Today's Tune: BoDeans - You Don't Get Much

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BoDeans continue to draw a crowd

Banished to smaller venues in other cities, roots rockers still a big name at Ravinia

By Mark Caro
Chicago Tribune reporter
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/
August 3, 2010


The BoDeans in concert. (Courtesy of Peter Wochniak)


The BoDeans return to Ravinia on Saturday night for the 11th time in 11 years (they didn't play there in 2002, but played two nights in 2004), their enduring Chicago-area popularity a rebuttal to the notion that the Internet and electronic media have rendered regionalism obsolete.

Later this month, the band will perform at a 500-seat club in San Francisco (tickets still available) and a San Diego dinner-theater venue that seats about 350 (ditto). Ravinia boasts a 3,200-seat pavilion and room for another 14,000 patrons on the lawn, and although tickets remain for Saturday's show (with Big Head Todd and the Monsters), the band has sold out the place in previous years. In fact, Ravinia associate communications director Amy Schrage said it was the BoDeans' jam-packed 2000 show, with an estimated crowd exceeding 20,000, that prompted the venue to start capping its lawn capacity the following year.

Why are the BoDeans still so huge here?

"Because I think Chicago really likes our music," band co-leader Kurt Neumann said on the phone from his Austin, Texas, home. "Really, I don't know what else to say."

Back before rock radio became homogenous and reliant on the say-so of New York programmers, bands typically would rise in their home regions, then spread nationally if they were fortunate. Rock history is studded with acts that thrived locally while having varied success elsewhere: Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes in New Jersey, the Hooters in Philadelphia and even Styx in Chicago, with WLS-AM championing "Lady" long before the song and band broke out nationally.

Norm Winer, program director of WXRT-FM 93.1 (disclosure: this writer's wife, Mary Dixon, appears on the station's morning show), noted that despite its hallowed reputation now, the Band was primarily an East Coast act in its heyday, so although Martin Scorsese shot the 1978 farewell concert film "The Last Waltz" in San Francisco, that city "was not a big Band market."

Country singer Pat Green currently plays stadiums in his native Texas, where last month he was honored as the decade's most-played artist in the state, yet his 2008 show in Chicago was at Joe's Bar.

Then there are the BoDeans. "We're a Midwestern band, and our following is in the Midwest," Neumann said, noting that Ravinia is an especially natural fit. "I think the BoDeans outside in the summertime is just classic … and Ravinia kind of sets up a great format for that."

"I think the party aspect of it certainly is very popular," Ravinia President and Chief Executive Welz Kauffman agreed, "and if you walk the lawn or even go through the pavilion, you'll see people who were together in college who reunite to go to that concert. People's taste in popular music tends to kind of freeze in college, and those memories they associate with the college experience tend to be with them the rest of their lives."

The BoDeans certainly were a big college band in the late '80s and early-mid '90s as they arrived offering tuneful roots-rock amid a sea of Bon Jovi and Poison. Formed in Milwaukee by Neumann and fellow singer-songwriter-guitarist Sam Llanas, the band released its first album, "Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams," in 1986, and songs such as "Still the Night" and "Fadeaway" received ample airplay from WXRT.

Subsequent albums, with such radio-friendly singles as "You Don't Get Much" and "Good Things" (which both had the flavor of U2 by way of Mars' Cheese Castle), raised the band's national profile, which peaked when the TV drama "Party of Five" made 1993's anthemic "Closer to Free" its theme song. The song's 1996 re-release reached No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100, the only BoDeans song to make that chart.

"Closer to Free" introduced the BoDeans to a new audience — and also resulted in what Neumann called "the worst year of our touring existence" because the band was playing to listeners who didn't really know it, often in shows packaged by radio stations that had no affinity for its music. "You were just this latest pop song, and it was just very bland and very uninteresting to me compared to how we've always (toured), where it's just going town to town playing our two-hour shows and letting people really digest who we were."

Neumann said the common thread where the BoDeans have lasted is radio. "You can't really think of BoDeans in Chicago without XRT," he said. "For a band like us who's not a big pop band, you just need that kind of radio help in a city, or people may not really hear of you."

Said WXRT's Winer: "We've always played them, and wherever they were played consistently from the beginning they've become known and loved — because their music transcends trends."

Chicago isn't the only city that has stuck with the BoDeans, whose new album, "Mr. Sad Clown," has landed the songs "Stay" and "Say Goodbye" on adult album alternative stations and helped maintain interest in the group. (The new "Headed for the End of the World" also has been used to promote the just-released documentary "Countdown to Zero.") Winer checked Mediabase, which monitors nationwide radio play, and found that six other U.S. cities have given more radio spins to the band than Chicago in 2010: Minneapolis, Austin, Madison, Denver, Spokane, Wash., and Seattle. But WXRT, the only local station currently playing the band, has spun the most BoDeans songs this year: 22.

Neumman said Minneapolis and his adopted hometown of Austin remain among the band's biggest markets. Milwaukee, where Llanas again lives following a stint in New Orleans, "has trailed off."

Still, the regional pull has remained strong even these days, when almost any band is accessible via a mouse click.

"I expected with YouTube and all that that some band from Iceland would be super-popular here in Texas right now, but I haven't seen that yet," Neumann said. "It still seems like people relate to their regional music a little more. Our music certainly still resonates in the Midwest, and if computers were able to spread it virally really well, there would be just as big a demand in Russia right now for me, but there's not."

Neumann said he is just happy there remains a demand for his group in the Chicago area. Playing here, he said, is "like going home to your family, people who have grown up with you. They know you. They've been around for 20 years. Some people have seen 30 shows. They've been around for all the records. They've seen lots of incarnations (of the band) and all the ups and downs. It's really more like family as opposed to just going to some place where they don't know so much about you, and you're playing your show, and they're real nice about it, but it's not quite that intimacy that you have with a city who's just always been there for you for so long."

mcaro@tribune.com

When: 7 p.m., Saturday

Where: Ravinia Festival, Lake-Cook and Green Bay roads, Highland Park

Tickets: $55 pavilion, $27 lawn ($32 day of concert); 847-266-5100


Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune

The Rangel Center for Public Service - really

Debra J. Saunders
The San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/
Tuesday, August 3, 2010

The House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct - also known as the House ethics committee - issued a Statement of Alleged Violation last week to Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-N.Y. To sum it up, Rangel thought he could skirt the rules and get away with it.

Earlier this year, the ethics committee admonished Rangel for taking corporate trips to the Caribbean in violation of House rules.

This go-round involves - I kid you not - the 20-term congressman's quest for a Rangel Center for Public Service at City College of New York. Rangel thought it would serve the public interest to "preserve the work of (his) public life." So in 2005, while a top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, he began requesting earmarks of $6 million for the center.

In what the committee sees as a probable violation of House rules, Rangel had his staff draw up a list of potential donors - which happened to include large corporations, tax-exempt foundations and charitable trusts with interests in his committee's rulings. He sent letters on House stationery, using the House franking privilege, to deep pockets and squeezed donations from individuals with intense interest in Ways and Means Committee votes.

Rangel's lawyers issued a response that argued, "If he mistakenly used the wrong letterhead or other modest resources for this worthy cause" - that worthy cause being the Rangel Center for Public Service - "the error was made in good faith." (Ahem. That's like forgetting to pay your taxes in good faith.)

The ethics committee also hit Rangel for receiving a rent-controlled apartment for his political action committee and failing to claim rental income on federal tax returns.

Rangel's predicament must be very painful for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, who once argued that she would "drain the swamp" of corruption in Congress.

Now Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill stresses the "bipartisan, confidential and independent ethics process in the House."

You can argue that it does not reflect on Pelosi if Rangel broke the rules. But it does reflect on Pelosi if Democrats behave as if they don't have to abide by the rules. What drives voters crazy is not so much that some lawmakers abuse their office as the fact that they get away with it for so long.

The ethics committee offered to allow Rangel to accept a reprimand - read: slap on the wrist - on the 13 charges, but Rangel refused.

Then on Monday, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles, followed Rangel's lead in challenging an ethics committee probe into her possible role in lobbying for a bank in which her husband owned stock. The bank, OneUnited, got $12.1 million in TARP funds.

It always was a conceit for Democrats to portray themselves as the ethical political party. The Republicans had Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay to prove that power corrupts on the right by turning the party of small government into an agent of big spending. The Democrats have Rangel and Waters - who have managed to mix racial politics with the arrogance of incumbency.

In that spirit, Rangel and Waters have demanded trials where, at best, they may convince their peers that if they did not break the rules, then they showed little interest in safeguarding the reputations of their party or their institution.

As the November elections approach, two House trials will parade two Democrats who will argue that they acted in the name of "disadvantaged and minority students" (Rangel) or "minority-owned banks" (Walters). And you think Americans have contempt for Congress now.

E-mail Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/08/03/EDUU1ENLJD.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 10 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Ban the Burqa

By Claire Berlinski
http://www.nationalreview.com/
August 2, 2010 4:00 A.M.

From the August 16 issue of NATIONAL REVIEW.


Istanbul — I moved here five years ago. In the beginning, I was sympathetic to the argument that Turkey’s ban on headscarves in universities and public institutions was grossly discriminatory. I spoke to many women who described veiling themselves as an uncoerced act of faith. One businesswoman in her mid-30s told me that she began veiling in high school, defying her secular family. Her schoolteacher gasped when she saw her: “If Atatürk could see you now, he would weep!” Her pain at the memory of the opprobrium she had suffered was clearly real.

Why had she decided to cover herself? I asked. As a teenager, she told me, she had experienced a religious revelation. She described this in terms anyone familiar with William James would recognize. She began veiling to affirm her connection with the Ineffable. “Every time I look in the mirror,” she said, “I see a religious woman looking back. It reminds me that I’ve chosen to have a particular kind of relationship with God.”

Seen thus, the covering of the head is no more radical than many other religious rituals that demand symbolic acts of renunciation or daily inconvenience. I have heard Jews describe the spiritual rewards of following the laws of kashrut in much the same way. It is inconvenient, they say, and seemingly arbitrary; it demands daily sacrifice. But a Jew who keeps kosher cannot eat a meal without being reminded that he is a Jew, and thus the simple act of eating is elevated to a religious rite.

One woman here told me of her humiliation in childhood when her family was ejected from a swimming pool because her mother was veiled. I believed her. All stories of childhood humiliation sound alike and are told in the same way. It was perverse, she said to me, that she should be free to cover her head in an American university but not in a Turkish one. It seemed perverse to me as well. It would to any American; politically, we all descend from men and women persecuted for their faith. I was, I decided, on the side of these women.

But that was when I could still visit the neighborhood of Balat without being called a whore.

The French National Assembly’s recent vote to ban face-covering veils including the burqa — which conceals even the eyes — is the latest such measure taken by governments across Europe. In April, the Belgian parliament became the first to ban the burqa; shortly afterward, police in northern Italy fined a woman for wearing a niqab, which covers the entire face save for the eyes, appealing to a 1975 law prohibiting the covering of the face in public. Conservative backbencher Philip Hollobone has called for a burqa ban in Britain. Last week in Spain, a measure to ban the burqa was narrowly defeated. The broad term for veiling, curtaining, or covering is hijab, and all forms of it, even those exposing the face, have been banned in French public schools since 2004.

Let’s be perfectly frank. These bans are outrages against religious freedom and freedom of expression. They stigmatize Muslims. No modern state should be in the business of dictating what women should wear. The security arguments are spurious; there are a million ways to hide a bomb, and one hardly need wear a burqa to do so. It is not necessarily the case that the burqa is imposed upon women against their will; when it is the case, there are already laws on the books against physical coercion.

The argument that the garment is not a religious obligation under Islam is well-founded but irrelevant; millions of Muslims the world around believe that it is, and the state is not qualified to be in the business of Koranic exegesis. The choice to cover one’s face is for many women a genuine expression of the most private kind of religious sentiment. To prevent them from doing so is discriminatory, persecutory, and incompatible with the Enlightenment traditions of the West. It is, moreover, cruel to demand of a woman that she reveal parts of her body that her sense of modesty compels her to cover; to such a woman, the demand is as tyrannical, humiliating, and arbitrary as the passage of a law dictating that women bare their breasts.

All true. And yet the burqa must be banned. All forms of veiling must be, if not banned, strongly discouraged and stigmatized. The arguments against a ban are coherent and principled. They are also shallow and insufficient. They fail to take something crucial into account, and that thing is this: If Europe does not stand up now against veiling — and the conception of women and their place in society that it represents — within a generation there will be many cities in Europe where no unveiled woman will walk comfortably or safely.

Recently, on a New York Times blog, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum not only argued against the ban, but proposed that those who wear the burqa be protected from “subtle forms of discrimination.” It was a perfect example of a philosopher at the peak of her powers operating in a cultural and historical vacuum. “My judgment about Turkey in the past,” Nussbaum writes, was

that the ban on veiling was justified, in those days, by a compelling state interest — derived from the belief that women were at risk of physical violence if they went unveiled, unless the government intervened to make the veil illegal for all. Today in Europe the situation is utterly different, and no physical violence will greet the woman who wears even scanty clothing.

Nussbaum is absolutely wrong. There are already many neighborhoods in Europe where scantily dressed women are not safe. In the benighted Islamic suburbs of Paris, as Samira Bellil writes in her autobiography Dans l’enfer des tournantes (“In Gang-Rape Hell”),

there are only two kinds of girls. Good girls stay home, clean the house, take care of their brothers and sisters, and only go out to go to school. . . . Those who . . . dare to wear make-up, to go out, to smoke, quickly earn the reputation as “easy” or as “little whores.”

Parents in these neighborhoods ask gynecologists to testify to their daughters’ virginity. Polygamy and forced marriages are commonplace. Many girls are banned from leaving the house at all. According to French-government statistics, rapes in the housing projects have risen between 15 and 20 percent every year since 1999. In these neighborhoods, women have indeed begun veiling only to escape harassment and violence. In the suburb of La Courneuve, 77 percent of veiled women report that they wear the veil to avoid the wrath of Islamic morality patrols. We are talking about France, not Iran.

The association of Islam and crime against women is seen throughout Europe: “The police in the Norwegian capital Oslo revealed that 2009 set yet another record: compared to 2008, there were twice as many cases of assault rapes,” the conservative Brussels Journal noted earlier this year. “In each and every case, not only in 2008 and 2009 but also in 2007, the offender was a non-Western immigrant.” These statistics are rarely discussed; they are too evocative of ancient racist tropes for anyone’s comfort. But they are facts.

The debate in Europe now concerns primarily the burqa, not less restrictive forms of veiling, such as the headscarf. The sheer outrageousness of the burqa makes it an easy target, as does the political viability of justifying such a ban on security grounds, particularly in the era of suicide bombings, even if such a justification does not entirely stand up to scrutiny. But the burqa is simply the extreme point on the continuum of veiling, and all forced veiling is not only an abomination, but contagious: Unless it is stopped, the natural tendency of this practice is to spread, for veiling is a political symbol as well as a religious one, and that symbol is of a dynamic, totalitarian ideology that has set its sights on Europe and will not be content until every woman on the planet is humbled, submissive, silent, and enslaved.

The cancerous spread of veiling has been seen throughout the Islamic world since the Iranian Revolution. I have watched it in Turkey. Through migration and demographic shift, neighborhoods that once were mixed have become predominantly veiled. The government has sought to lift prohibitions on the wearing of headscarves, legitimizing and emboldening advocates of the practice. Five years ago, the historically Jewish and Greek neighborhood of Balat, on the Golden Horn, was one in which many unveiled women could be seen. It is not anymore. Recently I visited a friend there who reluctantly suggested that I dress more modestly — while in his apartment. His windows faced the street. He was concerned that his neighbors would call the police and report a prostitute in their midst.

Veiling cannot be disambiguated from the problem of Islam’s conception of women, and this conception is directly tied to gender apartheid and the subjugation and abuse of women throughout the Islamic world, the greatest human-rights problem on the planet, bar none. Nor can the practice of veiling be divorced from the concept of namus — an ethical category that is often translated as “honor,” and if your first association with this word is “honor killing,” it is for a reason: That is the correct association. The path from veiling to the practice of killing unveiled women is not nearly so meandering as you might think.

At its core, the veil is the expression of the belief that female sexuality is so destructive a force that men must at all costs be protected from it; the natural correlate of this belief is that men cannot be held responsible for the desires prompted in them by an unveiled woman, including the impulse to rape her. In 2006, Sheikh Taj el-Din al-Hilali, Australia’s most senior Muslim cleric, delivered a sermon referring to a recent rape victim thus:

If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside . . . without cover, and the cats come to eat it . . . whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat’s? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred.

His remarks caused a firestorm of denunciation and the usual insistence that this sentiment did not represent the true nature of Islam. But the only unusual thing about his comments was that they were made in public. If you believe these views are atypical of the Muslim community, spend five minutes in an Islamic chat room on the Internet. No need to cherry-pick; just Google “hijab” and look at the first results that come up. A typical entry:

What kind of dignity a non-believer has by the way; they conduct their life and expose themselves. They have removed the shield of protection, that modesty of Hijab and left themselves unprotected and that is the cause for the assault, which takes place once every ten seconds in rape and murder around the world. But those true Muslims who observe proper Hijab are protected from such assaults and not one [case of] this type is ever heard of.

A faraway, fire-eyed Saudi cleric? No. This site is hosted in Norway. The site’s moderator is one Espen Egil Hansen, and the managing director is someone by the name of Jo Christian Oterhals.

Some other comments:

Any woman who perfumes herself and passes by some people that they smell her scent, then she is a Zaniyah [adulteress]. . . . Examining the various conditions about the hijab one can clearly recognise that many of the young Muslim women are not fulfilling these conditions. Many just take “half-way” measures, which not only mocks the community in which she lives, but also mocks the commands of Allah. . . . The hijab fits the natural feeling of Gheerah, which is intrinsic in the straight man who does not like people to look at his wife or daughters. Gheerah is a driving emotion that drives the straight man to safeguard women who are related to him from strangers. The straight MUSLIM man has Gheerah for ALL MUSLIM women. In response to lust and desire, men look (with desire) at other women while they do not mind that other men do the same to their wives or daughters. The mixing of sexes and absence of hijab destroys the Gheera in men.

These insights were posted on the official website of the Islamic Society of the University of Essex. As they suggest, the veil is a legitimization of murderous jealousy. It sanctions the impulse of primitive men to possess the very sight of their women entirely to themselves. There is no nation on the planet where the veil is the cultural norm and where women enjoy equal rights. Not one. Nor is there such a thing as a neighborhood where the veil is the cultural norm and yet no judgment is passed upon women who do not wear it.

Like all freedoms, religious freedom is not absolute. It is said in the United States that the Constitution is not a suicide pact, and this principle is applicable to any open society. It is one thing to say I should be perfectly free to worship Baal, another to say I must be free to sacrifice children to him. Donning a burqa is not an outrage on the order of killing a child, but it is surely an outrage on just that order to permit a culture that views women as slaves to displace one that does not. We are all by now familiar with the demographic predictions: Europe’s Muslim population is growing; many cities will soon have Muslim majorities. If the conception of Islam that the veil represents is allowed to prevail in Europe, these cities will no longer be free.

It is difficult to form a position on this issue that reconciles all of the West’s legal precedents and moral intuitions. It is probably best that the burqa be banned immediately on “security” grounds, even if we all know deep down that the case is spurious; for such a ban to make perfect sense, it would have to extend to all loose clothing, suitcases, capacious handbags, beer bellies, and shoes. Yet in some cases, hypocrisy is the least awful of options; bans thus justified may be the best way of expressing a society’s entirely legitimate revulsion without setting a dangerous precedent of legislating against a targeted religious group.

Headscarves cannot at this point be banned. It is politically impossible, and it is also too late: The practice is too widespread. But the decision to wear them should be viewed much as the decision to wear Klan robes or Nazi regalia would be in the United States. Yes, you are free to do so, but no, you cannot wear that and expect to be hired by the government to teach schoolchildren, and no, we are not going to pretend collectively that this choice is devoid of a deeply sinister political and cultural meaning. Such a stance would serve the cause of liberty more than it would harm it: While it is true that some women adopt the veil voluntarily, it is also true that most veiling is forced. It is nearly impossible for the state to ascertain who is veiled by choice and who has been coerced. A woman who has been forced to veil is hardly likely to volunteer this information to authorities. Our responsibility to protect these women from coercion is greater than our responsibility to protect the freedom of those who choose to veil. Why? Because this is our culture, and in our culture, we do not veil. We do not veil because we do not believe that God demands this of women or even desires it; nor do we believe that unveiled women are whores, nor do we believe they deserve social censure, harassment, or rape. Our culture’s position on these questions is morally superior. We have every right, indeed an obligation, to ensure that our more enlightened conception of women and their proper role in society prevails in any cultural conflict, particularly one on Western soil.

When government ministers such as the British environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, legitimize the veil by babbling about the freedom and empowerment the garment affords, they reveal a colossally dangerous collapse in Europe’s cultural confidence. Instead, campaigns designed to discourage veiling should be launched. If the state is entitled to warn, say, of the unhealthful effects of cigarette smoking, it is surely also entitled to make the case against the conception of women that veiling represents.

Banning the burqa is without doubt a terrible assault on the ideal of religious liberty. It is the sign of a desperate society. No one wishes for things to have come so far that it is necessary.

But they have, and it is.

— Claire Berlinski is a freelance journalist who lives in Istanbul. She is the author of Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis Is America’s, Too, and There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters. This article first appeared in the August 16, 2010 issue of National Review.

The Soak-the-Rich Catch-22

By ARTHUR LAFFER
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
August 2, 2010

Tax reduction thus sets off a process that can bring gains for everyone, gains won by marshalling resources that would otherwise stand idle—workers without jobs and farm and factory capacity without markets. Yet many taxpayers seemed prepared to deny the nation the fruits of tax reduction because they question the financial soundness of reducing taxes when the federal budget is already in deficit. Let me make clear why, in today's economy, fiscal prudence and responsibility call for tax reduction even if it temporarily enlarged the federal deficit—why reducing taxes is the best way open to us to increase revenues.

—President John F. Kennedy,
Economic Report of the President,

January 1963


If only more of today's leaders thought like JFK. Sadly, in the debate over whether to extend the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, and if so whether the cuts should be extended to those people who are in the highest tax bracket, there is a false presumption that higher tax rates on the top 1% of income earners will raise tax revenues.

Anyone who is familiar with the historical data available from the IRS knows full well that raising income tax rates on the top 1% of income earners will most likely reduce the direct tax receipts from the now higher taxed income—even without considering the secondary tax revenue effects, all of which will be negative. And who on Earth wants higher tax rates on anyone if it means larger deficits?

Since 1978, the U.S. has cut the highest marginal earned-income tax rate to 35% from 50%, the highest capital gains tax rate to 15% from about 50%, and the highest dividend tax rate to 15% from 70%. President Clinton cut the highest marginal tax rate on long-term capital gains from the sale of owner-occupied homes to 0% for almost all home owners. We've also cut just about every other income tax rate as well.

During this era of ubiquitous tax cuts, income tax receipts from the top 1% of income earners rose to 3.3% of GDP in 2007 (the latest year for which we have data) from 1.5% of GDP in 1978. Income tax receipts from the bottom 95% of income earners fell to 3.2% of GDP from 5.4% of GDP over the same time period. (See the nearby chart).

These results shouldn't be surprising. The highest tax bracket income earners, when compared with those people in lower tax brackets, are far more capable of changing their taxable income by hiring lawyers, accountants, deferred income specialists and the like. They can change the location, timing, composition and volume of income to avoid taxation.

Just look at Sen. John Kerry's recent yacht brouhaha if you don't believe me. He bought and housed his $7 million yacht in Rhode Island instead of Massachusetts, where he is the senior senator and champion of higher taxes on the rich, avoiding some $437,500 in state sales tax and an annual excise tax of about $70,000.

Howard Metzenbaum, the former Ohio senator and liberal supporter of the death tax, chose to change his official residence to Florida just before he died because Florida does not have an estate tax while Ohio does. Goodness knows what creative devices former House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel has used to avoid paying taxes.

In short, the highest bracket income earners—even left-wing liberals—are far more sensitive to tax rates than are other income earners.

When President Kennedy cut the highest income tax rate to 70% from 91%, revenues also rose. Income tax receipts from the top 1% of income earners rose to 1.9% of GDP in 1968 from 1.3% in 1960. Even when Presidents Harding and Coolidge cut tax rates in the 1920s, tax receipts from the rich rose. Between 1921 and 1928 the highest marginal personal income tax rate was lowered to 25% from 73% and tax receipts from the top 1% of income earners went to 1.1% of GDP from 0.6% of GDP.

Or perhaps you'd like to see how the rich paid less in taxes under the bipartisan tax rate increases of Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter? Between 1968 and 1981 the top 1% of income earners reduced their total income tax payments to 1.5% of GDP from 1.9% of GDP.

And then there's the Hoover/Roosevelt Great Depression. The Great Depression was precipitated by President Hoover in early 1930, when he signed into law the largest ever U.S. tax increase on traded products—the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. President Hoover then thought it would be clever to try to tax America into prosperity. Using many of the same arguments that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are using today, President Hoover raised the highest personal income tax rate to 63% from 24% on Jan. 1, 1932. He raised many other taxes as well.

President Roosevelt then debauched the dollar with the 1933 Bank Holiday Act and his soak-the-rich tax increase on Jan. 1, 1936. He raised the highest personal income tax rate to 79% from 63% along with a whole host of other corporate and personal tax rates as well. The U.S. economy went into a double dip depression, with unemployment rates rising again to 20% in 1938. Over the course of the Great Depression, the government raised the top marginal personal income tax rate to 83% from 24%.

Is it any wonder that the Great Depression was as long and deep as it was? Whoever heard of a country taxing itself into prosperity? Not only did taxes as a share of GDP fall, but GDP fell as well. It was a double whammy. Tax receipts from the top 1% of income earners stayed flat as a share of GDP, going to 1% in 1940 from 1.1% in 1928, but at what cost?

We all know that there are lots of factors influencing tax revenues from the rich, but the number one factor has to be the statutory tax rates government tells the rich they have to pay. Not only do the direct income tax consequences of higher tax rates on those in the highest brackets lead to higher deficits, the indirect effects magnify the tax revenue losses many fold.

As a result of higher tax rates on those people in the highest tax brackets, there will be less employment, output, sales, profits and capital gains—all leading to lower payrolls and lower total tax receipts. There will also be higher unemployment, poverty and lower incomes, all of which require more government spending. It's a Catch-22.

Higher tax rates on the rich create the very poverty and unemployment that is used to justify their presence. It is a vicious cycle that well-trained economists should know to avoid.

Mr. Laffer is the chairman of Laffer Associates and co-author of "Return to Prosperity: How America Can Regain Its Economic Superpower Status" (Threshold, 2010).

The Arizona Lesson

What the state’s experiment with the rule of law has already taught us

By Heather Mac Donald
http://www.city-journal.org/
27 July 2010

As the start date of Arizona’s new immigration law, SB 1070, approaches, the Los Angeles Times has published an article [1] on a nearly three-month-old homicide in Phoenix that no one but the victim’s family claims had anything to do with Arizona’s immigration initiative—not the Hispanic neighbors of the alleged killer and his victim, not the police, not even illegal-alien advocacy groups. “It’s just weird to hear them say he’s racist,” one of the suspect’s Hispanic acquaintances marvels. The suspect had expressed his opposition to Arizona’s law just days before the May 6 shooting; he had invited his Hispanic neighbors to Thanksgiving last year. As for the victim, he “did not get shot because he was Mexican,” a local civil rights activist maintains.

And yet the Times has put the story on its front page as part of its coverage of SB 1070. Why? The official reason: as “an illustration of how incidents in the state now get interpreted through the prism of the new law.” The real reason: to suggest that the Arizona law—which officially authorizes a police officer, during a lawful police stop, to check the immigration status of people whom he suspects of being in the country illegally—is fueling a wave of possibly homicidal hatred against Hispanics. Evidence for this proposition, which has been embraced by editorialists and activists across the country? Zero.

A protester, against SB 1070, holds up flags in front of a police officer in Phoenix, Arizona, July 29, 2010. Arizona brought in a weakened anti-immigration law on Thursday after a U.S. court blocked its most intrusive provisions and analysts said the court ruling would stall similar tough legislation action in other states. Hispanic and labor activists, delighted by Wednesday's last minute ruling, pushed ahead with rallies in central Phoenix and scores of illegal day laborers touted for work openly in the city in defiance of surviving clauses in the new law.
REUTERS/Rick Scuteri (UNITED STATES - Tags: SOCIETY POLITICS CIVIL UNREST)

When the Arizona law is not provoking possible hate crimes, it’s destroying the state’s economy, according to the Times. Last Friday’s front-page story [2] suggested that the law was decimating the customer base of Phoenix businesses, as illegal aliens allegedly fled the state. As the paper admitted, it’s impossible to distinguish the effects of the recession from the effects of the law. But even if the law causes a temporary drop-off in local business patronage, that tells you nothing about the larger effects of illegal immigration on a state or national economy. True, more people mean more customers for local business. But not all customers are the same.

The low-skilled, low-educated population of illegal aliens and their progeny in Arizona and elsewhere costs taxpayers large sums in remedial education, emergency-room care, welfare, and jail and prison costs. In many areas, the costs associated with illegal immigration go up in the second and third generation, as the American-born children and grandchildren of illegals get sucked into underclass culture. Illegal aliens make up 22 percent of the felony defendants in Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa, and more than 17 percent of the state’s prison population, though they are roughly 10 percent of Maricopa County’s population and a lower percentage of the state’s population. Their children’s crime rates are undoubtedly higher—the incarceration rate of Mexican immigrants jumps more than eightfold between the first and second generations, resulting in a prison rate for Mexican-Americans that is 3.45 times higher than that of whites, according to an analysis of 2000 census data by the Migration Policy Institute. But even in the first generation, the Mexican incarceration rate—1.8 percent of all 12- to 24-year-olds—is higher than the incarceration rate for that same age group in the overall American population—1.4 percent—according to a Manhattan Institute study of assimilation. [3]

The Hispanic teen pregnancy rate is the highest of any ethnic group in the country—three times that of whites, and 27 percent higher than that of blacks. The Hispanic illegitimacy rate—53 percent—is growing faster than that of any other ethnic group. Children raised by teen and single mothers experience high levels of poverty, school failure, and juvenile delinquency.

The long-term consequences of illegal immigration for American competitiveness cannot be captured in a month’s worth of local sales receipts. The Educational Testing Service foresees the country’s first drop in literacy and numeracy by 2030 if the current mix of low-skilled immigrants remains unchanged. California remains the bellwether for all things pertaining to illegal immigration: thanks to immigration, the state has dropped from the seventh-most-educated state in the nation in 1970 to the least-educated state today, according to the Center for Immigration Studies. [4] Large numbers of California’s Hispanic students continue to be classified as non-native “English language learners” [5] through much of their school years, even though they speak English and were either born here or taught here through most of their lives, because their academic and formal linguistic skills are so deficient. The National Center for Higher Education Management Systems has predicted that California’s per-capita income will drop by 11 percent from 2000 to 2020 because of the poor academic performance of Latino students, many of whom are the progeny of illegal immigrants. In Arizona, the federal government has been contributing at least $600 million a year in an effort to bring the state’s underperforming students, the vast majority of whom are the children and grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants, up to par, without a massive positive effect. [6]

And as for costs to Arizona’s legal workers, Harvard economist George Borjas estimates the lowered wages and lost job opportunities caused by Arizona’s illegal population at more than $200 million annually, as he told the federal district court in the Obama administration’s lawsuit against SB 1070. The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that illegal aliens cost Arizona taxpayers $2.5 billion annually.

The Los Angeles Times’s story on the alleged effects of SB 1070 on Phoenix stores leaves out another critical fact: if illegal aliens are actually leaving Arizona in anticipation of the law’s implementation, a major plank of the open-borders manifesto has been demolished. For years, open-borders advocates argued that immigration enforcement is helpless against illegal entry. Therefore, the illegal-alien lobby concluded, the country should stop wasting resources on futile enforcement efforts. Rather, it should legalize everyone now here illegally and let the determination of who enters the country and joins the polity rest with the billions of people who live outside our borders, not with American voters.

The alleged effect of Arizona’s new law blows that argument out of the water. It turns out that immigration enforcement appeared to have little effect on illegal entry because it had never really been tried: once an illegal alien got across the border, he entered a nearly 6-million-square-mile national sanctuary zone where his chances of encountering a federal immigration agent were extremely low. The real reason for opposition to SB 1070 is that it will make immigration enforcement a reality and in so doing will show that law enforcement works; the hue and cry over racial profiling is merely a pretext. Even if the federal judge now reviewing the Obama administration’s case enjoins SB 1070 before its supposed start date this Thursday, enough will have been learned about immigration enforcement to have made Arizona’s experiment with the rule of law a milestone.

- Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal, the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and coauthor of The Immigration Solution: A Better Plan Than Today’s.

Links:

[1] http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-immigration-arizona-20100726,0,2113319.story

[2] http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-immigration-phoenix-20100723,0,6111019.story

[3] http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_53.htm

[4] http://www.cis.org/california-education

[5] http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_bilingual-education.html

[6] http://www.schoolfunding.info/states/az/lit_az.php3

It’s About Sharia

Newt Gingrich resets our national-security debate.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/
July 31, 2010 4:00 A.M.

The 2010 midterms have not happened yet, but the 2012 campaign is under way. For that we can thank Newt Gingrich. Not because Gingrich is a candidate, though he almost certainly is. And not because he can win, because that is by no means certain. We should thank Gingrich because he has crystallized the essence of our national-security challenge. Henceforth, there should be no place to hide for any candidate, including any incumbent. The question will be: Where do you stand on sharia?

The former speaker of the House gets the war on terror. For one thing, he refuses to call it the “war on terror,” which should be the entry-level requirement for any politician who wants to influence how we wage it. Gingrich grasps that there is an enemy here and that it is a mortal threat to freedom. He knows that if we are to remain a free people, it is an enemy we must defeat. That enemy is Islamism, and its operatives — whether they come as terrorists or stealth saboteurs — are the purveyors of sharia, Islam’s authoritarian legal and political system.

This being the Era of the Reset Button, Gingrich is going about the long-overdue business of resetting our understanding of the civilizational jihad that has been waged against the United States for some 31 years. It is the jihad begun when Islamists overran the American embassy in Tehran, heralding a revolutionary regime that remains the No. 1 U.S. security challenge in the Middle East, as Gingrich argued Thursday in a provocative speech at the American Enterprise Institute.

The single purpose of this jihad is the imposition of sharia. On that score, Gingrich made two points of surpassing importance. First, some Islamists employ mass-murder attacks while others prefer a gradual march through our institutions — our legal, political, academic, and financial systems, as well as our broader culture; the goal of both, though, is the same. The stealth Islamists occasionally feign outrage at the terrorists, but their quarrel is over methodology and pace. Both camps covet the same outcome.

Second, that outcome is the death of freedom. In Islamist ideology, sharia is deemed to be the necessary precondition for Islamicizing a society — for Islam is not merely a religious doctrine, but a comprehensive socio-economic and political system. As the former speaker elaborated, sharia embodies principles and punishments that are abhorrent to Western values. Indeed, its foundational premise is anti-American, holding that we are not free people at liberty to govern ourselves irrespective of any theocratic code, that people are instead beholden to the Islamic state, which is divinely enjoined to impose Allah’s laws.

Sharia, moreover, is anti-equality. It subjugates women and brutally punishes transgressors, particularly homosexuals and apostates. While our law forbids cruel and unusual punishments, Gingrich observed that the brutality in sharia sanctions is not gratuitous, but intentional: It is meant to enforce Allah’s will by striking example.

On this last point, Gingrich offered a salient insight, one well worth internalizing in the Sun Tzu sense of knowing one’s enemy. Islamists, violent or not, have very good reasons for the wanting to destroy the West. Those reasons are not crazy or wanton — and they have nothing to do with Gitmo, Israel, cartoons, or any other excuse we conjure to explain the savagery away. Islamists devoutly believe, based on a well-founded interpretation of Islamic doctrine, that they have been commanded by Allah to kill, convert, or subdue all who do not adhere to sharia — because they regard Allah as their only master (“There is no God but Allah”). It is thus entirely rational (albeit frightening to us) that they accept the scriptural instruction that the very existence of those who resist sharia is offensive to Allah, and that a powerful example must be made of those resisters in order to induce the submission of all — “submission” being the meaning of Islam.

It makes no sense to dismiss our enemies as lunatics just because “secular socialist” elites, as Gingrich called them, cannot imagine a fervor that stems from religious devotion. We ought to respect our enemies, he said. Not “respect” in Obama-speak, which translates as “appease,” but in the sense of taking them seriously, understanding that they are absolutely determined to win, and realizing that they are implacable. There is no “moderate” sharia devotee, for sharia is not moderate. Gingrich noted that in response to global outcry against the prospect of death by stoning for an Iranian woman, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, convicted of adultery, the mullahs’ great concession appears to be that she will be hanged instead. Islamism is not a movement to be engaged, it is an enemy to be defeated.

Victory, Gingrich said, will be very long in coming — longer, perhaps, than the nearly half-century it took to win the Cold War. Invoking JFK, he urged that the survival and success of liberty will still require an unwavering commitment to pay any price and bear any burden, for as long as it takes. Will that entail an ambitious project to democratize Islamic countries — notwithstanding that sharia dictates waging jihad against Westerners who try? Gingrich’s embrace of President Bush’s second inaugural address suggests that he may think so.

How we go about it and whether we use our military to spearhead a “forward march of freedom” are matters the former speaker did not flesh out. He also wondered aloud why, after nearly nine years in Afghanistan, we had not tasked military engineers and contractors to blanket that backward land with highways, the roads to advancement and prosperity. But we haven’t defeated the enemy yet. One can agree wholeheartedly with the former speaker that, having taken on a war against Afghan Islamists, it is imperative that America win. But in World War II, which Gingrich invoked repeatedly, and to great effect, we had our priorities straight: unambiguous victory first; then, and only then, the Marshall Plan’s ambitious reconstruction of Europe and Japan.

Debate over all of this is essential. The crucial point is that we must have the debate with eyes open. It is a debate about which Gingrich has put down impressive markers: The main front in the war is not Afghanistan or Iraq but the United States. The war is about the survival of Western civilization, and we should make no apologies for the fact that the West’s freedom culture is a Judeo-Christian culture — a fact that was unabashedly acknowledged, Gingrich reminded his audience, by FDR and Churchill. To ensure victory in the United States we must, once again, save Europe, where the enemy has advanced markedly. There is no separating our national security and our economic prosperity — they are interdependent. And while the Middle East poses challenges of immense complexity, Gingrich contended that addressing two of them — Iran, the chief backer of violent jihad, and Saudi Arabia, the chief backer of stealth jihad — would go a long way toward improving our prospects on the rest.

Most significant, there is sharia. By pressing the issue, Newt Gingrich accomplishes two things. First, he gives us a metric for determining whether those who would presume to lead us will fight or surrender. Second, at long last, someone is empowering truly moderate Muslims — assuming they exist in the numbers we’re constantly assured of. Our allies are the Muslims who embrace our freedom culture — those for whom sharia is a matter of private belief, not public mission. Our enemies are those who want sharia to supplant American law and Western culture. When we call out the latter, and marginalize them, we may finally energize the former.

It’s that simple. Not easy, but simple.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Behind Brown Eyes

By PETER GERSTENZANG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
July 30, 2010

WHEN THAT ROUGH GOD GOES RIDING

Listening to Van Morrison

By Greil Marcus

195 pp. PublicAffairs. $22.95

Writing about the songs of Van Morrison is rightly seen as something of a paradox. Perhaps that’s because, for all his scholarly use of multiple musical styles and his references to Yeats and Joyce, the Belfast Cowboy’s work is more sensual than it is intellectual. Which makes the renowned rock critic Greil Marcus, who’s written definitively on Elvis and Bob Dylan, the right man to plumb that work. Combining an incantatory prose style with careful reporting and inventive, sometimes infuriating judgments, Marcus manages to illuminate Morrison’s cerebral soul music — even if, as the singer once claimed, “the process is beyond words.”

“When That Rough God Goes Riding” is more a series of nonfiction short stories than a straightforward analysis. Marcus devotes virtually every chapter to a wide-ranging discussion of a Morrison album, song or live performance. Fittingly, just as the singer peppers his songs with eclectic allusions to Muddy Waters and William Blake, Marcus, too, brings in endless cultural signifiers, the better for us to understand the music. This means comparing Morrison’s version of Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” to Raymond Chandler’s writing: “It begins like the first page of a detective novel, with three clipped, odd bass patterns, like a knock on the door, but with an odd fatalism.” Throughout the book, Marcus also makes reference to artists as disparate as the comic Robert Klein, the director Neil Jordan and the novelist Jonathan Lethem, so that we might get a sense of Morrison’s complex appeal. Mostly, these comparisons feel strangely accurate. Sometimes, as when Marcus compares the music to Bob Beamon’s astonishing long jump, he’s, uh, stretching things a bit.

Mick Hutson/Redferns—Getty Images

Van Morrison in 1990.

As with any critic whose strong tastes make him a maverick, occasionally you want to lasso Marcus and bring him under control. That point comes after a reverential chapter on Morrison’s magnum opus, “Astral Weeks.” It’s one thing to adore the record and write that Morrison is “saying everything in the cues of his chords, hesitations, lunges, silences, and in those moments when he loosed himself from words and floated on his own air.” It’s quite another to dismiss 16 (!) of Morrison’s recordings, from 1980 to 1996, as an “endless stream of dull and tired albums” that carry “titles like warning labels.” Marcus suggests that the slump ended only with “The Healing Game,” which contains the song that gives his book its title. This is where certain serious music critics always lose me.

Sure, the pop-jazz knockout “Astral Weeks” is deep, beautiful, painful. But it’s also become something of a shillelagh, often used to club other fine Morrison albums. O.K., Morrison explores all the ­requisite literary topics on “Astral Weeks”: sex, death, loss. Yet he is also tremendously convincing on less quirky albums. One listen to the radiant “Someone Like You,” from the “tired” “Poetic Champions Compose,” proves that. Also, Morrison showed in the course of those 16 albums that he was as interested in an evolving musical sophistication as he was in being the heartbroken Beat poet. It all depends on your mood, anyway. Sometimes you want “Cyprus Avenue.” Other days, “Have I Told You Lately” is exactly right.

Still, that’s what the most thoughtful music critics make you do: argue like crazy about their choices and ideas. And it’s what Marcus does here — reminding us, even as he antagonizes us, why we listen to Morrison in the first place. But the author might want to remember something simple. Sure, it’s great to hear Morrison sing about the dark, disturbed Madame George. Sometimes, though, all you want to listen to is “Brown-Eyed Girl” because, at that moment, “sha la la” says everything a rock fan needs to know.


Peter Gerstenzang is a humorist and a freelance journalist.

Joke's on Arizona

By RICH LOWRY
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com
July 30, 2010

Judge Susan Bolton has to get credit for her cheekiness. She took a matter of profound national concern and in jected an element of hilarity into it.

As gloriously ridiculous as a classic "Monty Python" skit, the federal judge's decision blocking Arizona's immigration law is an appropriate first volley in the legal war over the law. If our immigration system is to be defined by a judicially sanctioned lawlessness, we might as well dispense with the pretense.

Acting in keeping with federal law, court precedent and a Justice Department memorandum (not to mention common sense), Arizona said its law-enforcement officers would henceforth check the legal status of suspected illegals during the course of a lawful stop or arrest. To conclude that the law likely will be struck down for "pre-empting" federal regulations, Bolton had to engage in complicated judicial gymnastics, which she nailed with the skill of a Mary Lou Retton in robes.

Taking her cues from the Obama administration's suit against the law, Bolton worried that too many legal aliens would be caught up in Arizona's dragnet. Of course, these aliens are already required by federal law to carry proof of their legal status. But let's put that aside (as Bolton does). She claims that too many legal aliens without ready access to documents proving their lawful entry into the US will be put at risk, including visitors from visa-waiver countries.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that visitors from countries like Norway and Australia are flooding into the border areas of Arizona. And let's assume they engage in recklessly illegal conduct, daring cops to stop and arrest them. And let's assume they exhibit all the behaviors associated with illegal immigrants. How could such a visitor escape the dreaded fate awaiting him when an officer asks about his legal status? Perhaps by producing a passport stamped with the duration of his stay, possessed by every visitor from a visa-waiver country?

Bolton piles speculation atop implausible readings of the law. Say a legal alien is arrested and his release is delayed by a check on his status. Let's put aside (as Bolton does) that on average it takes the staff manning the federal database set up for such checks 70 minutes to get to an inquiry and a mere 11 minutes to answer it. Judge Bolton declares that any delay amounts to exposing legal aliens to "the possibility of inquisitorial practices and police surveillance."

This is a tautology dressed up with scare words. It's impossible as a matter of definition to get arrested without experiencing "police surveillance." As for "inquisitorial practices," blogger William A. Jacobson notes that "states already routinely run searches for a variety of statuses, including outstanding warrants, child support orders and non-immigration identity checks. Each of these checks potentially could delay release of an innocent person."

When states want to check on someone's immigration status, they do it with the aforementioned federal database. As a matter of law, the outfit running it must respond to all inquiries "seeking to verify or ascertain citizenship or immigration status . . . for any purpose authorized by law." In writing this sweeping requirement, Congress did not make an exception for requests emanating from Arizona.

Too bad, says Judge Bolton. If the state finds too many suspected illegal immigrants, it might overburden the system. Let's put aside (as Bolton does) that the system already gets 1 million inquiries a year, that it has a theoretical capacity to process 1.5 million and that, as of now, Arizona only makes 80,000 inquiries annually, meaning even a drastic increase could be accommodated. If the federal government fears a surge from Arizona, couldn't it add some positions to the 153 staffers currently assigned to the database? Think of it as stimulus.

But never mind. With emotion running high over the Arizona law, some comic relief's always welcome. Bolton has provided it.

National Health Service is coming to America

By: Cal Thomas
The Washington Examiner Columnist
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/
July 29, 2010

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told a group of liberal activists meeting in Las Vegas they shouldn't worry about not getting the single-payer provision in the new health care law. "We're going to have a public option," Reid said. "It's just a question of when."

Remember the objections conservatives and many Republicans raised during the debate about government-run health care and the danger of eliminating private health insurance, despite its many flaws?

Recall that Britain's National Health Service was frequently cited as an example of where the U.S. health system might be headed: coverage for all, but with lower quality, long waits for major surgery and denial of care when the government decides the procedure is not "cost effective."

Anyone who believes a U.S. health care system based on the NHS model can somehow fare better than Britain's had better consider this recent headline and story from London's Sunday Telegraph: "Axe Falls on NHS Services; Hip operations, cataract surgery and IVF rationed; Cancer care, maternity, pediatric services at risk."

Rationing? Oh yes, and it is something the unconfirmed, recess-appointed U.S. health care czar, Donald Berwick, strongly favors.

British government leaders had promised to protect frontline services. The Obama administration also made similar promises in order to win enough support from members of Congress, most of whom never read the bill before they voted for it.

Here's what America can look forward to if it follows the NHS model, according to an investigation by the Sunday Telegraph: "Plans to cut hundreds of thousands of pounds from budgets for the terminally ill, with dying cancer patients to be told to manage their own symptoms if their condition worsens at evenings or weekends." Never has "take two aspirin and call me in the morning" sounded more callous.

Nursing homes for the elderly would be closed, the number of hospital beds for the mentally ill reduced and general practitioners would be discouraged from sending patients to hospitals. Accident and emergency department services would also be cut.

Thousands of jobs would be lost at NHS hospitals, reports the Telegraph, "including 500 staff to go at a trust where cancer patients recently suffered delays in diagnosis and treatment because of staff shortages." Katherine Murphy of the Patients Association called the cuts "astonishingly brutal."

She expressed particular concern at attempts to ration (that word again) hip and knee operations. "These are not unusual procedures," she said. "This is a really blatant attempt to save money by leaving people in pain."

What do politicians care about that? In Britain, as in America, top officials (including Berwick, who has lifetime health coverage given to him by the Institute for Health Care Improvement) will always have access to the best care, even while they decide the rest of us cannot.

This paragraph in the Telegraph story should send chills down the spine of every American: "Doctors across the country have already been told that their patients can have the operations only if they are given 'prior approval' by the Primary Care Trust, with each authorization made on a 'case by case' basis."

When cost, rather than the value of life, becomes supreme, rationing will inevitably lead to other cost-cutting policies. And yes, despite protestations from those who favored Obamacare that "death panels" would not be part of the equation, you can count on them.

They will, of course, be called something else. We wouldn't want to disturb any remaining moral sensibilities we might have.

It has taken the NHS 62 years to get to this point. America's journey should be a lot shorter given the declared goals of Harry Reid and Donald Berwick.

It is more than ironic that this is taking place in the year when Britain is observing the centenary of the revered nurse Florence Nightingale. Given the prevailing attitude toward the value of human life and its care, her replacement might be the likes of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Hemlock, anyone?

Examiner Columnist Cal Thomas is nationally syndicated by Tribune Media.

Forgotten soldiers

By RALPH PETERS
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com
July 29, 2010

If we needed yet another example of Washington's self-absorption, we sure got it with the WikiLeaks dump of classified data on AfPak.

Government officials promptly freaked about the political consequences. The rush to insist that "there's nothing new here" and that the leaks "really don't change anything" was dishonest even by DC standards.

Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies!

The victims of this tragic event aren't punch-drunk White House staffers or members of Congress up for re-election. They're not the wed-to-Pakistan wonks at State or even the Pentagon's hide-the-bad-news generals.

The forgotten victims are our troops on the ground. And the Afghans who've risked everything to help them.

If I hear one more senator from either party tell us that the WikiLeaks betrayal won't make a significant difference, I'm going to violate security to puke on the Capitol's steps.

No difference? These leaked documents are an immeasurably valuable gift to the Taliban and al Qaeda -- as well as to other enemies, present and potential.

An alert reader -- and the terrorists have plenty on the case -- can harvest vital information about our special operations, unit locations, logistics vulnerabilities, fire-support system, response times, medevac procedures, command-and-control weaknesses, intelligence deficiencies, physical security, weapons limitations, internal policy debates . . . and that's just the start.

American service members will die because of the WikiLeaks "service to humanity." And nobody in Washington seems to have noticed.

Afghans will die, too. A lot of them. In just a few hours of data-mining, Britain's The Times unearthed the names of hundreds of Afghans who've helped us. Information about their families and home villages is in there, too.

Think the Taliban will give a free pass to Afghans who've supported us? Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Afghan lives are newly at risk. It's a huge gift to the terrorists: Our collaborators will run for cover -- and recruiting informants will be immeasurably more difficult.

Thanks to WikiLeaks -- and the treasonous leaker himself -- our enemies will gain a more-detailed picture of how we operate than we'll ever have of them. There hasn't been a bigger war-time intelligence coup since ULTRA, when the Brits got their hands on the key Nazi encryption device in World War II.

And what troubles Washington? The administration, which blithely assured voters it knew how to fix Afghanistan, is worried about eroding poll numbers. Congressional Democrats tied to the president's AfPak policies to prove their toughness on national security are panicked about voter backlash.

Republicans, who bluster about a mission they haven't defined, worry that truth will lessen support for the war. State fears diplomatic repercussions, and the Pentagon's been caught cheating on its AfPak midterm. The

intelligence community worries (justifiably) that sources will

dry up, since we obviously can't protect our secrets.

Yet how many voices raised concerns about the increased danger to which our troops will be exposed? Precious few.

The bad, horrible, terrible news is that the WikiLeaks drama is still in its opening act. As enemies and journalists (not so concerned about our troops, either) dig through these vast files, the revelations are going to get worse.

Of course, our government lawyers wouldn't let us take WikiLeaks down. We won't even go after Mr. WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, whose release of this data will facilitate Taliban war crimes and assassinations.

Folks, don't be bamboozled: This leak is the biggest geo-strategic event in the short history of the Internet, potentially altering the course of a war and changing the dynamics of an entire region. No Web-publicized political scandal, no breathless war-crime allegations, not even those old pictures of your girlfriend that popped up on shamelesskittens.com come close.

What can we do, now that the terrorists have downloaded the data? We could get a grip on the harsh new realities of war in the age of the Web. But we won't. It's too hard. It upsets too many rice bowls.

Our leaders can't even be honest about the damage done. And the troops get screwed again.

Ralph Peters' latest book is "Endless War."

Behind the Lockerbie letter

By ARTHUR HERMAN
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/
July 29, 2010


In Washington, what people say is happening and what's actually happening tend to be two different things -- especially these days.

Tuesday, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) announced that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was going to suspend its hearings on the sudden release last year of convicted Lockerbie bomber and Libyan citizen Abdel Baset al-Megrahi.

Menendez claims the reason he had to stop the investigation that he, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and other Democrats have been screaming for is that the British witnesses they wanted to question on the possible link between Megrahi's release and a big BP offshore-drilling deal with Libya refused to testify.

Congressional Dems stopped a probe that would have disclosed what Obama and AG Holder knew about the release of Libyan terrorist Abdel Baset al-Megrahi.


The real reason is that the probe might also have had to disclose what President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder knew and when they knew it. That's because the London Times on Sunday published a letter written by deputy US ambassador Richard LeBaron in the days before Megrahi was set free, telling Scotland's first minister that, while the Obama administration opposed the terrorist bomber's release, it was nonetheless "far preferable" that he be sprung on compassionate grounds than be moved to a Libyan prison.

At the very least, the letter undermines Obama's statement that he had been "surprised, disappointed and angry" by the release last August. It turns out that he knew all along and that his anger and disappointment didn't extend so far as to make a diplomatic big deal about it.

At the time, an outraged Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said the release of the man convicted of murdering the 189 Americans on Pan Am 103 on grounds of "compassion" turned the meaning of the word on its head. It seems Obama was one of those doing the headstand.

Now that the Lockerbie hearings have been suspended, we may never get to the truth of what happened in those crucial days in mid-August or read the transcript that the White House is withholding of a conversation Holder had with his Scottish counterpart before the release.

That's unfortunate, because the truth would help us answer a more important question: How serious is this president about fighting and winning the War on Terror?

Certainly, Obama's defenders haven't been slow on damage control on that point. They say that the Times has "Sherroded" him -- that the letter was quoted out of context. They say the full text of LeBaron's letter shows that the White House demanded proof that Megrahi had only weeks to live, as the Scots were claiming. It also wanted the Libyan terrorist, if he was to be released, to be kept in custody in Scotland -- not returned home in triumph.

They also say that there's no doubt that the real culprits in the case were the British, whether BP was involved or not.

All the same, it's unimaginable that Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush or John McCain would have allowed such a letter linking "compassion" to the fate of a terrorist bomber to be sent.

It's also hard to imagine that a Republican president would have let Megrahi return to Libya unmolested. More likely, on White House orders, US fighters and a special-ops team would have diverted Megrahi's flight to an extradition-to-the-US-friendly airport.

Some might cry that such a move would've damaged our "special relationship" with Great Britain.

In fact, it's hard to see how Anglo-American relations could get any worse.

In the last few weeks, Obama has waged a campaign to vilify and cripple Britain's biggest corporation and besmirch the integrity of the British government by suggesting it has sold out to BP. Whoever was behind the letter's publication clearly was engaged in retaliation. Indeed, ever since he returned Britain's present of a bust of Winston Churchill, Obama has turned the "special relationship" into a train wreck.

But there's a more troubling issue lurking behind this scandal.

Obama's feckless handling of the Megrahi affair seems to be part of a pattern. It includes making the release of terrorists from Gitmo a top priority, his notorious apology tour and "we feel your pain" speech to a Muslim audience in Cairo and his top terrorism adviser John Brennan's May 26 pronouncement that jihad is a legitimate religious practice. It includes the effort to turn NASA into a Muslim-outreach program, Obama's steady harassment of Israel compared to his reluctance to challenge the Tehran regime and now his silence about the building of a mosque at Ground Zero.

In short, whose side is Obama really on? Is there more sympathy and compassion at the White House for Islamicist terrorists than there is for those they killed on 9/11 and over Lockerbie -- and those they're still killing in Afghanistan?

Americans need to know the answer before they can have confidence in Obama's conduct of the War on Terror. They need to know what he knew, and when, about the Lockerbie bomber release.

Unfortunately, it may take the election of a Republican Congress in November before we can get those answers.

Arthur Herman's most recent book is "Gandhi and Churchill."

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE, WHO NEEDS KEITH OLBERMANN?

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
July 28, 2010

While engaging in astonishing viciousness, vulgarity and violence toward Republicans, liberals accuse cheerful, law-abiding Tea Party activists of being violent racists.

Responding to these vile charges, conservative television pundits think it's a great comeback to say: "There is the fringe on both sides."

Both sides? Really? How about: "That's a despicable lie"? Did that occur to you simpering morons as a possible reply to the slanderous claim that conservatives are fiery racists?

All the accusations of "racism" at anti-Obama rallies so far have turned out to be completely false. The most notorious was the allegation that one black congressman was spat on and another called the N-word 15 times at an anti-ObamaCare rally on Capitol Hill last March.

The particularly sensitive Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., perhaps walking too closely to a protester chanting "Kill the Bill," was hit with some spittle -- and briefly thought he was a Freedom Rider! When observers contested Cleaver's account -- with massive video evidence -- he walked back his claim of being spat upon.

The slanderous claim that a protester called the civil rights hero John Lewis the N-word 15 times was an outrageous lie -- never made by Lewis himself -- but promoted endlessly by teary-eyed reporters, most of whom cannot count to 15.

The media never retracted it, even after the N-word allegation was proved false with a still-uncollected $100,000 reward for two seconds of video proof taken from a protest crawling with video cameras and reporters hungry for an act of racism.

When St. Louis Tea Party co-founder Dana Loesch did make the point on CNN that no one spat on any black congressmen at the anti-ObamaCare rally, a liberal on the panel, Nancy Giles, told her to "shut your mouth," while alleged "comedian" Stephanie Miller repeatedly called Tea Party activists "tea baggers."

It's like watching Hitler hysterically denounce Poland for being mean to Nazi Germany while Polish TV commentators defend Poland by saying, "There are mistakes on both sides."

Meanwhile, we do have video proof of the New Black Panthers standing outside a polling station in Philadelphia in 2008 with billy clubs threatening white voters who tried to vote. And there is video footage of Sarah Palin, Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice as well as a slew of conservative college speakers being assaulted by crazed liberals.

We also have evidence of liberals' proclivity for violence in the form of mountains of arrest records. Liberal protesters at the 2008 Republican National Convention were arrested for smashing police cars, slashing tires, breaking store windows, and for possessing Molotov cocktails, napalm bombs and assorted firearms. (If only they could muster up that kind of fighting spirit on foreign battlefields.)

There were no arrests of conservatives at the Democratic National Convention.

Over the past couple of election cycles, Bush and McCain election headquarters around the country have been repeatedly vandalized, ransacked, burglarized and shot at (by staunch gun-control advocates, no doubt); Bush and McCain campaign signs have been torched; and Republican campaign volunteers have been physically attacked.

It was a good day when George Bush was merely burned in effigy, compared to Hitler or, most innocuously, compared to a monkey.

In the fall of 2008, Obama supporters Mace'd elderly volunteers in a McCain campaign office in Galax, Va. In separate attacks, a half-dozen liberals threw Molotov cocktails at McCain signs on families' front yards in and around Portland, Ore. One Obama supporter broke a McCain sign being held by a small middle-aged woman in midtown Manhattan before hitting her in the face with the stick. These are just a few acts of violence from the left too numerous to catalog.

There were arrests in all these cases. There was, however, absolutely no national coverage of the attacks by Obama supporters.

Obama is in danger from the Tea Partiers! The Poles are mobilizing on the border!

Since Obama became president, the only recorded violence at Tea Parties or Town Halls has been committed by liberals. Last fall, a conservative had his finger bitten off by a man from a MoveOn.org crowd in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Two Service Employees International Union thugs have been charged with beating up an African-American selling anti-Obama bumper stickers at a St. Louis Tea Party in August 2009.

Respected elder statesmen of the Democratic Party have referred to Obama's "Negro dialect" (Harry Reid), said he would be getting them coffee a few years ago (Bill Clinton), and called him "clean" (Joe Biden). And that's not including the former Ku Klux Klan Democratic senator, the late Bob Byrd.

So I'm thinking that maybe when conservatives are called racists on TV, instead of saying, "There are fringe elements on both sides," conservative commentators might want to think about saying, "That is a complete lie."

Liberals explode in rage when we accuse them of being unpatriotic based on 50 years of treasonous behavior. They have zero examples of conservative racism, but the best our spokesmen can think to say when accused of racism is: "Man is imperfect."

Conservatives who prefer to come across on TV as wonderfully moderate than to speak the truth should find another line of work and stop defaming conservatives with their "both sides" pabulum.

I hear BP is looking for a new spokesman.

COPYRIGHT 2010 ANN COULTER

Into the Wild

By Bill Gifford
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
Sunday, March 30, 2008

GOD'S MIDDLE FINGER

Into the Lawless Heart Of the Sierra Madre

By Richard Grant

Free Press. 288 pp. Paperback, $15

This intriguing and ultimately terrifying Mexican walkabout belongs to that subgenre of travel writing that can generally be summed up in four words: Should have stayed home.

It's the author's first job to persuade us why he didn't, and in the initial chapters of God's Middle Finger, Richard Grant does not quite succeed. Something about a sad divorce, a taste for risk and a desire to see the Sierra Madre, the mythical but quite lawless mountain range that forms the backbone of western Mexico.

Rugged, impoverished and all but closed to outsiders, the Sierra Madre is indeed a fine place to hide buried treasure -- or to grow marijuana and opium poppies, while murdering anyone who tries to stand in your way. The rule of law is literally a distant rumor in the Sierra Madre, where the nearest police station can be a day's drive away (and the police in question are likely corrupt). Most murders and nearly all rapes go unreported; the locals simply sort things out among themselves.

Grant, a British journalist, spends a lot of time on how-I-got-the-story, but not enough on why. "Are you looking for your death?" he is asked by a folk healer. It seems a fair question, for at the outset the author comes across smelling like a bit of an adrenaline tourist, slumming for thrills. "Here I was at last, riding an outlaw trail into the high wilds of the Sierra Madre," he declares, having arrived in the fabled mountains and feeling smug; not long afterward, he's whipping out a hunk of Italian prosciutto.

Thankfully for the reader, Grant's self-satisfaction soon withers, replaced by a genuine fascination with this isolated, violent place. He describes a small-town festival that manages to be "a solemn religious celebration, a drunken party, a social occasion, and a flea market, all rolled into one."

"Behind his tented stall," he writes, "I saw one of the vendors dip a long thin knife into a plastic bag full of white powder, administer a parakeet-blast to both nostrils and then step up to relieve his partner. 'Se¿ores y se¿oras!' he bellowed. 'I now present to you a most exquisite item of the finest quality at a price that is not to be believed! I have no boss, I have no wife, I have no children, my friends say I have lost my mind! Maybe that is why I can offer you a price of one hundred -- NO! Eighty! -- NO! Seventy! -- NO! Fifty pesos is all I ask for this beautiful, hard-wearing set of saucepans.' "

The festival is crawling with a more sinister type of character: The narcos, both real and wannabe, the former distinguished only by the heft of their gold jewelry. The narcos run everything in the Sierra Madre, which is the headwaters of the drug supply stream. In the hardscrabble mountain villages, marijuana is known as the crop that pays, and pretty much everyone grows it.

That he navigates this dangerous land safely (for the most part) is a testament to his drinking abilities -- and his thoroughgoing command of Mexican curses. ("Sons of obscene perpetrations!" is how he translates a standard Sierra Madre toast.) In one fascinating scene after another, he meets peasant marijuana farmers, very many drunks and a few Mormons and Mennonites, who fled south for various political and religious reasons. He spends time with the indigenous Tarahumara and memorably attends an Easter festival in a Tarahumara town that descends into total madness, fueled by the local corn-brewed beer, tesguino. (The local statue depicting God is missing all but one of its fingers; hence the book's title.)

But not until about page 200 do we encounter anything like a larger point: in this case, the utter futility of the war on drugs and the hypocrisy of waging it against suppliers rather than consumers. The impoverished farmer who grows marijuana is merely responding to market forces, as any good American capitalist would.

It's not a message we really want to hear, up in El Norte. When Grant volunteers to teach English in a local schoolhouse, he has his students compose a letter to their American peers, describing their lives. He shows the letter to teachers in Tucson, but they decline to use it in their classes because of the references to pistols and pot. Better to build a border fence and pretend that this Mexico doesn't exist. When an American expat activist expresses the hope that Mexico is headed toward a liberal-democratic future, Grant is doubtful: "I thought the whole nation was turning more feral, violent, and chaotic, that the Sierra Madre held glimpses of Mexico's future as well as its past."

A strong editor might have moved this up and turned it into the book's controlling thesis, but Grant is more of a rambling sort of writer, one who keeps pushing the limits. Not to give away the ending, but I think I can sum things up in six words instead of four: He got what he came for.

-- Bill Gifford is the author of "Ledyard: In Search of the First American Explorer."

The New Journalism

The consumer backlash against the House of Cronkite.

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com/
July 28, 2010 12:00 A.M.

‘The high standards and wise judgments of people like Walter Cronkite once acted as a national immune system, zapping scandal mongers and quashing wild rumors,” wrote former “green jobs czar” Van Jones (pictured at right) in Sunday’s New York Times.

This may be one of the most unintentionally hilarious lines in recent memory. Jones, you may recall, left the White House when his background — not just as an alleged 9/11 truther but as a self-confessed Communist and revolutionary — became grist for the Fox News mill. Mainstream publications mostly ignored the controversy until after he was fired, and then focused on the fact that he directed an expletive at Republicans in a YouTube video.

Now Jones, with billets at Princeton and the Center for American Progress, casts himself as yet another victim, just like Shirley Sherrod, the Department of Agriculture employee fired after Andrew Breitbart released a misleadingly edited video of her. (Breitbart, a friend of mine, insists to me that he did not edit the video himself.)

You’ve just got to love a former member of STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement), a Mao-influenced organization with a professed “commitment to the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism,” giving Walter Cronkite — the dashboard saint of American bourgeois conformity — his due as the bulwark of decency. Yes, yes, Jones says he’s grown and is no longer the Red he was even a few years ago. But come on.

For generations, conservatives lamented the decline in standards. When Hollywood portrayed glandular instincts as the new moral compass of the secular age, conservatives waxed nostalgic over the lost decency of the “studio system.” When the education industry shelved the great books in favor of hugs, conservatives lamented the demise of the three R’s and the “closing of the American mind.” When the Left became enamored with a “riot ideology” that mistook lawlessness for political protest, conservatives invoked “law and order.” Name a front in the political and culture wars, and conservatives defended the authority of authority and the tradition of tradition, while liberals and leftists defended sticking it to the man.

But now that the legacy media is one of the last resources the Left still has at its disposal, even Comrade Jones isn’t immune to mossy nostalgia for Walter Cronkite (who, by the way, is easily one of the most overrated American icons).

And that’s the irony: The Left only believes in sticking it to the man when it isn’t the man. Teachers unions and tenured professors, now that they control their guilds, are darn-near reactionary in their white-knuckled grip on the status quo. Liberal legal scholars are a cargo cult to stare decisis, for the simple reason that the precedents are still on their side.

The essence of the culture war today is a battle over whose “gatekeepers” are legitimate and whose are not.

Nowhere is this more true than in the temples of journalism, where the high priests are barricading the doors with pews and candelabras to fend off the barbarians.

Among the liberal Brahmins of the legacy media, probity, standards, and restraint are the order of the day for inconvenient news. Feeding frenzies are reserved for the fun news (i.e., the news that reinforces liberal assumptions).

So, when the Climategate e-mails were released, the New York Times’s chief environmental correspondent refrained from posting private e-mails, a standard he would never have taken with internal e-mails from, say, BP. The leak of Valerie Plame’s identity: a shocking scandal that tore at the heart of the Bush administration. The leaking of vital state secrets: great journalism.

The house Cronkite built did many fine and noble things. It also locked out competing points of view, buried inconvenient bodies, spun the news with centrifugal force, and racked up a formidable list of Shirley Sherrods all its own. The New York Times whitewashed Stalin’s genocide. Cronkite misreported the significance of the Tet Offensive to say the Vietnam War was unwinnable. Dan Rather, Cronkite’s replacement, began his career falsely reporting that Dallas schoolchildren cheered JFK’s murder and ended it falsely reporting on forged National Guard memos. The Rodney King video was misleadingly edited; the Tailwind story was not true. And that’s only a snippet of the list.

The media environment today is dizzying not because of one revolution but two complementary ones. First there’s the churn of the Internet, from Wikileaks to wilding bloggers. But there’s also a second revolution that amounts to consumer backlash against the House of Cronkite. It has fueled the rise of Fox News and the new alternative media.

This pincer movement can be scary. But it’s progress.

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.