A WINNING WEEK FOR TERROR

WEST'S HUGS FAIL TO STOP THUGS

By Ralph Peters
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/
August 25, 2009

LAST week, we learned the answer to the hoary question "What does a Scots man wear under his kilt?" When it comes to terrorism, the answer's "a white flag."

But Scotland's craven release, "on humanitarian grounds," of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the mastermind of the bombing that killed 270 passengers aboard a Pan Am flight two decades ago, was merely the noisiest terrorist triumph during a week of shame.

And noisy it was: Libya's Moammar Khadafy staged a huge homecoming party for the terrorist. (Think that would've happened while W was president?) The gleeful Khadafy rubbed the West's snout in our feckless taste for appeasement.

Appeasement was also the watchword back in the United States, where Yale University Press delighted Islamist extremists by removing all illustrations from a scholarly work about the Danish cartoon debacle -- not just the caricatures of Mohammed.

Elsewhere, the casualty count went beyond book illustrations. In Iraq, Islamist terrorists staged massive suicide bombings in Baghdad. Over a hundred Iraqis died, with more than a thousand wounded. The foreign and finance ministries lie in rubble. The government's reeling.

Our president went to the beach.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban crippled the national elections so severely that the eventual "winner" won't have much of a mandate. Despite madcap ballot-box stuffing, the final tally will probably show that less than half of the eligible population voted -- fewer than one in five in the crucial south.

Afghans put more faith in Taliban threats than in government promises. US and Western officials are struggling to paint a smile on the face of the corpse, but the vote was divisive, not unifying. On Sunday, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, admitted that the Afghan situation is "serious and deteriorating."

That's what happens when, instead of killing our enemies, we try hugs.

Iran? We all know that its nuclear program is purely for peaceful purposes. That's why, just last week, President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad chose a Revolutionary Guard commander, Ahmad Vahidi, as his new defense minister.

Interpolwants Vahidi for running the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires -- 85 dead, 300 wounded. Soon, he may have his trigger finger on nuclear weapons. But no need for Israel to worry: The Obama administration will negotiate with Tehran.

Returning to America, the establishment media continued to portray imprisoned terrorists as victims, while further chastising the bygone Bush administration for rudeness to mass murderers. (Any self-righteous journalist care to spend a night in a cell with one of the butchers whose "rights" have been infringed?)

Then the White House took all major interrogations away from the CIA, further restricting the techniques allowed to stop terrorists.

And now the administration's hard-left Justice Department -- perhaps the most extreme in our country's history -- is on another witch hunt to prosecute CIA patriots who did all they could to keep our citizens safe.

Last but not least, a minor legal case bears enormous implications: A 17-year-old female Muslim immigrant to the US, Fathima Rifqa Bary, begged our justice system not to return her to her family.

She fears she'll be the victim of an honor killing.

Smooching with the boys? Naw. Much worse: She converted to Christianity -- still an offense for which, many Muslims believe, Islam (that "religion of peace") prescribes death. Fleeing from her Ohio home to Florida, she's in protective custody, awaiting a judge's verdict on Sept. 3.

Not all of the details are clear, but the big picture is: A legal resident of our country, where religious freedom is constitutionally guaranteed, fears death at the hands of her relatives and her community because she changed her faith.

If she's sent "home" and murdered, will the crime be written off as freedom of religion?

Coddled by Washington Democrats and Republicans, extremist mullahs here in the United States -- often funded by our "friends" the Saudis -- invoke religious freedom at the drop of a prayer rug. And our elected officials cower.

Well, it's high time for Muslim clerics across this country to issue a public statement explicitly denouncing all violence against Muslims who switch faiths. This is America, folks. If a Methodist turns Muslim, fine. But if a Muslim becomes an Evangelical, that, too, must be tolerated. The Koran is not a license to kill in this country.

(And that dating thing? Murder over that's a no-no, too.)

One year ago, terrorists were on the defensive around the world. Then a new US administration condemned our country while "reaching out" to our enemies.

And here we are.

Ralph Peters new novel, "The War After Armageddon," will be published Sept. 15.

The Great Escape

Much harm results when we run from personal responsibility.

By Thomas Sowell
http://www.nationalreview.com/
August 25, 2009, 0:00 a.m.

Many of the issues of our times are hard to understand without understanding the vision of the world that they are part of. Whether the particular issue is education, economics, or medical care, the preferred explanation tends to be an external explanation — that is, something outside the control of the individuals directly involved.

Education is usually discussed in terms of the money spent on it, the teaching methods used, class sizes, or the way the whole system is organized. Students are discussed largely as passive recipients of good or bad education.

But education is not something that can be given to anybody. It is something that students either acquire or fail to acquire. Personal responsibility may be ignored or downplayed in this “non-judgmental” age, but it remains a major factor nevertheless.

After many students go through a dozen years in the public schools, at a total cost of $100,000 or more per student — and emerge semi-literate and with little understanding of the society in which they live, much less the larger world and its history — most discussions of what is wrong leave out the fact that many such students may have chosen to use school as a place to fool around, act up, organize gangs, or even peddle drugs.

The great escape of our times is escape from personal responsibility for the consequences of one’s own behavior. Differences in infant-mortality rates provoke pious editorials on a need for more prenatal care to be provided by the government for those unable to afford it. In other words, the explanation is automatically assumed to be external to the mothers involved and the solution is assumed to be something that “we” can do for “them.”

While it is true that black mothers get less prenatal care than white mothers and have higher infant-mortality rates, it is also true that women of Mexican ancestry get less prenatal care than white women and yet have lower infant-mortality rates. But, once people with the prevailing social vision see the first set of facts, they seldom look for any other facts that might go against the explanation that fits their vision of the world.

No small part of the current confusion between “health care” and medical care comes from failing to recognize that Americans can have the best medical care in the world without having the best health or longevity because so many people choose to live in ways that shorten their lives.

There can be grave practical consequences of a dogmatic insistence on external explanations that allow individuals to escape personal responsibility. Americans can end up ruining the best medical care in the world in the vain hope that a government takeover will give us better health.

Economic issues are approached in the same way. People with low incomes are seen as a problem for other people to solve. Studies that follow the same individuals over time show that the vast majority of working people who are in the bottom 20 percent of income earners at a given time end up rising out of that bracket.

Many are simply beginners who get beginners’ wages but whose pay rises as they acquire more skills and experience. Yet there is a small minority of workers who do not rise and a large number of people who seldom work and who — surprise! — have low incomes as a result.

Seldom is there any thought that people who choose to waste years of their own time (and the taxpayers’ money) in school need to change their own behavior — or to visibly suffer the consequences, so that their fate can be a warning to others coming after them not to make that same mistake.

It is not just the “non-judgmental” ideology of the intelligentsia but also the self-interest of politicians that leads to so much downplaying of personal responsibility in favor of external explanations and external programs to “solve” the “problem.”

On these and other issues, government programs are far less likely to solve the country’s problems than to solve the politicians’ problem of getting the votes of those whose think the answer to every problem is for the government to “do something.”

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2009 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Gold's New Book on Iran Contains Dire Warning

by James Zumwalt
http://www.humanevents.com/
08/24/2009

Dore Gold’s The Rise of Nuclear Iran -- How Tehran Defies the West provides a dire warning: Despite the current problems raging in the Middle East, the worst may have yet to come. The Islamic Revolution that started in Tehran in 1979 has given birth to “an octopus” with tentacles that have grown to stretch far beyond Iran’s borders.

For thirty years, the West has been unable to contain this growth as Iran has moved closer and closer to regional hegemony and a nuclear weapons capability. Gold persuasively details four reasons why the West has failed to stop Iran:

1.) Tehran’s march to a nuclear weapons capability has been along a road built on diplomatic deception. The Persian word for deception is “taqiya” -- saying one thing while meaning another. Originating centuries ago in a Muslim world dominated by Sunnis, minority Shiites used it as a tool in their struggle for survival, achieving objectives otherwise unobtainable. In 21st century negotiations, taqiya results in conflicting assessments by Westerners as to what Iran’s Shiite leaders are actually putting on the table.

Gold tells how the tactic was employed early in the Islamic Revolution as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, trying to broker international support for his return to Iran and the Shah’s expulsion, represented he had no desire to rule Iran. The picture painted was of a religious leader who would be Iran’s Mahatma Gandhi, ensuring stability in the region and a better life for the Iranian people. Gold points out even U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Andrew Young went so far as to suggest Khomeini was “some kind of saint.” But, upon his arrival in Iran, Supreme Leader Khomeini immediately transitioned from Mahatma Gandhi to Attila the Hun, ruling the country for a decade with an iron Islamist fist.

2.) Gold surmises negotiations by Western powers using diplomatic engagement to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons march have failed too because they never understood the true driving force behind the mullahs’ thinking. He says successive U.S. administrations “totally misread Iran’s revolutionary leadership, underestimating the deep enmity of the Iranian regime and its uncompromising commitment to its confrontational revolutionary ideology.” The mullahs rule with blinders -- and will not be denied their destiny to spread their revolutionary ideology globally. But this destiny, Gold explains, is cemented by a dark side.

Iran’s top two leaders, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Amadinejad, firmly anticipate the imminent return of Islam’s 12th Imam -- the “Mahdi” -- who disappeared eleven centuries ago at age six. Ahmadinejad believes his term in office will end as he turns Iran over to the Mahdi. While the Mahdi’s return is an Islamic belief, tradition adheres to a natural evolution for his reappearance; however, Ahmadinejad believes he is a catalyst in expediting the return by creating the world chaos necessary to trigger it. The belief is such chaos involves the death, initially, of at least one third the world’s population, to be followed by another third. But the end result is a world ruled by Sharia law.

3.) Gold points out, as years passed and the West chose continued diplomatic engagement rather than fully confronting Iran’s deceptive diplomacy. Tehran had no incentive to change its approach. Following the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini bragged, “The Americans can’t do a damn thing.” He argues Iran perceives these words have rung true ever since. For even after collecting evidence of Iranian involvement in two major attacks against the U.S. -- the 1983 Beirut bombing of the Marine Barracks and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia -- Iran never paid a price for its terrorist acts.

4.) Iran’s economic power as an oil and natural gas producer with enormous petro-dollar buying power makes diplomatic engagement problematic. Gold writes, “The tie that binds Iran to the West is business. Strong economic interests have always trumped effective action by the United States and its allies, especially in using economic sanctions.”

Gold painstakingly documents how the mullahs, after securing control of Iran, sought to export revolution outside its borders. He richly details with dates and names, event after event, including the establishment of terrorist networks such as Hizballah, that became fronts for Tehran, doing Iran’s extraterritorial bidding.

This bidding included assassinations, kidnappings, hijackings and bombings, primarily in the Middle East and, more recently, in Iraq. But, employing taqiya, Tehran disavowed any relationship to the groups. Investigations took years to complete. Some showed involvement by Iran at the highest levels. Again, however, as Gold details, victim states exercised restraint in taking punitive action as, periodically, Iran appeared to be moderating its extremist mindset. Unbeknownst to the West, however, such appearances were simply taqiya gamesmanship.

For example, encouraged by Iranian presidential elections bringing perceived moderates Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami to power, Washington failed to hold them accountable for previous transgressions. While Tehran succeeded in painting these leaders as moderates, it was under their leadership that Iran’s nuclear weapons and missile delivery programs actually made substantial progress.

One comes to the shocking reality in reading Gold’s book that not a single U.S. administration, Democrat or Republican, has succeeded in reducing Tehran’s threat to regional security. Yet, for 30 years, Iran’s mullahs have methodically moved closer to achieving their objective of becoming an hegemonic power within the region, fostering instability throughout the Middle East in the process.

Gold notes President Obama took office with renewed faith and optimism in the power of engagement. But, he cautions, diplomatic engagement alone will not work. He cites the 2003 freeze by Tehran of its nuclear enrichment program as an example of limited success -- only because of the pending U.S. invasion of Iraq. But for the threat to the mullahs’ existence, the freeze would not have occurred.

Gold surmises, as much instability as Iran has generated in the region, it will only increase should Iran become nuclear-armed. While an emboldened Tehran would probably not launch a nuclear strike against the West, it would step up terrorist acts by proxies, promising them protection under its nuclear umbrella.

In 2004, President George Bush -- observed carrying former Soviet “refusenik” Anatoly Shransky’s The Case for Democracy -- stimulated book sales and a better understanding of the power of democracy. Were President Obama observed carrying Gold’s book, the American people would be well served by stimulating a better understanding of the grave danger a nuclear-armed Iran poses to global security -- a reality that may be less than a year away.

James Zumwalt is a retired Marine who served in the Vietnam and Gulf wars. He has written opinion pieces on foreign policy, defense and security issues for dozens of newspapers. He is president of his own security consulting company.

Bob Novak's Angle of Repose

In Memoriam

By G. Tracy Mehan, III on 8.21.09 @ 6:07AM

The American Spectator

http://spectator.org/

I only met Bob Novak once and relatively recently, at my daughter's wedding, as he was a dear friend of the groom's family. After offering him my personal appreciation for his writings over the years, the brief conversation turned to the newlyweds, the Illini, and other pleasantries.
I had read his columns all my adult life and several of his books. I was in complete agreement with him on issues ranging from his strong anti-Communism and social conservatism, supply-side economics, and his prescient opposition to the Iraq war which earned him an unjustified insult from David Frum who accused him of being part of a posse of so-called "Unpatriotic Conservatives."

Reading all the heartfelt tributes to Novak as a reporter, controversialist and a human being, I am struck by the trajectory of his life and thought which seem to have come to a kind of Augustinian position, a place of rest, an angle of repose to use an engineering term appropriated by Wallace Stegner for his famous novel of the same name.

Bob Novak was an unsparing observer of the Washington circus, a very unedifying spectacle of the works of the City of Man. In later life he was drawn to the nearest thing to the City of God on earth, Roman Catholicism, at least from his perspective.

As a Catholic I was both surprised and heartened by this development. I was surprised because Novak's public persona was curmudgeonly and fierce. There is a great line attributed to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) in which he said, "Well, we've now made Bob a Catholic. The question is, can we make him a Christian?" Only later did I read the testimony of so many of his close friends who spoke of his kindness and sacrifice on their behalf.

I was heartened by Bob Novak's conversion, as I am with all conversions, since, like many "cradle" Catholics, I sometimes become too immersed in the culture of Catholicism as just part of the furniture in your life, taken for granted, often losing that sense of the power and glory of Jesus who lived, taught, suffered, died and rose in untold love and mercy for us all. For a mature adult to take the plunge into faith is always a wonderful thing to behold and a jolt to a dormant spirituality of other persons of faith, often distracted by the cares of daily life and in need of spiritual rekindling.

As to this theory of mine that Novak developed a kind of Augustinian sense that the City of God was not of this world, recall Voltaire's quip that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, Roman nor an empire. Some fabulists in the Middle Ages misread St. Augustine's great text on the subject as justifying such a thing, thereby rendering unto Caesar the things of God. The City of God does exist, but not in the same dimension of time and space as the Terrestrial City. It is a thing to be longed for, strived for. As Richard John Neuhaus has written, we rely on that hope even as we do what we can to serve and work for the welfare of the city of our exile as the Old Testament prophet counseled the Jews in their Babylonian exile.

Tim Carney, who worked for Novak at the Evans-Novak Political Report late in the great man's career, describes his change over time:

Novak earned the nickname the Prince of Darkness for being so pessimistic so young. Early in his career, his bleak outlook stemmed from a fear that freedom would fall to Communism -- a worry he would shed by the time Ronald Reagan became president. Later in his career, Novak's pessimism and reputation as a curmudgeon derived from something altogether different -- he had lost faith in politics to make the world better.[Emphasis added]

Noting that Bob Novak was influenced by Whittaker Chambers, author of Witness and an ex-Communist, Carney states, "After Novak's trust in politicians was steadily worn down by the gritty facts of politics, the old man found faith in God. I believe this is no coincidence."

St. Francis of Assisi urged us to "Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words." Bob Novak would, no doubt, appreciate the irony that his very life itself, rather than his outstanding reporting and written words, may be his greatest gift to us all. May he rest in peace.

topics:Catholicism, Robert Novak, St. Augustine

G. Tracy Mehan, III served at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the administrations of both Presidents Bush. He is a consultant in Arlington, Virginia, and an adjunct professor at George Mason University School of Law.

Today's Tune: Elvis Presley - Power of My Love

(Click on title to play video)

Review: From Elvis in Memphis (Legacy Edition)

US release date: 28 July 2009
UK release date: 27 July 2009

By Christel Loar
PopMatters
Thursday, August 13 2009

Hot on the heels of the phenomenal success of his so called “‘68 Comeback Special”, aired that December on NBC, Elvis Presley made one of the smartest moves of his career. He returned to Memphis, for the first time since his days with Sun Records, to record an album.

From Elvis in Memphis: Legacy Edition is the result of those 1969 recordings, and 40 years later, it’s easy to see why so many fans and critics consider this the pinnacle of the King’s powers as an artist. It’s Elvis at his best, and fully aware of that fact. He’s surrounded by top-notch writers and musicians and, as with the television performance, he’s clearly having fun doing something he loves. He’s in the best vocal shape since before his stint in the army, and he’s quite possibly more open to various styles and sounds than when he did his first Sun sessions.

Disc one of the Legacy Edition follows the 12 original From Elvis in Memphis tracks with four bonus recordings from the sessions, including a cover of “Hey Jude” that, although Presley plays fast and loose with the lyrics—or possibly, just doesn’t know them very well, given his laughter at the end of the song—is yet another surprising example, among many on this album, of both the power of his voice and his willingness to pull from all sorts of musical sources.

Disc two adds the ten tracks, also from the 1969 Memphis sessions, initially featured on the first half of From Memphis to Vegas - From Vegas to Memphis, which has seen some of its songs reissued over the years as Back in Memphis, and as parts of various compilations. These, along with four single mixes of album tracks and six non-album singles, round out the Legacy Edition release for a total of 36 tracks from Elvis’s sessions at Chip Moman’s American Studio. The singles appear in their original mono format and include both the chart hits, like “In The Ghetto”, “Suspicious Minds”, “Kentucky Rain”, and “Don’t Cry Daddy”, as well as their B-sides, such as “Any Day Now”, “You’ll Think of Me”, “My Little Friend”, and “Rubberneckin’”.

Extensive liner notes for this set were written by the Memphis based authors, filmmakers, and historians Robert Gordon and Tara McAdams, whose works include the books It Came From Memphis and The Elvis Handbook and the documentary films Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story and Shakespeare Was a Big George Jones Fan: Cowboy Jack Clement’s Home Movies. In addition to those notes, the accompanying booklet features several wonderful photos of Elvis with his Memphis band and back up singers and of his opening night in Las Vegas. A complete list of musicians at the sessions and details of the overdubs is also included.

Of course, it’s still the music that really sets this set apart. The newly remastered recordings allow listeners to experience every nuance of Elvis’s phrasing and delivery, and it’s truly difficult to choose specific tracks that stand out among such singular performances. On the first disc, “Any Day Now” and “In the Ghetto” are naturally the clinchers, but “Power of My Love” is a stunningly, well, powerful mid-album dark horse. On the second disc, one might argue that it’s all about the singles, but that would do grave injustice to Elvis’s masterful interpretation of Percy Mayfield’s “Stranger in My Own Home Town,” which is a true testament his unique ability to pay tribute to the artists he loved while simultaneously making a song incontestably his own.

With the fortieth anniversary of the recordings—and the remastering, repackaging, and releasing as a complete collection—From Elvis in Memphis: Legacy Edition has, at long last, given these tracks the treatment they deserve as some of the best music Elvis Presley ever made.

Elvis Presley

Q&A: John Fogerty returns to roots with Rangers

By Cortney Harding Cortney Harding – Fri Aug 21, 5:35 pm ET
http://www.reuters.com/

NEW YORK (Billboard) – Attempting to sum up John Fogerty's musical career in a few lines feels incomplete at best. As the frontman for Creedence Clearwater Revival, he brought bluesy swamp rock to the hippie masses; as a solo artist, he's done everything from sharp political tracks to perhaps the greatest baseball tune ever ("Centerfield"). Fogerty also holds the distinct honor of being one of the few musicians to be sued for sounding too much like himself.


Singer John Fogerty poses backstage at the 50th Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles February 10, 2008. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

When Fogerty released the first Blue Ridge Rangers album in 1973, it was seen as a declaration of his independence from Creedence and the start of his solo career. Since then, he's recorded seven solo albums but has never revisited the country and blues covers-driven project until recently. Fogerty spoke with Billboard about choosing the tracks for "The Blue Ridge Rangers Rides Again" (due September 1 on Fortunate Son/Verve/Forecast), Woodstock and the importance of a great live tune.

Billboard: Why did you decide to revive the Blue Ridge Rangers project now?

John Fogerty: My wife, Julie, suggested it. I was right in the middle of working on a DVD of a show at (London's) Albert Hall, and out of the blue she suggests the Blue Ridge Rangers. I was sort of surprised, but in a sense she was enabling that project. I was never really sure how she even regarded that record; she's probably not the country fan that I am. But that's what got the ball rolling. I guess you might say since she's going to give me a couple of hours off to play with my hobby, I guess I'm going to jump at the chance.

Billboard: After your 2007 release "Revival," which was a loud album, did you have a desire to do something quieter?

Fogerty: I don't really think in those terms. I'm caught up being a musician and a songwriter, and when you're in the middle of the stream it's kind of hard to know anything except what's immediately around you. It's simply that I regard Blue Ridge Rangers music -- that style -- in a very special way, and I don't think I was particularly trying to be quieter or anything like that. I just know that the music that I love certainly comes out in Blue Ridge Rangers mode.

Billboard: How did you decide which songs to put on the album?

Fogerty: I've been carrying around a lot of songs for many, many years. I always had the idea, "Well, if someday I ever do that Blue Ridge Rangers album again, this would be a good song." There was never an official list, although every four or five years I'd actually sit down and write out a list of 20 songs or something. As this thing got more real it became more official.
(My wife) had a couple of other suggestions, like the John Denver song "Back Home Again" -- now that was also something on my list but I was very scared of ever trying to do that song. Because John Denver is such a wonderful vocalist, and the fact that he's so great and I don't sound like John Denver. The most horrible thing you can do in life is when you love something so much you make a really bad rendition of it. You want to be that thing but you are not.

I really have to give Julie my respect for insisting that I could do it even when I didn't feel like I could. I love the way guitars sound in that key and I love that whole arrangement. Everything was going to be cool, except I was totally worrying about my voice -- and it turned out I didn't have to sound like John Denver. I'd figured out another way that still sounded OK.

Billboard: Looking back on the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, where CCR performed, how has it affected your life and career?

Fogerty: Woodstock at the time was certainly a watermark -- I don't know if it was a high-water mark. There was a very strong ethic to my generation -- it was political, it was economical, it was even philosophical. It wasn't just the fact that you happened to be at a circus that was thrown for three days in New York. I felt that all of that generation more or less was tuned in to the same radio wave.

But as things went along in our country -- let's say the invention of the yuppie, the rise of Ronald Reagan and so-called Reagan Democrats and the whole idea that greed is good and all that stuff -- I began to wonder what happened to that -- where are all those people that were at Woodstock? For me that is the missing ingredient, and in some ways I feel like an old dinosaur. If anything, that got turned into a tie-dye business long ago.

Billboard: What are your plans for the rest of the year and 2010?

Fogerty: To perform this music in front of as many people as possible. I mean, this is live music -- it was intended to be played live. These are all songs that are good live songs -- that was the first requisite. I think people need to hear a live band and me performing this stuff.

(Editing by Sheri Linden at Reuters)

(please visit our entertainment blog via www.reuters.com or on http://blogs.reuters.com/fanfare/)

Still 'Crazy' -- And Proud of It

Conservatives induce a case of the vapors at the Washington Post.

by P.J. O'Rourke
The Weekly Standard
08/31/2009, Volume 014, Issue 46
http://www.weeklystandard.com/

Us right-wing nuts sure is scary! That's the message from the Washington Post. To put this in language a conservative would understand, the fourth estate has been alarmed once again by the Burkean proclivities of our nation's citizens. The Post is in a panic about (to use its own descriptive terms) "birthers," "anti-tax tea-partiers," and "town hall hecklers."

If, last Sunday, you spent a profitless hour reading the Washington Post (itself not too profitable), you noticed the loud yapping and desperate nipping at those who disagree with liberal orthodoxy. It was as if top management were a toy schnauzer accidentally mistaken for a duster and traumatized by being run back and forth through the venetian blinds. The wise and prestigious broadsheet institution was so barking mad that it sent three (Three! In these times of hardship for the print media! When reporters are being laid off right and left--well, mostly right--and stories are going uncovered from rapidly warming pole to pole! Three!) journalists to do battle with "The Return of Right-Wing Rage."

That was the subtitle of Rick Perlstein's section B leader. The title was "In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition." Perlstein wrote the book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus so you can intuit (or "grok" as Perlstein might put it, given his prose style) the contents of his article. Yes, Rick, right-wing rage has returned. It was up at my place for the weekend. But it's back, and it's not like right-wing rage ever really went away. It didn't, as you would say, Rick, "move on."

Accompanying the Perlstein screed was a sidebar by Alec MacGillis explaining how "health care reform is not that hard to understand, and those who tell you otherwise most likely have an ulterior motive."

All you town hall hecklers, calm down and go home. Never mind that Alec MacGillis is a rat, something that's evident by the sixth sentence of his piece: "Fixing [health care] could be very simple: a single-payer system." And never mind that his writing is more than uninformative, it is informationally subtractive. Read him and you'll know less than you know now about what the government is going to do to you and your doctor. Read him carefully and you'll know nothing.

But calm down and go home, because the Washington Post said so. This is exactly the joke that used to be told in the Soviet Union. An old guy's wife tells him to go to the butcher shop and get some meat. He goes to the butcher shop and stands in line for hours. Finally the butcher says, "We're out of meat." The old guy blows his top. He yells, "I am a worker! I am a proletarian! I am a veteran of the Great Patriotic War! I have fought for socialism all my life, and now you tell me you're out of meat! What kind of a system is this?! You are fools! You are thieves! . . . " A big man in a trench coat comes up to the old guy and says, "Comrade, Comrade, not so loud. In the old days you know what they would do if you said such things." The big man in the trench coat makes a pistol motion with his hand. He says to the old guy, "Calm down and go home." The old guy shrugs and leaves. He comes back empty-handed, and his wife says, "What's the matter, are they out of meat?" "Worse than that," says the old guy, "they're out of bullets."

So there was Rick Perlstein calling everyone to the right of Nikita Khrushchev a candidate for the state psychiatric ward with Alec MacGillis playing his KGB Bozo sidekick, firing blanks and honking his "End-of-life care eats up a huge slice of spending" airhorn. Then, to add idiocy to insult, the Post sent Robin Givhan to observe the Americans who are taking exception to various expansions of government powers and prerogatives and to make fun of their clothes.

Givhan writes a column called "On Culture," and this is what passes for culture at the Post: "Of the hundreds of thousands of style guides currently for sale on Amazon, not one . . . was prescient enough to outline the appropriate attire for those public occasions when good citizens decided to behave like raving lunatics and turn lawmakers into punching bags." Meeting with Givhan's scorn were "T-shirts, baseball caps, promotional polo shirts and sundresses with bra straps sliding down their arm."

I've never seen Robin Givhan. For all I know she dolls herself up like Jackie O. But I have seen other employees of the Washington Post and--with the exception of the elegant and, I dare say, cultured, Roxanne Roberts--they look as if they got dressed in the unlit confines of a Planet Aid clothing-donation bin.

Perlstein, for all the highness of his dudgeon, doesn't catch the nuts saying anything very nutty. The closest he gets to a lunatic quote is from a "libertarian" wearing a holstered pistol who declares that the "tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots." And those are the words of lefty icon Thomas Jefferson. I myself could point out the absurdity of protestors' concerns about government euthanasia committees. Federal bureaucracy has never moved fast enough to get to the ill and elderly before natural causes do. And what's with those "birthers"? Why their obsession with a nonentity like Obama? How about John Adams with his Alien and Sedition Acts choke-hold on the First Amendment? Or Jefferson? He could tell his Monica Lewinsky, "I own you," and he wasn't kidding. Or John Quincy Adams, pulling the original Blagojevich, buying the presidency from Henry Clay? Or that backwoods Bolshevik Andrew Jackson? Or William Henry Harrison, too dumb to come in out of the rain? Not one of these scallywags was born in the United States of America--look it up.

But Perlstein couldn't be bothered. Instead he resorts to lazy fallacies of post hoc ergo propter hoc and argumentum ad verecundiam to try to prove that the Obama administration is a wise and prestigious political institution because nuts are attacking it the way nuts previously attacked other wise and prestigious political institutions, such as Adlai Stevenson. Even with the force of illogic on his side Perlstein cannot make his case. He tells about Stevenson speaking on United Nations Day in 1963. "Then, when Stevenson was walked to his limousine, a grimacing and wild-eyed lady thwacked him with a picket sign. Stevenson was baffled. 'What's the matter, madam?' he asked. 'What can I do for you?' The woman responded with self-righteous fury: 'Well, if you don't know I can't help you.' "

And I can't help the Washington Post. Why is the paper intimidated by dissent that's tame even by Adlai Stevenson standards? Not that the Post has ever been exactly a "profile in courage." (A little joke there about the propensity to endorse anything with a Kennedy stuck to it.) No doubt it's always alarming to the know-it-alls when ordinary people decide they'd like some say in ordinary life, when regular folk tell the know-it-alls to take their fishwrap and go blog themselves. And the Post has been extra jumpy since it got caught trying to pimp Washington's power elite to K Street lobbyists at a pay-to-play bun fight in the publisher's manse. Personally I thought this was great--the first time the newspaper had shown any respect for the free market system since Eleanor Roosevelt was a pup. But terror, like the Post, is not a thing of reason. Dread lurks in wise and prestigious institutions across the land. Rick Perlstein has a phrase that gives poignant expression to this fear and trembling: "America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendency."

Oh, it's a crazy tree. And the taller it grows, the crazier it gets. And I roost upon the tip-top branch. Ye of the Washington Post, Don't park your SmartCar under my perch.

P. J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Terrorists Go Scot Free

The release of the Lockerbie terrorist is exactly what we should have expected.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/
August 21, 2009, 0:30 p.m.

There was precious outrage in some mainstream media quarters Friday over the Obama administration’s pusillanimous reaction to Scotland’s release of PanAm 103 bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi. But what were they expecting?

Megrahi has been transferred home to Libya. The release of the Lockerbie terrorist was said to be on humanitarian grounds, because Megrahi is said to be terminally ill. The action, though, was totally discretionary on Scotland’s part and could have been stopped by Britain. The Obama administration did nothing meaningful to stop it from happening. Perhaps the White House and the State Department were too embarrassed to try. In June, when they made arrangements with Bermuda’s prime-minister to transfer four of the Uighur detainees (trained jihadists) from Guantanamo Bay to the tiny island, they cut the British government out of the secret negotiations — even though Britain, aside from being our closest ally, is responsible for the foreign policy and national security of Bermuda, its protectorate.

Laughably, the president is reported to have called for the terrorist to be placed under house arrest and to have “warned” Colonel Gadhafi “not to give him a hero’s welcome.” Here’s AP’s report of what happened next:

Despite the warning, thousands of young men were on hand at a Tripoli airport where al-Megrahi’s plane touched down. Some threw flower petals as he stepped from the plane. . . . He was accompanied by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s son, Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, who was dressed in a traditional white robe and golden embroidered vest. The son pledged last year to bring al-Megrahi home and raised his hand victoriously to the crowd as he exited the plane. . . .

At home, al-Megrahi, 57, is seen as an innocent scapegoat the West used to turn this African nation into a pariah. At the airport, some wore T-shirts with his picture and waved Libyan and miniature blue-and-white Scottish flags. Libyan songs blared in the background. “It’s a great day for us,” 24-year-old Abdel-Aal Mansour said. “He belongs here, at home.” Moammar Gadhafi lobbied hard for the return of al-Megrahi.

Megrahi, who was convicted and sentenced to 27 years’ imprisonment, served eight years in prison.

By contrast, Binyam Mohammed, the accomplice of “Dirty Bomber” Jose Padilla who plotted a post-9/11 second wave of mass-murder attacks targeting American cities, is now living free (and on public assistance) in England after President Obama released him outright, without prosecution. Mohammed had previously been detained as an enemy combatant by Pres. George W. Bush.

Obama’s Justice Department, meanwhile, gave a lesser-charges plea deal to Ali Saleh Kallah al-Marri, another member of al-Qaeda’s second-wave plot. The deal caps Marri’s potential sentence at 15 years and permits the judge to impose as little as the time Marri has already served, meaning about six years.

Consider the human context in which those decisions were made: Several high officials in the Obama Justice Department, including Attorney General Eric Holder, must be recused from participation in various terrorism matters on conflict-of-interest grounds. This is because they or their firms represented numerous terrorists in litigation against the United States over the past eight years. And the Justice Department recently hired Jennifer Daskal, a left-wing activist from Human Rights Watch, to help shape its detainee policies. She has worked in behalf of terrorist prisoners for years. To give just a thumbnail sketch, Daskal has expressed doubt about the guilt of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (arguing that we may have tortured him into admitting to the atrocities he has repeatedly bragged about committing); has lamented that one detainee, “a self-styled poet,” suffered abuse in U.S. custody when he “found it was nearly impossible to write poetry anymore because the prison guards would only allow him to keep a pen or pencil in his cell for short periods of time”; and has argued on behalf of terrorist detainee Omar Khadr, who was 15 when he allegedly launched the grenade that killed U.S. Army Sgt. First Class Christopher Speer, because a prosecution of Khadr would violate his “rights as a child.” (Next month, Khadr will be 23.)

President Obama’s circle of friends includes Rashid Khalidi, a cohort of and flak for Yasser Arafat, the master terrorist responsible for two intifadas and the murder of U.S. diplomats in Sudan. It also includes the unrepentant former Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

The Los Angeles Times observes that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered only muted criticism of the Megrahi release (she found it “deeply disappointing”). Mrs. Clinton was first lady when President Clinton pardoned (i.e., commuted the sentences of) 16 Puerto Rican terrorists whose organizations, including the FALN, had carried out numerous bombings in the United States. The pardons were transparently an effort to appeal to Hispanic voters in New York, where Mrs. Clinton was a candidate for the U.S. Senate. On his last day in office, moreover, Clinton also released Weather Underground terrorists Susan Rosenberg (whose 58-year sentence was thus commuted to 16 years) and Linda Sue Evans (whose 40-year sentence was thus commuted to 15 years).

In the Justice Department, pardon issues are overseen by the deputy attorney general. The DAG at the time of these Clinton commutations was Eric Holder. The Los Angeles Times adds that Holder meekly expressed regret that the interests of justice “have not been served by” Scotland’s release of Megrahi.

Obviously, the fecklessness of the Obama administration in response to Scotland’s release and Libya’s celebration of a terrorist who murdered 270 people, including 189 Americans, is outrageous. But the Obama administration is staffed with appeasers who all but ensure outcomes of this sort. What did we think the attitude of other countries was going to be when we put these folks in charge?

— National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).

NCAA vacates all reason with Memphis ruling

by Mark Kriegel
http://msn.foxsports.com/
Updated: August 20, 2009, 6:17 PM EDT

Mark Kriegel is the national columnist for FOXSports.com. He is the author of two New York Times best sellers, Namath: A Biography and Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich, which Sports Illustrated called "the best sports biography of the year."

Only an institution as perversely legalistic and blindly arrogant as the NCAA could "vacate" a university's Final Four appearance.

I was at the Meadowlands in '96, when John Calipari's Massachusetts team lost to Kentucky, and in San Antonio 12 years later when his Memphis squad lost in overtime to Kansas. Now comes word that Calipari is two for two, that Memphis' glorious campaign, like that of UMass, is to be deleted from the record books.


Derrick Rose and John Calipari

So should I expunge the memory as well, to pretend that Mario Chalmers' three-pointer, the famous shot that sent the game into an extra period, never happened? And what of the fans from, say, UCLA, who traveled to Texas to get beat by a player who, it now turns out, shouldn't have been playing? Derrick Rose had 25 points, nine rebounds and four assists while holding the Bruins' Darren Collison to 1-of-9 shooting. I'm sure Bruins fans would love to forget that. Maybe it would help ease their pain if the NCAA reimbursed them for the price of their tickets to the vacated games.

Actually, it's easier to pretend these games never happened than it is to imagine the NCAA parting with a cent. This game's all about money, which brings me back to Calipari.

His '96 UMass team was dirty. His '08 Memphis team was dirty. But now as then, the coach keeps getting richer. Thirteen years ago, while the NCAA was investigating the Minutemen, he took a gig with the Nets as coach and director of basketball operations. It paid about $3 million per, pretty good money back in the dark ages. This time, as investigators were uncovering the fugazy tales of Rose and his brother, Calipari was negotiating with Kentucky. His deal in Lexington runs almost $32 million for eight years.

The purely coincidental similarities don't stop there, either. Back in '96, he didn't know anything about the cash and the jewelry agents were lavishing on his star player, Marcus Camby. I'm sure he had absolutely no idea — none at all — that an assistant athletic director was leaving comp tickets for the agents.

Likewise, 13 years later, one of the sharpest coaches around again finds himself in a state of blissful, lucrative ignorance. How was he to know that Derrick Rose didn't take the SAT himself? How was he to know that Rose's brother received $1,713.85 in illicit benefits from the university, including free transportation, lodging and meals?

Apparently, it was too much for Calipari to say: "Hey, Derrick, what's your brother the AAU coach doing on our charter flights? How's he paying for it?"

Or to wonder why a Chicago kid — who had already failed the ACT three times — finally qualified for college eligibility by taking the SAT 283 miles away in Detroit?

Then again, Calipari understood as well as anyone: don't ask, don't worry.

I'm probably being too hard on Calipari, who might be almost as good a coach as he is a hustler. After all, he only does what the system allows him to do. Kentucky knew. A few months ago, AD Mitch Barnhardt issued a press release commending his new coach for being "forthcoming and honest about the NCAA inquiry" during the interview process. Even university president Lee Todd deigned to be quoted in a release, saying he was "confident that Coach Calipari was not involved in any way."

Of course not. Everything went as forecast. Memphis' record — including those games won by its long-gone coach — have been "vacated." It had to return the trophy. Then, in perhaps the final indignity, Paul Dee of the Infractions Committee explained the NCAA's position on a conference call.

"The coach is the important person on any team," said Dee.

Then what about this coach, he was asked, who presided over a now-vacated season?


"No allegations were brought against the coach," he said. "Therefore we did not go through that exercise."

Still, you wonder: was Calipari in a position to know better?

"There was no allegation that the coach knew or should have known so we didn't go forward with that inquiry."

Sounds as though the NCAA has vacated common sense along with Memphis' record. Yes, I know Calipari wasn't individually charged or investigated. But if the infractions were serious enough to expunge a school's Final Four season, then the guy who runs the team for that university — "the most important person" in Dee's words — should bear some real responsibility. So, too, should the university that hires a coach with an investigation still pending.

Instead, Calipari was rewarded. He may not be a cheater, but he had almost 32 million reasons to look the other way.

Now the NCAA wants me to imagine that Memphis' 2007-08 season never happened. It's much easier to imagine Calipari being introduced as the next coach of UCLA, just weeks before Kentucky vacates its next appearance in the Final Four.

Stimulus hits a pothole

And Obamacare can't be rationalized on economic or medical grounds because it's not about that. It's about moving America left.

By MARK STEYN
Syndicated columnist
Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
Friday, August 21, 2009

The other day, wending my way from Woodsville, N.H., 40 miles south to Plymouth, I came across several "stimulus" projects – every few miles, and heralded by a two-tone sign, a hitherto rare sight on Granite State highways. The orange strip at the top said "PUTTING AMERICA BACK TO WORK" with a silhouette of a man with a shovel, and the green part underneath informed you that what you were about to see was a "PROJECT FUNDED BY THE AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT." There then followed a few yards of desolate, abandoned scarified pavement, followed by an "END OF ROAD WORKS" sign, until the next "stimulus" project a couple of bends down a quiet rural blacktop.

I don't know why one of the least fiscally debauched states in the Union needs funds from "the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" to repair random stretches of highway, especially stretches that were perfectly fine until someone came along to dig them up in order to access "stimulus" funding. I would have asked one of those men with a shovel, as depicted on the sign. But there were none to be found. Usually in New Hampshire, they dig up the road, regrade or repave it, while the flagmen stand guard until it's all done. But here a certain federal torpor seemed to hang in the eerie silence.

Still, what do I know? Evidently, it's stimulated the sign-making industry, putting America back to work by putting up "PUTTING AMERICA BACK TO WORK" signs every 200 yards across the land. And at 300 bucks a pop the signage alone should be enough to launch an era of unparalleled prosperity, assuming America's gilded sign magnates don't spend their newfound wealth on Bahamian vacations and European imports. Perhaps if the president were to have his All-Seeing O logo lovingly hand-painted onto each sign, it would stimulate the economy even more, if only when they were taken down and auctioned on eBay.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, India, China, Japan and much of Continental Europe the recession has ended. In the second quarter this year, both the French and German economies grew by 0.3 percent, while the U.S. economy shrank by 1 percent. How can that be? Unlike America, France and Germany had no government stimulus worth speaking of, the Germans declining to go the Obama route on the quaint grounds that they couldn't afford it. They did not invest in the critical signage-in-front-of-holes-in-the-road sector. And yet their recession has gone away. Of the world's biggest economies, only the U.S., Britain and Italy are still contracting. All three are big stimulators, though Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi can't compete with Obama's $800 billion porkapalooza. The president has borrowed more money to spend to less effect than anybody on the planet.

Actually, when I say "to less effect," that's not strictly true: Due to Obama, one of the least-indebted developed nations is now one of the most indebted – and getting ever more so. We've become the third most debt-ridden country, after Japan and Italy. According to last month's IMF report, general government debt as a percentage of GDP will rise from 63 percent in 2007 to 88.8 percent this year and to 99.8 percent of GDP next year.

Of course, the president retains his formidable political skills, artfully distracting attention from his stimulus debacle with his health care debacle. But there are diminishing returns to his serial thousand-page, trillion-dollar boondoggles. They may be too long for your representatives to bother reading before passing into law, but, whatever the intricacies of Section 417(a) xii on page 938, people are beginning to spot what all this stuff has in common: He's spending your future. And by "future" I don't mean 2070, 2060, 2040, but the day after tomorrow. Democrats can talk about only raising taxes on "the rich," but more and more Americans are beginning to figure out what percentage of them will wind up in "the richest 5 percent" before this binge is over. According to Gallup, nearly 70 percent of Americans now expect higher taxes under Obama.

But the silver-tongued salesman sails on. Why be scared of a government health program? After all, says the president, "Medicare is a government program that works really well," and if "we're able to get something right like Medicare," we should have more "confidence" about being able to do it for everyone.

On the other hand, says the president, Medicare is "unsustainable" and "running out of money."

By the way, unlike your run-of-the-mill politician's contradictory statements, these weren't made a year or even a week apart, but during the same presidential speech in Portsmouth, N.H. At any rate, in order to "control costs," Obama says we need to introduce a new trillion-dollar government entitlement. It's a good thing he's the smartest president of all time and the greatest orator since Socrates because otherwise one might easily confuse him with some birdbrained Bush type. But, if we take him at his word, then a trillion-dollar public expenditure that "controls costs" presumably means he's planning on reducing private health expenditure – such as, say, your insurance plan – by at least a trillion. Or he'll be raising a trillion dollars' worth of revenue. Either way, under Obama nothing is certain but death panels and taxes – i.e., a vast enervating statism and the confiscation of the fruits of your labors required to pay for it.

That's why the "stimulus" flopped. It didn't just fail to stimulate, it actively deterred stimulation, because it was the first explicit signal to America and the world that the Democrats' political priorities overrode everything else. If you're a business owner, why take on extra employees when cap-and-trade is promising increased regulatory costs, and health "reform" wants to stick you with an 8 percent tax for not having a company insurance plan? Obama's leviathan sends a consistent message to business and consumers alike: When he's spending this crazy, maybe the smart thing for you to do is hunker down until the dust's settled, and you get a better sense of just how broke he's going to make you. For this level of "community organization," there aren't enough of "the rich" to pay for it. That leaves you.

For Obama, government health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture in which all elections and most public discourse will be conducted on Democrat terms. It's no surprise that the president can't make a coherent economic or medical argument for Obamacare because that's not what it's about – and for all his cool he can't quite disguise that. Apropos a new poll, the Associated Press reports that Americans "are losing faith in Barack Obama."

"Losing faith"? Oh, no! Fall on your knees and beseech the One: "Give me a sign, O Lord!"

But he has. They're all along empty highways across rural New Hampshire: "This Massive Expansion Of Wasteful Statism Brought To You By Obama Marketing Inc."

©MARK STEYN

Today's Tune: Ramones - Baby, I Love You

(Click on title to play video)

Paedophile pensioner given Viagra on the NHS - despite string of attacks on children

By Daniel Bates
The London Daily Mail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/
Last updated at 2:14 AM on 20th August 2009

A paedophile with a 30-year history of abusing children is being prescribed Viagra on the NHS - and there is nothing the authorities can do to stop him.

Roger Martin, 71, merely has to visit his GP to obtain the libido-enhancing drug, even though experts warn it will enable him to continue preying on children despite his age.

The probation officers who oversee Martin are powerless to interfere with the administration of prescription drugs.

He does not have to tell his GP about his criminal past and even if he does, doctors cannot take convictions into account.

Martin suffers from numerous illnesses including diabetes, for which Department of Health guidelines say Viagra can be prescribed.

He has forced himself on a string of youngsters and his latest assault was on an 11-year-old girl last year.

But when he was sentenced at Peterborough Crown Court yesterday a judge chose not to send him to prison after being persuaded he 'wouldn't be able to cope' with a spell behind bars.

Last night Martin, a widower, claimed he 'wasn't doing anything wrong' by taking Viagra. But child safety campaigners and MPs reacted with horror and demanded the loophole be closed.

Claude Knights, director of children's charity Kidscape, said: 'I am shocked that someone has been given a chemical aid to sexual activity when they are misdirecting their urges. It gives them a chance to abuse more children.'

Peterborough MP Stewart Jackson said: 'This is a bizarre and outrageous example of where common sense gets thrown out of the window in preference to so-called human rights and political correctness.

'Someone needs to get a grip here and start thinking about what's in the public interest instead of ticking boxes like a robot.'

Martin, of Dogsthorpe, Peterborough, has a history of sex offences dating back to 1978 when he was convicted for having unlawful sex with a 15-year-old baby-sitter.

He pleaded guilty to his latest offence of touching an 11-year-old inappropriately when she visited his sheltered accommodation home in December 2008 to do some cleaning for pocket money.

Judge Nicholas Coleman ordered him to attend a three-year sex offenders' treatment programme and banned from having contact with children indefinitely.

Last night he said his Viagra use was 'a personal thing really'.

He added: 'I live on my own and I don't have any female company and I don't think I'm doing anything wrong.'

Review: Bruce Springsteen at Comcast Theatre

By Eric R. Danton on August 20, 2009 12:29 AM
The Hartford Courant
http://www.courant.com/

Overheard in Hartford Wednesday afternoon: "Has Bruce Springsteen worn out his welcome?"

No, he has not.

It's a fair question, given that he's now played here four times since October 2007, including a performance Wednesday night at Comcast Theatre that clocked in at darn close to 3 hours.

But he wouldn't keep coming back if there weren't interest, and there was plenty of that this time around, even on one of the hottest days of the summer.

The sweltering weather made for a sweaty show on stage and in the crowd, but there was something special about the vibe that created: a sort of superheated rock 'n' roll delirium as Springsteen dug deep into his catalog for concert rarities and sat them next to some of his biggest and best songs.

"Do you feel the spirit?" he shouted early on, and the answer was yes. Well, either that or it was dehydration.

Nah, let's go with spirit. Bruce sure felt it on the inky hot rock 'n' soul number "Spirit in the Night," drummer Max Weinberg swinging the song as Springsteen made forays into the crowd, clasping people's forearms and accepting a proffered beer, which he tossed back with a few quick gulps.

He dove into working class anthems, sounding defiant on "Out in the Street" and trapped on "Johnny 99," guitarist Nils Lofgren adding fiery lap steel as Springsteen wet him down with a sponge from a bucket near the drums.

The rarities included the cynical "Murder Incorporated" and "Be True," an outtake from sessions for his 1980 album "The River." It was one of the more reflective moments, along with the restless yearning of "My Love Will Not Let You Down" and "American Skin (41 Shots)," one of Springsteen's most pointed social commentaries.

There were moments of levity, too: Springsteen collected song requests on signs from people in the audience, and the band arranged a few of them on the spot, including joyous versions of Johnny Rivers' "Mountain of Love" and the Manfred Mann hit "Sha La La."

He pulled back from the deep cuts toward the end of the show with an impressive run to end his main set. "Lonesome Day" led to "The Rising," and then the lights came on for "Born to Run," the audience singing at top volume in a wringing catharsis.

Next came the buoyant "Rosalita," building to waves of saxophone from Clarence Clemons, followed by a deeply soulful version of "Thunder Road." It was a little less urgent and a little more wistful, and Clemons' iconic solo at the end shone out like a beacon for true believers.

Springsteen and the band had already played 24 songs by that point, but he seemed loath to stop. He pushed onward with another four songs in the encore: the folk songs "Hard Times Come Again No More" and "American Land," followed by "Dancing in the Dark" and, finally, a medley of "Twist and Shout" and "La Bamba."

Set list

1. Sherry Darling
2. Badlands
3. Out in the Street
4. Outlaw Pete
5. Spirit in the Night
6. Working on a Dream
7. Seeds
8. Johnny 99
9. Murder Incorporated
10. Something in the Night
11. Raise Your Hand
12. Mountain of Love
13. Sha La La
14. I'm on Fire
15. Be True
16. My Love Will Not Let You Down
17. Waitin' on a Sunny Day
18. The Promised Land
19. American Skin (41 Shots)
20. Lonesome Day
21. The Rising
22. Born to Run
23. Rosalita
24. Thunder Road

Encore

25. Hard Times Come Again No More
26. American Land
27. Dancing in the Dark
28. Twist and Shout/La Bamba

Film Review: "Julie & Julia"

Two for the Stove

By A. O. SCOTT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
Published: August 7, 2009

This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.

In an understated but nonetheless climactic scene in Nora Ephron’s “Julie & Julia,” Julia Child (Meryl Streep) and her editor, Judith Jones (Erin Dilly), struggle to come up with a title for the culinary doorstopper Julia has spent the past eight years composing. It’s not an especially suspenseful moment — pretty much anyone who has cooked an omelet knows what the book is called — but it gives Ms. Ephron and the audience a chance to savor the precise nature of Julia Child’s achievement.

Jonathan Wenk/Columbia Pictures

Meryl Streep stars as Julia Child in "Julie & Julia."

The book is “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” — not “How To” or “Made Easy” or “For Dummies,” but “Mastering the Art.” In other words, cooking that omelet is part of a demanding, exalted discipline not to be entered into frivolously or casually. But at the same time: You can do it. It is a matter of technique, of skill, of practice.

The impact of that first volume of “Mastering the Art,” and of Child’s subsequent television career (which is mostly tangential to the movie’s concerns), is hard to overstate. The book stands with a few other postwar touchstones — including Dr. Benjamin Spock’s “Baby and Child Care,” the Kinsey Report and Dr. Seuss’s “Cat in the Hat” — as a publication that fundamentally altered the way a basic human activity was perceived and pursued.

Not that Ms. Ephron’s breezy, busy movie traffics in such sweeping historical ideas, except occasionally by implication. Nor does she infuse the happy, well-fed life of her Julia (the main source for whom is a memoir Child wrote with Alex Prud’homme, her great-nephew) with too much grand drama. “Julie & Julia” proceeds with such ease and charm that its audacity — a no-nonsense, plucky self-confidence embodied by the indomitable Julia herself — is easy to miss.

Most strikingly, this is a Hollywood movie about women that is not about the desperate pursuit of men. Marriage is certainly the context both of Julia’s story and of Julie’s (about whom more in a moment), but it is not the point. The point, to invoke the title of a book whose author has an amusing cameo here (played by Frances Sternhagen), is the joy of cooking.
In the vernacular of many American kitchens, “Mastering the Art” is better known simply as “Julia,” and many a kitchen debate has been settled by an appeal to its authority. Should we separate the eggs? Turn the roast? What does Julia say?

In 2002, more than half a century after Julia and her husband, Paul, arrived in France — a debarkation that provides the movie’s opening scene — a young woman named Julie Powell decided to answer that question in the most literal and systematic way imaginable. A would-be writer working at a thankless office job and living with her husband in Long Island City, Queens, Ms. Powell spent a year cooking every single recipe in “Mastering the Art” and writing a blog about the experience. The blog led to the memoir that provided Ms. Ephron’s movie with its title and the lesser half of its narrative.

A downtrodden cubicle inmate named Julie Powell (Amy Adams) decides to prepare all 524 often-daunting recipes in said cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," and blog about it.
Photo: Jonathan Wenk/Columbia Pictures

Trimming some fat from Ms. Powell’s rambling book (and draining some of the juice as well), Ms. Ephron’s script emphasizes the parallels between the lives of her leading characters, who never meet. (They appear on screen together only when Julie watches Julia on television). Julie (Amy Adams) and Julia have loving, supportive husbands — the affable Chris Messina is Eric Powell; the impeccable Stanley Tucci is Paul Child — who only occasionally express impatience with their wives’ gastronomic obsessions. (Paul by arching an eyebrow, Eric by storming out of the apartment.)

Both women take up cooking out of a restless sense of drift — “I need something to dooooo,” Julia exclaims — and both pursue it in the service of a latent but powerful ambition. Publishing success is the happy ending to both tales, and Ms. Ephron, a literary and journalistic star before she was a filmmaker, is unequivocal in her celebration of the joys of such triumph.
Julie, in an early scene, is humiliated by a table full of college friends who flaunt their BlackBerrys, assistants, real estate deals and lucrative glossy-magazine gigs. But by means of failed aspics and triumphant sauces, Julie shows them all up. And Julia, similarly, overcomes the xenophobia and sexism of the French culinary establishment and the myopia of an American publisher and becomes the person we know as Julia Child.

As does Ms. Streep. By now this actress has exhausted every superlative that exists and to suggest that she has outdone herself is only to say that she’s done it again. Her performance goes beyond physical imitation, though she has the rounded shoulders and the fluting voice down perfectly.
Often when gifted actors impersonate real, familiar people, they overshadow the originals, so that, for example, you can’t think of Ray Charles without seeing Jamie Foxx, or Truman Capote without envisioning Philip Seymour Hoffman. But Ms. Streep’s incarnation of Julia Child has the opposite effect, making the real Julia, who died in 2004, more vivid, more alive, than ever.

In Mr. Tucci Ms. Streep finds, as in “The Devil Wears Prada,” a perfect foil. Like the character he plays, he is gallant and self-assured and able to assert a strong sense of his own presence even as he happily cedes the center of attention. Together, their mastery of the art is so perfect that even quiet, transitional scenes between them are delightful. (And when Jane Lynch shows up as Dorothy, Julia’s sister, the delight ascends to an almost indecent level of giddiness).

If only Mr. Tucci and Ms. Streep were in every movie, I thought to myself at one point, as, in a state of rapture, I watched them sit still on a couch looking off into space.

The problem is that when they aren’t on screen in this movie, you can’t help missing them. Ms. Adams is a lovely and subtle performer, but she is overmatched by her co-star and handicapped by the material. Julia Child could whip up a navarin of lamb for lunch, but Meryl Streep eats young actresses for breakfast. Remember Anne Hathaway in “The Devil Wears Prada”? Amanda Seyfried in “Mamma Mia!”? Neither do I.

The deck is further stacked against Ms. Adams by the discrepancy between Ms. Powell’s achievement and Ms. Child’s, and by a corresponding imbalance in Ms. Ephron’s interest in the characters. The conceit of parallel lives is undone by the movie’s condescending treatment of Julie and also by its ardent embrace of the past at the expense of the present.

From the very start, Paris in the late ’40s and early ’50s is — well, it’s postwar Paris, a dream world of fabulous clothes, architecture, sex, food, cigarettes and political intrigue. And New York in 2002 is made, a little unfairly, to seem drab and soulless by comparison. Queens, demographically the most cosmopolitan of the five boroughs and something of a foodie mecca, is treated with easy Manhattanite disdain, as a punch line and punching bag.

The unevenness of “Julie and Julia” is nobody’s fault, really. It arises from an inherent flaw in the film’s premise. Julie is an insecure, enterprising young woman who found a gimmick and scored a book contract. Julia is a figure of such imposing cultural stature that her pots and pans are displayed at the Smithsonian. The fact that Ms. Ephron, like Julie herself, is well aware of this gap does not prevent the film from falling into it. All the filmmaker’s artful whisking can’t quite achieve the light, fluffy emulsion she is trying for.

But an imperfect meal can still have a lot of flavor, and the pleasures offered by this movie should not be disdained. Julia Child knew what to do with a broken sauce or a half-fallen soufflé: serve it anyway, with flair and without apology. What would Julia say? What she always said: Bon appétit!


“Julie and Julia” is rated PG-13. It has mild profanity, and the indulgence — in exquisite moderation — of a few choice vices.

JULIE & JULIA

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Written and directed by Nora Ephron; based on “My Life in France” by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme, and “Julie & Julia” by Julie Powell; director of photography, Stephen Goldblatt; edited by Richard Marks; music by Alexandre Desplat; production designer, Mark Ricker; produced by Ms. Ephron, Laurence Mark, Amy Robinson and Eric Steel; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes.

WITH: Meryl Streep (Julia Child), Amy Adams (Julie Powell), Stanley Tucci (Paul Child), Chris Messina (Eric Powell), Jane Lynch (Dorothy McWilliams), Linda Emond (Simone Beck), Erin Dilly (Judith Jones) and Frances Sternhagen (Irma Rombauer).


Related

Full Stomachs, and Full Marriages Too (August 2, 2009)

Film Food, Ready for Its ‘Bon Appetit’ (July 29, 2009)

Spare Times (August 7, 2009)

Multimedia
Slide Show
Comedy, Cooking and Romance

Interactive Feature
Behind the Scenes With the Dishes

LIBERAL LIES ABOUT NATIONAL HEALTH CARE: FIRST IN A SERIES

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
August 19, 2009

(1) National health care will punish the insurance companies.

You want to punish insurance companies? Make them compete.

As Adam Smith observed, whenever two businessmen meet, "the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." That's why we need a third, fourth and 45th competing insurance company that will undercut them by offering better service at a lower price.

Tiny little France and Germany have more competition among health insurers than the U.S. does right now. Amazingly, both of these socialist countries have less state regulation of health insurance than we do, and you can buy health insurance across regional lines -- unlike in the U.S., where a federal law allows states to ban interstate commerce in health insurance.

U.S. health insurance companies are often imperious, unresponsive consumer hellholes because they're a partial monopoly, protected from competition by government regulation. In some states, one big insurer will control 80 percent of the market. (Guess which party these big insurance companies favor? Big companies love big government.)

Liberals think they can improve the problem of a partial monopoly by turning it into a total monopoly. That's what single-payer health care is: "Single payer" means "single provider."

It's the famous liberal two-step: First screw something up, then claim that it's screwed up because there's not enough government oversight (it's the free market run wild!), and then step in and really screw it up in the name of "reform."

You could fix 90 percent of the problems with health insurance by ending the federal law allowing states to ban health insurance sales across state lines. But when John McCain called for ending the ban during the 2008 presidential campaign, he was attacked by Joe Biden -- another illustration of the ironclad Ann Coulter rule that the worst Republicans are still better than allegedly "conservative" Democrats.

(2) National health care will "increase competition and keep insurance companies honest" -- as President Barack Obama has said.

Government-provided health care isn't a competitor; it's a monopoly product paid for by the taxpayer. Consumers may be able to "choose" whether they take the service -- at least at first -- but every single one of us will be forced to buy it, under penalty of prison for tax evasion. It's like a new cable plan with a "yes" box, but no "no" box.

Obama himself compared national health care to the post office -- immediately conjuring images of a highly efficient and consumer-friendly work force -- which, like so many consumer-friendly shops, is closed by 2 p.m. on Saturdays, all Sundays and every conceivable holiday.

But what most people don't know -- including the president, apparently -- with certain narrow exceptions, competing with the post office is prohibited by law.

Expect the same with national health care. Liberals won't stop until they have total control. How else will they get you to pay for their sex-change operations?

(3) Insurance companies are denying legitimate claims because they are "villains."

Obama denounced the insurance companies in last Sunday's New York Times, saying: "A man lost his health coverage in the middle of chemotherapy because the insurance company discovered that he had gallstones, which he hadn't known about when he applied for his policy. Because his treatment was delayed, he died."

Well, yeah. That and the cancer.

Assuming this is true -- which would distinguish it from every other story told by Democrats pushing national health care -- in a free market, such an insurance company couldn't stay in business. Other insurance companies would scream from the rooftops about their competitor's shoddy business practices, and customers would leave in droves.

If only customers had a choice! But we don't because of government regulation of health insurance.

Speaking of which, maybe if Mr. Gallstone's insurance company weren't required by law to cover early childhood development programs and sex-change operations, it wouldn't be forced to cut corners in the few areas not regulated by the government, such as cancer treatments for patients with gallstones.

(4) National health care will give Americans "basic consumer protections that will finally hold insurance companies accountable" -- as Barack Obama claimed in his op/ed in the Times.

You want to protect consumers? Do it the same way we protect consumers of dry cleaning, hamburgers and electricians: Give them the power to tell their insurance companies, "I'm taking my business elsewhere."

(5) Government intervention is the only way to provide coverage for pre-existing conditions.

The only reason most "pre-existing" conditions aren't already covered is because of government regulations that shrink the insurance market to a microscopic size, which leads to fewer options in health insurance and a lot more uninsured people than would exist in a free market.

The free market has produced a dizzying array of insurance products in areas other than health. (Ironically, array-associated dizziness is not covered by most health plans.) Even insurance companies have "reinsurance" policies to cover catastrophic events occurring on the properties they insure, such as nuclear accidents, earthquakes and Michael Moore dropping in for a visit and breaking the couch.

If we had a free market in health insurance, it would be inexpensive and easy to buy insurance for "pre-existing" conditions before they exist, for example, insurance on unborn -- unconceived -- children and health insurance even when you don't have a job. The vast majority of "pre-existing" conditions that currently exist in a cramped, limited, heavily regulated insurance market would be "covered" conditions under a free market in health insurance.

I've hit my word limit on liberal lies about national health care without breaking a sweat. See this space next week for more lies in our continuing series.

COPYRIGHT 2009 ANN COULTER