nor teach.” But writing to friends, he could let down his guard enough to admit that, “I would claim, if I did not think it presumptuous in one so ill-instructed, to have as one object the elucidation of truth, and the encouragement of good morals in this real world, by the ancient device of exemplifying them in unfamiliar embodiments.” (italics mine)

Our fallen fantasists, one can’t help but notice, recoil from truth like a vampire from a crucifix. There is none of their beloved shades of gray in truth: by its very nature, the word renders or implies some sort of moral judgment on the events described, and forces the author to come down on one side or the other of the cosmic “good vs. evil” debate at play. Liberals often contort the English language into pretzels in their effort to avoid making these judgments, hence they speak of “my truth” versus “your truth” and how all truths need to be respected in an enlightened society. If, say, Sauron’s truth is different from Gandalf’s truth, then who are we to force the reader into embracing one over the other?

Tolkien, at least, refused to torture the English language until the words lost all sense of meaning. To him the word truth said what it meant and meant what it said: to wit, there can be only one truth, with all other conflicting views being false. Furthermore, he believed that “fairy story has its own mode of reflecting ‘truth,’ different from allegory, or (sustained) satire, or ‘realism,’ and in some ways more powerful.”

Mind you, Tolkien’s method of explicating truth was not evangelistic. He very deliberately left all mentions of religion out of his fiction, as well as all totems, icons, and symbols of Christianity. Instead, he chose to bring to life what he called a “monotheistic world of ‘natural theology’” wherein the lamps illuminating truth are invisible but nevertheless there. Only very rarely are we lucky enough to see that light burst through dark clouds in full splendor, revealing the sense that Life, for all of its seemingly random evils and tragedies, is threaded with a great, majestic pattern that provides both comfort and the bracing sense of underlying reason.

***********************

“The reason of my waking mind tells me that great evil has befallen and we stand at the end of days. But my heart says nay; and all my limbs are light, and a hope and joy are come to me that no reason can deny. Éowyn, Éowyn, White Lady of Rohan, in this hour I do not believe that any darkness will endure!” And he stooped and kissed her brow.

And so they stood on the walls of the City of Gondor, and a great wind rose and blew, and their hair, raven and golden, streamed out mingling in the air. And the Shadow departed, and the Sun was unveiled, and light leaped forth; and the waters of Anduin shone like silver, and in all the houses of the City men sang for the joy that welled up in their hearts from what source they could not tell.

***********************

Sitting in church in late 1944, J.R.R. Tolkien had an epiphany. As he later told his son Christopher in a letter, he was listening to “a wonderful commentary on the gospel” one peppered with stories of modern miracles of healing among the faithful. “I was deeply moved,” Tolkien said, “and had that peculiar emotion we all have. . . For it I coined [in his now-famous essay "On Fairy Stories"] the word ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears. . . [which is] is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce.”

Eucatastrophe.

It’s a word that has been studied by Tolkien fans and scholars a great deal, but often I think in the wrong way. It is not just a feeling of preternatural joy or relief — it is a revelation of truth. As such, it is also a judgment — thunderous in its silence — on the nature of Man, God, and the Universe. Tolkien stressed that…

[Eucatastrophe] produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives. . . that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made.

Truth, in other words, with a capital T. Eucatastrophe is revealed truth on a biblical scale — it’s no wonder that Tolkien referred to The Resurrection as “the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the Greatest Fairy Story,” and credited it with creating “that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.”

That feeling of “Christian joy,” so deeply felt that it’s almost indistinguishable from sorrow, was in Tolkien’s view the closest a living human being could come to discerning an underlying reason for existence, and thus satisfying that ultimate appetite which all men have gnawing away deep within their guts, whether they admit it nor not. The film director Werner Herzog, in much the same context (a context which, I propose, was derived from his own flirtation with Catholicism in his teens) calls this same feeling ecstatic truth.

For those keeping score, this is the exact opposite of nihilism.

To be continued. . . .

Author Archive: (Parts 1 & 2 of the Tolkien series can be found here)

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/author/lgrin/

Arid Uka’s Gratitude

Multiculturalism says he’s as German as Helmut and Franz. Except he’s not.

By Mark Steyn
http://www.nationalreview.com/
March 5, 2011 7:00 A.M.

According to Bismarck’s best-known maxim on Europe’s most troublesome region, the Balkans are not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. Americans could be forgiven for harboring similar sentiments after the murder of two U.S. airmen in Germany by a Kosovar Muslim.

Remember Kosovo? Me neither. But it was big at the time, launched by Bill Clinton in the wake of his Monica difficulties: Make war, not love, as the boomers advise. So Clinton did — and without any pesky U.N. resolutions, or even the pretense of seeking them. Instead, he and Tony Blair and even Jacques Chirac just cried “Bombs away!” and got on with it. And the Left didn’t mind at all — because, for a modern Western nation, war is only legitimate if you have no conceivable national interest in whatever war you’re waging. Unlike Iraq and all its supposed “blood for oil,” in Kosovo no one remembers why we went in, what the hell the point of it was, or which side were the good guys. (Answer: Neither.) The principal rationale advanced by Clinton and Blair was that there was no rationale. This was what they called “liberal interventionism,” which boils down to: The fact that we have no reason to get into it justifies our getting into it.

The photo is from Arid Uka's Facebook page - once listed under his real name but changed recently to that of Abu Reyann, his chosen 'warrior' name.

A decade on, Kosovo is a sorta sovereign state, and in Frankfurt a young airport employee is so grateful for what America did for his people that he guns down U.S. servicemen while yelling “Allahu akbar!” The strange shrunken spectator who serves as president of the United States, offering what he called “a few words about the tragic event that took place,” announced that he was “saddened,” and expressed his “gratitude for the service of those who were lost” and would “spare no effort” to “work with the German authorities” but it was a “stark reminder” of the “extraordinary sacrifices that our men and women in uniform are making . . . ”

The passivity of these remarks is very telling. Men and women “in uniform” (which it’s not clear these airmen were even wearing) understand they may be called upon to make “extraordinary sacrifices” in battle. They do not expect to be “lost” on the shuttle bus at the hands of a civilian employee at a passenger air terminal in an allied nation. But then I don’t suppose their comrades expected to be “lost” at the hands of an army major at Fort Hood, to cite the last “tragic event” that “took place” — which seems to be the president’s preferred euphemism for a guy opening fire while screaming “Allahu akbar!” But relax, this fellow in Frankfurt was most likely a “lone wolf” (as Sen. Chuck Schumer described the Times Square bomber) or an “isolated extremist” (as the president described the Christmas Day Pantybomber). There are so many of these “lone wolves” and “isolated extremists” you may occasionally wonder whether they’ve all gotten together and joined Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves and Isolated Extremists, but don’t worry about it: As any Homeland Security official can tell you, “Allahu akbar” is Arabic for “Nothing to see here.”

Bismarck’s second best known maxim on the region is that the Balkans start in the slums of Vienna. The Habsburg imperial capital was a protean “multicultural society” wherein festered the ancient grievances of many diverse peoples. Today, the Muslim world starts in the suburbs of Frankfurt. Those U.S. airmen were killed by Arid Uka, whose Muslim Albanian parents emigrated from Kosovo decades ago. Young Arid was born and bred in Germany. He is a German citizen who holds a German passport. He is, according to multicultural theory, as German as Fritz and Helmut and Hans. Except he’s not. Not when it counts.

Why isn’t he a fully functioning citizen of the nation he’s spent his entire life in? Well, that’s a tricky one.

Okay, why is a Muslim who wants to kill Americans holding down a job at a European airport? That’s slightly easier to answer. Almost every problem facing the Western world, from self-detonating jihadists to America’s own suicide bomb — the multi-trillion-dollar debt — has at its root a remorseless demographic arithmetic. In the U.S., the baby boomers did not have enough children to maintain their mid-20th-century social programs. I see that recent polls supposedly show that huge majorities of Americans don’t want any modifications to Medicare or Social Security. So what? It doesn’t matter what you “want.” The country’s broke, and you can vote yourself unsustainable quantities of government lollipops all you like, but all you’re doing is ensuring that when, eventually, you’re obliged to reacquaint yourself with reality, the shock will be far more devastating and convulsive.

But even with looming bankruptcy, America still looks pretty sweet if you’re south of the border. Last week, the former director of the U.S. Census Bureau, Steve Murdock, told the Houston Chronicle that in Texas “it’s basically over for Anglos.” He pointed out that two out of every three children are already “non-Anglo,” and that this gap will widen even further in the years ahead. Remember the Alamo? Why bother? America won the war, but Mexico won the peace. In the Lone Star State, Murdock envisions a future in which millions of people with minimal skills will be competing for ever fewer jobs paying less in actual dollars and cents than they would have earned in the year 2000. That doesn’t sound a recipe for social tranquility.

What’s south of Europe’s border? Why, it’s even livelier. In Libya, there are presently 1 million refugees from sub-Saharan Africa whose ambition is to get in a boat to Italy. There isn’t a lot to stop them. Between now and mid-century, Islam and sub-Saharan Africa will be responsible for almost all the world’s population growth — and yet, aside from a few thousand layabout Saudi princes whoring in Mayfair, they will enjoy almost none of the world’s wealth. Niger had 10 million people in 2000, and half a million of them were starving children. By 2010, they had 15 million, and more children were starving. By 2100, they’re predicted to hit 100 million. But they won’t — because it would be unreasonable to expect an extra 90 million people to stay in a country that can’t feed a population a tenth that size. So they will look elsewhere — to countries with great infrastructure, generous welfare, and among the aging natives a kind of civilizational wasting disease so advanced that, as a point of moral virtue, they are incapable of enforcing their borders.

The nations that built the modern world decided to outsource their future. In simple economic terms, the arithmetic is stark: In America, the boomers have condemned their shrunken progeny to the certainty of poorer, meaner lives. In sociocultural terms, the transformation will be even greater. Bismarck, so shrewd and cynical about the backward Balkans, was also the father of the modern welfare state: When he introduced the old-age pension, you had to be 65 to collect and Prussian life expectancy was 45. Now life expectancy has near doubled, you get your pension a decade earlier, and, in a vain attempt to make that deformed math add up, Bismarck’s successors moved the old East/West faultline from the Balkans to the main street of every German city.

Americans sometimes wonder why, two decades after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the U.S. Army still lives in Germany. The day is approaching when they will move out — if only to avoid any more “tragic events” “taking place.”

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone.© 2011 Mark Steyn.

Jean-Jacques Jihad

There is a reason leftists and Islamists collaborate: totalitarianism.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/
March 5, 2011 4:00 A.M.


The one thing that absolutely could not be tolerated was true freedom, the liberty of the individual. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the “social compact” would otherwise be “an empty formula.” The irreducible core of the utopia he envisioned, the “undertaking which alone can give force to the rest,” was quite simply this: “Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body.”

Ah, yes, the “general will.” For this, every modern totalitarian movement is indebted to the 18th-century Genevan philosopher who claimed, in The Social Contract, that a man’s compulsory servitude to the state — the embodiment of this general will — “means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free.” Rousseau was what we today call “Orwellian” long before there was an Orwell. “Freedom” was nothing more than submission.

That is why Rousseau so admired Islam.
The history of Islam and the modern Left is one of cooperation when there is some obstacle to their divergent concepts of “social justice” and the perfect society. These are always marriages of convenience, enduring no longer than the enemy that drives them into each other’s arms. But, reliably, it is they — the Islamists and the leftists — who come together when there is a third party in the mix. Rarely will one collude with a common enemy against the other. Today, the common enemy of Islamists and leftists is individual liberty, especially the social, economic, and political freedom guaranteed by the American Constitution, as conceived by the Framers. Conceived, that is, by men who saw government as a necessary evil to be rigorously limited lest it devour true freedom — not as an essential good to be empowered for the very purpose of enforcing servitude.

Collaborations between Islamists and leftists — past examples and those happening right before our eyes — are numerous, so much so that I admit to being dumbfounded by the frequency of the question of whether they really happen. That there is collusion is undeniable.

That collusion is a major theme of my book The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America — “grand jihad” and “sabotage” being the Islamists’ own terms for what they describe as their plan to “destroy Western civilization.” By the time the book was published last spring, the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New Left flagship created by radical lawyer William Kunstler in the 1960s, had spent nearly a decade spearheading the representation of jihadists captured making war against the United States. The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) — whose founders were ardent admirers of Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, and whose current executive director said, right after the 9/11 attacks, that “we should put the State of Israel on the suspect list” — was at the forefront of Islamist organizations then campaigning for the enactment of Obamacare, when MPAC wasn’t otherwise occupied by the numerous executive-branch agencies that regularly seek its input on any number of issues.

This should have been no surprise, for history is littered with Islamist/leftist confederations — e.g., the Muslim Brotherhood’s support of the military coup led by Soviet puppet Gamal Abdel Nasser to overthrow the British-backed Egyptian monarchy; the avowed “Islamic socialism” of the Pakistan People’s Party; the blend of Islamists and leftists that has always composed the Palestine Liberation Organization. Let’s say that this hadn’t been the case, though. Let’s pretend that the last 30 years hadn’t seen everything from Iranian Communists rallying to support Khomeini’s revolution to last summer’s “peace flotilla,” a joint effort by Islamist operatives and avowed Communists such as Bill Ayers to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza. The everyday cooperation between Islamists and leftists right under our noses would still be manifest.

The interesting question is not whether it occurs, but why. To anyone who studies the matter, as the liberty-loving Muslim reformer Zuhdi Jasser has, the Islamist enthusiasm for statist schemes like Obamacare is easy to decode. Islamist organizations are collectivist groups, Dr. Jasser explains.[1] They fall squarely in line with the socialist platform of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is, as Dr. Jasser puts it, to “increase the power of government through entitlement programs, increased taxation, and restricting free markets whenever and wherever possible.” That platform is the legacy of Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna and of Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood’s most formidable theoretician. Decades after their deaths, both these men remain required reading for budding Islamist activists in Brotherhood-inspired redoubts like the Muslim Student Association, the Islamic Society of North America, and the International Institute of Islamic Thought.

An animating goal of these organizations is to have Islamic principles recognized by government and enforced through the state’s coercive power. These principles needn’t be known as “Islamic” any more than leftist pieties are advertised as “leftist.” They need only reflect what Islamists, like leftists, call “social justice.”

This is perhaps most clearly illustrated in Qutb’s tract, Social Justice in Islam. The book teaches that Islam is about the collective, and that those who resist the Muslim ummah must, as Rousseau would have said, be “forced to be free.” According to Qutb, “integrating” humanity in “an essential unity” under sharia is “a prerequisite for true and complete human life, even justifying the use of force against those who deviate from it, so that those who wander from the true path may be brought back to it.” The overarching principle is the “interdependence and solidarity of mankind,” with the individual’s well-being achieved by his submission to the Islamic state. And “whoever has lost sight of this principle must be brought back to it by any means.” Thus, Qutb elaborates, sharia makes “unbelief” a “crime” that is “reckoned as equal in punishment” to the “crime of murder.” Forms of treason such as apostasy and fomenting discord in the ummah are capital offenses. As in all totalitarian systems, freedom is an illusion: security through enslavement.

Thus is Islam virulently opposed to capitalism, true freedom’s economic form. Qutb expounds on Islamic economic tenets: Human life is demeaned by great agglomerations of personal wealth and by the enrichment financiers attain by collecting interest on loans (which sharia forbids). These arrangements are said to enslave debtors and the working classes, making men the gods of other men. To be sure, Islam endorses private property — nominally — and it is less indifferent than the Left about incentivizing human achievement. But this is only because individual achievement is ultimately a corporate asset, increasing the dominance of the ummah. The property “owner” is merely a custodian; his wealth belongs to Allah. It is subject to confiscation by Allah’s agent on earth, the Islamic state, for what is deemed to be the collective good of the Muslim Nation.

This is Islam’s version of the general will: sharia’s enforcement of the central conceit that there is no God but Allah. Freedom, for Qutb, was a release from the servitude of men to men. Not, however, a release from all servitude. Freedom was “submission” to Allah — and not just spiritual submission, but total submission. Authority in Islam is unitary and indivisible. It recognizes no distinctions between the sacred and the secular. Sharia is not simply a set of spiritual principles. Islam is a comprehensive political, economic, social, and military program with its own legal code, governing every aspect of life.

There can be no compartmentalizing or narrowing. To narrow the breadth of sharia — as Qutb put it, “to confine Islam to the emotions and ritual cycles, and to bar it from participating in the activity of life, and to check its complete dominance over every human secular activity” — would reduce it to something other than the divine law. It would no longer be Islam. Therefore, mankind is not at liberty to constrict Allah’s law, much less to enact provisions that contradict it. Legislatures in the Islamic state are not democratic in the Western sense, even if they have been elected by the community. In a sharia state, as Brotherhood guide Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi has observed, legislators don’t really legislate; they are merely vessels of the divine law, which has substantially been set in stone for more than a millennium.

In Islam, it is Allah’s sharia that fills the role of Rousseau’s general will. Thus did Qutb observe of Rousseau’s great upheaval, the French Revolution, that what it “theoretically established by human laws . . . was established as a matter of practice by Islam in a profound and elevated form more than fourteen centuries earlier.”

Such symmetry had not been lost on Rousseau, for whom statism would be the “religion of the citizen.” Above all, it would merge the sacred and the secular under a single authority. As in the pagan states of antiquity, Rousseau’s vision of the ideal regime included

its gods, its own tutelary patrons; it has its dogmas, its rites, and its external cult prescribed by law; outside the single nation that follows it, all the world is in its sight infidel, foreign and barbarous; the duties and rights of man extend for it only as far as its own altars.

The similarity to Qutb’s Islam is striking. For the Islamist, all the world is divided into irreconcilable spheres: the perfect social justice of Dar al-Islam, the realm of the Muslims, and the unenlightened darkness so tellingly called Dar al-Harb, “the realm of war” — infidel, foreign, and barbarous.

Small wonder, then, that Rousseau lavished praise on Islam. But not just any Islam; his accolades were reserved for the early Muslims, Islam’s first generations. “Mahomet held very sane views,” Rousseau opined in The Social Contract. The prophet “linked his political system well together,” the civil and the spiritual as one. “As long as the form of his government continued under the caliphs who succeeded him, that government was indeed one, and so far good.” It was only when “the Arabs” departed from this model — when, “having grown prosperous, lettered, civilised, slack and cowardly,” they were “conquered by barbarians” — that Islam fell victim to what Rousseau (and Qutb) saw as the Christian dystopia: “the division between the two powers” of religion and the state.

The Muslim Brotherhood, it bears remembering, preaches a Salafist ideology: a retrenchment to the principles of the salafia, the “rightly guided caliphs” who were Mohammed’s immediate successors. The reform of Islam urged by Banna and Qutb was a purge of the same barbaric influences — particularly Western, Judeo-Christian influences — that Rousseau had seen as so corrupting.

Islamists and leftists have several significant differences. Qutb saw communism as far preferable to capitalism but too obsessed with an economic determinism that discounted the spiritual. The two camps part company on the equality of women and of non-Muslims, on matters of sexual liberty, and on abortion. If the world were populated only by Islamists and leftists, they could not coexist. Their marriages of convenience can have savagely unhappy endings once the common enemy that has drawn them together has been overcome. In Egypt, the Islamists were brutally persecuted by Nasser; in Iran, the secular leftists were routed by Khomeini.

Nevertheless, for all their differences, what unites Islamists and leftists is stronger than what presently divides them. They both support totalitarian systems. They would both attempt to recreate mankind, intending to perfect us by indenturing us to their utopian schemes. Their general will cannot abide free will. They both abhor individual liberty, unfettered reason, freedom of conscience, equality of opportunity rather than result, and bourgeois values that inculcate a devotion to bedrock Western principles and traditions.

That is why Islamists and leftists work together. It is why they will continue working together as long as there is resistance.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Link:

[1] http://www.hudson-ny.org/786/wake-up-call-islamists-insert-themselves-into-healthcare-debate

UNCIVIL UNIONS

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
March 2, 2011

As Obama rakes in historic campaign contributions from Wall Street money, liberals claim Republicans are beholden to "the rich." However that may be, it is far more true, and far less remarked upon, that the Democratic Party is the party of public sector unions.

And now, the nation watches helplessly as public sector unions and their Democratic allies say to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker: Nice state you got there, governor. Be a shame if something bad happened to it.

For Democrats, the purpose of government is to generously provide jobs for people who otherwise couldn't be hired -- because their skills, attitude or sense of entitlement are considered undesirable in the private sector. And no, I'm not just talking about Barack Obama.

Democrats use taxpayer money to fund a government jobs program, impoverishing the middle class and harming the people allegedly helped by the programs -- but creating a vast class of voters who owe their jobs to the Democrats.

This is a system designed to ratchet up costs. Look at the history of every entity where public employees have unionized, and you will find that not only are government workers paid more, but there are also a lot more of them doing a lot less useful work.

There could be two students per class, and the Democrats would still be campaigning for "smaller class size," so that the government would be required to hire more public school teachers to staff classes with one student. For Democrats, the purpose of public education in this country is not to teach children; it's to create jobs for "educators."

Forget the nonsense about working men with dirt under their fingernails, slugging it out at dangerous jobs with a heartless management riding them to get more production at lower wages –- those guys are what liberal journalist Harold Meyerson calls "dead weight."

We're talking about government employees, most of whom -- when they show up to work at all -- sit in comfortable, air-conditioned offices, kick off at 3 p.m., are entitled to endless sick days, personal days and holidays, whose performance can never be evaluated and who retire at age 50. (Again, I'm not focusing just on Barack Obama here.)

Government employees are even worse than welfare layabouts. In a triple-whammy for the taxpayer, they are: (1) hideously expensive, (2) impossible to fire, and (3) doing things you don't want done at any price.

Hey, guess what? I'm from the government, and I can burn down your garage for $300!

NO! I'M NOT INTERESTED!

OK, fine, I'll do it for you for $20.

BUT I DON'T WANT MY GARAGE BURNED DOWN AT ANY PRICE!

OK, the guys with the matches and gasoline will be by sometime between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. one day next week.

As with so many other things, such as vegan restaurants and the crack epidemic, California leads the country in destruction by government unions.

California's civil service unions have employed all the usual thug techniques –- regular strikes (illegal until the California Supreme Court approved them in 1985), rolling strikes, the "blue flu" (cops and other public-safety workers calling in "sick") -- all of which are almost as harmful to the state as when they actually show up for work.

While taxpayers groan under their tax burdens, one group of voters is constantly lobbying for higher taxes: government employees, who are paid by the taxpayer.

When California voters approved Proposition 13 back in 1978, cutting astronomical property taxes 57 percent, the public sector unions went ballistic.

Union bigwig Ron Coleman said, "We're not going to just lie back and take it."

John Seferian, vice president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), said the union should have told politicians: "Hey, we'll bring the roof down on you." (Which you have to be a member of the roofers' union to do.)

Jerry Wurf, president of AFSCME, warned that the union was "prepared for confrontation."

His solution to the ballooning cost of government employees was ... guess? That's right, it was the same as it always is: Tax the rich.

"Let the big shots pay!" Wurf said. Embodying the hopes and dreams of our Founding Fathers, Wurf said organizing government employees was part of his goal to "remake the economic and political system" in line with the vision of socialist Norman Thomas and the Young People's Socialist League.

Members of public sector unions see their pensions and benefits the way the Mafia views its "partnership" with a restaurant, as described in the movie "Goodfellas": "Business bad? F--k you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? F--k you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning, huh? F--k you, pay me."

Spoiler alert: When the restaurant owner is unable to pay his mob tribute, they burn the place to the ground.

But government employees aren't exactly like the mob. At least the Mafia guys have a strong work ethic.

COPYRIGHT 2011 ANN COULTER

Reagan-Era Paperboy

By Daniel J. Flynn on 3.4.11
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/


In 1985, everybody that I knew had a paper route. Time magazine's Tom Vanderbilt reports that paperboys have been replaced with papermen. They apparently like to be called "independent delivery contractors." Twenty years ago, Time notes, paperboys made 70 percent of newspaper deliveries. The most recent statistics show that paperboys make just 13 percent of deliveries -- and you've probably noticed that subscriptions are down.

From 1982 to 1987, I delivered the Boston Globe. For those five years, I held three different routes -- two simultaneously -- and filled in for vacationing friends atop that. Mailmen brag of neither rain nor sleet nor snow keeping them from their rounds; newspaper carriers might add Sundays and federal holidays to that list. Paperboy is a 365-day-a-year job.

Time touts lost work experience as a reason to lament the demise of the paperboy. But I didn't deliver papers as a career builder. I did it for the cash. My weekly profits, usually around $15, enabled me to purchase a road Quebec Nordiques jersey, Atari 2600 cartridges, and a bulky 4-inch black-and-white portable television whose supporting cast of ever-expiring D-batteries proved too costly for me to support. Not so frivolous, and unappreciated until a few years later, was the $5,000 college scholarship the Globe awarded for keeping a route for three years. I never got an allowance. I got a job. And when that cash in your pocket is your own, even if you're using it to obtain already-dated electronic gizmos and fashion tributes to the Stastny brothers, you know its value.

Delivery was just one way the route turned a profit. A meek fiftysomething gentleman and his burly blue-collar roommate, surely my first cognizant exposure to gay people, contracted with me to shovel them out for a generous $20 upon significant snowfalls. A senior citizen, weak with emphysema, paid me to pick him up Marlboros. It was the '80s, and they didn't card cigarette-buying nine-year-olds. He had but a few years to live, and I like to think the tobacco certainly increased the quality, if not the quantity, of his life. A shaggy customer, whose clock had stopped sometime during the previous decade, paid me $10 to help him move on a summer Saturday morning. He insisted upon finishing before that afternoon's historic event, Live Aid, which, as soon became apparent, he considered historic for reasons peculiar to him. He excitedly asked, "Do you know that Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young are reuniting this afternoon?" "No," I informed him. "Do you know that Led Zeppelin and The Who are?"

Other child-labor arrangements proved more stereotypically exploitative. An older woman believed that paying for newspaper delivery entitled her to my delivering her groceries as well. The hounding paperboy in the contemporaneous movie Better Off Dead more closely resembled a few of my customers. The call to go to the store rudely interrupted driveway basketball games, homework, and would-be record scores in Demon Attack. The unpredictability of the imposition haunted me. The 35-cent tip acted more as irritant than salve. For slightly more money, she employed me to remove crumbly insulation around pipes in her basement. Only later did I realize what she had then known: I had extracted more than my weight in asbestos.

Bad customers didn't tip; worse ones avoided paying altogether. Fourth-graders aren't very difficult to bowl over. Collection could be more negotiation session than straight receipt of payment. "Oh, goodness, no. Four weeks? You must be mistaken. Here's two weeks." The Globe didn't absorb the losses. The paperboy did. Shouldering the costs of sweet old-lady scofflaws fostered a healthy childhood habit of saying "no" -- half as long as a four-letter word but twice as offensive to adults.

So when a wealthy young customer -- in the vernacular of the times, a Yuppie -- avoided me for several months, and then declared that my tardy delivery justified non-payment, I pled with the paper office to cut the surly, stingy, and unstable woman from my rolls. "Make one last effort to collect," they directed. Over my objections, I did. She proceeded to swear at me, hit me, and dig her nails deep into my neck. The Globe not only dropped her form my rolls, they flagged her to never receive home delivery again.

The delivery "death penalty" was the least of her problems. In a Henry II-St. Thomas Becket moment, I relayed my story of woe to several enthusiastic listeners. These principled hooligans, fond of hurling broken spark plugs at windows and reenacting Neil Armstrong's moonwalk on parked automobiles, paid restitution. Their loyalty -- even if more to hooliganism than to me -- touched. The paperboy gets paid one way or another.

Despite the drawbacks, routes were sought after. I inherited my primary route from an older brother. I bequeathed it to a younger brother. Occasionally, carriers sold their routes. Now, you literally can't pay a kid to deliver newspapers.

That's too bad. Much of what parents protect children from turn out to be what they need most. Paper routes ensure outside activity every day, responsibility, independence, and familiarity with neighbors. The forced neighborhood interactions included a few children of the 19th century, shut-ins shut off from departed friends and spouses, whose time spent with a child of the late 20th could make a week -- for me at least.

Alas, overprotective parents aren't the sole, or even primary, issue explaining the decline of the paperboy. People don't read newspapers in the religiously observant way that they once did. A byproduct of an uninformed citizenry is an uninformed kidizenry. More than instilling self-sufficiency or a sense of duty, a paper route produced a literate, worldly kid who read the product he delivered. Is it a coincidence that Matt Drudge, Matt Lauer, and Tom Brokaw delivered the news before they delivered the news?

Victrolas, telegraphs, duels, and other such atavisms generally go out of style because society progresses. Paperboys have faded into yesterday because society has decayed.

- Daniel J. Flynn, the author of A Conservative History of the American Left, blogs at www.flynnfiles.com.

Mexico Lost

By George H. Wittman on 3.4.11
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/

Soldiers arrive to secure and area where the bodies of two men were found in Acapulco, Mexico, Sunday, March 14, 2010. Nine people were killed in a gang shootout early that Sunday in Acapulco. (AP)


The Mexican drug cartels up to last year had avoidedscaring the tourists: no battling in Cancun -- at least not right in the resort areas themselves -- no shooting in Acapulco; and so on. That's over now. At the height of this year's February tourist season, 15 taxi drivers and a few passengers were killed in Acapulco. This followed a mid-January slaughter of 31 in that resort area. The year before in March a total of 17, including 6 police, were assassinated in what has been referred to as Mexico's Pearl of the Pacific. The drug cartels are no longer honoring their deals with the resort owners.

According to local journalists, the taxi drivers in years past acted as the eyes and ears of the police. It was a convenient arrangement. The cops were able to keep a discreet eye on the always vulnerable but wealthy tourists, and at the same time the taxi drivers received some protection for their "guide" activities in recommending everything from high stakes poker games, incidental drug availability and, of course, prostitutes. It was all quite circumspect and traditional to resort communities in many parts of the world. The drug gangs took them over and the result has been taxis are now the couriers-of-choice -- and fair game.

The resort owners of Cancun employed the same local toughs who later became the soldiers of the cartels to provide protection for their guests from traveling scam artists, thieves, and that part of the underworld that preyed on Cancun's seasonal target of students on school break. The arrangement took a great weight off the job of the underpaid local police and provided useful local employment. Now drug trafficking has increased employment, but also local insecurity and premature death among the formerly ubiquitous "beach boys." Two were killed in January. Nonetheless Cancun remains Mexico's preferred beach resort, if one doesn't mind vacationing under the protection of Los Zetas.

The cartels have destabilized the entire "hand-in-glove" system that had existed for years between law enforcement, the holiday industry, and the security provided by traditional Mexican organized crime. If the Corleone family actually had existed outside of their Hollywood creation, they would have lamented the fact that the drug cartels were "ruining the neighborhood."

The real test will come in the next month as American college students begin their annual Spring break. The Cancun hotel association is doing everything it can to create a secure environment, but the cartels are just not playing ball. The government of Felipe Calderon, as previous Mexican administrations before him, counts on the tourism industry for a major portion of their yearly service sector income and employment. The impact of the ongoing drug wars now adversely affects broad areas of society, even as the profits continue to buoy up investments.

When 30,169 people are killed as a result of drug wars in the four years of a presidential administration (Mexican Govt. statistics 2006-2010, including 12,456 Jan.-Nov. 2010), there must be a recognition that a civil war exists. And yet Mexico is still treated as a friendly neighbor with an unfortunate problem by the White House. The Mexican government may be quite correct when it points to the U.S. narcotics consumer as the reason for the scope of the illicit trade, but it is also true that Calderon encourages the Obama Administration to pretend there is no connection between the cartels' smuggling of humans and drug trafficking.

The latest example of purposely unexplored action has been the movement in Pima County, Arizona to secede from Arizona in order to establish a 51st state on the Mexican border. Apparently, certain Pima County authorities want to ensure freer access for all goods and human travel between the two countries. To suggest that this initiative is unconnected to the conflict over illegal immigrants challenges the public's intellect.

Another puzzle was created recently when the combined forces of ICE, FBI and DEA acted in swift response to the killing in Mexico of ICE Special Agent Jaime Zapata and wounding of his companion S.A. Victor Avila. The result of this joint task force operation in a matter of a few days was the arrest of more than 100 people, the seizing of $4.5 million in cash and sizeable quantities of meth, cocaine, heroin and marijuana in several hundred locations around the U.S. Los Zetas members are the prime candidates for the shooting and it is presumed that those arrested in the raids principally had connections to this group.

Carl Pike, assistant special agent of the DEA Special Operations Division, said the raids were designed "to disrupt drug trafficking operations in the U.S." It is obvious that the entire operation was definitely "personal not business" -- all of which is quite understandable. The question arises, though, of how more effective similar activities could be if the secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, unleashed her considerable anti-drug trafficking forces on a regular basis rather than restricting such actions to such a "personal" reaction to one agent's tragic death.

The Homeland Security department has allowed false stories to be perpetuated such as the reverse traffic in guns from the U.S. to Mexico. Why is that? It has turned out that detailed analysis by the independent STRATFOR group indicated that the figure of 90% of smuggled guns into Mexico was in itself off by 90%.

It's about time the Obama Administration accepted its responsibility to correctly identify the scope of the issue and protect the American public from the dangers that Mexico's economic and human turmoil brings. While this may be seen as a political problem, it is even a greater issue of governmental ethics. Get some backbone, Washington! The time for symbolic action is over. That is the real way to honor Jaime Zapata.

George H. Wittman writes a weekly column on international affairs for The American Spectator online. He was the founding chairman of the National Institute for Public Policy.

Related:

http://www.businessinsider.com/texas-to-college-students-stay-away-from-mexico-2011-3?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+businessinsider+%28Business+Insider%29

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/02/28/dangers-lurk-spring-breaks-dangerous-destinations/

Lessons Of The Fight Game

JOE POSNANSKI
Sports Illustrated
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1182632/1/index.htm
March 07, 2011

Steve Farhoo and Nick Charles

Today is a good day. Nick Charles never knows when the good days will come, but he tries to embrace them. "Let's go for a walk," he says. We walk together unsteadily along the streets of downtown Santa Fe. People look over sometimes, but not because they recognize him. His face has hollowed. His hair was lost to chemotherapy. Every now and again, he bumps into me. The walking makes his breathing heavy.

"You know," he says, not unhappily, "I once did roadwork with Muhammad Ali."

Charles has lived a sports life. He sat ringside when Buster Douglas floored Mike Tyson. He stood on the sidelines while Joe Montana led the 49ers on a last-minute Super Bowl drive. He anchored coverage of the first Goodwill Games in Moscow, and became so close to Yankees owner George Steinbrenner that the Boss insisted on identifying himself by a spy name when calling with tips. Steinbrenner chose "Tom Turner."

Charles is 64 years old. He was the original sports anchor at CNN, in 1980, so long ago that when he called Tigers manager Sparky Anderson and introduced himself, Sparky said, "CNN? F--- you, I don't need a car loan," and slammed down the phone. He worked alongside Fred Hickman for 17 years, and together they battled to keep up with ESPN and SportsCenter. "I never liked all that ratings business," he says. "But we held our own for a long time."

The sun seems to gleam especially bright over downtown Santa Fe's low-slung cityscape. It is early afternoon and the air is crisp, and Charles does not want the walk to end. He knows it must. "Sure, it's corny to say that the lesson is we should embrace every minute," he says. "But what else is there? This is a beautiful world."

Nick Charles will die soon. He does not hide from it. When we pass a pretty little Spanish cemetery, he says that he considered being buried there. When he talks about how much he'd like to cover one more fight for television, he smiles and admits it probably won't happen. "It's O.K.," he says. "I've covered a lot of fights."

The doctors found Stage 4 cancer in his bladder in August 2009. By then the cancer had already spread into his lungs. No operation could help him. At first, the highest concentration of chemo seemed to subdue the cancer cells. Seven months later the doctors said the cancer had "come back with a vengeance." Charles noticed that it sounded like something a boxing announcer might say.

By Christmas of 2010, he knew that the fight was over. The doctors said that one more terrifying round of chemo offered a small chance to extend his life by a couple of months. Charles said no. "Remember the look on Thomas Hearns's face when he realized that no matter what he did, he could never slow down Marvin Hagler?" he asks. He decided then that he would spend the last few months fighting a different fight.

"I want to feel everything," he says.

He was born Nicholas Charles Nickeas and grew up in Chicago's inner city, a cab driver's son. It was a childhood of mustard sandwiches and cold nights with the heat off. It was a childhood that taught him to love self-made people. This, he feels, is what drew him to boxing. From 2001 through '10 he covered boxing almost exclusively—first for Showtime, and then for Bob Arum's Top Rank. "You know why I love boxers?" he asks as he looks out his living room window at the peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. "I love them because they face fear. And they face it alone. They came from nothing."

He says this without tears. He almost never cries. People marvel at this. Charles says he stays positive because he has no unfulfilled longings. "I've seen Paris," he says. He rereads his favorite books and watches sports with the sound down ("I want to make my own observations," he says), and discusses the news with his wife, Cory, who is a senior director for CNN International. He gets e-mails and phone calls from friends. Two weeks ago Mike Tyson called, as he often does. "On the other side," Iron Mike said, "I want to hang out with you."

There are fewer good days. "I hope," he says, "that I go to sleep and just don't wake up." This too he says with the same strong voice that once told America about Super Bowl quarterbacks and Kentucky Derby thoroughbreds.

He cries only when talking about Giovanna. She is his youngest daughter, and she turns five this month. Charles has three other children from two previous marriages, but the divorces were painful, and sports were all-consuming, and he did not spend much time with them. "I have regrets," he says. He has given his life to Giovanna. He spends every good moment playing with her and talking with her and watching Barbie movies with her.

"I'm sorry," Nick Charles says again and again because now he is crying, crying hard, and he says he has never been to Disneyland but will take Giovanna this month, if he lives long enough. He smiles as he considers how silly that sounds, like a sports cliché: "I'm going to Disneyland."

"She is strong," he says. "She will be O.K. when I'm gone. I know it." And he is quiet for a long time as he stares out the window at the mountains and then abruptly changes the subject. He talks about how much he likes watching sunsets. He says that sunsets in Santa Fe last almost forever.

Talk Back

If you have a comment or a topic to suggest, send an e-mail to PointAfter@si.timeinc.com or tweet PJPosnanski


Nick Charles: Lead Pipe Cinch

By Keith Olbermann
http://foknewschannel.com/nick-charles-lead-pipe-cinch/
Posted on March 3, 2011

Fred Hickman and Nick Charles

The first time I was ever on television, the first time they paid me to do that, something went really wrong. In 1981, the cameras used by reporters in the field were still vulnerable to the powerful radar systems at airports. Thus you can guess what happened we went out to the stadium next to LaGuardia in New York to do a story about the second chance afforded to the hapless New York Mets by the “split season” adopted by baseball in the wake of that summer’s player strike.

Nearly everything we shot, including most of my first-ever interview (Mets manager Joe Torre), turned out to have radar stripes and waves over the pictures, and air traffic controller growls over the audio. That’s right: it seemed like my future friend Torre was trying to land Pan Am’s 2:28 from Detroit. So what was supposed to be a two-minute report written and narrated by me in the field, was instead turned into what we could salvage: thirty ‘clean’ seconds of Torre answering one of my questions, edited to another ten seconds of Torre answering another one of my questions. The three usable seconds or so of the “cut-away” of me listening to Torre speaking, were shown over the point at which Torre’s two answers were butted together.

Nobody told the anchor of the broadcast for which I was free-lancing, CNN Sports Tonight. Nick Charles only knew there was a 40-second sound bite of Joe Torre in the middle of his story about the baseball season resuming. Out of nowhere, he saw some kid he didn’t know, with a big mustache and bigger glasses, nodding (nodding just once, because all the rest of the tape of me nodding had radar sweeps over it). I watched the show that night and Nick looked like there had been some kind of technical snafu. Or perhaps some strange kid had managed to cut in to CNN’s feed to get himself shown on television for three seconds. Nick Charles did not look happy.

Nick often did not look happy, on-air or off, but as I would come to quickly learn, his was a practiced dyspepsia, a studied world-weariness that had given him a gravitas that exceeded his 34 years, and had already made him a success in the Baltimore and Washington markets while most of the rest of his CNN Sports columns had come no closer to Baltimore and Washington than what they read on the backs of their baseball cards. Nick was our star and our credibility, literally the anchor that let punk kids like me and Fred Hickman and Gary Miller, and later Dan Patrick, learn our craft in front of the eyes of viewers who probably often looked at us the way Nick looked at me that first night when I suddenly showed up in the middle of his Joe Torre soundbite. Dan and I would later entertain each other at ESPN by doing impressions of Nick’s favorite expressions like “lead-pipe cinch” and his gloriously written reports from The Kentucky Derby (“the powerful, lunging thighs of a champion”).

When I went to work full-time for CNN out of New York about six months later, I came to know Nick, mostly second-hand (“Nick liked your piece last night. He said it didn’t suck like the other ones had. But you have to remember if he didn’t like you he wouldn’t even bother to say the other ones sucked”) and then by phone. That terrifying stare, or its phone equivalent, the pause, proved to be a small part blunt criticism (“Pizza? In our office? Seriously? You still in college when you’re not doing this?”) and a large part growling affection (“When I was your age I called everybody Sir. Of course when I was your age I also couldn’t have written a script as good as that”).

I bonded with Nick on a couple of nights when CNN sent me into Times Square to get him a newspaper. You read right. In the pre-internet days, The New York Times would print the “bulldog” edition and it would hit the streets, especially the ones nearest its own offices, between 10:00 PM and 12:30 AM. Exactly which story Nick needed to know about in ‘tomorrow’s Times’ I don’t remember (I think it had something to do with Bobby Knight) but the twenty minutes I spent in the payphone in the middle of the war zone there while I waited for it to come out, I remember perfectly, because when I called in to Atlanta to say the paper was still not on the newsstands, Nick came on and babysat me until it did. “You’re from New York and you don’t know Rule One? Rule One is, if you’re in a phone booth in Times Square and you’re actually talking to somebody, the drug addicts are far less likely to try to kill you because they’re afraid you’ll be able to give a description of them to the guy you’re talking to.”

When The Times turned out to have not run the story that night, I got back on the phone with Nick and he swore profoundly, and thanked me. And promptly sent me back in to Times Square the next night to do the whole thing over again. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he said with an evil laugh. Then, “hey…what are you wearing? Huh?”

As Joe Posnanski bluntly writes on the back page of Sports Illustrated this week, “Nick Charles will die soon.” He was diagnosed with Stage 4 bladder cancer in August of ’09. There have been some improvements since, but we’ve all known what was coming and I know a lot of us did our interviews nearly a year ago with CNN about Nick and how he influenced our careers and supported us and led us in that way that makes you not notice he was doing anything until years later and how some of his ‘kids’ like Dan and me moved on to compete with him from ESPN in the ’90s and he never expressed anything but pride. I don’t know of any of these interviews that were completed without tears. Joe tells Nick’s story beautifully and simply, and I urge you to read it. I did. I will not be able to read it a second time.

Jihad in Frankfurt

By Robert Spencer
http://www.frontpagemag.com
March 3, 2011

A policeman armed with a machine gun patrols at Terminal 2 of the airport in Frankfurt/M., western Germany. German authorities said Thursday they suspected a Kosovan man arrested over the fatal shooting of two US airmen was an Islamic extremist, but played down fears he was part of a cell.
(AFP/DPA/Frank Rumpenhorst)

Like so many jihad plots and actual jihad attacks and attempted attacks these days, the jihad murder of two U.S. airmen and the wounding of two others outside the Frankfurt Airport in Germany Wednesday was initially dismissed as having nothing to do with terrorism. According to the German news agency DAPD, Boris Rhein, the interior minister for the German state of Hesse hurried to the airport and almost immediately declared that there were no indications that the shootings had been a terror attack.

One wonders what actually would constitute a terrorist attack for such analysts. Would the murderer have to announce that he was about to carry out a terrorist attack before he started shooting? Would he have to be carrying an al-Qaeda membership card? In the case of the Frankfurt Airport shooting, there were, in fact, numerous indications that this was a jihad attack. The murderer was Arif Uka, a Kosovar Muslim. Despite widespread assumptions among American analysts that Kosovar Muslims are mostly moderate, secular, peaceful, Westernized, and grateful for U.S. intervention on their behalf, in reality al-Qaeda and other jihad terror groups have been active in that region for over a decade.

And even aside from the possibility of an actual link to al-Qaeda, Muslim hardliners have been streaming into Kosovo and the neighboring regions for just as long, and have been challenging on Islamic grounds the relatively secularized and non-combative Islam of the native Muslims. What’s more, Arif Uka is twenty-one years old and lives in Frankfurt, which has long been a hotbed of jihad activity in Germany.

As Uka opened fire, he shouted “Allahu akbar,” the universal cry of jihadis worldwide which Muhammad Atta reminded his fellow 9/11 hijackers to shout as they began operations, since, he said, the sound of it struck terror into the hearts of unbelievers. Another report suggests that he shouted “jihad, jihad.”

Nor would this be the first jihad attack against Americans by a Kosovar Muslim. Stratfor Global Intelligence reports: “A number of Albanian individuals were part of the Fort Dix plot in the United States in 2007. U.S. authorities broke up a militant cell in North Carolina that involved an individual of ethnic Albanian origin. In 2009, a U.S. citizen of Albanian descent from Brooklyn, New York, tried to go to Pakistan for militant training.”

Barack Obama quickly issued a statement saying, “I want everybody to understand that we will spare no effort in learning how this outrageous act took place, and in working with German authorities to ensure that all of the perpetrators are brought to justice.” Yet it is absolutely certain that if Arif Uka turns out to have been a pious, devout Muslim who read the Qur’an and cited it as a justification for the idea that Muslims have a responsibility to fight against infidels, that is one lead that Barack Obama will not follow up. No matter how many Muslim gunmen shout “Allahu akbar” as they open fire on non-Muslims, at this point the dogmatic lines have been drawn: analysts in the top military and intelligence posts in the U.S. and Europe understand that Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists, and they have been taught to understand that that fact somehow frees them from the obligation of understanding the enemy’s belief-system and formulating effective ways to combat it.

The script has long been written. The characters are cast. With every new jihad plot, all the media, government and law enforcement officials, and Islamic leaders need to do is fill in the blanks. In fact, I even pasted sections of this article in from older articles on earlier jihad attacks, including those previous three sentences and much of the lead paragraph – because the story never changes. All one need do is fill in the blanks in the template. In fact, Islamic groups in the U.S. have been shown to do this in the other direction, when a few years ago a template was found for condemnations of jihad terror attacks and protestations that they had nothing to do with the Islamic doctrines that their perpetrators avowed as their primary inspiration.

And so everyone follows his own template: Islamic groups issue their pro-forma condemnations of the latest jihad terror attack, which never seem to lead to any honest or forthright examination of the texts and teachings of Islam that inspire Muslims to shout “Allah akbar” and murder infidels. Government and law enforcement officials publish their expressions of outrage and vows to track down the perpetrators and punish them to the full extent of the law – vows that are rendered somewhat hollow by their consistent and essentially unanimous unwillingness to look honestly at the ways in which such attacks are inspired by Islamic teachings. This in turn prevents them from adopting any realistic measures to prevent such attacks in the future.

And I myself, as the writer of this article, have so many articles that I have written in the past about jihad terror plots or successful attacks, and the obfuscation and denial that followed in the wake of them, that I can use – and have used in this piece – to skewer yet again that obfuscation and denial, and to ask how many more innocent non-Muslims are going to have to be murdered before the elites in politics and the media begin to examine the problem of Islamic jihad seriously and honestly.

But really, how many more times must these templates be used? How much more murder and Allahu-akbaring must there be before American and European officials begin to take a hard look at immigration policies, at the short-sighted realpolitik it has pursued in the Balkans so as to create an Islamic supremacist beachhead there, and at multiculturalism itself. Several European leaders recently conceded that multiculturalism was a failure; this was a positive step, but so far none of them have actually done anything to roll back its deleterious effects.

The European Union and the United States have a great deal of work to do if they wish to make sure that there are no more jihad attacks like the one that Arif Uka perpetrated on an airport bus in Frankfurt on Wednesday. But there is still no clear, unambiguous indication that they really do have any serious interest in taking the necessary steps to protect their citizens from such random jihad violence, or even to preserve their free societies. Such steps would require no setting-aside of the legal rights that any citizen of an E.U. country or the U.S. enjoys; but they would certainly require the discarding of assumptions that are as tightly held as they are howlingly false.


URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/03/03/jihad-in-frankfurt/

Bernard Nathanson, 1926-2011

Much to Atone For

By JOSEPH BOTTUM
The Weekly Standard
Mar 7, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 24
http://www.weeklystandard.com/

Back-alley butchers. That was the catchphrase. And 10,000 women a year killed in illegal abortions, that was another. Coat hangers were what those butchers used to perform their grisly trade, and the only thing American women wanted was medical safety on the rare occasions when they made the agonized choice to abort their fetus. Not their unborn child. Fetus was the more scientific word, the true medical term, and besides, the argument wasn’t really about abortion. It was about choice​—​and who could be against that?

All these old slogans from the 1960s and 1970s, all these statistics, all these ways of framing the issue: One man, a doctor in New York named Bernard Nathanson, had a hand in concocting nearly every one of them. Sometimes, as in the claim of thousands dead from illegal abortions, they were complete fabrications. Other times, they were mere exaggerations. But always Dr. Nathanson was involved. “I am one of those,” as he later wrote, “who helped usher in this barbaric age,” and he spent the last 30 years of his life trying to atone for it.

His journey began with personal experience. Born in 1926, Nathanson was in medical school in Canada in 1949 when his girlfriend told him she was pregnant. Appropriating money from his father, he paid for her illegal abortion. The experience​—​and the desperate effort to justify what he had done​—​led him by the mid-1960s to become one of the nation’s most prominent advocates for legalized abortion.

Those were strange days for medicine, and Bernard Nathanson was in the midst of it all. In February 1969, then 42 years old, he addressed the conference that would soon develop into the largest pro-abortion lobbying group in the country, NARAL​—​the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. “We’re interested in the poor people who have had to use the back-alley butchers in the past,” he announced, and he showed it by doing such things as picketing his own Manhattan hospital. In 1970, New York enacted what was then the most permissive abortion law in America, and Nathanson promptly opened what he called the “Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health.” What it was, in fact, was a straightforward abortion practice, and over the next few years he oversaw 75,000 abortions​—​and performed 5,000 himself, including one on a mistress carrying his own child.

Not a violent man​—​he was, in fact, a slight figure, blinking through his owlish glasses​—​Bernard Nathanson nonetheless always described himself as an extremist and a militant. Just as an early experience of abortion radicalized him, so later experience radicalized him again. All the blood he saw as he worked, together with the emerging clarity of ultrasound pictures, eventually convinced him that the fetus was what he had once denied it to be: a living child.

He performed his last abortion in 1979, and by 1985 Nathanson had emerged again as a national spokesman​—​but this time on the pro-life side. He proved just as radical in his new cause, and perhaps it’s not surprising that, upon his conversion to Catholicism in 1996, he chose for his godmother not one of the movement’s intellectuals but one of its fighters: Joan Andrews Bell, who had spent more than a year in jail for blocking abortion clinics. In the mid-1980s, Nathanson provided the narration for The Silent Scream, the graphic film of an abortion that President Reagan screened in the White House to much outrage in the nation’s press.

“I know every facet of abortion,” he wrote. “I helped nurture the creature in its infancy by feeding it great draughts of blood and money; I guided it through its adolescence as it grew fecklessly out of control.” That was in his 1996 autobiography The Hand of God​—​and yet, it is a book less about abortion than about the theological narrative he came to see had shaped his life.

Born to a doctor father in a secular Jewish family, Nathanson had always assumed that rationality required the rejection of God. But something in the pro-life fight brought him to faith. He didn’t reject abortion because he was Catholic. He became a Catholic because the struggle against abortion exposed him to serious believers, for the first time in his life. “We systematically vilified the Catholic Church and its ‘socially backward ideas,’ ” he explained about his early days with NARAL. In the final years before his death on February 21 at age 84, he had become an apostle for those same ideas.

Bernard Nathanson was a very American kind of figure​—​a man filled with equal portions of eccentricity and greatness, and both deriving from the same source: his incapacity to live without a defining purpose. He wanted to believe in the goodness of abortion, and so he threw himself, body and soul, into the work. And when he realized it was just a business, and when he couldn’t any longer avoid seeing the children on whom it is performed, he reclaimed himself, body and soul again, by plunging into the fight against abortion.

It’s hard to praise the life Bernard Nathanson led, striding across the stage of America’s public struggles. But it was always a big life. And, in the end, a redeemed one.

Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

Libya’s Makeover

The Libyan people are no more our ally than Qadaffi.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com
March 2, 2011 4:00 A.M.

Condoleezza Rice meets with Moammar Qaddafi in September 2008.

‘The relationship has been moving in a good direction for a number of years now, and I think tonight does mark a new phase,” said Condoleezza Rice. President Bush’s secretary of state was taking time out from inventing the 70 percent of Palestinians who just want to live side-by-side in peace with the Zionist entity in order to reinvent Moammar Qaddafi.

It was September 2008, and the Freedom Agenda was in full swing, with a few hiccups: Hamas taking over Gaza, Hezbollah strangling what passed for the government of Lebanon, al-Qaeda reassembling in Pakistan, the Taliban resurging in Afghanistan, and, in Iraq, the usual: Shiites killing Sunnis, Sunnis killing Shiites, and everyone killing Americans when they weren’t busy chasing any remaining non-Muslims out of the country. What better time to see Colonel Qaddafi, heretofore a barbaric mass-murderer, as the proverbial leopard who’d changed his spots?

In reality, it had been the swift military rout of Saddam Hussein that induced Qaddafi to renounce (or claim to renounce) his ambition to develop weapons of mass destruction in late 2003. But once the hard-power promise of the Bush Doctrine gave way to the belief that thugs could be democratized into submission, the wily old terrorist found a system he could game. And game it he did.

I didn’t buy the remaking of Qaddafi then, and I don’t buy the remaking of Libya now. That puts me among a breed that, if news accounts are to be believed, is increasingly rare: I don’t care about the Libyan people — I’m sorry, I mean the “brave Libyan freedom fighters.”

Yes, yes, I know: We are not supposed to look at Libyans now as they appeared the last time we took notice: a cheering throng greeting Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie terrorist, whom the Obama administration was cajoled into ignoring when the Brits orchestrated his release from jail to appease our spot-shorn leopard. Nor are we supposed to register that Qaddafi’s main opponents in this 97 percent Muslim country are Islamists who have about as much use for us as they do for Colonel Crazy. No, this is to be the desperately wished-for Arab awakening, so we are to take the Libyans as noble secularists who just want to throw off the yoke of tyranny and establish democracy (and never you mind the sharia).

Eager to get with the program, newspapers, blogs, and television reports tell us that Qaddafi has been America’s incorrigible enemy for 30 years. The problem is, if your memory actually goes back more than ten minutes, you may recall that the same media outlets only recently pronounced Qaddafi downright corrigible.

And why not? After all, that was how the State Department saw it. As if history had never really happened, we agreed to let the strongman receive an ebullient Secretary Rice (“my darling black African woman,” as Qaddafi called her) in the very Bab al-Azizia compound that President Reagan had ordered bombed in retaliation for Libya’s 1986 terrorist attack on a Berlin disco. Qaddafi had targeted American servicemen and managed to kill two of them while maiming hundreds of other victims.

Had Qaddafi really changed in the ensuing 22 years? He arrived at the 2008 love fest arrayed in one of his lunatic costumes. The room, a smitten Associated Press reported, was “redolent of incense.” The dictator couldn’t gush enough over “Leezza,” being especially “proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders,” as he had told al-Jazeera in a 2007 interview.

That is, nothing had changed. Qaddafi was the same old “mad dog of the Middle East,” the title President Reagan aptly bestowed on him in 1986 — even before the strongman ordered the bombing of Pan-Am Flight 103, murdering 259 people onboard (including 189 Americans) and killing eleven more when the wreckage landed on the small Scottish town of Lockerbie. In 2008, just as in 1988, Qaddafi was the same dyed-in-the-wool terrorist he is today, the kind with whom the Bush administration occasionally professed to know you don’t negotiate. The kind you regard as an enemy, not a rehabilitation project.

But when you are determined to see policy success rather than reality, everything is made to look different. By 2008, the Bush Doctrine was no longer about bludgeoning terrorists into submission and squeezing their state sponsors until they said “Uncle.” That was so retro, so 2001. Now, the goal was to show real political progress in the Middle East. So Colonel Crazy wasn’t a terrorist anymore. He was rebranded an ally in the War on Terror. And hey, enemy schmenemy: “I’ve said many times,” Secretary Rice declaimed, “the United States . . . doesn’t have any permanent enemies.” The Libyans — just like us, according to Rice — had “learned the lessons of the past.” That’s why we were now so ready to “talk about the importance of moving forward.”

And did Qaddafi ever know how to move forward, to bank on our bottomless capacity to overpay for dubious concessions. In 2004, President Bush began removing sanctions and unfreezing assets. By 2006, diplomatic relations were restored and the regime — for which terrorism and a hammerlock on national oil riches were the keys to remaining in power — was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Announcing these developments, in exchange for which the U.S. demanded exactly nothing in the way of authentic democratic reform, the State Department lauded “Libya’s continued commitment to its renunciation of terrorism” and its “excellent cooperation” against the “global threat faced by the civilized world.” Oh, sure, Qaddafi’s regime was still, shall we say, “restrictive” — the gentle term State used in asking Congress to open the foreign-aid spigot. But soon, with all the Western guidance Qaddafi was anxiously soaking up, Libya would be a “developing” country. After that, the sky was the limit, and no need to spoil the mood by mentioning the alarming number of Libyans who were crossing Syria to wage jihad against American troops in Iraq.

Finally, to further grease the wheels for Secretary Rice’s historic visit with our new ally, the administration agreed to pay Libya reparations. Yes, you read that correctly. This was for what Qaddafi claimed were damages sustained in Reagan’s 1986 bombing campaign. Drawing a moral equivalence between (a) the comeuppance served up by the United States for a savage attack on our troops and (b) Qaddafi’s mass-murder of innocents in a plane bombing, David Welch, the State Department’s assistant secretary for near-east affairs, cooed that now “each country’s citizens can receive fair compensation for past incidents.” Incidents? Yes, that’s what historic atrocities become when we pretend our enemies are our friends.

But now the enemy who became a friend has become an enemy again. Of course, he never changed — we did. He just used the largesse and support we provided him to tighten his grip on the throne. Are you surprised?

Evidently, the State Department is. Secretary Rice’s successor, Hillary Clinton, suddenly wants Qaddafi gone yesterday. That’s after only weeks of rampage during which her boss, President Obama, couldn’t bring himself to utter a negative word about Qaddafi. In retrospect, maybe the president has decided that the lack of shovel-ready projects was not a good reason for him to use more U.S. taxpayer funds to stimulate “charities” run by the Qaddafi family.

In any event, guess who else wants Qaddafi gone tomorrow? None other than Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s sharia compass, who is still tingling from his recent, triumphant return to Egypt, right across the border from Eastern Libya, where Qaddafi’s fiercest opposition just happens to be. He did make time, though, to issue a fatwa last week calling for the Libyan despot’s assassination.

Not to worry, though. We have it on good authority (the U.S. government) that the Muslim Brotherhood is a “largely secular” organization, with a real passion for democracy. Perhaps if one of the Libyan secularists is moved to carry out the fatwa — which, of course, should be understood as a strictly secular edict — Secretary Clinton could find a new friend of America in Sheikh Qaradawi. They say Bab al-Azizia is lovely this time of year.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Green boondoggles

By SHIKHA DALMIA
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com
March 2, 2011

President Barack Obama, accompanied by Orion Energy Systems founder and CEO Neal Verfuerth tours the company in Manitowoc, Wis. , Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2011. Orion Energy Systems makes high-efficiency lighting and renewable solar technology for businesses. (AP)


President Obama hasn't abandoned his jobs-killing global-warming agenda, just wrapped it in the rhetoric of "clean energy." And that may be enough to get Republicans to sign on.

That "clean energy" is code for "anti-warming" is obvious, given that even Environmental Protection Agency numbers show that virtually all emissions have dropped dramatically in recent decades -- except for greenhouse gases.

To cut those, Obama's budget aims to hike Department of Energy spending by 12 percent from 2010 levels. He proposes $8 billion more for various clean-energy programs -- on top of the $30 billion "invested" via the 2009 stimulus. Even that's only the tip of the iceberg.

To pay for it all, Obama would stick it to Big Oil. He wants to eliminate $43 billion in oil-tax breaks over 10 years. That would be fine if he were aiming for a "level" energy market, with the government playing no favorites; in fact, he's just looking to divert the subsidies to his favorites.

Despite his talk of promoting nuclear power, the president's budget cuts support for it by 0.6 percent from 2010 levels. The big winners are -- surprise! -- solar (88 percent rise), biomass and biorefinery (57 percent), geothermal (136 percent) and wind (61 percent).

Obama is also doubling the budget of the Advanced Research Projects Agency to encourage R&D on renewables. That's because progressives are suddenly convinced (thanks to "Where Good Technologies Come From," a paper by the Breakthrough Institute) that the basic research for nearly every major technological invention -- blockbuster pharmaceuticals, high-yield crops, the Internet -- has been the result of government funding.

Pumping money into pie-in-the sky energy projects has been a perennial presidential project since Jimmy Carter. But Obama has a new wrinkle: The White House believes that past pushes for alternative fuels failed (despite subsidies) because they did nothing to ensure a market for the new products. So Obama has decreed that he wants 80 percent of America's energy to come from clean sources by 2035.

That won't happen automatically, so the Center for American Progress (the Obama White House's unofficial think tank) argues for a federal "35 by 35" standard -- mandating that 35 percent of America's energy come from renewables by 2035. This means the feds would force all utilities to generate more than a third of their electricity from renewables -- a guarantee of far higher prices.

A Heritage Foundation study found that even a scaled-down version of the plan, a 22.5 percent renewable standard by 2025, would bump household-electricity prices 36 percent and industry prices 60 percent by 2035 -- producing a net GDP loss of $5.2 trillion between 2012 and 2035.

So much for green growth and jobs.

Obama also means to make America's transportation oil-free to ensure a low-carbon future for mankind. To this end, he wants a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.

So, while low-income families face a cut in heating assistance from Uncle Sam (and higher electric bills), rich people would get $200 million for a $7,500 tax rebate to use toward each $40,000 Chevy Volt.

Obama also wants a $4 billion downpayment toward a six-year, $53 billion plan to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail. In fact, his own transportation secretary admits that this can't be done for less than $500 billion.

Obama has no political capital left to pursue grand global-warming schemes, so he is taking an incremental, piecemeal approach. Once these programs are in place, the constituency of activists and industry they'll spawn will use their very failure to argue for their expansion.

You'd think that Republicans would have nothing to do with this. But unlike global warming, clean energy polls well. So virtually no Republican has denounced it.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) actually supports a renewable standard. Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has committed only to examining Obama's energy budget "line by line" -- not killing it.

Global warming is a dying cause because the costs of the favored "fixes" for the problem vastly outweigh the supposed benefits -- and China and India aren't going to stop industrializing, and stay poor, simply to please Western elites. Republicans should wake up and not let Obama use the guise of clean energy to keep the anti-warming crusade alive.

Shikha Dalmia is a Reason Foundation senior fellow.

Today's Tune: Justin Townes Earle - Harlem River Blues

Jane Russell: 1921 - 2011

Jane Russell dies at 89; screen siren had sensational debut in 'The Outlaw'

Her provocative performance in the 1943 Howard Hughes film — and the publicity shots posing her in a low-cut blouse while reclined on a stack of hay bales — marked a turning point in moviedom sexuality. She became a bona fide star and a favorite pinup girl of soldiers during World War II

By Claudia Luther, Special to the Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/
8:30 PM PST, February 28, 2011

Jane Russell, the dark-haired siren whose sensational debut in the 1943 film “"The Outlaw"” inspired producer Howard Hughes to challenge the power and strict morality of Hollywood's production code, has died. She was 89. (File photo / February 27, 2011)

Jane Russell, the dark-haired siren whose sensational debut in the 1943 film "The Outlaw" inspired producer Howard Hughes to challenge the power and strict morality of Hollywood's production code, died Monday at her home in Santa Maria, Calif. She was 89.

Russell, who would later turn her sexy image to comic effect in films with Bob Hope, Marilyn Monroe and other major stars, had respiratory problems and died after a short illness, her family said.

Russell's provocative performance in "The Outlaw" — and the studio publicity shots posing her in a low-cut blouse while reclined on a stack of hay bales — marked a turning point in moviedom sexuality. She became a bona fide star and a favorite pinup girl of soldiers during World War II. Troops in Korea named two embattled hills in her honor.

She went on to appear in 18 more films in the 1940s and '50s and, though only a few were memorable, she remains a favorite from the era for her wry portrayals of sex goddesses who seem amused by their own effect.

"Such droll eroticism is rare in Hollywood, and we are lucky that she was allowed to decorate so many adventure movies," film historian and critic David Thomson wrote of Russell, whom he called "physically glorious."

Among Russell's better films are "The Paleface," in which she plays the spirited Calamity Jane opposite Hope's feckless dentist in a spoof of "The Virginian"; and "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," a musical in which she is brunet gal pal Dorothy to Marilyn Monroe's gold-digging Lorelei Lee. In the latter, the two stars perform a razzle-dazzle production number of the Jule Styne-Leo Robin hit song "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend."

Russell appeared in a few films in the 1960s and ended her movie career in 1970 playing Alabama Tigress in "Darker Than Amber," a film version of John D. McDonald's mystery novel. She replaced Elaine Stritch in "Company" on Broadway for several months in 1971, but her career after that was mostly limited to nightclub, stage or other live appearances.

To later generations, Russell — who once famously had a brassiere designed for her by Hughes — was known as the "bra lady" for her role as a spokeswoman for Playtex bras for "full-figured women."

Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell was born June 21, 1921, in Bemidji, Minn., and moved to Southern California with her family as an infant. After graduating from Van Nuys High School, she was working as a part-time model and receptionist when her photo was noticed by a casting agent working for Hughes. The mogul was conducting a nationwide search for a beauty with ample breasts for the part of Rio McDonald, who falls for Billy the Kid in "The Outlaw."

One audition got Russell the part.

Hughes, who took over direction of the film from Howard Hawks, made it his personal business to make the most of his discovery's assets. He even had his engineers design a special "cantilever" bra with no noticeable seams that would expose more of her breasts than conventional undergarments. Russell said she found his contraption "ridiculous" and wore her own bra.

"He could design planes, but a Mr. Playtex he wasn't," Russell wrote in her 1985 autobiography, "Jane Russell: My Past and My Detours."

Jane Russell, right, and Marilyn Monroe perform "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" from the 1953 film "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." (20th Century Fox)

On seeing the results of Hughes' efforts in 1941, Joe Breen, who enforced the production code, was appalled, saying he had "never seen anything quite so unacceptable as the shots of the breasts of the character of Rio," which were "shockingly emphasized and, in almost every instance, are very substantially uncovered."

He ordered Hughes to delete dozens of shots of Russell's bosom. Hughes not only refused but played up the resulting controversy to publicize the film. He issued Russell-in-the-haystack posters with such lines as "How Would You Like to Tussle With Russell?" and "Mean! Moody! Magnificent!" In one publicity stunt, a skywriter wrote "The Outlaw" in the sky and then carefully drew two circles with a dot in the center of each.

Hughes also dreamed up the line: "What are the two reasons for Jane Russell's rise to stardom?" (Comedian Hope later used a variation, introducing the actress as "the two and only Jane Russell.")

The film was released briefly in 1943, then withdrawn while Hughes considered revisions and maximized the publicity. It was released more widely in 1946 without code approval. The film was "not a bore," a Los Angeles Times reviewer wrote, assuring readers that while Russell's character was incidental to the story line, "the exploitation of [her] physical attractions is as insistent as advertised."

Drawn by the film's notoriety, moviegoers flocked to see it. It had made millions of dollars by the time censors approved it in 1949. As James R. Petersen wrote in Playboy magazine in 1997, "Hughes showed that a film could ignore the code and make a profit." Other challenges to the code followed —including, notably, director Otto Preminger's "The Man With the Golden Arm" and "The Moon Is Blue" in the 1950s. In the late 1960s, the code was replaced by the Motion Picture Assn. of America's ratings system, which permitted the release of explicitly sexual or violent movies as long as audiences were restricted on the basis of age.

Hughes' famed battle with the code was portrayed in "The Aviator," Martin Scorsese's 2004 biographical film that starred Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes. In the film, Hughes appears before the enforcer of the production code armed with close-up pictures of Russell's and other prominent bosoms of the day.

Russell cooperated in Hughes' publicity campaign, but drew the line at blatantly revealing pictures.

Deeply religious throughout her life, she looked back with regret at the unrelenting attention devoted to her bounteous figure, calling it "Hollywood gook."

Although she grew to despise the provocative pictures that had made her a star at 19, she succumbed to her publisher's pressure to use one of the sultriest on the cover of her autobiography.

In her personal life, counter to her rather rowdy public image, Russell was a political conservative and a born-again Christian years before the phrase became popular. She once promoted the use of the Bible in public schools.

She and her first husband — Van Nuys High School sweetheart Bob Waterfield who went on to become a football star for UCLA and the Cleveland (later Los Angeles) Rams — were married for 23 years until they divorced in 1967. They adopted three children — Tracy, Thomas and Robert (Buck) — who survive her, along with six grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

Russell recounted in her autobiography that before her marriage to Waterfield she had had a botched abortion, which she thought might have affected her ability to have children. The couple's difficulties in adopting inspired her to form the World Adopting International Fund, which helped place tens of thousands of children with adoptive families. The organization closed in 1998.

Finding homes for orphans became a full-time job for Jane Russell, here in 1959 with youngsters Andy Kenny and Yoko Todd and artist Jeanette Whiteaker. (AP)

After she and Waterfield divorced, Russell married actor Roger Barrett, who died of a heart attack three months after their 1968 wedding. Her marriage in 1974 to John Calvin Peoples, a real estate businessman, lasted until his death in 1999.

After her third husband's death, Russell moved from their Montecito estate to Santa Maria, home to her youngest son and his family. By 2006, macular degeneration had begun claiming her sight.

At 84, silver-haired and still statuesque, she regularly performed in a 1940s-style revue that she staged with friends on a tiny stage at the local Radisson Hotel, far from Las Vegas, where she made her singing debut in 1957.

In summing up her film career, Russell wrote in her autobiography that she never got to make the kinds of movies she would have liked to.

"Except for comedy, I went nowhere in the acting department," she said. "I was definitely a victim of Hollywood typecasting."

Funeral services will be held at 11 a.m. March 12 at Pacific Christian Church 3435 Santa Maria Way, Santa Maria.

Luther is a former Times staff writer.

news.obits@latimes.com


Jane Russell, Sultry Star of 1940s and ’50s, Dies at 89

By ANITA GATES
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
March 1, 2011

Jane Russell stands next to a movie still of her and Robert Mitchum at her home near Santa Barbara in 1999. (Reed Saxon / Associated Press)


Jane Russell, the voluptuous actress at the center of one of the most highly publicized censorship episodes in movie history, the long-delayed release of the 1940s western “The Outlaw,” died on Monday at her home in Santa Maria, Calif. She was 89.

The cause was a respiratory-related illness, her daughter-in-law, Etta Waterfield, said.

Ms. Russell was 19 and working in a doctor’s office when Howard Hughes, returning to movie production after his aviation successes, cast her as the tempestuous Rio McDonald, Sheriff Pat Garrett’s girlfriend, in “The Outlaw,” which he directed.

A movie poster — which showed a sultry Ms. Russell in a cleavage-revealing blouse falling off one shoulder as she reclined in a haystack and held a gun — quickly became notorious and seemed to fuel movie censors’ determination to prevent the film’s release because of scenes that, by 1940s standards, revealed too much of the star’s breasts. The Roman Catholic Church was one of the movie’s vocal opponents.

Although the film had its premiere and ran for nine weeks in San Francisco in 1943, it did not open in New York until 1947 and was not given a complete national release until 1950. Critics were generally unimpressed by its quality, but it made Ms. Russell a star. The specially engineered bra that Hughes was said to have designed for his 38D leading lady took its place in cinematic history, although Ms. Russell always contended that she never actually wore it.

She went on to make some two dozen feature films, all but a handful of them between 1948 and 1957 and many of them westerns.

In the western comedy “The Paleface” (1948), she played Calamity Jane opposite Bob Hope, with whom she also starred in “Son of Paleface,” the 1952 sequel. In the musical comedy that she called her favorite film, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953), she starred with Marilyn Monroe as one of two ambitious showgirls. Her numbers included “Two Little Girls From Little Rock,” one of several duets with Monroe, and the comic lament “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love?” Two years later she starred with Jeanne Crain in “Gentlemen Marry Brunettes,” a sequel of sorts, set in Paris.

A number of her movies were musicals, and singing became a large part of her career. She first appeared in Las Vegas in 1957 and was performing in musical shows at small venues as recently as 2008. Although she did considerable stage acting over the years, her sole Broadway appearance was in 1971 in the Stephen Sondheim musical “Company,” in which she replaced Elaine Stritch as the tough-talking character who sings “The Ladies Who Lunch.”

Promo shots and poster from Howard Hughes' film "The Outlaw"

Ms. Russell was best known in the 1970s and ’80s as the television spokeswoman in commercials for Playtex bras, which she promoted as ideal for “full-figured gals” like her.

Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell was born on June 21, 1921, in Bemidji, Minn., the daughter of Roy and Geraldine Russell. Her mother had been an aspiring actress and a model. “The Girl in the Blue Hat,” a portrait of her by the watercolorist Mary B. Titcomb, once hung in the White House, bought by President Woodrow Wilson.

When Jane was 9 months old, before her four brothers were born, her father moved the family to Southern California to take a job as an office manager. He died when Jane was in her teens.

After high school, Jane took acting classes at Max Reinhardt’s theater workshop and with Maria Ouspenskaya. She did some modeling for a photographer friend but was working in a chiropodist’s office when a photo of her found its way to Hughes’s casting people.

In 1943 she married her high school sweetheart, Bob Waterfield, a U.C.L.A. football player who became the star quarterback of the Los Angeles Rams. They adopted a daughter, Tracy, and two sons, Thomas and Robert. (After a botched abortion before her marriage, Ms. Russell was unable to have children. She later became an outspoken opponent of abortion and an advocate of adoption, founding the World Adoption International Fund in the 1950s.)

She and Mr. Waterfield divorced in 1967 after 24 years of marriage. The following year she married Roger Barrett, an actor, who died of a heart attack three months after the wedding.

In 1974, John Calvin Peoples, a real estate broker and retired Air Force lieutenant, became her third husband, and they were together until his death, in 1999. Ms. Russell had had previous problems with alcohol, but they became worse after she was widowed again; her grown children insisted that she undergo rehabilitation at the age of 79.

She also turned to conservative politics in her later years.

“These days I’m a teetotal, mean-spirited, right-wing, narrow-minded, conservative Christian bigot, but not a racist,” she told an Australian newspaper, The Daily Mail, in 2003. Bigotry, she added, “just means you don’t have an open mind.”

By the time she married Mr. Peoples, her acting career was all but over. After appearing in three movies in the mid-1960s, she had a small role in her last film, “Darker Than Amber,” a 1970 action drama starring Rod Taylor. She did relatively little television, but her final screen role was in a 1986 episode of the NBC police drama “Hunter.”

Her children survive her, as do 8 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

Ms. Russell was very public about her religious convictions. She organized Bible study groups in Hollywood and wrote about having experienced speaking in tongues. In her memoir, “My Path and My Detours” (1985), she described the strength she drew from Christianity.

A higher power was always there, she wrote, “telling me that if I could just hold tough a little longer, I’d find myself around one more dark corner, see one more spot of light and have one more drop of pure joy in this journey called life.”

Related:

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=42076

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/movies/interviews/2009/janerussell.html