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To: JohnM who wrote (21282)	12/24/2003 5:34:38 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793597

And you wonder why I get upset, John. But it must be all lies. After all, it is in "The Weekly Standard." To make it even worse, the author is that awful Professor at CUNY that they tried to get rid of. NY Times - City University of New York board overrules Brooklyn College officials and grants tenure to history professor Robert D Johnson; case drew national attention last year when he was denied tenured on ground of being uncollegial - The Standard Reader From the December 19, 2003 / January 5, 2004 issue: Robert David Johnson on "The Arts of Democracy." 12/29/2003, Volume 009, Issue 16 School for Scandal This fall, twelve colleges featured a program called "The Arts of Democracy"--with funds from the federal Department of Education. It's an interesting curriculum the nation's tax dollars have bought. At Albany SUNY, for example, students in "The Arts of Democracy" focus on the African diaspora. Pacific Lutheran teaches democracy with classes in theater, women's studies, and environmental studies. At John Carroll University, instruction comes through courses on globalization and cultural diversity. Going beyond the classroom, Beloit College features "action-oriented activities" in women's studies, while at the University of Delaware, freshmen in common dorms enroll in such course clusters as "Caribbean Steel Drums" or "Globalization and Gender." Heritage College has courses that stress "cross-cultural community" and "global awareness." Meanwhile, the Rochester Institute of Technology announced that the money will allow the school to hire a "cadre of new, multidisciplinary faculty" to develop courses skeptical of "globalization." The program already contains several offerings organized around the "Western veil of ignorance" and the "apartheid" of globalization. Students are graded in part through journal entries "about involvement in social-advocacy groups." Then there's my own Brooklyn College, where "The Arts of Democracy" has no courses related to democracy or international relations in political science, history, economics, or philosophy. Students learn, instead, that democracy entails support for a "community of diversity," with courses on such topics as literature and cultural diversity and global cinema. The school's administration admires this approach so much that it wants to expand the program into a major called "Global Studies." Indeed, declaring "The Arts of Democracy" the model for making "an understanding of global perspectives an integral part of the general education curriculum," Brooklyn College hopes to use it to replace the college's nationally respected core curriculum. The provost, Roberta Matthews, termed the idea that colleges should focus on transmitting knowledge "a very outdated notion." That, perhaps, explains why the instructors in Brooklyn's "Arts of Democracy" include the dean of student life--who notes that before the attacks of September 11, few understood the nation could be targeted by "those referred to as 'terrorists' or by other American citizens." The new curriculum will help students answer such questions as, "Was September 11 contrived?" and "What did the United States government know and when did it know it?" and "Whose rights would be violated now?" Underlying the "Arts of Democracy" project is a fascinating attempt to redefine college education. The group coordinating the program--the Association of American Colleges and Universities--holds that middle- and working-class students enter college deeply sexist and racist. Such students need "education for the 21st century" to abandon their hostility to "diversity." The association's project director describes "The Arts of Democracy" as "one small way of beginning to work toward another kind of global community rather than the fractured, violence-ridden one represented by the kind of heinous acts committed on September 11th." The program will create "knowledgeable, empathetic members of society" who would "help ensure enlightened policy decisions." The association seems unable to understand that different people may, in good faith, define "enlightened policy decisions" in different ways. Nor has the organization explained why or how a college curriculum should promote specific policy decisions--even those related to the "heinous acts committed on September 11th." By underwriting the "Arts of Democracy" project, the federal government has used Americans' tax dollars for a program that views the entire modern democratic project as a sustained effort to suppress and marginalize in the interests of power, privilege, and profit--in fact, for a program that not only fails to inform students about their civic foundations but undermines respect for the American achievement. © Copyright 2003, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

To: JohnM who wrote (21282)	12/24/2003 6:30:12 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793597

OPENING ARGUMENT Should The Supreme Court Clean Up Its Own Mess? By Stuart Taylor Jr., National Journal © National Journal Group Inc. Stuart Taylor Jr. is a senior writer for National Journal magazine, where "Opening Argument" appears. Overshadowed by the December 10 decision upholding the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law was an important oral argument that morning over whether the Supreme Court should arrogate to itself vast new powers to redraw every congressional district in the nation. The goal would be to clean up the incumbent-entrenching, polarizing, gerrymandered mess that redistricting has become, or at least to strike down partisan gerrymanders so extreme as to mock majority rule. The justices have destroyed all the rules, customs, and traditions that used to restrain gerrymanders. The lawyers were too polite to tell the justices -- who had just finished clucking at great length about the ickiness of campaign money -- that the ickiness of gerrymandering is a mess mostly of their own making. The Court's well-intended but clumsy interventions in the redistricting process over the past 40 years have destroyed the standards that had previously kept politically motivated manipulations of election-district lines within tolerable bounds. So the real question in Vieth v. Jubelirer is whether the way to mitigate the harm done to our political system by the Court's previous usurpations of legislative power is for the Court to usurp more power still. The Vieth case is a lawsuit by Democrats to overturn the strangely shaped districts that Pennsylvania's Republican-controlled Legislature drew after the 2000 census, which cost the state two House seats. The new maps, overtly designed for partisan advantage, forced two pairs of incumbent House Democrats to run against each other, put a fifth in a heavily Republican district, and ended up delivering 12 of the state's 19 House seats to Republicans in 2002, up from 11 out of 21. This despite the nearly even split in voting loyalties illustrated by Al Gore's narrow win in Pennsylvania in 2000. Republican legislative majorities in Florida, Michigan, and Ohio engineered similar partisan gerrymanders after the 2000 census. The result is that Republicans hold 51 House seats to Democrats' 26 in these four states, even though their voters in 2000 split almost evenly between Gore and George W. Bush. Democrats have collected a smaller number of seats in their own post-2000 gerrymanders. And this year, Republican-controlled legislatures in Texas and Colorado have taken the once-a-decade redistricting wars to a new level, by redrawing the new district lines that had been put in place after the 2000 census. Republicans in Texas rammed through in October -- after Democratic legislators had twice fled the state to prevent a quorum -- a county-splitting gerrymander designed to give Republicans as many as 22 of the state's 32 House seats next year, up from the current 15, and to help Majority Leader Tom DeLay cement Republican control of the House of Representatives. The new districts must first survive legal challenges. The Colorado Supreme Court struck down a somewhat similar mid-decade Republican gerrymander in that state on December 1, saying that the state constitution allows only one redistricting per decade. Bipartisan gerrymanders, in which incumbents in both parties get together to guarantee themselves safe seats, may be even more destructive to democratic governance. This practice has made it ever more difficult for changes in public opinion to affect the branch that the Framers designed to be most responsive to such changes. Only four members of the House -- less than 1 percent -- lost their seats in 2002 to challengers from the other party. The number of House races deemed competitive has plunged from about 150 in 1992 to an expected 35 next year. So the voters have no real say in the general elections in more than 90 percent of all House districts, because the results have been rigged in advance. This has produced a House bitterly divided between the most liberal of Democrats and the most conservative of Republicans. They are unrepresentative of the nation's largely centrist population because they need fear challenges only in primaries, which are dominated by their respective parties' fiercest loyalists. Moderate centrists have almost disappeared from the House, and been replaced by partisans disinclined to make pragmatic compromises. Never before has "gerrymandering" -- the word was inspired by Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry's approval of a salamander-shaped district to help his party in 1811 -- been taken to such extremes. What brought us to this pass? The most familiar explanation is that modern computer technology allows line-drawers to use surgical precision in distributing likely Republican and Democratic voters among election districts in exactly the numbers desired. The more important explanation may be that the Supreme Court did it. Beginning with the "one-person, one-vote" rulings of the early 1960s, the justices have repeatedly intervened in the redistricting process, with the unintended but foreseeable consequence of destroying all of the rules, customs, and traditions that had restrained partisan and bipartisan gerrymanders alike. The justices have had their reasons. The Warren Court was right to end the outrageous malapportionment of legislative districts that had left urban voters in many states with a fraction of the voting power of rural voters. But the Court went about it the wrong way. Instead of citing the most relevant constitutional provision -- the clause requiring "a republican form of government" in each state -- the Court pretended against all evidence that the Fourteenth Amendment's equal-protection clause had been designed to mandate precise equality in election-district populations. This absolutist approach, while easy for courts to administer, has led to such perverse extremes as the 1983 decision (in Karcher v. Daggett) striking down a New Jersey redistricting plan because of a difference of less than 1 percent between the most-populous and least-populous districts. This "uncompromising emphasis on numerical equality" has served to "encourage and legitimate even the most outrageously partisan gerrymandering" -- as Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. predicted in his dissent -- by requiring abandonment of traditional districting standards: city and county lines, compactness, contiguity, and natural and historical boundaries. Those had been the only brakes on incumbents' power to gerrymander district lines for personal and partisan advantage. The justices made matters worse in 1986, in Thornburg v. Gingles, with their questionable interpretation of the 1982 Voting Rights Act Amendments. It virtually required states to draw as many strangely shaped districts as possible to maximize the number of safe seats for black and Hispanic candidates. That mandate destroyed what was left of the traditional districting standards. It also fostered an unholy alliance that teamed black and Hispanic Democrats who wanted safe seats for themselves with Republicans who were glad to help. The Republicans knew that packing minority voters into a few districts would enable Republicans to score net gains, by creating more suburban districts with conservative, white majorities. The results: a few more liberal black and Hispanic members; a lot more conservative Republicans; and a lot fewer moderate Democrats. This helps explain the 1994 landslide that gave Republicans control of the House. But by that time, a more conservative Supreme Court majority had developed a distaste for the race-based gerrymandering that the Court itself had required. Unwilling to reconsider Gingles, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the swing vote, and her four more-conservative colleagues decided instead to hold racial gerrymanders unconstitutional, in a succession of decisions between 1993 and 1997. But in 2001, in yet another switch, O'Connor voted with the Court's liberals in Easley v. Cromartie to uphold a gerrymander designed to protect an incumbent black Democrat, Rep. Melvin Watt of North Carolina. The rationale: The Legislature's main motive had been to create not a safe black district, but a safe Democratic district. Thus has politically motivated gerrymandering become a constitutional virtue. But not for long, if Pennsylvania's Democrats win Vieth v. Jubelirer. "The House of Representatives is supposed to be the mirror of the people," their lawyer, Paul Smith, told the justices. He argued that when gerrymandering can give Republicans (or Democrats) "two-thirds of the seats with less than half of the vote," the Court must enforce "an outer boundary" to protect majority rule. A good point. But Smith didn't seem to be finding many takers. He tried to come up with rules for deciding how much gerrymandering is too much. But it was clear that this would be an utterly subjective choice. "You're pulling this out of a hat, so to speak," said Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. "The Constitution doesn't intimate anything like what you're talking about." Nobody mentioned all the rabbits that the justices have pulled out of hats. "Maybe the way to go is to just say, 'Hands off,' " said O'Connor. Maybe someone should have thought of that a long time ago. The solution is probably for states to emulate Iowa, where legislators vote up or down on maps drawn by civil servants who are instructed to ignore partisan voting patterns -- not for the justices to come blundering once again to the rescue.

To: JohnM who wrote (21282)	12/24/2003 6:48:56 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793597

I just got a present and a "Newton Day" card from my daughter. Dec 25th is Issac Newton's Birthday, and we celebrate it. At last, a rational reason for the Holiday! Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial Christmas should celebrate reason, selfishness and capitalism By Leonard Peikoff Christmas in America is an exuberant display of human ingenuity, capitalist productivity, and the enjoyment of life. Yet all of these are castigated as "materialistic"; the real meaning of the holiday, we are told, is assorted Nativity tales and altruist injunctions (e.g., love thy neighbor) that no one takes seriously. In fact, Christmas as we celebrate it today is a 19th-century American invention. The freedom and prosperity of post Civil War America created the happiest nation in history. The result was the desire to celebrate, to revel in the goods and pleasures of life on earth. Christmas (which was not a federal holiday until 1870) became the leading American outlet for this feeling. Historically, people have always celebrated the winter solstice as the time when the days begin to lengthen, indicating the earth's return to life. Ancient Romans feasted and reveled during the festival of Saturnalia. Early Christians condemned these Roman celebrations—they were waiting for the end of the world and had only scorn for earthly pleasures. By the fourth century the pagans were worshipping the god of the sun on December 25, and the Christians came to a decision: if you can't stop 'em, join 'em. They claimed (contrary to known fact) that the date was Jesus' birthday, and usurped the solstice holiday for their Church. Even after the Christians stole Christmas, they were ambivalent about it. The holiday was inherently a pro-life festival of earthly renewal, but the Christians preached renunciation, sacrifice, and concern for the next world, not this one. As Cotton Mather, an 18th-century clergyman, put it: "Can you in your consciences think that our Holy Savior is honored by mirth? . . . Shall it be said that at the birth of our Savior . . . we take time . . . to do actions that have much more of hell than of heaven in them?" Then came the major developments of 19th-century capitalism: industrialization, urbanization, the triumph of science—all of it leading to easy transportation, efficient mail delivery, the widespread publishing of books and magazines, new inventions making life comfortable and exciting, and the rise of entrepreneurs who understood that the way to make a profit was to produce something good and sell it to a mass market. For the first time, the giving of gifts became a major feature of Christmas. Early Christians denounced gift-giving as a Roman practice, and Puritans called it diabolical. But Americans were not to be deterred. Thanks to capitalism, there was enough wealth to make gifts possible, a great productive apparatus to advertise them and make them available cheaply, and a country so content that men wanted to reach out to their friends and express their enjoyment of life. The whole country took with glee to giving gifts on an unprecedented scale. Santa Claus is a thoroughly American invention. There was a St. Nicholas long ago and a feeble holiday connected with him (on December 5). In 1822, an American named Clement Clarke Moore wrote a poem about a visit from St. Nick. It was Moore (and a few other New Yorkers) who invented St. Nick's physical appearance and personality, came up with the idea that Santa travels on Christmas Eve in a sleigh pulled by reindeer, comes down the chimney, stuffs toys in the kids' stockings, then goes back to the North Pole. Of course, the Puritans denounced Santa as the Anti-Christ, because he pushed Jesus to the background. Furthermore, Santa implicitly rejected the whole Christian ethics. He did not denounce the rich and demand that they give everything to the poor; on the contrary, he gave gifts to rich and poor children alike. Nor is Santa a champion of Christian mercy or unconditional love. On the contrary, he is for justice—Santa gives only to good children, not to bad ones. All the best customs of Christmas, from carols to trees to spectacular decorations, have their root in pagan ideas and practices. These customs were greatly amplified by American culture, as the product of reason, science, business, worldliness, and egoism, i.e., the pursuit of happiness. America's tragedy is that its intellectual leaders have typically tried to replace happiness with guilt by insisting that the spiritual meaning of Christmas is religion and self-sacrifice for Tiny Tim or his equivalent. But the spiritual must start with recognizing reality. Life requires reason, selfishness, capitalism; that is what Christmas should celebrate—and really, underneath all the pretense, that is what it does celebrate. It is time to take the Christ out of Christmas, and turn the holiday into a guiltlessly egoistic, pro-reason, this-worldly, commercial celebration. Leonard Peikoff, who founded the Ayn Rand Institute, is the foremost authority on Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. The Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

To: JohnM who wrote (21282)	1/3/2004 3:08:40 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793597

"Apres Hall, Le Deluge!" Texas Rep. Hall to Switch to Republicans By DAVID ESPO and SUZANNE GAMBOA AP Special Correspondent January 2, 2004, 9:49 PM EST WASHINGTON -- Texas Rep. Ralph Hall switched parties Friday night, filing for re-election as a Republican after nearly a quarter-century as one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress. "I've always said that if being a Democrat hurt my district I would switch or I would resign," Hall said in an interview with The Associated Press. He said GOP leaders had recently refused to place money for his district in a spending bill and "the only reason I was given was I was a Democrat." In an interview in which he said he had filed to run as a Republican, he also said he didn't agree with "all these guys running against the president." Hall's switch follows a GOP-led drive -- bitterly contested by Democrats -- to remake Texas' congressional districts more to their liking. Party strategists contend they can gain five or more seats through a mid-decade redistricting, a change that could greatly strengthen their grip on power in the House. Before Hall's move, the House had 228 Republicans, 205 Democrats, 1 Democrat-leaning independent and 1 vacancy. In addition to representing a personal change, Hall's defection had historic overtones. His district in Texas includes territory once represented in Congress by the late Sam Rayburn, who served as a Democratic speaker for much of the time between 1940 and 1961. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said he looked forward to working with Hall in the majority party. "Ralph is a man of courage and a man of great conviction," Hastert said. "Common sense continues to guide him in Washington and now in the Republican Party." Fellow Texan Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, called Hall on Friday to welcome him to the party. "Democrats are reaping what they've sown," DeLay said. "Their leaders have lined up behind Howard Dean's brand of angry, intolerant politics. They've made their message clear: 'moderates need not apply' and that's a sad trend for a once-great party." President Bush also praised Hall. "I welcome Congressman Ralph Hall to the Republican Party," Bush said. "Ralph is a close friend of the Bush family. He is a well-respected leader of the highest integrity, and a tireless advocate for the people of Texas." Rep. Martin Frost, Texas' most senior Democrat, declined comment late Friday. Republican sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Hall privately relayed word of his intentions to White House officials and other senior GOP officials earlier in the day. Hall, 80, was first elected to the House in 1980. Hall has long been among the most conservative Democrats in Congress. Speculation that he might switch parties first surfaced in 1995, when the GOP gained control of the House for the first time in 40 years. He said then he wouldn't, arguing that it would be better to try and move the Democratic party toward the middle. Hall's sons, one a Texas judge and the other a lawyer, had been considered possible candidates for their father's congressional seats if Hall resigned. Hall said Friday his party switch would make it easier for his sons to run should he eventually resign, but he added, "Neither of my sons seems interested in coming to Congress." Democrats have sued to block the new redistricting plan, arguing it violates minority rights. The Justice Department has approved the plan, and a court ruling on its legality is expected shortly. Texas Republican Party spokesman Ted Royer said Hall was the 174th elected Texas Democrat to join the Republican Party since 1992. * _ Associated Press writer Natalie Gott in Austin contributed to this story. Copyright © 2003, The Associated Press