Sobran's -- The Real News of the Month MAY 2000 Volume 7, No. 5 Editor: Joe Sobran Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications) Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff Subscription Rates (print version): $19.98 for six months; $59.95 per year; $100 for 2 years. Trial subscription available for $19.95 (6 issues). E-mail subscriptions: $39.95 for 1 year ($25 with a 12-month subscription to the print edition); $65 for 2 years ($45 with a 2-year subscription to the print edition). Payment should be made to The Vere Company. Address: Sobran's, P.O. Box 1383, Vienna, VA 22183-1383 Fax: 703-281-6617 Publisher's Office: 703-255-2211 Foreign Subscriptions (print version only): Add $1.25 per issue for Canada and Mexico; all other foreign countries, add $1.75 per issue. Credit Card Orders: Call 1-800-493-3348. Allow 4-6 weeks for delivery of your first issue Features THE MOVING PICTURE (page 1) I regret to announce that I won't be the next vice president. I've resigned from the Constitution Party ticket. Writing and campaigning don't mix as easily as I had thought; in fact -- if it doesn't sound self-pitying to say so -- they turned out to be a surprisingly stressful combination. I found that I was either implicating my running mate and the entire party in my personal views or watering those views down in order to avoid doing so. But with or without yours truly on the ticket, the Constitution Party remains the only party that stands for undiluted constitutional principle. * * * Several Oscars this year went to AMERICAN BEAUTY, the latest daring expose of the dark underside of American suburban life, and THE CIDER HOUSE RULES, the story of a kindly abortionist who initiates a youngster into the mysteries of his trade. Everyone agreed that it took incredible courage to make these breakthrough films, proving once more that Hollywood is the safest place to be courageous. * * * I confess I'm addicted to VANITY FAIR, the high-toned gossip mag. I spend about half an hour just finding the table of contents, but I can't resist the dirt about Hollywood, especially in the old days -- such as a couple of recent pieces about Judy Garland (her rocky marriage to the homosexual director Vincente Minelli, Liza's dad) and Natalie Wood's suspicious drowning. It helps me understand why movies have gotten so awful: these folks want to pull the whole country down to their own level. It helps them feel normal. * * * David Irving has lost his libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt. The judge played it safe, declaring Irving a racist anti-Semitic Holocaust-denying liar and ruling that he must pay more than $3 million in expenses to the high-powered defense team he faced himself, without the aid of a single lawyer. Irving took a huge gamble and lost. But I honor his courage, and he did expose the methods of the international Jewish thought-police, about which more next month. * * * Garry Wills's forthcoming book is titled PAPAL SIN. Somehow I'm not surprised. * * * Those of us who urge conservatives to leave the Republican Party are often charged with ensuring the election of Al Gore and especially with helping see to it that Gore will name the next few Supreme Court justices. But recent Republican nominees to the Court -- Souter, Kennedy, and O'Connor -- have saved Roe v. Wade; worse yet, Republicans in the Senate have voted overwhelmingly to confirm Clinton's nominees, Ginzburg and Breyer, and would no doubt do the same for Gore's picks. Both parties show approximately equal respect for constitutional law. That is, approximately none. Put otherwise, both parties -- and both candidates -- would support a continuation of lawless government. A moment of peace and prosperity is the ideal time to build a new party. * * * In giving the press Kathleen Willey's personal letters to him, Bill Clinton argues, he didn't violate the 1974 Privacy Act -- *couldn't* have violated it -- because the act doesn't apply to the White House. Another bit of Clintonian audacity, this, since, as John Fund of the WALL STREET JOURNAL reminds us, the law was passed in response to White House shenanigans during the Watergate scandals. How simple, straightforward, and earnest Clinton makes the Nixon era seem. * * * (Exclusive to the electronic version): The Republican-led House of Representatives has appropriated $100 million in federal subsidies for local fire departments. The Republican- sponsored measure drew sarcastic praise from Barney Frank, the original Massachusetts Democrat: "I congratulate the Republican Party on sloughing off that old notion that the federal government was something whose influence should be restricted and resisted. Having the Republican Party bring forward a new federal program, putting the federal government into a new area where it had not previously been, helping local firefighting, shows a degree of intellectual growth on which I congratulate them." IMPERFECT CONTRITION (pages 2-5) The Pope's recent "apology" for the sins of Catholics seems to be having the direct opposite of the effect he intended. There must be a way to oppose anti-Semitism without fostering anti-Catholicism. Catholics should, and do, regret many things their ancestors have done over the centuries. But our forebears -- including Popes -- have to do their own repenting, just as we do. Their sins are not necessarily ours, and their offenses against non-Catholics, however deplorable by today's standards, weren't necessarily sins in their own minds. In the Middle Ages and long afterward, just about everyone regarded atheism, heresy, and apostasy as criminal; rulers were expected, as a matter of course, to protect the religion of the community. The "great religions," as we now call them, regarded each other as enemies -- *God's* enemies -- not as brothers under the skin or valid alternative lifestyles. The New Testament condemns "those of the synagogue of Satan, who say they are Jews and are not"; these words and others like them are ascribed to Christ, who apparently said nothing about "pluralism," "tolerance," "dialogue," or "the Judaeo-Christian tradition." The Jews are bluntly accused of crucifying Christ and persecuting Christians, and are warned that they must repent and convert. The Talmud is no more ecumenical, condemning all gentiles and Christians in particular, with obscene curses against Christ and the Blessed Virgin. Islam merely brought another fighting faith into the world, which sought to impose itself wherever it could: that, everyone agreed in principle, was what the True Religion was supposed to do. Immortal souls were at stake. Of course persuasion was the ideal, but, since human nature was obstinate, force was sometimes necessary. The early Protestants saw it the same way and acted accordingly. Is the Pope "repenting" because twelfth-century men weren't twentieth-century men? (As if we can safely assume that that would have been an improvement.) And his penitence seems to extend only to those putative sins that the twentieth century condemns, ignoring all manner of other things that are sinful by traditional Catholic standards. This is very much in the spirit of modern man, who condemns earlier generations for not having been modern men. So the papal statement, far from correcting the sins of the modern world, had the effect of seeming to justify every modern prejudice against Catholicism. Of course the Pope distinguished carefully between the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ, which can never sin, and the Church as a human institution. But since only Catholics accept this distinction -- anyone who does accept it is almost by definition a believing Catholic -- the qualification seemed Pickwickian to non-Catholics, who generally took the view that the Catholic Church had finally, belatedly, though imperfectly, admitted that it is, after all, the source of most of the great evils of history. In short, the Pope seemed to be validating every familiar anti-Catholic canard. Even ordinary Catholics of this generation, who are woefully weak in theological and historical understanding (a fact for which the hierarchy of today's Church really *should* repent), took the impression that the modern calumnies must be true after all. Since John Paul II is a man of considerable intellect and diplomatic skill, it's amazing that he didn't foresee this natural and predictable interpretation of his gesture. His successors will have a lot of explaining to do. The reaction was fascinating. To a purely rational unbeliever, it might be as if the current mayor of Athens had apologized for the execution of Socrates, or as if the House of Windsor had apologized for the depredations of Henry VIII (without, however, offering to return England's great cathedrals to the Church of Rome). How can people who reject the concept of apostolic succession -- the principle that the Church inherits the authority of Christ -- believe that today's Church can inherit guilt from the medieval Church? And if guilt is hereditary, why not also blame today's Jews for the Crucifixion? Can we now expect rabbis to apologize for the role of Jews in Communism and for their own "silence" during Soviet mass murders of Christians? There are interesting possibilities here. And does today's Church get credit for creating Western civilization? Or is her uniquely continuous moral identity over two millennia recognized only for the purpose of heaping accusations on her? For whatever reason, everyone seemed to assume that the present Pope *could* somehow take responsibility for all the sins of Catholics throughout history, *should* take responsibility for them, and yet had failed to do so adequately. Jews objected (again) that the Pope had failed to apologize specifically for the you-know-what and demanded that he condemn the "silence" of Pius XII; homosexuals complained that he hadn't expressed remorse to gays and lesbians; the NEW YORK TIMES noted sorrowfully that he hadn't repudiated Catholic teaching on contraception and abortion. Liberal Catholics found fault with him too, on similar grounds. As for believing Catholics, most of them saw the futility of trying to appease the insatiable. In short, if you're going to apologize to the modern world, you have to do it on the modern world's terms. Technically, of course, the "apology" was a prayer addressed to God, not to the Anti-Defamation League; but it was clearly designed to be overheard, as it were, by secular ears. The free-for-all of faultfinding was only to be expected. We must ask: What is the fruit of the hundred or so apologies this Pope has now uttered? Is there any evidence that they have drawn any souls to the Church? Do they not, on the contrary, confirm every malicious common belief about the Church, while discouraging faithful Catholics and confusing weak ones? What on earth is the *point?* Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League complains that the Pope had "stopped short in addressing specific Catholic wrongs against the Jewish people, especially the Holocaust." This is now a tenet of Holocaust-centered secular Jewish ideology: that the Catholic Church bears guilt for the Holocaust, not only because Pius XII was "Hitler's Pope," but because the Church is the historic mother of anti-Semitism. This attitude has been reinforced, not softened, by the papal statement. It would have been only fair if Jews like Foxman had communicated their view to Catholic soldiers in the Allied armies early on, so that those boys would have had some inkling of what they were being sent to fight for: a postwar world in which countless of their fellow Catholics and other Christians were subjugated and persecuted by Communism, while Jewish propaganda blamed the crimes of the Axis on their Church. Probably not the sort of victory they had in mind. But the Foxmans maintained a discreet silence on the subject as long as they needed those Catholic boys to do the fighting. Now that the war has long since ended favorably, they've sized up today's Catholic Church as soft, and they deem it safe to insult the dead as well as the Church with their measureless libels. They can be confident that a Church that craves their pardon won't give them any backtalk. As for the young Christians who died fighting Hitler, well, who cares? They've served their purpose; did they expect to be thanked? Speaking as a convert, I am deeply grateful that the Catholic Church of my boyhood -- the Church of Pius XII -- evangelized in a different spirit, claiming, and proclaiming, the authority of Christ. Nobody dreamed of demanding apologies from that Church, and none were forthcoming. The message was simple, unclouded by equivocation: the Catholic Church was the way to salvation. To reject Christ and his One True Church was to incur damnation. There were, to be sure, qualifications. We were taught that people might guiltlessly reject Catholicism out of "invincible ignorance"; but they were still in danger of damnation as the natural result of original and actual sin, and they still *needed* the Church, even if they didn't know it. Catholic teaching covered everything with majestic common sense; the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas merely took common sense to sublime heights. The simple old widows I saw at daily Mass and the sophisticated scholars from whom I sought answers were in this thing together, and they understood each other as members of the same divine family. We were American and French and Filipino and African and everything else. Every Catholic priest in the world spoke Latin. Catholicism was universal in a way that was far more real and resonant than today's abstract "universalism" and "multiculturalism" can ever be. It all revolved around the Last Supper and the Crucifixion. Christ had instituted the Eucharist, turning bread and wine into his body and blood and telling us to do likewise. He called himself "the bread of life" and said that eating his flesh was necessary for salvation. The Mass, reenacting his sacrifice at Calvary, was our essential rite. The Mass necessitated a priesthood, which in turn necessitated a hierarchy to ordain priests and, in time, a magisterium to keep doctrine pure. The Holy Inquisition followed eventually, and was essentially legitimate in spite of any abuses that might befall it. Within this framework, the notorious Index of Forbidden Books didn't trouble me at all. The infallibility of the Pope, our supreme shepherd in the line of St. Peter, the rock on which Christ built his Church, was my assurance that I could trust the Church's teaching authority not to mislead me. Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary and the saints, prayers for the poor souls in Purgatory, the rosary, the Stations of the Cross, all this seemed to offer a wealth of spiritual opportunities. The Latin liturgy exuded holiness and mystery; it also signified the unity and ancient continuity of the Church. Catholic morality was unchanging and uncompromising. In all this I saw nothing that called for improvement as of the commencement of the Second Vatican Council in 1962; I was confident that the Council would merely continue what had already existed, making some parts of the Deposit of Faith more explicit, leaving intact everything that was already established. I understood the logic of Protestantism too. It issued from the rejection of the Eucharist: the words "This is my body" and "This is my blood" were only figurative, even to "fundamentalists" who took the Bible literally! But if Christ had been speaking figuratively, why had so many disciples deserted him when he announced that eating his flesh and drinking his blood were necessary for salvation (John 6: 53- 66)? When they left, saying, "This is a hard saying; who can accept it?" he could easily have said, "Wait, come back! I was just using a metaphor!" Instead, he rebuked them for not believing. Once the Eucharist was demoted to a mere symbol, there was no need for a priesthood to consecrate bread and wine, no need for a hierarchy, et cetera. The "priesthood of all believers" became the papacy of each believer, with no cohesive authority to ensure unity. Freedom of conscience, permitting each believer to interpret Scripture for himself, seemed to me anarchic; and Protestantism seemed doomed to dissolve into countless sects, creating a centrifugal culture that would terminate in unbelief and sensuality. Some Protestants held firm to as much of the Deposit of Faith as they had received; such people were faithful to Christ by their lights, though they lacked the blessings of the Sacraments they had rejected and had cut themselves off from the graces they might have received through Our Lady and the saints. I considered Protestants of this kind better "Catholics," as it were, than those nominal Catholics who picked and chose among the Church's teachings and therefore essentially rejected the authority of the Church. Today, whether because of the Council I don't know, many Catholics as well as Protestants have committed apostasy while continuing to call themselves Christians. The "dissident" Catholic insists that he is as good a Catholic as the faithful members of the Church, even if he denies the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and therefore rejects the very rationale of Catholicism. But the usual motive for this internal apostasy isn't specifically theological; it is sexual. The defector claims a "right" to sexual freedom -- fornication, contraception, sodomy, divorce, and remarriage; nominally Catholic voters and politicians even treat abortion as a right. I can only wonder why these virtual Unitarians insist on identifying themselves as Catholics. But such dissidence suffers no penalty in today's Church. If the Pope seeks matter for repentance -- sins he can actually do something about -- he should look to the failure of the Church under recent papacies, very much including his own, to teach and discipline Catholics properly. The Eucharist itself is constantly abused, even to sacrilege, in the Novus Ordo Mass, which permits the Body of Christ to be treated with contempt. Do I exaggerate? Not long ago I saw a young man take Communion while wearing a T-shirt that read "PARTY NAKED." Nobody in the Church is apologizing for letting that sort of thing happen. But then, the Anti-Defamation League isn't complaining. THE CASE OF ELIAN GONZALEZ (pages 5-6) As I write, the case of Elian Gonzalez remains unresolved, but Al Gore has broken with the Clinton administration -- and the entire Democratic Party -- over whether the six-year-old should be sent back to his father in Cuba. Gore now favors letting Elian stay with his relatives in Miami, a position that is being harshly denounced by other Democrats, including congressional leaders Richard Gephardt and Tom Daschle, not to mention such odious leftists as California's Maxine Waters and New York's Charles Rangel. Lee Hamilton of Indiana says Gore's shift calls into question his "convictions and commitment." So the Gonzalez case amounts to a sort of litmus test of liberal Democratic orthodoxy -- as well it should. (Within a few days Gore, feeling the heat, was already edging away from his new position.) City officials in Miami, including the mayor and police chief, have announced that they won't assist federal forces in repatriating the boy. Many of Miami's Cubans are ready to take arms, if necessary, to prevent his deportation. What is most impressive in this case is the near- unanimity of liberal opinion that Elian should be sent back to life under Communism. Not a single liberal voice, as far as I know, has even called for some assurance by Fidel Castro that Elian will not be killed if he tries to leave Cuba later. Liberal anti-Communism, never a hardy plant, appears to be extinct. A believer in the sanctity of family ties may honestly feel that Elian should be returned to his father, no matter what the political environment. And such a view would not at all palliate or play down the evil and sordidness of Cuban Communism; it might even underline the dangers repatriation poses for Elian. But this is not the case that is currently being made for sending Elian back to Cuba. To hear the advocates of sending him back, you might gather that there is no downside at all. Suddenly the liberal-feminist bloc has discovered the "family values" it usually ridicules, swallowing its opposition to "patriarchy" for the sake of Elian's piteous father. Even Janet Reno -- Mother Waco herself -- now speaks of "the sacred bond between parent and child." As a Florida prosecutor, she was noted for taking children from their parents on the slenderest pretext of "protecting" them from "abuse." This solicitude for "our children" is grotesque, coming from people who defend the killing of unborn children even at full term. Bill Clinton isn't one to put Castro on the spot by demanding, or even suggesting, that Elian's father and his family be permitted to migrate to this country. We can't have that! The United States may be bedeviled by illegal immigrants, but Castro's Cuba has never had that problem: it has always had to deal with Communism's perennial problem -- illegal *emigrants.* More than any other form of government in history, Communism, from the beginning, has made people want to leave their ancestral homes behind and take their chances elsewhere. This has produced that reliable fixture of Communist rule, the armed, barbed-wired border, not to keep invaders out but to keep the natives in. Not that Castro is the least bit abashed about this; but then, Communist rulers tend not to be people who care much when they're not wanted. Liberal opinion has also been strikingly hostile to the exiled Cubans in Florida. Stalin may be long gone and the Cold War may be over, but most liberals can still be trusted to take the Communist side whenever there is a Communist side to take. And they still hold refugees from Communism in contempt. No liberal -- none of the audible ones, anyway -- is holding Castro responsible for Elian's mother's death; she drowned after escaping the gunboats that patrol Cuba's shoreline for the purpose of killing would-be refugees. On the contrary, some liberals blame her for exposing Elian to danger with her "reckless" escape attempt in a pitifully inadequate boat. To ideologues, Communism may still appear as a "progressive" -- if sometimes heavy-handed -- form of government, aspiring to "social justice." But to those who have lived under it, Communism is defined not by any such abstract aspirations but by its claim, and unabashed exercise, of total power, including the power to kill its subjects, particularly those who try to escape. That power, not Marxist theory or "class stuggle," is the ugly essence of Communism. That power was what the Berlin Wall signified; and some liberals openly defended the Wall. The tens of millions murdered by Communist states haven't essentially altered Communism's ideological attraction for liberals. By Communist standards, after all, any dictator who has killed fewer than a million people practically qualifies as a humanitarian. Not that the numbers really matter. Liberals, after all, judge Communism not by its history but by its future. What it does never matters as much as what it promises to do. And it doesn't matter how often the promise is broken: Communism is right in principle. After all these years, liberals still accept Communism on its own terms and grant Castro the moral high ground against the Cubans in Miami. This is all the more remarkable in that today's liberals are far less gullible, far less likely to be "dupes" and "useful idiots," than those of the Stalin era. Solzhenitsyn, the Vietnamese boat people, and long experience have rendered the old illusions impossible. Today it comes down to basic principles, stripped of utopian hopes. And the Gonzalez case shows that liberalism doesn't need illusions about steel production, literacy rates, and five-year plans in order to approve of Communism in principle. One standard feature of liberal anti-anti-Communist (i.e., obliquely pro-Communist) polemics is the denigration of refugees. They are never admitted to be seeking freedom or fleeing tyranny; they are always "landed oligarchs," bitter at being dispossessed of ill-gotten wealth and privilege; or, at best, they are materialists who want to get a piece of Western prosperity. Liberals won't acknowledge that people have a natural right to acquire wealth and property without impediment by the state, or that they also have a natural right to escape religious persecution, which is always a feature of the Communist state. After all, liberals share the Communist desire to impose total economic control and eliminate Christianity from public and private life. So the refugees get no credit for courage when they risk their lives to escape. To liberals there is nothing heroic about fleeing Communism and therefore nothing sympathetic about those who perish in the attempt. Naturally, then, liberals have infintely more pity for a Communist "victim of McCarthyism," who has lost nothing more than a livelihood as a Hollywood screenwriter, than for a woman who drowns escaping from Castro. It's vital to bear in mind that liberals don't believe in natural rights. When they speak of "rights," they mean legal rights they think it desirable for the state to confer. But since they think the state, not God or nature, is the actual source of rights, they don't object in principle to a Communist state that confers no rights at all. They recognize sovereign "states' rights," but in a peculiar modern sense, not in the sense meant by John Calhoun and Jefferson Davis. Such limitless sovereignty belongs only to "progressive" states, not to "reactionary" ones. So liberals favor the prosecution of a Pinochet, but would never call for or assent to the prosecution of Castro. The liberal press tips its hand by calling Pinochet a "dictator," while calling Castro a "leader." The Gonzalez case should clear our minds. Even now, when we are told that not only the Cold War but "the era of big government" is over, liberalism hasn't repudiated its affinity to Communism. It insists on treating Castro's murderous slave- state as a perfectly legitimate regime, not as a monstrous tyranny. It accepts his right to kill his subjects,even for the crime of emigration. One Cuban diplomat called Elian a "possession" of the Cuban government; among the media, only the conservative WASHINGTON TIMES quoted this revealing claim, though the liberal WASHINGTON POST ran a damning op-ed piece about Castro's Cuba by a former Cuban official, now in exile. If Elian is sent back, he wrote, it will not be to his father so much as to Fidel. Cuban law requires that every child be imbued with a "Communist personality" and proscribes "influences contrary to Communist commitment"; children begin the school day with a chant: "Pioneers for Communism, we will be like Che!" Beginning at age ten they attend mandatory summer indoctrination camps. So Castro mustn't be asked to assure us that Elian will be free to leave Cuba later: why should one boy be so privileged in a land where all are equal, if only in subjection? If, when he grows up, he is caught trying to escape, he'll be shot like anyone else; as his unpitied mother would have been, for example. Liberals simply don't find this horrifying. And they don't want to embarrass Castro (or themselves) by calling attention to it. The debate over Elian Gonzalez, like many previous debates (e.g., those over McCarthyism, the Vietnam war, and recognizing Red China), is really a debate over the moral legitimacy of Communism. By taking the Communist side again, liberalism is reminding us that it still stands for unconditional state power. Liberals would of course deny that this is their creed. But as Bernard Shaw observed, a man's real beliefs must be inferred not from the creed he professes, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts. In the real world, liberalism is a welter of hypocrisies that mask a set of cynical attitudes. It isn't hard to penetrate those hypocrisies and deduce those attitudes. Boxed Copy IT TAKES A VILLAGE (SUCH AS HAVANA): Janet Reno says Elian must go back to Cuba because of the "sacred bond" between father and child. When has she -- or any Clintonite -- ever used that phrase for that relationship before? (page 6) LEST WE FORGET: Even under Stalin, the Soviet Union had a constitution that guaranteed all sorts of rights, including, as Franklin Roosevelt enthusiastically noted, religious freedom. Of course, as with Roosevelt's Supreme Court, such rights were qualified: they meant what the government wanted them to mean. In short -- a living document! (page 8) NO! NO! DON'T RAISE IT! George W. Bush has met with a group of homosexual Republicans and emerged feeling like "a better person" for the experience. "I welcome gay Americans into my campaign," he said. (Mark the phrase "gay Americans." Will he also welcome pedophile Americans into his campaign?) He added that he was "very interested in the idea" of a gay speaker at the GOP convention this year. One of the group said the purpose of the meeting was to "raise his consciousness." Heaven forbid. The very thought of a Bush with a raised consciousness is kind of creepy. (page 10) A DEFINITE MAYBE: As we head into the homestretch of the Clinton era, a question naturally arises: Will Bill be indicted when he leaves office? The new special prosecutor, Robert Ray, says it's a live issue; and he can quote all those Democrats who, while insisting that perjury and obstruction didn't "rise to the level of impeachable offenses," bailed out with the proviso that Clinton remained liable to criminal law at the end of his term. The new party line, though, is "Enough is enough." Clinton and Al Gore are dodging the question of a pardon. Their equivocations amount to the usual Clintonian denial: a yes that sounds like a no. (page 12) Reprinted Columns (pages 7-12) * The Papal "Apology" (March 14) http://www.sobran.com/columns/000314.shtml * In Defense of Bob Jones (March 16) http://www.sobran.com/columns/000316.shtml * Punishing "Hate" (March 21) http://www.sobran.com/columns/000321.shtml * Pat Buchanan: The Next John McCain? (March 23) http://www.sobran.com/columns/000323.shtml * Smearing a Pope (March 28) http://www.sobran.com/columns/000328.shtml * The Clinton Rap Sheet (March 30) http://www.sobran.com/columns/000330.shtml All articles are written by Joe Sobran Copyright (c) 2000. All rights reserved. This material may not be disseminated or distributed in any way without the express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate. It is for private use only and may not be published -- either in print or on the Internet.Those wishing to publish the newsletter or columns must obtain a publications rate, which is based on the circulation of your publication. Contact fran@griffnews.com for further details. [ENDS]