ABC via Associated Press

McKay remembered as a reporter with soul of a poet
By Jeremy Schaap
Special to ESPN.com

When ABC was able to confirm that the German attempt to rescue the Israeli Olympic hostages in Munich had failed and all the hostages were dead, Jim McKay wasn't thinking about the tens of millions of viewers who were waiting for him to communicate what had happened. He was thinking only about two of them: David Berger's parents, sitting at home in suburban Cleveland. He knew that in all likelihood, his would be the voice -- the first -- telling them that their son, a 28-year-old Olympic weightlifter, was dead.

Sad and visibly tired, but composed, McKay gathered himself and said, "They're all gone." The Bergers, whose hopes had been raised by false reports that the hostages had been freed, then knew the truth.

That was 36 years ago, and McKay's reporting during the Olympic hostage crisis will endure as the standard by which all such reporting is judged. Not sports reporting. Just reporting. Of all the news, bad and good, terrifying and uplifting, that television hosts have delivered to the American people, perhaps the only moment that compares was nine years earlier, when Walter Cronkite removed his glasses, dried his eyes and told the nation that John F. Kennedy had died.

Shortly after McKay delivered the tragic news in Munich, he received a telegram. "Dear Jim," it read. "Today you honored yourself, your network and your industry. -- Walter Cronkite."

McKay was special not just because he was a solid reporter in a field dominated by men who had been trained to call games. He was special because he was a reporter with the soul of a poet, his twin talents perfectly matched to his assignments.

In the hands of someone less sincere, it might have seemed maudlin to recite several lines from A.E. Housman's poem "To An Athlete Dying Young," even in the Munich aftermath. But when McKay memorialized the slain Israelis by saying, "Now you will not swell the rout/Of lads that wore their honors out/Runners whom renown outran/And the name died before the man," it could not have been more poignant or more fitting. Of course, long before Munich, the American people had come to trust McKay.

As the host of "ABC's Wide World of Sports," McKay spent the 1960s and 1970s spanning the globe, calling everything from mainstream events, such as the Indianapolis 500, to the most obscure and seemingly silly sports, such as barrel jumping. Unfailingly, he treated the barrel jumpers and cliff divers and bicycle polo players with the same respect he afforded Mario Andretti and Mark Spitz and Bill Shoemaker. If there was a defining McKay characteristic, that was it. He respected his subjects. He never stripped them of their dignity. It would have been all too easy to play the small sports for laughs. McKay didn't. Sure, he would have fun -- he was by no means a stick in the mud -- but not at the expense of the athletes or their families.

Case in point: the 1965 world barrel jumping championship. (Barrel jumping, long a staple of Wide World, is simply long jumping on ice skates, over uniformly sized barrels). A young man from Lake Placid, N.Y., named Ken Lebel was attempting to break the world record by clearing 17 barrels, and when he succeeded, McKay was almost overcome with emotion. "Nobody in the history of the sport ever did it before," he said. "There's Kenny's wife, just as tearfully excited as if her husband had just won the World Series." Looking now at the grainy footage, it's clear that McKay was just as excited as Mrs. Lebel.

And it was McKay who was the primary voice at the Olympics for a quarter-century -- the quarter-century when the Olympics mattered most, when the games were all but defined by the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, when for two separate fortnights every four years little else seemed to matter. With McKay setting the tone for Olympics coverage, first on CBS and then on ABC, the athletes from behind the Iron Curtain were never demonized, even if it was clear that the system that nurtured them was morally reprehensible. McKay and his boss, Roone Arledge, did not resort to Hollywood tactics. They never made Olga Korbut or Sergei Makarov or Nadia Comaneci into Ivan Dragos. In his heart, McKay might have preferred to see the American pixies defeat the Red pixies and our amateurs defeat their pros, but it never showed.

In the end, McKay will stay with us because of all the ways in which he exemplified journalistic professionalism, informed by true grace, a poet's touch and simple humanity. Unlike Housman's athlete, he lived long -- 86 years -- but not long enough to see his renown outrun.
It's unlikely that it ever will be.

Jeremy Schaap is an ESPN anchor and national correspondent, based in New York since 1998. He is the substitute host of Outside the Lines and the Sports Reporters. He is also a frequent contributor to ABC's World News Tonight and Nightline.

J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series,
at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.
From HarvardMagazine.com:
The Fringe Benefits of Failure,
and the Importance of Imagination
By J.K. Rowling

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I’ve experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world’s best-educated Harry Potter convention.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I’ve used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.

From OCRegister.com:
From backstage with Springsteen
to published author

An assist from The Boss' entourage
helped Tustin's Jennie Kogler.
Turns out, she was born to write.
By KEITH SHARON
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Despite their advanced ages – John was 42 and Clare was 43 – they
danced with such enthusiasm that they made the 20-something fans look
worn out.

On that night in Indianapolis in 1984, the "old" couple with front row
seats for the Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" tour rocked so hard
that the roadies, the E Street Band and even the Boss took notice.

During a guitar change, one of the roadies made a bet with Springsteen.

"I'll bet you can't wear out that old couple," he said. "You can't make
them sit down."

Springsteen took the bet.

And Springsteen lost.

John and Clare Kogler, the Tustin parents of eight kids, never stopped
dancing. They don't remember the name of the hotel where they stayed
that weekend, but they do remember what happened in the bar after the
show.

One of the Springsteen roadies recognized them, told them about how they
had beat the Boss, and introduced them to saxophone God Clarence Clemons
and Springsteen assistant Terry Magovern, who both eventually became the
Koglers' friends.

This story isn't about John or Clare or Clarence or Terry or even
Bruuuuuuce – but this story wouldn't have happened the way it did
without the improbable confluence of all those people during a tour stop
in Indiana.

It's about Jennie, the Koglers' youngest daughter, and how the Koglers'
connections to their all-time favorite band helped launch a literary
career.

Jennie grew up with lots of brothers, lots of baseball and basketball,
and lots of Bruce.

And the Kogler Kronicles.

When she was old enough to write, Jennie started her own family
newspaper. She would write stories about family events and her parents
would pay her for each installment.
"I wrote an expose on my brother's undue influence over what we were
having for dinner," said Jennie, now 26.

Clare said her daughter showed talent with words at an early age, and
she was motivated by a quarter.

"She thought that was big money," Clare said.

When they got to know the members of the E Street Band better, John and
Clare began getting free tickets and backstage passes to shows. They
brought Jennie along.

"I remember how dark and unglamorous it was," Jennie said. "It's a bunch
of tattooed roadies setting stuff up. I remember rolled up carpet and
stale quiche."

Clare said she was worried that her kids would step on a wire and get
electrocuted. But the risk was nothing compared to the chance to meet
Springsteen, who mother and daughter described as a "down to earth" guy,
who is passionate about his music and delivering a good show.

Jennie grew up listening to the Springsteen songs. One of her favorite
songs is "Growin' Up" about a rebellious kid who refused to conform …
"When they said sit down, I stood up."

"He uses so few words and evokes a whole story," she said.

If Springsteen wasn't inspiration enough, she had her parents. They made
a career out of analyzing infomercials (officially known as Direct
Response Television). They publish a successful newsletter about the
infomercial industry. Jennie tells people her parents watch television
for a living.

Always, the Koglers encouraged their daughter to be off-beat.

Jennie remembers a birthday card from her parents that advised her to
take the "road not taken" as her course in life.

Jennie played basketball at Foothill High School ("My two biggest
attributes were that I was annoying on defense, and I could shoot three
pointers"), then attended Princeton, where she was accepted into the
creative writing program.

Her senior writing project was inspired by her childhood. The story
involved the 1988 Dodgers (her favorite team) and how they beat long
odds to win the World Series, and a girl who finds herself on the run to
Las Vegas with her mother, who is a huge rock 'n roll fan.

She called the novel "Ruby Tuesday."

Since the 1970s, Terry Magovern had been a friend, bodyguard, driver and
assistant to Springsteen. As the Koglers got to know the band, Magovern
would offer them tickets to the shows – he even set them up with
tickets for a European tour.

When Magovern heard that the little girl he had met backstage had grown
up to be a writer, he made a phone call on her behalf.

Magovern knew someone (it was his job to know everyone) who got Jennie
connected to a literary agent in New York. In 2005, Harper Collins
published "Ruby Tuesday" and signed Jennifer Anne Kogler to a two-book
deal.

"It's a cool story about how it all happened," Clare said.

Jennie was shocked that her project became a hardback book. Harper
Collins distributed 9,000 copies in April of 2005. Author Joyce Carol
Oates, who was one of Jennie's Princeton professors, called the book
"irresistibly readable," "wonderfully funny" and a "most impressive
debut."

"It didn't occur to me that it would get published," Jennie said. "My
agent called me and said, 'This is a great Y.A. novel.'"
Jennie had no idea what a Y.A. novel was. She quickly learned that YA
stands for "Young Adult." It's a genre aimed at a middle school
audience.

"I love writing for this group because that's when I became a book
nerd," she said.

Once Ruby Tuesday was published, Jennie immediately started on a sequel.
But about 200 pages into the project, she decided to go a different
direction with her second book.

She went goth.

After studying Dracula and Frankenstein in a course at Princeton, Jennie
decided to write a novel about a pale girl from San Juan Capistrano who
discovers that she is a vampire. The main character, Fern, becomes
involved in a war between sects of good and evil vampires.

"The Otherworldlies" is scheduled to be released in bookstores on June
17.

"Maybe I'll go through a gothic phase," she said. "Maybe I'll dye my
hair and get a little angst."

She's working on a third novel about a brother and sister who venture
into cyberspace to try to save the Internet from a killer virus.

This spring she has been living with her parents in Tustin (during the
school year she lives near Stanford University, where she is pursuing a
law degree) and touring Orange County middle schools to promote "The
Otherworldlies."

"Going to a middle school makes you feel famous," Jennie said.

Her mother sees a different side. Book tours aren't easy.

"What she's doing now is really hard," said Clare, who regularly goes
with Jennie when she speaks. "That's a tough audience. But she goes out
on the stage and gives 110 percent every time. God bless her, but I
couldn't do it."

But Bruce Springsteen could.

From USA Today: Remembrances such as this should headline
every newspaper in the United States every year on this day.
D-Day:
Veterans remember invasion of Normandy

Allied forces began the bloody invasion of Normandy, France, on this day in 1944.

Bob Powell, 86, flew a fighter during Operation Neptune, as part of the massive D-Day effort was known.

"Imagine it: We put up a wall of airplanes from the treetop level to 30,000 feet," he tells the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "When we could see down through the clouds, it was unreal. I couldn't imagine the volume of men going in."

Laynie Satterfield was one of the thousands of soldiers fighting for a foothold on the beach below Powell's plane.

“We didn’t know what a battle was till we got there,” he tells the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. “I saw a lot of stuff I didn’t want to see — so many dead. I saw 740-some-odd [body bags ] in one pile. You had to push the bodies out of the way to get onto the beach because the first, second and third waves didn’t hardly make it.”

Decades later, The Dallas Morning News says there's little to suggest that the landing zone hosted so much destruction.

"In appearance, Omaha Beach is much like other parts of France's Normandy coastline, rugged, sometimes storm-lashed, tranquil in fair weather. Its smells and sounds are of the sea, not war," the paper says. "A visit to the Normandy American Cemetery, however, brings into focus the scope of the D-Day invasion and the sacrifice."

The total number of people who were killed, wounded or taken prisoner on D-Day is thought to fall somewhere between 14,000 and 19,000. All told, the Battle of Normandy is said to have resulted in more than 425,000 casualties among Allied and German forces.

Clifton Raynor, who landed on the beach two days after the invasion began, says it was worth the sacrifice.

"Without what we went through, what the men went through, my comrades went through, there wouldn't be any United States today," he tells Newsday. "We wouldn't be living in a free world."

From The Ottawa Citizen:
Show Trial
By David Warren

The writings of Canada's most talented journalist, Mark Steyn, went on trial in Vancouver on Monday, in a case designed to challenge freedom of the press. It is a show trial, under the arbitrary powers given to Canada's obscene "human rights" commissions, by Section 13 of our Human Rights Act.

I wrote "obscene" advisedly. Before Canada's "human rights" tribunals, a respondent has none of the defences formerly guaranteed in common law. The truth is no defence, reasonable intention is no defence, nor material harmlessness, there are no rules of evidence, no precedents, nor case law of any kind. The commissars running the tribunals need have no legal training, exhibit none, and owe their appointments to networking among leftwing activists.

I wrote "show trial" advisedly, for there has been a 100 percent conviction rate in cases brought to "human rights" tribunals under Section 13.

Take this in:

A group of Islamist fanatics, claiming to speak for every Muslim in Canada, charged Maclean's magazine with "spreading hatred against Muslims" for having printed a lucid and reasonable (if controversial) excerpt from Steyn's bestselling book, America Alone. This is a news story that should be on the front page of every newspaper in Canada, every day until it is resolved.

Everything about this case stinks to high heaven. It was brought before three different "human rights" tribunals simultaneously. The British Columbian venue was openly "jurisdiction shopped" because the province's human rights tribunals have an especially egregious record for ignoring respondents' most basic charter rights. The charges were brought more than a year after the article appeared. There was an open attempt at extortion, when representatives of the complainant called a press conference in which an offer was made to retract the charges for unspecified considerations. And so on: a layering of affronts to the most elementary standards of justice and decency.

The case is the more ludicrous because the allegations brought are semi-literate (for instance, Steyn's quotations of lunatic Islamist imams are confused with Steyn's own assertions). The remedies sought keep changing; the arguments keep changing; the explanation of why the complainant has brought the case and what he hopes to gain from it has kept changing. And now the show trial has begun, the prosecution is presenting a parade of entirely irrelevant testimony. (Has Steyn properly understood the Koran? Etc.)

A farce, but a farce that has huge consequences for Canada: for by such methods free speech and free press are being snuffed out. The Left may think they have found the ideal method to silence anyone who challenges their insane, "politically correct" ideas, but have instead created a monster that can as easily eat them next.

This is a disaster also for Canada's Muslims, for the views of fanatical Islamists are being presented as representative of them all. No single person has done so much to advance contempt for Islam in this country as Mohamed Elmasry, president of the "Canadian Islamic Congress," the complainant in this case -- whose public assertions have included e.g. the view that every Israeli citizen is a valid target for Palestinian hitmen.

The bland acceptance of this jackass, by mainstream Canadian media, as the definitive spokesman for Muslim interests in Canada, cannot be blamed on the Muslim community. Innumerable Muslims have disavowed him, and yet are entirely ignored. Indeed: Mark Steyn has been among the few journalists distinguishing between camps. He would be: for he has plenty of Muslim supporters.

There is some good news. It appears the Harper government has finally been goaded into calling a public inquiry into proceedings of at least the federal "human rights" commission. Some good may come from public confirmation of the outrageous, often sick behaviour of its members and hangers-on -- which Canada's leading bloggers have been documenting.

But the problem is at once more urgent and much broader than any carefully-focused inquiry can present. For what radical activists have achieved through "human rights" commissions is now endemic, in all kinds of "star chamber" and "kangaroo court" operations, in everything from the tax system to provisions of family law.

Another crucial point:

While media attention to Mark Steyn's show trial is inadequate (it is getting more attention in the United States than up here), it is nevertheless the best publicized case ever to come before our "human rights" bureaucracies. Most of the victims of these neo-Maoist tribunals have been "little people," with nothing like the resources Maclean's magazine has put in play to defend itself and Steyn, and no media reporting whatever. They have been persecuted, stripped of their livelihoods and savings, demonized among their neighbours, made to endure humiliating "re-education" programmes -- without lawyers, without assistance of any kind -- all for exercising rights that any Canadian would have taken for granted a mere generation ago.

I want justice for Mark Steyn. But I also want justice for all these little people, who have been crushed under the jackboot of "political correction."

Casinos, gold phones, and Kennedy's hookers:
Perez Prado, the original mambo king

From The Village Voice:
A Colorful Look Back at Pre-Castro Cuba

Mobsters do the mambo

by Tom Robbins

May 27th, 2008 12:00 AM

The best image of the capitalist/criminal cabal that ran pre-revolutionary Cuba was captured in the Havana episode in The Godfather, Part II, where gangsters famously slice up a cake decorated with a map of the country. Now comes the book version of that sordid saga, and we're happy to report from T.J. English's fascinating Havana Nocturne that many of the movie's telling details are dead-on accurate.

For instance, communications colossus IT&T (UT&T in the movie) really did give Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista a solid-gold telephone in thanks for its local monopoly. The slick character named Johnny Ola who takes care of business for Hyman Roth (who's supposed to be mob finance whiz Meyer Lansky) is based on a wiseguy named Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo. ("Ola" is "Alo" backwards, see?). And there really was a character called "Superman"—proud possessor of a 14-inch schlong—who performed a must-see live sex show at the notorious Shanghai Theater.

Such amusements in 1950s-era Havana were the product of what English calls "perhaps the most organic and exotic entertainment era in the history of organized crime." In Havana, mob-owned casinos and nightclubs fed off a ruthless dictatorship and vice versa. Collecting his fee for tolerating these indulgences, Batista's emissaries made nightly visits to casino counting rooms and emerged with satchels stuffed with cash. All told, Batista took some $10 million a year off the mob, according to English.

Until Castro's rumpled, bearded rebels spoiled the fun on New Year's morning, 1959, it was a near-perfect devils' pact: "These mobsters had always dreamed of one day controlling their own country," writes English, "a place where they could provide gambling, narcotics, booze, prostitution, and other forms of vice free from government or law enforcement intrusion."

As it happens, the regime that made this deal also specialized in cheating and torturing its own citizens. But while Havana Nocturne makes you glad that Batista and his gangster pals ultimately got what they deserved, it also makes you regret never having gotten the chance to soak up a few mojitos while catching the floor show at the old Tropicana, the fabulous nightclub nestled in the jungle on the city's edge.

Havana under the mob was the place that launched Chano Pozo and Afro- Cuban jazz, where band leader Perez Prado created the mambo, and where crooner Beny Moré, the Cuban Frank Sinatra, sang his aching "Como Fue." American talent, Sinatra and others, were regulars at Lansky's lavish cabaret in the Nacional Hotel. To encourage tourism, Pan Am offered a $35 round-trip flight from Miami to Havana. The airline had good reason to do so, English notes: It owned a controlling interest in the Nacional, while letting Lansky run the joint.

Lansky later built an even bigger palace, the Riviera, located on the ocean-splashed Malecón boulevard. He hired Ginger Rogers to star at his Copa Room, modeled after New York's Copacabana. The gambling czar was pleased with her sex appeal but not with her voice. "She can wiggle her ass, but she can't sing a goddamn note," he said.

Lansky's partner and sometimes rival was the wily Santo Trafficante of Tampa, Florida, who ran the Hotel Deauville, also on the Malecón, the Sans Souci nightclub, and the luxurious Hotel Capri. He also had the Comodoro hotel and casino where, in 1957, Trafficante allegedly fixed up a young American senator named Jack Kennedy with a trio of hookers.

Trafficante later kicked himself for not having filmed the scene, English says. He also badly misjudged the growing Castro rebellion. "This is a temporary storm," he insisted as the rebels took Havana. "It'll blow over." Lansky, the son of Russian exiles, disagreed. "I know a communist revolution when I see one," he said.

Batista, who beat it out of Cuba on New Year's Eve without warning his American partners, wound up with a fortune of some $300 million, English says. Lansky wasn't as lucky. Lansky's granddaughter told English that at his death in 1983, the old man left a whopping $37,000 in cash. When asked in his later years what went wrong in Cuba, the gangster offered no excuses. "I crapped out," he said.

From The Boston Globe:
Slaying gave US a first taste of Mideast terror
Analysts call Robert Kennedy's death
a prelude to kidnappings and attacks
By Sasha Issenberg

June 5, 2008

WASHINGTON - The shooting of Robert F. Kennedy is widely remembered as part of the wrenching domestic turbulence of the 1960s. But some scholars are beginning to see it as something quite different yet no less significant: America's first taste of the political violence of the Middle East.

Sirhan Sirhan, the young Palestinian-American who shot Kennedy, made the attack on the first anniversary of the Six-Day War in Israel. In his private writings, he had demonstrated anger over Kennedy's positions favoring Israel over the Palestinian cause.

"I thought of it as an act of violence motivated by hatred of Israel and of anybody who supported Israel," said Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor who had worked on Kennedy's campaign as a volunteer adviser on gun-control policy. "It was in some ways the beginning of Islamic terrorism in America. It was the first shot. A lot of us didn't recognize it at the time."

Dershowitz said he came to fully understand the significance of the assassination when he learned that Sirhan had targeted others seen as pro-Israel. About one year after Kennedy's death, former United Nations ambassador Arthur Goldberg - for whom Dershowitz had clerked on the Supreme Court and with whom he shared a fervent Zionism - told Dershowitz that Sirhan had identified Goldberg as a potential target, too.

By then, Kennedy's slaying, which occurred 40 years ago today, was widely viewed as part of a cycle of American civic turmoil, marked by assassinations, urban riots, and violent protests. Yet a generation of revelations about Sirhan's motives - and a changed environment in which Americans have come to fear political violence with origins abroad - have drawn out his crime as a largely unacknowledged prelude to the kidnappings at the Munich Olympics, the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, and the two assaults on the World Trade Center.

"Even though it wasn't perceived at the time as an act of political terrorism, on a visceral level - on a subliminal level - the Kennedy assassination planted a seed of concern in Americans about the Palestinian issue and the issue of terrorism," said Michael Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the author of "Power, Faith and Fantasy," a history of US engagement in the Middle East.

Kennedy's run for the Democratic nomination in 1968 was conducted in the shadow of assassination. President John F. Kennedy, his brother, had been shot in November 1963 on a campaign-style trip through Texas. Just weeks after Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy in March 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, too. Both assassins were American-born loners whose actions were not clearly tied to particular political causes.

To the extent that aides to Robert Kennedy feared violence against their candidate, they expected it might come from organized crime, Cuban exiles, or home-grown right-wingers - forces rumored to have been involved in his brother's death.

Sirhan, a Christian Arab born in Jerusalem, had moved to California as a teenager and was 24 when he shot Kennedy. "My only connection with Robert Kennedy was his sole support of Israel and his deliberate attempt to send those 50 bombers to Israel to obviously do harm to the Palestinians," he told David Frost in 1989.

That would have been largely unfamiliar to Americans as a political cause at the time of Kennedy's murder. UN Resolution 242, passed in the fall of 1967 in the wake of the Six-Day War, does not include the word "Palestinian" at all, and Middle Eastern issues were barely mentioned in a presidential campaign dominated by the Vietnam War.

"No one would have thought of this as Palestinian terrorism," Oren said. "They didn't even know the term 'Palestinian' at the time."

Government investigators quickly ruled out a conspiracy, and Sirhan has never been linked with any terrorist groups. When his trial began in 1969, Sirhan's attorneys quickly settled on a defense that their client lacked the mental capacity to have premeditated the attack, a defense that preempted a serious examination of his motives.

"My reaction and that of many people is that a crazy person could have had an infinite number of guiding forces and he just happened to have that one," Peter Edelman, who was issues director of Kennedy's campaign, said in an interview.

Sirhan's legal strategy demonstrated his lack of interest in using the courtroom as a venue to air his political grievances - or to introduce evidence that contradicted the prosecution's theory.

"He was a Middle Eastern version of Lee Harvey Oswald," said Steven M. Gillon, political historian at the University of Oklahoma. "He fit the profile of a lone gunman who wants to become famous by shooting a famous person rather than having a political ideology he wanted to advance."

In September 1969, Palestinian guerrillas hijacked a TWA plane over Greek airspace, perhaps the first time Middle Eastern terrorists had picked an American target and an increasingly frequent occurrence after the group Black September was founded the following year. But few in the United States or Israel showed any interest in portraying Kennedy as a victim of that cause - and those around Kennedy say he would have been an unlikely martyr.

"Robert Kennedy was pro-Israel," said Edelman. "So was basically every other American politician."

Yet Kennedy's high profile and involvement in New York politics made him a particular target for critics of the US relationship to Israel. A year earlier, during a UN Security Council session on the Six-Day War, a Saudi representative had suggested that Kennedy was controlled by Jewish interests, recalled Frank Mankiewicz, his press secretary.

"See if you can get him to repeat it in prime time," Kennedy quipped when told of the Saudi criticism.

While there were conversations within the Jewish community about the political motives behind Kennedy's death, according to Dershowitz, no Jewish or pro-Israel advocacy groups appear to have drawn attention to them. The Anti-Defamation League has still never acknowledged or commemorated the Kennedy assassination as violence targeted at Israel or American Jewry, a spokesman said.

"If anything, they would not do that because the feeling is, 'Oh, my God, we'll be blamed for that, too,' " Dershowitz said.

Even as fears of Middle Eastern terrorism have come to dominate the national subconscious since Sept. 11, 2001, Kennedy's death continues to be associated with domestic conflict and wanton violence.

When Hillary Clinton raised the subject two weeks ago, much of the outrage from her opponents and the media derived from the presumed analogy to the safety of Barack Obama - whose campaign has been likened to Kennedy's - rather than to recent terror attacks.

"We have in American political life an ultimate horror of assassination of prominent charismatic figures and [Robert Kennedy's assassination] is placed in that context," said Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who specializes in studies of violence and trauma. "Her unfortunate use of that example and the reaction to it both reflected that unspoken fear."

In last year's film "Bobby," set around Kennedy's death, fictional characters exhibit suspicion of one another and the direction of their country - but not terrorists with an anti-American agenda.

"In 1968," said John Ridley, the film's coproducer, people "looked at the government as a more radical force than some foreign element outside the government. In 2008, we might look at [the assassination] and say, 'Maybe it was Al Qaeda.' "

From The New York Sun:
Racism In Retreat
By JOHN McWHORTER

June 5, 2008

A year and a half ago, often I was sweetly dismissed when I said that Barack Obama was possibly on his way to the White House and would certainly trounce Hillary Clinton for the nomination.

"You don't know what they'll do to him," they'd say. As often as not, the idea was that America could not seriously support a black man for its highest office.

I didn't get this. The America I live in today does not seem as deeply stamped by bigotry as these people seemed to think. It seemed as if, on this topic, I was talking to people who had woken up after 25 years and didn't know how the country had changed. Couldn't they see that this man's color was only going to help?

Well, here we are. Are there some bigots? Of course. Did they, or any purported instance of "racism" during the campaign, keep Barack Obama from the nomination?

His victory demonstrates the main platform of my race writing. The guiding question in everything I have ever written on race is: Why do so many people exaggerate about racism?

This exaggeration is a nasty hangover from the sixties, and the place it has taken as a purported badge of intellectual and moral gravitas is a tire-block on coherent, constructive sociopolitical discussion.

Here's a typical case for what passes as enlightenment. On my desk(top) is an article from last year's American Psychologist. The wisdom imparted? To be a person of color these days is to withstand an endless barrage of racist "microaggressions."

Say to someone, "When I look at you, I don't see color" and you "deny their ethnic experiences." You do the same by saying, "As a woman, I know what you go through as a racial minority," as well as with hate speech such as "America is a melting pot." Other "microaggressions" include college buildings being all named after straight, white rich men (I'm not kidding about the straight part).

This sort of thing will not do. Why channel mental energy into performance art of this kind?

Some may mistake me as implying that it would be okay to stop talking about racism. But that interpretation is incorrect: I am stating that it would be okay to stop talking about racism. We need to be talking about serious activism focused on results. Those who suppose that the main meal in the aforementioned is to decry racism are not helping people.

At this point, if racism was unattended to for 10 years, during that time it would play exactly the same kind of role it does in America now — elusive, marginal, and insignificant.

Note that I did not say that there was no racism. There seems to be an assumption that when discussing racism, it is a sign of higher wisdom to neglect the issue of its degree. This assumption is neither logical nor productive. I reject it, and am pleased to see increasing numbers of black people doing same.

Of course there is racism. The question is whether there is enough to matter. All evidence shows that there is not. No, the number of black men in prison is not counterevidence: black legislators were solidly behind the laws penalizing possession of crack more heavily than powder.

In any case, to insist that we are hamstrung until every vestige of racism, bias, or inequity is gone indicates a grievous lack of confidence, which I hope any person of any history would reject.

Anyone who intones that America remains permeated with racism is, in a word, lucky. They have not had the misfortune of living in a society riven by true sociological conflict, such as between Sunnis and Shiites, Hutus and Tutsis — or whites and blacks before the sixties. It'd be interesting to open up a discussion with a Darfurian about "microaggressions."

To state that racism is no longer a serious problem in our country is neither ignorant nor cynical. Warnings that such a statement invites a racist backlash are, in 2008, melodramatic. They are based on no empirical evidence.

Yet every time some stupid thing happens — some comedian says a word, some sniggering blockhead hangs a little noose, some study shows that white people tend to get slightly better car loans — we are taught that racism is still mother's milk in the U.S. of A. "Always just beneath the surface."

Barack Obama's success is the most powerful argument against this way of thinking in the entire four decades since recreational underdoggism was mistaken as deep thought. A black man clinching the Democratic presidential nomination — and rather easily at that — indicates that racism is a lot further "beneath the surface" than it used to be.

And if Mr. Obama ends up in the White House, then it might be time to admit that racism is less beneath the surface than all but fossilized.

I know, I don't know what they'll do to him now. Let's just wait and see.

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

From The New York Times:
China’s Grief, Unearthed
By MA JIAN

London

FOR three days last month, China’s national flag flew at half-staff in Tiananmen Square to honor the victims of the devastating earthquake in Sichuan. It was the first time in memory that China has publicly commemorated the deaths of ordinary civilians.

Crowds were allowed to gather in the square to express sympathy for their compatriots. Despite a death toll that has risen to nearly 70,000, the earthquake has shaken the nation back to life. The Chinese people have rushed to donate blood and money and join the rescue efforts. They have rediscovered their civic responsibility and compassion.

Their grief, shock and confused solidarity recall the hours that followed the Tiananmen massacre 19 years ago today, when the Communist Party sent army tanks into Beijing to crush a pro-democracy movement organized by unarmed, peaceful students.

The protests had been set off by the death of the reform-minded party leader Hu Yaobang. College students had camped out in the square — the symbolic heart of the nation — to demand freedom, democracy and an end to government corruption. There they fell in love, danced to Bob Dylan tapes and discussed Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man.”

The city had come out to support the protesters: workers, entrepreneurs, writers, petty thieves. After the tanks drove the students from the square in the early hours of June 4, 1989, nearby shop owners turned up with baskets of sneakers to hand out to protesters who’d lost their shoes in the confrontation. As soldiers opened fire in the streets, civilians rushed to the wounded to carry them to the hospital.

But even as doctors were caring for students hurt in the melee, the party was rewriting history. It branded the peaceful democracy movement a “counterrevolutionary riot” and maintained that the brutal crackdown was the only way of restoring order. As leaders of the movement were rounded up and jailed, people who had donated food and drink to the students during their six-week occupation of the square began reporting them to the police.

Realizing that their much-vaunted mandate to rule had been nullified by the massacre, the party focused on economic growth to quell demands for political change. Thanks to its cheap, industrious and non-unionized labor force, China has since become a world economic power, while the Communist Party has become the world’s best friend.

Watched on television screens around the world, the Tiananmen massacre was a defining moment in 20th-century history. Like Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968, it has become a global symbol of totalitarian repression. But in China the subject is taboo. Even in the privacy of their homes, parents dare not discuss it with their children. Blinded by fear and bloated by prosperity, they have succumbed to a collective amnesia.

Some might object to recalling calamities of the past while China is struggling to cope with a present disaster. Already the Western news media has turned its attention away from political repression in China and Tibet, out of respect for the dead. When invited to speak at a London human rights event recently as a banned Chinese novelist, I was asked not to say anything negative about my country.

But grief refuses to be channeled. It spills over. In Sichuan, it turns to anger as parents demand to know why 6,898 schools collapsed during the quake while government buildings remained standing. As the nation mourns, it will begin to remember the deaths it has been forbidden to recall: not only the thousands who were slaughtered in 1989, but the tens of millions who died under Mao’s rule during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

The government leaders know that despite their efforts to erase history, the wounds inflicted by past repression are festering. With each anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre it becomes clearer that behind the bravado, the party is as fearful as a deer caught in the headlights.

Last year, Tiananmen Square was patrolled once again by plainclothes policemen, ready to quash any attempts to remember the victims of the massacre. People involved in the democracy movement were removed from the city or placed under house arrest. Three editors of a Chengdu newspaper that carried a tiny advertisement saluting the “mothers of June 4” were fired from their jobs. It turns out that the young clerk who had approved the ad hadn’t grasped the significance of the date. She, like the rest of her generation, had been robbed of her own history.

Still, a few brave individuals continue to speak out and remind the world what happened. In 2004, the poet Shi Tao sent to a Western democracy Web site a government document banning the news media from mentioning the June 4 anniversary. He was arrested and is now serving a 10-year prison sentence. Ding Zilin, the head of the Tiananmen Mothers Group who lost her 17-year-old son in the massacre, will this year defy the authorities and lay a wreath in the flower bed off Chang An Avenue where her son was shot dead.

There is an expression in Chinese that says, “One can only stand up from the place where one fell.” If China is to truly stand up and deserve its powerful position in the international community, it must return to the place where it fell. The regime must reveal the truth about past crackdowns and apologize to the victims and their families; release the hundred or so people still jailed for their connection to the Tiananmen movement, and the tens of thousands of other political prisoners languishing in jails and labor camps. And it must introduce democratic reforms.

The Chinese people have been reminded by the earthquake that lives are not expendable and that deaths cannot go unmourned. Now they have to extend that understanding to the victims of Tiananmen.

Ma Jian is the author, most recently, of the novel “Beijing Coma.” This essay was translated by Flora Drew from the Chinese.

The picture above illustrates the point Ingraham makes in her e-blast below: in terms of image and style, Obama has it all over McCain. I'm amazed at how many iconic images there are of Obama that are skillfully done and excellent graphic art. This is something that could be easily combated by McCain and the Republicans. McCain offers excellent possibilities for branding if the Republicans and his campaign apparatus had the right vision and sense of image that they evidently lack.

From Laura's e-blast:

RATING THE SPEECHES
Laura Ingraham

On style and substance:

Obama	A
Hillary	B-
McCain	C (graded on a B mean...in other words, it's really a D)

Look, it kills me to say this but last night Obama looked and sounded like a general election winner. Yes, his "this is our time" and "this journey will be hard" lines are light as air, but he also hit numerous patriotic notes — "We may call ourselves Democrats and Republicans, but we are Americans first. We are always Americans first." Of course Obama is a willing participant in his own deification, predicting future generations will look back at his nomination as "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." What's next? "This is the moment when I turn water into wine!"

Hillary did the best she could, still holding out the carrot of concession only to pull it away at the end.

As for McCain, God bless him, he simply does not inspire at the lectern. He looks bored and we feel bored. And while there were a few fun lines in his address, he still has the stiff "screen-lock" look reading the teleprompter. It's too bad that Obama capitalized on the "Change" brand because McCain is the one who needs it most: he needs a change in approach, a change in emphasis, a change in substance.

McCain emphasized ending "partisan rancor" and boasted "I have never refused to work with Democrats...if I'm elected president the era of the permanent campaign will end." President Bush thought he could do the same by having Ted Kennedy write his education bill and by massively expanding Medicare. Look where that got him. Here's a clue: If you truly believe the left's agenda for America is destructive, working with Democrats ain't that honorable.

From the Los Angeles Times:
AN APPRECIATION
The night Bo Diddley banned the Beat
How do you play with a legend without
doing it the legendary way?
By learning his lesson of keeping himself new.

By Dave Alvin

June 4, 2008

"Whatever you do, do not play 'the Beat!' "

That was the first thing Bo Diddley said to us before we walked onto the stage of the Music Machine club in West L.A. for two sets in 1983. We were a mix of members of the Blasters and X who had agreed, with great enthusiasm, to back up one of our greatest heroes for free at a benefit show for the Southern California Blues Society.

To say that we were upset by his announcement/warning would be an understatement. How could you play Bo Diddley songs and not play the powerful, infectious and sensual Bo Diddley Beat?

Since Bo's first records for the Chess label back in the mid-'50s, his "Beat" (a primal and relentless mix of the old shave-and-a-haircut riff, Chicago blues grooves and Latin rhythms) had been borrowed, stolen or adapted by everyone from Buddy Holly to the Rolling Stones to David Bowie for their own hit records.

Now, even though Bo had used various permutations of the Beat over the course of his long career, he was asking us to abandon it entirely in favor of . . . what? It's sort of like asking an actor to do "Hamlet" but don't use any of Shakespeare's words.

Blasters drummer Bill Bateman and X drummer DJ Bonebreak, sharing the drum and percussion duties for the night, asked Bo to clarify what beat they should play. He tapped out some rhythm that stressed a different accent, but, to be honest, I couldn't tell what the difference was. Fortunately, Bill and DJ picked up on his instructions, and by the end of the first song Bo seemed pretty happy.

It was a very good band, with Bill and DJ teaming for the essential duties on drums, timbales and maracas, X's John Doe and Blasters bassist John Bazz sharing the bass position, while my brother Phil, who also played some harmonica, and I followed Bo as best we could on guitars.

Most of the songs in the first set were new songs that Bo had recently recorded but none of us had ever heard, let alone studied. We (and just about every other musician in the modern age) had been dissecting all of his old records for years with the passion of theology students poring over the Dead Sea Scrolls or physicists debating string theory. A couple of the songs in the set were straight blues that easily fell into a comfortable pocket, but the rest were extended one-chord, semi-funk jams that wound up sounding as much like "Bitches Brew"-era Miles Davis as they did classic Bo Diddley.

As the set progressed and I began to get comfortable with Bo's new beats, I started thinking that it was close-minded of me to expect him to play the old songs the same old way. Wasn't Bo Diddley as much of a musical revolutionary as Bob Dylan? Weren't his original recordings of "Mona" or "Who Do You Love?" as musically unique, pivotal and influential in their day as Dylan's?

Maybe Bo wasn't the genius lyricist that Dylan is, but in rock 'n' roll (or blues and folk), lyrics aren't everything. If Dylan could change the melodies, grooves and even lyrics to his songs to keep exploring the possibilities of his art, why couldn't Bo Diddley?

Some people would argue that Bo was one of the architects of funk and, if that's the case, why shouldn't he be allowed to follow his own rhythmic path to wherever it might lead him? Why should Bo Diddley have to be stuck in the past just because that's where a part of his audience (and perhaps his backing bands) wanted him to remain?

I remember smiling on stage like a goofball as I realized all of this and came to the conclusion that if you really dig Bo Diddley, then let Bo Diddley be Bo Diddley! I was a young guy at the time who was trying his best to replicate old music -- and that's the best way to learn, believe me -- but that night Bo taught me a lesson about growing and surviving as a musician/artist: Stay true to yourself.

After the first set I approached Bo backstage and told him what I had been thinking while I played with him. "That's right," he said, laughing. "I already made all them old records years ago. Now I'm keeping myself new."

But as we walked back onstage for the second set, Bo turned to us, smiled and said, "You know, you boys are pretty good, so I'll tell what: The first song is gonna be 'Mona' and you can play with the Bo Diddley Beat." And we did.

Thank you, Bo, for all your incredible music over the years and, especially, the wise life lesson you taught me.

Singer, songwriter and guitarist Dave Alvin has been a member of the Blasters, X, and the Knitters and leads his own roots-rock group, the Guilty Men.

From The New York Post:
THE NEWEST TRENDS IN TERROR
By PETER BROOKES

THE good news is that al Qaeda's in bad shape; the bad news is that the terrorist threat is evolving. If we don't adapt, the tide could turn back.

Director of National Intelligence Michael Hayden last week told The Washington Post that al Qaeda movements in Iraq and Saudi Arabia were essentially defeated and pushed back on their heels elsewhere, including Pakistan.

Some doubt that take on Pakistan, especially with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri still on the loose. Yet the other anti-terror gains seem undeniable.

But the bad guys could bounce back. Consider some trends that worry US planners.

First, al Qaeda's Internet propaganda machine is working overtime to spread its extremist message, looking for recruits and funding and pushing terrorist acts to overcome its setbacks on the ground in places like Iraq.

Terror groups prize the Web, releasing a torrent of products - from print manifestos to on-line terror encyclopedias to videos - for digestion by their supporters around the world.

Al Qaeda's online mouthpiece is a media-production entity called as-Sahab ("the clouds"). Using that and other outlets to push the party line of violence and hate, the terror groups seek to win support from sympathetic audiences and to project an image of power and prestige.

Indeed, Zawahiri wrote: "We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media . . . a race for the hearts and minds of our people."

This isn't amateurish stuff. These outlets are feverishly improving their quality - and achieving ever-more-impressive message conformity, a key to propaganda warfare.

They're targeting younger audiences and women - and translating their extremist screeds into other languages, especially English. Production levels are at all-time highs, say analysts.

Experts believe Internet radicalization is replacing in-person radicalization in terror camps, tea houses or mosques. The Web lets al Qaeda & Co. build ties with the sympathetic, radicalize those on the margins - and offer training and expertise to the converted. All without a trip to a terror camp - a "virtual safe haven."

Which leads to the next worry: Homegrown terrorists.

Al Qaeda has long sought to recruit operatives already in-place in the West - foot soldiers who don't need passports or transportation to slaughter innocents here.

Europe has a real problem. DNI Hayden told Congress this year of an "influx of Western recruits" into Pakistan since 2006, which suggests rising radicalizing across the Pond.

Homegrown terrorists pulled off deadly attacks in Madrid (2004) and London (2005). Other plots have been hatched, or carried out, in recent years in Germany, the Netherlands, France and Denmark.

The Brits feel particularly under the gun; their authorities are tracking dozens of active plots and more than 2,000 people in the UK. The 2006 London-based conspiracy to bring down 10 or so airliners over the Atlantic could've produced more victims than 9/11.

But it's not just Europe. We've also had terror attempts here, too - by "self-radicalized" people who were inspired by, but had no physical contact with al Qaeda at all. Such homegrown, self-radicalized "lone wolf" terrorists are a particular worry for the FBI.

There's also the growing intersection of terrorism and international crime. Al Qaeda and others, such as the Taliban, are increasingly turning to crime to fund their operations.

For instance, Afghanistan's poppy crop provides perhaps half of the Taliban's income, according to US and UN analysts; al Qaeda is likely getting a cut, too.

Terror groups are also making money through smuggling and trafficking persons, the State Department reports. Those same networks are moving foreign fighters, particularly into Iraq - but could get terrorists into America as well.

The blood and sweat of brave Americans - plus international cooperation - has brought great strides in tackling terrorism. Al Qaeda's been its own worst enemy, alienating fellow Muslims with its brutal violence.

But this is no time to rest on our laurels. Al Qaeda and its affiliates continue to adapt their means and methods to our security measures - meaning we must evolve to the twists and turns in their terror tactics.

Heritage Foundation Senior Fellow Peter Brookes is a former deputy assistant secretary of defense.

From The Washington Post:
Carbon's Power Brokers
By George F. Will

Sunday, June 1, 2008

An unprecedentedly radical government grab for control of the American economy will be debated this week when the Senate considers saving the planet by means of a cap-and-trade system to ration carbon emissions. The plan is co-authored (with John Warner) by Joe Lieberman, an ardent supporter of John McCain, who supports Lieberman's legislation and recently spoke about "the central facts of rising temperatures, rising waters and all the endless troubles that global warming will bring."

Speaking of endless troubles, "cap-and-trade" comes cloaked in reassuring rhetoric about the government merely creating a market, but government actually would create a scarcity so that government could sell what it had made scarce. The Wall Street Journal underestimates cap-and-trade's perniciousness when it says the scheme would create a new right ("allowances") to produce carbon dioxide and would put a price on the right. Actually, because freedom is the silence of the law, that right has always existed in the absence of prohibitions. With cap-and-trade, government would create a right for itself-- an extraordinarily lucrative right to ration Americans' exercise of their traditional rights.

Businesses with unused emission allowances could sell their surpluses to businesses that exceed their allowances. The more expensive and constraining the allowances, the more money government would gain.

If carbon emissions are the planetary menace that the political class suddenly says they are, why not a straightforward tax on fossil fuels based on each fuel's carbon content? This would have none of the enormous administrative costs of the baroque cap-and-trade regime. And a carbon tax would avoid the uncertainties inseparable from cap-and-trade's government allocation of emission permits sector by sector, industry by industry. So a carbon tax would be a clear and candid incentive to adopt energy-saving and carbon-minimizing technologies. That is the problem.

A carbon tax would be too clear and candid for political comfort. It would clearly be what cap-and-trade deviously is, a tax, but one with a known cost. Therefore, taxpayers would demand a commensurate reduction of other taxes. Cap-and-trade -- government auctioning permits for businesses to continue to do business -- is a huge tax hidden in a bureaucratic labyrinth of opaque permit transactions.

The proper price of permits for carbon emissions should reflect the future warming costs of current emissions. That is bound to be a guess based on computer models built on guesses. Lieberman guesses that the market value of all permits would be "about $7 trillion by 2050." Will that staggering sum pay for a $7 trillion reduction of other taxes? Not exactly.

It would go to a Climate Change Credit Corporation, which Lieberman calls "a private-public entity" that, operating outside the budget process, would invest "in many things." This would be industrial policy, a.k.a. socialism, on a grand scale -- government picking winners and losers, all of whom will have powerful incentives to invest in lobbyists to influence government's thousands of new wealth-allocating decisions.

Lieberman's legislation also would create a Carbon Market Efficiency Board empowered to "provide allowances and alter demands" in response to "an impact that is much more onerous" than expected. And Lieberman says that if a foreign company selling a product in America "enjoys a price advantage over an American competitor" because the American firm has had to comply with the cap-and-trade regime, "we will impose a fee" on the foreign company "to equalize the price." Protectionism-masquerading-as-environmentalism will thicken the unsavory entanglement of commercial life and political life.

McCain, who supports Lieberman's unprecedented expansion of government's regulatory reach, is the scourge of all lobbyists (other than those employed by his campaign). But cap-and-trade would be a bonanza for K Street, the lobbyists' habitat, because it would vastly deepen and broaden the upside benefits and downside risks that the government's choices mean for businesses.

McCain, the political hygienist, is eager to reduce the amount of money in politics. But cap-and-trade, by hugely increasing the amount of politics in the allocation of money, would guarantee a surge of money into politics.

Regarding McCain's "central facts," the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, which helped establish the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- co-winner, with Al Gore, of the Nobel Peace Prize -- says global temperatures have not risen in a decade. So Congress might be arriving late at the save-the-planet party. Better late than never? No. When government, ever eager to expand its grip on the governed and their wealth, manufactures hysteria as an excuse for doing so, then: better never.

The wanderers
At a Florida strip club, three troubled characters
are drawn toward disaster on the eve of 9/11
By John Dufresne

June 1, 2008

The Garden of Last Days
By Andre Dubus III
Norton, 537 pp., $24.95

April's doing all right for herself. She's a single mom, making $10,000 a month dancing and otherwise entertaining customers at the Puma Club for Men in Sarasota, Fla. She's got a cozy little flat near the bay and a built-in babysitter for her 3-year-old daughter in her landlady, Jean Hanson. April has come to depend on the empowering income. She has plans for a modest real estate empire on Florida's Gulf Coast someday. She's got $50,000 in the bank already, and maybe she's getting a little greedy. So when Jean has one of her panic attacks and is taken to the hospital, April decides not to call in sick just this once, but to take little Franny to work. What could go wrong?

AJ Carey is one of the woebegone regulars at the Puma Club, and AJ, well, he's had a mild run of bad luck lately. His wife, Deena, took out a restraining order after he hit her for only the second time. Now he can't see his little boy, Cole, the love of his life. He's behind in his child-support payments, hates his dead-end job, and he's back living with his mother. He's sleeping on the foldout couch, and she's hooked up to an oxygen tank, but at least she's trying to cut back on the smoking. The one bright light in AJ's life these days is Marianne, a dancer at the club. He's thinking he could sweep her off her feet if only she'd hold his hand. He has mistaken a commercial transaction for romance. AJ is what could go wrong.

Bassam al-Jizani is the appalling kind of zealot we find at the fringes of religion, a man who has lost faith in himself and found it in a holy cause, which brings meaning to his unavailing life and offers him the promise of ineluctable power and an eternity of pleasure in the sweet by-and-by. "I am just a baboon in a thorn tree," he says. "I am nothing." Bassam is in America to rain death and terror down on the polytheists, the idolators, the kufar, those who reject Islam. He's here to fly a plane into the World Trade Center, "insha'Allah," as he says, God willing.

Bassam is a true believer, but he's not without his demons, which explains why he's at the Puma Club squandering money on forbidden pleasures on this, one of his last evenings on earth. Only nothing seems to please him, unless it's passing judgment and stoking his hatred for the infidel. Bassam lectures April in the Champagne Room, buying her attention with a lavishment of cash. His is the smug vanity of the selfless, and the insufferable arrogance of the certain. The money buys him time and keeps April from checking on Franny, who's being watched, April trusts, by the house mother. Meanwhile, AJ gets himself booted out of the club and has his wrist snapped and broken by Lonnie the bouncer, so when Franny wanders out into the parking lot, AJ is there to whisk her away from all this moral corruption. A little Benadryl in the Slush Puppie will keep her sleeping until he can figure out what do to with her; a few extra-strength Motrin and a bag of ice ought to ease the pain in his useless arm.

The brilliance of the novel, the first by Andre Dubus III since "The House of Sand and Fog," lies in his relentless and penetrating examination of these three sometimes infuriating, but always fascinating, characters. He understands that everything Bassam denies in himself is precisely what makes him human and compelling. The novel is dedicated to the late writer Larry Brown, and AJ hails from the same grim province as Brown's benighted losers, his pickup-driving, beer-swilling rednecks. AJ is an unexpectedly complex man with simple aspirations and a generous heart who suffers from chronic bad judgment. He can't get out of his own way. Bassam doesn't believe in second chances; AJ won't survive without one. He's lost his way, but he still insists on looking for the shortcut. He's emboldened by unfounded hope and encouraged by magical thinking. If he could only catch a break, a lucrative insurance settlement, say, why then surely he could realize his humble dreams and maybe even strike it rich.

Compared with this pair, April is a wellspring of reason and self-reliance, if not prudence. When Lonnie tells her that customers "blame you for their weakness," he strikes a major thematic chord. Bassam blames the infidel; April, her babysitters; AJ blames his ex, his boss, the judge, but he also understands his own culpability. He longs to be the man he believes he is, a man who would do the right thing, but he also understands what a sorry wretch he really is.

"The Garden of Last Days" is storytelling of the finest kind: unforgettable and desperate characters caught up in a plot thundering toward catastrophe. Maybe the end of the novel is rushed, or maybe I think it is because I wanted to read another hundred pages. Take your toddler to a strip club? What were you thinking? Murder thousands of innocents? Kidnap a child? Why on earth do people do the unthinkable? Dubus knows that you may not make sense out of the incomprehensible, but you can make art. He has done just that in this incandescent and absorbing novel.

John Dufresne's most recent book is the story collection "Johnny Too Bad."

Irrelevant Apologies
By Thomas Sowell

It is amazing how seriously the media are taking Senator Barack Obama's latest statement about the latest racist rant from the pulpit of the church he has attended for 20 years. But neither that statement nor the apology for his rant by Father Michael Pfleger really matters, one way or the other. Nor does Senator Obama's belated resignation from that church.

For any politician, what matters is not his election year rhetoric, or an election year resignation from a church, but the track record of that politician in the years before the election.

Yet so many people are so fascinated by Barack Obama's rhetorical skills that they don't care about his voting record in the U.S. Senate, in the Illinois state senate, the causes that he has chosen to promote over the years, or the candidate's personal character and values, as revealed by his actions and associations.

Despite clever spin from Obama's supporters about avoiding "guilt by association," much more is involved than casual association with people like Jeremiah Wright and Father Pfleger.

In addition to giving $20,000 of his own money to Jeremiah Wright, as a state senator Obama directed $225,000 of the Illinois taxpayers' money for programs run by Father Pfleger. In the U.S. Senate, Obama earmarked $100,000 in federal tax money for Father Pfleger's work. Giving someone more than 300 grand is not just some tenuous, coincidental association.

Are Barack Obama's views shown by what he says during an election year or by what he has been doing for decades before?

The complete contrast between Obama's election year image as a healer of divisions and his whole career of promoting far-left grievance politics, in association with America-haters like Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, are brushed aside by his supporters who talk about getting back to "the real issues."

There is nothing more real than a man's character and values. The track record of what he has actually done is far more real than anything he says, however elegantly he says it.

There is no office where the character and values of the person in that office matter more than the office of President of the United States. He holds the destiny of 300 million Americans in his hands and the fate of generations yet unborn.

That was never more true than today, with Iran moving ever closer to a nuclear bomb, while the United Nations wrings its hands and Congress fritters away its time on everything from steroids in sports to earmarks for pet projects back home.

Does anyone seriously consider what it would mean for Iran to have nuclear weapons? They are already supplying terrorists with the means of killing people in other countries, including killing American troops in Iraq.

Senator Obama has been downplaying the Iran threat, saying that they are just "a small country," not like the Soviet Union. The people who flew planes into the World Trade Center were an even smaller group than the Iranian government.

Half a dozen terrorists like that with nuclear weapons would be a bigger danger than the Soviet Union ever was, because the Soviet leaders were not suicide bombers. They could be deterred by the threat of what we would do to Moscow if they attacked New York.

You cannot deter suicidal fanatics. They are not going to stop unless they get stopped. Rhetoric is not going to do it.

Not only Senator Obama, but too many other Americans, seem to have no concept of the seething hatred that can lead people to destroy their own lives in order to lash out at others.

But terrorists have been doing this repeatedly, not only in Iraq and in Israel, but in other countries around the world-- including the United States on 9/11.

Have we already forgotten how the Palestinians were cheering in the streets over the news of the attack on the World Trade Center? How videotapes of sadistic beheadings of innocent people by terrorists have found an eager audience in the Middle East?

Are we going to leave our children hostages to hate-filled sadists with nuclear weapons? Are we to rely on Barack Obama's rhetoric to protect them?

Senator Obama's foreign policy seems to be somewhere between Rodney King's "Can't we just get along?" and Alfred E. Neuman's "What, me worry?"

Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.

Munich, 1938

By Patrick J. Buchanan

When President Bush, before the Knesset, used the word "appeasement" to label those who would negotiate with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he invoked the most powerful analogy in any debate over war and peace.

No man wishes to be regarded as an "appeaser."

But, as this writer has discovered since my book "Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World" was launched Memorial Day, there is a deep well of ignorance about what happened that September, 70 years ago.

Why did Neville Chamberlain go to Munich? How did Munich lead to World War II?

The seeds of the crisis were planted at the Paris peace conference of 1919. There, the victorious Allies carved the new nation of Czechoslovakia out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

But instead of following their principle of self-determination, the Allies placed under the rule of 7 million Czechs 3 million Germans, 3 million Slovaks, 800,000 Hungarians, 150,000 Poles and 500,000 Ruthenians. These foolish decisions spat upon Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points, under the terms of which the Germans, Austrians and Hungarians had laid down their arms.

By 1938, Germany had arisen, re-armed and brought Austria into the Reich, and was demanding the right of self-determination now be granted to the 3 million Germans in Czechoslovakia, who were clamoring to be free of Prague to rejoin their kinsmen.

Britain had no alliance with, and no obligation to fight for, the Czechs. But France did. And Britain feared that if Adolf Hitler used force to bring the Sudeten Germans back to German rule, France might fight. And if France declared war, Britain would be drawn in, and a second bloodbath would ensue as it had in 1914.

Chamberlain went to Munich because he did not believe that keeping 3 million Germans inside a nation to which they had been consigned against their will was worth a world war.

Moreover, Britain was unprepared for war. She had no draft, no Spitfires, no divisions ready to be sent to France. Why should the British Empire commit suicide by declaring war on Germany, to support a Paris peace agreement that he, Chamberlain, believed had been unjustly and dishonorably imposed on a defeated Germany?

Chamberlain believed not -- and, after three trips to Germany that September, he effected the transfer of the Sudeten Germans to Berlin's rule, where they wished to be. He came home in triumph to be hailed as the greatest peacemaker of all time.

Why, then, are "Munich" and "appeasement" terms of obloquy?

The answer lies in what happened next.

Chamberlain returned from Munich to a rapturous reception, waving a paper he and Hitler had signed, and declared: "For the second time in 60 years, a British prime minister has returned from Germany with peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time."

This was palpable nonsense. Hitler had already turned to the next item on his menu, Danzig, a city of 350,000 Germans, detached from the Reich at Versailles and made a Free City to give the new Poland an outlet to the sea. Hitler did not want war with Poland. Indeed, he wanted the kind of alliance with Poland he had with Italy. But, first, Danzig must be resolved.

Here, too, the British Government agreed: Danzig should be returned. For of all the amputations of German lands and peoples at Versailles, European statesmen, even Winston Churchill, regarded Danzig and the Polish Corridor that sliced Germany in two as the most outrageous. The problem was the Poles, who refused to discuss Danzig.

Then, in March, Czechoslovakia suddenly began to fall apart. The Sudetenland had been annexed by Germany. Hungary had taken back its lost lands, and Poland had annexed the disputed region of Teschen. Slovakia and Ruthenia now moved to declare independence, and Prague began to march on the provinces.

Hitler intervened to guarantee the independence of Slovakia and gave Hungary a green light to re-annex Ruthenia. Czech President Hacha then asked to see Hitler, who bullied him for three hours into signing away Czech sovereignty and making his nation the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

Chamberlain, now humiliated, mocked by Tory back-benchers, panicking over wild false rumors of German attacks on Romania and Poland, made the greatest blunder in British history. Unasked, he issued a war guarantee to Poland, empowering a Polish dictatorship of colonels that had joined Hitler in dismembering Czechoslovakia to drag the British Empire into war with Germany over a city, Danzig, the British thought should be returned to Germany.

It was not Munich. It was the war guarantee that guaranteed the war that brought down the Empire, and gave us the Holocaust, 50 million dead and the Stalinization of half of Europe.