Pope Welcomes New US Ambassador

Pope Benedict XVI receives credentials from new U.S. Ambassador to the

Holy See, Mary Ann Glendon, during a private meeting at the Vatican.

REUTERS/Osservatore Romano

Pope Benedict XVI warmly welcomed Mary Ann Glendon as the new United States Ambassador to the Holy See today, and saluted the "American people's historic appreciation of the role of religion in shaping public discourse and in shedding light on the inherent moral dimension of social issues."

In his welcome to the former Harvard Law School professor, the Pope urged greater respect for "God's gift of life from conception to natural death, and the safeguarding of the institution of marriage, acknowledged as a stable union between a man and a woman, and that of the family" -- themes the Pope is likely to emphasize when he visits the United States in April.

The full text of the Holy Father's address to Dr. Glendon is here.

Don't Buy the Cookies!

From WorldNetDaily

By Jane Chastain

I used to dread this time of year. In the month of March, Girl Scouts are out in force in their smart little green and brown uniforms selling cookies. There was a time I would buy a box from every girl I encountered as a payback for my positive scouting experience.

However, buying that box of cookies now presents a moral dilemma, as the Girl Scouts have become a training ground for the left-wing feminist agenda.

I used to get a knot in my stomach as I turned down these Girl Scouts. Last year I came up with a better plan. I began giving each girl who approached me a letter with an offer to give her troop $100 if it will change its affiliation to the American Heritage Girls. I greet the leader or parent with the girl and hand her information from the AHG website, along with my column "Confessions of a former Girl Scout" and my contact information.

I can still remember the pride I felt as I stood at attention in my crisp Girl Scout uniform to recite the promise:

On my honor, I will try:To do my duty to God and my country,To help other people at all times,To obey the Girl Scout Laws.

How times have changed! Now God has an asterisk telling the girl that "it is OK to replace the word 'God' with whatever word your spiritual beliefs dictate."

The word "duty" (to God) has been replaced with "serve" and the new all-inclusive Girl Scouts are free to serve anyone, including themselves, which seems fitting after reviewing some of their materials that stress "girl empowerment" and moral relativism.

Is it any wonder that the "Covenant of the Goddess" website now boasts that the Girl Scouts allow its members to earn and wear its Over the Moon and Hart and Crescent Award, offered to any young person who is a member of a nature-oriented religion (Wicca, Druid, Asatru, you name it)?

While the Boy Scouts have clung to their original God-centered charter, the Girl Scouts adopted a policy of nondiscrimination and now accepts atheists and lesbians as scouts, troop leaders and staff. In 2004, the Arcus Gay and Lesbian Fund gave a $21,500 grant to the Glowing Embers GS Council in Kalamazoo, Mich., to develop and produce a series of interactive games based on the new diversity (code word for homosexual) curriculum, "Living on My Honor"

The changes began in 1970 when feminist Betty Friedan was put on the national governing board. Soon afterward, the Girl Scouts began purging their materials of all positive references to homemakers. Partnerships with Planned Parenthood followed and the Girl Scouts begin showing up at gun control rallies like the Million Mom March. The Scouts have adopted a new global agenda under the Studio 2B program. The Scouts bemoan the fact that the United States has not signed the radical feminist treaty, the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which would force nations to legalize abortion and prostitution. Guess a girl has to make a living!

To earn the Women Worldwide Interest Project Patch, senior girls are asked to research women who have made an impact. Eve Ensler, the author of the "Vagina Monologues," and Rigoberta Menchu Tum, the lesbian Guatemalan Marxist activist, are held up as role models.

To be sure, there are many good people engaged in Girl Scouting, and the experience largely depends on the character of the local leader and the disposition of the area council. Local councils select area delegates. However, these delegates have no say in national policy. This presents a real conflict for most people of faith, especially since the Girl Scouts brought in the controversial New Age group the Ashland Institute to assist in leadership training.

Today, the American Heritage Girls is everything the Girl Scouts used to be. AHG began in 1995 and offers a scouting experience similar to the Boy Scouts of America. AHG's highest honor is the Stars and Stripes Award patterned after the BSA's Eagle award. It is not at all surprising that the Girl Scouts is losing members, while AHG is one of the fastest-growing youth organizations in America. AHG now boasts 185 troops and more than 6,300 members in 33 states with plans to expand to all 50 states in 2008.

I proudly support them and I hope you will too.

Poland and Malta Stand Up to European Union, United Nations on Abortion

by Samantha Singson

The governments of Poland and Malta broke rank with the European Union on the question of abortion this week. The dissension occurred at the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) which convened it’s annual two-week meeting at UN headquarters in New York on Monday. The reaction of Poland and Malta happened after the EU tried to shift the meeting’s agenda to include the right to abortion.

On Tuesday Radoslaw Mleczko, the Polish Under-Secretary of State in the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy, told the gathering of UN Member States that Poland generally aligned itself with the EU but that any EU reference to sexual and reproductive health could not include abortion.

On Thursday afternoon, the head of Malta’s mission to the UN, Ambassador Saviour F. Borg said, “Malta would like to clarify its position with respect to the language relating to sexual and reproductive health and rights in the [EU] statement. Malta firmly continues to maintain that any position taken or recommendations made regarding women’s empowerment and gender equality should not in any way create an obligation on any party to consider abortion as a legitimate form of reproductive health rights, services or commodities.”

The split in the European Union is significant because the EU hardly ever splits on questions of social policy at the UN. Even countries that are generally anti-abortion go along with the more radical approach taken by the United Kingdom, France and Germany. They do this as an agreement that the EU will always work out their differences behind closed doors and present a united front at UN negotiations.

This works to the advantage of the pro-abortion states since they outnumber the anti-abortion states.

Moreover, an EU that is divided is one that can be defeated on social policy questions. In fact, the last time the EU split in any significant way was in the UN cloning debate which resulted in the UN calling for the ban of all forms of human cloning, an effort opposed by the UK, France, Germany and other left-wing European governments. It is unclear how meaningful this current split will be in the negotiations which will begin in earnest tomorrow.

Pro-life and pro-family issues were also woven into UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s opening remarks to the commission on Monday when he criticized the now widespread practice of choosing abortions based on the sex of the baby, an issue that was all but taken off the agenda at last year’s CSW despite solid support from both civil society and numerous governmental delegations.

In his speech to launch the new UN multi-year campaign to end violence against women, the Secretary-General stressed, “Through the practice of prenatal sex selection, countless others are denied the right even to exist. No country, no culture, no woman young or old is immune to this scourge.”

The Secretary-General also highlighted the importance of families and children stating, “We know that violence against women compounds the enormous social and economic toll on families, communities, even whole nations. And we know that when we work to eradicate violence against women, we empower our greatest resource for development: mothers raising children.”

Among the many pro-life and pro-family lobbyists attending the CSW is a large contingent of high school girls from Overbrook Academy in Rhode Island. Fourteen year old Elsa Corripio told the Friday Fax, “We want these delegates to know that there are many young people who believe in respecting life.”

Ana Paola Rangel, 15, added, “Maybe we can't change the world, but we know we can make a difference.”

The CSW meeting continues through next week.


Samantha Singson writes for the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute. This article originally appeared in the pro-life group's Friday Fax publication.

William F. Buckley: May He Rest In Peace

William F. Buckley, Jr.

1925 - 2008

From National Review Online

By Peter Wehner

There will be many people who knew Bill Buckley far better than I who will attest to his personal kindness and grace over the years. And many people will pour forth with testimonies about Mr. Buckley's monumental role in the history of modern conservatism. I simply want to recount his role in my own pilgrimage of faith.

When I was a young Christian, I happened to come across a re-broadcast of a Firing Line episode in which Mr. Buckley interviewed the British journalist and author Malcolm Muggeridge. The subject was Muggeridge's Christian faith. I had never heard of "St. Mugg" before - but as I watched the interview, I was utterly captivated by the conversation. It was a remarkable, intellectually serious, uplifting, and even moving discussion between two close friends, united in common purpose. That interview became a kind of touchstone for me, one that I still return to (via videotape) from time to time. Years later, I corresponded with Mr. Buckley about this interview, and about faith more broadly. He was as gracious - more gracious - than I could have hoped for.

William Buckley was many remarkable things. But he was, perhaps above all, a good and faithful servant of the Lord. And now he is in the company of his Lord and his beloved wife Pat, in a place where there is no more death or mourning, crying or pain, and where every tear has been wiped away. And with Messrs. Buckley and Muggeridge together again, the conversation has gotten even better, even richer.

God bless William F. Buckley, Jr.

British Parliament To Investigate Catholic Influence in Catholic Schools

This blog has frequently lamented the growing secularization of Europe and its suicidal refusal to even acknowledge the Christian foundations on which Western civilization flourished. But with this story in The Independent about a British Parliamentary investigation into Catholic influence in Catholic schools, one must wonder if outright persecution is at hand.

According to The Independent, "Members of the Children, Schools and Families Committee plan to call senior bishops to give evidence in an inquiry into the approach schools are adopting towards a range of issues – including abortion, sex education and PSHE (personal and social health education) classes." Let's hope that with that "Catholic influence," those students are preparing for the world in which they may have to live, and are learning about the English Martyrs and the Tyburn Tree.

Has anyone heard about a Parliamentary investigation into Muslim influence in Britain's Islamic schools?

OBAMA'S WOMEN REVEAL HIS SECRET

From the Asia Times Online

By Spengler

"Cherchez la femme," advised Alexander Dumas in: "When you want to uncover an unspecified secret, look for the woman." In the case of Barack Obama, we have two: his late mother, the went-native anthropologist Ann Dunham, and his rancorous wife Michelle. Obama's women reveal his secret: he hates America.

We know less about Senator Obama than about any prospective president in American history. His uplifting rhetoric is empty, as Hillary Clinton helplessly protests. His career bears no trace of his own character, not an article for the Harvard Law Review he edited, or a single piece of legislation. He appears to be an empty vessel filled with the wishful thinking of those around him. But there is a real Barack Obama. No man - least of all one abandoned in infancy by his father - can conceal the imprint of an impassioned mother, or the influence of a brilliant wife.

America is not the embodiment of hope, but the abandonment of one kind of hope in return for another. America is the spirit of creative destruction, selecting immigrants willing to turn their back on the tragedy of their own failing culture in return for a new start. Its creative success is so enormous that its global influence hastens the decline of other cultures. For those on the destruction side of the trade, America is a monster. Between half and nine-tenths of the world's 6,700 spoken languages will become extinct in the next century, and the anguish of dying peoples rises up in a global cry of despair. Some of those who listen to this cry become anthropologists, the curators of soon-to-be extinct cultures; anthropologists who really identify with their subjects marry them. Obama's mother, the University of Hawaii anthropologist Ann Dunham, did so twice.

Obama profiles Americans the way anthropologists interact with primitive peoples. He holds his own view in reserve and emphatically draws out the feelings of others; that is how friends and colleagues describe his modus operandi since his days at the Harvard Law Review, through his years as a community activist in Chicago, and in national politics. Anthropologists, though, proceed from resentment against the devouring culture of America and sympathy with the endangered cultures of the primitive world. Obama inverts the anthropological model: he applies the tools of cultural manipulation out of resentment against America. The probable next president of the United States is a mother's revenge against the America she despised.

Ann Dunham died in 1995, and her character emerges piecemeal from the historical record, to which I will return below. But Michelle Obama is a living witness. Her February 18 comment that she felt proud of her country for the first time caused a minor scandal, and was hastily qualified. But she meant it, and more. The video footage of her remarks shows eyes hooded with rage as she declares:

For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment.

The desperation, frustration and disappointment visible on Michelle Obama's face are not new to the candidate's wife; as Steve Sailer, Rod Dreher and other commentators have noted, they were the theme of her undergraduate thesis, on the subject of "blackness" at Princeton University. No matter what the good intentions of Princeton, which founded her fortunes as a well-paid corporate lawyer, she wrote, "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong."

Never undererestimate the influence of a wife who bitch-slaps her husband in public. Early in Obama's campaign, Michelle Obama could not restrain herself from belittling the senator. "I have some difficulty reconciling the two images I have of Barack Obama. There's Barack Obama the phenomenon. He's an amazing orator, Harvard Law Review, or whatever it was, law professor, best-selling author, Grammy winner. Pretty amazing, right? And then there's the Barack Obama that lives with me in my house, and that guy's a little less impressive," she told a fundraiser in February 2007.

"For some reason this guy still can't manage to put the butter up when he makes toast, secure the bread so that it doesn't get stale, and his five-year-old is still better at making the bed than he is." New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reported at the time, "She added that the TV version of Barack Obama sounded really interesting and that she'd like to meet him sometime." Her handlers have convinced her to be more tactful since then.

"Frustration" and "disappointment" have dogged Michelle Obama these past 20 years, despite her US$300,000 a year salary and corporate board memberships. It is hard for the descendants of slaves not to resent America. They were not voluntary immigrants but kidnap victims, subjected to a century of second-class citizenship even after the Civil War ended slavery. Blackness is not the issue; General Colin Powell, whose parents chose to immigrate to America from the West Indies, saw America just as other immigrants do, as a land of opportunity. Obama's choice of wife is a failsafe indicator of his own sentiments. Spouses do not necessarily share their likes, but they must have their hatreds in common. Obama imbibed this hatred with his mother's milk.

Michelle Obama speaks with greater warmth of her mother-in-law than of her husband. "She was kind of a dreamer, his mother," Michelle Obama was quoted in the January 25 Boston Globe. "She wanted the world to be open to her and her children. And as a result of her naivete, sometimes they lived on food stamps, because sometimes dreams don't pay the rent. But as a result of her naivete, Barack got to see the world like most of us don't in this country." How strong the ideological motivation must be of a mother to raise her children on the thin fair of government assistance in pursuit of a political agenda.

"Naivete" is a euphemism for Ann Dunham's motivation. Friends describe her as a "fellow traveler", that is, a communist sympathizer, from her youth, according to a March 27, 2007, Chicago Tribune report. Many Americans harbor leftist views, but not many marry into them, twice. Ann Dunham met and married the Kenyan economics student Barack Obama, Sr, at the University of Hawaii in 1960, and in 1967 married the Indonesian student Lolo Soetero. It is unclear why Soetero's student visa was revoked in 1967 - the fact but not the cause are noted in press accounts. But it is probable that the change in government in Indonesia in 1967, in which the leftist leader Sukarno was deposed, was the motivation.

Soetero had been sponsored as a graduate student by one of the most radical of all Third World governments. Sukarno had founded the so-called Non-Aligned Movement as an anti-colonialist turn at the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia. Before deposing him in 1967, Indonesia's military slaughtered 500,000 communists (or unfortunates who were mistaken for communists). When Ann Dunham chose to follow Lolo Soetero to Indonesia in 1967, she brought the six-year-old Barack into the kitchen of anti-colonialist outrage, immediate following one of the worst episodes of civil violence in post-war history.

Dunham's experience in Indonesia provided the material for a doctoral dissertation celebrating the hardiness of local cultures against the encroaching metropolis. It was entitled, "Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: surviving against all odds". In this respect Dunham remained within the mainstream of her discipline. Anthropology broke into popular awareness with Margaret Mead's long-discredited Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), which offered a falsified ideal of sexual liberation in the South Pacific as an alternative to the supposedly repressive West. Mead's work was one of the founding documents of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and anthropology faculties stood at the left-wing fringe of American universities.

In the Global South, anthropologists went into the field and took matters a step further. Peru's brutal Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerilla movement was the brainchild of the anthropologist Efrain Morote Best, who headed the University of San Cristobal of Huamanga in Ayacucho, Peru, between 1962 and 1968. Dunham's radicalism was more vicarious; she ended her career as an employee of international organizations.

Barack Obama received at least some instruction in the Islamic faith of his father and went with him to the mosque, but the importance of this experience is vastly overstated by conservative commentators who seek to portray Obama as a Muslim of sorts. Radical anti-Americanism, rather than Islam, was the reigning faith in the Dunham household. In the Muslim world of the 1960s, nationalism rather than radical Islam was the ideology of choice among the enraged. Radical Islam did not emerge as a major political force until the nationalism of a Gamal Abdel Nasser or a Sukarno failed.

Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother's milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.

There is nothing mysterious about Obama's methods. "A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is," wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world's biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis' cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power's portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama speech.

America has the great misfortune to have encountered Obama at the peak of his powers at its worst moment of vulnerability in a generation. With malice of forethought, he has sought out their sore point.

Since the Ronald Reagan boom began in 1984, the year the American stock market doubled, Americans have enjoyed a quarter-century of rising wealth. Even the collapse of the Internet bubble in 2000 did not interrupt the upward trajectory of household assets, as the housing price boom eclipsed the effect of equity market weakness. America's success made it a magnet for the world's savings, and Americans came to believe that they were riding a boom that would last forever, as I wrote recently [1].

Americans regard upward mobility as a God-given right. America had a double founding, as David Hackett Fischer showed in his 1989 study, Albion's Seed . Two kinds of immigrants founded America: religious dissidents seeking a new Promised Land, and economic opportunists looking to get rich quick. Both elements still are present, but the course of the past quarter-century has made wealth-creation the sine qua non of American life. Now for the first time in a generation Americans have become poorer, and many of them have become much poorer due to the collapse of home prices. Unlike the Reagan years, when cutting the top tax rate from a punitive 70% to a more tolerable 40% was sufficient to start an economic boom, no lever of economic policy is available to fix the problem. Americans have no choice but to work harder, retire later, save more and retrench.

This reversal has provoked a national mood of existential crisis. In Europe, economic downturns do not inspire this kind of soul-searching, for Europeans, richer are poorer, remain what they always have been. But Americans are what they make of themselves, and the slim makings of 2008 shake their sense of identity. Americans have no institutionalized culture to fall back on. Their national religion has consisted of waves of enthusiasm - "Great Awakenings" – every second generation or so, followed by an interim of apathy. In times of stress they have a baleful susceptibility to hucksters and conmen.

Be afraid - be very afraid. America is at a low point in its fortunes, and feeling sorry for itself. When Barack utters the word "hope", they instead hear, "handout". A cynic might translate the national motto, E pluribus unum, as "something for nothing". Now that the stock market and the housing market have failed to give Americans something for nothing, they want something for nothing from the government. The trouble is that he who gets something for nothing will earn every penny of it, twice over.

The George W Bush administration has squandered a great strategic advantage in a sorry lampoon of nation-building in the Muslim world, and has made enemies out of countries that might have been friendly rivals, notably Russia. Americans question the premise of America's standing as a global superpower, and of the promise of upward mobility and wealth-creation. If elected, Barack Obama will do his utmost to destroy the dual premises of America's standing. It might take the country another generation to recover.

"Evil will oft evil mars", J R R Tolkien wrote. It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama. As he recalled in his 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, Obama idealized the Kenyan economist who had married and dumped his mother, and was saddened to learn that Barack Hussein Obama, Sr, was a sullen, drunken polygamist. The elder Obama became a senior official of the government of Kenya after earning a PhD at Harvard. He was an abusive drunk and philanderer whose temper soured his career.

The senior Obama died in a 1982 car crash. Kenyan government officials in those days normally spent their nights drinking themselves stupid at the Pan-Afrique Hotel. Two or three of them would be found with their Mercedes wrapped around a palm tree every morning. During the 1970s I came to know a number of them, mostly British-educated hollow men dying inside of their own hypocrisy and corruption.

Both Obama and the American public should be very careful of what they wish for. As the horrible example of Obama's father shows, there is nothing worse for an embittered outsider manipulating the system from within than to achieve his goals - and nothing can be more terrible for the system. Even those who despise America for its blunders of the past few years should ask themselves whether the world will be a safer place if America retreats into a self-pitying shell.

Note1. Obama bin lottery Asia Times Online, January 29, 2008.

A Call To Texans

A call to action for all Texans to stand for their principles and convictions and to support Mike Huckabee in the primary on March 4, 2008. Mike Huckabee needs Texas, y'all!

A Republican Response to Clinton-Obama "Comprehensive Health Care"

At The Catholic University of America, A Symposium of Intellectual Powerhouses

From CUA Magazine

A few years ago, a key Vatican official — the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — wrote to Very Rev. David M. O’Connell, C.M., university president, requesting that Catholic University look into organizing a symposium.

A short time thereafter, that prefect — Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — became Pope Benedict XVI, and now, after more than two years of planning, the university is finalizing preparations to host a first-of-its-kind international symposium, tailored to the pope’s request.

That symposium, hosted by CUA’s Center for Law, Philosophy and Culture, will ask whether today’s global culture can reclaim an original attitude of acknowledgement of — and respect for — the gift of existence that historically informed the world’s moral and cultural traditions. It will ask, as well, whether, by doing so, that culture can bolster its capacity for the moral insight needed to address the world’s pressing problems. The symposium will seek to elicit ideas advancing a more widely shared understanding of these questions and the answers they provoke.

“A Common Morality for the Global Age: In Gratitude for What We Are Given,” the symposium will feature 22 speakers who constitute a “who’s who list” of leading philosophers, political scientists and theologians from around the world, says William Wagner, director of the CUA center and a professor at the Columbus School of Law. The symposium is scheduled for March 27–30, 2008.

A first-rate scholarly gathering takes years of planning, says Wagner. But he described the cardinal’s letter to Father O’Connell as “conceptually brilliant, providing an excellent protocol for developing a cogent symposium.”

Some of the highlighted speakers include Rev. John Polkinghorne, a leading particle physicist and the president emeritus of Cambridge University’s Queens’ College, who will discuss “The Christian Belief in Creation and the Attitude of Moral Accountability,” and Princeton University’s Robert George, who will deliver a paper on “Natural Law, God, and Human Rights.” Cardinal Angelo Scola, patriarch of Venice, Italy, will give the keynote address, “The Luminousness of Being and the Light of Moral Insight,” via video.

Other noted speakers will include Stanley Hauerwas of Duke University, author of a work on Christian social ethics that was named one of the 100 most important books on religion in the 20th century; Paul Vitz of New York University, who has written several books on the relationship of Christianity and psychology; and Jean Bethke Elshtain of the University of Chicago, a prolific author on the connections between political and ethical convictions.

The conference, Wagner stresses, is an ecumenical one: About half of the speakers will be non-Catholics. Cardinal Ratzinger’s objective was to dialogue across national boundaries, combining a Christian sponsorship with a broader universality that would allow for a common conversation. The shared question, says Wagner, is whether the global community can find access to an underlying attitude of respect for the gifts of existence, which can give it a capacity to recognize moral truths necessary to respond to critical moral questions. Two examples of such questions include the stewardship of the earth and humanitarian response to international conflict. The symposium seeks to re-explore the core meaning of what the Catholic tradition terms “natural law” and to uncover parallel and converging directions in the world’s other religious and moral traditions.

“Outstanding” is the way Father O’Connell describes Wagner’s efforts in organizing the symposium. “Professor Wagner has gone out and recruited the finest minds we have, to grapple with issues that are universal, complex and deserving of the most serious scrutiny. We are honored that His Holiness invited Catholic University to organize this symposium and pleased to fulfill a role that is so consonant with our mission.”

To view the complete program for the symposium, see http://law.cua.edu/CLPC/internationalsymposium/

Canada, U. S. Agree to Share Troops in Civil Emergencies

Here's an interesting item from the Canadian press -- another Bush executive fiat, without the knowledge or consent of the United States Congress. Of course, we are supposed to believe that the Security and Prosperity Partnership (aka North American Union) is about nothing more than the uniform production, distribution, and sale of jelly beans.

From the National Post
David Pugliese, Canwest News Service

Canada and the U.S. have signed an agreement that paves the way for the militaries from either nation to send troops across each other's borders during an emergency, but some are questioning why the Harper government has kept silent on the deal.

Neither the Canadian government nor the Canadian Forces announced the new agreement, which was signed Feb. 14 in Texas.

The U.S. military's Northern Command, however, publicized the agreement with a statement outlining how its top officer, Gen. Gene Renuart, and Canadian Lt.-Gen. Marc Dumais, head of Canada Command, signed the plan, which allows the military from one nation to support the armed forces of the other nation during a civil emergency.

The new agreement has been greeted with suspicion by the left wing in Canada and the right wing in the U.S.

The left-leaning Council of Canadians, which is campaigning against what it calls the increasing integration of the U.S. and Canadian militaries, is raising concerns about the deal.

"It's kind of a trend when it comes to issues of Canada-U.S. relations and contentious issues like military integration. We see that this government is reluctant to disclose information to Canadians that is readily available on American and Mexican websites," said Stuart Trew, a researcher with the Council of Canadians.

Trew said there is potential for the agreement to militarize civilian responses to emergency incidents. He noted that work is also underway for the two nations to put in place a joint plan to protect common infrastructure such as roadways and oil pipelines.

"Are we going to see [U.S.] troops on our soil for minor potential threats to a pipeline or a road?" he asked.

Trew also noted the U.S. military does not allow its soldiers to operate under foreign command so there are questions about who controls American forces if they are requested for service in Canada. "We don't know the answers because the government doesn't want to even announce the plan," he said.

But Canada Command spokesman Commander David Scanlon said it will be up to civilian authorities in both countries on whether military assistance is requested or even used.

He said the agreement is "benign" and simply sets the stage for military-to-military co-operation if the governments approve.

"But there's no agreement to allow troops to come in," he said. "It facilitates planning and co-ordination between the two militaries. The ‘allow' piece is entirely up to the two governments."

If U.S. forces were to come into Canada they would be under tactical control of the Canadian Forces but still under the command of the U.S. military, Scanlon added.

News of the deal, and the allegation it was kept secret in Canada, is already making the rounds on left-wing blogs and Internet sites as an example of the dangers of the growing integration between the two militaries.

On right-wing blogs in the U.S., it is being used as evidence of a plan for a "North American union" where foreign troops, not bound by U.S. laws, could be used by the American federal government to override local authorities.

"Co-operative militaries on Home Soil!" notes one Web site. "The next time your town has a ‘national emergency,' don't be surprised if Canadian soldiers respond. And remember -- Canadian military aren't bound by posse comitatus."

Posse comitatus is a U.S. law that prohibits the use of federal troops from conducting law enforcement duties on domestic soil unless approved by Congress.

Scanlon said there was no intent to keep the agreement secret on the Canadian side of the border. He noted it will be reported on in the Canadian Forces newspaper next week and that publication will be put on the Internet.

Scanlon said the actual agreement hasn't been released to the public as that requires approval from both nations. That decision has not yet been taken, he added.

American Liberty Teetering on Edge of Abyss

As an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration, Paul Craig Roberts became known as the “Father of Reaganomics.” A distinguished economist, journalist, and nationally syndicated columnist, he is the author of eight books and a recipient of the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists in the United States.

His recent column in Chronicles, “American Liberty Teetering on Edge of Abyss,” is a “must read” for anyone who cares about liberty and the rule of law under the United States Constitution. In it Roberts summarizes the shocking erosion of power from the people and their representatives to a President “who can do whatever he wants.”

Conservatives may acquiesce to this subverting of the Constitution now, but will a Democrat President be any more respectful of the “separate but equal” legislative branch, or be willing to part with those powers Bush has usurped?

Mass Sentencing of Chinese House Church Leaders

Twenty-one prominent Christian leaders have been sentenced to re-education through labour in what China Aid Association (CAA) describes as the largest mass sentencing of house church leaders in China in 25 years.

The Linyi City Re-education through Labour Commission in Shandong Province simultaneously sentenced 17 male and 4 female church leaders to re-education through labour for fifteen months to three years, according to news released yesterday by CAA.

The 21 were detained during a mass arrest of 270 Christian leaders on 7 December 2007 in Hedeng District, Linyi City as they gathered for leadership training. The others detained with them were fined and released in the intervening period. The leaders were accused of holding an “illegal religious gathering” and the 21 labelled as members of an “evil cult”, a term which Chinese authorities arbitrarily apply to unregistered religious groups.

The news of the mass sentencing comes just a day after CAA published an open letter to the international community from the President of the Chinese House Church Alliance, Pastor Zhang Mingxuan. In the letter, Pastor Zhang describes the persecution he has faced as a Christian leader, including being incarcerated on twelve occasions. He also describes how the Public Security Bureau have harassed an orphanage he ran with his two sons and forced it to close.

Pastor Zhang expresses support for the Beijing Olympics, but hopes that the attention on China around the Games will encourage the Chinese Government to allow real freedom of religion and to release Christians imprisoned as a result of their faith.

The mass sentencing and Pastor Zhang’s letter follow a significant increase in persecution against the house churches in China last year and a level of expulsion of foreign Christians not seen since the 1950s, according to CAA’s annual report. CAA also report that four Christians were detained for five days at the end of January for handing out Christian tracts in Zhejiang province. Additionally, two female House Church Alliance leaders were taken into custody on Monday, 18 February 2008, on their way to Beijing. Their whereabouts is currently unknown. CAA believes this activity is designed to dismantle the House Church Alliance before the Olympic Games start.

Christian Solidarity Worldwide’s Chief Executive, Mervyn Thomas, says: “It is shocking that China would commit such a grave and large scale violation of religious freedom as the eyes of the world are focused on the nation. At a time when Beijing is hosting a sporting event which is based on ‘universal fundamental ethical principles’, the crackdown on China’s peaceful Christian house churches must not go unnoticed. We join Pastor Zhang in his desire for China to release the many Christians detained as a result of their faith and we urge the international community to respond to the serious breaches of international standards committed against religious believers in China.”

Vatican Radio On Life Under Castro

(19 Feb 08 - RV) Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro announced today that he will not return to lead the country as president or commander-in-chief, retiring as head of state 49 years after he seized power in an armed revolution. Fr Ernesto Travieso is a Jesuit priest and Cuban native. He says Fidel’s magnetic charisma often blinded many people to the reality of every day life for people in Cuba.

Listen here:

Sandi Patty - "How Great Thou Art"

In loving memory and gratitude for a special friend on her birthday.

The West’s Fatal Mistake: We Are All Serbs Now

Published by The Brussels Journal

By Thomas Landen

Today, one day after Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence, the United States and the major European countries rushed to recognize Kosovo’s independence. George Bush hailed Kosovo’s “bold and historic bid for statehood.” Five years ago, Mr Bush invaded Iraq and began “operation Iraqi freedom.” He toppled Saddam Hussein in order to get rid of a rogue regime, one of the members of the “axis of evil.” Five years later, Mr Bush is saddling Europe with a new rogue state.

Surely, Mr Bush knows that al-Qa’eda fighters were involved in driving the Serbs from Kosovo in the late 1990s. The Jerusalem Post reported in 1998 that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was “provided with financial and military support from Islamic countries,” and had been “bolstered by hundreds of Iranian fighters or mujahedin [some of whom] were trained in Osama bin Laden’s terrorist camps in Afghanistan.” There is more proof of involvement of the KLA of the (then and current) Kosovar leader Hashim Thaçi, nicknamed ‘the Snake,’ with al-Qa’eda than there was of the Iraqi Ba’ath regime of the late Saddam Hussein.

Yesterday, thousands of ethnic Albanians were celebrating their independence in the Kosovar capital Pristina, shouting “KLA! KLA!” and waving American flags alongside the Albanian and the new Kosovar national flag. Is America now in league with al-Qa’eda and the Albanian mafia? What is the point of fighting Islamism in Iraq while at the same time one creates a free haven for Islamists on the European continent?

Surely, Mr Bush knows that “the KLA […] is tied in with every known middle and far eastern drug cartel. Interpol, Europol, and nearly every European intelligence and counter-narcotics agency has files open on drug syndicates that lead right to the KLA, and right to Albanian gangs in [Kosovo]. Furthermore, the KLA was involved in sex slaves. Furthermore, they were supported by Osama Bin Laden.”

Only last week, General Fabio Mini, the Italian general who commanded the NATO troops in Kosovo in 2002-2003, warned that the recognition of Kosovo’s independence would turn out to be a “fatal mistake.” This new state, the general said, will only benefit the clans who currently rule Kosovo: i.e. the clans of the current Prime Minister, Hashim ‘the Snake’ Thaçi “who is in business with the oil companies,” of his predecessor Ramush Haradinay, who is standing trial for war crimes in The Hague, of former Prime Minister Agim Ceku “who wants to become a generalissimo” and of Behgjet Pacolli, a billionaire “who needs somewhere to stack the money of his empire.” “What these clans want,” General Mini said, “is a place in Europe where they can open new banks, a free haven for the money that flows in from the East.”

Sadly, Mr Bush is not the only one making a “fatal mistake.” Many of the 27 European Union (EU) member states have done so, too, including the big three – Britain, France, Germany – and the Franco-German poodle, multinational Belgium. Others, however, have serious misgivings. Spain, Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia oppose Kosovo’s independence. The Italian government is divided on the issue.

In a statement issued in Brussels the EU foreign ministers say that Kosovo’s history of “conflict, ethnic cleansing and humanitarian catastrophe” in the 1990s by Serbia exempts it from the rule that international borders can only be changed with the agreement of all parties. The EU countries that recognize Kosovo’s independence admit that they are doing so in violation of the rule of “territorial integrity” of nations under international law. They want to ‘punish’ Serbia for its misbehaviour in the 1990s, but fail to see that they are ‘punishing’ the whole of Europe by saddling it with a state run by criminal gangs.

Russia refuses to accept Kosovo’s independence. So does China. Moscow has called on the United Nations to annul Pristina’s decision. It will be interesting to see which countries will back Russia in the UN. Moscow’s allies in the Organization of Islamic States definitely will not. They applaud the establishment of a new Muslim state in Europe. Will Russia now become the leader of the Europeans who resist the Islamization of their continent? Or will the crisis in the Balkan trigger a new world war, just as the Great War was triggered in the Balkans in 1914?

Indeed, what will Russia do if the 16,000 NATO “peace keeping” troops in Kosovo attack the Serbian army when it attempts to recover its breakaway province? If Russia intervenes, then 2008 might become the year that war broke out between Russia and NATO. America, the EU, Europe’s immigrant “youths” and Osama bin Laden would find themselves on one side, and Russia, with China and the Europeans who resist Islamization on the other.

Top Psychiatrist Concludes Liberals Are Clinically Nuts!

From WorldNet Daily

WASHINGTON – Just when liberals thought it was safe to start identifying themselves as such, an acclaimed, veteran psychiatrist is making the case that the ideology motivating them is actually a mental disorder.

"Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded," says Dr. Lyle Rossiter, author of the new book, "The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness." "Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of adulthood and demand that a parental government meet their needs from cradle to grave."

While political activists on the other side of the spectrum have made similar observations, Rossiter boasts professional credentials and a life virtually free of activism and links to "the vast right-wing conspiracy."

For more than 35 years he has diagnosed and treated more than 1,500 patients as a board-certified clinical psychiatrist and examined more than 2,700 civil and criminal cases as a board-certified forensic psychiatrist. He received his medical and psychiatric training at the University of Chicago.

Rossiter says the kind of liberalism being displayed by the two major candidates for the Democratic Party presidential nomination can only be understood as a psychological disorder.

"A social scientist who understands human nature will not dismiss the vital roles of free choice, voluntary cooperation and moral integrity – as liberals do," he says. "A political leader who understands human nature will not ignore individual differences in talent, drive, personal appeal and work ethic, and then try to impose economic and social equality on the population – as liberals do. And a legislator who understands human nature will not create an environment of rules which over-regulates and over-taxes the nation's citizens, corrupts their character and reduces them to wards of the state – as liberals do."

Dr. Rossiter says the liberal agenda preys on weakness and feelings of inferiority in the population by:

• creating and reinforcing perceptions of victimization;

• satisfying infantile claims to entitlement, indulgence and compensation;

• augmenting primitive feelings of envy;

• rejecting the sovereignty of the individual, subordinating him to the will of the government.

"The roots of liberalism – and its associated madness – can be clearly identified by understanding how children develop from infancy to adulthood and how distorted development produces the irrational beliefs of the liberal mind," he says. "When the modern liberal mind whines about imaginary victims, rages against imaginary villains and seeks above all else to run the lives of persons competent to run their own lives, the neurosis of the liberal mind becomes painfully obvious."

Archbishop Vindicated. British Government Prepared to Say Yes to Sharia Law

From The Brussells Journal

Britain is to become the first Western nation to issue bonds approved by Muslim clerics in line with sharia law, which bans conventional loans involving interest payments as "sinful". The scheme would mark one of the most significant economic advances of sharia law in the non-Muslim world.

It will lead to the ownership of Government buildings and other assets currently belonging to British taxpayers being switched wholesale to wealthy Middle-Eastern businessmen and banks. The Government sees sharia-compliant bonds as a way of tapping Middle-East money and building bridges with the Muslim community.

But critics say the scheme would waste money and could undermine Britain's financial and legal systems. […] Other Western nations have been reluctant to issue Islamic bonds. In the United States the bonds are banned partly as a result of claims that the money could be linked to terrorism. […]

However, The Mail on Sunday has established that Chancellor Alistair Darling is ready to give the go-ahead to sharia-compliant bonds – known as "sukuk", an early Arabic form of cheque. Treasury officials have been working behind the scenes for months on the plan. […] Treasury officials say the aim is to attract big investors as well as making it easier for British Muslims to invest in National Savings products at banks and post offices. The Government has already backed Islamic car loans and mortgages.

GEORGE WASHINGTON'S PRAYER FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Almighty GOD; we make our earnest prayer that Thou wilt keep the United States in Thy holy protection, that thou wilt incline the hearts of the citizens to cultivate a spirit of subordination and obedience to government; and entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another and for their fellow citizens of the United States of America at large. And finally that Thou wilt most graciously be pleased to dispose us all to do justice, to love mercy and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility and pacific temper of mind which were the characteristics of The Divine Author of our blessed religion, and without whose example in these things we can never hope to be a happy nation. Grant our supplication, we beseech thee, through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Amen

- George Washington -

April 30th, 1789

George Washington's prayer was adapted from his Circular Letter to the Governors of the United States

The End of Press Freedom in Europe?

The unelected elite running the European Union are consolidating their power and tightening their grip. The following from The Brussells Journal sounds the alarm that freedom of the press may soon be eliminated.

EU Journalist or Propagandist?

By Elaib Harvey

Created 2008-02-15 19:23

Yesterday I received a copy of an open letter from Aidan White, the General Secretary of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ). And very odd it was. It talked about the idea of a new journalist registration system, with Mr White pointing out that such a thing already exists in the shape of the IFJ card.

I write on behalf of the International Federation of Journalists and the European Federation of Journalists concerning a current discussion within European Union circles over the issuing of a specific European Press Card.

You might like to know that there is already an accreditation in circulation which is recognised by the major organisations of journalists throughout the European Union – the International Press Card of the IFJ.

The IFJ International Press Card (IPC) is the world’s oldest and most reputable press accreditation and provides instant confirmation that the bearer is a working journalist. It is only issued to genuine journalists who are committed to ethical standards and solidarity between media professionals.

Despite his job Mr White is no radical, and often seems pretty tardy on issues relating to press freedom, however here he is bang on. I immediately picked up the phone to the IFJ and spoke to them.

Indeed this letter seems to be a shot across the bows of the Commission. There are discussions going on in the Commission, (but at this point I and nor do the IFJ know how high up they go) about the creation of an European Press Card.

The ramifications of this could be massive. It could mean that it would be the Commission which could decide which journalist were 'proper' journalists and which were not. I know personally of journalists who have been threatened and arrested on the say so of European officials. They are accused of publishing inaccuracies, they are told that 'what they write does not represent the interests of their newspapers'. I know of newspapers that have had their advertisers phoned by the Commission's legal team with suggestions about how the Commission is represented in the paper, and how it would be helpful if they were to have a quiet word with editorial team. I remember when Alessandro Buttice the lawyer who represents OLAF as its press spokesman sent out a 16 page document to the Brussels' press corps advising them of how they should report EU news.

Access to Commissioners and officials could be restricted to those on the Commission list. Today there is European Institutional press accreditation, but any journalist who is vouched for by an editor is accepted. This new idea has a strong suggestion that the Commission itself will do the vetting not the news organisation and must be opposed as vigorously as possible.

I cannot emphasise how serious this could be.

Book Review: A Grace Given

From Catholic Exchange

One of the hardest things to bear is the illness or loss of a child. I brushed up against this terrifying possibility briefly last December, when my five year old daughter with Down syndrome, normally so healthy, was suddenly stricken with double pneumonia.

For six days, we dwelt in the valley of the shadow of death with her, holding an oxygen tube in front of her mouth day and night, our eyes fixed upon the monitor who measured her blood oxygenation, thumping her back and chest with our cupped hands, the simple treatment which saved her life. There was never a more joyful Christmas Eve procession as that of our family bearing her out of the hospital past the hospital chapel overflowing with worshippers who turned as I prayed aloud, "Praise to You, Lord Jesus Christ, King of endless glory!"

But for Liz and Kent Gilges the dark night of sorrow didn't end. Life saving surgery on their firstborn infant girl, Elizabeth Nyanga Gilges, whom they called "Elie" caused brain damage from which she would never recover. They lovingly nursed her, unresponsive in a persistent vegetative state, for ten years before Jesus took Elie home.

Liz, a devout Catholic, had her faith to sustain her, but her husband, Kent was raised without any religious faith. His deep love for Elie, however, brought him down a path he never expected to travel, one towards faith in God. Just before the crisis with Elie began, he had asked Jesus for a sign that He was real, and, paradoxically, Elie's suffering and death was His answer. It was the same response Jesus gave in the Gospel, "If you wish to be my disciples, you must take up your cross and follow me", St. Matt16:23.

A Severe Mercy, the classic by Sheldon Vanauken, speaks of his beloved wife Davy's death as God's way — His severe mercy -- of calling him home to faith in Christ. Kent, whose heart, still raw with his daughter's loss, admits that her suffering is God's megaphone, which got his attention. However, he is still stumbling over the cross he experienced in his daughter's suffering. "Why did Elie have to die?" her brother Alexander asks, and Kent has no answer. Yet. But he does know why she lived. "Elie is the greatest gift we as a family could have received. She made — and still makes — our lives far richer, more contemplative, and full of joy than they ever would have been without her. She was a beloved and essential part of our family and would have been as long as she was with us. Elie has given us an awareness of suffering's noble beauty."

A Grace Given is a beautifully written treatise on love. It is one of the most pro-life books I have ever read. The love of a father for a child that can give him almost nothing in the traditional sense, no open arms, no endearing words, no loving glances, no soft caresses, is so complete, that we are transformed and ennobled merely by witnessing it. The story, even though we are told of its heartbreaking ending near the book's beginning, is so engrossing, I read the entire 260 pages in only two sittings.

Kent Gilges' gifted use of language transports the reader with him around the globe, to the various places he's traveled, from Africa, to Rome, Oxford, Manhattan and to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. His precise use of detail and ability to build the drama of a scene, powerfully evokes the intensity of the emotions which he and Liz were going through in their ten year odyssey with Elie. Kent Gilges draws you into the sea of love that is his family, and helps you understand the depth of their devotion to their beautiful, helpless little girl. A little girl whose intercessory prayers he suggests may already be working miracles in the lives of others, and will certainly work a miracle in your heart. Read A Grace Given and you will be renewed in your hope in the power of a father's love, and the gift which the disabled child is for a family who knows God.

Leticia Velasquez is a wife and homeschooling mother of three daughters. She is a free lance writer whose articles have appeared in Faith and Family and Celebrate Life magazines. A film critic for Mercatornet, Leticia has recently helped create a new blog called Catholic Media Review.

LARRY KING LIVE, FEBRUARY 4, 2009 (humor)

From National Review online February 8, 2008

By Rob Long

LARRY KING: “From Rawlins, Wyoming! Hello!”

CALLER: “Hi, Larry. I’d like to ask your guest if she intends to keep her maiden name.”

LARRY KING: “Good question. Your name. You’ve been back and forth on it. What’s gonna be the deal?”

HILLARY CLINTON: “Well, Larry, I’ve always been Hillary Rodham, and then when I was married to Bill, I was Hillary Rodham Clinton, and then of course with all of those forms and so forth — ”

LARRY KING: “Legalese! It’s killing us!”

HILLARY CLINTON: “Right, right. So it was easier to just keep it simple. Hillary Clinton.”

LARRY KING: “But Bill’s been dead for . . . what? Nine months?”

HILLARY CLINTON: “Eleven. And two weeks. And three days.”

LARRY KING: “And so now the healing starts.”

HILLARY CLINTON: “And sixteen minutes.”

LARRY KING: “From Stevens Creek, California! Hello!”

CALLER: “Hi, Larry, hi Mrs. Clinton. I want to know if you have any regrets about the way the campaign ended up last year. And if you still have plans to run again?”

LARRY KING: “What about it? Tough year. Obama. Then the thing with Bill. The . . . heart attack? Was it a heart attack? The ticker just went pop? Been there, folks! Been there, felt that!”

HILLARY CLINTON: “Honestly, Larry, we don’t really know. We’re trying to get to the bottom of it, but the Chappaqua medical examiner’s office has been less than forthcoming. As near as I can tell — and remember, I was in the middle of a pretty intense presidential campaign at the time — he had a heart attack, fell down the stairs, and that was that.”

LARRY KING: “I know he had a history of heart disease. But the cause of death was ruled as ‘poison.’”

HILLARY CLINTON: “That’s correct, Larry. Apparently, he fell down the stairs onto an open bottle of poison, somehow ingested a large amount . . .”

LARRY KING: “Amazing. And I’ve had heart attacks, friends, so I know they can be disorientating.”

HILLARY CLINTON: “It was a tragedy, Larry. Of course, I was devastated. What we shared . . . well, it was a very special thing. It’s been hard to heal, of course. Very painful. But Bill would have wanted me to go on . . .”

LARRY KING: “Would you like a tissue?”

HILLARY CLINTON: “Thank you, Larry.”

LARRY KING: “From Rockport, Maine! Hello!”

CALLER: “Hi, Larry. Mrs. Clinton, I was wondering if you have any thoughts about the new McCain administration. Have you talked to him? And how do you think he’s doing?”

LARRY KING: “The one hundred days! Important stuff! Up! Down! Your thoughts!”

HILLARY CLINTON: “Well, as you know, Larry, I endorsed Senator McCain shortly after I left the race myself, due to the unfortunate events with Bill and so forth, and I’ve been pleased to see him moving forward on a lot of the issues that I talked about during my campaign — national health insurance, higher income taxes, that sort of thing — but even I have been surprised by some of his initiatives.”

LARRY KING: “The open borders?”

HILLARY CLINTON: “Not just opening them up. But the welcome barbeques, the logo tote bags, the free skin-care products, all of it.”

LARRY KING: “He’s taken it to a whole ’nother level!”

HILLARY CLINTON: “And nobody expected him to switch parties. Especially not to the Peace and Freedom party.”

LARRY KING: “He’s a maverick! He’s outside the box! From Detroit, Michigan! Hello!”

CALLER: “Hi, Mrs. Clinton. I was wondering if you have any plans to remarry?”

LARRY KING: “Great question! Well? Got the itch? Lemme be the first to say, marriage is great after sixty! The sex, even better than it was at fifty-five!”

HILLARY CLINTON: “Oh, this is all very premature.”

LARRY KING: “Is there a man in your life? Is there a guy for Hillary Clinton?”

HILLARY CLINTON: “You know, Larry, I just haven’t had a moment to think about that kind of thing. I’ve been focusing on healing, and the family, and the issues that I care about. And Bill’s death is so recent . . .”

LARRY KING: “Would he have wanted you to date?”

HILLARY CLINTON: “That’s a very complicated question, Larry.”

LARRY KING: “But he was a guy who understood something about physical needs, right? About the human desire for touch.”

HILLARY CLINTON: “Um . . .”

LARRY KING: “He wouldn’t have begrudged you, would he? You know who would be good for you? I keep thinking a Mort Zuckerman. A Ron Perelman.”

HILLARY CLINTON: “Aren’t both of those gentlemen married?”

LARRY KING: “I didn’t say get married to them! I said, go out, have a few drinks, have some laughs! Look at me! I’m a yenta all of a sudden!”

HILLARY CLINTON: “Honestly, Larry, I’m just looking forward to putting this all behind me, and then moving on.”

LARRY KING: “You’re talking about the inquest?”

HILLARY CLINTON: “Yes. It’s all so unnecessary. People just love to make things into these big conspiracies.”

LARRY KING: “They’re trying to explain the stab wounds?”

HILLARY CLINTON: “But they’re so easy to explain! Bill had a heart attack, then fell down the stairs onto a bottle of poison, ate some, then got up to call 9-1-1, and when reaching for the phone he mistakenly grabbed a knife from the counter, stabbed himself several times in the chest and neck and face and abdomen, raced to the garage, and collapsed in the trunk of the car. Why is that so hard to understand?”

LARRY KING: “Makes sense to me! Tomorrow night! The whole hour with Lorna Luft!”