WHERE SOMALIS ARE FREE TO SPEAK:

Area Somalis want peace for homeland: Many of the 1,500 protesters in Minneapolis were angered that the U.S. gave tacit support for ousting of Islamists. (Liz Fedor, 12/30/06, Minneapolis Star Tribune)

More than a thousand Somalis gathered in Minneapolis on Saturday to call for Ethiopian troops to withdraw immediately from Somalia.

Their protest capped a week in which transitional government troops retook Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, with the backing of Ethiopian infantrymen.

The U.S. government "gave the green light" to Ethiopia to work in concert with the transitional federal government in Somalia, and that action was "totally wrong," said Hassan Mohamud.

He is the president of the Somali Institute for Peace and Justice in Minneapolis, which organized Saturday's rally.

"We ask the president of the United States, Mr. Bush, and his administration to stop supporting the terrorists. Ethiopian troops are terrorists," Mohamud said to a cheering crowd.

Somali men, women and children gathered Saturday morning in Peavey Park in Minneapolis, and they carried an array of signs. Some said "No more war" and "Islam is the solution."

The Administration has biffed Somalia pretty badly, but likely only temporarily.

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ALL ROADBLOCKS LEAD TO DAMASCUS:

Hamas cites breakthrough in deal over Israeli soldier (STEVEN ERLANGER, December 31, 2006, International Herald Tribune)

Those involved in holding an Israeli soldier who was captured in late June said today that there had been significant progress toward a prisoner exchange that would release him.

A spokesman in Gaza for the military wing of Hamas said "there is a breakthrough" in the prisoner issue "and we hope it will be concluded very soon." The spokesman, Abu Ubaida, suggested a deal could be close for the release of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, captured by Hamas and two other militant groups during a raid into Israel on June 25.

A spokesman for the larger Hamas movement in Gaza, Fawzi Barhum, confirmed today that "there has been progress," while Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya said last Thursday that the Israeli soldier would be freed soon.

The Egyptians have spent months trying to broker a deal, but their efforts have been stymied by the refusal of Hamas leaders in exile, in particular Khaled Meshal, who heads the Hamas political bureau, to sanction a deal that would send Corporal Shalit home before the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.

While Israeli attacks on Palestine and South Lebanon are counterproductive, they could do themselves a world of good by taking out the regime in Syria and those it provides safe harbor.

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"DESPERATE COMBAT" (via Mike Daley):

The devil divides Scotland from England (Bruce Anderson, 12/31/06, Sunday Telegraph)

Hogmanay is about darkness. It is a ceremony based on the three "Ds": the dark, the devil and the dram. That is why a proper Scottish New Year does not start until midnight. The previous hours are spent lining the stomach with heavy food and non-alcoholic beverages, such as wine, so that the innards are fortified against the onslaught of the whisky bottle.

Then midnight strikes: the blackest hour, when the forces of darkness dominate. How to repel them? Strong drink, strong men, who go in procession from house to house, bearing bottles of whisky and lumps of coal. The darkest-visaged is chosen to put the first foot across the threshold, so that, however black the features, it will be a friendly first foot — and not Satan. The first foot's lump of coal is a harmless addition to the domestic hearth, not fuel borrowed from the infernal furnaces.

So Hogmanay may have some tenuous links with Christianity. It appears to draw from the two elements which the Scots always found most inspiring: hell fire and the devil. In the spirit fired up from eternal conflict, the Scots spend the first six hours or so of the New Year keeping the de'il at bay with their equivalent of a crucifix and garlic: whisky. The word "whisky" is a corruption of the Gaelic for the water of life: its vital function on New Year's morn.

After a rest for sleep and rehydration, Hogmanay resumes around lunchtime on January 1, just to ensure that the devil has been kept off the premises. In recent years, January 2 has also become a virtual holiday in Scotland and one can understand why. It is not actually known as liver-function resumption day, but that is the general idea.

This is not to say that there will be no hangovers in England this Tuesday. But there is a crucial difference. A hungover Englishman is merely a victim of overindulgence. A Scots hangover is a war wound, mightily earned in a desperate combat with the hosts of hell.

The English celebrate New Year as if they were Hobbits in Tolkien's Shire; the Scots celebrate Hogmanay as if they were Aragorn on the frontier of Mordor. Long may the difference continue. Happy New Year.

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THE LATE TIDE JUST KEEPS BREAKIN':

Democrat gives GOP Pa. House majority: Stunning switch by representative from Reading is aimed at depriving DeWeese of top job (Tom Barnes, December 31, 2006, Post-Gazette)

A Democratic legislator from Reading stunned his colleagues yesterday by announcing he will support Republican John Perzel for House speaker rather than Democrat H. William DeWeese.

State Rep. Thomas R. Caltagirone wrote to the other 101 Democrats in the House, criticizing Mr. DeWeese's "petty'' and "vindictive'' way of running the Democratic caucus and calling Mr. Perzel "a man of his word'' who is "open, inclusive and fair.''

If Mr. Perzel holds on to all 101 Republican House members -- which is not a certainty -- he would eke out a 102-101 victory over Mr. DeWeese on Tuesday, the opening day of the 2007-08 session. The Waynesburg Democrat has been hoping to regain the powerful speaker's post, which held in 1993-94.

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WHY RAY FAIR HATES AL GORE AND KARL ROVE:

AP Poll: Americans Optimistic for 2007 (NANCY BENAC, 12/31/06, AP)

An AP-AOL News Poll finds that while most Americans said 2006 was a bad year for the country, three-fourths thought it had been a good one for them and their families. [...]

Looking ahead, optimism reigns.

Seventy-two percent of Americans feel good about what 2007 will bring for the country, and an even larger 89 percent are optimistic about the new year for themselves and their families, according to the poll.

The way the GOP ran on Iraq instead of this economy will confuse political forecasts for some time.

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THE WOG OR WORK 'TIL YOU DROP:

Daunting challenges face fast-graying nation (MARTIN WEBB, 12/31/06, Japan Times)

Robert Feldman is chief economist at Morgan Stanley Japan Securities, where, as cohead of Japan Equity Research, he is responsible for forecasting the direction of the Japanese economy.

How is Japan going to cope with its rapidly aging population?

There's only one true answer and a number of sort of supporting answers: The true answer is by raising productivity.

I think that finally there is an understanding [in the government] that the productivity agenda is the agenda for dealing with the aging population issue.

There are two main remedies that have been proposed to combat the potential damage to growth the falling population will cause: One is bringing more female members of the population into the workforce, the other is immigration.

Do you see either of those measures actually being implemented?

Well, the number of immigrants has actually been growing at about 4 percent annually for the last 20 years. That will be part of the solution, but if you calculate how many would be necessary to deal with the demographic problem, the numbers are mind-boggling -- this society is not ready for that. So that's not really going to work.

Regarding female participation rates [the percentage of adult women in the workforce], I stun 95 percent of my clients with the following question: Has the female participation rate here gone up or has it gone down over the last 15 years? Ninety-five percent say up, but the answer is down. It's down because basically the population is aging so quickly. So this is not really a gender issue, it's an age issue.

The key thing is to make sure that people over 65 keep working. That means re-education; improved labor exchanges; improved access to labor-force amenities; and better commuting, easier lifestyle decisions -- stuff like that.

Note that, in a secular society, natural population growth or stability isn't even an option to be considered.

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SAME TROUGH, DIFFERENT SNOUTS:

Conyers accepts responsibility for possible ethics violations (Jonathan E. Kaplan and Jackie Kucinich, 12/30/06, The Hill)

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) has "accepted responsibility" for possibly violating House rules by requiring his official staff to perform campaign-related work, according to a statement quietly released by the House ethics committee late Friday evening.

MURTHA'S 'CHARITY' MESS (NY Post, December 31, 2006)

Congressional Democrats, just days from reclaiming their majority on Capitol Hill, are preparing for what promises to be a lot of investigations.

Well, here's one that they should, but doubtless won't, undertake.

It centers on a charity founded by a longtime aide to Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), the incoming chairman of the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee. The Washington Post reports that the group has become a funnel for money to Murtha's campaigns from defense contractors and lobbyists who benefit from legislation he will write.

One thing Ms Pelosi and company didn't learn from Newt's experience is not to promise what postlapsarian Man can't deliver.

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IF BILL CLINTON WAS THE FIRST AFRICAN-AMERICAN PRRESIDENT...:

Bush Has Quietly Tripled Aid to Africa: Increase in Funding to Impoverished Continent Is Viewed as Altruistic or Pragmatic (Michael A. Fletcher, 12/31/06, Washington Post)

President Bush's legacy is sure to be defined by his wielding of U.S. military power in Afghanistan and Iraq, but there is another, much softer and less-noticed effort by his administration in foreign affairs: a dramatic increase in U.S. aid to Africa.

The president has tripled direct humanitarian and development aid to the world's most impoverished continent since taking office and recently vowed to double that increased amount by 2010 -- to nearly $9 billion.

The moves have surprised -- and pleased -- longtime supporters of assistance for Africa, who note that because Bush has received little support from African American voters, he has little obvious political incentive for his interest.

"I think the Bush administration deserves pretty high marks in terms of increasing aid to Africa," said Steve Radelet, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development.

...then W is surely the first African president, though it's symptomatic that Mr. Fletcher ignores Mr. Bush's most important legacy, the special relationship with India.

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VOTING WITH THEIR FEET:

At the Capitol, VIP Roll Call Has Many No-Shows (Dana Milbank, 12/31/06, Washington Post)

Everything was in place for Gerald R. Ford's state funeral last night -- everything, that is, but the statesmen.

President Bush sent his regrets; he was cutting cedar and riding his bike on his ranch in Texas. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his deputy, Richard Durbin, couldn't make it, either; they were on a trip to visit Incan ruins. Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took a pass, too -- as did nearly 500 of the 535 members of Congress.

A 6-to-3 majority of the Supreme Court, including Ford's appointee, John Paul Stevens, ruled against attending. All the nation's governors were invited; few, if any, came. Apparently only two Cabinet members -- Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez -- accepted the invite.

Congressional staffers and Ford family representatives scrambled to find sufficient greeters and honorary pallbearers to join Vice President Cheney and a score of former lawmakers and Ford administration officials. Organizers had to scratch one name they had circulated Friday as a pallbearer: Elford Albin Cederberg, the former Republican congressman from Michigan, died eight months ago.

Waiting in the Capitol crypt -- the holding place for lawmakers attending the rites for Ford -- Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) noted the absence of a quorum. There were only eight congressmen in the room, and a couple of them were watching the Texas-Iowa football game. "What's the score?" one called out.

Nice tribute that no one actually believes in is one thing, but at the end of the day, a cipher is just a cipher.

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REGIME CHANGE ALWAYS AND THE SOONER THE BETTER:

Conflicts Shaped Two Presidencies: U.S., Iraq Continue to Experience Aftereffects of Their Confrontations (Peter Baker, 12/31/06, Washington Post)

The day after he ordered a cease-fire and brought the Persian Gulf War to a close, President George H.W. Bush ruminated about the status quo he had left behind in Iraq. "Still no feeling of euphoria," he dictated to his diary Feb. 28, 1991. Saddam Hussein, he recognized, remained a threat. "He's got to go," Bush concluded.

It took nearly 16 years, but he's finally gone.

With Saddam swinging I figured it was a good time to read Con Coughlin's bio, King of Terror. Beyond Saddam's own insensate evil three things really stand out:

(1) How badly the Brits and we screwed Iraq up by pretending there was such a thing, rather than allowing it to remain dividing in three as it had been under the Ottomans.

(2) What a relentlessly poisonous role the French, in general, and Chirac, in particular, played there. The latter even got the Iraqis to change the official name of the Osirack nuclear reactor, which he played a central role in building for Saddam, because his political opposition was using the rhyme against him.

(3) How disastrous the decision to leave Saddam in place in 1991 was for the people of Iraq. Imagine what we'd think of FDR today if he left Hitler in place once the rest of Europe was liberated?

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SO IT'S A TRIVIA CONTEST?:

Worst 2006 civil liberties violations (DAHLIA LITHWICK, Dec. 31, 2006, The Washington Post)

I must confess that I love all those year-end lists of greatest movies and albums and lip glosses and tractors of the past 12 months – it’s reassuring that all human information can be wrestled into bundles of 10. In that spirit, herewith are my top 10 civil liberties nightmares of 2006.

10. Attempt to get death penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui: Long after it was clear that the hapless Frenchman was neither the “20th hijacker” nor a key plotter in the attacks of 9/11, the government pressed to execute him as a “conspirator” in those attacks. [...]

8. Bashing the media [...]

7. Slagging the courts [...]

1. Hubris

At the point where she was typing such pabulumatic offenses as "bashing" and "hubris" it would probably have been best for Ms Lithwick to just reconsider the whole column, but we should note her repetition of the obvious canard that because events prevented Zaccarias Moussaoui from getting to act as the 20th hijacker he was never part of the 9-11 plot. Willie Randolph was voted a full World Series share even though Brian Doyle replaced him.

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THERE WAS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO:

When Ford lost, so did Dems: Gerald Ford's 1976 defeat may have been among the worst things ever to happen to American liberalism. (Jonathan Chait, December 31, 2006, LA Times)

[F]ord's defeat in the 1976 presidential race may have been one of the worst things that ever happened to American liberalism.

Liberals, of course, detested Ford for his pardon of Richard Nixon, and indeed the pardon was a pretty rotten act. In the light of history, however, Ford comes through as a far more innocuous figure. By the standard of his day, he was a conservative. But by the standard of our times, he's a raging moderate.

In Ford's time, to be a conservative meant to be cautious and prudent. Ford opposed deficits, and he vetoed spending hikes and tax cuts alike. His recently released comments criticizing the Iraq war (made in a 2004 interview but embargoed until after his death) show how alien he found the current president's reckless foreign policy. In his post-presidential career, Ford emerged as a critic of the religious right and an advocate of political reforms, both of which placed him far to the left of today's GOP.

It was Ford's narrow loss to Jimmy Carter in 1976 that enabled the subsequent radicalization of the Republican Party. Carter was a mediocre president, and he came into office under terrible conditions — stagflation, an energy crisis, the wake of a losing war — under which no president could have succeeded.

Yet Ronald Reagan succeeded brilliantly given all the same conditions. The fact is that Nixon and Ford like the Democrats surrounding them got the two important issues of the second half of 20th Century wrong and were therefore just as ineffective as FDR, Truman, LBJ & Carter. These liberal presidents, who accepted the inevitability of socialism at home and Communism abroad, were ridden by events and couldn't help but seem hapless.

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THE SCIENCE OF NAME THAT TUNE:

Music of the Hemispheres (CLIVE THOMPSON, 12/31/06, NY Times)

“Listen to this,” Daniel Levitin said. “What is it?” He hit a button on his computer keyboard and out came a half-second clip of music. It was just two notes blasted on a raspy electric guitar, but I could immediately identify it: the opening lick to the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar.”

Then he played another, even shorter snippet: a single chord struck once on piano. Again I could instantly figure out what it was: the first note in Elton John’s live version of “Benny and the Jets.”

Dr. Levitin beamed. “You hear only one note, and you already know who it is,” he said. “So what I want to know is: How we do this? Why are we so good at recognizing music?” [...]

For his first experiment he came up with an elegant concept: He stopped people on the street and asked them to sing, entirely from memory, one of their favorite hit songs. The results were astonishingly accurate. Most people could hit the tempo of the original song within a four-percent margin of error, and two-thirds sang within a semitone of the original pitch, a level of accuracy that wouldn’t embarrass a pro.

“When you played the recording of them singing alongside the actual recording of the original song, it sounded like they were singing along,” Dr. Levitin said.

It was a remarkable feat. Most memories degrade and distort with time; why would pop music memories be so sharply encoded? Perhaps because music triggers the reward centers in our brains. In a study published last year Dr. Levitin and group of neuroscientists mapped out precisely how.

Observing 13 subjects who listened to classical music while in an M.R.I. machine, the scientists found a cascade of brain-chemical activity. First the music triggered the forebrain, as it analyzed the structure and meaning of the tune. Then the nucleus accumbus and ventral tegmental area activated to release dopamine, a chemical that triggers the brain’s sense of reward.

The cerebellum, an area normally associated with physical movement, reacted too, responding to what Dr. Levitin suspected was the brain’s predictions of where the song was going to go. As the brain internalizes the tempo, rhythm and emotional peaks of a song, the cerebellum begins reacting every time the song produces tension (that is, subtle deviations from its normal melody or tempo).

“When we saw all this activity going on precisely in sync, in this order, we knew we had the smoking gun,” he said. “We’ve always known that music is good for improving your mood. But this showed precisely how it happens.”

The subtlest reason that pop music is so flavorful to our brains is that it relies so strongly on timbre. Timbre is a peculiar blend of tones in any sound; it is why a tuba sounds so different from a flute even when they are playing the same melody in the same key. Popular performers or groups, Dr. Levitin argued, are pleasing not because of any particular virtuosity, but because they create an overall timbre that remains consistent from song to song. That quality explains why, for example, I could identify even a single note of Elton John’s “Benny and the Jets.”

One of the most futile denials of the rationalists is of truth of the music of the spheres.

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LIKE A FRIDAY NIGHT IN ENUMCLAW:

Animal Sacrifices Maim 1,400 in Turkey (AP, 12/31/06)

Over a thousand Turks spent the first day of the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha in emergency wards on Sunday after stabbing themselves or suffering other injuries while sacrificing startled animals.

At least 1,413 people - referred to as "amateur butchers" by the Turkish media - were treated at hospitals across the country, most suffering cuts to their hands and legs, the Anatolia news agency reported.

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THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT REQUIRES WE ASSUME HE WAS JUST IN WAY OVER HIS HEAD:

Our Short National Nightmare: How President Ford managed to go soft on Iraqi Baathists, Indonesian fascists, Soviet Communists, and the shah … in just two years. (Christopher Hitchens, Dec. 29, 2006, Slate)

One expects a certain amount of piety and hypocrisy when retired statesmen give up the ghost, but this doesn't excuse the astonishing number of omissions and misstatements that have characterized the sickly national farewell to Gerald Ford. One could graze for hours on the great slopes of the massive obituaries and never guess that during his mercifully brief occupation of the White House, this president had:

1. Disgraced the United States in Iraq and inaugurated a long period of calamitous misjudgment of that country.

2. Colluded with the Indonesian dictatorship in a gross violation of international law that led to a near-genocide in East Timor.

3. Delivered a resounding snub to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the time when the Soviet dissident movement was in the greatest need of solidarity. [...]

Ford's refusal to meet with Solzhenitsyn, when the great dissident historian came to America, was consistent with his general style of making excuses for power. As Timothy Noah has suggested lately, there seems to have been a confusion in Ford's mind as to whether the Helsinki Treaty was intended to stabilize, recognize, or challenge the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. However that may be, the great moral component of the Helsinki agreement—that it placed the United States on the side of the repressed populations—was ridiculed by Ford's repudiation of Solzhenitsyn, as well as by his later fatuities on the nature of Soviet domination. To have been soft on Republican crime, soft on Baathism, soft on the shah, soft on Indonesian fascism, and soft on Communism, all in one brief and transient presidency, argues for the sort of sportsmanlike Midwestern geniality that we do not ever need to see again.

Finally to the Mayaguez. Ford did not dispatch forces to "rescue" the vessel, as so many of his obituarists have claimed. He ordered an attack on the Cambodian island of Koh Tang, several hours after the crew of the ship had actually been released. A subsequent congressional inquiry discovered that he, and Henry Kissinger, could have discovered as much by monitoring Cambodian radio and contacting foreign diplomats.

The posthumously published interviews making the rounds, where Mr. Ford shared his view that the Iraqi people should not have been liberated, are a fitting epitaph for a guy who didn't think the Poles should be either.

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EVERYTHING'S COMING HIS WAY:

Zito deal gives 126 million reasons to expect Santana will be gone: The lefty's Giants contract means Johan Santana's price tag will be well out of reach of the Twins' budget. (Patrick Reusse, 12/30/06, Minneapolis Star Tribune)

We know now there's a possibility the Twins will have a Venezuelan with a first name pronounced Yo-haan in their rotation when the new ballpark opens in 2010, but he will not be the one to whom Minnesota fans are now attached.

Zito has signed for $18 million per year, and that means there is zero chance Johan Santana will be pitching for the Twins following the 2008 season.

Zito is excellent at what he does and has not missed a start in five seasons. His new contract is the largest ever given to a pitcher.

Santana became a full-time starter halfway through the 2003 season and has been baseball's best since then. He will turn 28 in March. If he continues that excellence through 2008 and then becomes a free agent, he will be the first $200 million pitcher.

Goodbye, Twins. Hello, New York City.

If Barry Zito is worth $140 million then Johann is worth googleplex...squared...

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CIRCLING THE WAGON:

Fighting Sioux Prevail: Lone Dartmouth Protester Objects to Indian Logo at Game (David Corriveau, 12/30/06, Valley News)

Before and during Dartmouth College's hockey game with the University of North Dakota's Fighting Sioux last night, Shelby Grantham couldn’t help feeling like a voice crying in the wilderness.

“Whoo! Whoo! Whoo!” one middle-aged man, rhythmically tapping his lips with his open hand, called to the Dartmouth English professor outside Thompson Arena, where Grantham stood with signs protesting the Indian nickname and logo of the perennial national-championship contenders from the Great Plains.

Looking at the sign in her arms that read, “American Indians are people not mascots,” another passer-by in his 50s said, “You need to lighten up.”

They weren't the first, or the last, to criticize the lone protester, particularly among the many North Dakota fans who helped fill the Dartmouth rink to capacity while proudly, loudly wearing white, black and green UND hockey jerseys with the school's recently redesigned Indian logo on the chest.

“It's been largely negative,” Grantham said shortly before game time. “Lots of shaking heads, as though I were crazy. The biggest thing I'm hearing from people is, ‘Why don't you go home?’ Some people have said, ‘How! ... I had expected more support by this time.”

Maybe if Dartmouth had kept its Indian mascot instead of switching to a color they'd have played with more spirit.

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IT'S EASY WHEN THERE'S NO COMPETITION:

Boeing breaks '05 record order for jets (Seattle Times, 12/30/06)

With a rush of last-minute commercial jet sales, Boeing has broken its remarkable 2005 record order tally.

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ON THE WHOLE, EID RATHER BE IN PHILADELPHIA::

Hussein Is Put to Death: Former Iraqi President Hanged Before Dawn in Baghdad (Sudarsan Raghavan, 12/30/06, Washington Post)

Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was hanged in the predawn hours of Saturday for crimes against humanity in the mass murder of Shiite men and boys in the 1980s, sent to the gallows by a government backed by the United States and led by Shiite Muslims who had been oppressed during his rule, Iraqi and American officials said.

In the early morning, Hussein, 69, was escorted from his U.S. military prison cell at Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad airport, and handed over to Iraqi officials. He was executed on the day Sunni Muslims, of which Hussein was one, begin celebrating the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha. [...]

In Crawford, Tex., President Bush said in a statement that Hussein received "the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime." He added, "Fair trials were unimaginable under Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule. It is a testament to the Iraqi people's resolve to move forward after decades of oppression that, despite his terrible crimes against his own people, Saddam Hussein received a fair trial. This would not have been possible without the Iraqi people's determination to create a society governed by the rule of law."

After the execution, celebratory gunfire broke out in Baghdad. Iraqis across the nation sent text messages to their relatives and friends as soon as they heard of Hussein's execution. Ali al-Hayeri, one of the witnesses who testified openly in the Dujail trial, said he received his first text message at 3:15 a.m. It read: "We congratulate you for the execution of the tyrant Saddam."

"This is what should happen," said Suad Shakir, 52, a resident of the Karrada district in Baghdad, and a Christian. "People will be relieved. I hope that it will bring good to Iraq." She said she wanted Hussein to be executed. "He hurt Iraqis," she said. "We haven't seen anything good from him."

Sic semper tyrannis.

MORE:
Justice for Saddam, Precedent for the Future: America and its allies deliver a warning to future dictators. (Mario Loyola, 12/29/06, National Review)

Dictators around the world can draw some comfort from the bloody nose America has taken since the capture of Saddam. But not much. They now know something important. Though absent from any formal articulation of international law, new standards of governance are evolving as a matter of state practice. Regimes that support terrorists or allow their territories to become sanctuaries for territories risk elimination. Regimes that fail to account transparently for their WMD activities may be rendered transparent by force. And regimes that abuse their own people risk having to answer for their crimes eventually.

The capture, trial, and execution of Saddam Hussein ends a terrible chapter in the history of Iraq, even if — thanks to the terrorists — things have gone from bad to worse for many Iraqis. Iraq has become today’s Russian Front — the terrifying center-of-gravity in a new world war.

And yet as that struggle continues, it is fitting and just to meditate a moment on something nobody could have imagined in decades past: Saddam got what was coming to him.

Dictators around the world have one more reason to think that they will get theirs too if they are not careful. America and its partners have made terrible sacrifices since the toppling of Saddam’s dictatorship. But we will never know how much suffering we saved future generations by making this example of Saddam. For the victims of future dictatorships as for the victims of his own, this just and fitting end to the career of one of the most sadistic and destructive criminals of modern times can only strengthen the vital hope that justice prevails in the end. And that is worth many sacrifices.

Saddam Hussein executed (The Guardian, December 30, 2006)

Saddam's execution, which became imminent after his appeal was this week rejected, has brought to an end the life of one of the Middle East's most brutal dictators.

Launching the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, campaigns against the Kurds and putting down the southern Shia revolt that followed the 1991 Gulf war - triggered by his invasion of Kuwait - put the casualties attributable to his rule into the hundreds of thousands.

But his conviction was for a relatively lower figure - the deaths of 148 men and boys from the Shia Muslim town of Dujail, where members of an opposition group had made a botched attempt to assassinate him in 1982.

In Iraq opinion was divided sharply along sectarian lines, with Sunni Muslims warning of "bloodbaths in the streets". Even among the Shia, terrorised for decades by Saddam, there was a sense of hopelessness. "They can kill him 10 times but it won't bring safety to the streets because there is no state of law," said one Shia taxi driver who gave his name as Shawkat.

In the Kurdish north, jubilation was tempered by the fear of deeper sectarian tensions and disappointment that Saddam would now not be able to stand trial for other charges including the Anfal attack on the town of Halabja that killed 5,000 people in 1988.

"It would have been much better for the execution to have taken place in Halabja, not in Baghdad," said Barham Khorsheed, a Kurd.

Obituary - Saddam Hussein: April 28, 1937 - December 30, 2006: Former Iraqi dictator who ruled his country without mercy and struck fear into the heart of millions (Times of London, 12/30/06)

Saddam Hussein was a tyrant whose actions brought down unimaginable catastrophe on Iraq and its peoples. From an early age, he had enjoyed inflicted suffering on those around him and, when he came to positions of political power, those whom he could not force or corrupt into submitting to his will, he maimed, murdered or made to flee.

He started two major international wars - one against Iran, the second as a result of aggression against Kuwait - which cost an estimated one million lives. He instituted genocidal campaigns against the Kurds in the north of Iraq and the Marsh Arabs in the south. Ruling through the Sunni minority of which he was a member, he ignored the claims of the country's majority Shia population.

The third war in the region - which brought him and his regime down - was not directly begun by him, but by apparent American - and British - fears of a perceived threat his arsenal of weapons posed to international security. This time Saddam misjudged the event - and certainly the American mood.

Hussein legacy: Megalomaniac, nationalist leader (Aamer Madhani, December 29, 2006, Chicago Tribune)

Over his 24 years as president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein earned the moniker Butcher of Baghdad by ruling with brute force, torture and cunning.

His regime murdered at least 300,000 of his countrymen, according to estimates by human-rights groups. During his reign, neighbors spied on each other and children were taught at school to tattle on their parents if they spoke against the regime. More than 1 million Iraqis were killed in wars against Iran, Kuwait and the United States on his watch.

Iraqis, by and large, say they suffered terribly at the hands of the dictator.

Justice, Iraqi-style (NY Daily News, 12/30/06)

Saddam Hussein, flushed from a "spider hole" in Tikrit a bit more than three years ago, may, as you read this, be in another kind of hole, one that's 6 feet deep. Or perhaps he is ashes and dust. Either way, he would have been brought to a fitting end.
It is not often that the world witnesses justice administered in orderly, lawful fashion to a mass-murdering despot. And Saddam had his days in court, afforded the benefits of due process that he never extended to the victims of his barbarity.

If his trial was at times a circus, that's because he made it a circus. And if there was a hitch or two in the proceedings, that's because the Iraqis rather nobly conducted them on a battlefield. For, make no mistake, this was sovereign Iraqi justice, applied by a nation struggling to leave behind a brutal past.

Final chapter in life of brutality: Slaughter of Iraqi civilians avenged at last (CORKY SIEMASZKO, 12/30/06, DAILY NEWS)
Tyrant pays for his horrors: Saddam hangs at dawn in Baghdad (RICHARD Sisk, 12/30/06, NY Daily News)
A thug who used terror and war to stay in power (Rory McCarthy, December 30, 2006, The Guardian)

Saddam was at heart a thug, born into a violent childhood in a country whose history has been shaped by great political violence. He studied law in Baghdad and Cairo, but was not an exceptional student. Instead, he strong-armed his way up the hierarchy of the Ba'ath party until he rose to the presidency in 1979. He relied on the skilful promotion of others from his hometown of Tikrit until he had a web of kinship and tribal loyalty around him. Those who crossed him or looked like rivals paid with their lives, as the "hero of national liberation" cemented his power.

Promptly he led Iraq into war with Iran, a punishing eight-year conflict that left more than 1 million people dead. It is one of modern history's most grisly ironies that he only held out so long against a more numerous opponent because of the covert support of the west, which saw his regime as the lesser of two evils.

War was to characterise Saddam's rule, the glue he used to hold together his country and to maintain the dominance of his Sunni Muslim minority over the persecuted Shia and Kurdish communities.

As the Iran-Iraq war ended, he went into battle against the Kurds of northern Iraq, committing some of the gravest war crimes of his regime, wiping out villages with chemical gas attacks at a time when he was still an ally of the west. He sent his forces storming into Kuwait in 1990, disguising a long-harboured land grab with atavistic notions of pan-Arab unity. When western forces pushed his troops back, he then went to war on the Shia and the Kurds who had risen up in rebellion against him at home. He deployed his troops and his attack helicopters and the uprising was crushed with summary brutality. Graves across the south and the north were filled with the bodies of thousands of rebels. Most of those corpses were only recovered, mourned and reburied 12 years later, after Saddam's fall. The most modest assessments put at 200,000 the number of Iraqis who "disappeared" in the Saddam years.

His actions brought punishing UN sanctions, which in a decade transformed what had been a prosperous, oil-rich nation into an economic basket case. Scientists and musicians became taxi drivers and cigarette sellers. Saddam, his family and their cronies grew wealthier and wealthier. And the paranoia deepened. There were at least a dozen intelligence agencies, mostly spying on each other and all spying on the Iraqi population. "There was an eye on everyone, and an eye for everyone," one Ba'athist said later.

Hanging on a Muslim holiday is criticized (Ashraf Khalil, 12/30/06, LA Times)

The Muslim religious holiday Eid al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice, is meant to commemorate Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son on God's orders.

But now the holiday could also be associated with something else: the execution of ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

The Iraqi government's push to hang Hussein this morning, when much of the Muslim world was celebrating Eid, drew criticism from Islamic leaders in the Middle East and America.

"Executing any individual during this holiday period indicates poor judgment and a lack of sensitivity," the Muslim Public Affairs Council said in a statement.

As the Hussein drama played out Friday in Baghdad, millions of Muslims gathered in Saudi Arabia for the Hajj pilgrimage, a pillar of the Islamic faith that every Muslim is required to perform at least once if able.

"Connecting this to a religious occasion will just widen the gap between the factions in Iraq," said Muhammad Eissa, a University of Chicago professor of Arabic and an Islamic scholar.

The Sunni had thirty years to hang him themselves. They didn't.
‘I Saw Fear, He Was Afraid’: In a NEWSWEEK exclusive, the man hired to videotape Saddam Hussein’s execution recalls the brutal dictator’s humble final moments. (Michael Hastings, 12/30/06, Newsweek)

Ali Al Massedy was 3 feet away from Saddam Hussein when he died. The 38 year old, normally Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's official videographer, was the man responsible for filming the late dictator's execution at dawn on Saturday. "I saw fear, he was afraid," Ali told NEWSWEEK minutes after returning from the execution. [...]

Ali was greeted as a hero when he returned from the execution a little after 7 a.m., flying in with other officials and landing in two helicopters in the Green Zone. A convoy of 20 or so GMCs and Toyota Land Cruisers waited outside to drive some of the Iraqi officials home.

The Iraqi bodyguards, mostly Shiites they said, had passed the time smoking and praying—some prayed on cardboard mats on the street.

It was a cold morning in Baghdad, a few degrees above freezing, and in the post dawn light the guards' breaths could be seen in the air. When the thudding of helicopters began, the body guards rushed towards the entrance to the landing zone. They swarmed around Ali, snapping digital pictures on camera phones and cheering. "Saddam finished, Saddam finished," a guard who gave his name as Mohammed told NEWSWEEK. Ali looked somewhat stunned as he exited, carrying the camera.

"All Iraqis will be happy," he says. "This is the most important day for me [as a cameraman,]" he said. "This page [in history] is over, this page is over. All Iraqis will be happy from the north to the south to the east to the west."

The Defiant Despot Oppressed Iraq for More Than 30 Years (NEIL MacFARQUHAR, 12/30/06, NY Times)
Feared and Pitiless; Fearful and Pitiable (JOHN F. BURNS, 12/31/06, NY Times)

NOBODY who experienced Iraq under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein could imagine, at the height of the terror he imposed on his countrymen, ever pitying him. Pitiless himself, he sent hundreds of thousands of his countrymen to miserable deaths, in the wars he started against Iran and Kuwait, in the torture chambers of his secret police, or on the gallows that became an industry at Abu Ghraib and other charnel houses across Iraq. Iraqis who were caught in his spider’s web of evil, and survived, tell of countless tortures, of the psychopathic pleasure the former dictator appeared to take from inflicting suffering and death.

Yet there was a moment when I pitied him, and it came back to me after the nine Iraqi appeal judges upheld the death sentence against Saddam last week, setting off the countdown to his execution. As I write this, flying hurriedly back to Baghdad from an interrupted Christmas break, Saddam makes his own trip to the gallows with an indecent haste, without the mercy of family farewells and other spare acts of compassion that lend at least a pretense of civility to executions under law in kinder jurisdictions. From all we know of the preparations, Saddam’s death was to be a miserable and lonely one, as stark and undignified as Iraq’s new rulers can devise.

Many Iraqis, perhaps most, will spare no sympathies for him. However much he may have suffered in the end, they will say, it could never be enough to atone for a long dark night he imposed on his people. Still, there was that moment, on July 1, 2004, when Saddam became, for me, if only briefly, an object of compassion.

Dictator Who Ruled Iraq With Violence Is Hanged for Crimes Against Humanity (Marc Santora, James Glanz and Sabrina Tavernise, 12/30/06, NY Times)

Saddam Hussein, the dictator who led Iraq through three decades of brutality, war and bombast before American forces chased him from his capital city and captured him in a filthy pit near his hometown, was hanged just before dawn Saturday during the morning call to prayer.

The final stages for Mr. Hussein, 69, came with terrible swiftness after he lost the appeal, five days ago, of his death sentence for the killings of 148 men and boys in the northern town of Dujail in 1982.

Darn, they came so close to getting that bit right, but what came for Saddam was the "fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword."

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THE SLEEP OF THE JUST:

When Saddam was hanged, Bush slept! (Express India, December 30, 2006)

US President George W Bush learned at 6:15 pm on Friday (0545 IST Saturday) that Saddam Hussein would be executed in a few hours but was asleep when the ousted dictator was hanged, a spokesman said.

"The President concluded his day knowing that the final phase of bringing Saddam Hussein to justice was underway," said deputy White House press secretary Scott Stanzel.

Asked whether that meant Bush was asleep when Saddam and two former members of his regime were hanged in succession in the early morning hours of Baghdad, Stanzel replied, “That's correct."

MORE:
President Bush's Statement on Execution of Saddam Hussein (President George W. Bush, 12/29/06)

Today, Saddam Hussein was executed after receiving a fair trial -- the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime.

Fair trials were unimaginable under Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule. It is a testament to the Iraqi people's resolve to move forward after decades of oppression that, despite his terrible crimes against his own people, Saddam Hussein received a fair trial. This would not have been possible without the Iraqi people's determination to create a society governed by the rule of law.

Saddam Hussein's execution comes at the end of a difficult year for the Iraqi people and for our troops. Bringing Saddam Hussein to justice will not end the violence in Iraq, but it is an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend itself, and be an ally in the War on Terror.

We are reminded today of how far the Iraqi people have come since the end of Saddam Hussein's rule - and that the progress they have made would not have been possible without the continued service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform.

Many difficult choices and further sacrifices lie ahead. Yet the safety and security of the American people require that we not relent in ensuring that Iraq's young democracy continues to progress.

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UNIVERSALITY ALWAYS WORKS BEST:

Using technology to save lives makes sense (Seattle Times, 12/30/06)

People convicted of driving under the influence are required to install ignition-interlock devices in their cars. Proof of installment is required to get suspended driver's licenses reinstated.

Only a fraction of convicted drunk drivers are following this law. There ought to be a way to compel the others and protect the public. The state Department of Licensing is required to monitor the activities of legal drivers. [...]

Washington started out ahead of the trend in adopting ignition-interlock laws. We've required them since 2004. But without strict measures to ensure compliance, the law puts up a feeble fight against drunk driving.

Remedies range from getting car manufacturers to include the device in all cars — expensive — to insurance companies offering a discount for drivers who use the device — unlikely. The best prospect lies with the state licensing department, which is convening a task force to tackle the problem of drivers who represent a threat to public safety.

Nothing is guaranteed to clear the road 100 percent of drunk drivers, but it is foolish to have a tool and not use it to its fullest potential.

They aren't more expensive than the lives ended and ruined.

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LIBERATORS, NOT EMPIRE BUILDERS:

Genghis Khan: Law and order: How would four of the greatest war leaders in history have handled Iraq? (Jack Weatherford, December 29, 2006, LA Times)

Genghis Khan recognized that victory came by conquering people, not land or cities. In contrast to the Americans in 2003, who sought to take the largest cities first in a campaign of shock and awe, the Mongols in 1258 took the smallest settlements first, gradually working toward the capital. Both the Mongols and the Americans used heavy bombardment to topple Baghdad, but whereas the Americans rushed into the capital in a triumphant victory celebration, the Mongols wisely decided not to enter the defeated — but still dangerous — city. They ordered the residents to evacuate, and then they sent in Christian and Muslim allies, who seethed with a variety of resentments against the caliph, to expunge any pockets of resistance and secure the capital. The Americans ended up as occupiers; the Mongols pulled strings, watching from camps in the countryside.

The Mongols also immediately executed the caliph and his sons on charges that they spent too much money on their palaces and not enough defending their nation. They killed most members of the court and administration. The Mongols took no prisoners and allowed no torture, but they executed swiftly and efficiently, including the soldiers of the defeated army who, they believed, would be a constant source of future problems if allowed to live. The first several months of a Mongol invasion were bloody, but once the takeover ended, the bloodshed ended.

By contrast, the American military campaign was quick, with comparatively few Iraqi (or coalition) casualties, but the bloodshed has continued for years. Constrained from decisively dispatching enemies of a new Iraq, the United States has allowed Iraqi terrorists to select who lives and who dies, including women and children, in a slow-motion massacre. [...]

By the time of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the political achievements of the Mongols had been forgotten, and only the destructive fury of their wars was remembered. Yet under the Mongols — and the legacy of Genghis Khan — Iraq enjoyed a century of peace and a renaissance that brought the region to a level of prosperity and cultural sophistication higher than it enjoyed before or after. Any country with a bent for empire could do worse than learn from Genghis Khan.

Which, obviously, rules out America.

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ALL ABOUT SYNERGY:

Dice-K is already pitching for Sox -- in Japanese ads: Team hopes to exploit star's power to gain marketing clout over there (Keith Reed, December 30, 2006, Boston Globe)

Newly minted Red Sox hurler Daisuke Matsuzaka donned a Red Sox uniform to make his latest pitch in Japan.

The Japanese baseball star, also known as "Dice-K," who the Sox paid $103 million to acquire has recorded a Japanese commercial hawking Asahi Super Dry beer, fully dressed in Red Sox regalia, showing that his star power in the Far East has already lent marketing clout to his new team. The endorsement happened without the involvement of the Red Sox, under rules that give Major League Baseball control over the team's trademarks outside New England .

Those rules aside, Sox executives believe there is a big market in Japan and locally for endorsements involving the team and Matsuzaka, and that their new pitcher will boost the team's popularity in Japan past that of a certain pinstripe-wearing rival with a Japanese player of its own.

"We want to be the team of Japan. The Yankees are very popular over there because of [Hideki] Matsui, but now we think we can get in over there as well," said Sam Kennedy , the Red Sox' senior vice president of sales and marketing. Matsui , the left fielder the New York Yankees snagged in 2003 from Japan, remains popular there and has several endorsement deals.

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BASEBALL AS ECONOMIC METAPHOR (via Mike Daley):

A dangerous obsession: Part IV (Thomas Sowell, December 29, 2006, Townhall)

One of the questions often asked by those obsessed with income "gaps" and "disparities" is: "Is anyone really worth the millions of dollars a year that some people receive as personal income?"

Such a question presupposes that there is such a thing as "real" worth. That assumption goes back to the Middle Ages, when people thought that there was a "fair and just price" for things. [...]

It is the same story when Derek Jeter gets paid millions of dollars to play shortstop for the Yankees. He gains by exchanging his time and skills for the money that George Steinbrenner pays him. But Steinbrenner also gains by paying Jeter to play shortstop -- which helps bring in more money in gate receipts, the sale of television rights, and other sources of revenue.

As for the rest of us, it is none of our business what Steinbrenner pays Jeter. It's their deal. If we don't understand it, there is no reason why our ignorance should influence what happens.

The medieval notion that there is an objective "fair and just price" dies hard, though even in medieval times St. Thomas Aquinas saw some of the problems with the idea.

The British classical economists of the 18th and early 19th centuries saw cost of production as an objective basis for prices. But, since the 1870s, economists around the world have recognized that value is subjective, and have incorporated that into their analysis of prices, based on supply and demand.

If something costs more to produce than people are willing to pay, then the producer just loses money. But a principle that seems obvious, after it has been articulated, may take generations to evolve and be incorporated into our thinking.

Yet here we are, in the 21st century, still talking about whether people are paid more or less than they are "really" worth -- and we are hot to give government the power to "do something" if we don't understand why some people are paid so much or so little.

If ignorance is bad, confusion is worse. Productivity, for example, is often confused with merit.

If Derek Jeter worked like a dog for years to perfect his skills as a baseball player, some might think that he had earned the big bucks he gets. But if he was just born with natural talent and the whole thing is a breeze to him, that would mean he didn't really merit such a huge payoff.

But Steinbrenner is not paying for Jeter's merit. He is paying for his productivity, whether at bat or in the field. Somebody who worked twice as hard and was still only half as good would never get the same money that Jeter gets.

One interesting economic carryover is that the Yankees' overestimate of Derek Jeter's productivity not only forces them to pay him far more than he's worth but to play him at SS, a position he can't handle as well as the guy to his right.

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UNCHARTED WATERS:

Friend Peter Burnet has started a blog of his own at: Diversely We Sail

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SIX WEEKS UNTIL PITCHERS AND CATCHERS...:

GONE SOUTH: In a last surprise, the young Marlins are champs. (ROGER ANGELL, 2003-11-24, The New Yorker)

These wild-card Florida Marlins, who finished the regular season ten games behind the Atlanta Braves in the National League East, entered the post-season as an assemblage of attractive outsiders who’d posted the best record in their league since the beginning of June under a fresh manager, seventy-two-year-old Jack McKeon, called out of retirement to take the post early in May. With a lineup featuring the perpetual All-Star catcher Ivan Rodriguez; the leggy and engaging twenty-one-year-old flinger Dontrelle Willis, who could start and finish games with equal ardor; and a twenty-year-old Venezuelan, Miguel Cabrera, up from double-A ball, at cleanup, the Marlins appeared elated by the odds against them, even when they fell behind. They didn’t go away, in the parlance, but burned steadily and imperturbably through October, winning the last three games in a row in successive elimination series against the power of the Giants, the celebrated pitching of the Cubs, and now the Yankees—and with the last one, of course, the World Championship. Their closest call, you could say, came when the Giants’ J. T. Snow, representing the tying run, charged frantically down the line toward home with two out in the ninth of the final Divisional game, and slammed into Rodriguez at home. The throw in from left field beat him by yards, and Pudge held onto the ball.

This was the second crown for the Marlins in seven years, but the new champs fielded only one player, third baseman Jeff Conine, who played for them in 1997—a returnee signed aboard this summer after interim stints with the Royals and the Orioles. The current owner, Jeffrey Loria, was allowed to buy the franchise two years ago, after epochal sufferings with his prior fief, the Montreal Expos. By consensus, most of the credit for the Marlins’ sudden rise goes to some brilliant draft signings by the carryover general manager, Dave Dombrowski, who has since accepted the same post with the Tigers, and prior owner John Henry, who now owns the Red Sox, of all things. A uniting thread between these Marlins and the 1997 group—aside from chronic low attendance at steamy Pro Player Stadium, which was built for the N.F.L.’s Miami Dolphins—is that neither champion visited first place after April.

The upbeat Marlins will soon drop out of this account (we are following the Selig fantasy formula), but they leave behind a trail of bright images, including that of the expressionist lefty Dontrelle Willis—who appeared in five post-season relief turns and two starts—tilting and flailing like a reborn Goose Gossage, with his tongue stuck out and his excited eyes alight under that down-to-his-nose, flat-brim street-chic cap. In Game Three, another outsized pitcher, the goat-bearded, sulky-faced Josh Beckett, struck out ten Yankees in seven and a third innings, amid tropic Miami showers, but was beaten by Derek Jeter’s three hits for the night, the last a double up the right-field line, after a terrific mound duel against Mike Mussina. The win put the Yanks one up in the series, and when they rallied late the next night—this was Clemens’s career-closing start—to carry the game into extra innings, and loaded the bases with one out in the eleventh, a customary Yankee outcome appeared at hand. They didn’t deliver, and the winning Florida poke—a lead-off homer down the left-field line in the twelfth by shortstop Alex Gonzalez—bore such an uncanny resemblance to the Aaron Boone walk-off that had killed the Red Sox, days before, that it looked like a mistake in the screening room. Hey, hold it—wrong guys!

The Yankee offense, unreliable all season, was so creaky by now that Torre benched Jason Giambi and the wholly discombobulated Alfonso Soriano the next night—and shortly had to do without his starter, David Wells, who suffered back spasms after one inning’s work and could not return. (Jolly in the interview room the day before, Boomer had boasted that he had a rubber arm and could leave the rigors of conditioning to other pitchers forever.) The Marlins’ seven hits over the next four innings helped build the 6-4 win and the parvenus’ second lead in the series. The teams came back to the Stadium, where the Yankees win big games by force of habit, but they’d finished scoring for the year. The silencing 2-0 win delivered by Josh Beckett was the first Series-ending shutout suffered at home by the Yankees since Lew Burdette did it for the Milwaukee Braves, in 1957. The Marlins were outscored in the Series, and outhit, as well, but it had begun to be noticed by the irritated Yankee pitchers that most of those scores—nine of the latest twelve Florida runs, in fact—had come with two outs. Just when you thought you had them, you didn’t. And here it happened again, with two down in the sixth: a bloop against Andy Pettitte by Gonzalez, a drive up the middle from Pierre, and Castillo’s sliced mini-hit to right, to bring in the first run of the game—the only one required, it turned out. The peg from right had a chance, but the front runner, Gonzalez, came skidding past home on a slide that fell away from Posada’s swipe, and he caressed the plate with his outstretched left hand as he flew by. Marlin-style ball, and a recognizable marque by now.

Beckett’s opponent, Pettitte, was making his thirtieth post-season start here and his tenth in the World Series, but it was the younger man who looked suave and untroubled on this evening, jumping ahead in the counts and delivering ceaseless heat and late-moving curveballs in a thrilling, manner-free flow. He was in the mid-to-upper-ninety-m.p.h. range all night, and here and there edged higher. Beckett, who is twenty-three and six-five, has the contemptuous air of the overgifted athlete, but, having earned the sneer now—he’d added nine more strikeouts, and by the time he was done had surrendered but three runs in his last twenty-nine innings, along with two shutouts—he appeared to forgive us a little at the end. He holds an apprentice’s 17-17 record for his three years in the majors to date, with a 9-8 won-lost record and a 3.04 earned-run average this season, when he had to sit out seven weeks with an inflamed elbow. “He’s just starting to pitch,” said the Florida utility infielder Mike Mordecai, shaking his head in awe. He compared Beckett to a teammate of his from a decade ago, the left-handed Atlanta phenom Steve Avery, but I had a better model in mind: twenty-one-year-old Bret Saberhagen, who gave up a lone run to the Cardinals over eighteen innings during the 1985 Series, and effortlessly won the M.V.P., just as Beckett did here. Watching them both, you could see Cooperstown in the mists ahead—or else the waiting rooms of Dr. James Andrews, the celebrated Birmingham shoulder surgeon, et al., which was Saberhagen’s path, as it turned out. This is a tough trade.

Young players who win a championship are clueless about its rarity, but Jack McKeon, lighting a cigar in the corridor outside the champagne-damp Marlins clubhouse, knew what they’d accomplished. His fifty-five years in baseball include managerial tenures with four other major-league teams, and a decade as baseball-operations vice-president of the Padres, who made the World Series in 1984 but swiftly lost to the Tigers. Now he had that ring. McKeon grew up in South Amboy, New Jersey, but has acquired the skipperish, plainsman’s mien, behind rimless glasses, that comes to so many elder baseball guys. In conversation before the finale, he and I had discussed the way that “seventy-two-year-old” prefix had become welded to his name these past weeks. “You notice that, too, I bet,” he said, throwing an unexpected arm around my shoulder, “but, hell, this beats retirement. Never retire—right?” He’d been idle at home in Elon, North Carolina, when Marlins owner Loria came calling in May. McKeon said that he’d not minded the daylight hours at home, or the garden work, but hated what came afterward. “Sitting in the same damned chair till midnight, watching games,” he said scornfully. “That used to be my working day.”

I hope Jack McKeon saw the Post headline the day after he’d won, and is having it framed: “Yankees sleep with the fish.”

LONG VOYAGE HOME: The games almost finished off their fans, but at last, wow, the Sox have won. (ROGER ANGELL, 2004-11-22, The New Yorker)

Because they lost, the Yankees’ hundred and one wins this season (second only to the Cardinals’ hundred and five) barely count, here at the end. This Torre team, transformed by the departure of Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte and the arrival of expensive superstars like Alex Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield, and the fragile and palely hostile Kevin Brown, struggled glumly in the early weeks, perhaps distracted by its opening visiting-celebrity series against the Devil Rays, which was played in Japan. The Yankees settled into first place in their division on June 1st and were not dislodged thereafter—more of a feat than it appears, given the miseries of Jason Giambi, pathetically diminished by an intestinal parasite and then a tumor of the pituitary gland. None of the starting pitchers stayed consistent or free of the disabled list, but the rotation was lifted by the bullpen duo of Paul Quantrill and Tom Gordon, coming on almost daily before Mariano Rivera. Kept in games they’d looked to lose, the Yanks won late and often, but it was the day-to-day from Hideki Matsui and the imperturbably brilliant Derek Jeter (who shrugged off an early 0-for-32 streak at the plate) and the wrinkly-browed super-pro Gary Sheffield that made up for their deficiencies. A-Rod, acquired late in the off-season after an earlier trade had seemed set to land him in Boston (the Players Association nixed the deal, which would have allowed him to accept a substantially reduced salary), struggled a bit at the plate but not at third base, a new position to him, taken on because of Jeter’s tenancy at short. The team ran into strange blips and swerves along the way—a three-game sweep by the Mets in July, a rocky 1-7 patch in August, and a 22-0 pounding, the worst defeat in Yankee history, by the Indians a few days later. When Kevin Brown came off the field after a losing September effort against the Orioles and smashed his left fist (it was not his pitching hand) into a wall, breaking some bones and sidelining himself for the most serious part of the season, it confirmed something rich and dark about the fame-burdened old champions in the minds of their insatiable haters.

It was quite the other way at the overpacked Fenway Park, where grunge and base hits and a thousand team hug-ups became something like a perpetual kiddies’ picnic as the eventful summer wore along. Headbands and team hair proliferated, batting helmets tarred over, and “The Idiots” replaced last year’s “Cowboy Up!” Johnny Damon’s Sea of Galilee hairline reached his shoulders and below—“WWJDD?” began popping up on the Soxblogs—while Kevin Millar opted for a blond semi-buzz cut to go with his black Abe Lincoln whiskers, and Bronson Arroyo came out in yellow cornrows, with fetching tassels at the nape. On his off days, Pedro Martinez settled capless into his upper corner of the dugout, wearing only remainder bits of the Boston uniform, and delivered momlike nods and smiles toward the unbuttoned Manny as he ambled toward the bat rack again. No one could say how much of this boyish narcissism was just countermatter to the dadly Yankee hauteur, or how much it had to do with the Sox’ bounce and verve when the games began. Why even ask?

This was the most confident lineup of hitters and count-workers we’d seen in years, a bunch at ease with strike two or a late-inning deficit. Their rackety three hundred and seventy-three doubles was an offensive high-water mark famously reached by the Cardinals in 1930. Their talent would show itself unexpectedly in games, and sometimes almost give you a glimpse of what hitting is all about. In the fourth inning of Game Six of the Yankee playoff, the switch-hitting catcher Jason Varitek stood in against a tough-minded Yankee right-hander, Jon Lieber, and quickly fell behind on two called strikes. There were two outs, with a Boston base runner, Kevin Millar, on second. The next pitch, a ball, got away, moving Millar along to third, but seven more pitches were required—four of them fouls and the last one barely ticked—before Varitek singled cleanly to center for the first run of the game. Orlando Cabrera also singled, and the next batter, Mark Bellhorn, hit a three-run homer to left—the big blow of the game, of course, but it was Lieber’s discouragement and hurt feelings about all those pitches he’d had to think about and then deliver to Varitek, all of them after two strikes and two outs, that made it happen. When Johnny Damon came up to bat in the second inning of the final Yankee game, the Sox were already ahead by 2-0 and had the bases loaded. The new pitcher just now summoned in for the crisis was a starter, Javier Vazquez, and it must have entered Damon’s mind that, unaccustomed to the current clutter, he would almost surely opt for a first-pitch fastball and strike one. Damon swung and hit it into the right-field stands for a grand slam.

In the middle of the Sox order this year came the large and optimistic d.h., David Ortiz, forever smacking his gloves together and stepping back into the box, where he presented a pitcher with miserable options. Ortiz swings left, and anything low and in to him tends to be blistered distantly to right—some of his pulled shots got into the stands or caromed off a barrier in right before he was three steps up the line—while up and away produced high drives to left, good for outs in many parks but in Fenway a rain of doubles off the wall. His year-end batting line confirms the pattern: third in the league in doubles; second in runs batted in and tied for second in homers (with his teammate Ramirez just ahead); and first with ninety-one extra-base hits.

Watching the unkempt Red Sox brought back to me a different frazzled and talented bunch, the 1982 Milwaukee Brewers, who lost a seven-game World Series to the Cardinals that year. Three veteran swingers in their lineup—Ben Ogilvie, Cecil Cooper, and Gorman Thomas—combined for a hundred and five homers that season, while two others, Paul Molitor and Robin Yount, were heading for the Hall of Fame. Grunge and three-day beards were a specialty with the frowzy Thomas, who wore the same pair of lucky stockings in every game of the year, and Pete Vuckovich, a hulking right-handed starter who later played the heavy in the movie “Major League.” Despite resemblances, the style gap (and the income gap) between the two teams is hard to grasp. These Brewers were working guys, grizzled clubhouse rats who lingered over their card games, and later helped out behind the bar at Cesar’s Inn, a nearby factory-clientele bar owned by manager Harvey Kuenn and his wife, Audrey. It would never have occurred to Harvey’s Wallbangers (as they were known) to goof around like adolescents in the clubhouse or the dugout; they were grown men, and private. Were they better hitters than the 2004 Red Sox? Maybe not.

Iconic players—the Kid and Johnny Pesky, Yaz, Jim Rice, and Nomar—have allowed the Red Sox to overlook some chronic problems, like speed and defense, down the years, but on July 31st, minutes before the trading deadline, and with the Sox in second in their division, eight and a half games behind the Yankees, the young general manager, Theo Epstein, completed a multi-club trade that sent away the once untouchable shortstop Nomar Garciaparra to the Cubs, in return for the younger and quicker Orlando Cabrera, from the Expos; a Gold Glove first baseman, Doug Mientkiewicz, from the Twins; and a late-inning base-stealer, Dave Roberts, from the Dodgers. The shocker here was Garciaparra, who had been too easily injured of late, and had become a distant celebrity in the clubhouse (there was a red line on the floor, a figurative little looped maître-d’ rope, in front of his locker, to discourage writers). Talk was that he’d been affronted by the news that the Sox planned to trade him away over the winter, as part of the aborted A-Rod deal, but I prefer to think that it was a damaged wrist, first injured in 1999, that took away his exuberant line-drive-spraying swings at the plate, and dimmed the gleam in his eyes. “Nomah!” no more.

The trade took a while to work itself out—Cabrera, after an opening home run, went three for twenty-four at the plate, while Epstein confessed that he’d been lying low, to avoid the fans—but then the Sox ran off six straight wins, then ten straight, and twenty of twenty-two along the way, and looked ahead to the hard games and melodramas just up the line. With two seasons gone since Epstein’s appointment, the club now bore his brand. This year, he also brought in the closer Keith Foulke, from the Athletics, and the famous and expensive Curt Schilling (for two years and twenty-five million dollars; or, with options, three years and forty), who had played a central role in his World Series with the Phillies and the Diamondbacks. Kevin Millar and David Ortiz had been scooped up at bargain rates a year earlier, while in low favor with their prior clubs. The winning Red Sox will be deeply involved in the post-season market, with players like Pedro Martinez, Derek Lowe, Orlando Cabrera, and Jason Varitek launched on the sea of free agency—and other front-office executives, perhaps a little awestruck, will be dealing warily with the young G.M. He turned thirty last December, and one of these days may even lose the prefix.

What remains of the summerlong soap of this year’s Sox and Yankees is a few plays and pitches, so relentlessly repeated in replay that they feel like commercials.

---

SWING TIME:

Official: Saddam to be executed tonight (CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA and QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA, 12/29/06, Associated Press)

The official witnesses to Saddam Hussein's impending execution gathered Friday in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone in final preparation for his hanging, as state television broadcast footage of his regime's atrocities.

With U.S. forces on high alert for a surge in violence, the Iraqi government readied all the necessary documents, including a "red card" — an execution order introduced during Saddam's dictatorship.

Soccer makes a useful contribution to the world, at last.

MORE:
Hanging Saddam won't bring peace to Iraq (Con Coughlin, 30/12/2006, Daily Telegraph)

This was a man whose maniacal policies – whether launching unnecessary wars with Iran and Kuwait or the genocidal purges of his own people that were a perennial feature of Iraqi politics – resulted in the deaths of up to one million people during the 35 years he dominated the nation.

That puts him on a par with Stalin, the political figure Saddam most admired as he rose through the ranks of the Ba'ath party during the early 1960s. Indeed, the reason why Saddam's regime lasted in power for so long, despite the various attempts to assassinate him and the constant eruption of violent rebellion, was his dexterity in imitating the ruthless and all-encompassing state security structure that Stalin used to maintain his iron grip over the Soviet Union. As a consequence, hardly a family in Iraq escaped without losing a beloved father or son, mother or daughter to Saddam's tyranny.

One of the great ironies of Saddam's year-long trial for ordering the 1982 massacre of 142 villagers in the Shia town of Dujail was his lawyers' constant reference to the Geneva Conventions to save their client from the gallows, a fate that was effectively pre-ordained from the moment he was dragged unceremoniously out of his hiding hole in Tikrit by American Marines in December 2003.

As president of Iraq, Saddam completely ignored the internationally recognised treaty on the conduct of war. When the Kurds sided with the Iranians during the 1980s, Saddam silenced them by dropping chemical weapons on their villages and forcibly driving the survivors into exile. Kuwaiti civilians captured after Saddam invaded their country in 1990 were subjected to the most horrible torture imaginable, from being slowly electrocuted to death to being thrown into vats of boiling water.

Even during his trials in Baghdad – both for the Dujail massacre and the notorious chemical weapons attack on Halabja at the end of the Iran-Iraq war – at no point did Saddam concede that he had done anything wrong. In the case of Dujail, he insisted it was his duty as president to take punitive action against the villagers after their failed assassination attempt; a similar argument was made with regard to the Halabja massacre, where Saddam's defence was that he was defending the nation's interests in attacking the Kurdish villagers who were siding with the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war.

This twisted logic and utter lack of any moral or ethical compass made Saddam a threat not just to his own country, but also to the entire region. About the only serious political aspiration he held throughout his career was to be the leader of a Saladin-like pan-Arab revival, in which all the Arab nations would be united under the rule of one benevolent leader – Saddam Hussein.

Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of America and Britain launching a military campaign to depose him in the spring of 2003, few can deny that the long-term future of Iraq and the wider Middle East is brighter without the butcher of Baghdad.

---

RED SMITH IS DEAD, YET THEY KEEP TYPING:

The Best Sports Columns of 2006 (CARL BIALIK AND JASON FRY, December 29, 2006, Wall Street Journal)

* The life of Brien: Bricks, back roads & broken dreams of a former phenom (WAYNE COFFEY, 7/02/06, NY DAILY NEWS)

A few times a week, often on his way home from work, the greatest pitching prospect the New York Yankees ever had pulls into a little roadside convenience store called In & Out Food Mart. It has cramped aisles and cheap gas, a cement box that sits forlornly across from a billboard that says "What A Friend We Have in Jesus" and a ballfield that once attracted big-league scouts by the dozens.

The prospect gets his gas, a soda pop or two, his 6-4, 250-pound body coated with mortar and morsels of brick, the dusty detritus of a day's labor. "He's a nice guy, a quiet guy," says Jimmy Quzh, the owner of In & Out. Then he's on his way, driving north, just two miles up to the green road sign that may be the last sliver of fame he has left.

It was made by inmates at the state Department of Corrections. It's in a semi-blighted community called North River.

"BRIEN TAYLOR LN," the road sign reads.

Brien Taylor is 34 now, and he lives at the end of the road named for him, with his parents, Willie Ray and Bettie. The trailer he was raised in has been replaced with a two-story brick and frame home, the House that Brien Built with the record $1.55 million bonus he got from the Yankees. He also bought a black Mustang 5.0 back then, a car that is still on the road. Otherwise, evidence of his long-ago windfall is in scant supply on Brien Taylor Lane, where the cab of a tractor-trailer is sunk into marsh grass and vines, and the yard is strewn with old cars and a heap of rusted lawnmowers.

It has been 15 years since the Yankees made Brien Taylor the No. 1 pick in the 1991 draft, and 14 seasons since Baseball America rated him the top prospect in the country, ahead of Pedro Martinez (No. 10) and Manny Ramirez (No. 37). He had two superb years in the minors and he, his left arm and his 98 mph fastball were rocketing toward the Bronx, until it all came undone one night outside a ramshackle trailer.

"He'd be making $15 or $20 million a year now if he hadn't gotten hurt," says Gary Chadwick, Taylor's former coach at East Carteret High School.

Richard Bailey is a football coach in Fayetteville, N.C. He caught Taylor when Taylor was 14 and already throwing 90 mph, with a motion as fluid as hot syrup, the ball not leaving his hand so much as getting launched from it.

"Brien was the most talented kid I ever saw," Bailey says. "It's a shame things didn't work out the way they should have."

* Shaq's free pass negated 'real' fun (Bruce Jenkins, January 12, 2006, SF Chronicle)

As a man given a lifetime free pass in the NBA, Shaquille O'Neal tends to toy with people. Certain things elude him, such as world championships (lately) and universal respect, but he's a Sherman tank in a world of Chevys and Mercedes. The notion never fails to amuse him.

Heading into the Arena at Oakland for Wednesday night's game against the Warriors, O'Neal knew he was going to have an in-the-paint field day against the vaguely familiar names of Diogu, Foyle and Biedrins. He decided against addressing the media before the game, but behind the scenes, his jovial nature was never more evident.

Most NBA heavyweights work out with weights, tightly wound tubing or massive exercise devices. Shaq gets down with humans. Summoning Bill Foran, the Miami Heat's solidly built strength and conditioning coach, Shaq lifted the man onto his back and lurched him into the air a few times. Then he effortlessly flipped Foran into a horizontal position and did a few curls with him. You figure Shaq's idea of a really good time is dangling refrigerators outside a second-story window, perhaps sipping tea with his free hand.

Dwyane Wade, merely the league's most priceless athletic specimen outside of Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, was relaxing on a nearby table. Now in full hilarity mode, Shaq leaped over that table from a standing position -- fairly amazing for a man of his size. It could have gone so wrong. In fact, someone cried out in mock horror. But this was Shaq. He pulled it off, smiling all the while.

* Royals fan, hope is a good thing (JOE POSNANSKI, 3/15/06, The Kansas City Star)

A letter to a young Royals fan:

Thank you so much for your recent e-mail, which I happily received a couple of weeks ago while freezing in a cold tent in the Italian Alps and waiting for Bode Miller to come down from the mountain and make excuses.

Your letter and boundless love for the Royals brought me great joy. I was not in the right frame of mind then to answer your thoughtful questions because of the frostbite. Now, though, I have arrived at spring training, and I look over Surprise Stadium, and I can smell the cut grass. I spent 30 minutes listening to the Royals' 86-year-old scout, Dave Garcia, tell stories about Dizzy Dean, Babe Ruth and Bob Feller. People eat hot dogs all around me. Alex Gordon, the Royals' hope, just rifled a single to right field. I'm ready to tell you some things.

First, hang in there. You talk about how all your fourth-grade friends make fun of you because you are a Royals fan. Listen: Throughout history, there have been men and women like Galileo, Joan of Arc and Thomas More who were condemned and even executed for their views. And as brave as they were - you can ask your teacher about this - not one of them had the courage to admit being a Royals fan.

Yes, it is hard being a Royals fan in these troubled times. But, take comfort in this: You are doing the right thing. Yes, as you say, some of your Kansas City friends take the easy route and choose the Yankees or Red Sox or Cardinals as their favorite teams. My dear friend, you will run into these kinds of people all your life. They will cut you off on highways. They will go through the 12-items-and-under supermarket lane with enough food to feed the Three Tenors. They will push their airline seats all the way back into your pelvis on overseas flights.

You are different. You write, "I will love the Royals, no matter what." You are worth so much more than the kid who ran out to pick up a Chicago White Sox hat last year.

* Coping with the inevitability of defeat makes victories all the more sweet (Simon Barnes, 5/19/06, Times of London)

SOME will tell you that sport is all about winning. Have nothing to do with such people. Winning is not the only thing in sport. There is also, for example, losing. Losing is one of the most important things in sport, and people do it all the time, and in a thousand different ways. You can lose gloriously, dramatically, heroically, unluckily, abjectly, humiliatingly, defiantly, haplessly.

You can lose by a street, by a distance, a canvas, a short head, a knockout, on points. You can be hammered, trounced, beaten out of sight. You can be edged out, beaten by the narrowest of margins. You can be beaten and hang up your boots/gloves/bat/racket; you can be beaten and take a lot of positives from this.

But it all adds up to the same common experience of sport: not winning. And not winning was very much on my mind as I looked back on Arsenal’s jaunt to Paris and the miracle that never quite was. I was with Arsenal for their last three rounds in the Champions League and enjoyed the ride: the wonderful demolition of Juventus, the angst-ridden squeezing out of Villarreal, and the final in Paris against Barcelona on Wednesday night.

It seemed possible that this would be the most wonderful night in their history. Arsenal winners! Arsenal, the best team in the world! Arsenal glorious, Arsenal for ever one-up on Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal repeating the unlikely heroics of Liverpool the previous year and stealing the European Cup from beneath the noses of the great. But it didn’t quite happen.

---

NO SWEAT, THEY'LL BE BACK IN A FLASH:

Rioting breaks out in capital of Somalia (Jeffrey Gettleman, December 29, 2006, International Herald Tribune)

Anti- Ethiopia riots erupted in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, on Friday, a day after Ethiopian-backed forces captured the city.

Hundreds of Somalis flooded into the bullet-pocked streets to hurl stones at Ethiopian soldiers, set tires on fire and shout anti-Ethiopian slogans.

"Get out of our country!" some yelled. "We hate you, Ethiopians!"

Somalian troops take Mogadishu (Edmund Sanders and Abukar Albadri, December 29, 2006, LA Times)

There were some cheers, but there were also youths throwing stones and shouting at soldiers, particularly the Ethiopians.

"Ethiopia is my enemy. My mother and father told me they are the enemy. I will fight against them," said Abdi Dhaqani, 12.

Mogadishu temporarily reverted to its familiar clan-based chaos as the Islamic Courts Union disintegrated and former warlords tried to resume their former positions of power.

Youths rampaged in the streets, stealing cellphones, looting homes and setting up checkpoints. Clan militias reclaimed their old neighborhoods. Offices and homes of the leaders of the Islamic alliance bore the brunt of the looting.

Later this morning, the streets grew quiet, with no sign of looting and most people staying indoors. Troops urged residents to stay calm and said peace would be restored within two days.

It was unclear whether the weak transitional government and its small military could impose lasting order on Mogadishu, much less the rest of Somalia. Officials of neighboring Ethiopia, whose forces provided most of the firepower to oust the Islamic alliance, said they would help but not remain in Somalia for long.

Mogadishu residents said the looting made them fearful about another long period of instability.

"We are going back to the former chaos and violence," said Ilyas Ahmed, whose brother was killed Thursday in a robbery. "The courts were not good, but at least we had security."

---

PICK THE ONE WHERE THE VIEWERS ARE YOUR VOTERS:

"The President's Watching. Let's Make Him Cringe And Squirm." (Ed Driscoll, December 29, 2006, EdDriscoll.com)

While late-1960s milestones such as Walter Cronkite's calling the Tet Offensive an American loss, and Hollywood's shift towards nihilistic movies such as Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy were considered the early signs of a culture war between what was then called "the new left" and mainstream America, a significant moment also occurred on April 17th, 1976, when Ron Nessen, President Ford's press secretary, appeared on an episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live, during the show's first season, to attempt to show that the Ford Administration had a sense of humor about itself, and the ribbing that SNL's Chevy Chase gave Ford about his occasional stumbles.

Nessen's appearance, along with a videotaped cameo of Ford saying, "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night", marked perhaps the last time that most Republicans in office would ever fully trust the mainstream media. And even then, Nessen was concerned about being set-up by the show. What he didn't know was that the SNL production team had conceived a strategy of feinting left and running right, to paraphrase one of the show's then-writers, so that the sketches that Nessen appeared in were relatively tame. It was the rest of the show that was deliberately raunchy and over the top, even for SNL. Because, as Rosie Shuster, another of the show's writers, remarked, "The President's watching. Let's make him cringe and squirm."

If he'd had any sense Mr. Ford would have nudged his way onto a couple football telecasts, the way Ronald Reagan snagged an All-Star game. the Ford people even gave much of the credit for his comeback against Jimmy Carter to a series of political ads where he chatted with Joe Garagiola,

---

TORYBOOK ENDING:

Lib Dem trio become Conservatives (BBC, 12/29/06)

Three Liberal Democrats who stood at last year's general election have joined the Conservative Party.

Richard Porter, who fought Camberwell and Peckham, and John Barstow, who stood at Tonbridge and Malling, have switched parties.

Tariq Mahmood, a physician who contested Uxbridge, also moved, saying the Tories "could make the NHS better".

Tory party chairman Francis Maude said the trio's move marked "a tremendous end to a great year for the party".

---

AFTER TWENTY-FIVE YEARS WITHOUT ANY YOU MIGHT NOTICE A TREND?:

One hard-to-rattle economy (Peter Robison, 12/29/06, Bloomberg News)

Inflation was the dog that didn't bite in 2006.

In a year of surprises — hurricanes that didn't hit, oil that didn't soar to $100 a barrel, a Republican majority in Congress that didn't hold — the non-arrival of inflation was the biggest non-event of all.

Money manager Robert Doll says he worried as recently as July that inflation would surge, triggering a meltdown in corporate earnings and pummeling U.S. markets.

---

NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS:

Resolution is entirely too formal a term for what are really just our best intentions, but it's never a bad time to focus on a couple things you'd like to be better about. I've two for 2007 and would welcome you sharing yours:

(1) Walk for thirty minutes a day.

(2) Write my next book: Why all Comedy is Conservative

---

THE WEAKEST ISM:

SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH BRITISH AUTHOR FREDERICK FORSYTH: "They Take The Mind, and What Emerges is Just Tapioca Pudding": Frederick Forsyth talks about researching intelligence activities for his new novel, "The Afghan" -- as well as western torture methods in Afghanistan and who would have killed Litvinenko if he had written the plot. (Der Spiegel, 12/29/06)
SPIEGEL: Mr. Forsyth, at the beginning of your new thriller "The Afghan," an al-Qaida member is eliminated when he uses his cell phone and is immediately located by American intelligence services. Do you own a cell phone?

Forsyth: No, and I don't own a computer either. I'm obviously much mocked for being such a dinosaur, but I have my reasons. With my typewriter I've never sent seven chapters into cyberspace and lost them. Secondly, try hacking into my typewriter ... (Chuckles). I also don't use the Internet for searches, because frankly I don't trust it.

SPIEGEL: Despite all your skepticism you have used the Internet for marketing purposes. One year ago you auctioned off six names in your new book on eBay.

Forsyth: Yes, I got about 100,000 pounds (€149,000) for different charities. Cpt. Michael Linnett, the special forces officer in the race through the wilderness, is actually a businessman in Northamptonshire, for example. [...]

SPIEGEL: In "The Afghan," a British intelligence office Mike Martin passes himself off as a Pashtun and successfully infiltrates al-Qaida. Isn't it possible to imagine the opposite also happening? Or did the era of double agents and moles finish with the end of the Cold War?

Forsyth: You might find a communist, but probably not an Islamic fanatic. We are now more trustworthy because you're unlikely to find an al-Qaida member in the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst, the German intelligence agency) or French intelligence. The presumption is much easier to make that we're going to get loyalty and therefore reliability.

SPIEGEL: In your book, the undercover agent Martin is warned against clean-shaven Muslims who smoke, drink and sleep with women, westernized human chameleons who hide their hate. You don't believe that al-Qaida sympathizers could infiltrate Western intelligence agencies?

Forsyth: Well they could, but it would be very noticeable. In the 1930s we had a rise of dictators in Europe, and many young people came to the view that democracy was decadent and weak and cowardly. That was the propaganda of Communism, and the (British spies for the Soviets) Macleans, Burgesses and Philbys fell for it. I don't think many people are falling for al-Qaida. The re-establishment of the first caliphate? The reconquista of all southern Europe by Islamic forces? It would be hard to persuade a German that this is the future. Even if he did convert to Islam inside the BND, I think his colleagues would notice. Wahhabism is the core behind the anger and the rage and hatred that a lot of Muslim extremists feel towards us. I don't see how that would affect a middle-class European.

---

NORKY PARK:

Nuanced thriller also cracks the mysteries of North Korea: a review of "A Corpse in the Koryo" By James Church (Glenn Kessler, 12/29/06, Seattle Times)

On the surface, "A Corpse in the Koryo" is a crackling good mystery novel, filled with unusual characters involved in a complex plot that keeps you guessing to the end. It has received rave reviews — as a mystery novel.

But the book has also caused a stir among Asia specialists because it offers an unusually nuanced and detailed portrait of one of the most closed societies on Earth: North Korea. Much like Martin Cruz Smith's novel "Gorky Park," which depicted life in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s through the eyes of a police inspector, "A Corpse in the Koryo" provides a window into a mysterious country through the perspective of its primary character, Inspector O.

North Korea expert Peter Hayes, executive director of the research group Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development, described the novel as "the best unclassified account of how North Korea works and why it has survived all these years when the rest of the Communist world capitulated to the global market a decade ago."

"This novel should be required bedtime reading for President Bush and his national security team," Hayes said.

MORE:
Inspector O Gets a Thermos (James Church, December 19th, 2006, Policy Forum)
Inspector O And The Case Of The Missing Tea Thermos (Peter Hayes, Policy Forum)

---

BRIANIAC:

Yanks, D-Backs close to Unit deal (BILL MADDEN and ANTHONY McCARRON, 12/29/06, NY DAILY NEWS)

The Diamondbacks have been the most aggressive suitors for Randy Johnson and sources close to the negotiations said yesterday that the Yankees and Arizona could complete a trade to send Johnson back to the desert before next week. [...]

The Diamondbacks are loaded with young talent and if the Yankees send Johnson home to Arizona - Johnson's home is in the Phoenix suburb of Paradise Valley - they'd like to get at least two of the following three pitchers: Dustin Nippert, Micah Owings and Ross Ohlendorf.

Nippert, 25, is a 6-8 righthander who was 13-8 with a 4.87 ERA in Triple-A last season and lost both his major league starts. Owings, a 6-5 righty, was 6-2 at Double-A and 10-0 at Triple-A. Ohlendorf, a 6-4 righty, spent most of last season in Double-A, going 10-8 with a 3.29 ERA. Ohlendorf had 125 strikeouts and only 29 walks in 177-2/3 innings.

If Cashman can trade another 40 year old whose juice supply has been cut off for real pitching prospects he'll have had a great off-season, even if their major league pitching staff still needs heaps of help.

---

NOW YOU'RE TALKIN'!:

Housework cuts breast cancer risk (BBC, 12/29/06)

Women who exercise by doing the housework can reduce their risk of breast cancer, a study suggests.

The research on more than 200,000 women from nine European countries found doing household chores was far more cancer protective than playing sport.

Dusting, mopping and vacuuming was also better than having a physical job.

No word yet on whether there's added benefit to being barefoot and pregnant...

---

WHO'S THIS "WE," KEMOSABE?:

Iran's Ahmadinejad Far Weaker Than He Lets On (Victor Davis Hanson, 12/29/06, Real Clear Politics)

The Iraq Study Group, prominent U.S. Senators and realist diplomats all want America to hold formal talks with the government of Iran. They think Tehran might help the United States disengage from Iraq and the general Middle East mess with dignity. That would be a grave error for a variety of reasons - the most important being that Iran is far shakier than we are.

The world of publicity-hungry Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not expanding, but shrinking. Despite his supposedly populist credentials, his support at home and abroad will only further weaken as long as the United States continues its steady, calm and quiet pressure on him.

In Iran's city council elections last week, moderate conservative and reformist candidates defeated Ahmadinejad's vehemently anti-American slate of allies. At a recent public meeting, angry Iranian students - tired of theocratic lunacy and repression - shouted down their president.

By supporting terrorists in Iraq and Lebanon, enriching uranium and insanely threatening to destroy a nuclear Israel, Ahmadinejad is only alienating Iranians, who wonder where their once vast oil revenues went and how they can possibly pay for all these wild adventures.

Boy, that tune changed fast...

---

AND YOU THINK FOLKS WILL GET IN THEIR PLANES? (via John Beckwith):

Report: Woman Stuck In Broken Elevator For 3 Days (AP, December 29, 2006)

A 19-year-old woman who disappeared was found stuck in an elevator in a suburban Paris housing project for three days, the French press reported Friday.

The daily Le Figaro described the woman, identified only as Safiatou, as vulnerable because she had "problems of confusion." It said she was found dehydrated but alive on Dec. 22.

According to newspaper and television accounts, Safiatou's father had contacted the building concierge Dec. 19 to say his daughter could be stuck in a broken elevator. No alarm went off and the concierge and a repairman found no one when they checked, Le Figaro reported, citing a source close to the investigation.

The technician began repair work the following day. On Dec. 22, the repairman returned to complete the job and heard a soft cry, Le Figaro reported.

At least if you were stuck in the elevator you wouldn't have to have any contact with French people.

---

OPPRESSION IS ONE THING, BUT POLLUTION...:

Bogus Data Masks Scale Of Pollution Woes Facing China (AFP, Dec 28, 2006)

Soaring pollution levels in China may be even worse than thought because local governments bent on economic growth are lying about their progress in meeting environmental goals, state media said Thursday.

Data reported by China's regional governments indicates a national goal to reduce China's two main pollutants by two percent in 2006 has been reached, but calculations by the top environment watchdog show they actually grew two percent, Xinhua news agency said, quoting an environment official. "The figures on pollution control reported by local governments dropped remarkably this year, while the real environmental situation continues to deteriorate," said the unnamed official with the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA). [...]

The official's comments mark the latest in a series of alarms by SEPA, which has said central-government efforts to curb the environmental damage from China's chugging economy are being overwhelmed by the local pursuit of economic growth at any cost.

Major Chinese cities are routinely enveloped in choking smog so thick it affects air travel and SEPA has said half of China's rivers are severely polluted and one-third of the country affected by acid rain.

Billions are being invested to upgrade environmental facilities and penalties for violations are being increased.

But collusion between industry and local-level officials, who often have a financial stake in economic growth, is hindering progress, SEPA has said.

---

THE SHINING STAR:

A salute from the soul in Harlem (Ellen Barry, December 29, 2006, LA Times)

As the caisson carrying James Brown's body rolled through Harlem on Thursday, people climbed out onto their fire escapes and stuck their heads out of windows. Some stood on police cars, and others ran out of beauty salons with rollers still in their hair.

When the carriage arrived — finally — on 125th Street, a ripple of sound went through the crowd. The horses drawing it were white, with tall white feathers trembling above their heads. Brown's casket appeared to be solid gold.

When Clarissa Hall saw this, tears welled in her eyes. She had taken the day off as a hospital secretary and spent five chilly hours waiting in front of the Apollo Theater for the chance to view his body.

"A gold casket," said Hall, who was wearing a tiger-print overcoat. "But what else would he have, you know? What else would he have?"

Brown's death prompted an outpouring here unlike any in recent memory. The line to see his body began forming before dawn, and at 8 p.m. — the hour the viewing was scheduled to end — it still stretched for five long blocks. The day brought any number of spontaneous expressions of love; at one point, a man began performing wiggly dance steps in the middle of two lanes of moving traffic on 125th Street.

The snaking queue would have greatly pleased Brown, who ritually monitored the length of lines outside his performances, the Rev. Al Sharpton said in a eulogy.

"They came because this man stood for something. This man represents us, the common man," said Sharpton, a decades-long friend of the musician. "James Brown shines for us that never had anybody shine for them."

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GIVING A PITCHER A SEVEN YEAR CONTRACT...:

Zito Hits The Jackpot With Giants (Washington Post, December 29, 2006)

Barry Zito and the San Francisco Giants reached a preliminary agreement on the largest contract for a pitcher in baseball history, a seven-year, $126 million deal.

There was no immediate confirmation from the Giants, but details of the contract were provided yesterday to the Associated Press by two people familiar with the negotiations who spoke on condition of anonymity because the deal wasn't announced by the team.

Zito's agreement, reached late Wednesday night, includes an $18 million option for 2014 with a $7 million buyout that could increase the value to $137 million. The option would become guaranteed if Zito pitches 200 innings in 2013, 400 combined in 2012 and 2013 or 600 combined from 2011 to '13.

...makes roughly as much sense as giving Rodney King your car keys and hoping for the best.

---

EVEN BETTER?:

Imports face a barrier: Sox’ communication key (Jeff Horrigan, December 29, 2006, Boston Herald)

Gabe Kapler doesn’t claim to be Siskel, Ebert, Lyons or Shalit, but the former Red Sox [team stats] outfielder has a bit of advice for Daisuke Matsuzaka’s and Hideki Okajima’s new teammates, as well as anyone else who will be dealing with the high-profile, Japanese imports:

Rent “Mr. Baseball” and “Lost in Translation” before spring training. [...]

“I know it sounds stupid . . . but I recommend that everyone watch those movies to understand what they’re going through,” said Kapler, who recently retired as a player to become manager of the Sox’ Single-A Greenville Drive. “I watched ‘Mr. Baseball’ before I went over, and that helped a lot. It explained a lot about the respect and saving-face issues, which are so important over there.

“I didn’t watch ‘Lost in Translation’ until I got back, but I wish I had because it’s even better. The scenes where (Murray is) working with a translator and the words coming out of his mouth aren’t the same as the ones coming out of his translator’s mouth are so true. It’s absolutely like that. I think anyone who has seen (both movies) will understand what these guys are going to be going through a lot more.”

Former Red Sox infielder Lou Merloni said communication and culture were the biggest obstacles he had to overcome when he played for the Yokohama Bay Stars of the Japanese Central League in 2000.

“When it comes to the game itself, (Matsuzaka) won’t need to make many adjustments because he’s just that good,” he said. “Communication will be the key. Hopefully, they’ll give him a good interpreter who knows what’s going on, because that can make all the difference in the world.”

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THANKS, DICE K:

Boston.com to share with Japanese site (Boston Globe, December 28, 2006)

Boston.com, the Web site of The Boston Globe, has signed a content-sharing agreement with an established Japanese language baseball site, it was announced Thursday.

Under the agreement, excerpts of baseball coverage in the newspaper, on Boston.com and on the Boston Dirt Dogs fan site will be translated into Japanese and posted on Go-RedSox.com, a site that has been operated for the past three years by Japanese sports journalist Daigo Fujiwara, who also is a graphics designer at the Globe. Fujiwara also operates a site on Japanese baseball players in Major League Baseball.

"This agreement is a creative way to bring our brand of quality coverage to a new audience who cares about Boston-area sports," said David Beard, editor of Boston.com. "This is no mere translation service."

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ONE MORE RESOLUTION...:

Hussein may be hanged in a 'day or so': The ex-president meets with his half brothers as his execution nears. (Molly Hennessy-Fiske, December 29, 2006, LA Times)

Saddam Hussein met with two of his half brothers and his lawyers Thursday at a U.S. detention facility as a senior U.S. official said his execution could come within "a couple more days."

The former Iraqi president has been in U.S. custody in a cell at Camp Cropper near Baghdad's international airport. He is to be officially turned over to Iraqi custody shortly before the death sentence is carried out, as ordered by an Iraqi court.

The execution could occur in "another day or so" — before the start of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, said the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Iraqi officials have said their government would be loath to carry out an execution during the Eid festival, and have suggested that it would not take place until the holiday ends next week. The U.S. official noted that the Bush administration had been "in close contact with the government of Iraq" on Hussein's fate.

...try not to revel in the death of another...

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CAESAR WAS A CONQUEROR, NOT A LIBERATOR:

Caesar: Diplomacy and power: How would four of the greatest war leaders in history have handled Iraq? (Adrian Goldsworthy, December 29, 2006, LA Times)

WHAT WOULD Julius Caesar do in Iraq? "He'd win" is the simplest answer. How he would do it is harder to say — after all, just how would a man like that behave in the modern world? We can never know, but his campaigns in Gaul give us a fair idea.

When Caesar led his legions into Gaul — basically present-day France and Belgium — in 58 BC, many of the tribes there greeted him as a liberator. Six years later, almost all of them rebelled against him in a war fought with appalling savagery. Through skill and luck, Caesar won. He then spent the better part of two years in painstaking diplomacy. As one of his own officers put it: "Caesar had one main aim, keeping the tribes friendly and giving them neither the opportunity nor cause for war." It worked, and Gaul remained at peace when he left in 49 BC.

From the start, Caesar backed his campaigns with concerted and highly personal diplomacy. He met the tribal leaders as a council at least once a year and visited them individually more often. The great rebellion in 52 BC was all the more surprising because it was led by chieftains who had done very well out of their alliance with Caesar. They had decided that they would do even better if the Romans were expelled. Allies, and especially those in an occupied country, may not necessarily have the same long-term ambitions.

Of course, Gaul in the 1st century BC was a very different place from Iraq today.

It's revealing both that Rome couldn't maintain its empire and that Caesar was assassinated by his fellow Romans who considered themselves free and not subject to conquest by him.

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BENCH STRENGTH:

GOP Rising Star Set To Take Calif. Post (Josh Richman, Dec 29, 2006, The Forward)

Steve Poizner is the Republican to watch for California’s 2010 gubernatorial race, according to many pundits — awfully good press for someone who won’t be sworn into his first public office until January.

The California insurance commissioner-elect has made a splash as the only Republican to win a statewide office here this year, besides re-elected incumbent Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. [...]

“I call [Poizner] the Energizer Bunny of the 2006 election cycle,” said former California Republican Party executive director Jon Fleischman, now a conservative blogger. “I’ve never met anybody who worked harder or was more diligent about doing everything he could to win a public office. He’s blessed with a very disarming demeanor, and he is refreshingly candid with people. I think the strength of his personality oftentimes helped ideologues put aside their personal differences with him.”

Poizner sits on the Republican Jewish Coalition’s president’s council.

“I had identified Steve very quickly and early as a talented and hardworking guy,” said RJC California state director Larry Greenfield, who described his “very warm relationship” with Poizner since the 2004 Assembly race. “Here’s a guy who’s not a career politician; he’s a problem solver, he’s a businessman…. It just all added up to be exactly the kind of guy I and many RJC folks wanted to get behind.” [...]

With an electrical-engineering degree from the University of Texas and a Master of Business Administration from Stanford University, Poizner founded SnapTrack, a company that developed technology to help pinpoint 911 emergency calls from cell phones. Qualcomm bought SnapTrack in 2000 for $1 billion in stock, catapulting Poizner’s net worth into the hundreds of millions.

Arriving for the White House Fellows program shortly before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he wound up becoming the National Security Council’s director of critical infrastructure protection. After returning to California, he volunteered to teach government at a high school in San Jose, Calif.

Veteran GOP campaign strategist Kevin Spillane, who briefly worked for one of Poizner’s two nascent rivals in this year’s primary, agreed with Fleischman that Poizner’s new bully pulpit and personal wealth would leave him “well positioned to be the Republican candidate for governor in 2010.”

“But of course,” Spillane noted, “he has to perform in office.”

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THE COOLEST MAN IN AMERICA:

Blue-Collar Colossus: When NFL athletes really played out of love of the game--a long time ago. (GEOFFREY NORMAN, December 28, 2006, Opinion Journal)

Before the kickoff, few people would have considered the football game scheduled for Yankee Stadium on Dec. 28, 1958, terribly significant. [...]

What they saw came to be regarded as a seminal event in modern sports, one that began pro football's ascent to wild popularity, Super Bowls, "Monday Night Football" and billion-dollar television contracts: Everything that the NFL became was spawned by that game. Also born that day was the pro league's first superstar: Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas.

The scene is vividly recaptured by http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110009445 in his biography of the quarterback, "Johnny U." In the last two minutes of the game, with the Colts trailing 17-14, Unitas completed four passes--three in a row to the future Hall of Fame receiver Raymond Berry, for a total of 62 yards. He had moved his team from its own 14-yard line to the Giants' 13. With seven seconds remaining, Colts kicker Steve Myhra put the ball through the uprights to tie the score, 17-17, pushing the game into sudden death.

The drive to put the Colts in field-goal range was agonizingly dramatic, but Unitas looked like the coolest man in America. No sign of nerves. No showboating. There was a kind of sublime, icy confidence in the way he managed the Colts' advance. It was utterly professional--and effective. In the overtime, Unitas led the Colts on an 80-yard drive--including a white-knuckle third-and-14 completion to Berry--before handing the ball to running back Alan Ameche for a one-yard plunge into the end zone and victory. This was decades before the celebrating star of a football game would pause onfield to make a paid announcement that his next stop was Disney World; Unitas turned down $500 to appear on "The Ed Sullivan Show" so that he could travel back to Baltimore with his teammates.

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...AND HIGHER...:

Dow Jones passes 12,500 (RICK BABSON, 12/28/06, The Kansas City Star)

The Dow Jones industrial average topped 12,500 Wednesday for the first time as bargain hunters helped send stocks higher for a second consecutive session.

Yet the GOP ran on war and the damage immigrants are doing to the economy?

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FIRST REGIME CHANGE, THEN ELECTIONS, THEN PEACE:

Assad’s Olive Branch Can Bear No Fruit (Ammar Abdulhamid, Dec 29, 2006, The Forward)

According to an article in Time magazine this month, I am the central figure in some cockamamie plot to overthrow the Syrian government. The plan, apparently, is to undermine Bashar al-Assad’s regime through the ballot box, starting with the parliamentary elections scheduled for March 2007.

But as every Syrian knows, these elections tend to be quite staged and inconsequential. Perhaps the American officials who concocted the classified plan for regime change believed they could make it appear more credible by assigning a primary role to a dissident like myself. No one, however, could exude the kind of aura needed to cover the naiveté of the proposed scheme.

If nothing else, this half-baked plot exposes how much the United States is struggling to develop a coherent policy toward Syria. Washington is clearly unable to grasp the reality on the ground, both in Syria and across the Middle East — and nowhere is this disconnect more visible than in the naive insistence, by the Iraq Study Group and others, on linking progress in Iraq to the revival of Syrian-Israeli peace talks.

But Jim Baker is a Realist, how could his view of Syria be such a fantasy?

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THE REORDERER-IN-CHIEF:

New U.S. Plan: Palestinian State Before Bush Leaves Office (Avraham Shmuel Lewin, December 27, 2006, Jewish Press)

In a move to counter the Baker-Hamilton report, the Bush administration is boosting its involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to a report in Israel's Yediot Aharonot newspaper on Sunday. Steps being planned include a series of measures that would embolden the Fatah movement and weaken Hamas.

According to the new plan, the final goal is the establishment of a Palestinian state with temporary borders within two years, before the end of President Bush's term in office.

The paper reports that last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held a seminar attended by the State Department's top political brass involved in the Middle East. It included U.S. ambassadors to countries in the region and Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, who is currently acting on behalf of the State Department in the region.

If we recognize the state there is one.

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REAL CONSERVATIVES:

Tories back 300mph levitating trains for UK (David Millward, 28/12/2006, Daily Telegraph)

Conservative support for a high speed rail project strengthened yesterday, with the party commissioning a detailed study into the cost of building a network linking major cities across the country.

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HE'S NO AL GORE:

Oops! Web slip put Edwards in day early (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, 12/28/06)

Former Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards jumped into the presidential race yesterday a day earlier than he'd planned, prodded by an Internet glitch.

The North Carolina Democrat's campaign accidentally went live with his election Web site a day before an announcement that was scheduled for today to use Hurricane-ravaged New Orleans as a backdrop.

The slipup gave an unintended double-meaning to his campaign slogan on the John Edwards '08 Web site: "Tomorrow begins today."

Of course, it's a worse sign for his candidacy that he doesn't realize the Katrina well dried up some time ago.

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LEGEND? HE WAS BARELY A RUMOR:

Last lunch with a legend (THOMAS M. DeFRANK, 12/28/06, NY DAILY NEWS)

Thomas DeFrank, the Washington bureau chief for the Daily News, is seen in this 1996 photo talking to Gerald Ford. The men struck up a friendship that lasted three decades. Below, the two chat on Air Force One.

Daily News Washington Bureau Chief Thomas M. DeFrank interviewed Gerald Ford more than three dozen times during the late President's retirement years. He saw Ford in November at his California home and spent more than two hours with him May 11 for this, his final interview.

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NOW IT'S THE SORT OF WAR THEY CAN WIN RATHER EASILY:

Islamist Forces in Somali City Vanish (JEFFREY GETTLEMAN, 12/27/06, NY Times)

The Islamist forces who have controlled much of Somalia in recent months suddenly vanished from the streets of the capital, Mogadishu, residents said Wednesday night, just as thousands of rival troops massed 15 miles away.

In the past few days, Ethiopian-backed forces, with tacit approval from the United States, have unleashed tanks, helicopter gunships and jet fighters on the Islamists, decimating their military and paving the way for the internationally recognized transitional government of Somalia to assert control.

Even so, the Islamists, who have been regarded as a regional menace by Ethiopia and the United States, had repeatedly vowed to fight to the death for their religion and their land, making their disappearance that much more unexpected.

An Ethiopian occupation will be a bloody fiasco.

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WHY DID THEY THINK MEN "LIBERATED" THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE?:

Old story: Women may have it worse: Divorce and lost earning time could put living standards in a free fall late in life. (Jonathan Peterson, December 28, , LA Times)

Ellen Tucker Emerson cut short her nursing career to help raise her children, but money was never a worry. Her husband made a good living as a lawyer, and the family didn't miss her income.

"We traveled where we wanted," she said. "He bought me furs and jewelry. We stayed at the best hotels."

Then the marriage fell apart. Now 51, Tucker Emerson scrambles to pay the bills and wonders how she will get by in retirement.

"Maybe I'll be that old lady on the cruise ship working as a singer, and I'll supplement my income working in a nursing home," said Tucker Emerson, who lives on the coast of Maine. She added, "We need to teach our daughters that you have to take care of yourself for the future."

Like millions of other upwardly mobile women of the baby boom generation, Tucker Emerson faces the danger that retirement will bring a sharp downhill slide in lifestyle. Many of these women could suffer a greater decline in living standards in later life than their mothers did.

To a degree, the retirement security of women is jeopardized by the same trends affecting men, such as cutbacks in corporate pensions. But experts say the threat to women is amplified by a confluence of factors, including:

• Higher overall rates of divorce and singlehood. Record numbers of women are heading toward later life without the backup of a partner's savings and income. Unmarried, older women have higher poverty rates than their male counterparts and much higher poverty rates than married women, government data show.

• Interrupted working years. Although baby boom women generally have more education and work skills than their mothers, many quit jobs or work part time to care for children or ailing relatives. Such efforts may be cherished by family members, but they slash retirement benefits.

• Long lives. At age 65, women are expected to live an average of three years longer than men. This greater longevity magnifies several risks to retirement security, including raising the danger that a woman will outlast her savings or incur costly medical bills without help from a spouse.

In addition to these factors, women overall still earn less than men and have less in the way of retirement benefits for old age.

"The bottom line is that women are subject to a double whammy: They need more but have less," said Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College and a former member of the White House Council of Economic Advisors.
They need what they gave up: husbands.

Comments

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ZEUS PRESERVE THEM:

Sucker Punch: How Bush fooled the neocons. (Jonathan Chait 12.25.06, New Republic)

[B]ush suckered the neocons.

On the surface, to be sure, they appear to be getting their way once again. News reports are suggesting that Bush plans to send more troops to Iraq. Neoconservatives have been urging this very course of action for a long time. Indeed, they've been advocating more troops in general for years--even before the war started. And that's not surprising. If you believe in expanding the worldwide application of American power, you need a military to do it. If you read old issues of The Weekly Standard, which is the bulletin board of neoconservatism, you can find calls for a bigger military going back to the Clinton administration

It's probably too late to make a difference in Iraq. Bush may have come to believe in the neoconservative mission for the nation's military. But he never accepted the corollary about increasing the military. So he ended up pursuing Dick Cheney's foreign policy with Bill Clinton's army.

In hindsight, we can see that the neocons made two huge blunders. The first was to go along with Bush's enormous tax cuts. When Bush took office in 2001, any halfway honest budget analyst would tell you that he was making a lot of promises that didn't add up. The neocons calculated that, if they supported the tax cuts like good party soldiers, Bush would grant them their defense budget increases later on.

So the Standard enthusiastically boosted the tax cuts. Neoconservative defense hawk Frank Gaffney concurred in a fawning open letter to Bush. "Those of us who look forward to helping you succeed in your efforts to rebuild our defense posture appreciate that your success in reducing taxes is a first and highly synergistic step toward that goal," he wrote. "Consequently, you can count on us in the national security community to support you in both of these important endeavors."

Whoops. It turned out there wasn't any money left over for a big troop increase, an eventuality nobody could have foreseen unless they knew how to add and subtract. Enraged at the lack of a defense hike, the Standard published an editorial calling on then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to resign in protest of "the impending evisceration of the military."

You pretty much have to be an intellectual not to realize that the main Bush/Rumsfeld mission was the transformation of the military and 9-11 and the WoT just unwelcome temporary distractions. The neocons were taken even worse on the Iraq War though, which has empowered the Shi'a they hate and will give them none of the permanent bases they dreamt of.

All of this was obvious years ago.

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BECAUSE NATIONALISM/DARWINISM HAS WORKED SO WELL IN THE PAST:

In Japan, new nationalism takes hold: The country's post-World War II pacificism is being challenged by a more assertive, patriotic attitude (Robert Marquand12/28/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

On a pleasant November morning, some 300 Japanese executives paid $150 each to hear a lanky math professor named Masahiko Fujiwara give a secular sermon on restoring Japan's greatness. Mr. Fujiwara spoke quietly, without notes, for 80 minutes. His message, a sort of spiritual nationalism, rang loudly, though: Japan has lost its "glorious purity," its samurai spirit, its traditional sense of beauty, because of habits instilled by the United States after the war. "We are slaves to the Americans," he said.

Fujiwara's remedy is for Japan to recover its emotional strength. He says that Japan "can help save the world" - but its youths are lost in a fog of laxity and don't love Japan enough.

That's not the love they lack.

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CULTURE OF DEATH:

A Deadly Story We Keep Missing (Peter J. Woolley, December 27, 2006, Washington Post)

The non-story of 2006 was also the non-story of 2005. It is a non-story every year going back decades. Yet the number of people who die in car crashes in the United States is staggering, even if it is absent from the agenda of most public officials and largely ignored by the public.

When all is said and done and the ball begins to drop on New Year's Eve, 44,000 people, give or take several hundred, will have died in auto accidents this year. To put that number in perspective, consider that:

? At the 2006 casualty rate of 800 soldiers per year, the United States would have to be in Iraq for more than 50 years to equal just one year of automobile deaths back home.

? In any five-year period, the total number of traffic deaths in the United States equals or exceeds the number of people who died in the horrific South Asian tsunami in December 2004. U.S. traffic deaths amount to the equivalent of two tsunamis every 10 years.

? According to the National Safety Council, your chance of dying in an automobile crash is one in 84 over your lifetime. But your chances of winning the Mega Millions lottery are just one in 175 million.

You can eliminate almost half right off the bat with mandatory sobriety sensors.

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HOW MUCH MOE ISOLATED CAN THEY GET?

Vietnam bank tightens screw on Pyongyang (Anna Fifield, December 27 2006, Financial Times)

North Korea has been isolated further from the global financial system with the decision of a Vietnamese bank to order the immediate closure of all accounts linked to Pyongyang.

East Asia Commercial Bank made the move even as diplomats tried to make progress during six-party nuclear talks last week.

The isolation of North Korea has overshadowed efforts to persuade Kim Jong-il’s regime to abandon its nuclear weapons programme, with Pyongyang refusing to discuss nuclear issues while the US-led crackdown continues.

Since the US started targeting the regime’s financial activities a year ago, banks, including those in friendly communist countries such as China and Vietnam, have closed North Korean accounts, making it near-impossible for Pyongyang to transfer money, illicitly earned or otherwise.

As in Iraq pre-2003, we're punishing the people when we should change the regime.

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I'M FINE, YOU'RE NOT SO HOT:

Myths And the Middle Class (Robert J. Samuelson, December 27, 2006, Washington Post)

What's striking is the huge gap between people's views about "the economy" -- an abstraction -- and their own personal situations:

- Although only 32 percent rate the overall economy as "excellent" or "good," 52 percent judge their personal situation as excellent or good (35 percent said "fair" and 13 percent "poor").

- Most Americans (60 to 37 percent) think their own living standards are rising; parents of children under 18 overwhelmingly (54 to 24 percent) think the same will be true for their children.

- Almost 70 percent of Americans say they've attained or will attain the "American Dream," as they define it. More than half say success comes from a good education and hard work, not from connections (18 percent) or being born wealthy (13 percent). [...]

People value stability and security. They also want higher incomes. Unfortunately, the two sometimes collide. In a recent book, "Economic Turbulence," three economists show that the constant turnover of companies and business locations ("establishments") improves economic growth -- but creates disruption and stress. In the five industries studied (trucking, computer chips, financial services, software and food stores), the productivity of the best establishments is often double that of the worst. Replacing the less efficient with the more efficient ultimately lowers costs and raises living standards. [...]

The economy will remain precarious if it remains productive. The new technologies and products we celebrate inflict anxiety by redefining middle-class society. The causes of our success are also the sources of our stress. Of course, many of today's complaints (growing inequality, eroding health insurance) are legitimate and, to some extent, might be corrected. But the remedies -- assuming they didn't make matters worse -- would succeed only temporarily, because they would not erase the basic dilemma.

The middle-class "squeeze" never vanishes. Sometimes the economy so outperforms expectations (say, after World War II or during the late 1990s) that it creates a lull. But that merely elevates expectations to more unrealistic levels and ensures later disappointment. The economy pleases most people most of the time -- but can never please everyone all of the time.

We need tv to bring back shows like the Waltons.

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THEY HAVE TO GET LUCKY EVERY DAY...:

Taleban 'admit commander's death' (BBC, 12/27/06)

The Taleban are reported to have confirmed the death of a senior commander who the Americans said they had killed in Afghanistan last week.

Initially, the Taleban denied that Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani had died in an air strike in Helmand province. [...]

"He has died. We got this information on the day of the strike but our leadership ordered us not to disclose it," Reuters reports the commander as telling one of its journalists by phone.

map

"He was not only an experienced military commander but also good in making financial transactions for us... his death will have some bad impact on our movement for some time."

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THE MUSICIAN AS EXECUTIVE:

Godfather of Soul, and C.E.O. of His Band (KELEFA SANNEH, 12/27/06, NY Times)

Most of all, he was an old-fashioned, hard-driving bandleader — which is to say, an anomaly. In an era of rock stars he often seemed like the second coming of Cab Calloway; the old big band had gotten smaller, but the man in front had only grown. [...]

He was black and proud, he was a sex machine, but he was also a brilliant conductor, known for coaxing great performances out of the singers and musicians behind him. That, most of all, is what Mr. Brown did. [...]

In this sense the bandleader was also a brand leader: in the 1970s, especially, “James Brown” was not just a star, but an executive, a producer, a franchise. His name (sometimes his face too) on the record label meant you were getting a James-Brown-approved product. And if you went to see the J.B.’s, the backing band that morphed into a terrific stand-alone group, you were also seeing a reflection of Mr. Brown, even if he was nowhere near the building.

Bandleaders have always (of necessity) been businessmen too, but Mr. Brown was wise enough to be unembarrassed by the echo. There was a hint of corporate precision in the way he led those musicians onstage: each wiggle of the hip or flicker of the hand was an urgent memo from top management; each post-show conversation was a performance evaluation. Even his political program reflected this obsession; his vision of black power was in large part a vision of black spending power, and he saw no reason why a black nationalist shouldn’t also be an eager (and successful) black capitalist.

The musician as executive: this is the not-quite-new notion that defines the current musical era.

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WHY WOULD THIS TIME BE ANY DIFFERENT?:

With Promises of a Better-Run Congress, Democrats Take on Political Risks (CARL HULSE, 12/27/06, NY Times)

Republican rule on Capitol Hill drew to an exhausted end just before dawn on Dec. 9 after lawmakers dispatched a pile of bills that few had read and even fewer had helped write. Democrats say the era of such chaotic and secretive legislating came to a close as well.

After chafing for years under what they saw as flagrant Republican abuse of Congressional power and procedures, the incoming majority has promised to restore House and Senate practices to those more closely resembling the textbook version of how a bill becomes law: daylight debate, serious amendments and minority party participation.

Beyond the parliamentary issues, Democrats assuming control on Jan. 4 said they also wanted to revive collegiality and civility in an institution that has been poisoned by partisanship in recent years.

If Ms Pelosi starts reading every page of every bill that Congress passes (nevermind considers) she'll spend the year doing nothing but...which actually wouldn't be a bad thing. And since she's going to have a hard enough time getting her own party to vote with her, there's no way she can allow the GOP any meaningful participation. She does sound like Newt and W did though.

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ON TO DAMASCUS:

Bush Could Usher in a Very Dangerous New Year (Robert Parry, December 27, 2006, Consortium News)

The first two or three months of 2007 represent a dangerous opening for an escalation of war in the Middle East, as George W. Bush will be tempted to "double-down" his gamble in Iraq by joining with Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair to strike at Syria and Iran, intelligence sources say.

President Bush's goal would be to transcend the bloody quagmire bogging down U.S. forces in Iraq by achieving "regime change" in Syria and by destroying nuclear facilities in Iran, two blows intended to weaken Islamic militants in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

When has he ever not thrown the long ball?

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WHEN ISRAEL READS FROM ITS ENEMIES NARRATIVES:

Hezbollah rises from ruins of its Beirut home: Its political resurgence traces to the Israeli destruction of Dahiyeh, which it aims to remake. (Megan K. Stack, December 27, 2006, LA Times)

To stroll through the Dahiyeh, the predominantly Shiite Muslim slums of south Beirut, is to take a tour through the ruins of Hezbollah's past — and prospects for its future. Nearly six months after Israeli airstrikes laid waste to these streets, teams of Hezbollah designers are drawing up grand plans for the area's rebirth.

This is more than terra sancta for the powerful Shiite political party and militia. In a real sense, the Dahiyeh and its people are Hezbollah: a district and a movement defined by each other.

Against this tumbledown backdrop, Haidar has lived out his tumultuous 18 years: His father, a Hezbollah official, was assassinated here when Haidar was a child. Haidar drove an ambulance through these streets during last summer's war with Israel, sleeping on sidewalks while explosions shook the earth. He lost the apartment where he lived with his mother and sister, and rented a new one with a cash handout from Hezbollah.

Thousands of stories like Haidar's, chronicles of displacement, hope and fighting, crisscross the streets of the Dahiyeh. It was in these slums that Hezbollah first began to use the deprivation of Lebanon's Shiites as an instrument of defiance, and to turn generations of neglect into political capital.

In spite of, and in part because of, the destruction of its de facto capital and southern heartland, Hezbollah emerged from the war with heavy political ambitions. No longer willing to remain largely independent of state power, Hezbollah called massive street demonstrations to demand a larger share in the government.

"The Dahiyeh is the history of the Shiites, the transformation from quietism to activism," says Ibrahim Moussawi, editor of Hezbollah's newspaper and a Dahiyeh native. "When you talk about the Dahiyeh, you talk about the grimmest face of Lebanon."

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THEY SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED TO DRIVE. PERIOD.

Bill sets tougher teen driving rules (Michael Levenson and Raja Mishra, December 27, 2006, Boston Globe)

Key state lawmakers reached an agreement yesterday on legislation intended to prevent crashes involving teen drivers by dramatically boosting training requirements and stiffening the penalties for reckless behavior behind the wheel. [...]

"This is a tough, no-nonsense bill," said Senator Steven A. Baddour , a Methuen Democrat and Senate chairman of the Legislature's Joint Committee on Transportation. "We strike an appropriate balance between education and penalties."

Under current law, a teenager can get a learner's permit at 16, then a junior operator's license at 16 1/2, and a full license at 18.

Under the bill, a driver with a learner's permit would have to spend at least 40 hours driving with a parent or other adult with a driver's license in the car, up from the current 12 hours, before the teen could get a junior operator's license. If the teenager passes an advanced driver's education course that teaches defensive driving techniques, that requirement would be cut to 30 hours. The requirement would be on the honor system; a parent or adult would sign a form certifying the number of hours.

Teenagers would also have to spend 12 hours behind the wheel in their regular driver's education courses, up from the current six hours, lawmakers said.

The bill also adds significant penalties for teens who violate the law.

Driving can wait until you're an adult: 21 or married.

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INTERESTING TO CONSIDER...:

Former President Gerald Ford Dies (AP, 12/26/06)

Gerald R. Ford, who picked up the pieces of Richard Nixon's scandal-shattered White House as the 38th and only unelected president in America's history, has died, his wife said. He was 93.

Details on his death Tuesday were not immediately available.

Gerald Ford dies at 93 (Mark Feeney, December 27, 2006, Boston Globe)

The burden of Nixon's legacy extended beyond Watergate. On Oct. 8, Mr. Ford unveiled his WIN program, "Whip Inflation Now," but it had little effect, and high unemployment as well as rising prices dogged his time in office. What was perhaps the administration's darkest hour came in April 1975 with the collapse of the US-supported regime in South Vietnam. The image of helicopters frantically evacuating refugees from the roof of the Saigon embassy symbolized declining US power.

Aware of the perception of US helplessness, Mr. Ford ordered on May 14 the rescue of the crew of a US merchant ship, the Mayaguez, which had been seized by Cambodia. The ship and its crew were recovered, though at the cost of 41 American lives. Mr. Ford regarded the rescue as one of the proudest moments of his presidency, and the ship's wheel is displayed at the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids.

Retaining Henry Kissinger as secretary of state, Mr. Ford continued Nixon's policy of detente with the Soviet Union. He held a summit with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in Vladivostok in November. His refusal to meet with exiled Soviet author Alexander Solzhenitsyn drew widespread criticism in July 1975. A few weeks later, Mr. Ford attended in Helsinki the 35-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the largest gathering of European heads of state since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and signed the Helsinki Accords on human rights. Mr. Ford also continued detente with China, journeying to Beijing in the late fall of 1975.

Mr. Ford's foreign policy made him unpopular with the right wing of his party, as had selecting former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller to succeed him as vice president. Former California governor Reagan announced he would oppose Mr. Ford for the 1976 Republican presidential nomination. At first, it seemed a futile quest, but Reagan's focus on the prospective "giveaway" of the Panama Canal energized his campaign. He came within 59 votes of denying Mr. Ford the nomination at the Republican Convention in Kansas City.

It was the end of an era in Republican politics: the last stand of the Midwestern-based party of the past, barely eking out a victory over the Sunbelt-based party of the future. Reagan's unenthusiastic support hindered Mr. Ford in the fall campaign.

...how inconsequential this former president was, particularly in light of James Brown's passing. Even in political terms the singer mattered more.

MORE:
Ford dies at 93 (Bill Nichols and Tom Vanden Brook, 12/26/06, USA TODAY)
Gerald R. Ford, 93, Dies; Led in Watergate's Wake (J.Y. Smith and Lou Cannon, 12/27/06, The Washington Post)
Gerald Ford, 38th President, Dies at 93 (JAMES M. NAUGHTON and ADAM CLYMER, 12/27/06, NY Times)
Gerald Ford dies at 93: Sworn in after Nixon resigned, new president helped nation recover (Robert L. Jackson, December 27, 2006, LA Times)

Untainted himself by Watergate, Ford was left the task of restoring public confidence in an institution badly damaged by the corrosive constitutional crisis that, until Nixon's resignation, was spiraling toward the president's impeachment and conviction in the Senate.

But, after serving barely a month as president, Ford made the controversial decision to grant Nixon a blanket pardon for any crimes he may have committed while in office. Many thought Ford's move fueled national cynicism about government and the officials who ran it. Others thought it was the correct decision to move the country past Watergate.

Ford defended his actions by saying he had hoped to end the bitter debate over whether to prosecute Nixon, which had become a serious distraction for the White House. He conceded after his narrow defeat by Carter in 1976, however, that the pardon had had "an adverse impact" on his popular support, although he maintained that he had made the "right decision."

Ford took over a disoriented and virtually immobilized administration at a time of mounting problems. Abroad, the long, costly U.S. military presence in Southeast Asia was nearing an end. At home, an economy warped by inflation and energy shortages was sliding into a recession.

The new president sought to distinguish his habits from the perception that his predecessor ran an imperial presidency. Ford replaced Nixon's aides, and White House officials became more accessible than they had been in years. Trust and civility began to reappear in White House relations with Congress and the public.

One morning, he invited the White House press corps to chat with him while he ate a typical breakfast. As photographers snapped away, Ford sliced and buttered his own English muffins in the manner of the Upper Midwesterner he was.

Although Ford defended the American commitment in Southeast Asia after most U.S. officeholders had written it off as political poison, he showed early sensitivity as president to the domestic divisions left by the unpopular conflict.

To promote "the rebuilding of peace among ourselves," he initiated a conditional clemency plan that he said would give draft dodgers and deserters a chance to "work their way back" to full citizenship.

Supporters praised Ford for integrity, openness and stubborn determination. His detractors called him unimaginative and outdated, an accidental president unqualified for the White House. A public perception of Ford as a fumbler took shape after a series of minor accidents was exploited in derisive commentary and cartoons.

He survived two attempts on his life. Both occurred in California in the same month — September 1975.

On the morning of Sept. 5, a young woman named Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a member of the Charles Manson family who had not been involved in Manson-related murders, aimed a borrowed .45-caliber pistol at Ford as he crossed a park near the state Capitol in Sacramento. The gun misfired as a Secret Service agent grabbed her arm.

Less than three weeks later, on Sept. 22, Sara Jane Moore, later diagnosed as psychologically disturbed, fired a shot at Ford from across the street as he emerged from the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. A retired Marine who saw Moore raise the gun struck her arm and deflected the shot. Again, Ford was not injured.

Both women were convicted for the attempted assassinations and were sentenced to life imprisonment.

But more fundamental problems confronted Ford's administration and, indirectly, his candidacy for an elected presidential term of his own.

Although the end of the Vietnam War in May 1975 meant that the nation was technically at peace for the first time in 11 years, international tensions continued. The administration was in a drawn-out confrontation with Congress on military posture, foreign policy and controls over covert intelligence operations.

On the foreign policy front, Ford — with help from holdover Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger — played a leading role in the Helsinki Accords, in which the Soviet Union in 1975 agreed to basic freedoms of religion and conscience for all peoples. Although some dismissed the accords as worthless, some historians now believe they paved the way for later democratic reforms among the Soviet people.

Domestically, Ford sought to slay the twin beasts of a deepening recession and ballooning inflation with an economic program that was largely ineffective. He dubbed it "Whip Inflation Now," using the acronym WIN. Unemployment in 1975 had reached 9.2%, a 34-year high, and inflation was at 11%.

Ford offered everyone in the nation a WIN button to encourage support for his campaign for such voluntary measures as cost-cutting by businesses and compliance with a 55-mph speed limit to reduce reliance on foreign oil. Soon there were WIN parades, WIN work projects and WIN flags.

But high unemployment continued into the 1976 election year. And, although the pall of Watergate was largely lifted, basic policy directions were little changed from the Nixon era.

The Ford presidency: Gerald Ford, who took over from a disgraced Richard Nixon, led the U.S. out of the shadow of Watergate. (LA Times, December 27, 2006)

Ford will be remembered most for one act: his pardon of Nixon, just one month after the resignation. Ford wanted to govern as the president who led his nation out of the long shadow of Watergate. Yet his ill-timed and ill-considered pardon actually drew the shadow of Watergate over Ford's own presidency, destroying the Republican Party's chances in midterm elections that year and perhaps contributing to Ford's reelection loss to Jimmy Carter in 1976.

The pardon was a mistake, inconsistent with the fundamental principle that everyone, including the president, is equal before the law.

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GEEZ, EVEN THE ITALIANS COULD BEAT THE ETHIOPIANS:

Islamists flee Ethiopian onslaught in Somalia (Mike Pflanz, 27/12/2006, Daily Telegraph)

Ethiopian troops routed Islamist forces in fighting and air strikes across Somalia yesterday, killing 1,000 and forcing survivors into a hurried retreat.

Fighters of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) were pushed out of several strategic towns close to the seat of Somalia's weak transitional government, which Addis Ababa has sent 4,000 troops to protect. Convoys of technicals – pick-ups fitted with anti-aircraft guns – were speeding south from the frontline towards their power base in Mogadishu, with the Ethiopians giving chase.

Militia members ride a truck mounted with anti-aircraft gun as they arrive at the former milk factory compound in Mogadishu
Abdikarin Farah, Somalia's ambassador to Ethiopia, said in Addis Ababa: "Ethiopian forces are on their way to Mogadishu. They are about 40 miles away and they could capture it in 48 hours."

The more organized Islamicists are the easier target they make.

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DO THIRD PARTIES JUST FORCE THE THIRD WAY?:

Who is supporting the rise of social conservatism? (Daniel Donahoo, 22 December 2006, Online Opinion)

Is it possible that the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party is contributing more to the rise of socially conservative, family-driven politics than John Howard and the Liberals?

Recent election results in Victoria suggest that it is Labor who has been responsible for electing representatives of Family First and the Democratic Labor Party who have run anti-abortion, family-focused campaigns. And, former Labor premiers Cain and Kirner are expressing their disappointment.

The election of Family First’s Steve Fielding to the Senate in the 2004 Federal election and the recent results in Victoria where Peter Kavanagh of the DLP was elected to the Upper House demonstrates just how far the Australian Labor Party has moved to the right. Its members are stranded between a desire to support the idealism of the Greens and the need to appeal to comfortable, consumer-driven middle Australia.
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The reality is, that in trying to present an alternative opposition and be competitive, they have been drifting right for more than a decade. The result, in this game of tug and war, is the Liberals are having the greater long-term political impact.

Paul Austin in The Age, (December 14, 2006) rightly pointed out that democracy is not in trouble just because the DLP have got a seat in the Victorian parliament after 20 years. But, we should be troubled by Labor parties who preside over significant surpluses and don’t use them to adequately improve the health and well-being of our society. So powerful has the pull of neo-capitalism been, Labor runs the economy more conservatively than the conservatives.

It's certainly conspicuous that in Britain, which has a semi-serious third party, and when America had its only recent viable third party candidacy, the leaders of Labour and the Democrats ran to the Right of the "conservative" parties.

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AN EASY WAR TO LOVE:

Christmas lives, thanks to atheism, Islam (James P. Pinkerton, December 26, 2006, Newsday)

First, and most obviously, there's the steadfast religiosity of the American people; polls routinely show that 90 percent of Americans believe in God. Secular progressives have done their best to knock the faith out of people, but it doesn't seem to be working.

Part of the problem is that those who are most inclined to accept "modernity" are oftentimes the least inclined to have children. So "converts" to atheism have a way of disappearing without heirs, while those who stick with their faith, including the injunction to go forth and multiply, are more likely to have kids who inherit at least some degree of devotion.

A second reason for the survival of Christmas is that people seek out rituals and traditions to help provide meaning and context for their lives. The self-declared forces of enlightenment and progress thought that they could demolish the structures of belief, and that after those structures had fallen, people would be free and liberated. Well, it didn't work out like that: People who were liberated from the old ways often found they had become slaves to some new ideology - made worse, as Winston Churchill said of the Nazis, "by the lights of perverted science."

In which case, Christianity starts to look pretty good to Christians. And so, to adapt a witticism from 18th-century writer Voltaire - himself an agnostic, at most - if Christmas didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent it.

Voltaire's purported agnosticism was barely more real than the war on Christmas.

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THE ANTI-WEBB:

Troop Push Is Personal For McCain (Senator Calls for Iraq Boost as Son Becomes a Marine (Elizabeth Williamson, 12/26/06, Washington Post)

John McCain's public certainty about Iraq masks a more private and potentially wrenching connection. If more troops go there, as McCain hopes they will, his youngest son could be one of them, taking his place in a line of family warriors that is one of the longest in U.S. history. [...]

A leading contender for the GOP presidential nomination, McCain has been one of the few and among the most vocal politicians pressing for more troops in Iraq. "We left Vietnam, it was over, we just had to heal the wounds of war. We leave this place . . . and they'll follow us home," he said on a news show recently. "So there's a great deal more at stake."

McCain's own father faced the anguish of sending a son to war. Adm. John McCain Jr., who commanded Pacific forces during the Vietnam War, ordered airstrikes on Hanoi even while his son, a Navy pilot, was imprisoned there after being shot down.

McCain was held captive for more than five years, repeatedly beaten and tortured. On more than one occasion, the North Vietnamese offered to release him as a propaganda move to shame his father. McCain, citing a prisoners' code of conduct requiring that POWs be released in order of capture, refused.

During McCain's imprisonment, his father, while privately collecting every scrap of information about his son that he could, "made an ironclad rule that no one would talk about his son around him," said Torie Clark, who was a staffer for the younger McCain and a Pentagon spokeswoman. "He wanted to make sure he made decisions based on what was right for U.S. forces . . . not what would be good or bad for his son.

"I'm not surprised that the current John McCain separates the private from the public."

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SCOUR YE THE HORSE ANEW (via Mike Daley):

THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE HORSE (G.K. Chesterton)

Prefatory Note

This ballad needs no historical notes, for the simple reason that it does not profess to be historical. All of it that is not frankly fictitious, as in any prose romance about the past, is meant to emphasize tradition rather than history. King Alfred is not a legend in the sense that King Arthur may be a legend; that is, in the sense that he may possibly be a lie. But King Alfred is a legend in this broader and more human sense, that the legends are the most important things about him.

The cult of Alfred was a popular cult, from the darkness of the ninth century to the deepening twilight of the twentieth. It is wholly as a popular legend that I deal with him here. I write as one ignorant of everything, except that I have found the legend of a King of Wessex still alive in the land. I will give three curt cases of what I mean. A tradition connects the ultimate victory of Alfred with the valley in Berkshire called the Vale of the White Horse. I have seen doubts of the tradition, which may be valid doubts. I do not know when or where the story started; it is enough that it started somewhere and ended with me; for I only seek to write upon a hearsay, as the old balladists did. For the second case, there is a popular tale that Alfred played the harp and sang in the Danish camp; I select it because it is a popular tale, at whatever time it arose. For the third case, there is a popular tale that Alfred came in contact with a woman and cakes; I select it because it is a popular tale, because it is a vulgar one. It has been disputed by grave historians, who were, I think, a little too grave to be good judges of it. The two chief charges against the story are that it was first recorded long after Alfred¹s death, and that (as Mr. Oman urges) Alfred never really wandered all alone without any thanes or soldiers. Both these objections might possibly be met. It has taken us nearly as long to learn the whole truth about Byron, and perhaps longer to learn the whole truth about Pepys, than elapsed between Alfred and the first writing of such tales. And as for the other objection, do the historians really think that Alfred after Wilton, or Napoleon after Leipsic, never walked about in a wood by himself for the matter of an hour or two? Ten minutes might be made sufficient for the essence of the story. But I am not concerned to prove the truth of these popular traditions. It is enough for me to maintain two things: that they are popular traditions; and that without these popular traditions we should have bothered about Alfred about as much as we bother about Eadwig.

One other consideration needs a note. Alfred has come down to us in the best way (that is, by national legends) solely for the same reason as Arthur and Roland and the other giants of that darkness, because he fought for the Christian civilization against the heathen nihilism. But since this work was really done by generation after generation, by the Romans before they withdrew, and by the Britons while they remained, I have summarised this first crusade in a triple symbol, and given to a fictitious Roman, Celt, and Saxon, a part in the glory of Ethandune. I fancy that in fact Alfred¹s Wessex was of very mixed bloods; but in any case, it is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment; to see all ages in a sort of splendid foreshortening. That is the use of tradition: it telescopes history.

G.K.C.

Comments

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WITH A PEN:

A Hero in His Own Right (SETH LIPSKY, December 26, 2006, NY Sun)

Uri Dan, who died Sunday at the age of 71, was one of the great journalists of his time. To thousands of New Yorkers he was known for his dispatches in the New York Post, which he served for 25 years as its correspondent in Israel. In 1954, he started writing for an Israel Defense Force paper. Early on, he met a young Israeli officer, Ariel Sharon, and the famous friendship began. It was Dan who, years later, forecast that those who would not have Ariel Sharon as chief of staff would have him as defense minister and those who would not have him as defense minister would have him as prime minister.

I first met Dan in the early 1980s, when he accompanied Mr. Sharon, then Menachem Begin's defense minister, on a visit to Washington and New York to explain the goals of the invasion of Lebanon that was going to take place the next time Israel was attacked by terrorist groups based there. Dan's role seemed a bit murky. Was he an adviser to the defense minister or merely a journalist covering him or simply a friend? He turned out to be all three.

What became clear over the years since is that Uri Dan had one of the truest understandings of Israel and the wider world in all of newspaperdom. This was apparent in his thousands of dispatches, broadcasts, and magazine articles, not to mention the books, that poured from his pen or the photographs that got captured by his camera. We may be in an age where the preoccupation is with the medium — the rise of the Internet, the fate of newspapers, the fragmentation of radio, the erosion of the big networks. Yet Uri Dan still worked with a pen. He made his mark not by pioneering a new medium but by championing a great cause.

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SUZE ORMOND FOR A WEEK:

A Chameleon Shows Her Colors (FRED KIRSHNIT, December 26, 2006, NY Sun)

Renée Fleming has nothing left to prove at the opera house, and so it was heartening to observe her self-confidence and listen to an entire Thursday evening at Carnegie Hall without one single aria on the printed program. The concert, titled Rejoice Greatly, contained nods to the world of classical music but was primarily a Christmas compendium of favorite songs in varying styles. Ms. Fleming proved that she was a master of each and every one of them.

The more elevated repertoire ranged from the Baroque to the modern and demonstrated Ms. Fleming's chameleon sense of subtle coloration. She is absolutely the best at interpreting the music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — anyone who has ever heard her Seven Early Songs of Alban Berg will testify to this — and so was superbly warm in the Maria Wiegenlied of Max Reger, with its reference to the main theme of the second of the Two Songs for Alto, Viola and Piano of Johannes Brahms. Also deeply satisfying was the velvety vibrato of Dank sei dir, Herr, a piece by fin de siècle composer Siegfried Ochs purportedly based on a Handelian air.

Handel was, of course, on the program and Ms. Fleming's "Rejoice Greatly" was notable for its steely ornamentation, perfectly on pitch melisma. But personally, I was more moved by her larger-than-life intonation of Leonard Bernstein's "A Simple Song," whose title belies its complexities.

You could hardly turn on PBS this weekend without seeing Ms Fleming in one of several fine Christmas concerts, a pleasant change from their seemingly endless baby boomer fare.

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A TAYMOR MAGIC FLUTE SOUNDS INTRIGUING:

See classic opera on the big screen (Melinda Bargreen, 12/26/06, Seattle Times)

[T]hree sites are the only places in the state of Washington where the Metropolitan Opera's first live high-definition "simulcast" broadcasts into movie theaters will take place, starting Jan. 6. Only Auburn has all five of the opera broadcasts. (There's also a Dec. 30 showing of "The Magic Flute," staged by Julie Taymor and conducted by James Levine, but it won't be shown in any theaters in our state.)

The other five of the six broadcasts, sent into selected movie theaters in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. via satellite, will include Bellini's "I Puritani" (with Anna Netrebko), Tan Dun's "The First Emperor" (with Plácido Domingo), Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin" (with Renée Fleming), Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" (staged by Intiman Theatre's Bartlett Sher) and Puccini's "Il Trittico" (with Salvatore Licitra and Stephanie Blythe). [...]

Eight cameras will capture the performances live at the Met and relay them to 40-foot screens in the theaters. With a U.S. cinema partner, National CineMedia, and a Canadian partner, Cineplex Entertainment, the Met is broadcasting into select movie theaters equipped with satellite-based HD (high definition) projection systems, including those of the Regal Entertainment Group (Regal Cinemas, United Artists and Edwards), Cinemark, and AMC theaters in the U.S. and Cineplex Odeon, Galaxy, and Famous Players Theatres in Canada. An estimated 135 theaters across the country have the special technology for high-definition events. Only 56 of them have signed on to present the first production, "The Magic Flute," but by the end of the first season, the number of theaters presenting the simulcasts is planned to rise to 117.

To read more about the movie-theater live broadcasts, including synopses and information about the operas, visit www.metoperafamily.org/hdlive.

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PASS THE MERCURY SALT:

Banality And Barefaced Lies (Robert Fisk, 26 December, 2006, The Independent)

I call it the Alice in Wonderland effect. Each time I tour the United States, I stare through the looking glass at the faraway region in which I live and work for The Independent - the Middle East - and see a landscape which I do no recognise, a distant tragedy turned, here in America, into a farce of hypocrisy and banality and barefaced lies. Am I the Cheshire Cat? Or the Mad Hatter?

I picked up Jimmy Carter's new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid at San Francisco airport, and zipped through it in a day. It's a good, strong read by the only American president approaching sainthood.

Way to answer your own question.

MORE:
A Religious Problem (MICHAEL B. OREN , December 26, 2006, Opinion Journal)

Whether in its secular and/or observant manifestations, Israel clearly discomfits Mr. Carter, a man who, even as president, considered himself in "full-time Christian service." Yet, in revealing his unease with the idea of Jewish statehood, Mr. Carter sets himself apart from many U.S. presidents before and after him, as well as from nearly 400 years of American Christian thought.

Generations of Christians in this country, representing a variety of dominations, laymen and clergy alike, have embraced the concept of renewed Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. The passion was already evident in 1620, when William Bradford alighted on Plymouth Rock and exclaimed, "Come, let us declare the word of God in Zion." Bradford was a leader of the Puritans, dissenting Protestants who, in their search for an unsullied religion and the strength to resist state oppression, turned to the Old Testament. There, they found a God who spoke directly to his people, who promised to deliver them from bondage and return them to their ancestral homeland. Appropriating this narrative, the Puritans fashioned themselves as the New Jews and America as their New Promised Land. They gave their children Hebrew names--David, Benjamin, Sarah, Rebecca--and called over 1,000 of their towns after Biblical places, including Bethlehem, Bethel and, of course, New Canaan.

Identifying with the Jews, a great many colonists endorsed the notion of restoring Palestine to Jewish control. Elias Boudinot, president of the Continental Congress, predicted that the Jews, "however scattered . . . are to be recovered by the mighty power of God, and restored to their beloved . . . Palestine." John Adams imagined "a hundred thousand Israelites" marching triumphantly into Palestine. "I really wish the Jews in Judea an independent nation," he wrote. During the Revolution, the association between America's struggle for independence and the Jews' struggle for repatriation was illustrated by the proposed Great Seal designed by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, showing Moses leading the Children of Israel toward the Holy Land.

Restorationism became a major theme in antebellum religious thought and a mainstay of the Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian churches. In his 1844 bestseller, "The Valley of the Vision," New York University Bible scholar George Bush--a forebear of two presidents of the same name--called on the U.S. to devote its economic and military might toward re-creating a Jewish polity in Palestine. But merely envisioning such a state was insufficient for some Americans, who, in the decades before the Civil War, left home to build colonies in Palestine. Each of these settlements had the same goal: to teach the Jews, long disenfranchised from the land, to farm and so enable them to establish a modern agrarian society. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln said that "restoring the Jews to their homeland is a noble dream shared by many Americans," and that the U.S. could work to realize that goal once the Union prevailed.

Nineteenth-century restorationism reached its fullest expression in an 1891 petition submitted by Midwestern magnate William Blackstone to President Benjamin Harrison. The Blackstone Memorial, as it was called, urged the president to convene an international conference to discuss ways of reviving Jewish dominion in Palestine. Among the memorial's 400 signatories were some of America's most preeminent figures, including John D. Rockefeller, J. Pierpont Morgan, Charles Scribner and William McKinley. By the century's turn, those advocating restored Jewish sovereignty in Palestine had begun calling themselves Zionists, though the vast majority of the movement's members remained Christian rather than Jewish. "It seems to me that it is entirely proper to start a Zionist State around Jerusalem," wrote Teddy Roosevelt, "and [that] the Jews be given control of Palestine."

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MONEY WHERE THEIR MOUTHS AREN'T:

The future's so bright?: The markets are pricing in tranquillity as far as the eye can see. The commentariat begs to differ. (Lawrence H. Summers, December 26, 2006, LA Times)

THE YEAR 2007 will begin with a vast divergence between the popular view of global risks and the risks as priced in financial markets. While the commentariat has been more alarmed about the state of the world than global markets for some years, the gap increased in 2006 as markets became more serene and everyone else grew more anxious.

The headlines and opinion writers focus on how the U.S. is badly bogged down in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; on an increasingly unstable Middle East and dangerous energy dependence; on nuclear proliferation that has already occurred in North Korea and that is coming in Iran; on the potential weakness of lame-duck political leaders; on record global trade imbalances and rising protectionist pressures; on increased levels of public and private-sector borrowing combined with record low saving in the United States; and on falling home prices and middle-class economic insecurity.

At the same time, financial markets are pricing in an expectation of tranquillity as far as the eye can see. Stock prices in the U.S. are at all-time highs. The risk premiums that corporations or developing countries have to pay to borrow money are at or near historic lows. In addition, estimates of the volatility of the stock, bond and foreign exchange markets inferred from the prices of options are near record lows.

Why the divergence between the headlines and the markets? Will the journalists or the investors be proved right about the state of the world? Or will the divergence continue?

Bet all those commentators are heavily invested in the market too.

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DOES SHODDY WORK IMPROVE IF YOU GO FASTER?:

Airbus superjumbo mess not just tangled in wires (David Greising, 12/26/06, Chicago Tribune)

In the dawning effort to set things right at Airbus' sprawling production plant here, one of modern industry's biggest meltdowns, is a tale of two airplane-production hangars and two countries, Germany and France.

Nearly 600 people should be hard at work in the key production hangar here, where Airbus planned to assemble the giant sections of the world's largest passenger airplane, the A380.

Instead, the quiet is broken only by music playing softly on stereo speakers a worker sneaked in. Only a few dozen employees tinker on eight airplane carcasses clogging a production line that cost some $15 billion to develop.

The workers essentially are hand-building some of the company's first two-dozen A380s.

Airbus' superjumbo jet program was launched before Boeing's big hit, the 787 Dreamliner, but the A380 now is two years behind schedule. The production delay will cost Airbus' parent company, European Aeronautic Defence & Space (EADS), $6.1 billion i[n] operating profit over the next four years.

In Hangar 42 nearby, it is a different scene. Dozens of aerospace engineers are in a mad dash to untangle the A380's myriad problems. They huddle in front of computer terminals, set up on 15-foot-long folding tables, so that they can be in constant contact with workers in blue jumpsuits investigating a hobbled A380.

The workers, confronted with bundles of wire that won't bend in the right places and cables that come up short, explain the problems to the engineers and urge them to design new ones. And quickly.

The craft in Hangar 51 will be in service here sooner.

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WHO DO YOU WANT ME TO BE TO MAKE YOU VOTE FOR ME:

Obama Scores as Exotic Who Says Nothing (Froma Harrop, 12/26/06, Real Clear Politics)

Obama's appeal comes not from the things he says, but from who is saying them. He scores as an exotic who talks of barbershops and church socials in the flat tones you'd expect from any son of the prairie.

Had Bayh been half-Kenyan and raised in Hawaii by white grandparents from Kansas, he too would have become a political star, at least for the month of December. But he is a conventional white man. When Bayh speaks in the quiet Midwestern way, he gets tarred as lackluster.

Listen to Obama:

"There's not a liberal America and a conservative America, there is the United States of America." These unremarkable words, spoken at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, set off wild applause.

And here is the similar quote that got hearts thumping in New Hampshire: "We've got a series of very important decisions to make, and we have the opportunity to make them, not as Democrats, not as Republicans, but as Americans. And it's that promise that I'm most excited about."

Obama likes to say things like, "We can do better," and, "America is ready for a new set of challenges." He is all for "a spiritual recovery."

The senator dislikes the "either-or" type of debate and warns against "false choices." He's not too left, not too right. Sort of black, and sort of white.

What Ronald Reagan used to call the rubber chicken circuit the Senator has turned into the pabulum trail.

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THE COAL IN THE NATIVISTS' STOCKINGS:

Bipartisan Effort to Draft Immigration Bill (RACHEL L. SWARNS, 12/26/06, NY Times)

Counting on the support of the new Democratic majority in Congress, Democratic lawmakers and their Republican allies are working on measures that could place millions of illegal immigrants on a more direct path to citizenship than would a bill that the Senate passed in the spring.

The lawmakers are considering abandoning a requirement in the Senate bill that would compel several million illegal immigrants to leave the United States before becoming eligible to apply for citizenship.

The lawmakers are also considering denying financing for 700 miles of fencing along the border with Mexico, a law championed by Republicans that passed with significant Democratic support. [...]

The Senate plans to introduce its immigration bill next month with an eye toward passage in March or April, officials said. The House is expected to consider its version later. President Bush said last week that he hoped to sign an immigration bill next year.

The major lawmakers drafting the legislation include Senators Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona, along with Representatives Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, and Luis V. Gutierrez, Democrat of Illinois.

Military considers recruiting foreigners: Expedited citizenship would be an incentive (Bryan Bender, December 26, 2006, Boston Globe)

The armed forces, already struggling to meet recruiting goals, are considering expanding the number of noncitizens in the ranks -- including disputed proposals to open recruiting stations overseas and putting more immigrants on a faster track to US citizenship if they volunteer -- according to Pentagon officials.

Foreign citizens serving in the US military is a highly charged issue, which could expose the Pentagon to criticism that it is essentially using mercenaries to defend the country. Other analysts voice concern that a large contingent of noncitizens under arms could jeopardize national security or reflect badly on Americans' willingness to serve in uniform.

The idea of signing up foreigners who are seeking US citizenship is gaining traction as a way to address a critical need for the Pentagon, while fully absorbing some of the roughly one million immigrants that enter the United States legally each year.

Boy, the far Right really taught Republicans a lesson, huh?

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COMMISSIONS COME AND GO, THE PRESIDENT REMAINS:

War Critics See New Resistance by Bush (JIM RUTENBERG, 12/26/06, NY Times)

In a way, this is the president being the president he has always been — while he still can.

With Congress out of session, Mr. Bush has sought to reassert his relevance and show yet again that he can chart his own course against all prevailing winds, whether they be unfavorable election returns, a record-low standing in the polls or the public prescriptions of Washington wise men.

He has at least for now put the Iraq war debate on terms with which he is said to be more comfortable, if only because they are not the terms imposed on him by Democrats and the study group.

The President is only secondary to the Iraqis themselves.

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TALK IS CHEAP:

Consultant Helps Democrats Embrace Faith, and Some in Party Are Not Pleased (DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, 12/26/06, NY Times)

Party strategists and nonpartisan pollsters credit the operative, Mara Vanderslice, and her 2-year-old consulting firm, Common Good Strategies, with helping a handful of Democratic candidates make deep inroads among white evangelical and churchgoing Roman Catholic voters in Kansas, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. [...]

The midterm elections were a “proof point” for arguments that Ms. Vanderslice had made two years before, said Mike McCurry, a Democratic consultant and former spokesman for President Bill Clinton who worked with Ms. Vanderslice on the Kerry campaign. For the Democrats, Mr. McCurry said, Ms. Vanderslice and her company “were the only ones taking systematic, methodical steps to build a religious component in the practical campaign work.”

Democratic officials in several states said Ms. Vanderslice and her business partner, Eric Sapp, pushed sometimes reluctant Democrats to speak publicly, early and in detail about the religious underpinnings of their policy views. They persuaded candidates to speak at conservative religious schools and to buy early commercials on Christian radio. They organized meetings and conference calls for candidates to speak privately with moderate and conservative members of the clergy.

In Michigan, they helped the state’s Democratic Party follow up on these meetings by incorporating recognizably biblical language into its platform. In Michigan and Ohio, they enlisted nuns in phone banks to urge voters who were Catholic or opposed abortion rights to support Democratic candidates, with some of the nuns saying they were making the case in religious terms.

But Ms. Vanderslice’s efforts to integrate faith into Democratic campaigns troubles some liberals, who accuse her of mimicking the Christian right.

Dr. Welton Gaddy, president of the liberal Interfaith Alliance, said her encouragement of such overt religiosity raised “red flags” about the traditional separation of church and state.

“I don’t want any politician prostituting the sanctity of religion,” Mr. Gaddy said, adding that nonbelievers also “have a right to feel they are represented at the highest levels of government.”

To Ms. Vanderslice, that attitude is her party’s problem. In an interview, she said she told candidates not to use the phrase “separation of church and state,” which does not appear in the Constitution’s clauses forbidding the establishment or protecting the exercise of religion.

“That language says to people that you don’t want there to be a role for religion in our public life,” Ms. Vanderslice said. “But 80 percent of the public is religious, and I think most people are eager for that kind of debate.”

More than 80 percent, in fact, say they are Christian, according to polls, but Ms. Vanderslice grew up in the other 20 percent, in Boulder, Colo. She joined an evangelical Bible study group at Earlham College, a Quaker campus in Richmond, Ind., and says she was born again one day while singing the hymn “Here I Am Lord.”

“God’s love was so much stronger than any of my doubts,” she said, acknowledging that like some other young evangelicals she still struggles with common evangelical ideas about abortion, homosexuality and the literal reading of Scripture.

She was baptized by full immersion in Rock Creek in Washington, D.C., while working with Sojourners, an evangelical antipoverty group. She entered politics by working with a group advocating debt relief for the developing world, once participating in a rally organized by a coalition that included the AIDS activist group Act Up.

During the 2004 campaign, that tenuous relationship provided the grist for William Donohue, an outspoken conservative Catholic, to denounce her as “an ultra-leftist who consorts with anti-Catholic bigots,” calling Act Up “anti-Catholic.”

Ms. Vanderslice wanted to fight back. She argued that the Kerry campaign should rebut the charges as part of a broader articulation of the Democrats’ religious convictions. But she was overruled by other advisers, who argued that doing so would inflame conservatives while entrapping Mr. Kerry in debates about homosexuality and abortion, said the Rev. Robert F. Drinan, 86, a liberal priest and former congressman who was an adviser to Mr. Kerry. “She was a little bit overzealous,” Father Drinan said.

She and Mr. Sapp, 30, a Presbyterian minister’s son and a fellow evangelical with a divinity degree from Duke, set out to test the rejected ideas. They organized workshops in which Democratic candidates practiced delivering short statements about their faith or their moral values. They urged Democrats to meet with even the most staunchly conservative evangelical pastors in their districts.

They persuaded candidates not to avoid controversial subjects like abortion, advising those who supported abortion rights to speak about reducing demand for the procedure. And they cautioned against the approach of many liberal Christians, which is to argue that Jesus was interested only in social justice and not in sexual morality.

“The Gospel has both in it,” Mr. Sapp said. “You can’t act like caring about abortion and family issues makes you a judgmental fool.”

Most of all, they told Democratic candidates not to try to fake it, advising those of non-Christian faiths or no faith at all to talk about the origins of their sense of ethics.

“People want to know are you on your knees?” Ms. Vanderslice said. “Are you responsible to something that is bigger than yourself?”

Now they have to cast votes in Congress and we find out if the someone they're responsible to is God or Nancy Pelosi.

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THE BUTTON-DOWN MIND VS. THE BUTTON MEN:

Near-Death of a Salesman (BOB NEWHART, 12/26/06, NY Times)

TRADITIONALLY, the two busiest days in retail are the day after Thanksgiving and the day after Christmas, but for two very opposite reasons. One is for sales and the other for returns. But let me back up.

In 1957, I left my job in accounting, largely because I was troubled by the illogic of spending four hours (at $6 an hour) to find a $1.68 underage in the petty cash drawer at the Glidden Company’s soy division in Chicago.

I then took the logical step of devoting myself to a career in comedy, because accountants, of course, are known for their sense of humor.

Since I was not initially overwhelmed with offers, I needed to sustain myself with part-time employment. This included working for the Illinois State Unemployment office. Behind the counter, not in front of it.

It is no longer called the Illinois State Unemployment office. Shortly after I left, the name was changed to the Illinois State Department of Human Resources, apparently because of presumed sensitivities among the unemployed at being called unemployed. (I think they were called “underutilized human resources.”)

But the high point of my part-time work came during the Christmas season. Those December days were a godsend, offering numerous opportunities at department stores. The nice thing about these jobs is that they extended beyond Christmas — all because of “returns” day.

Even so gentle a soul as Bob Newhart can't resist taking shots at political correctness.

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AMAZING WHAT A HUNTING BAN WILL DO:

Bald Eagle to Be Taken Off Endangered List (Peter Slevin, 12/25/06, Washington Post)

Seven years after the U.S. government moved to take the bald eagle off the endangered species list, the Bush administration intends to complete the step by February, prodded by a frustrated libertarian property owner in Minnesota.

The delisting, supported by mainstream environmental groups, would represent a formal declaration that the eagle population has sufficiently rebounded, increasing more than 15-fold since its 1963 nadir to more than 7,000 nesting pairs.

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BETTER TELL THE 12TH TO BRING CASH:

Report: Iran's Oil Exports May Disappear (BARRY SCHWEID, 12/25/06, The Associated Press)

Iran is suffering a staggering decline in revenue from its oil exports, and if the trend continues income could virtually disappear by 2015, according to an analysis published Monday in a journal of the National Academy of Sciences.

Iran's economic woes could make the country unstable and vulnerable, with its oil industry crippled, Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Johns Hopkins University, said in the report and in an interview.

Iran earns about $50 billion a year in oil exports. The decline is estimated at 10 to 12 percent annually. In less than five years exports could be halved and then disappear by 2015, Stern predicted.

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WHAT ABOUT THAT FABULOUS CUBAN HEALTH CARE THE AMERICAN LEFT IS ALWAYS TALKING ABOUT?:

Cuba waits for Castro surgery diagnosis (Isabel Sanchez, December 26, 2006, Agence France-Presse)

CUBA is on tenterhooks today over Fidel Castro's fragile health, as residents of the Communist island await a visiting Spanish doctor's diagnois on whether additional surgery is needed.

Officials in Madrid confirmed today that a Spanish surgeon had been disptched to Cuba to treat Castro, 80, who has not been seen in public for five months. Few medical updates have been made public since his reported intestinal surgery.

"The Cuban Government decided to ask one of our top professionals to care for its president," health councilor for Madrid's regional government, Manuel Lamela said.

The diagnosis is easy: he's 100% fistula.

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HAPPY KWANZAA:

Learn about Kwanzaa, it's worth celebrating (Akilah Monifa, 12/24/06, Contra Costa Times)

Kwanzaa's seven principles -- of unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith -- are ones that many people, irrespective of background, can appreciate.

Millions of people, regardless of race or religion, now celebrate Kwanzaa worldwide. But even as our communities become increasingly multicultural and cross-cultural, acceptance has diminished for those who don't follow mainstream traditions around this time of year.

In the age of terror, we would all benefit to learn more about one another, and to embody Kwanzaa's ideals of happiness, unity and peace.

Kwanzaa: 40 years of celebrating values (David Mannweiler, 12/25/06, The Indianapolis Star)

For years, Keesha Dixon celebrated Christmas with fervor.

She had five Christmas trees. Lights strung everywhere. Empty boxes wrapped as presents under the trees.

"I told my husband, 'Enough. We're not doing this anymore,' " says Dixon, 53, executive director of the Asante Children's Theatre in Indianapolis. "I realized I had gone too far."

Dixon wanted something that would keep the spiritual enrichments of the season around all year — without the commercialization.

She found the answer in Kwanzaa, a nonsectarian holiday celebrating family, community and African culture.

She replaced her trees with a Kwanzaa display on a piece of colorful African fabric, draped over her living-room hope chest. On top of the cloth, she placed a wooden candelabra her husband made to hold seven candles — three red, three green and one black. She added an ear of miniature corn, family photos and a unity cup, which is used for a libation ritual.

The seven candles represent the seven Kwanzaa principles of unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith. A candle is lit each day or night during Kwanzaa, which annually runs Dec. 26 to Jan. 1, and the principle it represents is discussed with family members and friends who gather for a celebration.

"My display stays up 365 [days]," Dixon says. "Every time I pass it, I am reminded of the principles each candle stands for. I want to stay focused on those principles."

More cultural than religious, Kwanzaa rooted in tradition (Gwenda Anthony, 12/24/06, Gannett News Service)

Tradition is the key word that marks Kwanzaa as a celebration of family, community and culture, says Tulivu Jadi, assistant director at the African American Cultural Center in Los Angeles, where Kwanzaa had its origins.

"It is important to remember that Kwanzaa is not a trend but a tradition that is rooted in more substantive, longer-lasting practices," Jadi says.

Kwanzaa grew out of the 1965 Watts riots and an organization founded Sept. 7 of that year by Dr. Maulana Karenga, a professor of black studies at California State University in Long Beach.

Kwanzaa is Right Around the Corner (CNS, 12/25/06)

The seven-day festival of Kwanzaa begins tomorrow, marking its 40th anniversary amid growing official acceptance and criticism of its authenticity and value.

Maulana Karenga, a professor in Cal State Long Beach's Department of Black Studies, created Kwanzaa in 1966 in an attempt to reaffirm and restore blacks' ties to African culture, reaffirm and reinforce bonds among blacks and to introduce and reinforce the ''Nguzo Saba,'' the Seven Principles, according to the Official Kwanzaa Web Site, www.officialkwanzaawebsite.org.

The Seven Principles are unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith.

During the week, a candelabrum called a ''kinara'' is lit, and ears of corn representing each child in the family are placed on a traditional straw mat.

African foods such as millet, spiced pepper balls and rice are often served. Some people fast during the holiday, and a feast is often held on the holiday's final night.

A flag with three bars -- red for the struggle for freedom, black for unity and green for the future -- is sometimes displayed during the holiday.

Kwanzaa is based on the theory of Kawaida, which espouses that social revolutionary change for black America can be achieved by exposing blacks to their cultural heritage.

Kwanzaa not catching on despite black population (Associated Press, 12/25/06)

It has been four decades since Kwanzaa was created as an African-American celebration of family and community, but in that time it has not resonated widely in South Carolina, a state where one-third of the population is black.

"I personally don't know a single person who celebrates the holiday," said Marcus Cox, founding director of the African-American Studies Program at The Citadel. [...]

Cox said he and many other blacks respect the holiday, but there are barriers to its broader acceptance.

One of them is the timing of Kwanzaa, which is celebrated from Dec. 26 through Jan. 1.

"Christmas is a religious holiday. And most African-Americans are Christians," Cox said.

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VICARIOUS YULE:

Tokyo's King of Holiday Lights (SEBASTIAN MOFFETT and AMY CHOZICK, December 22, 2006, Wall Street Journal)

Looking for a way to please his newborn son eight years ago, Tomoyuki Ishikawa decorated a Christmas tree with colored lights. But the loving gesture turned into an obsession. Last year, Mr. Ishikawa arranged 83,000 light bulbs into images of snowmen, Santa and sleighs on the walls, entrance and roof of his house in this suburb north of Tokyo.

Some 5,000 people a day came to admire and take photographs, and the local police department sent crowd-control cops, who disturbed the neighbors as they barked orders by megaphone. Mr. Ishikawa's wife pointed out that the 20 million yen (about $170,000) he'd spent over the years on bulbs and electricity could have paid off their mortgage. He decided to make that year his last -- but set up a business putting up displays for others.

Mr. Ishikawa, 41, stands at the extreme end of a bizarre phenomenon. While Japan mostly practices a mixture of Buddhism and the indigenous religion of Shinto, it goes crazy over Christmas illuminations, turning homes, stores and businesses into twinkling fairytales of tiny lights.

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BOGGED DOWN IN MINUTIAE:

The rejection bin of history: Forty-seven years ago, two of the greatest names in American historiography laid out a plan for a grand, multivolume summation of American history. Why is it still only half finished? (Christopher Shea, December 24, 2006, Boston Globe)

THE LITERARY EDITOR of the Atlantic Monthly, Benjamin Schwarz, recently leveled a sweeping indictment against American historians. Some 47 years ago, he pointed out in the magazine's October issue, C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter, two of the greatest names in postwar American historiography, laid out a plan for a multivolume history of the United States. The series, to be published by Oxford University Press, would be a grand summation of their generation's understanding of American history, combining high politics with social and cultural history and bridging the widening chasm between professional historians and intelligent lay readers.

Yet nearly a half-century later, only five of a projected 11 volumes in the Oxford History of the United States have been completed. (The best-known, by far, is "Battle Cry of Freedom," by James McPherson, about the Civil War era, which was a major bestseller.) [...]

Apart from the McPherson Civil War book, the series so far includes "The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789," by Berkeley's Robert Middlekauff, "Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War," by Kennedy; and two books by James Patterson, who teaches at Brown: "Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974" and "Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush vs. Gore." (Patterson chalks up his fast pen in part to time he spent as a cub reporter at the Hartford Courant, in the late 1950s.)

Writing long, comprehensive, narrative histories carries little prestige within the academy these days, and this too seems to have had something to do with the delays. "The idea that you can sum up the scholarship of a previous generation in one volume just doesn't hold anymore," says Gordon Wood, a Brown historian who doesn't quite share that view. Wood has been working for a decade, off and on, on a book for the series, on the period 1789 to 1815. He says the end is in sight.

Mr. Kennedy's is the best in the series because it doesn't just sum up what that generation of historians believes, painting the New Deal as a failure instead and WWII as FDR's salvation.

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THE CONTEMPT OF THE CHATTERING CLASS (vis Tom Morin):

Do Iraqis Have Free Will?: Not according to liberals. (Theodore Dalrymple, 18 December 2006, City Journal)

A headline in the British liberal newspaper, the Guardian, caught my eye recently: IRAQIS CAN’T BE BLAMED FOR THE CHAOS UNLEASHED BY INVASION. The writer was that newspaper’s veteran foreign correspondent, Jonathan Steele (another immortal headline to one of his articles, in May 2002, read: NEW YORK IS STARTING TO FEEL LIKE BREZHNEV’S MOSCOW).

Let us grant, for argument’s sake, the article’s premise: that American policy in Iraq has been naive, rash, foolish, precipitate, and culpable. Yet still it would not follow that “Iraqis can’t be blamed” and so forth, unless one also believed what not even the severest critics of the Bush administration have alleged—that the American army, or other agents of the American government, have desired, planned, and even executed the ongoing terrorist attacks in Baghdad.

The only other explanation of the non-culpability of Iraqis would be that they were not really full members of the human race—in other words, that they did not reflect upon their circumstances and act upon their reflections in the way that the fully responsible and therefore potentially culpable Americans do.

The headline makes clear that double standards are about to apply, double standards that are not flattering to the Iraqis’ capacity for independent action, despite the evident wish of the author to display as conspicuously as possible his sympathy with them by means of exculpating them. Forgive them, he invites all men of goodwill, for they know not what they do.

Like hell, they don’t.

Not even the most ardent, anthropomorphic dog-lover credits his pet with a fully developed moral sense, and he therefore regards its misdemeanors with an indulgence that he would not extend to a ten-year-old child. The author regards Iraqis as if they were in the same moral category as pets: for can one really say that people who travel to a different part of the city to explode bombs, resulting in scores of deaths of people chosen merely because they are (most of them) of a different religious confession, do not appreciate what they are doing, any more than a dog appreciates what it does when it knocks over a precious porcelain vase?

The need to feel oneself in control of events is the signal characteristic of the Left--little wonder they think that their (our) actions control the wogs.

MORE:
When It Became Their Fault (Joseph Grosso, 26 December, 2006, Countercurrents.org

One of the more vulgar turns discourse over Iraq has taken over the past year is the bi-partisan, self-righteous way the bloody debacle is blamed almost entirely on the Iraqi people.

Speak of the devils.

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IT'S JUST THERE FOR THE PARENTS:

Homework becomes question for experts (Scott Stephens, 12/24/06, Cleveland Plain Dealer)

Alfie Kohn says he's been doing his homework, and here's what he's learned: No one should be doing homework.

Kohn, one of the education world's big-name pundits, helped ignite a debate this past fall over the merits of take-home school assignments.

His book, "The Homework Myth," concluded that homework is not only worthless busywork but also a crippling punishment that actually hurts kids' love of learning.

Amen, brother.

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THERE IS NO BOLIVIA?:

Bolivia's Morales faces biggest test: Political leaders in wealthy regions, long alienated from his Andes power base, are pushing for more autonomy (Patrick J. McDonnell, December 25, 2006, LA Times)

A political insurrection has enveloped four provinces in Bolivia's east, north and south, a swath of the country known as the half-moon that contains much of the nation's wealth, including most of its gas reserves. Political leaders there, long alienated from Morales' power base in the Andes heartland and the coca-growing tropics, are pushing for more autonomy.

Their supporters launched mass demonstrations, civic strikes and legislative action, culminating in huge protests Dec. 15.

"The road to autonomy is something that our society has been working toward for a long time, with mobilizations, protests and votes," said Germán Antelo, president of the Civic Committee of Santa Cruz, the thriving eastern lowland city that is the heart of the autonomy movement. "We're not looking to break away from Bolivia. We just want respect for popular will that seeks autonomy."

What autonomy would mean in practice is unclear, although it probably would include local governments receiving a larger share of taxes and royalties from their natural gas. This is not a small thing at a time when gas revenue is expected to increase by billions of dollars thanks to new contracts negotiated with foreign energy companies under Morales' nationalization scheme.

The president has signaled that he regards talk of autonomy as the first step toward breaking up the country, South America's poorest. He derides the autonomy movement as the elite's response to his leftist reforms.

Base your politics on racial identity and you've already ceded the self-determination argument.

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ONE RECRUITED, ONE COACHES:

Knight, Smith reach top taking different routes (Robyn Norwood, December 25, 2006, LA Times)

Bob Knight and Dean Smith share little in image or personal style, but their ideas on basketball often converged. [...]

As Knight closed in on the record, tying it Saturday when Texas Tech beat Bucknell, The Times spoke to three contemporaries of the two men, quizzing them on a series of superlatives that ranged from serious to jesting.

Jim Calhoun has coached two NCAA championship teams at Connecticut and is a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Gene Keady was Knight's adversary for many years when Knight was at Indiana and Keady was at Purdue. And broadcaster Dick Vitale has known both for decades, referring to them admiringly as "Robert Montgomery Knight" and "Michelangelo."

Best coach with a five-point lead and two minutes left:

• Calhoun: Bob Knight. When he had his best players, it was almost like they were in some kind of trance. I've heard other coaches say that. They played with such discipline.

• Keady: That's an even one. I played them both, and I want to say there wasn't much difference. Both were very well-organized, great strategists, with great players.

• Vitale: I want to be a politician here, but when you're coming down the stretch, a guy like Knight, he holds a lead. [...]

Best with less talent:

• Keady: Knight.

• Vitale: Knight could take even mediocre talent and get them to play their hearts out, to play to the best of their ability.

• Calhoun: Anybody who played for Knight instantly became better. He determined their role. I would say both could judge talent, and both could mold it. Steve Alford was a better college player because of Knight.

Best in a coaches' clinic:

• Vitale: I remember being a high school coach listening to Knight early in his career. I was absolutely in awe. So many concepts. He relishes those settings. Dean didn't like the public eye.

• Keady: They're probably equal clinicians.

• Calhoun: Dean is not as great a clinician, because he's a little secretive. He's probably most interested in social issues. I'd probably rather hear from Dean on social issues now.

Best at a booster club meeting:

• Vitale: I would give that edge without a doubt to Knight. Dean would rather not be part of a scene like that. Bob Knight can be hilarious when he's on a roll. He can rock the place.

• Keady: Probably Knight was the funniest at booster club meetings. I never heard Dean at one.

• Calhoun: No question, Bob is one of the most captivating speakers I've ever heard. I've heard Colin Powell, Mario Cuomo, Bill Clinton. Incredible. I put Bob Knight in the top five or six I ever heard speak. [...]

Best behind closed doors with his team:

• Keady: Bobby.

• Vitale: I think that's where both excelled. They were masters on a 94-by-50 court. There's no way I'd give an edge. That's their greatest asset.

• Calhoun: Bob Knight. I heard one of his meetings once, at the Great Alaska Shootout. We were sitting in the lounge and could hear it. It was an hour long. I wanted to go out and play. It was so captivating, we didn't move.

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NOT JUST ANOTHER BRICK:

Ferguson lets family, heart & soul be his guide (Lisa Olson, 12/25/06, NY Daily News)

"Don't worry if you aren't sure where life will take you," [D'Brickashaw Ferguson] tells the crowd of football players, their parents, coaches and cheerleaders. "The journey will take you somewhere positive as long as you make the right choices."

There are times when Ferguson sounds like such an old soul. It's as if his brain is cluttered with so much wisdom, so many positive thoughts, he sometimes needs to pause before fully completing a sentence. At 23, and graced with the talent and the luck to be working not more than a few miles from where he spent his childhood, Ferguson is nearly a man in full. He has perfected the comical clichés Eric Mangini demands of his players, but ask Ferguson who he is once he sheds the pads and his answer is void of pretense.

Does he consider himself a football player before all else? A few minutes remain before Ferguson and the rest of the Jets must report for practice, on the day after his speech at Syosset High on Long Island. He takes a long moment to consider the question, because it is something he has pondered, and will for the rest of his life.

Who is he? Is he the Jets' first-round draft pick (fourth overall) who signed a contract worth some $17 million and is expected to anchor the left side of the line for the next decade? The lithe tackle who jokingly refers to himself as "a beast" and the "bodyguard" of quarterback Chad Pennington? The kid who had major heart surgery in third grade, and filled the next few years not with sports but civic activism? The college student who earned a degree in religious studies in just 3-1/2 years, who now engages his teammates in existential conversations that cause their heads to spin?

"When I leave here, I feel that when people ask me what I do, I don't need to say I'm a football player. That's what I do and some might even say I do it well, but there's so much more I want to be," he says. "Early on, I never expected this, never wanted it. It was just a matter of taking an opportunity and doing my best. I'd rather not concentrate on long-term goals and instead focus on where today might lead."

The holidays are a fine time to reflect on the benefits of a strong family foundation. It matters, on Christmas Day and every other. Ferguson, the man and the athlete, was a high school All-American at Freeport High on Long Island, in the thick of Jets territory, but he hasn't much interest in revisiting those glory years.

Edwin and Rhunette didn't raise their two sons - Edwin Jr. is working on his doctorate - to brag about all they've done. No, it's what they can do that matters, who they should be and how they should give back, and with D'Brickashaw it began when his parents christened him with a name plucked from "The Thorn Birds," a popular novel and subsequent TV miniseries. Father Ralph de Bricassart, the saga's central character, struggled between his religion and his love for a girl named Meggie Cleary, a human conflict Edwin found fascinating. The Fergusons changed the name slightly, to make their son even more unique, and it was thus no mere happenstance when years later the boy grew to be fascinated by world religions.

D'Brickashaw chose Christianity and Islam as the two he would study at the University of Virginia, where he also happened to be a pretty fine, if underweight, lineman, so long and nimble, with a wing span six inches inches greater than his 6-6 height and feet that danced like a cobbler's puppet.

"I was more interested in the philosophy behind the two cultures," he says. "Christianity is what I was reared on. Islam, I wanted to know more about it than what we were reading or hearing in the media. We have so many similarities and I wanted to understand them. I wasn't planning to be a priest or go to the seminary. I just think, as someone who occupies space on this planet, it's our obligation to ask why we're here and for what purpose.

"There's got to be more to life," he says, and he takes another long pause before continuing, "It's got to be more than just making a lot of money or being famous or being successful in your chosen field."

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WAIT, WE CAN'T BE ANTI-BLUE...:

"Children of Men": A reluctant hero carrying the hopes of a dying race (Mark Rahner, 12/25/06, Seattle Times)

Imagine a country where the government rounds up and cages immigrants who desperately want in, terrorists bomb the joint where you get your morning coffee, and activists are as ruthless as the oppressive government they fight. Also, it's been nearly 20 years since any babies were born on Earth.

That's the ultra-bleak world of Alfonso Cuarón's "Children of Men," which looks a lot like here and now, but takes place in 2027 England. I don't know what I expected from the director of "Y tu mamá también" and the third Harry Potter kiddie flick, but this dystopian masterpiece of misery kept me wound up for hours after the credits rolled. It's got a controversial and thought-provoking premise, action scenes that equal anything in "Saving Private Ryan," and a ragged performance from Clive Owen that'll make you glad he didn't squander his talents on the James Bond series.

Given the uniformly good reviews the film is getting, it's hard to interpret the studio's rather bashful release as motivated by other than political uncomfortableness and to conclude that Hollywood just doesn't want to be shouting the message that secularism is suicide.

And how typical that the Times, though liking the movie, mistakes it for a statement about Iraq, Apocalypse Now, but in the Wasteland a Child Is Given (MANOHLA DARGIS, 12/25/06, NY Times)

The end is nigh in “Children of Men,” the superbly directed political thriller by Alfonso Cuarón about a nervously plausible future. It’s 2027, and the human race is approaching the terminus of its long goodbye. Cities across the globe are in flames, and the “siege of Seattle” has entered Day 1,000. In a permanent war zone called Britain, smoke pours into the air as illegal immigrants are swept into detainment camps. It’s apocalypse right here, right now — the end of the world as we knew and loved it, if not nearly enough.

Based in broad outline on the 1992 dystopian novel by P. D. James about a world suffering from global infertility — and written with a nod to Orwell by Mr. Cuarón and his writing partner Timothy J. Sexton along with David Arata, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby — “Children of Men” pictures a world that looks a lot like our own, but darker, grimmer and more frighteningly, violently precarious. It imagines a world drained of hope and defined by terror in which bombs regularly explode in cafes crowded with men and women on their way to work. It imagines the unthinkable: What if instead of containing Iraq, the world has become Iraq, a universal battleground of military control, security zones, refugee camps and warring tribal identities?

Merry Christmas! Seriously. “Children of Men” may be something of a bummer, but it’s the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transporting you with the greatness of its filmmaking. Like Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima,” another new film that holds up a mirror to these times, Mr. Cuarón’s speculative fiction is a gratifying sign that big studios are still occasionally in the business of making ambitious, intelligent work that speaks to adults. And much like Mr. Eastwood’s most recent war movie, much like the best genre films of Hollywood history, “Children of Men” doesn’t announce its themes from a bully pulpit, with a megaphone in hand and Oscar in mind, but through the beauty of its form.

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PAPA'S GOT A BRAND NEW BODY BAG:

James Brown, the ’Godfather of Soul,’ dies in Atlanta hospital at 73 (Associated Press, December 25, 2006)

James Brown, the dynamic, pompadoured “Godfather of Soul,” whose rasping vocals and revolutionary rhythms made him a founder of rap, funk and disco as well, died early Monday, his agent said. He was 73. [...]

Along with Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and a handful of others, Brown was one of the major musical influences of the past 50 years. At least one generation idolized him, and sometimes openly copied him. His rapid-footed dancing inspired Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson among others. Songs such as David Bowie’s “Fame,” Prince’s “Kiss,” George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” and Sly and the Family Stone’s “Sing a Simple Song” were clearly based on Brown’s rhythms and vocal style.

If Brown’s claim to the invention of soul can be challenged by fans of Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, then his rights to the genres of rap, disco and funk are beyond question. He was to rhythm and dance music what Dylan was to lyrics: the unchallenged popular innovator.

“James presented obviously the best grooves,” rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy once told The Associated Press. “To this day, there has been no one near as funky. No one’s coming even close.”

His hit singles include such classics as “Out of Sight,” “(Get Up I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine,” “I Got You (I Feel Good)” and “Say It Loud - I’m Black and I’m Proud,” a landmark 1968 statement of racial pride.

“I clearly remember we were calling ourselves colored, and after the song, we were calling ourselves black,” Brown said in a 2003 Associated Press interview. “The song showed even people to that day that lyrics and music and a song can change society.” [...]

From the 1950s, when Brown had his first R&B hit, “Please, Please, Please” in 1956, through the mid-1970s, Brown went on a frenzy of cross-country tours, concerts and new songs. He earned the nickname “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business,” and often tried to prove it to his fans, said Jay Ross, his lawyer of 15 years.

Brown would routinely lose two or three pounds each time he performed and kept his furious concert schedule in his later years even as he fought prostate cancer, Ross said.

“He’d always give it his all to give his fans the type of show they expected,” he said.

Back in the day, promoters would put together shows with an entire lineup of top acts and each would try to outdo the other--known as "cutting." No one would follow James Brown because they knew they couldn't top him.

MORE:
-Soul star James Brown dies at 73 (BBC, 12/25/06)
-James Brown Top 10 Singles (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, December 25, 2006)

James Brown hit the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 or Billboard Top R&B Singles in each of four decades...

James Brown, the ‘Godfather of Soul,’ Dies at 73 (JON PARELES, 12/26/06, NY Times)

Through the years, Mr. Brown did not only call himself “the hardest working man in show business.” He also went by “Mr. Dynamite,” “Soul Brother No. 1,” “the Minister of Super Heavy Funk” and “the Godfather of Soul,” and he was all of those and more.

His music was sweaty and complex, disciplined and wild, lusty and socially conscious. Beyond his dozens of hits, Mr. Brown forged an entire musical idiom that is now a foundation of pop worldwide.

“I taught them everything they know, but not everything I know,” he wrote in an autobiography.

The funk Mr. Brown introduced in his 1965 hit “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” was both deeply rooted in Africa and thoroughly American. Songs like “I Got You (I Feel Good),” “Cold Sweat,” “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” and “Hot Pants” found the percussive side of every instrument and meshed sharply syncopated patterns into kinetic polyrhythms that made people dance.

Mr. Brown’s innovations reverberated through the soul and rhythm-and-blues of the 1970s and the hip-hop of the next three decades. The beat of a 1970 instrumental “Funky Drummer” may well be the most widely sampled rhythm in hip-hop.

Mr. Brown’s stage moves — the spins, the quick shuffles, the knee-drops, the splits — were imitated by performers who tried to match his stamina, from Mick Jagger to Michael Jackson, and were admired by the many more who could not. Mr. Brown was a political force, especially during the 1960s; his 1968 song “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” changed America’s racial vocabulary. He was never politically predictable; in 1972 he endorsed the re-election of Richard M. Nixon.

Mr. Brown led a turbulent life, and served prison time as both a teenager and an adult. He was a stern taskmaster who fined his band members for missed notes or imperfect shoeshines. He was an entrepreneur who, at the end of the 1960s, owned his own publishing company, three radio stations and a Learjet (which he would later sell to pay back taxes). And he performed constantly: as many as 51 weeks a year in his prime.

Say it loud: He gave music some new moves (Robert Hilburn, December 26, 2006, LA Times)

FOR all the impact of such towering figures as Ray Charles, Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye, no one influenced black music more than James Brown because no one mirrored black culture more than the man behind such hits as "Please, Please, Please," "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" and "I Got You (I Feel Good)."

You hear his percolating style in Prince's funky guitar licks, see his spectacular physicality in Michael Jackson's dance steps and feel his spirit and self-affirmation in every explosive hip-hop record.

Long before he was showered with celebrated (and eminently fitting) titles such as "the Godfather of Soul" and "the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business," Brown was briefly thought of by some as the black Elvis, which was mostly silly — except in one profound way.

If Presley was the artist most often cited by leading white musicians as an influence — and I found that to be true in the '60s and '70s — Brown was the name I most often heard when asking African American musicians about who inspired them.

Hardworking Godfather of Soul (Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb, 12/26/06, Washington Post)

Over the years, Brown sent audiences into states of frenzy when he dramatized his first R&B hit, "Please, Please, Please" (1956), on stage. As a finale, Brown would walk off stage, body bent with fatigue. He would stop, drop to one knee and wait for a band member to drape a cape around his shoulders. As he was being led away, Brown would toss the cape off, run to the microphone and start begging again, "Baby, please don't go, don't go. . . . I love you so." The audience would go wild as band members wailed on their horns.

Jonathan Lethem, writing for Rolling Stone magazine, described watching Brown entertain as a "feast of adoration and astonishment."

"For to see James Brown dance and sing, to see him lead his mighty band with the merest glances and tiny flickers of signal from his hands; to see him offer himself to his audience to be adored and enraptured and ravished; to watch him tremble and suffer as he tears his screams and moans of lust, glory and regret from his sweat-drenched body . . . is not to see: It is to behold," Lethem wrote.

Brown changed the course of African American music in the 1960s and 1970s, said Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West in their book, "The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country" (2000).

"Mr. Brown, as he likes to be known, rapped and crooned before his time, used vibrant horn, raunchy rock and roll guitar, and driving bass overlaid with a grunting, familiar voice like the sound of a moving train," Gates and West wrote. "His persona prefigured the flamboyance of the disco years, of techno-funk humor, of the era of his royal highness known as Prince."

Michael Jackson and Mick Jagger aspired to dance like Brown; Elvis Presley was said to have studied Brown's choreography on film.

His signature one-three beat can be heard on music from Ice-T, the Fat Boys, Public Enemy and many others who used the digital technique known as sampling to incorporate Brown's lyrics and rhythms into their own works.

His musical legacy includes more than 900 songs, among them: "I Got You ( I Feel Good)" (1965), "Cold Sweat" (1967), "Sex Machine (1970), "Hot Pants" (1971) and "The Payback" (1973). His "Say It Loud: I'm Black and I'm Proud" (1969) became an anthem during the civil rights movement.

Brown's live recording at the famed Apollo Theater in October 1962 was considered a pivotal event in his career and was declared one of the greatest 100 moments in rock music in the 1960s by Entertainment Weekly. The recording, which was released three months later, "marked the beginning of Brown's transformation from minor R&B star into soul's greatest bandleader," the magazine said in 1999. The live recording also created a template for Sly Stone and George Clinton to follow.

In 1965, Brown's "Pappa's Got a Brand New Bag" won a Grammy for best R&B recording, and in 1987, his "Living in America" single, which is heard in the movie "Rocky IV," received one for best male R&B vocal performance. In 1992, he won a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement.

He was one of the initial artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 1986, along with Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino and Buddy Holly. In 2003, he was honored by the John F. Kennedy Center of Performing Arts.

In a statement yesterday, President Bush called Brown "an American original" and noted that his fans came from all walks of life. "For half a century, the innovative talent of the 'Godfather of Soul' enriched our culture and influenced generations of musicians," the president said.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: NOT SO VANQUISHED:

A Revolutionary Christmas Story (LYNNE CHENEY, 12/21./04, NY Times)

AS 1776 was drawing to a close, Elkanah Watson, a young man in Massachusetts, expressed what many Americans feared about their war for independence. "We looked upon the contest as near its close," he wrote, "and considered ourselves a vanquished people."

There was good reason for pessimism. The British had driven Gen. George Washington and his men out of New York and across New Jersey. In early December, with the British on their heels, the Americans had commandeered every boat they could find to escape across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. They were starving, sick and cold. The artist Charles Willson Peale, watching the landing from the Pennsylvania shore, described a soldier dressed "in an old dirty blanket jacket, his beard long and his face so full of sores that he could not clean it." So disfigured was the man, Peale wrote, that at first he did not recognize him as his brother James.

In these desperate circumstances, George Washington made a stunning decision: to go back across the Delaware and launch a surprise attack on the Hessian mercenaries occupying Trenton. On Christmas night, he led 2,400 men, many of them with their feet wrapped in rags because they had no shoes, to a crossing point nine miles upstream from Trenton. As freezing temperatures turned rain to sleet and snow, they began to cross the river.

One of the best books of 2004 was David Hackett Fischer's Washington's Crossing, which covers this period brilliantly and opens with a terrific rehabilition of Emmanuel Leutze's iconic painting of the Crossing

[originally posted: 2004-12-21]

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BE MERRY:

We Brothers wish all of you and yours the very merriest of Christmases and hope the Holidays find you hale, hearty, and happy. Would that we could bring each of you a gift as precious as the one you bring us each day -- by reading, commenting, arguing, recommending, and creating a community here of a sort that's all too rare.

God Bless us, every one.

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Track Santa Live (NORAD):

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BUY AN "I":

'Bionic' skein rebuilt at NBC: 'Galactica' guy preps revamped 'Woman' (JOSEF ADALIAN, 10/09//06, Variety)

"Battlestar Galactica" exec producer David Eick is teaming with feature scribe Laeta Kalogridis to reinvent "The Bionic Woman" for NBC. [...]

Eick and scribe Ronald D. Moore turned Sci Fi's Peabody Award-winning "Battlestar" into a series vastly different from its predecessor, making it a metaphoric examination of the post-9/11 world. Eick and Kalogridis are planning a similar "re-imagination" of "Bionic Woman."

Instead of focusing on terrorism and militarism, the new "Bionic" will explore the role of professional women in contemporary society and how they juggle their various roles.

If they want a hit show they'll forget the juggling and opt for jiggling.

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HARDLY REPAYS THEIR DEBT:

Britain pays 1945 war debt (David Smith, 12/24/06, The Sunday Times of London)

THE government will this week close a chapter in Britain’s wartime history by completing the repayment of a loan taken out with America more than 60 years ago, just after the second world war.

Treasury officials said the repayment of the US war loan taken out under a 1945 agreement would be completed by December 31. [...]

Britain borrowed money from America during the first world war but never fully settled the debt.

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YOU DON'T CATCH AND RELEASE FLIES:

Reacquainting ourselves with the unthinkable (THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, December 24, 2006, Knox News)

Quick! Name the country we turn into a parking lot the next time al-Qaida's network pulls off a 9/11. If your knee jerks toward Pakistan instead of Iran, your instincts are sound because conditions are falling into place for that scary scenario to unfold.

No, we won't be toppling a regime - much less nation building - anytime soon in a country of 170 million Muslims (eight times the size of Iraq). But the United States could readily find itself unleashing the "gravest possible consequences" (remember that spooky Cold War phrase?) inside Pakistan's borders - specifically the federally administered tribal areas that border Afghanistan.

This swath of remote mountain ranges has never been effectively governed by distant Islamabad, but it's where the Taliban have - according to The New York Times - recently set up a virtual mini-state. The tribal areas are also where most terrorism experts believe Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida's senior leaders operate openly in secure sanctuary.

This mini-state grew out of a series of peace deals that Pakistan's government felt it had no choice but to offer to thousands of Taliban fighters who've taken up permanent residence in the tribal areas since fleeing Afghanistan. The accords offered the warriors respite from the Pakistani military in exchange for a cessation of cross-border attacks into Afghanistan. [...]

Let me remind you that America's the only government in human history to employ nuclear weapons against an enemy state, and with the Taliban back in the mini-state-sponsoring saddle, a politically correct target now exists.

I neither advocate this possible response nor condemn it. I just think it's essential we know what path we're on in this long war because, under the right conditions, nothing remains unthinkable.

Obviously once enough of them are adhering to the flypaper we ought to nuke them.

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A FEW SMALL ADJUSTMENTS:

Biggest story of our time: our self-extinction (MARK STEYN, 12/24/06, Chicago Sun-Times)

You might have a hard time finding ''Children Of Men'' at your local multiplex. It's a more pertinent Christmas movie this holiday season than ''Bad Santa 3'' or ''The Santa Clause 8,'' but Universal seems to have got cold feet and all but killed the picture. In an enthusiastic review in Seattle Weekly, J. Hoberman observed: "Universal may have deemed 'Children' too grim for Christmas, but it is premised on a reverence for life that some might term religious." Granted, he's in the godless precincts of Seattle, that last bit of the sentence -- "some might" -- seems a tad qualified. Obviously, Christianity has a "reverence for life." So too does Judaism: all that begetting the eyes glaze over at in the Old Testament, going right back to God's injunction to be fruitful and multiply.

Christmas is a good time not just for Christians to ponder the central proposition of their faith -- the baby in the manger -- but for post-Christian secularists to ponder the central proposition of theirs: that religion is a lot of goofy voodoo nonsense and that any truly rational person will give it the bum's rush. The problem with this view is that "rationalism" is looking less and less rational with each passing year. Here are three headlines from the last couple of weeks:

• • "Mohammed Overtakes George In List Of Most Popular Names" (Daily Telegraph, London)

• • "Japan's Population 'Set To Plummet' " (BBC News)

• • "Islam Thrives As Russia's Population Falls" (Toronto Star)

By comparison with America, those three societies are very secular. Indeed, Russia spent three-quarters of a century under the most militantly secularist regime of all: Under Communism, the state was itself a religion, but, alas, only an ersatz one, a present-tense chimera. As a result, Russians more or less gave up begetting: Slavs are in steep population decline, and, on present trends, Russia will be majority Muslim by 2050. And the Russian army will be majority Muslim by 2015. In western Europe, societal suicide isn't quite so advanced, but the symbolism is still poignant: "George" isn't just the name of America's reviled cowboy president, but of England's patron saint; the national flag is the Cross of St. George, under which Englishmen sallied forth to smite the Mohammedans in those long-ago Crusades. Now the Mohammedans have managed to smite the Georgians big time, not by conquest but simply by outbreeding. Mohammed is also the most popular boy's name in Brussels, Amsterdam and other Continental cities.

But forget Islam: In Europe, they're inheriting by default. There are no Muslims or any other significant group of immigrants in Japan and yet the Japanese are engaging in a remorseless auto-genocide. Already in net population decline and the most geriatric society on earth, their descent down the death spiral is only going to accelerate. As the BBC reported, "The imbalance is threatening future economic growth and raising fears over whether the government will be able to fund pensions. But Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki said: 'It's impossible for the pension system to collapse due to the declining birth rate because we will adjust the amount of money put into it.' "

Oh, OK then. But, just as a matter of interest, when you "adjust" the amount of money you put into the pension system, whose pockets are you going to "adjust" it out of? Japanese and European societies are trying to secure the future on upside-down family trees in which four grandparents have one grandchild. No matter how frantically you "adjust," that's unsustainable.

The Laffer Curve applies to welfare state funding too. If you confiscate 100% of peoples' paychecks to fund it they won't stay in your nation and work, while if you have no young workers you'll collect nothing whith which to fund the system.

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COULD THE MSM HAVE GOTTEN THIS STORY ANY MORE WRONG?:

Shiites resist isolating Sadr: Politicians and clerics support the leader and view U.S. opposition to him as interference. (Molly Hennessy-Fiske and Saad Fakhrildeen, December 24, 2006

One of Iraq's most influential Shiite clerics rejected a U.S.-backed proposal to isolate Shiite extremists in the national government, saying the country should govern itself with the help of anti-U.S. firebrand Muqtada Sadr, according to politicians who spoke with the cleric Saturday.

Shiite politicians met with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in this Shiite holy city, and then said they had thrown their support behind Sadr, who demands a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq rather than the temporary increase under consideration in Washington.

"The Sadr movement is part of Iraqi affairs," said Haider Abadi, a leader of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party. "We won't allow others to interfere to weaken any Iraqi political movement."

Ali Adeeb, another member of the Dawa Party, said Shiite leaders, including the prime minister, would resist U.S. efforts to sideline Sadr and his Al Mahdi army.

Feel free to use all those stories earlier this week about the increasingly isolated Sadr as fish wrap.

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BECAUSE ISOLATING ELECTED GOVERNMENTS WORKS SO WELL...:

Israel eases hard line on Palestinians: Olmert tells Abbas he'll release $100 million in withheld tax funds (Richard Boudreaux, December 24, 2006, LA Times)

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made several concessions to the Palestinians on Saturday, including the release of $100 million in taxes and duties Israel had collected for their treasury but withheld for months, in a bid to revive a peace process stalled for years.

Olmert also promised, in a dinner meeting at his office with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, to begin easing travel restrictions on Palestinians in the West Bank and allowing more trucks through Israeli cargo crossings to and from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Israeli leader came to office in March saying that peace talks were pointless because there was no strong, reliable partner on the Palestinian side. By engaging Abbas, a relative moderate, Olmert has made a politically risky about-face in an attempt to isolate the more militant Hamas movement that controls the Palestinian government and parliament. [...]

After indirect talks produced a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip last month, Olmert offered to meet Abbas face to face if the Palestinians freed an Israeli soldier captured in June and formed a new government that recognized Israel and renounced violence.

But Abbas, who leads the Fatah party, has been unable to take either step. Hamas, sworn to seek Israel's destruction, has balked at Abbas' power-sharing plan and refused to release captured Cpl. Gilad Shalit unless Israel frees hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.

In a tactical shift, Olmert decided to meet Abbas anyway and try to sideline Hamas.

If they're serious about strengthening the PLO they're going to have to release Barghouti.

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TWO INTO ONE WON'T GO:

Lebanon's Slow Slide From Hope To Deadlock: Massive '05 Protest Couldn't Heal Rifts (Anthony Shadid, December 24, 2006, Washington Post)

It was Feb. 16, 2005, and Ghena Hariri, dressed in black with a white veil, sat silent in an ambulance driving to the blue-domed Mohammed al-Amin Mosque in Beirut's Martyrs' Square. Next to her was a coffin draped in the Lebanese flag. Inside it was the body of her uncle, Rafiq al-Hariri, who was killed with 22 others when a bomb ripped through his convoy as it skirted the Mediterranean Sea.

The streets outside her windows teemed with hundreds of thousands gathering for the former prime minister's burial.

"I was hoping his death was not for nothing," the 27-year-old Hariri recalled, sipping coffee at a cafe. Her voice was soft, the words slow. "It's a loss you can't explain. I can't explain how I felt. It was a surreal time for me. But when I looked at how people were reacting, what was happening, I thought there was something good that's coming out of it."

"Lebanon is resurrecting," she remembered thinking.

Hariri's death and burial culminated in an event known simply as a date, March 14, possibly the largest demonstration in Lebanese history. The participants were drawn together in a protest over Syria's 29-year military presence here and its suspected role in Hariri's killing. Many of them were joined, too, in a call for a new Lebanon that would transcend decades-old politics steeped in feudal-like personalities, sectarian barriers honed by civil war, and patronage and corruption that almost ritually blurred principle. To those who took part, the date itself became iconic.

But nearly two years later, March 14 has come to represent something else: less the birth of a new country and more a border between two that coexist, suspicious, angry and unreconciled, entrenched in a terrain with almost no shared ground. Rather than a resurrection, it now marks the start of Lebanon's cold war, where the government and its supporters are pitted against an emboldened opposition led by Hezbollah and its allies, each with its perspective and foreign patrons, each prone to brinkmanship.

"It was a moment, and it developed into a line," said Marwan Hamadeh, the telecommunications minister who was targeted in an assassination attempt Oct. 1, 2004. "It was then that the demarcations started between us and them."

The solution to the deadlock can hardly be more obvious. Divide it into its constituent parts and everyone wins.

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...AND REDDER...:

Filipinos Gather In Va. Before Dawn For an Annual Rite: Early Mass Is a Christmas Tradition (Tara Bahrampour, December 24, 2006, Washington Post)

The sky was dark and wet fog hung over the roadways, but just before 5 a.m. yesterday, car headlights converged in Arlington.

Outside the St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church hung four "parols," the Filipino term for the star of Bethlehem, beckoning worshipers to the eighth day of a ritual called Simbang Gabi.

"When I was a child [in the Philippines], we went every day with my mother and sister," said Marina Balbado, an 84-year-old wearing a gold-colored lace head covering. "We walked on our knees from the door up to the altar."

Each year, from Dec. 16 to 24, Filipinos awake before dawn to attend the service, which celebrates the novena, marking the nine days leading to the birth of Jesus. The ritual began centuries ago when Spanish friars in the Philippines adjusted their schedule to encourage farmers and fishermen to attend Mass before going out to the fields or the sea.

In the Philippines, which is about 86 percent Catholic, many families make their own parols, and trees outside churches twinkle with the stars. After Mass, as the sun rises, worshipers pour into the streets, where outdoor stalls sell breakfast treats.

In the Washington area, St. Charles is the only church to have Simbang Gabi at dawn, though other parishes host evening Masses for the occasion. A 2005 census counted around 38,000 Filipino-born residents in the metro area; embassy officials estimate up to 200,000 residents are of Filipino descent.

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THANKS, ABNER:

Fifty-three days until pitchers and catchers report.

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WHILE SOME CELEBRATE DARWIN DAY:

Man sets self aflame in Calif. protest (AP, 12/23/06)

A man used flammable liquid to light himself on fire, apparently to protest a San Joaquin Valley school district's decision to change the names of winter and spring breaks to Christmas and Easter vacation.

Hopefully no American flags were hurt.

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WHITE BOARD:

What is it about Obama?: Maybe it's his message of inclusion, his smarts or his million-dollar smile. Whatever it is, people seem smitten. (Terry McDermott, December 24, 2006, LA Times)

Chicago politics tends toward polarization. Depolarization is Obama's stock in trade.

Just a generation ago, Harold Washington was campaigning to become the first black mayor of Chicago, and he and Democratic presidential candidate Walter F. Mondale attended Sunday Mass at St. Pascal's, a predominantly white Roman Catholic parish in Northwest Chicago. They were spit on, cursed and lucky to leave unharmed.

In the 2004 U.S. Senate campaign, Obama carried every precinct but one in St. Pascal's Portage Park neighborhood. Talk to people who live there now and you could easily get the impression that Obama grew up one block over.

Why?

"Barack is wildly less threatening than Harold Washington," said Judson Miner, who hired Obama into his small Chicago civil rights law firm in 1991. "Even the North Shore ladies love him."

Go west to DuPage County, one of the most Republican in the nation, and you'll find a GOP county chairman, state Sen. Kirk W. Dillard, who relishes the opportunity to accompany Obama whenever he comes to town. "My constituency is enamored of him," Dillard said. That Obama registered approval ratings in DuPage above 60% in this fall's campaign season is an obvious reason to get next to him — but Dillard has been on the Obama bandwagon for years.

He, along with many others, was skeptical when Obama arrived in Springfield, the state capital. There was suspicion that Obama, with his fancy degrees and a job teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago, was an elitist. It turned out he was a more or less regular guy who played pickup basketball and poker.

Obama developed a reputation as a very conservative poker player. He threw in many more hands than he played, said another state Senate colleague, Larry Walsh, a farmer from Will County. "I told him once, 'If you were a little more liberal in your poker-playing and a little more conservative in your politics, we'd get along a lot better.' "

Obama was somebody you could sit and have a beer with, Walsh said — even if Obama, who frequently quit buying but not smoking cigarettes, perpetually bummed them.

As a freshman, a member of a Democratic minority in a General Assembly not much interested in policing itself, Obama carried to passage the state's first significant ethics legislation in a generation. He later worked to overhaul the state's death penalty and healthcare laws. He developed a reputation as someone anybody could work with.

"I brag that before anybody knew who he was, I knew he had the gifts that have made him into the rock star he is — charm, intellect, hard worker, ability to relate," Dillard said. "I saw it all within the first couple of months when he came to the Legislature."

In "The Audacity of Hope," Obama tells of being on the state Senate floor, sitting with a white colleague, when an African American senator, whom Obama refers to as John Doe, gave a lengthy, passionate speech in which he said voting against the program he advocated would be racist. The white colleague, a liberal, turned to Obama and said, "You know what the problem is with John? Whenever I hear him, he makes me feel more white."

Obama sees this as an illustration of the exhaustion of white guilt.

The most comforting thing about Senator Obama is that he's never done anything and is identified with not a single idea other than his own ambition. Tough to run a presidential campaign on your similarity to Chancey Gardener though.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: NO ONE EVER IS TO BLAME (via Mike Daley):

Blaming Christmas (Lee Harris, 12/24/03, Tech Central Station)

To learn that your parents are Santa Claus is the end of one philosophic journey; but it is also the start of another, if you are prepared to continue it. For the skeptic must now ask himself, If my parents don't believe in Santa Claus, why have they tried so hard to get me to believe in him? Indeed, why have they saved money all year long -- or, as so often nowadays, maxed their credit card to the limit -- in order that I would continue to remain under such a costly illusion? Why do my own parents so empathically insist that I go on giving the tribute that is theirs to someone else instead -- especially when that someone else doesn't happen to exist, and with whom it is not even possible to score transcendental brownies points, as with God? Does this -- does any of this -- make sense? If Christmas is just an elaborate hoax, it would appear to be a hoax perpetuated at the expense of the hoaxer.

When the skeptical child becomes a skeptical adult, he may feel that he has hit upon the correct answer: his parents were themselves saps and suckers, hoodwinked by Madison Avenue into believing they were honor-bound to keep up the pretence that all this expensive merchandise was really manna from heaven, in order to bolster the sales of self-serving manufacturers and
retailers. But, here again, the skeptic lacks the will to push his skepticism to its logical conclusion, because he fails to ask the next question: Okay, suppose my parents were just the unwitting tools of capitalism, suppose that they had been brainwashed into buying more stuff
than any child could possibly need, or often want, why did they feel hide-bound to preserve the illusion of Santa Claus for me? What made them look upon Christmas as if it were a sacred duty?

They were hide-bound because they were honor-bound. They felt that they owed their children a happy Christmas, and felt it as a genuine ethical obligation, akin to the military service that a man may feel that he owes to his nation. That is what a sense of honor is all about. And it is the origin
of this sense that we must address, if we are to explain our parents' passion for perpetuating such a bizarre delusion.

Even if they were deluded by Madison Avenue, their susceptibility did not stem from a defective intellect, but from an overfull heart: they would not have been so vulnerable to cynical manipulation if they had not been so desperate to do their duty by their children that the mere idea that they might be depriving their children one of the good things of life drove them to a frenzy of anguished consumption, but at the same time drove them to something that the timid skeptic can never understand.

In their anxiety to do right by their kids, they achieved the supreme self-sacrifice of the human ego -- the doing of good without any expectation of getting credit for it. To question whether this self-sacrifice was worth it may be a legitimate function of the intellect; but it must not tempt you
to overlook the most significant fact about such self-sacrifice, namely, that it happens at all.

This too is a rebuke to neoconservatism.

[originally posted: 2003-12-24]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: WHITE HOUSE OF DAVID:

Born-Again President -- White House Hanukkah (Dennis Prager, December 19, 2004, LA Times)

"Only in America."

That's what I kept repeating to myself last week when I celebrated Hanukkah at a White House party attended by President and Mrs. Bush.

Only in America does a president light a menorah while a Jewish choral group sings Hebrew songs and the Marine band plays American songs. Only in America do Jews feel so honored as Jews and yet so completely part of the larger culture, fully Jewish and fully part of the greater nationality. Non-American Jews (including even Canadians) are often amazed at how completely American Jews in the U.S. feel. We take it for granted, but as a former college lecturer in Jewish history, I know that this is unique.

It is an incredible blessing to be an American Jew (or "Jewish American" � both terms are accurate). We are doubly blessed. An Israeli interviewer once asked if I were first a Jew or an American, "I have two fathers," I said. "George Washington and the patriarch Abraham." So to be one of about 200 Jews invited to celebrate Hanukkah at the White House with the president of the United States was about as profound a personal moment as I have experienced. My two loves -- America and Judaism -- in one place, reinforcing each other.

I suspect that this feeling was shared by just about every Jew present, including bearded Orthodox rabbis heretofore not prone to affirming any non-Jewish national identity. As a yeshiva graduate, I never thought I would live to see identifying Jews, let alone Orthodox rabbis, so happy to be in a room with a menorah and a Christmas tree. Yet that signified a sea change taking place in American Jewish life � the realization that Christianity is no longer the enemy or the great Other but, for the first time in 2,000 years, a great ally.

And the most Christian nation the most reliable ally.

MORE:
Meanwhile, in the secular world, Germany to stop accepting ex-Soviet Jews (Reuters, 12/19/04)

Germany is to stop offering unlimited immigration to Jews from Russia and eastern Europe from Jan. 1, 2006, ending a policy it launched with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, German newspapers reported on Saturday.

Germany began offering Jews from the former Soviet bloc the right to settle in the country in 1991 to help rebuild its own Jewish communities, devastated by the country's Nazi regime. Some 190,000 Jews had taken up the offer by the end of 2003.

But the fact the number of ex-Soviet Jews coming to Germany has in recent years been higher than the number going to Israel had led to a policy rethink, the newspapers said.

[originally posted: 2004-12-19]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: OK, BUT WE DEMAND HE LOSE WEIGHT AND GIVE UP SMOKING

It's good to believe in Santa, says psychiatrist (Debbie Andalo The Guardian, December 1, 2004)

Believing in Father Christmas helps boost children's mental development and social skills, a psychiatrist claimed today.

The festive ritual of exchanging presents associated with Father Christmas also helps develop a child's sense of charitable giving as well as their consideration of others less fortunate than themselves, according to Dr Lynda Breen from Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool.

She accepted that some parents believe that promoting the myth of Father Christmas is deceitful and promotes materialism.

Parents, she said, had to weigh up the benefits of maintaining the fantasy against the day that their child discovers Father Christmas does not exist.

Writing in the latest issue of Psychiatric Bulletin she said: "Whether or not the fable is a threat to the child's trust is to be decided by each parent.

"On balance the tale of Santa Claus is a powerful tool that may serve to nurture social and cognitive development, particularly in a technological society where children mature earlier."

A child's belief in Father Christmas was also an act of faith and many youngsters draw parallels between him and God, she said.

But she argued although they might question their belief in God when they find out Father Christmas does not exist, they do not lose their faith in the long term.

She said: "Their capacity for faith in a higher, transcendent power is not lost just because Santa proves to be mortal."

In other news, scientists from UCLA have proven that a belief in the Ten Commandments does wonders for self-esteem.

[originally posted: 2004-12-02]

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ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR:

What is Chanukah? (Paul Greenberg, Dec 25, 2005, Townhall)

The blessing over the candles recited each night of the holiday goes: "Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who wrought miracles for our fathers in days of old."

Miracles, not victories. As in the Exodus from Egypt, it is He who delivered us. Freedom is a gift from God, not men.

Chanukah isn't mentioned in the Old Testament. The swashbuckling stories of battles and victories have been relegated to the Apocrypha. A mere military victory rates only a secondary place in the canon. The victory is to be celebrated not for its own sake but for what it reveals.

One more violent confrontation has been lifted out of history, and enters the realm of the sacred. A messy little guerrilla war in the dim past of a forgotten empire has become something else, something that partakes of the eternal.

The central metaphor of all religious belief - revealing light - now blots out all the imperial intrigues and internecine warfare. And that may be the greatest miracle of Chanukah: the transformation of that oldest and darkest of human activities, war, into a feast of illumination.

From a purely parochial American perspective, the best thing about Jewish holidays is that Jews were repressed for so long that the celebrations all heavily emphasize the idea of freedom.

(Originally posted: 12/25/06)

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: HALLELUJAH! IT BURNS AGAIN!:

Yule log telecast lights fire of New York viewers (AP, December 28, 2002)

A TV broadcast of logs burning in a fireplace to a Christmas carol soundtrack burned up the ratings this year. The uninterrupted two-hour Christmas morning broadcast of the ''Yule Log Christmas Special,'' a holiday tradition for hearthless New Yorkers, returned to the air in 2001 after a 12-year hiatus. Wednesday's showing, from 9 to 11 a.m., boasted 284,012 viewing households, a 26 percent boost in viewership compared with last year, WPIX-Channel 11 said. It smoked the 1 p.m. airing of the 1951 classic film version of Charles Dickens' ''A Christmas Carol,'' starring Alistair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge, by 29,000 households. The rather bizarre Christmas tradition also burned up the airwaves every year from 1966 to 1989.

For a third of a century, the Brothers have been at war over the Yule Log, with the philistine claiming it's a 10 second tape loop repeated over and over and I stubbornly maintaining it was originally a live broadcast. I deeply resent the term "bizarre" in this un-American, borderline-fascistic story. [originally posted: 2002-12-28]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: BLUE STEEL BEAUTY:

Yule Log, Christmas Tradition on New York TV, Is Going National (Bloomberg, 12/22/05)

This is the year Kevin Tietjen, a New York City native living in Connecticut, plans to introduce his 5-year-old son to a Christmas tradition from his childhood: opening presents in the glow of a crackling fire beamed into homes by television station WPIX.

``You turned this thing on, they had Christmas carols playing in the background,'' remembers Tietjen, 38, a risk consultant at Deloitte Consulting LLP in New York. ``And because we didn't have a fireplace, the whole concept of the Yule Log was pretty cool.'' [...]

Last year's four-hour broadcast drew a bigger audience than WNBC's Christmas mass at Washington National Cathedral, according to New York-based Nielsen Media Research.

Success has spawned knock-offs. More than half a dozen DVD imitators, such as ``The Happy Holiday Hearth,'' are sold on Amazon.com. In Demand Networks, a high-definition cable broadcaster owned by Cox Enterprises Inc., Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Inc., will air an eight-hour broadcast of a digitally enhanced fireplace on its INHD2 network.

WPIX also has a high-definition version of its log that will air in the New York area on Cablevision System Corp.'s channel 711 and on Comcast's channel 235. Local stations in Dallas and New Orleans will broadcast the original as will Tribune's Superstation WGN, which reaches more than 66 million U.S. homes through cable and satellite services.

Christmas classics (LA Times, December 25, 2005)

BIOLOGISTS USE THE WORD "zeitgeber" to describe a physical stimulus that kicks the biological clock into gear. For example, light streaming through the window in the morning and birdsong are zeitgebers signaling that it's time to wake up.

Scientists haven't devoted a lot of attention to the role of zeitgebers in stimulating holiday cheer, gift buying and goodwill toward men. In some climes, it's probably connected to frosty windowpanes and snowy rooftops. In L.A., it may be the first appearance of Santas in shopping malls, or those giant, flashy decorations they string across Hollywood Boulevard every year. But for people across the nation, a prime signal that the holidays are approaching is the reappearance of classic Christmas movies and TV shows, many of which we've enjoyed since childhood and have seen so many times we can recite the dialogue by heart.

Here are a few of our favorite snippets. May they stimulate peace, comfort, joy and a very Merry Christmas to all.

Nothing can top It's a Wonderful Life and The Yule Log, but a newer and already beloved tradition is Turner's 24 hours of A Christmas Story.

(Originally posted: 12/25/05)

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: MORE TERRORISM:

Lutefisk from Minnesota bringing flavor of holidays to troops in Afghanistan (Associated Press. December 24, 2004)

Each year, Mike Field ships anywhere from 200,000 to 300,000 pounds of lutefisk from his small shop here to customers all over the United States.

But his latest order crosses a new horizon.

One lutefisk-loving soldier has ordered 25 pounds of the pungent lye-soaked fish to be shipped to Afghanistan as a ``treat'' for the servicemen and women stationed there.

``This is a first for this little outfit,'' said Field, owner of Mike's Fish and Seafood Inc.

(Originally posted: 12/24/04)

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: ONLY A FASCIST SYMP WOULD BELIEVE IT'S TAPED (via The Mother Judd):

Once Again, Having Its 7 Minutes of Flame (ALESSANDRA STANLEY, 12/25/05, NY Times)

The flames flicker too fast.

The Christmas morning yule log special on WPIX - a four-hour tape of a log blazing brightly in a fireplace - is not for the fainthearted. The unextinguishable electronic hearth is a beloved New York tradition, but it would be a stretch to call it soothing. Even with Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby crooning carols on the audio track, the pulsing flames mesmerize, but less like a snifter of brandy than like a double dose of methamphetamine.

In fact, staring at the yule log for an extended period may induce the kind of seizures that in December 1997 struck hundreds of Japanese children who watched a Pok�mon cartoon with too many flashing lights and Pikachu. This year the yule log will also be shown in high-definition television on WPIX's digital channel, WPIX-DT (channel 12). The HDTV version provides "a very sharp image of flames," said Ted Faraone, a WPIX spokesman. Parental discretion advised.

Memory can be misleading, of course. Apparently, the fire has always burned fast and furiously. Mr. Faraone said the yule log had not been speeded up or tampered with when it was digitally remastered in 2001, the year WPIX brought it back after a 12-year hiatus. He insisted that the tape was the same one that was made in 1970, a loop that runs just under seven minutes.

That's a damn lie! It's shown live every year.

[originally posted: 2004-12-25]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE BROTHERS WISH YOU ALL A MERRY SCHEMBARTLAUF:

The Last Wild Man: BEHIND SANTA'S GENIAL SMILE LIES A 70,000 YEAR OLD ANIMIST TRADITION OF A BEAST MAN (PHYLLIS SIEFKER, Fortean Times)

Tracking the elusive Jolly Old Elf's history involved a labyrinthine journey that would make Daedalus proud. The search began with 19th century gift givers in America, Britain, and Germany. These gift givers appeared at end-of-year celebrations, but didn't travel alone; they were accompanied by a predictable entourage, no matter what country they trod. Santa's companions invariably included a Bessy - a man dressed as a woman - and assorted merrymakers dressed in goat or bear skins or wearing goat or bear masks. The other characters varied; usually there was a comic doctor and often an archer. Of course, America's Christmas Man wasn't called Santa at the time; he gained that name in the mid-1800s. First, he was Pelznichol, or Nicholas in Furs; in Nova Scotia he was the Janney; in Trinidad he was Papa Bois; in Great Britain he was Yule until Ben Johnson christened him Father Christmas in his 1616 Christmas Masque. His names were as varied as the communities he both terrorized and blessed.

The Wild Man's motley crew went door-to-door, demanding entry. After the raucous group was welcomed, they acted out an odd play - the leader, who dressed in goat or bear skins, argued with another character or with the woman figure. He was killed, the woman lamented, and the doctor comically resuscitated him, or he spontaneously revived, declaring he wasn't dead after all. Before the troupe left to visit the next house, they demanded gifts. This might sound somewhat familiar; today's Halloween trick-or-treaters carry on a juvenile version of the original visit - going house to house, demanding gifts and treats. In the bygone adult festival, the troupe gave its blessing and shared fruits of the land with the inhabitants, or wreaked havoc and cursed the homes if they weren't well received.

This invasion didn't take place at only at Yuletide; in Germany, Carnival signaled the Wild Man's wild rush into town in the Schembartlauf (run of bearded men).

[originally posted: 2002-12-18]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: JUST BECAUSE KAMIKAZES DIED DIDN'T MEAN THEY WEREN'T ATTACKING:

What 'War on Christmas'? (Ruth Marcus, December 10, 2005, Washington Post)

I've been hearing about this "War on Christmas," so I headed to the Heritage Foundation the other day for a briefing from one of the defending army's generals: Fox News anchor John Gibson, author of "The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought." Gibson -- and Bill O'Reilly, his comrade in the Fox-hole -- see this as a two-front war: Assaulting Christmas from the government end, they say, are pusillanimous school principals, politically corrected city managers and their ilk, bullied by the ACLU types into extirpating any trace of Christmas from the public square. Battering the holiday from the private sector are infidel retailers such as Target and Wal-Mart, which balk at using the C-word in their advertising in favor of such secularist slogans as "Happy Holidays."

The assault, Gibson told the Heritage crowd, has reached a "shocking level this year."

After the lecture, I wandered over to Union Station to check out a retail battlefield. Inside and out, the station was festooned with giant You Know What wreaths. A huge You Know What tree, with presents wrapped in red and green underneath, stood in the main hall, near a placard announcing "Norwegian Christmas at Union Station." A high-tech player piano was playing "Go Tell It on the Mountain," proclaiming the birth of You Know Who; the next selection was You Know Who Else Is Coming to Town. The most generic element was a small sign reading "Happy Holidays," but even then the words were bracketed by reindeer -- and let's just say, they weren't eating latkes. It was beginning to look a lot like You Know What.

If the anti-Christmas forces are winning, then the war in Iraq is nothing short of total victory.

Of course the Christophobes aren't winning -- in fact, they're helping re-Christianize the holiday -- which just makes it all the stranger that they're waging the war.

(Originally posted: 12/10/05)

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: David Cohen sends this link:

The Klezmonauts and their klezmer Christmas album, Oy to the World. [Originally posted: 2002-12-08]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?:

Same house, different faiths But if there's a divorce, who gets 'soul custody'? (Cathy Lynn Grossman, 12/05/02, USA TODAY)

For millions of Americans, December is an extended toast to every holiday's highlights.

Christmas is coming. The feast of Eid al-Fitr, concluding Muslims' month-long Ramadan fast, is this week. Hanukkah's final candles are lit Friday. Sunday is Bodhi Day, marking the anniversary of the enlightenment of the Buddha.

But when religious pluralism hits home -- 22% of U.S. households now have more than one faith under one roof -- the party's over for a growing number of families. Divorce is three times more prevalent in interfaith families with children than in same-faith households, according to the first national statistical look at the issue.

The American Religious Identification Survey 2001 (ARIS) finds that of all U.S. adults who have had children with someone of another faith, 10% are divorced, compared with 3% for parents of the same faith.

People, you've got to get in the spirit of this multi-faith deal. For instance, when our kids turn thirteen we're having BapMitzvahs, combination Baptism/Bar Mitzvahs to soak both sides of the family and hopefully pay for each one's college education.
[Originally posted: 2002-12-07]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: WHAT ABOUT THE CAMELS?:

The Nativity, Now Chasing the Rockettes (BRUCE WEBER, December 9, 2002, NY Times)

Spread the Word," a rollicking gospel chorale, concludes "Nativity: A Life Story," the Broadway-size and starry Christmas pageant that had three performances over the weekend at the United Palace in Washington Heights.

On Friday night, by the time the cast (which included Phylicia Rashad, Keith David, Stephanie Mills, BeBe Winans, Freddie Jackson, three choirs and 125 people over all) got through with the song's repeated, rousing choruses, led by the full-throated and fully animated Lillias White, the audience was on its feet and roaring as though a rock concert was ending--or at least "Mamma Mia!" The song celebrates faith, and it is a fitting conclusion to this grandly spirited and wholly contemporary show, whose creators have persevered with a faith of their own.

A quirky combination of spiritual fervor, showbiz glamour, African-American pride and a celebration of women, "Nativity" has been presented in a variety of auditoriums over the past seven years, all the while growing in scope and building an audience, as well as earning the sponsorship of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Last year the show overflowed the 1,900-seat capacity of Riverside Church.

Now it has found what Howard Dodson, the Schomburg's executive director, told the Friday night audience will be a permanent annual home at the United Palace, the ornate and opulent 3,500-seat theater at 175th Street and Broadway that was built for vaudeville in the late 1920's and now is owned by Frederick Eikerenkoetter (better known as Reverend Ike) and the United Christian Evangelistic Association.

The shows creator's--the actors James Stovall and Hattie Winston and the composer and orchestrator Harold Wheeler--as well as the Schomburg, are hopeful that with an expanded annual schedule "Nativity: A Life Story" will become a holiday tradition to rival the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall and "A Christmas Carol" at the Theater at Madison Square Garden, not to mention spurring the growth uptown, from Harlem to Washington Heights, of Broadway-style theatrical entertainment.

Hopefully there's a secular roadshow they can send to Dallas. [Originally Posted: 2002-12-10]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: THIS WEEKEND'S OTHER WORTHY FLICK:

-INTERVIEW: Todd Komarnicki: Producer, Director, Writer�and Believer: The producer of Elf explains how his Christian faith affects his career as a Hollywood producer, director, and writer. (Jeffrey Overstreet, 11/13/2003, Christianity Today)

There is an interesting issue dividing Christian film critics' reviews over the new holiday comedy Elf. Some go so far as to call it a "perfect holiday movie" that "promot[es] biblical concepts." Others are frustrated that "spirituality is notably absent." It all comes down to whether or not the critic thinks Santa Claus is a meaningful metaphor, or if Jolly Old Saint Nick needs to surrender his throne and change his theme song to "Baby Jesus is Coming to Town." (See Film Forum's review roundups from this week and last week.)

But Elf's producer argues that the gospel message is reflected in this whimsical world of make-believe. [...]

For a lot of moviegoers�Christians included�Christmas fairy tales are a meaningful and enjoyable part of the holiday tradition. But there are those who think fairy tales cheapen Christmas. The snowmen, the reindeer, Santa. Elf does not make direct references to the real story of Christmas, and some Christian film critics have a problem with that. Do you think Elf and other such Christmas fairy tales are damaging?

Not if they tell the truth! One of the things that is beautiful about a good fairy tale is that it reflects the truth. The truth that Elf reflects is about giving and innocence and learning to live sacrificially�to put others first. That's the story of Christmas. It reflects the truth of Christmas.

We have a savior who was a storyteller, [so] I think there is great value in story. Jesus almost never said exactly what his thought was straight out. He was always couching it in metaphor and simile, so that people would think�to engage them and to engage their imagination, to see the context in which they were living. Story does that. I think it's a very powerful tool. Certainly, like any tool, it can be misused, but I think Elf is a really strong example of a beautiful fairy tale that by its nature ends up reflecting the truth. The writer didn't set out to reflect the gospel. But, in telling a beautiful fairy tale from his own heart and in reflecting a lot of Christmas movies that he had loved, he wound up reflecting the gospel.

Got an e-mail this week informing us that One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest couldn't be a Christian allegory because Ken Kesey wasn't a Christian. Folks have also complained that Cool Hand Luke is just a prison story. Just goes to show how right Albert Jay Nock was:

[V]ery few literate persons are able to read, very few indeed. This can be proven by observation and experiment of the simplest kind. I do not mean that the great majority are unable to read intelligently; I mean that they are unable to read at all--unable, that is, to carry away from a piece of printed matter anything like a correct idea of its content. They are more or less adept at passing printed matter through their minds, after a fashion, especially such matter as is addressed to mere sensation, (and knowledge of this fact is nine-tenths of a propagandist's equipment), but this is not reading. Reading implies a use of the reflective faculty, and very few have that faculty developed much beyond the anthropoid stage, let alone possessing it at a stage of development which makes reading practicable.

MORE:
-INTERVIEW: Big Screen Vision: The producer of Elf shares the Christian hope that drives his filmmaking. (Christian Reader, November/December 2003)
-REVIEW: of Elf (Jeffery Overstreet, Looking Closer)

[originally posted: 2003-11-14]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: TAKING BACK THE CULTURE:

A Question of Faith for a Holiday Parade (KIRK JOHNSON, 12/06/04, NY Times)

For many years, this city's annual Parade of Lights was as bland as butter and content to be so. Organized by the local business community, the event shunned politics and anything remotely smacking of controversy, including openly religious Christmas themes that might offend.

The star was Santa, not Jesus, and the mood was bouncy, commercial and determinedly secular.

This year, Jesus came anyway. A local evangelical Christian church called the Faith Bible Chapel sought but failed to get permission for a religious-themed float with a choir singing hymns and carols. By coincidence, Denver's mayor chose this year to change the traditional banner on the roof of the City and County Building. "Merry Christmas" was out. "Happy Holidays" was in.

Like a spark in dry tinder, the result was a flare-up that caught even some church leaders by surprise. A holiday rite that had drawn thousands of paradegoers annually suddenly became a symbol, for many Christians, of secular society run amok.

So for the two nights of the parade, on Friday and Saturday, hundreds of Denver-area faithful headed downtown for a mild but determined protest: from the sidewalk, they sang carols about mangers, shepherds and holy nights, handed out hot chocolate and spoke of their faith.

Many people, including parade organizers who say they will re-evaluate their policies for next year, say the event might never be the same.

"I think it just went too far one way, and now maybe it will tilt back the other," said Lee Martinez, a member of the Faith Bible Chapel who came on Saturday to sing with his wife, Laura.

The controversy exploded in just the last few days, fueled by news reports and stoked by the members of the church and about a dozen allied congregations, with hundreds of e-mail messages sent to parade organizers.

Some say the protests, and a reversal by the mayor, John W. Hickenlooper, over the banner, after a similar outcry, show a new Christian assertiveness and energy. Others, including the senior pastor at Faith Bible Chapel, say they were surprised by the vehemence of the debate that emerged about the role of God and faith in a civic celebration.

The point is that there's tinder waiting to be lit.

(originally posted: 12/10/04)

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: STAMPING OUT JOY

Unholy war on Christmas (Anthony Browne, The Australian, December 23, 2004)

Christmas has always stirred passion, attracting opponents and supporters. But, until recently, banning it has been so culturally offensive that fictional Christophobes entered the English language for their infamy. Ebenezer Scrooge declared: "Every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly in his heart." Dr Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas declared that the Grinch's motivation was "that his heart was two sizes too small".

But real-life Scrooges and Grinches have banned Christmas before, not because their hearts were too small but because their bigotry was too great. And now it is happening again.

In 1647 Oliver Cromwell cancelled Christmas: no parties, no fun, no days off work. Cromwell's Puritanism was offended by bacchanalian revelry, led by the Lord of Misrule. Each year, town criers went through the land ordering that "Christmas and all other superstitious festivals" should not be celebrated.

The English were outraged. Secret festivities were held, pro-Christmas riots broke out and dozens of Christmas martyrs were jailed.

A pamphlet called An Hue and Cry after Christmas was published, demanding that: "Any man or woman, that can give any knowledge, or tell any tidings of an old, old, very old grey bearded gentleman, called Christmas ... let him bring him back again into England." [...]

So who are the modern Scrooges, Grinches, Cromwells and Castros, and what motivates them?

In most cases, the Christophobes use the excuse of multiculturalism, insisting that celebrating Christmas is offensive to non-Christian minorities, often citing Muslims. But the truth is that it is done in the name of Muslims, rather than at the request of Muslims, who accept the existence of Christ. Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists don't mind Christmas celebrations any more than Christians object to Diwali, Eid or Hanukkah.

As UK Commission for Racial Equality chairman Trevor Phillips said: "It's not offensive to minority communities to celebrate the festival of Christmas."

No, the real Christophobes are the self-loathing, guilt-ridden, politically correct liberal elite, driven by anti-Christian bigotry and a ruthless determination to destroy their own heritage and replace it with "the other". It is the American Civil Liberties Union that is threatening lawsuits against any schools that allow the singing of carols and the BBC's editorial policy bans criticism of the Koran but not the Bible.

In reality, the Christophobes are acting against the interests of ethnic minorities. By stripping Britain of its culture and traditions, they are causing a dangerous rising tide of anger.

It prevents social cohesion and integration -- who could want to integrate into a culture that is committing suicide?

(Originally posted: 12/23/04)

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WHICH WOULD BE WHY THE WIFE AND I HOPE OUR SON FINDS A BLACK WIFE:

Celebrating Kwanzaa: Holiday honors African culture, culinary traditions (Donna Pierce, 12/29/05, Chicago Tribune)

Kwanzaa hugs two other holidays linked on December's calendar. And so you'll find it included in the tongue-in-cheek "Merry Chrismahanukwanzakah" greeting making the rounds this year.

But the Kwanzaa celebration created 39 years ago by an African-American professor, M. Ron Karenga of California State University Long Beach, is a new tradition when compared to the centuries-old Christmas and Hanukkah observances. And although Kwanzaa shares the emphasis on family traditions, charity and unity with those religious-rooted holidays, the harvest festival offers no nod to religion.

Each day of the seven-day celebration highlights a different cultural principle, referred to in both English and the pan-African KiSwahili (also known as Swahili) language. Food rituals also play an important role during Kwanzaa, which runs from Dec. 26 to Jan. 1. [...]

Sweet potato pie

Preparation time: 20 minutes
Cooking time: 50 minutes
Cooling time: 1 hour
Servings: 8

--This recipe is adapted from "Food for the Soul," by the Congregation of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church.

Ingredients:
3 medium sweet potatoes, cooked, peeled while still warm
1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp. each: vanilla, ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp. each: ground nutmeg, allspice
1 9-inch unbaked pie crust

1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Beat the sweet potatoes with an electric mixer on low speed while the potatoes are still warm. Add the butter; mix well. Beat in the sugars, eggs, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice; mix well. Pour into the pie crust.

2. Bake until set and lightly brown on top, about 50-60 minutes; cool on wire rack at least 1 hour.

(Originally posted: 12/29/05)

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: HATTERISH:

Have a little faith in the 'C' word (Jack Straw, 12/24/05, Times of London)

THE CHRISTMAS CARD I sent out as Blackburn�s MP is a proper one. It was designed by Anna Souroullas (Year 3 of Holy Souls RC Primary School), who won a competition that I organised with some Blackburn schools. But it also has a proper message inside. �Best wishes for Christmas and the new year�.

I claim no pride of ownership in this message. After all it�s what one should expect of a Christmas card. But I have just noticed � alas, for the first time � that the card I sent out in my capacity as Foreign Secretary has the anodyne, non-Christmas message of �Season�s Greetings�. And I was horrified to learn from an American friend that in the circles in which she, at least, moves it is considered not the done thing to wish people one does not know well �Merry Christmas�, still less to send out �Christmas� cards saying so.

It�s mad, in my opinion.

Amen, brother.

(Originally posted: 12/24/05)

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: WILL THE MARKET SAVE CHRISTMAS?

Say 'Merry Christmas' while you still can (Mark Steyn, The Telegraph, December 21st, 2004)

One December a few years back, I was in Santa Claus, Indiana, and went to the Post Office - a popular destination thanks to its seasonal postmark.

"Merry Christmas!" I said provocatively.

But Postmistress Sandy Colyon was ready for me. "A week ago," she said, "I'd have had to say 'Happy Holidays', but we've been given a special dispensation from the Postmaster-General allowing us to say 'Merry Christmas'. So Merry Christmas!" That's "Christmas" at the dawn of the third millennium - a word you have to get a special memo from head office authorising the use thereof. In America, most executive honchos would rather not take the risk, instructing the staff to eschew any mention of the C-word in favour of "Happy Holidays!" - the all-purpose inoffensive greeting that covers Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Eid, the Third Wednesday after Ramadan, hippy-dippy solstice worship, West Bank Suicide Bomber Appreciation Day and any other festive occasion you've lined up for the general vicinity of late 2004/early 2005.

For US columnists, the end-of-year column bemoaning the fanatical efforts to expunge all Christmas traditions from public life has become an annual Christmas tradition in itself. This year, there's no shortage of contenders for silliest Santa suit. In one New Jersey school district, the annual trip to see Dickens's A Christmas Carol has been cancelled after threats of legal action. At another New Jersey school, the policy on not singing any songs mentioning God, Christ, angels, etc, has been expanded to prohibit instrumental performances of music that would mention God if any singers were around to sing the words. So you can't do Silent Night as a piano solo or Handel's Messiah even if you junk the hallelujahs.

But let's not obsess on New Jersey's litigious secularists. In Plano, Texas, in the heart of God-fearin' Bush country, parents were instructed not to bring red and green plates and napkins for the school's "winter" parties, as red and green are colours with strong Christmas connotations and thus culturally oppressive. In Massachusetts, in the heart of Bush-fearin' country, the mayor of Somerville issued an apology for accidentally referring to the town "holiday party" as a C-------- party.[...]

And yet this year I'm disinclined to join in the general bemoaning. Flipping the dial on my car radio, I notice more stations than ever have been playing non-stop 24-hour "holiday music" for the month before C-day - not just Winter Wonderland and Jingle Bell Rock but Bing and Frank doing Go Tell it on the Mountain and Andy Williams singing O Holy Night. And not just the old guys, but all the current fellows, especially the country singers: Garth Brooks's new album - The Magic of Christmas - includes Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow! but also Baby Jesus is Born and O Little Town of Bethlehem.

Similarly up here in godless, multicultural Canada�-there haven�t been so many carols on the radio in years. Last Saturday, there was a beautiful Christmas concert before a full house at the (state-assisted) National Arts Center featuring the national symphony orchestra, two choirs and wonderful soloists. Full of Handel, haunting Christmas spirituals, the best carols and a conductor (a guest American from San Francisco with anti-Bush quips and a lisp) who reminded all that the essence of Christmas is not �peace� or �friendship� but a miracle long ago in Bethlehem. He even harangued the whole audience into singing �Joy to the World� without any patronizing disclaimers. The sense that all this was vaguely defiant and invited the wrath of the local human rights commission only added to the splendour.

A safe and Merry Christmas to all and your families.

(originally posted: 12/21/04)

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: MERRY CHRISTMAS TO THOSE ON THE FRONTLINES:

G.I. Joes May Be Under Tree, but Not Around It (RALPH BLUMENTHAL, 12/25/03, NY Times)

When Specialist Nichola Gauthier of the First Cavalry Division in Fort Hood goes to war in March, who will watch her babies, Genevieve, now 2, and the 7-month-old twins, Gretchen and Isabella?

Not their fathers. One has been a soldier in Iraq since April. The other was in the Army and now lives in Florida. Not her sister, Laura. She has been on duty in Iraq since April. The specialist's boyfriend cannot. He is leaving for Iraq in January.

So Specialist Gauthier, 27, Army mechanic and single mother from Brasher Falls, N.Y., is spending her Christmas arranging for her sister's husband � a rare civilian in the family � to be her interim nanny.

Little Genevieve already senses something is up, her mother said. "She knows when I put on a green uniform, and she throws a tantrum." Still, Specialist Gauthier (pronounced GAH-tee-ay) said: "I feel strongly it's something I have to do. I've got my mind set on going. I just pray to God I'm going to come back to them."

Torn between country and children. It may sound like a particularly wrenching dilemma, a sort of Nichola's Choice, but it is just an extreme example of the countless everyday sacrifices being made by Americans in and out of uniform as the United States counts down a first year of war in Iraq.

The all-volunteer force, with the burden they take on themselves, is one of the true marvels of the Republic and genuinely humbling.

(Originally posted: 12/25/03)

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: HICK TRICKED:

Radio City Christmas is a treat -- until it decends into preachiness: The Radio City Music Spectacular is everything you expect, until the final 20 minutes. (MARK LOWRY, Nov. 15, 2002, Dallas-Fort Worth Star-Telegram)

No one expects high art from something like the Radio City Christmas Spectacular featuring the Rockettes; instead, you want think-free holiday entertainment. [...]

For the first hour-and-40-minutes, the big-budget revue succeeds in entertaining and building holiday spirit.

But then the tone changes rapidly.

A recreation of the biblical Christmas story, complete with live animals, wise men and shepherds drags on for a good 20 minutes.

An ominous voice narrates the entire story, beginning with Isaiah's Old Testament prophecy, with such seriousness that it turns preachy and overbearing. You almost expect the narrator to tell the Easter story and read the Book of Revelation.

Had NextStage been a church and its congregation known what to expect, terrific.

But to lure spectators of all faiths (and non-faiths) with the promise of an entertaining holiday revue, and then to ambush them with Christian theology, is dated and borderline offensive, especially at a time when understanding of other cultures and beliefs is more important than ever.

The RCCS creators are wrong to assume that Jews, Muslims and other non-Christians don't have the same right to holiday fluff that Christians do.

Our grandparents used to take us every year. Usually there was a dreadful movie--Mame and the remake of Lost Horizon are two I recall as being particularly awful, though the Albert Finney Christmas Carol was actually good--and then the stage show. The living nativity is the point of the whole exercise. They used to even have camels and the wise men would walk in from the wings. It was awesome.

This nitwit seems to think that tolerance means that the religious should forego their celebrations lest someone take offense. One would have thought that it meant that non-believers could enjoy the show and, just maybe, gain some of the understanding he's talking about. Or is the requirement of greater understanding a one-way street, to be imposed only upon Christians? [Originally posted: 2002-12-04]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: DEFENDER OF THE FAITH:

Defend the Nativity from the Christmas refuseniks (Libby Purves, December 24, 2002, Times of London)

The Christmas story gets a lot of flak these days. The Red Cross won’t let its shops display even the most symbolic crib, lest other faiths be offended. It seems a bit patronising to me: the crybaby culture of hurt feelings and fragile self-esteem is far more of a Western phenomenon. And even so, Christians rarely burst into tears at the sight of a synagogue or turban, or get resentful when an Egyptian taxi-driver keeps them waiting outside a Cairo hotel while he finishes his evening prayer. On the contrary, Christian-based societies rather like all this. They celebrate Diwali in The Archers, for God’s sake.

But when their own religious culture is belittled, Christians just smirk apologetically and retreat. Their critics know this, and thus feel free to make vast, sweeping attacks on the historic faith. Some critics of religion are thoughtful, honest and worthy of respect; many others are not. [...]

Well, the season’s greetings to all of them. What I wanted to mark, and not from a tub-thumpingly Christian point of view, is the extraordinary subtlety and humanity of the Nativity story, as told in the New Testament and adjusted over the centuries by human hands. You may take it, if you wish, as merely a story: a Sunday Telegraph survey found that a quarter of its sample of Anglican priests did not believe in the Virgin Birth, and the BBC seems anxious to persuade us that Mary was raped by a Roman soldier. But if you look at the story closely, you find that unlike the merry-holly-jingle-bells view of Christmas it contains hopeful resonance for the most doubtful, depressed, confused or bleak spirit. That is why the
crib, and its carols, need defending.

The Anglican clergy are an odd lot. (Originally posted: 12/24/02)

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: GOOD TIDINGS:

President's Radio Address (George W. Bush, 12/24/05)

Good morning. On this Christmas Eve, Laura and I send our best wishes to families across America as you gather in your homes to celebrate the holiday. Christmas is a time of joy and peace, and we hope the holiday season brings all of you happy reunions with families and friends, and time to rest and reflect as you look forward to a new year.

At Christmas, we give thanks for the gift of the birth of Christ, and for the blessings that surround us every day of the year. In this great and prosperous land, we have so much to be thankful for, and Christmas reminds us of our obligation to share these blessings with others. There are many among us who are hurting and require a helping hand. In the new year, I hope Americans will look for ways to volunteer your time and talents where they are needed most. By reaching out to a neighbor in need, we make our nation a more just and compassionate place.

This Christmas, we remember our fellow citizens who suffered from the hurricanes and other disasters that struck our nation this past year. We pray for their strength as they continue to recover and rebuild their lives and their communities.

During the holiday season and throughout the year, we think with pride of the men and women of our Armed Forces, who are keeping our nation safe and defending freedom around the world. In Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, they are protecting our liberty by spreading liberty to others, and all Americans are grateful to our troops for their courage and commitment.

We're also grateful to their families. Staying behind when a family member goes to war is a heavy burden -- and it's particularly hard at Christmas. We pray for our military families; we ask Almighty God to bestow His protection and care on their loved ones as they protect our nation from grave dangers.

We also remember the heroic men and women who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation's freedom. We pray that God will comfort the loved ones they left behind. The sacrifices of these brave troops have rescued millions from lives of tyranny and sorrow, and made America more secure. We will always cherish the memory of each of our fallen servicemen and women, and count it a privilege to be citizens of the country they served.

The times we live in have brought many challenges to our country. And at such times, the story of Christmas brings special comfort and confidence. Christmas reminds us that we can trust in God's promise of peace on Earth and goodwill toward men. On a night more than 2,000 years ago, an angel of the Lord brought good tidings of great joy: the God of Heaven had come to Earth, and He would be with us always.

Thank you for listening, and Merry Christmas.

(Originally posted: 12/24/05)

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IN LIEU OF THOSE TWO FRONT TEETH:

We generally make it a practice not to ask folks for money, on the reasonably safe assumption that the site is worth precisely what we charge for it.

However, you may have noticed the banner for Amazon gift certificates that's appeared at the top of the page? If you plan on purchasing one anyway, doing so by following that link earns us something like 6% of your total without costing you anything additional. It's pretty much found money.

Meanwhile, if you're looking to pad your Wish List in time for Christmas, perhaps you could add:

Thanks for your indulgence,
OJ

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: YET THEY PAID FOR THE BILLBOARD:

'Santa is consumption' say Island couple (Sylvia Yu, December 11, 2002, Canadian Press)

An anti-Christmas billboard sign is slowing traffic on the Pat Bay Highway. The bright red sign says: "Gluttony. Envy. Insincerity. Greed. Enjoy your Christmas!" A Victoria couple paid for the $1,200 sign with the money they would have spent on Christmas gifts. Valerie Williams and her husband Trevor say they came up with the idea to attack Christmas on a billboard because the onslaught of consumerism "horrified and disgusted" them. She says she doesn't want to participate in a "white, middle-class, heterosexual, patriarchial, Christian Christmas."

Maybe they could celebrate the Nativity of Alice Walker? [originally posted: 2002-12-13]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: DON'T BE WARY OF THE EIDS OF DECEMBER:

How about an Eid sale at Macy's? (Sabiha Khan, December 25, 2005, LA Times)

Many Muslim core values � freedom, justice and peace � are shared by followers of the world's other great religions. And Muslims revere Jesus as one prophet of God in a long line of such prophets, among them Abraham, Moses, John the Baptist and Muhammad.

American Muslims believe that Christmas celebrations should not be watered down or banned because they might offend people of other faiths or non-faith. Acknowledging Christmas � or any other religious holiday � in the public square does not infringe on my sensibilities or my right to practice my religion.

Indeed, many Muslim families will take their children to see the beautiful decorations of Christmas lights on homes to share the happiness they produce. Similarly, Muslims will play host to Muslim and non-Muslim friends during the Islamic celebrations of Eid-ul-Adha (Festival of the Sacrifice) and Eid-ul-Fitr (Festival of the Feast). [...]

Many non-Christians merely want their religious holidays to receive the same recognition and acceptance as Christmas. For instance, why shouldn't Albertson's put lamb and hummus on sale during Ramadan? Or Macy's set aside a one-day blowout sale on clothing the day before Eid? Or the local elementary school stage an Eid production with traditional songs?

(Originally posted: 12/25/05)

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: AND THEY WERE EXECS WHEN FOLKS ACTUALLY WATCHED TV (via mc):

The Christmas classic that almost wasn't (Bill Nichols, 12/05/05, USA TODAY)

When CBS bigwigs saw a rough cut of A Charlie Brown Christmas in November 1965, they hated it.

"They said it was slow," executive producer Lee Mendelson remembers with a laugh. There were concerns that the show was almost defiantly different: There was no laugh track, real children provided the voices, and there was a swinging score by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi.

Mendelson and animator Bill Melendez fretted about the insistence by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz that his first-ever TV spinoff end with a reading of the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke by a lisping little boy named Linus.

"We told Schulz, 'Look, you can't read from the Bible on network television,' " Mendelson says. "When we finished the show and watched it, Melendez and I looked at each other and I said, 'We've ruined Charlie Brown.' "

Good grief, were they wrong. The first broadcast was watched by almost 50% of the nation's viewers. "When I started reading the reviews, I was absolutely shocked," says Melendez, 89. "They actually liked it!"

Television bigwigs certainly haven't evolved.

(Originally posted: 12/06/05)

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: BULLSEYE!:

A Very Wary Christmas: Retailers and governments heed the wrath of Christians who seek recognition of the sanctity of the occasion. Attorneys are standing by. (Stephanie Simon, December 9, 2005, LA Times)

Christmas is back.

A few weeks ago, banners outside every Lowe's store in the nation announced a sale on "Holiday Trees." Hundreds of Christians called to complain that the home-improvement chain was shunning Christmas.

The banners came down. Now the fake firs and pines are clearly labeled "Christmas Trees."

Target, too, started the season with a generic marketing theme. It pushed holiday plates, holiday leggings, holiday ornaments, holiday trees � with nary a mention of Christmas. Then, more than 500,000 shoppers signed an online pledge to boycott the chain. This week, Target promised to bring more Christmas into its stores as Dec. 25 approaches.

For the third year in a row, Christians nationwide have mobilized to put the holy back in the holiday. And they are winning battle after battle.

You'd think the Democrats would be at least as smart as 5 and 10s.

(Originally posted: 12/09/05)

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE LATKES WENT GREAT WITH THE STANDING RIB ROAST:

Two Faiths Celebrate in 'Merry Mishmash': Christmas falls on the first day of Hanukkah this year, a rarity causing many families to juggle their traditions. (Lisa Richardson, December 25, 2005, LA Times)

For the first time since 1959 and only the fourth time in nearly a century, Christmas and the start of Hanukkah fall on the same day. Hanukkah follows the Jewish calendar, which is tied to the moon's cycles, so it can occur as early as Thanksgiving or as late as New Year's Eve.

Because more than half of Jews marry outside their faith, many of those who marry Christians must juggle both holidays, each with its own unique customs and traditions. Indeed, a dual celebration could be confusing.

"This is the mother of all Chrismukkahs," said Ron Gompertz, who with his Christian wife, Michelle, co-founded the website http://www.chrismukkah.com , defined as "a cross-cultural gumbo of cherished rituals and festivities shared by interfaith families."

(Originally posted: 12/25/05)

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: BECAUSE THE 24TH IS CHRISTMAS EVE?:

Why is Dec. 25 the date to celebrate Christmas? (The Associated Press, 12/22/04)

There's a small disagreement about why Christians chose Dec. 25 for Christmas. Two main theories compete.

One notes that in A.D. 274, the Roman Emperor Aurelian inaugurated Dec. 25 as the pagan "Birth of the Unconquered Sun" celebration, at the calendar point when daylight began to lengthen. Supposedly, Christians then borrowed the date and devised Christmas. [...]

Hippolytus said Jesus' birth "took place eight days before the kalends of January," that is, Dec. 25.

The New Testament Gospels say the Crucifixion happened at the Jewish Passover season. The "integral age" concept, taught by ancient Judaism though not in the Bible, held that Israel's great prophets died the same day as their birth or conception.

Quite early on, Tighe said, Christians applied this idea to Jesus and set the Passover period's March 25 for the Feast of the Annunciation, marking the angel Gabriel's announcement to Mary that she would give birth. Add nine months to the conception date and we get Dec. 25.

[originally posted: 2004-12-23]

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Mike Daley has found another good Christmas disc, one that even supports a worthy cause.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: AND GINGER SNAPS? (via Mike Daley):

Orrin,

The latke recipes made me think of the Sauerbrauten I used to cook for friends and family in the 80�s and 90�s (we�ve again become scattered throughout the lower 48).

Holiday Sauerbraten

Marinade:

2 cups white vinegar

3 cups white wine

1 cup water

2 good sized onions, peeled and sliced

6-7 carrots, peeled and sliced

A �few� peppercorns and whole cloves

4-5 bay leaves

2 tsp salt

1 tsp mustard seeds

�Few� sprigs parsley

Bring to a boil, let simmer for about five minutes. Then cool

Take a 5-6# bottom round or boneless rump roast and place into an ultra-large zip-lock bag, add cooled marinade and refrigerate for 4-7 days (7days is best), turning once each day.

To Cook:

Dry meat with paper towels and SAVE marinade!

Dust roast well with flour and brown in about 2/3 cup of hot oil over medium heat, about 20 minutes. Brown on all sides.

Pour off excess oil and add:

1 large onion, peeled and sliced

6-8 whole cloves

1-2 bay leaves

3 cups reserved marinade, strained

Cover and simmer for about 3 hours, until the roast is �almost� tender.

Remove the meat and strain the marinade.

Return roast and strained marinade to pot.

Make a sweet roux in a small skillet:

Melt 2 Tbl butter in small skillet, then stir in

2 Tbl sugar

3 Tbl flour

Cook, stirring, over low heat until the roux is a rich, nutty brown color

Stir roux into the marinade.

Cover and continue cooking until meat is very tender, about another hour.

Remove meat to a heated platter and keep warm

Sprinkle a cup of finely ground gingersnap crumbs into the gravy. Using a wire whip, cook and stir for 2-3 minutes until the gravy is smooth and slightly thickened.

This is excellent with your favorite Latke recipe. Sweet and sour red cabbage is an excellent side dish.

(Originally posted: 12/22/05)

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: IF CHRISTMAS, WHY NOT DARWIN DAY?:

Evolution of a holiday? (Kristina Henderson, February 12, 2003, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Today, as most calendars note, is Abraham Lincoln's birthday. But a bevy of secular humanists, atheists, scientists and educators are pushing Feb. 12 as "Darwin Day."

Charles Darwin, known for his groundbreaking work on evolution, "The Origin of Species," happens to share a birthday with the 16th president.

Darwin Day proponents believe that the naturalist's theory that men evolved from apes warrants a federal holiday, even if it means sharing the day with the president who led America through its Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves in states in rebellion. [...]

Though Darwin was a good naturalist, he does not accurately describe the origin of humans, said Frank Sherwin, a writer and researcher at the Institute for Creation Research, who added that Darwin should not be celebrated in the manner some organizations have chosen.

"What people have done is magnified this idea of origin of species and made Darwin the high priest of secular humanism," said Mr. Sherwin, whose Christian ministry in Santee, Calif., works to integrate science and the Bible. "Darwin himself would be very shocked with the kind of high accolades that are given to him about an unproved, unobserved and untested idea of his."

This seems perfectly appropriate to us, Darwinism partaking of the nature of a religious belief, it's only fitting that it get its own Saint's Day. [originally posted: 2003-02-22]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: WE'RE HERE TO HELP:

Turkey, vegetables, spices, and a splash of gin (JOE FIORITO, 12/26/05, Toronto Star)

Rouse yourself. Go into the kitchen. Send the women back to bed to read their Christmas novels. Encourage the children to put a fresh set of batteries in their new toys.

Now open the door of the fridge and remove the carcass of the turkey. You are about to make soup.

Apron?

We are men. We don't need no stinking aprons.

Put the carcass of the bird on a sturdy cutting board and, with your best sharp knife, trim the meat from the bones. Why use a sharp knife? Because, with a dull one, all you cut is yourself.

I am living, breathing proof. The back of my left forefinger, the corner of my left thumb, that bit of knuckle.

Et bloody cetera.

(Originally posted: 12/26/05)

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: BREWMISTRESS:

Brewing up a Norwegian tradition (Alan Cowell, December 24, 2004, The New York Times)

In the fancier hotels here, and in many homes, this is the time of year when the prosperous people of one of Europe's wealthiest nations gather for celebratory dinners consisting, by long-standing custom, of dishes devised to withstand the long Nordic winter - cod soaked in lye and served with mustard, cured mutton doused with fat and other such robust sustenance.

It is a time, too, in this Lutheran land of 4.5 million - whose angst-laden totems range from the plays of Henrik Ibsen to the paintings of Edvard Munch - when tradition insists that families celebrate in the old ways, with church bells, huge meals and the seven different kind of cookies that must be offered on the eve of Christmas.

And for Olaug Flakne, it is a time to show how Norway's new ways blend smoothly with the old, specifically, in her case, through the brewing of beer.

(Originally posted: 12/24/04)

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: WHY MY FAMILY SHOULD HAVE A COLUMN INSTEAD OF ME, PART II:

Jingle Bell Schlock (MAUREEN DOWD, 12/05/04, NY Times)

If I hear "Frosty the Snowman" one more time, I'll rip his frozen face off.

It's a scientific fact, or should be, that Christmas music can turn you into a fruitcake. It either sends you into a Pavlovian shopping trance, buying stupid things like the Robosapien, or, if you hear repeated Clockwork-Orange choruses of "Ring, Christmas Bells" drilling into your brain with that slasher-movie staccato, makes you feel as possessed with Christmas spirit as Norman Bates.

I've never said this out loud before, but I can't stand Christmas.

Everyone in my family loves it except me, and they can't fathom why I get the mullygrubs, as a Southern friend of mine used to call a low-level depression, from Thanksgiving straight through New Year.

"You're weird," my mom says.

[originally posted: 2004-12-07]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: RIMES WITH CLASSIC:

LeAnn Rimes' What a Wonderful World Gives Old Christmas Standards New Spin (Mary Morningstar, 17 December 2004, VOA News)

LeAnn Rimes is known around the world as one of America's biggest Country stars. But, the 22-year-old Texan moved in a different musical direction for her first holiday album. Rimes retained the traditional sound of the standards she included on What A Wonderful World.

The Louis Armstrong classic "What A Wonderful World" is one of eight classics on LeAnn Rimes' new album of the same name. Also included are such holiday favorites as "White Christmas," "The Christmas Song" and "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas." Many of the songs feature a big band sound provided by members of the Brian Setzer Orchestra. One example is LeAnn's jazzy version of the Brenda Lee holiday standard, "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree."

LeAnn's been making hit records since she was 13-years-old. So, why did she wait so long to record a holiday collection? "I'd been waiting for me to be a little bit older because my voice was changing so much," she says. "I'm glad I waited because I wanted it to be something I could be proud of for the rest of my life."

[originally posted: 2004-12-17]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: AND THE EASTER BUNNY GOT SNARED AND STEWED:

Vicar tells children Santa is dead (BBC, 10 December, 2002)

It is the news no child wants to hear - and certainly not from the mouth of a vicar. Youngsters at a Christmas carol service were devastated when the Reverend Lee Rayfield told them Santa Claus was dead. Even parents at the service in Maidenhead, Berkshire, were shocked to hear Mr Rayfield say it was scientifically impossible for Father Christmas to deliver so many presents so quickly. Mr Rayfield has admitted making a serious misjudgment in telling the story to children as young as five.

He said: "I did not realise how young some of them were and I am sitting here now wondering how I managed not to realise. "Even when I was there, I did not twig. I am mortified and appreciate I have put some parents in a difficult position with a lot of explaining to do. I love Christmas." Mr Rayfield also told the youngsters that reindeer would burst into flames if they had to travel at the speeds necessary.

So, let's see if we have this straight: their Archbishop is some kind of officially sanctioned Wiccan druid, but the kids shouldn't believe in Santa? And, of course the reindeer catch fire, isn't one called Comet? [Originally posted: 2002-12-10]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: WAY TO WRECK AN APPETITE:

How to cook the perfect turkey (the scientific way): For most people, the key to preparing the perfect Christmas meal is cooking the turkey. University of Bristol physicist, Dr Peter Barham explains how applying scientific principles in the kitchen at Christmas can help you achieve the perfect festive fowl. (Dr Peter Barham, 12/23/05, Physorg)

Meat consists of muscle fibres, connective tissues and fats. The muscle fibres largely consist of two proteins, myosin and actin. When muscle fibres are heated above about 40�C the proteins start to denature, the resulting change of shape involves the proteins coiling up. This coiling process inevitably causes some contraction of the muscle.

As meat is cooked, so heat flows in and more proteins are denatured. The denatured proteins shrink making the meat progressively tougher. Thus the longer you cook any meat the 'tougher' the muscle fibres will become.

The connective tissues (collagen, reticulin and elastin) that join the muscles to the bone and wrap around the muscle fibre bundles, are too tough for us to bite through (and remain largely indigestible) before they are heated. However, after prolonged heating to a temperature above 60�C the collagen triple helices are destroyed and tough collagen becomes soft gelatin. Accordingly there must be a compromise between overheating the muscle fibres and producing a tough product, and not heating enough to denature the collagen, which would again leave tough meat.

The remaining important components of meat are fats and water.

(Originally posted: 12/23/05)

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: LIFT EVERY VOICE AND SING:

Kwanzaa isn't just a black Christmas: It's a cultural thing (J. Caleb Mozzocco , 12/19/02, Columbus Alive)

As far as holidays go, Kwanzaa's a young one. First celebrated in 1966, the late-December African-American cultural observance turns 36 years old this month. And if it feels like an invented tradition, well, that's because it is--but then, so are most holidays. They've all gotta start somewhere, right?

Kwanzaa started with author and educator Maulana Karenga, who wanted to give his fellow African-Americans a non-religious, non-heroic holiday all their own, focused on their culture rather than a particular faith or particular person. [...]

The word comes from the Swahili phrase matunda ya kwanza, which means "first fruits." The extra "a" was added to push the letter count up to lucky number seven, to better reflect the Nguzo Saba (seven principles) that are the focus of the observance--Umoja (unity), Kujichagulia (self-determination), Ujima (collective responsibility), Ujamaa (cooperative economics), Nia (purpose), Kuumba (creativity) and Imani (faith).

Each principle is the focus of one of the seven days of the season, and each is represented by one of the seven red, green and black candles held in a special candleholder called the kinara. Starting December 26, a different candle is lighted each day (not unlike the Christian Advent wreath or Jewish menorah).

While the holiday is relatively new, many of the customs Karenga based it on are among the oldest we know of. Inspired by a variety of African year-end harvest fests, the celebration includes symbolic items like the mkeka, a straw mat representing African culture, and the kikombe, a cup symbolizing unity. The holiday climaxes with the karamu (feast) on December 31 and a quiet day of reflection on January 1. Gifts that accentuate education and culture are given to children--often drums and books instead of toy guns and videogames.

Happy Kwanzaa.
(Originally posted: 12/26/02)

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SURELY THIS TIME WILL BE DIFFERENT....:

Economic disaster is ahead in Venezuela (GEORGE MICHAEL, 12/24/06, Herald-Mail)

Chavez's soul mates can be found in Iran and Syria. He sees Fidel Castro as his spiritual father and the Cuban revolution as his inspiration. Really? Has he visited Cuba lately? Is Socialism working there? Has it ever worked anywhere?

Socialism violates both human nature and the laws of economics. You can't go for very long by confiscating economic capital and passing it out to the poor. The rich will quit being productive and soon everyone is poor.

Suppose that I am a professor with a large class of students. After an exam, I bemoan the fact that even though the median grade was an 80, a number of students had failed the test. I then announce that for future tests, to make sure we have no failures and that the class average is 70 or above, I will take 15 to 20 points from the scores of the successful students and transfer these points to any student who failed so that everyone would be passing.

With a little liberal guilt manipulation, I might even be able to convince the "A" students that this is the right thing to do. The question then is: What would be the median score on the next test? Would it stay at 80? Or would it decline? What would be the impact of this decree on the more productive students? And on the lower achieving ones?

Socialism contradicts human nature. It destroys incentive. Citizens eventually feel that it is up to someone else to provide for their needs. Personal responsibility becomes a meaningless concept and private property rights are viewed as prerogatives of the state.

Socialism violates the basic economic law of supply and demand. It creates a huge amount of artificial demand by promising free food or easy money while discouraging productive citizens from producing anything extra. In other words, more demand and less supply. The state then dictates what the prices of goods and services will be, since an economic market is no longer functioning. Without exception, such controls lead to shortages. This is what is ahead in Venezuela.

Socialism sometimes looks and sounds good in the short run. But invariably, as night follows day, it destroys any nation and any people which succumb to its siren call of materialism.

Expect to see Chavez, if he has not already done so, erecting huge pictures of himself. Emperor worship is nothing new. Tyrants like Chavez need to invest "deity" in their persona so that people will be less inclined to notice their diminished standard of living. As happens in such cases, Chavez has already announced that he will need to suspend future elections in order to continue his enlightened rule. This is called dictatorship and it is not pretty.

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QUOTA HIRE ME OR I KILL MYSELF:

Professor vows tenure or death (AP, December 24, 2006)

A black professor at MIT has threatened to go on a hunger strike and "die defiantly" outside the provost's office if the university does not grant him tenure, which he said was denied because of racism.

Tenure should be no bar to professors hunger striking.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: DON'T MESS WITH FATHER NICK AT CHRISTMAS:

OH, HOLY FIGHT! TOWN TREE FUROR (MARSHA KRANES, December 9, 2005, NY Post)

The fir has been flying on Long Island over a Christmas tree-lighting celebration in the tony North Shore community of Manhasset. The North Hempstead town supervisor, who is Jewish, objected to a local Catholic priest's religious blessing at last Friday's ceremony, and he made his displeasure known � in front of the entire crowd. What followed was a mini-holy war, waged via phone and e-mail, that ended with Supervisor Jon Kaiman bowing to public out rage and repeatedly apologizing to the Rev. Nick Zientarski by letter and in person.

A friend who's a parishoner sent us the e-mail yesterday, but we didn't want to run it without the priest's say-so. That seems superfluous now:

Subject: War on Christmas hits home- your comments please!

Dear Friends,

I don't normally send out bulk emails, but this is a special case that
I would like you to know about and comment on if you wish.

This past Friday, I was invited by the Manhasset Parks Department to
give a blessing at a Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony here in town. I
thought about what kind of blessing to give-- something generic or
something "Catholic". It seemed to me that because this was a Christmas
tree, it would be okay to use the blessing from my Catholic tradition.
Further, a different clergy person from the area is asked each year to
do this blessing, which would mean that each house of worship would be
represented over the years and that people would hear blessings in the
various traditions. So I proceeded with the blessing found in the
Catholic Book of Blessings.

The ceremony started with the pledge of allegiance and then I gave my
blessing. Now, present at this function were various political
representatives, including the Town Supervisor, Jon Kaiman. As I gave
the blessing, I heard him saying something as he stood behind me,
something to the effect of, "this is nonsense", "we're not doing this
next year", "I can't believe this", and so on.... AS I WAS GIVING THE
BLESSING. I stumbled a bit on my words as I heard him, but continued.
When I finished (the blessing took all of 1.5 minutes), Mr. Kaiman
proceeded to get up to the microphone and tell everyone in a harsh,
annoyed voice, "Hi, I'm Jon Kaiman. I just want to make it clear that
this is in no way a religious ceremony... we're here to celebrate the
"holiday" tree lighting. This is not the place for a religious
ceremony." And so on. Because I was so stunned, I really can't remember
everything that he said. But his attitude was very clear and many
people were very upset. I thought about 50% or more were from my parish
(about 150 were in attendance) ... and they all told me how mean he was
and some went to talk to him and he told one lady off, saying "I don't
care what you think". This was bad. So many people called and wrote to
him that he was pretty much forced to apologize both in a letter the
next day and on the phone just yesterday. Obviously he's feeling the
heat from what he did.

Nobody was offended by my blessing, which did actually mention "Jesus"
twice. I received no phone calls or letters. Only support from other
people who were very upset.

So what do you think about all this? Was I wrong to give a Christian
blessing at a Christmas tree lighting that also included music like
Silent Night and featured Santa Claus coming in on a fire truck at the
end? The war on Christmas hit home for me-- not only have the stores
rejected God and Christ, now our government is warring against us. They
say that the persecutions ended with the Roman Empire. No... they
continue even until today.

I welcome your comments, even if you disagree with me.

-Father Nick Zientarski
St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church
Manhasset, NY 11030

(Originally posted: 12/09/05)

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WORD GAMES:

Language Guardian: An online journal fights for clear, expressive English. (JOSEPH EPSTEIN, 12/07/06, Wall Street Journal)

Cleaning up the language is a herculean job; unlike Hercules' assignment of cleaning up the Augean Stables, here it must be done with the animals still in them. It's a full-time job.

A man who has taken it on is Robert Hartwell Fiske, who runs an online monthly journal called the Vocabula Review (www.vocabula.com), which, as Mr. Fiske writes, "battles nonstandard, careless English and embraces clear, expressive English," and hopes to encourage its readers to do likewise. Vocabula means "words" in Latin, and words are the name of Mr. Fiske's game. Read the Vocabula Review, and you will be convinced that the battle ought to be yours, too.

Mr. Fiske is the latest — and let us hope not the last — in a line of language guardians that goes back, in English, to Jonathan Swift and has been continued, closer to our time, by H.L. Mencken, H.W. Fowler, George Orwell, F.L. Lucas and Sir Ernest Gowers. About the decay of language, Mr. Fiske is earnest without being humorless, strict without being scornful, and elevated without being snobbish.

Bad language is viral; it's in the atmosphere, and we all pick it up. Mr. Fiske diagnoses it and tells us, in the Vocabula Review and in his books, how to get well. His aim is a higher standard of linguistic health through the clear and precise use of language. A subscription to Vocabula Review is the intellectual equivalent of a monthly flu shot.

The third Sunday of every month, Mr. Fiske publishes a number of articles about "some aspect of the language and its effect on society." Running the operation out of his house in Rockport, Mass., he asks a $25 subscription fee from language lovers (renewing subscribers pay $15), of which — no great surprise here — there are all too few. The Vocabula Review had a high circulation figure of 1,400, but the number is now down to fewer than a thousand.

Mr. Fiske is on the job 24/7, a phrase I feel confident he would, rightly, loathe. Along with running his online magazine, he has produced three useful books — The Dictionary of Concise Writing, The Dimwit's Dictionary, and the Dictionary of Disagreeable English — and an anthology of pieces from the Vocabula Review called "Vocabula Bound."

Each issue of the Vocabula Review (of which there are now 87 — one every month since September 1999) is a miscellany of articles on English as it is used in America ("Singular They: The Pronoun That Came In From the Cold"), controversies of the day such as the teaching of English to immigrants ("José, Can You See?"), and various columns and departments, among them Shibboleths, Bethumped With Words, Scarcely Used Words, Clues to Concise Writing, Grumbling About Grammar, and letters from some of the language fanatics who are among Mr. Fiske's subscribers.

I read the Vocabula Review for amusement and as a prophylactic against falling into sloppiness in my own writing. The Vocabula Review is run on the prescriptivist principle that there are correct and incorrect uses of words; the descriptivists hold that any language used by the majority is automatically acceptable English. "Whatever!" might be the descriptivists' motto; "Not in my house you don't" that of the prescriptivists.

The Vocabula Review, in fact, has two mottoes: "A society is generally as lax as its language" and "Well spoken is half sung." Mr. Fiske believes that honest language is elegant language. His online magazine is neither a forum for prescriptivism nor for his prejudices, but deals extensively with the endless oddities and richness of language.