Imagine you are the world's most powerful newspaper and you have invested your credibility in yet another story line that is falling apart, crumbling as inexorably as Jayson Blair's fabrications and the flawed reporting on Saddam Hussein's supposed WMD. What to do?

 

If you're the New York Times and the story is the alleged gang rape of a black woman by three white Duke lacrosse players—a claim shown by mounting evidence to be almost certainly fraudulent—you tone down your rhetoric while doing your utmost to prop up a case that's been almost wholly driven by prosecutorial and police misconduct.

 

And by bad journalism. Worse, perhaps, than the other recent Times embarrassments. The Times still seems bent on advancing its race-sex-class ideological agenda, even at the cost of ruining the lives of three young men who it has reason to know are very probably innocent. This at a time when many other true believers in the rape charge, such as feminist law professor Susan Estrich, have at last seen through the prosecution's fog of lies and distortions.

"I have been surprised and extremely disappointed by Tony Blair's behavior," Carter said in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph newspaper.

 

"I think that more than any other person in the world, the prime minister could have had a moderating influence on Washington _ and he has not," added Carter, who opposed the war in Iraq. "I really thought that Tony Blair ... would be a constraint on President Bush's policy toward Iraq."

Welfare reform turned 10 this week, and more remarkable than its near-total success is the near-total amnesia that seems to have gripped its one-time opponents. The results and the history are both worth revisiting today because they offer some useful political and policy lessons for the future.

 

When Bill Clinton signed the bill ending a federal entitlement to welfare, a leading liberal newspaper called it "nasty," "atrocious" and "odious"--adding with typical nuance that "the children will suffer the most." Three Clinton Administration officials resigned over the bill. Georgia Congressman John Lewis not too subtly raised the specter of fascism as he literally screamed on the House floor, "They're coming for the children. They're coming for the poor. They're coming for the sick, the elderly and the disabled." Even as sensible a social scientist as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan lost his head and called it "something approaching an apocalypse."

 

The real story has been apocalypse not. Welfare reform has worked so well that its success runs the risk of going almost unnoticed. Welfare rolls are down to about two million today from a peak of five million in 1995. The last time welfare caseloads were this low was 1970, when America had 100 million fewer citizens. But what about the children? The rate of black children living in poverty in America was more than 40% in 1996 and stands at 32% today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In the 25 years prior to welfare reform, that number had only briefly ever dipped below 40% and stood as high as 47% in 1980.

It may turn out that the TSP is illegal, technically violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, but we wouldn't know that from Taylor's decision. She cited almost none of the most relevant cases on the matter, and the upshot of her ruling is that even if Congress wanted to codify in law what the president has been doing under his own authority, it couldn't because the founders never had any such thing in mind. "There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution," Taylor wrote, invoking the founders' intent and betraying her own intent to issue as quotable an opinion as possible for the press.

 

You do see the irony here, don't you? A coalition of pressure groups - Greenpeace, the ACLU and a bunch of left-wing professors - are arguing that the Constitution must be immutably inflexible, adamantine in the face of changing times. The fact that al-Qaida is using new technologies the founders could never have imagined is irrelevant, say the absolutists. If the government can listen in on bin Laden's phone calls without a warrant, what's to keep them from listening to a phone call between me and my Aunt Sally?

 

Isn't this just a bit hard to take with a straight face from the ACLU, which finds powers not created by the Constitution every day and periodically declares such inanities as the idea that the Constitution forbids teachers from reading "The Chronicles of Narnia" in class lest the tykes' young minds be corrupted by hidden messages about Christianity? Such concerns would have left the founders dumbfounded before the opening prayers of the Constitutional Convention.

Laypeople consuming early news reports may well have thought, “What a courageous judge!” and “It’s a good thing someone finally said that the president is not above the law.” Look at that juicy quotation from Judge Taylor’s ruling: “There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution.”

 

But this is sheer sophistry. The potential for the president to abuse his power has nothing to do with kings and heredity. (How much power do hereditary kings have these days, anyway?) And, indeed, the president is not claiming he has powers outside of the Constitution. He isn’t arguing that he’s above the law. He’s making an aggressive argument about the scope of his power under the law.

 

It is a serious argument, and judges need to take it seriously. If they do not, we ought to wonder why a court gets to decide what the law is and not the president. After all, the president has a sworn duty to uphold the Constitution; he has his advisers, and they’ve concluded that the program is legal. Why should the judicial view prevail over the president’s?

Although Islam is derived from the same root as salaam, it does not mean peace but submission. And although the Koran tells us that there shall be no compulsion in matters of religion, it does not overflow with kindness toward those who refuse to submit to God's will. The best they can hope for is to be protected by a treaty (dhimmah), and the privileges of the dhimmi are purchased by onerous taxation and humiliating rites of subservience. As for apostates, it remains as dangerous today as it was in the time of the prophet publicly to renounce the Muslim faith. Even if you cannot be compelled to adopt the faith, you can certainly be compelled to retain it. And the anger with which public Muslims greet any attempt to challenge, to ridicule or to marginalize their faith is every bit as ferocious as that which animated the murderer of Theo Van Gogh. Ordinary Christians, who suffer a daily diet of ridicule and skepticism, cannot help feeling that Muslims protest too much, and that the wounds, which they ostentatiously display to the world, are largely self-inflicted.

To recognize such facts is not to give up hope for a tolerant Islam. But there is a matter that needs to be clarified. Christians and Jews are heirs to a long tradition of secular government, which began under the Roman Empire and was renewed at the Enlightenment: Human societies should be governed by human laws, and these laws must take precedence over religious edicts. The primary duty of citizens is to obey the state; what they do with their souls is a matter between themselves and God, and all religions must bow down to the sovereign authority if they are to exist within its jurisdiction.

* * *

The Egyptian writer and leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, went so far as to denounce all secular law as blasphemy. Mortals who make laws for their own government, he argued, usurp a power which is God's alone. And although few Muslim leaders will publicly endorse Qutb's argument, few will publicly condemn it either. What to us is a proof of Qutb's fanaticism and egomania is, for many Muslims, a proof of his piety.

Data mining uses supercomputers to analyze vast amounts of information for suspicious patterns of behavior. It appears to have been an important tool in breaking up the plot in Britain. According to news reports, British authorities searched telephone, e-mail and banking records and uncovered connections between the bombers in Britain and their supporters in Pakistan.

American efforts to develop sophisticated data-mining abilities died early in 2003, when criticism killed the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program. The idea was to develop mining techniques to compare information in government and commercial databases. Civil libertarians engaged in a scare campaign representing the TIA as an unchecked Big Brother. Congress cut off all funding for the program. It was a political defeat early in the war on terrorism, and the president retreated as fast as he could.

But that was a dangerous overreaction. Corporations already use data mining to detect consumer fraud and to market products such as credit cards and magazine subscriptions. Financial companies analyze patterns that might indicate a stolen credit card or bank account number. Why should the government be barred from using similar tools on similar databases to protect the country from attack? Data mining is nothing but an ordinary, ubiquitous feature of technology today.

Taylor's opinion is remarkably thin on legal reasoning, leaving it vulnerable to getting reversed by the generally conservative Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Worse, the opinion's provocative, almost dismissive, language gives weight to criticism that this decision was more about politics than the law.

In an amorphous war of self-induced Western restraint, like the present one, truth and moral clarity are as important as military force. This past month, the world of the fascist jihadist and those who tolerate him was once again on display for civilization to fathom. Even the most timid and prone to appeasement in the West are beginning to see that it is becoming a question of “the Islamists or us.”

In this eleventh hour, that is a sort of progress after all.

Laffey supporters are betting that if he wins the primary, the GOP establishment will offer its support. They note that Rhode Islanders are willing to elect more conservative Republicans to statewide office, evidenced by the party's long hold on the governorship. Mostly, they turn to Mr. Laffey's near-miraculous wins in Cranston, where only 14% of voters are Republican. He won by 52% in 2002, and after turning around the near-bankrupt city's finances (which, it should be said, he did by raising taxes)--won with nearly 65% in 2004. He says Republican membership in the city is up 30% since he took over.

 

It's still a long shot, although at least some Republican strategists are nonplussed. They've long argued the party should write off the Northeast, and focus on consolidating its gains in the South and Midwest. If voters are as angry as seems, it may have no choice.

But after watching his "60 Minutes" interview, I came away thinking that Mr. Ahmadinejad understands us a lot better than we understand him. Over the years, dangerous men like him have learned how to play the media game. They have gotten quite sophisticated. I'm afraid we haven't. Unfortunately, "Mike Wallace on line one" doesn't scare anybody in Tehran.

1) extreme nationalism and/or racialism; 2) dictatorial (usually charismatic) leadership; 3) socioeconomic regimentation of some kind; 4) forcible oppression of opposition; and 5) the privileging the collective over the individual. Sometimes other characteristics, such as 6) extreme militarization of society and 7) a sense of victimization, are added.

1) a starting point of victim-hood, especially vis-à-vis the West and Christianity; 2) an intermediate goal of re-pietizing Islamic society via imposition of “true” shari`ah (Islamic law); 3) a long-term goal of re-creating the early Islamic ummah (community) under a new caliphate, which would eventually encompass the entire planet; and 4) the preferred methodology to achieve these goals of jihad.

extreme nationalism or ideas of racial superiority, socioeconomic regimentation and extreme militarization—really are not prominent themes in Islamic political thought and praxis, today or in the past. So, definitionally, while “Islamic fascism” at first glance appears appropriate, upon more careful consideration its descriptive value is nominal at best.

You were born in the Valley to a life in a suburban cage
Encino, where mean girls and cheerleaders
Drop bombs of hate on the unpopular girls
Shy poetry club chicks like you
With 1480 SATs and early admission to Berkeley
Fed by the violence and lookism of the dance squad
Raised in a four bedroom colonial
They wouldn't let you wear your Che T-shirt to prom
But your heart and your armpit hair still grew proud and strong

• Having a policy that requires parking lot patrols but not observing the policy at the store involved in this shooting; and
• Destroying a surveillance tape of the shooting.

The shooter was apprehended within minutes and is now serving a 15-year sentence. 

Lessons learned for corporate defendants: Do not destroy evidence.  Do not have a policy unless you follow it in all instances. 

Would either of these conclusions have prevented the injuries suffered by the victim in the case?  No. 

Yesterday brought an Islamic plot to blow up people on airliners. The news cycle before that brought Hezbollah's Katyusha rockets into Israel and a war in Lebanon. Before that, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran would give the West its reply to demands to halt nuclear bomb-making on Aug. 22, the anniversary of Muhammad's flight to heaven on a winged horse. Before that, in July, North Korea fired ballistic missiles toward the Sea of Japan (a little-noticed assessment by U.S. and Japanese technicians concluded this week that six of the seven missiles fell within their targets).

 

And in the past year, Democratic leaders have criticized not just in Iraq but warrantless wiretaps of suspected terrorists, interrogation techniques at Guantanamo, the Swift financial monitoring program, and data-mining phone records. The pull-out-from-Iraq letter was just the culmination.

 

This is the context in which the post-Lamont Democratic establishment plans to run as an antiwar party. Commencing a phased withdrawal from Iraq, as they suggest, with the mission unfinished, in my view will cause suicide-bomber recruitment to skyrocket in a delirium of victory over the American infidels. And those bombers won't remain inside the imaginary security line around Iraq but will travel to the capitals of Europe, to Israel and to the U.S.

 

In a better world, the U.S. war on terror, at its core, would be bipartisan. That world was what Joe Lieberman's politics represented. That world is dead. Democratic support for the Republican administration's plans to fight these terrorists is down to about zero. This means the Democrats must have a plan of their own to defeat terror. Every Republican running for office at every level this fall should force his opponent to describe it. And if they aren't certain about the details, they can call Ned Lamont.

“The American Bar Association opposes, as contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional system of separation of powers, the misuse of presidential signing statements … [and] urges Congress to enact legislation requiring the President promptly to submit to Congress an official copy of all signing statements [issued by the President].”

Ned Lamont is Karl Rove's dream come true. If he, and others of his stripe, carry the day, the Democratic party will lose the future, and deservedly.

These past few days the inability of millions of Westerners, both here and in Europe, to condemn fascist terrorists who start wars, spread racial hatred, and despise Western democracies is the real story, not the “quarter-ton” Israeli bombs that inadvertently hit civilians in Lebanon who live among rocket launchers that send missiles into Israeli cities and suburbs.

Yes, perhaps Israel should have hit more quickly, harder, and on the ground; yes, it has run an inept public relations campaign; yes, to these criticisms and more. But what is lost sight of is the central moral issue of our times: a humane democracy mired in an asymmetrical war is trying to protect itself against terrorists from the 7^th century, while under the scrutiny of a corrupt world that needs oil, is largely anti-Semitic and deathly afraid of Islamic terrorists, and finds psychic enjoyment in seeing successful Western societies under duress.

In short, if we wish to learn what was going on in Europe in 1938, just look around.

The idea of "Fidel" allows his leftish admirers from the comforts of free, mostly capitalist societies to imagine that someone out there is struggling to build a better, more egalitarian way of life--without any of them having to live amid the daily Cuban reality of grinding poverty and political intimidation.

For those who do not spend their days pulling imaginary bugs out of their eye sockets, "Christianist'' is a relatively new term that roughly refers to a virulent strain of right-wing political Christianity that, supposedly, parallels Islamist lunacy.

What to do now?

 

How about this: Treat it as an opportunity. Use the change of facts to announce a change of course. Declare the old way over. Declare a new U.S.-Cuban relationship, blow open the doors of commerce and human interaction, allow American investment and tourism, mix it up, reach out one by one and person by person to the people of Cuba. "Flood the zone." Flood it with incipient prosperity and the insinuation of democratic values. Let Castroism drown in it.

• Signing statements are appropriate because the President has a duty to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."  (A President cannot do that without considering the constitutionality of laws).
• It is better to have a President comment on the constitutionality of Acts of Congress when they are signed into law, rather than at some later date.
• Acts of Congress often contain clearly unconstitutional provisions and it is unreasonable to suggest that the President's only options are to sign, or not, an Act that contains constitutionally questionable material.