Sexual Sin and the Wider, Deeper Battles, by David Powlison

Jim Cramer On Spitzer

Still batting around those 'Abstract' ideas

Clinton's Exaggerated Foreign Policy Experience

When your entire campaign is based upon a claim of experience, it is important that you have evidence to support that claim. Hillary Clinton's argument that she has passed "the Commander- in-Chief test" is simply not supported by her record.

...When asked to describe her experience, Senator Clinton has cited a handful of international incidents where she says she played a central role. But any fair-minded and objective judge of these claims - i.e., by someone not affiliated with the Clinton campaign - would conclude that Senator Clinton's claims of foreign policy experience are exaggerated.

Hillary's 3am Call, SNL's take

Evangelism in a Post-Modern World, by Tim Keller

Newsweek: For the Record

"Antiterror Help Wanted" (PERISCOPE, March 3) is correct in noting the National Counterterrorism Center as a "bright spot" in intelligence reform but wrong in two other respects. Let me set the record straight. First, I believe we are strategically safer as a result of having gone into Iraq. As I have consistently stated in congressional testimony and interviews, a major reason for our not being attacked since 9/11 has been our strategy of taking the war to the terrorists. That assessment clearly includes Iraq, which Al Qaeda considers a critical battleground. This security has not come without a price. My comment in the 10-second TV sound bite (lifted out of a 40-minute interview) that we were probably not "tactically" safer referred to the loss of life of the courageous members of our military due to Al Qaeda's action on the Iraqi battlefield. Second, the backhanded implication that I was forced to resign is pure poppycock. I left because I had to have total knee-replacement surgery on both knees, period. That decision was discussed with the White House and director of National Intelligence well before the airing of the interview. I left NCTC confident that a strong team with a strong leader in Mike Leiter was in place. The day-to-day performance of NCTC—and, indeed, the entire counterterrorism community—in keeping the country safe for more than six years is the story you should focus on.
Scott Redd, Vice Admiral, U.S. Navy (Ret.)
Former Director, NCTC
Washington, D.C.

One for Freedom - John Ondrasik, Five For Fighting

One for Freedom
Meet a popular musician who says he supports the troops — and means it

JOHN J. MILLER

On the night of February 9, more than a thousand people gathered in tuxes and dresses at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library to pay tribute to Medal of Honor recipients. Forty-three of the 107 living medalists were in attendance, along with assorted dignitaries. The program began when John Ondrasik, a one-man act who goes by the improbable stage name of “Five for Fighting,” sat before a piano and sang about war and patriotism. When he was done, Ondrasik briefly addressed the crowd. “That song, ‘Freedom Never Cries,’ hopefully demonstrates the theme for this evening, which is that freedom isn’t free. But I don’t need to tell you that.”

No, he didn’t. Not to that crowd of heroes and their admirers. But in recent years, Ondrasik has conveyed this message to a broader public that surely can benefit from hearing it. Whereas many celebrities attack the president and bash the war with a relentless and numbing predictability, Ondrasik, the author of hits such as “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” and “100 Years,” stands apart as a popular artist who supports the troops and their cause through his music and actions. And he is without a doubt the only rock star ever to write a song inspired by a lunch with National Review contributor Victor Davis Hanson.

The 43-year-old Vladimir John Ondrasik III was a math major at UCLA who might have led a perfectly comfortable life helping his family run a small business that manufactures shopping carts in Southern California. From an early age, however, his passion was music. Even as an adult, he dreamed of turning it into a career. “I put on a suit by day and went into the studio at night,” he says. “For years, I got nowhere.”

He finally scored a record deal in 1996, but there were problems from the start. An executive told Ondrasik that the days of the singer-songwriter were over and ordered him to come up with a name that sounded like he was a full rock band. Ondrasik proposed “Marketing Ploy,” which apparently wasn’t met with a smile. So he suggested “Five for Fighting,” a reference to the five-minute penalty a hockey player receives for on-ice fisticuffs. It might have been a better fit for head-bangers or punk rockers than for a guy who specializes in soulful vocals and piano-driven ballads, but Ondrasik is a sports nut, and it stuck. Unfortunately, his label didn’t — it shuttered in 1997, just as Five for Fighting’s debut album was coming out. “I think it sold about 500 copies,” he says.

So Ondrasik started over. The experience was agonizing, but he kept writing songs. Ondrasik says he can spend more than a year on a single tune, refining the lyrics and melody until he thinks they’re just right. At one point during this period, however, he composed an entire song in about 45 minutes. “It pretty much wrote itself,” he says. “I got lucky.” The lyrics expressed the vulnerability and frustration he was feeling at the time: “It may sound absurd / But don’t be naïve / Even heroes have the right to bleed.” He called it “Superman,” and he wasn’t sure whether he liked it.

Meanwhile, Ondrasik secured a new record deal — certainly not based on the commercial strength of Five for Fighting’s debut, but because a label thought he showed promise and was willing to take a chance. When choosing from among several dozen songs he had written for what would become his second album, America Town, he couldn’t make up his mind about whether to include “Superman.” At the last moment, he decided to use it.

This was perhaps the best professional choice he ever made. America Town came out in 2000 and produced a minor hit with a song called “Easy Tonight.” The next year saw the release of “Superman” as a single. It turned into a hit as well — not a huge one, but big enough. Then came 9/11.

‘SUPERMAN’ TAKES FLIGHT
“I was in London when it happened,” says Ondrasik. “All I could do was sit in front of a television in a hotel and watch in horror.” Before long, news channels started running montages of rescue workers amid the rubble of the World Trade Center — and they often used “Superman” as the soundtrack. The song went from small success to near-iconic status.

Ondrasik performs in New York.Kristin Callahan/Ace Pictures
Back in the States, Ondrasik was on tour when he received a letter from Earl Holland, a New York City paramedic, who described how much “Superman” meant to him. He asked Ondrasik to dedicate it to those who had died at Ground Zero. Ondrasik obliged and read the letter during a concert in Chicago. The cable channel VH-1 heard about it and invited Ondrasik to perform at the Concert for New York City at Madison Square Garden, alongside some of the biggest names in popular music. “Every one of my living inspirations was on stage — Paul McCartney, Pete Townshend, Billy Joel,” he says. “I still can’t believe I was there.” During the show, held on October 20, Holland introduced Ondrasik, who performed “Superman” to thunderous applause.

By now, Ondrasik was a full-time musician on the periphery of stardom. His third album, The Battle for Everything, came out in 2004 and yielded another smash hit: “100 Years.” A couple of its cuts, such as “NYC Weather Report” and “Infidel,” were more topical — a trend that would continue two years later when his next album, Two Lights, came out.

The title track of Two Lights was born at a lunch with Victor Davis Hanson. “I had enjoyed a lot of his writing on military history and the War on Terror. A mutual friend asked if I wanted to meet him and I said sure,” says Ondrasik. They got together at a coffee shop in Palo Alto, Calif., and Hanson invited Ondrasik to join him for lunch with a former student who was about to deploy to Iraq with the Marines, as well as the young man’s father, a Vietnam veteran.

At lunch, Ondrasik talked to the dad. “I asked him how he was doing,” says Ondrasik. “He sat back, closed his eyes, and said, ‘It’s really hard on his mom.’ It was obviously hard on him, too. I saw the natural fear of a parent as well as pride in a son who is carrying on a tradition.” Afterward, Ondrasik wrote the song “Two Lights,” about a father who hears that a member of his son’s unit has been killed. The man decides to go for a nighttime drive and asks his wife to leave on two lights if she hears their son is alive. When he returns home just before sunup, he looks at his house, hoping for two lights, and says “my eyes burn.” The meaning is ambiguous. “I had to leave it open-ended, because sometimes the news is good and sometimes it’s bad,” says Ondrasik. “The song symbolizes the no man’s land that these families live in every day.”

Ondrasik says he has gained a special sympathy for military families through his work with the USO. He has visited injured soldiers at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and he has performed for troops at military bases in California, Guam, and Japan — and even at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. When he tours in the United States, he tries to make free tickets available to soldiers posted at nearby bases. “I don’t like it when artists let politics creep into their performances and I try not to make speeches,” he says. “But in my shows, I always tell the story of ‘Two Lights.’”

So far, Two Lights has produced at least a pair of certified hits, “The Riddle” and “World.” A third song didn’t make the charts but is starting to show staying power: “Freedom Never Cries.” It’s the song Ondrasik recently played for the Medal of Honor recipients. “I wrote it because I was tired of people raising their eyebrows whenever they heard the word ‘freedom,’ as if they don’t appreciate what we have in this country and what allows us to have it.” At the heart of the song is a line that embodies the idea that freedom isn’t free: “I never loved the soldier until there was a war.” The second stanza ties it all to the threat of Islamofascism:

I saw a man on the TV
In a mask with a gun
A man on the TV
He had a 10-year-old son
I saw a man on the TV
His son had a gun
He says that he’s coming for me.

And in case anybody still doesn’t grasp the point, there’s the just-released video, which features images of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, Gen. David Petraeus, and purple-fingered Iraqi voters.

Last year, at Grammys on the Hill, a lobbying event for the recording industry, Ondrasik elected to sing “Freedom Never Cries.” “Everyone was expecting me to play ‘Superman’ and ‘100 Years,’ but on my way up to the piano I decided that if there was ever a time to play ‘Freedom Never Cries,’ and if there was ever an audience that ought to hear it, this was it.” As he left the stage, Republican congresswoman Mary Bono Mack of California rushed to him and held up her iPod. By coincidence, she had been listening to the song earlier in the day, while working out in the House gym. “I didn’t even know that he was going to be there that evening,” she says. “I knew a few of his other songs and was listening to this one, trying to figure out if he’s a conservative or a liberal — you know, one of us or one of them.”

A TONIC FOR THE TROOPS
As it happens, Ondrasik calls himself a “moderate Republican.” He has supported John McCain for president through thick and thin, even during the period last year when it looked like McCain’s campaign was on the brink of collapse. On February 5, he attended McCain’s Super Tuesday victory party in Phoenix. “I’d never been to something like that before,” he says. Rather than hopping on anybody’s bandwagon, however, he has tried to support the troops by taking advantage of his new political connections with the likes of Rep. Bono Mack and Minnesota senator Norm Coleman, who hosted Ondrasik at a GOP steering-committee meeting in December. The result is an unlikely musical collaboration between Washington and Hollywood, or at least those parts that are willing to honor military service.

In 2006, a non-profit group called Music for Troops asked Ondrasik to write the liner notes for a compilation of songs by unsigned artists that it was planning to distribute to the military. “That gave me the idea to do the same thing with popular artists and songs we know,” says Ondrasik. It sounded easy, but it turned out to be much harder than he had anticipated and occupied him for most of last year. “I thought we’d find a corporate sponsor, someone who would write us a big check,” he recalls. Instead, he approached about two dozen potential funders and struck out with each one. “After four or five months of this, I was getting frustrated.” Finally, Kraig Kitchin, an executive then with Premiere Radio Networks, convinced his company to pitch in $50,000. Ondrasik agreed to match it, and he began to envision an effort scaled back from his original plans.

But he didn’t give up entirely. Last summer, he sent out an e-mail to a few friends, asking them for assistance. The actor Gary Sinise, who got to know Ondrasik through Rep. Bono Mack and others, received the message. “We both support the troops and I wanted to help out,” says Sinise, who has visited Iraq three times and Afghanistan once through the USO. Sinise contacted David McIntyre, the CEO of TriWest, a company that provides health-care services to the military, and TriWest decided to donate $250,000. Later, Sony offered to press 200,000 copies of For the Troops.

Following this surge of support, Ondrasik still needed to recruit the talent. He had received a few verbal commitments from a handful of artists, but these needed to become formal contracts drawn up by lawyers. Not only did the musicians have to grant permission to give away their songs, so did labels, songwriters, and managers. “The list of who declined is a lot longer than the list of who agreed,” says Ondrasik. He won’t mention which performers turned him down, but he allows that “politics had a lot to do with it.”

The process was intense, and Ondrasik credits Mitch Bainwol of the Recording Industry Association of America with making it run as quickly and smoothly as possible. In the end, 13 artists and groups participated, including Billy Joel, Brooks & Dunn, Jewel, Josh Groban, and the Neville Brothers. “Some of the contributors actually oppose the war, but they all wanted to support the troops without respect to partisanship,” he says. For the Troops came out at Thanksgiving. Most of the compact discs have been distributed through the USO and other organizations. What’s more, a website run by the Army & Air Force Exchange Service allows active-duty personnel to download individual songs for free. So far, that’s happened about 250,000 times.

Ondrasik wants to spend much of 2008 on a new Five for Fighting album. But he’s also thinking about the next thing he’ll do for the troops — possibly another CD, and almost certainly more performances. “I feel an obligation to support the war effort,” he says. “This is the most important cause of our time. I can’t shoot a gun and I’m too old for service. But maybe I can help with morale, and with the morale of the families. We all have to do our part, whatever our skills are.”

Five for Fighting won’t ever earn a Medal of Honor — but at least John Ondrasik is available for encores.

Chamberlin and Margolis Join Manning Selvage & Lee

Bulldog Reporter
March 7, 2008

Manning Selvage & Lee (www.mslpr.com) announced it has added two senior communications professionals to its growing corporate practice in North America: David Chamberlin as senior vice president, based in Dallas, and Karyn Margolis as vice president for corporate social responsibility, based in New York. Both appointments are effective immediately.

At MS&L, Chamberlin will be responsible for managing national programs for three of the agency's Dallas–based clients. He will also be responsible for generating new business and growth opportunities in the southwest market.

Margolis will be responsible for developing CSR platforms, writing CSR reports and related communications materials, stakeholder engagement and media relations strategies, as well as overall program implementation. She will also serve as the New York office's liaison to MS&L's global ECO network.

"David and Karyn's expertise in reputation management, international financial and technology communications, and corporate social responsibility will add tremendous value to our growing corporate practice, clients and staff," said Peter Harris, senior vice president and director of MS&L's NY corporate practice.

U2 on RTE Late Late Show

U2, Elliott Sadler & Nascar

The Ballad of Ronnie Drew

Feminism and the English Language: Can the damage to our mother tongue be undone?

An Interview with Timothy Keller

Antiterror Help Wanted

By Mark Hosenball | NEWSWEEK

Mar 3, 2008 Issue

In October 2007, National Counterterrorism Center director John Scott Redd, a retired Navy vice admiral, told a TV interviewer that the invasion of Iraq "probably" did not make the U.S. safer from terrorism. A few days later, Redd resigned, citing health concerns. Bush administration officials denied that Redd's departure had anything to do with his comments, and the post has remained vacant—which is odd, since the NCTC is one of the few undisputed bright spots of post-9/11 intelligence reform legislation. Since Redd left, the NCTC has been run on an interim basis by one of his deputies, Michael Leiter, a former Navy aviator and federal prosecutor whose leadership has won praise from intel officials and congressional monitors.

But until very recently, the White House has appeared reluctant to name Leiter as permanent NCTC chief. Instead, it spent months on a fruitless search for a higher-profile director, according to two government officials who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive matters. Several possible candidates, including military officers and CIA executives, turned the job down. Administration officials and Republican congressmen concluded that candidates were scared off by the prospect of the Senate confirmation process—especially since the job could be short-lived, with only a year left in the Bush presidency.

So why hasn't the White House offered the post to Leiter? One factor could be his political credentials. According to his official biography, Leiter, a Harvard law graduate, once clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, a liberal Bill Clinton appointee. A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment; a spokesman for the office of National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell declined to comment. Just hours after NEWSWEEK first inquired about the NCTC position, however, one government official indicated that the White House may well nominate Leiter in the near future.

Taylor University Community Mourns Marilyn Walker

Longtime professor of journalism and communication arts Marilyn Walker died February 18, in Marion. She was 74.

Walker retired from Taylor in 1996 after 30-years as professor of journalism and communication arts. Prior to coming to Taylor, she taught at Anderson Highland and Marion High School. She also taught summer journalism workshops at Indiana University and Ohio University. She was a frequent workshop leader and speaker at national college journalism conferences.

She was a graduate of Alexandria High School and earned a bachelor's degree in English and journalism from Ball State University, where she was editor of The Ball State News. Walker received a master's degree in journalism from Indiana University.

A life member of the College Media Advisers, Walker was also a life member and former president of the Indiana High School Press Association. She was also a member of Delta Kappa Gamma International Educational Society and the Marion Department Club.

Walker was a member of the Marion First United Methodist Church, the Anne Gonger Circle, and the United Methodist Women. She was also a member of the Alexandria Order of the Eastern Star.

Survivors include her husband, Jules Walker, Marion, an aunt and several cousins.

Funeral services are at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 26, in Needham-Storey-Wampner Funeral Service North Chapel, 1341 N. Baldwin Ave., Marion with the Rev. Kaye Patton officiating. Burial is in Grant Memorial Park.

Visitation is from 4:00 to 8:00 p.m. Monday, Feb. 25, 2008 in the funeral home.

Memorial contributions may be directed to the Communication Arts Department, Taylor University, Upland, Ind., 46986 or First United Methodist Church, 624 S. Adams St., Marion, Ind., 46953.

Online condolences may be made at www.nswcares.com.

Jean Ford Murphy,

Jean F. Murphy VIRGINIA BEACH - Jean Ford Murphy, 82, died Feb. 16, 2008. Jean was born in Tiger, Ga., the daughter of Harold and Ora Arrendale. She was a descendent of Dr. Pierre Chastain, a French Huguenot who emigrated to Virginia in the 1680s. This quiet, pretty Georgia farm girl grew up to become a community activist and a world traveler. While attending the University of Georgia, Jean met her first husband John Ellsworth Ford, a dashing young naval aviator on his way to the Pacific in World War II. They were a great team and Jean was an active Navy wife through three decades of Naval service, culminating in Capt. Ford's command of Naval Air Station Oceana in the early 1970s. They were married for 54 years until his death in 1998, and were blessed with three children. Jean married Capt. Joseph J. Murphy, U.S. Navy retired in 2003. They shared a full life of travel, community service and a love of the arts and theater. In recent years, she divided her time between her longtime home in Virginia Beach and The Villages, Fla. Jean was known for her devotion to diverse causes and was active in numerous local and national organizations. She represented Virginia as a delegate at the 2004 Republican National Convention and had served as president of the Virginia Beach Republican Women's Club and the Princess Anne Republican Women's Club. She was active in the Military Officers' Wives Association, the Association of Naval Aviators, Galilee Episcopal Church, Lee's Friends and the Virginia Federation of Republican Women. She was also a talented businesswoman and one of the owners of Braeford's Ltd., a successful Virginia Beach ladies clothing store operated for almost 20 years. Most importantly, she was "Jee Jee" to four generations of family, a wonderful homemaker and beloved wife, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother who shared the joys and events of their lives to her last day. She was dearly loved and will be greatly missed. In addition to her husband, Jean Ford Murphy is survived by her sister, Irma Howell of Alpharetta, Ga.; her daughter, Donna Redd of McLean, Va.; her sons, Anthony Ford of Louisville, Ky., and John Ford of Chevy Chase, Md.; eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. Services will be held at 2 p.m. Friday in Galilee Episcopal Church. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to Galilee Episcopal Church, 3928 Pacific Ave., Virginia Beach, VA 23451 and Lee's Friends, 618 Stockley Gardens, Norfolk, VA 23507.

How Right Is McCain?

Health Questions for the Candidates

Joe Nuxhall - Roundin' Third and Headin' for Home