From Andrew Sullivan

The Theocon Agenda
28 Feb 2006 06:58 pm
A reader writes a long email, but it's so smart and insightful I'm running all of it. If you're tired of this debate, by all means skip it. But if you care about the future of individual freedom in America, read on:
"I've long debated whether to write you about this and other matters, but as a frequent reader I feel I can no longer remain silent. Thank you for your follow up on Ramesh Ponnuru's comments in The Corner. His attacks on your earlier blogging regarding prof. George were wholly unwarranted.
Bear with me as I digress ... You see, I was president of Princeton Pro-Life from 1993 until 1995 and president of Princeton College Republicans from 1992 until 1996. I also studied in the politics department with Robert George (junior paper advisor 94-95; thesis advisor 95-96) and was a close associate of Father C. John McCloskey. Ramesh Ponnuru was a class ahead of me and an avowedly moderate member of the conservative movement on campus at the time.
In the interest of full disclosure, my position is and always has been that the murder of abortion providers deserves the full application of state criminal sanctions regardless of spurious claims of moral justification. Except in extreme cases, I do not support the criminalization of abortion -- there are far more effective and less conflictual means to reduce the number of abortions and ease our collective culture away from the attitude that life is disposable. Further, I am gay and support full and equal legal rights, including marriage, for LGBT individuals and their families. I also wholeheartedly endorse masturbation as a natural, normal and enjoyable part of physical existence.
So, onto the matter at hand: how could Ponnuru take offense at your characterization of Prof. George's position? The good professor deliberately humorized the issue of whether killing abortionists is morally justified in an attempt to sidestep the logical conclusion to which his other views on abortion must necessarily lead. Your emailer is exactly right - George has a predilection for cloaking his positions with the appearance of good-natured (though sometimes snide) humor, especially on issues where taking a genuine stand would cast him in an unfavorable light. The piece you cite, along with your comments, illustrate this modus operandi perfectly, and Ramesh doesn't like that the cliched cat is out of the bag. Ponnuru's attempts at rolling out "prudential" arguments notwithstanding, it's clear to me that much of their slipperiness is caused by the political environment, not their moral views.
Moreover, George's recommendation that Christians should pray for the redemption of abortion providers is beside the point - and Ponnuru knows better, but this is really just another dodge. It is quite possible to craft an internally consistent position that advocates praying for a transgressor's soul in this life and the next while also favoring a certain specific punishment (legal or otherwise) for his transgression. And the idea that compassion requires taking a lighter view of killing fetuses seems a hollow one. Would George and Ponnuru take a similar view about a certain mother who murdered her born children out of the "compassionate" view that doing so would relieve them from a great deal of suffering? Would they take the same view with respect to a psychopath who has a mistaken but honestly held view of the worth of adult human life? It's absurd if you ask me.
All that having been said, you've missed the point with George's statement that you cited on policing private sexual conduct. This particular claim turns on whether government retains the power to regulate such behavior in the absence of an individual right to the contrary (George believes there is no broad federal right to privacy). On the surface, his position seems closer to the following: "There is no right to masturbation (or fill in the blank with sinful sexual acts of your choosing). Thus, the states retain the power to criminalize it, but if I were a member of a legislature I might vote against such a law because it is unenforceable." If this is his position, then it's really more about judicial review than outright advocacy of a particular substantive law, and it has appeal across a broad swath of the political spectrum. It also appeals to me.
Of course, George and his allies ARE advocates for including the norms of their sexual morality in the law, but they prudently recognize that such controversial moral debates are likely to go against them on the national scale. So, they stick to the more general, structural arguments and omit the real focus of their attention: "Then again, I might vote for such laws because criminal prohibition of masturbation (or other sinful acts) would be 'instructive' regardless of whether it could be enforced, and my morality demands that the government strongly condemn non-generative sexual acts."
Is it a purely cynical move? For some yes, for others no -- the structural arguments do have independent merit. However, there's no denying that the theocon right has used this issue masterfully as a political tactic: attack the uses of judicial power that accomplish ends you disagree with as an incremental step toward your substantive goals. This tactic has become both a shield and a hammer with which to build intellectual and political coalitions that chip away at "bad" precedents while ruffling as few feathers as possible by defending nominees and politicians from hard questions.
Would George and his allies really criminalize masturbation if they could? I don't know, but I sure wouldn't want to find out the hard way. I do know for a fact they would roll back Griswold, Roe, Hardwick, and the right to privacy, as most Americans understand it, in the hopes that they could secure regional political coalitions to recriminalize abortion, sodomy, and contraception - not to mention dispatching Roemer and repealing the few anti-discrimination laws protecting gays. The ongoing experiement in South Dakota is proof that such coalitions are not only possible but probable, and I doubt it will end there substantively or geographically. Many modern First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment protections likely face an equally uncertain future.
And you've hit the nail on the head -- these people are bright enough to know that their radical agenda would scare the pants off most Americans, even many Republicans (it scares me and I fall into both categories). Thus, their best option is to engage in disingenuous rhetorical games designed to leave their opponents tied in intellectual and political knots, and with Roberts and Alito on the SCOTUS, they can smell victory around the corner. They most certainly don't want a bunch of hayseeds ruining it with their corn-belt idealism. Of course they get upset when you call them on it!
As for your tongue-in-cheek comments regarding Ponnuru's "hysteria", I can only say that I have always known him to hide himself behind various facades depending on the circumstances. Liberal, moderate, conservative? Whatever works at the moment."
For me, an instructive moment was when Rick Santorum insisted that he was only opposed to judicial activism in banning sodomy laws. Then he let it slip that he'd support an anti-sodomy law in his own state if the courts let legislatures decide. The theocons often use the legitimate judicial activism argument to conceal their real agenda. Gay people have borne the brunt of this so far, but we are not their ultimate targets. We're a tiny minority, easily beaten up on in the public discourse. But the broader aim is the policing of all private morality, straight or gay. You're next. But they're not exactly going to tell you that, are they?

Gay cowboys embraced by redneck country

Andrew Sullivan
Last December, when the movie Brokeback Mountain nudged nervously onto the cultural radar screen in the US, the consensus was broad and wide. This movie was one step too far. It was yet another example of Hollywood’s liberal bias. It wouldn’t sell in the heartland.
“They’re not going to go see the gay cowboys in Montana. I’m sorry. They’re not going to do it,” opined cable television’s chief windbag Bill O’Reilly on December 20.
The liberal blogger Mickey Kaus wrote around the same time: “I’m highly sceptical that a movie about gay cowhands, however good, will find a large mainstream audience. I’ll go see it, but I don’t want to go see it . . . When the film’s national box office fails to live up to its hype and to the record attendance at a few early screenings, prepare to be subjected to a tedious round of guilt-tripping and chin- scratching.”
The Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer made a new year’s prediction about Oscar night: “Brokeback Mountain will have been seen in the theatres by 18 people — but the right 18 — and will win the Academy Award.”
Something odd happened between the elite’s assessment of the heartland and the heartland’s assessment of Brokeback Mountain. No, it’s no The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe. But of all the Oscar nominees it has racked up by far the biggest domestic grosses so far: more than $70m at the last count (compared with, say, $22m for the superb Capote). And that’s before the potential Oscar boost. More interestingly, it’s done remarkably well in the middle of the red states.
O’Reilly’s Montana? In the 85-year-old cinema in Missoula, Montana, the owner told the media: “It’s been super every night since we started showing it.” The movie did even better in Billings, a more conservative city in the state.
According to Variety magazine, some of the strongest audiences have been in Tulsa, Oklahoma, El Paso, Texas, Des Moines, Iowa and Lubbock, Texas. Lubbock is the place George W Bush calls his spiritual home and may well be the site for his presidential library. Greenwich Village it ain’t.
What happened? There are various theories. Brilliant marketing pitched the movie as a love story and a western, two genres well ingrained in middle American tastes. Women dragged nervous husbands and boyfriends to see a film where the women could enjoy long, languorous views of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, and the men could admire the scenery.
Blue state liberals felt it some kind of social duty to see the film. Gays and lesbians flocked. The media hyped the “gay cowboy” movie and it generated more and more publicity, and thereby curiosity and thereby tickets.
The iconic phrase uttered by Gyllenhaal — “I wish I knew how to quit you” — has become part of the popular culture. The cover of last week’s New Yorker had a parody of the now-famous poster, with Bush and Dick Cheney as the cowboys and Cheney blowing some steam off the top of his rifle.
Everyone seems to have an opinion about the film, especially those who haven’t seen it. My own view is that Brokeback has done well primarily because it’s an excellent film. It has a compelling story, two astonishing performances from Ledger and Michelle Williams, and an elegant screenplay from the great western writer Larry McMurtry.
I still don’t think the movie is in the same class as the brilliantly compressed short story by Annie Proulx on which it’s based. But it’s still way better than most films now offered by Hollywood, and it’s a little depressing that we have to ask why a decent number of people would not want to see a rare example of Hollywood excellence.
As for the gay sex, it’s barely in the movie, and the least convincing part of it. Compared with the sex and violence usually served up by Hollywood films, Brokeback is Jackanory. But there is something, perhaps, that explains the interest beyond mere artistic skill.
The past two decades have seen a huge shift in how homosexual people are viewed in the West. Where once they were identified entirely by sex, now more and more recognise that the central homosexual experience is the central heterosexual experience: love — maddening, humiliating, sustaining love.
That’s what the marriage debate has meant and why the marriage movement, even where it has failed to achieve its immediate goals, has already achieved its long-term ambition: to humanise gay people, to tell the full, human truth about them.
And that truth includes the red states. The one thing you can say about the homosexual minority is that, unlike any other, it is not geographically limited and never has been. Red states produce as many gay kids as blue ones; and yet the heartland gay experience has rarely been portrayed and explored.
In America this is particularly odd, since the greatest gay writer in its history, Walt Whitman, was a man of the heartland. And you only have to read about the early years of Abraham Lincoln’s life to see that same-sex love and friendship was integral to the making of America, especially in its wildernesses and frontiers. You see that today even in the American gay vote, a third of which routinely backs Republicans.
Brokeback, in other words, is not just a good movie, but a genuinely new one that tells a genuinely old story. It shows how gay men in America have families and have always had families. It shows them among themselves and among women. It shows them, above all, as men.
For the first time it reveals that homosexuality and masculinity are not necessarily in conflict, and that masculinity, even the suppressed, inarticulate masculinity of the American frontier, is not incompatible with love.
It provides a story to help people better understand the turbulent social change around them and the history they never previously recorded. That is what great art always does: it reveals the truth we are too scared to see and the future we already, beneath all our denial, understand.

Copyright 2006 Times Newspapers Ltd.

CONSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS OF "PARTIAL BIRTH ABORTION" BAN
Laurence H. Tribe Ralph S. Tyler Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law Harvard University Law School
March 6, 1997
This memorandum addresses the constitutionality of S. 6, a proposed federal statute that would criminalize a certain abortion procedure whether or not the fetus is viable, and without making any exception for the health of the mother.
1. The proposed statute (called the "Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 1997"), in exempting from prohibition only those abortions necessary to save the life of the pregnant woman, is undeniably inconsistent with a core holding of Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) -- a holding explicitly reaffirmed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992). Roe held that, even after a fetus was viable, the State could not place the interests and welfare of that fetus above those of the method in preserving her own life and health. Accordingly, the State, after fetal viability may "regulate, even proscribe, abortion except where it is necessary, in appropriate medical judgment for the preservation of the life or health of the mother." Roe, 410 U.S. at 165 (emphasis added). Moreover, in Doe v. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179 (1973), the companion case to Roe, the Court emphasized that the health of the mother represents a medical judgment that "may be exercised in light of all factors -- physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman's age -- relevant to the well-being of the patient. Id. at 192. Even the dissenters in Roe and Doe suggested that abortion procedures required to avoid "substantial hazards to either life or health" could not constitutionally be forbidden. Doe, 410 U.S. at 223 (White, J., dissenting) emphasis added); see also Roe, 410 U.S. at 173 (Rehnquist, now C.J. dissenting). Perhaps most importantly, the controlling opinion in Casey explicitly reaffirmed Roe's requirement of an exception for the life or health of the pregnant woman, adopting verbatim the language quoted above from the Roe majority opinion. Casey, 505 U.S. at 879. The real debate in Roe and its progeny through Casey centered on whether so-called "elective" abortion was part of a woman's privacy and liberty; it appeared to be common ground that, however tragic it might be, an abortion require to protect a woman's life or health fell beyond the State's power to proscribe. Ironically, because many of the abortions that the proposed statute would ban involve fetuses that will never be "viable" because of their deformities would make it impossible for them to survive for any sustained period outside the womb -- there is dispute over just how many of the proscribed abortions would involve such fetuses, but no dispute that a considerable number would -- it follows that not even the broadest imaginable health exception could save the proposed statute's constitutionality as applied to many of the abortions it would purport to outlaw. The next paragraph develops this point in somewhat greater detail.
2. The proposed federal statute would forbid a described medical procedure regardless of whether the fetus being aborted was viable. Indeed, S. 6 is manifestly intended to prohibit at least some abortions of fetuses with severe abnormalities (such as anencephalic condition, in which the brain develops outside the head) that would likely render them unable to live independently outside the womb for more than a very short time. The vilified "partial-birth abortions" described in the statute clearly include pregnancy terminations (even if the pregnancy is in its final stages) in woman whose fetuses would in no event be able to survive for more than minutes or hours outside the womb. See, e.g., Testimony of Coreen Costello before the House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on the Constitution, March 21, 1996; Testimony of Mary-Dorothy Line before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, March 21, 1996. Yet the controlling opinion in Casey prohibits regulations that place an undue burden on women seeking abortions, and holds categorically that this test renders unconstitutional any regulation or requirement that has the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle -- let alone a flat prohibition -- in the path of a woman seeking to abort a non-viable fetus. It is true that Casey allowed for informed consent requirements as well as regulations designed to further the health or safety of a woman seeking an abortion, but the proposed law is plainly not designed to further those interests. It does not inform a woman but directly bans a particular procedure, one that is performed specifically because it is less likely to harm the pregnant woman. The proposed statute is thus analogous to the prohibition on saline amniocentesis that the Supreme Court invalidated in Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri v. Danforth, 428 U.S. 52 (1976). Many physicians considered saline amniocentesis to be safer for the pregnancy woman than other methods of abortion, just as many physicians consider so-called partial-birth abortions to be safer for certain pregnant women that the alternatives. The Court in Danforth emphasized this perceived safety advantage in ruling that the State could not prohibit abortions using saline amniocentesis. Id. at 78-79.
3. Even if supporters of the proposed statute attempted to argue the prohibition was designed to benefit the fetus, and even if they could demonstrate that the alternative methods of abortion would in fact be less awful from the perspective of the fetus itself -- a dubious proposition at best -- Supreme Court precedent forecloses the option of placing the well-being of the fetus above the health and safety of the pregnant woman -- even where the fetus is viable, and certainly where the fetus could not survive lone outside the woman in any event and thus is not "viable" as the Court has defined that term. In Thornburgh v. America College of Obstetricians, 476 U.S. 747 (1986), the Court specifically rejected as unconstitutional a proposal that the State be permitted to "trade" some of the woman's well-being for an increase in that of the fetus -- and in Thornburgh, in contrast to the proposed bill, the asserted interest on the fetus's side of the trade-off was in enhancing the prospects for fetal survival. Id. at 768-69.
4. The proposed statute attempts to elide the issue of viability with a peculiar bit of alchemy that raises its own constitutional problems: it defines a "partial-birth abortion" as an abortion in which "the person performing the abortion partially vaginally delivers a living fetus before killing the infant," and it specifies -- as it saying it could make it so -- that "the terms ‘fetus' and ‘infant' are interchangeable." Both this novel definition of "infant," and whatever protections that designation may be designed to evoke or entail, apply to any fetus, however, hopeless its condition, that may be brought into the vagina during an abortion, even if this occurs long before the fetus is sufficiently developed to feel pain or to approach viability, and even if this is done with respect to a fetus so badly deformed or disabled that it would never be "viable" even if it were to come to term and to be delivered in the ordinary manner, only to die shortly thereafter. The proposed statute therefore seeks to make the legality of the physician's conduct in facilitating the woman's exercise of her reproductive freedom turn no on the viability of the fetus or on its capacity to perceive or on the health of the woman but, strangely, on the physical location of the fetus between the uterus and the vagina at the moment its development within the woman is deliberately halted -- as though the fetus that is being aborted were suddenly to acquire the capacity to experience sensations of pain, or were to acquire other traits of personhood, simply by virtue of having been moved from one point to another within the woman's body prior to completion of the abortion procedure, rather than by virtue of its own state of neurological or other development. Evidently unable to identify in any other manner the procedure they wish to outlaw, the statute's authors have thus fastened upon anatomical details that bear no relationship whatsoever even to the concern with fetal dignity or sensation that supposedly animates both the statute's title and its structure. The authors' chosen definition of which abortions to condemn as "partial birth abortions," even if readily understandable in terms of the ability to persuade the general public that something gratuitously cruel and terrible is being prohibited, and hence in terms of the public relations objectives of the draftsmen, defies plausible justification in terms of anything real and might well fail even a test of minimum rationality, much less the far more stringent test of "undue burden" that the Court applies to regulations of abortion procedures. In any event, and quite apart from the irrationality introduced into the law by the proposed definition, the fact is that fetal viability is the constitutionally significant event, ad the bill's barely-concealed attempt to apply an altogether different standard is flatly inconsistent with the Liberty Clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments as construed by the Supreme Court in Casey.
5. Given the seemingly fatal constitutional infirmities in the proposed Partial Birth Abortion ban, one is led to wonder whether the insistence on enacting some new federal law in this area -- despite the absence of any reason to doubt the ability of the States to enact laws of their own dealing with precisely the same subject matter -- reflects more than a desperate desire to prove that Congress is capable of doing something about an obviously tragic procedure that everyone wishes were never necessary. There is, no doubt, a time and a place for such demonstrations of congressional determination, even in eras supposedly dedicated to the devolution of power to the States. But I doubt that experimenting with the lives and health of women, and with their ability to control their own reproductive destiny, represents a fit occasion for such a show of federal force.

Don Knotts, star of 'The Andy Griffith Show,' dead at 81
Knotts died Friday night of pulmonary and respiratory complications at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills.
By Scott Collins, Times Staff Writer2:30 PM PST,February 25 2006
Don Knotts, the saucer-eyed, scarecrow-thin comic actor best known for his roles as the high-strung small-town deputy Barney Fife on the 1960s CBS series "The Andy Griffith Show" and the leisure-suit-clad landlord Ralph Furley on ABC's '70s sitcom "Three's Company," has died. He was 81.Knotts, who lived in West Los Angeles, died Friday night of lung cancer at UCLA Medical Center, according to Sherwin Bash, his longtime manager.

Family members said that his longtime friend Griffth was one of his last visitors at Cedars on Friday night.Despite health problems, Knotts had kept working in recent months. He lent his distinctive, high-pitched voice as Turkey Mayor in Walt Disney's animated family film "Chicken Little," which was released in November 2005. He also did guest spots in 2005 on NBC's "Las Vegas" and Fox's "That '70s Show." He occasionally co-headlined in live comedy shows with Tim Conway, his sometime co-star in Disney films such as "The Apple Dumpling Gang." Knotts also appeared as the TV repairman in director Gary Ross's whimsical 1998 comedy "Pleasantville," and voiced the part of T.W. Turtle in the 1997 animated feature "Cats Don't Dance."As he grew older, Knotts became a lodestar for younger comic actors. The new generation came to appreciate his highly physical brand of acting that, at its best, was in the tradition of silent-film greats such as Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel and Harold Lloyd.Knotts first rose to prominence in the late 1950s, joining Louis Nye and other comedy players on "The Steve Allen Show." In 1961, United Artists Records released a comedy album entitled "Don Knotts: An Evening with Me," which featured various takeoffs on the "nervous man" routine the comic had made famous on Allen's show. One of the bits, "The Weatherman," concerned a TV forecaster forced to wing it after the meteorology report fails to make it to the studio by air time.During the mid to late 1960s, in a largely unsuccessful bid for major film stardom, Knotts made a series of family films that many connoisseurs now say were critically underappreciated at the time. These include "The Incredible Mr. Limpet" (1964), "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken" (1966) and "The Reluctant Astronaut" (1967). The latter two were made as part of a five-picture deal with Universal Pictures."Limpet," the tale of a meek man who is transformed into a fish, has particularly won recent acclaim. Its early mix of live action and animation was a forerunner of such later films as "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" and "Space Jam."At one point, Jim Carrey was said to be considering starring in a "Limpet" remake, although the project has yet to materialize. Once, when Knotts visited the set of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," Carrey paid tribute. "I went to him, and I was just like, 'Thank you so much for "The Ghost and Mr. Chicken,"' Carrey later told an interviewer. " 'I watched it a hundred times when I was a kid.' "Martin Short has likewise hailed Knotts as a major influence, and at least one of Short's recurring characters, shifty-eyed lawyer Nathan Thurm, owes a debt to Knotts' "nervous man" character, created for "The Steve Allen Show" in the 1950s.Many TV viewers remember Knotts as Ralph Furley, the ascot-wearing middle-aged landlord who mistakenly viewed himself as a swinger on ABC's hit sex farce "Three's Company." The series starred the late John Ritter as Jack Tripper, a chef who pretended to be gay in order to share an apartment with two attractive young women. The plot of many episodes hinged on Tripper struggling to keep his secret from an ever-suspicious (and homophobic) Furley. Knotts introduced the character in 1979, during the show's fourth season, when the original landlords (Norman Fell and Audra Lindley) had departed for their own spin-off, "The Ropers."For Knotts, who typically worked in Disney comedies and other family-friendly fare, appearing in a sex comedy — then decried by critics as "jiggle TV" -- constituted a major departure. But he stayed with "Three's Company" until it went off the air in 1984 after eight seasons.However, it was his portrayal of Barney Fife — a role for which he won five Emmy Awards -- that immortalized Knotts to TV viewers. Deputy Fife, an inveterate bumbler, was not in the series pilot, and was at first intended simply to be part of a large ensemble that would surround Griffith, who played Sheriff Andy Taylor in Mayberry, a fictional North Carolina town near Raleigh.But not long after the series debuted in October 1960, Knotts stole the show. Griffith, who was meant to be the series' comic focus, shifted to playing straight man. The writers began beefing up Fife's role and creating episodes that depended on the sheriff rescuing Fife from his latest predicament. "Andy Griffith" was the most popular comedy on television during its first season, and never dropped from the Top 10 for the rest of its eight-year run.In Knotts' hands, Fife was a fully realized stooge, a hick-town Don Quixote who imagined himself braver, more sophisticated and more competent than he actually was. His utter lack of self-control led him into desperate jams that usually culminated with Fife at the end of his rope, bug-eyed and panting with anxiety. Sheriff Taylor allowed his deputy to carry just one bullet, which he was obliged to keep separate from his service revolver due to past trigger mishaps.Asked how he developed his most famous character, Knotts replied in a 2000 interview: "Mainly, I thought of Barney as a kid. You can always look into the faces of kids and see what they're thinking, if they're happy or sad. That's what I tried to do with Barney. It's very identifiable."Jesse Donald Knotts was born in Morgantown, W.Va., on July 21, 1924, the youngest of four brothers. His family life was troubled; Knotts' father twice threatened his mother with a knife and later spent time in mental hospitals, while older brother Earl — nicknamed "Shadow" because of his thinness -- died of asthma when Knotts was still a teenager.Years later, the actor did not recall his childhood fondly."I felt like a loser," he recalled in a 1976 interview with the Los Angeles Times. "I was unhappy, I think, most of the time. We were terribly poor and I hated my size."Knotts turned to performing in his early teens, doing an Edgar Bergen-inspired ventriloquism act with a dummy he named Danny.He enlisted in the Army in 1943 and served in the Pacific, receiving the World War II Victory Medal among other decorations. After the war, in 1948, he graduated from West Virginia University with an education degree.He soon borrowed $100 and moved to New York to pursue an acting career. He auditioned for several radio gigs but was turned down. One of his earliest TV roles was on the CBS soap opera "Search for Tomorrow," where he played Wilbur Peterson — a neurotic young man so troubled he communicated only with his sister -- from 1953-55. It was the only non-comedic role he ever played.But Knotts did not receive widespread attention until he appeared on Broadway in Ira Levin's 1955 comedy "No Time for Sergeants." Based on Mac Hyman's novel, the play concerned a hillbilly — played by a then-unknown Andy Griffith -- who was drafted into the Air Force. Knotts won plaudits as an overly tense military evaluator.From 1956-60, Knotts further cemented his reputation on NBC's "The Steve Allen Show," where he would play a character named Mr. Morrison, aka "the nervous man." Interviewed on the street, Morrison was asked whether something was making him nervous and would inevitably offer a terse, anxiety-wracked "No!"In the meantime, "No Time for Sergeants" was made into a feature film in 1958, with Griffith and Knotts reprising their roles. The two actors kept in touch, and when Griffith signed to do the TV series as a rural sheriff, Knotts half-jokingly suggested that the lawman would need a deputy.Knotts left "Andy Griffith" in 1965, later explaining that he believed the producers had always intended for the series to last just five seasons. In a 1967 Times interview, he said, "The grind gets to you in television, and that's primarily the reason I'm concentrating on pictures."Griffith stayed with the program for three years after Knotts' departure, however, and Knotts agreed to revive his role as Fife in a number of guest spots. Even without Knotts, "Andy Griffith" remained popular, and the show was ranked No. 1 in its final season, 1967-68. Episodes remain syndication favorites and still appear in frequent rotation on cable network TV Land.But many fans now believe "Andy Griffith" fizzled creatively without Knotts' manic energy — a point that even Griffith himself has conceded. On the TV fan site www.jumptheshark.com, one viewer wrote, "When Barney Fife left town, 'The Andy Griffith Show' changed from a television classic to just another 60's TV show."After "Griffith," Knotts stayed busy, although he never quite matched the success he had seen as Barney Fife. An NBC variety hour, "The Don Knotts Show," premiered in 1970 and lasted just one season. The actor subsequently appeared in several live-action Disney features: as a bumbling bandit in "The Apple Dumpling Gang" (1975), a would-be safecracker in "No Deposit, No Return" (1976) and an auto-racing veteran in "Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo" (1977). He also reprised his role as Fife in "Return to Mayberry," a nostalgic TV movie that delivered enormous ratings for CBS in 1986, and had a recurring role in "Matlock," CBS' courtroom drama starring Griffith.A self-described hypochondriac, Knotts suffered numerous health reversals in recent years. He developed vision problems that made driving and some other tasks difficult. In the fall of 2003, he injured his Achilles tendon while starring in "On Golden Pond" at the New Theatre in Overland Park, Kansas, and had to wear a brace onstage.Two of Knotts' three marriages ended in divorce. The first, to Kathryn Kay Metz, lasted from 1947 to 1964 and produced two children, Karen, an actress who co-starred with her father in a 1996 stage revival of "You Can't Take It With You," and Thomas, both of whom survive him. From 1974 to 1983, Knotts was married to Loralee Czuchna. He was married to actress Francey Yarborough at the time of his death."He saw poignancy in people's pride and pain and he turned it into something endearing and hilarious," Yarborough, who is also an actress, said in a statement Saturday.Knotts received a star on the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame in January 2000.In the foreword to Knotts' 2000 memoir, "Barney Fife and Other Characters I Have Known," Griffith wrote that Knotts personally had little in common with his most famous creation. "Don was not Barney Fife," Griffith wrote. "I know Don to be a bright man and very much in control of himself. As everyone knows, Barney Fife had very little control of himself. In the comedy scenes we did, I was often closer to Don than the camera and I could look at him before we started those scenes, and through his eyes, I could see him become Barney Fife."

THE ROLLING STONES 29 January 2006: Qwest Center — Omaha, NE
Omaha Rock City: Four decades later, the Stones remain strangely vital.
by William Carl Ferleman


The Rolling Stones knew bloody well that they hadn't played in Omaha in about 40 years -- nearly as long as the band's ostensibly undying, but proud existence. Not only did eternally peppy frontman Mick Jagger say as much, but the group displayed its dour and desperate rite of spring ode to Dionysus with frenzied and carnally willful energy. The aged but hip band did not rest on its certified rock star laurels. Rather, they most demonstratively played for over two hours in front of a vicariously charged, sold-out crowd at the new, downtown Qwest Center.
Seasoned and saucy, the group initiated the show with the telling tale of transcendence and survival, "Jumpin' Jack Flash". With its distorted, diabolic murmur anticipating pirate-rogue guitarist Keith Richards's trademark jerky ingenuity and active reluctance, "Flash" overwhelmingly pronounced the band's sense of indestructibility and rough, ironic musical machismo. "But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas!" sung Jagger, shaking in what seemed like a Red Bull rush. The Stones, clearly aware of the many cynics, managed to brush aside any belittlement about their age and aptitude. The song was a harsh, determined slap in the face -- not to mention the emblem of a renewed, seminal viability and force.
The band -- near the close of its mammoth North American tour supporting A Bigger Bang -- donned several showy, flashy, and mock-formal Lucullan outfits. Of course, this kind of thing is almost standard fare: in St. Paul, for instance, Richards, jokingly wore a "Homeland Security" shirt for a good part of the show; in Omaha he gussied himself up in numerous glistening but loose and gaudy shirts -- mostly in ebony.
Jagger mimicked Richards, hitting the stage in a silver-spangled, short, black coat with tight matching pants. His St. Paul opening garb consisted of a dime-store ruby hat and a long coat. For the Stones, the Omaha event was something of a dignified, decadent mass.
From the band's 20-song set, three songs were particularly noteworthy. "She's So Cold", the laughably cruel and kind number, was no doubt the early riotous standout. Jagger auspiciously dragged and drawled out the song to compliment its primitive, libidinal rhythm as he acted out its sense of sorrowful, animal attraction.
"She's So Cold" metamorphosed into "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" territory in its delightful, yet doleful titillation and feeling. The band's brief set in the arena's center featured the rare, psychedelic classic "Get Off of My Cloud" -- this song went off rather brilliantly, with Richards manipulating a common bluesy sound, and Jagger spitting the chorus with authority. But by far the eerie war-evoking "Gimme Shelter" took the cake at the hits banquet: stellar singer Lisa Fischer nailed her notes, and she persuasively played luscious coquette to Jagger's rapacious Eros. The two sexily brushed against one another, singing with passion and a credible sense of intimacy. This unique moment was surely one of a kind -- "Gimme Shelter" is not played all too often after all.
Jagger knows not his age, for he still parades and prances as if he were in his 20s. Throughout the evening he raised his hands manically and shook his hips scandalously, taking few breaks. Richards competed with Jagger for stage dominance while still managing plenty of vehement guitar solos. While Ron Wood and Charlie Watts each played fairly, it was the other two that demanded the spotlight.
Watts laid the beats, but, alas, looked noticeably frail, having recently overcome cancer. Jagger and Richards were both talkative: Richards mischievously said, "Happy New Year" because he thought he could get away with it (it was almost February!).
Jagger thanked the crowd with "You're very kind" and "You're a fantastic audience." The classic band performed a greatest hits show, but also mixed several novel songs, including the risqué "Rough Justice" and the cleverly mocking "Oh No Not You Again".
The final climactic song, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", saw Jagger sporting an air-blown pink shirt and finally, graciously curtsying to the crowd. The Rolling Stones are far from washed up: they seem to have found the elixir of life -- or at least some concoction to skirt death a little longer.

Moms' Genetics Might Help Produce Gay Sons
By Randy DotingaHealthDay (HealthDay News) -- New research adds a twist to the debate on the origins of sexual orientation, suggesting that the genetics of mothers of multiple gay sons act differently than those of other women.
Scientists found that almost one fourth of the mothers who had more than one gay son processed X chromosomes in their bodies in the same way. Normally, women randomly process the chromosomes in one of two ways -- half go one way, half go the other.
The research "confirms that there is a strong genetic basis for sexual orientation, and that for some gay men, genes on the X chromosome are involved," said study co-author Sven Bocklandt, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles.
The link between genetics and sexual orientation has been a hot topic for more than a decade as a few scientists have tried to find genes that might make people gay or straight. In the new study, Bocklandt and colleagues examined a phenomenon called "X-chromosome inactivation."
While females have two X chromosomes, they actually require only one and routinely inactivate the other, Bocklandt said. "That way, both men and women have basically one functional X chromosome," he added. Men have both an X and Y chromosome, but the Y chromosome plays a much smaller role, he said.
Women typically inactivate one of their two X chromosomes at random. "It's like flipping a coin," Bocklandt said. "If you look at a woman in any given (bodily) tissue, you'd expect about half of the cells to inactivate one X, and half would inactivate the other."
In the new study, researchers looked at 97 mothers of gay sons and 103 mothers without gay sons to see if there was any difference in how they handled their X chromosomes. The findings appear in the February issue of the journal Human Genetics.
"When we looked at women who have gay kids, in those with more than one gay son, we saw a quarter of them inactivate the same X in virtually every cell we checked," Bocklandt said. "That's extremely unusual."
Forty-four of the women had more than one gay son.
In contrast, 4 percent of mothers with no gay sons activated the chromosome and 13 percent of those with just one gay son did.
The phenomenon of being more likely to inactivate one X chromosome -- known as "extreme skewing" -- is typically seen only in families that have major genetic irregularities, Bocklandt said.
What does this all mean? The researchers aren't sure, but Bocklandt thinks he and his colleagues are moving closer to understanding the origins of sexual orientation.
"What's really remarkable and very novel about this is that you see something in the bodies of women that is linked to a behavioral trait in their sons," he said. "That's new, that's unheard of."
Still, there are caveats. Dr. Ionel Sandovici, a genetics researcher at The Babraham Institute in Cambridge, England, pointed out that most of the mothers of multiple gay sons didn't share the unusual X-chromosome trait. And the study itself is small, which means more research will need to be done to confirm its findings, Sandovici said.
Ultimately, Sandovici added, the origins of sexual orientation remain "rather a complicated biological puzzle."
And this line of research does have its critics. Some have worried that, in the future, manipulation of a "gay gene" or genes might be used as a method of preventing homosexuality in utero, or perhaps even after. But Bocklandt said these kinds of fears shouldn't stand in the way of legitimate scientific research.
"We're trying to understand one of the most critical human traits: the ability to love and be attracted to others. Without sexual reproduction we would not exist, and sexual selection played an essential role in evolution," he said. "Yet, we have no idea how it works, and that's what we're trying to find out. As with any research, the knowledge you acquire could be used for benefit or harm. But if [scientists] would have avoided research because we were afraid of what we were going to find, then we would still be living in the stone age."
More information
Learn about the debate over a "gay gene" from the PBS' Frontline.
Copyright © 2006 HealthDay.

Here is a warning that Internet freedom is about to be limited. Is this an example of good intentions creating a disasterous consequence? If you were Google, what would you do?

Judge says Google's image search violates some copyrights

Elise AckermanMercury News
A Los Angeles federal judge has ruled that Google's image search violates an adult Web site's copyrights by displaying ``thumbnail'' versions of its photos.
In a ruling released Tuesday, U.S. District Judge A. Howard Matz found Google directly infringed on copyrights held by Perfect 10, a Beverly Hills publisher. He said the free availability of the photos on Google could harm Perfect 10's efforts to sell thumbnail, or small, versions of its photos as downloads to cell phones.
``The court reaches this conclusion despite the enormous public benefit that search engines such as Google provide,'' Matz wrote in a 47-page order filed Friday.
If upheld, the judge's ruling could affect Yahoo and other Internet companies whose image searches display thumbnails of copyrighted pictures.
The judge ordered Google and Perfect 10 to submit by March 8 wording for a preliminary injunction barring the use of the thumbnail images.
Perfect 10 publishes the adult magazine ``Perfect 10'' and operates a subscription Web site that claims to feature ``the world's most beautiful natural women.''
Google's image search displays thumbnail images when people submit a query on a particular subject. The tiny pictures are stored on Google's servers but when a person clicks on the image, they are taken to the original source of the full-sized image.
Google's creation and display of the Perfect 10 thumbnail images ``likely do not fall within the fair use exemption,'' Matz wrote, citing a legal standard that allows for limited use of copyrighted works, such as for criticism, comment, news reporting or teaching.
The Mountain View search company has long faced complaints for linking to copyrighted material, though some of criticism has been blunted as publishers have found ways to profit from the traffic Google sends to their sites.
The 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in an earlier case that a search engine could display thumbnail reproductions of scenes of the American West because its purpose was improving access to information on the Internet.
But Matz noted that Perfect 10's case was different in that the publisher had signed a licensing agreement with Fonestarz Media to sell its copyrighted images for download to cell phones. Meanwhile, those images were available for free on Google, Matz noted.
Google's legal counsel, Michael Kwun, said in a statement that the company was disappointed with ``portions'' of the preliminary injunction'' but that it will not affect the vast majority of image searches.
The company said it will probably appeal the injunction.
The judge rejected Perfect 10's request to bar Google from linking to third-party Web sites that contain Perfect 10 images.
``We feel when all the evidence comes out, we are confident that we are ultimately going to prevail on that as well,'' said Daniel Cooper, general counsel for Perfect 10.
The publisher has asked the judge to order Google to disclose the revenue it receives from third-party porn sites that participate in Google's AdSense advertising program.
Laurence Pulgram, a partner at Fenwick & West who has defended Napster, SONICblue and ReplayTV said Friday's injunction was good news for Internet users in general and ``limited bad news'' for Google.
He noted that a ruling against links to illegally posted content could have opened up untold numbers of Web site owners to liability.
Perfect 10 filed suit against Google and Amazon in November 2004 for allegedly displaying its copyrighted images. It also alleges that Google links to Web sites that display the images and published username and password combinations that allow access to perfect10.com.
Matz noted that Amazon licenses from Google much of the technology that is subject of the suits. The judge said he would issue a separate ruling addressing the request for an order against Amazon.
Contact Elise Ackerman at eackerman@mercurynews.com or (408) 271-3774.

Austria Imposes 3-Year Sentence on Notorious Holocaust Denier
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
VIENNA, Feb. 20 (AP) — The British historian David Irving on Monday pleaded guilty to denying the Holocaust and was sentenced to three years in prison. He conceded that he was wrong when he said there were no Nazi gas chambers at the Auschwitz death camp.
Mr. Irving, handcuffed and wearing a navy blue suit, arrived in court carrying a copy of one of his books, "Hitler's War," which challenges the extent of the Holocaust.
"I made a mistake when I said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz," he told the court before his sentencing, at which he faced up to 10 years in prison.
"In no way did I deny the killings of millions of people by the Nazis," testified Mr. Irving, who has written nearly 30 books.
He also expressed sorrow "for all the innocent people who died during the Second World War."
Mr. Irving's lawyer, Elmar Kresbach, immediately announced that he would appeal the sentence.
"I consider the verdict a little too stringent," he said. "I would say it's a bit of a message trial."
Mr. Irving appeared shocked as the sentence was read. Moments later, an elderly man who identified himself as a family friend called out, "Stay strong, David! Stay strong!" The man was escorted from the courtroom.
Mr. Irving, 67, has been in custody since Nov. 11, when he was arrested in the southern province of Styria on charges stemming from two speeches he gave in Austria in 1989 in which he was accused of denying the Nazis' annihilation of six million Jews. He has contended that most of those who died at camps like Auschwitz were not executed, but instead succumbed to diseases like typhus.
He was denied bail by a Vienna court, which said there was a risk he would flee the country. He was convicted under a 1992 law, which applies to "whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast or other media."
Mr. Irving's trial came during a period of intense debate in Europe over freedom of expression, after European newspapers printed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that set off deadly protests worldwide.

From Atlanta Constitution: Cynthia Tucker
Feds' Katrina cluelessness a perfect stormPublished on: 02/19/06
If Hurricane Katrina represented an act of God, the official response to it clearly came from somewhere else. The federal government of the richest and mightiest and most technologically sophisticated nation on Earth stood by and did next to nothing while a hurricane and subsequent flooding destroyed one of its major cities — despite plenty of warnings that the city was vulnerable.
Was it sheer incompetence? If so, it rose to levels that Americans might expect in places such as Bangladesh or Congo, but certainly not from authorities in the United States. Was it merely indifference? That, too, would require a degree of disregard for the lives of common folk that we've seen in the leaders of distant, undeveloped lands. But not here.
A recently released congressional report sums it up: "Katrina was a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare." Still, the report can't answer the most basic question: How could this have happened in the United States of America?
Certainly, those congressional investigators haven't made any excuses for Bush administration officials or local government leaders, including New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco. With Democrats expecting a whitewash and refusing to participate in the inquiry, House Republicans deserve accolades for a hard-headed, clear-eyed look at the missteps and bungling, all the way up to the White House. They issued a scathing indictment of officials at all levels, noting that only the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center comported themselves with professionalism; their predictions were largely on target.
Not that it mattered. All the weather service can really do is yell, "Batten down the hatches!" Somebody else has to do the battening. Despite the warnings, Blanco and Nagin "delayed ordering a mandatory evacuation in New Orleans until 19 hours before landfall," the report states. Nagin was worried that tourism-related businesses — hotels and restaurants — might sue over a loss of business if the predictions failed to pan out.
However, even if the mayor and governor had acted promptly, disaster planners know that a certain percentage of the population — 10 percent to 25 percent — will always remain behind, as the report notes. In New Orleans, where so many residents were poor, without cars or even the money for a bus ticket to Houston, that number may have been higher than average.
The resources of the city and state were overwhelmed even before the dimensions of the disaster became clear, and the response should have become a federal responsibility. When a tsunami strikes South Asia or an earthquake hits Pakistan, after all, no one expects Arizona or Pennsylvania to respond. It's a job for the combined national resources of the United States — an effort that can only be coordinated by officials at the very top.
The White House had been warned that conditions in New Orleans were dire. While administration officials claimed in the days immediately following the storm that experts had not foreseen a breach in the levees, such a failure had been predicted for years. Indeed, congressional investigators learned that a Federal Emergency Management Agency official, Marty Bahamonde, telephoned his superiors Monday evening to warn them that the levees had failed and flooding would be widespread. White House officials got the news that same night — before Tuesday's media reports of distraught residents trapped on rooftops.
What happened? Nothing. As Rep. Thomas Davis (R-Va.), chairman of the House committee, told The New York Times: "The president is still at his ranch, the vice president is still fly-fishing in Wyoming, the president's chief of staff is in Maine."
Even our vaunted military was hobbled by indecision and squabbling. Nobody could decide who was in charge. Republicans initially pointed the finger at Blanco, a Democrat, for refusing to allow the feds authority over the Louisiana National Guard, but the House report shows the failures started in a National Response Plan that created confusion over command. Still, as the report notes, "Earlier presidential involvement might have resulted in a more effective response."
Though FEMA director Michael Brown was rightly shunted out of his job shortly after the disaster, the White House is still lavishing praise on his boss, Michael Chertoff, head of the Department of Homeland Security. While senators blasted Chertoff last week, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said, "Secretary Chertoff is doing a great job."
That wasn't exactly reassuring, but it does help answer the question about how this cascading calamity occurred in the first place.

Hunter shot by Cheney has heart attack
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
Published: 15 February 2006
"We can't get Bin Laden, but we nailed a 78-year-old attorney," was how David Letterman put it on his CBS Late Night Show. Last night, the joke suddenly became a good deal less funny when Harry Whittington suffered a minor heart attack after being peppered with gunshot by Vice-President Dick Cheney on a quail hunt in Texas.
Doctors said a birdshot pellet had moved and lodged in a part of his heart, causing an atrial fibrillation (a disorder in the heart's rhythm). Though Mr Whittington was apparently fully alert and in good spirits, he was moved back into intensive care where he will be monitored for seven days.
Mr Whittington apparently did not experience the symptoms of a heart attack, and the pellet - for now at least - will be left in place. "He can live a healthy life with it there, he's not had a had a heart attack in the traditional sense," said David Blanchard, chief of emergency care at the Corpus Christi hospital. But Mr Whittington's age is a complicating factor.
Even before the latest developments, the Vice-President's unloading of a cartridge of 28-bore pellets into the face and torso of his friend, was the continuing talk of Washington. The White House press corps has been up in arms, comedians have material to keep them going for months, and Mr Cheney has unwittingly cemented his reputation as the ultimate hard man of the Bush administration.
The shooting, it is clear, was an accident. Hunting experts mostly agree that the fault belonged to Mr Whittington for not telling his fellow hunters exactly where he was. The Texas authorities issued a report blaming the incident on "a hunter's judgement factor".
Thus far, Mr Cheney's only offence (apart from failing to promptly inform the White House press of what had happened) has been the non-payment of a $7 (£3.50) hunting licence supplement required for upland game birds. "A cheque is on its way," a spokesman now says.
Whatever the outcome, the affair will claim its niche in history. For one thing, it is apparently the first time a sitting Vice-President has shot a person since 11 July, 1804, when Aaron Burr fatally shot the statesman Alexander Hamilton in a duel at Weehawken, New Jersey.
On Monday, moreover, it produced one of the more surreal press briefings in White House annals. For 40 minutes, Scott McClellan, Mr Bush's spokesman, came under a verbal shotgun barrage that even quails do not have to cope with. In the "questions you never-thought you'd hear" department, few rank higher than "When did the President learn the Vice-President had shot someone?"
The answer, it appears, was just before 8pm on Saturday evening - two and a half hours after Mr Whittington was wounded - when Karl Rove (who else?) called George Bush to inform him of what had happened.
What the hapless Mr McClellan could not explain was why neither the White House nor Mr Cheney's office had seen fit to make the announcement that evening, leaving it to the owner of the ranch to leak the news the following day. Even before yesterday's alarming turn in Mr Whittington's health, Mr Cheney had been cast as a man who believes executive branch powers trump any tiresome obligation to inform anyone - whether Congress or the press - of what he is up to. True to form, the one person who has not uttered a word on the affair is the Vice-President himself.
Almost everyone else was speaking out. On NBC's Tonight Show, Jay Leno declared that "Cheney is starting to lose it. After he shot the guy, he screamed, 'Anyone else want to call domestic wiretapping illegal?'"
The Comedy Central comedian Rob Corddry said: "The Vice-President is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. Now, according to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be a 78-year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr Whittington in the face."
"We can't get Bin Laden, but we nailed a 78-year-old attorney," was how David Letterman put it on his CBS Late Night Show. Last night, the joke suddenly became a good deal less funny when Harry Whittington suffered a minor heart attack after being peppered with gunshot by Vice-President Dick Cheney on a quail hunt in Texas.
Doctors said a birdshot pellet had moved and lodged in a part of his heart, causing an atrial fibrillation (a disorder in the heart's rhythm). Though Mr Whittington was apparently fully alert and in good spirits, he was moved back into intensive care where he will be monitored for seven days.
Mr Whittington apparently did not experience the symptoms of a heart attack, and the pellet - for now at least - will be left in place. "He can live a healthy life with it there, he's not had a had a heart attack in the traditional sense," said David Blanchard, chief of emergency care at the Corpus Christi hospital. But Mr Whittington's age is a complicating factor.
Even before the latest developments, the Vice-President's unloading of a cartridge of 28-bore pellets into the face and torso of his friend, was the continuing talk of Washington. The White House press corps has been up in arms, comedians have material to keep them going for months, and Mr Cheney has unwittingly cemented his reputation as the ultimate hard man of the Bush administration.
The shooting, it is clear, was an accident. Hunting experts mostly agree that the fault belonged to Mr Whittington for not telling his fellow hunters exactly where he was. The Texas authorities issued a report blaming the incident on "a hunter's judgement factor".
Thus far, Mr Cheney's only offence (apart from failing to promptly inform the White House press of what had happened) has been the non-payment of a $7 (£3.50) hunting licence supplement required for upland game birds. "A cheque is on its way," a spokesman now says.
Whatever the outcome, the affair will claim its niche in history. For one thing, it is apparently the first time a sitting Vice-President has shot a person since 11 July, 1804, when Aaron Burr fatally shot the statesman Alexander Hamilton in a duel at Weehawken, New Jersey.
On Monday, moreover, it produced one of the more surreal press briefings in White House annals. For 40 minutes, Scott McClellan, Mr Bush's spokesman, came under a verbal shotgun barrage that even quails do not have to cope with. In the "questions you never-thought you'd hear" department, few rank higher than "When did the President learn the Vice-President had shot someone?"
The answer, it appears, was just before 8pm on Saturday evening - two and a half hours after Mr Whittington was wounded - when Karl Rove (who else?) called George Bush to inform him of what had happened.
What the hapless Mr McClellan could not explain was why neither the White House nor Mr Cheney's office had seen fit to make the announcement that evening, leaving it to the owner of the ranch to leak the news the following day. Even before yesterday's alarming turn in Mr Whittington's health, Mr Cheney had been cast as a man who believes executive branch powers trump any tiresome obligation to inform anyone - whether Congress or the press - of what he is up to. True to form, the one person who has not uttered a word on the affair is the Vice-President himself.
Almost everyone else was speaking out. On NBC's Tonight Show, Jay Leno declared that "Cheney is starting to lose it. After he shot the guy, he screamed, 'Anyone else want to call domestic wiretapping illegal?'"
The Comedy Central comedian Rob Corddry said: "The Vice-President is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. Now, according to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be a 78-year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr Whittington in the face."

Cheney cited for breaking hunting law

NEDRA PICKLERAssociated Press
WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney has been given a warning citation for breaking Texas hunting law by failing to buy a $7 stamp allowing him to shoot upland game birds.
The warning came from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department after it investigated Cheney's accidental shooting of a fellow quail hunter Saturday on the private Armstrong Ranch in the south part of the state.
The department found the accident was caused by a "hunter's judgment factor" when Cheney sprayed another hunter while aiming at flying birds.
The report said the victim, prominent Republican attorney Harry Whittington of Austin, was retrieving a downed bird and stepped out of the hunting line he was sharing with Cheney. "Another covey was flushed and Cheney swung on a bird and fired, striking Whittington in the face, neck and chest at approximately 30 yards," the report said.
Cheney, an experienced hunter, has not commented publicly about the accident. His office said Monday night in a statement that Cheney had a $125 nonresident hunting license and has sent a $7 check to cover the cost of the stamp. "The staff asked for all permits needed, but was not informed of the $7 upland game bird stamp requirement," the statement said.
Whittington also received a warning for failing to have the stamp. A department spokesman said warnings are being issued in most cases because the stamp requirement only went into effect five months ago and many hunters aren't aware of it.
Whittington was in stable condition at Christus Spohn Hospital Corpus Christi-Memorial and was moved from intensive care to a "step-down unit" Monday. Doctors decided to leave several birdshot pellets lodged in his skin rather than try to remove them.
Katharine Armstrong, owner of the ranch where the shooting occurred, said it happened toward the end of the hunt, when it was still sunny but as darkness was encroaching and they were preparing to go inside. She said Whittington made a mistake by not announcing that he had walked up to rejoin the hunting line, and Cheney didn't see him as he tried to down a bird.
Armstrong said she saw Cheney's security detail running toward the scene. "The first thing that crossed my mind was he had a heart problem," she told The Associated Press.
She said Cheney stayed "close but cool" while the agents and medical personnel treated Whittington, then took him by ambulance to the hospital. Later, the hunting group sat down for dinner while Whittington was being treated, receiving updates from a family member at the hospital. Armstrong described Cheney's demeanor during dinner as "very worried" about Whittington.
Pamela Willeford, the U.S. ambassador to Switzerland, another member of the hunting party, told The Dallas Morning News for a story in Tuesday's editions that she and Cheney didn't realize Whittington had picked up a bird and caught up with them.
Willeford said she has hunted with Cheney before and would again.
"He's a great shot. He's very safety conscious. This is something that unfortunately was a bad accident and when you're with a group like that, he's safe or safer than all the rest of us," she said.
The accident raised questions about Cheney's adherence to hunting safety practices and the White House's failure to disclose the accident in a timely way.
Duane Harvey, president of the Wisconsin Hunter Education Instructors Association, said if Whittington had made his presence known "that would have been a polite thing to do." But, he added, "it's still the fault upon the shooter to identify his target and what is beyond it."
President Bush was told about Cheney's involvement in the accident shortly before 8 p.m. Saturday - about an hour after it occurred - but the White House did not disclose the accident until Sunday afternoon, and then only in response to press questions.
Facing a press corps upset that news had been withheld, press secretary Scott McClellan said, "I think you can always look back at these issues and look at how to do a better job."
Armstrong said she told Cheney on Sunday morning that she was going to inform the local paper, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. She said he agreed, and the newspaper was the first to report the incident on its Web site Sunday afternoon.
Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren said that about an hour after Cheney shot Whittington, the head of the Secret Service's local office called the Kenedy County sheriff to report the accident. "They made arrangements at the sheriff's request to have deputies come out and interview the vice president the following morning at 8 a.m. and that indeed did happen," Zahren said.
At least one deputy showed up at the ranch's front gate Saturday evening and asked to speak to Cheney but was turned away by the Secret Service, Zahren said. There was some miscommunication that arrangements already had been made to interview Cheney the next morning, he said.
Gilbert San Miguel, chief deputy sheriff for Kenedy County, said the department's report had not been completed Monday and that it was being handled as a hunting accident, although he would not comment about what exactly they were investigating. Both the sheriff's department and the state have determined that alcohol did not appear to be a factor.

Who's In Gitmo?
10 Feb 2006 12:30 pm (From Andrew Sullivan)
National Journal has done us all a service with fresh reporting on who is actually detained in Guantanamo Bay, and what happens to them once they're there. Key pieces here, here, and here. In June of last year, president Bush said "these are people picked up off the battlefield in Afghanistan." At the same time, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld was even more categorical: "These are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield." No big surprise that these statements are untrue. Stuart Taylor summarizes the piece thus:
* A high percentage, perhaps the majority, of the 500-odd men now held at Guantanamo were not captured on any battlefield, let alone on "the battlefield in Afghanistan" (as Bush asserted) while "trying to kill American forces" (as McClellan claimed).
* Fewer than 20 percent of the Guantanamo detainees, the best available evidence suggests, have ever been Qaeda members.
* Many scores, and perhaps hundreds, of the detainees were not even Taliban foot soldiers, let alone Qaeda terrorists. They were innocent, wrongly seized noncombatants with no intention of joining the Qaeda campaign to murder Americans.
* The majority were not captured by U.S. forces but rather handed over by reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability.
And how have these innocent men been treated? Taylor again:
[D]etainees who had no information - because they had no involvement in or knowledge of terrorism - have been put through "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions" in a systematic effort to break their wills that is "tantamount to torture," the International Committee of the Red Cross complained in a confidential report to the government, excerpts of which The New York Times obtained in November 2004. The Pentagon responded then that Guantanamo was an oasis of "humane" treatment.
As readers are aware, I am no fan of Islamism and support aggressive execution of the war on terror. But I do not believe we should be detaining people without due process, abusing and torturing detainees, and prompting dozens of prisoners to go on hunger-strike because of the complete hopelessness of their situation. As Jon Henke reminds us, we have principles in war-time: no self-censorship to appease religious thugs; no torture or abuse of detainees. You cannot defend freedom while extinguishing it at the same time. I fail to see why this is so hard for so many to appreciate.

BETTY FRIEDAN 1921-2006Mother of modern feminism

Betty Friedan, whose book launched American feminism, died Saturday. She oversaw many public triumphs for women.By ELAINE WOOLos Angeles Times Service
Betty Friedan, the visionary, combative feminist who launched a social revolution with her provocative 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, died Saturday, which was her 85th birthday.
Friedan died of congestive heart failure at her home in Washington, D.C., according to Emily Bazelon, a cousin who was speaking for the family. She said Friedan had been in failing health for some time.
Her best-selling book identified ''the problem that has no name,'' the unhappiness of post-World War II American women unfulfilled by traditional notions of female domesticity.
BOOK AS MANIFESTO
Melding sociology and humanistic psychology, the book became the cornerstone of one of the last century's most profound movements, unleashing the first full flowering of American feminism since the 1800s.
It gave Friedan, an obscure suburban New York housewife and freelance writer, the mantle to meet with popes and heads of state and to lead an international movement that would shake up marriage and the workplace, politics and education.
She founded the National Organization for Women in 1966, making it the first new feminist organization in a half-century.
She also was among the founders of the National Women's Political Caucus and the group that became the National Abortion Rights Action League.
''I never set out to write a book to change women's lives, to change history,'' said Friedan, who always kept a sense of wonder about her place in history as the mother of the contemporary women's movement.
'It's like, `Who, me?' Yes, me. I did it. And I'm not that different from other women. . . . Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman.''
Friedan's affinity with mainstream values was the foundation of her authority. Her emphatic belief that women should have equal rights -- but not at the expense of alienating men -- distinguished her from many feminist leaders who emerged later.
''She found that love between unequals can never succeed,'' Gloria Steinem once said, ``and she has undertaken the immense job of bringing up the status of women so love can succeed.''
RUPTURES
Her more moderate brand of feminism, combined with her often irascible nature, led to ruptures with other movement leaders, such as Steinem and the late Bella Abzug. Some feminists eventually denounced her as a reactionary.
By the 1980s, feminism had ceased being her primary focus, and she spent her last decades focused on issues of aging, families, work and public policy.
TIME WITH CHILDREN
In her last years, Friedan split her time between homes in Sag Harbor, N.Y., and Washington, D.C. She spent more time with her children -- Daniel, a theoretical physicist at Rutgers University who won a MacArthur Foundation genius grant; Jonathan, an engineer in Philadelphia; and Emily, a pediatrician in Buffalo, N.Y. -- and their families.
Friedan wrote six books and had teaching posts at many institutions, including Yale, Harvard, the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Southern California.
Surgery in 1997 to replace an infected aortic valve slowed her down only a little. A few years later, she was a distinguished visiting professor at Cornell University, where she used a $1 million Ford Foundation grant to conduct a three-year study on women, men, work, family and public policy.
She continued to deplore the lack of progress on issues that affected the quality of family life, such as flexible scheduling and better and more affordable child care.
SAW SUCCESS
Yet she seemed to look back on her life with immense pleasure, saying that the women's movement had succeeded in the United States and other advanced countries beyond her wildest imaginings.
''I thought once,'' she said, 'about what should be put on my gravestone: `She helped make women feel better about being women and therefore better able to freely and fully love men.' ''

From "Belmont Club"
Interesting times
It's possible to regard the cartoon crisis as either a strategic disaster or boon for the War on Terror. The argument for it being a disaster is the assertion that in the war against extremists it is necessary to win over the moderates. And even if winning them over is impossible one may still be capable of keeping them neutral or indifferent; but at all events to avoid raising the Muslim masses in an emotional war against the West. The Danish cartoon crisis has managed to ignite what the Bush administration hoped to avoid from the beginning: turning the War on Terror into a War with Islam. Now an incident arising from a relatively obscure newspaper in Denmark has forced a choice between the most deeply held of all Western values, freedom of speech, with the cherished strategic goal of keeping the Muslim "street" aboard in the War on Terror.
The argument for regarding the Danish cartoons as a boon is premised on the belief that President Bush's attempt to separate the War on Terror from Islam was doomed to fail anyway; that it was better to face that question now than later. According to this point of view, a view reinforced by the election of Hamas in the Palestinian territories, cultural and religious issues were at the root of international conflict. That mere voting -- in Palestine for example -- would never be sufficient to establish a liberal democracy for as long as the underlying culture remained hostile and aggressive to democracy's roots.
Ralph Peters argued that America's shiny weapons were striking at the wrong targets. The West was, like it or not, engaged in a contest of cultures, one it did not know how to fight.
The suicide bomber's willingness to discard civilization's cherished rules for warfare gives him enormous strength. In the Cain-and-Abel conflicts of the 21st century, ruthlessness trumps technology. We refuse to comprehend the suicide bomber's soul--even though today's wars are contests of souls, and belief is our enemy's ultimate order of battle. We write off the suicide bomber as a criminal, a wanton butcher, a terrorist. Yet, within his spiritual universe, he's more heroic than the American soldier who throws himself atop a grenade to spare his comrades: He isn't merely protecting other men, but defending his god. The suicide bomber can justify any level of carnage because he's doing his god's will. We agonize over a prisoner's slapped face, while our enemies are lauded as heroes for killing innocent masses (even of fellow believers). We continue to narrow our view of warfare's acceptable parameters even as our enemies amplify the concept of total war. ...
The hallmark of our age is the failure of belief systems and a subsequent flight back to primitive fundamentalism--and the phenomenon isn't limited to the Middle East. Faith revived is running roughshod over science and civilization. Secular societies appear increasingly fragmented, if not fragile. The angry gods are back. And they will not be defeated with cruise missiles or computer codes.
A paradox of our time is that the overwhelmingly secular global media--a collection of natural-born religion-haters--have become the crucial accomplices of the suicide bomber fueled by rabid faith. Mass murderers are lionized as freedom fighters, while our own troops are attacked by the press they protect for the least waywardness or error. One begins to wonder if the bomber's suicidal impulse isn't matched by a deep death wish affecting the West's cultural froth. (What if Darwin was right conceptually, but failed to grasp that homo sapiens' most powerful evolutionary strategy is faith?) Both the suicide bomber and the "world intellectual" with his reflexive hatred of America exist in emotional realms that our rational models of analysis cannot explain. The modern age's methods for interpreting humanity are played out.
We live in a new age of superstition and bloodthirsty gods, of collective madness. Its icons are the suicide bomber, the veil, and the video camera. ...
We are not (yet) at war with Islam, but the extreme believers within Islam are convinced that they are soldiers in a religious war against us. Despite their rhetoric, they are the crusaders. Even our conceptions of the struggle are asymmetrical. Despite the horrors we have witnessed, we have yet to take religious terrorists seriously on their own self-evident terms. We invaded a succession of their tormented countries, but haven't come close to penetrating their souls. The hermetic universe of the Islamist terrorist is immune to our reality (if not to our bullets), but our intellectuals appear equally incapable of accepting the religious extremist's reality.
Samuel Huntington wrote in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article that the primary driver of international conflicts in the 21st century would be a clash of civilizations.
"It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future."
This does not mean that all-out hostilities between Islam and the West are unavoidable. But it does imply that cultural conflict and competition is inevitable and that these clashes must be played out on some sort of battlefield, though not necessarily a physical one. The attitude of many Western intellectuals paralyzed by the cult of multiculturalism is ironically that "they don't do culture". Mark Steyn understood that multiculturalism was fundamentally about evading cultural conflicts rather than resolving them. In the New Criterion he wrote: "the great thing about multiculturalism is that it doesn’t involve knowing anything about other cultures—the capital of Bhutan, the principal exports of Malawi, who cares? All it requires is feeling good about other cultures. It’s fundamentally a fraud, and I would argue was subliminally accepted on that basis".
The challenge raised by Peters, Huntington and Steyn is to accept the existence of a clash of civilizations and find modalities -- preferably peaceful ones -- in which to resolve them.
No one can foresee where the Danish cartoon controversy will lead. At best both sides will return to their lines of departure after having made their points, each with a renewed respect for the other. The West should understand, if it didn't realize it before, that Muslims are willing to fight for their religion. And Muslims should understand, from the cartoon controversy, that whatever they had heard to the contrary it goes double ditto for the West. And in the long run that grudging respect may make the the process of winning over the Muslim moderates easier than feigning the cheap and superficial attitude of multiculturalism. For who in Islam would believe in us if we did not believe in ourselves? Who in Islam could trust that we would fight at their side if we could not defend all that we were, all that we believed?
posted by wretchard at 10:17 AM 116 comments
Thursday, February 02, 2006

February 2, 2006
Evangelical Filmmakers Criticized for Hiring Gay Actor
By NEELA BANERJEE NY TIMES
WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 — Christian ministers were enthusiastic at the early private screenings of "End of the Spear," made by Every Tribe Entertainment, an evangelical film company. But days before the film's premiere, a controversy erupted over the casting of a gay actor that has all but eclipsed the movie and revealed fault lines among evangelicals.
The film relates the true story of five American missionaries who were killed in 1956 by an indigenous tribe in Ecuador. The missionaries' families ultimately converted the tribe to Christianity, and forgave and befriended the killers. The tale inspired evangelicals 40 years ago with its message of redemption and grace, and the film company expected a similar reception.
On Jan. 12, though, the Rev. Jason Janz took the filmmakers to task for casting Chad Allen, an openly gay man and an activist, in the movie's lead role as one of the slain missionaries, and later, his grown son.
An assistant pastor at the independent Red Rocks Baptist Church in Denver, Mr. Janz posted his comments on his fundamentalist Christian Web site, sharperiron.org. He also asked the filmmakers to apologize for their choice.
The executives at Every Tribe stood by Mr. Allen. Jim Hanon, the director, said he was by far the best actor for the role. "If we make films according to what the Bible says is true, it's incumbent upon us to live that," he said. "We disagree with Chad about homosexuality, but we love him and worked with him, and we feel that's a Biblical position."
More than 100 pastors of churches across the country signed a letter drafted by Mr. Janz and addressed to Every Tribe expressing their disappointment in the casting of Mr. Allen.
Some evangelicals have boycotted the film, and Every Tribe's executives said that they had also turned over to the authorities material that they considered threatening.
"Does anyone really believe that Chad Allen was the best possible actor for Nate Saint?" Mr. Janz asked in his Jan. 12 Web log entry, referring to one of the characters in the movie. "That would be like Madonna playing the Virgin Mary."
After discussions with executives at Every Tribe, Mr. Janz wrote in an e-mail message that he had recently corrected a few assertions in his original posting and sent the corrections to his audience and members.
But Mr. Janz, who said he rarely weighed in on the culture wars, stood by his previous statement that "we must realize that the Christian message and the messenger are intricately related."
He wrote that Mr. Allen's homosexuality was not so much the problem as was his open activism for gay causes, and that if a drunk who "promoted drunkenness" had acted in the movie, "I'd be just as mad."
One Web log, nossobrii.blogspot .com, written by Kevin T. Bauder, president of Central Baptist Seminary in Minneapolis, stated in a Jan. 13 entry: "Granted, we must not overreact. And it would probably be an overreaction to firebomb these men's houses. But what they have done is no mistake. It is a calculated strategy."
Greg Clifford, chief operating officer of Every Tribe, said the company, based in Oklahoma, had alerted the F.B.I. there about the Web log. The F.B.I. did not return phone calls yesterday about the matter.
Mr. Janz said he had not been contacted by the F.B.I., and Mr. Bauder could not be reached for comment.
Many evangelicals are concerned that young people inspired by the movie will look up Mr. Allen on the Web and "get exposed to his views on homosexuality, and that would cause some of them to question Biblical views of homosexuality and every other sin," said Will Hall, executive director of BPNews.net, the news service of the Southern Baptist Convention, which has published articles critical of Every Tribe's decisions.
Other evangelicals said they felt that the message of the film should override such considerations.
Bob Waliszewski, head of the media review department at Focus on the Family, said that he was saddened by e-mail messages from angry Christians who said they would not see the movie.
A generation of young people were inspired to become missionaries by the true story, and Mr. Waliszewski said he had hoped a new generation would be moved by "End of the Spear."
"Has Focus on the Family made a strong statement against homosexuality? Absolutely," he said. "But what is the message of the product? And do we at Focus feel compelled to check on the sexual history of everyone in a movie? Did they have a D.U.I.? Did they pay their taxes?"
Mr. Hanon echoed: "If we start measuring the sin of everyone in a movie, we would never be able to make a picture because none of us would be left."
Mr. Allen, 31, who assists troubled young gay men and lesbians and speaks on behalf of same-sex marriage, said the response stemmed from fear that he could influence young people to become gay, a notion he dismissed.
Every Tribe, he said, did not see him as a threat. "When they offered me the part, my first thought was, Do they know who they're talking to?" he said in a phone interview.
He said that Mr. Hanon had told him there would be people on both sides who would be unhappy with the decision but suggested that they talk through the matter and show that they could respect one another's differences and work together.
Mr. Allen said: "When he said that, my hair stood on end, and I got up, and said: 'Absolutely! Yes!' "