NY Times Magazine: Belief in God is Part of Evolution

A very interesting article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, by Robin Marantz Henig, argues that religion is hardwired into our genes--by evolution:

Call it God; call it superstition; call it, as Atran does, “belief in hope beyond reason” — whatever you call it, there seems an inherent human drive to believe in something transcendent, unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the reach or understanding of science. “Why do we cross our fingers during turbulence, even the most atheistic among us?” asked Atran when we spoke at his Upper West Side pied-à-terre in January. Atran, who is 55, is an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, with joint appointments at the University of Michigan and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. His research interests include cognitive science and evolutionary biology, and sometimes he presents students with a wooden box that he pretends is an African relic. “If you have negative sentiments toward religion,” he tells them, “the box will destroy whatever you put inside it.” Many of his students say they doubt the existence of God, but in this demonstration they act as if they believe in something. Put your pencil into the magic box, he tells them, and the nonbelievers do so blithely. Put in your driver’s license, he says, and most do, but only after significant hesitation. And when he tells them to put in their hands, few will.

If they don’t believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?

New Chief for US Propaganda Board

According to the Washington Post, the Bush administration has chosen AEI scholar James Glassman (author of Dow 36,000, former Washington Post business columnist and Roll Call publisher) to succeed Ken Tomlinson as head of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio Marti, and Al Hurra's Arabic broadcasting, among other operations.

Reading between the lines of Tomlinson's January resignation letter, it seems Tomlinson could not get the US Senate to confirm his reappointment--no doubt due to scandals swirling around him. Here's the BBG press release:

Broadcasting Board of Governors Chairman Kenneth Y. Tomlinson has asked President Bush not to put his name in nomination for another term. Tomlinson said he serves at the pleasure of the President and plans to remain in office until his successor is confirmed.

In a letter to President Bush dated January 9, Tomlinson said he is proud of his record of service and “appreciated deeply your repeatedly submitting my name to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for reconfirmation to this position. However, I have concluded that it would be far more constructive to write a book about my experiences rather than to seek to continue government service.”

Glassman hosted a 2004 AEI conference, Selling America: How Well Does U.S. Government Broadcasting Work in the Middle East?, which may be related to his appointment as BBG topper. He said this:

The BBG, in its earlier incarnations and this one, has done fine work. But Ambassador Djerejian's advisory group, of which I was a member, made two recommendations regarding broadcasting.

First, we urged that the BBG, like all other elements of public diplomacy, be "brought under the strategic direction" of the White House--through an office headed by a special counselor to the president with Cabinet rank. Today, BBG spends nearly as much money on public diplomacy as the State Department, yet it operates outside the broader policy agenda.

Second, we urged that the BBG, again like all other agencies that practice public diplomacy, set clear objectives that can be measured. The objective should not merely be to build audience, but to "move the needle"--to change attitudes toward the United States. Evidence of the success or failure of broadcasting entities to meet objectives needs to be publicly disseminated.

There should be no fear that journalistic integrity and credibility will be compromised if these recommendations are followed. The point is to set strategic goals, not to interfere with the way specific news or entertainment is broadcast.

Think of it this way: a broad international security strategy is set; then a public diplomacy strategy is set to help implement it. Then the BBG, as part of the public diplomacy apparatus, operates within that strategy.

As an example, it is our strong national interest is to promote democratic regimes in the Arab and Muslim world. That may be the main reason we are in Iraq. Public diplomacy should follow this same track, even--and, in fact, especially, if it means criticizing existing non-democratic regimes. Public diplomacy can often do that when official diplomacy cannot. We will know Al Hurra is succeeding, says an Egyptian born friend, when Sec. Powell is besieged with complaints from heads of government in the Arab world complaining of mistreatment.

As for the prison abuse scandals, public diplomacy should not merely show what Americans have done wrong and what we are trying to set right but should also highlight prison abuse throughout the Arab and Muslim world. It is not an isolated problem.

If I sound disappointed with the greeting the Djerejian report--and others like it--have received, I am. Yes, many of our enemies will never approve of our policies in the Arab and Muslim world, but many others, given a clear and forceful explanation, will. We need to get serious. That was our message. The best sign of seriousness would be establishing the office and the structure we suggest and to fund public diplomacy adequately. It would not be difficult.

IMHO, I do hope Glassman is better at selling America to the world than at predicting the Dow Jones industrial average--currently 12,290.90...

Did Scooter Libby Want To Get Caught?

One of the cliches of Washington is: "It's not the crime, it's the coverup."

In the Scooter Libby case, they may not have been any crime at all prior to the cover-up, but the jury found that there was indeed a criminal cover-up. So, in the aftermath of this guilty verdict, one is moved to ask: "Did Scooter Libby Want To Get Caught?"

He had every incentive to leave the administration, but without appearing disloyal. This conviction enables him to get off a sinking ship--with a clear conscience.

First, Libby is not stupid. He's a Yale graduate and a Columbia Law School alumnus, who had a career at the highest levels of government. He knew better than to lie to a grand jury.

Second, the Libby defense seems to have skipped a number of chances to strike harder--for example, by permitting 11 jurors to decide the case, instead of insisting on 12, which would have thrown a monkey-wrench into the deliberations. Libby must have told his lawyer to "forget it"--strange, given that a new juror might have tipped the balance in what was obviously not an open-and-shut case.

Third, the now-discredited Libby cover-story dragged in Washington reporters--"Bigfoot" reporters like Tim Russert and Judy Miller--apparently against their will. Reporters who were sure to gossip, leak, squeal. Judy Miller went to jail to protect her source, it is true--but in the end, she testified against him...

Who would put top national correspondents in such a difficult position, except a person with a "death wish" who wanted to be caught?

My speculation--and there is no evidence for it other than the results so far--is that Libby may have felt guilty about something going on in the White House, and wanted out, at least at a subconscious level. He couldn't quit, out of loyalty to his superiors and perhaps a personal ethos of service. So, he constructed a complicated scheme that he knew at some level would result in the end of his career as a political operative--he lied.

When he lied to the Grand Jury, Libby sealed his fate (he beat one rap on lying to the FBI). He was then out of the game, and would no longer be involved in US foreign policy failures like Iraq and Afganistan--no doubt under his purview as Vice President Cheney's "go-to guy".

Further evidence is found in Libby's reputation. Almost everyone who has met him says he's a nice guy, a smart guy--not malicious. He wrote a novel that took 20 years to complete: The Apprentice: A NovelSuch a character might have felt uncomfortable doing the heavy lifting for others who may not be so nice.

With a conviction on his record, he's definitely not coming back to work in the Bush administration. Even if he's pardoned, it unlikely that he will be able to resume a legal career. Supposing that he is jailed until 2008 (President Bush might pardon him on his way out of town, without any repercussions), he will have plenty of time to write another book--and no responsibility whatsoever for the fall of Baghdad, should it happen on the watch of his superiors...

You can buy The Apprentice here, from Amazon:

Libby Juror Worked for Washington Post

Talk about trying your case in the press, according to Editor & Publisher, Libby juror Denis Collins used to work at the Washington Post:

Denis Collins, the juror in the Libby/CIA leak case who delivered a lengthy post-verdict commentary for the press, spent about a decade at The Washington Post, where he covered both metro news and sports, and spent time on the copy desk, according to editors at the paper.

The longtime journalist, who has also written for The Miami Herald and the San Jose Mercury New, is recalled as smart, hardworking and energetic, although not always "coloring within the lines."

The jury convicted Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the former chief aide to Vice President Cheney, on four of five counts today, including perjury and obstruction of justice. Collins, whose identity was not known until today, came out of the courthouse and spoke to the press, saying that as a former reporter he felt this was the right thing to do.

Cable TV news commentators noted the irony of a former reporter becoming chief jury spokesman -- at least today -- in a trial where reporters played such a central role. Some also wondered how someone who had written a book on spying (including the CIA variety) had made it on this jury.

In the jury selection phase, before Collins name came out, he was identified as having worked with Bob Woodward at the Post and being a neighbor of NBC's Tim Russert. Both would later testify in the case.

Washington, DC sure is a small town...

Byron York on the Libby Verdict

From National Review:

So now Libby has been convicted. His lawyers say they will ask for a new trial and, failing that, they will appeal the verdict. “We have every confidence Mr. Libby ultimately will be vindicated,” lead attorney Ted Wells told reporters. “We believe Mr. Libby is totally innocent and that he didn’t do anything wrong.” If Libby loses again, he could face a maximum of 25 years in prison.

What is next? Libby’s—and Cheney’s—enemies have always hoped that a guilty verdict would result in Libby flipping, in fingering the vice president for some still-unspecified crime for which Cheney would then be tried and convicted, or, even better, impeached and removed from office. “Mr. Libby, are you willing to go to jail to protect Vice President Cheney?” shouted MSNBC’s David Shuster as Libby walked away after his lawyers’ statement. That question will undoubtedly be heard many times in the days to come.

After Libby Conviction, Cheney Must Go...

Because of White House statements like this, when the Valerie Plame leak case first came up several years ago:

"I don't know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I'd like to know it, and we'll take the appropriate action." [Bush Remarks: Chicago, Illinois, 9/30/03]

"The President has set high standards, the highest of standards for people in his administration. He's made it very clear to people in his administration that he expects them to adhere to the highest standards of conduct. If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration." [White House Briefing, 9/29/03]

Even if the case was a "perjury trap," Libby fell into it--interestingly, juror Denis Collins told the press that he and other jurors felt sorry that Libby appeared to be a fall guy for the Vice President. Given President Bush's 2003 statements, Cheney must go now--or he will surely bring further troubles upon the Bush administration...

Christopher Hitchens on Ayaan Hirsi Ali

From Slate(ht lgf):

W.H. Auden, whose centenary fell late last month, had an extraordinary capacity to summon despair—but in such a way as to simultaneously inspire resistance to fatalism. His most beloved poem is probably September 1, 1939, in which he sees Europe toppling into a chasm of darkness. Reflecting on how this catastrophe for civilization had come about, he wrote:

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analyzed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

"The enlightenment driven away … " This very strong and bitter line came back to me when I saw the hostile, sneaky reviews that have been dogging the success of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's best seller Infidel, which describes the escape of a young Somali woman from sexual chattelhood to a new life in Holland and then (after the slaying of her friend Theo van Gogh) to a fresh exile in the United States. Two of our leading intellectual commentators, Timothy Garton Ash (in the New York Review of Books) and Ian Buruma, described Hirsi Ali, or those who defend her, as "Enlightenment fundamentalist[s]." In Sunday's New York Times Book Review, Buruma made a further borrowing from the language of tyranny and intolerance and described her view as an "absolutist" one.

Now, I know both Garton Ash and Buruma, and I remember what fun they used to have, in the days of the Cold War, with people who proposed a spurious "moral equivalence" between the Soviet and American sides. Much of this critique involved attention to language. Buruma was very mordant about those German leftists who referred to the "consumer terrorism" of the federal republic. You can fill in your own preferred example here; the most egregious were (and, come to think of it, still are) those who would survey the U.S. prison system and compare it to the Gulag.

In her book, Ayaan Hirsi Ali says the following: "I left the world of faith, of genital cutting and forced marriage for the world of reason and sexual emancipation. After making this voyage I know that one of these two worlds is simply better than the other. Not for its gaudy gadgetry, but for its fundamental values." This is a fairly representative quotation. She has her criticisms of the West, but she prefers it to a society where women are subordinate, censorship is pervasive, and violence is officially preached against unbelievers. As an African victim of, and escapee from, this system, she feels she has acquired the right to say so. What is "fundamentalist" about that?

Washington Times: USAID Supported Hamas Terrorism

Why am I not surprised by Joel Mowbray's report in today's Washington Times?

Millions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid have been given in the past several years to two Palestinian universities -- one of them controlled by Hamas -- that have participated in the advocacy, support or glorification of terrorism.

The funding -- principally in scholarships to individual students -- is being eyed by several members of Congress and their aides, who say it may violate U.S. law.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has provided more than $140,000 in assistance to the Hamas-controlled Islamic University in Gaza -- including scholarships to 49 of its students -- since Congress changed the law in 2004 to restrict aid to entities or individuals "involved in or advocating terrorist activity."

No U.S. assistance was directed to Islamic University last year, but USAID continues to fund multimillion-dollar programs through American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA), which is building a high-tech facility for the school. U.S. law requires that any recipient of U.S. aid have no association with terrorists.

USAID also gave $2.3 million in aid last year to Al-Quds University, which has student groups affiliated with designated terrorist organizations on campus and last month held a weeklong celebration of the man credited with designing and building the first suicide belts more than a decade ago.

"It is outrageous that U.S. taxpayer dollars are going toward institutions that support terrorists," said Rep. Gary L. Ackerman, New York Democrat and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia.

Melaine Phillips on the "Dialogue of the Demented"

From her March 1st Quadrant Lecture in Sydney, Australia, published on MelaniePhillips.com:

Multiculturalism has produced furthermore two particularly lethal effects. First, it has left all immigrants abandoned, and none more lethally so than young Muslims. For if there is no longer an overarching culture, there is nothing into which minorities can integrate. Many young Muslims, stranded between the backward Asian village culture of their parents and the drug, alcohol and sex-saturated decadence that passes for western civilisation, are filled with disgust and self-disgust – and are thus vulnerable to the predatory jihadis recruiting in youth clubs, in prisons and on campus, who promise them self-respect and a purpose to life based on holy war.

Second, and worse still, multiculturalism has reversed the notions of truth and lies, victim and victimiser. Since minorities can do no wrong, they cannot be held responsible for acts such as suicide bombings which must instead be the fault of their victims. This key confusion, which has caused intellectual and moral paralysis in the west, plays directly into the pathological Muslim victim culture which makes dialogue impossible. Because so many Muslims genuinely believe they are under attack by the west, which is a giant conspiracy to destroy Islam. So they perceive their own aggression as legitimate self-defence, and the west’s defence as aggression.

This fundamental untruth has created a dialogue of the demented. But instead of treating it as the mad discourse that it is and refusing to play along with it, Britain regards it as an extension of its own multicultural, minority rights doctrine which routinely reverses victim and aggressor. So the untruths driving the terror are merely deepened – particularly since the left, which controls British culture, demonises America and Israel. So the central Islamist perception of the Big and Little Satan, America and Israel, is echoed in mainstream British discourse where anti-Americanism is rampant and Israel is well on the way to being delegitimised altogether. This acts as an echo chamber for Muslim prejudice, reinforcing it and fuelling the sense of paranoia and victimisation. And it has also released the virus of Judeophobia.

Since Londonistan was published last summer, there has been a shift in British thinking. Things are now being said which only six months previously would have been considered unsayable. Public opinion has been steadily hardening as a result of a continuing series of events, including the discovery of the transatlantic airliner plot last August and an al Qaeda training camp in an idyllic village in the heart of rural England. People were also appalled when the Home Secretary John Reid visited east London to urge Muslim parents to look out for the ‘tell-tale signs’ that their children were being turned into potential suicide bombers, only to be greeted by a tirade from an Islamist extremist, Abu Izzadeen, who screamed: ‘How dare you come to a Muslim area when over 1,000 Muslims have been arrested?’ This assumption, that there are now ‘Muslim areas’ of Britain where non-Muslims are not welcome, has been allowed to take root, and there have been instances where non-Muslim women walking through such areas have been stoned.

In the face of all this, public opinion is hardening. Last October, the government deliberately provoked a debate about whether it was right for women to wear the full face niqab veil in public offices. That was before we discovered that a prime male suspect for the murder of a police officer had walked unchallenged through Heathrow airport and escaped to Somalia because he was wearing such a veil. And there was uproar when British Airways refused to allow a clerk to wear a small cross on chain round her neck even though it allowed Muslims and Sikhs to wear hijabs, turbans and bangles.

The government is making tougher noises, but progress is still very fitful. It is still appeasing Islamist radicalism. So MB [Muslim Brotherhood] radicals have been brought into government — as advisers on Islamist extremism. We now have sharia compliant mortgages, with a policy to make London the centre of global Islamic banking — even though global Islamic banking is controlled by Saudi Wahabbis, who use the money to radicalise British Muslims and Islamise Britain. And a blind eye is turned to polygamy and to the forced marriage of 14 year old girls.

"Wise Fool" Sweeps Russian Oscars

The Washington Post's Nora Fitzgerald explains why Pavel Lungin's The Island, starring Pyotor Mamonov, is the surprise hit of the this year's Russian movie season:

At the Golden Eagle awards last month, "The Island" won in the categories of feature film, director, actor, cinematography, supporting actor and screenplay.

Mamonov's portrayal of Anatoly "is half-acting and half-Mamonov," Lungin said.

The actor is known in Russia for his unexpected appearances and y urodivy, or wise fool, ways. His rambling acceptance speech for his Golden Eagle -- during which he called Putin a "sissy," told Russian women to make babies and worried that his grandchildren would be speaking Chinese -- was yanked off the air by programmers but became a sensation on the Internet.

"The yurodivy speaks out what everyone else thinks and would like to say," said Ivanova, the film critic. "But the freak is the only one who can say it and get away with it."

Lungin, who is working on a biography of Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, said the film "was the opposite of mainstream, and then it was accepted by the mainstream. This was absolutely surprising, and it says something about how people are feeling."

More on Mamonov from Wikipedia.

Happy Purim!

Here's a link to Wikipedia's entry on the meaning of today's Jewish holiday, which celebrates a historic victory over an ancient Persian plan to exterminate the Jews, the triumph of Mordechai and Queen Esther over Haman:

The events leading up to Purim were recorded in the Megillat Esther (the Book of Esther), which became the last of the 24 books of the Tanakh to be canonized by the Great Assembly. The Book of Esther records a series of seemingly unrelated events which took place over a nine-year period during the reign of King Ahasuerus. These events, when seen as a whole, reveal that the "coincidences" are really evidence of Divine intervention operating behind the scenes. This interpretation is developed and explained by Talmudic and other major commentaries on the Megillah.

The holiday of Purim has been held in high esteem by Judaism at all times; some have held that when all the prophetical and hagiographical works are forgotten, the Book of Esther will still be remembered, and, accordingly, the Feast of Purim will continue to be observed (Jerusalem Talmud, Megillah 1/5a; Maimonides, Yad, Megillah).

Like Chanukkah, Purim's status as a holiday is on a lesser level than those days ordained holy by the Torah. Accordingly, business transactions and even manual labor are allowed on Purim, though in certain places restrictions have been imposed on work (Shulkhan Arukh, Orach Chayim, 696). A special prayer ("Al ha-Nissim"—"For the Miracles") is inserted into the Shemoneh Esrei during evening, morning and afternoon prayers, as well as is included in the Grace after Meals.

The four main mitzvot of the day are:

*listening to the public reading, usually in synagogue, of the Book of Esther in the evening and again in the following morning
*sending food gifts to friends
*giving charity to the poor
*eating a festival meal

Here's a link to Purim Gateway, and another link to Mordechai Housman's English translation of the Book of Esther.

This Just In...

KINO INTERNATIONAL RELEASES ACCLAIMED DOCUMENTARY WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE? (1982) ON DVD

"There's never been anything quite like this small, spare independent production."
– David Ehrenstein, The Los Angeles Herald Examiner

Released to great acclaim and controversy over 25 years ago, Kino International is proud to finally make available on DVD the Holocaust documentary WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE? (1982). This penetrating documentary about America's knowledge of the Holocaust during the Second World War dares to ask, "Could the Jews of Europe have been saved?"

Coming with the 21-minute short DEATH MILLS, produced under the supervision of Billy Wilder, Kino’s WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE? DVD has a prebook date of March 6, 2007, with a SRP of $29.95. This gripping documentary about America’s complicity in the Holocaust will become available to the general public on April 3.

"A devastating political story" (Annette Insdorf, THE L.A. TIMES), WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE? boldly confronts the issue of governmental complicity by exploring the actions and inaction of the Roosevelt Administration and American Jewish leaders. Laurence Jarvik’s “searing” (Yaacov Rodan, THE JEWISH PRESS) film also exposes the political tradeoffs that kept doors closed to Jewish emigrants fleeing the Nazi regime. Requests were made to bomb Auschwitz, set up a Jewish army and construct rescue havens, yet no action was taken.

Containing previously classified information, contemporary interviews and rare newsreel footage, this film is a unique chronicle of important decisions made by the American political and Jewish establishments during World War II. "Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die? provides a much needed history lesson for all who are either too young to know, or who were never told the facts." (Neil Barsky, Jewish Students Press Service).

SPECIAL FEATURES

DEATH MILLS (1946, 21 Min.)
Produced under the supervision of Billy Wilder.
This War Department Information film forced the German people to face the grim realities of the concentration camps.

WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE?
U.S. 1982 85 Min. B&W Not Rated 1.33:1
[Produced by James R. Kurth & Laurence Jarvik]
Directed and edited by Laurence Jarvik
Photographed by Reuben Aaronson, Elliott Davis & Steven Weinstock
© 1981 Blue Light Film Company
---------------------
Rodrigo Brandao, Director of Publicity
Kino International
333 W. 39th St. #503
NYC, NY 10018
http://WWW.Kino.com/press
(212) 629-6880, ext. 12

You can buy it from Amazon.com, here:

Giuliani Speaks to CPAC Convention

Hizzoner is in Washington, DC today. Giuliani was introduced by George Will, significantly. Here's what he had to say, according to The Washington Times:

During his lunchtime speech today at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, Rudolph W. Giuliani made an important distinction that will resonate among the Republican Party’s core supporters.

“I have no doubt that America will prevail over the Islamic terrorists,” Giuliani told a standing-room only crowd.

A longtime complaint of many conservatives has been the Bush Administration’s unwillingness to identify the essential Islamic nature of the threats posed by Osama Bin Laden, Al qaeda and other terrorists.

Mr. Giuliani was introduced warmly and enthusiastically by newspaper columnist George Will, who recounted the former New York City mayor’s accomplishments.

BTW, Here's a link to a Giuliani fansite

General Fired at Walter Reed...

...shortly after we posted Fire the Generals! Wonder who's next?

You can read the New York Times story here.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: History and National Stupidity

In memoriam, a link to one of Arthur Schlesinger's last articles for The New York Review of Books:

History is not self-executing. You do not put a coin in the slot and have history come out. For the past is a chaos of events and personalities into which we cannot penetrate. It is beyond retrieval and it is beyond reconstruction. All historians know this in their souls.

Israel's Eurovision Song Contest Entry

Teapacks' "Push the Button" (ht lgf)

Douglas Macgregor: Fire the Generals!

At the National Press Club today for lunch, I came across this interesting unpublished 2006 article about Iraq, by Col. Douglas Macgregror (Ret.), of the Center for Defense Information: Fire the Generals!:

American soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines are rightly lauded by the American public for their courage and sacrifice in the fight for Iraq, but the high quality of American soldiers and Marines at battalion level and below cannot compensate for inadequate senior leadership at the highest levels in war. Today, the senior leadership of the U.S. armed forces in general and, the U.S. Army in particular, is overly bureaucratic, risk averse, professionally inadequate and, hence, unsuited to the complex military tasks entrusted to them. The Bush administration has a preference for compliant, sycophantic officers who are fatally dependent on the goodwill of the secretary of defense and the president who promoted and appointed them.

It is bitter to contemplate, but Americans now confront issues of the utmost gravity:

• first, the lack of character and competence apparent in the most senior ranks;
• second, the willingness of the civilians in charge, from the commander in chief to the secretary of defense, to ignore this problem; and,
• third, the probability that future American military operations will fail if generalship of this quality persists.

Steven Malanga on Rudy Giuliani's Electability

From City Journal (ht OpinionJournal):

As "America's mayor," a sobriquet he earned after 9/11, Mr. Giuliani has a unique profile as a presidential candidate. To engineer the city's turnaround, he had to take on a government whose budget and workforce were larger than all but five or six states. (Indeed, his budget his first year as mayor was about 10 times the size of the one that Bill Clinton managed in his last year as governor of Arkansas.) For more than a decade, the city has been among the biggest U.S. tourist destinations, and tens of millions of Americans have seen firsthand the dramatic changes he wrought in Gotham.

Moreover, as an expert on policing and America's key leader on 9/11, Mr. Giuliani is an authority on today's crucial foreign-policy issue, the war on terror. In fact, as a federal prosecutor in New York, he investigated and prosecuted major terrorist cases. As mayor, he took the high moral ground in the terrorism debate in 1995, when he had an uninvited Yasser Arafat expelled from city-sponsored celebrations during the United Nations' 50th anniversary because, in Mr. Giuliani's eyes, Arafat was a terrorist, not a world leader. "When we're having a party and a celebration, I would rather not have someone who has been implicated in the murders of Americans there, if I have the discretion not to have him there," Mr. Giuliani said at the time.

These are impressive conservative credentials. And if social and religious conservatives fret about Mr. Giuliani's more liberal social views, nevertheless, in the general election such views might make this experience-tested conservative even more electable.

My Morning With Yulia Tymoshenko...

I spent this morning with Ukraine's Yulia Tymoshenko...and a couple of hundred other star-struck Washingtonians who attended her talk in the SRO conference room, entitled "Ukraine: At Political and Economic Crossroads," at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

First impressions: Tymoshenko is quite petite, smaller in person than she appears on television. Her famous braid was solidly in place, giving a "halo effect" to her perfect complexion. She's as good a dresser, at least, as Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice (though she didn't show as much leg). Her talk was a plea for American support in her battle to maintain the Euro-Atlantic orientation of Ukraine's development in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution. She described her nation as "in crisis"--and took a number of hostile questions about her legal problems from Russian-speakers in the audience. Tymoshenko handled them with grace and aplomb, didn't bristle, smiled even. She's definitely a tough cookie and obviously smart. Not afraid to face tough questions. In her talk and the Q&A, Tymoshenko gave a pessmistic view of Ukraine's current crisis, and fights with Russia over gas pipelines. She said that even if Ukraine is taking backward steps, she was confident that Ukraine would go forward again, presumably under her leadership. She wouldn't criticize President Viktor Andriyovych Yushchenko, but did criticize Prime Minister Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych, whom she described as "not free" (ie, a tool of Russia). She did misunderstand a significant audience question--about "Ukraine fatigue" in Washington. Tymoshenko responded that Ukrainians have been fighting for their freedom for 100 years and will go on fighting forever. She didn't seem to understand that the Washingtonian was asking her response to the apparent fact that Washington is getting tired of perpetual crisis in Ukraine...One of the interesting questions was about Tymoshenko's call for a "Third Way"--her way. She was asked the ideology of her party, and if she were running for President of Ukraine. It was the only answer that seemed a bit vague. From that, it would seem that she is running, and in 2009, may become "Madame President." She told the crowd, that she didn't only make revolutions, that she was also able to be very calm. That will no doubt prove useful as she has to juggle geopolitics, domestic politics, and triangulate between the EU-Russia-USA. From her talk in Washington this morning, I'd say Tymoshenko's off to a good start...

Nuruddin Farah on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer

Here's a link to a podcast of Somali author Nuruddin Farah's interesting interview with Jeffrey Brown on last night's Newshour with Jim Lehrer. He blamed the rise of Islamist extremism in Somalia on the return of guest workers from the Gulf States, who had been exposed to Wahabi teachings. He seemed both perceptive and reasonable--I hope Americans will heed his message...His books include:

A Naked Needle (1976)
From a Crooked Rib (1970)

Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship,
a trilogy consisting of:
Sweet and Sour Milk (1979)
Sardines (1981)
Close Sesame (1983)

Maps (1986)
Gifts (1993)
Secrets (1998)
Links (2005)
Knots (2007).

Here's a link to the Nuruddin Farah Archive on NomadNet. You can buy his latest book, Knots from Amazon.com, here:

How Foreign Aid Ruined Afghanistan

By Joshua Foust, in TCS Daily (ht Registan):

Since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Non-Governmental Organizations have filled in the gaps left by an otherwise absent government—schools, health care, employment, and so on. After the American invasion in 2001, billions of dollars have flowed into the country, funding a massive reconstruction effort. The story of aid in Afghanistan is not all unicorns and sunshine, however. Its very abundance—over $8 billion pledged this year alone—is harming the country's ultimate chances of success.

Overabundance is not a problem traditionally associated with humanitarian missions. Indeed, quite often the opposite is true with programs lacking the funds required by their mandates.

The unfortunate reality in Afghanistan is that, no matter the amount donated, it would be too much. This is because Afghanistan's biggest problem is not poverty, but government.

Before the 2001 invasion, there were no institutions to speak of—no government, no services, no formal economy. There was simply no way to provide basic services, like police or fire fighting or medicine.

Yet even after years of what the IMF calls "building capacity," Kabul cannot manage its resources effectively. Trying to unravel the financial mess, the World Bank in late 2005 drafted a report on Afghanistan's public finances. It contains some sobering statistics: domestic revenues are only 5% of GDP, the fiscal deficit is financed entirely by a foreign aid, the entire operating budget is managed by a trust fund. The government cannot directly channel the reconstruction money, so it delegates to NGOs and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). As a result, it exercises no control, no accountability, and, most ominously, no legitimacy over the reconstruction process.

Who's Behind the "Appeal for Redress" PR Campaign?

The Mudville Gazette explains the background to last night's 60 Minutes segment breathily narrated by Lara Logan on anti-war protesters in the US military. It appears this protest may not be as spontaneous as it seems (ht The American Thinker):

The missing piece of the puzzle was actually available from the start:

Yesterday, a company that does public relations for the liberal activist political action committee MoveOn.org, Fenton Communications, organized a conference call for reporters and three active-duty soldiers to unveil the soldiers' anti-war group Appeal for Redress.
<...>
A staff member at Fenton Communications who requested anonymity said his company was approached last week by a longtime peace activist and former director of the anti-nuclear proliferation front known as SANE/Freeze, David Cortright, to publicize Appeal for Redress. Mr. Cortright is now president of an Indiana-based nonprofit group, the Fourth Freedom Forum, and his biography on the organization's Web site says he helped raise "more than $300,000 for the Win Without War coalition to avert a preemptive attack on Iraq in 2002–03."

That's from the October 26 New York Sun - kudos to the only reporters in the crowd who had the guts to tell the truth about this. As of this writing, over 200 newspapers have carried the story; The Boston Globe, al-Jazeera, The Washington Post, ABC News, Reuters, The (UK) Guardian... but none of the stories acknowledge the orchestration of the event by Fenton Communications. Instead, virtually all of them detail the "grass roots" effort of the troops. Even without the Sun story, the mere fact that this appeared simultaneously in multiple "big media" outlets is evidence enough of such a campaign. In the pre-internet days this wouldn't be so obvious, but in these days of instant global communication the life cycle of such a story should hardly exceed 24 hours (and wouldn't have in the past without active media participation). But if you're among the few tech savvy and information hungry people interested in not taking such slickly-packaged information at face value, here are the facts about "Appeal for Redress" in order of discovery here.

The site is registered to J.E. Glick, of 803 North Main Street, Goshen, Indiana. A quick check of online white pages reveals that's the address of The Fourth Freedom Forum. (You can also read about the group here). This would seem to confirm the point in the Sun story quoted above:

A staff member at Fenton Communications who requested anonymity said his company was approached last week by a longtime peace activist and former director of the anti-nuclear proliferation front known as SANE/Freeze, David Cortright, to publicize Appeal for Redress. Mr. Cortright is now president of an Indiana-based nonprofit group, the Fourth Freedom Forum.

And Jennifer Glick (J.E. Glick), actual "owner" of the Appeal for Redress web site, is listed in the Fourth Freedom Forum contact page as Director, Information Services.

The Fourth Freedom Forum's opposition to war pre-dates Iraq and Afghanistan. They are a well funded, very professional organization. But the group is not listed among the sponsoring organizations on the Appeal for Redress web page. (Those groups are Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, and Veterans For Peace.)

It would seem the Fourth Freedom Forum wants to hide it's activities behind some groups and individuals seen as more credible to this particular cause. (I think "front groups" is the usual term.) But it was easy to find the real owners of the "Redress" web page (I originally noted the failure to do so on the part of one of the reporters who carried this propaganda to "the next level" - but have since come to believe that among journalists this was actually common knowledge that they saw fit not to include in their stories), so the "staff member at Fenton Communications who requested anonymity" (ironically, given the breathless press accounts, the only actual whistleblower in this story) may or may not have needed to be so concerned about being revealed.

(Update: registration of the site has been changed. Fourth Freedom is working quickly to camoflage their involvement in this project.)

The Queen to Have "The Queen" to Tea

According to an AP story in The Guardian, Helen Mirren may soon be having tea at Buckingham Palace, after her Oscar win for "The Queen." Wouldn't it be nice to be a fly on the wall for that? In any case, Helen: Jolly Good Show!

Mr. Schwarzenegger Goes to Washington

Just heard Arnold Schwarzenegger's National Press Club speech on C-Span radio, while driving in the car. It's pretty good. You can watch it yourself (scroll down for link), on the C-Span website.

William Grimes on Alexander Herzen

Today's New York Times Book Review features William Grimes (who holds a doctorate in Russian literature) on the literary legacy of Alexander Herzen, "star" of Tom Stoppard's New York hit, The Coast of Utopia:

“My Past and Thoughts” embraces a wide range of moods and emotional registers, from the poignant lyricism of the chapters on childhood to the anguished, self-lacerating examination of the Herwegh affair (not included in the Macdonald abridgement). Herzen’s version is hot, vindictive and wildly unfair — in other words, the one you want to read first. Herwegh is portrayed as a weak-willed, cowardly narcissist, a third-rate poet who, while protesting undying devotion to Herzen, sets about seducing his wife. Herwegh’s slavishly adoring wife, whom Herzen loathed, gets her share of abuse as well. With cruel precision, Herzen describes her foghorn voice, her simpering Romantic vocabulary, her appetite for self-abasement before the altar of genius. As a character assassin, Herzen knows no peer.

At the time he published the first chapters of “My Past and Thoughts,” Herzen’s best years lay ahead of him. In July 1857 he and his childhood friend, the poet Nikolai Ogarev, began publishing a new periodical, The Bell. A rough equivalent of I. F. Stone’s Weekly, The Bell analyzed political developments in Russia, exposed crimes and abuses and put the fear of God into czarist functionaries high and low. “V. P. Botkin himself,” Herzen wrote, referring to a famous reactionary, “constant as a sunflower in his inclination toward any manifestation of power, looked with tenderness on The Bell as though it had been stuffed with truffles.”

“My Past and Thoughts” winds down inconclusively. Its final chapter contains a brief account of Herzen’s last years in Switzerland, some random observations on Italian architecture and Heinrich Heine, and some fascinating predictions about the United States (“The standard of their civilization is lower than that of Western Europe, but they have one standard and all attain to it: in that is their fearful strength”). Most telling, however, is his attack on the new breed of radical coming to the fore in Russia, and epitomized in the “nihilist” Bazarov, the antihero of Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons.”

In Bazarov, Herzen recognized his replacement. The world had turned since he and Ogarev, aflame with the ideas of the French Revolution and German philosophy, had stood on the hills overlooking Moscow and sworn eternal faith to the liberal Decembrist uprising of 1825. By the year of his death, Herzen was yesterday’s man, and his natural heirs would be among the first victims of the revolution to come. His enduring legacy was not a just, democratic Russia. It was “My Past and Thoughts.”

Washington DC's Black Opera Company

In yesterday's Washington Post, Jackie Trescott reports on the African-American opera company that brought high culture to America's capital in the 19th Century:

Where the idea for an opera company came from is not entirely clear, but the group was organized by a barber, William T. Benjamin. The opera company came together in 1873 with John Esputa, a well-known white teacher, as its director.

He had worked with St. Augustine's since 1868, according to a church history written by Morris J. MacGregor in 1999. How the partnership happened is not entirely clear.

"What it looks like is that he lived in the Navy Yard neighborhood, and the parish priest at [the nearby] St. Peter's Catholic Church was the Rev. Felix Barotti. He became the priest at Blessed Martin's, and recruited Esputa as the music director," says Patrick Warfield, visiting assistant professor of music at Georgetown University.

Esputa had been an apprentice of the U.S. Marine Band, where his father played, and then joined the band himself. He and his father ran a music school near the Marine Barracks, and John Philip Sousa was one of their students. About the time Esputa began working with the black church, he became a music teacher for the Washington Colored Schools.

The parish choir, according to the MacGregor history, sang Haydn and Mozart at well-attended performances chronicled by the daily newspapers, as well as the Catholic Mirror. "On Easter Sunday in 1873, for example, the choir performed Haydn's 'Solemn Mass in Honor of the Blessed Virgin' and Antonio Diabelli's 'Gaudeamus' accompanied by a small orchestra of trumpets, horns and strings," wrote MacGregor.

By 1873, the opera company was a distinct part of the church's music program.

Chicago's O'Hare Airport, Valentine's Day, 2007

Melvyn Bragg on William Wilberforce

From Radio Four's In Our Time. Listen here.

Lev Navrozov: China More Dangerous Than Russia

From Newsmax:

It is true that I write about the danger of Putin's Russia mainly because of its "cooperation" with China, which cooperation was established officially in 2001, but few Americans except me publicly noticed the sinister danger of such cooperation in the development of post-nuclear super weapons.

The population of China exceeds four times that of the United States, and eight times that of Russia.

Why is this important?

Those Westerners who write about the "China threat," while knowing nothing about it, speak about how big China's army is. Actually, it is tiny compared with the population of China. The size of its population is important as a source not of soldiers, but of scientists and technologists, such as Tsung-Dao Lee, a genius of high-energy particle physics, who received the Nobel Prize in 1937 and established in Beijing in 1998 the Chun-Tsung (Chun is the name of his wife) Endowment Fund to distribute scholarships among the most gifted students at five universities in China.

Graduated in China as of today are 442,000 engineers a year (with 48,000 graduates having masters' degrees) compared to 60,000 engineers a year in the USA. This is the real army, whom annual growth exceeds the relevant U.S. numbers already more than seven times....

...Recall Stalin: he concluded a treaty with Hitler under which Hitler was receiving raw materials for the production of military equipment. Stalin's goal was to divide the world with Hitler. Is Putin's goal to divide the world with Hu Jintao?

Hitler feared that Stalin would attack him, Hitler, to pre-empt Stalin's preemption.

Before our emigration from Russia, we had been living in our three-storied country house because I was the only native Russian capable of translating classical Russian literature into English. Our friends brought for dinner an important American. I entertained him by my anti-Sovietism, and he was delighted. Then I said: "Well, in China it is even worse."

He became ashen gray. "How can you say this?" He was visibly shaken.

I recall the scene whenever I meet an American unwilling to apply to China what was said during the Cold War about Stalin's Russia.

Tony Blair Speaks...

On BBC Radio Four's Today Programme, a fascinating and lengthy discussion with the British Prime Minister about the war in Iraq, and possible attacks on Iran,here.

Egyptian Blogger Convicted of Insulting Islam

From AP via JihadWatch (ht Michelle Malkin):

An Egyptian blogger was convicted Thursday and sentenced to four years in prison for insulting Islam, the Prophet Muhammad and Egypt's president, sending a chill through fellow Internet writers who fear a government crackdown.

Abdel Kareem Nabil, a 22-year-old former student at Egypt's Al-Azhar University, an Islamic institution, was a vocal secularist and sharp critic of conservative Muslims in his blog. He also lashed out often at Al-Azhar -- the most prominent religious center in Sunni Islam -- calling it "the university of terrorism" and accusing it of encouraging extremism.

Imagine...A World Without America

I dunno if pr like this might give some people the wrong idea--imagine the world without America!--but in any case this YouTube ad from the group BritainandAmerica is worth watching (ht lgf):

Christopher Hitchens on Sunnis v. Shiites

From Slate:

"See how the Christians love each other!" This used to be the secular response to the fratricide between Catholics and Protestants, let alone the schisms within the Catholic Church and the vicious quarrels between different schools of Calvinism. (When the Baptists of Danbury, Conn., wrote to Thomas Jefferson, asking for his assurance against persecution and generating his famous "wall of separation" response, it was the Congregationalists of Connecticut of whose intolerance they were apprehensive.)

Within Islam, these lines of division are many times more acute. Ahmadi Muslims are considered impossibly heretical by most other followers of the Prophet, and Ismaili Muslims are looked upon askance in many quarters as well, but the rivalry between Sunnis and Shiites (which also conceals numerous poisonous rifts between different interpretations and leaderships in both camps) has become one of the most toxic phenomena in the world today. On Web sites that offer advice to the devout, Sunnis and Shiites ask their imams and ayatollahs whether it is permitted to take the life of a member of the other sect. On American campuses, Muslim student groups now shun one another on a confessional basis. Throughout the Arab and Persian media, moods of excommunication and denunciation are vocally expressed. Almost every day in Iraq, as has been well-reported, a mosque is blown up or a religious procession shredded by other Muslims. As is less well-reported, the same thing happens in Pakistan almost every week. And it is waiting to happen in other countries, too, as the Alawite sect that runs Syria (Alawism being a splinter of Shiism) gets ready for another confrontation with the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, and as Sunni minorities in Iran become restive at the increasingly sectarian character of the Shiite dictatorship...

...However, the self-generated Islamic civil war does have significance in the wider cultural struggle. All over the non-Muslim world, we hear incessant demands that those who believe in the literal truth of the Quran be granted "respect." We are supposed to watch what we say about Islam, lest by any chance we be considered "offensive." A fair number of authors and academics in the West now have to live under police protection or endure prosecution in the courts for not observing this taboo with sufficient care. A stupid term—Islamophobia—has been put into circulation to try and suggest that a foul prejudice lurks behind any misgivings about Islam's infallible "message."

Well, this idiotic masochism has to be dropped. There may have been a handful of ugly incidents, provoked by lumpen elements, after certain episodes of Muslim terrorism. But no true secularist or even Christian has been involved in anything like the torching of a mosque. (The last time that such a thing did happen on any scale—in Bosnia—the United States and Britain intervened militarily to put a stop to it. We also overthrew the Taliban, which was slaughtering the Hazara Shiite minority in Afghanistan.) But where are the denunciations from centers of Sunni and Shiite authority of the daily murder and torture of Islamic co-religionists? Of the regular desecration of holy sites and holy books? Of the paranoid insults thrown so carelessly and callously by one Muslim group at another? This mounting ghastliness is a bit more worthy of condemnation, surely, than a few Danish cartoons or a false rumor about a profaned copy of the Quran in Guantanamo. The civilized world—yes I do mean to say that—should find its own voice and state firmly to Muslim leaders and citizens that respect is something to be earned and not demanded with menace. A short way of phrasing this would be to say, "See how the Muslims respect each other!"

Remote Control Inventor Dies at 93

From Paul Farhi's obituary in the Washington Post:

Robert Adler, a prolific inventor, received more than 180 U.S. patents during a lifetime of dreaming and tinkering. But only one of his creations revolutionized an industry, changed the face of modern life, and supplied stand-up comedians with a never-ending source of material.

Adler, who died Thursday at the age of 93, was the co-inventor of the remote control, the device that has bedeviled, edified and otherwise sustained a grateful nation of couch potatoes ever since its introduction. Along with inventor and fellow engineer Eugene Polley, Adler helped bring the first commercially successful wireless TV remote -- the Zenith Space Command -- to market in 1956.

Happy Chinese New Year

It's the Year of the Pig.

Michelle Malkin's Presidents' Day Greeting

Here.

Francisco Gil-White: No to Kosovo Independence

On his website, Francisco Gil-White argues Kosovo independence would be bad for the Jews:

In addition to directing a campaign of genocide against the Serbian minority in Kosovo, the KLA also attacked the very few Jews and Roma (Gypsies) who still lived there. Kosovo today is judenrein, as the Nazis would say....

Should the Jews endorse Kosovo independence?

If the Jews endorse Kosovo independence, they will be endorsing that terrorist Mulsim forces tracing their roots to the German Nazi Final Solution, and which have been directing terror against the greatest allies of the Jews, and against the Jews themselves, be rewarded for this terror.

What then will be the argument against rewarding the terror of PLO/Hamas, Muslim forces that also trace their roots to the German Nazi Final Solution, and whch further their goal of extermination the Jews by killing as many innocent Jews as they can?

If the Jews endorse Kosovo independence, they will be sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

An Interview with the New York Times' New Dance Critic

FT theatre critic and TLS dance critic Alastair Macaulay spoke to Paul Ben-Itzak of Dance Insider:

PBI: As far as you know, will Jennifer Dunning, as well as current freelancers Gia Kourlas and Roslyn Sulcas, still be reviewing for the Times?

AM: As far as I know, not only will they, but so will Claudia La Rocco. I have been in regular contact with Jennifer Dunning (whom I first met in 1980) since November about the posisbility of working together at the "Times."

The offer only materialized at the end of last week (February 8-9), I only spoke to the FT and considered their counter-offer on Monday (February 12), and only on the afternoon of Tuesday 13 (British time) did I advise both newspapers that I would be accepting the Times offer. My next immediate move was to make e-mail contact with Gia Kourlas (whom I had met in January), Claudia La Rocco (whom I have not yet met), and Roslyn Sulcas (whom I used to know years ago), and they have all made warm and enthusiastic replies. I like what I know of their work and am genuinely look forward to getting to know it and them better.

PBI: How do you see your role as a dance critic, generally and writing for a newspaper?

AM: A critic describes, analyses, contextualises, interprets, evaluates. He/she also entertains: I mean this in the serious sense that Balanchine told Denby that ballet is entertainment. But the word "critic" is, obviously, intimately connected to the word "criteria." In that sense, what makes a critic good is his/her choice of criteria and his/her application of them. A critic is a professional aesthete, a reporter on the ostensible facts and the intimate effects of art, and a communicative writer with passions and values.

PBI: Will you be responsive to the NY dance community -- not, of course, as pertains to your criticism but as far as listening to its feedback on dance coverage?

AM: How can I say at this stage? The senior dance critic and editor Mary Clarke gave me in the 1970s the advice that the senior dance critic Arnold Haskell gave her in the 1940s: "Never predict."

PBI: As a British-based critic, what qualifies you for this position over American candidates?

AM: I've written a great deal for the New Yorker, the Financial Times, and the Times Literary Supplement -- three publications for which the New York Times has great respect. As chief theater critic of the FT for over 13 years, I have very considerable experience of working for daily newspapers. I've written for many years about theater and music, and thus hope to bring some breadth to the area. I've been writing about dance for almost 29 years, and a large part of my dance writing has always been about American dance.

My first visits to the USA were all to see dance. On my first morning in New York, in January 1979, I stood in line for standing room places for New York City Ballet, and I did that for eight performances a week for three weeks. I was 23 years old, and I had withdrawn every bit of money I had to make the trip, all because the dance writing of Edwin Denby and Arlene Croce had inspired me to find out why on earth New York City Ballet prompted them to write such inspiring prose. Once I had bought my standing-room place, I used to spend every day in the New York Dance Collection, where I was a frequent visitor for many years (and will be again).

More recently, my visits to America have often been to see dance by Merce Cunningham and Mark Morris, whose companies I've been to watch in New York, Philadelphia, Berkeley, Orange County, and St. Louis. I've also had the opportunity to follow their work and Christopher Wheeldon's in Europe, where all three choreographers have given major world premieres this millennium. My experience of American ballet companies goes back 30 years this year: I can still tell you who danced what at every single performance by American Ballet Theatre at the London Coliseum in the week of July 18-23, 1977. Thanks to the visits by American ballet companies to the Edinburgh Festival and London in recent years, I have had the chance to see some American ballet productions that have not been shown in New York, not to mention most of Christopher Wheeldon's many ballets for the London Royal Ballet.

As I've mentioned, in 1988 and 1992, I worked as guest dance critic for the New Yorker. I covered choreography by George Balanchine, Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, William Forsythe, Peter Martins, Mark Morris, Paul Taylor, and Twyla Tharp and other American-based choreographers -- just as I've often covered them in Britain.

Since 1979, many of my best friends have been American dance critics and members of the American dance community; I'm looking forward to seeing more of them.

Will Bill Clinton Become NY's Next Senator?

Speculation has already started, on Fox News.

WASHINGTON — If Hillary Clinton is elected president, the next senator from New York could be her husband, Bill Clinton.

Supporters are touting that scenario in the event the seat currently held by Mrs. Clinton opens up as she moves to higher office. New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a Democrat, would be tasked with appointing someone to fill the open Senate seat for the remaining two years of Clinton's term.

The Washington Examiner reports that the Clintons' allies think that would be an excellent plan even if unlikely.

"As a senator, he’d be a knockout,” Harold Ickes, an adviser for Sen. Clinton and a White House aide to the former president, told the newspaper. “He knows issues, he loves public policy and he’s a good politician.”

Melanie Phillips on Anti-Israel Jews

From her column in The Jewish Chronicle (London):

Before Israel was restored to the Jews, before the Holocaust, before the Arabs of Palestine allied themselves with the Nazis, it was possible for there to be a legitimate Jewish argument against a Jewish state. But now that Israel exists, such an argument is obscene. It is a voice raised for the destruction of the Jewish nation.

If these signatories are so sure that they represent the authentic voice of Jewish conscience, why then are they so coy about stating their real agenda? Might it be that they don’t have the honesty to admit to the potentially murderous consequences of such attitudes?

As Natan Sharansky wrote this week, Israel is currently trapped in a pincer between the genocidal intentions of Iran and a world which is either silent in response to this threat or is increasingly willing to discuss Israel’s very existence as a mistake, an anachronism, or a provocation.

At a time when the west is being softened up for genocide by the demonisation of Israel, Jews who reinforce the Big Lie about the Jewish state are helping pave the way for a second potential holocaust.

Yet when this is pointed out, they call it an insult. More than that, they take it as proof of the rightness of their position! On the IJV website, Brian Klug gloated that the fierceness of the attacks upon them showed they had struck a nerve.

So the more we try to protect Israel from this lethal onslaught, the more these perpetrators claim that they are martyrs to those who would suppress free speech. The price they would force us to pay for not being thus vilified is to embrace our own people’s destruction.

The deadly enemies of the Jewish people are beside themselves with joy over the IJV. For the terrible thing is that, far from being silenced, Jewish voices like these are in the very forefront of the hate-fest against Israel. Martyrs of dissent? Hardly. They are the British arm of the pincer of Jewish destruction.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Speaks...

Unfortunately, I couldn't make it to the AEI speech by Ayaan Hirsi Ali Tuesday afternoon. There was a big snowstorm in Washington, DC that practically shut down the city--but it appears she Ayaan Hirsi Ali is made of sterner stuff. So here's a link to her book talk about her new book Infidel, posted on the AEI website. You can link directly to her video webcast here.

Terror Motive Behind Salt Lake City Shooting Spree?

The Jawa Report worries that Sulejman Talovic, an 18-year-old Bosnian Muslim refugee relocated to the United States, may have been triggered to go on his shooting spree at in a Salt Lake City shopping mall by Al Qaeda propaganda:

...I dunno if the fact that Sulejman Talovic is a Muslim refugee has anything to do with this vile act, but since we are kind of at war with the jihadis, it does seem like a good place to start.

We should also remember that the Islamist message boards have been encouraging potential jihadis to keep it simple. Also, it's important to think about the role of the internet in creating "virtual cells" of mujahideen. That is, jihadis who may never physically meet or formally join an terror organization, but who encourage one another to do acts of violence.

As I've mentioned here many times before, the present structure of the Salafi jihadi movement is such that any one can now claim to be al Qaeda. Although the formal organizations of al Qaeda 1.0 (bin Laden, Zawahiri) and 2.0 (Zarqawi/al Masri in Iraq/ -- GSPC/al Qaeda in Algeria) remain a threat, this "al Qaeda 3.0" is more of a movement than it is of an organization. And thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of young Muslim men in the West sympathize with that movement.

UPDATE: Samantha Hayes' interview with Suleiman Talovic's father, Suljo, posted on KSL.com, reinforces suspicions that the 18-year-old Trolley Barn gunman may not have been acting alone:

Suljo believes something or someone was controlling his son's mind and he wants police to look into that possibility.

Suljo: "I think this Suljemen did. I think somebody (is) behind him, I think, but I am not sure. What kind of person do you think that may have been? No good. I don't know he's not good. But you think somebody had influence over him? He not tell me nothing. Maybe this guy is in Trolley Square looking at how he died. I think so."

KSL Newsradio learned today that when Suljemen was a student at Horizonte school he was discovered looking at prohibited websites that contained information about AK-47s. That's when his parents pulled him out of school.

Fresh Plaza

Reading a link about increased exports of fruits and vegetables from Uzbekistan to Russia, I discovered Fresh Plaza, a weblog devoted to news of the fresh fruit and vegetable industry worldwide. It's based in The Netherlands, and has all sort of fascinating tidbits about how Winter fruit gets from Sicily or Chile (or Uzbekistan) to your local supermarket. You can also find out prices of those fresh orange juice futures on which you might be speculating:

Freshplaza.com is an independent news source for companies operating in the global fruit and vegetable sector. FreshPlaza intends to provide as much information as possible, which could help businesspeople with management information to deepen their perspectives on markets and developments.

After significant success with this concept in the Dutch market through the website www.agf.nl, it was decided to venture into the international market by the creation of FreshPlaza. Ever since the start up in March 2005, the interest in the FreshPlaza website and news mail has steadily grown.

When Mountains Crumble...

Dmitry Babich reviewed legendary Central Asian author Chingiz Aitmatov's new novel for Russia Profile:

In the Soviet period, it was common to divide writers between those who accepted the “new society” and those who didn’t. Aitmatov clearly and unequivocally does not accept the post-Soviet society. Nor does he embrace the global technocratic civilization, of which post-Soviet society has become a part.

Aitmatov’s critique is scathing and it does not leave any of this society’s “pillars” untouched. The cruel and senseless pop culture that steals the sweetheart of the main character, the formerly pro-Gorbachev journalist Arsen Samanchin, is emblematic of the plight of a writer in a society hostile to fiction; the poverty and degradation of the local villagers, all of whom lost their jobs after the collective farms were disbanded, and who try to improve their condition by taking the Arab hunters hostage; and the hypocrisy of the newly resurgent “religious leaders,” who complain to the authorities about Samanchin’s somewhat deistic views because they don’t correspond to the dogmas of Islam and Christianity.

Some critics might find Aitmatov’s style old-fashioned, writing off his views as the useless carping of a disgruntled Soviet idealist. However, it is important to remember that Soviet literary criticism used the same rhetoric against the old writers who did not accept the new society. History proved the Soviet critics wrong.

I hope there will be an English translation available soon...

Talkin' 'Bout My G-g-g-eneration...

Charlie Clark has published a review of Marc Fisher's book on Radio Rock & Roll -- in AARP's magazine...

To grasp the confluence of forces behind this revolution, set the way-back machine for the early 1950s, when the radio industry was on the verge of being destroyed by a fad called television. Radio then was a Squaresville of melodramas, religion for shut-ins, live big bands, and grown-up favorites dictated by Sing Along With Mitch.

The generational tsunami that would graft boomers to their radio dials was propelled by their demographic bulge, a new hybrid of music called rock and roll, some farsighted entrepreneurs, and technologies that haven't stopped evolving.

With conversational simplicity, Fisher describes the impact of breakthroughs, including the long-playing record, the 45, portable transistors, car radios, and the FM broadcasting equipment (and subsequent programming) that permitted longer songs and interior album cuts.

He sketches colorful personalities, both on-air—deejays who made you feel they were speaking directly to you—and the powers-that-be in the executive suite. You'll learn about Todd Storz, the Omaha-based beer-fortune heir who launched the first empire of stations that repeated the hit songs. You'll encounter Jean Shepherd, the eccentric New York-based storyteller who created a multi-state community of culturally disaffected "night people." You'll sample on-air long-hair Bob Fass, the father of free-form '60s community FM radio at New York's WBAI, who boosted the careers of Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie—and still broadcasts. You'll come to know commercial "Cousin Brucie" Morrow, the teen audience's "love courier of the New York night." And you'll meet Bob Siemering, the '60s Wisconsin college radio activist who went on to found All Things Considered for fledgling NPR.

Some of Fisher's fun facts: The term deejay was coined by Variety magazine in 1941; the "top 40" was named for the number of songs a jock could play in an average three-hour shift; many deejays were given on-air names so that they could be replaced without listeners knowing.

Melanie Phillips on British Tory Party Leader's "Pothead" Past

Writing in London's Daily Mail, Melanie Phillips suggests that Tory Party Leader David Cameron may have done hard drugs as well as smoked dope--and she's mad as hell about his insouciance:

This is why the revelations about Mr Cameron should rightly disturb us. It is because they point to a collective denial of the crucial role of leadership, consistency and law in tackling the scourge of illegal drugs.

That’s why it was so dispiriting to hear the supposedly hard-line Home Secretary John Reid sneering ‘So what?’ at Mr Cameron’s history of drug taking. That’s why it was so depressing to hear MPs from even the Right of the Tory Party saying that these revelations made them look more ‘normal’.

Would these people welcome a spot of shoplifting or grievous bodily harm on their front bench, one wonders, on the grounds that this too would make them look more ‘normal’? Is the Tory Party now really so degraded?

By using drug liberalisation to make the Tory Party seem cool, Mr Cameron risks making drug use itself seem cool. By not renouncing his own past in unambiguous terms, he risks turning himself into an accessory to individual misery and social mayhem.

What we need from him now is an honest and open acknowledgement of his past drug use and a declaration that he intends to pursue a zero-tolerance approach to drugs if he comes to power.

If he were to do this, no one would hold school or university misdemeanours against him. If he does not, he may find he becomes not the standard-bearer of the Tory future, but the prisoner of his own history.

Jefferson D. Dunbar Jr. on Sidney Poitier: The Measure of a Man

Jefferson D. Dunbar, Jr. wrote about Sidney Poitier's The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography for The Idler in 2000. He let us know that Oprah Winfrey selected the memoir for her book club--and gave permission to reprint his review:

Sidney Poitier subtitles his newest autobiography, The Measure of A Man, "A Spiritual Autobiography", introducing the reader into his humble beginnings as if through a dream or meditation.

"I'm on the porch of our little house on Cat Island in the Bahamas. It's the end of the day and evening is coming on, turning the sky and the sea to the west of us a bright burnt orange, and the sky to the east of us a cool blue that deepens to purple and then to black. In the gathering darkness, in the coolness of our porch, my mother and father sit and fan the smoke from green palm leaves they're burning to shoo away the mosquitoes and the sand flies." Cat Island was a "tiny spit of land", forty six miles long, three miles wide located in the Bahamas. It is where Mr. Poitier constructed his life's foundation, philosophy, his sense of self. And he credits this idyllic setting for much of the success he has had in his life.

The first chapter of this diligent, brisk autobiography is titled, "The Idyll". Without the influence of radio or television, Mr. Poitier, as a child, was free to explore the island, experience the good and bad of it; take risks, and learn to have no fears. His mother and father were the kind of parents who nurtured their youngest of three with a kind of silent love and kindness. A trait Mr. Poitier would come understand more in adulthood than he did as a child in their midst. It may be difficult for some to comprehend that such an articulate man of film, television, and theater spent the first fifteen years of his life being raised by a mother that he terms "...a creature of silence." The only person Evelyn Poitier was able to express herself to was her husband, Reginald. Yet Sidney Poitier never failed to feel how deeply his mother cared for him. To this day, he senses her presence, her guiding hand. For all the silent love, the continuing guidance, the question that lingers on in Mr. Poitier's mind is, "Who was this person?"

Although Evelyn Poitier was a woman, a mother given to reticence, she was quite active in her son's upbringing. She was "a very special human being..." who possessed an indomitable will and a strong instinctive nature. Mr. Poitier reflects on the time of his birth, and his mother's worry over whether he would survive or not. He was born prematurely in Miami where his parents had traveled to sell a hundred boxes of tomatoes at a produce exchange. At birth, Mr. Poitier had weighed less than three pounds and was not expected to live. His father, Reginald, had gone so far as to acquire a shoebox from an undertaker in the "colored" section of Miami that was to become Sidney's casket.

Undaunted, Evelyn visited a local soothsayer of sorts. She returned home with this from the soothsayer: "Don't worry about your son. He will survive and will not be a sickly child. He will grow up to be...he will travel to most of the corners of the earth. He will walk with kings. He will be rich and famous. Your name will be carried all over the world. You must not worry about that child." This particular soothsayer was not only quite prescient, but dead on the money. Perhaps this incident would be a sufficient example of who Evelyn Poitier was for anyone else. But Sidney Poitier had, and still has, a persistent curiosity about people and places.

And so, when he departed the Bahamas for Miami, Florida at fifteen he may have left his mother behind, but not his desire to know exactly who she was. The more he discovered about her, the more he would comprehend about his own psyche. Beginning anew in Miami, Mr. Poitier resided with an older brother. It was in Miami that he sampled his first taste of racism. Working as a delivery boy, he had refused to walk from the front door of a wealthy white customer to a rear door to deliver a package. Instead, Mr. Poitier left the parcel at the front door and walked away. Upon his return to his brother's home a couple of days later, he found the family in a darkened house, cringing in fear of the Ku Klux Klan. They had been there in search of the young Sidney to retaliate on behalf of the white customer.

While the rest of the family was filled with fear, Mr. Poitier was not. "In Nassau, while learning about myself, I had become conscious of being pigeonholed by others, and I had determined then to always aim myself toward a slot of my own choosing."

The youthful Mr. Poitier was not about to allow anyone to define who he was. Could that have been a part of Evelyn Poitier showing herself in her son? Furthermore, by the time that Mr. Poitier had come to the United States, the "foundation... had had time to set, the Jim Crow way of life had trouble overwhelming me." His "values and my sense of self were already fully constructed."

Soon, Mr. Poitier's distaste for the blatant racism he witnessed in Miami took him to New York, Harlem and The Apollo Theatre, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald. Later there was a brief stint in the Army, as a way to escape the chill of winter in New York.

On a whim, and badly in need of a job, Mr. Poitier auditioned as actor with the American Negro Theatre. He failed miserably. After learning how to read and shaking his Bahamian accent, Mr. Poitier succeeded the second time around, toiling as a janitor at the Theatre to earn his right to study. More of the irrepressible spirit of Evelyn Poitier in her son.

After replacing "a kid named Harry Belafonte" as his understudy, Sidney Poitier was discovered by a casting director who cast him in a version of Lysistrata for Broadway. With the exception of a few short periods of unemployment, it was onward and upward for Mr. Sidney Poitier, the actor. He was about to embark upon the kind a career in Hollywood that no other African American actor had experienced before him---as a leading man. Now Way Out, 1950, with Richard Widmark, was Sidney Poitier's first Hollywood film role; and it was not only the first film that his parents would see their son in, it was the first motion picture they had ever seen in their lives.

Since it was the 1950s and Hollywood was still in the grip of blacklisting, a period when directors, actors, and writers were questioned about their loyalties to the United States and possible associations with suspected communists or communist sympathizers. Mr. Poitier was unlucky enough to be questioned by a studio attorney about his association with the African American actors Paul Robeson and Canada Lee who had come under suspicion.

Asked, rather timidly, to sign a loyalty oath, Mr. Poitier demurred, and instead asked to give it some thought. Throughout the production of Blackboard Jungle, (1955), he was not questioned again, and believed he had been fortunate enough to escape having to name names.

He had already set his mind against doing such a thing, nonetheless, at the risk of sacrificing all that he had worked so hard for. Again during David Susskind's television production of "Edge of the City", Mr. Poitier had believed the issue of his associations would arise. But it did not happen, and his career was never jeopardized in the same way again.

He has no answers as to why his pursuers had given up.

Still, while he managed to avoid blacklisting, the inescapable issue of race would continue to haunt him. During a publicity tour for "Blackboard Jungle" in Atlanta, Mr. Poitier, film star, was told at a "very nice" restaurant -- where all the waiters were black, including the maître d'-- that if he wanted to be seated for a meal, a screen would have to be placed around him to hide him from the other diners.

When Mr. Poitier asked why, he was told: "Well, it's the practice here; it's the law." Mr. Poitier saw how it had hurt the black maître d' to say what he had to say, and Mr. Poitier hurt for him. He walked out of the restaurant outraged and angry, but he never "accommodated" the insult, perhaps, continuing unfettered by the lingering stench of racism, toward the fulfillment of his destiny, his quest for what defined him as a person.

Thus far, in Mr. Poitier's career as an actor, he had lent the characters he portrayed an air of dignity, intelligence, stature, pride, fierce determination combined with just the right amount of resilience in the face of great odds working against him. Traits that were passed on to him by Evelyn Poitier.

And then in 1964, Mr. Poitier won the Oscar for Best Actor, for his performance in Lilies of the Field. He was the first , and remains the only, African American performer to win Best Actor in the history of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

What was it about Sidney Poitier that his peers in the film industry liked and respected so much? It is one of the riddles that Mr. Poitier attempts to solve in his searching autobiography.

Yet, he was not surprised at Hollywood's response to him in 1964, "because I'd never seen myself as less than I am." More than anything else, he realized he had a responsibility, as an actor and not as a black man, to be disciplined in his chosen field.

The films that Mr. Poitier made, the way in which he portrayed his characters, were all deliberate choices made so that the public would know him as the person he wished to be perceived as: A determined, hard working individual of high standards making a living for his family.

These were the same qualities instilled in him by Reginald and Evelyn Poitier on Cat Island and Nassau, Bahamas.

Besides Lilies of the Field, The Defiant Ones, A Patch of Blue, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and To Sir With Love, are among the films that stand out most prominently in Mr. Poitier's mind.

Each of them contain the true essence of Sidney Poitier, qualities that aided him in his personal life; a hard won battle with prostate cancer; the loss of a best friend to the same ailment; the estrangement from his children from his first marriage.

Today, Sidney Poitier survives, against all odds. And though he believes many questions remain as to how and what formed him into the person he has become, in the end life, his life, as with all mortal beings, shall forever be a mystery.

You can buy a copy from Amazon, here:

Gen. Odom: How to Fix the Iraq Mess

The Washington Post editors today gave former Reagan National Security Agency head Gen. William Odom's op-ed a rather defeatist headline, but in fact Odom gives practical advice on how to salvage the Iraq situation, making the proverbial lemonade from the lemons America has found in its possession, leading to a "strategic recovery":

The first and most critical step is to recognize that fighting on now simply prolongs our losses and blocks the way to a new strategy. Getting out of Iraq is the pre-condition for creating new strategic options. Withdrawal will take away the conditions that allow our enemies in the region to enjoy our pain. It will awaken those European states reluctant to collaborate with us in Iraq and the region.

Second, we must recognize that the United States alone cannot stabilize the Middle East.

Third, we must acknowledge that most of our policies are actually destabilizing the region. Spreading democracy, using sticks to try to prevent nuclear proliferation, threatening "regime change," using the hysterical rhetoric of the "global war on terrorism" -- all undermine the stability we so desperately need in the Middle East.

Fourth, we must redefine our purpose. It must be a stable region, not primarily a democratic Iraq. We must redirect our military operations so they enhance rather than undermine stability. We can write off the war as a "tactical draw" and make "regional stability" our measure of "victory." That single step would dramatically realign the opposing forces in the region, where most states want stability. Even many in the angry mobs of young Arabs shouting profanities against the United States want predictable order, albeit on better social and economic terms than they now have.

Realigning our diplomacy and military capabilities to achieve order will hugely reduce the numbers of our enemies and gain us new and important allies. This cannot happen, however, until our forces are moving out of Iraq. Why should Iran negotiate to relieve our pain as long as we are increasing its influence in Iraq and beyond? Withdrawal will awaken most leaders in the region to their own need for U.S.-led diplomacy to stabilize their neighborhood.

If Bush truly wanted to rescue something of his historical legacy, he would seize the initiative to implement this kind of strategy. He would eventually be held up as a leader capable of reversing direction by turning an imminent, tragic defeat into strategic recovery.

Putin Warns the West

Here's an excerpt from the text of Vladimir Putin's now-famous speech in Munich, available on Kremlin.ru:

I am convinced that we have reached that decisive moment when we must seriously think about the architecture of global security.

And we must proceed by searching for a reasonable balance between the interests of all participants in the international dialogue. Especially since the international landscape is so varied and changes so quickly – changes in light of the dynamic development in a whole number of countries and regions.

Madam Federal Chancellor already mentioned this. The combined GDP measured in purchasing power parity of countries such as India and China is already greater than that of the United States. And a similar calculation with the GDP of the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – surpasses the cumulative GDP of the EU. And according to experts this gap will only increase in the future.

There is no reason to doubt that the economic potential of the new centres of global economic growth will inevitably be converted into political influence and will strengthen multipolarity.

In connection with this the role of multilateral diplomacy is significantly increasing. The need for principles such as openness, transparency and predictability in politics is uncontested and the use of force should be a really exceptional measure, comparable to using the death penalty in the judicial systems of certain states.

However, today we are witnessing the opposite tendency, namely a situation in which countries that forbid the death penalty even for murderers and other, dangerous criminals are airily participating in military operations that are difficult to consider legitimate. And as a matter of fact, these conflicts are killing people – hundreds and thousands of civilians!

But at the same time the question arises of whether we should be indifferent and aloof to various internal conflicts inside countries, to authoritarian regimes, to tyrants, and to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction? As a matter of fact, this was also at the centre of the question that our dear colleague Mr Lieberman asked the Federal Chancellor. If I correctly understood your question (addressing Mr Lieberman), then of course it is a serious one! Can we be indifferent observers in view of what is happening? I will try to answer your question as well: of course not.

But do we have the means to counter these threats? Certainly we do. It is sufficient to look at recent history. Did not our country have a peaceful transition to democracy? Indeed, we witnessed a peaceful transformation of the Soviet regime – a peaceful transformation! And what a regime! With what a number of weapons, including nuclear weapons! Why should we start bombing and shooting now at every available opportunity? Is it the case when without the threat of mutual destruction we do not have enough political culture, respect for democratic values and for the law?

I am convinced that the only mechanism that can make decisions about using military force as a last resort is the Charter of the United Nations. And in connection with this, either I did not understand what our colleague, the Italian Defence Minister, just said or what he said was inexact. In any case, I understood that the use of force can only be legitimate when the decision is taken by NATO, the EU, or the UN. If he really does think so, then we have different points of view. Or I didn’t hear correctly. The use of force can only be considered legitimate if the decision is sanctioned by the UN. And we do not need to substitute NATO or the EU for the UN. When the UN will truly unite the forces of the international community and can really react to events in various countries, when we will leave behind this disdain for international law, then the situation will be able to change. Otherwise the situation will simply result in a dead end, and the number of serious mistakes will be multiplied. Along with this, it is necessary to make sure that international law have a universal character both in the conception and application of its norms.

And one must not forget that democratic political actions necessarily go along with discussion and a laborious decision-making process.

BTW this photo shows another side to Russian diplomacy, Putin's charm offensive aimed at Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel (Russia already has former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on the Gazprom payroll):