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Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Today's Tune: The Rolling Stones - (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction (Live 1969)
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As GM Goes, So Goes the GOP
By Patrick J. Buchanan
http://www.vdare.com/
November 17, 2008
Understandably, Republicans are seething.
When Hank Paulson demanded $700 billion to haul away the trash in the dumpsters of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs—assuring us we could hold a garage sale of the junk—they rebelled. They acted as the nation, by 100 to one, demanded. They killed the Wall Street bailout.
The Dow quickly sank another 1,000 points, and, charged with criminal irresponsibility by the elites, the GOP buckled, reversed itself, rescued the bailout—and was wiped out on Nov. 4.
Now we hear from Paulson that the $700 billion Congress voted will not, after all, be used to buy up all that rotten paper on the books of the big banks. Some banks are using the cash to buy other banks.
So Republicans are right to be enraged. They are victims of the biggest bait-and-switch in political history.
But they are now about to do something terminally stupid. With GM, Ford and Chrysler teetering on the brink, they are turning a cold stone face to Detroit and are about to follow the counsel of that quintessential Bushite Dick Darman, who said of our computer chip industry, "If our guys can't hack it, let 'em go."
America responded—by letting George H.W. Bush and Darman go.
Are Republicans aware of what they are about to do?
When workers, execs, engineers, dealers, salesmen and suppliers are all factored in, the Big Three employ 3 million people who contribute $21 billion a year to Social Security and Medicare, and $25 billion in federal income taxes. Add in all the businesses that depend on the auto industry, and we are talking about one-tenth of the U.S. labor force.
As columnist Tom Piatak of Chronicles and Takimag.com writes, 850,000 retirees, and their families, depend for pensions and health care on the Big Three. If they go under, the burden falls on us.
And to let the auto industry die is to write America o out of much of the economic future of the planet.
In a good year, like 2005, Americans buy more than 17 million new cars, and West Europeans as many. Tens of millions in Eastern Europe, Russia, China, India and Southeast Asia are now moving into the middle class each year. These folks will all need or want one or two family cars. If we let the U.S. auto industry die, that immense and burgeoning market will be lost forever to America, and ceded to Asia.
"Who cares?" comes the free-traders' reply. Japanese and Koreans are setting up factories here. They can pick up the slack.
But that means Americans will work for and depend on foreign companies for a necessity of our national life as vital as the imported oil and gas on which our cars and trucks operate. All the profits of the mighty automobile industry in America will be sent abroad.
Before Republicans follow this free-trade fanaticism to their final interment, they might study the results of a poll by Peter Hart: [PDF]
* Seventy-eight percent of Americans believe the U.S. auto industry is highly or extremely important. Three percent think we can do without it.
* Ninety percent of Americans believe the death of the U.S. auto industry would do great damage to our economic future.
* By 55 percent to 30 percent, Americans favor federal loans to save it. And by 64 percent to 25 percent Americans back President-elect Obama's resolve not to let the U.S. auto industry go under.
If the GOP blocks these loans, and the industry dies, the party can forget about Ohio, Michigan and the industrial Midwest. For the Reagan Democrats will never come home again. Nor should they.
By the choices we make, we define ourselves and reveal what we truly care about. Thus, consider:
We bail out the New York and D.C. governments of Abe Beame and Marion Barry. We bail out a corrupt Mexico. We bail out public schools that have failed us for 40 years.
We bail out with International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans and foreign aid worthless Third World regimes.
We bail out Wall Street plutocrats and big banks.
But the most magnificent industry, the auto industry that was the pride of America and envy of the world, we surrender to predator-traders from Asia and Europe, lest we violate the tenets of some 19th-century ideological scribblers that the old Republicans considered the apogee of British stupidity.
Nancy Pelosi is talking about tying loans to a restructuring of the industry. But Congress is not competent to do that.
What needs to be restructured is the U.S. tax-and-trade regime.
Dump globalism. Instruct Japan, Canada, Korea, Germany and China that if they wish to sell cars here, they will assemble them here and produce the parts here. And we shall have the same free access to and same share of their auto market as they have of ours.
To accomplish this, use the same import quotas and tariffs Ronald Reagan used to save the steel industry and Harley-Davidson.
Reciprocal trade. Even Democrats like FDR used to practice it.
- Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, reviewed here by Paul Craig Roberts.
http://www.vdare.com/
November 17, 2008
Understandably, Republicans are seething.When Hank Paulson demanded $700 billion to haul away the trash in the dumpsters of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs—assuring us we could hold a garage sale of the junk—they rebelled. They acted as the nation, by 100 to one, demanded. They killed the Wall Street bailout.
The Dow quickly sank another 1,000 points, and, charged with criminal irresponsibility by the elites, the GOP buckled, reversed itself, rescued the bailout—and was wiped out on Nov. 4.
Now we hear from Paulson that the $700 billion Congress voted will not, after all, be used to buy up all that rotten paper on the books of the big banks. Some banks are using the cash to buy other banks.
So Republicans are right to be enraged. They are victims of the biggest bait-and-switch in political history.
But they are now about to do something terminally stupid. With GM, Ford and Chrysler teetering on the brink, they are turning a cold stone face to Detroit and are about to follow the counsel of that quintessential Bushite Dick Darman, who said of our computer chip industry, "If our guys can't hack it, let 'em go."
America responded—by letting George H.W. Bush and Darman go.
Are Republicans aware of what they are about to do?
When workers, execs, engineers, dealers, salesmen and suppliers are all factored in, the Big Three employ 3 million people who contribute $21 billion a year to Social Security and Medicare, and $25 billion in federal income taxes. Add in all the businesses that depend on the auto industry, and we are talking about one-tenth of the U.S. labor force.
As columnist Tom Piatak of Chronicles and Takimag.com writes, 850,000 retirees, and their families, depend for pensions and health care on the Big Three. If they go under, the burden falls on us.
And to let the auto industry die is to write America o out of much of the economic future of the planet.
In a good year, like 2005, Americans buy more than 17 million new cars, and West Europeans as many. Tens of millions in Eastern Europe, Russia, China, India and Southeast Asia are now moving into the middle class each year. These folks will all need or want one or two family cars. If we let the U.S. auto industry die, that immense and burgeoning market will be lost forever to America, and ceded to Asia.
"Who cares?" comes the free-traders' reply. Japanese and Koreans are setting up factories here. They can pick up the slack.
But that means Americans will work for and depend on foreign companies for a necessity of our national life as vital as the imported oil and gas on which our cars and trucks operate. All the profits of the mighty automobile industry in America will be sent abroad.
Before Republicans follow this free-trade fanaticism to their final interment, they might study the results of a poll by Peter Hart: [PDF]
* Seventy-eight percent of Americans believe the U.S. auto industry is highly or extremely important. Three percent think we can do without it.
* Ninety percent of Americans believe the death of the U.S. auto industry would do great damage to our economic future.
* By 55 percent to 30 percent, Americans favor federal loans to save it. And by 64 percent to 25 percent Americans back President-elect Obama's resolve not to let the U.S. auto industry go under.
If the GOP blocks these loans, and the industry dies, the party can forget about Ohio, Michigan and the industrial Midwest. For the Reagan Democrats will never come home again. Nor should they.
By the choices we make, we define ourselves and reveal what we truly care about. Thus, consider:
We bail out the New York and D.C. governments of Abe Beame and Marion Barry. We bail out a corrupt Mexico. We bail out public schools that have failed us for 40 years.
We bail out with International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans and foreign aid worthless Third World regimes.
We bail out Wall Street plutocrats and big banks.
But the most magnificent industry, the auto industry that was the pride of America and envy of the world, we surrender to predator-traders from Asia and Europe, lest we violate the tenets of some 19th-century ideological scribblers that the old Republicans considered the apogee of British stupidity.
Nancy Pelosi is talking about tying loans to a restructuring of the industry. But Congress is not competent to do that.
What needs to be restructured is the U.S. tax-and-trade regime.
Dump globalism. Instruct Japan, Canada, Korea, Germany and China that if they wish to sell cars here, they will assemble them here and produce the parts here. And we shall have the same free access to and same share of their auto market as they have of ours.
To accomplish this, use the same import quotas and tariffs Ronald Reagan used to save the steel industry and Harley-Davidson.
Reciprocal trade. Even Democrats like FDR used to practice it.
- Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, reviewed here by Paul Craig Roberts.
Never Wobbly
BOOKS
Statism's enemy: principled, charismatic and infuriatingly sure of herself.
By VINCENT CARROLL
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com
NOVEMBER 18, 2008
Conservatives of a fatalistic bent -- their numbers this month have swollen -- like to depress themselves with the maxim that government programs never perish. Statism's relentless march can be checked at times but rarely beaten back. Just look, they say, at those New Deal relics known as farm programs. And then they see Time magazine's cover this week -- Barack Obama pictured as FDR, with the cover line "The New New Deal" -- and they head for the window ledge.
But even those who think this way must realize that their thesis has holes -- whatever did happen to the Civil Aeronautics Board, anyway? -- and that it ignores the experience of many less developed nations where market reforms have been embraced. But the greatest refutation of their dour outlook can be expressed in a single name: Margaret Thatcher.
'There Is No Alternative'
By Claire Berlinski
(Basic Books, 386 pages, $27.95)
When the Conservative Party came to power in 1979, Claire Berlinski reminds us in " 'There Is No Alternative,' " Britain was "widely regarded -- choose your favorite cliché -- as the Sick Man of Europe, an economic basket case, ungovernable, and a living warning to Americans that the wages of imperial sin is death." Tax rates were not merely high; they were -- at 98% on some "unearned" income -- confiscatory. Unions were not merely powerful; they were seemingly immune to even government challenge. Work stoppages were strangling industry, while inflation was on a tear.
Mrs. Thatcher, the daughter of a lower-middle-class grocer, was poised to administer a large dose of free-market therapy. Ms. Berlinski sets out to tell us why Mrs. Thatcher was able to prevail against long odds and why her saga is still relevant today. The Conservative Party had trumpeted free-market economics before its triumph in 1970, after all, but Ted Heath reversed course in the face of surging unemployment and a chorus of savage criticism. Why didn't Mrs. Thatcher wilt, too?
In part, we learn, because the woman was infuriatingly sure of herself. Her enemies found her condescending, arrogant, moralistic and ruthless. And indeed at times she could be all of those things, even if they were not her essence -- even if she had charisma and judgment, too, and tact when she needed it (with Ronald Reagan, for example). Her confidence is hard to explain -- "preternatural," Ms. Berlinski calls it -- but was rooted in an absolute belief that the socialism undermining her nation's economy was not just wrong but evil because of its corrosive effects on the human spirit. "I hate communists," she once declared to a visiting Congolese Marxist and his startled translator.
Mrs. Thatcher's stubborn certitude was on display repeatedly in her 11 years as prime minister: during the anxious days of the Falklands War (we tend to forget that it was not a "walkover"); at the height of the government's showdown with the National Union of Mineworkers; in the early stage of her government's laissez-faire policies, when they produced higher unemployment; and in the final years of the Cold War, when she showed unswerving public loyalty to Mr. Reagan.
Despite Ms. Berlinski's obvious admiration for her subject, " 'There Is No Alternative' " is a pleasure to read in part because of its unflinching judgments. Yes, the miners' union and its Marxist leader, Arthur Scargill, had to be crushed -- the industry "had become an expensive welfare program." Yet given the miners' appalling working conditions, Ms. Berlinski writes, the wonder is "any of them weren't communists." Nor is it clear, Ms. Berlinski notes, that Mrs. Thatcher succeeded in fostering a moral society through her economic reforms, as she aimed to do. After a rough start, the tax cuts, privatization and restraint on government spending worked as advertised: "The average real income of British families rose 37 percent from 1979 to 1992" as the Sick Man of Europe got up from his bed. Even so, the "ubiquitous British underclass" remained (and remains) "a degraded, disgusting spectacle."
Mrs. Thatcher had none of Mr. Reagan's bonhomie and would not suffer fools gladly. When David Frost, in the tutorial style of ABC's Charles Gibson addressing Gov. Sarah Palin, attempted to pin Mrs. Thatcher down on inconsistencies in the official version of the sinking of the Argentinean ship Belgrano, he elicited the following retort: "Do you think, Mr. Frost, that I spend my days prowling round the pigeonholes of the Ministry of Defense to look at the chart of each and every ship? If you do you must be bonkers."
As an interviewer herself, Ms. Berlinski is subtle and dogged. And while she never interviews Mrs. Thatcher, whose mind has reportedly been clouded by strokes, she does sit down with a number of figures from the Thatcher era -- both loyal insiders and antagonists like former Labour leader Neil Kinnock -- and the exchanges she selects rank among the book's highlights.
Mr. Kinnock's attitude toward Mrs. Thatcher has not mellowed with time. He still detests her, politically and personally. And his grievances are so comprehensive that they prod him into comic byways. "She was in charge! She was in charge!," he declares. "She could have said, 'I'm me. I'm bright. I'm Margaret. I'm a Tory. Get out of my bloody way.' " Ms. Berlinski: "She did say that." Mr. Kinnock: "Well, she . . ." Ms. Berlinski: "I mean, if anybody ever said, 'I'm a Tory, get out of my bloody way,' it's Margaret Thatcher." Mr. Kinnock: "Yeah . . . [long pause] Maybe."
And Mrs. Thatcher's relevance? Socialist habits of mind have not ended, and socialism itself, Ms. Berlinski observes, "is ultimately far wider, more seductive, and more enduring than political Islam." Many societies, she says, "will inevitably arrive at a place much like the one Margaret Thatcher found herself upon her ascent to 10 Downing Street." Or perhaps where America could find itself after a New New Deal.
Mr. Carroll is editorial-page editor of the Rocky Mountain News.
Statism's enemy: principled, charismatic and infuriatingly sure of herself.
By VINCENT CARROLL
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com
NOVEMBER 18, 2008
Conservatives of a fatalistic bent -- their numbers this month have swollen -- like to depress themselves with the maxim that government programs never perish. Statism's relentless march can be checked at times but rarely beaten back. Just look, they say, at those New Deal relics known as farm programs. And then they see Time magazine's cover this week -- Barack Obama pictured as FDR, with the cover line "The New New Deal" -- and they head for the window ledge.
But even those who think this way must realize that their thesis has holes -- whatever did happen to the Civil Aeronautics Board, anyway? -- and that it ignores the experience of many less developed nations where market reforms have been embraced. But the greatest refutation of their dour outlook can be expressed in a single name: Margaret Thatcher.
'There Is No Alternative'
By Claire Berlinski
(Basic Books, 386 pages, $27.95)
When the Conservative Party came to power in 1979, Claire Berlinski reminds us in " 'There Is No Alternative,' " Britain was "widely regarded -- choose your favorite cliché -- as the Sick Man of Europe, an economic basket case, ungovernable, and a living warning to Americans that the wages of imperial sin is death." Tax rates were not merely high; they were -- at 98% on some "unearned" income -- confiscatory. Unions were not merely powerful; they were seemingly immune to even government challenge. Work stoppages were strangling industry, while inflation was on a tear.
Mrs. Thatcher, the daughter of a lower-middle-class grocer, was poised to administer a large dose of free-market therapy. Ms. Berlinski sets out to tell us why Mrs. Thatcher was able to prevail against long odds and why her saga is still relevant today. The Conservative Party had trumpeted free-market economics before its triumph in 1970, after all, but Ted Heath reversed course in the face of surging unemployment and a chorus of savage criticism. Why didn't Mrs. Thatcher wilt, too?
In part, we learn, because the woman was infuriatingly sure of herself. Her enemies found her condescending, arrogant, moralistic and ruthless. And indeed at times she could be all of those things, even if they were not her essence -- even if she had charisma and judgment, too, and tact when she needed it (with Ronald Reagan, for example). Her confidence is hard to explain -- "preternatural," Ms. Berlinski calls it -- but was rooted in an absolute belief that the socialism undermining her nation's economy was not just wrong but evil because of its corrosive effects on the human spirit. "I hate communists," she once declared to a visiting Congolese Marxist and his startled translator.
Mrs. Thatcher's stubborn certitude was on display repeatedly in her 11 years as prime minister: during the anxious days of the Falklands War (we tend to forget that it was not a "walkover"); at the height of the government's showdown with the National Union of Mineworkers; in the early stage of her government's laissez-faire policies, when they produced higher unemployment; and in the final years of the Cold War, when she showed unswerving public loyalty to Mr. Reagan.
Despite Ms. Berlinski's obvious admiration for her subject, " 'There Is No Alternative' " is a pleasure to read in part because of its unflinching judgments. Yes, the miners' union and its Marxist leader, Arthur Scargill, had to be crushed -- the industry "had become an expensive welfare program." Yet given the miners' appalling working conditions, Ms. Berlinski writes, the wonder is "any of them weren't communists." Nor is it clear, Ms. Berlinski notes, that Mrs. Thatcher succeeded in fostering a moral society through her economic reforms, as she aimed to do. After a rough start, the tax cuts, privatization and restraint on government spending worked as advertised: "The average real income of British families rose 37 percent from 1979 to 1992" as the Sick Man of Europe got up from his bed. Even so, the "ubiquitous British underclass" remained (and remains) "a degraded, disgusting spectacle."
Mrs. Thatcher had none of Mr. Reagan's bonhomie and would not suffer fools gladly. When David Frost, in the tutorial style of ABC's Charles Gibson addressing Gov. Sarah Palin, attempted to pin Mrs. Thatcher down on inconsistencies in the official version of the sinking of the Argentinean ship Belgrano, he elicited the following retort: "Do you think, Mr. Frost, that I spend my days prowling round the pigeonholes of the Ministry of Defense to look at the chart of each and every ship? If you do you must be bonkers."
As an interviewer herself, Ms. Berlinski is subtle and dogged. And while she never interviews Mrs. Thatcher, whose mind has reportedly been clouded by strokes, she does sit down with a number of figures from the Thatcher era -- both loyal insiders and antagonists like former Labour leader Neil Kinnock -- and the exchanges she selects rank among the book's highlights.
Mr. Kinnock's attitude toward Mrs. Thatcher has not mellowed with time. He still detests her, politically and personally. And his grievances are so comprehensive that they prod him into comic byways. "She was in charge! She was in charge!," he declares. "She could have said, 'I'm me. I'm bright. I'm Margaret. I'm a Tory. Get out of my bloody way.' " Ms. Berlinski: "She did say that." Mr. Kinnock: "Well, she . . ." Ms. Berlinski: "I mean, if anybody ever said, 'I'm a Tory, get out of my bloody way,' it's Margaret Thatcher." Mr. Kinnock: "Yeah . . . [long pause] Maybe."
And Mrs. Thatcher's relevance? Socialist habits of mind have not ended, and socialism itself, Ms. Berlinski observes, "is ultimately far wider, more seductive, and more enduring than political Islam." Many societies, she says, "will inevitably arrive at a place much like the one Margaret Thatcher found herself upon her ascent to 10 Downing Street." Or perhaps where America could find itself after a New New Deal.
Mr. Carroll is editorial-page editor of the Rocky Mountain News.
'A+' in Radicalism
By Reut Cohen
http://pajamasmedia.com/
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), a non-profit research organization founded by Steve Emerson, published a letter on the IPT website which was written by a Muslim Students Association (MSA) member. The letter urges Muslims not to vote in elections this November. While an overwhelming number of Muslim-Americans supported Barack Obama, the MSA student suggested that both candidates are “kafir” and “poisonous.”
Farhad Akbari, the San Diego student, writes:
Whether you vote for the white kafir or the half-black kafir, they will kill our brothers and sisters. They will subjugate our brothers and sisters. And they will certainly support Israel in killing our brothers and sisters. There is no “lesser of two evils” here. They are both greater evils. The lesser evil is avoiding the situation, as both are equally poisonous to the cause of Islam. … Brothers and sisters, I have one thing to say: DON’T VOTE.
IPT accurately points out that these radical views are not anomalies, and are pervasive among various MSA chapters.
The July 1999 issue of UCLA’s MSA magazine al-Talib features the faces of Ayatollah Khomeini, Osama bin Laden, and Malcolm X. The article in the magazine about Osama expresses a hope that Muslims will defend their “brother” when someone refers to him as a terrorist.
The Muslim Students Association of the United States and Canada maintains chapters on more than 600 college campuses, 150 of which are directly affiliated with the national organization. While chapters may sometimes vary since the relationship between individual chapters and the national level is not fixed, the MSA has gained notoriety for radicalism on North American college campuses.
The MSA was initially founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood and was named in a May 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum as one of the Brotherhood’s like-minded “organizations of our friends” who shared the common goal of destroying America. These “friends” were described by the Brotherhood as groups that could help teach Muslims “that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ’sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands … so that … God’s religion [Islam] is made victorious over all other religions.”
While it would be silly to believe that MSA students are engaging in any kind of conspiracy, Muslims typically have no alternative to the MSA when they first arrive on college campuses and become involved with this extreme organization. As an undergraduate student I recall several students who could have easily been described as moderates — and whom I was friendly with — joining the MSA during their first year. These students, who were initially amicable and reasonable, grew increasingly radical as they became more immersed in MSA activities.
It is crucial to recognize that the MSA was initially financed by Saudi Arabia. A New York Times piece says that the organization’s leaders, in return for the financing, “pushed the kingdom’s puritan, Wahhabi strain of Islam.” In the 1960s and 70s, adds the Times piece, MSA chapters “advocated theological and political positions derived from radical Islamist organizations and would brook no criticism of Saudi Arabia.”
Recent controversy surrounding the MSA shows a relationship between this student organization and the Holy Land Foundation fiasco in which money was allegedly being allocated to a Hamas front group. The MSA had apparently fundraised for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, whose assets the U.S. government seized in December 2001 because that organization was giving financial support to the terrorist group Hamas.
The MSA has also become increasingly influential. MSA has published the MSA Starter’s Guide: A Guide on How to Run a Successful MSA, which states: “It should be the long-term goal of every MSA to Islamicize the politics of their respective university. … The politicization of the MSA means to make the MSA more of a force on internal campus politics. The MSA needs to be a more ‘in-your-face’ association. … For example, the student body must be convinced that there is such a thing as a Muslim-bloc.” The MSA Starter’s Guide further advises: “Aim to rise within the ranks of the Union [student government] and to get on selected executive committees. … I cannot stress this enough, the Union has vast powers that Muslims need to control.”
Though the MSA often presents itself as a fairly innocuous religious organization catering to Muslims on campus, the behavior of student leaders and members of the MSA has been anything but innocent:
* October 22, 2000, Ahmed Shama, then-president of the UCLA Muslim Students Association, led a crowd of demonstrators at the Israeli consulate in chants of “Death to Israel!” and “Death to the Jews!” One guest speaker at the event was Hamid Ayloush, a member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which co-sponsored the rally. In his speech, Ayloush solicited contributions for the aforementioned Holy Land Foundation.
* In recent years, MSA members at UCLA raised money for Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists at their annual “Anti-Zionist Week.” In March 2003, speaker Muammad Faheed told an MSA meeting at Queensborough Community College in New York, “The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it!”
* At its annual conference in 2003, the Iowa Muslim Student Association invited, as a guest speaker, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad, who had told a college audience in 1994 that “I am a supporter of the Hamas movement.”
* The University of Southern California MSA invited Taliban ambassador Sayyid Hashimi to speak on campus six months before 9/11.
* The MSA chapter at California State University, Northridge, held a fundraiser for Islamic Relief Worldwide, an organization that received a $50,000 contribution from a pro-Osama bin Laden front group based in Canada.
* In 2002, James Madison University’s MSA sponsored a “jihad” panel that included Dr. Abdulrahman Hijazi, who had once extolled an Islamic suicide bomber as a “martyr” whose actions were animated by a hope of securing “the mercy of Allah” by means of “one of the greatest good deeds, which is jihad.”
* In 2003, University of Idaho MSA President Sami Omar Al-Hussayen was ordered deported because he worked for the Islamic Assembly of North America, which has ties to al-Qaeda. While on campus, Al-Hussayen had sought access to a chemical lab containing nuclear material.
* Alkalima, the newspaper of the Muslim Student Union (which is an MSA campus chapter) at the University of California, Irvine, once published a special report called “Zionism: The Forgotten Apartheid,” which glorified Hamas and Hezbollah as noble warriors fighting Israeli oppression. Alkalima’s June 2004 edition contained an opinion piece praising Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad. It also described Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin and former Hamas senior leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi as “martyrs.”
* At the seventh annual MSA West Conference held at the University of Southern California in January 2005, former MSA UCLA member Ahmed Shama said: “We want to restore Islam to the leadership of society. … The goal … is the reestablishment of the Islamic form of government.” Shama praised Hamas and Hezbollah for being “uncompromising” on their principles, and for refusing to “shake hands with the other side.” He lauded the terrorist leader Muqtada al-Sadr for “legitimately fighting against [U.S.] occupation” in Iraq. He identified Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood as part of the “mainstream Islamic movement.” He praised Hamas’ resolve that “the only solution to the current occupation is military resistance. Not shaking hands. Not dialogue.” And he declared, “We have an obligation to make sure that our MSAs are part of the global Islamic movement.”
* At the February 2006 MSA West Conference at Sacramento State University, guest speaker Abdel Malik-Ali praised the late Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin and rejoiced at Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s poor health.
* MSA co-founder Ahmad Totonji was a major figure in the Virginia-based, Muslim Brotherhood-dominated SAAR network, which, according to federal investigators, had financing ties to al-Qaeda, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas.
Perhaps the most notable and shocking case concerning an MSA member is that of former member Asan Akbar, an American Muslim extremist who attended the MSA-controlled student mosque at the University of California, Davis. After college, Akbar joined the U.S. Army and, in the early hours of March 23, 2003, he intentionally detonated a grenade amidst sleeping members of his 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division stationed in Kuwait — killing two and wounding fifteen.
Unfortunately, the MSA has refused to condemn terrorism and radical Islam. The group decided not to participate in or endorse a crucial rally on May 14, 2005, “Free Muslims March Against Terror,” an event with the purpose to “send a message to the terrorists and extremists that their days are numbered … [and to send] a message to the people of the Middle East, the Muslim world, and all people who seek freedom, democracy, and peaceful coexistence that we support them.”
Considering their other activities, the fact that MSA chapters refused to participate in or endorse a rally denouncing radical Islam suggests that their alliances are not innocent.
Despite the disturbing behavior that Muslim Students Associations have engaged in throughout North America, they are in good standing with universities across the United States. Various MSA chapters have brought anti-Semitic, anti-American, and even homophobic speakers to campus. While the MSA has the right to exercise their First Amendment rights, it is unwarranted that such a hateful organization abuses university resources and even solicits student government funding — paid for in part by tuition dollars — to engage in their vile behavior.
Related organizations include the Islamic Medical Association, the Muslim Arab Youth Association, the Association of Muslim Social Scientists, the Islamic Circle of North America, and the Islamic Society of North America. MSA also has strong ties to the World Assembly of Muslim Youth.
- Reut Cohen works with the Terrorism Awareness Project and the David Horowitz Freedom Center. She graduated from UCI, where she ran a blog to document the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and anti-American incidents on campus.
http://pajamasmedia.com/
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), a non-profit research organization founded by Steve Emerson, published a letter on the IPT website which was written by a Muslim Students Association (MSA) member. The letter urges Muslims not to vote in elections this November. While an overwhelming number of Muslim-Americans supported Barack Obama, the MSA student suggested that both candidates are “kafir” and “poisonous.”
Farhad Akbari, the San Diego student, writes:
Whether you vote for the white kafir or the half-black kafir, they will kill our brothers and sisters. They will subjugate our brothers and sisters. And they will certainly support Israel in killing our brothers and sisters. There is no “lesser of two evils” here. They are both greater evils. The lesser evil is avoiding the situation, as both are equally poisonous to the cause of Islam. … Brothers and sisters, I have one thing to say: DON’T VOTE.
IPT accurately points out that these radical views are not anomalies, and are pervasive among various MSA chapters.
The July 1999 issue of UCLA’s MSA magazine al-Talib features the faces of Ayatollah Khomeini, Osama bin Laden, and Malcolm X. The article in the magazine about Osama expresses a hope that Muslims will defend their “brother” when someone refers to him as a terrorist.
The Muslim Students Association of the United States and Canada maintains chapters on more than 600 college campuses, 150 of which are directly affiliated with the national organization. While chapters may sometimes vary since the relationship between individual chapters and the national level is not fixed, the MSA has gained notoriety for radicalism on North American college campuses.
The MSA was initially founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood and was named in a May 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum as one of the Brotherhood’s like-minded “organizations of our friends” who shared the common goal of destroying America. These “friends” were described by the Brotherhood as groups that could help teach Muslims “that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ’sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands … so that … God’s religion [Islam] is made victorious over all other religions.”
While it would be silly to believe that MSA students are engaging in any kind of conspiracy, Muslims typically have no alternative to the MSA when they first arrive on college campuses and become involved with this extreme organization. As an undergraduate student I recall several students who could have easily been described as moderates — and whom I was friendly with — joining the MSA during their first year. These students, who were initially amicable and reasonable, grew increasingly radical as they became more immersed in MSA activities.
It is crucial to recognize that the MSA was initially financed by Saudi Arabia. A New York Times piece says that the organization’s leaders, in return for the financing, “pushed the kingdom’s puritan, Wahhabi strain of Islam.” In the 1960s and 70s, adds the Times piece, MSA chapters “advocated theological and political positions derived from radical Islamist organizations and would brook no criticism of Saudi Arabia.”
Recent controversy surrounding the MSA shows a relationship between this student organization and the Holy Land Foundation fiasco in which money was allegedly being allocated to a Hamas front group. The MSA had apparently fundraised for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, whose assets the U.S. government seized in December 2001 because that organization was giving financial support to the terrorist group Hamas.
The MSA has also become increasingly influential. MSA has published the MSA Starter’s Guide: A Guide on How to Run a Successful MSA, which states: “It should be the long-term goal of every MSA to Islamicize the politics of their respective university. … The politicization of the MSA means to make the MSA more of a force on internal campus politics. The MSA needs to be a more ‘in-your-face’ association. … For example, the student body must be convinced that there is such a thing as a Muslim-bloc.” The MSA Starter’s Guide further advises: “Aim to rise within the ranks of the Union [student government] and to get on selected executive committees. … I cannot stress this enough, the Union has vast powers that Muslims need to control.”
Though the MSA often presents itself as a fairly innocuous religious organization catering to Muslims on campus, the behavior of student leaders and members of the MSA has been anything but innocent:
* October 22, 2000, Ahmed Shama, then-president of the UCLA Muslim Students Association, led a crowd of demonstrators at the Israeli consulate in chants of “Death to Israel!” and “Death to the Jews!” One guest speaker at the event was Hamid Ayloush, a member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which co-sponsored the rally. In his speech, Ayloush solicited contributions for the aforementioned Holy Land Foundation.
* In recent years, MSA members at UCLA raised money for Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists at their annual “Anti-Zionist Week.” In March 2003, speaker Muammad Faheed told an MSA meeting at Queensborough Community College in New York, “The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it!”
* At its annual conference in 2003, the Iowa Muslim Student Association invited, as a guest speaker, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad, who had told a college audience in 1994 that “I am a supporter of the Hamas movement.”
* The University of Southern California MSA invited Taliban ambassador Sayyid Hashimi to speak on campus six months before 9/11.
* The MSA chapter at California State University, Northridge, held a fundraiser for Islamic Relief Worldwide, an organization that received a $50,000 contribution from a pro-Osama bin Laden front group based in Canada.
* In 2002, James Madison University’s MSA sponsored a “jihad” panel that included Dr. Abdulrahman Hijazi, who had once extolled an Islamic suicide bomber as a “martyr” whose actions were animated by a hope of securing “the mercy of Allah” by means of “one of the greatest good deeds, which is jihad.”
* In 2003, University of Idaho MSA President Sami Omar Al-Hussayen was ordered deported because he worked for the Islamic Assembly of North America, which has ties to al-Qaeda. While on campus, Al-Hussayen had sought access to a chemical lab containing nuclear material.
* Alkalima, the newspaper of the Muslim Student Union (which is an MSA campus chapter) at the University of California, Irvine, once published a special report called “Zionism: The Forgotten Apartheid,” which glorified Hamas and Hezbollah as noble warriors fighting Israeli oppression. Alkalima’s June 2004 edition contained an opinion piece praising Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad. It also described Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin and former Hamas senior leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi as “martyrs.”
* At the seventh annual MSA West Conference held at the University of Southern California in January 2005, former MSA UCLA member Ahmed Shama said: “We want to restore Islam to the leadership of society. … The goal … is the reestablishment of the Islamic form of government.” Shama praised Hamas and Hezbollah for being “uncompromising” on their principles, and for refusing to “shake hands with the other side.” He lauded the terrorist leader Muqtada al-Sadr for “legitimately fighting against [U.S.] occupation” in Iraq. He identified Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood as part of the “mainstream Islamic movement.” He praised Hamas’ resolve that “the only solution to the current occupation is military resistance. Not shaking hands. Not dialogue.” And he declared, “We have an obligation to make sure that our MSAs are part of the global Islamic movement.”
* At the February 2006 MSA West Conference at Sacramento State University, guest speaker Abdel Malik-Ali praised the late Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin and rejoiced at Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s poor health.
* MSA co-founder Ahmad Totonji was a major figure in the Virginia-based, Muslim Brotherhood-dominated SAAR network, which, according to federal investigators, had financing ties to al-Qaeda, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas.
Perhaps the most notable and shocking case concerning an MSA member is that of former member Asan Akbar, an American Muslim extremist who attended the MSA-controlled student mosque at the University of California, Davis. After college, Akbar joined the U.S. Army and, in the early hours of March 23, 2003, he intentionally detonated a grenade amidst sleeping members of his 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division stationed in Kuwait — killing two and wounding fifteen.
Unfortunately, the MSA has refused to condemn terrorism and radical Islam. The group decided not to participate in or endorse a crucial rally on May 14, 2005, “Free Muslims March Against Terror,” an event with the purpose to “send a message to the terrorists and extremists that their days are numbered … [and to send] a message to the people of the Middle East, the Muslim world, and all people who seek freedom, democracy, and peaceful coexistence that we support them.”
Considering their other activities, the fact that MSA chapters refused to participate in or endorse a rally denouncing radical Islam suggests that their alliances are not innocent.
Despite the disturbing behavior that Muslim Students Associations have engaged in throughout North America, they are in good standing with universities across the United States. Various MSA chapters have brought anti-Semitic, anti-American, and even homophobic speakers to campus. While the MSA has the right to exercise their First Amendment rights, it is unwarranted that such a hateful organization abuses university resources and even solicits student government funding — paid for in part by tuition dollars — to engage in their vile behavior.
Related organizations include the Islamic Medical Association, the Muslim Arab Youth Association, the Association of Muslim Social Scientists, the Islamic Circle of North America, and the Islamic Society of North America. MSA also has strong ties to the World Assembly of Muslim Youth.
- Reut Cohen works with the Terrorism Awareness Project and the David Horowitz Freedom Center. She graduated from UCI, where she ran a blog to document the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and anti-American incidents on campus.
Behind the scenes work makes St. Louis' Albert Pujols MVP
Sports Columnist Bryan Burwell
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
http://www.stltoday.com/
11/18/2008
This was another of those plentiful public moments that have become a routine part of the careful construction of Albert Pujols' inevitable Hall of Fame career. A few hours earlier, he received a call informing him that he had won the second National League MVP award of his eight-year career, and he sat at home with the phone in his hand crying like a baby.
But late Monday afternoon, he stood before the hot lights in the crowded Busch Stadium pressroom. This was all too familiar territory for Pujols, cameras rolling, shutters clicking and the public witnessing it all as he once again explained what it felt like to be confirmed as the best baseball player in the National League.
Too often, we think these public moments of glory are the entire substance of the making of El Hombre's MVP greatness. The never-ending awards presentations; the thundering homer that crashed off the outfield window and silenced Minute Maid Park; that majestic blast that reached the third deck of the warehouse wall at Petco Park, or any number of signature moments when Pujols flipped his bat aside with such theatric impertinence and kept us awed and entertained.
We're always fooled when we see the truly great ones at work, largely because their heroics often obscure the hard work that goes into enhancing those superb natural gifts. If you want to know why Pujols has been voted the best player in the NL for the second time in his remarkable eight-year career, you need to be at his house in the offseason at the crack of dawn.
"Five days a week I'm in the gym," he said, "From 8 a.m. to around 11:30 every day, I'm in there lifting weights, I'm doing my cardio. I'm pushing myself hard all the time. And I want to do more, but Dr. (George) Paletta won't let me."
Five weeks after surgery on his damaged right elbow, the Cardinals slugger is aching to increase his workload. He's trying to find more ways to improve his metronome swing. He's trying to discover new routes to another level of fitness. He's carefully plotting new ways to turn the perfect baseball machine that he has become into something even more efficient than the past near decade of perfection that produced eight consecutive seasons with a .300 batting average, 30 or more home runs and 100 or more RBIs. But most of all, he's trying to strengthen his damaged right arm, which caused him intense pain all last season.
"I feel great now," he said as he smiled and flexed his right arm like a muscle man. "Look, I can flex it with no pain at all. I couldn't do that at all last season."
The progress, he says is coming so fast that it's causing him to get a little antsy and even a bit bored with his maniacal workout routine. He's getting a little bored with a weight-lifting routine that involves no upper body iron pumping. Pujols dreams of throwing up metal plates on bench presses, power lifts and heavy-duty arm curls.
"But every time I start thinking about it, I hear Dr. Paletta in my head telling me, 'Don't do it, don't do it,'" he joked.
There was never much doubt in my mind that Pujols would win this award, because as good as he has been since the day he walked into the majors, 2008 might have been his best year. Runner-up in the NL batting race (.357 average), 116 RBIs, 37 home runs, 104 walks, .462 on-base percentage, .653 slugging percentage and a staggering total of only 54 strikeouts in 633 plate appearances is just this side of ridiculous.
ST. LOUIS, MO - SEPTEMBER 25: (FILE PHOTO) Albert Pujols #5 of the St. Louis Cardinals rounds the bases after hitting a three-run home run against the Arizona Diamondbacks at Busch Stadium on September 25, 2008 in St. Louis, Missouri. It was announced that first baseman Albert Pujols of the St. Louis Cardinals won the 2008 National League's Most Valuable Player award (MVP) outplacing Ryan Howard of the Philadelphia Phillies November 17, 2008. (Photo by Dilip Vishwanat/Getty Images)
With all due respect to Philadelphia slugger and St. Louis native Ryan Howard, who finished second in the balloting and would have made a worthy winner if Pujols hadn't been around, this was the right choice by the Baseball Writers Association of America after several years of slighting Pujols.
What I love the most about watching him play is that it doesn't really matter what day you see him, what inning you see him. It could be May or July, April or August, in an October playoff game or in a batting cage during spring training, his swing and his effort are seamless and consistent.
This is that Jordanesque quality he shares with the man whose name is on the label of all his Nike athletic gear. Just like Michael Jordan, Pujols knows that no matter what day it is or what inning, this could be that moment when someone sees him for the first time.
And just like Jordan, Pujols always knows how to make a lasting impression.
But that greatness doesn't come easy. It's forged on those early mornings in the gym when no one, but his maniacal trainer or the team doctor who helped reconstruct his injured elbow put their heads together to make him better than before, like some new-age, indestructible baseball machine.
"What's funny is I got a text message from Dr. Paletta this afternoon when he found out that I won," said Pujols. "He said, 'Hey man, and that was done with a bad elbow. Now that it's fixed, who knows? Back-to-back MVPs?'"
Pujols stood there smiling and feverishly fidgeting his fingers like he was texting the doctor back.
"I told him, 'Yeah, I like that,'" said Pujols. —"'Back-to-back? Yeah, why not.'"
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
http://www.stltoday.com/
11/18/2008
This was another of those plentiful public moments that have become a routine part of the careful construction of Albert Pujols' inevitable Hall of Fame career. A few hours earlier, he received a call informing him that he had won the second National League MVP award of his eight-year career, and he sat at home with the phone in his hand crying like a baby.But late Monday afternoon, he stood before the hot lights in the crowded Busch Stadium pressroom. This was all too familiar territory for Pujols, cameras rolling, shutters clicking and the public witnessing it all as he once again explained what it felt like to be confirmed as the best baseball player in the National League.
Too often, we think these public moments of glory are the entire substance of the making of El Hombre's MVP greatness. The never-ending awards presentations; the thundering homer that crashed off the outfield window and silenced Minute Maid Park; that majestic blast that reached the third deck of the warehouse wall at Petco Park, or any number of signature moments when Pujols flipped his bat aside with such theatric impertinence and kept us awed and entertained.
We're always fooled when we see the truly great ones at work, largely because their heroics often obscure the hard work that goes into enhancing those superb natural gifts. If you want to know why Pujols has been voted the best player in the NL for the second time in his remarkable eight-year career, you need to be at his house in the offseason at the crack of dawn.
"Five days a week I'm in the gym," he said, "From 8 a.m. to around 11:30 every day, I'm in there lifting weights, I'm doing my cardio. I'm pushing myself hard all the time. And I want to do more, but Dr. (George) Paletta won't let me."
Five weeks after surgery on his damaged right elbow, the Cardinals slugger is aching to increase his workload. He's trying to find more ways to improve his metronome swing. He's trying to discover new routes to another level of fitness. He's carefully plotting new ways to turn the perfect baseball machine that he has become into something even more efficient than the past near decade of perfection that produced eight consecutive seasons with a .300 batting average, 30 or more home runs and 100 or more RBIs. But most of all, he's trying to strengthen his damaged right arm, which caused him intense pain all last season.
"I feel great now," he said as he smiled and flexed his right arm like a muscle man. "Look, I can flex it with no pain at all. I couldn't do that at all last season."
The progress, he says is coming so fast that it's causing him to get a little antsy and even a bit bored with his maniacal workout routine. He's getting a little bored with a weight-lifting routine that involves no upper body iron pumping. Pujols dreams of throwing up metal plates on bench presses, power lifts and heavy-duty arm curls.
"But every time I start thinking about it, I hear Dr. Paletta in my head telling me, 'Don't do it, don't do it,'" he joked.
There was never much doubt in my mind that Pujols would win this award, because as good as he has been since the day he walked into the majors, 2008 might have been his best year. Runner-up in the NL batting race (.357 average), 116 RBIs, 37 home runs, 104 walks, .462 on-base percentage, .653 slugging percentage and a staggering total of only 54 strikeouts in 633 plate appearances is just this side of ridiculous.
ST. LOUIS, MO - SEPTEMBER 25: (FILE PHOTO) Albert Pujols #5 of the St. Louis Cardinals rounds the bases after hitting a three-run home run against the Arizona Diamondbacks at Busch Stadium on September 25, 2008 in St. Louis, Missouri. It was announced that first baseman Albert Pujols of the St. Louis Cardinals won the 2008 National League's Most Valuable Player award (MVP) outplacing Ryan Howard of the Philadelphia Phillies November 17, 2008. (Photo by Dilip Vishwanat/Getty Images)
With all due respect to Philadelphia slugger and St. Louis native Ryan Howard, who finished second in the balloting and would have made a worthy winner if Pujols hadn't been around, this was the right choice by the Baseball Writers Association of America after several years of slighting Pujols.
What I love the most about watching him play is that it doesn't really matter what day you see him, what inning you see him. It could be May or July, April or August, in an October playoff game or in a batting cage during spring training, his swing and his effort are seamless and consistent.
This is that Jordanesque quality he shares with the man whose name is on the label of all his Nike athletic gear. Just like Michael Jordan, Pujols knows that no matter what day it is or what inning, this could be that moment when someone sees him for the first time.
And just like Jordan, Pujols always knows how to make a lasting impression.
But that greatness doesn't come easy. It's forged on those early mornings in the gym when no one, but his maniacal trainer or the team doctor who helped reconstruct his injured elbow put their heads together to make him better than before, like some new-age, indestructible baseball machine.
"What's funny is I got a text message from Dr. Paletta this afternoon when he found out that I won," said Pujols. "He said, 'Hey man, and that was done with a bad elbow. Now that it's fixed, who knows? Back-to-back MVPs?'"
Pujols stood there smiling and feverishly fidgeting his fingers like he was texting the doctor back.
"I told him, 'Yeah, I like that,'" said Pujols. —"'Back-to-back? Yeah, why not.'"
MVP honor for more than Pujols' 2008 season
Columnist Jeff Gordon
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
http://www.stltoday.com
11/17/2008
Was Albert Pujols really the Most Valuable Player in the National League this season?
Not really, if you define “most valuable” as “biggest difference maker.”
With Albert hitting third, the Cardinals finished fourth in the National League Central, 11½ games behind the Chicago Cubs. Without Albert’s machine-like production, the Cards would probably have finished fifth instead, allowing the Cincinnati Reds to move up a spot.
But Baseball Writers Association of America voters decided to give Pujols this MVP trophy as a Lifetime Achievement Award. The voters voted to recognize his massive presence in the sport.
The writers acknowledged what he brings to his team every time he digs into the batter’s box and glares back at the pitcher.
That was the right thing to do.
Albert’s eight-season run ranks among the greatest career starts in the history of Our National Pastime. His consistent production, physical toughness, fierce competitiveness and respected leadership make him a titan among peers.
Few athletes mean as much to their teams. You could put Cleveland Cavaliers star LeBron James on that pantheon. New Jersey Devils goaltender Martin Brodeur would make that list, along with Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis and Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning.
Despite that standing, Pujols had won just one previous MVP award. The voters rewarded super-sized slugger Barry Bonds four years running for posting astonishing (yet fraudulent) statistics.
Philadelphia Phillies stars Ryan Howard and Jimmy Rollins won the last two trophies after posting huge numbers for a playoff contender. Good for them, they earned the honors by lifting that long-frustrated franchise.
At some point, though, the baseball writers to recognize that Pujols has been the most forceful player in this league from the minute he arrived.
At some point, these experts had to quit taking his brilliance for granted and give him baseball’s most coveted individual award.
Sure, you could make a great case for Howard again. The Lafayette High School product literally powered the Phillies into postseason play with his massive run production (48 homers, 146 RBI).
True, his .251 batting average would have been the worst since this award when to defensive wizard Marty Marion (.267) in 1944. But Howard’s power boosted the Phillies into postseason play.
THAT is real value. Even Albert could make that argument, based on remarks he made two years ago after Howard edged him for the ’06 award.
“I see it this way: Someone who doesn't take his team to the playoffs doesn't deserve to win the MVP,” he told a news conference in the Dominican Republic.
Under this theory, perhaps pitcher C.C. Sabathia should have won the award. After arriving from the Indians, he pitched the Brewers to their first postseason bid since 1982.
Or maybe Manny Ramirez should have won, since he transformed the Dodgers from also-ran to juggernaut after arriving from Boston in a late-season trade. All ManRam did was hit .396 with 53 RBI in 53 games after changing leagues.
Both Sabathia and ManRam were transformational forces for teams needing a huge lift. The writers tend not to recognize half-seasons (or less) when examining candidates.
The Cards hurt Pujols’ MVP bid by fading this season after injuries took a big toll. Not since Andre Dawson in 1987 has a player won NL MVP honors while playing for an also-ran.
Albert’s 2008 season -- .357 batting average, 37 homers and 116 RBI -- was actually ordinary by his incredible standards. But no National League hitter commands more respect among pitchers.
They voted for Albert by walking him 104 times this season. He pitched him gingerly, even though he had Ryan Ludwick (37 homers, 113 RBI), Troy Glaus (27 homers, 99 RBI), Rick Ankiel (25 homers in 414 at bats), Yadier Molina (.304) and Skip Schumaker (.302) in the batting order for much of the season.
The players know who the real MVP is. For a change, the baseball writers figured it out as well.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
http://www.stltoday.com
11/17/2008
Was Albert Pujols really the Most Valuable Player in the National League this season?Not really, if you define “most valuable” as “biggest difference maker.”
With Albert hitting third, the Cardinals finished fourth in the National League Central, 11½ games behind the Chicago Cubs. Without Albert’s machine-like production, the Cards would probably have finished fifth instead, allowing the Cincinnati Reds to move up a spot.
But Baseball Writers Association of America voters decided to give Pujols this MVP trophy as a Lifetime Achievement Award. The voters voted to recognize his massive presence in the sport.
The writers acknowledged what he brings to his team every time he digs into the batter’s box and glares back at the pitcher.
That was the right thing to do.
Albert’s eight-season run ranks among the greatest career starts in the history of Our National Pastime. His consistent production, physical toughness, fierce competitiveness and respected leadership make him a titan among peers.
Few athletes mean as much to their teams. You could put Cleveland Cavaliers star LeBron James on that pantheon. New Jersey Devils goaltender Martin Brodeur would make that list, along with Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis and Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning.
Despite that standing, Pujols had won just one previous MVP award. The voters rewarded super-sized slugger Barry Bonds four years running for posting astonishing (yet fraudulent) statistics.
Philadelphia Phillies stars Ryan Howard and Jimmy Rollins won the last two trophies after posting huge numbers for a playoff contender. Good for them, they earned the honors by lifting that long-frustrated franchise.
At some point, though, the baseball writers to recognize that Pujols has been the most forceful player in this league from the minute he arrived.
At some point, these experts had to quit taking his brilliance for granted and give him baseball’s most coveted individual award.
Sure, you could make a great case for Howard again. The Lafayette High School product literally powered the Phillies into postseason play with his massive run production (48 homers, 146 RBI).
True, his .251 batting average would have been the worst since this award when to defensive wizard Marty Marion (.267) in 1944. But Howard’s power boosted the Phillies into postseason play.
THAT is real value. Even Albert could make that argument, based on remarks he made two years ago after Howard edged him for the ’06 award.
“I see it this way: Someone who doesn't take his team to the playoffs doesn't deserve to win the MVP,” he told a news conference in the Dominican Republic.
Under this theory, perhaps pitcher C.C. Sabathia should have won the award. After arriving from the Indians, he pitched the Brewers to their first postseason bid since 1982.
Or maybe Manny Ramirez should have won, since he transformed the Dodgers from also-ran to juggernaut after arriving from Boston in a late-season trade. All ManRam did was hit .396 with 53 RBI in 53 games after changing leagues.
Both Sabathia and ManRam were transformational forces for teams needing a huge lift. The writers tend not to recognize half-seasons (or less) when examining candidates.
The Cards hurt Pujols’ MVP bid by fading this season after injuries took a big toll. Not since Andre Dawson in 1987 has a player won NL MVP honors while playing for an also-ran.
Albert’s 2008 season -- .357 batting average, 37 homers and 116 RBI -- was actually ordinary by his incredible standards. But no National League hitter commands more respect among pitchers.
They voted for Albert by walking him 104 times this season. He pitched him gingerly, even though he had Ryan Ludwick (37 homers, 113 RBI), Troy Glaus (27 homers, 99 RBI), Rick Ankiel (25 homers in 414 at bats), Yadier Molina (.304) and Skip Schumaker (.302) in the batting order for much of the season.
The players know who the real MVP is. For a change, the baseball writers figured it out as well.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Pete Newell: Basketball coach and teacher dies
By Dwight Chapin, Special to The San Fransisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/
Monday, November 17, 2008
Pete Newell waves to the crowd at halftime of the Pete Newel Challenge in Oakland in 2005. (Michael Macor / SFC)
(11-17) 14:14 PST -- Famed basketball coach and teaching legend Pete Newell, whose long journey in the sport included stops at USF and Cal, where he led the Bears to a national championship in 1959, died Monday at the age of 93.
Mr. Newell died at the Del Mar, San Diego County home of Earl Shultz, one of the players from his 1959 team. Shultz had served as Newell's caretaker for the past few years. Mr. Newell had surgery in 2005 for the removal of a malignant tumor from a lung.
The self-effacing coach always deflected the praise that came his way from his players and peers over many decades.
But others, such as coaching disciple and longtime friend Bob Knight frequently noted, with admiration, Mr. Newell's lasting place in basketball history.
"Three coaches had the most influence on college basketball in terms of tactics, both offensively and defensively," Knight said. "Clair Bee, Hank Iba and Pete. And I think Pete had the greatest total grasp. He really studied it and kept abreast of it, both professional and collegiate. He was truly remarkable."
Mr. Newell was born Aug. 3, 1915 in Vancouver, British Columbia. He grew up in Los Angeles, where through his mother's persistence he became a child actor before he was of kindergarten age, appearing in several "Our Gang" movie comedies and being strongly considered for a plum part opposite Charlie Chaplin in "The Kid" in the early 1920s.
But Jackie Coogan got the role, which didn't bother Mr. Newell at all.
"I hated acting," he said. "All I wanted to do was to be home playing ball."
Mr. Newell graduated from St. Agnes High School in Los Angeles in 1933 and went on to what is now Loyola Marymount University, where he played basketball for three seasons. He then coached at a military academy and played one season of minor league baseball in the Brooklyn Dodgers' organization before serving in the U.S. Navy from 1942-46.
His college coaching career began in '46 at USF, where his Dons' teams went 70-37 through 1950 and won the NIT - then the country's most prestigious tournament - in 1949.
It was at USF where the tall, slim, mild-mannered Newell began putting a lasting mark on the game, with an innovative zone-pressing defense that would become a hallmark of his teams and a model for other teams.
After USF, Mr. Newell coached four up-and-down seasons at Michigan State, then took over at Cal in 1954.
From the start, he was a formidable force in Berkeley, even against the likes of UCLA's renowned John Wooden. The last eight games their Bear and Bruin teams played against each other, Mr. Newell beat the not-yet Wizard of Westwood every time.
A smiling coach Pete Newell is hoisted to the shoulders of members of the California Bears basketball team March 21, 1959 after they won a close, 71-70 decision over West Virginia in Louisville to became NCAA champs. (CHARLIE KNOBLOCK / Associated Press)
Mr. Newell led Cal to four consecutive Pacific 8 titles from 1957-60, and in 1959 coached the Bears to their only NCAA championship, beating Oscar Robertson and Cincinnati in the semifinals and Jerry West and West Virginia in the final.
The following season, Mr. Newell's Bears again beat Robertson and Cincinnati in the NCAA semifinals, but lost to Jerry Lucas and Ohio State in the final, where Buckeye coach Fred Taylor used a defense Mr. Newell had willingly taught him a year earlier.
Those two Cal teams, which included players like Darrall Imhoff, Denny Fitzpatrick, Bill McClintock, Bob Dalton and Al Buch, clearly didn't have the individual talent of their Final Four opponents.
"But they were very, very bright," Mr. Newell once said. "And they had a great ability to play with each other and pick each other up."
And to listen to and learn from Mr. Newell.
A keen observer of those teams was Knight, who was on the Ohio State squad that bested the Bears for the national title in 1960.
"When I saw them, I thought, 'Here's a team that really knows how to play basketball,' " Knight said.
The players also revered Mr. Newell.
"Playing for him created a bond," Stan Morrison, who would become a coach himself, said in a 1999 Los Angeles Times interview. "We had a bunch of guys who would stay in that foxhole until the very end, but you never had to worry. That was the brotherhood that was nurtured by Pete."
And Rene Herrerias, Mr. Newell's Cal assistant and successor with the Bears, said, "You just don't see guys like Pete, then or now. Not the whole package. There was only one."
But Mr. Newell, the National Coach of the Year in 1960, ended his college coaching days that season, at the age of just 44, finishing with a cumulative record of 234-123.
"It was my health," he said, decades later. "I was carrying it all inside. I was smoking too many cigarettes, drinking too much coffee, and wasn't able to eat. I wouldn't eat anything from Thursday to Saturday."
Texas Tech head coach Bob Knight, right, hugs former coach Pete Newell before the start of a game between Knight's team and Stanford during the Pete Newell basketball tournament in San Jose, Calif., Sunday, Dec. 3, 2006. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
Mr. Newell had one more coaching stop, however. He led the U.S. Olympic men's basketball team, which included West, Robertson and Lucas, to a 1960 gold medal.
That completed a "Triple Crown" only two other coaches have achieved - NIT, NCAA and Olympic titles.
Mr. Newell then went from coaching basketball to something he loved even more: teaching it.
After he left coaching, Mr. Newell became an administrator, serving as athletic director during at often-turbulent period at Cal from 1960-68, then as general manager of the NBA San Diego Rockets from 1968-72 and the Lakers from 1972-76, engineering a trade that brought Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Los Angeles. He then worked as a consultant and director of player personnel for the Warriors and started a long scouting stint with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
But Nr. Newell, who was elected to the National Basketball Hall of Fame in 1979, was busy teaching all the while, too, setting up a film program for the Peace Corps, volunteering to help develop the Japanese national basketball program, writing instructional books.
"Coaching can be about ego, money, terms of contracts, desire to move to the next level," Newell told the San Jose Mercury News in 2002. "Teaching is faceless. I get a thrill from helping a kid get a scholarship when he otherwise wouldn't have the chance to go to college or helping a kid with two left feet making the high school varsity."
Well into his octogenarian days, Mr. Newell would help players at the major college and NBA levels at his annual Big Man's camps in Los Angeles, Hawaii and later Las Vegas, where he taught millionaire pros how to play better in the post - and didn't charge them a dime for the instruction.
Along the way he elicited glowing comments like this from Shaquille O'Neal: "He's the best teacher there is."
In later years, Mr. Newell added yearly Tall Women's camps, held in Monterey, to his teaching schedule, commuting from his home in the Del Mar area, where the racetrack became one of his favorite recreational stops.
Mr. Newell was honored in the Bay Area in 1997, with the inception of an annual tournament called the Pete Newell Challenge.
His view of basketball remained keen, and, if he thought appropriate, sharply critical.
"Players today have increased physical skills, but basketball skills have diminished," he said a few years ago. "I resent the fact that many of them take the game for granted. It starts at the top, though. It's an overpriced, corporate-dominated business run by lawyers who have a bad product, and don't know how to fix it."
Mr. Newell spent a lifetime fixing what was wrong with the sport, building it, and, more than anything, teaching it.
Newell's wife, Florence, died in 1984.He is survived by sons Pete Jr., who retired in 2005 after an acclaimed coaching career at Santa Cruz High School; Tom, Roger and Greg.
Dwight Chapin is a former Chronicle Staff Writer.
Great coach, Great man
By Bruce Jenkins, San Fransisco Chronicle Staff Writer
http://www.sfgate.com/
Monday, November 17, 2008
Press conference for the ninth annual Pete Newell Challenge college basketball tournament in the Courtside Club of the Arena in Oakland in 2005. Newell died Monday at the age of 93. (Chris Stewart / SFC)
(11-17) 14:33 PST -- I sat across from John Wooden at his San Fernando Valley apartment in the summer of 1990, delivering questions about the man he could not beat. An eternity had passed, more than 30 years, but the legendary Wooden was squirming just a little. Such was the impact of Pete Newell on his legacy and his psyche.
There hasn't been another coach like Newell, who died at the age of 93 on Monday, and few could match him as a man. He probably saved his own life when he quit coaching, way back in 1960, but for those whose memories don't stretch much farther than Al McGuire, his absence clouded the truth about his place in history.
There are those who feel Newell was the greatest basketball coach of all time, and to them, the issue isn't even debatable. He built empires out of sawdust, all the while molding impressionable youngsters into the men they would become.
This wasn't about a firm hand or gentle guidance; Newell literally changed lives with advice having nothing to do with sports. I heard highly successful businessmen, one after another, giving Newell 100 percent credit for their careers. He coached teams (at Michigan State) that fell considerably short of glory, yet gather annually for reunions celebrating his influence.
As long as I pursue the business of sportswriting, I'll never have a more satisfying project than assembling Newell's biography in the 1990s. An autobiography was the quick and easy way out, but it wouldn't have been worth a damn; Newell wasn't terribly fond of noting his own accomplishments. Through the words of others, the complete Newell came forth: the style, the substance, the quirks.
Bill Russell, seldom inclined to accommodate the media, stopped in his tracks at the mention of Newell's name. Jerry West and Oscar Robertson revealed their frustration, to this day, over losing to Newell's pack of Cal plowhorses. His former players talked reverentially for hours, wishing it could have been days.
And Wooden? He'd just as soon change the subject. He wouldn't admit to me that Newell had his number, even though the evidence was plain for all to see.
There was a landmark Cal-UCLA game, unencumbered by television interests, in which neither Wooden nor Newell had called a timeout. It was a source of pride for both men; forget the flash cards, the meetings or even an assistant coach. Their players knew what to do - any time, any situation - and they were in shape. Timeouts were a blatant sign of weakness.
With about four minutes left, Wooden had no choice; one of his players was noticeably dragging. He called time, and Cal went on to win. That was the spring of 1957, and the streak was born. "Do you know that they never beat us again?" said Newell, who retired three years later with eight straight wins against Wooden. "And they never played timeouts again with us. Psychologically, that had so much to do with our confidence every time we played them. Our guys just figured, 'We never called timeout. They did.' "
A number of readers think I'm crazy in my unconditional admiration for Bobby Knight, but it stems from some unforgettable sessions I had with Knight, a Newell protégé, during the research process. "I think Wooden was a very good coach, but I don't think anything beyond that," Knight told me during an interview rife with insight and good cheer. "I don't say that to detract from Wooden, but come on, Pete Newell? He's simply the best there ever was."
Newell never took credit for it, but many feel he invented the modern-day press, long before Wooden popularized it with the Gail Goodrich-Walt Hazzard teams of the mid-'60s. He was an innovator in utilizing quick, undersized guards at a time (the 1940s) when big men occupied the backcourt. He single-handedly eliminated a strong East Coast bias against West Coast basketball when his USF team won the 1949 NIT tournament, then the most prestigious in the land, at Madison Square Garden. And his work at Cal - the 1959 NCAA title, then a 28-2 record in his farewell season - speaks for itself.
EDUARDO CONTRERAS / San Diego Union-Tribune
NBA coach Rick Carlisle called Pete Newell, "The greatest treasure we have in our sport. He is the godfather of modern basketball."
More than all this, though, I remember the man. People marveled at his instincts, his innate sense of the human spirit, his ability to accurately size up a person within moments. I learned that he was a coffee-swilling poker player by the age of 10; that he came from an ethnically diverse neighborhood in the heart of Los Angeles; that he was a child actor in Hollywood, routinely brawling with other kids over their jokes about his haircut; that he had seen Shanghai, Hong Kong, Manila and Singapore by the age of 19 as a steamship deck cadet; that he witnessed the horrors of World War II as a Navy seaman.
On top of this priceless experience, Newell was the Pat Riley of his day, an exceptionally handsome man with a celebrity's natural ease - "the type of guy who could walk into the Crosby (golf) tournament and be as bright and witty as anyone there," said Cappy Lavin (father of Steve), one of his players at USF. And if he brought his wife along, all the better. Knight thought so much of Florence Newell that he often called her for advice - on anything, including basketball - and stayed on the phone with her for hours without ever mentioning Pete.
Newell came across as a kindly old sort during his many years running the Big Man's Camp, but he was a scrapper at heart. As a rugged forward for Loyola of Los Angeles in the 1930s, he usually accumulated more fouls than points. He wasn't above telling a player, "Go in there and give (so-and-so) a belt. See how he takes it. See what he looks like." One of his favorite guys off the Cal bench was Joe Kapp (the future NFL quarterback), who once approached the USC locker room at halftime and challenged the entire team to a fight. One memorable night in New York, Newell, Kapp and several other Cal players engaged in an all-out brawl with some local toughs over the rights to a taxicab.
All the while, Newell was a bit mysterious, routinely engaging in late-night excursions to piano bars and taverns in cities around the country, always alone, never offering much in the way of detail. ("There was a little mystique about him, kind of a silent-Satan side," said former Cal player Bob Dalton. "He was like a phantom.") He could be remarkably forgetful, too, once chiding Florence for not picking him up during a fierce Midwestern snowstorm, when in fact he had driven to the Michigan State campus himself. These were the humanizing elements, the things that endeared him to friends and former players for all time.
By 1960, with a national title in his wake and an undefeated Cal season in progress, Newell was immersed so deeply in a coffee-and-cigarettes diet, he was stressed out beyond all reason. He was fine during the games, brilliant as ever, but he never felt right about his preparation. Had he forgotten something? Would his players react to a certain defensive alignment? He couldn't eat without throwing up, so he stewed in his torment, unable to speak or even take the floor as the opening tipoff approached. He'd be lurking in a hallway somewhere, furiously puffing away, before making a last-second appearance on the court.
The Cal fans never worried. Newell was a living, breathing legend in their minds, imparting as much knowledge and life lessons as any professor on the Berkeley campus. At the sight of him they would chant his name ("Hello, Pete Newell!") and break into long standing ovations.
"God, I hated that," Newell once said. "I still cringe when I hear my name."
He hears it no more, but it rings through the pages of history.
E-mail Bruce Jenkins at bjenkins@sfchronicle.com
Bruce Jenkins' biography of Pete Newell, "A Good Man," is available from www.amazon.com.
http://www.sfgate.com/
Monday, November 17, 2008
Pete Newell waves to the crowd at halftime of the Pete Newel Challenge in Oakland in 2005. (Michael Macor / SFC)
(11-17) 14:14 PST -- Famed basketball coach and teaching legend Pete Newell, whose long journey in the sport included stops at USF and Cal, where he led the Bears to a national championship in 1959, died Monday at the age of 93.
Mr. Newell died at the Del Mar, San Diego County home of Earl Shultz, one of the players from his 1959 team. Shultz had served as Newell's caretaker for the past few years. Mr. Newell had surgery in 2005 for the removal of a malignant tumor from a lung.
The self-effacing coach always deflected the praise that came his way from his players and peers over many decades.
But others, such as coaching disciple and longtime friend Bob Knight frequently noted, with admiration, Mr. Newell's lasting place in basketball history.
"Three coaches had the most influence on college basketball in terms of tactics, both offensively and defensively," Knight said. "Clair Bee, Hank Iba and Pete. And I think Pete had the greatest total grasp. He really studied it and kept abreast of it, both professional and collegiate. He was truly remarkable."
Mr. Newell was born Aug. 3, 1915 in Vancouver, British Columbia. He grew up in Los Angeles, where through his mother's persistence he became a child actor before he was of kindergarten age, appearing in several "Our Gang" movie comedies and being strongly considered for a plum part opposite Charlie Chaplin in "The Kid" in the early 1920s.
But Jackie Coogan got the role, which didn't bother Mr. Newell at all.
"I hated acting," he said. "All I wanted to do was to be home playing ball."
Mr. Newell graduated from St. Agnes High School in Los Angeles in 1933 and went on to what is now Loyola Marymount University, where he played basketball for three seasons. He then coached at a military academy and played one season of minor league baseball in the Brooklyn Dodgers' organization before serving in the U.S. Navy from 1942-46.
His college coaching career began in '46 at USF, where his Dons' teams went 70-37 through 1950 and won the NIT - then the country's most prestigious tournament - in 1949.
It was at USF where the tall, slim, mild-mannered Newell began putting a lasting mark on the game, with an innovative zone-pressing defense that would become a hallmark of his teams and a model for other teams.
After USF, Mr. Newell coached four up-and-down seasons at Michigan State, then took over at Cal in 1954.
From the start, he was a formidable force in Berkeley, even against the likes of UCLA's renowned John Wooden. The last eight games their Bear and Bruin teams played against each other, Mr. Newell beat the not-yet Wizard of Westwood every time.
A smiling coach Pete Newell is hoisted to the shoulders of members of the California Bears basketball team March 21, 1959 after they won a close, 71-70 decision over West Virginia in Louisville to became NCAA champs. (CHARLIE KNOBLOCK / Associated Press)
Mr. Newell led Cal to four consecutive Pacific 8 titles from 1957-60, and in 1959 coached the Bears to their only NCAA championship, beating Oscar Robertson and Cincinnati in the semifinals and Jerry West and West Virginia in the final.
The following season, Mr. Newell's Bears again beat Robertson and Cincinnati in the NCAA semifinals, but lost to Jerry Lucas and Ohio State in the final, where Buckeye coach Fred Taylor used a defense Mr. Newell had willingly taught him a year earlier.
Those two Cal teams, which included players like Darrall Imhoff, Denny Fitzpatrick, Bill McClintock, Bob Dalton and Al Buch, clearly didn't have the individual talent of their Final Four opponents.
"But they were very, very bright," Mr. Newell once said. "And they had a great ability to play with each other and pick each other up."
And to listen to and learn from Mr. Newell.
A keen observer of those teams was Knight, who was on the Ohio State squad that bested the Bears for the national title in 1960.
"When I saw them, I thought, 'Here's a team that really knows how to play basketball,' " Knight said.
The players also revered Mr. Newell.
"Playing for him created a bond," Stan Morrison, who would become a coach himself, said in a 1999 Los Angeles Times interview. "We had a bunch of guys who would stay in that foxhole until the very end, but you never had to worry. That was the brotherhood that was nurtured by Pete."
And Rene Herrerias, Mr. Newell's Cal assistant and successor with the Bears, said, "You just don't see guys like Pete, then or now. Not the whole package. There was only one."
But Mr. Newell, the National Coach of the Year in 1960, ended his college coaching days that season, at the age of just 44, finishing with a cumulative record of 234-123.
"It was my health," he said, decades later. "I was carrying it all inside. I was smoking too many cigarettes, drinking too much coffee, and wasn't able to eat. I wouldn't eat anything from Thursday to Saturday."
Texas Tech head coach Bob Knight, right, hugs former coach Pete Newell before the start of a game between Knight's team and Stanford during the Pete Newell basketball tournament in San Jose, Calif., Sunday, Dec. 3, 2006. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)
Mr. Newell had one more coaching stop, however. He led the U.S. Olympic men's basketball team, which included West, Robertson and Lucas, to a 1960 gold medal.
That completed a "Triple Crown" only two other coaches have achieved - NIT, NCAA and Olympic titles.
Mr. Newell then went from coaching basketball to something he loved even more: teaching it.
After he left coaching, Mr. Newell became an administrator, serving as athletic director during at often-turbulent period at Cal from 1960-68, then as general manager of the NBA San Diego Rockets from 1968-72 and the Lakers from 1972-76, engineering a trade that brought Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Los Angeles. He then worked as a consultant and director of player personnel for the Warriors and started a long scouting stint with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
But Nr. Newell, who was elected to the National Basketball Hall of Fame in 1979, was busy teaching all the while, too, setting up a film program for the Peace Corps, volunteering to help develop the Japanese national basketball program, writing instructional books.
"Coaching can be about ego, money, terms of contracts, desire to move to the next level," Newell told the San Jose Mercury News in 2002. "Teaching is faceless. I get a thrill from helping a kid get a scholarship when he otherwise wouldn't have the chance to go to college or helping a kid with two left feet making the high school varsity."
Well into his octogenarian days, Mr. Newell would help players at the major college and NBA levels at his annual Big Man's camps in Los Angeles, Hawaii and later Las Vegas, where he taught millionaire pros how to play better in the post - and didn't charge them a dime for the instruction.
Along the way he elicited glowing comments like this from Shaquille O'Neal: "He's the best teacher there is."
In later years, Mr. Newell added yearly Tall Women's camps, held in Monterey, to his teaching schedule, commuting from his home in the Del Mar area, where the racetrack became one of his favorite recreational stops.
Mr. Newell was honored in the Bay Area in 1997, with the inception of an annual tournament called the Pete Newell Challenge.
His view of basketball remained keen, and, if he thought appropriate, sharply critical.
"Players today have increased physical skills, but basketball skills have diminished," he said a few years ago. "I resent the fact that many of them take the game for granted. It starts at the top, though. It's an overpriced, corporate-dominated business run by lawyers who have a bad product, and don't know how to fix it."
Mr. Newell spent a lifetime fixing what was wrong with the sport, building it, and, more than anything, teaching it.
Newell's wife, Florence, died in 1984.He is survived by sons Pete Jr., who retired in 2005 after an acclaimed coaching career at Santa Cruz High School; Tom, Roger and Greg.
Dwight Chapin is a former Chronicle Staff Writer.
Great coach, Great man
By Bruce Jenkins, San Fransisco Chronicle Staff Writer
http://www.sfgate.com/
Monday, November 17, 2008
Press conference for the ninth annual Pete Newell Challenge college basketball tournament in the Courtside Club of the Arena in Oakland in 2005. Newell died Monday at the age of 93. (Chris Stewart / SFC)
(11-17) 14:33 PST -- I sat across from John Wooden at his San Fernando Valley apartment in the summer of 1990, delivering questions about the man he could not beat. An eternity had passed, more than 30 years, but the legendary Wooden was squirming just a little. Such was the impact of Pete Newell on his legacy and his psyche.
There hasn't been another coach like Newell, who died at the age of 93 on Monday, and few could match him as a man. He probably saved his own life when he quit coaching, way back in 1960, but for those whose memories don't stretch much farther than Al McGuire, his absence clouded the truth about his place in history.
There are those who feel Newell was the greatest basketball coach of all time, and to them, the issue isn't even debatable. He built empires out of sawdust, all the while molding impressionable youngsters into the men they would become.
This wasn't about a firm hand or gentle guidance; Newell literally changed lives with advice having nothing to do with sports. I heard highly successful businessmen, one after another, giving Newell 100 percent credit for their careers. He coached teams (at Michigan State) that fell considerably short of glory, yet gather annually for reunions celebrating his influence.
As long as I pursue the business of sportswriting, I'll never have a more satisfying project than assembling Newell's biography in the 1990s. An autobiography was the quick and easy way out, but it wouldn't have been worth a damn; Newell wasn't terribly fond of noting his own accomplishments. Through the words of others, the complete Newell came forth: the style, the substance, the quirks.
Bill Russell, seldom inclined to accommodate the media, stopped in his tracks at the mention of Newell's name. Jerry West and Oscar Robertson revealed their frustration, to this day, over losing to Newell's pack of Cal plowhorses. His former players talked reverentially for hours, wishing it could have been days.
And Wooden? He'd just as soon change the subject. He wouldn't admit to me that Newell had his number, even though the evidence was plain for all to see.
There was a landmark Cal-UCLA game, unencumbered by television interests, in which neither Wooden nor Newell had called a timeout. It was a source of pride for both men; forget the flash cards, the meetings or even an assistant coach. Their players knew what to do - any time, any situation - and they were in shape. Timeouts were a blatant sign of weakness.
With about four minutes left, Wooden had no choice; one of his players was noticeably dragging. He called time, and Cal went on to win. That was the spring of 1957, and the streak was born. "Do you know that they never beat us again?" said Newell, who retired three years later with eight straight wins against Wooden. "And they never played timeouts again with us. Psychologically, that had so much to do with our confidence every time we played them. Our guys just figured, 'We never called timeout. They did.' "
A number of readers think I'm crazy in my unconditional admiration for Bobby Knight, but it stems from some unforgettable sessions I had with Knight, a Newell protégé, during the research process. "I think Wooden was a very good coach, but I don't think anything beyond that," Knight told me during an interview rife with insight and good cheer. "I don't say that to detract from Wooden, but come on, Pete Newell? He's simply the best there ever was."
Newell never took credit for it, but many feel he invented the modern-day press, long before Wooden popularized it with the Gail Goodrich-Walt Hazzard teams of the mid-'60s. He was an innovator in utilizing quick, undersized guards at a time (the 1940s) when big men occupied the backcourt. He single-handedly eliminated a strong East Coast bias against West Coast basketball when his USF team won the 1949 NIT tournament, then the most prestigious in the land, at Madison Square Garden. And his work at Cal - the 1959 NCAA title, then a 28-2 record in his farewell season - speaks for itself.
EDUARDO CONTRERAS / San Diego Union-Tribune
NBA coach Rick Carlisle called Pete Newell, "The greatest treasure we have in our sport. He is the godfather of modern basketball."
More than all this, though, I remember the man. People marveled at his instincts, his innate sense of the human spirit, his ability to accurately size up a person within moments. I learned that he was a coffee-swilling poker player by the age of 10; that he came from an ethnically diverse neighborhood in the heart of Los Angeles; that he was a child actor in Hollywood, routinely brawling with other kids over their jokes about his haircut; that he had seen Shanghai, Hong Kong, Manila and Singapore by the age of 19 as a steamship deck cadet; that he witnessed the horrors of World War II as a Navy seaman.
On top of this priceless experience, Newell was the Pat Riley of his day, an exceptionally handsome man with a celebrity's natural ease - "the type of guy who could walk into the Crosby (golf) tournament and be as bright and witty as anyone there," said Cappy Lavin (father of Steve), one of his players at USF. And if he brought his wife along, all the better. Knight thought so much of Florence Newell that he often called her for advice - on anything, including basketball - and stayed on the phone with her for hours without ever mentioning Pete.
Newell came across as a kindly old sort during his many years running the Big Man's Camp, but he was a scrapper at heart. As a rugged forward for Loyola of Los Angeles in the 1930s, he usually accumulated more fouls than points. He wasn't above telling a player, "Go in there and give (so-and-so) a belt. See how he takes it. See what he looks like." One of his favorite guys off the Cal bench was Joe Kapp (the future NFL quarterback), who once approached the USC locker room at halftime and challenged the entire team to a fight. One memorable night in New York, Newell, Kapp and several other Cal players engaged in an all-out brawl with some local toughs over the rights to a taxicab.
All the while, Newell was a bit mysterious, routinely engaging in late-night excursions to piano bars and taverns in cities around the country, always alone, never offering much in the way of detail. ("There was a little mystique about him, kind of a silent-Satan side," said former Cal player Bob Dalton. "He was like a phantom.") He could be remarkably forgetful, too, once chiding Florence for not picking him up during a fierce Midwestern snowstorm, when in fact he had driven to the Michigan State campus himself. These were the humanizing elements, the things that endeared him to friends and former players for all time.
By 1960, with a national title in his wake and an undefeated Cal season in progress, Newell was immersed so deeply in a coffee-and-cigarettes diet, he was stressed out beyond all reason. He was fine during the games, brilliant as ever, but he never felt right about his preparation. Had he forgotten something? Would his players react to a certain defensive alignment? He couldn't eat without throwing up, so he stewed in his torment, unable to speak or even take the floor as the opening tipoff approached. He'd be lurking in a hallway somewhere, furiously puffing away, before making a last-second appearance on the court.
The Cal fans never worried. Newell was a living, breathing legend in their minds, imparting as much knowledge and life lessons as any professor on the Berkeley campus. At the sight of him they would chant his name ("Hello, Pete Newell!") and break into long standing ovations.
"God, I hated that," Newell once said. "I still cringe when I hear my name."
He hears it no more, but it rings through the pages of history.
E-mail Bruce Jenkins at bjenkins@sfchronicle.com
Bruce Jenkins' biography of Pete Newell, "A Good Man," is available from www.amazon.com.
CRISIS LETS DEMS PUSH OLD AGENDAS
By AMITY SHLAES
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/
November 17, 2008
THE trouble with new financial crises is that they provide pretexts for implementing old social agendas. As the president-elect's new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said recently, "never allow a crisis to go to waste."
Consider President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which President-elect Barack Obama invokes when he talks of "a defining moment." Like Obama today, FDR was inaugurated into trouble. He wisely addressed the financial crisis through the steps that we learned about in school. He signed deposit insurance into law, reassuring savers. He created the Securities and Exchange Commission, making the stock market more transparent and consistent. He soothed our grandparents via his radio Fireside Chats. This was the FDR we love.
But FDR also used the crisis mood to push through an unprecedented program of reforms that progressives had been hoping to put in place for years. Sen. George Norris of Nebraska, for example, had for decades argued that utilities should be in the public, not the private, sector. As far back as the early '20s, Norris wanted to build a big power project on Tennessee River. He wanted the government - and not the Ford Motor Company, which was drawing up such plans - to be in charge. FDR made Norris' progressive dream a reality by creating the publicly owned Tennessee Valley Authority. Washington won out, but it wasn't clear its power served the South down the decades.
Members of FDR's party and those to his left itched to enact other old plans: Subsidize agriculture like crazy. Institute a national minimum wage. Create strong unions to drive wages up, even when businesses couldn't afford it. The progressives and farmers wanted to end the gold standard.
None of these ideas got far in the prosperous '20s, but the financial crisis gave the progressives their chance. Suddenly, they had their Katrina, the telltale situation in which capitalism looked broken for all the world. They built a giant institution, the National Recovery Administration, to reorganize the industrial economy.
The NRA imposed a series of regulations on businesses - a minimum wage, shop-floor safety rules, price rules - codes that made certain infractions crimes. In a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, the feds prosecuted a family of Brooklyn chicken butchers, the Schechters, on the absurd charge of setting prices too low. The court stood by the Schechters and, two long years after the New Deal began, ruled the NRA unconstitutional. But it was too late for the economy, which was hurt by this singularly perverse institution.
The Obama administration isn't likely to advocate a new NRA. But President-elect Obama may go along with Democrats in Congress as they push other old social agendas. They, like the early-'30s Democrats, now have the ugly snapshot of capitalism for which they longed.
Foremost on their reform agenda, as in 1993, will be health insurance. Indeed, we are practically guaranteed a "healthcarization" of our financial crisis, even though health care and mortgage-backed securities have little to do with one another. "Nationalization" used to be a scare word. But the easy nationalization of the giant AIG makes the nationalization of private health care suddenly seem possible.
A Democratic Washington also will likely legislate the fondest wish of private-sector unions - the famous "card-check" legislation that will deprive workers of the chance to cast an anonymous vote on shop unionization. This, in turn, will put upward pressure on wages that workplaces can't afford.
The greater danger is that the public-sector unions, with support of Democrats, will push up their own pay aggressively. Behind the GM crisis is the crisis of state and city budgets - which the demands of AFSCME, the public-sector union, will only exacerbate.
President-elect Obama creates an opening for such demands when he says, as he did recently, that everything about the last four years was wrong. Everything? Sure, the financial crisis needs addressing. But government health care and card check don't have much to do with mortgage crises.
So remember what's really be going on: Voters want change - Obama's campaign message. But the Democratic Party is widening the definition of change by the hour. And the crisis? It's just a pretext.
Amity Shlaes, senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations, is author of "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" (Harper Perennial).
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/
November 17, 2008
THE trouble with new financial crises is that they provide pretexts for implementing old social agendas. As the president-elect's new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said recently, "never allow a crisis to go to waste."Consider President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which President-elect Barack Obama invokes when he talks of "a defining moment." Like Obama today, FDR was inaugurated into trouble. He wisely addressed the financial crisis through the steps that we learned about in school. He signed deposit insurance into law, reassuring savers. He created the Securities and Exchange Commission, making the stock market more transparent and consistent. He soothed our grandparents via his radio Fireside Chats. This was the FDR we love.
But FDR also used the crisis mood to push through an unprecedented program of reforms that progressives had been hoping to put in place for years. Sen. George Norris of Nebraska, for example, had for decades argued that utilities should be in the public, not the private, sector. As far back as the early '20s, Norris wanted to build a big power project on Tennessee River. He wanted the government - and not the Ford Motor Company, which was drawing up such plans - to be in charge. FDR made Norris' progressive dream a reality by creating the publicly owned Tennessee Valley Authority. Washington won out, but it wasn't clear its power served the South down the decades.
Members of FDR's party and those to his left itched to enact other old plans: Subsidize agriculture like crazy. Institute a national minimum wage. Create strong unions to drive wages up, even when businesses couldn't afford it. The progressives and farmers wanted to end the gold standard.
None of these ideas got far in the prosperous '20s, but the financial crisis gave the progressives their chance. Suddenly, they had their Katrina, the telltale situation in which capitalism looked broken for all the world. They built a giant institution, the National Recovery Administration, to reorganize the industrial economy.
The NRA imposed a series of regulations on businesses - a minimum wage, shop-floor safety rules, price rules - codes that made certain infractions crimes. In a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, the feds prosecuted a family of Brooklyn chicken butchers, the Schechters, on the absurd charge of setting prices too low. The court stood by the Schechters and, two long years after the New Deal began, ruled the NRA unconstitutional. But it was too late for the economy, which was hurt by this singularly perverse institution.
The Obama administration isn't likely to advocate a new NRA. But President-elect Obama may go along with Democrats in Congress as they push other old social agendas. They, like the early-'30s Democrats, now have the ugly snapshot of capitalism for which they longed.
Foremost on their reform agenda, as in 1993, will be health insurance. Indeed, we are practically guaranteed a "healthcarization" of our financial crisis, even though health care and mortgage-backed securities have little to do with one another. "Nationalization" used to be a scare word. But the easy nationalization of the giant AIG makes the nationalization of private health care suddenly seem possible.
A Democratic Washington also will likely legislate the fondest wish of private-sector unions - the famous "card-check" legislation that will deprive workers of the chance to cast an anonymous vote on shop unionization. This, in turn, will put upward pressure on wages that workplaces can't afford.
The greater danger is that the public-sector unions, with support of Democrats, will push up their own pay aggressively. Behind the GM crisis is the crisis of state and city budgets - which the demands of AFSCME, the public-sector union, will only exacerbate.
President-elect Obama creates an opening for such demands when he says, as he did recently, that everything about the last four years was wrong. Everything? Sure, the financial crisis needs addressing. But government health care and card check don't have much to do with mortgage crises.
So remember what's really be going on: Voters want change - Obama's campaign message. But the Democratic Party is widening the definition of change by the hour. And the crisis? It's just a pretext.
Amity Shlaes, senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations, is author of "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" (Harper Perennial).
Mexican Gangsters Converting America's National Parks Into Gigantic Marijuana Patches
By Brenda Walker
http://www.vdare.com
November 13, 2008
Photo by Troy Harvey / The Bakersfield Californian
A bag of Vigoro all-purpose fertilizer lies in the middle of a marijuana grow site near Balch Park Road and Pine Creek in the Sequoia National Park. Along with different types of fertilizers, marijuana growers also use assorted types of pesticides that can end up in nearby streams, which in turn can harm surrounding wildlife.
Vast tracts of our most treasured public lands, supposedly set aside in perpetuity for Americans, are no longer controlled by the United States government. Instead, they have been invaded and taken over by Mexico's violent criminal drug organizations to grow marijuana.
Even more shocking: Mexican cartels have been growing marijuana for at least 10 years in Sequoia National Park, one of the crown jewels of the system. Nature-loving hikers are compelled to accept that parts of Sequoia are "no go zones" during the growing season.
These Mexican marijuana messes are an ecological disaster. They are not innocent little plots that leave a minimal footprint. They are industrial grow sites, toxic stews where the gangsters use dangerous and illegal chemical herbicides, pesticides and growth hormones that result in long-lasting environmental damage.
National parks are supposed to be protected at the highest standard, preserving them for future generations in a pristine, unspoiled state. But he Mexican infestation has corrupted that idea to its core.
Drug czar John Walters testified to Congress in March that
"10 acres of forest are damaged for every acre planted with marijuana, with an estimated cost of $11,000 per acre to repair and restore land that has been contaminated with the toxic chemicals, fertilizers, irrigation tubing, and pipes associated with marijuana cultivation."
The Mexican gangsters (who are often illegal aliens) routinely cut down trees, divert streams with systems of PVC pipe and poach wildlife for food. Their operations are big business: In 2007, more than 20,000 plants were found in Yosemite National Park and 43,000 plants in Sequoia Kings Canyon National Park. The eradication operations cost the government millions of dollars, but today there is no money for the clean-up, so funds are either diverted from other projects or volunteers help out. Sadly, with budgets slim, park protection and maintenance do not rank high on Washington's priorities. The problem gets worse every year.
In an eradication photo-op in mid-October, John Walters remarked, "Some of these groups not only engage in crime and violence not only in Mexico and along the border, but they come across and kidnap, murder and carry out assassinations... These groups do not respect the border." [US official: Mexican cartels murder, kidnap in US, Associated Press, October 19, 2008]
Walters spoke in Sequoia Park, where plots were first discovered in 1998. Since it's tougher to smuggle pot post-9/11 because of increased border security and they can save money by eliminating transportation costs, the dealers grow pot stateside. The national forests have also been badly affected (see 2006 map).
In addition to the pollution, there is the danger to hikers of wandering into a booby-trapped pot grove guarded by Mexican thugs with full-auto weapons. Several law enforcement officers have been injured in altercations with growers. No hiker has been killed—yet.
This park destruction is reported every year, along with other harvest news. Camo-clad officers swoop down from military helicopters into hidden pot fields, arrest the caretakers and uproot the plants. Every summer-to-fall season brings the same predictable stories in the press:
2008 Mexican marijuana cartels sully US forests, parks [AP, October 9]
2007 Cartels grow pot on 'national treasures' [Washington Times, July 16]
2006 Pot farms ravaging park land: Big raid in Marin County hints at the extent of damaging techniques by growers [San Francisco Chronicle, September 6]
2005 War of the weed [Los Angeles Times, August 9]
2004 Policing runs gamut from poaching to dead bodies [San Francisco Chronicle, August 17]
2003 Park's Pot Problem Explodes [Los Angeles Times, May 14]
2002 Marijuana Found Thriving in Forests [New York Times, November 16]
And so it goes, in depressingly predictable fashion. The MainStream Media has actually done a decent job in shining a spotlight on the problem. But Washington has not reacted.
Citizens who know about the extent of the destruction (e.g. VDARE.com readers) ask: where the environmentalists are in organizing opposition to this fundamental affront to the conservation movement.
Unfortunately, the environmentalists who should be defending the parks don’t care that our natural heritage icons have been invaded and despoiled.
The flagship green organization, the Sierra Club, has said that it has "other priorities." [War of the Weed, By Joe Robinson, LA Times, August 9, 2005]
The Sierra Club was once a stalwart non-partisan defender of the planet and enemy of pollution. The organization's Mission Statement is a fine encapsulation of environmentalist values:
“To explore, enjoy, and protect the wild places of the earth; To practice and promote the responsible use of the earth's ecosystems and resources; To educate and enlist humanity to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environment; and to use all lawful means to carry out these objectives.”
Would that the Sierra Club still lived up to its noble—and practical—purpose.
Interestingly, an October 9 article in the Santa Barbara Independent nailed the current nature of the Sierra Club by characterizing it as "a left-leaning organization that focuses on environment and nature conservation issues."[Sierra Club, PUEBLO Announce Endorsements, By Jenny Pedersen and Shannon Switzer] That description is perhaps more polite than calling Clubbers "socialists in hiking boots" but the point is identical: leftism is the primary concern, the environment secondary.
In order to build a bigger left wing (with help from puppetmaster moneybags George Soros), the Sierra Club has moved in recent years to partnership with Open-Borders extremists. Speaking out against Mexican criminals poisoning our protected lands doesn't fit with the organization's current politics.
As an example of the group's new priorities, the Sierra Club has been deeply engaged in fighting against the US-Mexico border fence, despite the tons of trash left every year by illegal crossers. Obviously, the environmentally appropriate position would be pro-fence. But the leading organization of the environmental movement has gone over to the dark side.
The Sierra Club cashed in its conservationist integrity when it secretly accepted a donation of over $100 million on the condition that the organization not mention massive immigration/population growth as being environmentally harmful. The donor, Wall Street investor David Gelbaum, stated, "I did tell [Executive Director] Carl Pope in 1994 or 1995 that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.” [The Man behind the Land, By Kenneth R. Weiss, Los Angeles Times, October 27, 2004]
As a result of environmentalists' corruption, no powerful voice prods Congress to stop Mexican crime syndicates taking over parklands. In particular, poison-drenched marijuana plots shouldn't be allowed to grow to nearly harvest stage, when toxics and trash have reached maximum accumulation. Early intervention is required to prevent the Mexicans' pollution, and that mean more surveillance, particularly using helicopters. But those measures mean more money and personnel. The political will has not been there in Washington.
What's absent was well described by Chief Ranger Steve Shackelton of Yosemite Park.
"For years we've been seeing these people make millions of dollars in profit, while they devastate the environment on private property and California's majestic public lands. They destroy habitat, pollute streams with poisons and nitrogen fertilizers, kill wildlife, and pose a fire threat. The only thing missing is public outrage," concluded Shackelton. [Marijuana Gardens Raided in Yosemite National Park, NPS Park News, August 14, 2007]
Western writer Wallace Stegner said: "National parks are the best idea we ever had." It is shameful that so little is being done today to preserve them—and how we citizens sleepwalk through the loss of national treasures to the vilest sort of exploitation by foreign criminals.
Mexican criminals target the parks because they are open places with a premium on freedom. Like America itself, they were designed for use by a responsible, law-abiding population. When gangs of ruthless drug dealers invade, it is a case of wolves amidst sheep.
If the parks are to be saved from destruction by foreigners, far more policing will be needed. That might alter the basic nature of the parks, but it may be too late in the day to worry about that. America’s borders have been open for too many years.
As things are, probably it will take the death of an innocent hiker to convince Washington to do what's necessary—and to do it soon.
- Brenda Walker (email her) lives in Northern California and publishes two websites, LimitsToGrowth.org and ImmigrationsHumanCost.org. She is furious that Mexican cartel creeps have invaded her favorite local hiking spot, Point Reyes National Seashore.
http://www.vdare.com
November 13, 2008
Photo by Troy Harvey / The Bakersfield Californian
A bag of Vigoro all-purpose fertilizer lies in the middle of a marijuana grow site near Balch Park Road and Pine Creek in the Sequoia National Park. Along with different types of fertilizers, marijuana growers also use assorted types of pesticides that can end up in nearby streams, which in turn can harm surrounding wildlife.
Vast tracts of our most treasured public lands, supposedly set aside in perpetuity for Americans, are no longer controlled by the United States government. Instead, they have been invaded and taken over by Mexico's violent criminal drug organizations to grow marijuana.
Even more shocking: Mexican cartels have been growing marijuana for at least 10 years in Sequoia National Park, one of the crown jewels of the system. Nature-loving hikers are compelled to accept that parts of Sequoia are "no go zones" during the growing season.
These Mexican marijuana messes are an ecological disaster. They are not innocent little plots that leave a minimal footprint. They are industrial grow sites, toxic stews where the gangsters use dangerous and illegal chemical herbicides, pesticides and growth hormones that result in long-lasting environmental damage.
National parks are supposed to be protected at the highest standard, preserving them for future generations in a pristine, unspoiled state. But he Mexican infestation has corrupted that idea to its core.
Drug czar John Walters testified to Congress in March that
"10 acres of forest are damaged for every acre planted with marijuana, with an estimated cost of $11,000 per acre to repair and restore land that has been contaminated with the toxic chemicals, fertilizers, irrigation tubing, and pipes associated with marijuana cultivation."
The Mexican gangsters (who are often illegal aliens) routinely cut down trees, divert streams with systems of PVC pipe and poach wildlife for food. Their operations are big business: In 2007, more than 20,000 plants were found in Yosemite National Park and 43,000 plants in Sequoia Kings Canyon National Park. The eradication operations cost the government millions of dollars, but today there is no money for the clean-up, so funds are either diverted from other projects or volunteers help out. Sadly, with budgets slim, park protection and maintenance do not rank high on Washington's priorities. The problem gets worse every year.
In an eradication photo-op in mid-October, John Walters remarked, "Some of these groups not only engage in crime and violence not only in Mexico and along the border, but they come across and kidnap, murder and carry out assassinations... These groups do not respect the border." [US official: Mexican cartels murder, kidnap in US, Associated Press, October 19, 2008]
Walters spoke in Sequoia Park, where plots were first discovered in 1998. Since it's tougher to smuggle pot post-9/11 because of increased border security and they can save money by eliminating transportation costs, the dealers grow pot stateside. The national forests have also been badly affected (see 2006 map).
In addition to the pollution, there is the danger to hikers of wandering into a booby-trapped pot grove guarded by Mexican thugs with full-auto weapons. Several law enforcement officers have been injured in altercations with growers. No hiker has been killed—yet.
This park destruction is reported every year, along with other harvest news. Camo-clad officers swoop down from military helicopters into hidden pot fields, arrest the caretakers and uproot the plants. Every summer-to-fall season brings the same predictable stories in the press:
2008 Mexican marijuana cartels sully US forests, parks [AP, October 9]
2007 Cartels grow pot on 'national treasures' [Washington Times, July 16]
2006 Pot farms ravaging park land: Big raid in Marin County hints at the extent of damaging techniques by growers [San Francisco Chronicle, September 6]
2005 War of the weed [Los Angeles Times, August 9]
2004 Policing runs gamut from poaching to dead bodies [San Francisco Chronicle, August 17]
2003 Park's Pot Problem Explodes [Los Angeles Times, May 14]
2002 Marijuana Found Thriving in Forests [New York Times, November 16]
And so it goes, in depressingly predictable fashion. The MainStream Media has actually done a decent job in shining a spotlight on the problem. But Washington has not reacted.
Citizens who know about the extent of the destruction (e.g. VDARE.com readers) ask: where the environmentalists are in organizing opposition to this fundamental affront to the conservation movement.
Unfortunately, the environmentalists who should be defending the parks don’t care that our natural heritage icons have been invaded and despoiled.
The flagship green organization, the Sierra Club, has said that it has "other priorities." [War of the Weed, By Joe Robinson, LA Times, August 9, 2005]
The Sierra Club was once a stalwart non-partisan defender of the planet and enemy of pollution. The organization's Mission Statement is a fine encapsulation of environmentalist values:
“To explore, enjoy, and protect the wild places of the earth; To practice and promote the responsible use of the earth's ecosystems and resources; To educate and enlist humanity to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environment; and to use all lawful means to carry out these objectives.”
Would that the Sierra Club still lived up to its noble—and practical—purpose.
Interestingly, an October 9 article in the Santa Barbara Independent nailed the current nature of the Sierra Club by characterizing it as "a left-leaning organization that focuses on environment and nature conservation issues."[Sierra Club, PUEBLO Announce Endorsements, By Jenny Pedersen and Shannon Switzer] That description is perhaps more polite than calling Clubbers "socialists in hiking boots" but the point is identical: leftism is the primary concern, the environment secondary.
In order to build a bigger left wing (with help from puppetmaster moneybags George Soros), the Sierra Club has moved in recent years to partnership with Open-Borders extremists. Speaking out against Mexican criminals poisoning our protected lands doesn't fit with the organization's current politics.
As an example of the group's new priorities, the Sierra Club has been deeply engaged in fighting against the US-Mexico border fence, despite the tons of trash left every year by illegal crossers. Obviously, the environmentally appropriate position would be pro-fence. But the leading organization of the environmental movement has gone over to the dark side.
The Sierra Club cashed in its conservationist integrity when it secretly accepted a donation of over $100 million on the condition that the organization not mention massive immigration/population growth as being environmentally harmful. The donor, Wall Street investor David Gelbaum, stated, "I did tell [Executive Director] Carl Pope in 1994 or 1995 that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.” [The Man behind the Land, By Kenneth R. Weiss, Los Angeles Times, October 27, 2004]
As a result of environmentalists' corruption, no powerful voice prods Congress to stop Mexican crime syndicates taking over parklands. In particular, poison-drenched marijuana plots shouldn't be allowed to grow to nearly harvest stage, when toxics and trash have reached maximum accumulation. Early intervention is required to prevent the Mexicans' pollution, and that mean more surveillance, particularly using helicopters. But those measures mean more money and personnel. The political will has not been there in Washington.
What's absent was well described by Chief Ranger Steve Shackelton of Yosemite Park.
"For years we've been seeing these people make millions of dollars in profit, while they devastate the environment on private property and California's majestic public lands. They destroy habitat, pollute streams with poisons and nitrogen fertilizers, kill wildlife, and pose a fire threat. The only thing missing is public outrage," concluded Shackelton. [Marijuana Gardens Raided in Yosemite National Park, NPS Park News, August 14, 2007]
Western writer Wallace Stegner said: "National parks are the best idea we ever had." It is shameful that so little is being done today to preserve them—and how we citizens sleepwalk through the loss of national treasures to the vilest sort of exploitation by foreign criminals.
Mexican criminals target the parks because they are open places with a premium on freedom. Like America itself, they were designed for use by a responsible, law-abiding population. When gangs of ruthless drug dealers invade, it is a case of wolves amidst sheep.
If the parks are to be saved from destruction by foreigners, far more policing will be needed. That might alter the basic nature of the parks, but it may be too late in the day to worry about that. America’s borders have been open for too many years.
As things are, probably it will take the death of an innocent hiker to convince Washington to do what's necessary—and to do it soon.
- Brenda Walker (email her) lives in Northern California and publishes two websites, LimitsToGrowth.org and ImmigrationsHumanCost.org. She is furious that Mexican cartel creeps have invaded her favorite local hiking spot, Point Reyes National Seashore.
Bruce Springsteen 'Dreams' Big On New Album
By Jonathan Cohen, N.Y.
http://www.billboard.com/
November 17, 2008 , 10:05 AM ET
Bruce Springsteen rides his 1994 Harley Davidson Dyna Wide Glide motorcycle on to the stage at the 2nd annual Stand Up For Heroes: A Benefit for the Bob Woodruff Foundation in New York, Wednesday, Nov 5, 2008. The bike was auctioned off with Springsteen's motorcycle jacket for $70,000.
(AP Photo/Stuart Ramson)
As expected, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's new album, "Working on a Dream," will arrive Jan. 27 via Columbia. Excerpts from the title track debuted during NBC's NFL halftime show last night (Nov. 16).
The album includes 12 new songs plus the bonus tracks "The Wrestler" (from the Mickey Rourke-starring film of the same name) and "A Night With the Jersey Devil" (which Springsteen gave away free online on Halloween).
As with 2007's "Magic," Springsteen worked with producer Brendan O'Brien on basic tracks and brought in the E Street Band as needed during tour breaks. "All the songs were written quickly -- we usually used one of our first few takes," he says.
Springsteen and company will return to live duty Feb. 1 as part of the Super Bowl XLIII halftime show in Tampa, Fla.
"WORKING ON A DREAM" SET FOR JANUARY 27 RELEASE
From http://www.brucespringsteen.net/news/index.html
Bruce Springsteen said, "Towards the end of recording 'Magic,' excited by the return to pop production sounds, I continued writing. When my friend producer Brendan O'Brien heard the new songs, he said, 'Let's keep going.' Over the course of the next year, that's just what we did, recording with the E Street Band during the breaks on last year's tour. I hope 'Working on a Dream' has caught the energy of the band fresh off the road from some of the most exciting shows we've ever done. All the songs were written quickly, we usually used one of our first few takes, and we all had a blast making this one from beginning to end."
"Working on a Dream" is Bruce Springsteen's twenty-fourth album and was recorded and mixed at Southern Tracks in Atlanta, GA with additional recording in New York City, Los Angeles, and New Jersey.
Bruce Springsteen with his wife Patti Scialfa plays at a rally for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., at the Cleveland Mall in Cleveland, Ohio Sunday, Nov. 2, 2008.
(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Track list for "Working on a Dream":
"Outlaw Pete"
"My Lucky Day"
"Working on a Dream"
"Queen of the Supermarket"
"What Love Can Do"
"This Life"
"Good Eye"
"Tomorrow Never Knows"
"Life Itself"
"Kingdom of Days"
"Surprise, Surprise"
"The Last Carnival"
Bonus tracks:
"The Wrestler"
"A Night With the Jersey Devil"
http://www.billboard.com/
November 17, 2008 , 10:05 AM ET
Bruce Springsteen rides his 1994 Harley Davidson Dyna Wide Glide motorcycle on to the stage at the 2nd annual Stand Up For Heroes: A Benefit for the Bob Woodruff Foundation in New York, Wednesday, Nov 5, 2008. The bike was auctioned off with Springsteen's motorcycle jacket for $70,000.
(AP Photo/Stuart Ramson)
As expected, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's new album, "Working on a Dream," will arrive Jan. 27 via Columbia. Excerpts from the title track debuted during NBC's NFL halftime show last night (Nov. 16).
The album includes 12 new songs plus the bonus tracks "The Wrestler" (from the Mickey Rourke-starring film of the same name) and "A Night With the Jersey Devil" (which Springsteen gave away free online on Halloween).
As with 2007's "Magic," Springsteen worked with producer Brendan O'Brien on basic tracks and brought in the E Street Band as needed during tour breaks. "All the songs were written quickly -- we usually used one of our first few takes," he says.
Springsteen and company will return to live duty Feb. 1 as part of the Super Bowl XLIII halftime show in Tampa, Fla.
"WORKING ON A DREAM" SET FOR JANUARY 27 RELEASE
From http://www.brucespringsteen.net/news/index.html
Bruce Springsteen said, "Towards the end of recording 'Magic,' excited by the return to pop production sounds, I continued writing. When my friend producer Brendan O'Brien heard the new songs, he said, 'Let's keep going.' Over the course of the next year, that's just what we did, recording with the E Street Band during the breaks on last year's tour. I hope 'Working on a Dream' has caught the energy of the band fresh off the road from some of the most exciting shows we've ever done. All the songs were written quickly, we usually used one of our first few takes, and we all had a blast making this one from beginning to end."
"Working on a Dream" is Bruce Springsteen's twenty-fourth album and was recorded and mixed at Southern Tracks in Atlanta, GA with additional recording in New York City, Los Angeles, and New Jersey.
Bruce Springsteen with his wife Patti Scialfa plays at a rally for Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., at the Cleveland Mall in Cleveland, Ohio Sunday, Nov. 2, 2008.(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Track list for "Working on a Dream":
"Outlaw Pete"
"My Lucky Day"
"Working on a Dream"
"Queen of the Supermarket"
"What Love Can Do"
"This Life"
"Good Eye"
"Tomorrow Never Knows"
"Life Itself"
"Kingdom of Days"
"Surprise, Surprise"
"The Last Carnival"
Bonus tracks:
"The Wrestler"
"A Night With the Jersey Devil"
Obama Declares War on Conservative Talk Radio
By Jim Boulet, Jr.
http://www.americanthinker.com/
November 17, 2008
Barack Obama sought to silence his critics during his 2008 campaign. Now, with the ink barely dry on this November's ballots, Obama has begun a war against conservative talk radio.
Obama is on record as saying he does not plan an exhumation of the now-dead "Fairness Doctrine". Instead, Obama's attack on free speech will be far less understood by the general public and accordingly, far more dangerous.
Rush Limbaugh
The late community organizer Saul Alinsky taught his followers to strike hard from an unexpected direction, an approach known as Alinsky jujitsu.
Obama himself not only worked as an organizer for an Alinsky offshoot organization, Chicago's Developing Communities Project, but would go on to teach classes in Alinsky's beliefs and methods.
"Alinsky jujitsu" as applied to conservative talk radio means using vague rules already on the books to threaten any station which dares to air conservative programs with the loss of its valuable broadcast license.
Team Obama and the "localism" weapon
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rule in question is called "localism." Radio and television stations are required to serve the interests of their local community as a condition of keeping their broadcast licenses.
Obama needs only three votes from the five-member FCC to define localism in such a way that no radio station would dare air any syndicated conservative programming.
Localism is one of the rare issues on which Obama himself has been outspoken.
On September 20, 2007, Obama submitted a pro-localism written statement to an FCC hearing held at the Chicago headquarters of Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr.'s Operation Push.
Furthermore, the Obama transition team knows all about the potential of localism as a means of silencing conservative dissent. The head of the Obama transition team is John Podesta, President and CEO of the Center for American Progress.
In 2007, the Center for American Progress issued a report, The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio. This report complained that there was too much conservative talk on the radio because of "the absence of localism in American radio markets" and urged the FCC to "[e]nsure greater local accountability over radio licensing.
Podesta's choice as head of the Federal Communications Commission's transition team is Henry Rivera.
Since 1994, Rivera has been chairman of the Minority Media Telecommunications Council. This organization has specific ideas about localism:
In other words, it would not do for broadcasters to meet with the business leaders whose companies advertise on their station. Broadcasters must reach beyond the business sector and look for leaders in the civic, religious, and non-profit sectors that regularly serve the needs of the community, particularly the needs of minority groups that are typically poorly served by the broadcasting industry as a whole.
Rivera's law firm is also the former home of Kevin Martin, the current FCC chairman. Martin is himself an advocate of more stringent localism requirements.
It was on Martin's watch that on January 24, 2008, the FCC released its proposed localism regulations. According to TVNewsday: "At the NAB radio show two weeks ago, Martin said that he wanted to take action on localism this year and invited broadcasters to negotiate requirements with him."
FCC complaints as politics by other means
Remember that an FCC license is required for any radio or television station to legally operate in the United States. A single complaint from anyone can significantly hinder a station's license renewal process or even cost the station its FCC license entirely.
There have been some attempts to utilize the FCC complaint process for partisan political ends, most memorably in 2004, when Sinclair Broadcasting agreed to air a documentary questioning Senator John Kerry's war record:
Poised to pre-empt programming on its 62 television stations to run a negative documentary about Sen. John Kerry, Sinclair Broadcast Group has come under fire from critics calling it partisan and questioning whether it is failing federal broadcast requirements to reflect local interests.
Members of Congress and independent media groups have questioned the company's willingness to respect "localism," a section of federal law that requires media companies to cover local issues and provide an outlet for local voices.
One group, The Leftcoaster, went further:
But what isn't done a lot which requires the broadcaster to rack up expensive legal fees, is to challenge every one of their affiliates' FCC license renewals as they come up this year and next. ... [T]here still is time to organize and file Petitions or objections by November 1, 2004 for Sinclair stations in North Carolina and South Carolina, and for Florida by January 1, 2005.
More recently, the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium issued a "fill in the blanks" official FCC complaint form which begins "Anything that you feel is offensive is worth reporting."
Community advisory boards as permanent complaint departments
These random efforts could be far more effective at silencing conservatives if they could only be systematized and institutionalized. That is exactly what the FCC proposed on January 24th.
Every radio and television station would be required to create:
[P]ermanent advisory boards comprised of local officials and other community leaders, to periodically advise them of local needs and issues, and seek comment on the matter. ...
To ensure that these discussions include representatives of all community elements, these boards would be made up of leaders of various segments of the community, including underserved groups.
The "community advisory board as permanent complaint department" model may well be based upon the 1995 revisions of the Community Reinvestment Act, as described by Howard Husock in City Journal:
[T]the new CRA regulations also instructed bank examiners to take into account how well banks responded to complaints. ... [F]or advocacy groups that were in the complaint business, the Clinton administration regulations offered a formal invitation. ...
By intervening-even just threatening to intervene-in the CRA review process, left-wing nonprofit groups have been able to gain control over eye-popping pools of bank capital, which they in turn parcel out to individual low-income mortgage seekers. A radical group called ACORN Housing has a $760 million commitment from the Bank of New York...[emphasis in original].
Understand that even allowing conservatives to be radio talk show guests may provoke a FCC licensing complaint. Just ask "right wing hatchet man" Stanley Kurtz.
For Obama, when it comes to radio talk, silence is golden, at least when it comes to conservatives.
Can localism be stopped?
FCC observers agree that the outpouring of complaints from groups like the National Religious Broadcasters during the original comment period helped delay matters.
However, Kevin Martin's determination to enact a localism regulation has led him to ask the broadcast industry to accept a voluntary standard that the FCC would then enact. If industry failed to agree now, Martin warned, "a future FCC may be less willing to compromise than the current one."
This scare tactic -- agree to our demands today or suffer dire consequences tomorrow -- is having an impact.
What broadcasters need to do: speak up now
Radio and television station owners need to become engaged in the localism issue and then take the time to educate their own Congressman and Senators about the dangers of the FCC's proposals.
If broadcasters get involved, it just may be possible to block implementation of any localism rules during the few months remaining of the Bush Administration.
This delay is critical, since once it is the Obama Administration leading the fight for rules which would shut down conservative talk radio, Republican Congressmen and Senators will find it easier to fight back.
The Senate needs to draw a line in the sand: free speech, not localism
While President Obama will have the authority to name Commissioners as their terms end, these nominations must be confirmed by the Senate.
A few pointed questions on localism to FCC nominees during their confirmation hearings would be useful. A filibuster of any and all pro-localism FCC nominees would be even better.
Any Senator leading such a filibuster would earn the gratitude of millions of fans of talk radio as well as everyone who believes in free speech.
- Jim Boulet, Jr. is the founder of the anti-localism web site, KeepRushontheAir.com. Research assistance for this article was provided by Richard Falknor of Blue Ridge Forum.
http://www.americanthinker.com/
November 17, 2008
Barack Obama sought to silence his critics during his 2008 campaign. Now, with the ink barely dry on this November's ballots, Obama has begun a war against conservative talk radio.
Obama is on record as saying he does not plan an exhumation of the now-dead "Fairness Doctrine". Instead, Obama's attack on free speech will be far less understood by the general public and accordingly, far more dangerous.
Rush LimbaughThe late community organizer Saul Alinsky taught his followers to strike hard from an unexpected direction, an approach known as Alinsky jujitsu.
Obama himself not only worked as an organizer for an Alinsky offshoot organization, Chicago's Developing Communities Project, but would go on to teach classes in Alinsky's beliefs and methods.
"Alinsky jujitsu" as applied to conservative talk radio means using vague rules already on the books to threaten any station which dares to air conservative programs with the loss of its valuable broadcast license.
Team Obama and the "localism" weapon
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rule in question is called "localism." Radio and television stations are required to serve the interests of their local community as a condition of keeping their broadcast licenses.
Obama needs only three votes from the five-member FCC to define localism in such a way that no radio station would dare air any syndicated conservative programming.
Localism is one of the rare issues on which Obama himself has been outspoken.
On September 20, 2007, Obama submitted a pro-localism written statement to an FCC hearing held at the Chicago headquarters of Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr.'s Operation Push.
Furthermore, the Obama transition team knows all about the potential of localism as a means of silencing conservative dissent. The head of the Obama transition team is John Podesta, President and CEO of the Center for American Progress.
In 2007, the Center for American Progress issued a report, The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio. This report complained that there was too much conservative talk on the radio because of "the absence of localism in American radio markets" and urged the FCC to "[e]nsure greater local accountability over radio licensing.
Podesta's choice as head of the Federal Communications Commission's transition team is Henry Rivera.
Since 1994, Rivera has been chairman of the Minority Media Telecommunications Council. This organization has specific ideas about localism:
In other words, it would not do for broadcasters to meet with the business leaders whose companies advertise on their station. Broadcasters must reach beyond the business sector and look for leaders in the civic, religious, and non-profit sectors that regularly serve the needs of the community, particularly the needs of minority groups that are typically poorly served by the broadcasting industry as a whole.
Rivera's law firm is also the former home of Kevin Martin, the current FCC chairman. Martin is himself an advocate of more stringent localism requirements.
It was on Martin's watch that on January 24, 2008, the FCC released its proposed localism regulations. According to TVNewsday: "At the NAB radio show two weeks ago, Martin said that he wanted to take action on localism this year and invited broadcasters to negotiate requirements with him."
FCC complaints as politics by other means
Remember that an FCC license is required for any radio or television station to legally operate in the United States. A single complaint from anyone can significantly hinder a station's license renewal process or even cost the station its FCC license entirely.
There have been some attempts to utilize the FCC complaint process for partisan political ends, most memorably in 2004, when Sinclair Broadcasting agreed to air a documentary questioning Senator John Kerry's war record:
Poised to pre-empt programming on its 62 television stations to run a negative documentary about Sen. John Kerry, Sinclair Broadcast Group has come under fire from critics calling it partisan and questioning whether it is failing federal broadcast requirements to reflect local interests.
Members of Congress and independent media groups have questioned the company's willingness to respect "localism," a section of federal law that requires media companies to cover local issues and provide an outlet for local voices.
One group, The Leftcoaster, went further:
But what isn't done a lot which requires the broadcaster to rack up expensive legal fees, is to challenge every one of their affiliates' FCC license renewals as they come up this year and next. ... [T]here still is time to organize and file Petitions or objections by November 1, 2004 for Sinclair stations in North Carolina and South Carolina, and for Florida by January 1, 2005.
More recently, the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium issued a "fill in the blanks" official FCC complaint form which begins "Anything that you feel is offensive is worth reporting."
Community advisory boards as permanent complaint departments
These random efforts could be far more effective at silencing conservatives if they could only be systematized and institutionalized. That is exactly what the FCC proposed on January 24th.
Every radio and television station would be required to create:
[P]ermanent advisory boards comprised of local officials and other community leaders, to periodically advise them of local needs and issues, and seek comment on the matter. ...
To ensure that these discussions include representatives of all community elements, these boards would be made up of leaders of various segments of the community, including underserved groups.
The "community advisory board as permanent complaint department" model may well be based upon the 1995 revisions of the Community Reinvestment Act, as described by Howard Husock in City Journal:
[T]the new CRA regulations also instructed bank examiners to take into account how well banks responded to complaints. ... [F]or advocacy groups that were in the complaint business, the Clinton administration regulations offered a formal invitation. ...
By intervening-even just threatening to intervene-in the CRA review process, left-wing nonprofit groups have been able to gain control over eye-popping pools of bank capital, which they in turn parcel out to individual low-income mortgage seekers. A radical group called ACORN Housing has a $760 million commitment from the Bank of New York...[emphasis in original].
Understand that even allowing conservatives to be radio talk show guests may provoke a FCC licensing complaint. Just ask "right wing hatchet man" Stanley Kurtz.
For Obama, when it comes to radio talk, silence is golden, at least when it comes to conservatives.
Can localism be stopped?
FCC observers agree that the outpouring of complaints from groups like the National Religious Broadcasters during the original comment period helped delay matters.
However, Kevin Martin's determination to enact a localism regulation has led him to ask the broadcast industry to accept a voluntary standard that the FCC would then enact. If industry failed to agree now, Martin warned, "a future FCC may be less willing to compromise than the current one."
This scare tactic -- agree to our demands today or suffer dire consequences tomorrow -- is having an impact.
What broadcasters need to do: speak up now
Radio and television station owners need to become engaged in the localism issue and then take the time to educate their own Congressman and Senators about the dangers of the FCC's proposals.
If broadcasters get involved, it just may be possible to block implementation of any localism rules during the few months remaining of the Bush Administration.
This delay is critical, since once it is the Obama Administration leading the fight for rules which would shut down conservative talk radio, Republican Congressmen and Senators will find it easier to fight back.
The Senate needs to draw a line in the sand: free speech, not localism
While President Obama will have the authority to name Commissioners as their terms end, these nominations must be confirmed by the Senate.
A few pointed questions on localism to FCC nominees during their confirmation hearings would be useful. A filibuster of any and all pro-localism FCC nominees would be even better.
Any Senator leading such a filibuster would earn the gratitude of millions of fans of talk radio as well as everyone who believes in free speech.
- Jim Boulet, Jr. is the founder of the anti-localism web site, KeepRushontheAir.com. Research assistance for this article was provided by Richard Falknor of Blue Ridge Forum.
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