The Shame of Brandeis

And of a culture that has lost its way 

By Charles C. W. Cooke

http://www.nationalreview.com/

April 10, 2014

Aayan Hirsi Ali

The progression is becoming miserably familiar: first, an invitation is proffered to someone of heterodox views; next, the forces of conformity congeal and solidify, circulating petitions, banging drums, and rambling about justice and what you will; then the would-be host begins to worry, announcing meekly that it is reviewing its options; and finally, the invitation is shamefully revoked, usually under the paradoxical auspices of broadmindedness and inclusion. “We’re sorry,” the typical explanation runs, “but we’re too permissive to allow your sort.”

This week’s target was the atheist and women’s-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose invitation to Brandeis University’s commencement ceremony was rescinded after pressure from an array of bleeding hearts threatened to turn the event into a learning experience. “Following a discussion today between President Frederick Lawrence and Ayaan Hirsi Ali,” Brandeis confirmed yesterday afternoon, “Ms.Hirsi Ali’s name has been withdrawn as an honorary degree recipient at this year’s commencement.” And that, as they say, was that.

Those who have remarked reflexively that they could not imagine a university giving in to pressure leveled against a staunch critic of Christianity or Judaism presumably do not know just how right they are. Responding to criticism after it elected to confer an honorary degree on Tony Kushner — a playwright who has admitted to having “a problem with the idea of a Jewish state” and to believing that “the biggest supporters of Israel are the most repulsive members of the Jewish community” — Brandeis clarified its policy toward the controversial, explaining that the college

bestows honorary degrees as a means of acknowledging the outstanding accomplishments or contributions of individual men and women in any of a number of fields of human endeavor. Just as Brandeis does not inquire into the political opinions and beliefs of faculty or staff before appointing them, or students before offering admission, so too the University does not select honorary degree recipients on the basis of their political beliefs or opinions.

I must say that it is rather difficult for a layman such as myself to comprehend precisely how the esteemed faculty at Brandeis intends to square this wholehearted insistence that it “does not select honorary degree recipients on the basis of their political beliefs or opinions” with its profession on Wednesday that, having recently reviewed the more acerbic of Ali’s political beliefs and opinions, it finds them to be “inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values.” Perhaps I’m missing a critical emanation or penumbra here, but if the consciences and professions of its honorees have no bearing on the integrity of their achievements, it should not matter whether their convictions comport with those held by the University, should it?

The statement announcing Brandeis’s disinvitation confirms happily that Ali is held by the faculty to be “a compelling public figure and advocate for women’s rights” and that the powers-that-be “respect and appreciate her work to protect and defend the rights of women and girls throughout the world.” In this much at least, its authors did not err. In a less vapid world, Ali’s record would provoke the admiration, not the contempt, of the buzzwords-and-privilege crowd. In the face of the most appalling abuse, a weaker woman would have retreated from her project and gone quietly into hiding. Ali did no such thing. Instead, she established a foundation, the goal of which is to protect women in the West who are the victims of religiously inspired oppression and, in Ali’s own words, to

reinforce the basic rights and freedoms of women and girls, including security and control of their own bodies, access to an education, the ability to work outside the home and control their own income, freedom of expression and association, and the myriad other basic civil rights defined under the laws of Western democracies and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

 It strikes me that there should be little in this mission statement for anybody to dislike, least of all those who see themselves as the standard-bearers for “social justice” and for toleration. Still, as the more cynical among us have observed for a while now, the Left’s hierarchy of victims is a complex and contradictory thing, liable to yield all sorts of peculiar outcomes. Certainly, Ali has tended to side with a favored group — women — against a favored foe — religion. But in the process she has made the mistake of criticizing another favored group — Islam — and, Islam being customarily given a break because its adherents are generally poor and dark-skinned, that just won’t do.

Brandeis’s chairman of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, Joseph Lumbard, explained anemically that the invitation “makes Muslim students feel very uneasy.” One would rather expect so, yes. Ali has described Islam as “a destructive, nihilistic cult of death,” and she has made no secret of her holistic distaste for both its tenets and its practice. “Once [Islam] is defeated,” she argued bombastically during an interview with Reason in 2007, “it can mutate into something peaceful. It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now. They’re not interested in peace. I think that we are at war with Islam. And there’s no middle ground in wars.”

There is no middle ground in progressivism either, it seems: Either one is in or one is out; one is a player on the right team, or one is a bigot to be protested and to be shunned.

Illustrating this neatly last week, the Council on American-Islamic Relations complained to Brandeis that Ali was a “notorious Islamophobe,” thereby managing in a single sentence to dismiss a lifetime of experience and of work with the insinuation of irrationality and to apply to the victim a term customarily reserved for the tormentor. Typically, I object to the use of “phobic” on the grounds that, where once it meant something useful and concrete, it has now been hijacked by our self-appointed arbiters of taste and transmuted into a multipurpose cudgel against dissent. In this case, however, I must cut CAIR some slack, for, wholly inadvertently, it has hit the nail on the head. “Phobia,” as any first-year student of the classics knows, is derived from the Greek word phobos, which translates literally as “panic flight.” Could there be a more apposite description of Ali’s experiences than just that? Here is Ali on her experiences as a young Muslim girl in Somalia: “I left the world of faith, of genital cutting and forced marriage, for the world of reason and sexual emancipation. After making this voyage I know that one of these two worlds is simply better than the other. Not for its gaudy gadgetry, but for its fundamental values.”

That “world” was not the United States, but Holland, to which country Ali fled in search of emancipation. What she got instead — again at the hands of a religion that had previously attempted to remove her clitoris and to force her into a marriage that she opposed — was unimaginable horror. For the crime of sharing in documentary form what she had been through in Somalia, Ali was treated to the murder of her friend, the director Theo van Gogh, and to death threats of her own — one of which was thoughtfully pinned to van Gogh’s mutilated corpse. She fled, again, this time to the United States. Islamophobe? Sure.

Prepossessed as he was with the all-encompassing wars of his era, George Orwell complained that political language was “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Unlike Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the culture warriors of America’s pampered campuses are unlikely to be dealing in murder or in warfare or, for that matter, in anything of much consequence at all. Nevertheless, they enjoy playing assassin, painting glowing targets onto the backs of any idea that threatens their power and, one by one, seeking the bullseyes. In the private sector, this is a prerogative of which no friend of liberty would seek to deprive them. Like any other organization, Brandeis can do as it sees fit. But it could at least have the decency to dress its decisions in the clothing that they deserve. “Apologies,” the faculty might say, “but we can give out honors to whomever we wish, and the truth is that we just do not like the cut of your jib.”

— Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer at National Review.

Unpacking Progressivity

Most Americans don’t understand how “progressive” taxation works. 

By Amity Shlaes

http://www.nationalreview.com/

April 9, 2014

French economist Thomas Piketty

“β = s/g”

That’s the message of the hottest book in policy circles right now, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a 700-page tome by the French economist Thomas Piketty. As explained by Piketty, this formula stands for the concept that the capital/income ratio is equal in the long run to the savings rate divided by the growth rate. “β = s/g” is a problem, according to Piketty. And one so grave that he recommends making the progressive tax code even more progressive by raising our top marginal tax rate to 80 percent. Not content with further “progressivizing” the U.S. income tax, Piketty also advocates a global progressive tax on wealth per se.

“A progressive levy on individual wealth would reassert control over capitalism in the name of the general interest while relying on the forces of private property and competition,” Piketty writes confidently.

Private property will bolt to the moon if such a tax becomes global law. Most Americans sense this, but are halted from arguing because they are not sure they understand Piketty’s formula. It’s not clear that most Americans even understand progressivity.

And that’s not an accident. You don’t have to be Machiavelli, to name a clearer foreign writer, to see that the incomprehensibility of such concepts is not incidental — it is necessary to the grander process of redistribution.

Consider the history of progressivity, first introduced on a national scale with the income tax in 1913. The idea was, and still is, that tax rates go up like stair steps, and that the last dollar earned by a wealthy man or woman is taxed at a different, higher rate than the first dollar. The members of Congress who wrote that first income-tax law set their top progressive rate at a level then deemed sky-high, 7 percent.

Over the hundred years intervening, studies have shown that generally people do think that the greater the wealth, the more dollars wealthy people should pay in tax, proportionally. But that is not a progressive rate structure. That is a flat tax. A progressive tax increases rates as you earn more, disproportionally.

Nor are many people aware that under a progressive structure the last dollar is taxed at a different rate from the first dollar. The top marginal rate is not necessarily the average rate. In the early 1980s, scholar Karlyn Keene found that many Americans, when interviewed, thought flat taxes fair. Before Keene, Walter Blum and Harry Kalven at the University of Chicago studied attitudes toward progressivity and its functions and came away, despite their liberal predilections, concluding that the case for progressivity is “uneasy.”

Politicians, and the economists behind them, simply played off citizens’ ignorance. The simple early code of 1913 became complex and, yes, more onerous.

The real question should be why Americans allow themselves to be intimidated, especially when it comes to progressivity.

Vanity of two sorts provides answers. Most Americans are unwilling to concede that they may not understand or be comfortable with long formulas and complex economic ideas. So, like the Enron audit committee, they simply nod and go along.

The second vanity involves not intelligence but a kind of Puritan pretension. No American wants to be caught appearing unfair, even if in the most fleeting snapshot. “Progressivity” sounds like “progress.” Nobody wants to be seen opposing progress, even if that progress is regress and unfair to boot.

In any case: That willed American ignorance is the single greatest reason our progressive income-tax rates have moved, at times, into the 90 percent range, up from that original 7 percent.

Worse, the attitude makes progressivity hard to undo. When you cut taxes for all in a progressive rate structure, the rich necessarily get a larger tax break because they pay a greater share of the taxes. But “larger tax breaks for the rich” are impossible to sell. A redistributive corollary: benefits for the poor. This week Paul Ryan is getting scourged because his budget cuts affect the poor more than the rich. That is because the poor get more of the benefits in the first place.

The first step to overcoming such intimidation is to encourage economists to write and talk in plain language, English or French. The second is to counter with policies in plain English, plain formulas, and plain titles. A book like Piketty’s may be called Capital. A more accurate title might be Expropriation.

— Amity Shlaes chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation. 

On 40th anniversary of No. 715, Aaron remains true home run king

By Tom Verducci

More Columns

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/mlb

April 8, 2014

Photo: Neil Leifer/SI

Atlanta Fulton County Stadium was drained of more than half its fans and all of its tension on what had been one of the most famous rainy nights in Georgia. In his previous at-bat, Hank Aaron had ended the 53-year reign of Babe Ruth as baseball's Home Run King. Aaron, the newly crowned, the beloved teammate the Braves called "Supe," which they derived from "superstar," still a new and hip appellation in 1974, made his way to the on-deck circle. That's when teammate Ralph Garr called to him.

"Come on, Supe," Garr said. "Break Hank Aaron's record."

Aaron liked the sound of that. He was 40 years old and playing his 21st major league season, and the chasing of Ruth over the previous few years so wore him down that when he stepped to a microphone immediately after hitting 715 the one summation that came to his lips was, "Thank God it's over." The anxiety, much of it derived from the racists who made threats against him, at last had fallen away.

The apostrophe is the most powerful punctuation mark in grammar. It is far more muscular than the exclamation point, which has become so diluted by overuse in digital platforms that people feel compelled to use it in triplicate, if not greater multiples, to give it heft. The quotation mark needs a partner. The period is a lonesome little dot at ground level, a loose penny on a sidewalk. The semi-colon suffers from a confused personality and keeps showing up in the wrong places. But the apostrophe is elegant and kingly. It uses its graceful, airborne curve to define unquestioned ownership. It anoints possession.

"Hank Aaron's record."

What Hank forged and what Garr spoke exactly 40 years ago today -- April 8, 1974 -- may have met its official demise in 2007, when Barry Bonds hit home run number 756, surpassing the 755 Aaron took to retirement in 1976. But this is a case in which the unofficial trumps the official. It is the revolt of logic. What belongs to Bonds in the official sense still belongs to Aaron in all other ways, most especially in the manner of fair play as the bedrock of sport. Forty years later, it remains Hank Aaron's record.

Two months ago, the New York chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America honored Aaron and the man who threw the pitch for home run number 715, Al Downing, a classy gentleman and a former 20-game winner. After Downing spoke first, Aaron pulled him back to the podium.

"The pitch that he threw me that night -- if I can remember, it's been a long time, forty-some years -- it was supposed to be a screwball," Aaron said.

"It was a sinker," Downing said.

"Sinker?"

"Didn't sink."

"I was trying to get it before it sunk."

"You got it."

The two proud men were connected again.

No other night in the history of baseball is more deeply embedded in American cultural history than April 8, 1974. The nights that Fisk waved it fair, Buckner missed the grounder, Gibson took Eckersley deep and Ripken broke Gehrig's record are forever iconic, too. But 1974 was just 10 years after passage of the Civil Rights Act and baseball still was the undisputed national pastime that commanded the attention of America. More than half the televisions in the country were tuned to the previous World Series, contested between the Oakland Athletics and the New York Mets, even though four of the seven games were day games. No sport was bigger than baseball, and no name was bigger than Ruth's. So big was the potential of a new home run record that NBC, which had the rights to Monday Night Baseball in the summer, scrapped its regular Monday night spring programming and broadcast the game against top 10 CBS shows Maude and Rhoda. The game delivered a strong 22.3 rating and 36 share. (No World Series game has seen that kind of a share since 1997 Game 7.)

It was 9:07 p.m. ET when Downing threw that famous pitch. Three future winners of the Ford Frick Award, given by the Baseball Hall of Fame for broadcasting excellence, called the home run: Curt Gowdy for NBC, Vin Scully for the Dodgers and Milo Hamilton for the Braves.

Scully, ever the master, gave the moment 25 seconds of appropriate silence. Then, as he always does, he found words in an instant that hold their beauty for eternity:

"What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. And it is a great moment for all of us, and particularly Henry Aaron."

You wanted to add an "amen."

WATCH: Hank Aaron hits career homer No. 715, breaks Babe Ruth's record

What makes Hank Aaron's record all the more special to a baseball fan is that it was entirely above reproach. Ruth never played at night, west of St. Louis or after integration. Bonds was a serial user of performance-enhancing drugs, as so well defined by Game of Shadows. The apologia of the drug-enhanced era tries awkwardly and shamefully to cast Aaron as a product of the era of amphetamines, as if there is any comparison. For the record, Aaron wrote in his biography, I Had a Hammer, co-written with Lonnie Wheeler, that he tried a "greenie" once. It happened during a slump in 1968 when a teammate gave him one to try.

"When that thing took hold, I thought I was having a heart attack," Aaron wrote. "It was a stupid thing to do."

At the BBWAA dinner, Aaron said, "If a person wants something bad enough, he works very hard for it."

Then he told a story about Mickey Owen, the former Dodgers catcher known infamously for his dropped third strike in the 1941 World Series. Owen was Aaron's manager in 1953 in winter ball in Puerto Rico, where the Braves wanted the infielder to learn how to play the outfield. Owen, Aaron said, threw batting practice to him in the broiling heat for 14 consecutive days, each time with the same routine: 20 minutes hitting to rightfield, 20 minutes hitting to centerfield and 20 minutes to leftfield. And when they were done, Aaron would say to Owen, "I'd like to hit some more." And Owen, then 37 years old, would throw some more.

"I would have to give him all the credit for my career," Aaron said. "If not for him I don't think I would have had that kind of career."

GALLERY: Photos of Hank Aaron throughout his career

Graciousness always was an Aaron hallmark, as much as the home runs. The home run record was indeed so important in society that it caused most everything else about Aaron to be underestimated, including his all-around skills as a hitter. As Wheeler noted in the book, Aaron amassed so many more total bases than anybody who ever played this game that he literally is miles ahead of the pack. You could give Stan Musial, who is second on the total-bases list, 12 miles worth of total bases and he still would not catch Aaron.

Barry Bonds broke Aaron's record in 2007 with far fewer people paying attention.

Brad Mangin/SI

By 2007, when Bonds came along as the inauthentic heir, America, television, baseball and the concept of "hard work" alone as the path to achievement all were very different from Aaron's day. Bonds made a mockery of baseball and a wonder of pharmaceuticals. It wasn't just that the older he got the better he got; he got cartoonishly better and bigger in advancing baseball age. Until 2001, nobody 36 or older ever had slugged better than .731, the mark by Ted Williams in 1957. But Bonds did it not just once, not just twice, not just three times, but four times -- and by a lot. When he was 39 years old Bonds slugged .812 -- a preposterous level considering nobody else that age ever has slugged better than .584.

Through 1998, Bonds' age 33 season, he was headed toward greatness. The similarity scores at baseballreference.com list his top four doppelgangers at that age as Frank Robinson, Ken Griffey Jr., Duke Snider and Vladimir Guerrero -- four guys who wound up with an average of 518 home runs. That wasn't enough for Bonds. He would choose to join the not-so-secret society of PED users to achieve more, though to this day he and his trainer, Greg Anderson, find the choice to be unspeakable.

Bonds shows up nowhere on the top 10 list of most home runs through age 33. But after that his career reads like a work of fiction. Bonds hit more home runs just after age 33 (388) than Hall of Fame slugger Jim Rice hit over his entire career. Bonds hit 70 more home runs after age 33 than Aaron hit after 33 -- and 90 more than everybody else in history. It was too good to be true, which is why when Bonds hit number 756 it was at best a curiosity akin to sawing a woman in half (it required suspending logic to enjoy) and at worst one of the game's saddest travesties.

Most people fell in the vastness of the middle: they didn't care. The telecast of home run 756 in San Francisco generated only a 1.1 rating. Aaron stayed away; so did Bud Selig. The commissioner had a legitimate and appropriate excuse: he happened to be in New York to talk to Sen. George Mitchell's investigators about steroid use in baseball. Anderson couldn't be there, either. His excuse was even more unassailable: He was in prison, choosing to be incarcerated rather than answer questions from a federal grand jury about Bonds' drug use.

The postgame news conference was uncomfortable. The line of questioning was obvious: How could anybody accept this record as legitimate? Bonds was a hostile witness.

"This record is not tainted at all, at all, period," he said. "You guys can say whatever you want."

Somebody thought it was a good time to ask him about his friend Anderson. Bonds was in no mood to play along. He called it "just another negative question" in a roomful of negativity.

Hall of Fame broadcaster Tim McCarver captured the eternal emptiness of the record when he said in advance of 756, "It's a shame that after Bonds breaks the record the conversation will go, 'Barry is the all-time home run hitter, but . . .' This record deserves more than that. With Henry Aaron, there were no buts."

Make no mistake: Bonds owns the official home run record. Seven sixty-two does look and smell like 9.79, the world record time in the 100-meter dash that Ben Johnson posted in the 1988 Olympics, but it cannot and should not be wiped out like 9.79 was then. Bonds did hit more home runs than anybody else. He mastered better than others the dark arts in a dark era that has plenty of blame to go around.

Bonds may have zoomed past Aaron, but he also elevated Aaron. Forty years from that night in Atlanta, Hank and his record are more admirable than ever. The power of the apostrophe remains. Bonds has more home runs, but true greatness and authenticity belong to Hank Aaron's record.

This week Orioles slugger Chris Davis told USA Today the obvious: that "Bonds was a great player for a long time. But it's hard to say that Hank Aaron's record isn't the legitimate home run record because of the allegations, the accusations regarding Bonds."

It really wasn't much news at all -- more a statement of the common wisdom regarding what people still know as "Hank Aaron's record."

When Aaron and Downing reunited in New York, they stood next to one another at the microphone and were flanked on the dais by greats such as Sandy Koufax, Mariano Rivera, Miguel Cabrera and Clayton Kershaw. It was one of the greatest assemblages of baseball royalty since the initial Hall of Fame class of 1939 gathered for a group portrait. Aaron stood out among such legends. Aaron and Downing made for an especially sweet picture of friendship and dignity. Once again, Aaron found just the right words at the right moment.

"But he really was a terrific pitcher," Aaron said. "I just want to say everything was fine, really. I hit the home run and we went about our business the right way."

You wanted to add an "amen."

Read More: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/mlb/news/20140408/hank-aaron-715-home-runs-anniversary-barry-bonds/#ixzz2yO0h953q

Mickey Rooney, R.I.P.

His 84-year career was as American as apple pie. 

By Jack Fowler

http://www.nationalreview.com/

April 7, 2014

Mickey Rooney on CBS in 1956 (CBS Archive)

Like most Turner Classic Movies junkies, I am a Mickey Rooney fan. While admittedly slow in coming, I arrived in this happy place a few years back after sitting through a TCM marathon of Andy Hardy flicks. About Rooney: I am awed by the length of his career (1927 to 2011!), his prominence (No. 1 box-office draw in the late ’30s and early ’40s), his highs (Oscars) and lows (bankruptcy), and his acting abilities (from excellent to thickly sliced ham). And his importance to America.

Not because he married half of its available women. But if movies are America’s great cultural voice and product — if movies are the way generations of people from Bangor to Bozeman, from Sydney to Timbuktu, have learned, for better or worse, what America is — then Mickey Rooney’s iconic, ten-decade-spanning career has had a very broad impact on many, many millions.

Surely he represents to most a time when America had, or wished it had, Hardy-esque families that were marinated in goofiness, innocence, aw-shucks, jalopies, dances, old-maid aunts, and girl-crazy teens thrilled to steal a kiss from Polly or Betsy. Was it really like that? I hope so, because in those Hardy movies Rooney and the great Lewis Stone (with some help from Judy Garland) captured or created, or a little of both, the sense that America was a place where folks were honest, responsible, hard-working, hopeful, happy, and respectful. And fun and wise-acrey.

It’s an understatement to say Rooney, who pratfalled with the best, could be “overboard” in his acting, a view compounded by his now-notorious role as the “clazy” buck-toothed Japanese neighbor Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But he was a fine actor. The Hardy movies, in which he shined, are wholesome and instructive stories, still to be seen and enjoyed if only to escape from a culture of erection pills and rap rape tunes and twerking. Even when Rooney played a street tough with a bad attitude — as in 1938’s Boys Town, alongside Best Actor Oscar winner Spencer Tracy — you knew one good cry would reveal him as a delinquent with a heart of gold.

But Rooney’s best performances came as a conscientious trainer in Requiem for a Heavyweight, an excellent film (co-starring Anthony Quinn and Jackie Gleason) about the seamy side of boxing, and the at-times exquisite 1943 drama The Human Comedy, in which Rooney plays a “home front” teen trying to keep his family together while the men are off to war. He received one of his four acting Oscar nominations for that role. He’s also pretty darned good in the Korean War movieThe Bridges at Toko-Ri. And come to think of it, as Ding Bell in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

Babes in Arms has aged (a lot!), and can make Leave It to Beaver seem like Mad Max, but its watchability is overshadowed by its being the quintessential Rooney-Garland team-up. When her movie career gave way in the Sixties to the standard TV revue show, she reunited with her pal for a down-memory-lane performance that shows the showman in both. It’s hokey but worth watching.

To some, Rooney will be remembered as the guy who bested the Man from St. Ives by one wife. But he should be remembered as a hard-working and talented man who played a central and enduring role in America’s most prominent cultural product. Rest in Peace, Mickey, and thanks for all the fun.

— Jack Fowler is the publisher of National Review.

Today's Laugh Track: John Pinette - I'm Starvin'

Remembrance: John Pinette

Comic  John  Pinette  was  ‘sweet,  sweet  guy’

By Gayle Fee

http://bostonherald.com/

April 8, 2014

The Boston comedy scene is a whole lot sadder today after the death of longtime comic and Malden homey John Pinette, who died in a Pittsburgh hotel room over the weekend.

“If you saw John’s act, you saw John,” said local comedian Tony V, who traveled the stand-up circuit with Pinette for 20-plus years. “He was no more or no less than what he portrayed on stage: a big guy with big appetites and a big personality.”

Pinette, 50, whose most memorable role may have been as the hapless carjack victim in the “Seinfeld” finale, died of natural causes stemming from liver and heart disease. No autopsy was scheduled.

“He knew that the clubs never paid people enough to open for him,” said Belmont funnygal Stephanie Peters, who often opened for Pinette on the road. “So he would pay you out of his own pocket. He’d say, ‘Here’s the money you deserve.’ He was just the sweetest guy, not to mention the funniest.”

Pinette, who once weighed in at 450 pounds, had slimmed down to 250 over the past couple of years. But his super size was the butt of his jokes and his stand-up specials, “Show Me the Buffet,” “Still Hungry” and “I’m Starvin’!” (Pronounced ‘I’m Staaahh­vin’!”)

“Me and John did self-deprecating comedy because we’re fat,” Peters said. “He called me once after he had gastric bypass surgery and told me he was at the Cheesecake Factory. I said to him, ‘What are you doing at the Cheesecake Factory, you just had the bypass?’ And he said, ‘I’m going to order a whole raspberry cheesecake and lay down and put it on my chest and eat it like an 
otter.’ He killed me.”

A Malden Catholic grad, Pinette was in college working on an accounting degree when he started performing at open mic nights in Boston clubs in the 1980s. He was working at a bank when he was offered $100 a night to perform and he never went back to the day job.

He was a regular on the comedy circuit in Las Vegas and for years he opened for legendary crooner Frank Sinatra in Sin City. He also starred as Edna Turnblad in the Broadway production of “Hairspray” and made numerous TV and movie appearances, including a turn on the “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.” He was in the midst of a live comedy tour when he died.

“With John, if you hadn’t seen him in a while and you bumped into him on the road, he’d slap you on the back hard enough to put you through a window, then he’d say, ‘Let’s go eat!’” Tony V recalled. “That was always the way with him. He was that jovial fat guy.”

Peters said she was saddened when she learned that Pinette, who loved life and loved people, died alone in a Pittsburgh hotel room.

“He was such a sweet, sweet guy, the thought of him dying alone in some hotel is so sad,” she said. “On the road, we’re so 
lonely, it just bums me out.”

But Tony V said Pinette appeared to enjoy life to the fullest.

“I never saw a man hap­pier at being who he was than John was,” he said. “Maybe late at night it bothered him being him, but I never saw it — and I was up with him a lot of late nights!”

Putin's Czarist Folly

By Robert Service
http://www.nytimes.com/
April 6, 2014




Oxford, England — Russian school textbooks praise Peter the Great as an
industrializer and cultural visionary who turned his country into a
European power. Russia became feared but also respected by its
neighbors, and Peter is the official czar-hero of Russian history.

Vladimir V. Putin himself is much more like another czar, Nicholas I,
who stumbled into military conflict with the British and French and
rejected calls for the basic reforms needed to enable Russia to compete
with the world powers of the day. Nicholas had a cramped perspective and
arrogant personality. Always attentive to the armed forces and the secret
services, he overlooked the broader necessity to modernize Russia’s
economy and society. His country paid dearly for this when his army was
humbled in the Crimean War of 1853-56.

Russian foreign policy under Mr. Putin displays an equally gross lack
of foresight. On Ukraine, he made much of the threat to ethnic Russians
from West Ukrainian “fascists” who were influencing political
developments in Kiev. It is true that Ukraine’s right-wing coalition known
as the Right Sector includes some decidedly insalubrious extremists. But
not every partisan who waged the war of independence against the Soviet
Army in the 1950s was a fascist; and by seizing the Crimean peninsula, Mr.
Putin has set up a classic temptation for Russian patriots to extend to the
whole of Ukraine.

One-eighth of the Crimean population, moreover, consists of Tatars,
whom Joseph Stalin deported to Central Asia in 1944 and who were
allowed to return to their native peninsula only in the late 1980s. They
largely abstained from voting in the recent referendum on incorporation in
the Russian Federation. Most are Muslims, and some of their young people
could now become recruits for a jihad against Russian imperialism.

By snatching 4.5 percent of Ukrainian territory, Mr. Putin has
performed the unlikely feat of wrecking his own dream of forming a
“Eurasian Union” under Russia’s leadership. He once planned to keep
President Viktor F. Yanukovych as his puppet ruler in Kiev. Now Mr.
Yanukovych is a refugee somewhere in Russia, and Ukraine’s government
is strengthening cooperation with the European Union.

This is a disaster for Mr. Putin’s foreign policy. Although he is
concealing this from the public through his control of TV channels, he will
not be able to fool all the people all of the time.

His biggest miscalculation is about Russia itself. The emergency over
Ukraine has jolted the Russian superrich to ship even more of their wealth
to the West. Up to $70 billion has left the country this year alone.

Mr. Putin prided himself on bringing stability after the tumultuous
years of Boris N. Yeltsin’s rule. Capital flight on this scale tells a different
story. The World Bank is sounding the alarm about a halving of Russia’s
growth rate if Mr. Putin continues with his Ukrainian obsession.

Just as worrisome for the Russian president should be the
phenomenon of human flight. Hundreds of thousands of the brightest
young Russians have packed their bags and left for Silicon Valley, New
York and London. This has been happening since the collapse of
Communism, but Mr. Putin has done nothing to arrest the trend.

Young people leave out of exasperation with bully-boy administrators
and violent entrepreneurs. They want to live in a meritocracy where talent
alone is what counts. Their model is Google’s Sergey Brin, not the seedy
ministers and businessmen of Mr. Putin’s court.

For the expatriates to want to go back to Russia, things have to change
— and this is the true test of Mr. Putin’s effectiveness as a president. First
elected in 2000, he has done little to clean up corruption. He spectacularly
punished a handful of so-called oligarchs, only to redistribute their
fortunes to political cronies. The rule of law is feebly enforced whenever
the men of power see their interests at risk.

Nor has Mr. Putin done enough to diversify and open up Russia’s
economy. For years — indeed, since Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s perestroika
period — Russian and foreign economists have highlighted the need for the
country to move beyond its reliance on the petrochemical exports. Prime
Minister Dmitri A. Medvedev has always understood this, but he lacked
the authority to rectify the situation.

Russia needs to pump out high-technology goods, not just oil and gas.
And the rival power it ought to keep in sight is not to the west but to the
south. Since the mid-1970s, China’s rulers have prioritized the
diversification of their economy. This would be the minimal requirement
to ensure Russia’s status as a Eurasian power. Instead, the Chinese are set
to become a superpower while the Russians fall away.

Moscow’s opportunities to compete have always depended on
cooperation with Western states with advanced technology. Mr. Putin’s
impulsive action in tiny Crimea has rendered this a distant prospect. He
has lost his place at the Group of 8 industrialized countries.

There was always skepticism about Mr. Putin’s good intentions in
Eastern Europe; now there is outright hostility. Even Germany’s reliance
on Russian gas imports has not stopped Chancellor Angela Merkel from
rebuking Mr. Putin. The European Union is actively considering how to
wean itself off dependency on Russian fuel.

Mr. Putin started the year with a display of Russian “soft power” at
the Sochi Winter Olympics, where the closing ceremony presented a
country of stylish, inoffensive sport and culture. The very next day, he sent
troops to Crimea. And now the World Bank suggests Russia may suffer
economic recession by the end of the year.

The signs are that Mr. Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov
are starting to appreciate the implications of their self-inflicted
geopolitical blunder. Mr. Lavrov has at least begun to talk to Secretary of
State John Kerry.

Western powers are not going to start a second Crimean war, but they
have more opportunities to exert pressure on Russia than Mr. Putin
imagined. He would do well to consider the precedent of Czar Nicholas I.

Robert Service, a professor of Russian history at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, is the author, most
recently, of “A History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 7, 2014, in The International New York Times

CAIR’s Jihad against 'Honor Diaries'

The “civil rights” group hides Islam’s denial of civil rights to Muslim women. 

By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/

April 5, 2014

Honor Diaries is an important film that explores the brutality and systematic inequality faced by women in Muslim-majority societies. It features both believing Muslim women, like Dr. Qanta Ahmed (whose compelling essay about the film was published here at National Review Online yesterday), and former Muslims like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the renowned author and human-rights activist.

The purpose of Honor Diaries is to empower women by shining a light on the hardships they endure — including “honor” killings (i.e., murders over the perception of having brought shame to the family by violating Islamic norms), beatings, genital mutilation, forced marriage — particularly of young girls – and restrictions on movement, education, and economic opportunity. The film highlights authentic Muslim moderates struggling against the dead-end of Islamic supremacism.

So naturally, the Council on American–Islam Relations (CAIR) does not want you to see it.

At Fox News, Megyn Kelly has been covering the film anyway, despite CAIR’s howling. The segments that aired on Monday and Tuesday are available on Megyn’s website, here and here.

CAIR is a Muslim Brotherhood creation, conceived as the primo American public-relations firm for Islamic supremacists, particularly Hamas — a task CAIR pulls off by masquerading as a “civil rights” organization.

Hamas, as I recounted in The Grand Jihad, is a formally designated terrorist organization under federal law. It is also the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch. In the early Nineties, the Brotherhood established a “Palestine Committee” to promote Hamas in the United States, an agenda topped by fundraising and efforts to derail the 1993 Oslo accords — the futile, Clinton administration-brokered attempt to forge an Israeli–Palestinian peace settlement. CAIR’s founders, Nihad Awad and Omar Ahmed, attended a three-day summit in support of Hamas in Philadelphia in 1993, much of which was wiretapped by the FBI. CAIR was established shortly afterwards. By summer 1994, the Palestine Committee was listing CAIR in internal memoranda as one of its “working organizations.”

We’ve discussed CAIR here many times, including in my 2009 column about the FBI’s long-overdue severing of “outreach” ties with the organization. It is infuriating that the Feebs and the wider government thought it was worth canoodling with CAIR in the first place, but the Bureau officially ended the affair after the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial, in which several Hamas operatives were convicted. CAIR, though unindicted, was shown by the Justice Department to be a co-conspirator. In sum, prosecutors established that the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) was the primary Hamas fundraising arm in the United States. Like CAIR, HLF was identified by the Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee as one of its “working organizations.” As terrorism researcher Steve Emerson has shown, CAIR got $5,000 in seed money at its inception from HLF, and thereafter helped raise money for HLF. The federal government shut HLF down in 2001 because of its promotion of terrorism.

Although Honor Diaries has been widely acclaimed and screened internationally, CAIR has been agitating against it. As reliably happens when CAIR plays its tired “Islamophobia” card, universities across the nation cower — especially universities with active Muslim Students Association chapters. (As we’ve observed before, the MSA is the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s infrastructure in the United States.) Starting with the University of Michigan at Dearborn, several schools have now decided not to screen the film after all.

Why it is “Islamophobic” to condemn violence and abuse against Muslim women is not entirely clear to me. It is, however, clear to Linda Sarsour, a “community organizer” and “immigrants’ rights activist” who is celebrated on President Obama’s website, WhiteHouse.gov, as a “Champion of Change.” As reported on The Kelly File, this particular “champion” reacted to Honor Diaries by tweeting:

How many times do we have to tell White women that we do not need to be saved by them? Is there code language I need to use to get thru?

Thoughts like Ms. Sarsour’s make for depressing reading, but clearly she is referring to some of the filmmakers, who happen to be white women (the others include white men and a black woman, Ms. Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born executive producer who was raised as a Muslim). The film has also been promoted by yet another highly accomplished woman, Brooke Goldstein, the human-rights attorney and filmmaker who directs The Lawfare Project; and by the Clarion Project, a New York–based organization that promotes moderate Islam and publicly challenges “extremist” Islam.

The community organizers at CAIR have obviously read a bit farther along in Rules for Radicals than Ms. Sarsour. Rather than racist tweets, they couch their character assassination of the film’s backers in the poll-tested sensitivities of everyday Americans, pretending to endorse the film’s message while telling you not to watch it. They issued a statement on Monday that Megyn Kelly aired:

American Muslims join people of conscience of all faiths in condemning female genital mutilation, forced marriages, ‘honor killings,’ and any other form of domestic violence or gender inequality as violations of Islamic beliefs. If anyone mistreats women, they should not seek refuge in Islam. The real concern in this case is that the producers of the film, who have a track record of promoting anti-Muslim bigotry, are hijacking a legitimate issue to push their hate-filled agenda.

Right. Women are being brutalized but our “real concern” should be the “track record” of some film producers. Beyond CAIR’s say-so that it is “hate-filled,” this purportedly dark track record is not described. But, after all, who would know more about what counts as “hate-filled” than a PR flack for a terrorist organization whose charter vows to annihilate Israel by violent jihad?

On Tuesday night, CAIR’s Chicago branch dispatched Agnieszka Karoluk, one of its “senior communications coordinators,” to Fox in order to regurgitate CAIR’s statement. Questioned by Megyn Kelly, Ms. Karoluk gave a dizzying explanation: CAIR, we’re told, agrees that Honor Diaries raises vital issues, opposes the abuse of women just like the film does, and is not really happy that colleges are canceling screenings (even though CAIR put out a smiley-face tweet when the first cancellation was announced). But CAIR is “disgusted” by the Clarion Project because it is — all together now — “Islamophobic.” Ms. Karoluk declined to say what makes it so (of course, to get into that would bring attention to episodes of Islamic extremism Clarion has exposed). So because Clarion likes the film, you shouldn’t watch it even though its content is accurate and significant — got it? Confronted by Brooke Goldstein about CAIR’s own record, Ms. Karoluk predictably replied, “I’m not here to talk about CAIR, I’m here to talk about the film” . . . and then continued to avoid talking about the film.

It is no doubt true, as CAIR’s statement asserts, that American Muslims substantially join the rest of us in condemning the abuse of women. CAIR, however, is in no position to speak for American Muslims — and in fact speaks for very few of them. Even if one were inclined to accept CAIR’s statements at face value, Honor Diaries is about the abuse of Muslim women; it is not about the filmmakers. If CAIR truly condemned these misogynistic practices it would be encouragingpeople to see the film. Instead, as Dr. Ahmed told Megyn, “They claim to be defending the vulnerable whereas they’re actually silencing exposure about the vulnerable.”

But there is no reason to take CAIR’s statements at face value. Under the old adage that actions speak louder than words, the inescapable fact is that CAIR does not condemn the horrific abuse of women in Muslim-majority countries. It is feigning condemnation in hopes of rendering people more receptive to CAIR’s actual message, which is: Avoid Honor Diaries because anyone who exposes atrocities committed by Muslims is unworthy of consideration, no matter how valid the exposition.

And I can prove it.

CAIR has a very close relationship with another Muslim Brotherhood creation, the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) — an Islamic-supremacist think-tank we’ve also discussed in these pages (see, e.g., here). As Steve Emerson points out, disclosure forms IIIT filed with the IRS show thousands of dollars in contributions to CAIR. IIIT was also a major financial backer of Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative Sami al-Arian, whom CAIR continued to champion even after his guilty plea to a terrorism charge.

As I’ve previously recounted, IIIT is one of the influential Islamic academic outfits that have endorsed Reliance of the Traveller, the English translation of the classic sharia manual, `Umdat al-Salik. Indeed, the endorsement, written by IIIT’s then-president, Taha Jabir al-`Alwani, is included in the introduction section of the published manual. Dr. Alwani, a revered figure in Muslim Brotherhood circles, highly recommended Reliance as both a “textbook for teaching Islamic jurisprudence to English-speakers” and a legal reference for sharia scholars.

Here are just some of the things Reliance teaches about the treatment of women under Islamic law (with supporting citations to sections of the manual):

While retaliation is generally obligatory for the killing of a Muslim, there is to be no retaliation against “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” (Reliance o1.1 & o1.2.) This provision, among others, provides sharia justification for honor killing.

Female “circumcision” is obligatory (although only recommended or considered “a mere courtesy to the husband” in some Islamic legal schools); it consists of “removing the prepuce of the clitoris.” (Reliance e4.3.)

“It is recommended for a guardian to offer his marriageable female charges in marriage to righteous men.” For purposes of marriage, a woman must have a male guardian. A father or grandfather may compel his virgin daughter or granddaughter to marry a suitable match without her consent. A man may offer his prepubescent daughter in marriage provided that the marriage payment is sufficient. (Reliance m2.1, m3.4, 3.7, 3.13, m8.2.)

“It is obligatory for a woman to let her husband have sex with her immediately when (a) he asks her (b) at home (c) and she can physically endure it.” (Reliance m5.1.)

A Muslim woman may only marry a Muslim man; a Muslim man may marry up to four women, who may be Muslim, Christian, or Jewish (but no apostates from Islam). (Reliance m6.0 & ff. — Marriage.)

A woman is required to be obedient to her husband and is prohibited from leaving the marital home without permission; if permitted to go out, she must conceal her figure or alter it “to a form unlikely to draw looks from men or attract them.” (Reliance p42.0 & ff.)

If a wife is disobedient or “rebellious,” her husband may hit her (though not “in a way that injures her”) as long as he has first tried to “correct matters” by “admonition and advice” and by refusing to sleep with her. (Reliance m10.12.)

A non-Muslim may not be awarded custody of a Muslim child. (Reliance m13.2-3.)

A woman has no right of custody of her child from a previous marriage when she remarries “because married life will occupy her with fulfilling the rights of her husband and prevent her from tending to the child.” (Reliance m13.4.)

It is unlawful for women to leave the house with faces unveiled. (Reliance m2.3.)

It is unlawful for a woman to show any part of her body to an adolescent boy or a non-Muslim woman. (Reliance m2.7.)

The testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man. (Reliance o24.7.)

A woman’s inheritance rights are worth half that of a man. (Reliance L6.3 & L6.4.)

If a case involves an allegation of fornication (including rape), “then it requires four male witnesses.” (Reliance o24.9.)

The penalty for fornication outside marriage (for a woman or a man) is to be stoned to death, unless one is without the “capacity to remain chaste,” in which case the penalty is “being scourged one hundred stripes and banished to a distance of at least 81 km./50mi. for one year.” (Reliance o12.0 & ff.) Note that because the witness requirement for rape can rarely be met, and because a woman who cannot prove she has been raped (if the rapist is not her husband) will be found to have fornicated outside marriage and thus subject to fornication penalties, rape often goes unreported in sharia societies.

If a Muslim woman (or a man) apostatizes from Islam, the penalty is death. Apostasy includes not only renouncing Islam but, among other things, speaking words that imply disbelief, denying Islamic obligations, and being “sarcastic about any ruling of the Sacred Law.” (Reliance o8.0& ff., o9.0 & ff.)

The penalty for homosexual activity (“sodomy and lesbianism”) is death. (Reliance p17.0 & ff.)

The establishment of a caliphate is obligatory, and the caliph must be Muslim and male. “The Prophet . . . said, ‘Men are already destroyed when they obey women.’” (Reliance o25.0 & ff; see also p28.0, on Mohammed’s condemnation of “masculine women and effeminate men.”)

So will CAIR, the vaunted “civil rights” organization, be issuing one of its scathing condemnations against its friends at IIIT for endorsing an interpretation of sharia that permits honor killing, female genital mutilation, violence against women, coerced marriages, arranged child marriages, polygamy, inequality under law, and the denial — by savage means — of liberty, privacy, and freedom of conscience?

My guess is CAIR will tell you to ignore Reliance of the Traveller. After all, it’s not important that IIIT endorsed it (as did the general director of research, writing, and translation at al-Azhar University’s Islamic Research Academy); what matters is that I told you about it, which is, you know, so . . . Islamophobic.

As Honor Diaries powerfully illustrates, women in many Muslim-majority countries face violence, abuse, and systematic inequality. We can listen to CAIR and ignore this travesty; or we can take pride in the brave people trying to put a stop to it.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.