Thirteen 2003 Quotes

Among the most brazen agents of partisan intolerance in the early 2000s was Ann Coulter. Coulter wrote a series of bestselling books attacking liberals and Democrats in a McCarthyite voice. The books’ titles speak for themselves: Slander (2002); Treason (2003); Godless (2006); Guilty (2009); Demonic (2011); Adios, America! (2015). Treason, published around the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, defends Joseph McCarthy and embraces his tactics. The book claims that anti-Americanism is “intrinsic to [liberals’] entire worldview” and accuses liberals of having committed “fifty years of treason” during the Cold War. While doing publicity for Treason, Coulter declared, “There are millions of suspects here….I am indicting the entire Democratic Party.” The book spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

During Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat was invited to spend more time in the White House than any other foreign leader—thirteen invitations.303 Clinton was dead set on helping the Israelis and Palestinians achieve a lasting peace. He pushed the Israelis to grant ever-greater concessions until the Israelis were willing to grant the Palestinians up to 98 percent of all the territory they requested. And what was the Palestinian response? They walked away from the bargaining table and launched the wave of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks known as the Second Intifada. And what of Osama bin Laden? Even while America was granting concessions to Palestinians—and thereby theoretically easing the conditions that provided much of the pretext for Muslim terror—bin Laden was bombing U.S. embassies in Africa, almost sank the USS Cole in Yemen, and was well into the planning stages of the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001. After President George W. Bush ordered U.S. forces to invade Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, respectively, bringing American troops into direct ground combat with jihadists half a world away, many Americans quickly forgot the recent past and blamed American acts of self-defense for “inflaming” jihad. One of those Americans was Barack Obama. Soon after his election, Obama traveled to Cairo, Egypt, where he delivered a now-infamous speech that signaled America’s massive policy shifts. The United States pulled entirely out of Iraq despite the pleas of “all the major Iraqi parties.”304 In Egypt, the United States actually backed the Muslim Brotherhood government, going so far as agreeing to give it advanced F-16 fighters and M1 Abrams main battle tanks, even as the Muslim Brotherhood government was violating its peace treaty with Israel and persecuting Egypt’s ancient Coptic Christian community. The Obama administration continued supporting the Brotherhood, even when it stood aside and allowed jihadists to storm the American embassy, raising the black flag of jihad over an American diplomatic facility. In Libya, the United States persuaded its allies to come to the aid of a motley group of rebels, including jihadists. Then many of these same jihadists promptly turned their anger on the United States, attacking our diplomatic compound in Benghazi the afternoon and evening of September 11, 2012—killing the American ambassador and three more brave Americans. Compounding this disaster, the administration had steadfastly refused to reinforce the American security presence in spite of a deteriorating security situation, afraid that it would anger the local population. This naïve and foolish administration decision cost American lives.

Mexico has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs to China. U.S. Department of Commerce data reveal that from 2002 to 2003 Mexico lost market share in thirteen of its top twenty export industries, nearly always to China. With fewer jobs at home, Mexicans are finding it all the more compelling to cross the border into the United States in search of work. No fence is high enough to bar workers desperate to feed their families.

The popular press skews male as well. According to the Annenberg Public Policy Center, only 3 percent of the top positions in mainstream media are held by women. And bylines in the nation’s top intellectual and political magazines are heavily male. Meanwhile, according to the Columbia Journalism Review, in an analysis of eleven magazines published between October 2003 and May 2005, male-to-female byline ratios ranged from thirteen to one at the National Review to seven to one at Harper’s. When we become aware of just how many of the media stories we ingest are from a man’s point of view, it becomes much easier to understand why we struggle to believe that we as women can dream—and therefore dreaming does require that we dare.

It took thirteen years after its discovery to sequence full-length genome of HIV in 1996, and only thirty-one days to sequence the SARS virus in 2003, and we can now sequence many biological viruses in a single day.

The Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition stretched the boundaries of the United States from sea to shining sea. Thus July 4, 1803, was the beginning of today’s nation. The celebration in 1976 was designated as the Bicentennial, and that was appropriate for the original thirteen colonies, but it was with the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition that the United States west of the Mississippi River became a part of the nation. Therefore July 4, 2003, can be regarded as the real Bicentennial.

because of political and religious complications, the campaign was entirely halted for thirteen months beginning in 2003. As a result, the disease flared up, causing more than five thousand cases of paralysis in the three years ending in 2006. From Nigeria polio spread widely, causing paralysis in eighteen countries, primarily in West and Central Africa, that WHO had previously pronounced polio-free. The fragility of earlier progress was evident.

Graham is also one of the few living products of artificial insemination experiments in red wolves, a technique that Will wants to further hone. Artificial insemination may be useful to the program in the future in case the captive breeding efforts to create matched pairs based on mean kinship falls short of reproductive goals. In some cases, the captive female wolves were so aggressive to males that they were paired with that breeding never took place. Artificial insemination and securing red wolf sperm from all of the founding lines of the captive breeding program were identified in the 1990 Red Wolf Recovery/Species Survival Plan. Not long after, workers began collecting red wolf sperm. According to Will, there happened to be a fellow outside of Portland who had an international canid semen bank. The captive breeding program contracted him to help explore the viability of using electroejaculation on wolves. In the 1990s, Will helped develop protocols for immobilizing, catheterizing, and stimulating the wolves they sampled. They went through the captive population and methodically collected and evaluated sperm from male red wolves. If the sperm met certain criteria, it was processed and frozen. Eventually, the cryopreserved red wolf semen bank held samples from sixty individuals, which collectively represented thirteen of the fourteen founding lines. The work died down when a grant ran out and one of the main reproductive physiologists switched jobs. Today, the early efforts to cryopreserve red wolf sperm and artificially inseminate females have proven their value - not just through Graham and his antics at the exhibit, but because a wolf named Stubs, one of the last living representatives from one of the fourteen founding lines, died in 1998. With Stubs’s death, the unique diversity of his founding lineage died within the captive population. However, his semen was collected and banked before he died. Will would like nothing more than to resurrect Stubs’s line. The only challenge, he says, is that the previous two cases of artificial insemination, in 1992 and 2003, were done using fresh sperm. In the first case, a six-year-old red wolf birthed two females and one male. Graham was born into a different litter of five. “Clearly, we know artificial insemination using cryopreserved sperm works. It’s been done in other animals,” Will says. “We just need to pick this research up again and see where it might lead.” If male red wolves experience a decrease in sperm quality, or if females are behaviorally uncooperative with their male counterparts, then artificial insemination may move from the realm of research to that of necessity. It’s always nice to have a backup plan.