Keillor’s tantrum shows disdain for Minnesotans (11/27/02)
By Gary Larson in The Star Tribune
“Keillor’s histrionics show a disdain for Minnesotans. He is ‘a stranger with memories of people I knew there.’ Estrangement is complete. Most backwoods lake and prairie folk like us in rural Minnesota — idiots all? — voted for the Republican he despises. To this apostasy a smug Keillor shrugs: ‘To my own shame, I knew them. I’m ashamed of Minnesota for electing this cheap fraud.’ Thus he crowns his new hate object; ‘Hollow Man’ succeeds ‘The Body’ as prime target for his egotistical wrath. Sore losers are exposed in stressful situations. Crybabies lash out, poisoning the landscape. (This affliction strikes both left and right.) Keillor asserts GOPers are ‘cheap, cynical and unpatriotic,’ and ‘Republicans first, and Americans second.’”

A Letter From the Boss Contradicts Fox’s Creed (11/19/02)
By Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times
“The revelation that Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, the self-proclaimed fair and balanced news channel, secretly gave advice to the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks was less shocking than it was liberating — a little like the moment in 1985 when an ailing Rock Hudson finally explained that he had AIDS. Ever since Mr. Ailes changed jobs from Republican strategist to news executive, he has demanded to be treated as an unbiased journalist, not a conservative spokesman. But the cable channel he controls has an undisguised ideological agenda, which has made his protestations a bit puzzling.”

Attack on Fox News reeks of hypocrisy (11/24/02)
By Sterling Rome in The Boston Herald
“That the Times, the bastion of political correctness and diversity, would choose to print an analogy like this is proof of both its hypocrisy and its thinly veiled contempt. Never mind that the Times is comparing a political ideology to a deadly disease; it is doing so at the expense of a homosexual man who died a tragic death. Such an analogy by anyone else (most especially anyone from the right) would normally result in a flurry of op-eds and demands for termination from the Times.”

Empty victory for a hollow man: How Norm Coleman sold his soul for a Senate seat. (11/07/02)
By Garrison Keillor at Salon via TCPUNK
“It was a dreadful low moment for the Minnesota voters. To choose Coleman over Walter Mondale is one of those dumb low-rent mistakes, like going to a great steakhouse and ordering the tuna sandwich. But I don’t envy someone who’s sold his soul. He’s condemned to a life of small arrangements. There will be no passion, no joy, no heroism, for him. He is a hollow man. The next six years are not going to be kind to Norm.”

Minnesota’s shame: Republicans don’t like my criticism? Too bad.... (11/13/02)
By Garrison Keillor at Salon via Twin Cities Independent Media Center
“The hoots and cackles of Republicans reacting to my screed against Norman Coleman, the ex-radical, former Democratic, now compassionate conservative senator-elect from Minnesota, was all to be expected, given the state of the Republican Party today. Its entire ideology, top to bottom, is We-are-not-Democrats, We-are-the-unClinton, and if it can elect an empty suit like Coleman, on a campaign as cheap and cynical and unpatriotic as what he waged right up to the moment Paul Wellstone’s plane hit the ground, then Republicans are perfectly content. They are Republicans first and Americans second.”

Woebegone in Minnesota? (11/12/02)
By Bruce C. Sanborn at The Claremont Institute
“Garrison Keillor grew up in small-town Minnesota. In the column he wrote for Salon (the one in which he shot those insults at Coleman and Minnesotans) Keillor engaged in a small-town practice he professes to hate. Keillor treated gossip as political commentary: ‘St. Paul is a small town and anybody who hangs around the St. Paul Grill knows about Norm’s habits. Everyone knows that his family situation is, shall we say, very interesting, but nobody bothered to ask about it, least of all the religious people in the Republican Party. They made their peace with hypocrisy long ago.’ In more than one way, Keillor’s gossip is hypocritical, and his behavior may well bother Minnesotans and fair-minded Democrats. Keillor also asserted Coleman won his Senate seat ‘because he was well-financed and well-packaged.’ To be sure, in his debate with Mondale, Coleman had President Bush’s arguments down pat. Against the backdrop of the Democrats’ jumbotron political frenzy at the memorial rally for Paul Wellstone, Coleman delivered those arguments impressively and respectfully, as Mondale presented the Democrats’ forcefully and a bit patronizingly.”

Sing Goddess of the Wrath of Garrison: The Limits of Leftist Humor Get Narrow (11/21/02)
By Bruce C. Sanborn at The Claremont Institute
“Certainly, it’s possible Keillor wants to rally liberal Democrats after virtually nothing came up roses for them on election day. Keillor calculated that irony and humor would not rouse their passions the way a hot-blooded jeremiad would. He’d slam and damn Coleman — and the Republicans, too, for backing him all the way. He’d say the Republicans got in a car named Unpatriotic, cynically left Main Street, drove right past Fiscal Responsibility Avenue, and then, foul to the core, drove over the hearts of all the people who cared about America and about the Americans who died on 9/11 — and to their eternal shame, Minnesotans rewarded the Republicans with the election; that’s what he’d say; that’s what he said.... That then may explain what Keillor was up to in writing ‘Minnesota’s shame,’ but of course if it does, what must Keillor think of his fellow Democrats — I mean if he calculated that with them he should play the demagogue?”

Was Paul Wellstone Murdered? (10/28/02)
By Michael I. Niman at AlterNet
“There is no indication today that Wellstone’s death was the result of foul play. What we do know, however, is that Wellstone emerged as the most visible obstacle standing in the way of a draconian political agenda by an unelected government. And now he is conveniently gone. For our government to maintain its credibility at this time, we need an open and accountable independent investigation involving international participation into the death of Paul Wellstone. Hopefully we will find out, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that this was indeed an untimely accident. For the sake of our country, we need to know this.”

Hey, Roeper! I was right (11/24/02)
By Mark Steyn in The Chicago Sun-Times
“Calling for an international inquiry into his [Wellstone’s] death, Niman does not directly accuse the president [Bush] but the only guys he seems to think would have any motive for offing Wellstone are those for whom the idealistic senator had ‘emerged as the most visible obstacle standing in the way of a draconian political agenda by an unelected government. And now he is conveniently gone.’ I don’t know why Niman is suddenly so sheepish. If he’s not implying that Wellstone was killed by forces linked to the ‘unelected government,’ perhaps he could enlighten us as to what precise point his column was making. Here’s the thing: Ted Rall, Barbra Streisand and Niman reckon there’s something fishy about the Wellstone crash for no other reason than that a left-wing man is dead and a right-wing government’s in power.”

Commentary on Election 2002 (11/08/02)
By Bill Moyers at PBS
“And for the first time in the memory of anyone alive, the entire federal government — the Congress, the Executive, the Judiciary — is united behind a right-wing agenda for which George W. Bush believes he now has a mandate. That mandate includes the power of the state to force pregnant women to give up control over their own lives. It includes using the taxing power to transfer wealth from working people to the rich. It includes giving corporations a free hand to eviscerate the environment and control the regulatory agencies meant to hold them accountable. And it includes secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine. Above all, it means judges with a political agenda appointed for life. If you liked the Supreme Court that put George W. Bush in the White House, you will swoon over what’s coming. And if you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture. These folks don’t even mind you referring to the GOP as the party of God. Why else would the new House Majority Leader say that the Almighty is using him to promote ’a Biblical worldview’ in American politics? So it is a heady time in Washington — a heady time for piety, profits, and military power, all joined at the hip by ideology and money.”

The Day After (11/06/02)
By Matthew Rothschild in The Progressive
“The landscape this November 6 is barren. The Democrats managed to lose the Senate, and now the Republicans will have their way. They will be able to clog the benches with rightwing judges, cement Bush’s retrograde tax cuts, and roll back environmental, labor, and a host of other protections.... If the Democrats are to give themselves a fighting chance to win, and if they are going to stand as the party of the people, they had better start appealing to the poor, people of color, and the majority of Americans who didn’t show up at the polls November 5. A huge majority of Americans want a raise in the minimum wage. A huge majority of Americans believe that corporations have too much power. A huge majority of Americans identify health care as one of their top concerns. A huge majority of Americans want the environment protected, and a decent, affordable education for their kids. The Democrats ought to be able to say: We’ll give you a big raise, we’ll give you free health care, we’ll give your kids a free college education, we’ll curb corporate power and take the money out of politics, and we’ll clean up the environment while we’re at it.”

A dark week for democracy (11/10/02)
By Will Hutton at Guardian Unlimited Observer
“Nor do the Conservatives’ ambitions stop there. Following the ideas of the high priest of ultra conservatism, Leo Strauss, they want to construct a republic of ‘moral’, god-fearing citizens who adhere to traditional virtues, rewarding the rich who can only have become rich through the virtue of hard work and penalising the poor who are only poor because of their own fecklessness. Above all, by now having the opportunity to pack the judiciary with extreme right-wing judges, they intend to do away with the famous Roe v Wade judgment that legalised abortion. This is the most fiercely reactionary programme to have emerged in any Western democracy since the war, and for which last Tuesday’s vote, argue Republicans, is an explicit mandate.... But the game isn’t up. America’s conservatives, blinded by their ideology and in control of every lever of government, will overreach themselves and the reality of what they plan will become evident to all, stirring the apathetic voter and reminding the best of America what it stands for. Last week represented the highwater mark of American conservatism and, although it looks bleak, the beginnings of the long-awaited liberal revival. Not just the United States, but the world, needs it badly. In the meantime, despite its flaws, give thanks to the European Union for partial shelter from the conservative storm.”

Oh Boy — More Fear And Gluttony: Darkness falls across the land, flowers wilt, the GOP takes full, and frightening, control (11/08/02)
By Mark Morford at The San Francisco Gate
“Feel that numbness? That strange slightly chilling shift deep in the heart, like a cold wind across the blood, an ice pick straight to the third eye, fingernails across the karmic chalkboard? Fear not — it’s just the dark storm clouds of sadness and savage spiritual pain that just settled in over the collective soul of the country and indeed much of the world recently, as the Republican Party snatched total control of the American government and really honestly promised to further its agenda of fear and war and intolerance and bad sex and more petroleum products forevermore.... Let us not also forget anti-choice misogyny, racism, gluttony, support for Big Agribiz and Big Tobacco and a general antipathy toward anyone who makes less than six figures or who really cares about the environment or enjoys true religious freedom or alternative viewpoints or authentic orgasms or honest laughter.”

Jackson sees rights eroding under GOP (11/14/02)
In The Washington Times by Steve Miller
“American blacks face the end of civil rights under the new Republican-controlled Congress, and need to force the Democratic Party further to the left as a remedy, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and other liberal black leaders said yesterday at a voter-participation forum. Last week’s results ‘positions us to see the end of the second Reconstruction,’ said Mr. Jackson in a conference at the National Press Club. ‘Next year, the right wing is going to control the White House, the House, the Senate and the courts virtually every civil rights remedy will be made illegal next year,’ the two-time former Democratic presidential hopeful predicted.”

Dictatorship begins (11/08/02)
Letter to the Editor by Russell Rimovsky in The Lincoln Journal Star
“The dictatorship begins as the diabolical Republican party rises to power. We will see senior citizens shivering, begging for food, and dying a tortuous death after George W. Bush shoves them into the streets. Hospitals and care facilities will suffer neglect as the attention to health care is diverted by the worship of war. Calamity inevitably abounds. Terrorists will unleash horror as we’ve never seen before, because the warmongering dictator, George W. Bush, will now have his way, and the terrorists are really going to get mad at us now. Pollution will proliferate and thousands will perish by poisoning through our food, water and air. The delicate environment will deteriorate before our very eyes. Children, especially black children, will starve in our schools. Schools? What am I saying? There won’t be any schools.”

Absurd liberals (11/15/02)
Letter to the Editor by Russell Rimovsky in The Lincoln Journal Star
“I received a vast amount of feedback regarding my Nov. 8 letter, ‘Dictatorship begins.’ With that letter, I made foes of my friends, and friends of my foes, which was a risk I was willing to take in the pursuit of displaying the absurdity of the Liberal Democrat agenda. The summation of the column was, now that the Republicans have arisen to the distinct power they will soon enjoy while leading the House, Senate and White House, the nation will plummet into violent oblivion. The intent of the letter was to reveal the absurdity of the liberal perspective, by energetically portraying it. In other words, the letter was unapologetically sarcastic.”

Left-Wing Hates America, Says Author (11/07/02)
By Michael L. Betsch at Cybercast News Service
“‘The left talks a great deal about diversity, but the diversity that exists on college campuses is a diversity where you have a faculty that looks like the United Nations, but thinks like a San Francisco coffee house,’ Flynn said. For example, he said the Left hates Christianity’s influence in American society because it is an ‘intolerant’ religion. ‘But if you look at America, people of all faiths can practice their religion here,’ Flynn said. ‘You’re not going to be able to practice your faith in a lot of places outside of western civilization.’”

Failures of Nerve (November 2002)
By Roger Kimball in The New Criterion
“Orwell noted that pacifism was ‘objectively pro-Nazi’ because it inculcated an attitude that aided England’s enemies. Just so, anti-Americanism is objectively pro-terrorist. It was not surprising that the Nazis did all they could to encourage pacifism among the English (just as the Soviets actively aided the anti-War movement in America in the 1960s and 1970s). Similarly, anti-Americanism helps to create a climate where terrorism is excused, rationalized, explained — explained away. We deserved it; we had it coming; arrogance; poverty; the environment; root causes.... Pacifism was built around phrases that sounded pleasant (peace, love, non-violence) but that were essentially deceptive because they were unrealistic — that is, untrue to the nature of reality, to the way the world actually works (as distinct from the way we might wish that it did). ‘To abjure violence,’ Orwell noted, ‘it is necessary to have no experience of it.’”

Retreats into fantasy (November 2002)
By David Pryce-Jones in The New Criterion
“In the superficial sense that they seized power and initiated regimes, the nationalist leaders of the 1950s and 1960s succeeded. In some countries, for example in Indonesia, Malaysia, and sub-Saharan Africa, they seemed to have restored the rightful sense of dignity to their people. In the Arab countries, however, independence has brought neither freedom nor dignity but one-man rule secured by a single party and the military and secret police apparatus. The archetypal Arab leader remains Gamal Abdul Nasser, the undisputed leader of Egypt from 1953 till his death in 1970. What he claimed to be building was Arab socialism. What in fact he built was a second-hand totalitarian state with neither human rights, nor respect for life and property. Other Arab countries, even those that were nominally monarchies, imitated the model or deferred to it, also relying on the military and secret police apparatus.”

Yearning to be liked (November 2002)
By John Derbyshire in The New Criterion
“Try to imagine that your own notion of life in the United States was constructed entirely from American movies and TV programs. You would perceive my country as being inhabited by a mix of gigantic, steroid-enhanced basketball stars, exquisitely beautiful young people with perfect teeth and musculature, gangsters, detectives, lawyers, and freakish pop singers. We live in palatial apartments, do very little work, sleep around a lot, and get our way mainly by murdering each other. It is not much of a secret, I think, that a large proportion of American movies are made for export. The people of the Third World watch them with fascination. Unfortunately, fascination is not the same as admiration or fondness. It can coexist very happily with, for example, disgust.”

Behind the Veil: A Muslim Woman Speaks Out (11/09/02)
In The New York Times by Marlise Simons
“The theme of injustice toward women in Islamic countries has become common in the West, but it has gained fresh currency through Ms. Hirsi Ali’s European perspective, her study of Dutch immigrants and her own life. Born in Mogadishu, she grew up a typical Muslim girl in Somalia. When she was 5, she underwent the ‘cruel ritual,’ as she called it, of genital cutting. When her father, a Somali opposition politician, had to flee the country’s political troubles, the family went to Saudi Arabia, where, she said, she was kept veiled and, much of the time, indoors. At 22, her father forced her to marry a distant cousin, a man she had never seen. But a friend helped her to escape and she finally obtained political asylum in the Netherlands. She was shocked when, as a university student, she held a job as an interpreter for Dutch immigration and social workers and discovered hidden ‘suffering on a terrible scale’ among Muslim women even in the Netherlands. She entered safe houses for women and girls, most of them Turkish and Moroccan immigrants, who had run away from domestic violence or forced marriages. Many had secret abortions.”

The Reform Islam Needs (Autumn 2002)
By James Q. Wilson in City Journal
“Freedom of conscience has made the difference. In an old world where knowledge came from libraries, and scientific experiments were rare, freedom would not be so important. But in the new world, knowledge and all that it can produce come from the sharp challenge of competing ideas tested by standards of objective evidence. In Istanbul, Muslims printed no book until 1729, and thereafter only occasionally. By contrast, the West became a world in which books were published starting three centuries earlier and where doubt and self-criticism were important. Of course, doubt and self-criticism can become, as William Bennett has observed, a self-destructive fetish, but short of that calamity, they are the source of human progress. The central question is not why freedom of conscience failed to come to much of Islam but why it came at all to the West. Though Westerners will conventionally assign great weight to the arguments made by the defenders of freedom, I do not think that the ideas of Milton, Locke, Erasmus, and Spinoza — though important — were decisive. What made religious toleration and later freedom of conscience possible in England was not theoretical argument but political necessity. It was necessary, first in England and later in America and much of Europe, because rulers trying to govern nations could not do so without granting freedom to people of different faiths.”

This Is Serious: Dominance for Republicans. Vindication for the president. And a good showing from the American people. (11/06/02)
By David Brooks in The Weekly Standard
“The Republicans should not read a radical ideological mandate into the results tonight. But there is a trend here. The American people are fundamentally serious. They know that the most important problem facing the country right now is terrorism and security. They know that George W. Bush is basically right on how to approach this problem. They know it is important to send people to Washington to support the president. In key states, they are doing that.... Don’t underestimate the importance of the Wellstone memorial service/rally. The polls shifted in the last few days. One big event was that rally. People saw liberal self-righteousness and they remembered that they don't like it. People saw the future of the Democratic party and its name was Walter Mondale.”

Fallout from a Memorial: Did the memorial service for Paul Wellstone cost Democrats the election? (11/18/02)
In Time by Matthew Cooper
“A backlash against the politically charged service almost certainly helped Norm Coleman beat Walter Mondale for Wellstone’s Minnesota Senate seat. And a private poll by Bill Clinton’s former pollster, Mark Penn, suggests the service backfired on Democrats nationally as well. Penn found that 68% of voters knew about the service — a high awareness of an event broadcast live nationally only on C-SPAN. What’s more, 49% of voters said the service made them less likely to vote for a Democrat — and 67% of independents said they felt that way.”

The Gerrymander Scandal: Why bother voting for Congress? Redistricting has already determined the outcome. (11/10/01)
By the Editors of The Wall Street Journal
Americans will go to the polls a year from now in the quaint belief that they will be electing a new Congress. But the real story is that nearly all of those races have already been decided — by politicians in backrooms and long before anyone even votes. The reason is the bipartisan scandal known as redistricting, or more colorfully as the "gerrymander." That is the process by which state politicians sit down every 10 years to carve up Congressional districts. This time they’re doing it with an even more blatant mix than usual of partisanship and incumbent protection. The result is that perhaps only 30 of 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives will even be competitive next year.“”

The Gerrymandered Democrats: Incumbency protection isn’t good for the minority party or democracy. (11/05/02)
By the Editors of The Wall Street Journal
“Gerrymanders are hardly new, but it used to be that politicians had to guess how to draw district lines every 10 years. Nowadays they use computer databases that can account for voter tendencies down to the city block. Nowadays, too, politicians tend to be careerists who prize incumbency above even partisanship. So rather than go for broke every decade by creating many competitive seats, their first priority is to protect themselves. This is the box canyon Democrats have walked into this year. In California, Texas, New York and Illinois, accounting for nearly one-third of all House seats, they conspired with GOP incumbents to freeze the status quo. The result is that in America’s largest state of California, which is increasingly Democratic, only one of 53 House races is even competitive, and that one only because Gary Condit became famous. Republicans in the state still can’t believe their good luck.”

Based on Koranic Verses, Interpretations, and Traditions, Muslim Clerics State: The Jews Are the Descendants of Apes, Pigs, And Other Animals (11/01/02)
By Aluma Solnick at The Middle East Media Research Institute
“Depicting Jews – and sometimes also Zionists – as ‘the descendants of apes and pigs’ is extremely widespread today in public discourse in the Arab and Islamic worlds. For example, in a weekly sermon in April 2002, Al-Azhar Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the highest-ranking cleric in the Sunni Muslim world, called the Jews ‘the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs.’ In one of his sermons, Saudi sheikh Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudayyis, imam and preacher at the Al-Haraam mosque – the most important mosque in Mecca – beseeched Allah to annihilate the Jews. He also urged the Arabs to give up peace initiatives with them because they are ‘the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs.’”

Pigs, Jews & War: Fronts in the clash of civilizations. (11/01/02)
By Jonah Goldberg at The National Review Online
“Jean Francois Revel wrote, ‘Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.’ Well, increasingly I can’t help but think that the liberals of Europe and the leftists of America (there’s still hope for our liberals) have lost the energy and the conviction to defend themselves. They cannot grasp that our enemies — especially those hailing from the Third World — cannot be reasoned with. It doesn’t matter if we wronged them in the past. It doesn’t matter if their historical grievances have weight. What matters, as a matter of pure survival and morality, is what they believe today and what they do because of those beliefs. Germany had any number of legitimate grievances about the Treaty of Versailles and its treatment at the hands of the victors in World War I. That doesn’t justify Nazism.”

The Faith-Based Left: Getting behind the debate. (02/05/01)
By Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online
“Conservatives and liberals alike have bought into the notion that we face a choice between value-free programs that ignore the individual and simply dole out material goods, and faith-based programs that look to transform character by instilling morality. Certainly there are food banks and soup kitchens that fit the model of a strictly secular giveaway that makes neither moral nor behavioral demands on its beneficiaries. (Ironically, many of these effectively secular programs are run by churches.) But the government already gives legal and financial support to a raft of coercive and morally fraught leftist social programs that are religious in all but name. These programs are designed to turn their beneficiaries into gender warriors and militant multi-culturalists — whether they like it or not.”

The Church of the Left: Finding meaning in liberalism. (05/31/01)
By Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online
“Liberalism arose as a solution to the destructive religious wars of Europe’s past, and succeeded because it allowed people of differing religious perspectives to live peacefully and productively in the same society. Designed to make the world safe for adherents of differing faiths, liberalism itself was never supposed to be a faith. But that is exactly what liberalism has become. And this transformation of liberalism into a de facto religion explains a lot about what we call ‘political correctness.’”

Our Secularist Democratic Party (Fall 2002)
By Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio in The Public Interest
“Anyone who has followed American politics over the past decade cannot help but feel some concern about the supposed fundamentalist Christian threat to democratic civility, pluralism, and tolerance. At the very least, the attentive citizen would find it hard not to regard the cultural and political positions of fundamentalists as outside the mainstream, given the volume of media stories that have conveyed this point. At the same time, the media’s obsession with politicized fundamentalism distracts public attention from the changing role of religion in political life today. In particular, the media overlooks the remarkable erosion of denominational boundaries that until a quarter century ago defined the religious dimension of partisan conflict, with Catholics, Jews, and southern evangelicals aligned with the Democratic party and nonsouthern white, mostly mainline Protestants forming the religious base of the Republicans. Also, the media mistakenly frames cultural conflict since the 1970s as entirely the result of fundamentalist revanchism. In so doing, the media ignores the growing influence of secularists in the Democratic party and obfuscates how their worldview is just as powerful a determinant of social attitudes and voting behavior as is a religiously traditionalist outlook.”

UW-Waukesha astir over column: Student writer links black fashion, community, parents to Young’s death (10/25/02)
By Scott Williams in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“The fatal mob beating of Charlie Young Jr. is stirring racial tensions on a college campus here after a student newspaper column linked the Milwaukee incident to lifestyles and struggles in the African-American community. ‘Stop the welfare payments and you’ll end the madness,’ wrote assistant editor Dan Hubert in the latest issue of the Observer, University of Wisconsin-Waukesha’s student newspaper. Since the column rolled off the presses earlier this week, angry students have demanded Hubert’s expulsion from school and called for the university to cut off funding for the Observer.”

Student columnist apologizes but defends stance at forum: UW-Waukesha crowd sounds off about bigotry, rights (10/30/02)
By Scott Williams in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Attracting more than 200 students and others to the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha, the nearly two-hour forum was organized in response to a student newspaper column that linked African-American culture to a deadly mob attack in Milwaukee. The uproar that followed has turned an uneasy spotlight on the Waukesha college, as students and administrators struggle to balance freedom of the press with racially charged commentary that some view as hate speech.”

Zigging and zagging on the sniper’s trail (10/21/02)
By Mark Steyn in The National Post
“When the expert commentators get so much of the easily verifiable stuff wrong, it’s hard to see why their airier fancies should command respect. Is the sniper linked to al-Qaeda? ‘Most unlikely,’ said Elliott Leyton, a St. John’s professor of anthropology, in The Globe And Mail. ‘Such groups (religious or political) generally find their murderous pleasures in bombs, airplanes and gas, not rifles.’ In fairness to the Islamofascists, when it comes to their ‘murderous pleasures’ variety is the spice of death. They disdain a consistent M.O. Much of what they do is unprecedented: September 11th, the shoe bomber, the Afghan resistance leader they assassinated by posing as interviewers and killing him with a disguised camera. Before I rule out the Islamists, I’d want a better reason than Professor Leyton’s.”

We angry white males were right about the sniper (10/27/02)
By Mark Steyn in The London Telegraph
“You get the picture: sure, Muslim fundamentalists can be pretty extreme, but what about all our Christian fundamentalists? Unfortunately, for the old moral equivalence to hold up, the Christians really need to get off their fundamentalist butts and start killing more people. At the moment, the brilliantly versatile Muslim fundamentalists are gunning down Maryland schoolkids and bus drivers, hijacking Moscow theatres, self-detonating in Israeli pizza parlours, blowing up French oil tankers in Yemen, and slaughtering nightclubbers in Bali, while Christian fundamentalists are, er, sounding extremely strident in their calls for the return of prayer in school.”

Coloring the sniper news (10/11/02)
By Michelle Malkin in Jewish World Review
“The media immediately embraced the Angry White Male theory by sensationalizing the cops’ questioning over the weekend of one Robert Gene Baker. Newspaper reports described him as ‘heavily tattooed’ and ‘linked’ to ‘militia and white supremacist’ groups. The headlines screamed: ‘Supremacist Sought in Sniping Spree’ and ‘Neo Nazi Named as Sniper Murders Suspect.’ But in fact, Baker was never a suspect and had no weapons on him at the time he was taken into custody for an outstanding auto-theft warrant. The AWM theory remains a plausible one, of course. But it isn’t the only one. You won’t hear Katie Couric or Peter Jennings talking about it with their conventional-thinking experts, but there is a significant possibility that the sniper and the sniper’s support system could be non-white Muslim extremists with ties to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network.”

Who let Lee Malvo loose? (10/25/02)
By Michelle Malkin at TownHall
“The mainstream media informed us this week that Lee Malvo, the reportedly ‘17-year-old’ youth charged as a material witness in the sniper investigation along with John Mohammed, is a ‘Jamaican national.’ As of this writing (Oct. 24), the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to comment publicly on the exact nature of Malvo’s immigration status. Here are the facts the INS doesn’t want you to know: Lee Malvo is an illegal alien from Jamaica who jumped ship in Miami in June 2001. He was apprehended by the Border Patrol in Bellingham, Wash., in December 2001, but was then let go by the INS district in Seattle in clear violation of federal law and contrary to what the arresting Border Patrol officers intended, according to my law enforcement sources. ”

With the Sniper, TV Profilers Missed Their Mark (10/25/02)
By Paul Farhi and Linton Weeks in The Washington Post
“Almost everything the sniper ‘profilers’ and pundits told the media over the past three weeks turns out to have been off the mark, considering the very real profiles of the two people arrested early yesterday. The men and women who had been described on the air and in print as ‘forensic psychologists’ and ‘former FBI investigators’ took many swings at the who and why of the sniper case — and mostly missed.... The important question is, was the orgy of speculation harmless — or was there a very dangerous undercurrent to it? By saturating the public’s consciousness with phantom images of thirtyish white men, did the media profilers distract attention from a more general and possibly open-minded search for the perpetrators?”

Arm-Twisting: A historian’s book makes the case for gun control. Other scholars hotly dispute his claims. (04/05/01)
By Kimberley A. Strassel at OpinionJournal
“Released by highbrow publisher Knopf last year, Arming America was a historical and political bombshell, a rare piece of work that purported not only to overturn long-held historical beliefs, but to alter modern politics profoundly in the process. Few colonial Americans owned guns, Mr. Bellesiles argues. He bases this on his study of probate and military records, travel narratives and other primary sources.... Unsurprisingly, left-leaning journalists, academics and politicians went weak at the knees.... But there’s a problem. A growing number of respected scholars, from across the political spectrum, are saying that Mr. Bellesiles’s research and conclusions are wrong.”

Guns and Poses: Michael Bellesiles’s work is charming and disarming — but sloppy and maybe fraudulent. (02/22/02)
By Kimberley A. Strassel at OpinionJournal
“Arming America came out in September 2000. About that time, James Lindgren, a professor of law at Northwestern, wanted to reanalyze Mr. Bellesiles’s probate information for his own research. He sent Mr. Bellesiles a routine e-mail in August 2000 asking the Emory historian for details about which records he had used and where to find them. Mr. Bellesiles wrote back that he’d read them on microfilm in the federal archives in East Point, Ga. But when Mr. Lindgren and others made calls, they were told the facility had no such records. Mr. Bellesiles then sent an e-mail saying he’d read them in some 30 different places across the country. He also told Mr. Lindgren he couldn’t immediately send detailed information on which records he’d used because his counts — made on legal pads — had been damaged by a flood.”

Academic Accountability: An antigun scholar defends his shoddy work by calling critics names. (06/06/02)
By Kimberley A. Strassel at OpinionJournal
“Several weeks ago, in a bold and impressive move, the NEH became the first institution to treat the accusations against Mr. Bellesiles with the gravity they deserve. It came in response to a $30,000 NEH-funded fellowship that the Newberry Library, a Chicago research institution, awarded Mr. Bellesiles in February 2001. Last month NEH deputy chairman Lynne Munson wrote to the library that in light of the ‘serious question concerning academic integrity,’ that have been raised about Mr. Bellesiles, the NEH wanted its name removed from the fellowship. The Newberry Library’s defense is that the criticism of Mr. Bellesiles’s book didn’t take on a ‘scholarly character’ until after it had granted the fellowship. But whatever the timing, the fact remains that Newberry never did anything about revoking or suspending the fellowship — even when serious questions about Mr. Bellesiles’s academic integrity came to the fore.”

Michael Bellesiles Resigns from Emory Faculty (10/25/02)
By Robert A. Paul in a Press Release from Emory University
“I have accepted the resignation of Michael Bellesiles from his position as Professor of History at Emory University, effective December 31, 2002. Although we would not normally release any of the materials connected with a case involving the investigation of faculty misconduct in research, in light of the intense scholarly interest in the matter I have decided, with the assent of Professor Bellesiles as well as of the members of the Investigative Committee, to make public the report of the Investigative Committee appointed by me to evaluate the allegations made against Professor Bellesiles (none of the supporting documents, however, are being made public).”

Voices in the Wilderness: Versus the age-old sirens of appeasement. (10/18/02)
By Victor Davis Hanson at The National Review Online
“Every day a Marine is killed, a French tanker blown up, Christians butchered in Pakistan, tourists incinerated in Bali, terrorist cells broken up from Oregon to New York — and our pundits demand proof that we are at war. Why do the presidents’ critics press their attacks, the more principled playing down the chances of future danger, the more disingenuous engaging in character assassination and cheap psychoanalysis? In a word, human nature. It is our way always to put aside distant threats of the future to enjoy the tangible, but temporary, lull of the present.”

False Alarm: Why Liberals Should Support the War (10/10/02)
By Jonathan Chait at The New Republic Online
“It is perhaps telling that the case for war with Iraq was most clearly made not by Republican President George W. Bush but by Democratic President Bill Clinton. ‘Predators of the twenty-first century,’ Clinton warned, speaking four and a half years ago, ‘will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them.... There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.’ And if the world were to allow Saddam to continue to construct his terrible weapons? ‘Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will,’ Clinton declared. ‘He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you, he’ll use the arsenal.’”

Air War: How Saddam Manipulates the U.S. Media (10/17/02)
By Franklin Foer at The New Republic Online
“Like their Soviet-bloc predecessors, the Iraqis have become masters of the Orwellian pantomime — the state-orchestrated anti-American rally, the state-led tours of alleged chemical weapons sites that turn out to be baby milk factories — that promotes their distorted reality. And the Iraqi regime has found an audience for these displays in an unlikely place: the U.S. media. It’s not because American reporters have an ideological sympathy for Saddam Hussein; broadcasting his propaganda is simply the only way they can continue to work in Iraq. ‘There’s a quid pro quo for being there,’ says Peter Arnett, who worked the Iraq beat for CNN for a decade. ‘You go in and they control what you do.... So you have no option other than to report the opinion of the government of Iraq.’ In other words, the Western media’s presence in the Ministry of Information describes more than just a physical reality.”

Say “No” to War on Iraq (10/17/02)
By Josh Feit in The Stranger
“There’s a much more logical and honest (and urgent) way to proceed against terrorism. Let’s promote democratic reforms in the real linchpins of the region: Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. And I’m not talking about Radio Free Europe broadcasts — an imprecise, hit or miss Cold War tactic waged against our enemies. I’m talking about a direct American campaign for democracy (and women’s rights!) in the Middle East aimed at our suspect allies. In short, we have more than radio waves to influence the likes of Cairo and Riyadh. We’ve got dollars, business investments, and political relationships. Let’s get tough, and demand changes from our friends; demands backed with the threat of pulling our support.”

Say “Yes” to War on Iraq (10/17/02)
By Dan Savage in The Stranger
“You see, lefties, there are times when saying ‘no’ to war means saying ‘yes’ to oppression. Don’t believe me? Go ask a Czech or a European Jew about the British and French saying ‘no’ to war with Germany in 1938. War may be bad for children and other living things, but there are times when peace is worse for children and other living things, and this is one of those times. Saying no to war in Iraq means saying yes to the continued oppression of the Iraqi people. It amazes me when I hear lefties argue that we should assassinate Saddam in order to avoid war. If Saddam is assassinated, he will be replaced by another Baathist dictator — and what then for the people of Iraq? More ‘peace’ — i.e., more oppression, more executions, more gassings, more terror, more fear.”

They want to kill us all (10/19/02)
By Mark Steyn in The Spectator
“An appeaser, said Churchill, feeds the crocodile in the hope that it will eat him last. But sometimes the croc eats him first anyway. For months, the US, Britain and Canada had warned the Indonesian government about terrorists operating within its borders. So had Singapore and Malaysia. President Megawati’s administration responded by calling Washington anti-Muslim. The American ambassador was publicly denounced by her vice-president. Hassan Wirayuda, the foreign minister, said in February that the outside world’s fears of Islamic terrorism in Indonesia were overblown and that in Jakarta ‘we laugh at it’. Ha-ha. From government contacts to police indifference, the administration’s strategy was to deny the crocodile existed and then quietly slip him the à la carte menu. Now, Indonesian stocks are down, the rupiah’s in the toilet, the national carrier’s flying empty, and the official tourism websites have switched to continuously updated info on dead tourists, safe in the knowledge that they’re unlikely to be getting any new bookings from live ones.”

Don’t blame the west (10/16/02)
By Clive James in The Guardian
“But let us allow, for the moment, that the mass outcry against American hegemony is the voice of the true, the eternal and the compassionate left. Allowing that, we can put the best possible construction on its pervasiveness. Not just the majority of the intellectuals, academics and schoolteachers, but most of the face-workers in the media, share the view that international terrorism is to be explained by the vices of the liberal democracies. Or, at any rate, they shared it until a few days ago. It will be interesting, in the shattering light of an explosive event, to see if that easy view continues now to be quite so widespread, and how much room is made for the more awkward view that the true instigation for terrorism might not be the vices of the liberal democracies, but their virtues.”

So Long, Fellow Travelers: Is That All That’s Left? (10/20/02)
By Christopher Hitchens in The Washington Post
“As someone who has done a good deal of marching and public speaking about Vietnam, Chile, South Africa, Palestine and East Timor in his time (and would do it all again), I can only hint at how much I despise a Left that thinks of Osama bin Laden as a slightly misguided anti-imperialist. (He actually says he wants to restore the old imperial caliphate and has condemned the Australian-led international rescue of East Timor as a Christian plot against Muslim Indonesia). Or a Left that can think of Milosevic and Saddam as victims.”

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter wins Nobel Peace Prize (10/11/02)
In The San Francisco Chronicle by Doug Mellgren of The Associated Press
“Former President Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday ‘for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights.’ .... ‘It should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken,’ Gunnar Berge, chairman of the Nobel committee, said. ‘It’s a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States.’”

There He Goes Again: Jimmy Carter, our “model ex-president.” (05/02/02)
By Jay Nordlinger in The National Review
“Carter is immensely proud of his rendezvous with Middle East history, and he trades on it constantly. No one should assume, however, that he’s an honest broker — at least anymore. For the past many years, he has been passionately anti-Israel, more or less embracing the PLO line. He has repeatedly been at the service of Yasser Arafat. After the Gulf War, the PLO chief was on the outs with Saudi Arabia, because he had backed Saddam Hussein. So he asked Carter to fly to Riyadh to smooth things over and restore Saudi funding to him — which he did. Arabs are also robust funders of the Carter Center, the ex-president’s redoubt and vehicle in Atlanta.”

Carterpalooza! Jimmy Carter, our “model ex-president.” (10/11/02)
By Jay Nordlinger in The National Review
“The ex-president is known as Joe Human Rights, but he’s mighty selective about whose human rights to champion. If you live in Marcos’s Philippines, Pinochet’s Chile, or apartheid South Africa, he’s liable to care about you. If you live in Communist China, Communist Cuba, Communist Ethiopia, Communist Nicaragua, Communist North Korea, Communist...: screw you.”

Harry Belafonte Slams Colin Powell as Race Sellout (10/08/02)
At The Drudge Report by Matt Drudge
“Singer Harry Belafonte took to the AM radiowaves on Tuesday morning to slam Secretary of State Colin Powell as a sellout to the black race! Belafonte, appearing on San Diego’s 760 KFMB, told host Ted Leitner that Powell was like a plantation slave who moves into the slave owner’s house and only says what his master wants him to say.”

Harry Belafonte’s Havana Farewell (07/18/00)
By Ronald Radosh at FrontPage Magazine
“Most American admirers of Harry Belafonte probably don’t realize that the popular singer and actor is an unreconstructed Stalinist.... In an interview he gave in 1995, Belafonte claimed that ‘racism has sucked up my entire life,’ and that as a result, he decided never to accept ‘an indignity where I might find one.’ Some might view genuflecting before Castro in the year 2000 as an ultimate indignity — but to Harry Belafonte, the illusion dies hard. What will be left, I wonder, when the Cuban people finally are free of the longest surviving dictator in the world and his grotesque socialist prison? The banana boat is coming, Harry, and it won’t be long.”

C.I.A. Letter to Senate on Baghdad’s Intentions (10/07/02)
In The New York Times
“¶Since Operation Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad. ¶We have credible reporting that Al Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire W.M.D. capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to Al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs. ¶Iraq’s increasing support to extremist Palestinians coupled with growing indications of relationship with Al Qaeda. suggest that Baghdad’s links to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action.”

Who’s killing the children of Iraq? (10/08/02)
By Margaret Wente in The Globe and Mail
“Of all the reasons to oppose a war against Iraq, one of the most compelling is the image of innocent civilian victims. Children will die — if only because Saddam Hussein won’t hesitate to build orphanages atop his weapons labs. And of all the accusations hurled against the West in its treatment of Iraq, the most damning is the human cost of sanctions. According to many peace groups, humanitarian organizations and politicians, sanctions have killed 500,000 Iraqi children. The total death toll from sanctions amounts to a million and a half innocent people. Are these figures credible? Only if you believe Saddam Hussein.”

Text: Iraq Resolution (10/10/02)
In The Washington Times by The Associated Press
“The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to – (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq. ”

A just war? (10/06/02)
By Jean Bethke Elshtain in The Boston Globe
“Several weeks ago, 100 teachers of Christian ethics, both pacifists and those working within the just war tradition, signed a petition declaring, in its entirety: ‘As Christian ethicists, we share a common moral presumption against a pre-emptive war on Iraq by the United States.’ Although I am an ethicist and a Christian, I was not among the signatories, for two reasons. First, the statement is vague and, therefore, evasive. Within the just war tradition, there is a common moral presumption for justice as well as a recognition that all war is terrible. But there are times when justice demands the use of force as a response to violence, hatred, and injustice.”

Kids beat man to brain death, police say: Nearly 20 suspected of taking part, one just 10 years old (10/01/02)
In The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel by Leah Thorsen
“A mob of nearly 20 kids beat a man brain dead Sunday night after he confronted them for throwing an egg at him and punched one teen in the mouth, police said. Eight suspects, at least one as young as 10, were in custody Tuesday, police said. The victim, Charlie Young Jr., 36, remained on life support. Police said the group chased Young onto the porch of a house at 2021 N. 21st Lane and used bats, shovels and boards to pummel him in an attack that left blood splattered floor to ceiling.”

Community reacts with disbelief, outrage: Police, politicians, neighborhood groups condemn beating (10/01/02)
In The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel by Leonard Sykes Jr.
“As police continued their investigation Tuesday into the mob beating that left Charlie Young Jr. dead, reaction throughout the city ranged from shock and disbelief to outrage. From community centers, schools and City Hall, police, politicians and neighborhood groups condemned the brutal beating as they wrestled with what — if anything — can be done to prevent similar incidents in the future.”

Victim’s response to egging prompted beating, boys say: Youths tell police they were angry at Young’s overreaction (10/02/02)
In The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel by Jamaal Abdul-Alim
“Based on detailed statements police say some of the boys gave, none of the boys had any problem with Young, 36, and they were hanging out with him at a house on W. Brown St. for at least part of Sunday evening. But around 10 p.m., one of them — a 13-year-old nicknamed ‘Bump’ — objected to how Young intruded on a game of insults between Bump and his girlfriend and ‘started ribbing on everybody.’ That’s when Bump threw an egg that might as well have been a bombshell.”

10 held in beating death: Only one is adult; more suspects sought; murder charges expected (10/02/02)
In The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel by Jamaal Abdul-Alim and Jessica McBride
“Among those prosecutors expect to charge with murder in adult court is a 10-year-old boy, who could be the youngest person ever prosecuted as an adult in Wisconsin. Milwaukee Police Chief Arthur Jones said eight of those in custody have confessed to their roles in the beating death of Charlie Young Jr., who died Tuesday evening at Wauwatosa's Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital after being attacked Sunday by about 20 boys and young men.”

7 boys charged as adults in beating: 10-year-old kept in Children’s Court; other juveniles expected to be charged (10/02/02)
In The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel by Jessica McBride, Jamaal Abdul-Alim, and Tom Held
“Prosecutors charged seven youths as adults with first-degree reckless homicide Thursday in a savage mob beating, but they spared the youngest, a 10-year-old, from adult court and a possible 40-year prison term. The 10-year-old was charged with second-degree reckless homicide in Children’s Court, where he now could face a two-year sentence at a juvenile prison, a sentence that could be extended only until he is 18. At least three more teens in custody are expected to be charged next week, and police are looking for more suspects.”

Crime, gangs and broken homes play large part in boys’ lives (10/03/02)
In The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel by Gina Barton
“The 10-year-old who told police he helped beat Charlie Young Jr. to death has been smoking marijuana since summer, his half sister says. A 14-year-old being held in the case already is the father of a baby girl. He was arrested on a burglary charge when he was 8 or 9.”

Wichita to revisit brutal slayings as testimony begins (10/07/02)
In The Washington Times by Valerie Richardson
“The brothers, 24-year-old Reginald and 22-year-old Jonathan, face 113 criminal counts, notably kidnapping, rape, robbery and five murders, in connection with a crime spree from Dec. 7 to Dec. 15, 2000, that terrorized Wichita and much of Kansas. If convicted, they could receive the death penalty.... The Carr brothers are black, and each of the five victims was white. At the time of their arrest, Sedgwick County District Attorney Nola Foulston refused to charge them with hate crimes, explaining that the main motive was robbery, and that Kansas did not have a hate-crimes law.”

Inside Al Qaeda’s Training Camps: What they’re ready for. (10/01/02)
By Bryan Preston at The National Review Online
“Al Qaeda, the notorious terrorist gang responsible for killing 3,025 innocents a year ago, is still alive and planning future atrocities. Though last fall’s military campaign robbed the group of its terrorist training bases in Afghanistan, and possibly of its leader, Osama bin Laden, there is every reason to believe that al Qaeda is still trying to train its troops in weapons use, tactics, and hostage-taking at bases we’ve yet to find and destroy. And as recent developments in upstate New York make clear, al Qaeda probably already has scores of sleeper troops inside the U.S. and around Europe — troops already trained, and awaiting their signal.”

The Bigotry of Jihad (10/02/02)
By John Perazzo at FrontPage Magazine
“Liberals in academia and the media largely refuse to acknowledge the prejudice that animates anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiment in much of the Arab world today. Rather than identify it as raw, unadulterated bigotry, they posit all sorts of rational ‘explanations’ for Muslim antipathy toward other groups.... Rarely is it suggested that Islamic extremists might just be plain, old-fashioned bigots — not unlike the white American bigots who killed James Byrd four years ago.”

Innocents Abroad (10/01/02)
By George Will in The Washington Post
“Not since Jane Fonda posed for photographers at a Hanoi antiaircraft gun has there been anything like Rep. Jim McDermott, speaking to ABC’s ‘This Week’ from Baghdad, saying Americans should take Saddam Hussein at his word but should not take President Bush at his. McDermott, in his seventh term representing Seattle, said Iraqi officials promised him and his traveling companion, Rep. David E. Bonior, a 13-term Michigan Democrat, that weapons inspectors would be ‘allowed to look anywhere.’”

McDermott accuses Bush of plotting to be emperor (10/07/02)
In The Seattle Times by David Postman
“U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott broadened his attack on George W. Bush’s war plans yesterday, saying the president is threatening military action in Iraq as part of a plot to crown himself emperor of America. Criticized for saying on a trip to Iraq early last week that Bush would mislead the American public, McDermott, a Seattle Democrat, was back in his district yesterday telling cheering supporters that Bush is planning a war to distract voters’ attention from domestic problems.”

Crude (10/07/02)
By Peter Beinard at The New Republic
“Whatever you think of the Bushies, September 11, 2001, changed their view of the world. And it is that changed view that has brought America to the brink of war. The left can call that new outlook reckless or arrogant or dumb. But they should at least admit that it’s sincere.”

Message Full of Hypocrisy: Labour forgot Clinton’s notorious foreign policy (10/07/02)
By Christopher Hitchens in The Mirror
“Imagine if, during the Clinton presidency, ex-presidents Reagan or Bush had addressed the Tory Party conference, cast doubt upon the legitimacy of Clinton’s election, trashed his domestic and foreign policy and offered him lukewarm support at a time of crisis. It never happened, because there is a tradition it should not, but in breaking with ex-presidential etiquette Clinton, who’ll do anything for an audience, met an audience that would apparently do anything for him.”

Put up or shut up (10/05/02)
By Mark Steyn in The Spectator
“Structurally, the UN is a creature of the Cold War. It formalised the stalemate of East and West: it was designed to prevent rather than enable action; it tended towards inertia, which was no bad thing given the potentially catastrophic consequences of the alternative. But we no longer have a bipolar world, and so the vetoes only work one way — to restrain the sole surviving superpower. England’s clergy have redefined the Christian concept of a just war to mean only one blessed by the Security Council, which is to say the governments of France, Russia and China: it will be left to two atheists and a lapsed Catholic to determine whether this is a war Christians can support.”

Homosexuality debate could split Anglican Church (08/17/02)
In The Telegraph by Jonathan Petre
“Homosexuality will prove ‘more powerful than God’ if it causes further divisions in the Anglican Church, its most senior leaders have said. In the frankest admission yet that the controversy could tear the worldwide Church apart, the group of 12 primates and bishops said it was dominating their agenda. The group, whose members include the new Archbishop of Canterbury, was set up by the present Archbishop, Dr George Carey, to bridge differences between liberals and traditionalists following the 1998 Lambeth Conference. After a series of meetings over three years, however, it conceded that profound disagreements still remained and it acknowledged that the issue could split the Church still further.”

Carey warns of Church split on gays (09/17/02)
In The Telegraph by Jonathan Petre
“In a stinging rebuke to liberal bishops who are flouting the agreed position of the Church, Dr Carey said that individuals were undermining the whole institution by acting on their own. A number of dioceses in the Unites States and Canada are planning to bless homosexual ‘marriages’ and in another, a traditionalist priest has been deposed by his liberal bishop. Dr Carey said that he had previously condemned the ‘schism’ created by traditionalists and evangelicals who have broken away in protest at the actions of a number of liberal bishops, particularly over homosexuality. These liberal bishops had, however, ignored calls to desist from such actions, which were contrary to the views of the overwhelming majority and which were prompting ‘conscientious’ clergy to leave.”

Denounce gays or quit, church body tells Williams (09/26/02)
In The Telegraph by Jonathan Petre
“Prominent evangelicals in the Church of England raised the stakes over homosexuality yesterday by challenging the new Archbishop of Canterbury to renounce his liberal views or resign. Reform, the conservative evangelical network whose 1,500 members include more than 500 clergy and a bishop, said that it could not welcome the appointment of Dr Rowan Williams to Canterbury because of his ‘non-biblical’ views. In an unprecedented move, the group said that unless Dr Williams was prepared publicly to affirm the Church’s traditional teaching that all sex outside heterosexual marriage was sinful he should withdraw from the post ‘for the sake of the Church’s gospel witness and unity’.”

Rift within Church over gays deepens (10/03/02)
In The Telegraph by Jonathan Petre
“The rift in the Church of England over homosexuality deepened last night when two mainstream evangelical groups joined the growing chorus of criticism of the new Archbishop of Canterbury’s liberal stance on the issue. In a sign that battle lines are being drawn up, the two groups, which represent several thousand clergy and which are based in every diocese, said that concern over Dr Rowan Williams existed far more widely than among the relatively small ‘conservative’ evangelical wing of the Church. The Church of England Evangelical Council and the Anglican Evangelical Assembly backed the move by the conservative evangelical network Reform to urge Dr Williams to renounce his liberal views or resign, as reported in The Telegraph last week.”

Motive for Massacre: It’s not about “the West.” It’s about religious beliefs. (09/27/02)
By Paul Marshall at OpinionJournal
“The key in each case is not a geopolitical affiliation but an unacceptable religious belief. When al Qaeda was formed in 1998, it was named the ‘World Islamic Front for Holy War Against Jews and Crusaders.’ Osama bin Laden stressed in an Al-Jazeera interview at the time that his target was ‘World Christianity, which is allied with Jews and Zionism.’”

Globalthink’s Perils (09/24/02)
By Daniel Pipes in The New York Post
“In the debate over Iraq, the Democrats and most allied governments are demanding United Nations Security Council endorsement of a military campaign — or they are against it. This is a strange position. The U.S. government, with an over two-century record of forwarding human rights and defeating tyrants, is to defer to the United Nations? The duly elected leaders of the United States should step aside and let assorted dictators make key decisions affecting American national security?”

Nothing to lose but their chains (09/28/02)
By David Pryce-Jones in The Spectator
“Iraq may soon be liberated. The Americans are building bases and runways in the Middle East, airlifting men and supplies, and passing the resolutions in Congress necessary to take military action. Regime change is what President Bush has set his heart on. Condoleezza Rice goes further: she calls for democracy, not only in Iraq but also in the wider Muslim world. From the reaction all over Europe, you might think that Washington was insisting on the sacrifice of the first-born.”

We Must Fight Iraq (09/26/02)
By Christopher Hitchens in The Mirror
“It is almost certainly a mistake to assume anybody’s position on Iraq is determined by evidence alone. After all, last year there was overwhelming evidence of the connection between the World Trade Center aggression, al-Qaeda and the Taliban — and a decisive UN mandate for action — but many on the left opposed military action in Afghanistan, and still do. I have the feeling that Tony Blair would feel happier making the moral case that Saddam must go.”

Consider This: Clinton’s chief Iraq expert announces his reluctant belief that an invasion is needed. (09/26/02)
By Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online
“Setting aside, for the moment, the question of which political party is responsible for past missteps, Pollack’s more politically significant point may be his concluding claim that ‘the members of the international community who bleat about the importance of collective security, multilateral diplomacy, and international law have gravely weakened all three (not to mention the U.N. Security Council) by allowing Iraq to flout them while chastising the United States (and our handful of allies) when we objected....’ In other words, Pollack argues that the same nations now screaming about our invasion plans are the very ones who undermined the legal and multilateral policy of containment against Iraq.”

Iraq and the War on Terrorism (09/23/02)
Speech by Al Gore at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club in USA Today
“I’m speaking today in an effort to recommend a specific course of action for our country which I believe would be preferable to the course recommended by President Bush. Specifically, I am deeply concerned that the policy we are presently following with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century.”

For Remarks on Iraq, Gore Gets Praise and Scorn (09/25/02)
By Adam Nagourney in The New York Times
“Mr. Gore's advisers described his speech as a genuine expression of sentiment about an issue with which he has long been closely identified, rather than an attempt to position himself for the 2004 presidential election. He wrote it after consulting a fairly far-flung group of advisers that included Rob Reiner, the actor and filmmaker. For all that, some Democrats expressed skepticism that Mr. Gore had enhanced his standing.”

Speechless (09/26/02)
By Editors of The New Republic
“The former vice president’s speech almost perfectly encapsulated the evasions that have characterized the Democratic Party’s response to President Bush’s proposed war in Iraq. In typical Democratic style, Gore didn’t say he opposed the war. In fact, he endorsed the goal of regime change — before presenting a series of qualifications that would likely make that goal impossible.”

The new San Francisco democrat (09/27/02)
By Jonah Goldberg at TownHall
“Gore doubles back, crisscrosses and zigzags — between favoring force, opposing force, opposing multilateralism, opposing unilateralism — the only conclusion one can reach is that this speech wasn’t written to reveal his convictions. It was crafted as an attack on Bush and an attempt to win the Democratic nomination. The overriding theme wasn’t to depoliticize the war but to blame George Bush, at all costs.”

Look Who’s Playing Politics (09/25/02)
By Michael Kelly in The Washington Post
“Gore’s speech was one no decent politician could have delivered. It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts — bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible. But I understate.”

Conservative Churches Grew Fastest in 1990’s, Report Says (09/18/02)
In The New York Times by Laurie Goodstein
“Socially conservative churches that demand high commitment from their members grew faster than other religious denominations in the last decade, according to a study released yesterday by statisticians who count American religious affiliations every 10 years.... ‘I was astounded to see that by and large the growing churches are those that we ordinarily call conservative,’ said Ken Sanchagrin, director of the Glenmary Research Center and a professor and chairman of the department of sociology at Mars Hill College in Mars Hill, N.C. ‘And when I looked at those that were declining, most were moderate or liberal churches. And the more liberal the denomination, by most people’s definition, the more they were losing.’”

Christianity’s New Center (09/12/02)
Interview of Philip Jenkins by Katie Bacon at Atlantic Unbound
“In the global South you have almost a pre-Vatican II, old-world kind of Catholicism. Catholics there are more concerned with the traditional, more willing to accept authority and leadership, more prepared to insist on orthodoxy. Whereas in America and Europe we tend to have cafeteria Catholicism, as in, I'll take a little bit of this, a little bit of that, throw in a bit of Wicca, and see what we come up with.”

Prior Knowledge of Sept. 11 Not Just Urban Legend (09/10/02)
At Insight on the News by Jeffrey Scott Shapiro
“‘What are you looking at?’ asked the schoolteacher as she approached one of her freshman students. The boy, a young Palestinian, seemed captivated as he stared out the window across Brooklyn toward the lower downtown area of Manhattan. ‘Do you see those two buildings?’ he asked while pointing toward the World Trade Center. ‘They won’t be standing there next week.’ It was noon, Sept. 6, 2001.”

Hippocratic Oafs: Muslims demand sensitivity. They ought to show some too. (09/20/02)
By Peggy Noonan at OpinionJournal
“So the Southerners are eyeballing the young Muslim males. Maybe these guys are bad guys. They allow themselves to think this in part because one of the things Americans regret most since Sept. 11 2001 is their lack of suspicion. We’re all very live-and-let-live. Before Sept. 11, young Muslim males could tell someone in passing that soon those towers in New York will go boom. And fearing to offend, fearing to hurt the feelings of another person, we’d let it pass. We’d mind our business, give them the benefit of the doubt.”

Iraqi Interrogatories: The usual questions about Iraq. (09/20/02)
By Victor Davis Hanson at The National Review Online
“Since September 11 there has no longer been a margin of safety — or error — allowing us a measure of absolute certainty before action. Long gone is the notion that American soil is inviolable or that enemies will not butcher thousands of civilians unexpectedly and in time of peace. All we need to know is that [Saddam Hussein] broke the armistice agreements of the first war, violated the weapons-inspections accords, likes to attack other countries, dallies with terrorists, has nightmarish weapons, and has already fought us once. That he is a dictator, killed thousands of his own people, sought to assassinate a president of the United States, tried to destroy the ecology of Kuwait, and sent missiles into Israel and Saudi Arabia are not misdemeanors.”

Behind the Hate: The enemy’s problem. (09/11/02)
By David Pryce-Jones at The National Review Online
“For centuries now, the West and its social order has challenged other civilizations. In the face of that challenge, China, Japan, India, adopted the science and the arts, even the music, which were both the cause and the effect of Western creativity. Leaders and thinkers in Muslim countries also tried to match the West. With the possible exception of Turkey, they proved unable to do so. The reasons for this are unclear. Nobody and nothing effectively stands in the way of education, reform, experiment in building a modern social order with its own special characteristics like other peoples.”

Is This the Way to Decide on Iraq? (09/20/02)
By Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post
“When the case for war is made purely in terms of American national interest — in terms of the safety, security and very lives of American citizens — chins are pulled as the Democrats think it over. But when the case is the abstraction of being the good international citizen and strengthening the House of Kofi, the Democrats are ready to parachute into Baghdad.”

U.S. Was Aware of bin Laden Threat Before Sept. 11 Attacks (09/19/02)
In The New York Times by James Risen
“The Congressional panels’ staff director said on Wednesday that the American intelligence community was told in 1998 that Arab terrorists were planning to fly a bomb-laden aircraft into the World Trade Center, but the F.B.I. and the Federal Aviation Administration did not take the threat seriously. The August 1998 intelligence report from the Central Intelligence Agency was just one of several warnings the United States received, but did not seriously analyze, in the years leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks that were detailed at the Congressional hearings.”

Congress was Warned Two Months Before 9/11 Attacks (09/19/02)
At Cybercast News Service by Jeff Johnson
“Based on information gathered by the committee, there were a total of 28 pieces of intelligence information gathered after June 1998 that hinted bin Laden wanted to strike the U.S., including 11 indicating an imminent attack after March 2001. Additionally, 12 so-called ‘intelligence indicators’ lead analysts to believe that al Qaeda would use airplanes to strike targets in Washington, D.C., and New York.”

A Visit to Shanksville (09/11/02)
By Joan Marie Nagy at NewsMax
“I hope the permanent memorial maintains the evidence of that violent impact and preserves that hallowed ground forever. Americans need to remember the price paid in that Pennsylvania field. When I remember September 11, I will feel grief, then anger, then pride. The overwhelming thought or feeling I will forever associate with September 11 will be that, when given a chance, most every ordinary American will still fight to the death to preserve the lives of other Americans.”

A Bell Tolls In Shanksville (09/11/02)
At CBSNews by Jim Krasula (?)
“Flight 93 took off from Newark, N.J., bound for San Francisco. It crashed in a grass field next to a line of trees about 70 miles southeast of Pittsburgh — far from the devastation in New York and at the Pentagon. The reason, say investigators, is that people on board confronted their four hijackers and brought down the flight far from some intended target in Washington, D.C. — The Capitol, according to al Qaeda members interviewed by Arab television recently.”

“Citizen-soldiers” of Flight 93 honored (09/12/02)
In The Modesto Bee by Lawrence M. O’Rourke
“Charles Carpenter, a farmer just over the ridge from the crash site, said the terrorists failed to splinter America. ‘The terrible thing that happened here has brought us closer together as a people,’ he said. ‘If those terrorists had in mind splitting us up, it sure did backfire.’ Sandy Dahl, widow of pilot Jason Dahl, said that the memory of Sept. 11 constantly reminds her that ‘lives are short and there is no time for hate.’ ‘Here we remember ordinary people who did heroic things,’ said Albert Youngblood, an accountant whose half sister, Wanda Green, a flight attendant, died in the crash. Alice Hoglan, the mother of passenger Mark Bingham of San Francisco, said the terrorist attack showed the need for the United States to take an active role in solving the world’s problems. ‘Today was beautiful,’ she said. ‘It was a fitting tribute in honor of the actions the people aboard Flight 93 took.’”

The Heroes Of Flight 93: The last full measure of devotion (09/12/02)
In Newsday by Hugo Kugiya
“A sharp change in the weather marked the service for the 33 passengers (not including the four hijackers) and the crew of seven aboard the Boeing 757 that crashed onto a reclaimed strip mine about an hour after it departed Newark Airport. Low, dark clouds, propelled by a furious wind, arrived with the dawn, turning frigid what had been a string of balmy, humid days. Schools in Somerset County were canceled for the day, as all the district’s school buses were deployed to shuttle people to the memorial site. Attendees were searched and prohibited from freely entering and leaving the service. State police patrolled the grounds on horseback. A covered stage was set up about 500 yards from the crash site, where the Johnstown Symphony Orchestra and a Marine Corps band played to open the service at 9:30 a.m. Relatives sat in white folding chairs on a gravel clearing in front of the stage. Separated by a plastic fence behind the relatives were the 4,000 others who attended.”

Flight 93 Victims Praised as Patriots (09/11/02)
At KDKA by The Associated Press
“Family members clutched flowers and flags - some wore pins with photographs of their lost loved ones - under overcast skies as wind whipped across the pastoral setting. Military aircraft, first large cargo ships and then four fighter jets, flew over the ceremony in formation.... Some of the family members of the victims also spoke. Murial Borza, an 11-year-old who lost her half-sister, Deora Bodley, asked for a minute of silence for world peace. Sandy Dahl, the wife of Flight 93 pilot Jason Dahl said, ‘If we learn nothing else from this tragedy, we learn that life is short and there is no time for hate.’”

Courage of Flight 93 heroes celebrated in Pa. (09/12/02)
In The (Penn State) Collegian by Adam Fabian
“‘We are all grateful,’ Director of Homeland Security and former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge told the listeners. ‘Your loved ones did not expect to serve the cause of freedom that Tuesday morning, but serve freedom they did.’ Ridge also took a moment during his statement to thank the citizens of Shanksville for their help and support. ‘This sleepy little town puts its arms around you and embraces you,’ he said. After those remarks, the family members of Flight 93 stood and applauded the crowd that included many residents of Shanksville and surrounding communities.”

Site of Crash Is “Hallowed Ground”: In a Pa. Field, Thousands Pay Homage to Where America First Fought Back (09/11/02)
In The Washington Post by Sue Anne Pressley
“There is nothing much to see at the rural crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 — just a line of charred trees and a distant disturbance in the oats field where the giant crater was. Yet people keep coming here, with the hushed reverence of church-goers, more than a thousand of them a week. Most say it helps them somehow. They stand quietly near the wall of tokens brought here by other visitors — the police patches and firefighters’ caps from around the country, the flags with broken hearts designed by someone in Ohio, even plain rocks with ‘Thank you, Heroes of Flight 93’ scrawled over them in big black letters.”

Flight 93 Passengers Honored with Gratitude (09/11/02)
At ABCNews by David Morgan of Reuters
“The tolling of a single bell and release of white doves on a wind-swept field on Wednesday honored the memory of the 40 passengers and crew on United Airlines Flight 93, a year after their plane crashed during an onboard struggle with four hijackers. Near the edge of a reclaimed strip mine in the Appalachian highlands 70 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, thousands — including more than 500 relatives of the victims — gathered for an anniversary service under leaden skies, many tearfully clutching American flags.”

Site Of Tragedy Now A Shrine To American Heroes (09/02/02)
At Cox Newspapers by Bob Dart
“Todd Beamer’s final call to action is repeated on hundreds of signs, rocks and scrawled messages at the temporary memorial that overlooks the crash site. Congress will soon approve legislation authorizing the National Park Service to build and maintain a permanent memorial. It will be designed with input of the families of the 40 victims of Flight 93. Meanwhile, thousands of tributes have been attached to a billboard-sized rectangle of chain-link fence. Smaller memorials are added daily by the visitors who drive down Skyline Drive to reach the site. Visitors write on every available spot — poster boards attached to the fence, the guard rails around the parking lot, stones on the ground, even the porta-potties. ”

Life in small town forever changed by Sept. 11 plane crash (03/09/02)
In The (South Carolina) State by Amy Worden of Knight Ridder Newspapers
“Twenty miles from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, along narrow roads, Shanksville is not easy to find. A driver could easily miss the small sign directing traffic to a temporary memorial along a newly paved mountaintop road. Visitors stop at a parking area built a quarter-mile from the crash site, overlooking the area now ringed with chain-link fence and still under 24-hour guard. A memorial wall - a colorful shrine to the heroes of Flight 93 - has sprouted on the barren land scarred by years of mining. Visitors leave familiar tokens behind - flags, flowers, toys and signs - and they bring intimate mementos such as MIA bracelets, watches, police badges, and a United Airlines flight attendant’s uniform.”

Year One: We Didn’t Change After All (09/09/02)
By Charles Krauthammer in The Spectator
“This September 11 marks not just a day of infamy, but the close of Year One of that war. And to win it we will need to demonstrate — as we did in the other great wars of necessity — patience, endurance, determination, and a willingness to bear any burden. That is a solemn calling, but it need not elicit grim solemnity. Success will require that both sides of the American character — the visible fluff and the (once) buried steel — remain in play. Last September 11, we thought that the one must banish the other. The great lesson, the great triumph, of Year One is that fury and grit did not drive out lightness and laughter. And a good thing too. To prevail in this long twilight struggle, we will need them all.”

The triumph of American values (09/07/02)
By Mark Steyn in The Spectator
“The change that occurred on 11 September was a simple one. When Osama bin Laden blew up the World Trade Center, he also blew up the polite fictions of the pre-war world. At Ground Zero, they’ve been working frantically to clear away the rubble. Likewise, at the UN, EU and all the rest, they’ve also been working frantically not so much to clear away the mess but to stick it back together and reconstruct the great fantasy world as it existed on 10 September, that bizarro make-believe land where Nato is a ‘mutual defence alliance’ and Egypt and Saudi Arabia are ‘our staunch friends’. Even in America, some people are still living in that world. You can switch on the TV and hear apparently sane ‘experts’ using phrases like ‘Bush risks losing the support of the Arab League’.”

America, Be Angry: This is no time to “get over” Sept. 11. (08/13/02)
By Rod Dreher at The National Review Online
“The most patriotic thing the networks can do in the days running up to the September 11 anniversary is run those pictures of the planes crashing into the towers, over and over. They were taken off the air days after the attack, for fear of traumatizing the shocked nation. Well, we need to be shocked again. We need to be traumatized again. Our national survival depends on it. And this time, don't withhold the images of human beings jumping to the