Brave new world
By Patrick J. Buchanan
June 2, 2006
Writing in that fateful year, 1939, T.S. Eliot, intellectual and Christian, admonished his contemporaries who had placed their faith in the triumph of democracy. Democracy is not enough, Eliot wrote.
''As political philosophy derives its sanction from ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organization which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality.
''The term 'democracy,' as I have said again and again, does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces you dislike – it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler and Stalin.''
When Eliot wrote, the world had before it a textbook example of how democracy can be exploited by its enemies: the Third Reich.
After his failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, Hitler decided to take the longer road to power, the democracy road.
Named chancellor of Germany as leader of the largest minority party in the Reichstag in 1933, Hitler used plebiscites to enable the German people to participate in his rule and ratify his policies. After the reoccupation of the Rhineland and the Anschluss with Austria, national referenda were held. Up to 99 percent of all Germans endorsed his actions. By Munich, he was the most popular political leader in Europe.
This, then, is the point. Democracy is but a process by which people participate in choosing and confirming their rulers. But if the peoples of Europe have lost their belief in the truths of Christianity – the faith that made Europe – and the morality and ethics derived from those truths, they can wind up with a hell on earth.
Which brings us to Holland, a nation that can rightfully claim to be in the avant-garde of post-Christian Europe.
In Amsterdam, in the Red Light District, there are brothels, sex shops and sex museums. Women advertise their charms in storefronts. Window prostitution has been legalized, as has possession of marijuana and hashish, which are sold over the counter in coffee shops. Drugs are done openly. Pornography is pervasive.
Amsterdam has a ''liberal and tolerant attitude,'' runs a web ad. ''Instead of criminalizing everything, this upfront city wears its heart on its sleeve.'' Not to be outdone, Utrecht has a canal-based red light district. Rotterdam has sex clubs and private houses for the legalized enjoyment of the pleasures of the flesh.
Holland also leads Europe in the ''liberal and tolerant'' stance it has taken toward suicide. In April 2002, a Dutch law took effect permitting physicians to assist in euthanasia and suicides so long as the procedure is carried out in a medically appropriate fashion.
Anyone 16 or over has a right to suicide. If you are between 12 and 16, you have to get your guardian's approval to kill yourself. In World War II, the Dutch doctors who resisted the Nazi euthanasia program were heroes. Apparently, those doctors were just behind the times.
The latest news from Holland is that a new party is about to be formed, the Charity, Freedom and Diversity Party. Principal platform plank: reduction of the legal age for sex from 16 to 12 years old.
''We are going to shake The Hague awake!'' say the pedophiles of Holland, for whom dropping the age for sex to 12 is but the beginning. They wish to eradicate all prohibitions on sex with children and with animals.
This, of course, would cheer the late Dr. Alfred Kinsey, the American sexologist whose ''researchers'' either abused scores of children and infants, or who used the testimony of child-molesters to make the case that adult-child sex can be beneficial to both.
Which brings us back to Eliot's point. If one rejects Christianity, and the morality and ethics that proceed from it, on what ground does one stand to outlaw drugs, prostitution, euthanasia, assisted suicide and sex with children or dogs?
Holland today, and America – with its toll of aborted babies now nearing the 50 million mark since Roe v. Wade – raise profound questions for conservatives and traditionalists.
What if the free society chooses to become a decadent and depraved society? Do we still owe it allegiance and loyalty? Does a community have the right to impose its values, if those values are rooted in religion, on a minority that disbelieves in those values? We certainly did that during the civil rights era of the 1960s.
At what point does a regime, even if democratically elected, become illegitimate, as surely Hitler's was by the time Eliot wrote?
''What makes you think the West is worth saving?'' the priest asked Whittaker Chambers when he visited him in that hospital room in the 1950s. Good question then. Better question now.
Perhaps the Muslims, who may well be a majority in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague in 10 years, will moot the issue for us all.
Friday, June 09, 2006
Boss' energy helps revive folk classics
Paul Liberatore
Marin Independent Journal
BRUCE Springsteen looked like a character from one of the songs on his new album, "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions," in his old-timey stage outfit - slacks and suspenders, vest, gauzy shirt, string tie. He could have been a rock star, circa the 1800s.
Sweaty and full of adrenaline after his exuberant Tuesday night concert at the Concord Pavilion (officially, and drowsily, called the Sleep Train Pavilion), he was still too pumped to sit down.
As soon as he left the stage, slim-hipped and sweaty, he raced to his downstairs dressing room for a quick visit with a fellow icon of American popular music: the Bay Area's Joan Baez.
Only minutes before, she had joined him on-stage for a rousing rendition of "Pay Me My Money Down," an irresistible, if obscure, tune on the new CD that was originally a protest song by black stevedores in the South that Springsteen has transformed into a Zydeco-flavored, accordion-fueled rave-up.
On "The Seeger Sessions," Springsteen has unearthed and breathed new life into a baker's dozen of the kind of traditional folk songs that Baez, as much as Seeger, popularized in the '60s.
To put this scene in a larger context, the 57-year-old Springsteen represents the socially conscious wing of rock 'n' roll. Baez, 8 years older, symbolizes the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements.
The reunion of these two superstars was their first since the "Human Rights Now!" tour in 1988, a benefit for Amnesty International. A Boss/Baez duet on Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" closed three of those shows 18 years ago.
And now, here they were, two of our most revered progressive voices, catching up with each other.
Because Joan and I have been friends for many years, and because she invited me to go to the Springsteen concert with her, it was my good fortune to be the only other person in the room.
She was there because she wanted to tell him how much she loves his Seeger-inspired CD, describing it as "a musical history lesson," a fresh, high-energy take on traditional folk music.
For his part, he modestly calls the project a happy "accident." In 1997, he told us, he recorded "We Shall Overcome" for a track on a Seeger tribute album. That experience sent him on a journey into the past, a quest into the trove of Americana music that, as he put it, reflects "the vitality that it took to build this country."
"What I bring to this music is a sense of urgency," he said, looking me in the eye. "It's like I'm saying to people, 'You've got to listen to this music right now, right in the moment.' That urgency is my service to these songs."
With some disappointment, he let us know that these all-American songs, culled from our history and heritage, have been more enthusiastically embraced when he performed them in Europe than in certain parts of the U.S., namely middle America.
As he has suggested, this attitude may stem from a disregard for the past that affects the way this country behaves in the world.
"In places like Paris and London, people were jumping out of their seats for American songs that are 100 years old," he said. "But in the Midwest, we're having trouble selling tickets."
When I asked him why that is, he said it has to do with what he sees as American "rigidity," the reluctance to accept him doing anything other than the rock classics he's famous for with his E Street Band.
Nevertheless, that hasn't diminished his passion for music that is part of the blood and bone of this country.
"I'm going to do this again, maybe in the fall," he said. "There are hundreds of beautiful songs just sitting there waiting. I like singing them as much as my own."
For the "Seeger Sessions," a dual-disc with an audio CD on one side and a DVD of the recording sessions on the other, he assembled a group of New York City folk and acoustic musicians who had played at a party on his farm.
The band set up in the living room of his farm house ("no bigger than this," he said, indicating the modest confines of his dressing room).
With the horns in the hallway, they recorded the CD over three days without rehearsals. In the background, you can hear Springsteen calling out solos and key changes as the band plays.
That same wildly exuberant, 16-piece band - a zany four-man, Dixieland-style horn section, fiddles, accordion, acoustic guitars, piano, drums, washboard, banjo, stand-up bass, a bevy of backup singers - backed Springsteen Tuesday night as he lent his gritty voice and rock energy to many of the reels and hymns, campfire favorites and public domain gems on the new CD - among them "Erie Canal," "Old Dan Tucker," "John Henry," "Jacob's Ladder," "Eyes on the Prize," the ancient children's song "Froggie Went A Courtin,'" and the title track, "We Shall Overcome," given new resonance in Springsteen's churchy, uplifting rendition.
For an encore, he sang "When the Saints Go Marchin' In" as a kind of homage to New Orleans, and told the crowd about the devastation from Hurricane Katrina that he witnessed in New Orleans in April, when he performed at the Jazz and Heritage Festival there.
He added another Seeger song that isn't on the CD, "Send Them Home," originally an anti-Vietnam War lament, updated with new verses that Springsteen wrote about the bloodshed in Iraq. Sadly, history is repeating itself.
Springsteen filled the 12,500-capacity Concord Pavilion. When he does this again, as he said he would, maybe more Americans in other parts of the country will be as eager to celebrate their past as he is.
Contact Paul Liberatore via e-mail at liberatore@marinij.com
Paul Liberatore
Marin Independent Journal
BRUCE Springsteen looked like a character from one of the songs on his new album, "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions," in his old-timey stage outfit - slacks and suspenders, vest, gauzy shirt, string tie. He could have been a rock star, circa the 1800s.
Sweaty and full of adrenaline after his exuberant Tuesday night concert at the Concord Pavilion (officially, and drowsily, called the Sleep Train Pavilion), he was still too pumped to sit down.
As soon as he left the stage, slim-hipped and sweaty, he raced to his downstairs dressing room for a quick visit with a fellow icon of American popular music: the Bay Area's Joan Baez.
Only minutes before, she had joined him on-stage for a rousing rendition of "Pay Me My Money Down," an irresistible, if obscure, tune on the new CD that was originally a protest song by black stevedores in the South that Springsteen has transformed into a Zydeco-flavored, accordion-fueled rave-up.
On "The Seeger Sessions," Springsteen has unearthed and breathed new life into a baker's dozen of the kind of traditional folk songs that Baez, as much as Seeger, popularized in the '60s.
To put this scene in a larger context, the 57-year-old Springsteen represents the socially conscious wing of rock 'n' roll. Baez, 8 years older, symbolizes the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements.
The reunion of these two superstars was their first since the "Human Rights Now!" tour in 1988, a benefit for Amnesty International. A Boss/Baez duet on Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" closed three of those shows 18 years ago.
And now, here they were, two of our most revered progressive voices, catching up with each other.
Because Joan and I have been friends for many years, and because she invited me to go to the Springsteen concert with her, it was my good fortune to be the only other person in the room.
She was there because she wanted to tell him how much she loves his Seeger-inspired CD, describing it as "a musical history lesson," a fresh, high-energy take on traditional folk music.
For his part, he modestly calls the project a happy "accident." In 1997, he told us, he recorded "We Shall Overcome" for a track on a Seeger tribute album. That experience sent him on a journey into the past, a quest into the trove of Americana music that, as he put it, reflects "the vitality that it took to build this country."
"What I bring to this music is a sense of urgency," he said, looking me in the eye. "It's like I'm saying to people, 'You've got to listen to this music right now, right in the moment.' That urgency is my service to these songs."
With some disappointment, he let us know that these all-American songs, culled from our history and heritage, have been more enthusiastically embraced when he performed them in Europe than in certain parts of the U.S., namely middle America.
As he has suggested, this attitude may stem from a disregard for the past that affects the way this country behaves in the world.
"In places like Paris and London, people were jumping out of their seats for American songs that are 100 years old," he said. "But in the Midwest, we're having trouble selling tickets."
When I asked him why that is, he said it has to do with what he sees as American "rigidity," the reluctance to accept him doing anything other than the rock classics he's famous for with his E Street Band.
Nevertheless, that hasn't diminished his passion for music that is part of the blood and bone of this country.
"I'm going to do this again, maybe in the fall," he said. "There are hundreds of beautiful songs just sitting there waiting. I like singing them as much as my own."
For the "Seeger Sessions," a dual-disc with an audio CD on one side and a DVD of the recording sessions on the other, he assembled a group of New York City folk and acoustic musicians who had played at a party on his farm.
The band set up in the living room of his farm house ("no bigger than this," he said, indicating the modest confines of his dressing room).
With the horns in the hallway, they recorded the CD over three days without rehearsals. In the background, you can hear Springsteen calling out solos and key changes as the band plays.
That same wildly exuberant, 16-piece band - a zany four-man, Dixieland-style horn section, fiddles, accordion, acoustic guitars, piano, drums, washboard, banjo, stand-up bass, a bevy of backup singers - backed Springsteen Tuesday night as he lent his gritty voice and rock energy to many of the reels and hymns, campfire favorites and public domain gems on the new CD - among them "Erie Canal," "Old Dan Tucker," "John Henry," "Jacob's Ladder," "Eyes on the Prize," the ancient children's song "Froggie Went A Courtin,'" and the title track, "We Shall Overcome," given new resonance in Springsteen's churchy, uplifting rendition.
For an encore, he sang "When the Saints Go Marchin' In" as a kind of homage to New Orleans, and told the crowd about the devastation from Hurricane Katrina that he witnessed in New Orleans in April, when he performed at the Jazz and Heritage Festival there.
He added another Seeger song that isn't on the CD, "Send Them Home," originally an anti-Vietnam War lament, updated with new verses that Springsteen wrote about the bloodshed in Iraq. Sadly, history is repeating itself.
Springsteen filled the 12,500-capacity Concord Pavilion. When he does this again, as he said he would, maybe more Americans in other parts of the country will be as eager to celebrate their past as he is.
Contact Paul Liberatore via e-mail at liberatore@marinij.com
Bad Month for McCain
By Patrick Buchanan
In almost every poll, the three front-runners for the Republican nomination in 2008 are Rudy Giuliani, Condi Rice and John McCain.
As Condi has ruled it out and Rudy is a Manhattanite on social and moral issues -- gays, guns, affirmative action and abortion -- McCain, as a conservative maverick and media darling, appeared to have the pole position for the nomination. That no charismatic challenger is visible has seemed to add to the aura of inevitability of John McCain.
But the last six weeks have muddled this picture, and McCain now appears out of step with his party and country. Consider the returns from California of Tuesday last.
Brian Bilbray, a lobbyist who had won 15 percent in the primary to 44 percent for Democratic opponent Francine Busby -- to fill the seat of convicted Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham -- came from behind to win 49-45. Busby's failure suggests the "culture-of-corruption" issue is no sure winner for Democrats this fall. Bad news for Rahm Emanuel, who runs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
But worse news for McCain. For Bilbray attributes his comeback to a relentless assault on the McCain amnesty for illegal aliens that passed the Senate in May and his support for a 2,000-mile fence on the U.S. border from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific. So miffed at Bilbray was McCain he canceled a fund-raising appearance.
Not only is McCain the champion of the "indocumentados," he has imputed racist motives to senators who oppose putting illegals on a path to American citizenship. As Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review Online writes, "McCain uttered on the Senate floor what was probably the worst sentence of the entire debate," when he flippantly asked, "What next -- are we going to say work-authorized immigrants are going to have to ride in the back of the bus?"
This language is redolent of the moral superiority liberals often assumed, which helped to make them insufferable to Middle America.
After comparing opponents of his amnesty bill to defenders of Jim Crow, McCain, says Lopez, at an off-the-record event in New York, allegedly called Rush Limbaugh a "nativist." He then joined the liberal Republicans in voting against a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as between a man and a woman.
Not needed, says McCain. But if some U.S. judge declares that the 14th Amendment outlaws state discrimination against gays when handing out marriage licenses, how would McCain overturn the ruling? To the Christian base of the party, protection of marriage is an imperative if we are to slow America's slide into decadence.
While voting no on the marriage amendment will cause McCain's media auxiliary to purr with pleasure at this backhanding of the religious right, how would it have hurt McCain to have voted with his party? He seems more concerned with remaining in the good graces of the Log Cabin club than with the evangelical Christians. To secularists, this is the moral place to stand -- but the GOP is not a secularized institution.
On Iraq, an increasingly unpopular war, McCain remains far more hawkish than Bush and is pushing the president to insult Russia's President Putin by boycotting the July G-8 meeting in St. Petersburg.
Yet one senses Americans are tiring of the endless bellicosity of the Bushites and neoconservatives, which has produced nothing but ill will against us. This was surely not the way of the tough but gracious and genial Ronald Reagan.
But it is the immigration issue that could sink McCain. For it is hard to believe today's GOP and Middle America, which wants the U.S. border sealed with a security fence and troops, will vote for a senator who favors amnesty, voted for welfare benefits for illegal aliens and sponsored with Teddy Kennedy a bill to bring scores of millions of new immigrants in over the next 20 years.
A McCain nomination would sunder the GOP between corporate conservatives and populist conservatives, and might generate a third party movement that could return the country -- to Bill and Hillary.
In Memphis, a month ago, when the Southern and Midwestern GOP parties gathered, a straw poll was held for which McCain was strangely unprepared. To avoid his impending embarrassment, McCain urged the attendees to cast their votes for President Bush. No one was fooled, especially not a political press corps that was out in force.
Since 2000, McCain has seemed the likely successor to George Bush, and to be moving adroitly to address his vulnerabilities as a candidate. Systematically, he repaired his relations with the Bush family, reached out to the Rev. Falwell and the religious right, became the most sought-after speaker at Republican rallies and fund-raisers, has been generous with his time and endorsements, and yet maintained his unique popularity with the media.
But of late, he appears to have re-adopted the persona and re-embraced the sort of ideas that make conservatives feel good about themselves when they vote against him. This thing is wide open.
By Patrick Buchanan
In almost every poll, the three front-runners for the Republican nomination in 2008 are Rudy Giuliani, Condi Rice and John McCain.
As Condi has ruled it out and Rudy is a Manhattanite on social and moral issues -- gays, guns, affirmative action and abortion -- McCain, as a conservative maverick and media darling, appeared to have the pole position for the nomination. That no charismatic challenger is visible has seemed to add to the aura of inevitability of John McCain.
But the last six weeks have muddled this picture, and McCain now appears out of step with his party and country. Consider the returns from California of Tuesday last.
Brian Bilbray, a lobbyist who had won 15 percent in the primary to 44 percent for Democratic opponent Francine Busby -- to fill the seat of convicted Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham -- came from behind to win 49-45. Busby's failure suggests the "culture-of-corruption" issue is no sure winner for Democrats this fall. Bad news for Rahm Emanuel, who runs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
But worse news for McCain. For Bilbray attributes his comeback to a relentless assault on the McCain amnesty for illegal aliens that passed the Senate in May and his support for a 2,000-mile fence on the U.S. border from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific. So miffed at Bilbray was McCain he canceled a fund-raising appearance.
Not only is McCain the champion of the "indocumentados," he has imputed racist motives to senators who oppose putting illegals on a path to American citizenship. As Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review Online writes, "McCain uttered on the Senate floor what was probably the worst sentence of the entire debate," when he flippantly asked, "What next -- are we going to say work-authorized immigrants are going to have to ride in the back of the bus?"
This language is redolent of the moral superiority liberals often assumed, which helped to make them insufferable to Middle America.
After comparing opponents of his amnesty bill to defenders of Jim Crow, McCain, says Lopez, at an off-the-record event in New York, allegedly called Rush Limbaugh a "nativist." He then joined the liberal Republicans in voting against a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as between a man and a woman.
Not needed, says McCain. But if some U.S. judge declares that the 14th Amendment outlaws state discrimination against gays when handing out marriage licenses, how would McCain overturn the ruling? To the Christian base of the party, protection of marriage is an imperative if we are to slow America's slide into decadence.
While voting no on the marriage amendment will cause McCain's media auxiliary to purr with pleasure at this backhanding of the religious right, how would it have hurt McCain to have voted with his party? He seems more concerned with remaining in the good graces of the Log Cabin club than with the evangelical Christians. To secularists, this is the moral place to stand -- but the GOP is not a secularized institution.
On Iraq, an increasingly unpopular war, McCain remains far more hawkish than Bush and is pushing the president to insult Russia's President Putin by boycotting the July G-8 meeting in St. Petersburg.
Yet one senses Americans are tiring of the endless bellicosity of the Bushites and neoconservatives, which has produced nothing but ill will against us. This was surely not the way of the tough but gracious and genial Ronald Reagan.
But it is the immigration issue that could sink McCain. For it is hard to believe today's GOP and Middle America, which wants the U.S. border sealed with a security fence and troops, will vote for a senator who favors amnesty, voted for welfare benefits for illegal aliens and sponsored with Teddy Kennedy a bill to bring scores of millions of new immigrants in over the next 20 years.
A McCain nomination would sunder the GOP between corporate conservatives and populist conservatives, and might generate a third party movement that could return the country -- to Bill and Hillary.
In Memphis, a month ago, when the Southern and Midwestern GOP parties gathered, a straw poll was held for which McCain was strangely unprepared. To avoid his impending embarrassment, McCain urged the attendees to cast their votes for President Bush. No one was fooled, especially not a political press corps that was out in force.
Since 2000, McCain has seemed the likely successor to George Bush, and to be moving adroitly to address his vulnerabilities as a candidate. Systematically, he repaired his relations with the Bush family, reached out to the Rev. Falwell and the religious right, became the most sought-after speaker at Republican rallies and fund-raisers, has been generous with his time and endorsements, and yet maintained his unique popularity with the media.
But of late, he appears to have re-adopted the persona and re-embraced the sort of ideas that make conservatives feel good about themselves when they vote against him. This thing is wide open.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
'Fifth Beatle' Billy Preston Made the Greats Even Greater
By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 8, 2006
Billy Preston was one of the music business's true MVPs, someone who had his own substantial hits but whose real gift was making other stars sound better. After all, there's no musician who can claim to have been coveted by both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in their prime, or to have been touted as Ray Charles's successor by Charles himself.
Go to Preston's entry in All Music Guide, click on "credits" and prepare to be amazed. He was Everysideman, part Zelig, part Forrest Gump, but never anywhere accidentally or incidentally. Preston was always invited to be in the right place at the right time.
Preston, who died Tuesday at 59 in Los Angeles after a long, kidney-related illness that had left him in a coma since November, was a virtuoso on the Hammond B-3 organ. Two albums recorded before he was 20 were aptly titled "The Wildest Organ in Town" and "Most Exciting Organ Ever." His ecstatic, loose-limbed jubilation was acquired at Los Angeles's Victory Baptist Church, where his mother was the organist. The precocious Preston often backed visiting gospel royalty; Mahalia Jackson was so impressed she drafted him at age 10. Church never left Preston -- he called his '70s band the God Squad -- and an exuberant gospel underpinning remained constant in his music.
In the '60s and '70s in particular, Preston had a memorable look: mushroom-cloud-size Afro, ingratiating gap-toothed smile, funky fashions that seemed more dreamed-up than designed. And he had a matching personality that invited you in. The countless artists who sought him out probably did so as much for his engaging character as his dazzling virtuosity on organ and piano.
Take the Beatles, for instance. That relationship went back to 1962, when a 15-year-old Preston was hired for Little Richard's backing band on a European tour that was supposed to be about gospel but that Little Richard decided to make about rock-and-roll. Preston first met the Beatles during their fabled residency at the Star Club in Hamburg; a year later, they'd both made their album debuts with "Sixteen Year Old Soul" and "Please Please Me," respectively.
They'd hook up again in 1969, as the Beatles were about to break up while recording their final album, "Let It Be." George Harrison, always Preston's best Beatles buddy, had quit and walked out of the studio and gone to a Ray Charles concert in London, where Preston was playing organ. Harrison brought Preston back to the studio, where his keen musicianship and gregarious personality temporarily calmed the tension.
In bootlegged "Let It Be" session tapes, one can hear several heated arguments between John Lennon and Paul McCartney about making Preston a group member (Lennon was all for it). That would have made Preston officially "the fifth Beatle," a title he was not loath to exploit over the next three decades. Perhaps as consolation, "Get Back," the only Beatles single to enter the British charts at No.1, was credited to "the Beatles with Billy Preston" -- the first and only time the band shared the spotlight with a sideman. Preston also accompanied the Beatles during their famous rooftop gig in London, the Beatles' last public performance.
The Harrison connection would remain strong as the Beatles signed Preston to Apple Records and co-produced Preston's two albums for the label, "That's the Way God Planned It" and "Encouraging Words." On the first album's title track, one got a sense of the respect Preston engendered: Harrison and Eric Clapton played guitar, Keith Richards was on bass, Ginger Baker on drums. "That's the Way God Planned It" was pure gospel, nowhere more evident than in Preston's incredible performance of the song at Harrison's 1973 "Concert for Bangladesh," from soulful pleading and churchy organ fills to a Holy Spirit-infused dance at song's end.
Preston contributed to many Beatle solo albums, and toured with Harrison and Ringo Starr. In the '70s, he was also a key player with the Rolling Stones on the road and on such classic albums as "Sticky Fingers" and "Exile on Main Street." A sign of their respect: During their mid-'70s world tour, the Stones allowed Preston to play a few of his own songs during their set. By then, he'd finally had some hits of his own, topping the R&B charts with the instrumentals "Outa-Space" and "Space Race" and the pop charts with "Will It Go Round in Circles" and "Nothing From Nothing." Preston also co-wrote Joe Cocker's 1974 hit "You Are So Beautiful," which became a wedding, anniversary and Valentine's Day standard.
Cocker sang "You Are So Beautiful" to George and Barbara Bush at 1989's Inaugural Concert for Young Americans, brilliantly backed by Preston. Lee Atwater, the late Republican National Committee chairman as well as a blues and R&B fanatic, had hired Preston to lead an all-star band in an old-fashioned soul revue. The band opened the show with a rousing rendition of "Sweet Soul Music," and Preston later did an incredible duet with Carla Thomas on "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby."
He would come through Washington in later years as a member of Starr's All-Starr Band. Had those whose work over the decades shone brighter because of his contributions formed Billy Preston's All-Star Band, they probably would have filled the Convention Center. Not the stage -- the center itself.
By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 8, 2006
Billy Preston was one of the music business's true MVPs, someone who had his own substantial hits but whose real gift was making other stars sound better. After all, there's no musician who can claim to have been coveted by both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in their prime, or to have been touted as Ray Charles's successor by Charles himself.
Go to Preston's entry in All Music Guide, click on "credits" and prepare to be amazed. He was Everysideman, part Zelig, part Forrest Gump, but never anywhere accidentally or incidentally. Preston was always invited to be in the right place at the right time.
Preston, who died Tuesday at 59 in Los Angeles after a long, kidney-related illness that had left him in a coma since November, was a virtuoso on the Hammond B-3 organ. Two albums recorded before he was 20 were aptly titled "The Wildest Organ in Town" and "Most Exciting Organ Ever." His ecstatic, loose-limbed jubilation was acquired at Los Angeles's Victory Baptist Church, where his mother was the organist. The precocious Preston often backed visiting gospel royalty; Mahalia Jackson was so impressed she drafted him at age 10. Church never left Preston -- he called his '70s band the God Squad -- and an exuberant gospel underpinning remained constant in his music.
In the '60s and '70s in particular, Preston had a memorable look: mushroom-cloud-size Afro, ingratiating gap-toothed smile, funky fashions that seemed more dreamed-up than designed. And he had a matching personality that invited you in. The countless artists who sought him out probably did so as much for his engaging character as his dazzling virtuosity on organ and piano.
Take the Beatles, for instance. That relationship went back to 1962, when a 15-year-old Preston was hired for Little Richard's backing band on a European tour that was supposed to be about gospel but that Little Richard decided to make about rock-and-roll. Preston first met the Beatles during their fabled residency at the Star Club in Hamburg; a year later, they'd both made their album debuts with "Sixteen Year Old Soul" and "Please Please Me," respectively.
They'd hook up again in 1969, as the Beatles were about to break up while recording their final album, "Let It Be." George Harrison, always Preston's best Beatles buddy, had quit and walked out of the studio and gone to a Ray Charles concert in London, where Preston was playing organ. Harrison brought Preston back to the studio, where his keen musicianship and gregarious personality temporarily calmed the tension.
In bootlegged "Let It Be" session tapes, one can hear several heated arguments between John Lennon and Paul McCartney about making Preston a group member (Lennon was all for it). That would have made Preston officially "the fifth Beatle," a title he was not loath to exploit over the next three decades. Perhaps as consolation, "Get Back," the only Beatles single to enter the British charts at No.1, was credited to "the Beatles with Billy Preston" -- the first and only time the band shared the spotlight with a sideman. Preston also accompanied the Beatles during their famous rooftop gig in London, the Beatles' last public performance.
The Harrison connection would remain strong as the Beatles signed Preston to Apple Records and co-produced Preston's two albums for the label, "That's the Way God Planned It" and "Encouraging Words." On the first album's title track, one got a sense of the respect Preston engendered: Harrison and Eric Clapton played guitar, Keith Richards was on bass, Ginger Baker on drums. "That's the Way God Planned It" was pure gospel, nowhere more evident than in Preston's incredible performance of the song at Harrison's 1973 "Concert for Bangladesh," from soulful pleading and churchy organ fills to a Holy Spirit-infused dance at song's end.
Preston contributed to many Beatle solo albums, and toured with Harrison and Ringo Starr. In the '70s, he was also a key player with the Rolling Stones on the road and on such classic albums as "Sticky Fingers" and "Exile on Main Street." A sign of their respect: During their mid-'70s world tour, the Stones allowed Preston to play a few of his own songs during their set. By then, he'd finally had some hits of his own, topping the R&B charts with the instrumentals "Outa-Space" and "Space Race" and the pop charts with "Will It Go Round in Circles" and "Nothing From Nothing." Preston also co-wrote Joe Cocker's 1974 hit "You Are So Beautiful," which became a wedding, anniversary and Valentine's Day standard.
Cocker sang "You Are So Beautiful" to George and Barbara Bush at 1989's Inaugural Concert for Young Americans, brilliantly backed by Preston. Lee Atwater, the late Republican National Committee chairman as well as a blues and R&B fanatic, had hired Preston to lead an all-star band in an old-fashioned soul revue. The band opened the show with a rousing rendition of "Sweet Soul Music," and Preston later did an incredible duet with Carla Thomas on "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby."
He would come through Washington in later years as a member of Starr's All-Starr Band. Had those whose work over the decades shone brighter because of his contributions formed Billy Preston's All-Star Band, they probably would have filled the Convention Center. Not the stage -- the center itself.
Expect explosive revelations in the wake of Grimsley probe
BY MARK PURDY
San Jose Mercury News
SAN FRANCISCO - For the past year, Barry Bonds has been the scapegoat. That is what his defenders say. Some are his fellow major leaguers. Others are people who describe themselves as baseball fans.
Why, these people ask, are so many fingers pointing at Bonds, as if he were the only guy involved with muscle juice? Why don't the feds go after other players? Why don't the media focus on anyone else?
Those people should have been careful what they wished for, because after the events of this week in suburban Phoenix, baseball could be in for a long, horrible and scandalous summer - with Bonds serving as a mere minor character in the morality play.
Because here is what happened Tuesday: Federal agents visited the home of Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Jason Grimsley with a search warrant.
For six hours, investigators searched the house for evidence related to Grimsley's alleged use and illegal purchase of human growth hormone, a powerful performance-enhancing substance banned from baseball.
Giants shortstop Omar Vizquel was a teammate of Grimsley's with the Cleveland Indians in 1994-95. Vizquel heard news of the raid Wednesday at AT&T Park before the Giants' 8-1 loss to Florida.
After the game, asked for his reaction, Vizquel initially uttered just one word.
"Weird," Vizquel said.
Weird? How so?
"There were guys searching his house," Vizquel said. "Even if you hear of a guy who used something, you don't see them searching a house."
Bingo. In a few seconds a couple of sentences, Vizquel had grasped and elucidated the significance of the Grimsley situation: Namely, that the federal investigation into baseball's substance-abuse problem has taken a huge new step. And if you happen to be a major league player, it could be a rather scary one.
Here in the Bay Area, we know that Jeff Novitzky, the lead investigator in the BALCO case, has searched a laboratory and the homes of its owners, as well as that of Bonds' personal trainer. But not until Tuesday had Novitzky's people knocked on a major league player's door and sent cops inside to obtain...what?
Drug paraphernalia?
Phone records and address books, with the names of Grimsley's many baseball acquaintances?
Checkbooks and bank statements, to see how payments were made to the company that sent growth hormone by mail to Grimsley's house?
The answer is, all of the above. It's spelled out in the search affidavit, along with this interesting twist: Agents knew exactly what to look for, because they had met with Grimsley two months ago. On April 19, they were tipped off that he would be receiving a shipment of growth hormone. They watched the delivery, busted Grimsley and gave him two options: speak with them or have his house searched.
Grimsley, 38, said he would speak. He then spent two hours giving up the names of as many as eight teammates or former teammates who had been involved with him in steroid, growth hormone and amphetamine use and/or trafficking. But a week later, he retained a lawyer and stopped cooperating. Which led to Tuesday's search warrant.
Of course, the feds already had plenty of information. In the affidavit describing his conversation in April, Grimsley is quoted as saying that he knew "boatloads" of players who used the same source for amphetamines and growth hormone.
Boatloads? Yes, boatloads. The names of those fingered were blacked out from the publicly released search affidavit. But there will be a lot of speculation.
Grimsley, released by the Diamondbacks at his request Wednesday, was a textbook baseball journeyman. Arizona was his seventh Major League stop. He's probably occupied a home locker room with 200 or more players.
The Giants alone have three players who are Grimsley's former teammates - Vizquel and pitchers Jamey Wright and Steve Kline.
Vizquel said Wednesday that during his Cleveland seasons with Grimsley, there was no real steroid talk about him. But that's not surprising, Vizquel said. Steroid users, unless they are Jose Canseco trying to sell a book, don't usually shoot up and tell.
You get the feeling, though, that the situation might change. If Grimsley is forced to sing, we could be in for some explosive revelations. Before this, growth hormone was baseball's stealth, no-consequences drug. It is banned, but the only accurate test involves drawing blood, and baseball's drug policy, agreed upon by owners and the union, calls only for urine tests.
In other words, the only way to find baseball's growth hormone cheaters is to catch them with the stuff - which is what happened to Grimsley. But how did the feds know when he was receiving his shipment?
It suggests that someone else might be cooperating. It suggests that this investigation may already be larger than we think. It suggests that those "boatloads" of players might eventually be hearing knocks on their doors.
For baseball, trying desperately to put the steroid issue in the rear view mirror, that's a pure nightmare.
Not to overblow anything, but by the time this is over, we may look back on the scenes of this spring - with Bonds being vilified and booed as the sole steroid bad guy - and call them the good old days.
BY MARK PURDY
San Jose Mercury News
SAN FRANCISCO - For the past year, Barry Bonds has been the scapegoat. That is what his defenders say. Some are his fellow major leaguers. Others are people who describe themselves as baseball fans.
Why, these people ask, are so many fingers pointing at Bonds, as if he were the only guy involved with muscle juice? Why don't the feds go after other players? Why don't the media focus on anyone else?
Those people should have been careful what they wished for, because after the events of this week in suburban Phoenix, baseball could be in for a long, horrible and scandalous summer - with Bonds serving as a mere minor character in the morality play.
Because here is what happened Tuesday: Federal agents visited the home of Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Jason Grimsley with a search warrant.
For six hours, investigators searched the house for evidence related to Grimsley's alleged use and illegal purchase of human growth hormone, a powerful performance-enhancing substance banned from baseball.
Giants shortstop Omar Vizquel was a teammate of Grimsley's with the Cleveland Indians in 1994-95. Vizquel heard news of the raid Wednesday at AT&T Park before the Giants' 8-1 loss to Florida.
After the game, asked for his reaction, Vizquel initially uttered just one word.
"Weird," Vizquel said.
Weird? How so?
"There were guys searching his house," Vizquel said. "Even if you hear of a guy who used something, you don't see them searching a house."
Bingo. In a few seconds a couple of sentences, Vizquel had grasped and elucidated the significance of the Grimsley situation: Namely, that the federal investigation into baseball's substance-abuse problem has taken a huge new step. And if you happen to be a major league player, it could be a rather scary one.
Here in the Bay Area, we know that Jeff Novitzky, the lead investigator in the BALCO case, has searched a laboratory and the homes of its owners, as well as that of Bonds' personal trainer. But not until Tuesday had Novitzky's people knocked on a major league player's door and sent cops inside to obtain...what?
Drug paraphernalia?
Phone records and address books, with the names of Grimsley's many baseball acquaintances?
Checkbooks and bank statements, to see how payments were made to the company that sent growth hormone by mail to Grimsley's house?
The answer is, all of the above. It's spelled out in the search affidavit, along with this interesting twist: Agents knew exactly what to look for, because they had met with Grimsley two months ago. On April 19, they were tipped off that he would be receiving a shipment of growth hormone. They watched the delivery, busted Grimsley and gave him two options: speak with them or have his house searched.
Grimsley, 38, said he would speak. He then spent two hours giving up the names of as many as eight teammates or former teammates who had been involved with him in steroid, growth hormone and amphetamine use and/or trafficking. But a week later, he retained a lawyer and stopped cooperating. Which led to Tuesday's search warrant.
Of course, the feds already had plenty of information. In the affidavit describing his conversation in April, Grimsley is quoted as saying that he knew "boatloads" of players who used the same source for amphetamines and growth hormone.
Boatloads? Yes, boatloads. The names of those fingered were blacked out from the publicly released search affidavit. But there will be a lot of speculation.
Grimsley, released by the Diamondbacks at his request Wednesday, was a textbook baseball journeyman. Arizona was his seventh Major League stop. He's probably occupied a home locker room with 200 or more players.
The Giants alone have three players who are Grimsley's former teammates - Vizquel and pitchers Jamey Wright and Steve Kline.
Vizquel said Wednesday that during his Cleveland seasons with Grimsley, there was no real steroid talk about him. But that's not surprising, Vizquel said. Steroid users, unless they are Jose Canseco trying to sell a book, don't usually shoot up and tell.
You get the feeling, though, that the situation might change. If Grimsley is forced to sing, we could be in for some explosive revelations. Before this, growth hormone was baseball's stealth, no-consequences drug. It is banned, but the only accurate test involves drawing blood, and baseball's drug policy, agreed upon by owners and the union, calls only for urine tests.
In other words, the only way to find baseball's growth hormone cheaters is to catch them with the stuff - which is what happened to Grimsley. But how did the feds know when he was receiving his shipment?
It suggests that someone else might be cooperating. It suggests that this investigation may already be larger than we think. It suggests that those "boatloads" of players might eventually be hearing knocks on their doors.
For baseball, trying desperately to put the steroid issue in the rear view mirror, that's a pure nightmare.
Not to overblow anything, but by the time this is over, we may look back on the scenes of this spring - with Bonds being vilified and booed as the sole steroid bad guy - and call them the good old days.
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Is Bill Clinton Still President?
We’re making the ultimate confrontation with Iran more difficult than it need be.
By Michael Ledeen
From time to time various wags have suggested that we send Bill Clinton to negotiate with the mullahs on our behalf. It turns out it isn’t necessary; we’ve just adopted his methods. Apparently those in charge of our Iran non-policy concluded that the appeasement of North Korea worked so well, we should do the same thing with Iran. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before Condi borrows one of Albright’s big hats, and goes to Tehran to dance with their dictator.
The architects of this latest foolishness are whispering the same reassuring nonsense as their predecessors did about North Korea: We’re offering light-water reactors, which aren’t as dangerous as heavy-water reactors, we won’t give them anything unless they agree to stop enrichment, blah, blah, blah. All of which is true, and totally insane, since a madman is, famously, a person who thinks that he will produce a different outcome by doing the same thing over and over again.
It is utterly fanciful to think that Iran will negotiate away their nuclear-weapons program, whatever the combination of diplomatic carrots and sticks. They have no interest whatsoever in giving away their bombs, whatever the actual status of their arsenal. For them, the only point of negotiations is to gain more time to pursue their war against us, to kill more Americans and Brits in Iraq, to mobilize more jihadis all over the region, to threaten our regional friends and allies, to enlarge their terror network throughout the world, to stuff their war chest with petrodollars, and to enlarge their arsenal.
I do not believe any of the Europeans seriously believes that the mullahs will abandon any of their war plans, whether it is enrichment or terrorism or political subversion or the intimidation of lesser regional players. I think the Europeans view the negotiations as a method of restraining us, not bringing the Iranians to heel. They have long since adopted a policy of total appeasement. To her shame Chancellor Merkel came to Washington a few weeks ago and begged President Bush to play along. And he shamefully agreed.
The much-heralded announcement that we were willing to sit down with the Iranians if they halted their enrichment program was either a total collapse or a gambit designed to expose the Iranians’ unwillingness to play by the international rules. If the latter, it was too clever by half, as shown by the sorts of Western offers that are now trickling out of the foreign offices. We have actually set a clever trap for ourselves. The carrots are precisely what negotiations were supposed to be all about, and here we’ve offered them in advance of talks. The Iranians are certainly smart enough to say “well, that’s interesting, and maybe if you make the pot a bit more caloric, we might even agree to suspend enrichment. Let’s talk about it.” The Europeans and our statesmen will declare a diplomatic triumph and they will say to Bush that we do indeed have to talk about it, and then we will have lost even this little gambit. We will have undertaken negotiations, and the Iranians will not have ceased enrichment. We will still not have an Iran policy, we will still have done nothing to support freedom in Iran, and we will still be pretending it is possible to win a regional war by playing defense in Iraq alone.
The political consequences of such foolishness are very hard to calculate, but it is certain that any Iranian contemplating risking his or her life on behalf of a free Iran will be discouraged at the spectacle. It is also certain that this demarche-to use a word much beloved by the diplomats—will reinforce the extremely dangerous conviction in Tehran that they are winning, and we will do nothing to threaten them. This is what makes the latest gambit so self-destructive. It will encourage the mullahs to intensify their attacks—real attacks, not merely verbal ones—on all fronts. They think we are headed out of Iraq, in abject humiliation, as a result of their terror war against us, and they will now redouble those efforts.
Would you not do the same in their position? Of course you would, and you would do it even if you were not a fanatic, you would do it if you were a student of Bismarck and Clausewitz and Sun Tzu.
But these are fanatics, millenarian fanatics who believe that the world is headed for a final and decisive confrontation between the forces of Islam and the infidels and crusaders. They believe that the final days are at hand, and that they are the instruments of Divine power and glory. They have no doubt about their ultimate triumph, and everything they see in the West only reinforces their confidence, and leads them to redouble their murderous efforts.
Their vision is not world peace, but world domination, accompanied by the slaughter of their enemies. And we are encouraging them in that vision.
I do not believe we will surrender and give them a free hand, but our current behavior only makes the ultimate confrontation with Iran more difficult and likely more violent than it need be. No matter how unwilling Western leaders may be to respond to their 27-year war against us, we cannot escape it, because they will not permit us to escape. It is a conflict we can either win or lose, but we cannot opt out of it. Eventually we will be compelled to respond.
At the moment, most of our leaders are trying desperately to convince themselves that there is a way out, that we can make a grand bargain, that we do not have to confront the mullahs. It is the illogic of appeasement so well described by Churchill after Munich. Chamberlain, he said, had to choose between war and dishonor. Chamberlain chose dishonor, and he got war. This is the risk our leaders are running today.
And the hell of it all is that the mullahs are terribly vulnerable, loathed by their own people, our natural allies in what is after all a political and ideological conflict. Our failure to support the Iranians’ cry for freedom is a dark stain on our banners, and worse: Our dishonor leads directly a war that we should not need to fight. We can defeat the mullahs the same way we defeated the Soviet Union, by mobilizing their own people against them, and by consistently stating and supporting our own ideals. Instead we are sending our young men and women into the field to fall alongside innocent Iraqis to whom we promised a better fate.
Faster, please. Please.
— Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author of The War Against the Terror Masters. He is resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.
We’re making the ultimate confrontation with Iran more difficult than it need be.
By Michael Ledeen
From time to time various wags have suggested that we send Bill Clinton to negotiate with the mullahs on our behalf. It turns out it isn’t necessary; we’ve just adopted his methods. Apparently those in charge of our Iran non-policy concluded that the appeasement of North Korea worked so well, we should do the same thing with Iran. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before Condi borrows one of Albright’s big hats, and goes to Tehran to dance with their dictator.
The architects of this latest foolishness are whispering the same reassuring nonsense as their predecessors did about North Korea: We’re offering light-water reactors, which aren’t as dangerous as heavy-water reactors, we won’t give them anything unless they agree to stop enrichment, blah, blah, blah. All of which is true, and totally insane, since a madman is, famously, a person who thinks that he will produce a different outcome by doing the same thing over and over again.
It is utterly fanciful to think that Iran will negotiate away their nuclear-weapons program, whatever the combination of diplomatic carrots and sticks. They have no interest whatsoever in giving away their bombs, whatever the actual status of their arsenal. For them, the only point of negotiations is to gain more time to pursue their war against us, to kill more Americans and Brits in Iraq, to mobilize more jihadis all over the region, to threaten our regional friends and allies, to enlarge their terror network throughout the world, to stuff their war chest with petrodollars, and to enlarge their arsenal.
I do not believe any of the Europeans seriously believes that the mullahs will abandon any of their war plans, whether it is enrichment or terrorism or political subversion or the intimidation of lesser regional players. I think the Europeans view the negotiations as a method of restraining us, not bringing the Iranians to heel. They have long since adopted a policy of total appeasement. To her shame Chancellor Merkel came to Washington a few weeks ago and begged President Bush to play along. And he shamefully agreed.
The much-heralded announcement that we were willing to sit down with the Iranians if they halted their enrichment program was either a total collapse or a gambit designed to expose the Iranians’ unwillingness to play by the international rules. If the latter, it was too clever by half, as shown by the sorts of Western offers that are now trickling out of the foreign offices. We have actually set a clever trap for ourselves. The carrots are precisely what negotiations were supposed to be all about, and here we’ve offered them in advance of talks. The Iranians are certainly smart enough to say “well, that’s interesting, and maybe if you make the pot a bit more caloric, we might even agree to suspend enrichment. Let’s talk about it.” The Europeans and our statesmen will declare a diplomatic triumph and they will say to Bush that we do indeed have to talk about it, and then we will have lost even this little gambit. We will have undertaken negotiations, and the Iranians will not have ceased enrichment. We will still not have an Iran policy, we will still have done nothing to support freedom in Iran, and we will still be pretending it is possible to win a regional war by playing defense in Iraq alone.
The political consequences of such foolishness are very hard to calculate, but it is certain that any Iranian contemplating risking his or her life on behalf of a free Iran will be discouraged at the spectacle. It is also certain that this demarche-to use a word much beloved by the diplomats—will reinforce the extremely dangerous conviction in Tehran that they are winning, and we will do nothing to threaten them. This is what makes the latest gambit so self-destructive. It will encourage the mullahs to intensify their attacks—real attacks, not merely verbal ones—on all fronts. They think we are headed out of Iraq, in abject humiliation, as a result of their terror war against us, and they will now redouble those efforts.
Would you not do the same in their position? Of course you would, and you would do it even if you were not a fanatic, you would do it if you were a student of Bismarck and Clausewitz and Sun Tzu.
But these are fanatics, millenarian fanatics who believe that the world is headed for a final and decisive confrontation between the forces of Islam and the infidels and crusaders. They believe that the final days are at hand, and that they are the instruments of Divine power and glory. They have no doubt about their ultimate triumph, and everything they see in the West only reinforces their confidence, and leads them to redouble their murderous efforts.
Their vision is not world peace, but world domination, accompanied by the slaughter of their enemies. And we are encouraging them in that vision.
I do not believe we will surrender and give them a free hand, but our current behavior only makes the ultimate confrontation with Iran more difficult and likely more violent than it need be. No matter how unwilling Western leaders may be to respond to their 27-year war against us, we cannot escape it, because they will not permit us to escape. It is a conflict we can either win or lose, but we cannot opt out of it. Eventually we will be compelled to respond.
At the moment, most of our leaders are trying desperately to convince themselves that there is a way out, that we can make a grand bargain, that we do not have to confront the mullahs. It is the illogic of appeasement so well described by Churchill after Munich. Chamberlain, he said, had to choose between war and dishonor. Chamberlain chose dishonor, and he got war. This is the risk our leaders are running today.
And the hell of it all is that the mullahs are terribly vulnerable, loathed by their own people, our natural allies in what is after all a political and ideological conflict. Our failure to support the Iranians’ cry for freedom is a dark stain on our banners, and worse: Our dishonor leads directly a war that we should not need to fight. We can defeat the mullahs the same way we defeated the Soviet Union, by mobilizing their own people against them, and by consistently stating and supporting our own ideals. Instead we are sending our young men and women into the field to fall alongside innocent Iraqis to whom we promised a better fate.
Faster, please. Please.
— Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author of The War Against the Terror Masters. He is resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.
Billy Preston, 59, Soul Musician, Is Dead; Renowned Keyboardist and Collaborator
By JON PARELES
The New York Times
Billy Preston, the splashy gospel-rooted keyboardist whose career included No. 1 solo hits and work with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, died yesterday in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 59.
He died after having been in a coma since November, his manager, Joyce Moore, told The Associated Press. He had voluntarily entered a drug rehabilitation clinic in Malibu, Calif., and suffered pericarditis there, leading to respiratory failure that left him in a coma.
Mr. Preston had an extensive career as a sideman, working with musicians from Little Richard to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. His own hits included the Grammy-winning instrumental "Outa-Space" in 1972 and the No. 1 pop singles "Will It Go Round in Circles" (1973) and "Nothing From Nothing" (1974). He also wrote (with Bruce Fisher) the ubiquitous "You Are So Beautiful."
But his best-known performance was the afternoon he spent on a London rooftop with the Beatles in what was their last concert, which was filmed for "Let It Be." In a 2001 interview, he recalled, "They made me feel like a member of the band."
William Everett Preston was born in Houston on Sept. 9, 1946, and grew up in Los Angeles. He was a child prodigy who accompanied the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson when he was 10. In 1958, he played the young W. C. Handy in the film biography "St. Louis Blues." Little Richard hired Mr. Preston for a European tour in 1962, and during that tour Mr. Preston met the fledgling Beatles — who were Little Richard's opening act — as well as Sam Cooke, who hired Mr. Preston for his band and signed him to his own label, SAR Records. After Mr. Cooke's death, Mr. Preston began recording instrumental albums with titles like "The Wildest Organ in Town" (1965) and "The Most Exciting Organ Ever" (1966).
He worked in the house band of the pop TV show "Shindig," then joined Ray Charles' band for three years. George Harrison of the Beatles saw him with Charles' band, and brought him to work with the Beatles.
Mr. Preston was signed to the Beatles' label, Apple, and made two albums produced by Harrison: "That's the Way God Planned It" and "Encouraging Words." He was invited to join the recording sessions that yielded "Let It Be" and "Abbey Road," where he helped hold together the band. "It was a struggle for them," Mr. Preston said in 2001. "They were kind of despondent. They had lost the joy of doing it all."
The Beatles' 1969 single of "Get Back" is credited to "The Beatles With Billy Preston," the only shared label credit in the Beatles' own career. Mr. Preston appeared at the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh that Mr. Harrison organized, and did studio work on solo projects by Mr. Harrison, John Lennon and Ringo Starr.
Mr. Preston's own career flourished in the early 1970's, when he had his major hits: synthesizer-topped instrumentals ("Outa-Space" and "Space Race") and jaunty soul songs ("Will It Go Round in Circles" and "Nothing From Nothing"). He worked in the studio with the Rolling Stones on their 1970's albums, among them "Sticky Fingers" and "Exile on Main Street," and toured with them. He was also a studio musician on Sly and the Family Stone's "There's a Riot Goin' On" and on Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks."
Mr. Preston was the musical guest on the first "Saturday Night Live," broadcast in 1975. He appeared in the 1978 Beatles-inspired film "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" as Sergeant Pepper In 1979 he had a hit duet with the singer Syreeta Wright, "With You I'm Born Again."
He continued working as a studio sideman and making solo albums through the 1980's, and he toured with Ringo Starr's All-Starr Band in 1989. But a longtime drug problem caught up with him in 1992, when he pleaded no contest to charges of assault and cocaine possession and spent nine months at a drug rehabilitation center. He made gospel albums during the 1990's, including "Minister of Music" in 1995 and "Words and Music," with Edna Tatum, in 1996. In 1997 he was sentenced to three years in prison for violating probation, and in 1998 he pleaded guilty to insurance fraud.
After Mr. Preston was released from prison, he was welcomed as a musician. He appeared in the movie "Blues Brothers 2000" and performed at the 2002 Concert for George, a tribute organized by Eric Clapton a year after Harrison's death. He appears on Mr. Clapton's album "Me and Mr. Johnson," and toured with Mr. Clapton. He was a studio musician on Neil Diamond's "12 Songs" and on the current Red Hot Chili Peppers album, "Stadium Arcadium," and he was one of the guests on Ray Charles' final album, "Genius Loves Company." He made a tribute album, "Billy Preston's Beatles Salute," in 2004, and he performed on the season finale of "American Idol" in 2005. He played his final recording session in October, for a coming album by Sam Moore of Sam and Dave.
He is survived by his sister, Gwen Gooden, and two half sisters, Lettie Preston and Rodena Williams.
"When you're doing it you're just trying to do the best you can," Mr. Preston said in 2001. "You don't know if you're doing something important, and whether it will make history has yet to be seen. Just the fact of being able to do it, and striving to do the best you can, was the accomplishment."
By JON PARELES
The New York Times
Billy Preston, the splashy gospel-rooted keyboardist whose career included No. 1 solo hits and work with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, died yesterday in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 59.
He died after having been in a coma since November, his manager, Joyce Moore, told The Associated Press. He had voluntarily entered a drug rehabilitation clinic in Malibu, Calif., and suffered pericarditis there, leading to respiratory failure that left him in a coma.
Mr. Preston had an extensive career as a sideman, working with musicians from Little Richard to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. His own hits included the Grammy-winning instrumental "Outa-Space" in 1972 and the No. 1 pop singles "Will It Go Round in Circles" (1973) and "Nothing From Nothing" (1974). He also wrote (with Bruce Fisher) the ubiquitous "You Are So Beautiful."
But his best-known performance was the afternoon he spent on a London rooftop with the Beatles in what was their last concert, which was filmed for "Let It Be." In a 2001 interview, he recalled, "They made me feel like a member of the band."
William Everett Preston was born in Houston on Sept. 9, 1946, and grew up in Los Angeles. He was a child prodigy who accompanied the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson when he was 10. In 1958, he played the young W. C. Handy in the film biography "St. Louis Blues." Little Richard hired Mr. Preston for a European tour in 1962, and during that tour Mr. Preston met the fledgling Beatles — who were Little Richard's opening act — as well as Sam Cooke, who hired Mr. Preston for his band and signed him to his own label, SAR Records. After Mr. Cooke's death, Mr. Preston began recording instrumental albums with titles like "The Wildest Organ in Town" (1965) and "The Most Exciting Organ Ever" (1966).
He worked in the house band of the pop TV show "Shindig," then joined Ray Charles' band for three years. George Harrison of the Beatles saw him with Charles' band, and brought him to work with the Beatles.
Mr. Preston was signed to the Beatles' label, Apple, and made two albums produced by Harrison: "That's the Way God Planned It" and "Encouraging Words." He was invited to join the recording sessions that yielded "Let It Be" and "Abbey Road," where he helped hold together the band. "It was a struggle for them," Mr. Preston said in 2001. "They were kind of despondent. They had lost the joy of doing it all."
The Beatles' 1969 single of "Get Back" is credited to "The Beatles With Billy Preston," the only shared label credit in the Beatles' own career. Mr. Preston appeared at the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh that Mr. Harrison organized, and did studio work on solo projects by Mr. Harrison, John Lennon and Ringo Starr.
Mr. Preston's own career flourished in the early 1970's, when he had his major hits: synthesizer-topped instrumentals ("Outa-Space" and "Space Race") and jaunty soul songs ("Will It Go Round in Circles" and "Nothing From Nothing"). He worked in the studio with the Rolling Stones on their 1970's albums, among them "Sticky Fingers" and "Exile on Main Street," and toured with them. He was also a studio musician on Sly and the Family Stone's "There's a Riot Goin' On" and on Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks."
Mr. Preston was the musical guest on the first "Saturday Night Live," broadcast in 1975. He appeared in the 1978 Beatles-inspired film "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" as Sergeant Pepper In 1979 he had a hit duet with the singer Syreeta Wright, "With You I'm Born Again."
He continued working as a studio sideman and making solo albums through the 1980's, and he toured with Ringo Starr's All-Starr Band in 1989. But a longtime drug problem caught up with him in 1992, when he pleaded no contest to charges of assault and cocaine possession and spent nine months at a drug rehabilitation center. He made gospel albums during the 1990's, including "Minister of Music" in 1995 and "Words and Music," with Edna Tatum, in 1996. In 1997 he was sentenced to three years in prison for violating probation, and in 1998 he pleaded guilty to insurance fraud.
After Mr. Preston was released from prison, he was welcomed as a musician. He appeared in the movie "Blues Brothers 2000" and performed at the 2002 Concert for George, a tribute organized by Eric Clapton a year after Harrison's death. He appears on Mr. Clapton's album "Me and Mr. Johnson," and toured with Mr. Clapton. He was a studio musician on Neil Diamond's "12 Songs" and on the current Red Hot Chili Peppers album, "Stadium Arcadium," and he was one of the guests on Ray Charles' final album, "Genius Loves Company." He made a tribute album, "Billy Preston's Beatles Salute," in 2004, and he performed on the season finale of "American Idol" in 2005. He played his final recording session in October, for a coming album by Sam Moore of Sam and Dave.
He is survived by his sister, Gwen Gooden, and two half sisters, Lettie Preston and Rodena Williams.
"When you're doing it you're just trying to do the best you can," Mr. Preston said in 2001. "You don't know if you're doing something important, and whether it will make history has yet to be seen. Just the fact of being able to do it, and striving to do the best you can, was the accomplishment."
For Springsteen, 'Seeger Sessions' sends a message
By Edna Gundersen, USA TODAY
Explaining why he resurrected traditional folk tunes popularized by Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen cracks: "I'm an old guy. I can do whatever I want whenever I want, and I like doing it all."
The defiance that fueled 1975 breakthrough Born to Run also gave rise to We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, perhaps Springsteen's most surprising album yet. Few expected this plodding perfectionist, who labors over his handiwork for years in solitude, to serve up a ramshackle batch of covers recorded in three one-day sessions at a farmhouse with 13 players.
And those presuming the project was The Boss' spring break from his real job are discovering the depth of his commitment in the Seeger ensemble's enthralling live performances. After an emotional launch in New Orleans, the rambunctious Americana hoedown drew raves across Europe. In the UK, The Independent dubbed the concert "an astonishingly rich evening," while The Observer called it "an inspiring triumph." The newly launched U.S. leg is similarly wowing critics; a Washington Post reviewer declared Springsteen's ragtime orchestra "the best live show I've seen in at least five years."
The brief 18-date U.S. swing won't meet demand, so Springsteen is cherry-picking one song from each show for AOL Music (aolmusic.com), along with photos, set lists and recaps. Among on-demand videos so far are Erie Canal, Old Dan Tucker, O Mary Don't You Weep and John Henry. A full 18-tune set will be available when the tour ends June 25 in New Jersey.
Springsteen, 56, never set out to make an album of freewheeling folk music and socially conscious messages that dovetail with the current political climate.
"It happened so spontaneously," he says. "As I've gotten older, I tend to be more comfortable, and there's less second guessing. I'm always looking for another road to go down. I knew a good deal about Pete's work, but I hadn't steeped myself in it. In my late 20s, I went back to Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie and some early blues. I've continued to look into different types of music that gave birth to rock. In Pete's records, I found compelling music and characters, and I thought I could find these voices inside of me. Also, it was a release from my own writing. When you're released from your own style and sense of structure or what you're trying to convey, it allows a real free musical expression, which I hadn't had in a while."
The album, which entered Billboard at No. 3 and has sold 365,000 copies, scouts beyond the familiar protest tunes and refutes the notion that folk is feeble.
"I wanted it to be really raucous," Springsteen says. "Folk, in its essential element, is some of the rawest music ever made. I was interested in capturing some of that. Pete's thing could be so directly political, but I tried to get a balance of songs that had overt social implications, like Eyes on the Prize, a big freedom song from the civil rights era, and character studies, like Jesse James. It wasn't a conceptual project. It just happened and conceived itself over time."
The trick, he says, was finding a modern context for revived traditions, antique compositions and retro flavors of banjos, accordions, fiddles and washboards.
"I want to remember and yet forge ahead and find out what's over the next hill," he says. "A lot of this music was written so long ago, but I felt I could make it feel essential right now. I've always got an eye toward the future and an eye to the past. That's how you know where you've come from and where you want to go. If you look at our recent history, it seems there's been so much disregard of past experience in the way the country has conducted itself."
Though the album's politics are restrained, Springsteen has been increasingly vocal in his criticism of the Bush administration since joining 2004's Vote for Change tour. His solution to domestic ills?
"Obviously, get rid of the president," he says. "When you see the devastation (in New Orleans) and realize the kind of support the city will need to get back on its feet, there's no way to make sense of someone pushing for more tax cuts for the 1% of the 1% of the population. It's insanity and a subversion of everything America is supposed to be about. You can't travel around the city and not wonder what in the world is going on."
With midterm elections looming, that's probably not his last word on the subject. Nor will the Seeger tunes be his last whirl with history. He hopes to explore other areas of American and international folk music. He also has a roots-based solo project on the back burner.
And fret not, rock fans.
"I have a pretty good book of songs for the E Street Band," he says.
His longtime bandmates may discover their new Boss isn't the same as the old Boss. The fast and loose Seeger process taught Springsteen valuable lessons.
"It's fascinating to record a song when musicians don't know it," he says. "It's a powerful tool, especially with experienced musicians, in getting a certain spontaneity that you lose with too much rehearsal. If people learn their parts too well, they consciously perform rather than flat-out play. When you just launch into it, it breaks down another barrier between you and the audience. It's one less layer of formality. I like that a lot. I've done it with the E Street Band at times over the years, but never an entire record. We may try it."
By Edna Gundersen, USA TODAY
Explaining why he resurrected traditional folk tunes popularized by Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen cracks: "I'm an old guy. I can do whatever I want whenever I want, and I like doing it all."
The defiance that fueled 1975 breakthrough Born to Run also gave rise to We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, perhaps Springsteen's most surprising album yet. Few expected this plodding perfectionist, who labors over his handiwork for years in solitude, to serve up a ramshackle batch of covers recorded in three one-day sessions at a farmhouse with 13 players.
And those presuming the project was The Boss' spring break from his real job are discovering the depth of his commitment in the Seeger ensemble's enthralling live performances. After an emotional launch in New Orleans, the rambunctious Americana hoedown drew raves across Europe. In the UK, The Independent dubbed the concert "an astonishingly rich evening," while The Observer called it "an inspiring triumph." The newly launched U.S. leg is similarly wowing critics; a Washington Post reviewer declared Springsteen's ragtime orchestra "the best live show I've seen in at least five years."
The brief 18-date U.S. swing won't meet demand, so Springsteen is cherry-picking one song from each show for AOL Music (aolmusic.com), along with photos, set lists and recaps. Among on-demand videos so far are Erie Canal, Old Dan Tucker, O Mary Don't You Weep and John Henry. A full 18-tune set will be available when the tour ends June 25 in New Jersey.
Springsteen, 56, never set out to make an album of freewheeling folk music and socially conscious messages that dovetail with the current political climate.
"It happened so spontaneously," he says. "As I've gotten older, I tend to be more comfortable, and there's less second guessing. I'm always looking for another road to go down. I knew a good deal about Pete's work, but I hadn't steeped myself in it. In my late 20s, I went back to Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie and some early blues. I've continued to look into different types of music that gave birth to rock. In Pete's records, I found compelling music and characters, and I thought I could find these voices inside of me. Also, it was a release from my own writing. When you're released from your own style and sense of structure or what you're trying to convey, it allows a real free musical expression, which I hadn't had in a while."
The album, which entered Billboard at No. 3 and has sold 365,000 copies, scouts beyond the familiar protest tunes and refutes the notion that folk is feeble.
"I wanted it to be really raucous," Springsteen says. "Folk, in its essential element, is some of the rawest music ever made. I was interested in capturing some of that. Pete's thing could be so directly political, but I tried to get a balance of songs that had overt social implications, like Eyes on the Prize, a big freedom song from the civil rights era, and character studies, like Jesse James. It wasn't a conceptual project. It just happened and conceived itself over time."
The trick, he says, was finding a modern context for revived traditions, antique compositions and retro flavors of banjos, accordions, fiddles and washboards.
"I want to remember and yet forge ahead and find out what's over the next hill," he says. "A lot of this music was written so long ago, but I felt I could make it feel essential right now. I've always got an eye toward the future and an eye to the past. That's how you know where you've come from and where you want to go. If you look at our recent history, it seems there's been so much disregard of past experience in the way the country has conducted itself."
Though the album's politics are restrained, Springsteen has been increasingly vocal in his criticism of the Bush administration since joining 2004's Vote for Change tour. His solution to domestic ills?
"Obviously, get rid of the president," he says. "When you see the devastation (in New Orleans) and realize the kind of support the city will need to get back on its feet, there's no way to make sense of someone pushing for more tax cuts for the 1% of the 1% of the population. It's insanity and a subversion of everything America is supposed to be about. You can't travel around the city and not wonder what in the world is going on."
With midterm elections looming, that's probably not his last word on the subject. Nor will the Seeger tunes be his last whirl with history. He hopes to explore other areas of American and international folk music. He also has a roots-based solo project on the back burner.
And fret not, rock fans.
"I have a pretty good book of songs for the E Street Band," he says.
His longtime bandmates may discover their new Boss isn't the same as the old Boss. The fast and loose Seeger process taught Springsteen valuable lessons.
"It's fascinating to record a song when musicians don't know it," he says. "It's a powerful tool, especially with experienced musicians, in getting a certain spontaneity that you lose with too much rehearsal. If people learn their parts too well, they consciously perform rather than flat-out play. When you just launch into it, it breaks down another barrier between you and the audience. It's one less layer of formality. I like that a lot. I've done it with the E Street Band at times over the years, but never an entire record. We may try it."
Brind'Amour leading by example
Ed Willes
The Province
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
RALEIGH, N.C. - Doug Weight had heard the stories before he joined the Carolina Hurricanes but, like Michelangelo's David or even Pamela Anderson, it's one thing to hear about the legend, it's another to witness it first hand.
"You watch (Rod Brind'Amour) play 27 minutes and he's in the gym after the game doing his squats," says the Canes' centre with a shake of his head. "Or you walk by in a suit and he's still in there dripping wet. Or you get (to the rink) at nine in the morning and he's already been on the bike for an hour."
Weight, like just about everyone else in the NHL, doesn't profess to understand the monomaniacal work ethic of the kid from Campbell River but he does know one thing.
As much as it drives Brind'Amour, it also drives the Hurricanes these days.
"I think his body is 21," said Weight. "I get tired just looking at him."
And so will the Edmonton Oilers if this keeps up.
Brind'Amour, who was the Canes' MVP through the first three rounds of the playoffs, further substantiated his claim to the Conn Smythe on Monday night by scoring the goal which launched his team's inspired comeback in Game 1, then potted the game-winner with 32 seconds left in regulation when he converted a gift from Oilers backup Ty Conklin.
The two goals gave him an NHL-playoff-leading 11 but, as is usually the case with Brind'Amour, that was just part of his story. He also logged a team-high 23 minutes and 48 seconds of ice time, finished plus-two and, incredibly, won 28 of 34 faceoffs.
It's the kind of performance that has become commonplace in this playoff run which also explains why Brind'Amour has emerged as something of a folk-hero in these parts. But if the 35-year-old pivot now occupies the spotlight on the game's biggest stage, he's just making up for lost time.
Prior to this season Brind'Amour was known primarily as the league's best supporting actor. He spent nine seasons in Philadelphia playing second banana to Eric Lindros. He was then traded to Carolina six years ago where he fell in behind Ron Francis on the Canes' depth chart.
Somewhere in there, Brind'Amour sort of became the NHL's answer to the family car. He was safe. He was dependable. He was also as sexy as Dick Cheney.
But that all changed this summer when he was named the Canes' captain and, suddenly, Brind'Amour became more visible on and off the ice. It helped, of course, that he produced 31 goals and 70 points in his best offensive season in Carolina.
But it was his work ethic, his preparation and his commitment which became ingrained in the team and helped create its identity.
"I laughed when he said with a straight face, he's not the face of the franchise," Carolina defenceman Aaron Ward said of Brind'Amour's pre-final attempts to deflect attention from himself. "He knows what his role is. When you walk into this room, you're 100-per-cent certain your captain is going to be ready and he's going to lead you."
Mark Recchi, who played with him in Philly, said Brind'Amour always worked like a farmer off the ice but he's noticed a change since he was named the Hurricanes' captain.
"He was never one to speak a lot but he has no problem getting up in front of guys and saying what he thinks." said Recchi.
Still, it's his actions which speak most loudly in the Canes' locker room and they resonate with every player on the team. After Game 1, Ward brought his visiting cousins into the room after midnight, assuming his teammates had all cleared out.
As you might have guessed there was Brind'Amour, after the two goals and the 24 minutes of ice time, doing elevated push-ups, his body bathed in sweat.
"I just scurried them along," said Ward with a laugh.
"I told them. 'Don't look. That's not real. That guy's a freak.'"
Maybe, but he's a super freak.
© The Vancouver Province 2006
Ed Willes
The Province
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
RALEIGH, N.C. - Doug Weight had heard the stories before he joined the Carolina Hurricanes but, like Michelangelo's David or even Pamela Anderson, it's one thing to hear about the legend, it's another to witness it first hand.
"You watch (Rod Brind'Amour) play 27 minutes and he's in the gym after the game doing his squats," says the Canes' centre with a shake of his head. "Or you walk by in a suit and he's still in there dripping wet. Or you get (to the rink) at nine in the morning and he's already been on the bike for an hour."
Weight, like just about everyone else in the NHL, doesn't profess to understand the monomaniacal work ethic of the kid from Campbell River but he does know one thing.
As much as it drives Brind'Amour, it also drives the Hurricanes these days.
"I think his body is 21," said Weight. "I get tired just looking at him."
And so will the Edmonton Oilers if this keeps up.
Brind'Amour, who was the Canes' MVP through the first three rounds of the playoffs, further substantiated his claim to the Conn Smythe on Monday night by scoring the goal which launched his team's inspired comeback in Game 1, then potted the game-winner with 32 seconds left in regulation when he converted a gift from Oilers backup Ty Conklin.
The two goals gave him an NHL-playoff-leading 11 but, as is usually the case with Brind'Amour, that was just part of his story. He also logged a team-high 23 minutes and 48 seconds of ice time, finished plus-two and, incredibly, won 28 of 34 faceoffs.
It's the kind of performance that has become commonplace in this playoff run which also explains why Brind'Amour has emerged as something of a folk-hero in these parts. But if the 35-year-old pivot now occupies the spotlight on the game's biggest stage, he's just making up for lost time.
Prior to this season Brind'Amour was known primarily as the league's best supporting actor. He spent nine seasons in Philadelphia playing second banana to Eric Lindros. He was then traded to Carolina six years ago where he fell in behind Ron Francis on the Canes' depth chart.
Somewhere in there, Brind'Amour sort of became the NHL's answer to the family car. He was safe. He was dependable. He was also as sexy as Dick Cheney.
But that all changed this summer when he was named the Canes' captain and, suddenly, Brind'Amour became more visible on and off the ice. It helped, of course, that he produced 31 goals and 70 points in his best offensive season in Carolina.
But it was his work ethic, his preparation and his commitment which became ingrained in the team and helped create its identity.
"I laughed when he said with a straight face, he's not the face of the franchise," Carolina defenceman Aaron Ward said of Brind'Amour's pre-final attempts to deflect attention from himself. "He knows what his role is. When you walk into this room, you're 100-per-cent certain your captain is going to be ready and he's going to lead you."
Mark Recchi, who played with him in Philly, said Brind'Amour always worked like a farmer off the ice but he's noticed a change since he was named the Hurricanes' captain.
"He was never one to speak a lot but he has no problem getting up in front of guys and saying what he thinks." said Recchi.
Still, it's his actions which speak most loudly in the Canes' locker room and they resonate with every player on the team. After Game 1, Ward brought his visiting cousins into the room after midnight, assuming his teammates had all cleared out.
As you might have guessed there was Brind'Amour, after the two goals and the 24 minutes of ice time, doing elevated push-ups, his body bathed in sweat.
"I just scurried them along," said Ward with a laugh.
"I told them. 'Don't look. That's not real. That guy's a freak.'"
Maybe, but he's a super freak.
© The Vancouver Province 2006
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Birthright Sale
By Thomas Sowell
Many stores held sales over the Memorial Day holidays. In Washington, the Senate immigration bill has been selling our birthright for a message of political pottage.
Far from "controlling the borders" as advertised, this bill reduces our existing control of the borders. Under a provision inserted at the eleventh hour by Senator Arlen Specter, the Senate bill forbids the federal government from building a fence without first consulting with the Mexican government.
In fact, state and local governments are also forbidden by this bill to take any border control actions without first consulting with their Mexican counterparts. In other words, if the city of San Diego wants to put up any sort of barriers, it would have to consult with the municipal authorities in Tijuana before doing so.
This legislation was never about border control. The laws already on the books at this very moment allow us to control the borders, to build any fence we choose, without consulting the government of Mexico.
The laws already on the books allow any illegal alien to be arrested and expelled. Those laws are simply not being enforced. If a Los Angeles policeman arrests an illegal alien and reports him to the federal authorities, it is the Los Angeles cop who will be in big trouble.
Border Patrol agents can knock themselves out capturing people trying to enter the country illegally but nothing happens to most of those people, even the ones organizing the smuggling of people and drugs into this country.
An Associated Press dispatch reports: "The vast majority of people caught smuggling immigrants across the border near San Diego are never prosecuted for the offense, demoralizing the Border Patrol agents, according to an internal document obtained by the Associated Press."
In other words, we have make-believe border control and the current Senate legislation will weaken even that, all the while talking about "tough" enforcement. That "tough" enforcement is a promise but legalizing illegal aliens is immediate and irrevocable and its consequences irreversible and lasting far into the future.
"Border control" is just political cover for legalizing illegal aliens. The two things are put together in a package deal that is like horse-and-rabbit stew, whose ingredients are one horse and one rabbit. Border control is the rabbit.
The word games played about "amnesty" deliberately confuse the issue of violations of American law with the issue of acquiring American citizenship.
The fact that the Senate bill has requirements -- described as "tough," like everything else -- for acquiring citizenship is irrelevant to the question of letting the violations of law go unpunished.
Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, who has over the years done some of the most incisive analysis of census and other statistical data, projects the actual consequences of legalizing the existing illegal alien population in the United States to extend far beyond the 12 million estimated to be here now.
These 12 million people are not test tube babies. They have parents and they will have children. Nor are their other family members likely to be kept out after the illegals are made legal.
Over the following 20 years, Dr. Rector projects that the real increase in this population living in the United States to be 103 million, not the 12 million that everyone is talking about.
This is one of the most reckless gambles with the future of this nation ever taken by supposedly responsible members of Congress. The idea that we must consult with Mexico before controlling our own borders is staggering -- and revealing.
The Mexican government has already shown its utter contempt for our laws by publishing booklets advising its citizens how to enter the United States illegally and how to take advantage of American welfare state provisions.
Mexican president Vicente Fox has even had the nerve to warn that his "friendship" with the United States is at risk if we pass immigration laws he doesn't like. Consulting with his government is truly putting Vicente Fox in charge of the hen house.
By Thomas Sowell
Many stores held sales over the Memorial Day holidays. In Washington, the Senate immigration bill has been selling our birthright for a message of political pottage.
Far from "controlling the borders" as advertised, this bill reduces our existing control of the borders. Under a provision inserted at the eleventh hour by Senator Arlen Specter, the Senate bill forbids the federal government from building a fence without first consulting with the Mexican government.
In fact, state and local governments are also forbidden by this bill to take any border control actions without first consulting with their Mexican counterparts. In other words, if the city of San Diego wants to put up any sort of barriers, it would have to consult with the municipal authorities in Tijuana before doing so.
This legislation was never about border control. The laws already on the books at this very moment allow us to control the borders, to build any fence we choose, without consulting the government of Mexico.
The laws already on the books allow any illegal alien to be arrested and expelled. Those laws are simply not being enforced. If a Los Angeles policeman arrests an illegal alien and reports him to the federal authorities, it is the Los Angeles cop who will be in big trouble.
Border Patrol agents can knock themselves out capturing people trying to enter the country illegally but nothing happens to most of those people, even the ones organizing the smuggling of people and drugs into this country.
An Associated Press dispatch reports: "The vast majority of people caught smuggling immigrants across the border near San Diego are never prosecuted for the offense, demoralizing the Border Patrol agents, according to an internal document obtained by the Associated Press."
In other words, we have make-believe border control and the current Senate legislation will weaken even that, all the while talking about "tough" enforcement. That "tough" enforcement is a promise but legalizing illegal aliens is immediate and irrevocable and its consequences irreversible and lasting far into the future.
"Border control" is just political cover for legalizing illegal aliens. The two things are put together in a package deal that is like horse-and-rabbit stew, whose ingredients are one horse and one rabbit. Border control is the rabbit.
The word games played about "amnesty" deliberately confuse the issue of violations of American law with the issue of acquiring American citizenship.
The fact that the Senate bill has requirements -- described as "tough," like everything else -- for acquiring citizenship is irrelevant to the question of letting the violations of law go unpunished.
Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, who has over the years done some of the most incisive analysis of census and other statistical data, projects the actual consequences of legalizing the existing illegal alien population in the United States to extend far beyond the 12 million estimated to be here now.
These 12 million people are not test tube babies. They have parents and they will have children. Nor are their other family members likely to be kept out after the illegals are made legal.
Over the following 20 years, Dr. Rector projects that the real increase in this population living in the United States to be 103 million, not the 12 million that everyone is talking about.
This is one of the most reckless gambles with the future of this nation ever taken by supposedly responsible members of Congress. The idea that we must consult with Mexico before controlling our own borders is staggering -- and revealing.
The Mexican government has already shown its utter contempt for our laws by publishing booklets advising its citizens how to enter the United States illegally and how to take advantage of American welfare state provisions.
Mexican president Vicente Fox has even had the nerve to warn that his "friendship" with the United States is at risk if we pass immigration laws he doesn't like. Consulting with his government is truly putting Vicente Fox in charge of the hen house.
Monday, June 05, 2006
From Human Events:
Coulter Attacks the Cult of Liberalism
by Lisa De Pasquale
Posted Jun 05, 2006
In "Godless: The Church of Liberalism," HUMAN EVENTS legal affairs correspondent Ann Coulter lays out one of the most original and perceptive philosophies on the cult of liberalism.
She states, "Under the guise of not favoring religion, liberals favor one cosmology over another and demand total indoctrination into theirs. The state religion of liberalism demands obeisance (to the National Organization for Women), tithing (to teachers' unions), reverence (for abortion), and formulaic imprecations ('Bush lied, kids died!'' 'Keep your laws off my body!' 'Arms for hostages!'). Everyone is taxed to support indoctrination into the state religion through public schools where innocent children are taught a specific belief system, rather than, say, math."
For years liberals have relied on a strategy of faking out the American public in order to win elections. Instead of accurately articulating their beliefs and engaging in an honest debate, they scour the nation for the perfect patsy. A hysterical mother who is willing to go on national television and call the President a "fuhrer" and "evil maniac" is akin to seeing the stigmata. Liberals' ecstasy over Cindy Sheehan, Max Cleland, and the widows who made a spectacle of themselves in the midst of the 9/11 Commission epitomizes their secret weapon for winning back America -- a doctrine of infallibility in which victory goes to the most hysterical.
As Coulter writes:
Finally, the Democrats hit on an ingenious strategy: They would choose only messengers whom we're not allowed to reply to. That’s why all Democratic spokesmen these days are sobbing, hysterical women. You can't respond to them because that would be questioning the authenticity of their suffering. Liberals haven't changed the message, just the messenger. All the most prominent liberal spokesmen are people with "absolute moral authority" -- Democrats with a dead husband, a dead child, a wife who works at the CIA, a war record, terminal illness, or as a last resort, being on a first-name basis with Nelson Mandela. Like Oprah during Sweeps Week, liberals have come to rely exclusively on people with sad stories to improve their Q rating. They've become the "Lifetime" TV Network of political parties. Liberals prey on people at a time of extreme emotional vulnerability and offer them fame and fortune to be that month’s purveyor of hate. Victory goes to the most hysterical.
By embracing phony prophets, liberals strip away any honesty and credibility they may have once had with the public. Unlike Christians, liberals can't shield themselves from criticism by referring to their most outspoken nuts as just a small group of fringe leaders. On the contrary, their leaders are writing curriculum for public schools, cloning obnoxious "apple-polishers" at colleges and universities and intimidating small towns with baseless lawsuits.
In the aptly titled chapter, "The Liberal Priesthood: Spare the Rod, Spoil the Teacher," Coulter peels back the political correctness surrounding the public education bureaucracy, "We are simultaneously supposed to gasp in awe at teachers' raw dedication and be forced to listen to their incessant caterwauling about how they don't make enough money. Well, which is it? Are they dedicated to teaching or are they in it for the money? After all the carping about how little teachers are paid, if someone enters the teaching profession for the big bucks, aren't they too stupid to be teaching our kids?"
Books like "The Professors," "Brainwashed" and "The Shadow University," exposed liberals' stranglehold on college campuses. But it wasn't until 10th-grader Sean Allen taped his world geography teacher's rant against President Bush that many Americans woke up to the reality of what is going on in K-12 public schools. During his world geography class, Jay Bennish engaged in a 20 minute tirade against President Bush and America, leading to the unoriginal conclusion that Bush is like Hitler. Coulter writes, "Anyone who uses this adolescent cliché should not be in the tenth grade, much less teaching it." Congratulations, Jay Bennish, this clever observation makes you qualified to replace a nose-pierced barista at Starbucks!
Comparing priests and teachers, Coulter notes, "The worst scandal to hit the real churches in 20 years is the priest child-molestation scandal -- which pales in comparison to the teacher child-molestation problem." By comparing studies done on the number of children sexually abused by priests and those sexually abused by teachers and accounting for unreported cases, Coulter concludes that there are roughly 821 children abused by priests per year and 32,000 children abused by educators per year. Given the increasingly explicit sex-education curriculum foisted on children and the incessant assurance from "experts" like Dr. Jocelyn Elders and U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop that it’s OK for children to be sexual beings, it’s no wonder that predatory teachers treat them as such.
Much of "Godless" exposes the contempt that liberals have for science, especially as it relates to disproving their religious doctrine. Using their strategy of capitalizing on sympathetic messengers, liberals counter science by parading Christopher Reeves, Michael J. Fox and the Reagan family in order to distract from the evidence favoring adult stem cell research over embryonic stem cell research. Coulter puts together an impressive list of successful achievements using adult stem cells, including repairing spinal cord injuries, treating sickle-cell anemia, restoring bone marrow in cancer patients, restoring eye sight and repairing weakened heart muscles. However, adult stem cell research does lack one crucial element -- it doesn't involve the destruction of life. Coulter writes, "At least embryonic stem-cell researchers have a clear financial incentive to lie about adult stem-cell research. Liberals just want to kill humans. … Stem-cell research on embryos is an even worse excuse for the slaughter of life than abortion. No woman is even being spared an inconvenience this time."
The final chapters of "Godless" should be required reading for all science classes, much like "Treason" should be required for all American history classes. Coulter illustrates why evolution is so important to the church of liberalism, "Liberals' creation myth is Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which is about one notch above Scientology in scientific rigor. It's a make-believe story, based on a theory that is a tautology, with no proof in the scientist's laboratory or the fossil record -- and that's after 150 years of very determined looking. We wouldn't still be talking about it but for the fact that liberals' think evolution disproves God."
With the help of the ACLU, liberals and their lawsuits have intimidated school districts into teaching evolution or what Coulter calls -- quoting mathematician David Berlinski -- "the last of the 19th century mystery religions." It's the equivalent of pointing and yelling, "Witch!" In Dover, Pa., a small group of parents backed by the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State sued the school district to prevent the teaching of intelligent design in a high school biology class. The judge ruled in their favor and the school district was ordered to pay the plaintiffs' legal fees, in excess of $1 million. Coulter explains, "After Dover, no school district will dare breathe a word about 'intelligent design,’ unless they want to risk being bankrupted by ACLU lawsuits. The Darwinists have saved the secular sanctity of their temples: the public schools. They didn't win on science, persuasion, or the evidence. They won the way liberals always win: by finding a court to hand them everything they want on a silver platter."
For those of us who had to endure countless viewings of "Inherit the Wind" when biology teachers had a hangover and needed the lights off, Coulter gives the true history behind the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn. This phony trial was conceived by civic leaders and the ACLU, who agreed upfront to pay for costs incurred by the defense and the prosecution. Coulter writes, "The rest of Tennessee was not so thrilled with Dayton's public relations stunt. Chattanooga Congressman Foster V. Brown summarized the whole affair when he said the trial was 'not a fight for evolution or against evolution, but a fight against obscurity.'"
Liberals weren't the first to use Darwinism to justify a political movement. After reading "The Origin of Species," Karl Marx wrote, "This is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our views." Coulter writes, "While Marx saw the 'struggle' as among classes, Hitler conceived of the struggle as among the races. 'Mein Kampf' means 'My Struggle,' which Hitler described in unmistakably Darwinian terms."
From Darwinism to Nazism to Liberalism -- finally, some proof in favor of evolution!
In the mockumentary, "This is Spinal Tap," one of the band members points out to a journalist that while most amp volume knobs go to 10, theirs go to 11. To borrow from the philosophy of Spinal Tap, Godless is Coulter at 11 -- at her funniest and most insightful. In "How to Talk to Liberal (If You Must)," Coulter writes, "People don't get angry when lies are told about them; they get angry when the truth is told about them." Perhaps the best compliment one can give to "Godless" is that it will totally enrage liberals.
Coulter Attacks the Cult of Liberalism
by Lisa De Pasquale
Posted Jun 05, 2006
In "Godless: The Church of Liberalism," HUMAN EVENTS legal affairs correspondent Ann Coulter lays out one of the most original and perceptive philosophies on the cult of liberalism.
She states, "Under the guise of not favoring religion, liberals favor one cosmology over another and demand total indoctrination into theirs. The state religion of liberalism demands obeisance (to the National Organization for Women), tithing (to teachers' unions), reverence (for abortion), and formulaic imprecations ('Bush lied, kids died!'' 'Keep your laws off my body!' 'Arms for hostages!'). Everyone is taxed to support indoctrination into the state religion through public schools where innocent children are taught a specific belief system, rather than, say, math."
For years liberals have relied on a strategy of faking out the American public in order to win elections. Instead of accurately articulating their beliefs and engaging in an honest debate, they scour the nation for the perfect patsy. A hysterical mother who is willing to go on national television and call the President a "fuhrer" and "evil maniac" is akin to seeing the stigmata. Liberals' ecstasy over Cindy Sheehan, Max Cleland, and the widows who made a spectacle of themselves in the midst of the 9/11 Commission epitomizes their secret weapon for winning back America -- a doctrine of infallibility in which victory goes to the most hysterical.
As Coulter writes:
Finally, the Democrats hit on an ingenious strategy: They would choose only messengers whom we're not allowed to reply to. That’s why all Democratic spokesmen these days are sobbing, hysterical women. You can't respond to them because that would be questioning the authenticity of their suffering. Liberals haven't changed the message, just the messenger. All the most prominent liberal spokesmen are people with "absolute moral authority" -- Democrats with a dead husband, a dead child, a wife who works at the CIA, a war record, terminal illness, or as a last resort, being on a first-name basis with Nelson Mandela. Like Oprah during Sweeps Week, liberals have come to rely exclusively on people with sad stories to improve their Q rating. They've become the "Lifetime" TV Network of political parties. Liberals prey on people at a time of extreme emotional vulnerability and offer them fame and fortune to be that month’s purveyor of hate. Victory goes to the most hysterical.
By embracing phony prophets, liberals strip away any honesty and credibility they may have once had with the public. Unlike Christians, liberals can't shield themselves from criticism by referring to their most outspoken nuts as just a small group of fringe leaders. On the contrary, their leaders are writing curriculum for public schools, cloning obnoxious "apple-polishers" at colleges and universities and intimidating small towns with baseless lawsuits.
In the aptly titled chapter, "The Liberal Priesthood: Spare the Rod, Spoil the Teacher," Coulter peels back the political correctness surrounding the public education bureaucracy, "We are simultaneously supposed to gasp in awe at teachers' raw dedication and be forced to listen to their incessant caterwauling about how they don't make enough money. Well, which is it? Are they dedicated to teaching or are they in it for the money? After all the carping about how little teachers are paid, if someone enters the teaching profession for the big bucks, aren't they too stupid to be teaching our kids?"
Books like "The Professors," "Brainwashed" and "The Shadow University," exposed liberals' stranglehold on college campuses. But it wasn't until 10th-grader Sean Allen taped his world geography teacher's rant against President Bush that many Americans woke up to the reality of what is going on in K-12 public schools. During his world geography class, Jay Bennish engaged in a 20 minute tirade against President Bush and America, leading to the unoriginal conclusion that Bush is like Hitler. Coulter writes, "Anyone who uses this adolescent cliché should not be in the tenth grade, much less teaching it." Congratulations, Jay Bennish, this clever observation makes you qualified to replace a nose-pierced barista at Starbucks!
Comparing priests and teachers, Coulter notes, "The worst scandal to hit the real churches in 20 years is the priest child-molestation scandal -- which pales in comparison to the teacher child-molestation problem." By comparing studies done on the number of children sexually abused by priests and those sexually abused by teachers and accounting for unreported cases, Coulter concludes that there are roughly 821 children abused by priests per year and 32,000 children abused by educators per year. Given the increasingly explicit sex-education curriculum foisted on children and the incessant assurance from "experts" like Dr. Jocelyn Elders and U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop that it’s OK for children to be sexual beings, it’s no wonder that predatory teachers treat them as such.
Much of "Godless" exposes the contempt that liberals have for science, especially as it relates to disproving their religious doctrine. Using their strategy of capitalizing on sympathetic messengers, liberals counter science by parading Christopher Reeves, Michael J. Fox and the Reagan family in order to distract from the evidence favoring adult stem cell research over embryonic stem cell research. Coulter puts together an impressive list of successful achievements using adult stem cells, including repairing spinal cord injuries, treating sickle-cell anemia, restoring bone marrow in cancer patients, restoring eye sight and repairing weakened heart muscles. However, adult stem cell research does lack one crucial element -- it doesn't involve the destruction of life. Coulter writes, "At least embryonic stem-cell researchers have a clear financial incentive to lie about adult stem-cell research. Liberals just want to kill humans. … Stem-cell research on embryos is an even worse excuse for the slaughter of life than abortion. No woman is even being spared an inconvenience this time."
The final chapters of "Godless" should be required reading for all science classes, much like "Treason" should be required for all American history classes. Coulter illustrates why evolution is so important to the church of liberalism, "Liberals' creation myth is Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which is about one notch above Scientology in scientific rigor. It's a make-believe story, based on a theory that is a tautology, with no proof in the scientist's laboratory or the fossil record -- and that's after 150 years of very determined looking. We wouldn't still be talking about it but for the fact that liberals' think evolution disproves God."
With the help of the ACLU, liberals and their lawsuits have intimidated school districts into teaching evolution or what Coulter calls -- quoting mathematician David Berlinski -- "the last of the 19th century mystery religions." It's the equivalent of pointing and yelling, "Witch!" In Dover, Pa., a small group of parents backed by the ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State sued the school district to prevent the teaching of intelligent design in a high school biology class. The judge ruled in their favor and the school district was ordered to pay the plaintiffs' legal fees, in excess of $1 million. Coulter explains, "After Dover, no school district will dare breathe a word about 'intelligent design,’ unless they want to risk being bankrupted by ACLU lawsuits. The Darwinists have saved the secular sanctity of their temples: the public schools. They didn't win on science, persuasion, or the evidence. They won the way liberals always win: by finding a court to hand them everything they want on a silver platter."
For those of us who had to endure countless viewings of "Inherit the Wind" when biology teachers had a hangover and needed the lights off, Coulter gives the true history behind the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn. This phony trial was conceived by civic leaders and the ACLU, who agreed upfront to pay for costs incurred by the defense and the prosecution. Coulter writes, "The rest of Tennessee was not so thrilled with Dayton's public relations stunt. Chattanooga Congressman Foster V. Brown summarized the whole affair when he said the trial was 'not a fight for evolution or against evolution, but a fight against obscurity.'"
Liberals weren't the first to use Darwinism to justify a political movement. After reading "The Origin of Species," Karl Marx wrote, "This is the book which contains the basis in natural history for our views." Coulter writes, "While Marx saw the 'struggle' as among classes, Hitler conceived of the struggle as among the races. 'Mein Kampf' means 'My Struggle,' which Hitler described in unmistakably Darwinian terms."
From Darwinism to Nazism to Liberalism -- finally, some proof in favor of evolution!
In the mockumentary, "This is Spinal Tap," one of the band members points out to a journalist that while most amp volume knobs go to 10, theirs go to 11. To borrow from the philosophy of Spinal Tap, Godless is Coulter at 11 -- at her funniest and most insightful. In "How to Talk to Liberal (If You Must)," Coulter writes, "People don't get angry when lies are told about them; they get angry when the truth is told about them." Perhaps the best compliment one can give to "Godless" is that it will totally enrage liberals.
From DebbieSchlussel.com:
OUTRAGE/Break'g Schlussel Exclusive:
Bush Admin Hiring For Guest Workers Program as if Done Deal!!!
By Debbie Schlussel
Our Homeland Security federal agent tipsters are very angry. And we should be, too.
They point out that new hiring and job openings at Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) have suddenly ballooned (here and here). The ONLY reason that would happen is to hire new workers to administer the new Guest Workers program (a/k/a ShAmnesty).
Says one Homeland Security federal agent:
Take a peek at the job listings at the govt. site. It is at http://www.usajobs.opm.gov (from there prompt to DHS/CIS). Normally they have 20 to 30+ various positions open at any given time within CIS. This week, however, there is over 100. Interesting that they are seeking massive quantities of Adjudication Officers GS-9/12, all over the country. Some areas don't even specify how many openings are available. I haven't seen this since pre-IRCA of 1986...AKA "AMNESTY". It is no secret now., the decision has already been made. It WILL happen.
Since they are not beefing up on Deportation Officer positions, their direction/intention is obvious.
Just give the f---ing store away, and it makes me
sick.
S--t! we can't even use the term 'Alien' any longer, in spite of the fact it has a legally recognized definition.
The American people have not been heard, and the bastards in DC are going to lick Vicente Fox's boots, irrespective of what the majority of the voters wish. And THIS is a democracy?
"Path to citizenship" or "shot at citizenship" aren't these euphemisms cute? Time for a 3rd political party while we still have a country left.
Think I'm gonna hurl.
Yup, President Bush and his buds are taking us for dummies. Suckers. He thinks we--through our political activism and voiced anger--can't outsmart him. Screw us. Who cares what we--the American people--want, as in stopping the illegal alien hemorrhaging. He's already hiring for his new program, before he even gets it passed.
We think the House would be interested to know that they are not needed, in the Bush view, to get a bill signed into law.
No wonder President Bush is focusing on gay marriage. Trying to keep our minds on other things while he's sneaking behind our backs to sell out America's borders.
illegalaliens.jpg
Coming Soon To Citizenship & Immigration Services?
(Illegal Aliens Congregating Somewhere Near You)
**** UPDATE: Another Homeland Security federal agent tells us:
Debbie,
Here are ALL the job openings, the very employees who will be authorizing amnesty and guest worker applications. The Adjudication Officers are the guys who will be reviewing and APPROVING all amnesty and guest worker applications.
The job description states:
"You will write detailed decisions on applications/petitions filed with USCIS."
Take a look! THERE ARE 92 JOB OPENINGS for Adjudications Officer!!
Also, did you happen to notice most of those jobs were opened on June 1st?
That means the money for these positions had to have been approved
months ago, and the only people who can approve such a large
appropriation would be?... yep. CONGRESS!
Incredible.
OUTRAGE/Break'g Schlussel Exclusive:
Bush Admin Hiring For Guest Workers Program as if Done Deal!!!
By Debbie Schlussel
Our Homeland Security federal agent tipsters are very angry. And we should be, too.
They point out that new hiring and job openings at Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) have suddenly ballooned (here and here). The ONLY reason that would happen is to hire new workers to administer the new Guest Workers program (a/k/a ShAmnesty).
Says one Homeland Security federal agent:
Take a peek at the job listings at the govt. site. It is at http://www.usajobs.opm.gov (from there prompt to DHS/CIS). Normally they have 20 to 30+ various positions open at any given time within CIS. This week, however, there is over 100. Interesting that they are seeking massive quantities of Adjudication Officers GS-9/12, all over the country. Some areas don't even specify how many openings are available. I haven't seen this since pre-IRCA of 1986...AKA "AMNESTY". It is no secret now., the decision has already been made. It WILL happen.
Since they are not beefing up on Deportation Officer positions, their direction/intention is obvious.
Just give the f---ing store away, and it makes me
sick.
S--t! we can't even use the term 'Alien' any longer, in spite of the fact it has a legally recognized definition.
The American people have not been heard, and the bastards in DC are going to lick Vicente Fox's boots, irrespective of what the majority of the voters wish. And THIS is a democracy?
"Path to citizenship" or "shot at citizenship" aren't these euphemisms cute? Time for a 3rd political party while we still have a country left.
Think I'm gonna hurl.
Yup, President Bush and his buds are taking us for dummies. Suckers. He thinks we--through our political activism and voiced anger--can't outsmart him. Screw us. Who cares what we--the American people--want, as in stopping the illegal alien hemorrhaging. He's already hiring for his new program, before he even gets it passed.
We think the House would be interested to know that they are not needed, in the Bush view, to get a bill signed into law.
No wonder President Bush is focusing on gay marriage. Trying to keep our minds on other things while he's sneaking behind our backs to sell out America's borders.
illegalaliens.jpg
Coming Soon To Citizenship & Immigration Services?
(Illegal Aliens Congregating Somewhere Near You)
**** UPDATE: Another Homeland Security federal agent tells us:
Debbie,
Here are ALL the job openings, the very employees who will be authorizing amnesty and guest worker applications. The Adjudication Officers are the guys who will be reviewing and APPROVING all amnesty and guest worker applications.
The job description states:
"You will write detailed decisions on applications/petitions filed with USCIS."
Take a look! THERE ARE 92 JOB OPENINGS for Adjudications Officer!!
Also, did you happen to notice most of those jobs were opened on June 1st?
That means the money for these positions had to have been approved
months ago, and the only people who can approve such a large
appropriation would be?... yep. CONGRESS!
Incredible.
From Slate:
The Hell of War
Why Haditha isn't My Lai.
By Christopher Hitchens
June 5, 2006
Unjust though the assumption may prove to be, let us imagine that the Marines of Kilo Company did indeed crack up and cut loose in Haditha that day. Something like this has certainly been waiting to happen. I wrote in this space almost a year ago about a warning delivered to the U.S. commanders in Iraq by their British counterpart Gen. Michael Jackson. He told them that their "zero tolerance" force-protection measures, which allow for the use of deadly fire if anyone comes too close, ran a serious risk of losing Iraq. (Recent clumsy skirmishes in Kabul, though they do not involve any allegation of deliberate murder, make the same point in a different way.)
It's thus a bit harder than one might like to argue that a Haditha-type incident would have been an "isolated" one. The combat in Iraq and Afghanistan is overwhelmingly political, and there is no soldier who doesn't know that it's imperative for this reason—to say nothing of any moral objections—to use his or her firepower with exact discrimination. If this principle is not being meticulously observed, then it means that there is a rupture in training and discipline, which would be a serious enough story in its own right.
However, all the glib talk about My Lai is so much propaganda and hot air. In Vietnam, the rules of engagement were such as to make an atrocity—the slaughter of the My Lai villagers took almost a day rather than a white-hot few minutes—overwhelmingly probable. The ghastliness was only stopped by a brave officer who prepared his chopper-gunner to fire. In those days there were no precision-guided missiles, but there were "free-fire zones," and "body counts," and other virtual incitements to psycho officers such as Capt. Medina and Lt. Calley. As a consequence, a training film about My Lai—"if anything like this happens, you have really, truly screwed up"—has been in use for U.S. soldiers for some time.
The other difference, one ought not need add, is that in My Lai the United States was fighting the Vietcong. A recent article about the captured diary of a slain female Vietnamese militant (now a best seller in Vietnam) makes it plain that we were vainly attempting to defeat a peoples' army with a high morale and exalted standards. I, for one, will not have them insulted by any comparison to the forces of Zarqawi, the Fedayeen Saddam, and the criminal underworld now arrayed against us. These depraved elements are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge. They have two methods of warfare. One is the use of random murder to create a sectarian and ethnic civil war—perhaps the most evil combination of tactics and strategy it is possible to imagine. The other is the attempt to alienate coalition soldiers from the population.
Even before the fall of Baghdad in 2003, Saddam's foreign minister, Naji Sabry, wrote a memo about how to combat the increasing fraternization between advancing Americans and Iraqi civilians. Send some suicide bombers to the scene, he recommended, and force a wedge between the two. The Americans would then learn to distrust anyone who approached. As with the foul policy above, the awful thing about this charming policy is that it works. Which leads us to one very important conclusion: Any coalition soldier who relieves his rage by discharging a clip is by definition doing Zarqawi's work for him, and even in a way obeying his orders. If anything justifies a court-martial, then surely that does.
It's not amusing to see fascist killers hiding behind human shields and then releasing obscene videos of the work that they do. Nor is it rewarding to clean up the remains of a comrade who has been charred and shredded by a roadside bomb. To be taunted while doing so must be unbearable. The humane George Orwell, writing of his life as a colonial policeman in Burma in Shooting an Elephant, told his readers that there were days when "I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts." But he did not, in fact, succumb to this temptation. And the British were unwanted colonial occupiers in Burma, while the coalition forces are—until further notice—the guests of Iraq's first-ever elected government and the executors of a U.N.-mandated plan for the salvage and reconstruction of the country.
There is no respectable way of having this both ways. Those who say that the rioters in Baghdad in the early days should have been put down more forcefully are accepting the chance that a mob might have had to be fired on to protect the National Museum. Those who now wish there had been more troops are also demanding that there should have been more targets and thus more body bags. The lawyers at Centcom who refused to give permission to strike Mullah Omar's fleeing convoy in Afghanistan—lest it by any chance be the wrong convoy of SUVs speeding from Kabul to Kandahar under cover of night—are partly responsible for the deaths of dozens of Afghan teachers and international aid workers who have since been murdered by those who were allowed to get away. If Iraq had been stuffed with WMD warehouses and stiff with al-Qaida training camps, there would still have been an Abu Ghraib. Only pacifists—not those who compare the Iraqi killers to the Minutemen—have the right to object to every casualty of war. And if the pacifists had been heeded, then Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein would all still be in power—hardly a humanitarian outcome. People like to go on about the "fog" of war as well as the "hell" of it. Hell it most certainly is—but not always so foggy. Indeed, many of the dilemmas posed by combat can be highly clarifying, once the tone of righteous sententiousness is dropped.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War.
The Hell of War
Why Haditha isn't My Lai.
By Christopher Hitchens
June 5, 2006
Unjust though the assumption may prove to be, let us imagine that the Marines of Kilo Company did indeed crack up and cut loose in Haditha that day. Something like this has certainly been waiting to happen. I wrote in this space almost a year ago about a warning delivered to the U.S. commanders in Iraq by their British counterpart Gen. Michael Jackson. He told them that their "zero tolerance" force-protection measures, which allow for the use of deadly fire if anyone comes too close, ran a serious risk of losing Iraq. (Recent clumsy skirmishes in Kabul, though they do not involve any allegation of deliberate murder, make the same point in a different way.)
It's thus a bit harder than one might like to argue that a Haditha-type incident would have been an "isolated" one. The combat in Iraq and Afghanistan is overwhelmingly political, and there is no soldier who doesn't know that it's imperative for this reason—to say nothing of any moral objections—to use his or her firepower with exact discrimination. If this principle is not being meticulously observed, then it means that there is a rupture in training and discipline, which would be a serious enough story in its own right.
However, all the glib talk about My Lai is so much propaganda and hot air. In Vietnam, the rules of engagement were such as to make an atrocity—the slaughter of the My Lai villagers took almost a day rather than a white-hot few minutes—overwhelmingly probable. The ghastliness was only stopped by a brave officer who prepared his chopper-gunner to fire. In those days there were no precision-guided missiles, but there were "free-fire zones," and "body counts," and other virtual incitements to psycho officers such as Capt. Medina and Lt. Calley. As a consequence, a training film about My Lai—"if anything like this happens, you have really, truly screwed up"—has been in use for U.S. soldiers for some time.
The other difference, one ought not need add, is that in My Lai the United States was fighting the Vietcong. A recent article about the captured diary of a slain female Vietnamese militant (now a best seller in Vietnam) makes it plain that we were vainly attempting to defeat a peoples' army with a high morale and exalted standards. I, for one, will not have them insulted by any comparison to the forces of Zarqawi, the Fedayeen Saddam, and the criminal underworld now arrayed against us. These depraved elements are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge. They have two methods of warfare. One is the use of random murder to create a sectarian and ethnic civil war—perhaps the most evil combination of tactics and strategy it is possible to imagine. The other is the attempt to alienate coalition soldiers from the population.
Even before the fall of Baghdad in 2003, Saddam's foreign minister, Naji Sabry, wrote a memo about how to combat the increasing fraternization between advancing Americans and Iraqi civilians. Send some suicide bombers to the scene, he recommended, and force a wedge between the two. The Americans would then learn to distrust anyone who approached. As with the foul policy above, the awful thing about this charming policy is that it works. Which leads us to one very important conclusion: Any coalition soldier who relieves his rage by discharging a clip is by definition doing Zarqawi's work for him, and even in a way obeying his orders. If anything justifies a court-martial, then surely that does.
It's not amusing to see fascist killers hiding behind human shields and then releasing obscene videos of the work that they do. Nor is it rewarding to clean up the remains of a comrade who has been charred and shredded by a roadside bomb. To be taunted while doing so must be unbearable. The humane George Orwell, writing of his life as a colonial policeman in Burma in Shooting an Elephant, told his readers that there were days when "I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts." But he did not, in fact, succumb to this temptation. And the British were unwanted colonial occupiers in Burma, while the coalition forces are—until further notice—the guests of Iraq's first-ever elected government and the executors of a U.N.-mandated plan for the salvage and reconstruction of the country.
There is no respectable way of having this both ways. Those who say that the rioters in Baghdad in the early days should have been put down more forcefully are accepting the chance that a mob might have had to be fired on to protect the National Museum. Those who now wish there had been more troops are also demanding that there should have been more targets and thus more body bags. The lawyers at Centcom who refused to give permission to strike Mullah Omar's fleeing convoy in Afghanistan—lest it by any chance be the wrong convoy of SUVs speeding from Kabul to Kandahar under cover of night—are partly responsible for the deaths of dozens of Afghan teachers and international aid workers who have since been murdered by those who were allowed to get away. If Iraq had been stuffed with WMD warehouses and stiff with al-Qaida training camps, there would still have been an Abu Ghraib. Only pacifists—not those who compare the Iraqi killers to the Minutemen—have the right to object to every casualty of war. And if the pacifists had been heeded, then Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein would all still be in power—hardly a humanitarian outcome. People like to go on about the "fog" of war as well as the "hell" of it. Hell it most certainly is—but not always so foggy. Indeed, many of the dilemmas posed by combat can be highly clarifying, once the tone of righteous sententiousness is dropped.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War.
From charlotteobserver.com:
'Relentless' fan inspires Canes
Coach's neighbor faces 2nd bout with leukemia
By KEN TYSIAC
RALEIGH - Peter Laviolette was sideswiped in April by the news that spread quickly on the cul-de-sac where he lives with his family in Southwest Raleigh.
He loves his neighborhood because of the friends he has made there. There is always an impromptu cookout or gathering to watch hockey on television when Laviolette is out of town coaching the Carolina Hurricanes.
Eight or 10 families gather for Easter egg hunts and the annual Fourth of July picnic at the Laviolettes' pool, complete with a fireworks display.
Six-year-old Julia Rowe, who lives four doors down, plays with Elisabeth Laviolette, 4, while Laviolette's sons Peter, 8, and Jack, 7, play rough-and-tumble games of street hockey.
Rowe was just another child in the neighborhood until April, when she learned she'd had a reoccurrence of leukemia. She would need a second round of chemotherapy plus radiation treatment and a bone marrow transplant.
Today, Laviolette will begin the biggest series of his life when the Edmonton Oilers visit the RBC Center for Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Finals. He has to figure a way for his forwards to navigate around towering defenseman Chris Pronger and beat hot goalie Dwayne Roloson to bring North Carolina the first major professional sports title in the state's history.
But every day, Laviolette thinks about little Julia.
"She's always in my thoughts," he said.
When Laviolette married his wife, Kristen, on June 8, 1996, they vowed to immerse themselves in their neighborhoods and communities wherever they lived while he was coaching. From Wheeling, W.Va., to Boston, Providence, R.I. and Long Island, N.Y. they built networks of friends they plan to keep forever.
Laviolette's heart sank when Rowe's leukemia invaded his latest circle of friends. His next-door neighbor from his childhood home in Franklin, Mass., Kristine Stoughton, had gone to Seattle to be treated for leukemia when Laviolette was in his early 20s.
Stoughton is happy and healthy today, but Laviolette said 18 of the 21 patients on her floor did not survive. He felt angry and helpless when he heard Julia was sick again.
He visited Hurricanes community relations manager Emma Bennett. "I want to do something about this," he said he told her. "I don't know what to do. Help me."
Julia will listen to Game 1 on the radio tonight from Duke Hospital, whose cable television lineup does not include Outdoor Life Network, which has televised most NHL playoff games.
"I can watch it here," she said, "but only if it's on NBC."
Except for her illness and the hair loss caused by the chemotherapy, Julia is like any other little girl. She has a crush on 21-year-old Hurricanes center Eric Staal and likes to play with Barbie dolls and watch "Power Rangers" and "Full House" on television.
She and parents, Mark and Kate Rowe, are holding up well after her second round of chemo.
Many children are ill and weak by the time they reach Julia's stage in their treatment because the drugs used in chemotherapy cause them to lose their appetite and they refuse to eat.
Julia munches on Fruit Loops like a champ and is asking for lunch before 11:30 a.m. Saturday. Mark and Kate each have a parent who survived cancer and believe positive thinking can help beat the disease.
But the raw numbers for Julia are frightening. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common form of childhood cancer, has a survival rate of about 85 percent, Kate Rowe said.
The relapse cuts that to 40 percent.
"We cried for a day, and we were done," Kate Rowe said. "It was, this is what we have to do to get it better. And quite honestly, she's been great."
Mark said Julia is too young to fully grasp the danger the disease poses to her. She is more afraid of the shots and the other pain the treatment causes.
She will miss first grade because of her treatment, but Julia is fortunate to have found an exact match from umbilical cord blood for her transplant. Many patients, especially ethnic minorities with a smaller pool of potential donors, have difficulty finding suitable cord blood, Kate Rowe said.
The Rowes want people to know this so they will donate their umbilical cord blood when their children are born. Spreading the message in the fight against leukemia and other blood cancers is where Laviolette comes in.
`Relentless'
Emma Bennett helped Laviolette put together a campaign to aid in the fight against leukemia.
Laviolette did a public service ad that runs on the scoreboard TV screen during home games. He urged Hurricanes fans to donate at least $2 to receive the red "Relentless" bracelets (modeled after the "Live Strong" cancer bracelets) that benefit the Eastern North Carolina Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. He pledged to match each dollar Hurricanes fans donated at the arena, up to $10,000.
Most of all, he hopes to raise awareness of leukemia, lymphoma and blood cancers. He could win 10 Stanley Cups and still be powerless to help Julia beat leukemia. But if his devotion and fame result in more donations that fund groundbreaking research, he might save some child, somewhere, some day.
An apparent mistake by Buffalo Sabres coach Lindy Ruff aided Laviolette in that cause. Word got back to Ruff that Laviolette had champagne in the Carolina locker room before Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals in Buffalo, N.Y.
Ruff accused the Hurricanes of being arrogant. After Carolina eliminated the Sabres in Game 7, Laviolette brought the bottle to the postgame news conference to set the record straight.
"It was a chance for me to take the opportunity and get some more airtime for a great cause," he said.
Before Game 6, Laviolette stood in the visitors' locker room in Buffalo with an unopened bottle of wine.
A hockey coach doesn't often cry in front of his team, but Laviolette barely kept his composure as he talked to the team about Julia and told them what he intended to do with the bottle.
"It kind of caught us off guard," said defenseman Aaron Ward.
The bottle was from the Shafer winery in California's Napa Valley. The brand on the label was "Relentless," the slogan used on the red bracelets in the fund raiser.
Laviolette and his players might sign thousands of autographs in their lives, but the carefully printed signature on the label of the bottle is priceless to Laviolette. Julia had signed the bottle, and Laviolette chose to give it to the player who showed the most relentless attitude in the series with Buffalo.
He gave the bottle to team captain Rod Brind'Amour, and it was sitting in his locker room stall after Saturday's practice. The Hurricanes assume whoever told Ruff that Carolina had champagne mistook the Relentless bottle for something else.
"I've never commented on that part of it," Laviolette said. "It's good that the thing was set straight."
Laviolette has one more bottle with Julia's signature reserved for the most relentless player in the Stanley Cup Finals. After the Finals, he hopes to take a player to the hospital to meet Julia.
Always, "Mr. Peter," as he is known in his neighborhood, will keep her close to his heart.
"We're praying for her, and it's not about what I've done," Laviolette said.
"It's about her and keeping our thoughts and prayers with her so she can whip this one more time."
For more information on the fight against blood-related cancers, go to www.leukemia-lymphoma.org.
'Relentless' fan inspires Canes
Coach's neighbor faces 2nd bout with leukemia
By KEN TYSIAC
RALEIGH - Peter Laviolette was sideswiped in April by the news that spread quickly on the cul-de-sac where he lives with his family in Southwest Raleigh.
He loves his neighborhood because of the friends he has made there. There is always an impromptu cookout or gathering to watch hockey on television when Laviolette is out of town coaching the Carolina Hurricanes.
Eight or 10 families gather for Easter egg hunts and the annual Fourth of July picnic at the Laviolettes' pool, complete with a fireworks display.
Six-year-old Julia Rowe, who lives four doors down, plays with Elisabeth Laviolette, 4, while Laviolette's sons Peter, 8, and Jack, 7, play rough-and-tumble games of street hockey.
Rowe was just another child in the neighborhood until April, when she learned she'd had a reoccurrence of leukemia. She would need a second round of chemotherapy plus radiation treatment and a bone marrow transplant.
Today, Laviolette will begin the biggest series of his life when the Edmonton Oilers visit the RBC Center for Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Finals. He has to figure a way for his forwards to navigate around towering defenseman Chris Pronger and beat hot goalie Dwayne Roloson to bring North Carolina the first major professional sports title in the state's history.
But every day, Laviolette thinks about little Julia.
"She's always in my thoughts," he said.
When Laviolette married his wife, Kristen, on June 8, 1996, they vowed to immerse themselves in their neighborhoods and communities wherever they lived while he was coaching. From Wheeling, W.Va., to Boston, Providence, R.I. and Long Island, N.Y. they built networks of friends they plan to keep forever.
Laviolette's heart sank when Rowe's leukemia invaded his latest circle of friends. His next-door neighbor from his childhood home in Franklin, Mass., Kristine Stoughton, had gone to Seattle to be treated for leukemia when Laviolette was in his early 20s.
Stoughton is happy and healthy today, but Laviolette said 18 of the 21 patients on her floor did not survive. He felt angry and helpless when he heard Julia was sick again.
He visited Hurricanes community relations manager Emma Bennett. "I want to do something about this," he said he told her. "I don't know what to do. Help me."
Julia will listen to Game 1 on the radio tonight from Duke Hospital, whose cable television lineup does not include Outdoor Life Network, which has televised most NHL playoff games.
"I can watch it here," she said, "but only if it's on NBC."
Except for her illness and the hair loss caused by the chemotherapy, Julia is like any other little girl. She has a crush on 21-year-old Hurricanes center Eric Staal and likes to play with Barbie dolls and watch "Power Rangers" and "Full House" on television.
She and parents, Mark and Kate Rowe, are holding up well after her second round of chemo.
Many children are ill and weak by the time they reach Julia's stage in their treatment because the drugs used in chemotherapy cause them to lose their appetite and they refuse to eat.
Julia munches on Fruit Loops like a champ and is asking for lunch before 11:30 a.m. Saturday. Mark and Kate each have a parent who survived cancer and believe positive thinking can help beat the disease.
But the raw numbers for Julia are frightening. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common form of childhood cancer, has a survival rate of about 85 percent, Kate Rowe said.
The relapse cuts that to 40 percent.
"We cried for a day, and we were done," Kate Rowe said. "It was, this is what we have to do to get it better. And quite honestly, she's been great."
Mark said Julia is too young to fully grasp the danger the disease poses to her. She is more afraid of the shots and the other pain the treatment causes.
She will miss first grade because of her treatment, but Julia is fortunate to have found an exact match from umbilical cord blood for her transplant. Many patients, especially ethnic minorities with a smaller pool of potential donors, have difficulty finding suitable cord blood, Kate Rowe said.
The Rowes want people to know this so they will donate their umbilical cord blood when their children are born. Spreading the message in the fight against leukemia and other blood cancers is where Laviolette comes in.
`Relentless'
Emma Bennett helped Laviolette put together a campaign to aid in the fight against leukemia.
Laviolette did a public service ad that runs on the scoreboard TV screen during home games. He urged Hurricanes fans to donate at least $2 to receive the red "Relentless" bracelets (modeled after the "Live Strong" cancer bracelets) that benefit the Eastern North Carolina Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. He pledged to match each dollar Hurricanes fans donated at the arena, up to $10,000.
Most of all, he hopes to raise awareness of leukemia, lymphoma and blood cancers. He could win 10 Stanley Cups and still be powerless to help Julia beat leukemia. But if his devotion and fame result in more donations that fund groundbreaking research, he might save some child, somewhere, some day.
An apparent mistake by Buffalo Sabres coach Lindy Ruff aided Laviolette in that cause. Word got back to Ruff that Laviolette had champagne in the Carolina locker room before Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals in Buffalo, N.Y.
Ruff accused the Hurricanes of being arrogant. After Carolina eliminated the Sabres in Game 7, Laviolette brought the bottle to the postgame news conference to set the record straight.
"It was a chance for me to take the opportunity and get some more airtime for a great cause," he said.
Before Game 6, Laviolette stood in the visitors' locker room in Buffalo with an unopened bottle of wine.
A hockey coach doesn't often cry in front of his team, but Laviolette barely kept his composure as he talked to the team about Julia and told them what he intended to do with the bottle.
"It kind of caught us off guard," said defenseman Aaron Ward.
The bottle was from the Shafer winery in California's Napa Valley. The brand on the label was "Relentless," the slogan used on the red bracelets in the fund raiser.
Laviolette and his players might sign thousands of autographs in their lives, but the carefully printed signature on the label of the bottle is priceless to Laviolette. Julia had signed the bottle, and Laviolette chose to give it to the player who showed the most relentless attitude in the series with Buffalo.
He gave the bottle to team captain Rod Brind'Amour, and it was sitting in his locker room stall after Saturday's practice. The Hurricanes assume whoever told Ruff that Carolina had champagne mistook the Relentless bottle for something else.
"I've never commented on that part of it," Laviolette said. "It's good that the thing was set straight."
Laviolette has one more bottle with Julia's signature reserved for the most relentless player in the Stanley Cup Finals. After the Finals, he hopes to take a player to the hospital to meet Julia.
Always, "Mr. Peter," as he is known in his neighborhood, will keep her close to his heart.
"We're praying for her, and it's not about what I've done," Laviolette said.
"It's about her and keeping our thoughts and prayers with her so she can whip this one more time."
For more information on the fight against blood-related cancers, go to www.leukemia-lymphoma.org.
From Real Clear Politics:
The Truth, John Kerry, and The New York Times
By Thomas Lipscomb
June 05, 2006
Kate Zernike's story on the front page of the Memorial Day Sunday New York Times, "Kerry Pressing Swift Boat Case Long After Loss," is an unfortunate reminder of the Times's embarrassingly poor coverage of Kerry in the face of the Swift Boat Veterans' for Truth charges in the 2004 election. Now as then, the Times acts as if the issues involved were between Kerry's latest representations of his record and the "unsubstantiated" charges of the Swift Boat group. The Times used the term "unsubstantiated" more than twenty times during its election coverage and continues to make no discernable effort to examine any of the charges in detail.
But there was plenty of evidence in the work of other news organizations that some of the charges, and the Kerry military records themselves, were worth examining seriously. I found numerous problems with Kerry's records on his website in my own reporting for the Chicago Sun-Times: a Silver Star with a V for valor listed that the Navy stated it had never awarded in the history of the US Navy, three separate medal citations with some heavy revisions in Kerry's favor signed by former Navy Secretary John Lehman who denied ever signing them, to name two.
Additionally I found by examining the message traffic with experts that when the Swift Boat Vets charged that Kerry had written the Bay Hap after action report, by which he received his bronze star and the third purple heart that was his ticket out of Vietnam, the evidence showed that it was indeed probably written by Kerry himself. Zernike seems to have totally missed this in her reporting. Zernike is content to refer to Kerry's claim that "original reports pulled from the naval archives contradict the charge that he drafted his own accounts of various incidents," none of which she cites, provides, or analyzes.
Zernike appears to have made no effort to look at any record besides listing Kerry's latest assertions with obligatory quotes from the usual Swiftie suspects to provide "balance." She doesn't appear to be aware of the hilarious inconsistency of the Kerry hat story she recites dutifully as if this was the very first time the hat had appeared in print. As the clips should have shown her, Kerry first pulled the famous hat out of a "secret compartment" for Washington Post reporter Laura Blumenfeld's feature story in 2003. "My good luck hat," Kerry told Blumenfeld, "given to me by a CIA guy." Now he tells Zernike a "special operations team" member gave it to him on a secret "mission that records say was to insert Navy Seals" in February.
Once again Zernike cites a Kerry claim as fact, this time directly conflicting with the Washington Post account on the record. But the facts on this are already on the record and no matter what Kerry "researchers" may come up with they should be addressed by any reporter attempting a review of the dispute. Admiral Roy Hoffman may have been head of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, but he was also in command of all the Swift Boat operations in Vietnam, directly under the commander of all sea operations in Vietnam, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt.
Any tasking for insertions of special operations troops across borders by sea, whether Seals, CIA, Army Special Forces or Vietnamese troops like CIDG had to come through his command. Hoffman stated he was never asked to handle missions for the CIA. "They had their own teams for that. And none of my Coastal Commands ever inserted any troops of this kind into Cambodia. We had some operations we ran north that I am not at liberty to discuss."
Orders for sensitive incursion operations like this don't appear by magic. And an individual boat commander, whether it is Kerry or anyone else, doesn't simply head across a border with a boatful of Seals on his own. Kerry's direct commander at An Thoi, George Elliott, has denied ever being asked to run such a mission out of his base and three of Kerry's PCF 44 crewmen have denied ever being in Cambodia with Kerry.
Tedd Peck, accompanied Kerry's PCF 44 on his PCF 57 from Cam Ranh down to their new assignment at An Thoi where they arrived on December 8, 1968. Peck served there with Kerry until he was wounded and med-evaced out on January 29, 1969. Douglas Brinkley states that "Kerry liked Peck." So what does Peck have to say about secret missions out of An Thoi to Cambodia? "There never was one. And I never saw a Navy Seal at An Thoi the whole time I served there with Kerry"
What does it take to wake up a good reporter that there are some issues here besides one junior lieutenant's latest assertions on the basis, once again, of totally undisclosed records? It isn't simply a matter of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth "lies." The facts recited by Kerry make no military sense, fly in direct opposition to authoritative testimony, and are yet to be backed by any records anyone has seen. And Kerry keeps changing his story.
The mission Kerry described to Laura Blumenfeld was the famous "Christmas in Cambodia" trip since disproved by Kerry's own log. Zernike ledes with "showing the entry in a log he kept from 1969: 'Feb 12: 0800 run to Cambodia'" and swallows it unquestioningly. The only authority that "Kerry log" has ever had is that it has been in the sole possession of John Kerry and carefully kept away from objective research that may or not have disclosed changes or heavy editing over time.
Zernike should remember what happened to historian Douglas Brinkley who accepted Kerry's word in his best-selling TOUR OF DUTY. Kerry told Brinkley personally that he was a "no-show" at a national meeting of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Kansas City which voted on a resolution to assassinate six US Senators supporting the Vietnam War in 1971.
One can understand why Brinkley would naturally have assumed that as a sitting US Senator himself, Kerry would have vividly recalled the occasion if he had been there. My reporting and Josh Gerstein's in The New York Sun and Scott Canon's at The Kansas City Star found quite a few witnesses, most of whom were working for Kerry's presidential campaign, who saw Kerry at the meeting and some saw him vote and his presence was confirmed by FBI taps as well. The FBI taps were surfaced by a left wing writer, Gerald Nicosia, for whom Kerry had hosted a book party at his Senate office.
Kerry flatly lied to Brinkley and continued to lie to the press until the story got so strong he finally had a sudden attack of minimal memory recovery. Brinkley had to print a correction, but not before Kerry showed another unattractive side to his approach to historical revisionism. He pressured several of the witnesses who confirmed his presence at Kansas City to change their stories. I reported it, and The New York Times confirmed my story in a front page story by Adam Nagourney and David Halbfinger.
One of those witnesses was a Marine who had been totally disabled in the fighting in Viet Nam and had been a Kerry supporter. When Kerry suddenly discovers a witness who has changed his mind in his favor, the circumstances might merit more than one grain of salt. And all this happened well before the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ever appeared on the scene.
Zernike makes much of the support of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth "backed by Republican donors and consultants," which indeed it was. But she shows no interest in who is backing "the Patriot Project" challenging the Swift Vets claims "formed by Kerry supporters" since February 2005 that is the occasion for her story. She even passes on the following at face value: "Kerry portrays himself as a wary participant in his own defense, insisting in the two-hour interview that he does not want to dwell on the accusations or the mistakes of his 2004 campaign. 'I'm moving on,' he says several times."
That will certainly come as a surprise to anyone reading this story which lays down a lot of unproven statements as fact, unproven and unconfirmed by Kate Zernike, such as: "Naval records and accounts from other sailors contradicted almost every claim they made, and some members of the group who had earlier praised Mr. Kerry's heroism contradicted themselves." Please note this is not a statement of position from a Kerry advocate being quoted. This is a flat statement of fact by Zernike on behalf of "the newspaper of record."
Zernike wastes most of her story simply repeating rather than weighing Kerry talking points: She defines John O'Neill as "a former Swift boat commander who was recruited by the Nixon administration to debate Mr. Kerry on "The Dick Cavett Show." That is a pretty dramatic charge by The New York Times. But the extensive record Zernike apparently missed, including the Times's own archives, shows it is totally untrue. If O'Neill was recruited by anyone for the Cavett Show, it was Bruce Kesler, a Marine veteran whose op-ed O'Neill had come across in the Times and whose "Vietnam Veterans for A Just Peace" O'Neill quickly joined.
Kesler nominated O'Neill for the show. In the CSPAN rebroadcast of the original 1971 Cavett debate during the 2004 campaign, Dick Cavett, who had been on the famous Nixon "enemies list," denied the Nixon Administration had anything to do with setting up the debate or who participated. During the election Kesler gave the entire story to Todd Purdum, but nothing appeared in the Times. Kesler also outlined how the debate had come about in a commentary piece in the Augusta Free Press in August of 2004. And the Kesler challenge for Kerry to debate was carried in the June 2, 1971 New York Times.
If The New York Times fails to correct that error, O'Neill could have a pretty good libel action. How can there be "absence of malice" when a great newspaper repeatedly lists claims by eyewitnesses backed by military records as "unsubstantiated," while its reporter ignores published records including its own archive?
In any case, it is time for some tough reporting to evaluate the Kerry's claims as listed in Zernike's article. I will be following up with several other key incidents which appear to be widely at variance with these claims. These will include what appears to be the current state of the evidence about the "skimmer" operation Kerry has decided to put in play again and the greatest newspaper coverup in modern history.
It is time we all got to see a picture of the famous Kerry "lucky hat," rather than another account by the latest star-struck journalist. It is time for Kerry to stop alluding to "records" and start producing them. And it is time media assigned reporters with military experience or the resources to analyze this record and see just who is lying about what.
Thomas Lipscomb is an independent investigative reporter who was nominated for a Pulitzer for his reporting on Kerry during the 2004 elections. He is a senior fellow at the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future (USC) tom@digitalfuture.org
© 2000-2006 RealClearPolitics.com All Rights Reserved
The Truth, John Kerry, and The New York Times
By Thomas Lipscomb
June 05, 2006
Kate Zernike's story on the front page of the Memorial Day Sunday New York Times, "Kerry Pressing Swift Boat Case Long After Loss," is an unfortunate reminder of the Times's embarrassingly poor coverage of Kerry in the face of the Swift Boat Veterans' for Truth charges in the 2004 election. Now as then, the Times acts as if the issues involved were between Kerry's latest representations of his record and the "unsubstantiated" charges of the Swift Boat group. The Times used the term "unsubstantiated" more than twenty times during its election coverage and continues to make no discernable effort to examine any of the charges in detail.
But there was plenty of evidence in the work of other news organizations that some of the charges, and the Kerry military records themselves, were worth examining seriously. I found numerous problems with Kerry's records on his website in my own reporting for the Chicago Sun-Times: a Silver Star with a V for valor listed that the Navy stated it had never awarded in the history of the US Navy, three separate medal citations with some heavy revisions in Kerry's favor signed by former Navy Secretary John Lehman who denied ever signing them, to name two.
Additionally I found by examining the message traffic with experts that when the Swift Boat Vets charged that Kerry had written the Bay Hap after action report, by which he received his bronze star and the third purple heart that was his ticket out of Vietnam, the evidence showed that it was indeed probably written by Kerry himself. Zernike seems to have totally missed this in her reporting. Zernike is content to refer to Kerry's claim that "original reports pulled from the naval archives contradict the charge that he drafted his own accounts of various incidents," none of which she cites, provides, or analyzes.
Zernike appears to have made no effort to look at any record besides listing Kerry's latest assertions with obligatory quotes from the usual Swiftie suspects to provide "balance." She doesn't appear to be aware of the hilarious inconsistency of the Kerry hat story she recites dutifully as if this was the very first time the hat had appeared in print. As the clips should have shown her, Kerry first pulled the famous hat out of a "secret compartment" for Washington Post reporter Laura Blumenfeld's feature story in 2003. "My good luck hat," Kerry told Blumenfeld, "given to me by a CIA guy." Now he tells Zernike a "special operations team" member gave it to him on a secret "mission that records say was to insert Navy Seals" in February.
Once again Zernike cites a Kerry claim as fact, this time directly conflicting with the Washington Post account on the record. But the facts on this are already on the record and no matter what Kerry "researchers" may come up with they should be addressed by any reporter attempting a review of the dispute. Admiral Roy Hoffman may have been head of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, but he was also in command of all the Swift Boat operations in Vietnam, directly under the commander of all sea operations in Vietnam, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt.
Any tasking for insertions of special operations troops across borders by sea, whether Seals, CIA, Army Special Forces or Vietnamese troops like CIDG had to come through his command. Hoffman stated he was never asked to handle missions for the CIA. "They had their own teams for that. And none of my Coastal Commands ever inserted any troops of this kind into Cambodia. We had some operations we ran north that I am not at liberty to discuss."
Orders for sensitive incursion operations like this don't appear by magic. And an individual boat commander, whether it is Kerry or anyone else, doesn't simply head across a border with a boatful of Seals on his own. Kerry's direct commander at An Thoi, George Elliott, has denied ever being asked to run such a mission out of his base and three of Kerry's PCF 44 crewmen have denied ever being in Cambodia with Kerry.
Tedd Peck, accompanied Kerry's PCF 44 on his PCF 57 from Cam Ranh down to their new assignment at An Thoi where they arrived on December 8, 1968. Peck served there with Kerry until he was wounded and med-evaced out on January 29, 1969. Douglas Brinkley states that "Kerry liked Peck." So what does Peck have to say about secret missions out of An Thoi to Cambodia? "There never was one. And I never saw a Navy Seal at An Thoi the whole time I served there with Kerry"
What does it take to wake up a good reporter that there are some issues here besides one junior lieutenant's latest assertions on the basis, once again, of totally undisclosed records? It isn't simply a matter of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth "lies." The facts recited by Kerry make no military sense, fly in direct opposition to authoritative testimony, and are yet to be backed by any records anyone has seen. And Kerry keeps changing his story.
The mission Kerry described to Laura Blumenfeld was the famous "Christmas in Cambodia" trip since disproved by Kerry's own log. Zernike ledes with "showing the entry in a log he kept from 1969: 'Feb 12: 0800 run to Cambodia'" and swallows it unquestioningly. The only authority that "Kerry log" has ever had is that it has been in the sole possession of John Kerry and carefully kept away from objective research that may or not have disclosed changes or heavy editing over time.
Zernike should remember what happened to historian Douglas Brinkley who accepted Kerry's word in his best-selling TOUR OF DUTY. Kerry told Brinkley personally that he was a "no-show" at a national meeting of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War in Kansas City which voted on a resolution to assassinate six US Senators supporting the Vietnam War in 1971.
One can understand why Brinkley would naturally have assumed that as a sitting US Senator himself, Kerry would have vividly recalled the occasion if he had been there. My reporting and Josh Gerstein's in The New York Sun and Scott Canon's at The Kansas City Star found quite a few witnesses, most of whom were working for Kerry's presidential campaign, who saw Kerry at the meeting and some saw him vote and his presence was confirmed by FBI taps as well. The FBI taps were surfaced by a left wing writer, Gerald Nicosia, for whom Kerry had hosted a book party at his Senate office.
Kerry flatly lied to Brinkley and continued to lie to the press until the story got so strong he finally had a sudden attack of minimal memory recovery. Brinkley had to print a correction, but not before Kerry showed another unattractive side to his approach to historical revisionism. He pressured several of the witnesses who confirmed his presence at Kansas City to change their stories. I reported it, and The New York Times confirmed my story in a front page story by Adam Nagourney and David Halbfinger.
One of those witnesses was a Marine who had been totally disabled in the fighting in Viet Nam and had been a Kerry supporter. When Kerry suddenly discovers a witness who has changed his mind in his favor, the circumstances might merit more than one grain of salt. And all this happened well before the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ever appeared on the scene.
Zernike makes much of the support of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth "backed by Republican donors and consultants," which indeed it was. But she shows no interest in who is backing "the Patriot Project" challenging the Swift Vets claims "formed by Kerry supporters" since February 2005 that is the occasion for her story. She even passes on the following at face value: "Kerry portrays himself as a wary participant in his own defense, insisting in the two-hour interview that he does not want to dwell on the accusations or the mistakes of his 2004 campaign. 'I'm moving on,' he says several times."
That will certainly come as a surprise to anyone reading this story which lays down a lot of unproven statements as fact, unproven and unconfirmed by Kate Zernike, such as: "Naval records and accounts from other sailors contradicted almost every claim they made, and some members of the group who had earlier praised Mr. Kerry's heroism contradicted themselves." Please note this is not a statement of position from a Kerry advocate being quoted. This is a flat statement of fact by Zernike on behalf of "the newspaper of record."
Zernike wastes most of her story simply repeating rather than weighing Kerry talking points: She defines John O'Neill as "a former Swift boat commander who was recruited by the Nixon administration to debate Mr. Kerry on "The Dick Cavett Show." That is a pretty dramatic charge by The New York Times. But the extensive record Zernike apparently missed, including the Times's own archives, shows it is totally untrue. If O'Neill was recruited by anyone for the Cavett Show, it was Bruce Kesler, a Marine veteran whose op-ed O'Neill had come across in the Times and whose "Vietnam Veterans for A Just Peace" O'Neill quickly joined.
Kesler nominated O'Neill for the show. In the CSPAN rebroadcast of the original 1971 Cavett debate during the 2004 campaign, Dick Cavett, who had been on the famous Nixon "enemies list," denied the Nixon Administration had anything to do with setting up the debate or who participated. During the election Kesler gave the entire story to Todd Purdum, but nothing appeared in the Times. Kesler also outlined how the debate had come about in a commentary piece in the Augusta Free Press in August of 2004. And the Kesler challenge for Kerry to debate was carried in the June 2, 1971 New York Times.
If The New York Times fails to correct that error, O'Neill could have a pretty good libel action. How can there be "absence of malice" when a great newspaper repeatedly lists claims by eyewitnesses backed by military records as "unsubstantiated," while its reporter ignores published records including its own archive?
In any case, it is time for some tough reporting to evaluate the Kerry's claims as listed in Zernike's article. I will be following up with several other key incidents which appear to be widely at variance with these claims. These will include what appears to be the current state of the evidence about the "skimmer" operation Kerry has decided to put in play again and the greatest newspaper coverup in modern history.
It is time we all got to see a picture of the famous Kerry "lucky hat," rather than another account by the latest star-struck journalist. It is time for Kerry to stop alluding to "records" and start producing them. And it is time media assigned reporters with military experience or the resources to analyze this record and see just who is lying about what.
Thomas Lipscomb is an independent investigative reporter who was nominated for a Pulitzer for his reporting on Kerry during the 2004 elections. He is a senior fellow at the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future (USC) tom@digitalfuture.org
© 2000-2006 RealClearPolitics.com All Rights Reserved
Sunday, June 04, 2006
From Slate:
Pee No Evil
Why are sportswriters pretending baseball's steroids era is over?
By Jeff Pearlman
Posted Friday, June 2, 2006, at 5:12 PM ET
It's easy to understand the media's love-fest with Albert Pujols. The St. Louis Cardinals slugger crushes baseballs into the outer realms. And more important in the wake of the BALCO fiasco, he has yet to be tainted by evidence of steroid use.
Pujols has 25 homers in 51 games played, putting him on pace to break Barry Bonds' record of 73 home runs in a single season. Both fans and rival players breathlessly praise Pujols as they once did Bonds. St. Louis' marketing department is constantly churning with new ideas for milking the Albert cash cow. And within baseball's press boxes, writers and reporters check their e-mail, drink free sodas, and question, well, nothing.
Two weeks ago, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Pujols "is being touted as the first P.S. slugger, post-steroids." The paper also categorized speculation that Pujols might be juicing as an "errant rumor." The New York Times followed up with this Pujols quote: "My testing is proving a lot. It's working really good."
Is Pujols abusing steroids or human growth hormones? I don't know. But what's alarming in this era of deceit is that nobody seems interested in finding out. A little more than one year removed from congressional hearings that produced the most humiliating images in the game's history, baseball writers have a duty to second-guess everything. Instead, everyone is taking Pujols' test results at face value. Have we forgotten that Barry Bonds has never failed one of Major League Baseball's drug tests?
In Sports Illustrated's baseball preview issue, Tom Verducci, who has done great work exposing the proliferation of steroids in baseball, credulously praised the likes of Pujols and Twins catcher Joe Mauer. Verducci exclaimed that baseball is now "a young man's game, belonging to new stars who, certified by the sport's tougher drug policy, have replaced their juiced-up, broken-down elders who aged so ungracefully. It's baseball as it ought to be. A fresh start." In other words: Masking agents? What masking agents?
Last year, editors at the Post-Dispatch assembled a task force to investigate whether Mark McGwire had ingested performance-enhancing drugs. After a short stretch of fruitless reporting, the effort died. One would think that Pujols—a 13th-round draft pick who has put on 20 pounds of muscle since his debut in 2001—would at least warrant a gander, or perhaps a flight or two to his native Dominican Republic to check out the friendly neighborhood pharmacies. Yet the paper has lifted nary a finger in examining Pujols' background. "Albert isn't an enhanced thug like some of the other suspects," explains Rick Hummel, the longtime Post-Dispatch baseball writer. "He hasn't grown significantly and he's always had a lot of power. So what's there to look into?"
What's there to look into? How about this: For the past decade, baseball has been routinely pulling the bait-and-switch with its fan base. When McGwire and Sammy Sosa engaged in "The Chase" for the home-run record during 1998, we were told the game was being saved, that two great men with selfless hearts were doing the impossible. Oops, it was all a lie. Three years later, we were asked to suspend belief yet again as the 37-year-old Bonds, with a head the size of Jupiter, effortlessly broke McGwire's standard.
Why are journalists so soft in this area? One reason: fear of being shut out. Over the course of a 162-game season, beat writers and columnists work their tails off to develop relationships with players. You grovel. You whimper. You plead. You tiptoe up to a first baseman, hoping he has five minutes to talk about that swollen toe. You share jokes and—embarrassingly—fist pounds. Wanna kill all that hard work in six seconds? Ask the following question: Are you juiced?
After having been duped by the men they cover, America's sportswriters are playing dumb again. One year after being dismissed as a has-been, steroid-using fibber, Yankees first baseman Jason Giambi is the toast of New York. Recent articles in metropolitan newspapers have praised the steadfastness and resiliency that have led him to hit a team-high 14 home runs. But where, oh where, are the doubters? At the start of spring training in 2005, Giambi looked smaller than in seasons past. Now, he has muscles atop muscles atop muscles. Yet unlike the San Francisco Chronicle, which dedicated itself (journalistically and financially) to learning the truth about Bonds, none of the New York dailies have assigned an investigative team to the case. The closest we've come is Joel Sherman of the New York Post, who recently wrote a piece titled "Clean Machine—Giambi Says Fast Start Is Untainted." The article dies with this whimper of a quote: "The big thing I learned during all my problems was that I can only control what I can control. I can't stand on a soapbox every day. I am working my tail off."
I, for one, don't believe him. During my six years at Sports Illustrated, I fell for the trick and covered Giambi as the hulking, lovable lug who cracked jokes and hit monstrous homers. All the while, he was cheating to gain an edge. So, why—when MLB doesn't administer a test for human growth hormone—should I believe Giambi is clean?
Likewise, when I look at Roger Clemens, I wonder: Where's the investigative digging? Like Bonds, Clemens is a larger-than-life athletic specimen. Like Bonds, Clemens is producing at an age when most of his peers are knitting. Unlike Bonds, Clemens does not have journalists breathing down his neck. Instead, the hometown Houston Chronicle has covered his recent re-signing with the Astros as a time for unmitigated celebration. Forget combing through his garbage for vials—I just want the Chronicle to ask Clemens whether he's used. Is the Rocket cheating? Again, I don't know. But doesn't someone have to at least try and find out?
"A lot of baseball writers are drunks or cheat on their wives," says Jose de Jesus Ortiz, the Chronicle's Astros beat writer. "I would never question anybody unless I have evidence. It's unfair to feel that just because of Bonds now we're required to question everyone about their methods."
Is it unfair to pester individual athletes about steroids? Maybe. Is it the right thing to do journalistically? Without a doubt.
Jeff Pearlman is a former Sports Illustrated senior writer and the author of Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero.
Pee No Evil
Why are sportswriters pretending baseball's steroids era is over?
By Jeff Pearlman
Posted Friday, June 2, 2006, at 5:12 PM ET
It's easy to understand the media's love-fest with Albert Pujols. The St. Louis Cardinals slugger crushes baseballs into the outer realms. And more important in the wake of the BALCO fiasco, he has yet to be tainted by evidence of steroid use.
Pujols has 25 homers in 51 games played, putting him on pace to break Barry Bonds' record of 73 home runs in a single season. Both fans and rival players breathlessly praise Pujols as they once did Bonds. St. Louis' marketing department is constantly churning with new ideas for milking the Albert cash cow. And within baseball's press boxes, writers and reporters check their e-mail, drink free sodas, and question, well, nothing.
Two weeks ago, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Pujols "is being touted as the first P.S. slugger, post-steroids." The paper also categorized speculation that Pujols might be juicing as an "errant rumor." The New York Times followed up with this Pujols quote: "My testing is proving a lot. It's working really good."
Is Pujols abusing steroids or human growth hormones? I don't know. But what's alarming in this era of deceit is that nobody seems interested in finding out. A little more than one year removed from congressional hearings that produced the most humiliating images in the game's history, baseball writers have a duty to second-guess everything. Instead, everyone is taking Pujols' test results at face value. Have we forgotten that Barry Bonds has never failed one of Major League Baseball's drug tests?
In Sports Illustrated's baseball preview issue, Tom Verducci, who has done great work exposing the proliferation of steroids in baseball, credulously praised the likes of Pujols and Twins catcher Joe Mauer. Verducci exclaimed that baseball is now "a young man's game, belonging to new stars who, certified by the sport's tougher drug policy, have replaced their juiced-up, broken-down elders who aged so ungracefully. It's baseball as it ought to be. A fresh start." In other words: Masking agents? What masking agents?
Last year, editors at the Post-Dispatch assembled a task force to investigate whether Mark McGwire had ingested performance-enhancing drugs. After a short stretch of fruitless reporting, the effort died. One would think that Pujols—a 13th-round draft pick who has put on 20 pounds of muscle since his debut in 2001—would at least warrant a gander, or perhaps a flight or two to his native Dominican Republic to check out the friendly neighborhood pharmacies. Yet the paper has lifted nary a finger in examining Pujols' background. "Albert isn't an enhanced thug like some of the other suspects," explains Rick Hummel, the longtime Post-Dispatch baseball writer. "He hasn't grown significantly and he's always had a lot of power. So what's there to look into?"
What's there to look into? How about this: For the past decade, baseball has been routinely pulling the bait-and-switch with its fan base. When McGwire and Sammy Sosa engaged in "The Chase" for the home-run record during 1998, we were told the game was being saved, that two great men with selfless hearts were doing the impossible. Oops, it was all a lie. Three years later, we were asked to suspend belief yet again as the 37-year-old Bonds, with a head the size of Jupiter, effortlessly broke McGwire's standard.
Why are journalists so soft in this area? One reason: fear of being shut out. Over the course of a 162-game season, beat writers and columnists work their tails off to develop relationships with players. You grovel. You whimper. You plead. You tiptoe up to a first baseman, hoping he has five minutes to talk about that swollen toe. You share jokes and—embarrassingly—fist pounds. Wanna kill all that hard work in six seconds? Ask the following question: Are you juiced?
After having been duped by the men they cover, America's sportswriters are playing dumb again. One year after being dismissed as a has-been, steroid-using fibber, Yankees first baseman Jason Giambi is the toast of New York. Recent articles in metropolitan newspapers have praised the steadfastness and resiliency that have led him to hit a team-high 14 home runs. But where, oh where, are the doubters? At the start of spring training in 2005, Giambi looked smaller than in seasons past. Now, he has muscles atop muscles atop muscles. Yet unlike the San Francisco Chronicle, which dedicated itself (journalistically and financially) to learning the truth about Bonds, none of the New York dailies have assigned an investigative team to the case. The closest we've come is Joel Sherman of the New York Post, who recently wrote a piece titled "Clean Machine—Giambi Says Fast Start Is Untainted." The article dies with this whimper of a quote: "The big thing I learned during all my problems was that I can only control what I can control. I can't stand on a soapbox every day. I am working my tail off."
I, for one, don't believe him. During my six years at Sports Illustrated, I fell for the trick and covered Giambi as the hulking, lovable lug who cracked jokes and hit monstrous homers. All the while, he was cheating to gain an edge. So, why—when MLB doesn't administer a test for human growth hormone—should I believe Giambi is clean?
Likewise, when I look at Roger Clemens, I wonder: Where's the investigative digging? Like Bonds, Clemens is a larger-than-life athletic specimen. Like Bonds, Clemens is producing at an age when most of his peers are knitting. Unlike Bonds, Clemens does not have journalists breathing down his neck. Instead, the hometown Houston Chronicle has covered his recent re-signing with the Astros as a time for unmitigated celebration. Forget combing through his garbage for vials—I just want the Chronicle to ask Clemens whether he's used. Is the Rocket cheating? Again, I don't know. But doesn't someone have to at least try and find out?
"A lot of baseball writers are drunks or cheat on their wives," says Jose de Jesus Ortiz, the Chronicle's Astros beat writer. "I would never question anybody unless I have evidence. It's unfair to feel that just because of Bonds now we're required to question everyone about their methods."
Is it unfair to pester individual athletes about steroids? Maybe. Is it the right thing to do journalistically? Without a doubt.
Jeff Pearlman is a former Sports Illustrated senior writer and the author of Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero.
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