Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Diatribe I write in response to a foolish essay by Jeremy A. Rabkin that appeared in your August 1994 issue ("Double Immunity"). Because Rabkin does not discuss the merits of the...
...Leave it to that old panacea, technology...
...A logical alternative to the destructive system of segregating the underclass into site-specific "projects," vouchers bypass the bureaucrats and provide purchasing power and, more importantly, choice directly to those in need...
...Hale presumes a familiarity with the brightest luminaries (a presumption that will send many readers, shamefaced, to the encyclopedia...
...He cites natural selection as a tautology, limited variability of species, lack of viable mutations, the peppered moths, and the materialistic philosophical foundation of evolution as explained by Mr...
...Bethell's prerogative to remain unconvinced by any particular "scrap of bone," but in fact we have many scraps of bone (complete skulls among them) in a sequence beginning with Australopithecus afarensis 4 million years ago, continuing with the larger-brained Homo habilis 2 million years ago, the still larger-brained Homo erectus and allied forms starting 1.5 million years ago, and culminating with fully modern humans within the past 200,000 years...
...Ask any plaintiff's lawyer...
...They agree that the material world is an emanation of the Divine Mind, the Heavenly Father, the Force, Whatever...
...You may cancel at any time...
...Why did God spread the creating over more than 500 million years instead of in a week as the Good Book says...
...was acting as Lance's broker...
...r 1111111111111111111111111111 Get 90 minutes FREE...
...The latter, however, does not confer special immunity upon the former...
...As for these critics: Thomas Ewing apparently believes he has explained away the perennial failures of HUD by labeling any critic of federal social engineering a racist...
...If Tribe had thought then that the president had a constitutional entitlement to put off civil suits until he left office, it is strange that the treatise made no mention of this point...
...The threats of prosecution that HUD makes to private citizens who speak out against its plan to move the "working poor" into middle class neighborhoods reminded me of The Ominous Parallels (with fascism) that Leonard Peikoff wrote over a decade ago...
...These scientific points were probably new and helpful to many of your readers and editors...
...Former Minnesota Sen...
...Christopher D. Marotta Gaithersburg, Maryland James Bovard's attack on Henry Cisneros's forced migration strategy is generally on target, but his critique of the Section 235 program is slightly off base...
...If the races evolved, maybe some races are more evolved than others...
...Despite such problems as drug abuse, public drunkenness, fights, shootings, stabbings, boarding unauthorized individuals within units, unreported income, failure to pay rents as little as $25 per month, and vandalism to the landlord's own property, they refused to evict any troublemakers, in order to maintain the government-paid funds...
...Technically, the tenants are required to reimburse the government for the guarantees—good luck...
...It went through the roof when I read James Bovard's story about Henry Cisneros and Roberta Achtenberg in the first issue I received...
...The intent of the Republicans was to provide a monthly mortgage subsidy to buyers who were part of nonprofit neighborhood self-help housing-rehab programs, instead of having the government pay the full up-front cost of purchasing unmarketable FHA mortgages...
...In fact, the 1978 edition of Tribe's treatise (at page 202) labeled as "the sounder view" that "a President cannot be criminally tried prior to impeachment and removal...
...The DNA-based science that permits a court to hold that this man fathered this baby also tells us that humans and chimpanzees are closely related—more so than either is related to orangutans...
...But the fact that local governments often intentionally screw up their real estate markets is no reason to give federal bureaucrats unlimited power to inject welfare recipients into the neighborhoods of HUD's choice...
...The bridge to objective thinking from the naive adoption of various liberal tenets in my early youth was provided by author Ayn Rand...
...When conservatives fail to oppose state altruism on principle (fearing the obloquy of superior souls) they are countenancing an evil premise...
...ADL's dispute with the Religious Right involves secular issues, not theology...
...It might interest readers of the report that the ADL now considers parental choice in education—the use of vouchers for public and private schools—to be an extremist attack on the First Amendment...
...Bethell correctly points out that biology answers how one species begets another distinct species with "just so stories...
...T hanks to a revolution in on-line ser- i vices, you can get THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR in electronic form...
...I once worked for a landlord who accepted Section 8 tenants, and I can tell you from experience that the incidents of abuse your article documented were not unlike the situations I had to deal with...
...H ale's style is marked by restraint...
...Duane Gish, both with the Institute for Creation Research, could have told him of their many debates with evolutionists...
...these schemes were marked by "a heartless prying into private lives" and a "ruthless planning zeal" that entailed eugenics, euthanasia, and thought control...
...That urban economy was deliberately undercut, partly because of racism and partly because of complete obeisance to the automobile...
...Lance for the imprecision and sympathize with his desire to put his 1970s BCCI connection behind him...
...If it's that simple, why are middle-class blacks in St...
...That's not easy either in suburban areas where, unlike a city, there is rarely a mix of housing costs...
...Online...
...Opportunity would be more egalitarian...
...Don't Bovard That Joint People love to hate the welfare bums, and James Bovard sure knows how to fan the flames ("Suburban Guerrilla," TAS, September 1994...
...What is needed to combat the incipient fascism of agencies like HUD, FDA, EPA, etc...
...Rabkin must be aware, our history is not exactly replete with instances of such litigation...
...Louis fiercely opposed to having Section 8 recipients placed in their neighborhood...
...Sylvia Simpson Genske Marbella, Spain Tom Bethell replies: The scraps of bone allegedly demonstrating hominid evolution can be placed in almost any sequence, their dating involves large assumptions, and the claim that we know any one bone is ancestral to another is wishful thinking on the part of those who (usually without saying so) are wedded to materialism...
...We have not sought to "demonize" the Religious Right, nor climbed aboard any other bandwagon seeking to do so...
...It is this exposure which provides the values and opportunities that we as conservatives constantly espouse...
...the company that is revolutionizing computer communications...
...ed another investment to Sami...
...On both of these points, Mr...
...Because Rabkin does not discuss the merits of the legal arguments for and against my view that civil lawsuits against a sitting president arising out of conduct alleged to have occurred before the president's election should ordinarily be held in abeyance until the president leaves office, I will not address the merits in this forum...
...Evolution is simply the most plausible construct given the evidence available...
...I take issue with Mr...
...Sami also attended, along with Swaleh Naqvi, Abedi's number two man...
...Hey, Lynn forgot about being a shill for the tobacco industry with those cigars and mass-murderer from all that secondhand smoke...
...Moreover, Tribe went to some length in that section of his treatise to show that the Supreme Court's 1982 deci10 The American Spectator November 1994 sion in Nixon v. Fitzgerald provided only limited immunity from civil suits against the president, and even this immunity, Tribe contended, might be withdrawn by subsequent legislation...
...Finally, I should respond to Tribe's complaint that my piece was "ad hominem...
...Ron Pasini discerns a "tidal wave of disciplined research and evidence favoring Darwin...
...It's such fun to live when the paradigm is changing...
...The book is a mean-spirited, dishonest, shoddily researched and produced cut-and-paste collection of attacks...
...We don't know...
...The program gained only limited funding and by 1986 had barely 12,000 families enrolled nationwide...
...Disputes about the age of any one of them are unlikely to change the big picture of a human line stretching back millions of years to an ancestor more ape-like than we are...
...I confused two meetings and so, in my August piece on Hillary, Refco, and BCCI, placed him in Little Rock at a conference he says he did not attend...
...These age limits are all facts rooted in the hard sciences of radioactivity and spectroscopy: no touchy-feely biology here...
...Tom Bethell correctly identifies the Establishment's underlying assumption of materialism as the bug-a-boo that has led it into a dead end, a dark alley where the stubborn presence of truth and other strange phenomena must be denied, ignored, or surpressed...
...He told Sami it would be an attractive opportunity for investors such as Pharaon...
...God works in mysterious ways and some naturalistic if not evolutionary change seems certainly to hate played a role, even though this needn't lead us to conclude that all living things evolved from the same cell...
...Incidentally, the present Section 8 described by Bovard was an outgrowth of Section 23, a program promoted by House Republicans to replace the horrendous public housing high-rises favored by the Democrats who ran most of the nation's cities...
...Those plans provide opportunity for a few, the rest can go to hell...
...The Reagan-Bush era left many positive legacies in its wake...
...Obviously the necessary philosophical consequences of the doctrines of origins cannot determine which doctrine we accept...
...Foxman fails to mention that he has already apologized in writing to Pat Robertson for two major errors...
...Booth favors using Section 8 to move welfare recipients into affluent housing so that "mainstream Americans" can "become de facto social workers...
...Science attempts to come up with descriptive and predictive theories to explain the phenomena that confront us...
...Buses now are deliberately kept out of certain areas...
...Bovard's piece on Henry Cisneros's HUD scams was excellent...
...Anybody with a brain can figure out that the Mystery of the Universe is bigger than all of us...
...George Breindel Sumas, Washington Kenneth S. Lynn replies: All I wish to say in reply to Mr...
...a German carpenter playing Emily Post as he exhorts his peers not to make pigs of themselves at the table...
...The dominant news media have sustained the pretense that opposition to the dogma of evolution was mere religious prejudice...
...That should do it...
...are more selfish, special-interest organizations like the National Rifle Association...
...235 as a method for pushing lower-income home-buyers into tony suburbs...
...All the best-known promoters of evolution (Richard Dawkins, S.J...
...Booth claims that the most important aspect of the Section 8 vouchers is "a real and more natural integration of the haves and the have-nots...
...But this is one of Hale's outstanding qualities...
...Reagan and Bush officials lavished far more praise on the ideal of Section 8 than was justified...
...In the box at the bottom of the contents page the following sentence appears: "In accordance with the rights granted by the First Amendment and as a matter of policy, the opinions expressed in the magazine are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the board of directors...
...What about the constant skewering of Roosevelt 2—definite cripophobia...
...Tribe still cannot expect serious readers to believe that his current expressions of support for presidential immunity on behalf of the Clintons are consistent with his own past pronouncements...
...And then there were the light and dark moths, of course...
...The solution is to decrease the power of government officials at all levels over housing...
...Mr...
...Either Dr...
...If Bovard doesn't want an aggressive housing policy that is supposed to help poor people, will he write in support of a policy that all new job growth has to be inside our decaying cities, or at least directly accessible by mass transit...
...Embracing and promoting this synergy of social healing and governmental efficiency could in fact give new life to that noble cause we once called "A Thousand Points of Light...
...He takes a weak one-sentence attempt at explaining why this is inherently illogical by writing, "Trouble-making public housing residents will not be transformed into angels simply by moving them into different neighborhoods...
...twenty years ago such a book would have told this story very differently, if at all...
...I will not quibble about the stature of Susan Bloch...
...liberal...
...I read something that dismayed me and that I feel compelled to bring to your attention...
...Spiritual evolution is a basic truth of all the great religions, though the vocabulary differs...
...Whenever my officers responded to a domestic dispute call, nine times out of ten the combatants (husbands and wives, children and parents, or lovers and other strangers) were part of the Section 8 program...
...Just as critically, the density of the urban economy provided an economic spin-off that supported small shops and restaurants, shoe shines, produce markets, a tremendous variety of fledgling economic enterprises that at least gave a chance to scrape out a living, and maybe do better...
...While our new voucher toting neighbors won't be transformed overnight, they will gain exposure to uplifting spiritual, social, and economic forces in their new surroundings...
...I discovered early on that it is easier to convict than evict when it comes to Section 8 tenants...
...Indeed we would be displaying extremely short memories, as the Reagan administration wisely promoted this concept as an efficient means to provide decent housing for the underprivileged...
...His narrative is alive with credible, sympathetic people of all kinds and conditions: a nine-year-old girl and her guardian molester, banished and hanged respectively by the authorities of their French town...
...M,encken is one of my heroes, not least because yahoos never fazed him...
...The voices of those neither famous nor powerful give depth to the story, but they do not predominate—only natural, since their traces survive in minuscule amounts compared to the writings by and about the era's great personalities...
...Now we have a planned economy of office parks and malls and distant giant production centers...
...In just three tongue-in-cheek (hopefully) pages we learn the young Henry was suicidal and resented his father...
...Curiously, Shakespeare is the occasion of two errors in a work where errors are scarce...
...Once the premise is established, all that remains in dispute is its price tag...
...racist, vile-mouthed anti-Semite, whorehound, with a fear of strong women (get it...
...It was to enable qualified lower-income families to achieve home ownership, but there was no intent to push inner-city families into high-priced suburbs...
...They wanted new construction and union jobs—six million new units in the coming ten years...
...Bovard's informative essay should serve as a wake up call to save this innovative opportunity for budgetary discipline, not to rip out one of Ronald Reagan's most progressive alterations to the social safety net...
...Once connected, you may hit your ENTER key once or twice to initiate a handshake between your computer and THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR –Online...
...Box 2029 Friday Harbor, WA 98250 The American Spectator November 1994 81 For those of us who have followed Philip Johnson's work on Darwinism with interest, Tom Bethell left one question unanswered in his July essay...
...Implemented in 1983 as a part of Reagan's attack on wasteful and destructive welfare programs, it was opposed at that time by the left as it threatened the entrenched interests of the poverty industry...
...Phillip Johnson...
...Emphasis added...
...Excessive, above-market payments quickly undo the potential gains in budgetary efficiency, and onerous restric(continued on page 78) 12 The American Spectator November 1994 serves as a topical bridge between the art market and the economic status of women...
...As a scientist, I regard this as bad science, and as a Catholic Christian, I regard this as bad Bible scholarship...
...The Constitution has done so well for Tribe over the years, no one can doubt that he is quite devoted to it—in his own way...
...However, I must ask why there is a "white male" pictured on the cover with a Section 8 voucher...
...That way, poor people could get to the employment office, and the affluent could drive in from the 'burbs...
...One family contributed a son who robbed and sexually mauled women who were on their way to work in the morning...
...T. Bertram Lance of Calhoun, Georgia, telephoned recently to point out a conflation in my account of his involvement with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International...
...Communication is indeed the name of the game...
...To order by check or money order, send your payment to: LOOKOUT POINT P.O...
...To Mr...
...Like Mencken, I regard evolution as a fact...
...These fossils were dated with the same physics that we use to design nuclear reactors...
...Rather, our report expresses our profound—and just as perfectly legitimate—concerns about efforts, often deceptive and harmful in our view, to undermine the crucial separation of church and state in America, and to promote sectarian religious doctrines in the public schools, among other things The ADL report, in fact, emphasizes: "Like anyone else, evangelical Christians have the right to organize, to run for office, to lobby, to boycott, to demonstrate, to attempt to implement their views...
...Doctrines of racial superiority stem directly from evolutionary theory...
...social chaos...
...Your wording, which would turn a right into a privilege bestowed by government (and therefore subject to repeal by government), displays the serious misunderstanding of the Bill of Rights The American Spectator November 1994 79 the vast majority of Americans out of their locale...
...In fact, the section of my treatise Rabkin cites—which dealt with the Supreme Court's 1982 decision in Nixon v. Fitzgerald—does not discuss at all the question of lawsuits against a sitting president arising out of alleged unofficial misconduct...
...Moreover, although he declares it his intention "to provide a guidebook for time-travellers," this book is more like a map, accurately and significantly detailed, than a Baedeker, with blurbs on the main attractions...
...Now we know better...
...Oddly, Mr...
...So does Paul Milenkovic, by the way...
...For the egalitarian, "All men are created equal" makes far more sense than evolution...
...This only illustrates a poor understanding of the scope of the process...
...I don't think it is particularly heinous for a lawyer to argue different positions from one case to the next...
...Thomas Ford Colton, California Attracted by your cover story by James Bovard, I purchased your September issue...
...Why do we have to argue that evolution was God's way when we don't have any evidence for evolution...
...To take advantage of this offer, use your Visa or MasterCard online...
...Ronald Smail Duncansville, Pennsylvania I realize Washington is a long way from Santee, California, but I would think a competent journalist like Tom Bethell could invest in a long distance call to eliminate his obvious ignorance of the evolution/creation battles...
...Bethell is correct in suggesting that the blind watch-maker crowd inexplicably castrates an otherwise all-powerful God...
...On the other hand, anyone familiar with animals (chimps, dogs, lions, or eagles, for example) knows that they are not inanimate matter either, and that it is empirically plausible—and no insult at all—to acknowledge them as cousins of ours...
...Now do the hard part: report the fact that in 1994, we still build segregated communities...
...There is currently little motivation for bureaucrats or slumlords with guaranteed tenants and incomes to keep site-specific public housing in working order...
...In a voucher system, tenants have the option to take their purchasing power to the site of their choice placing all operators in a competitive posture...
...Ed Chynoweth says that there are a lot of missing links, but it would be closer to the truth to say that there are no known links...
...Is he pulling a Clinton with this evasive phrase or does he really have such a short memory...
...Delaying civil suits (which, unlike criminal charges, can be brought by any individual) arising out of alleged pre-presidential or otherwise unofficial misconduct until the president leaves office is entirely consistent with this...
...Stephens Inc...
...Gould et al...
...There are so many fallacies and twists of logic in the article that one cannot hope to cover them all in a letter...
...Sami is believed to have returned to his mative Pakistan, where he is unavailable to American investigators...
...Theodore J. Hordeski Roslyn, Pennsylvania After some critical remarks about the Institute for Creation Research, Tom Bethell makes some excellent points about the lack of scientific evidence for evolution...
...If Booth is so inclined, he is welcome to spend his time urging Section 8 neighbors to stop beating their kids and throwing trash on the front lawn...
...Bovard correctly identifies two major flaws in the program as currently administered...
...Clinton, and believe in what they are trying to do, I am on the record as strongly opposed to many of the constitutional positions that have been taken by the present administration—on issues ranging from gays in the military, to the rights of resident aliens, to the validity of various telecommunications regulations, to the president's power to invade Haiti without Congress's consent, to the need for Senate ratification of the Uruguay Round as a treaty...
...People need to work, but Bovard knows that the time is long gone when burgeoning factories and office towers combined with a city's "geographic opportunity"—its accessible localeprovided almost everyone with a range of skilled and unskilled jobs...
...Norman Ely Byers, Coloradothat I expect from liberals and similar deplorable creatures...
...The first fossil bats have echo-location equipment and we don't know what they evolved from...
...It is Mr...
...Naqvi is now serving a prison term in American custody after a controversial plea bargain with federal prosecutors (described in the September issue...
...Legitimate criticism of the political views of religious people should not be confused with intolerance...
...Predictably, though, in publications like yours, analysis is so narrow...
...Geologic evidence of single-cell life goes back 2 billion years, but the first complex plant and animal organisms appear as fossils in the Cambrian, some 500 million years ago...
...The burden of a better theory is on them, and I saw no evidence of their "facts" or competing model coming forth...
...I have been reading about them in depth for years in the publications of . . . the Institute for Creation Research...
...It is Hale's alertness to the position and fate of the individual—whose development Burckhardt identified as a crucial achievement of the period—that immunizes him to the appeal of Utopias, even that of the thinker who coined the word, St...
...After failing to overturn Einstein's Special and General Theories with the so-called Gallilean Electrodynamics last year, he's at it again attacking Darwin and the whole basis of evolution...
...Because I agree with President Clinton on this issue, Mr...
...Please delineate a conservative social policy that will break the above Gordian knot...
...Finally, Mr...
...Stephens was on the board of Financial General Bankshares, a multi-state bank holding company based in Washington, D.C., and his faction was trying to oust the incumbent managers...
...contain successive generations of fossils...
...In the course of the visit, according to the document, Jackson Stephens suggest...
...Not to me, however...
...In fact, Tribe's letter is quite implausible in its claim that the later edition of the treatise has no relevance to the current question of civil liability for a sitting president...
...Wow...
...The ADL document does not condemn religious conservatives in general, or the Christian Coalition in particular, for their perfectly legitimate political activism...
...Answer: "Yes" if you have a color monitor, "No" if you have a monochrome screen...
...He never checked with such Jewish conservatives as columnist Don Feder or Christian Coalition executive director Marshall Wittmann (whose name, incidentally, is misspelled in two different ways in the report...
...merchants and their wives bearing themselves with varying degrees of pride in portraits by van Eyck, Massys, and Darer...
...He should read Mencken, starting with the Alistair Cooke anthology TAS once mailed as a subscription bonus...
...Court of Appeals...
...Among others, Yale Law School Professor Akhil Amar, one of the most distinguished constitutional scholars of his generation, and Professor Susan Bloch of Georgetown Law School, the author of Supreme Court Politics, have both published essays reaching essentially the same conclusion...
...Bovard to analyze the much larger, overwhelming question—Why do we not only tolerate, but actively promote, deliberately exclusive economic and social policies, and then take such high-handed joy in cluck-clucking when elected officials try to deal with the tragic fallout from those policies...
...Shope want to say that the Institute for Creation Research has played a useful role, I won't argue with that...
...It states that the Coalition's "commitment to local conservative politics represent[s] a remarkable democratic exercise," and calls the Religious Right's grassroots organizing "an exceptional exercise of political commitment...
...Thomas More...
...We continue to evolve, I hope...
...Yes, Ayn Rand and H.L...
...But why am I expected to agree with them...
...Further, observing the population fluctuations of a moth species, even over several decades, is neither a suitable demonstration nor disproof of evolution...
...Why, for example, encourage Congress to pass a law restricting presidential immunity from civil suits (as the treatise essentially did), without acknowledging that such a law would still have to allow the president to escape answering such suits until his return to private life...
...Paul Milenkovic Madison, Wisconsin Tom Bethell seems to delight in trying to resuscitate scientific anachronisms...
...Forgetting about all the disagreements and "exasperation," and granting that God could hardly be a "subjective add-on to a naturalist picture of reality," what about the possibility that "evolution" is very definitely one of His tools or mechanisms...
...Although the purport of the story is not changed, I apologize to Mr...
...If only I'd known...
...More than four pages on prostitution, largely from the prostitute's point of view, is a tribute to the influence of women's history...
...Jason Baldwin Birmingham, Alabama When I opened the July American Spectator, a publication which I presume is written by products of the American school system, and found an article on the lack of proof for Darwin's theory of evolution, I felt a frisson of excitement...
...This is the first issue of the American Spectator I have examined closely...
...0 CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 12) tions placed on landlords corrupt what would otherwise be a normal business relationship between lessor and lessee...
...Minority women with children are the people who get Section 8 housing vouchers, not white guys with bandannas...
...He then went on to become depressive, hypersensitive, hypochondriacal, narcissistic, VD-infected, workaholic (gasp...
...As described in a 1978 law suit, the meeting in Little Rock in early November 1977 actually involved a senior BCCI officer named Abdus Sami, Jackson Stephens, and employees of Stephens, Inc...
...Bethell's reference to the theory of evolution as accepted "fact...
...These buyers served as the excuse for transferring taxpayer funds to contractors and their mostly white and(thanks to the Davis-Bacon Act) usually overpaid workers...
...The Democrats were not interested in the self-help programs, rehab, or support for fledgling home buyers...
...He was dubbed "The Rush Hour Bandit" by reporters covering the crack war in Washington Heights...
...DNA sequences show degree in similarity, not ancestral lineage...
...It's brought to you by Lookpt Point, a bold new innovation of Real-World Intelligence, Inc...
...I was unpleasantly surprised to see this statement in what I understand to be a conservative magazine...
...Benefit number one is the quality of subsidized housing tends to rise as property managers approach a more evenly distributed motivation for investment and property maintenance...
...for those who sought it, extramarital sex became more furtive and animalistic and less companionable, less holiday-like, no longer a more-or-less taken for granted rite of passage from adolescence to manhood...
...He never called Rabbi Daniel Lapin, who is attacked as "strident" for speaking to the Christian Coalition...
...Rabkin absurdly suggests that I would sell my constitutional soul to "send the Clintons a .. . message of devotion...
...Economic spin-off is grabbed by restaurant chains, video chains, boutique chains, auto dealers, and similar franchise operations...
...In the mid-1980s, I served as director of security for a large housing complex in New York City's Washington Heights district...
...Clinton" (in Tribe's telling phrase) would be at all disappointed to see their ostensible legal position (forced on them by political expedience) overturned in the courts...
...On such issues as gays in the military, one may well wonder whether "the President and Mrs...
...What species did cats or dogs evolve from...
...Indeed, the Clinton Justice Department and I are arguing on opposite sides of a major constitutional case now pending in a U.S...
...Bethell cites the failure of various attempts to accelerate the evolutionary process to discount Darwin's life work...
...It is the religionists who are making it an "either-or" contest, as science takes no position on the divine, which is not testable or falsifiable...
...Why did God sow the Universe and the Earth and its rocks with so much evidence of age and of a progression of life forms over time...
...Laurence H. Tribe Ralph S. Tyler, Jr...
...It may be that both Johnson and Bethell already share this assumption, but it wasn't clear from the article...
...In most metropolitan regions, new investments in jobs are usually far from Section 8 housing...
...Firm scientific evidence dates the oldest rocks at 3.5 billion years, the Earth and Solar System 4.5 billion years, the oldest stars in the Milky Way 13 billion...
...What Bethell dismisses as speculation on flimsy evidence with the usual tactic of out of context quotes and wishful thinking, is in fact a tidal wave of disciplined research and evidence favoring Darwin...
...Dale Booth writes that my article tries "to gain the high ground for conservatives...
...We should not, however, condemn the entire concept because of the ineptness of the current administration or undisciplined legislators who think more money always means a more effective program...
...But such a decision should be voluntary, not dictated by bureaucrats and political hacks...
...Religious conservatives have every right to raise their voices in political activity as well as in prayer...
...But Section 8 is not a question of "conservative" vs...
...That brilliant idea awaited the coming of Clinton and Cisneros, as Bovard amply documents...
...But even the Democrats, keenly aware of the racial tensions exacerbated by the urban disorders of 196/-68, did not see Sec...
...Why not just accept this natural process as part of God's plan, whose purpose we humble servants have yet to perceive...
...There were also tenants who had been on the program for as long as ten years and no indication they were making any attempt to achieve financial independence...
...The result is the same negative effects, to a lesser extent, that we see in the site-specific subsidy program...
...In fact, it is difficult to justify any moral code at all if we humans are only the lucky and temporary top of the cosmic muck heap...
...The Declaration of Independence and the negative wording of the Bill of Rights show that rights are granted not by government but rather by man's Creator, and that the purpose of government is to secure these inalienable rights...
...Instead, I will confine my remarks to the gratuitous ad hominem nature of Rabkin's piece...
...The word "inexplicably" in Jason Baldwin's letter should be replaced by "deliberately...
...John McClaughry Institute for Liberty & Community Concord, Vermont James Bovard's excellent article reminded me of my own professional experiences with the Section 8 housing program...
...The creation argument lost a century ago, and decades of discovery have only strengthened and amplified the case for evolution...
...E-Mail Evolution Tom Bethell is right that huge questions remain about the origin of life on earth ("E-Mail Evolution," TAS, July 1994), but the evolution of humans from earlier primates is not one of them...
...whereas the political philosopher Justus Lipsius, "one of the most influential if not one of the most profound minds of the Renaissance," rates six pages for his role in the revival of Stoicism...
...Tribe now says that "for as long as I can remember" his view has been that the president should be liable for criminal prosecution while in office...
...Despite Mr...
...Mencken were atheists...
...After generations of dependence on ill-conceived welfare and public housing programs, there are few positive influences left in the systematically segregated environment in which they grow up...
...The principal purpose was to discuss the sale of Lance's NBG stock to Pharaon, but, according to an affidavit sworn by Sami, Stephens and Lance also touted the FGB investment...
...No, Mr...
...Follow the directions that appear on the screen...
...Wasn't the short portrait of Valentino an outburst of homophobia...
...That it was recently a Main Selection of the Book of the Month Club is even better news: the popular appetite for history is perennial, but the diet has always been variable...
...Here's a bulletin: It's over, Tom...
...Never mind that free citizens have the right to not give a damn about the poor, the homeless, the whatever...
...However, and without exception, the issue of Bible interpretation was first introduced by the evolutionist...
...James J. Kouri, CPP Director of Security New York Hall of Science Flushing Meadows, New York As interest in the voucher system of subsidized housing has grown, conservatives and liberals are drawing ideological battle lines to exploit the new political capital created by this issue...
...Whether 500 years ago or today, a distinguished humanist is not necessarily distinguished for his humanity...
...Although I strongly support the president and Mrs...
...By attacking supporters of parental choice—more than 70 percent of Americans—the ADL makes all of us members of the Religious Right...
...Never mind that altruism is not a 78 The American Spectator November 1994 constitutional value, and that it truly exists only in private acts of personal generosity...
...This family, along with other Section 8ers, made life miserable for the rest of the residents, who blamed me and my officers for the chaos perpetrated by these troublemakers...
...235 was a Democratic transmogrification of the Percy-Widnall homeownership proposal, co-sponsored by all Republican senators and some 112 GOP House members...
...Rather, it is a question of individual responsibility vs...
...He accepts evolution as axiomatic and concludes that, by golly,we're no better than the animals after all...
...Having failed to establish credibility with a scientific argument, the evolutionist resorted to forays into unfamiliar territory, hoping, I'm certain, to belittle his opponent with a display of "scientific" disdain for matters spiritual...
...Shakespeare, whom the Englishman Hale invokes on virtually every subject, gets more than two pages to himself, but that is as the embodiment of Elizabethan drama, which Hale considers the apogee of the English Renaissance...
...I submit that "granted" should be replaced by "secured" or "protected...
...Okay, let us posit Divine creation of each species...
...An accurate statement...
...I did not read the 1968 legislative history of the bill...
...will decline rapidly...
...E-mail discussion allows people who didn't know of each other's existence to get together 82 The American Spectator November 1994 and compare notes...
...Egalitarian evolutionists such as Steve Gould have had a tough time with that...
...Bethell notes, ". . arguments were often footnoted to the Bible...
...The Section 8 program is virtually a financial underwriter for uncivil, pathological behavior...
...Machiavelli and Montaigne are frequent-ly quoted, and yet they never get the spotlight...
...To divide the conservative movement...
...Waverly, and that the Clintons are virtuous people...
...do refer to evolution as "fact...
...Breindel is that H.L...
...James Ring Adams The American Spectator Arlington, Virginia Let Us Not Pray Grover G. Norquist is off the mark in lumping ADL's recent report on the Religious Right with various politically motivated criticism ("Hate Trick," TAS, September 1994...
...Here's all you do...
...Theodore Hordeski may note that Gregory Inskip thinks there are no remaining questions about human evolution...
...Many developers and local officials don't want bus lines—get the code words?—coming anywhere near new office parks and shopping malls...
...Thus the birth of Section 8 in 1974...
...I hope you're not going P.C...
...After all, you know who rides buses (please be polite . . . ). What about an investigative piece on that topic...
...But I agree with Baldwin about the philosophical implications...
...Limited Offer...
...Professor of Constitutional Law Harvard University Law School Cambridge, Massachusetts Jeremy A. Rabkin replies: I thank Professor Tribe for responding at such length to my "foolish essay...
...Instead of being expanded into suburbia, it deserves to be junked from top to bottom...
...This flip-flop—which Tribe now tries to pass off as a mere "change in nuance"—points to the central issue raised in my article...
...When we attempted to evict this one-family crime wave, we were blocked by the Section 8 bureaucracy...
...Suppose Genesis is factual instead of mythic...
...Many suburbs have imposed unjustified one-acre or five-acres per house zoning requirements that price Mr...
...Abraham H. Foxman National Director, ADL New York, New York Grover G. Norquist replies: When I wrote that the ADL's book, The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America, was a "cutand-paste collection of attacks," maybe I wasn't clear enough...
...They can commute by car—which is difficult for poor people...
...It is a movement to put the Fundamentalist teaching on Genesis, 6,000 year old Earth and all, into school science textbooks...
...As Mr...
...Temporally successive rock strata...
...Besides, HUD has a long history of exhorting and subsidizing local governments to impose stringent zoning codes—thereby creating many of the same problems that Section 8 is supposed to counteract...
...The Fed declared that Pharaon was a front man for secret BCCI control of NBG, and he is now a fugitive from state and federal bank fraud indictments...
...Sylvia Genske is right about the liberating effects of the new technology...
...When Jesus prayed, "Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth," could his prayer have gone unanswered...
...Kick back, have a Snapple, and learn something about the scientific process...
...When he does occasionally make his opinions pointedly clear, the effect is arresting, particularly when the opinion defies our expectations or the current wisdom...
...Ed Chynoweth Sanger, California I was quite pleased to find Tom Bethell tackling the sticky issue of evolution in his July column, especially given the alarming number of "enlightened" conservative atheists who might squawk...
...As a result of the meeting, Abedi instructed Naqvi to set aside $1.35 million to buy a block of FGB stock...
...W.H...
...What it boils down to is that some people find the notion of evolution distasteful...
...In light of the unique risks of abuse inherent in such actions, it is my judgment that the constitutional balance between providing immediate redress to individuals alleging wrongs, and permitting the president to exercise without distraction the responsibilities delegated by Article II of the Constitution, must be struck in favor of preserving the president's energies for fulfilling the constitutionally mandated duties of that office...
...Bovard provides some anecdotal examples of these problems and uses them to take issue with the third and most important aspect of a voucher system: a real and more natural integration of the haves and the have-nots...
...Bethell recounts between "Christian intellectuals" and "metaphysical naturalism," because there are more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in either philosophy...
...Cantor admitted he didn't call any of the individuals attacked or question any of the clipping-supplied quotes used against them...
...These debates, held mostly on college campuses, were intended as confrontations between sci80 The American Spectator November 1994 entists with the issues and tools that would be common to both sides, but, as Mr...
...Housing vouchers may be one legacy that is yet to come into full bloom...
...Sarni was there ostensibly as the representative of BCCI client Ghalth Pharaon, a Saudi businessman, who was buying Bert Lance's stock in the National Bank of Georgia in Atlanta...
...What would be atheistic about that...
...Faulting the theory's supposed paucity of "proof," Bethell certainly would have trouble digging up one shred of evidence for creationism...
...When Bert Lance Calls...
...Wouldn't it be a lot more disruptive for President Clinton to have to answer an indictment secured by an independent counsel in a criminal case...
...What about an investigative piece on that topic...
...Set your computer software to: No Parity, 8 Bits, 1 Stop (N-8-1), 2400 Baud, VT 100 or ANSI...
...I'm grateful for the many supportiveletters, and also for those less supportive...
...The meeting between Abedi, Lance, and Stephens occurred on the last weekend in November, in Atlanta, not Little Rock, as I erroneously reported in the August issue...
...It ignores, however, the pathology of why they are trouble-makers to begin with...
...I agree with Ronald Smail's excellent letter...
...That goal could be attained only by eliminating the social support and offering extremely deep subsidies to attract as many buyers as quickly as possible...
...It's easy to make fun of unpopular welfare/housing...
...Trustees for the bankrupt BCCI pled guilty to the charge...
...One aspect that the article did not The American Spectator November 1994 11 mention but is worth pointing out is that any unpaid portions of the tenants' rents are guaranteed by the government, as are the costs of damages to the property due to vandalism or other careless behavior on the tenants' part...
...The first thing you will be asked, once connected, is whether to "Display ANSI Graphics: Yes or No...
...Trying to gain the high ground for conservatives, policy wonk James Bovard has penned an essay pointing out some truly disturbing aspects of this growing niche in public housing...
...Ron Pasini Auburn, Washington THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR...
...Clinton" on some issues...
...But why didn't he identify just one item of that evidence, or just one of my fallacies and out-of-context quotes...
...Sami took material on FGB back to BCCI headquarters in London, and reported to BCCI founder Agha Hasan Abedi, who decided to pursue the investment...
...My conclusions about the meaning of the Constitution are not for sale...
...Henry Morris or Dr...
...Bovard's assessment of Henry Cisneros's feather-brained scheme completely...
...Although the majority of the recipients were black, the people who suffered and complained most from the abuses were also black...
...Gregory A. Inskip Wilmington, Delaware Tom Bethell's "E-Mail Evolution" reminds me that as a conservative I am, disturbingly, in the company of mystics...
...he does not explain why we ought not instead extend the animals' lack of rights up to us...
...Or they can live nearby...
...That is how lawyers make a living...
...It's tougher to take a broader perspective, and just so annoying to tell your readers that racism not only remains strong, but that it is more entrenched and institutionalized than when black people couldn't even walk into a bank, let alone borrow money from it...
...Bethell's excellent comments I might add that the Darwinists have been somewhat disingenuous in considering the consequences of their theory for the doctrines of natural rights and individual moral worth...
...Rudy Boschwitz, an honorary ADL vice-chairman, says the book "paints an unfair and inaccurate portrait of conservative Christians," and adds: "I know this report to be ill-founded...
...Rachels's solution is to extend our rights down to the animals...
...If Professor Tribe has received more than his share of pointed fingers and cries of hypocrisy (I am by no means the first to complain of Tribe's periodic repositionings), it is perhaps because he is so quick to justify himself with pious postures and self-important rhetoric—such as his protest here against an article "absurdly suggest[ing] that I would sell my constitutional soul...
...Again, this misses the point: the issue is not haves and the have-nots but workers and nonworkers/welfare recipients...
...Norquist's gratuitous and dismissive reference notwithstanding, the ADL book is not a "cut-and-paste collection of attacks...
...Bethell, such people soon learned that they could not "smile indulgently" at the arguments of men like Drs...
...Sec...
...Maybe they didn't evolve at all...
...The Christians are right that humans are not inanimate matter, that humans are sinful and need the moral constraints that our progressive age seems intent on destroying, and that science, like anything human, is fallible...
...More than that, a healthy democracy encourages and depends on their doing so...
...can bring world peace with that Egyptian playing the part of Mr...
...The American Spectator November 1994 83...
...Why are modern women so beautiful or why are some peoples taller or of different colors...
...Contrary to Rabkin's suggestion, delaying such litigation until the president leaves office would create no "immovable barrier to civil suits against the president...
...She, like Darwin, would be considered a "materialist" and she expressed her uniquely conservative values from an explicitly atheistic viewpoint...
...Unhung Henry It was annoying to discover a P.C.-style psychobabble critique of HLM in the September 1994 TAS ("Hung-Up Henry," by Kenneth S. Lynn...
...David V. Walden Des Plaines, Illinois James Bovard replies: David Walden's point is an excellent one, and the editors have already corrected the fine print in the contents-page box...
...And if you're going to bring God into the picture, why bother with evolution at all...
...Morris and Gish...
...Instead of Terry Gray's belief that "God's handiwork was implemented by evolution," why not a belief that "God has utilized evolution in His handiwork...
...Wacky establishment ideas are being by-passed via the chaotic chatter of Internet, just as the Roman Curia's were 500 years ago when printed books appeared...
...In 1991, the Federal Reserve chargedthat BCCI had illegally acquired control of First American and NBG (later merged into the First American chain...
...I cannot choose sides in the contest Mr...
...Other evidence establishes our primate lineage as well...
...Another benefit is the ability to provide public housing more efficiently...
...Shope Santa Ana, California Tom Bethell's creationist sympathies in E-Mail Evolution run contrary to the tradition of skepticism in Conservative thought...
...Sure, there are still missing links (a lot of them), and divine creation has a strong case, but there also seems to have been a process of natural selection and adaptation at work...
...As to my view on the question at issue in Rabkin's piece, I am by no means the only scholar "of any real stature" who "came forward to endorse" the thesis that this type of civil suit ought to be delayed absent a showing of extraordinary need for urgent resolution...
...The hypothesis is not necessary here...
...We had several Section 8 tenants and they were responsible for the bulk of the violence, crime, vandalism, drug use, and noise...
...You can substitute any animal you like for "cat" and "dog" and get the same answer...
...Nor will I quibble over how much Tribe's positions actually depart from those embraced at any particular moment by the Clinton Justice Department...
...Why then does the Establishment think that Darwin's quaint nineteenth-century theory should be unimpeachable...
...most of my research focused on the program activities and effects in the early 1970s, when it was widely perceived as a "free homes for welfare mothers" monstrosity...
...Besides, HUD has created myriad rules that bring out the worst behavior of many Section 8 recipients—and leave landlords and neighbors practically defenseless against the problems...
...Thus began the BCCI's interest in what became First American Bankshares, later to be chaired by super-lawyer Clark Clifford...
...On the other hand, if we follow Bovard's thinking on this important point, we condemn our would-be neighbors to the culture of myth, ignorance, and crime that pervades the projects...
...Yet the conclusion is likely to make most feminists uneasy: After the Reformation, Protestant countries tried to abolish sex for pay, with the consequence that for the purveyors, unless they found rich protectors, life became more harassed and degrading...
...As a conservative, I believe that if you can swallow creationism, you can believe that the government can provide universal health care without taking away fundamental liberties, that the Man from U.N.C.L.E...
...If he and W.H...
...The whole purpose of evolution was to get rid of God...
...For a more balanced view, refer to the man's own mellow and reflective A Choice of Days and consider that his last seven years after the stroke were borne without rancor or complaint, though he was not able to read or write...
...The driving principle of Section 235, enacted in 1968, was not "using tax dollars to forcibly mix different economic classes," as Bovard claims...
...It is the ringleaders of evolution themselves who are animated by prejudice: prejudice against religion...
...I called the ADL office while writing "Hate Trick" and spoke at length with David Cantor, listed as the book's author...
...and don't forget the well-developed castration complex...
...Nonetheless, we have always instinctively believed in some kind of evolution...
...At minimum there ought to be a two-year limit for recipients, with no exceptions...
...Your card will be charged $10 each month, in advance...
...However, ideas do have consequences, and the advocates of evolution ought to own up to the devastating consequences their theory implies for our status in the moral universe...
...A high school journalism student would display greater competence...
...To my knowledge, only the nationally known (im)moral philosopher James Rachels at the University of Alabama at Birmingham has attempted to deal with these difficulties...
...After word spread of the common humiliation experienced by the evolutionists, ICR found, about ten years ago, that debates could no longer be scheduled...
...Thomas F. Ewing Cincinnati, Ohio For whatever it's worth, I just wanted to say I agree with Mr...
...Consider the small but obvious changes that have occurred in the human species over the past few millennia, let alone the past few million years...
...It comes from all fields, the strongest being genetics, on which Bethell is strangely silent...
...As privately managed properties absorb the voucher holders, the need for budget skimming public-payroll administrators, maintenance men, housing police, etc...
...A secondary efficiency is also produced as mainstream Americans become de facto social workers and further reduce the need for budget bloating welfare industrialists...
...If Tribe could overcome his previous doubts and embrace the view that a sitting president should be liable to criminal prosecution, how can he now argue that a mere civil suit by a private person is too disruptive for the chief executive to answer while in office...
...So-called Scientific Creationism isnot E-mail agonizing over species generating mutations...
...Dale Booth Tyler, Texas I should have got blood-pressure clearance before I subscribed...
...It taught Congress an important lesson: giving people perpetual rent subsidies was less politically offensive than giving them free homes outright...
...Unlimited Access For a limited time only, you can purchase unlimited access to THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR-Online for just $10 per month...
...It is the result of months of painstaking independent research and writing...
...For the record, as the chief draftsman of the Percy-Widnall home-ownership bill, I urged Senator Percy to vote against the Democrats' wrong-headed version of the idea, but he didn't...
...on us...
...This predator's siblings, although not quite so violent, were nonetheless far from being pillars of the community...
...Rabkin's confused attempt to make political hay of a change in the nuance of my thinking during the decade between the first and second editions of mytreatise American Constitutional Law, my view for as long as I can remember has been that giving a sitting president absolute immunity from criminal proceedings prior to impeachment and removal from office represents an extreme solution to an institutional concern best dealt with in less drastic ways...
...Only in the 1988 edition of the treatise did Tribe claim (at page 269) that "the burden should be on those who insist that the President is immune from criminal trial prior to impeachment and removal from office...
...Cisneros and Achtenberg are from a long line of zealots who believe that altruism is something to be extracted from those who actually work...
...I appreciate John McClaughry's correction on the intent of Section 235...
...I rest my case...
...It's too bad that McClaughry, with his well-recognized understanding of liberty and responsibility, did not have a greater impact on the formulation of federal housing policy...
...But let us stipulate that Tribe is capable of disagreeing with "the President and Mrs...
...Rabkin's observation that my second edition urged "holding presidents . . . accountable even to civil suits" without offering "the slightest hint that such suits would [sometimes] have to be delayed until the president left office" is nothing more than a misleading half-truth...
...Lest anyone still think my article tooextreme, consider the Massachusetts supreme court's ruling last July 22 that a pyromaniac has a "constitutionally protected property interest" in his eligibility for subsidized housing...
...leaving a festering excuse for continued spending on the federal dependence industry...
...I am a social worker and I can assure you that 95 percent of Section 8 recipients are female, a majority of them being black or Hispanic...
...The treatise cheerfully reviewed a number of cases in which sitting cabinet secretaries (and a sitting state governor) were subject to civil litigation and it offered not the slightest hint that suits against the president should be differently handled...
...Ewing is correct that exclusionary zoning policies have sometimes had a racist impact...
...Direct your modem to dial (216) 831-1522...
...No doubt The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance will become a staple of college intro courses, where it will fill a long conspicuous gap...
...Different clients will naturally need different defenses...
...How should the poor apply...
...They should take a bus...
...Any capitalist worth his salt can see the benefits of this more market-oriented approach...
...But if you need help call (216) 831-3250...
...Fat chance...
Vol. 27 • November 1994 • No. 11
