JEFF CHRISTENSEN/STAR FILE PHOTO

Only Michelle Phillips of the original Mamas and Papas super group of the 1960s is still alive. Denny Doherty of Halifax died today. Group founder John Phillips and "Mama" Cass Elliott died earlier. In this 1998 photo, when the group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Owen Elliot (left) accepted on behalf of her mother. Michelle Phillips, Doherty and John Phillips smiled for the camera.

From The Toronto Star:

'Papa' Denny Doherty dies TheStar.com - artsentertainment - 'Papa' Denny Doherty dies

Canadian lead singer for super-group Mamas and Papas was 66

January 19, 2007

Canadian Press
Denny Doherty, the Canadian quarter of the 1960s folk-rock group the Mamas and the Papas, known for soaring harmonies on hits like “California Dreamin’ ” and “Monday, Monday,” died today in Misssauga. He was 66.

His older sister Frances Arnold said the singer-songwriter died at his home after suffering an aneurysm in his abdomen.

The group burst on the international scene in 1966 with the top 10 smash “California Dreamin’.” The Mamas and the Papas broke new ground by having women and men in one group at a time when most singing groups were unisex. John Phillips, the group’s chief songwriter; his wife, Michelle; and another female vocalist, Cass Elliot, teamed with Doherty.

“Monday, Monday” hit No. 1 on the charts and won the band a Grammy for best contemporary group performance. Among the group’s other songs were “Go Where You Wanna Go,’’ “I Call Your Name’’ and “Dedicated to the One I Love.’’

During their time together, the Mamas and the Papas had 10 hit singles over five albums and sold an estimated 20 million records. Doherty co-wrote the songs “I Saw Her Again Last Night” and ``Got a Feelin.’ ”

“What made the group special was their haunting and sumptuous harmony singing,” according to “The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll.’’

In 1998, the Mamas and the Papas were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Doherty had been inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1996.

The group’s catchy sound was a blend of ’60s upbeat pop and the folk music that had surged in popularity early in the decade. The song “Creeque Alley” told the story of their formation amid the musical ferment of the folk scene; among the other stars-to-be mentioned in the lyrics were members of the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Byrds.

But the group’s heyday was brief and internal squabbling, heavy drug use and a web of love triangles ultimately led to their breakup in 1970 following John and Michelle Phillips’ divorce. The members re-formed in 1971 for the album “People Like Us,” but all hope for a reunion ended in 1974 when the 30-year-old Elliot suffered a fatal heart attack in London.

Phillips briefly re-formed the group in 1982 with Doherty, Phillips’ actress daughter, Mackenzie, and Elaine “Spanky’’ McFarlane. The foursome toured playing oldies and new Phillips originals.

Doherty launched an acting career in the ’70s and appeared on Broadway in the 1974 play “Man on the Moon.” Later in Halifax, he joined John Neville at the Neptune Theatre where he was in “The Taming of the Shrew,” “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Cabaret.”

In 2003, Doherty was co-author and performer in an off-Broadway show called “Dream a Little Dream: The Mamas and the Papas Musical,” which premiered in Toronto and traced the band’s early years, its dizzying fame and breakup.

“There’s a part of this thing that if I’m not careful, I’d be just a blob on the stage crying my guts out,” Doherty told The Associated Press at the time. “Everybody knows about death and dying and sadness, so it’s an exercise in staying in the moment and not getting maudlin about your friends dying.’’

John Phillips died in 2001 at 65.

The Halifax-born Doherty started his music career in Montreal in 1960 as the co-founder of the folk group the Colonials, which later became the Halifax Three.

Doherty made a solo album in 1974 and achieved a bit of immortality by both playing the Harbourmaster and voicing all the characters for the children’s TV series “Theodore Tugboat,’’ which was produced in Halifax.

Doherty suffered kidney problems following surgery Dec. 14 and was put on dialysis, Arnold said. He was discharged from hospital last week, and Arnold said he sounded tired when she spoke with him just days ago.

“It’s got an unreal quality to it, I just can’t get it through my head,” Arnold, 78, said by phone from Halifax.

“We weren’t expecting it.”

She said Doherty was depressed about his decline in health, and had been making plans for an adventurous boat trip across the Atlantic.

“He was a very energetic, busy, active person and it was hard for him to make that adjustment, I think,” she said.

Arnold said the first time their mother heard Doherty on the radio, he was singing “California Dreamin’.”

“My mother stood in the kitchen and cried,” she said.

Doherty leaves his siblings Frances, Joe, Denise and Joan and children John, Emberly and Jessica.

Funeral arrangements are pending, Arnold said

See the Superpower Run

By Patrick Buchanan

No sooner had Sens. Hagel and Biden announced their resolution expressing the sense of the Senate that the Bush surge of 21,500 troops to Iraq was not in the national interest than the stampede was on. By day's end, Sens. Dodd, Clinton, Bayh, Levin and Obama and ex-Sen. John Edwards had all made or issued statements calling for reversing course or getting out.

You can't run a war by committee, said Vice President Cheney.

True. George Washington did not request a vote of confidence from the Continental Congress before crossing the Delaware, and Douglas MacArthur did not consult Capitol Hill before landing at Inchon.

But Congress is not trying to run a war. Congress is trying to get out of Iraq and get on record opposing the "surge." Congress is running after popular opinion.

And if the surge does not succeed in six months in quelling the sectarian violence in Baghdad, there will be no more troops, and the Americans will start down the road to Kuwait. And, unlike 2003, there will be no embedded and exhilarated journalists riding with them.

To the older generation, the American way of abandonment is familiar. JFK's New Frontiersmen marched us, flags flying, into Vietnam. But, as the body count rose to 200 a week, the "Best and Brightest" suddenly discovered this was a "civil war," "Nixon's war" and the Saigon regime was "corrupt and dictatorial." So, with a clean conscience, they cut off funds and averted their gaze as Pol Pot's holocaust ensued.

Our Vietnamese friends who did not make it out on the choppers, or survive the hellish crossing of the South China Sea by raft, wound up shot in the street or sent to "re-education camps."

Nouri al-Maliki can see what is coming.

As Condi flies about the Middle East in a security bubble, telling the press he is living on "borrowed time," and Bush tells PBS of his revulsion at the botched hanging of Saddam Hussein, Maliki is showing the same signs of independence he demonstrated when he refused Bush's invitation to dine with him and the king of Jordan. Give me the guns and equipment and go home, he seems to be saying to the White House.

Put me down on Maliki's side. It is he who is taking the real risk here -- with his life. It is he who is likely to learn what Kissinger meant when he observed that in this world, while it is often dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, to be a friend is fatal.

Will the surge work? Can it work? Certainly, adding thousands of the toughest cops in America to the LAPD would reduce gang violence in South Central. So, it may work for a time.

Yet in the long run it is hard to see how the surge succeeds. We are four years into this war, and the bloodletting in Baghdad is rising. Our presence has never been more resented. In America, the war has already been lost. Even Bush admits that staying the course means "slow failure." And a rapid withdrawal, as urged by the Baker-Hamilton commission, means "expedited failure."

Even should the surge succeed for a time, it may only push the inevitable into another year.

And consider what it is we are asking Maliki to do.

We want him to use Sunni and Kurdish brigades of the Iraqi Army, in concert with the U.S. Army, to smash the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr, the most popular Shia leader in the country and the principal political support of Maliki. We are asking Maliki to turn on his ruthless Shia patron and bet his future on an America whose people want all U.S. troops home, the earlier the better.

For Maliki to implement fully the U.S. conditions would make him a mortal enemy of Moqtada and millions of Shia, and possibly result in his assassination. Whatever legacy Bush faces, he is not staring down a gun barrel at that.

The truth: There is only one U.S. policy guaranteed to work if we are resolved to keep Iraq in the U.S. camp. That is to send an army of 500,000 to 750,000 U.S. troops into Iraq for an indefinite period, to pacify Baghdad, retake and hold Anbar and secure the borders against jihadis. Even that kind of commitment, beyond the present capacity of the U.S. Army and Marines, would not secure America's position, once the inevitable withdrawal began.

It is over. What we need to face now are the consequence of the folly of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice in launching this unnecessary and unprovoked war, the folly of the neocon snake oil salesmen who bamboozled the media into believing in this insane crusade to bring democracy to Baghdad in the belly of Bradley fighting vehicles and the folly of the Democratic establishment in handing Bush a blank check for war out of political fear of being called unpatriotic.

Copyright 2007 Creators Syndicate

From the blog Standing on My Head:

From the blog Standing on My Head:

Gollum - the Mirror of Man

It's theology my precious...

Gollum shows us the Catholic understanding of humanity's problem with sin. Peter Jackson's film portrayal faithfully reveals Tolkien's deep understanding of the tangled web that humanity has fallen into.

First notice that Gollum has been twisted and hideously deformed by sin. Smeagol was good once, just like the other happy hobbits, and in every scene of Jackson's film, a glint of Gollumy goodness shines through. Never is Gollum totally devoured by the evil. Even as he plunges into the fires of Mount Doom there is still a desire that is not totally corrupted.

There's no 'total depravity' here. Gollum's goodness is horribly twisted. The light is shaded, but not extinguished. In my journey to the Catholic faith the Catholic understanding of original sin came as a great relief. I had been brought up in a kind of default Calvinism. Total Depravity was one of the doctrines that lay at the foundation of the form of Evangelicalism I was taught. I realize there are subtle explanations of the doctrine of Total Depravity that are more nuanced, but what I heard was, 'You are dead in your trespasses and sins. There is none righteous, no not one. Your righteousness is as filthy rags. You cannot please God. You are totally and utterly depraved. You are a pile of dung that needs some snow to cover you." The conclusion I drew was that I was worthless, and under judgement for something I had no choice in, and was powerless to do anything about.

The Catholic view of original sin is that we are created in the image of God, and although we are born in sin, the image of God is wounded, but not utterly destroyed. I found this view not only refreshingly compassionate, but also more true to what I perceived around me. Chesterton says something somewhere like this: "Sometimes things are actually just as they seem. There is no conspiracy, no secret knowledge, no esoteric understanding."

Most people mean well. Nobody I know gets up in the morning and says, "Now, let me see what can I do today that is totally wicked, perverse and horrible." Most people perceive their desires as good (even if they're not good) and this means they want to pursue the good.

Experience indicates that most people are not actually totally and utterly depraved. They want goodness. They want God (if they only knew it) They want Love and Life and all things good. Oh yes, we go about getting what we want in wrong ways, and we are too often content with the good and too lazy to pursue the best. We're sinners, that's for sure, but like Gollum, there is always a glimmer of goodness within us. That's what God sees, and that's what he redeems, and that's what he rescues. That's the little ember that he wants to gently blow into life with the breath of the Holy Spirit.

In addition to this, the Catholic viewpoint says, "You may be cursed by sin, but with God's grace, you can do something about it. Your actions matter. Your decisions matter. The good you do and the evil you do matter. You're responsible. With God's help you can do something about the state of your soul."

That's why Frodo continues to have compassion on Gollum. He sees what Gollum was and what he still can be. Frodo knows the terrible corrupting power of the ring. He's seen how it made a monster of Bilbo. He sees how it's made a monster of Smeagol, and he feels how he himself is being made into a monster, but this knowledge breeds compassion, not judgement in his heart. He looks on Gollum with pity not with blame.

Its the same with us. Twisted and deformed by sin, but still the image of God glimmers within, and Christ, like Frodo, knows the burden we bear, and sees not how deformed we are, but how beautiful we were, and how beautiful we can be.

He looks on us with pity not with blame. Praise Him.

posted by Fr. Dwight Longenecker @ Thursday, January 18, 2007

From Jihad Watch: Robert Spencer commentary on "a spectacularly wrongheaded and potentially immensely damaging new book" by Dinesh D'Souza.

Dinesh D'Souza: "It’s foolish to blame Islam when Islam has been around for 1,300 years and Islamic terrorism has been a problem for the past 25 years"

Dinesh D'Souza has written a spectacularly wrongheaded and potentially immensely damaging new book, The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, in which he argues essentially that the jihadists hate us because we are immoral. It is, of course, already getting lavish attention from those who, out of political correctness and fear, as well as a miscalculation of the most effective ways to deal with the problem we face, have steadily ignored the jihad ideology and its influence among those who are waging war against the U.S. and its allies.

D'Souza showed up in a National Review Q & A with Kathryn Lopez yesterday, wherein he breezily discounted the possibility that they hate us because of imperatives arising from within the Islamic religion.

Lopez: On Islam: It has been argued that the Koran itself is violent. That moderate Muslims, in fact, have to distance themselves from more than Osama bin Laden. Is it possible that you are part of the not-understanding-the-threat-we-face problem by suggesting that line of examination be shut down?

D’Souza: I’m not urging that any line of inquiry be “shut down.”

It's ironic that this question would even have been asked and answered, since, with the notable and noble exception of the articles of Andrew McCarthy, this line of inquiry has effectively been shut down at National Review. For reasons I do not know, after my 2005 skirmish with Rich Lowry over J. L. Menezes' book on Muhammad, NR has tended to shy away from considering the possibility that there might be something within Islam that fuels jihad terror -- Lowry, if I understand him correctly, thinks (as does D'Souza -- see below) that to do so alienates moderates. This is ironic, however, because by declining, at least so far, to enter into this discussion they cut the ground out from under those moderates, by pretending that nothing in Islam actually needs reform.

I'd like to invite Kathryn Lopez and NR to take D'Souza's words to heart and not shut down this line of inquiry. I'd be happy to debate D'Souza in the pages of National Review or at NRO on whether or not there is something about Islam that fuels today's jihad violence, and whether our immorality is the paramount cause of jihad. I contend that, pace D'Souza, that we could be the most moral people on earth and the jihad would continue nevertheless. The Qur'an (9:29) directs Muslims to fight Jews and Christians, not just immoral Jews and Christians. What has changed in the last 25 years is the material ability of Muslims to pursue the jihad imperative.

After all, Egyptian jihad theorist Sayyid Qutb was enraged by the immorality of the dancing at a church social in Colorado in the late 1940s; how immoral do you think that dancing really was, compared to today's standards? Yet despite its relative innocuousness, it still enraged him. He would not have been pacified by anything short of full Islamic separation of the sexes, and the covering of women. In other words, he would not have been satisfied by anything short of our islamization.

D'Souza continues:

I’m saying it’s foolish to blame Islam when Islam has been around for 1,300 years and Islamic terrorism has been a problem for the past 25 years.

I expect in this D'Souza is dating the beginning of Islamic terrorism to the Khomeini revolution in Iran in 1979. This suggests that he does not regard the relentless jihad against Israel as "Islamic terrorism"; that he doesn't regard the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood, the direct forerunner of Hamas and Al-Qaeda, in Egypt in 1928 as having anything to do with "Islamic terrorism"; and that he either doesn't know or care that the ideology held by Osama bin Laden and other jihad terrorists today is identical to that held by jihad armies of the past, which overwhelmed and islamized the Middle East, North Africa, Persia, and significant portions of Europe and Asia.

So is it even reasonable to blame Mohammad or the Koran? I realize that you can fish out this passage or that passage and make it sound like the Muslims want to convert or kill everybody. But that would be like taking passages out of the Old Testament to make Moses sound like Hitler.

Would it really? The question here is who is doing the fishing. D'Souza refers to Osama's communiques -- what about all the Qur'an quotes in them? Here's the one from November 24, 2002. Lots of Qur'an in it. As I have pointed out many, many times, jihadists quote Qur'an and Hadith copiously, and portray themselves as the exponents of "pure Islam." It is not "Islamophobes" who are "fish[ing] out this passage or that passage," it is the jihadists. Are we to avoid examining this phenomenon and discussing its implications because of fear of "blam[ing] blame Mohammad or the Koran"? Would it not be more prudent to explore it and try to formulate positive ways to deal with it?

After all, there is no body of Jews corresponding to the Islamic jihadists, quoting the Old Testament to justify Hitlerian genocide. And that's why D'Souza's analogy fails utterly.

And also, Muslims don't want to "convert or kill everybody." That is a false oversimplification. Muhammad commanded Muslims to convert or subjugate or kill everybody. And that explains much of what D'Souza brings up next:

Besides, you have to look at what the Islamic empires actually did. There were Christians and Jews who lived under the various Muslim dynasties, from the Abbasid to the Ottoman. In fact, Jews were much safer in the Ottoman empire than in just about any of the Christian kingdoms, such as that of Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain.

In fact, Jews as dhimmis were in Ottoman domains, as Andrew Bostom put it in an email to me, "subject to grinding persecution interspersed with massacres." Bostom says that D'Souza's contention that "Jews were much safer in the Ottoman empire than in just about any of the Christian kingdoms" is flatly false. In fact, "it was a cycle of going from Islamdom to Christendom to Islamdom -- the Almohads slaughtered and forcibly converted thousands of Jews whose survivors fled to Christian areas of Spain, like the Kingdom of Aragon, where they were welcomed. Then the descendants of these Jews fled the Inquisition for the Ottoman Empire, filling a void created by the slaughter and deportation ["surgun" in Turkish] of the Jews conquered by the Ottoman jihad against the Byzantine Empire."

D'Souza continues:

The Mughals ruled northern India for 200 years. They could have forcibly converted the Hindus or killed all of them. But they did no such thing.

Bostom: "BOTH were done, under the Mughals, especially Aurangzeb and their predecessors in the Delhi Sultanate, some of whom were known as killers of lakhs of Hindus, each lakh being 100,000. Indeed, not all Hindus were killed, although that was pined for by some leading Muslim ulema like Shah Wali Allah, who went so far as to invite a brutal Afghan invasion of 'his' country in the 18th century because the Afghan Muslims were more fanatical."

D'Souza:

So we have to be careful about simply describing a religion of one billion people as “violent.” This would be tactically imprudent even if it were true, but it is not true, so why repeat a canard that has the terrible effect of driving the traditional Muslims into the radical camp?

Although this idea is taken for granted by most analysts, no one has ever yet explained to me why describing Islam as containing elements that incite to violence will make otherwise peaceful Muslims become violent or begin to condone religious violence. Why wouldn't it lead them to begin much more active reform efforts? D'Souza thinks talking about the elements of Islam that give rise to violence is "tactically imprudent"; I think his avoiding doing so is tactically disastrous. He wants to foster the growth of an Islam that accepts the idea of Muslims coexisting peacefully as equals with non-Muslims by ignoring the elements of Islam that make this increasingly difficult in the modern world. Yet while D'Souza is calling upon us to ignore these elements of Islam, jihad terrorists are not ignoring them. They continue to use them to recruit and motivate terrorists. Thus in reality the only viable way to encourage moderate Muslims is to help them confront and reject these elements of Islam, so as to forestall such recruitment.

So how about it, Ms. Lopez? Mr. D'Souza? I am up for a debate anytime you're ready.

From The American Thinker:
Will the Next Attack Get Our Attention?
By Peter Mulhern

What will our politics look like the day after the next time jihad comes home to America?

Ever since September 11, 2001 political leaders of every stripe have been telling us that another catastrophic attack is inevitable. Consensus regarding terrorism begins and ends with the cliché "when not if."

Our leaders speak as if they can avoid responsibility for the next attack by predicting it. They don't seem aware that a grieving and enraged public isn't likely to get much satisfaction from a chorus of "I told you so."

Let's suppose that conventional wisdom is uncharacteristically correct about the prospects for more terrorism in the United States. How will the American public deal with the political class that saw attacks coming years ahead and frittered away the opportunity to deter them?

The whole relevant political spectrum from Nancy Pelosi to George W. Bush has misled the American public about our enemies. Nobody who matters has been willing to identify the people we need to fight, describe their motivations accurately and explain how we can defeat them.

Instead we remain embroiled in a sterile debate about how to control the violence in Iraq. President Bush has just unveiled his "new way forward" which involves more troops and more aggressive and tenacious tactics in trouble spots. He hasn't announced any plans to engineer regime change in either Syria or Iran.

Democrats are gearing up to make a lot of noise in support of ignominious withdrawal from Iraq before gracelessly accepting the inevitable reality that the Commander in Chief calls the shots in wartime. This way they hope to appease their defeatist constituency without having to take the fall for yet another surrender and the blood bath that would certainly ensue.

The entire discussion is surreal.

The public debate gives very little indication that our troubles in Iraq are just one part of a much larger strategic problem. It is as if the allies, having conquered Sicily in August 1943, agreed that the troops should all come home without bothering to invade the mainland of Europe, either in Italy or France.

Try to imagine Franklin Roosevelt reduced to arguing with congressional critics over whether American forces should leave the Sicilian quagmire immediately or stick around long enough to eradicate the Mafia and teach the Sicilians to rise above traditional vendettas. When a war leader has to engage in that sort of debate, things aren't going well.

Pacifying Iraq is not now and never has been an important end in its own right. A peaceful and cooperative Iraq might be useful in our ongoing struggle against the terror masters in Damascus, Riyadh and Tehran. But, apart from George Bush's insubstantial notion that Iraq can be a democratic inspiration to the rest of the Arab world, our leaders don't seem to have any idea how we can use the conquest of Iraq to undermine our enemies in the surrounding countries. They have no apparent intention of doing so.

President Bush doesn't talk about using the conquest of Iraq as a weapon against Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Instead he never misses an opportunity to claim that our goal in Iraq is to create the conditions that will make it possible to bring our forces home. But the idea that we have a job to do in Iraq that will come to an end any time in the foreseeable future is absurd.

We may establish a political equilibrium in Iraq that looks very much like peace but that equilibrium will last only as long as we have significant forces there to maintain it. When we insisted on a democratic Iraq we ensured that Iraq would remain dependent on American troops indefinitely. Apparently, the Bush administration either forgot or never learned that most "democracies" look a lot like two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.

Without our supervision any elected Iraqi government will rapidly degenerate into an extraordinarily well-equipped sectarian militia serving the interests of the Shiite majority. Sunnis, with the support of friendly neighboring governments, will fight to resist Shiite domination. Kurds will seize whatever advantage they can from the resulting chaos as will Iraq's neighbors, in particular Iran.

The result will be a humanitarian disaster. It will also be a fatal blow to our war against militant Islam. It doesn't matter whether we leave Iraq in chaos or leave after order is established and then watch it lapse back into chaos. Either way we will suffer a catastrophic defeat.

We have taken on an imperial role in Iraq and Great Britain's imperial history is instructive. When you assume the task of running a foreign country there is no tidy way to disengage. The British East India Company conquered India starting in 1757. After the Sepoy Mutiny a hundred years later, the British Government took over and ran India for 89 years. It began trying to establish Indian home rule in the 1890's.

Nonetheless, when the British left India in 1947, their former colony dissolved in an orgy of sectarian cleansing and divided into warring nations which now threaten each other with nuclear weapons.

If we decamp for North America and let the house of cards we constructed in Iraq collapse we will be utterly discredited in the Middle East and around the world. Then we can hunker down and wait for the next terrorist attack to give us yet another opportunity to demonstrate our impotence.

Very few politicians of any party will ever be willing to take responsibility for this result. At some level they all know that any person or party that gets blamed for defeat in Iraq will also get blamed for the next terrorist attack. President Bush will talk about bringing troops home and, with luck, he may preside over some troop reductions. But he will bequeath a substantial American presence in Iraq to his successor.

Democrats may get some short term political advantage from arguing that we should turn our backs on Iraq and disengage from the effort to detoxify the Middle East. Dogs get a short term kick out of chasing cars, but the smart ones know enough to avoid catching one. Every time the issue of our commitments in Iraq comes up Democrats will huff and puff and point fingers. Then they will participate in perpetuating those commitments. That's what the new Democrat majority in Congress is about to do. That's what the next Democrat president will do. World without end, amen.

The surreal debate about Iraq is a thin veil covering the real political preoccupation of our time - the competition to assign blame for the next terrorist attack to somebody else. Democrats are setting themselves up to argue that the Republican administration is at fault because it hasn't been diligent enough about homeland security and because it has fanned the flames of Islamofascism by fighting in Iraq. Republicans are setting themselves up to argue that Democrats are at fault for refusing to take militant Islam seriously and working to frustrate our every effort to confront it.

Who wins this cat fight? Probably nobody.

The next terrorist attack should give us a relatively lucid moment. It will strike us like a bolt of lightening and illuminate the geopolitical landscape. Even without leadership the American people might see Iraq in context, if only for a moment They may suddenly see that our entire political class has been indulging itself in meaningless partisan disputes when it should have been teaching our Arab and Persian enemies a bitter lesson about the consequences of messing with the eagle.

It isn't a forgone conclusion that any attack, no matter how savage, would make most Americans understand that we are fighting for our lives and doing so blindfolded with our hands in our pockets. Many, perhaps most, of us would react to another assault by redoubling their already heroic efforts to ignore unpleasant realities. But it is also possible that most of us might suddenly see just how feckless and irresponsible America's politicians have been since 9/11.

If we wake up one morning to find that one of our great cities is a smoking ruin or that our children are dying by the million from some mysterious disease, the odds are that America's contempt for its leaders of both parties will know no bounds.

What then?

Something similar happened to Britain at the outset of World War II when the people woke up to discover that their leaders had blundered into a war which they were utterly unprepared to fight. Most of Britain's leaders were thoroughly discredited by the events leading up to the war, but there was one important exception. Winston Churchill had spent a decade warning that war was coming and urging his country to head it off or, failing that, to be ready. When war came, he was the logical person to lead the government.

Where is our Churchill?

The Stripper Has No Clothes

by Ann Coulter
Posted Jan 17, 2007

Stuart Taylor Jr., the liberal but brilliant legal reporter for the National Journal, described the New York Times' coverage of the Duke lacrosse rape case as "(w)orse, perhaps, than the other recent Times embarrassments." For a newspaper that carries Maureen Dowd's column, that's saying something.

As the Times' most loyal reader, this came as welcome news. I had briefly suspected the Times was engaging in fair reporting of the alleged rape case at Duke University. Taylor's article documenting the Times' massive misrepresentations restored order and coherence to my world.

The first part of the story -- the lie part -- was angrily reported in the Times. But as the accuser's story began to unravel, the Times gave only a selective account of the facts, using its famed lie-by-omission technique.

Among the many gigantic omissions from the Times' pretend-balanced article ("Files From Duke Rape Case Give Details but No Answers") is the fact that the only remaining particulars about the case that are not completely exculpatory come from a memo by Sgt. Mark Gottlieb -- written four months after the alleged incident.

Gottlieb, the lead investigator on the alleged rape case, took no contemporaneous notes when he interviewed the accuser, but rather waited for the facts to come in -- and his case to be falling apart -- to write a memo recalling her statements during that initial investigation. The statements he recalled were surprisingly favorable to the prosecution!

The only problem with his memo, besides being preposterous on its face, is that it is contradicted by the contemporaneous notes taken by other people involved in the investigation. Indeed, the only thing Gottlieb's memo was consistent with were the facts as the prosecution was then alleging them.

Of course, it was hard to keep straight what facts the prosecution was alleging. The accuser made up so many stories about the incident that the Times was forced to offer her Jayson Blair's old position.

The Times "No Answers" article gave no indication that Gottlieb's memo was written four months after the alleged rape, but rather refers to it as the policeman's "case notes," falsely suggesting the notes were taken during the investigation and not after the frame-up.

Beginning with the strongest invented evidence from Gottlieb's "case notes," the Times reported that the nurse who examined the alleged rape victim told Gottlieb that the "blunt force trauma" seen in the examination "was consistent with the sexual assault that was alleged by the victim."

Or at least that's what Gottlieb wrote four months after talking to the nurse. It's not what the nurse wrote the night she examined the accuser. To the contrary, the only sign of physical trauma the nurse noted in her written report immediately after examining the accuser were some superficial scratches on the woman's knee and heel.

Indeed, in all 24 pages of the report prepared by doctors and nurses who examined the accuser the night of the alleged rape, there is no mention of any "blunt force trauma" or any injuries other than the scratches.

Also contradicting Gottlieb's hindsight memo were the notes taken by another policeman during their interview with the accuser -- not four months later -- saying she described her assailants as "chubby," with a "chubby face" and weighing "260-270" pounds.

That description fit none of the eventual defendants -- whom she repeatedly failed to pick out of photo lineups until Gottlieb finally gave up and presented her with a photo lineup of only Duke lacrosse players, to ensure that she couldn't guess wrong.

But according to Gottlieb's hindsight memo, the accuser described one of her rapists as "baby-faced, tall, lean" -- just like one of the actual defendants!

In repeatedly citing Gottlieb's after-the-fact memo as if it were the Rosetta stone of the case, the Times also neglected to mention Gottlieb's dark history with Duke students.

Gottlieb repeatedly jailed Duke students charged with minor infractions such as carrying an open beer or playing loud music, often throwing them in cells with violent criminals. He was not so tough on nonstudents, releasing one caught with marijuana and a concealed .45-caliber handgun.

A review of Gottlieb's record published in the Durham News & Observer showed that, in the previous year, when he patrolled an area that included both a "crime-ridden" public housing project and Duke off-campus housing, he arrested 20 Duke students and only eight nonstudents. During that same period, the three other officers in that district arrested two Duke students and 61 nonstudents.

At this point, Gottlieb's memo is the linchpin of the prosecution's case, and every single other fact in the case exonerates the defendants.

I mention all this to point out the Alice-in-Wonderland quality of the Times Jan. 15 editorial titled "Politicizing Prosecutors." The editorial had nothing to do with lunatic Southern prosecutors like Mike Nifong, Barry Krischer and Ronnie Earle threatening to put innocent people in prison for being Republican or "privileged white males."

No, the Times was upset because the law allows President Bush to fill vacant U.S. attorney slots with temporary replacements. The Times is enraged that Bush may be choosing prosecutors he likes, rather than prosecutors Sen. Dianne Feinstein likes, for these interim appointments.

If Bush were choosing the most hack, unprincipled, out-of-control Republican Party operatives for these temporary U.S. attorney positions, they could not match the partisan witch-hunts of the prosecutors and policemen the Times lies to defend.

From Time Magazine: Monday, Jan. 15, 2007

The 10 Greatest Books of All-Time

By Lev Grossman

Let's not mince words: literary lists are basically an obscenity. Literature is the realm of the ineffable and the unquantifiable; lists are the realm of menus and laundry and rotisserie baseball. There's something unseemly and promiscuous about all those letters and numbers jumbled together. Take it from me, a critic who has committed this particular sin many times over.

But what if—just for argument's sake—you got insanely rigorous about it. You went to all the big-name authors in the world—Franzen, Mailer, Wallace, Wolfe, Chabon, Lethem, King, 125 of them— and got each one to cough up a top-10 list of the greatest books of all time. We're talking ultimate-fighting-style here: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, modern, ancient, everything's fair game except eye-gouging and fish-hooking. Then you printed and collated all the lists, crunched the numbers together, and used them to create a definitive all-time Top Top 10 list.

Yes, it would probably still be an obscenity. But it would be a pretty interesting obscenity. And that's what we have in J. Peder Zane's The Top 10 (Norton; 352 pages).

Each individual top 10 list is like its own steeplechase through the international canon. Look at Michael Chabon's. He heads it up with Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths. (Nice: an undersung masterpiece by a writer's writer.) He follows that up with by Pale Fire by Nabokov at #2. (Hm. Does he really think it's better than Lolita? Really?) Then with number 3 he goes straight off the reservation: Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini. (What? By who?) The whole exercise is an orgy of intellectual second-guessing, which as we all know is infinitely more fun than the first round of guessing.

There's plenty of canon fodder on the lists. Zane, who's the books editor at the Raleigh News & Observer, has done a statistical breakdown of the results, so we know, for example, that Shakespeare is the most-represented author (followed by Faulkner, who ties with Henry James; they're followed by a five-way tie, which you can read about for yourself). But I'm more interested in the dark horses, the statistical outliers, which lay bare the secret fetishes and perversions of the literati. Douglas Coupland puts Capote's unfinished Answered Prayers at number one, blowing right by Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood, too. Jonathan Franzen begins straight up the middle, with The Brothers Karamazov, but turns a sharp corner at #9 with The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead, and another at #10 with Independent People by Halldor Laxness. The quintessentially American Tom Wolfe starts by reeling off four French classics in a row. Norman Mailer revives John Dos Passos's out-of-fashion U.S.A trilogy for his #6 (and shows uncharacteristic forebearance by leaving his own works off the list). And so on. (At times one reads in the knowledge that one is being messed with. There's an outside, screwball chance that David Foster Wallace really reveres C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters above all other books, but I feel comfortable asserting—having read Infinite Jesttwice—that Wallace does not feel that way about Stephen King's The Stand (at #2) or The Sum of All Fears, by Tom Clancy (#10).)

There are several lifetimes worth of promising literary leads here—544 books in all. An 85-page appendix providing enlightened summaries of all the works mentioned is worth the price of admission all on its own. But to get you started, here, in all its glory, is the all-time, ultimate Top Top 10 list, derived from the top 10 lists of 125 of the world's most celebrated writers combined. Read it and— well, just read it.

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot

Choice of Martinez sparks GOP rebellion
By Ralph Z. Hallow
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published January 16, 2007

Rebellion is brewing among conservatives on the Republican National Committee over President's Bush's attempt to "impose" Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida as "general chairman" of the party, who favors "amnesty" for illegal aliens.
"I will be voting against Senator Martinez if he is nominated for any chairmanship of the RNC," Tina Benkiser, Texas Republican Party chairman, told The Washington Times yesterday.
Bill Crocker, the elected national committeeman from Texas, says that when the RNC convenes here tomorrow, "Absolutely, I will vote against Martinez."
The conservatives -- one of whom accused the Bush White House of "outsourcing" party leadership -- say the general-chairman post does not exist under RNC rules, which can be changed only at the party's presidential nominating convention.
Unhappy committee members say that, in the past, Republican presidents and RNC leaders have successfully run roughshod over the rules, because the RNC officer presiding over votes at committee meetings have simply overruled points of order and other objections from the floor, with no accredited professional parliamentarians to exercise a check.
This time, the organizers of the rebellion say, their strategy will rely in part on having a parliamentarian present. And violations of Robert's Rules of Order and of the RNC's written rules -- adopted at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York -- could result in legal challenges.
"I have also requested that the RNC employ the services of an independent certified parliamentarian to assure that breaches of the rules are avoided," North Dakota RNC member Curly Haugland said in a letter sent to all RNC members yesterday. "And I trust that my request will be honored due to the potential need for numerous interpretations of the rules."
Mr. Bush has said he hopes the RNC will elect Mr. Martinez as "honorary chairman" but that title has changed, in Republican Party press releases and conversations with RNC officials, to "general chairman."
Robert M. "Mike" Duncan, a Kentucky RNC member and RNC treasurer, is expected to be elected as the national chairman, with the responsibility of day-to-day management of the committee.
"Every president has the prerogative of naming who runs the national committee," Mr. Duncan told The Washington Times. "The choice is determined by the needs of the party at the time the selection is made."
Arguing precedent, proponents of the arrangement point out that the RNC members went along with President Reagan's desire in 1983 to have his friend, Nevada Sen. Paul Laxalt, voted in as general chairman, even though the rules provided for no such office. The RNC members at the same time elected Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr. -- an RNC member and chairman of the Nevada Republican Party at the time -- as chairman.
But opponents say that 1983 precedent does not justify another violation of the party's rules.
"I have a hard time understanding the logic," said RNC member Randy Pullen, who is running for Arizona Republican Party chairman in an election at the end of this month. "Just because the RNC did something wrong once before, somehow that justifies doing it again?"
Mr. Pullen pointed out that Mr. Martinez, who served as Mr. Bush's secretary of Housing and Urban Development before winning a Senate seat, is not an RNC member. RNC rebels say the rules are clear that the person who heads the committee must be a member of the committee.
"Outsourcing our leadership at this critical time is not an option," Mr. Haugland said.
Organizers of the rebellion against the White House domination of the RNC -- as well as other members who haven't decided yet to join the planned public showdown at the RNC's annual three-day winter meeting -- say even before Mr. Martinez became an issue, they expected difficulty in fundraising by the national committee for the 2008 election cycle.
"Martinez aside, the simple fact that the GOP no longer is in the majority in Congress is going to make it more difficult to raise money," said Louisiana RNC member Ross Little.
National committeemen willing to buck the White House on the RNC chairmanship also cite as fundraising obstacles the president's unpopularity, the conduct of the Iraq war, as well as disillusionment caused by the scandals, big spending and ineptitude of Republican leadership in Washington.
The rebels say that electing Mr. Martinez as head of the RNC would make raising money even more difficult because of resentment by the party's rank-and-file small donors over Mr. Martinez's co-sponsorship of legislation to allow millions of illegal aliens to become citizens.
"Martinez's support of [Arizona Sen. John] McCain's immigration bill on amnesty for illegal aliens is causing a lot of concern among our base," said Mr. Pullen. "I happen to know that people -- our $25 and $35 donors -- are writing on the back of our RNC solicitations for donations: 'When you close the border to illegal aliens, we'll open our checkbooks.' "
The Central Committee of the Republican Party in the president's own state of Texas has passed a resolution strongly urging the Texas Republican Party chairman, Mrs. Benkiser, and the two other Texas RNC members to vote against Mr. Martinez.

Musician Michael Brecker;
Won 11 Grammy Awards

By Adam Bernstein

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, January 15, 2007

Michael Brecker, 57, a bold-toned, versatile tenor saxophonist who won 11 Grammy Awards and whose work as a studio and backup musician and leader appears on thousands of recordings, died Jan. 13 at a hospital in New York. He had leukemia.

Mr. Brecker was regarded among many musicians and critics as a virtuoso of technique and melodic expression.

He adapted easily among jazz musicians of wildly different styles -- among them Horace Silver, Charles Mingus, Chet Baker, Pat Metheny and George Benson. Mr. Brecker also backed performers as varied as Frank Sinatra, Yoko Ono, James Brown, Eric Clapton, Billy Joel and Joni Mitchell.

He provided memorable saxophone licks to James Taylor's "Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight," Bruce Springsteen's "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out" and Paul Simon's "Still Crazy After All These Years." Simon also admired Mr. Brecker's experiments with the electronic wind instrument, a hybrid of sax and synthesizer, in the late 1980s.

Mr. Brecker made his solo debut, in 1986, with a self-titled album featuring guitarist Metheny, keyboardist Kenny Kirkland, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Jack DeJohnette.

The release, showcasing slower mood pieces and quicker musical flights, was named Down Beat magazine's Jazz Album of the Year and was nominated for a Grammy Award for best solo jazz instrumental.

He later won Grammys for such albums as "Don't Try This at Home" (1988) and "Infinity" (1995), the latter of which featured pianist McCoy Tyner. His last Grammy was for "Wide Angles" (2003), featuring a 15-piece orchestra he called the Quindectet.

Michael Leonard Brecker was born March 29, 1949, in Philadelphia. His father, a lawyer, played jazz piano between courtroom dates and in their home kept a Hammond B3 organ that he eventually sold to future rock star Todd Rundgren.

Brecker, who played clarinet before switching to saxophone, said his musical role models were Joe Henderson, Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane. He recalled a turning point in his style when he bought Coltrane's 1963 album "Live at Birdland."

"I ran home so I could play it right away, but when I heard it, I was disappointed," Mr. Brecker told the New York Times in 2001. "The music sounded harsh, and I couldn't really understand it. I thought there seemed to be too many notes lying around. I kept listening to it, though, until one day something clicked for me and the doors swung wide open."

At 19, he appeared on the album "Score" with his older brother, trumpeter Randy Brecker. Afterward, Michael Brecker left Indiana University to focus on a music career in New York.

He was mentored by trombonist Barry Rogers, who introduced him to Cajun, African and Latin rhythms. Rogers played a significant role in helping Mr. Brecker form his first group, Dreams, a rock-jazz band whose lineup included Randy Brecker, drummer Billy Cobham, guitarist John Abercrombie, keyboardist Jeff Kent and bassist Doug Lubahn.

Michael and Randy Brecker went on to play in Horace Silver's quintet and Cobham's rock-jazz fusion band Spectrum before they formed, in 1975, the Brecker Brothers jazz fusion group. Brecker Brothers recorded with saxophonist David Sanborn and other leading pop musicians.

From 1977 to 1987, the Breckers also owned a New York club called Seventh Avenue South, which became a laboratory for their music. The club was often called the birthplace of vibraphonist Mike Mainieri's jazz-rock band Steps Ahead, in which Michael Brecker also played.

Mr. Brecker formed musical partnerships with pianist Herbie Hancock and trumpeter Roy Hargrove, among others, and toured prolifically until in May 2005 he received a diagnosis of myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood and bone-marrow disease that ultimately gave way to his leukemia.

Besides his brother, survivors include his wife, Susan Neustadt Brecker, whom he married in 1986, of Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y; two children; and a sister.

Pelosi a rare example of a woman who 'has it all'

BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist

I don't know where they stand on apple pie, but the Democrats have come out for motherhood in a big way. In fact, who needs apple pie when you've got the extra-sugary content of the Washington Post? Last Wednesday, the capital's newspaper of record (now available in print, online and in granulated form) published a column headlined ''Grandma With A Gavel.''

Can you guess which grandma it was, boys and girls? Yes, it was Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has single-handedly, as she put it, ''shattered the marble ceiling.'' And she's right: From CNN to the New York Times, the entire press corps has lost its marbles. Grandma Smith Goes to Washington is the hit of the planet. At a time when most grandmothers are reduced to eating dog food because the Bush administration refuses to let them bulk-order prescription drugs from Saskatchewan or, even more horrifying, reduced to watching Robert Goulet in dinner theater night after night in Florida, Gran'ma Pelosi has single-handedly shattered the dinner-theater ceiling and/or dog-kennel ceiling. ''Grandma With A Gavel'' was written by hard-headed reporter Ruth Marcus, scourge of Republican Justice Departments for many years, and this column reflected her notoriously sharp forensic skills:

''The images as California Democrat Nancy Pelosi took office last week were striking -- and stirring -- in their unfamiliarity. Pelosi, holding her infant grandson swaddled in a white receiving blanket, as she sat in the well of the House, awaiting her election. Pelosi, with the assurance of a mother experienced at dispensing cookies to impatient toddlers, giving each child his -- and her -- turn with the gavel. Pelosi raising her hand to take the oath as her grandson, at her side, fiddled with grandma's papers.''

Golly. One only hopes the wee ones understand that, post-coronation, Queen Nancy's ascension to the throne might cut into all this quality time. "Gran'ma Got Run Over By Her Reign, Dears,'' as the old song so shrewdly warns. But don't Republicans have families, too? Yes, but let's face it, they creep you out, don't they? If you have the misfortune to be nominated by the Bush administration, your kids get headlines like ''An Image A Little Too Carefully Coordinated.'' That was the Washington Post's Style Section on Chief Justice John Roberts' moppets: They didn't care for ''the 1950s-style tableaux vivant,'' or the ''freshly scrubbed and adorable'' look from ''a Currier & Ives landscape''; they sniffed at the ''seersucker suit with short pants'' of ''towheaded Jack'' and his sister's ''blond pageboy''; they didn't even like the name ''Jack.''

But these Pelosi kids are in a whole other league. You have to pity those losers in Hollywood: Instead of wasting their time with that lousy Geena Davis ''Commander in Chief'' strong-career-woman thing, why didn't they do ''The Pelosi Bunch''?

''Here's the story of a lovely lady

Who was raising 30 grandkids on her own

All of them had hair of black like their gran'ma

And swaddling cloths hand-sewn.''

''Here's the story of a man named Hastert

Who was never photographed with any kids

'Cept in stories on Mark Foley's pages

And so he hit the skids . . . ''

Oh, come on. OK, Dennis Hastert doesn't bake cookies, but I can't be the only one who thinks he's a little like that cute Cookie Bear on ''The Andy Williams Show.''

I am? Oh, well.

''Having five children in six years is the best training in the world for Speaker of the House,'' Speaker Grandma said. ''It made me the ultimate multitasker and the master of focus, routine and scheduling.''

''How different is this?'' cooed Ruth Marcus. ''Imagine Margaret Thatcher threatening to deploy her 'mother-of-five voice.' ''

Boy, did Thatcher get it wrong! That old Iron Lady shtick, talking about communism, and inflation, and boring old ''issues,'' when eve feminist reporter in town was dying to hear her favorite cookie recipes.

Alas, not every Democrat has got the lioness-with-cubs routine down quite so pat. On Thursday, Sen. Barbara Boxer advanced the notion that Condoleezza Rice can't understand ''the price of war'' because she's childless. ''You're not going to pay a particular price,'' she told the secretary of state, ''with an immediate family.'' In other words, her childlessness means she will never have to experience any personal loss for the decisions she makes. ''You can't begin to imagine how you celebrate any holiday or birthday,'' Boxer continued, accusingly.

Hmm. What I can't begin to imagine is a Republican senator getting away with hammering, say, Gloria Steinem for her childlessness. But, after 12 years in the barren wilderness, the left is overjoyed at the Fecund Coming. Over at Ms. magazine, I expect they're rolling their eyes while admiring the cynicism. But the internal contradictions of the new Democrats are striking. At the ''Women's Tea'' inaugural festivities, the Dems played, inevitably, ''I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar,'' and the new speaker saluted the late Texas Gov. Ann Richards, and Rep. Rosa DeLauro honored Gov. Richards' daughter Cecile, who's now the president of Planned Parenthood.

I would wager that, when the young Nancy Pelosi had ''five children in six years,'' a hefty percentage of that parenthood wasn't planned. She is, in that sense, philosophically at odds with her party -- and, indeed, with her congressional district. San Francisco now registers more dogs that it does schoolchildren. Lest you think I'm being my usual homophobic self, I hasten to add that for once I'm not: It speaks well for the Bay Area that they had to embrace the gay life to match the collapsed birth rates European cities have managed to achieve heterosexually. Nonetheless, at a time when fertility rates call into question the survival of Russia, Japan, Germany, Spain and Italy, the new speaker certainly presents an unusual model: She appears to be a rare example of a woman who truly ''has it all.'' She had five kids and then became the first female speaker in human history, an event (according to the media) women have been waiting for since Caveman Ug said, ''Hi, honey, I'm home!'' and clubbed the missus over the head for being late with the saber-toothed meatloaf. It's certainly not the career path feminist orthodoxy has commended these last 30 years, but it seems to have brought Pelosi happiness, and at a time of greater life expectancy it has a certain logic: Have kids in your 20s, go into politics in your 40s, serve as two-term president in your 60s. You can have it all!

I think the GOP should give up trying to demonize Nancy Pelosi. The Botox gags and bug-eyed photos won't work. Tonally, she seems very normal, in ways that, for example, certain presidentially inclined New York senators can never quite manage. But Pelosi's fellow California liberals and those gushing feminist columnists ought to ponder why ''the most powerful woman in America'' is quite so untypical: What does it say when it's the exception that proves the ruler?

©Mark Steyn 2007