Heston Steps Down As NRA President
After serving an unprecedented five-year term as president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), actor and conservative activist Charlton Heston resigned from his position as head of the nation’s leading organization that protects the rights of gun owners.
Heston, 78, who suffers from the early stages of Alzheimer’s, gave a brief speech before the annual NRA meeting in Orlando, Fla., on April 26.
"Thanks you for everything, not only now but for all the years. . . . It has been a wonderful run. I’m going to miss you," Heston told a cheering throng of 4,000 NRA delegates shortly after he received a standing ovation.
The ailing actor raised an 1866 Winchester rifle over his head and delivered his trademark words, "From my cold, dead hands."
Heston began his tenure as NRA president in 1998 and helped raise the NRA membership level to 4 million.
The veteran actor of such memorable roles as Michelangelo, Ben Hur, and Moses served in World War II, married in 1994. His wife Lydia is a breast cancer survivor.
Kayne Robinson, a former police officer from Des Moines, Iowa, and conservative Republican activist, was elected the new president of the NRA on April 28.
For more information on the NRA visit the group’s website: www.nra.org.
Buckley Edits ‘Treasury Of Classic Children’s Literature’
William F. Buckley, Jr., prominent conservative author and former editor of National Review, has edited a compilation of Children’s literature titled: The National Review Treasury of Children’s Literature, which is co-published with ISI Books.
This handsome 508pp volume contains 44 short stories, essays, and poems-42 of which were originally published in St. Nicholas Magazine from its "golden years," between 1874 and 1918.
The text and pictures were scanned from the original magazine issues and include such classics as "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" by Rudyard Kipling, "Tom Sawyer Abroad," by Mark Twain, "The Happychaps," by Carolyn Wells, Jack London’s "In Yeddo Bay," Bret Harte’s "Baby Sylvester," and L. Frank Baum’s "Juggerjook."
For more information contact Elizabeth Capano at National Review (212) 679-7330, the Barnes and Noble website: www.bn.com, Amazon books: www.Amazon.com or your local bookstore.
CATO Study Examines Coffee Industry practices
A new briefing paper released by the CATO Institute analyzes the recent glut of coffee beans on the global coffee market and found some of the low-cost suppliers (Brazil and Vietnam) leading the way with improved productivity and reduced costs.
"Grounds for Complaint? "Understanding the Coffee Crisis," by Brink Lindsey, director of CATO’s Center for Trade Policy Studies, scrutinizes the anti-market ‘fair trade’ campaigns by labor activists. Such market critics believe they are assisting coffee farmers with "interventionist" solutions to the coffee trade, but such measures contribute to higher retail costs, which are passed along to consumers.
"Those who single out particular companies as scapegoats and advocate various half-baked schemes to prop up prices may have the best of intentions, but they are not really helping," Lindsey asserts. "The coffee slump need not be faced with passive resignation. There are a variety of strategies for responding constructively to the current difficulties. But all of those strategies have this in common: They work with the market forces rather than against them."
Copies of the trade policy briefing paper (no. 16) are available from the CATO website: www.freetrade.org/pubs/briefs/tbp-016es.html or by calling (202) 789-5210.
Ex-GOP Chairman In New Controversy
During his stormy two years as Republican state chairman of California, Shawn Steel was not exactly a shrinking violet. Whether the issue was the power in the state party of Bushman (and Steel arch-nemesis) Gerald Parsky or the proposed recall of Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, one could always find Los Angeles attorney and longtime conservative activist Steel out front and with an opinion sure to spawn controversy and make headlines.
Less than four months after he stepped down from the party helm, Steel is demonstrating that his seeming romance with controversy is an ongoing one.
According to a report in the University of Southern California Daily Trojan, Steel, while addressing a pro-Iraqi War rally sponsored by the USC College Republicans April 14th, denounced the Islamic community because it "has a cancer growing inside it, which hates Jews, hates Freedom, and hates western society."
Steel, reported the Trojan, went on to say that "[t]he disease of Islam must be rectified. It’s kill or be killed."
Needless to say, reaction came swift and hard. The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) demanded that the California Republican Party "repudiate this latest smear of Islam" and reassure the Muslim community in California "that Steel’s Islamophobic views do not reflect those of the party."
The group got its reassurance, as Steel’s successor as state chairman, Duf Sundheim, announced he would soon meet with CAIR to discuss relations between the party and the Islamic community, according to state GOP spokesman Rob Stutzman. Of Steel, Stutzman declared, "He’s no longer chairman for the party and no longer speaks for it. If the remarks are correct, then we don’t stand by them, and frankly, we condemn them."
That’s just it, insisted Steel-the reporting of his remarks was "incorrect and out of context."
The former party chieftain told us that he had qualified his remarks at USC by pointing out "within every religion there are problems and there is presently a disease within Islam." He went on to underscore that his remarks only referred to Islamic fundamentalism rather than Islam as a whole, and that "there seems to be an emerging class of mass murderers emerging from radical Islam."
To charges of bigotry and xenophobia, Steel bristled and recalled his emphasis as chairman on recruiting minorities-Latinos, Asian Americans, and Muslims-as contributors and supporters of the Republican Party. In his final year as party chairman, he noted, he arranged for the first Moslem prayer to be delivered at a state convention.
Steel underscored what he actually said as well as his views in a detailed letter to CAIR entitled, "Open Letter to the Muslim Community."
But CAIR isn’t buying. Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR in Southern California, said that Steel’s charge that there is a disease within Islam "is extremely offensive," that even if given the benefit of the doubt that his speech was taken out of context, "the response he’s given to people who have contacted him demanded an apology showed even greater insensitivity." Ayloush, however, stopped short of branding Steel a bigot and said he felt the comments were guided more by ignorance than a desire to offend anyone.
Steel told us he stands by his letter and his remarks and, predictably, he wasn’t backing down. One has a strong feeling this is a story that we haven’t heard the last of.
