Milestone in Baghdad

By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
December 5, 2008; Page A25

WASHINGTON -- The barbarism in Mumbai and the economic crisis at home have largely overshadowed an otherwise singular event: the ratification of military and strategic cooperation agreements between Iraq and the United States.

They must not pass unnoted. They were certainly noted by Iran, which fought fiercely to undermine the agreements. Tehran understood how a formal U.S.-Iraqi alliance endorsed by a broad Iraqi consensus expressed in a freely elected parliament changes the strategic balance in the region.


U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Dustin Gillette with schoolchildren while on patrol in Iraq on Wednesday. (By Maya Alleruzzo -- Associated Press)

For the United States, it represents the single most important geopolitical advance in the region since Henry Kissinger turned Egypt from a Soviet client into an American ally. If we don't blow it with too hasty a withdrawal from Iraq, we will have turned a chronically destabilizing enemy state at the epicenter of the Arab Middle East into an ally.

Also largely overlooked at home was the sheer wonder of the procedure that produced Iraq's consent: classic legislative maneuvering with no more than a tussle or two -- tame by international standards (see YouTube: "Best Taiwanese Parliament Fights Of All Time!") -- over the most fundamental issues of national identity and direction.

The only significant opposition bloc was the Sadrists, a mere 30 seats out of 275. The ostensibly pro-Iranian religious Shiite parties resisted Tehran's pressure and championed the agreement. As did the Kurds. The Sunnis put up the greatest fight. But their concern was that America would be withdrawing too soon, leaving them subject to overbearing and perhaps even vengeful Shiite dominance.

The Sunnis, who only a few years ago had boycotted provincial elections, bargained with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, trying to exploit his personal stake in agreements he himself had negotiated. They did not achieve their maximum objectives. But they did get formal legislative commitments for future consideration of their grievances, from amnesty to further relaxation of the de-Baathification laws.

That any of this democratic give-and-take should be happening in a peaceful parliament just two years after Iraq's descent into sectarian hell is in itself astonishing. Nor is the setting of a withdrawal date terribly troubling. The deadline is almost entirely symbolic. U.S. troops must be out by Dec. 31, 2011 -- the weekend before the Iowa caucuses, which, because God is merciful, will arrive again only in the very fullness of time. Moreover, that date is not just distant but flexible. By treaty, it can be amended. If conditions on the ground warrant, it will be.

True, the war is not over. As Gen. David Petraeus repeatedly insists, our (belated) successes in Iraq are still fragile. There has already been an uptick in terror bombings, which will undoubtedly continue as what's left of al-Qaeda, the Sadrist militias and the Iranian-controlled "special groups" try to disrupt January's provincial elections.

The more long-term danger is that Iraq's reborn central government becomes too strong and, by military or parliamentary coup, the current democratic arrangements are dismantled by a renewed dictatorship that abrogates the alliance with the United States.

Such disasters are possible. But if our drawdown is conducted with the same acumen as was the surge, not probable. A self-sustaining, democratic and pro-American Iraq is within our reach. It would have two hugely important effects in the region.

First, it would constitute a major defeat for Tehran, the putative winner of the Iraq War according to the smart set. Iran's client, Moqtada al-Sadr, still hiding in Iran, was visibly marginalized in parliament -- after being militarily humiliated in Basra and Baghdad by the new Iraqi security forces. Moreover, the major religious Shiite parties were the ones who negotiated, promoted and assured passage of the strategic alliance with the U.S., against the most determined Iranian opposition.

Second is the regional effect of the new political entity on display in Baghdad -- a flawed yet functioning democratic polity with unprecedented free speech, free elections and freely competing parliamentary factions. For this to happen in the most important Arab country besides Egypt can, over time (over generational time, the timescale of the war on terror), alter the evolution of Arab society. It constitutes our best hope for the kind of fundamental political-cultural change in the Arab sphere that alone will bring about the defeat of Islamic extremism. After all, newly sovereign Iraq is today more engaged in the fight against Arab radicalism than any country on earth, save the United States -- with which, mirabile dictu, it has now thrown in its lot.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

PSU women set it up

By Sam Ross Jr.
PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/sports/
Friday, December 5, 2008


Christa Harmotto, Megan Hodge, Alisha Glass and Alyssa D'Errico.

The road to championships in Division I college volleyball -- women's and men's -- is a continuous loop that begins and ends at Penn State.

From the women winning a national championship in the winter of 2007, to the men claiming a national title the following spring, to the present -- the top-ranked women are poised to begin defense of their national crown Friday by hosting Long Island in Rec Hall -- Penn State is enjoying a continuous success of an historic nature.

In a sport where the power base is far west of the Mississippi River, Penn State joined Stanford's 1996-97 teams as the only schools in NCAA history to win women's and men's national championships in the same academic year.

"Certainly, the West Coast has won the majority of national championships on both the men's and women's sides," said Penn State women's coach Russ Rose, who's in his 30th season. "But, the fact that Penn State has found its way to the championship podium a few times in both sports is an indication that it can be done."

Men's coach Mark Pavlik, the Derry native in his 15th season running the program, deflected the credit.

"I wish it was something that was a secret, but I just think the women playing for Russ are some of the best players I've ever seen," he said. "The same is true of the guys on our team.

"It's like a perfect storm is brewing, and it seems like it's centered right over Rec Hall."

The net results

That storm of success is a source of pride for Salima Rockwell, the former Penn Hills High School player who earned All-America recognition playing for Rose from 1991-94. She now is in her third year back with the women's program -- as director of volleyball operations in 2006 and as an assistant coach the past two seasons.

"To have kind of the center of volleyball be here, certainly last (school) year with two national championships, I think it's easy for people to see that we know what we're doing," Rockwell said.

Penn State's volleyball success is all the more striking under closer examination. Consider:

• The Lions (32-0) are the first collegiate women's team to go an entire season without losing a single set.

• The women have won an NCAA-record 58 consecutive matches. Its Big Ten win streak stands at 45.

• The two women's national titles (1999 and 2007) are the only Division I championships won by a school east of Nebraska.

• The two men's national titles (1994 and 2008) are the only Division I championships won by a school east of Utah. (Lewis, Ill., had to vacate its 2003 title for using ineligible players.)

The success comes from within the Commonwealth, as both Penn State programs boast in-state players.

On the women's roster, three of the 14 players are from Pennsylvania, including Hopewell High's Christa Harmotto. The 17-player men's roster has seven Pennsylvania players, including Hempfield's Joe Sunder.

That success has not been lost on the school's student body, even in the midst of a Rose Bowl season for the football team.

"The athletes really do a good job of supporting each other," said Harmotto, a 6-foot-2 senior All-America middle hitter from Aliquippa. "We know a lot of the football guys and other athletes. It's just one, big athletic family, I suppose.

"We've had great crowds. We had close to 6,000 (Nov. 21 vs. Northwestern). Obviously, it helps that it was the Rally in the Valley for the football team, but we're definitely getting a larger student following."

The women's pursuit of a perfect season, both in terms of sets and matches, became a prominent subplot -- but not to Rose.

"It's special because everybody else talks about it," he said. "It's not special to me. This team's goal is to try to defend its national championship."

Some downplay the men's success because there are just 23 Division I programs nationwide, compared with 331 women's programs.

"In defense of that, when the men get to the final four, they've got to win two matches to win the national championship,(too)," Rose said. "It's just a lot easier for them to get to the final four."

Rose's world

Rose's volleyball teams have won two national championships, not that you'd notice.

"I don't wear any championship rings or anything that would give anybody an idea of any of those sort of things that I've been a part of," he said. "My job is to help the players have a chance to be successful."

Rose has done just that. He began the season as one of just three volleyball coaches with more than 900 career wins. His winning percentage of nearly 86 percent is tops among active coaches, and he is already in the American Volleyball Coaches Hall of Fame.

While much has been made of the fact that Joe Paterno has been on the staff for more than half of the 800 all-time football wins for Penn State, Rose (957 wins) has been the head man for more than nine-tenths of the Nittany Lions' women's volleyball victories.

"I'm the guy that gets the publicity," Paterno said at a recent football pep rally, "but the best coach on this campus is Russ Rose."

Rose allowed himself a slight smile when he heard that.

"You appreciate it," Rose said, "when it comes from Joe Paterno."

Rose's reputation is that of a no-nonsense guy, which he attributes to his Chicago roots.

"Brutally honest," junior setter Alisha Glass said in describing her coach. "He knows what it takes to win, whether it's looking at statistics, whether its minimizing errors or just knowing how to push a player. Even when you don't necessarily want to hear it, he knows what he's talking about."

The Rose candor is what first attracted Rockwell to the program as a player and brought her back as an assistant.

"Brutally honest? That's probably fair," Rockwell said. "Someone's got to be, and I think that's his job. We always get the players that understand that and want that."

Rose makes no apologies for his style.

"I keep thinking it's my responsibility to treat these players the way I treated my players 30 years ago as well," he said. "I run into problems with that because this is a new era of soft, entitled kids that feel that everybody owes them the world, and I'm just too negative and not telling them how lovely they are.

"Every now and then, you get a throwback, and it's great. Salima was. I never had any problems with Salima. Christa Harmotto, the same. I've had a number of kids from Western Pennsylvania -- that's great stock.

"I was from Chicago. It was the same thing. The kids I recruited from the Midwest, their parents, they didn't own the companies. They worked. They worked the third shift. Those people understand what challenges are about. Their kids are a little tougher. They're not spoiled."

Attitude and talent

When Rose sees a combination of athletic ability and blue-collar work ethic, he knows he has something special.

Such is the case with Harmotto, who was recently named ESPN the Magazine's Academic All-American of the Year.

Harmotto is seen as the volleyball equivalent of former Penn State All-America linebacker Paul Posluszny, who won ESPN's Academic All-American of the Year honor in 2006 and now plays for the Buffalo Bills.

She and Posluszny even had to overcome knee injuries at almost the same time.

"Everybody was asking what was in the water in Hopewell Township," said Harmotto, whose family has socialized with the Poslusznys. "But we both recovered fine."

Rose ranks Harmotto among his all-time favorite players.

"I've been coaching for 34 years, and there's a few players that you would say, 'I would sign to coach them forever,' and she'd be right at the top of that list," he said. "She's so full of life. She's a giver. Everybody gets energy from her. Her academic success, her community involvement -- someone asked me if I knew she teaches Sunday school, I'm like, 'I didn't know, but I'm not surprised.' "

Harmotto's career is winding down, but it's already been all that she had hoped it could be.

"It's just an honor to play for (coach Rose)," she said. "And it's an honor to play for Penn State."

NCAA women's volleyball

Playoff pairings this weekend at Penn State's Rec Hall:

Friday

Yale vs Ohio, 3:30 p.m.

Long Island vs Penn State, 6

Saturday

Friday winners, 4 p.m.

NOTE: Penn State also hosts an NCAA regional Dec. 12 and 13 at Rec Hall

Recent women's champions

2007: Penn State

2006: Nebraska

2005: Washington

2004: Stanford.

2003: Southern Cal

2002: Southern Cal

2001: Stanford

2000: Nebraska

Recent men's champions

2008: Penn State

2007: UC-Irvine

2006: UCLA

2005: Pepperdine

2004: Brigham Young

2003: Lewis (Ill.)*

2002: Hawaii*

2001: Brigham Young

2000: UCLA

* -- Those titles were later vacated


Sam Ross Jr. can be reached at sross@tribweb.com or 724-838-5144.

Were There Muslims in Mumbai?

By Don Feder
GrassTopsUSA.com
Thursday, December 04, 2008

Islamist students burn Israeli, U.S. and Indian flags as they shout anti-U.S. and anti-Indian slogans during a demonstration in Islamabad, Pakistan, Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2008. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari indicated Wednesday he would not hand over 20 terrorist suspects wanted by India in the wake of the Mumbai attacks.
(AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Come on along and listen to the Lullaby of Mumbai, the hip hooray and politically correct coverage, and never say the “I” word. That doesn’t rhyme, does it?

In its coverage of a series of coordinated attacks in Mumbai last week that left 172 dead, the New York Times – America’s newspaper that sounds like a broken record – scrupulously avoided any suggestion of possible sectarian motivation for the atrocities. The perpetrators were variously referred to as “terrorists,” “gunmen,” “militants” and “assailants.”

The only time “Islam,” “Muslims” or similar expressions were used was in reporting on statements of the terrorists themselves – as when they railed against the alleged mistreatment of Muslims in Kashmir and India or demanded that “mujahedeen” prisoners be released. Sky News reported that the terrorists called on the Indian government “to return stolen Muslim lands” – which, in the wide world of Islam, is all of India.

It’s not just the New York Times that engages in extreme reality-avoidance when it comes to the nastier aspects of the Prophet's creed.

At its annual convention in October 2001, the Society of Professional Journalists issued “Diversity Guidelines,” that instructed reporters and editors to, “Avoid using word combinations such as ‘Islamic terrorist’ or ‘Muslim extremist’ that are misleading because they link whole religions to criminal activity.”

Let’s see: In the past 30 years, the overwhelming majority of acts of terrorism were committed by Muslims. Most terrorist groups have names like jihad-this and Islamic-that. Terrorists regularly quote the Koran’s kill-the-infidels verses. (“O True Believers, when you encounter the unbeliever, strike off their heads!”) Al-Qaeda and company tell us that their goal is to advance the global jihad . Those inciting inter-religious violence have titles like sheikh, imam and mullah. But linking Islam to terrorism is “misleading”?

Since 1993, there have been at least 17 terror-bombings in India – 12 of them since 2005. In each, the death toll has ranged from a dozen to more than 200. That the victims were (almost exclusively) Hindus, and the perpetrators (when identified) Muslims, is happenstance, according to the mainstream media.

It’s also a coincidence that, along with the U.S. and Israel, India is one of the principal targets of international terrorism, and India has the second largest Muslim population in the world.

In an op-ed in the November 29, New York Times (“What They Hate About Mumbai”) Suketu Mehta – a professor of journalism at New York University – insists the terrorists were striking out at city’s cosmopolitanism, which they loath. “Religious extremists” (Mehta indicts both Muslims and Hindus) were enraged because “Mumbai stands for lucre (wealth), profane dreams and indiscriminate openness.”

Well, that explains why the terrorists invaded Mumbai’s Chabad House, a citadel of decadence run by Hasidic Jews. Among those murdered were Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, his wife, Rivka, Rabbi Leibish Teitelbaum and three Israeli girls, all in their teens.

What debauchery was going on at the Mumbai Chabad House to make it a target of anti-cosmopolitan extremists? Eating gefilte fish and dancing the Hora?

The Chabad House was targeted because it was Mumbai’s center of Jewish activity. Muslims like killing Jews almost as much as they enjoy killing Hindus. Their religion commands it. A doctor who performed post-mortems on the Jewish victims said they were tortured before they were killed and "bore the maximum torture marks" of all who died in Mumbai (as quoted on the Indian news website Rediff.com).

There must’ve been a whole lot of shaking going on in 8th century India, when the Muslim subjugation of the subcontinent began. Millions were murdered. In the city of Somnath alone, more than 50,000 were slaughtered.

The slave markets of the Middle East were glutted with Hindu women and children taken captive. An ancient civilization was nearly destroyed. (Libraries were leveled and manuscripts burned.)

In his book The Sword of the Prophet: Islam History, Theology, Impact on The World, Serge Trifkovic offers the following account: “Muslim invaders began entering India in the early eighth century, on the orders of Hajjaj, the governor of Iraq. Starting in 712, the raiders, commanded by Muhammad Qasim, demolished temples, shattered sculptures, plundered palaces, killed vast numbers of men – it took them three days to slaughter the inhabitants of the port city of Debal – and carried off their women and children to slavery.”

Strange how the plunderers of palaces and killers of vast numbers usually have names like Muhammad or Osama instead of Seymour or Sanjay.

In his multi-volume work, The Story of Civilization, Will Durant singled this out as among the bloodiest episodes in history. Durant characterized it as “a discouraging tale, for it’s evident that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from within.…”

Multiple-choice quiz: The barbarians Durant refers to are: 1. Episcopalians 2. Jehovah’s Witnesses 3. Scientologists or 4. Muslims? The correct answer is the religion of Muhammad.

Closed circuit television footage released on December 3, 2008 shows gunmen walking across a parking lot after a shooting spree at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus train station in Mumbai on November 26, 2008.
REUTERS/Investigating Team Video via Reuters TV (INDIA) QUALITY FROM SOURCE

Here’s another remarkable coincidence: When Muslim authorities, religious or secular, open their mouths, what issues there from is frequently abominable or absurd.

* On September 14, Sheikh Muhammed Al-Munajid told viewers of the Saudi religious station that Mickey Mouse was an agent of Satan (along with Zionists, Hindus, and Christian missionaries). The former diplomat attached to the Islamic Affairs Department of the Saudi embassy in Washington explained that mice are unclean. But the Disney character – like Warner’s Jerry – teaches children to revere rodents. Ergo, “Mickey Mouse has become an awesome character, even though, according to Islamic law, Mickey Mouse should be killed in all cases.” Try to imagine a rabbi putting out a contract on Porky Pig.

* On October 30, a thoroughly charming Egyptian lawyer, Ms. Nagla Al-Imam, suggested on the Arab TV channel Al-Arabiya that Palestinian men should threaten to rape Israeli women and girls as a form of “resistance” against the so-called occupation. Non-Muslim women in Europe are frequently the targets of gang-rape by Muslim men – but to link these crimes to Islam would be misleading.

* On November 28, the Associated Press reported that Al-Zawahiri – Al-Qaeda’s primo capo – released a video urging Americans to convert to Islam to avoid a financial meltdown. The U.S. economy had been destroyed by 9/11 “and usury (interest paid on loans)” Zawahiri declared. Americans should “embrace Islam to live a life free of greed, exploitation and forbidden wealth.” Islam’s aversion to what it calls greed (capitalism) is one reason that, absent oil, Muslim societies’ most important products are fleas, filth, fanaticism and poverty.

The naked emperor is nowhere more evident than in the way the West goes to absurd lengths to be sensitive to those who decapitate hostages and shoot 13-year-old American girls (one of the victims in the Mumbai massacre).

Jesse Nieto is a 25-year veteran of the Marine Corps whose youngest son was one of 17 killed in the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.

Now a civilian employee of Camp LeJeune, Nieto was ordered to remove from his car decals with the slogans: “Islam = Terrorism” and “We Died, They Rejoiced!” In fact, the deaths of 3,000 Americans on 9/11 were celebrated from Indonesia to the shores of Tripoli.

Base police gave Nieto a ticket for displaying “offensive material” on his vehicle.

The Corps certainly wouldn’t want to offend the fine folks who murdered 241 Marines in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, or the non-denominational militants who’ve been killing leathernecks for the past six years, from Kabul to Fullujah.

Mumbai is the latest chapter in the millennial bestseller, Gone With The Jihad. Since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, communities in the Negev have been under continuous bombardment.

On Friday, November 14, Sderot was hit by 11 Qassam rockets. Ashkelon – a city of 120,000 north of Gaza – got six incoming, courtesy of the Al-Quds Brigade, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad. If it bothered to report such attacks at all – which is doesn’t – the New York Times would assign blame to the Militants’, Assailants’ and Gunmen’s Group for Spiritual Struggle.

Naturally, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and Amnesty International have condemned not the rocket attacks, but the Israeli response – a partial blockade of Gaza, which they called “collective punishment.” It’s irrelevant that Gazans collectively condone and abet the aggression.

If the U.N. has its way, soon, a commentary like the one you’re reading will be against the law – at least the international law.

Four days before the beginning of the Mumbai massacre, the United Nations General Assembly passed a measure called “Combating Defamation of Religions” – which seeks to root out “acts of hatred, discrimination, intimidation and coercion resulting from defamation of religion.”

Enactment of the Orwellian measure has been high on the agenda of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which maintains that “Islam is frequently associated with human rights violations and terrorism.”

Imagine the infidel dogs implying that there’s a connection between Islam and honor killings, floggings for minor infractions of Shari'a law, flying planes into buildings, bombings, rocket attacks and the murder of rabbis and their wives. Infamous!

A Pakistani Islamist student wears headband reading: 'God is Great' as he shouts anti-U.S. and anti-Indian slogans during a demonstration in Islamabad, Pakistan, Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2008. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari indicated Wednesday he would not hand over 20 terrorist suspects wanted by India in the wake of the Mumbai attacks.
(AP Photo/Anjum Naveed)

My friend Robert Spencer – author of Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs and editor of the website Jihad Watch – warns that the U.N. enactment is “a veiled attempt to restrict speech that Islamic authorities find offensive or inconvenient, including honest discussion of the motives and goals of jihad terrorists and how they make use of Islamic texts to gain recruits and justify their actions.”

The measure will not be deployed against the imams who regularly call for the blood of Christians, Jews and Hindus, or the government of Egypt that condones church burnings, or the Saudi Religious Police who smash down doors in search of covert Christian services, or Holocaust-denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or Syrian President-for-life Bashar Assad, who told Pope John Paul II that Jews “try to kill the principle of religions,” or the producers of the 2002 Egyptian television multi-series, “Horseman Without A Horse,” a dramatization of the anti-Semitic canard “The Protocols of The Elders of Zion,” or the U.N., whose 2001 Anti-Racism Conference in Durban turned into a hate-Zionism fest.

It will be used to silence the likes of Geert Wilders (the Dutch parliamentarian who produced Fitna), Brigitte Gabriel (the Lebanese-American journalist and author of Because They Hate), Bob Spencer, Ann Coulter, and ex-Muslims who run websites like “Islam Watch.”

The United Nations was founded in response to the carnage of World War II. Considered by many to be the greatest statesman of the 20th century, Winston Churchill was one of the leaders of West in that titanic struggle.

Were he alive, Churchill would be among the defamers of religion targeted by the U.N. edict. Having encountered Islam as a young soldier in India and the Sudan, this is what the future British PM had to say about the subject over 100 years ago:

Several generations have elapsed since the nations of the West have drawn the sword in religious controversy and the evil memories of the gloomy past have soon faded in the strong, clear light of Rationalism and human sympathy…But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness. In a moment, the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside…Seizing their weapons, they become Ghazis (warriors for Islam) – as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such…The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace. Luckily the religion of peace is usually better armed. (from Churchill By Himself: The Definitive Collection of Quotations.)

Someone forgot to issue the Diversity Guidelines to Winnie. Then, too, Winston Spencer Churchill was part of a generation that confronted evil, instead of trying to make it go away by refusing to acknowledge its existence.

Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website,
DonFeder.com.

Today's Tune: Warren Zevon - Poor Poor Pitiful Me/Cadillac Ranch (Live 1982)

(Click on title to play video)

Lying at State

There'll be lots of it from the Tuzla survivor.

By R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. on 12.4.08 @ 6:08AM
The American Spectator
http://www.spectator.org/

WASHINGTON -- President-elect Barack Obama campaigned intoning the mantra that Washington's political system is "broken." Now with most of his appointments either named or leaked he has proved it. There is indeed something broken in a political system whose electorate rejects Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries and nonetheless finds itself saddled with a third Clinton Administration at year's end.

Of all the Clintonistas that Mr. Obama has appointed, the most bizarre is the appointment of Senator Clinton as secretary of state. He himself during the campaign remarked on her lack of foreign policy credentials. "What exactly is [her] foreign policy expertise?" he asked. Mr. Obama's incoming White House counsel, Greg Craig, was blunter still. In a detailed memo last March, Craig explained why, as he put it, "There is no reason to believe… she was a key player in foreign policy at any time during the Clinton Administration." The memo led Oliver Willis, the progressive blogger, to note, "This malarkey about Sen. Clinton having all this foreign policy experience strikes me as a serial fabrication on the level of Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair" -- two infamous journalistic frauds.

Those words were chosen wisely. It was in March that at least two of Senator Clinton's claims to foreign policy credentials were exposed as the sheerest poppycock. She had been presenting herself as having been an indispensable instrument in effecting the Irish peace settlement during her husband's administration. "I was deeply involved in the Irish peace process," she would boast on the campaign trail. Unfortunately for her, Judicial Watch forced the Clintons to release Hillary's heavily redacted White House schedules, from which it was apparent that she had nothing to do with the peace process other than appearing in public with her husband sporting her famous forced smile.

The charge that Hillary was engaged in "serial fabrication" was validated again when one of the participants in the Irish peace negotiations, Noble Peace Prize winner David Trimble, exclaimed, "I don't know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill going around." Trimble characterized her empty boasts as a "wee bit silly." Two months earlier she had fibbed that "I actually went to Northern Ireland more often than my husband did," and on one occasion "pulled together in Belfast, in the town hall" Catholic and Protestant women whom she persuaded to bury the hatchet so "the hard work of peace-making could move forward." That whopper provoked London's Daily Telegraph to report, "There is no record of a meeting at Belfast City Hall, though Mrs. Clinton attended a ceremony there when her husband turned on Christmas tree lights in November 1995."

It was in last March, too, that our next secretary of state was caught B.S.-ing that twelve years before while traveling through Bosnia as First Lady she had to dodge "sniper fire." This was a tall tale that she had been uttering repeatedly in her campaign to present herself as more experienced than Mr. Obama. According to it, the snipers attacked at a planned "greeting ceremony" in Tuzla, which had to be canceled as the sniper fire rained down and, said Hillary, "we just raan with our heads down to get into our vehicles to go to our base." Actually the ceremony was held at the base. It was not canceled and with scores of journalists and dignitaries standing by it was taped. CBS played the tape. Once again a brazen and artless lie by Hillary was her undoing. Said one member of the military, obviously peeved by Hillary's deprecation of the military's security measures, "Getting shot at by snipers is not something you forget -- or make light of."

Well, Hillary trivializes a lot of serious things and is often caught B.S.-ing. In fact, except for her husband I cannot think of another public figure of her stature caught so often in her own lies. About this time in the primary season she was also caught lying that "I negotiated open borders to let fleeing refugees into safety from Kosovo." She was caught in fibs about advice she offered her husband during the Rwanda genocide.

Now all of the above were lies deployed by Hillary to convince the electorate that she is vastly experienced in foreign policy. Apparently she failed to convince voters, but she seems to have convinced her erstwhile adversary, the President-elect. He should have taken note of her discrepancies and one other thing. He should by now be aware that both Clintons cause trouble for themselves and for others nearby when there is no apparent reason for the trouble other than the Clintons' bad character. Frankly, Mr. Obama, it is not wise to be too close to these two. You are going to be sitting with Mrs. Clinton in cabinet meetings. Watch out for sniper fire.

- R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is the founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute.

Got "Milk"?

Gus Van Sant’s new movie is well-cast, beautifully filmed, Oscar-bound, and mediocre.

By Mark Hemingway
http://www.nationalreview.com/
December 04, 2008, 4:00 a.m.


Sean Penn as Harvey Milk


It doesn’t really matter what the general public thinks of Gus Van Sant’s new film Milk, chronicling the life of gay activist Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to major public office in the U.S. It hits theaters guaranteed to clean up at Oscar time and the critical reception is . . . well, here’s Ann Hornaday at the Washington Post:

Once in a while, a movie arrives at such a perfect moment, its message and meaning so finely tuned to the current zeitgeist, that it seems less a cinematic event than a cosmic convergence, willed into being by a once-in-a-lifetime alignment of the stars.

Aside from the embarrassing hyperbole, the suggestion that the movie “arrives at such a perfect moment” is laughable, given that gay-rights activists and film-industry types complained about the movie being released after Election Day and the California decision on Proposition 8.

“[I] can’t help but wonder what Milk might have meant for today’s cause, if anything, had it landed in the marketplace last month,” wrote one blogger at popular film website In Contention. The Hollywood Reporter sparked furor with a story claiming that Focus Features, the studio releasing Milk, was “eschewing publicity for the gay-themed movie” because it was afraid the Prop 8 controversy would hurt the film’s chances — a claim that prompted an angry denial from Focus head James Schamus, the producer of Brokeback Mountain.

In other words, there was a lot of debate pre-release about whether the film had a sufficiently political agenda. Well, it does: the entire last act centers on Harvey Milk’s activism against Proposition 6, a 1978 initiative which would have banned gay teachers in California schools. The film is at pains to drive home parallels between Prop 6 and Prop 8, historically relevant or not. In reality, Proposition 6 was a poorly written law that that would have effectively legalized witch hunts, banning teachers who even supported other gay teachers. Both Jimmy Carter and sensible conservatives led by former governor Ronald Reagan opposed the law, which ultimately failed at the ballot. In terms of its legislative absurdity and popular support, Prop 6 and Prop 8 aren’t really comparable.

So Milk is a highly charged political film, which seems to have distracted people like Ann Hornaday from asking more relevant questions. Is it a good movie? Does it fairly represent Harvey Milk’s life and accomplishments? The answers to those questions are maybe and absolutely not, respectively.

Not all of the hype over the film is unjustified. The cinematography successfully evokes San Francisco in the 1970s, and the cast is uniformly excellent. Too often, actors play gay roles with overdone affectation; here, Penn disappears into the title role and turns in an incredible performance. Penn isn’t known for being a likable character on screen or off — but as Harvey Milk, he’s charismatic and disarming. He’s also buoyed by a series of excellent supporting performances from James Franco, Diego Luna, and Emile Hirsch, among others. Doubtless, you will hear more about the film’s performances as awards season nears.

But the strength of the film’s performances and the zeal that has greeted the film’s politics seems to have distracted everyone from noticing that the script is remarkably weak. Screenwriter Dustin Lance Black — a former Mormon missionary who’s now out and proud — is a hot Hollywood commodity on the strength of Milk, and it boggles the mind why.

The film borrows most of its structure — centering on the real-life, tape-recorded message Milk left behind in the event that he was killed — from the 1984 documentary, The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. The final scene, in which Milk is assassinated by one of his fellow San Francisco city supervisors is the hamfisted and melodramatic culmination of a lazy and obvious series of references to Milk’s love of opera that one can see coming a mile away. Telegraphed punches rarely land with force.

Further, the film repeatedly speculates, without any evidence whatsoever, that Milk’s financially ruined and mentally unstable assassin is a closeted homosexual. In ascribing motive, its plot resorts to a tiresome and baseless pop-culture meme that anyone opposed to homosexuality — or even to a story’s gay protagonist — must be a “closet case.” (Not that I expect the meme to die anytime soon; look for Haggard to land in theaters the next time a major gay-rights initiative is on a state ballot.)

The script sidesteps any and all moral dilemmas that might arise from examining, well, the life and times of the Harvey Milk — a man who was as polarizing as he was charismatic. Milk is less a biopic than a hagiography. Which is unfortunate.

Even a cursory examination of Harvey Milk’s life confirms that he was hardly a saint, and a film seeking to emphasize Milk’s positive achievements need not sacrifice its integrity in this regard. Whatever one thinks of the morality of homosexuality, the violence against gays that was once commonplace even in San Francisco was reprehensible, and Milk was an effective voice against it. Further, much of the criticism of homosexuality being lobbed at the time was uncharitable and unchristian, and as a national public figure, Milk put a sympathetic face on gay America.

On the other hand, the notion that this film — much less a more honest portrayal of Harvey Milk — would somehow have won votes for gay marriage is laughable. The film, probably accurately, doesn’t shy away from the promiscuity of the characters involved. Men hop into bed together literally at first sight. Indeed, one of Milk’s election promises noted in the film was his public announcement that he would no longer visit San Francisco’s famed bathhouses. Hmmm. No longer seeking out anonymous sex with multiple partners even while living with a longtime companion? What a concession to respectability.

Because the film is so myopically focused on justifying Milk’s political crusades, it doesn’t begin to get at who exactly Milk was as a person. The film doesn’t mention he was a Korean war veteran with a respectable military career, serving as a diver in the Navy a few years after the war ended. He was a Republican who worked on Barry Goldwater’s campaign — and initially decided to run for office not simply to advance gay rights but in a fit of pique over San Francisco’s business taxes on his camera store. In fact, the film barely even alludes to what he had done before he turned 40.

Even with the focus on Milk’s political accomplishments, the film still runs from the truth. One of Milk’s signature issues was encouraging gay men and women to come out — he felt that, if more Americans realized they had personal relationships with homosexuals, it would advance their cause. The film includes a tense scene where Milk pressures a friend into going into the next room to call his father and come out. (Later, Milk’s former lover chastises him for being a hypocrite, as he never came out to his mother while she was alive.) But the film passes over in silence an infamous “outing” episode in Milk’s life.

In 1975, while President Ford was visiting San Francisco, Sara Jane Moore attempted to shoot the president. A bystander, a former Marine named Oliver Sipple, grabbed her arm and her shot hit the pavement, possibly saving the president’s life. Milk knew Sipple — he was the former lover of one of Milk’s former lovers, Joe Campbell — and Milk wanted to out him, hoping that Sipple’s heroism would burnish the gay image. Sipple was openly gay, and he participated in gay-pride events — but he asked Milk not to out him in the wake of his heroic act. Milk did it anyway, and Sipple eventually sued the San Francisco Chronicle for invasion of privacy. The film barely acknowledges how questionable many of Milk’s tactics were — which is odd, considering that the ethics of outing are still hotly debated in the gay community today.

Instead, Milk portrays its protagonist as someone who did nothing but help people, with barely a nod to how abrasive and self-serving he could be. Every time Milk the man gets in the way of Milk the political message, moral ambiguities and inconvenient facts get steamrolled.

Which is why the film’s political message is effectively lost on those who aren’t pro–gay rights coming in. Milk presents one version of events for viewers to accept or reject. And since the film suggests that Harvey Milk was an angel and everyone opposed to him or to gay rights is a closet case or a crazy fundamentalist — well, good luck winning people over.

While Penn and his co-stars’ performances are exemplary, Milk isn’t nearly as good as its hype. Oh, it will collect its fair share of awards. The March Oscar ceremony will doubtless be an insufferable parade of moral superiority, as the movie-industry lets America know that it voted for Milk as a statement against the rubes who voted for Proposition 8. But in the end, Hollywood doesn’t speak for America. As much as it pains me to dampen Ann Hornaday’s expectations for the film, the only “once-in-a-lifetime alignment of the stars” Milk will array is within the ranks of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

— Mark Hemingway is an NRO staff reporter.

Interview: Jonathan Brent on "Inside the Stalin Archives"

http://www.nationalreview.com/
December 4, 2008

Between the Covers

Jonathan Brent on Inside the Stalin Archives

"We're learning exactly the degree of Stalin's own personal involvement in the masterminding and the execution of the terror itself...in fact [the terror] had been initiated and managed by Stalin for his own particular ends," says Jonathan Brent, author of Inside the Stalin Archives.


(Click on title to access audio)

THE CLEANEST STATE MEETS THE PUSHIEST PERSON

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
December 3, 2008

Until now, Minnesota was always famous for its clean elections. Indeed, Democratic consultant Bob Beckel recently attested to the honesty of Minnesota's elections, joking: "Believe me. I've tried. I've tried every way around the system out there, and it doesn't work."

But that was before Minnesota encountered the pushiest, most aggressive, most unscrupulous person who has ever sought public office, Al Franken.

On Election Day, Franken lost the U.S. Senate race in Minnesota to the Republican incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman by 725 votes. But over the next week, Democratic counties kept discovering new votes for Franken and subtracting votes from Coleman, claiming to be correcting "typos."

In all, Franken picked up 459 votes and Coleman lost 60 votes from these alleged "corrections."

As the inestimable economist John Lott pointed out, the "corrections" in the Senate race generated more new votes for Franken than all the votes added by corrections in every race in the entire state -- presidential, congressional, state house, sanitation commissioner and dogcatcher -- combined.

And yet the left-wing, George Soros-backed Secretary of State, Mark Ritchie, stoutly defended the statistically impossible "corrected" votes. There's something fishy going on in Minnesota besides the annual bigmouth bass tournament.

Fortunately, the very outrageousness of the "corrections" scam brought national attention to the Minnesota recount, at which point it became more difficult to keep "finding" votes for Franken. Under the glare of the national media, the steady accretion of post-election ballots for Franken came to a screeching halt, rather like a child who, after being caught red-handed, tactfully removes his hand from the cookie jar.

As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, sunlight is the best disinfectant. (Although, having met Franken, I would add that actual disinfectant might not be a bad idea either.)

Since then, the state has been conducting a meticulous hand recount and, despite a suspicious delay from liberal Hennepin County and a suspicious late-vote discovery from liberal Ramsey County, Coleman has consistently held a lead of 200 to 300 votes. (That's not including the 519 votes that were stolen -- or "corrected" -- from Coleman immediately after the election when no one was paying attention.)

As of Wednesday, with 93 percent of the votes recounted, Coleman holds a 295-vote lead. At no point since the first count after the election has Franken been ahead.

The famously honest people of Minnesota probably think this means the recount is almost over. But like a bad Al Franken sketch on "Saturday Night Live," I predict this recount will keep going on and on and on for no apparent reason.

To understand what is happening in Minnesota, one must turn to the Washington state gubernatorial election of 2004.

As in Minnesota this year, the Republican candidate kept winning and winning, but the Democrats refused to concede, instead demanding endless recounts. Meanwhile, Democratic precincts kept "discovering" new ballots for the Democrat, Chris Gregoire.

Six days after the election on Nov. 10, 2004, Republican Dino Rossi was ahead by 3,492 votes. But five days later, heavily Democratic King County election officials actually claimed to "find" 10,000 uncounted ballots! And they favored Gregoire!

Nonetheless, after a full recount, Rossi was still ahead, but this time by only 42 votes.

So the Democrats demanded a third recount -- and King County continued its miraculous ballot-"finding" trick, which continued to favor Gregoire.

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Democrat election officials were "finding" new votes as much as they needed to find new votes. Here are 10,000 new votes. You need more? OK, back to work!

Eventually, King County found enough provisional and absentee ballots to put Democrat Gregoire in the lead -- and this result was immediately certified by the weenie Republican secretary of state.

Republicans are always accused of being sharks; I wish they'd rise to the level of minnows.

According to Michael Barone, an examination of King County records showed that nearly 2,000 more mail-in ballots had been "cast" in King County than had been requested.

But Gregoire got to be governor -- having done unusually well among the imaginary voters of King County.

The head of the Washington State Democratic Party orchestrating this ballot theft was Paul Berendt. Guess who is advising Al Franken on the Minnesota recount right now? That's right: Paul Berendt.

Get ready, good people of Minnesota: You have no idea what is about to hit you. And, per usual, the Republicans clearly haven't the vaguest notion what is about to hit them.

Just this week, liberal Ramsey County "discovered" 171 new votes from a single voting machine in a single precinct. An analysis by John Lott shows that these newly "discovered" votes represent yet another statistical improbability that favors Franken: Despite the fact that Maplewood precinct No. 6 gave Franken only 45.4 percent of the original, untampered-with vote, the newly "discovered" votes gave Franken 53.2 percent of the vote.

Also, you will notice that Franken is obsessively fixated on the absentee ballots, a specialty of the vote fraud experts at ACORN. Inasmuch as only 5 percent of absentee ballots were rejected in Minnesota, Franken already has fraud baked into the cake. But he needs more.

He is demanding to be given the names of voters whose absentee ballots were rejected. Why would he need the names of the voters? Unless ... he plans to track them down, determine how they voted and then ferociously fight to qualify the absentee ballots only of known Franken voters.

Franken can pretend to be generous -- by not demanding that all rejected absentee ballots be counted -- while in fact being manipulative -- by requesting that only the ballots with votes for him be counted. That's exactly what the Democrats -- led by Franken adviser Berendt -- did to steal the 2004 election in Washington state.

But first, Franken will need the names. Then he can check voter registration lists, ask around or, in a really aggressive move, call the rejected voters directly and bully them into admitting who they voted for. If they say "Coleman," I promise you they won't get a call back to ensure that "every vote is counted."

There is absolutely no other reason to get the names of those whose ballots were rejected.

We'll find out in the next few weeks if Barack Obama's "new politics of hope and change" includes turning the cleanest state in the union into one of the dirtiest.

Now the Advent

Streetcar Line

By Quin Hillyer on 12.1.08 @ 6:09AM
The American Spectator
http://www.spectator.org/


Angels announcing Christ's birth to the shepherds

Govaert Flinck
1639
Oil on canvas, 160 cm x 196 cm
Louvre, Paris


Rejoice, rejoice: Emanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

Here's the situation, people: Politics right now is depressing. The national news is depressing. The government bailouts are depressing. The internecine fights among Republicans are depressing. The internecine fights among conservatives are depressing. The thought of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State is profoundly depressing. The craziness of Wal-Mart shoppers who would trample a store worker to death is depressing. The horrible terrorism in India is far worse than depressing.

Rejoice, rejoice: Emanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

This has been an awful year for conservatives. John McCain won the Republican nomination. John McCain ran an utterly inept and dishonorable campaign, and the leftist Barack Obama won the presidency. A Republican president and his appointees at the Federal Reserve and at Treasury badly mishandled a rolling credit crisis, exacerbated rather than healed a panic, and engineered a series of outrageous bailouts and buyouts while saddling generations of taxpayers with the bill.

William F. Buckley died. Tony Snow died. Peter Rodman died. Alexander Solzhenitsyn died. Jesse Helms died. One year and a day ago as I write this (a year and two days ago as you read it), Henry Hyde died. And Bob Novak has been stricken with a brain tumor and we pray for his recovery.

Rejoice, rejoice: Emanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

Russia has gone authoritarian again, aggressive, and vicious. Iran is going nuclear. China continues to be repressive. Pirates (pirates, in this day and age!) successfully ply the Indian Ocean -- and, to a lesser extent, oceans worldwide, including in the Americas.

Rejoice, rejoice: Emanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

Israel -- ah, yes, Israel. Israel is beleaguered. Always. But perhaps even more now than usual. Its prime minister is a lame duck, on his way out of office amidst a scandal. Its strongest international supporter, the United States, is hobbled by doubts caused by a financial panic, and the incoming U.S. president's commitment to Israel (a few bits of rhetoric aside) is in some doubt. And Iran rattles its sabers at Israel while Hamas sits perched in Gaza.

Rejoice, rejoice: Emanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

The world is too much with us, late and soon. The center has not held, and the worst are full of passionate intensity. We are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven. We wind up wounded, and not even dead. I have to turn my head until my darkness goes. The lone and level sands stretch far away…..

And yet…. And yet….

Rejoice, rejoice: Emanuel shall come to thee, O Israel….
Oh Come, thou Wisdom, from on high.

And yet we in the Christian tradition believe that the things of this world pale in comparison to the marvelous things of the spirit which are to come. Especially here in the United States, where we just celebrated Thanksgiving, we see this bleak time of year and can only be grateful, and hopeful, and confident in the Advent of grace and light. In the Jewish tradition, too, Isaiah's teachings (and others) tell of redemption -- in some forms of Judaism, in the shape of a person as Messiah, who has not come yet but surely is coming; and in other forms of Judaism, in a Messianic age. Either way, if Christmas is a uniquely Christian celebration, then Advent, in its broader meaning of an expectant preparation for redemption, is a season where Christians and Jews can share Isaiah's belief that "all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God…announcing peace, heralding good tidings."

We believe, because we already have seen manifold examples of survival despite suffering, of obstacles overcome, of hope rekindled, of joy emerging miraculously from sorrows. In the civic realm, we Americans especially believe, because we have been so mightily blessed already. From Valley Forge we made it to Yorktown. From the burning of James Madison's White House we found victory outside of New Orleans. We bungled Dred Scott but issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Pearl Harbor begat Iwo Jima and D-Day. Sputnik spurred us to Apollo and the Moon. Malaise gave way to Morning in America. And, lest we forget how spectacular a triumph it actually was, we helped a Wall come down while leaving its Soviet sponsors on the ash heap of history.

But again, the civic realm is as nothing next to the gifts of the spirit our faith tells us to believe in. Or, what is more quotidian but still in many ways more important than affairs of state, we spend this season, from Thanksgiving all the way through the New Year's arrival, celebrating hearth and home. The love of human for human may be a weak imitation of the love of our Lord, but it springs from the same source and is itself powerful enough for wondrous things. And if even that love is not enough, Isaiah tells us that "the Lord God shall wipe the tears off every face."

Our blessings as Americans -- freedom, plenty, beautiful lands, great leaders when times were tough -- sustain us, and our faith and faiths sustain us even more mightily. We know we have always had a rendezvous with destiny, and that knowledge gives us solace and strength. Advent is upon us. O come, o come, Emanuel.


- Quin Hillyer is an associate editor at the Washington Examiner and a senior editor of The American Spectator. He can be reached at qhillyer@gmail.com.

Today's Tune: Neil Young - Heart of Gold (Live 1971)

(Click on title to play video)

'Sugar Mountain' release reveals a Neil Young 'before the gold rush'

By Jim Farber
New York Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com/
Tuesday, December 2nd 2008, 4:00 AM


Platt Collection/Getty

Portrait of Canadian rock singer Neil Young in 1969.

Everyone dreams about the days when stars were new. Who doesn’t wish they’d seen the Beatles rip up the Cavern Club, or attended those mythic Scandinavian dates when Led Zeppelin tested things out under the name the New Yardbirds, or lurked in the garage as Nirvana made its first fumbling attempts at what would become grunge?

That’s the kind of fly-on-the-wall excitement that surrounds “Sugar Mountain” — a CD, out today, that captures a Neil Young concert taped before he’d released a single solo song. The singer was hardly unknown at the time. Though not yet 23, he had already spent over two years in the popular Sunset Strip band Buffalo Springfield, a group he’d left just six months earlier.

To test out his solo skills live, Young booked a pair of dates — Nov. 9 and 10, 1968 — at the Canterbury House in Ann Arbor, on the campus of the University of Michigan. Two days later, he released his first solo album.

In some ways the newness shows. Young rambles shyly in 10 overlong raps that stretch between the 13 songs. (Luckily, they’re contained in separate tracks, so you can skip them after first-time curiosity flags.) Also, the recording itself could barely be more creaky. An ancient TEAC two-track tape recorder captured it, and it doesn’t seem like much has been done to buff up the sound 40 years on. Young’s voice never sounded more rickety (which is saying something), nor his guitar so splintery.

Luckily, this only adds to the immediacy, and nascent nature, of the whole affair. Maybe because Young built a key part of his subsequent career on demonizing slickness, there’s something right about a recording so raw. Also, the disparity between the amateurism of the technology and the erudition of the material just makes the latter more startling.

Few musicians have written a more sterling melody than the one in “On the Way Home,” a song Young penned for Springfield. He includes other pieces he recorded with that band — “Broken Arrow” and “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing” — along with others that turned up on his solo debut, like “The Loner” or “The Last Trip to Tulsa.” Perhaps the most fascinating track is “Birds,” which didn’t appear on an album for another two years (on “After the Gold Rush”). Not only does it match “On the Way Home” for melodic grace, it ranks as perhaps the most generous breakup song ever written from the point of view of the one doing the breaking.

“Sugar Mountain” represents the first pebble of what will be an avalanche of early Young recordings to tumble down in 2009. Next year will see the release of “Neil Young Archives Vol. 1,” a 10-disk Blu-ray and DVD that contains recordings from 1963 through ’72. Judging by this tease, we have a lot to look forward to.

jfarber@nydailynews.com


RECORDINGS : Quick Spins
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Tuesday, December 2, 2008; Page C05

SUGAR MOUNTAIN: LIVE AT CANTERBURY HOUSE 1968

Neil Young

The latest installment in the Neil Young Archives Performance Series, this intimate collection was culled from a pair of live shows recorded 40 years ago at a coffeehouse at the University of Michigan. Young was fresh from the recently imploded Buffalo Springfield, and apparently there was some concern as to whether his more complex, idiosyncratic songs like "Broken Arrow" and "Expecting to Fly" would translate to a stripped-down solo setting. Just the palpable hush captured on the two-track recorder used to document the experience would have been enough to confirm that those apprehensions were unfounded.

The set opens with a gorgeous, jazz-inflected version of "On the Way Home," one of a half-dozen numbers from Young's Springfield days, including achingly beautiful takes of "Out of My Mind" and "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing." A handful of tracks that wound up on his self-titled, 1969 solo debut are here as well. Benefiting most from the unplugged treatment are "The Old Laughing Lady" and "The Last Trip to Tulsa," the former perhaps more ethereal, the latter more starkly surreal, for the spareness of their instrumental accompaniment. Young's wistful performance of the impressionistic title track, a coming-of-age classic written when he was 19, is the recording that subsequently became a staple of FM radio, and deservedly so. His more meandering between-song banter might not be to everyone's liking, but in all fairness to Young, then 22, this set finds him less self-conscious, and abundantly more gifted, than the often-exasperating likes of, say, Ryan Adams or Devendra Banhart will ever be.

-- Bill Friskics-Warren

CD: Neil Young, 'Sugar Mountain'

Joel Selvin
The San Fransisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/
Sunday, November 30, 2008

A few days shy of his 23rd birthday and the release of his self-titled debut solo album, Neil Young played two nights solo acoustic at a small Ann Arbor, Mich., nightclub. Fresh from Buffalo Springfield - numbers from that band's songbook litter the set - Young is caught at the dawn of the singer-songwriter era ("I used to be a folksinger," he sings on "The Last Trip to Tulsa"). The seeds of everything he became can be clearly heard in this disarming performance; he's commanding beyond his years. It's a remarkable snapshot of a budding rock great.


ALBUM REVIEW: NEIL YOUNG - SUGAR MOUNTAIN: LIVE AT CANTERBURY HOUSE 1968
Neil Young
(Reprise)
5 stars

By Allan Jones
Uncut Magazine
http://www.uncut.co.uk/music/neil_young/reviews/12548


On May 5, 1968, in Long Beach, California, Neil Young played his final show with Buffalo Springfield, a band he’d already left and re-joined at least twice. “I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do next,” he told me in 1989. This seemed unlikely. For someone with only a vague notion of what he was going to do, he moved decisively, quickly hiring Elliot Roberts as his manager. Roberts - on his way to becoming one of the most powerful people in the American music business - had worked briefly with the Springfield earlier in their last disputatious year together, before being sacked by Neil for playing golf when he should have been attending to the group’s multiple whims. Roberts now signed his new client to Reprise, where apart from a short and unhappy liaison with Geffen Records, Young would remain for the rest of his career. That summer, Neil started work on his first solo album.

The next step was to get Young in front of an audience, to test their reactions. In November, with the release of his debut solo album, Neil Young, now looming, two shows were booked, at Canterbury House, part of the University Of Michigan. The gigs were recorded on two-track tape, and exactly 40 years later finally see the light of the proverbial day as Sugar Mountain.

I think if I’d been there on either night, my first reaction would have been something akin to shock. From what I knew of him at the time, Young was by reputation surly and remote, inclined towards fractious discord. In pictures, he had a tendency to look sullen, a moody loner. What a flattening surprise, then, to hear him here sounding so, well, goofy, I suppose you’d say. Ten of the 23 tracks listed on Sugar Mountain are spoken word introductions, rambling asides, random observations, often hilarious anecdotes delivered in a youthfully high-pitched voice that he at one point makes fun of himself.

This awe-shucks folksiness is thoroughly disarming, as no doubt intended. Down the years, Young’s played this part to serial perfection – the straw-chewing backwoods philosopher, the bucolic savant, plain-speaking, daffy but wise, Jimmy Stewart on his way to Washington as Mr Deeds. “I never plan anything,” he says at one point, sounding baffled by his present circumstance in front all these people, some of them calling out for Buffalo Springfield songs he thought no one had even heard. But how true, you wonder, is this?

Among the Buffalo Springfield songs for which he was perhaps best known were elaborate patchworks like 'Mr Soul', 'Expecting To Fly' and 'Broken Arrow' (all featured here). These were post-Pepper sonic collages, painstakingly assembled during long hours of over-dubbing in the studio, which was also how much of Neil Young had been produced, a process that had left him by his own admission disenchanted. For these Canterbury Hall shows, though, there clearly would be no attempt to replicate the unreleased album’s dense arrangements, orchestral flourishes and gospel backing vocals.

This is just Neil, his voice and guitar and 13 songs, six from his Buffalo Springfield days, four from the forthcoming album, the unrecorded 'Sugar Mountain', an exquisite version of 'Birds', a song that would appear on After The Goldrush, and a brief snippet of 'Winterlude' that barely merits a track listing of its own. In virtually every instance, these solo versions are preferable to the originals, performed with a singular confidence that suggests he may already have realised how dated when it came out aspects of Neil Young would sound, the stereo panning and overlaying of studio effects giving it an ornate fussiness that sat uneasily in the mutating musical climate of the late 60s.

What’s striking here is how cleverly Young by now had grasped the fundamental changes in American music essayed already by Dylan and The Band on John Wesley Harding and Music From Big Pink. The summer of 1968 had seen the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. A season of riot had left cities on fire across the republic and Nixon was in the White House. Dark times were getting darker. It was as if the only legitimate response to more complicated times was a new kind of simplicity. And so the precocious psychedelic technician of those Springfield epics is calculatedly recast as a soulful solo voyager whose songs spoke without undue adornment of shared apprehensions, collective uncertainties.

On songs like 'Sugar Mountain', 'If I Could Have Her Tonight' and 'I've Been Waiting For You', his vulnerability is something tangible and universal. On a quartet of great Springfield songs included here – 'Out Of My Mind', 'Mr Soul', 'Expecting To Fly', 'Broken Arrow' – he expresses among other things an uneasy discomfort with fame and its hollow trappings that places him on the side of the people he’s playing to, an unchallenged alliance.

These songs and similarly intimate others like them were unquestionably personal. Young brilliantly, however, was able to make the ‘you’ of the songs not only the individual they initially were addressed to, but also the people who would shortly be buying his albums in their thousands and then millions. The ‘you’ in this instance being the plurality of his audience, spoken to as if in private conversation, with whom he shared mutual intimacies, feelings about love and loss in which his fans would increasingly hear aspects of themselves and what they were going through.

One of the pivotal songs here, I think, is the surreal 'Last Trip To Tulsa', which as the closing track of Neil Young would be regarded by some as an aberration, too heavily indebted to Dylan, its solo acoustic setting at odds with the rest of the album. Now, of course, its impressionistic narrative – nightmarish, absurd, paranoid, awash with grim portent - can be heard as the precursor to masterpieces to come, like 'Ambulance Blues' or 'Thrasher' and even 'Ordinary People', that similarly took the pulse of the nation and its people.

Sugar Mountain is a fascinating snapshot of Neil Young at a transitory moment in his long career, for which it also provides an indelible template. This is in many ways how he would sound for the next 40 years. At least, that is, when he wasn’t raging noisily with Crazy Horse, taking various detours into unadulterated country, winsome folk, synthesiser-pop, stylised rockabilly, big band R&B, grunge, electronic experimentalism, otherwise undermining convenient expectation or elsewhere meandering down the musical avenues that have at various times left fans baffled and at least one record company exasperated enough to want to sue him for not sounding enough like himself, when in fact for all this time he has sounded like no one at all but himself.

A ferocious Neil Young electrifies crowd in Montreal

By Brent Hallenbeck
Burlington (VT) Free Press
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/
December 3, 2008



MONTREAL -- Neil Young is ferocious.

It's no surprise to anyone who's seen him in concert that, while mild-mannered if a tad eccentric as a personality, the rock legend is musically fierce on stage. My wife and I, however, had never seen him in concert, even though we go to a ton of shows and he's been on our must-see list for eons. That finally changed Monday night when, as a belated birthday present, I took my wife to hear his show at the Bell Centre in Montreal.

That's what struck me from the moment he started, how ferocious he is. This was electric Neil, not the acoustic Neil from the sedate Jonathan Demme film "Heart of Gold" a couple of years ago.

When he plays, with his body swaying and writhing violently, it looks like his electric guitar is trying to escape from the otherworldly sounds this possessed man and his trusty tremolo bar are working so hard to extract from it. It's man vs. machine, and in this case, man always wins.

Hearing the slicing guitar chords of "Hey Hey, My My" in person for the first time after hearing the recorded versions again and again over the past 30 years felt like having some legendary yet strangely distant land all of a sudden in your lap. Imagine Halley's Comet crashing through your roof into your living room, famously familiar and white-hot.

The raucous songs dominated the night. Young and his veteran (non-Crazy Horse) band practically shot sparks into the nearly capacity arena crowd on "Cinnamon Girl," "Powderfinger" and even the slow-burner "Cortez the Killer." He closed his two-hour pre-encore set with "Rockin' in the Free World" -- which in classic serious-artist Neil Young fashion is a rock 'n' roll anthem carrying the heavy burden of stark reality -- that sent thousands of fists flying into the air in exultation.

On his quieter songs--"Heart of Gold," "Unknown Legend," "The Needle and the Damage Done" and even the newer, slightly less-effective "Sea Change" -- Young proved that he's still sensitive and emotionally pitch-perfect. You could certainly argue that as a technically unskilled singer he hasn't had far to fall in the past 40 years, but it's also hard to argue that he's lost any of that gut-wrenching vocal quality, and he certainly hasn't lost any intensity.

The sweetest moment came when he sang "Happy Birthday" to his backup singer, band mate and wife, Pegi. That was sweet not just for them but for me and my wife, celebrating her birthday almost two months late with one of the most amazing arena shows I've ever seen by one of my wife's favorite performers.

His only encore song was a flammable cover of The Beatles' "A Day In the Life." At the end, where The Beatles' version ends with that never-ending note, Young ripped the strings from his guitar and headed off, leaving his instrument musically battered and bleeding on stage.

He proved once more that when it comes to Neil Young and the guitar, man always wins. Always.

Contact Brent Hallenbeck at 660-1844 or bhallenb@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com


Neil Young going strong

Bernard Perusse, The Gazette,
http://www.financialpost.com/
Published: Tuesday, December 02, 2008


Apollo Hammersmith, London, England, 3/14/08
Photo by Chris a.k.a Crris b

Talk about peaking early – and sustaining.

Neil Young, only two songs into his two-hour-plus set at the Bell Centre last night, roared out a blistering version of "Hey, Hey, My, My (Into the Black)" and reminded a fully-packed house that it's better to burn out than to fade away. Everyone sang along, as if the sentiment were self-evident, but the joke is that Young has lived to eat those words --- much as Pete Townshend has had to shrug off "Hope I die before I get old."

Young did not burn out. He is, at 63, fading away. But there's no sadness in that, let alone defeat. In fact, great beauty lies in his refusal to fade away gracefully. That meant everything last night, when Young's emphatic yes to rock n' roll at its most primal seemed a yes to life itself. By the time he throttled his guitar in a spectacular "Rockin' in the Free World" and pulled out every string on his instrument at the end of his (literally) show-stopping cover of the Beatles' "A Day In the Life", the line between entertaining and inspiring had been crossed long ago.

The stage had been set and the bar raised by the two opening acts. Los Angeles rockers Everest, hand-picked by Young for this tour, played a 35-minute set showing them to be one of the year's promising acts, while Wilco --- headliners in their own right --- followed up with 50 minutes of brilliantly-executed fan favourites (the astounding madness of the triple-guitar attack on "Handshake Drugs" must still be ringing in many ears).

As the lights went down for the last time at 9:20, peals of feedback --- is there anyone in rock n' roll who loves it more than Young? --- announced the opening chords of "Love and Only Love". All it took was a trademark choppy opening guitar solo from Young and drummer Chad Cromwell dumbing it all down with a Crazy Horse backbeat, and the rules of the game were instantly changed. It was Neil's world.

In his first Montreal appearance in 12 years, Young placed the emphasis on his uncompromising rockers, like the ever-vital "Powderfinger", the garage-band classic "Cinammon Girl" (still the greatest one-note solo of all time) and the crowd-pleasing jams in "Cowgirl in the Sand", all of which had bassist Rick Rosas working furiously. But fans of Young's mellower, acoustic-based material were also given a treat in a show that deftly combined the sweet and the salty. About an hour into the concert, Young's acoustic guitar came out for the Don Gibson evergreen "Oh, Lonesome Me", which he first covered in 1970. An unplugged segment ensued, featuring guaranteed singalongs like "Heart of Gold" and "Old Man". Longtime Young accompanist Ben Keith on pedal steel guitar, multi-instrumentalist Anthony Crawford and Young's wife, Pegi, on vocals and piano, shone during this thoughtfully-paced sequence.

As the electric axes were retrieved and the amplifiers turned back up, the meaning of the show became clearer. It wasn't really about musicianship: Young has a distinctive vocabulary on his instrument, but he's no guitar virtuoso. Nor was it about presentation, although the guy painting canvases on stage was a nice touch. A clue came with the title of one of three excellent new songs in the set list, the mid-tempo rocker "Just Singing a Song (Won't Change the World)".

It's a provocative song title for rock n' roll evangelists, but we know Young's right. His greatest gift lies in making us hope that he's wrong.

SET LIST:

1. Love and Only Love

2. Hey, Hey, My, My (Into the Black)

3. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

4. Powderfinger

5. Spirit Road

6. Cortez the Killer

7. Cinammon Girl

8. Oh, Lonesome Me

9. Mother Earth

10. The Needle and the Damage Done

11. Unknown Legend (includes Happy Birthday, sung to Pegi Young, instigated by Neil)

12. Heart of Gold

13. Old Man

14. Get Back to the Country

15. Just Singing a Song (Won't Change the World)

16. Sea Change

17. When Worlds Collide

18. Cowgirl in the Sand

19. Rockin' in the Free World

Encore:

20: A Day in the Life


bperusse@thegazette.canwest.com


Neil Young still rockin' his world

Bernard Perusse, Canwest News Service
http://www.canada.com/
Published: Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Being a fan is generally a straightforward thing: You connect with an artist, you buy his or her albums, you go to the shows.

That's pretty much it.

Being a Neil Young fan is a more complicated proposition. The singer-songwriter has slipped in and out of so many personas and musical styles that his followers have perpetually been denied easy identification with a particular image or sound.

In the end, it often comes down to embracing the concept of Neil.

But even the concept of Neil is a slippery thing. It definitely has something to do with not selling out: Young has steadfastly refused to allow his music to be used for commercial purposes. He also lives on a ranch and has built himself a hybrid electric car, so there's something about loving the Earth in there, too.

Simple humanity certainly plays a role. Young's sons, Ben and Zeke, born of different mothers, both have cerebral palsy. Ben is quadriplegic. Apart from their well-documented devotion to the boys, Young and wife Pegi stage annual concerts to raise funds for the Bridge School, which assists children with severe physical impairments and complex communication needs.

A heartwarming scene of Young jamming with Iraq war veteran Josh Hisle in the documentary CSNY / Deja Vu also speaks eloquently of his genuine compassion.

Mostly, though, the concept of Neil has to do with the perception that he just doesn't care what people think: fans, journalists and record company execs have always had to learn to march to Young's drummer.

Even Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Young's Crazy Horse bandmates, pretty much wait for his call.
In its more extreme manifestations, the singer's take-it-or-leave-it individualism has sometimes seemed like a giant raspberry blown at his audience.

Who can forget the robot sounds of Trans in 1982 or the 1991 release of Arc -- 35 minutes of feedback and guitar noise -- as a companion to the live collection Weld? How about the nine-minute-plus "T-Bone" (entire lyrics: "Got mashed potatoes / Ain't got no T-Bone.") in 1981?

"I like it if people enjoy what I'm doing, but if they don't, I also like it," Young once told radio interviewer Mary Turner.

"I sometimes really like aggravating people with what I do. I think it's good for them." He said that in 1979, the year he released Rust Never Sleeps.

With that album, the Woodstock hippie with the fringed buckskin jacket became one of the only 1960s icons to embrace -- and be spared -- by punk's slash-and-burn agenda.

"Underground music before it becomes established -- I like that music, because the people making it are alive," Young said of the punk years in a 1987 interview, cited in Jimmy McDonough's compelling biography, Shakey. "I'm known around the world, so how can I be an underground type of person? I'm not -- I've outgrown that. But my heart is in the underground."

So how did Young deal with his new punk cred in the '80s? By apparently sabotaging it and releasing albums so experimental and uneven that his own label, Geffen Records, actually sued him for not sounding like himself. "Not commercial" and "musically uncharacteristic of Young's previous recordings" were the terms used.

But there's not a Young fan alive who didn't laugh at that one. Young told biographer McDonough that label president David Geffen "was gonna shock me back to reality. He was hurt because it was his record company and he thought I was gonna be a big star and I just wasn't into it. I was more into bein' me, doin what I do," he said.

Geffen should also have known that Young had a history of causing record company executives to tear their hair out. Young had previously followed up his post-Woodstock singer-songwriter smash Harvest (1972) and its No. 1 hit, "Heart of Gold," with Time Fades Away (1973), On the Beach (1974) and Tonight's the Night (1975) -- a trio of albums so dark and uncommercial that they became known as the "Ditch trilogy".

The name came from a famous Young quotation that defined his approach as well as anything he's ever said: "'Heart of Gold" put me in the middle of the road. Travelling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch," he wrote in the liner notes of the Decade anthology in 1977. "A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people there."

The ditch, it seems, has been a good place for Young. Its unique perspective allowed him to reinvent himself yet again in the 1990s by working with Pearl Jam and becoming revered as the godfather of grunge. Once again, though, a series of substandard releases from that era -- Mirror Ball (1995), Broken Arrow (1996) and the particularly dismal Are You Passionate? (2002) -- made one wonder whether the goodwill from a fan base spanning generations could hold out forever.

Young allayed the fears of many with the comfy-old-shoe songs of Prairie Wind (2005) and the rough-and-ready Bush-bashing rockers of Living with War (2006).

And 40 years after the release of his first solo album, some still don't want to hear anything but plaid-shirt Neil with an acoustic guitar, while others are never happy unless he's thrashing it out with longtime supporting band and eardrum-splitting soulmates Crazy Horse.

On his current tour, more people than usual could end up satisfied. The set lists that have been published online so far show a thoughtful blend of material throughout Young's career.

"I haven't done a tour like this in 15 years," Young recently told Rolling Stone. "With this band, there's no limit to what kind of music I can make. My other bands were always one thing or another. This band can handle anything."

But no set, however varied, will give you a handle on the enigmatic performer. Ask McDonough.

After investing eight years of work in Shakey, only to have Young withdraw his approval at the end and try to stop the book from being published, the author sued. The parties settled out of the court and the book did come out -- with an epilogue that just has to resonate with lifelong believers in the concept of Neil.

"The layers of (Young) were like the layers of an onion -- just when you thought you'd gotten to the bottom of it all, there was another. And another," McDonough wrote.

"Young has invaded every pore of my being, he was in my bloodstream," he wrote. "Somehow he'd made me question everything, just as his music had. He'd given me the adventure of a lifetime."