You know a conservative Republican legislative initiative is in trouble when Fox News Channel¹s Bill O¹Reilly won¹t even support it. That¹s what happened to Pennsylvania House Resolution 119, which calls on the state liquor control board to stop purchasing French wine for the state stores to protest the French government¹s opposition to a U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Reps. Babette Josephs and Mark Cohen, both of Philadelphia, spearheaded opposition to the measure in the statehouse. Cohen bravely appeared live on the May 8 O'Reilly Factor, brought out as a liberal sacrificial lamb, a staple of the show. After O'Reilly expressed support for the resolution, which he approvingly compared to sending [a] missile into Paris, Cohen stood his ground. Arguing that each Pennsylvanian should be able to make his or her own decision about whether to boycott French products, and explaining that his position was not liberal but libertarian, the host made the rare admission that, you're changing my mind here.

In the end, O'Reilly encouraged each individual to boycott French products on their own, but Cohen was not on board. (If he had his druthers, Cohen said, people would all drink Pennsylvania wine, though he refused to lecture people on what they should be drinking.) I was just starting to like you, O'Reilly said before going to commercial.

But Bill O'Reilly's stance on the issue matters less than the stance of the Pennsylvania statehouse leadership. And they're decidedly lukewarm on the resolution, having flip-flopped on whether to bring the bill to a vote.

Mark Cohen and I basically killed it [by making] a fuss, says Rep. Josephs. By alerting their fellow representatives and the public that the resolution was under consideration, the duo turned what could have been an under-the-radar resolution into an international incident.

In a letter dated April 29, the French ambassador to the United States, Jean-David Levitte, wrote to Rep. John Perzel, the head of the Pennsylvania House's Republican leadership, urging him to reconsider this issue and not pass HR 119. In the letter, the ambassador threatened that the passage of the bill could jeopardize our deep economic ties. Citing European Commission statistics, Levitte wrote that European firms are responsible for nearly 200,000 jobs in Pennsylvania.

After the governor made clear to resolution sponsor Rep. Stephen Barrar last week that the measure could cost Pennsylvania jobs from a French multinational currently considering investing in the Keystone State, the Delaware County Republican agreed to keep his proposal from coming to a vote. The last thing on earth I want to do is hurt Pennsylvania economically, Barrar says. I was trying to make a point with the French government and the point was well made.

Therese Kenley, a spokesperson for Rep. Perzel, confirmed that the resolution is not currently on the voting schedule.

Mesopotamian Mess

With the American archaeological community dismayed over the looting of Iraq¹s museums, Richard Zettler, curator in charge of the Near East Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, gave a briefing on the state of Iraq¹s National Museum at the UPenn museum May 9. Zettler knows the museum well. In the 1970s as a graduate student, he worked there cataloguing cuneiform tablets. (The audience chuckled when he pointed to an island in the Tigris River on a map of downtown Baghdad and recommended it is a great place to have a picnic.) ¹I feel as if this museum is an old friend,¹ Zettler said.

Thanks to an old friend and colleague from the British Museum who is inside Baghdad, Zettler was able to give an up-to-the-minute analysis of what took place. Though details remain sketchy, Zettler said there is reason to believe that some of the looting may have been coordinated by organized thieves with help from museum officials. As for the wanton destruction of many of the objects, Zettler believes this to be a misguided attempt to lash out at Saddam Hussein's regime. Under Saddam, the Iraqi antiquities bureau was turned from a highly professional cultural department into a propaganda machine in an attempt to link Saddam with the great Mesopotamian rulers of the past like Nebuchadnezzar.

While some Western museum officials have been critical of American troops' inability to prevent the looting, Zettler was not among them. Assessing blame for what happened doesn't really get us very far, he said. According to Zettler's source inside Iraq, forces loyal to Saddam had been stationed on the museum grounds, lending credence to the Pentagon's contention that the U.S. military had to worry about winning the war rather than protecting Iraq's cultural heritage. At this point, Zettler said, there are a lot of possible scenarios.