Alan K. Henderson's Weblog

FROM: THE DESK OF THE DIRECTOR PROMOTIONS, INTERNATIONAL PROMOTIONS/PRIZE AWARD DEPARTMENT, REF: WBL/67-AO91657984

ATTENTION:
AWARD NOTIFICATION; FINAL NOTICE
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the category C. All participants were selected through a computer ballot system drawn from 70,000 names from Australia, New Zealand, America, Asia, Europe and North America as part our International Promotions Program, which is
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The discovery of DDT by scientist Paul Herman Muller, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948, was originally hailed as a major public health success because DDT kills mosquitoes, lice and fleas, which are carriers for more than 20 serious infectious diseases like the bubonic plague, typhus, yellow fever, encephalitis and malaria.

"To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. It is estimated that, in little more than two decades DDT has prevented 500 million human deaths, due to malaria, that would otherwise have been inevitable," a statement from the National Academy of Sciences said. Before DDT, infectious diseases spread like wildfire, leaving millions dead in their wake. During World War I, typhus epidemics killed 3 million Russians and millions elsewhere in European. But during World War II, before it was blacklisted by Carson and her crew, DDT saved millions of Allied troops from becoming ill and/or dying from infectious diseases such as malaria, typhus and the plague. Plus, DDT also saved the lives of recently liberated Nazi concentration camp survivors by killing off typhus-causing lice.

Other reasons for DDT being hailed as a modern day miracle are legion. For starters, it is extremely cheap to produce, costing $1.44 to spray one house for a whole year. Alternative pesticides being pushed by the U.N. and environmentalists are 10 to 20 times more expensive.

Another reason DDT is such a blessing is that it enables developing countries to make significant economic progress, thanks to plunging infectious disease rates. According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control, "The unparalleled benefits stemming from [public health] programs [in developing countries] are due almost entirely to the use of DDT. DDT provides the only safe, economically feasible eradication measure available today [that helps to promote economic development."

The nation of India provides an illustrative example. Before the World Health Organization began its worldwide malaria eradication program in the 1940s, India had more than 100 million cases of malaria and 2.5 million deaths annually; produced less than 25 million tons of wheat per year; was host to widespread starvation; and spent 60 percent of its GDP on malaria control. But by the '60s, India's malaria cases dropped to fewer than 100,000 reported cases, with less than 1,000 deaths. Thanks to this stability, India produced more than 100 million tons of wheat annually.

But most importantly, DDT is also not hazardous to humans or the environment -- despite all the propaganda to the contrary. According to tests conducted by Dr. Philip Butler, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service's Sabine Island Research Laboratory, "92 percent of DDT and its metabolites disappear" from the environment after 38 days. (See Environmental Protection Agency's DDT hearings transcript, page 3,726.) Plus, humans have nothing to worry about small exposures to DDT.

"DDT is so safe that no symptoms have been observed among the 130,000 spraymen or the 535 million inhabitants of sprayed houses [over the past 29 years of its existence]. No toxicity was observed in the wildlife of the countries participating in the malaria campaign," said the WHO director in 1969. "Therefore WHO has no grounds to abandon this chemical which has saved millions of lives, the discontinuation of which would result in thousands of human deaths and millions of illnesses. It has served at least 2 billion people in the world without costing a single human life by poisoning from DDT. The discontinuation of the use of DDT would be a disaster to world health."

Carson predicted that pesticides -- namely DDT -- would cause "practically 100 percent" of the human population would be wiped out from a cancer epidemic after one more generation. This would come about because a race of super-insects, impervious to pesticides, would come about threatening U.S. farms. Desperate farmers then would triple the amount of pesticides they were using so they could stop the super-bugs from destroying their crops. As a result, DDT would eventually work its way up the food chain, killing off first the bugs, then the worms, then the birds (hence her title), the fish and finally mankind.

The White House wanted any applicants for citizenship to be naturalized in time to register for the November election, so the pressure on the INS was constant. On March 21, Elaine Kamarck in the Vice President's office sent an e-mail to Farbrother saying, "THE PRESIDENT IS SICK OF THIS AND WANTS ACTION. IF NOTHING MOVES TODAY WE'LL HAVE TO TAKE SOME PRETTY DRASTIC MEASURES." Farbrother responded, "I favor drastic measures." If he couldn't get what he wanted from the INS, he wrote, he would "call for heavy artillery."

In a March 26 e-mail to the Vice President, Farbrother reported that Chris Sale had indeed "delegated hiring authority to the five cities and increased their budgets by 20%." But, he wrote, "I still don't think the city directors have enough freedom to do the job." Two days later, Farbrother told the Vice President by e-mail, "[U]nless we blast INS headquarters loose from their grip on the frontline managers, we are going to have way too many people still waiting for citizenship in November." He added, "I can't make Doris Meissner delegate broad authority to her field managers. Can you?"

Gore answered, "We'll explore it. Thanks." By the end of March, Doris Meissner capitulated. On April 4, 1996, Elaine Kamarck, to prepare the Vice President for a lunch with Clinton, drafted a memo to Gore briefing him on the INS progress. In time, Newark, N.J., and Houston, Tex., would be added to the list of targeted cities, and in all, more than a million aliens would be naturalized in time to vote in the 1996 election.

Because of time constraints, we focused our own investigation on the INS district office in Chicago, which Gore had visited in 1996 to check on the registration progress. We quickly discovered that the most flagrant and critical breakdown occurred in fingerprint checks.

1. More than 75,000 new citizens who had arrest records when they applied;

2. An additional 115,000 whose fingerprints were unclassifiable for various technical reasons and were never resubmitted; and

3. Another 61,000 people who were given citizenship with no fingerprints submitted at all.

In the course of our investigation, we discovered that FBI arrest records were still missing from the proper files; many were still in boxes. We unearthed that several individuals who had been naturalized illegally were now trying to sponsor their relatives for citizenship. We found sponsors who were unable to speak a word of English, a condition that should have prevented naturalization. Similarly, we uncovered arrest records or other information that should have been disqualifiers for naturalization. But, according to interviews my staff conducted with sources inside INS offices, INS agents who had found these irregularities were ordered to ignore them and to revoke citizenship only in cases ordered by the auditors.

Our sources inside the INS revealed that, in preparation for the 2000 elections, INS agents in the district offices were directed to relax the testing for English, complete every interview within 20 minutes, and ensure that all applicants pass the civics test by continuing to ask questions until an applicant got a sufficient number right. Sometimes it was necessary to ask 25 questions before four or five were answered correctly.

We received no cooperation from either the Justice Department or the INS. Instead we received nothing but complaints about not going through proper channels, investigating old news, being partisan - if not racist - and so on. But we reasoned that if criminals were given citizenship in 1996, at least some of them had probably continued their criminal activity in the two years since. We asked the GAO - an investigative agency that works for Congress and is therefore not subject to White House or Justice Department pressures - to give us FBI arrest records related to the CUSA program. We were given unquestioned cooperation and boxes of FBI reports.

We reviewed every document in those boxes, pulling out about a hundred of the most violent or serious crimes committed by aliens prior to naturalization and documented by arrest records. I specifically excluded minor immigration crimes, tax offenses, or white-collar crimes such as driving under the influence. I asked the staff to search for drug trafficking and violent crimes such as rape and child abuse. Those are the types of crimes that are most often repeated. A child abuser tends to abuse again, and a rapist tends to rape again.

After a few days - and going through only a few of the 20 or so boxes - we had our basic 100 heinous crimes, including one criminal who was actually in jail at the time he was naturalized.

We asked the FBI if it had arrest records for crimes committed by the same aliens in this country since 1996 and sent them our 100 profiles.

Less than a week later, the FBI sent the updated arrest records to the Justice Department. (Per an agreement between the FBI and the Justice Department, all materials requested from the Bureau must go through Justice.) But when we inquired about them, the department claimed that it hadn't yet received the records. An hour later, however, Justice called back to say that the "misplaced" reports had been located.

Of those 100 arrest records updated by the Bureau, some 20% showed arrests for serious crimes after the subject was given citizenship. Based on these random results, we asked for updates on every arrest record in our 20 boxes. Our plan was to update every report, using only FBI numbers and with the FBI redacting all identifying information to address the issue of privacy concerns. If, as we anticipated, anywhere near 20% came back with subsequent crimes, we would then confront the Justice Department, demand the identity and address of these known criminals, and point out that they had been given citizenship illegally, and were still engaged in criminal activity. Unfortunately, before we could go further, the referral from Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr arrived. Had we been given sufficient time to develop evidence and witnesses, the CUSA matter might have been included in the abuse of power impeachment article.

The 1996 arrest records are still available, and I am sure the FBI is still willing to update all of them. In the meantime, thousands of criminals are now citizens of the United States because it was assumed they would vote for Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

Andrew Ian Castel-Dodge: Ambassador to England (poetic justice for the grief he ran into with Britain's immigration bureaucrats - can't find the original blog posts, you can ask him to refresh our memories)

Patrick Crozier: Secretary of Transportation

Daniel Drezner: Secretary of Treasury

Charles Johnson: Secretary of State (Mideast relations will never be the same)

Brink Lindsey: Secretary of Commerce

Jay Manifold: He should hold the cabinet post he invented: Secretary of Defeated Former Enemies' Security

Virginia Postrel: Press Secretary (seems appropriate for a former magazine editor)

Rand Simberg: In charge of privatizing NASA and all government research facilities.

Andrew Sullivan: Fundraising chairman (get that PayPal button working, Sully)

Pejman Yousefzadeh: Solicitor General

Cuban Revolution Faces Dissent, Isolation at 50.

Whether their deity (or religious interpretation of the deity) is genuine or not, the citizens [of a theocracy] have no objective means of determining that the deity plays an active role in its government, endorses the ruling party, or ordered the creation of the theocracy in the first place.

Christianity revolves around a voluntary personal relationship with God. The Bible makes no record of God granting authority to a State to govern that relationship through force. Christian theocracy is therefore a heresy by which government usurps the authority of God over the individual's relationship with Him.

Thanks for your note. My aim is not "promoting [the] joys" of drug use but attacking the specious moral distinction between alcohol and the currently illegal intoxicants. (There's a reason why the book is called Saying Yes instead of Just Say Yes.) I think it's important to address this issue because the cost-benefit analysis is not enough to persuade people who accept the myths of voodoo pharmacology. If you believe that certain drugs cannot be used responsibly because they hijack the user's will and force him to sin, you will have a hard time accepting the idea of a world without prohibition, even if you recognize the costs associated with the war on drugs. Voodoo pharmacology also undermines the moral argument that people should be free to do as they choose with their own bodies (provided they don't violate other people's rights), because it teaches that certain substances make choice impossible.

I think voodoo pharmacology is the key reason why alcohol prohibition was repealed while drug prohibition was expanded. Most people knew from their own experience that the typical drinker was not an alcoholic. But when it came to less familiar drugs associated with out-groups, they found it easy to believe that the typical user was an addict, or at least a dangerous maniac while under the influence. If such ideas are not addressed directly, most Americans will continue to believe that, whatever the costs of prohibition, the costs of making these choice-negating, mind-enslaving substances more readily available would be greater.

My main problem with the Ames review is that he imagines the world is divided into two groups: hard-core drug warriors and drug enthusiasts. I think most people occupy a middle position, troubled (at least potentially) by the side effects of prohibition as well as the damage done by drug abuse. That's the audience where voodoo pharmacology makes a real difference, and the one I'm trying to reach.

In the first chapter, "Chemical Reactions," he rationally engages mainstream Christians by comparing their beliefs about drugs to Mormon and Islamic attitudes, and then he debunks widely held Christian prejudices by citing counter-examples within the Bible which support wine-drinking and merriment.

At which point I thought, "Is Sullum f___ing nuts? He’s debating Christians!"

You can almost see Sullum at a witch-burning a few centuries earlier, standing calmly at the edge of the mob, confident that his power of reason would win them over one by one and free the condemned woman: "Gentlemen, fellow Colonials, hear me, for ye may think that the woman ye are befixing to the stake is a witch deserving of fire, but did ye know that among the Africans along the Western Cape, there doth practice witches who perform good and bad–"

A counter-war should be waged. We need more and better cultural propaganda to promote the joys of drug use, marginalize the drug war lunatics and expose the destruction that the drug war causes to innocent lives. It should no longer be respectable to promote the drug war. In fact, it should be dangerous.

The consultant and airline-security author said al-Qaida operatives who planned and conducted the attacks were aware of "non-existent cockpit door protection, inadequate flight-crew training and porous screening protocols," which were all under the purview of the FAA.

Since the attacks, Congress has managed to pass legislation supporters hope will make it more difficult for terrorists to gain control of airliners in the future.

One step, as WorldNetDaily reported extensively, was to authorize commercial airline pilots to carry firearms, after receiving the appropriate federally mandated training.

Ironically, the FAA had adopted a rule allowing pilots to be armed, but rescinded it just two months before the 9-11 attacks.

- Our Oriental Heritage, Will and Ariel Durant, p. 662.

Not as well known is that neither [Governor Kenny] Guinn nor any other party to the complaint called upon the court to vacate the two-thirds requirement - a provision established by a vote of the people via ballot initiative in 1996 (the Gibbons Initiative). That request came specifically from an amicus brief filed by the Nevada State Education Association (NSEA) and its largest local affiliates.

[NSEA] "After all, if the purpose of the Initiative is to limit the adoption of tax measures to those that most people think is a good idea, doesn't it make sense to require that everyone agree? Shouldn't one 'statesman' be allowed to resist the 'tyranny' of a 'temporary majority' that includes everyone but him?" [Antonucci] Ever heard of a filibuster?

[NSEA] "Here, the Gibbons Initiative results in some votes being weighted more heavily than other votes depending on geographical locations, i.e., the precinct boundaries that the 15 dissident Assembly members represent." [Antonucci] Kind of like Wyoming and California having the same number of U.S. Senators.

Nevadans who think higher taxes and bigger government are the way to utopia can simply elude the border guards and float a simple raft to the western shore of Lake Tahoe, where the experiment has been so successful the citizens are pondering whether to recall a career politician and replace him with an Austrian bodybuilder.

The Nevada Supreme Court invokes a right to education under the assumptions that a) this "right" demands that the State of Nevada supply education (rather than contract out the service to private bidders), and b) public schools really need everything that is in the official budget. (Note that the Court never considers that the Nevada legislature could make cuts to education or other departments as an alternative to raising taxes.) Translation: Nevada public school administrators [Update: that is, school policy makers] have a right to whatever tax revenues they demand.

First, according to a report by European law enforcement agencies, in 2000 and 2001 (pre-9/11), Taylor sold diamonds to al Qaeda. The terrorist organization moved as much as $20 million into commodities to outmaneuver the international effort to freeze al Qaeda assets following the 1998 American embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Removing Taylor and bringing him to justice would help stem this problem.

Second, there is legitimate concern that parts of Africa could become a safe haven or breeding ground for terrorism. The U.N. Special Court on Sierra Leone claims Taylor is harboring terrorists from the Middle East, including al Qaeda and Hezbollah.

Liberals use words like "critical mass" to justify their thinly veiled quota system, but all in all there isn't any more difference in these school admissions policies than there is in a white person exclaiming "I've just bought me a black friend ..." All in the name of diversity...

What does it mean when the University of Michigan and the liberal elites on the Court explicitly state that black or Hispanic presence would be healthy for the white students on campus? It sounds awfully close to saying, "You all look alike, act alike and we sure love the way you sing 'Mammy.' Could you sing it to us one more time ... we whites really need to understand your cultures. In fact, could you share with the class what you had for dinner last night ... or better yet ...?"

The most important of these facts is that the White House impeded the investigation of Foster's death in both gross and subtle ways. I didn't need to read this book to learn that. This was painfully clear from last year's U.S. Senate Report 104-280 (pages 51-90, for anyone interested in the facts).

These blatant attempts at covering up do not necessarily mean that the White House was somehow involved in Foster's death. They do suggest that a full investigation of his death might have brought out other things that the Clintons preferred to keep quiet. They have a lot of things that they have gone to a lot of trouble to keep quiet.

The second conclusion that seems undeniable is that the U.S. Park Police, which investigated Foster's death after finding his body in a federal park, immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was a suicide committed in that park, even before the investigation really got underway. Clues that might suggest otherwise were just not followed up. Various independent forensic experts have been scathing in their criticisms of how the Park Police handled the case and neglected the evidence.

Any number of things might have happened on July 20, 1993, when Vincent Foster's body was discovered in Marcy Park. The hardest thing to reconcile with the evidence is that he committed suicide in that park.

He may have committed suicide somewhere else, where it would have been embarrassing to have the body discovered, so that it was moved to the park. Some experienced police detectives have suggested this, partly because the small amount of blood found with the body in Marcy Park is wholly inconsistent with what they have seen happen when someone puts a .38 revolver in his mouth and pulls the trigger. Moreover, there are many other inconsistencies.

Another possibility is that Foster might have been killed somewhere else and a suicide faked. Far out as this sounds, it is more consistent with the book's diagram of the pattern of powder burns on Foster's hands than the notion that he pulled the trigger himself. To produce that same pattern of powder burns by shooting himself would have required some real contortions.

"This whole notion of [Fiske and Starr] doing an honest investigation is laughable...All I know is that things did not happen the way Fiske says that they happened, and the reports don't support what Fiske said. There is nothing consistent with [Foster] committing that kind of violent act [suicide] at all."

She usually stands in the doorway with a guilty grin, and I walk her back to her bed. But tonight she had a downcast expression. "I'm sad," she said when she came in my room.

Why?

"I can't sleep."

Well, then think of things that make you happy, and you can sleep. Think of playing with Jasper. Think of caramels. Think of flying to the moon.

"I can't fly to the moon," she said. "It's too high."

You could if you had a rocket ship.

"Oh, yes. Then I could go to the cheese planet moon."

- WBAP host Mark Davis, remarking on the colorful invective in Ann Coulter's recent bestseller

First there is the anecdotal evidence. When I wrote critically about candidate Bush during the 2000 election, my inbox would flood with missives chiding me for being unfair in my characterizations of his conservative credentials and unrealistic in my political expectations. Just as frequently, there would be impassioned defenses of the man and his policies. In fact, one column where I was particularly hard on Bush elicited the most hostile response I have ever gotten from a conservative reader, who actually sent me an e-mail challenging me to a fight...

Less anecdotally, professional conservatives, the very people who have generally been most reluctant to criticize the Bush administration, are beginning to gripe about some of the president's policies. Conservative think tanks are openly opposing the administration's passivity on health care, for example. Perhaps more representative of grassroots sentiment is some of the grumbling now being heard on the predominantly conservative blogosphere.

Why this outpouring of criticism of the man many conservatives breathlessly predict will usher in an enduring national Republican majority? As a sequel to dropping serious conservative education reform in favor of giving Ted Kennedy the big-government education bill he wanted, Bush is dropping serious conservative Medicare reform in favor of giving Kennedy the big-government Medicare bill he wants. (The latter promising to be a massive boondoggle that will impose staggering costs on future generations to come.) To follow up on his decision to cave on the free speech-strangling McCain-Feingold campaign finance travesty, he is caving on Second Amendment rights by backing a renewal of the assault weapons ban. He has apparently decided that as long as the Sandra Day O'Connor pays lip service to color-blindness 25 years from now, ruling in favor of a more surreptitious regime of racial preferences is A-OK. He's willing to spend federal money on constitutionally dubious "marriage promotion" initiatives but has yet to take any proactive steps to curb the growing judicial threat to traditional marriage.

Then of course there is the steel and lumber tariffs, the PATRIOT Act, the decision to sign ridiculously bloated farm and transportation bills and the refusal to veto wasteful federal spending. Rather than address porous borders and an immigration policy that lends itself more to balkanization than Americanization, the administration treats us to Karl Rove's schemes for illegal alien amnesties. The list goes on.

Remember, Bush did not say that Saddam had attempted to buy the uranium. His statement was "the British Government has "learned" that Saddam tried to buy the uranium. You may be surprised to know that Tony Blair's government is standing by the claim to this day!

Last week Blair made the following statement to the British Parliament: "In the 1980s, Iraq purchased somewhere in the region of 200 or more tons of uranium from Niger. The evidence that we had that the Iraqi government had gone back to try to purchase further amounts of uranium from Niger did not come from so-called 'forged' documents; they came from separate intelligence." This makes Bush's infamous 16 words absolutely true.

What's that? You say that this is the first time you've heard about Blair's statement? No surprise there. Blair's defense of British intelligence claims has been virtually ignored. As of the end of last week there had not been one mention of Blair's statement to Parliament in any major U.S. newspaper or broadcast news network. You can select from two possible reasons the American press has ignored Blair's words. On the one hand you can chose to believe that in spite of their vast resources, The New York Times, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN and The Washington Post never learned of the contents of Blair's statement to Parliament. On the other hand, if you're more reality-based you can choose to believe that the media knew of Blair's words, but didn't want to publish them and see a vigorous anti-Bush story fall victim to the truth.

In particular, they point out that two of the Institute's five categories (legal protection of property rights and "sound money") are positive rather than negative liberties - things the government provides so you can actually use your freedom - and that this reduces the whole index to measuring "what rich people need to enjoy their money".

Rights are legitimately understood as freedom to engage in certain activities, and freedom from certain coercive acts committed against us...Positive law insists that people have the right to be given stuff.

As a feminist, Clinton disgusts me because she single-handedly has managed to tell women the world over that no matter what your husband does - humiliate you, betray you, lie to you, abuse other women, sexually harass other women, intimidate women, even possibly be a rapist - you should not only not leave him, you should forever support and enable that behavior.

After the YWCA appointment, Ireland refused to say whether or not she’s a Christian (she’s not), and then finally stated in the New York Times (April 30, 2003) that the YWCA was no longer be a Christian organization, but one of - surprise! - social justice. That does not bode well for the tens of thousands of little girls and their families who rely on the YWCA.

After all, who can forget the obscene attack on the free speech of a Jewish woman who dared to speak her mind a few years ago? She was attacked by the New Gestapo for using an unapproved-of word. There was a very public attempt to destroy that woman, professionally and personally, because she dared to speak her opinion about serious social issues, Gee, kinda like what Sarandon and the Dixie Chicks are claiming.

Was she featured in Ms. magazine? Is her case discussed in their article about the assault on freedom of expression? Of course not, because the woman I’m speaking of is Dr. Laura and the gang that flew into a jihad to destroy her was the gay establishment, along with the help of the Feminist Elite and hypocrites like Susan Sarandon. The double-standard is stunning, and exposes nothing less than the partisan leftist agenda that has been masquerading as feminism for far too long.

Former president Jimmy Carter says a "modest" force of perhaps 2,000 U.S. troops should join a coalition of west African countries to help stabilize Liberia.

I hate to point out that the Constitution itself sucks; there's a lot wrong with it. There's no right to healthcare, no right to education, no right to jobs, none of that is in there. Racism, anti-gay bigotry, none of that is outlawed by the Constitution. Those are the things that need to be in a real peoples' constitution. It's important to point out because we keep defending the Constitution, but it's a Constitution that's extremely weak and does not represent what people need. And when we defend the Constitution we have to go one step further and say "this is what a real constitution should look like."

'Paradise, with its food and its houris [virgins], is programmed for a consumer-believer deprived of the creative dimension. The believer is fulfilled in Paradise by renouncing all the potentialities that define 'a human being, all possibilities of making choices not programmed by an external will. The purpose of the believer is to fit himself into the plan organized, conceived, and programmed by another will. The purpose of the believer is to reduce himself to a consumer and annihilate within himself his creative potential, for to create within the paradisal context would be to disturb the order and destroy the plan. The believer is passive: He digests, makes love to a houri deprived of a uterus (for she is a virgin), and relaxes. Like the houri, he forms an integral part of a system where he exists as a thing deprived of will. The only difference is that the houri is consumed as an object by the believer, and he is consumed as an object by the system. In the Muslim Hereafter, where one would expect that the spiritual dimension of the being would be magnified, one witnesses the metamorphosis of the human being into a thing. In the ideal society of Islam, the ideal citizen, the successful believer, is an automaton reduced to a few limited, programmed movements of the digestive tract and genital apparatus.'

It is this reification of the believer that lies, I believe, at the heart of our dilemma. By dressing all women in much the same costume, above all by covering the face, the seat of individuality and recognition, it is possible to transform each single woman into a stereotype of 'woman' as she ought to be, as she is prescribed for in the law. A man may go abroad with his face uncovered, but even here the law lays down how he should wear his hair and beard, how he should dress, how he should eat, drink, urinate and make love. There is little room for the individual. The image of rank upon rank of believers praying in unison brings home how powerful is this erasure of man as individual and his replacement by man as believer, as an ordained type.

Of course, the reality of Muslim society has been quite other than this. Muslims are individuals, they are creative, inventive, different. But the pressures are undeniably present. The inculcation of a norm to which each individual must conform, the fear of innovation, the elaboration of rules for all areas of human conduct--all have conspired to render individuality something very close to a sin...One of the most central problems for Muslims in the modern period has been that of identity - of finding old identities or forging new ones. Ironically, the very shari'a-mindedness that is looked on as a route to the rediscovery of the Muslim self is more likely to imperil any real formulation of personal identity, precisely because of its stress on conformity to an exaggerated ideal.

"We're undermining a Christian, Baptist president to bring in Muslim rebels to take over the country," he said on his 700 Club show Monday. "And how dare the president of the United States say to the duly elected president of another country, 'You've got to step down."

[At] a February 2002 Liberia for Jesus rally... Taylor reportedly told 65,000 of his subjects, "I am not your president. Jesus is!"

"There are people who say that's phony baloney, but I thought it was sincere," Robertson told Cooperman. "He definitely has Christian sentiments, although you hear of all these rumors that he's done this or done that.

"I have never met Taylor in my life. I don't know what he has done or hasn't done. I do know he was elected by the people, and he has maintained a relatively stable government in Liberia; and they observe the rule of law; they have a working legislature; they have courts. And though he may have certain dictatorial powers, so do most leaders in Africa."

* Sankoh then began smuggling out thousands of diamonds, many of which he sent to Charles Taylor in Liberia in exchange for weapons. Jackson repeatedly raised the issue of the illicit diamond trade and the clandestine arms supplies with Taylor, who simply denied the charges. Jackson never pressed him further.

* Jackson stayed in contact with Sankoh, phoning him repeatedly with words of encouragement. Braced by this support and funded by the diamond trade, Sankoh built up his Revolutionary United Front (RUF) forces, ignoring Jackson's pleas to disarm and give peace a chance. New fighting broke out in January 2000 in the hinterland. Jackson's cease-fire lasted less than six months.

* By May 2000, the fighting in Sierra Leone took on crisis proportions, when Sankoh's fighters murdered U.N. peacekeepers and took 500 of them hostage. Meanwhile, Liberia, which has no diamonds, reported that it had exported $300 million worth of diamonds the previous year.

* Jackson made one final attempt to halt the bloodshed in mid-May 2000, but was warned by the U.S. embassy in Freetown not to set foot in Sierra Leone because of widespread popular anger over his role in rehabilitating Sankoh, a known mass murderer. One local journalist wrote bitterly that the U.S. civil rights leader was better known in Africa as a "killer's rights" leader.

* Jackson's final contributions to the "peace process" were vain attempts to cajol Taylor to "negotiate" an end to the hostage crisis, since Taylor was the godfather of the RUF and Sankoh's arms and diamond broker.

* Arriving in Monrovia, Liberia, at the peak of the crisis, Jackson declared, "President Taylor has been doing a commendable job negotiating for the release of the hostages. All the hostages should be freed, and freed now. There is no basis for delay, there is no basis for negotiations."

The Clinton State Department is not innocent in this affair. Declassified dispatches and briefing documents show that top State officials primed Jackson with information, talking points and background papers throughout his three years as Clinton's envoy.

"Given that homosexual advocates are in a full court press to lower the age of consent as low as it can go, and pro-pedophile sitting Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg 's documented advocacy of lowering the age of consent to 12 years old, parents should be horrified that there are so few politicians, like Sen. Santorum, actually defending the family," Timothy Chichester, [Catholic Family Association of America] president, said April 23.

Chichester was referring to a paper authored by Ginsburg entitled "Sex Bias in the U.S. Code," which was prepared for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in April 1977

The allegation was further substantiated by Robert Knight, director of [Concerned Women for America's] Culture Institute, in "Homosexual Behavior and Pedophilia," an article he co-authored with the Family Research Council's Frank York.

"When U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an attorney for the ACLU, she co-authored a report recommending that the age of consent for sexual acts be lowered to 12 years of age," the article points out.

Knight and York's footnoted documentation on this is as follows: "Sex Bias in the U.S. Code," Report for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, April 1977, p. 102, quoted in "Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Feminist World View," The Phyllis Schlafly Report, Vol. 26, No. 12, Section 1, p. 3. The paragraph (from the Ginsburg report) reads as follows: "'Eliminate the phrase "carnal knowledge of any female, not his wife, who has not attained the age of 16 years" and substitute a federal, sex-neutral definition of the offense. ... A person is guilty of an offense if he engages in a sexual act with another person. ... [and] the other person is, in fact, less than 12 years old.'"

When sociopaths rape and kill, they do not see their victims as human beings, but only as objects. This is because the sociopaths were themselves, at one time, used as objects - as their bodily integrity was repeatedly violated. The rage that results from sexual abuse is one thing, but when combined with living in a dysfunctional culture of sexual repression and misogyny, where love is reduced to violent domination, it is quite another...

Socially segregated from women, Arab men succumb to homosexual behavior. But, interestingly enough, there is no word for "homosexual" in their culture in the modern Western sense. That is because having sex with boys, or with effeminate men, is seen as a social norm. Males serve as available substitutes for unavailable women. The male who does the penetrating, meanwhile, is not emasculated any more than if he had sex with a wife. The male who is penetrated is emasculated. The boy, however, is not, since it is rationalized that he is not yet a man.

In this culture, males sexually penetrating males becomes a manifestation of male power, conferring a status of hyper-masculinity. It is considered to have nothing to do with homosexuality. An unmarried man who has sex with boys is simply doing what men do. As the scholar Bruce Dunne has demonstrated, sex in Islamic societies is not about mutuality between partners, but about the adult male's achievement of pleasure through violent domination...

With women out of touch - and out of sight -- until marriage, males experience pre-marital sex only in the confines of being with other males. Their sexual outlet mostly includes victimizing younger males - just the way they were victimized.

In all of these circumstances, the idea of love is removed from men's understanding of sexuality. Like the essence of Arab masculinity, it is reduced to hurting others by violence. A gigantic rupture develops between men and women, where no harmony, affection or equality is allowed to exist. In relationships between men, meanwhile, affection, solidarity and empathy are left out of the picture. They threaten the hyper-masculine order.

What a procedural requirement that is general in nature prevents funding for a basic, substantive right, the procedure must yield. Here, the application of the general procedural requirement for a two-thirds majority has prevented the Legislature as a body from performing its obligation to give life to the specific substantive educational rights enunciated in our Constitution.

A radio talk host who invited me on his show to heckle me about my last column, which called for an American attitude similar to that of World War II, zeroed in on my line about having been raised on "Remember the Alamo!" "Remember the Maine!" and "Remember Pearl Harbor!" I asked in that screed, "When's the last time you were exhorted to 'Remember 9/11?' "

"Our historians have done a pretty good job," he said, "discrediting any remembrance of the Alamo and the Maine. Those are bad examples."

"Right you are," I said. "Let me give you some better ones. How about 'Remember Khobar Towers!' 'Remember the Cole!' 'Remember the East African embassies!' Have you heard much of that, before or since 9/11?" His guns fell silent.

It is a shame that Coulter mars her case with claims that cannot be sustained. In making McCarthy the center of her history, ironically, she has fallen into the very liberal trap she warns about. It is the Left that wants McCarthy to be the center of (and in effect to define) the postwar era so that it can use his recklessness to discredit the anti-Communist cause. In fact, as Coulter herself points out, McCarthy began his anti-Communist crusade after the decisive battles of 1947 and 1948, surfacing only in 1950, after the onset of the Korean War. By then, even Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party's presidential candidate, knew he had been duped. [The Progressive Party formed in 1948 out of protest against Truman's anti-communist policies.] This is why McCarthy did not unearth any Communists in government or out (all they had all been previously identified by the FBI), and why FBI officials engaged in counter-intelligence work despised McCarthy for damaging their efforts. Hopefully, Treason will not have a similar effect.

If liberals abhor "McCarthyism," why are they such worshippers of Hillary Clinton who is the unrepentant author of the most famous McCarthyite smear since the Senator's censure fifty years ago? In fact, liberals like Joe Conason were eager abettors of her lie that a "vast right-wing conspiracy" invented her husband's affair with Monica Lewinsky in order to destroy his liberal good works. Liberals like Conason indulge in related "McCarthyite" tactics like "guilt-by-association," gleefully linking political opponents (myself for example) to those they have demonized like Richard Mellon Scaife -- the alleged kingpin of the alleged conspiracy -- with the express purpose of discrediting those they have so linked

Where was the liberal opposition to prosecutions by congressional committee when Col. Oliver North and others were in the dock? Who on the Left objected when Senator Inouye, chair of the Iran-Contra investigating committee, in true McCarthy fashion condemned North as a "traitor" before a national television audience and without the protections of a court proceeding? The only difference between the Iran-Contra victims of Senators Kennedy and Inouye and the Communists who were pilloried by Joe McCarthy was that the Iran-Contra witnesses were patriots and the Communists called before McCarthy's committee were not.

The fact is that if so many liberals and Democrats had not covered so assiduously for Communists and Soviet spies like Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, there would have been no "McCarthy Era" -- no wave of loyalty oaths and no congressional investigations. Derelictions like Roosevelt's, the sense of insecurity created when the public realized that there was an enemy within who had thoroughly penetrated the Democratic Party and which was indeed controlled by the Kremlin, and the refusal of Democratic leaders to take the threat as seriously as they should have -- created the demand for investigations and made the exploits of demagogues like McCarthy inevitable.