Uighur Refugees

The New York Times leads with the right story for a change. Personal stories of unjustified, prolonged detention at Guantanamo Bay will keep coming out for a generation. If you're not moved and angered by the way the U.S. has behaved in the post-9/11 world, you should be.

58 Arabic Linguists

Maureen Dowd tells it like it is on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

Pope, President, and Protestors

President Bush meets Pope Benedict XVI for the first time. The meeting was peaceful, but 10,000 Italian police officers were on hand to keep the massive protest outside the Vatican under control.

Such protests are commonplace whenever the President travels throughout the world. And its probably safe to say that every U.S. President has dealt with international hostility. Yet there's something about the specific rhetoric against this American President that is worth noticing. Here's a protestor speaking about Mr. Bush: “There are a lot of people who are here to demonstrate their opposition to overpowering and violence personified by the man who is here, welcomed with great honor as a friend, while instead he should be treated for what he is: that is an assassin responsible of the worst crimes."

And it goes without saying that this is the opinion of the majority of the world. George W. Bush, rightly or wrongly, has become a world symbol for violence and aggression. Whether we agree with specific foreign policy actions over the past six years or not, this should cause us extreme unease.

Interview with Cormac

Trey Patterson pins down the shallow creepiness of Oprah Winfrey's recent interview with literary icon Cormac McCarthy.

What do Bono and Michael Moore and Cormac McCarthy have in common in this context? Have they materialized in our family rooms so that we can do our part—for Africa, for health care, for Lit-ra-chur—without giving a dime or breaking a sweat? If Jerome David Salinger descended from his own private ashram in New Hampshire to greet Oprah with a hug, would she waste our time by asking questions about "identifying" with Franny Glass? What does she want us to get from this show?

Lincoln's Ambiguous Eulogy

Here's an unforgettable essay in the New Yorker about Lincoln's final moments. Adam Gopnik's poignant closing remarks:

"History is not an agreed-on fiction but what gets made in a crowded room; what is said isn’t what’s heard, and what is heard isn’t what gets repeated. Civilization is an agreement to keep people from shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre, but the moments we call historical occur when there is a fire in a crowded theatre; and then we all try to remember afterward when we heard it, and if we ever really smelled smoke, and who went first, and what they said. The indeterminacy is built into the emotion of the moment. The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present."

Death Qualification

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that trial judges can exclude potential jurors from capital cases based on their beliefs about the death penalty. The New York Times reports this could exclude large swaths of the population, mainly minorities and women, from serving on these juries. The Court has just approved a kind of discrimination.

Watch for wrongful conviction rates to sky-rocket.

Giuliani's Woes

Citing Giuliani's position on abortion, a Rhode Island bishop compares Rudy Giuliani to Pontius Pilate. He has a point -- Giuliani is just trying to coast along, hoping not to rock the boat.

Giuliani gets a low F thus far for how he's handled his abortion position. How could a potential Republican frontrunner for 2008 have entered this campaign season without a clear plan for dealing with this? It's no secret that Giuliani is pro-choice. When will America's Mayor finally stand up and stop mitigating or apologizing for his stance?

His campaign website (admittedly well-designed) deals with abortion really tepidly:

"But Rudy understands that this is a deeply personal moral dilemma, and people of good conscience can disagree respectfully."

Warms your heart, doesn't it? I'm getting visions of annual Giuliani family reunions, where everybody sits around and disagrees respectfully about abortion. Too bad for Giuliani that politics don't work that way, and for good reason. The abortion debate won't be solved by listening indefinitely to "good conscience" appeals from both sides. It will be won by the most convincing and articulate side, which (no matter which it is) is not likely to include Rudy Giuliani.

So Long, Gen. Pace

Gen. Peter Pace will not be nominated for a second term as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Everybody is being patronizing to a fault -- saying that, regrettably, the re-confirmation process would have been too divisive.

Well of course it would have been divisive, and for good reason. Recall that Gen. Pace smeared thousands of gay and lesbian American servicemen last March when he called their behavior "immoral." The Bush administration won't say it, but Pace's anti-gay comments were probably the straw that broke the camel's back here. The end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is inevitable in the next decade. The last thing we need is someone who thinks the policy is too inclusive.

So how does Pace's replacement, Admiral Michael C. Mullen, feel about "Don't Ask, Don't Tell?" He'll need to be pressed on the question, but here's what he had to say on April 3 at the Brookings Institute:

If it's time to revisit that policy, the American people I believe -- and we live in a country -- the American people ought to raise that issue and we'll have the debate. As a member of the Joint Chiefs and obviously the head of one of the services, I will contribute to that and give my best military advice based on what -- the debate that's going on, and if it changes, it changes.

"If it changes, it changes" eh? An ambivalent answer but an interesting one, and I'll take it over the moralist slurs of his predecessor.

An Unlikely Global Warming Dissident

Laurie David, wife of Seinfeld creator Larry David, is the new face of Hollywood anti-global-warming activism. You can watch her here on Bill Mahr -- remember, this is the woman Al Gore called the most important environmental activist in America today. Does she seem drunk to you?

Laurie David rubbed me the wrong way when she came to speak at UW-Madison last fall. She held up Ted Danson as a moral exemplar, for his early support for energy-efficient cars. (Thanks, but I'll stick with Buddha.) And there was an ugly, almost evangelical cockiness in her moral absolutism. Saying that we must make sure to unplug our cell phone chargers when they're not being used, for example, struck me as just so much more fire and brimstone. We're supposed to applaud when American evangelicals start preaching the impending danger of man-made global warming. This is no surprise. Secular environmentalist dogma transposes onto religious dogma quite nicely. It's a match made in hell.

It's only a matter of time before the lid is exposed on the enforced, non-existent 'scientific consensus.' I consider it a great triumph when a democratic socialist like Alexander Cockburn writes a series of columns for The Nation magazine outlining the grave scientific problems with the global warming model. If indeed high atmospheric carbon levels follow dramatic increases in temperature, as Cockburn writes, this is a huge act of whistle-blowing. The science here makes sense, and I plan to research it and report back to all of you.

You can bet Mr. Gore and Ms. David are mad as hell at Mr. Cockburn, and for The Nation for publishing these recent columns. But good for him for spoiling their fun, at least for a little while. And good for those members of the international left who want to leave their pseudo-leftist environmentalist evangelicals behind. They've found a voice which should keep growing.

You can read the Cockburn columns here, here, and here.