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• April 23, 2007 (word)
• April 23, 2007 (pdf)

First we have a few pieces on gun controls. It is painful to continue gazing at events in Blacksburg, but compelling things keep showing up.

Classically Liberal an offshoot of FreeStudents with a great post on what happens when killers meet armed resistance. And what happens when the main stream media has an agenda that avoids telling truth.

It took place at a university in Virginia. A student with a grudge, an immigrant, pulled a gun and went on a shooting spree. It wasn’t Virginia Tech at all. It was the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, not far away. You can easily drive from the one school to the other, just take a trip down Route 460 through Tazewell. …

James Taranto with a look at a Yaleful idiot.

Tech Central destroys the canard that shootings happen only in the US.

Fred Thompson writes on the subject for National Review.

We’re loaded with political items today.

John Fund writes on the fall of a congressman.

… It will be a sad end to a political career that began with such promise. In 1980, when I met Mr. Doolittle, he was a 30-year-old lawyer and political upstart and I was a California college student. Mr. Doolittle had just defeated an incumbent Democratic state senator in Sacramento County, which had elected only one Republican to partisan office in the past generation (and she soon switched parties). …

Michael Barone thinks the dems have made a mistake.

Instapundit too.

Corner Post on Hillary, George Tenet’s book and Harry Reid who wants it both ways on partial birth abortion.

Dean Barnett posts on Tommy Thompson.

… You know, presidential politics viewed from a distance can seem an odd thing. From a casual observer’s perspective, it might seem odd that a guy like Tommy Thompson’s candidacy is considered a non-starter while Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson are considered potential powerhouse candidates. After all, Tommy Thompson was a successful two-term governor and a Cabinet secretary. Romney was a one term governor and Fred Thompson a one-term Senator.
But Tommy Thompson’s comments show the real value-add of the insider primary. People who got to know Romney and Fred or who paid attention to them saw something that suggested presidential timber. People who paid attention to Tommy Thompson, to be perfectly frank, saw something of a schmuck. Remember, this is the guy who offered strategic counsel to al Qaeda as he left Bush’s cabinet.
Because of the chatter that emanated from the chattering classes, Romney and Fred Thompson emerged as top tier candidates. Because of their indifference to people like Tommy Thompson, Joe Biden, and Chris Dodd, none of these guys have a chance. Honestly – should it be otherwise?

Dick Morris says it’s time for Fred to get in.

According to John Fund, Fred had a good day in PA.

The Captain posts on events in Russia. First on Yeltsin and then an interview with Andrei Illarionov

Couple of items on the CIA from Power Line and Contentions.

Got some posts on Sheryl Crow and Laurie David. You can’t make this stuff up!

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• April 22, 2007 (word)
• April 22, 2007 (pdf)

Mark’s Sun-Times column is on VA Tech.

… The “gun-free zone” fraud isn’t just about banning firearms or even a symptom of academia’s distaste for an entire sensibility of which the Second Amendment is part and parcel but part of a deeper reluctance of critical segments of our culture to engage with reality. Michelle Malkin wrote a column a few days ago connecting the prohibition against physical self-defense with “the erosion of intellectual self-defense,” and the retreat of college campuses into a smothering security blanket of speech codes and “safe spaces” that’s the very opposite of the principles of honest enquiry and vigorous debate on which university life was founded. And so we “fear guns,” and “verbal violence,” and excessively realistic swashbuckling in the varsity production of ”The Three Musketeers.” What kind of functioning society can emerge from such a cocoon?

Bill Kristol contrasts the courage of McCain to Harry Reid.

Now we are at a moment of truth. There is McCain’s way, a way of difficulty and honor. There is Reid’s way, a way of political expediency and dishonor. McCain may lose the political battle at home, and the U.S. may ultimately lose in Iraq. But some of us will always be proud, at this moment of choice, to have stood with McCain, and our soldiers, and our country.

New Editor posts well on McCain as described by James Carville. And, provides a look at French elections from The Economist.

Speaking of the French, Adam Smith quotes the famous French economist Frederic Bastiat.

Hugh Hewitt follows along on his disgust with NBC’s airing of Cho’s video. Dean Barnett picks up the theme and then posts on Edward’s $400 haircuts.

Eugene Volokh finds a blast from the past. In a different age, the Far Rockaway High School’s shooting team’s exploits are celebrated in the paper.

Canada may pull out of Kyoto. The Captain says they’re saying Bush could be right. He also posts on Hillary’s rapper friends.

The AP6 makes a lot more sense than Kyoto does for that very reason. Kyoto would force the West to commit economic suicide while allowing India and China to pollute to their hearts’ content in reaping the rewards. Bush’s AP6 engages all sides equally and uses technology sharing as an incentive for compliance. The Chinese need access to Western technology so badly that they jump through hoops to steal it. India doesn’t need it as badly, but they want to create a cleaner energy system for themselves, and have expanded their nuclear program to accommodate that need.
If Canada joins the AP6, Kyoto will collapse. It will bind only those nations who already have economic difficulties, and Kyoto compliance — which none of them have met — will cost them even more. In the end, AP6 will bind all nations together in a manner that Kyoto explicitly rejected and will allow everyone to proceed with clean-environment initiatives on an equal footing.

Josh Muravchik follows up on the giant rabbits shipped to North Korea.

Rachel Carson reconsidered by an editor of Reason.

Lotsa posts from some of our favorite blogs.

The humor section is started with a Corner post on Joe Biden who has figured out why things have gone wrong.

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April 19, 2007 (word)

April 19, 2007 (pdf)

While writing today on Duke, Thomas Sowell references a column from last May. That column was in Pickings May 31, 2006. Both columns are here for a display of Sowell’s wisdom and prescience. (5/16/2006)

If there is a smoking gun in the Duke University rape case, it is not about the stripper who made the charges or the lacrosse players who have been accused. The smoking gun is the decision of District Attorney Michael Nifong to postpone a trial until the spring of 2007.

That makes no sense from either a legal or a social standpoint, whether the players are guilty or innocent. But it tells us something about District Attorney Nifong. …

With a couple of posts from his blog, Hugh Hewitt goes after NBC for broadcasting so much of the stuff sent by Cho.

I wrote last night about the repulsive decision of NBC to put its ratings ahead of the public good and run the video and pictures of the Virginia Tech murderer. That they should not have done so was obvious to many, many people, so obvious in fact that NBC’s rush to get its ratings boom had to have been motivated at least in part by a recognition that if they delayed, the discussion about the potential appalling consequences of airing the material would have deterred them. Less than two hours passed after the public learned that NBC had the materials and NBC’s airing of them. There is no evidence that the network consulted anyone outside of their cloister. Had the Steve Capus-led gang of exploiters of the dead, the wounded and their families had a shred of decency or professional skill, they would have asked around a bit. …

Jack Kelly asks if you want to feel safe or do you want to be safe.

The New Editor and Power Line note a NY Times op-ed piece.

We have the item from the Times.

… In other words, most of the broad social “lessons” we are being told we must learn from the Virginia Tech shootings have little to do with what allowed the horrors to occur. This is about evil, and about how our universities are able to deal with it as a literary subject but not as a fact of life. Can administrators and deans really continue to leave professors and other college personnel to deal with deeply disturbed students on their own, with only pencils in their defense?

American Thinker compares homes of politicians.

Rocky Mountain News editorializes on Gov. Corzine’s accident.

A gleeful Dick Morris notes slippage in Hillary’s polls.

In a late March Pickings we noted the trial of a doctor for pain medication. John Tierney says some things are going well.

The case of the United States v. William Eliot Hurwitz, which began in federal court here on Monday, is about much more than one physician. It’s a battle over who sets the rules for treating patients who are in pain: narcotics agents and prosecutors, or doctors and scientists.

WSJ lets two congressmen write on proposed fed prohibitions against gas price “gouging”. The title is “Gas Bags.” We like that.

The proprietor of the Carpe Diem blog writes on the same subject for Detroit Free Press. People assume that oil companies control gasoline prices, but the economic reality is that they don’t. Even the biggest oil companies don’t set prices for gasoline, diesel or jet fuel, any more than farmers set the price of corn, soybeans or milk. Oil prices, like prices for all world commodities, are set by competitive international market forces.

And yet oil companies are constantly accused by politicians of “price gouging,” and a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee is pushing for federal regulation of oil prices that would end up harming U.S. consumers and increasing our dependence on foreign oil. …

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April 18, 2007 (word)

April 18, 2007 (pdf)

More thoughts on VA Tech. Mark Steyn from NR Online.

WSJ editorial next.

WSJ OpEd on the failure of gun-free zones. It ends with the thoughts of UVA’s founder.

… The founder of the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, understood the harms resulting from the type of policy created at Virginia Tech. In his “Commonplace Book,” Jefferson copied a passage from Cesare Beccaria, the founder of criminology, which was as true on Monday as it always has been:
“Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”

Riehl World View with a short.

Mugabe still lives. His latest stunt from the Times (London).

As a follow-up to yesterday’s Wolfowitz section, Power Line has fun with idiot columnists at WaPo.

New Editor learns Corzine’s car was doing 90 in the hammer lane. It all turned to $%^# when drivers were trying to get out of his way.

Marty Peretz has thoughts on Duke and VA Tech.

Jonah Goldberg uses the Imus flap as a jumping off point for a defense (sort of) for political correctness (kind of).

The reality is that much of political correctness — the successful part — is a necessary attempt to redefine good manners in a sexually and racially integrated society. Good manners are simply those things you do to demonstrate respect to others and contribute to social decorum. Aren’t conservatives the natural defenders of proper manners?

The Captain wonders who is paying for Edward’s do.

John Stossel with a tax conversation.

Twelve years ago, Estonia became the first country to tax everyone — companies and individuals — at the same flat rate. It started at 26 percent, dropped to 22, and will go to 20 in 2009. There are a few deductions for things like mortgage interest, educational expenses, and charitable donations. Very low incomes are exempt.
Unsurprisingly, Estonia is booming. The former Soviet republic used to be poor, with an average income 65 percent below its European neighbors. Today, Estonians are almost as rich as their neighbors, and their economy is growing more than 11 percent a year.

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April 17, 2007 (word)

April 17, 2007 (pdf)

The VA Tech story is hard to add to. But, Samizdata provided links to interesting background items the MSM are sure to ignore.

The Roanoke Times reported in January 2006 the defeat of a bill that would have allowed concealed handgun permits holders (CHP) to carry on Virginia college campuses. … Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker was happy to hear the bill was defeated. “I’m sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly’s actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.” …

Later in the year a Tech student wrote in the Collegiate Times suggesting the defeat of that bill was making the school more hazardous. The occasion for his piece was the capture of an escaped prisoner who found his way to the campus.

John Fund and Jim Taranto have more.

Time to take on some of the Wolfowitz story. Andy McCarthy posts in The Corner and suggests reading a WSJ editorial. So that’s here too.

Christopher Hitchens on Wolfowitz too.

“We know no spectacle so ridiculous,” wrote Macaulay about the vilification of Lord Byron, “as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.” Change the word “ridiculous” to “contemptible,” and the words “British public” to “American press,” and you have some sense of the eagerness for prurience, the readiness for slander, and the utter want of fact-checking that have characterized Paul Wolfowitz and Shaha Riza as if they were not only the equivalent of Byron seducing his half-sister, but as if they were financing their shameless lasciviousness out of the public purse and the begging bowls of the wretched of the earth.
I ought probably to say at once that I know both Wolfowitz and Riza slightly, and have known the latter for a number of years. Anyone in Washington who cares about democracy in the Muslim world is familiar with her work, at various institutions, in supporting civil-society activists in the Palestinian territories, in Iran, in the Gulf, and elsewhere. The relationship between the two of them is none of my damn business (or yours), but it has always been very discreet, even at times when Wolfowitz, regularly caricatured as a slave of the Israeli lobby, might perhaps have benefited from a strategic leak about his Arab and Muslim companion.

An international law prof from Johns Hopkins writes on Wolfowitz for the LA Times. ON TAKING office, World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz set two priorities for the world’s premier development institution. He asked for a focus on Africa’s persistent poverty, and he targeted corruption that diverts aid dollars from the poor.

African leaders endorsed this vision, but not all bank bureaucrats were thrilled by Wolfowitz or his policies. Still, any friend of the bank’s work should be dismayed by the disruption caused by a manufactured scandal at a time when the bank needs to replenish its coffers. The imbroglio rattling the World Bank during its spring meeting of finance ministers is a rehash of its clumsy attempt to resolve the status of Shaha Ali Riza, a veteran bank professional and Wolfowitz’s longtime romantic partner.

The authors of this acrid affair have nakedly forgotten the standards of fairness and due process owed Riza, who is a member of the bank staff association and entitled to its fiduciary protections. And the scandal-mongers have recklessly ignored a written record of bank documents that serves not to condemn but to exculpate Wolfowitz. …

Paul Greenberg wants to get rid of the ‘monster’ tax code.

Interesting Imus spin from Am. Spectator.

Thomas Sowell on the lynch mob at Duke.

Randy Barnett in WSJ with “Three Cheers for Lawyers”.

… The crucial importance of defense lawyers was illustrated in reverse by the Duke rape prosecution, mercifully ended last week by North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper’s highly unusual affirmation of the defendants’ complete innocence. Others are rightly focusing on the “perfect storm,” generated by a local prosecutor up for election peddling to his constituents a racially-charged narrative that so neatly fit the ideological template of those who dominate academia and the media. But perhaps we should stop for a moment to consider what saved these young men: defense attorneys, blogs and competing governments.
Our criminal justice system does not rely solely on the fairness of the police and prosecutors to get things right. In every criminal case, there is a professional whose only obligation is to scrutinize what the police and prosecutor have done. This “professional” is a lawyer. The next time you hear a lawyer joke, maybe you’ll think of the lawyers who represented these three boys and it won’t seem so funny. You probably can’t picture their faces and don’t know their names. (They include Joe Cheshire, Jim Cooney, Michael Cornacchia, Bill Cotter, Wade Smith and the late Kirk Osborn.) That’s because they put their zealous representation of their clients ahead of their own egos and fame. Without their lawyering skills, we would not today be speaking so confidently of their clients’ innocence. …

The Russians are thinking of building floating nuclear power plants.

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April 16, 2007 (word)

April 16, 2007 (pdf)

Michael Barone goes from the Duke lacrosse team to belief in victims.

The “Group of 88″ Duke professors, journalists for The New York Times and the Durham Herald-Sun, and heads of black and feminist organizations all seemed to have a powerful emotional need to believe. A need to believe that those they classify as victims must be virtuous and those they classify as oppressors must be villains. A need to believe that this is the way the world usually works.

Similar theme in Boston Globe.

IN MAY 2006, the women’s lacrosse team at Duke University announced their intention to wear sweatbands with the word “innocent” for a Final Four game at Boston University’s Nickerson Field. This gesture was a clear statement of support for the three Duke lacrosse players accused of sexually assaulting an exotic dancer at a team party. In response, New York Times sports columnist Harvey Araton suggested that “cross-team friendship” had overridden the women’s common sense. In the online magazine Salon , writer Kevin Sweeney chided them for lack of solidarity with rape victims.
Now, it looks like the women’s lacrosse team had it right.
John Fund comments on Imus.

Marty Peretz was traveling for a bit. Now he’s back with posts on Sarkozy, movie on Pete Seeger and Bill Clinton’s help for Israel.

But I bet that the Communist Party doesn’t appear in the film, and the Communist Party was a big part of Seeger’s life and Seeger a big part of the party’s life, as well. The paradox of a loyal, no, fervent Communist being seen as a force for freedom and justice still escapes some over-age lefties. And it is incomprehensible to the young. Alas! Still, “If I had a hammer…” or “Kevin Barry” or even “The banks are made of marble, with a guard at every door” sounds strange coming out of the mouth of someone who was loyal to Comrade Stalin

The Captain posts on McCain’s attention to the tax code.

Power Line notes an Examiner article on dem corruption.

Instapundit says John Kerry is keeping his powder dry.

John Tierney has fun with the doomsday clock.

Sixty years ago, a group of physicists concerned about nuclear weapons created the Doomsday Clock and set its hands at seven minutes to midnight. Now, the clock’s keepers, alarmed by dangers like climate change, have moved the hands to 11:55 p.m.
The news wasn’t all bad. After all, the 1947 doomsday prediction marked the start of a golden age. Never have so many humans lived so long — and maybe never so peacefully — as during the past 60 years. The per-capita rate of violence, particularly in the West, seems remarkably low by historical standards. If the clock’s keepers are worried once again, their track record suggests we’re in for even happier days.

Couple of good items from New Editor.

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April 15, 2007 (word)

April 15, 2007 (pdf)

Some of the places we frequent have noted tax day.
WSJ;

… In the beginning the return was indeed simple, resembling the postcard flat tax that Steve Forbes and Dick Armey have advocated in recent years. The original 1040 form in 1914 was so compact, the New York Times printed it on the front page. There were a grand total of four instruction forms. Now there are 4,000. …

… The original IRS enforcement office had 4,000 employees. Now the IRS has 100,000 tax agents, more employees than the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Food and Drug Administration combined. …

… Looking back 93 years, there’s a case to be made that the 16th amendment was an even greater failure than that other Progressive era experiment, prohibition. We should have listened to the advice rendered by the New York Times, which while editorializing against the income tax in 1909 warned: “When men get in the habit of helping themselves to the property of others, they cannot be easily cured of it.”

Washington Post;

Early American history was a conservative’s nirvana: It was one long tax revolt.
The British imposed taxes on everything from molasses to tea, and Americans smuggled the molasses, tossed the tea into a harbor and reached for their muskets. Thomas Jefferson’s incendiary Declaration of Independence listed King George III’s basest transgressions; prominent among them was that he had “sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” The descendants of those royal minions are now, of course, nestled in thousands of cubicles in Internal Revenue Service offices across the country.
Looking at that history, it’s astonishing how low the taxes were. Talk about men being men. One historian estimated the combined burden of the infamous “Navigation Acts,” for example, to be 1 percent of income. The other assorted taxes added up to about the same, making the total bite a measly 2 percent.
And that set off a war. …

And the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Mark’s Sun-Times column is on Imus.

I was at LaGuardia the other day. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just the usual four-hour delay brought on by yet another of these April snowstorms Al Gore has arranged as a savvy marketing gimmick for his global warming documentary. Anyway, as always when you’re at the gate for hours on end, there’s nothing to do but watch CNN. I gather air traffic delays now account for 87 percent of CNN’s audience. If it’s just a routine holdup of two or three hours because the gate agent hasn’t shown up, you know you’ll be out of there before Wolf Blitzer’s said goodnight. But, if it’s something serious, like a light breeze at O’Hare, you know you’ll be watching Larry King right through to the plug for tomorrow night’s full hour with Tina Louise.
So I had the pleasure of sampling a typical evening’s lineup of Don Imus coverage, from Wolf bringing us up to speed on the various networks that have fired him to Paula Zahn hosting a balanced panel of three African Americans and a guilt-ridden honky.

After the Madrid train bombings Spain bought off the islamofascists by retiring from the field of battle. How’d that work? VDH with some answers.

Couple of posts from The Spine and Melanie Phillips touching on the anti-Semitism of the BBC.

Open Market has some fun finding hypocrites in the green community. The post is titled the Don Imuses of Environmentalism.

Michael Barone posts on E. J. Dionne’s acceptance of media bias.

Human Events with a series of ‘dueling quotes’ from Hillary and Milton Freidman.

“The unfettered free market has been the most radically destructive force in American life in the last generation.”
– First Lady Hillary Clinton on C-Span in 1996 stating her troubles
with the free market

“What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself.”
– Milton Friedman, Wall Street Journal, May 18, 1961

Samizdata spots surprising China fact.

George Will notes the 60th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s first game in ‘the show’. Will spots interesting facts. Unfortunately he didn’t take the time to string them together in a coherent message. But, we know the story and it’s worth being reminded.

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April 12, 2007 (word)

April 12, 2007 (pdf)

George Will hits a global warming home run.

In a campaign without peacetime precedent, the media-entertainment-environmental complex is warning about global warming. Never, other than during the two world wars, has there been such a concerted effort by opinion-forming institutions to indoctrinate Americans, 83% of whom now call global warming a “serious problem.”

Anatole Kaletsky in Times, UK.

We are constantly told by politicians, journalists and business experts that we live in an era of unprecedented change — a dizzying period of technological and geopolitical revolutions, in which every year brings some new and astonishing upheaval for which our nervous, insecure societies are totally unprepared. What nonsense.

Cafe Hayek posts on an insult to the president.

A new Anne Frank has emerged. Contentions has the story. Then NY Times with more about the 13 year-old Czech poet.

The first sign that things aren’t quite right comes when Jews are required to wear a badge, a black and yellow star of David, on the outside of their clothes. And yet 13-year-old Petr Ginz remains wryly amused, writing in his diary: “When I went to school, I counted sixty-nine ‘sheriffs.’ ” …
… The book also includes pictures of Petr and his family; a handful of his drawings and paintings; excerpts from Vedem, the weekly magazine he founded in Theresienstadt; and even two poems — one about Prague and one, both angry and satiric, about the restrictions the Jews increasingly had to endure. One verse, as translated by Ms. Lappin, begins:
And especially the outcast Jew
must give up all habits he knew:
he can’t buy clothes, can’t buy a shoe,
since dressing well is not his due. …

Lotsa Duke stuff.

First from Rocky Mountain News.

The most remarkable fact about the Duke lacrosse fiasco is not that it took nearly a year for obviously flimsy charges to be dropped against the players. …
… No, the most astonishing fact, hands down, was and remains the squalid behavior of the community of scholars at Duke itself. For months nearly the entire faculty fell into one of two camps: those who demanded the verdict first and the trial later, and those whose silence enabled their vigilante colleagues to set the tone. …
Dittos from Fred Barnes and Charles Krauthammer.

Then we hear from K. C. Johnson, the Brooklyn College prof who ran the Durham In Wonderland blog.

John Fund has a look.

Then Howie Kurtz.

There’s a lot going on the last couple of days–MSNBC booting Imus, McCain’s big speech on the war, Fred Thompson’s cancer, Larry Birkhead prancing before the cameras, and, oh yeah, the Duke sexual assault charges were dropped.
I hope that last one gets plenty of coverage, even though it’s been clear for some time that the case had fallen apart. As long as we’re talking about how the Rutgers women were unfairly disparaged as “ho’s,” consider the nightmare that the three Duke lacrosse players have lived through.
But in all the coverage you read and see about the clearing of these young men, very little of it will be devoted to the media’s role in ruining their lives. I didn’t hear a single television analyst mention it yesterday, even though two of the players’ lawyers took shots at the press.
It was an awful performance, no question about it. …

Great stuff from Overlawyered.

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April 11, 2007 (html)

April 11, 2007 (pdf)

April 11, 2007 (word)

So what, pray tell, does a grownup like Camille Paglia think of the global warming boomlet?

… I voted for Ralph Nader for president in the 2000 election because I feel that the United States needs a strong Green Party. However, when I tried to watch Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” on cable TV recently, I wasn’t able to get past the first 10 minutes. I was snorting with disgust at its manipulations and distortions and laughing at Gore’s lugubrious sentimentality, which was painfully revelatory of his indecisive, self-thwarting character. When Gore told a congressional hearing last month that there is a universal consensus among scientists about global warming — which is blatantly untrue — he forfeited his own credibility. …

New York’s weather in April is on a pace that could possibly yield the lowest April EVER topping 1874, the coldest on record. God does have a sense of humor.

WSJ and Jonah Goldberg at National Review got lotsa nice things to say about McCain.

In case you missed it, The Corner and the Captain post on the embarrassed Katie Couric.

Today Howie Kurtz informs us that Katie, sweet, sweet, Katie ripped off someone else’s work for a personal commentary (more in the Media Blog). Kurtz writes:
Katie Couric did a one-minute commentary last week on the joys of getting her first library card, but the thoughts were less than original. The piece was substantially lifted from a Wall Street Journal column.
CBS News apologized for the plagiarized passages yesterday and said the commentary had been written by a network producer who has since been fired.
…

Very good Robert Samuelson piece from Newsweek on the coming ‘Boomer’ drag on the economy.

John Stossel notes the growing practice of naming buildings after politicians while the crooks are still alive.

Power Line post introduces an article by David Ignatius about the controversy over a 60′s Soviet defector thought by many to be a disinformation effort by the KGB.

… What larger purpose did the deception serve? Mr. Bagley argues that the KGB’s real game was to steer the CIA away from realizing that the Russians had recruited one American code clerk in Moscow in 1949, and perhaps two others later on. The KGB may also have hoped to protect an early (and to this day undiscovered) mole inside the CIA.
Take a stroll with Mr. Bagley down paranoia lane and you are reminded just how good the Russians are at the three-dimensional chess game of intelligence. For a century, their spies have created entire networks of illusion — phony dissident movements, fake spy services — to condition the desired response. Reading Mr. Bagley’s book, I could not help thinking: What mind games are the Russians playing with the West today? Which leads to Pickerhead’s efforts to set the record straight in a debate about Zhukov’s accomplishments.

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April 10, 2007 (word)

April 10, 2007 (pdf)

New York Sun on Mugabe.

The world’s attention towards Africa could not be more peripatetic. Last month, the battered face of the leader of Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change, Morgan Tsvangirai, was beamed around the world after President Mugabe’s thugs tortured the former trade unionist and shattered his skull. Western governments condemned the action, editorial pages disapproved of it, and the world quickly moved on.
But the past two weeks have seen a further deterioration in the situation. Reports are scarce because of a ban on foreign press entering Zimbabwe. Suspected opponents of Mugabe have been abducted and tortured, and a cameraman suspected of smuggling out video of the violent crackdowns has been murdered. This state-sanctioned violence has been only a piece of a new defiance emerging from the Mugabe regime; last week the state-controlled newspaper, the Herald, warned the British political attaché in Zimbabwe, Gillian Dare, that she risked “going home in a body bag.” …

Power Line posts on Caroline Glick’s latest in the Jerusalem Post, and on the tendencies of conservatives to overlook McCain.

There is something mysterious, not to say perverse, about the attitude of many conservatives toward John McCain. It is commonplace, for example, to hear talk radio callers refer to McCain as a “liberal.” This is ridiculous; whatever he is, and whichever positions you may disagree with him on, McCain is no liberal. He is a pro-life spending hawk; more important, he is a hawk, period.

Sen. Stevens slapped around by John Fund.

The recent money race by presidential candidates has Brendan Miniter wondering what happened to the legislation that was supposed to get money out of politics.

Good reminder of the efforts to restore the Mesopotamian Marshes.

Two days ago Dick Morris gave us a tour of the dem candidates. Now its the GOP.

Thomas Sowell looks at the GOP too.

The Republicans’ verbal ineptness would be just their problem, and the rest of us could let them stew in their own juices, except for one thing.
At a crucial time in the history of this country and of Western civilization, the Democrats are embracing foreign policies with a long track record of defeat, which can be punctuated by the ultimate defeat, terrorist nations and movements with nuclear weapons.

It’s a slow night, so how ’bout a lesson to help avoid easily made grammar mistakes.

Carpe Diem thinks the day we pay taxes needs to be closer to the day we vote.