Bill’s Blog

“Not for the politically correct.”

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If it isn’t it has sure been doing a good job of acting like one.

If the defeat of Saddam actually does spawn “little bin Ladens” they will have at least one less country supporting them. Chirac doesn’t realize that the fall of Saddam might cause other terrorist-sponsoring states to change their policies.

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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan--Lest we forget the other front, pay heed to this: For the past few weeks, American B-1 heavy bombers and helicopter gunships have been fighting the largest force of Afghan rebels to have surfaced in nearly a year in southern Afghanistan. The battle, which began on Jan. 27, now involves some 400 U.S. and Afghan government troops, who are looking for the remainder of a force of 80 rebels. At least 18 rebels have been killed so far.

The ominous issue is not that they are there, but that they assembled in Pakistan with heavy weapons, sophisticated communications equipment for a clandestine radio station, posters and pamphlets announcing a jihad against U.S. forces and the government of President Hamid Karzai, and enough supplies to set up a base camp (and a medical clinic) in the mountains south of Spin Baldak just 15 miles from the Pakistan border. Their objective was clearly to harass the 82nd Airborne division camp near Kandahar--some 120 miles to the west.

It was as if they had sent a man to the moon and brought him back safely, but had done no scientific research in the process. "Take our word for it, we were there. Here's a photo," they said. No rock samples, just the PR value of having achieved the goal. Not only did they never go back, but they made it seem like there was no point in anyone ever going back.

More Farenheit 451-type censorship based on political correctness.

The problem is that the Roman Church contributes to the “climate of hatred” that has led to murders and bombings. By becoming involved in politics the Roman Church has made itself a target.

TEMPEST IN A TEEPEE:

After complaints from unnamed sources involved with the Indian Outreach program at St. Cloud State University, says the St. Cloud (Minn.) Times, students at Technical High School have been forced to change the name of the play Ten Little Indians. Based on the Agatha Christie murder mystery And Then There Were None, the play has nothing to do with race, …

SIGN LANGUAGE:

For years Immaculate Heart of Mary parish in Brooklyn, N.Y., has had a billboard outside its rectory bearing the words “Abortion Stops a Human Heart From Beating.” The diocesan newspaper the Tablet has been the only one to report that Father John Costello awoke one morning recently to find a sign saying “Happy 30th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade” pasted over his rectory door--and about 100 coat hangers strewn about the property. A few weeks ago someone spray-painted “bigot” in red letters over the same sign. …

This tends to confirm the observation that the purpose of contemporary American education is indoctrination instead of conveying information.

One wonders if this will become a forum for political correctness.

When Sam Cooke recorded that line back in 1960, it was part of a love song. But if Bruce Cole of the National Endowment for the Humanities is right, it could be our epitaph.

According to a recent survey of America’s most elite universities, nearly all college seniors could identify Beavis and Butt-head but 40% could not place the Civil War in the right half-century. A national history test of high-school seniors found a majority of them identifying Germany, Italy or Japan as a U.S. ally in World War II. Still another survey of Americans at large found a third attributing the line “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” to the Constitution rather than Karl Marx.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that the NEH is making a little history of its own via its “We the People” initiative (www.wethepeople.gov). This Tuesday prize-winning historian Robert V. Remini will add some oomph when he talks about the Founding Fathers in what will be an annual “Heroes of History” lecture in Washington. That same night the NEH will announce the six winners of a national contest for the best essays from high-school juniors on “The Idea of America.”

Roy Innis is the National Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

It’s refreshing to see that some black public officials aren’t willing to follow the party line of the Racial Left.

Black leaders who focus on racial divisions are too often showered with media attention and, what is worse, given a free pass on demagoguery. Presidential candidate Al Sharpton, handled with kid gloves by other White House contenders, comes to mind. At the same time, leaders such as Clarence Thomas, J.C. Watts, civil-rights leader Roy Innis and even Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice are often called “sellouts,” or worse, for not viewing every issue through a racial prism.

Nonetheless, a growing number of black officials are breaking ranks by calling for a more honest approach to race relations. The latest is David Clarke, the elected sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wis., who accused other black elected officials of practicing a “cult of victimology” instead of making “real efforts to better the lives of black people.” His critics claim that the 46-year-old Democrat is pandering to whites, but his message has struck a chord among voters of all races and could catapult him into higher office.

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Claims of a “Black Holocaust” are absurd; in the Ante-Bellum South slaves were valuable property and were needed to raise the crops on the plantations.

The sad truth is that contemporary American blacks condone far worse horrors than their forbearers underwent in America—the crimes of Communism.

Note that the National Endowment for the Humanities is helping to finance this Leftist indoctrination of America’s children.

Dennis Smith, a Milwaukee, Wis., teacher, is part of the elite group of African-American scholars from across the country who were chosen by the Thomas Day Education Project (TDEP) to participate in its ‘Let It Shine’ program. Both rely on federal grant money from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support their educational efforts.

In a letter of January 13, 2003, to President Shaw, FIRE noted that he had seriously damaged liberty on his campus and violated his institution’s own policies, including its guarantee of both academic freedom and “the fullest freedom of political thought and activity.” FIRE wrote, “The right to criticize the administration and the sitting president of a university is well within the customary understanding of what free speech and academic freedom mean in this country…While some things may be unclear about the outer parameters of free speech, it is uncontested that, at its core, free speech exists to allow people to air grievances on matters of public concern and to question the legitimacy and decisions of those in power. Isaacs’s resolution is the very essence of the heart of free speech. To fire her for this is to demonstrate grave hostility to freedom itself.”

Blacks now make up nearly 5 percent of the estimated 1.7 million children who were home-schooled last year, according to estimates by the National Home Educators Research Institute in Oregon, a non-profit organization devoted to research on home-based education.

It would be more honest if these cities held plebiscites to see if their citizens really reflected the views of their public officials.

Cities for Peace, a grass-roots movement backed by nearly 90 city councils and county governments, gathered in Washington yesterday to oppose a U.S.-led attack on Iraq.

If illegal immigrants can cross our borders with impunity so can terrorists.

An Arizona couple has discovered a diary written in Arabic in a backpack apparently dropped on their property by an illegal alien entering the U.S., reports the Sierra Vista Herald Review.

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SPRINGDALE — Barefoot girls in island dresses approached the dignitaries at the Jones Center for Families, draping them with colorful necklaces. Outside, snow covered the ground.

The paradox of South Pacific culture and wintry weather at the Feb. 8 civic association ceremony spoke volumes about the daily lives of Marshall Island natives in Springdale. An estimated 3,000 Marshallese now live in the city.

Springdale is home to the largest population of Marshallese living outside the island nation, according to its embassy.

The inauguration ceremony, held for the chairmen of the state’s first Marshallese civic association, also speaks to the fact that many Marshallese are putting roots down in Northwest Arkansas.

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The islands lie southwest of Hawaii, some 6,000 miles from Arkansas. The economy of the archipelago is dismal, and it’s driven by an annual $39 million in aid from the United States, according to the CIA World Factbook.

 Having attained independence in 1986, the Marshall Islands signed a Compact of Free Association with the United States. The agreement gives Marshallese free access to jobs in the United States.

Cuba is a hostile Communist state; and it brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in October, 1962

This explains where the extremely poor Communist Cuba is getting the money. One wonders what countries are backing Cuba and what they’re getting in return.

Kennedy imposed the trade embargo because Castro confiscated American property.

The big question is whether trade with Communist Cuba will help keep Castro in power. The goal of American policy should be to get rid of him.

Visions of Cuba as the next trade frontier have created a steady stream of groups vying for the next deal and just as many opposed to trading with a country that’s considered an enemy by the U.S. government and Cuban exiles. Cuba moved from a dead last ranking in countries making U.S. food purchases in 2000 to 46th out of 228 countries last year with purchases of $165 million, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Although a 1959 embargo remains on American trade with and travel to Cuba, a U.S. law enacted in 2000 allows American producers to sell food directly to the island through cash-only or non-U.S.-financed sales.

Since President Kennedy imposed the embargo to punish Cuban dictator Fidel Castro during the Cold War period, the communist island 90 miles off the coast of Florida has been stuck in a 1950s freeze-frame. Many of the cars on Havana’s streets are ’57 Chevys. No golden arches or Blockbusters are found in this capital city.

But that all could change if American businesses get their way.

At stake is a potential $1.2 billion business in agricultural U.S. exports, according to a study released last year by the Cuba Policy Foundation.

Arkansas, which the study says would be the biggest beneficiary of U.S. trade with Cuba, could sell up to $167 million a year in agricultural products and reap up to $500 million a year in other economic benefits.

If the trade helps keep Castro in power it is, for all practical purposes, pro-Communist.

This is why anti-Communists don’t like Cuba.

Some readers are going to take me task, hopefully in craftily written letters or e-mails, for comparing the distance to Clarksville and Cuba. They might claim that I’m not quite being honest, or even a bit deceptive and not comparing apples to apples (they might say I’m comparing peaches to cigars ), and they might be correct.

We also might publish those letters from readers who call me foolish or who take the opportunity to say our political leaders are shortsighted when it comes to Cuba. And that would be fine.

Ironically, you would never see that dialogue in Fidel Castro’s Communist-controlled Cuba, where public dissent with opinion makers or the political establishment is forbidden.

One cannot intelligently discuss the bodark (Maclura pomifera) without considering a book by science writer Connie Barlow, The Ghosts of Evolution, which includes a great deal of interesting data on the bodark, or Osage Orange, as it is often known. Barlow says the bodark is an “ecological anachronism” because the animals that ate it and thereby distributed its seeds are now extinct. The “distributor” of the bodark was the prehistoric mastodon and mammoth. (Yes, I realize modern horses sometimes eat bodark fruits and distribute their seeds, but the North American horse went extinct along with the mastodons.)

When these huge creatures died off some 10,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene, the bodark began a gradual decline. During interglacial periods in the distant past bodarks grew across practically all of North America, reaching as far north as modern Ontario. By the time Europeans began settling modern Arkansas in the 18th century, the bodark could only be found in a small area of the Red River Valley in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Among other plants losing their primary distributors with the Pleistocene extinctions were the pawpaw, the honey locust, the Kentucky coffee bean and the avocado in Central America.

It has long been known that the bodark was exploited by Indians. Indeed, the name bodark comes from a corruption of the French name for the tree, bois d’arc, which translates as “bow wood.” Bows made from the bodark have been found in numerous sites over much of the nation.

1937 was the height of Stalin’s Great Terror.

When a ruler assumes divine powers and undertakes to shape his own reality by giving new names to the basic elements of life, it’s not long before he sets out to reshape his people as well—an ambition that invariably results in ferocious repression. Unfortunate nations—such as the Soviet Union and North Korea—have learned this from experience. The lucky ones that have never been subjected to such megalomaniac experiments find it hard to see what is so obvious to us: The leader who has taken to writing epics or inventing his own philosophy of time and space is a mortal danger to his people.

In today’s Russia it’s not uncommon to hear people say, “It’s like the year ’37”—the time when Joseph Stalin’s terror killed millions of Soviet citizens. But it’s only a metaphor. Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin may be obsessed with taking control of political life in Russia, but fortunately it’s far from succeeding. There is no fear of the state in post-Communist Russia.

In Turkmenistan, however, “the year ’37” is more than metaphor. It has elements of chilling reality. Niyazov has built a brutal and isolationist totalitarian regime in his country. Any trace of political opposition has been eradicated. Torture, lawless arrests and disappearances of people are common. A free press does not exist (the Russian print media were recently barred from Turkmenistan). Internet access is strictly limited.

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The problem here is how to deal with religions which don’t recognize that the First Amendment allows their fellow Americans to follow different faiths.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Jews could not serve as chaplains in the U.S. armed forces. When the war commenced in 1861, Jews enlisted in both the Union and Confederate armies. The Northern Congress adopted a bill in July of 1861 that permitted each regiment's commander, on a vote of his field officers, to appoint a regimental chaplain so long as he was “a regularly ordained minister of some Christian denomination.”

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Korn concluded, “Because there were Jews in the land who cherished the equality granted them in the Constitution, the practice of that equality was assured, not only for Jews, but for all minority religious groups.”

I strongly disagree with Ms. Malkin’s assertion that schoolyard bullies should be ignored by adults. Contemporary usage holds that children who extort money from other children with threats of violence are “bullies” instead of juvenile delinquents. Such children shouldn’t be ignored; they should be under the supervision of a juvenile court.

Which brings me to the pair of overgrown crybabies who are suing Southwest Airlines over a ridiculously misperceived racial insult. The Kansas City Star reports this week that sisters Louise Sawyer, 46, and Grace Fuller, 48, are headed to trial because their feelings were hurt by a flight attendant who used an old nursery rhyme to get meandering passengers to hurry up and sit down before flight departure.

Sawyer and Fuller allege that they were discriminated against on a crowded February 2001 flight after Southwest Airlines attendant Jennifer Cundiff said over the intercom: “Eenie, meenie, minie, moe; pick a seat, we gotta go.”

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This article was published in the Sunday, February 16, 2002 issue of The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

There is “no question,” Murphy added, that Douglas’s “military service alone” was not enough to make him eligible for burial in Arlington -- though his career on the court makes it “appropriate.” But the story is made more complicated -- and apparently far less damning of Douglas -- by documentary evidence not cited in Murphy's book, Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas, to be published by Random House.

Under Section 553.15 of Title 32 of the United States Code, which was in force when Douglas died in 1980, burial at Arlington is automatically permitted to any former associate justice whose “last period of active duty (other than for training) as a member of the Armed Forces terminated honorably.”

Thus, all Douglas's family had to show was that he once served on active duty for as little as a day, and had an honorable discharge, according to Tom Sherlock, Arlington's official historian.

Records in the William O. Douglas Papers at the Library of Congress show that Douglas, then a student at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., received instruction at a Reserve Officers Training Corps camp at the Presidio in San Francisco from June 3 to July 3, 1918, then served from Oct. 4 to Dec. 10, 1918, in the SATC on the Whitman campus.

This article was published in the Sunday, February 16, 2002 issue of The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Apparently Congress isn’t serious about curbing illegal aliens.

Congress has cut in half federal funding to help states, counties and cities incarcerate illegal immigrants who commit crimes, and local officials say that is adding to the burden on cash-strapped states.

“Once again, the federal government has proven itself to be a deadbeat partner when it comes to border issues,” said Kris Mayes, spokeswoman for Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano.

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Schippers Leads Fight for Freedoms

Eric Schippers has been executive director of the Center for Individual Freedom (CFIF) ever since the Alexandria, Va.-based group was founded in 1998. Schippers tells Insight that he likes to call his group a “think tank with teeth” -- meaning that it's an organization that issues policy papers and press releases like many other Washington-area groups but that it's also an organization that, in Schippers’ words, “pulls up its sleeves and gets its fingers dirty” for the causes of individual freedom and citizen rights. No constitutional issue is too small. CFIF, for example, took on the mayor of Westover, W. Va., after she began pulling up political posters on private property in the name of town beautification, an action that CFIF saw as a violation of property rights and guarantees of free speech.

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