Discovery Blog

Democrats are worrying about the four primaries today, especially Ohio’s and Texas’. Nationwide, meanwhile, both remaining Democratic presidential campaigns are looking wobbly on foreign policy.

Recall last week’s debate from Ohio. Hillary Clinton denounced the Russian government, but then couldn’t remember the name of the country’s prospective new president, Dimitri Medvedev. Barack Obama sounded confused when describing how, if elected, he’ll take troops out of Iraq for good, unless there is trouble with Al Qaeda in Iraq (but, my, who could imagine such a possibility?), in which case troops might be sent back. He repeatedly called Pakistan “Pockistan”. He is trying to sound smart, but sounds affected instead. Does he pronounce France “Frahnce”?

Mere errors of style, perhaps, but if George W. Bush made them, imagine the finger pointing.

Of more serious concern are errors of substance. On the foreign policy issue that the Democrats have discussed most thoroughly of late--the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA)--the vague mantra of “Change” turns out to include a very specific threat to abrogate an international treaty unless our trade partners make new concessions.

When it comes to overseas dictators, Sen. Obama, in particular, says that he would meet with America’s foes without preconditions. But when it comes to our friendly neighbors, Canada and Mexico, Sen. Obama (and Sen. Clinton, for that matter)—without any meetings, and while still candidates—are threatening to break a vital diplomatic agreement unilaterally. Even though they obviously would like to stay out of our political campaigns, officials in Canada, our number one trade partner, and in Mexico, our second largest trade partner, have been forced to protest.

Since the debate it turns out that both Obama and the Canadians were embarrassed about a call reportedly made by an official Obama campaign adviser to tell the Canadian government not to take the candidates’ NAFTA bashing too seriously.

Forget the question about what the adviser really said. Let the public record speak. And on the record both the Canadians and the Mexicans felt after the well-publicized Ohio debate that they had to remonstrate, pointing out that the U.S has benefited greatly from NAFTA.

Passed by the Clinton Administration in 1994, NAFTA has been an engine of healthy economic development throughout the continent. It helped spur an almost unprecedented boom in Canada, permitting a 38 percent increase in imports from the U.S. in the treaty’s first ten years.

Mexico has been able to stabilize its economy and reduce political volatility, which helps our country, too. Were it not for economic growth south of the border in recent years our problem of illegal immigration would have been even worse. Does anyone think the problem would get better if we dumped NAFTA?

Politically speaking, if trashing our trade agreement with Mexico and, implicitly, the treaties we have been negotiating with the rest of Latin America, is the Democrats’ way to court Hispanic votes in this country, it is a strange one. You can bet that Sen. McCain will continue to make clear how damaging and disrespectful this approach is.

Once Americans of all ethnic backgrounds wake up and realize what ditching NAFTA would do to trade-dependent regions of the United States (and that’s most of the country now), it is hard to think that the checks that have been flowing into Democratic campaigns from big business this season, especially in high tech, shipping and agriculture, are going to continue. Workers in companies that in the past 15 years have expanded hiring thanks to exports also are going to wonder if the slogan “Change” could lead in the wrong direction.

Indeed, one is waiting for the trade alliances that were so active in the early 1990s to reassemble to fight this new protectionism.

Or will it turn out that the threats against America’s trade agreements are just campaign rhetoric, as many observers believe? Once they slew the Republican elephant and were back in the White House, the Democrats surely would know better than to slay the golden goose of foreign trade, too. Surely they know that while some jobs were lost under NAFTA, America has gained far more jobs, improved our competitiveness and helped restrain inflation.

If so, the "Change" slogan is simply cynical. And that is another issue.

You can argue that the Michigan primary was irrelevant for the Democrats, since the only serious candidate on the ballot was Hillary Clinton. But the Florida vote in late January was different. Even though the candidates didn't show up to campaign, their surrogates were there and the ballot listed the candidates themselves. It was a genuine election.

Clinton won it. Obviously, she now wants those delegates counted. If they are she will lead Obama, or come close, in the national delegate count. The only way Obama leads is not to acknowledge the large states of Michigan and Florida. Imagine a US map without them. Imagine wining the Democratic nomination and then trying to stir up party enthusiasm in states whose primary votes you have dismissed.

I wrote in January that the same Democratic National Committee that made such trouble over the highly doubtful claims of a few supposed uncounted votes in the 2000 presidential election was now itself proposing to disenfranchise the million or more voters who turned up to vote in the Florida Presidential Primary of 2008. The DNC contention is that the federal party apparatus and its rules are more important than a state's right to hold a primary and the voters' right to vote. Regardless of where you stand on that (I happen to think it is shows what folly this overly-long primary season is), it is not going to go down well with the voters themselves.

Now Sen. Nelson of Florida is trying hard to make that point to a very stolid DNC Chairman Dean. http://thehill.com/campaign-2008/sen.-bill-nelson-paints-florida-train-wreck-scenario-2008-03-06.html

It is possible that neither Clinton nor Obama will arrive in Denver with enough delegates to win the nomination. That could lead to a crucial credentials fight at the convention and a key tactical vote on whether to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations. The decision in a split convention would fall to the uncommitted superdelegates and some leftover Edwards and other delegates. The outcome would probably predict the ultimate nominee's victory. But it would leave wounds.

Here, for free, is Chapman's compromise solution: Retroactively adopt the Republican's formula for punishing states that don't conform to the party's primary schedule and dock only half of Florida's (and probably Michigan's) delegates, and assign the proportions according to the numbers of votes each candidate got. That way the issue more or less goes away and the voters in both states will be happy. Hillary will get a boost, albeit a modest one, and a contentious, divisive issue will be avoided.

At that point, with what may be roughly equal delegate counts for Clinton and Obama, the nomination will fall to a convention brokered by the superdelegates. That is fine and exactly the role the superdelegates were created for. (The Democratic rules are inferior to the Republicans' in most ways, I think, but superior on this one.) The governors, senators and other top elected officials and each state's top party officers should have a say on who leads them. Fifty to a hundred years ago most party nominations were decided by such veterans.

There have been so many tributes to Bill Buckley, but I might as well add some more. The modern history of conservatism, no less, is the subject of his life. It would be impossible to describe one without the other.

From about 1960, while we were still at Harvard, George Gilder and I published a moderate Republican magazine, Advance. We ambitiously aimed to counter the conservative magazine, National Review, that seemed to us well established, but actually had only been in existence for a half dozen years. In his own career, though it would not have seemed so to us (NR at the time described me as "a well-scrubbed youngster"), Bill Buckley, was still pretty young himself.

We saw National Review as too negative and pessimistic. We argued that Republicans should apply conservative principles to solving problems, not just opposing the proposals of the left. More than that, we specifically opposed acceptance of the paranoid right--meaning the John Birch Society, whose head, Robert Welch, called Eisenhower a communist--and we affirmed the need for civil rights legislation to protect blacks in the South. On both subjects we considered National Review to be on the wrong side.

Oddly, in his article just published in the March Commentary--posthumously, it turns out--Bill Buckley tells the inside story of how he worked to anathematize the Birch Society in the early 60s. I guess I didn't really know this story in detail, though some years ago I learned it in outline. It is gratifying to see that Buckley had come to the same conclusion we had. But Buckley, seeing, as Sen. Goldwater apparently did, that many fine people had been attracted to the Birch Society and were best weaned away from it rather than attacked, had a quieter way to approach the problem. I think it's safe to say we at Advance didn't see what was going on at the time and didn't give Bill any credit. Nor, at the time, did he want any.

Buckley also eventually came to see that it was a mistake to tie the GOP to the segregationist traditions of the South--or, as George Gilder and I had put it, to "hitch our wagons to the fading star of segregation." The thing is, this change at National Review took place so slowly that it was not evident, at least to George and me, at the time. (The Republicans in Congress, not the Democrats, it always bears remembering, provided the great bulk of the votes to enact civil rights legislation in the end. Meg Greenfield, among others, acknowledges this in her boo, Washington.)

So Buckley, the exemplary conservative, Mr. Hard Core, did change over time on certain issues. (He changed, but being intelligent, he did not "evolve".) So,too, however, did certain moderates like Gilder and me. And we may have changed more. George moved faster right than I and brought much of what was then the Ripon Society with him. I was fascinated, but, being involved in local and state government, didn't start to see myself as a conservative until the late 70s.

George wrote an article for Playboy, of all things, on Bill Buckley, in the late 60s (I can't find a link for it) and in the writing of it had Bill's full cooperation. Astonishingly, Bill invited George to go to Phoenix on a trip with him and they both wound up staying at Barry Goldwater's ranch. Another house guest was Claire Booth Luce. It must have been quite a weekend. Among other things, former Air Force Gen. Goldwater took George up in his private plane and flew him through the Grand Canyon. A reconciliation was thus effected. In any case, regarding Buckley, George, who had always appreciated him as a writer, came to admire him as a thinker.

All of this makes me sad that it took me so long to get acquainted with Bill Buckley, and when I did, the meetings were fleeting. One of the most pleasant, nonetheless, was in Atlanta where he moderated a debate on intelligent design about ten years back. He was very encouraging on the issue of Darwinian evolution, as one would expect from the author of God and Man at Yale, 1951. (Among other things--it is nice to remind the current editors of NR, Buckley wrote in that book, "I believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.") Over the years I had the chance to write for NR a few times and to see many friends, not the least of whom was George Gilder, become influential there.

Buckley's kindness to other writers is famous. Two I'd like to list here are my brother (and Discovery Adjunct Fellow) Howard Chapman and my DI colleague David Klinghoffer. The latter served under Bill Buckley at NR for several years. Both pay Bill warm tributes.

http://www.discovery.org/a/4504

http://www.discovery.org/a/4505

Former Vice President Al Gore’s claim that global warming represents “by far the largest challenge human civilization has ever faced,” and a “planetary emergency” came under intense scrutiny—perhaps as never before—at a recent conference in New York sponsored by the Heartland Institute. There, more than five hundred scientists and policy experts gathered to discuss , among other things: the reliability of global warming data; the role of natural warming vs. manmade causes; and what strategies should be employed in response to the purported crisis.

Conference organizers did a marvelous job of balancing hard science critiques of the methods used by global warming alarmists with practical public policy advice for the elected officials, economists and scholars in attendance. There was something for everyone. Perhaps the most interesting scientific analysis was presented by renowned hurricane forecaster William Gray, who argued that variances in ocean salinity play a much larger role in global climate change than any human causes. Based on his 40 years of experience studying the oceans, he even went so far as to predict a cycle of global cooling within ten years (though he acknowledged that he may not be around the see it!) Several other scientists, from such respected institutions as Harvard, the University of Virginia and the Institut Pasteur in Paris, presented convincing counter-arguments to the findings of the United Nations’ highly touted Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Shamefully, (but not surprisingly) their arguments are usually ignored by the mainstream media. Keynote speaker and ABC News correspondent John Stossel blamed this phenomenon on the media’s fascination with “doom and gloom” stories that, while not always representative of the full story, make for good television.

On the policy front, several panelists and speakers discussed the intensively negative impact that proposed legislation would have on the U.S. and world economies. It is estimated, for example, that meeting the requirements of the Kyoto protocol would cost U.S. taxpayers $300 billion annually—nearly ten times as much as the largest tax increase in U.S. history. Radical legislation on climate change could also hamper the Third World’s access to energy and thus keep them from solving such problems as, shortages in their food supply, unclean water, high rates of infant mortality and shorter life spans. But the cost can be measured in more than just dollars. The cost to entrepreneurship and innovation could be even higher—taking valuable resources away from as-yet-unknown technologies that could reduce carbon emissions even more efficiently than Kyoto. This point was effectively made by former Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Richard Rahn, who used the “game-changing” technology of Blackberry phones as an example of innovation that didn’t exist just ten years ago. In the same vein, applying human ingenuity to the crisis of global warming—whether real or imagined—is a better strategy than layers of burdensome state and federal regulation.

Whatever the final outcome in the debate over global warming, the conference offered convincing proof that the global warming “consensus” is not all that it seems. In science and in public policy, scrutiny and skepticism are positives, not negatives. Kudos to the Heartland Institute for tackling this issue and for bringing some much needed attention to the other side of this important debate. To paraphrase Al Gore, the future of human civilization is depending on it.

Some are saying that the prostitution scandal involving Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York truly is a "private matter" because it involves a "victimless crime." Another argument is that Americans exaggerate sex crimes, putting a story like this on page one, whereas it would be buried in the back of European dailies.

Actually, as someone pointed out, the Spitzer story was on page one of today's European dailies, as well as the American. As for its being a victimless crime, prostitution often is not victimless, as John R. Miller, former U. S. Ambassador at Large (and currently a Discovery Institute Senior Fellow on Human Rights doing work at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington) points out.

Published today is a new book, A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face with Modern-Day Slavery by E. Benjamin Skinner. It's reviewed by Power Line here: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2008/03/020009.php

Mr. Skinner will appear on March 27 at the Discovery Institute offices in Washington, D.C. to discuss his book(1015 Fifteenth NW, at K Street; 5:30-7:00 p.m.). Needless to say, it is gratifying to see the extent to which Mr. Skinner explains the significant role Amb. Miller played in fighting the sex-slavery trade. (I understand that John Miller also will be in attendance at the Skinner book party.)

Everyone says that (former) Governor Eliot Spitzer's flaw was his hypocrisy. I disagree. His most salient flaw was his self-righteous, Javert-like prosecutorial zeal, the ferocious delight he took in putting others in the wrong. And, beyond Victor Hugo's nasty policy inspector, he was a grandstanding publicity-seeker, to boot. These qualities almost should disqualify a prosecutor or attorney general. We should not want military generals who take pleasure in killing people and we should not want attorneys general who derive personal joy in jailing people, especially when they arrange the arrests so that they can be shown on the six o'clock news. It is all a bit disgusting, actually. And it may indicate the core of psychological projection that resides in the heart of the modern witch-hunters.

Roger Kimball (editor of The New Criterion) gets it right in this blog that I am happy to link to.http://pajamasmedia.com/xpress/rogerkimball/2008/03/15/spitzer_and_the_army_of_bornag.php

My colleague John Wohlstetter had such an interesting take on the Spitzer scandal--in actually proposing something to do about the type of political Machiavellianism Spitzer represents--that I reprint it here (from John's Discovery-linked blog, "Letter from the Capitol."

SAVONAROLA SPITZER: SEMI-SOLUTIONS

The resignation of Eliot Spitzer has sparked much commentary about the tragedy it is for his family, which no one disputes, and equally, the overdue comeuppance of a self-styled "steamroller" crusading reformer who showed his victims no mercy. That mercy is properly reserved for the merciful, and denied the merciless, seems to be understood by most. Spitzer's resignation (effective March 17), if ultimately an aid to a plea agreement, would show that Spitzer does indeed possess the precious quality of mercy--for himself, at least. But the U.S. attorney, in a rare statement, said that there was no plea deal of any kind made; here is a list of charges Spitzer could face.

Legal eagle Alan Dershowitz sees entrapment in the Spitzer case, and worries of open-ended investigative excess. WSJ pundit John Fund notes that Spitzer self-styled himself as the Enforcer--on his kiddie soccer team!, that he often prosecuted low-level corporate types, below the radar screen and after coercing millions from their corporate chieftains, and that he often lost those cases.

Spitzer was a supremely ruthless figure: his cold-blooded pursuit of political and prosecutorial power, his threatening to throw the awesome power of the state at targets who had the temerity to resist and protest their innocence, his coerced restructuring of companies by confronting them with Draconian penalties for the sin of resisting, his use of the press to convict victims in public without risking failure at trial, his calculated circumventing of the campaign finance laws so as to enable him to spend part of his vast family fortune. But most ruthless of all was his clandestine use of an unwitting friend's name as an alias to keep his trysts secret. It was a chilling negation of the very foundation of friendship, the marriage of trust and concern for the welfare of cherished others that makes for joy in life.

So what to do about post-Spitzer governance? His successor, David Paterson, solves New York State's immediate problem, gubernatorial succession. Notably, Peterson is personable and willing to listen respectfully to others, even those with whom he disagrees. The contrast is most welcome. But there are other problems yet to be faced, let alone, fixed.

The problem posed by the Spitzers of the world may be called the Savonarola Syndrome: extremes of ruthlessness used by political reformers, who treat and label their adversaries as evil, and thus to destroy them, literally as well as symbolically. The problem is especially acute when a public prosecutor has aspirations to higher political office, and pursues his legal career with political ambitions in mind.

At the root of Spitzer's career is an all-consuming ambition that, in its gross excess, is a danger to those who cross his path and, for public figures, to the public as well. It was best summed up in this timeless comment from Caesar to Antony in Act I, Scene II of Julius Caesar:

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.
He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.

As with all problems of this kind, solutions will be at best imperfect, offering no universally satisfying answer. I propose the following: (1) public prosecutors should either be barred outright from running for higher political office, or else be barred for 5 to 10 years from running; (2) prosecutors should be required to seek special judicial approval, before using extraordinary tools against defendants; (3) prosecutors should be penalized for leaking evidence to the press, by being prosecuted themselves; (4) prosecutions, in extreme cases of trial by press, should be thrown out, or at minimum the prosecution should be barred from using leaked evidence in court; (5) successful defendants, save in cases certified as extraordinary, should be reimbursed for their legal costs.

Separating Law & Politics. Limiting or barring outright prosecutors from seeking higher office carries a cost: Talented prosecutors who could govern effectively would be denied opportunity, or at least face diminished chances for reaching higher office. Rudy Giuliani, New York's finest mayor ever, might never have been elected. But people who combine Rudy's talents as a top prosecutor and as a top executive are rare. All too common are less talented Savonarolas.

Special Case Authority. The routine use of special legal tools like RICO (Racketeer-Influenced Corrupt Organizations) for purposes other than originally intended (RICO targeted organized crime), can be curbed. Extreme asset forfeitures can coerce innocent defendants into negotiating a plea deal, that they may ultimately resume their lives. Put simply, extraordinary tools like instantaneous seizure of assets, loosened evidentiary standards as to establishing conspiracies, and the like, should be reserved for special cases against defendants in certain designated classes. Organized crime bosses, drug lords, terrorists, are the kinds of defendants who pose special problems for prosecutors, including their ability to cause great public harm by intimidating witnesses, and highly-skilled evasion of statutes. For such cases, advance judicial certification of a case as being in such a special class should be required, before such tools can be used. Assaults on ordinary defendants--even those with vast financial resources, should be prevented. Only where special public harm is in prospect should the awesome power of the State be unleashed in its full force.

Penalizing Prosecutorial Leaks. A common tactic of ruthless prosecutors is to artfully leak selected evidence to the press, thus sullying the reputation pf defendant. While this may be satisfying as to particularly evil targets, the danger of harm to the reputation of other defendants is too great. The First Amendment precludes forceful action against the press (whose unholy and eager cooperation with Spitzer is detailed by WSJ columnist Kimberely Strassel), so the abuse must be stopped at the source.

Limiting or Tossing Scarlet-Letter Prosecutions. Where public abuse bids fair to irreparably harm a defendant's reputation, the courts should toss the case out, or as a lesser remedy, exclude leaked evidence from trial. Consider it analogous to the rationale for the Exclusionary Rule, which bars the use of illegally-seized evidence from being used in court. The objective of the ER is to deter misconduct (its efficacy is debatable); a Scarlet-Letter ER might limit resort to trial by press.
Reimbursing Successful, Non-Special, Defendants. Finally, forcing the State to pay the costs of unsuccessful prosecutions might deter marginal cases from being brought. Defendants classed as special, as noted above, should be exempted: We don't want the State to underwrite the defense costs of crime bosses, drug lords and terrorists.

These I term semi-solutions, because nothing works perfectly. But by making a replay of Eliot Spitzer's crusading career less likely, there would be immense public benefit. Oh, and there is one more politician who loses--a little, at least: Spitzer was a super delegate, pledged to Hillary. He has stepped aside, leaving Hillary with one fewer super pledgor.

March 13, 2008 in The Ap & The Cap: NYC & DC | Permalink | Comments (0)

Turkey provides another example of pernicious ideologues--radical secularists in this case--who cloak their political designs in the the protection of "reform". It is outrageous, Mustafa Akyol of The Turkish Daily News explains, that prosecutors should even imagine the actions they contemplate. "Undemocratic" just begins to describe it.

The Attempt For a Judiciary Coup D'état

Mustafa Akyol, Turkish Daily News  March 17, 2008

I have been telling you that these people are crazy. And now they proved it beyond any doubt.

You must have heard what I am speaking about. Turkey’s chief prosecutor has just filed a case against the incumbent AKP (Justice and Development Party). He asks for the closure of the party and the banning of Prime Minister Erdoğan and his 70 top colleagues from politics. A political party which has just gained the votes of the 47 percent of the Turkish people is now under threat. Even President Abdullah Gül is on the list of the would-be banned politicians. Unbelievable but true!

For long we have feared military coup d'état’s in Turkey. That type of assault on democracy happened four times and left behind an executed prime minister, hundreds of imprisoned politicians, and thousands of tortured intellectuals and activists. But although the Leviathan that organized those military coups is very orthodox in its authoritarian ideology, it is not totally mindless. It, as Donald Rumsfeld once said in a different context, “has a brain – is continuously changing and adapting tactics.”

The Empire Goes Mad

The 21st century tactic is to stage coups via not the military but the judiciary. As I noted in my piece dated Jan. 24 and titled “The Empire Strikes Back (Via Juristocracy),” now the bureaucratic empire in Ankara attacks the representatives of the people with legal decisions, not armed battalions.

If you talk to them, they will proudly tell you that they are saving Turkey from Islamic fundamentalism. You have to be a secular fundamentalist – or hopelessly uninformed – to believe that. The AKP has proved to be a party committed to the democratization and liberalization of Turkey, a process which, naturally, includes the broadening of religious freedom. But that democratization and liberalization is the very thing that the empire fears from.

If you look at the “evidence” that the chief prosecutor presented to the Constitutional Court to blame the AKP, you will see how fake all this “Islamic fundamentalism” rhetoric is. The anti-secular “crimes” of AKP include:

- Making a constitutional amendment in order to allow university students to wear the headscarf. (Maddeningly enough, this bill was accepted in Parliament with the votes of not just the AKP’s deputies but also those of the Nationalist Movement Party [MHP], and the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society party.)

- Supplying free bus services for the student of the religious “imam-hatip” schools, which are nothing but state-sponsored modern high schools that teach some Islamic classes in addition to the standard secular education.

- Naming a park in Ankara after the deceased leader of a Sufi order.

- Not allowing the public display of a bikini advertisement.

- Employing headscarved doctors in public hospitals.

- Allowing one of the local administrators to issue a paper which has the criminal sentence, “May God have mercy on the souls of our colleagues who have passed away.” (The simple fact that he dared to mention God [“Allah” in Arabic and Turkish] in an official setting was considered as a crime.)

Yes, this is absolutely crazy. It is like defining the Republican Party in the United States as an “anti-secular threat” and asking for its closure based on facts such as that it has pro-life (anti-abortion) tendencies and that President Bush publicly said that his favorite philosopher is Jesus Christ.

The heart of the matter is that Turkey’s self-styled secularism is a fiercely anti-religious ideology akin to that of Marxist-Leninist tyrannies. And the AKP has been trying to turn Turkey into a democracy. That’s the party’s real “crime.”

A Shipwrecked Turkey?

Now what?.. We will see… The chief prosecutor’s file will be evaluated by the Constitutional Court, which is notoriously dominated by the ultra-secularists appointed by the previous president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer. Recently the same court cancelled a law which allowed foreign companies to buy real estate in Turkey. (Yes, the empire is against not just religion but also capitalism.) In that real estate decision, the ratio of the judges was 6 to 5, which was enough to cancel a law. But to close a party you need 7 votes (3/5th of the 11 members). And if 6 is the number of illiberal judges sitting there, that might not be enough to make an extremely illiberal decision such as closing down the AKP.

But what if the AKP really gets executed? To be sure, a party with a similar program will be formed soon and it will win the next elections. Meanwhile, though, the economy will be ruined, the EU process will be wrecked, and the hopes and dreams of millions of Turkish citizens will be crushed. That’s really the worst thing about tyrannies: You ultimately win your struggle against them. But, in the meantime, they give you hell.

http://www.thewhitepath.com/archives/2008/03/the_attempt_for_a_judiciary_coup_detat.php

Being offended is the new high road of low politics. Ultimately, we are not looking for confidence-inspiring leaders any more, but victims who successfully take umbrage. If you haven't been fired from someone's campaign staff, it is not clear you have really been helping the candidate.

Michael Kinsley captures the spirit beautifully in The Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/15/AR2008031501004.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

It's global warming, that's for sure, eh?
I blame Bush.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/03/10/phillips-winter.html

Like many films in pre-release, Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is being selectively screened around the country to develop a buzz.

Press will be invited to screen the final version in three weeks, I’m told, while the official opening in theaters is April 18. Surprisingly, even the private screenings are causing excitement. Audiences love it.

In January I saw an early version that was screened in Fort Lauderdale and I will be at a Seattle screening soon. The Darwinists who are portrayed in the film -- giving answers to questions submitted in advance! -- are worried about what the public will think of their views when produced incontrovertibly in their own words. What they say is damning, all right, but it’s not much different than what they write in books and say in speeches and other appearances.

There is a growing fear by the producers that Darwinists may be trying get into the showings to make bootleg copies (for the Web?), possibly in hopes of damaging the commercial value. Others may be crashing because they want to trash it before it even gets reviewed by the media. P.Z. Myers, who was not let into a showing last night in Minnesota, probably falls in the latter category.

Amazingly, the best selling Oxford scientist/author Richard Dawkins also crashed a showing of Expelled in Minnesota last night and he not only was let in, but introduced at the end of the showing.

Dawkins apparently acknowledged that he had not been invited and did not have a ticket. A sophomoric side to his ideological campaign is thus revealed.

Dawkins, understandably is nervous about this film, among other reasons because Ben Stein has him on camera acknowledging that life on Earth may, indeed, have been intelligently designed, but that it had to have been accomplished by space aliens! This is hilarious, of course, because Dawkins is death on intelligent design. But it turns out that that view applies only if it includes the possibility that the designer might be God.

Myers, of course, relished being expelled from Expelled, but objective observers know that Myers is the most vociferous advocate of expelling Darwin critics from academia. Not from movie pre-screenings where he wasn’t invited, mind you, but from their jobs. Too bad the film doesn’t show (and I wish it had), his promotion of advice to attack teachers and professors who dare question Darwin’s theory. The whole point of Myers is that he is a take-no-prisoners, crusading atheist scientist who has made it his purpose in life to harass people who disagree with him. Dawkins turns out to be his buddy and mutual admirer.

Frankly, I wish the producers would have a special pre-release screening for the Darwinists who are interviewed in the film -- and invite some of the rest of us who have seen their depredations up close. We’d be glad to debate right there.

Among other things, I’d like to read some of the Darwinists’ statements and charges back to them and ask them to defend themselves. One of the most preposterous is that the well-funded’ Discovery Institute is funding this film! ( 1-They seem to have far more money available to them than we do, and 2-We are saving our pennies for the upcoming Broadway musical comedy, Darwin’s Folly.)

I have to say something else, personally. I have been sandbagged by one TV and documentary crew after another. So have Discovery-affiliated scientists. The interviewers all say they just want to understand the issue. Going in, they are quite clear about definitions, for example, and only start using Darwinist definitions of our positions when they report. They never provide questions in advance and even if they say they will stick to science questions and public policy, almost all sneak in questions about personal religious beliefs. Then, of all the footage, guess what gets on TV or in the documentary?

So it really is pathetic of Dawkins, et al to complain that when they were interviewed for Expelled they didn’t know that the film was inherently unfriendly. These are interviewees who received pre-agreed questions, signed release forms after the interviews were conducted, and actually got paid for their time.

I am getting more excited about Expelled myself and can’t wait to see the finished version. I suspect I’ll wish that the film was twice as long and had twice as much from Dawkins, P.Z. Myers, et al. From what I already have seen, they really expose themselves as the anti-intellectual, bullying poseurs they are -- small men who above all are afraid of a fair contest.

The New York Times story on Richard Dawkins' gatecrashing a special screening of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed in Minneapolis Thursday night contains the usual boilerplate bias of reporter Cornelia Dean. (Expelled is a "creationist" film, you see, and ID is an "ideological cousin of creationism", etc.).

(Read the story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/science/21expelledw.html?em&ex=1206417600&en=46c17af663bbda1d&ei=5087%0A)

Nonetheless, Dean's report contains two nuggets. One is that Dawkins had flown to Minneapolis to accompany P. Z. Myers to a convention of atheists. That underscores the real mission of these gents, as I have said before. When they accuse ID supporters of injecting religion into science they really are just projecting.

Second, and more important, Dawkins says that the film's references to the linkage of Darwinist thought and the Nazi's race policies is a "major outrage." Great. Let him debate that with scholars who, unlike the one-time zoologist, now turned polemicist, actually have studied the matter.

No one in the film, and certainly not Richard Weikart, historian and author of From Darwin to Hitler, sees one-to-one causality. But Darwinist thought did influence the Nazis. Probably more than anywhere, the ideas of racial superiority and eugenics were fervently advocated in Germany for decades, among others, by the noted Darwin enthusiast Ernst Haeckel. As a result, race theory and eugenics were not a hard sell to the German volk, including educated people, when the Nazis took charge.

Lovely stuff. Maybe Dawkins should make a tour of it.

In Expelled, Ben Stein does.

I just received the new Harper's . The issue's first essay under "Reading" is "The Evidence of Things Not Seen," by David Berlinski, the noted mathematician whose writings have won many awards and whose new book, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions, comes out next month. David's essay is the perfect punctuation to the end of the American Atheists convention held in Minneapolis over Easter Weekend (when else would atheists meet, Christmas?).

Suffice that Berlinski's article--derived from the book--is a joy. There is at least one other leading intellectual journal with a piece from the book coming out.

And then there is Berlinski's major role in the new Ben Stein film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The film comes out on April 18. Also, George Gilder has persuaded Dr. Berlinski to address the opening of the Telecosm Conference at Lake George in May andthere will be Devil's Delusion book parties in Washington, D.C. and Seattle (see our DI homepage for schedules). And speeches elsewhere.

I can summarize the Berlinski review of real scientific knowledge (as opposed to fanciful guesswork and speculation) on the origin of the universe, the origin of matter and the origin of life: No One Knows.

How many of his fellow scientists will admit as much?

Gilder says Berlinski's new work is the "best book of the decade."

Well, that leaves two years for Dawkins, et al to mount a reply.

A crowd of 350 invited guests attended a pre-screening of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed tonight in Seattle's Pacific Place. I can see now why the eminent Richard Dawkins, who crashed a screening in Minneapolis last week, remains so upset about Ben Stein's movie. He must not have realized until he sat in the theater last week and heard people laughing at him on the screen that he had made himself look foolish. On his website he calls the audience "sycophantic."

Among other things, he writes that before he was interviewed he didn't know who actor/economist/columnist Ben Stein was or that his droll monotone had comedic appeal to those strange Americans. He's so "boring," Dawkins writes. (Ferris Bueller thought the very same, Richard.)

Of Stein's laconic inquiry as to whether he saw any way intelligent design could occur in the universe, Dawkins complains that "I was charitable enough to think he (Stein) was an honestly stupid man seeking enlightenment from a scientist."

How typically "charitable" of Dawkins that he had such a generous thought. And then to have his charity betrayed when the cheeky Yankee actually used Dawkins' extensive reply in the film!

In Seattle, the sycophantic audience chuckled, then guffawed as Stein slowly winkled out of Dawkins the answer that intelligent space aliens might have "seeded" the Earth with its first life molecule. (Actually, does anyone wonder why those "highly evolved" aliens would stop with creating a mere molecule? After coming so far, why not linger and go all the way, create, oh, I don't know, fishes and amphibians and human beings while they were at it?)

So now he deplores the film's "cheap laughs at expense of scientists who are making honest attempts to explain difficult points." He means himself. He's a victim, see. So is his buddy, P. Z. Myers, who started attacking the film weeks ago on his blog, and was not let into the Minneapolis shindig.

Yet in his blog Dawkins complains that Expelled's tale of persecuted scientists seems "whiny" to him.

I suspect that Dawkins may have been upset, furthermore, to see captured on film the hard swipe he takes at Eugenie Scott and the accommodationist strategy of the National Center for Science Education. It is a telling moment, and give credit to Dawkins for his candor about the atheism baked into Darwinism and the deceitful nature of the NCSE's claims of compatibility between Darwinism and religion. He does a commendable job of pulling the veil aside.

Less candor is apparent as Dawkins returns to his charge (made in The New York Times) that the film unfairly shows Darwinism's influence on Nazi race policies. "The alleged association of Darwinism with Nazism is harped on for what seemed like hours, and it is quite simply an outrage," he scolds. Having seen that statement before last night's screening, I tried as best I could in the dark to clock the time in the film devoted to the Nazis. It was roughly 10 minutes. That included Ben Stein's chilling interview with the head of the museum at the former sanatorium at Hadamar, near Dachau, where the director readily acknowledged--even insisted on--the Darwinian provenance of the Nazi treatment of the handicapped "patients" there. And it included clips from Nazi propaganda films that eerily advocate the line of "natural selection" in human beings. How can you argue with that? The film is careful to qualify the case of Darwinism's influence on Nazi policies. But evidence of influence is abundant. (Much more could have been used if the film really had spent "hours" on the subject.)

As I have noted before, the Expelled producers are nervous about what they see as potential efforts by screening interlopers to record the film and expose it in ways that would damage its commercial value. In Seattle, even some of the "sycophants" were chuckling as a boilerplate copyright protection warning was read aloud. But I don't think any in the audience would have characterized the person who read it the way Dawkins characterizes the one who read it in Minneapolis--as a "Gauleiter."

A "Gauleiter"? A Nazi district leader?

Funny word choice for a man who is unhappy that Expelled raises the question of Darwinian theory's influence on the Nazis.

Dawkins on his website is at pains to protest that he himself does not promote a Darwinian society. Good for him. But he might be more persuasive if he were willing to concede that a Darwinian society not only would have the potential to become a fascist state--which he does--but also that once in history Darwinist views contributed to creating just such a state.

After last night's screening, a good part of the crowd in Seattle stayed around as long as the theater management would allow to talk with three of the Darwin critics and ID scientists who were interviewed in the movie. I wish Richard Dawkins had snuck into that event so they could have invited him to join them.

A packed crowd heard author E. Benjamin Skinner speak about his just-released book, A Crime So Monstrous, last night at the Discovery Institute offices in Washington, D.C. Discovery senior fellow and former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large on Human Trafficking, John R. Miller, was present and spoke for a few minutes, too.

Hundreds of thousands of human beings are sold into bondage in the world each year, often with the connivance of governments and even more often while governments look on with seeming indifference. Like most evils that go under-noticed, this one suffers from the problem that everyone says he is opposed to slavery, but few, indeed, are willing to do anything to stop it. In a strange way, if some group were to defend the practice there might be cause for a debate and, through that, a heightening of public awareness.

Do you ever look back on the slavery of yore, or the anti-semitism in Europe that preceeded the Nazis, and wonder, why didn't people pay attention? Well, our grandchildren may well ask the same of us.

Free press has brought out the book. I am just getting into it myself and already can recommend it to Discovery Blog visitors.

It is hard to believe that the highest court in Turkey actually will consider outlawing the governing party in that country because it is accused of crossing over the nation's division between mosque and state. Yet that is going to happen, as noted in this article. Even taking up the subject will put strains on the country for months.

I have assumed--and still assume--that the court eventually will hold back, even though many of its appointed members come from the secularist opposition party. Long term, if the Court decides to disallow the existing Administration, there will be economic as well as political consequences.

The government's supposed "religious" offenses--merely ALLOWING female students and others to wear headscarfs to school, for example--will seem trivial to Westerners, including even the left wing parties in most European Union countries. In fact, the anti-religious zeal of some in Turkey is so extreme that it is almost a mirror-image of the pro-religious zeal in certain Arab and Central Asian countries (like Iran, next door). Someone should tell the Turkish high court that the opposite of one extreme is not another, but a moderate position. The cure for communism was not Nazism, after all, but liberal democracy. The cure for Islamic fanaticism is not secularist fanaticism, but a government that makes space for religious observances, including the protection of religious minorities.

Turkey has a long way to go, but it's a fine country, with good hearted people. It doesn't need to be pushed into a kind of secularist suicide by its high court.