Wolfowitz's father, a brilliant mathematician whose family fled anti-Semitism in Poland and lost many relatives in the Holocaust, instilled in him a hatred of totalitarianism and a belief in the United States' power to do good. His later intellectual odyssey is about as close as one gets to a classic neo-conservative trajectory.

As a senior in high school in Upstate New York, Wolfowitz said he stuck out as a supporter of John F. Kennedy....That led to work for Sen. Henry M. Jackson, a hawkish Washington state Democrat known as "Scoop" who believed in using U.S. power for humanitarian purposes.

After serving at the Pentagon during the Carter administration, Wolfowitz remained a registered Democrat until he joined the Reagan administration as head of policy planning at the State Department. He said it was not he who changed his political philosophy so much as the Democratic Party, which abandoned the hard-headed internationalism of Harry Truman, Kennedy and Jackson.

It's not easy to write a love scene for Jesus.
So we can't blame Margaret George too much if her big moment in the woods, when Mary Magdalene throws herself at the son of God, reads like a pallid version of the fiery encounter in the barn when Scarlett throws herself at Ashley.
" 'You love me as well. I know it!' she added defiantly. . . .
" 'Yes, I do love you,' he said. 'I love your courage and your integrity, your insights and your quietness, and if I were going to have a life that went in another direction, I would choose you to be beside me on that path. . . .'
" 'I don't understand! Why can't you take that path?' "
The man has a good excuse. He's a little busy struggling with Satan and getting Christianity off the ground. But like every young woman involved with a powerful man, Mary of Magdala yearned for the Messiah to put aside his "lofty mission" and tend to her.
"She didn't want to be needed, she wanted someone to fulfill her needs," the author writes.
Jesus urges her to snap out of it and "stay the course."

As Ms. George explains in her afterward: "I assume that Jesus was an attractive person, and it would be unusual if none of his female followers developed heightened feelings for him." But in this innocent and stilted retelling, the famous biblical temptress never even tries to lure Jesus to the dark side. She sees him as marriage material, an eligible young Jewish carpenter-turned-miracle-worker.
Meet Mary Magdalene, good girl.
She was renowned as the sensual half of the madonna-whore equation, "the Jessica Rabbit of the Gospels, the gold-hearted town tramp," as one admiring writer called her. There was the Virgin Mary and the wanton Mary; the Mary in blue and the Mary in red.
The comely harlot who rubbed Jesus' feet with perfumed oil and tears and dried them with her hair inspired great art with her jar of ointment, haunting eyes and naked breasts. She inspired the spread of refuges for prostitutes around the world called Magdalene houses. And she inspired Barbara Hershey to become a notorious pioneer in lip-plumping to play the sultry sinner Jesus saves from being stoned in Martin Scorsese's "Last Temptation of Christ."
But for some time a cadre of female historians have been making the case that Mary Magdalene was framed and defamed. They point out that there is no scriptural evidence that she was a prostitute. They say the Gnostic "Gospel of Mary," supposedly written by Mary Magdalene and discovered in Egypt half a century ago, portrays her as a rival to Peter, as a female apostle who stayed faithful at the end, unlike some of the skittish males. The revisionists argue that, wittingly or unwittingly, the men who run Christianity obliterated Mary Magdalene's role as an influential apostle and reduced her to a metaphor for sexual guilt. The main confusion was sown in the sixth century, when Pope Gregory the Great conflated Mary of Magdala -- a friend of Jesus who was present at the Crucifixion, who anointed his body for burial and who was the first to see the risen Christ -- with Mary of Bethany (Martha and Lazarus's sister) and an unnamed sinful woman in the Gospel of Luke who bathed Jesus' feet.
The question is not merely academic, given the roiling state of the Roman Catholic Church. The church refuses to allow women to be ordained as priests because there were no female apostles. If Mary Magdalene was a woman of hard virtue rather than easy virtue, then the church loses its flimsy justification. So the premise of Ms. George's novel is intriguing. Loaves-and-fishes style, she takes a few mentions in the Gospels and spins them into a 625-page "diary of a soul." She begins with the reference to Mary being delivered of seven demons by Jesus. In her quest to be exorcised of the malevolent spirits who have tormented her since childhood, Mary runs into Jesus and ends up leaving her family to troop around after him. With rigorous research, Ms. George paints the landscape and rituals of Judea and makes "educated guesses" about her mysterious subject: that Mary was an observant Jew, that she married a sardine fisherman and had a baby, that she could read, that she had visions, that she befriended other women mentioned in the Gospels as part of Jesus' circle and stifled her jealousy. ("I met Jesus first, I knew him longer.")
The author goes a bit overboard with her feminist fable, turning Mary into the Gloria Steinem of Galilee. Speaking of the naming ceremony for Mary's infant daughter, she writes: "However, it was marred by the fact that Mary would have to stand up the entire time, and not allow anyone to touch her, since ritual law proclaimed that any bed or chair she sat on until the 66th day after the birth was unclean, and so was anyone who touched her. That meant that she could not hold her own child for the ceremony.
" 'The curse of Eve,' Joel had said lightly. To him it was only amusing, whereas to Mary it was a painful reminder that in every way women were considered so much lower than men." At another point, when Jesus tells her she is a prophet, "perhaps the only one in the group," Peter blurts out, "But she's a woman." The author retells the familiar stories in the Gospels but inserts Good Mary as a major player alongside Really Good Mary. Mary Magdalene is not in the lineup at the Last Supper table because she's bustling about in the kitchen, making horseradish dip, serving platters of roast lamb with coriander relish and unleavened bread. She is the one who suggests Christ might want to get away from the madding crowd in the olive garden at Gethsemane. She is the one who discovers Judas's betrayal by disguising herself as a veiled waitress at the palace of Antipas. Despite the demonic possession and all her dazzling adventures, this Mary never seems vivid or beguiling.
The book creates a role model for those who want to believe that Jesus, who treated men and women equally in the Gospels, was more enlightened than the church's leadership two millenniums later. Yet the new Mary's arc from pious good girl to Mrs. Sardine Salesman to Pillar of the Church may leave you a little nostalgic for the transgressive Mary's more gripping drama of sin and redemption, of flirting with the Messiah and finding faith through him.

As I was walking through Barnes and Noble earlier this week, I noticed a book by Nation columnist Eric Alterman, titled "What Liberal Media?" I picked it up but quickly put it back down. I'm sure Mr. Alterman is very sharp and intelligent, but I can't imagine anything refuting media bias, considering that organizations like the Media Research Center and many authors like Bernard Goldberg have documented this as a fact.

Agent Smith: Do we have a deal, Mr. Reagan?
Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?... Ignorance is bliss.
Agent Smith: Then we have a deal.
Cypher: I don't want to remember nothing. Nothing! You understand? And I want to be rich, you know, someone important. Like an actor.
Agent Smith: Whatever you want, Mr. Reagan.

A federal appeals court ruled on Thursday that a 1988 Supreme Court decision that gave wide latitude to high-school administrators to review and censor student publications does not apply to student newspapers at public colleges. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit made the ruling in finding that a dean at Governors State University does not have immunity from a suit filed by the editors of The Innovator, the student newspaper at the Illinois institution. The editors sued the dean after she told the newspaper's printer that a university official had to approve the content of the newspaper before it could be printed. Patricia A. Carter, the dean of student affairs and services at Governors State, admitted making that request to the printer in 2000. But she argued -- with backing from the Illinois attorney general -- that the suit should have been dismissed because of uncertainty about the constitutional protections afforded to college journalists. Her lawyers cited the 1988 Supreme Court ruling in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, in which the court ruled that high-school journalists did not enjoy the same First Amendment protections as adults. While the Hazelwood decision dealt with high-school journalists, many college journalists have feared that it could be used to limit their freedom. As a result, many journalism groups have backed the Governors State student editors and warned that a ruling against them could have broad implications for college newspapers.
In Thursday's decision, the court ruled that college journalists are protected by the U.S. Constitution, unlike high-school journalists. "The differences between a college and a high school are far greater than the obvious differences in curriculum and extracurricular activities," the decision said. "While Hazelwood teaches that younger students in a high-school setting must endure First Amendment restrictions, we see nothing in that case that should be interpreted to change the general view favoring broad First Amendment rights for students at the university level."

On April 10, 2003, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld freedom of the press at Governors State University (GSU), in University Park, Illinois. FIRE had joined an amicus brief submitted by the Student Press Law Center urging the Court to vindicate the basic first amendment rights of college students. Judge Terence T. Evans, who wrote the decision, called this brief "superb." This is a crucial victory that undoes an attempt to impose a truly draconian form of censorship on college students and should serve as a warning to any university that seeks to treat their students as children. [FIRE's brief is here]

In any event, on the second floor of a Nashua restaurant, we watched Howard Dean give his passionate, energetic stump speech to a nice sized crowd, which the Nashua Democratic regulars there told us was made up of a lot of "new" people, brought into politics this time by some combination of the power of the web and their passion for Dr. Dean. Dean entered the room to the strains of a techno pop mix that a supporter has done, that samples Dean's DNC speech; while the concept is awesome, the execution isn't great, and somebody with more editing skills should steal the idea and re-do it. It has a great beat AND you can dance to it. (The Note)