Ryan Sager on the Republican Presidential Debate

From the NY Sun (ht Michelle Malkin):

But, now, to name the winners and losers. Off the bat, let me stipulate that I don't consider any of the seven dwarves to necessitate much analysis. Ron Paul is a pure libertarian, so I always enjoy hearing from him. But I'll stick mostly here to the Big Three. Winner: Mitt Romney. Loser, by a mile: Rudy Giuliani. Treading water: John McCain.

Mr. Romney: If anyone stood out from the other candidates, in terms of looking polished and poised, it was clearly Mr. Romney. He got off some of the best lines of the night, partially because Chris Matthews gave him some oddball questions (I particularly liked: "I don't say anything to Roman Catholic bishops. They can do whatever the heck they want." [see: 8:38]). He, more than any of the others, managed to sound reasonable and assured no matter what he was saying. He's still got a major flip-flopping problem, and basically lied about it during his answers on abortion. But any casual observer of the debate (were there any non-junkies watching?) would probably have to view him as head-and-shoulders above the others.

Mr. Giuliani: At this point, it's hard to escape the conclusion that the Giuliani campaign is in a full meltdown. The former mayor simply wasn't himself on that stage, trying to contort himself into something the religious right can accept, while at the same time refusing to pander to them in any way that would actually help him win the nomination. Basically, he was offending them while seeming terrified of offending them. His answer on abortion [see: 8:29] will go down as one of the worst moments of either debate so far this season — just painful to watch. His inability to say more than five seconds worth of positive things about Christian conservatives [see: 8:44] was also truly awful. He was thrown a softball and chose to bash himself over the head with the bat instead. The campaign is still salvageable for Mr. Giuliani, but if tonight wasn't his operation's wake-up call, nothing will be.

Mr. McCain: Maybe it's because I've seen too much of him recently, but Mr. McCain was really relying on a lot of canned lines at this debate, and it was grating. He didn't embarrass himself like Mr. Giuliani, but he didn't distinguish himself either. He may be the tortoise in this race. But it's no fun watching him plod.

Christopher Hitchens on Mormonism

My father tipped me off to this Hitchens essay in Slate:

If the followers of the prophet Muhammad hoped to put an end to any future "revelations" after the immaculate conception of the Koran, they reckoned without the founder of what is now one of the world's fastest-growing faiths. And they did not foresee (how could they, mammals as they were?) that the prophet of this ridiculous cult would model himself on theirs. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—hereafter known as the Mormons—was founded by a gifted opportunist who, despite couching his text in openly plagiarized Christian terms, announced that "I shall be to this generation a new Muhammad" and adopted as his fighting slogan the words, which he thought he had learned from Islam, "Either the Al-Koran or the sword." He was too ignorant to know that if you use the word al you do not need another definite article, but then he did resemble Muhammad in being able only to make a borrowing out of other people's bibles.

In March 1826 a court in Bainbridge, New York, convicted a twenty-one-year-old man of being "a disorderly person and an impostor." That ought to have been all we ever heard of Joseph Smith, who at trial admitted to defrauding citizens by organizing mad gold-digging expeditions and also to claiming to possess dark or "necromantic" powers. However, within four years he was back in the local newspapers (all of which one may still read) as the discoverer of the "Book of Mormon." He had two huge local advantages which most mountebanks and charlatans do not possess. First, he was operating in the same hectically pious district that gave us the Shakers and several other self-proclaimed American prophets. So notorious did this local tendency become that the region became known as the "Burned-Over District," in honor of the way in which it had surrendered to one religious craze after another. Second, he was operating in an area which, unlike large tracts of the newly opening North America, did possess the signs of an ancient history.

A vanished and vanquished Indian civilization had bequeathed a considerable number of burial mounds, which when randomly and amateurishly desecrated were found to contain not merely bones but also quite advanced artifacts of stone, copper, and beaten silver. There were eight of these sites within twelve miles of the underperforming farm which the Smith family called home. There were two equally stupid schools or factions who took a fascinated interest in such matters: the first were the gold-diggers and treasure-diviners who brought their magic sticks and crystals and stuffed toads to bear in the search for lucre, and the second those who hoped to find the resting place of a lost tribe of Israel. Smith's cleverness was to be a member of both groups, and to unite cupidity with half-baked anthropology.

Mixed Reviews in Salt Lake City for PBS Mormon Documentary

Carrie Moore reports on the response in Utah, in the Deseret News:

With few of the major issues facing the LDS Church left untouched, the final installment of the four-hour PBS documentary on "The Mormons" drew responses all across the board late Tuesday night among Utahns of different faiths — and particularly Latter-day Saints.

This stained-glass window, completed in 1913 by an unknown artist, depicts the first vision in which the prophet Joseph Smith Jr. said God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him in 1820 in answer to prayer.

Sacred temple rites, death, family life, intellectual dissidents, excommunication, homosexuality, blacks and the priesthood, missionary work, conversion and obedience were among the topics chronicled in Tuesday night's installment, looking at the modern church.

Gold plates, angels, revelation, basic doctrine, persecution, polygamy and the Mountain Meadows massacre were covered in Monday's part one, which looked at the church's early history. The effort is believed to be the most in-depth broadcast examination to date on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, both past and present.

Fred Woods, a religion professor at Brigham Young University, said he doesn't think people of other faiths "would have understood Mormons by this documentary. Just as Jews understand Judaism and Muslims Islam better than outsiders, LDS people understand their faith better than someone (Helen Whitney in this case) looking from the outside in."

He credited the filmmaker for the many interviews she included, though he said, "There was too much of those who did not present what Mormonism is really all about, particularly by those who had left the faith and therefore presented a tainted view."

Quoting the apostle Paul, he said, "The natural man (or woman) receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." (I Cor. 2:11,14).

Official response from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints here.

Christopher Hitchens on George Tenet

From Slate (ht Drudge):

Notice the direct quotes that make it clear who is the author of this brilliant insight. And then pause for a second. The author is almost the only man who could have known of Zacarias Moussaoui and his co-conspirators—the very man who positively knew they were among us, in flight schools, and then decided to leave them alone. In his latest effusion, he writes: "I do know one thing in my gut. Al-Qaeda is here and waiting." Well, we all know that much by now. But Tenet is one of the few who knew it then, and not just in his "gut" but in his small brain, and who left us all under open skies. His ridiculous agency, supposedly committed to "HUMINT" under his leadership, could not even do what John Walker Lindh had done—namely, infiltrate the Taliban and the Bin Laden circle. It's for this reason that the CIA now has to rely on torturing the few suspects it can catch, a policy, incidentally, that Tenet's book warmly defends.

So, the only really interesting question is why the president did not fire this vain and useless person on the very first day of the war. Instead, he awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom! Tenet is now so self-pitying that he expects us to believe that he was "not at all sure that [he] really wanted to accept" this honor. But it seems that he allowed or persuaded himself to do so, given that the citation didn't mention Iraq. You could imagine that Tenet had never sat directly behind Colin Powell at the United Nations, beaming like an overfed cat, as the secretary of state went through his rather ill-starred presentation. And who cares whether his "slam dunk" vulgarity was misquoted or not? We have better evidence than that. Here is what Tenet told the relevant Senate committee in February 2002...

Read the whole thing.

Turkey's Byzantine Heritage

Writing before the Constitutional Court overturned the AKP candidate's election, Indian diplomat K Gajendra Singh noted the current Turkish presidential election crisis is about the struggle between Islamism vs. Secularism, in the context of Turkey's Byzantine heritage:

In spite of all AKP endeavours Abdullah Gul failed to get required 2/3rd votes in the first round . In fact the opposition Republican Peoples party ( RPP) which controls one third of the seats , refused to enter the Parliament , thus 'even the quorum was not established' .Later it filed with the Constitutional Court that in the absence of quorum of 367 ,the proceedings were illegal and be declared invalid. The Court is likely to decide before the next vote.

Ever since AKP stunned everyone including itself in November 2002 elections by winning over 360 seats , the Turkish Armed forces , a bastion of secularism have made no secret of its dislike for the former's policies. AKP has used the criteria for joining the Europe Union(EU) to reduce military's decision making role in the National Security Council, now an advisory body .

Apparently it was in a coordinated manouvre by the secular establishment that the Chief of General Staff (CGS) issued the statement that "It should not be forgotten that the Turkish armed forces is one of the sides in this debate and the absolute defender of secularism." It added, "when necessary, they will display its stance and attitudes very clearly. No one should doubt that."

Next day, in a show of confidence rarely seen in past civilian administrations, the AKP government rebuked the military said that it was "unthinkable" for the institution (military) to challenge its political leaders in a democracy. "It is out of the question to withdraw my candidacy," Gul insisted on 29 April. "The Constitutional Court will make the right decision."

"We must avoid polarization ... Turkish democracy has been wounded," said Erkan Mumcu, leader of the center-right ANAP party, referring to the army statement. Protests began with thousands at Ankara University against the government on 27 April. Then came the Istanbul show of strength.

The secular establishment and citizens suspect AKP of harbouring a secret Islamic agenda like National Salvation Front in 1992 in Algeria which had almost won but was banned .( US led West said nothing then) .AKP attempted to criminalise adultery, restrict alcohol sales and lift a ban on Islamic headscarves in public places. It even tried to intervene in the autonomy of the military which expels suspected Islamist officers each year.

It is feared that the strict separation of state and religion will be eroded and Islam will creep into all fields of life if Gul were elected. Control of Presidency will give AKP a free hand to implement Islamist policies.

A hard and determined Prime Minister Recep Erdogan with statements like "Minarets are our bayonets, domes are our helmets, mosques are our barracks, believers are our soldiers," for which he was convicted and jailed for 4 months ,make people nervous . Perhaps pre-poning general elections due in November , which AKP is likely to win but not with 2/3 rd massive majority , would be the best option. To cool tempers for now.

IMHO Western complaints about the role of the Turkish military as guardians of secularism are ill-considered. It is clear that the American military, and NATO, play a similar role in Western Europe to that of the Turkish military in Turkey. NATO has done so since the end of World War II--acting as guardians against a return to Fascism or the advance of Communism, overthrowing Communist governments when needed, and currently at war against Islamists in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since Turkey is a member of NATO, the EU would do better to unconditionally support the Turkish military's defense of secularism against the "democracy" supposedly represented by so-called "moderate Islamist parties"--a fraudulent political pose analagous in its relation to the central menace to the so-called "Eurocommunism" that disappeared immediately after the fall of the USSR from which it once claimed to be independent...

More coverage at Turkish Daily News.

May Day!

You can read Wikipedia's history of May Day, here:

International Workers' Day (a name used interchangeably with May Day) is a celebration of the social and economic achievements of the international labour movement. May Day commonly sees organized street demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of working people and their labour unions throughout Europe and most of the rest of the world — though, as noted below, in neither the United States nor Canada. More-radical groups such as communists and anarchists are also given to widespread street protest on this day as well.

May Day was originally the commemoration of the Haymarket protests in Chicago in 1886: in 1889, the first congress of the Second International, meeting in Paris for the centennial of the French Revolution and the Exposition Universelle (1889), following a proposal by Raymond Lavigne, called for international demonstrations on the 1890 anniversary of the Chicago protests. These were so successful that May Day was formally recognized as an annual event at the International's second congress in 1891. The May Day Riots of 1894 and May Day Riots of 1919 occurred subsequently.

In 1904, the International Socialist Conference meeting in Amsterdam called on "all Social-Democratic Party organizations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on May First for the legal establishment of the 8-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace." As the most effective way of demonstrating was by striking, the congress made it "mandatory upon the proletarian organizations of all countries to stop work on May 1, wherever it is possible without injury to the workers."

May Day has long been a focal point for demonstrations by various socialist, communist, and anarchist groups. In some circles, bonfires are lit in commemoration of the Haymarket martyrs, usually right as the first day of May begins [1].
Due to its status as a celebration of the efforts of workers and the socialist movement, May Day is an important official holiday in Communist countries such as the People's Republic of China, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union. May Day celebrations typically feature elaborate popular and military parades in these countries.

In countries other than the United States and Canada, resident working classes fought hard to make May Day an official holiday[citation needed], efforts which largely succeeded. For this reason, in most of the world today, May Day is marked by massive street rallies led by workers, their trade unions, anarchists and various socialist and communist parties.

Due to its importance in Communist countries, the First and Second Red Scare periods ended May Day as a mass holiday in the United States, which has celebrated Labor Day on the first Monday of September since 1880.

Is Bush Education Secretary Whoring for Coke?

Scott Jaschik reports in Inside Higher Ed that critics of Education Secretary Margaret Spellings efforts to re-design American higher education are pointing to her acceptance of gifts from the Coca-Cola Company:

Asked a series of questions about Coke’s role in the Atlanta meeting (including specific questions about how much money was involved and what it was paying for), the department’s press office responded by sending a copy of a portion of the U.S. Code that says: “The Secretary is authorized to accept, hold, administer, and utilize gifts, bequests and devises of property, both real and personal, and to accept donations of services, for the purpose of aiding or facilitating the work of the Department. Gifts, bequests, and devises of money and proceeds from sales of other property received as gifts, bequests, or devises shall be deposited in the Treasury and shall be available for disbursement upon the order of the Secretary.”

Pressed for details, Chad Colby said that he believed Coke was paying for food for the Atlanta meeting and that the department was paying other expenses. Arrangements for the other regional meetings would each be different, he said.

Critics — most of whom did not want to be quoted by name — said that they viewed the invitations noting Coke’s role as host as further evidence of a corporate tilt by the department. They noted that the invitations were not generally available to rank and file professors and that the Spellings Commission report had a strong business orientation, but has been criticized for ignoring the liberal arts.

“The emphasis in the department’s consultations seems to be primarily on colleges and universities as training grounds for corporate America, rather than as a place for students to explore a variety of perspectives and learn to think critically for themselves,” said John W. Curtis, director of research and public policy for the American Association of University Professors, via e-mail. “This was reflected in the inclusion of corporate representatives on the secretary’s commission while faculty were largely excluded. The fact that these follow-up ’summit’ meetings are by invitation only, and appear to have some level of corporate sponsorship, only strengthens this impression.”

Charles Miller, chair of the Spellings Commission, said that the arrangements for the regional meetings were set up to make it relatively easy for people to attend and that many businesses can be helpful in this area.

Miller suggested that some academics “seem to have a problem with the word corporation” and suggested that professors should welcome more business involvement. He said that most business leaders are strong supporters of higher education. “They pay the taxes, they are on the boards, they use the graduates, they know about foreign competition,” he said.

In this context, it makes sense to look for ways to involve business leaders, he said. “It’s wrong-headed to think that the only people who can talk about the academy are the people who are in it.”

More criticism of Spellings on SchoolsMatter, including a link to this brewing scandal over US Department of Education-funded reading programs:

Fueled by a growing list of such complaints, the House Education and Labor Committee is looking into whether the Bush administration steered contracts to its favorite vendors, shutting out Slavin and other competitors.

And the Education Department's inspector general has asked the Justice Department to examine allegations of mismanagement and conflicts of interest that are swirling around the $6 billion federal grant program known as Reading First, a centerpiece of the five-year-old No Child Left Behind law.

Inspector General John Higgins said his office began investigating Reading First in May 2005 after receiving complaints of favoritism. He told the Education and Labor Committee that the law calls for a balanced panel of experts to review grant applications but the department had created a panel that had professional ties to a specific reading program.

Democratic Rep. George Miller of California, the committee's chairman, said three people involved in the reviewing process benefited financially - either directly or indirectly - when the panel distributed grants.

At a committee hearing April 20, three review panel members acknowledged benefiting from the sale of an assessment product called the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Learning Skills. One of the panel members was a co-author of the product, and the company in which he owned a 50 percent share had received more than $1.3 million in royalty and other payments from the sale of DIBELS. Two other review panel members were co-authors of a reading intervention product that was packaged with DIBELS, and they each had received about $150,000 in royalty payments from sales of their product.

All three denied any conflict of interest, saying they didn't review grant proposals that involved their own products. They said their products were selling because of their popularity, not because of any pressure from Washington.

Bush Foreign Aid Chief Resigns in Call-Girl Scandal

From the Indianapolis Star::

WASHINGTON - Ex-State Department official and Indiana native Randall Tobias may be called to testify in the defense of the woman at the center of a Washington sex scandal, her attorney said Monday.

Montgomery Blair Sibley, an attorney for Deborah Jeane Palfrey who is accused of running a prostitution service, said Palfrey has the obligation and the right to compel witnesses like Tobias to testify on her behalf.

"When they are served with a subpoena to appear and testify under oath, we expect them to tell the truth," Sibley said. "And we expect them to show up because nobody is above the law in this country, as this case is rapidly pointing out."
Tobias resigned Friday from a top post in the State Department where he oversaw most U.S. foreign aid.

ABC News reported late Friday that Tobias said in a Thursday interview that he had used the Pamela Martin and Associates escort services for massages, but he said there had been "no sex." Palfrey ran the service and turned its telephone records over to ABC.

Here's a link to the White House biography for Ambassador Tobias. Tobias was ex-CEO of pharmaceutical manufacturer Eli Lilly. Interestingly as US aid czar, he had been responsible for US government HIV and sexually transmitted disease initiatives, among other things.

According to an AP report on Yahoo! News:

Tobias submitted his resignation a day after he was interviewed by ABC News for an upcoming program about an alleged prostitution service run by the so-called D.C. Madam.

ABC reported on its Web site late Friday that Tobias confirmed that he had called the Pamela Martin and Associates escort service to have women come to his condo and give him massages. More recently, Tobias told the network, he has been using a service with Central American women.

Tobias, 65, who is married, told ABC News there had been "no sex" during the women's visits to his condo. His name was on a list of clients given to ABC by Deborah Jeane Palfrey, who owns the escort service and has been charged with running a prostitution ring in the nation's capital.

U.S. officials would not confirm the information. A message left on Tobias' voice mail seeking comment was not returned.

Tobias held two titles: director of U.S. foreign assistance and administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development. His rank was equivalent to deputy secretary of state.

Your tax dollars at work...

Olga Sobolevskaya on Mstislav Rostropovich

From RIAN.ru:

Talent and conscience were his only guides in life. "Solzhenitsyn's suffering earned him the right to speak the truth," he declared in 1970 in an open letter to the press. By supporting the dissident writer, he expressed his own unshakeable credo: be truthful in everything, in art and in life.

He had followed that credo since his youth. In February 1952, Rostropovich performed Prokofiev's Symphony Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, with the pianist Sviatoslav Richter conducting, at the Grand Conservatory Hall. It was a daring act of civil defiance as memories were still fresh of the crackdown on "formalist" composers (including Shostakovich and Prokofiev), who were accused of sacrificing content for the sake of form. In any case, he was "forgiven," just like he would be 10 years later, in the early 60s, when he accompanied his wife's performance of "Satires," a vocal cycle composed by Shostakovich to the words of a "banned" poet, Sasha Cherny. These social send-ups were considered frivolous, but they fell short of being criminal, so the couple were allowed to go on tours, win prizes and put their creative ideas into practice. In 1968, Rostropovich was even able to realize his life-long dream by staging Tchaikovsky's opera "Eugene Onegin" at the Bolshoi with Vishnevskaya, his wife, singing the lead part, Tatyana Larina.

In the 1970s, after the Solzhenitsyn scandal, the authorities tried to cut off Rostropovich's oxygen. They didn't stand a chance. His freedom was personal and total. No ideology could crush it. And no ailment could stop him from creating.

Putin on Yeltsin

From Kremlin.ru:

PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN: Dear Naina Yosifovna,

Dear members of the Yeltsin family,

Dear friends,

We have just paid our last farewell to Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, a man of true Russian expanse and generosity of spirit. We have paid farewell to a man of resolute will and authentic determination.

I am certain that only such a leader, a leader raised and nurtured by all the energy of our great Russia, could arouse a country such as ours and lead it to such fundamental change.

He became President through the support of millions of our citizens, changed the face of power and broke down the thick wall between the public and the state. He was devoted to his people and served them with courage.

He knew how to and loved speaking with people frankly and openly. He never remained in the shadows or hid behind the backs of others. There were times when he consciously chose to take all the fire on himself, accepting personal responsibility for very tough but necessary decisions. He bravely took upon himself the most difficult role in creating the most important democratic institutions.

President Yeltsin understood that most important of all was the irreversibility of the changes that had taken place and steadfast resolution in pursuing his strategic course.

This kind of political style and instinct distinguishes national leaders who do not think only of the present moment but look far ahead into the future.

At a time when the old mechanisms of power had collapsed and Russia’s statehood was weakened, Boris Yeltsin made the difficult achievement of giving the country a new constitution. He put his health and even perhaps his life on the line during the election of 1996, and he emerged victorious.

Looking back at Boris Nikolayevich, one cannot but remember his openness and love of life. It is not by chance that his amazing ability to build relations of genuine friendship became a real foreign policy advantage for Russia.

Dear friends and colleagues,

It is the destiny of a rare few to have found their own freedom and been followed by millions, to have led their country to truly historical transformation and in so doing change the world itself.

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was able to do this, not once retreating or bowing under the weight of his task, not once betraying the people’s choice and his own conscience.

He will always remain a shining symbol of change, a symbol of the fight against decrepit dogmas and prohibitions.

Figures of this dimension never leave us. They live on in people’s ideas and aspirations, in the achievements and successes of their Motherland.

No matter how difficult it was for him, and no matter how great the challenges facing our country, Boris Nikolayevich always believed in the renaissance and transformation of Russia. He respected the talent and strength of the Russian people and sincerely tried to do all he could to improve the lives of millions of Russians (and he always said this word in his own distinctive way, with that particular ‘Yeltsin intonation’).

This was his dream, his goal. And Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin will not just live on in our memories – we will work towards this goal.

May his memory live forever!

Leon Aron on Yeltsin's Legacy

From The American.com:

He was rife with authoritarian habits and urges—and bound by self-imposed and self-enforced constraints. He thirsted for power and was zealous to acquire and hold it. Yet both the mode of acquisition of that power (by two free elections) and at least some of the uses to which he put it—greatly weakening the state’s stranglehold over society and the economy, and Moscow’s over Russia—were utterly novel for that country.

The Russia that Yeltsin left behind reflected the contradictions of its founding father. It was a hybrid: a polity still semiauthoritarian, corrupt, and mistrusted by the society, but also one that was governable, in which the elites’ competition for power was arbitrated by popular vote, and in which most of the tools of authoritarian mobilization and coercion appeared to have been significantly dulled. Yeltsin’s legacy is a collection of necessary, although far from sufficient, conditions for a modern capitalist democracy: free elections; freedom of political opposition; demilitarization of state and society; decentralization of the traditionally unitary state; a largely privatized economy; and a still small and weak but increasingly assertive civil society, sustained by civil liberties, freedom of the press from government censorship, and an increasingly independent and assertive judiciary. The political organism that he forged is full of severe defects, both genetic and acquired, yet capable of development and of peacefully thwarting Communist restoration without succumbing to authoritarianism.

Perhaps most important of all, Yeltsin freed Russia from what the great English poet Robert Graves (in an entirely different context) called “the never changing circuit of its fate”—the history that after four centuries appeared to have become destiny: imperialism, militarism, and rigid centralization interrupted by episodes of horrifyingly brutal anarchy. He gave Russia a “peredyshka,” a time to catch its breath. The traditional attributes of the Russian state—authoritarianism, imperialism, militarism, xenophobia—are far from extinguished. Yet more and higher hedges have been erected against their recurrence under Yeltsin’s peredyshka than at any other time in Russian history.

Brutalized—the rulers and the ruled alike—by terror and lies, gnarled by fear and poverty, paralyzed by total dependence on the state, the Russians’ journey from subjects to a free people will be neither easy nor fast. Yet, like a convalescing invalid, Russia under Yeltsin began to hobble away from the prison hospital that the czars and commissars built, with its awful food, stern nurses, short visiting hours, and ugly uniforms.

She is not out of the hospital yard yet. But if she can no longer be stopped, Yeltsin’s name, next to Gorbachev’s, will be inscribed by History among those of the greatest liberators.

Giuliani Speaks on Hamas-US Relations

Hizzoner is for them in principle, on one condition: Hamas recognize Israel's right to exist and renounce terrorism.

Sounds good to me. Here's Susan Rosenbluh's report from New Jersey's Jewish Voice and Opinion (ht lgf):

Rudy Giuliani doesn’t care whether the Palestinian government is run by Hamas, which is recognized by the US as a terrorist organization, or Mahmoud Abbas, the chairman of Fatah who is regarded by the Bush administration as a moderate.

"Hamas or Abbas, it makes no difference. The ball is in their court, and we just have to show patience and not push any peace process until they do what they have to do," said Mr. Giuliani.

What they have to do, he said, is, at the very minimum, to recognize Israel’s right to exist and to renounce terrorism. Then, he said, Israel and the US should sit back and see if they mean it.

"They don’t just have to say the words. Anyone can say the words. They have to show that they are ending terrorism; they have to show that they are doing what they have to do to end terrorism. I’m a strong proponent of the philosophy that we can trust, but we have to verify," he said. "If all that happens, then it will lead naturally to a peace process, but we have to wait patiently until they are ready to make it happen. And no one should make any concessions to the Palestinians until they take those steps."

Will Bush Education Department Destroy US Higher Education?

Of all the disasters caused by Bush Administration policies, there is one that I have seen up-close and personal--an attempt to bring "outcomes-based education" to US Higher Education through the mechanism of accreditation bodies. The result, as any adjunct faculty member knows, is a morass of bureaucratic goals, objectives, rubrics, boilerplate padding of syllabi, and "training" that seems designed to dumb down higher education until it becomes as disabled as what goes on in the worst American K-12 public schools. I've actually seen the University of Phoenix and Stanley Kaplan test prep courses held up as models for what university courses should become...

Until now, I thought no one was acting to oppose the imposition of an iron cage of accreditation review, an additional layer of bureaucracy championed by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. But according to an article in Inside Higher Education, I'm not alone in thinking that the Bush Administration initiatives are bureaucratic madness:

The accreditation panel is by far the most controversial of the rule making committees, because unlike the others, there have been no recent changes in federal law regarding accreditation, and some college officials have questioned whether the department has the legal grounds to consider some of the changes it is considering — most of which were prompted by the work of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education.

Over several months, the negotiators — a mix of college administrators, accrediting agency officials and others — have engaged in pointed and at times tense debates about a range of issues, most of which boil down to: how far the federal government should go in demanding that accreditors set minimum standards for the performance of the colleges they oversee, most notably on how much their students learn.

As the department’s various proposals have evolved over the weeks and months, they have become slightly less intrusive at each turn. Most recently, the department issued draft regulatory language — based, its officials repeated again and again, on a proposal that some of the “non-federal” negotiators had suggested — that would no longer require accrediting agencies to dictate to colleges the levels of performance they must achieve in student learning (for non-vocational programs, at least; for vocational programs, all accreditors would still be required to set such standards, which agencies that accredit for-profit career-related colleges already must).

But because the government would still require accrediting agencies to judge whether the standards that colleges set for themselves and their success in meeting those goals are sufficient — and because the accreditors would be doing so knowing that the Education Department can (through its process for recognizing accrediting agencies) punish any accreditor who doesn’t set the bar high enough to satisfy department officials — some members of the negotiating panel argued Tuesday that even the less-aggressive changes amount to federal control of accreditation, and ultimately of higher education.

“We are taking a system of quality review driven by cooperation and replacing it with a parent-child relationship,” where the parent (the accreditor) is “controlled by the federal government,” argued Judith S. Eaton, president of the Council on Higher Education Accreditation, which coordinates accreditation nationally and recognizes 60 accrediting agencies. “When the accreditor stipulates the level of the performance indicators and the performance expectations, the institution has lost the opportunity to set its own direction, and that’s where the problem is ... We should say yes to accountability and to the goals of accountability, but no to this way.”

I'd go even further and ask that university cooperation with this initiative be ended as soon as possible. In the interests of academic freedom and defending the one element of our educational system that is really a model for the world--higher education--I'd ask Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats to stop the Bush Administration's accreditation reform madness, before it completely destroys the liberal arts in American colleges and universities...

David Halberstam Killed By Journalism Student

According to the San Francsico Chronicle:

At the time of Monday morning's accident, Halberstam was being driven to an interview with Hall of Fame quarterback Y.A. Tittle.

The drivers of the two cars were injured, but not seriously. Halberstam was being driven by a graduate journalism student from the University of California at Berkeley, where he had visited over the weekend. The crash remained under investigation, and the Menlo Park police officer on duty early Tuesday said no further information was available.

Kommersant on the Death of Boris Yeltsin

At the president's residence, it seemed to me that the tragedy had occurred in those very rooms: everyone walked carefully, avoiding each other's eyes, and spoke in whispers, if they spoke at all. People mentioned that Boris Nikolayevich's heart had been bothering him for a week, and then he suddenly improved on Sunday. Just when everyone had breathed a sigh of relief, he suffered cardiac arrest. The doctors did everything they could: they managed to get his heart going again, but it soon stopped, this time forever. His allotted time was simply up. He was so worn out that he just had no chance. No chance, and there was nothing else that could be done.

Vladimir Putin decided to make an announcement about the death of Russia's first president. The text of the statement was his own, and he edited and corrected it several times. He considered the words to be so important for himself personally and for the country as a whole that he waited to write them down until he could gather his thoughts late yesterday evening.

Before then, he met with the president of Turkmenistan, whom he went out to meet in a dark suit and tie. Mr. Berdymukhammedov initially smiled at the Russian president, but as soon as he saw the expression on Mr. Putin's face, the smile slid from his lips. In my opinion, the Turkmen president did not immediately understand what was going on and labored for some time under the impression that Mr. Putin's condition was somehow his fault. The Russian president congratulated Mr. Berdymukhammedov unenthusiastically on his election to the post of president and declared that the relationship between Turkmenistan and Russia is going along "extremely well" and that "we have responded to your recent request to build another branch of the gas pipeline along the Caspian Sea." Then he clammed up.

"Thank you for your respect… We are grateful for your hospitality…" began the Turkmen president. "Our cooperation has historical, uh, roots… We will build our cooperation on, um, mutually beneficial terms…"

Obviously noticing that something was up, he let his voice trail off. It seemed that he was still uninformed about what had happened. When the journalists were leaving, Vladimir Putin quietly informed his colleague, "we suffered a great tragedy today."

The talks with the president of Turkmenistan were also very short, as was dinner with him.

At the same time, it was being decided what would be done with the president's address to the Federation Council, which was scheduled for April 25. When it became known that Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin's family might schedule the funeral for Thursday, April 26, the Kremlin determined to go forward with the speech on Wednesday as planned, with the additional of a few extra phrases that would have the hall on its feet.

But then it was announced that the funeral would be on Wednesday, and the president's speech was immediately rescheduled.

There was no real doubt where final goodbyes would be said to Russia's first president: the Church of Christ the Savior, in the portion of the church dedicated to events of exceptional importance in the life of the church and of the country. Boris Yeltsin will be laid to rest in Novodevichy Cemetery.

An hour after the Turkmen president left, Vladimir Putin said his first words of farewell to Boris Yeltsin. In a televised speech to the nation, he also designated April 25 a national day of mourning.

"We knew Boris Nikolayevich as a courageous and also warm-hearted, sincere man," said Mr. Putin. "This was a straightforward and brave national leader… Boris Yeltsin took full responsibility on himself for everything that he advocated and strove for. For what he tried to do and did – for the sake of the country, for the sake of millions of Russians. All of Russia's woes and hardships, people's difficulties and woes, he unceasingly channeled through himself… And today I express my sincerest and deepest sympathies to [Yeltsin's widow] Naina Iosifovna and to Boris Nikolayevich's friends and relatives. We grieve together with you. We will do everything in our power to ensure that the memory of Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, his noble designs, his words 'take care of Russia' always serve as our moral and political compass… The person who brought an entire era into being has gone. A new democratic Russia was born – a free nation open to the world. Thanks to the will and direct initiative of Boris Yeltsin, a new constitution was adopted that acclaimed human rights as the highest value. It gave the people the opportunity to freely express their thoughts, to freely choose the powers-that-be in the country…"

Vladimir Putin's words oblige him to do the same.

The Accomplices: A Review

It seems fitting to review Bernard Weinraub's The Accomplices around the time of Israel's 59th Independence Day. I saw Ian Morgan's impressive New Group production at The Acorn theatre on 42nd Street last Saturday. The actors were uniformly excellent, direction intelligent, sets and costumes true to the 1940s period. Weinraub's play is a serious work about an important subject, and even if were not as well-written as it is, one that merits sober consideration. It is not for everyone, just for sensitive and intelligent audiences who like old-fashioned plays that help them think as well as feel. In a word--highbrow.

It is necessary to note that The Accomplices is a work of metaphorical rather than literal truth. Don't look to the play for an account of what actually happened day-by-day. It is not a documentary--although reminiscent of work by Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, or the WPA Federal Theatre Project's Living Newspaper. Rather, it reflects a personal re-imagining of history in order to illuminate, explore, and challenge the complacency of an audience. The pacing is slow and deliberate, it takes concentration and attention to understand what is happening on stage--it is a difficult play, intended for intelligent audiences. If you don't get it, then it's not for you. But if you do, you will think about it for a while. It sticks.

The conflicts between characters are symbolic incarnations of forces, such as love, fear, bigotry, assimilation, political expediency, calculation, determination, well-intentioned caution, and regret, that loom bigger than the individuals on stage, bigger than the story itself. For example, Daniel Sauli's Peter Bergson and David Margulies' Rabbi Stephen Wise act not as individuals alone, but as archetypal figures, representing the New Hebrew--the Israeli--in conflict with the Diaspora Jew--in the person of the "Pope" of the American Reform movement.

Bergson, arrived from Palestine, sees America with the eyes of a foreigner, so does not understand Wise. Wise, likewise, does not understand Bergson. What they say to each other on stage, they did not say in real life. But through their actions, they illuminate a Father-Son conflict at the roots of tensions in the relationship between Israel and American Jewry. Zionist leaders like Rabbi Wise helped create the state of Israel. That young Israel pursued a truly independent national course inevitably led to a strained relationship. The conflict between Bergson and Wise is the conflict between the Diaspora and Israel.

This conflict is nested within other sets of dramatic conflicts--between "Our Crowd" members like Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. and "street Jews" like speechwriter Samuel Rosenman, between Hollywood representatives like Ben Hecht and Establishment pillars, between Eleanor and Franklin, between the Treasury Department and the State Department. between Congress and the President. It's not just a play about Peter Bergson--it's a play about human nature in times of crisis, as acted out in the American system of government.

In brilliantly acted scenes starring John DeVries as FDR and Robert Hogan as a very Princetonian Breckenridge Long, Weinraub illuminates FDR's Machiavellian genius in holding together a Democratic Party coalition that united Southern racists and union leaders alongside liberal Northerners. In the character of Breckenridge Long, the State Deparment functionary responsible for keeping immigrants out of the USA in the wake of the Depression. When Rosenman finally asks Long to let up and permit more refugees to enter the USA, Long tells Samuel Rosenman that they both work for the same man--FDR.

Even Bergson's relationship with his wife Betty is symbolic of a conflict between political commitment and personal growth--Betty is portrayed as a dancer more interested in Bergson as a man, than in his cause.

Which is to say that The Accomplices is complex and intricate, operating on a series of different levels that require a certain degree of sophistication. It is a subtle work--not The Lion King nor Angels in America.

I must admit a personal interest, in that the author credited my film with stimulating an interest in the subject, and credited me generously in his program notes. Weinraub has gone well beyond what I attempted, and taken his story in a different and interesting direction. In his dramatizations of character and action, he both intensifed and crystallized the underlying personal and philosophical dramas of the conflict in a way that my documentary could not.

And he does it very well. I attended the play with the man who paid for the production of my film, a professor of political science and editor of a journal of international relations--and he was more enthusiastic than I, saying that the depiction of the FDR-Breckenridge Long-Morgenthau relationship was exactlly how political scientists understand presidential decision-making. Perhaps it might be staged at next year's American Political Science Association convention?

In any case, The Accomplices runs in New York until May 5th. You can buy tickets online, here.

Sarkozy Next French President

That's the gist of today's post-election analysis in today's International Herald Tribune.

Leon Aron Remembers Boris Yeltsin, 76

In a statement released by the American Enterprise Institute:

Today, Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically elected leader in Russia's thousand-year history, died.

As AEI resident scholar Leon Aron explains in his book, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life, Yeltsin oversaw the transformation of the Russian political system from stark totalitarianism to free market-based democracy. He institutionalized the vital liberties that Gorbachev had granted only provisionally and often by default, including freedom of speech and free and multicandidate elections. His eight and a half years as president were by far the freest, most tolerant, and open period Russia had ever known.

The Russia that Yeltsin left behind reflected the contradictions of its founding father. It was a hybrid: a polity still semiauthoritarian, corrupt, and mistrusted by the society, but also one that was governable, in which the elites' competition for power was arbitrated by popular vote, and in which most of the tools of authoritarian mobilization and coercion appeared to have been significantly dulled.

Leon Aron, author of Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life, the definitive biography of Yeltsin, is available for comment. He can be contacted at laron@aei.org or through his assistant, Igor Khrestin, at 202.828.6025 or ikhrestin@aei.org.

For additional media inquiries, please contact Veronique Rodman at 202.862.4870 or vrodman@aei.org.

Blame De-Institutionalization for School Massacres

Dr. Jonathan Kellerman tells it like it is about the Virginia Tech massacre, in today's Wall Street Journal:

The basic premise of Community Psych--that severely mentally ill people could be depended on to show up for treatment voluntarily--never made sense to me. The core of the most common and debilitating psychosis, schizophrenia, is degradation of thought and reason. So the idea that people with fractured minds could and would make rational, often complex decisions about self-care seemed preposterous.

One day, I voiced that opinion in class, questioning if any mechanisms were being set in place to prevent a flood of schizophrenics from ending up on the streets, homeless, helpless, victims of crime and, in some cases, victimizers. The Community Psych professor--one of the liberationists--responded with a patronizing smile and a folksy account of the success of a program in rural Belgium or some such place, where humble working folk created a therapeutic milieu by volunteering to house psychotics in their humble homes and everything ended up peachy.

I didn't challenge what amounted to flimsy anecdotal data, but I did question its relevance to the plight of thousands of severely mentally disabled individuals set loose in vast urban centers. The professor's smile tightened and he changed the subject; and I resolved to get through this joke of a prerequisite and concentrate on becoming the best psychologist possible.

By the time I received my doctorate in 1974, the doors to many of the locked wards had been flung open and the much vaunted community mental health centers were being built--predominately in low-rent neighborhoods. A few years later, government funding for these allegedly humane treatment outposts had been cut, as yet more fiscal belt-tightening was inspired by findings that they didn't work.

Because crazy people rarely showed up for treatment voluntarily, and when they did, the treatment milieu consisted of queuing up interminably at Thorazine Kiosks.

William Easterly on Paul Wolfowitz

In today's Washington Post:

Pity Paul Wolfowitz: Every time he tries regime change, he triggers an insurrection.

The latest revolt was launched by World Bank staffers and Western aid leaders in response to the revelation that Wolfowitz -- who had made a crusade against corruption the hallmark of his bumpy tenure as president of the World Bank -- may have awarded his companion a $60,000 pay increase. A staff that had always hated working for the intellectual architect of the Iraq war was now quite literally shouting for his resignation, and Wolfowitz was left wandering the corridors of the bank looking for a Green Zone in which to hide.

The root cause of his debacle at the bank was pretty much the same as the reason for the fiasco in Iraq: intellectual hubris at the top that disdained the messy realities at the bottom. He imagined it would be as easy to clean up the pathologies of foreign aid as he had thought it would be to create democracy in the Middle East.