LATE IS THE HOUR:

Vatican: Pope receives Last Rites (Daily Telegraph 31/03/2005)

Pope John Paul II has received the Last Rites, the Roman Catholic sacrament reserved for the sick and dying.

A Vatican spokesman confirmed reports from the Italian media that the Pontiff, who is suffering from a very high fever caused by a urinary infection, received the sacrament earlier today after doctors inserted a tube in his throat to ease his breathing.

Pilgrims gather for sombre vigil as Pope 'nears the end' (Richard Owen, 4/01/05, Times of London)

DOCTORS were rushed to the Pope’s bedside last night as his condition worsened dramatically and a senior cardinal said that he was “nearing the end”.

Rumours swept Rome that the Pope had been given the sacrament of the infirm (last rites).

Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the chief Vatican spokesman, said that the Pope was suffering from a high temperature caused by a urinary tract infection that was being treated urgently with antibiotics. “The Holy Father today was struck by a high fever caused by a confirmed infection of the urinary tract,” Dr Navarro-Valls said.

“The medical situation is being strictly controlled by the Vatican medical team that is taking care of him.”

Vatican sources denied, however, that the Pope was being transferred to the Gemelli hospital in Rome, where he has already been treated twice since the beginning of February.

Early this morning the Vatican said that the Pope was responding to the antibiotics and his condition had stabilised.

Italian new agencies said that the Pope, 84, was suffering from a high temperature and substantial weight loss. The reports said that doctors had intervened because of a “worrying lowering of blood pressure”.

Overnight the lights were burning in the Pope’s rooms in the third floor of the apostolic apartment above a floodlit St Peter’s Square, which was sealed as pilgrims gathered to keep vigil. Italian television made special late-night broadcasts announcing that the Pope was “seriously ill”.

Pope suffers heart attack (The Age, April 1, 2005)

Pope John Paul II suffered a heart attack and his condition is "very serious", Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said today.

"Following a urinary tract infection, septic shock and a cardiocirculatory collapse occurred," Navarro-Valls said in a statement. [...]

Navarro-Valls said the Pope had been given the Holy Viaticum - communion reserved for those close to death - and had decided himself not to go to hospital for treatment.

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WHAT IF NO ONE HAD NOTICED THAT NIXON WENT TO CHINA?:

Going Out for Indian: By helping India become "a major world power," the administration is showing the global seriuosness of the Bush Doctrine. (Tom Donnelly, 03/31/2005, Weekly Standard)

WITH THE NEWS from Iraq relegated to the back pages recently, last Friday's State Department briefing--especially since it was not devoted to Condoleezza Rice's latest fashion statements--attracted little attention. The subject: the evolving strategic partnership between the United States and India. The news? It is the "goal" of the Bush administration "to help India become a major world power in the 21st century."

This is indeed a monumental and welcome development; it's the clearest sign to date that the Bush Doctrine has a genuine strategic logic, that it's more than a justification for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. To realize the president's goals, particularly the commitment to spreading freedom that was the core message of his Second Inaugural Address, the United States needs a workable, how-to plan, one that bends the instruments of international politics--most notably, the tools of "hard" power like military force and political alliances--to American purposes. A U.S.-India strategic partnership, if fully developed, would be the single most important step toward an alliance capable of meeting the 21st century's principal challenges: radical Islam and rising China.

Unlike our almost erstwhile allies in western Europe, India shares an equal strategic concern with both these challenges. Perhaps even more important, India shares a commitment to democracy that transcends ethnic nationalism--Hindu nationalism, in this case, will not suffice to govern a state that includes 120 million Muslims--and an understanding of the necessity for armed strength. India's position in South Asia puts it in an essential geostrategic location from both a continental and maritime perspective. In sum, the United States could hardly dream up a more ideal strategic partner.

Fifty years from today the forging of this alliance will rank only slightly behind liberalizing the Middle East among the President's accomplishment's yet the MSM has barely even noticed it.

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ALL A WITE WASH:

'Inheriting Syria' in the Modern Age (Terry Gross, 3/31/05, Fresh Air)

Flynt Leverett is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. As Syria is prodded to withdraw its troops -- and influence -- from neighboring Lebanon, the region faces potentially drastic changes.

A veteran expert on Middle East policy -- from the National Security Council and the State Department to the CIA -- Leverett has also written a new book, Inheriting Syria: Bashar’s Trial By Fire, about Bashar al-Assad's rule of Syria after following his father as the country's leader.

For today's priceless moment with the Realists, Ms Gross asked Mr. Leverett if Bashar Assad and his father could be called "brutal" rulers. Mr. Leverett was, naturally, unable to say any such thing, though he did go on to explain that 10 to 20, 000 Syrians had "died" at Hama. One wonders how many of your people you have to murder to qualify as brutal in his book. Meanwhile, by the end of the program he was almost sobbing at the thought of the challenges that poor Baby Assad faces.

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YES, DEAR:

Grumpy old men are a myth. It's the women who rage (Lewis Smith, 4/01/05, Times of London)

GRUMPY old men are just a myth. It’s women who are really raging in old age, research indicates.

Far from following the lead of Victor Meldrew, elderly men are calm old buffers who refuse to fly off the handle. Their womenfolk, on the other hand, have been boiling with anger since they were young, a situation that fails to improve with age.

The grumpy old women do score over men in one respect, however; they are much better at hiding their anger.

“Victor Meldrew was the exception and not the rule,” Jane Barnett, of Middlesex University, said in reference to Richard Wilson’s permanently cross character in the hit television show One Foot in the Grave.

She added that the Grumpy Old Women television programme, featuring people such as Janet Street-Porter and Germaine Greer ranting at a succession of irritants, was far better at reflecting reality than its counterpart Grumpy Old Men.[....]

[R]ather than follow the stereotype of male anger and reasonable female calm the women showed themselves to be far crosser than men. Once organised into age brackets it became clear that although men and women showed the same levels of anger aged 18 to 25, their responses sharply diverged as they aged.

By the time they are heading for their 40th birthday men are far less easily angered and the downward trend continues, though not at the same rate, during the ages of 41 to 60. Women’s anger levels remain the same throughout their lives and by the time they collect their pensions they are as aerated as the day they began their careers.

The study backed up previous research indicating that there is a gender difference in what makes people angry.

Men were far more likely to be infuriated by the actions of strangers and inanimate objects while what made women most cross were the people they were closest to. Frustration at failing to meet personal goals was the same for men and women.

Miss Barnett told the conference in Manchester yesterday that more research was needed into why men calm down while women “remain simmering” through the ages.
Do you really need this research when you've got Harvard Faculty meetings you can observe?

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WHO ELSE WOULD YOU LEND MONEY?:

Surprise--America Owes Too Little (Kenneth L. Fisher, 04.18.05, Forbes)

What is the right debt level for society to carry? The answer is: that level where our marginal borrowing costs approach our marginal return on assets. This is, in fact, the same formula that a corporation would use. If you can borrow at 6% to build a factory that will yield a return of 12%, you should borrow.

The U.S. is nowhere near there. As a result, we need more debt to get more income, so people can become wealthier.

The Federal Reserve counts $97 trillion of assets in the economy, offset by $44 trillion of debt, leaving (with rounding) $52 trillion of net worth. The asset figure, to be sure, involves some double-counting (General Motors' factory, an asset, is financed by bonds, counted again as an asset in your individual retirement account), but no matter: The key figure is the $52 trillion at the bottom of the U.S. balance sheet. And we're getting a great return on that $52 trillion. Our national income is $12 trillion.

Yes, most of the income is labor income, not a return on capital as conventionally calculated. Yet think for a moment: Why are labor rates higher here than in Madagascar? It's precisely because we have so much invested in the form of roads, factories and job skills. I compare the $12 trillion income to the $52 trillion of net capital and conclude that capital is extremely productive in this country. I'm not worried about importing a little more of it and putting it to use.

Folks fret about our $2 trillion of consumer debt and $4 trillion of federal government debt. But these are small numbers in relation to our income, to our total debt (mortgage and business debts are far larger) and to our net worth. Stop worrying. Instead, buy stocks.

Lend us more and we'll make it grow.

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ANY THEORY THAT SOUNDS NONSENSICAL ENOUGH IS:

Black holes 'do not exist': These mysterious objects are dark-energy stars, physicist claims. (Philip Ball, 3/31/05, Nature)

Black holes are staples of science fiction and many think astronomers have observed them indirectly. But according to a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, these awesome breaches in space-time do not and indeed cannot exist.

Over the past few years, observations of the motions of galaxies have shown that some 70% the Universe seems to be composed of a strange 'dark energy' that is driving the Universe's accelerating expansion.

George Chapline thinks that the collapse of the massive stars, which was long believed to generate black holes, actually leads to the formation of stars that contain dark energy. "It's a near certainty that black holes don't exist," he claims.

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THAT'S WHY GOD GAVE US PLIERS:

I pulled out my own teeth (TREVOR KAVANAGH, 3/31/05, Daily Sun)

TONY Blair yesterday faced a woman who pulled out SEVEN of her teeth after failing to find an NHS dentist.

Great-grandmother Valerie Halsworth, 64, removed them with her husband’s pliers.

She pulled out a seventh tooth over the weekend before meeting the PM in Coventry yesterday.

If more folks were like Ms Halsworth maybe National Health wouldn't be collapsing.

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GOOD ENOUGH FOR HARRY:

Bush Highlights Thrift Savings Plans (Fox News, March 31, 2005)

The retirement savings plan that federal employees enjoy and President Bush cites as a model for his individual investment accounts differs in a key regard from what he proposes: Bush would carve the new accounts out of the Social Security taxes workers now pay.

The government workers' savings plan, by contrast, is in addition to the Social Security taxes they pay and the benefits they are promised.

Democrats have said they would be much more inclined to embrace the private accounts — the signature item of the president's proposed Social Security overhaul — if they, too, were treated as an add-on to the traditional benefit check rather than a partial replacement.

One Republican, Rep. Clay Shaw of Florida, who oversees a House Social Security subcommittee, has filed legislation that would create the accounts as an addition to the program. But so far the broader debate over ensuring Social Security's long-term solvency has stalled over opposition to the president's "carve-out" accounts.

"It is just so unfair, misleading and fraudulent," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said of the president's references to the Thrift Savings Plan (search). The Nevada Democrat accused the administration of using carve-out accounts as a Trojan Horse for eliminating Social Security, by siphoning off the taxes that pay benefits.

Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, said: "It's a political pitch because his accounts can't stand on their own merits, so what he tries to do is pretend that the Thrift Savings Plan that Congress and federal employees have is the same as what he's proposing and is something Congress is denying to the public."

Do it as an add-on but means test SS benefits and both sides can claim victory, even though it effectively ends SS.

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IS THAT AN INCRIMINATING DOCUMENT IN YOUR PANTS OR ARE YOU HOMELESS?:

Ex-National Security Adviser to Plead Guilty to Taking Classified Material (Fox News, March 31, 2005)

Former national security adviser Sandy Berger will plead guilty to taking classified material from the National Archives, a misdemeanor, the Justice Department said Thursday. [...]

The former Clinton administration official previously acknowledged he removed from the National Archives copies of documents about the government's anti-terror efforts and notes that he took on those documents. He said he was reviewing the materials to help determine which Clinton administration documents to provide to the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

He called the episode "an honest mistake," and denied criminal wrongdoing.

Berger and his lawyer, Lanny Breuer, have said Berger knowingly removed the handwritten notes by placing them in his jacket and pants and inadvertently took copies of actual classified documents in a leather portfolio. He returned most of the documents, but some still are missing.

If your kid said he was sorry about taking the cookies but they ended up in his pants by mistake you'd punish him more severely.

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COME BACK, PTOLEMY, ALL IS FORGIVEN:

Five Out of Five Researchers Agree: Earth's Solar System Special (Sara Goudarzi, 3/31/05, SPACE.com)

Though researchers find more and more distant planets revolving around alien suns, the discoveries highlight that Earth and its solar system may be an exceptionally rare place indeed.

That was the consensus here Wednesday evening among five planetary science experts who spoke at the 5th annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Panel Debate held at the American Museum of Natural History.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium, moderated the informal discussion. At issue was whether our solar system is special, why it looks the way it does, and how others thus far detected differ. The debate took place between theoretical and observational scientists on the different aspects of detecting and categorizing alien solar systems. About 700 people attended the event.

Prior to the discovery of planets around stars other than our sun in the 1990’s, scientists thought that alien solar systems must look something like our own. They presumed that just like our solar system, there would be small rocky planets like as Earth close to their host stars and large, low density ones a little farther out. But what they discovered were solar systems unlike ours with big Jupiter-like planets close to their host star.

Of the 150 alien planets found, none of them resemble our own. “So maybe it’s not the enigma of other solar systems, it’s the enigma of our solar system,” Tyson said in opening the debate.

The more science you do the better our ancestors look.

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IF I WERE TRULY OBSESSED WE'D HAVE NAMED THE THIRD KID "DELINO":

My Fantasy Life: Our NEWSWEEK sports columnist, finally, comes clean and puts you in touch with his infantile side. (Mark Starr, March 31, 2005, Newsweek)

I confess that, for a man my age, I have a very active fantasy life. And my wife can get really steamed about it sometimes.

Nah, not that kind of fantasy. I told you ages ago that I haven’t had an impure thought about another woman since Natalie Wood crossed the Great Divide. I’m not talking about the ladies. I’m talking fantasy baseball.

I am one of the multitude of Americans—estimates now run to 15 million—who play fantasy baseball, a preoccupation that has grown from the quirky little hobby of some New York writers into a billion-dollar industry. (And there is now fantasy football, basketball, NASCAR and, for all I know, fantasy “American Idol” too … or is “American Idol” the actual fantasy?) The pioneers of the fantasy baseball game have seen very little of any money generated by their idea. Hardly surprising. If they had a knack for profit, they wouldn’t be in my profession.

For the uninitiated, fantasy baseball uses real players and real stats to create faux teams in faux leagues. The teams are formed in auctions—my league gathers for the annual bidfest in the basement of a West Side Irish bar in New York City—or in NFL-style drafts. At auction, everybody has the same amount of money to buy the same number of players for their team, a delicious counterpoint to the financial inequities in the real game.

The original concept is credited to Dan Okrent, who would later despair that its success would dominate his obituary. But now that Okrent has served as the first public editor (i.e., ombudsman) of The New York Times, he has assured himself a slightly different post mortem (“Dan Okrent, the first public editor of The New York Times and the man who invented fantasy baseball …”). Okrent shared the idea with his cohorts during a meal in a now-defunct New York restaurant called La Rotisserie Francaise. Thus the game became known as “Rotisserie Baseball.” When the hoi polloi got involved, they cut through the fancy Frenchified title and to the chase—fantasy baseball.

Okrent’s Rotisserie gang made its debut in 1980, using National League players. Our league followed a year later, a junior circuit with an American League attachment. We became the American Dream League. (Our name was a riff on the Norman Mailer novel and meant as a decided irony for a bunch of ‘60s cynics who weren’t all that sold on the concept of the American dream.) What is remarkable is that we are now entering our 25th season, with 12 teams and 18 owners still going strong, still battling with our imaginary teams. (My team is Nova, a triple play on a fiery Starr, a smoked fish and, in a tribute to multiculturalism that was ahead of its time, “no go” in Spanish). This weekend we will come from six states around the country to celebrate the remarkable feat of our survival with a Tex-Mex banquet in Greenwich Village (if banquet and Tex-Mex can rightfully exist in the same sentence).

I joke not when I say it is remarkable. There are very few such alliances of pals—poker games, golf games, book clubs, investment clubs, dining groups or anything else—that have lasted a quarter of a century.

Infantile? We of the Juddernaut resent that crack.

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DESPITE THE OBLIGATORY SATAN REFERENCE:

The Politics of Churlishness: GIVING GEORGE W. BUSH HIS DUE ON DEMOCRACY (Martin Peretz, 03.31.05, New Republic)

Bush, it now seems safe to say, is one of the great surprises in modern U.S. history. Nothing about his past suggested that he harbored these ideals nor the qualities of character required for their realization. Right up to the moment Bush became president, I was convinced that his mind, at least on matters Levantine, belonged to his father and to James Baker III, whose worldview seemed to be defined by the pecuniary prejudice of oil and Texas: Keep the ruling Arabs happy. But I was wrong, and, in light of what has already been achieved in the Middle East, I am glad to say so. Most American liberals, alas, enjoy no similar gladness. They are not exactly pleased by the positive results of Bush's campaign in the Middle East. They deny and resent and begrudge and snipe. They are trapped in the politics of churlishness.

The achievements of Bush's foreign policy abroad represent a revolution in the foreign policy culture at home. The traditional Republican mentality that was so perfectly and meanly represented by Bush père and Baker precluded the United States from pressing the Arabs about reform--about anything--for decades. Not Iraq about its tyranny and its record of genocide, not Syria about its military occupation of Lebanon and its own brutal Baathist dictatorship, not Egypt about loosening the crippling bonds of a statist economy and an authoritarian political system, not Saudi Arabia about its championing of the Wahhabi extremism that made its own country so desiccated and the world so dangerous, and certainly not the Palestinians about the fantasy that they had won all the wars that they had actually lost and were therefore entitled to the full rewards due them from their victories. [...]

History has never traveled in the Middle East as fast as it has during the last two years. In this place where time seems to have stopped, time has suddenly accelerated. It may be true (more likely, it is not) that a deep yearning for democracy has been latent throughout the region for a long time. There certainly was a basis in reality for skepticism about the Arabs' hospitability to the opening of their societies. Whatever the proper historical and cultural analysis of the past, however, the fact is that democracy did not begin even to breathe until the small coalition of Western nations led by the United States destroyed the most ruthless dictatorship in the area.

Democracy in Mesopotamia? A fantasy, surely. But not quite. Iraq was, despite its unbelievably bloody history, a rather sophisticated place. During the nineteenth century, many Baghdadis went abroad to study. Modern nationalism sank some roots. Baghdad itself had a plurality of Jews, learned and mercantile, until they fled to the new state of Israel. An ancient minority of Christians survived into the age of Sunni pogroms and survives--though in lesser numbers--still. The Kurds grew relatively tolerant in the areas they dominated. And the majority Shia, though viciously persecuted from the founding of the Iraqi state after World War I--with the not-so-passive consent of the British colonials--and condemned to near-genocide by Saddam's revolutionary republic, have generally maintained the restraint that piety sometimes allows. After a year and a half of nearly daily Sunni bloodletting among them, the Shia have not wreaked the vengeance they surely could and, equally as surely, some of them long to take.

The U.S. liberation-occupation has now tried to cobble together these diverging Iraqis into the beginnings of a democratic regime. Wonder of wonders, these estranged cousins have shown some talent in the art of compromise; and trying to make this polity work is hardly an effort undertaken without courage. The judge who was killed with his son outside his home on his way to work at the tribunal that will try Saddam knew that danger stalked him, and so did the rest of the victims of Sunni bloodlust. This bloodlust evokes an unmistakable but macabre schadenfreude among many critics of the war, who want nothing of history except to be proved right. It is as if suicide bombings and other sorts of helter-skelter murder were a just judgment on the wrongdoings--yes, there have been wrongdoings, some of them really disgusting--of the Bush administration. And, even if ridding western Asia of Saddam is reluctantly accepted as justified, what blogger couldn't have accomplished what came after more deftly?

In any case, this churlish orthodoxy tells us that the Sunnis need to be enticed into the political game lest it be deemed illegitimate. In this scenario, it is the murderers who withhold or bestow moral authority. John F. Burns, the defiantly honest New York Times journalist in Baghdad, who has consistently reported the ambiguous and truly tangled realities of the war, now sees the Baathist and Sunni warriors in retreat, if not actually beaten. What will probably happen in Iraq is a version of what endured for decades in Lebanon: a representative government rooted in sect--argumentative, perhaps even corrupt, but functioning. Lebanon was never perfect, but it worked reasonably well, until the aggressive Palestinian guests took to commanding Shia turf to establish a "state within a state." (This was a phenomenon that the nimble Thomas L. Friedman did not much report on in the first leg of his journey From Beirut to Jerusalem, confiding that fear for his life and livelihood kept him from deviating too far from the Palestinian story as they wanted it told. Eason Jordan avant la lettre.)

The fine fruits of the Bush administration's indifference to international opinion may be seen now in Lebanon, too. What is happening there is the most concrete intra-Arab consequence of the Iraq war. Nothing could be done in Lebanon without Syria's sanction, no government decision without the approval of Damascus, no business without a hefty Damascene percentage. Syrian troops and spies were everywhere. Lebanese of all sects and clans have been restive for years. But they lived in the fearful memory of their mad civil war, the civil war of the daily car bombs in the marketplace. Suddenly, the elections in Iraq, Bush's main achievement there, exhilarating and inspiring, sprung loose the psychological impediments that shackled the Lebanese to Syria. Even if the outcomes will not be exactly the same, this was Prague and Berlin at the end of the long subjugation to their neighbor to the east. More immediately, this was Kiev only a few months ago. The first mass protest against the Syrians and their satrap prime minister drew tens of thousands. Then there was the much larger crowd of pro-Syria Shia from the south, a disconcerting moment. But, after that, a multitude so huge that it defied counting, and so diverse. This was the true cedar revolution, a revolution of the young, for independence, for freedom from the failing but always brutal Damascus regime next door. Will Vladimir Putin be so stupid as to invest credit and arms in the stiff and callow son of Hafez Al Assad?

None of this happened by spontaneous generation. Yes, there were lucky breaks: Yasir Arafat died, Syria conspired somehow to have former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri assassinated. And yes, the new directions are young, and the autocratic-theocratic political culture of the Middle East is old, and it is once again too early to proclaim that the mission has been accomplished. As the ancient Israelite king observed, let he who girds his harness not boast as he who takes it off. But the mission is nonetheless real, and far along, and it is showing thrilling accomplishments. It is simply stupid, empirically and philosophically, to deny that all or any of this would have happened without the deeply unpopular but historically grand initiative of Bush. The hundreds of thousands of young people in Martyrs' Square knew that they had Bush's backing. The president seems even to have enticed Jacques Chirac into a more active policy toward Lebanon: For him, too, Syria had to go. If this satisfies Chirac's yearning for la gloire, so be it. (But it will not be so easy to maintain such alliances: Already, Security Council members are said to be working up plans to put the future of Lebanon under the protective care of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, when nothing in unifil's past--nothing--should provide confidence that it is able, or even disposed, to act decisively against Arab brutality.)

What is occurring in Saudi Arabia and Egypt is also heartening, if more than a bit tentative. Under pressure from the Bush administration, the Saudis have allowed the first local elections in the country's history: an election to bodies that cannot make big decisions, and an election limited to male voters, naturally. But infidels (that is, Shia) may also vote. By Saudi standards, this is the revolution of 1848. In Egypt, responding to the insistence of the Bush people, President Hosni Mubarak has allowed that he will permit opponents to run in the presidential elections against him. Mubarak has no chance of losing ... this time. Maybe, however, the son will not be the father's inevitable successor, and maybe the Arab custom of turning dictatorships into dynasties will also come to an end, at least in Cairo. And, in the brave figure of Ayman Nour, the world now has a hero of the anti-Mubarak forces to celebrate and to support. In both countries, to be sure, what we are seeing are the bare beginnings of a democratic process, the very bare beginnings. It will be years, maybe decades, before these become democratic polities. And there is always the chance--as was the case in Algeria, once the jewel in the shabby crown of the "nonaligned"--that the vox populi will vote wrong. In the Algerian instance, it had to vote wrong: The choice was between national fascists and pious fascists. Take your pick.

So the situation is certainly complex. But complexity is not a warrant for despair. The significant fact is that Bush's obsession with the democratization of the region is working. Have Democrats begun to wonder how it came to pass that this noble cause became the work of Republicans?

Jon Stewart Syndrome strikes again.

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ARTICLES OF FAITH

Secularization Doesn’t Just Happen (Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, First Things, March, 2005)

“As society became more modern, it became more secular.” That sentence has about it a certain “of courseness.” It or its equivalent is to be found in numerous textbooks from grade school through graduate school. The connection between modernization and secularization is taken for granted. Christian Smith, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, challenges what everybody knows in an important new collection of essays by several sociologists and historians, The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life (University of California Press, 484 pp., $60). The challenge is not novel with Smith. Social scientists who had long propounded “secularization theory,” Peter L. Berger very notably among them, have in recent years undergone a major change of mind. The contribution of Smith’s big book is in his detailed analysis of the dubious (sometimes contrary to fact) assumptions underlying the theory, and in the case studies he and his colleagues present showing how various interest groups have employed the theory in the service of their own quest for power, usually at the expense of religion and religious institutions.

There are, writes Smith, seven crucial and related defects in conventional secularization theory. Over-abstraction: the literature of the theorists routinely spoke of “differentiation,” “autonomization,” “privatization,” and other abstract, if not abstruse, dynamics disengaged from concrete factors of social change such as interests, ideologies, institutions, and power conflicts. Lack of human agency: the theory was big on process without protagonists. It depicted secularization without secularizers. According to the theory, secularization just happens. Overdeterministic inevitability: “Religion’s marginalization from public life is portrayed as a natural or inevitable process like cell mitosis or adolescent puberty.” Secularization theory reflects a view of linear social evolution in the tradition of Comte and Spencer. “If there is one truth that history teaches us beyond doubt,” wrote the great Durkheim, “it is that religion tends to embrace a smaller and smaller portion of social life.” Any questions, class?

Idealist intellectual history: here the history of ideas is determinative. Owen Chadwick’s The Secularization of the European Mind (note the focus on the mind) puts the primary explanatory emphasis on the philosophy of liberalism, evolutionary theory, Marxist ideology, and so forth. Smith writes, “Culture, philosophy, and intellectual systems certainly matter. But they cannot be abstracted from the real historical, social, political, legal, and institutional dynamics through which they worked and were worked upon.” Romanticized history: there was in the view of secularization theorists an “age of faith”—for instance, the thirteenth century—which was succeeded and displaced by the age of reason and modernity. Then everything was religious; now everything, or at least everything that matters in public, is secular. Against that view, anthropologist Mary Douglas writes: “Secularization is often treated as a modern trend. But the contrast of secular with religious has nothing whatsoever to do with the contrast of modern with traditional or primitive. The idea that primitive man is by nature deeply religious is nonsense. The truth is that all of the varieties of skepticism, materialism, and spiritual fervor are found in the range of tribal societies. They vary as much from one another on these lines as any chosen segment of London life.”

An overemphasis on religious self-destruction: Berger’s 1967 The Sacred Canopy suggested that the Judeo-Christian tradition “carried the seeds of secularization within itself.” Ancient Israel’s monotheism began the secularization process by historicizing and rationalizing ethics, a process which Catholicism temporarily restrained but which the Protestant Reformation returned to full force in bringing about a “disenchanted” (Weber) world. A host of theorists agreed that the Reformation and the cultural exhaustion following the “wars of religion” hastened the process of secularization. While not discounting such claims entirely, Smith writes, “What most versions of secularization theory overlook is the important role played by other, nonreligious and antireligious actors in the process of secularization. At the very least, our analytical framework should include room to account for all the players who may have been involved in a process of change.”

Seventh and finally, underspecified causal mechanisms: the influential Bryan Wilson, for example, simply asserted the incompatibility of modernity and religion: “The moral intimations of Christianity do not belong to a world ordered by conveyor belts, time-and-motion studies, and bureaucratic organizations. The very thought processes which these devices demand of men leave little place for the operation of the divine.” One is reminded of the “demythologizing” New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann and his dictum that a man who knows how to work a light switch cannot believe in divine causality. Again, it was Berger who wrote very persuasively, thirty and more years ago, about the powerful linkage between “social structure” and consciousness. To all this Smith responds: “But sociologists and historians give too little attention to explaining exactly how and why these social changes had their supposed detrimental effects on religion. Exactly why did urbanization or technological developments have to undermine religious authority? Exactly how did industrialization and immigration work to produce religious privatization? Why should we treat these as some kind of ‘great gears of history’ that inexorably grind their way toward religious privatization? Rather than all nodding our scholarly heads together in what could be premature analytical closure, we need to go back and force ourselves to answer these questions again.”

Although these seven dubious beliefs clearly run through just about everything secularists think and do, most of them are certain they live in a world of pure and objective empiricism with minds uncluttered by prejudice or dogmatic influence.

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WHY HAS [STORY] GIVEN US...:

Cracking the Story Code: There are seven basic plots that tell the human tale. (Christopher Booker, March 31, 2005, LA Times)

One of the greatest mysteries in our lives lies so close beneath our noses that we don't even recognize it to be a mystery. Why do we tell stories? Why has evolution given us the ability to conjure up these sequences of imaginary happenings, on which, through movies, novels, plays, TV soaps and comic strips, we spend so much of our lives?

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THE GOYS WHO CRIED WOLF:

Wolfowitz wins unanimous bank vote (Andrew Balls, March 31 2005, Financial Times)

The World Bank's member countries met on Thursday to appoint Paul Wolfowitz, US deputy defence secretary, as president of the world's leading development institution.

The bank's executive directors approved the controversial US nominee in a unanimous vote as James Wolfensohn prepares to step down at the end of May after almost 10 years in the post.

All that hysteria for nothing?

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THEY'RE DOING THEIR PART:

Long Queues as Zimbabwe Votes in Test for Mugabe (Cris Chinaka, 3/31/05, Reuters)

Zimbabweans queued in large numbers on Thursday to vote in polls which President Robert Mugabe says will deliver a clear victory for his ruling party but which Western powers have already condemned as unfair.

Thousands of voters in the capital Harare defied early drizzle to cast their ballots after polling stations opened at 7:00 am (12 a.m. EST), while in rural areas people turned out by bicycle and donkey-cart.

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THE CREAM OF THE WORST GOVERNED NATION IN THE WEST:

De Gaulle's Tattered Legacy (Jim Hoagland, March 31, 2005, Washington Post)

Charles de Gaulle bequeathed the French two big ideas and the atomic bomb to see them through the sad national duty of surviving without him. The bomb is still there and probably always will be. The ideas may not be as resilient. They face severe challenge this spring.

One idea was to form a superbly educated, merit-based political elite to revitalize the defeated and demoralized nation that emerged from World War II. The cream of the intellectual crop would be chosen by rigorous examinations, educated in prestigious national schools and assigned important government jobs based on grades.

This meritocracy produced two working generations of talented, dedicated administrators who gradually moved to the top of France's business and political establishments. How you respond to "the French" depends in some measure on how you react to dealing with the smartest kid in the class, who cannot resist occasionally reminding you of that fact. You may not find that as invigorating as I (usually) do.

Is there a more absurd notion than a French elite? Who's the last Frenchman that mattered? Napoleon?

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THE LAST HOSTAGE GOES FREE:

Koppel to Leave ABC (ABC News, March 31, 2005)
Ted Koppel, the "Nightline" anchor and a 42-year veteran of ABC News, will leave the network in December.
Who even knew he was still there?

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CATS AND DOGS SLEEPING TOGETHER:

An Unlikely Meeting Of the Minds: For Very Different Reasons, Groups Agree on Gas Alternatives (Greg Schneider, March 31, 2005, Washington Post)

A who's who of right-leaning military hawks -- including former CIA director R. James Woolsey and Iraq war advocate Frank J. Gaffney Jr. -- has joined with environmental advocates such as the Natural Resources Defense Council to lobby Congress to spend $12 billion to cut oil use in half by 2025. The alliance highlights how popular sentiment is turning against the no-worries gas-guzzling culture of the past decade and how alternative technologies such as gas-electric hybrids are finding increasingly widespread support.

"I think there are a number of things converging," said Gary L. Bauer, a former Republican presidential candidate and former head of the Family Research Council who has signed on to a strange-bedfellows coalition of conservatives and environmentalists called Set America Free. "I just think reasonable people are more inclined right now to start thinking about ways our country's future isn't dependent on . . . oil from a region where there are a lot of very bad actors."

One important factor in the convergence is there's no downside to the policy.

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U HAUL:

THE GREATEST SAVE: The inside story of the daring rescue of a Tiger's mother (TAMARA AUDI and MICHAEL ROSENBERG, 3/31/05, Detroit FREE PRESS)

He went over the plan again in his head.

Sixteen men on the ground, armed with M-16 rifles and newly sharpened machetes. Four men in the chopper, three more in the plane. The ground force would split into six Jeeps floated by boat across the Orinoco River. They would drive into the Amazon jungle as far as the Jeeps could go, then hike into the mountains the rest of the way, a two-hour march, each man weighed down by weapons and flak jackets. They would reach camp at sunrise and attack immediately.

He hoped she would be alive when they got there.

It had been five months since gunmen seized Maura Villarreal, the 54-year-old mother of Tigers pitcher Ugueth Urbina, whisking her away in a worn, green Ford Fiesta.

Even in a country with an alarming rise in the number of kidnappings, this one was unlike any other. The brazen, daylight abduction of a sports star's mother showed kidnappers were getting bolder. Maura's captors had even dressed in the official uniforms of the federal police.

The case stunned Venezuelans and dominated the life of Joel Rengifo, a fit, balding 48-year-old federal police commander with a methodical mind and crooked front teeth, lying now on an uncomfortable bed in a rented room, replaying the rescue plan, disobeying his own orders to sleep.

In a few hours, Rengifo and his men would leave this village outside Caicara, a last outpost before the mountainous jungle that consumes lower Venezuela, and embark on the most important mission of their careers and one of the most dangerous of their lives. [...]

On Sept. 2, Urbina boarded a flight from Miami to Caracas, the chic, turbulent capital of his home country.

It was a backward journey for Urbina, who had spent a decade trying to escape Venezuela's slums for a major league life in North America. In a scant three hours and 15 minutes -- the time it took to fly from Miami -- Venezuela's troubles would claim him, again.

In 1994, when he was 20 and barely holding a spot on a Double-A roster in Harrisburg, Pa., Urbina received what was then the worst news of his life. His father and biggest supporter, Juan Manuel, had been shot and killed trying to resist four young robbers on the streets of Ocumare del Tuy.

Urbina went home, devastated. He told his mother he would never play again. Maura would not hear of it. She reminded him that his father always thought he would make the big leagues and wanted him to be a star.

Five weeks after his father's murder, Urbina was back in the United States, playing ball. Friends said he returned with new purpose -- to make his father proud and give his mother and brothers a secure, comfortable life. In 1995, a year after his father's death, Urbina pitched in his first game for the Montreal Expos.

Three years later, already known for his fastball and intimidating on-mound sneer, Urbina signed a long-term contract with the Expos for $10 million.

He moved his mother and brothers out of a rough, cramped apartment complex in Ocumare del Tuy into a large white stucco house in a middle-class neighborhood of pastels, palms and new American cars.

Urbina installed himself in a gorgeous, bright-yellow mansion in a fashionable neighborhood of Caracas. He bought a gold Mercedes, a motorcycle and a few off-road four-wheelers. His first neighborhood was just a few miles away, rising above Caracas in the form of massive, jail-like apartment buildings and burnt orange ranchos -- tiny, hand-built concrete huts stacked every which way.

The spray-painted face of Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara is still found throughout the January 23 barrio -- named for the date Venezuelans won democracy. Political unrest and gang violence are still common. Parents command children to be in by 6 p.m. Elderly people walk with snarling dogs on ropes for protection.

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MATTHEW 25:40:

Schiavo dies after feeding tube removed (MIKE SCHNEIDER, 3/31/05, The Associated Press)

Terri Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged woman whose final years tethered to a feeding tube sparked a bitter feud over her fate that divided a family and a nation, died Thursday, her husband's attorney said.

WHATEVER YOU DID UNTO ONE OF THE LEAST, YOU DID UNTO ME (Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Given at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC Thur, 3 Feb 94)

On the last day, Jesus will say to those on His right hand, "Come, enter the Kingdom. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was sick and you visited me." Then Jesus will turn to those on His left hand and say, "Depart from me because I was hungry and you did not feed me, I was thirsty and you did not give me to drink, I was sick and you did not visit me." These will ask Him, "When did we see You hungry, or thirsty or sick and did not come to Your help?" And Jesus will answer them, "Whatever you neglected to do unto one of these least of these, you neglected to do unto Me!"

As we have gathered here to pray together, I think it will be beautiful if we begin with a prayer that expresses very well what Jesus wants us to do for the least. St. Francis of Assisi understood very well these words of Jesus and His life is very well expressed by a prayer. And this prayer, which we say every day after Holy Communion, always surprises me very much, because it is very fitting for each one of us. And I always wonder whether 800 years ago when St. Francis lived, they had the same difficulties that we have today. I think that some of you already have this prayer of peace - so we will pray it together.

Let us thank God for the opportunity He has given us today to have come here to pray together. We have come here especially to pray for peace, joy and love. We are reminded that Jesus came to bring the good news to the poor. He had told us what is that good news when He said: "My peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you." He came not to give the peace of the world which is only that we don't bother each other. He came to give the peace of heart which comes from loving - from doing good to others.

And God loved the world so much that He gave His son - it was a giving. God gave His son to the Virgin Mary, and what did she do with Him? As soon as Jesus came into Mary's life, immediately she went in haste to give that good news. And as she came into the house of her cousin, Elizabeth, Scripture tells us that the unborn child - the child in the womb of Elizabeth - leapt with joy. While still in the womb of Mary - Jesus brought peace to John the Baptist who leapt for joy in the womb of Elizabeth.

And as if that were not enough, as if it were not enough that God the Son should become one of us and bring peace and joy while still in the womb of Mary, Jesus also died on the Cross to show that greater love. He died for you and for me, and for the leper and for that man dying of hunger and that naked person lying in the street, no only of Calcutta, but of Africa, and everywhere. Our Sisters serve these poor people in 105 countries throughout the world. Jesus insisted that we love one another as He loves each one of us. Jesus gave His life to love us and He tells us that we also have to give whatever it takes to do good to one another. And in the Gospel Jesus says very clearly: "Love as I have loved you."

Jesus died on the Cross because that is what it took for Him to do good to us - to save us from our selfishness in sin. He gave up everything to do the Father's will - to show us that we too must be willing to give up everything to do God's will - to love one another as He loves each of us. If we are not willing to give whatever it takes to do good to one another, sin is still in us. That is why we too must give to each other until it hurts.

It is not enough for us to say: "I love God," but I also have to love my neighbor. St. John says that you are a liar if you say you love God and you don't love your neighbor. How can you love God whom you do not see, if you do not love your neighbor whom you see, whom you touch, with whom you live? And so it is very important for us to realize that love, to be true, has to hurt. I must be willing to give whatever it takes not to harm other people and, in fact, to do good to them. This requires that I be willing to give until it hurts. Otherwise, there is not true love in me and I bring injustice, not peace, to those around me.

It hurt Jesus to love us. We have been created in His image for greater things, to love and to be loved. We must "put on Christ" as Scripture tells us. And so, we have been created to love as He loves us. Jesus makes Himself the hungry one, the naked one, the homeless one, the unwanted one, and He says, "You did it to Me." On the last day He will say to those on His right, "whatever you did to the least of these, you did to Me, and He will also say to those on His left, whatever you neglected to do for the least of these, you neglected to do it for Me."

When He was dying on the Cross, Jesus said, "I thirst." Jesus is thirsting for our love, and this is the thirst of everyone, poor and rich alike. We all thirst for the love of others, that they go out of their way to avoid harming us and to do good to us. This is the meaning of true love, to give until it hurts.

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BETTER STICK TO THE SAT WITH ESSAY:

Despite Discontent, Mugabe's Party Has Upper Hand in Vote: Opposition says fraud and intimidation will steer parliamentary poll today in Zimbabwe. (Robyn Dixon, March 31, 2005, LA Times)

The election is as much a test of Zimbabwe's longtime ruler, Robert Mugabe, as it is of African leaders' promise to uphold human rights and ensure elections are free and fair in order to win international investment.

This year, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice named Zimbabwe as an "outpost of tyranny," lumping it with repressive regimes in Myanmar, North Korea, Iran, Cuba and Belarus. South African President Thabo Mbeki, the continent's most influential leader, has advocated "quiet diplomacy" to persuade Mugabe to enact reforms, a strategy that has reaped little reward and divided Mbeki's African National Congress party. Mbeki has also said there is no reason to doubt that today's election will be fair.

"The collateral damage Zimbabwe has inflicted on the region, if not Africa as a whole, is immeasurable," wrote Dumisani Muleya, Zimbabwe correspondent for Business Day newspaper in South Africa. "Those efforts depend on African leaders' ability to tackle issues of democracy and governance in return for funding, but Mbeki and his colleagues have not fulfilled their side of the bargain. Zimbabwe is the test case."

South Africa's black leadership seems determined to fail the test.

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YAO MING FOR PRESIDENT!:

Stature of Limitations in China: In a newly competitive society, being short can mean being passed over. To some people, the answer lies in a painful surgery that adds inches. (Ching-Ching Ni, March 31, 2005, LA Times)

She's an acting student. She sits in a wheelchair. He's a business major. He relies on crutches to get around.

Each of them willingly had a doctor break their legs and insert steel pins into the bones just below their knees and above their ankles. The pins are attached to a bulky contraption that looks like a metal cage. For six months or so, they will wear this stretching device even though it delivers excruciating pain eased only by medication.

They dial the adjustment knobs daily, forcing the ends of the broken limbs to pull away from each other even as they heal. As new bone grows, the device forces it apart again, resulting in more new bone to fill the gap. Patients on the device typically gain about 3 inches in six months.

It may sound like medieval torture, but people who are determined to stand taller say it's nothing short of a dream maker.

At about $6,000, the treatment is out of reach for the average Chinese urbanite, who makes just more than $1,100 a year. But for some with money, it's a price they're willing to pay. In this increasingly competitive society, height has emerged as one of the most visible criteria for upward mobility.

Or they could just get rid of Communism and improve their diet.

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THERE GOES PHILADELPHIA...:

States Debate Photo IDs at Polls (DEANNA WRENN, March 31, 2005, Associated Press)

Legislation that would require voters to show photo identification before casting ballots has touched off fierce debate in three states, with opponents complaining the measures represent a return to the days of poll taxes and Jim Crow.

Lawmakers in Georgia and Indiana walked off the job to protest the proposals, which they say would deprive the poor, the elderly and minorities of the right to vote. Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, has already vetoed a similar measure and has vowed to do so again.

Republicans argue the bills would restore voter confidence and eliminate fraud without overly burdening voters, most of whom have driver's licenses or photo IDs anyway.

"I want everyone to be able to vote -- once," said Indiana state Sen. Victor Heinold, a Republican.

Nineteen states require voters to show identification, but only five of those request photo ID, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Those states -- Hawaii, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and South Dakota -- allow voters without a photo ID to present other forms of identification, such as a utility bill, or sign an affidavit of identity.

Critics say the measures in Indiana, Georgia and Wisconsin do not provide good alternatives for those without photo IDs.

No sweat, just require a national photo i.d..

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+ 27, - 16:

A national sales tax (George Will, March 31, 2005, Townhall)

The power to tax involves, as Chief Justice John Marshall said, the power to destroy. So does the power of tax reform, which is one reason why Rep. John Linder, a Georgia Republican, has a 133-page bill to replace 55,000 pages of tax rules.

His bill would abolish the IRS and the many billions of tax forms it sends out and receives. He would erase the federal income tax system -- personal and corporate income taxes, the regressive payroll tax and self-employment tax, capital gains, gift and estate taxes, the alternative minimum tax and the earned income tax credit -- and replace all that with a 23 percent national sales tax on personal consumption. That would not only sensitize consumers to the cost of government with every purchase, it would destroy K Street.

``K Street'' is shorthand for Washington's lawyer-lobbyist complex. It exists to continually complicate and defend the tax code, which is a cornucopia from which the political class pours benefits on constituencies. By replacing the income tax -- Linder had better repeal the 16th Amendment, to make sure the income tax stays gone -- everyone and all businesses would pay their taxes through economic choices, and K Street's intellectual capital, which consists of knowing how to game the tax code, would be radically depreciated.

Mr. Will has put his finger on the key to this idea, that the 16th be repealed.

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ICC - USA = OK:

U.S. Drops Objection to Sudan Trial (GEORGE GEDDA, March 31, 2005, Associated Press)

The United States is dropping its objections to use of the U.N.'s International Criminal Court to try Sudanese responsible for an ethnic cleansing campaign in the Darfur region that has killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted more than 2 million, administration officials said Wednesday night.

The administration had preferred that an African court try the case but agreed to a compromise during daylong discussions at the United Nations on Wednesday.

The United States has strongly opposed the ICC on grounds that American service members or civilians serving overseas could be subject to politically motivated or frivolous prosecutions.

In return for its concession, the United States received assurances that Americans deployed in Sudan, in whatever capacity, would not be subject to ICC prosecutions, the officials told The Associated Press. They asked not to be identified because the decision has not been officially announced.

The decision could raise hackles among conservatives for whom the ICC is an unaccountable body that cannot be trusted to the right thing.

That's silly. Conservatives are all for depriving second rates nations like France of their sovereignty so long as we keep our own.

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WOULDN'T IT HAVE BEEN BETTER JUST TO NOT SIGN IT?:

UK greenhouse emissions still rising (David Crouch, March 31, 2005, The Guardian)

UK carbon dioxide emissions have risen for two consecutive years according to figures released today, despite government pledges on climate change.

Emissions are now at their highest since 1996 and 3% higher than when Labour came to power in 1997. The government will need to implement drastic changes if it is to meet its target to reduce carbon pollution by 2010.

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THEY MAY TIRE OF THEM, BUT WE DON'T:

Watching the Detective: Sherlock Holmes lives on—in fan societies, annotated versions, and new adventures (Lawrence Block, March 28th, 2005, Village Voice)

He was born on January 6, 1854, and died for the first time in May of 1891. Died, that is to say, in print, in "The Final Problem," locked in mortal combat with Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime, with the two of them plunging to their death at the Reichenbach Falls.

A few years later, it became evident that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. In 1894, he returned to active practice, and handled hundreds of cases in the next decade. In 1902 he turned down a knighthood, retiring a year or two later to the Sussex coast, where he took up beekeeping—he hoped royal jelly, the food of the queen bee, might lengthen life and minimize the effects of aging—and began his magnum opus, The Whole Art of Detection. He put it aside, probably in 1912, and began undercover work in anticipation of the coming war with Germany.

He seems to have retired at the war's end, but it's hard to say for sure. There's no record of his death, and there are inferences, certainly, of his continuing life over the years. A recent report (of which more later) has him in Japan during the American occupation, strolling in the ashes of Hiroshima. He was 93 at the time, and if he's still alive now he'd be 151. That might strike one as impossible, but is the continuing existence of Sherlock Holmes one whit less conceivable than that he should have somehow ceased to be?

The novel A Study in Scarlet (1887) marked the first appearance in print of Sherlock Holmes, but it wasn't until four years later, when short stories began appearing in The Strand, that the character became popular with the reading public. His audience grew with every new appearance, but almost from the beginning his chronicler, Arthur Conan Doyle, began to tire of him. Before he'd finished the first series of 12 stories, his mother had to talk him out of killing his hero off, a threat which he acted upon in the 24th story, "The Final Problem."

If Doyle was happy to see the end of Holmes, he seems to have been the only person so disposed. City of London stockbrokers donned black armbands, and some 20,000 angry readers canceled their Strand subscriptions.

It's hard to say why Doyle tired of Holmes, but it's not unheard of for authors to grow weary of chronicling the exploits of series characters. Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers are supposed to have had a conversation in which each expressed a desire to put a violent end to her chief protagonist, but neither Hercule Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey received such harsh treatment.

Some 30 years ago, Nicolas Freeling killed his series detective, Inspector Van der Valk, midway through a novel, leaving his widow to solve the case. He subsequently wrote further about the widow—Arlette, her name was—and launched another whole series of books (about one Henri Castang). Readers, by and large, washed their hands of the son of a bitch. It's my understanding that Freeling resuscitated Van der Valk in 1990 in Sand Castles, but it was too late to win back his audience. They were through with him.

But when Sherlock Holmes came back, all was forgiven.

In the past couple years aothers killed off two terrific series protagonists: John Harvey did Charlie Resnick and Colin Dexter whacked Inspector Morse.

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WE SHALL OVERCOME:

GOP works to overcome skepticism among blacks (Chuck Raasch, 3/30/05, Gannett News Service)

Skepticism aside, this time could be different. There is lingering discontent toward Democrats among some blacks while Republicans are forging new alliances on issues with powerful appeal in the black community, such as school vouchers. Democratic strategist Donna Brazile says Mehlman's efforts should be "cause for alarm" for her party.

Republicans are reaching out to conservative black ministers and younger blacks who don't have the formative connection to the Democrats' pro-civil rights record of the 1960s. One of the more visible ministers is Bishop Harry R. Jackson Jr., head of the 3,000-member Hope Christian Church in Lanham, Md. Wearied by what he described as Democrats' timidity and indifference, the lifelong Democrat voted for Bush in 2004 and spoke out on Bush's behalf.

Jackson said he and other conservative black ministers, "gave permission for other Bible-based black Christians to unhook ... from the Democratic Party and vote their conscience."

Such ministers, Brazile wrote in the newspaper "Roll Call," "will assist the GOP in getting its message to black voters" and that some "may even like what they hear."

Jackson doesn't yet see the GOP as a panacea for black hopes, but he sees in Bush a man of religious conviction with a willingness to try new approaches.

"If we don't figure out how to keep these young black men from going back to prison, and with seven of 10 black babies being born out of wedlock, I don't see much positive," Jackson said in an interview. "The house is on fire, so I felt as though it was time to rise up and speak. But many, many people are going to hold the Republican Party accountable."

In their latest efforts to reach out to blacks, Republicans have replaced broader "big tent" rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s with more calibrated, issues-based arguments framed around morality and economic empowerment, from abortion to Social Security reform.

"There are a whole series of issues that are coming up to demonstrate that we have ideas and we have proposals that will be beneficial to the African-American community," Mehlman said. "(Republicans are saying) 'If you give us a chance, we will give you a choice.' "

The big tent told blacks what was in it for the GOP. Specific issues tell blacks what's in it for them.

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ONE MAN'S TERRORIST...:

Elusive Castro foe may be here: A veteran Cuban exile militant linked to a string of violent acts against Fidel Castro and his government is reportedly in South Florida seeking safe haven. (ELAINE DE VALLE AND ALFONSO CHARDY, 3/31/05, Miami Herald)

Luis Posada Carriles, the legendary Cuban exile operative accused of blowing up a Cuban airliner in 1976 and trying to kill Fidel Castro in 2000, is believed to have secretly slipped into South Florida after years of hiding abroad, a federal source said Wednesday.

The source said he understands that Posada, 77, has been in the area for about a week and has made contact with government authorities.

The source said he may be trying to retain a local attorney, but didn't explain why. One possibility might be to help ensure Posada wouldn't be extradited to Venezuela, where he escaped from prison in 1985 while facing charges related to the airliner bombing.

The Cuban-born militant, however, does not face any charges in the United States.

Santiago Alvarez, a Miami developer who is a close friend and financial backer of Posada, said he talked to three attorneys on Wednesday in case his friend decides to come forward and seek asylum. Alvarez, however, said he would neither confirm nor deny Posada is in the area.

''I cannot tell you if I have seen him or have not seen him, if he is here or is not here,'' Alvarez said. ``What I can tell you is that I am signing a contract with a lawyer to represent him in case it is true that he is here and that he will present himself to immigration.''

Were Posada to emerge publicly in Miami, his presence could pose an embarrassing foreign-relations dilemma for the Bush administration. Amid the U.S. war on global terrorism, Posada's alleged involvement in hotel bombings and assassination plots could leave the nation open to criticism, especially by Cuba and Venezuela, whose governments are antagonistic toward American policies.

Oh no, criticism from Castro and Hugo? Maybe they'll make it a causus belli.

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TALK ABOUT ROLE REVERSAL:

Ecuador to fight EU banana regime at the WTO (Lisbeth Kirk, 31.03.2005, EU Observer)

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WHAT'S THE PROPER BALANCE BETWEEN DEMOCRACY AND COMMUNISM?:

Roh Accents Alliance With US (Shim Jae-yun, 3/31/05, Korea Times)

President Roh Moo-hyun stressed Wednesday the need for the nation to strengthen its alliance with the United States in efforts to maintain peace and prosperity in Northeast Asia.

"Our diplomacy should focus on playing a balancing role to prevent possible conflicts in the region,’’ Roh said while receiving a policy briefing from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

"To that end, we need to firmly maintain the alliance with the United States,’’ he said.

Roh’s statement came amid growing concern focusing on a ``balancing role’’ will eventually distance Seoul from Washington and weaken the bilateral alliance. Some experts are concerned South Korea has moved closer to China, alienating itself from traditional allies such as the U.S. and Japan.

If you seek balance between Communist China and its democratic foes then aren't you too an enemy?

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WHY PRE-EMPTION IS ALWAYS JUSTIFIED:

Spy agencies 'dead wrong' on WMD (KATHERINE SHRADER, 3/31/05, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

In a scathing report, a presidential commission said Thursday that America's spy agencies were "dead wrong" in most of their judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the war and that the United States knows "disturbingly little" about the threats posed by many of the nation's most dangerous adversaries.

Because we can know so little about what our enemies are up, to the only responsible position is to always assume the worst and act accordingly.

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FEDERALISM IS FOR LOSERS:

Will the GOP need life support? (Glenn Harlan Reynolds, March 31, 2005, Salon)

The Terri Schiavo story is a tragedy in the truest sense. It is a case in which there are no happy endings and in which the mighty fall. One thing that has fallen is the notion of the Republican Party as a bastion of federalism and limited government.

The notion that a party born of abolitionism and devoted over the years to prohibition, anti-communism, strict drug laws, restrictions on abortion, etc. was ever primarily concerned about federalism is rather fanciful. Federalism is the politics of whatever party is out of power. Having lost control of the national agenda they seek to preserve their own power in the states they do control. And it's always a losing issue.

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IT'S WHATEVER TIME WE DECIDE IT IS:

The power behind daylight-saving: Some grumble, but time change has purpose (Mark Sauer, March 31, 2005, San Diego Tribune)

Benjamin Franklin liked to sleep late. But waking early one day in 1784, the 78-year-old American minister to France was astonished to find the sun already streaming into his Paris residence.

He wrote a whimsical letter to the Journal de Paris suggesting the madness of sleeping when it is light and wasting the cost of candles when it is dark. He suggested a solution: daylight-saving time.

It was an idea well ahead of its time and one which has proved remarkably controversial over the years. [...]

The many advantages of DST makes you wonder why it has been so fiercely resisted.

Besides providing an extra hour of light in the evening for recreation, many studies have shown DST saves energy, reduces the number of auto accidents and even lowers crime rates, said Prerau, who holds a Ph.D. from MIT and has co-authored three reports to Congress on the effects of DST.

"The idea has been contentious all over the world, and for the same reasons," Prerau said. "City people love it, country people don't."

Farmers are tied to the sun and DST has them operating "an hour late compared with everybody else for things like going to the bank in town, meeting trains and trucks for deliveries, or even going to a movie after finishing work," he explained.

"Then there was the danger for schoolchildren standing on rural roads in the morning darkness waiting for the bus."

Daylight-saving time begins in the United States at 2 a.m., local time, on the first Sunday in April. We revert to Standard Time at 2 a.m. on the last Sunday in October. [...]

One persistent complaint about DST comes from people who blame the confusion over the time change for being late to church on the first Sunday in April.

"But there is this marvelous observation from a priest in St. Petersburg, Fla.," Downing said. "Why is it, he wondered, that when we fall back to Standard Time in October nobody shows up to church an hour early?"

The Wife is just happy because she won't have to subtract an hour from the clock on my bedside table for a few months.

MORE:
Spring Forward Faster (DAVID PRERAU , 3/31/05, NY Times)

Studies in many countries have found that daylight saving time curbs energy consumption and reduces traffic fatalities. While I was a researcher at the Transportation Department in the 1970's, we did a study that found that under daylight time in spring and fall, electrical energy use fell by about 1 percent, the equivalent today of roughly three billion kilowatt-hours per month, while the reduction in traffic accidents saved 25 lives and averted 1,000 injuries each month. Crime also decreased.

These results derive directly from the shift of daylight from morning to evening. For example, many people sleep through morning sunlight and then depend on electric lighting after the sun sets. Even taking commuters into account, far more people travel in the evening than in the morning, and this, when combined with poor visibility, leads to more traffic accidents. And more crimes in which darkness is a factor, like muggings, take place after dusk than before dawn.

Under the present law we have daylight time in October but not in March, even though the sun rises at similar times in both months. The European Union starts daylight time on the last Sunday in March, with few complaints. Adding one spring week of daylight time would synchronize us with Europe. Adding two weeks in the spring would double the benefit while not making a single sunrise later than those we already experience in October, thus reducing concerns about dark mornings for farmers and children heading for school.

We should also consider adding a week of daylight time in the fall. Daylight time now always ends just before Halloween - sometimes, as last year, on Halloween morning. Alarmingly, children's pedestrian deaths are four times higher on Halloween than on any other night of the year, and daylight time would provide another hour of light for young trick-or-treaters.

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THE DEATHSTAR LIMPETH (via Jim Siegel):

2005 Major League Baseball Preview - The Yankees (TIM MARCHMAN, March 31, 2005, NY Sun)

Every year I preach that the Yankees are about to collapse, and they never do. I'm sticking with my preaching - the Yankees are about to collapse, and don't look like a 90-win team to me. They're horrible defensively, old and injury-prone, and boast a lineup consisting of five superb players and four mediocrities.

This strangely built $200 million team is as thin as a dime. I count nine potential Hall of Famers on the roster, but no one else on the team is very good, with a few exceptions like Hideki Matsui and Tom Gordon. The contrast with the Red Sox, who have three superstars and 22 solid players, is stunning. The Yankees have no sixth starter, no credible reserves in the infield, the outfield or behind the plate, and several regulars who could be among the worst at their positions in baseball.

The Yankees' underlying statistics were those of an 89-win team last year, and it's not clear that they got much better over the off-season. The real improvement, of course, was bringing in ace Randy Johnson, who represents a marked improvement over Javier Vazquez. But I'm not clear how that does more than offset the terrible Tony Womack and the continued disintegration of the team defense. This team looks to me to be clearly inferior to the Red Sox.

The Sox have just two problems, only one of which can be taken care of in season. Unless you're willing to bet a World Series trophy that David Wells is going to be healthy in October they don't really have a number 2 starter to plug in behind Curt Schilling. They'll need to acquire someone by the All Star break and on a championship team the #2 is generally a second #1 so they're usually scarce. The other problem is that neither David Ortiz nor Manny Ramirez should ever be allowed to play defense, but they obviously can't both DH. Playing Manny in Left costs them a couple games a year and playing them both in the World Series is a recipe for disaster.

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WHEN JAW-JAW IS WAR-WAR:

Why World War IV can't sell (John Brown, 4/01/05, Asia Times)

In a recent essay (Are we in World War IV?) Tom Engelhardt of Tomdispatch commented quite rightly that "World War IV" has "become a commonplace trope of the imperial right" of the United States. But he didn't mention one small matter - the rest of the US, not to speak of the outside world, hasn't bought the neo-cons' efforts to justify President George W Bush's militaristic adventures abroad with crude "we're in World War IV" agitprop meant to mobilize Americans in support of the administration's foreign-policy follies. That's why, in his second term, Bush - first and foremost a politician concerned about maintaining domestic support - is talking ever less about waging a global war and ever more about democratizing the world.

Rather, it's proved much easier to win than even the neocons expected. With less than two thousand men lost and democracy imposed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Liberia, Ukraine, Palestine, Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, Togo, etc. and elections beginning to occur even in supposedly unreformable places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt it's just hard to think of it as a conventional war. Perhaps we need a new term for the kind of global conflict where we can topple a regime just by talking tough.

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JESUS WEPT:

SERMON DELIVERED BY BISHOP CLEMENS AUGUST COUNT OF GALEN (The Third Sermon, preached in the Church of St. Lambert's on August 3rd, 1941)

My Beloved Brethren,

In today's Gospel we read of an unusual event: Our Saviour weeps. Yes, the Son of God sheds tears. Whoever weeps must be either in physical or mental anguish. At that time Jesus was not yet in bodily pain and yet here were tears. What depth of torment He must have felt in His heart and Soul, if He, the bravest of men, was reduced to tears. Why is He weeping? He is lamenting over Jerusalem, the holy city He loved so tenderly, the capital of His race. He is weeping over her inhabitants, over His own compatriots because they cannot foresee the judgment that is to overtake them, the punishment which His divine prescience and justice have pronounced. ‘Ah, if thou too couldst understand, above all in this day that is granted thee, the ways that can bring thee peace!’ Why did the people of Jerusalem not know it? Jesus had given them the reason a short time before. ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often have I been ready to gather thy children together, as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings; and thou didst refuse it! I your God and your King wished it, but you would have none of Me. . . .’ This is the reason for the tears of Jesus, for the tears of God. . . . Tears for the misrule, the injustice and man's willful refusal of Him and the resulting evils, which, in His divine omniscience, He foresees and which in His justice He must decree. . . . It is a fearful thing when man sets his will against the will of God, and it is because of this that Our Lord is lamenting over Jerusalem.

My faithful brethren! In the pastoral letter drawn up by the German Hierarchy on the 26th of June at Fulda and appointed to be read in all the churches of Germany on July 6th, it is expressly stated: ‘According to Catholic doctrine, there are doubtless commandments which are not binding when obedience to them requires too great a sacrifice, but there are sacred obligations of conscience from which no one can release us and which we must fulfil even at the price of death itself. At no time, and under no circumstances whatsoever, may a man, except in war and in lawful defence, take the life of an innocent person.’

When this pastoral was read on July 6th I took the opportunity of adding this exposition:

For the past several months it has been reported that, on instructions from Berlin, patients who have been suffering for a long time from apparently incurable diseases have been forcibly removed from homes and clinics. Their relatives are later informed that the patient has died, that the body has been cremated and that the ashes may be claimed. There is little doubt that these numerous cases of unexpected death in the case of the insane are not natural, but often deliberately caused, and result from the belief that it is lawful to take away life which is unworthy of being lived.

This ghastly doctrine tries to justify the murder of blameless men and would seek to give legal sanction to the forcible killing of invalids, cripples, the incurable and the incapacitated. I have discovered that the practice here in Westphalia is to compile lists of such patients who are to be removed elsewhere as ‘unproductive citizens,’ and after a period of time put to death. This very week, the first group of these patients has been sent from the clinic of Marienthal, near Münster.

Paragraph 21 of the Code of Penal Law is still valid. It states that anyone who deliberately kills a man by a premeditated act will be executed as a murderer. It is in order to protect the murderers of these poor invalids—members of our own families—against this legal punishment, that the patients who are to be killed are transferred from their domicile to some distant institution. Some sort of disease is then given as the cause of death, but as cremation immediately follows it is impossible for either their families or the regular police to ascertain whether death was from natural causes.

I am assured that at the Ministry of the Interior and at the Ministry of Health, no attempt is made to hide the fact that a great number of the insane have already been deliberately killed and that many more will follow.

Article 139 of the Penal Code expressly lays down that anyone who knows from a reliable source of any plot against the life of a man and who does not inform the proper authorities or the intended victim, will be punished. . . .

When I was informed of the intention to remove patients from Marienthal for the purpose of putting them to death I addressed the following registered letter on July 29th to the Public Prosecutor, the Tribunal of Münster, as well as to the Head of the Münster Police:

‘I have been informed this week that a considerable number of patients from the provincial clinic of Marienthal are to be transferred as citizens alleged to be "unproductive" to the institution of Richenberg, there to be executed immediately; and that according to general opinion, this has already been carried out in the case of other patients who have been removed in like manner. Since this sort of procedure is not only contrary to moral law, both divine and natural, but is also punishable by death, according to Article 211 of the Penal Code, it is my bounden obligation in accordance with Article 139 of the same Code to inform the authorities thereof. Therefore I demand at once protection for my fellow countrymen who are threatened in this way, and from those who purpose to transfer and kill them, and I further demand to be informed of your decision.’

I have received no news up till now of any steps taken by these authorities. On July 26th I had already written and dispatched a strongly worded protest to the Provincial Administration of Westphalia which is responsible for the clinics to which these patients have been entrusted for care and treatment. My efforts were of no avail. The first batch of innocent folk have left Marienthal under sentence of death, and I am informed that no less than eight hundred cases from the institution of Waestein have now gone. And so we must await the news that these wretched defenceless patients will sooner or later lose their lives. Why? Not because they have committed crimes worthy of death, not because they have attacked guardians or nurses as to cause the latter to defend themselves with violence which would be both legitimate and even in certain cases necessary, like killing an armed enemy soldier in a righteous war.

No, these are not the reasons why these unfortunate patients are to be put to death. It is simply because that according to some doctor, or because of the decision of some committee, they have no longer a right to live because they are ‘unproductive citizens’. The opinion is that since they can no longer make money, they are obsolete machines, comparable with some old cow that can no longer give milk or some horse that has gone lame. What is the lot of unproductive machines and cattle? They are destroyed. I have no intention of stretching this comparison further. The case here is not one of machines or cattle which exist to serve men and furnish them with plenty. They may be legitimately done away with when they can no longer fulfil their function. Here we are dealing with human beings, with our neighbours, brothers and sisters, the poor and invalids . . . unproductive—perhaps! But have they, therefore, lost the right to live? Have you or I the right to exist only because we are ‘productive’? If the principle is established that unproductive human beings may be killed, then God help all those invalids who, in order to produce wealth, have given their all and sacrificed their strength of body. If all unproductive people may thus be violently eliminated, then woe betide our brave soldiers who return home, wounded, maimed or sick.

Once admit the right to kill unproductive persons . . . then none of us can be sure of his life. We shall be at the mercy of any committee that can put a man on the list of unproductives. There will be no police protection, no court to avenge the murder and inflict punishment upon the murderer. Who can have confidence in any doctor? He has but to certify his patients as unproductive and he receives the command to kill. If this dreadful doctrine is permitted and practised it is impossible to conjure up the degradation to which it will lead. Suspicion and distrust will be sown within the family itself. A curse on men and on the German people if we break the holy commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ which was given us by God on Mount Sinai with thunder and lightning, and which God our Maker imprinted on the human conscience from the beginning of time! Woe to us German people if we not only licence this heinous offence but allow it to be committed with impunity! [...]

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ALL ABOUT THE MBA:

Bush Is Keeping Cabinet Secretaries Close to Home: Spending Time at White House Required (Michael Fletcher, March 31, 2005, Washington Post)

President Bush is requiring Cabinet members to spend several hours a week at the White House compound, a move top aides say eases coordination with government agencies but one seen by some analysts as fresh evidence of the White House's tightening grip over administration policy.

Under a directive instituted by Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. at the start of Bush's second term, Cabinet secretaries spend as many as four hours a week working out of an office suite set up for them at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House. There, they meet with presidential policy and communications aides in an effort to better coordinate the administration's initiatives and messages.

"It allows us to work on a much more regular basis with the Cabinet in helping to manage issues," said Claude A. Allen, Bush's domestic policy adviser. "It also helps us lay the groundwork that is going to be necessary to implement the very aggressive agenda that the president has laid out for his second term."

The new practice applies to every Cabinet agency, although the heads of the Defense, State, Homeland Security and Justice departments are required to be at the White House so regularly for meetings that they rarely use the suite, said Erin Healy, a White House spokeswoman. Robert S. Nichols, spokesman for the Treasury Department, said that Secretary John W. Snow was already spending a lot of time at the White House "in large part due to his key role on the president's top domestic priorities, primarily Social Security."

One White House official said the policy has caused some consternation among some of the Cabinet secretaries, but the officers publicly defended the new practice. "Having an office and time to work at the White House is a great way to build an effective and cohesive team," Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao said.

Paul C. Light, a professor of public service at New York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, sees its purpose differently. "This administration has been very conscious in the second term of the need to control what happens in Cabinet agencies and to make sure Cabinet officers don't get too far out there," he said. "I find it absolutely shocking that they would have regular office hours at the White House. It confirms how little the domestic Cabinet secretaries have to do with making policy."

He's been president for 4+ years and they still haven't figured out that he runs the administration on a business model?

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THOU SHALT NOT:

Clerics of 3 Faiths Protest Gay Festival Planned for Jerusalem (LAURIE GOODSTEIN and GREG MYRE, 3/31/05, NY Times)

International gay leaders are planning a 10-day WorldPride festival and parade in Jerusalem in August, saying they want to make a statement about tolerance and diversity in the Holy City, home to three great religious traditions.

Now major leaders of the three faiths - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - are making a rare show of unity to try to stop the festival. They say the event would desecrate the city and convey the erroneous impression that homosexuality is acceptable.

"They are creating a deep and terrible sorrow that is unbearable," Shlomo Amar, Israel's Sephardic chief rabbi, said yesterday at a news conference in Jerusalem attended by Israel's two chief rabbis, the patriarchs of the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian churches, and three senior Muslim prayer leaders. "It hurts all of the religions. We are all against it."

Abdel Aziz Bukhari, a Sufi sheik, added: "We can't permit anybody to come and make the Holy City dirty. This is very ugly and very nasty to have these people come to Jerusalem."

Israeli authorities have not indicated what action, if any, they might take to limit the events. Banning the festival would seem unlikely, though the government could withhold the required permits for specific events, like a parade.

Interfaith agreement is unusual in Israel. The leaders' joint opposition was initially generated by the Rev. Leo Giovinetti, an evangelical pastor from San Diego who is both a veteran of the American culture war over homosexuality and a frequent visitor to Israel, where he has formed relationships with rabbis and politicians.

Organizers of the gay pride event, Jerusalem WorldPride 2005, said that 75 non-Orthodox rabbis had signed a statement of support for the event, and that Christian and Muslim leaders as well as Israeli politicians were expected to announce their support soon. They said they were dismayed to see that what united their opponents was their objection to homosexuality.

"That is something new I've never witnessed before, such an attempt to globalize bigotry," said Hagai El-Ad, the executive director of Jerusalem Open House, a gay and lesbian group that is the host for the festival. "It's quite sad and ironic that these religious figures are coming together around such a negative message."

You bet. Odd that the three great Abrahamic faiths would unite around morality.

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THOSE WHO REMEMBER THE PAST ARE DOOMED TO THINK IT'S REPEATING:

Sinking Globalization (Niall Ferguson, March/April 2005, Foreign Affairs)

The last age of globalization resembled the current one in numerous ways. It was characterized by relatively free trade, limited restrictions on migration, and hardly any regulation of capital flows. Inflation was low. A wave of technological innovation was revolutionizing the communications and energy sectors; the world first discovered the joys of the telephone, the radio, the internal combustion engine, and paved roads. The U.S. economy was the biggest in the world, and the development of its massive internal market had become the principal source of business innovation. China was opening up, raising all kinds of expectations in the West, and Russia was growing rapidly.

World War I wrecked all of this. Global markets were disrupted and disconnected, first by economic warfare, then by postwar protectionism. Prices went haywire: a number of major economies (Germany's among them) suffered from both hyperinflation and steep deflation in the space of a decade. The technological advances of the 1900s petered out: innovation hit a plateau, and stagnating consumption discouraged the development of even existing technologies such as the automobile. After faltering during the war, overheating in the 1920s, and languishing throughout the 1930s in the doldrums of depression, the U.S. economy ceased to be the most dynamic in the world. China succumbed to civil war and foreign invasion, defaulting on its debts and disappointing optimists in the West. Russia suffered revolution, civil war, tyranny, and foreign invasion. Both these giants responded to the crisis by donning the constricting armor of state socialism. They were not alone. By the end of the 1940s, most states in the world, including those that retained political freedoms, had imposed restrictions on trade, migration, and investment as a matter of course. Some achieved autarky, the ideal of a deglobalized society. Consciously or unconsciously, all governments applied in peacetime the economic restrictions that had first been imposed between 1914 and 1918.

The end of globalization after 1914 was not unforeseeable. There was no shortage of voices prophesying Armageddon in the prewar decades. Many popular writers earned a living by predicting a cataclysmic European war. Solemn Marxists had long foretold the collapse of capitalism and imperialism. And Social Darwinists had looked forward eagerly to a conflagration that would weed out the weak and fortify the strong.

Yet most investors were completely caught off guard when the crisis came. Not until the last week of July 1914 was there a desperate dash for liquidity; it happened so suddenly and on such a large scale that the world's major stock markets, New York's included, closed down for the rest of the year. As The Economist put it at the time, investors and financial institutions "saw in a flash the meaning of war." The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by about 25 percent between January 1910 and December 1913 and remained flat through the first half of 1914. European bond markets, which had held up throughout the diplomatic crises of the 1900s, crashed only at the 11th hour, as the lights went out all over Europe.

Some economic historians detect the origins of the deglobalization that followed World War I in the prewar decades. They point, variously, to rising tariffs and restrictions on migration, a slight uptick in inflation starting around 1896, and the chronic vulnerability of the U.S. economy to banking crises. To this list, it might be added that the risk of further Russian and Chinese revolutions should have been fairly apparent after those of 1905 and 1911, respectively.

The trouble is that none of these problems can be said to have caused the great conflagration that was World War I. To be sure, the prewar world was marked by all kinds of economic rivalries--not least between British and German manufacturers--but these did not suffice to cause a disaster. On the contrary, businessmen on both sides agreed that a major war would be an economic calamity. The point seemed so obvious that war came to be seen by some optimistic commentators as all but impossible--a "great illusion," in the famous phrase of the author Norman Angell. Even when the war broke out, many people optimistically clung to the illusion that it would soon be over. Economist John Maynard Keynes said that it "could not last more than a year."

With the benefit of hindsight, however, five factors can be seen to have precipitated the global explosion of 1914-18. The first cause was imperial overstretch. By 1914, the British Empire was showing signs of being a "weary Titan," in the words of the poet Matthew Arnold. It lacked the will to build up an army capable of deterring Germany from staging a rival bid for European hegemony (if not world power). As the world's policeman, distracted by old and new commitments in Asia and Africa, the United Kingdom's beat had simply become too big.

Great-power rivalry was another principal cause of the catastrophe. The problem was not so much Anglo-German rivalry at sea as it was Russo-German rivalry on land. Fear of a Russian arms buildup convinced the German general staff to fight in 1914 rather than risk waiting any longer.

The third fatal factor was an unstable alliance system. Alliances existed in abundance, but they were shaky. The Germans did not trust the Austrians to stand by them in a crisis, and the Russians worried that the French might lose their nerve. The United Kingdom's actions were impossible to predict because its ententes with France and Russia made no explicit provisions for the eventuality of war in Europe. The associated insecurities encouraged risk-taking diplomacy. In 1908, for example, Austria-Hungary brusquely annexed Bosnia. Three years later, the German government sent the gunboat Panther to Agadir to challenge French claims to predominance in Morocco.

The presence of a rogue regime sponsoring terror was a fourth source of instability. The chain of events leading to war, as every schoolchild used to know, began with the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip. There were shady links between the assassin's organization and the Serbian government, which had itself come to power not long before in a bloody palace coup.

Finally, the rise of a revolutionary terrorist organization hostile to capitalism turned an international crisis into a backlash against the global free market. The Bolsheviks, who emerged from the 1903 split in the Russian Social Democratic Party, had already established their credentials as a fanatical organization committed to using violence to bring about world revolution. By straining the tsarist system to the breaking point, the war gave Lenin and his confederates their opportunity. They seized it and used the most ruthless terrorist tactics to win the ensuing civil war.

The similarities of course pale in comparison to the differences. First, Britain was not even the leading military power of the day. Though it was more engaged in world affairs, it had been apparent since the Civil War that all America required was motivation in order to crank up an unrivalled war machine, which it went on to demonstrate in the ensuing World Wars. Indeed, Britain could not have defeated several of its European rivals on its own, not least Germany. The United States has no rival today, no nation it could not defeat in hours were it sufficiently provoked. Folks imagine China a rival but America has a GDP several times that of China, despite a population less than a quarter of China's and spends more than ten times as much on its military. Not only are we not overstretched but our military expenditure as a percentage of GDP is quite low by the historic standards of a superpower. If we are an imperial power we are a mostly cultural one and we maintain it on the cheap.

Similarly, Britain didn't have the leading economy of its day. America had overtaken it in the 19th Century and today has a GDP the size of all of Europe's. Nor is America forced to pump its wealth into the black hole of colonies, as Britain was--a waste which Mr. Ferguson seems to cite with approval. Instead America is invested in its own economy; the same one that foreigners are so drawn to--a fact which Mr. Ferguson cites with disapproval.

As important though as the drastic difference in relative power between the Britain of 1914 and the America of 2005 is the imbalance between the threat of communism/socialism and that of Islamicism. In the world of 1914, a world completely dominated by Christendom, communism was an immensely appealing Christian heresy that represented a genuine internal challenge to even the successful Anglo-American model of democratic protestant capitalism. Islamicism on the other hand is totally external to the West, holding no appeal here and rather little even within Islam. It's just not a significant existential threat.

So all we're really left with is the possibility that we might do something stupid like becoming nationalistic and trying to put a stop to free trade and immigration. We may not want to dismiss our own potential for idiocy out of hand but we do need to note how little success Pat Buchanan had running on such a platform.

We'll find some way to screw up the current Golden Age eventually, but it doesn't seem likely that the era of American dominance will end in anything like the way the Pax Britannica did, or at least not for the same reasons.

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LIVE LONG AND DESPAIR:

Elderly increasingly isolated from society (Lewis Smith, 3/31/05, Times of London)

A GROWING sense of loneliness among pensioners is destroying the self-belief and quality of life of the generation that won the war, a leading charity says.

More older people than ever are finding themselves isolated from the rest of society, with almost two million of the elderly spending Easter alone.

Of the more than 1,100 people questioned for a survey published today by Help the Aged, one in five of the 65-plus age group who live alone see members of their family less than once a month; almost one in ten go six months or more between visits.

The fast pace of modern life is blamed by the age group as a prime factor in their dislocation from society with more than two thirds — about three million — feeling out of touch.Some 9 per cent feel completely cut off from society; 21 per cent feel they have been cast off and are of use to no one.

The sense of isolation is intensified because most pensioners have no friends under the age of 30, even though they would welcome greater contact with the younger generations.

The effects of loneliness are to make older people withdraw into themselves, fearful of rebuffs and increasingly doubtful of their own abilities. Paul McCann, director of policy for the charity, said: “We far too often shunt older people into the sidings of life, leaving them without enough money, activity but, above all, human warmth.”

In the focus on self and extension of life they've forgotten everything that makes life worthwhile in the first place.

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WHO MAKES CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS LOOK WILD AND CRAZY?

Why sex is good for the species (Bjorn Carey, MSNBC, March 31th, 2005)

Sex is an expensive and risky business. It steals time and drains precious nutrient resources. And each act of reproduction runs the risk of messing up carefully crafted genetic blueprints. So why do we do it?

The answer might seem obvious to you. But it's not so clear to biologists who consider that despite a logical alternative — asexual reproduction by simple cloning without the help of a partner — sex is preferred in the wild.[...]

Scientists don't know how sex even got started. But they have long suspected that organisms prefer sex specifically because of the risk. The slight shuffling of genes produced through sexual reproduction may help organisms adapt more easily to a stressful or changing environment, the thinking goes.

We assume the stressful and changing environment is her family.

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MEDICINE IS LOVE...:

Useless eaters: disability as genocidal marker in Nazi Germany: The methods used for mass extermination in the Nazi death camps originated and were perfected in earlier use against people with physical, emotional, and intellectual disabilities. This article describes the historical context of attitudes toward people with disabilities in Germany and how this context produced mass murder of people with disabilities prior to and during the early years of-World War II. Several key marker variables, the manipulation of which allowed a highly sophisticated Western society to officially sanction the murder of people with disabilities, are examined. Important implications must continually be drawn from these sad events as we work with people with disabilities at the dawn of a new century. (Mark P. Mostert, Fall, 2002, Journal of Special Education)

Historically, euthanasia has meant a voluntary request for death without suffering by the patient. However, in the 17th century its meaning was modified to grant the right to alleviate suffering exclusively to physicians. While the meaning and implications of euthanasia changed somewhat over time, it was universally accepted that the act of euthanasia was always voluntary. That is, when individuals exercised their right to voluntarily choose the timing and the manner of their death as a means of ending their suffering, it was a physician's responsibility to assist them (Proctor, 1988). However, in the 1890s the meaning of euthanasia in Europe, and especially in Germany, came to include two other aspects. First, the notion of a voluntary "right to die" was extended to mean that in some instances the request for euthanasia could be made by persons other than the suffering patient. Second, the extraordinary levels of care accorded the terminally ill and asylum inmates again raised the issue of negative human worth and underlined the possibility of involuntary euthanasia; that is, the economic burden that terminal illness or caring for the insane placed on families, caregivers, and the community was a factor to consider in decisions for euthanasia. In one sense, therefore, the debate quickly shifted from the idea of a "gentle death" itself to who would request or abet the patient's demise. Subsequent branches of the debate took up the notion of suffering among humans as comparable to that of animals and the implication that in certain instances humans could be disposed of in the same way--quickly and painlessly. The distinction between voluntary euthanasia and involuntary killing was thus effectively eradicated, and an ominous term was coined for the first time: "life unworthy of life."

In 1920 the concept of living beings not worthy of the life they embodied gained impetus with a tract published by two university professors, Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche. Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life articulated key implications for people with disabilities. Binding and Hoche called for the killing of people with disabilities, whom they viewed as "incurable idiots" having no will or sense of living. Killing them, therefore, was hardly involuntary euthanasia, that is, the imposition of others' will upon them. This shifted the burden of human existence from simply being alive to requiring an explicit justification for living. For Binding and Hoche, therefore, the right to live was to be earned, not assumed. One earned the right to live by being a useful economic contributor to society. Chief among the individuals they saw as being useless were those who seemed to have little or no human feeling, or in their terms, "empty human husks" whose only societal function was the consuming of precious resources while contributing nothing to society in return. In Binding and Hoche's terms, they were "useless eaters" whose "ballast lives" could be tossed overboard to better balance the economic ship of state. In speaking of those with disabilities, and explicitly advocating involuntary euthanasia, Binding and Hoche wrote,

Their life is absolutely pointless, but they do not regard it as being
unbearable. They are a terrible, heavy burden upon their relatives and
society as a whole. Their death would not create even the smallest
gap--except perhaps in the feelings of their mothers or loyal nurses.
(Burleigh, 1994, p. 17)

Furthermore, Binding and Hoche drove home the economic argument by calculating the total cost expended in caring for such people. They concluded that this cost was "a massive capital in the form of foodstuffs, clothing and heating, which is being subtracted from the national product for entirely unproductive purposes" (Burleigh, 1994, p. 19).

Binding and Hoche's polemic was furiously debated across Germany. One strident critic of the Binding and Hoche position was Ewald Meltzer, the director of an asylum in Saxony, who held that many of his charges did indeed have the ability to enjoy life inasmuch as their disabilities would allow. In an attempt to support his belief, Meltzer surveyed the parents of his patients to ascertain their perceptions of disability and euthanasia. To Meltzer's astonishment, the survey results showed a widely held contradiction among the parents that although they had strong emotional ties to their children, they simultaneously expressed, with varying degrees of qualification, a "positive" attitude toward killing them. In fact, only a handful of respondents completely rejected all notions of euthanasia (Proctor, 1988). The results of this survey were a harbinger of future public and official perceptions and actions toward people with disabilities. Meltzer's survey was later used as a major rationale for the killing of thousands of people with disabilities under the National Socialists, whose long-held social perceptions of difference coupled with official state prejudice delineated a series of genocidal markers that doomed significant numbers of people with disabilities during the Nazi era.

Genocidal Markers of Disability

Scientific research of the late 19th century was overshadowed by Darwin's ideas of biological determinism, including its most radical form, eugenics, which had begun to establish genetic markers predictive of physiological characteristics. The fate of people with disabilities in Germany may be understood by examining a similar series of genocidal markers, with corresponding sequelae, which determined the real-world fate of "useless eaters."

Marker 1: Darwinism and the Biology of Determination

Nineteenth- and early-20th-century Germany, like the rest of the Western world, had been significantly influenced by two powerful scientific impressions. First, the prominence of the biological sciences had been established by the revolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin, who provided reasonable explanations for distinct differences among many observed natural phenomena. Darwin and his contemporaries focused on inequalities within all living species, including humans. Darwin's ideas of evolution emphasized the struggle for survival and the notion that only the strongest and most able of any species would survive as genetic progenitors of future generations, thereby safeguarding the health, and ultimately the endurance, of that species. In short order, these ideas were applied to humans in the form of Social Darwinism, which held that in humans, both biological and social traits were passed from one generation to the next.

Thus, as scientists busied themselves with measurement, classification, and definitions based on physical, biological, and social similarity and difference, they not only reinforced popular social prejudices but enshrined them as irrefutable scientific fact. By the early 20th century, scientists had amassed a great deal of pseudodata portending to show differences between individuals, genders, and ethnic groups by rank ordering any population trait from superior to inferior. For example, individuals were judged as superior based on their race (White, with northern Europeans deemed superior to southern Europeans and Slavic ethnic groups) or their wealth (wealth was superior to poverty). In addition, levels of socially appropriate behavior (law-abiding, self-regulating, restrained, and conformist) were judged superior to socially inappropriate behavior (criminality or antisocial behavior; Friedlander, 1995). These and other classifications soon precipitated both informal social changes and more formal legal measures. Darwin's ideas gained widespread acceptance in Germany, where they nudged the predisposed intelligentsia toward accepting social inequality as presumptive long before Hitler's National Socialist party swept to power in 1933.

Second, an offshoot of Darwinism, Social Darwinism, held that not only biological traits but also social characteristics and their resultant behaviors were genetically determined. Social Darwinism's ideas of difference, therefore, in the form of eugenics, appeared to have immediate and effective application for a number of societal problems, such as "hereditary" social traits (e.g., socially inappropriate or criminal behavior). Here the rationale was simple: All visible traits of human difference were genetically determined. Thus, just as eye and hair color were genetically determined, so were drunkenness, sexual promiscuity, and other socially inappropriate behaviors. A simple extension of these perceptions led to the idea that an effective way of controlling or eliminating these problems was by sterilization, incarceration, or death.

Having established the concept of social heritability and its consequences for individual inequality, similar rankings of desirability were soon applied to entire groups of people, including grouping people by class. That is, the more "inferior" (i.e., lower class) the person, the more likely they would be to engage in undesirable social behavior (e.g., sexual promiscuity) and often criminal behavior (e.g., prostitution). This logic was then used to extrapolate that because many individuals from impoverished backgrounds committed undesirable social and criminal acts, and far fewer from among the wealthy, the entire lower class was characterized by criminality. People with disabilities, many of whom displayed inappropriate behavior or abnormal physical appearance, were among the groups of people thus classified. Based on these perceptions of difference, the next logical step was to control and eventually eradicate undesirable biological and social differences through eugenics.

Marker 2: Eugenics

The term eugenics was coined by the naturalist and mathematician Francis Galton in 1881. Eugenics was described by its leading American proponent, Charles Davenport, as "the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding" (Friedlander, 1995, p. 4). The eugenicists believed Mendelian laws governed the heredity of human physiological traits (Darwinism) and social traits (Social Darwinism). Genetics, therefore, could be manipulated to enhance social ends. This assumption encouraged research on the transmission of social traits and the classification of individuals, groups, and whole societies on a scale of human worth.

Predictably, the results of these efforts isolated individuals and groups of people who appeared to have less intelligence, higher levels of antisocial behavior, and, therefore, by definition, less human worth than those higher up on the ability and prosocial behavior scales. In turn, the emphasis on human worth by rank allowed the eugenicists to study different segments of the scale. More often than not, they chose to study the lower end, including study of individuals with lower intelligence and those they considered socially deviant. Eugenics captured the imagination of researchers in Europe, England, and the United States. In the United States, politicians purportedly promoting the public good were quick to recognize eugenics as a powerful tool for shaping public opinion against people with disabilities. Such awareness fueled laws in many states for the involuntary sterilization of people with disabilities, the most famous case perhaps being that of a Virginia woman with mental retardation, Carrie Buck, named in the 1927 landmark Buck v. Bell case (Winzer, 1993).

Prior to World War I, the German eugenicists concurred with their American and British colleagues regarding a scale of human worth, dividing the German population into those who were superior (hochwertig) and inferior (minderwertig). Thus, eugenics asserted that the "feebleminded" (a generic, inaccurate term covering everything from mental retardation to alcoholism) were almost always so because of inherited inferior characteristics. From these assumptions, they "saw the cause of the social problems of their times, such as alcoholism and prostitution, as inherited feeblemindedness, and viewed the manifestations of poverty, such as intermittent employment and chronic illness, as a hereditary degeneracy" (Friedlander, 1995, p. 6).

However, without the political heterogeneity that encouraged diverse views within the genetics movement in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in England, German eugenicists' views were much more radically homogeneous. Until Germany's defeat in World War I, the German eugenicists concentrated on "positive Eugenics," through the encouragement of higher birth rates among superior populations, which reflected the German eugenic concentration on class rather than race. However, a precursor of future troubles appeared in a eugenic faction that favored the concept of the Nordic racial ideal and despised its inferior counterpart, the anti-Nordic (Friedlander, 1995). It was this concept that eventually dominated German eugenic discourse and became enshrined in the Nazi idea of Aryan supremacy.

The two genocidal markers of Social Darwinism and eugenics were firmly in place in the professional and lay psyche when the National Socialists, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, were elected in January 1933. Thereafter, German acceptance of humanitarian inequality mixed with Hitler's racist convictions to produce the political ideology of the "Thousand Year Reich," a major component of which was the elimination of those deemed inferior (Friedlander, 1995). Furthermore, these two markers became the bedrock of increasingly coercive official policy, eventually killing thousands of people with disabilities. These two genocidal markers were then enacted in the real world, first by involuntary sterilization.

Marker 3: Forced Prevention of Disability

Discussions of eugenic sterilization in Germany became more prominent in the early 1920s and were bolstered by contemporaneous debates about the worth of human life, although sterilization was illegal in Germany until Hitler became chancellor. One of the first official acts undertaken by the Nazis was the enactment of a sterilization law in 1933, less than 6 months after their election. Grandly titled the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, it decreed compulsory sterilization for persons characterized by a wide variety of disabilities. The law also established a mechanism for deciding who should be sterilized, which consisted of 220 regional Hereditary Health Courts, each made up of a judge and two physicians. People in or recently discharged from institutions were particularly vulnerable to this law for obvious reasons. Approximately 30% to 40% of those sterilized between 1934 and 1936 were patients in asylums across Germany (Burleigh, 1994). The sterilization law reached many categories of the "heriditarily sick," including persons with mental retardation (200,000), schizophrenia (80,000), Huntington's chorea (600), epilepsy (60,000), blindness (4,000), hereditary deafness (16,000), grave bodily malformation (20,000), hereditary alcoholism (10,000), and other specified groups (Lifton, 1986).

The law was repeatedly amended to close loopholes that might allow some persons with disabilities to escape sterilization. For example, an amendment was added to cover women with a "hereditary disease" who became pregnant prior to sterilization, or women who were impregnated by men with such "diseases." In such cases the law officially sanctioned abortion and simultaneous sterilization (Friedlander, 1995). The law also stipulated heavy penalties for physicians carrying out such actions on persons or unborn children legally judged to be healthy.

Also in 1933, the Nazis enacted the Law Against Dangerous Habitual Criminals, a law that further blurred the distinction between bona fide criminal behavior and inappropriate social behavior that characterized many people with disabilities. The law stipulated that these criminal asozialen (asocials) could be committed to state asylums, held in indeterminate protective custody, and, in the case of sex offenders, officially castrated (Friedlander, 1995).

These and other laws were the precursors of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which, while directed primarily at Jews, also regulated marriage among people with disabilities. For example, the Marriage Health Law prohibited marriage between two people if either party suffered from some form of mental disability, had a "hereditary disease" as previously defined by law, or suffered from a contagious disease, particularly tuberculosis or venereal disease.

To this point, while Nazi law had become increasingly segregationist and isolationist for people with disabilities, it had not yet sanctioned murder, even though it is clear that as early as 1935 Hitler voiced thoughts that he would use the cover of war to murder psychiatric patients in fulfillment of a long-held belief that he had articulated in Mein Kampf (Yahil, 1987). However, Hitler understood that state-sanctioned homicide would depend on other factors to severely curb public outrage until war became reality. The war, Hitler reasoned, would provide both a distraction and an excuse for officially killing those deemed undesirable. One such factor was the use of propaganda to convince the public of the desirability of some lives over others.

Marker 4: Disability Propagandized as Life Unworthy of Living

By 1938 the tide of public and official benevolence toward people with disabilities had begun to turn. The public mind now characterized people with disabilities as a separate, different, often criminalized group of less economic value than their counterparts without disabilities. German literature and art soon depicted lives unworthy of living in a host of propagandistic projects (Lifton, 1986; Michalczyk, 1994). For example, two 1935 silent documentaries produced largely for distribution among Nazi Party functionaries and sympathizers depicted persons with severe physical and intellectual disabilities in staged scenes to show them to their greatest disadvantage (Burleigh, 1994; Lifton, 1986). Other films were produced for wider audiences. A 1935 propaganda sound film, Das Erbe (The Inheritance), depicted, in a pseudoscientific format, the medical, social, and economic consequences of hereditary disabilities. Other films soon followed. The 1937 film Opfer der Vergangenheit (The Victim of the Past) went much further, comparing healthy, ideal German citizens with institutionalized people with severe disabilities and adding that Jewish mental patients were creations in violation of natural law. The film proposed the solution of compulsory sterilization.

Propaganda was not limited to film, however, but also appeared in German literature. An exemplar of this work is the novel Sendung und Gewissen (Mission and Conscience), which was turned into a very popular film, Ich Klage an! (I Accuse!). In the story, a beautiful young woman suffering from multiple sclerosis decides that her life is no longer worth living and requests a "merciful death" at the hand of her husband, a physician. In the film's death scene climax, he administers the fatal injection to his wife, who dies peacefully to the strains of soothing piano music played by a friend in the next room. At his trial, the doctor heroically refuses to allow his colleagues to invent an alibi for the murder and challenges the court by asking, "Would you, if you were a cripple, want to vegetate forever?" Predictably, the court acquits the physician because his actions were merciful, not murderous, a notion reinforced in the closing scenes, where the words of the Renaissance physician Paracelsus are recalled, that "medicine is love" (Proctor, 1988).

This type of propaganda, fueled by then current perceptions of disability and euthanasia, profoundly affected the German public. By the late 1930s, requests for mercy killing were being received by Nazi officials. For example, requests were received from a woman ill with terminal cancer and from a man who had been severely injured and blinded in a construction accident (Burleigh, 1997). The state was also receiving similar requests from parents of newborns and young infants with severe physical and intellectual disabilities (Lifton, 1986).

To this point, Nazi involvement with mercy killing, while implicit, appears to have been muted and uninitiated by the state. However, social perceptions of disability had been radically modified, and requests for mercy deaths were increasing and were generally viewed as more acceptable, whether conducted by individual citizens or the state. Essentially, disability was widely acknowledged to be a legitimate justification for murder.

See what we could do if only the issues wasn't cluttered up with emotion and religious mumbo-jumbo...

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SNUFF PICKS (via John Resnick):

Litigation As Spiritual Practice by George J. Felos (Amazon.com)

Product Description:

As the legal advocate of his client's right to die, Attorney George Felos plumbed the depths of death and dying and spearheaded a social revolution to enable death with dignity in the state of Florida. Felos uses this case and a decade-long tax battle with the United States Justice Department - sending him to Hong Kong's back alleys in search of antique jades and ivories - as framework to interweave the story of his law practice and spiritual unfoldment.

Litigation as Spiritual Practice describes the excitement and drama of the courtroom, and the ecstasy and anguish of spiritual evolution in a combative environment.

If the seemingly barren and war-strewn field of litigation can be the playground where spirit dances, it can revel anywhere.

Which would make Terri Schiavo the teeter-totter?

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READY FOR THE WAR:

Amputee Soldier Returns to Changed Iraq (Fox News, March 30, 2005)

The first amputee with a combat command, [Capt. David] Rozelle, of the 3rd Armored Cavalry, arrived in Baghdad just about a week ago. His prosthesis has a patch from his unit and the U.S. flag imprinted on it.

"It's ready for the war," he said.

Rozelle lost his foot in the city of Hit in June 2003 when his Humvee hit a landmine. Now helping to provide security for the citizens of Iraq, it wasn't always easy for him to think about returning.

"At the very beginning, I had a lot of self pity," he said. "I was laying in the Army hospital just outside here, when I first found out that I was going to lose my foot. Of course, I thought I'd given enough," he said.

But Rozelle said that mindset didn't last long.

"I wanted to come back into the job. Coming back to Iraq wasn't really the ultimate goal. Of course, now that I'm here, It's brought things full circle — in other words, it's taken me back to the point where I lost my foot the first time. It's allowed me to start my life again, in Iraq, where I thought it had ended," he said.

Rozelle admits that it hasn't always been easy back in Iraq and he's had to make some adjustments.

"Any time you find yourself in position where you have to walk all the time, as an amputee, that's a challenge in itself because it's much more difficult on your body to do something like walk all day. I try to drive as much as I can," he said.

Rozelle's injury doesn't appear to be fazing the unit he commands. If anything, they're grateful to have him around.

"If anything does go down, it's good to know he has the experience to keep everything in control and not let anything get out of hand," said combat medic Richard Arsenault.

After almost two years away from Iraq, Rozelle said he was surprised to see how much had changed since he'd last been there. He recalled a more uncertain environment, when the insurgency movement seemed to be growing.

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TICKET TO HISTORY (via The Mother Judd):

Jim Thorpe and a Ticket to Serendipity (BILL PENNINGTON, 3/29/05, NY Times)

When Anthony Barone Jr. went to a local book auction with his sister Lee early this month, they came across a book from the 1920's, "Jesse James and His Greatest Hauls," a Wild West adventure of daring holdups.

Unimpressed by the condition of the book's cover, Anthony was not interested in purchasing it. But when the bidding crested at $6, Lee looked at her brother. "What's six bucks?" she said.

Anthony and Lee took the book home and ignored it for a week. They contemplated putting it back up for auction the next week, when Anthony decided he would at least flip through it.

"I started leafing through the pages, and out dropped this big red ticket," said Barone, a 44-year-old purchasing manager from Jamestown, N.Y. "It literally fell into my lap."

The ticket, six inches long, in good condition and with its stub still attached, was for an exhibition basketball game featuring Jim Thorpe and "His World Famous Indians" on March 1, 1927. It did not indicate where the game was being played, other than at a Y.M.C.A. gym. Other teams listed on the ticket - "Clothes Shop," "New Process" and "Bankers" - were mysteries.

What has followed is a story of discovery and rediscovery. Barone's red ticket, according to several historians who have chronicled the life of Thorpe, who was a star athlete in football, baseball and track and field in the early 20th century, is like an archeological find.

Artifacts of Thorpe's athletic career, generally conceded to have ended in 1928, are rare and valuable. Nearly every authority on Thorpe's life and times, including his son, did not know he had played basketball at a high level as an adult. The ticket has helped uncover a 45-game barnstorming tour centered in Pennsylvania in which Thorpe, then 39, led a team of American Indian all-star basketball players.

"I didn't know what any of it meant," Barone said of the ticket. "But I kept thinking that some 14-year-old kid thought enough of that game that he didn't even let the usher rip the stub off. He had gone to see an American hero, and then he stuffed the ticket in his favorite book about the old West, and that's where it's been for 80 years.

"I felt it must mean something."

Opening old books is often an adventure.

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THE SCOTS CERTAINLY DON'T DESERVE IT ANYMORE:

'Braveheart' Sword Leaves Scotland (AP, Mar 30, 2005)

One of Scotland's national treasures, the 5-foot sword wielded by William Wallace, the rebel leader portrayed in the Academy Award-winning film "Braveheart," left its homeland for the first time in more than 700 years Wednesday.

The double-handed weapon that belonged to Wallace will be the centerpiece of an exhibition at New York's Grand Central Station during Tartan Day celebrations, which begin later this week.

This year marks the 700th anniversary of the execution of Wallace, who led the Scots in their battle to free themselves from English rule and whose story was brought to the screen by Mel Gibson in the 1995 film "Braveheart." The film won five Academy Awards. [...]

The 6-pound weapon will be returned to its home at the National Wallace Monument in Stirling, Scotland, after the celebrations.

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WELL, DUH...

1981 attack on Pope planned by Soviets: Report (Agence France-Presse, 3/30/05)

New documents found in the files of the former East German intelligence services confirm the 1981 assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II was ordered by the Soviet KGB and assigned to Bulgarian agents, an Italian daily said on Wednesday.

In other news, the left continues to ridicule the claim that Syria had any hand at all in the assasination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri while demanding that President Bush be tried before the International Criminal Court in for his involvement in the death of US Senator Paul Wellstone.

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DID HE SIGN THAT WOLFOWITZ PETITION?:

An unholy alliance: Aryan Nation leader reaches out to al Qaeda (Henry Schuster, March 29, 2005, CNN)

A couple of hours up the road from where some September 11 hijackers learned to fly, the new head of Aryan Nation is praising them -- and trying to create an unholy alliance between his white supremacist group and al Qaeda.

"You say they're terrorists, I say they're freedom fighters. And I want to instill the same jihadic feeling in our peoples' heart, in the Aryan race, that they have for their father, who they call Allah."

With his long beard and potbelly, August Kreis looks more like a washed up member of ZZ Top than an aspiring revolutionary.

Don't let appearances fool you: his résumé includes stops at some of America's nastiest extremist groups -- Posse Comitatus, the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nation.

"I don't believe that they were the ones that attacked us," Kreis said. "And even if they did, even if you say they did, I don't care!"

Kreis wants to make common cause with al Qaeda because, he says, they share the same enemies: Jews and the American government. [...]

You might think white supremacists like Kreis would spurn al Qaeda, since they tend to view non-Aryan Christians as, in their own term, "mud people." In fact, most of them do. But Kreis wants to change that.

"That's old-school racism, white supremacy, this is something new," he said. "We have to be realists and realize what didn't work [previously] isn't going to work in the future."

Certainly sounds like a Realist.

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PEOPLE ARE RESOURCES NOT LIABILITIES FILE #849:

La Vida Robot (Joshua Davis,April 2005, www.wired.com)

There certainly isn't a lot of pride on the outside. The school buildings are mostly drab, late '50s-era boxes. The front lawn is nothing but brown scrub and patches of dirt. The class photos beside the principal's office tell the story of the past four decades. In 1965, the students were nearly all white, wearing blazers, ties, and long skirts. Now the school is 92 percent Hispanic. Drooping, baggy jeans and XXXL hoodies are the norm.

Across campus, in a second-floor windowless room, four students huddle around an odd, 3-foot-tall frame constructed of PVC pipe. They have equipped it with propellers, cameras, lights, a laser, depth detectors, pumps, an underwater microphone, and an articulated pincer. At the top sits a black, waterproof briefcase containing a nest of hacked processors, minuscule fans, and LEDs. It's a cheap but astoundingly functional underwater robot capable of recording sonar pings and retrieving objects 50 feet below the surface. The four teenagers who built it are all undocumented Mexican immigrants who came to this country through tunnels or hidden in the backseats of cars. They live in sheds and rooms without electricity. But over three days last summer, these kids from the desert proved they are among the smartest young underwater engineers in the country.

You simply must read this story. A bunch of bright, poor, 'undocumented' Mexican high school kids with about $800 in sponsorship money goes against MIT and $11,000 in sponsorship money for an underwater robot contest. How does it turn out? Here's a hint: Either Gene Hackman or Edward James Olmos should star as the Mentor/Coach when the movie is made....

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FIRST THE DEHUMANIZATION, THEN THE DEBATE:

Prop. 71 stem cell research stirs ethical debate (Sandy Kleffman, 3/30/05, CONTRA COSTA TIMES)

California's plunge into the brave new world of stem cell research is raising prickly ethical questions and could create a demand for hundreds of women's eggs.

Scientists plan to use the eggs from as many as 1,000 women for therapeutic cloning -- a technique many believe holds huge promise for medical breakthroughs in Parkinson's disease, diabetes and other chronic illnesses.

But some women's groups fear egg donors will face health risks. They worry that scientists do not know all the long-term effects of the drugs women will receive to stimulate ovulation. Some question whether voters knew the ramifications when they passed Proposition 71 in November.

"This certainly was not a well-understood or talked-about issue," said state Sen. George Runner, R-Antelope Valley, who opposed the measure.

"I'm not sure the voters really understood the ethical divide they were crossing."

They should be proud to die for the greater good.

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ETHICS FOR YOU, NOT FOR ME:

Who is CREW? (The Hill, 3/30/05)

Why would any person or organization professing to believe in clean democracy object to revealing the names of the people influencing its policy?

One such is Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) — a self-important moniker if ever there was one — which has repeatedly refused to tell The Hill who sits on its board of directors, unlike all eight other members of the Congressional Ethics Coalition.

CREW’s secrecy is hypocritical. Its avowed mission is to promote greater transparency in federal politics. Its website boasts, “Our aim is to encourage officials to be open about their values and to act based upon their honest and best assessment of the public interest.

“If a government agency withholds information to which the public is entitled, CREW will go to court to enforce legal rules regarding disclosure.”

Sounds fine, no? But transparency is also appropriate for an organization that is at the center of partisan disputes, such as the growing ethics war in the House of Representatives.

CREW assisted former Rep. Chris Bell (D-Texas) in drafting a complaint against Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) that resulted in the majority leader’s admonishment by the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct.

Just keep digging 'til you find the check from George Soros.

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DE-MILITANTIZED ZONE:

Islamic official attends PLO meeting for first time (Arnon Regular, 3/29/05, Haaretz)

Islamic Jihad head Mohammed al-Hindi attended a Palestine Liberation Organization executive committee meeting in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, marking the first time that a religious Islamic group has participated in a meeting of the PLO's highest decision-making body.

Hamas, however, boycotted the meeting, which was planned as a first step toward the inclusion of all the major Palestinian factions in the PLO's executive body.

Expressing optimism after the meeting, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas told reporters that a definite possibility exists for the parties to "reach an agreement on basic political common denominators."

Hamas drops call for Greater Palestine: According to a report in al-Quds a historic understanding was reached with Hamas according to which the movement will merge with the PLO and relinquish its demand for total liberation of Palestine (Roee Nahmias, 3/30/05, y-netnews)

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas has reached a historic understanding to incorporate Hamas into the Palestinian Liberation Oraganization (PLO) in exchange for relinquishing its vision of liberating the whole of Palestine, reported the London-based al-Quds newspaper Wednesday.

According to the report, Fatah will relinquish its monopoly on government and political influence, while

Hamas has recognized the PLO as the only legitimate Palestinian organization.

In addition, Hamas has agreed in principle to a series of far-reaching concessions, primarily acceptance of the PLO’s current political platform, which is based on the founding of a Palestinian state according to the 1967 borders. Verification of the report would mean the movement has abandoned its primary demand -- namely, the liberation of Greater Palestine.

Give folks an internal politics they can contest and they will.

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MALTHUSIANS NEVER GIVE UP (via Rick Turley):

Two-thirds of world's resources 'used up' (Tim Radford, March 30, 2005, The Guardian)

The human race is living beyond its means. A report backed by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries - some of them world leaders in their fields - today warns that the almost two-thirds of the natural machinery that supports life on Earth is being degraded by human pressure.

The study contains what its authors call "a stark warning" for the entire world. The wetlands, forests, savannahs, estuaries, coastal fisheries and other habitats that recycle air, water and nutrients for all living creatures are being irretrievably damaged. In effect, one species is now a hazard to the other 10 million or so on the planet, and to itself.

"Human activity is putting such a strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted," it says.

The intense competition for dwindling resources would certainly explain how much speciation we observe.

MORE (via Mike Daley)::
Shaping the Future: Scientific uncertainty often becomes an excuse to ignore long-term problems, such as climate change. It doesn't have to be so (Steven W. Popper, Robert J. Lempert and Steven C. Bankes, 3/28/05, Scientific American)

Striking a balance between the economy and the environment is one leading example of the difficulty in using science to inform long-term decisions. In his 2002 book The Future of Life, Edward O. Wilson described the debate between economists and environmental scientists [see "The Bottleneck," by Edward O. Wilson; Scientific American, February 2002]. The former group frequently argues that present policies will guide society successfully through the coming century. Technological innovation will reduce pollution and improve energy efficiency, and changes in commodity prices will ensure timely switching from scarce to more plentiful resources. The latter group argues that society's present course will prove unsustainable. By the time the signs of environmental stress become unambiguous, society may have passed the point of easy recovery. Better to apply the brakes now rather than jam them on later when it may be too late.

No matter how compelling their arguments, both sides' detailed predictions are surely wrong. Decisions made today will affect the world 50 to 100 years hence, but no one can credibly predict what life will be like then, regardless of the quality of the science. Interested parties view the same incomplete data, apply different values and assumptions, and arrive at different conclusions. The result can be static and acrimonious debate: "Tree hugger!" "Eco-criminal!"

The (in)famous report The Limits to Growth from the early 1970s is the perfect example of how the standard tools of analysis often fail to mediate such debates. A group of scientists and opinion leaders called the Club of Rome predicted that the world would soon exhaust its natural resources unless it took immediate action to slow their use. This conclusion flowed from a then state-of-the-art computer model of the dynamics of resource use. The report met with great skepticism. Since the days of Thomas Malthus, impending resource shortages have melted away as new technologies have made production more efficient and provided alternatives to dwindling resources.

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LIFE SAVING CELIBACY

Pope Getting Nutrition From Tube in Nose (Victor L. Simpson, AP, 3/30/05)

Pope John Paul II is getting nutrition from a tube in his nose, the Vatican said Wednesday, shortly after the frail pontiff appeared at his window in St. Peter's Square and managed only a rasp when he tried to speak.

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EVERYBODY WANTS TO KILL SOMEBODY:

Remembering a dark chapter in Turkish history (Peter S. Canellos, March 29, 2005, Boston Globe)

Henry Morgenthau III sits in his living room, surrounded by mementos of his family, and speaks of the great goal of his grandfather's life: ''He wanted to think of himself as fully American."

Morgenthau's immigrant grandfather, who served as US ambassador to Turkey between 1913 and 1916, strived to establish the German-Jewish Morgenthaus in the American aristocracy almost as assiduously as Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. strived to establish his Irish-Catholic family in the American pantheon. The Morgenthaus acquired top-notch educations, a grand home in the Hudson Valley near the Roosevelts, and a seemingly permanent seat at the tables of power.

The Morgenthaus ascended the way most immigrants did, by assimilation. Henry III still remembers his grandfather reciting rhymes to try to rid himself of the last vestige of a German accent -- his difficulty pronouncing the letters ''th." The first Henry Morgenthau distanced himself from Zionism, fearful that it would prompt suspicions of dual loyalties among American Jews.

But while assuming the posture of the Protestant Yankee elites, the Morgenthaus never forgot their shared ancestry with the refugees, displaced peoples, and immigrants of the world. That is why they occupy a unique niche among America's self-made aristocracy: Both Henry Morgenthau Sr. and his son Henry Morgenthau Jr. are heroes to millions overseas for trying to intervene in the first two genocides of the 20th century, the Turkish slaughter of Armenians in 1915 and the Nazi extermination of European Jews.

The irony is that Henry Morgenthau Jr. planned with FDR to impose reprisals on a defeated Germany that would have likewise been genocidal:

TERENCE SMITH: A central character in your book is Henry Morgenthau, President Roosevelt's secretary of treasury and friend, close friend.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Indeed.

TERENCE SMITH: And he had a vision for postwar Germany. Tell us about that and what he did to try to forward it.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Morgenthau was only the second Jew in American history to be in a President's cabinet, his Hudson... Roosevelt's Hudson Valley friend and neighbor. He was horrified by what he learned about the Holocaust, and he went to Roosevelt and confronted him. He had been told that they were making lampshades out of the skins of the Jews, and he said to Roosevelt, "you have to stop this." Roosevelt began to act, but Morgenthau went further. He said, "not only do you have to try to stop the Holocaust, you have to make sure that Germany will never threaten the world again," came up with something called the Morgenthau Plan, and went to Roosevelt and said, "After this war is won by the United States and our allies, we should take apart the factories of Germany, flood the mines, make sure that there's no industry in Germany, even if the Germans starve, to teach them a lesson."

TERENCE SMITH: Of course, after Roosevelt died and Truman became President, he saw it differently.

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Truman turned it around, because after Roosevelt died, Truman said, "yes, we have to eliminate Nazism, but if you make Germany that weak, not only will the Germans be resentful and perhaps start another world war, but also you'll leave Europe open to the Soviet Union." So Truman, after World War II and after Roosevelt's death, he was the one who presided over the big effort to build democratic institutions in Germany-- schools, newspapers, all those things that we now see today-- and the result is that Germany is one of the strongest democracies on earth.

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STILL A LOT OF LITTER:

Libertystan (Leon Aron, March 30, 2005, Wall Street Journal)

Similar to the equally inspiring Iraqi election in its reaffirmation of human dignity--which in today's world is impossible without political liberty--in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, the recent revolts in former Soviet states should prompt a revision of many misleading stereotypes and help the U.S. to reassess its policies in that part of the world.

While the first wave of liberation in the early 1990s ended the state's monopoly in politics and economy, it failed, first, to establish civic society's effective preponderance over the state apparatus and, second, to separate political power at every level from control of property. These two preconditions of liberal democracy, which in the West took centuries to develop, proved especially difficult to achieve within a decade for the countries where the land-owning magnate, the village elder, the tribal chief or the king's satrap had combined economic and political power long before Soviet patrimonialism obliterated any distinction between the state and property for over seven decades.

With the collapse of the Soviet system, patrimonialism in the form of bureaucratic claims on property survived in myriad instances, from the former kolkhoz chairman and district fire inspector to the offices of prime ministers and presidents. Already an integral part of a long national tradition, corruption reached new heights of ubiquity and brazenness. In the end, the national revulsion over the rapacity of the executive branch and its shameless efforts to protect its loot through increasingly authoritarian politics became one of the two key components of this "second wave" of liberation.

Yet the revolts have also shown that in all three nations the anti-totalitarian revolutions of the '90s did not disappear without a trace. Instead, they left behind a basic framework of rights and liberties--rudimentary by the standards of older democracies and often subverted by the authorities--yet remarkably resilient.

The structural problems in these states will still take some time to overcome, if they ever can be--they were after all famously dubbed "trashcanistans" by Stephen Kotkin.

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WHAT WE LEARNED FROM THE 70s:

Kids aren't as drunk, crooked as parents were (KEVIN FREKING, March 30, 2005, Chicago Sun-Times)

In many ways, children today are doing better than their parents did. They commit fewer crimes, have fewer babies and get drunk less.

The Child-Well Being Index, which tracks 28 separate measures, shows that since 1993 children have been engaging in less risky behavior. [...]

Jeffrey Butts, director of the youth justice program at the Urban Institute, said the report speaks well of today's teens.

''Maybe we have the next 'greatest generation' coming along here,'' Butts said. [...]

Some findings from developers of a child well-being index:

THE GOOD

The adolescent and teen birth rate has dropped from 20 births per 1,000 girls in 1992 to an estimated 11 births per 1,000 girls in 2004.

Binge drinking among high school seniors has fallen from 37 percent in 1975 to about 29 percent in 2004. Binge drinking is the consumption of five or more alcoholic drinks in one setting.

The number of violent young criminals has dropped over three decades from a level of 31 offenders per 1,000 youths to an estimated 8 offenders per 1,000 youths in 2003.

The number of high school seniors who reported smoking within the past month has dropped from 36 percent in 1975 to an estimated 16 percent in 2004.

Those of us who watched the mess the Boomers made of the 60s and 70s knew our parents/grandparents had been far too permissive.

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SUNNI OR LATER:

Lawmakers regroup, aim to name leaders by week's end (ANTONIO CASTANEDA, March 30, 2005, ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Iraqi lawmakers regrouped on Wednesday after failing to name parliamentary leaders during their contentious second session, seeking to forge an agreement by the end of the week so that they can begin to focus on their primary task of writing a new constitution.

The impasse, two months after the country's historic national elections, is rooted in disagreements about the posts that should be granted to Sunni Arabs, an attempt to incorporate in the new government members of the minority group that dominated under ousted dictator Saddam Hussein.

The Sunni Arab minority-- believed to be the backbone of the insurgency-- was given until Sunday to come up with a candidate to serve as speaker.

"We saw that things were confused ... so we gave (the Sunnis) a last chance," said Hussein al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric and member of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's coalition. "We expect the Sunni Arab brothers to nominate their candidate. Otherwise, we will vote on a candidate on Sunday."

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SHARANSCHISM:

Golan elephant and the Lebanese crisis (Ashraf Fahim, 3/31/05, Asia Times)

At the center of the ongoing crisis surrounding the Syrian presence in Lebanon, a 38-year-old elephant has been loitering almost unnoticed. While the world scrutinizes Syria's promised withdrawal, gawks as the Lebanese opposition and Hezbollah flood the streets of Beirut in their war of demonstrations, and debates whether the Bush administration deserves credit for inspiring the "cedar revolution", little attention has been given to a principal factor binding this Levantine Gordian knot - the Israeli occupation of the Syrian Golan heights. [...]

[T]here is every indication that the administration of US President George W Bush is settling into the dogmatic belief that peace can only be made between democracies - a belief now reinforced by right-wing Israeli politician and former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, whose book The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror holds a hypnotic power over Bush. The so-called "democratic peace" thesis has become Bush's guidestar on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

It is difficult to see how Bush could resolve the ideological contradiction of demanding root and branch Palestinian democratization, while also pressuring Israel to negotiate with Assad's Allawite dictatorship. Assad has moved at a tortoise's pace on democratic reform, partly as a result of conspicuous US pressure and the threatening US presence in Iraq, but also because real reform would likely mean reforming the Ba'ath regime right out of power.

Assad desperately needs to recover the Golan if he is to revive the Syrian economy and shore up his legitimacy. But with Lebanon making him look fragile, the US and Israel have little interest in gifting him the Golan lifesaver.

Indeed, Assad should be further undercut by a declaration that Israel is ready and willing to turn over the Golan to the democratic regime that succeeds him.
Who gives a

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WHERE'S SMUTS WHEN YOU NEED HIM?:

South Africa's failure in Zimbabwe (Padraig O'Malley, March 30, 2005, Boston Globe)

Mugabe is in substantial breach of every election protocol of the Southern African Development Community, of which Zimbabwe is a member; he has failed to implement the recommendations of the African Union's Commission on Human and People's Rights; he flouts international law, and he has banned the presence of observer teams from all countries and nongovernmental organizations that might conclude that the elections might not be free and fair (China qualifies, the European Union does not).

Rather than rebuke Mugabe for his crimes against his own people, South Africa assists in their persecution. When Zimbabweans, desperate for food and work, sneak their way into South Africa, they are incarcerated in the Lindela Repatriation Center, a prison that would put any apartheid-era prison to shame.

Sadly, black South Africans seem to have forgotten that all of Africa took them in and championed their cause, often at risk to themselves. Just weeks ago, President Thabo Mbeki pronounced, ''Nobody in Zimbabwe is likely to act in a way that will prevent free and fair elections being held" -- the blithe sentiment of the mightily unperturbed.

A mere 11 years ago, South Africa held its first free, fair, and nonracial elections, which brought 40 years of apartheid ignominy and 300 years of institutionalized racial discrimination to an end. It ushered in an era of democratic governance, with the ANC the lead actor. However, before the ANC would agree to elections in 1994, it insisted on a level political playing field. The actual casting of a ballot, the ANC well knew, is the next to final act in the process of a free and fair election, not the first. The world supported the demands the ANC made on the white minority government. It stood in solidarity, and across the globe people took to the streets on its behalf, on behalf of millions of black South Africans. It flooded the country with election observers from across the world to ensure free and fair elections.

The result is history, and South Africa has been eager to share the secrets of its success with other democracies in the process of transition.

Except with its next-door neighbor.

In the days ahead, the South African government's observers have a chance to redeem their country's honor, but few here are holding their breath.

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WELL, AT LEAST HE GOT GEOCENTRISM RIGHT:

Ptolemy Tilted Off His Axis: Studying a statue of Atlas holding the sky, an American astronomer finds key evidence of what could be a major fraud in science history. (John Johnson, March 30, 2005, LA Times)

In a sunlit gallery of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Italy, astronomer Brad Schaefer came face to face with an ancient statue known as the Farnese Atlas.

For centuries, the 7-foot marble figure of the mythological Atlas has bent in stoic agony with a sphere of the cosmos crushing his shoulders.

Carved on the sphere — one of only three celestial globes that have survived from Greco-Roman times — are figures representing 41 of the 48 constellations of classical antiquity, as well as the celestial equator, tropics and meridians.

Historians have long looked on the Atlas as a postcard from the past — interesting largely as astronomical art.

But as Schaefer approached, he began to notice subtle details in the arrangement of the constellations. It wasn't that anything was wrong with the statue. If anything, the positions of the constellations were too perfect to be mere decoration.

He was more than a little intrigued. No, this was no mere piece of art. Taking out his camera, he was about to take a journey through the centuries to unravel one of the great mysteries of the ancient world and uncover key evidence in what may be one of the biggest cases of fraud in the history of science.

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BRING OUT THE "FAKE" TURKEY:

Laura Bush to make women focus of her visit,/a> (Chicago Tribune, March 30, 2005)

First Lady Laura Bush set out Tuesday on a whirlwind trip to Afghanistan, eager to finally tell the women of that country that American women stand with them.

The first lady was to be in the country for about five hours Wednesday, time to visit women who are training to be teachers and others who have made a business of selling handicrafts. She also was to meet with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and have dinner with U.S. troops stationed at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul.

Bush has wanted to visit Afghanistan for a couple of years but delayed the journey, mostly because of security concerns in the war-torn country, where U.S. forces still are battling a stubborn Taliban-led insurgency. Her trip was kept secret until just before she left from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington.

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1...2...3...4...5...6...7...8...9...10...11...12...?:

Federal court agrees to hear new Schiavo request (RON WORD, 3/30/05, Associated Press)

In a rare legal victory for Terri Schiavo's parents, a federal appeals court agreed to consider an emergency motion requesting a new hearing on whether to reconnect their severely brain-damaged daughter's feeding tube.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta issued a written order without comment late Tuesday allowing Bob and Mary Schindler to file the appeal, even though the court had set a March 26 deadline for doing so.

In the one-sentence order, the court said: "The Appellant's emergency motion for leave to file out of time is granted."

The court didn't say when it would decide whether to grant the hearing. Last week, it twice ruled against the Schindlers, who are trying to keep their daughter alive.

In requesting a new hearing, the Schindlers argued that a federal judge in Tampa should have considered the entire state court record and not just the procedural history when he ruled against the parents.

Time was running out for Schiavo, however. Bob Schindler described his daughter as "failing" on Tuesday, her 12th day without nourishment.

"She still looks pretty darn good under the circumstances," Schindler said. "You can see the impact of no food and water for 12 days. Her bodily functions are still working. We still have her."

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THE UNIVERSAL IDIOSYNCRASY (via Paul Cella):

How to Mix Religion and Politics (Edward Feser, 3/29/05, Tech Central Station)

We are constantly told by liberals -- or "progressives," or "the reality-based community," or however it is they are marketing themselves this week -- that religion and politics ought never to be mixed. Religion, it is said, should be confined as far as possible to the private sphere. In the public square, it is secular considerations alone that ought to get a hearing. The problem with these claims is that there is absolutely nothing serious to be said in their defense. We can of course readily concede that the Constitution forbids the establishment of any particular denomination as the official religion of the United States; I know of no one who denies this. But the question is not whether membership in some church or synagogue or other ought to be compulsory. The question is whether religious arguments should have the same standing in public life as secular arguments, and the answer is that there is no good reason they should not.

To be sure, liberal criticism of the influence of religion on politics is largely directed at a straw man in any case. In most of the areas where liberals think they see such an influence, religion plays, or need play, no essential role at all. For example, the main arguments presented by opponents of abortion and same-sex marriage do not rest on religious premises. Some pro-life arguments do indeed make controversial claims about the moral and metaphysical status of the fetus -- just as pro-choice arguments do -- but acceptance of those claims does not necessarily entail belief in God. The influential arguments of Princeton University's Robert P. George, for instance, rest only on some very plausible and modest claims about fetal biology and a few secular moral premises. The arguments of Don Marquis, the author of what is probably the most widely anthologized and cited pro-life article in contemporary philosophy (pdf), assume an even less robust and controversial view of the nature of the fetus. Things are no different with same-sex marriage. Philosophers like Roger Scruton and Michael Levin have defended traditional sexual morality in terms of a quasi-Kantian ethics and evolutionary psychology, respectively, rather than by appeal to any religious tradition or authority.

Suppose, however, that someone did defend a view about abortion, same-sex marriage, or some other contentious matter by appealing to religious considerations. Why should this be considered unacceptable? The problem, in the view of many liberals, is that religious considerations are matters of faith, where "faith" connotes in their minds a kind of groundless commitment, a will to believe that for which there is no objective evidence. Opinions on matters of public policy, they would say, can only appropriately be arrived at via methods of argument assessable by all members of the political community, not by reference to the idiosyncratic and subjective feelings of a minority.

If religious arguments were in general really like this, then I would agree with the liberal that they ought to be kept out of the public square. But in fact this liberal depiction of religion is a ludicrous caricature, and manifests just the sort of ignorance and bigotry of which liberals frequently accuse others.

An excellent essay except that it concedes two interlocking points unwisely: first, that reason is objective; second, that subjective faith is an inadequate basis for political philosophy.

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THE CONSTITUTION IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL

Yesterday, Peter Burnet posted this story: Colorado Court Bars Execution Because Jurors Consulted Bible (Kirk Johnson, New York Times, March 29th, 2005)

In a sharply divided ruling, Colorado's highest court on Monday upheld a lower court's decision throwing out the sentence of a man who was given the death penalty after jurors consulted the Bible in reaching a verdict.

How, then, to explain this:

Benjamin Franklin: Constitutional Convention Address on Prayer (delivered Thursday, June 28, 1787, Philadelphia, PA)

Mr. President:

The small progress we have made after 4 or five weeks close attendance & continual reasonings with each other -- our different sentiments on almost every question, several of the last producing as many noes as ays, is methinks a melancholy proof of the imperfection of the Human Understanding. We indeed seem to feel our own wont of political wisdom, since we have been running about in search of it. We have gone back to ancient history for models of government, and examined the different forms of those Republics which having been formed with the seeds of their own dissolution now no longer exist. And we have viewed Modern States all round Europe, but find none of their Constitutions suitable to our circumstances.

In this situation of this Assembly groping as it were in the dark to find political truth, and scarce able to distinguish it when to us, how has it happened, Sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings? In the beginning of the contest with G. Britain, when we were sensible of danger we had daily prayer in this room for the Divine Protection. -- Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a Superintending providence in our favor. To that kind providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? or do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance.

I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth -- that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings that "except the Lord build they labor in vain that build it." I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel: We shall be divided by our little partial local interests; our projects will be confounded, and we ourselves shall be become a reproach and a bye word down to future age. And what is worse, mankind may hereafter this unfortunate instance, despair of establishing Governments by Human Wisdom, and leave it to chance, war, and conquest.

I therefore beg leave to move -- that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the Clergy of this City be requested to officiate in that service.

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SELF-REFERENCE ALERT:

Insightful detective series 'Eyes' has a whole lot of plot (LUCIO GUERRERO, March 30, 2005, Chicago Sun-Times)

ABC calls Judd "impulsive, sharp-witted."

So it's universal then?

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THEO'S A GENIUS:

Relief needs prompt trade: With Tsao injured, Rockies go for Kim (Tracy Ringolsby, March 30, 2005, Rocky Mountain News)

Even when the Rockies think they have found an answer to their biggest uncertainty - their bullpen - they wind up with more questions.

They decided to take a shot at reviving the career of Byung-Hyun Kim, reaching a tentative deal Tuesday to acquire him from the Boston Red Sox, according to a source close to the Rockies.

Like any sidearmer, Byung-Hyun Kim can be effective against righties but gets murdered by lefties. If they let him face any of the latter in Denver someone may hit a ball 600 feet off of him.

N.B.: Okay, maybe not a genius--"The deal was pending approval by Sox ownership, who must agree to the provision of paying more than $5.6 million of Kim's $6 million salary. "

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J'ACCUSE!:

Schiavo Case Is Solely a U.S. Phenomenon (ALICIA COLON, 3/29/05, NY Sun)

The national furor surrounding the Theresa Schiavo tragedy will no doubt rage for a few days but will eventually die down. The rest of the world has regarded this battle over one woman’s life as proof that we are religious extremists. I, however, have never been prouder to be an American.

Wouldn't it be interesting if Ms. Schiavo just...continues to live? Breathing, blinking, looking around, cooing, and all the rest? Imagine puzzled doctors examining the situation and saying, yes, she's unquestionably failing to receive nourishment but she continues to survive somehow on her own.

How long would it take before a freaked-out public concluded that this was an act of God and demanded that Terri's parents assume responsibility for her? How long would it take our addle-brained robed elites to comply?

Or we can take the Old Testament route: Right before she dies, a fully-conscious Terri Schiavo sits upright in her bed, points an accusatory finger straight at her husband and says...

Readers of this blog can take it from there.

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WHERE THE BOYS ARE:

Boy Scouts Executive Surrenders in Fort Worth on a Child Pornography Charge (RALPH BLUMENTHAL, 3/30/05, NY Times)

The longtime program director of the Boy Scouts of America and chairman of its Youth Protection Task Force has surrendered on a federal charge of receiving and distributing child pornography on the Internet, the United States attorney's office in Fort Worth said Tuesday.

The director, Douglas Sovereign Smith Jr., 61, who was put on leave last month and quietly retired March 1, was expected to plead guilty on Wednesday to the single felony count filed by federal prosecutors, a crime that can carry a prison term of 5 to 20 years, said Kathy Colvin, a spokeswoman for the United States attorney's office.

Ms. Colvin said that a prosecutor's filing, rather than a grand jury indictment, was commonly used to charge a defendant when a guilty plea was anticipated. The filing charges Mr. Smith with knowingly receiving and sending "computer images which contained photographs of minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct." [...]

Mr. Shields said the Scouts learned of the investigation in a visit by agents from the Department of Homeland Security in February and put Mr. Smith on administrative leave. "Shortly thereafter he chose to retire," Mr. Shields said.

Ms. Colvin said the investigation had been carried out under Operation Predator, an initiative announced in 2003 by the Department of Homeland Security "to protect children from pornographers, child prostitution rings, Internet predators, alien smugglers, human traffickers and other criminals." The operation's investigative agency is the department's Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which coordinates enforcement actions from what it calls its CyberSmuggling Center in Fairfax, Va.

It has been comforting for folk to assume that the scandals of the Catholic clergy are a unique function of its celibacy. This, however, misapprehends the problem. Men don't develop an attraction to boys because they are priests; men who are attracted to boys become priests because it will provide them access. The Church needs to do a better job of weeding such men out, but already does better than other institutions that likewise offer access.

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THEIR OBSESSION DOESN'T MAKE HIM ANY MORE VISIBLE:

Liberals To Target DeLay In Ads (Mike Allen, March 30, 2005, Washington Post)

Democratic officials and a well-funded liberal advocacy group said yesterday that they will try to capitalize on the new visibility of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (Tex.) by casting him as a symbol of Republican excess, as critics once did with former House speaker New Gingrich.

Democratic officials in the House and Senate said that news coverage of DeLay's travel and ties to lobbyists, and his high profile in the congressional intervention in the Terri Schiavo case, has given them an opening to use him as more of a foil. They said that until now, he was so little known to the general public -- despite his enormous power at the Capitol -- that attacks on him were not effective.

The Campaign for America's Future, backed by labor and other liberal leaders, plans to announce today that DeLay will be featured in television ads in at least four Republican House districts. The group said it is buying a 30-second ad in DeLay's suburban Houston district that shows a man wearing cufflinks and a Rolex watch and washing his hands.

"Tom DeLay: He'd like to wash his hands of corruption," the announcer says before recounting charges against the majority leader. "Tom DeLay can't wash his hands of corruption," the ad concludes. "But Congress can certainly wash its hands of Tom DeLay."

The poor befuddled Left--going after a guy no one has ever heard of and who the GOP can therefore easily afford to toss under the bus if he ever does become a liability.

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GOOD OLD FLASHY:

What makes a hero? (Harry Mount, 3/26/05, The Spectator)

‘Flashman’s just a monster,’ says George MacDonald Fraser. ‘He’s extremely unpleasant but he knows how to present a front to the world, and at least he’s honest about himself. But that was because he assumed that his memoirs would never be published.’

I’d just been putting to the author of the Flashman novels the theory of this magazine’s editor: that far from being a scoundrel, Flashman — the fag-roasting rotter thrown out of Rugby in Tom Brown’s Schooldays only to pop up in the great historic moments of the Victorian age — was in fact the toppest of eggs; an accidental hero who’s actually the genuine article because he at least admits to his flaws.

‘It’s usually my female readers who write and say that,’ Fraser says in his perfectly modulated Miss-Jean-Brodie-goes-to-Glasgow vowels, unflattened by 35 years as a tax exile on the Isle of Man, ‘— that he’s actually a very modest hero who makes himself out to be a coward and a cad. If that’s the way they want to see him, fair enough. But you must remember, he raped a girl in the first book; since then, he’s never needed to.’

Fraser’s 80th birthday on 2 April coincides with the publication of Flashman on the March, the 12th in the series. [...]

Carrying on regardless is Flashman’s forte, with his unwilling starring roles throughout the blood-soaked annals of the Victorian age. At the retreat from Kabul in 1842, Flashman is so terrified of falling victim to a badmash’s jezail that he tries to hand over the regiment’s colours to the enemy, only to be rescued in the nick of time, colours still in hand, unconscious, once more the accidental hero.

Flashman’s slug-like trail winds its way up the peaks and down the troughs of the 19th century; he shoots General Custer at Little Big Horn, he launches the Charge of the Light Brigade with a volley of farts brought on by some dodgy Russian champagne, and he stars in the Chinese Opium Wars, the Indian Mutiny and Rorke’s Drift. He always behaves odiously, but his fraudulent triumphs lead him into more and more unwelcome fixes. And he does it all with lashings of élan. Even Fraser acknowledges that Flashman has style.

‘I do remember thinking he was by far the most attractive character in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. The book fell apart after he left. My own feeling is that Thomas Hughes realised that Flashman was in danger of taking the book over and so he dropped him.’

That devil-may-care aura means the title of the real Flashman has plenty of claimants. ‘My old housemaster wrote to me and said, “I know who this is; knew him in India.” Everybody thinks he’s based on Sir Richard Burton. I knew nothing about Burton. A bit rough on Burton, who so far as I know wasn’t a scoundrel and certainly wasn’t a coward.’

There is no one original Flashman, although Fraser acknowledges there are plenty of people who take after him. ‘I see Flashy characteristics on the political scene; I won’t say where. They haven’t got his style. David Niven was keen to play him; he would have made a wonderful Flashman. Or his friend Errol Flynn, who had that shifty quality.’

They've none of the literary pretense of the Aubrey/Maturin books, but they're great fun.

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IF ONLY SHE WERE A SERIAL KILLER, THE LEFT WOULD HELP (via Mike Daley):

Terri Schiavo: Judicial Murder: Her crime was being disabled, voiceless, and at the disposal of our media (Nat Hentoff, March 29th, 2005, Village Voice)

For all the world to see, a 41-year-old woman, who has committed no crime, will die of dehydration and starvation in the longest public execution in American history.

She is not brain-dead or comatose, and breathes naturally on her own. Although brain-damaged, she is not in a persistent vegetative state, according to an increasing number of radiologists and neurologists.

Among many other violations of her due process rights, Terri Schiavo has never been allowed by the primary judge in her case—Florida Circuit Judge George Greer, whose conclusions have been robotically upheld by all the courts above him—to have her own lawyer represent her. [...]

While lawyers and judges have engaged in a minuet of death, the American Civil Liberties Union, which would be passionately criticizing state court decisions and demanding due process if Terri were a convict on death row, has shamefully served as co-counsel for her husband, Michael Schiavo, in his insistent desire to have her die.

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EXISTENCE IN A NUTSHELL:

Rice Alarms Reformist Arabs with Stability Remarks (Jonathan Wright, 3/29/05, Reuters)

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has alarmed many reformist Arabs with comments suggesting a new U.S. approach that promotes rapid political change without regard for internal stability.

Rice said in an interview with the Washington Post last week the Middle East status quo was not stable and she doubted it would be stable soon. Washington would speak out for "freedom" without offering a model or knowing what the outcome would be.

"This a very dangerous scheme. Anarchy will be out of control," said Hassan Nafaa, a professor of political science at Cairo University and an advocate of gradual change.

Every significant question men ask themselves boils down to that: freedom vs. security.

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ENRON IS WORKING:

On Wall Street, a Rise in Dismissals Over Ethics (LANDON THOMAS Jr., 3/29/05. NY Times)

Two senior investment bankers at Bank of America were summoned to a meeting this month where their boss, visibly uncomfortable and flanked by bank lawyers, read them a statement. They were both dismissed and asked to leave the building immediately. The decision was final.

Stunned, the bankers asked if they had broken any regulations. No, they were told. Nor had they traded on any inside information. Within the hour, they had turned in their BlackBerrys and laptops and were on their way home to the suburbs.

In the ruthlessly competitive world of investment banking, these two men had been doing what presumably was their job. Acting on a tip from a rival banker, they had called a company preparing to merge with another and asked to get in on the deal. In a different era, such an action might well have been seen as an example of what hungry bankers do to secure an edge with a client and maybe even a better bonus - not an inappropriate use of confidential information and cause for termination.

But with regulatory scrutiny heightened after the collapse of Enron and other companies, corporations and their boards are adopting zero-tolerance policies. Increasingly, they are holding their employees to lofty standards of business and personal behavior. The result is a wave of abrupt firings as corporations move to stop perceived breaches of ethics by their employees that could result in law enforcement action or public relations disasters.

Finally adopting and enforcing standards is hardly lofty.

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THE PARTY OF DEATH AND THE DEPRESSION:

King Karl: Think Karl Rove is losing on Social Security and Schiavo? Those are mere tactical skirmishes—he’s got a grander prize in mind. (John Heilemann, 4/04/05, New York)

The numbers are pretty striking. On Social Security, polls show support for George W. Bush’s position mired at under 40 percent, with 58 percent of Americans saying that the more they learn about his plan the less they like it. Meanwhile, an ABC poll last week reported that, by a 63 to 28 percent margin, the public favors the removal of Schiavo’s feeding tube—and that even Evangelicals are split down the middle on the question.

Not surprisingly, the Democratic reaction has been unalloyed glee—not least at the implication that Bush’s strategic supremo and deputy chief of staff may be fallible after all. Democrats in Congress charge that the Rove-ified Republicans’ Schiavo intervention unmasks the GOP as the party of big and intrusive government, while liberal strategists claim that the parade of blunders on Social Security suggests that the administration’s balding boy wonder has lost his populist touch. As New Democrat Network president Simon Rosenberg said to me the other day, “This is one of those times when you have to conclude that Rove isn’t as smart as people say.”

The Democrats’ jubilation is understandable, and even justified. But I also suspect it may turn out to be premature. Both Schiavo and Social Security are, for Rove, parts of a bigger puzzle: how to cement the fractious Republican coalition into a stable governing majority, one that advances the cause of a historic partisan realignment. Solving that puzzle inevitably poses knotty political challenges. But let’s remember, they’re the sort of challenges Democrats can only wish they had.

Not long ago, I had a chance to see Rove speak to an audience of conservative activists down in Washington. The speech was as revealing for what it left out as for what it included. Not once did Rove proclaim the importance of reducing the size and sphere of Washington’s purview. Not once did he echo Ronald Reagan’s famous line—which codified a fundamental verity of modern Republicanism—that “government isn’t the solution to our problems; government is our problem.” Instead, Rove rejected the party’s “reactionary” and “pessimistic” past, in which it stood idly by while “liberals were setting the pace of change and had the visionary goals.” Now, he went on, the GOP has seized the “mantle of idealism,” dedicating itself to “putting government on the side of progress and reform, modernization and greater freedom.” [...]

“On Social Security, we’re playing on our field,” [Grover] Norquist says. “What would a Democratic win be? The status quo! Not exactly exciting for the party of progressivism.”

More important, although Democrats, in my view, have been right as a matter both of principle and politics to fight Bush on Social Security, their stance leaves them open to attack. “Democrats did something really stupid by saying there’s not a problem,” argues Luntz. “They damaged their credibility and made themselves the party of No.” Or, as Rove put it in his speech, “they’re attempting to block reform,” he said. “The risk is that they’ll appear to be obstructionist, oppositional, and wedded to the past instead of the future—and that’s not a good place to be in American politics.”

REPUBLICANS KNOW WHAT THEY'RE DOING ON SCHIAVO (Noam Scheiber, 3/22/05, New Republic)

[T]hough polls suggest the public overwhelmingly approves of the Democrats' position, elections aren't generally referendums on single issues. The party that does well in an election is the one that voters deem to have better addressed their fundamental concerns. I'd argue that, in 2002 in 2004, that concern was security. Though polls showed vast majorities of Americans favored working through the United Nations in Iraq, being the candidate of the U.N. didn't help John Kerry because he never broke through on the security issue in some deeper emotional way. In fact, to the extent that Kerry constantly emphasized his willingness to work with our allies and the U.N., it probably hurt him more than it helped him, since his apparent deference to foreign countries underscored people's reservations about his willingness to defend our country.

The short story here is that embracing a popular issue can leave you on the wrong end of an electoral outcome if it reinforces suspicions people already have about you. Conversely, rejecting a popular position, as the Bushies did with respect to the U.N., can actually help you if it demonstrates your attentiveness to voters' fundamental concerns.

I think Democrats face a similar risk with respect to Schiavo. Since the 1960s, the party has tended to take a libertarian position on social issues like abortion and the right to die. As with the U.N. and alliances, polls show that these are overwhelmingly popular positions. Large majorities agree that the government should stay out of people's personal decisions even in socially conservative regions like the South. My concern is that, despite the public support for these individual positions, embracing them tends to reinforce deeper suspicions people have about Democrats--namely, that they're a bunch of moral relativists who can't be trusted to do what's right.

Similarly, the defense of the Social Security status quo shows them to be still wedded to the failed socialist experiment of the 20th century and not to be trusted with a modern economy.

N.B. Michael Burns, who sent the second piece, refers to it aptly as a "clue burst."

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NO ONE MISSES THE STENCH:

Ireland celebrates success of smoking ban (Jodie Ginsberg, 3/29/05, Reuters)

Ireland's pioneering smoking ban has won widespread support, figures published today show, despite fears the law is putting pubs out of business.

The ban on smoking in restaurants, pubs and workplaces, introduced exactly a year ago, had been expected to meet widespread resistance in a country where the pub culture of a drink and a smoke were considered part of its life blood.

Instead, the sight of smokers huddled outside pub doors is now as familiar as a pint of Guinness.

"The general support for this health initiative is extremely high and has increased further since its introduction, even among smokers -- and exceeds all expectations," said anti-smoking lobby group ASH.

Figures from an independent survey conducted earlier this month for the government's Office of Tobacco Control show 93 percent of people think the ban is a good idea.

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ALL REACTION ALL THE TIME:

Conservative, Liberal, Principled (E. J. Dionne Jr., March 29, 2005, Washington Post)

For at least a decade now, conservatives have gleefully called their political foes "reactionary liberals" whose main task, they say, is the preservation of a New Deal-Great Society status quo. Since the 2004 election gave narrow but firm control of Washington's two elected branches of government to a Republican Party committed to conservatism, the dominant political narrative has highlighted the right's effectiveness and the left's fecklessness.

Yet the liberals' opposition to many of Bush's policies -- in particular his Social Security program and his tax cuts for the wealthy -- cannot be dismissed as a blind rejection of whatever this controversial president proposes. If there is a principle that unites the left side of the political spectrum, it is a belief that an energetic government can effectively use progressive taxation to insure the poor, the unlucky and the elderly against undue hardship. Bush's embrace of the partial privatization of Social Security has thus united liberals and created a sense of momentum unusual for the left during the Bush years.

United them in defense of the status quo, against an energetic use of government and tax policy that would empower and enrich the poor, the unlucky and the elderly. Does anyone doubt that if Bill Clinton had backed this kind of reform it would have passed the Republican Congress with bipartisan support, just as Welfare reform eventually did?

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BAD DAY FOR "HEROES" OF MODERN JURISPRUDENCE:

Howell Heflin, Former Alabama Senator, Dies at 83
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, March 29 - Former Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama, a conservative Democrat who supported civil rights legislation and was sometimes described as the conscience of the Senate, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Sheffield, Ala., near his home in Tuscumbia. He was 83.

His death was announced by his family.

Mr. Heflin, a large, bearlike man, was chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court before he was elected in 1978 to the Senate, where he served for 18 years.

Fellow senators often called him Judge Heflin, referring to his probity and his judicious approach to issues. For 13 years, he passed judgment on his colleagues as a senior member or chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Ethics.

Mr. Heflin voted against the nominations of Clarence Thomas and Robert H. Bork to the United States Supreme Court. He said Mr. Thomas's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee suggested "contradictions, lack of scholarship, lack of conviction and instability."
Whatever else may have been true of Mr. Heflin, he authored one deeply despicable moment in the Senate when he tried to get himself off the hook with his constituents for voting against Robert Bork by accusing him of having a "strange lifestyle." But he got paid back in the end, even if indirectly:

Mr. Heflin was a swing voter on the Judiciary Committee, often siding with Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and other conservative Republicans.

But in 1986, Mr. Heflin voted against a lawyer from his home state who had been nominated by President Ronald Reagan to be a federal district judge. Several civil rights groups opposed the lawyer, Jeff Sessions, on the ground that he had shown insensitivity to blacks while serving as the United States attorney in Mobile, Ala.

The Judiciary Committee blocked the nomination. Mr. Heflin said he did not know whether Mr. Sessions would be "a fair and impartial judge." But the tables eventually turned. In 1996, Mr. Sessions, a Republican, won the Senate seat being vacated by Mr. Heflin, and he now serves on the Judiciary Committee.

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DOIN' IT WITHOUT THE FEZ ON:

US pressure making Musharraf next Ata Turak, claims Tanzeem-e-Islami (WebIndia, March 28, 2005)

After facing flak from jihadi outfits and religious fanatics for his vision of enlightened moderation, Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf's has now been compared to Kamal Ata Turak by a religious group in Pakistan for the fervour with which it believes, Musharraf is espousing the American agenda of enlightened moderationhe News quoted the founder of Pakistan's Tanzeem-e-Islami, Dr Israr Ahmad as saying that Musharraf was following the American agenda of enlightened moderation and if given more time would even beat Turkish leader Kamal Ata Turak in enlightenment.

Ahmad said that Musharraf was going ahead with his plan despite the fact that Islam itself was a moderate and enlightened religion.

Ahmad while addressing a seminar titled 'Present view of enlightenment and Islam' organised by Tanzeem-e-Islami at the Quran auditorium, said that Musharraf under US pressure, wanted to promote a new brand of Islam acceptable to the Western powers, especially the US.

Took them three and a half years to figure that out?

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WORTH MORE DEAD THAN ALIVE:

Detroit's New Crisis Could Be Its Worst (DANNY HAKIM, 3/27/05, NY Times)

Once again, Detroit has resumed its long slide to automotive oblivion, and everyone's getting his two cents in about how to stop the bleeding. One suggestion: Make cars and trucks that people actually want, as opposed to ones that they'll tolerate in their driveway because of a $5,000 rebate or zero percent financing. A century ago the landscape was littered with American automakers. At this point, we're down to two domestic automakers, or three, depending how you count. Since Chrysler became a division of the German automaker DaimlerChrysler in 1998, people in Detroit sometimes call the Big Three the Big Two-and-a-Half.

Though Chrysler has shown recent signs of revival, General Motors and Ford are rapidly losing customers at home and their debt is rated one notch above junk by Standard & Poor's. That's bad news for two of the nation's biggest corporate borrowers, because a further downgrade could cost billions of dollars. G.M. is in particularly bad shape. Most believe a significant overhaul is required, including possibly sending another brand like Pontiac or Buick to join Oldsmobile on the chopping block.

Crises visit at least one Detroit automaker at least once a decade. But this is a different time: The silver bullets have run out. Previously, someone or something came to the rescue. In the 1980's, Chrysler fell back on the government for a bailout and then helped itself by inventing the minivan. In the 1990's, the Big Three rode the sport utility vehicle to the mainstream, and the big rigs helped them skate past lagging reputations and terminally tacky design.

But there aren't any new magic cars or trucks in the works. And with the Japanese capturing broad swaths of the S.U.V. market and even taking on Detroit's hegemony of pickup trucks, the domestics are hurting in an era when Washington looks increasingly unwilling to backstop American industry.

Detroit's dependence on trucks also has some analysts worried.

"Demand for S.U.V.'s has evidently stalled," said Standard & Poor's in a recent report. G.M. is rushing its next generation of big S.U.V.'s like the Chevrolet Suburban into production by year's end, but with increased competition and volatile gas prices, "it is questionable whether these will generate the profit margins" of the past, the report said.

Worse, there used to be just the Japanese and the Europeans to worry about. Now a vigorous Korean competitor, Hyundai, and a Chinese company, Chery, promises to bring the first ultracheap Chinese cars to the United States in two years. Worse still, soaring healthcare costs are a severe competitive disadvantage for American companies with hundreds of thousands of retirees. G.M. spends nearly $2,000 for each car or truck it produces in the United States on health care and pension benefits, more than enough to equip each car with free leather seats.

Falling to Junk (New York Sun, March 22, 2005)

It's hard to believe that the bond rating of General Motors may soon fall to junk, but it's true. Last week, GM announced an expected loss of $850 million, about $1.50 a share, for the first three months of 2005. The company slashed its profit forecast by $2 billion for the year. [...]

Over the decades, union leaders have won such generous pension and healthcare benefits for GM employees that today GM is the world's largest private consumer of health care, covering the medical costs of more than 1 million people. Health care represents more than $1,000 worth of cost, on average, in every vehicle General Motors produces, its chairman, Richard Wagoner, has said.

GM spends more on health care than on steel. The health-care costs - about $5.5 billion a year and growing - are fixed. GM's unfunded health-care obligations amount to $57 billion. GM also holds America's largest private pension obligation. The company estimates its total future American pension costs at $87 billion.

The company's total market valuation stood last week at $16.39 billion. General Motors was once the leading car manufacturer in the world. Today, it's a pension fund and a health maintenance organization with a relatively small car-making operation on the side.

Ford and GM are surviving on mere sentiment and markets aren't sentimental in the long term.

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EARLY IN THE REALIGNMENT:

435 Ways To Parse The Presidential Election Results (Charlie Cook, March 29, 2005, National Journal)

For true political junkies, nothing is more exciting than getting a whole new bunch of voting data to pore over and analyze. This week, Polidata's Clark Bensen's preliminary compilation of presidential results by each of the 435 congressional districts is political nirvana for congressional-race watchers. The new results show President Bush won the popular vote in 255 congressional districts, a 75-seat edge over Sen. John Kerry's 180 congressional districts. [...]

For Democrats, there is even more bad news in these numbers. Forty-one (almost 70 percent) of these 59 "ticket-splitting" districts were won by President Bush and are currently held by Democrats; Kerry won just 18 districts held by a Republican incumbent. Not surprisingly, half (21) of the Bush districts held by Democratic House incumbents are in the South, while a little more than half (10) of the Kerry districts held by Republican House incumbents are located in the Northeast.

The 10 Democrats sitting in the most Republican districts by Bush percentage are: Chet Edwards, Texas-17, Gene Taylor, Miss.-04, Jim Matheson, Utah-02, Ike Skelton, Mo.-04, Earl Pomeroy, N.D.-01, Bud Cramer, Ala.-05, Stephanie Herseth, S.D.-01, Bart Gordon, Tenn.-06, Rick Boucher, Va.-09, and Dan Boren, Okla.-02.

The 10 Republicans sitting in the most Democratic districts are: Jim Leach, Iowa-02, Rob Simmons, Conn.-02, Michael Castle, Del.-01, Mark Kirk, Ill.-10, Jim Nussle, Iowa-01, Curt Weldon, Pa.-07, Chris Shays, Conn.-04, Clay Shaw, Fla.-22, Charlie Bass, N.H.-02, and Jim Gerlach, Pa.-06.

As in the Senate, the GOP majority in the House will more likely get bigger than smaller.

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AT THIS RATE JOHN STREET MAY WIN:

Dead and buried but backing Mugabe (The Australian, March 30, 2005)

SEVENTY-eight per cent of people who have died in Zimbabwe since 1980 are registered to vote and are expected to give phantom votes to Robert Mugabe in tomorrow's national poll.

Supporters of Zimbabwe's Opposition Movement for Democratic Change say up to a million phantom voters may appear on the register and that "ghost voters" will be used by the ruling Zanu PF party to inflate the votes that it receives in this week's parliamentary elections.

For instance, Tichaona Chiminya, a driver for the leader of Zimbabwe's main opposition party, was burnt alive in a truck. David Stevens, a white farmer, was shot in the back of the head.

They were among the first to die as President Mugabe's reign of terror unrolled five years ago but their names are still on the voters' roll.

Added to a campaign to deny food to opponents of President Mugabe and door-to-door intimidation of rural voters, the opposition fears that it may lose the election, even if it has the support of the majority of voters.

MORE:
Sorry, the resurrection's been postponed: Tomorrow’s election in Zimbabwe will expose Mugabe’s thuggery and South Africa’s misguided approach (Magnus Linklater, 3/30/05, Times of London)

THERE ARE two kinds of courage. One is blind and instinctive — Napoleon called it “two in the morning courage” — when adrenalin takes over and you tackle the burglar in the front hall, or confront a gang of youths breaking into your car. It is admirable but unpredictable, and it can all too easily fail you. Instead of playing the hero, you cower in bed or carry on walking.

The other kind is sustained courage in the face of overwhelming odds. It is deliberate and determined. It wins few friends and makes many enemies. It can end with an assassin’s bullet, or in the dark corner of a torture cell. For most of us, it is beyond the reaches of our imagination.

Archbishop Pius Ncube carries this brand of courage unassumingly, but with burning conviction. His outrage at what has happened to his nation, Zimbabwe, has never abated; indeed it grows. It takes the form of open defiance of the most sinister regime in Africa, and it is embraced in full knowledge of the risks involved. On the wall of his office, next to St Mary’s Cathedral in Bulawayo, hangs a picture of Oscar Romero, Archbishop of San Salvador, who was murdered by death squads as he said Mass in his chapel. Archbishop Ncube knows, therefore, what may lie in store for him if he continues to challenge the excesses of Robert Mugabe’s State, and to expose the fraudulence of his elections. But he does not give up.

When, tomorrow, the voters of Zimbabwe go to the polls, they will do so with the words of Archbishop Ncube ringing in their ears: “Somewhere there shall come a resurrection for Zimbabwe,” he told his congregation on Easter Day. He called for a “popular mass uprising” to remove Mr Mugabe from power. “The people have been too soft with this Government,” he said. “They should pluck up a bit of courage and stand up against him and chase him away.”

Words like these are an open invitation to the thugs of Zanu PF, the ruling party, to apply their tactics of violence and intimidation. Archbishop Ncube is fully aware of the risks. His sermons are monitored, his telephone bugged, he has been told he is on a death list, he has been subjected to a series of ugly slanders by pro-government propagandists. Yet he is relentless in exposing the corruption and violence that has brought the country to its knees. And he has been consistent.

Mbeki, Mandela & Tutu must have 3am wake-up calls.

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DETENTE DREAMS:

Plans by U.S. to Dominate Space Raising Concerns: Arms Experts Worried at Pentagon Push for Superiority (Walter Pincus, March 29, 2005, Washington Post)

Arms control advocates in the United States and abroad are expressing concern with the Bush administration's push for military superiority in space.

A series of Pentagon doctrinal papers, released over the past year, have emphasized that the U.S. military is increasingly dependent on space satellites for offensive and defensive operations, and must be able to protect them in times of war.

The Air Force in August put forward a Counterspace Operations Doctrine, which described "ways and means by which the Air Force achieves and maintains space superiority" and has worked to develop weapons to accomplish such missions.

On March 1, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed a new National Defense Strategy paper that said the use of space "enables us to project power anywhere in the world from secure bases of operation." A key goal of Rumsfeld's new strategy is "to ensure our access to and use of space and to deny hostile exploitation of space to adversaries."

The Pentagon is developing a suborbital space capsule that could hit targets anywhere in the world within two hours of being launched from U.S. bases. It also is developing systems that could attack potential enemy satellites, destroying them or temporarily preventing them from sending signals.

Michael Krepon, president emeritus of the Henry L. Stimson Center and an arms control official in the Clinton administration, said the United States is moving toward a national space doctrine that is "preemptive and proactive." He expects the Bush administration to produce a new National Space Policy statement soon that will contrast with the one adopted in 1996 by President Bill Clinton.

"We adopted the traditional U.S. position of being a reluctant space warrior," Krepon said of the Clinton position. "Space was to be used for peaceful purposes, but if someone messed with us, we couldn't allow that to happen. But it was not our space policy preference."

Krepon last week attended a conference in Geneva organized by the Chinese and Russian governments on preventing an arms race in outer space.

Few things in life are more certain than that an "arms control expert" will side with the enemy.

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1/14 CHANGED EVERYTHING?:

Where Were You on 1/14? (Sally Satel, M.D., Christina Hoff Sommers, March 29, 2005, Wall Street Journal)

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University hosted a conference last week entitled "Impediments to Change: Revisiting the Women in Science Question." The auditorium in Agassiz Theatre in Radcliffe Yard was packed. Dedicated in 1904, the theatre has been the site of many a spirited intellectual exchange. But on this day it was a forum not for debate but for indignation over the insult that the assembled referred to as "1/14"--the date when Harvard President Larry Summers fatefully speculated about the possibility of inborn differences between the sexes.

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UNIVERSAL, BUT AMERICAN-STYLE:

Bill mandates universal health insurance for Minnesotans (Patricia Lopez, March 30, 2005, Minneapolis Star Tribune)

Every Minnesotan would be required to have at least minimal health insurance and every insurer would have to offer such a plan under a far-ranging health care overhaul bill offered by the Minnesota Medical Association on Tuesday.

The bill, which is being introduced with bipartisan support in the House and Senate today, would also ban smoking in the workplace -- including restaurants and bars -- and would increase the cigarette tax by $1 a pack.

Sen. Sheila Kiscaden, I-Rochester, the bill's Senate sponsor, called the proposal "a major health care reform effort" that ultimately could result in lower cost and more effective health care that tilts the system toward illness prevention. [...]

At its core, the plan would set out an as-yet-undefined set of "essential benefits" that would provide minimal coverage with an emphasis on prevention. Kiscaden said that Minnesotans might be required to offer proof of coverage when they filed their income taxes or applied for a driver's license. By the same token, insurers would have to offer the essential benefits and could not reject anyone because of age, gender or health history. Pre-existing health conditions, a common reason for rejection for traditional policies, could not be taken into account.

Require them to offer HSA's and it's a model for the nation.

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GET YOUR SUREFIRE COUNTERINTELLIGENCE PLAN HERE, FREE!:

Bush approves tough new plan to battle spies (Bill Gertz, 3/29/05, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Nearly 80 Americans have been caught spying since 1985, and the Bush administration has launched a more aggressive anti-spying effort to better combat foreign intelligence activities, according to a new strategy report made public yesterday.

The National Counterintelligence Strategy was approved March 1 by President Bush, marking the first time that the U.S. government has sought to formulate a comprehensive counterspy program, said Michelle Van Cleave, head of the office of the national counterintelligence executive, a White House-level intelligence post.

The strategy calls for "specific counterintelligence policies for attacking foreign intelligence services systematically via strategic counterintelligence operations," stated the report, which was released yesterday.

The new strategy "will require substantial changes in the conduct of U.S. counterintelligence," Miss Van Cleave said.

"These changes include a renewed intelligence focus on hostile services and intelligence capabilities, including those of terrorist groups, and proactive efforts to defeat them," she said.

The strategy will call for the FBI, CIA and other intelligence components to "identify, assess, neutralize and exploit foreign intelligence activities before they can do harm to the United States."

That's all a terrible waste of time. Secrets can't be kept and what we "know" is always wrong. The solution is just to completely open up our intelligence system, put everything we know on-line, and let anyone who wants to add to it, comment on it, or critique it.

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INFLAMMATORY AND PREJUDICIAL

Colorado Court Bars Execution Because Jurors Consulted Bible (Kirk Johnson, New York Times, March 29th, 2005)

In a sharply divided ruling, Colorado's highest court on Monday upheld a lower court's decision throwing out the sentence of a man who was given the death penalty after jurors consulted the Bible in reaching a verdict. The Bible, the court said, constituted an improper outside influence and a reliance on what the court called a "higher authority."

"The judicial system works very hard to emphasize the rarified, solemn and sequestered nature of jury deliberations," the majority said in a 3-to-2 decision by a panel of the Colorado Supreme Court. "Jurors must deliberate in that atmosphere without the aid or distraction of extraneous texts."

The ruling involved the conviction of Robert Harlan, who was found guilty in 1995 of raping and murdering a cocktail waitress near Denver. After Mr. Harlan's conviction, the judge in the case - as Colorado law requires - sent the jury off to deliberate about the death penalty with an instruction to think beyond the narrow confines of the law. Each juror, the judge told the panel, must make an "individual moral assessment," in deciding whether Mr. Harlan should live.

The jurors voted unanimously for death. The State Supreme Court's decision changes that sentence to life in prison without parole.

In the decision on Monday, the dissenting judges said the majority had confused the internal codes of right and wrong that juries are expected to possess in such weighty moral matters with the outside influences that are always to be avoided, like newspaper articles or television programs about the case. The jurors consulted Bibles, the minority said, not to look for facts or alternative legal interpretations, but for wisdom.

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ACCIDENTAL ACCOUNTABILITY:

Negotiating the election maize: Food shortages in the former 'breadbasket of southern Africa' are the burning issue of Zimbabwe elections (Andrew Meldrum, March 29, 2005, Guardian Unlimited)

President Robert Mugabe's claims of the triumph of his seizures of white-owned farms ring hollow at campaign rallies where people are hungry.

Confronted by unenthusiastic crowds, Mr Mugabe has admitted for the first time while campaigning that the country is confronted by widespread food shortages. Meanwhile, police have threatened to jail a civic leader who has charged that the government is withholding food from areas that support the opposition.

But the food shortages are undeniable. Maize meal supplies have been erratic in both rural and urban areas over the past month, with supermarkets in the cities without stocks for days. Zimbabwean residents say large areas of planted crops stand dry and damaged, and international agencies estimate that more than 4 million Zimbabweans are in need of food aid.

Speaking in Zimbabwe's rural heartland, Mr Mugabe was forced to acknowledge that the people were suffering from a lack of maize, the country's staple grain. At a rally for his Zanu-PF party on March 17 in Gutu, in southeastern Zimbabwe, Mr Mugabe blamed the shortages on the failure of the seasonal rains.

"The main problem we are facing is one of drought and the shortage of food, we are going to work out a hunger alleviation programme ... I promise you that no one will starve," Mr Mugabe told a listless crowd of 7,000, according to Reuters. The villagers sat through Mr Mugabe's 40-minute speech, many with blank faces.

Strange things happen when you go before the people and ask for their votes.

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WHO DO THOSE PARENTS THINK THEY ARE?:

Kelly 'obsessed' with parent power (Staff and agencies, March 29, 2005, Guardian Unlimited)

The leader of Britain's largest teachers' union today criticised the education secretary's "obsession" with giving parents more power over their children's education.

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WHERE THE WAR ENDS:

College Faculties A Most Liberal Lot, Study Finds (Howard Kurtz, March 29, 2005, Washington Post)

College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says.

By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans.

The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.

"What's most striking is how few conservatives there are in any field," said Robert Lichter, a professor at George Mason University and a co-author of the study. "There was no field we studied in which there were more conservatives than liberals or more Republicans than Democrats. It's a very homogenous environment, not just in the places you'd expect to be dominated by liberals."

The Right has done a reasonably good job of creating alternatives to the liberal media and destroying the credibility of journalism generally, which leaves academia as the final battlefield.

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HAVE THEY EVER GOTTEN ANYTHING RIGHT?:

Panel's Report Assails C.I.A. for Failure on Iraq Weapons (DAVID E. SANGER and SCOTT SHANE, 3/29/05, NY Times)

The final report of a presidential commission studying American intelligence failures regarding illicit weapons includes a searing critique of how the C.I.A. and other agencies never properly assessed Saddam Hussein's political maneuverings or the possibility that he no longer had weapon stockpiles, according to officials who have seen the report's executive summary.

The report also proposes broad changes in the sharing of information among intelligence agencies that go well beyond the legislation passed by Congress late last year that set up a director of national intelligence to coordinate action among all 15 agencies.

Those recommendations are likely to figure prominently in April in the confirmation hearings of John D. Negroponte, whom President Bush has nominated to be national intelligence director and who is about to move to the center of the campaign against terror.

The report particularly singles out the Central Intelligence Agency under its former director, George J. Tenet, but also includes what one senior official called "a hearty condemnation" of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.

The unclassified version of the report, which is more than 400 pages long, devotes relatively little space to North Korea and Iran, the two nations now posing the largest potential nuclear challenge to the United States and its allies.

Perhaps the one thing Left and Right can agree on is that intelligence reports can't be the basis for war.

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I AM SOMEBODY:

Jackson Meets With Schiavo's Parents in Florida (AP, 3/29/05)

The parents of Terri Schiavo met and prayed Tuesday with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who called her impending death "an injustice."

Joining the conservatives who have rallied to the parents' cause, the liberal Jackson said he would call state senators who opposed legislation that would have reinserted Schiavo's feeding tube and ask them to reconsider.

Terri Schiavo was in her 12th day without food and water. Her husband and guardian, Michael Schiavo, has insisted that he was carrying out her wishes by having her feeding tube pulled. His lawyer said Monday that an autopsy was planned to show the extent of Terri Schiavo's brain damage.

Jackson's arrival Tuesday was greeted by some applause and cries of "This is about civil rights."

"I feel so passionate about this injustice being done, how unnecessary it is to deny her a feeding tube, water, not even ice to be used for her parched lips," said Jackson, who has run for president as a Democrat. "This is a moral issue and it transcends politics and family disputes."

Amazing how Democrats have put themselves in a position where when a Jesse Jackson, Joe Lieberman, or Hillary Clinton want to do the decent thing they have to go stand with conservatives.

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LOW MAN (via Robert Schwartz):

A 60's Holdout and His Daughter, Searching for an Epic (MANOHLA DARGIS, 3/25/05, NY Times)

The Jack of all trades in the new film "The Ballad of Jack and Rose," played by the brilliant actor Daniel Day-Lewis, is no ordinary man. A proud survivor of the 1960's and its utopian promise, Jack lives alone on an island with his only daughter, Rose (Camilla Belle), a doe-eyed beauty with the milky skin and ruby lips of a fairy-tale heroine. Shrunk to near-skeletal size, his bones poking right angles through his clothes, Jack suffers from two heart conditions. One will soon put him six feet under. But before that, the other may send the terminal outsider and his daughter down the path of disaster, though one shaped more by the tao of Oprah and Dr. Phil than the tragedy of Lear and Cordelia.

The film opens in 1986 with the image of richly hued red flowers seemingly bopping to the music flooding the soundtrack, Screamin' Jay Hawkins's singularly creepy song, "I Put a Spell on You." This first version is by Creedence Clearwater Revival and is all growls and lugubriously plodding beats. Sometime later, after Jack and Rose are on the emotional outs and neck-deep in melodrama, we hear the song again, only this time the voice prowling the soundtrack belongs to Nina Simone, a singer whose unhurried phrasing and heat bring the song to a slow boil. By this point in the story, Jack has invited a woman, his sometimes lover, Kathleen (Catherine Keener), to move in with him, an invitation that sends his daughter reeling.

A story about the limits of love, "The Ballad of Jack and Rose" is also about the limits of idealism. Written and directed by Rebecca Miller, the wife of Mr. Day-Lewis and a daughter of Arthur Miller, the film summons up both a time and a worldview as distant as the Port Huron Statement, a founding document of the New Left. Once upon a time, Jack and some like-minded souls, including Rose's long-gone mother, hoped to live in communion with one another and with the natural world. The second goal turned out to be easier than the first and, over time, the other commune members drifted back into the outside world. These days, Jack alone lights the house with windmill power while Rose collects seaweed to use as fertilizer in the garden. [...]

Love is strange, and some love, like that between Jack and Rose, is stranger still. But in "The Ballad of Jack and Rose," it's also unbelievable because Ms. Miller is too smitten with the idea of this impossible love to make her characters ring true. The full measure of Jack's wrongs, what his convictions have done to his daughter and how they have shaped their life together, doesn't emerge until late in the film. But even then it remains unclear whether Ms. Miller fully appreciates just how loathsome a creature Jack is, the damage he's wrought.

As Mr. Schwartz points out, Arthur Miller is too much an icon around places like the Times for them to accept that Ms Miller knows precisly how loathsome the father is and how much damage he did.

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JIMMY CARTER WINS!:

Rice: Human Rights Ultimate Factor in US Relations Abroad (David Gollust, 28 March 2005, VOA News)

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice vowed Monday to make respect for human rights a test of U.S. bilateral relations around the world. She spoke on release of a report on U.S. efforts to advance human rights and freedoms worldwide.

Ms. Rice's comments are a further sign of a new assertiveness on human rights, marked by President Bush's declaration in his inaugural address in January that ending tyranny in the world is a U.S. policy goal.

At a State Department event launching the human rights report, the secretary cited a dramatic shift in the international landscape over the past year, with elections in Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories and Iraq, and steps toward democracy in places like Georgia, Ukraine and Lebanon.

Ms. Rice rejected what she termed a cynical notion that some countries and societies are not ready for freedom, and she said respect for human rights will be the ultimate measure in U.S. relations with other countries.

"In all that lies ahead, our nation will continue to clarify for other nations the moral choice between oppression and freedom, and we will make it clear that, ultimately, success in our relations depends on the treatment of their own people. America's belief in human dignity and human rights will guide our policy," she said.

If only President Carter'd had sense enough to insist that our enemies meet human rights standards, instead of just our friends.

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ALL QUIET ON THE EASTERN FRONT:

US Uses Arms Sales To Strengthen Ties with South Asian Regional Rivals (Gary Thomas, 28 March 2005, VOA News)

The Bush administration announced last week it would sell F-16 warplanes to Pakistan. But often overlooked was the simultaneous announcement that the United States would also sell arms, including F-16s, to India. The United States is engaged in a delicate balancing act in South Asia.

The real surprise about the U.S. offer to sell some F-16 warplanes to Pakistan, say analysts of South Asian affairs, was India's relatively muted reaction to the move.

President Bush took the step of calling Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to alert him to the upcoming announcement. And India also got a U.S. pledge that it, too, would be allowed to purchase arms, including F-16s.

Sumit Ganguly, director of the Indian Studies program at Indiana University at Bloomington, says that because of those actions, the reaction from New Delhi was less vocal than might have been expected in the past. "Consequently, while the Indians are somewhat piqued and irritated by the renewal of an arms transfer relationship with Pakistan, much of the sting of this message has actually been removed," he said.

A South Asia analyst at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Christine Fair, says India gains in the deal as well because Washington is trying to bolster its renewed relationship with New Delhi. "India is in some sense the long-term winner in all of this," she said. "Obviously, India gets a lot of stuff as well. But over the long term India is very much our partner. If you look at the kinds of stuff that the Indian military is doing with the U.S. military, it is qualitatively different than the stuff that the United States is doing with the Pakistan military."

The new relationship with India is a perfect example of the President's oft-stated belief that you can more easily accomplish great things if you don't insist on getting credit for them. Most of the work on the US/India/Pakistan front has been done quietly...and has been enormously effective.

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WHEN YOU'RE TIRED, SLEEP:

Poll: Most American Adults Sleep Poorly (SIOBHAN McDONOUGH, 3/29/05, AP)

Getting a good night's sleep is hard for many adults and that often means poorer health, lower productivity on the job, more danger on the roads and a less vibrant sex life.

"By 3 to 4 in the afternoon, I'm starting to feel brain-drained and I need that caffeine to pick me back up again," said Becky Mcerien, 50, of Philadelphia.

She gets about 6.5 hours of sleep a night - slightly less than the adult average of 6.9 hours reported by the National Sleep Foundation.

Many experts say adults need a minimum of seven to nine hours of sleep a night. [...]

One-fourth of adults say sleep problems have some impact on their daily lives.

Richard Gelula, the foundation's CEO, said there's a link between sleep and quality of life.

"People who sleep well, in general, are happier and healthier," he said. "But when sleep is poor or inadequate, people feel tired or fatigued, their social and intimate relationships suffer, work productivity is negatively affected, and they make our roads more dangerous by driving while sleepy and less alert."

Symptoms of a sleep problem include difficulty falling asleep, waking a lot during the night, waking up too early and not being able to get back to sleep, waking up feeling unrefreshed, snoring, unpleasant feelings in the legs or pauses in breathing.

These problems are quite real but most are just a matter of simple common sense. For instance, instead of drinking coffeee, Ms Mcerian should just take a nap (and, obviously, go to bed earlier).

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THE DETERIORATION OF THE REGIME (via Random Lawyer):

Freedom and Decency (David B. Hart, June/July 2004, First Things)

Every nation with any pretense to civilization must be governed by some regime of civic prudence, possessing the power to place certain restraints upon public transactions. Without such a regime, a society cannot assure its citizens any measure of genuinely civil freedom, by which I mean the freedom that only a rigidly observed social courtesy—necessarily confining and somewhat artificially ceremonious—provides: freedom from other people’s bad taste. There is almost no such thing as purely private expression under the best of circumstances; in the age of mass communication, when every venture into a public space quickly becomes complete immersion in a world of jarring noise and garish pomps and shrill distraction, it is folly to imagine that one can if one chooses simply “turn things off” and go unmolested by the worst elements of popular culture. It is folly also to believe that the cause of freedom is advanced when a society’s citizens cannot demand—with the full force of law and custom on their side—that others not be given license to subject them constantly to offensive materials or to corrupt their children with impunity.

This is, one could argue, the simplest matter of moral stewardship. The forces of barbarism that are always eager to assail civilization—from without and within—are, if not tireless, at least remarkably resilient. Where no codes of civil conduct govern cultural production, it is inevitable that those who are coarsest and most conscienceless—those who are most wanting in shame, restraint, imagination, modesty, consideration, or charity—will prevail. What, then, of everyone else whose peace and dignity a just political order should be concerned to protect? I think it safe to say there has never been a society where the lewd, the dissolute, or the perverted have not been able to find some place for their recreation, and this is a reality to which we are wise to be in some degree resigned. But we live now in an age in which indecency refuses to be confined within its own sphere, but rather forces itself upon us, and indeed demands (almost sanctimoniously) that it be embraced and granted social legitimacy, and that it be subject to no strictures other than those of the free market. Anyone so quaintly retrograde as to want to escape the deluge must retreat to some jealously insulated domestic realm, guarded with almost martial vigilance against any intrusion by the encircling culture.

It is difficult to make sense of many of the conventional arguments against censorship. The objection that in my experience tends to be adduced most promptly (and with the greatest degree of hysteria) is that of the “slippery slope”: grant some agency the legal power of censure, the argument goes, and before long political speech will be suppressed, privacy invaded, legal protections eroded, republican liberties abridged, schools taken over by fundamentalists from Alabama, women reduced to chattels, and the demonic ferment of fascism lying always just below the surface of American life set loose upon the world. This, at any rate, was the case that a depressingly earnest civil liberties attorney in North Carolina once made to me—with such an air of catechetical exactitude that it was clear she was merely giving voice to a deeply entrenched professional orthodoxy. It was simply inconceivable to her that a humane regime of censorship could be evolved in such a way as to make abuse of its authority all but legally impossible. Apparently, as a society, we are poised precariously upon the narrowest precipice of a sheer escarpment as smooth as glass, overlooking a vast chasm of totalitarian tyranny; so much as a single step towards censorship will send us hurtling into the abyss, and nothing will be able to stay our fall.

This is, of course, nonsense. In the days when the U.S. Post Office had the authority to prosecute those who delivered obscene materials through the mails, and cinema was subject to the Hayes Office, and communities were permitted to ban books, there were certainly cases of excessive zeal in the application of these powers, and instances when provincialism triumphed over art, and perhaps many miscarriages of justice; but, mirabile dictu, we were not at the mercy of a secret police; warrantless incarceration in nameless prisons, torture, murdered journalists, the cult of the Great Leader, the rule of clandestine tribunals, the bullet in the back of the head at dawn—all of these things remained miraculously absent from our society. Were there any historical example of republican freedom weakened or subverted by public and commercial codes of decency, this line of argument might command some force. As it is, it seems to me that any people that honestly believes political despotism to be the inevitable consequence of any constraints being placed upon the dissemination of popular artifacts—say, forbidding the sale of recordings made by some sullen thug fantasizing about raping his girlfriend’s daughter—is a people that has elevated the cult of personal liberty to a new and oppressive fanaticism.

A somewhat more plausible objection is that a public censor will as often as not turn out to be some well-intentioned philistine who cannot distinguish artistically or conceptually accomplished treatments of delicate themes from simple pornography; and this, in turn, will have a stifling effect on artists and thinkers. Here, one must acknowledge, there is enough historical evidence to render this anxiety credible. It does require a fairly perceptive and finely discriminating eye to judge intelligently the intrinsic qualities of any work of art. It is somewhat embarrassing to recall the legal perils that delayed production of an American edition of Lolita, which is really—quite apart from its extraordinary aesthetic merit—a rather moral and even slightly prudish work (though Nabokov would bristle at those words). That Ulysses ever had to appear before an American bar of justice now rightly seems ridiculous. Of course, we would all have been better off to have been spared the overrated, intellectually arthritic, and incompetently written Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but two cases out of three are sufficient to make the point.

Even here, however, I am still largely unconvinced. For one thing, great art endures, and over time distinguishes itself from all the lesser accomplishments with which it might initially have been confused; and it is not necessarily a bad thing for the artist who wishes to treat of things usually left decently veiled to have to submit his work to the ordeal of prevailing moral prejudice: it is likely, for one thing, to inspire more ingenious art, as well as to test the mettle of the artist. There were many inconveniences suffered by the “urbane” bibliophile in the days when the unexpurgated Aretino or Rochester was available only in private editions, and Burton’s complete Thousand Nights and a Night existed only in limited printings, and volumes of Pierre Louÿs were sold exclusively out of back rooms and in borrowed dust-jackets by booksellers of dubious character, and Frederick Rolfe’s Venetian letters could bring fines and imprisonment to their purveyors; but I am not convinced that the cause of civilization was grievously impaired by such inconveniences. Nor does it seem plausible to me to suggest that our national literature has noticeably improved since these fetters were struck off. There is, after all, a kind of philistinism on either side of this issue. Is good art suppressed more by rules of public decency (even when applied with a heavy hand) or by the barbarism of a culture whose sensibilities have become so debauched by constant exposure to the scabrous and the vile as to have become incapable of any discrimination, or of any due appreciation of subtlety or craft?

Consider one of the more obvious cases of commercial standards abandoned, that of cinema. For all the ponderous parochialism of the old motion picture code, it did at the very least demand of screenwriters the kind of delicate technique necessary to communicate certain things to mature viewers without giving any hint of their meaning to the children also watching. Thus films had to be written by adults, and the best films required writers of some considerable skill. After all, everyone of a certain age in the audience was well aware of what things occurred between men and women in private. They understood, therefore, what may have happened between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman when the camera cut away to the watchtower’s revolving beam of light; what had failed to happen when Spencer Tracy quietly slipped out of Katharine Hepburn’s apartment, neglecting to take his hat with him; what it was that Katharine Hepburn was both relieved and offended to discover had not happened when, on the previous evening, her inebriation had required Jimmy Stewart to carry her to her bed; what Bogart and Bacall were really discussing under the veil of their equestrian metaphors; why Glenn Ford was treating Rita Hayworth with at once such tenderness and such malice; and what Barbara Stanwyck was implying when she wrapped her arms around Fred MacMurray’s neck and murmured, “But, darling, we are at Niagara Falls.”

Well, nostalgia can be a particularly toxic opiate, perhaps. Obviously many extraordinary films have been produced since the Hayes Office vanished—there was even a brief golden age of sorts in the early 1970s—and among them have been many that could never have appeared under the old code. Even now, one is occasionally astonished by some gold amid the dross (my life would have been somewhat poorer, I think, without O Brother, Where Art Thou—though, as a Preston Sturges aficionado, I had little choice but to like it). Nevertheless, the current state of cinema seems to suggest that where good (or at least clever) writing is not a commercial necessity, and where there are no artificially imposed limits within which writers must work, the general intellectual quality of the medium cannot help but decline, and do considerable cultural damage as it descends. It would certainly be hard, if nothing else, to argue credibly that artistic expression has been well served by the revolution in standards that has made scriptwriting an occupation dominated by sadistic adolescents, and hard to claim that the art has flourished in an era in which it has been proved that immense profits can be generated from minimal dialogue but plenteous bloodshed, and in which practically nothing is considered too degraded or degrading to be offered to the public.

All my bitter musings aside, however, let me stipulate that, in an ideal situation, the practice of censorship would be undertaken only by persons properly educated and formed, whose decisions would be under some form of collective review. But, precisely at this point (alas), I encounter an obstacle to censorship that makes a creditable regime of public standards seem so unlikely as to be, for all intents and purposes, a utopian fantasy. For while it really is not that difficult to recognize irredeemable obscenity when one encounters it, as things now stand it is difficult to say whom—what class of persons—one would care to entrust with a censor’s authority. We live at a time, after all, when even the humanities departments in our universities are frequently populated by scholars of rather exiguous learning, who think that épater les bourgeoises is a significant cultural and moral achievement, and who—in their insatiable craving for ever greater frissons of the subversive—can make an “artist,” “philosopher,” and “martyr” out of an ineffably tedious mediocrity like the Marquis de Sade. Censors drawn from those ranks might prove eager and indefatigable in searching out and suppressing every form of “hate speech” (that is, anything you are likely to find in a papal encyclical), but little else. I do not believe that, if we were to create some sort of board of censors, we would be likely to suffer the reign of the American equivalent of Soviet realist art; but this is in part because the persons we would choose for the office might not be sufficiently sophisticated to rise to so plausible a level of philistinism. Simply said, it may be that we no longer have enough civilization left to save.

At least, in my darker moments (which are frequent), that is what I think. At the end of the day, however, it does not matter whether I am right to do so; all of these considerations have about them something of the fabulous and absurd. Obviously no new laws of censorship will be passed in America; even among those who sincerely wish that the circumambient culture could be purged of its ever more aggressive coarseness, there are many who would see such laws as somehow contrary to the principles of their democracy and a threat to liberty in general. This is why I suspect—as I hinted above—that the real malady afflicting our culture lies not primarily in the division between those who would prefer and those who would resent more rigid social standards of decency, but far deeper down, in many of the premises that both parties share.

As it happens, by far the worst argument against censorship is the one likely to carry most weight with persons on both sides of the cultural divide: that, were certain cultural products legally proscribed, we would be denying people things they want, denying them the right to choose for themselves, putting limits upon expressive freedom, refusing to trust in the law of supply and demand—all of which is, of course, quite true. But to find this a compelling argument, one must already be convinced of the inalienable sanctity of choice, over against every other social good, and convinced, moreover, that freedom and choice are more or less synonymous. It is indeed true that many of us manifestly do want unimpeded access to explicit depictions of sex and violence, and to mindlessly brutal forms of entertainment, and to artifacts born solely from the basest impulses of the imagination; but surely, in point of fact, no society that simply concedes the prior right of its citizens to have whatever they want can ever really be free.

This is the crucial issue, I think: not what we understand decency to be, but what we mean when we speak of freedom. It is a curious condition of late Western modernity that, for so many of us, the highest ideal of the good society is simply democracy as such, and then within democracy varying alloys of capitalism, the welfare state, regionalism, federalism, individualism, and so on. And what we habitually understand democratic liberty to be—what we take, that is, as our most exalted model of freedom—is merely the unobstructed power of choice. The consequence of this, manifestly, is that we tend to elevate what should at best be regarded as the moral life’s minimal condition to the status of its highest expression, and in the process reduce the very concept of freedom to one of purely libertarian or voluntarist spontaneity. We have come to believe—more or less unreflectively—that the will necessarily becomes more free the more it is emancipated from whatever constraints it suffers; which means that, over the course of time, even our most revered moral traditions can come to seem onerous nuisances that we must shed if we are to secure our “rights.” At the very last, any constraint at all comes to seem an intolerable bondage. But it was not ever thus.

Obviously any sane organism is predisposed to resist subjugation to forces outside itself—which is to say, forces related to it only by their power over it—and every healthy soul has a natural prejudice in favor of its own autonomy. Moreover, any rational person naturally prefers the local to the general, the familiar to the abstract, the intimate to the universal, and so resents the intrusion of any alien or usurpatious power (the state, or large corporations, or heartless bureaucracies, or unjust laws) upon the independence or integrity of his person, or family, or native place, or culture, or faith. But this is to say no more than that it is natural to rebel against purely arbitrary or extrinsic constraints, either upon oneself or upon what one loves. What distinguishes the specifically modern conception of freedom from earlier models, however, especially in its most extreme expressions, is that it seems often to presume that all constraints are arbitrary and extrinsic, and that there is no such thing as a natural or intrinsic constraint at all.

And yet—and I would not even go so far as to call this a paradox—freedom is possible only through constraints. That sane organism of which I spoke above can be solicitous of its autonomy only because it is some particular thing; and for anything to be anything at all—to possess, that is, a concrete form—it must acquire and cultivate useful, defining, shaping limits. True freedom, at least according to one venerable definition, is the realization of a complex nature in its proper good (that is, in both its natural and supernatural ends); it is the freedom of a thing to flourish, to become ever more fully what it is. An absolutely “negative liberty”—the absence of any religious, cultural, or social restrictions upon the exercise of the will—may often seem desirable (at least for oneself) but ultimately offers only the “freedom” of chaos, of formless potential. This is enough, admittedly, if one’s highest model of life is protoplasm; but if one suspects that, as rational beings, we are called to a somewhat more elevated moral existence than that, one must begin to ask which impulses within us should be suppressed, both by ourselves and by the cultural rules that we all must share.

For instance, if one wishes to become “honorable” (a word so quaint and antique as now to have the power to charm but not to compel), one must accede to any number of elaborate restrictions upon one’s actions and even thoughts; and these restrictions unquestionably confine and inhibit desire and volition, and are themselves often more a matter of ritual comity and factitious grace and painful reserve than of practical necessity. And yet, as one learns to consent to a common and demanding set of conventions and duties, one also progressively acquires an ever greater purity of character, a stability and hence identity, a unified “self”; one emerges from the inchoate turmoil of mere emotion, and is liberated from the momentary impulses and vain promptings of the will, and arrives at what can truly be called one’s essence. The form, as Michelangelo liked to say, is liberated from the marble. In this way, precisely through accepting freely the constraints of a larger social and moral tradition and community, one gives shape to a character that can endure from moment to moment, rather than dissolving in each instant into whichever new inclination of appetite or curiosity rises up within one. One ceases to be governed by caprice, or to be the slave of one’s own liberty.

This understanding of freedom, however, requires not only the belief that we possess an actual nature, which must flourish to be free, but a belief in the transcendent Good towards which that nature is oriented. This Christians, Jews, and virtuous pagans have always understood: that which can endure in us is sustained by that which lies beyond us, in the eternity of its own plenitude. To be fully free is to be joined to that end for which our natures were originally framed, and for which—in the deepest reaches of our souls—we ceaselessly yearn. And whatever separates us from that end—even if it be our own power of choice within us—is a form of bondage. We are free not because we can choose, but only when we have chosen well. And to choose well we must ever more clearly see the “sun of the Good” (to employ the lovely Platonic metaphor), and yet to see more clearly we must choose well; and the more we are emancipated from illusion and caprice, and the more our will is informed by and responds to the Good, the more perfect our vision becomes, and the less there is really to choose. The consummation for which we should long, if we are wise, is that ultimately we shall, in St. Augustine’s language, achieve not only the liberty enjoyed by Adam and Eve—who were merely “able not to sin” (posse non peccare)—but the truest freedom of all, that of being entirely “unable to sin” (non posse peccare), because God’s will works perfectly in ours.

Which is why it is not only perplexing but deeply disturbing that so many Christians and Jews in the modern world unthinkingly embrace and defend a purely libertarian understanding of freedom, even as they decry the constant gravitation of modern society toward ever more arbitrary, decadent, and extreme expressions of just this kind of freedom. They cannot be acquitted on the grounds that the cultivation of virtue is the work of individual souls and not of society at large, for there is no such thing as private virtue, any more than there is such a thing as private language, and fallen creatures vary enormously in their capacity for obedience to the Good. Though to say this might make me seem like an unregenerate Christian Platonist (which is not too dreadful a fate, since that is precisely what I am), a society is just precisely to the degree that it makes true freedom possible; to do this it must leave certain areas of moral existence to govern themselves, but it must also in many cases seek to defeat the most vicious aspects of fallen nature, and to aid as far as possible in the elevation in each soul of right reason over mere appetite and impulse—which necessarily involves denying certain persons the things they want most. A just social order, that is to say, would be one devoted to what might be called a “pedagogy of the Good,” and would recognize that there can be no simple partition between the polity of the soul and the polity of the people, and that there is in fact a reciprocal spiritual relation—a harmony—between them. When appetite seizes the reins of the soul or the city, it drives the chariot toward ruin; so it is the very art of sound governance to seek to perfect the intricate and delicate choreography of moral and legal custom that will best promote the sway of reverent reason in city and soul alike.

Democracy is not something intrinsically good, after all. Where the moral formation of a people is deficient, the general will malign, or historical circumstance unpropitious, democracy is quite unambiguously wicked in its results. All of Plato’s warnings against “ochlocracy” have been proved right often enough, even within the confines of duly constituted republics, and even he could not have foreseen the magnitude of the evil that can be born from a popular franchise (the Third Reich leaps here rather nimbly to mind). The only sound premise for a people’s self-governance is a culture of common virtue directed towards the one Good. And a society that can no longer conceive of freedom as anything more than limitless choice and uninhibited self-expression must of necessity progressively conclude that all things should be permitted, that all values are relative, that desire fashions its own truth, that there is no such thing as “nature,” that we are our own creatures. The ultimate consequence of a purely libertarian political ethos, if it could be taken to its logical end, would be a world in which we would no longer even remember that we should want to choose the good, as we would have learned to deem things good solely because they have been chosen. This would in truth be absolute slavery to the momentary, the final eclipse of rational dignity, the triumph within us of the bestial over the spiritual, and so of death over life.

When all is said and done, however, as I have already more or less acknowledged, I am trading here not merely in speculation, but in extravagant fantasy. We are very far removed indeed from a culture capable of such pedagogy—perhaps farther now than at almost any other point in Western history. And in the age of the omnicompetent liberal state, when government is at once more intimately invasive of and more airily abstracted from the concrete reality of communities and families, even to speak of moral pedagogy is likely to invite any number of pernicious authoritarianisms. Moreover, we are very near to a consensus as a society not only that choice and self-expression are values in and of themselves, but that they are perhaps the highest values of all; and no society can believe such nonsense unless it has forsaken almost every substantial good.

This is why, as I say, I am not convinced that we are in any very meaningful sense in the midst of a “culture war”; I think it might at best be described as a fracas. I do not say that such a war would not be worth waging. Yet most of us have already unconsciously surrendered to the more insidious aspects of modernity long before we even contemplate drawing our swords from their scabbards and inspecting them for rust. This is not to say that there are no practical measures for those who wish in earnest for the battle to be joined: homeschooling or private “trivium” academies; the disposal or locking away of televisions; prohibitions on video games and popular music; Greek and Latin; great books; remote places; archaic enthusiasms. It is generally wise to seek to be separate, to be in the world but not of it, to be no more engaged with modernity than were the ancient Christians with the culture of pagan antiquity; and wise also to cultivate in our hearts a generous hatred toward the secular order, and a charitable contempt. Probably the most subversive and effective strategy we might undertake would be one of militant fecundity: abundant, relentless, exuberant, and defiant childbearing. Given the reluctance of modern men and women to be fruitful and multiply, it would not be difficult, surely, for the devout to accomplish—in no more than a generation or two—a demographic revolution. Such a course is quite radical, admittedly, and contrary to the spirit of the age, but that is rather the point, after all. It would mean often forgoing certain material advantages, and forfeiting a great deal of our leisure; it would often prove difficult to sustain a two-career family or to be certain of a lavish retirement. But if it is a war we want, we should not recoil from sacrifice.

In the end, however, no matter how much we would like to win back the culture around us, we can hope for no “victory” at all—no matter what practical measures we take—if we are not resolved first and foremost to extirpate the habits and presuppositions of secular modernity from within ourselves.

It wouldn't surprise de Tocqueville or the Founders, but we live in a republic so debased that political speech of completely unobjectionable content is banned but it is insisted that obscene, violent, and pornographic commercial speech must be beyond regulation.

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INVIOLABLE AS IN INALIENABLE:

Did Descartes Doom Terri Schiavo? (JOHN LELAND, 3/27/05, NY Times)

IN the parade of faces talking about Terri Schiavo last week, two notable authorities were missing: Aristotle and Descartes. Yet their legacy was there.

Beneath the political maneuvering and legal wrangling, the case re-enacted a clash of ideals that has run through the history of Western thought. And in a way, it's the essential question that has been asked by philosophers since the dawn of human civilization. Is every human life precious, no matter how disabled? Or do human beings have the right to self-determination and to decide when life has value?

"The clash is about how we understand the human person," said Samuel Gregg, director of research at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, a conservative policy group.

The plea last week to prolong Ms. Schiavo's feeding, against the wishes of her husband or what courts determined to be her own expressed inclinations, echoed the teachings of Aristotle, who considered existence itself to be inviolable.

On the other side, the argument that Ms. Schiavo's life could be judged as not worth living echoed Descartes, the Enlightenment philosopher who defined human life not as biological existence - which might be an inviolable gift from God - but as consciousness, about which people can make judgments. [...]

[T]his idea that all life is sacred has exerted a powerful force in America, said Mark A. Noll, a professor of history at Wheaton College, a prestigious evangelical school in Illinois, and the author of "The Old Religion in a New World: The History of North American Christianity. " It fueled the abolitionist movement of the 18th and 19th centuries, which insisted on the humanity of slaves, against the prevailing views of social science. In the early 20th century, the same ideal stood up against eugenics, which advocated forced sterilization to prevent the weakest members of society from reproducing.

In both battles, Professor Noll said, people who held the sanctity of all human life as a religious conviction triumphed over an Enlightenment contention "that said 'No, we can qualify this value' " - meaning the value of a human life could be determined by scientific thought. [...]

[T]he scientific legacy of the Enlightenment, which argued that human life resided not in the body but the mind, is now being undermined, as modern neuroscience demystifies elements of thought and personality as heartless biochemical or genetic processes. The mind is simply prisoner to the body's DNA.

The ideas at play over this history do not conclude with Ms. Schiavo's case, but feed into arguments over abortion, stem-cell research, assisted suicide, the death penalty and even animal rights.

In their competing claims, these ideas are part of what defines America, said Courtney S. Campbell, a professor of medical ethics at Oregon State University who has argued for the rights of patients to pull the plug.

"It goes back to the foundations of the Republic - the right to life and the right to liberty in the Declaration of Independence," he said. "It's a deep-rooted conflict that goes to the core of who we are as a people and as a political society, so it's not surprising that it can be polarizing."

The notion that liberty can include the right to kill is vile.

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NOT SO FAST, FELIX?:

The state of baseball - Questions abound as countdown to season continues (George Kimball, March 29, 2005, Boston Herald)

Babe Ruth was 19 years old when he appeared in his first major league game. So were Lou Gehrig and Mickey Mantle, a couple of other Yankees legends. Ted Williams broke into the big leagues when he was 20, as did his National League counterpart Stan (The Man) Musial. Al Kaline played in his first game for the Tigers at 18, and, trivia buffs will remind you, Joe Nuxhall pitched for the wartime Cincinnati Reds six weeks shy of his 16th birthday.

Take a guess how many of today's major leaguers are under 21?

Zero, that's how many.

Which is why baseball has managed to avoid the embarrassing meltdown of basic skills that has plagued football and especially basketball.

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SHARE YOUR LOVE:

Whose Team Am I On? (DAVID BROOKS, 3/29/05, NY Times)

If you had chanced upon the front door of Grace Church School on lower Broadway on a sunny morning in the fall of 1969, you might have come upon a radiant boy clutching a brown paper bag that contained a piece of sacred turf harvested from Shea Stadium, where the New York Mets had recently won the world championship of baseball.

That boy grew up, slightly, and in the early spring of 1986, he vowed that he would ask his girlfriend to marry him the day the Mets won their 30th game of the season. The Mets got off to an unnervingly fast start that year, and the young man decided to postpone his proposal until the 40th win. But he followed through with it, and the marriage has even endured what his wife calls his Metsomnia - his tendency to toss and turn sleeplessly after his favorite baseball team has suffered a painful defeat.

And yet we are the playthings of fate and lead lives filled with strange twists, and I (for it is time to throw off the artfully constructed mask) now find myself contemplating the uncontemplatable: that I will switch my allegiance from the beloved Mets to the new team of my adopted town. I will become a fan of the Washington Nationals.

Already I feel the tug, the love that dare not speak its name. I own several Nationals caps. Some friends and I have bought season tickets.

In the midst of this spiritual crisis I have begun to ask the fundamental question. What is the nature of the loyalty that binds us to our teams? Can a team be tossed aside even though it has given you (especially during the 1970's) some of the worst years of its life?

There's a moral obligation to root for the first team you ever love and for the hometown team, but there doesn't seem any reason that you shouldn't have a number of different teams you like. The Brothers moved to Northern NJ in the later 60s, just in time for the Amazin' Mets of Cleon Jones and Tommie Agee so we'll always have a residual affection for the team, but deep in the heart of Sox Nation you can't help but follow the Hometown Team.

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TRICKLE-DOWN PSYCHOLOGY:

Random Thoughts (Thomas Sowell, 3/29/2005)

People on the political left not only have their own view of the world, they have a view of the world which they insist on attributing to others, regardless of what those others actually say. A classic example is the "trickle down theory," which no one has ever advocated, but which the left insists on fighting against.

Actually, it's worse than that: what the left attributes to others, and attacks them for, is what they themselves actually favor.

What could better fit the description of "trickle-down economics" than the argument that we should hand over our money to the government, let them "invest" it for us (in the memorable words of William Clinton), and expect to receive back more than we handed over? Isn't that precisely the trickle-down logic -- hand over your money to a powerful elite, and it will trickle back down to you in expanded form?

The "trickle-down economics" argument was a smokescreen. Now that Democrats are no longer actively seeking to expand government, they are no longer vulnerable to the trickle-down charge, so they have ceased to hurl the charge at Republicans.

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SUBLIME SCHWEID:

59 former U.S. diplomats ask Senate to reject Bolton (The Associated Press, March 30, 2005)

Others who signed the letter include ...Princeton Lyman, ambassador to South Africa and Nigeria under Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; Monteagle Stearns, ambassador to Greece and Ivory Coast in the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations; and Spurgeon Keeny Jr., deputy director of the Arms Control Agency in the Carter administration.

How he slipped that past the AP editors is anybody's guess, but it's the funniest thing in today's paper. One assumes their wives--Muffy, Buffy, & Bunny--are still seething over Jews being let into the country club.

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JUST COMPORT WITH COMMUNITY STANDARDS:

Political storm cloud hangs over Hollywood: Since the reelection of George W. Bush last fall, cultural conservatives have been flexing their muscles on the entertainment front. (Patrick Goldstein, March 29, 2005, LA Times)

Last week the lunch chatter in Hollywood was all about William Morris chief David Wirtschafter's ill-fated New Yorker interview and Pat O'Brien's lascivious answering machine messages. As usual, Hollywood is worried about the important things in life.

What they're not paying attention to is the fact that since the reelection of George W. Bush last fall, cultural conservatives have been flexing their muscles not only in the political arena but also on the entertainment front. Earlier this month, the chairmen of the Senate and House committees overseeing the broadcast industry said they were considering action that would make cable TV outlets such as HBO or MTV subject to the same indecency rules as network broadcasters, which, if nothing else, would cut most "Deadwood" episodes to the length of a cartoon short.

More recently, the New York Times reported that a number of Imax theaters, including some in science museums, have refused to exhibit movies that mention evolution or the big-bang theory, fearing protests from religious groups who object to films that don't support biblical descriptions of the origins of Earth. One would hope that won't apply to "King Kong" when it reaches theaters later this year. An official at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History said the museum had decided against showing a science film called "Volcanoes" because members of a test audience had viewed it as "blasphemous." And, of course, all this comes in the wake of Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning "Million Dollar Baby," which was attacked by Rush Limbaugh and others as "a million-dollar euthanasia movie."

The industry response has been muted, to say the least. In Hollywood, when it's not an election year, few people worry about political storm clouds until the lightning hits their roof. But in an era in which Congress is willing to inject itself into baseball's steroid scandal or family decisions, as in the Terri Schiavo case, it would hardly be a stretch to imagine a few stray sparks setting off a political crusade against raunch and violence in Hollywood. If James Dobson can accuse SpongeBob SquarePants of being part of a pro-gay agenda, can charges of devil worship in "Bewitched" be far behind?

We'll accept any reason to get rid of drivel like Bewitched.

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THE PARTY IN POWER GETS TO CAPITALIZE:

Leaders of the Opposition (NOAM SCHEIBER, 3/29/05, NY Times)

ACCORDING to a now infamous memo circulated among Republican senators, the Terri Schiavo case is a "great political issue" for their party. The memo is half right: the case may be good politics - but for Democrats. After all, in defending their intervention, Republican leaders in Congress have marshaled traditionally liberal arguments about the federal government's obligations to its citizens.

Indeed, the practical effect of the idealistic arguments the Republican leadership puts forth to defend much of its agenda - from health care to education to immigration reform - may be to sell the middle of the electorate on longtime Democratic positions.

This phenomenon may be most pronounced in foreign policy, the president's defining issue. It is true that the president can claim that recent events in Lebanon, Egypt and even Kyrgyzstan vindicate his decision to invade Iraq, and so may bolster his party. If this trend toward democratization continues, however, Democrats may be better positioned to capitalize on it politically.

The reason is that - as with education, health care and immigration - promoting liberal democracy is a project Democrats have historically embraced.

You can almost pity folks like Mr. Scheiber who haven't figured out yet that its the Republicans not the Democrats who reflect their values.

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DIVISION OF LABOR:

Chinese shares in free fall (Asia Times, 3/29/05)

China's shares this week hit their lowest intra-day level in nearly six years due to a piling up of weak investor sentiment. The benchmark Shanghai composite index, which groups together foreign currency B shares and local currency A shares, slid 0.46% on Monday to close at 1,200.113 points after initially docking at 1,185.45 points at noon, 1.71 points lower than 1,187.26 - the previous record logged in May 1999.

Turnover in Shanghai hit 4.910 billion yuan (US$592 million), with the bourse's biggest loser - Dongfeng Technology - shedding 10.05% to close at 7.35 yuan. Analysts foresee more losses ahead with sentiment extremely weak after an unremitting share slump. Experts said the situation is the natural result of poor sentiment caused by the government's new economic cooling measures and the failure of regulators to take steps to solve the stock market's problems following the National People's Congress (NPC) and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).

"The government has taken a series of steps, such as the housing loan rate increase, to cool the overheating economy. It's estimated that tougher ones will follow and the gross domestic product [GDP] this year will fall. Most investors have a pessimistic view of the market and are reluctant to trade amid this prevalently weak sentiment," said Wang Kai, a manager from the Investment Research Department of China Securities Co.

Still folks wonder why they're so eager to buy our securities...

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THE PACKAGE:

Rice's tough-minded yet temperate style apparent in Asia visit (Richard Halloran, Mar 29, 2005, Taipei Times)

A South Korean journalist in Seoul last weekend asked the visiting US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice a pointed question about how she coped with a bureaucracy staffed largely with white men.

Rice neither sidestepped the query nor brushed it away but took it head-on.

She reminded the questioner that neither of her predecessors, Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright, had been white men, then asserted: "I'm a package, I'm black and female and me."

"I think I act as Condi Rice, and that's a person who is female and black and grew up in Alabama and lived in California and was a professor," she said.

She noted that her ancestors had been slaves but that "we're making a lot of progress in the United States."

Yeah, we moved on from that whole slavery deal...

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DOUBLE TALK FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS (via The Other Brother):

Walking in the Opposition's Shoes (NY Times, 3/29/05)

While the filibuster has not traditionally been used to stop judicial confirmations, it seems to us this is a matter in which it's most important that a large minority of senators has a limited right of veto. Once confirmed, judges can serve for life and will remain on the bench long after Mr. Bush leaves the White House. And there are few responsibilities given to the executive and the legislature that are more important than choosing the members of the third co-equal branch of government. The Senate has an obligation to do everything in its power to ensure the integrity of the process.

A decade ago, this page expressed support for tactics that would have gone even further than the "nuclear option" in eliminating the power of the filibuster. At the time, we had vivid memories of the difficulty that Senate Republicans had given much of Bill Clinton's early agenda. But we were still wrong. To see the filibuster fully, it's obviously a good idea to have to live on both sides of it. We hope acknowledging our own error may remind some wavering Republican senators that someday they, too, will be on the other side and in need of all the protections the Senate rules can provide.

Actually, what it reminds us is that only one party is required by the press to meet heightened standards, while the other is invited to use any means necessary.

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HIS ACHILLES HEEL IS A PREDATOR:

`We are the termites' to Cuba's old regime: Washington boosts aid to groups backing internal opposition (Gary Marx, March 29, 2005, Chicago Tribune)

Far from the White House and Havana, in strip malls and nondescript buildings along South Florida's sunlit streets, a multimillion-dollar infusion from the U.S. government has rejuvenated Cuban-American non-profit groups providing assistance to Cuba's tiny opposition movement.

The groups' ultimate goal, supported by the Bush administration, is to bring political change to Cuba and end the presidency of Fidel Castro, who has remained in power despite numerous assassination attempts and a four-decade U.S. trade embargo.

Some of what the groups send to the island doesn't reach the dissidents they hope to help, and some of the groups' leaders acknowledge that the extra $14 million the administration is sending their way this year--on top of the nearly $9 million that was appropriated--is unlikely to bring down the Cuban government.

But that hasn't dimmed their enthusiasm for aiding what they describe as courageous opposition figures, whom they view as Castro's Achilles' heel.

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RED/GREEN, AMERICAN STYLE:

Green Opportunities for the GOP: Republicans Need New Strategy on the Environment (Samuel Thernstrom, March 28, 2005, Ripon Forum)

With the national electorate closely divided, no party can afford to ignore a chance to seize the high ground on a major issue--and the opportunities for environmental leadership today are enormous. The broad outlines of a new approach to environmental regulation are obvious, but the loudest voices on these issues are firmly committed to the old “command-and-control” (and litigate, litigate, litigate) approach.

The greatest challenge in enacting new environmental legislation is not a lack of issues; it’s lack of leadership. Democrats are loathe to give the President a victory on an issue they consider their own, and Republicans so far have been willing to settle for defeat. The President and congressional leaders are understandably focused on higher profile questions, leaving environmental policymaking to drift. It’s a shame, because the sensible reform agenda is clear, and the political payoff for leading the way could be significant.

Sixty to seventy percent of Americans sympathize with the environmental movement, while only five or six percent are hostile to it. But at the same time, voters don’t take their cues from activists: In 2004, only 9 percent said they would be more likely to vote for the presidential candidate who carried the Sierra Club’s endorsement. And basic party preferences on the environment are more balanced than you might think. Only half of the electorate prefers Democrats, while a quarter to a third prefer Republicans; the rest are evenly divided or undecided.

To make progress on this issue, Republicans will have to overcome a national press corps that considers conservative conservationists oxymoronic. That can be done with a strong agenda and real commitment. Too often, the loudest Republican voices on the environment are hardliners who mock “tree huggers” and dismiss the EPA as an American Gestapo. This ignores the real opportunities here: With environmentalists and Democrats moving steadily to the left, the common sense center is up for grabs.

For more than ten years, America has stood at the threshold of a new era in environmental policymaking, but hasn’t stepped forward. The successes--and failures--of many of our landmark environmental laws (the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Superfund program) have been clear since the 1990s. All have accomplished much, although at needless cost, and all are straining against their limitations, undermined by unforeseen complications and unintended consequences. They haven’t met their goals completely, and they face uncertain prospects for getting the job done.

Enacted a generation ago, these laws have been revised only occasionally and incompletely, if at all. They were the first federal efforts to respond to important--and complicated--problems. It’s not surprising that they weren’t perfect; it’s surprising they worked at all. By now, their strengths and weaknesses are well understood, and yet reforms have been halting at best.

Take, for example, the Clean Air Act. A vast army of state and federal bureaucrats is employed issuing thousands of permits, inspecting facilities, and litigating everything from medical science to speculative engineering questions. Rigid regulations require overly prescriptive and sometimes counterproductive approaches to complex problems. Perverse regulatory incentives hinder innovation, as companies focus on the letter of the law rather than the larger goal of environmental performance. Every sector of the economy--and every household--bears some of the cost of this inefficiency; in some sectors, the cost is considerable. Meanwhile, in some areas, air pollution remains a serious public health problem, despite 35 years of federal regulation.

To do better--to make further improvements in air quality, where it’s needed, at less cost--we need a better regulatory approach. We need an approach that promotes less bureaucracy, less litigation, more flexibility and innovation--and perhaps most importantly, more reliable results. In broad terms, we know what is needed, but cannot agree on how to do it.

It's an issue that's been sitting there for awhile just waiting for the Republican willing to face the fury of his own party for talking it up.

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WHAT AMERICA SEES:

Condiplomacy:
Travels with the new secretary of state. (Jonathan Karl, 04/04/2005, Weekly Standard)

Democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile can know: America sees you for who you are: the future leaders of your free country.
--George W. Bush, January 20, 2005

WHEN THE LEADING OPPOSITION FIGURE in Egypt was arrested on questionable charges in late January, Condoleezza Rice saw a perfect test of President Bush's inaugural promise to stand with democratic reformers around the world. Egyptian authorities jailed Ayman Nour just nine days after Bush's inaugural address. "They couldn't have picked a worse time to do this," Rice told Elliott Abrams of the National Security Council when she heard the news. Indeed. Rice first directed State Department spokesman Richard Boucher to make an uncharacteristically blunt statement. "We are concerned by the signal that the arrest sends," Boucher said, warning the Egyptians against "rough treatment" of Nour and noting, "He is one of Egypt's most prominent opposition leaders." Two weeks later, with Nour still in prison, Rice gave Hosni Mubarak's government the diplomatic equivalent of a kick in the teeth.

At the end of a meeting at the State Department with Egyptian foreign minister Ahmed Gheit and a sizable contingent of Egyptian and U.S. officials, Rice made her move. She asked everybody--except Gheit, the Egyptian ambassador, and David Satterfield of the State Department's Near Eastern Affairs Bureau--to leave the room. No note-takers, no posturing. Just blunt talk. "She shot him over Ayman Nour, just shot him," said a source familiar with the discussion. Rice's message was unambiguous: Nour's arrest threatened to poison U.S.-Egyptian relations. If he were not released, she warned, she might cancel plans for an upcoming trip to Cairo. Gheit said the Nour case was working its way through the Egyptian legal system and U.S. pressure would be unhelpful. This phase of the meeting lasted more than 20 minutes, as reporters waited for Rice, now uncharacteristically late, to appear at a joint press conference with Gheit. Stung by the bluntness of Rice's criticism, the Egyptians insisted she not mention Nour's name at the press conference.

She didn't have to say his name. When a reporter asked whether she had talked about Nour's imprisonment in the meeting, Rice avoided diplomatic niceties: "Yes, I did raise our concerns, our very strong concerns about this case," she said. "I did talk at some length about the importance of this issue to the United States, to the American administration, to the American Congress, to the American people." Visibly shaken, Gheit stood silently at Rice's side. Nour remained in jail, and Rice cancelled her long-planned trip to Egypt.

If her first months in office are any indication, Secretary Rice's State Department is going to be radically different from Colin Powell's.

One big thing she has going for her is that her peers are ill prepared for bluntness.

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ENOUGH MAKE BELIEVE:

Taiwan democracy rises above bickering (Kathrin Hille, March 27 2005, Financial Times)

It was a good weekend for Liao Wen-yen. A massive protest in Taipei on Saturday against China's anti-secession law, which organisers said drew 1m people on to the streets, provided the garbage truck driver who collects banners and posters from demonstrations and election rallies with many new trophies. [...]

[P]articipants and political observers said the peaceful gathering was the most powerful statement Taiwan could make. David Lin, a marketing manager at a local telecoms company who took part in the march, said he decided to come although he did not support President Chen Shui-bian.

“I feel his rhetoric about loving Taiwan and the threat from China is somewhat exaggerated. But if we don't protest against the mainland passing a law which is in total denial of reality that [Taiwan is] not a Chinese province but a country of our own we will become [the world's] laughing stock.” Other participants said the different views were the best proof of Taiwan's democratic way of life. “If we were part of China, we could not possibly be doing this today,” said Angela Yeh, a sales agent who had come with her family. China's state-controlled media condemned the event. The Xinhua news agency said: “Taiwan independence forces were trying to stir up popular resentment against China, and organising a political carnival was a useless waste of money.”

As Taiwan enters a period of campaigning ahead of elections for the National Assembly in early May, the DPP can be expected to use the pictures and slogans from the demonstration to increase voter turnout.

But observers have also expressed relief that the ruling party has stayed clear of radical anti-China moves.

“It is encouraging that the DPP has managed to mobilise people without having emotions get out of hand,” said Emile Sheng, of Soochow University in Taipei.

It's long past time for Taiwan to get out of hand and declare itself a completely separate nation from China.

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THINK HOWARD DEAN CAN REACH THEM?

For family, religion shapes politics: Heartlanders convert others to live daily by 'the word of God' (Brian MacQuarrie, March 29, 2005, Boston Globe)

Michael and MarCee Wilkerson bow their heads and pray before every meal, even when they are surrounded by strangers at Skyline Chili. Their older daughter, Brittany, 13, listens to Christian-accented rap, hip-hop, and R&B. And Brooke, 9, is fond of wearing a T-shirt that proclaims, ''Jesus is my Homeboy."

A middle-class family in a Cincinnati suburb, the Wilkersons are evangelical Christians for whom a literal interpretation of the Bible is a blueprint for living. Religious beliefs also guide their politics in this staunchly Republican region, which helped President Bush carry Ohio and the national election.

To them, the president is ''a godly man" and Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts is not.

Such thinking is prompting many Democrats to rethink the party's message on religion and abortion, and how to reach out to voters for whom religion plays a critical, determining role. But in the Wilkersons' four-bedroom home, nestled between a creek and a cul-de-sac, a political conversion seems unlikely at best.

The Wilkersons oppose abortion and stem-cell research, consider homosexuality a sin, and regard same-sex marriage as the work of activist judges who cater to a dangerous fringe group. The future holds either heaven or hell, and the only way to paradise is to accept Jesus Christ. In their reading of Scripture, even a saintly non-Christian such as Gandhi has been doomed to eternal torment.

''This is the word of God," Michael Wilkerson says, brandishing the New International Version of the Bible. ''There's only one way, and it's through Jesus."

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FOOLISH CHILDREN:

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defense (Reinhold Niebuhr, 1944, Charles Scribner’s Sons)

The thesis of this volume grew out of my conviction that democracy has a more compelling justification and requires a more realistic vindication than is given it by the liberal culture with which it has been associated in modern history. The excessively optimistic estimates of human nature and of human history with which the democratic credo has been historically associated are a source of peril to democratic society; for contemporary experience is refuting this optimism and there is danger that it will seem to refute the democratic ideal as well.

A free society requires some confidence in the ability of men to reach tentative and tolerable adjustments between their competing interests and to arrive at some common notions of justice which transcend all partial interests. A consistent pessimism in regard to man’s rational capacity for justice invariably leads to absolutistic political theories; for they prompt the conviction that only preponderant power can coerce the various vitalities of a community into a working harmony. But a too consistent optimism in regard to man's ability and inclination to grant justice to his fellows obscures the perils of chaos which perennially confront every society, including a free society. In one sense a democratic society is particularly exposed to the dangers of confusion. If these perils are not appreciated they may overtake a free society and invite the alternative evil of tyranny.

But modem democracy requires a more realistic philosophical and religious basis, not only in order to anticipate and understand the perils to which it is exposed; but also to give it a more persuasive justification. Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. In all nondemocratic political theories the state or the ruler is invested with uncontrolled power for the sake of achieving order and unity in the community. But the pessimism which prompts and justifies this policy is not consistent; for it is not applied, as it should be, to the ruler. If men are inclined to deal unjustly with their fellows, the possession of power aggravates this inclination. That is why irresponsible and uncontrolled power is the greatest source of injustice.

The democratic techniques of a free society place checks upon the power of the ruler and administrator and thus prevent it from becoming vexatious. The perils of uncontrolled power are perennial reminders of the virtues of a democratic society; particularly if a society should become inclined to impatience with the dangers of freedom and should be tempted to choose the advantages of coerced unity at the price of freedom.

The consistent optimism of our liberal culture has prevented modern democratic societies both from gauging the perils of freedom accurately and from appreciating democracy fully as the only alternative to justice and oppression. When this optimism is not qualified to accord with the real and complex facts of human nature and history, there is always a danger that sentimentality will give way to despair and that a too consistent optimism will alternate with a too consistent pessimism. [...]

Democracy, as every other historic ideal and institution, contains both ephemeral and more permanently valid elements. Democracy is on the one hand the characteristic fruit of a bourgeois civilization; on the other hand it is a perennially valuable form of social organization in which freedom and order are made to support, and not to contradict, each other.

Democracy is a "bourgeois ideology" in so far as it expresses the typical viewpoints of the middle classes who have risen to power in European civilization in the past three or four centuries. Most of the democratic ideals, as we know them, were weapons of the commercial classes who engaged in stubborn, and ultimately victorious, conflict with the ecclesiastical and aristocratic rulers of the feudal-medieval world. The ideal of equality, unknown in the democratic life of the Greek city states and derived partly from Christian and partly from Stoic sources, gave the bourgeois classes a sense of self-respect in overcoming the aristocratic pretension and condescension of the feudal overlords of medieval society. The middle classes defeated the combination of economic and political power of mercantilism by stressing economic liberty; and, through the principles of political liberty, they added the political power of suffrage to their growing economic power. The implicit assumptions, as well as the explicit ideals, of democratic civilization were also largely the fruit of middle-class existence. The social and historical optimism of democratic life, for instance, represents the typical illusion of an advancing class which mistook its own progress for the progress of the world.

Since bourgeois civilization, which came to birth in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and reached its zenith in the nineteenth century, is now obviously in grave peril, if not actually in rigor mortis in the twentieth century, it must be obvious that democracy, in so far as it is a middle-class ideology, also faces its doom.

This fate of democracy might be viewed with equanimity, but for the fact that it has a deeper dimension and broader validity than its middle-class character. Ideally democracy is a permanently valid form of social and political organization which does justice to two dimensions of human existence: to man’s spiritual stature and his social character; to the uniqueness and variety of life, as well as to the common necessities of all men. Bourgeois democracy frequently exalted the individual at the expense of the community; but its emphasis upon liberty contained a valid element, which transcended its excessive individualism. The community requires liberty as much as does the individual; and the individual requires community more than bourgeois thought comprehended. Democracy can therefore not be equated with freedom. An ideal democratic order seeks unity within the conditions of freedom; and maintains freedom within the framework of order.

Man requires freedom in his social organization because he is "essentially" free, which is to say, that he has the capacity for indeterminate transcendence over the processes and limitations of nature. This freedom enables him to make history and to elaborate communal organizations in boundless variety and in endless breadth and extent. But he also requires community because he is by nature social. He cannot fulfill his life within himself but only in responsible and mutual relations with his fellows.

Bourgeois democrats are inclined to believe that freedom is primarily a necessity for the individual, and that community and social order are necessary only because there are many individuals in a small world, so that minimal restrictions are required to prevent confusion. Actually the community requires freedom as much as the individual; and the individual requires order as much as does the community.

Both the individual and the community require freedom so that neither communal nor historical restraints may prematurely arrest the potencies which inhere in man’s essential freedom and which express themselves collectively as well as individually. It is true that individuals are usually the initiators of new insights and the proponents of novel methods. Yet there are collective forces at work in society which are not the conscious contrivance of individuals. In any event society is as much the beneficiary of freedom as the individual. In a free society new forces may enter into competition with the old and gradually establish themselves. In a traditional or tyrannical form of social organization new forces are either suppressed, or they establish themselves at the price of social convulsion and upheaval.

The order of a community is, on the other hand, a boon to the individual as well as to the community. The individual cannot be a true self in isolation. Nor can he live within the confines of the community which "nature" establishes in the minimal cohesion of family and herd. His freedom transcends these limits of nature, and therefore makes larger and larger social units both possible and necessary. It is precisely because of the essential freedom of man that he requires a contrived order in his community.

The democratic ideal is thus more valid than the libertarian and individualistic version of it which bourgeois civilization elaborated. Since the bourgeois version has been discredited by the events of contemporary history and since, in any event, bourgeois civilization is in process of disintegration, it becomes important to distinguish and save what is permanently valid from what is ephemeral in the democratic order.

If democracy is to survive it must find a more adequate cultural basis than the philosophy which has informed the building of the bourgeois world. The inadequacy of the presuppositions upon which the democratic experiment rests does not consist merely in the excessive individualism and libertarianism of the bourgeois world view; though it must be noted that this excessive individualism prompted a civil war in the whole western world in which the rising proletarian classes pitted an excessive collectivism against the false individualism of middle-class life. This civil conflict contributed to the weakness of democratic civilization when faced with the threat of barbarism. Neither the individualism nor the collectivism did justice to all the requirements of man’s social life, and the conflict between half-truth and half-truth divided the civilized world in such a way that the barbarians were able to claim first one side and then the other in this civil conflict as their provisional allies.

But there is a more fundamental error in the social philosophy of democratic civilization than the individualism of bourgeois democracy and the collectivism of Marxism. It is the confidence of both bourgeois and proletarian idealists in the possibility of achieving an easy resolution of the tension and conflict between self-interest and the general interest. Modern bourgeois civilization is not, as Catholic philosophers and medievalists generally assert, a rebellion against universal law, or a defiance of universal standards of justice, or a war against the historic institutions which sought to achieve and preserve some general social and international harmony. Modern secularism is not, as religious idealists usually aver, merely a rationalization of self-interest, either individual or collective. Bourgeois individualism may be excessive and it may destroy the individual's organic relation to the community; but it was not intended to destroy either the national or the international order. On the contrary the social idealism which informs our democratic civilization had a touching faith in the possibility of achieving a simple harmony between self-interest and the general welfare on every level.

It is not true that Nazism is the final fruit of a moral cynicism which had its rise in the Renaissance and Reformation, as Catholic apologists aver. Nazi barbarism is the final fruit of a moral cynicism which was only a subordinate note in the cultural life of the modern period, and which remained subordinate until very recently. Modern civilization did indeed seek to give the individual a greater freedom in the national community than the traditional feudal order had given him; and it did seek to free the nations of restraints placed upon their freedom by the international church. But it never cynically defied the general interest in the name of self-interest, either individual or collective. It came closer to doing this nationally than individually. Machiavelli’s amoral "Prince," who knows no law beyond his own will and power, is made to bear the whole burden of the Catholic polemic against the modern world. It must be admitted that Machiavelli is the first of a long line of moral cynics in the field of international relations. But this moral cynicism only qualifies, and does not efface, the general universalistic overtone of modern liberal idealism. In the field of domestic politics the war of uncontrolled interests may have been the consequence, but it was certainly not the intention, of middle-class individualists. Nor was the conflict between nations in our modern world their intention. They did demand a greater degree of freedom for the nations; but they believed that it was possible to achieve an uncontrolled harmony between them, once the allegedly irrelevant restrictions of the old religio-political order were removed. In this they proved to be mistaken. They did not make the mistake, however, of giving simple moral sanction to self-interest. They depended rather upon controls and restraints which proved to be inadequate.

II.

In illumining this important distinction more fully, we may well designate the moral cynics, who know no law beyond their will and interest, with a scriptural designation of "children of this world" or "children of darkness." Those who believe that self-interest should be brought under the discipline of a higher law could then be termed "the children of light." This is no mere arbitrary device; for evil is always the assertion of some self-interest without regard to the whole, whether the whole be conceived as the immediate community, or the total community of mankind, or the total order of the world. The good is, on the other hand, always the harmony of the whole on various levels. Devotion to a subordinate and premature "whole" such as the nation, may of course become evil, viewed from the perspective of a larger whole, such as the community of mankind. The "children of light" may thus be defined as those who seek to bring self-interest under the discipline of a more universal law and in harmony with a more universal good.

According to the scripture "the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light." This observation fits the modern situation. Our democratic civilization has been built, not by children of darkness but by foolish children of light. It has been under attack by the children of darkness, by the moral cynics, who declare that a strong nation need acknowledge no law beyond its strength. It has come close to complete disaster under this attack, not because it accepted the same creed as the cynics; but because it underestimated the power of self-interest, both individual and collective, in modern society. The children of light have not been as wise as the children of darkness.

The children of darkness are evil because they know no law beyond the self. They are wise, though evil, because they understand the power of self-interest. The children of light are virtuous because they have some conception of a higher law than their own will. They are usually foolish because they do not know the power of self-will. They underestimate the peril of anarchy in both the national and the international community. Modern democratic civilization is, in short, sentimental rather than cynical. It has an easy solution for the problem of anarchy and chaos on both the national and international level of community, because of its fatuous and superficial view of man. It does not know that the same man who is ostensibly devoted to the "common good" may have desires and ambitions, hopes and fears, which set him at variance with his neighbor.

It must be understood that the children of light are foolish not merely because they underestimate the power of self-interest among the children of darkness. They underestimate this power among themselves. [...]

In the social philosophy of Adam Smith there was both a religious guarantee of the preservation of community and a moral demand that the individual consider its claims. The religious guarantee was contained in Smith’s secularized version of providence. Smith believed that when a man is guided by self-interest he is also "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which is not his intention." This "invisible hand" is of course the power of a pre-established social harmony, conceived as a harmony of nature, which transmutes conflicts of self-interest into a vast scheme of mutual service.

Despite this determinism Smith does not hesitate to make moral demands upon men to sacrifice their interests to the wider interest. The universalistic presupposition which underlies Smith's thought is clearly indicated for instance in such an observation as this: "The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interests should be sacrificed to the public interest of his own particular order of society — that the interests of this order of society be sacrificed to the greater interest of the state. He should therefore be equally willing that all those inferior interests should be sacrificed to the greater interests of the universe, to the interests of that great society of all sensible and intelligent beings of which God himself is the immediate administrator and director."

It must be noted that in Smith’s conception the "wider interest" does not stop at the boundary of the national state. His was a real universalism in intent. Laissez faire was intended to establish a world community as well as a natural harmony of interests within each nation. Smith clearly belongs to the children of light. But the children of darkness were able to make good use of his creed. A dogma which was intended to guarantee the economic freedom of the individual became the "ideology" of vast corporate structures of a later period of capitalism, used by them, and still used, to prevent a proper political control of their power. His vision of international harmony was transmuted into the sorry realities of an international capitalism which recognized neither moral scruples nor political restraints in expanding its power over the world. His vision of a democratic harmony of society, founded upon the free play of economic forces, was refuted by the tragic realities of the class conflicts in western society. Individual and collective egotism usually employed the political philosophy of this creed, but always defied the moral idealism which informed it.

The political theory of liberalism, as distinct from the economic theory, based its confidence in the identity of particular and universal interests, not so much upon the natural limits of egotism as upon either the capacity of reason to transmute egotism into a concern for the general welfare, or upon the ability of government to overcome the potential conflict of wills in society. But even when this confidence lies in reason or in government, the actual character of the egotism which must be restrained is frequently measured in the dimension of the natural impulse of survival only. Thus John Locke, who thinks government necessary in order to overcome the "inconvenience of the state of nature," sees self-interest in conflict with the general interest only on the low level where "self-preservation" stands in contrast to the interests of others. He therefore can express the sense of obligation to others in terms which assume no final conflict between egotism and the wider interest: "Everyone," he writes, "as he is bound to preserve himself and not to quit his station willfully, so by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not into competition, ought as much as he can preserve the rest of mankind." This is obviously no creed of a moral cynic; but neither is it a profound expression of the sense of universal obligation. For most of the gigantic conflicts of will in human history, whether between individuals or groups, take place on a level, where "self-preservation" is not immediately but only indirectly involved. They are conflicts of rival lusts and ambitions.

The general confidence of an identity between self-interest and the commonweal, which underlies liberal democratic political theory, is succinctly expressed in Thomas Paine’s simple creed: "Public good is not a term opposed to the good of the individual; on the contrary it is the good of every individual collected. It is the good of all, because it is the good of every one; for as the public body is every individual collected, so the public good is the collected good of those individuals."

While there is a sense in which this identity between a particular and the general interest is ultimately true, it is never absolutely true in an immediate situation; and such identity as could be validly claimed in an immediate situation is not usually recognized by the proponents of particular interest. Human intelligence is never as pure an instrument of the universal perspective as the liberal democratic theory assumes, though neither is it as purely the instrument of the ego, as is assumed by the anti-democratic theory, derived from the pessimism of such men as Thomas Hobbes and Martin Luther.

The most naive form of the democratic faith in an identity between the individual and the general interest is developed by the utilitarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their theory manages to extract a covertly expressed sense of obligation toward the "greatest good of the greatest number" from a hedonistic analysis of morals which really lacks all logical presuppositions for any idea of obligation, and which cannot logically rise above an egoistic view of life. This utilitarianism therefore expresses the stupidity of the children of light in its most vivid form. Traditional moralists may point to any hedonistic doctrine as the creed of the children of darkness, because it has no real escape from egotism. But since it thinks it has, it illustrates the stupidity of the children of light, rather than the malice of the children of darkness. It must be observed of course that the children of darkness are well able to make use of such a creed. Utilitarianism's conception of the wise egotist, who in his prudence manages to serve interests wider than his own, supported exactly the same kind of political philosophy as Adam Smith’s conception of the harmless egotist, who did not even have to be wise, since the providential laws of nature held his egotism in cheek. So Jeremy Bentham’s influence was added to that of Adam Smith in support of a laissez-faire political philosophy; and this philosophy encouraged an unrestrained expression of human greed at the precise moment in history when an advancing industrialism required more, rather than less, moral and political restraint upon economic forces.

It must be added that, whenever the democratic idealists were challenged to explain the contrast between the actual behaviour of men and their conception of it, they had recourse to the evolutionary hope; and declared with William Godwin, that human history is moving toward a form of rationality which will finally achieve a perfect identity of self-interest and the public good.

Perhaps the most remarkable proof of the power of this optimistic creed, which underlies democratic thought, is that Marxism, which is ostensibly a revolt against it, manages to express the same optimism in another form. While liberal democrats dreamed of a simple social harmony, to be achieved by a cool prudence and a calculating egotism, the actual facts of social history revealed that the static class struggle of agrarian societies had been fanned into the flames of a dynamic struggle. Marxism was the social creed and the social cry of those classes who knew by their miseries that the creed of the liberal optimists was a snare and a delusion. Marxism insisted that the increasingly overt social conflict in democratic society would have to become even more overt, and would finally be fought to a bitter conclusion. But Marxism was also convinced that after the triumph of the lower classes of society, a new society would emerge in which exactly that kind of harmony between all social forces would be established, which Adam Smith had regarded as a possibility for any kind of society. The similarities between classical laissez-faire theory and the vision of an anarchistic millennium in Marxism are significant, whatever may be the superficial differences. [...]

Hegel imagined that the nation, free of political but not of moral inhibitions, could nevertheless, by thinking "in Weltgeschichte" (that is, by becoming fully conscious of its relation to mankind), thereby "lay hold of its concrete universality." The error is very similar to that of Fichte and of all the universalists whether naturalistic or idealistic, positivist or romantic. It is the error of a too great reliance upon the human capacity for transcendence over self-interest. There is indeed such a capacity. If there were not, any form of social harmony among men would be impossible; and certainly a democratic version of such harmony would be quite unthinkable But the same man who displays this capacity also reveals varying degrees of the power of self-interest and of the subservience of the mind to these interests. Sometimes this egotism stands in frank contradiction to the professed ideal or sense of obligation to higher and wider values; and sometimes it uses the ideal as its instrument.

It is this fact which a few pessimists in our modern culture have realized, only to draw undemocratic and sometimes completely cynical conclusions from it. The democratic idealists of practically all schools of thought have managed to remain remarkably oblivious to the obvious facts. Democratic theory therefore has not squared with the facts of history. This grave defect in democratic theory was comparatively innocuous in the heyday of the bourgeois period, when the youth and the power of democratic civilization surmounted all errors of judgment and confusions of mind. But in this latter day, when it has become important to save what is valuable in democratic life from the destruction of what is false in bourgeois civilization, it has also become necessary to distinguish what is false in democratic theory from what is true in democratic life.

The preservation of a democratic civilization requires the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of the dove. The children of light must be armed with the wisdom of the children of darkness but remain free from their malice. They must know the power of self-interest in human society without giving it moral justification. They must have this wisdom in order that they may beguile, deflect, harness and restrain self-interest, individual and collective, for the sake of the community.

The whole book is excellent, as so much of what he wrote, but it's best as a reminder that so much of even the best intentioned liberalism--libertarianism, capitalism, etc.--is so flawed as to be dangerous because grounded in an unrealistic conception of humankind. Importantly though, this message is tempered with a warning to the conservative that this does not justify a descent into cynicism and pessimism. Of course, the balance that Niebuhr requires us to strike is no easy thing to achieve, but then no one said life would be easy...

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KINGS SEEN AND UNSEEN:

Ban this racist hymn, says bishop (Jonathan Petre and Jonathan Wynne-Jones, 12/08/2004, Daily Telegraph)

A Church of England bishop has called on churches to ban the singing of I Vow to Thee, My Country, one of the best known hymns, because he says it is heretical and has racist overtones.

The Bishop of Hulme, the Rt Rev Stephen Lowe, said the hymn's popularity was a symptom of a "dangerous" increase in English nationalism which had parallels with the rise of Nazism. [...]

The bishop said the words, written by Sir Cecil Spring-Rice in 1918, were "totally heretical" because they suggested that people should pledge their allegiance to their country before God. [...]

The bishop said the emergence of nationalism had been evident during the Euro 2004 football tournament and recent military anniversaries such as D-Day.

"It is like American culture where there is this view that America is the land of the free when we know it is not. But there are those in America who want to maintain that it is and want to impose their understanding, their culture, their way of doing things on everybody else. That is dangerous."

Allegiance can, of course, only be pledged to a country, not to God.

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I Vow to Thee, My Country (Ce­cil A. Spring-Rice, 1918)

I vow to thee, my country—all earthly things above—
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love;
The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test,
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best;
The love that never falters, the love that pays the price,
The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.

And there’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago—
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.

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OUT, OUT DAMN SPOTS:

Dances with fruit flies (Thomas Hayden, 3/28/05, US News)

The fly, at first, looks like nothing so much as a tiny matador. Now standing still, now feinting left or darting right, he circles the petri dish arena, waving a black-tipped wing at his quarry like a red cape. But he's a lover, not a fighter, and his dance is intended to induce the fruit fly equivalent of a swoon. Scientists can no more explain why female Drosophila biarmipes flies go gaga for manly markings than they can determine what it is that attracts teenage girls to Ashton Kutcher. But the spots--unheard of in biarmipes' s cousin, the widely studied lab fly D. melanogaster --are helping to shed light on even more vexing questions of animal evolution. Among them: How can species with nearly identical DNA turn out as different as biarmipes is from melanogaster, or as humans are from chimpanzees?

We're living at a strange moment in America. Once again, evolution is becoming a controversial topic. But while school boards are revisiting the 19th-century debate over whether evolution even happens, 21st-century scientists are beginning to show exactly how the natural phenomenon works. Using the powerful tools of molecular biology and comparative genomics, they're finding specific changes in the DNA that can account for 17,000 species of butterfly or why insects have only six legs instead of a dozen. And while some 55 percent of Americans balk at the idea that humans evolved at all, analysis of the genes that build our bodies shows our clear kinship not just to the apes but all the way back to bugs, worms, and beyond. Along the way, scientists are starting to find concrete explanations for everything from our large brains to just exactly how the fruit fly--or the leopard, for that matter--got its spots.

Sean Carroll, in whose University of Wisconsin-Madison laboratory the biarmipes flies danced, has been at the head of the new wave of evolutionary studies for two decades. An investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Carroll sets out in his engaging new book, Endless Forms Most Beautiful (W. W. Norton), to introduce us to the field he helped found: evolutionary developmental biology, or "evo devo." [...]

All fruit flies have the genes needed to make wing spots, including a gene for black pigment called, confusingly enough, Yellow. That gene is turned on at low levels throughout all fruit fly wings, but only male biarmipes flies have the characteristic spot. Writing recently in Nature, Carroll's research team reported finding mutations in a genetic switch for Yellow in biarmipes flies that allow a finer level of control; one part of the switch keeps gene expression low throughout the wing, while another cranks up expression at the tips, creating the characteristic spot.

It's just one small step in the twisting path of evolution, of course. But it's not hard to see how many such changes in gene switches--accompanied by even small survival advantages such as females who prefer spotted mates--could lead over time to a new species, with little change in the genes themselves. It's a principle that is found again and again throughout the animal kingdom, Carroll says, and one that should help solve one of the greatest biological mysteries of recent years. [...]

Speaking recently in his office--a space so comfortably cluttered it almost resembles a nest--sporting shaggy hair and dressed in jeans and sneakers, Carroll seems about as content as a man can be. But the critics of evolution--he calls them deniers--are really starting to get under his skin.

No wonder Mr. Carroll is upset; he's begged all the important questions and accidentally added weight to the arguments of his opponents, yet still folks don't agree with him. At the end of the day he and his cronies have used intelligent design to demonstrate that drosphila don't speciate no matter how much you isolate them.

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BLAME OPRAH

Fears as girls of 11 found drunk on streets (Brian Ferguson, The Scotsman, March 28th, 2005)

Girls as young as 11 are regularly being found drunk and incapable on the streets of the Capital amid growing fears about the effects of "ladette" culture.

Police chiefs said today that young girls now account for the vast majority of "teeny tipplers" picked up by officers in the city. [...]

Police chiefs said their greatest concern was the growing trouble caused by schoolgirls and the attitude of many parents.

A Lothian and Borders Police spokesman said: "The link between alcohol abuse and youth crime is nothing new, but what we are finding is a growing ‘ladette’ culture in the Capital. Girls are increasingly behind instances of drunken disorder and we’re asking parents to ensure that they know where their kids are and what they’re up to at night."

Officers said they were often astounded by the attitude of parents when they took their daughters, or sons, home drunk.

One officer told the Evening News: "Everyone seems to think their own kids won’t be the ones who are doing this. However, it’s quite clear that some parents either don’t know, or don’t care, what their children are up to.

"The first they know about it is when our officers bring ‘little Jenny’ home and she’s drunk. Even then, some will try and blame everyone else for her condition. Frankly, they need to get a grip."

Socio-economic factors undoubtedly play a role here, but perhaps not as much as one might imagine. Anyone who talks to a modern police officer or school principal will hear lots of tales of woe about how, while in times gone by parents generally supported and cooperated with authorities on discipline issues, even the most privileged are now more likely to hurl defensive accusations and threaten lawsuits at anyone who accuses their precious jewels of any wrongdoings.

Children used to be seen as unformed blobs of charming cuteness, neediness and selfishness that had to be guided and pushed into maturity by love, education and discipline. Now, more and more, they are seen by their parents as delicate, perfectly-formed creatures without original sin who are pre-destined to corner the market in silver futures or win an Olympic gold medal if no one fractures their fragile-as-fresh-eggshell egos. Such as by telling them they are in big trouble when they misbehave and are going to pay for it.

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CALLING JUDGE GREER

Schiavo's family squabbles over her funeral (Richard Luscombe, The Scotsman, March 28th, 2005)

The legal fight to keep brain-damaged Terri Schiavo alive appeared to be over last night, but a new row erupted between her husband and her parents over what will happen to her body after she dies.

Michael Schiavo, who had his wife’s feeding tube removed by court order ten days ago, has made arrangements for her to be cremated and her ashes interred in his family’s plot in Pennsylvania.

But Bob and Mary Schindler want their daughter to have a Roman Catholic funeral service and to be buried near their home in Clearwater, Florida. They are also furious that her husband denied her an Easter communion.

What these interfering and selfish parents don’t realize is that, on their first date, Terri told Michael she was unsure about the doctrine of transubstantiation and that once, while watching a film of a fevered crowd spilling Ayatollah Khomeini’s body out of his casket, she said it might have been more dignified if he had been cremated.

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SPEECH SO IMPORTANT IT SHOULDN'T BE CHALLENGED:

Voters recall Pledge objector (Valerie Richardson, 3/23/05, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Voters in Estes Park, Colo., removed town trustee David Habecker from office Tuesday in a recall election that hinged on his refusal to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at town meetings.

Mr. Habecker, who lost by a vote of 903-605, said he is considering whether to pursue further legal action to overturn the recall outcome, arguing that the voters had infringed upon his First Amendment rights.

The right to speech wouldn't be worth protecting if we didn't have the corresponding prerogative to judge you by what you say you believe.

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IMPERFECT WEATHERVANE:

In Rare Exchange, Jordan's King Says Syria, Iran Threaten Israel: 'Bold' Words to Groups Seen as Bid for Key Role (Ori Nir, March 25, 2005, Forward)

Syria and Iran are pushing Hezbollah to increase anti-Israeli terrorism, Jordan's King Abdullah warned this week, in a rare rebuke of other Muslim countries in front of a Jewish audience.

Abdullah made his remarks Tuesday in a meeting with Jewish communal leaders. According to participants in the meeting, the king told Jewish communal leaders that he recently offered a similar warning to Israeli Prime Minister Sharon, predicting that Hezbollah may launch attacks either directly or through its Islamist allies in the West Bank and Gaza.

It is highly unusual for an Arab leader to lob such severe accusations at another Arab state in a meeting with American Jews. The gathering was organized by the Jordanians and involved representatives of several organizations, including the two most influential Jewish groups on Israel-related issues, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

"This was striking," one participant said, noting that in past meetings Abdullah characterized Syrian President Bashar Assad as a pragmatist with whom Israel and the United States ought to be talking.

The remarks appeared to be part of a wider effort by Jordan to establish itself as a key address for Middle East peacemaking and as America's main Arab ally.

Sadly, as the Iraq War demonstrated, having the Hashemites switch to your side isn't necessarily an indicator that you're winning.

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SQUARING EUGENICS AND THE FOUNDING:

The Terri Schiavo Debacle from a Progressive Disability Perspective (Josie Byzek, 3/28/05, Common Dreams)

It's been a hard week for disability rights activists like me who have strong feelings about Terri Schiavo's situation. Personally I am shocked that the revulsion I feel about how lightly the president and the U.S. Congress hold our Constitution isn't universally shared by my fellow disability rights activists, most of whom, like me, are card-carrying members of various progressive organizations. Some of my colleagues want to "save Terri at all costs," but I don't think anyone's life is worth even a ding on the U.S. Constitution.

There has been a lot of dialog in the disability community this week, though, and that painfully open dialog has helped me frame how I understand what I think needs to happen next regarding situations like Terri Schiavo's.

I have personally known people who were thought to "not be there" who suddenly dropped in. The first time was back in 1990 when I worked at the center for independent living in Pittsburgh. We had a contract to get severely disabled people out of institutions and there was this one guy they'd park across from my desk ... talk about vacant stares. I always said, "Hi, Henry," when I saw him and one day he said "hi" back. I jumped and spilled my coffee. That was the first time I saw how wrong we can be about whether severely cognitively disabled people are "there" or not.

My experience with Henry is practically a rite-of-passage experience in the disability rights movement and hopefully explains why many of us don't think nondisabled people know enough about our lives to determine whether we should live or die. It was nondisabled medical professionals who told our agency not to waste time with Henry, as he wouldn't know anyway. Our agency was owned and operated by disabled people at the time--all the top management positions were held by people with such significant disabilities as spina bifida and blindness--so they knew to set aside what the nondisabled medical professionals thought about such people as Henry.

But, as she says, the lives of her and people like her aren't worth "dinging" the Constitution....

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BEST OF BOTH WORLDS:

Fearing Saddam, anthrax scientist kept her secret - and chanced war (AP, 3/28/05)

In early 2003, as war fever built in Washington, an Iraqi scientist faced a fateful choice.

Rihab Rashid Taha could try to lower the heat by finally telling U.N. inspectors what happened to Iraq's "missing" anthrax.

Or she could remain silent, rather than risk Saddam Hussein's wrath.

The microbiologist's dilemma, she has told U.S. interrogators, was that her team 12 years earlier had destroyed the lethal bacteria by dumping it practically at the gates of one of Saddam's main palaces, and the feared Iraqi despot might grow enraged at news of anthrax on his doorstep.

Taha chose silence in 2003, thus stoking suspicions of those who contended Iraq still harbored biological weapons. Soon thereafter, two years ago this month, the United States invaded.

"Whether those involved understood the significance and disastrous consequences of their actions is unclear," the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group says of Taha and colleagues in its final report on Iraq weapons-hunting. "These efforts demonstrate the problems that existed on both sides in establishing the truth."

Disastrous? She got rid of the WMD and Saddam. Where's the disaster?

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A PERP WALK TO SAVOR:

Investigation of Insurance Puts Buffett in a Spotlight (TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN, 3/28/05, NY Times)

Over the last four decades, Warren E. Buffett has built Berkshire Hathaway into one of the world's largest and most successful insurers. Along the way, he has navigated the stock market with legendary prowess and offered folksy guidelines for proper corporate governance.

Now, with investigators on three continents examining Berkshire affiliates and a deadline looming tomorrow to respond to an Australian regulatory inquiry, Mr. Buffett's company is in the unfamiliar position of having to defend its integrity.

Berkshire insurance affiliates run by Mr. Buffett's most trusted deputies are involved in what investigators describe as possible financial manipulation at insurance giants like the American International Group and the Zurich Financial Services Group. Investigators are examining Berkshire transactions that they say helped lead to the collapse four years ago of an insurance company involved in the biggest financial scandal in Australian history.

Investigators say they have traced many suspect transactions to a Berkshire subsidiary in Dublin, where at least two Berkshire executives who were recently banned from the Australian insurance market for engaging in abusive practices continue to work for the company.

Investigators are trying to determine the extent of Mr. Buffett's knowledge of the deals, which remains unclear.

His image as a guy who's just smarter about picking stocks than the rest of us has always been inexplicable.

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The Risk Not Taken: Eliot Spitzer is going after the wrong insurance company. (RICHARD DOOLING, 4/03/05, NY Times)

Granted, a Spitzer-Buffett bout might bump Michael Jackson's trial off the top of the news hour for a day or two, and Mr. Spitzer must think big, because he wants to be governor. But now his reach has officially exceeded his grasp. Investigating insurance companies is one thing, but reinsurance companies? What the heck is reinsurance? And isn't questioning Warren Buffett about the reinsurance industry a bit like asking Stephen Hawking about black holes and white dwarfs?

Let's go to this newspaper's business section for an explanation of the skullduggery that transpired: "The issues under inquiry are whether reinsurance companies controlled by A.I.G. were treated as separate entities in order to help hide A.I.G.'s exposure to risk; whether reinsurance transactions are tantamount to loans that should have been so listed; whether assets and liabilities were swapped to smooth earnings; and, finally, whether A.I.G. used finite reinsurance to smooth earnings."

Uncross your eyes and note the distinct absence of outrage.

I'm certain that Mr. Buffett understands this finite reinsurance lingo, but I fear for Mr. Spitzer if it comes to a contest of reinsurance wits bandying provisos back and forth. My prediction is that the entire scandal will vanish when the regulators get to Page 782 of the provisions governing the reinsurance contracts, where Paragraph LXIXII(A)(4), Clause (iii), colors the word "risk" a murky shade of gray and renders the entire investigation a publicity stunt within the meaning of Paragraph XXXVI(B)(3), Clause (vii). But by the time that document is parsed, Mr. Spitzer will be in his fifth term as governor and thinking about running for president.

Maybe I'm just a sucker for a demagogue, but I'd rather have Mr. Spitzer start small and initiate a full-scale investigation into how an insurance company in St. Paul can issue a policy promising (with a perfectly straight font face) to pay for direct loss to a building resulting from the eruption of a volcano, and then three paragraphs later state that it will absolutely not pay for water damage from a frozen pipe. Just what sort of industry is it that thrives by taking our premiums and promising to pay us money, but only if we die?

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THE SURRENDER TALKS BEGIN:

Ex-MI6 man starts US-Hamas talks (Stephen Grey, 3/27/05, Sunday Times)

As deputy leader of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, Musa Abu Marzouk is a potential target for assassination by Israel. Yet there to greet him last week was Alistair Crooke, a veteran of nearly 30 years with MI6 and until recently a European Union negotiator with the Palestinians.

As they made their way upstairs, they were joined by several Americans, some of them former members of the CIA and others with links to the US administration. They had gathered in the Lebanese capital for an initiative launched by Crooke: the first talks for more than 10 years between senior Americans and radical groups denounced as terrorists by Washington.

Although still defiant in their anti-American rhetoric, the militants were staking a claim to be part of the so-called “Arab spring” of democratic change that has encompassed elections in Iraq and protests in Lebanon against the presence of Syrian forces.

The Beirut meeting was attended by almost half the leadership of Hamas, which has used suicide bombers in Israel but is taking part in Palestinian parliamentary elections this summer.

The delegation from Hezbollah, which has elected members of the Lebanese parliament but remains a terrorist organisation in the eyes of the United States, included Nawaf Moussawi, the group’s chief political negotiator.

There were also representatives from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which is banned in many countries, and from the Jamiat-i-Islami party in Pakistan.

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THE USES OF HILLARY:

Under New Chief, F.C.C. Considers Widening Its Reach (STEPHEN LABATON, 3/28/05, NY Times)

Leading lawmakers and the new leader of the F.C.C. have proposed a broad expansion of indecency rules, which were significantly toughened just last year. They are also looking for significant increases in the size of fines and new procedures that could jeopardize the licenses of stations that repeatedly violate the rules.

Some senior lawmakers, including Senator Ted Stevens, the Alaskan Republican who is the leader of the Commerce Committee, as well as Kevin J. Martin, the new chairman of the commission, have suggested it may be time to extend the indecency and profanity rules to cable and satellite television providers, which now account for viewership in 85 percent of the nation's homes. And organizations opposing what they consider indecent programming have joined forces with consumer groups that have been trying to tighten regulation over the cable industry and force it to offer consumers less expensive packages of fewer stations, known as à la carte services.

Some of the anti-indecency groups see à la carte services as a way of helping consumers block out programming they consider indecent. "We are at a rare moment when there seems to be bipartisan energy on both sides of the political aisle and both sides of the ideological divide," said L. Brent Bozell, president of the Parents Television Council, a leading advocacy organization that officials say has been responsible for the vast majority of complaints against the broadcasters.

Mr. Martin and the senior Democrat on the commission, Michael J. Copps, have consistently been among the most aggressive members of the agency on indecency issues. President Bush is expected shortly to announce the appointment of two new members to the five-person commission. Those appointments will determine whether the views of Mr. Martin and Mr. Copps on indecency issues will prevail at the agency.

Senator Clinton will need to be on the side of the angels in this dispute, providing conservatives cover as they restore control of the culture.

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MULTIPOLARITY ON THE MARCH

Dissident scorns EU advice over Cuba protests (David Rennie, The Telegraph, March 28th, 2005)

A Cuban dissident poured scorn yesterday on a visiting European Union leader who told pro-democracy activists to avoid 'provoking' Fidel Castro.

The EU development commissioner, Louis Michel, also earned criticism for declaring, at the end of a four-day visit, that he was "very optimistic" about human rights on the communist island because he was allowed to meet groups of senior democracy activists and the wives of political prisoners.

"The government did not interfere with these meetings," Mr Michel said, calling that a hopeful sign.

But one of the dissident leaders who met the commissioner, Marta Beatriz Roque, the economist, said the encounter was window-dressing by the Castro regime, which continued to repress democratic activists. She also "respectfully disagreed" with an EU decision to suspend diplomatic sanctions on Cuba, and to seek closer ties.

"The government is not going to change. Castro is deaf. Sanctions have a political value because they demonstrate to the whole world that Castro is a human rights abuser. The EU should not be seeking deeper relations with a totalitarian regime," she said. "The fact that we could meet Mr Michel one day, for an hour, is an isolated phenomenon.

“But, Madame, please understand. It’s not that the EU wants to develop deeper relations with totalitarian regimes. We have no choice. That dangerous Mr. Bush is grabbing all the free ones.”

---

THE SA'UDS VS WAHHABISM:

Saudi writers risk flogging to challenge Islamists (Dominic Evans, 3/28/05, REUTERS)

For a man just sentenced to 200 lashes and four months in jail by an Islamic court, Saudi academic Hamza al-Mozainy is strikingly cheerful.

The diminutive, twinkle-eyed professor of linguistics was summoned by a Riyadh judge in March after an Islamist colleague said Mozainy made fun of his long beard in a newspaper article.

Dismissing arguments that his court had no jurisdiction in media cases, the judge ordered that he be flogged and jailed for two months – then doubled the punishment on the spot when Mozainy challenged his authority.

"He said: OK. Instead of 75 lashes and two months, 200 lashes and four months. And you are forbidden from writing for newspapers," Mozainy said.

But the 57-year-old professor is confident he will not serve his punishment. Just hours after the verdict, de facto ruler Crown Prince Abdullah intervened in this latest clash between liberals and religious scholars in the strict Muslim state.

"I left the court and Prince Abdullah issued a strong letter saying this judgment is null, void and baseless and the court does not have jurisdiction over this case," Mozainy said in his small office in King Saud University.

Abdullah's ruling has not been made public but liberals have interpreted it to mean that Islamic sharia courts would not have jurisdiction to try media cases. [...]

Open challenges to religious figures in Saudi Arabia, where the royal family rule in unofficial alliance with powerful Wahhabi scholars, remain rare. But in January some journalists mocked a scholar who said the Asian tsunami was God's punishment for Christmas "fornication and sexual perversion."

"The last four years have been a springtime. There has been an openness and high degree of freedom of speech," Mozainy said. "We have this openness and we don't want to lose it."

Under pressure from the United States and at home after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, Saudi Arabia has launched cautious reforms including an easing of some restrictions on its press.

Now that Wahabbism has backfired they've little choice but to help reform it.

---

BLAMING VICTIMS:

Schröder Calls on Companies to Create Jobs In Germany (RICHARD BERNSTEIN, 3/28/05, NY Times)

Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, in comments published Sunday, calls on German companies to stop moving jobs and factories outside of the country in search of cheaper labor and lower taxes and to invest in Germany to provide badly needed employment here.

Speaking a bit more than a week since he proposed a cut in corporate taxes, Mr. Schröder contended that the package of economic changes made under his leadership in the past couple of years had led to a renewal of German competitiveness.

"Conditions are right," he said in an interview published in the newspaper Bild am Sonntag. "Therefore, the constant talk of moving production and jobs should stop, and there should be investment in Germany."

If conditions were right they'd stay.

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LONG TIME COMING:

Re-examining practice of faith: Emotions run high in debates on gender roles, homosexuality, extremism; Progressive Muslims spark dialogue on Islam in the U.S. (Jack Chang, 3/28/05, CONTRA COSTA TIMES)

Ahmed Nassef stood at the front of a Stanford University classroom packed with hundreds of Muslims who had come from all over the Bay Area to hear him speak.

"I begin with the greeting of peace," Nassef said. "Some of what we'll talk about tonight will be painful to hear."

He wanted to discuss issues he said Muslims in the United States have avoided but can no longer ignore as American society scrutinizes their community:

Why do only about 10 percent of U.S. Muslims regularly attend prayer at mosques? How long can the religion's leaders treat women as second-class citizens? When will Muslims respond forcefully to strains of extremism?

"It's difficult being a Muslim in America today," said the New York activist and native of Egypt, who has prominently advocated re-examining how the religion is practiced. "We need to deal with these issues openly."

Many U.S. Muslims, especially those who have grown up in this country, are asking the same questions.

They are successful, professional women who chafe at having to pray in dark, secluded rooms at their local mosques while men enter through the front doors and worship in comfort.

They are professors at U.S. universities who object to attempts by religious leaders to enforce strict interpretations of Islam on others, labeling those who don't obey as fake Muslims.

They are African-American converts who see similarities between discrimination in the segregationist South and the cold treatment of blacks in some mosques run by immigrants.

"In my circles, this has been a long time in coming," said Oakland resident Moina Noor, director of the Bay Area group American Muslims Intent on Learning and Activism.

"There are angry people out there who have had bad experiences at mosques or have had people judge them," the 34-year-old said. "People have been disengaged with Islam for a long time because they don't think it's for them.

"Now, finally, there's something going on where people think, 'Wow, this is something I can belong to.'"

The ultimate irony of 9-11 is that it will affect not just the political arrangements in the Middle East but the religion of Islam itself.

---

WHAT ABOUT THE STEEL TARIFFS?:

Mideast Building Trade Ties With U.S. (Evelyn Iritani, March 28, 2005, LA Times)

In Morocco and across the Middle East, freer trade is gaining traction.

Eager for more business with America, the region's governments are slashing tariffs, reducing red tape and strengthening intellectual property laws and labor protections. These measures are boosting trade in textiles and apparel, farm goods and machinery. California farmers stand to benefit; Hollywood might find places like Morocco more attractive for film shoots.

A flurry of activity is exactly what the Bush administration hoped for two years ago when it unveiled an ambitious proposal to create a Middle East Free Trade Area within a decade.

The plan: to negotiate a series of trade agreements that would eventually fuse one of the world's most economically and politically unstable regions into a giant free-trade zone.

President Bush described the initiative as part of a larger effort to bring the Middle East into "an expanding circle of opportunity" by using free markets and trade to "defeat poverty" and teach "the habits of liberty."

Since then, the Bush administration has negotiated trade pacts with Bahrain and Morocco, and this month launched negotiations with the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Congress has yet to approve the Bahrain deal.

The U.S. also signed a deal with Egypt that created industrial zones in which goods produced with Israeli components could be exported to the U.S. duty-free. The U.S. already had trade pacts with Jordan and Israel. The Palestinian Authority is included in the Israeli agreement.

The Middle Eastern effort fits into a broader Bush administration plan to strike bilateral trade deals across the globe.

If you didn't know better you'd swear they'd been following overarching and consistent trade and democratization policies...

---

JUST ONE AISLE:

Gospel for Both Sides of the Aisle: The evangelism of the Rev. Jim Wallis defies stereotypes: He preaches a conservative morality but condemns 'pro-rich, pro-war' views. (Teresa Watanabe, March 28, 2005, LA Times)

On a recent rainy night, an evangelical Christian preacher held 900 people spellbound at a Pasadena church. He roared about evil and sexual morality. He quoted Jesus and the Hebrew prophets. He shared his story of conversion, recalling the fire-and-brimstone minister who first drew him to Christ.

But the Rev. Jim Wallis, 56, saved most of his thunder for matters not typically found in evangelical Christian sermons: poverty, environmental protection and peacemaking. To Wallis, such issues are dominant biblical mandates that deserve as much attention as abortion, gay marriage and other hot-button issues.

"What's at stake is the meaning of being evangelical," Wallis told the crowd at First Congregational Church. "The monologue of the religious right is over, and a new dialogue has begun!"

Stout and silver-haired, Wallis is a longtime social activist, author and executive director of Sojourners, a Washington-based Christian ministry best known for its monthly magazine on faith, politics and culture. He confounds stereotypes of evangelical Christians by arguing for conservative social morality but a dovish foreign policy and an economic agenda focused on helping the poor.

Urging common ground, he has chided the right for views that promote "pro-rich, pro-war and pro-American" policies and the left for bowing to "secular fundamentalists" who dismiss the public import of faith. In the past, his views had gained a loyal but limited following, along with criticism. But intensified national debate over faith and politics since the November election has propelled Wallis to the forefront as a possible bridge between left and right.

All well and good except that he's trying to bridge a false dichotomy and differs little from a stereotypical evangelical in his concern for the poor. The FBI and Ownership Society are directed squarely at the impoverished.

That leaves only his willingness to accommodate foreign tyrannies rather than overthrow them. A perfectly legitimate politics but a dicey theology.

---

MOVING ON:

Getting out of Iraq II (Robert Novak, March 28, 2005, Townhall)

Determination high in the Bush administration to begin irreversible withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq this year is reinforced by the presence at the State Department of the most dominant secretary since Henry Kissinger three decades ago. Condoleezza Rice is expected to support administration officials who want to leave even if what is left behind does not constitute perfection.

Amid the presidential campaign's furious debate over Iraq, I reported last Sept. 20 ("Getting Out of Iraq") about strong feeling in the policymaking apparatus to get out of Iraq in 2005 even if democracy and peace had not been achieved there. My column evoked widespread expressions of disbelief, but changes over the last six months have only strengthened the view of my Bush administration sources that the escape from Iraq should begin once a permanent government is in place in Baghdad.

The most obvious change is the improved situation on the ground in Iraq, where it is no longer preposterous to imagine local security forces in control. Subtler is the advent of Secretary of State Rice. This willowy, vulnerable-looking woman wields measurably more power than Colin Powell, the robust general who preceded her. Officials who know her well believe she favors the escape from Iraq.

"She is not controlled by the neo-cons insisting on achieving a perfect democracy before we go," a colleague told me.

The same folks who accused Mr. Bush of imperialism when he invaded, and of wanting a permanent presence there, now accuse him of leaving hastily when he does exactly what he said we'd do--help them take control of their own governance and then leave.

MORE:
Iraq's Sunni Arabs Seek Their Voice: The divided minority is trying to stake a claim in a system now dominated by Shiites and Kurds. (Richard Boudreaux, March 28, 2005, LA Times)

Nearly two months after most of them sat out Iraq's historic election, 200 Sunni Arab leaders gathered to consider a belated plunge into democratic politics.

It was not a civil discussion. As a legal scholar was explaining how they could help write a new constitution, a tribal chief cut him off, shouting, "Long live the resistance!"

The chief, Mazin Jaber Nima, said the Sunni Arab-led insurgency against American troops would falter if Sunni Arabs joined in the U.S.-backed creation of a new political order.

Applause filled the Babylon Hotel's ballroom, but the next speaker was undeterred. "The subject today is how to represent the Sunni people in the political process," argued Sheik Isam Sheikhli. "Do we do it with slogans? If we go on like this, we will not achieve a thing."

After three hours of raucous debate, advocates of the political boycott gave up. The conference, one of several such Sunni Arab initiatives, endorsed a vague plan to lobby for government posts and a role in drafting the constitution.

Tardy though it is, the shift is encouraging news for the U.S. effort to spread democracy in the Middle East.

---

TOM HAGEN:

With Bush Safely Re-elected, Rove Turns Intensity to Policy (RICHARD W. STEVENSON, 3/28/05, NY Times)

In naming Mr. Rove deputy White House chief of staff for policy last month, on top of his continuing catch-all title of senior adviser, the president formally recognized Mr. Rove's affinity for the nitty-gritty of governance and publicly acknowledged his influence over whatever deal might emerge on Social Security, his No. 1 domestic priority.

"All roads lead to Karl," said Kenneth J. Duberstein, a Republican lobbyist who was the White House chief of staff under President Ronald Reagan and is now part of Mr. Rove's vast network of informal advisers and intelligence gatherers. [...]

[W]hile Mr. Rove's policy acumen has helped him expand his portfolio, his influence is derived in large part from the political apparatus he has built up.

He plays an important role in deciding where Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other administration officials go as they crisscross the country trying to win public support. He is overseeing an intelligence-gathering effort that closely tracks the positions of every Republican in Congress and makes sure they get phone calls, invitations to the White House, rides on Air Force One or other expressions of support if they come under pressure from the forces battling Mr. Bush over Social Security.

The work done inside the White House is augmented by the Republican National Committee, now run by Ken Mehlman, who managed Mr. Bush's re-election campaign under Mr. Rove. The committee holds a nationwide databank on Bush supporters that Mr. Rove's team amassed during the election, a treasure trove that Republicans said would be used to mobilize public pressure on Congress when Social Security legislation is taken up.

Additionally, Mr. Rove is calling on a handful of outside groups to play a substantial, loosely coordinated role in the effort.

Every Friday the Republican National Committee holds a meeting on Social Security that is often attended by Barry Jackson, Mr. Rove's deputy in his senior adviser role, who handles much of the day-to-day oversight of the Social Security campaign. Also in attendance are representatives of Progress for America, an advocacy group that is running television commercials supporting Mr. Bush's call for individual accounts in Social Security, and Compass, a business-backed group that is running a grass-roots campaign on behalf of the initiative.

Although those groups operate independently of the White House, they have close ties to the administration and to Mr. Rove. Compass's campaign is being run by Terry Nelson, who was one of Mr. Rove's top aides as political director of Mr. Bush's re-election campaign. Compass is an offshoot of the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, which was once run by Mr. Blahous, the Social Security expert. Progress for America recently adopted an advertising strategy used by the Bush campaign, sponsoring traffic reports on radio stations in cities around the country.

Many Democrats say Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove have reached too far on Social Security and are headed for the first big defeat of their partnership. Republicans have yet to settle their own differences; Mr. Kemp, for one, continues to publicly support the approach Mr. Rove objected to, which is embodied in legislation sponsored by Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and Senator John E. Sununu of New Hampshire.

And there is grumbling among some Republicans that Mr. Rove has mishandled the Social Security campaign. But Mr. Rove's allies and fans say that he anticipated the difficulties of moving the Social Security debate forward and that he and Mr. Bush remain convinced that they will win in the end.

"Anyone who thinks otherwise," said Charlie Black, a veteran Republican strategist, "they're underestimating Karl and they're underestimating the president."

Folks have made quite a habit of doing just that.

---

WHERE IS THE LEFT?:

Staying On, Amid Zimbabwe's Madness: My parents cling to their home in the face of Mugabe's hostility (Douglas Rogers, March 28, 2005, LA Times)

This is Zimbabwe 25 years after Robert Mugabe came to power. Initially he was seen as a unifier, and my parents, longtime liberals, chose to stay on, even as 150,000 of the 250,000 whites fled, unwilling to live under black rule. Despite a decade of relative prosperity, the last four years have seen the country descend into political turmoil and economic ruin. After losing a referendum in 2000, Mugabe accused whites of being racist colonialists and began violently seizing their farms. Blacks who opposed the regime suffered even more.

The government has become increasingly corrupt, violence is endemic, human rights violations are among the worst in the world. Despite all this, race relations are surprisingly good. Most whites and blacks tend to see the wild rantings of the regime for the cheap opportunism they are.

My parents' farm is in the Eastern Highlands, four hours east of Harare, close to the Mozambique border. It was early evening, under a blood-red sunset, when I arrived, and my parents were locking their front gate. There were uniformed guards on the perimeter, and I saw the fence around their house had been electrified. "We've just been to a farewell," my mother laughed. "Soon we'll be the only ones left!" Today, 3 million of us live outside the country. In Harare, they call London "Harare North."

My parents refuse to leave. "We are Zimbabweans, this is our country," they say. My mother was born in Zimbabwe and my father, a South African, moved there in the 1960s. But they no longer rail against those whites who do leave. "We can't blame anyone for going," said my mother.

My parents' rental cottages are routinely burgled, entire living room sets and fridges dragged away through the bush. When my mother phoned the police about one robbery, the officer in charge barely stirred: "I have no car," he said. "Can you pick me up?" That's Zimbabwe: Just when you think it's Orwellian nightmare, it turns into Evelyn Waugh farce.

It is hard to imagine that just a few years ago Zimbabweans, black and white, stood strong in the face of the political corruption of Mugabe's government. Even during the height of the 2001-2003 violence, the opposition party, Movement for Democratic Change, was ascendant; people really believed change was coming. The 2002 presidential elections felt as momentous as South Africa's in 1994. Despite threats and intimidation, people lined up in the millions to vote, and for the first time in 22 years whites — my father included — moved out from behind their high walls and sports clubs and got involved in the campaign.

But the election was stolen by Mugabe through widespread vote-rigging and intimidation — and the backlash was swift and brutal. The opposition has been virtually silent since, its leaders beaten and jailed. Four newspapers have been closed since 2002, a dozen journalists expelled. And there's no reason to expect this week's parliamentary elections to be any less corrupt than those that have gone before.

Zimbabwe archbishop calls for peaceful ouster of Mugabe (MICHAEL HARTNACK, March 28, 2005, Chicago Sun-Times)

One of Zimbabwe's most outspoken church leaders Sunday called for a peaceful uprising against President Robert Mugabe's autocratic rule, days before a parliamentary election that rights groups say is tainted by years of violence and intimidation.

Roman Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncube of Zimbabwe's second-largest city, Bulawayo, said he was willing to put on his vestments and lead a march to Mugabe's residence himself, but feared: ''If I do it, I do it alone.''

''The people are so scared,'' he said. ''You are not going to get that where people are so cowardly.''

Police arrested about 200 opposition supporters after a rally Sunday in the capital, Harare, the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change said in a statement.

Mugabe, a former guerrilla leader, has led Zimbabwe since the end of white rule in 1980. Ncube thinks Mugabe's Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front Party will easily win Thursday's poll, which he said is sure to be rigged.

''I hope that people get so disillusioned that they really organize against the government and kick him out by a nonviolent, popular, mass uprising,'' Ncube said in an interview with the the Sunday Independent.

Mugabe's misrule (Financial Times, March 28 2005)

Anybody looking to Thursday's parliamentary poll for a way out of Zimbabwe's political impasse and economic disaster is likely to be disappointed. The vote is widely expected to consolidate the hold of Robert Mugabe's Zanu-PF. Even if the opposition Movement for Democratic Change makes a decent showing, the wily Mr Mugabe may turn that to his advantage and say it was given its chance.

In a crucial year for Africa's relations with the developed world, the election will be judged differently by Zimbabwe's neighbours and by the rich nations on which any recovery will eventually depend. At least for the English-speaking rich countries, including the US, which has lumped the Mugabe regime together with Cuba's and North Korea's as an "outpost of tyranny", Zimbabwe is a test of Africa's seriousness in its willingness to confront misgovernance. But the leadership role that Zimbabwe's powerful neighbour South Africa could have exerted - and has done on other African issues - has been sadly missing.

'This time Mugabe is going for sure. The world is watching us': Zimbabweans are openly challenging the President, believing that his days are now numbered (Xan Rice and Jan Raath, 3/28/05, Times of London)

AS THE drums sound at the Chimanimani Golf Club, a shy-looking white woman appears before several thousand jubilant supporters. Her husband is in jail. Her farm has been seized. She has no record as a politician, and President Mugabe wants her out of the country.

Yet the overwhelmingly black population of this rural constituency has insisted that she stand as their candidate in Thursday’s election. And Heather Bennett, 42, whose campaign has become a symbol of the defiance and optimism that has swept through Zimbabwe over the past week, has an excellent chance of winning.

A few weeks ago, eager to confer legitimacy on the parliamentary election, Mr Mugabe ordered his youth militia to curb their violence and permit at least the semblance of democracy. The strange new atmosphere of calm — unseen for five years — has breathed unexpected life into a contest that had seemed certain to end in crushing victory for the ruling party.

If it's possible to understand the deadly cravenness with which the Left opposes the use of American force to liberalize the Third World, it's impossible to put a charitable spin on their silence when people have a chance to forward democracy peacefully if only they had some outside help.

---

ONCE THE HATE'S OUT OF THE BAG... (via Robert Schwartz):

A Dutch Soccer Riddle: Jewish Regalia Without Jews (CRAIG S. SMITH, 3/28/05, NY Times)

Just minutes before a high-stakes soccer game not long ago between this city's home team, Ajax, and their rivals from the southern city of Eindhoven, a chant built to a roar in the hall packed with supporters where they were serving plastic pint cups of Dutch beer.

"Jews, Jews, Jews!" thousands of voices cried.

Outside, souvenir stalls sold Israeli flags or flags with the Ajax logo, the head of the fabled Greek warrior, emblazoned inside the star of David. Fans arrived with hats, jackets and scarves embroidered with Hebrew writing. Until recently, the team's official Web site even featured the ringing tones of Hava Nagila and other Jewish songs that could be downloaded into fans' mobile phones.

Few, if any, of these people are Jewish.

"About thirty years ago, the other teams' supporters started calling us Jews because there was a history of Jews in Ajax," explained Fred Harris, a stocky man with brush-cut hair and a thick gold chain around his neck, "so we took it up as a point of pride and now it has become our identity."

For years, the team's management supported that unique identity. But over time what seemed to many people like a harmless - if peculiar - custom has taken on a more sinister tone. Fans of Ajax's biggest rivals began giving the Nazis' signature straight-arm salute or chanting "Hamas, Hamas!" to provoke Ajax supporters. Ajax games have been marred by shouts of "Jews to the gas!" or simply hissing to simulate the sound of gas escaping.

But, wait, we only support Dutch intolerance towards Muslim immigrants....

---

THE MUSLIMS' FRIEND:

Jakarta Tenure Offers Glimpse of Wolfowitz: Indonesians Cite Stance on Rights, Reform (Alan Sipress and Ellen Nakashima, March 28, 2005, Washington Post)

At the height of President Suharto's autocratic rule, then-U.S. Ambassador Paul D. Wolfowitz publicly offered advice in 1989 that could have landed domestic critics in prison, pointedly telling the dictator that his record of rapid economic growth was not enough.

"If greater openness is a key to economic success, I believe there is increasingly a need for openness in the political sphere as well," Wolfowitz said in May 1989 farewell remarks at Jakarta's American Cultural Center as he prepared to leave Indonesia after three years as ambassador.

This single, unexpected sentence stunned some members of Suharto's inner circle. Wolfowitz's colleagues and friends, both Indonesian and American, said the statement was in line with the U.S. envoy's quiet pursuit of political and economic reforms in Indonesia, and they say he will bring those same values to the World Bank if approved as its new president. [...]

Even Suharto acknowledged in a 1991 interview with Time magazine that Wolfowitz's remarks had "intensified and aggravated" the debate over openness in the country. Faced with popular protests, Suharto resigned in 1998 after 32 years in power.

Abdurrahman Wahid, who became president in 1999, was so taken by Wolfowitz's 1989 speech that he asked to be introduced. Wahid, a leader of Indonesia's largest Muslim organization and staunch proponent of political pluralism, said in an interview Friday that they became friends and he remains proud of that relationship today despite differences over the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Wahid was impeached by his political rivals in 2001 but remains highly influential, especially among moderate Muslims.

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CHILL THOROUGHLY (via Mike Daley)

Stem cell allies divided over egg collection (Laura Mecoy, March 27, 2005, Sacramento Bee)

Ever since she championed the nation's first state law to authorize embryonic stem cell research, Sen. Deborah Ortiz has been a heroine to patient advocates and researchers.

In the past week, though, some of their admiration has turned to shock and dismay as they learned the lawmaker wants to impose a three-year moratorium on multiple egg extractions for research.

The Sacramento Democrat said she is trying to protect women's health by temporarily barring the use of hormone treatments to increase egg production for research until more is known about the risks.

But researchers and patient advocacy groups said Ortiz's proposed legislation would create enormous obstacles to therapeutic cloning, one of the promising forms of research scientists want to fund with the state's new $3 billion stem cell research program.

"It will have a chilling effect and be very damaging for the research," said Larry Goldstein, a University of California, San Diego, stem cell researcher who's worked with Ortiz. "It interferes with a woman's right to choose whether she wishes to donate her eggs or not."

So easy to pooh-pooh the slippery slope until the Death Lobby actually insists that the freedom to choose extends not just to the one fetus but to mass killing.

---

NO OPPOSITION:

On Iran and Korea, few options (Steven R. Weisman, , March 28, 2005, The New York Times)

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has won praise from Europeans and Democrats for working closely with American allies on a common approach to the crises of Iran's and North Korea's nuclear programs. Her phrase "the time for diplomacy is now" has become a kind of State Department battle cry.

But Rice has also sharpened her tone of impatience, as have other administration officials, over the stalled nuclear talks with North Korea and Iran, suggesting that "the time for diplomacy" may not last forever. [...]

The Bush administration was riven by ideological splits on foreign policy throughout the first term.

The former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, a moderate, was often pitted against conservative elements of the administration, led by the vice president, Dick Cheney, and the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.

But some administration officials, who asked not to be named because they were speaking about internal rivalries, said that Rice is not in that kind of opposition to other officials.

"The president has a goal, and the notion of hard-liners and moderates competing for influence is just not the right paradigm," said a senior administration official. "When it comes to Iran and North Korea, in neither case do we see that time is on our side, but in both cases we realize that progress isn't going to happen overnight."

The notion of State as a source of opposition to a president, while accurate, is deuced odd.

---

GUESS WHO WE SIDE WITH:

Koizumi stands firm to Chirac on Japan hosting nuclear project (AFP, Mar 27, 2005)

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said Sunday that Japan stood firm in its attempt to host a revolutionary nuclear reactor, amid EU pressure to let France be the site of the multibillion-dollar project.

Koizumi and French President Jacques Chirac discussed the deadlock over the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) during talks in Tokyo.

"Japan has no intention to withdraw its bid to invite ITER," Koizumi told a joint news conference with the French head of state.

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EXCEEDINGLY FINE GRINDING OF THE AXIS:

US unveils plans to make India 'major world power' (AFP, Mar 26, 2005)

The United States unveiled plans Friday to help India become a "major world power in the 21st century" even as it announced moves to beef up the military of New Delhi's nuclear rival, Pakistan.

Under the plans, Washington offered to step up a strategic dialogue with India to boost missile defense and other security initiatives as well as high-tech cooperation and expanded economic and energy cooperation.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has presented to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh the Bush administration's outline for a "decisively broader strategic relationship" between the world's oldest and largest democracies, a senior US official said.

"Its goal is to help India become a major world power in the 21st century," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We understand fully the implications, including military implications, of that statement."

He did not elaborate but noted that South Asia was critical, with China on one side, Iran and the Middle East on the other, and a somewhat turbulent Central Asian region to the north.

Astonishingly few outside the Administration though have understood the implications of its several years of India policy.

---

KILL HIM, WE NEED THE BED (via Jim Yates):

The toughest decision: Fairfax man awoke from coma after his wife refused to take him off life support (Richard Halstead, 3/27/05, Marin Independent Journal)

Areme Szemanski's husband Gene had been in a coma at Marin General Hospital for 31 days when she was summoned to a conference with a team of doctors, nurses and his case manager.

They told her there was nothing more they could do for her husband, who fell off the roof of his Fairfax house on April 13, 2000, while making repairs. They wanted to take him off life support.

"They didn't give me an option," Areme Szemanski said. "Oh no, no options. They were telling me they have to switch off the machine."

When she asked for more time, maybe 15 days, Szemanski said the case manager became aggressive. The manager asked her if she thought her husband would like being paralyzed, to not be able to speak, hear or see.

"You know, she was very strong," Szemanski said. "There was no compassion. Nothing. It was more like an order, and you have to follow the order."

Szemanski refused to grant permission to turn off her husband's ventilator after the conference on May 14, 2000. Instead, she spent long hours at the hospital talking to her husband and playing music for him. Then, eight days after the conference, on his wife's birthday, Gene Szemanski opened his eyes and smiled at his wife. Eventually, he would make virtually a complete recovery.

Sometimes it's better to scratch the finger than to pull the trigger.

---

THANK GOODNESS THAT ONE DOESN'T REQUIRE EMBRYOS:

Stem-cells could allow women to grow breast implants (Sophie Goodchild, 3/27/05, New Zealand Herald)

A revolutionary technique using stem-cell research could soon allow women to choose breast enhancements made of living tissue instead of silicone. [...]

Professor Mao has developed a method of isolating the patient's stem cells, culturing them into a fatty tissue mass, and then building it around a "scaffold" of the correct shape for breasts or lips.

Professor Mao said he first took adipose stem cells from a human donor and isolated the fat-generating cells. These were mixed with a chemical, hydrogel, "which can be moulded into any given shape or dimension". Hydrogel is a lightweight material licensed for use in medicine.

"You mould them into the shape of the other normal breast or the missing portion of breast and instead of implanting silicone or saline structures, we would use the stem cell-derived adipose implant," Professor Mao said.

The living tissue implants would not "wear out". And because they are derived from the patient's own stem cells, there would not be a problem of tissue rejection that can arise with tissue from a donor.

"The technique is also applicable for other soft tissue, including facial tissue such as the lips." he said

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THEY AIN'T SEEN NOTHIN' YET:

Glimpse of World Shatters North Koreans' Illusions (HOWARD W. FRENCH , 3/24/05, NY Times)

The Lee sisters are part of a virtually stateless underground population of North Koreans who have crossed into China along the 877-mile border between the countries and live on the lam in this region. International refugee and human rights groups have estimated their numbers at 200,000 and growing.

The exodus of North Koreans to Jilin and Liaoning Provinces began in earnest in the waves of famine that struck North Korea in the mid-1990's, killing as many as two million people.

The refugees pose challenges for China and for North Korea. Chinese officials fear that a flood of North Koreans across their borders would not only pose a huge economic strain on the region, but could eventually stoke a territorial dispute because of historic Korean claims in the region. For North Korea, the refugees' flight to China offers a pressure valve, allowing the poor to earn desperately needed money. But it also allows them a glimpse of the richness of the outside world, and that could be destabilizing.

Some of the refugees want to migrate to other countries, particularly South Korea, which they perceive as being hugely wealthy and hospitable. Others want to disappear amid the two million ethnic Korean Chinese in this border region. But increasingly, the refugees plan to shuttle secretly back and forth between the countries, coming to China to supply their petty commerce back home, to take care of health problems or to see relatives before returning to the hardships of their homeland. All face the perils of a paperless existence that prevents them from easily traveling to a third country, renders their presence in China illegal and exposes those who return home by wading across the Tumen or Yalu Rivers to the risk of drowning, being shot by border guards or facing punishment in labor camps.

One woman who plans to keep shuttling between countries is a 42-year-old military nurse. "I am in China now, and it is just like I had heard - very developed, full of people, with everything you could ever want to buy," she said. "But I have no ID card, no residence permit. I am in a free country, but I am not free."

The woman's unit, which served in the border regions, providing her with a glimpse of the richer world beyond, was dissolved in 1997. She said she had left an 18-year-old daughter and a 16-year-old son in North Korea, and would return there, once she had earned money in China and could buy shoes and clothes to take home to sell. "Otherwise, there is just no way to make a living in my country," she said. If the former military nurse had a good idea of what life was like in China, most recent arrivals here, including many who live close to the border, said they had a vague idea of China's striking new wealth.

In interview after interview, they spoke of the huge shift in perspective they experienced upon entering China. "When I lived in Korea, I never thought my leaders were bad," said one woman in her 50's, a farmer who had brought her grown daughter to Yanji recently from her home not far from the other side of the border for treatment of an intestinal ailment. "When I got here, I learned that Chinese can travel wherever they want in the world as long as they have the money. I learned that South Korea is far richer, even than China."

"If we are so poor," she continued, "it must be because of Kim Jong Il's mistakes," she said referring to North Korea's leader.

If they think China is free they're in for some really pleasant surprises in the future. But, in the meantime, we should be using our ability to further destabilize North Korea, and thereby China itself, as a weapon against the PRC.

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75/25 + 75/25 = 50/50:

Longtime marrieds tell how it's done in book (Susan Reimer, February 13, 2005, Baltimore Sun)

There is plenty of other good advice in [Sheryl] Kurland's new book, Everlasting Matrimony: Pearls of Wisdom From Couples Married 50 Years or More.

"Remember your children will hear if you lived right," wrote Alice Chancey of Tampa, Fla., married to Guy since 1931.

"Family and friends talk a lot, make it good."

"We got one piece of advice from the minister who married us, and it is one we carried with us from the beginning and one that works," wrote Suzanne Concelman of Pittsburgh, married to George since 1950.

"He told us that there is no such thing as a 50/50 marriage. A good marriage is 75/25 - and both sides give 75 percent."

The book has the look of a wedding album and it includes the wedding pictures of the couples who agreed to write down for Kurland the secrets to their long marriages.

Both the husbands and the wives responded, including such pearls as this one from Sydney Cooper of Lake City, Fla., married to Rosalie since 1942:

"Always allow your wife to win [she will anyway]." [...]

"These couples grew up very fast," said Kurland. "But the part that intrigued me about the war stories was the will and determination and commitment of these people.

"Divorce just wasn't in their vocabulary. I am sure there were points when they were miserable, but they learned how to weave their way out of it."

Themes repeat themselves in the written responses included in Kurland's book: the importance of faith and church; the importance of sharing the financial decisions; the need to give each other "space;" the value of children; and the tremendous pride these couples have in them. [...]

"One of the things that sticks with me is that, for so many of these couples, marriage is a way of thinking. It is selfless.

"You are always thinking about the other person's well-being and welfare, about how to make them happy and their life richer.

"If you do that, it will come back to you."

And, she said, the happy couples had one more thing in common.

"They always praise the other person for making the marriage successful."

Interesting to note what a closed loop this is--the personal qualities that made their marriages work are those they learned from their religion. It suggests the futility of trying to expand the institution to those who aren't qualified.

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ANYBODY KNOW ANY MATH?:

Depressed Annan close to quitting over UN scandals (Sarah Baxter, 3/27/05, Times of London)

KOFI ANNAN, the United Nations secretary-general, is said to be struggling with depression and considering his future. Colleagues have reported concerns about Annan ahead of an official report this week that will examine his son Kojo’s connection to the controversial Iraqi oil for food scheme.

Depending on the findings of the report, by a team led by the former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, Annan may have to choose between the secretary-generalship and loyalty to his son.

American congressional critics of the UN are already pressing him to resign over the mismanagement of the oil for food programme, and even his supporters have been dismayed by the scandals on his watch, including the sexual abuse of children by UN peacekeepers in Congo.

One close observer at the UN said Annan’s moods were like a “sine curve” and that he appeared near the bottom of the trough.

Do sine curves keep going down or do they turn back up?

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EVERYBODY GETS WHAT THEY WANT...:

F-16 deal: S. Asia's new arms race?: Pakistan got its long-waited US jet sale Friday. But India also got a green light for US weapons. (Owais Tohid, 3/28/05, The Christian Science Monitor)

In a move seen as rewarding Pakistan as a key ally in its war on terror, the United States agreed Friday to sell the South Asian nation F-16 fighter jets - reversing a 15-year ban.

Bush administration officials simultaneously announced that India would have the opportunity to buy some of the latest American combat aircraft.

The steps are seen as politically bolstering Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf at home, and indicate a shift in US policy toward a tacit acceptance of Pakistan and India as nuclear powers, analysts say.

"It will help Musharraf counter the religious extremists who used to taunt that America is not trustworthy as it had walked off after first Afghan War and may change the perception of common man [toward the US] as well," says analyst Tauseef Ahmed.

...except al Qaeda, France and China.

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GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER:

Wolfowitz Dating Muslim Woman Causes Stir (Barbara Ferguson, 3/23/05, Arab News)

Here’s a bit of news that had Washingtonians choking on their coffee this morning: President Bush’s neoconservative hawk Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon’s architect of the US invasion of Iraq, is dating a Muslim!

While battle lines have hardened over President Bush’s nomination of Wolfowitz to become president of the World Bank, what many say is really fueling the controversy is concern within the bank over Wolfowitz’s reported romantic relationship with Shaha Ali Riza, an Arab feminist who is the acting manager for External Relations and Outreach for the Middle East and North Africa Region at the World Bank.

Political foes of Wolfowitz portray him as a leader of Washington’s Jewish neo-conservatives driving a blindly pro-Israel policy in the Middle East. Critics have also noted that his sister, Laura, a biologist, lives in Israel and has an Israeli husband.

But Wolfowitz, a married father of three, is said to be so blinded by his relationship with Riza, that influential members of the World Bank believe she played a key role in influencing the Pentagon official to launch the 2003 Iraq war. As his trusted confident, she is said to be one of most influential Muslims in Washington. [...]

A Wolfowitz opponent at the World Bank told a reporter: “Unless Riza gives up her job, this will be an impossible conflict of interest.”

Wolfowitz married his wife Clare Selgin in 1968. But they have lived separately since 2001, after allegations he had an affair with an employee at the School of Advanced International Studies where he was dean for seven years. They are now believed to be legally separated. [...]

[W]olfowitz’s only comment on the complaints has been a terse statement issued through a Pentagon spokesman. He said: “If a personal relationship presents a potential conflict of interest, I will comply with bank policies to resolve the issue.”

Adultery should be a firing offense, but is the Left really going to argue that his friendship with a Muslim disqualifies him?

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TANNED, RESTED, AND READY TO MANAGE THE DECLINE:

Tories ready, willing and able to take reins (Rick Anderson, 3/27/05, Toronto Star)

The Conservatives are certainly ready to govern. This really boils down to two main questions and, on both counts, the Conservatives are increasingly in better shape than the Liberals.

First, the Conservatives are slowly putting together an attractive policy program: Raise incomes and create jobs by easing the heavy hand of government on economic levers and in your pocket; shift the emphasis to individual, family and local responsibility; curtail the growth of the nanny state. Let innovation flourish in health care, guided by practical criteria — better services and access, value for money — instead of shackled by partisan clichés. Common sense approaches to international affairs and relationships. [...]

Second, the Conservatives have the depth of talent. Long-term MPs like Diane Ablonczy, Jay Hill, Monte Solberg, Chuck Strahl and others have a dozen years of parliamentary experience under their belts. Younger MPs like James Rajotte and James Moore are smart and steady contributors. Vic Toews, Loyola Hearn, Brian Pallister and Rob Nicholson bring ministerial experience from provincial and federal governments. And rookie MPs such as Gord Brown, Gordon O'Connor, Bev Oda, Jim Prentice and Belinda Stronach add valuable experience from outside politics.

Bottom line, the Conservative benches compare increasingly favourably to the Liberals in terms of creativity, energy, idealism and freshness.

Finally, there is the principle known in French as l'alternance.

All they lack is an electorate that hasn't given up on a future.

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NIGHT ROLLERS:

Minutemen appear to be restyling campaign along Mexican border (Michael Marizco, 3/27/05, ARIZONA DAILY STAR)

The Minuteman Project - reported on by the media as an impending disaster in the immigration debate - is changing its tune.

What started as a group of volunteers intending to monitor illegal entrants crossing the border and calling them in to the U.S. Border Patrol is now being sold as something more like a tailgate party on the banks of the San Pedro River.

"Our MO has changed," said Richard Humphries, a retired federal agent who's in charge of the planes the Minuteman volunteers will use to patrol the area. "Originally, we were going to try to remain quiet and hidden. That way when the illegals walked by, we could see them."

The group has been concerned about the misconception that "the media is putting out" and wants to show "that it's not just a bunch of shaved head rednecks," Humphries said.

Organizers now claim 40 percent of it's still-unproven 956 volunteers are women and minorities and that the group includes "4 wheelchair bound paraplegics and 6 amputees."

Now this is a reality tv show just waiting to happen.

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AND A VERY HAPPY EASTER TO YOU TOO

The God Racket, From DeMille to DeLay (Frank Rich, New York Times, March 27th, 2005)

Culture is often a more reliable prophecy than religion of where the country is going, and our culture has been screaming its theocratic inclinations for months now. The anti-indecency campaign, already a roaring success, has just yielded a new chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Kevin J. Martin, who had been endorsed by the Parents Television Council and other avatars of the religious right. The push for the sanctity of marriage (or all marriages except Terri and Michael Schiavo's) has led to the banishment of lesbian moms on public television. The Armageddon-fueled worldview of the "Left Behind" books extends its spell by the day, soon to surface in a new NBC prime-time mini-series, "Revelations," being sold with the slogan "The End is Near."

All this is happening while polls consistently show that at most a fifth of the country subscribes to the religious views of those in the Republican base whom even George Will, speaking last Sunday on ABC's "This Week," acknowledged may be considered "extremists." In that famous Election Day exit poll, "moral values" voters amounted to only 22 percent. Similarly, an ABC News survey last weekend found that only 27 percent of Americans thought it was "appropriate" for Congress to "get involved" in the Schiavo case and only 16 percent said it would want to be kept alive in her condition. But a majority of American colonists didn't believe in witches during the Salem trials either - any more than the Taliban reflected the views of a majority of Afghans. At a certain point - and we seem to be at that point - fear takes over, allowing a mob to bully the majority over the short term. (Of course, if you believe the end is near, there is no long term.)

That bullying, stoked by politicians in power, has become omnipresent, leading television stations to practice self-censorship and high school teachers to avoid mentioning "the E word," evolution, in their classrooms, lest they arouse fundamentalist rancor. The president is on record as saying that the jury is still out on evolution, so perhaps it's no surprise that The Los Angeles Times has uncovered a three-year-old "religious rights" unit in the Justice Department that investigated a biology professor at Texas Tech because he refused to write letters of recommendation for students who do not accept evolution as "the central, unifying principle of biology." Cornelia Dean of The New York Times broke the story last weekend that some Imax theaters, even those in science centers, are now refusing to show documentaries like "Galápagos" or "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea" because their references to Darwin and the Big Bang theory might antagonize some audiences. Soon such films will disappear along with biology textbooks that don't give equal time to creationism.

James Cameron, producer of "Volcanoes" (and, more famously, the director of "Titanic"), called this development "obviously symptomatic of our shift away from empiricism in science to faith-based science." Faith-based science has in turn begat faith-based medicine that impedes stem-cell research, not to mention faith-based abstinence-only health policy that impedes the prevention of unwanted pregnancies and diseases like AIDS.

Faith-based news is not far behind. Ashley Smith, the 26-year-old woman who was held hostage by Brian Nichols, the accused Atlanta courthouse killer, has been canonized by virtually every American news organization as God's messenger because she inspired Mr. Nichols to surrender by talking about her faith and reading him a chapter from Rick Warren's best seller, "The Purpose-Driven Life." But if she's speaking for God, what does that make Dennis Rader, the church council president arrested in Wichita's B.T.K. serial killer case? Was God instructing Terry Ratzmann, the devoted member of the Living Church of God who this month murdered his pastor, an elderly man, two teenagers and two others before killing himself at a weekly church service in Wisconsin? The religious elements of these stories, including the role played by the end-of-times fatalism of Mr. Ratzmann's church, are left largely unexamined by the same news outlets that serve up Ashley Smith's tale as an inspirational parable for profit.

Next to what's happening now, official displays of DeMille's old Ten Commandments monuments seem an innocuous encroachment of religion into public life. It is a full-scale jihad that our government signed onto last weekend, and what's most scary about it is how little was heard from the political opposition. The Harvard Law School constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe pointed out this week that even Joe McCarthy did not go so far as this Congress and president did in conspiring to "try to undo the processes of a state court." But faced with McCarthyism in God's name, most Democratic leaders went into hiding and stayed silent. Prayers are no more likely to revive their spines than poor Terri Schiavo's brain.

That the Times would celebrate Easter with a scurrilous rant like this shows just how strong is the visceral hatred for religion and the religious among the chattering classes. Mr. Rich is presumably one of the social liberals his colleague David Brooks thinks believes that the quality of life is a fundamental value. Of course, we already have a pretty good idea of what constitutes Mr. Rich’s notion of a quality life.

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AND THIS YEAR’S AWARD FOR BEST SELF-PARODY GOES TO...

And now, the European Dream (Eric Sylvers, International Herald Tribune, March 26th, 2005)

He stares you straight in the eyes as he tells you the world can be a better place and that the European Union has the best chance of making it possible. He says it with such conviction that you know he believes it and he gesticulates with just enough emphasis that you find yourself believing it, too.

So it goes with Jeremy Rifkin, consultant to companies and governments on both sides of the Atlantic, a best-selling author and president of the Washington-based Foundation on Economic Trends research institute. Rifkin's books are as varied as they are plentiful - there are almost 20. But for more than a decade he has railed against globalization and the widening income inequality between rich and poor countries and within the United States.

"In a frontier economy, unfettered capitalism makes sense," Rifkin said in a recent interview in Turin, where he participated in a conference organized by the World Political Forum to mark 20 years since the beginning of perestroika, the series of liberalization measures undertaken by Mikhail Gorbachev in the final phase of the Soviet Union.

"But times have changed and Adam Smith's dictum of everybody pursuing their self-interest doesn't make sense anymore now that everything and everybody are interconnected." [...]

Rifkin does note that Europe is plagued by its own problems, including bloated welfare programs, a rigid labor market and an aging population. But he says that can be solved, at least in the short term, with more vigorous integration of the European Union.

That will not be easy, he concedes, because the nation-state remains the paramount governmental institution. But it is possible if the member countries begin to see the region's 25 countries like the 50 states are seen in the United States, he says.

"Europeans must start comparing Germany to California," Rifkin said. "Both are the biggest states in their region, yet Germany is larger so the EU comes out on top."

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DARING:

He dares to believe: Throw out the arguments, numbers and logic on Social Security. Bush is moved by his instincts (David Shribman, March 27, 2005, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

After years (12 of them if you count the years of the presidency of Bush's father along with those of his new boon pal, Bill Clinton) of prudence and caution, members of the Bush administration have adopted daring as the new White House leitmotif. They dare to impose tax cuts in a recession, they dare to try to make those tax cuts permanent, they dare to nominate the sorts of judges whom even Ronald Reagan wouldn't contemplate selecting, they dare to take on the mainstream press in a way that even Richard Nixon wouldn't consider. They dare, therefore they are. [...]

In this context, the dare on Social Security isn't anything very remarkable at all. It's completely in the context of the times and the politics. It has become a commonplace to say that his opponents have underestimated President Bush. Most of the time that means they have underestimated his political skills and, most disastrously, his intelligence. He has both in surfeit, which is the kind of statement that gets his opponents really angry, probably because they have come to learn that it is true and wish desperately it weren't.

But they also underestimate his determination. He believes in freedom, which is why he talked the way he did on Inauguration Day, and he believes in ownership, which is why he talks the way he does on Social Security. He believes. He may believe in things his opponents do not, but he believes. Like so many of his rivals, he finds it hard to believe that everyone else doesn't believe what he does.

That might be the best explanation for what he is doing -- or will soon be doing, for there is very little flesh on the bones of his proposal right now -- on Social Security. He believes it is better to own (securities or mutual funds) than to rent (which is essentially what a pay-as-you-go system like Social Security consists of) and he's willing to fight.

It sometimes seems the only two mainstream journalists with any grasp of George W. Bush are David Shribman and, improbably enough, Bill Keller.

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BEES ME'S:

His predicament was all the buzz (Gordon Edes, March 27, 2005, Boston Globe)

Former Sox pitcher Darren Oliver speculated that his coconut oil-based hair gel may have attracted a swarm of bees that chased him from the mound and caused a premature halt to a Rockies-Diamondbacks exhibition game in Tucson Thursday.

"In the beginning, it was funny," said the Colorado reliever. "Then, I started to get a little nervous. I love baseball, but I like myself more.

That quote recalls the early days of the Mets, when Ralph Kiner was interviewing Choo-Choo Coleman and asked: "So, Choo-Choo, what'syour wife's name and what's she like?"

"Her name's Mrs. Coleman and she likes me."

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DOING ERNIE PANTUSO PROUD:

Albania stands with U.S. in Iraq (Fatos Tarifa, March 27, 2005, Washington Times)

The announcement several days ago Albania -- a small country with limited resources -- was sending an additional 50 well-trained troops to Iraq came as a surprise to some observers. But it really should not have surprised anyone.

Albania was one of only four countries to send combat troops during the operation "Iraqi Freedom." Albania is probably the most pro-American country on Earth. It showed its support of the United States early, when it initially sent 70 commandos to join the Coalition of the Willing's effort to bring peace, stability and free elections to Iraq. These new troops bring to a total of 120 Albanian soldiers serving in Iraq.

From a country with only 3.5 million people, the troops -- the flower of Albania's youth -- represent the best Albania has to offer. Why does Albania do this when it could have avoided President Bush's call for support, or when it could have dropped out as others have done when the going got tough? The answer is not difficult to find. If you believe in freedom, you believe in fighting for it. If you believe in fighting for freedom, you believe in America.

Unlike people in other countries in Europe and elsewhere, the Albanian people have not forgotten what it is like to live under tyranny and repression. The Albanians for more than 40 years were held in thrall by the repressive forces of the communists, living like prisoners without rights in their own country. It was to the United States that freedom-loving Albanians looked for inspiration during those dark years, and the Americans have not let us down.

"We Albanians are a nation of freedom fighters who know something about living under oppression," Albanian Prime Minister Fatos Nano wrote in a letter to President Bush. "That is why we wholeheartedly support the American-led effort to free the people of Iraq. And though we are a small country with a small military, we are proud to stand side by side with our allies in the fight to end the reign of terror in Baghdad."

Which makes it worth at least 120 France's.

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ONE OF THE FEW REASONS TO VIOLATE THE TIME ZONE RULE:

The timeless appeal of Wagner's epic (WYNNE DELACOMA, March 27, 2005, Chicago Sun-Times)

"We're getting jazzed," said a top Lyric staffer last week about the company's upcoming immersion in Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung.''

They aren't the only ones. Music lovers throughout the world have been getting jazzed, or the linguistic equivalent appropriate to their era, about Wagner's four-opera saga since its premiere as a complete cycle in the Franconian town of Bayreuth, Germany, in August 1876.

Loosely based on Nordic mythology, the first "Ring'' cycles were presented in a brand-new theater built to Wagner's specifications. Among the audiences in 1876 were Kaiser Wilhelm, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Saint-Saens, Liszt and a tribe of 60 international music critics, including critics for London's Daily Telegraph and the New York Times.

Of course, not everyone was smitten by the "Ring'' and its 15 1/2 hours of music. The score has few long, definable melodies and more than 100 different "motifs'' or themes, small musical phrases whose rhythms or melodies identify specific characters or situations. Wagner weaves those into a more or less seamless musical flow.

"We've been rehearsing for two hours,'' complained British conductor Thomas Beecham during rehearsals of "Gotterdammerung," in the 1960s, "and we're still playing the same bloody tune!"

There's no question, however, that hundreds of thousands of music lovers can't get enough of the "Ring.'' They plan their vacations around "Ring'' cycles, traveling to Bayreuth or Toronto, Seattle or Berlin, New York or Chicago, to catch the "Ring'' of the moment. Lyric's will attract visitors from 27 countries and all 50 states. Approximately a dozen people have bought tickets to all three cycles. In 1996, the company estimates that "Ring'' audiences pumped $34.7 million into the city's economy.

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GENES AS GODS:

The evolutionary revolutionary: In the 1970s, Robert Trivers wrote a series of papers that transformed evolutionary biology. Then he all but disappeared. Now he’s back—and ready to rumble. (Drake Bennett, March 27, 2005, Boston Globe)

In the 1970s, [evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers] published five immensely influential papers that braided genetics into behavioral biology, using a gene's-eye view of evolution to explain behaviors from bird warning calls to cuckoldry to sibling rivalry to revenge. According to David Haig, a Harvard professor of biology and a leading genetic theorist, each paper virtually founded a research field. ''Most of my career has been based on exploring the implications of one of them,'' says Haig. ''I don't know of any comparable set of papers.''

Trivers's ideas have rippled out into anthropology, psychology, sociology, medicine, even economics. His work provided the intellectual basis for the then-emergent field of sociobiology (now better known as evolutionary psychology), which sought to challenge our conceptions of family, sex, friendship, and ethics by arguing (controversially) that everything from rape to religion is bred in the bone through the process of evolution. The linguist and Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker calls Trivers ''one of the great thinkers in the history of Western thought.'' [...]

Trivers's work grew out of an insight made by the Oxford biologist William D. Hamilton, who died in 2000. In a 1964 paper, Hamilton proposed an elegant solution to a problem that had rankled evolutionary theorists for some time. In a battle of the fittest, why did organisms occasionally do things that benefited others at a cost to themselves? The answer, Hamilton wrote, emerged when one took evolution down to the level of the gene. Individuals were merely vessels for genes, which survived from generation to generation, and it made no difference to the gene which organism it survived in.

According to this logic, the degree to which an organism was likely to sacrifice for another should vary in direct proportion to the degree of relatedness: Humans, for example, would be more likely to share food with a son than a second cousin, and more likely to share with a second cousin than someone wholly unrelated. Hamilton called the concept ''inclusive fitness.''

In 1976, the Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins would popularize Hamilton's ideas in his book ''The Selfish Gene.'' But more than anyone else, it was Trivers, then a graduate student, who grasped the profound implications of Hamilton's work. In a way, Trivers's legendary papers of the early 1970s were simply a series of startling applications of its logic.

There's not much left to add to the ridicule of evolutionary biology after what Andrew Ferguson and David Stove did to the notion that it comports with logic, but an example or two from reality can't hurt, Sept. 11 Hero Buried in Israel (AP, 8/05/02):

A computer programmer hailed as a hero for remaining with his quadriplegic friend rather than flee the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center was laid to rest in Israel on Monday.

In an act of final closure, the family of Abraham Zelmanowitz, 55, buried his remains next to his parents at the cemetery overlooking Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives, a revered resting place for many religious Jews. [...]

Zelmanowitz, who worked on the 27th floor of the trade center's north tower, refused to leave behind his co-worker of many years, Ed Beyea, who couldn't descend the stairs in his wheelchair. Both died when the tower collapsed.

No Ordinary Joe: Remembering a heroic act that ended in tragedy. (Rick Reilly, July 02, 2003, Sports Illustrated)

Why in creation did Joe Delaney jump into that pit full of water that day?

Why in the world would the AFC's best young running back try to save three drowning boys when he himself couldn't swim?

Nobody -- not his wife, not his mother -- had ever seen him so much as dog-paddle. A year and a half earlier, when he went to the Pro Bowl in Hawaii as the AFC's starting halfback and Rookie of the Year, he never set even a pinkie toe in the ocean or the pool. "Never had," says his wife, Carolyn, who'd known Joe since they were both seven. "In all my years, I never had seen him swim."

So why? Why did the 24-year-old Kansas City Chief try to save three boys he didn't know with a skill he didn't have?

He'd been sitting in the cool shade of a tree on a tar-bubbling afternoon at Chennault Park, a public recreation area in Monroe, La., when he heard voices calling, "Help! Help!" He popped up like a Bobo doll and sprinted toward the pit.

What made Delaney that kind of person? Why did he mow that lonely woman's lawn when he was back home in Haughton, La., rich as he was? Why did he check in on that old man every day he was in town? Why did he show up on the Haughton streets one day with a bag full of new shoes and clothes for kids whose names he'd never heard?

Why could he never think of anything that he wanted for himself? Why didn't he even make a Christmas list? The man never cashed a paycheck in his life. He would throw his checks on top of the TV for his wife. "Don't you want nothing for yourself?" Carolyn would ask Joe.

"Nah," he'd say. "You just take care of you and the girls."

"Nothing?"

"Well, if you could give me a little pocket change for the week, I'd appreciate it."

Why didn't he ask somebody else to help those three kids that day? After all, there were hundreds of people at the park, and not another soul dived into that pit. Nobody but Delaney, one guy who shouldn't have.

The boys in that pit were struggling to stay afloat. They were two brothers -- Harry and LeMarkits Holland, 11 and 10, respectively -- and a cousin, Lancer Perkins, 11. Of course, LeMarkits was always with Harry. He idolized his big brother. A water park adjacent to Chennault was staging a big promotion with free admission that day, and the boys had wandered over to the pit and waded into the water. Like Delaney, they couldn't swim.

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THE MAKING OF A PRESIDENT:

Movement in the Pews Tries to Jolt Ohio (JAMES DAO, 3/27/05, NY Times)

Christian conservative leaders from scores of Ohio's fastest growing churches are mounting a campaign to win control of local government posts and Republican organizations, starting with the 2006 governor's race.

In a manifesto that is being circulated among church leaders and on the Internet, the group, which is called the Ohio Restoration Project, is planning to mobilize 2,000 evangelical, Baptist, Pentecostal and Roman Catholic leaders in a network of so-called Patriot Pastors to register half a million new voters, enlist activists, train candidates and endorse conservative causes in the next year.

The initial goal is to elect Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, a conservative Republican, governor in 2006. The group hopes to build grass-roots organizations in Ohio's 88 counties and take control of local Republican organizations. [...]

"In Ohio, the church is awakening to its historic role as the moral voice in the community," said Colin A. Hanna, president of Let Freedom Ring, a conservative group based in Pennsylvania that trains ministers in political activism. "Ohio is in the vanguard of that nationally. I very much want Pennsylvania to be with them."

The church leaders say they will try to harness the energy of religious conservatives who were vital not only to Mr. Bush's narrow victory in Ohio but also to passage of an amendment to the state constitution banning same-sex marriage. The amendment, known as Issue 1, was credited with drawing large numbers of rural and suburban conservatives to the polls and increasing Mr. Bush's support among urban blacks.

Mr. Blackwell's ties to Evangelicals make him a more likely first black president than Barack Obama or Condi Rice.

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SEEN ONE VEGETABLE YOU'VE SEEM 'EM ALL:

DeLay's Own Tragic Crossroads: Family of the lawmaker involved in the Schiavo case decided in '88 to let his comatose father die. (Walter F. Roche Jr. and Sam Howe Verhovek, March 27, 2005, LA Times)

A family tragedy that unfolded in a Texas hospital during the fall of 1988 was a private ordeal — without judges, emergency sessions of Congress or the debate raging outside Terri Schiavo's Florida hospice.

The patient then was a 65-year-old drilling contractor, badly injured in a freak accident at his home. Among the family members keeping vigil at Brooke Army Medical Center was a grieving junior congressman — Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas).

More than 16 years ago, far from the political passions that have defined the Schiavo controversy, the DeLay family endured its own wrenching end-of-life crisis. The man in a coma, kept alive by intravenous lines and oxygen equipment, was DeLay's father, Charles Ray DeLay.

Then, freshly reelected to a third term in the House, the 41-year-old DeLay waited, all but helpless, for the verdict of doctors.

Today, as House Majority Leader, DeLay has teamed with his Senate counterpart, Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), to champion political intervention in the Schiavo case. They pushed emergency legislation through Congress to shift the legal case from Florida state courts to the federal judiciary.

And DeLay is among the strongest advocates of keeping the woman, who doctors say has been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years, connected to her feeding tube. DeLay has denounced Schiavo's husband, as well as judges, for committing what he calls "an act of barbarism" in removing the tube.

In 1988, however, there was no such fiery rhetoric as the congressman quietly joined the sad family consensus to let his father die.

"There was no point to even really talking about it," Maxine DeLay, the congressman's 81-year-old widowed mother, recalled in an interview last week. "There was no way [Charles] wanted to live like that. Tom knew — we all knew — his father wouldn't have wanted to live that way."

Doctors advised that he would "basically be a vegetable," said the congressman's aunt, JoAnne DeLay.

When his father's kidneys failed, the DeLay family decided against connecting him to a dialysis machine. "Extraordinary measures to prolong life were not initiated," said his medical report, citing "agreement with the family's wishes." His bedside chart carried the instruction: "Do not resuscitate."

Why Schiavo case worries the disabled (WILLIAM G. STOTHERS, 3/25/05, Toronto Star)

First thing:Terri Schiavo is not terminally ill. She is severely disabled with a brain injury. She is not hooked up to any life-support systems. For 15 years she has relied on a feeding tube for food and water. Her organs function normally.

So why does anyone want to kill her? "Kill" is the correct word here. Removing her feeding tube will cause her death. She will die by starvation and dehydration.

For those of us in the organized disability rights movement, it looks like Schiavo is being put to death for the crime of being disabled.

Disability makes many people uncomfortable. How many times have you said, or heard someone say, "I would never want to live like that." Or, "I would rather be dead than be like that."

People have said that to me. I am severely disabled and use a motorized wheelchair as a result of having polio 55 years ago.

Doctors told my parents to put me into a "home" and forget about me. He will have no life, they said, move on with your own lives.

They ignored the advice. When I went to school, I was teased and made an object of pity. "I would hate to live like you," kids told me. When I went to university, I was told that "at least you still have your mind." When I went to work in the newspaper business, I was expected to remain at an entry level position; when I left to go to graduate school, my work supervisor told a colleague "what else could he ever hope to do?"

People with disabilities are pushed to the ragged edge of our collective consciousness, stereotyped as dependent, unproductive and pitiful. It is not such a long step to considering such persons burdensome and too costly to maintain and finally, and of course regrettably, expendable.

Even by its own abysmal standards the press has done a terrible job covering the issues surrounding the Schiavo case--there's a great difference between the question of whether it's morally necessary to initiate heroic measures to prolong life and whether it's morally permissible to withdraw simple sustenance from someone who isn't otherwise terminal.

MORE:
Time for a moral revolution: Abortion ‘on demand’ and the scandalous Schiavo case have resonance in the week we celebrate the triumph of life over death (GERALD WARNER, 3/27/05, Scotland on Sunday)

EASTER is a celebration of the triumph of life over death and of right over wrong. So it is peculiarly poignant that issues of life and death should be dominating the news this Easter, most dramatically so in the United States.

Last week, before the eyes of the whole world, the nation that has pledged to export its values to the rest of the globe set about starving and dehydrating one of its citizens to death. That it did so against the wishes of the president, Congress and the people only added to the horror of the situation. If Terri Schiavo is still alive by the time you read this and there has been no new intervention, it will be her ninth day deprived even of water. [...]

"I thirst" was among the last words on the Cross. A human being dying of dehydration in Holy Week has an apocalyptic resonance. This Easter we must pledge ourselves to moral regeneration, reasserting our human dignity and the inviolability of all innocent life.

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THE RATCHET RACKET:

It's the morality, stupid: In the run-up to the general election, religion and politics are mixing as never before. But ‘issues of conscience’ are a minefield for every party (EDDIE BARNES AND BRIAN BRADY, 27 Mar 2005, Scotland on Sunday)

TONY Blair is known to be an avid reader of his Bible. How he must be wishing this Easter Sunday morning that more people would pay some attention to Luke 20:25. "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s," Christ told his disciples. It has long been taken as the definitive judgment on the need to keep the worlds of church and state at arms length. Britons - with their circumspect wariness of religion and moralising - have long approved of Christ’s guidance. Yet five weeks before a likely election at the beginning of May, the unexpected has happened: the country has become locked in an epic spiritual struggle within the moral maze. The economy, inflation and public services are out. Abortion, euthanasia and questions of faith are in. What, in God’s name, is going on?

Like no election campaign in recent memory, the separate worlds of religion and politics are mixing freely. The latest example this morning comes in St Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh where Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the leader of Scotland’s Roman Catholics, offers his Easter sermon. His homily (which was conveniently e-mailed to media outlets more than 24 hours beforehand) is less spiritual reflection and more political rally. In it, O’Brien barely draws breath before he tackles Caesar head on. Within the first few minutes, he is addressing the issue of abortion, and alluding to Conservative leader Michael Howard’s approval for a reduction in the time limit from 24 weeks to 20. Then it is swiftly on to cloning, and last week’s report by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee which calls for more experiments on embryos to be permitted. Then, on to the election. "I urge you all to question your prospective candidates on these issues and demand that the defence of life is placed at the top of the political agenda," O’Brien declares. He is only doing what his English counterpart Cormac Murphy O’Connor started two weeks ago when he commended Howard on abortion.

Interventions in elections by churchmen such as O’Brien are nothing new. But this time, they are more bullish. On the face of it, this would appear entirely unjustified. Religious attendance is inexorably in decline. Across Scotland, cities are pock-marked with redundant churches converted into pubs, DIY outlets and designer flats. Yet church leaders across several other denominations are convinced that the public mood is changing. Morality is back, they claim, because 21st-century Britons, disillusioned with the superficial promise of modern secular materialism, are demanding its return like never before.

Why don't these folks ever question Caesar's meddling in settled moral issues, like abortion?

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MAKING THE SIGN SEEMS SUPERFLUOUS:

Pope Struggles to Speak at Easter Blessing (Sabina Castelfranco, 27 March 2005, VOA News)

Pope John Paul did not disappoint the Roman Catholic faithful on Easter Sunday. He came to his window to bless the Vatican pilgrims, but was unable to speak to the thousands crowding Saint Peter's Square. The pope appeared at his study window as promised, but did not speak. He tried to say something but made only some sound.

The 84-year-old pope looked pained at not being able to address the pilgrims. He has been a great communicator and a very visible pope and is clearly suffering at his inability to speak.

Aides had prepared a microphone for him, but the pope was only able to make the sign of the cross.

Many of those present cried in Saint Peter's Square. It was the most emotional Easter in the pope's long 26-year papacy.

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AS BEST WE CAN:

They're everyday believers (Janet I. Tu, 3/27/05, Seattle Times)

Jim Roths of Sumner, who attends Redmond's Overlake Christian Church, left a high-level corporate position to move with his family to Central Asia to work as a missionary for eight years.

Betty Woodard, a grandmother of 13 and great-grandmother of three, founded a prison ministry at her church, Goodwill Missionary Baptist in Seattle's Central Area, and volunteers regularly, visiting shut-ins and nursing homes.

George Balagtas is a student minister at Seattle University, preparing the school's light-filled Chapel of St. Ignatius for Mass.

Three people from different walks of life, each with different ways of practicing their faith. Yet, at a time when Christianity has become politicized and polarized, these three also express a certain unity in what they believe it means to be Christian.

Today, some 159 million Christians in the United States, and about 1.9 billion worldwide, will celebrate Easter, marking the day they believe Jesus was resurrected. (Orthodox Christians use a different calendar and will celebrate Easter on May 1.)

It is, perhaps, one of the two days of the year — the other is Christmas — when the public expression of Christianity is most apparent, as the faithful flock to churches.

For Roths, Woodard and Balagtas and many other Christians, their faith is also lived day in and day out, in ways big and small.

The three articulate it differently. To Balagtas, it is living the life of Jesus, applying to his own life Christ's teachings and the hope of the resurrection story. Woodard calls it letting "your light shine that they may see your good work and glorify the Father." Roths sees it as a calling from God to be an example of how a Christian lives his faith.

Underlying their different statements are similar sentiments about what it means to be a Christian: to follow the example of Jesus to love others and do good deeds; and to trust that God has a plan for their lives.

As Roths says: "I think the best way we can impact society is to be an example ourselves, to live out our faith as best we can."

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IF ONLY MANDELA AND TUTU WERE STILL ALIVE:

Zimbabwe: Mbeki sees no evil, hears no evil: Outcry as South African premier fails to back neighbour’s struggle for democracy (Fred Bridgland, 3/27/05, Sunday Herald)

Zimbabwe’s sixth parliamentary election, to be held in five days’ time, has become less a test of President Robert Mugabe’s credibility and reputation – which are already beyond repair – than the standing of his South African ally, President Thabo Mbeki.

Mugabe, who has rigged yet another election in advance, has bet on Mbeki having no stomach to act against him when South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) government could, if it so chose, topple Mugabe in months, perhaps weeks, by cutting off his electricity and oil supplies.

Mbeki greatly comforted Mugabe, but stunned many South Africans and most of the concerned international community when, a few days ago, he proclaimed from the steps of parliament in Cape Town: “I have no reason to think that anybody in Zimbabwe will act in a way that will militate against the [Zimbabwe] elections being free and fair.” [...]

What is extraordinary about Mbeki’s stand, apart from the long-term damage it will cause an increasingly troubled post-Mandela South Africa, is that he and other heads of state of the 14-member Southern African Development Community (SADC), southern Africa’s most important regional grouping, spent a huge amount of energy six months ago drafting guidelines for free and fair elections at a summit in Mauritius. The document won worldwide acclaim. It was even signed by President Mugabe.

Yet it is clear that Mugabe has no intention of applying the guidelines. It is equally clear that neither Mbeki nor the other SADC leaders intend calling him to account.

In the end, South Africa and SADC will pay the price in terms of lost credibility in the developed world, where they should have important roles to play in negotiating a better deal for the struggling nations of Africa. Forget about all the high ideals of Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa and of the coming G8 summit in Scotland if, after Thursday’s blatantly rigged Zimbabwe election, it is more of the same from presidents Mbeki and Mugabe.

Mbeki’s much touted doctrine of delivering good governance in Africa for better trading opportunities with the developed world will be the prime victim. Investment in South Africa, already a trickle because of bewilderingly complex black empowerment legislation and Mbeki’s denial of the scale of his country’s Aids crisis, will almost dry up.

Pius Ncube, the outspoken Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bulawayo, who is Zimbabwe’s nearest equivalent to South Africa’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has observed that Mbeki “would be booed in the streets” if he was to speak to ordinary Zimbabweans and ask them what they thought about his views on their country.

The archbishop, who said he refused an offer from Mugabe of an appropriated white commercial farm in exchange for his silence, said: “The people of Zimbabwe have no respect for Mbeki. They don’t know why he is supporting Mugabe. They don’t understand it.”

Asked what he thought of Mugabe, Archbishop Ncube replied: “He’s a very, very evil man. The sooner he dies, the better.”

MORE:
South Africa's president feels the squeeze over Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe's parliamentary election Thursday puts Mbeki between Africa and the West. (Abraham McLaughlin , 3/28/05, The Christian Science Monitor)

For years, South African President Thabo Mbeki's approach on the growing autocracy in Zimbabwe has been to use "quiet diplomacy" - supporting President Robert Mugabe in public, cajoling him in private. This used to satisfy the United States.

But that's begun to change. President Bush is newly set on "ending tyranny in our world"; his team calls Zimbabwe one of six "outposts of tyranny." Mr. Bush's ambassador to South Africa, Jendayi Frazer, hinted in a speech last month that Zimbabwe's crisis threatens US support for the region. If African organizations are "not seen to act forcefully against tyranny," she said, "it is going to be a problem in terms of trying to build international support and resources."

Now Zimbabwe holds parliamentary elections Thursday. Critics expect they'll be flawed, like the 2000 vote in which Mr. Mugabe was reelected. If so, they may cloud Mr. Mbeki's vision for an "African renaissance" that would bring in billions in Western aid dollars in exchange for stronger democracy and better governance.

"If Mbeki cares" how his plans are perceived by the world's wealthy nations, "he's in trouble" over Zimbabwe, says Tom Lodge, a political scientist at University of the Witwatersrand here.

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NEED TO KNOW:

Blair clashes with Cabinet over Wolfowitz nomination (Nick Mathiason, March 27, 2005, The Observer)

Tony Blair has clashed with Cabinet members in a bitter row over the nomination of the neo-conservative US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, as president of the World Bank.

International Development Secretary Hilary Benn is said to be furious that Blair kept him in the dark over the nomination, which was announced by President George Bush two weeks ago.

Benn has written to the Prime Minister outlining his frustrations. Sources close to Gordon Brown describe the Chancellor as 'incandescent' over the nomination. Blair was aware of Bush's plans for a month before they became public, and declined to tell either the Chancellor, who is a key IMF figure, or Benn, a World Bank board member.

But a Blair aide said the Prime Minister was 'comfortable' with the architect of the Iraq war taking the helm of the world's most important poverty alleviation institution, which dishes out loans of $20 billion each year.

When was the last White House that could keep something like this nomination from the press for a month?

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IRAQ FOR THE IRAQIS:

Iraqi resistance begins to crack after elections (Jason Burke, March 27, 2005, The Observer)

The Iraqi resistance has peaked and is 'turning in on itself', according to recent intelligence reports from Baghdad received by Middle Eastern intelligence agencies.

The reports are the most optimistic for several months and reflect analysts' sense that recent elections in Iraq marked a 'quantum shift'. They will boost the government in the run-up to the expected general election in May.

Though the reports predict that violence against coalition troops and local forces is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, at least two Middle Eastern intelligence agencies believe that recent 'backchannel' initiatives aimed at persuading Sunni Muslim tribes in western Iraq to cease their resistance are meeting with some success.

The talks are aimed at driving a wedge between so-called Iraqi nationalist elements of the resistance and radical Islamic militants.

'We know there is a considerable degree of animosity between the various groups that comprise the resistance and that is an opportunity for us,' said one security source.

One foreign intelligence report cites a recent incident in which members of the al-Dulaimi tribe, previously known for their antagonism to the coalition and the new government in Iraq, shot dead a number of Islamic militants from outside Iraq, whom they believed responsible for killing a senior al-Dulaimi sheikh.

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EVEN MORE OF A ASS THAN USUAL:

Free Saddam and jail Blair? (Daily Telegraph, 27/03/2005)

When the International Criminal Court was set up in 2002, the Americans refused to recognise its authority. They explained their reluctance on the basis that to give overarching authority to an international court would not ensure that decisions on vital international issues were made by judges independent of political control. It would simply hand those decisions to another set of politicians with their own political agendas - which might be flatly opposed to the fundamental interests of the United States.

Tony Blair passionately endorsed the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC), arguing that Britain must be subordinated to its rules. In the run up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Prime Minister was determined to join President Bush's coalition to invade Iraq. But he also repeatedly insisted that he would not go to war with Iraq unless it was in accord with international law. His own moral convictions may have led him to that position, but there was also the small matter of parliamentary approval for the invasion. Gaining that support would be impossible if the Prime Minister admitted that he was committed to supporting an "illegal" war.

"Illegal", however, is precisely what it seems to have been. Indeed, according to Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the deputy head of the Foreign Office legal department who resigned over the issue of the war, practically all the Government's lawyers believed it would be illegal to invade Iraq without a second UN Security Council resolution explicitly authorising that step. The Prime Minister did everything he could to achieve a second resolution. He failed so comprehensively that the issue was never even put to a Security Council vote. [...]

Tony Blair must be arrested and tried by the ICC, and Saddam should be the primary witness against him. That is the inescapable logic of the champions of international law. It should make every-one realise how unreal is the world in which they live.

Yet if there's one thing we can all agree on it is that Tony Blair is smart and George W. Bush a moron...

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OBLIGATORY MCCARTHYISM COMPARISON:

Dissent has gone out of style in U.S. (LEWIS W. DIUGUID, 3/25/05, KC Star)

Conformity rocks across America these days while dissent keeps losing its voice.

That condition emanates from the White House, and it's spreading across the country like a cancer. Gone are the voices of reason and caution such as former Gen. Colin Powell. He stepped down as secretary of state when President Bush began a second term.

Powell was replaced by Condoleezza Rice, former national security adviser and close Bush confidant. What Bush unilaterally wants goes.

The same go-along-to-get-along infection grips the GOP-dominated House and Senate. The wrongheaded legislative action they took with Bush this week to send the Terri Schiavo feeding tube case to federal court is the latest example.

It's as if many in government have signed loyalty oaths such as those required in the McCarthy era when alternative stands weren't tolerated.

Doesn't anyone in the GOP support a culture of death at home and tyranny abroad?

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INSTABILITY IS US:

Rice Describes Plans To Spread Democracy (Glenn Kessler and Robin Wright, March 26, 2005, Washington Post)

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday set out ambitious goals for the Bush administration's push for greater democracy overseas over the next four years, including pressing for competitive presidential elections this year in Egypt and women's right to vote in Saudi Arabia and