Brett Arends: Irony in Indignation Over Imus

Radio personality Don Imus, left, and Rev. Al Sharpton appear face-to-face on Rev. Sharpton's radio show, in New York Monday April 9, 2007. Imus issued another apology for referring to the Rutgers women's basketball team as 'nappy-headed hos' on his morning show last week.

He turns you off? Then don’t tune in: Irony in indignation over Imus

Boston Herald Business Columnist

Thursday, April 12, 2007


Let me get this straight. We hang people now for the phrase “nappy-headed hos”?

I have watched with disbelief as the media mob has formed around talk jock Don Imus. OK, so he wasn’t paying a compliment to the young women of the Rutgers basketball team. But so what? Are compliments the only kind of speech permitted these days?

It needs to be said: This was not a Michael Richards moment. This was not a Mel Gibson moment. “Nappy-headed hos” was crude and off base, but it was obviously tongue in cheek, and it is not hate speech.

It is not, for example, like calling Jews “Hymies” and New York “Hymietown.” That, of course, is what the Rev. Jesse Jackson once did. Yet on Monday Jackson was leading 50 people in protest against Imus in Chicago. “These walls of bigotry are coming down,” he intoned. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

And “nappy-headed hos” isn’t, for example, like going before an inflamed anti-Semitic mob in Brooklyn to rail against “diamond merchants” with “the blood of innocent babies” on their hands. But that’s what the Rev. Al Sharpton did back in 1991, after a car accident involving a Jewish driver killed a local black child. The Crown Heights riots Sharpton helped whip up eventually left one Jewish student dead.

The same Sharpton is now apparently presiding over Imus’ show trial as the judge, jury and executioner. Imus even went on Sharpton’s radio program Monday, vainly seeking clemency.

The activist industry is now in full swing aided and abetted, as always, by those useful idiots in the press.

The National Organization for Women is running a signature drive to get Imus fired. “We want to make sure he’s no longer on the air,” Hazel Dukes, president of the New York State NAACP, said of Imus. “He’s outlived his usefulness.”

Outlived his “usefulness!”

Angela Burt-Murray, editor of Essence magazine, wailed: “Michael Richards apologizes. We move on. Mel Gibson apologizes. We move on. When does it stop? When do we make it stop?”

Imus, of course, had nothing to do with Richards’ or Gibson’s comments. But why let that get in the way?

Of course, the greedy lickspittles at CBS and MSNBC bowed to the arm-twisting and suspended Imus for two weeks.

As the hysteria has spun out of control, otherwise sane people have taken leave of their senses. The New York Times professed itself shocked that Imus “seemed to impugn” the Rutgers players’ “moral characteristics.”

Memo to the Times: I don’t think the word “ho” was meant literally.

Meanwhile the president of Rutgers says the university is “considering its options.”

Imus’ enemies are dragging up past transgressions. Ten years ago he said Gwen Ifill looked like a cleaning lady. He called the New York Knicks “chest-thumping pimps.” Shock, horror.

Millions tune into Imus every day. They like his acerbic wit, the subversive way he mocks politically correct sensibilities and his great interviews.

The question is whether he can be saved at this point. The process is under way and it almost never stops without a blood sacrifice.

Anyone who stands in the way is probably going to be accused of racism. It is precisely what he has made fun of all these years.


Talk back at mail@brettarends.com.

George Will: Fuzzy Climate Math

Greenpeace protesters hold a banner as they stand next to ice sculptures placed outside Sydney's parliament to protest at Australia's increasing greenhouse emissions February 16, 2005.

April 12, 2007

The Washington Post

In a campaign without peacetime precedent, the media-entertainment-environmental complex is warning about global warming. Never, other than during the two world wars, has there been such a concerted effort by opinion-forming institutions to indoctrinate Americans, 83 percent of whom now call global warming a "serious problem.'' Indoctrination is supposed to be a predicate for action commensurate with professions of seriousness.

For example, Democrats could demand that the president send the Kyoto Protocol to the Senate so they can embrace it. In 1997, the Senate voted 95-0 in opposition to any agreement which would, like the protocol, require significant reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions in America and some other developed nations but would involve no "specific scheduled commitments'' for 129 "developing'' countries, including the second, fourth, 10th, 11th, 13th and 15th largest economies (China, India, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico and Indonesia). Forty-two of the senators serving in 1997 are gone. Let's find out if the new senators disagree with the 1997 vote.

Do they also disagree with Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist''? He says: Compliance with Kyoto would reduce global warming by an amount too small to measure. But the cost of compliance just to the United States would be higher than the cost of providing the entire world with clean drinking water and sanitation, which would prevent 2 million deaths (from diseases like infant diarrhea) a year and prevent half a billion people from becoming seriously ill each year.

Nature designed us as carnivores, but what does nature know about nature? Meat has been designated a menace. Among the 51 exhortations in Time magazine's "global warming survival guide'' (April 9), No. 22 says a BMW is less responsible than a Big Mac for "climate change,'' that conveniently imprecise name for our peril. This is because the world meat industry produces 18 percent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions, more than transportation produces. Nitrous oxide in manure (warming effect: 296 times greater than that of carbon) and methane from animal flatulence (23 times greater) mean that "a 16 ounce T-bone is like a Hummer on a plate.''
Ben & Jerry's ice cream might be even more sinister: A gallon of it requires electricity guzzling refrigeration, and four gallons of milk produced by cows that simultaneously produce eight gallons of manure and flatulence with eight gallons of methane. The cows do this while consuming lots of grain and hay, which are cultivated by using tractor fuel, chemical fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides, and transported by fuel-consuming trains and trucks.

Newsweek says most food travels at least 1,200 miles to get to Americans' plates, so buying local food will save fuel. Do not order halibut in Omaha.

Speaking of Hummers, perhaps it is environmentally responsible to buy one and squash a Prius with it. The Prius hybrid is, of course, fuel-efficient. There are, however, environmental costs to mining and smelting (in Canada) 1,000 tons a year of zinc for the battery-powered second motor, and the shipping of the zinc 10,000 miles -- trailing a cloud of carbon -- to Wales for refining and then to China for turning it into the component that is then sent to a battery factory in Japan.

Opinions differ as to whether acid rain from the Canadian mining and smelting operation is killing vegetation that once absorbed carbon dioxide. But a report from CNW Marketing Research ("Dust to Dust: The Energy Cost of New Vehicles from Concept to Disposal'') concludes that in "dollars per lifetime mile,'' a Prius (expected life: 109,000 miles) costs $3.25, compared to $1.95 for a Hummer H3 (expected life: 207,000 miles).

The CNW report states that a hybrid makes economic and environmental sense for a purchaser living in the Los Angeles basin, where fuel costs are high and smog is worrisome. But environmental costs of the hybrid are exported from the basin.

We are urged to "think globally and act locally,'' as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has done with proposals to reduce California's carbon dioxide emissions 25 percent by 2020. If California improbably achieves this, at a cost not yet computed, it will have reduced global greenhouse-gas emissions 0.3 percent. The question is:

Suppose the costs over a decade of trying to achieve a local goal are significant. And suppose the positive impact on the globe's temperature is insignificant -- and much less than, say, the negative impact of one year's increase in the number of vehicles in one country (e.g., India). If so, are people who recommend such things thinking globally but not clearly?

georgewill@washpost.com

Victor Davis Hanson: It's the Oil, Stupid

April 12, 2007

http://www.realclearpolitics.com

It is usually silly to offer a single solution to complex problems. But it's hard not to when looking at the serial savagery in Iran and the Arab world.

Oil -- the huge profits it provides and the insidious influence it gives those selling it -- explains most of the world's worries over the Middle East.

No, that does not mean the United States is fighting in Iraq to get control of its petroleum. For all the charges of "No blood for oil," the American occupation has neither been able to reverse a decline in oil production in Iraq nor alleviate skyrocketing oil prices worldwide. And, recently, the first new contracts of the now-transparent Iraqi oil ministry went to non-American companies.

What it does mean, though, is that the vast imported-petroleum needs of the West, India and China, and the resulting huge profits that pour into oil-exporting states, have super-sized the Middle East's problems.

Currently, much of the Islamic world is struggling to come to grips with modernity and globalization. Yet while the West pays little attention to disenchanted Muslims in India, Indochina or Malaysia, we focus our attention on Iranian and Arab radicals. They alone, thanks to oil, have the cash to fund jihadists and hate-filled madrassas.

The Palestinian problem illustrates this point. Since Israel's occupation of land taken after the 1967 war, much of the world has seen this issue as threatening to regional and global peace.

Such old territorial disputes are, of course, common -- and go relatively unnoticed -- throughout the world. Japan's Kurile Islands are still held by Russia. Tibet has been absorbed by China. Nuclear Pakistan and nuclear India fight over Kashmir. The list goes on.

Yet it's the anger over the tiny West Bank that in the past caused the Arab patrons of the Palestinians to embargo oil to the West and create long gas lines in Europe and America. As a result, a single suicide bomber from Jericho earns more press than anonymous thousands slaughtered in Darfur.

Today, terrorists operate from East Timor to Peru. But global anxiety has been continually focused on Middle Eastern terrorists, from the Palestinian assassins and hijackers of the 1970s to al-Qaida's suicide bombers. These killers alone have had the means to disrupt the Western way of life. Take away Hezbollah's Iranian petrodollars and it could never afford weapons and foot soldiers to slaughter Westerners in the Middle East and beyond.

An oil-rich Saddam Hussein was a threat only because he had purchased more military hardware than is owned by most European powers -- and used it to attack oil-exporting neighbors in a bid to control more of the world's petroleum reserves.

In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is confident that powerful nations abroad will overlook his thuggery in hopes of getting a chance to buy his country's oil -- or in worry that any tension would send world prices even higher. Ahmadinejad also knows -- and fears -- that without supporting terrorists or trying to acquire a nuclear bomb that he'd be just another tinhorn loudmouth like Cuba's Fidel Castro or Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.

At the same time, vast oil profits do little to help -- and probably much to harm -- Middle Eastern countries. Unlike in places where economic achievement is the result of savvy business leaders, a hardworking labor force and a literate public, tribal hierarchies in the Middle East simply metamorphosed into billion-dollar nations by virtue of sitting atop crude oil.

One result is a big inferiority complex in the Middle East. There is always the fear that gas and oil reserves will dry up, leaving a Libya, Iran or Saudi Arabia with as much global attention as a Chad or Bulgaria.

Another result is unstable societies. When nations acquire collective wealth gradually through their own industry, a middle class can arise. But in the Middle East, a few tribal and religious sects with oil are fabulously wealthy; most everyone else is abjectly poor. Illegitimate monarchies and jittery dictatorships -- always in fear of coups, terrorists and revolutions -- depend upon oil-needy foreigners, trading scarce oil and endless petrodollars for export goods and protection.

If the United States could curb its voracious purchases of foreign oil by using conservation, additional petroleum production, nuclear power, alternate fuels, coal gasification and new technologies, the world price might return to below $40 a barrel.

That decline would dry up the oil profits of those in the Middle East who now so desperately use them to ensure that their own problems must also be the world's.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.

Seven Games, Six Homers: Rodriguez Stays Locked In

Yankees 10, Twins 1



Derek Jeter, left, celebrates with Alex Rodriguez after Rodriguez' two-run home run off Minnesota Twins' Boof Bonser.

By TYLER KEPNER
The New York Times
April 11, 2007

MINNEAPOLIS, April 10 — The Minnesota Twins could have reached into their past and cloned Walter Johnson, and it probably would have made no difference. Alex Rodriguez is especially hot right now, seeming to bludgeon any pitcher in his path.

Andy Pettitte took the Metrodome mound Tuesday night with a two-run lead thanks to Rodriguez. If Pettitte were pitching against him, he admitted, he would duck the challenge. “I’d probably tell my catcher to put four fingers up and go after the next guy,” Pettitte said.

Rodriguez had never faced Boof Bonser before Tuesday, but it took just six pitches to figure him out. Rodriguez blasted a high changeup into the left-field seats for a two-run homer, propelling the Yankees to a 10-1 victory behind six shutout innings from Pettitte.

“He’s just unbelievable right now,” Pettitte said of Rodriguez, who has six home runs in his first seven games. “He’s locked in, he’s focused, he’s not giving at-bats away. It’s awesome to see.”

Last season, it took 28 games for Rodriguez to hit six home runs. He is already there now, with a season-opening flurry that just one player has ever exceeded.

According to the Elias Sports Bureau, the record for home runs in the first seven games of a season is seven, set by the Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt for the Phillies in 1976; that stretch included a four-homer game. Rodriguez is one of eight others — and the only Yankee — with six in the first seven games.

“You don’t want to miss any of his at-bats right now,” catcher Jorge Posada said. “That’s how good he is.”

The way Rodriguez is swinging, it hardly seems fair that Wednesday’s opposing starter is Ramón Ortiz. In 48 career at-bats against Ortiz, Rodriguez has a .333 average and eight home runs.

“Just trying to see the ball and hit it,” Rodriguez said. “Keeping it simple.”

Rodriguez spoke mostly in platitudes, smiling when an agitated Mike Mussina joked that his locker stall was crowded with reporters waiting for Rodriguez.

“Come on!” Mussina wailed. “Six home runs in seven games? He’s supposed to do that, just ask you guys!”

When talking about himself, Rodriguez had little to say. He was more comfortable talking about Pettitte, whose victory was the first of his second tour with the Yankees and the 150th of his Yankees career.

“It’s awesome playing behind Andy,” Rodriguez said. “He’s such a competitor. He’s so focused and intense, and he’s a perfectionist.”



Andy Pettitte winds up against the Minnesota Twins in the second inning.

Pettitte’s victory followed a seven-inning effort by Carl Pavano on Monday. Pettitte allowed four hits and a walk, striking out three. Twice the Twins put a runner in scoring position with no outs, and both times Pettitte escaped the inning.

Though he said his legs felt tired, the result of a layoff late in spring training because of back spasms, Pettitte was pleased with how aggressive he was against the Twins. He also worked better with Posada than he had in his first start, when he lasted only four innings in a game the Yankees lost to Tampa Bay.

“We had a good game plan,” Posada said. “The main thing was just throwing everything for strikes, expanding the zone away and not using the cutter until we needed to. We really worked it out.”

Rodriguez started last season with a grand slam on opening day, but over the next 10 games he had just two extra-base hits and one run batted in. Rodriguez drove in 16 runs last April; he has 15 already this month.

He came up in the first inning Tuesday with Derek Jeter on first and two outs. The count ran full when Bonser got Rodriguez to chase a low changeup. But the next changeup came in belt high and over the middle, an invitation for Rodriguez to pounce.

He did, smashing the ball over the wall in left-center. At that point, Rodriguez had 31 total bases in 26 at-bats, including six home runs. Even when he flied out to right field in his next at-bat, Manager Joe Torre said, the players on the bench thought the ball was gone.

“The way he’s swinging, all he has to do is make contact to hit the ball hard,” Jeter said. “It’s one of those waves you hope you can ride for a long time.”

The Twins walked Rodriguez intentionally his third time up. By then, the Yankees had widened their lead to 6-0, helped by Melky Cabrera, who would go 3 for 4 to shake a 2-for-21 slump.

Another rout was on, and Rodriguez had started it all, picking up where he had finished in Monday’s 8-2 victory, when he homered in his last at-bat.

The hitting coach Kevin Long said Rodriguez was keeping his leg kick under control and staying short and compact in his swing.

From an aesthetic standpoint, Rodriguez has hiked up his pant legs to just below the knees, showing off solid navy blue socks every game. He has done it before, for a game or so at a time, but now it is part of his ensemble.

“We were on a back field in the middle of spring training, just being goofy,” Rodriguez said. “I was with my buddy Pepe, from Miami, and I just put them up. He said, ‘You look like a Notre Dame football player,’ and I just stuck with them after that.”

Whatever Rodriguez is doing, for whatever reasons, it is working.

Kathleen Parker: Don Imus's Via Dolorosa

Don Imus

April 11, 2007

The Orlando Sentinel

WASHINGTON -- I'm an Imus fan and often tune in for headlines, a shot of guyness and a pinch of politics. He's sometimes funny, sometimes smart, and every now and then, dumber'n a box o' rocks.

As recently, when he referred to the Rutgers University women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos.'' It was ridiculously unacceptable, mean and insensitive.

But was it unforgivable?

Piling on is awfully fashionable at the moment, and while tempting, it's also awfully easy. Let's try something hard. Like thinking.

The offensive remark was meant to be funny on a show that is a mix of serious and humorous commentary, both irreverent and sometimes adolescent. We all can agree it wasn't funny. As Imus has acknowledged during his stations of the cross, it was "repugnant, repulsive and horrible.''

It was also racist.

But the public scourging of Don Imus -- and his "I'm a good person who said a bad thing'' mea culpa -- borders on the ridiculous. Most absurd was his lashing by Al Sharpton on the latter's radio show.

Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and others have called for the I-Man's' firing. A two-week suspension isn't enough, according to these self-appointed arbiters of acceptable speech, who seem to have made peace with their own racist remarks of the past.

In 1995, Sharpton organized a protest and called a Jewish landlord a "white interloper'' after the man terminated the lease on a black-owned music store. Later, the landlord's own store was burned to the ground, and eight people were killed.

Jackson called New York City "Hymietown" and Jews "hymies" in a 1984 interview with The Washington Post. When accused of anti-Semitism, he said, "Charge it to my head ... not to my heart.''

Fair enough for Jackson, but not for Imus?

What Imus said was not hateful, but it was thoughtlessly unkind to young women who are not, in fact, "hos.''

Anyone who caught the student-athletes' Tuesday news conference couldn't help being impressed by the players' maturity, integrity and poise -- and feel a little bit sorry for the less-mature Imus. His chastening has been severe and his humiliation must be painful.

The strength of the country's reaction may suggest that our tolerance for gratuitous insult has reached a tipping point -- and that is a welcome development. What would be even more welcome is if that news were to reach the places where the word "ho," short for "can't-be-printed-here,'' is frequently used.

Black hip-hop artists have been denigrating the women of their families and neighborhoods for years with terminology that reduces all women to receptacles for men's pleasure. Sharpton and Jackson would do well to direct some of their outrage to that neck of the woods.

Meanwhile, the broader savaging of Imus seems disproportionate to the crime. There is in the air the unmistakable scent of schadenfreude -- pleasure in someone else's misery -- as some in the media have turned on the radio jock like pack wolves on a wounded puppy.

Otherwise, his takedown feels like hecklers gone wild. When the star is down, the heckler gets to be the star. Celebrity comes to the one with the loudest voice, the meanest jibe or, in this case, the pithiest piety.

In such an environment, punishment doesn't have to be equal to the sin; it has to be equal to the sinner. Because Imus is rich and powerful, the only appropriate punishment is death by a million apologies.

Followed by forced retirement.

Context has been ignored, meanwhile, by all but Imus' oldest friends. Imus has said a few dumb things in a decades-long career -- as have we all -- but he also has raised many millions for charities.

Otherwise, his show is entertaining and informative, thanks to the many national politicians who show up. Yes, it's a little clubby at times, mutually admiring and self-absorbed, but those characteristics also create a sense of relaxed intimacy that is part of the show's attraction.

Whatever his flaws -- and however careless his recent blurt -- Imus deserves a shot at resurrection.

He has promised to make a better show and to become an even better person. If that means no more racist jokes, the world will be better. It would be a waste, however, to banish a reformed Imus from the airwaves -- especially if an example of redemption and rehabilitation is what we seek.

But sainthood -- please -- is not required. In fact, a St. Imus would be a suicide bomb for sure.

kparker@orlandosentinel.com

John McWhorter: A Dangerous Detour

Don Imus appeared on Al Sharpton's "Keeping It Real" radio show yesterday.

Cycles of outrage and apology distract blacks from confronting many big, chronic problems

The New York Daily News

Tuesday, April 10th 2007, 4:00 AM

You can count on about one a month. Last August it was Sen. George Allen's (R-Va.) "macaca" comment that led to the usual editorials about the "persistence of racism in America" and the duty of good-thinking people to police the country for "offensive language." Allen apologized.

We were barely past that episode when Michael Richards tossed off the N-word in a meltdown during a standup routine when some black men heckled him. More policing, more talk shows exploring the issue. Richards apologized, with the Rev. Jesse Jackson in tow.

Upon which Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) was dragged through the mud for calling Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) "articulate and bright and clean." Never mind that if you look at the actual transcript, he meant something different from what was reported. This was still water-cooler talk for a couple of weeks, complete with the Op-Eds and the requisite apology.

Not long ago, a radio host in Texas, making fun of Biden, called Obama a "clean darky." The local NAACP was up in arms.

Writing about this kind of thing a little while ago, I predicted that there would be a new episode the following week. I was off by seven days. Now it's Don Imus on the coals for saying that the women on Rutgers' basketball team are "nappy-headed ho's."

We know the drill. The Rev. Al Sharpton wants Imus to resign. Reflective sorts are tsk-tsking over Imus. Condemning him. Imus will be trotted out as one more example that on racism in America we've come a long way, but we have a ...(need I even finish?).

And what will the point be? What, really, is the goal of these monthly performances over something someone says in passing and usually in jest? If the goal is to stop people from ever uttering anything that can be construed as belittling to people of color, it doesn't appear to be working.

We have already succeeded in making the outright abusive wielding of racial slurs unacceptable in American society. Nicholas (Fat Nick) Minucci, the Howard Beach, Queens, twentysomething who assaulted a black man with a bat while shouting the N-word, deserved to go to prison.

However, the quest for an America where no one ever makes passing observations that are less than respectful of minority groups is futile. And why are so many of us so obsessed with chasing that rainbow anyway? The truth is that black people who go to pieces whenever anyone says a little something are revealing that they are not too sure about themselves.

Imus hosts a radio show and a lot of people listen to it. During a few seconds last week he said something tacky. The show went on, as did life. Black people continued to constitute most new AIDS cases, black men continued to come out of prison unsupervised. And we're supposed to be most interested in Imus saying "nappy-headed ho's"?

What creates that hypersensitivity is a poor racial self-image. Where, after all, did Imus pick up the very terminology he used? Rap music and the language young black people use themselves on the street to refer to one another.

What Imus said is lowdown indeed, but so is the way blacks refer to each other. And life goes on.

Street theater is not strength. It saps energy better put to other uses. The focus we'll be dedicating to the next gaffe sometime in (this time I'll give myself a little more wiggle room) May will mean that much less commitment to addressing black people's real problems.

McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is author of the book "Winning the Race."

The Fall of Rome: Season Two

April 9, 2007

http://www.firstthings.com

By Gerard J. Russello

What was perhaps the most pro-Christian show on television did not have a single Christian character in it—and there was no way it could have. Rome, the hit series that has just completed its second (and for now final) season on the cable channel HBO, turned out to be a surprising affirmation of the Western religious tradition. While it is packed with sex and violence, its message—intended or not—is that the Roman world was desperate for Christianity.

Neo-pagan life before Christianity does not come off well. Against a Gibbon-centered historical approach that placed primary responsibility for the decline of the classical world at Christianity’s rise and the concomitant loss of traditional Roman virtues, historians such as Christopher Dawson argued earlier in the last century that Christianity had a revolutionary, and positive, effect on the pagan Roman world. It turned slaves into serfs, wedding contracts into sacramental marriages, and placed limits on the unjust use of authority. The show’s depiction of the commonplaces of Roman life—even if a bit exaggerated at times, in keeping with the Rome-as-soap-opera marketing—gives us the reasons why.

The show is set in the closing days of the Roman Republic; the first season ended with the assassination of Julius Caesar on the floor of the senate by his friends Brutus and Cassius. The second season was concerned with the emergence of the empire under Octavian, Caesar’s nephew and adopted son, who becomes Caesar Augustus and who reigned as de facto emperor from about 27 B.C. to his death 19 A.D; his rule ended the republic and brought about the Roman Empire. The series ends with a triumphal procession of Augustus after his return from defeating the forces of Cleopatra and Marc Antony in the Battle of Actium.

Along the way we see the fighting between Julius Caesar and Pompey Magnus for control of Rome, the death of Cicero, the Battle of Philippi, where Marcus and Cassius are defeated by the combined forces of Octavian and Marc Antony before their own falling out over, among other things, Antony’s affair with Cleopatra (at the time he was married to Octavian’s sister). Tracking their more famous fellow Romans are the centurions Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo, who are actual historical figures mentioned in passing in Caesar’s Gallic Wars, but about whom little else is known. Their more normal lives allow the directors to explore sides of Roman life not often seen in the history books.



From left: Zuleikha Robinson, Ray Stevenson and Kevin McKidd in Season 2 of "Rome."

Three features stand out amid the thrilling story lines. The first is slavery. The casual cruelty of the Roman world as it is portrayed here is striking, and this is especially so in its treatment of slaves. Rome was, after all, a slave society, and slaves had no rights—indeed, almost no recognized existence except as property. They are everywhere in the show, sometimes as trusted servants (such as Cicero’s amanuensis), sometimes treated like commodities (such as when Atia, Julius Caesar’s niece and also Octavian’s mother, offers her female slaves to Marc Antony, with whom she is having an affair) and sometimes just as the constant source of labor and menial service. They are routinely brutalized (as shown in a sequence set in a slave farm to which Vorenus goes to find his children). The show treats this aspect of Roman life matter of factly and not for shock value or with a false sentimentality. Life in the ancient world could be rough for anyone; it was just worse for slaves.

This is not to deny that Roman law is one of the great inheritances of the West or to demean the real virtues that Rome bequeathed to the West. The Romans did develop a legal culture that included notions of natural law and rights, and our language and procedures still echo their Roman forebears. But that system, we should not fail to remember, was harsh. Testimony from slaves in court, for example, was not admitted absent torture, a fact which is noted in one particularly gruesome scene. The legal system, in other words, had not yet been enlightened through the principles of equity that would make their appearance with the Catholic Church’s canon law and admonitions of charity.



Kevin McKidd, as Lucius Vorenus, and Ray Stevenson, as Titus Pullo, still command the screen in Season 2 of "Rome."

The second notable feature of the show is its treatment of family. Husbands could, and did, beat their wives with impunity, and children, even into adulthood, were only extensions of the father’s will. Roman fathers could choose not to recognize their offspring and could expose them to the elements or offer them to strangers (often slave traders). In the first episode, when Vorenus returns after years campaigning with Caesar, his wife (who had thought him dead) hides from him an illegitimate child; otherwise, she says to her other children, “He will kill us all”—including the child, with, we are given to understand, hardly any risk of punishment. And indeed, by the end of the series, Vorenus does discover the child and goes at his wife in a murderous rage.

The portrayals of the upper classes are no better. Octavian marries his sister to Marc Antony for reasons of politics, rather than let him be with his mother, and orders another woman to divorce her husband in order to become his wife. There are exceptions to this otherwise depressing treatment: Vorenus and his wife do have reconciliation after his return, and Pullo marries a slave (whom he first frees), but the overall impression is one of family as a function of power.

Finally, there is religion. Rome is saturated with it—there are prayers and oaths, offerings made to deities known and unknown, and religious processions and priestly orders. One of the strengths of the show is that, as with other aspects of daily life, the naturalness of religious belief is treated soberly and as a normal way to behave. But these gods rarely provide a guide to conduct or right behavior. At most, they serve to confirm the honor and shame-driven culture of the time. When Vorenus’ daughter is forced to work as a prostitute before she is rescued, Vorenus brings them before a priest to cleanse her and the other children of their shame. And, of course, there is always suicide as an honorable way out of dishonorable situations, a recourse several characters take during the series. A pagan world, in other words, is not one in which we control the gods, as trendy neo-pagans suppose, but a world in which we are ever at risk of offending some god for failure to make the right offering or sacrifice.



Promo for the second season of the HBO series "Rome"

Some may quibble with the historical accuracy of this or that detail, but in the main the show has it right. The picture presented by Rome is provocative, troubling, and at times downright strange. Despite how well we know the story of the fall of Rome, and despite our clear debts to the Romans as a constituent part of our own culture, they are not us and we are not them, in large measure because of the interposition of Christianity. Indeed, the most recognizable people in the series are perhaps the Jewish characters, whose ethical structure is clearly recognizable as our own from the brief glimpses we are given of it.

From the account the series presents of life in Rome, it is no wonder that the message of Christianity, building perhaps on other mystery cults emerging around this time, would be so appealing to slaves, women, and others whose participation in Roman life was partial at best. As Walter Pater wrote in 1885, the revelation of the Christian message must have been seen as fresh air in a suffocating world: “Penetrating the whole atmosphere, touching everything around with its peculiar sentiment, it seemed to make all this visible mortality, death itself, more beautiful than any fantastic dream of old mythology had ever hoped to make it; and that, in a simple sincerity of feeling about a supposed actual fact. The thought, the word, Pax—Pax Tecum! —was put forth everywhere, with images of hope, snatched sometimes even from that jaded pagan world, which had really afforded men so little of it from first to last.” This breath of air was revolutionary, and we should do well to remember it in the context of our own resurgences into barbarism in the areas, for example, of family life and treatment of the poor.

All this is not, of course, to say that in some respects the ancient world improved immediately upon the rise of Christianity, or that, for example, marriages, even into the modern age, were not done for convenience or for reasons of power politics. But the point is that the intellectual and moral climate that made any improvement possible would not have been possible at all within the classical pagan world.

These days, some contend that a world without Christian restraints would be more egalitarian, less violent, and more individualistic. But for those with a historical sense, Rome shows that another alternative is more likely. The classical world was not all marble columns and noble rhetoric. It was a world where the strong ruled, and those who could not conquer were themselves conquered. Far from being egalitarian, the only clear rule was inequality: between masters and slaves, husbands and wives, or plebeians and patricians. Those wishing to reject the West’s Christian heritage should take a hard look at what that world was like.

Gerald J. Russello is the editor of the University Bookman and a fellow of the Chesterton Institute at Seton Hall.

Livia's legacy, Bacala's broken heart

Monday, April 09, 2007
BY ALAN SEPINWALL

NEWARK STAR-LEDGER

Sopranos Rewind

WARNING: This column contains major plot spoilers for last night's "Sopranos" episode.

"Tony is not a vindictive man."

Uh, Carm? You want to watch last night's episode and get back to me on that?

Forcing Bacala to get his hands bloody after so many years of avoiding murder was was the worst thing Tony could have done to his brother-in-law, short of whacking one of Bobby's kids. And all over a fight that started with a silly argument over the unofficial Free Parking rule in Monopoly. That is some revenge served up sub-zero, the sort of calculating evil that only one other character in "Sopranos" history would be capable of:

Livia.

Ever since Janice turned up in Season Two, we've been taught to believe in an obvious gender-based personality inheritance. Tony is his father's son, with Johnny Boy's temper and ego. Janice is Livia's daughter, with the scheming and the passive-agressive manipulation. Simple, right? Not really, according to the final season premiere, "Soprano Home Movies," in which Janice of all people -- delusional Janice, who rewrites every second of her autobiography to make herself into the heroine -- suggests that the roles might be reversed.

And, in fact, killing Richie for punching her in the mouth (presented in a sad, funny alternate history to Carmela) was more a Johnny Boy reaction than a Livia one. Livia wouldn't have shot Richie. She would have henpecked him to death, or found something he loved and taken it from him. What Tony did to Bacala, meanwhile, as payback for the Monopoly brawl, is exactly the move Livia would have made, where Johnny Boy and Janice both would have gone straight to pistols or knives or whatever weapon was handy.

In looking back over the series, I've always wondered how things would have gone if Nancy Marchand hadn't died after Season Two. Livia was so fundamental to the show -- David Chase having based her on his own mother -- that everything after her death feels almost like a backup plan. And yet as the show heads to a close, Livia's spirit remains a presence, and last night's episode was our strongest hint since Season Five's "Cold Cuts" (the one where Tony provoked Janice into attacking him because he was jealous of her good mood) that Tony is in the process of becoming the person he most feared and loathed.

He isn't becoming New Tony, that's for sure. It took a while after last year's shooting, but all the "every day a gift" and "they go about in pity for themselves" quotes couldn't keep Tony's true nature hidden forever. If "Soprano Home Movies" was slower-paced and more claustrophobic than I suspect some of you may have liked, it was also a crucial reminder that Tony is not a nice person -- no matter how much we try to rationalize all his behavior because James Gandolfini is so charismatic. Tony is selfish and judgmental. He nurses grudges and takes advantage of his power as boss to make sure he always wins. He's a monster, even if he's our monster, and even if Livia made him into one.

(She did a number on Janice, too, obviously. Watching Janice flip out over Nica for acting her age and saying "No!" made me feel just a little bit sorry for her for the first time. And it made me feel very sorry for Nica, who's destined to put some therapist's kid through private school.)

The show began with a brief prologue where Tony was arrested for the gun he dropped in the snow at the end of Season Five. (Carmela's "Is this it?" as the Essex County sherriffs pounded on the front door served as a nice opening statement for a season in which the audience is waiting to see when or if Tony will be arrested or killed.) But after cameo appearances by most of the wiseguys from both sides of the Hudson (the Jersey ones awaiting Tony's return from jail, the New York ones greeting the rehabilitated Phil Leotardo and telling jokes about the "farmers" in Jersey), Tony, Carm and the episode headed off for Bacala's cabin for their own road company version of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

Even by the standards of "Sopranos" episodes set largely outside the characters' home turf, this one felt like a departure. Director Tim Van Patten's use of dissolves to illustrate the passage of time, coupled with all those lingering shots of Bacala's lake, gave the precedings a relaxed, almost hypnotic quality, one that made the ugliness of the Monopoly game (even before the brawl) especially shocking. Everyone's having a fine old time telling old stories, getting drunk, singing karaoke, and all of a sudden Tony's getting pounded on by walking-fat-joke Bacala?

The hour was largely a refresher course on Tony, Janice and their history, but it also gave Bacala the dignity he's so often been deprived by the writers. Having to kill that Canadian guy just crushed him, and when the Canadian ripped open Bobby's shirt as the second bullet was fired, it exposed his broken heart for all of us to see.

As I said in my preview last week, if "Soprano Home Movies" was too on the quiet side for your taste (even with the brawl and the shooting and Tony teaching that tree a lesson it won't forget), know that next week's show will likely be more your speed. In the meantime, some other thoughts:

Proving once again that the genius of the show is in the little details, I give you Carmela brushing off the Monopoly piece stuck to Tony's bloody cheek.

Michael Imperioli had, what, 10 or 15 seconds of screentime? Still, Christopher seemed clear-headed in that cameo, so maybe he's on the wagon again. Either way, Tony doesn't seem over the Julianna thing.

Some of the funniest aspects of the show are the things left unsaid. Last year, a big deal was made of Tony getting tough with A.J. and forcing him to do that construction job, and we were left with the implication that A.J. had finally come within spitting distance of a work ethic. So, of course, we return from hiatus and now he's working at a pizzeria. So much for both his maturity and Tony's tough love.

Know your Family: Two important characters to keep an eye on from the brief glimpse of the New York mob are Doc Santoro and Gerry "The Hairdo" Torciano. Doc's the white-haired guy who's been serving as unofficial boss during Phil's recovery, the one the other wiseguys were complaining about. Gerry The Hairdo (possibly my favorite nickname in show history) is the one who complimented Phil on looking good. He popped up several times last season (looking blonder); he was one of Vito's killers.

"Sopranos" hypocrisy in action: the "they oughta build a wall now" comments after Bobby's story about his grandfather entering America illegally.

When Tony started asking Janice, "I'm different how? How am I different?," I can't have been the only one to flash back to the "Funny how?" scene from "Goodfellas," can I?

In addition to Janice's Richie story, we had Tony and Bacala discussing the killing prowess of the late Bacala Sr., played by Burt Young, who coughed himself to death after the bloodiest shootout in "Sopranos" history, in Season Three's "Another Toothpick."

Another subtle callback: Carmela's other birthday present for Tony (the one in the bedroom, not the golf clubs) was a reminder of the scene in Season One's "Boca," where we found out that Tony returns the favor once a year and only once a year.

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com, or by writing him at 1 Star-Ledger Plaza, Newark, N.J. 07102-1200.

Richard S. Lindzen: Why So Gloomy?

Living With Global Warming

• This Way Forward
• What It Means for the Economy
• Beyond British Petroleum
• Q&A: Our Fear Is Getting In the Way
• The Costa del Norte
• Untold Harvest
• An African Revolution
• Vineyards On the Move
• Who Will Win, and Who Will Lose
• Hot On the Pole
• Follow the Butterflies
• Mosquito Trajectory
• Wars For Water?
• Cities of Virtue
• Schwarzenegger's Crusade
• Picture Change
• There’s No Such Thing As a 'Perfect' Temperature
• Q&A: Gary Yohe on Vulnerable Nations
• Q&A: Why I’m Investing in Climate Science
• The Call for Draconian Cuts
• The Race to Make Fuel From Sugar
• How 100 Countries Will Adapt to Climate Change
• The Global 100 Greenest CompaniesMULTIMEDIA
• Winners and Losers: Interactive Map
• Photo Gallery: Heating Up
• Test Your Knowledge of Global Warming
• Calculate Your Carbon Footprint


By Richard S. Lindzen
Newsweek International

April 16, 2007 issue - Judging from the media in recent months, the debate over global warming is now over. There has been a net warming of the earth over the last century and a half, and our greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level. Both of these statements are almost certainly true. What of it? Recently many people have said that the earth is facing a crisis requiring urgent action. This statement has nothing to do with science. There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we've seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe. What most commentators—and many scientists—seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes. The earth is always warming or cooling by as much as a few tenths of a degree a year; periods of constant average temperatures are rare. Looking back on the earth's climate history, it's apparent that there's no such thing as an optimal temperature—a climate at which everything is just right. The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperaturewise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman's forecast for next week.

A warmer climate could prove to be more beneficial than the one we have now. Much of the alarm over climate change is based on ignorance of what is normal for weather and climate. There is no evidence, for instance, that extreme weather events are increasing in any systematic way, according to scientists at the U.S. National Hurricane Center, the World Meteorological Organization and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which released the second part of this year's report earlier this month). Indeed, meteorological theory holds that, outside the tropics, weather in a warming world should be less variable, which might be a good thing.

In many other respects, the ill effects of warming are overblown. Sea levels, for example, have been increasing since the end of the last ice age. When you look at recent centuries in perspective, ignoring short-term fluctuations, the rate of sea-level rise has been relatively uniform (less than a couple of millimeters a year). There's even some evidence that the rate was higher in the first half of the twentieth century than in the second half. Overall, the risk of sea-level rise from global warming is less at almost any given location than that from other causes, such as tectonic motions of the earth's surface.

Many of the most alarming studies rely on long-range predictions using inherently untrustworthy climate models, similar to those that cannot accurately forecast the weather a week from now. Interpretations of these studies rarely consider that the impact of carbon on temperature goes down—not up—the more carbon accumulates in the atmosphere. Even if emissions were the sole cause of the recent temperature rise—a dubious proposition—future increases wouldn't be as steep as the climb in emissions.

Indeed, one overlooked mystery is why temperatures are not already higher. Various models predict that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere will raise the world's average temperature by as little as 1.5 degrees Celsius or as much as 4.5 degrees. The important thing about doubled CO2 (or any other greenhouse gas) is its "forcing"—its contribution to warming. At present, the greenhouse forcing is already about three-quarters of what one would get from a doubling of CO2. But average temperatures rose only about 0.6 degrees since the beginning of the industrial era, and the change hasn't been uniform—warming has largely occurred during the periods from 1919 to 1940 and from 1976 to 1998, with cooling in between. Researchers have been unable to explain this discrepancy.

Modelers claim to have simulated the warming and cooling that occurred before 1976 by choosing among various guesses as to what effect poorly observed volcanoes and unmeasured output from the sun have had. These factors, they claim, don't explain the warming of about 0.4 degrees C between 1976 and 1998. Climate modelers assume the cause must be greenhouse-gas emissions because they have no other explanation. This is a poor substitute for evidence, and simulation hardly constitutes explanation. Ten years ago climate modelers also couldn't account for the warming that occurred from about 1050 to 1300. They tried to expunge the medieval warm period from the observational record—an effort that is now generally discredited. The models have also severely underestimated short-term variability El Niño and the Intraseasonal Oscillation. Such phenomena illustrate the ability of the complex and turbulent climate system to vary significantly with no external cause whatever, and to do so over many years, even centuries.

Is there any point in pretending that CO2 increases will be catastrophic? Or could they be modest and on balance beneficial? India has warmed during the second half of the 20th century, and agricultural output has increased greatly. Infectious diseases like malaria are a matter not so much of temperature as poverty and public-health policies (like eliminating DDT). Exposure to cold is generally found to be both more dangerous and less comfortable.

Moreover, actions taken thus far to reduce emissions have already had negative consequences without improving our ability to adapt to climate change. An emphasis on ethanol, for instance, has led to angry protests against corn-price increases in Mexico, and forest clearing and habitat destruction in Southeast Asia. Carbon caps are likely to lead to increased prices, as well as corruption associated with permit trading. (Enron was a leading lobbyist for Kyoto because it had hoped to capitalize on emissions trading.) The alleged solutions have more potential for catastrophe than the putative problem. The conclusion of the late climate scientist Roger Revelle—Al Gore's supposed mentor—is worth pondering: the evidence for global warming thus far doesn't warrant any action unless it is justifiable on grounds that have nothing to do with climate.

Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. He receives no funding from any energy companies.

© 2007 Newsweek, Inc.

Paul Sperry: The Great Al-Qaeda "Patriot"

Paul Sperry
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
April 9, 2007


A man identified as "Esam Omesh" spoke just before Cindy Sheehan at last month's antiwar rally that Sheehan headlined in Washington.

Following chants of "Impeach Bush!" from shivering protesters, Omesh took the podium and exhorted "brothers and sisters" to condemn Bush for the deaths of "more than 650,000 Iraqi lives." He demanded the White House "pull our troops out of Iraq now" and "end the war today."


Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center (Falls Church, VA)...approximately 3,000 congregants pray at this Muslim Brotherhood bastion every Friday.

The speaker counted himself among the "great American patriots" who braved the cold to march on Washington and protest the war that day.

While there may have been legitimate voices there, this speaker decidedly was not one of them. Not because he's Muslim, but because he's an Islamist tied to an al-Qaida fund raiser and the spiritual adviser to the 9/11 hijackers.

Turns out it his real name is Esam S. Omeish, and he runs a nonprofit group in Washington called the Muslim American Society, which the FBI believes is the U.S. branch of the dangerous Muslim Brotherhood, a worldwide jihadist movement that operates like the mafia. The secret Islamist society counts Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahri, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and blind sheik Omar Abdel Rahman among its members. Its motto: "The Quran is our constitution, the prophet is our guide; Death for the glory of Allah is our greatest ambition."

His office is right next door to the old office of one of Al-Qaida's top fund raisers in America, Abdurahman Alamoudi, before he was jailed a few years ago. And it's located in the same Alexandria, Va., business park as the former office of Osama bin Laden's nephew, before he hightailed it back to Saudi Arabia after 9/11.

"Omesh" is not the legal spelling of his name. He may spell it that way for the media, but that's not how it's listed in court documents I've examined. The correct spelling is Omeish with an "i." Perhaps he leaves it out to avoid links to his brother, Mohamed S. Omeish.

As I first reported in my book, "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington," Mohamed Omeish headed the U.S. branch of one of bin Laden's favorite Saudi charities, the International Islamic Relief Organization, which was raided after 9/11. Tax records I've obtained show Omeish shared an office with Alamoudi, the convicted al-Qaida-tied terrorist and godfather of the Muslim mafia in America. This is the same "moderate" Muslim leader who federal prosecutors caught on tape complaining bin Laden hadn't killed enough Americans.

It gets worse. Esam S. Omeish also sits on the board of the 9/11-tied mosque in Washington that helped the hijackers get licenses and housing, and whose imam prepared them for martyrdom operations in private closed-door sessions. Omeish personally hired the imam, Anwar Aulaqi, who fled the country on a Saudi jet about a year after 9/11 (the FBI now wants another crack at questioning him).

Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, which tax records show has received large donations from the Islamic Relief Organization, is a Muslim Brotherhood bastion. Another former imam and current prayer leader, for example, is an admitted Brotherhood member from the Sudan. The mosque's deed was signed by an Alamoudi crony who has admitted participating in the Brotherhood's "Ikhwan" movement in America.

Dar al-Hijrah is a turnstile for terrorists and terror suspects. A prayer leader, Sheikh Mohammed al-Hanooti, was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the first World Trade Center bombing.

Other dubious mosque members have included: Alamoudi, Abdullah bin Laden, Osama's nephew; Hamas leader and fugitive Mousa Abu Marzook and his partners Ismail Elbarasse and Abdelhaleem Ashqar, who was convicted of obstruction of justice in February; convicted Virginia Jihad Network leader Randall "Ismail" Royer, a former CAIR official; and Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, an al-Qaida operative recently convicted of plotting to assassinate President Bush.

Leaders of the mosque rallied around Ali, calling the trial a Zionist "witch hunt," even after it became obvious he was guilty.

What's more, the phone number to the mosque was found in the German apartment of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, roommate of 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta. Atta's deputy "emir" in the "raid" on America, Nawaf al-Hazmi, worshipped at Dar al-Hijrah, along with the pilot who crashed the plane into the Pentagon.

Back to mosque leader Esam Omeish, the "American patriot." Court records I've obtained show he put his home up for bond collateral in 2004 to help spring from jail a terrorist suspect who was caught allegedly casing the Chesapeake bridge for attack. His dubious pal Ismail Elbarasse is a founding member of Dar al-Hijrah.

Omeish's house is just down the road from the mosque in Falls Church, Va., and just a few blocks in the other direction from the Islamist business park in Alexandria. One of Omeish's neighbors on his cul-de-sac is the former bookkeeper for terror banker Soliman Biheiri. He started an Islamic investment bank that included Hamas leader Marzook and Abdullah bin Laden as major investors. Biheiri, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, was recently convicted of lying about his connections to Marzook in an investigation into his terrorist ties.

It's one big happy Islamist family in Omeish's neck of the woods.This is who is rallying opposition to the war. Omeish may claim to be an "American patriot," but even Cindy Sheehan should know better. The people she's consorting with would not have shed a tear had her son been beheaded in Iraq.

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Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington. He can be contacted at Sperry@SperryFiles.com.

Micah Halpern: A Pope Who Gets It

Pope Benedict XVI gives his blessing after his traditional "Urbi et Orbi'' speech overlooking St.Peter's Square, Sunday, April 16, 2006.

By Micah Halpern

http://www.MicahHalpern.com

April 9, 2007

It has been confirmed by the Vatican.

Pope Benedict XVI wrote a letter to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei on behalf of the fifteen British sailors and marines taken captive by Iran. Writing this letter to Iran's Muslim leader was a very bold move on the part of the world's leading Catholic.

Evil incarnate is the way the Muslim world views the Catholic Pope. The Muslim world in general and Iran specifically have deemed the Pope the most dangerous leader on our planet. The Western world pales in comparison. The United States is a mere trifling annoyance. Israel is a speck on the Muslim hatred meter when compared to the Catholic Pope.

The Pope is a threat to Islam.

Unlike other Western leaders who, according to present day Muslim theological thought, might be misled by Western ideas and thoughts and whose followers are secular, the Pope is the leader of the behaviors and attitudes of nearly a billion and a half religious people across the globe. The Pope's people are fervent in their belief and their belief and their teachings are very different from Muslim belief and teachings. Muslim fear of and hatred for Catholicism is not new. In Muslim historical memory the horrors of the Crusades are still palpable. The indignity thrust upon Islam when Christians arrived at their doorstep in order to convert them and rule over them and dictate to them and control their holy sites still reverberates throughout the Muslim world.

Given all that Islamic emotional and historical baggage the question begs asking: Would a missive by the Pope have any impact on The Supreme Leader? The answer is, it doesn't matter. This letter was not about Muslim attitudes. This letter was not about the Catholic Church in general. This letter was specifically about the mindset and the insight of Pope Benedict XVI.

Pope Benedict wrote this letter not to defend the honor of the Church, after all, there are only 4.2 million Catholics in England as compared to about 24 million Protestants. Pope Benedict penned this letter to put forth and articulate a humanitarian objective. Note that the letter was sent not to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It was sent directly to the Ayatollah Khamenei. Ahmadinejad might be the public presenter, the face of Iran to the outside world, but inside Iran, he is second fiddle. The Ayatollah is just as his title describes, the Ayatollah is absolute supreme leader. Whatever the Ayatollah wants, happens. Whatever the Ayatollah decrees, is implemented. As much policy freedom as we are now seeing from Ahmadinejad, his personal survival depends on doing just as he is told.

This Pope understands Iran. This Pope understands the dangers of Islam. This Pope knows radical Islam to be one of the greatest threats to Europe Catholicism and to the Western World. This Pope knows that a cultural and religious battle pitting Islam on one side and the rest of the world on the other is brewing.

This Pope understands that at stake is the world as we know it. The Ayatollah Khamenei knows this, too.

The Ayatollah Khamenei is determined to be at the forefront of the world's conversion to his brand of Islam. The Ayatollah Khamenei knows that the only leader who has a chance at stopping the wave Muslim influence around the world is the Pope. The Ayatollah Khamenei is planning a reverse Crusades.

Both leaders are reading the numbers. Khamenei represents a population of seventy to seventy-five million Iranian believers and followers. He dreams of representing the entire Muslim world, 1.5 billion Muslims strong. He knows that his chances of actually leading the Muslim world are small now, he understands that the masses are so involved in their daily survival that they are not psyched for a massive religious conflict. But he is laying the foundation.

Laying the foundation includes Iran's Holocaust denial. It includes Iran's resistance to play by the rules on matters of nuclear development. And laying the foundation is why the British sailors and marines were captured. And laying the foundation is why they were later released. The Supreme Leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Khamenei was paid his due respect by the great Great Britain. He received the apology he craved, the apology he felt he deserves, the apology that was heard around the Muslim world.

The actions of the Ayatollah Khamenei are calculated by their ability to showcase Iran's honor. Khamenei's ploys, his actions, his decisions, even his bluster are calculated to showcase Iran's place of honor among Muslim nations. It is the eyes of his fellow Muslims that he is watching, it is the hearts of Islam that he is seeking.

Pope Benedict XVI put aside his bigger battle to try to solve the little issue. The message that the Pope put forth to the supreme leader of Iran was simple: if you are really interested in the message of God, if you are really interested in relieving pain and suffering, you will release your captives.

This time, the Pope called the Ayatollah's bluff.

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Micah Halpern maintains The Micah Report.

Film Review: "Grindhouse"

Flicks In the Days Of Gore

2-for-1 Isn't So Special As 'Grindhouse' Recalls High Times of Low Cinema

By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 6, 2007; C01


What truly grinds in the film "Grindhouse," the Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez double feature, is your butt against the seat.

Clocking in at more than three hours, the film is one grand self-indulgence that is calibrated exquisitely for an audience that pines for the gory double-feature format that petered out in the early '70s. That audience can be counted: One, two. Named Tarantino and Rodriguez.

"Grindhouse," actually two movies in one, attempts to reconstruct to the tiniest detail the actual double-feature experience in a sleazy urban theater 35 to 40 years ago, and if the boys had been able to afford Smell-O-Vision, they'd have offered up the fumes of popcorn decomposing in a greasy bin in the lobby, the stench of ancient Jujubes annealed to the ceiling, and even the sickly-sweet chemical tang of that wafer or whatever it was they put in the urinal.

As it is, they replicate the scratchy, ratchety nature of oft-showed film stock; the hang-ups where the movie sticks in the projector, ignites and achieves bubbly, brown liquefaction; the crude emergency splices; the out-of-sync sound system; and all the high hallmarks of exhibition at its lowest, cheapest level. (The term "grindhouse" usually refers to a single-screen theater showing exploitation films.)

The films -- Rodriguez directed the first, "Planet Terror," and Tarantino the second, "Death Proof" -- are bloody, stupid and buoyant in a kind of infantile way, celebrating mayhem and flesh and gore; they are ersatz replicas (with slight satirical exaggeration but not as much as you might expect) of films by Herschell Gordon Lewis ("Blood Feast") or the automotive violence of, say, Richard Sarafian's "Vanishing Point."

But it goes further: There's also a selection of "comic" previews both before and between the features that compress the joys of upcoming grindhouse fodder, like Nazi atrocity films ("Werewolf Women of the SS"), gimmicky splatter parties ("Machete") and so forth. They're designated by that staple of childhood memories, the whirlpool of color set to cheesy public domain music that announces "Coming Attractions." You feel the directors enjoying themselves as if at a giggly slumber party, as the tropes pile up, come around again and again and approach tedium.



Rose McGowan in the "Planet Terror" segment of Dimension Films' Grindhouse - 2007

As for the two "films," they offer marginal pleasures. "Planet Terror" is by far the livelier, drawing from work by Lewis, the Italian goremeisters Mario Bava and Dario Argento, and George Romero. The situation involves a bunch of people, including a beautiful doctor in high heels, a one-legged go-go dancer ("And I wanted to be a stand-up comedian"), a barbecue chef, a wounded sheriff, an old guy and a deputy (played by makeup artist Tom Savini, who did some of the early gore effects in splatter flicks of the '80s), trying to escape from a landscape of heavily armed zombiefied cannibalistic killers. Also, they are led by Bruce Willis with a bad case of chronic, greasy, bubbling facial tumors, and believe me, you don't want to know more.

Okay, here's what you get for your entertainment buck: Lots of folks being shredded, atomized, liquefied, splattered, Cuisinarted or otherwise deconstructed by gunfire. Lots of folks. Almost an hour's worth of folks. The payoff is when the go-go gal (Rose McGowan) is fitted with an assault rifle where her leg used to be, and does some serious zombie pacification. It looks like when you put jelly beans in a microwave and hammer out a big 10 on the dial and you get splatsplatsplatsplat as the beans detonate. The movie doesn't bother to tell you, by the way, how she manages to pull the trigger, but that's just the critic in me, details, details, details.

Tarantino's movie, "Death Proof," is so narratively simplistic that to describe it is to ruin it. Let's just say it's a car chase movie fused with a women's acting workshop and leave it at that.

The antecedent is the early-'70s "car chase" movies but also "Dirty Mary Crazy Larry" and "Gone in 60 Seconds" -- the filmmaker invokes them twice in the dialogue (and movie geek Tarantino has to specify "the original and not the remake!"). But for the longest, longest, longest time the movie simply indulges two sets of four actresses as they appear to improvise their way through long buildups that will ultimately have nothing to do with the completely arbitrary action sequences that mark the halfway point and the climax. And for some reason, Tarantino gives the women a tough-gal gangsta stylization to their lines, as they call each other "bitch" and the n-word (it's a diverse crowd) and the 12-letter word over and over. Ach, and nothing happens except their little circle is evoked: The first quartet are young Texans, one a deejay; the second is a group of young movie professionals, in Tennessee on a shoot, looking for the exact duplicate of the car Barry Newman drove in "Vanishing Point," a boss-mother bootie-smackin' 1959 sky-blue Corvair with three on the floor and a 68-hp monster slamming away in its guts.



Kurt Russell in the "Death Proof" segment of Dimension Films' Grindhouse - 2007

Some surprisingly high-end performers make a contribution. Kurt Russell plays "Stuntman Mike," a bar visitor with what looks like the San Andreas Fault ripped across his face by King Leonidas's beer-can opener, who tries to chat up the young women. He later makes an appearance in Tennessee, where, among that group of young women, the blindingly beautiful Rosario Dawson stops the action with the Helen of Troyesque power of her mythologically classic face.

All this, really, sets up the film's final few minutes of car-crazy, Viking-berserker to-the-death demo derby along Tennessee's rural byways, and in turn an excuse to show off the stunt stylings of Zoe Bell, the New Zealand stuntwoman of whom Tarantino is an unabashed fan. (She doubled for Lucy Lawless in "Xena: Warrior Princess" and for Uma Thurman in Tarantino's two "Kill Bill" movies.) She's quite possibly the best stuntwoman in the world and the movie features her on the hood of a speeding car (no, it's not a Corvair, it's a Dodge Challenger, that was my little joke) more or less surfing on her backside (but staying alive) while someone rams the car, trying to knock her off. It's a great stunt exhibition, and if it was half as dangerous as it looks, it was very dangerous.

But really: You have about an hour and half of yappy chatter in exchange for four minutes of high-octane road rage. Is that a deal or are you a sucker?

Hmm, well, I would have left earlier, but my shoe got stuck to the floor by an Affy Tapple stick tarred in caramel that had been there since 1972.


Grindhouse (191 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for graphic bloody violence and gore, pervasive profanity, some sexual content, nudity and scenes of drug use.

This Thing of Ours, It’s Over

'The Sopranos,' 1999-2007

In the opening episode of the final season of “The Sopranos,” Tony celebrates his birthday at a lake house. The first two new episodes are mostly solemn.

BY ALESSANDRA STANLEY
The New York Times
Published: April 8, 2007

I’m old, Carm,” Tony Soprano says at the beginning of the end on Sunday. This New Jersey mob boss has recovered from last season’s shooting but tells Carmela he feels changed: “My body has suffered a trauma it will probably never recover from.”

Death was never the most dreaded thing in “The Sopranos” — decline was. Long before any rival mobsters were beaten, knee-capped or killed, there were wistful intimations of decay. In the opening scene of the premiere episode in 1999, Tony confided to his psychiatrist that he no longer found much satisfaction from work: “Things are trending downward.”

Now they are bottoming out, and as Tony and his people grapple with their sense of impending loss, so are viewers.

There are nine episodes left, a coda to put the Soprano saga to rest. It’s high time of course because even before last season the series had started to sag in places, a creative fatigue that matched the main characters’ weariness and also the audience’s.

Now the long-awaited seventh and final season has arrived, and trouble is closing in. Melancholia is spreading just as inexorably as the aches and fatal illnesses that keep knocking down Tony’s friends and foes. After his own brush with mortality last season a chastened Tony crashed through spiny thickets of Cosa Nostra ill will to share with a longtime rival the bromide about how people on their deathbed never ask themselves why they didn’t put in more hours at work, though he phrased it the Soprano way.

“Believe me,” Tony told Phil Leotardo, lying prone and barely conscious after a heart attack. “Nobody lays on their deathbed wishing they had saved more no-show jobs.”

This season opens with the police at the door, a rapping that prompts Carmela to exclaim, “Is this it?” It isn’t, at least not yet. It’s a gun possession charge that Tony’s lawyer easily sets aside. The arrest doesn’t even prevent Tony and Carmela from driving to his sister Janice and brother-in-law Bobby’s lake house in upstate New York to celebrate Tony’s 47th birthday, and to do some business on the other side of the Canadian border.

Christopher, meanwhile, is pursuing show business by producing a gangster-slasher film, “Cleaver,” that he made with Tony’s money. And Johnny Sack, still in prison, has a new set of problems behind bars.

Sunday’s premiere marks the start of the show’s valedictory tour, a chance for the actors and the series’s creator, David Chase, to show off one last time and for viewers to pay their respects to the family that changed television, mostly for the better. It’s not that “The Sopranos” was the only good thing on television, though plenty of fans would say so. But Mr. Chase’s take on New Jersey mobsters was certainly groundbreaking — in opposing directions.

The series lowered the bar on permissible violence, sex and profanity at the same time that it elevated viewers’ taste, cultivating an appetite for complexity, wit and cinematic stylishness on a serial drama in which psychological themes flickered and built and faded and reappeared. The best episodes had equal amounts of high and low appeal, an alchemy of artistry and gutter-level blood and gore, all of it leavened with humor.



The Sopranos at home, with A. J.’s new girlfriend and her child.


Carmela, the most earnest character of all, was often the funniest. At one point she became infatuated with Tony’s Italian henchman Furio, and the two shared a lovestruck moment while inspecting the construction work on Furio’s new house. “You are a very special woman,” Furio told Carmela in a husky undertone. She held his gaze, then broke the spell, saying in her trademark nasal whine, “Have you thought about flooring yet?”

“The Sopranos,” is often praised as the series that definitively bridged pop culture and art. Maybe. It was certainly a gateway drug to television for the elitists who just said no. Some of the same people who used to say they have no time for television can now be heard complaining that they don’t have time to watch everything they recorded on DVR. But “The Sopranos” was a revelation only to people who did not realize there was already a lot of very good television available. And not only reruns of “The Honeymooners” or “Saturday Night Live” and Masterpiece Theater.

Network dramas had already laid the groundwork for HBO almost two decades earlier. “Hill Street Blues” reinvented the cop show much as “St. Elsewhere” transformed the hospital drama in 1982. The first actor brilliantly to portray a charismatic gangster and sociopath on television wasn’t James Gandolfini; it was Kevin Spacey in 1987 on the CBS series “Wiseguy.”

David Lynch’s surrealistic soap opera, “Twin Peaks,” peaked in its first season in 1991, but Mr. Chase has said that show opened his eyes to the medium’s potential. And the cable revolution was already in its primacy by the time “The Sopranos” went on the air. “Oz,” the HBO series set in a maximum-security prison, began in 1997, while “Sex and the City” made its debut a year later.

From the beginning the greatest appeal of “The Sopranos” was its context — organized crime as a low-life milieu that attracts high-minded people. Television had never before produced a crime show in which the criminals were the main protagonists, and law-enforcement officials minor characters at the margins of the story. But before Mr. Chase mined his memories of Italian-American New Jersey, Francis Ford Coppola had made the three “Godfather” movies, and Martin Scorsese, with “Goodfellas,” had built on a foundation laid by old James Cagney gangster movies. Mr. Chase never forgot that debt. Christopher and his pals referred to Mr. Scorsese as “Marty” and went wild when they spied him going into a gala movie premiere in the first season. A running joke that never failed to crack Tony up was Silvio Dante’s impersonation of Al Pacino in “The Godfather: Part III.” And when Tony’s mother, Livia, died, he ended up in his den watching “Public Enemy.”

Mr. Chase chose to explore the waning days of organized crime, focusing on a lost generation of mobsters who had surrendered territory and influence to newer criminal gangs, been decimated by RICO laws and abandoned the old code of Omerta. Mob malaise was so bad, the boss consulted a psychiatrist who put him on Prozac.

Early on, the conceit of Italian-American crime families in the twilight of their power was played for mostly for comic effect. The saga stood out in the way it humbled the mafia, even as it exalted its lawlessness, contrasting feral street violence and collapsing crime family values with the most prosaic suburban concerns: — parent-teachers conferences, baked ziti casseroles and shopping at Color Tile. Tony’s business pursuits seesawed from high crime — insurance and public-housing fraud — to the ridiculous, like a stolen shipment of provolone.

Some of the funnier moments, and some of the most shocking, arose from those incongruities. In one of the best episodes Tony took Meadow to Maine for a college tour, and while there discovered an ex-mobster who had entered the witness-protection program after informing on some of Tony’s friends. Tony stalked the man and killed him in between father-daughter Kodak moments.

In another episode Paulie Walnuts took his aged mother and two of her elderly friends to a restaurant and grew indignant when one of the women slipped into her doggie bag a Parker House roll he felt belonged rightfully to his mother. Later he slipped into the old woman’s house to steal the savings she stored under her mattress, and when she discovered him, smothered her to death with a pillow.

Yet no matter how crass or grotesque the context, the strains and strange bonds between mother and son, sister and brother, and husband and wife, were deeply yet delicately mined.

“The Sopranos” was reliably unpredictable, with subplots that seemed destined to resurface and instead disappeared, like the Russian veteran of the Chechnya war who escaped his would-be killers and ran through the snowy woods.

And throw-away jokes turned out to have hidden portent. Carmela refused to believe Meadow, her boyfriend Finn and her roommates at Columbia when they tell Carmela that the bullied hero of Melville’s “Billy Bud,” a class assignment for A. J., has a homosexual subtext. Much later Tony gives Finn a construction job, and the young man ends up being tormented by Vito Spatafore, the closeted gay mobster.

After a while — certainly after the third season, which included the long and graphic scene of the rape of Tony’s psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi — violence lost some of its shock value. For one thing “The Sopranos” emboldened other series to lose their inhibitions. HBO prodded networks to push the limits of sex and violence, though most efforts to create a network “Sopranos” failed. Showtime, however, took more imaginative riffs on the HBO example, with smart, provocative fare like “Weeds” and “Sleeper Cell.”

Not all of the show’s influence was to the good. “The Sopranos” can be partly blamed for emboldening ABC to allow so many plotting excesses and drawn-out detours on "Lost," which in turn prompted a surfeit of copycat series, all with huge casts of characters and complicated interlocking story lines that required nothing short of maniacal commitment on the part of viewers. (“Heroes” was the only one to become a bona fide hit.)

But the main difference between “The Sopranos” and its spawn wasn’t prurience, it was ambition. Most shows overreach, or “jump the shark,” when they pile on too much melodrama and too many dead bodies. On “The Sopranos” it was the opposite: The show lost its way when it put murders and mischief aside and weighed itself down in ponderous character sketches and too many Bergmanesque dream sequences. Those flights of fancy were not surprising given how often the series was hailed as Shakespearian or Dickensian. Norman Mailer recently called “The Sopranos” the closest thing to the Great American Novel in today’s culture.

Last season was particularly low on whimsy and the playful black humor that was so much a part of the series’s charm, and the first two episodes of the final season are mostly solemn and self-serious.

It’s just as well. Way back in the fourth season, when Tony resisted Carmela’s pleas that he protect his loved ones’ future with some estate planning, she told him to grow up. “Let me tell you something,” Carmela snapped. “Everything comes to an end.”