Michael Gerson: Obama's Abortion Extremism

April 02, 2008
Washington Post

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr.'s endorsement of Barack Obama last week -- "I believe in this guy like I've never believed in a candidate in my life" -- recalled another dramatic moment in Democratic politics. In the summer of 1992, as Bill Clinton solidified his control over the Democratic Party, Robert P. Casey Sr., the senator's father, was banned from speaking to the Democratic convention for the heresy of being pro-life.

The elder Casey (now deceased) was then the sitting governor of Pennsylvania -- one of the most prominent elected Democrats in the country. He was an economic progressive in the Roosevelt tradition. But his Irish Catholic conscience led him to oppose abortion. So the Clintons chose to humiliate him. It was a sign and a warning of much mean-spirited pettiness to come.

The younger Casey, no doubt, is a sincere fan of Obama. He also must have found it satisfying to help along the cycle of political justice.

But by his father's standard of social justice for the unborn, Obama is badly lacking.

Obama has not made abortion rights the shouted refrain of his campaign, as other Democrats have done. He seems to realize that pro-choice enthusiasm is inconsistent with a reputation for post-partisanship.

But Obama's record on abortion is extreme. He opposed the ban on partial-birth abortion -- a practice a fellow Democrat, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once called "too close to infanticide." Obama strongly criticized the Supreme Court decision upholding the partial-birth ban. In the Illinois state Senate, he opposed a bill similar to the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, which prevents the killing of infants mistakenly left alive by abortion. And now Obama has oddly claimed he would not want his daughters to be "punished with a baby" because of a crisis pregnancy -- hardly a welcoming attitude toward new life.

For decades, most Democrats and many Republicans have hoped the political debate on abortion would simply go away. But it is the issue that does not die. Recent polls have shown that young people are more likely to support abortion restrictions than their elders. Few Americans oppose abortion under every circumstance, but a majority oppose most of the abortions that actually take place -- generally supporting the procedure only in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother.

Perhaps this is a revolt against a culture of disposability. Perhaps it reflects the continuing revolution of ultrasound technology -- what might be called the "Juno" effect. In the delightful movie by that name, the protagonist, a pregnant teen seeking an abortion, is confronted by a classmate who informs her that the unborn child already has fingernails -- which causes second thoughts. A worthless part of its mother's body -- a clump of protoplasmic rubbish -- doesn't have fingernails.

Abortion is an unavoidable moral issue. It also has broader political significance. Democrats of a past generation -- the generation of Hubert Humphrey and Martin Luther King -- spoke about building a beloved community that cared especially for the elderly, the weak, the disadvantaged and the young. The advance of pro-choice policies imported a different ideology into the Democratic Party -- the absolute triumph of individualism. The rights and choices of adults have become paramount, even at the expense of other, voiceless members of the community.

These trends reached their logical culmination during a congressional debate on partial-birth abortion in 1999. When Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer was pressed to affirm that she opposed the medical killing of children after birth, she refused to commit, saying that children only deserve legal protection "when you bring your baby home." It was unclear if this includes the car trip or not.

Having endorsed partial-birth abortion, Obama has little room for maneuver on the broader issue. But he does have some. He could take the wise counsel of evangelical Democrats such as Amy Sullivan and come out strongly for policies that would reduce the number of abortions -- support for pregnant women, abstinence education, the responsible promotion of birth control. An organization called Democrats for Life has proposed the creation of a "95-10 Initiative" in which states and the federal government would work toward the reduction of abortion rates by 95 percent within 10 years. That would be a unifying national goal.

Such efforts will not please many pro-lifers, who are waiting on Obama to support any type of legal protection for the unborn. But a real effort to reduce the number of abortions would indicate that Obama's Democratic Party is moving beyond its humiliation of Gov. Casey. And maybe Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr., with his newfound leverage, could insist upon it.

michaelgerson@cfr.org

The Evolution of Religious Bigotry

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com
April 2, 2008 12:00 AM


Geert Wilders

Courage without consequence.

I just watched Fitna, a 17-minute film by Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders.

Released on the Internet last week, Fitna juxtaposes verses from the Koran with images from the world of jihad. Heads cut off, bodies blown apart, gays executed, toddlers taught to denounce Jews as “apes and pigs,” protesters holding up signs reading “God Bless Hitler” and “Freedom go to Hell” — these are among the powerful images from Fitna, Arabic for “strife” or “ordeal.”

Predictably, various Muslim governments have condemned the film. Half the Jordanian parliament voted to sever ties with the Netherlands. Egypt’s grand imam threatened “severe” consequences if the Dutch didn’t ban the film.

Meanwhile, European and U.N. leaders are going through the usual theatrical hand-wringing, heaping anger on Wilders for sowing “hatred.”

Me? I keep thinking about Jesus fish.

During a 1991 visit to Istanbul, a buddy and I found ourselves in a small restaurant, drinking, dancing, and singing with a bunch of middle-class Turkish businessmen, mostly shop owners. It was a hilariously joyful evening, even though they spoke little English and we spoke considerably less Turkish.

At the end of the night, after imbibing unquantifiable quantities of raki, an ouzo-like Turkish liqueur, one of the men gave me a worn-out business card. On the back, he’d scribbled an image. It was little more than a curlicue, but he seemed intent on showing it to me (and nobody else). It was, I realized, a Jesus fish.

It was an eye-opening moment for me, though obviously trivial compared with the experiences of others. Here in this cosmopolitan and self-styled European city, this fellow felt the need to surreptitiously clue me in that he was a Christian just like me (or so he thought).

Traditionally, the fish pictogram conjures the miracle of the loaves and fishes as well as the Greek word IXΘΥΣ, which means fish and also is an acronym for “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.” Christians persecuted by the Romans used to draw the Jesus fish in the dirt as a way to tip off fellow Christians that they weren’t alone.

In America, these fish appear mostly on cars. Recently, however, it seems Jesus fish have become outnumbered by Darwin fish. No doubt you’ve seen these, too. The fish is “updated” with little feet on the bottom, and “IXΘΥΣ” or “Jesus” is replaced with either “Darwin” or “Evolve.”

I find Darwin fish offensive. First, there’s the smugness. The undeniable message: Those Jesus fish people are less evolved, less sophisticated than we Darwin fishers.

The hypocrisy is even more glaring. Darwin fish are often stuck next to bumper stickers promoting tolerance or admonishing that “hate is not a family value.” But the whole point of the Darwin fish is intolerance; similar mockery of a cherished symbol would rightly be condemned as bigoted if aimed at blacks or women or, yes, Muslims.

As Christopher Caldwell once observed in the Weekly Standard, Darwin fish flout the agreed-on etiquette of identity politics. “Namely: It’s acceptable to assert identity and abhorrent to attack it. A plaque with ‘Shalom’ written inside a Star of David would hardly attract notice; a plaque with ‘Usury’ written inside the same symbol would be an outrage.”

But it’s the false bravado of the Darwin fish that grates the most. Like so much other Christian-baiting in American popular culture, sporting your Darwin fish is a way to speak truth to power on the cheap, to show courage without consequence.

Whatever the faults of Fitna, it ain’t no Darwin fish.

Wilders’ film could easily get him killed. It picks up the work of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was murdered in 2004 by a jihadi for criticizing Islam.

Fitna is provocative, but it has good reason to provoke. A cancer of violence, bigotry, and cruelty is metastasizing within the Islamic world.

It’s fine for Muslim moderates to say they aren’t part of the cancer; and that some have, in response to the film, is a positive sign. But more often, diagnosing or even observing this cancer — in film, book or cartoon — is dubbed “intolerant,” while calls for violence, censorship, and even murder are treated as understandable, if regrettable, expressions of anger.

It’s not that secular progressives support Muslim religious fanatics, it’s that they reserve their passion and scorn for religious Christians who are neither fanatical nor violent.

The Darwin fish ostensibly symbolizes the superiority of progressive-minded science over backward-looking faith. I think this is a false juxtaposition, but I would have a lot more respect for the folks who believe it if they aimed their brave contempt for religion at those who might behead them for it.

— Jonah Goldberg is the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

Melky Cabrera highlights electric evening at Yankee Stadium

Mike Lupica
Daily News
Wednesday, April 2nd 2008, 4:00 AM



New York Yankees captain Derek Jeter (2) kneels as players line up during the national anthem in their opening day baseball game against the Toronto Blue Jays at Yankee Stadium in New York, Tuesday, April 1, 2008.
(AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

The preliminaries had already been kind of wonderful at Yankee Stadium, Opening Night now instead of Opening Day, a great big Yankee opening under the lights this time.

Melky Cabrera had made two spectacular plays in the outfield, top of the fourth against the Blue Jays, the best back-to-back plays any Yankee center fielder could ever make in that outfield, the Grand Concourse of baseball. First Melky had run a mile to his left in right-center and reached his glove across his body and taken at least a double away from Lyle Overbay, then had run the other way on Aaron Hill, like he was running toward the new Stadium, laid out like some soccer goalie and buried another double in his glove. New memories for the old place, just like that, reminding you all over again what it still sounds like when the Yankees are doing something.

"This place was absolutely awesome tonight," Johnny Damon would say later.

"Jazzed," Brian Cashman would say.

Then Melky, the kid who nearly went to the Twins for Johan Santana, hit a 3-2 pitch down the right-field line in the sixth, a high shot that seemed to go up as high as the lights at the top of the place before landing in the first row of the stands, just inside the right-field foul pole. It is 314 feet out there. Maybe this one went 315. Or 316. Whatever. It was Yankees 2 and Blue Jays 2 on Opening Night.



NEW YORK - APRIL 01: Melky Cabrera #28 of the New York Yankees celebrates with teammate Derek Jeter #2 after hitting a solo homerun in the bottom of the sixth inning to tie the game against the Toronto Blue Jays during Opening Day at Yankee Stadium April 1, 2008 in the Bronx borough of New York City. (Photo by Chris Trotman/Getty Images)

Jason Giambi, in looking for a bunt, helped keep it that way, making this amazing leap and catch of a line drive hit by Marco Scutaro. Aaron Hill, who had just doubled, had to stay at second. Chien Ming-Wang got out of the top of the seventh at 2-2. The Yankees got a run in the bottom of the inning off Roy Halladay. Now it was 3-2.

Now it was 9:07 at Yankee Stadium, first night of the last season on this side of the street, and the blue doors opened out in front of the monuments and here came Joba Chamberlain. There is only one cheer like it out of those doors in the history of the Yankees, and that is the cheer when Mo Rivera comes through them, the way he would an inning from now if Joba did his job.

For now it was the kid's show against the Blue Jays. For now the job was what it was down the stretch last season, it was to get the game to Rivera. Chamberlain got a ground ball out of Shannon Stewart. Walked Alex Rios on a 3-2 pitch. Went to 2-2 on Vernon Wells, the best the Blue Jays had. There was a summer noise to the Stadium as the place got up. A late-season roar. Foul ball from Wells to the right. Still 2-2. The place still up as Wells took a third strike and Rios stole second.

Two outs now in the top of the eighth, tying run on second. The kid went to 0-2 on Frank Thomas and just like that the Stadium was crazy with noise. He threw one 97 past Frank Thomas, threw all he had, and Thomas swung right through that baby for strike three.

Jorge Posada was asked if he'd called for a 97-mph fastball.

Posada smiled. "98," he said.

The kid threw some punches in the air as he came hard off the mound toward first base and there was another roar for him, just to remind the kid where he was. Before the game, Reggie Jackson, who threw out the first pitch, walked out to do that with Yogi Berra as his wing man, had been talking about how being a Yankee had changed everything for him, even after winning three World Series as a member of the Oakland A's, one of the great teams of all time.



Baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson throws out the ceremonial first pitch before the opening day baseball game between the Toronto Blue Jays and New York Yankees, at Yankee Stadium in New York, Tuesday, April 1, 2008.
(AP Photo/Kathy Willens)

"I needed to be a Yankee," Reggie said. "The Yankees were a whole 'nother level. Yankee Stadium was a whole 'nother place."

Just like that, the Stadium dialed itself all the way up on Opening Night, jazzed itself up. RBI double from A-Rod in the bottom of the first, a ball that must have sounded like a police siren coming off his bat. Melky's catches and Melky's moon shot and then Giambi showing more ups than anybody knew he had to make that play on Scutaro in the seventh.

Then Joba, and that fastball to Thomas, one that must have rattled some of the girders across the street when it ended up in Jorge Posada's glove. So they were through the eighth and then the bullpen doors opened again, and everybody heard "Enter Sandman" and here came Rivera.



NEW YORK - APRIL 01: Relief pitcher Mariano Rivera #42 of the New York Yankees pitches against the Toronto Blue Jays during Opening Day at Yankee Stadium April 1, 2008 in the Bronx borough of New York City. The Yankees defeated the Blue Jays 3-2. (Photo by Jeff Zelevansky/Getty Images)

Mo Rivera threw his first pitch to Lyle Overbay and there were lights from cameras all over the ballpark, the kind you see on the first pitch of the game, not in the ninth. But then all the memories are supposed to be even more valuable this year, this side of 161st. That is just the way it is going to be. Rivera put one on the outside corner and Overbay just stared at it for strike three, like some dealer had turned over a card and busted him out.

One out in the ninth.

Fly ball to Melky, strictly routine this time.

Two outs.

"Let's Go Yankees!" chants rocked the place. Rivera busted one in on Scutaro's hands, the kind of pitch he has thrown a thousand times in the ninth inning, and Scutaro beat it to Robinson Cano at second, and it was over. The night shouldn't have been nearly this loud, this exciting. It was. Whole 'nother place. Still.

Jeter has earned monument at new Yankee Stadium

Mark Herrmann
Newsday
11:15 PM EDT, April 1, 2008



NEW YORK - APRIL 01: Derek Jeter makes the throw to second for the out to end the third inning after fielding the hit by Alex Rios #15 of the Toronto Blue Jays during Opening Day at Yankee Stadium April 1. (Photo by Jeff Zelevansky/Getty Images)


At this stage of his career, which is to say his prime, there is only one question left about Derek Jeter: monument or plaque?

A person couldn't help getting in a historical mood, what with the Yankees playing their final Opening Day (at night) in the original (albeit remodeled) Yankee Stadium. So it was only natural to wonder how the captain and symbol of this era will be remembered once they move Monument Park to the glittering new (yet traditional) Yankee Stadium next door.

Jeter couldn't escape history's tap on the shoulder. He was asked about the impending move on Monday, before the originally scheduled Opening Day was rained out. He had agreed to appear at a rare pregame news conference because what he thinks matters. At 33, he is too young to be an elder statesman, but he has been around long enough to be the face and heart and soul of the most famous team on Earth.

Let's put it this way. He has come a long way from being the skinny kid who referred to the manager as Mr. Torre. For all the respect the shortstop has earned, people on the team ought to be calling him "Mr. Jeter."

For the record, he believes the Yankees legacy will make the transition just fine.

"It's just what, 100 yards away? That's not too far for the ghosts to go," he said.

Fact is, he is the one who will carry the torch on behalf of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Thurman Munson and Reggie Jackson. And that brings us back to the question of where Jeter eventually will wind up in the relocated Monument Park.

Years from now, when he spends all his days happily settled in that new home he is building in Florida, the Yankees are going to honor him. Fans are going to remember nights like Tuesday night, when they gave him a huge ovation as he ran to the first-base line when his name was introduced. They will give him an even bigger ovation that day, as the club retires his No. 2 -- and rewards him with either a plaque, like the ones Berra, Whitey Ford, Jackson, Phil Rizzuto and others have; or a monument, like Ruth, Gehrig, Miller Huggins, DiMaggio and Mantle have.

The case for a plaque is that, so far he isn't a jaw-dropping slugger, league batting champion, record setter or even a one-time Most Valuable Player. Is he a bigger deal than Yogi and Whitey?

The case for a monument so far is about a hundred-fold, such as he is one of the great clutch players ever, has four rings, is very likely to reach 3,000 hits, has three Gold Gloves and breezily handles the responsibility of being an icon on the most pressurized team in the non-stop information age.

I vote for the monument.

He has simply done too much unforgettable stuff to deny him getting his career etched in granite. The home run that broke the Mets' back, the backhanded relay flip that doomed the Athletics, the face-busting rush into the seats for that foul ball against the Red Sox.

Joe Girardi, a teammate when Jeter was a rookie and his manager now, has seen Jeter evolve. He pointed out that it hasn't been all that much of an evolution. True, the photos from 1996 made current teammates say he looked like flagpole-thin pitcher Edwar Ramirez. "He's filled out a little bit," Girardi said, adding, "his attitude is the same. I think it's always youthful enthusiasm."

There also is the Jeter that most people don't see. At 3:40 Tuesday afternoon, before the Yankees' 3-2 win over the Blue Jays, neophyte first baseman Shelley Duncan was taking ground balls and practicing throws to second. Only one other infielder was out there, serving as a target, encourager, teacher. It was Jeter. He even helped pick up the practice baseballs and put them in the bag.

"It wasn't the first time," Duncan said. "Aside from Derek being made into some sort of character, when you're actually working with him, he's amazing. He's an amazing teammate."

Sounds like an epigram to me. Cast it in bronze, save it for the millions who will visit the new Yankee Stadium next door.

With all due respect to those fancy digs he is planning in Florida, the new ballpark in the Bronx will be the true House that Jeter Built.

Thomas Sowell: Irony on the Street

April 1, 2008 6:00 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com

A lesson in Economics 101.

Bear Stearns Building

There was a real irony in the recent intervention by the Federal Reserve System to provide the money that enabled the firm of JPMorgan Chase to buy Bear Stearns before it went bankrupt. The point was to try to prevent a domino effect of panic in the financial markets that could lead to a downturn in the economy.

The irony is that it was almost exactly 100 years ago — 1907, to be exact — that the original J. P. Morgan arranged a bailout of a troubled financial institution for the same purpose of preventing a panic that could end up with the whole economy declining.

The difference is that J. P. Morgan and his fellow bankers used their own money, while the Federal Reserve System used their power to create money.

What that means is that the value of your money and my money — all Federal Reserve Notes — goes down when more Federal Reserve Notes are issued to subsidize the purchase of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase.

It wasn’t really a bailout because the stockholders of Bear Stearns lost their shirts. But the firm of JPMorgan Chase got money from the government to seal the deal.

In other words, we all paid to keep Bear Stearns out of bankruptcy, whether we all realize it or not. Whether that was better than the alternative is a separate question — and one whose answer may never be known.

But the big difference between this year’s rescue to stabilize the financial markets and that 101 years ago is that this year’s government rescue leads to demands that still more rescues — including real bailouts — should be extended to homeowners and others.

Back in 1907, nobody could demand that the original J. P. Morgan bail out more people with his own money. But whatever the government does sets a precedent and causes more special interests to demand that they get the same treatment.

There is another irony in this situation. There was no Federal Reserve System in 1907. That is why Wall Street bankers like J. P. Morgan had to do their own heavy lifting with their own money.

Somehow that did not sit right with the Progressives of that era who, like today’s liberals, seemed to think that things should not be left to the market when the government can step in and make everything right.

Such thinking led in 1914 to the creation of the Federal Reserve System.

Unlike other countries, the United States had gotten along for generations without a central government bank. But President Woodrow Wilson thought that the monetary system of the country was too important to let private bankers play such a large role as J. P. Morgan had played in 1907.

Describing the Federal Reserve System created during his administration, Woodrow Wilson said: “It provides a currency which expands as it is needed and contracts when it is not needed.”

The power to expand and contract the currency was “put into the hands of a public board of disinterested officers of the Government itself.”

Their task was to prevent financial panics, bank failures, and a catastrophic contraction of demand. It sounded wonderful — and such sounds count for a lot in politics.

In reality, however, the biggest financial panic in American history occurred under the Federal Reserve System in 1929, followed by thousands of bank failures and an unprecedented contraction of the money supply by one-third during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

There is no question that the people who run the Federal Reserve System today are a lot more knowledgeable about economics than those who ran it back in the days of the Great Depression. Indeed, the average student who has passed Economics 101 today is probably more knowledgeable than those who ran the Federal Reserve System back during the Great Depression.

Being a disinterested government official does not mean that you know what you are doing. That fact gets left out of the equation in a lot of proposals for new government programs.

© 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

The Muslim Students Association at UCLA

By FrontPage Magazine

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

UCLA

Over the next several days, Frontpage will publish profiles of individual chapters of the Muslim Students Association on a variety of campuses around the country, showing how they work to advance the cause of radical Islam and lead the effort to stigmatize Israel. These profiles are compiled in our new booklet, "The Muslim Students Association and the Jihad Network." To read the introduction, click here. – The Editors

The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) chapter of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) operates both on campus and off – organizing events that feature militant guest speakers, co-sponsoring events and conferences with radical Islamic groups, and co-sponsoring fundraisers on behalf of the same. In addition, the organization uses its publication, Al-Talib, to disseminate its anti-Jewish, anti-American views.

On October 22, 2000 at the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles, MSA-UCLA members Arif Shaikh and Ahmed Shama (who was then president of the organization) led a demonstration protesting “Israeli aggression” against Palestinians. At this rally, chants of “Death to Israel!” and “Death to Jews!” repeatedly emanated from the crowd. After himself shouting, “Victory to Islam! Death to the Jews!” Shama told the audience, “Our solution is simple. .… Our solution is the establishment of justice by Islamic means. That is the only solution to this Israeli apartheid.”

Criticizing Israeli/Palestinian peace talks at Camp David, Shama added: “When we see negotiations between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who is a racist Zionist, and on the other side is Yasser Arafat, who used to be a so-called ‘Arab activist,’ but is now a racist Zionist, being mediated by Bill Clinton, who is a racist Zionist. And Hosni Mubarak … the President of Egypt, who is a racist Zionist. And King Hussein II of Jordan, who is a racist Zionist. When we see that a peace process is being negotiated between Zionists, mediated by Zionists, controlled by Zionists, and being portrayed in the media by Zionists, we come and we condemn all of you. ... Because you are racist Zionists. And we will not accept their definition of peace. I will not accept their definition of Islam. We will define Islam the way that the Prophet, peace be upon him, defined it.”

Shama also burned an Israeli flag while a jubilant crowd chanted “Khaibar, Khaibar, O Jews, the army of Mohammed is coming for you,” and “Death to Israel, victory to Islam.”

Guest speaker Sohail Shakry, President of MSA West, stepped to the podium and quoted the following words of Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah: “If we look at the situation the past 52 years, the biggest impediment to peace has been the existence of the Zionist State of Israel. Since the existence of this state, we have had wars, conflicts, killings, massacres. If we really want true peace then we must see that it goes with the elimination of the Zionist entity in the middle of the Muslim world.”

On January 21, 2001, MSA-UCLA sponsored an event titled “Shaping Our Perspective: Our Role in a Changing World.” Guest speaker Abdul-Alim Musa (Imam of Masjid al-Islam in Washington, D.C.) told the crowd: “If you were to say that the Soviet Union was wiped off the face of the earth . . . people would have thought you were crazy, right? The people of Afghanistan didn’t have the intellect or historical knowledge to know that they wasn’t supposed to wipe out the Soviet Union, is that right? . . . We saw the fall of one so-called superpower, Old Uncle Sam is next.”

In April 2001, MSA-UCLA hosted the MSA West annual conference, which featured guest speaker Imam Muhammad al-Asi, an anti-Semitic Shiite cleric who supports the Iranian regime and the militant Islamic movement in general. Al-Asi’s speech included the following remarks: “Discrimination, if it is against a gentile, is not objectionable; but anything that happens against a Jew becomes a Holocaust…Where is the courageous Jew who can come out and say Israel is as fascist as the most fascist of Europe? Israel is as racist as Apartheid could ever be…. In the meantime, the Zionist-Israeli lobby ... is taking the United States government and the United States people to the abyss. We have a psychosis in the Jewish community that is unable to co-exist equally and brotherly (sic) with other human beings. You can take a Jew out of the ghetto, but you cannot take the ghetto out of the Jew.”

In May 2006, MSA UCLA and Students for Justice in Palestine co-sponsored a week of events called “Israel and Palestine: Obstacles to Peace.” They invited the Holocaust-denying, Hezbollah-supporting academic Norman Finkelstein to lecture on this topic. 28 Attacking Israel for its characterization of Palestinian suicide bombers as terrorists, he said the real terrorists were the Israeli soldiers who kill Arab militants.

Al-Talib is the news magazine of the Muslim Students Association of UCLA . Founded in 1990 and staffed entirely by unpaid students, it is the largest Muslim student publication in the United States. The press run for each issue is approximately 20,000 copies, which are distributed to more than 150 locations (mostly mosques, community centers, and college campuses) in 37 states. All told, Al-Talib’s estimated national readership is about 56,000.

In July 1999 Al-Talib featured a cover story on Osama bin Laden, titled “The Spirit of Jihad.” In November 2000, Al-Talib examined the ideas of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden’s spiritual leader who has called for “jihad and the rifle alone” as a means to the formation of an Islamic empire. “We pray that Sheik Azzam’s dream of a true Islamic state comes true,” said Al-Talib.

Along with Alkalima (the newspaper of UC Irvine’s Muslim Student Union), Al-Talib published a special report titled “Zionism: The Forgotten Apartheid.” This report featured a section devoted to “the resistance movements against Zionist aggression,” glorifying Hamas and Hezbollah not only as noble warriors fighting Israeli oppressors, but also as providers of social welfare services for the Palestinian people. Said the report: “As the Zionists continue to colonize, torture and ethnically-cleanse in the name of the ‘peace process’ and the Americans continue to fund them, the respective staffs of Al-Talib and Alkalima feel it to be their basic duty to expose Zionism, its evils and its effects … Zionist-controlled world media has been purposefully distorting and misconstruing world events too long.”

Two days before 9/11, Al-Talib co-sponsored a dinner at UC-Irvine to honor Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, a.k.a. H. Rap Brown, former Minister of Justice for the Black Panthers. A featured guest speaker at this event was a Black Muslim named Abdul-Alim Musa, Imam of Masjid al-Islam in Washington, D.C.33 Said Musa: “We’re telling you about apartheid right here in America. Not an apartheid of the 1960s, but an apartheid right now today. When you fight Old Uncle Sam, you are fighting someone that is superior in criminality and Nazism. … The American criminalizer (sic) is the most skillful oppressor that the world has ever known. …”

The November 2001 edition of Al-Talib featured three full-page, color advertisements soliciting donations for the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), the Global Relief Foundation (GRF), and the Benevolence International Foundation (BIF). One month later, each of these pseudo-charities would be shut down by federal agents for funding al-Qaeda and Hamas terrorists.

MICHELLE MALKIN: POISONED CAMPUSES

New York Post
http://www.nypost.com

Prof. Madonna Constantine, who was targeted with a noose on her office door, speaks at rally on October 10th.


April 1, 2008 -- Is the affair of the Columbia University noose finally nearing the end of its rope?

The latest twist in the noose mystery will come as no surprise to those who have closely monitored the racial-grievance cauldrons on American college campuses.

The Post's Murray Weiss reported exclusively yesterday that a Manhattan grand jury has subpoenaed the university records of Professor Madonna Constantine of Columbia Teachers College, who found a noose hanging from her office door nearly six months ago.

The case garnered national attention and inspired an outpouring of rage, a slew of anti-noose legislation - and several copycat noose-hangings by publicity-seeking wannabes.

But now, as Weiss notes, this subpoena signals that investigators are now looking at possible links between Constantine, her friends and the racially charged incident.

Given the onset of staged hate crimes since the Tawana Brawley hoax two decades ago, skepticism is warranted.

As Weiss reports, the noose-hanging happened at the height of the school's probe of plagiarism charges against the professor - conditions that provide a "possible motive for a sympathetic friend to consider placing a noose on her door - thinking it could whip up support for her."

Stunningly, Constantine got to keep her job after the university determined that she had filched the work of a colleague and several students. Predictably, she cried "systematic racism" about that, too.

We don't know yet for sure what happened at Columbia.

And, as I've reported several times over the years, faked hate crimes are an abhorrently common phenomenon on modern college campuses, where race-consciousness reigns in such a poisonous way that it would make integrationists weep.

"Students of color" are herded into separate dorms, separate departments and separate graduation ceremonies. "Professors of color" carve out lucrative niches in the diversity/blame-whitey indusry.

Mix identity politics, multicultural studies, cowardly administrators and sympathetic media - and you've got a toxic recipe for opportunistic hate-crime hoaxes. Today's Tawana Brawley-copycats couldn't ask for better enablers.

* In 2001, Arizona State University student Ahmad Saad Nasim admitted to police that he'd fabricated two anti-Muslim hate-crime incidents against himself.

* In 2002, black students at the University of Mississippi scrawled racist graffiti in campus housing.

* In 2004, Kerri Dunn, an assistant visiting professor at Claremont McKenna College, was sentenced to prison after staging an anti-Semitic hate crime against herself.

* In 2005, a lesbian student at Mt. Tamalpais HS in Marin County, Calif., faked several anti-gay incidents to garner attention and sympathy.

* Last fall, George Washington University student Sarah Marshak admitted scrawling swastikas on her own dorm-room door.

* Last December, an idiot Princeton student, Francisco Nava, falsely claimed he was targeted and beaten because of his politics.

Campuses remain fertile ground for hate-crime hoaxes because administrators - whipped up into p.c. frenzies when the "crimes" are first reported - are reluctant to crack down on minority students and professors who perpetrate the lies. In many of these cases, charges against the con artists are reduced to wrist-slaps or dropped completely.

And the university grievance-coddlers come up with excuses to rationalize away the manufactured hate: They meant well. At least they "raised awareness." Nobody was hurt.

Bull, bull and bull. Faked campus hate crimes diminish the credibility of whistleblowers with bona-fide claims of victimization. They squander law-enforcement resources. They poison the academic environment.

It's time to man up, stand up to race charlatans and crack down hard on those who play the system.

As the grievance-hustlers like to chant: "No justice, no peace."

malkinblog@gmail.com

Geert Wilders is no Right-Wing Populist

April 01, 2008
By Henryk M. Broder
Der Spiegel

DPA
About 50 Indonesian protesters gathered outside the Dutch embassy in Jakarta on Monday to complain about "Fitna," a controversial new film by the right-wing populist Dutch politician Geert Wilders.

Dutch politician Geert Wilders may be many things, but he is not the right-wing populist he is accused of being. What the debate over his film "Fitna" reveals most clearly is the West's cowardice toward Islam.

There's a key for every lock, just as there's a perfectly fitting label for everyone who refuses to fit in. At the moment, the term "right-wing populist" is hot. Everyone and his brother is calling Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders by that name at the moment, but hardly any commentators or reporters have taken the time to explain what a "right-wing populist" actually is. And what distinguishes it from other political standpoints like, for instance, "left-wing populists."

Geert Wilders may be many things -- he is self-confident to the point of vanity and stubborn to the point of sacrificing himself. But he's not a right-wing populist.

For one thing, he's a radical liberal. For another, what he's doing at the moment is extremely unpopular. Six years ago, Pim Fortuyn, who was murdered by an animal rights fanatic, was also called a "right-wing populist." He was indeed very popular -- not because he was "right-wing" but because he insisted on drawing attention to things that the traditional elites of Dutch society had steadfastly ignored.

The label "right-wing populist" resonates negatively today the same way that "communist" did in the '50s and '60s, "fascist" did in the '70s and '80s and "climate change denier" does today. It saves the speaker from having to engage with the actual content of the argument and makes the bearer of the term solely responsible for the consequences of his or her actions.

If fanatical Muslims do, in fact, go ballistic over Wilder's film "Fitna," it's not because they have a flawed relationship to freedom of speech and religion, but because they've been insulted and provoked by Wilders -- or so the reasoning goes.

So, it comes as no surprise that TV presenter Tom Buhrow opened the Friday late-evening news on the German TV channel ARD with a report on the "anti-Islamic video of the right-wing populist" Geert Wilders -- as though there were a central authority in the otherwise censor-free Federal Republic of Germany that is responsible for prescribing the vocabulary of Euro-Islamic affairs. It was followed by a report on the relaxed response of Dutch Muslims, who were shown sitting in their cafes peacefully drinking coffee while Wilders raised havoc outside.

According to Buhrow's narration: "The knives are already being sharpened -- but only for the doner kebabs." But he forgot to mention that, by that point, "Fitna" had already been pulled off the video portal LiveLeak, where it had been first published (more...). The British provider had received death threats that it took as seriously as they were intended -- a not entirely irrelevant bit of information that the ARD anchorman opted to omit, so as not to confuse his viewers with too many details.

According to this interpretation of events, Wilders has only himself to blame for the fact that he has to be under 24-hour police protection and sleep in a different location every night. If he'd taken on, say, the Federation of Dutch Floriculturists, his private life would be fully intact.

Unfortunately, one needs to point out at this juncture that it's not Wilders' obsessive arrogance that has robbed him of his private life, but the memory of how and why director Theo van Gogh was murdered, namely by a Dutch-born Muslim of Moroccan heritage. He, too, probably liked sitting in cafes drinking coffee peacefully -- until one fine morning, when he set off to kill the "provocateur" van Gogh, who would presumably still be alive today if he hadn't been so silly as to make an "anti-Islamic" film.

We should take comfort in the fact that Wilders -- to quote a female Muslim writing for SPIEGEL ONLINE (more...) -- "avoids the mistake Theo van Gogh made by connecting the Koran and sexuality," which didn't go over well among "less tolerant Muslims" and which would apparently have "raised the chances of a violent reaction to Wilders' film." She doesn't feel the least bit insulted by Wilders, and goes so far as to state that Wilders' film shows "nothing but facts, even if they are somewhat one-sided."

Leaving aside the fact that it seems a little excessive to kill someone because he made a "mistake," can facts be shown any other way than one-sided?

Is it possible to have anything other than a one-sided position on the murder of Theo van Gogh, the beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, the execution of a woman in a stadium in Kabul, the hanging of homosexuals and the stoning of adulterous women in Iran? Wouldn't you then have to mention after, say, a plane crash, that such things don't happen every day and that most planes land in one piece in order not to present the facts one-sidedly?

Wilders is as "one-sided" as any filmmaker trying to compress reality into a documentary film. His film is as "anti-Islamic" as Michael Moore's are "anti-capitalist." The hostility does not lie in the eye of the beholder, but rather in the nature of the film's subject. Part of the ritualistic response of Muslim communities to the observation that Islam is not always a peaceful religion is invariably the threat of violence, should the "insult" not be retracted -- regardless of whether it was made by the pope, a politician or a poet.

And Wilders is guilty of breaking with yet another aspect of the prevailing consensus. He opted to act, not just react. Since announcing his film three months ago, he has been defining the course of the debate, driving his opponent away from him. Nobody would have been surprised if Wilders had ended his game by confessing that the film itself did not actually exist.

What he wanted to accomplish had already been accomplished (more...) with the threat to show an "anti-Islamic video." He showed the "free West" to be a paper tiger. The Dutch government distanced itself from the project and asked its ambassadors in Muslim countries to explain to their host governments the situation in their home country, where the government is not as omnipotent as it would like to be.

The EU, wanting to please all sides, issued a statement that emphasized the importance of freedom of speech while at the same time relativizing it: "We believe that acts such as (Geert Wilders') film serve no other purpose than inflaming hatred."

Even UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon chimed in to condemn the Wilders film "in the strongest terms." He said that nothing can justify hate speech or incitement to violence. "The right of free expression is not at stake here. ... Freedom must always be accompanied by social responsibility."

This is the kind of tone that one waits for in vain when Islamists call for jihad, fanatics massacre non-believers or Holocaust deniers organize conferences. The only objective of these exercises is to prevent a repetition of what happened in 2006, when a dozen harmless Muhammad caricatures caused a blaze of indignation from Jakarta to Rabat. At the time, many politicians, including the prominent German Green Party politician Claudia Roth, called for "de-escalation."

The call was not aimed at the arsonists who were burning Danish flags and destroying embassies, but at the Europeans, who were watching the jihadists in bafflement, in a bid to not pour more oil on the flames.

A similar thing happened recently in Sudan, when a British woman innocently named a teddy bear Muhammad. Or when Salman Rushdie was knighted by the British queen. Muslims were outraged and Europeans sought cover until the storm had blown over.

And now the "right-wing populist" Wilders is being sacrificed on the altar of appeasement policy. He is no cineaste, and his film is certainly no masterpiece. It is, however, a brute challenge to us to at least recognize reality.

Today's Tune: The Cult- She Sells Sanctuary

(Click on title to play video)

"Magic" at KeyArena: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band

By Patrick MacDonald
March 30, 2008
Seattle Times music critic



Like a coach on fire at the Final Four, Bruce Springsteen rallied, inspired and sparked his E Street Band into giving their all Saturday night in a great concert at a packed Key. His student body, his congregation, was feeling the spirit, as he testified to the power of love in troubled times.

He railed over "the rolling back of our civil liberties" and "attacks on our Constitution" and preached about a new wind blowing.

"Who'll be the last to die for a mistake?" he sang about the Iraq War, a powerful lyric that took on new meaning following the recent grim milestone of 4,000 American military casualties. It came in a song called "Last To Die," from his bracing new album, "Magic." Most of the songs from it were included in the seamless two-and-a-half hour set, including "Radio Nowhere," "Livin' In the Future" and the crowd's favorite, "Long Walk Home." They fit perfectly with classics like "No Surrender," "Badlands" and "Born to Run."

A nonstop dynamo, Springsteen roamed the flat, unadorned stage, constantly connecting with each of the eight, black-clad E Street Band musicians, pushing, praising and prodding them. The low-slung stage was close enough to fans that they were able to touch him, grab his legs, slap his hand.

He lifted his arms, urging everyone to stand and join in, and cupped his ears, asking for crowd response. He grabbed hand-made signs with song requests, played the songs — "Waitin' On A Sunny Day," "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" — then signed the posters and tossed them back to their owners. He effectively erased the barrier between the band and the fans.



His guitar-playing was stronger than ever, especially his "Lonesome Day" solo. He and Steve Van Zandt traded licks on several songs, and Nils Lofgren turned the place out with his blistering "Because the Night" solo. The whole band was in peak form, but Max Weinberg deserves special praise for his powerful, roof-raising drumming.

And what's this about Clarence Clemons slowing down? He moved a little slower than he used to, and sat on a thronelike chair occasionally, but came through strong as ever with his sax solos, bringing cheers from the pumped-up crowd.

Springsteen played harmonica more searingly than ever, especially during the rollin' and tumblin' blues romp, "Reason to Believe." He hung onto the mike stand and bent over backward, almost touching the floor. He was full of playful, youthful energy all night long.

The set started an hour past the 7:30 showtime with "Trapped," with the thematic lyric, "The truth will set me free." A few songs in, when they bungled the opening to "Gypsy Biker," Springsteen quipped, "We're flyin' by the seat of our pants. A little panic is good for the system." That honest, easygoing vibe prevailed through the whole wonderful night.

Patrick MacDonald: 206-464-2312, pmacdonald@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company



Setlist:
Trapped
Radio Nowhere
No Surrender
Lonesome Day
Gypsy Biker
Magic
Reason to Believe
Darkness on the Edge of Town
Because the Night
She's the One
Livin' in the Future
The Promised Land
Waitin' on a Sunny Day
Your Own Worst Enemy
Point Blank
Devil's Arcade
The Rising
Last to Die
Long Walk Home
Badlands
* * *
Tenth Avenue Freeze-out
Rosalita
Born to Run
American Land

Geert Wilders' 'Fitna': Insightful and Inciteful

by Robert Spencer
http://www.humanevents.com/
Posted: 03/31/2008

Geert Wilders’ much-anticipated film on the Qur’an, Fitna, was released on LiveLeak.com on Thursday, pulled by LiveLeak on Friday after death threats, and by Saturday couldn’t be stopped: it had gone viral, having been posted in innumerable places all over the Internet. (You can watch it at my website Jihad Watch.)

But many, many people are still trying to make sure you don’t see it. Iran urged European leaders to block the film, and summoned the Slovenia representative in Tehran (Slovenia currently holds the EU presidency) to lodge an official protest, as Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad-Ali Hosseini called it a “provocative and anti-Islamic movie,” revealing “continued enmity and deep hostility of such western nationals against Islam and Muslims.” The Pakistani government summoned the Dutch Ambassador in Islamabad to lodge a formal protest also. Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad called on Muslims to boycott Dutch products in retaliation for the movie.

The 57-nation strong Organization of the Islamic Conference condemned the film in “the strongest terms,” saying that it was “a deliberate act of discrimination against Muslims” designed to “provoke unrest and intolerance.” An Indonesian Foreign Ministry spokesman said: “We are of the view that the film has a racist flavour and is an insult to Islam, hidden under the cover of freedom of expression.” Arsalan Iftikhar, who has served as national legal director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), asserted that Fitna was “a direct attempt to incite violence from Muslims and help fan the flames of Islamophobia. Any reasonable person can see this is meant to spit in the face of Muslims and insult our religion.”

Nor was the film condemned only by Muslims. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the film was “offensively anti-Islamic,” observed that Muslims were “understandably offended by it,” and declared: “There is no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence. The right of free expression is not at stake here.” Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende took issue with the film’s linking Islam with violence: “We reject this interpretation. The vast majority of Muslims reject extremism and violence. In fact, the victims are often also Muslims.”

Australia’s Foreign Minister Stephen Smith agreed, saying that the film’s connection of Islam with acts of terror and violence and was “highly offensive,” and was an “obvious attempt to generate discord between faith communities.” Smith stated: “Like leaders in the Muslim world and in Europe, I strongly reject the ideas contained in the film and deplore its release. In Australia we believe in the right to freedom of expression but we don’t believe in abusing that right to incite racial hatred.” Slovenia, in its capacity as EU president, also took a dim view of the film: “The European Union and its member states apply the principle of the freedom of speech which is part of our values and traditions. However, it should be exercised in a spirit of respect for religious and other beliefs and convictions….We believe that acts, such as the above-mentioned film, serve no other purpose than inflaming hatred.”

And most ominously of all, an Al-Qaeda linked website wished a stroke on Wilders: “Dear brothers, remember what happened to Ariel Sharon. Now let’s hope that he (Wilders) ends up the same way.” In Karachi, a small group of jihadists rallied against the film, chanting “Death to the filmmaker.”

What did the film contain that was so hateful and intolerant, and so threatening to Muslim states that they were doing all they could to make sure it would not be seen? It consists largely of a series of Qur’an quotes, followed by acts of violence committed by Muslims that are manifestly consonant with those quotes. This is buttressed by statements of Islamic preachers, justifying acts of violence against unbelievers in the name of Islam. The most harrowingly effective of these sequences in the film is the first, which begins with Qur’an 8:60, chanted in Arabic and presented visually in both Arabic and English: “Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies, of Allah and your enemies…” Then follow scenes of horror from September 11, 2001, as we hear a frantic woman calling 911 and saying she was going to die -- clearly, terror had been struck into her heart, as it had into the heart of a woman in Spain we hear next as the scenes shifts to Madrid on March 11, 2004, as she calls someone to say a bomb has just gone off on the train.

But the connection of the images and sounds to Qur’an 8:60 is not left to the viewer to make. Presently a Muslim imam appears, declaring, with a clear dependence on that Qur’an verse: “Annihilate the infidels and the polytheists, your (Allah’s) enemies and the enemies of the religion. Allah, count them and kill them to the last one…”

And there’s the rub. For all the indignation that Fitna has caused around the world, and for all the angry claims that it “equates Islam with violence,” that equation has already been made, many, many times, by Islamic jihadists around the world. It was not Geert Wilders, but Osama bin Laden and innumerable others who share his theological perspective, who have linked Islam with violence by committing acts of violence and justifying those acts with reference to the Qur’an -- often the same verses Wilders dramatizes in Fitna. Omar Bakri, the jihadist leader who was formerly based in Britain, acknowledged this himself, saying that with a few modifications “it could be a film by the [Islamist] Mujahideen.”

This is a recurring phenomenon: when non-Muslims point out that Islamic jihadists commit acts of violence and justify them by reference to the Qur’an, many non-Muslim and Muslim apologists for jihad, include many who are widely known as "moderates" respond by claiming that the one who is pointing out all this is committing an act of “hatred,” “bigotry,” “Islamophobia,” and the like. They don't have a word to say about the actual acts of violence, hatred and supremacism committed by the jihadists -- no, the real villain is the one who reports on these actions.

Geert Wilders and his Fitna are only the latest to find themselves on the receiving end of this strange form of cognitive dissonance -- and as in all other cases, if he is silenced and Fitna disappears, nothing, nothing at all, will have been done to stop those Islamic jihadists from continuing to use the Qur’an to portray themselves as acting as authentic Muslims. The only losers will be those who are trying to call attention to this usage, so as to formulate realistic ways to deal with it and more effectively defend the West.

Mr. Spencer is director of Jihad Watch and author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)" , "The Truth About Muhammad" and "Religion of Peace?" (all from Regnery -- a HUMAN EVENTS sister company).

Do the time, lower the crime

Too many people behind bars? The statistics suggest otherwise.

By James Q. Wilson
Los Angeles Times
March 30, 2008

Do we have too many people in prison?

If you read a recent report by the Pew Center on the States, you would think so. As its title proclaimed, more than one in 100 American adults is in jail or prison. For young black males, the number is one in nine.

The report's authors contend that the incarceration rate represents a problem because the number of felons serving time does not have a "clear impact" on crime rates -- and that all those inmates are costing taxpayers too much money to house. But nowhere in the report is there any discussion of the effect of prison on crime, and the argument about costs seems based on the false assumption that we are locking people up at high rates for the wrong reasons.

In the last 10 years, the effect of prison on crime rates has been studied by many scholars. The Pew report doesn't mention any of them. Among them is Steven Levitt, coauthor of "Freakonomics." He and others have shown that states that sent a higher fraction of convicts to prison had lower rates of crime, even after controlling for all of the other ways (poverty, urbanization and the proportion of young men in the population) that the states differed. A high risk of punishment reduces crime. Deterrence works.

But so does putting people in prison. The typical criminal commits from 12 to 16 crimes a year (not counting drug offenses). Locking him up spares society those crimes. Several scholars have separately estimated that the increase in the size of our prison population has driven down crime rates by 25%.

The Pew writers lament the fact that this country imprisons a higher fraction of its population than any other nation in the world, including Russia. But what they ignore is what the United States gets in return for its high rate of incarceration. For instance, in 1976, Britain had a lower robbery rate than did California. But then California got tough on crime as judges began handing out more prison sentences, and Britain became soft as laws were passed encouraging judges to avoid prison sentences. As a result, the size of the state's prison population went up while Britain's went down. By 1996, Britain's robbery rate was one-quarter higher than California's. Compared with those of the U.S. overall, Britain's burglary and assault rates are twice as high, according to a comparative study done by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

These differences in crime rates involve many countries with low imprisonment rates. The robbery rate in the U.S. is not only lower than that in Britain but also that in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Scotlandand Spain, according to the same study. The imprisonment rate in these countries is one-fifth to one-tenth that in the United States.

You cannot make an argument about the cost of prisons without taking into account the benefit of prisons. The Pew report makes no effort to do this. Instead, it argues that spending on prisons may be crowding out spending on education. For instance, tax dollars spent on higher education in the U.S. have increased much more slowly than those spent on corrections. The report does not ask whether the slower growth may be in part because of the sharp increase in private support for public universities, much less whether society gets as much from universities as it does from prisons.

But Pew rightly points to problems in the nation's imprisonment policy and in what it does (or, typically, doesn't do) to prevent crime in the first place. Take California. It has failed to manage well the health -- especially the mental health -- problems of many of its inmates. Federal judges are in the process of imposing tough new rules to rectify the problem. Nor has the state found good ways to integrate former inmates back into society. Instead, parole officers routinely send people back to prison if they misbehave -- and sometimes the return orders are for minor violations.

California does not handle drug offenders wisely either. Just how big this problem is remains uncertain because some inmates involved in serious crimes plead out to drug offenses to avoid tougher prison sentences. For serious drug users who have not committed a major crime, the goal should be to get them into a community treatment program and keep the offenders there.

To do that, we might emulate the HOPE (Hawaii's Opportunity for Probation with Enforcement) project in Honolulu. The program, started by state Judge Steven Alm in 2004, aims to get probationers to stay in a treatment program. Alm makes offenders take a random, mandatory drug test every week. If they fail, he immediately sends them to jail for a short time to discourage them from being on drugs. Within four years, according to a study by professors Mark Kleiman of UCLA and Angela Hawken of Pepperdine University, the violation rate among HOPE probationers fell by 90%. (Oddly, the Pew report, in discussing our "excessive" use of prison, makes no mention of the fact that there are about as many felons on probation as there are in prison.)

There is more that could be done to prevent young people from embarking on a life of crime. The Pew report rightly notes the success of the High/Scope Perry Preschool Project in Michigan, which began in the 1960s. The project has reduced delinquency among children of (mostly) poor black women by exposing them to a high-quality preschool program.

What we have learned from High/Scope is especially noteworthy because a random sample of youngsters were enrolled in the preschool program and the results were compared with those of a control group.

The Pew report could have mentioned at least 10 other crime-prevention programs that work. They can be found in "Blueprints for Violence Prevention," published by the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado, and include Big Brothers/Big Sisters, nurse home-visitation programs and various special education programs in high schools. All were rigorously tested by controlled experiments in at least two locations.

But even with prevention programs, there will always be many people in prison. A major challenge for scholars today is to discover better ways of placing ex-inmates back into the community. If such methods can be devised, we can reduce the large number of parolees who are sent back to prison for violating the terms of their release.

But we should not suppose that, except for some minor drug offenders, we imprison too many people. There are still people who ought to be in prison and are not. There are more than 1 million felons on probation, in many cases because prisons are overcrowded, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. There are violent gang members who are hard to arrest and convict because their neighbors are afraid to go to the police or testify against them.

It is discouraging to read a report by an important private organization that can do no better than say we incarcerate too many people, get nothing from it and are stealing money from higher education.

James Q. Wilson teaches public policy at Pepperdine University and previously taught at UCLA and Harvard University. He is the co-editor of the new book "Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation."

Today's Tune: Fleetwood Mac- The Chain (Live)

(Click on title to play video)

Show of force

Hansbrough's defining game lifts UNC into Final Four

SI.com
Posted: Sunday March 30, 2008 2:00AM; Updated: Sunday March 30, 2008 2:24AM



Tyler Hansbrough had 28 points and 13 rebounds in leading the Tar Heels to their first Final Four since winning the '05 title.
AP

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- The schedule taped to the wall Saturday in the North Carolina locker room lacked one critical, final entry.

8:50 p.m.: National anthem (Teams remain on the court.)

9:01 p.m.: Horn to clear floor for player introductions.

9:02 p.m.: Player introductions.

9:05 p.m.: Tip-off.

11:17 p.m.: Everyone stops worrying about what kind of pro Tyler Hansbrough will be and appreciates him for what he is -- a great college basketball player who just blessed us all with one of the most dominant, career-defining performances in NCAA Tournament history.

Until this tournament ends a week from Monday, let's place a moratorium on the debate as to whether Hansbrough will be the second coming of Karl Malone or the second coming of Matt Geiger. It's the least we can do to honor the 28 points and 13 rebounds Hansbrough hung on Louisville in top-seeded North Carolina's 83-73 win in Saturday's East Regional final. When the Tar Heels needed carrying, Hansbrough strapped them to his back. When the third-seeded Cardinals still had a tiny spark of hope, Hansbrough singlehandedly snuffed it.

David Padgett, the 6-foot-11 Goliath cut down by Hansbrough at every turn Saturday, gushed. "I've never played against somebody who plays that hard," Padgett said. "That kid is determined to be a great basketball player." Padgett, the hub through which Louisville coach Rick Pitino runs his offense, entered Saturday averaging 11.4 points. With Hansbrough harassing him, he didn't score his first basket until two minutes into the second half.

By then, Hansbrough had already soared over Padgett's head to slam down a Danny Green miss. By then, Hansbrough had already scored 12 points and grabbed five rebounds. Padgett would suffer two more indignities at the hands of Hansbrough on Saturday but they would have to wait until after the 6-foot-9, 250-pound junior from Poplar Bluff, Mo., did the real heavy lifting.

The Tar Heels led by 12 at the half, but the lead didn't feel safe. Louisville shot 52 percent in the first half and the Cardinals knew that if they could crank up their press and reduce their turnovers, they could erase that lead. Which is exactly what they did.

The Cardinals sliced the deficit to one when Juan Palacios found Jerry Smith for a three-pointer with 11:44 remaining but the Tar Heels stretched the lead back to four when Hansbrough scored in spite of a Terrence Williams foul and swished the ensuing free throw. But on Louisville's next possession, Andre McGee made a three. Next trip, Earl Clark made the second of two free throws to tie the score at 59 with 10:21 remaining. The Tar Heels flashed back to 2007 in East Rutherford, N.J. There, they squandered an 11-point second-half lead and wound up losing in overtime to Georgetown in the East region final.

But Saturday, they didn't panic.

"We're more mature this year," Hansbrough said. "We have guys who know what it's like to lose a game like that  to be so close to a Final Four and let it slip away. Tonight, everybody had that on their minds."



Marcus Ginyard (1), Tyler Hansbrough (50) and the Tar Heels stamped the program's first Final Four ticket since winning the national championship in 2005.
Photo: Bob Rosato/SI

During second-half huddles, North Carolina coach Roy Williams said Hansbrough actually spoke. Williams remembered Hansbrough saying "Hey! Come on! Let's finish this off!"

"When he says something like that," Williams said, "they listen to him."

Any guesses as to who broke the tie? That's right. Hansbrough grabbed a Ty Lawson pass and laid the ball in to give the Tar Heels a lead they never would relinquish. Not that the Cardinals didn't get close. Clark cut the lead to five with 3:51 remaining. Then McGee stole the ball from Hansbrough. One bucket, and Louisville had a one-possession game. But out on the perimeter, with little opposition, Terrence Williams threw a pass at McGee's ankles. McGee couldn't handle the short hop, and the ball bounded over the sideline as Williams staggered off the court wondering how he screwed up an uncontested pass.

Less than a minute later, Hansbrough had the ball just inside the top of the key. He rose. Padgett charged. The 19-foot jumper arced over Padgett and sank through the net to give the Heels a 73-66 lead. After a travelling call against Louisville's Clark, Pitino called timeout. It couldn't happen again, everyone in red thought. Seconds later, Hansbrough cradled the ball 15 feet from the hoop on the left wing. He rose. Padgett charged. All net. "Tyler Hansbrough," Pitino would say later, "made two shots that you prayed they were going to take."

As he sat early Sunday morning in the locker room with a piece of net tied around the band of his hat, North Carolina's Green reflected on the jumpers that broke the Cardinals. "If [Hansbrough] didn't make those, the whole season could have changed," Green said. "It would have changed our whole season. You guys would probably talking to Louisville right now."

Funny thing about those shots, Hansbrough said. Padgett nearly stuffed both of them. "If you look at it again, [the first jumper] probably almost got blocked. He was right there with me," Hansbrough said. "The next one, he was right on me as soon as I took that dribble. It just happened to go in."

Williams would disagree. He saw Hansbrough practice those very same jumpers thousands of times this season as he searched for a new facet to add to the game some believe won't translate to the NBA. "You guys have heard it before, but he does the same thing in practice every day," Williams said. "I mean, the young man is the most driven, most focused youngster I've ever seen in my life."

And now he's led his team to a Final Four. That fact wasn't lost on Hansbrough, who knew he'd have a gaping hole in his legacy if he didn't. "Each great college team, that Final Four has to come with it," Hansbrough said. "For players, they say they're not a great college player unless they have a Final Four."



Roy Williams passed Bob Knight and moved into a tie with Kentucky's Adolph Rupp and Louisville's Denny Crum with six Final Four appearances, fourth most all-time.
Photo: Bob Rosato/SI

Sunday, Hansbrough plans to sleep until noon. He doesn't intend to watch the Kansas-Davidson game that will determine whom the Tar Heels will face Saturday in San Antonio. In fact, he said, he didn't even know when Kansas and Davidson will tip off. Hansbrough does know he can't be satisfied with simply reaching the Final Four. Teammate Marcus Ginyard drove home that point late Saturday night. As the pair walked behind Williams down a hallway toward a packed press conference, Ginyard leaned toward Hansbrough.

"It feels like we did something big," Hansbrough remembered Ginyard saying. "But we can also do something bigger."

Review: Bruce Springsteen at the Rose Garden

Posted by Luciana Lopez, The Portland Oregonian March 29, 2008 00:50AM



Ross Hamilton

I need to think of something more interesting to say for our print edition than, "Bruce was awesome!" But, well, Bruce was awesome! Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played for almost two and a half hours on Friday night at the Rose Garden to an adoring crowd.

As good a time as the crowd had, though, I don't think anyone had more fun than Springsteen, who looked a lot like a big little kid up on stage, playing around with some of his best friends. (Those friends, in this case, being world-class musicians...) His encore stretched to five songs, including the inevitable "Born to Run" and, apparently off the prompting of an audience sign, an extended version of "Jungleland," and I almost expected it to go longer, so much joy did he seem to have up on the stage.

Still, whatever exuberance he showed, he kept a tight grip on the band and the show. All the band members clearly respect each other (the lineup Friday included Clarence Clemons on sax, Nils Lofgren and Steve Van Zandt on guitar, Max Weinberg on drums, Garry Talent on bass, Roy Bittan on piano, Soozie Tyrell on violin and Charlie Giordano on organ, subbing for Danny Federici, who's being treated for melanoma. Patti Scialfa, who's also married to Springsteen, stayed home with the couple's three kids. With three teenagers, Springsteen noted, the fort needs to be defended), but Bruce was just as clearly the leader, signaling the transitions from song to song -- a major feat, considering how often the band didn't so much stop between songs as take the briefest of pauses.

The band's set drew heavily on their 2007 album, "Magic." They played the title track, "Radio Nowhere," "Livin' in the Future," "Gypsy Biker," "Girls in Their Summer Clothes," "Last to Die," "Devil's Arcade," and the gorgeously longing "Long Walk Home." But they played a lot of old favorites, as well, such as "Badlands," "Prove it All Night," and, during the encore, "Dancing in the Dark."

Springsteen being Springsteen, politics of course made an appearance. Besides plugs for the Oregon Food Bank and Growing Gardens, he also made clear his feelings for the current administration, noting in his intro to "Magic" that the country's approaching the end of 8 years of magic tricks. For those unfamiliar with the song's lyrics, it's about a con man, a charlatan, who professes to be a magician but is ultimately a thief of dear things.

But that was only a small part of the show. Really, those two and a half hours were about music, about a band that's endured for decades, and about a musician whose powerful voice remains undiminished despite the years.



Setlist:
Night
Radio Nowhere
Lonesome Day
Gypsy Biker
Magic
Reason to Believe
Candy's Room
Prove It All Night
She's the One
Livin' in the Future
The Promised Land
For You
Lost in the Flood
Devil's Arcade
The Rising
Last to Die
Long Walk Home
Badlands
* * *
Girls in Their Summer Clothes
Jungleland
Born to Run
Dancing in the Dark
American Land

Hillary: Swiftboated!

by Ann Coulter
http://www.humanevents.com/
Posted: 03/26/2008

Hillary is being "swiftboated"!

She claimed that she came under sniper fire when she visited in Bosnia in 1996, but was contradicted by videotape showing her sauntering off the plane and stopping on the tarmac to listen to a little girl read her a poem.

Similarly, John Kerry's claim to heroism in Vietnam was contradicted by 264 Swift Boat Veterans who served with him. His claim to having been on a secret mission to Cambodia for President Nixon on Christmas 1968 was contradicted not only by all of his commanders -- who said he would have been court-martialed if he had gone anywhere near Cambodia -- but also the simple fact that Nixon wasn't president on Christmas 1968.Continued

In Hillary's defense, she probably deserves a Purple Heart about as much as Kerry did for his service in Vietnam.

Also, unlike Kerry, Hillary acknowledged her error, telling the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: "I was sleep-deprived, and I misspoke." (What if she's sleep-deprived when she gets that call on the red phone at 3 a.m., imagines a Russian nuclear attack and responds with mutual assured destruction? Oops. "It proves I'm human.")

The reason no one claims Hillary is being "swiftboated" is that the definition of "swiftboating" is: "producing irrefutable evidence that a Democrat is lying." And for purposes of her race against matinee idol B. Hussein Obama, Hillary has become the media's honorary Republican.

In liberal-speak, only a Democrat can be swiftboated. Democrats are "swiftboated"; Republicans are "guilty." So as an honorary Republican, Hillary isn't being swiftboated; she's just lying.

Indeed, instead of attacking the people who produced a video of Hillary's uneventful landing in Bosnia, the mainstream media are the people who discovered that video.

I've always wondered how a Democrat would fare being treated like a Republican by the media. Now we know.

It's such fun watching liberals turn on the Clintons! The bitter infighting among Democrats is especially enjoyable after having to listen to Democrats hyperventilate for months about how delighted they were to have so many wonderful choices for president.

Now liberals just want to be rid of the Clintons -- which is as close to actual mainstream thinking as they've been in years. So the media suddenly notice when Hillary "misspeaks," while rushing to make absurd excuses for much greater outrages by her opponent.

Liberals are even using the Slick Willy defense when Obama is caught fraternizing with a racist loon. When Bill Clinton was exposed as a philandering, adulterous, pathological liar, his defenders said that everybody is a philandering, adulterous, pathological liar.

And now, when B. Hussein Obama is caught in a 20-year relationship with a raving racist, his defenders scream that everybody is a racist wack-job.

In the Obama speech on race that Chris Matthews deemed "worthy of Abraham Lincoln," B. Hussein Obama defended Wright's anti-American statements, saying:

"For the men and women of Rev. Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table."

So in the speech the media are telling us is on a par with the Gettysburg Address, B. Hussein Obama casually informed us that even blacks who seem to like white people actually hate our guts.

First of all: Watch out the next time you get your hair cut by a black barber over the age of 50.

Second, Rev. Wright's world wasn't segregated.

And third, what about Wright's wanton anti-Semitism? All the liberals (including essence-besplattered Chris Matthews) have accepted Obama's defense of Wright and want us to understand Wright's "legitimate" rage over his painful youth in segregated America.

But the anti-Semitic tone of Wright's sermons is as clear as his rage against the United States. Rev. Wright calls Israel a "dirty word" and a "racist country." He denounces Zionism and calls for divestment from Israel.

In addition to videos of Rev. Wright's sermons, Obama's church also offers for sale sermons by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, whom Rev. Wright joined on a visit to Moammar Gadhafi in Libya in 1984. Just last year, Obama's church awarded Farrakhan the Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award, saying Farrakhan "truly epitomized greatness."

What, pray tell, is the legitimate source of Wright's anti-Semitism? I believe Brother Obama passed over that issue entirely in his "conversation," even as he made the obligatory bow to Israel's status as one of our "stalwart allies." Why does crazy "uncle" Wright dislike Jews?

Will liberals contend that these remarks were "taken out of context"? Maybe Wright's church was trying to say that Farrakhan isn't great when it said he "epitomized greatness." Who knows? We weren't there.

Can liberals please educate us on the "legitimate" impulses behind Rev. Wright's Jew-baiting?

Ann Coulter is Legal Affairs Correspondent for HUMAN EVENTS and author of "High Crimes and Misdemeanors," "Slander," ""How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)," "Godless," and most recently, "If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans."

Thomas Sowell: Obama a too-eager convert to blackness

Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com

Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright

He consciously sought out people on the far left fringe

It is painful to watch defenders of Barack Obama tying themselves into knots trying to evade the obvious.

Some are saying that Sen. Obama cannot be held responsible for what his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, said. In their version of events, Barack Obama just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – and a bunch of mean-spirited people are trying to make something out of it.

It makes a good story, but it won't stand up under scrutiny.

Barack Obama's own account of his life shows that he consciously sought out people on the far left fringe. In college, "I chose my friends carefully," he said in his first book, "Dreams From My Father."

These friends included "Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets" – in Obama's own words – as well as the "more politically active black students." He later visited a former member of the terrorist Weatherman underground, who endorsed him when he ran for state senator.

Obama didn't just happen to encounter Jeremiah Wright, who just happened to say some way-out things. Jeremiah Wright is in the same mold as the kinds of people Barack Obama began seeking out in college – members of the left, anti-American counter-culture.

In Shelby Steele's brilliantly insightful book about Barack Obama – "A Bound Man" – it is painfully clear that Obama was one of those people seeking a racial identity that he had never really experienced in growing up in a white world. He was trying to become a convert to blackness, as it were – and, like many converts, he went overboard.

Nor has Obama changed in recent years. His voting record in the U.S. Senate is the furthest left of any senator. There is a remarkable consistency in what Barack Obama has done over the years, despite inconsistencies in what he says.

The irony is that Obama's sudden rise politically to the level of being the leading contender for his party's presidential nomination has required him to project an entirely different persona, that of a post-racial leader who bring us all together.

The ease with which he has accomplished this chameleonlike change, and entranced both white and black Democrats, is a tribute to the man's talent and a warning about his reliability.

There is no evidence that Obama ever sought to educate himself on the views of people on the other end of the political spectrum, much less reach out to them. He reached out from the left to the far left. That's bringing us all together?

Is "divisiveness" defined as disagreeing with the agenda of the Left? Who on the left was ever called divisive by Obama before that became politically necessary in order to respond to revelations about Jeremiah Wright?

One sign of Obama's verbal virtuosity was his equating a passing comment by his grandmother – "a typical white person," he says – with a campaign of public vilification of America in general, and white America in particular, by Wright.

Since all things are the same, except for the differences, and different except for the similarities, it is always possible to make things look similar verbally, however different they are in the real world.

Among the many desperate gambits by defenders of Sen. Obama and Jeremiah Wright is to say that Wright's words have a "resonance" in the black community. There was a time when the Ku Klux Klan's words had a resonance among whites, not only in the South but in other states.

While many whites may be annoyed by Wright's words, a year from now most of them will probably have forgotten about him. But many blacks who absorb his toxic message can still be paying for it, big-time, for decades to come.

Why should young blacks be expected to work to meet educational standards, or even behavioral standards, if they believe the message that all their problems are caused by whites? That is ultimately a message of hopelessness, however much audacity it may have.