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• April 30, 2007 (word)
• April 30, 2007 (pdf)

John Fund says campaign finance laws inhibit free speech.

Campaign finance laws are increasingly becoming a tool to suppress political speech, and the courts are finally waking up to the danger. …

A Brit pamphleteer says there are now 266 ways a government creep can enter homes in the UK.

In January I reported a bizarre drama that unfolded on a farm in the Forest of Dean, when 22 agents of the state – two state vets, eight trading standards officials and 12 policemen – descended without warning on the owners of a pet Jersey cow, Harriet, to kill her. On that occasion the officials, acting under EU law, were persuaded to back off until the case went to judicial review (and on March 23 Harriet, sadly, had to be put down after developing kidney problems). But the episode helped inspire a pamphlet published today by the Centre for Policy Studies entitled Crossing the Threshold: 266 ways in which the state can enter your home. …

AdamSmith honors tax freedom day, in the U. S., 32 days to go in England.

George Will writes in Newsweek about the dem campaign to bring back the fairness doctrine.

… Supreme Court justice and liberal icon William Douglas said: “The Fairness Doctrine has no place in our First Amendment regime. It puts the head of the camel inside the tent and enables administration after administration to toy with TV and radio.” The Reagan administration scrapped the doctrine because of its chilling effect on controversial speech, and because the scarcity rationale was becoming absurd. …

OK! It’s George Tenet’s turn. First Chris Hitchens.

… Tenet knows how the kiss-up and kiss-down game is played. And, for a rather mediocre man, he did well enough out of the arrangement while it lasted. …

Roger Simon.

… This is the former DCI we’re talking about here. Is he a moron or a liar or both? …

The Captain; Ed Morrissey.

… Tenet has yet to see his book hit the stores, and it already has serious credibility issues. He misidentifies a Defense Department analyst as a “naval reservist” in an attempt to belittle her credentials. Tenet can’t seem to understand that Iran-Contra involved arming the mullahs, not the dissidents. It’s a great display of why the CIA seems to have been rather incompetent during the years of his leadership. If the boss can’t get his facts straight, how can he have advised two presidents with any degree of competence at all? …

The Captain finishes with a post on Carl Bernstein’s new Hillary book and leads us to his post on the subject in the HeadingRight blog.

WSJ editorial with more on Wolfowitz.

… Ms. Riza will also get her first hearing today in this kangaroo court, and she ought to blast them for the way the bank has violated its own rules in leaking details of her salary and damaged her career — all in the name of preventing a “conflict” that was no fault of her own. The real disgrace here isn’t Mr. Wolfowitz or Ms. Riza but the bank itself and its self-protecting staff and European directors. Their only “ethic” is to oust an American reformer so they can get back to running the foreign aid status quo.

Shorts from John Fund.

Michael Barone with a good gun-law summary.

If you have, or know, a child applying to college this year, this piece in the NY Times by a Harvard grad is for you.

Hugh Hewitt comments on declining newspaper readership.

Humor section starts with a Chi Trib column on the accents of Hillary and other pols.

… America might finally be ready for a white Yale Law School graduate from Park Ridge who is fluent in Southern Woman and various dialects, including Granny Clampett and Black Female Preacher. She commands many different voices — and uses them without blushing — as you may see for yourself on YouTube. …

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• April 29, 2007 (pdf)
• April 29, 2007 (word)

Mark Steyn’s Sun-Times column juxtaposes changing light bulbs and voting for defeat in Iraq.

… In Khartoum, Tehran, Moscow and elsewhere, the world’s mischief-makers have reached their own conclusions about how much serious “work” America is prepared to do.

Charles Krauthammer gives his Yeltsin send-off.

… Yeltsin is not the first great revolutionary to have failed at building something new. Nonetheless, it is worth remembering what he did achieve. He brought down not just a party, a regime, and an empire, but an idea. Communism today survives only in the lunatic kingdom of North Korea, in Fidel Castro’s personal satrapy and in the minds of such political imbeciles as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who can sustain his socialist airs only as long as he sits on $65 oil.
Outside of college English departments, no sane person takes Marxism seriously. Certainly not Putin and his KGB cronies. In the end, Yeltsin succeeded only in midwifing Russia’s transition from totalitarianism to authoritarianism with the briefest of stops for democracy—a far more modest advance than he (and we) had hoped, but still significant. And for which the Russian people—and the rest of the world spared the depredations of a malevolent empire—should forever be grateful.

Couple of good posts from Power Line.

WSJ and then Amity Shlaes at Bloomberg News with more on Wolfowitz. You will not believe the World Bank Ms. Shlaes shows us.

The Captain gets us up to date on some of Jimmy Carter’s benefactors. The Captain quotes Alan Dershowitz.

… Recent disclosures of Carter’s extensive financial connections to Arab oil money, particularly from Saudi Arabia, had deeply shaken my belief in his integrity. When I was first told that he received a monetary reward in the name of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, and kept the money, even after Harvard returned money from the same source because of its anti-Semitic history, I simply did not believe it. How could a man of such apparent integrity enrich himself with dirty money from so dirty a source? And let there be no mistake about how dirty the Zayed Foundation is. I know because I was involved, in a small way, in helping to persuade Harvard University to return more than $2 million that the financially strapped Divinity School received from this source. Initially, I was reluctant to put pressure on Harvard to turn back money for the Divinity School, but then a student at the Divinity School, Rachael Lea Fish showed me the facts. …

And if you’re wondering what to think about Tenet’s book, the Captain posts on one of Tenet’s critics, Michael Scheuer.

… Scheuer offers this contemptuous evaluation of Tenet as CIA chief:
‘Still, he may have been the ideal CIA leader for Clinton and Bush — denigrating good intelligence to sate the former’s cowardly pacifism and accepting bad intelligence to please the latter’s Wilsonian militarism.’
And now Tenet can sell the American public what it wants to hear.

Shorts from National Review.

John Tierney gives us the verdict for Dr. Hurwitz.

Want to clean up the environment? You must industrialize.

While the modern environmental movement often portrays capitalist industrial societies as the world’s biggest pollution problem, Forbes notes something interesting about the top-25 cleanest cities in the world: Most of them are in wealthy industrialized democracies. Turns out, all that industrialization created wealth which, in turn, buys the things (mass transit, especially) and pays for the policies that create a cleaner environment. …

Taxes around the world from Greg Mankiw.

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• April 26, 2007 (word)
• April 26, 2007 (pdf)

AdamSmith.org notes the anniversary of the publication of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.

… From the Greeks onward, many philosophers had argued that virtue was largely a matter of utility. Actions are good if they are useful to those involved. We praise actions that help people or promote the human community, and condemn those which cause harm. Smith’s innovative view was that morality is not in fact so calculating. Human beings are social creatures, born with a natural empathy (Smith says sympathy) for others. We feel some of the pain, or the happiness, of others. To avoid that empathic pain, we avoid causing distress to others, and condemn those who do. To enjoy that empathic happiness, we actually help others, and praise those who do likewise. …

VDH with a piece that could have been in yesterday’s Pickings.

David Broder takes off after Harry Reid. Like all libs, before criticizing a dem, he must first trash someone from the GOP. No card carrying member of the MSM is allowed to have a stand alone column dumping on a democrat. That just isn’t done. In this case Broder picks on Gonzales. We’ll take ‘em where we can get ‘em.

… Hailed by his staff as “a strong leader who speaks his mind in direct fashion,” Reid is assuredly not a man who misses many opportunities to put his foot in his mouth. In 2005, he attacked Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, as “one of the biggest political hacks we have here in Washington.”
He called President Bush ” a loser,” then apologized. He said that Bill Frist, then Senate majority leader, had “no institutional integrity” because Frist planned to leave the Senate to fulfill a term-limits pledge. Then he apologized to Frist.
Most of these earlier gaffes were personal, bespeaking a kind of displaced aggressiveness on the part of the onetime amateur boxer. But Reid’s verbal wanderings on the war in Iraq are consequential — not just for his party and the Senate but for the more important question of what happens to U.S. policy in that violent country and to the men and women whose lives are at stake. …

Hugh Hewitt posts on Reid.

Ryan Sager posts on the Court’s look at campaign finance reform.

While on campaign finance and resulting free speech issues, The Institute for Justice today reported on an important decision in Washington state. IJ started as champions of economic liberty, added school choice, and eminent domain, and now are working in areas of free speech.

David Brooks with an interesting Obama interview.

An AdamSmith post indicates how poorly the Brit health service is performing.

John Tierney continues his coverage of the pain doctor’s trial. The jury is now in the 5th day.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, Commentary senior editor, has three great posts at Contentions. He covers Naomi Wolf’s silliness, Yeltsin, and our some of the foolishness in our economy.

While we are on the subject of the USSR—Boris Yeltsin’s death was the subject of one of my posts here yesterday—it is a good moment to remember that one of the very best things about the now defunct Soviet Union was its centrally planned economy. If nothing else, it could be counted on to produce an endless series of amusing anecdotes. In the topsy-turvy world of the five-year plan, factory managers and workers were rewarded not for profits but for maximizing other success indicators, like gross physical output, often with bizarre results.
Nikita Khrushchev famously complained about the immense size and weight of chandeliers. It turned out that workers at a Moscow lamp factory were awarded bonuses for production measured in tons. The chandeliers they produced grew ever heavier until they led to a rash of ceiling collapses.
The United States has a market economy—but we also have a huge government sector, where amusing Soviet-style distortions often creep in. Yesterday’s Washington Post reported on the “Metrochek” program in Washington D.C. …

Perhaps the most important item tonight is news Wal-Mart is creating in-store medical clinics. Carpe Diem has the details.

Village Voice with a great obit for Grambling’s Eddie Robinson.

Because parchment was costly, past writers would erase and reuse. BBC reports on the discoveries from “peeling” back those layers.

Dr Noel said: “There is no more important philosopher in the world than Aristotle. To have early views in the 2nd and 3rd Century AD of Aristotle’s Categories is just fantastic.” “We have one book that contains three texts from the ancient world that are absolutely central to our understanding of mathematics, politics and now philosophy,” he said. “I am at a loss for words at what this book has turned out to be. To make these discoveries in the 21st Century is frankly nutty – it is just so exciting.”

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• April 25, 2007 (word)
• April 25, 2007 (pdf)

Have we lost in Iraq? If we have, is that so bad? Some of our favorites have thoughts.
Tony Blankley is first.

… It would appear that the great divide in both public opinion and between politicians is not Republican-Democrat, liberal-conservative, pro or anti-Bush, or even pro or anti-war (or, in Europe: pro-or anti-American). Rather, the great divide is between those, such as me, who believe that the rise of radical Islam poses an existential threat to Western Civilization; and those who believe it is a nuisance, if, episodically, a very dangerous nuisance. …

Transterrestial Musings on the dems.

… The problem is that they won’t start acting in the national interest until, to paraphrase Golda Meir, they start loving their country more than they hunger for power and hate George Bush.

WSJ editorializes on the dem ownership of defeat.

… The stakes in Iraq are about the future of the entire Middle East–and of our inevitable involvement in it. In calling for withdrawal, Mr. Reid and his allies, just as with Vietnam, may think they are merely following polls that show the public is unhappy with the war. Yet Americans will come to dislike a humiliation and its aftermath even more, especially as they realize that a withdrawal from Iraq now will only make it harder to stabilize the region and defeat Islamist radicals. And they will like it even less should we be required to re-enter the country someday under far worse circumstances. …

Hugh Hewitt interviews the New Yorker contributor who wrote the book on the rise of al Qaeda.

What does the European left think of the dems idea of quitting Iraq? The Captain spots a piece in The Guardian.

The Guardian (UK) has relentlessly opposed the war in Iraq for the past four years and more, giving its readers on the Left a steady diet of bad news and angry opinion based on its editorial policy. British newspapers have an open editorial bias, and readers expect news from a point of view. Guardian readers may find themselves surprised today, however, to find a detailed explanation of all the reasons why the nations in the Middle East do not want an American withdrawal from Iraq …

Jim Taranto closes out the section.

Jonah Goldberg with a Corner post on jargon. From that he links to a 2002 column. We have that too.

… I think the strategic conceit of creating new buzzwords and jargon to protect bureaucrats, consultants and ideologues is one of the more fascinating constants of the human condition (I think Vaclav Havel wrote a play on this and Orwell was obviously a hero in the battle against this sort of thing.). If you don’t know the lingo, you’re on the outside. But often the only thing that justifies you’re outsider status is your ignorance of the lingo. Intellectuals, obviously, are the greatest culprits when it comes to using words as bouncers (I wrote a column about it here a long time ago), but as we move deeper into the New Economy, it’s only going to get worse. …

Tech Central has an item on Milton Friedman that morphs into a short history of The Foundation for Economic Education . FEE is a little known, but effective, group of free market scholars. Pickerhead grew up in New York reading the Times and The Saturday Review of Literature and was on his way to becoming an obnoxious north-east liberal. Until by chance, at the age of 15, discovered a FEE published copy of The Law by Frederic Bastiat.

Some of the things in the Tech Central piece did not ring true so we consulted a Pickings reader who was executive secretary of FEE for 15 years. His thoughts are here too.

It’s FEE night at Pickings. John Stossel’s column on the environment links to The Freeman published by FEE.

… John Semmens of Arizona’s Laissez Faire Institute points out that Earth Day misses an important point. In the April issue of The Freeman magazine, Semmens says the environmental movement overlooks how hospitable the earth has become — thanks to technology. “The environmental alarmists have it backwards. If anything imperils the earth it is ignorant obstruction of science and progress. … That technology provides the best option for serving human wants and conserving the environment should be evident in the progress made in environmental improvement in the United States. Virtually every measure shows that pollution is headed downward and that nature is making a comeback.” (Carbon dioxide excepted, if it is really a pollutant.)
Semmens describes his visit to historic Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, an area “lush with trees and greenery.” It wasn’t always that way. In 1775, the land was cleared so it could be farmed. Today, technology makes farmers so efficient that only a fraction of the land is needed to produce much more food. As a result, “Massachusetts farmland has been allowed to revert back to forest.” …

Riehl World warns of a new global warming scam.

Division of Labour has ideas for Africa from NY Times’ Thomas Friedman and Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek.

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• April 24, 2007 (pdf)
• April 24, 2007 (word)

“The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” Harry Truman said that and it’ll serve to introduce and justify a somewhat long article by Christopher Hitchens about our country’s first confrontation with the Islamic world.

… it is certain that the Barbary question had considerable influence on the debate that ratified the United States Constitution in the succeeding years. Many a delegate, urging his home state to endorse the new document, argued that only a strong federal union could repel the Algerian threat. In The Federalist No. 24, Alexander Hamilton argued that without a “federal navy . . . of respectable weight . . . the genius of American Merchants and Navigators would be stifled and lost.” In No. 41, James Madison insisted that only union could guard America’s maritime capacity from “the rapacious demands of pirates and barbarians.” John Jay, in his letters, took a “bring-it-on” approach; he believed that “Algerian Corsairs and the Pirates of Tunis and Tripoli” would compel the feeble American states to unite, since “the more we are ill-treated abroad the more we shall unite and consolidate at home.” The eventual Constitution, which says nothing about an army, does explicitly provide for a navy. …

John Fund on Ward Connerly.

As noted before, a Muslim cleric in Johnstown, PA has called for the killing of Ayann Hirsi Ali. Mike Rappaport of Right Coast wants to know where the outcry is.

Anne Applebaum sends off Boris Nikolayevich.

… Though we hailed him as a democrat, Yeltsin did not leave behind anything resembling a functional democracy. And he knew, at some level, that he had failed: When he resigned from the presidency, on New Year’s Eve of the millennium — the second momentous resignation speech of his career — he wiped away a tear and apologized to the Russian people for “your dreams that never came true.” …

John Tierney continues to follow the “drug doctor” trial in Alexandria.

John Edwards’ $400 haircuts have attracted Maureen Dowd’s attention.

… Americans have revered such homely leaders as Abe Lincoln. They seem open to balding pates like Rudy’s and flattops like Jon Tester’s. They don’t want self-confidence to look like self-love.
John Edwards has reminded us that even — or especially — in the age of appearances, you must not appear to care too much about appearances. …
… All the haircuts in the world may not save John Edwards from a blowout.

Dean Barnett posts on Edwards too. This includes a photoshopped view of John with a facial. Barnett also posts on her perkiness.

Dilbert’s here.

Good news! Chuck Hagel might get challenged and Chuck is already behind in the polls.

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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.