Last week in England British Law Lord Brian Hutton secretly barred the release of all medical records on Dr. David Kelly, including results of the post mortem and unpublished evidence. This is vital evidence which could solve the mystery of the death of this government weapons inspector who was also an anthrax expert.

Hutton had them sealed for 70 years.

British weapons inspector Dr. David Kelly was writing an expose about his work with anthrax and his warnings that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction at the time of his death in July 2003.

He was found dead in the woods near his home. The same woods he predicted he would be found in if the U.K. went to war with Iraq. He emailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller his fears moments before he took the fateful walk from which he never returned.

Yet his death was deemed a "suicide" by Lord Hutton [who is a judge, not an expert coroner], even though the two experienced paramedics who were first responders said that was impossible. They've attended many people who have accidently or purposely cut their wrists and only one person ever died from their wounds. And that one had pints of blood around the room. According to their eye witness account, there was little if any blood on his wrist or around him at the scene. It was one small artery that experts say would not cause his death. Perplexed, they don't understand how a ruling of suicide could be made.

According to the U.K. Daily Express "he [Kelly] was intending to reveal that he warned Prime Minister Tony Blair there were no weapons of mass destruction anywhere in Iraq weeks before the British and American invasion...and was also intending to lift the lid on a potentially bigger scandal, his own secret dealings in germ warfare with the apartheid regime in South Africa."

"Anybody concerned will be dead by then and that is quite clearly Lord Hutton's intention," said Nicholas Gardiner, the Chief Coroner for Oxfordshire on the sealing of Dr. Kelly's records.

Who is served if evidence is suppressed for 70 years? Who is served if we don't know whether or not Dr. Kelly was murdered and by whom? The only people served would be the Government of the United Kingdom and possibly the United States. So did they have Dr. Kelly killed and are they now covering it up? Sealing records until all guilty players are dead and gone?

And if they don't like those questions, they should be in the business of transparency and democratic full disclosure instead of draconian cover-ups. (Or as they are calling this in London: whitewashing.)

Where is the BBC in reporting this more fully? Where is the American mainstream media? The fourth estate appears to be off drinking and playing Playstation instead of doing its job and holding corrupt politicians and government assassins accountable. Or as Bill Moyers once wrote: has the fourth estate become the fifth column? Dr. Kelly was a whistle-blower found dead as he predicted he would be of a non-fatal wound to his wrist. Now England has sealed all records surrounding his death for 70 years. Sounds worthy of a journalistic outcry to me.

Dr. Michael Powers, a doctor campaigning to overturn the Hutton findings, said: "What is it about David Kelly's death which is so secret as to justify these reports being kept out of the public domain for 70 years?"

Dr. Kelly was found dead shortly after he was exposed as the source of a BBC news report questioning the Government's claims that Saddam Hussein had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction which could be deployed within 45 minutes.

Last year a group of doctors compiled a medical dossier as part of their legal challenge to the Hutton verdict. They argue that Hutton's conclusion that Dr. Kelly killed himself by severing the ulnar artery in his left wrist after taking prescription painkillers is untenable because the artery is small and difficult to access and severing it could not have caused death. Also, he didn't have enough of the pain killers in his blood to kill him.

The Chief Coroner for Oxfordshire said in his opinion Lord Hutton had embargoed the records to protect Dr. Kelly's children. His "children" are in their thirties. How gullible do they think we are? Don't his "children" want to know the truth about their father?
Ironically, it also emerged that Dr Kelly, one of the leading authorities on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, believed Saddam posed a real threat. However, he had told colleagues that although he believed Saddam had a biological weapons programme, Britain and America would not be able to find the weapons "bolted together." And he is believed to have told a colleague that the Government claim that Saddam could deploy weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes was totally inaccurate, as it would take handlers the same time to even start filling shells with biological compounds.

Dr. Kelly was a biological weapons expert, a consummate insider and a trusted keeper of dangerous and deadly secrets that could topple governments. He was a prominent figure in the bio-weapons defense establishment. Three other anthrax experts died suspiciously before he did. Dr. Bruce Ivins, accused of mailing anthrax in the U.S. committed "suicide." Fellow scientists Benito Que and Don Wiley also died under suspicious circumstances.

A suspicious pattern of deaths of prominent microbiologists has emerged around the world, but especially highly-advanced researchers connected with the USA, the UK, Russia, and Israel. Were many of these microbiologists murdered because of what they knew or had discovered?

Benito Que was bludgeoned to death during an attempted carjacking except, "strangely enough, his body showed no signs of a beating," according to The Toronto Globe & Mail in 2002. 3 days later, Don Wiley, after planning a trip to Graceland, was found floating in the Mississippi river after his rental car was found on a bridge outside Memphis, Tenn.

Dr. Kelly had reluctantly become an Enemy of the State. In a book on his death by Liberal-Democratic MP Norman Baker, one source told him that Kelly's death was "a wet operations, a wet disposal," a term used in intelligence circles to denote an assasination.

As of Wednesday January 27th, 2010 no hue and cry has been heard to protest this outrageous cover-up by the British government. Are citizens there numb or uninformed or in a mass coma?

British ambassador David Broucher reported a conversation he had with Kelly in Geneva. The ambassador asked Kelly what would happen if Iraq were invaded? The bio-weapons expert replied, "I will probably be found dead in the woods."

And two days after giving testimony before Parliment, he was.

Now that I'm THIS close to being am empty nester, my Hippie-ness is starting to return. It's coy. It's teasing me.

The last 18 years I've spent being responsible and mature, adult, disciplined [sort of] and reasonable. The first two I stayed home with my son. Fed him organic baby food and breastfed him which ironically created the boy who loves sugar and junk food to this day; brought him to baby play dates and started him at Montessori school. I worked for the next 16 of those years to help put food on the table, a roof over my son's head and clothes on his back [which he is fond of pointing out are often sitting in the laundrey basket]. I've taken jobs I didn't want, I've moved where I didn't want to move. I've attended events and met people I didn't want to meet. For the baby. For my son. For my teenager.

But now I get to become again who I always was. Again. I am a hippie.

I won't wear birkenstocks but I will wear tie-dye. I might wear bell bottoms and I know I will wear holey jeans. I can take classes, throw pots, [smoke some?], grow herbs, have big loud parties and stay up as late as I want to. I know some people can be hippies and be parents but I'm not that good a multi-tasker. In order to successfully follow through on this whole raising a child thing, I had to wear pumps and show up and have health insurance and have a career. I had to be strait-laced and be a "good example". I had to give my son something to rebel against.

I had to be the Liz Lemon to my hippie alter ego. Worry and plan, herd cats, put up with unfortunate choices in bosses and commute. Oh God, I've had to commute. Sometimes by airplane, sometimes by car. Listening to the radio, books on tape, CD's, A.M., F.M., religious, new age and self-help tapes. But I wanted to do this because I wanted the experience of being a parent and raising a child. My sisters didn't choose this route. I had to do it. I'm glad I did it. I'll be a mother until I die. But God it will feel good to slip on my hippie clothes and head to an all night drumming session.

My house can be full of quilts and cats, lutes and incense. Some stereotypes die hard. When my son comes to visit he can lecture me on house hygiene and investing my money. I'll hug his neck and try to look serious and write down his advice and lose it in the wash next time I do laundrey. I'll take in stray dogs and bake cookies and let young neighbors run in and out of my house. I'll pay them to weed the garden and wash the dogs. I'll name my next pet Skye just to blow some relatives mind.

I'll start braiding my hair and let it grow a bit longer. And hope my son has children whom I can spoil and call "sugar". The house will smell of patchouli oil and brownies, old books and sun tea. Let my grown son be responsible and a good example to his children. Let him take over that steady reign. Sometimes just sitting on a porch on a rainy day is enough.

I'll be less a Kesey-onian hippie and more of a Grateful Dead/Joan Baez type. Less LSD, more stickin' it to The Man. I know dominant culture is corrupt, a monolithic entity that exercises undue power over our lives. The Establishment sucks.

Mama is tuning in and droppin' out. I'll go back to my beatnik roots, play guitar again, learn CSNY's "Ohio", celebrate counterculture, listen to jazz. My clothes will be psychedelic, my spirit facing east. Maybe I'll finally learn to paint something besides the wall in my bedroom and create Art with beads and feathers, flowers and bells. I'll wear my hippie boots and grow wild flowers and wear bangles, I don't have any more parent-teacher meetings. I don't have to be square. Maybe I'll get my Tarot cards read and my astrological chart drawn up.

And maybe, just maybe this time, I'll make it to Kathmandu.

Weathermen and Economists have always had the best jobs. They get to be wrong over 50% of the time and still keep their jobs and their 401(k)'s. To add to that short list would be professors who churn out books filled with made-up data created to scare the bejesus out of us, then go on to enjoy the book tour, then the book is debunked yet they still have their cushy job and tenure.

Sucks to be us, eh?

Remember the book on overpopulation in the late sixties? Oh what was that called? Oh yes! The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich. He promised us we would experience famines between 1970 and 1985 due to population growth outstripping resources. Promised that in the 1970's and 1980's hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in spite of any programs embarked on immediately. He discusssed his solution to the overpopulation: "compulsory birth regulation...through the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired family size." Go into any bathroom in the late sixties and throughout the seventies and you'd find that well-thumbed book there.

His book and Soylent Green are still used as the basis to shout " overpopulation!" in a crowded theatre and to blame innocent, everyday human beings minding their own business of creating all kinds of horrors like famine, global warming, climate change, poverty, crime. But with the advent of computers, computer models and crunching the numbers, overpopulation has been debunked. Over and over. Only to rear its ugly head whenever there is a dictator creating famine and poverty and wants to distract you from his culpability or a government that wants to tax you to oblivion.

Even though the New York Times rightly listed it as "one of the myths of the 20th century" in its January 1, 2000 Millennium Edition, it's a myth that just won't die.

As Abid Ullah Jan writes, over the years many researchers have authentically proved that the problem is not too many people at all. World population growth is rapidly declining. United Nations figures showed in 2003 that 79 countries that comprise 40% of the worlds population had fertility rates too low to prevent population decline.

Overpopulation, he points out, is a relative term. Over with respect to what? Food? Resources? Living Space? The data shows that no case can be made for overpopulation with respect to all three variables. It is true that the world has been experiencing a population increase that began in the eighteenth century. Population rose six-fold in the next 200 years. But this is an increase, not an explosion because it has been accompanied by a productivity explosion, a resource explosion, a food explosion, an information explosion, a communication explosion, a science explosion and a medical explosion.

The result is that the six-fold increase in world population is dwarfed by the eighty-fold increase in world output during the same 200 year period.

That is the part that the Overpopulation Hysterics always overlook. People change, grow and evolve. Systems are put into place to cope with larger populations. We are not a static humanity. We invent things. We are made up of both the mundane and divine. Yet the Population Alarmists can't get their mind around that. It's always just an endgame to them.

Paul Erlich started the overpopulation hysteria with his book that scared people with its prophesies of starvation, death and destruction. However, the exact opposite has occurred.

Fewer than half as many people die from famine each year now than a century ago, even though our population has quadrupled. Many of those deaths today are the direct result of politcal action by ruthless dictators and not a lack of food. As Abid points out, to put it simply "the hungry are hungry because they are excluded from the land or cannot earn enough to survive and not because of a natural limit to the amount of food that can be produced." Lord Peter Bauer of the London School of Economics pointed out that the so-called "population explosion" of the 20th century should be seen "as a blessing rather than a disaster, because it stems from a fall in mortality, a prima facie improvement in people's welfare."

Amartya Sen, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998 argues that famines in the Third World are not caused by actual food shortages but institutional failure. The great famine of Bangladesh in 1974 occurred in a year of greater food availability per head than in any other year between 1971 and 1976. Instead it was the Bangladesh Government that owned 40% of the industry and regulated with price controls and high taxes administered by a huge, corrupt, foreign-aid dependent bureaucracy that caused the famine. The problems were caused by that country's flawed domestic policies, not too many people. The same can be said of Africa today. It is like putting on golden handcuffs when you turn your own freedom and power over to a neglectful, soul-less, unaccountable entity called government.

The 7.0 earthquake that struck just off the coast of Haiti Tuesday hit a country that was in bad enough shape already. The poorest nation in the western hemisphere, Haitians have suffered in recent decades through multiple coup d’etats and the breakdown of law and order, as well as poverty and hunger. Obviously, a 7.0 quake is bad news in general, but it’s especially so for people who live in shantytowns and can’t count on their government for relief or support - thus was Big Salons headline Tuesday, a perfect real-time example of a country that doesn't need to be impoverished but is, due to nothing more than government corruption.

The West only enables evil and dictatorships when it calls government corruption "overpopulation" and "global warming". Call evil what it is. We don't live in a finite world; for every problem there are always several solutions which don't involve taxing the citizenship into poverty or paying farmers not to grow nutritious food.

John N. Doggett sums it up succinctly. "The problem is not that there are too many of us. We can produce enough food to feed 6 billion to 16 billion. The problem is that governments in far too many countries care more about maintaining political power than the well-being of their people."

Government corruption and callousness has turned many natural resource "rich" countries into poor countries. Brazil, India, Mexico, Russia and the Congo are examples of natural resource rich countries whose corrupt, anticapitalistic policies have consigned most of their citizens to lives of grinding poverty. Chile, who used to be in those ranks, has moved on. Chile's war on corruption, investment in its people and downsizing of its government has made all the difference. If every country adopted the Chilean model, poverty as we know it would be eliminated by the end of this century.

What about the starving people? They do exist and their suffering is totally unnecessary. Doggett points out that not only the United States but Japan and Western Europe pay farmers not to produce food. If American, Candadian, Latin American and Western European farmers were encouraged to plant as much as possible and process as much as possible, the world would drown in food.

You want number crunching? If you gave every person on Planet Earth an acre of land, Europe, Asia, Africa and half of Latin America and North America would be empty. Antigrowth arguments that we are running out of land are just plain wrong. The vast majority of the planet's inhabitable surface is empty of human inhabitants. Demographers have calculated that the entire world population in 1984 could have fit into the state of Texas, allotting 1500 square feet per person.

So go ahead, have a baby! Have two!

Collateral damage is damage that is unintended or incidental to the intended outcome. The term originated in the United States Military, but it has since expanded into broader use.

To the terrorists, I am not collateral damage: I am the target. But to my Government and foreign Governments, this is what I've been reduced to.

I am racially profiled by terrorists every day: American. Christian. Western Woman. Infidel. If there is a way to blow up my airplane or my mall or my towers, it will be attempted. Sometimes it will succeed.

"The system worked," Napolitano had the nerve to say. Well yes, it worked for the terrorists.

Flight 253 recently taught us multitudinous lessons, not the least of which is that very little has changed since September 11, 2001. Security is terrible. Nobody is sharing information with anybody in any meaningful way. It takes an Amsterdam film maker who is a passenger to jump the terrorist trying to blow up the airplane, just like it took the brave Americans who brought down United Airlines Flight 93. That flight was headed for the White House or the U.S. Capitol; the passengers chose to die fighting rather than let the terrorists win that day.

You are collateral damage.

By all accounts, and after everything we know, the Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab never should have been allowed on that airplane.

* He had no passport.
* His own father had warned authorities he was a terrorist and a security risk.
* He had no money.
* He had no reason to be flying to Detroit, Michigan.
* He had received training and instructions from al-Qaida in Yemen.

The hijacking of Flight 93 on September 11th was led by Ziad Jarrah, a member of Al-Qaeda. The only difference between he and Abdulmutallab is that he had a passport and he succeeded in his terrorist act.

Abdulmutallabs' attempt to blow up the airplane [which would have become another 911 under President Obama], which could have killed thousands had it succeeded and blown up as it descended upon Detroit, serves another purpose. It's called a Practice Run. Trial Run. Test Run. Dry Run. Terrorists use the information gleaned from Practice Runs to sharpen their tactics, fix some mistakes, plug any gaps.

Actor James Woods was on a flight from Boston to Los Angeles a month before the 911 hijackings during a dry run. It scared the living crap out of him. He did all the right things. He reported it to authorities and a flight attendant but they seemed unwilling to become involved. A month later, these same men helped kill 2,819 Americans when they slammed into the World Trade Center.

News reports indicate that at least some of the 19 hijackers made "dry runs" several weeks in advance, taking trips on cross-country flights headed for S.F., L.A. and San Diego from east coast departure points such as Boston's Logan Airport.

The Imams out of Michigan in 2006 performed a practice run and managed to scare everybody before the plane ever left the ground. Even before the airplane took off, both passengers and crew members became alarmed at their suspicious behavior so much so that the airport police and Federal Air Marshall asked the men to leave the plane. The suspicious behavior included:

* The Imams refusing to sit in their assigned seats.
* Requesting seatbelt extensions, even though according to flight crew they didn't need them and indeed placed them on the cabin floor instead of lengthening their seatbelts with them.
* 3 traveled without any checked baggage and on one-way tickets.
* Spoke only in Arabic to each other but were listened to by a passenger who also spoke Arabic who called what they were talking about suspicious.

They filed a lawsuit for being discriminated against and eventually won.

A Northwest flight in 2004 involved 14 Syrian men who were also eventually released even though passengers, Air Marshalls and crew members again became extremely alarmed. Their actions were so obvious that several passengers became distraught, with grown women crying. Pilots for both Northwest Airlines and American say there is "widespread knowledge" among crew members that these probes are taking place. One event documented on the Northwest flight was the rushing of the cockpit and stopping suddenly to try and flush out the Air Marshalls. The Syrians were taken into custody and released after their information and fingerprints were added to a database.

Each time a terrorist makes it onto an airplane, it gives more information to the terrorists on how to sneak somebody on, in plain sight; how to blow it up, how to take down "hero's" before they can stop you.

Every time a terrorist makes it onto an airplane, another one of my conveniences is taken away. Box cutters and plastic knives are now weapons. Taking off shoes at the airport is mandatory. Bottles of water are dumped before I can drink them while going through security. Now they are talking about not allowing passengers to get up during the final hour of an international flight. Make the good citizens cower and grovel, lift shirts and open briefcases and keep allowing the bad guys on board. Don't profile them but keep checking my trunk at the airport. Now will they ask us all to take off our underwear before boarding the plane?

This was a sophisticated enough terrorist attempt that Abdulmutallab got exactly the seat he wanted, which would allow the most damage if he had succeeded in his attempt to blow up Flight 253. He boarded without a passport! When was the last time somebody waived you through when you said you didn't have a passport on an International flight?

I thought so.

Lawyer, passenger on Flight 253 and witness, Kurt Haskell, has this story to tell. He and his wife live in Taylor, Michigan.

While waiting in the holding area in the Amsterdam airport, in a room designated for only the passengers of Flight 253, Haskell saw a well dressed man of apparent Indian descent accompany a young, poorly attired man of African descent to the boarding gate. He said the Indian man appeared to have an no accent.

The well dressed man told the ticket agent that the young man had to get on the flight even though he had no passport. She told him he must have a passport in order to board. The man insisted that this happens all of the time, these guys get on flights without passportss all the time, so she sent him off to talk to management. That was the last time Mr. Haskell saw the Indian man and it was the last time he saw the African man, until later in the day when he tried to blow up the plane.

Did the well dressed man bribe Airport management to allow the terrorist onto the airplane? The FBI has twice interviewed Kurt Haskell and his wife. Kurt was one of the passengers who jumped up and ran to row 19 when he saw flames shoot up as their plane descended into Detroit. They have the ticket agent as a witness, they have the film of the man and the terrorist at the desk, but have yet to release it, to help identify the accomplice. Yet as of Tuesday January 5th Dutch investigators are claiming they have found no evidence of accomplices.

Under the category of looks-like-about-12-days-too-late, the State Department has announced it is revoking the U.S. visa for suspected Nigerian underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Why did he have one in the first place? It is a privilege to visit the United States, not a right. He was on a terrorist watch list. Are American lives now so under-valued that we must give the benefit of the doubt to any and all who might wish us harm?

Political Islam is not a religion, it's an act of war. I guess security will only get seriously tightened when Paul Pelosi or Malia Obama or Trent Franks are on one of those airplanes that go down. But since our Washington elite do not fly commercial, that may never happen.

We are all collateral damage.

Former Louisiana congressman William Jefferson was sentenced yesterday afternoon to 13 years in federal prison for his conviction on public corruption charges.

Prosecutors had asked for up to 33 years. Jefferson's lawyers argued for less than 10.

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III said Jefferson's conduct was "a cancer on the body politic."

Jefferson, a Democrat, was convicted on 11 counts related to a scheme in which he used influence to win contracts for businesses in Africa, while accepting millions of dollars in payments and stock to family-owned businesses. During a raid, the FBI famously found $90,000 in his freezer.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who yanked embattled Jefferson off of a powerful tax committee after he was indicted, decided to put him on the Homeland Security panel instead.

The move infuriated some Republicans, who accused him of being a potential security risk.

In 2004 Theo Van Gogh was murdered in the street of his beloved Amsterdam by an Islamic man furious at the movie "Submission" Van Gogh had produced with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim woman from Somalia. The movie was about defiance, about Muslim women and the oppression and abuse they suffer under the precepts of the Quran. Muhammad Bouyeri shot Theo and after Theo begged, "Can't we talk about this?" Bouyeri shot him 4 more times and sawed Theo's throat with a knife then stabbed a 5 page letter onto the dying man's chest. The letter threatened Western Governments, Jews and Ayaan who had to go into hiding. Van Gogh was the great grandson of Theo Van Gogh, Vincents brother.

The moment was a defining one for Holland. They finally realized that their western values were incompatible with the Islamic faith practiced by the many Muslims in Holland. It set the country on fire. As Hirsi Ali says, "Opinion makers were now saying that it was irresponsible and indeed morally wrong to pretend that appeasing Islamic leaders would magically lead to social harmony. Dutch society was churninng with discussion over how to best integrate Muslims, and Muslims in Holland also seemed largely aware now that they needed to choose between Western values and the old ways."

The freedom of expression that liberated Hirsi Ali once she moved to Holland is unknown in most if not all theocratic Islamic countries. Theo's murderer and others like him don't realize how deeply people in the West are committed to the idea of an open society, she points out. Even though open societies are vulnerable, they are stubborn. It is the place where she ran for safety and freedom and she wants to keep it that way: safe and free.

Hirsi Ali grew up in a culture of death in Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Kenya. She wrote in her book "Infidel" that "death lures many to take their own lives in order to escape the dismal reality. For many women, because of the perception of lost honor, death comes at the hands of a father, brother or husband. Wishful thinking about the peaceful tolerance of Islam, she points out, cannot interpret away this reality: hands are still cut off, women still stoned and enslaved.

Ayaan has made this her lifes purpose: to educate those of us who are free that we in the West would be wrong to prolong the pain of transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life.

The fact is that hundreds of millions of women around the world live in forced marriages, and six thousand small girls are excised every day. As was Hirsi Ali. With a pair of scissors wielded by a local religious man while being held down by adults.

The apologists for militant Islam do the West no favors when they run in with their politically correct mega-phones directing us all on what to think when another Muslim commits terror and murder in the name of his religion. The apologists for militant Islam do the Muslim faith no favors when they tamp down much needed discussion on how we in the West are to cope with a population that has gone through no reformation and often does not seek to assimilate in the country that opened its doors to them, but instead to take it over. The next time you see a woman in a burqa shopping, ask her if she was excised as a girl. Ask her what level of education she was allowed to achieve. Ask her if she was forced into her marriage. The women of the West have fought too hard and too long to be "free" to throw it all away by calling the oppression and abuse of millions of women in the name of religion just another lifestyle choice.

It is oppression and abuse.

We in the West are a tolerant people. Freedom of speech is protected by our constitution. Religious freedom in protected by our constitution. And women have been liberated, to run their own lives. All three of these are in direct conflict with strict Islam. You are not allowed to criticize or even question Islamic precepts. They tolerate no religion but their own. And women are subjugated with no voice or power either within the religious arena or at home. Peaceful Muslims are just as victimized as the rest of us by strict Islamists. [Writer Heather Michon points out that Islamic feminism is on the rise in the Muslim world and Europe is going to play a huge part in that development.]

Even American muslims who have grown up in America enjoying the perks and benefits of an open society, such as Major Hasan and his Imam, dare to embrace the belief that Islamic law trumps the U.S. Constitution. This sets up a dangerous conflict because

We are not a theocracy. The goal of a global Islamic Government is incompatible with religious tolerance.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali made her mark in Holland. She pushed through legislation that caused the Dutch government to register murders in that country based on honor killings and to register the domestic violence, sexual abuse and incest and the number of excisions of little girls taking place every year on Dutch kitchen tables. The Dutch government registered the number of drug-related killings and traffic accidents every year but not the number of honor killings because no Dutch official wanted to recognize that this kind of murder happened on a regular basis. Once these figures were clear, the facts alone shocked the country and helped her reach the goal of eliminating the complacent attitude of moral relativists who claimed all cultures are equal. She took away the excuse that nobody knew.

The creeping in of Shari'a law is incompatible with Western values. It is mainly muslim men in England who stridently demand to follow only Shari'a law instead of the laws of England, much to the horror of Islamic women who have fled brutal theocracies to escape Shari'a so they might attend universities and not marry if they wish and not be killed for being raped. And part of that creeping Shari'a law that is marking itself in free countries is the criminalization of religious talk and discourse if it involves Islam. That is Shari'a law. In our country Christians and Jews, Catholics and Baptists [and Hare Krishna's] are routinely debated, ridiculed and admired at various times and by various factions. Islam does not get a pass in a free society, which becomes un-free once freedom of speech is suppressed.

As a free society it is our duty to engage in vigorous discourse on the violence in our country being perpetuated on the innocent in the name of Islam. We are not the ones who are bringing up religion. When you shout "Allahu Akbar" before engaging in murder, you bring religion to the table. Now is not the time to apologize or wish away the realities. Now is the time to confront and hold feet to the fire: we have shed literal blood, sweat and tears to form a more perfect union, an open society that relishes its freedoms. And we won't be held hostage to the notion we must tolerate the intolerable.

There are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice. Or as Winston Churchill put it: "The malice of the wicked is reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous." Unfortunately, Theo Van Gogh learned that the hard way.

Almost 30 years ago I worked full-time at an alternative newspaper in Santa Barbara. I wrote articles and helped keep the community events section organized as well. Men and women worked there, there was smoking inside while working, pot smoking in the back, beer drinking at night while working late. A liberal bastion while Ronald Reagan was in office and his western white house shimmered in the hills close by.

One of the male writers who worked there started hassling me. He wanted to date me, I didn't want to date him. He lived with his girlfriend who also worked at the newspaper. But she was sufficiently oppressed by his ego that she said nothing while he openly courted me. I didn't want to date him. I didn't really even like him. When he finally realized I was serious he started to make my life a living hell. At first I ignored him. But then I realized something curious. I was a liberal woman working at a liberal newspaper getting sexually harrassed by a liberal man and nobody was batting an eye. I mean nobody.

I went to the Editor of the newspaper, a woman who was friends with this male writer. I told her the problem. She told me that that was just the way D. was and he didn't mean any harm, just put up with it, no big deal. I explained to her it was a big deal to me and it was seriously affecting my work and my being able to even come to work. She shrugged and poured herself another cup of coffee.

Here's what I did: I walked away from my dream job.

So it was with great dismay to see that almost 30 years later, nothing has changed for women in the workplace.

Nell Scovell, a former writer for David Letterman, with an impressive 20 year resume, weighed in this week on her experience as one of the very few female writers on his staff. She has also been writing for Vanity Fair since 1988.

When the news first broke that Letterman was being black-mailed by a staff member for his blatent affairs with women who work under him I listened bleakly to the rush, the whoosh! of defense to poor married Mr. Letterman. The men were all: "those women want to be with rich, successful men!" "The woman blackmailing him must have planned this from the start!" Well, it was a man who was blackmailing Letterman. CBS news producer Robert J. Halderman tried to extort $2 million dollars from Letterman to keep some of the comedians' sexual affairs quiet. Oopsy to all you men who screamed "Ho!" at the top of your lungs.

Totally missing the point that this is about workplace policies, not about a single man dating someone at work. And deftly tucked away was the fact he is married with a kid at home. Apparently if you are rich, and a "star" you have permission to prowl the halls for your next one night stand. Really. Who's going to say no to the boss?

I watched with disheartenment as my fellow feminist bloggers defended him to the hilt. "It's not about sex!" "How else do you meet people?" "Those ladies love it!" "His wife probably doesn't even mind!" and Barbara Walters weighed in on the View: "It isn't sexual harrassment."

Oh but Barbara, it is.

As Nell points out, there's a subset of sexual harrassment called sexual favoritism that, according to the Equal Opportunity Commision can lead to a "hostile work environment," often "creating an atmosphere that is demeaning to women." And that was her experience as a writer on the David Letterman show.

At this moment there are zero women working as comedy writers for various late shows, Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien included. Nell describes her experience:

"Was I aware of rumors that Dave was having sexual relationships with female staffers? Yes. Was I aware that other high-level male employees were having sexual relationships with female staffers? Yes. Did these female staffers have access to information and wield power disproportionate to their job titles? Yes. Did that create a hostile work environment? Yes. Did I believe these female staffers were benefiting professionally from their personal relationships? Yes. Did that make me feel demeaned? Completely. Did I say anything at the time? Sadly, no."

But I did say something at the time and it got me exactly nowhere. And I know thousands of women have said something at the time at their jobs and it got them exactly nowhere. So you can stop screaming in my ear that she should have "said" something. Oooh. That would make it stop.

Here's what she did: she walked away from her dream job.

She's coming forward now because she wants to pivot the discussion away from the bedroom and toward the writers' room, because "it pains me that almost 20 years later, the situation for female writers in late-night TV hasn't improved." She points out that shows "often rely on current (white, male) writers to recommend their funny (white, male) friends to be future (white, male) writers." Anybody who saw the movie "Funny People" starring Adam Sandler can't argue that fact. The whole movie showed how older men mentor younger men and younger men bring on board their male friends and so it goes. I believe my mothers generation called this "The Old Boys Network."

Perhaps male writers don't want women in the room. But Scovell points out "we're your co-workers, not your wives."

Sexual harrassment of women in the workplace is wrong. It robs a women of her right to employment, to be safe, to benefit from her years of education or experience. And it is wrong whether it is a liberal man like Letterman [or Clinton] or a conservative. To argue otherwise is intellectually dishonest and is the definition of double-standard.

The man who harrassed me almost 30 years ago went on to have a very successful writing career. He didn't have to worry about hostile work environments and also could rely on his network of male writers to recommend him to his next job. This creates economic disparity between the sexes on a huge scale.

To be able to work at a job you love without having to worry about the David Lettermans in the office trolling for sex. Must be nice.