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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) -- Former President Jimmy Carter believes women eventually will be able to join Augusta National Golf Club. ``But the members themselves will have to make that decision,'' Carter said Tuesday. Augusta National, home of the Masters, has been at the center of a dispute for not allowing female members. Martha Burk, head of the National Council of Women's Organizations, urged the club to invite a woman to join. Club chairman Hootie Johnson responded that he would not do so ``at the point of a bayonet.'' ``I think that the present administration of the Masters has not...

Arnold Palmer, who bid an emotional farewell last year at the Masters, is returning for an encore. Arnold Palmer wants some more adventure at Rae's Creek and the Masters. The 73-year-old Palmer, a four-time winner of the green jacket, decided Saturday to play in the Masters for the 49th consecutive year, spokesman Doc Giffin said. That would tie Doug Ford for the most times playing in the tournament. Giffin said an announcement was expected Monday from Augusta National. ''I can only say he loves to play in that tournament,'' Giffin said. The decision comes one day after Jack Nicklaus, 63,...

Feminism's next major crusade is sitting at its feet, ignored.Sadly, my great dissertation on modern feminism, “You’re Adorable When You’re Angry,” went unfinished despite the Great Book Writing Fit of the mid-1990s. The title summed up the conclusion; with feminism’s important battles long since fought and won, the movement has collapsed onto itself, becoming in the process an odd parody of something that once mattered. Conservatives are often asked what they have against feminism – the correct answer is, conservatives don’t hate feminism, but they are annoyed by its modern leanings. Whatever its intentions, all it succeeds in doing these...

SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) The leader of a Ku Klux Klan splinter group said Friday he will demonstrate in support of Augusta National Golf Club's all-male membership during the Masters, whether the club likes it or not. "This equal rights stuff has gotten out of hand," said Joseph J. Harper of Cordele, imperial wizard of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. "We're not concerned with whether they want us there or not. We're concerned with their right to choose who they want to choose" as members. Harper wrote the Richmond County Sheriff's Department on Thursday, requesting a permit to...

Ku Klux Klan asks for permit to demonstrate Associated Press AUGUSTA, Ga. -- A Ku Klux Klan group has asked for a permit to demonstrate in support of Augusta National Golf Club's right to an all-male membership, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Friday. "We intend on making speeches and picketing for the right of the Augusta National Club to include only members of their choice regardless of race, religion, sex or creed,'' said J.J. Harper, identified by the newspaper as the imperial wizard of the American White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Augusta National spokesman Glenn Greenspan distanced the...

Filed at 10:35 a.m. ET Nearly 30 companies whose chief executives are members at all-male Augusta National now belong to another exclusive club. They are listed in the ``Hall of Hypocrisy,'' the slogan on a Web site launched Tuesday night by Martha Burk and the National Council of Women's Organization in the latest attempt to pressure the golf club into inviting women to join. The site -- www.augustadiscriminates.org -- made its debut about the time Burk appeared on HBO's ``Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.'' ``We think it is important for women to know that some of America's largest corporations maintain...

A local diamond merchant here in Augusta, Doris Diamonds, is holding a "Martha Burk Sale" this coming Sunday for MEN ONLY! They are invited to come in and pick out a Christmas gift for their wives or girlfriends. Ad is all over the radio, and people here in Augusta are loving it. We can still laugh while the liberals in rest of the US gets carried away with pontificating...

<p>CLOTHES MAKE the man, and so it is that Tiger Woods can become the manliest man in America.</p> <p>How? By wearing a dress while playing in this year's Masters.</p> <p>The New York Times wants Tiger to boycott the Masters to protest the host club's no-women membership policy. Not gonna happen. Golfers don't boycott for reasons of social conscience. It's not in their genes or their endorsement contracts.</p>

For the past few months, while the top corners of The New York Times’ front page have been preoccupied with Iraqi invasion plans and Al Qaeda sleeper cells, below the paper’s fold—and in other prominent spots inside—The Times has launched its own tactical assault against the Augusta National Golf Club, host to the Masters Tournament. Usually forgotten for 51 weeks out of the year, the Georgia club’s refusal to admit women as members has made it a bull’s-eye for equal-opportunity proponents and a symbol of the kind of mint-julep, stick-in-the mud thinking that critics say belongs in Binx Bolling’s South,...

The working women and female business leaders of Augusta, Ga. have a message for the National Council of Women's Organizations and its chair 'person' Martha Burk: Get Lost! Women in Augusta say that if the Augusta National Golf Club cancels the 2003 Masters tournament, which may happen, it would only hurt female business owners, homeowners, caterers, hostesses, waitresses, housekeepers and service personnel of all types who make a lot of their yearly earnings from the month-long buildup to the PGA Tour's first Major of the year, in April. The Masters pumps over $100 million into the local economy each year,...

The Augusta National Golf Club, one of the bastions of American golf, has been closed all summer, as it traditionally is after playing host to the Masters Tournament in April. But a bitter dispute over the club's all-male membership has brought unwelcome attention to the members. Embarrassed and embattled, some of Augusta National's 300 or so members now say they plan to seek an internal compromise that would end the club's conflict with a coalition of women's groups. About a dozen members who were interviewed over the past three weeks said they had been distressed by the confrontational approach taken...

Augusta National Golf Club's all-male membership is an eclectic who's who of the corporate, political and sports worlds. Its approximately 300 members range from former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to University of South Carolina football coach Lou Holtz; former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn and auto scion and Detroit Lions owner William Clay Ford; ex-General Electric CEO Jack Welch and Atlanta developer Tom Cousins. The club's roster includes race car builder Roger Penske; the director of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, Bruce Lilly, and beer baron Peter Coors. Also, investment genius Warren Buffett, former Secretary of State George Shultz,...

Earning the "privilege" to smoke fine cigars, exchange dirty jokes and lie about your golf game, sexual exploits and how hard you worked to inherit your wealth with a group of mostly old white men isn't part of the cure for gender discrimination. Augusta National Golf Club, the home of the Masters, the chosen playground for Hootie (Johnson) & His Blowhards, isn't the proper battleground for the war on gender discrimination. It's the equivalent of President Bush sending ground troops to Dallas looking for Osama bin Laden. A hunt for bin Laden in Texas would draw a lot of attention...

The movement to pressure all-male Augusta National Golf Club, site of The Masters, into admitting a woman as a member has taken an unexpected turn that prompts the question: Where will it all end? Augusta chairman Hootie Johnson fired the latest salvo when he announced in a statement the 2003 Masters would be telecast by CBS without sponsors to keep those sponsors free from pressure. Citigroup, Coca-Cola and IBM had one-year contracts for 2002. Johnson says the move was in response to what he calls a corporate campaign against The Masters and Augusta National by the National Council of Women's...