Thursday, July 04, 2013
Mariano Rivera saves another as he savors farewell tour
By Kevin Kernan
July 4, 2013
Twins manager Ron Gardenhire, along with first baseman Justin Morneau and closer Glen Perkins, presented Mariano Rivera with a rocking chair made of Twins bats broken by Rivera’s pitches. “We call this the ‘Chair of Broken Dreams,’ ’’ Gardenhire said.
MINNEAPOLIS — The injuries keep coming for the Yankees, but at least they have some things going for them — CC Sabathia, Robinson Cano, the inept Twins and Mariano Rivera to close the deal.
On the day Manny Ramirez landed with yet another ballclub, signing a minor league deal with the Rangers, Rivera continued his dignified departure along his MLB Victory Tour, closing out Sabathia’s 200th win last night, a 3-2 Yankees’ victory over the Twins at Target Field.
This is Rivera’s last Yankees team. This team is nothing like those Dynasty Yankees, but this team is special to Rivera in many ways because it has battled through so much.
“We don’t have the team that we usually have,’’ Rivera told the Post, “But what we have is what we have and this is my team. I think they’re great. These guys are giving us everything that they have. I can’t ask for more. These guys play hard, you can’t ask for more.
“You just want to appreciate the game, appreciate the players that you are playing with and knowing they are giving everything.’’
All that speaks volumes about Mariano Rivera.
“He’s unbelievable,’’ Sabathia said, “and to still be able to pitch a such a high-level. Usually when you get to these last-round guys, they are not performing like he is, but he’s throwing harder than ever.’’
On Tuesday, Rivera was given a rocking chair crafted from broken bats belonging to Minnesota hitters, bats broken by Rivera, according to Twins manager Ron Gardenhire.
“That’s the best one yet,’’ Rivera said of the gifts that have come his way. “There was a lot of thought put into this gift.’’
Much thought has been put into his retirement tour. Rivera said he has received so much from this long goodbye.
Jason Zillo, the Yankees director of communications and media relations has been on the tour with Rivera, organizing each stop, like a Tuesday visit with longtime Twins employees. Zillo has witnessed Rivera’s gentle blend of kindness, humility and thankfulness.
“A lot of players say at the end of their career that they will really get to appreciate it after they’re done,’’ Zillo said. “Well, Mo is appreciating it now while he is still living it.’’
Rivera is straddling the life of being a superstar and a retiring legend. He still is not ready for that rocking chair.
Rivera already has 28 saves (636 lifetime) and when he gets to 30 that will mark the 15th season he has had at least 30 saves, which would break a tie with Trevor Hoffman for the most such seasons all time. Rivera also has a lifetime ERA of 2.20, the lowest such mark all-time with 1,000 innings pitched, fractionally ahead of Eddie Cicotte (2.20) and just ahead of Jim Scott (2.26) and Babe Ruth (2.28), according to Elias Sports Bureau.
That is some heady stuff. That is Mariano Rivera.
He loves every minute of his final season. During batting practice he tossed baseballs to fans. After the game he playfully high-fived Travis Hafner’s young son Blake.
When Rivera was asked if this feels like his last go-round, he said, “I’m really not thinking about it at all. It’s more of a joyous thing than anything else, I am enjoying every minute of it. And all the people I’ve met, they all bring their different feelings and personality.
“What I get from them is that they all appreciate what we do, that’s the beauty of it and I appreciate what they do. I get more than what I am giving.’’
That is the perfect way to go out.
With Ramirez signing with another team, which happens often in this game, does that make his journey even much more special?
“I respect whatever a guy does, if he wants to hang on for the longest time, that’s fine,’’ Rivera said. “But I don’t want to do that.
Rivera then smiled and said, “I’m not going nowhere. The only place I’m going from here is home.’’
Another perfect ending for the Great Rivera.
Read more:Kevin Kernan: New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera picks up 28th save of season as he savors his farewell tour - NYPOST.comhttp://www.nypost.com/p/sports/yankees/win_by_twin_of_their_teeth_K7RJQXZfiTWNSfWPyQ4saJ#ixzz2Y4tvtjGM
Egypt: Now What?
Posted By Robert Spencer On July 4, 2013 @ 12:38 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 3 Comments
Egyptians protest against President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt's landmark Tahrir square in Cairo. Egypt, on June 30, 2013. UPI/Ahmed Jomaa
Few analysts expected that the demonstrations in Egypt over the past few days would result in such a swift toppling of Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood regime, and no one can be sure of what is going to happen next in Egypt, but there are some things we do know:
First is that the forces standing for equality of rights for all and a free society in Egypt are overjoyed at what happened Wednesday. Secularists and Coptic Christians are celebrating, and insisting to a Western press that has been as indefatigably pro-Muslim Brotherhood as Barack Obama that this is not a military coup, but a revolution, a true people’s revolution as the “Arab Spring” that toppled Mubarak was supposed to be.
For this group, Egyptian Army Chief Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi sounded all the rights as he announced the removal of Morsi and the suspension of the Sharia constitution that Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood colleagues had forced upon the Egyptian people. “We’ll build an Egyptian society,” Al-Sisi declared, “that is strong and stable, that will not exclude anyone.” Morsi, of course, had insisted that the Egyptian society he had in mind wouldn’t exclude anyone, either, but the nation’s Christians and Western-oriented women knew that their inclusion would be ensured only if they knew their place. They hope that Al-Sisi’s statement represents a genuine affirmation of a society that will not impose Islamic law and will guarantee equality of rights for all.
What’s more, Egypt’s new rulers moved swiftly late Wednesday night to shut down three Islamic supremacist TV channels, including one run by the Muslim Brotherhood, and also raided Al Jazeera’s Egyptian offices – clear indications that they want to set Egypt on a course away from Sharia and Islamic absolutism.
I’m a free speech advocate. I don’t believe people whose views one dislikes should be shut down. That’s the road to tyranny. That’s the weapon of the desperately insecure and authoritarian Left. These Islamic supremacist channels should have been allowed to operate, as long as they weren’t the only voices speaking to Egyptians. Still, this is a good indication of the current leadership’s determination not to allow Sharia in Egypt.
Also ecstatic at Wednesday’s events, however, are the Salafists and other Islamic supremacist factions that despised Morsi for not imposing Islamic law quickly enough. Some protesters over the last few days even superimposed an image of Morsi over a Star of David, much as the “Arab Spring” demonstrators defaced posters of Mubarak by drawing Stars of David on his forehead. The implication in both instances is that the protesters despised the rulers for being pawns of the hated Israelis, and specifically for not abrogating the Camp David Accords and going to war with Israel.
Especially now with its economy in tatters, Egypt has good reason not to go to war with Israel, for doing so would likely jeopardize the billions it receives in aid from the United States – even in this age of Obama. Morsi, as pragmatic as the Muslim Brotherhood has been for ages, and as willing as his organization has always been to work toward final victory in stages, showed little signs of risking that aid. But this pragmatism enraged Islamic supremacist, who castigated Morsi for his gradualism (tadarruj), a concept that Sharia hardliners frown upon.
Ironically, however, now that Morsi is gone (at least for now), that U.S. aid could be at risk anyway. Barack Obama issued a stern statement Wednesday, directing U.S. government agencies to “review” the aid they’re giving to Egypt: “The United States is monitoring the very fluid situation in Egypt, and we believe that ultimately the future of Egypt can only be determined by the Egyptian people. Nevertheless, we are deeply concerned by the decision of the Egyptian Armed Forces to remove President Morsi and suspend the Egyptian constitution. I now call on the Egyptian military to move quickly and responsibly to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government as soon as possible through an inclusive and transparent process, and to avoid any arbitrary arrests of President Morsi and his supporters. Given today’s developments, I have also directed the relevant departments and agencies to review the implications under U.S. law for our assistance to the Government of Egypt.”
Obama made no similar statement when Hosni Mubarak was toppled. The Muslim Brotherhood could well use this statement as a knife to the throat of Egypt, demanding that they be restored to power as the only means to ensure that the American aid keeps flowing and that Egypt’s economy doesn’t collapse utterly.
And to be sure, the Brotherhood is still around, and still enjoys broad popular support, despite the black eye that Morsi’s disastrous regime has given it. The developments in Egypt Wednesday are surprising and welcome, but they do not presage a new birth of freedom in Egypt, any more than did the toppling of Mubarak and the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Nonetheless, it is hard not to take some joy in events that have Obama, whose support for the Muslim Brotherhood has been consistent and unstinting since he invited its leaders to attend his June 2009 speech in Cairo, “concerned,” and have Muslim Brotherhood groups in the U.S. such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issuing confused and angry statements questioning the protesters’ motives and reminding the world that Morsi was democratically elected.
Whether the demonstrators in Egypt who brought down Morsi can ultimately defeat the pro-Sharia forces in Egypt and establish a truly free society, and whether enough of them even really want to, remains to be seen. But if Obama and CAIR see them as foes, they can’t be all bad.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
Few analysts expected that the demonstrations in Egypt over the past few days would result in such a swift toppling of Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood regime, and no one can be sure of what is going to happen next in Egypt, but there are some things we do know:
First is that the forces standing for equality of rights for all and a free society in Egypt are overjoyed at what happened Wednesday. Secularists and Coptic Christians are celebrating, and insisting to a Western press that has been as indefatigably pro-Muslim Brotherhood as Barack Obama that this is not a military coup, but a revolution, a true people’s revolution as the “Arab Spring” that toppled Mubarak was supposed to be.
For this group, Egyptian Army Chief Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi sounded all the rights as he announced the removal of Morsi and the suspension of the Sharia constitution that Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood colleagues had forced upon the Egyptian people. “We’ll build an Egyptian society,” Al-Sisi declared, “that is strong and stable, that will not exclude anyone.” Morsi, of course, had insisted that the Egyptian society he had in mind wouldn’t exclude anyone, either, but the nation’s Christians and Western-oriented women knew that their inclusion would be ensured only if they knew their place. They hope that Al-Sisi’s statement represents a genuine affirmation of a society that will not impose Islamic law and will guarantee equality of rights for all.
What’s more, Egypt’s new rulers moved swiftly late Wednesday night to shut down three Islamic supremacist TV channels, including one run by the Muslim Brotherhood, and also raided Al Jazeera’s Egyptian offices – clear indications that they want to set Egypt on a course away from Sharia and Islamic absolutism.
I’m a free speech advocate. I don’t believe people whose views one dislikes should be shut down. That’s the road to tyranny. That’s the weapon of the desperately insecure and authoritarian Left. These Islamic supremacist channels should have been allowed to operate, as long as they weren’t the only voices speaking to Egyptians. Still, this is a good indication of the current leadership’s determination not to allow Sharia in Egypt.
Also ecstatic at Wednesday’s events, however, are the Salafists and other Islamic supremacist factions that despised Morsi for not imposing Islamic law quickly enough. Some protesters over the last few days even superimposed an image of Morsi over a Star of David, much as the “Arab Spring” demonstrators defaced posters of Mubarak by drawing Stars of David on his forehead. The implication in both instances is that the protesters despised the rulers for being pawns of the hated Israelis, and specifically for not abrogating the Camp David Accords and going to war with Israel.
Especially now with its economy in tatters, Egypt has good reason not to go to war with Israel, for doing so would likely jeopardize the billions it receives in aid from the United States – even in this age of Obama. Morsi, as pragmatic as the Muslim Brotherhood has been for ages, and as willing as his organization has always been to work toward final victory in stages, showed little signs of risking that aid. But this pragmatism enraged Islamic supremacist, who castigated Morsi for his gradualism (tadarruj), a concept that Sharia hardliners frown upon.
Ironically, however, now that Morsi is gone (at least for now), that U.S. aid could be at risk anyway. Barack Obama issued a stern statement Wednesday, directing U.S. government agencies to “review” the aid they’re giving to Egypt: “The United States is monitoring the very fluid situation in Egypt, and we believe that ultimately the future of Egypt can only be determined by the Egyptian people. Nevertheless, we are deeply concerned by the decision of the Egyptian Armed Forces to remove President Morsi and suspend the Egyptian constitution. I now call on the Egyptian military to move quickly and responsibly to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government as soon as possible through an inclusive and transparent process, and to avoid any arbitrary arrests of President Morsi and his supporters. Given today’s developments, I have also directed the relevant departments and agencies to review the implications under U.S. law for our assistance to the Government of Egypt.”
Obama made no similar statement when Hosni Mubarak was toppled. The Muslim Brotherhood could well use this statement as a knife to the throat of Egypt, demanding that they be restored to power as the only means to ensure that the American aid keeps flowing and that Egypt’s economy doesn’t collapse utterly.
And to be sure, the Brotherhood is still around, and still enjoys broad popular support, despite the black eye that Morsi’s disastrous regime has given it. The developments in Egypt Wednesday are surprising and welcome, but they do not presage a new birth of freedom in Egypt, any more than did the toppling of Mubarak and the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Nonetheless, it is hard not to take some joy in events that have Obama, whose support for the Muslim Brotherhood has been consistent and unstinting since he invited its leaders to attend his June 2009 speech in Cairo, “concerned,” and have Muslim Brotherhood groups in the U.S. such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issuing confused and angry statements questioning the protesters’ motives and reminding the world that Morsi was democratically elected.
Whether the demonstrators in Egypt who brought down Morsi can ultimately defeat the pro-Sharia forces in Egypt and establish a truly free society, and whether enough of them even really want to, remains to be seen. But if Obama and CAIR see them as foes, they can’t be all bad.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/egypt-now-what/
Coaching crisis: College basketball loses integrity with Brad Stevens' jump to NBA
By Pat Forde
http://sports.yahoo.com
July 3, 2013
The single biggest drain on the quality and credibility of college basketball over the last 20 years has been early entries to the National Basketball Association.
Primarily, that’s been a player problem.
Wednesday it was a coach problem.
A huge coach problem.
Brad Stevens, college basketball’s single brightest light under the age of 40, jilted the college ranks well before anyone thought he would. If anyone ever thought he would.
The 36-year-old stunned the basketball world by leaving Butler for the Boston Celtics, which absolutely nobody saw coming. This Third of July shocker was a star-spangled stealth move. No rumors, no buzz, no speculation. It was quite the covert operation.
Stevens had been courted for every major opening in the college ranks for the past three years, since the first of Butler’s consecutive, fairy-tale runs to the NCAA Tournament title game. The only places that ever seemed like possible destinations were blue-blood locales — Duke, North Carolina, Indiana. Nobody ever linked him with the NBA, until all of a sudden he was gone.
It was the most significant pro raid on the college coaching ranks since the Celtics nabbed Rick Pitino from Kentucky in 1997. My guess is that this one will work out better than that one.
Stevens is on par with Pitino in terms of intellect, but a better fit in the pros than mid-90s Pitino from an ego standpoint. He has the kind of temperament that should work well with professional millionaires — even Rajon Rondo, who often exasperated Tubby Smith in college and Doc Rivers in the pros. Stevens should have no problem putting the players first, which is the way it has to be in the NBA.
[Related: Rewards outweight risks for Brad Stevens]
So this looks like a great move for the Celtics. But it is a massive blow to college hoops.
Stevens had been so perfect in college, especially the mid-major fit at Butler. Young, sincere, not jaded, thankful where he was, winning without a whiff of scandal or a hint of ethical compromise — he was the white knight the game needed, coaching in the Camelot of Hinkle Fieldhouse.
But white knights and Camelot exist in storybooks. And college hoops is no storybook place.
It is a game compromised by towering egos, control freaks, scam artists and empty suits. That doesn’t mean there aren’t a few good men coaching at that level — quite a few, really — but they tend to be overshadowed by con men who talk like Gandhi and operate like the Godfather.
Stevens was not that guy.
He wasn’t into hiring AAU operators who couldn’t coach a lick but would bring along a star player in a package deal. He didn’t turn Butler into a safe haven for recruits who hopscotched from one high school to the next, producing transcripts that looked like ransom notes. He didn’t ask anyone to believe, with a straight face, that impoverished kids with fancy cars and uneducated kids with great grades were perfectly natural occurrences. He didn’t take shortcuts, didn’t game the system, didn’t ask the Butler administration to look the other way while he got things done by any means necessary.
And he still won big. At a place that had no business winning big.
Making the 2010 Final Four was an incredible triumph for a small school from the Horizon League. Then the Bulldogs nearly won the thing, until Gordon Hayward’s half-court heave banged off the rim after the buzzer. That Final Four was in Indianapolis, and on the day of the title game, players on the hometown team actually went to class.
It was the feel-good story college basketball badly needed.
Then Butler backed it up the next year, going back to the title game with a team that truly had no business making it that far without Hayward, who had turned pro after his sophomore season. The Bulldogs collapsed in the final against Connecticut, but that back-to-back run ranks high among the great feats in college basketball history.
Stevens was the architect. The guiding force. The preternaturally calm guy who had every answer — in the huddles during timeouts, in the press conferences, everywhere. Butler was built on a great foundation of mid-major success, but the biggest reason it rapidly rose from the Horizon League to the Atlantic-10 to the new Big East was the nerdy looking dude on the sidelines.
No wonder every single school from every single power conference that had an opening since 2010 at least put out a feeler to see if Stevens was ready to leave the Shangri-La of Hinkle for the big time. And every time the answer was no.
The longer Stevens stayed at Butler, the more college basketball needed him to stay. He had six glorious seasons there, but the game needed him for 26 more. As there steadily became less to believe in, the reassurance of believing in Brad only grew.
Whenever people despaired about the future of college coaching — which was often, and quite frequently from within the profession — the two guys you could point to as reasons for hope were Brad Stevens at Butler and Shaka Smart at VCU.
Now that hope has been cut in half. A nation turns its lonely eyes to Richmond, Va., and hopes Smart can handle the burden by himself.
Brad Stevens will be missed. Not just by Butler, but by college basketball as a whole.
The Fourth of July President
Who else, but someone born on July 4?
July 3, 2013
Coolidge with pitching great Walter Johnson
Calvin Coolidge, who became the 20th President, was born on the Fourth of July, as if Divine Providence had decided he was to be the embodiment of basic American values. As it turned out, he was.
He was born in 1872 to a long line of farmers who scratched out a living from the thin soil of Vermont. The residents of Plymouth Notch took it for granted that hard physical work was part of their destiny. As a boy, Calvin was no exception. Chores around the home and farm were part of his daily life.
Public service was also a birthright. Calvin grew up to believe that honest and earnest public service was the highest calling. He had an almost sacramental view of the democracy of the town meeting and, later, by extension that of larger deliberative bodies. No wonder. His father was a role model. In addition to his involvement in running the town, he was a justice of the peace and state legislator.
The characteristics that we think of as ideal American ones became his through example: thrift, modesty, self-reliance, tolerance, morality, and civility. Even in today’s age of relativism and situation ethics, such characteristics are widely admired.
These traits, combined with shyness, led him to use words carefully and economically (in public life he became jokingly known as “Silent Cal”). When one reads his speeches (he wrote his own), the value of this approach to communication comes through strongly. He did not use more words than were necessary to describe an idea. The resulting clarity made many people realize that he was dispensing common sense.
After finishing college at Amherst he read law and began to practice it in Northampton, Massachusetts. Public service also called, from city council to mayor, the state House of Representatives, state Senate president and lieutenant governor; he went on to become governor. In 1919 the Boston police went on strike. After the directly responsible authorities dithered, Coolidge, using the State Guard, stepped in and quickly brought it to an end. Nineteen policemen were fired.
When Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, asked him for leniency for the strike’s ring-leaders, Coolidge replied, “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” This statement brought him into national consciousness — and politics.
In 1920 he become Warren Harding’s vice-presidential running mate. Harding, who was later vilified by the Left, managed to create the Bureau of the Budget (now the Office of Management and Budget) to coordinate budgets of all Executive Branch units. Coolidge was able to use its creation to good effect in reducing expenses and providing balanced budgets.
When Harding died unexpectedly on August 2, 1923, Coolidge was sworn in by kerosene lantern by his father, a justice of the peace, in the family parlor at Plymouth Notch. He lost no time in taking hold of the reins of government.
He inherited Andrew Mellon as Secretary of the Treasury. Mellon had been engineering sharp income tax rate reductions. Coolidge began allotting several hours a week on his schedule to working with Mellon and his budget director to cut, squeeze, and trim expenses to get the federal budget under control and provide surpluses.
Unprecedented growth followed for the rest of the Coolidge years. Per capita income increased by nearly 50 percent between 1921 and 1929. Automobile production, which was only 569,054 vehicles in 1914, soared to 5,621,715 in 1929. Air travel grew from 49,713 passengers in 1920 to 417,505 in 1929. It was an era of great technological advancement. The number of patents issued between 1918 and 1934 (most of those during Harding-Coolidge years) was not matched until the late 1980s and ’90s.
Coolidge believed that, in normal times, the government should get out of the way, for the most part, and let the private sector — the people — build and expand economic prosperity. He said, “I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry, This is the chief meaning of freedom.” Would that Barack Obama had a hearing aid to overcome his tin ear that blocks such messages.
Upon Coolidge’s early death in January 1933 (just short of age 61), humorist Will Rogers wrote this tribute: “By golly, you little redheaded New Englander, I liked you. You put horse sense into statesmanship.”
Wednesday, July 03, 2013
Wendy Davis shouldn’t be sainted for her filibuster
By
July 2, 2013
I like Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis. I admire her intelligence, chutzpah and tenacity.
But her elevation to national heroine, essentially owing to her ability to speak for 11 hours straight without a break while wearing (how many times did we hear or read it?) “rouge-red sneakers,” is absurd.
No matter what one’s politics, one can’t help noticing the strangeness of this latest phenomenon — fame by filibuster — or the remarkable acclamation bestowed on Davis for her passionate defense of a woman’s right to destroy an unborn child (or fetus, if you prefer) up to the 24th week of pregnancy.
One may wish to leave unfettered a woman’s right to do anything to herself, even if it means destroying her own offspring, but shouldn’t one be at least somewhat discomfited?
Instead, we celebrate.
In the days after Davis’ now-famous filibuster to block a Texas bill that would have banned abortions after 20 weeks, as well as imposed stricter safety standards and doctor qualifications for the procedure, the flaxen-haired damsel (if only to be consistent with media coverage thus far) has been on a magic carpet ride through the green rooms of America’s television talk shows.
Almost without exception, Davis has been regaled as a heroine of the war on women, a new gladiator in the pantheon of feminist warriors. As such, she faced such probing questions as “How are you even awake today?” and “What was it like standing for that long?” Like wowser-zowser, Wonder Woman, “Will you filibuster again?”
When MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough asked a substantive question — whether Davis thinks 20 weeks is an unreasonable limit on abortion — she replied in part that some women don’t even know they’re pregnant at 20 weeks. Really? Even if true, though surely rare, this observation is utterly irrelevant.
We have indeed come a long way from Roe v. Wade. In the early days of legal abortion, nearly everyone insisted that the procedure wasn’t intended as birth control. Millions of abortions later, original intent is laughable.
Even Bill Clinton’s call for abortion to be safe, legal and rare has a fairy-tale quality by today’s standards. Such that when legislators seek to place limits on abortion, based at least in part on technology that now allows us to see fetuses as more than a clump of cells, we are appalled.
No adult needs a primer on the politics of abortion. Part of what makes this issue so difficult is that both sides are, in principle, correct. Anti-abortion folks see it as a human rights issue. Given that human life is a continuum that begins at conception, there can be no compromise.
Pro-abortion rights folks see any limitation on abortion as an infringement on a woman’s right to control her own body. In their view, the baby isn’t a baby with human rights until it leaves the mother’s body, thereby becoming autonomous if lacking in self-sufficiency.
No wonder we can’t untwist this pretzel.
Ultimately, the question comes down to which awful option we can live with. Although a majority of Americans (61 percent) generally favor legal abortion in the first trimester, they become much more squeamish in the second (27 percent) and third (14 percent).
In other words, we seem to be relatively comfortable terminating a pregnancy before the fetus looks much like a baby. At 20 weeks, the halfway point, the fetus looks very much like a baby.
The abortion conundrum is further complicated by the dishonesty of our terminology. Simplistic phrases such as “pro-life” and “pro-choice” distort the complexity of how most people feel. It is also deceptive to refer to abortion as only a “women’s health issue” or to people who push for abortion limits as waging a “war on women.”
Perhaps the silliness and vagueness of our language have led to silliness and vagueness in our understanding and behavior. Who wants to talk about the meaning and purpose of life when you can talk about rouge-red shoes?
But when the question of whether we should destroy human life at any stage is reduced to theater, leaving many journalists gushing like breathless red-carpet commentators, we have lost more than a sense of decorum.
One may agree with Davis’s principled stand on the Texas bill, which, she argued, tried to do too much. Even so, a little less glee from the bleachers would seem more appropriate to the moment.
Obama’s Visit to Hell
Posted By Daniel Greenfield On July 3, 2013 @ 12:45 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 7 Comments
US President Barack Obama flanked by First Lady Michelle Obama, left, waves with South African President Jacob Zuma, second right, and his wife Tobeka Madiba Zuma, right, on the steps of Union Building in Pretoria, South Africa, Saturday June 29, 2013. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)During his visit to South Africa, Obama compared Nelson Mandela to George Washington.
George Washington, unlike Nelson Mandela, was not a member of the Communist Party. Martha Washington had not been involved in murdering a 14-year-old boy or in urging the colonists to burn men, women and children alive by placing rubber tires around them, pouring gasoline on them and setting them on fire.
The American Revolution did not unleash a state of permanent lawlessness in which the quality of life declined drastically for everyone in the country and people went to sleep every night expecting to be murdered in their beds.
If both Washington and Mandela are to be considered the fathers of their respective countries, Washington’s children are figuring out how to go into space while Mandela’s children are raping children because they believe it will magically give them immunity to contracting AIDS.
“The outpouring of love that we’ve seen in recent days shows the triumph of Mandela,” Obama said. Perhaps he should have stopped by the Du Plessis farm where Roelof Du Plessis, a white farmer, was murdered in one of those outpourings of love while trying to protect his wife and son.
While the media maintained its death watch on Mandela, yet another white farmer was murdered in a genocidal campaign unleashed by ANC rule.
The bodies of men like Du Plessis are Mandela’s real legacy. The end of Apartheid did not bring with it reconciliation, but a state of corruption and terror. The number of white farmers murdered has even attracted the attention of Genocide Watch. And the violence isn’t random. It comes from the top down.
Winnie Mandela, the Martha Washington of South Africa, if Martha had been responsible for multiple murders and had been sentenced to prison, had once said, “With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country.”
The matches were real matches and the necklaces were the rubber tires draped around the necks of the enemies of the ANC, covered with gasoline and lit with a match.
The ANC’s Western enablers had insisted on pretending that such atrocities were the temporary expedients of an oppressed people, rather than the tactics of a terrorist movement with close ties to the Communist Party.
The end of Apartheid and the growth of crime and violence under ANC rule have shown that there was nothing temporary about these atrocities. They were not the responses of desperate men to oppression, but the brutality of a lawless movement that practiced terror for its own sake and is still practicing it today.
While white farmers die, President Zuma, whom Obama met with on his visit to South Africa, sings, “Kill the Boer.” “Kill the Boer” is an ANC song. Its continuing presence on the public stage of the ANC regime and its leaders two decades later is a sharp reminder that no matter how often world leaders sing the praises of Nelson Mandela; the Mandela legacy is a racist state that discriminates and tolerates murder.
But Post-Apartheid South Africa is more than just a place where racial hatreds are vented, it is a land where rape is so ubiquitous that 4 out of 10 South African women will be raped and 1 in 4 men cheerfully admit to being rapists and even its president was put on trial for rape.
South Africa has the largest number of people infected with AIDS. The disease, like so many other forms of social breakdown, only really took off once the ANC came to power. Unemployment is widespread and every kind of mortality, including maternal mortality, shot up under the rule of the African National Congress which was better at necklacing its victims, often other Africans, than at running a country.
The left didn’t fight against Apartheid because it opposed racism. It fought against Apartheid because it supported the ANC. The distinction is a fundamentally important one and it explains why the left has continued covering up the profound failures of ANC rule when even Desmond Tutu has admitted them.
In 2005, Kanye West told audiences, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”. In fact it’s the left that doesn’t care about black people. Rwanda is only one example among many. The left was not interested in freeing South African blacks, only in imposing Communist ANC rule on them.
That mission has been accomplished. The ANC has become a kleptocracy like any other; violent, corrupt and dangerous. But the left will never treat a Zuma the way that they would treat any other regional kleptocrat. Instead South Africa has become the model for what “people power can accomplish.”
And that has become South Africa’s true purpose. It is meant to inspire Western liberals who want to read soothing quotes from Nelson Mandela while knowing nothing about the current situation in South Africa.
Nelson Mandela’s death allows media outlets that know nothing about either George Washington or Mandela to compare the two men.
“Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule indeed extends with more or less force to every species of free Government,” George Washington wrote in his farewell address.
Under ANC rule, South Africa has neither virtue nor morality. It barely has popular government as the ANC has consolidated its power. It is a ruined land that Western liberals insist on calling a utopia. It is a land at war with itself that Western liberals insist on believing found peace through the inspiring words of Nelson Mandela.
At the HIV Foundation Center, with Desmond Tutu, Obama listened to a 15-year-old perform a song he titled, “Hell on Earth.” The name is a fitting description of what Mandela’s South Africa has become.
The Mandela myth of a transformed South Africa is so toxic because it encourages the left to repeat the same process again and again, while ignoring the actual outcome. As long as the real story of South Africa remains buried under the trite quotes of a Mandela or a Tutu and the insistence of Western liberals on believing that their cause had a happy ending, the same story will happen again and again.
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Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-visit-to-hell/
How Not to Remember Gettysburg: Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Abysmal Speech
Posted By Ron Radosh On July 2, 2013 @ 10:48 am In Uncategorized | 5 Comments
This week our nation remembers the battle that raged at Gettysburg 150 years ago. Thousands were killed in three days of fierce fighting. Had the Union troops not won, an outcome that was not a sure thing when the fighting began, our nation would have been quite different than it is today.
If you want to know what it means, many commentators have eloquently explained its critical importance. Today, David Brooks [1] writes that the soldiers who fought did so not just to protect their immediate comrades, but out of “love for country” and a feeling of “indebtedness to the past.” At Commentary, Peter Wehner [2] writes that this three-day battle, in which 51,000 were killed, wounded, or missing, the outcome was essential to our future: “It ended slavery and it preserved the Union, which meant it preserved and extended liberty in America and the world.”
Few have written about its meaning more eloquently, however, than the esteemed Civil War historian Allen C. Guelzo, author of the recently released book [3] Gettysburg:The Last Invasion. Writing in National Review [4], Guelzo points out that it might have been the Southern states’ last chance to win their fight for independence, and hence, to win the war. General Robert E. Lee’s strategy of luring the Union troops after him and then smashing them to oblivion was close to being accomplished. As Guelzo writes, “it nearly worked.”
Fortunately, Union troops arrived in the town of Gettysburg first, and were “ready to fight for dear life to hold it.” The Union won, but at great cost. The final toll on the Union side was “3,903 dead, 18,735 wounded, and 5,425 ‘missing,’ so that the entire butcher’s bill edged up to 28,063.” Guelzo writes:
Gettysburg did not end the war in one stroke, but it was decisive enough to restore the sinking morale of the Union, decisive enough to keep at bay the forces that hoped Lincoln could be persuaded to revoke emancipation, and decisive enough to make people understand that the Confederacy would never be able to mount a serious invasion again.In the New York Times [5], Guelzo sheds more light on how and why the Confederates lost the battle and the Union won: “But win it they did,” he writes, “and as that realization sank in, it rejuvenated the sagging weariness of the Union as no other single event in the war.”
Either of Professor Guelzo’s two articles would have made an appropriate and powerful speech at the official commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the battle held two nights ago at Gettysburg National Park. If the National Park Service and the Gettysburg Foundation had any integrity, they would have asked Gulezo, or perhaps our nation’s most well-known historian of the Civil War, James McPherson [6], to give the keynote speech.
Instead, they went for celebrity and chose the well-known television historian and best-selling author Doris Kearns Goodwin [7]. My wife and I watched it live two nights ago, and were stunned at what we heard. Goodwin barely mentioned Gettysburg, except for a perfunctory acknowledgement at the start of her comments.
Those in attendance were forced to listen to a self-absorbed, narcissistic, and politically correct bromide about how Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg was important as a precursor to LBJ’s support of the Civil Rights Act, the fight for gay marriage, the “women’s liberation” movement of the ’70s, and, of course, the need for a female president (there were numerous references to Hillary Clinton, Kearns Goodwin’s obvious choice).
Anyone who has heard Kearns Goodwin talk on interview programs, or read her essays, or seen previous speeches had heard it all before. A historian who was widely condemned some years back for proven plagiarism[8] — an act that did not harm her career or standing one bit — she even plagiarized herself, taking segments almost verbatim from her 1998 commencement address [9] at Dartmouth College, and similar themes and words she used in her 2006 speech [10] to the Abraham Lincoln Association.
Writer and columnist Tony Lee captures the outrage over Kearns Goodwin’s speech at Breitbart.com’s [11] “Big Journalism.” He is correct to argue that “she desecrated the hallowed land on which she spoke, dishonored Gettysburg’s honored dead, and disrespected the nearly 8,000 Americans in attendance who did not come to Gettysburg to hear about her life’s story and a progressive history lecture. “ Lee writes:
Clearly mistaking the Gettysburg 150 audience for the Aspen Ideas Festival crowd, Kearns Goodwin then lectured the audience on the “women’s liberation movement” and spoke at length about Eleanor Roosevelt. She emphasized that World War II led to a “new birth of freedom” for women and reminded attendees, “Still, we await our first female president.”Indeed. The author has actually written works of history, and in her books, she knows how to tell a story. There is a reason, after all, that the public that usually ignores history flocks to buy any tome she writes. Sadly, once the scandal about her plagiarism broke, her book sales only skyrocketed. They say that there is no such thing as bad publicity, and Kearns Goodwin’s career seems to prove that aphorism.
To me, the most outrageous section of her talk was when she told the audience that when she was on a radio talk show, Hillary Clinton phoned in and invited her to sleep over at the White House. Once there, she said, Clinton “said then we could wander the corridors together and figure out where everyone had slept 50 years before.” Later, as a guest at a Clinton administration state dinner, the first lady, President Clinton, and Kearns Goodwin and her husband Richard Goodwin went “with map in hand…through every room,” and the group was able to “figure out whose it had been during [World War II].” To her delight, she found that she was sleeping “in Winston Churchill’s bedroom.”
What, one must say, led this prolific best-selling writer to think anyone concerned with the meaning of Gettysburg would give a damn about where she and her husband slept when they were overnight guests at the White House? I was waiting to hear her say that, unlike others, she didn’t have to pay for the honor. And anyone who read her Dartmouth commencement address already knew this story.
As a historian, Kearns Goodwin should know that history is the means by which we, as a people, learn about our country’s past — how our ancestors took risks and measures that made the United States the hope of the world and created the great republic in which we now live and breathe as free men and women. Instead, Kearns Goodwin used the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the most important battle held on our own land to talk about herself, and the would-be greatness of the contemporary liberals she holds in esteem.
Her speech was a disgrace to those who fought and died at Gettysburg, and to those today who seek to honor them and remember their sacrifice. Doris Kearns Goodwin should publicly apologize, and return whatever money the Gettysburg Foundation paid to have her speak or donate it to the National Park Service to be used in maintaining the hallowed ground for future generations to enjoy.
Article printed from Ron Radosh: http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2013/07/02/how-not-to-remember-gettysburg-doris-kearns-goodwins-abysmal-speech/
URLs in this post:
[1] David Brooks: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/02/opinion/brooks-why-they-fought.html?ref=opinion&_r=0
[2] Peter Wehner: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/07/01/the-meaning-of-gettysburg-civil-war/
[3] book: http://www.amazon.com/Gettysburg-Invasion-Allen-C-Guelzo/dp/0307594084/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372785366&sr=1-1&keywords=allen+guelzo
[4] National Review: https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/352182/twilight-confederacy
[5] New York Times: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/what-gettysburg-proved/
[6] James McPherson: http://www.amazon.com/Battle-Cry-Freedom-Oxford-History/dp/019516895X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372784952&sr=1-1&keywords=james+macpherson
[7] Doris Kearns Goodwin: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Commemorativ
[8] plagiarism: http://hnn.us/articles/590.html
[9] commencement address: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/1998/june98/dkg.html
[10] 2006 speech: http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2012/02/20/midday2
[11] Breitbart.com’s: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/07/01/Doris-Kearns-Goodwin-A-Few-Inappropriate-Remarks-At-Gettysburg
Inhospitable Earth
Environmentalist killjoys pretend that this is the worst time in history to live on Earth.
Tuesday, July 02, 2013
Forbidden Science: Stephen Meyer and 'Darwin's Doubt' in the Context of Academic Freedom
By David Klinghoffer
June 18, 2013
Let's take a step back from the excitement surrounding the publication today of Stephen Meyer's new book, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, and recall the origins of the book. Well, you know by now that they go back to Steve Meyer's PhD studies at Cambridge University and before that to the discovery of the Burgess Shale in 1909 by Smithsonian Institution paleontologist Charles Doolittle Walcott -- and to Charles Darwin's own doubts about whether the Cambrian explosion, 530 million years ago, could be reconciled with his new theory.
Less familiar to many of us may be that Dr. Meyer first raised some (but far from all) of the scientific challenges that you'll find in the new book in a 2004 technical article published in a peer-reviewed biology journal, the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. The journal was edited by a Smithsonian Institution evolutionary biologist, Richard Sternberg, affiliated with the National Museum of Natural History.
I first started thinking about Meyer's critique of Darwinian theory, and the case for ID based on the Cambrian event, when I interviewed Sternberg and wrote about his story for the Wall Street Journal. You'll find that article here.
Go back and read it, but the gist is that Dr. Sternberg, merely for editing the article by Steve Meyer, was ruthlessly punished by his colleagues and supervisors, who investigated his scientific, religious, and political views and basically tried to make his life as a researcher as difficult as possible. He was finally forced out of the Smithsonian but not before the federal Office of Special Counsel concluded that Sternberg had indeed been the victim of retaliation.
Anyone who has followed the Eric Hedin affair knows that this is now standard practice by the Darwinian thought police. Dr. Hedin is the Ball State University physicist of whom University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne got wind that he, Hedin, was teaching an honors course including texts favorable to intelligent design. Among those texts were Stephen Meyer's 2004 article that resulted in Sternberg's persecution and Meyer's 2010 book Signature in the Cell. Coyne enlisted the aid of the extreme atheist group Freedom from Religion Foundation, which threatened Ball State with legal action on First Amendment grounds. Coyne and FFRP hold that teaching ID at the university level, in a public institution, amounts to establishment of religion and hence is illegal.
Absurd? Yet scary and disturbing? Absolutely, all three, but the administration at BSU launched an investigation more than four weeks ago and says it is taking the complaint "very seriously." The mind boggles -- or it would, if we didn't know of similar cases from colleges and universities around the country, which we have amply covered here at ENV. In a report over the weekend in the Muncie, IN, Star Press, we learned the names of the four faculty members assigned to investigate Hedin ("Panel investigates Christian BSU prof's class"). If this does not constitute a scandalous case of academic intimidation, what does?
(You will please, if you have not done so yet, sign the petition calling on Ball State University to promptly affirm Dr. Hedin's freedom to teach.)
I bring up the history regarding the Sternberg/Smithsonian story, and the current scandal at BSU, to remind you that the significance of Darwin's Doubt extends beyond its immediate subject: the mainstream scientific search for a replacement theory for Darwinism and the evidence for intelligent design in a variety of relevant fields.
The importance of the book is also not exhausted by the existential question that lies behind the evolution debate. If Darwin were ever shown to be right, then what psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl called (in his famous book) Man's Search for Meaning would automatically be rendered null and void. In a Darwinian universe, where life's origin and evolution reflect no design or intention, there can be no ultimate meaning to our existence, as candid Darwinists admit.
However, apart from the scientific, philosophical and spiritual meanings, the context of the book in the debate about academic freedom must also not be forgotten. The spark of the idea that Meyer elaborates in Darwin's Doubt was so controversial when it was unveiled in 2004 that it resulted in a spasm of persecution at our nation's leading public scientific institution, the Smithsonian.
Another scholar, atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, would likewise stir up the hornet's nest by commending Stephen Meyer's arguments for ID. His praise for Dr. Meyer's Signature in the Cell, and for Michael Behe and David Berlinski, is the primary reason that a Darwinian lynch mob formed against him. Fortunately, Dr. Nagel's academic position was impregnable -- which is obviously not the case with younger scientists and scholars like Sternberg and Hedin. But I trust you are noticing the pattern.
This is how the scientific "consensus" on Darwinian evolution is maintained: by fear. By bullying. And I cannot tell you how much I despise bullies. Do you agree?
Arguably, no ID theorist has aroused more persecutory rage than Stephen Meyer. What can we do, though, we who believe in the freedom to think and publish and research, free of fear? I mean practically speaking. How can we make our voices and feelings heard, so that they count? We can support appropriate legislation at the state and local level to protect high school science teachers who wish to acquaint students with the evolution debate in mainstream science.
We can let our elected representatives know that we are outraged by threats to such freedom at higher levels of education, especially in our public universities.
More immediately, but also most easily and much more enjoyably, we can buy, read and distribute Darwin's Doubt. This week is not just launch week for a book, but also an opportunity to send a message in favor of the freedom of scholars to write and teach, and our right as informed citizens to evaluate their ideas for ourselves.
- See more at: http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/06/forbidden_scien073431.html#sthash.kSu8LVDl.dpuf
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