I am presently reading one of the preeminent biographies on Lincoln: “Lincoln, A Life of Purpose and Power” by Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University, Richard Carwardine. It is an inspiring and refreshing portrait free from the taint of historical revisionists such as Howard Zinn, whose requisite college and high school textbook, “A People’s History of the United States” cherrypicks Lincoln’s worst moments and paints him as a racist and capitalist oppressor. Carwardine’s biography reveals the glorious and revolutionary roots of the GOP, of which Lincoln was one of the early founders. It’s a proud heritage that we should cherish and publicize. I wrote the following piece for the January issue of the Queens Village Eagle in order to promote the annual Lincoln’s Day Dinner, where we will resume the tradition of honoring Lincoln with a lecture on his life and legacy.
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The Party of Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln is considered the greatest man to have served as president of the United States of America. He was also the first president the newly formed Republican Party put into office.

We will be honoring our 16th president and his steadfast vision of freedom in America, by holding our annual Lincoln's Day Dinner with a roster of exciting speakers including Curtis Sliwa - the founder of the Guardian Angels, Daniel Donovan - Richmond County District Attorney, Dennis Walcott - New York City Deputy Mayor and Gerald Matacotta - professor of history at Queensborough Community College, who will be honored as the educator of the year. As always, we will be entertained by a great selection of music and enjoy the excellent cuisine at Antun's.

As one of the highlights of this year's event, we will be treated to a lecture on Abraham Lincoln by Professor Matacotta to shed light on why the Republican Party is known as the "Party of Lincoln." This will help us navigate the present times of political schism, terrorism and war by revisiting the vision and ideals of the Great Emancipator of the slaves and savior of our nation.

The troubling times of today are similar to the pre-Civil War era of our nation leading up to 1860 when Lincoln was elected president as the nation was breaking up into warring factions over the issue of slavery. The essentially pro-slavery Democratic Party was torn apart. At first it was led by Stephen Douglas, a moral relativist on the issue of slavery, however the southern faction nominated Breckinridge, the party's leading pro-slavery advocate. Democrats upheld slavery as a positive institution for the survival and expansion of the cotton economy, which enriched the plantation owners and built the wealth of the Southern states on the backs of human beings treated as chattel.

The Republican Party was a newly formed coalition of parties founded from the Free Soil anti-slavery movement opposing the expansion of slave labor into new territories, in order to quarantine the evil institution to the Deep South and allow it to die a natural death. Lincoln, the party's anti-slavery spokesman stood up decisively as the leading figure for change in a tumultuous climate of violent clashes between Free Soilers and pro-slavery forces, race riots and church burnings. The Republican Party's message of individual freedom and free enterprise for a new era resonated with the emerging middle class of workers, entrepreneurs and pioneers.

At a time when people resisted change, Lincoln appeared on the scene as the new breed - the enterprising new man for the new America. He was a self-educated, self-made man of virtue, ambition and honesty, with a fierce revulsion against the old social order of idle aristocratic southerners who enslaved human beings and scoffed at hard work, sweat and toil. Lincoln won and lost local elections on the road to the presidency, but along the way he molded and shaped public opinion with impassioned eloquence. He raised the consciousness of ordinary citizens based upon the mandate of the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal" and the fundamental directive against the tyranny of one man's domination over another. His belief was that freemen contribute to the prosperity of society as they pursue the American dream. He declared unequivocally that slavery was wrong, freedom was right and there was no middle ground. In his famous "House Divided" speech he implored: "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other."

When Lincoln was elected to the presidency, the Southern states seceded and the nation was plunged into Civil War. As Commander-in-Chief he led the divided union through the war and ultimately united the nation based on the just cause of equality for all and emancipation of the slaves. He stood valiantly against any party or foe that would undermine this righteous cause saying: "Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged."

Returning to the present, we see elected officials and the media engaging in lies, false propaganda, fraud, and any other means for political gain, thereby undermining the people's trust, our national unity in wartime, and the very founding principles of our great country. In our own party there are elected officials who choose political expediency over Republican principles. Therefore it is urgent that we return to our roots as the "Party of Lincoln." Looking forward to the crucial election of 2008 and today's pressing issues of the war in Iraq, the media crusade against it, national security, bloated bureaucracy, and the question of illegal immigration, it is important to understand the purpose driven character of the man, Abraham Lincoln in order to develop new leaders and field candidates who will stand on such moral high ground for the future of our great nation.

Two interesting posts this afternoon consider the morality of the hanging of Saddam Hussein. Steve Bainbridge does an excellent job of laying out the morality of the hanging, according to Catholic teachings and reasoning that are more universal than solely vengeance. It’s a very worthwhile read, and to consider.

Another devout Catholic, the blogstress Anchoress, also ruminates on the death penalty and Saddam. She asks, but doesn’t answer as it’s up to each of us, an important question:

No, I am not sad that he will die. But I think we should never enter these things without wondering what it does to us, too, and to our souls. If we stop thinking about that, if we lose sight of the spiritual aspect of everything we do…well, then it will be easy to lose sight of ourselves.

With all due respects to sensitivities, we should consider what it does to our souls when we do not act to fight and, when necessary, expunge evil.

EVIL. Yes, there is such a tangible thing as evil. It clearly exists in the extremes where one with purpose and repeatedly engages in mass tortures and exterminations. It is necessary to remove its perpetrators from this earth in order to both avoid more and provide a clear and present warning to others who may go down that path. A public execution, filmed and viewed, of Saddam Hussein serves that worthwhile end.

It would, instead, be a countenance of evil, a harm to our souls, to do less. It’s not noble or godly to allow evil to live but rather a crippling weakness of soul to not stand for what’s right. Weakness, the easy or sophistic or rationalized path, only leads to condoning evil acts by oneself or others.

It’s not for vengeance that Saddam’s execution is correct. (See, if you will, some photos of what Saddam did to others.) It’s for our and others’ souls.

I'm ordinarily not a supporter of the death penalty, for many common reasons. In this and similar cases, however, there are overriding necessities, most prominent of which is the sanctity of our good purpose on earth.

Much of the commentary upon the passing of President Gerald Ford debates his decision to pardon President Nixon for his Watergate break-in cover-up: whether it healed to move forward, or whether it missed an opportunity to make more explicit the rule of law for his successors. There’s another pardon that isn’t discussed, which may have had more lasting effects: the Ford and President Carter approaches to amnesty and pardon for Vietnam war draft dodgers and deserters.

President Carter’s abdication of the even minimal responsibility for one’s actions demanded by both President Ford and the public has had more lasting deleterious effects for America than the pardon of an already punished Nixon.

The consensus reflection upon the life of President Gerald Ford is that he led by an exceedingly decent, honorable and honest life, and that at a most trying and divisive time in our history he calmed tensions for the nation to go forward. I couldn’t agree more. The Moderate Voice offers a broad sampling of the reflections. One, by “Captain” Ed Morrissey of CaptainsQuarters blog, is referred to as a “must read,” and as usual for the “Captain” it is.

Regarding the pardon of President Nixon, most see the need for this healing, with Nixon having paid the price of loss of office being seen as adequate punishment. Some on the Left see a lost opportunity to further damn the electorate that overwhelmingly elected him. These critics revile Nixon, and Ford, for seeking a “peace with honor” finale to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. They ignore the consequences of their post-Watergate abandonment of U.S. pledges of aid to South Vietnam, including the death and concentration camps suffered by millions, and the encouragement to adversaries elsewhere against a weak-willed America that continues to this day.

To get a better appreciation of the arguments, one might consider the Ford and Carter approaches to amnesty and pardon for Vietnam era draft dodgers and deserters. Ford offered a healing plan that was consistent with America’s post-war treatment of draft evaders and deserters, conditioned by pledge of allegiance to America and two-year’s service. The Left held out for an unconditional pardon, which they largely got from Carter.

I was part of this debate at the time. In the March 3, 1972 The Daily Pennsylvanian, I wrote an op-ed in the University of Pennsylvania newspaper (where I was a post-Vietnam service grad student) opposed to unconditional amnesty. It caught the eye of Freedom House, where an expanded version was published in the March-April 1973 Freedom at Issue magazine. This caught the attention of the Los Angeles Times, who reprinted it in their Sunday, March 25, 1973 opinion section. (My piece was given twice the space as the opposing view by Jean-Paul Sartre!)

I noted that a Gallup poll in 1972 found only 7% in favor of unconditional amnesty. I showed that most of the unconditional amnesty supporters came from a “premise of intolerance. Not only are the evaders and deserters to be welcomed back, but they are to be welcomed as heroic resisters of a nefarious policy of purposeful genocide.”

As late as February 23, 2001, James Webb (before his devil’s deal with the Kos’ian descendants of the decision by Carter to pardon Vietnam era evaders and deserters) wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Carter's first official act as president was to pardon, en masse, all those who had been or could be charged with draft evasion during the Vietnam era. Motivated by the ever-present desire of American politicians to "heal the wounds" of the Vietnam War, and beyond doubt manipulated by the army of antiwar McGovernites who had seized control of the Democratic Party, Mr. Carter's gesture had the symbolic effect of elevating everyone who had opposed the Vietnam War to the level of moral purist, and by implication insulting those who often had struggled just as deeply with the moral dimensions of the war and had decided, often at great sacrifice, to honor the laws of their country and serve….

Nor did President Carter's abuse of power end with the pardoning of draft evaders. Some had criticized this blanket amnesty as having made class distinctions between college boys who were "enlightened" enough to oppose the draft and blue-collar boys who had gone into the military and then either seen the light regarding the war or suffered the supposed abuses of the military system. Liberal groups and antiwar politicians assailed the "inequities" of military justice and the "randomness" of its characterization of service when one left the military, despite the fact that 97% of those who served during Vietnam had been discharged under honorable circumstances. Within weeks of pardoning all the draft evaders, Mr. Carter invoked his powers as commander in chief and ordered that the "bad paper" military discharges of hundreds of thousands of deserters, malcontents and nonperformers be mandatorily upgraded, so long as they met one of six easily attained criteria.

Again President Carter had upset a delicately balanced apple cart among the Vietnam generation. By wiping the slate clean for those who had dodged the draft or created problems while in the military, he signaled to those who had served honorably during a horribly emotional period that their self-discipline, loyalty, wounds and even deaths did not matter….

These acts resonate when one evaluates Bill Clinton's incessantly arrogant presidency, from the endless string of conscious and serious abuses of power to the "conversion" of White House furniture and china on his way out the door. For what we are seeing are the echoes of a pervasive elitism, from people who were taught when young that the laws that applied to their countrymen did not necessarily apply to them.

For two reasons, the U.S. media may hope the Haditha charges against eight Marines are dismissed, or don’t come to trial.

First, it will allow those within the media who write that the U.S. is guilty of atrocities, an evil plan gone awry, or even just that the whole engagement is a tragic miscalculation, to claim that the U.S. military doesn’t care or is engaged in a cover-up.

Second, the U.S. media would avoid itself possibly being put on trial for its shortcomings in coverage of the Iraq war. To the extent that the prosecutors’ case relies upon the Iraqi stringers and suspect “witnesses” used by U.S. media, their case will be both weak and will publicly expose the grave shortcomings of the U.S. media’s operations in the Iraq war zone – in effect, functionally often acting as useful adjuncts to our enemies opposing the secure and free future of Iraq and the region.

(This is a long post, so please continue below the fold. The conclusion: If the Haditha charges go to trial, this may be quite a trial – and the U.S. media’s failure to take proper care in a war zone be exposed, moreso than among the Marines.)

One of the Democracy Project site's strength is its true respect for all religious heritages. As James Madison, the Father of our Constitution, wrote in his Memorial and Remonstrance:

Because finally, "the equal right of every citizen to the free exercise of his Religion according to the dictates of conscience" is held by the same tenure with all our other rights. If we recur to its origin, it is equally the gift of nature; if we weigh its importance, it cannot be less dear to us; if we consult the "Declaration of those rights which pertain to the good people of Virginia, as the basis and foundation of Government," it is enumerated with equal solemnity, or rather studied emphasis.

Our nation is unique for its ability to respect and abide the religious and cultural traditions of all its citizens, which is something uniquely different than our friends in Iraq, and the greater Middle East, who by and large have not learned that they will be able to exercise their religious freedoms more effectively if they stopped forcing other Iraqis into believing the way they do. But perhaps, this situation would be less of a problem, if the Americans had protested more fervently when the Iraqis demanded that Islam be the central doctrine that guides all legislation in Iraqi's new government.

A quick read of the Iraqi constitution reveals that we are reaping what we sow in Iraq for our failure to head the words and wisdom of our founding fathers who established a system that has worked for over 200 years.

For those Christians living in the Middle East, unable to live in governments that respect your faith, Merry Christmas. Do know that millions of us are praying for you.

Fellow blogger Mitchell Langbert wrote an excellent and enlightening analysis of the economic climate and Mayor Bloomberg’s Plan for New York City invoking the notorious “Let them eat cake” mantra of the haughty pre-revolutionary saga of French history. It is a sad but true commentary on the economic and social decline of the once greatest city in the world. The true pioneers of prosperity and progress, the local businessmen and entrepreneurs continue to make a hasty exodus while the void is filled at the bottom with public sector union jobs and at the top of the bloated bureaucracy, with highly compensated staffers of a dysfunctional one-party government. Bloomberg’s new plan is a Christmas bonus for the privileged few lawyers, advertising executives and foreign diplomats who occupy skyscraper penthouses and the corner offices overlooking Central Park. I had my own rude awakening years ago with a trademark attorney occupying the penthouse suites of the Chrysler building to whom I naively hand delivered my papers and was charged $800 for our 40 minute meeting plus $50 clerical charges just to make a copy.

This aloof economic climate that caters to the wealthiest cosmopolitan elites brings to mind another sad phase of post-revolutionary France. This period was the reactionary era of the Bourbon king Louis Phillippe when the people were demanding a greater access to voting which was only granted to the narrowest segment of the wealthy classes of the population. In response to their demands his arrogant chief minister Francois Guizzot flippantly replied: "What's the matter with the suffrage? There's no problem here. Just make more money." Our own out-of-touch Mayor acting like a divine right monarch of New York who has even dispatched health police to ban smoking and transfats because his Excellency knows what is best for the peasants, tells them “there’s no problem with New York. Just make more money.”

I am reminded as well of the recent fiery speech that Rabbi Spero delivered comparing the New York Times reading bluebloods of New York’s Upper West Side to Parisians. The New York Sun reported a rally in Manhattan where he called for the boycott and federal prosecution of the New York Times for the treasonous act of publishing national security secrets used to monitor the financial trail of terrorists. Rabbi Spero then spoke about the character of the readers who would be attracted to this unpatriotic worldview as reported in the news story by the Sun:

He added that the patriotic image of the Times had disappeared, saying that it was now only read by the "snobs on the Upper West Side" and "trans-nationalists and cosmopolitans," who called themselves "citizens of the world, not Americans. They think that they have had graduated from America and see themselves more as Parisians or something like that," he said.

Merry Christmas, in Hebrew and Arabic, have different impacts on Palestinian Christians.

Two religion-based areas are next to each other: Israel, and Gaza and West Bank where Muslim religious law is now adopted as part of the Palestinian Authority constitution. The results: In Israel, the Christian population has increased, while in Palestinian areas it has decreased.

[T]wo-thirds of the Christian Arabs had already departed between 1948 and 1967, when Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt the Gaza Strip, prior to the "occupation" and decades before construction began on the security barrier to protect Israel's population from waves of deadly suicide bombers. During the same period, hundreds of thousands of Christians were leaving other Muslim-ruled countries in the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa. Every one of the more than twenty Muslim states in the Middle East has a declining Christian population. In fact, Israel is the only state in the region in which the Christian Arab population has grown in real terms - from approximately 34,000 in 1948 to nearly 130,000 in 2005.

The Chicago Tribune reports on the sad Christmas in Bethlehem:

Bethlehem, revered as the birthplace of Jesus, is losing its Christians, an exodus spurred by economic hardship and the grinding conflict with Israel.

Once an overwhelming majority here, Christians have dwindled to about a third of the population of Bethlehem and less than 2 percent of all Palestinians in the West Bank, according to several estimates.

London’s Telegraph reports:

The issue will be in the headlines later this week, when Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, lead a joint delegation to Bethlehem to express solidarity with their beleaguered brethren.

A Bethlehem water engineer tells one of the many common experiences of Christians in Palestinian areas:

"And we know that, if a job becomes available, it will go to a Muslim, not a Christian." He said tension between the Christian minority and Muslim majority is a daily feature of life. It rarely flares into violence or spectacular acts of cruelty, but it steadily corrodes the quality of life enjoyed by Christians.

"My son, Nazar, when he was just 13, used to come home from school and the Muslim boys of his age from the local refugee camp would run after him shouting 'Nazarene, Nazarene', which is a derogatory local term for Christian. Once they caught up and threatened to beat him unless he said Allah was his god and Mohammed his only prophet. We had to move house, but now my son has left university and cannot get a job, so every day he says we must leave."

A Bethlehem cab driver tells us in another British newspaper’s report:

"Every day, I experience discrimination," he says. "
"It is a type of racism. We are a minority so we are an easier target. Many extremists from the villages are coming into Bethlehem."

The owner of the only Christian TV station in Bethlehem plans to leave:

Samir Qumsieh is general manager of Al-Mahed - Nativity - which is the only Christian television station in Bethlehem.
He has had death threats and visits from armed men demanding three acres of his land - and he is now ready to leave.
"As Christians, we have no future here," he says.
"We are melting away. Next summer I will leave this country to go to the States. How can I continue?
"I would rather have a beautiful dream in my head about what my home is like, not the nightmare of the reality."

When we say Merry Christmas, let's remember the Christians in Arab lands for whom it's not so merry.

A Yiddish proverb says, don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining. That seems to be the weather report from Left bloggers – it’s just rain -- regarding the Associated Press’ refusal to produce its star source for 61 reports of violence in Baghdad, including the Shia immolation of six Sunnis who, also, no one can find, nor to produce any photos or other evidence.

Eric Boehlert of Media Matters, a left-wing self-described truth squad aimed at conservatives, has taken liberties with the truth and the gravity of the matter by using partial and out of context quotes from conservative bloggers to claim a conservative conspiracy to silence the press.

As Wikipedia sums up, Media Matters has some truth problems about its rainmakers:

On Dec. 1, 2004 Media Matters issued a statement saying that "neither Media Matters nor its president and CEO David Brock has received any money from [George] Soros or from any organization with which he is affiliated." Three months later, it revised this statement by acknowledging support from organizations and individuals aligned with or funded by Soros such as moveon.org, Peter Lewis and the New Democratic Network, but denying direct funding by Soros himself.

Michelle Malkin brings us up to date about the AP’s Waldo. The AP still will not produce him, nor will they answer any questions except with, “I have no additional information for you at this time.” No one else -- journalists, Iraqis, U.S. military -- can find Waldo, either.

A Chinese proverb says, “One who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; one who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.” The Left bloggers who deny the AP’s flim flam are determined to remain fools, but better stay away from my shoes.

The fact that Senator Meier’s term is ending this month and he took the time to write this thoughtful letter in response to my Memo to ABOR Sponsors shows how this issue of academic freedom and the lack of intellectual diversity on campus touches a nerve and resonates with the public.

The Senate
State of New York
Raymond A. Meier
Senator, 47th District

December 14th 2006

Dear Mr. Orenstein,

I received your memo in which you ask for a modification or addition to New York Senate Bill S-6336 – The Academic Bill of Rights. Specifically, you request a provision that would protect “the civil exchange of ideas,” especially as those ideas are facilitated by campus speakers or campus literature. You make this request in light of an October 4 incident at Columbia University.

As a cosponsor of S-6336, I appreciate your concern about this matter. Indeed, I believe that we need to promote an academic culture marked by excellent scholarship, informed conversation, and respectful debate. The foundation of such a culture is, on the one hand a profound respect for the dignity and individuality of each student and professor, and on the other hand, a high regard for careful scholarship and the truth.

My concern for these things notwithstanding, I will be leaving my Senate seat at the end of the month. I am therefore not in a position to work toward a revision of the proposed Academic Bill of Rights. My suggestion is that you reach out to my colleague, the Honorable John A. DeFrancisco. As the sponsor of this legislation, Senator DeFrancisco will control whether there are any revisions made to it.

I wish you well as you endeavor to support and refine the Academic Bill of Rights. As you probably know, S-6336 remained in the Senate Higher Education Committee when the 2006 legislative Session came to a close. Hopefully this legislation will make progress in 2007.

Thank you for sharing with me your suggestion on this matter of mutual concern. Best wishes to you this holiday season.

Very truly yours,

Raymond A. Meier
New York State Senate
47th District

Candace de Russy has written a spot-on article for NRO, "Grossed Out Yet? Salvaging Civilization." After outlining recent examples (from a seemingly endless supply) of low class behavior masquerading as edgy, revolutionary action, Candace calls for transcending transgression:

If civilization is to be salvaged, we must transcend transgression — “regress,” as it were, to an understanding of culture as famously defined by Matthew Arnold, culture as the repository of humanity’s highest spiritual, intellectual and aesthetic aspirations, or “the best that has been thought and said in the world.”

I'm reminded of an article I've been meaning to write for about 15 years: "Nothing Is More Bourgeois than the Affectation of Despising the Bourgeoisie."

On the December 14 broadcast of National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" devoted to discussing the recent Holocaust denial conference in Tehran, ABC News Consultant and Sarah Lawrence College professor Fawaz Gerges argued that the Holocaust and what he called the "tragedies of the Palestinians" were "similar historical injustices." Gerges was interviewed from Egypt, where he is a visiting professor at the American University in Cairo. Robert Satloff, the executive director of the Washington Institute of Near East Policy, was also interviewed and strongly disagreed with Gerges's statements.

Gerges's last words on the show, hosted by Lynn Neary, were: "I really believe that both the Jews and the Palestinians, basically, are, have suffered from similar historical injustices."

I've included many more quotations from Gerges's comments at Campus Watch.

Given the number of scholars and experts in the U.S. who could comment on the Middle East, it's remarkable that an organization like ABC News would turn to a man so willing to engage in moral and intellectual relativism. Whatever one thinks of the Palestinian question, or of Israel's policy toward them, to speak as Gerges speaks is to cheapen the horror of the Holocaust in an effort to deny Israelis any moral foundation for their state. It's also extremely sloppy history, especially for a scholar, and a clear attempt to use the past for contemporary political ends.

Bruce Kesler suggests this quotation as a means of shedding futher light on the abuse of history, from George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949):

"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth."

Let's work to ensure that this doesn't come to pass--again.

Last week I wrote about the “FEC Claws Further Into Your Mouth.” I should have added, the FEC claws further into your pocket. The costs of trying to comply with the McCain-Feingold so-called reforms of campaigns and campaign financing would be prohibitive for any but the well heeled, requiring very experienced and expensive lawyers.

The Swiftboat Veterans for Truth spent about $300,000 on attorney fees before throwing in the towel in order not to spend even more that takes away from its multimillion dollar donations to disabled vets. I spent parts of the past week trying to understand the details and interpretations of McCain-Feingold and, despite some fine websites on campaign law, I made the unusual admission for me -- who commonly works with obscure benefits laws -- that I would have to become an attorney and spend full-time at trying to understand the ins-and-outs of McCain-Feingold and the layers of other campaign finance laws that are called reforms.

Incumbent politicians like it, seeing the benefits of restricting challengers. Some newspapers like it, seeing their control strengthened over what views voters see. Some think tanks like it, either for consistency with their paranoia of anyone wealthy or because of hefty contributions via Soros fronts.

Others who understand the permutations of McCain-Feingold consider it an extreme intrusion on free speech. Bradley Smith served as chairman of the Federal Election Commission in 2004. Today he wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

In what other country can ordinary people have such a profound political effect? Certainly some didn't like what one group or the other had to say. But isn't the point of the 1st Amendment that we hear these messages and make up our own minds, without the government telling us whom to believe or silencing voices before we hear them?

If last week's fines have the desired effect, in future elections we will not hear from groups such as the Swifties or MoveOn. Instead, there will be issues not raised, points of view not heard. The funny thing is, we voters won't even know who is not getting to speak or what issues are not being raised. Politicians who want to "control their own campaigns" will find this to their advantage. But how this is an advantage for democracy, I'm not sure.

Bob Bauer contributes to the Campaign Finance Law Guide. He dissects the editorials in the New York Times and Washington Post about 527’s:

In the Times' vision, regulation is the natural order of things: political money must be controlled in amount. Controls on amount will also serve as quality controls—checks on too much "negativity" or "mudslinging" or "hard-edged activism" or "partisanship." These are the harms, the justification for government restrictions on speech and organizing.

It is worth noting that last week, the Times, in another editorial published Friday, thunderously denounced the Administration for using its subpoena power in criminal investigations to wrest from litigants leaked documents. "A Gag on Free Speech," New York Times (Dec. 15, 2006). Here was an outrage against the First Amendment: unprecedented, and most obviously a deplorable instance of prior restraint. The Times writes this improper exercise of power enables government "to deprive Americans of information they need to make informed judgments about their elected leaders’ policies and actions."

Of course, with its interest in leaked materials, the Times might well have a strong First Amendment complaint to register. It may be that the perceived offensiveness of the government’s behavior—when depriving Americans of access to political information—depends on where the critic stands in relation to the source and use of the information. As the Times shows, it is not disinterested inquiry.

The Washington Post this morning turns in a more measured performance on the issue. "Finally, 527s," Washington Post (Dec. 18, 2006) at A24. Also convinced of the need to regulate 527s, it appreciates that the law was "murky" and that the "lower" fines so infuriating to the Times were for that reason "appropriate."

But like the Times, the Post can’t quite pin down the wrongdoing at the center of all this enforcement activity. 527s are said to have been afforded so much freedom that it "allowed them to wield significant influence in the campaign." Influence—made by possible by too much "freedom"—cannot be a federal offense; it is certainly not a constitutional ground for restricting speech or association. The case against 527s is no stronger if we say that, because they exercise any influence over elections, they should have to "play by the same rules as other political organizations." There are all sorts of political organizations, defined as organizations seeking some sway over politics; and the very question before the FEC is which of them is engaged in activity that the government rightly, acting within constitutional bounds, can regulate in some considerable and effectively suppressive detail.

In another post, Bauer concludes the effect:

Organizations with strong views to express about public elected officials and candidates will now know better and think twice.

While vacationing in Arizona last month, I saw in the newspaper that Senator John McCain and wife just purchased a $3 or $4-million condo in Phoenix. So, I suppose that along with his Senatorial privileges and venues he can afford to “straight-talk.” Others without his advantages are disadvantaged in their free speech by McCain-Feingold. Its supporters like it that way.

IMPORTANT UPDATE II: Write c/o Col. Wade F. Dennis

If you send your card to:

Col. Wade F. Dennis
JTF GTMO, APO AE 09360

This should ensure that your cards make it to the troops. We'll try to contact Col. Dennis to let him know of your cards coming.

IMPORTANT UPDATE:

The USPS has cancelled the address that originally appeared in the post below. Follow this link for the new instructions, which require you to send mail to a specific person.
Here's the link:

http://www.usps.com/supportingourtroops/addressingtips.htm

Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu, U.S. Army (Ret.), is a sometime blogger here at Democracy Project and a personal friend. Gordon writes frequently and passionately about American forces serving around the world, and the email below, sent from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, tells of a neglected band of brothers who receive fewer Christmas cards from the American people than those stationed at other locales: the guards at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Worse, they receive more abuse from the press, in spite of the documented fact that they are subject to constant abuse from the terrorists they guard.

As if that isn't enough, last Christmas the terrorists held there received no fewer than 14,000 pieces of mail at Christmas, and they're expected to receive 16,000 this year. All while our troops there are, for the most part, overlooked even by those of us here at home who support their mission.

Here's Gordon's email:

Christmas Greetings

(GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA) At holiday time it is customary for soldiers deployed to remote locations around the world to receive cards from a grateful American public addressed simply to "Any Soldier." Typically such cards are distributed throughout the units and top sergeants make certain that soldiers who may be light in the mail department or who may have a bit of holiday depression receive cards. This tradition has been in place at least since the days of World War II.

Today the tradition continues. Soldiers away from home patrolling in the freezing mountains of Afghanistan and fighting in the cold desert winds of Iraq receive the cards. Many post them on the bulletin boards, share them with companions, and put them inside helmets as they go on operations. Quite often the GIs will reply to the unsolicited seasonal cards and friendships will emerge. Occasionally these friendships will last for years.

Even in the midst of a war in which the opposition and the media desperately try to discourage American popular support for the troops and the mission, thousands of holiday greetings arrive annually in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Kuwait, Korea, and other stations around a troubled world.

But such is not the case at the US base in Guantanamo, Cuba where thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and coast guardsmen toil to defend America. This station has become for the most part the forgotten or neglected theater, or the place most Americans wish would just go away.

Instead of bullets and IEDs, troopers here duck noxious "cocktails" of the fab five: feces, urine, spit, semen, and vomit tossed into their faces. They don't receive Purple Hearts when an enemy detainee requests a comfort item then grabs the hand of the kind guard passing it to him and breaks the trooper's arm or wrist.

Do you want to guess who receives the Christmas and Holiday greetings here in Guantanamo? The terrorist detainees who are confined here to keep them from killing you and your families! Last year alone Guantanamo detainees received more than 14,000 cards, the vast majority from muddle-headed well-wishers and sympathizers. This year local authorities estimate the number may exceed 16,000! Some are addressed to the detainees by name or by their detainee number, available on the Pentagon website. Most are simply addressed to "Any Detainee at Guantanamo."

Like the other 40,000 or so pieces of detainee mail that transit the post office on the base the cards are distributed into the cells. The cards are passed out to the detainees by troopers who may themselves not have received any sort of greeting from home in a long time. Some of the troops here are wary about the way they are perceived by their friends and families at home. One officer said that "nobody in my family was in the military. None of my friends have the slightest clue of what we do here. They think I'm some kind of brutal jailor or something."

It's hard to blame the American public for being ignorant about real conditions here considering that their opinions are shaped in large part by politicians eager to score points against the president by trashing the soldiers at Guantanamo, or by a compliant media ready to believe and promulgate the worse without the trouble of fact-checking or balancing the story.

These troops have been called terrible names by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin and by Ted Kennedy and John Kerry from Massachusetts. On the House side Nancy Pelosi and Jack Murtha act as if the troops are the problem and not the terrorists. No wonder some reservists who have returned from tours in Guantanamo to the States are reluctant to tell their friends where they served.

"People treat me as if I'm a war criminal because I served in Guantanamo," one young soldier told me emotionally. "Now I just don't tell anyone where I was overseas. Maybe it"s better that way."

No, it's not better. Why ought our American troopers have to hang their heads in shame for performin a tough, thankless job that few among us would be willing do at all and none would be able to perform as well? It's past time that these brave men and women of all services--primarily Army and Navy, but Marines, Coast Guard, and Air Force pull a share too--are able to receive the praise, admiration, pride, and gratitude that the country owes them for their effort.

Understand this cold fact: Guantanamo and its population of approximately 430 detainees from more than 25 countries is a combat front in the War for the Free World. While critics complain that America has no human intelligence sources inside the terror groups the single greatest collection of HUMINT sources are confined behind the wire at Camp Delta and surrounding camps.

Never in human history have enemy combatants been kept in conditions of safe, humane care and custody as are found here. Detainees receive quality of food, medical treatment, legal assistance, and due process better than they have ever been exposed to in their terrorist lives. They not tortured or abused, but are treated with far more kindness than any prisoner who has ever been unfortunate enough to be in their cruel clutches.

But still our gallant troopers are maligned, slandered, insulted, and spit upon. And not only by the terrorists here, but also--shamefully--by many of those at home.

Let's turn this sad situation around. If the detainees are going to receive 16,000 pieces of holiday mail from misguided Americans let's make sure that our troops get ten times that from loyal, patriotic Americans! America, you've been asking to do something positive in this war and here is an easy opportunity to do something to make the lonely holiday season bright for our men and women in Guantanamo.

When John Kennedy proposed that we should think not of what government can do for us but what we could do for the government, I don’t think he had in mind what we could do for government workers and public union employees.

The requirement that state and local governments must perform actuarial assessments of their pension and health care promises to their employees is resulting in shockingly huge financial obligations upon their taxpayers.

The new rule, issued by the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) in 2004, goes into effect on December 15th. It will require public-sector employers to treat their health-care promises to workers the same way they already handle their pension obligations: by reporting on the total size of their future commitment, instead of just this year's cost….

The states are having a hard enough time meeting their pension promises…. By 2004, assets in the average state's pension fund were enough to cover only 84% of its accrued pension liabilities, according to Standard & Poor's (S&P), a rating agency.

For the 50 states as a group, S&P reckons, the 16% shortfall is equal to $284 billion, almost as large again as their combined general-spending debt. Many American cities are in a similar bind. Of the 20 biggest, Philadelphia has the largest shortfall, with funding for only 53% of its pension liabilities.

As hard as it will be for state and local governments to meet public employees' pension costs, paying for their retirees' health care is an even bigger challenge thanks to rapidly rising costs. California, for example, faces $49 billion in unfunded pension liabilities, but believes that its health-care shortfall is another $70 billion. Maryland estimates that its unfunded health-care costs top $20 billion. That is $300,000 per public worker, nearly eight times its pension shortfall.

Chris Edwards and Jagadeesh Gokhale of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, reckon that America's state and local governments face a total shortfall in their health-care plans of $1.4 trillion. They arrive at that staggering sum by extrapolating from 16 states and 11 local government employers that have tried to gauge their health-care liabilities, which amount to roughly $135,000 per state or local employee. Even if Messrs Edwards and Gokhale have overstated the problem, many experts agree that the health-care shortfall is much bigger than the pension gap.

Fortunately for public employers, they probably have more leeway than with pensions to tackle the problem. Courts in many states have issued rulings that make it hard for those governments to break a pension promise to their employees. Health-care plans are less sacrosanct. The sooner public employers start breaking those vows the better. The new accounting rule, though dreaded by some officials, should help—by shedding some much needed light on the problem.

Revealing the cost of these tremendously expensive promises made by our politicians comes at a time when more states are confronting “Massachusetts plan” type approaches to health care coverage for the uninsured. For example, in Illinois, the Chicago Tribune's editorial points out:

As in the Massachusetts plan, every Illinois resident would be required to have insurance, through an employer or otherwise. Those who can afford it would be required to buy it. Those of limited means would be subsidized. Those who refused would be penalized….

The glaring vulnerability in the Illinois proposal is this: It would cost state government $3.6 billion and private employers $1.5 billion more a year.

The report came just a day after a prominent business group warned that Illinois is headed toward "financial implosion." The state has $106 billion in debt and unfunded liabilities, about $8,800 for each resident, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago said. Unless something changes dramatically, that massive gap will continue to grow quickly. Piling on an expensive new health-care initiative would make a horrendous situation worse.

In California, such proposals are estimated to cost up to $10-billion a year, for a state that already has serious budget deficits. Yet, the Governor has been stymied by the Democrat legislature and tens of millions of dollars of public union funds to defeat his reform initiatives, so he’s just going along with the slide into insolvency.

A problem that has emerged since last year – a debt of $40 billion to $70 billion for providing retiree health care in the future – does not have to be formally acknowledged until June 2008 under new accounting rules.

The Republican governor, who wants to continue bipartisan relations with the Legislature, could reopen hostilities with Democrats if he proposes sweeping pension changes opposed by their public-employee union allies….

What could be considered imprudent, however, is the state's promise to provide health care for retired workers and their dependents without creating a pensionlike investment fund to help pay for retiree health costs.

As a result, the Legislative Analyst said in February, future generations will be asked to pay for the health costs of current state workers when they retire.

A recent study of the correlations between taxation levels and the reduction of poverty among the states shows that lower taxes are associated with lower rates of poverty.

Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the pages that follow demonstrate that low-tax and -spending states enjoyed sizable decreases in poverty rates during the 1990s. High-tax and -spending states, meanwhile, suffered increases in poverty rates. Th is study grades each state with regard to reducing both general and childhood poverty rates during the 1990s.

Will the people opt for higher taxes to support government employees, especially at benefit levels largely unavailable or disappearing under their cost burdens in the private sector, which also reduces the opportunities for our poorest to advance? Power to the people!

The Examiner’s editorial coins the word “ridiculosity” to describe former President Carter’s roundly chastised one-sided diatribe book against Israel, concluding:

Everybody is entitled to their opinion, just not to their own set of facts. That observation has particular relevance for Carter because, as Stein [highly reputed Middle East scholar, who resigned from Carter’s “think tank” over the sloppy inventions in Carter’s book] noted in his letter, “being a former president does not give one a unique privilege to invent information or to unpack it with cuts, deftly slanted to provide a particular outlook.”

Carter would do himself and his countrymen a favor by permanently resisting the urge to offer any further commentary on world affairs.

However, there’s little chance of that from Carter. The peanut farmer has been harvesting huge sums from Arab states and supporters to fund his activities.

FrontPage exposes some of the money trail, and it’s not peanuts.

After all, the Carter Center, the combination research and activist project he founded at Emory University in 1982, has for years prospered from the largesse of assorted Arab financiers.

There’s literally tens of millions of dollars flowing from Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and even a source that Harvard refused, and Carter’s “money laundering” scheme for Hamas.

Carter may still harbor illusions of grandeur, seeing himself as an instrument of peace in the Middle East. But an altogether different element explains his enduring popularity in Arab capitals: Not for all the millions they have sunk into the Carter Center over the years could Arab elites have hoped to purchase such a prominent and willing propaganda tool.

Ridiculosity, and avarice. It’s not peanuts propelling Carter's peanut brain.

It is good news that the New York State Academic Bill of Rights (ABOR) legislation is almost certain be re-introduced in next year’s legislative session. With the recent escalation of incidents of campus censorship and bullying of students and speakers with divergent viewpoints, this bill is now even more necessary for safeguarding intellectual diversity and basic constitutional rights on college campuses. The original brainchild of David Horowitz, ABOR was introduced in the NYS Senate as S6336 early in the year sponsored by 10 Senators followed by the sponsorship of the same bill in the Assembly as A10098 by 6 Assemblymembers due to the lobbying efforts of several supporters of ABOR and I.

The stated purpose of the bill is “to ensure that students enrolled in institutions of higher education receive exposure to a wide range of scholarly viewpoints, and to recognize the academic rights of faculty members.” The bill “…ensures an academic environment for both students and faculty members that allows freedom of political viewpoint, expression and instruction” and it requires that institutions of higher education set up a viable grievance mechanism.

The bill’s prospects look promising in the NYS Senate thanks to the continuous efforts of a number of concerned colleagues and students over the past year calling state representatives and sending letters and faxes to Higher Education Committee members. In recent conversations with John Googas, the Chief of Staff of Senator Padavan, one of the co-sponsors, he assured me that the bill would be reintroduced in 2007. He said he doubts that anything will be done with the bill in the current state legislative session. This is a lame duck session that has accomplished absolutely nothing, failing to raise the cap on charter schools as well as a number of other vital measures. He mentioned that the position of the Higher Education Committee, where the bill now sits, is well staked out and its prospects for passage look good once it gets to the floor.

In answer to the dire warnings of the NYSUT and faculty unions, that this bill would bring government intrusion into the classroom, Googas assured me that policing the colleges and classrooms is the furthest thing from the legislator’s busy agendas. He said that it’s not up to the legislators to get involved in the minutia of academic details. That’s for the faculty and staff to worry about. No government bodies are going to interfere. The purpose of ABOR is to make the faculty and staff face their responsibilities to live up to their own professional standards and depose the ‘rotten apples’ who are abusing the institution for political or other biased agendas. Susan Aron, Chief of Staff of Senator Maltese, another co-sponsor, expressed concern that the bill would face an uphill battle in the Assembly and we should concentrate our efforts there.

Nonetheless, the word from Assembly sponsors is just as reassuring, as far as reintroduction of the bill is concerned. Assemblyman Seminerio’s Chief of Staff Jody Rickert said that the Assemblyman, the chief sponsor, would certainly reintroduce it next year. As a conservative Democrat, he is a strong ally of the academic freedom movement having experienced the abuses first hand. When he was a college student, he was penalized for having a different viewpoint from his professors. In a recent Frontpage interview he expressed his strong support for the bill:

If a professor is there to shape your mind and teach reasoning and thinking, you’re not going to get that from always hearing a one–sided view. The overall reports that I get are from students who have professors that hate America. A student who protests an anti–American professor should not find their marks or their grades in jeopardy. Once we pass it they will have to accept it.

This past year I have reached out to other Assemblymembers conducting several phone sessions with Assemblywoman Barbara Clark, Assemblyman Kirwan, and I have future plans to do so with Mark Weprin, my own Assemblyman. John Delessio, one of Kirwan’s aides, a recent graduate spoke to me about the problems he encountered with his own “leftist Marxist professors”. He said that ABOR would be difficult to enforce in such a classroom setting under the dominion of leftist professors. The biggest problem in his opinion is the hostile academic environment that is not conducive to learning and reasoning. Rather students learn to shut up and agree with their professors in order to get good grades.

In all cases I discussed some of the incidents and experiences I have heard from students on local NY campuses or read about. When I mentioned testimonies of student’s failing grades for disagreeing with their professors, 9/11 conspiracy theory courses presented by professors at Pace University and BMCC, the mob violence at Columbia and censorship at Pace to silence certain viewpoints, they were stunned that such abuses and anti-American indoctrination are such a growing phenomenon right here in their own legislative backyards and vowed to fight for the current ABOR legislation as a key step to a solution.

The need for outside legislation has been proven by the fact that university staff and administrators are reluctant to deal with the lack of intellectual diversity and rampant political indoctrination in the classroom and the curriculum. After publicly declaring his intention to strengthen intellectual diversity on State University of New York (SUNY) campuses and give the matter a fair hearing, SUNY Board of Trustees Chairman Thomas Egan failed numerous times to make time for the issue and encourage a fair debate when it was brought to the table by SUNY trustee Dr. Candace deRussy. In March SUNY trustees once again had had an opportunity to formulate a statewide policy to encourage intellectual diversity and protect the academic rights of students and professors from viewpoint discrimination, but again they rejected all attempts to seriously look into the matter.

As a result of the apparent fact that an Academic Bill of Rights or any other version such as the ACE Statement, could not get a fair hearing on college campuses in New York and no such safeguards presently exist, various supporters of ABOR and I initiated the phone and letterwritting campaign to let our legislators know that we are concerned about the bias on campus. Once the bill is introduced in the new legislative sessions in 2007, we will undoubtedly need to commence our campaign once again and contact our state Assemblymembers and Senators to express our concerns.

The crack reporting team at Editor & Publisher, was fast off the mark in repeating the possibility that the mysterious “policeman” may have been found, who the Associated Press claimed is its prime source for the Shia immolation of six Sunnis but the AP won't produce him.

E&P says:

Though far from definitive proof, it was strong enough to cause at least one conservative blogger to wonder if those who had mocked the AP might have to eat “a huge shinola sandwich.”

That is based upon this from Winds of Change blog:

With the help of some friends who have been doing a smidgen of looking, and it appears - appears, but is not certain - that there is in fact a Jamail Hussein in the Yarmouk police station in Baghdad. We'll know more tomorrow.
Not sure yet what this means in terms of the AP story - but will know more about that tomorrow or Monday as well.
Watch the skies...

Those on the Left, who are quick to judge based on this, are gleefully rubbing their hands at those on the Right who have questioned the AP’s reporting. For example:

Looks like Malkin is stuck between Iraq and a hard place.

Here’s some of the questions that need to be answered:
1. At which mosque did the incident occur? Are there damages consistent with the incident?
2. Is there photographic evidence of the immolations, or the burn-marks on the ground?
3. Where are the bodies? What are their names?
4. Why has no Sunni imams or Iraqi authorities vouched for the incident?
5. What are the names of any “witnesses”? Are they credible?
6. Who is Jamil, or Jamail, Hussein? Is he a knowledgeable policeman? If a policeman, though located far from the scene, how would he know what happened, especially when others nearby don’t? What are his affiliations?
7. What are the qualifications of the AP reporter who sources Jamil? How does AP verify his reporting?

It’s not over, by a long shot. Indeed, “watch the skies.” We eagerly await the E&P’s full report of all the facts. Indeed, we eagerly await E&P even asking the questions.

SEE Flopping Aces for more details.

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, especially compared to waiting for United Nations dithering and excuses for confronting tyrannies.

A new film to be shown in Cambodia finds young people there not believing that the Khmer Rouge slaughtered almost 2-million of their countrymen in the late 1970’s.

Throughout the film older Cambodians describe the horrors of life under the Khmer Rouge, when up to two million died because of the regime's brutality.

The camera then pans to giggling teenagers who declare that they do not believe a word of what their relatives have just said. …

"Our film shows a lot of people saying: 'I don't believe, I don't believe what happened'.

"But I think the better way to understand it is: 'I just have nothing in my own life today to allow me to conceive and to understand the stories of what you're telling me about what happened in the past," she said.

In the film, the young people are eventually shocked into belief when they are taken to visit the "killing fields", where they encounter vast collections of the skulls of victims.

Trials of some of the surviving leaders are due to be begin next year.

Pol Pot, the founder and leader of the Khmer Rouge, died in a camp on the border with Thailand in 1998.

Other key figures have also died. Ta Mok - the regime's military commander and one of Pol Pot's most ruthless henchmen - died on 21 July 2006.

A more fitting end to Pol Pot and friends would have been Mussolini’s.

The United Nations supported trial, decades late, is still stalled by arguments over procedures. Justice delayed is justice denied.

"We can't dwell on this for years," Motoo Noguchi, a Japanese prosecutor who will serve as a judge for the tribunal, said at a talk at Quinnipiac University School of Law. "Now it's time to really start cases. We have to identify the disagreements and we have to make our best efforts to solve them and quickly move to the next stage."…

The Cambodian and international judicial officials said last month that they had encountered "substantive disagreement" in their goal to adopt 110 draft rules for running the proceedings. The rules cover every phase of the proceedings -- preliminary investigations, judicial investigations, the trial and appeals. They also delineate the roles of all parties, including prosecutors, defense attorneys and defendants. The tribunal cannot begin until they are in place.

Meanwhile, one of the documenters for the coming trials, Youk Chhang, was called by Time magazine one of the heroes of Asia over the past 60-years.

Youk's Documentation Center of Cambodia, a private organization financed mainly by foreign grants, has amassed more than 600,000 pages of documents detailing the workings of the Khmer Rouge regime that from April 1975 to January 1979 transformed Cambodia into a slave state. The Center's holdings in the capital Phnom Penh include minutes of Cambodian Communist Party leadership meetings chaired by the movement's ultra-radical chief Pol Pot; confidential reports describing conditions in the countryside where more than a million people died of starvation or related illness; and the confessions under torture of thousands of prisoners killed by Pol Pot's secret police. Without these documents, a trial would be almost impossible. Today the most damning items are kept in armor-plated, fireproof cabinets, guarded day and night.

An affable, engaging 45-year-old, Youk has the demeanor of a soft-spoken diplomat rather than a man investigating mass murder. Yet his quest for justice has been as much a personal odyssey as an abstract search for historical truth. When the Khmer Rouge took power, he was marched off, like millions of others, to do forced labor in the countryside. His brother-in-law and two nieces died. Then his sister was accused of stealing rice. "She denied it," he remembers, "but the Khmer Rouge cadre refused to believe her. To prove his accusation, he took a knife and slashed her belly open. Her stomach was empty. She died a slow and horrible death." …

Youk believes the trial, to which he has devoted so many years, will help Cambodia find closure. Without accountability, he argues, the country will remain dysfunctional and unable to advance, no matter how much foreign aid is poured in. "Cambodia is like broken glass," he says. "Without justice, we cannot put the pieces together."

Outside a very few, my pleas for support of the persecuted, tortured, raped, murdered hills peoples of Vietnam and Laos seem to fall on deaf ears. Their lands have been confiscated and denuded of its valuable trees and resources, to enrich the “new class” of government and lackey businesspeople within and abroad.

The U.S. State Department removed Vietnam from its list of nations persecuting non-state religions, despite the reporting of virtually every world human rights organization. Pathetic is the paltry $1 million the State Department pledged (AP report; free registration) “to pay the short-term bills for people who take great risks by defending human rights ‘in countries where tyranny persists,’ the department said.”

Anna Husarska, senior policy adviser at the International Rescue Committee, gets her say in today’s Washington Post. The U.S. is denying entry to the U.S. by Hmong who fought with us during the Vietnam war who are able to flee from Laos, labeling them “terrorists,” in apparent cooperation with the Laotian designation of them as “bandits.”

The United States has not had much luck in winning hearts and minds as it wages what President Bush calls the "war on terror." But it could at least make an effort to stand by those whose hearts and minds it won decades ago in other conflicts. Instead, it is turning its back on them.

The anti-terrorist laws introduced after Sept. 11, 2001, are keeping thousands of bona fide refugees from places around the world out the United States, on the grounds that their past participation in armed insurgencies, even those friendly to (and sometimes supported by) the United States, makes them a threat to American security. Perhaps no group is more harmed by this legislation -- with its absurdly broad definition of "terrorist activity" -- than the Hmong, a hill tribe of northern Laos.

The U.S. can issue a waiver, and admit them. It should do no less. Why should anyone stand with the U.S. in desperate struggles when we don’t stand with them? $1 million doesn’t buy off our responsibilities.

FOR current events, see the Hmong International Human Rights Watch.

Here’s my two most recent posts on the Hmong: December 12 and December 14.

My 6-year old son told the story of Chanukah to his Christian classmates in his afterschool German-language lesson, and they made little paper menorahs to hang on their trees at home. The triumph of the spiritual over defilers, the centrality of morality over the lures of transitory excuses, appeals to us all.

The overwhelming majority of Americans are Christian. I’m not in favor of the state funding any religious observances. But, neither should the government deny that the root and strength of our being is in Judeo-Christian morality. Otherwise, our city on the hill is just a transitory moment in the murkiness of history, offering no special light.

Rabbi David Aaron offers this insight:

Albert Einstein once said: "There are two ways of looking at the world: Either you see nothing as a miracle or you see everything as a miracle."

Chanukah reminds us that Judaism sees everything as a miracle. But Hellenism saw nothing as a miracle. To the Greeks, a miracle was an absurdity. To them, only what was reasonable, logical, and rational could be real. Miracles were illogical and, therefore, not possible.

The Greeks could never see the light of Chanukah, the light of miracles, because they only believed in the light of logic and reason. According to the Greeks, the world always existed, it never was created. History is an inevitable process — the present and the future are linked to the past and are the necessary outcome of the past. Nothing unusual will happen or can happen. History will march on, a consequence following consequence. Similarly, their view of G-d or gods was of super-beings detached from the world. Their gods didn't care about man. Therefore, miracles were impossible….

Judaism believes that G-d created the world, cares about us, and invites us to be His partner in making history and perfecting His creation. The Greeks assumed that the world is perfect already. Everything is as it should be. The world is eternal, the events of history are inevitable and G-d is impersonal. Therefore, don't expect any favors, don't expect any novelties, don't expect any divine interventions, don't expect miracles, and have no hope. Life is just one big Greek tragedy.

Therefore, the Greeks wanted to do away with the Jews and their commitment to Torah (religious) life….

There’s, also, another reason that Christmas and Chanukah go together: gifts. This short story about the Chanukah business is typical Jewish humor to convey truths.

“Do people enjoy giving gifts and getting gifts?” he asked.

“Of course,” said Reb Cantor.

“And you can profit from this?”

“Hoo boy, yes,” said Reb Cantor. He was puffing and huffing from the climb up the second hill.

“So,” Rabbi Abrahms said, “I don’t see much of a problem. Sell the gifts, make the money.”

“But,” panted Reb Cantor, “what about the Christianization of a Jewish holiday?”

Rabbi Abrahms raised his hands, palms up. “What Christianization? On Hanukkah you tell the story of the Maccabees. You tell the story of the miracle. You light the menorah. You eat the latkes. You give and get some presents. Where’s the Christian part of that?” “The gifts!”

Reb Cantor coughed. “The gifts.”

Rabbi Abrahms shook his head. “Do you think that the Maccabees ate latkes on Hanukkah? No. Potatoes came from America. Some enterprising potato farmer decided that having potato pancakes was good for business. Who are we to complain? They taste good — except for Mrs. Chaipul’s.”…

Reb Cantor sighed. “I suppose you are right. But how can we avoid doing it to excess. If there’s one thing the Christians do, they go all out celebrating their holiday. It’s crazy-making.”

“Last year I went to the Schlemiel house for latkes.” Rabbi Abrahms licked his lips. “They were delicious. I ate so many that I felt sick to my stomach for three days. You know what? This year when I come to your house to eat latkes I’m not going to eat so many. You have to let people learn from their mistakes and set their own limits. Now let’s go back.”

Without another word, Rabbi Abrahms set down the hill at a jog.
“Wait!” shouted Reb Cantor after him. “Richard also wanted to know how you should spell it in English, ‘Hanukkah’ or ‘Chanukah’!” But the young rabbi was already far down the hill, and Reb Cantor decided that it probably didn’t matter anyway, and set off after him.

One enterprising blogger tried to count the usage of the different transliteration spellings of Chanukah. Hanukkah spelling surpassed the guttural speech of East European immigrants.

I don’t care what you call it, especially if I’m not called late for latkes. Just as long as we all remember and live by what is at the core of our being and meaning.

Last Sunday, I wrote “Hmong Need AP” as Google News didn’t show any Associated Press coverage of the horrible persecution, torture and murder by the Laotian government of our Hmong allies in Laos during the Vietnam war. Nor, has there been reporting of the cooperation among Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia to persecute the hills peoples, and to line the rulers' pockets from raping their lands.

I have no reason to believe anyone at the AP acted on my post, and I do thank them if they did, but at least AP did have a story yesterday, although the AP skipped the gory details of how the Lao military treats the Hmong except to refer to Amnesty International’s condemnation, and skips the economic motivations for persecuting the hills peoples. The Hmong still need AP's help, with more depth reporting.

More than 400 members of the Hmong hill tribe minority who have been on the run for decades from the communist government of Laos surrendered to the authorities there on Wednesday, supporters of the group said….

Fifty Lao government soldiers showed up a couple of hours after the group arrived and began interviewing and registering those who surrendered, in preparation for resettling them, the commission said. At the same time, the village chief served them a meal of rice and pig.

The mood turned cooler as soldiers separated the Hmong from the villagers and refused to say to where they would be moved, according to the latest information the commission received….

Thousands more Hmong are believed to have remained in the jungle, and unconfirmed reports say they continue to face attacks by the government.

The two founders of the Fact Finding Commission, Ed and Georgie Szendrey of Oroville, Calif., witnessed a similar surrender in June last year of about 170 people, also from Moua Tua Ter's group.

That was also accomplished peacefully, and the returnees resettled. However, independent aid agencies and foreign diplomats were not allowed access to that group, and the Szendreys said that many fled to Thailand afterward because of poor living conditions….

Several highly critical reports by Amnesty International accused the Lao government of gross human rights violations in persecuting the Hmong.

The Lao government denies any human rights violation and usually labels the armed Hmong groups as "bandits."

The latest challenge to mandarin journalism, that us mere citizens should accept without question the delivered wisdom of our betters who wear the robes of – for example – the Associated Press, concerns the unfolding story of where’s Waldo, er, Jamil Hussein, not to mention the purported bodies, “witnesses,” mosque damage, etc. that the AP claims – repeatedly – vouch for its reporting that six Sunnis were immolated by Shiites.

No less an authority on journalism than Eason Jordan, formerly the CNN bureau chief in Baghdad who admitted to slanting its reporting to accommodate Saddam Hussein, and then accused the U.S. military of targeting journalists, has started a new website to aggregate news about Iraq. And, at its debut, Jordan has already stepped into the midst of the battle.

I haven’t investigated all of Jordan’s site for worthiness, but what immediately struck me is that there’s no Topic for “Journalism,” one of the major fronts of the war. Not a confidence builder in the completeness of the site. I wrote to the site, inquiring about this lack of coverage, and will report back if I receive an answer.

Nonetheless, Jordan has offered his site’s resources and Michelle Malkin accepted an invite to join in a trip to Iraq to search for Jamil Hussein. The richness of the commentary is instructive, fascinating, as we watch the unfolding of “the rest of the story” that the AP just wants us to ignore on its say-so, without evidence and despite glaring holes. I strongly suggest you read Malkin’s post, and follow its links, to get up to date.

Gateway Pundit suggests additional AP “sources” to look for in Iraq. Jules Crittenden and CaptainsQuarters guide us to the background of Eason Jordan, and the one-eyed view of the editor of journalism’s leading daily Editor & Publisher. Confederate Yankee offers the AP the latest in technology. (UPDATE: Reuters' head hears, and introduces new photo technology. Jeff Jarvis sees need for transparency. Is AP listening?)

You haven't read much, if anything, about this in your local mandarin newspaper.........yet. The question is, how much longer will you be restricted to Column B (or, should that be column BS).

UPDATE:
E&P editor Greg Mitchell might have looked at the back issues of E&P, before forgetting about Eason Jordan’s sorry record. It’s not available online, but here’s what Thomas Lipscomb wrote on March 14, 2005 in E&P: (here it is republished in Oregon Magazine)

…In that case, the issue was simple enough. Did or didn't Eason Jordan state, at the off-the-record World Economic Forum Conference in Davos, Switzerland, on January 27, something remotely like the charge that U.S. troops had targeted journalists in Iraq and killed a dozen of them or so? It didn’t matter what the opinions of Barney Frank, Christopher Dodd, or the blogger attendee who spilled the beans, Rony Abovitz, thought. It doesn’t even matter what Jordan said about what he said. And it doesn't matter if he apologized for it or not. The World Economic Forum had videotaped the “off the record” meeting. All CNN and Jordan had to do was to ask the tape be released. …

Readership and audiences of the mainstream media are dropping like a stone, but the reporting by the mainstream media on Rathergate and Easongate give little sign that anyone understands why. CJR Daily managing editor Steve Lovelady gave a pretty accurate consensus of the mainstream media's view of what the real problem was: the bloggers did it! Rather and Jordan went down, he said, because: "The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail."

If it takes “salivating morons” to get major news organizations to clean up their acts and remember Journalism 101, may they slobber on -- before the American people stop paying any attention to big media at all. In the end, as The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz points out, Jordan only resigned “following a relentless campaign by online critics but scant coverage in the mainstream press” Those of us in mainstream media had better ask why we didn’t do a better job ourselves.

The Federal Election Commission (See here for details from the FEC) announced

“major settlements in ‘527’ cases involving Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the League of Conservation Voters and Moveon.org. Civil penalties to be paid by the respondents exceed $600,000 in the aggregate, with the largest amount paid by Swift Boat Veterans ($229,500). As in its recent settlement with the Sierra Club, the FEC has signaled an aggressive use of the “part b” or second prong of the express advocacy standard, which provides that it includes public communications “taken as a whole” that “could only be interpreted by a reasonable person as containing the advocacy of the election or defeat” of a federal candidate. 11 CFR 100.22(b). …

There are several implications here:

The FEC had been ordered by a court considering the reach by McCain-Feingold to reach further, and detail regulations of 527 organizations. These settlements will be used by the FEC to argue to the court that further regulations are not necessary. Whether this or other overreaching courts will agree is another matter.

It will bring these settlements to the courtroom of Judge Emmett Sullivan to support its contention that, because its regulatory authority is sufficient to address claims against 527s, it has not abdicated its responsibility in declining to adopt new 527 rules.

This Campaign Finance Law site ponders other implications.

What is that message?

One is that the FEC will hold organization's liable for their intended "purpose," reflected, for example, in fundraising solicitations—and this may be the decisive finding regardless of whether the public communications eventually issued cross over into express electoral advocacy. A number of examples cited by the FEC focus on what was said to prospective donors. An example, appearing in the MoveOn settlement, is the stated intention to "challenge George Bush’s policies and record in order to reduce support for his re-election."

Now the FEC has no standards for judging purpose—no such term is defined, and the FEC has so far been able or unwilling to adopt any such definition. But it is apparently current enforcement policy to consider what is said internally, and not only to the public.
This means, of course, that public criticism, which might be devoid of terms of "express advocacy," would have its legal fate tied, to some undetermined degree, to the expected purpose of those statements as presented more privately to donors and others. The expected effect of the statements will heavily influence the regulatory judgment passed on its content.

Some might say that in the case of 527s, organized as political committees for IRS purposes, this shouldn't trouble anyone. And yet this same rationale will pose challenges for other nonprofits active in politics and, inevitably, in the criticism of candidates and of officeholders who are candidates.

Of course, what is said publicly still matters and this is the other notable feature of the case: It is apparent that the agency is now committed to an elastically applied "express advocacy" standard, on the books but until now rarely invoked, for determing when the criticism of an officeholder is a regulatory event. The facts and circumstances all matter in judging whether the purpose of the criticism is one of influencing an election.

An early indicator of the FEC's use of this standard appeared in the recent Sierra Club settlement. In the cases released today, the FEC applied this flexible standard to find an election-influencing purpose where a public communication attacks or questions a candidate's "character, qualifications and accomplishments." Such appraisals, the Commission concludes in the Swift Boats case, can have, in context, "no other reasonable meaning than to encourage actions to defeat [Democratic candidate Kerry]."

The cases do not, notably, rest on "coordination," that is, on conspiracies with candidates and parties to skirt the law. Liability in these matters followed an inquiry—described by the FEC's General Counsel as a "thorough investigation"—into intent ("purpose") and the meaning and effect of speech. Rick Hasen rightly predicts that this is a development destined to come before the courts. It is too early to gauge the extent to which this will affect non-527 nonprofit community—but it is clear that that the question is not whether it will be affected, but simply how much and how soon.

There’s no doubt that big money will continue to find ways into electoral influence. Moveon.org already has, and true to its Sorosish double-standards is pleased that others may have a harder time expressing their rights of free political speech:

MoveOn.org shut down its Voter Fund organization in 2004, and drove its campaign activity through its political action committee, which raised more than $27 million in the 2006 election cycle. MoveOn also operates a nonprofit organization, MoveOn.org Civic Action, that advocates positions on national issues.

"We welcome the FEC clamping down on pop-up 527s, set up just to influence elections and funded only by big money, since that would almost certainly put Swift Boat Veterans and similar groups out of business," said Wes Boyd, a co-founder of MoveOn.org.

The Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, which instead has contributed the almost $2-million it had remaining to disabled veterans, issued the following press release:

… In the settlement agreement the FEC made it abundantly clear that Swift Boat Veterans and POWs for Truth were operating in good faith based on its understanding of the law at the time. In addition, the FEC voted to take no action against any individual members of the group. The Swift Boat Veterans agreed to settle this dispute without any finding of probable cause that the group violated the Federal Election Campaign Act or the McCain-Feingold amendments to it….

"It is far better to end this legal confrontation now rather than continue a costly battle against government bureaucrats in an area where the law is unconscionably vague," said Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann, founder of the Swift Boat Veterans and POW's for Truth. "Despite the opinions of reputable legal counsel who believe that the Swift Boat Veterans would win on this issue in court, we are settling this dispute now so the bulk of our remaining cash can go to financially assist seriously wounded veterans," Hoffmann added.

The first question that Senator McCain should be asked at every campaign stop is whether he believes politicians should only speak to us but not us to them? Then, if McCain believes that only small donors have that right to speak to politicians, will McCain eschew any donations from big donors, as equity would seem to demand a two-way street? There's many more questions about the silencing of free speech that McCain must answer for.

Columbia University provost Alan Brinkley responded to Inside Higher Ed, regarding coziness by the then Columbia president between 1933-1937 to Nazi speakers and universities, that:

If the events that Professor Norwood describes are examples of “collaboration,” then the collaborators include many thousands of leaders and citizens of the United States, Britain, and many other nations.

Brinkley has been roundly criticized, not for this statement of fact but for Columbia’s failure to apologize for its particular acts.

However, there’s a broader and more contemporary issue at stake: What responsibility do today’s universities have to avoid repeating such acts?

A professorial critic replies:

That kind of everyone-was-doing-it attitude is appalling. Is that the kind of message that one of the most prominent universities in America wants to send to its students – that if many people are doing something, it can’t be so bad…?

Anne Applebaum addresses today’s historical revisionism in her Washington Post column, as it emanates from a Jimmy Carter, from Arabist and Palestinian apologists, or from Iran’s current exercise in holocaust denial:

Of course, Holocaust denial also has broader roots and many more adherents in the Middle East, which may be part of the point, too: Questioning the reality of the Holocaust has long been another means of questioning the legitimacy of the state of Israel, which was indeed created by the United Nations in response to the Holocaust, and which has indeed incorporated Holocaust history into its national identity. If the Shiite Iranians are looking for friends, particularly among Sunni Arabs, Holocaust denial isn't a bad way to find them….

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that this particular brand of historical revisionism is no joke, and we shouldn't be tempted to treat it that way. Yes, we think we know this story already; we think we've institutionalized this memory; we think this particular European horror has been put to rest, and it is time to move on. I've sometimes thought that myself: There is so much other history to learn, after all. The 20th century was not lacking in tragedy.

And yet -- the near-destruction of the European Jews, in a very brief span of time, by a sophisticated European nation using the best technology available was, it seems, an event that requires constant reexplanation, not least because it really did shape subsequent European and world history in untold ways. For that reason alone it seems the archives, the photographs and the endless rebuttals will go on being necessary, long beyond the lifetime of the last survivor.

Lisa Beyer, in Time magazine, writes about “The Big Lie About the Middle East.”

No sensible person is against peacemaking in the Holy Land. Applause and hopefulness would seem the reasonable reaction to the Iraq Study Group's recommendation that the Bush Administration "act boldly" and "as soon as possible" to resolve the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. But as a front-row observer of similar efforts over the past 15 years, I could muster neither response. In lumping the Iraq mess in with the Palestinian problem--and suggesting the first could not be fixed unless the second was too--the Baker-Hamilton commission lent credibility to a corrosive myth: that the fundamental problem in the Arab world is the plight of the Palestinians.

It is a falsehood perpetuated not just by the likes of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, who came late to the slogan after their actual beefs--Saddam with his neighbors; bin Laden with the Saudi royals--gained insufficient traction in the Arab world. The mantra is also repeated like an axiom in the U.S.--in parts of the State Department, in various think tanks, by editorial writers and Sunday talk-show hosts….

To promote the canard that the troubles of the Arab world are rooted in the Palestinians' misfortune does great harm. It encourages the Arabs to continue to avoid addressing their colossal societal and political ills by hiding behind their Great Excuse: it's all Israel's fault….

Yet, this unhistorical cabal of past and current revisionism is widely tolerated on U.S. campuses, and by James Baker's attitude toward Israel.

We treasure our free speech. No ifs, ands or buts. That free speech, however, is abused by our enemies. No ifs, ands or buts. It provides a false plausability to such as the ISG's sacrificial stance toward Israel, as if that would really matter to our foes.

The appropriate response is not to interfere with free speech. The appropriate response is to loudly and clearly hold accountable the boards and administrators of our universities for their selections of faculty or speakers whose scholarship is shoddily one-sided or who allow small numbers of radicals to squelch pro-Israel or anti-terrorist students. It shouldn’t take another holocaust, or 9/11, to get them to take their responsibilities more seriously than Columbia in the 1930’s or today. The ISG is a product of such miseducation.

Raquel Lacomba Walker wrote a good piece on her website, about the crisis at Pace, Hitler's Germany and the Academic Bill of Rights:
*****************************************
One cannot deny that radical Islam exists. The best example would be 9/11, but there are many others. Proponents of radical Islam are a small, yet loud, faction of the Muslim community who want to destroy America and Western civilization. In recent years, radical Islamists brutally attacked thousands of innocent civilians of all stripes and colors from Africa to London to New York City. Nothing stands in their way including their own lives via suicide bombers. I think we can all agree that destructive acts upon innocent civilians are always wrong and immoral.

Let me be perfectly clear, the aforementioned comments are not anti-Muslim. Are there dangerous radicals in all ethnic/religious groups? Of course there is, but in the present day, it is radical Islam that is threatening Western civilization the most. That is why it is so important for Americans of all stripes and colors to understand how radical Islam began, and how it is currently and consistently being promulgated to the detriment of our very lives and the future of democracy as we know it.

Political correctness has unfortunately trumped access to information concerning radical Islam. Here’s one example. Michael Abdurakhmanov is a student at Pace University in New York City and President of Hillel, a Jewish campus club. He wanted to view the documentary film, Obsession, on campus, as part of a week-long tribute to Judaism. Obsession describes how radical Islam is spurned, how it has grown, and where it is today. As a courtesy, Mr. Addurankhmanov contacted the President of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) to make her aware of the planned event, just in case the MSA wanted to send a representative to see what the film was about. That’s when all hell broke loose.

Turns out the MSA had big problems with screening Obsession because they claimed it was “insulting” and “offensive” to the Muslim community, although they had not seen the movie, nor does the film target peaceful Muslims, but radical ones alone. After school administrators hauled Mr. Abdurankhmanov into a “mediation” to discuss the dilemma, MSA representatives cursed and screamed, and school administrators let Mr. Abdurankhmanov take a verbal beating and prevented him from ever making his point. Ultimately, the mock court deemed Hillel’s actions inappropriate, with a hint of ramifications if he screens the film anyway, and a threat that the police would be called to charge Mr. Abdurankhmanov and Hillel for hate crimes.

In a gentlemanly manner, Mr. Abdurankhmanov agreed to postpone the viewing of Obsession, in light of some recent hate crimes against Muslims at Pace, but has vowed to continue the fight (God bless him) to screen the film at a later date.

The problem here is that while the viewing of Obsession might make the MSA feel uncomfortable, that does not mean that it cannot be viewed by another group that does not, and in this case, it is rather brave and important that Hillel take the lead in exposing fanatics that are serious about taking over the world and America’s way of life, whether unsuspecting groups become offended or not.

I bet it was the politically correct crowd that kept their mouths closed as Hitler was collecting Jews for extermination. There will always be hatred and bigotry in the world. Keeping it mum in some misguided effort to be politically correct is not helping anyone. The Hillel community is free to occupy space as a club at Pace just as MSA is, but when one club starts dictating the other’s events, their respective rights to peaceful assembly and freedom of speech are being trampled, and their whole purpose to begin with becomes meaningless.

This is a perfect example of why a formal Academic Bill of Rights is the only sure way for college campuses to retain its high standards of equal rights under the law. With the Academic Bill of Rights students do not have to rely on "administrators" and "mediators" to make de-facto rules upon campus organizations, instead all sides can rely on the same uniformed document, one that guarantees rights without discrimination and without bullying tactics.

Last week I published an op-ed in the Washington Examiner that covered the role played by Michigan professor of Near Eastern studies Kathryn Babayan in a recent effort to shout down former Michigan professor of politics Raymond Tanter.

Here's the text of that article:

Is a professor’s job to teach or obstruct?

WASHINGTON - For the University of Michigan community, it must come as some relief that the three people arrested by campus police for repeatedly disrupting a lecture on Iran last Thursday by Michigan professor of politics emeritus Raymond Tanter have no connection to the university.

But the role played by another Michigan professor leaves little room for celebration: Kathryn Babayan, an associate professor of Near Eastern studies, sat with the demonstrators as a sign of solidarity and insulted Tanter personally from the floor.

Speaking by telephone from his home in Washington, where he now teaches at Georgetown University and oversees the Iran Policy Committee, which he founded, Tanter stressed that Babayan didn’t disrupt his talk: “She didn’t prevent me from speaking,” he said.

But he found her actions “particularly disturbing,” because, “she aided and abetted a group that prevented the scholarly transmission of knowledge.”

“The paradox is that a scholar from Princeton [where Babayan earned her Ph.D.] would be part of a group that denies free speech on a university campus,” Tanter said, adding that, “students have rights, and faculty have an obligation to teach, not to obstruct the teaching of others.”

“The issue,” insisted Tanter, “is freedom of speech for students.”

Tanter’s topic was “Stalled International Diplomacy and Problematic Military Options for Iran,” but hecklers prevented him for delivering his talk as he had planned. A Power Point slide show was rendered useless by constant interruptions and shouts, which included “Tanter is a pig.”

Students in attendance were disappointed that Tanter was unable to speak, and that a Michigan professor would ally herself with protesters whose goal was to shout down a lecturer.

Tamara Livshiz, a sophomore majoring in history and anthropology-zoology who attended the lecture, said in a telephone interview that Babayan held a poster protesting Tanter’s appearance. Later, as Tanter attempted in vain to accommodate the hecklers by answering their questions, Babayan stood up, raised her hand, and gave a “long narrative” before asking an insulting rhetorical question.

Livshiz said that “a speaker should inform, but the protesters charged him with trying to enforce his views on everyone else.”

According to Tanter, Babayan accused him of knowing nothing about the Shia in Iran and of being condescending, and claimed that she had “too many young students” at the lecture who she feared, “could be misled” by his views.

Josh Berman, who graduates next week with degrees in psychology and political science, is chairman of American Movement for Israel, a student group that sponsored the talk. Speaking by phone, Berman said that Michigan students who are harsh critics of Israel “tend to be more respectful” of speakers with whom they disagree than were the off-campus hecklers. Yet he was more disappointed in Babayan than in the protesters, whom he says numbered around seven.

“Faculty have an obligation to be respectful toward their colleagues,” said Berman. “You might not agree with a speaker, but students have a right to hear a lecture by an invited guest, who ought to be given the opportunity to speak without being interrupted.”

Tanter seems an unlikely target for such protest. He speaks twice weekly with the Arabic language branch of Al-Jazeera and appears often on the Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. and Al Arabiya, a Saudi-controlled news station based in Dubai. He says he’s on good terms with many scholars with whom he disagrees, including controversial Michigan historian Juan Cole and former Carter administration official Gary Sick.

But his sponsorship by Jewish students was sufficient to send self-professed “anti-Zionist” agitators into action. Livshiz, the sophomore who attended the lecture, said that one protester held aloft a poster that read “No More Wars for Israel,” with the “s” in the word Israel written as a swastika.

Tanter mentioned Israel only tangentially by noting that it may preempt American policy by striking Iranian nuclear facilities on its own.

Tanter’s efforts to be polite in the face of unprovoked rage were noted by an Ann Arbor police officer in attendance who told him: “I found your lecture interesting and informative. It is unfortunate that we had to take action relative to the disruptive individuals at the event. … I felt you addressed the concerns and questions in a respectful manner, despite the harshness and negativity expressed by some of those in attendance.”

But neither Tanter’s irenic nature nor his decades spent in university life, matter to hecklers bent on denying students their right to hear scholarly lectures on university property, nor to professors like Kathryn Babayan, whose behavior so violated the obligations of her vocation.

When the Chairman of Dow Jones says, “The Media Is in Need of Some Mending,” we have to believe the members of the Boards of other media giants are listening. The question is whether they will act. The eminent media Board at the Associated Press, for example, has not been heard from regarding the burgeoning exposure of shoddy reporting and cover-up by AP’s executive editor.

The Media Is in Need of Some Mending
By PETER R. KANN
December 11, 2006; Page A18

Thomas Jefferson, a better president than we've had in a very long time, penned a line back in 1787: "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I would not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." By 1807, in his seventh year as president and after seven years of being subjected to severe press criticism, he wrote: "I deplore the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed, and the malignity, the vulgarity and the mendacious spirit of those who write them."

You'll be relieved to know that Jefferson did remain true to his primary principle: "The press," he concluded, "is an evil for which there is no remedy. Liberty depends upon freedom of the press and that cannot be limited without being lost." He was right then, and we are right now, to prefer a free press, however flawed, to any controlled alternative. Still, as we watched CNN flashing its pre-election logos each day -- "Broken Borders," "Broken Government," "Broken Politics," Broken Everything -- I can't help thinking the media, too, is in need of some mending.

At its best news informs and enlightens the citizens of a free society and thereby safeguards and strengthens our democracy. At its worst -- dishonest, unfair, irresponsible -- the media has potential to erode the public trust on which its own success depends and to corrode the democratic system of which it is so indispensably a part. So, let me touch on 10 current trends in the mass media that ought to disturb us.

The blurring of the lines between journalism and entertainment. Journalism that puts too high a priority on entertaining is almost destined to distort and mislead. Compounding this confusion is a diffusing definition of "journalist." When political operatives moonlight at moderating news shows, when people alternate between being political editors and political consultants, when celebrity newspeople pocket $20,000 fees speaking at corporate conventions while criticizing congressman for conflicts of interest -- we jumble public perceptions of newspeople as well as news.

The blurring of lines between news and opinion. Newspapers have a format that helps maintain the distinction. The Internet, TV and most magazines have neither that format nor that tradition. The result is a blending of news and views. The two are not ingredients to mix together for a tastier meal, they are different courses. Part of the problem here lies in fashionable new philosophies that argue there are no basic values of right and wrong, that news is merely a matter of views. It's a dangerous philosophy for our society and a dagger at the heart of genuine journalism.

The blending of news and advertising, sponsorships or other commercial relationships. The resulting porridges may be called "advertorials" or "infomercials"; they may be special sections masquerading as news, news pages driven by commercial interests, or Web pages where everything somehow is selling something. Without clear distinctions between news and advertising, readers or viewers lose confidence in the veracity of a news medium. And advertisers lose the business benefit of an environment of trust.

The problems and pitfalls inherent in pack journalism. Individually, most reporters are decent, dedicated, fair-minded people. But the press, en masse, tends to lose its common sense and its sense of fairness and independence and what we see all too often is the spectacle of a pack of hounds in pursuit of a quarry. We frequently see this phenomenon in political reporting, where the faintest whiff of scandal, or even of weakness, can send the pack in pursuit. At its worst, the pack, not finding a real problem, proclaims the "perception" of one and this perception becomes self-fulfilling.

The issue of conflict and context. On most issues most Americans are not on polar extremes. On abortion, for example, most seek a sensible center. Where is that center reflected in media coverage that mainly portrays rabid feminists or irate pro-life activists? Balance is not achieved by the talk show format of two extre