It Didn't Work
By William F. Buckley
"I can tell you the main reason behind all our woes -- it is America." The New York Times reporter is quoting the complaint of a clothing merchant in a Sunni stronghold in Iraq. "Everything that is going on between Sunnis and Shiites, the troublemaker in the middle is America."
One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed. The same edition of the paper quotes a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Reuel Marc Gerecht backed the American intervention. He now speaks of the bombing of the especially sacred Shiite mosque in Samarra and what that has precipitated in the way of revenge. He concludes that "the bombing has completely demolished" what was being attempted -- to bring Sunnis into the defense and interior ministries.
Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols.
The Iraqis we hear about are first indignant, and then infuriated, that Americans aren't on the scene to protect them and to punish the aggressors. And so they join the clothing merchant who says that everything is the fault of the Americans.
The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elucidates on the complaint against Americans. It is not only that the invaders are American, it is that they are "Zionists." It would not be surprising to learn from an anonymously cited American soldier that he can understand why Saddam Hussein was needed to keep the Sunnis and the Shiites from each other's throats.
A problem for American policymakers -- for President Bush, ultimately -- is to cope with the postulates and decide how to proceed.
One of these postulates, from the beginning, was that the Iraqi people, whatever their tribal differences, would suspend internal divisions in order to get on with life in a political structure that guaranteed them religious freedom. The accompanying postulate was that the invading American army would succeed in training Iraqi soldiers and policymakers to cope with insurgents bent on violence.
This last did not happen. And the administration has, now, to cope with failure. It can defend itself historically, standing by the inherent reasonableness of the postulates. After all, they govern our policies in Latin America, in Africa and in much of Asia. The failure in Iraq does not force us to generalize that violence and anti-democratic movements always prevail. It does call on us to adjust to the question, What do we do when we see that the postulates do not prevail -- in the absence of interventionist measures (we used these against Hirohito and Hitler) that we simply are not prepared to take?
It is healthier for the disillusioned American to concede that in one theater in the Mideast, the postulates didn't work. The alternative would be to abandon the postulates. To do that would be to register a kind of philosophical despair. The killer insurgents are not entitled to blow up the shrine of American idealism.
Mr. Bush has a very difficult internal problem here because to make the kind of concession that is strategically appropriate requires a mitigation of policies he has several times affirmed in high-flown pronouncements. His challenge is to persuade himself that he can submit to a historical reality without forswearing basic commitments in foreign policy.
He will certainly face the current development as military leaders are expected to do: They are called upon to acknowledge a tactical setback, but to insist on the survival of strategic policies.
Yes, but within their own counsels, different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgment of defeat.
Saturday, February 25, 2006
From the Los Angeles Times:
Don Knotts, star of "The Andy Griffith Show," dead at 81
Knotts, who lived in West Los Angeles, died Friday night of lung cancer at Cedars Sinai Medical Center.
By Scott Collins
Times Staff Writer
February 25, 2006, 4:30 PM CST
Don Knotts, the saucer-eyed, scarecrow-thin comic actor best known for his roles as the high-strung small-town deputy Barney Fife on the 1960s CBS series "The Andy Griffith Show" and the leisure-suit-clad landlord Ralph Furley on ABC's '70s sitcom "Three's Company," has died. He was 81.
Knotts, who lived in West Los Angeles, died Friday night of lung cancer at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to Sherwin Bash, his longtime manager.
Family members said that his longtime friend Griffth was one of his last visitors at Cedars on Friday night.
Despite health problems, Knotts had kept working in recent months. He lent his distinctive, high-pitched voice as Turkey Mayor in Walt Disney's animated family film "Chicken Little," which was released in November 2005. He also did guest spots in 2005 on NBC's "Las Vegas" and Fox's "That '70s Show." He occasionally co-headlined in live comedy shows with Tim Conway, his sometime co-star in Disney films such as "The Apple Dumpling Gang." Knotts also appeared as the TV repairman in director Gary Ross's whimsical 1998 comedy "Pleasantville," and voiced the part of T.W. Turtle in the 1997 animated feature "Cats Don't Dance."
As he grew older, Knotts became a lodestar for younger comic actors. The new generation came to appreciate his highly physical brand of acting that, at its best, was in the tradition of silent-film greats such as Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel and Harold Lloyd.
Knotts first rose to prominence in the late 1950s, joining Louis Nye and other comedy players on "The Steve Allen Show." In 1961, United Artists Records released a comedy album entitled "Don Knotts: An Evening with Me," which featured various takeoffs on the "nervous man" routine the comic had made famous on Allen's show. One of the bits, "The Weatherman," concerned a TV forecaster forced to wing it after the meteorology report fails to make it to the studio by air time.
During the mid to late 1960s, in a largely unsuccessful bid for major film stardom, Knotts made a series of family films that many connoisseurs now say were critically underappreciated at the time. These include "The Incredible Mr. Limpet" (1964), "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken" (1966) and "The Reluctant Astronaut" (1967). The latter two were made as part of a five-picture deal with Universal Pictures.
"Limpet," the tale of a meek man who is transformed into a fish, has particularly won recent acclaim. Its early mix of live action and animation was a forerunner of such later films as "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and "Space Jam."
At one point, Jim Carrey was said to be considering starring in a "Limpet" remake, although the project has yet to materialize. Once, when Knotts visited the set of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," Carrey paid tribute. "I went to him, and I was just like, 'Thank you so much for "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken,"' Carrey later told an interviewer. " 'I watched it a hundred times when I was a kid.' "
Martin Short has likewise hailed Knotts as a major influence, and at least one of Short's recurring characters, shifty-eyed lawyer Nathan Thurm, owes a debt to Knotts' "nervous man" character, created for "The Steve Allen Show" in the 1950s.
Many TV viewers remember Knotts as Ralph Furley, the ascot-wearing middle-aged landlord who mistakenly viewed himself as a swinger on ABC's hit sex farce "Three's Company." The series starred the late John Ritter as Jack Tripper, a chef who pretended to be gay in order to share an apartment with two attractive young women. The plot of many episodes hinged on Tripper struggling to keep his secret from an ever-suspicious (and homophobic) Furley. Knotts introduced the character in 1979, during the show's fourth season, when the original landlords (Norman Fell and Audra Lindley) had departed for their own spin-off, "The Ropers."
For Knotts, who typically worked in Disney comedies and other family-friendly fare, appearing in a sex comedy — then decried by critics as "jiggle TV" -- constituted a major departure. But he stayed with "Three's Company" until it went off the air in 1984 after eight seasons.
However, it was his portrayal of Barney Fife — a role for which he won five Emmy Awards -- that immortalized Knotts to TV viewers. Deputy Fife, an inveterate bumbler, was not in the series pilot, and was at first intended simply to be part of a large ensemble that would surround Griffith, who played Sheriff Andy Taylor in Mayberry, a fictional North Carolina town near Raleigh.
But not long after the series debuted in October 1960, Knotts stole the show. Griffith, who was meant to be the series' comic focus, shifted to playing straight man. The writers began beefing up Fife's role and creating episodes that depended on the sheriff rescuing Fife from his latest predicament. "Andy Griffith" was the most popular comedy on television during its first season, and never dropped from the Top 10 for the rest of its eight-year run.
In Knotts' hands, Fife was a fully realized stooge, a hick-town Don Quixote who imagined himself braver, more sophisticated and more competent than he actually was. His utter lack of self-control led him into desperate jams that usually culminated with Fife at the end of his rope, bug-eyed and panting with anxiety. Sheriff Taylor allowed his deputy to carry just one bullet, which he was obliged to keep separate from his service revolver due to past trigger mishaps.
Asked how he developed his most famous character, Knotts replied in a 2000 interview: "Mainly, I thought of Barney as a kid. You can always look into the faces of kids and see what they're thinking, if they're happy or sad. That's what I tried to do with Barney. It's very identifiable."
Jesse Donald Knotts was born in Morgantown, W.Va., on July 21, 1924, the youngest of four brothers. His family life was troubled; Knotts' father twice threatened his mother with a knife and later spent time in mental hospitals, while older brother Earl — nicknamed "Shadow" because of his thinness -- died of asthma when Knotts was still a teenager.
Years later, the actor did not recall his childhood fondly.
"I felt like a loser," he recalled in a 1976 interview with the Los Angeles Times. "I was unhappy, I think, most of the time. We were terribly poor and I hated my size."
Knotts turned to performing in his early teens, doing an Edgar Bergen-inspired ventriloquism act with a dummy he named Danny.
He enlisted in the Army in 1943 and served in the Pacific, receiving the World War II Victory Medal among other decorations. After the war, in 1948, he graduated from West Virginia University with an education degree.
He soon borrowed $100 and moved to New York to pursue an acting career. He auditioned for several radio gigs but was turned down. One of his earliest TV roles was on the CBS soap opera "Search for Tomorrow," where he played Wilbur Peterson — a neurotic young man so troubled he communicated only with his sister -- from 1953-55. It was the only non-comedic role he ever played.
But Knotts did not receive widespread attention until he appeared on Broadway in Ira Levin's 1955 comedy "No Time for Sergeants." Based on Mac Hyman's novel, the play concerned a hillbilly — played by a then-unknown Andy Griffith -- who was drafted into the Air Force. Knotts won plaudits as an overly tense military evaluator.
From 1956-60, Knotts further cemented his reputation on NBC's "The Steve Allen Show," where he would play a character named Mr. Morrison, aka "the nervous man." Interviewed on the street, Morrison was asked whether something was making him nervous and would inevitably offer a terse, anxiety-wracked "No!"
In the meantime, "No Time for Sergeants" was made into a feature film in 1958, with Griffith and Knotts reprising their roles. The two actors kept in touch, and when Griffith signed to do the TV series as a rural sheriff, Knotts half-jokingly suggested that the lawman would need a deputy.
Knotts left "Andy Griffith" in 1965, later explaining that he believed the producers had always intended for the series to last just five seasons. In a 1967 Times interview, he said, "The grind gets to you in television, and that's primarily the reason I'm concentrating on pictures."
Griffith stayed with the program for three years after Knotts' departure, however, and Knotts agreed to revive his role as Fife in a number of guest spots. Even without Knotts, "Andy Griffith" remained popular, and the show was ranked No. 1 in its final season, 1967-68. Episodes remain syndication favorites and still appear in frequent rotation on cable network TV Land.
But many fans now believe "Andy Griffith" fizzled creatively without Knotts' manic energy — a point that even Griffith himself has conceded. On the TV fan site www.jumptheshark.com, one viewer wrote, "When Barney Fife left town, 'The Andy Griffith Show' changed from a television classic to just another 60's TV show."
After "Griffith," Knotts stayed busy, although he never quite matched the success he had seen as Barney Fife. An NBC variety hour, "The Don Knotts Show," premiered in 1970 and lasted just one season. The actor subsequently appeared in several live-action Disney features: as a bumbling bandit in "The Apple Dumpling Gang" (1975), a would-be safecracker in "No Deposit, No Return" (1976) and an auto-racing veteran in "Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo" (1977). He also reprised his role as Fife in "Return to Mayberry," a nostalgic TV movie that delivered enormous ratings for CBS in 1986, and had a recurring role in "Matlock," CBS' courtroom drama starring Griffith.
A self-described hypochondriac, Knotts suffered numerous health reversals in recent years. He developed vision problems that made driving and some other tasks difficult. In the fall of 2003, he injured his Achilles tendon while starring in "On Golden Pond" at the New Theatre in Overland Park, Kansas, and had to wear a brace onstage.
Two of Knotts' three marriages ended in divorce. The first, to Kathryn Kay Metz, lasted from 1947 to 1964 and produced two children, Karen, an actress who co-starred with her father in a 1996 stage revival of "You Can't Take It With You," and Thomas, both of whom survive him. From 1974 to 1983, Knotts was married to Loralee Czuchna. He was married to actress Francey Yarborough at the time of his death.
"He saw poignancy in people's pride and pain and he turned it into something endearing and hilarious," Yarborough, who is also an actress, said in a statement Saturday.
Knotts received a star on the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame in January 2000.
In the foreword to Knotts' 2000 memoir, "Barney Fife and Other Characters I Have Known," Griffith wrote that Knotts personally had little in common with his most famous creation. "Don was not Barney Fife," Griffith wrote. "I know Don to be a bright man and very much in control of himself. As everyone knows, Barney Fife had very little control of himself. In the comedy scenes we did, I was often closer to Don than the camera and I could look at him before we started those scenes, and through his eyes, I could see him become Barney Fife."
Copyright © 2006, The Los Angeles Times
Don Knotts, star of "The Andy Griffith Show," dead at 81
Knotts, who lived in West Los Angeles, died Friday night of lung cancer at Cedars Sinai Medical Center.
By Scott Collins
Times Staff Writer
February 25, 2006, 4:30 PM CST
Don Knotts, the saucer-eyed, scarecrow-thin comic actor best known for his roles as the high-strung small-town deputy Barney Fife on the 1960s CBS series "The Andy Griffith Show" and the leisure-suit-clad landlord Ralph Furley on ABC's '70s sitcom "Three's Company," has died. He was 81.
Knotts, who lived in West Los Angeles, died Friday night of lung cancer at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, according to Sherwin Bash, his longtime manager.
Family members said that his longtime friend Griffth was one of his last visitors at Cedars on Friday night.
Despite health problems, Knotts had kept working in recent months. He lent his distinctive, high-pitched voice as Turkey Mayor in Walt Disney's animated family film "Chicken Little," which was released in November 2005. He also did guest spots in 2005 on NBC's "Las Vegas" and Fox's "That '70s Show." He occasionally co-headlined in live comedy shows with Tim Conway, his sometime co-star in Disney films such as "The Apple Dumpling Gang." Knotts also appeared as the TV repairman in director Gary Ross's whimsical 1998 comedy "Pleasantville," and voiced the part of T.W. Turtle in the 1997 animated feature "Cats Don't Dance."
As he grew older, Knotts became a lodestar for younger comic actors. The new generation came to appreciate his highly physical brand of acting that, at its best, was in the tradition of silent-film greats such as Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel and Harold Lloyd.
Knotts first rose to prominence in the late 1950s, joining Louis Nye and other comedy players on "The Steve Allen Show." In 1961, United Artists Records released a comedy album entitled "Don Knotts: An Evening with Me," which featured various takeoffs on the "nervous man" routine the comic had made famous on Allen's show. One of the bits, "The Weatherman," concerned a TV forecaster forced to wing it after the meteorology report fails to make it to the studio by air time.
During the mid to late 1960s, in a largely unsuccessful bid for major film stardom, Knotts made a series of family films that many connoisseurs now say were critically underappreciated at the time. These include "The Incredible Mr. Limpet" (1964), "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken" (1966) and "The Reluctant Astronaut" (1967). The latter two were made as part of a five-picture deal with Universal Pictures.
"Limpet," the tale of a meek man who is transformed into a fish, has particularly won recent acclaim. Its early mix of live action and animation was a forerunner of such later films as "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and "Space Jam."
At one point, Jim Carrey was said to be considering starring in a "Limpet" remake, although the project has yet to materialize. Once, when Knotts visited the set of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," Carrey paid tribute. "I went to him, and I was just like, 'Thank you so much for "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken,"' Carrey later told an interviewer. " 'I watched it a hundred times when I was a kid.' "
Martin Short has likewise hailed Knotts as a major influence, and at least one of Short's recurring characters, shifty-eyed lawyer Nathan Thurm, owes a debt to Knotts' "nervous man" character, created for "The Steve Allen Show" in the 1950s.
Many TV viewers remember Knotts as Ralph Furley, the ascot-wearing middle-aged landlord who mistakenly viewed himself as a swinger on ABC's hit sex farce "Three's Company." The series starred the late John Ritter as Jack Tripper, a chef who pretended to be gay in order to share an apartment with two attractive young women. The plot of many episodes hinged on Tripper struggling to keep his secret from an ever-suspicious (and homophobic) Furley. Knotts introduced the character in 1979, during the show's fourth season, when the original landlords (Norman Fell and Audra Lindley) had departed for their own spin-off, "The Ropers."
For Knotts, who typically worked in Disney comedies and other family-friendly fare, appearing in a sex comedy — then decried by critics as "jiggle TV" -- constituted a major departure. But he stayed with "Three's Company" until it went off the air in 1984 after eight seasons.
However, it was his portrayal of Barney Fife — a role for which he won five Emmy Awards -- that immortalized Knotts to TV viewers. Deputy Fife, an inveterate bumbler, was not in the series pilot, and was at first intended simply to be part of a large ensemble that would surround Griffith, who played Sheriff Andy Taylor in Mayberry, a fictional North Carolina town near Raleigh.
But not long after the series debuted in October 1960, Knotts stole the show. Griffith, who was meant to be the series' comic focus, shifted to playing straight man. The writers began beefing up Fife's role and creating episodes that depended on the sheriff rescuing Fife from his latest predicament. "Andy Griffith" was the most popular comedy on television during its first season, and never dropped from the Top 10 for the rest of its eight-year run.
In Knotts' hands, Fife was a fully realized stooge, a hick-town Don Quixote who imagined himself braver, more sophisticated and more competent than he actually was. His utter lack of self-control led him into desperate jams that usually culminated with Fife at the end of his rope, bug-eyed and panting with anxiety. Sheriff Taylor allowed his deputy to carry just one bullet, which he was obliged to keep separate from his service revolver due to past trigger mishaps.
Asked how he developed his most famous character, Knotts replied in a 2000 interview: "Mainly, I thought of Barney as a kid. You can always look into the faces of kids and see what they're thinking, if they're happy or sad. That's what I tried to do with Barney. It's very identifiable."
Jesse Donald Knotts was born in Morgantown, W.Va., on July 21, 1924, the youngest of four brothers. His family life was troubled; Knotts' father twice threatened his mother with a knife and later spent time in mental hospitals, while older brother Earl — nicknamed "Shadow" because of his thinness -- died of asthma when Knotts was still a teenager.
Years later, the actor did not recall his childhood fondly.
"I felt like a loser," he recalled in a 1976 interview with the Los Angeles Times. "I was unhappy, I think, most of the time. We were terribly poor and I hated my size."
Knotts turned to performing in his early teens, doing an Edgar Bergen-inspired ventriloquism act with a dummy he named Danny.
He enlisted in the Army in 1943 and served in the Pacific, receiving the World War II Victory Medal among other decorations. After the war, in 1948, he graduated from West Virginia University with an education degree.
He soon borrowed $100 and moved to New York to pursue an acting career. He auditioned for several radio gigs but was turned down. One of his earliest TV roles was on the CBS soap opera "Search for Tomorrow," where he played Wilbur Peterson — a neurotic young man so troubled he communicated only with his sister -- from 1953-55. It was the only non-comedic role he ever played.
But Knotts did not receive widespread attention until he appeared on Broadway in Ira Levin's 1955 comedy "No Time for Sergeants." Based on Mac Hyman's novel, the play concerned a hillbilly — played by a then-unknown Andy Griffith -- who was drafted into the Air Force. Knotts won plaudits as an overly tense military evaluator.
From 1956-60, Knotts further cemented his reputation on NBC's "The Steve Allen Show," where he would play a character named Mr. Morrison, aka "the nervous man." Interviewed on the street, Morrison was asked whether something was making him nervous and would inevitably offer a terse, anxiety-wracked "No!"
In the meantime, "No Time for Sergeants" was made into a feature film in 1958, with Griffith and Knotts reprising their roles. The two actors kept in touch, and when Griffith signed to do the TV series as a rural sheriff, Knotts half-jokingly suggested that the lawman would need a deputy.
Knotts left "Andy Griffith" in 1965, later explaining that he believed the producers had always intended for the series to last just five seasons. In a 1967 Times interview, he said, "The grind gets to you in television, and that's primarily the reason I'm concentrating on pictures."
Griffith stayed with the program for three years after Knotts' departure, however, and Knotts agreed to revive his role as Fife in a number of guest spots. Even without Knotts, "Andy Griffith" remained popular, and the show was ranked No. 1 in its final season, 1967-68. Episodes remain syndication favorites and still appear in frequent rotation on cable network TV Land.
But many fans now believe "Andy Griffith" fizzled creatively without Knotts' manic energy — a point that even Griffith himself has conceded. On the TV fan site www.jumptheshark.com, one viewer wrote, "When Barney Fife left town, 'The Andy Griffith Show' changed from a television classic to just another 60's TV show."
After "Griffith," Knotts stayed busy, although he never quite matched the success he had seen as Barney Fife. An NBC variety hour, "The Don Knotts Show," premiered in 1970 and lasted just one season. The actor subsequently appeared in several live-action Disney features: as a bumbling bandit in "The Apple Dumpling Gang" (1975), a would-be safecracker in "No Deposit, No Return" (1976) and an auto-racing veteran in "Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo" (1977). He also reprised his role as Fife in "Return to Mayberry," a nostalgic TV movie that delivered enormous ratings for CBS in 1986, and had a recurring role in "Matlock," CBS' courtroom drama starring Griffith.
A self-described hypochondriac, Knotts suffered numerous health reversals in recent years. He developed vision problems that made driving and some other tasks difficult. In the fall of 2003, he injured his Achilles tendon while starring in "On Golden Pond" at the New Theatre in Overland Park, Kansas, and had to wear a brace onstage.
Two of Knotts' three marriages ended in divorce. The first, to Kathryn Kay Metz, lasted from 1947 to 1964 and produced two children, Karen, an actress who co-starred with her father in a 1996 stage revival of "You Can't Take It With You," and Thomas, both of whom survive him. From 1974 to 1983, Knotts was married to Loralee Czuchna. He was married to actress Francey Yarborough at the time of his death.
"He saw poignancy in people's pride and pain and he turned it into something endearing and hilarious," Yarborough, who is also an actress, said in a statement Saturday.
Knotts received a star on the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame in January 2000.
In the foreword to Knotts' 2000 memoir, "Barney Fife and Other Characters I Have Known," Griffith wrote that Knotts personally had little in common with his most famous creation. "Don was not Barney Fife," Griffith wrote. "I know Don to be a bright man and very much in control of himself. As everyone knows, Barney Fife had very little control of himself. In the comedy scenes we did, I was often closer to Don than the camera and I could look at him before we started those scenes, and through his eyes, I could see him become Barney Fife."
Copyright © 2006, The Los Angeles Times
Friday, February 24, 2006
From Capitol Hill Blue:
The Rant
Secret Service agents say Cheney was drunk when he shot lawyer
By DOUG THOMPSON
Feb 22, 2006, 07:35
Secret Service agents guarding Vice President Dick Cheney when he shot Texas lawyer Harry Whittington on a hunting outing two weeks ago say Cheney was "clearly inebriated" at the time of the shooting.
Agents observed several members of the hunting party, including the Vice President, consuming alcohol before and during the hunting expedition, the report notes, and Cheney exhibited "visible signs" of impairment, including slurred speech and erratic actions.
According to those who have talked with the agents and others present at the outing, Cheney was drunk when he gunned down his friend and the day-and-a-half delay in allowing Texas law enforcement officials on the ranch where the shooting occurred gave all members of the hunting party time to sober up.
We talked with a number of administration officials who are privy to inside information on the Vice President's shooting "accident" and all admit Secret Service agents and others say they saw Cheney consume far more than the "one beer' he claimed he drank at lunch earlier that day.
"This was a South Texas hunt," says one White House aide. "Of course there was drinking. There's always drinking. Lots of it."
One agent at the scene has been placed on administrative leave and another requested reassignment this week. A memo reportedly written by one agent has been destroyed, sources said Wednesday afternoon.
Cheney has a long history of alcohol abuse, including two convictions of driving under the influence when he was younger. Doctors tell me that someone like Cheney, who is taking blood thinners because of his history of heart attacks, could get legally drunk now after consuming just one drink.
If Cheney was legally drunk at the time of the shooting, he could be guilty of a felony under Texas law and the shooting, ruled an accident by a compliant Kenedy County Sheriff, would be a prosecutable offense.
But we will never know for sure because the owners of the Armstrong Ranch, where the shooting occurred, barred the sheriff's department from the property on the day of the shooting and Kenedy County Sheriff Ramon Salinas III agreed to wait until the next day to send deputies in to talk to those involved.
Sheriff's Captain Charles Kirk says he went to the Armstrong Ranch immediately after the shooting was reported on Saturday, February 11 but both he and a game warden were not allowed on the 50,000-acre property. He called Salinas who told him to forget about it and return to the station.
"I told him don't worry about it. I'll make a call," Salinas said. The sheriff claims he called another deputy who moonlights at the Armstrong ranch, said he was told it was "just an accident" and made the decision to wait until Sunday to investigate.
"We've known these people for years. They are honest and wouldn't call us, telling us a lie," Salinas said.
Like all elected officials in Kenedy County, Salinas owes his job to the backing and financial support of Katherine Armstrong, owner of the ranch and the county's largest employer.
"The Armstrongs rule Kenedy County like a fiefdom," says a former employee.
Secret Service officials also took possession of all tests on Whittington's blood at the hospitals where he was treated for his wounds. When asked if a blood alcohol test had been performed on Whittington, the doctors who treated him at Christus Spohn Hospital Memorial in Corpus Christi or the hospital in Kingsville refused to answer. One admits privately he was ordered by the Secret Service to "never discuss the case with the press."
It's a sure bet that is a private doctor who treated the victim of Cheney's reckless and drunken actions can't talk to the public then any evidence that shows the Vice President drunk as a skunk will never see the light of day.
The Rant
Secret Service agents say Cheney was drunk when he shot lawyer
By DOUG THOMPSON
Feb 22, 2006, 07:35
Secret Service agents guarding Vice President Dick Cheney when he shot Texas lawyer Harry Whittington on a hunting outing two weeks ago say Cheney was "clearly inebriated" at the time of the shooting.
Agents observed several members of the hunting party, including the Vice President, consuming alcohol before and during the hunting expedition, the report notes, and Cheney exhibited "visible signs" of impairment, including slurred speech and erratic actions.
According to those who have talked with the agents and others present at the outing, Cheney was drunk when he gunned down his friend and the day-and-a-half delay in allowing Texas law enforcement officials on the ranch where the shooting occurred gave all members of the hunting party time to sober up.
We talked with a number of administration officials who are privy to inside information on the Vice President's shooting "accident" and all admit Secret Service agents and others say they saw Cheney consume far more than the "one beer' he claimed he drank at lunch earlier that day.
"This was a South Texas hunt," says one White House aide. "Of course there was drinking. There's always drinking. Lots of it."
One agent at the scene has been placed on administrative leave and another requested reassignment this week. A memo reportedly written by one agent has been destroyed, sources said Wednesday afternoon.
Cheney has a long history of alcohol abuse, including two convictions of driving under the influence when he was younger. Doctors tell me that someone like Cheney, who is taking blood thinners because of his history of heart attacks, could get legally drunk now after consuming just one drink.
If Cheney was legally drunk at the time of the shooting, he could be guilty of a felony under Texas law and the shooting, ruled an accident by a compliant Kenedy County Sheriff, would be a prosecutable offense.
But we will never know for sure because the owners of the Armstrong Ranch, where the shooting occurred, barred the sheriff's department from the property on the day of the shooting and Kenedy County Sheriff Ramon Salinas III agreed to wait until the next day to send deputies in to talk to those involved.
Sheriff's Captain Charles Kirk says he went to the Armstrong Ranch immediately after the shooting was reported on Saturday, February 11 but both he and a game warden were not allowed on the 50,000-acre property. He called Salinas who told him to forget about it and return to the station.
"I told him don't worry about it. I'll make a call," Salinas said. The sheriff claims he called another deputy who moonlights at the Armstrong ranch, said he was told it was "just an accident" and made the decision to wait until Sunday to investigate.
"We've known these people for years. They are honest and wouldn't call us, telling us a lie," Salinas said.
Like all elected officials in Kenedy County, Salinas owes his job to the backing and financial support of Katherine Armstrong, owner of the ranch and the county's largest employer.
"The Armstrongs rule Kenedy County like a fiefdom," says a former employee.
Secret Service officials also took possession of all tests on Whittington's blood at the hospitals where he was treated for his wounds. When asked if a blood alcohol test had been performed on Whittington, the doctors who treated him at Christus Spohn Hospital Memorial in Corpus Christi or the hospital in Kingsville refused to answer. One admits privately he was ordered by the Secret Service to "never discuss the case with the press."
It's a sure bet that is a private doctor who treated the victim of Cheney's reckless and drunken actions can't talk to the public then any evidence that shows the Vice President drunk as a skunk will never see the light of day.
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Another Academic Casualty
By Thomas Sowell
The resignation of Lawrence Summers as president of Harvard University tells us a lot about what is wrong with academia today.
When he took office in 2001, Summers seemed like an ideal president of Harvard. He had had a distinguished career in and out of the academic world, including having been a professor at Harvard, so there was no obvious reason why he would not fit in.
His fatal flaws were honesty and a desire to do the right thing. That has ruined more than one academic career.
Dr. Summers' problems started early on. He called in Cornel West for a private discussion of West's scholarly activities -- or rather, Professor West's lack of scholarly activities.
It was not that Cornel West was inactive. He was active as a great showman on television, he was active in politics, he was active on the lucrative lecture circuit, and he was even active in entertainment, writing and performing rap music. He was also popular with students, as any professor who gives out lots of A's is likely to be.
The kind of activity that Lawrence Summers wanted to see from West was the kind of activity expected from full professors at a leading university -- scholarly research and writing. Cornel West wrote lots of things in lots of places but even an editor of the liberal New Republic characterized West's books as "almost completely worthless."
Although the discussion between Summers and West was private, Cornel West himself made it a public issue -- and a public scandal. West and his supporters made this a racial issue. That made facts and logic irrelevant.
Summers apologized.
That should tell us all we need to know about Harvard and about academia in general. Neither truth nor standards matter when it comes to one of the ideological raw nerves like race.
Lawrence Summers touched another ideological raw nerve last year, when discussing why there were not more tenured women professors in science. Since he was addressing a scholarly symposium, Summers cited hypotheses and data that might explain the under-representation of women at the top in science.
Summers advanced what he called "the high-powered job hypothesis." Mothers have a hard time reaching the top in jobs where people work long hours and put everything else aside when the job requires it.
He cited another well-known and unchallenged fact. Although women and men have similar average IQs, men are over-represented at both the lowest and the highest IQ levels. Men outnumber women among both idiots and geniuses.
Since top scientists are drawn disproportionately from people at the highest levels, that is another possible factor in differences between women and men in high-end science.
Summers also cited other factors, including socialization and discrimination but this did not prevent another ideological firestorm from erupting. Summers was simply demonized and the faculty turned against him.
The only politically correct explanation is discrimination.
Summer apologized -- again. But, in the end, these hasty retreats did not save his job.
Despite incessant repetition of the word "diversity" in academe, the tragic fact is that the academic world is one of the most intolerant places in America when it comes to diversity of ideas. Even the president of Harvard dare not step out of line.
Parents pay the kind of money on which whole families could live, in order to have their children "educated" at elite academic institutions, hearing only one side of a whole range of issues -- race and sex being just two.
Even if every conclusion with which students are indoctrinated were true, unless those students develop their own ability to weigh opposing arguments, these conclusions will become obsolete as new issues arise in the years ahead. These "educated" people will have developed no ability to analyze opposing sides of issues.
Students are getting half an education at inflated prices and learning only how to label, dismiss and demonize ideas that differ from what they have been led to believe. Their "educated" ignorance is a danger to the future of this country.
By Thomas Sowell
The resignation of Lawrence Summers as president of Harvard University tells us a lot about what is wrong with academia today.
When he took office in 2001, Summers seemed like an ideal president of Harvard. He had had a distinguished career in and out of the academic world, including having been a professor at Harvard, so there was no obvious reason why he would not fit in.
His fatal flaws were honesty and a desire to do the right thing. That has ruined more than one academic career.
Dr. Summers' problems started early on. He called in Cornel West for a private discussion of West's scholarly activities -- or rather, Professor West's lack of scholarly activities.
It was not that Cornel West was inactive. He was active as a great showman on television, he was active in politics, he was active on the lucrative lecture circuit, and he was even active in entertainment, writing and performing rap music. He was also popular with students, as any professor who gives out lots of A's is likely to be.
The kind of activity that Lawrence Summers wanted to see from West was the kind of activity expected from full professors at a leading university -- scholarly research and writing. Cornel West wrote lots of things in lots of places but even an editor of the liberal New Republic characterized West's books as "almost completely worthless."
Although the discussion between Summers and West was private, Cornel West himself made it a public issue -- and a public scandal. West and his supporters made this a racial issue. That made facts and logic irrelevant.
Summers apologized.
That should tell us all we need to know about Harvard and about academia in general. Neither truth nor standards matter when it comes to one of the ideological raw nerves like race.
Lawrence Summers touched another ideological raw nerve last year, when discussing why there were not more tenured women professors in science. Since he was addressing a scholarly symposium, Summers cited hypotheses and data that might explain the under-representation of women at the top in science.
Summers advanced what he called "the high-powered job hypothesis." Mothers have a hard time reaching the top in jobs where people work long hours and put everything else aside when the job requires it.
He cited another well-known and unchallenged fact. Although women and men have similar average IQs, men are over-represented at both the lowest and the highest IQ levels. Men outnumber women among both idiots and geniuses.
Since top scientists are drawn disproportionately from people at the highest levels, that is another possible factor in differences between women and men in high-end science.
Summers also cited other factors, including socialization and discrimination but this did not prevent another ideological firestorm from erupting. Summers was simply demonized and the faculty turned against him.
The only politically correct explanation is discrimination.
Summer apologized -- again. But, in the end, these hasty retreats did not save his job.
Despite incessant repetition of the word "diversity" in academe, the tragic fact is that the academic world is one of the most intolerant places in America when it comes to diversity of ideas. Even the president of Harvard dare not step out of line.
Parents pay the kind of money on which whole families could live, in order to have their children "educated" at elite academic institutions, hearing only one side of a whole range of issues -- race and sex being just two.
Even if every conclusion with which students are indoctrinated were true, unless those students develop their own ability to weigh opposing arguments, these conclusions will become obsolete as new issues arise in the years ahead. These "educated" people will have developed no ability to analyze opposing sides of issues.
Students are getting half an education at inflated prices and learning only how to label, dismiss and demonize ideas that differ from what they have been led to believe. Their "educated" ignorance is a danger to the future of this country.
Stuck in a hard place
Appalachian teens come of age in compelling 'Country Boys'
By Sam Allis, Globe Staff
Robert Bly, the white-maned poet who was ridiculed in the early '90s for leading the men's movement into the woods with tom-toms, identified a sad and scary reality in the United States -- the absence of older men teaching young men how to be good men.
This gaping hole in our social fabric has been examined largely through the prism of urban America, and much has been documented about the crisis facing boys in cities who grow up without fathers or other male role models.
Rural America, by contrast, is terra incognita. We rarely run into textured looks at how country boys come of age, particularly amid rural poverty. Most of us settle for stereotypical images of monosyllabic youth, decaying cars, and swayback trailers. We simply don't know with any emotional depth what happens to the rural kids who are dealt a bad hand.
David Sutherland runs hard at the subject in ''Country Boys," his strong, heavily promoted documentary that runs for six hours over three evenings beginning tonight on WGBH. Expectations hover in the stratosphere after his acclaimed ''The Farmer's Wife" in 1998 about the travails of a Nebraska couple trying to hold on to their farm and marriage. Here, Sutherland follows the lives of two teenage boys in an Appalachian hamlet in eastern Kentucky from ages 15 to 18.
His effort is heroic and his access astonishing during the filming from 1999-2002. At its best, ''Country Boys" is compelling human drama, moving and unredeemingly sad. It provides the kind of rich, nuanced grasp of its characters more common to literature than television.
It must be said that it also can be tedious. If the program is very good at six hours, it would have been superb at five. The story line of one youth is manifestly more gripping than that of the other, and some of the ancillary figures are tiresome. Still, ''Country Boys" can hook you and haunt you with its unfiltered eye.
Sutherland grounds the program in raw visions. His camera wanders into squalor in the hollows of the area and along its train tracks. It lingers, a shade too often, on the passing freights, bleak landscapes, and ubiquitous religious highway signs like ''You need a cross better than Blue Cross" that shape the culture there. But then, these images are essential to remind us how different this world is from ours.
His two protagonists are utterly different. Cody Perkins is an orphan who lives with a step-grandmother in relative comfort. His mother committed suicide when he was 5 months old and his father later shot and killed his seventh wife before turning the gun on himself. He wears earrings and black nail polish and succumbs to a pair of nipple rings. He plays guitar in a band that produces blood-curdling noise, and he claims to be an ardent Christian.
Chris Johnson, a soft, conventional-looking kid, is trapped in a trailer with his alcoholic father, Randall, an emotionally vacant mother named Sheila, two siblings, and a grandmother. Sheila eventually moves out but, to make her car payments, still depends on the meager federal check Chris receives each month for his learning disorders. He can only receive it if he stays in school, which is a monumental challenge for him. ''My hundred percent is like 50 percent to most people," he says.
Both attend a small alternative high school for troubled teens. Cody goes out with Jessica Riddle, a vacuous girl whose parents provide him an added degree of stability in addition to what Liz, his rock of Gibraltar step-grandmother, gives. That said, the Riddles are a boring lot. Jessica's father, Ray, spends most of his time supine in a recliner, sleeping or engaging in desultory conversations. His presence is leavened by his simple songwriting and guitar playing, which can be charming.
It is Chris whose clumsy efforts to succeed captures us early. He enjoys none of the security available to Cody and suffers for it. He struggles at school and drops out to take one job at a Taco Bell and then another delivering pizza. He loses this when his car gives out.
Chris's boundless verbal patter masks a terror born of isolation from anyone who can aid him other than helpful teachers. No kid should be stuck in his circumstances. He occasionally slides into self-pity but generally maintains a game attitude toward life under ghastly conditions.
The fork in the road for Cody and Chris, when it comes, is merciless. Cody graduates from school, valedictorian, no less, secure with a girlfriend and plans to attend a technical college. Chris finally earns a GED and graduates from the same school but then falls through the cracks. He fails a competency test that prevents him from attending a nearby college, and then the family trailer is repossessed. He disappears with his grandmother in a U-Haul headed for Florida in search of his mother.
Since he completed filming, Sutherland has been bombarded with questions about what happened to the pair, so he has added a brief update at the end of the program. Cody's life proceeds along on a comfortable trajectory toward stability and independence while Chris spirals further down into the rural squalor he was so desperately aching to quit.
Sutherland, who wrote, produced, and directed ''Country Boys," has given us another unsparing look at the hardness of this American life. He reminds us here in brutal detail that country boys, like city boys, need all the help they can get to become men.
Appalachian teens come of age in compelling 'Country Boys'
By Sam Allis, Globe Staff
Robert Bly, the white-maned poet who was ridiculed in the early '90s for leading the men's movement into the woods with tom-toms, identified a sad and scary reality in the United States -- the absence of older men teaching young men how to be good men.
This gaping hole in our social fabric has been examined largely through the prism of urban America, and much has been documented about the crisis facing boys in cities who grow up without fathers or other male role models.
Rural America, by contrast, is terra incognita. We rarely run into textured looks at how country boys come of age, particularly amid rural poverty. Most of us settle for stereotypical images of monosyllabic youth, decaying cars, and swayback trailers. We simply don't know with any emotional depth what happens to the rural kids who are dealt a bad hand.
David Sutherland runs hard at the subject in ''Country Boys," his strong, heavily promoted documentary that runs for six hours over three evenings beginning tonight on WGBH. Expectations hover in the stratosphere after his acclaimed ''The Farmer's Wife" in 1998 about the travails of a Nebraska couple trying to hold on to their farm and marriage. Here, Sutherland follows the lives of two teenage boys in an Appalachian hamlet in eastern Kentucky from ages 15 to 18.
His effort is heroic and his access astonishing during the filming from 1999-2002. At its best, ''Country Boys" is compelling human drama, moving and unredeemingly sad. It provides the kind of rich, nuanced grasp of its characters more common to literature than television.
It must be said that it also can be tedious. If the program is very good at six hours, it would have been superb at five. The story line of one youth is manifestly more gripping than that of the other, and some of the ancillary figures are tiresome. Still, ''Country Boys" can hook you and haunt you with its unfiltered eye.
Sutherland grounds the program in raw visions. His camera wanders into squalor in the hollows of the area and along its train tracks. It lingers, a shade too often, on the passing freights, bleak landscapes, and ubiquitous religious highway signs like ''You need a cross better than Blue Cross" that shape the culture there. But then, these images are essential to remind us how different this world is from ours.
His two protagonists are utterly different. Cody Perkins is an orphan who lives with a step-grandmother in relative comfort. His mother committed suicide when he was 5 months old and his father later shot and killed his seventh wife before turning the gun on himself. He wears earrings and black nail polish and succumbs to a pair of nipple rings. He plays guitar in a band that produces blood-curdling noise, and he claims to be an ardent Christian.
Chris Johnson, a soft, conventional-looking kid, is trapped in a trailer with his alcoholic father, Randall, an emotionally vacant mother named Sheila, two siblings, and a grandmother. Sheila eventually moves out but, to make her car payments, still depends on the meager federal check Chris receives each month for his learning disorders. He can only receive it if he stays in school, which is a monumental challenge for him. ''My hundred percent is like 50 percent to most people," he says.
Both attend a small alternative high school for troubled teens. Cody goes out with Jessica Riddle, a vacuous girl whose parents provide him an added degree of stability in addition to what Liz, his rock of Gibraltar step-grandmother, gives. That said, the Riddles are a boring lot. Jessica's father, Ray, spends most of his time supine in a recliner, sleeping or engaging in desultory conversations. His presence is leavened by his simple songwriting and guitar playing, which can be charming.
It is Chris whose clumsy efforts to succeed captures us early. He enjoys none of the security available to Cody and suffers for it. He struggles at school and drops out to take one job at a Taco Bell and then another delivering pizza. He loses this when his car gives out.
Chris's boundless verbal patter masks a terror born of isolation from anyone who can aid him other than helpful teachers. No kid should be stuck in his circumstances. He occasionally slides into self-pity but generally maintains a game attitude toward life under ghastly conditions.
The fork in the road for Cody and Chris, when it comes, is merciless. Cody graduates from school, valedictorian, no less, secure with a girlfriend and plans to attend a technical college. Chris finally earns a GED and graduates from the same school but then falls through the cracks. He fails a competency test that prevents him from attending a nearby college, and then the family trailer is repossessed. He disappears with his grandmother in a U-Haul headed for Florida in search of his mother.
Since he completed filming, Sutherland has been bombarded with questions about what happened to the pair, so he has added a brief update at the end of the program. Cody's life proceeds along on a comfortable trajectory toward stability and independence while Chris spirals further down into the rural squalor he was so desperately aching to quit.
Sutherland, who wrote, produced, and directed ''Country Boys," has given us another unsparing look at the hardness of this American life. He reminds us here in brutal detail that country boys, like city boys, need all the help they can get to become men.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
From The Boston Globe:
Coup against Summers a dubious victory for the politically correct
By Alan M. Dershowitz
A PLURALITY of one faculty has brought about an academic coup d'etat against not only Harvard University president Lawrence Summers but also against the majority of students, faculty, and alumni. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which forced Summers's resignation by voting a lack of confidence in him last March and threatening to do so again on Feb. 28, is only one component of Harvard University and is hardly representative of widespread attitudes on the campus toward Summers. The graduate faculties, the students, and the alumni generally supported Summers for his many accomplishments. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences includes, in general, some of the most radical, hard-left elements within Harvard's diverse constituencies. And let there be no mistake about the origin of Summers's problem with that particular faculty: It started as a hard left-center conflict. Summers committed the cardinal sin against the academic hard left: He expressed politically incorrect views regarding gender, race, religion, sexual preference, and the military.
The original no-confidence motion contained an explanatory note that explicitly referenced ''Mr. Summers' apparently ongoing convictions about the capacities and rights not only of women but also of African-Americans, third-world nations, gay people, and colonized peoples." The note also condemned Summers for his 2002 speech in which he said calls from professors and students for divestment from Israel were ''anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent."
Although the explanatory note was eventually removed from the motion, it was the 400-pound gorilla in the room. Summers was being condemned for expressing views deemed offensive by some of the faculty. I personally disagreed with some of Summers's statements, but that is beside the point in an institution committed to academic freedom and diversity of viewpoints.
In the minds of at least some vocal members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, expressing such politically incorrect views is the academic equivalent of provoking Islamic extremists by depicting Prophet Mohammed in a political cartoon. Radical academics do not, of course, burn down buildings, at least not since the 1970s. Instead they introduce motions of no confidence and demand resignations of those who offend their sensibilities (while insisting on complete freedom of speech for those with whom they agree -- free speech for me but not for thee!).
Once the academic bloodletting began, it was difficult to stanch the wound. Everything Summers did, or did not do, became the object of criticism. Not only was the honeymoon over, the divorce had begun, at least in the minds of those determined to get rid of Summers. When he selected a new dean of Arts and Sciences, there were complaints. When the new dean resigned, there were complaints, some from the same faculty members who opposed the original selection.
When Summers recused himself from any investigation of his friend Andre Shleifer for investing in Russian companies while he was consulting about the Russian economy, he was condemned by some who would have condemned him even more vociferously had he not recused himself.
Summers could do no right in the eyes of his radical critics, who could never forgive him for his perceived original sins and who saw an opportunity to build wider coalitions every time Summers took actions that alienated other groups, as a president -- especially an activist and sometimes abrasive president -- will inevitably do. Some less ideological critics of Summers's leadership style then joined the radicals in a cacophony of strange bedfellows, but the core of the opposition always remained the hard left.
It was arrogant in the extreme for a plurality of a single faculty to purport to speak for the entire university, especially when that plurality is out of synch with the mainstream of Harvard. It was dangerous for the corporation to listen primarily to that faculty, without widely consulting other professors, students, and alumni who supported Summers. Now that this plurality of one faculty has succeeded in ousting the president, the most radical elements of Harvard will be emboldened to seek to mold all of Harvard in its image. If they succeed, Harvard will become a less diverse and less interesting institution of learning governed by political-correctness cops of the hard left. This is what happened in many European universities after the violent student protests of the late 1960s. It should not be allowed to happen at Harvard in the wake of the coup d'etat engineered by some in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Coup against Summers a dubious victory for the politically correct
By Alan M. Dershowitz
A PLURALITY of one faculty has brought about an academic coup d'etat against not only Harvard University president Lawrence Summers but also against the majority of students, faculty, and alumni. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which forced Summers's resignation by voting a lack of confidence in him last March and threatening to do so again on Feb. 28, is only one component of Harvard University and is hardly representative of widespread attitudes on the campus toward Summers. The graduate faculties, the students, and the alumni generally supported Summers for his many accomplishments. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences includes, in general, some of the most radical, hard-left elements within Harvard's diverse constituencies. And let there be no mistake about the origin of Summers's problem with that particular faculty: It started as a hard left-center conflict. Summers committed the cardinal sin against the academic hard left: He expressed politically incorrect views regarding gender, race, religion, sexual preference, and the military.
The original no-confidence motion contained an explanatory note that explicitly referenced ''Mr. Summers' apparently ongoing convictions about the capacities and rights not only of women but also of African-Americans, third-world nations, gay people, and colonized peoples." The note also condemned Summers for his 2002 speech in which he said calls from professors and students for divestment from Israel were ''anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent."
Although the explanatory note was eventually removed from the motion, it was the 400-pound gorilla in the room. Summers was being condemned for expressing views deemed offensive by some of the faculty. I personally disagreed with some of Summers's statements, but that is beside the point in an institution committed to academic freedom and diversity of viewpoints.
In the minds of at least some vocal members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, expressing such politically incorrect views is the academic equivalent of provoking Islamic extremists by depicting Prophet Mohammed in a political cartoon. Radical academics do not, of course, burn down buildings, at least not since the 1970s. Instead they introduce motions of no confidence and demand resignations of those who offend their sensibilities (while insisting on complete freedom of speech for those with whom they agree -- free speech for me but not for thee!).
Once the academic bloodletting began, it was difficult to stanch the wound. Everything Summers did, or did not do, became the object of criticism. Not only was the honeymoon over, the divorce had begun, at least in the minds of those determined to get rid of Summers. When he selected a new dean of Arts and Sciences, there were complaints. When the new dean resigned, there were complaints, some from the same faculty members who opposed the original selection.
When Summers recused himself from any investigation of his friend Andre Shleifer for investing in Russian companies while he was consulting about the Russian economy, he was condemned by some who would have condemned him even more vociferously had he not recused himself.
Summers could do no right in the eyes of his radical critics, who could never forgive him for his perceived original sins and who saw an opportunity to build wider coalitions every time Summers took actions that alienated other groups, as a president -- especially an activist and sometimes abrasive president -- will inevitably do. Some less ideological critics of Summers's leadership style then joined the radicals in a cacophony of strange bedfellows, but the core of the opposition always remained the hard left.
It was arrogant in the extreme for a plurality of a single faculty to purport to speak for the entire university, especially when that plurality is out of synch with the mainstream of Harvard. It was dangerous for the corporation to listen primarily to that faculty, without widely consulting other professors, students, and alumni who supported Summers. Now that this plurality of one faculty has succeeded in ousting the president, the most radical elements of Harvard will be emboldened to seek to mold all of Harvard in its image. If they succeed, Harvard will become a less diverse and less interesting institution of learning governed by political-correctness cops of the hard left. This is what happened in many European universities after the violent student protests of the late 1960s. It should not be allowed to happen at Harvard in the wake of the coup d'etat engineered by some in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
So, Three Muslims Walk Into a Port
by Ann Coulter
The idea that the Democrats have any meaningful interest in America's national security is a joke, so I'm perfectly willing to believe there's more to this port story.
But President Bush is going to need a better justification for turning over management of our ports to an Arab country than he's come up with so far -- especially now that Jimmy Carter has said it's a good idea. Judging from his life's work to date, Carter's definition of a good idea is "an idea likely to hurt America and/or help its enemies."
Bush's defense of the port deal is to say that "those who are questioning it" need to "step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company."
First of all, it's not "all of a sudden." The phrase you're searching for, Mr. President, is "ever since the murderous attacks of Sept. 11." The Bush administration's obstinate refusal to profile Middle Easterners has been the one massive gaping hole in national security since the 9/11 attacks -- attacks that received indirect support from the United Arab Emirates.
There are at least 3,000 reasons why a company controlled by a Middle Eastern Muslim emirate should be held to a different standard than a British company. Many of these reasons are now buried under a gaping hole that isn't metaphorical in lower Manhattan.
Even four years after 9/11, I note that we don't hear Tony Blair condemning some cartoons in a Danish newspaper as "a cultural extremism," or saying their publication represents a "dreadful clash of civilizations."
That was U.A.E. Minister of Justice and Islamic Affairs Mohammed Al Dhaheri's recent comment on the great Danish cartoon caper.
So maybe Bush could defend his port deal without insulting our intelligence by asking why anyone might imagine there's any conceivable difference between a British company and a United Arab Emirates company.
Bush has painted himself into a corner on this issue, and he needs a face-saving compromise to get out of it. Here's my proposal: Let Harriet Miers run the ports.
Isn't it enough that we're already patronizing the savages over the cartoons? Do we have to let them operate our ports, too?
The Bush administration defended Muslims rioting over cartoons, saying, "We certainly understand why Muslims would find these images offensive." Hey, while they're at it, why don't they invite some Muslim leaders with well-known ties to terrorism to the White House for a reception? Oh wait, I forgot ... They did that right after 9/11. Yes, now I see why we must turn over our ports to the United Arab Emirates.
The University of Illinois has suspended editors of the student newspaper, The Daily Illini, for republishing the cartoons -- even though the kiss-ass editors ran a column accompanying the cartoons denouncing them as "bigoted and insensitive."
That was still not enough for Richard Herman, the chancellor of the university, who wrote a letter to the editor saying that he was "saddened" by the publication of the cartoons. You want sad? The University of Illinois' sports teams are known as the "Fighting Illini." Now they're going to have to change it to the "Surrendering Illini."
Fox News' Bill O'Reilly refuses to show the cartoons on "The O'Reilly Factor," saying he doesn't want to offend anyone's religion. Someone should tell him those endless interviews with prostitutes from the Bunny Ranch and porn stars aren't high on Christians' list of enjoyable viewing either. (How about adding Prophet Muhammad cartoon T-shirts and fleece tops to his vast collection of "Factor gear"? Isn't Father's Day right around the corner? I'd buy those.)
Needless to say, the Treason Times won't show the cartoons that have incited mass rioting around the globe. At least The New York Times has a good excuse: It's too busy printing national security secrets that will get Americans killed. Its pages are already brimming with classified information about our techniques for spying on terrorists here in America -- no room for newsworthy cartoons! The Pentagon Papers and a top-secret surveillance program are one thing; cartoons that irritate Muslims are quite another.
Two days after the Times editorial page justified its decision not to reprint the cartoons as "a reasonable choice for news organizations that usually refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols, especially since the cartoons are so easy to describe in words," the Times ran a photo of the Virgin Mary covered in cutouts from pornographic magazines and cow dung -- which I seem to have just described using a handful of common words! Gee, that was easy!
Taking to heart the lesson that violence works, I hereby announce to the world: I am offended by hotel windows that don't open, pilots chattering when the passengers are trying to sleep, and Garfield cartoons. Next time my sleep is disturbed by gibberish about our altitude over Kansas, the National Pilots Emirate embassy is going down. And mark my words: One minute after "Garfield II" goes into pre-production, some heads are gonna roll. Oh -- and I'll take the San Diego port, please.
by Ann Coulter
The idea that the Democrats have any meaningful interest in America's national security is a joke, so I'm perfectly willing to believe there's more to this port story.
But President Bush is going to need a better justification for turning over management of our ports to an Arab country than he's come up with so far -- especially now that Jimmy Carter has said it's a good idea. Judging from his life's work to date, Carter's definition of a good idea is "an idea likely to hurt America and/or help its enemies."
Bush's defense of the port deal is to say that "those who are questioning it" need to "step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company."
First of all, it's not "all of a sudden." The phrase you're searching for, Mr. President, is "ever since the murderous attacks of Sept. 11." The Bush administration's obstinate refusal to profile Middle Easterners has been the one massive gaping hole in national security since the 9/11 attacks -- attacks that received indirect support from the United Arab Emirates.
There are at least 3,000 reasons why a company controlled by a Middle Eastern Muslim emirate should be held to a different standard than a British company. Many of these reasons are now buried under a gaping hole that isn't metaphorical in lower Manhattan.
Even four years after 9/11, I note that we don't hear Tony Blair condemning some cartoons in a Danish newspaper as "a cultural extremism," or saying their publication represents a "dreadful clash of civilizations."
That was U.A.E. Minister of Justice and Islamic Affairs Mohammed Al Dhaheri's recent comment on the great Danish cartoon caper.
So maybe Bush could defend his port deal without insulting our intelligence by asking why anyone might imagine there's any conceivable difference between a British company and a United Arab Emirates company.
Bush has painted himself into a corner on this issue, and he needs a face-saving compromise to get out of it. Here's my proposal: Let Harriet Miers run the ports.
Isn't it enough that we're already patronizing the savages over the cartoons? Do we have to let them operate our ports, too?
The Bush administration defended Muslims rioting over cartoons, saying, "We certainly understand why Muslims would find these images offensive." Hey, while they're at it, why don't they invite some Muslim leaders with well-known ties to terrorism to the White House for a reception? Oh wait, I forgot ... They did that right after 9/11. Yes, now I see why we must turn over our ports to the United Arab Emirates.
The University of Illinois has suspended editors of the student newspaper, The Daily Illini, for republishing the cartoons -- even though the kiss-ass editors ran a column accompanying the cartoons denouncing them as "bigoted and insensitive."
That was still not enough for Richard Herman, the chancellor of the university, who wrote a letter to the editor saying that he was "saddened" by the publication of the cartoons. You want sad? The University of Illinois' sports teams are known as the "Fighting Illini." Now they're going to have to change it to the "Surrendering Illini."
Fox News' Bill O'Reilly refuses to show the cartoons on "The O'Reilly Factor," saying he doesn't want to offend anyone's religion. Someone should tell him those endless interviews with prostitutes from the Bunny Ranch and porn stars aren't high on Christians' list of enjoyable viewing either. (How about adding Prophet Muhammad cartoon T-shirts and fleece tops to his vast collection of "Factor gear"? Isn't Father's Day right around the corner? I'd buy those.)
Needless to say, the Treason Times won't show the cartoons that have incited mass rioting around the globe. At least The New York Times has a good excuse: It's too busy printing national security secrets that will get Americans killed. Its pages are already brimming with classified information about our techniques for spying on terrorists here in America -- no room for newsworthy cartoons! The Pentagon Papers and a top-secret surveillance program are one thing; cartoons that irritate Muslims are quite another.
Two days after the Times editorial page justified its decision not to reprint the cartoons as "a reasonable choice for news organizations that usually refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols, especially since the cartoons are so easy to describe in words," the Times ran a photo of the Virgin Mary covered in cutouts from pornographic magazines and cow dung -- which I seem to have just described using a handful of common words! Gee, that was easy!
Taking to heart the lesson that violence works, I hereby announce to the world: I am offended by hotel windows that don't open, pilots chattering when the passengers are trying to sleep, and Garfield cartoons. Next time my sleep is disturbed by gibberish about our altitude over Kansas, the National Pilots Emirate embassy is going down. And mark my words: One minute after "Garfield II" goes into pre-production, some heads are gonna roll. Oh -- and I'll take the San Diego port, please.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Any port in the terrorist storm
By Cal Thomas
Feb 20, 2006
On Sunday, the Australian government issued the following alert to its citizens: "We advise you to exercise a high degree of caution in the United Arab Emirates because of the high threat of terrorist attack. We continue to receive reports that terrorists are planning attacks against Western interests in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Commercial and public areas frequented by foreigners are possible terrorist targets."
The United States has approved a business deal that would turn over the operation of six major American ports to a company that is owned by the UAE, the very country Australians are to be wary of visiting. The obvious question is: If it is dangerous for an Australian to travel to the UAE because of terrorism, isn't it even more dangerous for a company owned by UAE to own the rights to American ports where terror might be directly, or indirectly, imported?
There have been some dumb decisions since the United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, including the "welcoming" of radical Muslim groups, mosques and schools that seek by their preaching and teaching to influence U.S. foreign policy and undermine the nation. But the decision to sell port operations in New York, Newark-Port Elizabeth, Baltimore, Miami, Philadelphia and New Orleans to a company owned by the UAE may be the dumbest of all.
Security experts have repeatedly said American ports are poorly protected. Each year, approximately 9 million cargo containers enter the United States through its ports. Repeated calls to improve port security have mostly gone unheeded.
In supporting the sale decision by a little-known interagency panel called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the Bush administration dismissed security risk concerns. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones said the sale of the ports for $6.8 billion to Dubai Ports World was "rigorously reviewed" by CFIUS, which, he said, considers security threats when foreign companies seek to buy or invest in American industry. Apparently money talked more than common sense.
In a rare display of bipartisanship, congressional Republicans and Democrats are forging an alliance to reverse the decision. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, has announced plans for her Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs to hold hearings. Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J. - both members of Collins' committee - have raised concerns. New York's Democratic senators, Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton have also objected to the sale. Clinton and Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., expect to offer a bill to ban companies owned or controlled by foreign governments from acquiring U.S. port operations.
In the House, Reps. Chris Shays, R-Conn.; Mark Foley, R-Fla.; and Vito Fossella, R.-N.Y., are among those who want to know more about the sale. In a House speech, Foley said, "The potential threat to our country is not imagined, it is real."
The UAE was used as a financial and operational base by some of the 9/11 hijackers. A New York Times editorial said the sale takes the Bush administration's "laxness to a new level."
Members of Congress may wish to consider that the UAE was an important transfer point for shipments of smuggled nuclear components bound for Iran, North Korea and Libya by a Pakistani scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan. The UAE was one of only three countries to recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan's legitimate government before the U.S. invasion toppled it.
The Department of Homeland Security says it is legally impossible under CFIUS rules to reconsider approval of the sale without evidence the Dubai company gave false information or withheld vital details from U.S. officials. Congress should change that law.
Last year, Congress overwhelmingly recommended against the Bush administration granting permission to a Chinese company to purchase the U.S. oil services company UNOCAL. Six years ago, when a Chinese company took control of the Panama Canal from the United States, retired U.S. Admiral and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Thomas H. Moorer warned of a "nuclear Pearl Harbor."
Congress must stop this sale of American ports to foreign interests and, in an era of terrorism, prevent any more potential terrorist targets from falling into the hands of those who wish to destroy us.
By Cal Thomas
Feb 20, 2006
On Sunday, the Australian government issued the following alert to its citizens: "We advise you to exercise a high degree of caution in the United Arab Emirates because of the high threat of terrorist attack. We continue to receive reports that terrorists are planning attacks against Western interests in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Commercial and public areas frequented by foreigners are possible terrorist targets."
The United States has approved a business deal that would turn over the operation of six major American ports to a company that is owned by the UAE, the very country Australians are to be wary of visiting. The obvious question is: If it is dangerous for an Australian to travel to the UAE because of terrorism, isn't it even more dangerous for a company owned by UAE to own the rights to American ports where terror might be directly, or indirectly, imported?
There have been some dumb decisions since the United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, including the "welcoming" of radical Muslim groups, mosques and schools that seek by their preaching and teaching to influence U.S. foreign policy and undermine the nation. But the decision to sell port operations in New York, Newark-Port Elizabeth, Baltimore, Miami, Philadelphia and New Orleans to a company owned by the UAE may be the dumbest of all.
Security experts have repeatedly said American ports are poorly protected. Each year, approximately 9 million cargo containers enter the United States through its ports. Repeated calls to improve port security have mostly gone unheeded.
In supporting the sale decision by a little-known interagency panel called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the Bush administration dismissed security risk concerns. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones said the sale of the ports for $6.8 billion to Dubai Ports World was "rigorously reviewed" by CFIUS, which, he said, considers security threats when foreign companies seek to buy or invest in American industry. Apparently money talked more than common sense.
In a rare display of bipartisanship, congressional Republicans and Democrats are forging an alliance to reverse the decision. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, has announced plans for her Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs to hold hearings. Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J. - both members of Collins' committee - have raised concerns. New York's Democratic senators, Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton have also objected to the sale. Clinton and Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., expect to offer a bill to ban companies owned or controlled by foreign governments from acquiring U.S. port operations.
In the House, Reps. Chris Shays, R-Conn.; Mark Foley, R-Fla.; and Vito Fossella, R.-N.Y., are among those who want to know more about the sale. In a House speech, Foley said, "The potential threat to our country is not imagined, it is real."
The UAE was used as a financial and operational base by some of the 9/11 hijackers. A New York Times editorial said the sale takes the Bush administration's "laxness to a new level."
Members of Congress may wish to consider that the UAE was an important transfer point for shipments of smuggled nuclear components bound for Iran, North Korea and Libya by a Pakistani scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan. The UAE was one of only three countries to recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan's legitimate government before the U.S. invasion toppled it.
The Department of Homeland Security says it is legally impossible under CFIUS rules to reconsider approval of the sale without evidence the Dubai company gave false information or withheld vital details from U.S. officials. Congress should change that law.
Last year, Congress overwhelmingly recommended against the Bush administration granting permission to a Chinese company to purchase the U.S. oil services company UNOCAL. Six years ago, when a Chinese company took control of the Panama Canal from the United States, retired U.S. Admiral and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Thomas H. Moorer warned of a "nuclear Pearl Harbor."
Congress must stop this sale of American ports to foreign interests and, in an era of terrorism, prevent any more potential terrorist targets from falling into the hands of those who wish to destroy us.
More trenchant criticism of the idiot Bush:
HOW THE PORT SELLOUT WAS FINANCED
By Michelle Malkin
February 21, 2006 10:39 AM
A tipster e-mailed me last night:
I work as a corporate lawyer at a large law firm that has a speciality in Islamic finance. The real reason Dubai Ports World is undergoing the transaction is because of an Islamic finance vehicle called the sukuk. The sukuk is essentially a commerical paper type of Islamic financle vehicle--it is essentially a "fake" bond to work around the Muslim prohibition on interest.
Now comes the interesting part.
As you might know, Dubai has recently christened (my word) its stock exchange. It hasn't been very successful thus far--so they've been looking to
acquire really high profile items to trade on it. (Note: they also tried to buy the Refco assets after Refco collapsed). If the Dubai Ports World sukuk goes through, it becomes the largest publicly traded sukuk in the world.
As a result, Dubai instantly becomes the place to go for Islamic finance in the world--and folks specializing in Islamic finance stand to make a great deal of money.
Here's some background on how the bidding war between Dubai Ports World and the other competitor to buy out British-based P& O's port operations, Singapore’s PSA (the more experienced and established of the two bidders), shook out via ITP News, Jan. 26, 2006:
The multi-billion dollar bidding war between Dubai and Singapore over the British ports and ferries operator P&O could be settled this week.
Dubai Ports World (DPW), owned by the emirate's government, fired the first shot when it made a bid of US$5.91 billion in November 2005. However, Singapore’s PSA has hit back, approaching P&O with a conditional counter offer of US$6.21 billion. A formal offer could be submitted within the next few days.
PSA’s conditions were that it be allowed to complete satisfactory due diligence, that its board give final approval, that P&O’s directors withdraw their recommendation of the DPW offer, and that P&O’s pension trustees approve the offer.
PSA has operations in 11 countries and is the world’s second-largest ports group. By contrast, DPW was formed as recently as September with the amalgamation of the Dubai Ports Authority and DPI Terminals.
The company’s container throughput is roughly a third of what PSA handles. However, if DPW were to acquire P&O — currently the world’s fourth-largest ports group — the industry landscape would shift dramatically. Not only would DPW immediately become the second-largest player in the marketplace, it would also have secured key ports in India and Australia — markets in which fast traffic growth is anticipated...
...In order to help fund the massive bid, Dubai Ports, Customs & Free Zone Corporation (PCFC) have launched the world’s largest sukuk, or Sharia-compliant bond. What was intended as a US $2.8 billion issue has instead rocketed to US $3.5 billion, after an overwhelming response from investors. Lead-managed by Dubai Islamic Bank (DIB) and Barclays Capital, the distinctive sukuk is also the first convertible instrument in the Islamic finance market.
The issue is just one of a series of initiatives designed to boost the PCFC’s corporate activities, ongoing business development needs and expansion plans. Its unique convertible structure allows partial redemption of up to 30% in the form of equity shares of the PCFC entities as and when they go for a Public Equity Offering within the next three years. If no Public Equity Offering takes place prior to the final redemption date, investors will be compensated with a higher yield.
The Dubai International Financial Exchange (DIFX) listed the world's largest Sukuk, worth US $3.5 billion, from Dubai Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corporation (PCFC) on Jan. 26th, 2006. PSA withdrew last week.
Alex Alexiev, of the Center for Security Policy, points out:
Washington claims that the United Arab Emirates is a reliable friend and ally of the United States in the war on terror. To the extent that Dubai Ports World is a UAE state-owned company, this may in fact be the key question to ask. The answer is not hard to find if you start looking at the role played by the UAE as an eager financier of the huge worldwide infrastructure of radical Islam built over the past three decades by Saudi Arabia. An infrastructure that’s the main breeding ground of extremism and terrorism.
From the very beginning in the 1970s, the UAE has been a key source of financial support for Saudi-controlled organizations like the Islamic Solidarity Fund, the Islamic Development Bank (IDB), World Council of Mosques, and the Muslim World League (MWL) as documented in The Muslim World League Journal, an English-language monthly. The IDB alone, for instance, spent $10 billion between 1977 and 1990 for “Islamic activities” and at least $1 billion more recently to support terrorist activities by the Palestinian Al Aqsa and Intifada Funds.
One of the most successful Islamist operations in the U.S. early on involved the Wahhabi ideological takeover of the Nation of Islam after the death of its founder Elijah Muhammad. Of the $4.8 million “presented” to W. D. Muhammad, Elijah’s son and successor, in 1980 alone, one million came from UAE’s president Sheikh Zayad, according to the August 1980 issue of the MWL Journal. Zayad continued his “philanthropic” activities by donating $2.5 million for a Zayad Islamic Center at Harvard University’s divinity school of all places. The donation had to be returned after it became known that a similar Zayad Center in the UAE was closed because it had become a hotbed of Islamic extremism. And this is likely just the tip of the iceberg. A reliable friend and ally? Perhaps, but hardly one of ours.
Dubai media outlets are calling critics and skeptics of the port sellout "Islamophobes."
If demanding that our government put American security interests above foreign business interests makes me an "Islamophobe," and if wanting to know the full details of the who, what, when, where, and why of this UAE government deal, secretly approved by the Treasury Dept.-led Committee on Foreign Investments in the US, makes me an "Islamophobe," I plead guilty.
HOW THE PORT SELLOUT WAS FINANCED
By Michelle Malkin
February 21, 2006 10:39 AM
A tipster e-mailed me last night:
I work as a corporate lawyer at a large law firm that has a speciality in Islamic finance. The real reason Dubai Ports World is undergoing the transaction is because of an Islamic finance vehicle called the sukuk. The sukuk is essentially a commerical paper type of Islamic financle vehicle--it is essentially a "fake" bond to work around the Muslim prohibition on interest.
Now comes the interesting part.
As you might know, Dubai has recently christened (my word) its stock exchange. It hasn't been very successful thus far--so they've been looking to
acquire really high profile items to trade on it. (Note: they also tried to buy the Refco assets after Refco collapsed). If the Dubai Ports World sukuk goes through, it becomes the largest publicly traded sukuk in the world.
As a result, Dubai instantly becomes the place to go for Islamic finance in the world--and folks specializing in Islamic finance stand to make a great deal of money.
Here's some background on how the bidding war between Dubai Ports World and the other competitor to buy out British-based P& O's port operations, Singapore’s PSA (the more experienced and established of the two bidders), shook out via ITP News, Jan. 26, 2006:
The multi-billion dollar bidding war between Dubai and Singapore over the British ports and ferries operator P&O could be settled this week.
Dubai Ports World (DPW), owned by the emirate's government, fired the first shot when it made a bid of US$5.91 billion in November 2005. However, Singapore’s PSA has hit back, approaching P&O with a conditional counter offer of US$6.21 billion. A formal offer could be submitted within the next few days.
PSA’s conditions were that it be allowed to complete satisfactory due diligence, that its board give final approval, that P&O’s directors withdraw their recommendation of the DPW offer, and that P&O’s pension trustees approve the offer.
PSA has operations in 11 countries and is the world’s second-largest ports group. By contrast, DPW was formed as recently as September with the amalgamation of the Dubai Ports Authority and DPI Terminals.
The company’s container throughput is roughly a third of what PSA handles. However, if DPW were to acquire P&O — currently the world’s fourth-largest ports group — the industry landscape would shift dramatically. Not only would DPW immediately become the second-largest player in the marketplace, it would also have secured key ports in India and Australia — markets in which fast traffic growth is anticipated...
...In order to help fund the massive bid, Dubai Ports, Customs & Free Zone Corporation (PCFC) have launched the world’s largest sukuk, or Sharia-compliant bond. What was intended as a US $2.8 billion issue has instead rocketed to US $3.5 billion, after an overwhelming response from investors. Lead-managed by Dubai Islamic Bank (DIB) and Barclays Capital, the distinctive sukuk is also the first convertible instrument in the Islamic finance market.
The issue is just one of a series of initiatives designed to boost the PCFC’s corporate activities, ongoing business development needs and expansion plans. Its unique convertible structure allows partial redemption of up to 30% in the form of equity shares of the PCFC entities as and when they go for a Public Equity Offering within the next three years. If no Public Equity Offering takes place prior to the final redemption date, investors will be compensated with a higher yield.
The Dubai International Financial Exchange (DIFX) listed the world's largest Sukuk, worth US $3.5 billion, from Dubai Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corporation (PCFC) on Jan. 26th, 2006. PSA withdrew last week.
Alex Alexiev, of the Center for Security Policy, points out:
Washington claims that the United Arab Emirates is a reliable friend and ally of the United States in the war on terror. To the extent that Dubai Ports World is a UAE state-owned company, this may in fact be the key question to ask. The answer is not hard to find if you start looking at the role played by the UAE as an eager financier of the huge worldwide infrastructure of radical Islam built over the past three decades by Saudi Arabia. An infrastructure that’s the main breeding ground of extremism and terrorism.
From the very beginning in the 1970s, the UAE has been a key source of financial support for Saudi-controlled organizations like the Islamic Solidarity Fund, the Islamic Development Bank (IDB), World Council of Mosques, and the Muslim World League (MWL) as documented in The Muslim World League Journal, an English-language monthly. The IDB alone, for instance, spent $10 billion between 1977 and 1990 for “Islamic activities” and at least $1 billion more recently to support terrorist activities by the Palestinian Al Aqsa and Intifada Funds.
One of the most successful Islamist operations in the U.S. early on involved the Wahhabi ideological takeover of the Nation of Islam after the death of its founder Elijah Muhammad. Of the $4.8 million “presented” to W. D. Muhammad, Elijah’s son and successor, in 1980 alone, one million came from UAE’s president Sheikh Zayad, according to the August 1980 issue of the MWL Journal. Zayad continued his “philanthropic” activities by donating $2.5 million for a Zayad Islamic Center at Harvard University’s divinity school of all places. The donation had to be returned after it became known that a similar Zayad Center in the UAE was closed because it had become a hotbed of Islamic extremism. And this is likely just the tip of the iceberg. A reliable friend and ally? Perhaps, but hardly one of ours.
Dubai media outlets are calling critics and skeptics of the port sellout "Islamophobes."
If demanding that our government put American security interests above foreign business interests makes me an "Islamophobe," and if wanting to know the full details of the who, what, when, where, and why of this UAE government deal, secretly approved by the Treasury Dept.-led Committee on Foreign Investments in the US, makes me an "Islamophobe," I plead guilty.
From The Washington Times: If any other proof was needed that the simpleton Bush was wrong about this idiotic port deal, Jimmy Carter supports the move.
Ports of CFIUS call
By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
The federal bureaucracy has made a strategic mistake that threatens to cost the president dearly. The question is not whether last week's ill-advised decision by the secretive Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (known by its acronym, CFIUS, pronounced syphius) will be undone. Rather, the question is: By whom -- and at what political cost to Mr. Bush?
In the latest of a series of approvals of questionable foreign takeovers of American interests, CFIUS has given the green light to a company owned by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to acquire contracts to manage port facilities in New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami and New Orleans. The company, Dubai Ports World (DP World), would do so by purchasing a British concern, Peninsula and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P and O).
Experts have long identified America's sea ports as weak links in the chain of our homeland security. With their proximity to major U.S. population centers, expensive infrastructure vital to the regional and, in many cases, national economy and their throughput of large quantities of poorly monitored cargo, they are prime targets for terror.
As a result, a case can be made it is a mistake to have foreign entities responsible for any aspect of such ports, including managing their docks, stevedore operations and terminals. After all, that duty affords abundant opportunities to insinuate personnel and/or shipping containers that can pose a threat to this country. Even though the company in question may not be directly responsible for port security, at least some of their employees have to be read in on the relevant plans, potentially compromising the latter irreparably.
At least the previous foreign contractors were from Britain, a country on our side before September 11, 2001. The same cannot be said of the United Arab Emirates, whose territory was used for most of the planning and financing of the September 11 attacks. While the UAE's government is now depicted as a friend and ally in the so-called war on terror, its country remains awash with Islamofascist recruiters and adherents, who are all too willing to exploit any new opportunity to harm us.
Since a column raising an alarm about CFIUS' decision appeared in this space last week, three new factors have come to light that compound the strategic folly of the UAE deal:
• First, in addition to the six affected ports mentioned above, two others would also have part of their operations managed by DP World -- on behalf of none other than the U.S. Army. Under a newly extended contract, the owner of P and O will manage the movement of heavy armor, helicopters and other military materiel through the Texas seaports of Beaumont and Corpus Christi. How much would our enemies like to be able to sabotage such shipments?
• Second, while advocates of the stealthy CFIUS decisionmaking process point to Defense Department involvement in its DP World decision, it is unclear at what level this bizarre proposition was reviewed in the Pentagon. Many top jobs remain unfilled by presidential appointees. Past experience suggests the job may have fallen to lower-level career bureaucrats who give priority to maintaining good relations with their foreign "clients," like the UAE.
• Then, there is the financing of the DP World takeover of Peninsula and Oriental. The UAE evidently intends to raise nearly all the $6.8 billion price for P and O on international capital markets. It must be asked: Who will the foreign investors be, and might they have malign intentions toward the U.S.? If American sources of capital are sought, will the possible danger this transaction may create for this country be properly disclosed? For that matter, will the underwriters, Barclays and Deutsche Bank, reveal to prospective funders the real risk that the deal will ultimately fall through?
In fact, that seems virtually certain now that talk radio, the blogosphere and the public have become aware of -- and white hot about -- this transaction. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle and of Capitol Hill have made known their determination to prevent the transfer of control of U.S. ports to the UAE. In particular, Democrats like New York Sens. Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer have been quick to seize on this issue as an opportunity to burnish their national security credentials at the expense of President Bush and his party.
So, the question recurs: How long will it take before Mr. Bush cuts his losses? This could be accomplished in one of three ways: He could reverse the decision himself (perhaps by directing CFIUS to reconsider its initial recommendation). He could encourage and sign into law legislation barring foreign ownership or management of U.S. port facilities (akin to the rules governing other critical infrastructure). Or he could quietly encourage the UAE to do as Communist China did last year with respect to the Unocal purchase -- withdraw the offer itself, sparing the country in question (and its friends here) the embarrassment of having its behavior carefully scrutinized and its offer spurned in a high-profile way.
Call it a Harriet Meirs moment. Politics being the art of the possible, it is time to recognize the Dubai Ports World deal is neither strategically sensible nor politically doable. It is time to pull the plug, and to reform the secretive interagency CFIUS process that allowed this fiasco in the first place.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy and lead-author of "War Footing: 10 Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World."
Ports of CFIUS call
By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
The federal bureaucracy has made a strategic mistake that threatens to cost the president dearly. The question is not whether last week's ill-advised decision by the secretive Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (known by its acronym, CFIUS, pronounced syphius) will be undone. Rather, the question is: By whom -- and at what political cost to Mr. Bush?
In the latest of a series of approvals of questionable foreign takeovers of American interests, CFIUS has given the green light to a company owned by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to acquire contracts to manage port facilities in New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami and New Orleans. The company, Dubai Ports World (DP World), would do so by purchasing a British concern, Peninsula and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P and O).
Experts have long identified America's sea ports as weak links in the chain of our homeland security. With their proximity to major U.S. population centers, expensive infrastructure vital to the regional and, in many cases, national economy and their throughput of large quantities of poorly monitored cargo, they are prime targets for terror.
As a result, a case can be made it is a mistake to have foreign entities responsible for any aspect of such ports, including managing their docks, stevedore operations and terminals. After all, that duty affords abundant opportunities to insinuate personnel and/or shipping containers that can pose a threat to this country. Even though the company in question may not be directly responsible for port security, at least some of their employees have to be read in on the relevant plans, potentially compromising the latter irreparably.
At least the previous foreign contractors were from Britain, a country on our side before September 11, 2001. The same cannot be said of the United Arab Emirates, whose territory was used for most of the planning and financing of the September 11 attacks. While the UAE's government is now depicted as a friend and ally in the so-called war on terror, its country remains awash with Islamofascist recruiters and adherents, who are all too willing to exploit any new opportunity to harm us.
Since a column raising an alarm about CFIUS' decision appeared in this space last week, three new factors have come to light that compound the strategic folly of the UAE deal:
• First, in addition to the six affected ports mentioned above, two others would also have part of their operations managed by DP World -- on behalf of none other than the U.S. Army. Under a newly extended contract, the owner of P and O will manage the movement of heavy armor, helicopters and other military materiel through the Texas seaports of Beaumont and Corpus Christi. How much would our enemies like to be able to sabotage such shipments?
• Second, while advocates of the stealthy CFIUS decisionmaking process point to Defense Department involvement in its DP World decision, it is unclear at what level this bizarre proposition was reviewed in the Pentagon. Many top jobs remain unfilled by presidential appointees. Past experience suggests the job may have fallen to lower-level career bureaucrats who give priority to maintaining good relations with their foreign "clients," like the UAE.
• Then, there is the financing of the DP World takeover of Peninsula and Oriental. The UAE evidently intends to raise nearly all the $6.8 billion price for P and O on international capital markets. It must be asked: Who will the foreign investors be, and might they have malign intentions toward the U.S.? If American sources of capital are sought, will the possible danger this transaction may create for this country be properly disclosed? For that matter, will the underwriters, Barclays and Deutsche Bank, reveal to prospective funders the real risk that the deal will ultimately fall through?
In fact, that seems virtually certain now that talk radio, the blogosphere and the public have become aware of -- and white hot about -- this transaction. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle and of Capitol Hill have made known their determination to prevent the transfer of control of U.S. ports to the UAE. In particular, Democrats like New York Sens. Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer have been quick to seize on this issue as an opportunity to burnish their national security credentials at the expense of President Bush and his party.
So, the question recurs: How long will it take before Mr. Bush cuts his losses? This could be accomplished in one of three ways: He could reverse the decision himself (perhaps by directing CFIUS to reconsider its initial recommendation). He could encourage and sign into law legislation barring foreign ownership or management of U.S. port facilities (akin to the rules governing other critical infrastructure). Or he could quietly encourage the UAE to do as Communist China did last year with respect to the Unocal purchase -- withdraw the offer itself, sparing the country in question (and its friends here) the embarrassment of having its behavior carefully scrutinized and its offer spurned in a high-profile way.
Call it a Harriet Meirs moment. Politics being the art of the possible, it is time to recognize the Dubai Ports World deal is neither strategically sensible nor politically doable. It is time to pull the plug, and to reform the secretive interagency CFIUS process that allowed this fiasco in the first place.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy and lead-author of "War Footing: 10 Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World."
Monday, February 20, 2006
Interesting take from Mere Comments (though I'm not sure I agree with it) on the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring:
The Joy of Goodness
A few days ago at our house we watched a tape of The Fellowship of the Ring, and for a couple of hours afterwards I racked my brains trying to figure out why, for all that the movie was splendidly produced and (with a few notable exceptions) subtly acted, I had to admit that I did not enjoy it. I understand that I'm going to call down upon my head the wrath of the film trilogy's fans, including my friend the priest who insists that these are classics that will be watched as long as there are screens and human eyes to gape at them. But here goes, anyway.
The trouble is that neither the director nor his fellow screenplay writers understood the joy of goodness. I don't mean happiness exactly, or the perky buffoonery of Merry and Pippin, but the simple and abiding joy that one feels, almost unconsciously, when one is doing a good thing, like planting out a garden of fine potatoes, or drinking excellent ale with old friends, or following one's master into Mordor, come what may. It's a kind of spiritual health, a brightness that you don't always notice until it is seared or spoiled.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy is simply full of this joy, always threatening, like good but boisterous children, to burst out of the iron bonds of a bad world and rough things up again. I understand that when you write a screenplay you can't and shouldn't include every episode -- so I'm not blaming Jackson and his colleagues for cutting out Tom Bombadill. I'm blaming them for not understanding why Tolkien included that episode, unnecessary for the plot, in the first place. For if you cut out the good Tom, a force of nature, you sure had better not cut out Radagast, the simple wizard who spends all his time learning the languages of birds. Or you had better make sure that Merry and Pippin meet Sam and Frodo by design, since they are happy to accompany them no matter what. Or you had better be precise about the quiet humor, the eye-twinkling, of Aragorn. Or you better make Galadriel into something other than a female Boromir who pulls back from temptation at the last moment. You had better make your elves as beautiful as the trees they love; and you should sometimes shoot scenes that shine with the glories of wood and stream and sunlight.
The characters seem good in the way that weary, scorched souls may try to be good; they can no longer imagine the innocence they have lost. Or they stare wide-eyed out into nothing, like Elijah Wood, hoping that that will convey something like innocence -- innocuousness, at least. Even the wicked characters have no hypocritical traces of glory about them: so Saruman is reduced from the self-deluded, prideful fool who initially thinks he can do good by playing with evil, to a mere raving tool of Sauron; he does not rise to the level of the two-dimensional.
Something of this same callousness to the joy of goodness can be found in PBS's current production of Dickens' Bleak House. Dark, dreary, grim sets, with a dreary heroine whose idea of humility is to put up with being a housekeeper but in general to be proud, reserved, prim, and frosty; and almost all the boisterousness and Christian humor written out of a book that fairly explodes with good men and women, some of whom are regular "characters," like the sorely missed Mrs. Bagnet, omitted from the production.
By way of contrast: John Ford's How Green Was My Valley is, unlike The Fellowship of the Ring, a too-episodic movie based on a wildly episodic and generally incoherent book; in many ways it does not show a tenth of the craftsmanship of the Tolkien movie. But despite the encompassing evil that destroys the Welsh village, Ford manages to show the joy of goodness, in Gwillim Morgan and his dear wife, in the preacher, in Angharad, and even in the bare-knuckled Dai Bando, who teaches the boy Huw to fight and, years later, goes down into the flooded mine, though he is stone blind, to help search for Morgan. Ford and his lot were sinners who still somehow heard the peal of church bells, even after they had strayed far away; but if there are church bells in the world of Peter Jackson, I don't hear them. Don't get me wrong, I think that The Fellowship of the Ring is a great movie, and vastly superior to the poisonous stuff that Hollywood produces. But it seems a great movie in a bad age; Ford's was a very good movie in better times
The Joy of Goodness
A few days ago at our house we watched a tape of The Fellowship of the Ring, and for a couple of hours afterwards I racked my brains trying to figure out why, for all that the movie was splendidly produced and (with a few notable exceptions) subtly acted, I had to admit that I did not enjoy it. I understand that I'm going to call down upon my head the wrath of the film trilogy's fans, including my friend the priest who insists that these are classics that will be watched as long as there are screens and human eyes to gape at them. But here goes, anyway.
The trouble is that neither the director nor his fellow screenplay writers understood the joy of goodness. I don't mean happiness exactly, or the perky buffoonery of Merry and Pippin, but the simple and abiding joy that one feels, almost unconsciously, when one is doing a good thing, like planting out a garden of fine potatoes, or drinking excellent ale with old friends, or following one's master into Mordor, come what may. It's a kind of spiritual health, a brightness that you don't always notice until it is seared or spoiled.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy is simply full of this joy, always threatening, like good but boisterous children, to burst out of the iron bonds of a bad world and rough things up again. I understand that when you write a screenplay you can't and shouldn't include every episode -- so I'm not blaming Jackson and his colleagues for cutting out Tom Bombadill. I'm blaming them for not understanding why Tolkien included that episode, unnecessary for the plot, in the first place. For if you cut out the good Tom, a force of nature, you sure had better not cut out Radagast, the simple wizard who spends all his time learning the languages of birds. Or you had better make sure that Merry and Pippin meet Sam and Frodo by design, since they are happy to accompany them no matter what. Or you had better be precise about the quiet humor, the eye-twinkling, of Aragorn. Or you better make Galadriel into something other than a female Boromir who pulls back from temptation at the last moment. You had better make your elves as beautiful as the trees they love; and you should sometimes shoot scenes that shine with the glories of wood and stream and sunlight.
The characters seem good in the way that weary, scorched souls may try to be good; they can no longer imagine the innocence they have lost. Or they stare wide-eyed out into nothing, like Elijah Wood, hoping that that will convey something like innocence -- innocuousness, at least. Even the wicked characters have no hypocritical traces of glory about them: so Saruman is reduced from the self-deluded, prideful fool who initially thinks he can do good by playing with evil, to a mere raving tool of Sauron; he does not rise to the level of the two-dimensional.
Something of this same callousness to the joy of goodness can be found in PBS's current production of Dickens' Bleak House. Dark, dreary, grim sets, with a dreary heroine whose idea of humility is to put up with being a housekeeper but in general to be proud, reserved, prim, and frosty; and almost all the boisterousness and Christian humor written out of a book that fairly explodes with good men and women, some of whom are regular "characters," like the sorely missed Mrs. Bagnet, omitted from the production.
By way of contrast: John Ford's How Green Was My Valley is, unlike The Fellowship of the Ring, a too-episodic movie based on a wildly episodic and generally incoherent book; in many ways it does not show a tenth of the craftsmanship of the Tolkien movie. But despite the encompassing evil that destroys the Welsh village, Ford manages to show the joy of goodness, in Gwillim Morgan and his dear wife, in the preacher, in Angharad, and even in the bare-knuckled Dai Bando, who teaches the boy Huw to fight and, years later, goes down into the flooded mine, though he is stone blind, to help search for Morgan. Ford and his lot were sinners who still somehow heard the peal of church bells, even after they had strayed far away; but if there are church bells in the world of Peter Jackson, I don't hear them. Don't get me wrong, I think that The Fellowship of the Ring is a great movie, and vastly superior to the poisonous stuff that Hollywood produces. But it seems a great movie in a bad age; Ford's was a very good movie in better times
Sunday, February 19, 2006
From The New York Times:
A Pitcher Who Surrendered, and Won
By TYLER KEPNER
TAMPA, Fla., Feb. 18 — This is the short version: Baseball kicked around Aaron Small for 16 years. He thought about quitting. He said a prayer. Four hours later, the Yankees called. He answered and won 10 games, lost none and made a million dollars.
Now there is a book proposal circulating among publishers. There were a dozen speaking engagements over the winter. There is a family in Loudon, Tenn., that no longer lives from week to week.
"We're just normal people, trying to pay off the house and have security for our kids," said Small's wife, Macy, the secretary at Clearwater Baptist Church in Athens, Tenn. "We're not buying any new sports cars."
It is spring training, and Aaron Small is the happiest guy in the clubhouse at Legends Field. Certainly, he is the most grateful long reliever. The last time he expected to make a team was in 1999, when the Diamondbacks cut him on the last day of camp.
"I was never anybody," Small said. "I was always coming in trying to let them put a name on the face."
In the pocket of a glove in his locker, Small keeps a baseball from the winter league in Puerto Rico, where he played for two years. As baseball goes, it was fine, Small said. But he would rather spend winters with his family, and he does not want to go back.
In the first week of spring training, Small grippedthe ball along the seams that frame the sweet spot. That, he explained, was how he used to throw a sinker. Last spring, the pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre suggested that he move his fingers up a bit, so only the right one rested on a seam.
The effect was astounding. If Small made a mistake, the ball would sink a little. If he didn't, the ball would sink a lot, darting away from a left-handed hitter. It was a revelation, and the Yankees liked what they saw.
But when injuries hit last season, there were other options. There were prospects with more potential, veterans with bigger names. Sean Henn started against the Mets. Tim Redding started against the Red Sox. Small could not escape Class AAA Columbus.
He had pitched in the majors before. In 1997, with a last-place Oakland team, Small pitched 71 games in relief.
But from Sept. 27, 1998, to July 1, 2004, he pitched in just one major league game. Seven organizations let him go, and an eighth, the Marlins, did so after a seven-game cameo.
The Braves used Small to get one out against the Mets on April 6, 2002. He came in for John Smoltz with the bases loaded and two outs in the ninth inning. Five runs had already scored.
The first batter hit a three-run double off an outfielder's glove. Then came another double, a wild pitch, two walks and, mercifully, a strikeout. When the next day's game went 14 innings, and every other reliever had been used, Small sat alone in the bullpen.
"I was like, 'Well, I guess I get to pitch next,' " he said. "All of a sudden the door opens. It's Albie. He came up through the tunnel. He has his spikes on and his glove. I didn't even need to ask. I knew exactly what was going on."
Albie Lopez, who had started two days before, relieved instead of Small. It was a public rejection before 34,000 people.
Small hung on in the minors until the Braves released him at the end of the season. His one game was a tease, the kind the Smalls had gotten used to.
"We'd go for a couple of weeks or a month at a time without any kind of income or knowing where the next job was going to be," Macy Small said. "That was always difficult financially, just worrying, trying to make a living. That's hard."
Small had always promised to provide for his wife and their children, Mariah and Mason. He believed he could pitch, and he was young enough — he is 34 — to keep trying.
But last July, Small came to a personal crossroads as he drove back to Columbus after the All-Star Game break. Four Yankee starters were injured, and Small had not been promoted. As he left his family behind again, Small called the team chaplain and asked for guidance.
"I didn't feel like my heart was in the game anymore," Small said. "I told him: 'I'm just releasing it to God. I surrender. I'm tired of doing it myself. Pray with me.' I wasn't looking for a sign. Just some peace."
Small reached his apartment, took a nap and reported to the ballpark. It was his day to start, but the lineup card had another pitcher's name on it. Bucky Dent, the Columbus manager, told Small he was going to the Yankees.
The simple moral, Small knows, is that prayer equals success. The reality is more complicated, a message he tries to impart when he speaks to church groups.
"He's not saying it guarantees things will work out the way you want," said Wayne Bryant, the pastor at Clearwater Baptist Church, where Small volunteers every Wednesday during the winter for a youth Bible study group.
"It's that moment of surrender when you say, 'O.K., God, what do you want me to do?' He would have been totally at peace with not getting the call. That's the key. I don't think he, in any way, wants people to believe that just because you're faithful, it's going to always work out perfectly."
In Small's case, though, it did.
After throwing a shutout against the A's on Sept. 3, Small asked reporters why they were smiling. He looked down and noticed a beaming Mason, who had never seen his father pitch in the majors, cupping his hands to collect the drops from his ice pack. It was such a touching moment that Small fought back tears.
It kept getting better. At Yankee Stadium, Small beat the Red Sox and walked off the mound to a standing ovation. In the playoffs, fans chanted his name while he warmed up in the bullpen.
Small lost that game in relief of Randy Johnson, and that was disappointing. But when the season ended, he returned to Loudon, to the home he and Macy built last May. They live on five acres at the farm where she grew up.
On Jan. 24, Small signed a one-year contract for $1.2 million. He has never played for the money, because he never made much to begin with. But for a long reliever on the richest team in baseball, it means a lot.
"My kids are young, we're thinking about college, and it's not getting any cheaper," Small said. "It's kind of a nice feeling, you know?"
A Pitcher Who Surrendered, and Won
By TYLER KEPNER
TAMPA, Fla., Feb. 18 — This is the short version: Baseball kicked around Aaron Small for 16 years. He thought about quitting. He said a prayer. Four hours later, the Yankees called. He answered and won 10 games, lost none and made a million dollars.
Now there is a book proposal circulating among publishers. There were a dozen speaking engagements over the winter. There is a family in Loudon, Tenn., that no longer lives from week to week.
"We're just normal people, trying to pay off the house and have security for our kids," said Small's wife, Macy, the secretary at Clearwater Baptist Church in Athens, Tenn. "We're not buying any new sports cars."
It is spring training, and Aaron Small is the happiest guy in the clubhouse at Legends Field. Certainly, he is the most grateful long reliever. The last time he expected to make a team was in 1999, when the Diamondbacks cut him on the last day of camp.
"I was never anybody," Small said. "I was always coming in trying to let them put a name on the face."
In the pocket of a glove in his locker, Small keeps a baseball from the winter league in Puerto Rico, where he played for two years. As baseball goes, it was fine, Small said. But he would rather spend winters with his family, and he does not want to go back.
In the first week of spring training, Small grippedthe ball along the seams that frame the sweet spot. That, he explained, was how he used to throw a sinker. Last spring, the pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre suggested that he move his fingers up a bit, so only the right one rested on a seam.
The effect was astounding. If Small made a mistake, the ball would sink a little. If he didn't, the ball would sink a lot, darting away from a left-handed hitter. It was a revelation, and the Yankees liked what they saw.
But when injuries hit last season, there were other options. There were prospects with more potential, veterans with bigger names. Sean Henn started against the Mets. Tim Redding started against the Red Sox. Small could not escape Class AAA Columbus.
He had pitched in the majors before. In 1997, with a last-place Oakland team, Small pitched 71 games in relief.
But from Sept. 27, 1998, to July 1, 2004, he pitched in just one major league game. Seven organizations let him go, and an eighth, the Marlins, did so after a seven-game cameo.
The Braves used Small to get one out against the Mets on April 6, 2002. He came in for John Smoltz with the bases loaded and two outs in the ninth inning. Five runs had already scored.
The first batter hit a three-run double off an outfielder's glove. Then came another double, a wild pitch, two walks and, mercifully, a strikeout. When the next day's game went 14 innings, and every other reliever had been used, Small sat alone in the bullpen.
"I was like, 'Well, I guess I get to pitch next,' " he said. "All of a sudden the door opens. It's Albie. He came up through the tunnel. He has his spikes on and his glove. I didn't even need to ask. I knew exactly what was going on."
Albie Lopez, who had started two days before, relieved instead of Small. It was a public rejection before 34,000 people.
Small hung on in the minors until the Braves released him at the end of the season. His one game was a tease, the kind the Smalls had gotten used to.
"We'd go for a couple of weeks or a month at a time without any kind of income or knowing where the next job was going to be," Macy Small said. "That was always difficult financially, just worrying, trying to make a living. That's hard."
Small had always promised to provide for his wife and their children, Mariah and Mason. He believed he could pitch, and he was young enough — he is 34 — to keep trying.
But last July, Small came to a personal crossroads as he drove back to Columbus after the All-Star Game break. Four Yankee starters were injured, and Small had not been promoted. As he left his family behind again, Small called the team chaplain and asked for guidance.
"I didn't feel like my heart was in the game anymore," Small said. "I told him: 'I'm just releasing it to God. I surrender. I'm tired of doing it myself. Pray with me.' I wasn't looking for a sign. Just some peace."
Small reached his apartment, took a nap and reported to the ballpark. It was his day to start, but the lineup card had another pitcher's name on it. Bucky Dent, the Columbus manager, told Small he was going to the Yankees.
The simple moral, Small knows, is that prayer equals success. The reality is more complicated, a message he tries to impart when he speaks to church groups.
"He's not saying it guarantees things will work out the way you want," said Wayne Bryant, the pastor at Clearwater Baptist Church, where Small volunteers every Wednesday during the winter for a youth Bible study group.
"It's that moment of surrender when you say, 'O.K., God, what do you want me to do?' He would have been totally at peace with not getting the call. That's the key. I don't think he, in any way, wants people to believe that just because you're faithful, it's going to always work out perfectly."
In Small's case, though, it did.
After throwing a shutout against the A's on Sept. 3, Small asked reporters why they were smiling. He looked down and noticed a beaming Mason, who had never seen his father pitch in the majors, cupping his hands to collect the drops from his ice pack. It was such a touching moment that Small fought back tears.
It kept getting better. At Yankee Stadium, Small beat the Red Sox and walked off the mound to a standing ovation. In the playoffs, fans chanted his name while he warmed up in the bullpen.
Small lost that game in relief of Randy Johnson, and that was disappointing. But when the season ended, he returned to Loudon, to the home he and Macy built last May. They live on five acres at the farm where she grew up.
On Jan. 24, Small signed a one-year contract for $1.2 million. He has never played for the money, because he never made much to begin with. But for a long reliever on the richest team in baseball, it means a lot.
"My kids are young, we're thinking about college, and it's not getting any cheaper," Small said. "It's kind of a nice feeling, you know?"
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