saturday december 31, 2005
remember the hippo and the tortoise?
Snopes updates the story of the duo brought together by the tsunami.
live local, see global
Earthcams around the world.
hoops
by Burt Prelutsky
I used to love basketball when I was a kid. First, my dad attached a basket to our garage, and I would spend hours at a time practicing my shooting. Then, when I was eight or nine years old, while one of my older brothers was attending UCLA, John Wooden came out from Indiana and taught fast-break basketball to the Bruins. And that clinched my devotion to the game.
Although most people remember the championship teams anchored by the likes of Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton, I recall the earlier teams I first started rooting for with players named Stanich and Sheldrake, guys who were all well under six and a half feet tall, but who could run the legs off the opposition.
When I entered junior high, all that practice paid off. In the seventh grade, I set the record for kids my age and size in the two-minute basketball test. In this phys ed event, you took your first shot from the free-throw line, recovered the ball, dribbled outside the key, took a shot, recovered the ball, dribbled outside the key, and so on and so forth for 120 seconds. I made 24 baskets, or one every five seconds. Frankly, I’m still amazed. It’s not as if I sank every shot, and some of the bounces were rather erratic. But I am also amazed that I can still remember how many baskets I made after 50-odd years, when I can barely recall what I had for lunch today.
The following year, I sank 27 shots. But by then I was older and a little bigger, so I was in a different classification. As luck would have it, some kid in that particular group held the record for the entire school. He’d made 29. Or so he claimed. Back then, I figured he’d cheated. Half a century later, I still think so.
Over the years, I found my interest in the game waning. It wasn’t just that I preferred playing tennis and watching baseball. I came to feel the game, itself, had become tacky. Players began to take more pride in their trash–talking ability than in dribbling or passing.
I came to think that the NBA should start drafting their referees from the boxing fraternity, guys experienced in warning fighters to break cleanly and not punch in the clinches. At the same time, the refs stopped calling such obvious fouls as traveling and double-dribbling -- anything, in fact, that might discourage fan-favorites from showboating to their hearts content.
I don’t blame the players or the coaches, the owners or the league. Charging the prices they do, they have to give the fans what they want, the same way as any other form of lowbrow entertainment, from soap operas to wrestling. And, clearly, what the fans want, actually demand, is a lot of scoring -- and for a lot of that to come in the form of dunking.
Fans are so excited by the sight of a player dunking the ball that at the annual all star game, they set time aside for a dunking competition. What makes it a particularly moronic activity is that nobody is even guarding the participants. They just go out there and ham it up -- like the Harlem Globetrotters, but without their class, humor or memorable theme song, “Sweet Georgia Brown.”
What, I wonder, is it about guys seven feet tall dunking a basketball in a hoop 10 feet off the floor that thrills these ninnies? All that these giants have to do is lift their arms over their heads, and the ball is already at hoop level. The basket, in fact, has remained at the same level since the day the game was invented back in the 19th century, back when the men playing the game were about five and a half feet tall. Isn’t it time they raised the basket a tad? Heck, the day they get it up around 13 feet, even I’ll be impressed if some yutz dunks it.
A few months ago, I was in a local delicatessen. When I sat down with my friends, I noticed there were three elderly people in the next booth. One of them, I saw, was John Wooden.
When they finished their meal and were getting up to leave, I noticed that Mr. Wooden was having trouble getting out of the booth. I rose quickly and rushed over to lend him a hand.
“Thank you,” he said.
“It’s a privilege, Coach Wooden. It was thanks to you that I became a basketball fan.”
He nodded. Then he gave me a look, and he asked, “Are you still?”
What a strange question, I thought. I knew what my honest answer was. But I also knew I was speaking to a man in his 90s who had devoted his entire life to the game, both as an All American player and as a Hall of Fame coach, and I didn’t wish to offend him.
Then I figured that with his reputation for ingraining ethics and integrity in his players, I would be doing him no favor by lying. So I sucked it up, and said, “No, Coach. Not for a long time.”
Then he nodded and smiled before walking away.
It was a very sad smile.
top five ignored stories of 2005
American Thinker has its list.
bengali buddha and the rickshaw
Hand-pulled rickshaws will soon be disappearing from Calcutta's streets because they're getting in the way of progress.
friday december 30, 2005
gateway pundit
...shows how Iraqi deaths have tapered off dramatically.
dana priest: why won't bush heed me?
MSM arrogance on parade:
The effort President Bush authorized shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to fight al Qaeda has grown into the largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War, expanding in size and ambition despite a growing outcry at home and abroad over its clandestine tactics, according to former and current intelligence officials and congressional and administration sources.
To which clear headed Americans say: Right on!
The broad-based effort, known within the agency by the initials GST, is compartmentalized into dozens of highly classified individual programs, details of which are known mainly to those directly involved.
GST includes programs allowing the CIA to capture al Qaeda suspects with help from foreign intelligence services, to maintain secret prisons abroad, to use interrogation techniques that some lawyers say violate international treaties, and to maintain a fleet of aircraft to move detainees around the globe. Other compartments within GST give the CIA enhanced ability to mine international financial records and eavesdrop on suspects anywhere in the world.
Good, good...
Over the past two years, as aspects of this umbrella effort have burst into public view, the revelations have prompted protests and official investigations in countries that work with the United States, as well as condemnation by international human rights activists and criticism by members of Congress.
Burst? Y'mean they showed up on the front page of your newspaper, written by you?
Still, virtually all the programs continue to operate largely as they were set up, according to current and former officials. These sources say Bush's personal commitment to maintaining the GST program and his belief in its legality have been key to resisting any pressure to change course.
And despite all your best efforts, Bush is still determined to protect the nation? Oh, the horror!
open letter to "euroeunuchs"
From Jeff at Beautiful Atrocities.
bold predictions for 2006
Some things we all know about the coming year: a poor soul in Nigeria will require our help, our PayPal accounts will be on the verge of being shut down and the New York Times will further degrade.
Here are our bold predictions:
1. GRATE AMERICAN
A caller to Sean Hannity's radio program will call him a "great American" and Hannity will reply "you're a great American." Millions of Americans will suffer a wave of nausea. A minor scandal will erupt after an Al Franken-Air America investigation determines that the caller was in fact, merely a good American.
2. EYE BALLS GO AIRBORN
During a news conference, Nancy Pelosi's eyeballs will completely leave their sockets, much like Jim Carrey's in The Mask. It will also be revealed that the author of recent Democrat slogans such as "arrogant abuse of power" and "culture of corruption" moonlights from his full-time job writing fortune cookies.
3. "MENOPLAY" DEBUTS
After years in the laboratory, the long awaited female Viagra (developed under the code name "Hot Pants") will become available. A splashy Superbowl commercial will feature before and after moments: an annoyed wife with a "get lost" grimace that morphs into a randy come-hither. The tagline: "Turn MenoPause into MenoPlay." Sales of Viagra and Cialis go through the roof.
4. BRAT TAX GOES INTO EFFECT
Everyone knows brats are painful to be around. But new studies showing that brats, when grown, generate massive social costs (increased criminality, incessant whining and demands for public services) lead to a nation-wide movement for a brat tax. With "Make Perp Parents Pay" as their campaign slogan, advocates of the new tax garner bipartisan support. Millions of supermarket checkers and waiters are deputized as enforcers.
5. SPORTS FANS CELEBRATE THE "DE-BLABBERIZER"
A device that hooks up to equipped TiVo units and cable boxes uses waveform recognition technology to filter out annoying sportscasters from broadcasts. Sports fans jump at the chance to download filters for such notorious blabbers as Bill Walton, Dan Dierdorf and Brent Musberger. The nuclear option eliminates "color commentators" completely.
6. MALLS GET FAST LANES
In a desperate attempt to draw male shoppers back to shopping malls, owners will institute striped pedestrian lanes, like on highways. Dawdling, gawking shoppers will be segregated from brisk walking, point-to-point shoppers. "Men are used to point and click Internet shopping," said Mike Glick of RDL Properties. "They become frustrated by pokey women walking four abreast, especially when they're a wide load." For further appeal, users of the fast lane will be allowed to "hockey check" dawdlers who drift into the fast lane.
7. THIN THE HERD HIT LIST
The paranoid left will circulate rumors that President Bush plans to solve the impending Social Security disaster by selectively eliminating vast numbers of Baby Boomers. Bush's secret hit list will be leaked to the Daily Kos and will echo within the fringe for several months before Howard Dean lends the conspiracy theory credence with a slip of his tongue. Millions of suggested names for the list will be emailed anonymously to the White House.
8. EVERYTHING BAD BECOMES GOOD
Every food or chemical that was bad for you in 2005 will be found beneficial in 2006. Once again, the diet industry will suppress the secret to weight loss (eat less, more around more) in order to sell hope to hopeful suckers.
9. FOX LAUNCHES MISSING WHITE GIRL CHANNEL
After determining there was insufficent air time to adequately cover the disappearance of Nattalee Holloway in Aruba on Fox News Channel, Rupert Murdoch will launch a 24/7 "Missing (White) Girl Channel." Ratings among Alzheimers patients will soar.
10. MEL BROOKS DEBUTS "THE EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS"
Not content to repurpose the same concept three times, Brooks brings a gloomy, serious drama to Broadway. The story hinges on a Willie Loman-like writer (with nothing more than a "high concept and a smile") who turns a cult movie into a blockbuster Broadway musical and back into a lame movie.
Jim Bass
making book on daniel
by J.C. Phillips
I received an email petition urging me to contact my local NBC affiliate and ask them not to air their new hour long religious drama, “The Book of Daniel.”
The series, set to begin airing on Jan. 6, depicts the life and family of an Episcopal priest named Daniel Webster. Webster has an alcoholic wife, a 23-year-old homosexual son, a 16-year-old drug-dealing daughter and a 16-year-old adopted son who is having sex with the bishop's daughter. At the office, Father Webster’s secretary is a lesbian who is sleeping with his sister-in-law. NBC calls the new series “edgy” and “courageous”. Many Christians call it offensive. After viewing the commercials, it is not a program I intend to watch, however, nor am I going to write my local NBC affiliate. I prefer a different kind of activism.
I think few people object to the portrayal of a religious family dealing with emotional and spiritual trials. What insults is the absolute disdain Hollywood shows for the religious community. There is a sizable Christian audience that is begging the networks for programming that is not only wholesome but that also reflects their sensibilities and values. To that the network executives thumb their nose. They know better than the audience and instead serve-up a priest that pops pills, an alcoholic wife, homosexuality and adultery, drug dealing and all manner of dysfunction sold as NORMAL.
Daniel’s supporters argue that the program’s message is about having compassion and learning to love all people. The arrogance of Hollywood constantly fascinates me. The very people who show contempt for religion at every opportunity now want to preach to Christians about the true meaning of Christianity. Hollywood’s real message is that those claiming to be Christians are hateful hypocrites that do not love all people, proof of which is in our rejection of the normalization of homosexuality and sexual promiscuity.
It is an odd kind of projection Hollywood is engaged in. Hate and intolerance do not come from the Christian right, but from the Hollywood left. It is Hollywood that rebukes complaint by referring to average Americans as religious fanatics, zealots and right wing crazies. It is Hollywood that maligned Mel Gibson for making “The Passion of the Christ.” It is Hollywood that describes offending the sensibilities of a large portion of their audience as courageous and edgy.
What many Christians have done is demand programs like “Daniel” be taken off the air and on this point I disagree. I want Americans to view first hand what Hollywood thinks of them and their faith. After a few episodes of “The Book of Daniel”, I am betting America will continue to use the power of the remote control and abandon network programs in search of something better. The Christian community can offer them something better.
If, as the media is fond of writing, the nation is awash with evangelical Christian influence, why must we beg Hollywood executives to give us anything? If we are convinced their vision is bankrupt, let us challenge it with a vision that is more robust, more vibrant and in the end more profitable. Let us create the wholesome, values rich programming Hollywood refuses to provide and invite the network audience to spend time with us. There is more than enough Christian creative talent, more than enough money to finance projects and there are more than enough cable networks looking to fill programming time with well-written, family friendly entertainment. All we need to do is stop putting our energies toward stifling Hollywood and get to work on offering a better product. That is not only the American way, it is Christian activism at its best. It is also the kind of movement I could really get behind.
thursday december 29, 2005
la times channels emily litella
From their corrections page:
Religion and government: A Dec. 18 article defending the separation of church and state stated that the Rev. Jerry Falwell claimed that Ellen DeGeneres played a role in the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina because she was the host of the Emmy Awards before both events. He made no such claim.
as it ever was
Reading Ron Chernow's excellent biography of Alexander Hamilton, I came across a passage than rang familiar. Hamilton was working as George Washington's chief of staff, with duties that included corresponding with the Continental Congress:
"Like Washington, Hamilton was scandalized by the dissension and cowardice, the backstabbing and avarice, of the politicians in Philadelphia while soldiers were dying in the field."
fascinating interview
Author Robert Kaplan on Hugh Hewitt's show, transcript courtesy of RadioBlogger:
RK: Yes, we are. Keep in mind that throughout the Earth, there are all these regional separatist movements with barbaric techniques. And a good deal of them have some kind of like overlapping, strategic affinity with the goals of al Qaeda. It doesn't mean they have the same objective. It means their interests overlap. So think of al Qaeda as kind of a loose, post-modern organization that's weak at the center, strong at the edges, that doesn't demand absolute affinity of views with a lot of its allies. So the U.S. military is in this position of going to the Afghan/Pakistan border, where North Waziristan is, going to the southern Phillipines, going to the Colombian/Venezuelan border, and kind of efficiently using an economy of force, force multiplication strategy, of just a few teams of special forces training the host country military to do the lion share of the work.
HH: But the host country militaries...are they capable of absorbing the sort of training that the special forces are willing to give them, in as short of a period of time as we have?
RK: Yes, they are, because what we do is we don't train just recruits. We train their best units. And not only do we train their best units in Colombia or the Philippines, we train the trainers of the best units, so that our methods can be replicated and carried on within these countries. And it's important to keep in mind that we have U.S. military training missions throughout the world. There are so many of them that the Marines are taking the burden from special forces in many cases. As we speak, Hugh, the United States Marines are training...retraining the entire Georgian military to kind of consolidate the gains of the Rose democratic revolution in the former Soviet republic. And in every single case, we're dealing with legitimated democracies. We're not around the world propping up dictatorships. You know, that may have been true thirty or forty years ago. But the reality today is there was an explosion of democracies in the 90's, and you cannot have an age of democratization without an age of military professionalization. If we don't professionalize these militaries, they won't stay democratic for long.
...
HH: ...that really interested me in the civilian/military divide that he worried about. Do you see that growing or narrowing?
RK: I see it growing, because this is the first time in history where you have an intellectual media governmental elite, where people don't have anyone...where have very few people who've served in the military within their own social circle. One of the things you see in Iraq, you see all these soldiers, Marines, private contractors, and they're all from the South, the greater South, the Mid-West, the Great Plains. And they all e-mail their families every single night about what's going on. And so people in other parts of the country are far more cosmopolitan and sophisticated about what's going on in Iraq now, than people on the two coasts of California and New York.
Read it all.
nice try
Another lawyer joke:
The United States should free Saddam Hussein if it wants to end its problems in Iraq and earn the friendship of Arabs, the former Iraqi president's lawyer wrote in a letter to U.S. President George W. Bush.
The chief lawyer for Saddam at his trial for crimes against humanity in Baghdad told Bush that Iraqis who supported their former leader were waiting for a bold decision from the world's most powerful statesman to free him.
"I call on you (President Bush) to release Mr. President (Saddam) immediately to allow the Iraqis to decide his fate. Only then will you get out of your predicament in Iraq and truly become an advocate of justice," Khalil Dulaimi wrote in a letter obtained by Reuters.
Meanwhile, television ads are running in Southern California for a horror film called Hostel. They depict a chamber of horrors, with toes being lopped off, electric drills raised menacingly etc. Awful stuff.
One wonders: do the filmmakers know that Saddam ran such torture chambers for real?
wednesday december 28, 2005
the da'mage done
Being a committed capitalist requires being neither a materialist nor a sap. But saps abide. Today at Costco I found $65 "handmade" jeans sold under the Da'mage label. Damage indeed; they were purposefully worn in strategic places to achieve some stylistic goal. (Being a fogey, this is probably stale news, so humor me.)
No doubt the hands doing the hand-making live in the Third World. What goes through the mind of factory workers who are asked to take perfectly nice jeans and turn them into, well, the worn out jeans people give to charities, who in turn bundle them off to the Third World?
French is a handy tongue for making the ordinary seem sophisticated. You probably know that Evian spelled backward is Naive. Was this a gallic prank on gullible yanks? Will we be seeing products sold under the name GU'LLIBLE? or GAR'BAGE?
Oui.
Jim Bass
corruption in plain sight
Claudia Rosett on the UN scandal beat.
chicago tribune: bush did not lie
This is only news to news organizations, but better late than never. Next up: will the Los Angeles Times, which is owned by the Trib, publish or report on this story? Excerpt:
After reassessing the administration's nine arguments for war, we do not see the conspiracy to mislead that many critics allege. Example: The accusation that Bush lied about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs overlooks years of global intelligence warnings that, by February 2003, had convinced even French President Jacques Chirac of "the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq." We also know that, as early as 1997, U.S. intel agencies began repeatedly warning the Clinton White House that Iraq, with fissile material from a foreign source, could have a crude nuclear bomb within a year.
das kapital redux
From Der Spiegel:
It is sometime in the near future. The world is dominated by a handful of corporations. Taxes have been abolished; schools are sponsored by McDonald's or Mattel; and people take the name of the company that employs them.
Hack Nike has been assigned a contemptible task by marketing head John Nike. To boost sales of the new, ludicrously expensive Mercury shoes, he has been dispatched to murder over a dozen young shoppers. The message: People will do anything to lay their hands on these shoes.
Welcome to "Logoland," the nightmarish world of the terrorized consumer conjured up by Australian author Max Barry. Governments have long thrown in the towel. The world has been privatized. The police only pursue criminals if the victims are prepared to foot the bill. Companies have torn down all boundaries, physical and moral. Crimes are subject to market laws alone.
This is the nightmare of Eurotwits: national sovereignty subjugated to corporate overlords. Of course, Europe is the intellectual swamp that dreamt up transnational progressivism, which seeks to subjugate national sovereignty to world government.
Given the choice between bowing to Wal-mart or bowing to the likes of Kofi Annan, I'll take the former any day. Shoot, give me the whole gang at Enron over Kofi. At least with Enron, you can fire the bastards or put them in jail. Kofi just keeps tap dancing.
Of course it's a false premise: corporations derive their power by selling us stuff. We consumers vote with our dollars, practicing democracy on a daily basis.
The Euro socialist model siphons off tax dollars to bureaucrats who know how to spend your money better than you. Not so democratic.
And that's what scares the bureaucrats the most: if people are given a real choice, they'll be out of a job and might have to do something useful to get by.
UPDATE: For a great example of bureaucratic folly, read Instapundit's post on Europe's answer to the GPS systems.
two too many
by Burt Prelutsky
I don’t know how much attention, if any, sociologists have given to the study of couples, but I have a feeling the answer is, not enough. Lately, I’ve been giving couples a great deal of thought, and I believe they warrant looking into by those academic types who have government grants and way too much time on their hands.
My own preliminary observations lead me to one inescapable conclusion; namely, that it’s a wonder that couples ever have other couples for friends.
Consider any two couples you know. That’s four separate people. As individuals, they might all be just fine. Or at least acceptable. But the odds are against the four of them being compatible. For instance, let’s say that the two men are the primary friends. Perhaps they work together, maybe they’re old school chums who hunt or fish or drink together, or maybe they just root for the same football team. Any of those things could bind men, simple creatures that we are, for life. But the two women in the group might be as different as any two women on the planet. One could be a driven career type, while the other might be a dedicated homemaker. Albert Einstein and a New Guinea headhunter would have more in common, and be far less hostile to one another.
If things were reversed and it was the women who were chums, one of the men could be a member of the ACLU, while the other one could well be a fine, rational, upstanding member of the community.
With just four people involved, you might think there was a fairly good chance they’d all get along. You might even assume they’d all like each other. There is always that chance, of course, but the actual odds of that being the case are 47,000,000 to one.
For openers, not every couple is mutually devoted. So you start out with some likelihood that even the two people in the couple wish the other one was traveling at the speed of light somewhere in space.
There are exceptions, naturally, foursomes in which each person looks upon the other three with boundless love and affection. But, far more often than not, I’m betting that, at the end of the evening, at least one of the wives is saying to her husband, “I’ll never know what Agnes ever saw in Dave,” and one of the husbands is saying to his wife, “I give that marriage six more months. Sooner, if Jack comes to his senses.”
It’s an absolute wonder to me that couples ever manage to get together with other couples. Believe me, I speak from experience. I bet it’s been nearly two years since another couple has invited us to do anything with them. And, frankly, I don’t get it, because my wife seems like a very nice person.
tuesday december 27, 2005
red scare and upton sinclair
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In high school we were taught about the so-called Red Scare in the US between 1918 and 1921. It was a time of great upheaval and social change: a just completed world war, a flu epidemic that killed 20-40 million, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, socialist and communist movements in the US, labor strikes, coming alcohol prohibition, female suffrage, and suppression of civil liberties (for real, not the whining we hear today).
The US had absorbed millions of immigrants in recent decades, some of whom were anarchists. Two of them were Sacco and Vanzetti. When the Italian immigrants were convicted of murder and executed in Massachusetts, many on the left claimed their conviction was an act of political supression.
It was presented to us in high school as a stain upon our history.
On the 50th anniversary of their execution, then-Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis proclaimed, "any disgrace should be forever removed from their names."
Dukakis was joining a distinguised list of Sacco Vanzetti defenders: Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Bertrand Russell, John Dos Passos, Katherine Ann Porter, Upton Sinclair, George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger wrotes verses about them. Of late, the band Rage Against the Machine featured them in a video.
Upton Sinclair, whose muckraking book The Jungle lead to the creation of the FDA, wrote a novel about Sacco and Vanzetti called Boston that claimed they were railroaded. Now, we learn that Sinclair had been told by the mens' lawyers that the two were indeed guilty.
Yes, Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. From a story in the December 24 LA Times:
Ordinarily, Paul Hegness wouldn't have looked twice at Lot 217 as he strolled through an Irvine auction warehouse, preferring first-edition books and artwork to the box stuffed with old papers and holiday cards.
But then, he wouldn't have stumbled upon a confession from one of America's great authors. Inside the box, an envelope postmarked Sept. 12, 1929, caught his eye. It was addressed to John Beardsley, Esq., of Los Angeles. The return address read, "Upton Sinclair, Long Beach."
"I stood there for 15 minutes reading it over and over again," Hegness said of the letter by the author of "The Jungle," the groundbreaking 1906 book that exposed unsanitary conditions at slaughterhouses.
The last paragraph got the Newport Beach attorney's attention. "This letter is for yourself alone," it read. "Stick it away in your safe, and some time in the far distant future the world may know the real truth about the matter. I am here trying to make plain my own part in the story."
The story was "Boston," Sinclair's 1920s novelized condemnation of the trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants accused of killing two men in the robbery of a Massachusetts shoe factory.
Prosecutors characterized the anarchists as ruthless killers who had used the money to bankroll antigovernment bombings and deserved to die. Sinclair thought the pair were innocent and being railroaded because of their political views.
Soon Sinclair would learn something that filled him with doubt. During his research for "Boston," Sinclair met with Fred Moore, the men's attorney, in a Denver motel room. Moore "sent me into a panic," Sinclair wrote in the typed letter that Hegness found at the auction a decade ago.
"Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth," Sinclair wrote. " … He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them."
So what did Sinclair -- the crusader for truth -- do with this knowledge? He suppressed it.
"I faced the most difficult ethical problem of my life at that point," he wrote to his attorney. "I had come to Boston with the announcement that I was going to write the truth about the case."
Other letters tucked away in the Indiana archive illuminate why one of America's most strident truth tellers kept his reservations to himself.
"My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe, I will be called a traitor to the movement and may not live to finish the book," Sinclair wrote Robert Minor, a confidant at the Socialist Daily Worker in New York, in 1927.
"Of course," he added, "the next big case may be a frame-up, and my telling the truth about the Sacco-Vanzetti case will make things harder for the victims."
He also worried that revealing what he had been told would cost him readers. "It is much better copy as a naïve defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public," he wrote to Minor.
Sinclair perpetuated a lie that continues to be believed to this day.
Which brings to mind another supposed case of injustice, cop-killer Abu-Jamal Mumia. As noted in FrontPageMag:
N THE SPRING OF 1994, I was strolling down Philadelphia's legendary South Street. I noticed a poster in a storefront window, reminiscent of those seen in Moscow, Beijing, and Hanoi that informed passersby the latest news.
"Free Mumia," read the headline. The sign concerned efforts by the Uhuru Democratic Party, the local successor to the Black Panthers, to release the convicted murderer of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner from death row. Abu-Jamal killed Faulkner back in 1981, and a jury found him guilty only one year later. In the intervening seventeen years, however, left-wing supporters have waged a tireless campaign to exonerate their man. In April, thousands marched in Philadelphia to demand his freedom. Speakers at the rally included Ramsey Clark and Ossie Davis.
They are but two of the many celebrities on the Mumia bandwagon. Whoopi Goldberg, Ed Asner, Peter Coyote, Mike Farrell, punk-rock band Rage Against the Machine, and many others are also on board. The group is so eclectic that it’s difficult to see what it is that unites them around this particular murderer.
Read it all. History surely does repeat itself.
Jim Bass
reuters numbers game
If American police discover a man with six bodies buried in his back yard, it becomes a national story. Who were the victims? Why were they killed? Fox News's Greta Van Susteren would be all over the story.
So what about 31 corpses in a shallow grave? Does 31 meet the standard of "mass"? Here's Reuters with their quote marks:
Iraqis find "mass grave" at Kerbala
Iraqi officials said they found the skeletal remains of 31 people in what they described as a mass grave in the Shi'ite holy city of Kerbala on Tuesday.
A senior official at the laboratory to which the bodies were taken said the people appeared to have died during the suppression of a Shi'ite uprising against Saddam Hussein after the 1991 Gulf War.
"There are 31 bodies. We're still testing but it appears they are victims of the events of 1991," the official told Reuters.
There had been confusion over the scale of the find at a building site for a sewage project in the city center, with police initially saying there were 150 bodies; police spokesman Rahman Mishawi later revised that to "dozens" of sets of remains.
77 feng shui way
Isn't this precious:
Developers looking to maximize the marketability of their homes are complaining about the city's street address rules, which they say can scare off buyers who practice the ancient Chinese art of feng shui.
Under a numbering system established by Alameda County in the 1950s, addresses are assigned based on how far the homes are from downtown Oakland, a method that puts five digits on almost every mailbox in Hayward and other cities in the county.
Maybe there are practical aspects to feng shui in terms of siting buildings sensibly. But to call superstition over five digit numbers an "ancient art" is too much.
The numbers have always been hard to remember, but home builders recently raised concerns that they may decrease property values because the odds are greater that an address will carry a number considered unlucky by feng shui practitioners.
Feng shui holds that the way dwellings are designed can affect the fortunes and health of inhabitants.
"Now developers are saying, 'Why do we have to do it this way?'" said Sylvia Ehrenthal, Hayward's director of economic and community development. "There are some numbers people don't like to have in their address."
City Council members, five of whom live at addresses with numbers that start in the 20,000 range, voted unanimously last week to allow the builders of an upscale development to use shorter street numbers. In seeking the waiver, the builders cited convenience concerns as well as the potential for violating feng shui precepts, according to Richard Patenaude, Hayward's principal planner.
Where is the ACLU in this? If a tiny cross on the Los Angeles county seal commemorating its founding missionaries is verboten, how dare the Hayward City Council bow to ancient Chinese superstitions?
I have several friends who buy into feng shui. Literally. They pay consultants to analyze their dwellings. If you see crystals hanging from corners (to deflect bad energy, I believe) or an abundance of fountains, you know the joint's been feng shuied.
Amusingly, many New Agey adherents of feng shui regard themselves as members of the "reality-based community" as opposed to those religious nuts who pray to Jesus. If you ask me, believing in invisible forces (ki) is little different than believing in the Holy Spirit.
One other beef I have with feng shui is how its spelled. It is pronounced FUNG-SHWAY. Given that Chinese uses a different alphabet, why not transliterate phoneticly?
Jim Bass
monday december 26, 2005
scant political diversity on campuses
From the New York Times:
While attending a Pennsylvania Republican Party picnic, Jennie Mae Brown bumped into her state representative and started venting.
"How could this happen?" Ms. Brown asked Representative Gibson C. Armstrong two summers ago, complaining about a physics professor at the York campus of Pennsylvania State University who she said routinely used class time to belittle President Bush and the war in Iraq. As an Air Force veteran, Ms. Brown said she felt the teacher's comments were inappropriate for the classroom.
The encounter has blossomed into an official legislative inquiry, putting Pennsylvania in the middle of a national debate spurred by conservatives over whether public universities are promoting largely liberal positions and discriminating against students who disagree with them.
The encounter has blossomed into an official legislative inquiry, putting Pennsylvania in the middle of a national debate spurred by conservatives over whether public universities are promoting largely liberal positions and discriminating against students who disagree with them.
A committee held two hearings last month in Pittsburgh and has scheduled another for Jan. 9 in Philadelphia. A final report with any recommendations for legislative remedy is due in June.
The Students for Academic Freedom website is here.
It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Kwanzaa
Here's our annual Kwanzaa post --it's a tradition:
Once upon a time, a violent felon dreamed of a not-so-white Christmas. This being America, where nobody goes broke overestimating the public's willingness to patronize a minority group, his dream lead to phony obeisance, a new line of greeting cards (plus assorted kitsch) and official postage stamps.
If you don't know the origins of Kwanzaa, then gather your children 'round the fire and read this heart-burning account.
On December 24, 1971, the New York Times ran one of the first of many articles on a new holiday designed to foster unity among African Americans. The holiday, called Kwanzaa, was applauded by a certain sixteen-year-old minister who explained that the feast would perform the valuable service of "de-whitizing" Christmas. The minister was a nobody at the time but he would later go on to become perhaps the premier race-baiter of the twentieth century. His name was Al Sharpton and he would later spawn the Tawana Brawley hoax and then incite anti-Jewish tensions in a 1995 incident that ended with the arson deaths of seven people.
Great minds think alike. The inventor of the holiday was one of the few black "leaders" in America even worse than Sharpton. But there was no mention in the Times article of this man or of the fact that at that very moment he was sitting in a California prison. And there was no mention of the curious fact that this purported benefactor of the black people had founded an organization that in its short history tortured and murdered blacks in ways of which the Ku Klux Klan could only fantasize.
It was in newspaper articles like that, repeated in papers all over the country, that the tradition of Kwanzaa began. It is a tradition not out of Africa but out of Orwell. Both history and language have been bent to serve a political goal. When that New York Times article appeared, Ron Karenga's crimes were still recent events. If the reporter had bothered to do any research into the background of the Kwanzaa founder, he might have learned about Karenga's trial earlier that year on charges of torturing two women who were members of US (United Slaves), a black nationalist cult he had founded.
can't fool betsy newmark
...However, Robert Kuttner's column today, entitled "What Bush could learn from Lincoln" seems to focus mainly on how much Bush would benefit if he took his political rivals like John McCain and Chuck Hagel into his cabinet and listened more to the media. And here I thought that Kuttner was going to say that Bush could have learned much from Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus without Congressional approval and defiance of Chief Justice Taney's order to release secessionist sympathizer, John Merryman.
Or, I thought, maybe Kuttner admired the way that Lincoln instituted a draft. Or how he again suspended habeas corpus and ordered the arrest of anyone who spoke out against the draft or anyone disloyal to the Union. Or how he sent troops to arrest secessionist members of the Maryland legislature until after the election of a new pro-Unionist legislature.
plots foiled against bush, musharaff
Before he was captured last spring, Osama Bin Laden's top operational commander was solely focused on killing President Bush and Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharaff, the Daily News has learned.
The capture last May of Al Qaeda's No. 3 leader, Abu Faraj Al-Libi, apparently thwarted plots to assassinate the two partners in the global war on terror, said a senior Pakistani official, whose information was corroborated by two senior U.S. counterterrorism officials.
"Al-Libi had one mission: Kill Bush and Musharraf," the Pakistani official told The News. "He wanted to kill Bush in the White House, preferably."
not so haute cuisine
by Burt Prelutsky
I heard that a restaurant owner in Chicago found himself in a peck of trouble for posting a sign that read: “Children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices.” It seems that a certain number of doting parents took umbrage at his policy, even though by including “of all ages,” I suspect he might have had those goofy parents, and not just their offspring, in mind.
Frankly, I think, if anything, the guy was far too lenient. So far as I’m concerned, if I owned the place, I’d post one of those signs they have at the amusement parks forbidding kids under a certain height from getting on rides.
I don’t know if you could legally keep children out of restaurants, unless of course they happened to be smokers, but I think forcing the parents of crying babies and squalling toddlers to pick up everybody’s check is only fair.
Frankly, I can’t even imagine why these people want to be seen in public with these annoying little creatures. I should have imagined that the whole point of eating in a restaurant surrounded by other grown-ups would be the opportunity to get away from the kiddies for a precious hour or two.
Understand, I like children. I also like horses, ducks and alpacas, but I don’t care to eat with them, either.
Lest you think that I am being unduly harsh where the tots are concerned, I have a whole list of adults I’d like to see the restaurant police cart off in cuffs. At the top of the list are those self-important idiots who spend the entire time calling or being called on their cell phones. I have even seen tables where two of the three people never got off the phone, while the third person sat alone being ignored. I would normally feel sorry for the odd wheel except I assume anybody who’d be friends with the other two is simply someone stuck with a cell phone that’s out of commission.
The other folks I’d love to have placed under house arrest are those people, usually middle-aged men, who pontificate loudly and incessantly to a table around which are seated four or five young, well-dressed, adults. My assumption is always that the loudmouth oaf is their employer, who, like far too many bosses, assumes that his captive audience is simply enthralled by his brilliance. Having eavesdropped more times than I care to remember -- as if anyone within 50 feet of their table has a choice in the matter -- I’m here to announce that brilliance is not the word that comes to mind.
The other tables any sane person will want to avoid sitting near are those at which four or more women are seated. When they really get going, and they will inevitably get going, the shrillness is enough to make me and most dogs start baying at the moon. And if, god forbid, one of them should say something rude about a husband or a boyfriend, the shrieks of laughter are enough to give a deaf person a migraine.
Even the arrival of their bill isn’t cause for celebration. That merely means that the rest of us are now in store for 20 minutes of noisy bickering over who had the iced tea and who ordered the latte.
We’re all familiar with the age-honored caveat: “No Shoes, No Shirts, No Service.” But this is a new age, and desperate times call for desperate measures. Speaking for myself and probably millions of others, I don’t really care if you’re barefoot, just so long as you let the rest of us eat in peace. And please do us all a favor and leave the kids at home. The money you won’t be wasting on the food they throw on the floor will more than pay for the babysitter.
As for the young folks who can’t get away from their boorish bosses even at lunch time, find another job. Life’s too short. You’ll thank me later.
Christmas day, 2005
Merry Christmas
At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled shows,
But like of each thing that in season grows.--William Shakespeare, Love’s Labor’s Lost
A lovely thing about Christmas is that it’s compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.--Garrison Keillor
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead; nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail,
The right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men.”--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A good conscience is a continual Christmas.--Benjamin Franklin
Dear Lord, I've been asked, nay commanded, to thank Thee for the Christmas turkey before us... a turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird... a social being... capable of actual affection... nuzzling its young with almost human- like compassion. Anyway, it's dead and we're gonna eat it. Please give our respects to its family...--Berke Breathed, Bloom Country Babylon
christmas in senegal
Hundreds of young men decked with tinsel wander outside Senegal's mosques, hawking plastic Christmas trees. Women pray to Allah on a sidewalk where an inflatable Santa Claus happens to be hanging.
Senegal may be 95 percent Muslim, but it certainly knows it's Christmas. In fact, for this nation of 12 million it's a national holiday.
Blame it on globalization, which has turned the West's yuletide icons into a worldwide commodity. Or the Internet, or Hollywood, or the availability of travel that allows new generations of Senegalese to sample Christmas at close quarters. But mainly, Senegalese revel in the trappings of Christmas because they can and want to.
saturday december 24, 2005
good thing they weren't arguing about the dog
It was a conversation stopper. A lovers' dispute over a cell phone took a serious turn early Friday morning when the woman ended the spat by swallowing the phone whole.
"cheeky schoolboy" bites back
James Bone, recently scolded by Kofi Annan, writes:
AS A journalist, I expect my share of verbal abuse. But it is not everyday that I have my professionalism impugned by the world's top diplomat on global TV.
The advantage is that I have not felt as young for years as I do now that Kofi Annan has described me as an “overgrown schoolboy”. The disadvantage — rather more serious — is that the UN Secretary-General continues to refuse to respond to the still-unanswered questions about his role in the Oil-For-Food corruption scandal.
For months journalists were told that the UN could not answer any questions because the scandal was under investigation by the Volcker inquiry. Since the Volcker panel issued its last report in October, the UN has refused to answer any questions because it says the matter has already been investigated. Yet the inquiry raised more questions than it answered, the most important being: what did Kofi Annan know and when did he know it?
two views of "munich"
Salon and Der Spiegel joined up to defend “Munich”'s message from its detractors, claiming that the movie “dares to break the rules of post-9/11 political correctness.” (Funny, I thought the main criticism of the movie is that it embodies post-9-11 political correctness in its solicitousness for the humanity of terrorists.) Michelle Goldberg inveighs against what she perceives as unjust criticism of the film, yet she uncritically parrots its received wisdom, which is exactly what the detractors are trying to debunk. She says:
The story is full of moral ambiguities -- few would dispute that Israel had the right to retaliate, but its pursuit of revenge became an end in itself, sometimes compromising both Israel's ethics and its own security.
From Asharq Alawsatt:
It is inspired by events surrounding the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists during the 1972 Olympics and the secret hit squad assembled by the Israeli government to track down the perpetrators and assassinate them.
I intentionally chose the word "terrorist" to get your attention and because I believe the murder of the athletes was an act of terrorism.
More importantly I chose that word because I worry that discussion in the Arab world around "Munich" will become stuck on that word and therefore miss the point of the film. I worry that the Arab world will ban "Munich" as just the latest example of a Western film depicting Arabs as terrorists.
If "Munich" is banned in the Arab world, it will be just the latest example of its unwillingness and inability to join the intellectual debates of the day. Not only does the film, based on the birth of the concept of counterterrorism, ask the big questions of our time but it also challenges the Arab world to produce its own works of art that ask equally painful and pertinent questions.
Munich and Syriana savaged here:
...given the track record of Tony Kushner, the film's main writer, it was all but certain that "Munich" would posit a moral equivalence between the terrorists and those who brought them to justice. That's exactly what "Munich" does.
Just like "Syriana," this is simplistic garbage. But it's all we can expect, given how Hollywood and much of the left view the world.
Reality is a lot more complicated. In Iraq, we see an American president leading an unlikely, ambitious, Wilsonian effort to foster democracy. Meanwhile, in Israel, it wasn't the peaceniks but Prime Minister Ariel Sharon – the veteran warrior loathed as the embodiment of bloodthirsty Zionism by faculty petition-signers everywhere – who razed the Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.
These are striking, fascinating developments – except to the Hollywood left. Its mind is made up: George W. Bush is an oil-industry stooge, Sharon is a mass murderer, the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is a giant who deserved his Nobel Peace Prize and the problems in the Middle East are entirely America's and Israel's fault.
friday december 23, 2005
didgeridoo to the rescue
Playing a few hours a day chases the snoring away.
missed cinema: genghis blues
Try pitching this story as fiction: a blind blues musician (Paul Pena) in San Francisco is deeply depressed, having mourned his wife for six months. While tuning his shortwave radio one night, he hears strange singing on a Radio Moscow broadcast. Fascinated, he learns about Tuvan throat singing, teaches himself how to do it, then learns rudimentary Tuvan by translating Tuvan to Russian, then Russian to English. Via Braille, no less.
Then, because of Richard Feynman (yes, the Nobel laureate) a Tuvan singer comes to the Bay Area and Paul encounters him, throat-sings a song and gets invited to a Tuvan singing competition.
It's all true, and the subject of this odd documentary, a non-fiction cousin to Schultze Gets the Blues. The film came out in 1999 and won numerous awards, although I think mostly because of its sympathetic subject matter. The film itself is ragged, with footage recycled and some gaps in story telling, but the making of the film itself is part of the story.
jonah goldberg on time
I frankly don't understand how anyone can stomach Time's cutesy writing style, but Goldberg zeros in on it's mindlessness.
Among the proud recipients of Time magazine's fluffy end-of-year "People Who Mattered" feature, is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Here's how it begins: "He is an unlikely firebrand: the soft-spoken son of a blacksmith who still sometimes drives a 30-year-old Peugeot. But Iran's new president doesn't shrink from controversy. After winning a disputed election, he said. . . . " Now, before I finish that sentence, let's at least note that so far Time is using the same tone it might use to talk about John McCain, Joe Wilson, George Clooney or some other "soft-spoken" "unlikely firebrand" beloved by the media.
So, does Ahmadinejad have a wacky blog? Did he admit on "Larry King Live" that he voted for Ralph Nader in 2000? What makes him such a charming rogue?
Let's pick up that sentence where we left off and see: "After winning a disputed election," Time reports, "he said he would continue Iran's nuclear program, called the Holocaust a 'myth' and pledged to destroy Israel. Even some of the nation's ruling clerics are nervous about what he will do next." So even some of Iran's terrorism-supporting theocratic dictators are "nervous" about this guy.
What, one wonders, would it take for the editors to get really rough? Perhaps if Ahmadinejad offered a deeply negative review of "Brokeback Mountain"?
thursday december 22, 2005
"i'm king kong"
In connection with the latest King Kong, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) produced an original documentary ("I'm King Kong") about Merian C. Cooper, the director of the original King Kong. Cooper did not found a studio, but his influence on American movies is as big as Goldwyn, Thalberg et al.
Cooper was an adventurer, aviator, innovator, trail blazer and patriot. Read his bio on the TCM website here. Check showtimes for repeats of the documentary. Some highlights:
- Cooper flies bombers in WWI, gets shot down and captured by the Germans. After the war, he fights for Poland against Russian aggression.
- He gets into the film business as a documentarian, filming Grass in 1925. It's influences can be seen today in Himalaya.
- He makes King Kong in 1933, a technical and story telling breakthrough
- He gets behind Technicolor along with David Selznick, who went on to shoot Gone with the Wind using the process.
- Six months before Pearl Harbor, at age 49, Cooper rejoins the military and gets posted to China where he becomes chief of staff to the head of the Flying Tigers.
- Postwar, he joins with John Ford to produce some great westerns including The Searchers
- In 1952, he produces and co-directs This Is Cinerama, a valentine to America.
My dad took me to see This Is Cinerama when I was 8 (some years after the debut). The process used three projectors and a curved screen to create a very wide, immersive experience. Think of it as the IMAX of the time.
Cooper's film was a heart filled travelogue. He mounted the one-and-only Cinerama camera on the nose of a retired bomber and photographed the nation he loved. As a boy, I marveled at seeing the beauty and breadth of my country, from sea to shining sea.
While watching the TCM documentary, I realized how influential that one film had been on my sense of the United States. I was eager to go visit the Grand Canyon and appreciate all the riches America. That, of course, was exactly Cooper's intent.
Jim Bass
how about nano government for a change?
Here we go again:
California must move fast if it is to be a world leader in exploiting the next Gold Rush -- nanotechnology, the science of incredibly small machinery and molecules with a wide range of industrial, medical and environmental applications -- according to a report to be made public Monday.
Fashioned by the state's Blue Ribbon Task Force on Nanotechnology, the report represents California's second attempt in recent years to position itself at the forefront of a potential superscience, although the approach would presumably be different than in 2004, when voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 71, the $3 billion stem cell research initiative.
The state of California is here to provide police, roads, health services, schools, parks etc. It is not meant to be a venture capitalist.
We're not going to be in the forefront of anything if the Democrat-led legislature continues to follow the policies that have doomed the French economy.
say it ain't so
From the LA Daily News
For two days, people from all over Los Angeles and the world came to pay their respects to a man whose life was ended prematurely. Masses of black people filed in one after another to view Williams' body at an L.A. mortuary. Young, old, rich, poor, gangbangers, ex-bangers, teachers, students, activists and the like all came to see the man who Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger denied clemency to and executed.
The attendance at Williams' funeral was enormous. Thousands of people crowded the streets in front of Bethel A.M.E. to participate in what easily could be named the largest gathering of blacks in Los Angeles this year. The Rosa Parks Memorial, filled with all of Los Angeles' black bourgeoisie, didn't even garner the attendance - both from the public and the media - that Williams' funeral garnered.
wednesday december 21, 2005
kofi: call moveon.org
Smooth talker Kofi Annan lost his cool today, telling Times of London reporter James Bone:
"I think you're being very cheeky. Listen James Bone, you've been behaving like an overgrown schoolboy in this room for many, many months and years. You are an embarrassment to your colleagues and to your profession. Please stop misbehaving and please let's move on to a serious subject."
So, billions in corrupt dealings that (very likely) extended the reign of Saddam Hussein by a few years is not a serious subject? Get serious.
UPDATE: Claudia Rosett explains the context of Kofi's tantrum.
UPDATE 2: Just a thought: isn't Kofi behaving the way Joe Biden said John Bolten would behave?
powerline talks to the ny times
An interesting back-and-forth. The Times's final silence deafens.
caramba!
The Mexican government, angered by a U.S. proposal to extend a wall along the border to keep out migrants, pledged Tuesday to block the plan and organize an international campaign against it. Facing a growing tide of anti-immigrant sentiment north of the border, the Mexican government has taken out ads urging Mexican workers to denounce rights violations in the United States. It also is hiring an American public relations firm to improve its image and counter growing U.S. concerns about immigration.
Mexican President Vicente Fox denounced the U.S. measures, passed by the House of Representatives on Friday, as "shameful" and his foreign secretary, Luis Ernesto Derbez, echoed his complaints on Tuesday.
"Mexico is not going to bear, it is not going to permit, and it will not allow a stupid thing like this wall," Derbez said.
If the stupid Mexican government cured its incompetence and corruption, the Mexican economy would bloom and workers would not need to travel north (violating its laws) for work.
Maybe they can organize an international campaign to to accomplish that. But methinks they can't organize a fire drill, much less run a country.
baby boomer jokes
...in response to Time magazine's People of the Year. And from the same blog, Rewriting History.
just in time for the holidays
The BBC explains everything about drinking alcohol.
a genetic basis for skin color
...seems logical, despite pronouncements by some scientists that there is no genetic basis for race.
first day of winter
bawling barbara sticks foot in mouth (again)
Yesterday novelist-legislator Sen. Barbara Boxer announced she was looking into whether President Bush can/should be impeached for the NSA wiretaps. With most senators, I'd write that off to cynicism--hot talk meant to score points and nothing more. In Boxer's case, I assume stupidity and ignorance because it fits the pattern.
In any case, Barbara, should you find these pages, read this list of warrantless searches the courts have deemed legal. Or just call your in-law, Bill Clinton, for an explanation.
rocky puzzles roberts
tuesday december 20, 2005
balls of fire: bees carefully cook invaders to death
At least two species of honeybees, the native Apis cerana and the introduced European honeybee, Apis mellifera, engulf a wasp in a living ball of defenders and heat the predator to death. A new study of heat balling has described a margin of safety for the defending bees, says Tan Ken of Yunnan Agricultural University in Kunming, China.
clinton claimed same authority as bush
In a little-remembered debate from 1994, the Clinton administration argued that the president has "inherent authority" to order physical searches — including break-ins at the homes of U.S. citizens — for foreign intelligence purposes without any warrant or permission from any outside body. Even after the administration ultimately agreed with Congress's decision to place the authority to pre-approve such searches in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, President Clinton still maintained that he had sufficient authority to order such searches on his own.
"The Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes," Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on July 14, 1994, "and that the President may, as has been done, delegate this authority to the Attorney General."
"It is important to understand," Gorelick continued, "that the rules and methodology for criminal searches are inconsistent with the collection of foreign intelligence and would unduly frustrate the president in carrying out his foreign intelligence responsibilities."
That was Jamie Gorelick under Clinton. This is Jamie Gorelick quoted today:
"The issue here is this," said Jamie Gorelick, who served as deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton and as a member of the Sept. 11 commission. "If you're John McCain and you just got Congress to agree to limits on interrogation techniques, why would you think that limits anything if the executive branch can ignore it by asserting its inherent authority?"
Gorelick is responsible for writing the infamous memo creating a "wall" between law enforcement agencies that tied their hands prior to 9/11 (subsequently untied by the Patriot Act).
And the same Gorelick who refused to recuse herself from the 9/11 Commission, despite a glaring conflict of interest.
senator blabbermouths
The cartoon character Foghorn Cleghorn often comes to mind when listening to bloviating senators. Sometimes their big mouths do real damage to national security, such as tipping off Osama.
How long are we going to tolerate senators and congressmen who divulge our most closely-held secrets to the public in search of cheap political gain? We have laws that make those leaks serious federal crimes. We're spending enormous resources on finding out who leaked Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA agent to the press. Leaks that are vastly more important -- and which should be pursued with no less determination and resources -- are regularly ignored because the culprits are sitting members of Congress. These leakers should be thrown out of office and prosecuted.
It's been about two years since Sen. Richard Shelby blew one of our most important secrets -- that we were bugging Osama bin Laden's cell phone, a fact that could have led to the capture of America's most wanted terrorist -- by bragging about it to a reporter. Shelby's action (if it really was him) has never been prosecuted. Why not? Now, another huge leak comes in the form of the disclosure by members of the Senate of a highly-classified satellite program. Three members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have apparently committed a very serious crime by blabbing about a highly-classified satellite program to the press last week. If these men actually did what it appears they did, we ought to throw the book at 'em for divulging one of our most-protected secrets: stealthy reconnaissance satellites.
As a result of their revelations to the public and the press, three U.S. Senators -- Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who's also the ranking Dem on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) -- are the subject of a "criminal referral" made on Monday for speaking publicly about this satellite. Such referrals are made to the Justice Department by the administration when criminal conduct is suspected. In this case, it's not only suspected, it's evidenced on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post. A highly reliable intelligence community source told me that the referral had been made because senior administration officials were beside themselves that the three had taken the controversy on funding this project to the press.
It makes you understand why President Bush would not want to keep these clowns in the loop.
french ed.
Betsy Newmark notes a story about the French public educational system, and how kids get tracked early in life.
arnold terminates hometown
Stung by criticism in his hometown over the execution of Stanley Tookie Williams, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday told officials in Graz, Austria, to take his name off the sports stadium and stop using his name to promote the city.
Schwarzenegger rejected a clemency plea from Williams, a former Crips gang leader who was convicted of four murders but later renounced violence and worked to keep kids out of gangs. Two more executions are scheduled in January and February.
"In all likelihood, during my term as governor I will have to make similar and equally difficult decisions,'' the governor wrote to Siegfried Nagl, the mayor of Graz, in a letter written in German that was translated by the governor's staff.
these are serious people?
Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame ask us to take them seriously (whistle-blower, wronged careerist etc.)
and yet they pose for photos such as this in Time magazine's year end wrap up. I know from experience, this shot took time to set up. Valerie in
pajamas striking a dramatic pose. Joe in film noir shadows wearing a grim expression. Oh life
is a cabaret, my friends. Who do they think they are, Nick and Nora Charles?
Uggh.
monday december 19, 2005
playing with fire
Denying the Holocaust is one thing, but banning western music in a country with the youngest population in the world? I guess that's why mad mullahs are so named.
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has banned all Western music from Iran's state radio and TV stations - an eerie reminder of the 1979 Islamic revolution when popular music was outlawed as "un-Islamic" under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Today, though, the sounds of hip-hop can be heard blaring from car radios in Tehran's streets, and Eric Clapton's "Rush" and the Eagles' "Hotel California" regularly accompany Iranian broadcasts.
No more - the official IRAN Persian daily reported Monday that Ahmadinejad, as head of the Supreme Cultural Revolutionary Council, ordered the enactment of an October ruling by the council to ban all Western music, including classical music, on state broadcast outlets.
clinton eavesdropped via nsa
During the 1990's under President Clinton, the National Security Agency monitored millions of private phone calls placed by U.S. citizens and citizens of other countries under a super secret program code-named Echelon.
On Friday, the New York Times suggested that the Bush administration has instituted "a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices" when it "secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without [obtaining] court-approved warrants."
But in fact, the NSA had been monitoring private domestic telephone conversations on a much larger scale throughout the 1990s - all of it done without a court order, let alone a catalyst like the 9/11 attacks.
Also...
clinton used echelon for economic espionage
In 2000, former Clinton CIA director James Woolsey set off a firestorm of protest in Europe when he told the French newspaper Le Figaro that he was ordered by Clinton in 1993 to transform Echelon into a tool for gathering economic intelligence.
"We have a triple and limited objective," the former intelligence chief told the French paper. "To look out for companies which are breaking US or UN sanctions; to trace 'dual' technologies, i.e., for civil and military use, and to track corruption in international business."
60 minutes about echelon
From March 2000.
charlie brown and the football
Not recognizing the political ground had shifted beneath their feet, Democrats continued to press forward with their offensive against the President. They’ve now foolishly climbed out on a limb that Rove and Bush have the real potential to chop off. One would think that after the political miscalculations the Democrats made during the 2002 and 2004 campaigns they would not make the same mistake a third time, but it is beginning to look a lot like Charlie Brown and the football again.
wit in chief
Thanks to The Corner for transcribing this from today's news conference. For all his shortcomings as a communicator, Bush is probably the funniest president in recent memory.
REPORTER: Sir, the other...
BUSH: You asked a multiple-part question.
REPORTER: Yes, I did.
BUSH: Thank you for violating the multiple-part question rule.
REPORTER: I didn't know there was a law on that.
(LAUGHTER)
BUSH: There's not a law.
(LAUGHTER)
It's an executive order.
(LAUGHTER)
In this case, not monitored by the Congress.
(LAUGHTER)
Nor is there any administrative oversight.
(LAUGHTER)
REPORTER: Well, without breaking any laws, back on domestic spying. Making the case for that, can you give us some example...
BUSH: Oh, I got you. Yes, sorry.
No, I'm not going to talk about that, because it would help give the enemy notification and/or perhaps signal to them methods and uses and sources. And we're not going to do that.
java is health food
Says US News & World Report.
pot holes
The cost of marijuana prohibition.
civilian war tolls: a graph
See it here. The toll for Rwanda conflicts with most estimates which peg it at 800,000.
mullah calls for tolerance, sorta
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust is a matter for academic discussion and the West should be more tolerant of his views, Iran's foreign ministry spokesman said on Sunday.
Ahmadinejad last week called the Holocaust a myth and suggested Israel be moved to Germany or Alaska, remarks that sparked international uproar and threaten diplomatic talks with Europe over Iran's nuclear programme.
If he's feeling untolerated, he can always book a seat for next year's Palestinian Solidarity Day where Israel is absent from the map. Just call Kofi for reservations.
what a coincidence
From the New York Times
Bush delivered his remarks as he has come under new criticism from both Democrats and Republicans for ordering the National Security Agency to conduct electronic eavesdropping in the United States without first obtaining warrants.
The disclosure of that program, reported last Friday in The New York Times, has overshadowed some of the good news of the Iraq election, and has frustrated a White House that was hoping to use the high turnout and relative calm of the vote as a positive end to the president's series of speeches.
All the news that's fit to slant.
sunday december 18, 2005
we don't need another study
Progressives want a "single payer" health care system. If George Soros wants to be that single payer, I'm for it. But if the single payer is the government, get real.
Ten years ago last week, Los Angeles County supervisors received a stern warning. The public healthcare system, pushed to the brink of collapse that summer by a $655-million budget shortfall, was still in jeopardy, the county's specially appointed health czar reported. And the supervisors were advised to relinquish some control to a board of experts.
The supervisors asked for a report.
The next year, they asked for another.
They asked for reports in 1999, 2000 and 2001.
Then in January, they asked for another, after a consultant said an independent health authority might prevent dangerous lapses in care like those that killed patients at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center.
Yet today, after at least 12 reports, most of the five supervisors, who have each been in office for at least nine years, still say they don't have enough information to decide if they should change the way the county's troubled $3.7-billion health system is run.
"It hasn't been studied," Supervisor Gloria Molina said, calling the reports inadequate.
la times does emily litella
We covered this a few days ago. Now the LA Times:
The bodies of New Orleans residents killed by Hurricane Katrina were almost as likely to be recovered from middle-class neighborhoods as from the city's poorer districts, such as the Lower 9th Ward, according to a Times analysis of data released by the state of Louisiana.
No, really?
The analysis contradicts what swiftly became conventional wisdom in the days after the storm hit — that it was the city's poorest African American residents who bore the brunt of the hurricane. Slightly more than half of the bodies were found in the city's poorer neighborhoods, with the remainder scattered throughout middle-class and even some richer districts.
And just how did this become conventional wisdom? Might it have been the very same mainstream media who reported rumor and race baiting screeds in order to tarnish Bush?
Did those chiseled teevee reporters got emotional and get it all wrong? Yup.
democrats lose another election: the one in iraq
Well, that old Iraqi quagmire just keeps getting worse and worse, if only for the Democratic Party. What was the straw they were clutching at back in January? Oh, yeah, sure, gazillions of Kurds and Shiites might have gone to the polls, but where were the Sunni?
As some of us said at the time, the Sunni'll come out tomorrow. And so they did. On Thursday, they voted in record numbers, leaving Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats frantically scrambling for another disaffected Iraqi minority group they could use as proof that the whole crazy neocon war-for-oil scam was a bust.
Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any disaffected Iraqi minority groups left. Oh, wait, there's Ahmed at 37 Sword of the Infidel Slayer Gardens in Ramadi. Apparently, he's still rejecting the new constitution. Maybe, if we're lucky, he's got a brother who's mildly irked. Whoops, sorry, they just went off to vote, too.
Heigh-ho. The Iraq election's over, the media did their best to ignore it, and, judging from the rippling torsos I saw every time I switched on the TV, the press seem to reckon that that gay cowboy movie was the big geopolitical event of the last week, if not of all time. Yes, yes, I know: They're not, technically, cowboys, they're gay shepherds, but even Hollywood isn't crazy enough to think it can sell gay shepherds to the world.
And the point is, even if I was in the mood for a story about two rugged insecure men who find themselves strangely attracted to each other in a dark transgressive relationship that breaks all the rules, who needs Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger when you've got Howard Dean and Abu Musad al-Zarqawi? Yee-haw! And, if that sounds unfair, pick almost any recent statement by a big-time Dem cowboy and tell me how exactly it would differ from the pep talks Zarqawi gives his dwindling band of head-hackers -- Dean arguing that America can't win in Iraq, Barbara Boxer demanding the troops begin withdrawing on Dec. 15, John Kerry accusing American soldiers of terrorizing Iraqi women and children, Jack Murtha declaring that the U.S. Army is utterly broken. Pepper 'em with a handful of "Praise be to Allahs" and any one of those statements could have been uttered by Zarqawi.
a marine's wife meets the president
Via Hugh Hewitt:
...After he spoke he greeted people in the audience. When he came near me I said, "President Bush my husband is in Iraq." He immediately made eye contact with me and came over to me.
I had a picture of Patrick in my hand and I said, "Here is my husband." He got a funny expression on his face, and I looked at my hand holding Patrick's picture and noticed that his picture was backwards (I was showing President Bush the back of the picture that was blank).
I instantly turned the picture around and President Bush took it out of my hand and looked at it. Then he turned it over and took a Sharpie out of his suit jacket and asked, "What is your husband's name?" I shouted out, "1st Lt Francescon!"
He smiled then asked, "What is his first name?" Completely embarrassed I said, "Oh, Patrick." As President Bush was signing the back of Patrick's picture, I thought to myself, Okay, here is my chance to tell the President that Patrick is honored to call him Commander-in-Chief."
But those words didn't come out of my mouth. I instead said, (and I know that Patrick would have not said this, and is going to be humiliated when I tell him I said this) "President Bush my husband loves to serve for you! He loves you!"
It was a little over the top, I know, I was just so nervous and excited that I became another person--I don't know who she was...oh, well!
After President Bush wrote "Patrick, thank you and God bless! --George Bush" on the back of Patrick's picture, President Bush then gave me a big hug and then KISSED me on my forehead and said, "Sweetie, everything is going to be alright."
stem cell bunco
Last year California voters approved a proposition to fund embryonic stem cell to the tune of $3 billion. The arguments were basically between a) those who thought lots of money was all it would take to cure the sick and b) those who thought using embryos for research was immoral.
I hated the idea because it put the state of California in the venture capital business. Bad, bad idea.
Where do things stand today?
A year after the passage of Proposition 71, the $3 billion Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative, there is no sign of any research, let alone cures, and the measure is literally on trial in Alameda County Superior Court.
Last month, Judge Bonnie Sabraw rejected a state request to dismiss lawsuits from opponents who charge that Proposition 71 is unconstitutional because it exists outside of state control. Judge Sabraw also lifted a stay on discovery in the case, but many of the measure's problems are already evident.
Proposition 71 was a triumph of political marketing by a man who is neither a scientist nor a medical researcher. The ballot measure, which created the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, was the brainchild of Robert Klein II, a Bay Area real-estate millionaire.
At Stanford law school, Klein worked for a legal aid society on housing-rights cases. At age 27, the California Legislature hired him to draft bills that created the California Housing Finance Authority. Son of the former city manager of Fresno, Klein went on to become a deal-maker with experience in bond issues.
A 1984 Fresno Bee report describes how, in 1981, Klein arranged for Fresno County to issue $27.8 million in low-interest loans to companies with which he was closely associated. Some of the money was then lent, according to The Bee, "at advantageous rates to development partnerships headed by Klein." In 1982, the Fresno Board of Supervisors would hire one of those partnerships, the Tomar Klein Financial Group, as a consultant on a bond issue.
Klein did not enjoy the scrutiny of his actions and said that, from then on, he would stay out of government work. He didn't, but he did learn a lesson. When he wrote Proposition 71, he made sure to keep politicians, critics and even the public at bay. The measure remains off-limits to amendment for three years. After that, legislators can only make changes if 70 percent of the state Senate and Assembly approve.
Klein also wrote the law to require that the chairman of the CIRM oversight committee have a background in advocacy of stem-cell research and experience in state government and bond issues. Sure enough, he got the job he essentially wrote for himself, becoming chairman of the Independent Citizens Oversight Committee, a 29-member board appointed by the governor and other elected officials.
saturday december 17, 2005
an egyptian's envy
...watching the Iraqis vote in a meaningful election.
president bush:
To fight the war on terror, I am using authority vested in me by Congress, including the Joint Authorization for Use of Military Force, which passed overwhelmingly in the first week after September the 11th. I'm also using constitutional authority vested in me as Commander-in-Chief.
In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. Before we intercept these communications, the government must have information that establishes a clear link to these terrorist networks.
This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security. Its purpose is to detect and prevent terrorist attacks against the United States, our friends and allies. Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk. Revealing classified information is illegal, alerts our enemies, and endangers our country.
As the 9/11 Commission pointed out, it was clear that terrorists inside the United States were communicating with terrorists abroad before the September the 11th attacks, and the commission criticized our nation's inability to uncover links between terrorists here at home and terrorists abroad. Two of the terrorist hijackers who flew a jet into the Pentagon, Nawaf al Hamzi and Khalid al Mihdhar, communicated while they were in the United States to other members of al Qaeda who were overseas. But we didn't know they were here, until it was too late.
The authorization I gave the National Security Agency after September the 11th helped address that problem in a way that is fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities. The activities I have authorized make it more likely that killers like these 9/11 hijackers will be identified and located in time. And the activities conducted under this authorization have helped detect and prevent possible terrorist attacks in the United