Frank J. Gaffney Jr.: To give America freedom

The Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com
May 20, 2008

What do the following recent events have in common? The president of the United States has prostrated himself for the second time in five months before the king of Saudi Arabia, pleading for more oil. Despite George Bush's inducements — an array of advanced, offensive arms; the promise of nuclear technology with which the Saudis can expect (like the North Koreans, Iranians, Pakistanis, etc.) to acquire the ultimate weapons; and U.S. help securing Saudi Arabia's borders (something the president has declined to do at home) — the American plea was spurned. The contempt felt by the House of Saud was captured in its oil minister's quip, "If you want more oil, buy it."

• The Senate rejected, by a vote of 56-42, an initiative offered by Republicans that called for opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska and some offshore waters now closed to exploration and exploitation of their substantial oil reserves.

• In addition, that chamber's appropriations committee refused by a similar party-line vote to lift its moratorium on oil-shale production in Colorado. It seems that, if we want more oil, we will have to buy it at ever increasing prices from the Saudis and others even more unfriendly to this country's national security and economic interests — like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez or Russia's Vladimir Putin, perhaps even Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

• One thing the Senate and House did agree upon, by overwhelmingly bipartisan majorities, was suspending purchases of oil to fill the remaining 3 percent of the capacity of the Strategic Petroleum Reserves. This action will have negligible (if any) impact on energy prices. But it will ensure that less oil will be available to us than would otherwise have been the case in the event, for example, the next terrorist attack on the Saudi oil infrastructure succeeds where others have failed and seriously disrupts world supplies.

• Then there is the newly formed coalition, ostensibly spearheaded by the Grocery Manufacturers' Association, that has launched a multimillion-dollar lobbying effort aimed at discouraging development of one alternative to oil: domestically produced or imported ethanol. Wrongly asserting that producing this transportation fuel from corn is largely responsible for rising food prices and the attendant global shortages, this instant grass-roots (read, "astroturf") coalition appears to want America to remain essentially dependent on oil. Wonder where the money for this campaign is coming from?

Answer: These actions — given soaring energy prices and the attendant hemorrhage of U.S. petrodollars to, among others, people who wish us ill — represent the sort of behavior in which only a nation utterly unserious about energy security could indulge.

In truth, no matter what we do, we will need oil for the foreseeable future. As a result, we should do our utmost to find and exploit it in places either under our control (for example, near where the Cubans and Chinese are getting it off the coast of Florida) or at least friendly to us (notably, Canada, Mexico and Brazil).

It is equally axiomatic that, no matter what we do, we almost certainly will have less oil than we need, certainly at prices we can afford. The question is: Are we going to do something to meet the shortfall? Or are we simply going to allow the economy and security of the United States to bleed out at the hands of the Saudi-led OPEC cartel?

The Set America Free Coalition — an initiative launched several years ago by unlikely array of national security-, environmental- and energy-minded people and organizations from across the political spectrum — is advancing practical, near-term alternatives to that unappetizing and unacceptable prospect.

At the moment, the Coalition is mounting its own campaign aimed at achieving in the immediate future, a simple yet far-reaching goal: Ensuring each of the 17 million new cars added to America's highways each year is capable of being powered by ethanol (from whatever source), methanol (ditto) or gasoline (or some combination thereof).

There are already some 6 million of these Flexible Fuel Vehicles (FFVs) on our roads today. Most of these are American-made (name another technology in which Detroit has a competitive advantage?) It costs less than $100 per car to equip new cars with this feature.

Ask yourself, and your elected representatives and would-be presidents: As each of these cars will last, on average, roughly 17 years, do we want any more of them built the old way — namely able to use only gasoline. Can we responsibly continue for another generation to lock our transportation sector (the principal, and most profligate, consumer of imported oil) into dependence on oil substantially imported from unfriendly places?

Robert Zubrin — a leader of the Set America Free Coalition and author of the terrific new book, "Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil" — notes that, at today's oil prices, we are allowing the Saudis and their friends to impose the equivalent of a 40 percent income tax of about $3,300 on every man woman and child in this country. We cannot afford to allow such lunacy to continue.

Sooner or later, Congress will adopt an Open Fuel Standard requiring every new car sold in America to be an FFV. The effect will be, in short order, to create an immense and highly competitive market for alternative, "Freedom Fuels" that we can make here or buy from friends. That will, in turn, will set America free by beginning to end its cars' present addiction to oil. Why wait any longer?

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for The Washington Times and a founding member of the Set America Free Coalition.

So much for 'settled science'

Lorne Gunter, National Post
Published: Tuesday, May 20, 2008



Noel Keenlyside, Raveendran, AFP, Getty Images

You may have heard earlier this month that global warming is now likely to take break for a decade or more. There will be no more warming until 2015, perhaps later.

Climate scientist Noel Keenlyside, leading a team from Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Science and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, for the first time entered verifiable data on ocean circulation cycles into one of the U. N.'s climate supercomputers, and the machine spit out a projection that there will be no more warming for the foreseeable future.

Of course, Mr. Keenlyside-- long a defender of the man-made global warming theory -- was quick to add that after 2015 (or perhaps 2020), warming would resume with a vengeance.

Climate alarmists the world over were quick to add that they had known all along there would be periods when the Earth's climate would cool even as the overall trend was toward dangerous climate change.

Sorry, but that is just so much backfill.

There may have been the odd global-warming scientist in the past decade who allowed that warming would pause periodically in its otherwise relentless upward march, but he or she was a rarity.

If anything, the opposite is true: Almost no climate scientist who backed the alarmism ever expected warming would take anything like a 10 or 15-year hiatus.

Last year, in its oft-quoted report on global warming, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted a 0.3-degree C rise in temperature in the coming decade -- not a cooling or even just temperature stability.

In its previous report in 2001, the IPCC prominently displaced the so-called temperature "hockey stick" that purported to show temperature pretty much plateauing for the thousand years before 1900, then taking off in the 20th Century in a smooth upward line. No 10-year dips backwards were foreseen.

It is drummed into us, ad nauseum, that the IPCC represents 2,500 scientists who together embrace a "consensus" that man-made global warming is a "scientific fact;" and as recently as last year, they didn't see this cooling coming. So the alarmists can't weasel out of this by claiming they knew all along such anomalies would occur.

This is not something any alarmist predicted, and it showed up in none of the UN's computer projections until Mr. Keenlyside et al. were finally able to enter detailed data into their climate model on past ocean current behaviour.

Less well-known is that global temperatures have already been falling for a decade. All of which means, that by 2015 or 2020, when warming is expected to resume, we will have had nearly 20 years of fairly steady cooling.

Saints of the new climate religion, such as Al Gore, have stated that eight of the 10 years since 1998 are the warmest on record. Even if that were true, none has been as warm as 1998, which means the trend of the past decade has been downward, not upward.

Last year, for instance, saw a drop in the global average temperature of nearly 0.7 degrees C (the largest single-year movement up or down since global temperature averages have been calculated). Despite advanced predictions that 2007 would be the warmest year on record, made by such UN associates as Britain's Hadley Centre, a government climate research agency, 2007 was the coolest year since at least 1993.

According to the U. S. National Climatic Data Center, the average temperature of the global land surface in January 2008 was below the 20th-Century mean for the first time since 1982.

Also in January, Southern Hemisphere sea ice coverage was at its greatest summer level (January is summer in the Southern Hemisphere) in the past 30 years.

Neither the 3,000 temperature buoys that float throughout the world's oceans nor the eight NASA satellites that float above our atmosphere have recorded appreciable warming in the past six to eight years.

Even Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, reluctantly admitted to Reuters in January that there has been no warming so far in the 21st Century.

Does this prove that global warming isn't happening, that we can all go back to idling our SUVs 24/7? No. But it should introduce doubt into the claim that the science of global warming is "settled."

lgunter@shaw.ca

Today's Tune: Bruce Springsteen - Badlands (Live NYC 1999)

(Click on title to play video)

Today's Tune: Bruce Springsteen - Darkness On The Edge Of Town (Live 1978)

June 29, 1978, San Jose, CA

(Click on title to play video)

A Map of the Future: "Darkness on the Edge of Town" at 30

By Joyce Millman
http://www.asburyparklibrary.org



DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN - 30 YEAR ANNIVERSARY

"Here be dragons." According to legend, medieval map-makers used that phrase to signal the dangers of unexplored realms. In 1978, Bruce Springsteen drew a map and wrote "here be dragons" on it - except his warning read, "Darkness on the Edge of Town." The "darkness" haunts this album like a living, often fire-breathing, presence. On the title track, "dreams are found and lost" within its shadows. On "Streets of Fire," when Springsteen yowls, "In the darkness, I hear somebody call my name," it's as if his anguished character has imagined the voice of darkness itself. On "Adam Raised a Cain," the narrator is swallowed up by an abyss of adolescent pain: "In the darkness of your room, your mother calls you by your true name/ You remember the faces, the places, the names/ You know it's never over/ It's relentless as the rain." "Darkness" has many meanings on the album. It's temptation and salvation. It's what we desire and what we fear. It's a crucible through which our true selves are revealed. It's the sin we hide deep in our souls.

In the 1998 book "Songs," Springsteen wrote that he envisioned the characters of "Darkness" as "a community under siege" from the emotional and financial struggles of working-class life. Thirty years after the album's June 2, 1978 release, Springsteen is still guided by his old map, still squinting at the darkness on the edge of town. His most recent album "Magic" (2007) returns to a community under siege, but, this time, the siege is literal. On "Magic," the darkness takes the monstrous shape of governmental arrogance, and the toll of that arrogance hangs over the Springsteenian Anytown landscape like a soul-chilling fog. The gypsy biker is returning home in a flag-draped coffin. There are bodies hanging in the trees. Our own worst enemy has come to town. Through the prism of "Magic," we can now see that "Darkness on the Edge of Town" was Springsteen's great transitional and transformative album. It broached thematic territory to which he would return again and again: the struggle to live up to the promise of our better natures as individuals and as a society. And, musically, it charted a new course that he would follow for the rest of his career.



Bruce Springsteen plays at the Spectrum, Philadelphia, PA, 5/26/1978

Springsteen's first three albums, "Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J." (1973), "The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle" (1973) and "Born to Run" (1975), were big, tumultuous blends of eclectic rock/jazz/soul orchestrations, cascading boardwalk poetry and technicolor turnpike psychodrama. These records owed a debt to '60s radio, Bob Dylan and Martin Scorsese's operatic vision of Italian-American manhood, "Mean Streets." But "Darkness" was something else entirely, a break with the past so sharp and unsentimental it looked more like an escape.

Take the album cover, for a start. The scraggly-bearded scamp of the previous records was gone, replaced by an unsmiling, (relatively) clean-shaven Springsteen gazing straight into the camera, sleepy-eyed and defiant. Dressed like vintage Brando or James Dean in a white T shirt and black leather jacket, Springsteen is incongruously posed against faded-pink flowered wallpaper and graying Venetian blinds in an old house. On the front and back cover shots, photographer Frank Stefanko positions Springsteen in a nook right up against the blinds, so he seems too large for that small, stifling space. The message is clear: You can't go home again. And indeed, Springsteen had left home. "Darkness" followed a messy legal emancipation from manager and producer Mike Appel; it was the first album made solely with new producer/mentor Jon Landau, the former rock critic who had proclaimed him the "rock and roll future" a few years earlier.



The mood of the music inside the album sleeve matches those broody, yet vulnerable, photos. On his previous records, Springsteen surrounded himself with a gang of lovable losers: Hazy Davy, Killer Joe, Spanish Johnny, Crazy Janey, the Magic Rat. But his lyrics for "Darkness" contain no such cameraderie. His characters here are anonymous, intensely alone and isolated. "I live now, only with strangers/ I talk to only strangers/ I walk with angels that have no place," Springsteen sings on "Streets of Fire." Clarence Clemons' sax solos, the sound of warmth and kinship on previous albums, only appear on three of the 10 cuts on "Darkness." Springsteen's vocals are gruff and growly, the guitar solos savage and scalding. Danny Federici's dirty-blues organ riffs on "Prove it all Night" and "Adam Raised a Cain" hark back to the rumbling working-class anthems of the early Animals. The stately ballad "Factory" and the harmonica-driven "The Promised Land" reflect Springsteen's new (and lasting) interest in Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie and other country and folk musicians. Lean where "Born to Run" was grand, "Darkness" jump-starts the straight-ahead, roots-rock sound that would hit full throttle on Springsteen's fifth album, "The River" (1980), the studio release that best captures the spontaneity of the E Street Band in concert.

With "Darkness," Springsteen also unveiled a stunning new songwriting style, with language that was newly spare and stripped-down, but no less vivid or poetic for its terseness. The songs were no longer exclusively set on urban turf. "Lights out tonight/ Trouble in the heartland" goes the first line of the first song, "Badlands," and from the "rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert" of "The Promised Land" to the "dusty road from Monroe to Angeline" of "Prove it all Night," "Darkness" crosses the Jersey state line to embrace prairies and plains and a wider, all-encompassing version of America. As if we couldn't guess from the literary-looking typewriter font of the album cover and lyric sheet, Springsteen had set out not to make just a great rock album, but to write his version of the great American novel. And in many ways, he did.



Bloomington, MN 1978

In its vinyl incarnation, "Darkness" comprises 10 songs, five on each side, perfectly mirroring one another in theme and mood. "Darkness" is a looped tale; finish one side, turn it over, and you find different characters in exactly the same emotional, if not physical, place as their brethren on the opposite side. And that's the whole point: The struggle to realize our dreams, to break out of pinched, repressive or hopeless circumstances, is a universal one, repeated from generation to generation, relentless as the rain. Springsteen sings most of the songs in the guise of a restless Everyman, but the ferocious "Adam Raised a Cain" stands apart as a close-to-home confession. Steeped in Catholic guilt and alluding to both biblical Genesis and Steinbeck's "East of Eden," "Adam" is the first song Springsteen recorded that nakedly depicts his turbulent relationship with his father.

But, then, all of the characters on the album share a desire to escape the dead-end, dead-eyed "workin' life" of their fathers (so succinctly and chillingly articulated on "Factory"). These people long to be somewhere, and, often, someone, else. And while all the songs on "Darkness" take place after sundown, this is not the sensual, liberating summer night of "Born to Run," but, rather, a darkness ambiguous and impenetrable, in which the characters drive around and around "chasing some mirage." But for all its car and road imagery, "Darkness" is really about the illusion of movement. Few of these characters truly get anywhere, except in their dreams.



The ones that do make it are haunted by the cost - betrayals, severed ties, disappointment - of pursuing their desires and ambitions, for "wanting things that can only be found/ In the darkness on the edge of town." On the heartbreaking "Racing in the Street," the narrator - possibly the kid from "Thunder Road," who lured Mary off her front porch and into his front seat, crowing "it's a town full of losers / And I'm pullin' out of here to win" - has failed the girl he loves. He promised her a better life, but they've ended up back where they started, "on the porch of her Daddy's house." The girl's "pretty dreams are torn"; the guy races cars to keep from "dying little by little, piece by piece" - to keep moving, even if he knows he's just spinning his wheels. And yet, the song ends with the possibility of redemption and escape: "Tonight my baby and me, we're gonna ride to the sea/ And wash these sins off our hands."

Battered, tenacious faith in the promise of a better life - that's the glimmer of light at the heart of "Darkness," and it shines brightest on each side's opening tracks, "Badlands" and "The Promised Land." Indeed, these two songs are the foundation of the populist spirit that has become an integral part of Springsteen's music. Against a churning beat, the narrator of "Badlands" is "caught in a crossfire" of emotions and impulses. He wants to get out of this nowhere life, take control of his future, but he wonders if it's possible to realize his heart's desire without losing his soul. Is it preordained that to succeed in America, you have to succumb to selfishness and cynicism and adhere to the social and economic facts of life that dictate, "Poor man wanna be rich/ Rich man wanna be king/ And a king ain't satisfied/ Till he rules everything"? The narrator considers going over to the dark side, but his heart isn't in it; the pull of youthful idealism and innocence remain too strong. He keeps coming back to these two words: "I believe." In the emotional crescendo of the song, Springsteen sings, "I believe in the love that you gave me/ I believe in the faith that can save me/ I believe in the hope/ And I pray, that someday it may raise me/ Above these badlands."



Spectrum, Philadelphia, PA, 5/26/1978

The assertion "I believe" recurs in "The Promised Land." The scenario is similar to "Badlands" - the young narrator works in his "daddy's garage" by day and drives around aimlessly by night. He feels weak and trapped and longs for a purifying "twister to blow everything down/ That ain't got the faith to stand its ground." But, he hasn't yet given up hope in what might wait shimmering for him in the wreckage: "Mister, I ain't a boy, no, I'm a man/ And I believe in a promised land."

That use of "Mister" in "Promised Land," as if the story is being told to an observer just out of our view, brought a documentary dimension to Springsteen's songwriting; he would pursue the "Mister" (or "Sir") structure further in the sparse and spooky modern folk music of his 1982 solo masterpiece, "Nebraska." But, in hindsight, "The Promised Land" may well have been Springsteen's first true folk song. Like Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," "The Promised Land" is a subversive - a people's - national anthem. It suggests the breadth and natural majesty of the land (that "dark cloud rising from the desert floor" is one of the most hauntingly visual images in all of Springsteen's songwriting) and the resilience of working-class optimism. But it's shadowed with the dark side of the American Dream - the socioeconomic inequalities, the "lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted." In "The Promised Land," we can find the seeds of two bittersweet latter-day Springsteen folk songs, "Land of Hope and Dreams," a passionate invocation of an America more generous and inclusive than the one we're living in, and "American Land," a rambunctious Irish-flavored salute to - and defense of - the immigrants who have followed their dreams to our supposed land of opportunity.



The question is, after eight years of the Bush Administration, after Iraq, torture, wiretaps, the erosion of the Constitution, the loss of moral standing in the eyes of the world, the disappearance of the middle class and the scapegoating of immigrants, legal and illegal, is it still possible to believe in America as the promised land? Springsteen thinks so, if his April 16 endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama for President is any indication. Springsteen wrote of Obama, "He speaks to the America I've envisioned in my music for the past 35 years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems, a country that's interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit."

But even if Springsteen had not written those words, his faith in the "gathered spirit" would have been evident from the pivotal set list positions he gave "The Promised Land" and "Badlands" on the 2007-08 legs of the E Street Band's "Magic" tour. "Magic" is an autumnal record, with references to ill winds and gray skies and a pervasive sense of identities, personal and national, breaking down. The deceptively upbeat "Livin' in the Future" is a litany of all the things that have fallen apart during the Bush years: "The earth it gave away/ The sea rose toward the sun . . . My ship Liberty sailed away … The groundskeeper opened the gates and let the wild dogs run." While the choruses repeat, "We're livin' in the future and/ None of this has happened yet," it's clear that this is only wishful thinking; to borrow a line from "Prove It All Night," this ain't no dream we're livin' through tonight. In nearly every concert of the initial North American portion of the "Magic" tour, "Livin' in the Future" was followed - and contradicted - by "The Promised Land." The latter song's sweet harmonica intro rose up in the wake of the bleak imagery of "Livin' in the Future" like a cleansing rain after a long, punishing dry spell. The words "I believe in a promised land" never sounded so cathartic, so welcome and so urgently necessary.



On the "Magic" tour, "Badlands" usually made its appearance at the end of the first set, immediately following "Long Walk Home," a cornerstone of the "Magic" album. On "Long Walk Home," Springsteen turns the map around, so that he's coming home out of the darkness - "in the distance I could see the town where I was born." He's out of the car and walking, just like Woody Guthrie in "This Land Is Your Land," but as he enters the heart of town, he sees that something has gone very wrong. The diner is shuttered, the VA hall is abandoned, the townspeople are "rank strangers." Once upon a time, his father proudly told him, this town - which is, of course, America itself - was a "great place to be born," and the flag flying over the courthouse "meant certain things are set in stone/ Who we are, what we'll do/ And what we won't."

The closing repetition of the wistful line, "It's gonna be a long walk home," alludes to the daunting work of reversing the moral, psychological and physical damage of the past eight years ("a great American reclamation project," Springsteen called it in his Obama endorsement). But "Badlands," with its holy trinity of belief in love, faith and hope, and its exhilarating assertion that "it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive," reassures us that the task is not insurmountable. In concert, placed after "Long Walk Home," the fervent declaration "I wanna spit in the face of these badlands" became a rejection of the moral wasteland of the Bush years, a refusal to remain a community under siege.

In "Songs," Springsteen wrote that "Darkness on the Edge of Town" was the record on which he found his "adult voice." But it's now clear that this was the record on which he found his political voice as well. "The Promised Land" and "Badlands" are simple yet profound affirmations of democratic ideals; they remain relevant today as commentaries on the darkness of cynicism and the dragons of endless war that threaten to wipe our town off the map. Like the whole of "Darkness," these songs were built on a faith that can stand its ground.

© 2008 by Joyce Millman

About The Author
Some people are inspired to pick up a guitar after seeing their first Bruce Springsteen concert. Joyce Millman (http://www.joycemillman.com/) was inspired to pick up a typewriter. Springsteen's first Boston show of the "Darkness on the Edge of Town" tour (May 29, 1978, the Music Hall) enabled her to imagine her rock 'n' roll-writing future. Since there were no actual rock criticism classes at her school (Boston University), she taught herself the art by reading a lot of great critics (like Ariel Swartley, Dave Marsh and Greil Marcus, who also happened to be Springsteen admirers). She began her career as a rock critic for the Boston Phoenix, after summoning the courage to approach the music editor at a Springsteen concert at the Boston Garden in 1980. Her long association with the paper included a cover review of the first New England show of the 1984 "Born in the U.S.A." tour. In 1987, she relocated to the Bay Area to become the television critic for the San Francisco Examiner. While at the Examiner, she was a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism (1989 and 1991). In 1995, she was a founding staff member of the online magazine Salon.com. Currently a freelance pop culture critic, essayist and author ("The Great Snape Debate," Borders/BenBella, 2007), she lives in San Mateo, California with her husband and teenage son. She is honored to be a part of the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection's celebration of "Darkness on the Edge of Town" and to have this chance to finish the essay she has been writing in her head for 30 years.

Today's Tune: AC/DC - Its A Long Way To The Top

(Click on title to play video)

Shine the light on SpyGate

By Mike Lupica
New York Daily News
Sunday, May 18th 2008, 8:28 AM



Elsa/Getty
Bill Belichick

Bill Belichick talking about an old video assistant of his named Matt Walsh suddenly sounds like Roger Clemens talking about an old trainer of his named Brian McNamee. And Sen. Arlen Specter, a tough guy and a smart guy, occasionally sounds like an old crank and an Eagles fan calling the radio when he gets going on the subject of Spygate. Specter still makes a lot more sense on this subject than most football people. It is why this idea that the world will suddenly stop spinning properly if Specter does ever hold Congressional hearings about cheating in pro football is silly.

Maybe it will never come to that. Maybe Specter will calm down. Or maybe he will follow through and Spygate will keep going. Guess what? If it does the country will survive and pro football will survive and so will the NFL media. For all the posturing and grandstanding that we have gotten from Congress in its hearings about drug cheats in baseball, in the end more good came out of them than bad, starting with the fact that baseball's drug-testing policy, with all its flaws, is now the most rigorous in sports. And Congress, as much as any book or article, put more of a spotlight on drug use in baseball than we'd ever had before.

Nobody knows what happens if Specter ever shines his big Congressional light on whatever Bill Belichick thought he was doing and whatever he thought he was getting away with; and how many other teams thought they were getting away with the same thing. But Specter has a right to keep talking about this, whether he's a disgruntled Eagles fan or not. Professional sports is a billion-dollar industry in this country and pro football, with that same sweet anti-trust exemption that baseball has, is the richest sport of all. So Specter happens to be right when he says that the integrity of the sport is still supposed to matter.

And whether or not you think what Belichick and the Patriots did is a felony or a misdemeanor, the integrity of the sport has been called into question here, with the best team of its time in pro football and the best coach of his time.

Matt Walsh may not be one of nature's noblemen. Neither was Jose Canseco. But Walsh said something pretty smart the other day when he said that if what Belichick was doing filming other team's signals, in violation of league rules, wasn't working for him he wouldn't have kept doing it. You wanted to give him the game ball right there.

Now Belichick goes after Walsh the way Clemens went after McNamee, the way Clemens is still after McNamee. Belichick says he made a mistake, that he was wrong, wrong, wrong about league rules, this coming from someone who you assume could recite league rules in a couple of languages. He has to be kidding now if he thinks anybody believes he forgot to read the warning labels.

No one is suggesting that this kind of cheating is as systemic as drug cheating became in baseball over the last 15 years. Belichick and the Patriots really want us to believe that they didn't think they were doing anything wrong, and one of the defenses of them all along is that they weren't doing anything different than anybody else was doing. At that point they do start to sound like baseball players explaining why they started using baseball drugs in the first place.

And just for the sheer entertainment value alone, it would be some show to watch Belichick have to answer questions from somebody like Arlen Specter.

The drug hearings in baseball were bad reality television so much of the time. And some of it was a waste of time. There were moments when you expected some of those Republican Congressmen and Congresswomen who didn't already have Roger Clemens' autograph to jump over the desk and ask him for one. But those hearings were dramatic and important, too, and not just to Mark McGwire's Hall of Fame chances.

Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner, is a smart guy and a tough guy himself. I believe he has, when you add it all up now, been thorough in his investigation of Belichick and Walsh and the tapes and all the rest of it. But he never should have destroyed any of the evidence, whatever his best intentions were there. And when it is all said and done on this matter, he is the same as Robert Kraft, the Patriots owner, and the rest of his owners, in that he wants this to go away.

It still hasn't, even as Goodell and Specter have agreed to disagree. So Specter talks about hearings and a Mitchell Report for football and he does get labeled a crank. And Walsh keeps saying that if the cheating the Patriots did hadn't been working, they would've stopped. When he does he sound exactly like a baseball executive I know, who once tried to explain to me what baseball was up against with steroids:

"They do it because it works," the guy said.

Four Issues Spread On Hot Air

By R. EMMETT TYRRELL JR.
The New York Sun
May 16, 2008

Readers of this column will recall that from time to time in covering an election cycle I have referred to a voting bloc that political analysts of more delicate sensibilities would rather not mention, to wit, the moron vote.

It is a constituency composed of politically ignorant citizens who nonetheless feel very intensely about political issues once their respective demagogues have notified them of the issues, suitably transmogrified.

The moron vote’s rank and file might, in point of fact, not be morons at all. Some might be marine biologists or interior decorators or professors of romance languages, and in their chosen field they might be very knowledgeable. Yet when it comes to politics they are in the dark. They are very angry but still in the dark.

We can all feel superior to these poor souls, if we are bereft of charity, but we might also feel a twinge of compassion for them. After all, they are not totally to blame for their ignorance. Most have been misled by their political messiahs — or should I say by their seducers? The fact is that in many elections clever politicians shamelessly prey on their supporters’ insecurities and the gaps in their political knowledge.

As Senator Clinton has demonstrated in her last gasp effort to wrest the Democratic nomination from Senator Obama, the moron vote can be very important. Once she is out of the race and seething back in Chappaqua (where life for Boy Clinton is going to be dreadful) the moron vote will continue to be very influential.

As the race has gone thus far, almost no politician has made an effort to inform the electorate. On four key issues the Democrats have only exploited the ignorance of the voters. On one issue even the Republican candidate, Senator McCain, has been of no help in educating voters.

First, consider the Democrats’ cruel exploitation of their supporters’ hopes and fears regarding rising gasoline prices. Both Senators Clinton and Obama have talked as though those prices can be lowered. Mrs. Clinton specifically talks of lowering federal gas taxes during the summer. That will do it, but only for the summer. The problem is that oil demand worldwide has exceeded supply.

As legendary oilman Boone Pickens has been warning for several years, the world can produce about 85 million barrels of oil a day and demand — thanks to growing prosperity in developing nations — now exceeds that production level. Even if somehow the world could produce more than 85 million barrels daily, we do not have refinery capacity to turn the oil into gasoline.

Environmentalists oppose increasing refinery capacity. Doing so will take years. America needs to develop alternative energy sources, and market pressure will ensure this development more effectively than demagoguery.

Likewise the candidates are deceiving their supporters when they promise to make the country “independent of foreign oil.” We shall not be independent of foreign oil for years to come, whatever progress we make with alternative sources of energy.

Drilling into known oil reservoirs in this country and developing nuclear, solar, and wind power will relieve our dependence on foreign oil, but 62% of our oil consumption is from foreign oil. Oil production here peaked in 1970, and what domestic oil is left will not markedly relieve our need for foreign oil for years. Again alternative sources of energy are needed.

Or consider the Democrats’ promise to pay for their new or expanded programs by eliminating the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Though neither the Obama nor the Clinton campaigns is forthcoming with the costs of its promises, the National Taxpayers’ Union estimates that the Obama platform will increase federal spending by $307.3 billion. The Clinton platform’s price tag is $226.1 billion. No rollback of the Bush tax cuts would cover that kind of wanton spending increase. The Heritage Foundation puts the figure at under $60 billion annually.

Amazed by the dishonesty of the presidential candidates, the Washington Post’s economics columnist lamented this week that “[t]he candidates dissemble because they believe that Americans don’t want the truth. It would be too upsetting.”

That brings us to the candidates’ empty boasts on global warming. Here all three remaining presidential candidates dwell in error. They promise to moderate global warming by reducing carbon emissions, but it is not clear how culpable carbon emissions are for global warming. In an enlightening new book on climate change, “An Appeal to Reason,” Nigel Lawson, former chancellor of the exchequer and Britain’s secretary of energy, explains that for the past seven years there has been no global warming.

Over the last quarter of the 20th century there was a modest increase in the earth’s temperature of a half degree centigrade; but in the three decades prior to that the earth was cooling. Moreover, though carbon emissions have continued to increase through our years of cooling, warming, and now temperature stability, the consequences of carbon emissions remain unclear. Worse, Mr. Lawson argues, there are no foolproof policies to limit carbon in the atmosphere.

There you have it: four public issues on which the presidential candidates spread only hot air. At least, Mr. McCain is only wrong on one.

- Mr. Tyrrell is the founder and editor in chief of the American Spectator, a contributing editor to The New York Sun, and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute.

Much Has Changed in Narnia

May 16, 2008, 0:00 p.m.
http://www.nationalreview.com

By Thomas S. Hibbs


A wonderful scene in the second half of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian — the second film in the Narnia series, based on C. S. Lewis’s beloved books — highlights the importance of cultivating a memory of the past in the face of strong cultural and political tendencies toward decay and decline. Returning to Narnia after a one-year absence (1,300 years in Narnia time), the Pevensie children — Peter (William Moseley), Susan (Anna Popplewell), Edmund (Skandar Keynes) and Lucy (Georgie Henley) — find themselves in a cave whose walls are covered with ancient drawings. The drawings are memorials to them and their heroic feats in Narnia; it turns out that they have entered a sort of crypt built around the stone tablet on which Aslan was murdered and from which he rose to defeat the White Witch.

The sense of the remote past, as both almost lost and yet recoverable, permeates Lewis’s book. Yet, apart from the scene in the cave, the film neglects this theme in favor of grand battles and a budding romance between Caspian (in a rather lackluster performance by Ben Barnes) and Susan. Indeed, devoted readers of Lewis’s books will likely take umbrage at the many changes the filmmakers have introduced. The unsettling question they ought to be asking themselves is whether the film transforms what, following Chesterton, we might call a great romance of orthodoxy into a Hollywood bubble-gum romance.

Having issued that harsh charge, I hasten to add two qualifications. On its own terms, the film version of Prince Caspian has much to offer. It is a solid piece of entertainment, with rousing battle scenes and many moments of humor. (The CG character Reepicheep, the honorable and hilarious mouse, steals every scene in which he appears.) But Caspian is more: it contains moving portrayals of the seductive power of temptation, and profound reflections on heroism — including a lesson on how the inordinate use of violence harms the perpetrator as well as the victim. Perhaps most impressive, particularly for those who have seen the first film, is the transformation of Edmund, who remains repentant for having disbelieved Lucy and for having treacherously served the White Witch. In a splendid performance, Skandar Keynes makes Edmund’s moral development credible and palpable; he is now wiser, more faithful, and more resolute.

The other thing that needs saying about the film is that the book from which it is drawn presents greater challenges to the filmmaker than does The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Director Andrew Adamson, who directed the first Narnia film after achieving fame for his work on the Shrek movies, takes more liberties with Lewis’s book than he did in the first film, of necessity. In the first half of Lewis’s book, he brings the Pevensie children (and his readers) up to date on the 1,300 years of Narnian history since the events related in the first book.

Lewis is doing more here than giving us a prolix prelude to a final battle. He is attempting to captivate his audience with the art of storytelling and with the superiority of real history over what passes for knowledge of the past in contemporary culture or in an ordinary academic setting. Lewis is also telling us something about the eponymous Caspian, a royal son, raised by his scheming uncle Miraz — who, it turns out, murdered Caspian’s father, and whose opportunistic desire to care for Caspian dissolves once his own wife gives birth to a son. We also learn that Caspian is from his youth a “lover of the Old Things,” in contrast to his uncle, who actively seeks to suppress the ancient and heroic history of Narnia.

Now, it makes sense to streamline Lewis’s historical narration, but, apart from the scene in the cave, the film fails to find a way to inject its version of the story with Lewis’s sense of devotion to the “Old Things.” Stressing Caspian’s longing to revive a lost way of life would have given his character greater gravity, something needed in the film to counterbalance the boyish good looks of Ben Barnes. His pretty appearance, the lack of character depth, and the filmmakers decision to focus on his innocuous flirtations with Susan render him a less than persuasive embodiment of Lewis’s main character.

That is not to say that all the changes are ill-conceived. One addition that works effectively is a longish battle scene in which Peter leads a surprise attack on Miraz’s castle, from which his army has to retreat in humiliation and sorrow, leaving behind many dead comrades.

Another addition concerns the reappearance of the White Witch, whose return is mentioned in the book as a possibility, but which never comes to pass. In the film, she returns — and who can blame them for bringing back Tilda Swinton’s chilling menace? — paralyzed in ice, which is a marvelously fitting image that recalls both her commitment to making Narnia always winter and never Christmas, and Dante’s vision of Satan as paralyzed in ice. This time, she is a powerful temptation not to Edmund, but to Peter.



The real problem with the film, I’m saddened to report, has to do with Aslan. This is due in part to the book’s relegation of him to a more marginal role than he had in the first book. On screen, he seems almost like one of the other animals — more powerful, certainly, but not all that mysterious. Except for when he roars, he is more cuddly than fearful. His admonitions to Lucy about the importance of fidelity to him come off as formulaic. A sign of the extent to which Aslan has been diminished in the film is evident in the penultimate scene, in which the children depart Narnia. In the book, they say goodbye to everyone else and then, last, “wonderfully and terribly,” as Lewis puts it, “it was farewell to Aslan himself.”

By contrast, in the film, the parting culminates with Susan’s sorrow over leaving Caspian. The scene is sweet and innocent enough, but it cultivates in the audience the mundane sense of unrealized romantic possibility, rather than the grand appreciation, both terrible and wonderful, of a cosmic romance of redemption.

— Thomas S. Hibbs is distinguished professor of ethics and culture at Baylor University and author of Arts of Darkness.

Crowning Prince Caspian: Behind the Movie

May 16, 2008, 0:00 p.m.
http://www.nationalreview.com

By Rebecca Cusey

Douglas Gresham, co-producer of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, is the stepson of the author of the Narnia series, C. S. Lewis. A child when Lewis married his mother, Joy Davidman, Gresham and his brother grew up in Lewis’s household and inherited Lewis’s estate. Much of Gresham’s life has been spent safeguarding his stepfather’s legacy, and pursuing the dream of properly adapting the series into film. In a phone conversation, I asked him about life on the set and behind the scenes of the movie, which hits theaters this weekend.

What is the essential thing that they absolutely have to get right in this movie?

The underlying messages of the story are so important, and so vital in fact, to the story; [they] are the return to faith, truth, justice, honesty, honor, glory, personal commitment, personal responsibility. All those things come out so strongly in the movie and were very important to me. Also the message is of vital importance, No matter how far away we stray, there’s always just one way back.

Do you think they got Aslan right?

Oh, yes. Far better than last time even. Aslan, in this movie, has all those characteristics which were so difficult to attempt last time. We’ve taken the technology that we’ve pioneered in some respects, but we’ve pushed out again. So, [with] this huge Aslan, you get this great character who is not only a great lion and beautiful to look at, but he’s warm and he’s welcoming, and just a tad bit forbidding, all at the same time. He’s not a tame lion. It’s all there now.

This film, even more than the other, seems to embody the idea of Muscular Christianity — fighting for what is right against desperate odds — that is apparent in C. S. Lewis’s writings. Would you agree that it is there in this film?

I think it is certainly there in this film to a certain degree. What you have to bear in mind is that the Narnian side tried everything they could, even to the extent of single combat with Peter, to avoid a bloodbath; it was the evil side in the end that brought it about. And that is of course, exactly what happens in our world. At the time that they were being written, Chamberlain [made an] effort to make peace with Hitler, right up until Hitler had betrayed everything they had agreed on. And of course we see it in our world today, where we are trying, Western society is trying — desperately almost — to the mistake of rolling over and playing dead, to pander to everyone else who is attacking it, one way or another. Eventually, of course, what will happen is people will dig their heels in, just as in Narnia, and the thing will be forced upon them. I think there are causes which are important to fight for, and I think that comes out in Prince Caspian.

It resonates throughout the whole of our society. We have to become more and more conscious of that fact, by the way. Most of us go about our little lives hoping that these things will go away and just leave us alone. Well, they won’t. The forces of evil are always going to be there. We’re always going to have to fight them. As Tolkien himself said, “All wars are lost. THE war goes on.”



Douglas Gresham at Belmont University.

Did you meet Tolkien?

Yes I did. Fine man, I liked him enormously.

Can we talk a little bit about Susan and Lucy’s more active role in the movie? How do you think Lewis would have responded to that?

Well, I’ve been persuaded by Andrew Adamson, that Lewis’s attitude toward women changed to some extent after he married my mother. Now there was a wonderful occasion that epitomized this to some extent. We’d had a problem in the wood with trespassers coming into the wood, local youths breaking down the trees, carving their initials into the trees, throwing rubbish into the lake, including each other and so forth. Mother said, “Jack we’ll just build a barbed wire fence to keep them out.” Jack said, “It’s no good my dear, they’ll just cut the wire and steal it.”

So, my mother, being from the Bronx, said, “If they do that, I’ll buy a shotgun.” They did steal the wire. Well, she bought one. Small gun. Threw a few pellets, never hurt anybody. She used to blast into the leaves of the trees whenever she saw a trespassers and they all chickened out and went somewhere else.

One day, Jack and my mother were walking up the hill ahead of me. Suddenly, out from the shrubbery, leapt a young man with a longbow and a quiver of arrows, casting himself in the part of a latter day Robin Hood, perhaps. Jack said, “Excuse me, but this is private land and you really shouldn’t be here. Would you mind leaving?” The man’s answer was to put an arrow to the string and draw the bow and point it at them. Immediately, Jack stepped in front of my mother to shield her from the arrow. He stood there for a moment, a very chivalrous thing to do, until he heard my mother in tones of chilled steel behind him saying “Goddamn it, Jack, get out of my line of fire.” He stepped sideways very smartly. That whole kind of experience of my mother’s determination and personality, I think changed Jack’s ideas toward women. In the first book he said “battles are ugly when women fight,” and he was right. But in the second, he did from there on, give them an active role for fighting for truth and justice and what was real.

I’m not entirely comfortable with it, because I do believe battles are ugly when women fight. I think they’re pretty ugly to start with, more so when women get involved. I believe what George MacDonald said was very true, which is that it’s every man’s responsibility to protect every woman, first of all from himself.

So what is the role of chivalry in a world where women take part in battles?

That becomes a very difficult thing to define. I don’t really think women should be involved in active combat. I don’t think it’s fair for the men who are fighting beside them, or the men who are fighting against them. And it’s not fair for the women themselves. I think the idea that women have to become men in our current society is a very bad one.

How do you think passionate fans of C. S. Lewis will receive this movie?

I think passionate purist fans of Jack’s works are going to have some interesting surprises when they see this movie. There is no more purist, more passionate fan of Narnia than myself. After all, I grew up there. I think the people who think about changing the book to a movie will see it was absolutely essential to do what we’ve done.

How involved were you?

Well above my neck, you might say. They call me a co-producer, but so much is under my umbrella of responsibility, there isn’t really a credit for what I do. I’m involved in the development of the screenplay, involved in just about every facet of the film and everything related to it. Video games, merchandise. And of course, we’re working on the next one as well.

How often were you on set?

I spent a lot of time on set. We had some interesting experiences. We were in a valley, way in the mountains, deep in the bush of New Zealand. It rained so savagely. There was a ford to get across the little stream to get into the place. Of course the river rose. No body could get in. It was just myself and about four others were the only people left in the whole base camp. For four days nobody could get in or out. I was on set as much as my other responsibilities to the movie would allow.

What do you do when you’re not making movies?

That depends. A lot of my life is spent overseeing everything that is being done in the publishing department of Lewis’s work. My spare time is largely filled, at the moment, with chopping down a forest of prickly pears in a field I’ve just bought. My life is pretty full.

You have children and grandchildren?

We have five children and we have nine, about to be ten, grandchildren. The keenest thing about having kids is grandkids, believe me. It’s wonderful when they hand you grandbabies and you spoil them rotten and when they turn an interesting green color, you hand them back.

— Rebecca Cusey writes from Washington, D.C.

Mark Steyn: Obama an appeaser? How dare you

Saturday, May 17, 2008
Orange County Register

"That's enough. That – that's a show of disrespect to me."

That was Barack Obama, a couple of weeks back, explaining why he was casting the Rev. Jeremiah Wright into outer darkness. It's one thing to wallow in "adolescent grandiosity" (as Scott Johnson of the Powerline Web site called it) when it's a family dispute between you and your pastor of 20 years. It's quite another to do so when it's the 60th anniversary celebrations of one of America's closest allies.

President Bush was in Israel the other day and gave a speech to the Knesset. Its perspective was summed up by his closing anecdote – a departing British officer in May 1948 handing the iron bar to the Zion Gate to a trembling rabbi and telling him it was the first time in 18 centuries that a key to the gates of the Jerusalem was in the hands of a Jew. In other words, it was a big-picture speech, referencing the Holocaust, the pogroms, Masada – and the challenges that lie ahead. Sen. Obama was not mentioned in the text. No Democrat was mentioned, save for President Truman, in the context of his recognition of the new state of Israel when it was a mere 11 minutes old.

Nonetheless, Barack Obama decided that the president's speech was really about him, and he didn't care for it. He didn't put it quite as bluntly as he did with the Rev. Wright, but the message was the same: "That's enough. That's a show of disrespect to me." And, taking their cue from the soon-to-be nominee's weirdly petty narcissism, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Joe Biden and Co. piled on to deplore Bush's outrageous, unacceptable, unpresidential, outrageously unacceptable and unacceptably unpresidential behavior.

Honestly. What a bunch of self-absorbed ninnies. Here's what the president said:

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

It says something for Democrat touchiness that the minute a guy makes a generalized observation about folks who appease terrorists and dictators the Dems assume: Hey, they're talking about me. Actually, he wasn't – or, to be more precise, he wasn't talking onlyabout you.

Yes, there are plenty of Democrats who are in favor of negotiating with our enemies, and a few Republicans, too – President Bush's pal James Baker, whose Iraq Study Group was full of proposals to barter with Iran and Syria and everybody else. But that general line is also taken by at least three of Tony Blair's former Cabinet ministers and his senior policy adviser, and by the leader of Canada's New Democratic Party and by a whole bunch of bigshot Europeans. It's not a Democrat election policy, it's an entire worldview. Even Barack Obama can't be so vain as to think his fly-me-to-[insert name of enemy here]concept is an original idea.

Increasingly, the Western world has attitudes rather than policies. It's one thing to talk as a means to an end. But these days, for most midlevel powers, talks arethe end, talks without end. Because that's what civilized nations like doing – chit-chatting, shooting the breeze, having tea and crumpets, talking talking talking. Uncivilized nations like torturing dissidents, killing civilians, bombing villages, doing doing doing. It's easier to get the doers to pass themselves off as talkers then to get the talkers to rouse themselves to do anything.

And, as the Iranians understand, talks provide a splendid cover for getting on with anything you want to do. If, say, you want to get on with your nuclear program relatively undisturbed, the easiest way to do it is to enter years of endless talks with the Europeans over said nuclear program. That's why that Hamas honcho endorsed Obama: They know he's their best shot at getting a European foreign minister installed as president of the United States.

Mo Mowlam was Britain's Northern Ireland secretary and oversaw the process by which the IRA's Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness became ministers of a Crown they decline to recognize. By 2004, she was calling for Osama bin Laden to be invited to "the negotiating table," having concluded he was no different from Adams: Stern fellow, lots of blood on his hands, but no sense getting on your high horse about all that; let's find out what he wants and give him part of it.

In his 2002 letter to the United States, bin Laden has a lot of grievances, from America's refusal to implement Sharia law to Jew-controlled usury to the lack of punishment for "President Clinton's immoral acts." Like Barack Obama's pastor, bin Laden shares the view that AIDS is a "Satanic American invention." Obviously, there are items on the agenda that the free world can never concede on – "President Clinton's immoral acts" – but who's to say most of the rest isn't worth chewing over?

This will be the fault line in the post-Bush war debate over the next few years. Are the political ambitions of the broader jihad totalitarian, genocidal, millenarian – in a word, nuts? Or are they negotiable? President Bush knows where he stands. Just before the words that Barack Obama took umbrage at, he said:

"There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It's natural, but it is deadly wrong. As witnesses to evil in the past, we carry a solemn responsibility to take these words seriously."

Here are some words of Hussein Massawi, the former leader of Hezbollah:

"We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."

Are his actions consistent with those words? Amazingly so. So, too, are those of Hezbollah's patrons in Tehran.

President Reagan talked with the Soviets while pushing ahead with the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe. He spoke softly – after getting himself a bigger stick. Sen. Obama is proposing to reward a man who pledges to wipe Israel off the map with a presidential photo-op to which he will bring not even a twig. No wonder he's so twitchy about it.

©MARK STEYN

Today's Tune: Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson - My Rifle, My Pony and Me

(Click on title to play video)

Wedded to Activism

May 16, 2008 6:00 AM

http://www.nationalreview.com

By the Editors



A wedding cake is seen during a demonstration in West Hollywood, California, May 15 after the decision by the California Supreme Court to effectively greenlight same-sex marriage.
(AFP/Gabriel Bouys)

The California supreme court, by a 4-to-3 margin, ruled Thursday that it is not sufficient that California has enacted a domestic-partnership scheme that makes available to same-sex couples “virtually all of the same substantive legal benefits and privileges” as marriage. The court instead invented a “right of same-sex couples to have their official family relationship accorded the same dignity, respect, and stature as that accorded to all other officially recognized family relationships.” In short, it required that marriage itself — both the term and the institution — be redefined to be fully available to same-sex couples.

Chief Justice Ronald M. George’s majority opinion is as arrogant as it is confused. Never mind that, as his opinion concedes, “[f]rom the beginning of California statehood, the legal institution of marriage has been understood to refer to a relationship between a man and a woman.” Never mind that the very right to marry that he so wildly misconstrues is built on that understanding. Never mind that California voters in 2000 overwhelmingly ratified that understanding by adopting by initiative — by a 61.4-percent majority — the California Defense of Marriage Act.



Gay men exchanging rings at their wedding. California's supreme court ruled that a ban on gay marriage was unlawful Thursday, effectively leaving same-sex couples in America's most populous state free to tie the knot in a landmark ruling.
(AFP/File/Philippe Desmazes)

As associate justice Marvin R. Baxter aptly stated in dissent, “Nothing in our Constitution, express or implicit, compels the majority’s startling conclusion that the age-old understanding of marriage — an understanding recently confirmed by an initiative law — is no longer valid. California statutes already recognize same-sex unions and grant them all the substantive legal rights this state can bestow. If there is to be a further sea change in the social and legal understanding of marriage itself, that evolution should occur by similar democratic means.”

Fortunately for Californians, they will likely have an opportunity this November to undo their court’s mischief. Headed for the state ballot is the California Marriage Protection Act, a voter-sponsored initiative that would amend the California constitution to provide expressly that “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” The initiative would thus override the court’s misinterpretations of the state constitution. (The California Defense of Marriage Act in 2000 was an ordinary law, not a constitutional amendment.)



From left, Ernie Frausto, Ricky Terry, Ben Holder, and Eric Shangle, all of San Francisco, dance as they celebrate California's supreme court decision on Castro Street in San Francisco, Thursday, May, 15, 2008. A huge crowd gathered in the Castro district to celebrate, after the California Supreme Court overturned a voter-approved ban on gay marriage Thursday in a ruling that would allow same-sex couples in the nation's biggest state to tie the knot.
(AP Photo/Darryl Bush)

Reasonable people of good will have competing views on whether and how state laws should accommodate same-sex relationships. Our own views on this matter are traditionalist. But in a representative democracy, everyone ought to agree that any changes should result from legislation, not from activist judges who twist and distort constitutional text to their own ends.

Both John McCain and Barack Obama say they are opposed to same-sex marriage, but both oppose a constitutional amendment to codify that view. Such an amendment is the surest way to prevent judicial meddling. But there is nonetheless an important difference between these candidates. McCain, judging from his record and his recent speech against judicial activism, will try to appoint judges who will refrain from engaging in such meddling. About Obama we know no such thing, and have reason to suspect otherwise. We hope that Senator McCain will be willing to draw this distinction, which puts him on the right and popular side of this issue.

Top Ten Skeletons in the Left's Closet

By Daniel J. Flynn
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
Friday, May 16, 2008



Jerry Rubin

When the Left writes its own history, the past gets rewritten to suit the needs of the present. This is why I wrote A Conservative History of the American Left, to conserve not only fascinating figures now forgotten but to retrieve from the memory hole all that the Left has tossed down it. What is the history of the American Left that leftists want you to forget?

10. Ayatollah Khomeini, Leftist Hero

Reflexive anti-Americanism initially moved the Left to embrace the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Mother Jones, for instance, in 1979 predicted that “if Khomeini or his followers take power” then “democratic reforms, freedom for political prisoners, an end to the astronomical waste of huge arms purchases, and a constitutional government” would follow. The Nation, Michel Foucault, and other pillars of the Left similarly projected their ideals upon Khomeini and company.

9. Manson Family Values

“I fell in love with Charlie Manson the first time I saw his cherub face and sparkling eyes on TV,” hippie guru Jerry Rubin professed. “His words and courage inspired us.” Weatherman hoisted “Charles Manson Power” banners, adopted a spread-fingered greeting to symbolize the fork with which the Manson murderers impaled a victim’s stomach, and even boasted a cell nicknamed “The Fork.” Weatherman matriarch Bernardine Dohrn infamously proclaimed: “Dig it: first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!”



Bernardine Dohrn

8. Gay Activists Sue to Block AIDS Test

Today, homosexual activists blame Ronald Reagan and the clergy for the spread of AIDS. But in the mid-1980s, the National Gay Task Force and the Lambda Legal Defense, citing civil-liberties concerns, actually sued the federal government to stop the AIDS test. Thankfully, they lost and scores of lives have been saved as a result.

7. Murder Chic

The easiest way to become a hero on the Left is to kill another human being. John Brown, the Molly Maguires, the Haymarket Square Bombers, Joe Hill, Huey Newton, and Mumia Abu-Jamal—murderers all—have been venerated by the Left in song and on screen. The people they murdered are not even an afterthought.

6. Jonestown Kool-Aid

Before orchestrating the murder/suicides 900+ people in Guyana, Jim Jones was the darling of the San Francisco Left. Huey Newton, Angela Davis, and Willie Brown embraced a man who killed more blacks than the KKK. Democrats Rosalynn Carter, Walter Mondale, and Gerry Brown made campaign visits to the Peoples Temple’s “comrade leader.” The mayor of San Francisco even rewarded Jones for his activism by appointing him chairman of the city’s housing commission. “The temple was as much a left-wing political crusade as a church,” The Nation reported in 1978. Unfortunately, as the years progressed, more Americans gulped down the Left’s Kool-Aid that Jones was of the religious Right and not an atheist leftist.



Jim Jones

5. Concentration Camps, American Style

A year before Hitler came to power in Germany, Margaret Sanger called for a vast system of concentration camps for the United States. The Planned Parenthood founder demanded “a stern and rigid policy of segregation or sterilization” for “dysgenic” Americans who “would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.” The 1932 speech concluded that “fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense—defending the unborn against their own disabilities.”

4. Heaven on Earth

American intellectuals looked upon the hell on earth that was post-revolutionary Russia and saw a heaven on earth. The New Republic credited the Russian Revolution with providing “the most democratic franchise yet devised in our world,” while The Nation found that “the franchise is more democratic in Russia than in England or in the United States.” Lincoln Steffens marveled after a visit to the Soviet Union, “The revolution in Russia is to establish the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth.”

3. Eugenics

Even before the progressive era when most states instituted eugenics laws, the American Left had agitated for state controls over procreation. John Humphrey Noyes’ Bible Communists lamented that freedom of marital choice “leaves mating to be determined by a general scramble, without attempt at scientific direction” and devised the first eugenic experiment in the U.S.—“stirpiculture”—that produced dozens of children and prevented hundreds more. In Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy dreamed of “race purification” to “preserve and transmit the better types of the race, and let the inferior types drop out.” Other proponents included Margaret Sanger, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, who famously decreed in Buck v. Bell, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” State governments ultimately sterilized upwards of 60,000.



Margaret Sanger

2. Assassinating Presidents

Three of the four presidential assassins have been left-wing radicals. Bible Communist Charles Guiteau murdered President Garfield, anarcho-communist Leon Czolgosz murdered President McKinley, and Soviet Communist Lee Harvey Oswald murdered John F. Kennedy. Rather than own that history, the Left has invented conspiracy theories that absolve leftists from responsibility.

1. Nazi-Soviet Pact

The Left switched from pacifists to warmongers overnight once the Nazi attack upon the Communists dissolved the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Communist Party USA chief Earl Browder, who had dubbed WWII “the second imperialist war” during the pact, so thoroughly switched course when the Nazis attacked the Communists that he embraced conscription (after his opposition to it led to jail in WWI), endorsed a ‘no-strike’ pledge for labor unions (after encouraging strikes to impede the war effort), and kicked out Japanese Americans from the CP (after ostensibly championing civil rights). The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League ceased operations during the pact. The Communists’ New Masses panned the anti-Nazi Watch on the Rhine when it appeared as a play during the pact only to praise it when it appeared as a movie when Hitler and Stalin were again enemies.

- Daniel J. Flynn is the author of Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas and A Conservative History of the American Left. He is also the editor of www.flynnfiles.com.

Celebrating Israel's 60th - Sort Of

By P. David Hornik

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

Friday, May 16, 2008

US President George W. Bush and his Israeli counterpart Shimon Peres review a guard of honour in Jerusalem on Mayk 14. Bush has vowed to support Israel in battling "terror" groups, a day after a rocket fired from Gaza wounded 14 people and triggered warnings of retaliation.(AFP/Jim Watson)

“The Zionist regime is dying. The criminals assume that by holding celebrations...they can save the sinister Zionist regime from death and annihilation…. Nations of the region hate this criminal fabricated regime and will uproot this fabricated regime if the smallest and shortest opportunity is given to them.” These words were spoken Wednesday by a head of state, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, in a live address on state television.

Ahmadinejad knew that, even though incitement of this kind is illegal under international law, he would pay no penalty for his words. Indeed, for Austrian oil and gas giant OMV, which in April last year signed a 22-bn-euro joint natural gas project with Teheran, the mullahs’ regime is not only not criminal, but big business.

Also on Wednesday at OMV’s annual stockholder meeting in Vienna, protesters from the Stop the Bomb movement distributed flyers and asked questions that didn’t get very far. Queried whether it was consistent with OMV’s ethical code to do business with a country that “has executed more adolescents than any other state,” CEO Wolfgang Ruttenstorfer replied, “We reject the execution of adolescents, whether in the USA, China or Iran. We cannot change governments.”

His animus against America is understandable since, when asked about sanctions against Iran, Ruttenstorfer replied that OMV is waiting for “political change in the USA.”

And OMV is far from alone in Europe; Switzerland, for instance, is going ahead with the huge gas deal signed in Teheran last March by its foreign minister Micheline Calmy-Rey in a headscarfed handshake with Ahmadinejad, and Germany is Iran’s biggest European trading partner of all. So when you see Ahmadinejad smiling so much, there’s good reason for it.

Meanwhile the “Zionist regime” was indeed celebrating its 60th birthday along with President George Bush, who touched down in Israel on Wednesday. When a few hours after his arrival an Iranian-made Katyusha rocket crashed into a shopping mall in the coastal city of Ashkelon, wounding fifteen including four seriously, some of the Israeli ministers departed the festivities for the site of the attack.

One of them, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, invited Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice—part of Bush’s entourage—to come with him and see the damage and the reality of life in southern Israel, but she declined.

Although one indeed doesn’t want to spoil the mood at a party, Bush expressed concern to Olmert about the strategic situation in the region and said the crisis in Lebanon “is an Iranian effort to destabilize that young democracy.”

Yet about the Palestinians Bush was optimistic as always; while allowing that “Hamas’s stated objective is the destruction of the state of Israel,” he added that “the United States will stand strongly with Israel, as well as stand strongly with the Palestinians who don’t share that vision.”
It was hard, though, to know who he had in mind as Palestinians not only in Hamastan/Gaza but also throughout the West Bank and even in Lebanon geared up to mark Israel’s 60th—or, for them, Nakba (Catastrophe) Day—in their own way with marches and strikes. And Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, the centerpiece of Bush’s peace plans and object of his praise, lent his signature to a document vowing to continue the “struggle” for all Palestinian refugees to return to Israel.

A document, in other words, touting that very “vision”—Israel’s destruction—that Bush insists is only an objective of Hamas. But even if Bush attended to any of this—and, since he keeps affirming the peacefulness of non-Hamas Palestinians, there is no indication that he does—he could have found even worse tidings in Palestinian Media Watch’s latest report on Abbas’s Palestinian Authority’s severe anti-Americanism.

If Bush were to take some time out from his busy schedule and leaf through it, he could learn that just last March on PA TV a legislator from Abbas’s Fatah party called the U.S. “the greatest Satan in the world”; that the PA feels comradeship for distant, non-Muslim countries like North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela “precisely because [they] publicly challenge and express loathing for the U.S.”; or that the PA has named schools, streets, and sporting events after Saddam Hussein and its media are full of tributes to him.

He could learn, too, that the PA media lauds terrorist groups fighting the U.S. in Iraq; that in April 2007 the speaker of the PA Legislative Council implored Allah on PA TV to “take hold of the Americans and their allies… Allah, count them and kill them to the last one and don’t leave even one”; and that the report concludes by saying “this hatred by Palestinian Fatah and its closeness to these enemies of the U.S. are not a result of any specific U.S. policy, but are reflective of a deep and sincere ideological affinity to those enemies of the U.S.”

Israel’s 60th anniversary is indeed cause for celebration, but when looking at the security environment one’s jubilation has to be tempered. Whether it’s the European democracies—including the descendants of the Nazis—doing brisk trade with the Nazi regime in Teheran, the West’s and Israel’s continuing helplessness before Hezbollah’s assault on Lebanon and Hamas’s pounding of southern Israel, or the U.S. president’s ongoing delusional preoccupation with the Palestinian issue and perseverance in coddling and strengthening deadly enemies, the situation is hauntingly similar to the bleak landscape from which Israel eventually emerged.

P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/. He can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.