From The New York Times:

Don’t Ask, Don’t Know, Don’t Help
By Thomas L. Friedman

I haven’t kept count, but it seems to me that the number of times I’ve seen President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney give speeches about the Iraq war using smiling soldiers as their backdrops have been, well, countless. You’d think that an administration that has been so quick to exploit soldiers as props — whether it was to declare “Mission Accomplished” on a naval vessel or to silence critics by saying their words might endanger soldiers in battle — would have been equally quick to spare no expense in caring for those injured in the fight.

The squalid living conditions and red tape that have been inflicted on some recovering Iraq war veterans at Walter Reed hospital and elsewhere — which have been spotlighted by The Washington Post — are shocking in their detail, but not surprising. They are one more manifestation — like insufficient troops, postwar planning and armor — of a war that was really important to get right but really hard, which the Bush team thought was really important and would be really easy.

Mr. Bush summoned the country to D-Day and prepared the Army, the military health system, military industries and the American people for the invasion of Grenada.

From the start, the Bush team has tried to keep the Iraq war “off the books” both financially and emotionally. As Larry Diamond of Stanford’s Hoover Institution said to me: “America is not at war. The U.S. Army is at war.” The rest of us are just watching, or just ignoring, while the whole fight is carried on by 150,000 soldiers and their families.

In an interview last Jan. 16, Jim Lehrer asked President Bush why, if the war on terrorism was so overwhelmingly important, he had never asked more Americans “to sacrifice something.” Mr. Bush gave the most unbelievable answer: “Well, you know, I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night.”

Sacrifice peace of mind watching TV? What kind of crazy thing is that to say? Leadership is about enabling and inspiring people to contribute in time of war so the enemy has to fight all of us — not insulating the public so the enemy has to fight only a few of us.

If you want to compare President Bush in this regard with Presidents Roosevelt or Wilson, pick up a copy of Robert Hormats’s soon-to-be-published book: “The Price of Liberty: Paying for America’s Wars.”

“In every major war that we have fought, with the exception of Vietnam, there was an effort prior to the war or just after the inception to re-evaluate tax and spending policies and to shift resources from less vital national pursuits to the strategic objective of fighting and winning the war,” said Mr. Hormats, a vice chairman of Goldman Sachs (International). He quotes Roosevelt’s 1942 State of the Union address, when F.D.R. looked Americans in the eye and said: “War costs money. ... That means taxes and bonds and bonds and taxes. It means cutting luxuries and other nonessentials. In a word, it means an ‘all-out’ war by individual effort and family effort in a united country.”

Ever heard Mr. Bush talk that way? After Pearl Harbor, Mr. Hormats noted, Roosevelt vowed to mobilize U.S. industry to produce enough weapons so we would have a “crushing superiority” in arms over our enemies. Four years after the start of the Iraq war, this administration has still not equipped all our soldiers with the armor they need.

As retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton pointed out, last year, because of spending in Iraq, the Army had a $530 million budget shortfall for posts, so facilities got squeezed. If Americans had been asked to pay a small tax to fill that gap, they would have overwhelmingly checked that box. They would have also paid a “Patriot Tax” of 50 cents a gallon to raise the money and diminish our dependence on oil. But no one asked them to do anything other than “sacrifice peace of mind.”

If you want to help and don’t want to wait for the White House bugle, here are some places to start:

(1) Coalition to Salute America’s Heroes (www.saluteheroes.org), (2) the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund (www.fallenheroesfund.org), (3) the Fisher Houses (www.fisherhouse.org) and (4) the Walter Reed Society (www.walterreedsociety.org). And one I know personally from my hometown, Minnesotans’ Military Appreciation Fund (www.thankmntroops.org).

We can get just about everything wrong in Iraq, and pretty much have, but we’ve got to take first-class care of those who’ve carried the burden of this war. It’s that simple.

LIBERTAS Review: 300

— Dirty Harry @ 6:13 pm

How did this one slip through? That’s all I can think of to say right now: How did this one slip through? I sat in the theatre waiting. Waiting for the switch. Though I refused to take the bait (too many movies I’ve seen, says I) I still waited for the switch. There’s always a bait and switch. You don’t make the white guys the good guys and the non-white guys the bad guys without a switch — especially bad guys in turbans. Turbans! But there was no switch. Here’s a movie about free men dying to protect freedom against tyranny — where the anti-war voices are corrupt, cowardly, dead-wrong, and politically driven — where people talk about the honor of dying for one’s country — where a strong women urges a skittish council to declare war because the enemy already has — and there’s no switch. And then to top it off: The movie’s actually good.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a conservative or pro-Bush film. If it were it would be just another Hollywood polemic. It’s no message film, either. It is first and foremost a highly sylized, very violent battle film that will appeal to conservatives for the same reason it’ll have close-minded liberals — spoiled by thirty years of getting their way in darkened theatres — grinding their teeth: The film is not liberal.

What it is is illiberal, and it’s illiberalism is everywhere. Sparta is a peaceful country ruled by King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) who respects his Queen and holds her opinion in esteem. In comes a Persian messenger who insults women and advises the king that should he agree to pay a tribute to Persia’s king Xerxes they will not invade Sparta and enslave its people. Leonidas’ diplomatic answer is to kick the Persian down a well and go to war. Now, this is not supposed to happen in movies. The black guy isn’t supposed to be the sexist, fascist, imperialist — at least not when there are white guys around to do it for him. And the hero’s not supposed to shun appeaseme– er, diplomacy in favor of war.

But war it will be. And a futile one at that. The odds are too great, the Persians too many. But what Leonidas understands is that fighting is his country’s only chance. Appeasing a tyrant is what’s truly provocative. Sparta’s only hope is to bloody the bully’s nose. But the corrupt, pro-appeasement lawmakers refuse to give the king any troops. So, Leonidas decides to go it alone, finds 300 volunteers to join his suicide mission, and bids good-bye to his wife and child.

What makes this all work and not pedantic is that the film wisely eschews politics or any modern day references. Like Spartacus and Ben-Hur, 300 is about bravery, freedom, honor, and country. These are universal themes. But universal themes that will offend liberals because they’re not defended in a PC fashion. Liberals believe bravery is being brave enough to kiss despot hiney in the corrupt UN. Liberals believe freedom is porn in school libraries. Liberals believe honor is leaking national security secrets to the New York Times. Liberals believe ”country” is about everybodys counry but ours, so it’s okay to give mass murderers autographed basketballs and ask them to dance. The men in 300 believe they are good, their families are good, their country is good, and worth dying and fighting for. Now, that is not a conservative value. But it is an illiberal one.

It’s impossible not to compare the enemy in 300 to the current Islamofascists. The Persians are ruled by a theocracy; a king, Xerxes, who looks like a Culture Club refugee, fancies himself a god, and demands to be worshipped. The Persian ambition is to conquer those willing to convert, and butcher those who refuse. To convert some, Xerxes promises them paradise — especially a lot of hot women. Maybe not seventy-two. Certainly not virgins. But it’s all pretty familar. Again, this is not conservative. Using reality as a metaphor is not political. Not using reality as a metaphor because it doesn’t conform to PC standards is political.

One of the film’s surprising strong points is its subplot with Leonidas’ wife (Lena Headey). As he fights hordes of marauders, she fights to save her husband and country by trying to convince the council they need to send troops to fight the enemy over there before they show up at home. The anti-war crowd predictably responds by accusing the king of making things worse by fighting the enemy. But she’s more than up to the fight –and aided by a strong, sexy actress, this storyline is much better than most subplots in these kinds of films that usually don’t add up to anything more than a cut-away between action scenes. It’s also a storyline that really pays off in the end.

But story is everything. And the biggest reason 300’s successful is because its central story is exciting and well plotted. When your central hook is thousand-to-one odds, there’s a fine line between keeping your audience involved and losing them to disbelief. But what solves that problem is the same thing that keeps the film from becoming one of those episodic, battle-after-tedious-battle bores — and that’s strategy. The strategy the Spartans use to keep the fight even and the Persians from flanking or surrounding them is ingenious. Each battle has its own unique challenge and solution. This keeps the story interesting and belief suspended. Certainly there’s a heightened reality to everything, but within the world created by the filmmaker, nothing happens you can’t buy into.

The film is about ten minutes too long. It has a few slow spots filled with all that gregarious Twas a fine battle, was it not? talk that gets a bit tedious after a while. Because it’s used as a style, the CGI visuals do work. It also turns the violence into something hyper-realistic as opposed to visceral, making it much easier to take than anything I saw in Pan’s Labyrinth. The performances by the men are broad and strong, befitting this kind of film. And there’s so much nudity I thought it was 1984 again.

I’ve no doubt critics (I don’t read them until I post my own review) are calling 300 old-fashioned, and worse. But they’re wrong. After forty years of liberal rule in Hollywood it is nihilism that’s old-fashioned. It is moral relativism that is tired. It is political correctness, the always-noble people of color, the always-evil white guy, and the metrosexual that is cliched. A film with a clear divide between good and evil is something new. A film that celebrates patriotism, heroism, sacrifice, freedom, and honor is something revolutionary. In 1955 300 would be old-fashioned. In 2007 it makes a counter-culture statement as strong as Easy Rider in its day.

The Din Surrounding Duke
Has Grown Dim

By John Feinstein
Saturday, March 10, 2007; E10

TAMPA The end was surprising. Not the loss to North Carolina State. Anyone who has been paying attention during this basketball season knew that Duke was perfectly capable of losing to the Wolfpack. It wasn't even the fact that N.C. State scored on every possession of overtime against a team that once prided itself on playing shut-down defense.

The surprise Thursday night was the reaction to the final buzzer in the St. Pete Times Forum. The red-clad N.C. State fans were deliriously happy with the victory. But the rest of the fans, who once would have been just as delirious over seeing Duke humbled in the opening round of the ACC tournament by a 10th seed, seemed almost uninterested. A few stood to applaud and high five. Most looked at their watches and wondered if there was still time to get dinner somewhere.

That's because Duke isn't Duke anymore.

Oh sure, the St. Petersburg paper ran the predictable "why everyone hates Duke" story on the front of its ACC tournament section Thursday morning. But it isn't the same.

Mike Krzyzewski once made the point that people don't hate losers. While it may be unfair to label a 22-10 team that will be in the NCAA tournament for the 23rd time in 24 years as "losers," the Blue Devils aren't close to being the winners they once were.

This is a team that had played in nine straight ACC tournament finals -- winning seven. Its record in the tournament during that period was an astonishing 25-2. Dating from 1997, Duke's lowest ACC regular season finish had been third, and it had finished first six times and tied for first on another occasion. In the past 23 seasons, Duke had finished lower than fourth in the ACC once -- in 1995 when Krzyzewski was forced to leave the team after 12 games because he was exhausted, mentally and physically.

The change though isn't so much about numbers but about aura. In past years, Duke would have beaten State on Thursday night. Someone would have hit a big shot; someone would have taken a charge that would have left opposing fans screaming that the Duke kid flopped. An N.C. State shot would have rimmed out the way Greg Paulus's three-point attempt did in overtime for Duke. Fans would have left the building grumbling about Duke getting all the calls.

Not anymore. These days Duke is symbolized by Josh McRoberts, who simply couldn't defend State's Brandon Costner (career-high 30 points) and spent much of the evening pulling the ball out of the net and screaming at teammates as if it were their fault that he couldn't -- as Bob Knight once eloquently put it -- guard the floor.

One can tell how Duke is playing most of the time by looking closely at Krzyzewski after a game. When he has a team he likes -- one that plays defense and makes big shots and understands what he is asking -- he's funny and smart and entertaining in his postgame interviews. He will poke fun at himself and at old friends in the media. His eyes light up when he talks about his players and how much effort they have given him.

On Thursday, there was no spark in Krzyzewski at all -- no anger, just acceptance.

"Anyone who has watched us play this season knows we aren't a great basketball team," he said. "But we have been a very good basketball team. The last three games, though, we haven't played any defense. We can't win if we don't play defense."

Some think Krzyzewski has lost some focus because of the pressures he's facing as coach of the Olympic team. Others think recruiting mistakes have been made. Paulus, who was rated the best point guard in the country two years ago, isn't really a point guard. Lance Thomas, who was all the rage coming out of New Jersey last year, played 20 minutes Thursday and didn't score. McRoberts puts up nice numbers but appears to believe that playing college basketball is beneath him at times. He's about as ready for the NBA as he is for Broadway, but he may very well depart after the season. If you believe what people close to the Duke program are saying, few tears will be shed in the locker room if that occurs.

Krzyzewski has become a symbol of what is good about the sport and a lightning rod for those who can't stand coaches who win and win and win. As he has gotten older, Krzyzewski has come to respect his former rival Dean Smith more and more because he has come to understand what Smith dealt with when his North Carolina program was both dominant and hated.

Several years ago, Smith pointed out that he thought it was tougher for Duke and Krzyzewski because there is so much more attention paid to college basketball these days. Every Duke game is on national TV, and Dick Vitale seems to do about half of them, screaming about the greatness of Krzyzewski and Duke until normally reasonable people start to throw things at the television set. But there's more to it than that. Unlike Smith, who never endorsed anything, Krzyzewski has become a very wealthy pitchman for corporate America; he's written books on how to win and on how to lose and on how to tie. (Or so it seems.) He has put himself out there and, in doing so, made himself and his program a target.

Duke might very well climb the heights again in the near future. It won't be easy. Roy Williams has rebuilt North Carolina to superpower status, and the ACC appears deep and talented and will be for a long time to come. But Krzyzewski's greatest strength may be dealing with failure. The last time his team was a No. 7 seed in the ACC tournament was in 1983, when the Blue Devils lost to Ralph Sampson and Virginia, 109-66. There were some who thought then that the third-year coach with a record of 38-47 might not survive.

Early the next morning, sitting in a Denny's at 3 a.m with some friends, Krzyzewski heard someone raise a glass of water and say, "Here's to forgetting about tonight."

Krzyzewski picked up his glass and said, "Here's to never [expletive] forgetting about tonight."

No one hated Duke that night. For most of the next 23 years, people hated Duke. Now, those who do are doing it by instinct, because their memories tell them they're supposed to.

No one hates losers. You can bet that right now Krzyzewski hates not being hated. And he probably won't forget what it felt like walking off the floor here Thursday night. Outside of the N.C. State section, it was almost quiet.

The sound of silence is the sound of defeat. It is very quiet around the Duke basketball program right now.

From the OC Register blog, Soundcheck:

Brad Delp, 1951-2007: What a voice

Brad Delp, who died today at 55, sang many more songs than the eight that fill Boston's first album. "Don't Look Back," of course. Some people love "Amanda." No doubt there are even fans of specifics from Corporate America, from 2002, which may or may not prove to be the band's swan song.

Regardless, it's unlikely that everything else he ever recorded combined will be half as remembered and revered as what he did on that first Boston album, one of those totems of classic rock that reminds me of that great exchange between Tia Carrere and Mike Myers in the first Wayne's World:

Cassandra, showing Wayne a worn copy of Frampton Comes Alive!: "Isn't that great? You've heard it?"

Wayne: "Exqueeze me? Have I seen this one before? Frampton Comes Alive!? Everybody in the world has Frampton Comes Alive! If you lived in the suburbs you were issued it. It came in the mail with samples of Tide."

The dialogue would play just as funny were Boston substituted for Frampton. It's an album everyone who has ever listened to rock 'n' roll has heard at least something from, even if they despised it. And, frankly, I never felt it deserved the drubbing it got at the hands of critics and first-generation punks, who hated its polished craftmanship and corporate-rock association. Look again: It was first a homegrown piece of studio rock wizardry. Then it became a household staple. It's one of those rare stories.

And it remains as pervasive as sunlight. Side 1 is virtually inescapable: "More Than a Feeling" or "Peace of Mind" or "Long Time" of "Rock 'n' Roll Band." Classics, all of 'em. Side 2: "Smokin'," "Hitch a Ride," "Something About You," "Let Me Take You Home Tonight." I'm just listening to it again - concentrating on it, I mean, not just passing by it on the radio - for the first time in years. Side 1 is monolithic to me anymore. Side 2 is still really nice. And "Hitch a Ride" I just never tire of.

Some people never tire of any of it, I realize, and for them, this is a case of one of the voices of their youth dying. Brad Delp was certainly never a rock god like Robert Plant; he wasn't even Steve Perry, really, in terms of stature. But he was every bit as popular at a certain time in pop music history. His voice became a major element of the soundtrack to millions of people's lives - and at a very specific time in their lives.

And what an indelible, tremendous voice it was. Listen to the sweet clarity and mellow crispness with which he nails those inhuman high notes and carries those melodies on Boston: It's unquestionable that the number of people capable of replicating that can probably be counted on a hand, two at most. Keep in mind: Yeah, Tom Scholz, the brainiac behind the band, was a master DIY production whiz. But this was 1976. The Age of Analog, not pitch-perfection computer sorcery.

It is a positively staggering performance, when you put down the beer or get out of the car and really stop to think about it.

And here's reason to regard Delp even more highly: Even as he moved into his 50s he had retained that vocal power. I last saw Boston in Aug. 2003, at a sold-out Pacific Amphitheatre. The show was solid, but Delp, as I recall, was astonishing. "His might after all these years was the night's shocker," I wrote. "He joked more than once that center-stage guitarist-vocalist Fran Cosmo was there to hit notes that now were beyond his reach, but apart from one or two extreme highs during "More Than a Feeling,'' I didn't notice Delp deferring to Cosmo at all."

He belted everything with fresh enthusiasm, I said. How impressive: Night after night, singing his heart out on the same songs he'd been wailing for 30 years, yet not showing any sign of boredom.

Just doing what he could do to help people relive some memories. He'll be missed more than we may hear about, I suspect.

From Real Clear Politics:
Taxing Us for Breathing
By Robert Tracinski

Last week, the New York Times published an extraordinary editorial complaining that "Right now, everyone is using the atmosphere like a municipal dump, depositing carbon dioxide free." The Times editors suggested that the government "start charging for the privilege" by imposing a "carbon tax."

We all knew it would eventually come to this: the New York Times thinks the government should tax us for breathing.

Of course, the editorial was supposed to be aimed at big corporations who build coal-fired power plants--but why should the logic stop there? Right now, eight million people are walking around on the streets of New York City heedlessly inhaling precious oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide, treating the skies over their fair city "like a municipal dump, depositing carbon dioxide free." Shouldn't they be forced to pay for the "privilege," too?

And the connection is a logical one, because the generation of power by industrial-scale power plants is as much a vital activity as breathing.

I mean this in a literal, biological sense. In biology, "respiration" doesn't just refer to the act of breathing; it refers to the chemical reactions made possible by breathing. My dictionary defines this sense of "respiration" as "the processes by which a living organism or cell takes in oxygen from the air or water, distributes and utilizes it in oxidation, and gives off the products of oxidation, especially carbon dioxide." (Wikipedia has all the biochemical details.)

Sound familiar? That's right: there is no difference in principle between your cellular mitochondria and a coal-fired power plant. Our lungs take in oxygen and emit carbon dioxide so that they can provide the energy our cells use to keep us alive and to allow us to move, to grow, to thrive. Ditto for the power plants. They augment the biological process of respiration with a process you might call "industrial respiration," which we can define as follows: the processes by which a living civilization takes in fuel, distributes and utilizes it in oxidation, and gives off the products of oxidation, especially carbon dioxide.

There is an old, tired slogan used by environmentalists: that the Amazon jungle is the "lungs of the earth," because its mass of overgrown vegetation works the opposite way our lungs work: plants take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen, so that the Amazon allegedly produces something like 20% of the world's oxygen. It turns out this isn't true. An old-growth forest like the Amazon releases more carbon dioxide, from rotting vegetation, than it absorbs. But the problem with that slogan is much deeper. It denies the fact that the real lungs of the earth--or at least, the lungs of global human civilization--are power plants. They take in fuel and turn it into the energy we use to live.

For all of their "green" pose, environmentalists don't have a genuine biological perspective on the world. They regard mankind as if we were non-biological. They talk endlessly about the "ecosystem" required for the survival of every creature on earth--but they never ask what is mankind's means of survival.

Man's primary organ of survival is his brain. We use our minds to understand the world around us, to derive scientific principles, and then to put science to work for us by rebuilding our surroundings to better suit our needs. The inscription that rings the rotunda of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago--built in an age that had a better appreciation for progress--sums it up perfectly: "Science discerns the laws of nature. Industry applies them to the needs of man." That is the real biological imperative of human existence.

Industry is not "unnatural," not in any fundamental sense. It is the product of our biological means of survival, our minds, and it is the means by which we secure our survival and extend the reach of our action. And central to all of this is the development of "industrial respiration," the process by which we turn oil, natural gas, coal, or uranium into energy we can use.

That's why it is absurd to complain that America is "addicted" to oil. An addiction is an unhealthy dependence. So would you say that you are "addicted" to breathing, because you feel like you will die if you stop doing it? Of course not. The only difference between industrial respiration and the kind that we do with our lungs is that a human body can only use a limited quantity of energy, while the power made available to us by industrial respiration is unlimited. That's not a problem. In fact, it's the whole secret by which we rose from the cave to the skyscraper--and from the campfire to the power plant--with the result that we can now reliably stretch our lives into their eighth decades and beyond. It is the added power from industrial respiration that makes the modern human animal a healthy, vigorous, thriving organism.

That is why the environmentalist crusade against industrial power plants is so dangerous. In attempting to construct a phantom threat to our survival, the dubious theory of anthropogenic global warming, they are attempting to suppress the central source of human vitality.

What would you say if someone told you that he was concerned you might get sick because it's hot and humid out--and then told you that his "cure" was to constrict your supply of oxygen by 80%? Would you believe that he was sincerely concerned with your health? Well, you had better start asking the same question of Al Gore and the rest of the global warming fanatics, because that's exactly what they're trying to do. In denouncing fossil fuels, they are seeking to tax, reduce, and ultimately to eliminate the fuels that provide our civilization with 80% of its energy. Their goal is a fatal constriction of the process of industrial respiration.

That is the deepest, fullest reason why a "carbon tax" is just as dangerous as a tax on breathing.

If we really care about the biological health of human civilization, we need to guard it against the environmentalist charlatans who are seeking to suffocate the real lungs of the earth.

Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist and TIADaily.com.

Walter Reed symptom of military ills
By Ken Allard

San Antonio Express-News

The mold, the neglect and the mind-numbing bureaucratic nightmare at Walter Reed Army Medical Center were, as Paul Harvey likes to say, "the rest of the story." So, too, the public shock and outrage.

That's because from "Baghdad ER" to ABC newsman Bob Woodruff's remarkable recovery from a roadside bombing, the dominant story of military medicine at war has been about life snatched dramatically from the jaws of death. Sometimes death wins the grim shoving match; that is the nature of combat. But the doctors, nurses and medics win far more than they lose.

But they come from an Army run well past the red line. As rare as North Dakotans (both populations numbering about 600,000), the volunteers in the active Army are superbly trained and equipped professionals. After five years of war, however, our soldiers are under strength and overcommitted, members of a severely strained institution where the urgent routinely overwhelms the essential. When it does, things drop through the cracks, even such basics as taking care of wounded warriors — a situation the Army is now belatedly scrambling to set right.

If Abu Ghraib was the first indication that something was seriously amiss with the Iraq occupation, then the Walter Reed debacle is a stark warning that basic assumptions about the state of U.S. defenses may no longer be valid — including the numbers of troops in uniform and how we go about raising them.

Five years after 9-11, some of those hard-pressed soldiers are serving their third tours of duty in Iraq, even as our border with Mexico is being defended by the National Guard. See anything wrong with this picture?

Robert Gates does. The new secretary of defense had barely settled into office before calling for 100,000 troops to be added to the active-duty ranks. Since his arrival, the former president of Texas A&M has shown consistent wisdom and courage, selecting Gen. David Petraeus as the new Iraq commander and endorsing his ideas for a new counterinsurgency strategy — of which the controversial troop surge is but one element.

While these changes were long overdue, nothing may say more about Gates than his forcing the resignation of the secretary of the Army — a political appointee whose initial reaction to the Walter Reed scandal was to blame it on inattentive sergeants.

With other sackings possibly looming, the Army secretary's abrupt departure meant that accountability was suddenly back in season at the Pentagon. And as our friends in College Station like to remind us: That ain't half-bad for an Aggie.

Blue-ribbon commissions are to presidential embarrassments what lampposts are to drunkards — sources of support rather than illumination. Nevertheless, the one now being impaneled under the leadership of former Sen. Bob Dole and former Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala may yet perform a useful public service — but only if it can step back from the current scandal to address some zero-based questions.

How many wounded veterans are there, and what kinds of wounds do they bear? Do we really need a separate system of hospitals administered by the Veterans Administration to provide medical care for wounded soldiers and aging veterans? Are there ways in which the private sector might do that without requiring an entire department of government?

Can we reduce red tape and paperwork in the current military health care system? And, by the way, what conceivable hope is there of providing universal health care for ordinary citizens if we cannot even manage seamless treatment for our combat wounded?

Decent societies occasionally need reminding of such responsibilities — particularly if the reminders become unfashionable. Just last month, teaching my UTSA class on a day once consecrated to Presidents Washington and Lincoln, it was interesting to recall that even overlooked icons can still provide useful lessons. Washington invented our concept of the citizen-soldier. And during his second inaugural in 1865, just a month before he was killed, Lincoln urged his countrymen to bind up the nation's wounds, beginning with the veteran: "to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and for his orphan."

True then and now — but even more so if you disagree with the war while claiming to support the troops.

---

Retired Col. Ken Allard is an executive-in-residence at UTSA and author of "Warheads: Cable News and the Fog of War." E-mail him at WARHEADS6@aol.com

From New York Magazine:

The Leader of the Pack Is Back

Decades after her death-obsessed girl group, the Shangri-Las, was buried under litigation and changing pop tastes, Mary Weiss goes solo.

• By Michael Martin

They were the ultimate New York band of the sixties: four Catholic schoolgirls from Queens with leather vests and abandonment issues who sang beautifully arranged pop operas involving death by motorcycle (“Leader of the Pack”), death by car accident (“Give Us Your Blessings”), and death in general (“I Can Never Go Home Anymore”), along with the occasional ecstatic valentine involving the clomping of boots and the blowing of kisses.

The Shangri-Las turned teen angst into dark and spiky pop art, and even as the campy vroom-vroom! of their biggest hit became a starting point for junior-high talent shows everywhere, the group’s influence cut deep and wide. They were patron saints of the CBGB crowd—Blondie, the New York Dolls, and Johnny Thunders covered their songs; the Ramones took notes—and their mix of hooks and heartbreak has filtered down into the furthest reaches of alt-country and emo.

The lead singer was a 15-year-old named Mary Weiss. She wore her hair long, her pants off the men’s rack, and her heart on her billowy sleeve. In 1964, she screamed “Look out!” over and over as her biker boyfriend ate the pavement—all the way to No. 1. Four years later, the band itself had eaten it, run down by the sort of vituperative litigation that ridiculously successful bands staffed by minors always seem to generate. Next week, at age 58, she’s releasing Dangerous Game, marking one of the rock era’s longest hibernations and most anticipated comebacks. “I think people are expecting me to come out onstage in a walker,” says Weiss over lunch at the old-school Chinese restaurant she insisted on meeting me in near the United Nations—and across the street from her former apartment. “But they don’t realize how young I was back then.”

When it all started, Weiss, her older sister (a Bardot doppelgänger named Betty), and two of their friends (twin sisters Mary Ann and Margie Ganser) were singing at school dances. Nothing had come of their first demo. Then they were introduced to aspiring songwriter-producer George “Shadow” Morton. It was the era when the Brill Building songwriters reigned supreme over the American bandstand, and Morton decided he would impress two of the Brill gurus, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, by cutting a demo with the girls. The song, “Remember (Walking in the Sand),” was loaded with seagull sound effects and hit No. 5. (Years later, Aerosmith covered it and Weiss sang backup.)

Weiss speaks in terse and low tones, Garbo with a Queens honk. She grew up in “kind of downscale” Cambria Heights. “My father died right after I was born, and my mother didn’t do much of anything,” she says. “I had a fairly rotten childhood. Lived in abject poverty. Always fended for myself. I didn’t really have a childhood; I was supporting myself from the time I was 14.”

But Weiss never thought of herself as hardened. “I’ve heard we were tough, and I just find that so hilarious,” she says. “If you really look at the old tapes, I don’t think that word would even come up. I saw a clip recently and I sound like—” She makes a whimpering noise. “How do you get tough out of that? It makes me laugh. People liked to put people in boxes back then, especially the girls. Maybe it was the boots. Do these make me look tough?” she asks, hoisting an intimidating black heel to table height.

“Leader of the Pack,” their second hit, featured revving motorcycles, screeching tires, crashing glass, and an infamous adenoidal spoken-word intro. Its success led to a string of bubblegum Grand Guignol. In “Give Us Your Blessings,” Weiss begs her parents for approval to marry her boyfriend; the two drive off to their deaths—the song implies that their prodigious weeping might have affected their driving—leaving the parents to sob over their rain-soaked bodies. In “I Can Never Go Home Anymore,” a girl contemplates running away, inspiring her mother to die. But “Give Him a Great Big Kiss”—mwah!— and “Right Now and Not Later” were among the most buoyant songs of the time. There were war-bound boyfriends (“Long Live Our Love”) and bad-boy crushes to be analyzed (“He’s good bad,” went the interlude, “but he’s not evil”).

In an era that never lacked for overcooked melodrama, the Shangri-Las stood out because of Weiss’s vulnerable delivery. Today, to listen to “Out in the Streets”—in which a girl cleans up her hoodlum boyfriend, then realizes his soul has died and she has to let him go—is to swoon in pop dolor: “He used to act bad / Used to, but he quit it / It makes me so sad / ’Cause I know that he did it for me.” The group’s last top-100 song, “Past, Present and Future,” released in 1966, is an entirely spoken-word piece set to swirling piano and strings. It has also been interpreted to be about date rape, which Weiss says is nonsense. “It’s about being hurt and angsty and not wanting anyone near you.”

The band toured nonstop for four years, with a road manager barely out of his teens. After a man put his arm through the plate-glass window of her hotel room, Weiss bought a gun for protection, which resulted in her mother’s being visited by the FBI. “She must have loved that,” says Weiss with a laugh.

The band emerged late on the girl-group scene; Phil Spector protégées like the Crystals—who were even more hysterical, with songs like “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)”—had peaked in the early sixties. The Shangri-Las essentially closed the genre down, pushing the teenage yearning and countercultural fixations of West Side Story and Rebel Without a Cause as far the radio would allow (“Leader of the Pack” was banned by the BBC but proved irrepressible, hitting the U.K. charts three times and as late as 1976).

In 1968, after an attempted upgrade to Mercury Records resulted in two dud singles, the Shangri-Las disbanded amid legal issues that Weiss still cannot discuss. “My mother kind of signed my life away when I was 14,” she says. “I’m laughing. Thirty years of litigation. There’s a storeroom of litigation up to the ceiling … That’s one of the reasons I walked away. The litigation was much thicker than the music. I couldn’t go near another record label for ten years.”

The girl-group era was over anyway, replaced by something more band-driven and psychedelic. Perhaps obviously, she moved to San Francisco, where she spent a year and a half roller-skating through Golden Gate Park, pursuing “peace and love and all that hippie stuff—and floundering,” before returning to Manhattan (“Where else was I going to go?”) and living in weekly-rate hotels like the Warwick that were popular with musicians.

Eventually, she became a secretary at an architecture firm in midtown; later, she moved to a commercial furniture dealership. “I ran installation—all the techie stuff. When I left there, I was working on $20 million projects. The major project I worked on blew up during September 11. The landing gear came through the roof. They had asbestos, dioxin, mold growing everywhere—I walked through it with a mask on and cried.”

As for her former bandmates, Mary Ann Ganser died in 1971; conflicting accounts cite a drug overdose or a seizure. “And I’ll leave it that way. It doesn’t much matter anymore,” pronounces Weiss, sounding a bit like an intro to one of her old songs. Margie Ganser died of breast cancer in 1996. “It happens a lot,” says Weiss, sighing. “They get it, and then within five years—” Her sister is well but “doesn’t want to be a part of this,” says Weiss (Betty was an inconsistent member of the group, in any case).

The comeback was a long time coming. In 1977, Sire Records honcho Seymour Stein signed the three surviving Shangri-Las to record a new album, but a summer of recording sessions—capped by an impromptu gig at CBGB—displeased everyone involved and went into the vaults. Otherwise, she was too gun-shy from her legal experiences (which expanded to include a lawsuit against a promoter who had launched an impostor Shangri-Las act in the late eighties) to want to record.

Then last year, she had a chance meeting with Billy Miller, head of the Brooklyn indie label Norton, at a Rhino Records party for the girl-group boxed set One Kiss Can Lead to Another (it featured two Shangri-Las tracks). “I was a fan since the first record, which I remember hearing on WABC when I was 10 years old,” says Miller. “I followed every record they made. They were on TV a lot. It was the time of the British invasion, and it was just so unique that they were local. It was always stressed on TV that they were from New York City. Everybody on TV was either from Liverpool or California.” He e-mailed her and asked her if she wanted to go back into the studio. “The first thing I told her was I’m not interested in nostalgia. That’s what she wanted to hear, I think.”

“I always said I would do this once more,” she says. “And I didn’t feel like I wanted to—it just wasn’t right.” Still, the fans didn’t forget her; sometimes they went through her trash and showed up unannounced at her office. “When I walked away, it took me twelve years to get lost in the street and not be recognized.” After stints in Forest Hills and an eleven-year marriage that ended in 1985, Weiss now lives in Babylon, on Long Island, and has ducks on her front lawn. Her husband is a legal-case manager. (“I never thought I’d get married again,” she says. “I called it the M-word.”)

She decided to go for it. She listened to records in Miller’s Prospect Heights apartment. People wanted her to record their songs. “A lot of it was sort of dramatic—somebody drives off a cliff or something,” says Miller. “She said that’s nice—just don’t bring it up again.”

Dangerous Game contains a remake of the Shangri-Las “Heaven Only Knows.” It didn’t make it on the CD, but she’s dusting off a cover of the deliciously ambiguous “Train From Kansas City” to perform live. She’s not so sure she wants to play “Leader of the Pack” again.

“I wanted to do a mix of new with old,” Weiss says. “Why walk into the studio to do old things? What’s the point?”

She has been encouraged by social-networking Website MySpace. “I did my page myself. I didn’t want anyone else to touch it. I talk to people every day, and I go in and look at what young people are listening to. And their tastes are so all over the place and so sophisticated. They’re grounded. They’re listening to stuff from the forties, really good stuff! I went ‘Whoa,’ and thought, There’s room for me. But I didn’t know that before MySpace.”

She will play a show at Austin indie-music fest South by Southwest, and another in Cleveland; her New York City homecoming has yet to be scheduled. “I’m taking it very slowly,” she says. “Small steps. No rush.

“I just want to have fun now. And I’m going to. People can take advantage of you in your youth,” says Weiss. “And they’re not going to do it again. There are benefits to being a grown-up.”

From TigerWeekly:

‘PISTOL’: The Life of Pete Maravich

By Jennifer Bayhi

The ancient Greek writer Euripides could not have fashioned a more symmetrical, symbolic tragedy than the true story of basketball legend “Pistol” Pete Maravich. The life of the legend was as unpredictable as the innovative moves he brought to the court, as dangerous as he was to the opposing team and as up and down as the basketball he spent 35 of his 40 years dribbling.

“It’s as compelling and nuanced a father/son story as there ever was,” author Mark Kriegel says in a sit-down interview in Baton Rouge last week, the 11th stop in his nationwide tour to promote “PISTOL.”

The first third of the biography tells the story of the basketball legend’s father, Press Maravich, of whom the obsession with the sport is born.

Growing up in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, alienated from his family and placed in a special education class at school, the elder Maravich “doesn’t do a damn thing right in his life until the age of 14,” when a missionary gives him a basketball.

As he becomes a star at the game and a local hero, the boy equates salvation with basketball. Basketball is his life – his religion, in a sense. From that idolatrous relationship, the narrative starts, ultimately ending with Pete as the sacrificial offering to the game.

In his collegiate career at LSU under the tutelage of father and coach Press, Pistol Pete became college basketball’s all-time leading scorer, averaging 44 points per game. He achieved nationwide notoriety in college and later played 10 seasons in the NBA.

Early on, however, he began to search for a deeper meaning of life and fell prey to the alcoholism that plagued other members of his family. Some question now if Pete was an undiagnosed manic-depressive due to his frequent “lows” and “colorful eccentricity,” notably his painting “TAKE ME” on his rooftop to send a message to UFOs. Kriegel parallels Pete’s fame frequently to that of Elvis.

Kriegel began his research in January 2005. Intensely investigative, Kriegel traveled frequently from his home in California to Pennsylvania, the Carolinas and Louisiana to track down the cast of characters who knew the Maraviches best. Somewhere along the way, Kriegel formed close rapport with the family and friends of Pistol, as evidenced by those in attendance at the book signing in Baton Rouge last week: Pistol’s student trainer Billy Simmons, team manager Dexter Bott, LSU teammate Ralph Jukkola and son Joshua Maravich, all of whom give Kriegel’s “PISTOL” their stamp of approval.

Kriegel’s “PISTOL” is different than the slew of other biographies aimed at the Pistol because all the stories in the perfectly chronological book are firsthand accounts from those who knew Pete Maravich best.

“I really love this book because it’s all the truth,” Josh Maravich said.

“It tells the dark side, but it’s all true … a lot of things I didn’t know about,” the 24-year-old said.

Maravich said in a lifetime of interviewing about his dad, Kriegel is the only one who has ever asked him questions that reached him on a more personal level. In an early interview about Pistol’s death, Josh said he “just started bawling because it took [him] back to that moment.”

Kriegel said soon after, Josh called him literally in the middle of the night, just to talk and ask questions about Pistol. Now, two years later, the men talk at least three times a week.

“I really love that kid,” Kriegel says of Josh.

Kriegel initially envisioned telling the life of the legend as a narrative of the father/son relationship that forever changed the game of basketball. In a Maravichian strike of irony, it appears Kriegel has become a continuation of the story

From The Times Online:
How my eyes were opened
to the barbarity of Islam
Is it racist to condemn fanaticism?

By Phyllis Chesler

Once I was held captive in Kabul. I was the bride of a charming, seductive and Westernised Afghan Muslim whom I met at an American college. The purdah I experienced was relatively posh but the sequestered all-female life was not my cup of chai — nor was the male hostility to veiled, partly veiled and unveiled women in public.

When we landed in Kabul, an airport official smoothly confiscated my US passport. “Don’t worry, it’s just a formality,” my husband assured me. I never saw that passport again. I later learnt that this was routinely done to foreign wives — perhaps to make it impossible for them to leave. Overnight, my husband became a stranger. The man with whom I had discussed Camus, Dostoevsky, Tennessee Williams and the Italian cinema became a stranger. He treated me the same way his father and elder brother treated their wives: distantly, with a hint of disdain and embarrassment.

In our two years together, my future husband had never once mentioned that his father had three wives and 21 children. Nor did he tell me that I would be expected to live as if I had been reared as an Afghan woman. I was supposed to lead a largely indoor life among women, to go out only with a male escort and to spend my days waiting for my husband to return or visiting female relatives, or having new (and very fashionable) clothes made.

In America, my husband was proud that I was a natural-born rebel and free thinker. In Afghanistan, my criticism of the treatment of women and of the poor rendered him suspect, vulnerable. He mocked my horrified reactions. But I knew what my eyes and ears told me. I saw how poor women in chadaris were forced to sit at the back of the bus and had to keep yielding their place on line in the bazaar to any man.

I saw how polygamous, arranged marriages and child brides led to chronic female suffering and to rivalry between co-wives and half-brothers; how the subordination and sequestration of women led to a profound estrangement between the sexes — one that led to wife-beating, marital rape and to a rampant but hotly denied male “prison”-like homosexuality and pederasty; how frustrated, neglected and uneducated women tormented their daughter-in-laws and female servants; how women were not allowed to pray in mosques or visit male doctors (their husbands described the symptoms in their absence).

Individual Afghans were enchantingly courteous — but the Afghanistan I knew was a bastion of illiteracy, poverty, treachery and preventable diseases. It was also a police state, a feudal monarchy and a theocracy, rank with fear and paranoia. Afghanistan had never been colonised. My relatives said: “Not even the British could occupy us.” Thus I was forced to conclude that Afghan barbarism was of their own making and could not be attributed to Western imperialism.

Long before the rise of the Taleban, I learnt not to romanticise Third World countries or to confuse their hideous tyrants with liberators. I also learnt that sexual and religious apartheid in Muslim countries is indigenous and not the result of Western crimes — and that such “colourful tribal customs” are absolutely, not relatively, evil. Long before al-Qaeda beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and Nicholas Berg in Iraq, I understood that it was dangerous for a Westerner, especially a woman, to live in a Muslim country. In retrospect, I believe my so-called Western feminism was forged in that most beautiful and treacherous of Eastern countries.

Nevertheless, Western intellectual-ideologues, including feminists, have demonised me as a reactionary and racist “Islamophobe” for arguing that Islam, not Israel, is the largest practitioner of both sexual and religious apartheid in the world and that if Westerners do not stand up to this apartheid, morally, economically and militarily, we will not only have the blood of innocents on our hands; we will also be overrun by Sharia in the West. I have been heckled, menaced, never-invited, or disinvited for such heretical ideas — and for denouncing the epidemic of Muslim-on-Muslim violence for which tiny Israel is routinely, unbelievably scapegoated.

However, my views have found favour with the bravest and most enlightened people alive. Leading secular Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents — from Egypt, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Syria and exiles from Europe and North America — assembled for the landmark Islamic Summit Conference in Florida and invited me to chair the opening panel on Monday.

According to the chair of the meeting, Ibn Warraq: “What we need now is an age of enlightenment in the Islamic world. Without critical examination of Islam, it will remain dogmatic, fanatical and intolerant and will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality and truth.” The conference issued a declaration calling for such a new “Enlightenment”. The declaration views “Islamophobia” as a false allegation, sees a “noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine” and “demands the release of Islam from its captivity to the ambitions of power-hungry men”.

Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.

Ibn Warraq has written a devastating work that will be out by the summer. It is entitled Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Will Western intellectuals also dare to defend the West?

Phyllis Chesler is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at the City University of New York

Bush-Cheney-Libby-Hadley

Martyr of the War Party
By Patrick J. Buchanan

Wednesday, March 7, 2007

The conviction of Scooter Libby on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice is first of all a human tragedy.

A man who served his country at the highest level, who sat in every morning at the senior staff meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, has been dishonored and disgraced, and will be disbarred. Unless his conviction is overturned, or he is pardoned, Libby will go to prison. His life will end with an obituary that declares in its headline and lead paragraph that he was a convicted Dick Cheney aide.

Yet, this was a narrow case. Libby's convictions call to mind Martha Stewart's, who went to prison for lying to investigators about a crime she did not commit. Libby has been convicted of lying about the outing of a CIA classified officer, a crime for which no one has been indicted.

Valerie Plame, the wife of Ambassador Joe Wilson, who was outed as a CIA "operative," was no longer covert and had not been so for half a decade when her name was pushed out of the White House to the press. Joe Wilson, her husband, target of the White House vendetta, yet contends that not only was her career destroyed, a crime was committed -- and that is why the CIA demanded an investigation.

Yet it was an arrogant and stupid thing Libby did. He lied to the FBI, to Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, to the grand jury. He fabricated a story about where he learned about Wilson's wife, when, as sworn testimony proved, he learned it from Vice President Cheney and was himself moving it to the press.

However, this was about a larger issue than the narrow question of whether Libby lied about leaking the role of Valerie Plame in having her husband sent to Niger to investigate a report that Iraq had been seeking "yellowcake," a critical component in a uranium enrichment program.

That larger issue is this: Were we misled, were we deceived by our government, as the White House made the case for invading and occupying Iraq? Did neoconservatives at the Pentagon cherry-pick the intelligence, stovepipe it to the vice president's office and Libby, and then feed it to sympathizers and collaborators in the media, to stampede our country into a war against a nation that, no matter how odious its regime, did not threaten us, did not attack us and did not want war with us?

In short, were we lied into a war in Mesopotamia that is breaking our Army, has crippled an administration, and has bled and divided our country as it has not been since the days of Vietnam?

And why has the Democratic Congress, on taking power in January, not begun a broad investigation into how we got into this war?

This is the dog that didn't bark. And the reason the dog is silent suggests itself. The Congress, in voting President Bush the authority to take us to war against Iraq at a time and place of his own choosing, failed to do its duty by the Constitution. In October 2002, to get the issue off the table for the election and give themselves political cover against the Rovian charge they were tying the hands of the commander in chief in the War on Terror, a Democratic Senate -- Clinton, Kerry, Edwards, Daschle, Biden, Reid all assenting -- voted Bush the blank check for war that he cashed in five months later.

The dilemma a Democratic Congress faces in any investigation into whether we were lied into war is that Congress would be investigating why a Democratic Senate failed its constitutional duty to determine the necessity for war.

And, lest we forget, the media, too, played a supporting role in pushing this nation into an unnecessary war. Columnists and commentators assured us there was a nexus between Saddam, al-Qaida and 9-11, a "Prague connection" between Muhammad Atta and Iraqi intelligence. We were told Saddam had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and was working on nuclear weapons, that enrichment of uranium was being done secretly around the country, that if we did not act now, we faced a nuclear-armed Iraq that would surely transfer atomic weapons to al-Qaida terrorists. Said Condi Rice, our proof of WMD might well come in the form of a mushroom cloud above an American city.

Scooter Libby will not lack for legal defense funds as he pursues his appeal, and there will be demands for his pardon before Bush goes home. For Scooter is a martyr of the War Party. Scooter did what he had to do to get us into this war. Then he did what he felt he had to do to discredit Joe Wilson, because Wilson was out to discredit the White House case for war. And in the end, we are unlikely to know the truth of why it was we went to war. For that record is sealed in minds and souls.

Pat Buchanan is a founding editor of The American Conservative magazine, and the author of many books including State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America .

Global warming labeled a 'scam'
By Al Webb

THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published March 6, 2007

LONDON -- With a packet of claims that are almost certain to defy conventional wisdom, a television documentary to be aired in Britain this week condemns man-made global warming as a myth that has become "the biggest scam of modern times."
The program titled "The Great Global Warming Scandal" and set for screening by TV Channel 4 on Thursday dismisses claims that high levels of greenhouse gases generated by human activity causes climate change. Instead, the program suggests that the sun itself is the real culprit.
The documentary, directed by filmmaker Martin Durkin, is at odds with scientific opinion as outlined in a United Nations report in February, which blames mankind for global warming.
In his program, Mr. Durkin rejects the concept of man-made climate change, calling it "a lie ... the biggest scam of modern times."
The truth, he says, is that global warming "is a multibillion-dollar worldwide industry, created by fanatically anti-industrial environmentalists, supported by scientists peddling scare stories to chase funding, and propped up by compliant politicians and the media."
Channel 4 says that the program features "an impressive roll-call of experts," including nine professors, who are experts in climatology, oceanography, meteorology, biogeography and paleoclimatology.
It also says the experts come from prestigious institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Danish National Space Center and universities and other schools in London, Ottawa, Jerusalem, Alabama, Virginia and Winnipeg, Canada.
"It's very rare that a film changes history," says Martin Durkin, "but I think this is a turning point, and in five years the idea that the greenhouse effect is the main reason behind global warming will be seen as total bunk," he says.
His program collides sharply with the premise outlined in former Vice President Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," which presents a bleak picture of how a buildup in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide affects the global climate, with potentially disastrous consequences.
"Al Gore might have won an Oscar," says Mr. Durkin, in a preview of the documentary, "but the film is very misleading, and he has got the relationship between [carbon dioxide] and climate change the wrong way around."
One of the filmmaker's experts, paleontologist professor Ian Clark of the University of Ottawa, says that global warming could be caused by increased activity on the sun, such as massive eruptions, and that ice-core samples from Antarctica show that, in fact, warmer periods in Earth's history have come about 800 years before rises in carbon dioxide levels.
Mr. Clark's findings appear to contradict the work of other scientists, who have used similar ice-core samples to illustrate that raised levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have accompanied the various global warming periods.
"The fact is that [carbon dioxide] has no proven link to global temperatures," says Mr. Durkin. "Solar activity is far more likely to be the culprit."
Scientists in the Channel 4 documentary cite what they claim is another discrepancy involving conventional research, saying that most of the recent global warming occurred before 1940, after which temperatures around the world fell for four decades.
Mr. Durkin's skeptical specialists view this as a flaw in the official view, because the worldwide economic boom that followed the end of World War II produced more carbon dioxide, and therefore should have meant a rise in global temperatures -- something he says did not happen.
"The Great Global Warming Swindle" also questions an assertion by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report, published last month, that it was backed by some 2,500 of the world's leading scientists.
Another of Mr. Durkin's professors, Paul Reiter of Paris' Pasteur Institute, an expert in malaria, calls the U.N. report a "sham" because, he says, it included the names of scientists -- including his own -- who disagreed with the report and who resigned from the panel.
"That is how they make it seem that all the top scientists are agreed," he says. "It's not true."
Mr. Reiter says his name was removed only after he threatened legal action against the panel. The report itself, he adds, was finalized by government appointees.
Yet another expert in the Durkin documentary, Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, is more circumspect.
"The [climate] system is too complex to say exactly what the effect of cutting back on [carbon dioxide] production would be or, indeed, of continuing to produce [carbon dioxide]."
"The greenhouse effect theory worried me from the start," Mr. Stott says, "because you can't say that just one factor can have this effect."
"At the moment, there is almost a McCarthyism movement in science where the greenhouse effect is like a puritanical religion, and this is dangerous," he says.

From The New York Times:

To the Editor:

Re “Army Secretary Ousted in Furor on Hospital Care” (front page, March 3):

The coverage of the shamefully inadequate facilities at Walter Reed Army Medical Center is long overdue. My first experience with the Army’s “premier medical facility” was in early 2005, when I arrived at the hospital after being medically evacuated from Iraq.

We were brought to what can best be described as a third-world triage area. The cavernous room smelled of mildew. Paint was peeling from the walls as several overhead fluorescent lights flickered.

After about 20 minutes, a physician assistant (not a doctor) came to check us in. She spent about two minutes with each soldier. One by one, we were taken to our rooms. Unfortunately for me, my room was recently painted, and as a result, I had to wait three more hours.

Another young soldier apparently shared the same predicament. Out of shock, frustration or perhaps boredom, he pulled off the large bandage on his leg. He began to scream uncontrollably at the sight of his wound. Apparently, it was the first time he had seen it.

The sight of muscle and bone in his own leg was too much to take. An orderly tried to console him, but he continued to scream in horror for the better part of an hour with no doctor or psychologist in sight.

Welcome to Walter Reed. It got only worse. Inefficiency, disorganization and incompetence were the rule rather than the exception during my next two months at the hospital.

The fact that soldiers must face these conditions at the most difficult time in their lives is not unfortunate, regrettable or undesirable; it is criminal.

Christopher K. Donis

Indianapolis, March 3, 2007

The writer is a staff sergeant in the United States Army.

Gore's Crusade Ends at His Front Door

By Debra Saunders

Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," was billed as "a passionate and inspirational look at one man's fervent crusade to halt global warming's deadly progress in its tracks by exposing the myths and misconceptions that surround it." But right after the movie won an Oscar for best documentary, America learned that Gore's crusade ends at his front door.

A conservative think-tank, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, released a press release that showed the Gores spent $30,000 a year on energy for their suburban Nashville home -- and burned 221,000 kilowatt-hours last year, or 20 times the national average. The reaction of Gore's spokesperson is instructive. Kalee Kreider told ABC News' Jake Tapper, "I think what you're seeing here is the last gasp of the global warming skeptics. They've completely lost the debate on the issue, so now they're just attacking their most effective opponent."

Kreider is right, in a way. Gore is the most effective global-warming advocate in America. Yet somehow Gore has little problem doing a lot of the very thing he tells the rest of the country not to do -- that is, burning more energy than is necessary.

The message comes across loud and clear: The Gores are rich, and rich people are going to burn a lot of energy. They won't let their belief in global warming crimp their lifestyle.

That's why "Inconvenient Truth" producer Laurie David can boast on the movie Website that she is "committed to stopping global warming," denounce people who drive SUVs -- and still fly in private Gulfstream jets. (Having been blasted in the press for her high-flying ways, David told ABC last year that she was cutting back on her private-plane travel. Talk about commitment.)

And let us not forget two other California pioneers on climate change -- California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, both owners of multiple SUVs and users of private planes.

Fear not, however, because Gore, like those wonderful folks who put on the Oscars, is "carbon neutral." As Kreider told ABC, the Gores "purchase offsets for their carbon emissions to bring their carbon footprint down to zero."

I used to figure that rich sinners, who bought "indulgences" from the Catholic Church before the Protestant Reformation, would be ashamed of the bargain that other churchgoers looked upon with scorn and derision.

But lo, on Academy Awards night, the stars were quite impressed with themselves for participating in a "carbon-neutral" event. Cozy up to the Natural Resources Defense Council, and all those private flights, limo rides and multiple homes disappear. Almost like special effects.

I know that the word on many readers' lips is: hypocrisy.

But the real issue is that the most effective spokesman for global warming apparently doesn't think he has to show personal leadership on his signature issue by curbing his energy consumption. The same goes for Feinstein and Schwarzenegger, who are happy to push for laws that make other people cut their emissions, but are far too affluent to cut back themselves.

"With the future so open to doubt," Gore wrote in his 1992 book "Earth in the Balance," "we routinely choose to indulge our own generation at the expense of all who will follow."

Now Gore has a spokesperson who explains his indulgence -- er, offset -- policy. And it apparently doesn't matter that Gore's behavior signals to global-warming agnostics (like me) and to global warming believers that the climate situation must not be that dire after all.

In fact, watching Gore's conspicuous consumption, you have to wonder whether he really believes in global warming at all.

dsaunders@sfchronicle.com

Copyright 2007 Creators Syndicate

From TownHall.com:
CPAC COULTERIZED: THE OBLIGATORY COULTER POST
By Mary Katharine Ham

Oh, Ann Coulter. I know everyone's said about everything that can be said about this, and Monday isn't even over yet, but such is the power of Ann's rhetoric and the firestorms that follow it, that we are all obliged to respond to it. My first response was short, annoyed, and disgusted. Here's the full-blown take.

In college, I discovered Townhall. It was this wondrous place where I could read all sorts of conservative opinion all in one place, and use the political analysis I found to better arm myself against lefty professors. I'm not just saying that 'cause I work here, either. Really, that's where I read my daily political commentary. Among my most frequent reads were Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. I read others, too--notably Thomas Sowell and John Stossel, because I dig me some fiscal conservatism-- but Coulter and Malkin had an impact on me. They were young, strong conservative women who were sometimes biting and always successful. I liked the idea of what the future might hold for a young, strong conservative woman, though at the time I didn't think politics was going to be my career path.

Point being, I had a soft spot for Ann. When I left N.C. to move to D.C. a couple years ago, a friend gave me one of those talking Ann Coulter dolls, which I immediately set about hiding in my liberal editor's office, rigged to squawk about liberalism every 10 minutes. Heh. Luckily, he was a good-humored man.

For those reasons, I'm often more inclined to defend Coulter than others in my office, and others inside the Beltway, in general. But it's been a few years now since Coulter's become a caricature of herself, and I'm about done defending. I defended her on the grounds that she's a whip-smart woman who can whip-crack her political opponents like nobody's business. She's still both those things, but the shock jock element has really grown to overshadow the smartness, and it's not the liberal media bias that causes that effect. It's Ann herself.

I also defended her because I think it's very easy for policy wonks and Beltway snobs to forget that there's a large segment of decent, hard-working Americans for whom Coulter is an outlet and an icon. They get angry with liberals; they get frustrated with wimpy Republicans, and they let Ann lash out for them. I understand. There have been times that I've marveled at whatever stinging witticism she's levied and wondered at the fact that I could never do the same.

One of those times was not Friday, when she used the word "faggot" to refer to John Edwards. One of those times was not last year's CPAC when she used the word "ragheads" to refer to Iranians. I think it's important for us, here in our Washington pundit circles, not to forget that there are a bunch of right-leaning regular people out there who like Ann Coulter, and with good reasons. In the past, I've recoiled when confronted with reflexive Coulter snobbery because it's the "right" thing to say in Washington circles. "Oh, Ann Coulter. No, of course I don't like her. She's so gauche."

In the past, I've defended her, even as her rhetoric got worse, as a "gateway conservative"-- an entertaining act that pulled in folks who are ticked off at the modern liberal movement, but not necessarily ideological conservatives. However, once those people start reading her, I argued, they generally migrate to other conservative writers like Thomas Sowell and Charles Krauthammer, which I felt was a net win for conservatism. Many more people have been exposed to the ideas of free-market conservatism because of Coulter than would have been without such a popular figure to bring them in.

But how many have been turned off by the same figure? At some point, the scale tipped, and Ann started doing more harm than good. In two years at CPAC, with just two words, she reinforced two stereotypes of conservatives-- as racists and homophobes-- that certainly don't need reinforcing. I've spent much of my life fighting back against the notion that all conservatives are nasty, racist, homophobic meanies who just want to get rich and screw the poor. I became a fiscal conservative specifically because I wanted to help the low-income area in which I grew up, and it was apparent liberalism was not the way to do it. It's not a stereotype that's easy to dispel in a largely liberal environment, but it's one that needs to be dispelled, and inroads can be made as long as the person driving the car isn't yelling "faggot" and "raghead."

"Faggot" is a nasty word. I learned that from a teacher in first grade, when it suddenly became the in thing for my classmates to call each other, but I'm pretty sure I knew it before that. I knew it was a nasty word on the elementary-school playground. Why would we, as conservatives, not acknowledge that it's a nasty word when used at a mainstream political conference attended by presidential candidates and packed with young conservatives who are ostensibly learning to lead our movement?

If some liberal blogger had caught a random CPAC attendee on camera saying, "John Edwards is a faggot," I would have been embarrassed for our movement. How much worse that it was a featured speaker who said it?

Tough is fine. Even some of Ann's over-the-top jokes can be written off as just that-- jokes. But you can't write off every hateful, politically damaging crack as a-O.K. simply because that Ann's a jokester. I, for one, am proud that there are Middle Easterners, gay men and women, and other minorities for whom conservatism is an ideology that empowers. Don't they get enough crap from our lefty colleagues for "leaving the plantation?" Why should they be subjected to more from one of their supposed allies?

Ours is not the ideology of identity politics and knee-jerk, manufactured outrage that serve political ends, not people. But it is an ideology that should seek to serve everyone, regardless of color or sexual orientation. We're always going to disagree within our ranks about some issues, but if conservatives truly believe that free-market conservatism serves all Americans better than does big-government liberalism, then why scare people out of our big tent? We should be working, as Michael Steele said, "invite everyone to our table, because it's the table of opportunity"-- not by compromising our beliefs, but simply by not compromising our conferences with folks who say "faggot." It's really not much to ask.

As for the Left--no, they will never apologize or denounce similar behavior on their side, and no one will ever notice or give credit to the right for calling out its own. But to take that as a cue to excuse ourselves in acting just like them is ridiculous. I don't wanna be no Kos just because he can get away with it, so why can't I?

And, speaking in a politically pragmatic sense, it just does us no good to have her at CPAC, associated with all of the Republican Party's presidential candidates. Who will come to CPAC to bother with conservatives next year if she is there to cause a liability by proximity to any campaign that sets foot in the door? Don't conservatives want presidential candidates to come to their biggest gathering and address their concerns? The front-runners are all moderate-ish men that need to make some promises. That's a significant amount of political pull lost for a couple punchlines, if you keep Ann in the line-up, isn't it?

Check out the damage Coulter already did to Romney. He praised her before her speech, and she sucker-punched him. Now, anyone on YouTube can splice the two clips back-to-back and make Romney look like a jerk. Insodoing, as Ace points out, Ann handicaps a conservative guy who has the potential to effect more change on a conservative policy level, for all of America, than she'll ever have. Do we really want her doing that every year to our top candidates? We don't want to become the left:

It's a tenet of the fightin' fightin' nutroots that you spray your invective around indiscriminately, without thought to its effectiveness or blowback, because it's the fightin' fightiness of the fight that really matters, not actual results. Or prudence. Or simple decency.

I reject that. Most conservatives do, at least when they see such infantile tactics used by the left. But when it's Ann, well, many conservatives find themselves defending the fightin' fighty fightiness of the nutroots.

We're better than that, and Ann used to be better than that.

Right now, she's just making our battle more uphill, and we don't need that. She's also made it necessary for every conservative blogger to spend the past couple of days writing about a rude gay slur when they could have been writing about some of the actual ideas expressed at CPAC.

Not cool, Ann.

Anyway, who wants a doll that says "faggot?"

Bryan Ferry Covers Bob Dylan on New Solo Album

Former Roxy Music frontman Bryan Ferry has featured Bob Dylan covers on his albums before, but his 12th solo album, Dylanesque, is dedicated entirely to them. The album is out now in the UK, and Capitol will release it in the U.S. on June 19.

Most of Dylanesque was recorded in one week in the studio with Ferry's touring band. According to a press release, Brian Eno, Procol Harum guitarist Robin Trower, and Dirty Three/Grinderman/Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds member Warren Ellis provide "sonic enhancements," guitar, and string arrangements, respectively.

Ferry is currently on tour in the UK and Europe in support of Dylanesque. He will continue to play live through mid-April, and he has one date at a Princess Diana tribute in July.

Tracklist:

01 Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
02 Simple Twist of Fate
03 Make You Feel My Love
04 The Times They Are A-Changin'
05 All I Really Want to Do
06 Knockin' on Heaven's Door
07 Positively 4th Street
08 If Not for You
09 Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
10 Gates of Eden
11 All Along the Watchtower

THE MAJESTIC SWEEP
By Mark Steyn

It was the President of the United States who recommended The History Of The English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 to me. He was making a bit of social chitchat as I and a couple of others were leaving the Oval Office last year, and he asked me if I'd read Andrew Roberts' new book. For a world-renowned moron, President Bush is (from my limited acquaintance) far more widely read than many of his detractors. I don't just mean feeble types like the marketing dept. of Ontario's Lakehead University, whose advertising used a photo of Bush as a warning of the terrible failure that awaited those too dim to enter the groves of Thunder Bay academe, or simplyaudiobooks.ca, whose Toronto billboards likewise brandished a picture of Bush over the slogan "Don't read enough?" Compared to, say, powerful congressional committee chairmen, the President reads plenty, especially books on history and global affairs. My advice to Maclean's after the next US election is to fire me and pitch the gig to Dubya.

You don't have to read far into Roberts' volume to appreciate why it resonates with this particular Commander-in-Chief. On page six, we find another head of government of a global superpower, the third Marquess of Salisbury. Speaking at the dawn of the 20th century, Britain's Prime Minister remarks:

England is, I believe, the only country in which, during a great war, eminent men write and speak as if they belonged to the enemy.

Indeed. And, as Roberts adds, "In fact, the phenomenon was to recur throughout the English-speaking peoples over the coming decades, and in some engagements - such as at Suez and in Vietnam - opposition from a vociferous domestic minority was to doom their enterprises far more than foreign opponents."

He's certainly right about Vietnam, but my eyebrow arches skyward when it comes to Suez. It was surely neither domestic opposition nor Egyptian enemies that doomed the enterprise, but explicit and fierce American hostility to British action. Short-sighted hostility, one might argue, that led in part to the creation of the fetidly "stable" Middle East that plagues the world today. But that's one of the pleasures of Roberts' book: muscular polemical prose that cheerfully invites an argument about something or other on almost every page. It is, of course, a sequel - to Churchill's History Of The English-Speaking Peoples, whose four volumes concluded in the year 1900. Roberts feels, reasonably enough, that it's a shame to end the story without an account of the Anglosphere century.

Which raises the question of what he means by "the English-speaking peoples". I have both the London and New York editions of this book. The British jacket bears four flags - the Union Jack, the Stars and Stripes, the Southern Cross and the Maple Leaf (surely it should have been the Red Ensign). By contrast, the American jacket replaces that coalition of the willing with a scene of post-war jubilation in Times Square, and the only flag to be seen is that of Old Glory. Roberts' New York publishers would appear not to be entirely on board with his view of the great anglophone family and, at least for promotional purposes, prefer traditional notions of American exceptionalism. The author, on the other hand, subscribes to something closer to the Churchillian idea of a Britannic family with America as the prodigal son, but a son nevertheless and the greatest of all:

Just as we do not today differentiate between the Roman Republic and the imperial period of the Julio-Claudians when we think of the Roman Empire, so in the future no-one will bother to make a distinction between the British Empire-led and the American Republic-led periods of English-speaking dominance between the late-eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries. It will be recognised that in the majestic sweep of history they had so much in common - and enough that separated them from everyone else - that they ought to be regarded as a single historical entity, which only scholars and pedants will try to describe separately.

If you step back, this seems obvious. Of the three great global conflicts of the 20th century - the First, Second and Cold Wars - who called it right every time? Germany: one out of three. Italy: two out of three. France: well, let's not even go there. For a perfect hat trick, there are only those nations on the front of Roberts' London edition. There is a distinction between the "English-speaking peoples" and the rest of "the west", and at key moments in human history that distinction has proved critical. Europe has given us plenty of nice paintings and agreeable symphonies, French wine and Italian actresses and whatnot, but, for all our fetishization of multiculturalism, you can't help noticing that when it comes to the notion of a political west - a sustained commitment to individual liberty - the historical record looks a lot more unicultural and indeed (given that three of the four nations on that cover share the same head of state) uniregal. Roberts provides a good summation:

Although they are ancient states, many of the constitutions of European countries are very young indeed, far younger than those of Britain's constitutional monarchy (1688-9), America's democracy (1776), Canada's responsible government (1848) or even Australia's Federation (1900). By contrast, the French Constitution establishing its Fifth Republic was only promulgated in 1958, Germany's Basic Law was passed in 1949... Italy's was adopted in 1949... and Portugal's became law in 1976...

Or, as I like to say, the US Constitution is not only older than the French, German, Italian and Spanish constitutions, it's older than all of them put together. The entire political class of Portugal, Spain and Greece spent their childhoods living under dictatorships. So did Jacques Chirac and Angela Merkel. We forget how rare in this world is sustained peaceful constitutional evolution and, to be honest, it's kinda hard to remember when the principal political party of our own demented Dominion peddles non-stop Canada Day smiley-face banalities about how "we are such a young country" (Paul Martin) - which, aside from being obvious tripe, gives us the faintly creepy air of a professional virgin. "The English-speaking peoples did not invent the ideas that nonetheless made them great," concedes Roberts. "The Romans invented the concept of Law, the Greeks one-freeman-one-vote democracy, the Dutch modern capitalism..." But it is the English world that has managed to make these blessings seemingly permanent features of the landscape.

As Roberts sees it, the story of the 20th century is one of anglophone democracies defending the planet against what he calls four assaults: "The First Assault: Prussian Militarism 1914-17", "The Second Assault: Fascist Aggression 1931-39", "The Third Assault: Soviet Communism 1945-49" and "The Fourth Assault: Islamicist Terrorism and its De Facto Allies". In between come periods of complacency ("The Wasted Breathing Space: 1990-11 September 2001") and loss of faith ("The Long, Dismal, Drawling Tides: The 1970s"), but in the end the good guys always step up to the plate.

Of course, to point out such things is not terribly English, which may explain why this book has had some sniffy reviews in the mother country: "Everyone's Perfidious, Bar Albion And America: Andrew Roberts has written a most unEnglish book, says Tim Gardam" (The Observer). The proponent of such a thesis risks sounding like the old Flanders and Swann song:

The English, the English, the English are best.

I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest.

But Roberts is shrewder than that: he understands the enervating temptations of what he calls "permanent guilt" and "the politics of the pre-emptive cringe". Canada is an instructive example: we are a solid presence in the first half of his story, yet all but entirely absent from the second. The only one of our politicians post-Trudeau who rates a mention is a passing reference to Paul Martin's rejection of missile defence, and the only mention of Trudeau is a snide aside about his youthful enthusiasm for Maoist China. We are a wealthy G7 nation of 30 million people but chose under the cover of Trudeaupian narcissism to embrace global irrelevance. Our cousins across the ocean marked the dawn of the 9/11 era by selling off the Royal New Zealand Air Force. The whole lot, gone. Britain itself seems unable to rouse itself from a fatalistic three-legged danse macabre with Europe and its Islamifying cities that may yet mire it in the Continental pathologies it managed to avoid in the 20th century.

"Ah, the Anglosphere," Australia's Alexander Downer, my favourite foreign minister, said to me last year, when the subject of Canadian troops in Afghanistan came up. "There are really only five of us." But, in their present political sensibilities, Canada is semi-French, Britain is semi-European, and New Zealand is semi-bananas. The next volume of this story will be an interesting read.