From washingtonpost.com: Another brilliant evisceration of the pathetic Miers nomination by George Will.
Defending The Indefensible
By George F. Will
Sunday, October 23, 2005
Such is the perfect perversity of the nomination of Harriet Miers that it discredits, and even degrades, all who toil at justifying it. Many of their justifications cannot be dignified as arguments. Of those that can be, some reveal a deficit of constitutional understanding commensurate with that which it is, unfortunately, reasonable to impute to Miers. Other arguments betray a gross misunderstanding of conservatism on the part of persons masquerading as its defenders.
Miers's advocates, sensing the poverty of other possibilities, began by cynically calling her critics sexist snobs who disdain women with less than Ivy League degrees. Her advocates certainly know that her critics revere Margaret Thatcher almost as much as they revere the memory of the president who was educated at Eureka College.
Next, Miers's advocates managed, remarkably, to organize injurious testimonials. Sensible people cringed when one of the former Texas Supreme Court justices summoned to the White House offered this reason for putting her on the nation's highest tribunal: "I can vouch for her ability to analyze and to strategize." Another said: "When we were on the lottery commission together, a lot of the problems that we had there were legal in nature. And she was just very, very insistent that we always get all the facts together."
Miers's advocates tried the incense defense: Miers is pious. But that is irrelevant to her aptitude for constitutional reasoning. The crude people who crudely invoked it probably were sending a crude signal to conservatives who, the invokers evidently believe, are so crudely obsessed with abortion that they have an anti-constitutional willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade with an unreasoned act of judicial willfulness as raw as the 1973 decision itself.
In their unseemly eagerness to assure Miers's conservative detractors that she will reach the "right" results, her advocates betray complete incomprehension of this: Thoughtful conservatives' highest aim is not to achieve this or that particular outcome concerning this or that controversy. Rather, their aim for the Supreme Court is to replace semi-legislative reasoning with genuine constitutional reasoning about the Constitution's meaning as derived from close consideration of its text and structure. Such conservatives understand that how you get to a result is as important as the result. Indeed, in an important sense, the path that the Supreme Court takes to the result often is the result.
As Miers's confirmation hearings draw near, her advocates will make an argument that is always false but that they, especially, must make, considering the unusual nature of their nominee. The argument is that it is somehow inappropriate for senators to ask a nominee -- a nominee for a lifetime position making unappealable decisions of enormous social impact -- searching questions about specific Supreme Court decisions and the principles of constitutional law that these decisions have propelled into America's present and future.
To that argument, the obvious and sufficient refutation is: Why, then, have hearings? What, then, remains of the Senate's constitutional role in consenting to nominees?
It is not merely permissible, it is imperative that senators give Miers ample opportunity to refute skeptics by demonstrating her analytic powers and jurisprudential inclinations by discussing recent cases concerning, for example, the scope of federal power under the commerce clause, the compatibility of the First Amendment with campaign regulations and privacy -- including Roe v. Wade .
Can Miers's confirmation be blocked? It is easy to get a senatorial majority to take a stand in defense of this or that concrete interest, but it is surpassingly difficult to get a majority anywhere to rise in defense of mere excellence.
Still, Miers must begin with 22 Democratic votes against her. Surely no Democrat can retain a shred of self-respect if, having voted against John Roberts, he or she then declares Miers fit for the court. All Democrats who so declare will forfeit a right and an issue -- their right to criticize the administration's cronyism.
And Democrats, with their zest for gender politics, need this reminder: To give a woman a seat on a crowded bus because she is a woman is gallantry. To give a woman a seat on the Supreme Court because she is a woman is a dereliction of senatorial duty. It also is an affront to mature feminism, which may bridle at gallantry but should recoil from condescension.
As for Republicans, any who vote for Miers will thereafter be ineligible to argue that it is important to elect Republicans because they are conscientious conservers of the judicial branch's invaluable dignity. Finally, any Republican senator who supinely acquiesces in President Bush's reckless abuse of presidential discretion -- or who does not recognize the Miers nomination as such -- can never be considered presidential material.
Saturday, October 22, 2005
Economic Policy Gone Adrift
By Lawrence Kudlow
October 22, 2005
President George W. Bush is having a bad October -- and so is the stock market. The two are not unrelated.
Bush calls it “background noise,” but it’s a lot louder than that. Potential criminal charges in the CIA-leak case, a Supreme Court nomination gone awry, hurricane relief over-spending, and investigations of the Republican leaders of the House and Senate all threaten to derail both the president’s political standing and his policy agenda. Not even the successful Supreme Court confirmation of John Roberts and the strong Iraqi vote to ratify a freedom-and-democracy based constitution have been enough to take the heat off Bush.
A sagging stock market knows that all’s not right in Washington. Even worse, it knows that the president’s once solid economic-policy vision is drifting off-course.
A significant congressional debate is now brewing over taxes and spending. House Republicans such as Mike Pence, Jeff Flake, and Marsha Blackburn are putting together an expanded budget package for mandatory spending cuts and a 3 percent across-the-board discretionary sequester that could net $600 billion in 10-year savings estimates. Meanwhile, over in the Senate, Republican Tom Coburn valiantly tried to halt the pork-barrel funding of Alaska’s “bridge to nowhere.” These are important developments, but the president and his top economic managers seem to be offering no encouragement.
For instance, Josh Bolton, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, has said nothing publicly about the necessary renewal of spending restraint. Only a month ago, he promised to deliver, in a few weeks time, a new list of White House-sponsored budget cuts and perhaps even a rescission package. But the period elapsed without any new ideas coming out of the administration.
This silence from the top is deafening.
When a recent CNBC poll asked which party was worse on pork-barrel spending, Republicans earned profligacy honors by a margin of 14 points -- 57 percent to 43 percent. This result shows that the investor class may understand politics better than the professionals in the West Wing -- they know that in today’s setting, pro-growth tax-cut extensions on capital gains and dividends will never make it through without a strong budget-cutting package. If the investor class deserts the GOP in next year’s midterm elections, Republicans will be crushed and the Congress could change hands.
Even though the supply-side tax cuts of 2003 triggered an economy strong enough to absorb Gulf Coast hurricane damages, and have paid for themselves with a 32 percent ($78 billion) tax-revenue increase in fiscal year 2005, Democrats are calling for a deal that would repeal those tax cuts in return for minimal budget restraint. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi calls the new GOP budget package “another rip-off of the middle class to give tax cuts to the high end.” So class warfare is alive and well.
Democratic whip Steny Hoyer wants a 1993-type tax-hike deal that (along with the Clinton attempt to nationalize healthcare) cost the Democrats control of both houses for the first time in 40 years. But now it’s Bush who should beware. He can’t forget that his father relinquished a second term when he signed on to the infamous Andrew’s Air Force Base deal for large tax hikes and small spending cuts.
By not campaigning for tax-cut extensions, an omission that has chilled the stock market, and by not supporting tough budget-cutting proposals, the president could be trapping himself into another fateful compromise. Pro-growth, first-principle policies of tax cuts and budget restraint are the hallmarks of Republican political victories. Has the White House forgotten this, or has the “background noise” cat got its tongue?
A batch of good tax-reform ideas from former Sen. Connie Mack has also gone unnoticed by the president and his men. While Mack’s group, which was commissioned by the president, didn’t go far enough toward a flat-tax reform of the income-tax system, it has suggested a number of excellent ideas, such as: abolishing the dividend tax, slashing corporate tax rates, moving to the full cash expensing of business depreciation write-offs for the purchase of new plants and equipment, ending the worldwide taxation of U.S. corporate profits, greatly expanding savings accounts, and abolishing the alternative minimum tax. These proposals could form an optimistic starting point for a full-fledged pro-growth tax-reform debate. But they’ll go nowhere if the White House doesn’t take the lead.
It’s not too late for the president to avoid a shipwreck second term. Nor is it too late for the Republican government in Washington to reestablish a far-reaching policy vision for economic growth. Democratic strategist Bill Galston recently published a memo warning Democrats that “a liberal, anti-war, welfare state, soak the rich liberalism doesn’t sell anymore.” Yet that’s what Democrats are still selling. If Bush has a better product, now’s the time for him to roll out a first-rate merchandising effort.
By Lawrence Kudlow
October 22, 2005
President George W. Bush is having a bad October -- and so is the stock market. The two are not unrelated.
Bush calls it “background noise,” but it’s a lot louder than that. Potential criminal charges in the CIA-leak case, a Supreme Court nomination gone awry, hurricane relief over-spending, and investigations of the Republican leaders of the House and Senate all threaten to derail both the president’s political standing and his policy agenda. Not even the successful Supreme Court confirmation of John Roberts and the strong Iraqi vote to ratify a freedom-and-democracy based constitution have been enough to take the heat off Bush.
A sagging stock market knows that all’s not right in Washington. Even worse, it knows that the president’s once solid economic-policy vision is drifting off-course.
A significant congressional debate is now brewing over taxes and spending. House Republicans such as Mike Pence, Jeff Flake, and Marsha Blackburn are putting together an expanded budget package for mandatory spending cuts and a 3 percent across-the-board discretionary sequester that could net $600 billion in 10-year savings estimates. Meanwhile, over in the Senate, Republican Tom Coburn valiantly tried to halt the pork-barrel funding of Alaska’s “bridge to nowhere.” These are important developments, but the president and his top economic managers seem to be offering no encouragement.
For instance, Josh Bolton, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, has said nothing publicly about the necessary renewal of spending restraint. Only a month ago, he promised to deliver, in a few weeks time, a new list of White House-sponsored budget cuts and perhaps even a rescission package. But the period elapsed without any new ideas coming out of the administration.
This silence from the top is deafening.
When a recent CNBC poll asked which party was worse on pork-barrel spending, Republicans earned profligacy honors by a margin of 14 points -- 57 percent to 43 percent. This result shows that the investor class may understand politics better than the professionals in the West Wing -- they know that in today’s setting, pro-growth tax-cut extensions on capital gains and dividends will never make it through without a strong budget-cutting package. If the investor class deserts the GOP in next year’s midterm elections, Republicans will be crushed and the Congress could change hands.
Even though the supply-side tax cuts of 2003 triggered an economy strong enough to absorb Gulf Coast hurricane damages, and have paid for themselves with a 32 percent ($78 billion) tax-revenue increase in fiscal year 2005, Democrats are calling for a deal that would repeal those tax cuts in return for minimal budget restraint. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi calls the new GOP budget package “another rip-off of the middle class to give tax cuts to the high end.” So class warfare is alive and well.
Democratic whip Steny Hoyer wants a 1993-type tax-hike deal that (along with the Clinton attempt to nationalize healthcare) cost the Democrats control of both houses for the first time in 40 years. But now it’s Bush who should beware. He can’t forget that his father relinquished a second term when he signed on to the infamous Andrew’s Air Force Base deal for large tax hikes and small spending cuts.
By not campaigning for tax-cut extensions, an omission that has chilled the stock market, and by not supporting tough budget-cutting proposals, the president could be trapping himself into another fateful compromise. Pro-growth, first-principle policies of tax cuts and budget restraint are the hallmarks of Republican political victories. Has the White House forgotten this, or has the “background noise” cat got its tongue?
A batch of good tax-reform ideas from former Sen. Connie Mack has also gone unnoticed by the president and his men. While Mack’s group, which was commissioned by the president, didn’t go far enough toward a flat-tax reform of the income-tax system, it has suggested a number of excellent ideas, such as: abolishing the dividend tax, slashing corporate tax rates, moving to the full cash expensing of business depreciation write-offs for the purchase of new plants and equipment, ending the worldwide taxation of U.S. corporate profits, greatly expanding savings accounts, and abolishing the alternative minimum tax. These proposals could form an optimistic starting point for a full-fledged pro-growth tax-reform debate. But they’ll go nowhere if the White House doesn’t take the lead.
It’s not too late for the president to avoid a shipwreck second term. Nor is it too late for the Republican government in Washington to reestablish a far-reaching policy vision for economic growth. Democratic strategist Bill Galston recently published a memo warning Democrats that “a liberal, anti-war, welfare state, soak the rich liberalism doesn’t sell anymore.” Yet that’s what Democrats are still selling. If Bush has a better product, now’s the time for him to roll out a first-rate merchandising effort.
From washingtonpost.com:
The Innate Tempo Of Shirley Horn
By Richard Harrington
Saturday, October 22, 2005
No one mined the depths of a lyric the way Shirley Horn did, with a whispery voice that conjured cashmere and cognac. You could lose yourself -- you couldn't not lose yourself -- as the lifelong Washingtonian's dusky alto crawled unhurriedly through time-tested standards and rediscovered treasures, tapestries of song embroidered with her own crisp chords and subtly spun piano filigrees.
Horn's trademark: exquisitely slow tempo and sensitively savored lyric, effortlessly melded. Heart and soul expressed at a piano bench.
Horn, who died Thursday night at 71 after a long illness, could swing a tune with the best of them, and often surprised fans when she did, but that approach simply didn't fit her temperament. Instead, Horn did ballads and cool, understated ruminations better than anyone except her first champion, mentor and lifelong friend, trumpeter Miles Davis. Both were masters of silence and anticipation, but even Davis teased Horn about her pacing. "You do 'em awful slow!" he once said.
Indicating the level of respect Davis had for Horn, the legend, then ailing, accompanied her on the title track of the 1990 album "You Won't Forget Me," the first time he'd recorded with a vocalist in four decades, and Davis did so in the long-abandoned lyrical style he'd defined in the '50s, shortly before he first discovered her. The two were talking about collaborating on an all-ballad album when Davis died the following year. Horn won her only Grammy for 1998's "I Remember Miles," dedicated to Davis.
Another sign of respect came from the great pianist Ahmad Jamal, who accompanied Horn on her penultimate album, 2003's "May the Music Never End." Jamal, one of Horn's early inspirations and models, and himself a master of minimalism, had, in his 55 years of recording, never accompanied a vocalist. But for the first time in her career, Horn was unable to accompany herself on record, the result of losing her right foot to complications from diabetes. It was a significant change, denying Horn use of her piano's expression pedal for controlling the instrument's sustain and quiet features that so defined her sound.
The last few years had been rough on Horn, as she dealt with arthritis and underwent chemotherapy for breast cancer. In June Horn suffered a stroke and had been hospitalized since.
Several years earlier, Horn had been forced to abandon the security of her piano bench and rethink her approach after her voice and piano could no longer be intimate extensions of each other. Last December, just before a brief appearance at a Kennedy Center concert honoring her, Horn seemed weary but as quietly determined as ever, insisting: "I've tried to keep things as level as possible through this whole thing. I'm cool. I know what I have to do: I'm never going to give up the piano, I'm never going to stop singing till God says, 'I called your number.' "
Horn was at times reflective, at times wry, and on occasion caustic and cantankerous. She expressed frustration with the music business, particularly that such pianist-singers as Norah Jones and Diana Krall didn't acknowledge her as the influence she clearly heard herself to be. Motoring around her house in a wheelchair dubbed "the Cadillac" (the fancier "Jaguar" was reserved for concerts), Horn would proudly point to assorted honors, including last year's Jazz Master award from the National Endowment for the Arts. But she also seemed frustrated, reduced to performing only a concert or two a month, backed by pianist George Mesterhazy. "I can't get into the music," she said. "I just get lost."
In recent concerts, she managed to find both humor and pathos singing Paul McCartney's "Yesterday," lending multiple meanings to the line "I'm not half the girl I used to be."
So much about Shirley Horn was glacially slow, from her delivery of a song to the acclamation that came late in her career. You can't really make time stand still, but Horn managed an approximation, insisting that ballads were meant to be played slow, the better to understand the power of the story being told and the emotion of the lyric under exploration.
Horn started studying piano and composition at Howard University's School of Music when she was 12, with dreams of a career in classical music. But the realities of racism in the '40s precluded that possibility, and by the late '40s she'd become immersed in the thriving jazz scene around 14th and U streets NW. Debussy and Rachmaninoff gave way to Oscar Peterson, Wynton Kelly, Erroll Garner and Jamal. The girl piano player began to make an impression in local clubs, but even after forming her first trio in 1954, Horn was not one to advance herself.
In fact, that Horn came to sing at all was part accident -- a patron bribed her to sing "Melancholy Baby" -- and part pragmatism: A club owner gave Horn a raise on the condition that she keep singing.
That Miles Davis became a fan via Horn's 1960 debut album, "Embers and Ashes," was part miracle: few copies were manufactured and they were hard to find. Yet Davis managed to and became smitten, playing it so much at home that his kids could sing along to it. A year later, he invited Horn to open for him at the Village Vanguard, though that opportunity almost passed. When he called her and made the offer, Horn didn't believe it was really Davis. She hung up. But Davis sent her a train ticket to New York, and she went.
It could have been a breakthrough moment, but in the end, it was only a moment. Quincy Jones, who was in the opening-night crowd, would produce a pair of Horn albums in the early '60s but miscast her as a stand-up singer, denying her the comfort of accompanying herself in the trio format in which she was so adept. "Nobody knows how to play for me except me," she would complain. "I need to hear my own chords and set my own tempo."
Wider recognition didn't arrive until 1986, when she signed with Verve and began a string of critically acclaimed albums that garnered nine straight Grammy nominations.
Horn never pursued a career with the single-mindedness of such peers as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae or Betty Carter -- she simply wasn't as driven or hard-nosed or forceful. But Horn's records drew stellar guests, and she performed around the world as her health allowed. In the end, Shirley Horn's life was much like her song: She got as much music as possible out of every precious note, and in so doing made each note that much more precious.
Last December, looking back on her life, Horn suggested that she never had a choice in the matter: "I think when I was born, it's like God said, 'Music!,' and that was it. All my life, that's all I knew. It's in me, it's jammed up and it's got to come out."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
The Innate Tempo Of Shirley Horn
By Richard Harrington
Saturday, October 22, 2005
No one mined the depths of a lyric the way Shirley Horn did, with a whispery voice that conjured cashmere and cognac. You could lose yourself -- you couldn't not lose yourself -- as the lifelong Washingtonian's dusky alto crawled unhurriedly through time-tested standards and rediscovered treasures, tapestries of song embroidered with her own crisp chords and subtly spun piano filigrees.
Horn's trademark: exquisitely slow tempo and sensitively savored lyric, effortlessly melded. Heart and soul expressed at a piano bench.
Horn, who died Thursday night at 71 after a long illness, could swing a tune with the best of them, and often surprised fans when she did, but that approach simply didn't fit her temperament. Instead, Horn did ballads and cool, understated ruminations better than anyone except her first champion, mentor and lifelong friend, trumpeter Miles Davis. Both were masters of silence and anticipation, but even Davis teased Horn about her pacing. "You do 'em awful slow!" he once said.
Indicating the level of respect Davis had for Horn, the legend, then ailing, accompanied her on the title track of the 1990 album "You Won't Forget Me," the first time he'd recorded with a vocalist in four decades, and Davis did so in the long-abandoned lyrical style he'd defined in the '50s, shortly before he first discovered her. The two were talking about collaborating on an all-ballad album when Davis died the following year. Horn won her only Grammy for 1998's "I Remember Miles," dedicated to Davis.
Another sign of respect came from the great pianist Ahmad Jamal, who accompanied Horn on her penultimate album, 2003's "May the Music Never End." Jamal, one of Horn's early inspirations and models, and himself a master of minimalism, had, in his 55 years of recording, never accompanied a vocalist. But for the first time in her career, Horn was unable to accompany herself on record, the result of losing her right foot to complications from diabetes. It was a significant change, denying Horn use of her piano's expression pedal for controlling the instrument's sustain and quiet features that so defined her sound.
The last few years had been rough on Horn, as she dealt with arthritis and underwent chemotherapy for breast cancer. In June Horn suffered a stroke and had been hospitalized since.
Several years earlier, Horn had been forced to abandon the security of her piano bench and rethink her approach after her voice and piano could no longer be intimate extensions of each other. Last December, just before a brief appearance at a Kennedy Center concert honoring her, Horn seemed weary but as quietly determined as ever, insisting: "I've tried to keep things as level as possible through this whole thing. I'm cool. I know what I have to do: I'm never going to give up the piano, I'm never going to stop singing till God says, 'I called your number.' "
Horn was at times reflective, at times wry, and on occasion caustic and cantankerous. She expressed frustration with the music business, particularly that such pianist-singers as Norah Jones and Diana Krall didn't acknowledge her as the influence she clearly heard herself to be. Motoring around her house in a wheelchair dubbed "the Cadillac" (the fancier "Jaguar" was reserved for concerts), Horn would proudly point to assorted honors, including last year's Jazz Master award from the National Endowment for the Arts. But she also seemed frustrated, reduced to performing only a concert or two a month, backed by pianist George Mesterhazy. "I can't get into the music," she said. "I just get lost."
In recent concerts, she managed to find both humor and pathos singing Paul McCartney's "Yesterday," lending multiple meanings to the line "I'm not half the girl I used to be."
So much about Shirley Horn was glacially slow, from her delivery of a song to the acclamation that came late in her career. You can't really make time stand still, but Horn managed an approximation, insisting that ballads were meant to be played slow, the better to understand the power of the story being told and the emotion of the lyric under exploration.
Horn started studying piano and composition at Howard University's School of Music when she was 12, with dreams of a career in classical music. But the realities of racism in the '40s precluded that possibility, and by the late '40s she'd become immersed in the thriving jazz scene around 14th and U streets NW. Debussy and Rachmaninoff gave way to Oscar Peterson, Wynton Kelly, Erroll Garner and Jamal. The girl piano player began to make an impression in local clubs, but even after forming her first trio in 1954, Horn was not one to advance herself.
In fact, that Horn came to sing at all was part accident -- a patron bribed her to sing "Melancholy Baby" -- and part pragmatism: A club owner gave Horn a raise on the condition that she keep singing.
That Miles Davis became a fan via Horn's 1960 debut album, "Embers and Ashes," was part miracle: few copies were manufactured and they were hard to find. Yet Davis managed to and became smitten, playing it so much at home that his kids could sing along to it. A year later, he invited Horn to open for him at the Village Vanguard, though that opportunity almost passed. When he called her and made the offer, Horn didn't believe it was really Davis. She hung up. But Davis sent her a train ticket to New York, and she went.
It could have been a breakthrough moment, but in the end, it was only a moment. Quincy Jones, who was in the opening-night crowd, would produce a pair of Horn albums in the early '60s but miscast her as a stand-up singer, denying her the comfort of accompanying herself in the trio format in which she was so adept. "Nobody knows how to play for me except me," she would complain. "I need to hear my own chords and set my own tempo."
Wider recognition didn't arrive until 1986, when she signed with Verve and began a string of critically acclaimed albums that garnered nine straight Grammy nominations.
Horn never pursued a career with the single-mindedness of such peers as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae or Betty Carter -- she simply wasn't as driven or hard-nosed or forceful. But Horn's records drew stellar guests, and she performed around the world as her health allowed. In the end, Shirley Horn's life was much like her song: She got as much music as possible out of every precious note, and in so doing made each note that much more precious.
Last December, looking back on her life, Horn suggested that she never had a choice in the matter: "I think when I was born, it's like God said, 'Music!,' and that was it. All my life, that's all I knew. It's in me, it's jammed up and it's got to come out."
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Thursday, October 20, 2005
More evidence from a liberal that Bush shouldn't have acted like a eunuch and nominated the mediocrity Miers.
Support Choice, Not Roe
By Richard Cohen
Thursday, October 20, 2005
A very long time ago, I had a friend who had a girlfriend who became pregnant and did not want the child. By then my friend had disappeared and the young woman was alone -- she was in fact from Germany -- and asked me to arrange an abortion for her. With little thought, I did so. She went home to Germany and I never saw her again.
I would do things a bit differently now. I would give the matter much more thought. I no longer see abortion as directly related to sexual freedom or feminism, and I no longer see it strictly as a matter of personal privacy, either. It entails questions about life -- maybe more so at the end of the process than at the beginning, but life nonetheless.
This is not a fashionable view in some circles, but it is one that usually gets grudging acceptance when I mention it. I know of no one who has flipped on the abortion issue, but I do know of plenty of people who no longer think of it as a minor procedure that only prudes and right-wingers oppose. The antiabortion movement has made headway.
That shift in sentiment is not apparent in polls because they do not measure doubt, only position: for or against. But between one and the other, black or white, is a vast area of gray where up or down, yes or no, fades to questions about circumstance: Why, what month, etc.? Whatever the case, the very basis of the Roe v. Wade decision -- the one that grounds abortion rights in the Constitution -- strikes many people now as faintly ridiculous. Whatever abortion may be, it cannot simply be a matter of privacy.
That right of privacy, first enunciated in 1965 in Griswold v. Connecticut, once made sense. It overturned a state law forbidding the use of contraceptives by married couples. The average person could easily understand that a right of privacy was at issue here. If the government telling you what you can and cannot do in your own bedroom is not about privacy, then what is? The Connecticut law had to go. If the state legislature wasn't going to take it off the books, then the court had to.
Abortion is a different matter. It entails so much more than mere birth control -- issues that have roiled the country ever since the Roe decision was handed down in 1973 -- and so much more than mere privacy. As a layman, it's hard for me to raise profound constitutional objections to the decision. But it is not hard to say it confounds our common-sense understanding of what privacy is.
If a Supreme Court ruling is going to affect so many people then it ought to rest on perfectly clear logic and up-to-date science. Roe , with its reliance on trimesters and viability, has a musty feel to it, and its argument about privacy raises more questions than it answers. For instance, if the right to an abortion is a matter of privacy then why, asked Princeton professor Robert P. George in the New York Times, is recreational drug use not? You may think you ought to have the right to get high any way you want, but it's hard to find that right in the Constitution. George asks the same question about prostitution. Legalize it, if you want -- two consenting adults, after all -- but keep Jefferson, Madison and the rest of the boys out of it.
Conservatives -- and some liberals -- have long argued that the right to an abortion ought to be regulated by states. They have a point. My guess is that the more populous states would legalize it, the smaller ones would not, and most women would be protected. The prospect of some women traveling long distances to secure an abortion does not cheer me -- I'm pro-choice, I repeat -- but it would relieve us all from having to defend a Supreme Court decision whose reasoning has not held up. It seems more fiat than argument.
For liberals, the trick is to untether abortion rights from Roe . The former can stand even if the latter falls. The difficulty of doing this is obvious. Roe has become so encrusted with precedent that not even the White House will say how Harriet Miers would vote on it, even though she is rigorously antiabortion and politically conservative. Still, a bad decision is a bad decision. If the best we can say for it is that the end justifies the means, then we have not only lost the argument -- but a bit of our soul as well.
Support Choice, Not Roe
By Richard Cohen
Thursday, October 20, 2005
A very long time ago, I had a friend who had a girlfriend who became pregnant and did not want the child. By then my friend had disappeared and the young woman was alone -- she was in fact from Germany -- and asked me to arrange an abortion for her. With little thought, I did so. She went home to Germany and I never saw her again.
I would do things a bit differently now. I would give the matter much more thought. I no longer see abortion as directly related to sexual freedom or feminism, and I no longer see it strictly as a matter of personal privacy, either. It entails questions about life -- maybe more so at the end of the process than at the beginning, but life nonetheless.
This is not a fashionable view in some circles, but it is one that usually gets grudging acceptance when I mention it. I know of no one who has flipped on the abortion issue, but I do know of plenty of people who no longer think of it as a minor procedure that only prudes and right-wingers oppose. The antiabortion movement has made headway.
That shift in sentiment is not apparent in polls because they do not measure doubt, only position: for or against. But between one and the other, black or white, is a vast area of gray where up or down, yes or no, fades to questions about circumstance: Why, what month, etc.? Whatever the case, the very basis of the Roe v. Wade decision -- the one that grounds abortion rights in the Constitution -- strikes many people now as faintly ridiculous. Whatever abortion may be, it cannot simply be a matter of privacy.
That right of privacy, first enunciated in 1965 in Griswold v. Connecticut, once made sense. It overturned a state law forbidding the use of contraceptives by married couples. The average person could easily understand that a right of privacy was at issue here. If the government telling you what you can and cannot do in your own bedroom is not about privacy, then what is? The Connecticut law had to go. If the state legislature wasn't going to take it off the books, then the court had to.
Abortion is a different matter. It entails so much more than mere birth control -- issues that have roiled the country ever since the Roe decision was handed down in 1973 -- and so much more than mere privacy. As a layman, it's hard for me to raise profound constitutional objections to the decision. But it is not hard to say it confounds our common-sense understanding of what privacy is.
If a Supreme Court ruling is going to affect so many people then it ought to rest on perfectly clear logic and up-to-date science. Roe , with its reliance on trimesters and viability, has a musty feel to it, and its argument about privacy raises more questions than it answers. For instance, if the right to an abortion is a matter of privacy then why, asked Princeton professor Robert P. George in the New York Times, is recreational drug use not? You may think you ought to have the right to get high any way you want, but it's hard to find that right in the Constitution. George asks the same question about prostitution. Legalize it, if you want -- two consenting adults, after all -- but keep Jefferson, Madison and the rest of the boys out of it.
Conservatives -- and some liberals -- have long argued that the right to an abortion ought to be regulated by states. They have a point. My guess is that the more populous states would legalize it, the smaller ones would not, and most women would be protected. The prospect of some women traveling long distances to secure an abortion does not cheer me -- I'm pro-choice, I repeat -- but it would relieve us all from having to defend a Supreme Court decision whose reasoning has not held up. It seems more fiat than argument.
For liberals, the trick is to untether abortion rights from Roe . The former can stand even if the latter falls. The difficulty of doing this is obvious. Roe has become so encrusted with precedent that not even the White House will say how Harriet Miers would vote on it, even though she is rigorously antiabortion and politically conservative. Still, a bad decision is a bad decision. If the best we can say for it is that the end justifies the means, then we have not only lost the argument -- but a bit of our soul as well.
From TNR Online: Except for characterizing all social conservatives as "poor nutty bastards" in his final sentence, it's hard to argue with Chait's analysis below.
CONSERVATIVES GET TAKEN FOR A RIDE.
Crash Test
by Jonathan Chait
Post date 10.19.05 | Issue date 10.24.05
There are two basic ways to think about President Bush's relationship with the religious right. The first is that Bush is a genuine ally of social conservatives who, while often cagey in public, takes every opportunity to advance their agenda. As liberals would phrase this interpretation, Bush is a tool of the religious right. The second--utterly diametrical--theory is that Bush is mainly interested in harvesting votes from religious conservatives in order to implement an agenda dominated by his economic backers. In liberal-ese: Social conservatives are hapless GOP dupes. At this point, five years and two Supreme Court nominations into the Bush presidency, we can arrive at a definitive answer. And the verdict is: hapless dupes.
The nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court is, of course, the catalyzing event. Pat Buchanan, typifying the conservative response, wrote, "Bush may have tossed away his and our last chance to roll back the social revolution imposed upon us by our judicial dictatorship since the days of Earl Warren." And conservatives are certainly right to be upset. Miers may be personally conservative, but there is a long history of "stealth" nominees whom Republican presidents have passed off as true believers: John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter. Some of those assurances centered around the nominees' personal religiosity. (Conservative activist Paul Weyrich bitterly recalled "the White House conference call with Anthony M. Kennedy's priest, who assured the Reagan White House that Kennedy's strong Catholic upbringing would cause him to vote right on social issues.")
Bush's betrayal of the social conservative cause did not begin with Miers. His previous high court appointment, John Roberts, ought to have been taken as such. Bush all but explicitly promised to nominate justices like Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia, but Roberts is not in that mold. He has not displayed a passion for overturning precedents that enrage the right, and he has disavowed the tendency, favored by conservatives like Thomas, to use the Court to smother liberal legislation. As Jeffrey Rosen wrote in these pages last month, "Roberts's nomination as chief justice was a peace offering from Bush to Democrats." And, indeed, Roberts sailed through the Senate with 78 votes precisely because many liberals and moderates believe he will not be a Scalia.
Conservatives, of course, didn't want a justice who would get 78 votes. They wanted a maximally conservative justice. The point of the "nuclear option" showdown was to lay the groundwork for the Senate to confirm a Supreme Court justice with just 51 votes. Conservatives anticipated that Bush might nominate a justice so conservative that the entire Democratic Party--and even three or four moderate Republicans--would reject him. And they succeeded, using the threat of annulling the judicial filibuster to force Democrats to accept a compromise in which they could filibuster only in "extraordinary circumstances." Republican senators who signed on to that agreement said that it essentially banned Democrats from filibustering judges they had previously allowed to be appointed to the appellate courts, including radicals like Edith Clement and Janice Rogers Brown. If Bush so desired, he could have easily secured a seat for a militant conservative. He made no attempt to do so.
Miers, obviously, is even worse than Roberts from a conservative standpoint. Her most unwavering opponents come from the right. To the extent that Democrats oppose her, they cite her qualifications rather than her ideology. She may well be confirmed only because of Democratic votes, a spectacle nobody has contemplated.
This is in striking contrast to how Bush conducts his economic agenda. There, 78-vote coronations are rare. When it comes to tax cuts, regulation, or other controversial budget changes, Bush's Republicans usually muscle their legislation through both houses of Congress without any votes to spare. (Last week's House vote to ease oil refinement restrictions--during which the GOP leadership extended a five-minute vote to 45 minutes while they twisted enough arms to prevail 212 to 210--is a typical display.) The goal is always to win as many benefits as possible for the party's business and donor base. If it's a tax cut, to take a common example, Bush will hold out for the biggest, most regressive one he can get. (It's true that twelve Senate Democrats ultimately voted for Bush's 2001 tax cut, but only because they wanted to take credit for the goodies after passage was inevitable. The truly decisive vote--the one making room in the budget for the tax cut--happened earlier, and it passed with only two votes to spare.)
Maybe the most telling contrast is between the way Bush handled Social Security privatization and gay marriage. Polls this year and last showed that voters were roughly split on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. But those polls also showed that voters roundly rejected gay marriage--all eleven state anti-gay marriage ballot measures passed easily last November--which suggests that, if they could be persuaded that changing the Constitution was necessary to prevent gay marriage, they might support an amendment. Meanwhile, the public wildly approves of Social Security, and it has long opposed any change that would reduce guaranteed benefits.
At the beginning of the year, neither a gay marriage amendment nor Social Security privatization had anywhere close to enough support to pass. When The Washington Post asked Bush earlier this year about the marriage amendment, he shrugged, "Senators have made it clear that, so long as [the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act] is deemed constitutional, nothing will happen. I'd take their admonition seriously." He has done nothing to move public opinion since. In the face of opposition to Social Security privatization, on the other hand, Bush launched a campaign of unprecedented scale to win over the public and Congress. When his media blitz caused support for privatization to drop, he simply continued, persevering until long after even his staunchest allies had given up the ghost.
When Bush does advance the conservative social agenda, he almost always does so in ways that do not deplete his store of political capital. On stem cells, Bush tried to forge a compromise rather than battle for undiluted conservative principle. When polls showed his intervention for Terri Schiavo was unpopular, he dropped the issue like a stone.
Bush is far from the first Republican president to enjoy unrequited support from the Christian right. Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush appointed moderate Supreme Court justices and declined to press hard for constitutional amendments on issues like abortion and school prayer. Instead, those presidents, like the current one, give social conservatives symbolism and imagery but little in the way of actual policy change. Affluent conservative investors, on the other hand, get massive policy changes that they like.
Why do social conservatives keep accepting this rotten deal? It's not because there are fewer of them than there are economic conservatives. A detailed Pew survey last spring found that "enterprisers," who favor smaller government, comprise slightly less than a third of the GOP voting base. The other two groups, "pro-government conservatives" and "social conservatives," tilt right on cultural values but have moderate or even liberal economic views and outnumber the enterprisers by more than two to one.
Surely the answer has something to do with the fact that the religious right's political vanguard is complicit in its own subordination. For years, economic conservatives have learned that they can enlist social conservative groups to back their agenda on the flimsiest of pretexts. When business groups were fighting fuel economy standards, GOP activist Grover Norquist convinced Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum to oppose them as well, according to a 1995 Washington Post story, "because the mileage goals could be portrayed as threatening such mainstays of the family as the station wagon and the mini-van." According to its website, the top two legislative items on the Christian Coalition's legislative agenda are "Passing President Bush's Social Security reform" and "Making permanent President Bush's 2001 federal tax cuts."
Probably the most comic example of how Republicans use social conservatives came out of the Jack Abramoff scandal. Abramoff, you'll recall, is a GOP lobbyist who represented Indian casinos. At one point, he was hired to help shut down a rival casino. Ingeniously, he hired former Christian Coalition Director Ralph Reed, who in turn recruited Focus on the Family Chairman James Dobson to go on the radio and incite his followers to register their opposition to legalized gambling. The episode shows how GOP leaders view social conservative organizations as "rent-a-mobs" that can be manipulated into nearly any cause.
It's hard not to suspect that a good number of social conservatives have simply been co-opted by the Republican establishment. That would explain why, while social conservative intellectuals and commentators have almost unanimously rejected Miers, social conservative organizations have had a far more mixed reaction. While some criticized Miers, Dobson praised her, and she won unqualified endorsements from Jerry Falwell and groups like the Christian Coalition and the American Center for Law and Justice. With allies like these, Bush doesn't have much incentive to work harder to reward his social conservative base. No wonder the poor, nutty bastards got hosed again.
Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at TNR.
CONSERVATIVES GET TAKEN FOR A RIDE.
Crash Test
by Jonathan Chait
Post date 10.19.05 | Issue date 10.24.05
There are two basic ways to think about President Bush's relationship with the religious right. The first is that Bush is a genuine ally of social conservatives who, while often cagey in public, takes every opportunity to advance their agenda. As liberals would phrase this interpretation, Bush is a tool of the religious right. The second--utterly diametrical--theory is that Bush is mainly interested in harvesting votes from religious conservatives in order to implement an agenda dominated by his economic backers. In liberal-ese: Social conservatives are hapless GOP dupes. At this point, five years and two Supreme Court nominations into the Bush presidency, we can arrive at a definitive answer. And the verdict is: hapless dupes.
The nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court is, of course, the catalyzing event. Pat Buchanan, typifying the conservative response, wrote, "Bush may have tossed away his and our last chance to roll back the social revolution imposed upon us by our judicial dictatorship since the days of Earl Warren." And conservatives are certainly right to be upset. Miers may be personally conservative, but there is a long history of "stealth" nominees whom Republican presidents have passed off as true believers: John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter. Some of those assurances centered around the nominees' personal religiosity. (Conservative activist Paul Weyrich bitterly recalled "the White House conference call with Anthony M. Kennedy's priest, who assured the Reagan White House that Kennedy's strong Catholic upbringing would cause him to vote right on social issues.")
Bush's betrayal of the social conservative cause did not begin with Miers. His previous high court appointment, John Roberts, ought to have been taken as such. Bush all but explicitly promised to nominate justices like Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia, but Roberts is not in that mold. He has not displayed a passion for overturning precedents that enrage the right, and he has disavowed the tendency, favored by conservatives like Thomas, to use the Court to smother liberal legislation. As Jeffrey Rosen wrote in these pages last month, "Roberts's nomination as chief justice was a peace offering from Bush to Democrats." And, indeed, Roberts sailed through the Senate with 78 votes precisely because many liberals and moderates believe he will not be a Scalia.
Conservatives, of course, didn't want a justice who would get 78 votes. They wanted a maximally conservative justice. The point of the "nuclear option" showdown was to lay the groundwork for the Senate to confirm a Supreme Court justice with just 51 votes. Conservatives anticipated that Bush might nominate a justice so conservative that the entire Democratic Party--and even three or four moderate Republicans--would reject him. And they succeeded, using the threat of annulling the judicial filibuster to force Democrats to accept a compromise in which they could filibuster only in "extraordinary circumstances." Republican senators who signed on to that agreement said that it essentially banned Democrats from filibustering judges they had previously allowed to be appointed to the appellate courts, including radicals like Edith Clement and Janice Rogers Brown. If Bush so desired, he could have easily secured a seat for a militant conservative. He made no attempt to do so.
Miers, obviously, is even worse than Roberts from a conservative standpoint. Her most unwavering opponents come from the right. To the extent that Democrats oppose her, they cite her qualifications rather than her ideology. She may well be confirmed only because of Democratic votes, a spectacle nobody has contemplated.
This is in striking contrast to how Bush conducts his economic agenda. There, 78-vote coronations are rare. When it comes to tax cuts, regulation, or other controversial budget changes, Bush's Republicans usually muscle their legislation through both houses of Congress without any votes to spare. (Last week's House vote to ease oil refinement restrictions--during which the GOP leadership extended a five-minute vote to 45 minutes while they twisted enough arms to prevail 212 to 210--is a typical display.) The goal is always to win as many benefits as possible for the party's business and donor base. If it's a tax cut, to take a common example, Bush will hold out for the biggest, most regressive one he can get. (It's true that twelve Senate Democrats ultimately voted for Bush's 2001 tax cut, but only because they wanted to take credit for the goodies after passage was inevitable. The truly decisive vote--the one making room in the budget for the tax cut--happened earlier, and it passed with only two votes to spare.)
Maybe the most telling contrast is between the way Bush handled Social Security privatization and gay marriage. Polls this year and last showed that voters were roughly split on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. But those polls also showed that voters roundly rejected gay marriage--all eleven state anti-gay marriage ballot measures passed easily last November--which suggests that, if they could be persuaded that changing the Constitution was necessary to prevent gay marriage, they might support an amendment. Meanwhile, the public wildly approves of Social Security, and it has long opposed any change that would reduce guaranteed benefits.
At the beginning of the year, neither a gay marriage amendment nor Social Security privatization had anywhere close to enough support to pass. When The Washington Post asked Bush earlier this year about the marriage amendment, he shrugged, "Senators have made it clear that, so long as [the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act] is deemed constitutional, nothing will happen. I'd take their admonition seriously." He has done nothing to move public opinion since. In the face of opposition to Social Security privatization, on the other hand, Bush launched a campaign of unprecedented scale to win over the public and Congress. When his media blitz caused support for privatization to drop, he simply continued, persevering until long after even his staunchest allies had given up the ghost.
When Bush does advance the conservative social agenda, he almost always does so in ways that do not deplete his store of political capital. On stem cells, Bush tried to forge a compromise rather than battle for undiluted conservative principle. When polls showed his intervention for Terri Schiavo was unpopular, he dropped the issue like a stone.
Bush is far from the first Republican president to enjoy unrequited support from the Christian right. Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush appointed moderate Supreme Court justices and declined to press hard for constitutional amendments on issues like abortion and school prayer. Instead, those presidents, like the current one, give social conservatives symbolism and imagery but little in the way of actual policy change. Affluent conservative investors, on the other hand, get massive policy changes that they like.
Why do social conservatives keep accepting this rotten deal? It's not because there are fewer of them than there are economic conservatives. A detailed Pew survey last spring found that "enterprisers," who favor smaller government, comprise slightly less than a third of the GOP voting base. The other two groups, "pro-government conservatives" and "social conservatives," tilt right on cultural values but have moderate or even liberal economic views and outnumber the enterprisers by more than two to one.
Surely the answer has something to do with the fact that the religious right's political vanguard is complicit in its own subordination. For years, economic conservatives have learned that they can enlist social conservative groups to back their agenda on the flimsiest of pretexts. When business groups were fighting fuel economy standards, GOP activist Grover Norquist convinced Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum to oppose them as well, according to a 1995 Washington Post story, "because the mileage goals could be portrayed as threatening such mainstays of the family as the station wagon and the mini-van." According to its website, the top two legislative items on the Christian Coalition's legislative agenda are "Passing President Bush's Social Security reform" and "Making permanent President Bush's 2001 federal tax cuts."
Probably the most comic example of how Republicans use social conservatives came out of the Jack Abramoff scandal. Abramoff, you'll recall, is a GOP lobbyist who represented Indian casinos. At one point, he was hired to help shut down a rival casino. Ingeniously, he hired former Christian Coalition Director Ralph Reed, who in turn recruited Focus on the Family Chairman James Dobson to go on the radio and incite his followers to register their opposition to legalized gambling. The episode shows how GOP leaders view social conservative organizations as "rent-a-mobs" that can be manipulated into nearly any cause.
It's hard not to suspect that a good number of social conservatives have simply been co-opted by the Republican establishment. That would explain why, while social conservative intellectuals and commentators have almost unanimously rejected Miers, social conservative organizations have had a far more mixed reaction. While some criticized Miers, Dobson praised her, and she won unqualified endorsements from Jerry Falwell and groups like the Christian Coalition and the American Center for Law and Justice. With allies like these, Bush doesn't have much incentive to work harder to reward his social conservative base. No wonder the poor, nutty bastards got hosed again.
Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at TNR.
From Tapscott's Copy Desk: more evidence that Republicans are almost as lacking in testosterone as Democrats. Interestingly, though he is a whore for so-called "free trade." North Carolina Senator Richard Burr thought it useful to designate spending in this case. Elizabeth Dole voted against the Coburn amendment. Oh well, half a loaf...
Senate Overwhelmingly Rejects Three Coburn Anti-Pork Amendments
The U.S. Senate voted 86-13 against three anti-pork spending amendments offered by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK. The Coburn amendments would have repealed $500,000 previously authorized for a sculpture park in Seattle, Washington, $200,000 to build an animal shelter in Westerly, RI, and $200,000 to build a parking lot in Omaha, Nebraska, and re-directed the funds to help pay instead for Hurricane Katrina recovery.
It appears the majority of senators think it is more important to shelter dogs and cats in Rhode Island than people in Louisiana and Mississippi made homeless by Hurricane Katrina.
UPDATE: 2:45 EST
Sen. Patty Murray is issuing thinly-veiled threats to colleagues who might be inclined to support Coburnite movements. Getting that defensive this quick is probably an indication of just how scared the Big Spenders in both political parties are that the Coburnites will succeed.
And Glenn Reynolds hits the nail on the head: "I predict a revival of interest in term limits and a balanced budget amendment. But at least we've got their attention."
Hey, folks, don't be discouraged, this is just the opening round of what promises to be a long and probably bitter battle.
UPDATE: 2:50 p.m. EST
Here's how each senator voted. A Yea vote was to kill the Coburn amendments:
Grouped By Vote Position
YEAs ---86
Akaka (D-HI)Alexander (R-TN)Allard (R-CO)Baucus (D-MT)Bayh (D-IN)Bennett (R-UT)Biden (D-DE)Bingaman (D-NM)Bond (R-MO)Boxer (D-CA)Brownback (R-KS)Bunning (R-KY)Burns (R-MT)Byrd (D-WV)Cantwell (D-WA)Carper (D-DE)Chafee (R-RI)Chambliss (R-GA)Clinton (D-NY)Cochran (R-MS)Coleman (R-MN)Collins (R-ME)Conrad (D-ND)Cornyn (R-TX)Craig (R-ID)Crapo (R-ID)Dayton (D-MN)DeWine (R-OH)Dodd (D-CT)
Dole (R-NC)Domenici (R-NM)Dorgan (D-ND)Durbin (D-IL)Enzi (R-WY)Feinstein (D-CA)Frist (R-TN)Grassley (R-IA)Gregg (R-NH)Harkin (D-IA)Hatch (R-UT)Hutchison (R-TX)Inhofe (R-OK)Inouye (D-HI)Isakson (R-GA)Jeffords (I-VT)Johnson (D-SD)Kennedy (D-MA)Kerry (D-MA)Kohl (D-WI)Landrieu (D-LA)Lautenberg (D-NJ)Leahy (D-VT)Levin (D-MI)Lieberman (D-CT)Lincoln (D-AR)Lott (R-MS)Lugar (R-IN)Martinez (R-FL)
McConnell (R-KY)Mikulski (D-MD)Murkowski (R-AK)Murray (D-WA)Nelson (D-FL)Nelson (D-NE)Obama (D-IL)Pryor (D-AR)Reed (D-RI)Reid (D-NV)Roberts (R-KS)Rockefeller (D-WV)Salazar (D-CO)Santorum (R-PA)Sarbanes (D-MD)Schumer (D-NY)Shelby (R-AL)Smith (R-OR)Snowe (R-ME)Specter (R-PA)Stabenow (D-MI)Stevens (R-AK)Thomas (R-WY)Thune (R-SD)Vitter (R-LA)Voinovich (R-OH)Warner (R-VA)Wyden (D-OR)
NAYs ---13
Allen (R-VA)Burr (R-NC)Coburn (R-OK)DeMint (R-SC)Ensign (R-NV)
Feingold (D-WI)Graham (R-SC)Hagel (R-NE)Kyl (R-AZ)McCain (R-AZ)
Sessions (R-AL)Sununu (R-NH)Talent (R-MO)
Not Voting - 1
Corzine (D-NJ)
Senate Overwhelmingly Rejects Three Coburn Anti-Pork Amendments
The U.S. Senate voted 86-13 against three anti-pork spending amendments offered by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK. The Coburn amendments would have repealed $500,000 previously authorized for a sculpture park in Seattle, Washington, $200,000 to build an animal shelter in Westerly, RI, and $200,000 to build a parking lot in Omaha, Nebraska, and re-directed the funds to help pay instead for Hurricane Katrina recovery.
It appears the majority of senators think it is more important to shelter dogs and cats in Rhode Island than people in Louisiana and Mississippi made homeless by Hurricane Katrina.
UPDATE: 2:45 EST
Sen. Patty Murray is issuing thinly-veiled threats to colleagues who might be inclined to support Coburnite movements. Getting that defensive this quick is probably an indication of just how scared the Big Spenders in both political parties are that the Coburnites will succeed.
And Glenn Reynolds hits the nail on the head: "I predict a revival of interest in term limits and a balanced budget amendment. But at least we've got their attention."
Hey, folks, don't be discouraged, this is just the opening round of what promises to be a long and probably bitter battle.
UPDATE: 2:50 p.m. EST
Here's how each senator voted. A Yea vote was to kill the Coburn amendments:
Grouped By Vote Position
YEAs ---86
Akaka (D-HI)Alexander (R-TN)Allard (R-CO)Baucus (D-MT)Bayh (D-IN)Bennett (R-UT)Biden (D-DE)Bingaman (D-NM)Bond (R-MO)Boxer (D-CA)Brownback (R-KS)Bunning (R-KY)Burns (R-MT)Byrd (D-WV)Cantwell (D-WA)Carper (D-DE)Chafee (R-RI)Chambliss (R-GA)Clinton (D-NY)Cochran (R-MS)Coleman (R-MN)Collins (R-ME)Conrad (D-ND)Cornyn (R-TX)Craig (R-ID)Crapo (R-ID)Dayton (D-MN)DeWine (R-OH)Dodd (D-CT)
Dole (R-NC)Domenici (R-NM)Dorgan (D-ND)Durbin (D-IL)Enzi (R-WY)Feinstein (D-CA)Frist (R-TN)Grassley (R-IA)Gregg (R-NH)Harkin (D-IA)Hatch (R-UT)Hutchison (R-TX)Inhofe (R-OK)Inouye (D-HI)Isakson (R-GA)Jeffords (I-VT)Johnson (D-SD)Kennedy (D-MA)Kerry (D-MA)Kohl (D-WI)Landrieu (D-LA)Lautenberg (D-NJ)Leahy (D-VT)Levin (D-MI)Lieberman (D-CT)Lincoln (D-AR)Lott (R-MS)Lugar (R-IN)Martinez (R-FL)
McConnell (R-KY)Mikulski (D-MD)Murkowski (R-AK)Murray (D-WA)Nelson (D-FL)Nelson (D-NE)Obama (D-IL)Pryor (D-AR)Reed (D-RI)Reid (D-NV)Roberts (R-KS)Rockefeller (D-WV)Salazar (D-CO)Santorum (R-PA)Sarbanes (D-MD)Schumer (D-NY)Shelby (R-AL)Smith (R-OR)Snowe (R-ME)Specter (R-PA)Stabenow (D-MI)Stevens (R-AK)Thomas (R-WY)Thune (R-SD)Vitter (R-LA)Voinovich (R-OH)Warner (R-VA)Wyden (D-OR)
NAYs ---13
Allen (R-VA)Burr (R-NC)Coburn (R-OK)DeMint (R-SC)Ensign (R-NV)
Feingold (D-WI)Graham (R-SC)Hagel (R-NE)Kyl (R-AZ)McCain (R-AZ)
Sessions (R-AL)Sununu (R-NH)Talent (R-MO)
Not Voting - 1
Corzine (D-NJ)
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
The final straw
By Bruce Bartlett
Oct 18, 2005
The White House appears to have been truly blindsided by the vehemently negative response from conservative intellectuals to the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. In truth, this is a revolt that has been long in the making. The surprising thing is that it has taken such a long time for it to come out into the open.
The truth that is now dawning on many movement conservatives is that George W. Bush is not one of them and never has been. They were allies for a long time, to be sure, and conservatives used Bush just as he used them. But it now appears that they are headed for divorce. And as with all divorces, the ultimate cause was not the final incident, but the buildup of grievances over a long period that one day could no longer be overlooked, contained or smoothed over.
From the conservative point of view, the list of grievances is a long one, dating back to the first days of the Bush administration.
-- One of President Bush's first actions in office was a vast expansion of education spending with little real reform in return. To conservatives, it has always looked like a transparent effort to buy off the so-called soccer moms. But rather than buy peace with the education lobby, it has simply led to continuous calls for still more education spending, despite the paucity of evidence correlating spending with achievement.
-- Almost all conservatives view campaign finance reform as a blatantly unconstitutional abridgement of the First Amendment, the Supreme Court's endorsement notwithstanding. Now it may end up being used to suppress blogs and other new media that have been critical for conservatives in breaking the liberal monopoly of the mainstream press.
-- It is the rare conservative who has a kind word for the Bush immigration policy. Most conservatives think that he has been woefully weak on protecting our borders. Among the grassroots of the Republican Party, there is active hostility to administration plans to allow illegal immigrants to have guest-worker status. Most see this as a form of amnesty that will further encourage illegal immigration.
-- Even leaving aside national defense and homeland security, government spending has exploded during the Bush years. Although the vast proliferation of pork-barrel spending, which President Bush steadfastly refuses to veto, has gotten most of the attention, far more worrisome has been the expansion of entitlements, especially the extraordinarily ill-conceived Medicare drug benefit. In future years, Republicans will rue the day they passed this legislation, because they are eventually going to have to cut it, thereby losing all the political benefits they thought they would get among the elderly.
-- Government regulation got a big boost from passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, which Republicans rushed through Congress to deflect criticism over the Enron scandal. But the fact is that nothing in the legislation would have prevented Enron's financial abuses -- a fact proven by a new scandal involving stockbroker Refco, which appears to have engaged in Enron-style financial shenanigans that are now being investigated by authorities.
I could go on, but the point is that George W. Bush has never demonstrated any interest in shrinking the size of government. And on many occasions, he has increased government significantly. Yet if there is anything that defines conservatism in America, it is hostility to government expansion. The idea of big government conservatism, a term often used to describe Bush's philosophy, is a contradiction in terms.
Conservative intellectuals have known this for a long time, but looked the other way for various reasons. Some thought the war on terror trumped every other issue. If a few billion dollars had to be wasted to buy the votes needed to win the war, then so be it, many conservatives have argued. Others say that Bush never ran as a conservative in the first place, so there is no betrayal here, only a failure by conservatives to see what he has been all along.
Of course, this doesn't say much for the conservative movement. At best, conservatives were naive about Bush. At worst, they sold out much of what they claim to believe in.
The Miers nomination has led to some long-overdue soul-searching among conservative intellectuals. For many, the hope of finally turning around the judiciary was worth putting up with all the big government stuff. Thus, Bush's pick of a patently unqualified crony for a critical position on the Supreme Court was the final straw.
Had George W. Bush demonstrated more fealty to conservative principles over the last five years, he might have gotten a pass on Miers. But coming on top of all the big government initiatives he has supported, few in the conservative movement are inclined to give him the benefit of a doubt any longer.
By Bruce Bartlett
Oct 18, 2005
The White House appears to have been truly blindsided by the vehemently negative response from conservative intellectuals to the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. In truth, this is a revolt that has been long in the making. The surprising thing is that it has taken such a long time for it to come out into the open.
The truth that is now dawning on many movement conservatives is that George W. Bush is not one of them and never has been. They were allies for a long time, to be sure, and conservatives used Bush just as he used them. But it now appears that they are headed for divorce. And as with all divorces, the ultimate cause was not the final incident, but the buildup of grievances over a long period that one day could no longer be overlooked, contained or smoothed over.
From the conservative point of view, the list of grievances is a long one, dating back to the first days of the Bush administration.
-- One of President Bush's first actions in office was a vast expansion of education spending with little real reform in return. To conservatives, it has always looked like a transparent effort to buy off the so-called soccer moms. But rather than buy peace with the education lobby, it has simply led to continuous calls for still more education spending, despite the paucity of evidence correlating spending with achievement.
-- Almost all conservatives view campaign finance reform as a blatantly unconstitutional abridgement of the First Amendment, the Supreme Court's endorsement notwithstanding. Now it may end up being used to suppress blogs and other new media that have been critical for conservatives in breaking the liberal monopoly of the mainstream press.
-- It is the rare conservative who has a kind word for the Bush immigration policy. Most conservatives think that he has been woefully weak on protecting our borders. Among the grassroots of the Republican Party, there is active hostility to administration plans to allow illegal immigrants to have guest-worker status. Most see this as a form of amnesty that will further encourage illegal immigration.
-- Even leaving aside national defense and homeland security, government spending has exploded during the Bush years. Although the vast proliferation of pork-barrel spending, which President Bush steadfastly refuses to veto, has gotten most of the attention, far more worrisome has been the expansion of entitlements, especially the extraordinarily ill-conceived Medicare drug benefit. In future years, Republicans will rue the day they passed this legislation, because they are eventually going to have to cut it, thereby losing all the political benefits they thought they would get among the elderly.
-- Government regulation got a big boost from passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, which Republicans rushed through Congress to deflect criticism over the Enron scandal. But the fact is that nothing in the legislation would have prevented Enron's financial abuses -- a fact proven by a new scandal involving stockbroker Refco, which appears to have engaged in Enron-style financial shenanigans that are now being investigated by authorities.
I could go on, but the point is that George W. Bush has never demonstrated any interest in shrinking the size of government. And on many occasions, he has increased government significantly. Yet if there is anything that defines conservatism in America, it is hostility to government expansion. The idea of big government conservatism, a term often used to describe Bush's philosophy, is a contradiction in terms.
Conservative intellectuals have known this for a long time, but looked the other way for various reasons. Some thought the war on terror trumped every other issue. If a few billion dollars had to be wasted to buy the votes needed to win the war, then so be it, many conservatives have argued. Others say that Bush never ran as a conservative in the first place, so there is no betrayal here, only a failure by conservatives to see what he has been all along.
Of course, this doesn't say much for the conservative movement. At best, conservatives were naive about Bush. At worst, they sold out much of what they claim to believe in.
The Miers nomination has led to some long-overdue soul-searching among conservative intellectuals. For many, the hope of finally turning around the judiciary was worth putting up with all the big government stuff. Thus, Bush's pick of a patently unqualified crony for a critical position on the Supreme Court was the final straw.
Had George W. Bush demonstrated more fealty to conservative principles over the last five years, he might have gotten a pass on Miers. But coming on top of all the big government initiatives he has supported, few in the conservative movement are inclined to give him the benefit of a doubt any longer.
WHO WAS THE SECOND CHOICE?
by Ann Coulter
October 19, 2005
I have finally hit upon a misdeed by the Bush administration so outrageous, so appalling, so egregious, I am calling for a bipartisan commission with subpoena power to investigate: Who told the president to nominate Harriet Miers? The commission should also be charged with getting an answer to this question: Who was his second choice?
Things are so bad, the best option for Karl Rove now would be to get himself indicted. Then at least he'd have a colorable claim to having no involvement in the Miers nomination.
This week's Miers update is:
(1) Miers is a good bowler (New York Times, Oct. 16, 2005, front page — Joshua B. Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget: "'She is a very good bowler"), which, in all honesty, is the most impressive thing I've heard about Miers so far;
(2) In 1989, she supported a ban on abortion except to save the life of the mother.
From the beginning of this nightmare, I have taken it as a given that Miers will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. I assume that's why Bush nominated her. (It certainly wasn't her resume.) Pity no one told him there are scads of highly qualified judicial nominees who would also have voted against Roe. Wasn't it Harriet Miers' job to tell him that? Hey, wait a minute ...
But without a conservative theory of constitutional interpretation, Miers will lay the groundwork for a million more Roes. We're told she has terrific "common sense." Common sense is the last thing you want in a judge! The maxim "Hard cases make bad law" could be expanded to "Hard cases being decided by judges with 'common sense' make unfathomably bad law."
It was "common sense" to allow married couples to buy contraception in Connecticut. That was a decision any randomly selected group of nine good bowlers might well have concurred with on the grounds that, "Well, it's just common sense, isn't it?"
But when the Supreme Court used common sense — rather than the text of the Constitution — to strike down Connecticut's law banning contraception, it opened the door to the Supreme Court rewriting all manner of state laws. By creating a nonspecific "right to privacy," Griswold v. Connecticut led like night into day to the famed "constitutional right" to stick a fork in a baby's head.
This isn't rank speculation about where "common sense" devoid of constitutional theory gets you: Miers told Sen. Arlen Specter she would have voted with the majority in Griswold.
(Miers also told Sen. Patrick Leahy — in front of witnesses — that her favorite justice was "Warren," leaving people wondering whether she meant former Chief Justice Earl Warren, memorialized in "Impeach Warren" billboards across America, or former Chief Justice Warren Burger, another mediocrity praised for his "common sense" who voted for Roe v. Wade and was laughed at by Rehnquist clerks like John Roberts for his lack of ability.)
The sickness of what liberals have done to America is that so many citizens — even conservative citizens — seem to believe the job of a Supreme Court justice entails nothing more than "voting" on public policy issues. The White House considers it relevant to tell us Miers' religious beliefs, her hobbies, her hopes and dreams. She's a good bowler! A stickler for detail! Great dancer! Makes her own clothes!
That's nice for her, but what we're really in the market for is a constitutional scholar who can forcefully say, "No — that's not my job."
We've been waiting 30 years to end the lunacy of nine demigods on the Supreme Court deciding every burning social issue of the day for us, loyal subjects in a judicial theocracy. We don't want someone who will decide those issues for us — but decide them "our" way. If we did, a White House bureaucrat with good horse sense might be just the ticket.
Admittedly, there isn't much that's more important than ending the abortion holocaust in America. (Abortionist casualties: 7; Unborn casualties 30 million.) But there is one thing. That is democracy.
Democracy sometimes leads to silly laws such as the one that prohibited married couples from buying contraception in Connecticut. But allowing Americans to vote has never led to creches being torn down across America. It's never led to prayer being purged from every public school in the nation. It's never led to gay marriage. It's never led to returning slaves who had escaped to free states to their slavemasters. And it's never led to 30 million dead babies.
We've gone from a representative democracy to a monarchy, and the most appalling thing is — even conservatives just hope like the dickens the next king is a good one.
by Ann Coulter
October 19, 2005
I have finally hit upon a misdeed by the Bush administration so outrageous, so appalling, so egregious, I am calling for a bipartisan commission with subpoena power to investigate: Who told the president to nominate Harriet Miers? The commission should also be charged with getting an answer to this question: Who was his second choice?
Things are so bad, the best option for Karl Rove now would be to get himself indicted. Then at least he'd have a colorable claim to having no involvement in the Miers nomination.
This week's Miers update is:
(1) Miers is a good bowler (New York Times, Oct. 16, 2005, front page — Joshua B. Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget: "'She is a very good bowler"), which, in all honesty, is the most impressive thing I've heard about Miers so far;
(2) In 1989, she supported a ban on abortion except to save the life of the mother.
From the beginning of this nightmare, I have taken it as a given that Miers will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. I assume that's why Bush nominated her. (It certainly wasn't her resume.) Pity no one told him there are scads of highly qualified judicial nominees who would also have voted against Roe. Wasn't it Harriet Miers' job to tell him that? Hey, wait a minute ...
But without a conservative theory of constitutional interpretation, Miers will lay the groundwork for a million more Roes. We're told she has terrific "common sense." Common sense is the last thing you want in a judge! The maxim "Hard cases make bad law" could be expanded to "Hard cases being decided by judges with 'common sense' make unfathomably bad law."
It was "common sense" to allow married couples to buy contraception in Connecticut. That was a decision any randomly selected group of nine good bowlers might well have concurred with on the grounds that, "Well, it's just common sense, isn't it?"
But when the Supreme Court used common sense — rather than the text of the Constitution — to strike down Connecticut's law banning contraception, it opened the door to the Supreme Court rewriting all manner of state laws. By creating a nonspecific "right to privacy," Griswold v. Connecticut led like night into day to the famed "constitutional right" to stick a fork in a baby's head.
This isn't rank speculation about where "common sense" devoid of constitutional theory gets you: Miers told Sen. Arlen Specter she would have voted with the majority in Griswold.
(Miers also told Sen. Patrick Leahy — in front of witnesses — that her favorite justice was "Warren," leaving people wondering whether she meant former Chief Justice Earl Warren, memorialized in "Impeach Warren" billboards across America, or former Chief Justice Warren Burger, another mediocrity praised for his "common sense" who voted for Roe v. Wade and was laughed at by Rehnquist clerks like John Roberts for his lack of ability.)
The sickness of what liberals have done to America is that so many citizens — even conservative citizens — seem to believe the job of a Supreme Court justice entails nothing more than "voting" on public policy issues. The White House considers it relevant to tell us Miers' religious beliefs, her hobbies, her hopes and dreams. She's a good bowler! A stickler for detail! Great dancer! Makes her own clothes!
That's nice for her, but what we're really in the market for is a constitutional scholar who can forcefully say, "No — that's not my job."
We've been waiting 30 years to end the lunacy of nine demigods on the Supreme Court deciding every burning social issue of the day for us, loyal subjects in a judicial theocracy. We don't want someone who will decide those issues for us — but decide them "our" way. If we did, a White House bureaucrat with good horse sense might be just the ticket.
Admittedly, there isn't much that's more important than ending the abortion holocaust in America. (Abortionist casualties: 7; Unborn casualties 30 million.) But there is one thing. That is democracy.
Democracy sometimes leads to silly laws such as the one that prohibited married couples from buying contraception in Connecticut. But allowing Americans to vote has never led to creches being torn down across America. It's never led to prayer being purged from every public school in the nation. It's never led to gay marriage. It's never led to returning slaves who had escaped to free states to their slavemasters. And it's never led to 30 million dead babies.
We've gone from a representative democracy to a monarchy, and the most appalling thing is — even conservatives just hope like the dickens the next king is a good one.
Faith-Based War
By Pat Buchanan
October 19, 2005
"This is a very positive day ... for world peace," said President Bush, following the referendum on a new Iraqi constitution. "Democracies are peaceful countries." Considering that Iraq is perhaps the least peaceful country on earth, the statement seemed jarring.
It should not be. For it reflects a quasi-religious transformation in George W. Bush -- his political conversion to democratism, a faith-based ideology that holds democracy to be the cure for mankind's ills, and its absence to be the principal cause of terror and war.
In the theology of a devout democratist, if Americans will only persevere in using their power to convert the Islamic world, then the whole world, to democracy, we will come as close as mankind can to creating heaven on earth.
As Bush said in his second inaugural, "So, it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."
Speaking, three weeks ago, to the 20th birthday conclave of the National Endowment for Democracy, Bush recited the true believer's creed: "If the peoples (of the Middle East) are permitted to choose their own destiny ... by their participation as free men and women, then the extremists will be marginalized and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow and eventually end."
The president was seconded by Vice President Cheney on CNN: "I think ... we will, in fact, succeed in getting democracy established in Iraq, and I think that when we do, that will be the end of the insurgency."
Upon this faith Bush has wagered his presidency, the lives of America's best and bravest, and our entire position in the Middle East and the world. But as the Los Angeles Times' Tyler Marshall and Louise Roug report, U.S. field commanders George Casey and John Abizaid are skeptical that any election where Iraq's Sunnis are dispossessed of pre-eminence and power will ensure an end to terror. It may, they warn, bring new Sunni support for the insurgency.
Also challenging the Bush faith is Brian Jenkins, a terrorism specialist at RAND. He cites Colombia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Northern Ireland as countries where democracy has failed to end political violence.
Nathan Brown, a Mideast expert at the Carnegie Endowment, agrees: "The democratic process as it has worked so far (in Iraq) has certainly done nothing to undermine the insurgency."
But the most sweeping challenge to President Bush's faith-based war comes from F. Gregory Cause III in Foreign Affairs. Writes Cause: "There is no evidence that democracy reduces terror. Indeed, a democratic Middle East would probably result in Islamist governments unwilling to cooperate with Washington."
In Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria, it is anti-American Islamists who seem positioned to seize power should it fall from the hands of the authoritarian rulers the National Endowment for Democracy and its neoconservative allies seek to destabilize and dump over.
If Cause is right and Bush wrong, the fruits of our bloody war for democracy in Iraq could mean a Middle East more hostile to American values and U.S. vital interests than the one Bush inherited.
That would be a strategic disaster of historic dimension.
Not only does democracy offer no guarantee against terror, writes Cause, democracies are the most frequent targets of terror. Not one incident of terror was reported in China between 2000 and 2003, but democratic India suffered 203. Israel, the most democratic nation in the Middle East, endured scores of acts of terror from 2000 to 2005. Syria's dictatorship experienced almost none. While Saddam's Iraq was terror-free, democratic Iraq suffers daily attacks.
Researching 25 years of suicide bombings, scholar Robert Pape found the leading cause was not a lack of democracy, but the presence of troops from democratic nations on lands terrorists believe by right belong to them.
The United States was hit on 9-11 because we had an army on Saudi soil. Britain and Spain were hit for sending troops to occupy Iraq. Russia was hit at Beslan because she is perceived as occupying Chechnya.
Democracy is thus no more a cure for terror than its absence is the cause. Osama has no moral objection to dictatorships. He means to establish one, a caliphate where mosque and state are joined, and sharia law is imposed without recourse to referendum.
As with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Ho and Castro, so, too, with bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Such men seek absolute power and use revolutionary terror as the means to establish their dictatorships.
By January, we shall know whether Iraqi democracy is the antidote to terror Bush believes it to be. If it is not, he and we will have to face the grim consequences of his conversion to a utopian ideology in the name of which he pursued a potentially calamitous three-year war.
By Pat Buchanan
October 19, 2005
"This is a very positive day ... for world peace," said President Bush, following the referendum on a new Iraqi constitution. "Democracies are peaceful countries." Considering that Iraq is perhaps the least peaceful country on earth, the statement seemed jarring.
It should not be. For it reflects a quasi-religious transformation in George W. Bush -- his political conversion to democratism, a faith-based ideology that holds democracy to be the cure for mankind's ills, and its absence to be the principal cause of terror and war.
In the theology of a devout democratist, if Americans will only persevere in using their power to convert the Islamic world, then the whole world, to democracy, we will come as close as mankind can to creating heaven on earth.
As Bush said in his second inaugural, "So, it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."
Speaking, three weeks ago, to the 20th birthday conclave of the National Endowment for Democracy, Bush recited the true believer's creed: "If the peoples (of the Middle East) are permitted to choose their own destiny ... by their participation as free men and women, then the extremists will be marginalized and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow and eventually end."
The president was seconded by Vice President Cheney on CNN: "I think ... we will, in fact, succeed in getting democracy established in Iraq, and I think that when we do, that will be the end of the insurgency."
Upon this faith Bush has wagered his presidency, the lives of America's best and bravest, and our entire position in the Middle East and the world. But as the Los Angeles Times' Tyler Marshall and Louise Roug report, U.S. field commanders George Casey and John Abizaid are skeptical that any election where Iraq's Sunnis are dispossessed of pre-eminence and power will ensure an end to terror. It may, they warn, bring new Sunni support for the insurgency.
Also challenging the Bush faith is Brian Jenkins, a terrorism specialist at RAND. He cites Colombia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Northern Ireland as countries where democracy has failed to end political violence.
Nathan Brown, a Mideast expert at the Carnegie Endowment, agrees: "The democratic process as it has worked so far (in Iraq) has certainly done nothing to undermine the insurgency."
But the most sweeping challenge to President Bush's faith-based war comes from F. Gregory Cause III in Foreign Affairs. Writes Cause: "There is no evidence that democracy reduces terror. Indeed, a democratic Middle East would probably result in Islamist governments unwilling to cooperate with Washington."
In Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria, it is anti-American Islamists who seem positioned to seize power should it fall from the hands of the authoritarian rulers the National Endowment for Democracy and its neoconservative allies seek to destabilize and dump over.
If Cause is right and Bush wrong, the fruits of our bloody war for democracy in Iraq could mean a Middle East more hostile to American values and U.S. vital interests than the one Bush inherited.
That would be a strategic disaster of historic dimension.
Not only does democracy offer no guarantee against terror, writes Cause, democracies are the most frequent targets of terror. Not one incident of terror was reported in China between 2000 and 2003, but democratic India suffered 203. Israel, the most democratic nation in the Middle East, endured scores of acts of terror from 2000 to 2005. Syria's dictatorship experienced almost none. While Saddam's Iraq was terror-free, democratic Iraq suffers daily attacks.
Researching 25 years of suicide bombings, scholar Robert Pape found the leading cause was not a lack of democracy, but the presence of troops from democratic nations on lands terrorists believe by right belong to them.
The United States was hit on 9-11 because we had an army on Saudi soil. Britain and Spain were hit for sending troops to occupy Iraq. Russia was hit at Beslan because she is perceived as occupying Chechnya.
Democracy is thus no more a cure for terror than its absence is the cause. Osama has no moral objection to dictatorships. He means to establish one, a caliphate where mosque and state are joined, and sharia law is imposed without recourse to referendum.
As with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Ho and Castro, so, too, with bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Such men seek absolute power and use revolutionary terror as the means to establish their dictatorships.
By January, we shall know whether Iraqi democracy is the antidote to terror Bush believes it to be. If it is not, he and we will have to face the grim consequences of his conversion to a utopian ideology in the name of which he pursued a potentially calamitous three-year war.
Slouching Towards Miers
Bush shows himself to be indifferent, if not hostile, to conservative values.
By Robert H. Bork
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
With a single stroke--the nomination of Harriet Miers--the president has damaged the prospects for reform of a left-leaning and imperialistic Supreme Court, taken the heart out of a rising generation of constitutional scholars, and widened the fissures within the conservative movement. That's not a bad day's work--for liberals.
There is, to say the least, a heavy presumption that Ms. Miers, though undoubtedly possessed of many sterling qualities, is not qualified to be on the Supreme Court. It is not just that she has no known experience with constitutional law and no known opinions on judicial philosophy. It is worse than that. As president of the Texas Bar Association, she wrote columns for the association's journal. David Brooks of the New York Times examined those columns. He reports, with supporting examples, that the quality of her thought and writing demonstrates absolutely no "ability to write clearly and argue incisively."
The administration's defense of the nomination is pathetic: Ms. Miers was a bar association president (a nonqualification for anyone familiar with the bureaucratic service that leads to such presidencies); she shares Mr. Bush's judicial philosophy (which seems to consist of bromides about "strict construction" and the like); and she is, as an evangelical Christian, deeply religious. That last, along with her contributions to pro-life causes, is designed to suggest that she does not like Roe v. Wade, though it certainly does not necessarily mean that she would vote to overturn that constitutional travesty.
There is a great deal more to constitutional law than hostility to Roe. Ms. Miers is reported to have endorsed affirmative action. That position, or its opposite, can be reconciled with Christian belief. Issues we cannot now identify or even imagine will come before the court in the next 20 years. Reliance upon religious faith tells us nothing about how a Justice Miers would rule. Only a commitment to originalism provides a solid foundation for constitutional adjudication. There is no sign that she has thought about, much less adopted, that philosophy of judging.
Some moderate (i.e., lukewarm) conservatives admonish the rest of us to hold our fire until Ms. Miers's performance at her hearing tells us more about her outlook on law, but any significant revelations are highly unlikely. She cannot be expected to endorse originalism; that would alienate the bloc of senators who think constitutional philosophy is about arriving at pleasing political results. What, then, can she say? Probably that she cannot discuss any issue likely to come before the court. Given the adventurousness of this court, that's just about every issue imaginable. What we can expect in all probability is platitudes about not "legislating from the bench." The Senate is asked, then, to confirm a nominee with no visible judicial philosophy who lacks the basic skills of persuasive argument and clear writing.
But that is only part of the damage Mr. Bush has done. For the past 20 years conservatives have been articulating the philosophy of originalism, the only approach that can make judicial review democratically legitimate. Originalism simply means that the judge must discern from the relevant materials--debates at the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers, newspaper accounts of the time, debates in the state ratifying conventions, and the like--the principles the ratifiers understood themselves to be enacting. The remainder of the task is to apply those principles to unforeseen circumstances, a task that law performs all the time. Any philosophy that does not confine judges to the original understanding inevitably makes the Constitution the plaything of willful judges.
By passing over the many clearly qualified persons, male and female, to pick a stealth candidate, George W. Bush has sent a message to aspiring young originalists that it is better not to say anything remotely controversial, a sort of "Don't ask, don't tell" admonition to would-be judges. It is a blow in particular to the Federalist Society, most of whose members endorse originalism. The society, unlike the ACLU, takes no public positions, engages in no litigation, and includes people of differing views in its programs. It performs the invaluable function of making law students, in the heavily left-leaning schools, aware that there are respectable perspectives on law other than liberal activism. Yet the society has been defamed in McCarthyite fashion by liberals; and it appears to have been important to the White House that neither the new chief justice nor Ms. Miers had much to do with the Federalists.
Finally, this nomination has split the fragile conservative coalition on social issues into those appalled by the administration's cynicism and those still anxious, for a variety of reasons, to support or at least placate the president. Anger is growing between the two groups. The supporters should rethink. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq aside, George W. Bush has not governed as a conservative (amnesty for illegal immigrants, reckless spending that will ultimately undo his tax cuts, signing a campaign finance bill even while maintaining its unconstitutionality). This George Bush, like his father, is showing himself to be indifferent, if not actively hostile, to conservative values. He appears embittered by conservative opposition to his nomination, which raises the possibility that if Ms. Miers is not confirmed, the next nominee will be even less acceptable to those asking for a restrained court. That, ironically, is the best argument for her confirmation. But it is not good enough.
It is said that at La Scala an exhausted tenor, after responding to repeated cries of "Encore," said he could not go on. A man rose in the audience to say, "You'll keep singing until you get it right." That man should be our model.
Mr. Bork is a fellow of the Hudson Institute and editor of "A Country I Do Not Recognize: The Legal Assault on American Values" (Hoover, 2005). He is co-chairman of the Federalist Society.
Bush shows himself to be indifferent, if not hostile, to conservative values.
By Robert H. Bork
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
With a single stroke--the nomination of Harriet Miers--the president has damaged the prospects for reform of a left-leaning and imperialistic Supreme Court, taken the heart out of a rising generation of constitutional scholars, and widened the fissures within the conservative movement. That's not a bad day's work--for liberals.
There is, to say the least, a heavy presumption that Ms. Miers, though undoubtedly possessed of many sterling qualities, is not qualified to be on the Supreme Court. It is not just that she has no known experience with constitutional law and no known opinions on judicial philosophy. It is worse than that. As president of the Texas Bar Association, she wrote columns for the association's journal. David Brooks of the New York Times examined those columns. He reports, with supporting examples, that the quality of her thought and writing demonstrates absolutely no "ability to write clearly and argue incisively."
The administration's defense of the nomination is pathetic: Ms. Miers was a bar association president (a nonqualification for anyone familiar with the bureaucratic service that leads to such presidencies); she shares Mr. Bush's judicial philosophy (which seems to consist of bromides about "strict construction" and the like); and she is, as an evangelical Christian, deeply religious. That last, along with her contributions to pro-life causes, is designed to suggest that she does not like Roe v. Wade, though it certainly does not necessarily mean that she would vote to overturn that constitutional travesty.
There is a great deal more to constitutional law than hostility to Roe. Ms. Miers is reported to have endorsed affirmative action. That position, or its opposite, can be reconciled with Christian belief. Issues we cannot now identify or even imagine will come before the court in the next 20 years. Reliance upon religious faith tells us nothing about how a Justice Miers would rule. Only a commitment to originalism provides a solid foundation for constitutional adjudication. There is no sign that she has thought about, much less adopted, that philosophy of judging.
Some moderate (i.e., lukewarm) conservatives admonish the rest of us to hold our fire until Ms. Miers's performance at her hearing tells us more about her outlook on law, but any significant revelations are highly unlikely. She cannot be expected to endorse originalism; that would alienate the bloc of senators who think constitutional philosophy is about arriving at pleasing political results. What, then, can she say? Probably that she cannot discuss any issue likely to come before the court. Given the adventurousness of this court, that's just about every issue imaginable. What we can expect in all probability is platitudes about not "legislating from the bench." The Senate is asked, then, to confirm a nominee with no visible judicial philosophy who lacks the basic skills of persuasive argument and clear writing.
But that is only part of the damage Mr. Bush has done. For the past 20 years conservatives have been articulating the philosophy of originalism, the only approach that can make judicial review democratically legitimate. Originalism simply means that the judge must discern from the relevant materials--debates at the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers, newspaper accounts of the time, debates in the state ratifying conventions, and the like--the principles the ratifiers understood themselves to be enacting. The remainder of the task is to apply those principles to unforeseen circumstances, a task that law performs all the time. Any philosophy that does not confine judges to the original understanding inevitably makes the Constitution the plaything of willful judges.
By passing over the many clearly qualified persons, male and female, to pick a stealth candidate, George W. Bush has sent a message to aspiring young originalists that it is better not to say anything remotely controversial, a sort of "Don't ask, don't tell" admonition to would-be judges. It is a blow in particular to the Federalist Society, most of whose members endorse originalism. The society, unlike the ACLU, takes no public positions, engages in no litigation, and includes people of differing views in its programs. It performs the invaluable function of making law students, in the heavily left-leaning schools, aware that there are respectable perspectives on law other than liberal activism. Yet the society has been defamed in McCarthyite fashion by liberals; and it appears to have been important to the White House that neither the new chief justice nor Ms. Miers had much to do with the Federalists.
Finally, this nomination has split the fragile conservative coalition on social issues into those appalled by the administration's cynicism and those still anxious, for a variety of reasons, to support or at least placate the president. Anger is growing between the two groups. The supporters should rethink. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq aside, George W. Bush has not governed as a conservative (amnesty for illegal immigrants, reckless spending that will ultimately undo his tax cuts, signing a campaign finance bill even while maintaining its unconstitutionality). This George Bush, like his father, is showing himself to be indifferent, if not actively hostile, to conservative values. He appears embittered by conservative opposition to his nomination, which raises the possibility that if Ms. Miers is not confirmed, the next nominee will be even less acceptable to those asking for a restrained court. That, ironically, is the best argument for her confirmation. But it is not good enough.
It is said that at La Scala an exhausted tenor, after responding to repeated cries of "Encore," said he could not go on. A man rose in the audience to say, "You'll keep singing until you get it right." That man should be our model.
Mr. Bork is a fellow of the Hudson Institute and editor of "A Country I Do Not Recognize: The Legal Assault on American Values" (Hoover, 2005). He is co-chairman of the Federalist Society.
Monday, October 17, 2005
From Chronicles' website:
How to End the War
By Paul Craig Roberts
Friday, October 14, 2005
George W. Bush is a natural born liar. He lied us into a war, and now he is lying to keep us there. In his Oct. 6 self-congratulatory speech at that neoconservative shrine, the National Endowment for Democracy, the president of the United States said: “Today there are more than 80 Iraqi army battalions fighting the insurgency alongside our forces.”
Eighty Iraqi battalions make it sound like the United States is just lending Iraq a helping hand. I wonder what Congress and the U.S. commanders in Iraq thought when they heard there were 80 Iraqi battalions that American troops are helping to fight insurgents? Just a few days prior to Bush’s speech, Gens. Casey and Abizaid told Congress that, as a matter of fact, there was only one Iraqi battalion able to undertake operations against insurgents.
I wonder, also, who noticed the great contradiction in Bush’s speech. On the one hand, he claims steady progress toward freedom and democracy in Iraq. On the other hand, he seeks the American public’s support for open-ended war.
In her Princeton speech, Condi Rice made it clear that Iraq is just the beginning: “We have set out to help the people of the Middle East transform their societies. Now is not the time to falter or fade.”
On Oct. 5, Vice President Cheney let us know how long this commitment was to last: “Like other great duties in history, it will require decades of patient effort.”
Who’s going to pay for these decades of war to which the Bush administration is committing Americans? Already, the United States is spending $7 billion a month on war in Iraq alone. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service says that if the Iraq war goes on another five years, it will cost at least $570 billion by 2010.
Bush’s war has already doubled the price of gasoline and home heating oil. Americans are being laid off right and left, as corporations outsource their jobs to China, India and Eastern Europe.
With U.S. forces bogged down in Afghanistan (invaded Oct. 7, 2001) and Iraq (invaded March 20, 2003), Bush is plotting regime change in Syria and conspiring to set up Iran for attack.
Is there a single person in the Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Treasury, the Congressional Budget Office or the Federal Reserve who thinks the United States, already drowning in red ink, has the resources to fight wars for decades?
And where will the troops come from? The United States cannot replace the losses in Iraq. We know about the 2,000 American troops killed, but we do not hear about the large number of wounded. UPI correspondent Martin Sieff reported on Oct. 7 that U.S. wounded jumped from 16.3 per day at the end of September to 28.5 per day at the beginning of October. Multiply that daily rate by 30 days and you get 855 wounded per month. Approximately half of these are wounded too seriously to return to combat.
Has anyone in the administration pointed out to Bush, Cheney and Condi Rice what decades of casualties at these rates mean?
Insurgents are killing Iraqi security personnel who are collaborating with the U.S. occupation at the rate of 200 to 300 per month. The wounded numbers are much higher.
Last month, suicide bombers killed 481 Iraqis and wounded 1,074.
Has anyone in the administration put these numbers in a decades-long context?
Apparently not. Once these numbers are put on paper, not even Bush administration speechwriters can continue to pen rhetorical justifications for war and more war.
The neoconservative Bush administration prides itself on not being “reality based.” Facts get in the way of the administration’s illusions and delusions. Bush’s “80 Iraqi battalions” are like Hitler’s secret weapons. They don’t exist.
Iraqis cannot afford to collaborate with the hated Americans or with the puppet government that the United States has put in place. Out of desperation, some do, but their heart is not in it. Few Iraqis are willing to die fighting for the United States and Likudian Israel.
When the 2nd Iraq Battalion graduated from U.S. training camp on Jan. 6, 2004, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and U.S. commander in Iraq Gen. Ricardo Sanchez expressed “high expectations” that Iraqi troops, in the general’s words, “would help us bring security and stability back to the country.”
Three months later, when the 2nd Battalion was brought up to support the U.S. invasion of Fallujah, it refused to fight and returned to its post. “We did not sign up to fight Iraqis,” said the troops.
Readers write in frustration, “Tell us what we can do.” On the surface, it doesn’t look like Bush can be stopped from trashing our country.
The congressional midterm elections are a year away. Moreover, the Democrats have failed as an opposition party and are compromised by their support for the war. Bush has three more years in which to mire America in wider war. If Bush succeeds in starting wars throughout the Middle East, his successor will be stuck with them.
Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike have made it clear that they are going to ignore demonstrations and public opinion. The print and TV media have made it clear that there will be no reporting that will hold the Bush administration accountable for its deceit and delusion.
There still is a way to bring reality to the Bush administration. The public has the Internet. Is the antiwar movement well enough organized to collect via the Internet signatures on petitions for impeachment, perhaps one petition for each state? Millions of signatures would embarrass Bush before the world and embarrass our elected representatives for their failure to act.
If no one in Congress acted on the petitions, all the rhetoric about war for democracy would fall flat. It would be obvious that there is no democracy in America.
If the cloak of democracy is stripped away, Bush’s “wars for democracy” begin to look like the foreign adventures of a megalomaniac. Remove Bush’s rhetorical cover, and tolerance at home and abroad for Bush’s war would evaporate. If Bush persisted, he would become a pariah.
Americans may feel that they cannot undercut a president at war, in which case Americans will become an embattled people consumed by decades of conflict. Americans can boot out Bush or pay dearly in blood and money.
COPYRIGHT 2005 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
How to End the War
By Paul Craig Roberts
Friday, October 14, 2005
George W. Bush is a natural born liar. He lied us into a war, and now he is lying to keep us there. In his Oct. 6 self-congratulatory speech at that neoconservative shrine, the National Endowment for Democracy, the president of the United States said: “Today there are more than 80 Iraqi army battalions fighting the insurgency alongside our forces.”
Eighty Iraqi battalions make it sound like the United States is just lending Iraq a helping hand. I wonder what Congress and the U.S. commanders in Iraq thought when they heard there were 80 Iraqi battalions that American troops are helping to fight insurgents? Just a few days prior to Bush’s speech, Gens. Casey and Abizaid told Congress that, as a matter of fact, there was only one Iraqi battalion able to undertake operations against insurgents.
I wonder, also, who noticed the great contradiction in Bush’s speech. On the one hand, he claims steady progress toward freedom and democracy in Iraq. On the other hand, he seeks the American public’s support for open-ended war.
In her Princeton speech, Condi Rice made it clear that Iraq is just the beginning: “We have set out to help the people of the Middle East transform their societies. Now is not the time to falter or fade.”
On Oct. 5, Vice President Cheney let us know how long this commitment was to last: “Like other great duties in history, it will require decades of patient effort.”
Who’s going to pay for these decades of war to which the Bush administration is committing Americans? Already, the United States is spending $7 billion a month on war in Iraq alone. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service says that if the Iraq war goes on another five years, it will cost at least $570 billion by 2010.
Bush’s war has already doubled the price of gasoline and home heating oil. Americans are being laid off right and left, as corporations outsource their jobs to China, India and Eastern Europe.
With U.S. forces bogged down in Afghanistan (invaded Oct. 7, 2001) and Iraq (invaded March 20, 2003), Bush is plotting regime change in Syria and conspiring to set up Iran for attack.
Is there a single person in the Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Treasury, the Congressional Budget Office or the Federal Reserve who thinks the United States, already drowning in red ink, has the resources to fight wars for decades?
And where will the troops come from? The United States cannot replace the losses in Iraq. We know about the 2,000 American troops killed, but we do not hear about the large number of wounded. UPI correspondent Martin Sieff reported on Oct. 7 that U.S. wounded jumped from 16.3 per day at the end of September to 28.5 per day at the beginning of October. Multiply that daily rate by 30 days and you get 855 wounded per month. Approximately half of these are wounded too seriously to return to combat.
Has anyone in the administration pointed out to Bush, Cheney and Condi Rice what decades of casualties at these rates mean?
Insurgents are killing Iraqi security personnel who are collaborating with the U.S. occupation at the rate of 200 to 300 per month. The wounded numbers are much higher.
Last month, suicide bombers killed 481 Iraqis and wounded 1,074.
Has anyone in the administration put these numbers in a decades-long context?
Apparently not. Once these numbers are put on paper, not even Bush administration speechwriters can continue to pen rhetorical justifications for war and more war.
The neoconservative Bush administration prides itself on not being “reality based.” Facts get in the way of the administration’s illusions and delusions. Bush’s “80 Iraqi battalions” are like Hitler’s secret weapons. They don’t exist.
Iraqis cannot afford to collaborate with the hated Americans or with the puppet government that the United States has put in place. Out of desperation, some do, but their heart is not in it. Few Iraqis are willing to die fighting for the United States and Likudian Israel.
When the 2nd Iraq Battalion graduated from U.S. training camp on Jan. 6, 2004, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and U.S. commander in Iraq Gen. Ricardo Sanchez expressed “high expectations” that Iraqi troops, in the general’s words, “would help us bring security and stability back to the country.”
Three months later, when the 2nd Battalion was brought up to support the U.S. invasion of Fallujah, it refused to fight and returned to its post. “We did not sign up to fight Iraqis,” said the troops.
Readers write in frustration, “Tell us what we can do.” On the surface, it doesn’t look like Bush can be stopped from trashing our country.
The congressional midterm elections are a year away. Moreover, the Democrats have failed as an opposition party and are compromised by their support for the war. Bush has three more years in which to mire America in wider war. If Bush succeeds in starting wars throughout the Middle East, his successor will be stuck with them.
Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike have made it clear that they are going to ignore demonstrations and public opinion. The print and TV media have made it clear that there will be no reporting that will hold the Bush administration accountable for its deceit and delusion.
There still is a way to bring reality to the Bush administration. The public has the Internet. Is the antiwar movement well enough organized to collect via the Internet signatures on petitions for impeachment, perhaps one petition for each state? Millions of signatures would embarrass Bush before the world and embarrass our elected representatives for their failure to act.
If no one in Congress acted on the petitions, all the rhetoric about war for democracy would fall flat. It would be obvious that there is no democracy in America.
If the cloak of democracy is stripped away, Bush’s “wars for democracy” begin to look like the foreign adventures of a megalomaniac. Remove Bush’s rhetorical cover, and tolerance at home and abroad for Bush’s war would evaporate. If Bush persisted, he would become a pariah.
Americans may feel that they cannot undercut a president at war, in which case Americans will become an embattled people consumed by decades of conflict. Americans can boot out Bush or pay dearly in blood and money.
COPYRIGHT 2005 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
From The Herald Sun:
Top power forward Wright commits to Heels
By Nolan Hayes
October 17, 2005
North Carolina basketball fans showed up at Late Night with Roy on Friday to get their first look at this season's team.
While they were there, they also saw someone they hoped would be on next season's squad.
"We want Brandan," a group of them chanted in unison at the Smith Center, holding a banner with the name Wright and the No. 34 on it.
They'll get their wish.
Brandan Wright, a 6-91?2, 200-pound forward from Nashville, Tenn., who visited UNC during the weekend, decided Sunday morning to play for the Tar Heels. As the top-rated power forward in the Class of 2006, he adds more star power to a recruiting class that already was stacked.
"Right now, North Carolina has commitments from the top power forward, shooting guard and point guard in America," Dave Telep of scout.com said. "At this stage, you have to start referring to North Carolina's class as the deepest and most talented recruiting class in the country."
Wright, a first-team Parade All-America selection as a junior at Brentwood Academy, joins 5-11 Tywon Lawson (No. 1 point guard) of Oak Hill Academy; 6-4 Wayne Ellington (No. 1 shooting guard) of Merion, Pa.; 6-8 Deon Thompson (No. 3 center) of Torrance, Calif.; 6-9 Alex Stepheson (No. 13 center) of North Hollywood, Calif.; and 6-6 guard William Graves of Greensboro Dudley High among UNC's commitments.
"I'm happy for him that he's made a decision because I knew it was very hard for him," said George Pitts, Wright's coach at Brentwood Academy. "He had it down to Duke, Carolina, Kentucky and Vanderbilt. He's handled it very well, and I don't think he could have gone wrong with any of those places.
"I talked with him earlier today, and he just felt like Carolina was best fit for him."
Wright's decision was somewhat surprising because UNC was not thought to be on top of his list. Many recruiting insiders figured Kentucky was the school to beat before Wright's visit to Chapel Hill, but Pitts said Wright never leaned one way or another before Sunday.
"He texted me a couple of times this weekend while he was over there, and he just liked the whole thing," Pitts said. "He likes [Assistant] Coach [Steve] Robinson and Coach [Roy] Williams and just the evening there -- Friday evening and all that. He just felt really comfortable with whole situation."
Wright averaged more than 20 points per game last season, pulling down about 10 rebounds and blocking about five shots per contest. Telep said Wright's body style is similar to that of former Georgia Tech star Chris Bosh, who was the ACC rookie of the year in 2003 before becoming the No. 4 pick in the NBA Draft.
Wright can play inside and outside, and both Pitts and Telep said he has potential for significant improvement as he matures physically.
"I think he could be very good," Pitts said. "He is good, but he's got to get stronger and get better skillwise. Those are two areas he's improved upon since he came to our school, but he's got a long way to go to get his body better and his perimeter skills better."
Wright twice has earned Division II Mr. Basketball honors in Tennessee, and he is a three-time state tournament MVP. He and the rest of UNC's commitments can make their decisions official next month by signing letters of intent.
If they all sign as expected, the Tar Heels will have taken a big step in replacing the talent they lost from last season's NCAA championship team. UNC's group appears to be the strongest assembled this year, but where does it rank historically?
"Everybody likes to ask that question," Telep said. "Recruiting classes are really judged down the road: What have these guys done? Both North Carolina's class and Ohio State's class this year are two of best classes assembled in the last 10 or 15 years, beyond a shadow of a doubt.
"Put it this way: I can't envision Roy Williams ever signing a better recruiting class than this, and he's pretty good at it."
Top power forward Wright commits to Heels
By Nolan Hayes
October 17, 2005
North Carolina basketball fans showed up at Late Night with Roy on Friday to get their first look at this season's team.
While they were there, they also saw someone they hoped would be on next season's squad.
"We want Brandan," a group of them chanted in unison at the Smith Center, holding a banner with the name Wright and the No. 34 on it.
They'll get their wish.
Brandan Wright, a 6-91?2, 200-pound forward from Nashville, Tenn., who visited UNC during the weekend, decided Sunday morning to play for the Tar Heels. As the top-rated power forward in the Class of 2006, he adds more star power to a recruiting class that already was stacked.
"Right now, North Carolina has commitments from the top power forward, shooting guard and point guard in America," Dave Telep of scout.com said. "At this stage, you have to start referring to North Carolina's class as the deepest and most talented recruiting class in the country."
Wright, a first-team Parade All-America selection as a junior at Brentwood Academy, joins 5-11 Tywon Lawson (No. 1 point guard) of Oak Hill Academy; 6-4 Wayne Ellington (No. 1 shooting guard) of Merion, Pa.; 6-8 Deon Thompson (No. 3 center) of Torrance, Calif.; 6-9 Alex Stepheson (No. 13 center) of North Hollywood, Calif.; and 6-6 guard William Graves of Greensboro Dudley High among UNC's commitments.
"I'm happy for him that he's made a decision because I knew it was very hard for him," said George Pitts, Wright's coach at Brentwood Academy. "He had it down to Duke, Carolina, Kentucky and Vanderbilt. He's handled it very well, and I don't think he could have gone wrong with any of those places.
"I talked with him earlier today, and he just felt like Carolina was best fit for him."
Wright's decision was somewhat surprising because UNC was not thought to be on top of his list. Many recruiting insiders figured Kentucky was the school to beat before Wright's visit to Chapel Hill, but Pitts said Wright never leaned one way or another before Sunday.
"He texted me a couple of times this weekend while he was over there, and he just liked the whole thing," Pitts said. "He likes [Assistant] Coach [Steve] Robinson and Coach [Roy] Williams and just the evening there -- Friday evening and all that. He just felt really comfortable with whole situation."
Wright averaged more than 20 points per game last season, pulling down about 10 rebounds and blocking about five shots per contest. Telep said Wright's body style is similar to that of former Georgia Tech star Chris Bosh, who was the ACC rookie of the year in 2003 before becoming the No. 4 pick in the NBA Draft.
Wright can play inside and outside, and both Pitts and Telep said he has potential for significant improvement as he matures physically.
"I think he could be very good," Pitts said. "He is good, but he's got to get stronger and get better skillwise. Those are two areas he's improved upon since he came to our school, but he's got a long way to go to get his body better and his perimeter skills better."
Wright twice has earned Division II Mr. Basketball honors in Tennessee, and he is a three-time state tournament MVP. He and the rest of UNC's commitments can make their decisions official next month by signing letters of intent.
If they all sign as expected, the Tar Heels will have taken a big step in replacing the talent they lost from last season's NCAA championship team. UNC's group appears to be the strongest assembled this year, but where does it rank historically?
"Everybody likes to ask that question," Telep said. "Recruiting classes are really judged down the road: What have these guys done? Both North Carolina's class and Ohio State's class this year are two of best classes assembled in the last 10 or 15 years, beyond a shadow of a doubt.
"Put it this way: I can't envision Roy Williams ever signing a better recruiting class than this, and he's pretty good at it."
From Opinion Journal:
Judgment Call
Did Christian conservatives receive assurances that Miers would oppose Roe v. Wade?
By John Fund
Monday, October 17, 2005
Two days after President Bush announced Harriet Miers's Supreme Court nomination, James Dobson of Focus on the Family raised some eyebrows by declaring on his radio program: "When you know some of the things that I know--that I probably shouldn't know--you will understand why I have said, with fear and trepidation, that I believe Harriet Miers will be a good justice."
Mr. Dobson quelled the controversy by saying that Karl Rove, the White House's deputy chief of staff, had not given him assurances about how a Justice Miers would vote. "I would have loved to have known how Harriet Miers views Roe v. Wade," Mr. Dobson said last week. "But even if Karl had known the answer to that--and I'm certain that he didn't because the president himself said he didn't know--Karl would not have told me that. That's the most incendiary information that's out there, and it was never part of our discussion."
It might, however, have been part of another discussion. On Oct. 3, the day the Miers nomination was announced, Mr. Dobson and other religious conservatives held a conference call to discuss the nomination. One of the people on the call took extensive notes, which I have obtained. According to the notes, two of Ms. Miers's close friends--both sitting judges--said during the call that she would vote to overturn Roe.
The call was moderated by the Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association. Participating were 13 members of the executive committee of the Arlington Group, an umbrella alliance of 60 religious conservative groups, including Gary Bauer of American Values, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation and the Rev. Bill Owens, a black minister. Also on the call were Justice Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court and Judge Ed Kinkeade, a Dallas-based federal trial judge.
Mr. Dobson says he spoke with Mr. Rove on Sunday, Oct. 2, the day before President Bush publicly announced the nomination. Mr. Rove assured Mr. Dobson that Ms. Miers was an evangelical Christian and a strict constructionist, and said that Justice Hecht, a longtime friend of Ms. Miers who had helped her join an evangelical church in 1979, could provide background on her. Later that day, a personal friend of Mr. Dobson's in Texas called him and suggested he speak with Judge Kinkeade, who has been a friend of Ms. Miers's for decades.
Mr. Dobson says he was surprised the next day to learn that Justice Hecht and Judge Kinkeade were joining the Arlington Group call. He was asked to introduce the two of them, which he considered awkward given that he had never spoken with Justice Hecht and only once to Judge Kinkeade. According to the notes of the call, Mr. Dobson introduced them by saying, "Karl Rove suggested that we talk with these gentlemen because they can confirm specific reasons why Harriet Miers might be a better candidate than some of us think."
What followed, according to the notes, was a free-wheeling discussion about many topics, including same-sex marriage. Justice Hecht said he had never discussed that issue with Ms. Miers. Then an unidentified voice asked the two men, "Based on your personal knowledge of her, if she had the opportunity, do you believe she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade?"
"Absolutely," said Judge Kinkeade.
"I agree with that," said Justice Hecht. "I concur."
Shortly thereafter, according to the notes, Mr. Dobson apologized and said he had to leave the discussion: "That's all I need to know and I will get off and make some calls." (When asked about his comments in the notes I have, Mr. Dobson confirmed some of them and said it was "very possible" he made the others. He said he did not specifically recall the comments of the two judges on Roe v. Wade.)
Judge Kinkeade, through his secretary, declined to discuss the matter. Justice Hecht told me he remembers participating in the call but can't recollect who invited him or many specifics about it. He said he did tell the group that Ms. Miers was "pro-life," a characterization he has repeated in public. But he says that when someone asked him about her stand on overturning Roe v. Wade he answered, "I don't know." He doesn't recall what Judge Kinkeade said. But several people who participated in the call confirm that both jurists stated Ms. Miers would vote to overturn Roe.
The benign interpretation of the comments is that the two judges were speaking on behalf of themselves, not Ms. Miers or the White House, and they were therefore offering a prediction, not an assurance, about how she would come down on Roe v. Wade. But the people I interviewed who were on the call took the comments as an assurance, and at least one based his support for Ms. Miers on them.
The conference call will no doubt prove controversial on Capitol Hill, always a tinderbox for rumors that any judicial nominee has taken a stand on Roe v. Wade. Ms. Miers meets today with Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California and Chuck Schumer of New York, both stalwart Roe supporters, who surely will be interested to learn more about her views. After Mr. Dobson's initial comments about "things . . . that I probably shouldn't know," Sen. Arlen Specter, the pro-Roe Judiciary Committee chairman, said, "If there are backroom assurances and if there are backroom deals and if there is something that bears on a precondition as to how a nominee is going to vote, I think that's a matter that ought to be known." He and ranking Democrat Pat Leahy of Vermont threatened to subpoena Mr. Dobson as a witness.
Some participants in the Oct. 3 conference call fear that they will be called to testify at Ms. Miers's hearings. "If the call is as you describe it, an effort will be made to subpoena everyone on it," a Judiciary Committee staffer told me. It is possible that a tape or notes of the call are already in the hands of committee staffers. "Some people were on speaker phones allowing other people to listen in, and others could have been on extensions," one participant told me.
Should hearings begin on Nov. 7 as is now tentatively planned, they would likely turn into a spectacle. Mr. Specter has said he plans to press Ms. Miers "very hard" on whether Roe v. Wade is settled law. "She will have hearings like no nominee has ever had to sit through," Chuck Todd, editor of the political tip sheet Hotline, told radio host John Batchelor. "One slipup on camera and she is toast."
Should she survive the hearings, liberal groups may demand that Democrats filibuster her. Republican senators, already hesitant to back Ms. Miers after heavy blowback from their conservative base, would likely lack the will to trigger the so-called nuclear option. "The nomination is in real trouble," one GOP senator told me. "Not one senator wants to go through the agony of those hearings, even those who want to vote for her." Even if Ms. Miers avoids a filibuster, it's possible Democrats would join with dissident Republicans to defeat her outright.
There are philosophical reasons for Republican senators to oppose Ms. Miers. In 1987, the liberal onslaught on Robert Bork dramatically changed the confirmation process. The verb to bork, meaning to savage a nominee and distort his record, entered the vocabulary, and many liberals now acknowledge that the anti-Bork campaign had bad consequences. It led to more stealth nominees, with presidents hoping their scant paper trail would shield them from attack.
President Bush has now gone further in internalizing the lessons of the Bork debacle. Harriet Miers is a "superstealth" nominee--a close friend of the president with no available paper trail who keeps her cards so close to her chest they might as well be plastered on it. If Ms. Miers is confirmed, it will reinforce the popular belief that the Supreme Court is more about political outcomes than the rule of law.
Judgment Call
Did Christian conservatives receive assurances that Miers would oppose Roe v. Wade?
By John Fund
Monday, October 17, 2005
Two days after President Bush announced Harriet Miers's Supreme Court nomination, James Dobson of Focus on the Family raised some eyebrows by declaring on his radio program: "When you know some of the things that I know--that I probably shouldn't know--you will understand why I have said, with fear and trepidation, that I believe Harriet Miers will be a good justice."
Mr. Dobson quelled the controversy by saying that Karl Rove, the White House's deputy chief of staff, had not given him assurances about how a Justice Miers would vote. "I would have loved to have known how Harriet Miers views Roe v. Wade," Mr. Dobson said last week. "But even if Karl had known the answer to that--and I'm certain that he didn't because the president himself said he didn't know--Karl would not have told me that. That's the most incendiary information that's out there, and it was never part of our discussion."
It might, however, have been part of another discussion. On Oct. 3, the day the Miers nomination was announced, Mr. Dobson and other religious conservatives held a conference call to discuss the nomination. One of the people on the call took extensive notes, which I have obtained. According to the notes, two of Ms. Miers's close friends--both sitting judges--said during the call that she would vote to overturn Roe.
The call was moderated by the Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association. Participating were 13 members of the executive committee of the Arlington Group, an umbrella alliance of 60 religious conservative groups, including Gary Bauer of American Values, Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation and the Rev. Bill Owens, a black minister. Also on the call were Justice Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court and Judge Ed Kinkeade, a Dallas-based federal trial judge.
Mr. Dobson says he spoke with Mr. Rove on Sunday, Oct. 2, the day before President Bush publicly announced the nomination. Mr. Rove assured Mr. Dobson that Ms. Miers was an evangelical Christian and a strict constructionist, and said that Justice Hecht, a longtime friend of Ms. Miers who had helped her join an evangelical church in 1979, could provide background on her. Later that day, a personal friend of Mr. Dobson's in Texas called him and suggested he speak with Judge Kinkeade, who has been a friend of Ms. Miers's for decades.
Mr. Dobson says he was surprised the next day to learn that Justice Hecht and Judge Kinkeade were joining the Arlington Group call. He was asked to introduce the two of them, which he considered awkward given that he had never spoken with Justice Hecht and only once to Judge Kinkeade. According to the notes of the call, Mr. Dobson introduced them by saying, "Karl Rove suggested that we talk with these gentlemen because they can confirm specific reasons why Harriet Miers might be a better candidate than some of us think."
What followed, according to the notes, was a free-wheeling discussion about many topics, including same-sex marriage. Justice Hecht said he had never discussed that issue with Ms. Miers. Then an unidentified voice asked the two men, "Based on your personal knowledge of her, if she had the opportunity, do you believe she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade?"
"Absolutely," said Judge Kinkeade.
"I agree with that," said Justice Hecht. "I concur."
Shortly thereafter, according to the notes, Mr. Dobson apologized and said he had to leave the discussion: "That's all I need to know and I will get off and make some calls." (When asked about his comments in the notes I have, Mr. Dobson confirmed some of them and said it was "very possible" he made the others. He said he did not specifically recall the comments of the two judges on Roe v. Wade.)
Judge Kinkeade, through his secretary, declined to discuss the matter. Justice Hecht told me he remembers participating in the call but can't recollect who invited him or many specifics about it. He said he did tell the group that Ms. Miers was "pro-life," a characterization he has repeated in public. But he says that when someone asked him about her stand on overturning Roe v. Wade he answered, "I don't know." He doesn't recall what Judge Kinkeade said. But several people who participated in the call confirm that both jurists stated Ms. Miers would vote to overturn Roe.
The benign interpretation of the comments is that the two judges were speaking on behalf of themselves, not Ms. Miers or the White House, and they were therefore offering a prediction, not an assurance, about how she would come down on Roe v. Wade. But the people I interviewed who were on the call took the comments as an assurance, and at least one based his support for Ms. Miers on them.
The conference call will no doubt prove controversial on Capitol Hill, always a tinderbox for rumors that any judicial nominee has taken a stand on Roe v. Wade. Ms. Miers meets today with Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California and Chuck Schumer of New York, both stalwart Roe supporters, who surely will be interested to learn more about her views. After Mr. Dobson's initial comments about "things . . . that I probably shouldn't know," Sen. Arlen Specter, the pro-Roe Judiciary Committee chairman, said, "If there are backroom assurances and if there are backroom deals and if there is something that bears on a precondition as to how a nominee is going to vote, I think that's a matter that ought to be known." He and ranking Democrat Pat Leahy of Vermont threatened to subpoena Mr. Dobson as a witness.
Some participants in the Oct. 3 conference call fear that they will be called to testify at Ms. Miers's hearings. "If the call is as you describe it, an effort will be made to subpoena everyone on it," a Judiciary Committee staffer told me. It is possible that a tape or notes of the call are already in the hands of committee staffers. "Some people were on speaker phones allowing other people to listen in, and others could have been on extensions," one participant told me.
Should hearings begin on Nov. 7 as is now tentatively planned, they would likely turn into a spectacle. Mr. Specter has said he plans to press Ms. Miers "very hard" on whether Roe v. Wade is settled law. "She will have hearings like no nominee has ever had to sit through," Chuck Todd, editor of the political tip sheet Hotline, told radio host John Batchelor. "One slipup on camera and she is toast."
Should she survive the hearings, liberal groups may demand that Democrats filibuster her. Republican senators, already hesitant to back Ms. Miers after heavy blowback from their conservative base, would likely lack the will to trigger the so-called nuclear option. "The nomination is in real trouble," one GOP senator told me. "Not one senator wants to go through the agony of those hearings, even those who want to vote for her." Even if Ms. Miers avoids a filibuster, it's possible Democrats would join with dissident Republicans to defeat her outright.
There are philosophical reasons for Republican senators to oppose Ms. Miers. In 1987, the liberal onslaught on Robert Bork dramatically changed the confirmation process. The verb to bork, meaning to savage a nominee and distort his record, entered the vocabulary, and many liberals now acknowledge that the anti-Bork campaign had bad consequences. It led to more stealth nominees, with presidents hoping their scant paper trail would shield them from attack.
President Bush has now gone further in internalizing the lessons of the Bork debacle. Harriet Miers is a "superstealth" nominee--a close friend of the president with no available paper trail who keeps her cards so close to her chest they might as well be plastered on it. If Ms. Miers is confirmed, it will reinforce the popular belief that the Supreme Court is more about political outcomes than the rule of law.
From Variety - Icons of the Century:The Beatles
Here, there & everywhere
By Ken Kubernik
Sun., Oct. 16, 2005
Sunday, Oct. 13, 1963. For most Britons, the prospect of another grim, listless week lay just ahead. Their economy, mired in inefficiencies and a pervasive state of desuetude, was a sobering reminder of how exhausted their phantom empire had become. The air, gun-metal gray and sooty, was still redolent of the Profumo scandal, which broke that summer.
But there were other currents of disruption afoot, and not even the machinations of Downing Street could hope to compete with this tidal force, which would surge across television sets at 8:25 that early-fall evening. The Beatles were appearing on "Sunday Night at the London Palladium." And no one saw it coming.
Although they were topping the charts, the Beatles were still considered provincial, faddish and well below the radar of unforgivingly hip London. Appearing on the "Palladium" broadcast was daunting. As early as June, they were offered a spot but turned it down. Said John Lennon at the time: "There have been offers but we don't feel that we are ready. We have seen others go on and be torn to pieces."
Being "torn to pieces" might have become a regular part of the Fab Four's repertoire, but it was more the frenzy of adulation than lambs to the slaughter. At a show in Bedford, Andrew Loog Oldham, in his '60s memoir "Stoned," remembers the pandemonium. "Onstage, you could not hear the Beatles for the roar of the crowd and the roar I heard was the roar of the whole world. The audience that evening expressed something beyond repressed adolescent sexuality. The noise they made was the sound of the future. I didn't see it -- I heard and felt it. When I looked at (Beatles manager) Brian (Epstein), he had the same lump in his throat and tear in his eye as I."
'Northern bastards'
The Palladium Theater is situated on Argyll Street in London's West End. Thousands of fans, mostly girls, poured out of the Oxford Circus tube station, gathering up steam and screams. The security staff was woefully unprepared, hopelessly outnumbered. Inside the hall, one could hear the muffled roar from outside, like the echo of a portentous thunderclap. Host Bruce Forsyth teased the crowd early on with a brief cameo from the lads; but their set was saved until the end. Four songs, "From Me to You," "I'll Get You," "She Loves You" and "Twist and Shout," brought the proceedings to a properly pitched frenzy.
Ringo: "There was nothing bigger in the world than making it to the Palladium."
John: "It was the greatest experience we have had so far -- as soon as we were clear of the theater, we all agreed on that."
George: "We were told all the time, 'You'll never do anything, you Northern bastards.' And we walked right through London, the Palladium, and kept on going through Ed Sullivan and on to the world."
Monday morning's tabloids and broadsheets fought it out for the most hyperbolic coverage. The Daily Mirror nailed it in one word: "Beatlemania!" Like Dorothy in Oz, the skies suddenly shifted from monochrome to kaleidoscope.
On Nov. 4, they played before the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret at the prestigious Royal Variety Command Performance. Lennon, ever cheeky, uttered his immortal piss take: "For those in the cheaper seats, clap your hands. The rest of you, rattle your jewelry." Even the Royals had to laugh. The Beatles had charmed the pants off the toffs and the knickers off the rest of England. America now beckoned.
On April 14, 1964, Billboard Magazine reported the Beatles at Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 31, 41, 46, 58, 65, 68 and 79. Res ipsa loquitur.
The sea change that the Beatles created is all the more dramatic when one examines what came before.
Ready Teddy Go
During the Eisenhower '50s, American teenagers swooned and swayed to the first blasts of rock 'n' roll. Adolescence clashed with authority to the beat of Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" in the bigscreen hit "Blackboard Jungle." The sullen, smoldering intensity of Elvis, with his corrupt, curling lip, elicited desire that bordered on blood lust. And it was all packaged, commodified and sold -- next to Howdy Doody and Davy Crockett's coonskin cap -- to a burgeoning society of consumers whose appetites rivaled those of biblical locusts.
Across the pond, English teens still dealt with war rationing. Prospects were nil. Politicians were patronizing and dismissive of young people's concerns, the long leash of class status continuing to throttle hope and ambition. In the north, a provincial city like Liverpool was rocked hard by the new sounds, the new fashions, the confrontational attitude. A young Lennon embraced the "Teddy Boy" look: the duck's arse (DA) haircut; drainpipe trousers; winklepicker shoes; the long, Edwardian frock coats (Eddy = Teddy).
"Teds were magnificent specimens with an attitude way out above any station," wrote Oldham. "They were the first teenagers to stand up, let it rip and be counted. I loved the sight of a Ted on the high street a whole lot better than the first American rock 'n' roller I got to see live."
In short order, England began to market its own brand of pop culture. By January 1957, there were two television shows devoted to "the new thing" with plenty more to follow: "Cool for Cats," "Oh, Boy!," "Six-Five Special," "Dig This" and "Drumbeat" competed for the attention of a deficit-disordered teenage audience. A phalanx of pop stars was waiting in the wings: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, Tommy Steele and Billy Fury all hit the charts with their frenetic pastiche of American rhythm and blues, rockabilly, folk and country.
'Les beat'
Back in Liverpool, Lennon began his musical apprenticeship by embracing the skiffle movement led by Lonnie Donegan. It required only the most rudimentary skills (a washboard!), but it nurtured winning melodies and infectious rhythms. He soon teamed with local mates Paul McCartney and George Harrison, playing and rehearsing with a fervor that was surely absent from his "studies" at the Liverpool College of Art. Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers became their teachers, the craft of songwriting the sole curriculum. They needed a name -- the Beetles ala Buddy's Crickets, became the Beatles because it was "les beat" when you turned it around. Tres cool!
Liverpool, being a port city, was a crossroads not only for products but people, particularly American soldiers and sailors. Chocolate bars and nylons were replaced by vinyl albums as door-openers. And the most coveted currency was that of black recording artists. It was through this sea train that Little Richard, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry made their English debuts. They were rapturously received by a subculture untainted by racial prejudice.
The English had no indigenous black population, no burdensome history of segregation to surmount. The music spoke directly to their own sense of alienation and disenfranchisement. Most important, it was a joyful noise, a celebration over adversity. It provided a jolt that jumpstarted a thousand bands, put the Teddys to rest and replaced their gear with leather jackets and mouthfuls of leapers. The music became hard, tough, furious. To make it you had to be ruthless like a gangster; instead of a gun, you pointed a guitar.
Years later, Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan's manager, would observe that the Beatles' greatest accomplishment was making it "OK to be white." But in August 1960, the Beatles were less concerned about shedding their influences than in finding their own sound. A six-week residency in Hamburg loomed dead ahead. It was the end of pretending and the beginning of believing. It was time to hustle.
The 'pluperfect storm'
When Brian Epstein clambered down those sweaty steps into the Cavern to hear what all the fuss was about, Liverpool was bursting at its musical seams.
"There were at least 300 bands going," reckons Martin Lewis, the Denis Diderot of Beatle encyclopedists, "and the Beatles weren't even at the top. Maybe amongst the best four or five."
But Epstein immediately recognized that they were special -- an animating spirit coursed through all of them, magnetic, endearing, enduring.
He took the Hoover to them: out with the scruff, in with the Dougie Millings suits; out with the moody Pete Best, in with the radiant charm of Ringo Starr. No, said Decca Records; yes, said EMI and Abbey Road Studios.
Mark Lewisohn, author of numerous Beatle books, offers this rigorous assessment: Epstein "was a perfect blend of style, vision, naivete and devotion"; producer George Martin was "creative, keen to experiment, willing to listen, an expert about music but nicely inexperienced in pop and rock"; and Dick James, their music publisher, "an avuncular and protective man hungry for success."
This unprecedented conflation of talent, ambition and opportunity, a "pluperfect storm," in Lewis' words, gathered around England and crashed ashore that Sunday night at the London Palladium in 1963.
It was the Beatles year of wonders. They transformed themselves and, by extension, all of us in ways that continue to resonate to this day. Even the misanthropic English poet, Philip Larkin, was abashed, offering this memorable tribute:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) --
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first L.P.
It's called "Please Please Me." Check it out.
Here, there & everywhere
By Ken Kubernik
Sun., Oct. 16, 2005
Sunday, Oct. 13, 1963. For most Britons, the prospect of another grim, listless week lay just ahead. Their economy, mired in inefficiencies and a pervasive state of desuetude, was a sobering reminder of how exhausted their phantom empire had become. The air, gun-metal gray and sooty, was still redolent of the Profumo scandal, which broke that summer.
But there were other currents of disruption afoot, and not even the machinations of Downing Street could hope to compete with this tidal force, which would surge across television sets at 8:25 that early-fall evening. The Beatles were appearing on "Sunday Night at the London Palladium." And no one saw it coming.
Although they were topping the charts, the Beatles were still considered provincial, faddish and well below the radar of unforgivingly hip London. Appearing on the "Palladium" broadcast was daunting. As early as June, they were offered a spot but turned it down. Said John Lennon at the time: "There have been offers but we don't feel that we are ready. We have seen others go on and be torn to pieces."
Being "torn to pieces" might have become a regular part of the Fab Four's repertoire, but it was more the frenzy of adulation than lambs to the slaughter. At a show in Bedford, Andrew Loog Oldham, in his '60s memoir "Stoned," remembers the pandemonium. "Onstage, you could not hear the Beatles for the roar of the crowd and the roar I heard was the roar of the whole world. The audience that evening expressed something beyond repressed adolescent sexuality. The noise they made was the sound of the future. I didn't see it -- I heard and felt it. When I looked at (Beatles manager) Brian (Epstein), he had the same lump in his throat and tear in his eye as I."
'Northern bastards'
The Palladium Theater is situated on Argyll Street in London's West End. Thousands of fans, mostly girls, poured out of the Oxford Circus tube station, gathering up steam and screams. The security staff was woefully unprepared, hopelessly outnumbered. Inside the hall, one could hear the muffled roar from outside, like the echo of a portentous thunderclap. Host Bruce Forsyth teased the crowd early on with a brief cameo from the lads; but their set was saved until the end. Four songs, "From Me to You," "I'll Get You," "She Loves You" and "Twist and Shout," brought the proceedings to a properly pitched frenzy.
Ringo: "There was nothing bigger in the world than making it to the Palladium."
John: "It was the greatest experience we have had so far -- as soon as we were clear of the theater, we all agreed on that."
George: "We were told all the time, 'You'll never do anything, you Northern bastards.' And we walked right through London, the Palladium, and kept on going through Ed Sullivan and on to the world."
Monday morning's tabloids and broadsheets fought it out for the most hyperbolic coverage. The Daily Mirror nailed it in one word: "Beatlemania!" Like Dorothy in Oz, the skies suddenly shifted from monochrome to kaleidoscope.
On Nov. 4, they played before the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret at the prestigious Royal Variety Command Performance. Lennon, ever cheeky, uttered his immortal piss take: "For those in the cheaper seats, clap your hands. The rest of you, rattle your jewelry." Even the Royals had to laugh. The Beatles had charmed the pants off the toffs and the knickers off the rest of England. America now beckoned.
On April 14, 1964, Billboard Magazine reported the Beatles at Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 31, 41, 46, 58, 65, 68 and 79. Res ipsa loquitur.
The sea change that the Beatles created is all the more dramatic when one examines what came before.
Ready Teddy Go
During the Eisenhower '50s, American teenagers swooned and swayed to the first blasts of rock 'n' roll. Adolescence clashed with authority to the beat of Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" in the bigscreen hit "Blackboard Jungle." The sullen, smoldering intensity of Elvis, with his corrupt, curling lip, elicited desire that bordered on blood lust. And it was all packaged, commodified and sold -- next to Howdy Doody and Davy Crockett's coonskin cap -- to a burgeoning society of consumers whose appetites rivaled those of biblical locusts.
Across the pond, English teens still dealt with war rationing. Prospects were nil. Politicians were patronizing and dismissive of young people's concerns, the long leash of class status continuing to throttle hope and ambition. In the north, a provincial city like Liverpool was rocked hard by the new sounds, the new fashions, the confrontational attitude. A young Lennon embraced the "Teddy Boy" look: the duck's arse (DA) haircut; drainpipe trousers; winklepicker shoes; the long, Edwardian frock coats (Eddy = Teddy).
"Teds were magnificent specimens with an attitude way out above any station," wrote Oldham. "They were the first teenagers to stand up, let it rip and be counted. I loved the sight of a Ted on the high street a whole lot better than the first American rock 'n' roller I got to see live."
In short order, England began to market its own brand of pop culture. By January 1957, there were two television shows devoted to "the new thing" with plenty more to follow: "Cool for Cats," "Oh, Boy!," "Six-Five Special," "Dig This" and "Drumbeat" competed for the attention of a deficit-disordered teenage audience. A phalanx of pop stars was waiting in the wings: Cliff Richard and the Drifters, Tommy Steele and Billy Fury all hit the charts with their frenetic pastiche of American rhythm and blues, rockabilly, folk and country.
'Les beat'
Back in Liverpool, Lennon began his musical apprenticeship by embracing the skiffle movement led by Lonnie Donegan. It required only the most rudimentary skills (a washboard!), but it nurtured winning melodies and infectious rhythms. He soon teamed with local mates Paul McCartney and George Harrison, playing and rehearsing with a fervor that was surely absent from his "studies" at the Liverpool College of Art. Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers became their teachers, the craft of songwriting the sole curriculum. They needed a name -- the Beetles ala Buddy's Crickets, became the Beatles because it was "les beat" when you turned it around. Tres cool!
Liverpool, being a port city, was a crossroads not only for products but people, particularly American soldiers and sailors. Chocolate bars and nylons were replaced by vinyl albums as door-openers. And the most coveted currency was that of black recording artists. It was through this sea train that Little Richard, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry made their English debuts. They were rapturously received by a subculture untainted by racial prejudice.
The English had no indigenous black population, no burdensome history of segregation to surmount. The music spoke directly to their own sense of alienation and disenfranchisement. Most important, it was a joyful noise, a celebration over adversity. It provided a jolt that jumpstarted a thousand bands, put the Teddys to rest and replaced their gear with leather jackets and mouthfuls of leapers. The music became hard, tough, furious. To make it you had to be ruthless like a gangster; instead of a gun, you pointed a guitar.
Years later, Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan's manager, would observe that the Beatles' greatest accomplishment was making it "OK to be white." But in August 1960, the Beatles were less concerned about shedding their influences than in finding their own sound. A six-week residency in Hamburg loomed dead ahead. It was the end of pretending and the beginning of believing. It was time to hustle.
The 'pluperfect storm'
When Brian Epstein clambered down those sweaty steps into the Cavern to hear what all the fuss was about, Liverpool was bursting at its musical seams.
"There were at least 300 bands going," reckons Martin Lewis, the Denis Diderot of Beatle encyclopedists, "and the Beatles weren't even at the top. Maybe amongst the best four or five."
But Epstein immediately recognized that they were special -- an animating spirit coursed through all of them, magnetic, endearing, enduring.
He took the Hoover to them: out with the scruff, in with the Dougie Millings suits; out with the moody Pete Best, in with the radiant charm of Ringo Starr. No, said Decca Records; yes, said EMI and Abbey Road Studios.
Mark Lewisohn, author of numerous Beatle books, offers this rigorous assessment: Epstein "was a perfect blend of style, vision, naivete and devotion"; producer George Martin was "creative, keen to experiment, willing to listen, an expert about music but nicely inexperienced in pop and rock"; and Dick James, their music publisher, "an avuncular and protective man hungry for success."
This unprecedented conflation of talent, ambition and opportunity, a "pluperfect storm," in Lewis' words, gathered around England and crashed ashore that Sunday night at the London Palladium in 1963.
It was the Beatles year of wonders. They transformed themselves and, by extension, all of us in ways that continue to resonate to this day. Even the misanthropic English poet, Philip Larkin, was abashed, offering this memorable tribute:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) --
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first L.P.
It's called "Please Please Me." Check it out.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
Media utters nonsense, won't call enemy out
By Mark Steyn
From Thursday's New York Times: ''Nalchik, Russia -- Insurgents launched a series of raids today in this southern Russian city, striking the area's main airport and several police and security buildings in large-scale, daytime attacks that left at least 85 people dead.''
"Insurgents," eh?
From Agence France Presse:
"Nalchik, Russia: More than 60 people were killed as scores of militants launched simultaneous attacks on police and government buildings . . ."
"Militants," you say?
From the Scotsman:
"Rebel forces battled Russian troops for control of a provincial capital in the Caucasus yesterday . . ."
"Rebel forces,'' huh?
From Toronto's Globe & Mail:
"Nalchik, Russia -- Scores of rebels launched simultaneous attacks on police and government buildings . . ."
"Rebels," by the score. But why were they rebelling? What were they insurging over? You had to pick up the Globe & Mail's rival, the Toronto Star, to read exactly the same Associated Press dispatch but with one subtle difference:
''Nalchik, Russia -- Scores of Islamic militants launched simultaneous attacks on police and government buildings . . ."
Ah, "Islamic militants." So that's what the rebels were insurging over. In the geopolitical Hogwart's, Islamic "militants" are the new Voldemort, the enemy whose name it's best never to utter. In fairness to the New York Times, they did use the I-word in paragraph seven. And Agence France Presse got around to mentioning Islam in paragraph 22. And NPR's "All Things Considered" had one of those bland interviews between one of its unperturbable anchorettes and some Russian geopolitical academic type in which they chitchatted through every conceivable aspect of the situation and finally got around to kinda sorta revealing the identity of the perpetrators in the very last word of the geopolitical expert's very last sentence.
When the NPR report started, I was driving on the vast open plains of I-91 in Vermont and reckoned, just to make things interesting, I'll add another five miles to the speed for every minute that goes by without mentioning Islam. But I couldn't get the needle to go above 130, and the vibrations caused the passenger-side wing-mirror to drop off. And then, right at the end, having conducted a perfect interview that managed to go into great depth about everything except who these guys were and what they were fighting over, the Russian academic dude had to go and spoil it all by saying somethin' stupid like "republics which are mostly . . . Muslim." He mumbled the last word, but nevertheless the NPR gal leapt in to thank him and move smoothly on to some poll showing that the Dems are going to sweep the 2006 midterms because Bush has the worst numbers since numbers were invented.
I underestimated multiculturalism. After 9/11, I assumed the internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition would be made plain: that a cult of "tolerance" would in the end founder against a demographic so cheerfully upfront in their intolerance. Instead, Islamic "militants" have become the highest repository of multicultural pieties. So you're nice about gays and Native Americans? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of the tolerant, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti- masochists. And so Islamists who murder non-Muslims in pursuit of explicitly Islamic goals are airbrushed into vague, generic "rebel forces." You can't tell the players without a scorecard, and that's just the way the Western media intend to keep it. If you wake up one morning and switch on the TV to see the Empire State Building crumbling to dust, don't be surprised if the announcer goes, "Insurging rebel militant forces today attacked key targets in New York. In other news, the president's annual Ramadan banquet saw celebrities dancing into the small hours to Mullah Omar And His All-Girl Orchestra . . ."
What happened in Russia on Thursday was serious business, not just in the death toll but in the number of key government installations that the alleged insurging rebel militants of non-specific ideology managed to seize with relative ease. The militantly rebellious insurgers of no known religious affiliation have long said they want a pan-Caucasian Islamic state from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, and the carnage they wreaked in the hitherto semi-safe-ish republic of Kabardino-Balkaria suggests that they're more likely to spread the conflict to other parts of the Russian Federation than Moscow is to contain it.
Did you see that news item in Stavropolsky Meridian last October? "Strontium, Uranium And Plutonium Found In Train To Caucasus." When a region already regarded as a Bud's Discount Warehouse for nuclear materials is getting sucked deeper into the maw of Islamism, why be so sheepish about letting us know the forces at play?
The Russians couldn't hold on to Eastern Europe. They couldn't hold on to Central Asia. Why would they fare any better with the present so-called Russian "Federation"? The country is literally dying. It's had a net population loss every year since 1992, one of the lowest fertility rates in the world -- 1.2 children born per woman -- and one of the highest abortion rates: some 70 percent of pregnancies are terminated. Russian men now have a lower life expectancy than Bangladeshis -- not because Bangladesh is brimming with actuarial advantages but because, if he had four legs and hung from a tree in a rain forest, the Russian male would be on the endangered species list.
Yet, within their present territory, there remain a few exceptions to the grim statistics cited above, parts of Russia that retain healthy fertility rates and healthy mortality rates. And guess what? They're the Muslim parts. Or, as the New York Times/NPR/Agence France Presse/Scotsman/Toronto Globe & Mail would say, they're the insurgent rebel militant parts. Many of these Russian Muslim areas -- like Bashkortistan (and no, I didn't make that up, it's a real stan. Check it out in the World Book Of Stans) -- are also rich in natural resources.
If you're an energy-rich Muslim republic, what's the point of going down the express garbage chute of history with the Russian Federation? The Islamification of significant parts of present-day Russia is going to be a critical factor in its death spiral.
I'm aware the very concept of "the enemy" is alien to the non-judgment multicultural mind: There are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated. But the media's sensitivity police apparently want this to be the first war we lose without even knowing who it is we've lost to. C'mon, guys, next time something happens in the Caucasus, why not blame the "Caucasians"? At least that way, we'll figure it must have been right-wing buddies of Timothy McVeigh.
By Mark Steyn
From Thursday's New York Times: ''Nalchik, Russia -- Insurgents launched a series of raids today in this southern Russian city, striking the area's main airport and several police and security buildings in large-scale, daytime attacks that left at least 85 people dead.''
"Insurgents," eh?
From Agence France Presse:
"Nalchik, Russia: More than 60 people were killed as scores of militants launched simultaneous attacks on police and government buildings . . ."
"Militants," you say?
From the Scotsman:
"Rebel forces battled Russian troops for control of a provincial capital in the Caucasus yesterday . . ."
"Rebel forces,'' huh?
From Toronto's Globe & Mail:
"Nalchik, Russia -- Scores of rebels launched simultaneous attacks on police and government buildings . . ."
"Rebels," by the score. But why were they rebelling? What were they insurging over? You had to pick up the Globe & Mail's rival, the Toronto Star, to read exactly the same Associated Press dispatch but with one subtle difference:
''Nalchik, Russia -- Scores of Islamic militants launched simultaneous attacks on police and government buildings . . ."
Ah, "Islamic militants." So that's what the rebels were insurging over. In the geopolitical Hogwart's, Islamic "militants" are the new Voldemort, the enemy whose name it's best never to utter. In fairness to the New York Times, they did use the I-word in paragraph seven. And Agence France Presse got around to mentioning Islam in paragraph 22. And NPR's "All Things Considered" had one of those bland interviews between one of its unperturbable anchorettes and some Russian geopolitical academic type in which they chitchatted through every conceivable aspect of the situation and finally got around to kinda sorta revealing the identity of the perpetrators in the very last word of the geopolitical expert's very last sentence.
When the NPR report started, I was driving on the vast open plains of I-91 in Vermont and reckoned, just to make things interesting, I'll add another five miles to the speed for every minute that goes by without mentioning Islam. But I couldn't get the needle to go above 130, and the vibrations caused the passenger-side wing-mirror to drop off. And then, right at the end, having conducted a perfect interview that managed to go into great depth about everything except who these guys were and what they were fighting over, the Russian academic dude had to go and spoil it all by saying somethin' stupid like "republics which are mostly . . . Muslim." He mumbled the last word, but nevertheless the NPR gal leapt in to thank him and move smoothly on to some poll showing that the Dems are going to sweep the 2006 midterms because Bush has the worst numbers since numbers were invented.
I underestimated multiculturalism. After 9/11, I assumed the internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition would be made plain: that a cult of "tolerance" would in the end founder against a demographic so cheerfully upfront in their intolerance. Instead, Islamic "militants" have become the highest repository of multicultural pieties. So you're nice about gays and Native Americans? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of the tolerant, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti- masochists. And so Islamists who murder non-Muslims in pursuit of explicitly Islamic goals are airbrushed into vague, generic "rebel forces." You can't tell the players without a scorecard, and that's just the way the Western media intend to keep it. If you wake up one morning and switch on the TV to see the Empire State Building crumbling to dust, don't be surprised if the announcer goes, "Insurging rebel militant forces today attacked key targets in New York. In other news, the president's annual Ramadan banquet saw celebrities dancing into the small hours to Mullah Omar And His All-Girl Orchestra . . ."
What happened in Russia on Thursday was serious business, not just in the death toll but in the number of key government installations that the alleged insurging rebel militants of non-specific ideology managed to seize with relative ease. The militantly rebellious insurgers of no known religious affiliation have long said they want a pan-Caucasian Islamic state from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, and the carnage they wreaked in the hitherto semi-safe-ish republic of Kabardino-Balkaria suggests that they're more likely to spread the conflict to other parts of the Russian Federation than Moscow is to contain it.
Did you see that news item in Stavropolsky Meridian last October? "Strontium, Uranium And Plutonium Found In Train To Caucasus." When a region already regarded as a Bud's Discount Warehouse for nuclear materials is getting sucked deeper into the maw of Islamism, why be so sheepish about letting us know the forces at play?
The Russians couldn't hold on to Eastern Europe. They couldn't hold on to Central Asia. Why would they fare any better with the present so-called Russian "Federation"? The country is literally dying. It's had a net population loss every year since 1992, one of the lowest fertility rates in the world -- 1.2 children born per woman -- and one of the highest abortion rates: some 70 percent of pregnancies are terminated. Russian men now have a lower life expectancy than Bangladeshis -- not because Bangladesh is brimming with actuarial advantages but because, if he had four legs and hung from a tree in a rain forest, the Russian male would be on the endangered species list.
Yet, within their present territory, there remain a few exceptions to the grim statistics cited above, parts of Russia that retain healthy fertility rates and healthy mortality rates. And guess what? They're the Muslim parts. Or, as the New York Times/NPR/Agence France Presse/Scotsman/Toronto Globe & Mail would say, they're the insurgent rebel militant parts. Many of these Russian Muslim areas -- like Bashkortistan (and no, I didn't make that up, it's a real stan. Check it out in the World Book Of Stans) -- are also rich in natural resources.
If you're an energy-rich Muslim republic, what's the point of going down the express garbage chute of history with the Russian Federation? The Islamification of significant parts of present-day Russia is going to be a critical factor in its death spiral.
I'm aware the very concept of "the enemy" is alien to the non-judgment multicultural mind: There are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated. But the media's sensitivity police apparently want this to be the first war we lose without even knowing who it is we've lost to. C'mon, guys, next time something happens in the Caucasus, why not blame the "Caucasians"? At least that way, we'll figure it must have been right-wing buddies of Timothy McVeigh.
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