Packing Heat

By Peter Ferrara on 9.7.11 @ 6:07AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org

The theory that human activity is causing potentially catastrophic global warming is not science. It is politics, driven by special interests with ideological, political and economic stakes in the theory.

For environmentalists, global warming corresponds with the authoritarian goal at the core of their movement: repeal of the industrial revolution (which President Obama's EPA has begun to implement). For governments, it presents an opportunity to vastly expand their power and control through taxes, regulation and bureaucracy.

The theory also presents an opportunity for the United Nations to vastly expand its power and control. As an organization of world governments who would also gain enormously from acceptance of the theory, the UN is doubly corrupted as an honest broker on the issue. Yet, perversely, governments across the globe have delegated authoritative inquiry on the issue to the UN through its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Wily environmentalists have also successfully weaved economic stakes in the theory for some in the business community, starting with tens of billions -- growing into hundreds of billions -- of government subsidies for businesses that will pose as potential producers of the "green energy of tomorrow." This enables wily politicians to attempt to snooker voters with promises of "green jobs." Of course, those jobs would only become available if self-supporting producers of abundant low cost energy are replaced with an entire "green" industry that can survive on corporate welfare while producing unreliable high cost energy for the economy (resulting in job loss and a decline in America's standard of living).

What is so shocking is the way formerly objective, reliable Western science has been seduced by all these interests into intellectual corruption in service of the global warming fraud (less shocking when you consider the tens of billions in "research" funding provided by the above special interests). But don't forget that scientists live and breathe in the far left environment of the academic world. Thus, many of them have social and ideological interests in advancing the global warming charade.

The confluence of all these special interests and their money has now corrupted the broader scientific community. Formerly venerable, objective, respected scientific bodies such as the National Academy of Sciences have been taken over by politicians in scientific drag. Formerly independent scientific journals and publications have gone the same route rather than suffer the social and financial opprobrium that service to the truth will entail.

This growing intellectual corruption is greatly magnified by our thoroughly politicized Old Media, which operates today only in service of politically correct causes. Consequently, so much of the public discussion on global warming that we see is actually "play acting," with supposed scientists, journalists, media commentators, politicians and others posing as if objective science actually demonstrates the danger of human caused global warming. One day Al Gore​ will receive an Oscar for his role in posing as savior of the planet, which actually reflects delusional mental illness in the man who almost became our president.

But the politicization of Western science means the decline of Western science as well. That in turn augurs the decline of Western civilization, as objective science was a foundation of the rise of the West for centuries.

Climate Change Reconsidered

But real, objective science continues to flourish at little noticed work stations, offices, and independent institutes and foundations across the globe. The budding international headquarters of this worldwide counterrevolution has now flowered at the Chicago based Heartland Institute, which bravely soldiered on in devotion to real climate science when even compatriots told them objectivity on this issue was a lost cause.

In 2009, Heartland published the 858-page Climate Change Reconsidered, a comprehensive, dispassionate, thoroughly scientific refutation of the theory that human activity is causing global warming. That served as the first answer to the quadrennial Assessment Reports of the UN's IPCC. No one is knowledgeable about the true scientific debate over global warming until they have read and analyzed this thorough publication. Play acting commentators should be challenged for their response to this report, and publicly dismissed if they have none.

On August 29, Heartland released a 400-page follow up report titled Climate Change Reconsidered, reflecting the same thorough, objective, dispassionate analysis of the theory of global warming, and updating the science and developments. Heartland will continue the pattern of presenting full scientific alternatives to the UN's IPCC Assessment Reports (AR), planning to produce another full report in 2013 when the next IPCC AR is expected. Heartland has also sponsored annual international scientific conferences on climate change, several of which I have attended.

Hundreds of scientists from across the planet are now speaking out in opposition to the corruption of climate science. Among them are Fred Singer​, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science at the University of Virginia, and the founder and first Director of the National Weather Satellite Service; Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and U.S. Science Team Leader for the AMSR-E instrument flying on NASA's Aqua satellite; William Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University; Syun-ichi Akasofu, Professor of Physics and former director of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska; Patrick Michaels​, Research Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and past President of the American Association of State Climatogists; and David Douglass​, Professor of Physics at the University of Rochester. Physics icon Freeman Dyson​ expressed similar skepticism in the New York Times. These scientists are as good and as credentialed as any working on the UN's IPCC Assessment reports.

The just released Interim Report concludes that "natural causes are very likely to be the dominant cause of the climate change that took place in the twentieth and the start of the twenty-first centuries. We are not saying that anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHG) cannot produce some warming or have not in the past. Our conclusion is that the evidence shows they are not playing a substantial role."

The authors add, "the net effect of continued warming and rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere is most likely to be beneficial to humans, plants, and wildlife."

The Evidence Shows

The theory of global warming holds that carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases produced by human civilization collect in the atmosphere. They let radiation from the sun in, but like a greenhouse they prevent the radiation from escaping back out, leading temperatures to increase, potentially to catastrophic levels. Humans cause CO2 emissions primarily by burning fossil fuels like oil, coal, natural gas, and wood, which was the foundation of the industrial revolution.

But the established temperature record from the official sources is not consistent with this theory. Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions continually increased, yet temperatures did not steadily increase. Surface temperatures in the U.S. were warmer in the 1930s than they are today. From 1940 to the late 1970s, U.S. surface temperatures declined, despite all the increased burning of fossil fuels during that period, leaving no significant difference at that point from 1900. This decline actually prompted speculation at the time that a new ice age was coming. Surface temperatures then increased until the unrelated El Nino weather phenomenon in 1998, sponsoring the global warming hysteria. Since 1998, surface temperatures have actually declined again.

More reliable and relevant is the satellite data on global atmospheric temperatures, which is not distorted by the location, coverage, and surrounding activities of land based weather stations (highly unreliable outside the U.S. and Europe), and covers the whole planet. The satellite data starts in 1979, and shows no increase in global temperature trends until 1998, when El Nino caused a sharp temperature spike. Since then the satellite data again shows that global atmospheric temperatures have declined.

If supposed greenhouse gas emissions were causing global warming, then we should have seen a far more steady increase in temperatures. What the objective scientists are now saying is that this up and down pattern of temperature is far more consistent with natural causes. The temperature variation patterns follow variations in solar activity (like sunspots) and major ocean current temperature trends. For example, a major influence on global temperatures is what is known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which turns from warm to cold and back every 20 to 30 years, as cold water from deep in the ocean cycles up and is warmed by the sun. This PDO variation seems to follow closely with the actual temperature variation trends.

Global temperatures were also warmer than today during the Medieval Warm Period, a period of several hundred years around 1000 A.D, when now icy Greenland was named and actually farmed by settlers (who long since fled as the cold and ice advanced). Even higher temperatures prevailed during a period known as the Holocene Climate Optimum, which ran roughly from 6000 B.C. to 3000 B.C. In fact, temperatures were higher than today during most of the period from 9000 B.C. to the birth of Christ. Yet, there was no significant human burning of fossil fuels during these periods.

CO2 is a naturally occurring substance in the Earth's atmosphere essential to life. Plants need to take in CO2 to live, and emit oxygen, which is essential to animal life. Animals breathe in oxygen and emit CO2. Proxy records scientists use to reconstruct the past show that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were much higher in the past than today. For hundreds of millions of years prior to 400 million years ago, atmospheric CO2 concentrations were well over 30 times greater than today. But CO2 concentrations have actually been in sharp decline since then. From roughly 50 million back to 350 million years ago, fluctuating CO2 concentrations were generally 3 to 15 times their current levels. Princeton's Happer argues that we have been suffering a CO2 famine that has harmed plant life and agriculture.

CO2 concentrations have begun rising again, due primarily to the industrial revolution and increased burning of fossil fuels, up 44 percent from 150 years ago. And this is already causing more rapid growth of plant life. But CO2 still accounts for only 0.039 percent of all atmospheric molecules, less than 1 percent of the concentration in human breath.

Moreover, humans and their activities currently account for only 3 percent of CO2 emissions each year. And less than half of the CO2 emitted by fossil fuel burning remains in the atmosphere; the rest is absorbed by the ocean or incorporated by the terrestrial biosphere. This is why policies to reduce human CO2 emissions such as the Kyoto treaty, even if fully implemented, would have negligible effects on future temperatures, reducing the temperatures that would otherwise result by 0.02 degrees C by 2050 for Kyoto, as conceded by even global warming alarmists.

Marching Science Proves the Special Interests Wrong

Real science continues to march on, despite the politicians and media flacks. Right now, scientific proofs are developing and being published that disprove the global warming theory.

Published, peer reviewed papers by MIT's Lindzen find that a doubling of (CO2) in the atmosphere would increase temperatures by 0.7 degrees, less than half the estimate of the theoretical climate models relied on by the UN's IPCC. Another published paper by NASA's Spencer shows, using atmospheric temperature data from NASA's Terra satellite, that much more heat escapes back out to space than is assumed captured in the atmosphere by greenhouse effects under the UN's theoretical climate models. This explains why the warming temperature changes predicted by the UN's global warming models over the past 20 years have been so much greater than the actual measured temperature changes.

Last month came the results of another major experiment by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), involving 63 scientists from 17 European and U.S. institutes. The results show that the sun's cosmic rays resulting from sunspots have a much greater effect on Earth's temperatures through their effect on cloud cover than the UN's IPCC has been assuming. More cosmic rays mean more cloud cover, which cools temperatures. Less cosmic rays mean less cloud cover, raising temperatures. This again shows what the NIPCC and Heartland have been saying, that natural causes have the dominant effect on Earth's temperatures, not greenhouse gases.

Finally, the UN's own climate models project that if man's greenhouse gas emissions were causing global warming, there would be a particular pattern of temperature distribution in the atmosphere, which scientists call "the fingerprint." Temperatures in the troposphere portion of the atmosphere above the tropics would increase with altitude producing a "hotspot" near the top of the troposphere, about six miles above the earth's surface. Above that, in the stratosphere, there would be cooling. But higher quality temperature data from weather balloons and satellites now show just the opposite: no increasing warming with altitude in the tropical troposphere, but rather a slight cooling, with no hotspot and no fingerprint. QED.



- Peter Ferrara is Senior Fellow at the Carleson Center for Public Policy, Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy for the Heartland Institute, and General Counsel of the American Civil Rights Union. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan​, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the first President Bush. He is the author of America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb, now available from HarperCollins.

Simply Evil

A decade after 9/11, it remains the best description and most essential fact about al-Qaida.

By Christopher Hitchens
http://www.slate.com
Monday, Sept. 5, 2011

The proper task of the "public intellectual" might be conceived as the responsibility to introduce complexity into the argument: the reminder that things are very infrequently as simple as they can be made to seem. But what I learned in a highly indelible manner from the events and arguments of September 2001 was this: Never, ever ignore the obvious either. To the government and most of the people of the United States, it seemed that the country on 9/11 had been attacked in a particularly odious way (air piracy used to maximize civilian casualties) by a particularly odious group (a secretive and homicidal gang: part multinational corporation, part crime family) that was sworn to a medieval cult of death, a racist hatred of Jews, a religious frenzy against Hindus, Christians, Shia Muslims, and "unbelievers," and the restoration of a long-vanished and despotic empire.

To me, this remains the main point about al-Qaida and its surrogates. I do not believe, by stipulating it as the main point, that I try to oversimplify matters. I feel no need to show off or to think of something novel to say. Moreover, many of the attempts to introduce "complexity" into the picture strike me as half-baked obfuscations or distractions. These range from the irredeemably paranoid and contemptible efforts to pin responsibility for the attacks onto the Bush administration or the Jews, to the sometimes wearisome but not necessarily untrue insistence that Islamic peoples have suffered oppression. (Even when formally true, the latter must simply not be used as nonsequitur special pleading for the use of random violence by self-appointed Muslims.)

Underlying these and other attempts to change the subject there was, and still is, a perverse desire to say that the 9/11 atrocities were in some way deserved, or made historically more explicable, by the many crimes of past American foreign policy. Either that, or—to recall the contemporary comments of the "Reverends" Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson—a punishment from heaven for American sinfulness. (The two ways of thinking, one of them ostensibly "left" and the other "right," are in fact more or less identical.) That this was an assault upon our society, whatever its ostensible capitalist and militarist "targets," was again thought too obvious a point for a clever person to make. It became increasingly obvious, though, with every successive nihilistic attack on London, Madrid, Istanbul, Baghdad, and Bali. There was always some "intellectual," however, to argue in each case that the policy of Tony Blair, or George Bush, or the Spanish government, was the "root cause" of the broad-daylight slaughter of civilians. Responsibility, somehow, never lay squarely with the perpetrators.

So, although the official tone of this month's pious commemorations will stress the victims and their families (to the pathetically masochistic extent of continuing to forbid much of the graphic footage of the actual atrocities, lest "feelings" and susceptibilities be wounded), it is quite probable that those who accept the conventional "narrative" are, at least globally, in a minority. It is not only in the Muslim world that it is commonplace to hear that the events of 9/11 were part of a Jewish or U.S. government plot. And it is not only on the demented fringe that such fantasies circulate in "the West." A book alleging that the Pentagon rocketed the Pentagon with a cruise missile—somehow managing to dispose of the craft and crew and passengers of the still-missing Flight 77, including my slight friend Barbara Olson—was a best-seller in France, while another book about another 9/11 conspiracy theory was published in the United States by the publishing arm of the Nation magazine. Westminster John Knox Press, a respected house long associated with American Presbyterianism, published Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11, which asserted that the events of that day were planned in order to furnish a pretext for intervention in the Middle East. More explicitly on the Left, my old publishing house Verso—offshoot of the New Left Review—published an anthology of Osama Bin Laden's sermonizing rants in which the editors compared the leader of al-Qaida explicitly, and in the context not unfavorably, to Che Guevara.

So, for me at any rate, the experience of engaging in the 9/11 politico-cultural wars was a vertiginous one in at least two ways. To begin with, I found myself for the first time in my life sharing the outlook of soldiers and cops, or at least of those soldiers and cops who had not (like George Tenet and most of the CIA) left us defenseless under open skies while well-known "no fly" names were allowed to pay cash for one-way tickets after having done perfunctory training at flight schools. My sympathies were wholeheartedly and unironically (and, I claim, rationally) with the forces of law and order. Second, I became heavily involved in defending my adopted country from an amazing campaign of defamation, in which large numbers of the intellectual class seemed determined at least to minimize the gravity of what had occurred, or to translate it into innocuous terms (poverty is the cause of political violence) that would leave their worldview undisturbed. How much easier to maintain, as many did, that it was all an excuse to build a pipeline across Afghanistan (an option bizarrely neglected by American imperialism after the fall of communism in Kabul, when the wretched country could have been ours for the taking!).

My solidarity with soldiers, cops, and other "responders" didn't make me a full convert to the police mentality. I was a named plaintiff in the lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the National Security Agency, for its practice of warrantless wiretapping. I found a way of having myself "waterboarded" by former professionals, in order to satisfy my readers that the process does indeed constitute torture. I have visited Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, those two grotesque hellholes of American panic-reaction, and written very critically from both. And I was and remain unreconciled to the stupid, wasteful, oppressive collective punishment of Americans who try to use our civil aviation, or who want to be able to get into their own offices without showing ID to a guard who has no database against which to check it. But I had also seen Abu Ghraib shortly after it was first broken open in 2003, and could have no truck with the moral defectives who talked glibly as if that mini-Auschwitz and mass grave was no worse. When Amnesty International described Guantanamo as "the Gulag of our time," I felt a collapse of seriousness that I have felt many times since.

One reason for opposing excesses and stupidities on "our" side (actually, why do I defensively lob in those quotation marks? Please consider them as optional) was my conviction that the defeat of Bin-Ladenism was ultimately certain. Al-Qaida demands the impossible—worldwide application of the most fanatical interpretation of sharia—and to forward the demand employs the most hysterically irrational means. (This combination, by the way, would make a reasonable definition of "terrorism.") It follows that the resort to panicky or degrading tactics in order to combat terrorism is, as well as immoral, self-defeating.

Ten years ago I wrote to a despairing friend that a time would come when al-Qaida had been penetrated, when its own paranoia would devour it, when it had tried every tactic and failed to repeat its 9/11 coup, when it would fall victim to its own deluded worldview and—because it has no means of generating self-criticism—would begin to implode. The trove recovered from Bin Laden's rather dismal Abbottabad hideaway appears to confirm that this fate has indeed, with much labor on the part of unsung heroes, begun to engulf al-Qaida. I take this as a part vindication of the superiority of "our" civilization, which is at least so constituted as to be able to learn from past mistakes, rather than remain a prisoner of "faith."

The battle against casuistry and bad faith has also been worth fighting. So have many other struggles to assert the obvious. Contrary to the peddlers of shallow anti-Western self-hatred, the Muslim world did not adopt Bin-Ladenism as its shield against reality. Very much to the contrary, there turned out to be many millions of Arabs who have heretically and robustly preferred life over death. In many societies, al-Qaida defeated itself as well as underwent defeat.

In these cases, then, the problems did turn out to be more complicated than any "simple" solution the theocratic fanatics could propose. But, and against the tendencies of euphemism and evasion, some stout simplicities deservedly remain. Among them: Holocaust denial is in fact a surreptitious form of Holocaust affirmation. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was a direct and lethal challenge to free expression, not a clash between traditional faith and "free speech fundamentalism." The mass murder in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not the random product of "ancient hatreds" but a deliberate plan to erase the Muslim population. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fully deserve to be called "evil." And, 10 years ago in Manhattan and Washington and Shanksville, Pa., there was a direct confrontation with the totalitarian idea, expressed in its most vicious and unvarnished form. Let this and other struggles temper and strengthen us for future battles where it will be necessary to repudiate the big lie.

Today's Tune: Steve Earle - The Other Kind (Live)

Pro-Sharia Lunacy at the New York Times

By Ryan Mauro
http://frontpagemag.com
September 6, 2011

On September 2, The New York Times published an opinion piece by Yale University’s Eliyahu Stern titled, “Don’t Fear Islamic Law in America.” The article compares the fight against Sharia law to anti-Semitism and depicts it as being based in anti-Muslim bigotry. On the contrary, the campaigns to ban Sharia-based judicial rulings actually protect Muslims who love the U.S. and the values that define it.

“The crusade against Sharia undermines American democracy, ignores our country’s successful history of religious tolerance and assimilation, and creates a dangerous divide between America and its fastest-growing religious minority,” Stern writes.

At least a dozen states are considering outlawing Islamic arbitration tribunals where Muslims can voluntarily settle their disputes according to Sharia law. As Daveed Garteinstein-Ross notes, there are similar courts for Jews and they are not used as criminal courts. However, there is a danger that an Islamist judge will be able to push his interpretation of the faith from the bench, and that Muslims will feel forced by their communities to use Sharia courts. Islamist groups have also promoted Sharia courts as part of an incremental strategy to bring about Sharia-based governance.

The Center for Security Policy has found 50 examples in 23 states “where Muslim-Americans had their cases decided by Sharia Law against their will.” In one case, a Trial Court judge ruled based on Moroccan Sharia law, even though those involved were not Moroccans or even Muslims. In Tampa, FL, a judge ruled that a dispute between two Muslim parties would be solved in accordance with Sharia, overruling the objections of the one party. There is also the notorious New Jersey case where a judge exonerated a Muslim man of raping his wife because Sharia allowed him to do so. The ruling was later overturned.

“These families came to America for freedom and from the discriminatory and cruel laws of Sharia. When our courts then apply Sharia law in the lives of these families, and deny them equal protection, they are betraying the principles on which America was founded,” the study says.

This is why the American-Islamic Forum on Democracy supports the ban on Sharia-based rulings.
“As Americans we believe in the Constitution, the Establishment Clause, and our one law system. [The ban] reaffirms the First Amendment to the Constitution and prevents the establishment or empowerment of a foreign legal system like the specific Sharia legal systems implemented in many Muslim majority nations and in western Sharia courts seen in places like Britain,” the Muslim group said.

To see the problems posed by Sharia courts, one only needs to look at Europe, where they have been established. The Civitas think tank in the United Kingdom found that the country has at least 85 of them.

“Among the rulings…we find some that advise illegal actions and others that transgress human rights standards as they are applied by British courts,” the report said. It mentioned a case where a Muslim woman was not allowed to marry a non-Muslim. In one incident, a Sharia councilman dismissed a woman’s complaint that her husband hit her once, saying “it’s not a very serious matter.”

Another study of Britain’s Sharia courts by One Law For All found that, “There is neither control over the appointment of these judges nor an independent monitoring mechanism. People often do not have access to legal advice and representation. Proceedings are not recorded, nor are there any searchable legal judgments. Nor is there any real right to appeal.”

Baroness Cox has proposed a bill that would prevent Sharia courts from claiming they have legal jurisdiction over family law or criminal law. It also would require that women be informed that they are best protected if their marriage is recognized under English law.

“Cox said they are increasingly ruling on family and criminal cases, including child custody and domestic violence. Jurisdiction ‘creep’ had caused considerable suffering among women compelled to return to abusive husbands, or to give up children and property,” the Guardian said.

The British Ministry of Justice decided to investigate the Sharia courts, but dropped the probe because of a lack of cooperation by the courts. The Ministry said it had a hard time interviewing those involved with the courts because they are short-staffed, over-worked, and simply didn’t want to talk. The Ministry mentioned a “reluctance to discuss the private work of the councils and respondents were wary of the stereotypical ways in which their organisations were represented in the media.”

It determined that Islamist forces are promoting the courts. “Despite all efforts to package Sharia’s civil code as mundane, its imposition represents a concerted attempt by Islamists to gain further influence in Britain,” it concludes.
The creation of Sharia courts is part of Islamist programs elsewhere in Europe and in the U.S. There is a concerted effort by Islamist groups to create Sharia enclaves within the United States, as well as in Canada and Western Europe. For example, a Spanish National Intelligence Center report warns that foreign money is helping Islamists to create “parallel societies” that include Sharia courts “that operate outside of Spanish jurisprudence.”

The opponents of Sharia-based court rulings and Sharia-based governance should not be dismissed or denigrated as they were in The New York Times opinion piece. There are legitimate concerns about what kinds of judges will be appointed, “jurisdiction creep,” and the potential for the abuses seen in Europe. And those concerns cannot be addressed so long as those raising them are ridiculed and dismissed.

Banned Books Week is just hype

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.usatoday.com
September 5, 2011

School is starting up again, and later this month we will celebrate another national tradition: Banned Books Week, which since 1982 takes place every year during the last week of September.

It's an exciting time. There are going to be special readings of "banned books" not merely in bookstores (where the banned books will, tellingly, be for sale) but online as well. This year, explains BannedBooksWeek.org, "readers will be able to proclaim the virtues of their favorite banned books by posting videos of themselves reading excerpts to a dedicated YouTube channel." It's all so very brave and subversive!

Already, news outlets are dusting off familiar stories about the scary climate of censorship in the land. Indeed, it's a staple of nearly every major newspaper to at least let the American Library Association air its dire warnings about the growing threat to the freedom to read. Last year, on the eve of Banned Books Week, the ALA's official magazine, American Libraries, ran a story headlined, "Book banning alive and well in the U.S."

"What do books from the Twilight series, To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye have in common?" asked the magazine, "All have faced removal from library bookshelves in the United States within the past year."

It's a storyline the American left in particular seems to desperately want to be true. Recently, an American writer penned a lengthy online piece for the British newspaper The (London) Guardian headlined "The Tea Party moves to ban books." The left-wing activist group Think Progress announces, "Censorship On The Rise: U.S. Schools Have Banned More Than 20 Books This Year."

No, not true

The problem: None of this is remotely true. Banned Books Week is an exercise in propaganda. For starters, as a legal matter no book in America is banned, period, full stop (not counting, I suppose, some hard-core illegal child porn or some such out there). Any citizen can go to a bookstore or Amazon.com and buy any book legally in print — or out of print for that matter.

When the American Library Association talks about censorship of books, it invariably refers to "banned or challenged" books. A "banned" book is a book that has been removed from a public library or school's shelves or reading lists due to pressure from someone who isn't a librarian or teacher. In practice, this means pretty much any book that's pulled off the shelves of a library can be counted as "banned." Even so, that's very rare, which is why the ALA lump "banned" and "challenged" together. Moreover, it's crazy. If the mere absence of a book counts as a "ban," then 99.99% of books have been banned somewhere.

Meanwhile, a challenge happens when someone — usually a parent — questions the suitability of a book. If you complain that your 8-year-old kid shouldn't be reading a book with lots of sex, violence or profanity until he or she is a little older, you're not a good parent; you're a would-be book-banner. The preferred tactic of the BBWers is to highlight a stupid decision by one school somewhere in America and hype the anecdote as a trend. So when a school in Missouri recently removed Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five from its shelves, it was immediately decried as the harbinger of a national trend. (The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library immediately offered all the school's students free copies of the "banned" book)

Numbers tell it all

To get a sense of how overhyped these sorts of stories are, consider that reported challenges have dropped from 513 in 2008 to 348 last year. The historic norm is a mere 400 to 500 bans or challenges.

Well, there are almost 100,000 public schools in America (98,706 in 2009) educating roughtly 50 million students. (There are 33,000 private schools. And some 10,000 public libraries). So if there were, say, 500 parent-driven "bans or challenges" in a given year in public schools, that would mean for every 200 public schools, or every 100,000 students, at least one parent even complained about an age-inappropriate book. What an epidemic!

These days, teachers unions are fond of claiming that apathetic parents deserve more of the blame for the woeful state of education today. Maybe so. But a national policy of bullying parents interested in what their kids are reading hardly seems like the best way to encourage them. Indeed, from these numbers, the real scandal might be that so few books are "banned or challenged."

As an author myself, I'm all for making book-reading more attractive to young people. Banned Books Week seems in part designed to make book-reading seem "subversive." That's admirable. But Banned Books Week has less admirable themes as well. As an educational enterprise, it denigrates the United States as a backward, censorial country when it's anything but. It demeans parents and other citizens who take an interest in the schools. And it attempts to elevate the judgment of professional librarians to unimpeachable heights — the same librarians who've sometimes pushed to allow nearly unfettered access to porn in public libraries. Fighting mythical censorship with real propaganda hardly seems like a worthwhile trade.

Jonah Goldberg is editor at large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

Today's Tune: P.P. Arnold - The First Cut is the Deepest

Lee Roy Selmon's death deprives Tampa Bay of a football, and community, legend

By Gary Shelton, St. Petersburg Times Sports Columnist
http://www.tampabay.com/
Monday, September 5, 2011

This 1984 file photo shows Tampa Bay Buccaneer defensive end Lee Roy Selmon shaking hands with head coach John McKay. Selmon, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' Hall of Fame defensive end who teamed with his brothers to create a dominant defensive front and led Oklahoma to back-to-back national championships, died Sunday, Sept. 4, 2011, two days after being hospitalized for a stroke. He was 56. (AP PhotBruce Zake,File)

"Whenever I want to feel good, I think of Lee Roy Selmon," said the late John McKay, longtime coach of the Buccaneers

Today, Tampa Bay is not as kind as it was. It is not as gracious. It is not as decent. The best of us has been taken way. Lee Roy Selmon, a legend of a man with the demeanor of a common man, has died. All of the lives he touched, all of the people he enriched, mourn his passing. It is too sad for words, and it is too soon for reason. As a community, Tampa Bay was not yet done with Lee Roy. We needed to hear his soft voice, and to be comforted by his immense presence, for a while longer. He was only 56, and we needed to know he was there, and that he made the rest of us better, for years to come. Lee Roy is gone. A giant has fallen. And now, who is going to help to fill in the crater?

Josh?

Evan?

Steven?

Anyone?

The wounds are fresh, and the pain is deep. Since Friday, since the whispers of his death swept across Tampa Bay, most of us had braced for the worst. And still, it seems sudden and grim and final. He is gone, and much of us has gone with him. As an area, we are a little less than we were. Whoever can fill this void?

Gerald?

David?

Victor?

For the athletes of Tampa Bay, this should become a shared challenge. A good man has gone, and they should strive to carry the torch. One by one, they should realize they have a responsibility to help meet the standard that Selmon left behind. Oh, does Tampa Bay need it.

Above all else, the legacy of Selmon was in the consistency of his kindness. He never seemed to have a bad day, even a bad moment. He was a star who didn't act as if he were a star, a celebrity who never accepted the role. Tampa Bay loved him for that. How could it not?

On the day after his death, there are a thousand stories about encounters with Lee Roy being told across Tampa Bay, and they all sound the same. Lee Roy shook a lot of hands over the years, and his voice remained quiet, and his smile was never far away, and he treated strangers as if they were friends. He was as thoughtful as a professor, as calm as a diplomat, as honorable as a clergyman.

He was one of us. He was Lee Roy, and he set the standard for what an athlete should mean for the place in which he lived.

If you are Josh Freeman, or Evan Longoria, or Steven Stamkos, the responsibility has fallen to you. Be kinder. Make a difference. Take more time with people. Reduce the distance between yourself and those who follow you.

If you are Gerald McCoy, or David Price, or Victor Hedman, this should be a goal. Lower your voice. Raise your standards. Smile a little more. Give a little more.

In memory of Lee Roy, every athlete in Tampa Bay, from the budding stars to the players struggling to hang on, from the veterans to the rookies, needs to accept the responsibility of being a little more like Selmon. A little nicer. A little calmer. A little more like Lee Roy, the man who set the standard.

For that matter, it wouldn't hurt the rest of us to try, either.

This is how you honor Lee Roy. Not with a statue or a speech, not with a banner or a trophy. With Lee Roy, the ultimate tribute is to try to live your life a little more the way he lived his. How uncommon should common decency be?

Looking back, Tampa Bay did not merely draft Selmon 35 years ago. It adopted him, and he adopted the area right back. This is not as common as you might think. Most athletes come to a town through the accident of a player draft, and they change colors as quickly as there is bigger money to be made elsewhere.

Other athletes walk through a town and demand that the people who live there get out of their way. Too many are entitled and self-absorbed, and they convince themselves that nastiness and narcissism is the reason for their success. They love the adulation, but only as long as it keeps its distance.

Selmon's approach was different. His humility was genuine, and his decency was endless. He kept his awards in a box, and if he had any ego at all, it was in there, too. Part of his greatness was that he didn't need to bring it up.

On Friday night, after Selmon suffered his stroke, Chicago Bears pro personnel director Tim Ruskell (a ballboy for the Bucs when Selmon arrived) was talking about the last time he had seen Selmon. He had gone to visit Selmon at USF, and Selmon was giving a campus tour to prospective students.

"I wonder how many of those kids knew who Lee Roy was," Ruskell said. "Because you know he wouldn't tell them."

Ah, but if they were from Tampa Bay, they knew. Here, everyone knew.

He was more than a football player. It is odd, but the years have changed Tampa Bay, and there are more people who never saw him play than who did. Most of the people who loved Lee Roy, who idolized Lee Roy, never saw him embarrass a bigger offensive tackle with his rare speed and strength. They have read about him, and they know about his skills, and they know why he is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame (the college one, too).

Still, Selmon was an NFL player for only nine seasons.

He has been Lee Roy for the 27 years since.

As communities go, this one has been blessed with more good guys than most. Warrick Dunn. Derrick Brooks. Mike Alstott. Vinny Lecavalier. John Lynch. We have seen how athletes can affect lives.

Ah, but there has never been anyone quite like Lee Roy. He made a difference in a hundred big ways, and in a million small ways. He made people cheer, and he made people smile, and he filled Tampa Bay with his demeanor. He could have been a teacher or a plumber or a roofer, a mayor or a preacher or a lawyer, and he would have been the same guy.

Today, we mourn a loss that seems much too soon, and much too large, to comprehend. Tampa Bay is lucky that he came here, and blessed that he stayed. This was his home, and he was our neighbor.

Goodbye, Lee Roy.

Oh, and thanks.


OU, NFL football legend Lee Roy Selmon dies

Lee Roy Selmon, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' Hall of Fame defensive end who teamed with his brothers to create a dominant front and led the University of Oklahoma to back-to-back national championships, died Sunday. He was 56.

BY JOHN ROHDE, The Oklahoman Staff Writer, jrohde@opubco.com
http://newsok.com/
Published: September 4, 2011

Teammates insist the greatest player in Oklahoma football history was never knocked off his feet, but not even Lee Roy Selmon could conquer the massive stroke he suffered at home Friday.   

After spending two days in critical condition and with family members by his side, Selmon died Sunday in Tampa, Fla. He was 56.

“It is with very heavy hearts that the Selmon family announces the passing of our beloved husband, father and brother, Lee Roy Selmon,” the Selmon family said in a statement. “Lee Roy passed away today surrounded by family and friends at St. Joseph's Hospital.

“For all his accomplishments on and off the field, to us Lee Roy was the rock of our family. This has been a sudden and shocking event, and we are devastated by this unexpected loss. We deeply appreciate the prayers and support shown by family, friends, the football community and the public over the past two days.”

With Lee Roy lined up alongside older brothers Lucious and Dewey, the Selmons comprised arguably the most dominant defensive line in the history of college football.

Coaches and teammates claim they never saw Lee Roy knocked on his back side.

“When you see him make plays on film, Lee Roy Selmon would make tackles and lay people down,” former OU coach Barry Switzer said. “Everybody else would have crumpled to the ground, and Lee Roy Selmon would still be standing up.”

Former OU assistant Larry Lacewell recruited the Selmons out of Eufaula High School.

“I've never seen him play bad my whole life,” Lacewell once said of Lee Roy.

Ever seen him knocked off his feet?

“That's the legend, and I can't go against it,” Lacewell said. “I've never heard a guy who's been with him, or coached against him, who didn't say he's the best they've seen. I mean everybody. It's incredible, but it's all true.”

Lucious played two seasons at OU with Dewey and Lee Roy, who were in the same class despite being born 11 months apart.

With a Selmon in the lineup, the Sooners had a combined record of 54-3-1. Lee Roy and Dewey went 43-2-1, winning back-to-back national titles in 1974-75, four Big Eight titles and going 38 consecutive games without a loss.

Lee Roy won both the Lombardi and Outland trophies as the nation's outstanding collegiate lineman in 1975.

Receiver Tinker Owens was Lee Roy's teammate for four seasons at OU and later played against him in the NFL.“I haven't seen anybody any better, even in pro football,” Owens said.

Former Detroit Lions coach Monte Clark said Lee Roy was “a grown man at work among a bunch of boys.”

The Selmons long have been considered the First Family of Oklahoma Football.

“I'm still a little bit overwhelmed any time one of us are singled out,” Lee Roy said before being honored on Owen Field at halftime of the OU-South Florida game in 2002.

“Any type of recognition is just a reflection of all those people we played with. I'm humbled by it.”

Lee Roy was the first player taken in the 1976 NFL Draft and the first player chosen in Tampa Bay Buccaneers history. That same year, Tampa Bay selected Dewey with the last pick in the second round and the brothers played together five seasons with the Bucs.

A six-time Pro Bowl selection, Lee Roy was named NFL Defensive Player of the Year in 1979.

In 1995, Lee Roy became the first OU player to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He entered the College Football Hall of Fame in 1988 and the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame in 1992.

Dewey presented Lee Roy at the Pro Football Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Canton, Ohio, where Lucious also was in attendance.

“For 31 years, he was my celibate wife,” Dewey said that day of Lee Roy. “We went on dinner dates together. In fact, for our senior prom it was I who took him there ... I really feel with all of my heart that Lee Roy belongs here (in the Hall).”

Some believe Selmon was the best defensive end to play the game at any level.

“My firm belief is that if Lee Roy Selmon hadn't been such an extraordinarily decent man, he would have been the greatest defensive end who ever played the game,” said former Orlando Sentinel writer Jerry Greene, who covered every game Selmon played with the Bucs from 1976-84. “The only thing that kept him from clearly being the best is that he had nothing resembling a killer instinct. He did his job and he did it well, but he never took any enjoyment or got any extra thrill out of leaving a quarterback injured on the ground. He was a great football player but an even better human being.”

While Switzer was coaching the Dallas Cowboys, Pro Football Hall of Famer Howie Long once told him: “Coach, I just wanted you to know I patterned my game after Lee Roy Selmon, He was the guy I marveled at, and I wanted my game to be as good as his.”

Gary Shelton of the St. Petersburg Times wrote of Selmon: “He is perhaps the most genuine, most dignified former star who ever walked. His nature is so placid, it amazes you he could conjure such a physical player from it.”

Selmon was president of the University of South Florida Foundation Partnership for Athletics and had planned to attend USF's game at Notre Dame on Saturday.

In tribute, South Florida players wore a decal of Selmon's retired uniform number with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (No. 63) on the back of their helmets. USF wound up posting a 23-20 upset over the No. 16-ranked Fighting Irish.

Selmon served as USF's athletic director from 2001-04. He resigned from that position and returned to a fundraising role because of high blood pressure caused by heart and stress-related problems, Dewey told The Tampa Tribune in 2004.

Dewey also said their father, Lucious Sr., once had a stroke.

Mike Baldwin contributed to this report.


Related:

Lee Roy Selmon's teammates respected the player, loved the person -
http://newsok.com/article/3601282

Lee Roy Selmon was the best of the best -
http://newsok.com/tramel-lee-roy-selmon-was-the-best-of-the-best/article/3601403

Remembering Lee Roy Selmon -
http://espn.go.com/blog/nfcsouth/post/_/id/24577/remembering-lee-roy-selmon

How the NYPD Gets Jihad Right

In a world of wishful thinkers, Commissioner Kelly is a realist.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com
September 3, 2011

NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly

‘Every conspiracy against Islam and scheming against Islam and the Muslims — its source is America.”

“Jihad is Jihad. There is no such thing as commerce, industry, and science in jihad. This is calling things other than by its [sic] own name. If Allah says, ‘Do jihad,’ it means do jihad with the sword, with the cannon, with the grenades, and with the missile. This is Jihad. Jihad against Allah’s enemies for Allah’s cause and his word.”

“Why do we fear the word ‘terrorist’? If the terrorist is the person who defends his right, so we are terrorists. . . . The Koran mentions the words ‘to strike terror,’ therefore we don’t fear to be described with ‘terrorism.’ . . . We are ordered to prepare whatever we can of power to terrorize the enemies of Islam.”

This rhetoric was not at all unusual. It was the sort of thing you’d hear on any given Friday at mosques in Brooklyn or Jersey City. Nor is there anything ostensibly criminal about it, at least according to the hash the Supreme Court has made of the First Amendment.

That wasn’t the case in the speaker’s native Egypt. There, Omar Abdel Rahman had been notorious for such fiery Friday sermons. There, the imam known as “the Blind Sheikh,” a renowned scholar of Islamic jurisprudence, had been jailed several times for inciting Muslims — urging that they kill regime officials for allying with America and for failing to implement sharia, Islam’s legal system.

But not here, not in the land of free expression: In the United States, the authorities regarded Abdel Rahman as a respected community leader. The federal government put out its welcome mat despite his appearance on its terrorist watch lists. Federal authorities never consulted the police force responsible for protecting the New Yorkers he would attack; they just issued him a green card to work as a “religious teacher” and sent him on his way.

It was Ray Kelly, one of the great police commissioners in American history, who finally arranged to place the blind sheikh in handcuffs. This was during the summer of 1993, when Kelly was in his first go-round as NYPD commissioner.

The sheikh was holed up in a favorite New York City mosque, surrounded by his followers — at least those of them who were not already in prison or on the lam for multiple bombing plots. As I recounted in Willful Blindness, when Attorney General Janet Reno green-lighted the arrest that we prosecutors had been seeking for weeks, it was Kelly and his savvy city cops who defused the potentially explosive situation. The NYPD spoke to people in the community, the sheikh was coaxed out of the mosque, and federal immigration agents took him into custody without incident. This was no small thing: In the two decades since, dozens of innocent people have been killed by zealots demanding his release.

What I most remember about that day is Kelly’s quiet confidence, instilling calm in a room full of NYPD cops, FBI agents, and immigration officers — not to mention a thirtysomething government lawyer who happened to be on hand. A panicky supervisor from INS (called ICE now) groused that the sheikh’s arrest — initially on immigration charges — would have to wait until he could get clearance from his office. I was speechless. After all, the attorney general had already made her decision — why would we now have to wait on a midlevel bureaucrat? Because, it turned out, INS had sent the wrong bureaucrat to the meeting, the New York supervisor instead of the guy from across the river who was in charge of the INS end of the investigation. “You don’t understand,” the supervisor muttered as he reached for a phone, “the case belongs to New Jersey.”

“Yeah,” countered Commissioner Kelly, “but the streets belong to me.”

Kelly is now in his second tour of duty as commish, and New Yorkers are extraordinarily fortunate that their streets have belonged to him for most of the decade since September 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 of our fellow citizens were murdered. You mightn’t think so, however, if all you had to go on was the hatchet-job published by the Associated Press last week.

By the AP’s lights, Kelly is running a rogue domestic-spying operation. To the contrary, the commissioner has crafted an unparalleled counterterrorism strategy. Ever mindful of civil rights and respectful of Islamic culture — just as the police must be respectful of the variegated cultures in the Big Apple’s ethnic goulash — Kelly has kept the world’s No. 1 terrorist target safe from mass-casualty attacks. He has managed this despite 13 known attempts — and who knows how many others that cannot be spoken of without compromising intelligence sources.

The AP hit was compiled with scads of cooperation from federal-government sources, Islamist organizations, and the Lawyer Left (fancying itself the “civil-rights community”). Its timing is no coincidence. We are approaching the tenth anniversary of 9/11, which our community-organizer-in-chief is feverishly recasting as a “community service” exhibition rather than a day of national remembrance. The AP dropped its purported bombshell hard on the heels of “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States,” Obama’s recently published strategy for countering terrorism without referring to it as “terrorism” — a term that, as the Blind Sheikh (pictured at right) inconveniently points out, has roots in the Koran (e.g., Sura 8:12, in which Allah instructs Muslims, “I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them”).

Make no mistake: There is a battle under way over how we should pursue national security. It is not enough to say the Left wants to move us back to a September 10 mindset — unless you mean September 10 sometime in the mid-1970s. That was when “intelligence” became a dirty word upon revelation that the CIA and various law-enforcement agencies had gathered it against such left-wing radicals as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the Weather Underground terrorists who would later become the friends, ideological allies, and activist partners of a certain upstart Chicago pol.

The winners write the history. Thus, “domestic spying” has become That Seventies Show: the revisionist narrative the Left uses to erase the fact that it wasn’t all about cracking down on peaceful, patriotic dissent. In truth, there really were evil people who built bombs and tried to kill hundreds of Americans in an effort to foment revolution — people like Ayers, who tartly concedes that he was “guilty as sin,” even though he ended up “free as a bird.”

The difference is that today’s threat comes from a mostly alien force inspired by a known (albeit consciously ignored) ideology rooted in fundamentalist Islam — which, in much of the world, is mainstream Islam. Because that is so, service to the cause is convincingly sold to young Muslims as a religious duty. This not only makes jihadist recruitment easier, it also ensures that many of those disinclined to participate in violence will be open to lesser degrees of aggression: a posture of hostility toward America, hatred of Israel and of Jews, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s scheme of voluntary apartheid — life in a closed community of believers in a Muslim enclave that is functionally independent from the state, its laws, and their enforcement by police.

Today’s threat has also systematized jihadist training. That means its terror cells are more competent by orders of magnitude than the 1960s variety. Moreover, weaponry has evolved in the last half century. It takes fewer terrorists to project more lethal force. The horrific price of missing the signals of an oncoming attack, we learned ten years ago, cannot be calculated in dollars, cents, or lives destroyed.

That is what we are up against, and that is why Ray Kelly is a godsend. A decorated veteran who led Marines in combat, Kelly gets the difference between a crime racket and a national-security challenge. He was on the front lines when the jihad first came to these shores: when the World Trade Center was bombed in February 1993 and when, within a few months, jihadists were thwarted as they conspired to carry out a string of simultaneous attacks on New York City landmarks. He realized that the terrorists had been guided by Abdel Rahman’s sermons, had successfully drawn recruits from local Islamic centers, and had been influential fixtures in the metropolitan area’s Muslim community.

After Kelly’s first stint as commissioner, President Clinton had the good sense to make him a top Treasury Department official, with a portfolio covering counterterrorism and financial intelligence. He brought that experience to a three-year tenure as the nation’s customs commissioner. The newly elected mayor Michael Bloomberg brought Kelly back as NYPD commissioner in January 2002, while the city was still in shock over 9/11 and the War on Terror overseas increased the need for vigilance at home.
Kelly knows his city a lot better than Washington does. He appreciates that not every Muslim is a suspect — that most American Muslims are cold to the fundamentalist call and thus natural allies of law enforcement. But Kelly also grasps that Islamism is not a fringe movement, which is why cooperation with the police is fraught with risk for pro-American Muslims. It is simply a fact that our enemies have strong pockets of support in the Islamic communities.

Naturally, the AP report did not see fit to mention the findings of the Mapping Sharia project, which determined that roughly 80 percent of American mosques disseminate Islamist literature that endorses violence. The imams in these mosques tend to promote that literature. Over half of these mosques host guest lecturers known for promoting violent jihad.
The Mapping Sharia study, as its authors observe, may not accurately reflect the whole of Islam in America. Many Muslims do not attend mosques, and those who do are not necessarily receptive to the interpretation of Islam the imams are pushing. The study, however, is a stark depiction of the leadership in Muslim communities. It becomes easier to understand how Islamist ideology takes root in the young. It becomes easier to see how figures the authorities portray as respected community elders — just as the Blind Sheikh was once portrayed — are positioned to inspire anti-Americanism and worse.

Those responsible for protecting millions of lives cannot afford to be willfully blind to this sort of information. It indicates — just as common sense indicates, just as Ray Kelly’s experience indicates — that you cannot have safety without intelligence. Police need to be a visible presence in neighborhoods. They also need to be an invisible presence. When there are signs of trouble, they have to have informants willing to be their eyes and ears — meaning our eyes and ears. In Islamist hotbeds, they have to cultivate ties with pro-Western Muslims. They need to reach out not just to community leaders but to ordinary Muslims who do not want sharia enclaves, Muslims who are disposed to help police provide security but fear being ostracized as traitors if their cooperation becomes known.

Proactive, energetic, intelligence-based security is what Ray Kelly has forged. It is not an entirely new concept. It builds on Compstat, the crime-analysis and accountability system pioneered in the 1990s by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton — a system of intelligence-based policing driven by intensive analysis of crime data. The system drove city crime down by a remarkable 77 percent, and Heather Mac Donald sagely describes it as “the most revolutionary public-sector achievement of the last quarter-century.”

In our post-9/11 reality, the imperative of crime prevention has been magnified into mass-murder prevention. Kelly has thus incorporated the tactics that have worked nationally: recruiting aides schooled in CIA intelligence operations to make police better at collecting and analyzing information, and establishing liaisons overseas with foreign police and intelligence services, recognizing that attacks inside the city are often triggered from outside that city and outside the country. But, as Kelly often emphasizes, the system operates within the rigors of law-enforcement protocols.

This is not martial law, and it is not “domestic spying.” Investigations are triggered by reasonable, articulable suspicions of criminal activity — people are not targeted just because they are Muslims. The police are trained to be culturally sensitive and to avoid giving gratuitous offense. But, at the same time, culture is not treated as immunity from investigation. Police are duly deferential to community leaders, but they do not delegate their intelligence-gathering duties to them.

This is not the way the Obama administration wants things done. The president’s strategy warns against singling out any particular brand of “violent extremism” for special attention — jihadist terror is not to be regarded as any more a threat to America than other sources of violence. Obama miniaturizes the threat as “al-Qa’ida’s hateful ideology” — as if the Islamist challenge to the West were a fringe movement. He waves off concerns about Muslims’ support for Islamists with the peremptory declaration that “Muslim American communities have categorically condemned terrorism” — as if that were an incontestable proposition or one that told the whole story.

The real threat to our security, so the theory goes, is not Muslim terrorist plots against us but our provocation of Muslims by conveying the misimpression that America is at war with Islam. Therefore, the key to security is “partnering” with the leadership in Muslim communities: Let them train the police, let them be our eyes and ears, and surely they’ll let us know if there is any cause for concern.

In fact, in 2010, a working group of Obama’s Homeland Security Advisory Council, whose recommendations form the foundation of the administration’s new strategy, took a thinly veiled shot at the NYPD’s 2007 effort to study the phenomenon of Muslim radicalization. Current understanding of the “sociology of ‘radicalization’ and ‘extremism’ is still immature,” the president’s advisers pronounced. Therefore, they decreed, we must “delink” crime-reduction efforts from studies of radicalization — we must, that is, ignore the nexus between Islamist ideology and aggression by Muslims.

As we look across the Atlantic, we can see what happens when multi-culti governments convince themselves that security lies in abdicating sovereign responsibilities to a movement whose very goal is to split off from the sovereign. That this is done under the sweet-sounding guise of “partnering” with communities does not change the outcome. Good policing requires that hostile movements be understood as such. To be sure, keeping the peace counsels against antagonizing the movement’s adherents absent good cause. But it doesn’t mean “partnering” with them, and it cannot entail transferring law-enforcement chores to them. The police are a society’s manifestation of the determination to govern itself in accordance with its rule of law. They are there to protect and to serve, not to be passive observers of the society’s surrender.

The Blind Sheikh preached from his incendiary pulpit. His followers used their mosques to convene, to plot attacks, and to store and transfer weapons. They exploited Islamic community centers to recruit for the jihad and to advertise paramilitary training sessions. They found sympathizers in the community who would not join in forcible conduct but who were supportive — morally, and sometimes materially. They were able to carry out attacks that required months of planning because people who might have helped the police stop them were afraid to speak up.

This menace has not gone away. What do you suppose gives us a fighting chance to protect ourselves: Ray Kelly’s NYPD or the Obama administration’s “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism”? Do we really want to mess with ten years of success?

— 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.

Solyndra debacle spotlights Obama's folly

DEBRA J. SAUNDERS

San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/columns/

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Last year, President Obama came to the Bay Area to tout "green jobs" at an event at solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra's Fremont plant. Quoth the president: "The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra."

On Wednesday, Solyndra announced it was shuttering its remaining Fremont factory, laying off 1,100 workers and filing for bankruptcy. It was a sorry day for the Bay Area.

I remember that day, May 26, 2010, vividly. Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger came to greet the president and wave to the hard hats. Venture capitalists preened. Just to show how brainy and farsighted the solar crowd is, Obama reminded the audience that his energy secretary, Steven Chu, is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

Rube that I am, I didn't understand what Obamaland was thinking. Solyndra had not turned a profit since it was founded in 2005. The plant in which Obama stood was bankrolled with a $535 million federal loan guarantee. Two months before, PricewaterhouseCoopers questioned Solyndra's "ability to continue as a going concern."

If the president wants to send a positive message on the U.S. economy, I wondered, then couldn't his people have found a California company that didn't rely on a federal loan and actually made money?

Bad advance work, I figured.

A month later, Solyndra canceled a planned $300 million public offering. In November, Solyndra closed its older plant and cut its workforce. Today Solyndra's lights are out.

Now I am wondering: Isn't there some graybeard in the White House who - knowing that the president won't look good if the tax-funded solar plant folds - does some digging to make sure the president's choice of venue will not come back to haunt him?

Or could it be that Team Obama is composed of like-minded green true believers who insulate themselves from other points of view, much as critics contended George W. Bush surrounded himself with yes men?

Consider: The administration continues to cling to its belief that green jobs are the jobs of the future, despite evidence to the contrary. A July study by the Brookings Institution found that green jobs account for 2 percent of American jobs - and Brookings used a generous definition that included public-transit and waste-management jobs as green. Still, Brookings found that green jobs grew at a slower rate (3.4 percent annually) than the national economy (4.2 percent) between 2003 and 2010.

Some Democrats have gotten the message. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles, recently observed, "Of course we want to be part of the new innovation and green jobs. But you know, the green jobs have been about a lot of talk, and not a lot has been happening on that."

But Team Obama won't give up the dream.

Then again, the administration has friends in the green-titan community. Enter Oklahoma oil magnate George Kaiser, who raised at least $50,000 for the 2008 Obama campaign and is a frequent visitor to the White House. Kaiser was a top Solyndra investor.

In September 2009, Solyndra became the first recipient of an administration energy loan program that was part of the president's stimulus package. A 2010 Government Accountability Office audit of the program found that five applicants, including Solyndra, bypassed required steps for funding. A Department of Energy spokesperson told the Washington Post that the GAO got it wrong.

The Solyndra decision baffled some industry experts, who questioned the viability of the company's solar technology. "To think they could compete on any basis, that took a very big leap of faith," solar analyst Ramesh Misra later told the Washington Post.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee has been investigating the Solyndra deal - with little cooperation from the administration. Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., who chairs the investigative subcommittee, noted in a statement, "In an apparent rush to push stimulus dollars out the door, the Obama administration wasted $535 million in taxpayer funds in guaranteeing a loan to a firm that has proven to be unviable in the global market."

Thursday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney defended the loan program with its goal to "invest in cutting-edge technologies."

The president, his Nobel Prize-winning energy secretary and Vice President Joe Biden (via satellite) participated in events that promoted Solyndra's brand. In addition, Solyndra got to spend half a billion in taxpayer dollars - and still the solar company couldn't succeed.

Stearns and committee Chairman Fred Upton issued a joint statement that rang true. They said, "We smelled a rat from the onset."

E-mail Debra Saunders at dsaunders@sfchronicle.com.


http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/04/IN0V1KUV3L.DTL


This article appeared on page E - 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle

The measure of Tampa Bay Buccaneers' Lee Roy Selmon's greatness is off the field

By Gary Shelton, St. Petersburg Times Sports Columnist
http://www.tampabay.com/ 
Saturday, September 3, 2011

The measure of a man is not in the games he plays. Deep down, to the twisted pits of your soul where you feel pain over Lee Roy Selmon, you know that. He was a great football player, a terrific, inspired football player. There is no arguing that. Selmon was perhaps the best to play in Tampa Bay, and perhaps the best to play in Oklahoma, one of the best to play anywhere. He won awards, and he reached halls of fame, and he defined excellence. You can choose that definition of Selmon, if you wish. Or you can remember something greater about a man who has been far more than a football player.

The measure of a man is not in the money he makes. It is not whether he has an expressway named after him, or a restaurant, or if his name is in the Bucs' Ring of Honor. It is not a bust in the Hall of Fame, or a statue that may be built on his college campus, or in the memories of a thousand black and white photographs from his playing days.

In the case of Selmon, the measure of him and his meaning should be measured by the shadow he has cast. By the lives touched. By the grace shown.

And, yes, by the depth of the ache you felt when you heard the news that he had suffered a massive stroke Friday and was in extremely critical condition.

For 31/2 decades, Selmon has been Tampa Bay's best citizen, a gentle, dignified man with never a bad word to say to or about anyone. Selmon has always led the league in class, in grace, in integrity. No one dislikes Lee Roy. If you dislike Lee Roy, it says a lot more about you than it says about him.

Perhaps that is why the news of his stroke rippled so quickly across Tampa Bay on Friday evening. Bad news always moves in a hurry, like locusts across a field. There was word that Selmon had died, and then that he had not, and then again that he had, and then again that he had not. It was as if an entire community had been gut-punched. The news was grim and devastating and overwhelming, because few men have been as admired around here as Selmon.

How does this happen to Selmon? At 56, he looked to be in terrific shape. Whenever you saw Selmon, you had to force yourself to remember that he had played defensive end. Running back, maybe. Linebacker. But defensive end? True, Selmon had a health scare seven years ago, but he looked strong enough to suit up again.

"You hear people described as 'a perfect gentleman,' " said Rich McKay, president and CEO of the Falcons, who was a teenage boy when Selmon came to Tampa Bay to play for McKay's father, John, in 1976. "You hear the word 'flawless,' which isn't true because we're human. But with Lee Roy, I'm not sure it isn't close to being true."

In sports, in life, there are a lot of a good, decent people. There are caring athletes, and charitable athletes, and socially aware athletes. But there has never been an athlete whose basic decency has come easier to him.

Selmon has never been a man who had to work at being a good guy. There are a great many athletes who work at being a good guy, who want the world to know they are being a good guy, who border on playing a role of a good guy. Not Lee Roy. Lee Roy is just being Lee Roy.

"There is nothing special about Lee Roy Selmon," he told me once. It is the one thing he has ever said that no one agrees with.

"That's so far from the truth," McKay said, "because everything was special with Lee Roy."

McKay remembers. He was 17 when the Bucs sent him to pick up Lee Roy and his brother Dewey from the airport. He remembers how nice they were even then, how humble they were, how they were almost a little intimidating.

"I have never seen Lee Roy have a bad day, and in those early years (the Bucs started 0-26), we had a lot of bad days," McKay said. "He just was such an example of how to conduct yourself day in and day out. He was about as good as it gets.

"Later on, when the team got better, you would see him sitting at his locker, waiting to go out, in a complete calm state. Around him, everyone else was losing their minds. Ours is a very physical, intimidating sport. He played it without showing emotion. It would be the height of crazy around him, but he was the senator. When he did battle, he did it with honor, and he won almost every time."

There are those who believe you have to be nasty all the time to succeed. Selmon does not. And people love him for it. I once followed Selmon around the Oklahoma campus. He might as well have been the pope. People approached him with glistening eyes, with glowing words, with their hands shaking as they reached out to touch him. Somehow, the adulation didn't change him a bit. It never has.

"He was just one of those rare, great human beings," said Tim Ruskell, a ball boy on that first Bucs team who is now the pro personnel director for the Chicago Bears. "It's unbelievable how kind he is. You can't be any better. As a football player, you can always get better, but as a human, he never disappointed you. Forget that he was a football player. The football player lessens how good he was, because you get caught up in this stereotype."

Ruskell tells a story of that first year with the Bucs. Selmon was the high-priced No. 1 draft pick, the star designate. Ruskell was a ball boy. "A nobody," he said.

But Ruskell had been a disc jockey, and he knew his way around a stereo. Selmon asked him to come over and help him hook up his new system. Naturally, Ruskell was eager to help. But when he showed up, Selmon and his wife had food waiting. They rushed him to the table.

"They wanted to know who I was and what I was about," Ruskell remembers. "It was an hour before we got to the stereo, and then it only took 20 seconds. It was unbelievable. I was an 18-year-old kid. He could have treated me the way the other players treated me."

Then again, Selmon was never like other players. At 260 pounds, he was undersized for a defensive end, but he was always quicker, always stronger than the man he was playing against. He was good enough to be NFL defensive player of the year. He was good enough to be in the College Football Hall of Fame and the Pro Football Hall of Fame. For a long, long time, until Derrick Brooks and Warren Sapp and Ronde Barber and John Lynch, he was the crown jewel of the Bucs' franchise, its only flirtation with greatness.

Again, he was a terrific football player. And yet, he has been so much more. He has been an ambassador, a role model, a citizen. He has been decent enough, and kind enough, to embarrass the rest of us.

"I appreciated the game, and I wanted to play it with my best effort, but I didn't want it to define my life," Selmon once told me. "I believed there was more to it than football. It was an important part of it, but I wasn't consumed by it. I always knew there was going to be more to life when retirement came."

He was right. Thankfully, the best of Selmon has come in the smallest of moments. He has made the people he met feel special, and he has made their moments feel important.

Above all else, that has been the measure of Lee Roy Selmon. That has been his defining greatness.

Today, it is the reason so many prayers are being offered in his name.


Related:

Bucs Could Learn From Selmon -
http://www.tampabay.com/sports/football/bucs/tampa-bay-buccaneers-could-learn-from-all-time-great-lee-roy-selmon/1050234