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© Copyright 1876-2004 By The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved

© Copyright 1876-2004 By The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.

    IRVINE, CA -- Secretary of State Colin Powell declared this weekend that "The United States does not support either the elimination or the exile of Mr. Arafat." His reasoning? "There would be rage throughout the Arab world the Muslim world, and in many other parts of the world."
     By that reasoning we should not have attacked Afghanistan, nor Iraq; nor should we try to kill Hussein, bin Laden and the Al Qaeda leadership.
     In fact, if we accept Powell's reasoning, we should immediately stop our war on terror--we don't want to further enrage those peaceful Islamic terrorists and their supporters, do we?

   [Editor's Note: Click here to obtain more background info about the Ayn Rand Organization. ]

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© Copyright 1876-2004 by The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.

September 5, 2003
Briefing from Camp Victory, Baghdad
Donald H. Rumsfeld Secretary of Defense

Rumsfeld: I had a good visit with Jerry Bremer, and then went over and visited with General Sanchez, and then we visited the people around the building we've known over the years who are helping out.

And then we had a dinner with the British ambassador and the senior team that Jerry Bremer and General Sanchez have. It ran about an hour and 20 minutes longer than it was supposed to, but it was excellent. We were able to talk the broad scope of what's taking place in this country. It's truly amazing the amount of progress that's been achieved in whatever its been - four or five months, depending on whether you start before the war or after the war. If one looks at any other timeline - the timeline in Germany, the timeline in Japan, the timeline in any number of other countries. The progress here has been notably better, faster, and at least to my eyes really impressive. If you think of the political side -- the work that's been done to get the city councils going all across the country, the standing up of a government council, the first reasonably representative thing that's happened in this country nationwide in decades. The announcement more recently of the appointment of ministers to deal with the overwhelming majority of the ministries. There are important steps yet ahead and they're in pretty much in the hands of the Iraqi people and the Governing Council.

The next step presumably would be that they will fashion some sort of a date and an approach to a constitutional convention or populace to produce the drafting of a constitution. After that, there needs to say, there will have to be a ratification or approving of that constitution and the constitutional process by the Iraqi people, and after that, one would think they would be provided for in the constitution and opportunity for people to elect officials depending on how the constitution ends up being crafted. They have accomplished three or four steps and have three of four to go, but it's been enormously impressive progress. If you think of our country, it was sometime in 1776 until I think 1789 before we had a system in place that everyone agreed to. The amount of time in Germany, Jerry Bremer mentioned today that it took something like three years; I believe he said, to get a currency arranged in Germany. That was done in the first two or three months here in Iraq. So there are truly impressive accomplishments. It is understandable that with so much analysis and so much observation, and so much scrutiny as to what's going on here that the emphasis turns to be on the things that are unfortunate, where somebody is killed or somebody is wounded, or some building is blown up, or someone is critical of the government council, or critical of the coalition. And that's what happens in a free country. That's what happens when people are free to write what they want, say what they want, and so what they want. On the other hand, it tends to create an impression, an imbalance in public perception that is unfortunate.

These young men and women that are here are doing work that is enormously important. It's important to the Iraqi people who are free for the first time. It's important to the region and offers the prospect for something that can happen here that can affect the behavior politically in neighboring economic circumstances of the people of the entire region.

A peaceful recovering Iraq will make an enormous difference that can be (Inaudible.) of each of the neighboring countries. It's also important to the world. We've got an awful lot of people in this world who are teaching people that the thing to do is strap bombs on themselves and go kill people -- innocent women and children. We need more people who are teaching in schools that it's important to learn math, and to learn languages, and to learn the kinds of things that will enable them to provide for themselves and their families.

And if you think of the damage that Stalin and the Soviet Union did to the people of Russia and the people of the Soviet republics and the occupied Warsaw Pact countries and what happened to their infrastructure over those many decades, what happened to the lost opportunities, the effects on their lives, the education they didn't get. And then you think about what happens in a system that's rooted in fear. What happens to people psychologically if they know that their only opportunity is to acquiesce in that repressive system, their only way they can provide for their families is to be a part of a system that is corrupt, that is vicious, that is picking people up in the night without charges, throwing them in jail and killing them, and yet, to survive and succeed, they have to become a part of that apparatus. In Russia, they called it the nomenclature -- in the Soviet Union.

In other countries, here in this country it was the Ba'athists that were privileged, and needless to say that with the wonderful success that the armed forces have here -- the coalition forces -- those opportunities for the Ba'athists ended and there's a lot of them still around and they're unhappy about it and they're trying to destroy the infrastructure of the Iraqis. They're trying to kill Coalition people and drive them out. You ask yourself what's the future hold. Seems to be the future's pretty clear. The future is that these folks are going to be successful here and this country of ours and the Coalition is going to stay here for as much time is as necessary and not any longer. We have no desire to have any role in Iraqi oil, or Iraqi resources -- they belong to the Iraqi people, and our task is to try and create an environment that is hospitable for the Iraqi people to fashion a new way of governing themselves and be on our way. It is tough work. It's dangerous work. I stopped over in the tent where some of the folks that were wounded just in the last 48 hours were. It's dangerous needless to say, but it's getting better every day. I can certainly see a change since I was here. You can see a change since you were here.

I'm rambling. I'd be happy to respond to questions.

Q: The last time that you didn't spend the night in Iraq. Is the fact that you are this time dictated by the number of things you want to do or are you (Inaudible.).

Rumsfeld: No, I'm trying to get to bed. (Laughter.) It's a long way down to Kuwait and my problem with staying here last time was that -- I don't believe the war had even ended -- it hadn't. When I’m around, it's a problem. It takes a lot of people to guard me and to look out for you, and my feeling was that they had a lot of hard work to do and it was better for me to get out and not to put them into danger. Today's situation is very different. You've got folks here doing a wonderful job -- a lot of people helping the Coalition and Provisional Authority and the circumstance is such that I'm not putting -- I hope I’m not putting a lot of people out and certainly not that I would have --

Q: Under the heading of getting better every day, do you think that is true for the security situation? Or is it in fact getting worse or not getting better?

Rumsfeld: If you look at the data and look at the number of attacks and at the number of incidents, it tends to go up and down in waves and it is you know, it depends on what you baseline is and when you mark it. But at the moment, the last thing I saw it went like this and it came down and it went up a little, and it came down, and it has held fairly steady ion the last period. So it's down from where it was here, but it's been fairly level in recent weeks.

Q: The number of casualties, or number of (Inaudible.)

Rumsfeld: Those are attacks.

Q: What about the number of casualties, successful casualties, for instance, if you look at the number of car bombs in the last few weeks, it appears to be rising.

Rumsfeld: I'll have to go back and look. There are casualties every week. We know that.

Q: The larger question is if you're balancing the positive that you've just noted in the many things that have been stood up with the negatives in the instability in the security situation, is that threatening to outweigh the positive?

Rumsfeld: I'm sure there are people who will say that, but the answer is no, not at all. The number of reconstruction projects that have been done Jerry talked about is 6,000 -- 6,000 individual activities that the military and civilian effort in this country by the Coalition has accomplished. They have touched the lives of millions of Iraqis. They've seen the progress. They've seen things happen.

Schools are open. Universities are open. You look at right over here see what's going on in terms of entrepreneurial activities and people in the street selling things, buying things, bartering things, doing things -- walking out relatively freely. A key measure -- Pat Kennedy from the State Department who works with Jerry Bremer said the thing that he finds impressive, which General Sanchez agreed with -- is the growing number of Iraqis who are walking up to the forces -- civilian and military, U.S., Coalition, and to the Iraqi forces, and telling them where caches are, where people are who should be arrested, telling them what they ought to be looking our for -- that there's a bomb there. There's no way to capture that in a metric. That the people here, if you take them aside and ask them will tell you that they can feel the Iraqi people responding and being helpful. How do you compare it?

Q: Is it a (Inaudible.) security problem?

Rumsfeld: No it's not. It's a problem that has to be dealt with. It's a problem that ultimately the Iraqi people are going to deal with as well -- with the help of the Coalition forces. It's all interconnected. Progress on the political side will contribute to progress on the economic side and progress on the security side. Progress on the economic side will contribute to progress on the security side. Progress on the security side contributes to progress on the economic side. We've got to try to find a way to continue to put sufficient pressure on those that don't believe in a representative system for this country -- the people who want to go back to a dictatorship, the people who are coming across the borders because they want a Jihad, they want to engage in a terrorist act of some kind. We've got to put enough pressure on them that the good people of this country win.

Q: Have you been given any indication on whether it was foreigners who came across the borders or whether it was Ba'athists who are behind the truck bombs?

Rumsfeld: No.

Q: You don't know which ones they are?

Rumsfeld: I don't happen to know. I haven't looked, but some have been caught and some haven't. Some have been killed and some weren't. It varies. We've got every size and shape and nationality you can imagine that have been killed or captured. The mixture that I've characterized -- it isn't one single thing.

Q: Is it time for the Administration to tell Congress and the American people how much more money is going to be needed to sustain operations here for the next year? What's your best ballpark estimate?

Rumsfeld: I think very likely the Administration is pulling that together from the different departments and agencies and from Jerry Bremer and from DoD and State, and all the people that are involved.

Q: What's your best ballpark estimate?

Rumsfeld: I'm not going to prejudge what the president decides. He'll end up taking all of that and putting it together and making a judgment, and make an announcement at some appropriate time.

Q: Do you think American troops are threatened by forces in this country who may not be al Qaeda, who may not be Ba'athists -- who just don't --

Rumsfeld: There are certainly threats from the two you described. There are also threats from criminals who do these things -- that's what they do. And then there's undoubtedly those who are unemployed who are doing things they shouldn't be doing or doing something for money, but are not ideologically motivated. It really runs across the spectrum, but the circumstance of this country is so much better today than it was in April.

It's going to be so much better down the road -- another three or four months and the things you read where people say are "chaos" and "getting worse" and all of that. It seems to me they tend to be focused in Baghdad and tend to focus in the central region where the bulk of activity is going on. In the west or the south or the north, it's a relatively different circumstance. And it tends to be repeated and repeated and repeated in a way that people begin to walk away with the impression that it's deteriorating and that simply isn't the view that I get from Jerry Bremer or from General Sanchez and certainly not the impression that Larry or I or others who have been here before see by way of comparison.

I think people who come here and stay over a sustained period of many, many months see the improvement. People who come in and look at it with balanced eyes on an intermittent basis see the improvement. That is not to say that people aren't going to get killed. That is not to say it isn't dangerous. It is. And it's not to say that there won't be difficulties prospectively. Undoubtedly there undoubtedly will, but it seems to be the trajectory we're on is a good one.

Q: Did Mr. Bremer ask you for additional measures that the military should take to enhance security measures here? Did he ask you for specific additional measures?

Rumsfeld: We talk almost every day. So if you asked in this meeting today if he asked me for additional that he doesn't have, no, not that I recall. We talked about the importance of military police. We talked about the importance of trainers -- people. We talked about the growth in the Iraqi capability going from zero three or four months ago up to somewhere around 55,000 today, if you add up police, former Guard, militia, army, facilities protection -- now amazing that increment to go from zero to 55,000 Iraqis with weapons providing, assisting and providing security in this country. Now, it's a country of 23 or 4 million people, so it isn't where it stops. It's got to continue to go up as I said on the airplane for those that were there -- the Iraqi side.

Q: Can you give us a little more clarity on -- talking about --

Rumsfeld: I've had so many questions. I'm here to get educated, to learn and to test and taste what's taking place here. And I had six, eight, ten people around the table who live here and who are engaged in it and who care about it and who are doing everything humanly possible on the military and civilian side and they gave me the opportunity to ask them questions on a variety of different subjects.

Q: What about the U.N. role? Was that discussed and if things are going so well, does it make sense to have a larger U.N. role or is a larger U.N. role here desirable so that it doesn't appear to be such an American operation?

Rumsfeld: I don't want you to say that things are going so well as though I'm Pollyanna. I'm not. I said. This is a tough business. It's dangerous, and it's difficult, and it's going to take time. What I said is that there has been measurable progress. And that is not a Pollyannaish comment. And it is not (Inaudible.). It's truthful. And it would be wrong to begin your question that way. And I'm shocked that you did it, Jim! I can't believe you would do that! (Laughter.)

Q: What about the U.N. role? Is there a need for a larger --

Rumsfeld: We discussed it. And that's being negotiated now with the president and Colin. They're working with the Security Council members to try to figure out there's a dozen different models that have been used over the last decade. There are three or four that are currently being used that are different. And we're going to figure it out. Does it make sense to have a larger U.N. role? We think so, otherwise we wouldn't be in there requesting it and suggesting it.

Q: One of those models actually in Kosovo has NATO commanders in charge in sectors that we (Inaudible.) -- Do you think that's a possibility that the United States -- (Inaudible.)

Rumsfeld: I don't want to prejudge it.

Q: But how do you feel personally?

Rumsfeld: Personally I give my advice in discussions in National Security Council meetings and privately to the president and Secretary of State. He will negotiate that and figure out how to do it and which model makes the most sense and he comes back and says here's what people think and -- and at some point we'll have one. My guess is we'll end up with a somewhat larger role, although the U.N. has been involved from the beginning. The president went to the U.N. and got a resolution. The U.N. sat down (Inaudible.) --

Q: But do you envision a larger and maybe joint (Inaudible.) --

Rumsfeld: I envision exactly what I said. The president said from the beginning that "the U.N. should have a vital role," I think was his phrase. Right? And that's been evolving and we'll see what evolves. Who wants to guess? I don't have to be in the guessing business.

Q: General Sanchez -- he didn't ask for any more troops, did he?

Rumsfeld: Absolutely not. This is really a fixation people have. If he wanted more troops, he would have them, believe me. And I would send them. He has said he has about the right number of forces. We have all said it is healthy and good to enlarge the number of international forces, so we have for four months now been all across the globe been talking to something in excess of eighty or ninety countries and we now have 29 physically involved. And we want more. And we think that's a good thing. But mostly what we want, and what General Sanchez wants and want Jerry Bremer wants is more Iraqi forces. We want more force protection, more site protection, more border protection, more police protection in cities by Iraqis. This is their country. The security of their country, and the political future of their country, and the economic advancement of their country is going to be done by Iraqi people. It is not going to be done by nation builders. It is not going to be done by people coming in and fashioning a template and saying "here's how we do it, and therefore you must do it." They're going to figure it out.

Looks like this will be the last question.

Q: Do you think that will happen faster than anything out of the U.N.? Will we get more forces out of the indigenous population before you will out of the U.N.?

Rumsfeld: "Before" is the word that bothers me about your question. If you think about it, in three months we've gone from zero to 55,000 Iraqis, and in three or four months -- which one should I be using? [Mr. Di Rita in background: May 1, four months]. Ok. In four months we've got plus or minus 22,000 international troops, and we hope and our looking to get an additional increment from the four, five, six or eight countries, that we're currently in discussions and negotiations with, a few of which are interested in what the resolution looks like out of the U.N. and how that works. So, that answers your question. My guess is you're going to see the 55,000 Iraqis go up to 75.000, or 100,000 over some period of time. Why? Because it’s their country.

Q: By the end of the year?

Rumsfeld: No, come on. I don't do deadlines.

Q: You have a goal, though?

Rumsfeld: And my goal is to always exceed the goal and to do it (Inaudible.) better.

Q: (Inaudible).

Rumsfeld: That's a fair question. I think it helps the Iraqi people. I think it helps the neighboring countries. I think it helps some non-neighboring countries feel that it is a truly international effort. I think it tends to belie the argument that these countries are there to get the Iraqi or these countries are going to stay forever. People in the United States don't want to stay here forever. The people in the United States have isolationist impulses. Our first choice is to not be doing that. And to have our folks at home. So the (Inaudible.) of international forces is a helpful thing I believe. Always have. That's why we started before the war started trying to get other countries involved. In fact we even started before the war started and the liaison teams down at CENTCOM were working with the Brits and the Aussies in case a war started to get them involved . Thanks a lot.

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© Copyright 1876-2004 By The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.

August 7, 2003
CAN’T RECALL A MORE EXCITING ELECTION
by Sean Carter

    CHINO HILLS, CA -- As a political humorist (i.e., someone too lazy to pursue gainful employment), I’ve been longing for political turmoil. It didn't have to be anything earthshaking, like Camryn Manheim doing high-impact aerobics; just something that could compete with that ridiculous Queer Eye for the Straight Guy show on NBC. Well, I believe my prayers have been answered in the form of the California gubernatorial recall election.
    Ever since California courts certified the recall effort, the news from Sacramento has gotten weirder and weirder (and it was bizarre to begin with). Within days, hundreds of political unknowns announced their candidacies for governor of the nation’s most populous state. For example, three enterprising men named Gray Davis have filed to have their names placed on the ballot in an apparent attempt to win the governorship through name confusion.
     However, perhaps even more strange are the celebrities who have thrown their hats into the ring. For instance, Gallagher has announced his candidacy. This will be a much needed career boost for the comedian who believes that smashing a watermelon with a sledgehammer qualifies as humor. In addition, Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine, is running under a “pro porn” platform.
    As for politicians entering the race, we have former spouses Michael and Arianna Huffington running. Likewise, Gary “I Didn’t Kill That Woman … Ms. Levy” Condit is considering running as a Democrat.
     On the Republican side of the aisle, the situation is even more bizarre. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan are locked in a battle of “You go first. No, you go first.” Apparently, Riordan is interested in running only if the Terminator doesn’t also run. On a side note, Schwarzenegger should be running from the millions of fans who paid $8.50 to see the latest movie in the Terminator series, T3: Rise of Your Popcorn.
     So where does this leave California voters? It leaves them with the most interesting election ever. On October 7th, California voters may be faced with a ballot with up to 500 names on it. By comparison, the infamous butterfly ballot used in Florida in 2000 will seem like child’s play. In fact, the instructions for NASA’s Lunar Landing Module will be simple in comparison. In short, chances are excellent that this recall effort will be the greatest political debacle since Admiral Stockdale’s “What am I doing here?”
speech at the 1992 Vice Presidential Debate.
    This has led many Democrats in California to oppose the recall. They claim that recall is a Republican attempt to “steal” the governorship. Furthermore, they claim that the recall procedure will create chaos. However, I couldn’t disagree more. In fact, I’m saddened that the party that calls itself “Democratic” has a problem with democracy in its purest form.
    The simple truth of the matter is California’s recall election closely resembles the Founding Father’s view of an election. In the first presidential election, the electoral vote was split between twelve candidates.
    In those days, you didn’t need the endorsement of a major political party to run for President. You simply needed courage, a good family name and a newly-sanded set of wooden teeth. Nowadays, things are not that simple. To even consider running for dog catcher in most counties, you need the endorsement of a major party (and not many other job prospects).
   As a result, our political candidates have become as bland as the chicken at a Rotary Club luncheon (only not nearly as tough). This seems particularly true of the Democratic Party, which has nominated such “wild men” as Al Gore, Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale.
    However, in the California recall election, we aren’t going to have pre-packaged candidates with years of grooming and training in the art of obfuscation. We are going to have “real” Americans running for office – pornographers, adulterers and basically anyone who can come up with the $3,500 filing fee.
    In fact, if there is any drawback to the California recall process, it’s the process for getting on the ballot. To run for governor in this election, a candidate only needs to collect 65 signatures and pay the filing fee. Perhaps, we should increase the signature requirement by a factor of 10. After all, you can get 65 signatures at a single house in some neighborhoods in Los Angeles.
     In any event, it wouldn’t take more than an hour to get these signatures by just standing in front of a donut shop. Obviously, it should require more than an hour of preparation to mount a campaign for the second most important elected position in America.
    Nevertheless, the recall is going to be great for democracy. We are going to learn that not all candidates need to be boring (or even sane). Furthermore, we will have real choose in this election. And perhaps, most importantly, Arnold Schwarzenegger will be too busy to work on T4: Another $8.50 Down the Drain.

        [Editor's Note: Sean Carter may be reached at www.lawpsided.com].

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© Copyright 1876-2004 by The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.

August 6, 2003
A California Sport
The Politics of Surprise!
By R.D. Skidmore, Contributor

    LANCASTER, CA -- Politics is an exciting spectator sport! California has amassed their gladiatorial teams of candidates, lawyers, pundits and media representatives under political party banners and are moving around the playing field on all fronts.
     First the recall of Gov. Davis was not supposed to be successful, yet it did
qualify. Fear and speculation arose whether Secretary of State Kevin Shelley and Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante could manipulate the process to postpone a recall of Gov. Davis, but they were met with legal challenges and forced to follow California’s constitution.
     Next hope is the courts. Can the California courts be used as a delaying
tactic while the NAACP and the Mexican American Legal Defense & Education Fund run an interference pattern.
     Regina Chen, writing for the Daily California, a Berkeley CA. paper, reports that lawsuits have been filed in every court imaginable – state and federal. One lawsuit by the NAACP claims that the Recall Gray Davis effort will disenfranchise minority voters who won’t know where to vote on Election Day or would have further to travel because of consolidated precincts.
     MALDEF is suing because the racial privacy initiative, proposition 54, will
be placed on the same ballot. Proposition 54 asks voters to prohibit the state
government from collecting racial data. California statute requires that when a ballot issue is qualified, it is to appear on the next statewide ballot, only this time it is with Gov. Davis’ recall. Maybe MALDEF doesn’t want Californians to be too discriminating?
     Both NAACP and MALDEF have filed identical claims in both state and federal courts and are also claiming that the amount of time before the recall
election is not sufficient for information about the initiative to be gathered and disseminated to voters.
     Until then, even Gov. Davis jumped in the fray. The governor has petitioned the same court to rule that he can run as a candidate to succeed himself if he is recalled. The governor sees it as enormously unfair that he should not be allowed to also be a candidate to replace himself if the recall effort receives a majority of votes on Election Day.
     Of course, he is the candidate and he is on the ballot. His candidacy is under “Shall the Governor be recalled? Yes or No. If the No’s win, Davis
wins by a no.
     However, Rescue California, the recall committee, says that should Gov.
Davis’ name be allowed to appear on the ballot it would give Davis the
opportunity to lose twice in the same election.”
     It has been reported more than 2,000,000 Californians already signed recall petitions but that doesn’t hinder the governor! Davis says that if a majority of voters opt to remove him from office (and the latest polls show the recall is ahead by 15-20%) he should be allowed a “second chance” by being on the ballot a second time as a candidate to replace himself: Political legal handicappers say Davis' suit, smacks of Florida-style chaos, and needs to be taken seriously.
     Davis also asks the justices to postpone the balloting by five months --
until March -- to avoid a slapdash polling process that lawyer Robin
Johansen said would "make Florida look like a cakewalk."
     Their suit claims that the scheduled Oct. 7 recall vote means there will be
insufficient voting places and trained poll workers, as well as breakneck
deadlines to print and process both sample and actual ballots in up to seven
languages.
    The suit predicts the biggest potential problems in six counties, including
San Francisco and Los Angeles, were Democrat voters are huge majorities,
plan to use decertified punch card voting machines because replacements
won't be ready in October.
     Reporting in the Sacramento Bee, said Daniel Lowenstein, a UCLA elections law specialist, says "There are circumstances when it doesn't matter what the law says. You just can't have an election, " questioning, whether the
justices would have time to size up the "fact-intensive" situation.
     Surely before the October election, someone will file a suit claiming inconsistencies that violate the 14th Amendment’s anti-discrimination provisions!
     Finally, Gov. Davis gained enthusiastic union endorsement from the AFL-CIO to keep other prominent Democrats out of the recall election. It does not
matter that California’s left leaning legislators and the Gov. have lowered
average worker earnings by endorsing illegal aliens being employed in Calif.
Gov. Davis now wants to approve issuing valid California Drivers Licenses to illegal aliens.
    Still the nation's largest labor organization, in endorsing Gov. Davis, warns other party members not to put their names on the ballot. Davis asked the union to pledge $10 million to his campaign — half of the $20 million he told them he would need to fight the recall.

    [Editor's Note: R.D. Skidmore is a professor at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, Ca. His e-mail address: rskidmor49@excite.com].

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© Copyright 1876-2004 by The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.

    SAN ANTONIO, TX -- "It's mine!" says a three-year old. "He'll break it," says a nine-year old. "If he breaks it, you'll just have to buy me another one," says a teenager. The older the child, the more sophisticated the argument for why they don't want to share a toy. People learn that in order to get what they want, they must present a case that is not centered around their own needs, but rather, around someone else's needs.
     It's one thing for a congressman to risk his own life, but it's another for him to risk yours. These words stuck with me. It was a radio campaign paid by the pharmaceutical industry to keep foreign prescription drugs out of America. They argue that foreign-made drugs are unsafe and they urge all Americans to call their congressional representatives to stop the bill from passing.
     But is the powerful pharmaceutical industry really looking out for little brother? Or, like a child who doesn't want to share a toy, are they just protecting their turf?
     Arguments and actions of the pharmaceutical industry are sophisticated, calculated, measures to hold on to their monopoly. By using millions of dollars to lobby Congress and buy expensive media space to "educate" consumers, they demonstrate just how rich and powerful they have become on the backs of the consumers they claim to want to protect.
     Clearly their ability to pay for commercials and ads and to make political contributions of more than $20 million to the past election, is symbolic of a powerful industry. And it is in their best interest to hold on to that power.
     But as a nurse, almost daily I witness the devastation of a healthcare system that is itself diseased on many levels. For instance, on examining an elder patient, I noticed his face grimace as he took a few unsteady steps. When I asked him why he wasn't taking his medicine, the elder said, "Oh honey, I can't afford to get that arthritis medicine that works so good."
     But is allowing foreign prescription drugs into our country the solution? The U.S. through the FDA has imposed very high standards of our pharmaceutical industry to produce and distribute safe products. Having worked a short time in a pharmaceutical research company, I experienced the overwhelming demands by our federal government to keep us safe from
harmful drugs.
     There is no doubt in my mind that U.S. drugs are much more safe than anything produced abroad. But is safety the real issue?I believe the issue is choice. American consumers should be allowed the freedom to choose
between a costly U.S.-made drug, or a cheap foreign one.
     Consumers should clearly understand the risk they take by electing to use foreign-made drugs. With lax foreign production oversight of drugs, Americans may be risking their health and even their lives.
     Too often, cost is the only obstacle to obtaining a medication. This often causes a patient to choose between purchasing food or purchasing medicine. This choice can leave an unhealthy individual no choice but to live a life of pain.
     Depression caused by chronic illness, physical impairment, unrelieved pain, and financial stress are among the top reasons why someone 65 years and older commits suicide every 90 minutes. Perhaps a second-class cheap medication can offer hope to many in this group. This is a choice that should be given to consumers - not the federal government.
     As these debates are argued in Congress one must not lose site of the real issue: the health of American citizens. And as bills move toward our President, I hope he bases his decisions on what is best for Americans - freedom of choice, rather than be manipulated by sophisticated arguments to protect the turf of special interest groups.

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© Copyright 1876-2004 by The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.

Late Breaking Bulletin: (07/27/03) Bob Hope died Sunday night at the age of 100, at his home in Toluca Lake, California. The announced cause of death was pneumonia. He was surrounded by members of his family, including Dolores, his wife of 68 years. At a press conference Monday, his daughter Linda said, "Dad had an amazing sendoff. All of the family was together with him, and he died very peacefully."

May 28, 2003
Hope Over Darkness
By Aaron Hanscome, Contributor

    PACIFIC PALISADES -- Judging from my regal bowl cut, I must have been about ten years old when the photograph was taken. I’m seated a couple of rows behind third base close to where a few years later I’d witness a lame Kirk Gibson hobble to the plate and put the finishing touches on an improbable Cinderella Season. Unlike on that magical night, there are no ecstatic fans around me. Only Kevin, another shaggy lad, is at my side. Kevin’s well-connected father had allowed him to choose one lucky friend to join him for this Dodger pre-game interview. The two of us were going to offer up the valuable insights we’d attained after a full decade on the planet. I’d have to wait another decade to realize how profound and prescient I had in fact been during my first and only brush with fame. ...More!

March 26, 2003
The Pentagon's
New Asymmetrics
By Mark C. Clark, Staff Writer

    WASHINGTON, D.C. -- According to Robert Steele, at the Strategic Studies Institute, both the Cold War threat paradigm and the Cold War intelligence paradigm are dead. A new integrative paradigm for achieving asymmetric advantage in the face of nontraditional threats is needed in the face of both nontraditional threats and nontraditional sources and methods.
     This can be done by devising and exploiting new intelligence sources and methods.  The Cold War threat paradigm emphasized strategic nuclear and conventional force development and deployment over time. They were employed in accordance with well-understood rules of engagement and doctrine, were relatively easy to detect in mobilization, and were supported by generally recognizable intelligence assets.
     The new threat paradigm, in contrast, is generally nongovernmental (or a failed state), nonconventional, dynamic or random and nonlinear in its emergence, with no constraints or rules of engagement.
     It has no known doctrine, is almost impossible to predict in advance, and is supported by an unlimited 5th column of criminals, terrorists, drug addicts, and corrupt individuals. It is, in a word, asymmetric.
    The old intelligence paradigm relied heavily on secret and very expensive technical strategy deployed against one main target, the Soviet Union.
    Such information-sharing relationships as existed within the national and military intelligence communities have been both secret and on a bilateral basis.
    This new craft of intelligence requires that four quadrants of knowledge be fully developed, in an integrated fashion. Only one of these quadrants is secret.
    The first exploits the lessons of history; the second develops web-based means of sharing the burden of achieving global coverage; the third harnesses the full distributed intelligence capabilities of the entire Nation; and the fourth
utilizes spies and secrecy to great effect.
    With the new craft of intelligence well in hand, with a new strategy that understands the continuum of personnel skills needed from homeland defense to overseas power projection, the Army may be ready to consider radical
changes in how it recruits, trains, equips, and organizes the active, reserve, and National Guard forces.
    If we have entered a period of total war, with no front lines, it may be
that the Army should devise a new total force concept for asymmetric operations on the homefront and overseas with establishment of a homeland defense intelligence program, including a homeland defense analysis center and community intelligence centers in each state; a digital history and captured document project and processing center; and four major regional open source activities responsive to both the theater commanders and general national security needs.
    Additional initiatives include a web-based global information-sharing consortium to reduce the cost and time associated with global coverage activities of threats of common concern, and especially nontraditional asymmetric threats; and, close collaboration with Joint Forces Command to create a generic analytic workstation and a generic open source intelligence training program suitable for homeland and overseas partners. The attack of September 11, 2001, has brought to the fore the importance of strategic balance or diversification.
    We must have balance between our homeland defense and overseas defense capabilities; between domestic counterintelligence and foreign intelligence; and between symmetric and asymmetric concepts and doctrine and forces.
    In this monograph, the author reviews the global nontraditional threat situation, briefly updates the prospects for intelligence reform, and then lays out the details for the new craft of intelligence that is comprehensive, reliable, swift, and relevant to both the immediate and the longer-term threats.
    The new craft of intelligence must be held accountable for explaining the
threat in compelling terms. One means of doing so is by issuing public intelligence estimates and public intelligence warnings.
    None of the traditional threats that our military understands have diminished indeed, the attacks of September 11 demonstrate that our world is perhaps twice as dangerous as we might have imagined. America is very much on its own and whatever new craft of intelligence it may adopt, we must be able to achieve an asymmetric advantage over every threat to our national security and our national prosperity.

[Editor's Note: to access the complete report click on THE NEW CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE: ACHIEVING ASYMMETRIC ADVANTAGE IN THE FACE OF NONTRADITIONAL THREATS.]

    IRAQ -- There's a saying in military circles -We always fight the last
war. It means that too much focus on past enemy behavior can easily lead
to misjudging an enemy capability in the future.
So I asked myself today which war will this be Desert Storm or
Somalia?
In 1991, we had four ironclad prerequisites for war with Iraq (1) a clear
political end state (2) overwhelming force to achieve a quick and decisive
victory (3) a viable Arab coalition to avoid empowering Arab extremists,
and (4) absolutely no Israeli involvement to avoid a global holy war...More!

    WASHINGTON -   The George W. Bush administration has apparently begun moving along a broad front to pound Iraq with a deadly first strike that may cast the world into major economic disruption by early next week.
     The Bush offensive plans to open a northern front against Baghdad. But, word reached our bureau by late last night that Turkey has not signed-on with the Bush offensive. And, this just in, US troop deployments will run US taxpayers in excess of $100 billion dollars for...More!

© Copyright 1876-2004 By The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.

     WILLIAMSBURG, VA -- Remember that slogan, "It's the economy, stupid"? I couldn't agree more. Oui, oui, mon ami - the green stuff is center stage once again. Only this time, the forum is the indebted and oil-rich nation of Iraq.
     Of late, Germany, France, and Russia have led the anti-war movement on the international stage. Of particular interest are France and Russia. What, indeed, are their motives for promoting such an agenda with regard to Iraq? Is it true pacifism, or is it something else? Could it be a coincidence that the French company...More!

        One of the Republican party's most respected foreign policy gurus yesterday appealed for President Bush to halt his plans to invade Iraq, warning of "an Armageddon in the Middle East".

        The outspoken remarks from Brent Scowcroft, who advised a string of Republican presidents, including Mr Bush's father, represented an embarrassment for the administration on a day it was attempting to rally British public support for an eventual war...More!

    AGANA, Guam -- This nation needs Guam and Guam needs economic expansion.  Homeland security policies by the Bush Administration mean increased strategic activity, and raises the importance of Guam as a military staging area for operations in the Gulf now, as in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. These wartime conditions put living quarters, housing, apartments and real estate in play as economic fuel for Guam's important role in the new victory at sea.
    This is why Guam should be moving forward. Instead, it appears to this writer that Guam is still treading water. Remember September 11. Remember Pearl Harbor. Remember Guam. It's still part of the USA, the last time I checked.
    The official line is sustainable economic growth. The real truth is that Guam's overall economy is artificially restricted, by special interests who want to retain control of government and business at all costs.
    Denial of the individual's economic freedoms is inexcusable. The rights to land and its fruits thereof are the freedom we as Americans foster, and defend proudly. Not Here.
     On Guam, publicly owned open space is locked up and kept off the real estate market by local interests. Normal give and take in the real estate market is essential for the economic expansion that Guam needs for its survival. Under all is the land.

         
WASHINGTON -   You are taking no chances when you assert that Americans usually make good soldiers. They are truly a warlike race. They are not eager for war, but they are eager and earnest in war.
    No decent citizen of the United States doubts that for the preservation of the honor of our country it became necessary for us to strike back at Germany because she made hostile invasion upon rights which we were bound to maintain. Every intelligent man knows that we are now fighting to save the liberty-loving peoples of the earth from mastery by a tyrannous and brutal power.
    The opportunity to fight as a soldier for freedom, which now presents itself to every physically fit voting man in our country, is strongly attractive to all of them who have the right kind of blood in their veins. ...More!

Tuesday, January 21, 2003

Remembering
Taking War To Iraq
By Stephen R. Shalom

    WASHINGTON - The war between Iran and Iraq was one of the great human tragedies of recent Middle Eastern history. Perhaps as many as a million people died, many more were wounded, and millions were made refugees. The resources wasted on the war exceeded what the entire Third World spent on public health in a decade...More!

    WASHINGTON -- President Bush says the focus of the new year will be on security, winning the war on terrorism, and improving education.
     In a New Year's message Tuesday he says his administration will continue efforts to create new jobs and ensure the economic security of all Americans.
     The president also encouraged Americans to reaffirm their commitment to helping people around the world achieve peace and freedom.
     Mr. Bush praised 2002 as a year of progress and renewed hope for the American people, and said Americans will embrace both the challenges and the opportunities that lie ahead in the year 2003.

© Copyright 1876-2004 By The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.

    BERLIN - Iraq's arms report to the United Nations shows that more than 80 German companies have done business with Baghdad since the 1970s and that some have contravened a UN embargo, according to...More!

© Copyright 1876-2004 By The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.

    WASHINGTON -- Henry Kissinger - Nobel Laureate and the most famous diplomat of his generation - also an international business and foreign policy consultant to President George W. Bush, and some undisclosed foreign interests, has abruptly resigned his 911 Commission chair set up to investigate intelligence and security failures related to the September 11 terrorist attacks.
    Dr. Kissinger cited "conflicts of interest" when asked to disclose the names of his clients, which include many...More!

© Copyright 1876-2004 By The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.  

Friday December 13, 2002
Lott's Choice
An American Tragedy
By Howard Hobbs PhD Editor & Publisher

      WASHINGTON -- President Bush on Thursday openly denounced Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, for intemperate comments that shocked and may have cost the Republican majority in Congress the goodwill of the nation.
     Bush's censure came as calls for the Mississippi senator to resign his congressional leadership post rang out at the Capitol.
    President Bush angrily told reporters...More!

© Copyright 1876-2004 By The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.

© Copyright 1876-2004 By The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved

December 10, 2002
Information Transmission Theory:
Daily Republican Newspaper's Secret
By Thomas Hobbs, M.S., Howard Hobbs Ph.D.

    PALO ALTO - Publishers of this newspaper were writing the program code for publishing our newspapers through the medium of GUI technology on the Internet. It was 1993, and the Internet was an ASCII jungle.
    While searching for graduate research papers at Stanford University in 1993, we came across a 1948 research study describing a programmer's theory on how applications for the collection, storage, and, dissemination of information might theoretically be stored and distributed on demand along network lines.
     We found Shannon's theoretical work to be of practical value in explaining and identitifying...More!

© Copyright 1876-2004 By The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved

    WASHINGTON - Many combinations of unanticipated events will come back to haunt governments in the Middle East region and beyond. The economist George Perry, spoke of the unintended economic impacts of disruptions of world oil supplies, for example.
     His study mostly focused on the underlying economic world crises from the oil reduction in supply the supply of food and heating fuels, world wide.
    His worst case scenario is an outcome which assumes a decline in world oil production of seven million barrels per day. Some of this deficit might be provided by US strategic oil reserves of about 2 1/2 million barrels per day.
    In the event of an OPEC boycott, oil production might be reduced to less than 20 percent.
    Such impacts would readily drive up oil prices to around $75 per barrel or more. Perry estimates that gasoline prices would skyrocket overnight to more than $3 per gallon.
     The Bush administration assumes the negative effects...More!

© Copyright 1876-2004 by The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved

December 5, 2002
Puritan Revolution
Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau
By Amy Williams, Staff Writer

    WASHINGTON -- Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau developed theories on human nature and how men govern themselves. With the passing of time, political views on the philosophy of government gradually changed.
     Despite their differences they became three of the most influential political theorists in the world. Their ideas and philosophies spread all over the world influencing the creation of many new governments.
     These philosophers all recognize that people develop a social contract within their society, but have differing views on what exactly the social contract is and how it is established.
     Each developed differing versions of the social contract, but all agreed that certain freedoms had been surrendered for society’s protection and that the government has definite responsibilities to its citizens.
     These philosophers point to prehistory, before man came to govern themselves, they all existed in a state of nature. The state of nature is the condition men were in before political government came into existence, and what society would be if there was no government.
     Hobbes introduced the revolutionary concept of the state of nature. He did not believe government should be organized through the Church, therefore abandoning the idea of the divine right theory, where power of the King came directly from God. Starting from a clean slate, with no organized church, they needed a construct on what to build society on.
     The foundation of society began with that original view of the state of nature. Hobbes’ perception of the original state of nature is what would exist if there were no common power to execute and enforce the laws to restrain individuals.
     In this case, the laws of the jungle would prevail where only the fittest survive. Man’s desires are insatiable. Since resources are scarce, humankind is naturally competitive, inevitably creating jealousy and hatred, which eventually leads to war.
     This constant state of war is what Hobbes’ believed to be man’s original state of nature that put natural limitations on freedom and inalienable rights.
     Hobbes lived in the 17th century, and wrote during the time of the English Civil War. His political views were influenced by that war.
     John Locke believed the original state of nature was a form of perfect freedom.   Every man had the liberty to arrange his life in the manner he chose, except that no man has the right to kill himself.
     Unlike Hobbes’ nature of constant war, Locke’s state of nature is peace seeking, an assumption by Locke that men do not want to risk their lives by constantly fighting.
     Man, according to Locke, is governed by reason in the state of nature. The war caused Locke to dislike violence and extremes. Stability was the central assumption of his thinking.
     Hobbes’ theory of social institutions began with the premise that man was naturally at war with everyone else and with nature for his survival.
     The original state of nature, according to Rousseau, was the perfect state for man, where he is free and exercises just relationships with others and with nature. In that original state, man was naturally virtuous.
     He maintained that men were truly happy in the state of nature. Only when man become sociable, they become wicked. In Rousseau’s Social Contract, man is depicted as having no reason nor conscience in contact with others.
     Possessions begin to be claimed, but the inequality of skill lead to inequality of fortunes. Just the idea of claiming possessions excites men’s passions, which provoke conflict, leading to war.
     Rousseau believed men are not perfect in their original state, but had the ability to live in a more perfect society with guidance of laws. Rousseau had the perception that when people believe they are part of the government, they will work, fight, and build the state in the belief that what helps the good of all people is going to be beneficial to them.
    Rousseau acted on the belief preservation of mankind is the law of nature described by both Hobbes, Locke. In order to abide by the law of nature, man enters into an unspoken agreement, forming the social contract between man, nature and the state.
     That social contract is the basis of the theory of morality and the obligations of the state to its citizens. It is an underlying agreement by which men are said to have abandoned the “state of nature” in order to form the so-called ordered society in which they now live.
    Hobbes argued that man surrenders his independence and submits himself to the absolute authority of the state for mutual protection and self-preservation though the delegated absolute power of the sovereign.
     Locke positioned himself on the fringe of Hobbes thinking by qualifying the power delegated to the sovereign as on that which is necessary to secure the protection of individual rights with the government to be a function of representative of the people.
     Rousseau went along with Hobbes and Locke to the extent that the state should enter into a social contract where the individual must accommodate his personal freedom to the general will, he sum of all private interests.
     In Rousseau’s social contract, government serves the common good of the people.
     Today we see the social consequences of Rousseau's social contract model in the coordinated effort of all forms of government toward redirection of the economy, planned community, exploited environment, and a ruthless self-perpetuation by expansion of its local state and international governance.

    [Editor's Note: An increasing body of literature concerns Rousseau's philosophy applied to information asymmetries and information costs, bargaining, collective good problems. Some of Rousseau's most puzzling social proposals (on theater, women, music, etc.) can be explained by his well-argued conviction that an optimal economy demands a high social morale, a communicative morale. He proposes an economic philosophy for the most important properties of richness -- such as experiencing the unique, and being free although dependent on others (empowerment). It is for the adult capable of true deliberation, not for the trifle of the innocent child. He develops a concept of richness that is close to the Aristotelian capability-concept, later explored by Amartya Sen. Rousseau's economic philosophy has not been treated in a monograph before. The book should be rewarding to those interested in social theory, the history of social and economic thought, problems at the margins of market exchange, e.g. cultural economics, environmental economics, students of Rousseau and the thought of the 18th century, welfare economic theory in the direction of Arrow or Sen, and and others' theses about the transition from self-sufficiency to market.]

© Copyright 1876-2004 by The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.

November 27, 2002
John Rawls' Death
Moral Imperative Lives On
By Howard Hobbs PhD, Editor & Publisher

   WASHINGTON -- Dr. John Rawls 82, an American original and erstwhile political theorist died on Sunday at his home in his own bed on Sunday in Lexington, Mass.
     The cause was heart failure. Margaret Rawls, his wife told reporters, he had been ill since suffering a stroke in 1995.
     His book "A Theory of Justice" published in 1971 stimulated a revival of attention to moral philosophy.  
     In it, Rawls set out...More!

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November 26, 2002
West Wing Honors
By Amy Williams, Staff Writer

   WASHINGTON -- Emmy Award winners Aaron Sorkin, Thomas Schlamme, John Wells and NBC gave reporters this behind-the-scenes glimpse into the Oval Office as seen through the eyes of its eclectic group of...More!

© Copyright 1876-2004 by The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.

Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944

"We will always remember.
We will always be proud.
We will always be prepared,
so we may always be free."

[President Ronald Reagan's remarks at Omaha Beach, June 6, 1984]

Monday, November 25, 2002
Lest We Forget
The Normandy Invasion

Supreme Commander--General Dwight D. Eisenhower
Allied Expeditionary Naval Forces--Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay
21st Army Group--General Sir Bernard L. Montgomery
Allied Expeditionary Air Forces--Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh- Mallory

United States Army United Kingdom Land Forces

First Army Second British Army
V Corps 1st British Corps
VII Corps 30th British Corps
1st Infantry Division 3rd British Infantry Division
4th Infantry Division 6th British Airborne Division
29th Infantry Division 50th British Infantry Division
82nd Airborne Division 3rd Canadian Infantry Division
101st Airborne Division

Air Forces

U.S. Army Air Forces Royal Air Forces

Eighth Air Force 2nd Tactical Air Force
Ninth Air Force

Allied Expeditionary Naval Forces

Western Task Force Eastern Task Force
(United States) (British)

D-Day Operations
    The invasion itself gave prominence to land forces but provided major roles for air and sea components. Allied air forces carried three airborne divisions into battle, protected the force as it crossed the English Channel, and attacked targets throughout the invasion area before and after the landing in support of the assault forces.
     More than 5,000 ships--from battleships to landing craft--carried, escorted and landed the assault force along the Normandy coast. Once the force was landed, naval gunfire provided critical support for the soldiers as they fought their way across the beaches.
     In the invasion's early hour ,amphibious craft landed on UTAH and OMAHA. As the Allies came ashore, they took the first steps on the final road to victory in Europe.
Omaha Beach
    The landing by regiments of the 1st and 29th Infantry divisions and Army Rangers on OMAHA Beach was even more difficult than expected. When the first wave landed at 6:30 a.m., the men found that naval gunfire and prelanding air bombardments had not softened German defenses or resistance.
     Along the 7,000 yards of Normandy shore German defenses were as close to that of an Atlantic Wall as any of the D-Day beaches. Enemy positions that looked down from bluffs as high as 170 feet, and water and beach obstacles strewn across the narrow strip of beach, stopped the assault at the water's edge for much of the morning of D-Day.
     By mid-morning, initial reports painted such a bleak portrait of beachhead conditions that Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley, United States First Army commander, considered pulling off the beach and landing troops elsewhere along the coast.
     However, during these dark hours, bravery and initiative came to the fore. As soldiers struggled, one leader told his men that two types of people would stay on the beach--the dead and those going to die--so they'd better get the hell out of there, and they did.
     Slowly, as individuals and then in groups, soldiers began to cross the fire-swept beach. Supported by Allied naval gunfire from destroyers steaming dangerously close to shore, the American infantrymen gained the heights and beach exits and drove the enemy inland. By day's end V Corps had a tenuous toehold on the Normandy coast, and the force consolidated to protect its gains and prepare for the next step on the road to Germany.
Utah Beach
    In the predawn darkness of June 6, the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions were air dropped behind UTAH Beach to secure four causeways across a flooded area directly behind the beach and to protect the invasion's western flank. Numerous factors caused the paratroopers to miss their drop zones and become scattered across the Norman countryside.
     However, throughout the night and into the day the airborne troops gathered and organized themselves and went on to accomplish their missions. Ironically, the paratroopers' wide dispersion benefited the invasion. With paratroopers in so many places, the Germans never developed adequate responses to the airborne and amphibious assaults.
    The 4th Infantry Division was assigned to take UTAH Beach. In contrast with OMAHA Beach, the 4th Division's landing went smoothly. The first wave landed 2,000 yards south of the planned beach--one of the Allies' more fortuitous opportunities on D-Day.
     The original beach was heavily defended in comparison to the light resistance and few fixed defenses encountered on the new beach. After a personal reconnaissance, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who accompanied the first wave, decided to exploit the opportunity and altered the original plan.
     He ordered that landing craft carrying the successive assault waves land reinforcements, equipment and supplies to capitalize on the first wave's success. Within hours, the beachhead was secured and the 4th Division started inland to contact the airborne divisions scattered across its front.
     As in the OMAHA zone, at day's end the UTAH Beach forces had not gained all of their planned objectives. However, a lodgement was secured, and, most important, once again the American soldier's resourcefulness and initiative had rescued the operation from floundering along the Normandy coast...

        [Editor's Note: Sources quoted were found in: "D-Day, The 6th of June, Center of Military History Map Guide" Washington, D.C. 1994. "Normandy, U.S. Army Campaigns of World War II" pamphlet, Center of Military History, Washington, D.C. 1994. "50th Anniversary of World War II " Commemoration Committee HQDA, SACC; Pentagon, Room 3E524 Washington, D.C. 20310-0101 (703) 604-0822 .]

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Sunday, November 10, 2002
IRAQ ALERT
U.S. Forces Readied
By Bernard Brown, Staff Writer

   WASHINGTON -- A Pentagon source informed the Daily Republican that War  planning has been placed in high gear over the weekend. White House officials declined to comment on leaks from the Pentagon that planners there are moving to place upwards of a half-million US troops on alert-status.
     President Bush said Friday he wants to keep the military option open and is prepared to "move swiftly with force" to ensure the regime of Saddam Hussein is stripped of its weapons of mass destruction and its ability to produce more in the future.
     Meanwhile, the Pentagon has begun the process of moving US forces and preparing to launch strikes deep into into the Iraq land area. At this writing, US Navy carriers are standing by and are now within striking range of Iraq .
     An Air Force informant told the Daily Republican Saturday, B-2 stealth bombers have already been placed on alert near the island base at Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean.
     The US currerntly has a large well seasoned force of Air Force, Navy and Marines in the Gulf region.

     © Copyright 1876-2004 by The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.

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November 6, 2002
GOP Sweeps Nation
Controls House & Senate
By Amy Williams, Staff Writer

    WASHINGTON -- In a historic first, Republicans swept the slate in the United States Senate last night. Republicans are now in control of the White House and Congress for the next two years, and President Bush has leverage for a long needed legislative agenda. 
     The election results could mean a renewed struggle behind the scenes by Democrats. Republican control both houses of Congress and the White House has been dreamed of for years by party loyalists. However, Republicans lost the Senate in June 2001 as Sen. James M. Jeffords of Vermont switched parties and beccoming an independent who regularly voted with Democrats.
      "We made history tonight," said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, chairman of the Republican Congressional Campaign committee. "It was a great win for the president of the United States."
       The result signaled a major change in the way Washington does business, removing what Mr. Bush had repeatedly complained in recent days was Democratic opposition that had prevented him from winning confirmation of his judicial nominations and such measures as a permanent tax cut and a homeland security bill.
     It was a huge lift for Mr. Bush, who spent much of the past two weeks campaigning across the nation on behalf of Republican candidates for the House, the Senate and for governor. At the time, Democrats said that Mr. Bush was gambling his prestige on the outcome of the race. That was one bet that the president clearly appeared to have won last night.
     Gov. Jeb Bush survived the fallout from his brother's disputed election in 2000 to win a second term in Florida, drawing an early-evening congratulatory call from the White House. In Maryland, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a Democrat and a daughter of Robert F. Kennedy, lost her bid for governor to Representative Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. the first time a Republican was elected governor of that state since Spiro Agnew was elected in 1966. Voters in Massachusetts, another of the most Democratic states, elected a Republican as governor, Mitt Romney.
     Democrats were able to claim a handful of victories, like the one by Frank R. Lautenberg, the retired Democratic senator who reappeared on the political stage last month after Senator Robert G. Torricelli of New Jersey was forced aside by an ethics investigation.
     In one of the few dark moments for Republicans yesterday, Mark Pryor, the Democratic attorney general of Arkansas, toppled Senator Tim Hutchinson from office, while Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, won re-election.
     The Democrats recaptured the governorships in Illinois for the first time in 26 years, Pennsylvania and Michigan, important states in that could have significant bearing in the 2004 presidential race.
     Still, the evening was more than a little discouraging for Democrats. In what would amount to biggest upset in Senate races, Representative Saxby Chambliss unseated Senator Max Cleland, a celebrated war hero and a Democrat from Georgia. Elizabeth Dole, a two-time cabinet secretary and Republican candidate for president in 2000, was elected senator from North Carolina, and Representative John E. Sununu Jr. won the Senate race in New Hampshire. Both Republicans withstood spirited challenges from Democrats, assuring that those two states remained in the Republican column.
     The Republicans also sent Representative Lindsey Graham to fill the South Carolina Senate seat that was being vacated by Senator Strom Thurmond, while former Gov. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, a two-time presidential candidate, kept that state's Republican Senate seat.

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Thomas Hobbes 1588-1679

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© Copyright 1876-2004 by The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.

    [Editor's Note: The author is a professor of economics at Massey University, New Zealand]

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Sunday September 29 , 2002
ALLEGORIES
& Other Fairy Stories
By Tony Artero, Guam Bureau Chief

  WASHINGTON, DC -- I think Bill Gates has every right to keep every penny he made and continue to make more.
    If it makes Congress mad, then Congress should invent the next operating system that's better and label it Your Government’s Operating Systems Is Here To Help You.
     Congress should ask Al Gore who invented the Internet to help them achieve it. We are seeing the disastrous conditions in our island community delivered by a self-righteous liberal Democrat serving himself throughout his lifetime career in public office.
     Piously, Pride In Our Progress and People of Guam You’re Still the One resemble Al Gore’s lib service. I know that I am frowned upon and looked down upon because I will not conform or compromise my principles just to keep from hurting somebody's feelings. This country allowed me the right to speak.
     I am angry that we are all disenfranchised, thus taken advantage of, and our fundamental human rights are blatantly violated no matter how desperately the tyrant, his clones, and the mainstream media would like the world to believe otherwise.
     My belief and hope is that a candidate for governor will emerge to take a real stand on private property rights, and stick with it. Property rights are the essence of freedom for an individual, a country, and the global economy.
     The deplorable environmental and economic conditions here on Guam show that Guam needs to return to the land ethic upon which our American republic's foundation stands or falls.
     We are good Americans. We are patriotic Americans who served America in harms way. We are ready and willing to do it again. Remember Pearl Harbor -- that was not just another fairy tale. Remember Guam!

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Sunday September 17 , 2002
CENSORSHIP
ON CAMPUS POST 9/11?
By Dr. Onkar Ghate, Contributor, Ayn Rand Institute

     IRVINE, CA--Academic leftists cry that, post-September 11, they've lost the freedom to voice ideas critical of America. But the real concern is not to defend free speech on campus, but to retain control over the universities.
     Free speech protects an individual who voices unpopular ideas, but it does not require that others support him. If an individual wants others to finance the expression of his ideas, he must seek their voluntary agreement. Freedom of speech is not the right of a Ph.D. to force others to give him a university classroom.
     Yet that is precisely what these professors are demanding. They maintain that no matter how much the trustees of a university disagree with a professor's views, they should not be able to fire him. Why? So that professors who consistently teach the evil of America can do so without the burden of having to seek the voluntary consent of those forced to finance them.
     What makes the academic left think it can get away with this destruction of free speech? Most universities today are public institutions. Critics of the academic left have been calling for the firing of professors who broadcast anti-American ideas, since such views are odious to most taxpayers.
    But subjecting speech to majority rule, the left correctly argues, obliterates freedom of speech. Thus, it concludes, we must leave college professors alone. It doesn't follow. The truth is that public education as such is antithetical to free speech.
     Whether leftists are forced to pay taxes to fund universities from which their academic spokesmen are barred, or non-leftists are forced to pay taxes to fund professors who condemn America as a terrorist nation, someone loses the right to choose which ideas his money supports. "
     To protect free speech universities would have to be privatized. But since privatization would threaten the left's grip on the universities, it denounces as "tyranny of the almighty dollar" the sole means of actually preserving free speech on campus. "
     So don't be fooled by the left's cries about academic freedom. Freedom is precisely what they don't want.

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© Copyright 1876-2004 by The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.

September 11, 2002

By Karen  Tumulty

     WASHINGTON -- Within hours after President George Bush announced that he would ask Congress to vote on whether to wage war against Iraq, he sent Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to a secure, windowless room on the top floor of the Capitol, nearly three-quarters of the Senators awaited him.
     They were confronting one of the gravest decisions lawmakers can face—sending troops into battle—and they expected to see the intelligence Rumsfeld and other Bush Administration officials have said would clinch the case that Saddam Hussein must go, the sooner the better.
     Instead, they got the kind of riff Rumsfeld uses with the Pentagon press corps. "There are three issues here," the Defense Secretary told them. "There is the issue of what we know. There is the issue of what we don't know. And there is the issue of what we don't know we don't know." So much for a smoking gun.
    To read the complete story click here.

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© Copyright 1876-2004 by The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.

     WASHINGTON DC -- September 11, 2001, the day America was savagely and successfully attacked by different groups of terrorists almost certainly led by Usama bin Ladin.
     It is now known who some of the people in the air were. They were radical Arab terrorists, some with ties to Usama bin Ladin's al Qaeda, (The Base) organization responsible for previous acts of violence against the USA.
Some learned to fly in a flight school in Florida, some came to the USA via
Germany, some by Canada. A lot is now known about who they are, and from whence they came. However, there are still a lot of questions, but I want
to focus on a couple of them.
     Three weeks ago, Usama bin Ladin confided to an Arab newspaper that soon the USA would be hit with an unprecedented strike of terrorism. Something that would dwarf any of his previous exploits.
     On August the 30th, Vladimir Putin gave a speech where he criticized the
Taliban government in Afghanistan for appointing Usama bin Ladin as the
Commander in Chief of their armed forces.
     It was reported by UPI that on the day of the attack, three money exchanges in Moscow quit accepting dollars. This was before the attack. It is fairly well known here that when someone talks of the Russian mafia, he is frequently referring to people who are not ethnic Russians, but in fact are of middle eastern ancestry, and quite often associated with, or members of, radical Islamic terrorist groups.
     The conflict in Chechnya is a mafia sponsored and supported war. It is an attempt by these same gangsters to have their own gangster state. Sort of Al Capone's Chicago, but on a nation level.
     It would appear that someone knew there was going to be an event that would disrupt the financial markets, with the dollar being hit the hardest. Right
after the attack on New York, the dollar fell to 14 roubles per dollar for a
few hours before rebounding to its current level of around 29. Somewhere,
someone made a lot of money. It is also being investigated whether or not
representatives of Usama bin Ladin were trading large shares in expectation
of a quick drop in the markets.
     The USA has been critical of Russia's handling of the situation in Chechnya. It has urged restraint, for Russia to negotiate and not use force to solve the problems there. The USA didn't understand the foe Russia was dealing with. Now they do.
     The USA needs to take strong measures to punish those responsible, and not just the people who were in on the meetings. The people who give aid and
comfort need to be punished also. The Afghanistan's, the Iraqis, the Irans, and any other nation that wants to line up on the side of terror needs to now be purged of any capability to inflict it outside its own borders.
     An end needs to be put to the existence of the Fatah, the Hizbollah, and any other similar group. No more surgical strikes with cruise missiles. What is needed here is carpet-bombing of cities. Devastation needs to be meted out by the most powerful war machine that has ever been seen on the earth. They need to be beaten, broken, and utterly destroyed. As US Senator John McCain promised, "Make no mistake about it, we are coming. God may have mercy on your souls, but we wont."
     There is a widely growing coalition for retribution, and that is fine, but I don't think the US should put too much faith in it. European nations like France and Italy have been coddling these people for too long. The US should be prepared to go it alone, and if their European allies aren't willing to get in line, fine. They should be asked if they want diplomatic relations with the US or with the Hizbollah, because they can't have both.
     So far Russia has been the US's most staunch ally in this crisis. Truthfully, Russia has been warning us for years. Russia has been patiently waiting for America to get in the game, and now that we are here, we should
embrace Russia, combine our resources, and begin to exterminate these vermin wherever they may hide.
     This is a war, and there was another war where the US and Russia were allies, and that one turned out pretty good for the rest of the world. Lets get together again, and do the same.
     There is a lot of criticism about the fact that George W. Bush was whisked away to unknown places when the attacks began. There has been insinuations from many quarters that he behaved cowardly. One of the biggest fears, in the aftermath of the tragedy, is the financial situation.
     Confidence is key when it comes to market stability, and the lack of confidence that can be caused by an event of this magnitude, and the uncertainty of what may happen next can be very disruptive. My question is this. Has anyone seen Alan Greenspan? Greenspan probably has more respect than anyone on the planet when it comes to the markets. His decisions have helped lead America into some very good financial times, and he is closely watched by financial analysts. Markets move on small, innocent statements made by him. Since the attack, I haven't seen him.
     The Fed lowered interest rates today, but no Greenspan in front of thousands of cameras, which would be normal. If he is alive and ok, he should be out front, helping confidence stay solid. If he is not, we need to know. This is no time for the back room insiders to get a jump on the rest of the country.
     The Italians have said they wont help. What are we to do? How can we go forward without the Italians? I'm sure we all remember how significant
their participation was in WWII.
     Remember this? "A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares about more than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." [John Stuart Mill, writing on the U.S. Civil War, 1862.]

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     WASHINGTON DC -- As we pause on September 11 to remember the stockbrokers, policemen, firefighters and many other fallen Americans, it is vital also to reflect on the progress of the war. For it was precisely to prevent future September 11ths that America responded with force.
     How goes the war? Tragically, not well. To wage a war in self-defense you must know who your enemy is. But our enemy remains unidentified and, therefore, untargeted.
     Ours is a war against "terrorism"--a form of violence, not an ideological opponent intent on killing us. Our enemies, however, are dedicated to a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, which extols faith, mindless obedience, sacrifice to state and God, primitivism, theocracy.
     This is why they are at war with the "Great Satan," America, the foremost embodiment of the opposite values: reason, individualism, the selfish pursuit of happiness, secularism, capitalism. Bin Laden understands this: "Hostility toward America," he declares, "is a religious duty."
     Our politicians, schooled in pragmatism and range-of-the-moment non-thinking, cannot conceive of an ideologically motivated conflict. An individual terrorist brandishing a bomb, like bin Laden, may still be real to them, but the movement for which he fights, Islamic fundamentalism, is not.
     Thus we try to kill a few terrorists--but leave untouched the main militant Islamic states breeding the terrorists. We have no long-term plan to achieve victory in the war because we cannot identify the enemy that must be incapacitated.
     Ask yourself: Would America have been victorious in WWII if our goal had been to destroy "kamikaze-ism," not Japanese totalitarianism? Worse, to the extent that our policy makers glimpse the mystical ideology operative in the Middle East, they consider it a positive force.
     As pragmatists, they are intellectually blind to the historical evidence of centuries of religious wars and are led, instead, by their own religious feelings. They can grasp no connection between faith taken seriously as the ruling principle of every aspect of man's life--and the attempt to physically force such dogma on nonbelievers.
     The terrorists, on this approach, are inexplicable aberrations, deluded interpreters of true faith, who, mysteriously, try to spread their mystical doctrines by appeal not to a rational argument but to a gun. We therefore treat as allies such enemies of reason as Saudi Arabia, which spawns Islamic fundamentalists and finances their suicide bombers, and Pakistan, which trained the Taliban and punishes blasphemy with death.
     Our government even courts Iran, the spearhead of militant Islamic fundamentalism, and works with Iranian officials to foster "religious values" at U.N. conferences. Predictably, the administration's actions, guided as they are not by reason but by emotion (including emotions of outrage), are chaotic and contradictory.
     No one knows what--if anything--America will do next in the war because we ourselves don't know what we'll do or why. Bush pays lip service to the correct idea that you are either for America's ideals or against them, but undermines our strongest ally in the war, Israel. He even promises the Palestinians a provisional state, thereby teaching every would-be killer that to the terrorist go the spoils.
     In typically empty rhetoric Bush declares that there is an axis of evil in the world, but allows Syria to head the U.N. Security Council and pursues dialogue with axis-of-evil-members North Korea and Iran--all terrorist states according to his own government.
     Without actual principles, where will such a mentality turn for moral guidance? The answer is: to others and their moral views. So Bush--programmed by feelings formed from millennia of assertions that it is evil to uphold one's own interests, that the strong must sacrifice to the weak, that the meek shall inherit the earth--undercuts any genuine action taken in America's self-defense.
     In Afghanistan, for instance, morally unsure of his right to safeguard American lives, Bush feared world disapproval over civilian casualties. He would neither commit the number of American ground troops required to capture the enemy nor authorize the kind of massive bombing necessary to kill the enemy before it fled.
     The result: hundreds of Taliban and al Qaeda escaped to plot further American destruction. In the Middle East, uncertain of America's right unilaterally to defend its interests, the administration obsesses with "coalition-building" (which includes shunning Israel and courting Saudi Arabia) and refuses to proclaim the superiority of America's ideals over those of medieval barbarism.
     Lacking the moral conviction to uphold its values abroad, America increasingly and self-destructively turns inward, shifting its focus to such relatively trivial questions as whether airline pilots should be armed or government bureaucracies reshuffled.
     We have the means and the skilled military assets to defeat terrorism. Determination is needed to achieve victory, together with a well reasoned, rational self-interest and decisive timely action.

[Editor's Note: Onkar Ghasted, Ph.D. in philosophy, is a resident fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Send comments to reaction@aynrand.org]

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Thursday, July 11, 2002
For Which It Stands!
By Ronald J. Pestritto, Claremont Institute

    CLAREMONT -- Americans today seem very much in the holiday spirit - the holiday of Flag Day, commemorated today, June 14th. Since the attacks on our country last September, it has been wonderful to see the flag flying almost everywhere.
    This is certainly a welcome change from the condescension with which cultural elites and opinion leaders have frequently viewed "flag waving" in modern America.
    Officially created on June 14, 1777 by an act of the Second Continental Congress, the American Flag underwent many modifications until 1912, when President Taft established standard proportions for it and ordered that the stars be displayed in rows.
    The June 14th holiday was established formally by Proclamation of President Woodrow Wilson in 1916, and cemented into law when President Truman signed an Act of Congress in 1949.
     To remind ourselves of the ideas represented in the Flag, the proximity of Flag Day and the Fourth of July cannot be mere coincidence. It was the same Continental Congress, after all, that both signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th and subsequently created the Flag.
     The Declaration clearly laid out the principles to which the new nation would forever be dedicated: a protection of the individual rights of citizens to life, liberty, and security in their private property. It was out of dedication to securing these rights that the federal government was established, and
out of concern for maintaining these rights that government was strictly
limited in scope.
     George Washington understood these principles well, and knew what his army was fighting for when he addressed his Revolutionary War troops with these words in 1776: "Remember officers and Soldiers, that you are Freemen,
fighting for the blessings of Liberty - that slavery will be your portion,
and that of your posterity, if you do not acquit yourselves like men."
     Do we 21st century Americans know what we are fighting for? Have we
acquitted ourselves like the men Washington addressed? The current national
political scene makes it difficult to answer in the affirmative, regardless
of which side of the political spectrum one examines.
     Liberals have for decades advocated - and largely consummated - a rejection of the limited government of the founding in favor of a modern welfare state. Starting about 100 years ago, Progressives like Woodrow Wilson decided that the Declaration and Constitution were "out of date," and
inaugurated the idea of a constantly evolving, unlimited government.
   This makes it all the more ironic that it was Wilson who formally established Flag Day - since he mocked what he called the "blind worship" of the founding and complained that "some citizens of this country have never got beyond the Declaration of Independence."
     Likewise, today's conservatives have cause to question how they have acquitted themselves - perhaps even more than liberals, since conservatives are supposedly dedicated to "conserving" America's principles.
    Prominent conservative leaders today have essentially abandoned the aims of their counterparts in the 1980s and early 1990s to scale back the modern state.
    Gone is talk of eliminating those portions of the federal bureaucracy created to implement the failed policies of 1960s and 1970s liberalism.
    Instead, Republicans today help push through historic increases in funding for the Department of Education.  Even the current strategies in the war on terrorism, unfortunately, make one wonder whether the government is more interested in curtailing the rights of its own citizens or in taking the fight abroad, to those regimes that hate us and sponsor those attacking us.
     Our conservative administration makes plans for a new federal bureaucracy of "homeland security," while it shies away from making real war on terrorist regimes out of fear of offending our "friends" in the Arab world and the quasi-socialist governments in Europe.
     Throughout our history, brave Americans in both the military and in politics have fought mightily to prove themselves worthy of Washington, the men he addressed, and the principles for which they battled.
     Let this Flag Day be a spark for those of us in the 21st century to continue in that noble tradition.

Ronald J. Pestritto is a professor of political science at the University of
Dallas and an adjunct fellow of the Claremont Institute in California. To contact the authoru send e-mail.

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Friday May 10, 2002
Making Sense of the Attack
By Christopher C. Harmon, Contributor

    CLAREMONT -- Making Sense of the Attack It was a confederation of individuals from around the Middle East and North Africa.
     They lived in America. Some had been here quietly for a long time; others were fresh off the airplane.
     They all followed a sheik -- a Moslem religious leader -- of the most extreme politics and vicious opinions.
     He taught them, in effect, that the door to the sublime beauties of the Koran was entered with the twist of key sentences.
     They were to kill the enemies of Islam (as selected by violent sheiks). They had a duty to punish allies of Israel, a foul and foreign state defacing "greater Palestine." "Jihad" meant...More!

©1876- 2002 The Claremont Institute. All Rights Reserved.

Sunday, April 21, 2002
"No Moral Equivalence"
By Mark T. Clark

    CLAREMONT -- On a recent 60 Minutes, Andy Rooney declared with the certitude of a tenured academic that the U.S. should cut off all aid from Israel and the Palestinians "if [Ariel] Sharon and the Palestinian terrorists persist with their arrogance."
     His commentary was intended to show the difficulty of Secretary of State Colin Powell's recently failed mission in search of peace. Rooney prefaced his conclusion by asserting that Sharon loves this war and Arafat cannot stop the terrorists, as if both sides were equally to blame. In searching for that chimera, "peace in the Middle East," the United States-like Rooney-is obliterating any meaningful distinctions between just and unjust wars.
     Compelling Israel to cease defending itself against repeated attacks on its citizens conflates legitimate self-defense with the wholly unlawful-and immoral-slaughter of civilians by homicide-bombers.
     To be clear, the war between Israel and Palestinian terrorism is not...More!

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   SACRAMENTO -- The option of standing with our allies Israel is in fairly serious trouble. Its continued assault against Palestine seems destined to cause retaliation from various sources.
     The question arises of where the United States should stand on this issue. The President's initial "conditional" blessing on Israel's actions has given way to an insistence on Israeli withdrawal.
    The citizens of our country must decide if that is just. Some groups want us to focus on convincing both parties to decide on peace. This sounds great, until one understands the histories of the combatants.
     The division between Israel and the Arab nations begins with some of our earliest written records--in Genesis, Abraham, the father of both groups, expelled Hagar from his presence at his wife, Sarah's request.
     Hagar gave rise to the Arabic nations, whereas Sarah gave rise to the nation of Israel. Biblical history may not mean much to most modern activists, but all of us should be aware that this rift is about as deep as any can be, and, like any family feud, is very ugly.
     One thing is certain: Israel's cause is justified. As long as we recognize our right to destroy the terrorist organizations responsible for the horrific assaults on the United States last September, we also must consider Israel's actions valid.
    The very thought that one of the airliners may have been aimed at the White House enraged Americans, even those that voted against our President. Israel has had a top government official shot in the face and killed by a Palestinian terrorist.
     Further, during peace talks, Palestinian terrorists carried out suicide bombing attacks on Israeli targets, and more recently, on mixed Arabic and Israeli businesses. The loss of civilian life in Israel, in proportion to total population, has begun to look a lot like U.S. losses to terrorists.
     Further, Israel has been taking these losses for years, with limited retaliation. Every response from Israel has been open, honest and controlled, as opposed to Palestine's terrorist sneak attacks.
     It seems odd, then, that the United States has signed a United Nations resolution demanding Israel's withdrawal from Palestinian territory, or that pressure has been applied to force them to find a peaceful solution.
     Israel is insisting only on the right Americans have demanded: to eliminate a constant danger to their people. This is blatant hypocrisy, and it is wrong. Politically, supporting Israel is inconvenient.
     Arabic countries currently helping in our war on terror might be significantly more hostile if the U.S. does back Israel. There's a sense that to succeed, we'll need their help. Let's be honest on this issue.
     Politically convenient or not, supporting Israel is the right thing to do. Israel has never wavered in standing behind the U.S. While Palestinians cheered in the streets and fired weapons in celebration over September 11th, Israel held a sincere day of mourning on our behalf. Israel is a true, if occasionally inconvenient ally.
     Moreover, our alliance with Israel is a major cause of Arabic hostility toward the U.S. We've already chosen sides! Now is the time to act as Israel's ally, just as they have acted as ours.
     Further, Palestine is a hotbed of terrorism, and therefore a legitimate target in our war. As the saying goes, it's time to put up or shut up. At the very least, the U.S. has a duty not to oppose Israeli action. In truth, we should be offering them troops and close air support.
     Our unwavering allies deserve better than we've given. Take action: write your congressperson express your opinion.

1878-2002 Copyright, The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.

February 6, 2002
Ronald Reagan's
Enduring Influence!
By Mark Burson

    SIMI VALLEY -- American presidents for all of their many and mighty powers, do in fact follow the same undeniable calculus of politics.

    They enjoy a short shelf life as popular public figures. They are deemed "lame ducks" before they even leave office. And, once returned to private life, their political legacies become more an after thought than a marching order to guide and inform our future. But for one political leader of our age, this equation does not hold.

     Ronald Reagan not only proved how wrong we could be about our presidents, he overturned the conventional wisdom about how our political leaders are both considered while in office and valued as private citizens when out of it.

     This was first seen shortly after Ronald Reagan became our 40th President, when the American presidency was deemed by many to be well beyond the measure of any man.

     Nearing the end of the presidential term of Jimmy Carter, but before Ronald Reagan assumed office, Lloyd Cutler, the venerable Democrat lawyer who had worked in the Carter White House, wrote a newspaper essay trying to explain why his boss had failed.

     Cutler wrote that the presidency had become too large, too complex, too daunting, for any one individual to manage. The Oval Office was less an inspiration to great leaders to do great things than an exquisitely furnished meat grinder that would eventually overwhelm any who dared try to tame it.

     Ronald Reagan proved him wrong - and the presidency hasn't been the same since.

     Even our electoral politics still bears his signature stamp, as both parties - yes, Republicans as well as Democrats - strain to keep time with the Reagan rhythm. Republicans know that the "Great Communicator" earned and established ties with voters across every demographic and age group and that he maintains a relationship of the heart with people for whom politics is neither a hobby nor an interest.

     While Democrats surely feel no identical political connection, they appreciate how President Reagan confounded them again and again, both as a candidate and as a president. Like the St. Louis Rams watching game films to understand how the New England Patriots hampered their offense, Democrats have watched Ronald Reagan and studied how he won.

     Even today, a case can be made that Ronald Reagan is more powerful, more influential and more meaningful to public life and social understanding than when he was President.

     The national debate about whether to empower the individual or enable the state has come down squarely on the side of the people.

     The Keynesian model of excessive taxation - dominant only 25 years ago - is today the economic philosophy that no one dares to mention.

     The decades-long assertion that American power could not be projected around the world to enhance the cause of human freedom is currently taking up space in the dustbin of history - alongside the corrupt Communism that he led the West to oppose and overwhelm.

     In an 1850 speech, Henry Clay famously said, "Sir, I would rather be right than President." Great statesman that he was, Clay had to settle for the former. Ronald Reagan achieved both.

More than a full decade since he left the White House in 1989, America is still talking about his issues, on his terms, and reaping the rewards of his enduring legacy.

     If what is past is prologue, this will be even more true in the future than even at this time, on this day, Ronald Reagan's 91st birthday.

[Editor's Note: Click here to view the historic Ronald W. Reagan Presidental Medal, on sale at Web Portal Foundation's Ronald W. Reagan Museum and Bookstore Web Site.]

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Saturday January 26, 2002
Bin Laden Stirs Struggle
on Meaning of Jihad
By John F. Burns, New York Times

ZHAKHEL BALA, Pakistan, Jan. 20 — Little in the manner of Ijaz Khan Hussein betrays the miseries he saw as a volunteer in the war in Afghanistan. Mr. Khan, a college-trained pharmacist, joined the jihad, or holy war, like thousands of other Pakistanis who crossed over into Afghanistan.
     He worked as a medical orderly near Kabul, shuttling to the front lines, picking up bodies and parts of bodies. Of 43 men who traveled with him to Afghanistan by truck in October, he says, 41 were killed.
     Now with the Taliban and Al Qaeda routed, have Mr. Khan and other militants finished with holy war? Mr. Khan, at least, said he had not. "We went to the jihad filled with joy, and I would go again tomorrow," he said.
     "If Allah had chosen me to die, I would have been in paradise, eating honey and watermelons and grapes, and resting with beautiful virgins, just as it is promised in the Koran. Instead, my fate was to remain amid the unhappiness here on earth." Jihad literally means...More!

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Monday, January 21, 2002
Newspaper Archives:
Under Supreme Court Attack!
By Howard Hobbs Ph.D. President
Valley Press Media Network

    WASHINGTON - Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court changed they way U.S. newspapers conduct the information business, forever. The Court ruled that newspaper publishers don't own the rights to the most widely read online columns by freelance writers...More!

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Saturday, December 15, 2001
Pearl Harbor
And Modern California
By A. G. Block

    SACRAMENTO - - There are symbolic parallels in the attacks of December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001, both for the nation and for California.
     There also are significant differences. As the nation enters a new age of international uncertainty, a look at the past may help guide the future. Two fateful days smashed into the calendar of American history.
     Two ferocious assaults against America committed with such treachery as to make the date a synonym for outrage. Comparisons between Pearl Harbor and the attack of September 11 began soon after the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed into lower Manhattan.
     CBS News anchor Dan Rather, among others, referred to the terrorist assault as "another Pearl Harbor." Editorial cartoonist Michael Ramirez' September 14 offering in the Los Angeles Times blended the twin towers with the burning wreckage of the USS Arizona - one of the most famous images to emerge from World War II.
     Although separated by 60 years, the two events are similar in that both were surprise attacks that outraged Americans and rekindled their patriotism. In each case, prominent symbols of American power and prestige were reduced to burning hulks by an enemy with long-simmering resentment of United States foreign and economic policies.
     Each attack provoked deep anger in the American people and a thirst for revenge while at the same time stripping away a long-held sense of security. Finally, both brought the United States into a war that had raged for years in other parts of the globe. In each case, California suddenly found itself on the front lines.
     In 1941, the United States' principal military stronghold in the Pacific had been crippled, and many expected the Japanese to invade the West Coast within days. Today, the front is not a matter of geography but a state of mind. Terrorists do not fight for territory but to destabilize society, so even though initial attacks took place on the East Coast, the "front" is everywhere.
     Finally, now as then, California is home to a large number of residents who share ethnicity with those responsible for the attacks. In 1941, more than 94,000 people of Japanese ancestry were living here; in 2001, one million Muslims reside in California, 250,000 of whom trace their roots to the Middle East.
     But while December 7 and September 11 produced similar emotions, there are deep differences in the impact of these two attacks on our country. As the nation prepares for a showdown with another remote and little-understood enemy, it is worth glancing backward to compare the situations then and now.
     The impact of World War II In her book "The Second Gold Rush," Marilynn S. Johnson describes Richmond, California, as "a small, pastoral community ... [with] abundant open space" where livestock grazed in open fields along the northern shore of San Francisco Bay.
     In 1940, it was a blue-collar town, home to 23,642 residents, homogeneous white/Hispanic with no measurable numbers of Chinese or Japanese and only 270 blacks. Although visible across the Bay, San Francisco and Oakland - cities with heft and bustle - were remote both in mood and texture. World War II changed Richmond forever.
     By 1944, more than 93,000 people were squashed into its overcrowded neighborhoods, an increase of 297 percent. The open fields had been seeded with wartime housing projects, and the black population had soared 2000 percent, to nearly 6,000 - a figure that would more than double by decade's end.
     Industrialist Henry Kaiser had built two huge shipyards astride the Bay, while a once-innocuous Ford assembly plant had grown into a monstrous complex that produced 60,000 tanks by war's end.
     This transformation made Richmond a reflecting pool for the cultural and economic changes that swept California in the years following Pearl Harbor. A mostly white, semi-industrialized state struggling to emerge from the Great Depression, California became an ethnically diverse industrial dynamo dominated by sprawling metropolitan areas.
     According to the 1950 "California Blue Book," the state's population expanded from 6.9 million to 10.5 million (53 percent) between 1940 and 1950. Nearly three million migrants came from other parts of the country to work in factories and shipyards, joining legions of servicemen and women who passed through en route to the Pacific Theater and later returned again, motivated by memories of a temperate climate and relaxed lifestyle.
     The state's urban areas absorbed virtually all the growth. In 1940, two in seven Californians were classified as living in rural areas; by 1950, the ratio had shrunk to two in 10.
     During the corresponding decade, the state's urban population mushroomed from 4.9 million to 8.5 million, or 74 percent. Los Angeles alone grew by a million people between 1940 and 1948 - an increase of 35 percent.
     Jobs drew people to the cities, high-paying urban jobs that boosted statewide per-capita income more than threefold in the first half of the decade. The new prosperity was underscored by dramatic advances in two vital defense industries: aircraft production and shipbuilding. In 1940, 50,000 Californians earned nearly $80 million working in those plants and yards.
     By 1943, half a million people were employed there, pulling in more than $1.3 billion. The ethnic character of California's population also changed. Before the war, the Golden State was 95 percent white (including Hispanics, who were classified as white).
     There were only isolated pockets of Asians and virtually no blacks. Black migration in particular accelerated during the war. Although there had been some influx during the Depression, Census figures reveal that 124,000 blacks lived in California in 1940.
     A decade later, that number had swelled to 462,000. The war also reversed the trend of Mexican repatriation begun during the Depression when thousands of immigrants, some of them U.S. citizens, were forcibly repatriated to Mexico on the grounds that there was no work for them in the United States.
     One of the war's more lasting legacies was the jump-start it gave to a new wave of Mexican immigration that continues to this day. California also became younger as migrants and returning servicemen married and started families.
     The number of children 14 years and younger, static between 1930 and 1940, more than doubled over the next 10 years. The population aged 25 to 44 grew by more than a million during the '40s.
This newer and younger population changed the politics of California. In the years before World War II, California's political leadership focused mainly on the state's native sons, for the most part ignoring the steady influx of Depression-era migrants.
     But after the war, California was home to so many newcomers that officials at every level were representing constituencies that had not existed when they were first elected. Suddenly, there were no outsiders because an ever-growing chunk of the electorate was itself from the outside.
     This opened the political system to a new breed of younger politician, and among those who profited from the change were Jesse Unruh and Phil Burton.
     Economically, California not only prospered during World War II but also used $35 billion in defense spending to lay the foundation for an industrial and technology-based economy that remained recession-proof for nearly half a century.
     Aircraft manufacturers, for instance, had been associated with California since the 1910s when the Loughead brothers established a small factory in Burbank, later changing their company's name to "Lockheed."
     Over the next decade, they were joined by the likes of Donald Douglas, John Northrup and Claude Ryan, who built Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis in a San Diego hangar.
     Clustered in Los Angeles, Santa Monica and San Diego, their companies operated on shoestrings until World War II when, buoyed by $21 billion in federal contracts, they created the vanguard of what would become one of the great engines of California's postwar boom: the aerospace industry.
     Other industries experienced similar growth. California assembled fivefold more cars in 1948 than in 1941. The oil industry mushroomed to feed the state's growing fleet of private automobiles.
     A new steel industry prospered. Construction boomed for housing, factories, highways, universities, water projects, schools, office buildings, theaters, ad infinitum.
     The military moved in - and stayed. Cities expanded, sprawled out, merged. An embryonic industry based on technology began to stir in the triangular petrie dish formed by Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore Laboratories.
     The war also produced the "G.I. Bill," which historian Ed Cray credits with "creating the great middle class." "There were two aspects of it that were huge," Cray explains, "two benefit programs that never would have passed except as a thank-you to the G.I.s.
     First, an education clause which paid veterans to go to college and tech school, and a home-loan program which built the suburbs and fueled the construction industry."
     Modern California was born in the flames and rubble of Pearl Harbor, brought to life by this "second gold rush." World War II finally wrenched the nation from the throes of economic depression, and California was ideally suited to take advantage of America's sudden prosperity.
     There was plenty of room for growth, and a collective appetite for it. A different place Twenty-first century California is a vastly different place. In addition to being the nation's most populous state - 33.9 million according to the 2000 Census - it is the nation's most ethnically diverse state.
     Nearly 100 languages are spoken in Los Angeles schools. There are more Vietnamese living in California now than there were blacks in 1950.
     Today 15.8 million whites, 10.9 million Hispanics, 2.2 million blacks and 3.7 million Asians call California home. Among Asians, six different groups have populations that exceed 250,000: Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese.
     There are more Samoans in California today than there were blacks in 1920. As a result, there is precious little room for the kind of growth experienced during World War II.
     Inner cities are crowded and suburbs sprawl into deserts and once-productive farmland. Schools burst with students, water systems are overtaxed, urban highways jammed day and night.
     Instead of coming out of depression, the economy - after a decade of unprecedented growth - is in decline, the word "recession" seeping into political dialogue even before September 11 crippled industries vital to California's health, such as travel and tourism.
     Unemployment had been rising steadily during 2001 as the technology industry - another vital cog in the state's economy - finally contracted after years of expansion, causing a ripple throughout the state's economy.
     Unlike the 1940s, this new war does not bring with it the promise of economic salvation - quite the contrary. The state will not reap benefits from the kind of unbridled defense spending associated with World War II.
     There will be no round-the-clock shipyards launching armadas of Liberty ships, no aircraft factories spewing forth B-25 bombers and P-51 Mustang fighters, no assembly plants grinding out M-4 Sherman tanks and the ubiquitous Jeep.
     The military doesn't need all that material. No, this war isn't about hardware. This war is about people and their attitudes. Where were you?
     On Sunday, December 7, 1941, U.S. Army Private Ed Guthman was stationed at Fort Ord, California. As he finished lunch in the mess hall, his sergeant entered, a .45-caliber pistol strapped to his waist. "There ain't gonna be any Christmas furloughs," Guthman recollects the sergeant saying. "The Japs just bombed Pearl Harbor."
     That evening, Guthman's platoon was taken to the beach "where we defended Monterey Bay." Guthman eventually became an infantry officer and spent the war slogging through Italy.
     A Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, he served as press secretary to Attorney General Robert Kennedy from 1961 to 1965, then returned to journalism as editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
     Today, he teaches investigative journalism at the University of Southern California. In 1941, Frank McCullough had recently left his job as a $15-a-week reporter for United Press in San Francisco, opting for more lucrative work in a gold mine near Winnemucca, Nevada. "I tried to enlist that day [December 7]," he recalls, "but it was Sunday and all the recruiting offices were closed."
     McCullough eventually joined the Marine Corps and spent the war island-hopping around the Pacific as a combat correspondent. After the war, he resumed his career as a reporter, becoming managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, Saigon bureau chief for Time magazine during the Vietnam War, Time-Life bureau chief in New York City and executive editor of McClatchy Newspapers.
     He is retired and living in Northern California. Nao Takasugi was a junior at UCLA and heard the news while driving to his parents' home in Oxnard. "There was no question where my allegiance lay at the time," Takasugi says. "All my upbringing, my education was American."
     Nonetheless, Takasugi never returned to UCLA, choosing to remain with his Issei (first generation Japanese born) parents, who were resident aliens. In 1942, the Takasugi family was interned in Arizona.
     A year later, Nao was one of some 4,000 Nisei (U.S. born Japanese) "rescued" from the camps by Quakers who helped arrange slots for them at eastern universities. Takasugi went to Temple University in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1945.
     A businessman active in local politics, he served as mayor of Oxnard from 1982 to 1992, when he was elected to the first of three terms in the Assembly. Despite the discrimination he suffered, Takasugi's lot was put in perspective when he visited a sister in Arkansas in 1943.
     From Little Rock, he took a "podunk little train" where he encountered "colored only" seating for the first time. "I was ... pondering what to do," he says, "when the conductor approached. I asked where I should sit, and he told me to sit with the whites."
    It was still better to be Japanese than black - at least in Arkansas.
     Warren Christopher was a 16-year-old senior at Hollywood High School in 1941 and a 10-cents-a-word stringer for the Hollywood Citizen News. Christopher remembers hearing of the Pearl Harbor attack upon returning from a hike in the Hollywood hills and afterwards being sent out on the street to report public reaction for his newspaper.
     One of his most stunning memories is that of a darkened Los Angeles and of spontaneous public reaction to a violation of the blackout edict. "On Vine Street," he recalls, "a sign company had neglected to turn out the lights on a large billboard. People were standing in the streets, throwing rocks at the bulbs."
     A year later, when he turned 17, Christopher enlisted in the Navy. After the war, he studied law. He is best remembered for his roles as deputy secretary of state in the Carter administration, where he negotiated an end to the Iranian hostage crisis, and for his service as head of a commission that investigated the Los Angeles Police Department after the Rodney King beating in 1991.
     He also served as secretary of state under President Bill Clinton and remains active in legal and government affairs. Not your grandfather's war Guthman, McCullough, Takasugi and Christopher represent what has been often called "the greatest generation," and like most of their contemporaries, World War II consumed them for nearly half a decade.
     For many people, it proved the defining moment of their lives. And as with the September 11 attacks, a single event both propelled the country into war and unified it. "Both were attacks on the American homeland," says Christopher. "Hawaii was very far away, but we knew it was ours. This was an attack on us, and we responded that way. We are doing so now. The number of flags I see when I run every morning is quite striking."
     It is even, Christopher and others point out, once again fashionable for liberals to display patriotism. After September 11, Americans donated blood and money, displayed flags and lent emotional support to those immediately affected by the assault.
     But this is not our grandfather's war, and keeping the nation together and sustaining its resolve will be more challenging than in 1941. Unlike 1941, there is no recognizable enemy nation today.
     Afghanistan was a sanctuary for those alleged to have committed the September 11 attacks, but Afghanistan itself did not perpetrate the outrage and does not serve as a focal point for American resolve as did Japan and Germany.
     Indeed, President George W. Bush made it a point to announce that the United States would provide humanitarian aid to Afghanistan at the very moment the United States and Britain launched retaliatory strikes against its Taliban government on October 7.
     The enemy today is ephemeral, a collection of global outlaws. They have no field army to confront, no imperial navy to seek out and destroy, no ports to mine, no government to hold responsible. In addition, although the nation has experienced a wave of patriotic fervor, there is no consensus among the American people over a proper response to a terrorist attack.
     That wasn't the case after Pearl Harbor. The course of action was both traditional and plain to see: eliminate Japan's ability to wage war. "There was no doubt about a proper response," says McCullough of 1941. "Another nation had attacked us, and we envisioned 700 battleships sailing west ... to blow those bastards out of the Pacific."
     Who is it we attack today, and how? "Responding in 1941 was easy," explains veteran political consultant Stu Spencer, a San Gabriel teenager at the time of Pearl Harbor. "There was a nation [Japan] where everyone talked and looked alike and came from one place. There is a difference today, and we first need to define the enemy. This is an aggressor who comes from many countries."
     Spencer says the nation and its leadership must ask deeper questions of itself before deciding who, what and how to respond. Recent retaliatory attacks notwithstanding, bombing isn't the whole answer.

    [Editor's Note: A.G. Block's complete column is available online. He is executive editor of California Journal.]

Wednesday, December 14, 2001
Bill Clinton Belittles Bush
Attack on Terrorism
Former President Tells Audience
He Could Do Better
By William Fielder, Contributor

    WASHINGTON - - Bill Clinton confided to friends within three days after the 9-11 terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York. He told a stunned audience this week that he envies G.W. Bush's good fortune in having the terrotist attacks occur during his presidency."
     Mr. Clinton said he could "...do a better job of managing this'defining moment."
    The Georgetown University comments come at a time when actions by the former president raise questions about his own indirect role which may have played into the hands of terrorists through questionable pardons for convicted and suspect terrorists, and the elease from federal detention in the early 1990s of persons from El Salvador and Honduras who were suspected of committing terrorists acts against those governments.
    Mr. Clinton's administration also played a key role in the commutation of sentences for 11 convicted Puerto Rican gang members in 1999, and the last minute 2001 pardon for Susan Rosenberg, former Weather Underground member who had a role in the 1981 armed robbery in Nyack, NJ, of a Brink¹s truck in which 2 policemen were killed.
     In that case, Ms. Rosenberg had been captured while in the act of assisting in the unloading of 780 pounds of dynamite and 14 weapons.
     The 1993 World Trade Center bombers entered the US on student visas without security checks. Of the 19 terrorists responsible for the September 11th attacks, 15 were in the US with expired visas.
     After NATO intervention in Kosovo, about 20,000 Kosovars, many with suspected drug and terrorist connections, were allowed to immigrate without background investigations.
     Former President Clinton's political influence on terrorist activities cannot be ignored. Irreconcilable laws and edicts made it simultaneously permissible to overlook illegal and terrorist activities by those requesting visas while forbidding government security organizations, the FBI and CIA, to utilize such individuals as informants.
     A clear case, is that of the FBI. It was instructed not to recruit informants in communities of protected minorities even though some members were believed to have connections to drugs and terrorism. At least one radical group member allied with bin Laden claimed responsibility for the Oklahoma City Federal Courthouse bombing, yet these leads were dropped.
     Clinton preferred that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols be de[icted in the government's action as representatives of a vast right-wing conspiracy. And, when Sudan offered up bin Laden in 1995, then President Clinton reneged rather than confront the racially sensitive problem of prosecuting him.
     Unresponsiveness to previous terrorist attacks by the Clinton administration did not go un-noticed by the 9-11 terrorists.
     After the 1993 attack on the WTC that killed 6 Americans and injured many others nothing was done in retaliation. And as for the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers military residence in Saudi Arabia where 16 servicemen were killed, still Mr. Clinton held back.
    Finally, Clinton staged an ineffective missile attack when the 263 lives were lost in an attack on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
     Mr. Clinton, on his way out of the White House, did nothing when the USS Cole was bombed in 2000.
     In response to Mr. Clinton's repoted comments this week, concerned citizens are calling on Attorney General John Ashcroft at the Department of Justice for an investigation into foreign terrorist activity.

                         [Editor's Note: For a detailed analysis of public opinion on the 9-11 attacks go the the People & The Press -- Pew Center Report. William Fielder lives in Peachtree City, GA.]

Friday December 7, 2001
I Have A Dream
That I Am An American
What's Wrong With This Picture?
By Tony Artero, Bureau Chief

    AGANA (Guam) - - “In God We Trust” is the founders' motto of the United States. And on Guam, we still trust the US Congress to correct the mistakes of the past. Yet, the American Dream of economic freedom, prosperity, and good health remains beyond reach for American citizens on Guam. Remember Pearl Harbor!
     Despite all the hard work and personal sacrifices made, economic freedom is denied citizens on Guam. Conditions here have become intolerable. For decades, Americans on Guam have endured the denial of economic freedom and are subjected to intolerable and inefficient government services, often worse than those in third world countries.
    More than 50 years after the close of WWII Guam still lacks modern land use standards. Development has always been helter skelter with some land converted from military deployment and finding its way into the control of elected officials and their political cronies by way of vote deals to the chosen few at the time of elections.
    Worse still, substandard concrete electrical power poles create dangerous traffic and safety problems for our citizens. Frequent water and power outages are health and safety hazards, as well, caused by nonexistent preventive maintenance.
     On Guam, rats flourish on sidewalks and in alley ways as they feast on garbage, which is sometimes left out for days before trash is picked up by municipalities.
     Guam's school system still follows the archaic Organic Act. Under it, responsibility for school administration is in the hands of one official. In consequence, the school system and its transportation of students is beset with loggerheads, inefficiencies, and funding shortages caused by political interference and misuse of public funds.
     Under the present administration of public schools here, we have been shocked to witness badly needed new public school textbooks used instead for landfill dumping.
    In the face of inadequate and incompetent leadership in the public school sector, we have now been forced to be witnesses to the US military community establishing a separate military school system on the local bases.
    In the face of these failures of government, is it any wonder that many citizens of Guam have left the island? In the wake of the recent departures of Guam's families, open corruption has become the backbone of the underground economy, openly referred to as the “pare” system and the “chinchule.”
     The underlying weakness of the social structure and the economy coupled with Guam’s blurred legal and political status make it dependent upon and completely subject to the whims of the Congress of the United States.
     U.S. policies have been deceptive, one sided in more ways than one, and counterproductive at best. A good example of detrimental impact on the lives of Guamanian families and the economy of the island were the forced and excessive land takings after WWII.
     The land was confiscated without due process and no fair and just compensation was ever paid to its owners. That private property has not been restored nor returned to its former owners.
     By that action, Guam was instantly transformed from self-sufficiency to dependency. Following the close of WWII, under the catchall banner of “national security interest” the necessity of the actions taken by Congress and the US military during the "national emergency" became the new"status quo" for Guam.
     The Monroe Doctrine (1823) was cited by Congress in 1944, and Guam’s strategic location in the Pacific made Guam a perfect pawn in the Pacific Strategy for transforming America "the sleeping giant" into an icon of super military power. It still is discussed in military circles in that tone.
     Even the military's strategic readiness on Guam would play a roll in the Attack on Terrorism following the September 11, World Trade Center and Pentagon destruction.
     These attacks on the Continental United States brings to mind a statement of General Douglas MacArthur when he warned, “There is no security, only opportunity.”
      Someone here on Guam also had something to say about security, “Standing up against bad government is the greatest form of patriotism.” Let’s face it. The Organic Act of Guam is obviously a failure . Here on Guam, we believe in human rights, just laws, and equality. We as American Citizens, are still asking, with hope in our hearts, "Give Guam a chance!"

Sunday October 11, 2001
Bill Clinton Chattering Ass
"The people who died represent, in my view, not only the
best of America, but the best of the world that I worked
hard for eight years to build."
From The Weekly Standard

    WASHINGTON - - Last Wednesday, former President William J. Clinton returned to the guest speaker's podium at Georgetown University and proceeded to oppress an audience with his thoughtless comments on what he called "international terrorism concerns".
     Mr. Clinton apparently has learned that: Osama bin Laden's mass murders at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are a direct and deliberate assault on the Clinton legacy, specifically. After all, the former president points out --  "The people who died represent, in my view, not only the best of America, but the best of the world that I worked hard for eight years to build."
     Makes you even madder than you were before, doesn't it?   And Mr. Clinton adds another accusation -- "Indeed, in the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they ... proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple Mount."
     Later, he said, "... in the United States, some similar stuff happened: slavery and dispossession of the Indians and Jim Crow and whatnot. Why, "even today ... we still have the occasional hate crime rooted in race, religion, or sexual orientation."
     So, according to Mr. Clinton, don't start feeling all superior or anything, because "terror has a long history." There will be a happy ending, because a certain former president was tireless in preparing us for just such a crisis as we now confront.
     The voice of experience siad, "In the years that I served, career law enforcement officials working with our intelligence services and others and people around the world prevented many, many more terrorist attacks than were successful." And he said, he "...worked hard to strengthen the biological weapons convention and to pass the chemical weapons convention," and " to begin to build our stock of vaccines and antibiotics and to support an organized civilian preparedness," and "tripled our investment in counter-terrorism."

- Deep Background Report -
Thursday November 1, 2001
Osama's Money
He was 17th child of 52 born to a one eyed, illiterate immigrant to Saudi Arabia who formed a construction venture and was
awarded contracts by the Royal Family to restore
religious sites at Mecca and Medina.
By Dave Francis, Foreign Correspondent

    St. PETERSBURG (Russia) - - Osama bin Ladin is on everyone's a-list these days. He is the closest thing we have seen to a James Bond villain in my lifetime. He is an ultra-rich, secretive head of a worldwide organization of terror with unseen tentacles seemingly everywhere and nowhere.
     His appearance, a 6'4 inch 160 lb. Bearded boogeyman is as exotically absurd as anything we Americans could have dreamed up. If Hollywood had invented bin Ladin, it might have made a very good movie. What about him though? While secretive, there is information out there, if you want to look hard enough.
     Born Osama bin Mohammed bin Ladin in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1957, reportedly the 17th child of 52 born to Mohammed bin Ladin, a one eyed, illiterate, Yemeni who came to Saudi Arabia as a laborer and through perseverance and discipline, willed himself to great wealth. Mohammed bin Ladin came to Saudi Arabia in the 1930s, and toiled for literally pennies a day. He worked and saved, eventually founding a construction company.
     His company gained contracts at first by viciously undercutting prices, and eventually won favor with the royal family.
     The bin Ladin company became the country's unofficial builder, and was awarded the contracts to restore the religious sites at Mecca and Medina. At one time, during economic difficulties for the Saudi royal family, Mohammed bin Ladin reportedly loaned money to King Faisal to help them through hard times.
     Reports are that the elder bin Ladin paid the salaries of Saudi civil servants for six months. The Yemeni laborer, who had struggled to get to Saudi Arabia, who died in an airplane crash in 1968, still signing his name by making an X, had truly arrived. Osama's mother was the 10th wife of Mohammed.
     Unlike Mohammed's other wives, she was 22 years old, educated, and refused to wear the traditional veil typical to Islamic women. She was Syrian, or Palestinian, depending on whom you ask, but she is universally described as the least favored among the wives, and Osama was their only child.
     She was referred to as 'The Slave Wife' by the rest of the household. Osama was a quiet, well behaved, boy. He was described by his private tutor as kind and considerate. He was a good student, and was not at all adverse to western culture as a teen.
     He went by the nickname of Sammy, and on frequent trips to Geneva, was seen sporting silk shirts and bell-bottoms. Bin Ladin finished high school in Jetta in 1974 and began college at King Abdul Aziz University.
     He married his first wife, a Syrian, related to his mother, at the age of 17. During these formative years of schooling, one of the influences that appear to have left a deep impression on bin Ladin are his many contacts with pilgrims to the holy lands.
     The bin Ladin family hosted literally thousands of these pilgrims, and it can be safely assumed that their devotion impressed the young Osama. After the death of Osama's father, the family was run by the elder brother, Salim bin Ladin, who like his father, died in a plane crash. Just outside San Antonio Texas in 1988, Salim's light aircraft hit a power line, and the second bin Ladin head-of-household was killed.
     It has been reported that Salim was flying a BAC 1-11 purchased by Prince Mohammed bin Fahd, and that the plane had been used in secret meetings in Paris with Iranians, regarding relations with the USA. No firm evidence has been uncovered to substantiate these rumors, which are very widespread in the intelligence community.
     It was during this time that Osama became fascinated with Islamic fundamentalism, and the extremism it sometimes fosters. Bin Ladin began to fall under the spell of a Palestinian born, Jordanian academic named Abdallah Azzam. Azzam, the founder of the terrorist organization Hamas gave speeches, was on the radio, and distributed cassettes throughout the Arab world, and bin Ladin became a devotee.
     It was the culmination of a dream for bin Ladin later when, in Pakistan, he would work hand in hand with Azzam to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He also made useful contacts in other areas, striking up a crucial friendship with Prince Turki ibn Faisal, a young royal and the future chief of Saudi intelligence services.
     These contacts may have been serving bin Ladin well until the present day. In 1979, Osama graduated college with a degree in civil engineering, and he began postgraduate work as a terrorist.
     It was in 1979 that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and the following spring, Osama, aged 22 went to Pakistan to help the resistance. Basing himself in Peshawar, often called the Dodge City of Central Asia, he met his political mentor Azzam.
     They set up a support group there called the "House of the Faithful", and used it as a base for training, equipping and deploying fighters in nearby Afghanistan. While Osama was on the road to Saudi Arabia a lot, raising funds for the mujahadin, (CIA estimates are in the range of 50 million per year was raised by donations to bin Ladin.) he was 'one of the boys' when in Peshawar.
     Osama stayed in the Spartan quarters provided at House of the Faithful, sleeping 12 to a room on mats on the floor. Later, bin Ladin traveled to Afghanistan and joined in battles. In brutal fighting in Jalamabad, showing no regard for his personal safety, many Afghan veterans remember him fighting shoulder to shoulder against Soviet soldiers.
     Bin Ladin served in Afghanistan in a combat capacity from 1986 until 1989. He earned the respect of his men with personal bravery, and their loyalty with generosity. The stories of bin Ladin sending money to Afghan fighters families after their deaths are rampant.
     If only a fraction are true, bin Ladin demonstrated with his generosity a concern for his men that would do any commander proud. Reports of bin Ladin receiving CIA support while in Afghanistan are taken as conventional wisdom. It isn't as simple as that however.
     It appears that, oddly enough, there was very little if any contact with bin Ladin in a direct role. Bin Ladin concentrated his efforts on recruiting assistance from the Arab world, and even though his family had, and still has close ties to the US, including it's political and military establishment, no hard evidence can be found tying bin Ladin directly to American sources.
     This doesn't mean they weren't there, but you would expect some real evidence to have become apparent, and it hasn't. One thing he did do was build contacts in Pakistan that have served him well, and continue to serve him today. Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, is brutal, radical, and unstable.
     There are factions inside who have allegiances all over the globe, and not just a few are allies of bin Ladins. (Recent reports in US newspapers say that bin Ladin received nuclear materials from Pakistan, and two Pakistani's have fallen under suspicion for possibly helping al Qaida construct a nuclear device. One of these men is the father of Pakistan's nuclear program.) Osama returned to Saudi Arabia a hero.
     He was widely hailed and roundly cheered as he hit the circuit in Riyadh. Things didn't sit right with Osama in the kingdom though, and he made his criticisms of the royal family known.
     A lot of his anger may stem from the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and the house of Saud's rebuff of his offer to help. In 1990, Osama went to the royal family in Saudi Arabia with an offer to outfit and lead 30,000 men in a battle to oust Saddam from Kuwait and secure Saudi Arabian oilfields from the threat Saddam's armies represented.
     Weighing all it's options, Crown Prince Abdullah turned bin Ladin down flat. The prospect of having a battle hardened army of radicals, loyal to Osama bin Ladin brought together for the purpose of defending the regime seemed like a risky venture, and so Abdullah turned to Washington for assistance instead.
     Not long after this offer, Osama bin Ladin was placed under house arrest, and remained a prisoner until he was invited to come to Sudan by Hassan al-Turabi, the de facto leader of Sudan at the time.
     Osama went, and took his engineering degree with him. Along with him went his four wives, his children, and several hundred Afghan veteran bodyguards led by Saifu al-Hasnain, a 35 year-old Egyptian. Sudan needed help, and the industrious bin Ladin helped.
     He built roads, buildings, and at the same time reached out globally to terrorist groups in Chechnya, Jordan, and other affected areas. In Baku, Azerbaijan he began an aid agency, similar to the one he had run in Peshawar, but more international in scope.
     In London he started the Advice and Reform Committee, a radical organization, advocating overthrow of the house of Saud. His company, Ladin International built, among other things, a 700-mile highway, and was given the concession for export of sesame seeds. (Sudan is the third largest producer of sesame seeds worldwide.)
     During this time, bin Ladin had an office, went to work, had board meetings, etc. His radical views were getting more and more in the way though. In 1994, the Saudis, increasingly disturbed by bin Ladin's radicalism, revoked his citizenship, and his presence was interfering with Sudan's desire to join the civilized world.
     Bin Ladin was becoming more and more a hindrance, and the Sudanese tried to hand him over to the US, in an effort to curry favor in the west. By 1996, Osama was expelled from Sudan, and he made his way to Afghanistan.
     In October of that year, we find bin Ladin in Kabul, making contact with the mayor, Mohammed Rabbani.
     It was through Rabbani that bin Ladin would begin forging his ties with Mullah Omar and the rest of the Taliban leadership.
     It was also in 1996 that a bombing occurred in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that killed 19 U.S. servicemen. In another odd twist to the story, it was the Saudi binLadin Group, a construction firm, headed by Osama's older brother that won the contract for reconstruction. By early 1997, bin Ladin was well on his way to earning his place with the Taliban when they, the Taliban, discovered what they said was a Saudi plot to assassinate bin Ladin.
     The civil war in Afghanistan was going well for the Taliban, and they controlled about two thirds of the country. They invited bin Ladin to move to Kandahar for his own security. Bin Ladin moved into an old Soviet base close to Kandahar airport.
     He improved his standing with the Taliban funding huge military purchases, building mosques and buying cars for the leadership. He built a new residence for Mullah Omar and his family on the outskirts of the city, among other things. He imported a fleet of over 3000 used Toyota's and gave them to Taliban soldiers, so their families could earn a living. This is the kind of thing that earned him great loyalty.
     On August the 7th, 1998 there was an explosion in Nairobi. The driver of the truck in Nairobi, a Saudi named Azzam had gone to meet Allah. A light brown Toyota pickup truck was vaporized when the huge bomb it had been carrying had exploded. 213 people were killed and 4600 wounded as the US embassy, a secretarial college, and an office block were destroyed in the blast.
     A few minutes later, a second bomb, at the US embassy in Tanzania, exploded, killing 11. In Nairobi, one of the suicide bombers had second thoughts. Mohamed Rashid Daoud al-Owhali, a 22-year-old Saudi had jumped from the truck and run, later telling the FBI he had been handpicked for the mission by bin Ladin while training in Afghanistan.
     Thirteen days later, the US sent volleys of cruise missiles into Afghanistan, mainly destroying the empty tents George Bush has since derided. According to a published report, "Three months after the missile strikes two luxury jets landed at Kandahar air base. One brought Prince Turki al Faisal, bin Ladin's student friend and the head of Saudi Arabia's security services.
     The second was empty. It was there to take bin Ladin back to Riyadh. Prince Turki, who had been crucial in getting millions of dollars of official aid for the Taliban, went straight to Mullah Omar's residence where a magnificent lunch had been laid out. The prince began to lecture the Taliban leader about his ingratitude to his former benefactors.
     In the middle of his tirade Omar took a water jug from an attendant and emptied it over his head. 'I nearly lost my temper,' he told the astonished prince. 'Now I am calm. I will ask you a question and then you can leave. How long has the royalty of Saudi Arabia been the hired help of the Americans?' Lunch went uneaten and the second plane returned to Riyadh empty."
     It was shortly after this demonstration of loyalty from Omar that bin Ladin pledged his loyalty to the Taliban leader, and publicly recognized him as the 'Leader of the Faithful." Mullah Omar, the one eyed cleric, and leader of the Taliban, would now play the spiritual father to Osama bin Ladin. (Omar reportedly lost his other eye in a firefight with the Soviets.
     It is widely told that when hit and wounded by a shell fragment in the eye, Omar cut out the 'offending eye' and continued to fight.) Published reports in Europe say that a senior al Qaeda official detained here has begun to talk.
     He tells the story of the aftermath of the missile attack on the camps. Reports say that China paid several million dollars to bin Ladin for access to the unexploded missiles. According to the Pakistani newspaper Ausaf, in a report filed 4 months after the August assault, it was claimed that al Qaeda found 40 of the 75 missiles the US had fired unexploded at the sites.
     Lasid Ben Heni, a 32-year-old Libyan arrested in Munich is accused by Italian officials of being a liaison for al Qaeda members based in Germany and Italy. At a meeting in March in an apartment in Milan, Ben Heni met with Sami Ben Khemais Essid (alias "Saber") and recounted his experiences in Afghanistan, visiting bin Ladins camps.
     Italian police, long used to battling the mafia on its soil had the apartment wired. "Perhaps the Americans are convinced by the bombardment of the sheikh's [Bin Ladin's] training centres," Ben Heni says. "For them, it was a victory. But, in fact, it was a defeat because the majority of the missiles didn't even explode."
     The transcript continues, "With these weapons, he [Bin Ladin] has boosted his financial resources. From every part of the world businessmen who hate Americans have come to study American missile strategy.
     In particular, businessmen have come from China. He works a great deal with China. He's got good relations with them. You see them and you ask 'But what are they doing here?' In the end, you understand that they work for the sheikh and that they came to study these missiles. Thanks to the money that comes from these studies from outside, he created the army of mohajedin headed by Omar Zayan (or Zaghan) in Chechnya".
     Later in the tape, Ben Heni says: "When [Bin Ladin] saw that the Afghan people, who were dying of hunger, passed missiles to sheikh Messaoud, he bargained with the Chinese and sold them to them for an enormous sum - I think $10m dollars - but only after the sheikh had studied them". Bin Ladin has also given the Chechens 2 tons of pure heroin, with a street value estimated as several hundred million dollars.
     Now, inextricably linked to the Taliban in Afghanistan, with Islamic revolution worldwide on his mind, bin Ladin settled down to the life of your average urban terrorist. When not studying the Koran, or supervising the training and recruitment of recruits, security has been his main concern.
     Now wary of electronic communications, bin Ladin has adopted the ages old system of runners, trusted aides who receive his messages then carry them through the mountain passes to emissaries with the outside world.
     The image of him sitting somewhere in a mountain cave, computers humming in Batman-esque splendor are just wrong. For a long time, bin Ladin has been increasingly isolated from the outside world.
     According to Russian intelligence sources, there are more than 50 al Qaeda strongholds identifiable in Afghanistan, and bin Ladin has shuttled between them for a long time. It is known he used a base southwest of Kandahar, close to where the US Rangers attacked recently, as a headquarters.
     Up to the minute reports are making it seem more probable that al Qaeda has some sort of nuclear capability. Al Qaeda member Jamal al-Fadl said in federal court last winter that he had helped Osama bin Ladin's operatives arrange meetings aimed at acquiring black market fissile materials, probably from former Soviet states.
     According to further testimony by al-Fadl, the plans fell through, but it is increasingly believed that even Russian mafia members may have compromised Pakistan's nuclear program. Washington is now openly stating that bin Ladin may have achieved a 'nuclear suitcase' bomb. There are secret plans, in use today, to protect the President and senior administration officials in case of a nuclear blast.
     The US has developed nuclear warheads as light as 60 pounds, and it is believed the Soviets had successfully produced smaller devices, designed to be used by Spetznatz forces against NATO troops in the event of a conflict.
     These smaller devices, known as 'backpack bombs' first came to US attention in the 90's. Revelations by a former Soviet officer in 1998 are frightening.
     In a CIA 'blue border' report, (That classification means it contains material from a foreign source of the greatest sensitivity.) the details were presented to then President Clinton and his National Security Advisor Sandy Berger. Government officials are quoted as saying, "The report was so secret, the two men were only allowed to initial the document before it was returned to the CIA's custody."
Berger's office has refused comment on the matter stating that no comment could be made because it was an intelligence issue. Various accounts, not the least of which come from Soviet defector General Aleksander Lebed, the former head of Russian State Security, say that 48 of the devices are unaccounted for.
     In testimony before Congress in 1997, Lebed said there were bombs, made to look like suitcases, and one person in a 30 minute time span could explode them. The AP reported that the Czech government has acknowledged that Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague.
     ``We can confirm now that during his ... trip to the Czech Republic he did have a contact with an officer of the Iraqi intelligence, Mr. Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir Al-Ani,'' Interior Minister Stanislav Gross said. William F. Buckley, the former CIA agent, conservative icon, and founder of National review has suggested that the USA ask our allies in the Islamic world to sign and distribute the following statement. "We, political leaders of the community of Islamic nations, reject such terrorism as was practiced on September 11, 2001.
     The men who took this action in the name of Allah were impostors who profaned the word of the prophet." Not more would need to be said, but that Declaration of Islamic Doctrine and Modern Terrorism, with names and titles of world leaders, should appear everywhere, in parliaments and mosques, subway stations. And airports.

Wednesday October 31, 2001
All Bets Are Off
Another unexplained death after flu symptoms
experienced and Kathy checked into the hospital!
By Staff Researchers

    WASHINGTON - - Add one more unexplained death to a growing mystery. Now its Kathy T. Nguyen , age 61. Ms. Nguyen died early today, three days after checking herself into the hospital and being diagnosed as the city’s first case of the inhaled form of the disease, Lennox Hill Hospital spokeswoman Ann Silverman said.
     An autopsy was being conducted to verify the cause of death. Nguyen had been too sick to help investigators who are trying to find the source of her infection by reconstructing her social contacts, her commute and her on-the-job routines at the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital on the East Side.
     The possibility that mail was responsible for Nguyen’s infection has not been discounted. She worked as a stock room clerk in a basement that until recently also housed a mail-sorting operation for the hospital.
     Spokesperson Dr. Anthony Fauci, at the National Institute of Health told reporters today that preliminary environmental tests at the hospital had found no sign of anthrax spores."... public health officials were confronting the possibility that she was infected outside the workplace," he said.

Tuesday October 23, 2001
Communism's Comeback?
These people have had power,
wielded power, and lost it a decade ago.
They could be a dangerous lot !
By Dave Francis, Foreign Correspondent.

    St. PETERSBURG (Russia) -- Communism's is trying to make a comeback here in Russia, with Zyuganov, the leftist hard-liner in the Duma (Their version of the Senate.) pushing hard to keep Russia from involving itself too much in the war effort with it's former foe, the USA. Communists have been sent to the streets carrying the old red flag, armbands, pictures of everyone from Karl Marx, Stalin, and of course, the ever present Lenin. The average Russian considers these people an anachronism, and more of a comedy than any serious threat to the countries stability, but they did get over 20% of the vote in the last election.
     This is NOT the same as the communist party in the USA. These people have had power, wielded power, and had it wrenched from their little red palms about a decade ago. They could be a dangerous lot.
     All the more reason to respect the brave job Vladimir Putin is doing in supporting the US in the war effort. Putin understands this enemy. He is former KGB, and besides knowing where the bodies are buried, he may have buried a few.
     Incidentally, he strongly advised President Bush against allowing any moderates from the Taliban to have a hand in the new government in Afghanistan.
     "There are no moderates in the Taliban." Putin explained simply.
It is very important that the US not get stuck in a long, drawn out affair in Afghanistan. If the war on terrorism is going to last a long time, it needs to be a war with ever-changing fronts, filled with fresh victories to make people feel secure in our resolve.
     It is because of the danger that governments like Vladimir Putin's face that we need to make this war one where there is an obvious victor.
     Anything less could lead to some horrible consequences. Lest we forget, a lot of large conflicts have started over small, insignificant areas. Does anyone remember World War I ?
     With instability all over, and hostility breaking out even worse in Israel, Malaysia, the Philippines, and maybe even China, decisive action is needed on the part of the US to let people know they can find safety in our camp.
     On the Russian Mafia front; I was laughed at the other day in a closed door meeting with 4 members of different Russian Mafia groups. The four, all ethnic Russians explained to me I was wrong about Iraq.
     "Iraq couldn't make anthrax that good. They could barely produce liquid form." Said one tall Russian who I will call Ivan as he waved his cigarette across the table as he spoke. "The Iraqis are idiots. They would all die from exposure if they tried to produce high quality anthrax. This anthrax is Russian!"
     Now, I have lived in Russia, and I have lived in Texas, and there is a certain similarity. Russians have that same, 'Everything is bigger….' Attitude that Texans often…. No, ALWAYS exhibit. Knowing this, I was skeptical. I assumed he was bragging. (What a world, huh? Bragging about good anthrax….) "Maybe the Iraqis produced it with the help of the Russian scientists that went to work there after 911" I asked.
     "No. This anthrax is from a supply bought by bin Ladin several years ago in Kazakhstan." He explained, leaning forward. "The anthrax is the same they were making in Sverdlovsk."
     In 1979, there was an accident at a chemical weapons plant in Sverdlovsk and 66 people died of anthrax exposure.
     Vodka was poured, Ivan sat back, eyed, then downed his glass with a couple of hard swallows. I followed suit. Munching a cucumber, Ivan explained, "It goes all the way up to the top. Do you know who was the top man in Sverdlovsk?"
     "No," I replied, "who?" Pouring another round of vodka for the five of us, Ivan looked conspiratorially at the others, then at me and said, "Boris Yeltsin. He was the main contact. Everything went through him. Your Mafia had your mayors and governors, we had our president."
     "How did it work?" I asked. "Easy. After the accident at Sverdlovsk, they closed down the plant. They said they took all the anthrax to Vozrozhdeniye Island, but they didn't. The plant moved to Kazakhstan, and so did the anthrax. In sealed containers. Bin Ladin bought it there, through an intermediary in Kazakhstan."
     'That's that?" I asked? "Business" responded Igor, shrugging his shoulders in a way I have learned to recognize. "Don't forget, Tarzan was selling a submarine, why couldn't Mogilovich sell some germs?"
   Tarzan,(Ludwig Fainberg) is the nickname of a Russian mobster in jail in Miami who was caught while attempting to sell a submarine to a Colombian crime cartel. A real, honest to goodness submarine. He had 'acquired' it through channels with the Russian military.
     In my conversations, these guys bragged that it was the mafia running Russia, since Putin is former KGB, and most of the muscle-men in the current Russian mafia are also ex-KGB. "The truth is," I was told, "there is no such thing as retirement from our business. If you are KGB, or Mafia, you don't retire. You are always KGB or Mafia."
     If you ever wonder how good a friends the Saudis really are, there is a report out of South Africa that bin Ladin and the former head of Saudi security. Turki al-Faycal was ousted last month as head of Saudi security, and sources say that one of the reasons are his contacts with bin Ladin. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has recently become convinced that instead of actively looking for bin Ladin, Turki was actually feeding him information from the Saudi intelligence services to help him maintain himself, and his al Qaida network.
     These same Saudi's won't allow us to use the command and control center we built there to help defend their country. Well, the good news is, Russia is now selling 500,000 barrels of oil a day more than they were before all this happened. Anyone look at your gas prices lately?
     They have fallen since this war started. The Saudis may find that we don't need them as much as we used to. That would make them the REAL loser in all this.
     Contacts with Mossad tell me that the Israeli's are expecting a biological attack, probably in western Europe, and it should come soon. The same day I got that news, I was informed by the State Dept. that there is an alert put out in Russia for a possible biological attack. Part of the long-term information apparently came from telephone taps in Milan on a Tunisian national, Essid Sami Ben Khemais.
     Khemis has lived in Milan since March 1998 after completing two years of training at camps run by bin Ladin.
     Iran has pulled it's troops out of Lebanon, ending 15 years of military support to the area. Some in the intelligence community take this action to mean that Iran may be expecting US marines to move into the area in order to destroy some of the terrorist training camps there.
     This quiet withdrawal on the part of the normally boisterous Iran has the intelligence community thinking that Iran may be convinced that Uncle Sam is serious this time. If so, it is widely believed that the Iranians want to do all they can to avoid armed conflict with armed US soldiers.

Sunday October 20, 2001
Bare Bones Truth
About Anthrax & Smallpox Risks!
By Howard Hobbs, Ph.D. President
Valley Press Media Network.

    WASHINGTON -- Why is Anthrax a threat? Anthrax spores are the top choice in biological weapons for "germ warfare." Anthrax is effective as a biological weapon because: Anthrax is almost always fatal if not treated early.
     Spores can be produced in large quantities using only the basic knowledge of biology. Spores can be stored for decades without losing potency. Spores can be easily spread in the air by missiles, rockets, artillery, aerial bombs & sprayers.
     Everyone now knows there are potential adversaries developing it as a weapon. At least seven of our potential adversaries have worked to develop an offensive biological warfare capability using Anthrax. Iraq has admitted to producing and weaponizing anthrax. The Former Soviet Union produced hundreds of tons of weapons-grade anthrax spores.
     There is no indication of exposure. There is no cloud or color. There is no smell. There is no taste.
    In fact, there is no indication of an attack when dispersed by aerosol spray. Worst still, there is no effective treatment for unvaccinated victims of inhalational anthrax.
     Antibiotics will suppress infection only if administered early after exposure -- usually within the first 24 - 48 hours.
     By the time symptoms develop, it is highly likely death will occur despite the best efforts of modern medical science. 99% lethal to unprotected individuals.
    Even worse is the threat of a Smallpox weapn. Researchers at St. Louis University are now studying how to protect the population from a disease that had been wiped off the medical charts. Smallpox was declared eradicated from the world in 1980.
     The last known cases were isolated in 1977. Routine vaccinations ceased, and production of the vaccine was discontinued. But two decades later, researchers are interested in studying the deadly virus once again.
     Spurred by concerns of bioterrorism and biowarfare, scientists are researching how to multiply the remaining vaccine in case of an attack. "Russia and the United States have the virus," says Sharon Frey, MD, associate professor of internal medicine at the university.
     "The concern is that it might be in other countries that support bioterrorism." Anthrax and Smallpox are the leading potential agents of bioterrorism, says Frey, who specializes in infectious diseases.
     Only military personnel and those who work with the variola virus, which causes smallpox, are immune to the disease. Frey, who is leading the study, says that by diluting the vaccine, called Dryvax, she hopes to stretch the current supply by 10- to 100-fold. An estimated 15 million doses of the vaccine exist in the U.S., according to the CDC.
     "The population is 270 million," Frey tells WebMD. "Hardly would there be enough to immunize an entire nation." Last week, the CDC released a strategic plan to protect the country from attacks with biological agents such as smallpox.
     The plan calls for preparedness, planning, detection, and emergency response. Biological weapon programs have been discovered in Iraq and the former Soviet Union, the CDC reports.
     This threat calls for collaboration among health professionals, the creation of a diagnostic network, and the stockpiling of vaccines for agents like Smallpox that can be easily disseminated and cause high mortality rates, according to the agency.
     The government is working on a permanent solution, but in the interim Frey is preparing a temporary defense. "This is a stop-gap measure as we work on a new vaccine and get it manufactured," says Barbara Reynolds, CDC spokeswoman. "If a bioterrorist attack does occur, then we can mitigate the number of deaths or illnesses."
     As a once-common virus, smallpox killed about 20% of its victims. Survivors were permanently scarred, and some were blinded. Smallpox symptoms, including a high fever and pus-filled scabs, do not become apparent until about two weeks after the disease is contracted.
    Unlike Anthrax, Smallpox is contagious, allowing it to be passed easily through a simple sneeze, experts say.
     "It would continue to spread once in the environment.There is a potential for a large epidemic, even a pandemic," Frey told, reporters.

    [Editor's Note: Go to these links for more on Anthrax or on Smallpox risks.]

Thursday October 18, 2001
Germ Warfare
Back With Vengeance!
By Amy Williams, Staff Writer

    WASHINGTON --  In America's Secret War Against Biological Weapons, Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad of The New York Times uncover the truth about biological weapons and show why bio-warfare -- and bio-terrorism are fast becoming our worst national nightmare.
     Among the startling revelations is that the CIA secretly built and tested a model of a Soviet-designed germ bomb, alarming some officials who felt the work pushed to the limits of what is permitted by the global treaty banning germ arms. It is revealed that the Pentagon embarked on a secret effort to make Anthrax a weapons-grade option.
    The Soviet Union has a massive hidden program to produce biological weapons, including new charges that germs were tested on humans. Moscow's scientists made an untraceable germ that instructs the body to destroy itself.
     The Pentagon's chaotic efforts to improvise defenses against Iraq's biological weapons during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
    In a religious cult in Oregon in the 1980s an experiment went wrong and hundreds of Americans were made sick in a bio-terrorism attack that the government played down to avoid panic and copycat strikes. Plans by the U.S. military in the 1960s to attack Cuba with germ weapons.
    A small group of scientists and senior officials persuaded President Bill Clinton to launch a controversial multibillion-dollar program to detect a germ attack on U.S. soil and to aid its victims -- a program that, so far, has not provided any protection.
    Based on hundreds of interviews with scientists and senior officials, including President Clinton, as well as on recently declassified documents and on-site reporting from the former Soviet Union's sinister bio-weapons labs, the Book on Germs shows us bio-warriors past and present at work at their trade.
    There is the American scientist who devoted his professional life to perfecting biological weapons, and the Nobel laureate who helped pioneer the new biology of genetically modified germs and is now trying to stop its misuse.
     Most of today's Anthrax spores are the product of a former Soviet scientist who made enough plague, smallpox, and anthrax to kill everyone on Earth and whose expertise is now in great demand by terrorists, rogue states, and legitimate research labs alike.
    Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom have worked on Anthrax as an offensicve weapon for killing the enemy with the anthrax bacteria converted to dormant spores that resist heat, disinfectants, sunlight, and other environmental factors. These Anthrax spores, when  processed further, can be converted into deadly toxins that can be sprayed directly on enemies. The botulinum toxin paralyzes muscles, collapses the lungs. Death is instantaneous.

        [Editor's Note: Read about the New Germ Warfare in the stunning new book: Germs America's Secret War Against Biological Weapons By Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, William J. Broad.]

Tuesday, October 16, 2001
To Silence Dissent
Exert complete despotic control
shut down newspapers
disarm the citizen
then cancel elections?
By Andrew Ping, Staff Writer

   SACRAMENTO -- One of the first things the Taliban did when it took control of Afghanistan was disarm its people. The attempt wasn't entirely successful, of course, but leaders knew that the only way to exert complete despotic control was to disarm their citizens.
     You wouldn't think Governor Davis has much in common with the Taliban, but shockingly, he's working hard to disarm Californians.
     In a painfully short-sighted and misguided decision, Governor Davis signed a bill that will make it much harder for citizens of California to legally buy handguns.
     Melting any guns not on California's "safe list" this January wasn't enough. Now to own a gun, a written test will be required, a thumbprint taken, a "safety certificate" (at a cost of some $45) will be mandatory, and a potential gun owner will have to demonstrate to a "safety instructor" that they know how to operate a handgun.
     Will these legal hoops actually make it harder for criminals to obtain guns or keep us safer? These measures absolutely will not do anything but keep guns out of the hands of those who would use them responsibly.
     Let's face it, those who buy guns legally aren't the ones who use them criminally. One must already register a new gun at purchase, and pass a background check.
     People in their right minds don't then go out and use a weapon obtained in such a manner illegally. The hidden purpose of such legislation is to disarm citizens, to take from them arms and ordinance and then to subject them to the terrors of outlaws and whims of the state.
     Keeping guns out of the hands of citizens might be effective in a nation that imposed strict gun controls early, such as England or Canada. Even in these countries, however, criminals regularly obtain automatic weapons and use them.
     All of California's gun control hasn't stopped gangs from killing, criminals from terrorizing the innocent or our children from killing each other. The only thing that will stop that is the instruction of the public by responsible gun owners in gun safety.
     Children who know rules of safe handling of guns and have been taught proper respect for firearms don't kill other children in school. Adults who buy weapons legally and practice with them responsibly aren't the ones who misuse their guns.
     Those who use guns improperly are the ones who gain most of their experience with firearms from watching people use them irresponsibly on movie screens or get their instruction from other criminals.
     Perhaps, Governor Davis thinks he can do anything he likes if he disarms Californians. Has the Governor forgotten that the people still have the power to boot him out of the Governor's Mansion one way or the other?

Friday, October12, 2001
In these extraordinary times, extraordinary measures are needed!
By Dave Francis, Foreign Correspondent

   St. PETERSBURG  (Russia) -- There has been a lot of talk about how Americans should not take out their anger on Muslims living in America, that the average Muslim condemns the violence, and shouldn't be targeted by anyone as a scapegoat for what happened on Septermber 11th.
     That is all true, and it is a wonderful example of the American way of thought and life. It is one of the many examples of how American society is morally superior to the Taliban and their ilk.
     There is a problem though. Consider the report, coming out of New York. In Brooklyn, a high school freshman who recently immigrated from Pakistan was investigated by federal agents after his teacher reported that he had predicted the Trade Center's collapse a week before the towers were attacked.
     The student pointed out a third-story window of New Utrecht High School toward the Trade Center and said, "Do you see those two buildings? They won't be standing there next week," according to three police sources and a city official familiar with the investigation.
     They said the comment came in the midst of a heated political discussion the student was having with his teacher in an English class for Arab-American students.
     New York City Board of Education spokeswoman Catie Marshall confirmed that school officials reported the matter to police within minutes of the Sept. 11 attack.
     A veteran city police detective familiar with the case said investigators have been learning that many people in New York's Arab-American community had heard rumors about the Sept. 11 attacks before they occurred.
     The officer said the story "had been out on the street," and the number of leads turning up was so "overwhelming" that it was difficult to tell who had heard about the attacks from second-hand sources and who had heard it from someone who may have been a participant.
     For example, since Sept. 11, various leads have been investigated regarding Middle Eastern employees who may not have shown up for work at the World Trade Center that morning.
     One detective conducting such investigations in Brooklyn said they had become "a serious and major priority." The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Washington, D.C., said Brooklyn has the largest population of Arab-Americans in New York City.
     According to a federal indictment against bin Laden, FBI agents have linked the former Alkifah Refugee Center on Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue to the Saudi fugitive-exile's terrorist network, al-Qaida. " This is the kind of thing that is very disturbing.
     The Arab community in America needs to understand that the USA has a duty to protect its citizens, including those of Arab descent, and it may be necessary in a time like this to suffer some indignities brought on by racial profiling. We are living in extraordinary times, and extraordinary measures are needed.
     The Arab communities in the US need to help hunt down these terrorists and their support staff. It is time to say loud and clear to the Arab-Americans, "You share a large responsibility here. You are enjoying the fruits of America, it is time to fight for America. If not in Afghanistan, in Brooklyn, in Detroit, wherever you happen to live."

 [Editor's Note: The author of this column is an American journalist, living in St. Petersburg ,l Russia. His e-mail is Dave@Francisnet.com]          

Sunday, October 7, 2001
Rise like lions after slumber
in invanquishable number!
By Dave & Lena Francis, Foreign Correspondents

   St. PETERSBURG  (Russia) -- "Assignments where diarrhea is a way of life aren't high on the list for people. Most duty officers live in Virginia." Was the way one CIA official explained the lack of agents on the ground, in the region in and around Afghanistan.
     The fact that the intelligence community failed us all is obvious. What may not be obvious is why. The reasons, like the spy business is complicated.
     After Watergate, the US dismantled large parts of its spy networks, and made it more difficult to replace the ones leaving. American rules concerning who we would and wouldn't deal with had more to do with morals and principles and less to do with being effective.
     We made a determination to not deal with people who had a history of violence and of violating other peoples rights. In general, we wanted to go to war with Boy Scouts.
     Now don't get me wrong, I love the Boy Scouts, but there are times where something a little more earthy is needed.
     If you are going to go after terrorists and murderers, you are going to need to do business with some unsavory types of people. That is a decision we need to make.
     In the 70's, we made the decision to keep the high moral ground, and it has led to us being without an effective network to infiltrate and stop these kinds of terrorist threats. It is time to realize that it is a dangerous world out there, and we are a target to a hell of a lot of people.
      Some of the things we need to do may be morally repugnant, but ultimately, the most important job of a government, any government, is to provide for the security of it's citizens.
    According to published reports in Britain, in the spring of 1996, Sudan offered to serve us Osama bin Ladin's head on a platter. They were going to expel him, and offered to hand him over to Saudi Arabia, then we could take him from there.
     In a meeting in a closed hotel room in Arlington Virginia in March, the Clinton administration tried to find some legal way to grab bin Ladin and bring him back to the USA.
     At the time, the US had no case in the US on which to indict bin Ladin, and since we were unwilling to do anything shady, like liquidating him, he left Sudan 10 weeks after the Arlington meeting, on May 18th. He went to Afghanistan.
     He has wreaked extensive damage on America since that lost opportunity. The Sudanese offer all started on Feb 6, 1996 at the Khartoum residence of the Sudanese foreign minister, Ali Othman Taha.
     It was to be the last day of business for the American embassy there, and Ambassador Carney had come to say goodbye.
     American interests had suffered an upsurge in violent behavior at the hands of the Sudanese in recent past, including the CIA station chief, Paul Quaglia being attacked once with a knife, and once with a claw hammer.
     During the going away dinner, Mr Taha asked what Sudan could do to convince the US that it was serious about wanting to help fight terrorism, and get back on a good track with America, regarding the two countries quickly deteriorating relationship. Ambassador Carney remembers that Mr. Taha listened to a long list of complaints, without interrupting.
     Osama bin Ladin's expulsion was near the top of the list. The defense minister for Sudan, Major General Erwa came to Arlington and met Mr. Carney in a room at the Hyatt Arlington.
     The meeting was run by covert operations staff for the CIA's Africa division. Carney presented General Erwa with a document titled, "Measures Sudan Can Take To Improve Relations With The United States." On the document was a list where the US asked the government of Sudan to do 6 things. Second on the list was Osama bin Ladin. "Provide us with names, dates of arrival, departure, and destination and passport data on mujahidin that Osama bin Ladin has brought into Sudan." The document demanded. General Erwa offered to do us one better.
     He offered that Sudan would certainly keep close track of bin Ladin, but if that weren't enough, he offered to place him under arrest and hand him over. Different ideas were batted around, and eventually it was decided to try to convince the Saudis to take bin Ladin.
     It was remembered that after the bombing in Riyadh, the Saudis had quickly beheaded the four conspirators, and such a fate for bin Ladin would make everyone sleep a little better. Bin Ladin had issued a fatwa, or declaration of war against the ruling family of Saudi Arabia, so it was hoped that the Saudis would be willing to do in bin Ladin, in pursuit of their own interests.
     The Saudis in 1994 stripped bin Ladin of his citizenship, and had expelled him in 1991, but they demurred at the idea of jailing or executing him. The state department, it is reported, as usual didn't push the Saudis very hard. When the Saudi option was exhausted, the US just sent word to General Erwa to have him leave the country, but 'Just don't let him go to Somalia."
     Erwa said that Sudan offered to let bin Ladin go to Afghanistan, and the US agreed. Mr. Taha sent a fax to Ambassador Carney in Nairobi, informing him that Sudan was expelling bin Ladin, and Carney faxed back asking is bin Ladin would retain his assets he had in Sudan.
     No reply was forthcoming, and three days later, bin Ladin chartered a plane and left for Afghanistan. Intelligence sources indicate that bin Ladin has accessed his resources in Sudan. In 1999, it is now known that the Clinton administration trained a group of about 60 Pakistanis to go into Afghanistan, find and kill bin Ladin.
     The plan went astray when the government of Pakistan was toppled, and the current President of Pakistan, General Musharraf refused to go along.
     In other news: Crimean-Congo Hemorrhage Fever has broken out on the Pakistani-Afghan border. Pakistani health officials in Quetta have identified at least 75 cases of CCHF, and more are almost certainly out there. It is coming with the refugees from Afghanistan, and it is a mystery where they got this Ebola-type disease.
     Rumors abound about a bio-terror experiment in Afghanistan gone bad, and while that can't be confirmed, it is easy to verify that death from this disease is horrific.
     The victims 'melt before your eyes' as their blood vessels and veins deteriorate. It is highly contagious, and workers in the hospitals in the affected areas are required to wear full body bio-suits while in the ward with the patients.
     Garik Anovisian, an Armenian pilot close by saw it explode. A Russian airliner, with 77 passengers aboard, 51 of them Israeli citizens, was cruising 114 miles from the coastal city of Adler, near the Georgian/Russian border when the Tupolev 154 went up in flames before crashing into the sea.
     The flight, initiated in Israel, was bound for the Siberian city of Novosobirsk. Officials are tight lipped about the incident, but sources on the inside tell me that it was very likely that this plane was shot down with a missile, from the ground.
     They are not dismissing the idea that it was an accident, and the missile was a training missile, perhaps fired from Ukraine.  Officials there have said the missile could not have come from them.
     The flight number was, ironically 1812, a year famous in Russian history for the bitter battles with Napoleon, later memorialized in Tolstoy's epic, War and Peace. Israel has responded by banning all international carriers for the time being, as they investigate the tragedy.
     This is yet another in a strange wave of violence. We have had, in the last few days, an attempted hijacking in India, that later was described by Indian officials as an exercise.
     There was a terrible bombing in Kashmir, by Islamic radicals, the strange case of the Greyhound bus being attacked in Tennessee, by a man carrying a Croatian passport, and a few others.
     Has the second wave started, smaller, but more spread out? In addition to the above, we have seen others. In Israel, an Islamic radical, disguised as an Israeli soldier opened fire at a bus station in Afula Thursday, wounding 10 people and killing
     He was shot dead by Israeli police at the scene. Earlier, in Tolouse France, there was an explosion at a chemical plant, used to make fertilizer. It now appears that it was no accident.
     Among the 29 dead at the site was 35 year old Hassan Jandoubi, and his body was discovered wrapped in several layers of clothing, 'in the manner of a kamikaze fundamentalist' according to French sources. Jandoubi had been hired to work at the plant 5 days before the fatal explosion.
     Paris police say it took five days to get permission to search Jandoubi's apartment, and when they arrived, it had been thoroughly cleaned out. The world is waiting, but bin Ladin may not be.
     It was widely reported that when the Clinton administration fired cruise missiles at one of his camps in response to his acts of terror, the futility of the US attempt gave heart to the terrorists.
     Bin Ladin is telling anyone who will listen that America is afraid. Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban assured his countries army that "America will not come to Afghanistan. They are afraid to come here."
    
    [Editor's Note: The quotation was suggested by the authors: "Rise like lions after slumber in invanquishable number -- Shake your chains to earth like dew which in sleep had fallen on you -- ye are many -- they are few." Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). Dave is an American journalist, living in St. Petersburg with his wife, Lena. The author's e-mail is Dave@Francisnet.com]

Friday, September 21, 2001
Integrating Ethics into
Wharton's Undergraduate Curriculum
By Howard Hobbs Ph.D. President
Valley Press Media Network

    WASHINGTON - When the Wharton School implemented a new curriculum in the 1991-1992 academic year, the Ethics Program focused on incorporating ethics into a variety of courses central under the new requirements.
     A business ethics component was added to twelve courses in various disciplines including accounting, finance and marketing. The following excerpt is a summary from The Ethics Project Report produced by Wanda D. Foglia for the Wharton Ethics Program. "Students, educators, business leaders and the public agree that business education should cover business ethics.
     The Project on Integrating Ethics into the Wharton Undergraduate Curriculum contributes significantly to students' awareness, understanding, and ability to deal responsibly with ethical issues in business.
     In each of the participating courses, ethical issues are presented to students in one or two classes, or emphasized periodically throughout the semester along with regularly covered subject matter.
     The Ethics Project attempts to provide students with a comprehensive and varied experience with issues of fairness and social responsibility. With the options available under this curriculum there will not be uniform exposure to ethics, but the number of courses integrating ethics makes it likely that students will consider ethical issues in at least several courses while at Wharton.
     The variation in students' exposure is not problematic because the goal is to teach a general approach for handling ethical issues rather than a specific answer to particular ethical dilemmas. The Ethics Project does not guarantee that all Wharton graduates will behave ethically.
     Rather the goal is to teach an approach for handling ethical questions and to dispel a common attitude among business students that the bottom line is the only relevant consideration.
     The intellectual understanding of ethical obligations may not be sufficient to insure ethical behavior,but can be an important contributor to that goal. With the potential for exposure to ethics in nearly all their Business Fundamentals courses, many of their upper level courses, and in the courses they must take to fulfill the Social Environment bracket, Wharton students receive repeated and varied experience grappling with ethical questions in realistic contexts."

- Reprise -
October 4, 1921
Lest We Forget
The Declaration Of Independence
Translated into American Slang!
By H.L. Menken , Contributor

   WASHINGTON -- The following is my own translation, but I have had the aid of suggestions from various other scholars. On more than one occasion the American Legion has objected to The Declaration Of Independence being read before them.
     In one case they even tarred and feathered a gentleman who appeared there and read it out loud. What ailed them was that they could not understand its eighteenth century English.
     I make the suggestion that The Declaration of Independence be circulated among such patriotic men as the American Legion, translated into the language they use every day to prevent, or, at all events to diminish that sort of terrorism.
     Here's my translation of The Declaration of Independence into American slang:

1. When things get so balled up that the people of a country have to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are on the level, and not trying to put nothing over on nobody.
2. All we got to say on this proposition is this: first, you and me is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better; second, nobody ain’t got no right to take away none of our rights; third, every man has got a right to live, to come and go as he pleases, and to have a good time however he likes, so long as he don’t interfere with nobody else. That any government that don’t give a man these rights ain’t worth a damn; also, people ought to choose the kind of goverment they want themselves, and nobody else ought to have no say in the matter. That whenever any goverment don’t do this, then the people have got a right to can it and put in one that will take care of their interests. Of course, that don’t mean having a revolution every day like them South American coons and yellow-bellies and Bolsheviki, or every time some job-holder does something he ain’t got no business to do. It is better to stand a little graft, etc., than to have revolutions all the time, like them coons and Bolsheviki, and any man that wasn’t a anarchist or one of them I. W. W.’s would say the same. But when things get so bad that a man ain’t hardly got no rights at all no more, but you might almost call him a slave, then everybody ought to get together and throw the grafters out, and put in new ones who won’t carry on so high and steal so much, and then watch them. This is the proposition the people of these Colonies is up against, and they have got tired of it, and won’t stand it no more. The administration of the present King, George III, has been rotten from the start, and when anybody kicked about it he always tried to get away with it by strong-arm work.  Here is some of the rough stuff he has pulled.
     3. He vetoed bills in the Legislature that everybody was in favor of, and hardly nobody was against.
     4. He wouldn’t allow no law to be passed without it was first put up to him, and then he stuck it in his pocket and let on he forgot about it, and didn’t pay no attention to no kicks.
     5. When people went to work and gone to him and asked him to put through a law about this or that, he give them their choice: either they had to shut down the Legislature and let him pass it all by him-self, or they couldn’t have it at all.
     6. He made the Legislature meet at one-horse thank-towns out in the alfalfa belt, so that hardly nobody could get there and most of the leaders would stay home and let him go to work and do things as he pleased.
     7. He give the Legislature the air, and sent the members home every time they stood up to him and give him a call-down.
     8. When a Legislature was busted up he wouldn’t allow no new one to be elected, so that there wasn’t nobody left to run things, but anybody could walk in and do whatever they pleased.
     9. He tried to scare people outen moving into these States, and made it so hard for a wop or one of them poor kikes to get his papers that he would rather stay home and not try it, and then, when he come in, he wouldn’t let him have no land, and so he either went home again or never come.
     10. He monkeyed with the courts, and didn’t hire enough judges to do the work, and so a person had to wait so long for his case to come up that he got sick of waiting, and went home, and so never got what was coming to him.
     11. He got the judges under his thumb by turning them out when they done anything he didn’t like, or holding up their salaries, so that they had to cough up or not get no money.
     12. He made a lot of new jobs, and give them to loafers that nobody knowed nothing about, and the poor people had to pay the bill, whether they wanted to or not.
     13. Without no war going on, he kept an army loafing around the country, no matter how much people kicked about it.
     14. He let the army run things to suit theirself and never paid no attention whatsoever to nobody which didn’t wear no uniform.
     15. He let grafters run loose, from God knows where, and give them the say in everything, and let them put over such things as the following: 1
     16. Making poor people board and lodge a lot of soldiers they ain’t got no use for, and don’t want to see loafing around.
     17. When the soldiers kill a man, framing it up so that they would get off.
     18. Interfering with business.
     19. Making us pay taxes without asking us whether we thought the things we had to pay taxes for was something that was worth paying taxes for or not.
     20. When a man was arrested and asked for a jury trial, not letting him have no jury trial.
     21. Chasing men out of the country, without being guilty of nothing, and trying them somewheres else for what they done here.
     22. In countries that border on us, he put in bum goverments, and then tried to spread them out, so that by and by they would take in this country too, or make our own goverment as bum as they was. He never paid no attention whatever to the Constitution, but he went to work and repealed laws that everybody was satisfied with and hardly nobody was against, and tried to fix the goverment so that he could do whatever he pleased.
    23. He busted up the Legislatures and let on he could do all the work better by himself.
    24. Now he washes his hands of us and even declares war on us, so we don’t owe him nothing, and whatever authority he ever had he ain’t got no more.
    25. He has burned down towns, shot down people like dogs, and raised hell against us out on the ocean.
    26. He hired whole regiments of Dutch, etc., to fight us, and told them they could have anything they wanted if they could take it away from us, and sicked these Dutch, etc., on us without paying no attention whatever to international law.
    27. He grabbed our own people when he found them in ships on the ocean, and shoved guns into their hands, and made them fight against us, no matter how much they didn’t want to.
    28. He stirred up the Indians, and give them arms ammunition, and told them to go to it, and they have killed men, women and children, and don’t care which.
    29. Every time he has went to work and pulled any of these things, we have went to work and put in a kick, but every time we have went to work and put in a kick he has went to work and did it again.   When a man keeps on handing out such rough stuff all the time, all you can say is that he ain’t got no class and ain’t fitten to have no authority over people who have got any rights, and he ought to be kicked out.
    30. When we complained to the English we didn’t get no more satisfaction. Almost every day we warned them that the politicians over there was doing things to us that they didn’t have no right to do. We kept on reminding them who we were, and what we was doing here, and how we come to come here. We asked them to get us a square deal, and told them that if this thing kept on we’d have to do something about it and maybe they wouldn’t like it. But the more we talked, the more they didn’t pay no attention to us. Therefore, if they ain’t for us they must be agin us, and we are ready to give them the fight of their lives, or to shake hands when it is over.
   31. Therefore be it resolved, That we, the representatives of the people of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, hereby declare as follows:
     That the United States, which was the United Colonies in former times, is now free and independent, and ought to be;      that we have throwed out the English Kings and don’t want to have nothing to do with him no more, and are not in England no more;  that, being as we are now free and independent, we can do anything that free and independent parties can do, especially declare war, make peace, sign treaties, go into business, and we swear on the Bible on this proposition, one and all, and agree to stick to it no matter what happens, whether we win or we lose, and whether we get away with it or get the worst of it, no matter whether we lose all our property by it or even get hung for it!
      
     [Editor's Note: To read the full digital on-line text of H.L. Menken's book, go to The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States . This classic was written to clarify and to define what we call American English. This ground breaking study was undoubtedly the most scientific linguistic work on the American language ever written and continues to serve as a definitive resource in the field.]

History of English Pedigree in Antiquity

It is my belief that an interest in family origins is widespread and tending to increase among the peoples of English descent throughout the world, especially perhaps outside the mother country. Some will think this claim a paradox, others a truism, according to their experience. It cannot, probably, be either proved or disproved. But I think that my opinion will in the main be shared by those who are in one way or another targets of enquiry in these matters; the professional genealogists and record searchers; the staff of genealogical institutions and societies; the custodians of records connected with the subject; and the editors of genealogical publications. Most of these, I fancy, would agree that the volume of enquiry and the variety and geographical dispersion of those from whom it comes grow year by year.

To the genealogist this is not surprising. Curiosity about one's ancestors, a wish to know who and what and where they were, seems to him an obvious and elementary form of curiosity, which no one with a reasonably active all round interest in himself and the world about him is likely to lack, unless his circumstances or upbringing have smothered it. He would support this view by reference to history. In less sophisticated times and places it has often been thought a normal part of every child's education to teach him to recite his ancestors for several generations, while the genealogies of rulers, passed down by word of mouth, with or without biographical detail, are the backbone of the oldest historical traditions.

In a tribal organization society is held together by duties, rights and prohibitions attaching to blood relationship within the family, the kindred and the tribe or nation. In the periods of such organization, therefore, the general consciousness of kinship and descent is strong. The details of descent and relationship are in the forefront of consciousness and are passed down for generations. This way of life belongs to men whose wealth is in flocks and herds or to the wanderers by land or sea who live by preying on more settled peoples. When the tribes turn to agriculture and the life of cities, legal and economic ties tend slowly to replace the bond of kinship as the main cement of society.

Evidence of Anglo-Saxon concern with genealogy through the royal lines and some few others can be pieced together from scattered mentions in chronicles and charters.

In England after the Norman Conquest the legal aspect of pedigree had the preeminence for some centuries. This meant that the interest was in individual pedigrees for individual purposes. I know of no postConquest English collection of genealogies older than the fifteenth century. The historical use of pedigrees survived, however, in certain rolls in which the royal genealogy is made the basis of a short history of England. 2

A number of vellum rolls of this kind survive, of dates between Edward I's and Henry VII's reigns. Some are in French, as if for the use of knights and gentlemen, others in Latin as if for clerks. The pedigree form in which they are cast has itself an ancestry traceable to classical antiquity through the forms given to the Genealogy of Christ or Tree of Jesse and to the Table of Kindred and Affinity called the Arbor Juris. 3

From the start of the plea rolls in 1193 the many and lengthy statements of descent in lawsuits show the importance of genealogy in this context. Most such statements, naturally, cover three or four generations only. Some, however, cover five, six, seven or more, and are found occasionally throughout this period. 4
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1 W. G. Searle, Anglo-Saxon Bishops Kings and Nobles, 1899, pp. 251-5; K. Sisam, op. cit., p. 14, n. 1 supra.
2 Thomas Wright, Feudal Manuals of English History, 1872; Illustrated Catalogue of the Heralds of Commemorative Exhibition, 1484-1934, 1936, Nos. 65, 68, 113.
3 Arthur Watson, The Early Iconography of the Tree of Jesse, 1934, chap. iii.
4 See, for examples, Major-General the Hon. G. Wrottesley, Pedigrees from the Plea Rolls (reprinted from The Genealogist, N.S. v-xxi), pp. 6, 23, 48, 60-61, 86, 88, 475.
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This, in the earlier part of the period, means that the compilers were probably clerks and perhaps most often monks. The genealogies of the families of founders of monasteries, often found in cartularies, illustrate the nature of the monks' interest, as do such rare family chronicles as that of Wigmore kept by the monks of the Mortimers' foundation, Wigmore Abbey. 1

The original charters of benefactors, the copies entered in cartularies, chronicle entries, monumental inscriptions and oral tradition may all have helped the monks upon occasion to work out pedigrees retrospectively. For proof that they used documents to compile pedigrees in the fourteenth century we may quote the evidence given by two canons of Bridlington in the Scrope v. Grosvenor case in 1378. Asked if they had heard tell of the ancestors of Sir Richard Scrope, they said that their priory had possessions given them by his ancestors and produced charters sealed with great seals depicting knights on horseback with swords in their hands, such as 'those of the Conquest' used. The Scrope pedigree which they based on these, though open to criticism, is not wholly erroneous. 2

"Monkish genealogists, however, must not be trusted too far." Horace Round thought that the weakest point of Dugdale's Baronage was his acceptance of monastic statements as to the founder's family, which are, he believed, 'too often, the origin of persistent error and show the danger of departure from primary evidence as a source'. 3

A critical study of the nature, origin and worth of the pedigrees set up in lawsuits has still to be made. It would be of interest if we could show how and by whom these early pedigrees were put together. Many may rest on orally transmitted knowledge only, but it seems likely that some of the longer ones were even at this early date compiled from written evidence. The fifteenth century saw a marked development of antiquarian and topographical studies in England. Two men active in this movement who left manuscript works behind them were William Worcester alias Botoner ( 1415-82) of Bristol and Norfolk, gentleman, and John Rous of Warwick (c. 1425-91), chaplain of the Guy's Cliff chantry. Both were graduates of Oxford. Both wrote historical and topographical works. Both formed libraries. Worcester was Sir John Fastolf's secretary and man of business at Castle Combe in Wiltshire and Caister in Norfolk. Rous's patrons were the Beauchamp and Neville Earls of Warwick. 1
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1 Chicago University MS. CS 439 fM 82 W6, described by M. E. Griffin, "'A Wigmore Manuscript at the University of Chicago'", Nat. Lib. of Wales Journ., 1952.
2 The Scrope and Grosvenor Controversy, ed. Sir Harris Nicolas, i. 18, pp. 101-2; Complete Peerage, xi. 531.
3 Family Origins and other Studies by the late J. H. Round, ed. William Page, 1930, p. 7.
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Both made collections of genealogies. Worcester compiled a book on the ancient families of Norfolk. It has been lost, but extracts made from it by Sir Henry Spelman (d. 1641) show that it was substantial and important. 2

In it Worcester often noted his source of information, sometimes an individual informant, sometimes a chronicle, roll or record. His friend Nicholas Bocking, esquire, an estate official with access to financial records, and perhaps himself an antiquary, put his knowledge at Worcester's disposal, 3 and Worcester himself was sent by his master Fastolf on journeys to make genealogical researches in connection with property rights. 'Thus in May 1449 he rode out from London to various places in Somerset"ad inquirendum pro vera genealogia dominorum de Lovell & improbandum genealogiam uxoris Edwardi Hull militis".... Another journey into Kent was undertaken to test the pedigree of the Cliffords of Bobbing and their title to a rent charge in Hickling', and in 1458 we find him working on the De la Pole pedigree. 4

A recent study by Mr. P. S. Lewis shows that others besides Worcester worked for Fastolf on the pedigree of Lovell of Clevedon, Somerset, to support his right to the manor of Titchwell, Norfolk, against the claim of Sir Edward Hull. Among them were several clerks in the Chancery and Exchequer records, who received fees for searching these, John Crop of Bristol, a friend of William Worcester, and Henry Filongley, a kinsman of Fastolf and keeper of the writs of the Court of Common Pleas. Local records were sought for, but when these failed recourse was had, on what appear sound lines, to old men's memories. The conflict of evidence in this case throws an interesting light on the nature of early lawsuit pedigrees in general. 5

John Rous's collection of more than fifty genealogies is inscribed in a minute hand here and there on the face and in a series on the dorse of the Latin version of his great pictorial roll of the Earls of Warwick,
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1 See K. B. McFarlane, "'William Worcester, A Preliminary Survey'", in Studies presented to Sir Hilary Jenkinson, ed. J. Conway Davies, 1957, pp. 196-221, and T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity, 1950, chap. ii.
2 McFarlane, op. cit., pp. 216-17; Spelman's extracts are in Norwich Public Library MS. 7197, ff. 297-9 b and 304-21. The original appears to have belonged in 1674 to Edward Paston; see Norfolk Archaeology, iv. 4.
3 Op. cit., p. 199, and letter from Mr. McFarlane.
4 Op. cit., pp. 204-5.
5 P. S. Lewis, "'Sir John Fastolf's Lawsuit over Titchwell 1448-55'", The Historical Journal, i, 1958, pp. 1-20.
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compiled about 1480 and now in the College of Arms. 1 Those on the face give the ancestry on male and female lines of the Kings and the Earls of Warwick, whose lives he narrates and whose arms and portraits he draws. Those on the dorse are more extensive pedigrees of the Kings of Britain, France, England and Scotland and of the English earls. The last is of his own family.
He notes that he saw and wrote down two genealogies of the British kings at Glastonbury. Chronicles and monastic genealogies were no doubt among his sources. He was not uncritical, expressing suspicion of a genealogy of the Lords of Arundel and compiling dated lists of the popes and the Bishops of Worcester for use in the scrutiny of evidence. His genealogies have yet to be studied in detail, but it may be said that while they embody some mythology and some error they are, considering their date and extent, remarkably sound.
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We do not know when the heralds first interested themselves in genealogy. They were, however, concerned with coat armour from the twelfth century and made records of it from the fourteenth if not the thirteenth. Since a right to arms had often to be proved by pedigree (witness the testimony in Scrope v. Grosvenor), a concern with the one was bound to lead in time to the other. I have, however, found no evidence that this actually happened before the fifteenth century. In 1415 the new office of Garter King of Arms was created and William Bruges (d. 1450), who was appointed to it, seems to have set to work to honour the Order and Knights of the Garter by setting up a new series of enamelled stall plates of their arms at Windsor to replace those which had been lost. He also put in hand a painted record of the arms of all the knights from the foundation of the order in the 1340's down to his own day. 2 This must have involved him in research to identify former knights.

In 1448 Sir Richard Wydville, who had risen from comparative obscurity in the king's service after marrying the widowed Duchess of Bedford, was created Lord Rivers. The editors of the Complete Peerage could not explain this choice of title, but the heraldic evidence of Lord Rivers' Garter stall plate leaves little doubt that it refers to a claim to descent from the family of Reviers or Rivers, Earls of Devon in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. 1 The pedigree must in that case have been examined, if not produced, by Garter King of Arms. Pollard's theory of a link between the development of heraldry and of a hereditary House of Lords is relevant here. 2
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1 A. R. Wagner, A Catalogue of English Mediaeval Rolls of Arms, 1950, pp. 116-18.
2 St. W. H. John Hope, The Stall Plates of the Knights of the Garter, 1348-1485, 1901; A. R. Wagner, A Catalogue of English Mediaeval Rolls of Arms, 1950, pp. 83-86.
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The oldest books of pedigree which are known to be the work of heralds date from about 1480. William Ballard, March King of Arms c. 1475-c. 1490, made a Visitation of Cheshire and recorded brief genealogies as well as arms. 3 Much more interesting and important is a collection of pedigrees of northern families compiled between about 1480 and 1500, and for the most part before 1490. This was edited in 1930 by Mr. C. H. Hunter Blair from a sixteenth and a seventeenth century copy. 4

In 1935 I found an earlier sixteenth century copy in the College of Arms and I have since acquired a copy in what appears to be a late fifteenth century hand, which may either be the original or an early copy. The hand closely resembles one associated elsewhere with Sir Thomas Wriothesley, while later in this and in a companion volume are pedigrees in a hand which is either his or that of an amanuensis much employed by him. I have suggested elsewhere that the collection might be the work of Christopher Carlisle, Norroy King of Arms 1494-1510, but I am now inclined to place its compilation earlier than his term of office, while associations of my 'original' with Sir Thomas Wriothesley discount the argument from the association of the college copy with Carlisle's nephew Barker. I now therefore incline to attribute the compilation either to John Writhe (d. 1504), who may have begun it when he was Norroy ( 1477-8) and continued it as Garter, 5 or to his son and successor Sir Thomas Wriothesley (d. 1534). Mr. Hunter Blair has pointed out the similarity of this collection to another attributed to Wriothesley. 6

Some of the pedigrees in this collection are short and probably based on family knowledge, since children of sisters and personal details are given. Others, however, such as those of Percy, Neville and Fitzwilliam, go back to remote dates and must rest on either research or invention. Research is suggested by occasional marginal notes (e.g. to Neville) apparently from chronicles or charters, but the beginning of the Fitzwilliam pedigree is myth.

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1 Complete Peerage, xi. 20 n. (d); Notes & Queries, 15th ser. xxviii. 511-12; Hope, op. cit., pl. lx.
2 p. 95.
3 Coll. Arm. MS. M. 3; see A. R. Wagner, Catalogue of English Mediaeval Rolls of Arms, pp. 111-16, and Heralds and Heraldry in the Middle Ages, pp. 107-9.
4 Surtees Soc. cxliv.
5 A. R. Wagner, Heralds and Heraldry in the Middle Ages, pp. 106-7.
6 Op. cit., p. xii; the Wriothesley collection is Add. MS. 5530.

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The making of false pedigrees is an immemorial vice, practised in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times alike, but the age of Elizabeth I has a specially bad name for such activities. The rise of so many new families to wealth and station in a society where the prestige of ancient blood was great combined with a growing but as yet ill educated zeal for the study of English antiquities to produce a market for deplorable concoctions as well as for genuine research. The same pedigree craze which produced the fictions helped, however, to stimulate the great movement of scholarship which culminated in the work of Dugdale (d. 1686). 1

J. Horace Round ( 1854-1928), 2 the great genealogical critic, divided the bulk of spurious pedigrees into four classes, 'those that rested on garbled versions of perfectly genuine documents, such as Philpot the herald was an adept at constructing, those which rested on alleged transcripts of wholly imaginary documents, those which rested on actual forgeries expressly concocted for the purpose, and lastly those which rested on nothing but sheer fantastic fiction'. 3

Besides these four classes there are pedigrees whose errors rest on a strained or erroneous but not dishonest interpretation of genuine evidence. Parallel with this variety of method we have a variety of motive. Not all makers of false pedigrees are merely venal. Some, indeed, are not venal at all but simply have too much imagination and too little critical sense. They think they know what the truth must be; they use such evidence as they can; and then they let fancy take wing. Before we smile too broadly we ought to recall the credit still accorded to imaginative exercises in some other fields of scholarship. We may ask ourselves, for example, whether pre-history is or is not history.

The line between self deception and conscious fraud in genealogy is hard to draw. What is one to make of learned and critical genealogists who concoct false pedigrees for themselves simply or mainly for their private satisfaction? Sir Edward Dering (d. 1644), who made himself a Saxon pedigree, inserted the name and arms of a fictitious ancestor into ancient rolls of arms which he possessed and set up pseudo-ancestral brasses in Pluckley church, was a scholar and associate of scholars. 1
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1 pp. 320-2.
2 pp. 342-4.
3 Family Origins and other Studies by the late J. Horace Round, ed. William Page, 1930, pp. 170-1. Round's condemnation of Philpot has been questioned.
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The learned Sir Egerton Brydges (d. 1837), to support whose baseless claim to the barony of Chandos parish registers were tampered with, 2 presumably by him or at his instance, so resented its rejection that for thirty years he did not cease from bitter and public complaint. Furthermore he undertook the immense labour of editing a valuable and scholarly nine volume peerage 3 'in order that a few of its pages might transmit a record of his family wrongs to posterity'.

A victim of the same disease in still stranger form was George Harrison ( 1817-90), who latterly called himself Marshal-General George Henry de Strabolgie Neville Plantagenet-Harrison. In his early years he served with distinction as a soldier in several South American armies, in Denmark, and in Germany, his rank of marshal-general being in the army of 'God and Liberty' of Corrientes in the Argentine Republic.

He then settled in England and devoted himself to research, but from 1850 was forbidden access to the British Museum, according to his own account, 'because he claimed to be Duke of Lancaster'. In 1858 he unsuccessfully petitioned for a summons to the House of Lords as Duke of Lancaster, 'as heir of the whole blood of King Henry VI'. In 1861 he was declared bankrupt and confined in the Queen's Bench prison.

Soon after this he started upon a course of research in the Public Record Office which he continued for the rest of his life, devoting himself 'with incredible industry to the task of extracting from the voluminous and hitherto totally unindexed Rolls of the Queen's Bench and Common Pleas all entries relating to the transfer of land or containing any materials for family history from the reign of Richard I to that of James I'. The best witness to the value of this work is the fact that the thirty folio volumes which it filled were bought after his death for the Public Record Office and are kept there on the open shelves for the use of students.

In 1879 General Plantagenet-Harrison published the only volume to appear of a great projected History of Yorkshire. This is a large folio of nearly 600 pages dealing with the Wapentake of Gilling West. It contains a great number of pedigrees and much genealogical matter very useful if used with sufficient caution. According to Paley Baildon, whose opinion may be accepted, 'the persons composing the pedigrees as a rule may be accepted as having actually existed, but in his affiliations he is very untrustworthy, not scrupling to make John the son of Thomas without a tittle of evidence to support the alleged descent'.
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1 J. Horace Round, Peerage and Pedigree, 1910, ii. 111-17; A. R. Wagner, Catalogue of English Mediaeval Rolls of Arms, p. 141.
2 G. F. Beltz, A Review of the Chandos Peerage Case, 1834.
3 Collins's Peerage of England; genealogical, biographical, and historical, greatly augmented and continued to the present time, by Sir Egerton K.J Brydges., 1812; his account of the barony of Chandos and his claim to it is in vi. 704-40.

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To the work is prefixed a marvellous pedigree of the author, deriving him in the male line from Odin (with a note that 'all his ancestors in the direct male line stood upwards of seventy-five inches in stature') and making him by an unproved female descent the heir of one of the coheirs of Charles Neville, Earl of Westmorland (d. 1601), who was the representative in blood of Elizabeth, Duchess of Exeter, sister of King Henry IV. 1 Baildon asked him how he reconciled his own claim to the dukedom of Lancaster with the fact that, according to his own pedigrees, he had, when he published them, an elder brother living. 'Oh', said the general contemptuously, and with delightful irrelevance, 'he was a d----d fool!' The one genuine great distinction of his pedigree the general leaves unstressed, namely that his greatgrandfather was first cousin to Dr. Johnson. 2

Still more modern examples of this sort of aberration are known to genealogists and it is evidently not uncommon. My own experience leads me to believe that there are genealogists who would never fake a pedigree for money, but cannot resist this curious form of selfdeception and glorification. The point is of some importance in relation to the notable early Tudor figure mentioned earlier, Sir Thomas Wriothesley (d. 1534), Garter King of Arms.

Wriothesley was the son and successor of John Writhe (d. 1504), Garter, and probably the grandson of William Writhe, burgess for Cricklade in the Parliament of 1450-1. John Writhe began and his son continued on a much larger scale a remarkable and extensive work of heraldic codification and both seem to have been active genealogists, differing in this from most of the heralds of their day. Thomas Writhe, as he then was, soon after his father's death and his own appointment as Garter, disliking his monosyllabic surname began experimenting with improvements and after trying Wrye, Wryst, Wreseley, Writhesley and Wrotesley, at length settled on Wriothesley, a form which he then applied retrospectively to his father and in pedigrees to his ancestors. 3 Apart from this small absurdity I have found nothing
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1 The issue of the coheir in question is generally supposed to be extinct; see Burke Vicissitudes of Families, i. 24.
2 Aleyn Lyell Reade, The Reades of Blackwood Hill, 1906, pp. 177-85; The History of Yorkshire by Marshal-General Plantagenet-Harrison, H.K.G. i, 1879, after p. xiii. See Table III <7677245>.
3 Anstis, Register of the Garter, ii. 155, 369-70.

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impossible in such Wriothesley pedigrees as I have seen and nothing to suggest that Wriothesley made any claim to descent from the ancient Staffordshire family of Wrottesley. However, the historian of this family, Major-General the Hon. George Wrottesley (d. 1909), a genealogist who did much admirable work, incensed at the theft or near-theft of his surname, without quoting any other evidence, goes so far as to say that Wriothesley 'for the forgery and the falsification of documents...stands pre-eminent even amongst the Tudor Heralds'. 1

Evidence for this accusation may exist, though I have not found it. The point I wish, however, to make here is that forgery or concoction of his own pedigree would not in itself prove Wriothesley venal or even uncritical in relation to those of others. The only fictitious pedigree at present known to me which appears in Wriothesley's collections 2 and seems to me likely to have originated with him is that of Cavendish. Round, who discussed it, 3 did not know that it went back so far and thus missed the pleasure of blaming a herald for it. The position of the heralds in relation to the fictitious pedigrees of this epoch is a vexed question which we must try to put in perspective.

Round speaks of 'subservient heralds' of Tudor days 'who "found" pedigrees with equal readiness for their sovereign, their clients and themselves'. 4 This judgment lumps together the learned and the ignorant, the honest and the unscrupulous, and suggests, if it does not state, that in a general scramble to fudge pedigrees the heralds set the pace. The truth, I think, was otherwise. Though I have indicated that as far back as the middle fifteenth century some heralds were occasionally concerned with genealogy, I do not believe that it much concerned most of them till well into the reign of Elizabeth I.

Their principal occupations before that time were journeys on official business at home and abroad, the marshalling of tournaments, court ceremonies and the funerals of the nobility and gentry, and in the last connection and generally the superintendence, record and production of armorial bearings. The Visitations made under the Royal Commission of 1530 started the change of emphasis, but most of the pedigrees then entered,
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1 Maj.-Gen. the Hon. Geo. Wrottesley, 'A History of the family of Wrottesley of Wrottesley, Co. Stafford', 1903, Wm. Salt Soc., N.S. vi, pt. ii, pp. 276-7.
2 Brit. Mus. MS. Harl. 1417, fo. 88b.
3 Family Origins, pp. 22-32.
4 The Ancestor, iii 1902, p. 14.

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other than those of well known ancient families, were short, simple and doubtless based on family information. The Elizabethan phase begins in the 1560's when William Hervy (d. 1566), Clarenceux, and William Flower (d. 1588), Norroy, began a fresh cycle of Visitation on an altogether ampler scale. 1

Among the pedigrees submitted to the heralds and in some instances accepted by them in these and following years were a certain number of fabrications of all the types distinguished by Round. 2 The heralds of the first part of Elizabeth's reign were doubtless chosen for quite other qualities than skill in genealogy. But in any case a critical science of genealogy did not yet exist and only now began to develop.

By 1581 the need for a new type of herald was beginning to be felt for in that year Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (d. 1588), wrote to the Earl Marshal, whose deputy he was, recommending one Humphrey Hales for the vacant post of Bluemantle Pursuivant, as 'an honest gentleman ...altogether given to matters of pedigrees, and very well seen in them already. He doth draw and paint excellently well, as may appear by a thing done for your Lordship by him. He is properly studied in the law, but his chief and whole study is this service.' He adds 'that there is nothing more honourable for you, nor more profitable to the nobility, than to see fit men placed in these offices, especially the pursuivants'. 3 I suspect that skill in pedigrees was apt at this date to mean skill in setting them out.

Robert Cooke (d. 1592), Clarenceux, was a skilful genealogist in this sense. He was a neat penman and herald painter, a man of great energy and an enthusiastic collector of pedigrees. Sir Thomas Kendrick praises his church notes, made as early as 1569, including drawings of mediaeval monuments. 4 But his education was not academic and he had, it seems, little or no critical sense. He thus accepted at his Visitations and signed at other times a number of fictitious pedigrees. He is said to have begun as servant to Sir Edmund Brudenell (d. 1585), a Northamptonshire country gentleman who had inherited a love of pedigrees, heraldry and antiquities from his father Sir Thomas (d. 1549). This latter had entertained John Leland (d. 1552), the famous antiquary, more than once at his house at Deene and had shown him a roll of Henry VII's descent from the Welsh princes and other pedigrees and
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1 See p. 293 and Wagner, Records and Collections of the College of Arms, pp. 15-18 and 55-84.
2 p. 310.
3 Anstis, MS. Officers of Arms, ii. 409-11, quoting his MS. G. 5, fo. 90.
4 T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity, 1950, p. 156.

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had quoted to him 'an old record of the King's'. 1 We have seen 2 that there had been antiquarian country gentlemen since the fifteenth century at least. An able young man growing up in such a household and imbibing at the same time manners and a taste for antiquities might seem well qualified for a herald's post.

The construction of fictitious documents for genealogical or other purposes was nothing new in the sixteenth century. Professor Galbraith tells us, indeed, 'that the twelfth century was the golden age of forgery', 3 though the purpose then was to secure titles to land. The descent of the Pastons from a fictitious Wulstan Paston who 'came out of France...three years after the Conquest' may have been concocted as early as the fifteenth century and charters from the reign of Henry II forged to support it. 4 It is said to have been included in William Worcester's book of Norfolk families. 5 Since, however, that book was later in Paston ownership the pedigree might have been interpolated then. What is certain is that it was compiled before Hervy's Norfolk Visitation in 1563 at which it was entered.

I know of no early case where the authorship of such forgeries has been established. A notable sequence of forged charters carrying back the ancestry of the Lamberts of Skipton, Yorkshire, to Lambert, Count of Louvain (d. 1004), imposed on more than one worthy king of arms in the reign of James I. 6 What looks like such another sequence, carrying back the Mildmays, who were yeomen under Henry VIII, to twelfth century knights, was accepted by Clarenceux Cooke in 1583. 7 But in such instances the heralds' fault would seem to have been simply a lack of knowledge which few, if any, at that time possessed.

Far more serious are such accusations as Round made against Cooke's successor, Richard Lee (d. 1597), Clarenceux, in relation to the fictitious pedigree deriving the Spencers from the mediaeval Despencers. 'He took from the records', says Round, ' Spencers and Despencers wherever he could lay hands on them, fitted them together
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1 Joan Wake, The Brudenells of Deene, 1953, pp. 46, 67, quoting J. Leland, Itinerary, ed. L. Toulmin Smith, 1907.
2 p. 306.
3 V. H. Galbraith, Studies in the Public Records, 1948, p. 49.
4 'Account of a MS. Genealogy of the Paston Family', by Francis Worship, Norfolk Archaeology, iv, 1855, pp. 1-55; Walter Rye, Norfolk Families, 1913, pp. 647-54. Mr. K. B. McFarlane, whose researches should in due course settle the point is disposed to think the fifteenth century disparagements of the Paston ancestry ( The Paston Letters, A.D. 1422-1509, ed. James Gairdner, 1904, i. 28-29; iv. 181, 246-9) greatly exaggerated, if not pure malice.
5 p. 307.
6 The Ancestor, iii. 24-32.
7 J. H. Round, Family Origins, pp. 60-72.

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in one pedigree at his own sweet will, rammed into his composition several distinct families, and then boldly certified the whole as gospel truth.' 1 Lee's own colleagues accused him of venality but also of ignorance, so perhaps he may only have put his name here to some other man's ingenious concoction. In 1595 Sir William Dethick (d. 1612), Garter, a better antiquary than Lee, did not hesitate to defend himself against an accusation of propounding a false pedigree by saying that it was only according to the proofs shown him by the claimant, whose responsibility it was to defend these. 2

It was at this period that Robert Glover, who entered the College of Arms as Portcullis Pursuivant in 1567, began to lay the foundations of critical genealogy. He became Somerset Herald in 1570 and in the same year was deputed by his father in law William Flower (d. 1588), Norroy, to make Visitation in the north of England on his behalf. 3

His death at the age of forty four in 1588 cut short a career which had already set a mark upon historical scholarship. Glover's work has yet to be fully studied and assessed, but the volumes of his manuscript collections and especially the books of his Visitations of Cheshire 1580, Staffordshire 1583, and Yorkshire 1584-5, attest his grasp of the great principle that pedigrees should, if possible, be founded upon record evidence. Copies of family charters and extracts from the public records were entered by him for their evidential value.

Mr. Godfrey Davis notes that heralds such as Glover and Ralph Brooke (d. 1625) were the first to make antiquarian extracts from the monastic cartularies. 4 Round justly regards it as a testimony to the care and faithfulness of Glover's work that he was the only herald whose manuscript collections Dugdale used and used largely. 5

The great antiquary William Camden (d. 1623), who was brought into the College of Arms as Clarenceux in 1597 as part of a general reform, was less a genealogist than a local historian and archaeologist. His literary controversy with Ralph Brooke (d. 1625), York Herald, which Sir Thomas Kendrick commends as an early application of the scientific spirit to archaeology, 6 was little concerned with pedigree. It led on, however, to an epoch making genealogical controversy, for when in 1619 Brooke in his Catalogue of Nobility made a fresh attack
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1 J. Horace Round, Studies in Peerage and Family History, 1901, pp. 307-8.
2 Arthur Collins, Proceedings, Precedents and Arguments on Claims and Controversies concerning Baronies by Writ, and other Honours, 1734, pp. 141-7.
3 Wagner, Records and Collections of the College of Arms, p. 80.
4 G. R. C. Davis, Medieval Cartularies of Great Britain, 1958, p. xv.
5 Family Origins, p. 6.
6 British Antiquity, pp. 152-5.

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on Camden, the latter found a champion in his pupil and admirer Augustine Vincent (d. 1626), Rouge Croix Pursuivant, who attacked Brooke with criticisms of his genealogies. Vincent, who had been appointed Rouge Rose Pursuivant Extraordinary in 1616 and had come into the College of Arms as Rouge Croix in 1621, brought to it a new kind of learning cardinal to the development of critical genealogy, namely a close working knowledge of the mediaeval public records.

This knowledge he had acquired as a clerk in the Tower Record Office 1 under Sir John Borough (d. 1643) who himself came into the college as Norroy in 1623 and was later Garter. Historical genealogy in the Tower Record Office goes back to William Bowyer, Keeper there, who made Lord Treasurer Winchester a pedigree of his family from the records before 1567.

Winchester wrote to Cecil that he had desired Leicester to show this to him and to the queen 'that his service may be known, whereof will grow great reformation amongst the heralds, that maketh their books at a venture and not by the records'. 2 Vincent's manuscript collections now in the College of Arms include more than thirty volumes of extracts from the Public Records both in the Tower and elsewhere, for the most part from the Patent Rolls, Close Rolls, Inquisitions, Pleas and Fines. Upon these he bases many pedigrees in his other manuscript volumes and he often refers to the records in his controversy with Brooke.

In reply to Brooke's claim that his own library was better furnished than the College of Arms he asks if it be 'better furnished with ancient and authentic records than the office at the Tower' and remarks that 'experience cannot make you skilful in records unless you came where they were (which is not commonly in Painters' shops) 3 and come fitly prepared and qualified by your breeding to understand the language they speak'. 4 It would have been difficult for Brooke to gain access to those records, if he had wished -- and had been capable of understanding them. 5 Vincent, in Dugdale's words, 'had no small advantage by his free access to the Publick Records in the Tower of London, being then a Clerk in that Office'. 6 Glover had understood
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1 See p. 295; Anstis MS. Officers of Arms, ii. 639; Nicholas Harris Nicolas, Memoir of Augustine Vincent, Windsor Herald, 1827.
2 Professor R. B. Wernham, 'The Public Records in the 16th and 17th centuries', in English Scholarship in the 16th and 17th Centuries, ed. L. Fox, 1956, pp. 17-18, quoting State Papers, Domestic, Elizabeth, No. xlii, fo. 101.
3 Brooke had started as a herald painter.
4 Augustine Vincent, A Discoverie of Errours in the first Edition of the Catalogue of Nobility Published by Raphe Brooke, York Herald, &c., 1622.
5 Cf. p. 295.
6 Baronage, i, Preface.

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the value of record evidence, but his use of it seems to have been mainly confined to charters in private hands. Vincent's use of the public records was thus a landmark in the history of genealogy.

The demand for pedigrees under Elizabeth I had come, at least in the main, from men who would not, even if they had wished, have known how to apply critical canons to the concocted pedigrees too often furnished them. Between Glover's day and Vincent's, however, antiquarian studies had moved forward with rapid strides and pedigrees were now studied and scrutinized by an appreciable group of capable and disinterested scholars.

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A focus for the serious study of English antiquities was provided by the formation about 1586 of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries. 1 Its debates and papers were concerned with such general questions as the antiquity of titles of nobility, castles, cities, parishes, shires, coinage, armorial bearings and the like.

But its members included heralds such as Camden, Dethick and Thynne, amateurs of heraldry such as Joseph Holland and James Strangman, official keepers of records such as Arthur Agarde, Michael Heneage, and a Mr. Bowyer, who may have been William Bowyer, Keeper of the Tower Records, c. 1564-7, or Robert Bowyer, Keeper of the Chancery Records in 1604, 2 local historians like Richard Carew, Sampson Erdeswicke, William Lambarde and John Stow, and scholars like Sir Robert Cotton and Sir Henry Spelman whose wide ranging interests and manuscript collections comprised genealogy besides much else. 3

The county histories begin with William Lambarde (d. 1601) Perambulation of Kent printed in 1576. Not all their authors were interested in genealogy. 4 The works of some, like Richard Carew Survey of Cornwall ( 1602), were more descriptive than historical. But wherever manorial history was made the basis, as more and more it was, genealogy and documentation came into the picture. Sampson
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1 Joan Evans, A History of the Society of Antiquaries, 1956, p. 10.
2 English Historical Scholarship in the 16th and 17th Centuries, ed. L. Fox, 1956, pp. 17-18.
3 Hearne's Curious Discourses, 1765 ed. ii. 421-49.
4 For general accounts of the Elizabethan and early Stuart antiquarian movement see Robin Flower, 'Lawrence Nowell and the Discovery of England in Tudor Times', Proc. Brit. Academy, xxi. 5-73; T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity, 1950, pp. 156-67; A. L. Rowse, The England of Elizabeth, 1951, chap. ii; Philip Styles, Sir Simon Archer 1581-1662, Dugdale Soc. Occasional Papers, No. 6, 1946; C. E. Wright, 'Sir Edward Dering...', in C. Fox and B. Dickins, H. M. Chadwick Memorial Studies, 1950, pp. 371-93. C. E. Wright, 'The Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries and the Formation of the Cottonian Library', in The English Library before 1700, ed. F. Wormald, 1958.

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Erdeswicke (d. 1603), whose Survey of Staffordshire, begun about 1593, was circulated in manuscript but not printed till 1817, and William Burton (d. 1645), whose Description of Leicestershire appeared in 1622, were keen if not very critical genealogists, Sir William Pole (d. 1635), whose Description of Devonshire was not printed till 1791, made immense manuscript collections including copies of the charters in the muniment rooms of the Devon gentry.

Thomas Jekyll (d. 1653) made collections for a never accomplished history of Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, which later writers built upon. Sir Simon Archer (d. 1662) made collections for a Warwickshire history, Roger Dodsworth (d. 1654) for a Yorkshire history, a baronage, and a corpus of monastic charters, Augustine Vincent (d. 1626) for a history of Northamptonshire, and Thomas Habington (d. 1647) for a history of Worcestershire. John Smyth (d. 1640) of Nibley, Gloucestershire, steward of the Berkeley family, wrote their history and genealogy 'in an Historical way', which Dugdale heartily wished might be 'a Pattern for some others to follow: it being faithfully extracted, partly out of Publick Records, and partly from the great mass of ancient Charters, and other Memorials still remaining in Berkeley Castle'. 1

The surviving manuscripts of such old antiquaries as these, now scattered through many libraries, but especially the British Museum Manuscript Department, the Bodleian at Oxford and the College of Arms, can give much help to the genealogist today if he has opportunity and patience to seek them out, for in them are transcripts of many documents which have perished and references to many still existing which otherwise he might never find. Their inferences from the documents are naturally not always acceptable. Some of them went on the principle of using the documentary evidence so far as it would take them and then -- like some modern writers -- filling the gaps with their imaginations.

By the early 1600's there was thus a network of antiquaries spread through the country, with a scholarly approach to documents helped by legal training and an ardour for genealogies in relation at once to local history, family history and the safeguarding of rights of property. The career of Roger Dodsworth (d. 1654), one of the most distinguished of these scholars, illustrates their activities and the links which bound them together. His father was chancellor to successive
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1 Baronage, i, Preface; The Lives of the Berkeleys by John Smyth of Nibley, ed. Sir John Maclean , 3 vols. 1893; E. A. L. Moir, 'The Historians of Gloucestershire', in Gloucestershire Studies, ed. H. P. R. Finberg, 1957, pp. 268-71.

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Archbishops of York, so that he was probably familiar with records from childhood. 1 He was working at pedigrees and making notes in Yorkshire churches before he was twenty. By 1618 he was in London working in the great collection of manuscripts formed by Sir Robert Cotton, noting especially monastic charters and material of all kinds bearing on Yorkshire. Later he worked in many private libraries and muniment rooms and on the public records in the Tower and at Westminster. His manuscripts now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, fill 161 volumes and the accuracy of his transcription of old records is considered outstanding. He projected three great works, a collection of monastic charters or Monasticon, a baronage of England, and a history of Yorkshire. He completed none of them, however, and his materials were used by other men.
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Far the most effective of these was Sir William Dugdale ( 1605-86), a Warwickshire gentleman, whom his elder neighbour Sir Simon Archer (d. 1662) had encouraged in a taste for antiquities and introduced to many who shared it, both locally and on a visit to London in 1635. Among the scholars whom Dugdale met in London was the venerable Sir Henry Spelman, through whose good offices he was in time appointed an officer of the College of Arms. 2

Spelman also urged him to collaborate with Dodsworth to produce a Monasticon Anglicanum. This appeared after Dodsworth's death and it has been said that Dugdale's share in the work was less than he appeared to claim. 3 We are not here concerned with this, for though the Monasticon is a great storehouse of raw material for the genealogist, it is not a work of genealogy. On the other hand, Dugdale other great works, The Antiquities of Warwickshire ( 1656) and The Baronage of England ( 1675-6), are contributions of the first importance to genealogical literature. For the former his sole credit is undoubted nor have I seen serious question in regard to the latter, despite the fact that Dodsworth too, like others before him, 4 had planned a baronage.
To say this is not to forget the many whose help with material Dugdale acknowledged. 5 Though his personal researches in the Public
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1 Joseph Hunter, Three Catalogues, 1838, p. 66.
2 Blanch Lyon 1638, Rouge Croix 1639, Chester 1644, Norroy 1660, Garter 1677.
3 N. Denholm-Young and H. H. E. Craster, 'Roger Dodsworth (1585-1654) and His Circle', Yorkshire Arch. Journ. xxxii, 1936, pp. 5-32; D. C. Douglas, English Scholars, 1939, pp. 34-42.
4 Dugdale in the Preface of his Baronage mentions Glover, Brooke, and Vincent.
5 Styles, op. cit., pp. 41-47.

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Records in 1637-8 were in a sense the foundation of all his work, 1 his great superiority to others was less in the collection of evidence than in the skill with which he marshalled it and the judgement with which he drew conclusions from it. His pedigrees in the Warwickshire and the Baronage are, I believe, the first in English history to exemplify the great principle that for every statement made contemporary record evidence must if possible, be cited.

On the rare occasions, therefore, when he was deceived by spurious documents, one knows exactly what these were, as with those on which rested the claim of the Feildings, Earls of Denbigh, to descend from thirteenth century Hapsburgs (known to the present Feilding family as Perhapsburgs). 2 'It is', says Round, 'perhaps his supreme merit that for every statement he gives his reference so that we can test it for ourselves.' 3 'No single work', says Professor Douglas, 'has ever done so much for the history of the English aristocracy as the Baronage of William Dugdale.' 4

Dugdale was in France for three months in 1648 staying most of that time with the son of André Duchesne (d. 1640) the great French historian and antiquary and making extracts from the latter's valuable collections. In view of his avowal of indebtedness to Duchesne and other French authors it is interesting to have Round's opinion that even at his weakest point 'he is far superior to the French genealogist, La Roque, whose great Histoire de la Maison d'Harcourt, published some years earlier' than his Baronage, 'was constructed on the same principles, but whose Preuves are a lamentable jumble of evidence and of mere assertion'. 5

France, like England, produced in the seventeenth century a great school of genealogists. Their names -- Sainct Marthe, Du Chesne, Du Bouchet, Guichenon, La Roque, d'Hozier and le Père Anselme -- are famous in their field and more of their work was printed than of their English opposites. A full study of their achievement and of French and English mutual influence in this field and period has, however, yet to be made.

The pedigrees in both the Warwickshire and the Baronage are pedigrees with a limited object, in the one to illustrate the descents of manors, in the other those of baronies and peerage dignities. Cadet lines and even marriages were therefore largely irrelevant and were
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1 Styles, op. cit., pp. 37-41.
2 J. H. Round, 'Our English Hapsburgs: a Great Delusion', Peerage and Family History, 1901, chap. v.
3 Family Origins, p. 7.
4 D. C. Douglas, English Scholars, pp. 52-53.
5 Family Origins, p. 7.

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not sought out for their own sake though wives were always and cadets sometimes included if the information was to hand. The genealogies in the Complete Peerage and the Victoria County History naturally enough retain the same limitation to this day. Some pressure upon Dugdale to include more may, however, be inferred here and there.

Mr. Styles notes among those whose help Dugdale acknowledges in the Warwickshire, those obscure people, descended from younger sons or belonging to families of mere yeoman origin, whose small estates had been acquired within the last three generations. They number, on a rough estimate, rather more than a quarter of the whole.... Several belonged to Coventry or the immediate neighbourhood and had made their wealth in trade.

But about most of them we know very little. The majority were not armigerous and perhaps they may have hoped, in showing their deeds to Archer or Dugdale, that a record in print would establish their claim to gentility.... That such men were beginning to take an interest in history and genealogy was a notable sign of the times. 1

At the opposite pole from the feudal or manorial approach to genealogy was that of the Welsh genealogists, whose concern, reflecting the old Welsh social system and indeed an older phase of human society, was solely with the blood regardless of possessions or economic status. Shopkeepers and fiddlers, paupers and pedlars are shown in the Welsh pedigrees alongside the rich and eminent without the least discrimination or sense of incongruity, provided always that their ancestry was noble. 2

Welsh genealogy has its own long and separate history, which cannot be dealt with here. It is, however, worth noting that from the reign of Elizabeth I ( 1558-1603) to that of Queen Anne ( 1702-14) the Welsh genealogists, who successively collected and codified the traditional pedigrees, were in close touch with the English heralds, to whom some of them were official deputies, and each group certainly influenced the other. 3

Midway between these two poles lie the Heralds' Visitations. The formal purpose of each entry in a Visitation book was, it is true, to establish the gentility and right to arms of an individual, but few visiting heralds were as narrow minded as Sir Edward Bysshe (d. 1679),
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1 Styles, op. cit., p. 47.
2 Major Francis Jones, 'An Approach to Welsh Genealogy', Tr. Cymmrodorion Soc. 1948, pp. 394-5
3 Ibid., pp. 375-7, 418-29.
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who in general confined himself to linear entries, giving parents, grandparents and children of the head of the family, but neither brothers, sisters, nor collateral branches. At the other extreme Vincent in his Shropshire and Surrey Visitations of 1623, Henry St. George and Samson Lennard in their Devon and Cornwall Visitations of 1620 and their Wiltshire, Dorset and Somerset Visitations of 1623, and Gregory King and other deputies of Sir Henry St. George, Clarenceux, in their Visitations of the 1680's, went out of their way to include collateral branches in their pedigrees. So long as the branches in question were within the limitations of the arms this was proper and admirable, though not necessary, since according to the pure theory of the thing they could be entered separately under the several counties and hundreds in which their members lived.

Some time in the 1560's a radical change was made in the method of Visitation. Before that date Visitations had been domiciliary. The heralds had visited the gentry in their homes and were still doing so as late as 1563. This, however, proved too slow for the ambitious cycle of Visitation then in hand. Accordingly by 1566 a new method had been introduced by which the sheriffs of the counties sent out to the bailiffs of hundreds lists of 'gentlemen and others', whom they were to warn to appear before the visiting king of arms or heralds. In the next century the gentry were usually summoned to the inn where the heralds lodged in 'the chiefest towns in the Hundred'. Dugdale, who visited as Norroy in the 1660's, said that the place of summons should be not more than six or seven miles from the home of any person summoned to it and it was his custom to entertain at dinner all those who entered their arms and descents.

The Elizabethan Visitations, being far more extensive and ambitious than those of Henry VIII's reign, called for better organization and greater effort, while the growing interest in pedigrees was reflected in fuller entries. The Visitations made by Glover in the northern counties between 1570 and 1585 show the first application of higher critical standards and an interesting innovation in the form of entry seems also to be due to Glover. This was the introduction of the rectilinear tabular form of pedigree, still in general use. The first example I can date is of the year 1564. Though the first to use it in Visitation entries, Glover was not the first inventor of the rectilinear pedigree, for Sir Thomas Wriothesley had occasionally employed it forty or fifty years earlier. 1 It gained rapidly in favour and by 1618 had wholly
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1 Brit. Mus. MS. Harl. 1417, ff. 56, 61; see p. 309.

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superseded both the narrative form, normal since the 1530's, and the mediaeval true pedigree (pied de gru = crane's foot) form with radiating lines.
Another innovation of this date reflected both scholarly and popular trends in contemporary genealogy. This was the appointment by individual kings of arms (and in at least one case by the whole college) of local deputies, commonly known as deputy heralds. Their responsibilities and terms of appointment differed, but most were concerned not with Visitation but with painting arms and conducting heraldic funerals. Even this called for a knowledge of local pedigrees and the help of such deputies might therefore be enlisted when Visitations of their counties took place. Some few of them, however, were genealogists or scholars rather than painters, and were appointed primarily or solely to assist at Visitations.

The subject has as yet been little studied and our present knowledge is far from full. The first relevant reference I have yet met with is the statement that Griffith Hiraethog (d. 1566), a bard and poet who was also an antiquary and scholar, was deputy herald for all Wales under Garter, Clarenceux and Norroy. 1 The linguistic difficulty perhaps caused the heralds to feel the need to lean on a local expert in Wales sooner than elsewhere. In 1586 Clarenceux and Norroy jointly appointed Lewis Dwnn to make a Visitation of Wales, which he accomplished between that date and 1614. 2

In 1598 Thomas Chaloner was appointed deputy herald in Chester and in 1606 his widow's second husband Randle Holme (d. 1655) received the same appointment. This Randle Holme was the first of four generations so called, all herald painters in Chester down to 1707. But Randle Holme II, III and IV seem not to have been appointed official deputies, while Randle III was actually prosecuted by Dugdale for invasion of his office of Norroy in 1668. As genealogists the Holmes were indefatigable but inexact and unscholarly, so that the manuscript volumes of their collections, about two hundred and seventy in number, and now in the British Museum, must be used with caution. 3

In December 1624 and until 1626 Dodsworth was deputy herald for Yorkshire. 4 This appointment was presumably due to the then Norroy, Sir John Borough. Yorkshire was not in fact visited during
____________________
1 Francis Jones, op. cit., pp. 366-9; Heraldic Visitations of Wales by Lewis Dwnn, ed. Sir S. R. Meyrick, 1846, ii. 97 and i, p. xxii.
2 Ibid., p. xxiii and passim.
3 J. P. Earwaker, The Four Randle Holmes of Chester, 1892.
4 Coll. Arm. MS. I.C.B. Chaos I. 167.

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Dodsworth's tenure of office, but the appointment illustrates the wish of at least some of the heralds to lean on the best available local scholarship. Dugdale's Visitation deputies included such notable antiquaries as Richard Kuerden (d. c. 1690) for Lancashire and Nathaniel Johnston (d. 1705) 1 for Yorkshire.

We know that herald painters and local antiquaries alike sought and sometimes obtained copies of the Visitation books for their counties, despite the heralds' reluctance to let such copies out of their custody. Johnston secured extensive extracts, if not actually full copies, of most of the earlier Yorkshire Visitations. In the same way other extracts and copies were made by deputy heralds and herald painters, who often conflated successive Visitation books and then made additions of their own.

Many such copies or purported copies exist in public and private collections. Some were used by eighteenth and nineteenth century county and family historians and it is from such copies that the editions of Visitations printed by the Harleian Society and others are for the most part taken. The trouble with them is that, until they have been analysed and compared with the originals, their character and authenticity are quite uncertain. Some of the additional matter found in them is valuable, some of it worthless. Some render the originals exactly, others distort them. It may be added that the same weaknesses are found in the numerous armorials and heraldic collections made by herald painters of this period, which at one or two removes form the basis of such compilations as Sir Bernard Burke General Armory ( 1842 and 1884).
------------
The great fact to be grasped here is that Englishmen and those of English descent are fortunate in the immense bulk of the records kept and still preserved in England as compared with most other lands. This is a consequence of long continued settled government in island security under a constitution much addicted to the forms of law duly carried out and duly recorded.

Many people well established in the world are reluctant to begin enquiries which may show their origins to be even humbler than they think. Many others have no such feeling, but in the true spirit of the genealogist wish to know the facts whatever they may be. It is hardly for the genealogist to try to convert others to his way of thinking, but it may be worth pointing out that social movement, both up and down, from one class to another is much greater and more widespread than is often thought. The younger branches of gentle families are often found among the tradesmen and yeomen and it is likely, though less easily proved, that the further step down into the ranks of the labourers has frequently been taken. The exploration of these phenomena has been too limited for generalization, but most genealogists can point to instances.

Conversely, the ranks of the nobility and gentry have in every age been recruited from below and the rise to them has sometimes been rapid. Since the total number of the ancestors of each of us doubles in each generation we go back (save as modified by the marriage of cousins), most ancestries, if they could be carried back on all lines for eight or ten generations, would probably traverse a surprisingly wide social range. The exceptions to this would be the endogamous groups; the royal families; that minority of the high nobility and ancient gentry who have always been careful whom they married; the dwellers in the lonely valleys and the far off settlements; and the members of the straiter sects; and even these closed communities are far from being genetically watertight.

Besides those whose genealogical interest is mainly in their own ancestry I have had another class of possible readers in mind, namely those students of English history who feel the need for a clearer picture than their training has given them of the genealogical background. This need may now be growing. In the recent past a kind of historical writing was favoured which aimed less at establishing what happened than at explaining why it happened; which dealt in tendencies, causes and effects, statistics and ideas, rather than particular events and persons. This kind of history has naturally less use for genealogy than the plain narratives known to our ancestors.

Pedigrees might, indeed, themselves afford material for statistical analysis, if they were fully known, but much hard work would be required of the genealogists first. There is now, however, a truly modern school of historians, especially linked in England with Sir Lewis Namier, which builds up the picture of a former age round the descriptions of individuals and of their political and social relationships. To this school of historians genealogy is an essential tool and it may be that its rise will in due course lead to a higher estimation of scientific genealogy and so to a wider knowledge and better practice of its special skill and learning.

Is it presumption in a genealogist to believe that his special approach to history is a necessary and fundamental one?
Human beings [says Mr. C. S. Lewis ] look separate because you see them walking about separately. But then we are so made that we can see only the present moment. If we could see the past, then of course it would look different. For there was a time when every man was part of his mother, and (earlier still) part of his father as well: and when they were part of his grandparents. If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would not look like a lot of separate things dotted about. It would look like one single growing thing -- rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other. 1

| It is this vision of history that the genealogist feebly seeks to realize. I ought, I think, to indicate the nature and limits of my own experience of these matters. Genealogy was my passion from childhood and my interest was encouraged by that of my cousin Henry F. S.A. Wagner ( 1840-1926), a well known student of Huguenot genealogy. For the last twenty eight years it has been my duty as a herald to trace, prove and study pedigrees for clients and enquirers of all sorts. There must, however, be a division of labour in large scale genealogical practice and in mine the greater part of the field work has been done by others, while it has been my part to coordinate and analyse material collected by them from records everywhere, but myself to carry out primary research only in a certain range of records, mainly central.

For what I have written of material known to me only at secondhand I have therefore drawn freely on the information and advice of others. I was first introduced to the world of records in my Oxford days by Mr. (now Professor) V. H. Galbraith, to whose guidance in historical fields I am greatly indebted. My conception of genealogy as an art owes more than I can say to two masters of that art who have been my friends and fellow workers; the late Alfred Butler, Windsor Herald (see p. 353), and my assistant during many years Mr. Thomas Woodard. For guidance in the special fields of Welsh and Scottish genealogy I am indebted to Major Francis Jones and Sir Iain Moncreiffe, Bt., while the former has placed me further in his debt by reading and criticizing the manuscript of this book.

In American matters I have been helped and guided by the Rev. Dr. Arthur Adams and Mr. G. Andrews Moriarty. To Mr. Marc Fitch I owe most of the material on which the section dealing with his family is based. Other obligations are acknowledged in the text and on pages x-xi. Not my least debt is to my wife but for whom this book would scarcely have been carried through and without whose constructive criticism it would be even more imperfect than it is.

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Page 25

Addenda

p. 37 . See also The Mountbatten Lineage, prepared for private circulation, by Admiral of the Fleet the Earl Mountbatten of Burma, K.G., 1958.
p. 99 . The relation of the great houses of c. 1710-60 to the social standing and aims of their builders is discussed by Sir John Summerson in his Cantor Lectures, "'The Classical Country House in 18th Century England'", Journ. Roy. Soc. of Arts, vol. cvii, where a similar socio-architectural study of the ensuing epoch is desiderated.

p. 101 . In his Cantor Lectures, "'The Classical Country House in 18th Century England'", Journ. Roy. Soc. of Arts, vol. cvii, Sir John Summerson traces the reflection in architectural trends of the change from the overweening greatness of the Whig Oligarchs of c. 1710-60 to the more widely diffused luxury of the ensuing years.

pp. 115 and 116 . Mr. Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution, 1958, pp. 153-96, "'The Agrarian Legislation of the Revolution'", and pp. 199-214, 'Lord Clarendon and the Puritan Revolution', throws light on the part played by the sale of delinquents' lands and kindred policies during the interregnum in pulling down the old gentry and building up a new race of improving gentry who set the tone of the ensuing age.

pp. 120 and 129 . A picture of a yeoman on the borderline of gentility in the 1870's is given by Anthony Trollope, The American Senator, 1877, ch. i, pp. 9-11. Laurence Twentyman belonged to the class of 'yeoman, as they ought to be called, -- gentlemen-farmers as they now like to style themselves, -- men who owned some acres of land, and farmed these acres themselves.... He possessed over three hundred acres of land, on which his father had built an excellent house.... He had been at school for three years at Cheltenham College.'

p. 161 . See also "'The Social Origins and Provenance of the English Bishops during the Reign of Edward II'", by Miss K. Edwards, Royal Hist. Soc. Trans., 5th ser., ix, pp. 51-79.
p. 172 . See also Sir John Summerson Cantor Lectures, "'The Classical Country House in 18th Century England'", Journ. Roy. Soc. of Arts, vol. cvii.

p. 173 . The common ancestry with the Hoares of Hoares' Bank (pp. 141-2) attributed to this family in Edward Hoare Families of Hore and Hoare, 1883, was disproved by a pedigree recorded at the College of Arms in 1923 which takes its ancestry back to 1526 at Green's Norton, Northamptonshire.

p. 261 . See A. R. Wagner, "'The Children in the Mayflower'", in The Times, 30 June 1959. The documents are printed in full in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, July 1960.

____________________
1 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, ed. 1952, Collins, p. 152.

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Page 26

Acknowledgements are due to the authors, or their representatives, and the publishers of the following works for permission to make quotations from them:

Mr. N. G. Brett-James, The Growth of Stuart London, published by Messrs. George Allen & Unwin, Ltd. Professor A. Goodwin, The European Nobility in the 18th Century, published by Messrs. A. & C. Black, Ltd. Professor C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, published by Messrs. Geoffrey Bles, Ltd. Mrs. The late H. M. & N. K. Chadwick, The Growth of Literature, vol. 3, and Early Scotland, published by The University Press, Cambridge., Mr. G. A. Holmes, The Estates of the Higher Nobility in 14th Century England published by The University Press, Cambridge. Professor J. H. Plumb, Studies in Social History, published by The University Press, Cambridge. Dr. W. G. Hoskins, Devonshire Studies, published by Messrs. Jonathan Cape, Ltd. Dr. A. L. Rowse, A Cornish Childhood, published by Messrs. Jonathan Cape, Ltd. Professor D. C. Douglas, English Scholars, published by Messrs. Jonathan Cape, Ltd. Sir Frank Stenton, History of National Biography 1922/1930 -- Biography of J. H. Round, published by The Clarendon Press. Archbishop David Mathew, The Social Structure in Caroline England, published by The Clarendon Press. Mr. G. D. Q. C. Squibb, The High Court of Chivalry, published by The Clarendon Press. Dr. The late J. H. Round, Family Origins, Peerage and Family History, and Peerage and Pedigree, published by Messrs. Constable & Co., Ltd. Professor J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole, The Making of a Statesman, published by The Cresset Press. Professor The late T. F. O'Rahilly, Early Irish History and Mythology, published by The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Mr. E. D. Bebb, Non-Conformity and Economic Life, published by The Epworth Press. Mr. R. W. Ketton-Cremer, Norfolk Assembly, published by Messrs. Faber & Faber, Ltd. Mr. G. C. Homans, English Villagers of the 13th Century, published by The Harvard University Press. Mr. Richard Church, Over the Bridge, published by Messrs. William Heinemann, Ltd. Dr. W. G. Hoskins, English Provincial Towns of the 16th Century, published by the Royal Historical Society. Mr. J. T. Adams, The Founding of New England, published by Messrs. Little, Brown & Co. Dr. W. G. Hoskins, Essays in Leicestershire History, published by The Liverpool University Press.

End of Text

- Reprise -
Sunday, June 4, 2000
Lest We Forget
The Towering Boondoggle
When politicians make business decisions on a heroic scale, heroically scaled calamities often result!
By John Steele Gordon, American Heritage

   NEW YORK -- In 1899, Asa Candler, the owner of Coca-Cola, thought the soft drink’s future lay with the soda fountain and gave away the bottling rights.
     In the American folk memory the Ford Motor Company’s Edsel has become for corporate disasters what the Titanic is for shipwrecks. The reason for these lapses is simple enough.
     Humans are quirky, and predicting their future behavior, in the marketplace or anywhere else, is hard to do. But capitalism forces business people to try, and because their own future well being depends on it, they try very hard.
     Politicians, however, don’t have to worry about market share or profits; they have to worry about getting reelected. That is why politicians have a far worse record in economic decision making than do businesspeople.
     Again the reason is simple: Politicians don’t really make economic decisions; they make political ones. When politicians do make the sorts of decisions that capitalists should make instead, the results often make the Edsel seem like a good idea in comparison.
     Consider New York’s World Trade Center. It has been in the news lately because the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a joint venture of the two state governments that own the WTC, has been paralyzed.
     The governors of the two states are locked in a dispute over how much of the Port Authority’s vast pool of development money should be spent in each state.
     One of the decisions hanging fire is whether or not to sell the World Trade Center.
     In truth, it should never have been built. The Port Authority was established in 1921 so that New York and New Jersey could develop to the fullest the potential of New York Harbor, which the two states share.
     Over the years the Port Authority built bridges, tunnels, airports, and communication and harbor facilities. But it suddenly found itself in the Manhattan real estate business because the chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank wanted to protect his bank’s investment in its vast new downtown headquarters, completed in the early 1960s, and his family’s real estate holdings.
    The chairman of Chase Manhattan at the time was David Rockefeller, and he wanted to see downtown New York remade.
     Fortunately for him, his brother Nelson happened to be governor of New York, and Nelson Rockefeller never saw a megadevelopment project he didn’t want to build.
     After a great deal of political horse-trading between the two states, the Port Authority was authorized to build in New York two skyscrapers, each taller and far more spacious than the Empire State Building. In exchange New Jersey’s chronically money-losing Hudson Tubes, a subway system connecting New Jersey with Manhattan, would be taken over by the Port Authority.
     In theory the profits from the World Trade Center would cover the losses of the Hudson Tubes. The result was, from an engineering standpoint, a marvel. From an aesthetic one, however, it was at best a dubious achievement.
     The view of Manhattan as seen from the harbor had for decades been one of the world’s great vistas. But the huge bulk of the World Trade Center on the western edge made it look as if the entire island were about to capsize into the Hudson.
     And from an economic standpoint the World Trade Center was an utter disaster. The complex was completed just as the deep recession of the mid-1970s forced New York to the edge of bankruptcy.
     The vast supply of new office space in the World Trade Center overwhelmed demand in the downtown area. Had the state not been able to force many of its innumerable agencies to take space there, the Twin Towers would have been largely empty. Not until 1993, ironically the year it was bombed, did the World Trade Center begin to show a profit.
     The World Trade Center, of course, is hardly New York State’s only big business mistake. The state has a rich tradition in this regard.
   Read more about the Erie Railway in 1830s and how Gov. DeWitt Clinton's involvement promised them an avenue of their own, once the canal was finished, built by or with the substantial aid of the state.
     Only politicians could have designed what would be, upon completion, the longest railroad in the world, running, almost literally, between nowhere and nowhere.
     The surveyor thought it would cost $4,726,260. In the end the Erie Railway, with only 60 of its 450 miles double-tracked, took $23,500,000 and seventeen years to construct.
     In the context of the time, that was staggering. The sum was about what the federal government spent annually in the 1840s, more than three times what the Erie Canal had cost.
     As a result, the Erie from its inception was burdened with a capital structure that made it easy to manipulate on Wall Street, where plenty of people were more than willing to do so.
     Since then, the railroad has passed through bankruptcy and was reorganized no fewer than six times before losing its corporate identity altogether in the early 1970s.
     The Erie at least became a model of how not to build a trunk-line railroad, just as the World Trade Center 120 years later became a model of how not to carry out a major urban development project.
    Still, the WTC construction project disaster had one wonderful consequence. The dirt from the enormous hole dug for the foundation had to go somewhere.
     That place was the Hudson River, creating an expanse of landfill that remained empty for twenty years. (One year a conceptual artist planted two acres of wheat on it, the first agricultural crop to be harvested in Manhattan in decades.)
     Finally, when the real estate market was right, Battery Park City began to rise on the land. A mix of residential, commercial, and public areas designed by many different architects and built by many different real estate concerns under an overall design, it was clearly a masterpiece of urban development long before it neared completion.
     Further, because it lies to the west of the World Trade Center, those colossal structures no longer stand at the water’s edge, and the vista of Manhattan from the harbor is once again as aesthetically satisfying as it is awesome.

    [Editor's Note: The complete column archive as it appeared in the May-June 2000 Issue pp. 14,16, 2000 may be accessed at American Heritage.]

Comment

1876-2004 Copyright, The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved

     Washington D.C. -- Early this morning at 9:00 AM eastern time deadly attacks by terrorists in command of three commercial jets crashed into major commercial buildings in lower Manhattan.
    In the first attack, a plane smashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan shortly before 9 a.m., followed by another plane into the second tower about 20 minutes later.
     Both towers later collapsed. One of the planes was an American Airlines Boeing 767 hijacked after takeoff from Boston.
     About an hour later, a plane crashed into the Pentagon in Washington. The Pentagon, the White House, the State Department, the Justice Department, the Capitol and other government buildings were evacuated.
     All flights across the US are suspended until further notice. Following a series of plane attacks in the United States, aviation experts assess how the disaster happened.
     The FAA shut down all airports in the country, and all international flights heading into D.C. and New York airports were diverted to Canada.
     President Bush canceled an appearance in Florida to return to Washington, calling the "apparent terrorist attacks" a "national tragedy."
     In Chicago, the Sears Tower was evacuated. The New York Port Authority said it had closed all bridges and tunnels into the city.
     New York's Bellevue Hospital was designated command central for handling the catastrophe. The dead may well exceed the tens of thousands.
     Several hospitals have already reported receiving victims with burns and head injuries.
     News coverage of terrorism has been used as a tool of terrorist in the recent past to gain public support and recognition.
     Based on an analysis of more than 200 evening newscasts aired during the first six years of the Reagan administration, the news media appears to have escalated public panic about terrorism and encouraged support for specific U.S. Policy objectives, rather than building sympathy for terrorists.
     Bethami Dobkin studied similarities between news media and government portrayals of terrorism, combining textual criticism with an interpretation of official U.S. Policy statements, and says that government depiction and news presentations of terrorism reproduce an ideology that supports military strength and intervention.
    Middle East terrorist groups have come under suspicion for the attack with Osama Bin Laden a prime suspect.
    California Gov. Gray Davis has closed all State buildings and sent workers home. Fresno State University has been closed. State schools are to remain in session, however.
    Smoke and flames rose over the Pentagon at about 10 a.m. today following a suspected terrorist crash of a commercial airliner into the side of the building. Part of the building hit collapsed; firefighters continue to battle the flames. The building was evacuated, as were other federal buildings in the Capitol, including the White House. The number of casualties is unknown. The Pentagon's workday population is about 24,000. Updates will follow as they come available.

December 18, 2002
President Bush Announced
David Hobbs His Legislative Assistant
by Howard E. Hobbs, Ph.D., Editor & Publisher

    WASHINGTON -- President George W. Bush today announced that he has named David Hobbs Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs. Mr. Hobbs will fill the position held by Nicholas Calio who announced this week that he is leaving the White House staff to return to the private sector.
    " David Hobbs is a trusted member of my team who has played an important role in helping us achieve major legislative victories, from landmark education reforms to historic tax relief for the American people. His hard work and dedication have been invaluable, and I appreciate his continued service to my Administration," said President Bush.
     David Hobbs currently serves as Deputy Assistant to the President -- House of Representatives. He came to the White House from his position as Chief of Staff to House Majority Leader Dick Armey. He grew up in Houston, Texas, and received both his bachelor's and masters degrees from the University of Texas.

© Copyright 1876-2004 By The Daily Republican Newspaper. All rights reserved.

Feature Story
June 27, 2001
Growing up in Southern Missouri
On the Eve of World Destruction
By Howard E. Hobbs, Ph.D. President
Valley Press Media Network!

    CLOVIS, Calif. -- In this multicultural age my thoughts often turn to early childhood memories of a humid Missouri river town and the American ethic with which I came to terms growing up in the the South they called the "Midwest".
     A great many important aspects of American life have been ignored or treated very briefly, sometimes because they were or because I thought myself incompetent to handle them.
     I have been writing on the American ethic for more than fifty years. Inevitably I have sometimes repeated myself. As readers will soon discover, this is a personal memoir.
     I have made assertions because I thought them to be true and relevant, not because they had a weight of independent authority behind them. There may result from this, something that the reader will find interesting about the best country in the world and the way we were in the interesting and intelligible times of my childhood along the Mississippi River more than fifty years ago..
     Above all, I have tried to make plain that there is no parallel in history to the experiment of free government on the American scale. The sheer size of this undertaking accounts for a great deal, including the apparent justification at some periods and in some views of American life for pessimism about the present or the future of the nation.
     In the past, the pessimists have always been wrong. I think they are still wrong, although it is a good practice to keep one's eye on the ball, just in case it doesn't work out that way.
    When I went to the movies in Kansas City in 1938 I witnessed a magnificent sight that I still remember. A huge serene, and ominous Zeppelin, was moving past on the movie screen.
    It had been in New York and the narrator said it would be in Frankfort Germany by the very next day. A gigantic black and red swastika was plainly visible on its side as it moved on.
     A shadow was crossing Western Missouri, too. How remote it all seemed to be from me, and how much irrelevant to the people of Midwest America, with fifteen hundred miles each way between them and the oceans in 1938.
     The Kansas City Star Newspaper reminded local citizens of larger European cities and the newspapers there. I went with my family to see relatives who lived in a small town in Kansas. We went together to the corner drugstore to get ice cream after supper.
     It was a typical scene in Main Street America on a Saturday night in late Indian Summer. The boys and girls were there in their white summer clothes; there were endless cars; it was possible that here, as in other American towns like this, there was present and indefinable American air of happiness and ease, at least for the young.
     There was also that general friendliness and candor of Missouri folk. Here, as much as in the rest of old urban Kansas in those days, people called each other by their "last names".
It was a world in which the older boys and girls spent their evenings milling around outside the drugstores. Most adults we knew showed signs of fatigue and worry.
     They had reason. This was a farm based economy and the farmers were having a rough time. Across the wide Missouri River it was a drought year. In Emporia, Kansas, it was still doubtful, I later learned, whether they could reopen the local Normal College in the Fall. There might not be enough water, even for the town.
     That entire region had been badly hit by crop failures, by bank failures. But there was still an impression of hope, of recovery. There was an air of confident adaptation to their way of life in the dress, the speech, the manners of the young. In the drugstore there was the usual stock of gadgets, of remedies for all ills.
     There were soft drinks, and a large book and magazine rack. There were books, too. Books that had been made into films, like James Fennimore Cooper's book Last of The Mohicans. If you wanted to know about love, about astrology, about business success, about child training, about how to be happy on a small piece of land, the Old Farmer's Almanac and Life Magazine were there. And the radio blasted the soft summer night and the heat did not empty the movie house.
     There might be a Kansas City Star Newspaper with comics and cartoons like Gasoline Alley bringing home the bitter truth about the world of work. No doubt some residents in the town were traveled and knew about the outside world.
     Perhaps the librarian or the English teacher told the women's club of a tour to the Chicago World's Fair. Some veterans had memories of the Civil War. Others had memories of France in the World War, the Great War, the War to end all Wars.
      The local newspaper was doing a first-class job, a better job than was being done by most other small town papers, to awaken the people to the truth of the new iron age that we were all living in, to the significance of Manchukuo, to the menace of international war in Spain. Perhaps, the Parent-Teachers' Association had asked for more instruction in civics and in current affairs. Certainly, appeals for charity, for Chinese, or for Spaniards had been or would be answered as soon as made.
     But in the warmth and ease of that Southern summer night, things were to change forever. On one inevitable night the character of American natural isolationism was to be abruptly shattered for all time as I quietly gathered fire-flies in a quart Mason Jar in our front yard.
     It was 1938, it was calm. But the deplorable, maddening impact of the outside world on whole Mississippi Valley could be on local `radio stations. Something about about "peace in our time" and a war in Europe that was for the first time, to concern to us more than the local news.
     However, in a few short months German Nazi submarines were sinking American ships in the mouth of the Mississippi and all cities of the Mississippi Valley were getting set against air raids, against desperate, forlorn hopes in which the Nazis planned to strike, whatever the cost, at the most typical, representative, important cities of the Midwest.
     As the shadow over Europe grew longer and darker, the American people mobilized for the onslaught of yet another wave of European immigrants storming ashore at New York's Ellis Island.
     All over the United States the great railway station centers trains rolled both night and day. There was the Illinois Central, the New York Central, the Union Pacific, the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, and of course, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe. Not everyone rode the rails. Riders on the trains would see an occasional Rolls-Royce among the Lincolns, Packards, Buicks, Chevrolets, and Fords.
     The airspace above the trains and cars was filled with the new passenger planes, and the airports more numerous and more resplendent than money can buy.

 June 12, 1989
American Icons
Hobbs & Mendenhall Families
          by Howard E. Hobbs, PhD Editor & Publisher,
Daily Republican Newspaper

   CHAPEL HILL, NC -- This remarkable Hobbs family history has been researched from extant family records, and personal letters, chiefly from 1870, concerning the political and religious activities, travels, and careers of members of the Mendenhall and Hobbs families of Guilford County, N.C. Central figures include Lewis Lyndon Hobbs (1849-1932), educator and writer, active Quaker, and president of Guilford College; his wife, Mary Mendenhall Hobbs (1852-1930), active in promoting women's education, pacifism, and Quaker and Mary's father, Nereus Mendenhall (1819-1893), devout Quaker, physician, teacher at New Garden School (Greensboro, N.C.), and legislator active in the construction of the state asylum at Morganton in the 1870s and other reforms.
     Their history reflects the Quaker view of life and relates to several reform movements. Richard Hobbs, son of Lewis and Mary, served in France with a Quaker relief organization. Lewis Lyndon Hobbs while at Haverford College, in the 1870's was both as a student and later the College president.
     Nereus Mendenhall (1819-1893), graduated from Haverford College in 1839; received his degree from Jefferson College, Pa., in 1845. He taught in the New Garden Boarding School at Greensboro, N.C., and later became a civil engineer and surveyed many railroads in North Carolina. In 1860, he returned to the New Garden School as principal and kept it open during the Civil War, which he opposed along with secession and Reconstruction.
     He served two terms as a Democrat in the state legislature and, in 1876, was appointed to faculty of the Penn Charter School in Philadelphia. He helped with the construction of the insane asylum at Morganton and the State Penitentiary. He was a member of the Society of Friends and married Oriana Wilson in 1851. Mary Mendenhall Hobbs (1852-1930), daughter of Nereus and Oriana Mendenhall, was also a member of the Society of Friends. She married Lewis Lyndon Hobbs and with him dedicated her life to education in North Carolina, especially that of women. She was the third woman to receive a degree from the University of North Carolina.
     She wrote on many subjects and was prominent paifest who's efforts for peace were widely recognized. She and Lyndon Hobbs had five children: Lewis Lyndon, Richard Julius Mendenhall, Allen Wilson, Walter, and Gertrude. Richard served with a Quaker relief organization in France during the First World War. Lewis Lyndon Hobbs (1849-1932), son of Lewis and Phoebe Cook Hobbs, was a member of the Society of Friends and graduated from Haverford College in 1876.
     He accepted an appointment to teach at the New Garden College from 1876 to 1884 and was elected president of Guilford College from 1888 to 1915. He helped to establish the first rural grade school in North Carolina.