YOUNG GUNS
By Clint Jackson
CarolinaBlue.com Staff Writer
As the campus of Chapel Hill awaits the arrival this weekend of the top freshman class in the country, Carolina Blue basketball recruiting analyst Clint Jackson answers some questions about the expected impact of the three McDonald's All-Americans, Tywon Lawson, Brandan Wright and Wayne Ellington.
What kind of impact can we expect from Tywon Lawson? What will he need to do better?
I don't think much of anything is going to be an issue with Lawson. He's a stud. The biggest thing I can forsee with Lawson is how much consistency he shows shooting the ball from the perimeter if the defense gives him too much room. If he can do that -- it's lights out. I just don't think there's going to be many ACC guards who can keep him from turning the corner and getting into that lane. And once he gets inside that lane, and the defense breaks down, it's going to be ugly for the opposition. Especially with Tyler and Brandan awaiting the pass. And if they're not there, Lawson has his infamous floater. And I don't think he ever misses that thing.
Carolina fans are going to love the excitement that this kid brings from day one. You don't see many kids who can play this position as well as Lawson does. He's fast, quick, skilled, poised and ultra strong. It's like he drinks diesel fuel for breakfast.
He will be the difference between a really good team and a great team.
How do you think Brandan Wright will fare? What does he bring to the table?
The things that Brandan Wright brings to the table are pretty clear. He's skilled, he's ultra athletic and he's just so tremendously long. It's almost impossible to stop him at times because he can just s-t-r-e-t-c-h right over the top of you and sink that short jumper. He's such a quick leaper inside too. The type of kid that catches the ball and dunks before you realized that the pass went to him in the first place.
One of the most magical scenes with Wright is when he leaps up and grabs a rebound that has bounced high in the air over the rim. His arms are just so high above everyone else that it's just not fair. If someone doesn't make a conscious effort of putting a body on him, he's capable of grabbing offensive rebounds like Tyrus Thomas from LSU did against Duke in the tournament this year.
The only things I've ever worried about with Brandan, honestly, is getting tough and being strong. He's just so light right now, but after reading today's article from Carolina Blue Managing Editor Ryan "Lemonade" Bartow -- I see that the UNC staff has him working hard on that with the 6,000 calorie-a-day diet. It's going to be a tremendous blessing if UNC can get Wright to be around 220-225 pounds by the time the season rolls around. I think making his legs stronger will also be a focus of the UNC strength/conditioning coordinator. Once he's able to hold his position down on the blocks (and keep other's from establishing it) he'll definitely be able to impact the game in more ways.
Expected impact from Wayne Ellington next season?
I think with Ellington, it all depends on how much time he sees on the floor. Getting minutes at the wing guard position is going to be a day in and day out battle on this squad because of the tremendous depth that they have here. I think it's a good problem to have, for certain. And he might not start, quite honestly, at least for awhile into the season.
He's certainly going to give Miller a run on this team for the unofficial title as "best shooter," but I think the key to earning a lot of time at this spot is defense. Ellington is talented enough, that much we've never debated. But is he willing to become as well-rounded and consistent on defense? If he does that -- I think he'll earn the nod. But he's going to have to work everyday, in front of Coach Williams, trying to beat Marcus Ginyard off the dribble (which is pretty darn tough), trying to get enough room against Miller's fast feet, and getting the best of the matchups.
His size and smoothness, however, are just lethal. And I think he'll prove that he's simply too talented to spend much time on the pine. Honestly, I'm 32 years old, and I don't recall if I've ever seen an ACC team with this much depth. You could almost make two top 10 teams out of them.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
Friday, June 16, 2006
Fantasy candidate
By R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.
June 16, 2006
The Hon. Newt Gingrich's recent oracular rumble to a luncheon audience at the Brookings Institution, during which he threatened to seek the Republican presidential nomination if a "vacuum" remains in the Republican field, reminded me of an inescapable insight I suffered sometime in 1998. Mr. Gingrich is the Republicans' Bill Clinton. Being a Republican, Mr. Gingrich is not as hollow as the Arkansas huckster, nor as amusing. In fact, he can be boring.
Springing from the same late 1960s jugendkultur as the Boy President, Mr. Gingrich is the career pol, the hustling, self-promoting narcissist, the sempiternal fantasist. When he was Speaker of the House I should have called him the Boy Speaker. He made his exit from politics like a troubled adolescent: whining, blustering, and guilty as charged.
Had Mr. Gingrich measured himself scrupulously against those Republicans now mentioned as presidential contenders, he never could have spoken of a "vacuum." George Allen, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney are all sturdier candidates than the Boy Speaker whose House colleagues politely put a banana peel under his well-worn wingtips in 1998.
Doubtless there are many other Republicans who would be preferable to Mr. Gingrich. How about Tom Tancredo? What is it that makes Mr. Gingrich think he is a fit candidate to lead the nation? He prides himself on being an intellectual, by which he means being a policy wonk. This is another of his fantasies; he confuses wonkiness with learnedness and wisdom. This is a fantasy he shares with Clinton.
I once heard an English gentleman, fresh from bathing in Mr. Clinton's radiance, confide to the great British historian Paul Johnson that Clinton is "so intelligent." "Not intelligent," Mr. Johnson responded, "cunning." The word encapsulates Mr. Gingrich's thought process perfectly. Yet again, Mr. Gingrich is a Republican. He is not quite as cunning as Bill Clinton. In fact, whenever he found himself up against Mr. Clinton, he was bested by the Boy President.
When all the brag and bounce of Mr. Gingrich's intellectual pretense is anesthetized, and the corpus of his intellectual work is subjected to scholarly analysis, what do we see? An eternal graduate student at a mediocre state university has been playing with bits and pieces of the large ideas of Milton Friedman and like-minded political scientists, for instance, Edward Banfield. Down the hall is Mr. Clinton. The bits and pieces that he plays with are those of Ira Magaziner or Robert B. Reich. Mr. Gingrich is a more adventuresome graduate student.
Both Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Clinton benefited from the 1990s adjournment of character as a desideratum for public life. Very cleverly, candidate Bill Clinton in the 1992 campaign managed to banish character as a campaign issue. He portrayed the topic as a Republican dirty trick, and the journalists swallowed it. Eight years later it became clear why Mr. Clinton was desperate to render the question of character a topic unfit for public discussion. By then Mr. Gingrich too needed this dispensation.
Of course, Republicans are more fastidious than Democrats about personal morals. So when Mr. Gingrich's cutie was discovered even as he was impeaching Mr. Clinton for lying about a cutie and obstruction, Republicans gave Mr. Gingrich the heave-ho.
Now Mr. Gingrich is back and he expects Republican women to forget his treatment of women. He expects Republicans to forget how he bungled the 1998 off-year elections, claiming at one point Republicans would actually pick up seats when -- truth be known -- they were lucky to preserve their margin.
One reason for the Republicans' losses that year was that the Boy Speaker rushed an omnibus spending bill laden with pork through the House, to the dismay of Republican voters. The other was his sophomoric handling of one of the most important constitutional crises of the 20th century, Bill Clinton's impeachment. One day he would summon Republicans to attack. The next day he would claim to be aghast at their combativeness. Again Mr. Clinton bested him.
Now he believes he is a plausible candidate for the presidency. Given his erratic record, do I need to adduce any more evidence that he is a fantasist? He fashioned the Republican takeover of the House in 1994 with the indispensable assistance of his cogenerationists from the gaseous 1960s, the Clintons. In 1998, he recklessly imperiled his party's dominance and disgraced his name. Since his fall he has, as has his Democratic lookalike, strutted and pontificated tirelessly. Both had their moment in history and both blew it.
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is the founder and editor in chief of the American Spectator, a contributing editor to the New York Sun, and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute. His most recent book is "Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House."
By R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.
June 16, 2006
The Hon. Newt Gingrich's recent oracular rumble to a luncheon audience at the Brookings Institution, during which he threatened to seek the Republican presidential nomination if a "vacuum" remains in the Republican field, reminded me of an inescapable insight I suffered sometime in 1998. Mr. Gingrich is the Republicans' Bill Clinton. Being a Republican, Mr. Gingrich is not as hollow as the Arkansas huckster, nor as amusing. In fact, he can be boring.
Springing from the same late 1960s jugendkultur as the Boy President, Mr. Gingrich is the career pol, the hustling, self-promoting narcissist, the sempiternal fantasist. When he was Speaker of the House I should have called him the Boy Speaker. He made his exit from politics like a troubled adolescent: whining, blustering, and guilty as charged.
Had Mr. Gingrich measured himself scrupulously against those Republicans now mentioned as presidential contenders, he never could have spoken of a "vacuum." George Allen, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney are all sturdier candidates than the Boy Speaker whose House colleagues politely put a banana peel under his well-worn wingtips in 1998.
Doubtless there are many other Republicans who would be preferable to Mr. Gingrich. How about Tom Tancredo? What is it that makes Mr. Gingrich think he is a fit candidate to lead the nation? He prides himself on being an intellectual, by which he means being a policy wonk. This is another of his fantasies; he confuses wonkiness with learnedness and wisdom. This is a fantasy he shares with Clinton.
I once heard an English gentleman, fresh from bathing in Mr. Clinton's radiance, confide to the great British historian Paul Johnson that Clinton is "so intelligent." "Not intelligent," Mr. Johnson responded, "cunning." The word encapsulates Mr. Gingrich's thought process perfectly. Yet again, Mr. Gingrich is a Republican. He is not quite as cunning as Bill Clinton. In fact, whenever he found himself up against Mr. Clinton, he was bested by the Boy President.
When all the brag and bounce of Mr. Gingrich's intellectual pretense is anesthetized, and the corpus of his intellectual work is subjected to scholarly analysis, what do we see? An eternal graduate student at a mediocre state university has been playing with bits and pieces of the large ideas of Milton Friedman and like-minded political scientists, for instance, Edward Banfield. Down the hall is Mr. Clinton. The bits and pieces that he plays with are those of Ira Magaziner or Robert B. Reich. Mr. Gingrich is a more adventuresome graduate student.
Both Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Clinton benefited from the 1990s adjournment of character as a desideratum for public life. Very cleverly, candidate Bill Clinton in the 1992 campaign managed to banish character as a campaign issue. He portrayed the topic as a Republican dirty trick, and the journalists swallowed it. Eight years later it became clear why Mr. Clinton was desperate to render the question of character a topic unfit for public discussion. By then Mr. Gingrich too needed this dispensation.
Of course, Republicans are more fastidious than Democrats about personal morals. So when Mr. Gingrich's cutie was discovered even as he was impeaching Mr. Clinton for lying about a cutie and obstruction, Republicans gave Mr. Gingrich the heave-ho.
Now Mr. Gingrich is back and he expects Republican women to forget his treatment of women. He expects Republicans to forget how he bungled the 1998 off-year elections, claiming at one point Republicans would actually pick up seats when -- truth be known -- they were lucky to preserve their margin.
One reason for the Republicans' losses that year was that the Boy Speaker rushed an omnibus spending bill laden with pork through the House, to the dismay of Republican voters. The other was his sophomoric handling of one of the most important constitutional crises of the 20th century, Bill Clinton's impeachment. One day he would summon Republicans to attack. The next day he would claim to be aghast at their combativeness. Again Mr. Clinton bested him.
Now he believes he is a plausible candidate for the presidency. Given his erratic record, do I need to adduce any more evidence that he is a fantasist? He fashioned the Republican takeover of the House in 1994 with the indispensable assistance of his cogenerationists from the gaseous 1960s, the Clintons. In 1998, he recklessly imperiled his party's dominance and disgraced his name. Since his fall he has, as has his Democratic lookalike, strutted and pontificated tirelessly. Both had their moment in history and both blew it.
R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is the founder and editor in chief of the American Spectator, a contributing editor to the New York Sun, and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute. His most recent book is "Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House."
From PopMatters:
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND THE SEEGER SESSIONS BAND
31 May 2006 Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre — Indianapolis, IN
by Jeff Vrabel
Nothing -- absolutely nothing -- about the scene at Bruce Springsteen's concert in Indianapolis hinted that there was Bossness afoot. The crowd was smartly dressed and orderly; purple chandeliers hung on stage; and in the pit, general admission fans jockeyed politely for position. More beer stands were shuttered than open, and there wasn't a single line for a single bathroom. On an unseasonably sticky Indy night, it was hard not to look out at the yawning green lawn (empty as it was) and think sadly: Jimmy Buffett fans are gonna stuff this entire space next month to hear him sing about cheeseburgers.
But, such is the bizarre alternate universe that has swallowed Springsteen's strangely under-attended summer tour with the 17-member Seeger Sessions Band. Rambling along languidly in almost clandestine fashion, it may take the prize for the Worst-Pitched Concert of the Summer.
For the Hazy Davy's sake, I'm as big a Bruce homer as they come, but I'll admit, at first the idea of enduring a folk-powered evening of Pete Seeger songs made me want to sprint home and smooch my copy of Born in the U.S.A.. I like Bruce, and I like Pete Seeger, but when the Boss indulges his folkie leanings, the results are songs like "Nebraska" or the equally festive "The Ghost of Tom Joad." Both tunes are perfect for curling up in an abandoned warehouse and chugging a bottle of whiskey, but that's hardly what you want to do at a sunny amphitheatre show.
And that's why this Seeger business is such an out-of-left-field surprise: against all odds, it's fantastically fun. Seeger's name is on the ticket, sure, but in Springsteen's hands the music gets an enormous, big-band, horn-powered treatment that can only be explained with commas: gospel, blues, folk, rock, and zydeco (there is totally a washboard in the encore). All of this pours out of a tap attached to New Orleans. This is a big Big Easy show, a tribute to the flooded city. It's Bruce born on the bayou, part mourning, part hope, part house party, part cry for rebirth -- all metaphors you may remember from Every Other Thing Bruce Springsteen Has Ever Done.
In the Seeger band's debut performance at Jazz Fest in New Orleans, the mood was understandably subdued, mournful, and respectful. Now, though, the band indulges the spirit of the city, pulling great joy from great pain. As the man slyly howled in the show's ragged, revved-up version of "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)", "What can a poor boy do but play in a ragtime band?"
To be sure, this tour involves a certain degree of trust, particularly when you're dropping 90 bones to hear what my buddy Bradshaw rightly predicted was, "Bruce singing "Froggie Went A'Courtin.'" In fact, everything about Springsteen's brief summer tour seems to exist in a slightly altered reality. It's a universe where twentysomethings square dance, where "Nebraska"'s lo-fi monotoner "Open All Night" becomes a showstopping rave-up, where an emotional high point is a venomous cover of a forgotten blues song that's been retrofitted as an indictment of the government's bungled response to Katrina.
No one really knows what to make of it -- particularly those who rise and fall with the E Street Band. But what it might lack in the fist-pumping mass catharsis of "Badlands", the tour makes up for in the fist-pumping mass catharsis of "My Oklahoma Home." Frankly, I can't remember having a better time at a Bruce show. Or any show, for that matter.
Nor can I remember attending a show where the performers seemed to be having a better time. Aside from during songs about New Orleans, there was a smile on Bruce's face the entire time. And it was with that smile that he drove his 17-piece mean machine through horn-kissed, house-rockers: "Old Dan Tucker", "Oh Mary Don't You Weep", "Pay Me My Money Down".
If Bruce approaches the E Street Band as a man with a legacy to jealously protect, he approaches the Seeger Sessions Band as a work-in-progress, a means to no particular end, a science-fair project that's produced way better data than expected. He does it with a satisfyingly enviable glee. In Indy, he indulged a clever request from a seven-year-old fan down front who brought along a stuffed green frog. "I think we got a request!" Springsteen beamed, igniting the band's first-ever "Froggie Went A' Courtin'". Bonus gag: The kid reported that his name was River. "I think I've got another one I can do, too," Springsteen cracked. Zing!
But this is music that's pure, old-timey American -- a phrase that rankles Springsteen aficionados and detractors alike. Springsteen, the poor bastard, carries the torch as one of America's greatest living rock 'n' roll icons. Fair or not, it's the sort of thing that happens when you stamp your flank in front of the stars and stripes on an album that sells a million fourfillion gajillion copies. But here's the funny thing -- the album We Shall Overcome actually is the treatise on American music that the pinheaded conservative right thought Born in the U.S.A. was; it's just as sneaky in that context as U.S.A. was sneaky outside of it.
As such, political overtones burbled to the surface throughout the show. Wartime prayers appeared in the form of the Irish tale "Mrs. McGrath", the story of a mother whose son returns home after seven years without his legs. Of course, the showstopper was Springsteen's refashioning of Blind Willie McTell's "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" Bruce kept the first verse and rewrote the last three to reflect Katrina: "Me and my old school pals had some mighty high times 'round here / And what happened to you poor black folks well it just ain't fair," he sang, recalling the infuriating scene last fall in which President Bush stood with Trent Lott and said he looked forward to partying on Lott's soon-to-be rebuilt porch. It's brutal discourse.
The show ended with a sweet, acoustic-based "When the Saints Go Marching In", stripped of its horn-fueled zaniness and recast as a melancholy prayer shared by Springsteen and guitarist/vocalist Marc Anthony Thompson (who records as Chocolate Genius): "And some say that this world of trouble is the only one we'll ever see / But I'm waiting for that morning when the new world is revealed."
For the encore, a guy came out and, in a moment of purely Bruce-ian shtick, played dishes, bowls, and a kitchen sink…. with a spoon. "Jesus Christ, be careful," Springsteen joked. "That's my mother-in-law's goddamned silverware... Patti's gonna fucking kill me."
A certain sense of something surrounds the E Street Band these days -- not complacency necessarily , but an expectation of sheer reliability, a pretty decent bet against disappointment. It's like a meal at the Cheesecake Factory or watching a Braves game. E Street shows in the past few years have been good, even great, but also, at times, workmanlike. And I think, truly, that Bruce fears slipping into that hazy zone of complacency. Hence, the silverware.
As such, this piece should have probably been about finding new ways to enliven one's catalog or legacy. It should have probably used the word "reinvention" a lot and been filled with lively clichés about Neil Young. But for all this wearying talk of meanings and metaphors and the usual Springsteenian subtext of a blue-collar rock n' roll Joe trying to save the world, I also cannot remember having had this good a time at a show. If Bruce sneaks into your town this summer, check it out. It doesn't seem much like a Springsteen show, and that may be the best thing about it.
— 16 June 2006
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND THE SEEGER SESSIONS BAND
31 May 2006 Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre — Indianapolis, IN
by Jeff Vrabel
Nothing -- absolutely nothing -- about the scene at Bruce Springsteen's concert in Indianapolis hinted that there was Bossness afoot. The crowd was smartly dressed and orderly; purple chandeliers hung on stage; and in the pit, general admission fans jockeyed politely for position. More beer stands were shuttered than open, and there wasn't a single line for a single bathroom. On an unseasonably sticky Indy night, it was hard not to look out at the yawning green lawn (empty as it was) and think sadly: Jimmy Buffett fans are gonna stuff this entire space next month to hear him sing about cheeseburgers.
But, such is the bizarre alternate universe that has swallowed Springsteen's strangely under-attended summer tour with the 17-member Seeger Sessions Band. Rambling along languidly in almost clandestine fashion, it may take the prize for the Worst-Pitched Concert of the Summer.
For the Hazy Davy's sake, I'm as big a Bruce homer as they come, but I'll admit, at first the idea of enduring a folk-powered evening of Pete Seeger songs made me want to sprint home and smooch my copy of Born in the U.S.A.. I like Bruce, and I like Pete Seeger, but when the Boss indulges his folkie leanings, the results are songs like "Nebraska" or the equally festive "The Ghost of Tom Joad." Both tunes are perfect for curling up in an abandoned warehouse and chugging a bottle of whiskey, but that's hardly what you want to do at a sunny amphitheatre show.
And that's why this Seeger business is such an out-of-left-field surprise: against all odds, it's fantastically fun. Seeger's name is on the ticket, sure, but in Springsteen's hands the music gets an enormous, big-band, horn-powered treatment that can only be explained with commas: gospel, blues, folk, rock, and zydeco (there is totally a washboard in the encore). All of this pours out of a tap attached to New Orleans. This is a big Big Easy show, a tribute to the flooded city. It's Bruce born on the bayou, part mourning, part hope, part house party, part cry for rebirth -- all metaphors you may remember from Every Other Thing Bruce Springsteen Has Ever Done.
In the Seeger band's debut performance at Jazz Fest in New Orleans, the mood was understandably subdued, mournful, and respectful. Now, though, the band indulges the spirit of the city, pulling great joy from great pain. As the man slyly howled in the show's ragged, revved-up version of "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)", "What can a poor boy do but play in a ragtime band?"
To be sure, this tour involves a certain degree of trust, particularly when you're dropping 90 bones to hear what my buddy Bradshaw rightly predicted was, "Bruce singing "Froggie Went A'Courtin.'" In fact, everything about Springsteen's brief summer tour seems to exist in a slightly altered reality. It's a universe where twentysomethings square dance, where "Nebraska"'s lo-fi monotoner "Open All Night" becomes a showstopping rave-up, where an emotional high point is a venomous cover of a forgotten blues song that's been retrofitted as an indictment of the government's bungled response to Katrina.
No one really knows what to make of it -- particularly those who rise and fall with the E Street Band. But what it might lack in the fist-pumping mass catharsis of "Badlands", the tour makes up for in the fist-pumping mass catharsis of "My Oklahoma Home." Frankly, I can't remember having a better time at a Bruce show. Or any show, for that matter.
Nor can I remember attending a show where the performers seemed to be having a better time. Aside from during songs about New Orleans, there was a smile on Bruce's face the entire time. And it was with that smile that he drove his 17-piece mean machine through horn-kissed, house-rockers: "Old Dan Tucker", "Oh Mary Don't You Weep", "Pay Me My Money Down".
If Bruce approaches the E Street Band as a man with a legacy to jealously protect, he approaches the Seeger Sessions Band as a work-in-progress, a means to no particular end, a science-fair project that's produced way better data than expected. He does it with a satisfyingly enviable glee. In Indy, he indulged a clever request from a seven-year-old fan down front who brought along a stuffed green frog. "I think we got a request!" Springsteen beamed, igniting the band's first-ever "Froggie Went A' Courtin'". Bonus gag: The kid reported that his name was River. "I think I've got another one I can do, too," Springsteen cracked. Zing!
But this is music that's pure, old-timey American -- a phrase that rankles Springsteen aficionados and detractors alike. Springsteen, the poor bastard, carries the torch as one of America's greatest living rock 'n' roll icons. Fair or not, it's the sort of thing that happens when you stamp your flank in front of the stars and stripes on an album that sells a million fourfillion gajillion copies. But here's the funny thing -- the album We Shall Overcome actually is the treatise on American music that the pinheaded conservative right thought Born in the U.S.A. was; it's just as sneaky in that context as U.S.A. was sneaky outside of it.
As such, political overtones burbled to the surface throughout the show. Wartime prayers appeared in the form of the Irish tale "Mrs. McGrath", the story of a mother whose son returns home after seven years without his legs. Of course, the showstopper was Springsteen's refashioning of Blind Willie McTell's "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?" Bruce kept the first verse and rewrote the last three to reflect Katrina: "Me and my old school pals had some mighty high times 'round here / And what happened to you poor black folks well it just ain't fair," he sang, recalling the infuriating scene last fall in which President Bush stood with Trent Lott and said he looked forward to partying on Lott's soon-to-be rebuilt porch. It's brutal discourse.
The show ended with a sweet, acoustic-based "When the Saints Go Marching In", stripped of its horn-fueled zaniness and recast as a melancholy prayer shared by Springsteen and guitarist/vocalist Marc Anthony Thompson (who records as Chocolate Genius): "And some say that this world of trouble is the only one we'll ever see / But I'm waiting for that morning when the new world is revealed."
For the encore, a guy came out and, in a moment of purely Bruce-ian shtick, played dishes, bowls, and a kitchen sink…. with a spoon. "Jesus Christ, be careful," Springsteen joked. "That's my mother-in-law's goddamned silverware... Patti's gonna fucking kill me."
A certain sense of something surrounds the E Street Band these days -- not complacency necessarily , but an expectation of sheer reliability, a pretty decent bet against disappointment. It's like a meal at the Cheesecake Factory or watching a Braves game. E Street shows in the past few years have been good, even great, but also, at times, workmanlike. And I think, truly, that Bruce fears slipping into that hazy zone of complacency. Hence, the silverware.
As such, this piece should have probably been about finding new ways to enliven one's catalog or legacy. It should have probably used the word "reinvention" a lot and been filled with lively clichés about Neil Young. But for all this wearying talk of meanings and metaphors and the usual Springsteenian subtext of a blue-collar rock n' roll Joe trying to save the world, I also cannot remember having had this good a time at a show. If Bruce sneaks into your town this summer, check it out. It doesn't seem much like a Springsteen show, and that may be the best thing about it.
— 16 June 2006
From www.suntimes.com:
Workingman's anthems of Boss cloaked in irony
BY DAVE HOEKSTRA Staff Reporter
June 15, 2006
Pete Seeger sings songs of peace, hope and the working class. Bruce Springsteen's idea to reinterpret the Seeger songbook with broad strokes of street jazz and gospel is a noble thought. Unfortunately, Springsteen's Tuesday night "Seeger Sessions" concert was outsourced to the First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre in Tinley Park.
Everything that was so right about the music was so wrong for the venue.
Springsteen and his raucous 17-piece band failed to even fill the pavilion. Roughly 5,500 fans showed up, and the $92 ticket price knocked out the working-class audience that Springsteen and Seeger have championed. This is First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre, as in cha-ching. A Corona beer was $10. "Seeger Session" programs were $20. I know many fans who would have taken a chance on the show had tickets been $50 or less. So who's left? People who may not share Seeger and Springsteen's political beliefs.
How do I know this? Springsteen's first encore was an evocative version of "Bring Them Home (If You Love Your Uncle Sam)," which Seeger wrote in 1966 as an anti-Vietnam War song. Back then, thousands of people sang with Seeger on the chorus: "Bring 'em home, bring 'em home, but I got a right to sing this song. ..."
But after Tuesday's rendition, there was a smattering of applause to a message that is as much about freedom of expression as it is against war. The starchy atmosphere was not lost on the Boss, who earlier in the concert remarked, "Tinley Park. I don't know where the hell that is -- some big black box outside of Chicago?"
So Springsteen tried his best, especially in the second portion of the 2-1/2-hour show. (In what is becoming a Springsteen tradition, he kicked off the concert almost an hour after the advertised 7:30 p.m. start.) He rearranged "Ramrod" into a Tex-Mex-meets-ska roadhouse number with tuba solos, and "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)" continues to embrace the zydeco seasonings Springsteen deployed at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
New Orleans is still much on Springsteen's mind. He wasn't as vocal about President Bush as he was in New Orleans, explaining that he doesn't "like to kick a man when he's down." But Springsteen's hard-rockin' reworking of Blind Alfred Reed's "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live" continues to be an emotional cornerstone of the set.
Springsteen added his own post-Katrina lyrics to the 1929 blues song that reflected on the Great Depression. On Tuesday, he sang of "bodies floatin' on Canal and the levees gone to hell" with raw conviction and empathy. Moments earlier, Springsteen shared vocals with Marc Anthony Thompson (Chocolate Genius) as they recast "Long Black Veil" through pure country gospel.
The stage was basked in shades of red, and I found the three chandeliers above the band very ironic. Here's a news flash: There are places in Chicago like the Auditorium Theatre and Orchestra Hall that have storied chandeliers, where Seeger and the Weavers actually performed, and are more accessible for older folk music fans than a shed among the little boxes that Seeger himself sang about in 1963's ode to suburbia "Little Boxes (Ticky Tacky)."
Workingman's anthems of Boss cloaked in irony
BY DAVE HOEKSTRA Staff Reporter
June 15, 2006
Pete Seeger sings songs of peace, hope and the working class. Bruce Springsteen's idea to reinterpret the Seeger songbook with broad strokes of street jazz and gospel is a noble thought. Unfortunately, Springsteen's Tuesday night "Seeger Sessions" concert was outsourced to the First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre in Tinley Park.
Everything that was so right about the music was so wrong for the venue.
Springsteen and his raucous 17-piece band failed to even fill the pavilion. Roughly 5,500 fans showed up, and the $92 ticket price knocked out the working-class audience that Springsteen and Seeger have championed. This is First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre, as in cha-ching. A Corona beer was $10. "Seeger Session" programs were $20. I know many fans who would have taken a chance on the show had tickets been $50 or less. So who's left? People who may not share Seeger and Springsteen's political beliefs.
How do I know this? Springsteen's first encore was an evocative version of "Bring Them Home (If You Love Your Uncle Sam)," which Seeger wrote in 1966 as an anti-Vietnam War song. Back then, thousands of people sang with Seeger on the chorus: "Bring 'em home, bring 'em home, but I got a right to sing this song. ..."
But after Tuesday's rendition, there was a smattering of applause to a message that is as much about freedom of expression as it is against war. The starchy atmosphere was not lost on the Boss, who earlier in the concert remarked, "Tinley Park. I don't know where the hell that is -- some big black box outside of Chicago?"
So Springsteen tried his best, especially in the second portion of the 2-1/2-hour show. (In what is becoming a Springsteen tradition, he kicked off the concert almost an hour after the advertised 7:30 p.m. start.) He rearranged "Ramrod" into a Tex-Mex-meets-ska roadhouse number with tuba solos, and "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)" continues to embrace the zydeco seasonings Springsteen deployed at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
New Orleans is still much on Springsteen's mind. He wasn't as vocal about President Bush as he was in New Orleans, explaining that he doesn't "like to kick a man when he's down." But Springsteen's hard-rockin' reworking of Blind Alfred Reed's "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live" continues to be an emotional cornerstone of the set.
Springsteen added his own post-Katrina lyrics to the 1929 blues song that reflected on the Great Depression. On Tuesday, he sang of "bodies floatin' on Canal and the levees gone to hell" with raw conviction and empathy. Moments earlier, Springsteen shared vocals with Marc Anthony Thompson (Chocolate Genius) as they recast "Long Black Veil" through pure country gospel.
The stage was basked in shades of red, and I found the three chandeliers above the band very ironic. Here's a news flash: There are places in Chicago like the Auditorium Theatre and Orchestra Hall that have storied chandeliers, where Seeger and the Weavers actually performed, and are more accessible for older folk music fans than a shed among the little boxes that Seeger himself sang about in 1963's ode to suburbia "Little Boxes (Ticky Tacky)."
From CarolinaHurricanes.com:
PERSONAL FAITH LEADS TO 'GREAT RIDE' FOR HURRICANES PLAYERS
By DAVE POND
RALEIGH, NC (May 17, 2006) - As the Stanley Cup Final field continues to narrow, playoff beards, lucky shirts, and a number of meticulous routines have given NHL players the confidence they believe will lead to on-ice success.
Superstition extends to almost every athletic competition on the planet. Baseball hall-of-famer Wade Boggs ate chicken before every game of his 18-year career, while Michael Jordan never took to the NBA hardwood without his lucky UNC shorts underneath his uniform.
But for a number of players, superstition is superseded by faith in a higher power, something greater than the game itself.
"Guys have different beliefs and different backgrounds, so they're going to rely on different things," Carolina Hurricanes veteran defenseman Glen Wesley said. "When I go out on the ice I have a real sense of peace instead of being uptight or afraid, because I know that whatever happens, we're called to go out there and lay it all on the line.
"For me, it's clearly based on God's word and God's truth," he said. "That's my backbone."
Goaltender Cam Ward has seen his share of ups and downs during a tumultuous 2005-06 rookie season. Ward played so little at one point of the year that he was shipped to the minors for conditioning purposes.
"I don't think it's been difficult to keep my faith this year," said Ward, Carolina's first-round pick in 2002. "That's something that's aside from hockey and really comes first.
"In hockey, everyone goes through ups and downs, but it's how you react and respond to those situations that really matters."
And now, the roller-coaster ride is back on the upswing.
In game 2 of the Hurricanes' first-round playoff matchup with Montreal, Ward was called upon to replace a flu-stricken Martin Gerber in net for Carolina. Although the Hurricanes would fall 6-5 in a double-overtime thriller, Ward played well and was rewarded with a Game 3 start at the Bell Centre in Montreal.
The rookie's calm demeanor under pressure has been a key to the Hurricanes' success - not only did Carolina win the next four straight to eliminate the Habs, but took four of five against New Jersey to advance to Saturday's Eastern Conference Final.
"We remain unsure that Cam even possesses a pulse," Hurricanes center Eric Staal said with a laugh. "And he doesn't ever overthink things. We hope that will allow him to continue on this great roll that he is on."
Like many of his teammates, Ward's playoff beard has filled in nicely, thanks to the length of the Hurricanes' postseason run. But it's a pregame prayer session that allows the 22-year-old to stay focused and confident - even after being pulled from Saturday's Game 4, down 4-0 to the Devils.
"Before every game I will pray just before I go on the ice," Ward said. "God gave me a special talent, and I will be forever grateful for that. When I say a prayer, it really helps me feel more relaxed and calm."
After Gerber's solid relief performance in Game 4, Ward found himself back in net for Sunday's Game 5. Ward allowed just one goal en route to a 4-1 win that eliminated New Jersey and all-world goaltender Martin Brodeur - Ward's boyhood idol.
"You have to remind yourself to be thankful for the skills and the talents that you've been blessed with," Ward said. "It's just really exciting for me to be a part of such a great hockey club, playing the highest level of hockey in the entire world.
"I think it's very important to enjoy the moment, be thankful for it and make the best of it."
At 37, Wesley is one of the elder statesmen in the Hurricanes' locker room. Through 18 years of ups, downs, injuries and accolades, faith has remained a key component in the life of the veteran blueliner.
"When you look at an injury, a setback or anything else comes your way, you have to look to the truth," Wesley said. "For me, that's going into God's word."
Day in and day out, that truth has become the blueprint upon which Wesley lives out his daily life.
"We're called to lay it on the line," he said. "In reading His word and being able to renew that strength every day, you can follow it up by doing what you are able to do within your own limitations."
Wesley, a Hurricanes alternate captain, is looked up to by his Hurricanes teammates both on and off the ice.
"At Christmas, Glen invited me and others on the team to join him and his family at their church's annual Christmas play," Ward said. "Being a rookie, it definitely meant a lot to me to have a longtime NHL veteran take on that role and include his teammates in worship."
With 155 postseason games under his belt, Wesley holds the distinction of being the single player who has appeared in the most playoff games without winning a Stanley Cup title. It's not a quest that rules his life, nor would it be a blemish on Wesley's career if he never gets to raise the Cup in victory.
"I always say 'God knows'," Wesley said. "I trust that, and I know that if it's His will, then great - but if not, I've had a great ride. I don't hold that as a priority.
"My eternal salvation is far more important to me - it's more important to have that eternal security and one day be at the feet of the Lord than to be at the foot of the Cup," he said. "Life here on earth is temporary, and Heaven is eternal."
PERSONAL FAITH LEADS TO 'GREAT RIDE' FOR HURRICANES PLAYERS
By DAVE POND
RALEIGH, NC (May 17, 2006) - As the Stanley Cup Final field continues to narrow, playoff beards, lucky shirts, and a number of meticulous routines have given NHL players the confidence they believe will lead to on-ice success.
Superstition extends to almost every athletic competition on the planet. Baseball hall-of-famer Wade Boggs ate chicken before every game of his 18-year career, while Michael Jordan never took to the NBA hardwood without his lucky UNC shorts underneath his uniform.
But for a number of players, superstition is superseded by faith in a higher power, something greater than the game itself.
"Guys have different beliefs and different backgrounds, so they're going to rely on different things," Carolina Hurricanes veteran defenseman Glen Wesley said. "When I go out on the ice I have a real sense of peace instead of being uptight or afraid, because I know that whatever happens, we're called to go out there and lay it all on the line.
"For me, it's clearly based on God's word and God's truth," he said. "That's my backbone."
Goaltender Cam Ward has seen his share of ups and downs during a tumultuous 2005-06 rookie season. Ward played so little at one point of the year that he was shipped to the minors for conditioning purposes.
"I don't think it's been difficult to keep my faith this year," said Ward, Carolina's first-round pick in 2002. "That's something that's aside from hockey and really comes first.
"In hockey, everyone goes through ups and downs, but it's how you react and respond to those situations that really matters."
And now, the roller-coaster ride is back on the upswing.
In game 2 of the Hurricanes' first-round playoff matchup with Montreal, Ward was called upon to replace a flu-stricken Martin Gerber in net for Carolina. Although the Hurricanes would fall 6-5 in a double-overtime thriller, Ward played well and was rewarded with a Game 3 start at the Bell Centre in Montreal.
The rookie's calm demeanor under pressure has been a key to the Hurricanes' success - not only did Carolina win the next four straight to eliminate the Habs, but took four of five against New Jersey to advance to Saturday's Eastern Conference Final.
"We remain unsure that Cam even possesses a pulse," Hurricanes center Eric Staal said with a laugh. "And he doesn't ever overthink things. We hope that will allow him to continue on this great roll that he is on."
Like many of his teammates, Ward's playoff beard has filled in nicely, thanks to the length of the Hurricanes' postseason run. But it's a pregame prayer session that allows the 22-year-old to stay focused and confident - even after being pulled from Saturday's Game 4, down 4-0 to the Devils.
"Before every game I will pray just before I go on the ice," Ward said. "God gave me a special talent, and I will be forever grateful for that. When I say a prayer, it really helps me feel more relaxed and calm."
After Gerber's solid relief performance in Game 4, Ward found himself back in net for Sunday's Game 5. Ward allowed just one goal en route to a 4-1 win that eliminated New Jersey and all-world goaltender Martin Brodeur - Ward's boyhood idol.
"You have to remind yourself to be thankful for the skills and the talents that you've been blessed with," Ward said. "It's just really exciting for me to be a part of such a great hockey club, playing the highest level of hockey in the entire world.
"I think it's very important to enjoy the moment, be thankful for it and make the best of it."
At 37, Wesley is one of the elder statesmen in the Hurricanes' locker room. Through 18 years of ups, downs, injuries and accolades, faith has remained a key component in the life of the veteran blueliner.
"When you look at an injury, a setback or anything else comes your way, you have to look to the truth," Wesley said. "For me, that's going into God's word."
Day in and day out, that truth has become the blueprint upon which Wesley lives out his daily life.
"We're called to lay it on the line," he said. "In reading His word and being able to renew that strength every day, you can follow it up by doing what you are able to do within your own limitations."
Wesley, a Hurricanes alternate captain, is looked up to by his Hurricanes teammates both on and off the ice.
"At Christmas, Glen invited me and others on the team to join him and his family at their church's annual Christmas play," Ward said. "Being a rookie, it definitely meant a lot to me to have a longtime NHL veteran take on that role and include his teammates in worship."
With 155 postseason games under his belt, Wesley holds the distinction of being the single player who has appeared in the most playoff games without winning a Stanley Cup title. It's not a quest that rules his life, nor would it be a blemish on Wesley's career if he never gets to raise the Cup in victory.
"I always say 'God knows'," Wesley said. "I trust that, and I know that if it's His will, then great - but if not, I've had a great ride. I don't hold that as a priority.
"My eternal salvation is far more important to me - it's more important to have that eternal security and one day be at the feet of the Lord than to be at the foot of the Cup," he said. "Life here on earth is temporary, and Heaven is eternal."
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Scientists respond to Gore's warnings of climate catastrophe
"The Inconvenient Truth" is indeed inconvenient to alarmists
By Tom Harris
Monday, June 12, 2006
"Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it," Al Gore sensibly asserts in his film "An Inconvenient Truth", showing at Cumberland 4 Cinemas in Toronto since Jun 2. With that outlook in mind, what do world climate experts actually think about the science of his movie?
Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."
But surely Carter is merely part of what most people regard as a tiny cadre of "climate change skeptics" who disagree with the "vast majority of scientists" Gore cites?
No; Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. "Climate experts" is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field.
Even among that fraction, many focus their studies on the impacts of climate change; biologists, for example, who study everything from insects to polar bears to poison ivy. "While many are highly skilled researchers, they generally do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate change," explains former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball. "They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies."
This is highly valuable knowledge, but doesn't make them climate change cause experts, only climate impact experts.
So we have a smaller fraction.
But it becomes smaller still. Among experts who actually examine the causes of change on a global scale, many concentrate their research on designing and enhancing computer models of hypothetical futures. "These models have been consistently wrong in all their scenarios," asserts Ball. "Since modelers concede computer outputs are not "predictions" but are in fact merely scenarios, they are negligent in letting policy-makers and the public think they are actually making forecasts."
We should listen most to scientists who use real data to try to understand what nature is actually telling us about the causes and extent of global climate change. In this relatively small community, there is no consensus, despite what Gore and others would suggest.
Here is a small sample of the side of the debate we almost never hear:
Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years." Patterson asked the committee, "On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"
Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and "hundreds of other studies" reveal: on all time scales, there is very good correlation between Earth's temperature and natural celestial phenomena such changes in the brightness of the Sun.
Dr. Boris Winterhalter, former marine researcher at the Geological Survey of Finland and professor in marine geology, University of Helsinki, takes apart Gore's dramatic display of Antarctic glaciers collapsing into the sea. "The breaking glacier wall is a normally occurring phenomenon which is due to the normal advance of a glacier," says Winterhalter. "In Antarctica the temperature is low enough to prohibit melting of the ice front, so if the ice is grounded, it has to break off in beautiful ice cascades. If the water is deep enough icebergs will form."
Dr. Wibj?rn Karl?n, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden, admits, "Some small areas in the Antarctic Peninsula have broken up recently, just like it has done back in time. The temperature in this part of Antarctica has increased recently, probably because of a small change in the position of the low pressure systems."
But Karl?n clarifies that the 'mass balance' of Antarctica is positive - more snow is accumulating than melting off. As a result, Ball explains, there is an increase in the 'calving' of icebergs as the ice dome of Antarctica is growing and flowing to the oceans. When Greenland and Antarctica are assessed together, "their mass balance is considered to possibly increase the sea level by 0.03 mm/year - not much of an effect," Karl?n concludes.
The Antarctica has survived warm and cold events over millions of years. A meltdown is simply not a realistic scenario in the foreseeable future.
Gore tells us in the film, "Starting in 1970, there was a precipitous drop-off in the amount and extent and thickness of the Arctic ice cap." This is misleading, according to Ball: "The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology."
Karl?n explains that a paper published in 2003 by University of Alaska professor Igor Polyakov shows that, the region of the Arctic where rising temperature is supposedly endangering polar bears showed fluctuations since 1940 but no overall temperature rise. "For several published records it is a decrease for the last 50 years," says Karl?n
Dr. Dick Morgan, former advisor to the World Meteorological Organization and climatology researcher at University of Exeter, U.K. gives the details, "There has been some decrease in ice thickness in the Canadian Arctic over the past 30 years but no melt down. The Canadian Ice Service records show that from 1971-1981 there was average, to above average, ice thickness. From 1981-1982 there was a sharp decrease of 15% but there was a quick recovery to average, to slightly above average, values from 1983-1995. A sharp drop of 30% occurred again 1996-1998 and since then there has been a steady increase to reach near normal conditions since 2001."
Concerning Gore's beliefs about worldwide warming, Morgan points out that, in addition to the cooling in the NW Atlantic, massive areas of cooling are found in the North and South Pacific Ocean; the whole of the Amazon Valley; the north coast of South America and the Caribbean; the eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caucasus and Red Sea; New Zealand and even the Ganges Valley in India. Morgan explains, "Had the IPCC used the standard parameter for climate change (the 30 year average) and used an equal area projection, instead of the Mercator (which doubled the area of warming in Alaska, Siberia and the Antarctic Ocean) warming and cooling would have been almost in balance."
Gore's point that 200 cities and towns in the American West set all time high temperature records is also misleading according to Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. "It is not unusual for some locations, out of the thousands of cities and towns in the U.S., to set all-time records," he says. "The actual data shows that overall, recent temperatures in the U.S. were not unusual."
Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, "The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."
In April sixty of the world's leading experts in the field asked Prime Minister Harper to order a thorough public review of the science of climate change, something that has never happened in Canada. Considering what's at stake - either the end of civilization, if you believe Gore, or a waste of billions of dollars, if you believe his opponents - it seems like a reasonable request.
Tom Harris is mechanical engineer and Ottawa Director of High Park Group, a public affairs and public policy company. He can be reached at letters@canadafreepress.com
"The Inconvenient Truth" is indeed inconvenient to alarmists
By Tom Harris
Monday, June 12, 2006
"Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it," Al Gore sensibly asserts in his film "An Inconvenient Truth", showing at Cumberland 4 Cinemas in Toronto since Jun 2. With that outlook in mind, what do world climate experts actually think about the science of his movie?
Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."
But surely Carter is merely part of what most people regard as a tiny cadre of "climate change skeptics" who disagree with the "vast majority of scientists" Gore cites?
No; Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. "Climate experts" is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field.
Even among that fraction, many focus their studies on the impacts of climate change; biologists, for example, who study everything from insects to polar bears to poison ivy. "While many are highly skilled researchers, they generally do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate change," explains former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball. "They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies."
This is highly valuable knowledge, but doesn't make them climate change cause experts, only climate impact experts.
So we have a smaller fraction.
But it becomes smaller still. Among experts who actually examine the causes of change on a global scale, many concentrate their research on designing and enhancing computer models of hypothetical futures. "These models have been consistently wrong in all their scenarios," asserts Ball. "Since modelers concede computer outputs are not "predictions" but are in fact merely scenarios, they are negligent in letting policy-makers and the public think they are actually making forecasts."
We should listen most to scientists who use real data to try to understand what nature is actually telling us about the causes and extent of global climate change. In this relatively small community, there is no consensus, despite what Gore and others would suggest.
Here is a small sample of the side of the debate we almost never hear:
Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years." Patterson asked the committee, "On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?"
Patterson concluded his testimony by explaining what his research and "hundreds of other studies" reveal: on all time scales, there is very good correlation between Earth's temperature and natural celestial phenomena such changes in the brightness of the Sun.
Dr. Boris Winterhalter, former marine researcher at the Geological Survey of Finland and professor in marine geology, University of Helsinki, takes apart Gore's dramatic display of Antarctic glaciers collapsing into the sea. "The breaking glacier wall is a normally occurring phenomenon which is due to the normal advance of a glacier," says Winterhalter. "In Antarctica the temperature is low enough to prohibit melting of the ice front, so if the ice is grounded, it has to break off in beautiful ice cascades. If the water is deep enough icebergs will form."
Dr. Wibj?rn Karl?n, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden, admits, "Some small areas in the Antarctic Peninsula have broken up recently, just like it has done back in time. The temperature in this part of Antarctica has increased recently, probably because of a small change in the position of the low pressure systems."
But Karl?n clarifies that the 'mass balance' of Antarctica is positive - more snow is accumulating than melting off. As a result, Ball explains, there is an increase in the 'calving' of icebergs as the ice dome of Antarctica is growing and flowing to the oceans. When Greenland and Antarctica are assessed together, "their mass balance is considered to possibly increase the sea level by 0.03 mm/year - not much of an effect," Karl?n concludes.
The Antarctica has survived warm and cold events over millions of years. A meltdown is simply not a realistic scenario in the foreseeable future.
Gore tells us in the film, "Starting in 1970, there was a precipitous drop-off in the amount and extent and thickness of the Arctic ice cap." This is misleading, according to Ball: "The survey that Gore cites was a single transect across one part of the Arctic basin in the month of October during the 1960s when we were in the middle of the cooling period. The 1990 runs were done in the warmer month of September, using a wholly different technology."
Karl?n explains that a paper published in 2003 by University of Alaska professor Igor Polyakov shows that, the region of the Arctic where rising temperature is supposedly endangering polar bears showed fluctuations since 1940 but no overall temperature rise. "For several published records it is a decrease for the last 50 years," says Karl?n
Dr. Dick Morgan, former advisor to the World Meteorological Organization and climatology researcher at University of Exeter, U.K. gives the details, "There has been some decrease in ice thickness in the Canadian Arctic over the past 30 years but no melt down. The Canadian Ice Service records show that from 1971-1981 there was average, to above average, ice thickness. From 1981-1982 there was a sharp decrease of 15% but there was a quick recovery to average, to slightly above average, values from 1983-1995. A sharp drop of 30% occurred again 1996-1998 and since then there has been a steady increase to reach near normal conditions since 2001."
Concerning Gore's beliefs about worldwide warming, Morgan points out that, in addition to the cooling in the NW Atlantic, massive areas of cooling are found in the North and South Pacific Ocean; the whole of the Amazon Valley; the north coast of South America and the Caribbean; the eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, Caucasus and Red Sea; New Zealand and even the Ganges Valley in India. Morgan explains, "Had the IPCC used the standard parameter for climate change (the 30 year average) and used an equal area projection, instead of the Mercator (which doubled the area of warming in Alaska, Siberia and the Antarctic Ocean) warming and cooling would have been almost in balance."
Gore's point that 200 cities and towns in the American West set all time high temperature records is also misleading according to Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. "It is not unusual for some locations, out of the thousands of cities and towns in the U.S., to set all-time records," he says. "The actual data shows that overall, recent temperatures in the U.S. were not unusual."
Carter does not pull his punches about Gore's activism, "The man is an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but feel unable to state publicly) that his propaganda crusade is mostly based on junk science."
In April sixty of the world's leading experts in the field asked Prime Minister Harper to order a thorough public review of the science of climate change, something that has never happened in Canada. Considering what's at stake - either the end of civilization, if you believe Gore, or a waste of billions of dollars, if you believe his opponents - it seems like a reasonable request.
Tom Harris is mechanical engineer and Ottawa Director of High Park Group, a public affairs and public policy company. He can be reached at letters@canadafreepress.com
'Movimiento' aims to take back America
James P. Pinkerton
June 15, 2006
Advocates of an open border between the U.S. and Mexico do their best to present a mellow American flag-waving image to the public. But when they gather in semiprivate, they communicate much differently to each other. Perhaps they need to be even more careful.
In the big pro-immigration marches this spring, Hispanic activists sought to present themselves as "civil rights" advocates in the gentle and inclusive tradition of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Oh sure, some of the recent marchers went "off message," carrying Mexican flags and calling for "reconquista," but for the most part, the demonstrators were well-behaved.
But offstage, as it were, a different and harsher truth comes out. It's not a "movement," they tell each other when cameras aren't watching, it's a "movimiento" - and that Spanish-language phrasing speaks volumes about the true tilt of pro-immigration activists.
How do I know this? On Tuesday, I attended a panel discussion entitled "The New Immigrants Movement," part of a "Take Back America" conference convened in Washington, D.C., by the left-wing Campaign for America's Future. The event was open to anyone, although fewer than 100 people showed up. But to give you a flavor of the meeting, here are the surnames of the people on the panel: Lovato, Salas, Contreras, Lopez, Ramirez and another Lopez. All Hispanic - and some quite angry.
Consider the words of Roberto Lovato, identified as a writer for New American Media, describing itself as "the country's first and largest national collaboration of ethnic news organizations." Speaking first, Lovato declared that he had problems with the words "civil rights." Why? In part because that phrase had been used by black Americans half a century ago - it was their term. But mostly, he continued, the term is inapt because today "a lot of the members of the movement were political revolutionaries in countries such as Nicaragua and El Salvador." And that's why, he concluded, "this is not just a civil rights movement - this is the northernmost expression of a continental rights movement."
Got that? This is "the northernmost expression of a continental rights movement" led by "political revolutionaries" from Nicaragua and El Salvador. Could Lovato have gotten carried away? Could perhaps I have misquoted him? Fortunately for the sake of a verifiable record, Lovato made the same argument in an article, "Voices of a New Movimiento," in the June 19 issue of The Nation magazine. And how do I know about this piece? Because it was handed out to all attendees of the breakout session.
And on Page 11 of the Nation article, Lovato writes the following, reinforcing his argument that immigration is a "quintessentially global issue." About this global issue, he declares, "Reframing it as a 'new civil rights movement' risks erasing its roots in the Latin American struggles and history." Is that clear enough? Then, for good measure, Lovato's article cites the "radical" efforts of one Miguel Ramirez, who left El Salvador in 1979 and now heads up Centro Hispano Cuzcatlán in Queens. The transnational experience of Ramirez and others, "shows that the U.S. movimiento is ... the northernmost expression of a resurgent Latin American left."
Is that what we want to let into the United States?
In fairness, no others on the panel were as vehement as Lovato - although none took issue with his radicalism. More typical was Rudy Lopez, from the group Wellstone Action, based in St. Paul, Minn. "In spite of the makeup of the panel," Lopez told the audience, "this is not only a Latino movement." But then he proceeded to discuss key electoral states, providing the robust Spanish pronunciation of California, Texas and "La Florida."
This is a free country. Advocates for unlimited Hispanic immigration are free to advocate a radical, even revolutionary, worldview - indeed, they do the rest of us a favor when they do. Because then we are free to oppose them.
Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.
James P. Pinkerton
June 15, 2006
Advocates of an open border between the U.S. and Mexico do their best to present a mellow American flag-waving image to the public. But when they gather in semiprivate, they communicate much differently to each other. Perhaps they need to be even more careful.
In the big pro-immigration marches this spring, Hispanic activists sought to present themselves as "civil rights" advocates in the gentle and inclusive tradition of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Oh sure, some of the recent marchers went "off message," carrying Mexican flags and calling for "reconquista," but for the most part, the demonstrators were well-behaved.
But offstage, as it were, a different and harsher truth comes out. It's not a "movement," they tell each other when cameras aren't watching, it's a "movimiento" - and that Spanish-language phrasing speaks volumes about the true tilt of pro-immigration activists.
How do I know this? On Tuesday, I attended a panel discussion entitled "The New Immigrants Movement," part of a "Take Back America" conference convened in Washington, D.C., by the left-wing Campaign for America's Future. The event was open to anyone, although fewer than 100 people showed up. But to give you a flavor of the meeting, here are the surnames of the people on the panel: Lovato, Salas, Contreras, Lopez, Ramirez and another Lopez. All Hispanic - and some quite angry.
Consider the words of Roberto Lovato, identified as a writer for New American Media, describing itself as "the country's first and largest national collaboration of ethnic news organizations." Speaking first, Lovato declared that he had problems with the words "civil rights." Why? In part because that phrase had been used by black Americans half a century ago - it was their term. But mostly, he continued, the term is inapt because today "a lot of the members of the movement were political revolutionaries in countries such as Nicaragua and El Salvador." And that's why, he concluded, "this is not just a civil rights movement - this is the northernmost expression of a continental rights movement."
Got that? This is "the northernmost expression of a continental rights movement" led by "political revolutionaries" from Nicaragua and El Salvador. Could Lovato have gotten carried away? Could perhaps I have misquoted him? Fortunately for the sake of a verifiable record, Lovato made the same argument in an article, "Voices of a New Movimiento," in the June 19 issue of The Nation magazine. And how do I know about this piece? Because it was handed out to all attendees of the breakout session.
And on Page 11 of the Nation article, Lovato writes the following, reinforcing his argument that immigration is a "quintessentially global issue." About this global issue, he declares, "Reframing it as a 'new civil rights movement' risks erasing its roots in the Latin American struggles and history." Is that clear enough? Then, for good measure, Lovato's article cites the "radical" efforts of one Miguel Ramirez, who left El Salvador in 1979 and now heads up Centro Hispano Cuzcatlán in Queens. The transnational experience of Ramirez and others, "shows that the U.S. movimiento is ... the northernmost expression of a resurgent Latin American left."
Is that what we want to let into the United States?
In fairness, no others on the panel were as vehement as Lovato - although none took issue with his radicalism. More typical was Rudy Lopez, from the group Wellstone Action, based in St. Paul, Minn. "In spite of the makeup of the panel," Lopez told the audience, "this is not only a Latino movement." But then he proceeded to discuss key electoral states, providing the robust Spanish pronunciation of California, Texas and "La Florida."
This is a free country. Advocates for unlimited Hispanic immigration are free to advocate a radical, even revolutionary, worldview - indeed, they do the rest of us a favor when they do. Because then we are free to oppose them.
Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.
From The Chicago Tribune:
Springsteen brings a zeal to Seeger songs
By Greg Kot
June 14, 2006
Had this been one of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band tours, the place
would've been packed to bursting.
But with his rock persona on temporary hiatus, Springsteen faced a sea
of empty seats Tuesday at the First Midwest Bank Amphitheater in Tinley
Park. The 11,000-seat pavilion was barely half full, and the
17,000-capacity lawn was barren.
It was less a commentary on Springsteen's still-considerable magnetism
than on his recent artistic choices. On the current tour, he's focusing
on music from his latest album, "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger
Sessions," an acoustic outing covering songs associated with
87-year-old folk laureate Pete Seeger.
Sure, the idea of a rock icon dusting off tunes that your grandfather's
generation chanted at union rallies might sound a bit suspect. Combine
that with the prospect of seeing a bunch of folkies playing in what
Springsteen described as "a big black box outside of Chicago," and no
wonder the majority of the singer's fans said, "No, thanks."
But take it from one skeptic who harbored many of the same doubts: The
no-show Springsteen faithful missed a good one.
The graying but still boyishly energetic singer took the "Seeger
Sessions" songs to a deeper place, and brought a zeal to this
performance that stamped it as a keeper. Like last year's solo tour, in
which he took huge chances in re-inventing many of his songs, the new
show finds Springsteen in high spirits, his joy infectious as he
explored the various strands of American music that preceded rock 'n'
roll. With a 16-piece band that combined accordion, banjo, fiddles,
guitars, piano, pedal steel, brass, voices and percussion, he blended
Dixieland and Appalachia, swing and gospel, Celtic jigs and Tex-Mex
two-steps.
Hurricane Katrina and the fate of New Orleans were fresh on
Springsteen's mind. Only seven weeks ago, he had launched this tour at
the city's Jazz and Heritage festival, and witnessed the storm's
devastation first-hand. "We owe the city a debt," he said. "We need to
bear witness." And then he joined a time-honored folk tradition by
updating Blind Alfred Reed's Depression-era blues "How Can a Poor Man
Stand Such Times and Live?" with three newly written verses very much
of the moment.
"Them who's got, got out of town," Springsteen sang of the Katrina
disaster. "And them who ain't got left to drown."
He read "When the Saints Go Marching In" not as jaunty celebration but
as an elegy. He zeroed in on words that we have probably heard dozens,
if not hundreds of times, but never quite appreciated for the horror
they contain. In its images of blood-red moons and a sun that refuses
to shine, here was a redemption song like no other.
The relevance of Seeger's "Bring Them Home (If You Love Your Uncle
Sam)'' and the civil-rights anthem "Eyes on the Prize" couldn't be
missed. The more subtle but no less urgent message about broken
promises in "Pay Me My Money Down" was just as stirring, even as it was
refashioned into a wild-eyed zydeco whirl.
For relief and release, there were hootenanny-style bashers such as
"Old Dan Tucker," "O Mary Don't You Weep" and "Jesse James."
Springsteen also had a blast recasting his own songs: "Ramrod" drove
south of the border with accordion pumping, "Johnny 99" became a
polyrhythmic Creole swoon, and "Open All Night" was reincarnated as
swinging big-band boogie. This was music meant to be shared and sung
over drinks and on the dance floor, with horns blaring and guitars
thrashing until fingers bleed.
Springsteen turned a bunch of enthusiastic strangers in his audience
into an impromptu choir and a community of co-conspirators, much as
Pete Seeger had done at his historic 1963 Carnegie Hall concert. Even
as war loomed abroad and racist skirmishes flourished at home, Seeger
understood the value not just of protest songs, but of nursery rhymes,
sing-alongs, melodies and tall tales.
Back then, Seeger marveled at how folk artists such as Malvina
Reynolds, Tom Paxton and a new kid named Bob Dylan were following in
the footsteps of his peer Woody Guthrie and writing "songs about
everything that happens ... every imaginable subject." These were
singers who turned the political into the personal, and the personal
into the universal. Seeger sang their songs as if they were news
bulletins from the front lines of the human experience.
That's the impulse that turned Springsteen, a pretty decent chronicler
of the human condition in his own right, into a born-again folkie. By
invoking Seeger, he's not dusting off a sepia-tinged photograph of a
nearly forgotten past. Instead, like the master, he sees folk music as
a rocking and rolling commentary on who we are now and where we're
going next.
Springsteen brings a zeal to Seeger songs
By Greg Kot
June 14, 2006
Had this been one of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band tours, the place
would've been packed to bursting.
But with his rock persona on temporary hiatus, Springsteen faced a sea
of empty seats Tuesday at the First Midwest Bank Amphitheater in Tinley
Park. The 11,000-seat pavilion was barely half full, and the
17,000-capacity lawn was barren.
It was less a commentary on Springsteen's still-considerable magnetism
than on his recent artistic choices. On the current tour, he's focusing
on music from his latest album, "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger
Sessions," an acoustic outing covering songs associated with
87-year-old folk laureate Pete Seeger.
Sure, the idea of a rock icon dusting off tunes that your grandfather's
generation chanted at union rallies might sound a bit suspect. Combine
that with the prospect of seeing a bunch of folkies playing in what
Springsteen described as "a big black box outside of Chicago," and no
wonder the majority of the singer's fans said, "No, thanks."
But take it from one skeptic who harbored many of the same doubts: The
no-show Springsteen faithful missed a good one.
The graying but still boyishly energetic singer took the "Seeger
Sessions" songs to a deeper place, and brought a zeal to this
performance that stamped it as a keeper. Like last year's solo tour, in
which he took huge chances in re-inventing many of his songs, the new
show finds Springsteen in high spirits, his joy infectious as he
explored the various strands of American music that preceded rock 'n'
roll. With a 16-piece band that combined accordion, banjo, fiddles,
guitars, piano, pedal steel, brass, voices and percussion, he blended
Dixieland and Appalachia, swing and gospel, Celtic jigs and Tex-Mex
two-steps.
Hurricane Katrina and the fate of New Orleans were fresh on
Springsteen's mind. Only seven weeks ago, he had launched this tour at
the city's Jazz and Heritage festival, and witnessed the storm's
devastation first-hand. "We owe the city a debt," he said. "We need to
bear witness." And then he joined a time-honored folk tradition by
updating Blind Alfred Reed's Depression-era blues "How Can a Poor Man
Stand Such Times and Live?" with three newly written verses very much
of the moment.
"Them who's got, got out of town," Springsteen sang of the Katrina
disaster. "And them who ain't got left to drown."
He read "When the Saints Go Marching In" not as jaunty celebration but
as an elegy. He zeroed in on words that we have probably heard dozens,
if not hundreds of times, but never quite appreciated for the horror
they contain. In its images of blood-red moons and a sun that refuses
to shine, here was a redemption song like no other.
The relevance of Seeger's "Bring Them Home (If You Love Your Uncle
Sam)'' and the civil-rights anthem "Eyes on the Prize" couldn't be
missed. The more subtle but no less urgent message about broken
promises in "Pay Me My Money Down" was just as stirring, even as it was
refashioned into a wild-eyed zydeco whirl.
For relief and release, there were hootenanny-style bashers such as
"Old Dan Tucker," "O Mary Don't You Weep" and "Jesse James."
Springsteen also had a blast recasting his own songs: "Ramrod" drove
south of the border with accordion pumping, "Johnny 99" became a
polyrhythmic Creole swoon, and "Open All Night" was reincarnated as
swinging big-band boogie. This was music meant to be shared and sung
over drinks and on the dance floor, with horns blaring and guitars
thrashing until fingers bleed.
Springsteen turned a bunch of enthusiastic strangers in his audience
into an impromptu choir and a community of co-conspirators, much as
Pete Seeger had done at his historic 1963 Carnegie Hall concert. Even
as war loomed abroad and racist skirmishes flourished at home, Seeger
understood the value not just of protest songs, but of nursery rhymes,
sing-alongs, melodies and tall tales.
Back then, Seeger marveled at how folk artists such as Malvina
Reynolds, Tom Paxton and a new kid named Bob Dylan were following in
the footsteps of his peer Woody Guthrie and writing "songs about
everything that happens ... every imaginable subject." These were
singers who turned the political into the personal, and the personal
into the universal. Seeger sang their songs as if they were news
bulletins from the front lines of the human experience.
That's the impulse that turned Springsteen, a pretty decent chronicler
of the human condition in his own right, into a born-again folkie. By
invoking Seeger, he's not dusting off a sepia-tinged photograph of a
nearly forgotten past. Instead, like the master, he sees folk music as
a rocking and rolling commentary on who we are now and where we're
going next.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
AFI's 100 YEARS...100 CHEERS
IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE
Tops AFI's List Of
100 Most Inspiring Films Of All Time
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, SCHINDLER'S LIST, ROCKY
and MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON
Round Out The Top Five
A jury of 1,500 film artists, critics and historians selected the classic IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, starring James Stewart, as the most inspiring movie of all time.
# MOVIE YEAR
1 IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE 1946
2 TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD 1962
3 SCHINDLER'S LIST 1993
4 ROCKY 1976
5 MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON 1939
6 E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL 1982
7 THE GRAPES OF WRATH 1940
8 BREAKING AWAY 1979
9 MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET 1947
10 SAVING PRIVATE RYAN 1998
11 THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES 1946
12 APOLLO 13 1995
13 HOOSIERS 1986
14 THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI 1957
15 THE MIRACLE WORKER 1962
16 NORMA RAE 1979
17 ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST 1975
18 THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK 1959
19 THE RIGHT STUFF 1983
20 PHILADELPHIA 1993
21 IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT 1967
22 THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES 1942
23 THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION 1994
24 NATIONAL VELVET 1944
25 SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS 1941
26 THE WIZARD OF OZ 1939
27 HIGH NOON 1952
28 FIELD OF DREAMS 1989
29 GANDHI 1982
30 LAWRENCE OF ARABIA 1962
31 GLORY 1989
32 CASABLANCA 1942
33 CITY LIGHTS 1931
34 ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN 1976
35 GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER 1967
36 ON THE WATERFRONT 1954
37 FORREST GUMP 1994
38 PINOCCHIO 1940
39 STAR WARS 1977
40 MRS. MINIVER 1942
41 THE SOUND OF MUSIC 1965
42 12 ANGRY MEN 1957
43 GONE WITH THE WIND 1939
44 SPARTACUS 1960
45 ON GOLDEN POND 1981
46 LILIES OF THE FIELD 1963
47 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY 1968
48 THE AFRICAN QUEEN 1951
49 MEET JOHN DOE 1941
50 SEABISCUIT 2003
51 THE COLOR PURPLE 1985
52 DEAD POET'S SOCIETY 1989
53 SHANE 1953
54 RUDY 1993
55 THE DEFIANT ONES 1958
56 BEN-HUR 1959
57 SERGEANT YORK 1941
58 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND 1977
59 DANCES WITH WOLVES 1990
60 THE KILLING FIELDS 1984
61 SOUNDER 1972
62 BRAVEHEART 1995
63 RAIN MAN 1988
64 THE BLACK STALLION 1979
65 A RAISIN IN THE SUN 1961
66 SILKWOOD 1983
67 THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL 1951
68 AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN 1982
69 THE SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS 1957
70 COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER 1980
71 COOL HAND LUKE 1967
72 DARK VICTORY 1939
73 ERIN BROCKOVICH 2000
74 GUNGA DIN 1939
75 THE VERDICT 1982
76 BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ 1962
77 DRIVING MISS DAISY 1989
78 THELMA & LOUISE 1991
79 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 1956
80 BABE 1995
81 BOYS TOWN 1938
82 FIDDLER ON THE ROOF 1971
83 MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN 1936
84 SERPICO 1973
85 WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT 1993
86 STAND AND DELIVER 1988
87 WORKING GIRL 1988
88 YANKEE DOODLE DANDY 1942
89 HAROLD AND MAUDE 1972
90 HOTEL RWANDA 2004
91 THE PAPER CHASE 1973
92 FAME 1980
93 A BEAUTIFUL MIND 2001
94 CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS 1937
95 PLACES IN THE HEART 1984
96 SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER 1993
97 MADAME CURIE 1943
98 THE KARATE KID 1984
99 RAY 2004
100 CHARIOTS OF FIRE 198
IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE
Tops AFI's List Of
100 Most Inspiring Films Of All Time
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, SCHINDLER'S LIST, ROCKY
and MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON
Round Out The Top Five
A jury of 1,500 film artists, critics and historians selected the classic IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, starring James Stewart, as the most inspiring movie of all time.
# MOVIE YEAR
1 IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE 1946
2 TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD 1962
3 SCHINDLER'S LIST 1993
4 ROCKY 1976
5 MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON 1939
6 E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL 1982
7 THE GRAPES OF WRATH 1940
8 BREAKING AWAY 1979
9 MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET 1947
10 SAVING PRIVATE RYAN 1998
11 THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES 1946
12 APOLLO 13 1995
13 HOOSIERS 1986
14 THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI 1957
15 THE MIRACLE WORKER 1962
16 NORMA RAE 1979
17 ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST 1975
18 THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK 1959
19 THE RIGHT STUFF 1983
20 PHILADELPHIA 1993
21 IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT 1967
22 THE PRIDE OF THE YANKEES 1942
23 THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION 1994
24 NATIONAL VELVET 1944
25 SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS 1941
26 THE WIZARD OF OZ 1939
27 HIGH NOON 1952
28 FIELD OF DREAMS 1989
29 GANDHI 1982
30 LAWRENCE OF ARABIA 1962
31 GLORY 1989
32 CASABLANCA 1942
33 CITY LIGHTS 1931
34 ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN 1976
35 GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER 1967
36 ON THE WATERFRONT 1954
37 FORREST GUMP 1994
38 PINOCCHIO 1940
39 STAR WARS 1977
40 MRS. MINIVER 1942
41 THE SOUND OF MUSIC 1965
42 12 ANGRY MEN 1957
43 GONE WITH THE WIND 1939
44 SPARTACUS 1960
45 ON GOLDEN POND 1981
46 LILIES OF THE FIELD 1963
47 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY 1968
48 THE AFRICAN QUEEN 1951
49 MEET JOHN DOE 1941
50 SEABISCUIT 2003
51 THE COLOR PURPLE 1985
52 DEAD POET'S SOCIETY 1989
53 SHANE 1953
54 RUDY 1993
55 THE DEFIANT ONES 1958
56 BEN-HUR 1959
57 SERGEANT YORK 1941
58 CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND 1977
59 DANCES WITH WOLVES 1990
60 THE KILLING FIELDS 1984
61 SOUNDER 1972
62 BRAVEHEART 1995
63 RAIN MAN 1988
64 THE BLACK STALLION 1979
65 A RAISIN IN THE SUN 1961
66 SILKWOOD 1983
67 THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL 1951
68 AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN 1982
69 THE SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS 1957
70 COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER 1980
71 COOL HAND LUKE 1967
72 DARK VICTORY 1939
73 ERIN BROCKOVICH 2000
74 GUNGA DIN 1939
75 THE VERDICT 1982
76 BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ 1962
77 DRIVING MISS DAISY 1989
78 THELMA & LOUISE 1991
79 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS 1956
80 BABE 1995
81 BOYS TOWN 1938
82 FIDDLER ON THE ROOF 1971
83 MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN 1936
84 SERPICO 1973
85 WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT 1993
86 STAND AND DELIVER 1988
87 WORKING GIRL 1988
88 YANKEE DOODLE DANDY 1942
89 HAROLD AND MAUDE 1972
90 HOTEL RWANDA 2004
91 THE PAPER CHASE 1973
92 FAME 1980
93 A BEAUTIFUL MIND 2001
94 CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS 1937
95 PLACES IN THE HEART 1984
96 SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER 1993
97 MADAME CURIE 1943
98 THE KARATE KID 1984
99 RAY 2004
100 CHARIOTS OF FIRE 198
American Troops in Shackles
By Michelle Malkin
Did you know there are seven young Marines and a Navy corpsman sitting in a military brig right now in leg and wrist shackles -- despite the fact that they've not been charged with any crime?
The men are in solitary confinement, locked in 8'x8' cells at San Diego's Camp Pendleton, as investigators probe an April 26 incident involving the 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment, 1st Marine Division. They are behind bars 23 hours a day; family members can only see them through inch-thick Plexiglas. Military blabbermouths have told the press that the service members are suspected of kidnapping and shooting a man in the Iraqi town of Hamdaniya. The Iraqi man's family reportedly came forward seeking payment for his death as media hysteria set in over the separate alleged atrocity in Haditha.
These men -- our men -- may be innocent. They may be guilty. Charges may or may not be filed this week. But this much is certain: The media leaks and the Murtha-fication of the case are already taking a heavy toll on the troops and their families. The headlines have already convicted them: "Iraqi's Slaying Planned By Marines, Official Says." "Marines Planned to Kill Iraqi Civilian, Then Planted Evidence."
The national media ignored a protest by supporters outside Camp Pendleton over the weekend. "I want the Marines to know that they are not forgotten, that people are out here thinking of them," said one attendee. The father of one of the men in custody, Pfc. John J. Jodka, worried: "It appears to me that this is the reaction of some senior people to show 'We're in charge; we're cleaning up our act.'"
Not a peep heard yet from the American Civil Liberties Union. The website of the self-anointed crusaders for individual rights contains hundreds of articles on the rights of al Qaeda suspects and an indignant press release on the suicides of Guantanamo Bay detainees. But no mention of the Camp Pendleton Eight. For their part, human rights groups were too busy shedding tears for the Gitmo terrorist suicide squad and lionizing them as "heroes" in the words of William Goodman of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Editorial cartoonists have been preoccupied desecrating the Marine Corps logo and tarring troops as baby-killers.
A clarion voice stepped into the fray this week to push back against the global rush to judgment against our troops. Ilario Pantano, a Desert Storm vet-turned-Wall Street banker and new media entrepreneur-turned-reenlisted Marine from Hell's Kitchen, launched his gripping book "Warlord: No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy" this week, which recounts his harrowing ordeal as a Marine smeared and cleared. Last spring, he faced the death penalty for defending himself and his men in the heat of battle and killing two Iraqi insurgents. He was accused then, as Marines are being accused now, of wantonly executing Iraqis to send a message. His family and friends' defense of Pantano was met, as those of Marines are being met now, with incredulity or apathy.
There were no pleas to withhold judgment against Pantano from the New York Times then. No Oprah sit-downs now with the wives and children of accused troops.
As an agitated, condescending Ann Curry of NBC's "Today Show" tried to paint Pantano Monday as a callous thug, he replied with quiet dignity: "I don't think it's helpful to national security to have this kind of self-flagellation before the facts are actually disclosed."
Innocent until proven guilty? Justice for all? Benefit of the doubt? These are apparently foreign concepts when it comes to Americans in uniform being held on American soil. Perhaps if our troops proclaimed themselves "conscientious objectors" and converted to Islam, they might start getting some sympathy.
By Michelle Malkin
Did you know there are seven young Marines and a Navy corpsman sitting in a military brig right now in leg and wrist shackles -- despite the fact that they've not been charged with any crime?
The men are in solitary confinement, locked in 8'x8' cells at San Diego's Camp Pendleton, as investigators probe an April 26 incident involving the 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment, 1st Marine Division. They are behind bars 23 hours a day; family members can only see them through inch-thick Plexiglas. Military blabbermouths have told the press that the service members are suspected of kidnapping and shooting a man in the Iraqi town of Hamdaniya. The Iraqi man's family reportedly came forward seeking payment for his death as media hysteria set in over the separate alleged atrocity in Haditha.
These men -- our men -- may be innocent. They may be guilty. Charges may or may not be filed this week. But this much is certain: The media leaks and the Murtha-fication of the case are already taking a heavy toll on the troops and their families. The headlines have already convicted them: "Iraqi's Slaying Planned By Marines, Official Says." "Marines Planned to Kill Iraqi Civilian, Then Planted Evidence."
The national media ignored a protest by supporters outside Camp Pendleton over the weekend. "I want the Marines to know that they are not forgotten, that people are out here thinking of them," said one attendee. The father of one of the men in custody, Pfc. John J. Jodka, worried: "It appears to me that this is the reaction of some senior people to show 'We're in charge; we're cleaning up our act.'"
Not a peep heard yet from the American Civil Liberties Union. The website of the self-anointed crusaders for individual rights contains hundreds of articles on the rights of al Qaeda suspects and an indignant press release on the suicides of Guantanamo Bay detainees. But no mention of the Camp Pendleton Eight. For their part, human rights groups were too busy shedding tears for the Gitmo terrorist suicide squad and lionizing them as "heroes" in the words of William Goodman of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Editorial cartoonists have been preoccupied desecrating the Marine Corps logo and tarring troops as baby-killers.
A clarion voice stepped into the fray this week to push back against the global rush to judgment against our troops. Ilario Pantano, a Desert Storm vet-turned-Wall Street banker and new media entrepreneur-turned-reenlisted Marine from Hell's Kitchen, launched his gripping book "Warlord: No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy" this week, which recounts his harrowing ordeal as a Marine smeared and cleared. Last spring, he faced the death penalty for defending himself and his men in the heat of battle and killing two Iraqi insurgents. He was accused then, as Marines are being accused now, of wantonly executing Iraqis to send a message. His family and friends' defense of Pantano was met, as those of Marines are being met now, with incredulity or apathy.
There were no pleas to withhold judgment against Pantano from the New York Times then. No Oprah sit-downs now with the wives and children of accused troops.
As an agitated, condescending Ann Curry of NBC's "Today Show" tried to paint Pantano Monday as a callous thug, he replied with quiet dignity: "I don't think it's helpful to national security to have this kind of self-flagellation before the facts are actually disclosed."
Innocent until proven guilty? Justice for all? Benefit of the doubt? These are apparently foreign concepts when it comes to Americans in uniform being held on American soil. Perhaps if our troops proclaimed themselves "conscientious objectors" and converted to Islam, they might start getting some sympathy.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Global Warming Fever
By Debra Saunders
There is a conceit among the American left that the American right cleaves to bad science out of deference to religion, while the left is all-science, all-the-time. Former Veep Al Gore's new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," however, shows how unscientific -- and downright faith-based -- the left has become.
Is global warming human-induced? Gore says that it is, and he may well be right. Last month in The New York Times, Gregg Easterbrook of the Brookings Institution announced that he had converted from global-warming "skeptic to convert." Easterbrook noted that a 1992 survey found that a mere 17 percent of members of the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society believed in greenhouse-gas climate change. Since then, scientists have found more evidence of the phenomenon.
Gore was wrong in 1992 when he wrote that 98 percent of scientists agreed with him on global warming. Witness the survey cited above.
Now, he is wrong when he argues in his movie that there is a complete consensus on global warming today. As proof Gore cites a 2004 study that looked at 928 climate abstracts and found none that refuted global-warming dogma. That says more about the researcher than the scientific community.
There are a number of well-known scientists who don't believe that global warming is human-induced, or who believe that if it is, it is not catastrophic. Hurricane expert William Gray of Colorado State University believes the Earth will start to cool within 10 years. Neil Frank, former director of the National Hurricane Center, told The Washington Post that global warming is "a hoax." Climate scientist Robert Lindzen of MIT believes that clouds and water vapor will counteract greenhouse gas emissions.
So you have to ask yourself: Why does Gore pretend that apostates do not exist? Scientists acknowledge contradictory data. But the faith-driven Gore argues that all scientists agree with him -- well, except for those who are bought and paid for by big polluters.
Because this is a crusade -- and not about science -- Gore is drawn not to the most reasoned scenarios, but the most apocalyptic.
Consider this exchange with ABC's George Stephanopoulos -- formerly of the Clinton-Gore administration -- who questioned Gore's prediction that global-warming could cause sea levels to rise 20 feet. "But the consensus is several inches over the next century. Right?" asked Stephanopoulos on June 4. "Not 20 feet?"
"Not at all," Gore replied. He added that the scientists he talks to -- his disciples, if you will -- see it his way. He ignores the less catastrophic theories, which predict a rise of an inch per decade, or 3 feet over the next century. To Gore, the worst-case scenario is the only scenario.
I thought Gore's chart comparing carbon-dioxide increases to temperature spikes was dramatic. But because Gore omits what he does not want to see, I have to listen to former NASA scientist Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, when he tells me: "It is an alarming chart, but there are so many alternative explanations for what he's showing. He's giving it one possible explanation and making it sound like the only explanation." Spencer says it is "more likely" that the higher temperatures increased carbon dioxide levels.
Spencer, who also writes for TCS Daily (which receives some funding from ExxonMobil), believes that some global warming is human-induced, but "I don't believe in climate catastrophe. And, "It comes down to whether you believe the climate system is fragile or resilient." It all comes down to belief -- and that is the problem. Global warming has become so politicized that scientists must believe in it. If they predict dire consequences, they win praise from true believers and grants for their important research. Scientists who question the prophecies of doom can expect to be marginalized.
Oddly, Gore begins "An Inconvenient Truth" discussing a young classmate who wondered if South America and Africa once had been connected. Their teacher ridiculed the friend, who turned out to be right. Sometimes the know-it-alls are wrong.
Now Gore is the know-it-all teacher -- and woe to any scientist who does not agree with him, not just on global warming, but on a 20-foot rise in sea level. It is this alarmism -- this extremism -- that has led many a thinking person to question global warming. It's hard to trust those who believe only the most extreme scenario.
Besides, whenever the establishment says you have to believe something, you want people who question the establishment. Or as global cooling guru Gray once said, "Consensus science isn't science."
By Debra Saunders
There is a conceit among the American left that the American right cleaves to bad science out of deference to religion, while the left is all-science, all-the-time. Former Veep Al Gore's new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," however, shows how unscientific -- and downright faith-based -- the left has become.
Is global warming human-induced? Gore says that it is, and he may well be right. Last month in The New York Times, Gregg Easterbrook of the Brookings Institution announced that he had converted from global-warming "skeptic to convert." Easterbrook noted that a 1992 survey found that a mere 17 percent of members of the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society believed in greenhouse-gas climate change. Since then, scientists have found more evidence of the phenomenon.
Gore was wrong in 1992 when he wrote that 98 percent of scientists agreed with him on global warming. Witness the survey cited above.
Now, he is wrong when he argues in his movie that there is a complete consensus on global warming today. As proof Gore cites a 2004 study that looked at 928 climate abstracts and found none that refuted global-warming dogma. That says more about the researcher than the scientific community.
There are a number of well-known scientists who don't believe that global warming is human-induced, or who believe that if it is, it is not catastrophic. Hurricane expert William Gray of Colorado State University believes the Earth will start to cool within 10 years. Neil Frank, former director of the National Hurricane Center, told The Washington Post that global warming is "a hoax." Climate scientist Robert Lindzen of MIT believes that clouds and water vapor will counteract greenhouse gas emissions.
So you have to ask yourself: Why does Gore pretend that apostates do not exist? Scientists acknowledge contradictory data. But the faith-driven Gore argues that all scientists agree with him -- well, except for those who are bought and paid for by big polluters.
Because this is a crusade -- and not about science -- Gore is drawn not to the most reasoned scenarios, but the most apocalyptic.
Consider this exchange with ABC's George Stephanopoulos -- formerly of the Clinton-Gore administration -- who questioned Gore's prediction that global-warming could cause sea levels to rise 20 feet. "But the consensus is several inches over the next century. Right?" asked Stephanopoulos on June 4. "Not 20 feet?"
"Not at all," Gore replied. He added that the scientists he talks to -- his disciples, if you will -- see it his way. He ignores the less catastrophic theories, which predict a rise of an inch per decade, or 3 feet over the next century. To Gore, the worst-case scenario is the only scenario.
I thought Gore's chart comparing carbon-dioxide increases to temperature spikes was dramatic. But because Gore omits what he does not want to see, I have to listen to former NASA scientist Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, when he tells me: "It is an alarming chart, but there are so many alternative explanations for what he's showing. He's giving it one possible explanation and making it sound like the only explanation." Spencer says it is "more likely" that the higher temperatures increased carbon dioxide levels.
Spencer, who also writes for TCS Daily (which receives some funding from ExxonMobil), believes that some global warming is human-induced, but "I don't believe in climate catastrophe. And, "It comes down to whether you believe the climate system is fragile or resilient." It all comes down to belief -- and that is the problem. Global warming has become so politicized that scientists must believe in it. If they predict dire consequences, they win praise from true believers and grants for their important research. Scientists who question the prophecies of doom can expect to be marginalized.
Oddly, Gore begins "An Inconvenient Truth" discussing a young classmate who wondered if South America and Africa once had been connected. Their teacher ridiculed the friend, who turned out to be right. Sometimes the know-it-alls are wrong.
Now Gore is the know-it-all teacher -- and woe to any scientist who does not agree with him, not just on global warming, but on a 20-foot rise in sea level. It is this alarmism -- this extremism -- that has led many a thinking person to question global warming. It's hard to trust those who believe only the most extreme scenario.
Besides, whenever the establishment says you have to believe something, you want people who question the establishment. Or as global cooling guru Gray once said, "Consensus science isn't science."
From The Los Angeles Times:
Jordan Has a Worthy Defense for This Pick
By Larry Stewart
June 11, 2006
Michael Jordan, in an interview in the issue of Slam magazine that goes on sale Monday, is asked to name his ultimate starting five from his era.
Although Jordan declines to accept the label as "greatest of all time," the assumption can be made that he would name himself the shooting guard. He names Magic Johnson the point guard — "without a doubt."
His center is Hakeem Olajuwon, although he says he never saw Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in his prime.
Jordan, requesting the use of a sixth man, says he would split Scottie Pippen and Larry Bird at small forward.
Saying, "I'm a Carolina guy," Jordan names James Worthy his power forward.
"Charles is going to be mad," Jordan says, referring to Charles Barkley, "but I know Charles never played defense."
Jordan Has a Worthy Defense for This Pick
By Larry Stewart
June 11, 2006
Michael Jordan, in an interview in the issue of Slam magazine that goes on sale Monday, is asked to name his ultimate starting five from his era.
Although Jordan declines to accept the label as "greatest of all time," the assumption can be made that he would name himself the shooting guard. He names Magic Johnson the point guard — "without a doubt."
His center is Hakeem Olajuwon, although he says he never saw Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in his prime.
Jordan, requesting the use of a sixth man, says he would split Scottie Pippen and Larry Bird at small forward.
Saying, "I'm a Carolina guy," Jordan names James Worthy his power forward.
"Charles is going to be mad," Jordan says, referring to Charles Barkley, "but I know Charles never played defense."
From www.washingtontimes.com:
House Republicans hit Senate immigration bill
By Charles Hurt
June 13, 2006
The Senate's immigration-reform bill grants broad amnesty to illegal aliens and is even worse than previously thought, say House Republicans who have read the 850-page Senate bill and must approve any final legislation that Congress sends President Bush.
"The more people see of this Senate bill, the less they like it," House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Wisconsin Republican, said of the bill that was largely penned by Sens. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, and John McCain, Arizona Republican.
Allowing illegals to collect Social Security benefits based on past illegal work, for instance, is "outrageous," said Mr. Sensenbrenner.
But few provisions of the Senate bill have caused more head-scratching among opponents than a last-minute amendment that requires the U.S. to consult with Mexican officials before commencement of any fence construction along the border.
"I don't know what they were thinking on that one," Mr. Sensenbrenner said.
Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican, said he met last week with a group of hotel executives from Marriott International Inc. who favor increased immigration to bring them more cheap labor to work as hotel maids. He told them about the consultation requirement.
"People in the front of the room were saying, 'No. No. That's not possible,' " he recounted. "Really," he told them. "I'm not making this up."
The provision was inserted in the bill moments before it was voted on at the behest of Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, Connecticut Democrat. It says soliciting views "of affected communities lessen tensions and foster greater understanding."
"It is simply common sense and common courtesy to consult those individuals in our own communities and in affected communities on the other side of the border before constructing a fence," Mr. Dodd said.
The consultation amendment, he said, would "foster the kind of cooperation that is vital if we are going to once and for all secure our borders."
But, Mr. Sensenbrenner said, there are far more serious problems with the Senate bill.
For instance, the bill allows for the discounted in-state tuition rates at state colleges and universities for illegal aliens who reside in those states. Meanwhile, legal immigrants and citizens who reside outside that state must still pay the full price.
And while proponents of the bill cringe whenever people say it grants "amnesty" to illegal aliens, they don't dispute that the bill grants complete amnesty to employers who have illegally hired the millions of aliens and provided the magnet that drew them here in the first place.
And while aliens will be fined $2,000 before obtaining citizenship, opponents say it's hardly comparable punishment for the array of crimes the illegals have committed while working here. In addition to sneaking across the border, many have counterfeited documentation, committed Social Security fraud and cheated on taxes.
"An American who commits Social Security fraud ends up going to jail. An American who fails to pay taxes for two years ends up in the federal penitentiary," Mr. Sensenbrenner said. "An illegal alien who does this gets citizenship."
Mr. Tancredo said he is amazed at how little senators know about illegal entry, considering the importance Americans give it.
"They'll just trust Ted Kennedy to put this thing together for them," Mr. Tancredo said.
The president's prime-time speech last month essentially endorsing the Senate plan and arguing that it does not amount to "amnesty" caused Mr. Tancredo to do a double take.
"It's all so Clintonesque. It was horrible," he said, referring to former President Bill Clinton's penchant for parsing words. "I was listening to President Bush speak on the border, and I'm thinking to myself, 'I'm listening to Bill Clinton reworking every word, reworking every definition.' "
House Republicans hit Senate immigration bill
By Charles Hurt
June 13, 2006
The Senate's immigration-reform bill grants broad amnesty to illegal aliens and is even worse than previously thought, say House Republicans who have read the 850-page Senate bill and must approve any final legislation that Congress sends President Bush.
"The more people see of this Senate bill, the less they like it," House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Wisconsin Republican, said of the bill that was largely penned by Sens. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, and John McCain, Arizona Republican.
Allowing illegals to collect Social Security benefits based on past illegal work, for instance, is "outrageous," said Mr. Sensenbrenner.
But few provisions of the Senate bill have caused more head-scratching among opponents than a last-minute amendment that requires the U.S. to consult with Mexican officials before commencement of any fence construction along the border.
"I don't know what they were thinking on that one," Mr. Sensenbrenner said.
Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican, said he met last week with a group of hotel executives from Marriott International Inc. who favor increased immigration to bring them more cheap labor to work as hotel maids. He told them about the consultation requirement.
"People in the front of the room were saying, 'No. No. That's not possible,' " he recounted. "Really," he told them. "I'm not making this up."
The provision was inserted in the bill moments before it was voted on at the behest of Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, Connecticut Democrat. It says soliciting views "of affected communities lessen tensions and foster greater understanding."
"It is simply common sense and common courtesy to consult those individuals in our own communities and in affected communities on the other side of the border before constructing a fence," Mr. Dodd said.
The consultation amendment, he said, would "foster the kind of cooperation that is vital if we are going to once and for all secure our borders."
But, Mr. Sensenbrenner said, there are far more serious problems with the Senate bill.
For instance, the bill allows for the discounted in-state tuition rates at state colleges and universities for illegal aliens who reside in those states. Meanwhile, legal immigrants and citizens who reside outside that state must still pay the full price.
And while proponents of the bill cringe whenever people say it grants "amnesty" to illegal aliens, they don't dispute that the bill grants complete amnesty to employers who have illegally hired the millions of aliens and provided the magnet that drew them here in the first place.
And while aliens will be fined $2,000 before obtaining citizenship, opponents say it's hardly comparable punishment for the array of crimes the illegals have committed while working here. In addition to sneaking across the border, many have counterfeited documentation, committed Social Security fraud and cheated on taxes.
"An American who commits Social Security fraud ends up going to jail. An American who fails to pay taxes for two years ends up in the federal penitentiary," Mr. Sensenbrenner said. "An illegal alien who does this gets citizenship."
Mr. Tancredo said he is amazed at how little senators know about illegal entry, considering the importance Americans give it.
"They'll just trust Ted Kennedy to put this thing together for them," Mr. Tancredo said.
The president's prime-time speech last month essentially endorsing the Senate plan and arguing that it does not amount to "amnesty" caused Mr. Tancredo to do a double take.
"It's all so Clintonesque. It was horrible," he said, referring to former President Bill Clinton's penchant for parsing words. "I was listening to President Bush speak on the border, and I'm thinking to myself, 'I'm listening to Bill Clinton reworking every word, reworking every definition.' "
Wow. A John Derbyshire column with which I agree with virtually every word. Maybe there's hope for him after all.
Apologizing for Iraq
Allow me to eat crow.
By John Derbyshire
My son is passing through that very annoying stage of development in which a child discovers that language is not so much like a solid landscape of rocks and trees, but much more like a well-equipped theater stage, fitted out with screens, doors to nowhere, trick lighting, turntables, trapdoors, and wires to lift you up into the flies. He has, in short, discovered ambiguity. Asked whether he has finished his homework, he will furrow his brow and say: “Define ‘finished’.” No doubt the lad will make a fine attorney (or opinion journalist) one day. In the meantime we must endure his relentless parsing.
I retreat to that developmental phase myself when friends ask me, as they do on average about once a week, whether I feel embarrassed at having supported the Iraq war. “Define ‘war,’” is the thing I want to say. I don’t say it, of course, exactly because it sounds like an irritating 11-year-old, but it’s really the essence of the matter. Did I support the 2003 invasion of Iraq? Yes I did. Do I support the continuing effort to get civil society going in Iraq? No I don’t, and haven’t for over two years. So do I support the war? Well... define “war.”
Let’s start from the fact that the whole thing, taken in one piece—attack plus follow-up nation-building effort—has been a huge negative for the USA. Is there anyone, really, who is glad we did it? Most of my NR colleagues are still talking up the administration’s Iraq policy. It’s hard not to think, though, that if wired up to a polygraph and asked the question: “Supposing you could wind the movie back to early 2003, would you still attack Iraq?” any affirmative answers would have those old needles a-jumping and a-skipping all over the graph paper.
We are stuck there in that wretched place with no way out that would not involve massive loss of geostrategic face. Getting on for 3,000 of our troops have been killed, and close to 20,000 maimed. We’ve spent untold billions of dollars. For what?
One reason I supported the initial attack, and the destruction of the Saddam regime, was that I hoped it would serve as an example, deliver a psychic shock to the whole region. It would have done, if we’d just rubbled the place then left. As it is, the shock value has all been frittered away. Far from being seen as a nation willing to act resolutely, a nation that knows how to punish our enemies, a nation that can smash one of those ramshackle Mideast despotisms with one blow from our mailed fist, a nation to be feared and respected, we are perceived as a soft and foolish nation, that squanders its victories and permits its mighty military power to be held to standoff by teenagers with homemade bombs—that lets crooks and bandits tie it down, Gulliver-like, with a thousand little threads of blackmail, trickery, lies, and petty violence.
Just ask yourself: Given that Iran is the real looming threat in that region, are we better placed now to deal with that threat than we would have been absent an Iraq war? If we could ask President Ahmadinejad whether he thinks we are better placed, what would his honest answer be?
We are not controlling events in Iraq. Events in Iraq are controlling us. We are the puppet; the street gangs of Baghdad and Basra are the puppet-masters, aided and abetted by an unsavory assortment of confidence men, bazaar traders, scheming clerics, ethnic front men, and Iranian agents. With all our wealth and power and idealism, we have submitted to become the plaything of a rabble, and a Middle Eastern rabble at that. Instead of rubbling, we have ourselves been rabbled. The lazy-minded evangelico-romanticism of George W. Bush, the bureaucratic will to power of Donald Rumsfeld, the avuncular condescension of Dick Cheney, and the reflexive military deference of Colin Powell combined to get us into a situation we never wanted to be in, a situation no self-respecting nation ought to be in, a situation we don’t know how to get out of. It’s not inconceivable that, with a run of sheer good luck, we might yet escape without too much egg on our faces, but it’s not likely. The place we are at is surely not a place anyone in 2003 wanted us to be at—not even Vic Davis Hanson.
Since the Iraq war was obviously a gross blunder, is it time for those of us who cheered on the war to offer some kind of apology? Here we are—we, the United States—in our fourth year of occupying that sinkhole, and it looks pretty much like the third year, or the second. Will the eighth year of our occupation, or our twelfth, look any better? I know people who will say yes, but I no longer know any who will say it with real conviction. It’s a tough thing, to admit you were wrong. It’s way tough if you’re a big-name pundit with a reputation to preserve. For those of us down at the bottom of the pundit pecking order, the stakes aren’t so high. I, at any rate, am willing to eat some crow and say: I wish I had never given any support to this fool war.
I am spared major embarrassment not only by the slightness of my own reputation, as by the fact that while I supported the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of the regime, I never thought much of the nation-building exercise that followed. It took me a while to figure out that the administration actually believed all the guff about “establishing democracy in the Middle East,” but once it had sunk in, and the party enthusiasms of the 2004 election season had subsided, I was calling for withdrawal. (The first time I gave over a column to it was, I think, in mid-September of 2004.) I wish I had done so earlier. And, yes, I’ll admit, I wish I hadn’t supported the invasion in the first place.
Why did I? For the reasons I declared on another website, just a year after the invasion:
[M]y attitude to the war is really just punitive, and Iraq was a target of opportunity. I am not a Wilsonian nation-builder. I don’t want to “bring democracy to Iraq.” I don’t, in fact, give a fig about the Iraqis. I am happy to leave barbarians alone to practice their unspeakable folkways, so long as they do not bother civilized peoples. When they do bother us, though, I want them smacked down with great ferocity. Saddam Hussein had been scoffing for years at the very concept of international order, in the belief that we would never pass from words to deeds. I wanted to see that belief confounded, and I am pleased that it has been. If the civilized world is never willing to back up its agreements, resolutions, and communiqués with force, then those fine documents are all worthless and civilization is impotent against its enemies. I am very glad to know that we have not yet reached that sorry pass.
I worry a lot that the civilized world, of which this nation is faute de mieux the leader, has sunk into an enervated lassitude, a condition in which it is unwilling to act against threatening, or just annoying, barbarians. Every time we defer to some United Nations resolution, every time we offer an olive branch to some thug ruler, every time we declare our willingness to sit around a table with some crazy demagogue, I think of the old League of Nations, which was mighty big on resolutions, olive branches, and sittings-around of tables. Of course, those things are the basic stuff of diplomacy, and we have to do a certain amount of them. There comes a point, though, where they don’t suffice, and a nation must act. Back in mid-2002 I feared that we had no will to attack Iraq, though I said I wanted us to. I really feared that we had no will, no guts, to chastise our enemies the way I wanted them chastised—not with U.N. resolutions, but with bombs, tanks, and artillery shells. When events proved me wrong, I was delighted. (I felt the same delight when Margaret Thatcher, Whom God Preserve, went to war over the Falkland Islands in 1982.) Now we must act, we really must act, against Iran; but we can’t, because of Iraq.
I’ve never been able to work up any guilt, either on my own behalf or the administration’s, about the WMD issue. So far as I am concerned, what did I know? Saddam’s behavior sure made it look as though he was hiding something nasty. As an ordinary citizen, getting my information from newspapers and the TV, I had every reason to suppose that the WMD claims were true. Just why Saddam was behaving like that is now a bit of a mystery. Possibly he was a secret fan of classic Chinese literature (or opera) attempting a sort of Empty Fort Strategy. As for the administration: Well, either they knew the intelligence was worthless, or they didn’t. If they knew, then their duty was to assume the worst, and present it to us as the worst. If they didn’t know, then they honestly believed the lousy intelligence. None of this excuses the CIA’s incompetence, of course; but even that incompetence serves the good conservative purpose of driving home to the populace the fact that the federal government sucks at pretty much everything.
So why am I eating crow? Because I think it was foolish of me to suppose that the administration would act with the punitive ruthlessness I hoped to see. The rubble-and-out approach was not one that this administration, or perhaps any administration in the present state of our culture, would be willing to pursue. The universalist dogmas that rule unchallenged in our media and educational institutions have fixed their grip on our foreign policy, too. When the Founders of our nation said “all men” they had in mind Christian Anglo-Saxon men. Our leaders, though, want to bring the whole world under the scope of those grand Lockeian principles.
Perhaps this will work, or perhaps it won’t. My belief is, and always has been, that it won’t. My fault was in not grasping the scale of the administration’s multiculturalist ambitions. (Of which, to be fair to them, they had given plenty of hints, and even one or two frank declarations of intent.) George W. Bush believes that, to borrow and adjust a line from the colonel in Full Metal Jacket: “Inside every Middle East Muslim there is an American trying to get out.” The effort to stabilize Iraq, and the reluctance to just leave the Iraqis to fight each other among the rubble, followed inevitably from that belief, which is, according to me, a false belief. I see all that now. I didn’t see it then. I am sorry.
Apologizing for Iraq
Allow me to eat crow.
By John Derbyshire
My son is passing through that very annoying stage of development in which a child discovers that language is not so much like a solid landscape of rocks and trees, but much more like a well-equipped theater stage, fitted out with screens, doors to nowhere, trick lighting, turntables, trapdoors, and wires to lift you up into the flies. He has, in short, discovered ambiguity. Asked whether he has finished his homework, he will furrow his brow and say: “Define ‘finished’.” No doubt the lad will make a fine attorney (or opinion journalist) one day. In the meantime we must endure his relentless parsing.
I retreat to that developmental phase myself when friends ask me, as they do on average about once a week, whether I feel embarrassed at having supported the Iraq war. “Define ‘war,’” is the thing I want to say. I don’t say it, of course, exactly because it sounds like an irritating 11-year-old, but it’s really the essence of the matter. Did I support the 2003 invasion of Iraq? Yes I did. Do I support the continuing effort to get civil society going in Iraq? No I don’t, and haven’t for over two years. So do I support the war? Well... define “war.”
Let’s start from the fact that the whole thing, taken in one piece—attack plus follow-up nation-building effort—has been a huge negative for the USA. Is there anyone, really, who is glad we did it? Most of my NR colleagues are still talking up the administration’s Iraq policy. It’s hard not to think, though, that if wired up to a polygraph and asked the question: “Supposing you could wind the movie back to early 2003, would you still attack Iraq?” any affirmative answers would have those old needles a-jumping and a-skipping all over the graph paper.
We are stuck there in that wretched place with no way out that would not involve massive loss of geostrategic face. Getting on for 3,000 of our troops have been killed, and close to 20,000 maimed. We’ve spent untold billions of dollars. For what?
One reason I supported the initial attack, and the destruction of the Saddam regime, was that I hoped it would serve as an example, deliver a psychic shock to the whole region. It would have done, if we’d just rubbled the place then left. As it is, the shock value has all been frittered away. Far from being seen as a nation willing to act resolutely, a nation that knows how to punish our enemies, a nation that can smash one of those ramshackle Mideast despotisms with one blow from our mailed fist, a nation to be feared and respected, we are perceived as a soft and foolish nation, that squanders its victories and permits its mighty military power to be held to standoff by teenagers with homemade bombs—that lets crooks and bandits tie it down, Gulliver-like, with a thousand little threads of blackmail, trickery, lies, and petty violence.
Just ask yourself: Given that Iran is the real looming threat in that region, are we better placed now to deal with that threat than we would have been absent an Iraq war? If we could ask President Ahmadinejad whether he thinks we are better placed, what would his honest answer be?
We are not controlling events in Iraq. Events in Iraq are controlling us. We are the puppet; the street gangs of Baghdad and Basra are the puppet-masters, aided and abetted by an unsavory assortment of confidence men, bazaar traders, scheming clerics, ethnic front men, and Iranian agents. With all our wealth and power and idealism, we have submitted to become the plaything of a rabble, and a Middle Eastern rabble at that. Instead of rubbling, we have ourselves been rabbled. The lazy-minded evangelico-romanticism of George W. Bush, the bureaucratic will to power of Donald Rumsfeld, the avuncular condescension of Dick Cheney, and the reflexive military deference of Colin Powell combined to get us into a situation we never wanted to be in, a situation no self-respecting nation ought to be in, a situation we don’t know how to get out of. It’s not inconceivable that, with a run of sheer good luck, we might yet escape without too much egg on our faces, but it’s not likely. The place we are at is surely not a place anyone in 2003 wanted us to be at—not even Vic Davis Hanson.
Since the Iraq war was obviously a gross blunder, is it time for those of us who cheered on the war to offer some kind of apology? Here we are—we, the United States—in our fourth year of occupying that sinkhole, and it looks pretty much like the third year, or the second. Will the eighth year of our occupation, or our twelfth, look any better? I know people who will say yes, but I no longer know any who will say it with real conviction. It’s a tough thing, to admit you were wrong. It’s way tough if you’re a big-name pundit with a reputation to preserve. For those of us down at the bottom of the pundit pecking order, the stakes aren’t so high. I, at any rate, am willing to eat some crow and say: I wish I had never given any support to this fool war.
I am spared major embarrassment not only by the slightness of my own reputation, as by the fact that while I supported the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of the regime, I never thought much of the nation-building exercise that followed. It took me a while to figure out that the administration actually believed all the guff about “establishing democracy in the Middle East,” but once it had sunk in, and the party enthusiasms of the 2004 election season had subsided, I was calling for withdrawal. (The first time I gave over a column to it was, I think, in mid-September of 2004.) I wish I had done so earlier. And, yes, I’ll admit, I wish I hadn’t supported the invasion in the first place.
Why did I? For the reasons I declared on another website, just a year after the invasion:
[M]y attitude to the war is really just punitive, and Iraq was a target of opportunity. I am not a Wilsonian nation-builder. I don’t want to “bring democracy to Iraq.” I don’t, in fact, give a fig about the Iraqis. I am happy to leave barbarians alone to practice their unspeakable folkways, so long as they do not bother civilized peoples. When they do bother us, though, I want them smacked down with great ferocity. Saddam Hussein had been scoffing for years at the very concept of international order, in the belief that we would never pass from words to deeds. I wanted to see that belief confounded, and I am pleased that it has been. If the civilized world is never willing to back up its agreements, resolutions, and communiqués with force, then those fine documents are all worthless and civilization is impotent against its enemies. I am very glad to know that we have not yet reached that sorry pass.
I worry a lot that the civilized world, of which this nation is faute de mieux the leader, has sunk into an enervated lassitude, a condition in which it is unwilling to act against threatening, or just annoying, barbarians. Every time we defer to some United Nations resolution, every time we offer an olive branch to some thug ruler, every time we declare our willingness to sit around a table with some crazy demagogue, I think of the old League of Nations, which was mighty big on resolutions, olive branches, and sittings-around of tables. Of course, those things are the basic stuff of diplomacy, and we have to do a certain amount of them. There comes a point, though, where they don’t suffice, and a nation must act. Back in mid-2002 I feared that we had no will to attack Iraq, though I said I wanted us to. I really feared that we had no will, no guts, to chastise our enemies the way I wanted them chastised—not with U.N. resolutions, but with bombs, tanks, and artillery shells. When events proved me wrong, I was delighted. (I felt the same delight when Margaret Thatcher, Whom God Preserve, went to war over the Falkland Islands in 1982.) Now we must act, we really must act, against Iran; but we can’t, because of Iraq.
I’ve never been able to work up any guilt, either on my own behalf or the administration’s, about the WMD issue. So far as I am concerned, what did I know? Saddam’s behavior sure made it look as though he was hiding something nasty. As an ordinary citizen, getting my information from newspapers and the TV, I had every reason to suppose that the WMD claims were true. Just why Saddam was behaving like that is now a bit of a mystery. Possibly he was a secret fan of classic Chinese literature (or opera) attempting a sort of Empty Fort Strategy. As for the administration: Well, either they knew the intelligence was worthless, or they didn’t. If they knew, then their duty was to assume the worst, and present it to us as the worst. If they didn’t know, then they honestly believed the lousy intelligence. None of this excuses the CIA’s incompetence, of course; but even that incompetence serves the good conservative purpose of driving home to the populace the fact that the federal government sucks at pretty much everything.
So why am I eating crow? Because I think it was foolish of me to suppose that the administration would act with the punitive ruthlessness I hoped to see. The rubble-and-out approach was not one that this administration, or perhaps any administration in the present state of our culture, would be willing to pursue. The universalist dogmas that rule unchallenged in our media and educational institutions have fixed their grip on our foreign policy, too. When the Founders of our nation said “all men” they had in mind Christian Anglo-Saxon men. Our leaders, though, want to bring the whole world under the scope of those grand Lockeian principles.
Perhaps this will work, or perhaps it won’t. My belief is, and always has been, that it won’t. My fault was in not grasping the scale of the administration’s multiculturalist ambitions. (Of which, to be fair to them, they had given plenty of hints, and even one or two frank declarations of intent.) George W. Bush believes that, to borrow and adjust a line from the colonel in Full Metal Jacket: “Inside every Middle East Muslim there is an American trying to get out.” The effort to stabilize Iraq, and the reluctance to just leave the Iraqis to fight each other among the rubble, followed inevitably from that belief, which is, according to me, a false belief. I see all that now. I didn’t see it then. I am sorry.
From The Corner at NRO:
The Greatest Kos Posting Ever [John Podhoretz]
The poster's handle is CheChe. The text captures everything you need to know about the Angry Left:
I don't think I've ever seen such a look of misery and dejection on the face of my daughter as I just did a moment ago. She just couldn't understand why the President would be going to Iraq when so many things are wrong in this country. "Doesn’t Mr. Bush care about us anymore?" she asked pitifully.
I sat down with her on the sofa and (as calmly as I could) tried to explain to her why the President seems to be abandoning his country. "Honey, I think his boss, Mr. Rove, sent Mr. Bush out of the country in order to keep himself out of the newspapers. You see, he wasn’t sure if he was going to be arrested today or not, and so he planned Mr. Bush’s trip ahead of time just in case...”
I tried to keep my voice steady, but it became increasingly difficult - the rage and feelings of helplessness were just too much. I think my daughter could tell something was wrong. I found myself at such a loss for words - nothing made any sense; nothing makes sense anymore. I finally had to admit, "Honey, I just don't know - I don't know what's going on in this country anymore..."
When I finished her lower lip started to tremble and her eyes began to fill with tears, "Daddy" she said, "why are the Republicans doing this to the country?" Well, that was it for me: I finally fell apart. She just fell into my arms and we both began sobbing for several minutes.
For once she had to comfort me and get me back on my feet. Sometimes I just think it's too much, but seeing the strength in my young daughter's voice helped me to get through.
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the grief of Little CheChe.
The Greatest Kos Posting Ever [John Podhoretz]
The poster's handle is CheChe. The text captures everything you need to know about the Angry Left:
I don't think I've ever seen such a look of misery and dejection on the face of my daughter as I just did a moment ago. She just couldn't understand why the President would be going to Iraq when so many things are wrong in this country. "Doesn’t Mr. Bush care about us anymore?" she asked pitifully.
I sat down with her on the sofa and (as calmly as I could) tried to explain to her why the President seems to be abandoning his country. "Honey, I think his boss, Mr. Rove, sent Mr. Bush out of the country in order to keep himself out of the newspapers. You see, he wasn’t sure if he was going to be arrested today or not, and so he planned Mr. Bush’s trip ahead of time just in case...”
I tried to keep my voice steady, but it became increasingly difficult - the rage and feelings of helplessness were just too much. I think my daughter could tell something was wrong. I found myself at such a loss for words - nothing made any sense; nothing makes sense anymore. I finally had to admit, "Honey, I just don't know - I don't know what's going on in this country anymore..."
When I finished her lower lip started to tremble and her eyes began to fill with tears, "Daddy" she said, "why are the Republicans doing this to the country?" Well, that was it for me: I finally fell apart. She just fell into my arms and we both began sobbing for several minutes.
For once she had to comfort me and get me back on my feet. Sometimes I just think it's too much, but seeing the strength in my young daughter's voice helped me to get through.
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the grief of Little CheChe.
Monday, June 12, 2006
John Kerry's Skimmer Scam
By Thomas Lipscomb
As the Kate Zernike front page Memorial Day weekend New York Times story indicates, a number of Kerry supporters were disappointed that Kerry had not vigorously defended himself against the charges of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth during the 2004 Presidential campaign. According to Zernike some "are compiling a dossier that they say will expose every one of the Swift boat group's charges as a lie and put to rest any question about Mr. Kerry's valor in combat."
That might not only be a difficult task but it could backfire badly. As Vanity Fair's acerbic columnist Michael Wolff said in the 3-minute 2-second trailer to a Kerry-sponsored (and Kerry-censored) documentary campaign film by respected producer Steve Rosenbaum, Inside the Bubble, the real problem with the Swift Boat claims was they were "largely true." And as former Dean of the Stanford Law School Bayless Manning has cautioned enthusiastic advocates, "As an attorney, you needn't worry too much about the lies told by your opponents. Your real danger is the lies told by your client." Ask the ghost of Alger Hiss.
In the Times piece, Kerry makes a great deal of the "skimmer" operation. It is worth looking at closely. According to Kerry's accounts in both Michael Kranish's Boston Globe reporting, the Brinkley account of TOUR OF DUTY, and the Zernike Times piece, Kerry, an officer stationed at Coastal Division 14 at Cam Ranh Bay, still in training before being assigned a Swift boat, who had never been in combat before, "volunteered for a special mission on what the Navy called a skimmer but he knew as a Boston Whaler." Coastal Division 14 operations officer Bill Schachte, who says he was glad to have Kerry volunteer, agrees so far.
Kerry claims he was joined on the mission by two enlisted men, William Zaladonis and Patrick Runyon, and they confirm that. None of the three had ever been on a skimmer mission before. According to Grant Hibbard, the commander of Coastal Division 14 under whom all these men served, "These missions were originally designed and executed by my executive officer, Bill Schachte, who served as my operations officer."
The purpose of the missions is not in dispute. According to Schachte:
"I had gotten Hibbard's permission to conduct some skimmer missions out of our base when we appeared to have actionable intelligence. The bombing pause of North Vietnam was on and we expected more infiltration traffic of supplies down the coast, particularly at night.
We would generally tow a 'skimmer' (a Boston Whaler stripped down for a lower silhouette) behind a Swift boat into a likely area leaving the noisier Swift boat offshore and taking the skimmer in quietly to observe and fire on targets of opportunity. The areas we operated in were 'free fire zones.' All personnel in the specified area we investigated presumed to be enemy and having been selected by intel as worth taking a look at."
Schachte says he designed the missions for two officers and one enlisted man to run the boat. He commanded forward with an M-60 7.62 machine gun, the other officer would carry an M-16 with a starlight scope scanning the shoreline or an M-14 with an infrared scope if it was cloudy. He wanted two officers because as an intelligence-generated mission he wanted to make sure two men on the boat had been cued in at the 4PM operations meeting on what to look for in the area to be explored. Enlisted men did not attend that meeting.
Schachte's regular call sign on the radio was "Bacardi Charlie," but when he ran the occasional skimmer missions Schachte took on a distinctive new call sign "BATMAN" and the supporting Swift boat, whoever was in command, was "ROBIN."
Schachte says he personally led seven out of the eight skimmer missions he ran at Cam Ranh, and the one he didn't lead was not led by what Hibbard terms "a 'rookie' who knew nothing about the concept or tactics involved to command the skimmer." Schachte points out that if he had risked the lives of two enlisted men with a green officer on a difficult night mission like this he should have been reprimanded. Kerry, after all, was an "officer in training" at Coastal Division 14. Kerry had never had a command and had not yet been released to a first command of his own. His job was to go on missions with veterans and learn.
In fact, the one mission Schachte didn't lead was led by veteran Swift boat skipper Tedd Peck, two nights after the Kerry mission, to the same place, with Peck as leader with two other officers, Stephen Hayes and Mark Janes. In advance of the mission, according to Peck, "Schachte made us go down and have a gunner's mate train us with the M-60 machine gun which was not part of the Swift boat arsenal at the time, but was the main armament of the skimmer. It took two hours and we finished it just before we left on the mission."
According to the Times account: "Bill Schachte was not on that skimmer," Mr. Kerry says firmly. "He was not on that skimmer. It is a lie to suggest that he was out there on that skimmer... .The three guys who in fact were in the boat all say he wasn't there and will tell you he wasn't there. We know he wasn't there, and we have all kinds of ways of proving it."
Let's take a look at the "all kinds of ways." One of the "ways" would be for Kerry to disclose how he was ordered on this mission and by whom, but he has never done so. According to Coastal Division 14 commander Hibbard, every mission was assigned by Schachte. Does Kerry expect us to believe Schachte assigned him, in the face of his and Hibbard's statements, and they are both lying about it?
In that case, who was in command of the Kerry mission and where is the after action report? Does Kerry claim that as a trainee he was placed in command over an experienced Swift boat commander with his own boat like Mike Voss? Kerry hasn't told us about that either. And what about Mike Voss's statement to Lisa Myers of NBC that "I'm pretty certain Schachte was there in the skimmer?"
Certainly, training on the M-60 seems to have been essential enough to operations officer Schachte to have three officers grubbing around in the dirt training with an M-60 the afternoon of their night mission. But Patrick Runyon, one of Kerry's claimed crew, honestly admits he "was never trained on one." Runyon said that on the mission with Kerry, he and Zaladonis traded off on running the boat and manning the M-60. William Zaladonis isn't sure he agrees with Runyon about the trade off, but claimed to me that he was trained on an M-60 at Swift Boat School in California by the Marines at Camp Pendleton. My survey of over a dozen attendees, both pro and anti-Kerry, finds none who trained at Pendleton.
What about the mission itself on December 2-3 1968? Schachte reports that after creeping around the shoreline of empty Nha Trang Bay in the dark and finding nothing, he thought he saw movement on shore around 3AM, popped a parachute flare, and fired his M-60 where he saw the movement until it jammed while Kerry fired his M-16. When Kerry's M-16 stopped, Schachte heard the distinctive "POW" of an M-79 grenade launcher. Now they had made such a spectacular son et lumiere announcement of their once secret mission, Schachte decided to get out of there, back to Voss's supporting Swift boat, and home. The mission was a bust. No enemy action, not even the sighting of enemy, with rookie Kerry claiming he had been wounded in the arm and demanding his purple heart.
Kerry and his men describe a magical mystery tour - that same night and that same time in a parallel universe - in a traffic-jammed Nha Trang Bay that apparently had scheduled a starlight sampan regatta that evening. According to Kerry's account to Brinkley, "Most of the night had been spent being scared shitless by fishermen whom we would suddenly creep up on out of the darkness..." In Brinkley's summary, "For the next four hours Kerry's Boston Whaler, using paddles, brought boatloads of fisherman they found in sampans... back to the Swift. It was tiring work."
"Tiring work?" If you ever tried to paddle an almost 15-foot long Boston Whaler with three in crew, loaded with arms, ammunition, and a bunch of jabbering Vietnamese fishermen crammed onboard, 2 ½ miles out to a Swift boat a number of times in monsoon seas you would enthusiastically agree and want to shoot the idiot who refused to use the engine.
But wait a minute... . Didn't Kerry point to the phony "photograph of the skimmer being towed behind his Swift boat, insisting that it could barely fit three people, himself and two others"?
How many Vietnamese fishermen can you put on an armed skimmer with a three-man crew and still paddle miles out to a Swift boat without swamping it in a heavy monsoon chop? According to my interview with Bill Zaladonis, "three to four." Why do this? According to Zaladonis's interview with Lisa Myers, "I assume they were interrogating them - turning them loose or whatever." "Whatever," indeed.
And there's more. After four hours of playing galley slave for the U.S. Navy, "Suddenly it was scary as hell," according to Kerry in Brinkley. A group "of five or six sampans" (according to Zaladonis in Myers) glide into Kerry's starlight scope, beach their craft, and once Kerry pops a flare Brinkley says "they sprang for cover like a herd of panicked gazelles Kerry had once seen on Wild Kingdom."
And the wild rumpus commenced. "The air was full of explosions," Kerry and crew ran like hell strafing the shore as they went, Kerry experiences his wounding, and heads back to the Swift boat and home. Neither of his claimed crew members confirmed any enemy fire, yet they both "assumed" Kerry had been wounded by it. Curiouser and curiouser.
Kerry's summary of the mission? Here is what he told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press":
"We were in combat. We were in a very, very--probably one of the most frightening--if you ask anybody who was with me, the two guys who were with me, was probably the most frightening night that they had that they were in Vietnam... ."
Kerry in TOUR OF DUTY:
"It was a half-assed action that hardly qualified as combat, but it was my first... . ... [A] minor skirmish, but since I couldn't put my finger on what we really accomplished or on what had happened, it was difficult to feel satisfied. "
Finally, Kerry in TOUR OF DUTY a la recherche... from his "journal" nine days after "whatever" happened in Na Trang Bay:
"A cocky feeling of invincibility accompanied us up the Long Tau shipping channel because we hadn't been shot at yet, and Americans at war who haven't been shot at are allowed to be cocky."
Take your pick.
Poor Schachte, who had had a boring evening ending in a blown mission - somehow in the same time and place in that parallel universe to Kerry's "frightening" magical mystery tour - got debriefed by the Coastal Division 14 commander Hibbard, filed no after action report since there was no enemy action, told Hibbard Kerry wanted a Purple Heart, and hit the sack, mildly disgusted.
Kerry got back in the same time and same place, and filed no after action report. Neither did Mike Voss, despite an action as described by Kerry that certainly merited one and would have guaranteed him an automatic purple heart with no problems with either Hibbard or Schachte had he filed one. In fact, according to Hibbard, it would have been the only after action report filed on one of Schachte's skimmer missions which weren't as effective as he and Schachte had hoped. Schachte disagrees and is convinced there must have been "one or two."
Kerry reported to Navy doctor Louis Letson the next morning after duty hours began at 8 AM. Schachte had told him, "No enemy action, no purple heart." Kerry's appeal to Hibbard brought the rejoinder "I have seen rose thorn injuries worse than that. No enemy action, no purple heart." Surely a doctor would be more understanding, not that it mattered. Only Kerry's direct commanders could approve the award.
Kerry lay down on Letson's examination table and told Letson: "We were involved in a fire fight and we received fire from shore." One of the four or five men hanging around the dispensary out of Kerry's sight lowered his head and began to wag an emphatic "no" and stifle a laugh. Letson found ¼ inch fragment sticking out of Kerry's upper arm. It looked like wire about the diameter of a toothpick, he pulled it out with his forceps and flipped it with a tiny "klink" into a steel basin held by his Hospitalman, Jesus Carreon, to the applause of the appreciative audience. Letson was so amused he took a photo of Carreon holding the basin with the ½ inch fragment barely visible in the bottom of it.
As usual, whether Letson prescribed APC pills, ointment for a burn, cut out an ingrown toenail or any other medical action, Carreon dutifully noted in the medical record form Letson's treatment: "3 DEC 1968 U.S. NAVAL SUPPORT FACILITY CAM RANH BAY RVN FPO Shrapnel in left arm above elbow. Shrapnel removed and apply Bacitracin dressing. Ret to duty."
Letson says he slapped a bandaid on the wound. When he looked back in a few minutes later, Carreon was winding layers of gauze over the bandaid achieving quite a dramatic effect. Why? According to Letson "Carreon said Kerry was afraid the bandaid would come off." Tedd Peck was dying to see "the purple heart wound" but Kerry wouldn't show it to him.
Months later, Kerry's commanders Hibbard and Schachte had been rotated elsewhere, as had Kerry. In transit, Kerry was now in possession of his medical records file jacket including the form Carreon had filed out. And he apparently found someone to pay what he obviously thought was proper attention to what most people at Cam Ranh had regarded as an unintentionally self-inflicted wound by an improperly fired M-79 grenade launcher, if not a bad joke about a delusional rookie officer. The timing of the first purple heart request tells all.
No reasonable explanation has yet been offered for the grant of Kerry's first purple heart. Tedd Peck dissolves into laughter recalling a dispirited Schachte heading into the officers' club for a drink the day after the mission muttering that Kerry was threatening "to write his Congressman if he didn't get his purple heart," knowing the bales of quadruplicate paperwork that would ensue.
Twenty years later, in 1988, Rear Admiral William Schachte , then assistant JAG to the Department of the Navy was waiting with a friend for the Capitol subway train in the basement of Russell Senate Office Building. The friend he was with was eager to introduce him to another veteran of Swift boats who was waiting also. It was Senator John Forbes Kerry.
"Bill Schachte was not on that skimmer," Mr. Kerry firmly told The New York Times. "He was not on that skimmer. It is a lie to suggest that he was out there on that skimmer... ."
On seeing Admiral Schachte, resplendent in his dress blues, gold braid and decorations, Kerry broke out in a broad grin and pointing his finger said: "BATMAN.".
How could he know?
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
By Thomas Lipscomb
As the Kate Zernike front page Memorial Day weekend New York Times story indicates, a number of Kerry supporters were disappointed that Kerry had not vigorously defended himself against the charges of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth during the 2004 Presidential campaign. According to Zernike some "are compiling a dossier that they say will expose every one of the Swift boat group's charges as a lie and put to rest any question about Mr. Kerry's valor in combat."
That might not only be a difficult task but it could backfire badly. As Vanity Fair's acerbic columnist Michael Wolff said in the 3-minute 2-second trailer to a Kerry-sponsored (and Kerry-censored) documentary campaign film by respected producer Steve Rosenbaum, Inside the Bubble, the real problem with the Swift Boat claims was they were "largely true." And as former Dean of the Stanford Law School Bayless Manning has cautioned enthusiastic advocates, "As an attorney, you needn't worry too much about the lies told by your opponents. Your real danger is the lies told by your client." Ask the ghost of Alger Hiss.
In the Times piece, Kerry makes a great deal of the "skimmer" operation. It is worth looking at closely. According to Kerry's accounts in both Michael Kranish's Boston Globe reporting, the Brinkley account of TOUR OF DUTY, and the Zernike Times piece, Kerry, an officer stationed at Coastal Division 14 at Cam Ranh Bay, still in training before being assigned a Swift boat, who had never been in combat before, "volunteered for a special mission on what the Navy called a skimmer but he knew as a Boston Whaler." Coastal Division 14 operations officer Bill Schachte, who says he was glad to have Kerry volunteer, agrees so far.
Kerry claims he was joined on the mission by two enlisted men, William Zaladonis and Patrick Runyon, and they confirm that. None of the three had ever been on a skimmer mission before. According to Grant Hibbard, the commander of Coastal Division 14 under whom all these men served, "These missions were originally designed and executed by my executive officer, Bill Schachte, who served as my operations officer."
The purpose of the missions is not in dispute. According to Schachte:
"I had gotten Hibbard's permission to conduct some skimmer missions out of our base when we appeared to have actionable intelligence. The bombing pause of North Vietnam was on and we expected more infiltration traffic of supplies down the coast, particularly at night.
We would generally tow a 'skimmer' (a Boston Whaler stripped down for a lower silhouette) behind a Swift boat into a likely area leaving the noisier Swift boat offshore and taking the skimmer in quietly to observe and fire on targets of opportunity. The areas we operated in were 'free fire zones.' All personnel in the specified area we investigated presumed to be enemy and having been selected by intel as worth taking a look at."
Schachte says he designed the missions for two officers and one enlisted man to run the boat. He commanded forward with an M-60 7.62 machine gun, the other officer would carry an M-16 with a starlight scope scanning the shoreline or an M-14 with an infrared scope if it was cloudy. He wanted two officers because as an intelligence-generated mission he wanted to make sure two men on the boat had been cued in at the 4PM operations meeting on what to look for in the area to be explored. Enlisted men did not attend that meeting.
Schachte's regular call sign on the radio was "Bacardi Charlie," but when he ran the occasional skimmer missions Schachte took on a distinctive new call sign "BATMAN" and the supporting Swift boat, whoever was in command, was "ROBIN."
Schachte says he personally led seven out of the eight skimmer missions he ran at Cam Ranh, and the one he didn't lead was not led by what Hibbard terms "a 'rookie' who knew nothing about the concept or tactics involved to command the skimmer." Schachte points out that if he had risked the lives of two enlisted men with a green officer on a difficult night mission like this he should have been reprimanded. Kerry, after all, was an "officer in training" at Coastal Division 14. Kerry had never had a command and had not yet been released to a first command of his own. His job was to go on missions with veterans and learn.
In fact, the one mission Schachte didn't lead was led by veteran Swift boat skipper Tedd Peck, two nights after the Kerry mission, to the same place, with Peck as leader with two other officers, Stephen Hayes and Mark Janes. In advance of the mission, according to Peck, "Schachte made us go down and have a gunner's mate train us with the M-60 machine gun which was not part of the Swift boat arsenal at the time, but was the main armament of the skimmer. It took two hours and we finished it just before we left on the mission."
According to the Times account: "Bill Schachte was not on that skimmer," Mr. Kerry says firmly. "He was not on that skimmer. It is a lie to suggest that he was out there on that skimmer... .The three guys who in fact were in the boat all say he wasn't there and will tell you he wasn't there. We know he wasn't there, and we have all kinds of ways of proving it."
Let's take a look at the "all kinds of ways." One of the "ways" would be for Kerry to disclose how he was ordered on this mission and by whom, but he has never done so. According to Coastal Division 14 commander Hibbard, every mission was assigned by Schachte. Does Kerry expect us to believe Schachte assigned him, in the face of his and Hibbard's statements, and they are both lying about it?
In that case, who was in command of the Kerry mission and where is the after action report? Does Kerry claim that as a trainee he was placed in command over an experienced Swift boat commander with his own boat like Mike Voss? Kerry hasn't told us about that either. And what about Mike Voss's statement to Lisa Myers of NBC that "I'm pretty certain Schachte was there in the skimmer?"
Certainly, training on the M-60 seems to have been essential enough to operations officer Schachte to have three officers grubbing around in the dirt training with an M-60 the afternoon of their night mission. But Patrick Runyon, one of Kerry's claimed crew, honestly admits he "was never trained on one." Runyon said that on the mission with Kerry, he and Zaladonis traded off on running the boat and manning the M-60. William Zaladonis isn't sure he agrees with Runyon about the trade off, but claimed to me that he was trained on an M-60 at Swift Boat School in California by the Marines at Camp Pendleton. My survey of over a dozen attendees, both pro and anti-Kerry, finds none who trained at Pendleton.
What about the mission itself on December 2-3 1968? Schachte reports that after creeping around the shoreline of empty Nha Trang Bay in the dark and finding nothing, he thought he saw movement on shore around 3AM, popped a parachute flare, and fired his M-60 where he saw the movement until it jammed while Kerry fired his M-16. When Kerry's M-16 stopped, Schachte heard the distinctive "POW" of an M-79 grenade launcher. Now they had made such a spectacular son et lumiere announcement of their once secret mission, Schachte decided to get out of there, back to Voss's supporting Swift boat, and home. The mission was a bust. No enemy action, not even the sighting of enemy, with rookie Kerry claiming he had been wounded in the arm and demanding his purple heart.
Kerry and his men describe a magical mystery tour - that same night and that same time in a parallel universe - in a traffic-jammed Nha Trang Bay that apparently had scheduled a starlight sampan regatta that evening. According to Kerry's account to Brinkley, "Most of the night had been spent being scared shitless by fishermen whom we would suddenly creep up on out of the darkness..." In Brinkley's summary, "For the next four hours Kerry's Boston Whaler, using paddles, brought boatloads of fisherman they found in sampans... back to the Swift. It was tiring work."
"Tiring work?" If you ever tried to paddle an almost 15-foot long Boston Whaler with three in crew, loaded with arms, ammunition, and a bunch of jabbering Vietnamese fishermen crammed onboard, 2 ½ miles out to a Swift boat a number of times in monsoon seas you would enthusiastically agree and want to shoot the idiot who refused to use the engine.
But wait a minute... . Didn't Kerry point to the phony "photograph of the skimmer being towed behind his Swift boat, insisting that it could barely fit three people, himself and two others"?
How many Vietnamese fishermen can you put on an armed skimmer with a three-man crew and still paddle miles out to a Swift boat without swamping it in a heavy monsoon chop? According to my interview with Bill Zaladonis, "three to four." Why do this? According to Zaladonis's interview with Lisa Myers, "I assume they were interrogating them - turning them loose or whatever." "Whatever," indeed.
And there's more. After four hours of playing galley slave for the U.S. Navy, "Suddenly it was scary as hell," according to Kerry in Brinkley. A group "of five or six sampans" (according to Zaladonis in Myers) glide into Kerry's starlight scope, beach their craft, and once Kerry pops a flare Brinkley says "they sprang for cover like a herd of panicked gazelles Kerry had once seen on Wild Kingdom."
And the wild rumpus commenced. "The air was full of explosions," Kerry and crew ran like hell strafing the shore as they went, Kerry experiences his wounding, and heads back to the Swift boat and home. Neither of his claimed crew members confirmed any enemy fire, yet they both "assumed" Kerry had been wounded by it. Curiouser and curiouser.
Kerry's summary of the mission? Here is what he told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press":
"We were in combat. We were in a very, very--probably one of the most frightening--if you ask anybody who was with me, the two guys who were with me, was probably the most frightening night that they had that they were in Vietnam... ."
Kerry in TOUR OF DUTY:
"It was a half-assed action that hardly qualified as combat, but it was my first... . ... [A] minor skirmish, but since I couldn't put my finger on what we really accomplished or on what had happened, it was difficult to feel satisfied. "
Finally, Kerry in TOUR OF DUTY a la recherche... from his "journal" nine days after "whatever" happened in Na Trang Bay:
"A cocky feeling of invincibility accompanied us up the Long Tau shipping channel because we hadn't been shot at yet, and Americans at war who haven't been shot at are allowed to be cocky."
Take your pick.
Poor Schachte, who had had a boring evening ending in a blown mission - somehow in the same time and place in that parallel universe to Kerry's "frightening" magical mystery tour - got debriefed by the Coastal Division 14 commander Hibbard, filed no after action report since there was no enemy action, told Hibbard Kerry wanted a Purple Heart, and hit the sack, mildly disgusted.
Kerry got back in the same time and same place, and filed no after action report. Neither did Mike Voss, despite an action as described by Kerry that certainly merited one and would have guaranteed him an automatic purple heart with no problems with either Hibbard or Schachte had he filed one. In fact, according to Hibbard, it would have been the only after action report filed on one of Schachte's skimmer missions which weren't as effective as he and Schachte had hoped. Schachte disagrees and is convinced there must have been "one or two."
Kerry reported to Navy doctor Louis Letson the next morning after duty hours began at 8 AM. Schachte had told him, "No enemy action, no purple heart." Kerry's appeal to Hibbard brought the rejoinder "I have seen rose thorn injuries worse than that. No enemy action, no purple heart." Surely a doctor would be more understanding, not that it mattered. Only Kerry's direct commanders could approve the award.
Kerry lay down on Letson's examination table and told Letson: "We were involved in a fire fight and we received fire from shore." One of the four or five men hanging around the dispensary out of Kerry's sight lowered his head and began to wag an emphatic "no" and stifle a laugh. Letson found ¼ inch fragment sticking out of Kerry's upper arm. It looked like wire about the diameter of a toothpick, he pulled it out with his forceps and flipped it with a tiny "klink" into a steel basin held by his Hospitalman, Jesus Carreon, to the applause of the appreciative audience. Letson was so amused he took a photo of Carreon holding the basin with the ½ inch fragment barely visible in the bottom of it.
As usual, whether Letson prescribed APC pills, ointment for a burn, cut out an ingrown toenail or any other medical action, Carreon dutifully noted in the medical record form Letson's treatment: "3 DEC 1968 U.S. NAVAL SUPPORT FACILITY CAM RANH BAY RVN FPO Shrapnel in left arm above elbow. Shrapnel removed and apply Bacitracin dressing. Ret to duty."
Letson says he slapped a bandaid on the wound. When he looked back in a few minutes later, Carreon was winding layers of gauze over the bandaid achieving quite a dramatic effect. Why? According to Letson "Carreon said Kerry was afraid the bandaid would come off." Tedd Peck was dying to see "the purple heart wound" but Kerry wouldn't show it to him.
Months later, Kerry's commanders Hibbard and Schachte had been rotated elsewhere, as had Kerry. In transit, Kerry was now in possession of his medical records file jacket including the form Carreon had filed out. And he apparently found someone to pay what he obviously thought was proper attention to what most people at Cam Ranh had regarded as an unintentionally self-inflicted wound by an improperly fired M-79 grenade launcher, if not a bad joke about a delusional rookie officer. The timing of the first purple heart request tells all.
No reasonable explanation has yet been offered for the grant of Kerry's first purple heart. Tedd Peck dissolves into laughter recalling a dispirited Schachte heading into the officers' club for a drink the day after the mission muttering that Kerry was threatening "to write his Congressman if he didn't get his purple heart," knowing the bales of quadruplicate paperwork that would ensue.
Twenty years later, in 1988, Rear Admiral William Schachte , then assistant JAG to the Department of the Navy was waiting with a friend for the Capitol subway train in the basement of Russell Senate Office Building. The friend he was with was eager to introduce him to another veteran of Swift boats who was waiting also. It was Senator John Forbes Kerry.
"Bill Schachte was not on that skimmer," Mr. Kerry firmly told The New York Times. "He was not on that skimmer. It is a lie to suggest that he was out there on that skimmer... ."
On seeing Admiral Schachte, resplendent in his dress blues, gold braid and decorations, Kerry broke out in a broad grin and pointing his finger said: "BATMAN.".
How could he know?
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
From David Horowitz's blog:
The Coulter Identity
Here is the syndrome behind the attacks on Ann Coulter: the left is once again in an untenable position defending an enemy who wants to destroy us. Just as they were rooting for the Communists in the Cold War so they want us to lose the war in Iraq and the war with radical Islam. That's because they think we are the cause of the war with radical Islam.
According to the left: the Islamicists -- like the Stalinists before them -- are really desperate people driven to desperate means by our imperial ways (which now include torture and the deliberate murder of little children). Since leftists know that they can't just come out and say directly what they think and in so many words -- e.g., America is the bad guy in the war and should throw in the towel, give Iraq to al-Qaeda and give the world a break -- and do so with impunity, they need shields behind which to advance their cause. In this they have taken a leaf from the terrorists' playbook. Hide behind the women and children and then when the Americans defend themselves and fire back call them baby-killers.
So the left advances behind "mothers" like Cindy Sheehan, widows like the leftist Jersey girls, and veterans like the ineffable Kerry and call-our-brave-young-men-women-war-criminals-before-the-evidence-is-in Jack Murtha. I put quotes around the word "mother" in describing Sheenhan because she disowned her son twice before using him as fodder for her leftwing cannon. Once when he was seven and she simply left him, and the second time when he was dead and she pissed on his grave calling him a stooge (to serve her own miserable ends) when he was actually a hero, having volunteered twice, and a third time for the rescue mission that killed him.
Mourning is one thing and so is grief. Hiding behind a dead relative to defame your political opponents and stab your countrymen in the back is quite another. Bravo Ann for exposing these wretches.
The Coulter Identity
Here is the syndrome behind the attacks on Ann Coulter: the left is once again in an untenable position defending an enemy who wants to destroy us. Just as they were rooting for the Communists in the Cold War so they want us to lose the war in Iraq and the war with radical Islam. That's because they think we are the cause of the war with radical Islam.
According to the left: the Islamicists -- like the Stalinists before them -- are really desperate people driven to desperate means by our imperial ways (which now include torture and the deliberate murder of little children). Since leftists know that they can't just come out and say directly what they think and in so many words -- e.g., America is the bad guy in the war and should throw in the towel, give Iraq to al-Qaeda and give the world a break -- and do so with impunity, they need shields behind which to advance their cause. In this they have taken a leaf from the terrorists' playbook. Hide behind the women and children and then when the Americans defend themselves and fire back call them baby-killers.
So the left advances behind "mothers" like Cindy Sheehan, widows like the leftist Jersey girls, and veterans like the ineffable Kerry and call-our-brave-young-men-women-war-criminals-before-the-evidence-is-in Jack Murtha. I put quotes around the word "mother" in describing Sheenhan because she disowned her son twice before using him as fodder for her leftwing cannon. Once when he was seven and she simply left him, and the second time when he was dead and she pissed on his grave calling him a stooge (to serve her own miserable ends) when he was actually a hero, having volunteered twice, and a third time for the rescue mission that killed him.
Mourning is one thing and so is grief. Hiding behind a dead relative to defame your political opponents and stab your countrymen in the back is quite another. Bravo Ann for exposing these wretches.
From www.washingtontimes.com:
The devaluing of human life
By Nat Hentoff
June 12, 2006
A friend of mine told me of a recent conversation at his family's dinner table that keeps reverberating in my mind. His wife, a physician, also performs abortions. And their 9-year-old son -- hearing the words and curious about its meaning -- looked up from his plate and asked, "What is an abortion?" His mother tried carefully to describe it in simple terms.
"But," said her son, "that means killing the baby." The mother then explained that there are certain months during which an abortion cannot be performed, with very few exceptions. The 9-year-old shook his head. "But," he said, "it doesn't matter what month. It still means killing the babies." Hearing the story, I wished it could be repeated to the justices of the Supreme Court, in the hope that at least five of them might act on this 9-year-old's clarity of thought and vision.
The boy's spontaneous insistence on the primacy of life also reminded me of a powerful pro-life speaker and writer who, many years ago, helped me become a pro-lifer. He was a preacher, a black preacher. He said: "There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of a higher order than the right to life.
"That," he continued, "was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore out of your right to be concerned." This passionate reverend used to warn: "Don't let the pro-choicers convince you that a fetus isn't a human being. That's how the whites dehumanized us... The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in order to justify what they wanted to do and not even feel they'd done anything wrong."
That preacher was the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Later, he decided to run for the presidency, and it was a credible campaign that many found inspiring in its focus on what still had to be done on civil rights. But Mr. Jackson had by now become "pro-choice," much to the appreciation of most of those in the liberal base.
The last time I saw Mr. Jackson was years later, on a train from Washington to New York. I told him of a man nominated, but not yet confirmed, to a seat on a federal circuit court of appeals. This candidate was a strong supporter of capital punishment which both Mr. Jackson and I oppose, since it involves the irreversible taking of a human life by the state.
I asked Mr. Jackson if he would hold a press conference in Washington, criticizing the nomination, and he said he would. The reverend was true to his word; the press conference took place; but that nominee was confirmed to the federal circuit court. However, I appreciated Mr. Jackson's effort.
On that train, I also told Mr. Jackson that I'd been quoting in articles and in talks with various groups from his compelling pro-life statements. I asked him if he'd had any second thoughts on his reversal of those views.
Usually quick to respond to any challenge that he is not consistent in his positions, Mr. Jackson paused, and seemed somewhat disquieted at my question. Then he said to me, "I'll get back to you on that." I still patiently await what he has to say.
As time goes on, my deepening concern with the consequences of abortion is that its validation by the Supreme Court, as a constitutional practice, helps support the convictions of those who, in other controversies involving euthanasia, assisted suicide and the "futility doctrine" by certain hospital ethics committees, believe that there are lives not worth continuing.
Around the time of my conversation with Mr. Jackson on the train, I attended a conference on euthanasia at Clark College in Worcester, Mass. There, I met Derek Humphrey, the founder of the Hemlock Society, and already known internationally as a key proponent of the "death with dignity" movement.
He told me that for some years in this country, he had considerable difficulty getting his views about assisted suicide and, as he sees it, compassionate euthanasia, into the American press.
"But then," Mr. Humphrey told me, "a wonderful thing happened. It opened all the doors for me." "What was that wonderful thing?" I asked.
"Roe v. Wade," he answered.
The devaluing of human life as the 9-year-old at the dinner table put it more vividly did not end with making abortion legal, and therefore, to some people, moral. The word "baby" does not appear in Roe v. Wade, let alone the word "killing." And so, the termination of "lives not worth living" goes on.
The devaluing of human life
By Nat Hentoff
June 12, 2006
A friend of mine told me of a recent conversation at his family's dinner table that keeps reverberating in my mind. His wife, a physician, also performs abortions. And their 9-year-old son -- hearing the words and curious about its meaning -- looked up from his plate and asked, "What is an abortion?" His mother tried carefully to describe it in simple terms.
"But," said her son, "that means killing the baby." The mother then explained that there are certain months during which an abortion cannot be performed, with very few exceptions. The 9-year-old shook his head. "But," he said, "it doesn't matter what month. It still means killing the babies." Hearing the story, I wished it could be repeated to the justices of the Supreme Court, in the hope that at least five of them might act on this 9-year-old's clarity of thought and vision.
The boy's spontaneous insistence on the primacy of life also reminded me of a powerful pro-life speaker and writer who, many years ago, helped me become a pro-lifer. He was a preacher, a black preacher. He said: "There are those who argue that the right to privacy is of a higher order than the right to life.
"That," he continued, "was the premise of slavery. You could not protest the existence or treatment of slaves on the plantation because that was private and therefore out of your right to be concerned." This passionate reverend used to warn: "Don't let the pro-choicers convince you that a fetus isn't a human being. That's how the whites dehumanized us... The first step was to distort the image of us as human beings in order to justify what they wanted to do and not even feel they'd done anything wrong."
That preacher was the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Later, he decided to run for the presidency, and it was a credible campaign that many found inspiring in its focus on what still had to be done on civil rights. But Mr. Jackson had by now become "pro-choice," much to the appreciation of most of those in the liberal base.
The last time I saw Mr. Jackson was years later, on a train from Washington to New York. I told him of a man nominated, but not yet confirmed, to a seat on a federal circuit court of appeals. This candidate was a strong supporter of capital punishment which both Mr. Jackson and I oppose, since it involves the irreversible taking of a human life by the state.
I asked Mr. Jackson if he would hold a press conference in Washington, criticizing the nomination, and he said he would. The reverend was true to his word; the press conference took place; but that nominee was confirmed to the federal circuit court. However, I appreciated Mr. Jackson's effort.
On that train, I also told Mr. Jackson that I'd been quoting in articles and in talks with various groups from his compelling pro-life statements. I asked him if he'd had any second thoughts on his reversal of those views.
Usually quick to respond to any challenge that he is not consistent in his positions, Mr. Jackson paused, and seemed somewhat disquieted at my question. Then he said to me, "I'll get back to you on that." I still patiently await what he has to say.
As time goes on, my deepening concern with the consequences of abortion is that its validation by the Supreme Court, as a constitutional practice, helps support the convictions of those who, in other controversies involving euthanasia, assisted suicide and the "futility doctrine" by certain hospital ethics committees, believe that there are lives not worth continuing.
Around the time of my conversation with Mr. Jackson on the train, I attended a conference on euthanasia at Clark College in Worcester, Mass. There, I met Derek Humphrey, the founder of the Hemlock Society, and already known internationally as a key proponent of the "death with dignity" movement.
He told me that for some years in this country, he had considerable difficulty getting his views about assisted suicide and, as he sees it, compassionate euthanasia, into the American press.
"But then," Mr. Humphrey told me, "a wonderful thing happened. It opened all the doors for me." "What was that wonderful thing?" I asked.
"Roe v. Wade," he answered.
The devaluing of human life as the 9-year-old at the dinner table put it more vividly did not end with making abortion legal, and therefore, to some people, moral. The word "baby" does not appear in Roe v. Wade, let alone the word "killing." And so, the termination of "lives not worth living" goes on.
Sunday, June 11, 2006
'Warmongers' have a point: It's a war
BY MARK STEYN
June 11, 2006
Here are four news stories from the last week:
Baghdad: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi found himself on the receiving end of 500 pounds of U.S. ordnance.
London: Scotland Yard arrested a cell of East End Muslims allegedly plotting a sarin attack in Britain.
Toronto: The Mounties busted a cell of Ontario Muslims planning a bombing three times more powerful than Oklahoma City.
Mogadishu: An al-Qaida affiliate, the "Joint Islamic Courts," took control of the Somali capital, displacing "U.S.-backed warlords."
The world divides into those who think the above are all part of the same story and those who figure they're strictly local items of no wider significance deriving from various regional factors:
In Baghdad and London, fury at Bush-Blair neocon-Zionist-Halliburton warmongering;
In Toronto, fury at Canadian multiculti-liberal-pantywaist warmongering -- no, wait, that can't be right. It must be frustration among certain, ah, ethno-cultural communities at insufficiently lavish levels of massive government social programs, to judge from the surreal conversation on NPR's "Morning Edition" between Renee Montagne and the city's mayor;
And in Mogadishu, well, that's just one bunch of crazy Africans killing another bunch of crazy Africans -- who the hell can figure that out? If Bono holds a celebrity fund-raising gala, we'll all be glad to chip in 20 bucks.
If you choose to believe that, as Tip bin Neill might have put it, "all jihad is local," so be it. You can listen to NPR discussions on whether Canada's jihadist health- care programs are inadequately funded, and I'm sure you'll be very happy. But out in the real world it seems the true globalization success story of the 1990s was the export of ideology from a relatively obscure part of the planet to the heart of every Western city.
Take the subject of, say, decapitation. There's a lot of it about in the Muslim world. These Somali Islamists, in the course of their seizure of Mogadishu, captured troops from the warlords' side and beheaded them. Zarqawi made beheading his signature act, cutting the throats of the American hostage Nick Berg and the British hostage Ken Bigley and then releasing the footage as boffo snuff videos over the Internet.
But it's not just guerrillas and insurgents who are hot for decapitation. The Saudis, who are famously "our friends," behead folks on a daily basis. Last year, the kingdom beheaded six Somalis for auto theft. They'd been convicted and served five-year sentences but at the end thereof the Saudi courts decided to upgrade their crime to a capital offense. Some two-thirds of those beheaded in Saudi Arabia are foreign nationals, which would be an unlikely criminal profile in any civilized state and suggests that the justice "system" is driven by the Saudis' contempt for non-Saudis as much as anything else.
Which brings us to Toronto. In court last week, it was alleged that the conspirators planned to storm the Canadian Parliament and behead the prime minister. On the face of it, that sounds ridiculous. As ridiculous as it must have seemed to Ken Bigley, a British contractor in Iraq with no illusions about the world: He'd spent most of his adult life grubbing around the seedier outposts of empire and thought he knew the way the native chappies did things. He never imagined the last sounds he'd ever hear were delirious cries of "Allahu Akhbar" and the man behind him reaching for his blade. And he never imagined that back in his native land his fellow British subjects -- young Muslim men -- would boast to the London Times about downloading the video of his execution and watching it on their cellphones.
Writing about the collapse of nations such as Somalia, the Atlantic Monthly's Robert D. Kaplan referred to the "citizens" of such "states" as "re-primitivized man." When lifelong Torontonians are hot for decapitation, when Yorkshiremen born and bred and into fish 'n' chips and cricket and lousy English pop music self-detonate on the London Tube, it would seem that the phenomenon of "re-primitivized man" has been successfully exported around the planet. It's reverse globalization: The pathologies of the remotest backwaters now have franchise outlets in every Western city. You don't have to be a loser Ontario welfare recipient like Steven Chand, the 25-year-old Muslim convert named in the thwarted prime ministerial beheading. Omar Sheikh, the man behind the beheading of the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl, was an English "public" (i.e., private) schoolboy and graduate of the London School of Economics.
Five years after 9/11, some strategists say we can't win this thing "militarily," which is true in the sense that you can't send the Third Infantry Division to Brampton, Ontario. But nor is it something we can win through "law enforcement" -- by letting the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI and MI5 and every gendarmerie on the planet deal with every little plot on the map as a self-contained criminal investigation. We need to throttle the ideology and roll up the networks. These fellows barely qualify as "fifth columnists": Their shingles hang on Main Street. And, even though the number of Ontarians prepared actively to participate in the beheading of the prime minister is undoubtedly minimal, the informal support of the jihad's aims by many Western Muslims and the quiescence of too many of the remainder and the ethnic squeamishness of the modern multicultural state provide a big comfort zone.
This week the jihad lost its top field general, but in Somalia it may have gained a nation -- a new state base after the loss of Afghanistan. And in Toronto and London the picture isn't so clear: The forensic and surveillance successes were almost instantly undercut by the usual multicultural dissembling of the authorities. If you think the idea of some kook beheading prime ministers on video is nutty, maybe you're looking at things back to front. What's nutty is that, half a decade on from Sept. 11, the Saudis are still allowed to bankroll schools and mosques and think tanks and fast-track imam chaplaincy programs in prisons and armed forces around the world. Oil isn't the principal Saudi export, ideology is; petroleum merely bankrolls it. In Britain, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and elsewhere, second- and third-generation Muslims recognize the vapidity of the modern multicultural state for what it is -- a nullity, a national non-identity -- and so, for their own identity, they look elsewhere. To carry on letting Islamism fill it is to invite the re-primitivization of the world.
BY MARK STEYN
June 11, 2006
Here are four news stories from the last week:
Baghdad: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi found himself on the receiving end of 500 pounds of U.S. ordnance.
London: Scotland Yard arrested a cell of East End Muslims allegedly plotting a sarin attack in Britain.
Toronto: The Mounties busted a cell of Ontario Muslims planning a bombing three times more powerful than Oklahoma City.
Mogadishu: An al-Qaida affiliate, the "Joint Islamic Courts," took control of the Somali capital, displacing "U.S.-backed warlords."
The world divides into those who think the above are all part of the same story and those who figure they're strictly local items of no wider significance deriving from various regional factors:
In Baghdad and London, fury at Bush-Blair neocon-Zionist-Halliburton warmongering;
In Toronto, fury at Canadian multiculti-liberal-pantywaist warmongering -- no, wait, that can't be right. It must be frustration among certain, ah, ethno-cultural communities at insufficiently lavish levels of massive government social programs, to judge from the surreal conversation on NPR's "Morning Edition" between Renee Montagne and the city's mayor;
And in Mogadishu, well, that's just one bunch of crazy Africans killing another bunch of crazy Africans -- who the hell can figure that out? If Bono holds a celebrity fund-raising gala, we'll all be glad to chip in 20 bucks.
If you choose to believe that, as Tip bin Neill might have put it, "all jihad is local," so be it. You can listen to NPR discussions on whether Canada's jihadist health- care programs are inadequately funded, and I'm sure you'll be very happy. But out in the real world it seems the true globalization success story of the 1990s was the export of ideology from a relatively obscure part of the planet to the heart of every Western city.
Take the subject of, say, decapitation. There's a lot of it about in the Muslim world. These Somali Islamists, in the course of their seizure of Mogadishu, captured troops from the warlords' side and beheaded them. Zarqawi made beheading his signature act, cutting the throats of the American hostage Nick Berg and the British hostage Ken Bigley and then releasing the footage as boffo snuff videos over the Internet.
But it's not just guerrillas and insurgents who are hot for decapitation. The Saudis, who are famously "our friends," behead folks on a daily basis. Last year, the kingdom beheaded six Somalis for auto theft. They'd been convicted and served five-year sentences but at the end thereof the Saudi courts decided to upgrade their crime to a capital offense. Some two-thirds of those beheaded in Saudi Arabia are foreign nationals, which would be an unlikely criminal profile in any civilized state and suggests that the justice "system" is driven by the Saudis' contempt for non-Saudis as much as anything else.
Which brings us to Toronto. In court last week, it was alleged that the conspirators planned to storm the Canadian Parliament and behead the prime minister. On the face of it, that sounds ridiculous. As ridiculous as it must have seemed to Ken Bigley, a British contractor in Iraq with no illusions about the world: He'd spent most of his adult life grubbing around the seedier outposts of empire and thought he knew the way the native chappies did things. He never imagined the last sounds he'd ever hear were delirious cries of "Allahu Akhbar" and the man behind him reaching for his blade. And he never imagined that back in his native land his fellow British subjects -- young Muslim men -- would boast to the London Times about downloading the video of his execution and watching it on their cellphones.
Writing about the collapse of nations such as Somalia, the Atlantic Monthly's Robert D. Kaplan referred to the "citizens" of such "states" as "re-primitivized man." When lifelong Torontonians are hot for decapitation, when Yorkshiremen born and bred and into fish 'n' chips and cricket and lousy English pop music self-detonate on the London Tube, it would seem that the phenomenon of "re-primitivized man" has been successfully exported around the planet. It's reverse globalization: The pathologies of the remotest backwaters now have franchise outlets in every Western city. You don't have to be a loser Ontario welfare recipient like Steven Chand, the 25-year-old Muslim convert named in the thwarted prime ministerial beheading. Omar Sheikh, the man behind the beheading of the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl, was an English "public" (i.e., private) schoolboy and graduate of the London School of Economics.
Five years after 9/11, some strategists say we can't win this thing "militarily," which is true in the sense that you can't send the Third Infantry Division to Brampton, Ontario. But nor is it something we can win through "law enforcement" -- by letting the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI and MI5 and every gendarmerie on the planet deal with every little plot on the map as a self-contained criminal investigation. We need to throttle the ideology and roll up the networks. These fellows barely qualify as "fifth columnists": Their shingles hang on Main Street. And, even though the number of Ontarians prepared actively to participate in the beheading of the prime minister is undoubtedly minimal, the informal support of the jihad's aims by many Western Muslims and the quiescence of too many of the remainder and the ethnic squeamishness of the modern multicultural state provide a big comfort zone.
This week the jihad lost its top field general, but in Somalia it may have gained a nation -- a new state base after the loss of Afghanistan. And in Toronto and London the picture isn't so clear: The forensic and surveillance successes were almost instantly undercut by the usual multicultural dissembling of the authorities. If you think the idea of some kook beheading prime ministers on video is nutty, maybe you're looking at things back to front. What's nutty is that, half a decade on from Sept. 11, the Saudis are still allowed to bankroll schools and mosques and think tanks and fast-track imam chaplaincy programs in prisons and armed forces around the world. Oil isn't the principal Saudi export, ideology is; petroleum merely bankrolls it. In Britain, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and elsewhere, second- and third-generation Muslims recognize the vapidity of the modern multicultural state for what it is -- a nullity, a national non-identity -- and so, for their own identity, they look elsewhere. To carry on letting Islamism fill it is to invite the re-primitivization of the world.
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