New York Times Op-Ed: The instances listed of Mary J. Blige and Chuck D calling Elvis a racist are further microexamples of the black entertainment community being willing to make accusations of others, but unwilling to confront their own complicity in the degradation of the culture of their community. (See Juan Williams' book, Enough.)

How Did Elvis Get Turned Into a Racist?
By PETER GURALNICK

ONE of the songs Elvis Presley liked to perform in the ’70s was Joe South’s “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” its message clearly spelled out in the title.

Sometimes he would preface it with the 1951 Hank Williams recitation “Men With Broken Hearts,” which may well have been South’s original inspiration. “You’ve never walked in that man’s shoes/Or saw things through his eyes/Or stood and watched with helpless hands/While the heart inside you dies.” For Elvis these two songs were as much about social justice as empathy and understanding: “Help your brother along the road,” the Hank Williams number concluded, “No matter where you start/For the God that made you made them, too/These men with broken hearts.”

In Elvis’s case, this simple lesson was not just a matter of paying lip service to an abstract principle.

It was what he believed, it was what his music had stood for from the start: the breakdown of barriers, both musical and racial. This is not, unfortunately, how it is always perceived 30 years after his death, the anniversary of which is on Thursday. When the singer Mary J. Blige expressed her reservations about performing one of his signature songs, she only gave voice to a view common in the African-American community. “I prayed about it,” she said, “because I know Elvis was a racist.”

And yet, as the legendary Billboard editor Paul Ackerman, a devotee of English Romantic poetry as well as rock ’n’ roll, never tired of pointing out, the music represented not just an amalgam of America’s folk traditions (blues, gospel, country) but a bold restatement of an egalitarian ideal. “In one aspect of America’s cultural life,” Ackerman wrote in 1958, “integration has already taken place.”

It was due to rock ’n’ roll, he emphasized, that groundbreaking artists like Big Joe Turner, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, who would only recently have been confined to the “race” market, had acquired a broad-based pop following, while the music itself blossomed neither as a regional nor a racial phenomenon but as a joyful new synthesis “rich with Negro and hillbilly lore.”

No one could have embraced Paul Ackerman’s formulation more forcefully (or more fully) than Elvis Presley.

Asked to characterize his singing style when he first presented himself for an audition at the Sun recording studio in Memphis, Elvis said that he sang all kinds of music — “I don’t sound like nobody.” This, as it turned out, was far more than the bravado of an 18-year-old who had never sung in public before. It was in fact as succinct a definition as one might get of the democratic vision that fueled his music, a vision that denied distinctions of race, of class, of category, that embraced every kind of music equally, from the highest up to the lowest down.

It was, of course, in his embrace of black music that Elvis came in for his fiercest criticism. On one day alone, Ackerman wrote, he received calls from two Nashville music executives demanding in the strongest possible terms that Billboard stop listing Elvis’s records on the best-selling country chart because he played black music. He was simply seen as too low class, or perhaps just too no-class, in his refusal to deny recognition to a segment of society that had been rendered invisible by the cultural mainstream.

“Down in Tupelo, Mississippi,” Elvis told a white reporter for The Charlotte Observer in 1956, he used to listen to Arthur Crudup, the blues singer who originated “That’s All Right,” Elvis’s first record. Crudup, he said, used to “bang his box the way I do now, and I said if I ever got to the place where I could feel all old Arthur felt, I’d be a music man like nobody ever saw.”

It was statements like these that caused Elvis to be seen as something of a hero in the black community in those early years. In Memphis the two African-American newspapers, The Memphis World and The Tri-State Defender, hailed him as a “race man” — not just for his music but also for his indifference to the usual social distinctions. In the summer of 1956, The World reported, “the rock ’n’ roll phenomenon cracked Memphis’s segregation laws” by attending the Memphis Fairgrounds amusement park “during what is designated as ‘colored night.’”

That same year, Elvis also attended the otherwise segregated WDIA Goodwill Revue, an annual charity show put on by the radio station that called itself the “Mother Station of the Negroes.” In the aftermath of the event, a number of Negro newspapers printed photographs of Elvis with both Rufus Thomas and B.B. King (“Thanks, man, for all the early lessons you gave me,” were the words The Tri-State Defender reported he said to Mr. King).

When he returned to the revue the following December, a stylish shot of him “talking shop” with Little Junior Parker and Bobby “Blue” Bland appeared in Memphis’s mainstream afternoon paper, The Press-Scimitar, accompanied by a short feature that made Elvis’s feelings abundantly clear. “It was the real thing,” he said, summing up both performance and audience response. “Right from the heart.”

Just how committed he was to a view that insisted not just on musical accomplishment but fundamental humanity can be deduced from his reaction to the earliest appearance of an ugly rumor that has persisted in one form or another to this day. Elvis Presley, it was said increasingly within the African-American community, had declared, either at a personal appearance in Boston or on Edward R. Murrow’s “Person to Person” television program, “The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes.”

That he had never appeared in Boston or on Murrow’s program did nothing to abate the rumor, and so in June 1957, long after he had stopped talking to the mainstream press, he addressed the issue — and an audience that scarcely figured in his sales demographic — in an interview for the black weekly Jet.

Anyone who knew him, he told reporter Louie Robinson, would immediately recognize that he could never have uttered those words. Amid testimonials from black people who did know him, he described his attendance as a teenager at the church of celebrated black gospel composer, the Rev. W. Herbert Brewster, whose songs had been recorded by Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward and whose stand on civil rights was well known in the community. (Elvis’s version of “Peace in the Valley,” said Dr. Brewster later, was “one of the best gospel recordings I’ve ever heard.”)

The interview’s underlying point was the same as the underlying point of his music: far from asserting any superiority, he was merely doing his best to find a place in a musical continuum that included breathtaking talents like Ray Charles, Roy Hamilton, the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi and Howlin’ Wolf on the one hand, Hank Williams, Bill Monroe and the Statesmen Quartet on the other. “Let’s face it,” he said of his rhythm and blues influences, “nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. I can’t sing it like Fats Domino can. I know that.”

And as for prejudice, the article concluded, quoting an unnamed source, “To Elvis people are people, regardless of race, color or creed.”

So why didn’t the rumor die? Why did it continue to find common acceptance up to, and past, the point that Chuck D of Public Enemy could declare in 1990, “Elvis was a hero to most... straight-up racist that sucker was, simple and plain”?

Chuck D has long since repudiated that view for a more nuanced one of cultural history, but the reason for the rumor’s durability, the unassailable logic behind its common acceptance within the black community rests quite simply on the social inequities that have persisted to this day, the fact that we live in a society that is no more perfectly democratic today than it was 50 years ago. As Chuck D perceptively observes, what does it mean, within this context, for Elvis to be hailed as “king,” if Elvis’s enthronement obscures the striving, the aspirations and achievements of so many others who provided him with inspiration?

Elvis would have been the first to agree. When a reporter referred to him as the “king of rock ’n’ roll” at the press conference following his 1969 Las Vegas opening, he rejected the title, as he always did, calling attention to the presence in the room of his friend Fats Domino, “one of my influences from way back.” The larger point, of course, was that no one should be called king; surely the music, the American musical tradition that Elvis so strongly embraced, could stand on its own by now, after crossing all borders of race, class and even nationality.

“The lack of prejudice on the part of Elvis Presley,” said Sam Phillips, the Sun Records founder who discovered him, “had to be one of the biggest things that ever happened. It was almost subversive, sneaking around through the music, but we hit things a little bit, don’t you think?”

Or, as Jake Hess, the incomparable lead singer for the Statesmen Quartet and one of Elvis’s lifelong influences, pointed out: “Elvis was one of those artists, when he sang a song, he just seemed to live every word of it. There’s other people that have a voice that’s maybe as great or greater than Presley’s, but he had that certain something that everybody searches for all during their lifetime.”

To do justice to that gift, to do justice to the spirit of the music, we have to extend ourselves sometimes beyond the narrow confines of our own experience, we have to challenge ourselves to embrace the democratic principle of the music itself, which may in the end be its most precious gift.

Peter Guralnick is the author of “Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley.”

From TownHall.com:
No Reason to Mock the Death of Bergman
Posted by: Michael Medved

Western Culture Didn’t Produce Great Art Solely for Liberals

Last week one of my nationally syndicated, conservative talk radio colleagues repeatedly mocked the death of film director Ingmar Bergman, and I’m not sure I understand why.

The host kept alluding, sarcastically, to coping with the “great loss” of the Swedish filmmaker, apparently scorning the mainstream media for paying attention to the passing of a figure who meant nothing to the presumed talk radio audience. The smug, pompous, proudly philistine tone (as if to say, ‘we don’t give a bleep about some artsy-fartsy film freak from some socialist Scandinavian country’) bothered me deeply – not so much because I care about Bergman (though I do) but because I care about the future credibility of the conservative movement.

If film represents the most significant and influential art form of the last 100 years (and it obviously does) and if Ingmar Bergman counts as one of the greatest and most inspiring masters of that art form (and for me he most certainly does), then what’s the problem with taking note of his death? Once upon a time in America we paid serious attention to serious artists, and noted their passing in a big way – of course the deaths of Ernest Hemingway and Robert Frost and Igor Stravinsky and Frank Lloyd Wright and Alfred Hitchcock became big news, and why not? Their creative genius enriched the lives of millions.

Bergman, with films available almost exclusively in subtitles, may not have achieved the same kind of mass following in the US, but he still touched generations of film fans who came to appreciate the medium more richly and more deeply because of his art. I remember my father taking me, at age 11, to see “The Seventh Seal,” and feeling electrified, shaken, overwhelmed by its stark, dream-like black-and-white imagery (a Crusader knight playing chess with death on the beach), its passion, its fervent, heartfelt religiosity. Who cares that you have to read subtitles? Does scoffing at Bergman (or any other “foreign” director) indicate that conservatives are, in fact, too stupid to read the lines of dialogue so they can understand a film in Swedish?

I know that movie critics, with our obsession with talky, pretentious, obscure, impenetrable European films, deserve a certain amount of populist ridicule. But Bergman at his best hardly fits the snobbish stereotype: “Wild Strawberries,” “Smiles of a Summer Night,” “The Seventh Seal,” and “Virgin Spring” are completely accessible, crowd-pleasing masterpieces – delivering more emotion and humor and satisfaction and amazement than a decade’s worth of slam-bang Marvel Comic Book/Hollywood adaptations.

The deeper issue here involves the conservative attitude to great art.

Do we really believe that the appreciation of gutsy, richly imaginative, utterly engaging filmmaking is only for liberals and “sissies?” Do we want to identify with the idea that Country Music (or Christian Contemporary) is somehow more authentically conservative (whatever that means) than Beethoven or Mahler?

A great rabbi with whom I once studied (the late and beloved A.H. Lapin) used to say: “I refuse to believe that the Almighty, in his infinite wisdom, created all the beautiful and enjoyable things in His world only for non-religious people.” By the same token I refuse to believe that the finest artists in human history created their symphonies, plays, paintings, novels, poems, sculptures and – yes – motion pictures, only for non-conservative people.

In Bergman’s case, dismissal by right-wingers is particularly inappropriate. As the son of a strict Lutheran Pastor, he struggled all his life with questions of faith, death and morality, and utterly avoided the leftist platitudes typical of all-too-many contemporary American movies. Maybe the conservative radio host who dissed Bergman assumed that as a Swede, the great director must have been some sort of squishy liberal – especially since he married five different beautiful and talented women over his long life (and fathered illegitimate children with at least two others).

No, the filmmaker wasn’t a moral paragon, but can any honest conservative male actually blame him for finding Scandinavian women utterly irresistible?

In any event, I didn’t mention Bergman’s death on the air, but after hearing the scornful, insulting comments of my talk radio colleague I wish I had.

I’d like to urge all my listeners who haven’t experienced a Bergman film in all its beauty and elegance and emotional intensity to sample his work on DVD. The easiest recommendation: “Wild Strawberries,” a perfectly crafted and sublimely touching story about a complicated old man looking back on the joys and disappointments of his life on the same day he’s due to receive a public honor (Miraculously, Bergman made the film at age 39, when he still had 50 years of his own life left to live).

The important point here is that gun-loving, flag-waving, church-going, tax-hating, military-supporting, small-government, English-only, hard-working, red-blooded American right-wingers shouldn’t look with derision at the noble accumulation of centuries of timeless art – even though much of it is, in fact, from Europe. Appreciating the greatest works of western culture (very much including the greatest films) isn’t unpatriotic, or effeminate, or ungodly, or suspect in any way.

Appreciating great art, the finest products of our past, is, in fact, profoundly and unmistakably conservative.

From http://www.credenda.org/:
Volume 18, Issue 2: Thema

Who's Afraid of Flannery O'Connor?

By Douglas Jones

"Yes, and it takes all kinds to make the world go round," the lady said in her musical voice.

As she said it, the raw-complexioned girl snapped her teeth together. Her lower lip turned downwards and inside out, revealing the pale pink inside her mouth. After a second it rolled back up. It was the ugliest face Mrs. Turpin had ever seen anyone make, and for a moment she was certain that the girl had made it at her. She was looking at her as if she had known and disliked her all her life—all of Mrs. Turpin's life, it seemed too, not just all the girl's life. Why, girl, I don't even know you, Mrs. Turpin said silently.

Whoever thought the Holy Spirit could look like an annoyed girl's face, "blue with acne"? Or a sassy, club-footed boy? A tattoo? Or that Christ could appear as a bull? Or a carnival hermaphrodite?

That sort of list already puts off most Christians from having an interest in O'Connor. It's just all so unnecessary and ugly, they say. It's just more violence and weirdness in a culture already permeated with it.

I've found it terribly difficult to get modern Christians to read O'Connor—even in healthy Christian communities. In my case, too, secular writers first made me sit up and notice O'Connor. They praised her technique and famous opening paragraphs. They lauded her tension and dialogue. Flannery O'Connor won several notable writing awards during her life, even while the secularists didn't really have a clue about her Christian realism.

Flannery O'Connor is easily the most important and talented and self-consciously Christian short story author of the twentieth century. Nobody else is close. I've seen her stories revolutionize people's lives, and yet most Christians have never even heard her name. Sure, many Christian academics and writers sing her praises, especially of late. But we should all know her stories inside and out; they should be easy allusions in conversation; they should be common parables in our teens' mouths. And we need to master her style and absorb her insights before the next generation can build upon her gifts.

Dark and Disruptive Grace
Still, something's odd about selling Flannery to Christians. Even when people know about her superior technique and Christian frames, they still usually choke after a story or two. Too rough. Too troubling. They're not hard to read, they'll admit, but still, there's all that weirdness and death.

None of her stories, though, turns out to be as gruesome as common PG-13 fare. She places most of the ugliness off screen. Her stories do not fit in horror categories at all. Her use of the grotesque and ugly doesn't delight in power or shock value. All her stories focus on grace, grace, grace. That's what they're about. Every one of them. Real people wrestling with bodily grace.

And that's what disturbs many readers. They don't want their grace black. It feels like an alien faith to them, and they resist it. O'Connor herself heard this complaint. In her essay "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South," she argued against that pietism typical of Christian readers: "The reader wants his grace warm and binding, not dark and disruptive."

Here's the rub: her stories might be more palatable to modern Christians if she were just writing shock-jock horror stories. Frank Peretti sells, after all. That sort of writing goes down easier because we don't really believe it. It feels like someone else's world. It's alien enough that we're not truly threatened. But O'Connor's world is too close. And if her picture of dark grace is right, then our typical take on life fails.

Since Victorian times, Christians have tended to picture grace as cottony and covered with rubber. Grace always comforts and smoothes our furrowed brows; it always, always wipes away our tears, so sorry for them. We believe God is all-good; He's pretty much a nursery-school attendant, pink and white, who doesn't want anyone to get cut. In fact, we're surprised when people actually bump their heads. Pain seems unnatural to us. It's a no-no, and God is on our side. He never touches the stuff Himself.

In short, we believe deeply that all evil is bad. That's the heart of modern Christian faith. All evil is bad. It permeates our day-to-day lives, our work, our sermons, our struggles, our analysis of disasters. All evil is bad. And if so, then grace has to be Nice. Grace and niceness become interchangeable, and Flannery sees this as a (if not the) chief source of wickedness in the modern world. It's a lie about grace.

All Evil is Not Bad
O'Connor repeats the biblical theme that "grace cuts with the sword Christ said he came to bring." Grace cuts. It hurts; it slices; it makes us bleed. It "is never received warmly. Always a recoil," she says, and her stories show this time and time again.

In fact, Flannery's favorite target tends to be nice, mild, middle class ladies, full of decent and righteous advice. Nice ladies. Elsie Dinsmore all grown up. Yet these women lie about grace all day long. They lie about Christ as they go about trying to make a utopia of niceness. Grace is much more surprising than their Victorian sensibilities could ever imagine.

Some cringe at O'Connor's disposal of these ladies. Flannery famously gets a reader to side with a decent but perhaps slightly flawed lady, and then the story slowly turns grim. We see her smile is grounded in pettiness or deep bitterness. Finally, she has a severe encounter with dark grace. Nice readers close the story quickly and refuse to go on to another. It's as if the reader herself has been roughed up unjustly.

But that's the point. Flannery just reflects Christ's priorities. He was much softer on thieves, prostitutes, and murderers than he was on polite, middle class Pharisees. Christ berates and belittles and promises death-from-heaven for the most decent citizens of Jerusalem. The good, law-abiding Rotarian sorts incense Christ's deepest anger. And, in Flannery's stories, grace hunts them down. All evil is not bad. Some evil comes to shake us out of our sin; some evil comes to liberate us. Some evil is a gift of grace. Grace gnashes.

In Scripture, too, grace often appears evil. Sometimes it comes swooping down in the form of serpents. On the journey to Mount Hor, God's people complained bitterly. Nice middle-class people, not criminals. Yet God's dark grace came in horror story fashion: "The LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and many of the people of Israel died" (Num. 21:6). Imagine standing with that group of believers. Fiery serpents storm your spouse and children. All the screaming. All of grace. Surely fiery serpents were a bit of divine overreaction? God doesn't want to upset anyone does He? No. Wrong God.

Dark grace came to Noah in an ancient tsunami; to Abraham in that mad command to execute; to Isaac in faux hairy arms; to Jacob in a midnight wrestling assault; to Joseph in a deep pit; to Moses, that "bridegroom of blood," at a peaceful motel. (O'Connor herself never even approaches the level of relentless dark grace the Lord plays out in the book of Job; she's a softy when set next to that story.) The list goes on. O'Connor observes, "evil is not simply a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured."

Go through and count up all the dark grace that nice people face in Scripture. Right from God's throne. All evil is not bad. It's heavenly. It jolts our stories in surprising ways. It brings health. It reveals the glorious danger deep inside the Godhead.

Flannery says we "don't realize how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross." The cross. Yes. The darkest grace. Right at the center. All evil is not bad.

O'Connor summarizes this at the end of her essay, "The Fiction Writer and His Country," where she explains, "St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: `The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.' No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell."

Comic Core
And yet O'Connor does not think the story of life plays out as a tragedy. Cyril's dragon isn't in control. In a letter, Flannery noted, "Naw, I don't think life is a tragedy. Tragedy is something that can be explained by the professors. Life is the will of God and this cannot be defined by the professors; for which all thanksgiving." She grounds dark grace in laughter, cosmic laughter springing from the triumph of the Trinity. In our trinitarian world, the devil is always a stooge, always something of a fool tricked by Father, Son, and Spirit. O'Connor's stories are full of "devils," and she notes, "the Devil can always be a subject for my kind of comedy one way or another. I suppose this is because he is always accomplishing ends other than his own." He's always the straight man, always used for a deeper end. But this sort of comic world, too, unnerves some Christians; it's too unserious for them, too unpredictable.

Readers of Flannery's letters note her easy humor and wit; her letters reveal someone who laughs and makes others laugh easily. Explicit comic elements show up in every one of her stories. She takes particular delight in satirizing modern academic secularists, but no story passes without irony and great comic lines. Yet her comedy goes even deeper.

Writing teachers regularly note that if the writer doesn't love a character then the reader won't be able to either. It's an intangible of writing. Line up Flannery's worst protagonists and villains, and when you step back from her treatment, you realize she loves them all dearly, the serial killers and the pharisees. This is really quite an amazing feat. You can see this in contrast to someone like Walker Percy, another Catholic writer often compared to O'Connor. In Percy's Lancelot, for example, there's no doubt that Percy loathes his protagonist from beginning to end, and the reader can't help coming away with the same dragging disdain. In some ways that's too easy for a writer.

Flannery did not loathe herself or her life, and so when she identified with her characters, her sympathy for them showed up easily. She casually noted that her stories "lack bitterness," something unfathomable to those who read her too quickly. She once wrote to a friend about her characters, "Hulga is like me. So is Nelson, so is Haze, so is Enoch." Her sympathy for herself in them shows clearly. All of her characters show signs of being loved. In this way, Flannery's writing again imitates divine love for the ugly and self-righteous. This is the gospel: "While we were yet sinners. . ."

On top of this, when you read a group of her stories, a pretty amazing pattern emerges. You soon realize how her visitations of dark grace stand out as huge gifts when compared to actual life. Most people's actual lives seem to be Flannery characters who never have the privilege of meeting dark grace. Think of the people around you. Think of the secularists. Most go on for decades in their self-deception and self-righteousness and pettiness until their bitterness just grinds to a close at the end. No revolutions. The majority of people have always seemed to live tedious, small lives. But in Flannery's world, it's as if dark grace intrudes regularly. People who would have probably been handed over to let their sin slowly destroy them get this amazing explosion of grace that turns them inside out. Because of this, her stories start to read like gift after gift after gift. You start to long for more dark grace in actual life since it produces such wonderful turns of redemption. It's as if Flannery's stories are a photo album or a hall of fame of great moments in surprising grace, a pattern so far from do-the-dishes life. Maybe we have not because we ask not.

Don't be afraid of Flannery. Let her mess with your head. Let her disturb you. As she observed, "all human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful." She's not the first or the last word, but she has an amazing grasp of Christian drama, and it's hard to see how contemporary Christian culture can mature without having her stories or others like them very deep in its bones. Let her show you how surprising grace is, how dark and healthy it can be, what a gift it is. Let the ugly girl in the waiting room turn her lip inside out again, let her make a loud noise through her teeth, let her fingers clamp onto the soft flesh of your neck.

From The New York Times Yankees blog:
The Joba Chamberlain Era Begins
By Tyler Kepner

It was an eventful night here at the Rogers Center, to say the least. Need a story line? Take your pick: Joba Chamberlain’s debut, Roger Clemens’s stingy pitching or the bench-clearing fracas after Alex Rodriguez took a fastball in the calf from Josh Towers?

Throw in three more hits by Melky Cabrera and the return of Jason Giambi – “I was like Magellan down there: Fort Myers, Sarasota, the hot spots!” he said – and you have a night packed with Yankees news.

Years from now, though, if Chamberlain is as good as the Yankees believe, this night will be all about him. (Well, really, it’ll be all about Barry Bonds, but we’re just talking Yankees here.)

Chamberlain struck out the first hitter he faced, Ray Olmedo, with a slider Joe Torre described as “mean.” Chamberlain shook to it after Jorge Posada called for a fastball.

That pitch topped out at 99 m.p.h. on the stadium radar gun, 100 on the Blue Jays’ telecast. He walked two hitters in his two innings, but also struck out two and got a game-ending double-play ball.

“It was great to see him,” Clemens said. “I’m glad he wore No. 62. I told him it was the year I was born, but he didn’t know that. I appreciate him doing that for me.”

Chamberlain had 27 missed calls and 41 text messages on his cellphone afterward, and he looked up from it and sighed. “Technology is great, isn’t it?” he said.

But mostly, he was elated. He paused behind the mound before his first pitch, taking a moment, he said, to give thanks for the opportunity to be playing for the Yankees. He has a tattoo on his left arm that says, “Always Give Thanks and Praise.”

“I’m just counting my blessings,” Chamberlain said. “It’s a privilege to put this uniform on and to come out and say my job is to pitch for the most storied organization in all of sports.”

Torre said Chamberlain needed two days off after pitching two innings, so we won’t see him again until Friday in Cleveland, at the earliest. Oh, and about that name, Joba … it’s pronounced Jah-bah, as most Yankees fans probably know by now. When I went to Trenton to see him pitch last month, I asked him where it came from.

Here’s what he said: “It doesn’t mean anything. We went back to the reservation (in Nebraska) when I was born, and my uncle had just adopted a little girl. My cousin’s name was Joshua and she couldn’t say Joshua, it sounded like Jaba. I don’t know how they came up with the spelling. It turned into Joe-ba. But it’s all right.”

From The Washington Times:
Terrorists teaming with drug cartels
By Sara A. Carter

Islamic extremists embedded in the United States — posing as Hispanic nationals — are partnering with violent Mexican drug gangs to finance terror networks in the Middle East, according to a Drug Enforcement Administration report.

"Since drug traffickers and terrorists operate in a clandestine environment, both groups utilize similar methodologies to function ... all lend themselves to facilitation and are among the essential elements that may contribute to the successful conclusion of a catastrophic event by terrorists," said the confidential report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.

The 2005 report outlines an ongoing scheme in which multiple Middle Eastern drug-trafficking and terrorist cells operating in the U.S. fund terror networks overseas, aided by established Mexican cartels with highly sophisticated trafficking routes.

These terrorist groups, or sleeper cells, include people who speak Arabic, Spanish and Hebrew and, for the most part, arouse no suspicion in their communities.

"It is very likely that any future 'September 11th' type of terrorist event in the United States may be facilitated, wittingly or unwittingly, by drug traffickers operating on both sides of the United States-Mexico border," the DEA report says.

Rep. Ed Royce of California, ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs terrorism and nonproliferation subcommittee, said the DEA document substantiates information that his committee has been given in the past year.

"Hearings I held in Laredo [Texas] last year and this DEA report show that our southern border is a terrorist risk," Mr. Royce said. "Law enforcement has warned that people from Arab countries have crossed the border and adopted Hispanic surnames. The drug cartels have highly sophisticated smuggling and money-laundering networks, which terrorists could access."

Garrison K. Courtney, spokes- man for the DEA, would not comment on the document. However, he said that the DEA, which has only 5,000 active agents worldwide, is sharing information with other U.S. intelligence agencies and working closely with local law enforcement.

"We focus on drugs, but we keep our eyes open for any connection that can aid our other partners in law enforcement," Mr. Courtney said. "Everything we do relies on our ability to gather intelligence. We have said for years that there are shades of gray in the organizations we're dealing with. Intelligence requires us to look at the whole picture. Realistically to leave out a certain set of dots could be a huge mistake."

In the two years since the report was written, other DEA intelligence officials have said they are still struggling to cooperate with and share and gather information from other lead U.S. agencies charged with fighting the war on terrorism.

Lack of information sharing between U.S. intelligence agencies is creating a blind spot in the war on terror and has left the U.S. vulnerable to another attack, the report states.

"We are the eyes and ears when it comes to gathering intelligence on the cartels and smugglers," said the DEA official. "What we know for sure is that persons associated with terrorist groups have discovered what cartels have known all along — the border is the backdoor into the U.S."

According to a Department of Homeland Security intelligence report obtained by The Times, nearly every part of the Border Patrol's national strategy is failing.

"Al Qaeda has been trying to smuggle terrorists and terrorist weapons illegally into the United States," the 2006 document states. "This organization has also tried to enter the U.S. by taking advantage of its most vulnerable border areas. The seek to smuggle OTMs [other than Mexicans] from Middle Eastern countries into the U.S."

Peter Brown, terrorism and security consultant, stated that the "biggest element" to the DEA report is the ease with which terrorist cells have taken on new identities.

"The ability for people to completely transform their nationalities absent of their own identities is a dangerous step in the evolution of this cross-border operation," he said. "This is a true threat."

Lending credence to Mr. Brown's concern, an El Paso, Texas, law-enforcement report documents the influx of "approximately 20 Arab persons a week utilizing the Travis County Court in Austin to change their names and driver's licenses from Arabic to Hispanic surnames."

Under the current drug-intelligence collection, analysis and reporting posture, the DEA runs the risk of failing to detect or report the entry of terrorists, weapons of mass destruction or portable conventional weapons into the United States, according to the DEA document.

Many times, smugglers don't know what they are transporting.

"Despite all the pronouncements of the administration that these networks and their funding is being traced," Mr. Brown warned, "progress has been limited, and in certain circles of intelligence, they are nonexistent."

From DallasNews.com:

Why Harry Potter is 'essentially Christian'

This is the Religion Sneak Peek, an online newsletter that is sent to subscribers early Friday morning. It's a bit from me and a tout sheet about some upcoming Religion stories you can expect to read in the Dallas Morning News. To subscribe, click here and go to the News link on that page.

Primus: In which I admit that I’ve been completely wrong for several years about my religion-related analysis of the Harry Potter saga. I do offer an excuse or two.

(Obligatory spoiler warning: I won’t be giving away the whole store. But if you want to avoid every last detail, finish the book first.)

Here’s my mea culpa: After finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I realized the entire seven-volume story is at least as essentially Christian as C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories. That was a bit of a shock for me, because I’ve spent a couple of years writing about how the books are devoid of anything resembling explicit religion. And I had suggested that the moral themes that some Christian authors found in the books are also found in many other religions.

Now comes Book 7. Where author J. K Rowling makes it abundantly clear that Harry’s World has an essentially Christian worldview. (Here’s my excuse: What I wrote before wasn’t all wrong. There is no explicit religion anyplace in the previous books. And many of the themes she explores are not faith-specific.)

I have a piece scheduled to run Saturday that lays out my case in some detail for the essentially Christian nature of the Potter tale. I won’t spoil that here. What I’ll do instead is explain what I mean by “essentially Christian.”

Much much more after the jump.

Some 30 years ago, I was a college sophomore. What I knew then about Christianity was mostly Santa Claus and Christmas carols, the Easter Bunny, and the artwork in the Vatican Museum, which I’d visited with my family on vacation.

In my college course catalogue, in the listings for the English department, I spotted a class about the works of Tolkien, Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and Charles Williams. (They were all friends and were considered part of an informal group that was known as The Inklings.)

I had barely or never heard of three of the four, but I was a huge Lord of the Rings fan. The idea of getting college credit for noodling about hobbits seemed too good to be true. The rest of the readings turned out to be a bonus.

For the class, we were assigned the entire first and last books in the Narnia series. And while there’s no doubt that the books were filled with Christian stuff, most of it flew right through my willing suspension of disbelief.

Aslan dies and is reborn? Heck, I’m already on board with a talking lion. Whatever other “superpowers” Lewis wanted to drop in were just more fantasy. It never occurred to me on first reading to consider deeper meanings.

But then I got to the end of The Last Battle. Where it is revealed that every Earth-born character in the series – and surely hundreds of other people – have been killed in a terrible train wreck in the middle of England. Lewis is explicit that this is not to be understood merely as a happy ending, but as the happiest possible ending.

Huh? That was a jarring conflict with the worldview I lived with, where such an event would be considered tragic.

When our class got to Lewis, the teacher explained the author’s understanding of the Christian worldview about life and death and heaven in enough detail that I “got” what Lewis was doing. He was creating a world where Christian teachings are visibly, unambiguously, part of the day-to-day framework. The same way that, say, the gravitational acceleration of 10 meters per second squared is simply part of our everyday life. (Meaning that something dropped here on Earth speeds up by about 10 yards per second every second it falls, minus wind resistance. It’s not something we need to know or ever consciously think about. It’s just a part of the background of our world. Which is the point I’m trying to make.)

In that sense, although there is no prayer, no Jesus and no Bible, the worldview of Narnia is essentially Christian.

Spin over to Harry’s World. No God, no prayer, no Bible, no Jesus. No religion? Not explicitly, certainly not in the first six books. But we discover in the final book how central to the entire story a particular aspect of Christian worldview has been from the very start.

The most powerful force in Harry’s World – more powerful than any other aspect of magic – turns out to be the voluntary, substitutionary sacrifice of one life for another, but only if done totally for love.

Back in Book 1 we learn that Harry’s mom confers protection upon Harry by her willing sacrifice. And Harry (FINAL SPOILER WARNING!!! RUN AWAY!!) confers protection on the entire community of good wizards in Book 7 by his willingness to sacrifice himself similarly. There’s also the matter of his resurrection after what appears to be death, and the eventual victory of Good over Evil that emerges from that resurrection. (More about this in the Saturday piece.)

If when I finished Deathly Hallows, I’d been that same 20-something guy who didn’t know much about Christianity, my reaction once again might have been: Huh? Where did that come from? After all, in the world I live in, such sacrifices happen without there being any obvious physical effect. People apparently die in vain all the time, with no evident impact on the further course of evil actions.

But for a particular Christian worldview, substitutionary sacrifice, death, resurrection, and ultimate defeat of evil are central. That’s what believers say that Jesus did, does, or will do, depending on your reading of the New Testament and other sacred scriptures. Some Christians find echoes of that sacrifice and its effects around us every day.

So I’d argue that Rowling did not need to lard on explicit trappings of ritual and practice to create a world that is Christian at its core. “Essentially Christian.”

Secundus: Want more Potter stuff? We had a chat on dallasnews.com this week that included several of our Arts reporters and editors, me, and a bunch of regular folks who tossed out dozens of questions. The transcript is here .

And here’s the link to Texas Pages , the dallasnews.com books blog.

Good review of an enjoyable film. Summary quote: "No Reservations may not be a modern day classic but, despite the relatively small budget, it has more heart than nearly anything currently playing in multiplexes. It's perfect counterprogramming for anyone who wants more than pyrotechnics, testosterone, and special effects from two hours in a darkened auditorium."
And boy, does Catherine Zeta-Jones look great.

No Reservations
A Film Review by James Berardinelli

No Reservations is an adequate adaptation of Sandra Nettelbeck's 2001 German feature, Mostly Martha. While not as emotionally resonant as its inspiration and tending a little more toward melodrama, No Reservations is nevertheless a uplifting tale about love melting the heart of a cold, lonely woman. It's not exactly revolutionary territory but it is effectively presented and it will be hard to find viewers who aren't at least a little moved by what director Scott Hicks (Shine) has placed on the screen.

This is a "food movie," which means there are numerous shots of carefully prepared meals. The film doesn't come close to the likes of Babette's Feast or Big Night when it comes to a sensory overload but the images are there. Nevertheless, while food was a powerful symbol in Mostly Martha, it fulfills a less compelling purpose here. It's an integral part of the story, to be sure, but director Hicks has made this more about the people than their culinary creations, even if they talk as often through their cooking as through words.

Kate (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is the chef at a top Manhattan restaurant; her recipes, which tend toward the exotic, always receive rave reviews and, although she's a prickly woman, the owner of the place, Paula (Patricia Clarkson), tolerates her because she's one of the best in the city at creating French cuisine. Kate's world is turned upside down when her sister dies in a car crash, leaving Kate as the guardian of grade-schooler Zoe (Abigail Breslin). They mix like oil and water. Zoe is depressed at having lost her mother; Kate has no idea how to relate to a child. To make matters worse, Paula has hired the overqualified Nick (Aaron Eckhart) as a sous-chef. He claims to have taken the position because he wants the opportunity to work with Kate. She believes he's angling for her job. While knives nearly fly in the kitchen, sparks fly out of it.

The film's central relationships - between Kate and Zoe and Kate and Nick - are built upon strong foundations. We like and understand all three of these people. Nick is a free-spirit who brings joy and healing into the lives of two damaged individuals. Zoe is obviously deeply hurt by the loss of her mother and all in her life that is familiar. Kate, on the other hand, is emotionally shut-off. Her last relationship was years ago and she has become so focused on work that there is nothing else for her in life. Catherine Zeta-Jones does an excellent job of bringing out the sadness in a character who could easily have come across as a bitch. Abigail Breslin strikes an occasional wrong note but is generally believable. And Aaron Eckhart starts out strong and cocky then gradually mellows.

One of the film's small pleasures is a holdover from Mostly Martha - Kate's lighthearted therapy sessions with her psychologist (played by Bob Balaban). Most of the time, their hours together are spent discussing recipes or critiquing new dishes. It's amusing to observe the therapist questioning Kate about her romantic life while he samples her latest sauce and nearly moans in pleasure at its exquisite taste and texture.

There's evidence of an unrealized subplot that may have either ended up on the cutting room floor or that was pared down in the script. Kate's downstairs neighbor, Sean (Brian F. O'Byrne), carries a torch for her and it seems as if the movie wants to take this somewhere. Ultimately, however, Sean's only real role is to babysit Zoe one night and to be on hand when a slightly drunk Kate arrives home with Nick. It's a minor nitpick, but there's a sense that Sean has a little more potential.

The difficulty with No Reservations, as with any PG-rated adult-oriented drama (this movie would, in all likelihood, bore kids to death), is finding an audience. The film is charming and affecting but it's difficult to get summer audiences excited about a small character-based story centered around a lonely chef and a child who has lost her mother. No Reservations may not be a modern day classic but, despite the relatively small budget, it has more heart than nearly anything currently playing in multiplexes. It's perfect counterprogramming for anyone who wants more than pyrotechnics, testosterone, and special effects from two hours in a darkened auditorium.

DRAMA
United States, 2007
U.S. Release Date: 7/27/07 (wide)
Running Length: 1:45
MPAA Classification: PG (Profanity)
Theatrical Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

Cast: Catherine Zeta-Jones, Aaron Eckhart, Abigail Breslin, Patricia Clarkson, Jenny Wade, Bob Balaban, Brian F. O'Byrne
Director: Scott Hicks
Screenplay: Carol Fuchs, based on the screenplay for Mostly Martha by Sandra Nettelbeck
Cinematography: Stuart Dryburgh
Music: Philip Glass
U.S. Distributor: Warner Brothers

From EditorandPublisher.com:
Barry Bonds' HR Record Tainted by Elbow 'Armor'?
By Michael Witte

Published: August 06, 2007 10:45 AM

NEW YORK (Commentary) Beyond his alleged steroid use, Barry Bonds is guilty of the use of something that confers extraordinarily unfair mechanical advantage: the “armor” that he wears on his right elbow. Amid the press frenzy over Bonds’ unnatural bulk, the true role of the object on his right arm has simply gone unnoticed.

This is unfortunate, because by my estimate, Bonds’ front arm “armor” may have contributed no fewer than 75 to 100 home runs to his already steroid-questionable total.
Bonds tied Henry Aaron’s home run record of 755 on Saturday night and will go for the new standard this week back at home in San Francisco.

As a student of baseball – and currently a mechanics consultant to a major league baseball team -- I believe I have insight into the Bonds "achievement." I have studied his swing countless times on video and examined the mechanical gear closely through photographs.

For years, sportswriters remarked that his massive "protective" gear – unequaled in all of baseball -- permits Bonds to lean over the plate without fear of being hit by a pitch. Thus situated, Bonds can handle the outside pitch (where most pitchers live) unusually well. This is unfair advantage enough, but no longer controversial. However, it is only one of at least seven (largely unexplored) advantages conferred by the apparatus.

The other six:

1) The apparatus is hinged at the elbow. It is a literal "hitting machine" that allows Bonds to release his front arm on the same plane during every swing. It largely accounts for the seemingly magical consistency of every Bonds stroke.

2) The apparatus locks at the elbow when the lead arm is fully elongated because of a small flap at the top of the bottom section that fits into a groove in the bottom of the top section. The locked arm forms a rigid front arm fulcrum that allows extraordinary, maximally efficient explosion of the levers of Bonds' wrists. Bonds hands are quicker than those of average hitters because of his mechanical "assistant."

3) When Bonds swings, the weight of the apparatus helps to seal his inner upper arm to his torso at impact. Thus "connected," he automatically hits the ball with the weight of his entire body - not just his arms - as average hitters ("extending") tend to do.

4) Bonds has performed less well in Home Run Derbies than one might expect because he has no excuse to wear a "protector" facing a batting practice pitcher. As he tires, his front arm elbow tends to lift and he swings under the ball, producing towering pop flies or topspin liners that stay in the park. When the apparatus is worn, its weight keeps his elbow down and he drives the ball with backspin.

5) Bonds enjoys quicker access to the inside pitch than average hitters because his "assistant" - counter-intuitively - allows him to turn more rapidly. Everyone understands that skaters accelerate their spins by pulling their arms into their torsos, closer to their axes of rotation. When Bonds is confronted with an inside pitch, he spins like a skater because his upper front arm is "assistant"-sealed tightly against the side of his chest.

6) At impact, Bonds has additional mass (the weight of his "assistant") not available to the average hitter. The combined weight of "assistant" and bat is probably equal to the weight of the lumber wielded by Babe Ruth but with more manageable weight distribution.

At the moment, Bonds' apparatus enjoys "grandfathered" status. Similar devices are presently denied to average
major leaguers, who must present evidence of injury before receiving an exemption.

Bonds has worn some sort of front arm protection since 1992. In '94, a one-piece forearm guard was replaced by a jointed, two piece elbow model. In ‘95 it got bigger and a small "cap" on the elbow was replaced by a "flap" that overlapped the upper piece and locked the two pieces together when the arm was elongated. In '96, the "apparatus" grew even larger and so did the "flap."

It seems to have remained relatively the same until -- interestingly— 2001, the year of his record 73 home runs, when an advanced model appeared made (apparently) of a new material. It had softer edges and a groove for the flap to slip into automatically at full arm elongation. More important, the upper half of the machine was sculpted to conform more comfortably to the contours of Bonds' upper arm. Since 2001, the apparatus seems to have remained relatively unchanged.

Several years back, baseball was rightfully scandalized by the revelation that Sammy Sosa had "corked" his bat. The advantages conferred by the Bonds "hitting machine," however, far exceed anything supplied by cork. Ultimately, it appears the Bonds "achievement” must be regarded as partly the product of “double duplicity" -- steroidal and mechanical.

---

Michael Witte (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is a well-known illustrator whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Time, Sports Illustrated, The Wall Street Journal and dozens of other publications. The New Yorker recently wrote a piece about him and his study of mechanics, and he is presently a paid consultant to a major league team on mechanics. He appeared on network TV coverage of the 2003 World Series, providing cartoon sketches of some of the action.

From The New Republic: An honest liberal critique of the latest Bourne.
BOURNE, AGAIN:

I saw The Bourne Ultimatum last night at a sold-out theatre in Washington where it played well, although the audience seemed restrained by the end. Anyway, the movie was fine but unspectacular, and I can't for the life of me figure out why the reviews are near-perfect.

One theory about the critical plaudits is that the movie is surprisingly outspoken in its liberal politics. The plot concerns Bourne's quest to find out who made him a killer (and destroyed his soul), while at the same time dodging hitmen assigned by a corrupt CIA chief and his second-in-command. The latter even sounds eerily like President Bush when he talks of wanting to "win" after being questioned about civil liberties. SPOILER ALERT. Moreover, the CIA is happy to assasinate Guardian reporters in downtown London (in the middle of the day) and set off bombs in Morocco. And there's also some unambiguous, hit-you-over-the-head scenes showing the evils of torture (involving water, no less). To paraphrase an even better secret agent, we get the point.

Some people may find this type of pedantry enjoyable in summer escapism. I don't. And I cannot possibly imagine an action movie with the opposite politics getting these kinds of reviews. In sum, beware of political movies that get great reviews: They are often not as good as you've been led to believe.

--Isaac Chotiner

From MSNBC.com:
UNC's Williams stays hungry as game changes

Tar Heels coach gears up for another season after difficult offseason

By Ken Davis

Updated: 8:23 p.m. ET Aug 5, 2007

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. - The events of the past few weeks might have given North Carolina coach Roy Williams reason to pause and possibly even reconsider his future.

Smack dab in the middle of recruiting season, Williams had his latest encounter with vertigo, a condition that has bothered him from time to time in recent years. While coping with that, Williams received the stunning news that Wake Forest coach Skip Prosser had unexpectedly died after his daily jog. His popular Tobacco Road neighbor was only 56 and had just returned to campus from the recruiting trail.

In a three-day period, Williams attended Prosser’s funeral, celebrated his own 57th birthday, and then journeyed to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame for a guest appearance. He returns to Springfield on Sept. 6, as a member of the Class of 2007 and prepared for the life-changing events of enshrinement weekend.

That’s a lot to absorb. Williams still finds his election to the Hall of Fame a bit surreal. He hasn’t added the traditional “HOF” to his autograph the way so many others do. And he’s still trying to figure out how to thank all the important people in his life while staying within the five-minute limitation on his acceptance speech.

Despite his recent health issues, the loss of a close friend from the coaching fraternity, his impending immortality, and growing a year older, Williams insists retirement hasn’t crossed his mind. Not once.

He’s still fired up, enjoying the time he spends with his players, looking forward to the upcoming season, and treasuring the teaching experience that became his career goal when he was only a ninth grader. He marvels that this will be his 20th season as a head coach, but Williams still considers himself young.

“I still think I’m just as hungry as I ever was — and in some ways, more so,” said Williams, who has a 524-131 record. “I think I’m probably working just as hard, if not harder because, with the nature of recruiting, you almost have to work harder.”

Why wouldn’t Williams be looking forward to next season? His Tar Heels are coming off a 31-7 campaign and should be motivated to improve after a disappointing loss to Georgetown in the Elite Eight. The Tar Heels are sure to be a popular preseason pick for the 2007-08 season, with most polls placing them No. 1 or No. 2 in the nation.

Forward Brandan Wright joined the first generation of one-and-done superstars, heading to the NBA along with Greg Oden of Ohio State and Kevin Durant of Texas after their freshman seasons were mandated by the professional rules change. The Tar Heels also lost guard Reyshawn Terry and reserve Wes Miller, both seniors. As much as Williams would love to have Wright back in Carolina blue, he considers himself lucky to cut his losses there.

At the Final Four in Atlanta, when Williams’ election to the Hall of Fame was announced, he had to be concerned about the possibility of losing freshman point guard Ty Lawson and sophomore forward Tyler Hansbrough as well. But those two stayed in school and now Williams starts over with what he calls his most experienced team since his 1996-97 team at Kansas returned all five starters (Raef LaFrentz, Paul Pierce, Scot Pollard, Jacque Vaughn and Jerod Haase).

“You don’t have that happen now as much,” Williams said. “The game has changed so much from what it was three years ago [when the Tar Heels presented him with his first national championship], much less 10 years ago. We lost two starters and our sixth man but we’ve still got three of the top six and we’ve got 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 — all those guys back.

“I think the challenge for us is to not think that everything is going to be OK just because we’re experienced. We’ve got to have that same kind of hunger. The 2005 team had a great deal of hunger just to win the national championship.”

The challenge these days for Williams, the fastest Division I coach to 500 wins, is to fight those changes to college basketball’s landscape. His mentor, Dean Smith, thrived on the experience of senior-laden teams. But the cycles of the game are much different now with players leaving early for the NBA.

“Fifteen or 20 years ago, if we had had 11 freshmen or sophomores on our team and had a No. 1 seed in the tournament, you would have said, ‘Boy, they’re really going to be good the next three or four years,’ ” Williams said. “You can’t say those things nowadays. So it’s harder to relax. The game itself is still as much fun. Recruiting is not as much fun. And all the things around it are not as much fun.”

During his highly successful 15-year run at Kansas, 12 different NBA teams tried to lure Williams away from the college game. At one point, he admits he came home and told his wife Wanda that he didn’t know if he could cope with the recruiting wars any more. He felt frustrated by players who viewed college as a “bus stop” on the way to the NBA and the influence of the almighty dollar.

The recruiting class of Drew Gooden, Kirk Hinrich and Nick Collison, who joined the Jayhawks in 1999, kept Williams from leaving the college game. Gooden played three seasons before turning pro. Hinrich and Collison stayed at KU through their senior years.

“Their recruitment was such a joy and it showed me there are situations out there that are still really good,” Williams said. “You’ve just got to look for them a little harder. ... When Nick and Kirk decided to come back for their senior year, I had two NBA people call me ask, ‘Roy, what is it that they’re afraid of? What’s wrong with them?’ And I said, ‘You know, it is OK just to enjoy college and it’s OK to get an education.’ ”

Williams says recruiting is more distasteful than ever. He remembers when Dwight “The Man Child” Howard visited North Carolina, his only visit before turning pro out of high school. Howard showed Williams a paper he had written in ninth grade, a paper about his dreams. Williams said the text focused on Howard becoming a high school starter as a freshman, starting all four years, winning four state championships, and then being the No. 1 draft choice in the NBA.

“There was not one word about college,” Williams said. “Not one word.”

Despite the unsavory moments, Williams continues to get the job done. He has always worked hard on the recruiting trail and if he says he is working harder than ever, we should all believe him. That includes the North Carolina fans that were pushing the panic button earlier this summer when Samardo Samuels committed to Louisville and Delvon Roe picked Michigan State. Carolina invested a major effort in recruiting both.

The Tar Heel faithful began to worry that Ol’ Roy had lost his touch. Not so fast.

Two top recruits may have gotten away, but Williams reeled in power forward Ed Davis (No. 11 on the Rivals.com top 150) and point guard Larry Drew (No. 81). Davis was an enormous catch. He chose the Tar Heels over Virginia and UConn. And Williams didn’t let his vertigo keep him from the summer evaluation circuit. Instead of climbing to the top of the bleachers to find an isolated observation post, he settled into the first or second row in order to control his dizzy spells.

But he was out there, working it hard, doing what had to be done.

Just a couple of days before Prosser had his heart attack, he had been expressing his concern for Williams. Prosser told the North Carolina assistants that Williams looked pale and he should head home to take care of himself. That’s the kind of guy Skip Prosser was. Now Prosser’s death might be viewed as a warning to all coaches to slow down. But most — like Williams — will keep doing the things that made them successful.

Williams arrived in Springfield saying he felt better. His next stop was Pebble Beach (golf is his other passion), a birthday treat to himself and a well-deserved gift. A round of 18 probably restored some of the color that Prosser thought was missing.

But Williams realizes the blood will really start pumping on the first day of practice. If the Tar Heels can match the hunger of their Hall of Fame coach, Williams knows this could be a very special season. That’s the dream that keeps bringing him back, the dream that keeps him young.

“I’d like to start today,” he said. And that part might never change.

Ken Davis is a frequent contributor to MSNBC.com and freelance writer based in Hartford, Conn.

From Slate:

Brutality by the Bay
Why did the Oakland police do so little
about Your Black Muslim Bakery's thuggery?
By Christopher Hitchens

Posted Monday, Aug. 6, 2007, at 1:01 PM ET

---

Here is the situation regarding the enterprise known as Your Black Muslim Bakery, located on San Pablo Avenue in Oakland, Calif. Its founder, a man named Yusuf Bey, was arrested in 2002 and charged with forcing an underage girl to have sex. Subsequent investigation suggested that he had a long history of rape and abuse of his followers and had by this means fathered numerous children out of wedlock. Bey died in September 2003 before his case could come to trial. His son Yusuf Bey IV has since been arrested twice, first on suspicion of leading a gang that had trashed two Oakland liquor stores and intimidated their owners, and second (and perhaps less Islamically) for running over a San Francisco bouncer with his car. Nedir Bey, one of Yusuf Bey's "spiritually adopted" sons, is also alleged to have beaten a possible business rival with a flashlight, while another member of the gang tortured the victim with a heated knife.

These and several other crimes of violence were investigated by the East Bay Express, a local community weekly. Reporter Chris Thompson was subjected to threats and to aggressive stalking, and, for his own safety, worked in a different county for several months after his series about YBMB ran. The paper's editor, Stephen Buel, has been quoted as saying that his office and staff were deluged with threats and haunted by unpleasant characters and that the threats indicated that they originated with Your Black Muslim Bakery. "We have several threats left on voice mail that we obviously had a record of. One of the threats featured a taped quotation of a speech from Yusuf Bey the elder," said Buel. At a certain point, Buel admits, it became more trouble than it was worth to write about YBMB.

Oakland is a city fairly hardened to criminal violence, but beginning last December, there was what the papers like to call a "spree." In that month, a car was raked with bullets from several weapons. In May, two people were kidnapped and one was robbed and tortured. In July, two citizens were murdered by gunshots in the northern part of the city. The bullets all appear, according to the police, to come from the same source, which by now you may have guessed. The late Herb Caen, imperishable columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, used to refer humorously to "Baghdad by the Bay," but by that he meant Beach Blanket Babylon and not this gruesome horror show.

Now, I'm just asking, but: rape, polygamy, intimidation, torture, murder, all these actions emanating from one address and some of them performed in the name of a fanatical ideology. What does it take before the police decide to raid the premises? Should we wait until unveiled women are attacked on the street or until honor killings or female circumcision take hold? (There is no official connection between YBMB and Louis Farrakhan's racist and cultish Nation of Islam, though it seems that Yusuf Bey Sr. did convert to some form of Islam under that sinister organization's auspices.)

My question was answered last Friday, when the Oakland Police Department finally did storm the premises, along with three neighboring homes, and arrested seven people, including Yusuf Bey IV. This, however, was too late to save the life of Chauncey Bailey, the well-liked editor of the black-owned Oakland Post, who had decided to take up where the East Bay Express had left off and to investigate the finances of YBMB. He was shot dead last Thursday in broad daylight on an Oakland street. A young handyman from YBMB named Devaughndre Broussard has been charged in the Bailey case, and other members of the group are being investigated for involvement in the earlier crimes. The "bakery" itself owes more than $200,000 in back taxes and filed for bankruptcy protection last October.

Now, again, I am just asking, but what if this racket had been named the White Christian or Aryan Nations Cookie Parlor? (Motto and mission statement: "Don't F*** With Us.") I think that Oakland's mayor, Ron Dellums—who I was startled to find was still alive—would have joined a picket line around the store (as would I). The same would doubtless have been true of Rep. Barbara Lee, in whose district the YBMB was situated. But instead, in its role as a "community business," the YBMB enjoyed warm support and endorsement from both the mayor and the congresswoman. And the guns for past and future slayings were inside the store.

If this isn't softness on crime, then the term is meaningless. Residents have been complaining for a long time about the atmosphere of hatred and violence—and about what some have called the YBMB's attempt to "cleanse" the neighborhood, either of godless liquor stores on the model of jihadism or simply of business rivals and journalistic critics. What were the police doing all this time, and why did Chauncey Bailey have to be murdered before they could be moved to act? Perhaps they were doing what they do best: confiscating marijuana and rousting whores so as to painlessly improve the crime statistics. I called Bob Valladon, the extremely rude and graceless head of the Oakland police union, but I didn't even get to put my question before receiving a large flea in my ear. Other California law-enforcement officials were adamant in refusing to be quoted in any way. I can't say I blame them: Thousands of their voters and citizens are living in Third World conditions of fear, with a "no-snitch" policy openly enforced at gunpoint, and they cannot be troubled to do anything about it.

This official apathy—amounting to collusion—is undergirded by a culture that cringingly insists on "respect" for any organization, however depraved, that can masquerade as "faith-based." If I had stood outside that hideous bakery with a sign saying "Black Muslims Are Racists and Fanatics," I think the cops would have turned up in a flat second and taken me into custody. I might well have been charged with a hate crime. As I have written before and am sure I will write again: This has to stop, and it has to stop right now, before sharia baking comes to a place near you.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

The vanishing jihad exposés

By MARK STEYN

How will we lose the war against "radical Islam"?

Well, it won't be in a tank battle. Or in the Sunni Triangle or the caves of Bora Bora. It won't be because terrorists fly three jets into the Oval Office, Buckingham Palace and the Basilica of St Peter's on the same Tuesday morning.

The war will be lost incrementally because we are unable to reverse the ongoing radicalization of Muslim populations in South Asia, Indonesia, the Balkans, Western Europe and, yes, North America. And who's behind that radicalization? Who funds the mosques and Islamic centers that in the past 30 years have set up shop on just about every Main Street around the planet?

For the answer, let us turn to a fascinating book called "Alms for Jihad: Charity And Terrorism in the Islamic World," by J. Millard Burr, a former USAID relief coordinator, and the scholar Robert O Collins. Can't find it in your local Barnes & Noble? Never mind, let's go to Amazon. Everything's available there. And sure enough, you'll come through to the "Alms for Jihad" page and find a smattering of approving reviews from respectably torpid publications: "The most comprehensive look at the web of Islamic charities that have financed conflicts all around the world," according to Canada's Globe And Mail, which is like the New York Times but without the jokes.

Unfortunately, if you then try to buy "Alms for Jihad," you discover that the book is "Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock." Hang on, it was only published last year. At Amazon, items are either shipped within 24 hours or, if a little more specialized, within four to six weeks, but not many books from 2006 are entirely unavailable with no restock in sight.

Well, let us cross the ocean, thousands of miles from the Amazon warehouse, to the High Court in London. Last week, the Cambridge University Press agreed to recall all unsold copies of "Alms for Jihad" and pulp them. In addition, it has asked hundreds of libraries around the world to remove the volume from their shelves. This highly unusual action was accompanied by a letter to Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, in care of his English lawyers, explaining their reasons:

"Throughout the book there are serious and defamatory allegations about yourself and your family, alleging support for terrorism through your businesses, family and charities, and directly.

"As a result of what we now know, we accept and acknowledge that all of those allegations about you and your family, businesses and charities are entirely and manifestly false."

Who is Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz? Well, he's a very wealthy and influential Saudi. Big deal, you say. Is there any other kind? Yes, but even by the standards of very wealthy and influential Saudis, this guy is plugged in: He was the personal banker to the Saudi royal family and head of the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia, until he sold it to the Saudi government. He has a swanky pad in London and an Irish passport and multiple U.S. business connections, including to Thomas Kean, the chairman of the 9/11 Commission.

I'm not saying the 9/11 Commission is a Saudi shell operation, merely making the observation that, whenever you come across a big-shot Saudi, it's considerably less than six degrees of separation between him and the most respectable pillars of the American establishment.

As to whether allegations about support for terrorism by the sheikh and his "family, businesses and charities" are "entirely and manifestly false," the Cambridge University Press is going way further than the United States or most foreign governments would. Of his bank's funding of terrorism, Sheikh Mahfouz's lawyer has said: "Like upper management at any other major banking institution, Khalid Bin Mahfouz was not, of course, aware of every wire transfer moving through the bank. Had he known of any transfers that were going to fund al-Qaida or terrorism, he would not have permitted them." Sounds reasonable enough. Except that in this instance the Mahfouz bank was wiring money to the principal Mahfouz charity, the Muwafaq (or "Blessed Relief") Foundation, which in turn transferred them to Osama bin Laden.

In October 2001, the Treasury Department named Muwafaq as "an al-Qaida front that receives funding from wealthy Saudi businessmen" and its chairman as a "specially designated global terrorist." As the Treasury concluded, "Saudi businessmen have been transferring millions of dollars to bin Laden through Blessed Relief."

Indeed, this "charity" seems to have no other purpose than to fund jihad. It seeds Islamism wherever it operates. In Chechnya, it helped transform a reasonably conventional nationalist struggle into an outpost of the jihad. In the Balkans, it played a key role in replacing a traditionally moderate Islam with a form of Mitteleuropean Wahhabism. Pick a Muwafaq branch office almost anywhere on the planet and you get an interesting glimpse of the typical Saudi charity worker. The former head of its mission in Zagreb, Croatia, for example, is a guy called Ayadi Chafiq bin Muhammad. Well, he's called that most of the time. But he has at least four aliases and residences in at least three nations (Germany, Austria and Belgium). He was named as a bin Laden financier by the U.S. government and disappeared from the United Kingdom shortly after 9/11.

So why would the Cambridge University Press, one of the most respected publishers on the planet, absolve Khalid bin Mahfouz, his family, his businesses and his charities to a degree that neither (to pluck at random) the U.S., French, Albanian, Swiss and Pakistani governments would be prepared to do?

Because English libel law overwhelmingly favors the plaintiff. And like many other big-shot Saudis, Sheikh Mahfouz has become very adept at using foreign courts to silence American authors – in effect, using distant jurisdictions to nullify the First Amendment. He may be a wronged man, but his use of what the British call "libel chill" is designed not to vindicate his good name but to shut down the discussion, which is why Cambridge University Press made no serious attempt to mount a defense. He's one of the richest men on the planet, and they're an academic publisher with very small profit margins. But, even if you've got a bestseller, your pockets are unlikely to be deep enough: "House Of Saud, House Of Bush" did boffo biz with the anti-Bush crowd in America, but there's no British edition – because Sheikh Mahfouz had indicated he was prepared to spend what it takes to challenge it in court, and Random House decided it wasn't worth it.

We've gotten used to one-way multiculturalism: The world accepts that you can't open an Episcopal or Congregational church in Jeddah or Riyadh, but every week the Saudis can open radical mosques and madrassahs and pro-Saudi think-tanks in London and Toronto and Dearborn, Mich., and Falls Church, Va. And their global reach extends a little further day by day, inch by inch, in the lengthening shadows, as the lights go out one by one around the world.

Suppose you've got a manuscript about the Saudis. Where are you going to shop it? Think Cambridge University Press will be publishing anything anytime soon?