Hi. My name is Don Winslow, and I'm a writing addict

By John Wilkens
San Diego Union-Tribune
http://www.signonsandiego.com/
June 8, 2008

There's no ocean in Julian, but Don Winslow surfed there almost every day for about 18 months – surfed in his mind.

He was working on his latest crime novel, “The Dawn Patrol,” which is set largely in Pacific Beach. The hero, Boone Daniels, is a former cop turned private eye who would rather catch waves than catch crooks.

Winslow surfs, too. He keeps a wet suit in the trunk of his car. So writing about surfing came naturally to him, even if he does live on a 30-acre ranch out in apple country, some 40 miles from the water.

But that's not why he made surfing a central part of the new novel, his 10th.

“The book is in a lot of ways about perpetual childhood,” Winslow said on a recent weekday morning as he stood on the Crystal Pier, watching surfers. “It's kind of the Peter Pan syndrome that exists in surfing, where you're doing this when you're 11 and you're doing it when you're 50 and a lot of times you don't grow up. But then you're forced to.”

And in his literary hands, waves become metaphors, too. “What's a wave? It's a disturbance, right? You're riding energy, and maybe that carries the characters through the story. All crime stories are about a disturbance.”

There are many disturbances in “Dawn Patrol,” starting with a stripper tossed to her death from a motel balcony. Child prostitution. A Harvard-educated drug dealer with hair the color of traffic cones.

All of it's told with a healthy dose of San Diego locales and history, and in the Winslow style: fast-paced (there are 155 chapters in the book, roughly one every two pages), funny and full of colorful characters, including a surfer called Hang 12 because he has an extra toe on each foot.

Winslow, 54, has his own colorful history. Born on Halloween in New York City, he was a child actor, majored in African history at the University of Nebraska, worked as a safari guide in Kenya, herded cattle. He's also been a private investigator.

He grew up surrounded by stories – stories told by his dad's military buddies, and stories brought home by his mother, a librarian – so it's not surprising that eventually he would want to tell some, too.

His first book, “A Cool Breeze on the Underground,” came out in 1991 and led to another; before Winslow knew it, he was writing a series involving an investigator named Neal Carey. Five books into it, he got bored.

“I thought I just can't keep writing the same books with just a different set of facts in them,” Winslow said.

He still had his day job then, as an investigator, and was taking the train from Dana Point, his home at the time, to Los Angeles to work on a case.

“Just to amuse myself, I'd write a chapter going up on the train,” he said. “When I heard the conductor say, 'Union Station, 10 minutes,' I'd wrap the chapter up, just come up with an ending and be done with it. Same thing on the way home. And pretty soon I had a book.”

Short chapters would become something of a trademark for him, but the real breakthrough on “The Death and Life of Bobby Z” was writing in the present tense. It opened up the language for him, he said, gave his writing more energy and urgency.

“Bobby Z” led to a long-term book contract with Knopf. Warner Bros. bought the movie rights. “And life changed literally overnight,” Winslow said.



Now, he writes full-time, out on the Julian ranch he shares with Jean, his wife of 23 years, and their 18-year-old son, Thomas. (For a while, his writing literally was done out on the ranch, in a tent set up among oak trees. But a storm shredded the tent.)

He usually has two or three books going at a time, not just crime novels, but also historical fiction. He's co-authoring a book on the Crow Indian tribe now, and planning a retelling of Virgil's “Aeneid,” set in a New England crime war.

There's also the occasional TV screenplay, for shows like “Close to Home.” Another San Diego-based novel of his, “The Winter of Frankie Machine,” is set to become a movie starring Robert De Niro.

“Writing is a job, and it's an addiction,” he said. “I can't not do it. Sometimes I think there should be a 12-step program for writers: 'I'm thinking of starting a novel.' And your friends would say, 'No, don't do it! I'm calling a meeting!' ”

It helps that he's never had trouble coming up with ideas. For him, he said, “It's more like, 'Which horse do I ride today?' I've got the attention span of a gerbil on crack. Dangle any shiny thing in front of me and I'll follow it.”

He doesn't write erotica, even though there is another author named Don Winslow out there who does. “That's really become painful, because of the Internet. People look me up on Amazon.com or something, and there it is. I did not write 'Slave Girls of Rome.' I swear. But people ask me about it all the time.”

It's gotten to the point where he starts every public appearance – like the one scheduled for tomorrow at the library in downtown San Diego – with a disclaimer: “I'm not the guy.”

Winslow said he enjoys setting stories in San Diego because of the juxtaposition of the area's natural splendor with the ugly things people sometimes do to each other.

“For me, that's a fantastic challenge and an interesting thing to do,” he said. “I like to write about all of it: what's really beautiful and maybe what's not so beautiful. And how sometimes the things that are pretty are paid for by things that aren't.”

He also has a fondness for blue-collar people and underdogs.

“I gotta tell you, I don't like the beautiful people,” he said. “I just find them really boring and there's too much writing about them – too many movies and too much TV. Southern California is associated with them too much. I'd rather write about people who have to struggle.”

Boone Daniels and his friends struggle mightily in “Dawn Patrol.” They follow an unspoken code of honor – another regular theme of Winslow's work – and some cross lines they shouldn't. But their bonds are strong.

Winslow's already at work on a sequel. “I like the characters,” he said, glancing in the direction of the ocean again. “And I like the setting.”


A Surfer Shamus in Don Winslow's 'Dawn Patrol'

The novelist's new work hugs the Southern California cost but embraces a wider world.

By Scott Timberg,
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/
June 9, 2008



Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times
Author Don Winslow's former jobs include working as a private investigator in New York. He came to California to work as an investigator in arson cases and picked up technical knowledge along the way. After penning several books, he saw his novel "The Death and Life of Bobby Z" take off in 1997.

Waves breaking just a few feet away, the detective novelist Don Winslow was sitting on the patio of a Laguna Beach cafe with a view of the ocean below, looking like a private eye trying to avoid detection. A compact, wiry man whose intense green eyes flashed under a baseball cap, Winslow, 54, was talking about the strip of the coast that runs from San Diego through southern Orange County.

"What I think is emerging is a different kind of society," said Winslow, "based on the amazing ethnic variety. San Diego County no longer has any ethnic majority. Look around you," he said, pointing across the diners, most of them digging into fish tacos, who included a mix of Asian, Pacific Islander, Latino and Caucasian.

"It's also developing its own language, with little bits of Hawaiian and Filipino and Spanish, especially when you mix the language of surf culture, which has always been fun to me," he continued. "I wanted to write in that new language, about that new scene."

Winslow's new novel, "The Dawn Patrol," is set in that milieu, with a Japanese cop nicknamed Johnny Banzai, a Hawaiian drug mogul named Red Eddie, a collection of migrant workers from Mexico and a cast of Anglos that includes the macho strip-club owner Dan Silver and the uptight lawyer Petra Hall. Although the story never gets more than a few miles from the ocean, it spans a wide world, indeed.

The book's core is a collection of five friends who, despite working jobs that sometimes bring them into conflict with each other, meet at sunrise each morning to take the early waves as the Dawn Patrol. Among them is Boone Daniels, an ex-cop with a beat-up van who runs a private-investigation office above a surf shop.

Echoes of McGee

Besides the setting, the book has little in common with the often brooding "surf-noir" novels of Kem Nunn. A cult figure for years, Nunn became nationally known after his novel "John From Cincinnati" was turned into a (short-lived) HBO series, directed by David Milch. Daniels is more a West Coast equivalent of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee, the beach-bum P.I. who lived on a Fort Lauderdale houseboat.

[CORRECTION: While Nunn was a co-creator, co-executive producer and a writer on the HBO television series "John From Cincinnati," none of his novels has that title or was adapted for the series. —]

"The Dawn Patrol" -- which could be a breakthrough for Winslow, who has garnered praise from James Ellroy and Ian Rankin without becoming well known -- seems an inevitable step for the journeyman writer who's about a decade into a career setting noir novels in Southern California. And though he's lived for the last few years in the ranch country an hour inland from San Diego, the book was a way for this swamp Yankee to get back to his love of surfing and the sea.

With its short chapters, comic characters, hairpin plot turns and snappy dialogue, the novel can feel at times lighter than air. But it includes a considerable amount of violence, a heartbreaking subplot and its share of sleazy characters.

"One reason I find SoCal so interesting is that there's so much beauty -- and that's real," Winslow said. "But there's another layer underneath it that's not so pretty. One thing I wanted to do was run those two tracks simultaneously -- without backing off of either."

Making of a storyteller

Winslow's hometown, next to the Rhode Island fishing village of Matunuck, was the kind of place where poverty was close -- if you don't study hard, parents used to tell their kids, you'll be sweeping fish guts off the plant floor.

But he retains an affection for those years as well: Winslow calls a "khaki-collar" upbringing -- he's the son of a Navy noncom father who was "a great raconteur" and a librarian mother who encouraged him to read widely -- the best possible preparation to become a writer.

His parents would rent a lakeside cottage for a month each summer, inviting his dad's Navy friends to come visit as long as they would toss aside any privilege of rank.

"You'd wake up and there would be five sailors on the floor, and there were scuba divers and Marines and Navy nurses. So you had these storytellers around you. I learned very early that if I was quiet and kind of hid, they'd pretend not to know I was there. So I had these stories from around the world -- and I always thought it would be the best thing in the world to be, if I could, to be a storyteller. But it was a bit of a long and winding road to get there."

Winslow moved to New York in the late '70s to help a friend manage a series of movie theaters as a way to finance his literary ambitions.

When the theater job fell through, he turned to something that offered, at least, a steady paycheck. He became a private investigator, working in the back alleys off Times Square -- "you'd think you were walking on seashells, but they were crack vials" -- and busting pickpockets in movie theaters. That, he said, was fun, but it didn't seem to be leading anywhere.

That was followed by a master's degree in military history, itinerant years leading safaris in Kenya and hiking trips in China's Sichuan province and, eventually, gigs as a consultant and investigator who made frequent trips to the West Coast. He was writing novels, starting with "A Cool Breeze on the Underground" in 1991, set amid London's punk scene and written in tents and buses all over the world, but wasn't making much money.

"I started to come out here because of arson," Winslow recalled. "This was in the '90s and everything that people had bought on margin, when things were fat and happy, they were burning down."

Working as an investigator meant picking up some technical knowledge -- an accidental fire has one point of origin, but a building burned to the ground will have several -- as well as a lot of paperwork and fact checking.

"The really fun stuff was finding ways to explain the science to a jury in a way they could understand. That's really what they wanted me for -- as much as a storyteller as an investigator."

That narrative became important, since the visual evidence of an arson case was usually a black, ashy photograph. "It's hard to photograph a burned structure. If you're trained to look at it, you can see a certain burn pattern that tells you one thing but not another. But how do you communicate it?"

By the mid-'90s, fascinated and inspired by views of the Pacific, he moved out here with his wife, Jean, and infant son. "We lived in hotels and residence inns, in Orange County and San Diego, for close to three years, and it was great." He wrote and surfed -- not well -- at beaches like San Onofre and Laguna.

Along the way, he kept writing until, in 1997, his novel "The Death and Life of Bobby Z" -- a thriller written on the Metrolink train between San Juan Capistrano and downtown L.A. -- took off. Warner Bros. bought the rights to it one day, and Knopf a few days later. "And my life changed, literally, overnight."

Finally, after six books, he could quit his day job.

Film in the works

He has also spent some time writing screenplays, and his 2006 novel, "The Winter of Frankie Machine," is currently in pre-production, with Michael Mann directing and Robert De Niro in the lead.

"I like his brevity, I like the way he can cover a lot of time in a few pages," said Southland novelist T. Jefferson Parker, a friend and admirer. "He's so light and so nimble with the storytelling. He gets this high-velocity storytelling going, seemingly effortless, though I know there's a lot of effort involved in writing that perfectly. He knows what to leave out and when to get offstage."

So far, it's been a fruitful season for surf books.

Spring has seen David Rensin's "All for a Few Perfect Waves," about surfer Miki Dora; Bob Greene's "When We Get to Surf City"; and "Breath," a coming-of-age novel by Tim Winton, one of Australia's most decorated novelists.

As he drove and walked past some of SoCal's legendary surf spots -- Salt Creek, Dana Point Harbor, once home to the fearsome "Killer Dana" wave that crashed into a wall of rocks and took surfers with it -- Winslow talked about surf lore, about how shape is often more important than a wave's size, about how angry he gets to see construction and development at his old favorite spots. He was so into this history that he offered a "stop me when you've had enough" before one of his miniature lessons.

But it's clear that Winslow is more interested in the characters and their argot than the technical or even physical side of surfing. His larger-than-life characters are among his novel's pleasures.

Winslow's P.I., Daniels, seems like the kind of laid-back dude whose most deeply held principle is that everything tastes better on a tortilla. Over the course of the book, he shows himself to be tormented, heroic and complicated.

"I wanted a lead character who embodied the ocean," Winslow said. "So in the sense that if you look out there at it now, it looks very placid, but that can change in a heartbeat. There's something going on underneath."

scott.timberg@latimes.com

Today's Tune: Frank Sinatra - Summer Wind

(Click on title to play video)

Regulating Guns Out of Existence

“Cap-and-trade” for murder victims?

By Jack Dunphy
http://www.nationalreview.com/
July 2, 2008 6:00 AM

You know what they say about those who teach.

Sunday’s Los Angeles Times brought us as glorious an example of ivory-tower impracticality as ever put forth, this one by a pair of university professors who, if one may judge from their curricula vitae, are well steeped in academic theory but lacking sufficient practical experience to realize what they propose is manifestly absurd.

In an oped piece running under the headline, “How gun makers can help us,” Jeffrey Fagan, a professor of law and public health at Columbia, and Stephen D. Sugarman, a law professor at U.C. Berkeley, suggest a novel approach to reducing gun violence in America, where about 12,000 people will be shot to death this year. They acknowledge that the recent Heller decision in the Supreme Court “made the problem a little more difficult to solve,” but, like many of their fellow academics, they apparently see the Constitution not as a guarantor of civil liberties but rather as an obstacle to be surmounted along the shining path to Utopia.

What Fagan and Sugarman propose is a scheme only a lawyer could love, for it would invite litigation (and more work for lawyers) at virtually every turn. “By using a strategy known as ‘performance-based regulation,’” they write, “we would deputize private actors — the gun makers — to deal with the negative effects of their products in ways that promote the public good.”

Under this plan, no specific course of action would be imposed on gun makers. Rather, Congress would require the manufacturers themselves to devise ways to reach “performance targets” of reductions in the number of firearm deaths. They might achieve these goals, the authors say, by “add[ing] trigger locks to their guns, or to work only with dealers who meet certain standards of responsibility. They might withdraw their semiautomatic weapons from the consumer market, or even work hand in hand with local officials to fight gangs and increase youth employment opportunities. Surely they will think up new strategies once they have a legal obligation and financial incentive to take responsibility for the harm their products cause.”

And how would Fagan and Sugarman allocate their “performance targets” among the various gun manufacturers? They claim that in more than half of all gun homicides police are able to identify the precise type of weapon used. Based on my experience responding to hundreds of shootings over the course of my police career, this figure strikes me as overly optimistic. But for the sake of the discussion let’s assume it to be accurate. Bullets recovered from shooting victims are very often disfigured to the point that they offer limited information on the type of gun that fired them. The most reliable way to determine the type of weapon involved in a crime is through the examination of expended shell casings left at a crime scene. The casing itself tells the investigator the caliber of weapon, obviously, and a microscopic examination of firing-pin impressions and ejector marks can indeed reveal the make and model of weapon the casing came from.

Now let’s assume that gun manufacturers respond to the Fagan-Sugarman plan by, as they suggest, withdrawing semiautomatic weapons from the consumer market. Will the learned professors sleep easier if criminals turn to revolvers to commit their murders, thereby denying the police — and the bean counters who under their plan will assign responsibility and financial penalties among the gun manufacturers — the forensic evidence needed to identify murder weapons?

Fagan and Sugarman propose an even more preposterous element to their plan: a “cap-and-trade” arrangement that would allow a gun manufacturer who somehow reduces its body count to sell its excess allotment to a rival company. One can envision exciting new horizons opening on Wall Street as murder futures come to be traded alongside those of crude oil, coffee, and pork bellies.

Of course this plan, like almost any regulatory plan hatched inside the ivied walls of the academy, comes down to money. More precisely, it comes down to the transfer of money from those who earn it, i.e. the gun manufacturers, to those who don’t, the lawmakers, other government bureaucrats, and the lawyers who will profit from the confusion this would undoubtedly engender. “If gun makers fail to reach the performance targets,” write Fagan and Sugarman, “they would face substantial financial penalties that would hike the cost of the guns they make and drive home the huge negative social consequences they now cause.”

Thus the authors ascribe “social consequences” to inanimate objects rather than those who employ them for illegal purposes. And with this the authors reveal their true agenda: to bankrupt the gun manufacturers by concealing the iron fist of government in the velvet glove of “performance-based regulation.” And if they can enrich a few trial lawyers in the process, so much the better. In this regard, in the eyes of Fagan and Sugarman, perhaps the idea isn’t so impractical after all. The Supreme Court may have affirmed the Second Amendment, but if this regulatory scheme can drive gun manufacturers out of business, it will render the Second Amendment as moot as the Third.

— Jack Dunphy is an officer in the Los Angeles Police Department. “Jack Dunphy” is the author's nom de cyber. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management.

Israel Caves Again

By P. David Hornik

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

Wednesday, July 02, 2008

A Hezbollah militant plants his group's flag on a billboard bearing the images of captured Israeli soldiers Ehud Goldwasser (right) and Eldad Regev on the outskirts of Aita al-Shaab village near the Lebanon-Israel border in 2007. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has urged his cabinet to approve a prisoner swap with Hezbollah even though Israel now knew that the two captured soldiers were dead.(AFP/File/Joseph Barrak)

On Sunday the Israeli cabinet voted 22-3 in favor of a “prisoner” swap with Hezbollah. Israel, on its side of the bargain, won’t be receiving any prisoners but instead the corpses of Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, the two soldiers kidnapped by Hezbollah in 2006, along with partial, inadequate information on Ron Arad, the airman shot down over Lebanon in 1986.

Hezbollah, for its part, gets five live terrorists including child-killer Samir Kuntar, dozens of corpses of terrorists, information on four Iranian diplomats who were detained by Christian Phalange forces in Lebanon in 1982, and live Palestinian terrorists whose number and identity are supposed to be determined by Israel.

The lopsided vote in favor was especially notable given the opposition of Israel’s defense establishment, which stressed the obvious facts that: such deals strengthen terror organizations; such deals both encourage further kidnappings and encourage these organizations to up their demands for hostages already held; and trading live terrorists for dead Israelis further endangers other kidnapped Israelis by telling terrorists they can extort high prices even for their corpses.

The cabinet was also told by Mossad chief Meir Dagan and Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin—staunch opponents of the deal—that Kuntar’s inclusion means losing any further chance for genuine progress on the case of Ron Arad, since Kuntar was Israel’s last remaining bargaining chip for Arad.
The cabinet also heard, however, from Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi—staunchly in favor of the deal—who stated that “I am the commander of all the soldiers...of the living and the dead, and therefore I say to you the deal must be approved.”

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, for his part, told the cabinet that “We have the utmost collective responsibility and must look the [involved] families in the eye—as well as our conscience.” He referred to the “fundamental issue of a country’s obligation toward its soldiers it sends into battle” and said: “A nation that concedes in order to ensure life, save its wounded, bring home its dead—is a nation that creates unbreakable bonds of mutual obligation.”

Logically speaking, then, the “nays” had it. A nation indeed has an obligation toward the soldiers it sends into battle, but that obligation doesn’t include ransoming them with large numbers of lethal terrorists. If soldiers are taken captive by terrorists, a country’s intelligence services have to comb the world relentlessly to find them or find out about them. The country has to threaten, pressure, and punish the terrorists into freeing the captives. It can also agree to proportionate exchanges to free them.

It doesn’t, however, have to further strengthen its deadly enemies by giving in to their extortionate demands. As for making real, tangible sacrifices, like freeing live, dangerous terrorists, to secure soldiers’ remains, it’s a duty that only Israel seems to have discovered.

Ashkenazi and Olmert, though, appealed to emotions of group solidarity and sympathy for the soldiers’ families that clearly prevailed among the cabinet ministers. Olmert came closest to basing his appeal on logic with his claim that “A nation that concedes in order to ensure life, save its wounded, bring home its dead—is a nation that creates unbreakable bonds of mutual obligation.” But the unbreakable bonds of mutual obligation already exist in Israeli society—and they encompass, as well, victims of future terror attacks and kidnappings resulting from ill-advised deals.

The naysayers’ warnings were already borne out on Monday when Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar said that, in return for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit whom Hamas has been holding for two years, Israel would have to free prisoners with “blood on their hands” like Samir Kuntar. Or as an Israeli defense official put it, "They want to take advantage of the deal with Hezbollah. They see what price we are willing to pay for bodies and think they can now get more for Shalit, who is alive."

Hezbollah, for its part, reacted by celebrating the cabinet’s decision and its Al-Manar Television called it “proof that the word of the resistance is the most faithful, strongest and supreme.” Posters of Kuntar—who in a 1979 terror attack in Israel murdered four-year-old Einat Haran by bashing her head on rocks and with his rifle butt, after murdering her father Danny Haran—were hung throughout Kuntar’s home city of Sidon and in other parts of Lebanon.

The Palestinian Authority also expressed satisfaction. The PA had already been praising Kuntar and last week its official TV showed a picture of him next to a map of Israel covered by a Palestinian flag.

Olmert and the other cabinet ministers’ concern for the families of Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, which enabled all this, was a real but selective concern. It didn’t seem to encompass Danny Haran’s brother Roni Keren, who sharply objected on Sunday to the freeing of Kuntar; or the Almagor organization of terror victims and their relatives, which opposed the deal.
The one ray of hope in this bleak scenario is that Olmert also told the cabinet that “over the years we also learned that this obligation [to our soldiers] has limits. A country must have limits even when dealing with the price of freedom for soldiers, and the price for their very lives.”

He went on to say that once the Hezbollah exchange and an exchange for Shalit were done with, Israel would establish “organized, agreed-upon, and firm procedures to deal with this issue in the future, and we will do so soon.”

They can’t do it soon enough. Hopefully it will be part of a recovery from a period in which Israel has lost its nerve before the pure viciousness of its enemies.

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

The Wars of Religion Return

By Patrick J. Buchanan

http://www.vdare.com/

June 30, 2008

St. Michael, the archangel, conquering the devil- St. Michaelis Church, Hamburg, Germany.

Last week's clash between Dr. James Dobson and Barack Obama is but the latest skirmish in a war that dates back to the time of Christ. At issue: What is Christian truth? Does the true Christian put social peace ahead of his duty to make God's Law man's law?

In a speech in June 2006, Obama, citing the Book of Leviticus, which declares homosexuality an abomination, noted that Leviticus also says the eating of shellfish is an abomination and condones slavery.

Moreover, Jesus' Sermon on the Mount is "a passage so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application."
"Folks haven't been reading their Bibles," said Obama.

"Even ... if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States ... whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson's or with Al Sharpton's?"

Barack was saying that, since Christians disagree deeply over what is biblical truth, why fight? Let us "try to translate some of our concerns in a universal language so that we can have an open and vigorous debate rather than have religion divide us."

In Catholicism, this is the heresy of indifferentism, which holds that one religion is just as good as another and all religions can be a path to salvation. The Pew poll out last week reveals that 82 percent of Protestants believe there are multiple paths to salvation, as do 79 percent of Catholics and 57 percent of evangelicals.

A striking development. For did not Christ say, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me"?

Dr. Dobson is having none of it. Tuesday, he accused Obama of "deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology." [James Dobson Accuses Obama Of `Distorting' Bible, By Eric Gorski, Associated Press, June 24, 2008]

"(H)e is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter," said Dobson. "Am I required in a democracy to conform my efforts in the political arena to his bloody notion of what is right with regard to the life of tiny babies?"
"What he (Obama) is saying here is that unless everyone agrees, we have no right to fight for what we believe."

Dobson has no small point. For in his litany of moral heroes, Barack himself selected no "can't-we-all-just-get-along?" Christians.

Indeed, Obama celebrates the Underground Railroad and the abolitionists who, to end slavery, took us over the brink into Civil War. He invokes the defiant marchers of Selma Bridge and Dr. King, who chose confrontation and tore the nation asunder rather than see segregation endure.

Obama, however, is now preaching a kumbaya Christianity where leaders who believe abortion is the killing of the innocent unborn are to set their convictions and cause aside in the name of ecumenical amity.

It is Dobson who, in his intolerance of perceived evil, seems in the tradition of the abolitionists, and Barack who appears more like the milquetoast believers of whom Christ said he would spit them out of his mouth because they were neither hot nor cold and whom Dante consigned to the deepest reaches of hell.

Does social peace require the toleration of manifest evil?

In the Roman Empire before Constantine, Christians accepted martyrdom rather than burn incense to Caesar. Thomas More went to his death rather than assent to the divorce of the Henry VIII, declaring, "I am the King's good servant, but God's first."

A disciple of Gandhi, Dr. King is celebrated as a champion of civil disobedience against the injustice of segregation. What would Obama say to massive civil disobedience by those who believe the killing of 50 million unborn children since Roe v. Wade is a greater evil than segregating folks by race in public accommodations?

Would an Obama, who hails the abolitionists and Dr. King, condemn them as divisive? Was not that the charge thrown up at Dr. King?

The divide between Dobson and Barack is mirrored among many who profess the Christian faith. It split the Baptists. It is splitting the Episcopalians. A traditionalist minority has severed communion over female bishops and homosexual marriages.

Barack has a "fruitcake interpretation" of the Constitution if he thinks it requires us to give up fighting for justice because it may be divisive, says Dobson. Here, too, he has a point.

The unbridgeable divide between the two portends a troubled future. Can Americans ever come together if we are divided in our deepest beliefs about morality and truth, where one side believes gay marriage is moral progress, the other holds it a moral outrage; where one side views abortion to be a mighty advance for women's freedom, the other sees it as legalization of mass slaughter of unborn babies?

There can be no peaceful coexistence in a cultural war because it is at root a religious war. Far into the future, Americans seem fated to face each other again and again "at some disputed barricade."

Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, reviewed here by Paul Craig Roberts.

Boardwalk fortune teller Madam Marie dies

Asbury Park Press
http://www.app.com/
STAFF REPORT • July 1, 2008

ASBURY PARK — It was one line from a Bruce Springsteen song that made the boardwalk fortune teller world famous. And now, "Madam Marie" has passed away.

Marie Castello, who had told fortunes since the 1930s and became famous for her presence and predictions on the Asbury Park boardwalk, died Friday, her great-granddaughter, Sally Castello said today.

Family members were attending morning services today, Castello said.

The psychic reader and advisor was 93. She became known worldwide from Bruce Springsteen's homage to her in his music.

"Did you hear the cops finally busted Madam Marie," Springsteen sang in his 1973 song, "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" "for tellin' fortunes better than they do."

"That was just the Boss," said Asbury Park Deputy Mayor Jim Bruno. "She was never arrested. But Springsteen turned her into an icon."

Bruno remembers his own run-in with the psychic.

"I was a 12-year-old kid," he said. "And I don't remember what I was doing, but I remember her chasing me away from her shack. Her death is a real loss."

It was also somewhat unexpected.

"She really wasn't sick. She just wasn't feeling well," Castello said. ""She was very, very strong until the day she died."

Madam Marie- Associated Press file photo

Madam Marie bragged that she had told the fortunes of everyone from Judy Garland to Springsteen himself. Legend has it that she told Springsteen he was going to be a success. Springsteen later joked that she told all the musicians that.

And Springsteen never forgot Madam Marie.

"He always comes by to say hello," she told Press columnist Bill Handleman in May. "He knows where he came from."

Word of Castello's death spread along the Asbury Park boardwalk over the weekend. The American flag flying over the Convention Hall-Paramount Theatre complex was lowered to half staff in her honor, and it remained that way today.

"Of course, Madam Marie is our longest running tenant here on the boardwalk. ... She's an Asbury Park tradition," said Gary Mottola, president of investments for developer Madison Marquette, the lead partner in a joint venture with Asbury Partners to restore or rebuild the boardwalk's entertainment buildings. "We felt that honoring her by lowering the Convention Hall flag to half staff is the right thing to do."

Marie Castello closed down her regular operations on the boardwalk in the mid-1990s after a dropoff in business. She continued telling fortunes in Ocean Township.

But Sally Castello is one of the family members who still does readings at the Madam Marie booth not far from Convention Hall on the boardwalk.

"The booth will always be there," Marie Castello said in May. "The Temple of Knowledge, that's a landmark, that's nostalgia, they'll never tear it down."

Noemie Emery: Obama's real challenge isn't racism; it's elitism

The Dallas Morning News
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, June 29, 2008

On the way to his rendezvous with destiny, Barack Obama consistently lost white voters, especially of the middle and working classes, to Hillary Clinton – voters variously known as Appalachians or Reagan Democrats, rural voters and white ethnics in the industrial states.

Because of this, he lost most of the big swing states a Democrat needs – Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia (that last by a staggering 41 points). Heading into the general election, in which the weight of the black vote will shrink compared with its importance in the Democratic primaries, this weakness emerged as the prime threat to his candidacy and gave birth to two schools of thought on its cause.

School No. 1 thinks it reflects racial hostility that Mr. Obama's opponents – first Mrs. Clinton and now John McCain and the Republican Party – are doing their best to rub raw. This is a case that Democrats have been making for the past 30-plus years, and its most recent airing came in a long piece last month in Newsweek by Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe.

"The real test is yet to come," they warned. "The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968. ... It is a sure bet that the GOP will try to paint Obama as 'the other' – as a haughty black intellectual who has Muslim roots."

In this view, race is the issue, and the big years in history were 1964 and 1965, when Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and consigned his party to electoral darkness by losing the South for eons.

By these lights, bigotry and fear are the main factors, and all the others are thinly masked surrogates for them. If Mr. Obama loses, this will be the excuse of the campaign and of the press that supports it.

The second school of thought admits the presence of bias as a contributing factor – but not the most important one. The real cause, it holds, is a cultural divide among whites that splits them on matters of worldview and attitude into hostile and competing camps.

Let us call this rival approach the Barone Manifesto, after its author, political analyst Michael Barone, who crunched the poll numbers for Mr. Obama's primary battles with Mrs. Clinton and discovered that while Mr. Obama did exceedingly well with white voters in university towns and state capitals, he did poorly almost everywhere else.

From this, Mr. Barone broke the electorate down into two large divisions – academics and state employees who live in these places, whom he calls academics; and Jacksonians, who live elsewhere. (While the term academic explains itself, Jacksonian comes from Andrew Jackson, the first of the Democrats' warrior heroes.)

In this reading of history, the critical year would be 1968, when the Democrats splintered on crime and security issues, and afterwards became the party of peace, moral equivalence and aversion to force. This theory holds that the Jacksonians reject Mr. Obama less because he is black than because he is an academic, and they see him as "the other" not because of his name or his background but because of his ideas.

"Academics and public employees ... love the arts of peace and hate the demands of war," Mr. Barone says. "Jacksonians, in contrast, place a high value on the virtues of the warrior, and little value on the work of academics and public employees."

The divisions between these two classes tend to be deep. Academics traffic in words and abstractions, and admire those who do likewise. Jacksonians prefer men of action with tangible achievements.

Each side tends to look down on the other, though academics do it with much more intensity. The academics' theme songs are "Kumbaya" and "Imagine," while Jacksonians prefer Toby Keith.

This, and not color, seems to be the divide.

As a political type, Mr. Obama is not Middle America's idea of a "black" candidate, unlike Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. But he is beyond doubt the Academic Incarnate. Even some of his more notable missteps recall the gaffes academics made in the past.

His complaint in Iowa about the high price of arugula at Whole Foods recalled Michael Dukakis' advice to Iowa farmers that they grow Belgian endive; his faux pas at a fundraiser about rural voters who cling to God and guns out of desperation recalled the "joke" told by Gary Hart in 1984 about toxic wastes in New Jersey.

And he is up against Mr. McCain, a true Jacksonian if ever there was one. Of course, he dispatched another in Mrs. Clinton, who, against all expectations, emerged as a lower- to middle-class spokesman and all-purpose warrior queen.

As a feminist and graduate of Wellesley and Yale, she was an unlikely choice to appeal to Jacksonians, but she won them over by her grit, tenacity and stubborn refusal to give in to pressure. Like Mr. McCain, she gave the impression that she would never stop fighting, while Mr. Obama, as Mr. Barone puts it, gave "the impression, through his demeanor and through his statements that he would never start."

Mr. Obama may be the first nonwhite with a serious chance of reaching the White House, but he is also the latest in a long line of anti-Jacksonians who have tried and failed. The second obstacle may prove more formidable than the first.

In 1984 and 1988, Jesse Jackson, the first black candidate to compete seriously in the national primaries, won the black vote in them by 9-to-1 margins but carried virtually nobody else. Historically, Acadmician-like white candidates win the upscale white vote and the students but tend to do poorly elsewhere.

As the first black candidate to run on the wine track, Mr. Obama combines these two demographics – though, to his credit, his appeal is nonracial, and he didn't begin to win large tracts of black voters until after winning lily-white Iowa.

Nonetheless, it is the addition of the blacks to the students and upper-scale whites that allowed him to run better than the Gary Harts and the Bill Bradleys – and his share of the white vote, and his failings within it, tracked largely with theirs.

"Jacksonians may reject certain kinds of candidates, but not because they're black," Mr. Barone found. "A black candidate who will join them in fighting against attacks on their family or their country is all right with them."

Mr. Obama's problem may be less that he is running while black than that he is running to be the first academic elected president, a category that is 0-for-8 in national contests thus far. He is peering into an abyss not of bias, but a large Jackson Hole of rejection by warrior voters. And this problem is more than skin deep.

Complicating all this are the disparate facts that the voters most imbued with Jacksonian instincts – Southerners, rural voters and many white ethnics – are those most suspected of harboring deep racial bias, and that the first credible black candidate to be running for president of the world's greatest power is also one of the least Jacksonian candidates who ever drew breath.

The interesting counterexample, of course, would be to see a black Jacksonian run against a white academic, and if Colin Powell had chosen to run in 1996, we might have seen this take place. The charming, war-tested moderate Powell would have presented a fair test of whether an ultra-acceptable black candidate could have been undermined by prejudice. The charming, untested and left-wing Obama will not.

Now let us imagine a different candidate, one who looks like Barack Obama, with the same mixed-race, international background, even the same middle name. But this time, he is Col. Obama, a veteran of the war in Iraq, a tough Marine with a "take no prisoners" attitude, who vows to follow Osama bin Laden to the outskirts of hell.

He comes from the culture of the military (the most color-blind and merit-based in the country) and not the rarefied air of Hyde Park. He goes to a church with a mixed-race congregation and a rational preacher. He has never met Bill Ayers; if he did, he would flatten him. He thinks arugula is a town near Bogotá and has Toby Keith on his favorites list.

Would he strike no chords at all in Jacksonian country? Does anyone think he would lose West Virginia by 41 points?

For those Jacksonians who would be fine with a black man in the White House (not as tiny a group as Newsweek thinks), Col. Obama is the one we are waiting for. When we will get him is anyone's guess.


Noemie Emery is author most recently of "Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families" and a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard, where a version of this essay first appeared.

The Ever-Malleable Mr. Obama

By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
June 27, 2008

"To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies."

-- Obama spokesman Bill Burton, Oct. 24, 2007

That was then: Democratic primaries to be won, netroot lefties to be seduced. With all that (and Hillary Clinton) out of the way, Obama now says he'll vote in favor of the new FISA bill that gives the telecom companies blanket immunity for post-Sept. 11 eavesdropping.

Back then, in the yesteryear of primary season, he thoroughly trashed the North American Free Trade Agreement, pledging to force a renegotiation, take "the hammer" to Canada and Mexico and threaten unilateral abrogation.

Today the hammer is holstered. Obama calls his previous NAFTA rhetoric "overheated" and essentially endorses what one of his senior economic advisers privately told the Canadians: The anti-trade stuff was nothing more than populist posturing.

Nor is there much left of his primary season pledge to meet "without preconditions" with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There will be "preparations," you see, which are being spun by his aides into the functional equivalent of preconditions.

Obama's long march to the center has begun.

And why not? What's the downside? He won't lose the left, or even mainstream Democrats. They won't stay home on Nov. 4. The anti-Bush, anti-Republican sentiment is simply too strong. Election Day is their day of revenge -- for the Florida recount, for Swift-boating, for all the injuries, real and imagined, dealt out by Republicans over the past eight years.

Normally, flip-flopping presidential candidates have to worry about the press. Not Obama. After all, this is a press corps that heard his grandiloquent Philadelphia speech -- designed to rationalize why "I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown my white grandmother" -- then wiped away a tear and hailed him as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. Three months later, with Wright disowned, grandma embraced and the great "race speech" now inoperative, not a word of reconsideration is heard from his media acolytes.

Worry about the press? His FISA flip-flop elicited a few grumbles from lefty bloggers, but hardly a murmur from the mainstream press. Remember his pledge to stick to public financing? Now flush with cash, he is the first general-election candidate since Watergate to opt out. Some goo-goo clean-government types chided him, but the mainstream editorialists who for years had been railing against private financing as hopelessly corrupt and corrupting evinced only the mildest of disappointment.

Indeed, the New York Times expressed a sympathetic understanding of Obama's about-face by buying his preposterous claim that it was a preemptive attack on McCain's 527 independent expenditure groups -- notwithstanding the fact that (a) as Politico's Jonathan Martin notes, "there are no serious anti-Obama 527s in existence nor are there any immediate plans to create such a group" and (b) the only independent ad of any consequence now running in the entire country is an AFSCME-MoveOn.org co-production savaging McCain.

True, Obama's U-turn on public financing was not done for ideological reasons, it was done for Willie Sutton reasons: That's where the money is. It nonetheless betrayed a principle that so many in the press claimed to hold dear.

As public financing is not a principle dear to me, I am hardly dismayed by Obama's abandonment of it. Nor am I disappointed in the least by his other calculated and cynical repositionings. I have never had any illusions about Obama. I merely note with amazement that his media swooners seem to accept his every policy reversal with an equanimity unseen since the Daily Worker would change the party line overnight -- switching sides in World War II, for example -- whenever the wind from Moscow changed direction.

The truth about Obama is uncomplicated. He is just a politician (though of unusual skill and ambition). The man who dared say it plainly is the man who knows Obama all too well. "He does what politicians do," explained Jeremiah Wright.

When it's time to throw campaign finance reform, telecom accountability, NAFTA renegotiation or Jeremiah Wright overboard, Obama is not sentimental. He does not hesitate. He tosses lustily.

Why, the man even tossed his own grandmother overboard back in Philadelphia -- only to haul her back on deck now that her services are needed. Yesterday, granny was the moral equivalent of the raving Reverend Wright. Today, she is a featured prop in Obama's fuzzy-wuzzy get-to-know-me national TV ad.

Not a flinch. Not a flicker. Not a hint of shame. By the time he's finished, Obama will have made the Clintons look scrupulous.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Supreme Courtier?

If the Supreme Court is boss, Congress is Dilbert.

By Jonah Goldberg
National Review Online
http://www.nationalreview.com/
June 27, 2008, 0:00 a.m.

Out of 16 major American institutions, Congress ranks dead last in the eyes of the American people according to Gallup. Even HMOs are more revered. If Carrot Top and Joey Buttafuoco were elected to Congress, it would improve the legislative branch’s reputation.

The reasons for Congress’s craptacular standing are too long to list here. But some culprits never get blamed, even though they are hiding in plain sight. Chief among them: the U.S. Supreme Court.

Have you ever had a boss who treated you like a child, second-guessed you, reworked whatever you did so that you felt no ownership of the final product? As a result, did you take your job less and less seriously precisely because you knew that whatever you produced wouldn’t really be yours anyway?

Well, the Supreme Court is the boss, and Congress is the Dilbert. There was a time when the U.S. Congress took the Constitution very seriously. Even after Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 case that established the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review, Congress and the president were still the chief guardians of the Constitution. Indeed, before the Civil War, only two acts of Congress were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

These days, the Court seems to find duly enacted laws unconstitutional six days a week and twice on Sunday.

Lawmakers rarely bother their pretty little heads with the Constitution. Rather, they just load as much spit, tar, Vaseline, and whatever else they can think of on a legislative fastball and try to get it over SCOTUS’ plate. If those imperial umpires don’t call a constitutional strike, well, then — voilá — it must be constitutional.

Presidents are no better. George W. Bush, in his one act that does approach an impeachable offense, signed campaign finance “reform” in 2002, even though he made it clear he thought the law was unconstitutional. At the ceremony, he expressed his “concerns” over the fact that the law — which he signed! — “restrains the speech of a wide variety of groups on issues of public import in the months closest to an election.”

But, have no fear, the super Court is here. “I expect,” he explained, “that the courts will resolve these legitimate legal questions as appropriate under the law.”

No sale. Congressmen, senators, and presidents alike swear to protect and defend the same constitution as the Supremes do. In the 19th century, Congress actually debated constitutionality with passion, and if it found a proposed law falling short of that standard, it was fixed or killed, not outsourced to the Supreme Court for retrofitting.

The Court, by assuming that responsibility, and the other branches of government, by surrendering it, have permanently damaged the constitutional order. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson believed that a judiciary with final jurisdiction over the constitutionality of presidential and legislative actions “would make the judiciary a despotic branch” of government.

Today, that despot has a name. It’s Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy rules — thanks to his status as the court’s swing vote — as the true King of America.

For example, Congress and the president hammered out a system for treating enemy combatants held at Guantanamo Bay — at the behest of the court. But that compromise wasn’t to His Majesty’s liking, so it was invalidated anyway in Boumediene v. Bush, which gave members of al-Qaeda more rights than captured Nazis in WWII.

Indeed, the whole debate in Congress has been over to what extent the Supreme Court should be running our POW system, not what our POW policy should in fact be.

And just this week, Justice Kennedy issued a diktat in which he quashed Louisiana’s sovereign and popular decision to execute a man for raping his eight-year-old stepdaughter in a manner so brutal the details cannot be even hinted at in this space. Why? Not because such executions violate the sensibilities of the public, or the constitutional precedents, or even what Kennedy calls “evolving standards” of decency, but simply because they are at odds with the court’s own sense of lèse-majesté.

Supreme Court critic Mark Levin has it right when he says that “every time the Supreme Court meets in secret conference, it sits as a constitutional convention, rewriting the Constitution at will.”

Aside from a legalistic-yet-lawless despotism that makes the meaning of our Constitution hinge on how much fiber Justice Kennedy’s diet has on a particular day, the result of this pathetic state of affairs is that the first branch of government doesn’t take itself seriously.

It is merely a caucus of goodie-givers, sent to Washington to dole out trinkets to whomever it may. At least the president is still charged with life-or-death decisions from time to time. But Congress doesn’t take itself seriously, so who can blame Americans for following its lead?

— Jonah Goldberg is the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning and editor-at-large of National Review Online.

© 2008 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Second Chances

By the Editors
National Review Online

http://www.nationalreview.com
June 26, 2008 2:50 PM

For decades, localities around the country — the capital, New York City, Chicago, and many of its suburbs — have violated their residents’ right to keep and bear arms. Each of these locations directly or indirectly bans handguns.

Today the Supreme Court, in a ruling that is faithful to the Constitution, struck down the handgun ban in the nation’s capital. This ruling is the beginning of a long process — it will not affect bans in Illinois or New York — but is a good sign in itself.

Some have alleged that this ruling is merely judicial activism from the right. Judicial activism, however, entails going beyond what’s in the Constitution — “finding” new rights, or stretching words past their plain meaning. By contrast, Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion simply affirms what anyone fluent in English would conclude after reading the constitutional text at issue: The Second Amendment protects an individual right.

The Amendment reads, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” As the opinion translates, this means, “Because a well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” This is not at all the same as saying that only militia members can bear arms, or that “the people” can only bear arms for militia-related purposes. The latter clause describes the right and describes it as belonging to “the people,” while the former merely announces a purpose.

What’s more, the opinion explicitly recognizes the difference between legislating and judging. In the ruling’s final paragraph, Scalia writes that the majority takes “seriously the concerns raised by the amici who believe that prohibition handgun ownership is a solution” to gun violence. However, “the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table.” Scalia’s opinion, which is in many ways quite narrow, leaves ample room for legislation regulating concealed-carry, the types of firearms that are permissible, and the conditions under which firearms are sold. Scalia reaffirms that the Supreme Court determines not whether policies are good, but whether policies are consistent with the Constitution.

Unlike the Supreme Court, we are not limited to the constitutional questions, and can say without reservation that handgun bans are no solution to gun violence. D.C.’s ban came into being in 1976; it caused no obvious drop in the crime rate and, when the drug wars hit a decade later, it did nothing to curb the bloodshed. In 2003 the Centers for Disease Control — a reliably antigun outfit — found itself unable to muster any evidence that gun control reduced crime. The National Academies of Science followed suit the next year.

We congratulate the Second Amendment movement’s success. The lawyers who argued the case, interested parties who filed friend-of-the-court briefs, and many others rose to the occasion. But their battle is not over.

The Constitution is designed to be a restriction on the federal government only. It was the Fourteenth Amendment that (as interpreted) applied many Bill of Rights provisions to state and local governments. Since D.C. is an enclave of the federal government, this lawsuit did not ask the court to decide whether the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Second.

And even if outright bans were to be found unconstitutional throughout the U.S., it would remain unclear exactly what kinds of gun control remain acceptable. We see no reason why the Second Amendment shouldn’t be incorporated, and this ruling seems to indicate that gun control will face an uphill battle before the Supreme Court. But we’ll hold off declaring victory until the high Court has further elaborated its jurisprudence on this issue.

For Girls, Learning the Right Moves May Prevent A Common Athletic Injury

By Michael Sokolove
Special to The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, June 3, 2008; Page HE01



Silver Spring United team members Chelsea Lo, left, Binta Ceesay, Emily Musy and Mina Ulasevich warm up before taking part in exercises designed to protect knee ligaments. (By Leah L. Jones For The Washington Post)

Silver Spring United, a girls' under-16 soccer team, assembled for practice one day last month and started into its regular routine, one that is a little different from that of most teams. Before working on their soccer skills and tactics, the girls spent about 15 minutes practicing how not to suffer a rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), the knee injury that is the scourge of women's sports.

The girls jogged around the field for a few minutes to warm up. They stretched their calf, quadriceps, hamstring and hip muscles, making sure to hold each one for 30 seconds. Then they moved on to the most important part of the program: a series of "plyometric" exercises designed to improve their balance and form when decelerating from sprints and landing from jumps.

They made short jumps forward, backward and laterally, each time concentrating on cues they had learned at the beginning of the season: "Keep your toes pointed straight ahead." "Keep your knees over your toes." "Land softly on your toes while bending your knees." They practiced heading the ball, making sure never to come down on just one leg. They balanced on one leg while tossing a soccer ball.

It was all utterly unremarkable to watch. The exercises were not arduous or complicated, which was part of the point: Silver Spring United is enrolled in a study to see whether ACL injury prevention can be broken down to its essentials and brought to community athletic fields.

A regular observer of these exercises is Maj. Anthony Beutler, an Air Force doctor and ACL researcher. This is his study, funded by a small grant from the School of Medicine of the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, where he is an assistant professor.

"I find it amazing more teams do not do something like this and that more parents don't demand it," Beutler said earlier in the season. "Parents are smart and highly involved in their children's lives." He estimated that among competitive girls' club teams in the Washington area, "one in four do some form of this training, something that could be construed as involving injury and ACL prevention. Half of those (one in eight) do it to some level of competence, meaning they have some professional -- a trainer, physical therapist, someone knowledgeable about exercise science -- who can institute it."

In sports that both sexes play using similar rules -- soccer, basketball, volleyball -- researchers estimate that female athletes rupture their ACLs at rates as high as five to eight times as great as men. The reconstructive surgery after an ACL rupture is complicated, the rehabilitation painful and long, and those who suffer an injury are at high risk for developing arthritic knees.



While ACL damage can be caused by slamming into another player and buckling the knee, the causes of non-contact ACL injuries are not fully understood, nor are the reasons female athletes are so much more prone to them. Women are, on average, more flexible than men, a performance advantage in many sports but an injury risk when not accompanied by the muscle strength to keep joints in stable positions.

Women's wider hips may also put more stress on the knee, and researchers have looked at hormonal factors as well. But they are most intensely interested in biomechanical factors that can be modified: Women tend to run differently, with a more upright posture than men's.

Beutler compares an ACL rupture to a sudden mechanical malfunction. The body fails to perform a task that it has successfully executed thousands of times, and a surge of energy -- rather than being absorbed in the lower leg and up through the trunk -- sinks into the knee and rips apart a crucial component.

"What we are trying to do with these girls is reprogram their minds to jump and land in such a way that there is some slack in the system," he explained. "We think one of the big things is to avoid rotation of the hips and knees. We want everything in line. Hips over knees. Knees over ankles. Ankles over toes. If you had to tell someone one thing, it would be: Land softly. Use your knee as a hinge."

Beutler is also associated with a National Institutes of Health-funded ACL study that is following students at the three major U.S. military academies. Led by researchers from the University of North Carolina's School of Public Health, that study is building a database of thousands of subjects and, using sophisticated equipment, compiling the digitized images of their jumping and landing forms. The goal is to identify common risk factors among those who go on to suffer ACL ruptures.

Beutler's project is smaller and much more low-tech. Twenty-five teams playing in Montgomery County (14 of them girls' teams) are enrolled. At the beginning of the season, each player is videotaped as she jumps and lands from a small platform. They are graded by the researchers according to their perceived risk for ACL injury. One whose knees cave inward on impact, for instance, would be judged high-risk. The players are videotaped again at the end of the season to see whether the exercise program has improved their form.

Beutler's exercises fit on a single sheet of paper, and he notes that the videotaping takes place with a camera "that anyone could buy for a couple of hundred bucks." Beutler and his research assistants have begun conducting customized exercise programs for players deemed at high risk.

"This is the wave of the future, where we can bring prevention to this level, out of the laboratory and onto a field," Beutler said. "I think we are getting to the point where we can look in real time and say, with 95 percent certainty, 'You are at low risk. You're at moderate risk. And you're at high risk.' And we can design programs for each of those athletes."

Beutler did not want any recreational-level teams in his trial because they move more slowly and create so little force that they don't stand much chance of hurting themselves. Silver Spring United, a mix of varsity high school players and some junior varsity performers, competes in the classic division of Montgomery County Soccer Inc. "I saw a need [for injury prevention], and I went looking for something," said their coach, Karen Giacopuzzi, who signed up with Beutler after learning that he was seeking teams in the area.

Her players have made ACL prevention part of their routine. The captains led the exercises, with Giacopuzzi standing off to the side. In the season before entering Beutler's program, team members suffered two knee injuries, both of them meniscus tears that required surgery. They have had no significant knee injuries in the 18 months since.



Ellen Jackson is videotaped by Courtney Salgado, right, and Gordon Salgado. (Leah L. Jones - For The Washington Post)

Michelle Morris, 16, caught Beutler's attention because he thought she looked like the best athlete on the field. She moved with a low center of gravity and a springiness, the opposite of the stiff, upright gait that causes alarm. She was among several of the Silver Spring players who said she thought the exercises had improved her form. "I think my balance is way better now," Morris said. "I never learned how to land properly. I fell down a lot, but now, not at all."

The response was significant to Beutler because several studies have identified poor balance as a predictor of ACL injuries. An athlete who loses balance may twist her body at inopportune times -- for example, with one leg planted and extended out from her body -- while she is stopping or trying to change direction.

This is the third year of Beutler's pilot study, and for the first time, a player on one of the teams under study (a girl) has torn an ACL. He went back and looked at the videotape of her form when she jumped off a platform, and it revealed what he expected: Her knees caved in on landing, and she scored at high risk. The program did not protect her, but it seems to have had a positive effect on others.

It is not a huge group that Beutler has been observing. Nevertheless, the nearly total absence of injuries has encouraged him, considering that it is not uncommon for just one high school or club team of girls to suffer multiple ACL injuries in one season. He has seen one out of a group of about 400.

Studies elsewhere indicate that even relatively low levels of intervention -- swapping out a traditional warm-up for one that includes injury prevention -- may have an impact on lowering ACL injury rates.

The question remains whether coaches will buy in, especially coaches of go-go club teams seeking entries to the most prestigious tournaments and scholarships for their players. They often do not like to do anything they perceive as subtracting from practice time.

Beutler's answer is straightforward: "But you've got to do a warm-up anyway. So why not do this or something like it?"

This article is adapted from "Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women's Sports," published this week by Simon and Schuster. Comments:health@washpost.com. Michael Sokolove will be live online at noon today to answer readers' questions at www.washingtonpost.com/health.

Today's Tune: The Dubliners - Raglan Road

(Click on title to play video)

You Can't Fuel All of the People All of the Time

by Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
Posted: 06/25/2008

Liberals dismiss studies that show a link between abortion and breast cancer, claiming they are biased because the people promoting the studies are "anti-choice."

For the same reason, no one should believe the Democrats' "energy" policies.

Democrats couldn't care less about high gas prices. The consistent policy of the Democratic Party, going back at least to Jimmy Carter, has been to jack up gas prices so we can all start pedaling around on tricycles.

Environmentalists are constantly clamoring for higher gas taxes as the cure-all to their insane global warming theory. Clinton proposed a 26-cent tax on gas. John Kerry said it should be 50 cents. Gore endorsed the Malthusian proposal of Paul and Anne Ehrlich in "The Population Explosion" that gas taxes be raised gradually to match prices in Europe and Japan.

The result is consumers now pay about 46 cents per gallon in gasoline taxes. That's not including taxes paid directly to the government by the oil companies and passed onto consumers. As the inestimable economist John Lott has pointed out, in the past 25 years oil companies have paid more than three times in taxes what they have made in profits.

B. Hussein Obama's response to soaring gas prices is to have the oil companies collect even more money from us at the pump, proposing a "windfall profits tax" on oil companies. "Corporate taxes" sound like taxes on rich people, but all they do is force corporations to collect taxes on behalf of the government.

Democrats have worked hard to ensure that Americans pay as much for gas as Europeans do. After a quarter-century of gas tax hikes, a ban on drilling for oil and a complete destruction of the nuclear power industry in America, I guess liberals can declare: Mission accomplished!

In response to skyrocketing gas prices, liberals say, practically in unison, "We can't drill our way out of this crisis."

What does that mean? This is like telling a starving man, "You can't eat your way out of being hungry!" "You can't water your way out of drought!" "You can't sleep your way out of tiredness!" "You can't drink yourself out of dehydration!"

Seriously, what does it mean? Finding more oil isn't going to increase the supply of oil?

It is the typical Democratic strategy to babble meaningless slogans, as if they have a plan. Their plan is: the permanent twilight of the human race. It's the only solution they can think of to deal with the beastly traffic on the LIE (Long Island Expressway).

How do liberals propose we acquire the energy required for the economic activity and production that results in light appearing when they flick a switch? The larger enterprise involved in producing that little miracle eludes them.

Liberals complain that -- as B. Hussein Obama put it -- there's "no way that allowing offshore drilling would lower gas prices right now. At best you are looking at five years or more down the road."

This is as opposed to airplanes that run on woodchips, which should be up and running any moment now.

Moreover, what was going on five years ago? Why didn't anyone propose drilling back then?

Say, you know what we need? We need a class of people paid to anticipate national crises and plan solutions in advance. It would be such an important job, the taxpayers would pay them salaries so they wouldn't have to worry about making a living and could just sit around anticipating crises.
If only we had had such a group -- let's call them "elected representatives" -- they could have proposed drilling five years ago!

But of course we do pay people to anticipate national problems and propose solutions. Some of them -- we'll call them Republicans -- did anticipate high gas prices and propose solutions.

Six long years ago President Bush had the foresight to demand that Congress allow drilling in a minuscule portion of the Alaska's barren, uninhabitable Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). In 2002, Bush, Tom DeLay and the entire Republican Party were screaming from the rooftops: Drill! Drill! Drill!

We'd be gushing oil now -- except the Democrats stopped us from drilling.

Drilling on only 0.01 percent of ANWR's 19 million acres was projected to produce about 10 billion barrels of oil. From all domestic sources combined, we currently produce about 1.8 billion barrels of oil per year. To a layperson like myself, 10 billion barrels seems like a lot of oil.

The other party -- plus John McCain -- ferociously opposed drilling in ANWR, drilling offshore or drilling anyplace else. Instead of Drill! Drill! Drill!, their motto could be: Kill! Kill! Kill!

They refuse to believe our abortion studies? I refuse to believe they care about Americans having to pay high gas prices.

CAIR's Traitorous Cop Ally

By Paul Sperry

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

If the Taliban catches an American spy, they slit the informer's throat. If we catch a pro-Taliban spy, he gets a slap on the wrist after getting a letter from a Muslim pressure group urging leniency. Who says we're winning this war?

Last month, Taliban fighters claimed to have killed a "female U.S. spy" for helping American forces in Afghanistan. Once all the evidence against the alleged spy was gathered, they slit her throat with a knife.

Compare that with the kid glove treatment of Sgt. Muhammad Weiss Rasool, a Muslim cop in the nation's capital who tipped off the target of an FBI terrorism investigation into a pro-Taliban mosque.

Despite his arrest, confession and recent conviction in federal court, Rasool, an Afghan immigrant, will do no jail time and will continue to collect a paycheck from taxpayers pending the results of an internal-affairs probe by the Fairfax County Police Department outside Washington.

Rasool took an oath to protect this country several years ago when he joined the FCPD, which is the largest force in Virginia and a key partner with the FBI in investigating major terror cases in the Washington area, including the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon.

But Rasool put his religion ahead of his adopted country when he alerted a fellow member of his mosque that he was under federal surveillance. At his Muslim brother's request, he searched a police database and confirmed that FBI agents were tailing him.When agents went to arrest the target early one morning, they found him and his family already dressed and destroying evidence. They knew they had a mole and worked back through the system to find Rasool.

That's when agents discovered the police sergeant had breached their database at least 15 times to look up names of other contacts, including relatives, to see if they showed up on the terrorist watch list. (As part of post-9/11 data-sharing, local police now have access to classified federal case files on terrorists maintained within the NCIC, or National Crime Information Center system.)

Rasool's actions "damaged the integrity of the NCIC system and jeopardized at least one federal investigation," U.S. prosecutors said in court papers filed last month. "The defendant's actions could have placed federal agents in danger."

Rasool, 31, at first claimed he didn't know the terrorist target. He confessed only after hearing a recording of his message for the suspect, who was a cleric in his local Taliban-sympathizing mosque. Rasool finally pleaded guilty to illegally searching a federal database.

Despite his subsequent conviction, however, Fairfax County has left him on the force, pending the outcome of an internal investigation. The leniency afforded Rasool is unprecedented, given how he copped to the crime – and not just any crime, but one that betrayed his fellow officers and country.

It also contrasts starkly with the recent handling of other Arab and Muslim government employees caught breaching classified databases.

The city of Rochester, N.Y., for example, summarily fired a Muslim 911 operator, Nadire Zenelaj, well before she was formally charged last month with illegally searching the names of hundreds of friends in the terrorist watch list. And as part of a federal plea deal, Lebanese national Nada Prouty resigned from the U.S. government after confessing she accessed a restricted FBI database to see if relatives were being investigated for terrorist activities.

Unlike these alleged spies, however, Rasool has a powerful patron in Washington -- the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which lobbied on his behalf during his prosecution.

"I have always found Sgt. Rasool eager to promote a substantive relationship between the Fairfax County Police Department and the local Muslim community," wrote CAIR Governmental Affairs Coordinator Corey Saylor in a letter to the federal judge, who ended up denying prosecutors the jail time they requested for Rasool. (He got off lightly with a fine and two years probation.)

Indeed, Rasool acted as CAIR's representative on the police force, and even worked with the group to kill a successful counterterror-training program within the department.

Rasool and other Muslim officers tied to CAIR claimed the course taught by the respected Higgins Center for Counter Terrorism Research portrayed Islam in a bad light. CAIR phoned Fairfax County Police Chief David Rohrer to complain, and the chief canceled the training in 2006.

That same year, Rohrer spoke at CAIR's annual fundraising dinner in Washington, crediting the group with "helping police departments to better understand the Muslim community."

But the chief was being used -- by the Islamist enemy. It turns out his aggrieved sergeant at the time was under federal investigation for aiding and abetting terrorists. And so was CAIR -- the group from whom Rohrer was accepting phone calls and on whom he was conferring legitimacy. In fact, U.S. prosecutors at the time were adding CAIR to a list of co-conspirators in a terror scheme to funnel more than $12 million to Hamas suicide bombers and their families.

Yet CAIR and Rasool teamed up to persuade the politically correct Rohrer to nix the anti-terror training, which included counterintelligence measures to help police guard against the very infiltration from terror supporters and facilitators that has taken place on Rohrer's watch.

Sadly, the chief appears more concerned about protecting the force from charges of "Islamophobia" than Islamist penetration.Rasool, still on paid leave, says he hopes to be permanently reinstated. If so, it would mark a humiliating defeat in our battle against the growing Islamist 5th column in America. Rasool has a dangerous religious conflict, and should never wear the uniform again.

Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington. He can be conacted at Sperry@SperryFiles.com.