Is this crazy, or is this crazy?

By Melanie Phillips
London Spectator

http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/
Sunday, 24th February 2008

The decision by Britain, America and certain other European countries to recognise Kosovo as an independent state is mind-blowingly stupid and suicidal and of a piece with their obvious determination to capitulate in the war for civilisation. It is a rotten decision for the following reasons:

1) It endorses a breach of a country's right to maintain its own integrity. Serbia is a properly constituted democratic country. To recognise the validity of such a secession is to undermine the principle of a country's right to determine its own composition. It puts up two fingers to international law, which explicitly recognises Serbian authority over Kosovo and upholds a state’s right to its own sovereignty. It opens the way for any other breakaway movement to do the same, both in the Balkans and around the world. So Tamils can now claim a precedent for seceding from Sri Lanka, Corsicans from France, Basques from Spain. And after Kosovo, can Scotland be far behind?

2) It asserts that religion matters more than nationality. This is multiculturalism taken to its lunatic natural conclusion. It says in effect that nationality is not the glue that must bind people of different creeds together, but religion or ethnicity can be allowed to break the nation apart. Every nation with restive ethnic minorities will now be undermined by this endorsement of illegal Balkanisation. Serbians will now find themselves foreigners in their own country. And as Eldad Beck applies the same thinking to Israel -- whose kamikaze government is said to be ‘thinking about’ recognising Kosovo too -- a horrific potential scenario presents itself:

In contradiction to all the pessimistic predictions, Israel and the Palestinians are able to successfully conclude negotiations on a final-status agreement, among other things based to incentives provided by the European Union. In the final stages of negotiations, Israeli representatives cave in to international pressure and waive the demand to recognize Israel’s unique Jewish character.

A short while after the agreement is signed, an uprising breaks out in the Galilee, in the Triangle area, and in the southern Negev desert, with Arab Israelis demanding a cultural and political autonomy that would enable them to manage their own lives while disconnecting from the State of Israel’s ‘Jewish’ institutions.

The bloody clashes between the sides prompt the United Nations to call on Israel to restrain itself and consider the deployment of multinational forces to serve as a buffer. The European Union threatens to renounce Israel’s special status if it fails to act immediately in order to meet the demands of the minority living within it. Israel’s dependence on the EU is so great that it is forced to capitulate and turn into a ‘greater Tel Aviv’ shtetl.

3) It gives victory to the forces of ethnic cleansing. Although the Serbs under Milosevic committed atrocities, the Kosovars started the killing in their revolt against a sovereign country and drove out between 150,000 and 200,000 Serbs. In the past eight years 1,248 non-Albanians have been killed, with many more kidnapped, now presumed dead. 151 spiritual and cultural monuments in Kosovo have been destroyed by Albanians and 213 mosques built with money from Saudi Arabia. Eighty per cent of graveyards have been destroyed or desecrated, with no response from the international community. The Albanians have turned Christian graveyards into car parks, playgrounds and rubbish dumps. Anything relating to Serbia or Christianity libraries, public records, books, names of places and even towns have been wiped out.

4) Most important of all, an independent Muslim Kosovo is a beachhead for radical Islam in Europe. Al Qaeda has been operating in Kosovo since the early 1990s. Jihadis from Yemen and Chechnya have been fighting with the Kosovo Liberation Army and Saudi is pouring money into the Kosovo mosques thus turning them into Wahhabi hotbeds of radicalism. Caroline Glick notes in the Jerusalem Post:

In 2006, John Gizzi reported in Human Events that the German intelligence service BND had confirmed that the 2005 terrorist bombings in Britain and the 2004 bombings in Spain were organized in Kosovo. Furthermore, ‘The man at the center of the provision of the explosives in both instances was an Albanian, operating mostly out of Kosovo... who is the second ranking leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Niam Behzloulzi.’

It was at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 that some 70,000 died to keep the Islamic Ottoman Empire from advancing further into Europe. What is the point of fighting the jihad in Iraq when we are cheerfully opening the door to it in that very same place?

Russia’s President Putin has warned that recognising Kosovo will rebound very badly upon the countries who have blundered into endorsing it. The fact that this outcome is merely the inevitable consequence of the war so unwisely prosecuted by those countries against Serbia does not soften its deeply alarming implications. Putin is warning only too correctly of the dangers to the west of this development and the supreme folly of endorsing it.

For once, Putin is on the right side and Britain and America are utterly wrong. That is the measure of this debacle.


Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist. She also writes for the Jewish Chronicle and is a panellist on BBC Radio Four's Moral Maze. Her most recent book is 'Londonistan', published by Encounter and Gibson Square.

'No Country for Old Men’ Wins Oscar Tug of War

No film ran away with the night, however, as the 80th Academy Awards gave a bruised movie industry a chance to refocus its ever-inward gaze on laurels instead of labor strife. Ethan Coen, left, Joel Coen, center, and Scott Rudin accepted the award for best picture. More Photos >

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER and MICHAEL CIEPLY

The New York Times
Published: February 25, 2008

HOLLYWOOD — “No Country for Old Men,” Joel and Ethan Coen’s chilling confrontation of a desperate man with a relentless killer, won the Academy Award for best picture on Sunday night, providing a more-than-satisfying ending for the makers of a film that many believed lacked one.

The Coens, who live in New York and remain aloof from the Hollywood establishment, also shared the directing and adapted screenplay awards. Joel Coen thanked the academy members for “letting us continue to play in our corner of the sandbox.”

No film ran away with the night, however, as the 80th annual Academy Awards gave a bruised movie industry a chance to refocus its ever-inward gaze on laurels instead of labor strife.

Daniel Day-Lewis won best actor for his portrayal of a ruthless oil tycoon’s rise from the sweat and sludge of wildcatting to wealth, power and madness in “There Will Be Blood.”

And Marion Cotillard won the Oscar for best actress for her incarnation of the tormented chanteuse Edith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose.”

“Thank you life, thank you love,” an elated Ms. Cotillard said. “It is true there are some angels in this city.”

None of the best picture nominees went home empty-handed: all picked off a significant win in one category or another.

Javier Bardem won a fourth Oscar for “No Country,” capturing the best supporting actor for his role as the cattlegun-wielding, pageboy-wearing serial killer. He thanked the Coens, saying they “put one of the most horrible haircuts in history over my head.”

The Oscar for “No Country” was a long-sought triumph for Scott Rudin, a prolific producer who has specialized in movies on the smarter end of the spectrum, but only once before received a best-picture nomination, for “The Hours” in 2003.

Tilda Swinton took best supporting actress for playing a nervous wreck of a corporate lawyer who throws morality under the bus of her ambition in “Michael Clayton.”

The indie delight “Juno,” about a pregnant teenager with a mouth on her, won for best original screenplay, by Diablo Cody, who once worked as a stripper. She tearfully thanked her family for “loving me for who I am.”

“No Country” was denied in several technical categories, as well as in cinematography: Robert Elswit won that Oscar for “There Will Be Blood,” whose extended tracking shots in harsh open spaces and dimly lighted images of claustrophobic spots made for stunning scenes despite long stretches with little dialog.

With all four top acting prizes going to Europeans and the New York-based Coen brothers’ film in contention for several others, it was a night when Hollywood’s glittery establishment came out to honor what was essentially a gaggle of outsiders.

Another example: “Falling Slowly,” the ballad from “Once” about the music created in the space between two people, won best original song. It was written by the film’s stars, the Irish Glen Hansard and the Czech Marketa Irglova, who have since become a real-life couple.

“Atonement,” nominated for seven awards, won for best original score. The awards were otherwise all over the map, with the first nine going to different films, leaving the show’s host, Jon Stewart, to set the tone with a riff on the three-month writers’ strike that had threatened to turn the Oscars itself into a marathon of montages.

“You’re here — I can’t believe it, you’re actually here!” he joked as the show opened. “The fight is over, so tonight,” he added, “welcome to the makeup sex.”

Mindful of the election season, he took note of the Democratic primary race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. “Normally when you see a black man or a woman president, an asteroid is about to hit the Statue of Liberty,” he said.

“Ratatouille,” a rodent’s-eye view of the accessibility of art, won for best animated feature. Brad Bird, that film’s director, thanked his junior high school guidance counselor: “He asked me what I wanted to do with my life,” Mr. Bird recalled. “I said, ‘Make movies.’ He asked me what else I wanted to do with my life. And I said, ‘Make movies.’ ” Mr. Bird said the doubt he faced was “perfect training” for a life in Hollywood.

“Taxi to the Dark Side,” an examination of American torture practices, won best documentary feature.

Also in the early going, “La Vie en Rose” won for best makeup and “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” won for costume design. “The Golden Compass,” in which every human character is born with a shape-shifting animal companion known as a “daemon,” scored a big early upset in the visual-effects category, beating two far more successful films: “Transformers” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.”

Among the lesser-watched categories, “The Bourne Ultimatum” won Oscars for all three in which it was nominated: film editing, sound mixing and sound editing.

“The Counterfeiters,” a Nazi-era drama, became the first Austrian film to win an Oscar, for best foreign-language film.

Owen Wilson presented the award for best live-action short to “Le Mozart des Pickpockets,” and played it straight, avoiding any reference to his personal collapse and hospitalization just as his “Darjeeling Limited” was being released last fall. Best animated short went to “Peter and the Wolf,” and was presented by an animated Jerry Seinfeld, in his “Bee Movie” character.

The animation award, and Mr. Stewart’s opening monologue, provided a lighthearted liftoff for an Oscars telecast sure to be weighted down by the field of mostly small and dark films in the running for the top honors. Embraced by critics, those movies have been less warmly received by the mass audiences whose attentions have sustained the Academy Awards as one of the nation’s few remaining shared rituals.

The lack of a clear consensus among critics and audiences left the potential for an Oscar night in which the top awards were scattered in every direction. Among other things, the evening promised to be a tug of war over sensibilities: Academy voters were being asked to choose between the nihilism of “No Country for Old Men,” in which the serial killer prevails; the hopeful spunk of “Juno,” in which a pregnant teenager forges her own solutions; or, perhaps, a saga of childhood betrayal and lives destroyed, in “Atonement,” set against the backdrop of British retreat in the early days of World War II.

As Mr. Stewart put it: “Does this town need a hug?” He added, “All I can say is, thank God for teen pregnancy.”

The 80th annual Academy Awards, held at the Kodak Theater here, delivered a welcome return to pomp and ritual for a town still recovering from the strike by film and television writers that stripped the glitz from the enterprise. “I think the town is ready to celebrate,” said George Clooney, walking up the red carpet accompanied by his girlfriend, Sarah Larson. “I know I am, but then that’s never been a problem for me.”

On Sunday, however, jitters still surrounded a broadcast that was assembled quickly around a roster of independent-style films, none of which has shown the audience appeal of a “Titanic” or “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” previous best-picture winners that pulled large audiences to the awards show in the past.

The early proceedings were slightly ad hoc, not quite normal for a show that operates more like an industry, bringing the 6,500-member Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences roughly $40 million in net income each year. Security was tight, but did not operate with the usual precision. Promised ID checks and wristbanding did not occur. Mr. Stewart, the evening’s host, had little more than a week to prepare once writers voted to return to work.

With help from a smash-up special effects opening and Mr. Stewart’s monologue, things started out with a bang. But the show began to drag as one dusty montage after another of Oscar history piled up, more numerous and less effective than in recent memory.

The machine came slightly off the rails later on, as Mr. Stewart brought Ms. Irglova back out after a commercial break when she had been denied the chance to give an acceptance speech.

Probably nothing caught the slightly cynical air of self-reference better than Jack Nicholson’s lead-in to a montage of all 79 prior best-picture winners. “They touch the humanity — heh, heh, heh — in all of us,” laughed Mr. Nicholson, with a touch more of the Joker than human warmth.

A film community that lost its balance, and never quite got it back, was also clearly unsure how much fun was too much fun under the circumstances: The annual orgy of status, heat and sequined victory laps, Vanity Fair magazine’s Oscar after-party, was abruptly canceled, as were several other ordinarily hot-ticket private gatherings.

That sense of being unmoored was not the only disconnect on display.

All the stated concern for films and filmmakers aside, Oscar night has always been about stars — just ask ABC. Thirty nine million people tuned in two years ago when “Crash” upset “Brokeback Mountain,” one of the worst ratings performances in memory. (The 2003 telecast, shadowed by the beginning of the Iraq war, was worse.) That is compared with 1998, when 55 million viewers watched “Titanic” win 11 Oscars, Jack Nicholson beat out Matt Damon, and Helen Hunt slip past Kate Winslet.

Though no one would deny that this year’s contenders are long on talent, they are exceedingly short on celebrity. Casey Affleck’s breakthrough in “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” was nominated, but Brad Pitt’s starring performance was not. Cate Blanchett picked up nominations in both actress categories, but Angelina Jolie (“A Mighty Heart”) and Julia Roberts (“Charlie Wilson’s War”) went unacknowledged.

Rather, relative unknowns like the 21-year-old Ellen Page and the 13-year-old Saoirse Ronan nabbed nominations for best actress (“Juno”) and best supporting actress (“Atonement”), respectively. For that matter, Mr. Clooney (“Michael Clayton”) and Johnny Depp (“Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”) picked up best-actor nominations, while the twice-honored Tom Hanks (“Charlie Wilson’s War”) and Denzel Washington (“American Gangster”) went empty-handed.

Instead, the megawatts would be supplied by the awards presenters — Mr. Hanks and Mr. Washington among them, along with stars like Jessica Alba, Renée Zellweger, Forest Whitaker, John Travolta and Harrison Ford — creating a scenario in which the Hollywood establishment turned out to sustain an institution that had failed to repay the gesture.

If Hollywood’s preoccupation with its intramural tensions seemed at odds with the celebratory order of the day, some here have suggested a divide involving the movies themselves: between the darkness and despair of films like “There Will Be Blood” and “No Country for Old Men” and what the industry’s countless amateur political analysts discern as a more hopeful mood abroad in the land. By that logic, the frustrations over the Iraq war that gave rise to such films, as well as more direct cinematic responses like “In the Valley of Elah,” may have come a year too late to strike a chord with a public that has finally moved on, at least to the next election.

Perhaps nothing has drawn more attention and concern than the sharp line dividing films that have pleased the widest audiences from those embraced by critics. Thanks to “Juno” and its $130 million in ticket sales, the five best-picture nominees together have grossed $327 million, $111 million of that since the academy nominations were announced, an unusually strong Oscar bump. But the combined grosses are a far cry from a decade earlier, when “Titanic” inflated the total.

“Juno” was not the only $100 million-plus movie up for an award; the animated “Ratatouille” received five nominations; “The Bourne Ultimatum,” “Transformers” and “Enchanted” each had three. But in the major categories, only “American Gangster” exceeded that mark besides “Juno.”

Art and quality aside, the paucity of widely seen movies up for consideration is ominous not just for ABC selling commercial time against the telecast but for the academy itself, rendering it that less culturally relevant. Left unchecked, the trend threatens to turn the yearly ritual into a niche affair instead of a shared national experience.

Yet for all the doom and gloom on the minds of academy members and obsessives — Heath Ledger’s death provided another reason to mourn — there were many areas in which excitement could be seen bubbling up out of the ground like Daniel Plainview’s black gold in “There Will Be Blood.”

If small and dark films captured the attention of critics and the academy, it was not for lack of ambition among Hollywood studios.

Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age

Lorne Gunter, National Post
http://www.nationalpost.com
Published: Monday, February 25, 2008



Note Celebrity Line's 1,000 foot Summit ship next to Hubbard Glacier for an appreciation of the size of this glacier. Hubbard Glacier, longest tidewater glacier in North America, begins its 76 mile journey to the sea on the slopes of Mount Logan, the tallest moutain in Canada and part of the largest non-polar icefield in the world. At the point where it enters Disenchantment Bay, at the head of Yakutat Bay, it is 6 miles wide.

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.

But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.

And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.

lgunter@shaw.ca

Today's Tune: Tift Merritt- Virginia, No One Can Warn You

Tift Merritt DVD Release, SchoolKids Records, Raleigh, November 13, 2007 (L)



(Click on title to play video)

What campus rape crisis?

Promiscuity and hype have created a phony epidemic at colleges.

By Heather Mac Donald
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com
February 24, 2008

It's a lonely job, working the phones at a college rape crisis center. Day after day, you wait for the casualties to show up from the alleged campus rape epidemic -- but no one calls. Could this mean that the crisis is overblown? No. It means, according to campus sexual-assault organizations, that the abuse of coeds is worse than anyone had ever imagined. It means that consultants and counselors need more funding to persuade student rape victims to break the silence of their suffering.

It is a central claim of these organizations that between a fifth and a quarter of all college women will be raped or will be the targets of attempted rape by the end of their college years. Harvard's Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response uses the 20% to 25% statistic. Websites at New York University, Syracuse University, Penn State and the University of Virginia, among many other places, use the figures as well.

And who will be the assailants of these women? Not terrifying strangers who will grab them in dark alleys, but the guys sitting next to them in class or at the cafeteria.

If the one-in-four statistic is correct, campus rape represents a crime wave of unprecedented proportions. No felony, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20% or 25%, even over many years. The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in the U.S., was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants -- a rate of 2.4%.

Such a crime wave -- in which millions of young women would graduate having suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience -- would require nothing less than a state of emergency. Admissions policies, which if the numbers are true are allowing in tens of thousands of vicious criminals, would require a complete revision, perhaps banning male students entirely. The nation's nearly 10 million female undergraduates would need to take the most stringent safety precautions.

None of this crisis response occurs, of course -- because the crisis doesn't exist.

So where do the numbers come from? During the 1980s, feminist researchers committed to the rape-culture theory discovered that asking women directly if they had been raped yielded disappointing results -- very few women said that they had been. So Ms. magazine commissioned University of Arizona public health professor Mary Koss to develop a different way to measure the prevalence of rape.

Rather than asking female students about rape per se, Koss asked them if they had ever experienced actions that she then classified as rape. One question, for example, asked, "Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?" -- a question that is ambiguous on several fronts, including the woman's degree of incapacitation, the causal relation between being given a drink and having sexual intercourse, and the man's intentions. Koss' method produced the 25% rate, which Ms. then published.

It was a flawed study on a number of levels, but the most powerful refutation came from her own subjects: 73% of the women whom the study characterized as rape victims told the researchers that they hadn't been raped. Further, 42% of the study's supposed victims said they had had intercourse again with their alleged assailants -- though it is highly unlikely that a raped woman would have sex again with the fiend who attacked her.

Despite all this, the numbers have stuck. Today, John Foubert, an education professor at William and Mary College (and founder of a group called One-in-Four, which works on sexual assault issues and has chapters on 17 campuses), says, "The one-in-four statistic has been replicated in several studies for several decades. To the extent that social science can prove anything, which I believe it can, the one-in-four statistic has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt. My instincts tell me that the statistic is actually much higher."

Yet subsequent campus rape studies keep turning up the pesky divergence between the victims' and the researchers' point of view.

A 2006 survey of sorority women at the University of Virginia, for example, found that only 23% of the subjects whom the survey characterized as rape victims felt that they had been raped -- a result that the university's director of sexual and domestic violence services calls "discouraging." Equally damning was a 2000 campus rape study conducted under the aegis of the Department of Justice. Sixty-five percent of those whom the researchers called "completed rape" victims and three-quarters of "attempted rape" victims said that they did not think that their experiences were "serious enough to report."

Believing in the campus rape epidemic, it turns out, requires ignoring women's own interpretations of their experiences.

Nevertheless, none of the weaknesses in the research has had the slightest drag on the campus "anti-rape" movement, because the movement is political, not empirical. In a rape culture, which "condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as a norm," sexual assault will wind up underreported, argued Carole Goldberg, the director of Yale's Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources and Education Center, in a March 2007 newsletter. Campus rape centers and 24-hour hotlines, aided by tens of millions of dollars of federal funding, are ubiquitous.

Needless to say, those facilities don't appear to get a tremendous amount of use. For example, Hillary Wing-Richards, the associate director of sexual-assault prevention at James Madison University, said the school's campus rape "help line" gets a varying number of calls, some of which are "request-for-information calls" -- where to go, who to talk to and the like.

"Some months there are 10 and others, one or two," she said.

Referring to rape hotlines, risk management consultant Brett Sokolow laments: "The problem is, on so many of our campuses, very few people ever call. And mostly we've resigned ourselves to the underutilization of these resources."

Federal law requires colleges to publish reported crimes affecting their students. The numbers of reported sexual assaults -- the law does not require their confirmation -- usually run under half a dozen a year on private campuses, and maybe two to three times that at large public universities.

So what reality does lie behind the rape hype? I believe that it's the booze-fueled hookup culture of one-night, or sometimes just partial-night, stands. Students in the '60s demanded that college administrators stop setting rules for fraternization. The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora's box of boorish, promiscuous behavior that gets cruder each year.

This culture has been written about widely. College women -- as well as men -- reportedly drink heavily before and during parties. For the women, that drinking is often goal-oriented, suggests Karin Agness, a recent University of Virginia graduate and founder of NeW, a club for conservative university women: It frees the drinker from responsibility and "provides an excuse for engaging in behavior that she ordinarily wouldn't." Nights can include a meaningless sexual encounter with a guy whom the girl may not even know.

In all these drunken couplings, there may be some deplorable instances of forced and truly non-consensual sex. But most campus "rape" cases exist in the gray area of seeming cooperation and tacit consent, which is why they are almost never prosecuted criminally.

"Ninety-nine percent of all college rape cases would be thrown out of court in a twinkling," observes University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Kors.

Many students hold on to the view that women usually have the power to determine whether a campus social event ends with intercourse. A female Rutgers student expressed a common sentiment in a university sexual-assault survey: "When we go out to parties and I see girls and the way they dress and the way they act ... and just the way they are, under the influence and um, then they like accuse them of like, 'Oh yeah, my boyfriend did this to me' or whatever, I honestly always think it's their fault."

But suggest to a rape bureaucrat that female students share responsibility for the outcome of an evening and that greater sexual restraint would prevent campus "rape," and you might as well be saying that women should don the burka.

College officials have responded to the fallout of the college sexual revolution not with sound advice but with bizarre and anachronistic legalisms for responding to postcoital second thoughts.

University of Virginia students, for example, may demand a formal adjudication before the Sexual Assault Board; they can request a "structured meeting" with the Office of the Dean of Students by filing a formal complaint; or they can seek voluntary mediation.

Risk-management consultants travel the country to help colleges craft legal rules for student sexual congress.

"If one partner puts a condom on the other, does that signify that they are consenting to intercourse?" asks Alan D. Berkowitz, a campus rape consultant. Short of guiding the thus-sheathed instrumentality to port, it's hard to imagine a clearer signal of consent, although Berkowitz apparently finds it "inherently ambiguous."

And even as the campus rape industry decries alleged male predation, a parallel campus sex bureaucracy sends the message that students should have recreational sex at every opportunity.

New York University offers workshops on orgasms and "Sex Toys for Safer Sex" ("an evening with rubber, silicone and vibrating toys") in residence halls and various student clubs. Brown University's Student Services helps students answer the compelling question: "How can I bring sex toys into my relationship?" Princeton University's "Safer Sex Jeopardy" game for freshmen lists six types of vibrators and eight kinds of penile toys.

Why, exactly, are schools offering workshops on orgasms? Are students already so saturated with knowledge of the evolution of constitutional democracy, say, that colleges should reroute their resources to matters available on porn websites?

Remarkably, many students emerge from this farrago of mixed messages with common sense intact.

In a November column in the University of Virginia's student newspaper, a third-year student gave the real scoop on frat parties: They're filled with men hoping to have sex. Rather than calling these men "rapists," columnist Katelyn Kiley offered some practical wisdom to the women trooping off to Virginia's fraternity row:

"It's probably a good idea to keep your clothes on, and at the end of the night, to go home to your own bed. Interestingly enough, that's how you get [the guys] to keep asking you back."

Maybe such young iconoclasts can take up another discredited idea: College is for learning. Fighting male dominance or catering to the libidinal impulses released in the 1960s are sorry substitutes for the pursuit of knowledge.

Heather MacDonald is a contributing editor of City Journal, from which this is adapted.

Another city for Merritt

The singer-songwriter, long a Raleigh resident, has a new address, a new album and a new outlook

By David Menconi
Raleigh News & Observer Staff writer
February 24, 2008



Tift Merritt, now living in New York, says, 'In France, I discovered that I love writing in the city.' Her new album, 'Another Country,' contains songs she wrote during stays in Paris.

NEW YORK - Tift Merritt strolls toward the Hudson River in her quiet West Village neighborhood. Having moved here just a few months earlier, the North Carolina singer-songwriter is a newcomer to this tree-lined street with a century-old bohemian heritage.

With the blasé sophistication of a seasoned New Yorker, she notes the red brick compound where celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz lives and works, and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Julian Schnabel's raspberry-colored high-rise. But her face lights up with a newcomer's awe-struck glee when she rhapsodizes about the city's cold-weather palette or points out the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street at West 11th.

"Yeah, that's where the Village Voice was conceived, and where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death," Merritt says. Then she adds with a laugh, "We hope to avoid a similar fate."

Generations of artists and performers have gravitated to New York, some to live in a cultural mecca amid the Leibovitzes and Schnabels and legends. Others come with larger-than-life dreams, the 8 million-to-1 chance of being discovered, for reinvention or escape.

Merritt's reasons were more pragmatic than dreamy. With her third album on the way ("Another Country," on Fantasy Records, arriving Tuesday), a national tour about to start and a new monthly public-radio show, New York simply made more sense than North Carolina, her home base since childhood.

In New York, the apartment she shares with drummer Zeke Hutchins is a few minutes away from her manager's office. She can get just about anywhere she needs to be faster from New York than RDU.



Tift Merritt works in the West Village studio apartment she shares with drummer Zeke Hutchins, background, her boyfriend and business partner.

But there's also the irresistible confluence of only-in-New York energy. Merritt had barely arrived when she found herself on the "I'm Not There" Bob Dylan tribute concert at the Beacon Theatre in November with Joe Henry, My Morning Jacket, Yo La Tengo and other alternative-rock stars.

"We were literally moving stuff into the apartment when we heard that a female singer had to cancel," says Merritt, 33. "My manager called to ask, I got on the show and there was no pressure. It was great."

The New York Times agreed, saying she had "the night's purest voice." Variety called her performance "the program's most gripping."

Of course, Merritt got plenty of love from her old hometown, especially after she earned a Grammy nomination for "Tambourine," her 2004 album. She advanced from selling out local clubs to such prestigious engagements as opening the N.C. Museum of Art's summer concert season and performing with the N.C. Symphony.

Behind the scenes, however, were struggles with her label, her manager and the industry itself. She abandoned music, went to Paris and finally found herself in the place she needed to be.

"In France, I discovered that I love writing in the city," Merritt says. "There's such an intensity to being in the city that matches the intensity of what you're experiencing in your head. So you go out on the street in this haze and you're met with an equivalent amount of energy. As opposed to going through the aisles of the grocery store down there, feeling like a freak in dreamland."

Going wrong, going right

At a small cafe near her studio apartment, Merritt settles in over coffee and croissants and talks about the decline that began, as all declines do, at the top. Her Grammy nomination, for country album of the year, felt like validation and fuel for a commercial breakthrough. But the breakthrough never came.



Merritt grabs a coffee at a neighborhood shop.

"The label thought the Grammy nomination was a fluke," Merritt sighs into her coffee. "That made me feel good the first time I heard it."

From a distance of 21/2 years, she can see the honor's downside. "Tambourine" (on Lost Highway Records) didn't sound Nashville enough for country radio. Yet with Grammy branding it country, other formats ignored it. Sales stalled at 68,000 copies -- 11,000 more than 2002's "Bramble Rose," but well short of expectations.

"The hardest part for me was feeling like I was just back in the van spinning my wheels," she says. "I'd become more of a performer than a writer, and the focus was on just doing the same 13 songs every night, over and over. There was no way we could work any harder, but I couldn't see that it was getting us anywhere."

One night, Merritt poured herself a glass of wine and did a Google search on "Paris," "apartment" and "piano." She found a place to sublet and flew to Paris in summer 2005.

"I went off to France really thinking I might not do this anymore," she says. "Maybe I'd teach, write novels, figure out something else. But I had not anticipated writing anything at all because I felt empty, like I had nothing to say."

But Paris turned out to be what she needed to rediscover her voice as a writer. Listening to Merritt talk about the experience brings Joni Mitchell's "Free Man in Paris" to mind: I was a free man in Paris/I felt unfettered and alive/There was nobody calling me up for favors/And no one's future to decide.

"France was very opposite of the show-business experience I'd been living," Merritt says. "I was anonymous and alone. I wore no makeup, wore the same clothes every day. And I wrote and wrote and wrote. It was like I had a chance to catch my breath, and I suddenly went back to what I really am: a writer. It surprised me, and it was a relief. Although it wasn't, 'Everything's OK now because this is gonna be a hit!'"

Most of the songs on "Another Country" emerged during several stays in Paris. The lyrics sound like the musings of someone in crisis, with song after song about loneliness, longing, trying to connect. "Broken," the first single, concludes with a murmuring coda that could be the theme for the project: "I think I will break but I mend." The title track likens love to a faraway country because sometimes you have to go a long way to find what you're looking for.

"It became clear very early on that 'Another Country' was the umbrella this whole thing came under," Merritt says. "I'm just following a tradition, the American expatriate in Paris. You feel that when you're over there."



Merritt notes the White Horse Tavern near her apartment is famous as a favorite hangout of poet Dylan Thomas.

Seeing more than music

After coffee, Merritt catches a subway for the Museum of Modern Art. On the way, a steady stream of messages trickles in via her iPhone, including one with welcome news from her manager: KGSR-FM in Austin, Texas, is playing "Broken." Last time she couldn't crack the playlist at this influential station.

So far, all the news about "Another Country" is good, including a four-star rave review in Paste magazine. Whether the album gets any further than "Tambourine" or "Bramble Rose" is up to the fates. But Merritt is ready to do her part.

"I'm scared about doing it, and about not doing it," Merritt says about firing up the endless-touring cycle again. "About what will or won't happen. I'm getting back in the van. That's all I can say."

With the tour looming, today might be her last chance to visit MoMA for a while. Being in New York rekindles artistic interests other than music -- fiction (she studied creative writing at UNC-Chapel Hill), photography and even painting. Merritt moves through galleries devoted to Pablo Picasso and Jasper Johns, noting favorites. She pauses before French painter Édouard Vuillard's "The Park," an 1894 painting that depicts an idyllic scene in Paris.

"It's really like this in the parks over there," she says, smiling at the memory. "The streets and sidewalks are lined with chairs. You see people sleeping, reading, sitting with their jackets off, playing chess, even making out. It was amazing, the days over there. So much intimacy. I can sound over-the-top silly talking about it."

In an upper-floor gallery, Merritt walks directly to "The Italians" by American abstract painter Cy Twombly. Wild marks cover the 6-by-8-foot canvas and give it the look of a graffiti wall.

"This is what a lot of his paintings are like," she says. "Sometimes there's a word or a piece of a phrase on this huge canvas" -- such as the word "ROMA," scrawled in the painting's upper right corner. "It's like he's writing a letter. I love how the words and the paint interact, so passionate and emotional."



Merritt takes the subway to a gig at Union Hall in Brooklyn. She says living in New York is a practical matter, but she enjoys the city's energy and the artistic environment, too.

Merritt's fascination with Twombly inspired her radio show, "The Spark," which is transmitted from the artistic outpost of Marfa, Texas. On the program, which debuted in January with author and "ambassador of goodness" Nick Hornby, Merritt talks to other artists, peer-to-peer, about their methods and inspirations. In coming shows, she interviews poet C.K. Williams, landscape painter Wolf Kahn and bluegrass trio Nickel Creek.

She would love to talk to Twombly, the man behind the complex painting that's reduced to a clinical description in the text on the museum wall.

"This is the man, the reason why I started the radio show," Merritt says. "He's this 79-year-old man and I can't find anything remotely human written about him. When I told my mentor at UNC about it, he said, 'Why don't you? He's probably lonely in his studio.' And I decided he was right. Young artists need to know what he thought about this, and what he sees when he looks at his work -- and how his wife gets the crayon out of his shirt."

She pauses to laugh, then turns back to the picture.

"I can't explain why I see something of myself in this painting," she says softly. "But I do. I could sit in front of this for days."

Into 'pop' at last

In Merritt's apartment, there's a to-do list on the bulletin board by the door. Some of the items -- "label," "manager" and "songs recorded" -- are checked off. "Paris apartment," "finish college" and other items remain. But Merritt and Hutchins, her business partner as well as drummer and boyfriend, have accomplished amazing things over the past year.

Along with recording "Another Country," they struck new deals with Fantasy/Concord Records -- label home to John Fogerty and the late Ray Charles -- and manager David Newgarden, whose clients include Robert Pollard/Guided by Voices, Cibo Matto and other rock acts. Newgarden says he hesitated to take on Merritt until he learned that she wanted to move away from country music.

Merritt was somewhat miscast as a country singer, and "Another Country" should move her into the "pop" category for good.

"I guess this album is my departure from Nashville," she says. "Which is ironic, given the title and the fact that it's my follow-up to a country Grammy nomination. So what do I do but go off to France during the 'Freedom Fries' period and write this. It's going to confuse people."

Merritt recorded the album in Los Angeles with "Tambourine" producer George Drakoulias and the core of her regular band: Hutchins, bassist Jay Brown and keyboardist Danny Eisenberg. If "Tambourine" was Merritt's "Dusty in Memphis" blue-eyed-soul move, "Another Country" would sound at home in Laurel Canyon, somewhere between Carole King and Bonnie Raitt.

A move to Los Angeles would have made sense, given the album's West Coast laid-back vibe. But Merritt decided New York was a better fit.

"I want to be in the real game -- to take it seriously and be where it happens," she says. "Maybe I can advocate better for myself if I can pop in on people for coffee. Somebody told me once, 'Don't go to New York to find yourself or your voice, find it somewhere else and bring it to the city.' Which was great advice."

She doesn't know how long her New York sojourn will last, in part because she'll be on the road for most of 2008. She thinks about children, and she'd like to go back to Paris and live there awhile, too.

Whatever her mailing address, there's little doubt about where home remains.

"North Carolina is still such a huge part of our lives, it almost doesn't matter where we live," Merritt says. "As much as we tour, we're never home, anyway. Six months from now, we will probably have spent more time in North Carolina than New York."


david.menconi@newsobserver.com or blogs.newsobserver.com/beat or (919) 829-4759.

Today's Tune: Bruce Springsteen- Backstreets (Live 1978)

Here's a raised glass to one of my favorite magazines...long may they run.







(Click on title to play video)

No depression at Backstreets

By David Menconi
On The Beat
Raleigh News & Observer
Thursday, February 21, 2008



Thursday's paper has a story about the soon-to-fold music magazine No Depression. Pondering the state of the magazine business got me to wondering about how other music publications are doing, including Backstreets, the Carrboro-based Bruce Springsteen fan magazine. So I checked in with Chris Phillips, editor/publisher of the 16,000-circulation quarterly.

"Yeah," Phillips says, "times are tough for all niche publications -- and if No Depression is niche, Backstreets is super-niche. Fortunately for us, advertising has never been a major part of our business plan. We count on subscription revenue and merchandise to keep us going, so we're a little insulated from the music industry's print-advertising crunch. But we're feeling it everywhere else, including the way people receive their information. It's a struggle to keep a quarterly magazine relevant in the age of the Internet. That's always on my mind. It's scary. When I look at something like No Depression going under -- and they've done a fantastic job for years and years -- it does make the hair on the back of my neck stand up."

The next issue of Backstreets should be out sometime in March. Click through to see a 2005 feature about the magazine.

[More:]



Backstreets of Carrboro
By David Menconi, News & Observer
April 25, 2005

CARRBORO -- By now, Chris Phillips is used to weird things showing up in the mail. Not for him, but for Bruce Springsteen -- sent care of Backstreets, the Springsteen fan magazine that Phillips edits and publishes.

"Springsteen doesn't give out an address for fan mail, so people send a lot of that our way," says Phillips. "There are cute poems, the occasional fan letter to the Backstreet Boys. Years ago, someone sent a blanket they had crocheted that said, 'Bruce Springsteen Cover Me.' That was nice. But once, some woman sent a vial of blood with these strange David Lynch-ian writings.

"Yeah," Phillips adds with a laugh, "every now and then we do get something weird that needs forwarding to the proper authorities."

The funny part is that Carrboro-based Backstreets has no real link to Springsteen, operating completely independently of his organization -- a point made quite humorously in the "Frequently Asked Questions" section of www.backstreets.com. But it's an easy mistake to make, given how thoroughly the magazine chronicles The Boss and all his doings.

Since 1980, Backstreets has covered all things Bruce with admirable attention to obsessive detail. When Springsteen released 1998's "Tracks," a four-disc box set of previously unreleased rarities, it had no liner notes to speak of. So Backstreets published a special liner-notes pullout section that traced the history of each song -- and it even fit inside the "Tracks" box.

When Springsteen gets busy, so does Backstreets. With a new Springsteen album, "Devils & Dust" (Columbia Records), dropping Tuesday, Phillips and his staff have been working overtime to get the spring issue out on the same schedule. The magazine will go to the printer this week and start hitting mailboxes by the beginning of May.

"Right now, I'm trying to finish an editorial that's sort of a 'Devils & Dust' review, and sort of an explanation as to why it's not really a review," Phillips says, sitting at his desk on a recent afternoon. "I just haven't had enough time with the record. This issue will also have something about Bruce's Hall of Fame induction speech for U2, and a piece on DJs who were influential in Bruce's career. That's about 12 pages of interviews, archival photos, stuff about how radio changed and what Bruce's career would've been without it.

"A lot of nerd minutiae we can sprawl with," Phillips concludes. "But what would Backstreets be without minutiae?"

####

Back in the day

Backstreets began in Seattle in 1980, founded by Seattle Rocket editor Charles Cross and named after his favorite Springsteen song (from 1975's "Born to Run" album). The first issue was four newspaper pages, which Cross handed out at a Springsteen concert in Seattle.

While Backstreets remains very much a grass-roots outfit, the product is considerably heftier nowadays. The quarterly glossy magazine has a staff of four and a circulation of 16,000. Most issues are 56 pages, filled up by a stable of about 10 regular freelance contributors plus reader submissions. Backstreets runs very few advertisements. Most of its revenue comes from subscriptions and newsstand sales, and the sale of Springsteen merchandise such as hard-to-find vinyl copies of the new Springsteen album.



"I like the way it covers pretty much every facet," says Charlie Board, a Cary software engineer who has subscribed to Backstreets since 1986. "Bootleg reviews, definitive tour reviews with run-downs of every show -- the rare songs played, guests, fan reaction. You get editorials about the music, articles about tangentially related artists like Southside Johnny or Garland Jeffreys. It's sort of a way to be part of the community, like a print version of being a Deadhead."

Phillips joined Bruce nation in his early teenage years, after seeing what he calls a "life-changing show" on the 1984 "Born in the U.S.A." tour. But he wound up working for Backstreets almost by chance. After graduating from Duke University in 1993, Phillips picked up and moved to Seattle on a whim.

"No job, no nothing," he says. "I'm not sure what I was thinking. But then I remembered, 'Wait a minute, isn't Backstreets here?' I was a fan and a reader, so I got ahold of a back issue to look up the phone number and sent a resume."

Fortuitously, Backstreets was looking for a managing editor. Phillips got the job, and it's the only one he's had since college. He took over from Cross as editor/publisher in 1998 and moved the operation to Washington, D.C., in 2000.

Last summer, Backstreets moved again, to Carrboro. Phillips and his wife both went to Duke, and they count the proximity of Allen & Son Bar-B-Q near their house as a major plus. Also nearby is Phillips' brother Jon, who edits and publishes a book magazine called Bookmarks out of an office in his house. The Backstreets office in Carr Mill is considerably roomier than its D.C. quarters, where the main storage space was a bathtub. But there's still a lot of stuff in boxes.

"Since we moved here, we've had the big 'Vote For Change' tour and now 'Devils & Dust,'" Phillips says. "I hope it will settle down enough so we can eventually unpack, but it hasn't happened yet. I always used to think after every issue, 'This will be the biggest issue for a while, the next one should be smaller.' But that is just not happening."

####

Talkin' to the Boss

Inevitably, Phillips gets a lot of questions about what Springsteen is "really like." But he can honestly say he doesn't know. Phillips and Springsteen have met only once, at a Patty Scialfa show last year. And Phillips has interviewed Springsteen only once, a phone interview in conjunction with last fall's "Vote For Change" tour -- the only interview that the press-shy Springsteen has ever given Backstreets in its 25-year existence.

"The biggest thing I have to explain is that we're not connected to Bruce Springsteen's organization," Phillips says. "We're not a fan club or anything like that. I used to be able to say, 'I've never talked to or even met the guy.' Getting the interview was a huge thrill. But the down side is that it reinforced this weird impression people have, that I've got a red phone on my desk with a hotline to Bruce's house."

Phillips has dutifully put in another interview request for Springsteen's "Devils & Dust" tour, which isn't coming to North Carolina (Phillips is going to shows in Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago). But he's not holding his breath about getting another audience.

"Haven't heard a word," he says. "My fantasy is they've got a plan. They're waiting until after X number of shows, and then they'll spring it on me. But it probably won't happen. I just hope I won't have to wait another 11 years for the next one."

Posted at 08:05 am by davidmenconi in music On the Beat: David Menconi on music

Mark Steyn: Obama makes Hillary look like Bill Richardson

Orange County Register
Saturday, February 23, 2008


US Democratic presidential candidates Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) looks on as Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) gets up during a break at the Texas Democratic Party's presidential candidates debate at the University of Texas at Austin in Austin, Texas, February 21, 2008. REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi (UNITED STATES) US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN 2008

On the day that Margaret Thatcher was toppled by her own party, I ran into an old friend, a hard-core leftist playwright, Marxist to the core, who wasn't as happy as he should have been. He jabbed me in the chest. "You bastards on the right!" he fumed. "You wouldn't even let us be the ones to drive the stake through her heart."

I'm sure in America's Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy there are similar mixed feelings. The Clintons have met their Waterloo but it's not some doughty conservative warrior who gets to play Duke of Wellington, only some freshman pap peddler of liberal boilerplate whom no one had heard of the day before yesterday.

Such are the vicissitudes of politics. I see from the gay newspaper the Washington Blade that, as the headline writer put it, "Clinton Leads Among Gay Super Delegates." Only in the Democratic Party. I don't know how many supergays it takes to outvote the nonsuper primary and caucus voters from Maine to Nevada to Hawaii. They may yet pull Sen. Clinton's chestnuts out of the fire, but they're looking pretty charred and indigestible right now. Unlike the Fall of Thatcher, it's nothing so glamorous as an act of matricide, but just the nightly hell of a tired vaudeville act that can no longer find the spark.

Bill Clinton understood a crude rule of show business – that, if you behave like a star, there are plenty of people who'll treat you like one. The apotheosis of this theory was his interminable ambulatory entrance down mile after mile of corridor at the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, when Slick Willie finally out-Elvised Elvis – or, more accurately, out-Smarted the opening sequence of "Get Smart."

Apparently, no one had thought to tell him to try to get within four miles of the stage before the introductory video ended. He was, by my calculations, outside the men's room on Corridor G27, Sub-Basement Level 6 of the Staples Center. As he began the long, long, lo-oo-oo-oong televised walk to the podium the crowd watching the monitors cheered – and, 20 minutes later, after he'd strolled down the first three or four windowless tunnels of attractive luminous drywall, hung a left by the water cooler, taken the emergency stairs, cut across the stationery closet, moved smoothly through the boiler room and had still only reached the Coke machine on Sous-Mezzanine Level 4, and there was at least a mile and a half between him and the stage, and the Democratic activists out in the hall were beginning to figure they could get dinner and a movie and still be back in time for the last third of his walk-on, they were nevertheless still cheering.

In effect, President Clinton dared them not to cheer. Tom Jones wouldn't have risked it. Engelbert Humperdinck would have balked. But, after eight years of talking the talk, Bill walked the walk. In the hall, the delegates' hands were raw, bleeding stumps, but the Slickster knew that, even if he started his entrance in Idaho, those Dems would cheer him every step of the way.

The Clintons turned the Democratic Party into a star vehicle and designated everyone else as extras. But their star quality was strictly comparative. They had industrial-strength audacity and a lot of luck: Bill jumped into the 1992 race when A-listers like Mario Cuomo were too cowed by expert advice that Bush the Elder was unbeatable. Clinton gambled, won the nomination and beat a weak opponent in a three-way race, with Ross Perot siphoning votes from the right. He got even luckier four years later. So did Hillary when she embarked on something patently absurd – a first lady running for a Senate seat in a state she's never lived in – only to find Rudy Giuliani going into instant public meltdown.

The SAS, Britain's special forces, have a motto: Who dares wins. The Clintons dared, and they won – even as almost everyone else in their party lost: senators, congressmen, governors, state legislators. Even when they ran into a spot of intern trouble, sheer nerve saw them through. Almost anyone else would have slunk off in shame, but the Clintons understood that the checks and balances don't add up to much if you're determined not to go: As at that 2000 convention speech, they dared the Democrats not to cheer.

With hindsight, the oral sex was a master stroke. Bill Clinton likes to tell anyone who'll listen that he governed as an "Eisenhower Republican," which is kind of true – NAFTA, welfare reform, etc. If you have to have a Democrat in the Oval Office, he was as good as it gets for Republicans – if you don't mind the fact that he's a draft-dodging noninhaling sex-fiend. Republicans did mind, of course, which is why Dems rallied round out of boomer culture-war solidarity. But, if he hadn't been dropping his pants and appealing to so many of their social pathologies, his party wouldn't have been half so enthusiastic for another chorus of "I Like Ike."

Hillary is what the Clintons look like with their pants up. Their much-vaunted political savvy turns out to be a big nothing: The supposed masters of "the politics of personal destruction" can't turn up anything better on Obama than some ancient essay from his Jakarta grade school, plus a few limp charges of plagiarism. And instead of getting the surrogates to crowbar the enemy every time Hillary opens up on him she looks mean and petty, and he gets to do his high-minded Obamessiah routine.

Their star quality was also, as noted above, mostly a giant bluff. In his heyday, Bill could channel his narcissism into a famously sure "common touch" – he liked to bask in proof of his awesome empathetic powers. But, in the years since he left the Oval Office, he's played too many gazillion-dollar-a-plate jet-set dinners in France and Switzerland, and the "common touch" has curdled. That was plain even by the 2002 midterms, when you could more or less correlate Democratic losses by his travel schedule. He's a bust on the stump.

And, worst of all for Bill and Hill, the Dems found a new star – their first in 16 years. Look at it from Hillary's point of view: She'd expected to run against the likes of Joe Biden, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd – the usual mediocrities and misfits. Then Barack Obama came along, and did what the Clintons did in 1992 – saw his opportunity and seized it. All of a sudden, she's the Bill Richardson – worthy but dull, earthbound and joyless, lead weights round her ankles.

She has a melancholy dignity in decline. She knows she would make the better president, but every time she tries to explain why it sounds prosaic and unromantic. Bill gave the party an appetite for slick lounge acts, and this time round Barack's the guy delivering it in buckets of gaseous uplift. Can Barbra Streisand and the Supergays get Hillary airborne again? I doubt it. Go back to that Staples Center entrance in 2000, and try to imagine Hill walking that walk. How far would she get before the applause died away and she'd be padding that endless corridor to no audible accompaniment but the clack of her heels?

©MARK STEYN

Derek Jeter intends to play shortstop for as long as he can

BY MARK FEINSAND
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER

Saturday, February 23rd 2008, 4:00 AM



Jacobson/AP
Robinson Cano and Derek Jeter share a laugh on Friday.

TAMPA - The day will come when Derek Jeter is no longer playing shortstop for the Yankees. Just don't expect that day to be here anytime soon.

For years, stat heads have said that Jeter is a below-average fielder, yet managers and coaches voted him three consecutive Gold Glove awards from 2004-06.

One recent University of Pennsylvania study tabbed Jeter as the worst defensive shortstop in the majors, but the Yankees' captain has no plans to pull a Robin Yount or Ernie Banks and shift positions for the latter years of his career.

Instead, he plans on playing shortstop through the final three years of his current contract, and on remaining there for however many years he plays beyond 2010.

"That's the plan," Jeter said. "I haven't really thought about how long I'm playing. I take it one year at a time; I don't sit down and say, 'Well, I hope I'm playing in two-thousand whatever.' It's a tough question, because I haven't really thought about it much."

Could Jeter, who has been named to eight American League All-Star teams in his 12 big-league seasons - four as the league's starting shortstop - ever see himself playing another position?

"Right now?" Jeter said, "No."

Yount and Banks, both Hall of Famers, are considered two of the greatest shortstops of all time. Both players moved to different positions halfway through their careers - Banks to first base at age 31 and Yount to center field at age 29 - with injuries being the primary factors for the moves.

Injuries have not been a problem for Jeter, who has played in at least 148 games in 11 of his 12 full seasons, the lone exception coming in 2003, when a separated shoulder cost him the first six weeks of the year.

"Hopefully, I don't have to think about that for quite some time," Jeter said.

Year-round conditioning has been essential to Jeter's success, and with him reporting to camp this year in what Joe Girardi called "excellent shape," it doesn't appear the 33-year-old is ready to yield his position for quite a while. If 40-year-old Omar Vizquel can still play shortstop, Jeter asks, why can't he stick around there for the next six or seven years?

"First and foremost, I think it boils down to your body type," Jeter said. "If you take care of yourself and you're agile and flexible, you can do it. A lot more people are working out and conditioning all year round as opposed to the old days."

"The thing about a guy like Derek Jeter is that it's hard to envision him not playing," Girardi said. "There is going to come a day when he'll retire, but in my mind, it's too far out so I don't really see it. Maybe if he's playing at 47, he won't be a shortstop."

Many scouts believe Jeter would be able to make an easy transition to the outfield, where his speed, strong arm and terrific instincts would make him a natural. Asked about the possibility, Jeter waves off the question before it's finished.

"I ain't going out there," Jeter said. "It's not as easy as it sounds to just pick up a glove and say, 'I'm going to be an outfielder today.' It doesn't work like that."

As for his current position, Jeter feels he's a better shortstop now than he was during the early years of his career thanks to experience. By making the necessary adjustments on a regular basis, Jeter is constantly addressing what he feels are his strengths and weaknesses in the field. Just don't ask him what those are.

"I'll leave that to the computers to figure out," he said with a grin.

"You can make a poll or a study look the way you want, but it's not going to measure a complete player," said Girardi, who believes Jeter looks the same as he did in his rookie year of 1996. "I don't think it takes into account his steadiness at short, that you can count on him every day to be the same guy or his leadership skills."

Jeter focused on his agility, lateral movement and speed this winter, looking to help both his fielding and baserunning. After seeing Jeter on the first day of camp, Alex Rodriguez predicted an MVP season for his teammate, who was "flattered" by the prognostication.

"He took a lot of initiative this winter to do what he always does," Girardi said. "He tries to get better each year, because that's who Derek Jeter is."

Jeter brushed off the MVP talk, choosing instead to focus on the Yankees' ultimate goal of winning title No. 27.

"I have to be honest with you guys, I'd much rather win (the World Series than MVP)," Jeter said. "That's the bottom line. I've said it time and time again: you play to win. You always want to do well because the better you do, the better the team is going to be."

That's precisely what Girardi wants to hear. Put any computer study you want on the manager's desk, it doesn't matter. He knows what he sees, and when he looks at Jeter, he sees a winning ballplayer.

"I think 29 other teams would love to have Derek Jeter," Girardi said. "To me, that's the sign of the type of player you've got."

If It Feels Good, Say It

By George Neumayr
The American Spectator
http://www.spectator.org
Published 2/21/2008 12:07:57 AM

Presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill, speaks to a watch party crowd Thursday, Feb. 21, 2008, in Austin, Texas. Each hopeful spoke at the watch party after Thursday's 90-minute televised debate between Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
(AP Photo/Harry Cabluck)

If you have heard one Barack Obama speech, you have heard them all. In a way, his words are as limited as his legislative accomplishments, which explains his now-famous cribbing off Deval Patrick and JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen, among others.

The only variation in his speeches comes from the slight rearrangement of cliches, while the quality of thought in them never rises up the level of an episode of Oprah. That she launched his campaign is altogether fitting.

In the Oprah age of fantasy and instant happiness, feel-good babble about this or that problem, usually determined not by reality but by political exigency, is all that is needed to captivate crowds. If it feels good, just say it, and if anyone scrutinizes your promises too closely, accuse them of "fear" and cynicism.

"The fierce urgency of now": To what momentous injustice does that Obama line, borrowed from Martin Luther King Jr., refer? It is not clear and apparently it doesn't matter. Who cares what it means? It feels good.

The right words and principles, you see, aren't as important as the right feelings -- a defense to which the Obama campaign resorted after Michelle Obama's declaration of sudden pride in America. Her brazen words were defended by the campaign and sympathetic media commentators on the grounds that they conveyed a vibe of justified feeling from a black woman. Anyone who says otherwise is "parsing." The Obamas won't take responsibility for the words lifted from others or even their own.

"Hope is making a comeback," she burbled fatuously. But what she calls hope, sober historians would call raw demagoguery, which is a sign not of a society's renewal but of its accelerating decadence.

Obama's faux-radicalism and idealism, carefully stirred into a safe brew of truisms, is catnip for a decadent elite that would rather feel good than be good and complains amidst prosperity of the need for dramatic change. But how urgent could their "revolution" possibly be if it was hatched down at a Starbucks?

Perhaps Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital in between sips of a Latte, but the Obama craze is ridiculous, evidence not of revolutionary idealism but of a prosperous democracy's slide toward dilettantism. Were the country truly in a bind, it would never take a chance on a rookie senator whose only real accomplishment is revising and extending his remarks.

The fakeness of it all reminds me of Robert Redford's The Candidate, in which an attractive but vapid pol says upon winning: "What do we do now?"


THE BLANKNESS OF Kirk Watson -- the Texas legislator who, under barking questions from Chris Matthews on Tuesday night, couldn't come up with a single accomplishment by Obama in the Senate -- captures the hollowness of Obama's movement.

Obama appeals to an increasingly childish class of adults who crave an emotion-based politics and don't particularly care about the details of the package in which it comes. There is a "Kids for Obama" section on his web page but it is not clear where it ends and the rest begins.

Obama presents his campaign as one of high principle and great courage, but in reality it simply sparks off liberalism's low and perennial appeal to man's appetites and emotions. This is what makes "progressive" liberalism so easy to sell in a modern democracy: it straightforwardly caters to fallen human nature, "challenging" people to take a low road Original Sin takes them down anyways.

Conservatism, on the other hand, is a tricky sell (which is why it is so quickly compromised), as it asks people to follow reason despite wayward emotions -- a message fallen humans don't care to hear until a crisis hits which brings them back to reality.

For many years the Clintons played these demagogic games too, casting corruption as change and failed liberalism as progress. "Yesterday is gone, yesterday is gone," they enlisted Fleetwood Mac to screech.

And it is. Obama has surpassed their sophistry, scooping up yuppies who jumped off Hillary's train as they saw it begin to derail. While the Clintons couldn't stop "thinking about tomorrow," Obama was busy stealing away their supporters with his similarly sham "fierce urgency of now."


George Neumayr is editor of Catholic World Report and press critic for California Political Review.

Methodist Madness

Divesting from Israel

by Mark Tooley
http://www.weeklystandard.com
02/22/2008 12:00:00 AM



ONE OF THE OLDEST Religious Left groups in America is targeting Israel for divestment. The Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA) was founded in 1907 after its leaders met with President Teddy Roosevelt. It was one of the Social Gospel's chief proponents in the early 20th century, when much of Mainline Protestantism was exchanging theological orthodoxy for progressive political action. Functioning as an influential caucus within America's once largest Protestant denomination, MFSA for decades has commanded the allegiance of bishops, church bureaucrats, and seminary professors.

Famously derided in the 1950's by Reader's Digest as Methodism's "pink fringe," the increasingly far-left church caucus was briefly marginalized after its infatuations with Stalinist Russia. But MFSA roared back with the counter-culture of the 1960's, vigorously promoting the welfare state, disarmament, and racial, and gender justice. In the 1970s and 1980s it enthusiastically embraced Liberation Theology, touting the Sandinistas and countless other revolutionaries. Of late, MFSA has focused on homosexual causes and "marriage equality."

But now MFSA is demanding that the 7.9 million member United Methodist Church divest from firms consorting with Israel. The church's official lobby arm, the Capitol Hill-based General Board of Church and Society, is more cautiously recommending divestment only against Caterpillar, Inc. for its bulldozer sales to Israel. In late April, the denomination's governing General Conference will decide whether to accede to the anti-Israel initiatives.

MFSA wants a "phased, selective divestment from companies supporting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and other violations of human rights in Israel/Palestine," according to MFSA's chief Kathryn Johnson. "Those who support selective divestment will be accused of being anti-Semitic," she admitted. "Pleas will be made to consider inter-faith relations." But Johnson countered that divestment to pressure the U.S. and Israeli governments is not anti-Semitic. Instead, it can be a "powerful nonviolent tool to change unjust policies that lead to massive suffering and human rights violations in Palestine." She confessed that ties to Jewish groups will be "strained" by divestment, requiring more "compassionate" dialogue. And she urged that "interfaith relationships" also should include Muslims.

The rationale for MFSA's divestment legislation declares: "The destruction of Palestinian homes and confiscation for Palestinian land is made possible by the use of armored bulldozers, helicopter gunships, tanks and other equipment that may have been purchased from the U.S. corporations in which the United Methodist Church may hold investments." If the MFSA proposal were approved, the United Methodist Church would give the targeted companies 60 days to "change" their ties to the "Israeli occupation." Absent this "change," all church entities would divest from that company.



Anti-Israel divestment would primarily involve the United Methodist Church's $17 billion pension portfolio. But it also would affect another nearly $1 billion in assets by the church's 13 national church agencies. And it presumably would affect the even more considerable assets of United Methodism's over 100 affiliated universities and colleges and about 60 hospitals and clinics. Especially wealthy United Methodist universities include Duke, Emory, Southern Methodist, Boston, and Drew. United Methodism has never before targeted governments for corporate divestment, not even South Africa under Apartheid.

But MFSA, along with many United Methodist elites, apparently believes that Israel is uniquely guilty among the world's numerous oppressor regimes. MFSA's January-February 2008 newsletter offers a rather sinister history of Israel. Muslims, Christians, and Jews had lived in "harmony" in Palestine for centuries until disrupted by "extremist" Zionists, whose zeal for a Jewish state provoked violence. "High-placed American Zionists" pressured the United Nations to "give away" most of Palestine to Jews, who avariciously went on to "conquer" three quarters of Palestine. The Jewish conquest advanced in 1967, when Israel launched a "Pearl Harbor-like surprise attack" on Egypt. Israel's continued "confiscation" of Palestinian land perpetuates injustice until this day, inevitably igniting Palestinian uprisings.

The MFSA newsletter includes a commentary by a Sara Roy, a research scholar at Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Roy likens Israel's stance towards Palestinians to Nazi attitudes towards Jews, while declining to call it morally equivalent. "Within the Jewish community it has always been considered a form of heresy to compare Israeli actions or policies with those of the Nazis, and certainly one must be very careful in doing so," she recounted. "But what does it mean when Israeli soldiers paint identification numbers on Palestinian arms; when young Palestinian men and boys of a certain age are told through Israeli loudspeakers to gather in the town square; when Israeli soldiers openly admit to shooting Palestinian children for sport; when some of the Palestinian dead must be buried in mass graves while the bodies of others are left in city streets and camp alleyways because the army will not allow proper burial; when certain Israeli officials and Jewish intellectuals publicly call for the destruction of Palestinian villages in retaliation for suicide bombings or for the transfer of the Palestinian population out of the West Bank and Gaza; when 46 percent of the Israeli public favors such transfers and when transfer or expulsion becomes a legitimate part of popular discourse; when government officials speak of the 'cleansing of the refugee camps'; and when a leading Israeli intellectual calls for hermetic separation between Israelis and Palestinians in the form of a Berlin Wall, caring not whether the Palestinians on the other side of the wall may starve to death as a result."

MFSA's condemnation of Israel is harsh and contrasts starkly with its romances over the decades with Marxist regimes, whose absolutist oppression was far more akin to Nazi tactics. Such lack of proportion may lead to failure when the vote comes in April, but with support from many church officials, MFSA will continue to identify Israel as a pariah nation. Such hostility towards Israel may not be so much anti-Semitic as an anachronistic relic of the old left, which dreamt that world revolution would sweep away all religious and national identities. Israel is a stubborn rebuttal to the old left's historicist claims. For the fading remnants of old-time liberal Protestantism, that might be infuriating.

Mark Tooley directs the Institute on Religion and Democracy's program for United Methodists.