Finger Pointing (05/25/02)
By Linda Chavez in The Washington Post
“So what should the president have done in August 2001 after he was warned that intelligence sources thought an attack against American interests was likely in the not-too-distant future? If the president had gone public with the information, he probably would have been rebuked by the very same people who are raising a fuss now because he didn’t speak out sooner.”

What Clinton Knew (05/21/02)
By Dick Morris in The New York Post
“If Bush did not know much about al Qaeda intentions before 9/11, why didn’t he? The blame rests not on his incumbency, then only months old, but on that of his predecessor.... So, even had Bush received notification of the nature of al Qaeda’s plans, there was little he could have done, in the weeks before 9/11, to stymie them. Clinton and Gore had simply not left behind them the tools to permit an increase in airport security.”

FBI Memo Author Did Not Envision Sept. 11 (05/23/02)
In The Washington Post by Bill Miller and Dan Eggen
“The Phoenix FBI agent who wrote a memo last summer warning about possible terrorists at U.S. flight schools told lawmakers yesterday that he never expected officials at FBI headquarters to respond immediately to his suggestion for an investigation and that he never envisioned the kinds of attacks that took place Sept. 11. Although his memo cautioned that al Qaeda members might be training at U.S. aviation schools, FBI agent Kenneth Williams told congressional panels in secret hearings yesterday and Tuesday that none of the information in the document could have led investigators to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks, according to officials familiar with his testimony.”

Low Profile: The real scandal of the Phoenix memo isn’t that it was ignored — it’s why it was ignored. (05/24/02)
By Christopher Caldwell in The Weekly Standard
“The real scandal of the FBI memo is that it wasn’t passed up the line. And we can make a pretty good guess why it wasn’t. In May 8 hearings held by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dianne Feinstein asked FBI director Robert Mueller what had happened. Mueller replied, ‘There are more than 2,000 aviation academies in the United States. The latest figure I think I heard is something like 20,000 students attending them. And it was perceived that this would be a monumental undertaking without any specificity as to particular persons; the individuals who were being investigated by that agent in Phoenix were not the individuals that were involved in the September 11 attack.’ What a load of nonsense. Any small-town newspaper reporter could have narrowed down that 20,000 to under a hundred in an afternoon, just by focusing on names like... oh, I don’t know... try Mohamed, Walid, Marwan, and Hamza. Couldn’t the entire FBI have done the same?”

Letter contends FBI unit had dots to connect (05/25/02)
In The Chicago Tribune by Stephen J. Hedges and Cam Simpson
“A letter to Congress from an FBI lawyer suggests that at least a week before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, FBI officials in Washington had a broader knowledge of flight training activities by men with terrorist connections than has been previously disclosed.... Rowley’s letter, which expresses her frustration that it took three weeks from Moussaoui’s arrest before her office was told of the Phoenix investigation, is the strongest suggestion yet that someone within FBI headquarters had a working knowledge of both cases, and had acted on them together.”

Social Security memo gives GOP smoking gun (05/24/02)
In The Washington Times by Stephen Dinan
“Republicans have obtained a congressional staff memo they say proves that Democrats want to use Social Security for scare tactics, not serious debate. The memo, mistakenly sent by e-mail to a Republican staff member on Capitol Hill, contains an apparent draft opinion piece on Social Security and reaction from staffers in the office of Rep. Marcy Kaptur, Ohio Democrat.... But another Kaptur staff member responded that the information in the opinion piece was ‘not entirely factually accurate,’ adding: ‘Talk about scaring seniors — this may be a little over the top. But it is sooo fun to bash Republicans.’ She included an e-mail ‘smiley face’ — :) — after her comment.”

Ammunition in a Battle for Souls (05/22/02)
In The New York Times by Daniel J. Wakin
“Over the past four months, while Catholics have publicly debated and suffered over their church’s scandals, most other Christian denominations have stayed aloof, perhaps aware of a certain aphorism about stones and glass houses, and also sympathetic. Most evangelical Christians would say they have no interest in capitalizing on Catholicism’s woe. But when asked, they do not hesitate to find the scandal’s roots in Catholic dogma, and some go even further. In a few cases, priests say, the scandal is being thrown in Catholic faces by proselytizing neighbors. And others who study the evangelical world suggest that the scandal will be used as a wedge in the long struggle between Catholics and evangelicals for Latino souls.”

Report: Weakland sexually abused former student, paid for silence (05/23/02)
By The Associated Press in The Journal-Sentinel
“Roman Catholic Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee agreed in 1998 to pay $450,000 to a man who accused him of sexual assault, according to documents cited Thursday by ABC News. ABC said the agreement had required Paul J. Marcoux, 53, to keep silent. ‘I was involved in a cover-up. I accepted money to be silent about it, not to speak out against what was going on,’ Marcoux said in an interview broadcast on ‘Good Morning America.’”

Pope accepts Weakland’s resignation (05/25/02)
In The Journal-Sentinel by Tom Heinen
“Pope John Paul II has quickly granted Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland’s request to speed up his retirement, with the Vatican announcing on Friday that Weakland’s resignation had been accepted. The moment that action was communicated to Weakland, he was officially retired and Auxiliary Bishop Richard J. Sklba assumed Weakland’s duties.”

Weakland’s views take on new meaning after scandal (05/25/02)
In The Journal-Sentinel by Dave Umhoefer
“How much, the faithful are left to wonder, did Weakland’s struggles with sexual questions and the until-now private accusations of abuse against him color his actions in defending and dealing with priests in similar situations over the years? How did they affect his controversial views about teenage victims in such cases?”

Catholic Bishops Refuse Communion To Homosexual Activists (05/20/02)
At Cybercast News Service by Patrick Goodenough
“‘Homosexual acts are contrary to the natural law, they close the sexual act to the gift of life,’ Archbishop George Pell told Catholics gathered for Pentecost Sunday Mass at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney. In an orchestrated move, 20 members of a group campaigning for the church to give full recognition to homosexual Catholics had earlier gone forward for communion, while another 12 did the same St. Patrick’s Cathedral in another major city, Melbourne. Each member of the Rainbow Sash Movement (RSM) wore a rainbow-colored sash over their clothing. In both churches they were denied communion, although in Melbourne, Archbishop Denis Hart did offer the sash-wearers a blessing.”

The Bishop Is Back (05/22/02)
On ABC7 News by The I-Team
“Patrick Ziemann was the first bishop ever to be sued by a priest for sexual assault. He resigned from the Santa Rosa diocese, and the church paid more than half a million dollars to settle the case. In light of the recent sex scandals across the country, we wondered what is Ziemann doing now. The answer has some North Bay Catholics shocked and dismayed. When we found him in Arizona three weeks ago, Bishop Patrick Ziemann didn’t want to discuss the mess he left behind in Santa Rosa — his sexual misconduct and severe financial mismanagement.... A church spokesman says Ziemann’s past prohibits him from acting as a priest in the Tucson Diocese. But, he is allowed to work inside the monastery with young men who want to become priests and with people who are going through some crisis in their lives, who go there for guidance. ”

Cardinal Coverup (05/02/02)
In New Times LA by Ron Russell
“Yet in his pell-mell rush to be seen as the cardinal with a plan, all the while playing a gullible local mainstream press like a harp in diverting attention from his own dismal record of protecting pedo-priests, Mahony’s actions amounted to little more than a public-relations snow job.... In fact, most of his publicly announced ideas for dealing with the sex-abuse crisis, including those he unveiled amid much fanfare before jetting off to Rome along with other American cardinals to meet with the pope this month, weren’t Mahony’s at all. They had been forced on him, kicking and screaming, as it were, last August as conditions for settling a potentially explosive sex-abuse case involving the former principal of a prominent Catholic high school in Orange County, Monsignor Michael Harris.”

Four Sue Cardinal Over Sexual Abuse (05/21/02)
At Yahoo! News by Paul Wilborn of Associated Press
“Four men filed a racketeering lawsuit against Cardinal Roger Mahony that accuses him of protecting a priest who allegedly molested several children in the nation’s largest archdiocese. The suit, which seeks unspecified damages, cites federal laws involving conspiracy in a criminal enterprise. It was filed Monday in a state court.”

A cardinal who gets it (05/23/02)
By Adrian Walker in The Boston Globe
“He believes it is time for clergy to set an example by living more simply. He further believes the mansion he lives in, which has been the scene of overnight stays by a pope and a president, is unnecessarily lavish. And his archdiocese may face the prospect of paying damages to victims of sexual abuse. Therefore, the cardinal — Francis E. George of Chicago — announced this week that he will seek permission to sell his residence, one of the more lavish in the city.”

Battling poison with ink and holy water (05/12/02)
By David House in The Star-Telegram
“I’ve read many U.S. news reports about this issue. I agree with Christine Chinlund — the reader advocate at The Boston Globe, where the pedophilia story broke last January — that coverage has been factual, well-documented, even-handed, and the product of commendably aggressive but fair and persistent inquiry. The news media will follow developments in this scandal, and not because they have found a delightfully marvelous mountain of muck to rake. You may hear otherwise. Think twice about believing it. The truth is that the media are confronting an evil on behalf of millions of people, including the many selfless priests who have been unjustly smeared.”

When in Dallas (05/17/02)
By Editorial Staff of Commonweal
“The toxicity of this scandal lies not only in pernicious decisions over the years, but also in the manner that senior church officials have handled the current crisis. There has been a failure of episcopal leadership in kowtowing to cardinals and in remaining silent. Just as many priests have been affected by the sins of the few, so too have many bishops. Their June meeting gives them a singular opportunity to begin bailing out a ship that is in grave danger of sinking.”

Seriously ill historian’s book-in-progress tells of his changed views (05/24/02)
In The Miami Herald by Brett Martel of Associated Press
“In what he fears may be his dying days, cancer-stricken historian Stephen E. Ambrose spends much of his time at his word processor, trying to set the record straight about some of the views he espoused as a young professor. Perhaps best known for his 1994 best seller D-Day, Ambrose, 66, has put a World War II project about the Pacific on hold in favor of a new book depicting his own transformation from a left-wing demonstrator to a super patriot.”

Now girls have the advantage in school (05/22/02)
By Katherine Kersten in The Star Tribune
“Is there gender bias in American schools? Evidence is growing that the answer is yes. But if you think it’s girls who are suffering, you’re wrong. Today, boys are on the short end of the academic stick, and their performance gap with girls is both startling and alarming. Thus far, few educators have acknowledged or addressed the problem of widespread male academic underachievement. ”

Why are U.S. universities moral wastelands? (05/21/02)
By Dennis Prager at WorldNetDaily
“The vast majority of Americans believe that America’s war against Islamic terror is a moral one, that the Iraqi, Iranian and North Korean regimes are evil, and that Israel’s war for survival is a just war. They also believe that colleges should not have dormitories or graduation ceremonies segregated by race or ethnicity.... In sum, if the universities are morally right, Americans are, by and large, morally wrong, and America is indeed the malevolent force in the world that so many colleges depict it as. On the other hand, if Americans are by and large right about the greatest moral issues of the day, and America, with all its flaws, really is the greatest force for good in the world, our universities are, with a few exceptions, moral wastelands.”

College recruiters look to gays: But schools see problem in identifying students (05/21/02)
In The Boston Globe by Patrick Healy
“Last Saturday, Harvard, Yale, Brown, and about 40 other New England colleges — as well as top private institutions outside the region, like Stanford and Grinnell — sent representatives to Boston for the nation’s first college fair for gay high school students. Colleges were invited for the first time to the annual Youth Pride celebration for gay teenagers as a way to broaden the event. Several admissions officials had also asked regional gay organizations about ways to recruit these students, said chief organizer Mark Taggart of the Massachusetts Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth. ”

College Commencements Still Dominated By Liberals (05/21/02)
At Cybercast News Service by Matt Pyeatt
“Young America’s Foundation (YAF) released its study Monday and found that the list of the nation’s commencement speakers leans heavily to the left. The report also shows that schools not listed in the top 50 colleges and universities also lack representation from conservatives at commencement. ‘For the ninth consecutive year, our most prestigious schools excluded scholars such as Milton Friedman, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Thomas Sowell for the likes of left-wing activists Morris Dees, Lani Guinier, Madeline Albright and Whoopi Goldberg,’ Ron Robinson, president of YAF, said. ‘College administrators are using commencement ceremonies to send their students off with one more predictable leftist lecture.’”

Principals should stop preaching, start teaching (05/22/02)
By Bruce Ramsey in The Seattle Times
“Dear principals: Stop saving the world. A dream of racial brotherhood does not justify labeling Seattle’s kids ‘White’ and ‘Colored’ (or whatever your labels are) and shuffling them around to Do Good. Brotherhood will not result. Anyway, the people of Washington had a vote, and you lost. If you would prepare students for success in the world, hammer on academics, academics, academics. That was John Stanford’s message. Academics! If certain schools are weak, make them strong. That is your job.”

Harvard to award more B’s, raise honors standards (05/22/02)
In The Boston Globe by Patrick Healy
“Concerned that grade inflation has become pervasive at Harvard University, the school’s faculty yesterday committed itself to awarding more B’s to students and voted to sharply raise academic requirements for honors, which went to a record 91 percent of graduating seniors last June. For the first time, Harvard will cap the number of students receiving summa, magna, and cum laude, starting with the current freshman class. No more than 60 percent of seniors will be eligible, and cut-off scores will be raised to make honors harder to achieve.”

Anti-Semitic Pogrom at San Francisco State (05/09/02)
By Laurie Zoloth at FrontPage Magazine
“I cannot fully express what it feels like to walk across campus daily, past maps of the Middle East that do not include Israel, past posters of cans of soup with labels on them of drops of blood and dead babies, labeled ‘canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license,’ past poster after poster calling out ‘Zionism = racism, and Jews = Nazis.’ This is not civic discourse, this is not free speech, and this is the Weimar Republic with brown shirts it cannot control. This is the casual introduction of the medieval blood libel and virulent hatred smeared around our campus in a manner so ordinary that it hardly excites concern — except if you are a Jew, and you understand that hateful words have always led to hateful deeds.”

Jewish Blood Libel Poster at SFSU (April 2002)
By Scott Armel-Funkhouser of University of California at Berkeley
“This poster, funded by the Associated Students of San Francisco State University, was posted on campus in April 2002. This is perhaps the most grotesque and explicit incarnation of the ‘blood libel’ observed in the free world since the Nazi Holocaust. It was generated on the campus of a public university by students, using public money. The poster included the names of the following organizations: Associated Students, GUPS (General Union of Palestinian Students), MSA (Muslim Student Association) and WIA (unidentified). The poster incorporates the two most common elements to this medieval racist slur. It suggests (1) that Jews ingest the flesh and/or blood of children, and (2) that there are rites associated with the Jewish religion which detail how to perform this cannibalism. Note that this vicious racism is not directed specifically at Israel but at Jews, for it reads, ‘slaughtered according to Jewish rites’.”

Anti-Semitic riot at San Francisco State University (05/16/02)
By Melissa Radler in The Jerusalem Post
“After being surrounded by a mob of students shouting, ‘Hitler didn’t finish the job,’ and ‘Get out or we’ll kill you,’ pro-Israel students at San Francisco State University are finally finding an ally against hate. The university president is so fed-up with the hate-filled atmosphere on the Bay Area campus that he has asked the local district attorney’s office to help bring pro-Palestinian hate-mongers to justice.”

Colleges Only Protect PC Speech, Groups (05/16/02)
By Glenn Harlan Reynolds at FoxNews
“But so far this event, and the university’s tepid response, is simply the latest stage in a long-standing and widespread trend of giving some student groups the permission to engage in behavior that the university would not permit for a moment if it came from groups not favored as politically correct. The result of impunity, of course, is escalation. Just as the toleration of ‘broken windows’ and other petty acts of lawbreaking leads to more serious crime, so a policy of tolerating acts of lawlessness by overpoliticized students leads to more serious problems.”

University of South Carolina Mandates Political Indoctrination and Orthodoxy (05/13/02)
At Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
“The University of South Carolina (USC), in a required course for a degree-granting program, has adopted ‘Guidelines for Classroom Discussion’ that demand adherence to a narrow set of partisan political assumptions — on pain of being graded poorly for honest disagreement. Although USC is a public institution, bound by the First Amendment, it has created an ideological ‘loyalty oath’ that constitutes a profound threat to both freedom of speech and freedom of conscience in South Carolina and across the country.”

Women’s studies mandates seen as threats to free speech (05/16/02)
By Ellen Sorokin in The Washington Times
“The course syllabus, distributed in January, specifically outlines eight prerequisites during class discussion, which counts for 20 percent of the students’ overall grade. The course — ‘Women’s Studies 797: Seminar in Women’s Studies’ — is listed on the program’s Web site as ‘required’ for a certificate of graduate study in women’s studies. One of the prerequisites is that students ‘acknowledge that racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism and other institutionalized forms of oppression exist.’”

Berkeley Course on Mideast Raises Concerns (05/16/02)
In The New York Times by Chris Gaither
“The political tensions in the Middle East have once again roiled the University of California, with the most recent incident focused on a catalog course description.... The listing for the course, ‘The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance,’ one of the choices for a required course in reading and composition, was pulled for review last week by university officials after protests by civil liberties and pro-Israeli groups.... The last line of his course description drew the most ire, especially among civil libertarians: ‘Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections.’”

Replacing Airport Screeners Proves Tough (05/15/02)
In Washington Post by Sara Kehaulani Goo
“After 4,800 people applied for 600 federal airport screening jobs at Baltimore-Washington International, the Transportation Security Administration confidently removed the job application from its Web site. Then the problems started. Hundreds of applicants either failed the government’s tests for prospective screeners or they didn’t even show up for the exam, according to a TSA official. ‘Surprisingly, the numbers of the latter were higher than we expected,’ he said.”

Global Warming Models Labeled “Fairy Tale” By Team of Scientists (05/14/02)
At Cybercast News Service by Marc Morano
“A team of international scientists Monday said climate models showing global warming are based on a ‘fairy tale’ of computer projections. The scientists met on Capitol Hill to expose what they see as a dearth of scientific evidence about global warming. Hartwig Volz, a geophysicist with the RWE Research Lab in Germany questioned the merit of the climate projections coming from the United Nations sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC.) The IPCC climate projections have fueled worldwide support for the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to restrict the greenhouse gases thought to cause global warming.”

Climate change faults and fears (05/12/02)
By Pete du Pont in The Washington Times
“While climate models cannot be expected to simulate future weather, they should be able to accurately depict the Earth’s present climate and to simulate changes in the frequency and type of the weather events that make up ‘climate.’ Since they cannot, GCM predictions of climate change are statistical exercises with little bearing on reality and certainly should not serve as the basis for government policy.”

Jimmy Carter: America basher (05/15/02)
By Jonah Goldberg at TownHall
“It’s an unusual thing for a former president to more or less choose sides against the United States and with a hostile nation ruled by a ruthless dictator. Unusual, that is, in the sense that most U.S. presidents — current or former — don’t do this sort of thing. Unfortunately, Carter is the exception that proves the rule.”

Death rattle? (05/13/02)
By Laura Miller at Salon
“Beyond the familiar schism between the Sunnis and the Shiites, the faith is spectacularly diverse, from the mystical brotherhoods of the Sufis, to the puritanical Wahabbites, to (what remains of) the relatively secularized cosmopolitan elites of more developed countries like Egypt. It makes as much sense to draw conclusions about all Muslims on the basis of the beliefs of the Taliban or bin Laden as it does to expect a Quaker to light candles to Santa Barbara or a Unitarian minister to plant bombs in abortion clinics simply because other people who call themselves Christians do so.”

Beyond the Numbers: A hopeless state (05/15/02)
By Ron Dermer in The Jerusalem Post
“In fact, the recipe for making a suicide bomber is one part fanaticism and one part hope. The fanaticism is bred in a culture of death, where terrorist recruits are meticulously brainwashed to believe that their noble ends justify any means. Still, a fanatical mindset only sets the fuse. Hope is the spark that lights it. Suicide bombers would not be so quick to die if they didn’t believe that the cause they so fanatically pursue will be advanced by their sacrifice.”

Gaza’s Children Worship Martyrdom (05/14/02)
In The Washington Post by Hamza Hendawi
“In Gaza’s funerals for ‘shaheeds,’ or martyrs, and in rallies by Palestinian factions such as Arafat’s Fatah or the militant Islamic group Hamas, children as young as three or four are outfitted with combat fatigues, masks and toy guns. Such occasions routinely attract hundreds of children, all accustomed by now to the deafening noise made by gunmen firing in the air.”

Exploding Myths: Why Israel’s war on terrorism is working. (05/13/02)
By Jonathan Chait at Slate
“Palestinian terrorism does not result from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but from Israel’s existence. Palestinian terrorism long predates the 1967 occupation; the Palestine Liberation Organization was formed in 1964, three years earlier. But hasn’t the more recent phenomenon of suicide bombing come about because of long-simmering Palestinian despair? Not really. Suicide bombings started only after the 1993 Oslo Accords, which provided Palestinians with their best opportunity for a state.”

Columnist Andrew Sullivan Bites Paper; Paper Bites Back (05/14/02)
In The Washington Post by Howard Kurtz
“Andrew Sullivan, the confrontational conservative columnist, has been attempting the high-wire act of writing for the New York Times while frequently whacking the Times for liberal bias on his Web site. Now the tightrope has snapped. Sullivan, who once wrote a biweekly column for the New York Times Magazine, says he has been ‘barred indefinitely from writing any more’ for the magazine. The popular Weblog writer says the directive came from Executive Editor Howell Raines. ”

New York Times v. Sullivan (05/14/02)
By Nick Schulz at Tech Central Station
“There is already chatter among the chattering asses dissecting Sullivan’s banishment. Slate’s Mickey Kaus and John Ellis of Fast Company fame suggest it is because of Raines’ need for control. Meanwhile the folks at The American Prospect — the terrific lefty publication edited by Robert Kuttner — say that explanation is way off base. Actually, they call it ‘paranoid.’ They say Sullivan was dropped because he has taken shots at the Times for its biased coverage and shoddy reporting.”

The Cultures of Newsrooms: A Book Unfit for The New York Times (05/15/02)
By Nat Hentoff in The Village Voice
“Unlike Bernard Goldberg’s bestselling Bias, McGowan’s Coloring the News has received generally favorable reviews, even in such papers as The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, which are sharply criticized in his book. But the influential New York Times Book Review has so far ignored McGowan’s indictment of much of the press — an analysis that, as Peter Schrag, no right-winger, says in the Columbia Journalism Review, ‘has focused attention on important and troubling issues.’”

The news we heard from a guy at Handgun Control (05/16/02)
By Ann Coulter at Town Hall
“But for bald-faced lies, nothing beats the [New York] Times’ preposterous characterization of Supreme Court precedent. The most recent case directly raising the Second Amendment was United States vs. Miller, decided in 1939.... The Miller case simply defined the types of guns protected by the Second Amendment. Reviewing the case of two bootleggers charged with failing to pay federal taxes on a sawed-off shotgun, the court concluded that the ‘instrument’ was not covered by the Second Amendment.”

Guns are bad. The New York Times says so. (05/08/02)
By David Nieporent at Jumping to Conclusions
“The Justice Department submitted briefs to the Supreme Court on Monday that said that the Second Amendment protected an individual right, not just a collective right, to bear arms.... And then the [New York] Times had to try to prove that this is a novel theory, that John Ashcroft was going against established law. Unfortunately, since he wasn’t, the Times had to make something up: ‘The Supreme Court’s view has been that the the Second Amendment protected only those rights that have “some reasonable relationship to the preservation of efficiency of a well regulated militia,” as the court put it in United States v. Miller, a 1939 decision that remains the court’s latest word on the subject.’ Actually, this cleverly clips the Supreme Court quote in just the right part so that she can paraphrase it incorrectly.”

Lawyer says animals have rights too (05/17/02)
In Contra Costa Times from Reuters
“Basing his arguments on well-documented studies of their mental powers, emotional bonds, social skills, language and self-awareness, Wise says there is also increasing evidence to suggest that African elephants, African Gray parrots, honeybees and dogs may merit such legal rights. In an age when it would be unthinkable to use newborn human babies, the profoundly senile, or the insane for biomedical research or display them for public entertainment, Wise asks why dolphins, chimps or elephants — some of whom are more sophisticated than tiny infants — should have to endure such indignities.”

Fighting for Moe: Activists Pursuing Legal Status for Animals One Case at a Time (05/13/02)
At ABCNews.com by Amanda Onion
“Moe’s owners think they know what’s best for him. So does the city of West Covina, Calif., so does the Animal Legal Defense Fund, and so does the director of a local sanctuary. The problem is, even though he’s 36 years old, Moe the chimp can’t speak for himself. That’s partly why the custody battle between Moe’s owners and the city of West Covina has continued for nearly four years. It’s also why a growing cadre of prominent lawyers is lobbying to broaden the way we define all animals and animal rights in the U.S. court system.”

Germany votes for animal rights (05/15/02)
At CNN without Byline
“A majority of lawmakers in the Bundestag voted on Friday to add ‘and animals’ to a clause that obliges the state to respect and protect the dignity of humans. The main impact of the measure will be to restrict the use of animals in experiments. In the end 543 lawmakers in Germany’s lower house of parliament voted in favour of giving animals constitutional rights. Nineteen voted against it and 15 abstained.”

Darwinism in a flutter (05/11/02)
Review by Peter D. Smith of Of Moths and Men: Intrigue, Tragedy & the Peppered Moth at Guardian Unlimited
“The question Hooper sets out to answer is why such a shoddy piece of scientific research was so readily accepted by the scientific community and allowed to attain iconic status in evolutionary biology. Her answer: because scientists wanted to believe it. Once it had been cited enough times, it became an irrefutable article of faith. Hooper’s meticulous research provides a fascinating insight into the fallibility of scientists — after all, as she points out, they are only human.”

Anchor Steam: Why the Evening News is Worse Than “O’Reilly” (05/10/02)
By Rob Walker at The New Republic Online
“So what did I learn in three weeks of watching the evening news? Basically that the network news, which defends itself against detractors by invoking the earnest sobriety of its broadcasts, contains as much hype and fake populism as any of its cable competitors. In fact, in some ways it’s actually worse. As distasteful as the cable shout fests can be, they generally assume that their viewers can handle a detailed discussion, conflicting views, and lengthy segments on a particular issue.”

Why is “morality” a dirty word? (05/13/02)
By Dennis Byrne in The Chicago Tribune
“We are a diverse nation founded on respect for others’ beliefs, religious or otherwise. But that principle has become subverted by this hell-bent determination to avoid discussion of the moral aspects of conduct. When you think of it, this avoidance makes no sense, because we are a nation operating on such concepts as justice and equality — concepts that are fundamentally moral in nature.”

Christianity turns the other cheek: Where is the outrage when a church is desecrated? (05/13/02)
By Raymond J. de Souza in The National Post
“It needs to be said. The occupation of the Church of the Nativity by armed Palestinian terrorists was a gravely anti-Christian act. Much has been made of how the basilica was filthy but not seriously damaged. To speak only of what happens to a church physically is to miss the point. One of Christianity’s holiest shrines was profaned by armed terrorists. It is blasphemy to use the house of God as a military refuge. For more than a month, the faithful were denied access to the basilica to pray while the gunmen used its status as a house of prayer as a tactical advantage.”

Family Matters: Welfare reform has liberals and conservatives calling for government action. (06/02)
By Mike Lynch at Reason Online
“Why exactly it’s up to ‘us’ to set goals for less-educated women and to slot them into their proper role in promoting that great fiction of ‘society’s interest’ is left unsaid. Maybe even less-educated women are smart enough to get by without conservatives shoving them to the altar — or liberals shoving them into classrooms.”

Reliving 9/11: Too Much? Too Soon? (05/12/02)
In The New York Times by Julie Salamon
“Television has long been the defining medium for great and terrible national events like war, assassinations and presidential elections. But nothing in the past has generated this sheer volume of reportage and commentary, because Sept. 11 was an unprecedented event occurring in an age of unprecedented media exposure.... The variety and quantity have been staggering — valuable (much of it), but also alarming.”

Megachurches as Minitowns (05/09/02)
In The New York Times by Patricia Leigh Brown
“Southeast Christian is an example of a new breed of megachurch — a full-service ‘24/7’ sprawling village, which offers many of the conveniences and trappings of secular life wrapped around a spiritual core. It is possible to eat, shop, go to school, bank, work out, scale a rock-climbing wall and pray there, all without leaving the grounds. These churches are becoming civic in a way unimaginable since the 13th century and its cathedral towns. No longer simply places to worship, they have become part resort, part mall, part extended family and part town square.”

Is anti-Catholicism the new anti-Semitism? (05/09/02)
By Rev. Ephraem Chifley in The Age
“Considering that most instances of paedophilia involve not priests but live-in step-fathers, clerical celibacy cannot be considered a significant element in this tragedy. Strange, isn’t it, that cartoonists and comedians don’t make jokes about paedophilia and mum’s new boyfriend, or that there are so few voices calling for a royal commission into marriage break-up and child protection? That, of course, would call for society to examine its substitution of personal fulfilment for duty — far easier to attack a large and slow-moving target, like the church, especially as it is apt frequently to say inconvenient and frightening things.”

Doing Nothing is Something (05/13/02)
By Anna Quindlen in Newsweek via MSNBC
“It is not simply that it is pathetic to consider the lives of children who don’t have a moment between piano and dance and homework to talk about their day or just search for split ends, an enormously satisfying leisure-time activity of my youth. There is also ample psychological research suggesting that what we might call ‘doing nothing’ is when human beings actually do their best thinking, and when creativity comes to call. Perhaps we are creating an entire generation of people whose ability to think outside the box, as the current parlance of business has it, is being systematically stunted by scheduling.”

Who’s ugly now? (05/04/02)
By Mark Steyn in The Spectator
“Muslims killed thousands of Americans, but America doesn’t have anti-Muslim political parties — just a goofy President who hosts a month of Ramadan knees-ups at the White House and enjoins schoolkids to get an Islamic penpal. America has millions of Muslims, but they don’t firebomb synagogues and beat up Jews, and, if they did, the police wouldn’t turn a blind eye.”

Bush is right: Skip international court (05/08/02)
By Editors of The Seattle Times
“President Bush is right to pull out of the treaty for the International Criminal Court, which is an agreement that would give a foreign court jurisdiction over acts committed by U.S. soldiers. This is not the International Court of Justice, or ‘World Court,’ which has existed since 1945 to settle disputes that governments bring to it. This court is to have jurisdiction over individuals. It promises to act only if national courts don’t, but it will make the decision to intervene itself, which is a breach of national sovereignty.”

The New York Times Gloats Over Pope’s Illness, Awaits His Death (05/09/02)
By J. P. Zmirak at FrontPage Magazine
“It fills Keller, and liberal Catholics, with intolerant rage that a Church is permitted to exist which claims continuity with the past and divine authority, which refuses to cave in to their opinions, which dares to dissent from dissent. They will not follow their consciences — which point the way to the Episcopal church down the road — and they’re furious that they cannot coerce the consciences of other Catholics, pull down the Church’s leadership, destroy her internal consistency and integrity, then smoke a joint in her rubble.”

How Jenin battle became a “massacre” (05/06/02)
By Sharon Sadeh at Media Guardian
“In line with the prevalent tradition, the liberal British press has made an extensive and creative use of figurative language in its reports, which betrayed both bias and an attempt to elicit emotional response from the readers which could be translated into increased sales circulation.”

The Big Jenin Lie (05/08/02)
By Richard Starr in The Weekly Standard
“Precisely a month ago, on April 8, the Palestinian news agency Wafa was reporting that Israel had committed the ‘massacre of the 21st century’ in the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin. ‘Medical sources’ informed Wafa of ‘hundreds of martyrs.’ This was a lie, concocted not only for local consumption — to keep the Palestinian people whipped up in a patriotic, Israel-hating frenzy — but mostly for export to the West.”

The brutal Afghan winter hits Jenin: Announcing the first British Press Award For Total Fantasy (05/06/02)
By Mark Steyn in The National Post
“Nonetheless, in recognition of my London friends’ spectacularly inept record since Sept. 11, I am proud to announce the inauguration of the British Press Award For Total Fantasy. Journalists can enter as many of their reports as they wish. Can’t decide whether that story based on a Hamas press release is more risible than that dispatch based on the Radio Taliban lunchtime news? Hey, send us both! Winners will receive a grand prize of five thousand pounds!!!! However, in keeping with traditional Fleet Street standards of numerical accuracy, when the cheque eventually shows up a month later it’ll be for £8.47.”

DUPED! When journalists fall for fake news (n.d.)
At Society of Professional Journalists by Chris Berdik
“Media hoaxes are nothing new. Both Ben Franklin and Edgar Allen Poe wrote satirical yarns and passed them off as news articles. And in the 19th century, frontier newspapers were filled with tall tales of murder and mayhem. It seems that as long as there’s been mass media in America, there’s been somebody around to monkey with it. Yet there is something new, as it turns out. In recent years, the public’s confidence in and regard for news media has plummeted.”

The Internationalist (05/03-09/02)
Christopher Hitchens on George Orwell in Weekly Literary Supplement of LA Weekly
“Orwell was an early and consistent foe of European imperialism and foresaw the end of colonial rule. He was one of the first to volunteer to bear arms against fascism and Nazism in Spain. And, while soldiering in Catalonia, he saw through the biggest and most seductive lie of them all — the false promise of a radiant future offered by the intellectual underlings of Stalinism.”

The “Dinosaurs” Are Taking Over (05/13/02)
Jane Black interviews Lawrence Lessig at Business Week Online
“Who should control the Internet? If Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig is right, the Internet will soon belong to Hollywood studios, record labels, and cable operators — corporate giants that he says are trying to cordon off chunks of the once-open data network.... Lessig argues that imminent changes to Internet architecture plus court decisions that restrict the use of intellectual property will co-opt the Net on behalf of Establishment players — and stifle innovation.”

Two Cheers for Colonialism (05/10/02)
By Dinesh D’Souza in The Chronicle Review
“There is nothing uniquely Western about colonialism.... The West did not become rich and powerful through colonial oppression.... The reason the West became so affluent and dominant in the modern era is that it invented three institutions: science, democracy, and capitalism. All those institutions are based on universal impulses and aspirations, but those aspirations were given a unique expression in Western civilization.... The descendants of colonialism are better off than they would be if colonialism had never happened. ”

The SAT Comes Full Circle: Proposed changes in the Big Test guarantee more racial special-pleading. (05/06/02)
By Heather Mac Donald in City Journal
“Racial quota pushers are laying a big trap. For years, they have argued that the college admissions aptitude test, the SAT, discriminated against blacks and Hispanics.... Despite its faulty arguments, the race industry easily persuaded colleges virtually to ignore low SAT grades when evaluating black and Hispanic students. Now, the race industry is about to claim its biggest victory of all — dismantling the SAT entirely.”

Disassembling the Catholic Church, Public Education and the U.S. Navy (05/01/02)
By Diane Alden at NewsMax
“If the leadership in all the institutions don’t get a grip, speak up and out, defend Western civilization and traditional beliefs, the scandals of the Catholic Church will pale in comparison to the horrors inflicted by the ‘facilitators’ and ‘change agents’ of the despotic left. Our war on terrorism should include a war on the ideas and the people who promote moral relativism and the use of trends like diversity and sensitivity training to produce the new statist man.”

Conservatism can survive despite liberal bias (05/05/02)
By Debra J. Saunders in The San Francisco Chronicle
“Of course the news media are liberal.... Better to get the facts with a little bias than no facts at all.... Besides, most reporters — not columnists, who are paid to be opinionated — try to keep their ideology under wraps. Most also strive for balance within a story. It’s in the story ideas, however, that the bias really shows.”

Biologists Sought a Treaty; Now They Fault It (05/07/02)
In The New York Times by Andrew C. Revkin
“A treaty enacted nine years ago to conserve and exploit the diversity of species on earth is seriously impeding biologists’ efforts to catalog and comprehend that same natural bounty, many scientists say.... As a result, biologists say, in many tropical regions it is easier to cut a forest than to study it.”

Fall and Rise of Christianity (05/04/02)
In The Wichita Eagle by Kristin E. Holmes
“When scholars talk about the death of Christianity and the rise of the secular state, Penn State University professor Philip Jenkins just remembers the south. Not south as in Georgia or Mississippi, but south as in sections of Latin America, Africa and Asia. There, Christianity is not only alive but thriving. ‘Christianity is not in free fall,’ said Jenkins, a professor of history and religious studies at Penn State. ‘It’s booming and growing very fast in absolute and relative numbers.’”

A Hard Look at Jenin (05/07/02)
By Richard Hart Sinnreich in The Washington Post
“But before Americans, assaulted by dramatic pictures of Jenin refugee camp’s rubble-strewn streets and shattered buildings, draw hasty conclusions about the Israeli Army’s recent operations, we had better face up to an uncomfortable reality: In an urbanizing world in which enemies actuated by ideological or religious fervor feel no obligation to conform to Western norms of military behavior, scenes such as those in Jenin are likely to increasingly become the rule in war rather than the exception.”

“Final Solution,” Phase 2 (George Will)
“In Britain the climate created by much of the intelligentsia, including the elite press, is so toxic that the Sun, a tabloid with more readers than any other British newspaper, recently was moved to offer a contrapuntal editorial headlined ‘The Jewish faith is not an evil religion.’ Contrary to what Europeans are encouraged to think. And Ron Rosenbaum, author of the brilliant book ‘Explaining Hitler,’ acidly notes the scandal of European leaders supporting the Palestinians’ ‘right of return’ — the right to inundate and eliminate the state created in response to European genocide — ‘when so many Europeans are still living in homes stolen from Jews they helped murder.’ It is time to face a sickening fact that is much more obvious today than it was 11 years ago, when Ruth R. Wisse asserted it. In a dark and brilliant essay in Commentary magazine, she argued that anti-Semitism has proved to be ‘the most durable and successful’ ideology of the ideology-besotted 20th century.”

Gore’s Grossing (Ken Adelman)
“When former Vice President Al Gore takes pen to paper — or computer to email — he seemingly can’t avoid engaging in hyperbole. Thus, it is no surprise the man who wrote that we live in ‘a dysfunctional civilization’ in Earth in the Balance would claim in a column to The New York Times April 21 that the administration that replaced his was in the pocket of special interests. But as the Danish mathematician, Bjorn Lomborg, pointed out in The Skeptical Environmentalist, to characterize as ‘dysfunctional’ a civilization that has produced ‘more leisure time, greater security, fewer accidents, more education, more amenities, higher incomes, fewer starving, more food and healthier and longer life,’ is ‘quite simply immoral.’”

Speaking Lies to Power: Ralph Nader fudges the truth just like a real politician. (Matt Welch)
“Eighteen hours earlier, I had watched the Nader 2000 crew engage in a far more flagrant manipulation of the truth, more egregious than anything else I witnessed during my two months covering the campaign for the lefty news site WorkingForChange.com. Even before the first preliminary exit poll data crossed the wires, young staffers, on the orders of campaign headquarters, were frantically devising multiple formulas to ‘prove’ that Nader didn’t cost Gore the election, no matter what the results might say later. ‘That’s shocking,’ I told one of the harried idealists charged with carrying out the deception. The faces around the computer, for what it’s worth, did not register any surprise. We’ve come to expect this kind of professional dishonesty from the two major political parties, which is one of the reasons many of us find them repellent. But coming from a ‘purity’ candidate who wants to lecture us on ‘how to tell the truth,’ it suggests a certain self-delusion. It’s one thing to display the schizophrenia inherent in trying to cobble together a coalition of disaffected lifelong Democrats and party-hating anti-globalization activists. It’s quite another to ‘speak truth to power’ by fudging it.”

Careers are “making women miserable” (London Telegraph)
“Women have become unhappier as a result of concentrating more on their careers than the family role they once fulfilled, an academic claims in a new book. Prof James Tooley believes the feminist revolution of the 1960s and 1970s brought about huge changes in attitudes which have not be conducive to motherhood. In his book, The Miseducation of Women, published next month, he suggests many professional woman would have been more contented by staying at home and bringing up children. He draws comparisons with the film character Bridget Jones, a love-hungry young woman in publishing who becomes a television presenter and craves a stable relationship rather than being left ‘a singleton’. Prof Tooley, professor of education policy at Newcastle University, considers that the role of housewife has been ‘desperately undervalued’ in society. He argues that schools should allow girls to concentrate on the arts and domestic science rather than being pushed towards subjects such as engineering and computer science in an attempt at sexual equality.”

It’s the End of the Modern Age (John Lukacs)
“For a long time, I have been convinced that we in the West are living near the end of an entire age, the age that began about 500 years ago. I knew, at a very early age, that ‘the West’ was better than ‘the East’ — especially better than Russia and Communism. I had read Spengler: But I believed that the Anglo-American victory over the Third Reich (and over Japan) was, at least in some ways, a refutation of the categorical German proposition of the inevitable and imminent Decline of the West. However — Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s victory had to be shared with Stalin. The result, after 1945, was my early decision to flee from a not yet wholly Sovietized Hungary to the United States, at the age of 22. And 20-odd years later, at the age of 45, I was convinced that the entire Modern Age was crumbling fast. But there is a duality in every human life, in every human character. I am neither a cynic nor a categorical pessimist. Twelve years ago, I wrote: ‘Because of the goodness of God I have had a happy unhappy life, which is preferable to an unhappy happy one.’ I wrote, too: ‘So living during the decline of the West — and being much aware of it — is not at all that hopeless and terrible.’ But during these past 10 years (not fin de siècle: fin d’une ère), my conviction hardened further, into an unquestioning belief not only that the entire age, and the civilization to which I have belonged, are passing but that we are living through — if not already beyond — its very end. I am writing about the so-called Modern Age.”

Gun Control Misfires in Europe (John Lott)
“Sixteen people were killed during Friday’s school shooting in Germany. This follows the killing of 14 regional legislators in Zug, a Swiss canton, last September, and the massacre of eight city council members in a Paris suburb last month. The three worst public shootings in the Western world during the past year all occurred in Europe, whose gun laws are exactly what gun-control advocates want the U.S. to adopt. Indeed, all three occurred in gun-free ‘safe zones.’ Germans who wish to get hold of a hunting rifle must undergo checks that can last a year, while those wanting a gun for sport must be a member of a club and obtain a license from the police. The French must apply for gun permits, which are granted only after an exhaustive background and medical record check and demonstrated need, with permits only valid for three years. Even Switzerland’s once famously liberal laws have become tighter. Swiss federal law now limits gun permits to only those who can demonstrate in advance a need for a weapon to protect themselves or others against a precisely specified danger. The problem with such laws is that they take away guns from law-abiding citizens, while would-be criminals ignore them, leaving potential victims defenseless. The U.S. has shown that making guns more available is actually a better formula for law and order.”

The end of poverty? (Christian Science Monitor)
“John Edmunds has seen the future – and it’s wealthy. This will be news to many – certainly to all those antiglobalization protesters who now force the world’s economic leaders into retreat behind concrete wherever they gather. And many people are used to thinking of the developing world only in terms of dire, and worsening, poverty. But Dr. Edmunds, a professor at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., is adamant. ‘The economic problem is now solved,’ he says. ‘For thousands of years, mankind struggled to achieve freedom from poverty. The solution is now here and is rapidly transforming everyone’s economic possibilities everywhere.’ It may be true that global wealth creation continues apace. But some warn that the rich are getting richer, and the poor poorer, at rates that surprise even pessimists. A recent World Bank study, for instance, found the gap between rich and poor ‘absolutely huge and far higher than conventional measures indicate.’ Yet statistics also show millions escaping poverty.... And someone out there is buying all those cellphones and TVs and computers being sold in the developing world.”

Great Basin Mammals (co2science.org)
“The results of this study and those of several others (Grayson, 2000; Grayson and Madson, 2000; Fleishman et al., 2001) stand in stark contrast to the doom-and-gloom predictions of climate alarmists, who incessantly claim that global warming will lead to a mass extinction of species nearly everywhere on earth because, as they say, plants and animals will not be able to migrate fast enough to keep up with the climatic zones to which they are currently most accustomed, or alternatively, they will literally ‘run out of places to run’ when the migration is upward as opposed to poleward. As simple-sounding as that fearsome hypothesis is, more complex studies, such as the one reviewed here, indicate it is simply wrong, because plants and animals are simply not the simpletons climate alarmists make them out to be, as they possess a wide array of strategies for coping with environmental change and recolonizing former territories after having once been forced out of them.”

Water Level History of the U.S. Great Lakes (co2science.org)
“Climate alarmists worry — or claim they worry — that greenhouse-induced warming will dramatically lower the water levels of the Great Lakes. However, over what they claim to be the century that has exhibited the greatest warming of the entire past millennium, there has been no net change in the water level of any of the Great Lakes. In addition, over the past two decades of what they typically refer to as unprecedented warming, the four lakes have exhibited their greatest stability and highest water levels of the past century. These observations fly in the face of all the climate alarmists’ horror stories, suggesting that either the consequences they predict to follow on the heels of global warming are wrong or their global temperature history of the past millennium is wrong... or both are wrong. Based on their poor track record in representing reality, we lean towards the latter alternative.”

Study: Science Literacy Poor in US (Yahoo! News)
“Few Americans understand the scientific process and many believe in mysterious psychic powers and may be quick to accept phony science reports, according to a national survey. The survey, part of the National Science Foundation (news - web sites)’s biennial report on the state of science understanding, research, education and investment, found that the belief in ‘pseudoscience’ is common in America. The study found that science literacy has improved only slightly since the previous survey and that 70 percent of American adults do not understand the scientific process. America continues to lead the world, the study found, in scientific investment, in research and development and in technology advances. But it found weakness in some levels of scientific education and noted that the U.S. continues to depend heavily on foreign-born scientists and now faces increased competition from steadily improving scientific enterprises abroad. In the survey of American attitudes toward science, the study found that doctors and scientists were the most respected of the professions, but it also found that ‘belief in pseudoscience is relatively widespread and growing.’”

Limits (Peter Beinart)
“At first glance, the dynamics of the Church pedophilia cover-up feel familiar: Mid-level officials abused their authority; their superiors, fearing embarrassment, protected them, immeasurably compounding the offense; those superiors responded to initial press reports by stonewalling and denigrating the accusers; but then, when the revelations grew overwhelming, they belatedly opted for full disclosure and public apologies. Presented with this apparently familiar script, the commentariat has settled into its familiar role. As with Enron, Gary Condit, and Monica Lewinsky, it has focused on two main questions: ‘Who should take the blame?’ and ‘What lesson is to be drawn?’ The problem in the Church pedophilia scandal is that the opinion industry can’t answer either of those questions because, in a deep sense, they are none of its business. The Boston Globe and The Boston Herald have called on Bernard Cardinal Law to resign. But you can’t declare someone unfit for their post without having an opinion about the requirements of the post. And you can’t have an opinion about the requirements of the post without having an opinion about the mission of the institution as a whole. Newspapers can call on a politician to resign because they have legitimate opinions about the purpose of the government in which he or she serves. They can demand that a cardinal who shields pedophile priests go to jail because they have legitimate opinions about criminal justice. But they can’t legitimately call on a cardinal to resign because they can’t have a legitimate opinion about the purpose of the Catholic Church. You can’t weigh Law’s cover-up of pedophilia against his work serving the poor, or opposing abortion, or bestowing the sacraments, or espousing the gospel, without making a judgment about the relative value of those endeavors, and that judgment is inescapably theological. It is a judgment about the best way to incarnate the revelation of Jesus Christ — and that’s not a judgment for The Boston Globe.”

Scientists Cautious on Report of Cancer From Starchy Foods (NYT)
“Many experts say that a rising furor over a new report that many starchy foods, including breads, cereals and French fries, are laced with a chemical that could cause cancer is overblown. The chemical is acrylamide, which, Swedish scientists reported last week, is produced when certain carbohydrates are baked or fried at high temperatures. The scientists have not published a paper on their small study. Instead, they made their announcement at a news conference last week. Shortly afterward, the World Health Organization announced it would ‘organize an expert consultation as soon as possible to determine the full extent of the public health risk from acrylamide in food.’ But many experts said yesterday that it made no sense to be alarmed over unpublished data on a chemical that was very unlikely to have a measurable impact on cancer rates. ‘It’s just dumb, dumb, dumb,’ Dr. Stephen Safe, a professor of toxicology at Texas A&M University. ‘There are carcinogens in everything you eat. Maybe they’ll just ban food.’ Others agreed.”

Tales of the Tyrant (Mark Bowden)
“Fresh food is flown in for him twice a week — lobster, shrimp, and fish, lots of lean meat, plenty of dairy products. The shipments are sent first to his nuclear scientists, who x-ray them and test them for radiation and poison. The food is then prepared for him by European-trained chefs, who work under the supervision of al Himaya, Saddam’s personal bodyguards. Each of his more than twenty palaces is fully staffed, and three meals a day are cooked for him at every one; security demands that palaces from which he is absent perform an elaborate pantomime each day, as if he were in residence. Saddam tries to regulate his diet, allotting servings and portions the way he counts out the laps in his pools. For a big man he usually eats little, picking at his meals, often leaving half the food on his plate. Sometimes he eats dinner at restaurants in Baghdad, and when he does, his security staff invades the kitchen, demanding that the pots and pans, dishware, and utensils be well scrubbed, but otherwise interfering little. Saddam appreciates the culinary arts. He prefers fish to meat, and eats a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables. He likes wine with his meals, though he is hardly an oenophile; his wine of choice is Mateus rosé. But even though he indulges only in moderation, he is careful not to let anyone outside his most trusted circle of family and aides see him drinking. Alcohol is forbidden by Islam, and in public Saddam is a dutiful son of the faith.”

The Hidden Victims (Thomas Friedman)
“Progressive Arab states, like Jordan, Morocco and Bahrain, which want to build their legitimacy not on how they confront Israel but on how well they prepare their people for the future, are being impeded. And retrograde Arab regimes, like Syria, Saudi Arabia or Iraq, can now feed their people more excuses why not to reform. The Palestinians have been experts at seducing the Arab world into postponing its future until all the emotive issues of Palestine are resolved. Three generations of Arabs have already paid dearly for only being allowed to ask one question: Who rules Palestine? — not, How are we educating our young or what kind of democracy or economy should we have? It would be a tragedy if a fourth generation suffered the same fate.”

A Field of Nightmares (Jessica Gavora)
“Feminists call the struggle for proportionality under Title IX the pursuit of “gender equity.” The Women’s Sports Foundation (WSF) is perhaps the strongest advocate of Title IX and “gender equity” in sports, having as its mission to “increase and enhance sports and fitness opportunities for all girls and women.” Founded by tennis player Billie Jean King in 1974 in the after-glow of her victory over Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes,” the WSF is the most powerful advocacy group for female athletes in the country. Like most women’s groups, it has benefited from friendly press coverage.... But behind the appealing image of strong female athleticism that is the group’s public face, the Women’s Sports Foundation pursues a relentlessly political agenda: to turn the grant of opportunity for women guaranteed under Title IX into a grant of preference. Under the leadership of its street-fighting executive director, Donna Lopiano, a former All-American softball player and the former women’s athletic director at the University of Texas, the WSF has done more than any other group to convince colleges and universities that compliance with Title IX means manipulating the numbers of male and female athletes.”

Cardinal Coverup (New Times LA)
“On the day after child-molesting Boston priest John Geoghan was sentenced to prison in late February, marking an incremental low in the sex scandal afflicting the Roman Catholic Church, Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony launched a remarkable public-relations campaign. It began subtly, with a pastoral letter published in The Tidings, the archdiocese’s official newspaper. The 65-year-old cardinal pledged to do ‘all that is humanly possible’ to prevent sexual abuse in the L.A. Archdiocese, the nation’s largest. He set forth a zero tolerance policy for priests who abuse children.... A few days later — even as he abruptly dismissed a few sex-abusing priests who had enjoyed his favor for years despite his knowledge that they were molesters, and then stonewalled law enforcement about who they were — Mahony quickly sought to establish himself as a leading voice in dealing with the widening scandal. He ordered that a brochure on the problem of sex abuse be distributed to all parishes and schools within the sprawling L.A. Archdiocese, encompassing Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. And he unveiled a new sexual-abuse hotline ostensibly aimed at enabling abuse victims to blow the whistle on errant priests. The cardinal’s press spokesman described these efforts in glowing terms. In view of the Boston scandal, Tod Tamberg, his spokesman, said the cardinal thought the time had come to let the faithful know ‘that we have comprehensive policies on sex abuse, that we follow them carefully and review them regularly.’ The implicit message: Other Catholic hierarchs might appear flat-footed in the face of the worst scandal to rock the church in centuries, but Los Angeles’ Mahony was a leader who was actually doing something. Yet in his pell-mell rush to be seen as the cardinal with a plan, all the while playing a gullible local mainstream press like a harp in diverting attention from his own dismal record of protecting pedo-priests, Mahony’s actions amounted to little more than a public-relations snow job. His image as a reformer took another beating this week with the disclosure that his protecting of accused pedophiles has extended even to the new Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral residential suites, with abuse claims against Father Carl Sutphin, who until recently was associate pastor there.... In fact, most of his publicly announced ideas for dealing with the sex-abuse crisis, including those he unveiled amid much fanfare before jetting off to Rome along with other American cardinals to meet with the pope this month, weren’t Mahony’s at all. They had been forced on him, kicking and screaming, as it were, last August as conditions for settling a potentially explosive sex-abuse case involving the former principal of a prominent Catholic high school in Orange County, Monsignor Michael Harris. Barely a month before he would have been forced to testify at the Harris trial, Mahony authorized the Los Angeles Archdiocese to pay victim Ryan DiMaria $5.2 million — the largest such settlement ever for a single victim in a Catholic sex-abuse case.”

Bishops, media views of “zero tolerance” create gap in perceptions (CNS)
“U.S. church leaders left a Vatican summit on clerical sex abuse saying they felt encouraged to take new steps to curb such abuse and rein in offenders. But they arrived home in the United States to a largely negative reaction and headlines that read: ‘Cardinals Confront Sex Abuse and Come Up Short,’ and ‘Vatican Summit Confounds, Angers.’ What happened? Why such a gulf between perceptions? One big reason was confusion over the term ‘zero tolerance,’ especially in light of a final communique by summit participants. Going into the meeting, ‘zero tolerance’ was a phrase used by bishops and dioceses to describe the policy of removing from positions of ministry any priest who has abused minors or who is facing a credible accusation. In effect, the priest remains a priest, but he is out of a church job. The summit communique introduced a new, even stronger potential punishment that may be designed for priest-offenders: a quick procedure of forced laicization. That means an abusive priest would not only be out of a job, he would no longer be a priest. Unfortunately, many in the media never understood the distinction.”

What We’re Fighting For: We hold these truths to be self-evident. Let’s start acting like it. (Brendan Miniter)
“Now it’s time for Western culture to stand up again. Worries about imperialism, especially cultural imperialism, should be cast off. Global free trade isn’t imperialistic; it’s the spread of a natural right, economic freedom. Demanding that a country respect its people’s basic rights isn’t imperialistic, and neither is standing for an unfettered media. No one wants to bring back colonial empires. All cannot remain quiet on the Western front. The West, not just America, is locked in a struggle with forces that question its foundation. Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and many others reject the fundamental ideals of Western culture: individual sovereignty, freedom of conscience, free interaction among men and the right to the fruits of one’s own labor. They reject the Western intellectual framework that has permitted scientific, political and economic freedom and given the world the fruits of unparalleled creativity. These thugs hate Western success and religious plurality. Like Lenin buying rope from capitalists, the only Western product they seem to like is weaponry. The media’s historical ignorance helps undermine Western confidence. Rarely do we see reports explaining how the West benefited from Judeo-Christian thought. We are told America’s Founding Founders were deists if not atheists. Yet studying the period you’ll find countless references to God and prayers of asking God’s guidance. John Adams once said the intellectual framework for rebellion was laid in the churches years before it became a political struggle. That makes sense, for America is founded on the idea that man is endowed by his Creator with the right to be free.”

Blind Spot (Randall Kennedy)
“The key argument in favor of racial profiling, essentially, is that taking race into account enables the authorities to screen carefully and at less expense those sectors of the population that are more likely than others to contain the criminals for whom officials are searching.... Some commentators embrace this position as if it were unassailable, but under U.S. law racial discrimination backed by state power is presumptively illicit. This means that supporters of racial profiling carry a heavy burden of persuasion.... Stressing that racial profiling generates clear harm (for example, the fear, resentment, and alienation felt by innocent people in the profiled group), opponents of racial profiling sensibly question whether compromising our hard-earned principle of anti-discrimination is worth merely speculative gains in overall security. A notable feature of this conflict is that champions of each position frequently embrace rhetoric, attitudes, and value systems that are completely at odds with those they adopt when confronting another controversial instance of racial discrimination — namely, affirmative action. Vocal supporters of racial profiling who trumpet the urgency of communal needs when discussing law enforcement all of a sudden become fanatical individualists when condemning affirmative action in college admissions and the labor market. Supporters of profiling, who are willing to impose what amounts to a racial tax on profiled groups, denounce as betrayals of ‘color blindness’ programs that require racial diversity. A similar turnabout can be seen on the part of many of those who support affirmative action. Impatient with talk of communal needs in assessing racial profiling, they very often have no difficulty with subordinating the interests of individual white candidates to the purported good of the whole. Opposed to race consciousness in policing, they demand race consciousness in deciding whom to admit to college or select for a job.”

A War of Resolve: American kowtowing to “moderate” Arabs may embolden bin Laden. (Bernard Lewis)
“It was the shock of America’s rapid and sharp reaction that made bin Laden blink. After the U.S.’s initial response, he halted his campaign and adopted a more cautious attitude. But some recent American actions and utterances may bring a reconsideration of this judgement and the halt to which it gave rise. Our anxious pleading with the fragile and frightened regimes of the region to join — or at least to tolerate — a campaign against terrorism and its sponsors has put the U.S. in a corner where it seems to be asking permission for actions that are its own prerogative to take. Likewise, the exemptions accorded to some terrorist leaders, movements and actions not immediately directed against us have undermined the strong moral position which must be the foundation of our global war on terrorism. The submission to being scolded and slighted, as Secretary of State Colin Powell did in his recent meeting with the king of Morocco, and his failure to meet with the president of Egypt, make the U.S. seem it is reverting to bad habits. That only further contributes to a perceived posture of irresolution and uncertainty on the part of the U.S. administration.”

Radical Islam gains adherents abroad (Stephen Handelman)
“But even where it succeeded in gaining a political foothold, radical Islam exposed itself as incoherent and unsatisfying to those whom it most needed to attract. Islamists’ ‘incendiary rhetoric and uncompromising approach to statecraft alienated the very middle classes that earlier sympathized with their critique of corrupt elites,’ wrote Ray Takeyh of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. So what does their failure have to do with Europe and the West? The answer is chillingly simple: Unable to win political traction at home, radical Islam has found its most passionate new adherents in Muslim communities abroad. At least 12 million Muslims — perhaps as many as 22 million — live in Europe today. The targets of economic discrimination and prejudice themselves, many can be easily swayed to violence in the pursuit of a political agenda set elsewhere. That governments in the Muslim world are aware of this is indisputable. Also indisputable is the fact that the money and logistics support channelled to these overseas groups by some of those governments deflects the still-genuine threat posed by Islamic alternatives at home.”

Intellectuals are failing the West (Paul Mulshine)
“With a few prominent exceptions, such as Johns Hopkins University professor Fouad Ajami, intellectuals have been reluctant to criticize the Muslim world’s tilt toward totalitarianism. And that Muslim world will continue to be a threat to the West as long as so many fanatics cling to the illusion that a government is justified in ignoring basic rights as long as it claims to be religiously inspired. ‘Even the massacre of 3,000 innocent people has not alerted people to what’s going on,’ Warraq said of the events of Sept. 11. ‘I noticed in England, where I have some liberal friends, that many of the intellectuals took it that this was all because of American foreign policy. It’s really, really dangerous to go along that line of thought.’ The problem is much deeper than that, according to Warraq. The leaders of the Islamist movement see themselves as on the verge of another great expansion like the one that occurred in the Middle Ages. And the mushiness of the multiculturalists fuels their ambitions.... The multiculturalists maintain that different cultures can have different values, even if those values infringe upon the basic rights of the individual. The opposite view, best stated by Thomas Jefferson back when it was European kings who were claiming to rule in the name of God, is that rights are unalienable. Any government that tramples on them is illegitimate. Warraq says Western intellectuals should insist that Muslim governments observe individual rights.”

Excusing child abuse (Matt Kaufman)
“There are some things whose evil should be so obvious that no debate is necessary. We wouldn’t be a better society if we sat down for calm, dispassionate discussions of the merits of, say, rape. (‘Sure,’ one side would argue, ‘women say “no means no,” but some of them don’t really mean it.’) The same is true of sex with children. That’s why it’s important that we not only reject pedophilia, but reject it vehemently, with undisguised disgust. We modern folk hesitate to display that sort of disgust, for fear we’ll be considered ‘judgmental.’ But we’d better recognize something: If the pro-pedophilia crowd can simply get recognized as a legitimate side in a debate — sharing podiums with opponents, haggling over the fine points of scientific studies, gradually accustoming people to the idea that some types of pedophilia aren’t really so bad — then they’re well on their way to achieving their goal. As Newshouse News Service writer Mark O’Keefe summarizes their view, ‘it may be only a matter of time before modern society accepts adult-child sex, just as it has learned to accept premarital sex and homosexual sex.’ That’s a sobering comparison for anyone who complacently assumes society will never reach the point of tolerating pedophilia. It’s also an important reminder of where the roots of the threat really lie.”

Gunmen stole gold, crucifixes, escaped monks report (Jerusalem Post)
“Three Armenian monks, who had been held hostage by the Palestinian gunmen inside the Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, managed to flee the church area via a side gate yesterday morning. They immediately thanked the soldiers for rescuing them. They told army officers the gunmen had stolen gold and other property, including crucifixes and prayer books, and had caused damage. The three elderly monks were assisted by soldiers. One of them held a white cloth banner with the words ‘Please help.’ One of the monks, Narkiss Korasian, later told reporters: ‘They stole everything, they opened the doors one by one and stole everything... they stole our prayer books and four crosses... they didn’t leave anything. Thank you for your help, we will never forget it.’”

In Dealing With Abusive Priests, Bishops Stood Along Wide Spectrum (NYT)
“While some American bishops transferred predator priests from parish to parish, the leader of one diocese, Bishop Donald W. Wuerl of Pittsburgh, battled for seven years to remove a sexually abusive priest from the ministry. Bishop Wuerl suspended the priest, the Rev. Anthony Cipolla, in 1988 after a former altar boy sued him for damages and at least one other victim stepped forward. And when Father Cipolla persuaded the Vatican’s highest tribunal to reinstate him, Bishop Wuerl traveled to Rome with suitcases full of papers to document the priest’s sex crimes. The Vatican reversed course in 1995, upholding the bishop’s sanctions and vindicating what he describes as his effort to protect the safety of his flock. ‘You have to assure your people that their needs are first,’ he said in an interview last week. Bishop Wuerl stands on one end of a broad spectrum of how Catholic leaders have responded to the sexual abuse crisis in the church. While he and some other bishops in the nation’s 194 dioceses have sought in various ways to prevent abuse and to hold pedophiles accountable, others have seemed more concerned with protecting the church’s name and its bank accounts, church leaders and religious scholars said in interviews.... In an interview on Thursday at his downtown Pittsburgh chancery, Bishop Wuerl said that shortly after assuming leadership of the diocese in 1988, he paid a visit to the shattered family of two brothers who had been abused by priests. The meeting had a profound effect on him, he said. ‘You cannot visit with someone who has been abused without coming away with deepened resolve that this should never happen again,’ he said. That same year, he removed Father Cipolla as a chaplain at a Catholic home for handicapped children, after Timothy A. Bendig, a Pittsburgh paramedic, accused the priest of having repeatedly abused him when he was an altar boy earlier in the 1980’s. Mr. Bendig, the second Pittsburgh Catholic to step forward with accusations against Father Cipolla, sued the Diocese of Pittsburgh for damages, eventually obtaining a settlement. Father Cipolla appealed his removal all the way to the Vatican’s highest court, the Signatura, which in 1993 ordered that he be reinstated, on the ground that Bishop Wuerl had violated his rights under canon law. But in 1995, after the bishop went to Rome to offer details of the priest’s behavior, the court reversed itself. ‘Bishop Wuerl took a brave stand in my case,’ Mr. Bendig said in an interview. ‘He just insisted, “This man should not be a priest.”’”

Well, oil be ... it’s our new pal, Russia (Bill Virgin)
“So we have finally soured on our friends of convenience, the Saudis. This is hardly surprising. After all, if you expect us to keep your country from being annexed by Saddam as the 19th or 20th province of Iraq but you treat our troops like your subjects, all the while secretly encouraging attacks on us and our allies, even we Americans eventually catch on. But this is all right, because we believe we have found a new best friend — the Russians. An affiliation with the Russians has several attractions. It provides an answer and an alternative to the reason we’ve put up with the Saudis this long — oil. Having Russia as a major supplier would allow us to tell the Saudis to literally and figuratively go pound sand. And being business and political partners with Russia puts on our side a nation that, while smaller than in the Soviet Union era, is still a significant force (‘we just know we’ve got those nukes around here somewhere’).”

Jewish Chiefs: Anti-Semitism Grows (Yahoo! News)
“World Jewish leaders warned Tuesday that the level of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe is the worst since World War II. The executive committee of the World Jewish Congress demanded better protection by authorities. Secretary-general Avi Beker said 360 anti-Semitic incidents in France over the past two weeks heralded worse to come for Jewish communities in Europe. ‘There is today an anxiety on the part of Jews when they go to the religious centers, they go to their social centers, when they send their children to school,’ Beker said on the last day of a two-day emergency meeting of the umbrella group that represents Jewish groups from about 80 countries. ‘This is quite shameful for Europe.’ Synagogues, Jewish schools and cemeteries have been targeted in attacks in several European nations in recent weeks, coinciding with Israel’s major offensive in Palestinian cities in the West Bank. Suspects in many of the attacks are Arab youths of North African origin.”

U.S. to help U.N. redefine “families” (WT)
“The Bush administration has joined European delegates to an upcoming U.N. summit on children in moving to recognize families ‘in various forms,’ including unmarried cohabiting couples and homosexual partners. A coalition of Catholic and Muslim countries has formed to block the change to the traditional U.N. definition of the family — married heterosexual parents and children — at the General Assembly’s Special Session on Children from May 8 to May 10. A senior official at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York said the U.S. Mission and the State Department are backing the delegates from Switzerland and the European Union in their efforts because so many children today are brought up by single parents. Informal negotiations resume today in New York on a final document for the summit. The U.S. official spoke anonymously, saying he did not want to be ‘hung out to dry’ for explaining the administration’s position. He said the United States supports the proposal to recognize families ‘in various forms’ because ‘obviously we feel this more reflects the families of today, which are headed by single parents and extended families.’ Customarily, U.N. members are obliged to conform their national laws to the body’s declarations, and critics have said that the European-backed changes would make such proposals as homosexual ‘marriage’ and domestic-partner benefits an internationally recognized right.”

PAT Answers: It’s time to stop taking the likes of Paul Ehrlich seriously. (Pete Du Pont)
“So how did the leading environmentalists get it so wrong in the 1970s? Perhaps the most important reason was a profound misunderstanding of the way the world works. The root of the misconception was Paul Ehrlich and John Holden’s famous equation: I = PAT. The negative Impact of humans on the environment, they said, is the product of Population times Affluence times Technology. A bigger population was a bad thing because people consume resources and need houses and roads and so forth. More affluence was bad too as it allowed greater capita consumption of resources, and that must be multiplied by the negative impact of the technology necessary to produce the resources consumed.... What was missing in this view was the greatest resource of all — the human mind and its ability to develop efficient technologies that would improve the quality of life. Missing was the understanding that more electricity for more operating rooms to do more heart surgery was a good thing. More fertilizer meant less acreage had to be tilled, thus saving — and actually expanding — the forests. More production of goods meant more jobs, more opportunity and more national income to devote to environmental improvement. In short, I = PAT posited not even a zero-sum society (your gain is my loss), but a negative-sum society (your gain is always the world’s loss). It was a cost-benefit analysis in which there was only cost, never benefit. And it was dead wrong.”

Religious Freedom in Jeopardy? (Susanna Cornett)
“The protection religious groups have now is because of our Constitution — the protection of religious freedom — and because it is generally felt even among non-believers that religion on the whole benefits society, if for no other reason than that it is an expression of our freedom of speech and pursuit of happiness. What if, as society changes, the religious practices become more and more out of step with it? I think the response to what we see in Afghanistan is illustrative. When the media speak about the oppression of women in Afghanistan, using burkas as a symbol of it, they don’t separate belief from practice. The problem, as I see it, is not that women wear burkas, but that the ones who don’t believe it necessary are forced to do so. Our society, however, can’t quite conceive of women choosing to live within the restrictions imposed by some of the stricter Muslim teachings, so we assume that any woman who is living that way is doing so through force or ignorance. Perhaps that is true in some cases, but not all. And if we insist that their religious freedoms must stay within certain boundaries, then how can we preserve the full range of our own? I’m not advocating, in the Muslim instance, that all manifestations of Islam should be allowed. Murder of the innocent is always wrong, and we have a responsibility to stop it. And I’m also not saying that the teachings of Islam are correct; I don’t believe that’s true. But how we as a society respond to their religious choices, and how those of us who are religious respond to evil when we find it in our midst, will shape the tomorrow for religious freedom in the United States. Losing tax-exempt status wouldn’t end religious freedom in this country, but it would move us further down that road, and it’s not a road with easy return. Just as our right to privacy is in jeopardy from laws passed ostensibly to give us greater homeland security, so our religious freedoms could suffer from laws passed to prevent ecclesiastical abuse. I think we stand at a crossroad; how we call the Catholic Church hierarchy to account for lies, abuse and years of protecting self at the cost of the innocence of dozens of young men and women will help determine on which path we set our feet.”

The Hard Way: It’s easier to fight than to pray. So let’s pray. (Peggy Noonan)
“So what are we to do? I was daydreaming about all this as I walked in my neighborhood on Pierrepont Street yesterday, and I found myself staring at a message someone had drawn onto newly poured concrete: ‘Smile. Today is what you have.’ It struck me, naturally, as sentimental street art. And then I thought no, it’s both spiritual — ‘This is the day the Lord made / let us rejoice and be glad in it,’ wrote the