From The New York Times:

Harry Potter Works His Magic Again in a Far Darker Tale
By Michiko Kakutani

In an earlier Harry Potter novel, Sibyll Trelawney, divination teacher, looks at Harry and declares that her inner eye sees past his "brave face to the troubled soul within."

"I regret to say that your worries are not baseless," she adds. "I see difficult times ahead for you, alas ... most difficult ... I fear the thing you dread will indeed come to pass ... and perhaps sooner than you think."

In "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," that frightening prophecy does in fact come true - in a thoroughly harrowing denouement that sees the death of yet another important person in Harry's life, and that renders this, the sixth volume of the series, the darkest and most unsettling installment yet.

It is a novel that pulls together dozens of plot strands from previous volumes, underscoring how cleverly and carefully J. K. Rowling has assembled this giant jigsaw puzzle of an epic. It is also a novel that depicts Harry Potter, now 16, as more alone than ever - all too well aware of loss and death, and increasingly isolated by his growing reputation as "the Chosen One," picked from among all others to do battle with the Dark Lord, Voldemort.

As the novel opens, the wizarding world is at war: Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters have grown so powerful that their evil deeds have spilled over into the Muggle world of nonmagic folks. The Muggles' prime minister has been alerted by the Ministry of Magic about the rise of Voldemort. And the terrible things that Ms. Rowling describes as being abroad in the green and pleasant land of England read like a grim echo of events in our own post-9/11, post-7/7 world and an uncanny reminder that the Hogwarts Express, which Harry and his friends all take to school, leaves from King's Cross station - the very station where the suspected London bombers gathered minutes before the explosions that rocked the city nine days ago.

Harry, who as an infant miraculously survived a Voldemort attack that killed his mother and father, is regarded as "a symbol of hope" by many in the wizarding world, and as he learns more about the Dark Lord's obsession with his family, he realizes that he has a destiny he cannot escape. Like Luke Skywalker, he is eager to play the role of hero. But like Spider-Man, he is also aware of the burden that that role imposes: although he has developed romantic yearnings for a certain girl, he is wary of involvement, given his recognition of the dangers he will have to face.

"It's been like ... like something out of someone else's life, these last few weeks with you," he tells her. "But I can't ... we can't ... I've got things to do alone now."

Indeed, the perilous task Professor Dumbledore sets Harry in this volume will leave him with less and less time for Quidditch and hanging out with his pals Ron and Hermione: he is to help his beloved teacher find four missing Horcruxes - super-secret, magical objects in which Voldemort has secreted parts of his soul as a means of ensuring his immortality. Only when all of these items have been found and destroyed, Harry is told, can the Dark Lord finally be vanquished.

There are a host of other unsettling developments in this novel, too: the Dementors, those fearsome creatures in charge of guarding Azkaban Prison, have joined forces with Voldemort; Draco Malfoy, Harry's sneering classmate who boasts of moving on to "bigger and better things," appears to vanish regularly from the school grounds; the sinister Severus Snape has been named the new teacher of defense against the dark arts; two Hogwarts students are nearly killed in mysterious attacks; and Dumbledore suddenly turns up with a badly injured hand, which he declines to explain. One of the few bright spots in Harry's school life appears to be an old textbook annotated by its enigmatic former owner, who goes by the name the Half-Blood Prince - a book that initially supplies Harry with some helpful tips for making potions.

The early and middle sections of this novel meld the ordinary and the fantastic in the playful fashion Ms. Rowling has patented in her previous books, capturing adolescent angst about boy-girl and student-teacher relations with perfect pitch. Ron and Hermione, as well as Harry, all become involved in romantic flirtations with other students, even as they begin to realize that their O.W.L. (Ordinary Wizarding Level) grades may well determine the course of their post-Hogwarts future. As the story proceeds, however, it grows progressively more somber, eventually becoming positively Miltonian in its darkness. In fact, two of the novel's final scenes - like the violent showdown between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker in the last "Star Wars" movie, "Revenge of the Sith" - may well be too alarming for the youngest readers.

Harry still has his wry sense of humor and a plucky boyish heart, but as in the last volume ("Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"), he is more Henry V than Prince Hal, more King Arthur than the young Wart. He has emerged, at school and on the Quidditch field, as an unquestioned leader: someone who must learn to make unpopular decisions and control his impetuous temper, someone who must keep certain secrets from his schoolmates and teachers.

He has become more aware than ever of what he and Voldemort have in common - from orphaned childhoods to an ability to talk Parseltongue (i.e., snake speech) to the possession of matching wands - and in one chilling scene, he is forced to choose between duty to his mission and his most heartfelt emotions. In discovering the true identity of the Half-Blood Prince, Harry will learn to re-evaluate the value of first impressions and the possibility that his elders' convictions can blind them to parlous truths. And in embracing his own identity, he will discover his place in history.

As in earlier volumes, Ms. Rowling moves Harry's story forward by chronicling his adventures at Hogwarts, while simultaneously moving backward in time through the use of flashbacks (via Dumbledore's remarkable Pensieve, a receptacle for people's memories). As a result, this is a coming-of-age story that chronicles the hero's evolution not only by showing his maturation through a series of grueling tests, but also by detailing the growing emotional wisdom he gains from understanding more and more about the past.

In addition to being a bildungsroman, of course, the Harry Potter books are also detective stories, quest narratives, moral fables, boarding school tales and action-adventure thrill rides, and Ms. Rowling uses her tireless gift for invention to thread these genres together, while at the same time taking myriad references and tropes (borrowed from such disparate sources as Shakespeare, Dickens, fairy tales, Greek myths and more recent works like "Star Wars") and making them her own.

Perhaps because of its position as the penultimate installment of a seven-book series, "The Half-Blood Prince" suffers, at moments, from an excess of exposition. Some of Dumbledore's speeches to Harry have a forced, summing-up quality, and the reader can occasionally feel Ms. Rowling methodically setting the stage for developments to come or fleshing out scenarios put in play by earlier volumes (most notably, "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets," with its revelations about the young Voldemort, a k a Tom Riddle).

Such passages, however, are easily forgotten, as the plot hurtles along, gaining a terrible momentum in this volume's closing pages. At the same time, the suspense generated by these books does not stem solely from the tension of wondering who will die next or how one or another mystery will be solved. It stems, as well, from Ms. Rowling's dexterity in creating a character-driven tale, a story in which a person's choices determine the map of his or her life - a story that creates a hunger to know more about these people who have become so palpably real.

We want to know more about Harry's parents - how they met and married and died - because that may tell us more about Harry's own yearnings and decisions. We want to know more about Dumbledore's desire to believe the best of everyone because that may shed light on whom he chooses to trust. We want to know more about the circumstances of Tom Riddle's birth because that may shed light on his decision to reinvent himself as Lord Voldemort.

Indeed, the achievement of the Potter books is the same as that of the great classics of children's literature, from the Oz novels to "The Lord of the Rings": the creation of a richly imagined and utterly singular world, as detailed, as improbable and as mortal as our own

From Backstreets.com:

DAVID SANCIOUS DISCUSSES BORN TO RUN 30TH ANNIVERSARY SET

Early E Street keyboardist David Sancious spoke with Jay Lustig in today's Star-Ledger, in advance of tomorrow night's show at the Two River Theatre in Red Bank. Along the way, he mentioned his participation in an upcoming 30th Anniversary reissue of Born to Run -- a project that has been in the works more many a month and rumored aplenty, though there has yet to be an official announcement.

Sancious says, "A couple of months ago, I did an interview for a documentary that Bruce's company is making about the 30th anniversary of Born to Run. They got everybody down to New York City in a studio and filmed interviews with everybody who played on [the album], getting people to remember the sessions and tell stories about what went on."

While it's too early for set-in-stone details, the reissue is planned as a lavishly packaged multi-disc affair, including the remastered BTR CD along with bonus material including a long-awaited official DVD of performance footage from the era and the making-of documentary Sancious mentions. Look for a release date in late summer or fall.

From The Sun:

Beatles breakup film due on DVD
By Terry Ott

Could the end of the long, long winding road to the release on DVD of the Beatles' 1970 breakup flick, Let It Be, actually be in sight?

According to Beatles Anthology director Bob Smeaton, the Let It Be DVD, punched up with "remarkable bonus material," will be released in September. Smeaton told a Denver, Colo., radio station that the DVD release had been delayed due to the sheer volume of film stock shot, and colour restoration issues.

Although Smeaton did not identify any of the extra material, Beatles fans are clamoring for a 5.1 surround sound mix, and the inclusion of what's known as the complete rooftop gig. That's the Jan. 30, 1969, 35-minute show played by the Fab Four on the roof of their London headquarters, but which was only partially shown in the film.

Good quality audio-only bootlegs of the complete show are in circulation, but film of the mini concert has remained secure in Apple Corps vaults.

The original 80-minute Let It Be film, unavailable on home video for over 20 years, is expected on DVD to be fleshed out with original Nagra audio recordings that went missing from Apple in the early '70s, but which were recovered in a police raid on bootleggers in the Netherlands in January 2003.

The recovered tapes would allow some film footage that was without original sound to be used for the DVD, including many Beatles takes of old time rock 'n' roll and jam sessions.

Also on the reissue front, George Harrison's 1971 Concert For Bangladesh on both remastered CD and DVD will be released Oct. 25.

Early reports say that the reissued Concert For Bangladesh, perhaps the first all-star rock benefit of its time, will also contain extra material, including a song by Bob Dylan left off the original three-album deluxe box set.

Details are sketchy, but some Internet Beatles news sites suggest that the reissued Bangladesh could contain unissued material from both the matinee and evening performances of the show, held at Madison Square Garden, Aug. 1, 1971, and featuring the likes of Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and Leon Russell.

Reportedly, Harrison had been searching unsuccessfully for the master tapes of the concert just prior to his death, but they were eventually located, and the reissue may contain a heretofore unissued Dylan song from the concert.

Finally, Sir Paul McCartney will be touring this fall behind a new release, his first since 2001. Chaos And Creation In The Back Yard, said to be "a return to basics" for McCartney, will debut Sept. 13.

From washingtonpost.com:

A Hawk Questions Himself as His Son Goes to War
By Eliot A. Cohen

Sunday, July 10, 2005

War forces us, or should force us, to ask hard questions of ourselves. As a military historian, a commentator on current events and the father of a young Army officer, these are mine.

You supported the Iraq war when it was launched in 2003. If you had known then what you know now, would you still have been in favor of it?

As I watched President Bush give his speech at Fort Bragg to rally support for the war the other week, I contemplated this question from a different vantage than my usual professorial perch. Our oldest son now dresses like the impassive soldiers who served as stage props for that event; he too wears crossed rifles, jump wings and a Ranger tab. Before long he will fight in the war that I advocated, and that the president was defending.

So it is not an academic matter when I say that what I took to be the basic rationale for the war still strikes me as sound. Iraq was a policy problem that we could evade in words but not escape in reality. But what I did not know then that I do know now is just how incompetent we would be at carrying out that task. And that's what prevents me from answering this question with an unhesitating yes.

The Bush administration did itself a disservice by resting much of its case for war on Iraq's actual possession of weapons of mass destruction. The true arguments for war reached deeper than that. Long before 2003, weapons inspections in Iraq had broken down, and sanctions, thanks to countries like Russia, China and France, were failing. The regime's character and ambitions, including its desire to resume suspended weapons programs, had not changed. In the meanwhile, the policy of isolation had brought suffering to the Iraqi people and had not stabilized the Gulf. Read Osama bin Laden's fatwas in the late 1990s and see how the massive American presence in Saudi Arabia -- a presence born of the need to keep Saddam Hussein in his cage -- fed the outrage of the jihadis with whom we are in a war that will last a generation or more.

More than this: Decades of American policy had hoped to achieve stability in the Middle East by relying on accommodating thugs and kleptocrats to maintain order. That policy, too, had failed; it was the well-educated children of our client regimes who leveled the Twin Towers, after all.

The administration was and is right in thinking that the overthrow of Saddam's regime could change the pattern of Middle Eastern politics in ways that, by favoring the cause of decent government and basic freedoms, would favor our interests as well. Iraq will not become Switzerland, a progressive and prosperous social democracy, for generations, if ever. But it can become a state that makes room for the various confessions and communities that constitute it, that has reasonably open and free politics, and that chooses a path to a future that could inspire other changes in the Arab Middle East. I still think something like that will happen. The administration believed that the invasion of Iraq would jolt and transform a region bewitched by the malignant dreams that my colleague Fouad Ajami has described so well -- the dark fantasies of Baathists, ultra-nationalists and religious fanatics. And indeed, in the aftermath of the Iraq war the cracks have begun to show -- in Libya, Lebanon, Egypt, and even in Syria and Saudi Arabia.

But a pundit should not recommend a policy without adequate regard for the ability of those in charge to execute it, and here I stumbled. I could not imagine, for example, that the civilian and military high command would treat "Phase IV" -- the post-combat period that has killed far more Americans than the "real" war -- as of secondary importance to the planning of Gen. Tommy Franks's blitzkrieg. I never dreamed that Ambassador Paul Bremer and Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the two top civilian and military leaders early in the occupation of Iraq -- brave, honorable and committed though they were -- would be so unsuited for their tasks, and that they would serve their full length of duty nonetheless. I did not expect that we would begin the occupation with cockamamie schemes of creating an immobile Iraqi army to defend the country's borders rather than maintain internal order, or that the under-planned, under-prepared and in some respects mis-manned Coalition Provisional Authority would seek to rebuild Iraq with big construction contracts awarded under federal acquisition regulations, rather than with small grants aimed at getting angry, bewildered young Iraqi men off the streets and into jobs.

I did not know, but I might have guessed.

You are a military historian; what does the history of war have to tell us about the future of Iraq?

History provides perspective and context, not lessons. The failures and squandered opportunities of that first year in Iraq do not look that different from some of the institutional stupidities we saw in Vietnam. What is different here is how quickly -- relatively speaking -- the United States changed its course. It took five years before we became serious about training our Vietnamese allies to take our place. It has taken about a year to get serious about training Iraqis.

The political side of insurgency, which is the side that counts most, never really came to the fore in Vietnam, but it has in Iraq. For the presidents who got us into Vietnam, and for that matter out of it, the war was a distraction from other, more important priorities. For this president, the war is the defining decision of his tenure, and he knows it. Whatever his faults may be, a lack of determination is not one of them. And in war, character -- and above all persistence -- counts for a very great deal.

That's particularly true here because counterinsurgency is inherently a long, long business. Conceivably, the Iraqi insurgency could collapse in a year or so, but that would be highly unusual. More likely Iraq will suffer from chronic violence, which need not prevent the country as a whole from progressing. If the insurgencies in Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka and Kashmir continue, what reason do we have to expect this one to end so soon? Most insurgencies do, however, fail. Moreover, most insurgencies consist of a collection of guerrilla microclimates in which local conditions -- charismatic leaders (or their absence), ethnographic peculiarities, concrete grievances -- determine how much violence will occur and with what effect.

This is an unusually invertebrate insurgency, without a central organization or ideology, a coherent set of objectives or a common positive purpose. The FLN in 5lgeria or the Viet Cong were far more cohesive and directed. The decentralized ad hoc nature of the insurgency makes it harder to figure out, but also less likely to succeed; there is a reason why it is well-organized and disciplined guerrillas who eventually occupy presidential palaces. And with all of its errors and follies, the United States remains an extraordinarily wealthy and formidable foe. By any historical standard, our resources are immense, our technology fabulous, the quality of our people on the ground superb. We have far more power than the Britain of the 19th century or the America of the 1960s. That fact may invite hubris, but it also provides solace.

None of this predetermines the outcome, of course, or foretells the consequences of a muddled success or a blurred failure in Iraq. Historians have the comfort of knowing how past wars played out. But short of clairvoyance, no one can forecast the outcome and the second- or third-order effects of events as they unfold. Five or even 10 years from now, we still may not be able to judge our Iraq venture in a definitive way. Unfortunately, that philosophical detachment is cold consolation in the here and now, as young men and women go off to war.

Your son is an infantry officer, shipping out soon for Iraq. How do you feel about that?

Pride, of course -- great pride. And fear. And an occasional burning in the gut, a flare of anger at empty pieties and lame excuses, at flip answers and a lack of urgency, at a failure to hold those at the top to the standards of accountability that the military system rightly imposes on subalterns.

It is a flicker of rage that two years into an insurgency, we still expose our troops in Humvees to the blasts of roadside bombs -- knowing that even the armored version of that humble successor to the Jeep is simply not designed for warfare along guerrilla-infested highways, while, at the same time, knowing that plenty of countries manufacture armored cars that are. It is disbelief at a manpower system that, following its prewar routines, ships soldiers off to war for a year or 15 months, giving them two weeks of leave at the end, when our British comrades, more experienced in these matters and wiser in pacing themselves, ship troops out for half that time, and give them an extra month on top of their regular leave after an operational deployment.

It is the sick feeling that churned inside me at least 18 months ago, when a glib and upbeat Pentagon bureaucrat assured me that the opposition in Iraq consisted of "5,000 bitter-enders and criminals," even after we had killed at least that many. It flames up when hearing about the veteran who in theory has a year between Iraq rotations, but in fact, because he transferred between units after returning from one tour, will go back to Iraq half a year later, and who, because of "stop-loss orders" involuntarily extending active duty tours, will find himself in combat nine months after his enlistment runs out. And all this because after 9/11, when so many Americans asked for nothing but an opportunity to serve, we did not expand our Army and Marine Corps when we could, even though we knew we would need more troops.

A variety of emotions wash over me as I reflect on our Iraq war: Disbelief at the length of time it took to call an insurgency by its name. Alarm at our continuing failure to promote at wartime speed the colonels and generals who have a talent for fighting it, while also failing to sweep aside those who do not. Incredulity at seeing decorations pinned on the chests and promotions on the shoulders of senior leaders -- both civilians and military -- who had the helm when things went badly wrong. Disdain for the general who thinks Job One is simply whacking the bad guys and who, ever conscious of public relations, cannot admit that American soldiers have tortured prisoners or, in panic, killed innocent civilians. Contempt for the ghoulish glee of some who think they were right in opposing the war, and for the blithe disregard of the bungles by some who think they were right in favoring it. A desire -- barely controlled -- to slap the highly educated fool who, having no soldier friends or family, once explained to me that mistakes happen in all wars, and that the casualties are not really all that high and that I really shouldn't get exercised about them.

There is a lot of talk these days about shaky public support for the war. That is not really the issue. Nor should cheerleading, as opposed to truth-telling, be our leaders' chief concern. If we fail in Iraq -- and I don't think we will -- it won't be because the American people lack heart, but because leaders and institutions have failed. Rather than fretting about support at home, let them show themselves dedicated to waging and winning a strange kind of war and describing it as it is, candidly and in detail. Then the American people will give them all the support they need. The scholar in me is not surprised when our leaders blunder, although the pundit in me is dismayed when they do. What the father in me expects from our leaders is, simply, the truth -- an end to happy talk and denials of error, and a seriousness equal to that of the men and women our country sends into the fight.

Eliot Cohen is Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University

From The New York Times:

Johnson and Yankees Will Their Way to Optimistic Finish to First Half
By Tyler Kepner

About an hour into his All-Star Game break, George Steinbrenner marched into a Yankee Stadium elevator yesterday with his shades on, his chin up and his chest out. At last, his team also seemed stout. Winners of seven out of eight games, the Yankees must look just as he expected.

"The way they're playing right now, yeah," said Steinbrenner, the principal owner. "Not the way they were playing before this."

The comment underscored a lesson the Yankees learned in the first half. After Randy Johnson's 9-4 victory over the Cleveland Indians yesterday, the Yankees hit the break six games over .500, matching their high point this season. But their optimism is tinged with caution. Their previous failures are never far from their memories.

For 86 games, the Yankees have played Chutes and Ladders. They lost 19 of 30 to start the season. Then they won 16 of 18. Then they dropped 11 of 14. Then came a 6-0 stretch, a 1-5 skid and the current 9-3 run.

Just who are the Yankees? They do not talk much about defining themselves. The American League East standings matter most, and for the next three days, the Yankees will be frozen at two and a half games behind Boston and a half-game behind Baltimore. On Thursday, they start a four-game series against the Red Sox at Fenway Park.

"We're starting to play our best baseball," Johnson said. "So it's good timing."

The offense is rolling, scoring at least seven runs five times in the last week. Jason Giambi has five home runs in the last six games, Gary Sheffield four. Both homered again yesterday. Hideki Matsui, who was 3 for 4, has reached base safely in his last 36 games.

The Yankees are winning even though their pitching has rarely been shakier. They have three starters on the disabled list, and setup man Tom Gordon missed the last three games with shoulder tendinitis. Those issues made Johnson's performance especially important.

Johnson (9-6) was far from dominant, allowing at least one hit in each of his six innings, but he managed to strike out eight and allow only three runs. He dodged serious danger, but he had to wade his way through another deep A.L. lineup.

After six and a half seasons in the National League, where he could count on blowing away a pitcher once every nine batters, Johnson gave up two hits yesterday to the Indians' ninth hitter, Aaron Boone.

"There's nobody in this league that swings like a pitcher," Johnson said, smiling. "It's been a learning curve."

Johnson has not handled it as well as he hoped. Asked to grade his first half, he gave himself a C-plus or a B-minus.

But yesterday seemed like a significant step for Johnson. He kept his composure and won on a day when his slider was flat and he could not locate his inside pitches to right-handers.

"Today was probably one of those games that wouldn't have worked out real well a few weeks ago for him, and he found a way to struggle and get by," catcher John Flaherty said. "That's the sign of a good pitcher: when you don't have your good stuff, you're able to get quality starts. We feel good about where he's at right now."

Johnson has built his arm strength and sharpened his mechanics, helping him win four of his last five decisions. But Flaherty, who has caught six of Johnson's last seven starts, said Johnson's mentality made the biggest difference yesterday.

"Knowing that he doesn't have his good stuff and probably being frustrated out there, he kind of just threw it all aside and willed his way through six innings," Flaherty said. "Sometimes that's more impressive than when he goes out there with his nasty stuff and dominates."

The Yankees had determined Friday that they would not use Gordon the rest of the series. Gordon left Thursday's game after three batters, and with the break coming up, the Yankees planned to rest him.

"He'll be available as Joe wants to use him for the Boston series," General Manager Brian Cashman said, referring to Manager Joe Torre. "He wanted to pitch, but we said no. He has a mild case of tendinitis; let's not turn it into a major case. We were able to sneak away with a couple of wins."

They did it because others filled in. After Wayne Franklin faltered in the seventh yesterday, Tanyon Sturtze and Mariano Rivera finished up.

Sturtze relieved Franklin with one out and runners on first and second in the seventh inning, the Yankees ahead by 6-4. He struck out Victor Martinez and got a pop-up from Casey Blake, leaving the tying runs on base.

"That was the turning point of the game," Flaherty said. "Sturtzie came up huge."

So did Rivera, who got his first six-out save since July 11, 2003. Rivera, an All-Star, retired all six hitters he faced yesterday, striking out three and finishing the first half with 20 consecutive saves and a 1.01 earned run average.

When Coco Crisp took Rivera's fastball to end the game, everything seemed right in the Bronx. The Yankees could be poised for a playoff push, even after the adversity they brought upon themselves.

"I don't know if it brought us together," Cashman said. "It was nice to see it didn't tear us apart."

INSIDE PITCH

Manager Joe Torre said the Yankees' first three starters for the series in Boston after the All-Star Game break would be Mike Mussina, Chien-Ming Wang and Randy Johnson. The Red Sox will start Bronson Arroyo, David Wells, Matt Clement and Tim Wakefield. The Yankees want Carl Pavano to start the fourth game, but he is on the disabled list with a sore shoulder and may not be ready.

The right-hander Felix Rodriguez, recovering from a knee injury, should rejoin the Yankees by Thursday, General Manager Brian Cashman said. Rodriguez is scheduled to pitch in the minor leagues today and Wednesday.

Cashman said he did not expect starter Kevin Brown to be back until the second time through the rotation after the break, at the earliest. Brown has missed almost a month with a strained lower back and is still not throwing off a mound.

From Opinion Journal:

Property Rights Are Civil Rights
Opposition to the Kelo decision crosses racial and party lines.
By John Fund

Monday, July 11, 2005

In 1954 the Supreme Court declared in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. But that same year it also ruled in Berman v. Parker that government's power of eminent domain could be used to seize property in order to tear down "blighted" areas.

It soon became clear that too often urban renewal really meant "Negro removal," as cities increasingly razed stable neighborhoods to benefit powerful interests. That helps explain why 50 years later so many minority groups are furious at the Supreme Court's decision last month to build on the Berman precedent and give government a green light to take private property that isn't "blighted" if it can be justified in the name of economic development.

Within a week of the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Kelo v. New London, Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and the longest-serving member of the Congressional Black Caucus, pronounced himself "shocked" to be joining with conservatives in backing a bill to bar federal funds from being used to make improvements on any lands seized for private development. He noted that the NAACP, Operation PUSH and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights all believe "this court opinion makes it too easy for private property to be taken and [this is a practice] that has been used historically to target the poor, people of color and the elderly." The measure blocking federal funds passed the House by 231-189. A companion resolution condemning the Kelo decision was approved 365-33. Only 10 of the 43 members of the Congressional Black Caucus and only two members of the Congrssional Hispanic Caucus voted against the latter measure.

Many Democrats who used to scoff at conservative fears about activist judges are now joining their barricades when it comes to eminent domain. "In a way this ruling is about civil rights because it interferes with your right to own and keep your property," says Wilhelmina Leigh, a research analyst with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. "It means you have to hope and trust in the goodness of other human beings that if you buy real estate that you will be allowed to keep it." Few appear to be willing to trust government on this issue, which is why the Kelo decision has touched off such a populist reaction against it.

Martin Luther King III, a former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, says that "eminent domain should only be used for true public projects, not to take from one private owner to give to another wealthier private owner." In 2001 he joined with the free-market Institute for Justice (which represented the Kelo plaintiffs) to stop the state of Mississippi from uprooting homeowners to make room for a Nissan truck factory. After he compared the state's actions to "a giant stepping on a grasshopper," public opposition to the taking mounted. The state finally announced that Nissan had come up with a way to redesign its facility so that the homeowners wouldn't have to leave.

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor warned in her Kelo dissent "all private property is now vulnerable to being taken and transferred to another private owner, so long as it might be upgraded." She added that the decision's effect is to "wash out any distinction between private and public use of property--and thereby effectively to delete the words 'for public use' from the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment."


In her outraged dissent, Justice O'Connor failed to note that the Supreme Court's erosion of property rights began a long time ago. Before the 1954 Berman decision, with some exceptions, private property could be taken through eminent domain only for public uses. In Berman, however, the court declared the words "public use" to mean "public purpose," as defined by local officials. Soon the definition of "blight" became highly elastic, as governments began condemning working- and middle-class neighborhoods simply because they were desired by private interests. As Justice Clarence Thomas noted in his dissent in Kelo: "Of all the families displaced by urban renewal from 1949 through 1963, 63 percent of those whose race was known were nonwhite, and of these families, 56 percent of nonwhites and 38 percent of whites had incomes low enough to qualify for public housing, which, however, was seldom available to them."

The definition of a "blighted" area eventually became so expansive that it 1981 the Michigan Supreme Court allowed the city of Detroit to raze a stable neighborhood called Poletown to make way for a General Motors plant. The Michigan Supreme Court finally repudiated that decision last year, in a ruling that noted that property rights would no longer exist in America if cities could simply take property when they found a use that yielded higher taxes or other benefits.

By contrast, the U.S. Supreme Court has now decided not to overturn its Berman precedent and indeed has expanded the deference it gives to local governments to determine what "public use" means. But states and localities are free to take their own steps to preserve private property rights. Nine states--Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Montana, South Carolina and Washington--already forbid the use of eminent domain for economic development except in narrow circumstances. The Institute for Justice has launched a $3 million "Hands Off My Home" campaign to convince other states to join them. In Georgia, Gov. Sonny Perdue is demanding a full review of eminent domain. The Texas Legislature has already debated a constitutional amendment that would ban the use of eminent domain solely for economic purposes.

No one argues that struggling cities or states don't have a right to improve themselves through redevelopment. But the new civil-rights coalition forming in reaction to the Kelo decision says that need can't justify land seizures from which politically connected players stand to gain at the expense of individual civil rights. If the half-century since Brown v. Board of Education has taught us anything, it is that some rights are and must remain nonnegotiable.

From The New York Daily News

It's really an attack on our civility
By Stanley Crouch

Monday, July 11th, 2005

The recent terror attack in London should help Americans see much more clearly and understand much better what we are up against. This clarity is not impossible: The 19th and 20th centuries provided us with enough religious and political wars to perceive what happens when the idea of individual rights has no sanctity within a system.

We have seen the crude methods put forth by terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Irish Republican Army and by those loons who flew passenger planes into the World Trade Center and now claim to have set off the explosions that killed at least 49 innocent commuters in London.

One thing we can be sure of is that the sort of hysteria we find very common in Muslim countries will not take place in America or in England. We have both exhibited as much violent hysteria as possible in our separate pasts, but seem to have evolved beyond the primitive levels of violent outbursts at those whose only crime is being a symbol of a hidden threat. There will be no Muslim businesses burned, no Muslims burned alive before cheering crowds, no retaliatory murders of noncombatants.

That is our strength and our burden. Our belief in a person being innocent until proven guilty extends itself out to entire groups. The result is that some terrible crime committed by a cell of Muslim nuts is no condemnation of Muslims at large. That belief will always cost us in the short run; loons will hide among us and they will spill blood whenever they can and as much as they can.

Still, we cannot expect to truly assess what is going on in the minds of people who blow themselves up or blow up others far from the field of battle, or the organized savagery that we call war. The barbarians are either mad or have embraced the idea that there are no innocents and that those who are not combatants have no rights at all and should expect no mercy. Such thinking, if that is what we want to call it, usually makes a perfect fit in systems deeply influenced by religious loons. The slaveholding South and Adolf Hitler's Third Reich made it clear how comfortably refinement and barbarism could work together.

In that land of sweet magnolias and in the country that had produced Bach, Goethe and so many other giants of art, thought and science, torture and murder were assumed to be the only ways in which things could be kept in order. The crudest vision of a nation held sway.

Someday the Muslim communities in Western countries may begin to see these rabid swine for what they are and, when sufficiently suspicious, will report them to the authorities. Whether they do or not, we can be sure that some Muslims will begin to understand the sheer social greatness and grace of democratic societies in which individual rights are considered essential and mob rule, even when air-brushed with religious rhetoric, is recognized as the enemy.

This is a war all right, but it is most deeply a war of ideas in much the same way that World War II was. However twisted up it might be by oil, a Palestinian homeland and other considerations, this is a conflict between civilization and barbarism, and those who do not understand that are truly fools.

From The Chicago Sun-Times:

Time for stoic Brits to come out swinging
By Mark Steyn

One way of measuring any terrorist attack is to look at whether the killers accomplished everything they set out to. On Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida set out to hijack four planes and succeeded in seizing every one. Had the killers attempted to take another 30 jets between 7:30 and 9 that morning, who can doubt that they'd have maintained their pristine 100 percent success rate? Throughout the IRA's long war against the British Crown, two generations of politicians pointed out that there would always be the odd ''crack in the system'' through which the determined terrorist would slip. But on 9/11 the failure of the system was total.

Thursday, al-Qaida hit three London Underground trains and one bus. Had they broadened their attentions from the Central Zone, had they attempted to blow up 30 trains across the furthest reaches of the Tube map, from Uxbridge to Upminster, who can doubt that they too would have been successful? In other words, the scale of the carnage was constrained only by the murderers' ambition and their manpower.

The difference is that 9/11 hit out of the blue -- literally and politically; 7/7 came after four years of Her Majesty's government prioritizing terrorism and ''security'' above all else -- and the failure rate was still 100 percent. After the Madrid bombing, I was struck by a spate of "comic" security breaches in London: two Greenpeace guys shin up St. Stephen's Tower at the Palace of Westminster, a Daily Mirror reporter bluffs his way into a servant's gig at Buckingham Palace a week before Bush comes to stay; an Osama lookalike gatecrashes Prince William's birthday party. As I wrote last March: "History repeats itself: farce, farce, farce, but sooner or later tragedy is bound to kick in. The inability of the state to secure even the three highest-profile targets in the realm -- the queen, her heir, her Parliament -- should remind us that a defensive war against terrorism will ensure terrorism.''

To three high-profile farces, we now have that high-profile tragedy, of impressive timing. The jihad, via one of its wholly owned but independently operated subsidiaries, scheduled an atrocity for the start of the G-8 summit and managed to pull it off -- at a time when the ports and airports and internal security of a small island were all supposed to be on heightened alert. That's quite a feat. The only good news is that the bombs were, by the standards of what's out there, small. One day they won't be.

Of course, many resources had been redeployed to Scotland to cope with elderly rocker Sir Bob Geldof's pathetic call for a million anti-globalist ninnies to descend on the G-8 summit and tie up the police with their pitiful narcissist preening: the papier-mache Bush and Blair puppets, the ersatz ethnic drumming, etc.

The choice for Britons now is whether they wish to be Australians post-Bali or Spaniards post-Madrid. That shouldn't be a tough call. But it's easy to stand before a news camera and sonorously declare that "the British people will never surrender to terrorism.'' In reality, unless it's clear a threat is primal, most democratic peoples and their political leaders prefer to regard bad news as a peripheral nuisance which can be negotiated away to the fringe of their concerns.

That's what Britain thought in the 1930s -- back when Hitler was slavering over Czechoslovakia, and Neville Chamberlain dismissed it as "a faraway country of which we know little." Today, the faraway country of which the British know little is Britain itself. Traditional terrorists -- the IRA, the Basque separatists -- operate close to home. Islamism projects itself long-range to any point of the planet with an ease most G-8 militaries can't manage. Small cells operate in the nooks and crannies of a free society while the political class seems all but unaware of their existence.

Did we learn enough, for example, from the case of Omar Sheikh? He's the fellow convicted of the kidnapping and beheading in Karachi, Pakistan, of the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl. He's usually described as "Pakistani" but he is, in fact, a citizen of the United Kingdom, with as English a resume as you can get: born in Whips Cross Hospital, educated at Nightingale Primary School in Wanstead, the Forest School in Snaresbrook and the London School of Economics. He travels on a British passport.

Or take Abdel Karim al-Tuhami al-Majati, a senior al-Qaida member from Morocco killed by Saudi security forces in al Ras last April. One of al-Majati's wives is a Belgian citizen currently residing in Britain. In Pakistan, the jihadists speak openly of London as the terrorist bridgehead to Europe. Given the British jihadists who've been discovered in the thick of it in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Israel, Chechnya and Bosnia, only a fool would believe they had no plans for anything closer to home -- or, rather, "home."

Most Britons can only speculate at the degree of Islamist penetration in the United Kingdom because they simply don't know, and multicultural pieties require that they keep themselves in the dark. It's not just the British left that's been skeptical of Washington's war on terror. Former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd and many other Conservative grandees have been openly scornful of the Bush doctrine. Lord Hurd would no doubt have preferred a policy of urbane aloofness, such as he promoted vis-a-vis the Balkans in the early '90s. He's probably still unaware that Omar Sheikh was a Westernized non-observant chess-playing pop-listening beer-drinking English student until he was radicalized by the massacres of Bosnian Muslims.

Abdel Karim al-Tuhami al-Majati was another Europeanized Muslim radicalized by the 250,000 corpses of Bosnia. The fact that most of us were unaware of the consequences of EU lethargy on Bosnia until that chicken policy came home to roost a decade later should be sobering: It was what Donald Rumsfeld, in a remark mocked by many snide media twerps, accurately characterized as an "unknown unknown": a vital factor so successfully immersed you don't even know you don't know it.

This is the beginning of a long existential struggle. It's hard not to be moved by the sight of Londoners calmly going about their business as usual in the face of terrorism. But, if the political class goes about business as usual, that's not a stiff upper lip but a suicide cult. The question now is will the British return to the fantasy agenda of Bob Geldof or avenge their dead?

Is Bush adopting a Nixon strategy?
By Patrick J. Buchanan

July 4, 2005

Closely rereading the president's Tuesday address at Ft. Bragg calls to mind speeches I wrote, 35 years ago, for Richard M. Nixon.

While Bush continues to insist Iraq is the central front in the war on terror and will never be abandoned "on my watch," U.S. war policy is emerging as a 21st-century version of "Vietnamization."

For the president just wagered the ultimate success or failure of this mission on the ability of Iraqis themselves. "As the Iraqis stand up," said Bush, "we will stand down."

Clearly, the president has heard the message of an impatient country. His rhetoric has been reconfigured to conform to reality. His policy is moving toward that urged upon him by Republican Rep. Walter Jones, whose House resolution calls on the president to draft a plan for the withdrawal of U.S. forces, but does not impose a hard timetable.

Bush appears to have begun to understand that for many Iraqis, the cause of this war – why they fight – is that we are there. They do not have to love Saddam to want Americans gone. And as President Bush has now told the Iraqis that we do not mean to stay, U.S. generals are back-channeling the Sunni insurgents to assure them we intend to leave – and that their real enemy is Zarqawi, al-Qaida and the foreign fighters, who intend to remain and start a civil war.

Not so very long ago, the neoconservatives were cawing, "On to Damascus!" and braying about Iraq becoming a U.S. strategic base camp flanking Iran and Syria. But, repeatedly at Ft. Bragg, Bush signaled that when our mission is complete, America will come home. "I recognize that Americans want our troops to come home as quickly as possible," he told the 82nd Airborne. "So do I."

While ruling out a deadline for withdrawal, Bush emphasized, "We will stay in Iraq as long as we are needed, and not a day longer."

Not today, not tomorrow, but the day after, America is coming home.

To Sen. John McCain and others who say we need 100,000 more troops to cope with an insurgency that is now at its most murderous, Bush retorted: "Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging the Iraqis to take the lead in this fight. And sending more Americans would suggest that we intend to stay forever, when we are in fact working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave."

There is another reason Bush will not be sending 100,000 more troops. The Army, Reserves, Marines and National Guard are failing to meet recruiting and re-enlistment quotas. Soon, Bush will not even have the option of sending another 100,000 troops, unless he is prepared to go to Congress and ask for a draft.

Democracy may be the antidote to terrorism, Bush is saying, and democracy may be the future of the Middle East, but democracy is not going to be brought in on the turrets of Abrams tanks. Whether the Arabs are free will depend on the Arabs themselves. And that is as it should be.

Admittedly, there were caveats. If U.S. commanders say more troops are needed, I will send them, said Bush. But as the generals have already said more troops are not needed and would entice more terrorists and give them more targets, the 135,000 in Iraq today is probably as high as the American commitment goes.

But fixing the level of U.S. forces raises the same problem as an announcement of a withdrawal date. The enemy now knows U.S. forces will not exceed present levels. But if 135,000 U.S. troops are adequate only to cope with the insurgency, but insufficient to crush it, where are the forces needed for victory to come from? Our European, Latin and Asian allies are all bailing out.

Bush's answer: The new troops will come from Iraq itself.

Thus, whether we win or lose this war is going to come down to the question it came down to for Nixon – as he pungently put it in the early 1970s – "Can the Vietnamese hack it?"

Can the Iraqis hack it? Can Iraqis build up their political institutions and military and security forces not only to take over from the Americans, but to win a war the Americans were unable to win? The answer to that question will give us the answer to a far greater question: Will Iraq be a historic triumph for the United States and George Bush, or is it destined to end in a defeat and a debacle more disastrous than Vietnam?

What persuades me we are headed for a crisis is that, within the president's speech, lies a contradiction. He calls the war in Iraq "vital to the future security of our country" – i.e., defeat would be life-threatening for America.

But if victory is vital to this country, how can President Bush ever entrust the outcome of this war to Iraqis? If victory is vital, how can he rule out more troops? If victory is vital, how can he even rule out a draft?

Has President Bush thought this through?

From Newsweek: Seems like telling the Bushies what they want to hear has now made its way into our Special Ops forces. It's starting to look like the damage the neocon zealots are exacting on our Armed Forces is going to approach Clintonite proportions before this Iraq debacle is over.

Military: Frustration for the Fabled SEALs

July 18 issue - It was the worst setback in the 43-year history of the Navy SEAL program. At least 10 of the elite commandos died when a reconnaissance team came under fire in the mountains of Afghanistan's Kunar province, and a SEAL rescue helicopter crashed trying to save them. For many proud SEALs (an acronym for Sea, Air and Land Team), the Afghan debacle was just a bitter new chapter in a very frustrating war on terror. Since 9/11—but especially since the Iraq war—many SEALs have come to feel like second-class citizens in the exclusive world of Special Forces.

Why? "The main reason has been severe restrictions on the types of missions they are allowed to undertake," says a U.S. defense analyst under Pentagon contract who works closely with Special Forces (he declined to be identified because his work is classified). While the Army's Delta Force and Green Berets get the best "direct action" and unconventional warfare missions—going after the bad guys—SEALs say they are often relegated to doing VIP escorts in Iraq or rescue missions, the defense analyst says. The Afghan recon mission was a rare "bright spot," he says, despite its tragic end. The Army also dominates the senior command, with Gen. Bryan Brown and Lt. Gen. William Boykin running Special Ops worldwide.

The result is that hundreds of veteran SEALs have not re-enlisted, while others have resigned their commissions, says the defense analyst, citing official Pentagon numbers. That has deprived the overall SEAL population of about 2,500 of experienced commandos, he says. Asked to respond, SEALs spokesman Cmdr. Jeff Bender said: "We can't go into the nature of our missions. But it's categorically untrue that morale is low." He also said that "retention is better than it has been."

Still, many SEALs have left for higher-paying jobs—and sometimes better action—with private security firms, like North Carolina-based Blackwater USA (founded by ex-SEAL Gary Jackson). The Defense Department has offered a "retention incentive" $150,000 bonus for SEALs senior officers (and other Special Ops forces) who re-enlist for six years. But John Arquilla, who teaches at the Naval postgraduate program in Monterey, Calif., says the offer of extra money is "a sign that we need to reconsider how we are employing them. These men don't become SEALs for the money. They do what they do for the prospect of action." Some experts say the SEALs might do well to revert to their maritime origins by dealing with terror threats on the high seas or in ports. Blackwater founder Jackson doesn't see a morale problem. "Right now," says Jackson, who spoke to NEWSWEEK after attending a memorial service for the 10 dead Seals, "the SEALs are galvanized as one."

—Michael Hirsh and Jamie Reno

From The Sunday Times. If this is going on in Britain, with the level of surveillance that country has, one can only imagine how much more pervasive the burrowed in Muslim terrorists must be in this country.

Terror in London
Leaked No 10 dossier reveals Al-Qaeda’s British recruits
Robert Winnett and David Leppard

AL-QAEDA is secretly recruiting affluent, middle-class Muslims in British universities and colleges to carry out terrorist attacks in this country, leaked Whitehall documents reveal.

A network of “extremist recruiters” is circulating on campuses targeting people with “technical and professional qualifications”, particularly engineering and IT degrees.

Yesterday it emerged that last week’s London bombings were a sophisticated attack with all the devices detonating on the Underground within 50 seconds of each other. The police believe those behind the outrage may be home-grown British terrorists with no criminal backgrounds and possessing technical expertise.

A joint Home Office and Foreign Office dossier — Young Muslims and Extremism — prepared for the prime minister last year, said Britain might now be harbouring thousands of Al-Qaeda sympathisers.

Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan police chief, revealed separately last night that up to 3,000 British-born or British-based people had passed through Osama Bin Laden’s training camps.

The Whitehall dossier, ordered by Tony Blair following last year’s train bombings in Madrid, says: “Extremists are known to target schools and colleges where young people may be very inquisitive but less challenging and more susceptible to extremist reasoning/ arguments.”

The confidential assessment, covering more than 100 pages of letters, papers and other documents, forms the basis of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy, codenamed Operation Contest.

It paints a chilling picture of the scale of the task in tackling terrorism. Drawing on information from MI5, it concludes: “Intelligence indicates that the number of British Muslims actively engaged in terrorist activity, whether at home or abroad or supporting such activity, is extremely small and estimated at less than 1%.”

This equates to fewer than 16,000 potential terrorists and supporters out of a Muslim population of almost 1.6m.

The dossier also estimates that 10,000 have attended extremist conferences. The security services believe that the number who are prepared to commit terrorist attacks may run into hundreds.

Most of the Al-Qaeda recruits tend to be loners “attracted to university clubs based on ethnicity or religion” because of “disillusionment with their current existence”. British-based terrorists are made up of different ethnic groups, according to the documents.

“They range from foreign nationals now naturalised and resident in the UK, arriving mainly from north Africa and the Middle East, to second and third generation British citizens whose forebears mainly originate from Pakistan or Kashmir.

“In addition . . . a significant number come from liberal, non-religious Muslim backgrounds or (are) only converted to Islam in adulthood. These converts include white British nationals and those of West Indian extraction.”

The Iraq war is identified by the dossier as a key cause of young Britons turning to terrorism. The analysis says: “It seems that a particularly strong cause of disillusionment among Muslims, including young Muslims, is a perceived ‘double standard’ in the foreign policy of western governments, in particular Britain and the US.

“The perception is that passive ‘oppression’, as demonstrated in British foreign policy, eg non-action on Kashmir and Chechnya, has given way to ‘active oppression’. The war on terror, and in Iraq and Afghanistan, are all seen by a section of British Muslims as having been acts against Islam.”

In an interview yesterday, Blair denied that the London terrorist attacks were a direct result of British involvement in the Iraq war. He said Russia had suffered terrorism with the Beslan school massacre despite its opposition to the war, and terrorists were planning further attacks on Spain even after the pro-war government was voted out.

“September 11 happened before Iraq, before Afghanistan, before any of these issues and that was the worst terrorist atrocity of all,” he said.

However, the analysis prepared for Blair identified Iraq as a “recruiting sergeant” for extremism.

The Sunday Times has learnt that Britain is negotiating with Australia to hand over military command of southern Iraq to release British troops for redeployment in Afghanistan.

The plan behind Operation Contest has been to win over Muslim “hearts and minds” with policy initiatives including anti-religious discrimination laws. A meeting of Contest officials this week is expected to consider a radical overhaul of the strategy following the London attacks.

Stevens said last night at least eight attacks aimed at civilian targets on the British mainland had been foiled in the past five years and that none had been planned by the same gang.

The former Scotland Yard chief, who retired earlier this year, said that on one weekend more than 1,000 undercover officers had been deployed, monitoring a group of suspected terrorists.

He said that he believed last week’s attackers were almost certainly British-born, “brought up here and totally aware of British life and values”.

“There’s a sufficient number of people in this country willing to be Islamic terrorists that they don’t have to be drafted in from abroad,” he said