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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.

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April 9, 2007 (word)

April 9, 2007 (pdf)

David Warren, our favorite Canadian, wonders what’s going on in Britain.

Michael Barone on Nancy’s foreign policy.

Friendship, hope and a determination to be on the road to peace are not enough to protect us in this world. A speedy exit from Iraq might make many Americans less unsettled while watching cable news — for a while. But it wouldn’t make us safer. It will just leave us more likely to face the kind of surprise we had on Sept. 11, 2001.

Excerpts of Hewitt and Steyn from last week.

Debra Saunders on the Flying Imams

Newsweek published something sensible on global warming.

Judging from the media in recent months, the debate over global warming is now over. There has been a net warming of the earth over the last century and a half, and our greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level. Both of these statements are almost certainly true. What of it? Recently many people have said that the earth is facing a crisis requiring urgent action. This statement has nothing to do with science. There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we’ve seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe. What most commentators—and many scientists—seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes. The earth is always warming or cooling by as much as a few tenths of a degree a year; periods of constant average temperatures are rare. Looking back on the earth’s climate history, it’s apparent that there’s no such thing as an optimal temperature—a climate at which everything is just right. The current alarm rests on the false assumption not only that we live in a perfect world, temperaturewise, but also that our warming forecasts for the year 2040 are somehow more reliable than the weatherman’s forecast for next week. …

Stuart Taylor one of the country’s finest legal reporters tells us of another rape accusation that’s proved false. … this is a story about how overreaction to the bad old days when real rape victims were not taken seriously has fostered a politically correct presumption of guilt in many rape cases, leading to wrongful prosecutions of innocent men and, probably, the convictions of some. …

Hugh Hewitt comments on a NY Times article on Mormons.

Tech Central on the regulatory state.

Cafe Hayek posts on growth problems in India.

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April 8, 2007 (word)

April 5, 2007 (pdf)

The Brit hostage dénouement draws Mark’s ire.

Watching Tottenham Hotspur fans taking on the Spanish constabulary at a European soccer match the other night, I found myself idly speculating on what might have happened had those Iranian kidnappers made the mistake of seizing 15 hard-boiled football yobs who hadn’t got the Blair memo about not escalating the situation. …

… Europeans and more and more Americans believe they can live in a world with all the benefits of global prosperity and none of the messy obligations necessary to maintain it. And so they cruise around war zones like floating NGOs. Iran called their bluff, and televised it to the world. In the end, every great power is as great as its credibility, and the only consolation after these last two weeks is that Britain doesn’t have much more left to lose.

Charles Krauthammer seconds that emotion.

Claudia Rosett writes on the Pelosi visit.

This is not just nutty politics; it is dangerous. For Pelosi, this may count as interaction. But for Assad’s regime in Syria, this amounts to chumps on pilgrimage. Damascus is infested by a dynastic tyranny in which “dialogue” serves chiefly as cover for duplicity and terror. These traits are not simply regrettable habits that Assad might be charmed out of. They are big business and prime instruments of power.

An example of how visits like Pelosi’s can harm us is in David Brooks’ column.

Power Line has a great post on how media bias is brought to bear on an offending target. This times it’s a renowned hurricane forecaster who takes exception to many of Al Gore’s ideas.

Little bit of the same from Contentions.

And Jim Taranto slays the NY Times and its hypocritical reactions to two recess appointments. One by Clinton and one by Bush. Can you guess which one the Times liked?

Fred Thompson posts at Redstate. Captain with details.

George Will is not impressed.

Back then (1994), Thompson believed, implausibly, that voters are “deeply concerned” about campaign finance reform. Today, many likely voters in Republican primaries are deeply concerned about what Thompson and others have done to free speech in the name of “reform,” as John McCain is unhappily learning.

Corner post on Will’s complaint.

Dick Morris does a tour of dem fundraising.

Mona Charen reviews Thomas Sowell’s autobiography.

This may be the most unlikely tale of a high-school dropout you will ever read—and the most satisfying. Thomas Sowell (he went back to school after testing the market’s receptivity to a skill-free youth of 16) is one of those rare people who is so organized that he kept copies of all of his letters even before the days of e-mail and computers. We are the richer for it. In his new book, A Man of Letters, Sowell has mined his files to offer us keen insights into our nation’s recent history and into the soul of an extraordinary man.
Like most young intellectuals of his generation, Sowell began his adult life as a leftist. But he was prematurely wise. By 1962 he was already showing impatience with the twaddle peddled by left-wing admirers of third-world despots. Responding to an article about Cuba and Ghana, Sowell wrote, “Perhaps there can legitimately be double standards of morality . . . but there can never be double standards of truth. If, for example, we are justified in saying that tyranny in Ghana is serving a noble purpose, we are still not justified in saying that it is not tyranny.” …

Right Coast posts on a Michael Crichton interview. … In response to the question, “What is the most serious threat facing our civilisation?,” he writes:

Loss of classical liberal values in those western societies that embraced them.
England was the first modern state, the first superpower, the first nation to deal with moral issues around the world, and the first nation to install the benefits of what we might now loosely term a liberal society. I mean that in the 19th century sense of liberalism. That notion of liberalism was also present in America, but made it to the Continent only in a pale and limited form. It is a wonderful social conception that must be vigilantly guarded. It is not shared by other nations in the world. Nor is it shared by many citizens in English-speaking countries. Peculiarly, many of our most educated citizens are least sympathetic to classical liberal ideals. …

We know about carbon offsets. A writer at Wired comes up with new types of offsets. Like say, jerk offsets. Fork over the bills and we’ll go out and perform random acts of … kindness.

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April 5, 2007 (word)

April 5, 2007 (pdf)

Meant to lead with Master’s stuff, but Pickerhead was provoked by Pelosi pranks.

The Captain does a good job.

… Pelosi not only arrogated to herself the role of American foreign policy director — which Condoleezza Rice has as Secretary of State — she did the same with Israel’s foreign policy as well.
Not a bad night’s work for an incompetent.
When diplomats meet with enemies, they make sure to get their positions coordinated with their allies and execute strict message discipline. They do not “wing it” — they check with their elected governments when any questions arise about the directions of talks. Only someone with an ego in inverse proportion to her talent would start making stuff up as she goes when dealing with the Syrian-Israeli relationship, one of the most explosive in the world. …
The Corner weighs in.

WaPo editorializes;

… “We came in friendship, hope, and determined that the road to Damascus is a road to peace,” Ms. Pelosi grandly declared.
Never mind that that statement is ludicrous:As any diplomat with knowledge of the region could have told Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Assad is a corrupt thug whose overriding priority at the moment is not peace with Israel but heading off U.N. charges that he orchestrated the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. …
Here’s how you know Nancy’s stupid – Jimmy Carter thinks she’s done the right thing. Neal Boortz has the details.

Power Line posts on something sweet done by W.

Now for the fun stuff. Of all places, The American Spectator thrills us with someone’s first look at Augusta.

… But 30-something years of watching the Masters could not prepare me for my first view of the course, nor could it prepare me to appreciate so much the panorama of the 6th, known as “Juniper.” A par three hole of 180 yards, Juniper features an elevation drop from tee to green of what must be 50 feet. The mounded green slopes dramatically from back to front. Majestic pine trees loom over the vista. The grass everywhere is a shade of new spring green so pure that it feels somehow sacred. And from a golfer’s sheer shot-making perspective, the effective target area on the correct side of the golf green’s mounds looks small enough to make your throat tighten.

Then, when you walk down the hill toward the green, you look back up the hill from whence you came — and the explosion of color is almost indescribable. The entire hillside is covered in azaleas, of multiple hues. Purples battle pinks while whites peek through and orange-ish blossoms intermittently strut their stuff as well. Not even Matisse’s palette could do justice to the scene if he tried.

You’ve been on the course less than 15 minutes, and already you understand why the Masters announcers always sound like they are in a house of worship. The sun beams through the pines and magnolias and dogwoods as if illuminating the finest of ancient stained glass. …

Slate’s got a couple of good items on the Masters. The first is a guide to watching and the second looks at the technology involved in the course and the coverage.

Even among people of less than conservative persuasion, it was becoming close to settled opinion that Roe v. Wade was foolish in that it took controversy that should have found a political decision, out of the hands of the people and their representatives. In many ways it has poisoned the atmosphere in Washington. Now in a fit of stunning stupidity the court has done it again. David Schoenbrod who was quoted yesterday by John Tierney was in WSJ with a piece today.

And Robert Tracinski with a good effort at Real Clear Politics.

… This ominous decision overturns the basic rule of a free society. In a free society, that which is not explicitly forbidden is permitted. As philosopher Harry Binswanger once put it, in a free society we live in a sea of liberty, a vast realm of actions that cannot be impeded by government–with only a few small islands marked “off limits,” a strictly delimited set of evil actions like armed robbery and check-forging that are banned by government.
In a dictatorship, by contrast, men are mired in a giant, endless quagmire of government controls, and they have to struggle to establish a few small islands of liberty.
Yet that is the meaning of this ruling: unless your economic activity falls within a little island of liberty carved out by a sympathetic EPA administrator, it is automatically assumed that it must be regulated. That which is not explicitly permitted is forbidden. …
Illustrating the mistake, Volokh Conspiracy spotted Justice Stevens’ scientific error.

How ’bout a grownup look at oil. This is from George Will.

… In the 20 years from 1987 to 2006, Exxon Mobil invested more ($279 billion) than it earned ($266 billion). Five weeks after the company announced its 2006 earnings, it said it will invest $60 billion in oil and gas projects over the next three years. It will, unless a President Clinton and a Democratic-controlled Congress “take” Big Oil’s profits, which are much smaller than Big Government’s revenue from gasoline consumption.
Oil companies make about 13 cents on a gallon of gas. Government makes much more. The federal tax is 18.4 cents per gallon. Mrs. Clinton’s New York collects 42.4 cents a gallon. … Are we running out? … In 1979 President Jimmy Carter, an early practitioner of the Oh, Woe! School of Planetary Analysis (today Al Gore is the dean of that school), said that oil wells were “drying up all over the world.” Not exactly.
In 1971, according to M.A. Adelman, an MIT economist, non-OPEC countries had remaining proven reserves of 200 billion barrels. After the next 33 years of global economic growth, Adelman says, those countries had produced 460 billion barrels and had 209 billion remaining. As for OPEC countries, in 1971 they had 412 billion in proven reserves; by 2004 they had produced 307 billion and had 819 billion remaining. …

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April 4, 2007 (word)

April 4, 2007 (pdf)

Five years ago 20 Israelis were killed in a massacre at Netanya. We have Mark Steyn’s contemporaneous column.

… In the days after September 11, we were told that Muslims had great respect for their fellow “people of the book” – ie, Jews and Christians. This ought to be so: after all, the dramatis personae of the Koran include Abraham, Moses, David, John the Baptist, Jesus and the Virgin Mary, though the virginity of the last and the divinity of the penultimate are disputed. Still, it’s one thing to believe that the Israelis are occupiers and oppressors and that the Zionist state should not exist. Harder, you’d think, to blow up a Passover Seder. It would seem to mark a new low in the Palestinians’ descent into nihilism – though, as usual, the silence of the imams is deafening, and no doubt another new low will be along any minute. As for the nonchalance of the Europeans, that too should not surprise us: in my experience, the Continent’s Christians and post-Christians find the ceremonies of Jewish life faintly creepy, notwithstanding that these were also the rituals by which their own Saviour lived. …

John Fund sums up Nancy’s trip.

Dick Morris and Michael Goodwin with thoughts on the dem leadership in congress.

The annoying Chuck Hagel gets an lesson in the constitution from the Examiner.

Speaking of annoying people, John Kerry tries to get himself in the news claiming McCain offered himself to Kerry. John Fund and the Captain do a good job of taking that apart.

… However, Jonathan gives far too much credit to Kerry for honesty. Kerry has a long track record as a fantasist. One only need recall the stories about Christmas in Cambodia and the Magic Hat to recall his sometimes distant relationship with reality. He has a habit of rearranging the truth to shine the best possible light on himself. McCain has many faults, but not this one, and one can expect more personal honesty from him than from his erstwhile running mate. …

Power Line has at too and then posts on the “myth” of the Exodus according to Egypt’s senior archeologist.

NY Sun writes on a CEO with cojones.

NY Observer with a long piece on the appeal of Fred Thompson.

Five years ago, former Senator Fred Thompson seemed ready to say goodbye to White House dreams for good. He’d announced his re-election campaign in the wake of the attacks of Sept. 11, but seemed to lose steam after the death of his daughter a few months later, ultimately abandoning the run in the spring of 2002.

“At the funeral, I went over to him, and he was obviously just drained,” recalled Representative Zach Wamp of Tennessee. “And he said to me, ‘I’ve just lost my heart for [public] service. I’ve lost my heart.’”

So, like his fellow Tennessean, Al Gore, Mr. Thompson wound up nursing his psychic wounds in Hollywood’s warm embrace. …

Bill Buckley notes the religious fervor of greens.

John Stossel says we should worry about the right things.

Here’s another example. What do you think is more dangerous, a house with a pool or a house with a gun? When, for “20/20,” I asked some kids, all said the house with the gun is more dangerous. I’m sure their parents would agree. Yet a child is 100 times more likely to die in a swimming pool than in a gun accident.
Parents don’t know that partly because the media hate guns and gun accidents make bigger headlines. Ask yourself which incident would be more likely to be covered on TV.

Walter Williams tells us what he really thinks. Many of our nation’s colleges and universities have become cesspools of indoctrination, intolerance, academic dishonesty and the new racism.

WSJ on preventing malaria.

Because John Tierney is wise he knows what will come of the greens’ win at the supreme court.

My favorite guide to the E.P.A. is David Schoenbrod, who sued to force the E.P.A. to take lead out of gasoline in the 1970s, when he was a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council. The environmentalists won in court. But as Mr. Schoenbrod watched the agency dither, through both Republican and Democratic administrations, he became convinced that the lawsuit hadn’t really been a victory — that lawmakers at the state and federal levels would have been forced to act sooner if the problem hadn’t been delegated to the E.P.A.

Carpe Diem looks at Michigan students protesting against sweatshops.

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April 3, 2007 (word)

April 3, 2007 (pdf)

Thomas Sowell reacts to the tactics of Pelosi and the dems.

… Until Nancy Pelosi came along, it was understood by all that we had only one president at a time and — like him or not — he alone had the Constitutional authority to speak for this country to foreign nations, especially in wartime.
All that Pelosi’s trip can accomplish is to advertise American disunity to a terrorist-sponsoring nation in the Middle East while we are in a war there. That in turn can only embolden the Syrians to exploit the lack of unified resolve in Washington by stepping up their efforts to destabilize Iraq and the Middle East in general. …
How useless is the UN? Anne Bayefsky counts the ways.

Victor Davis Hanson has answers beyond Anne’s.

… This “incident” has proved a multilateral trifecta: a patrol sanctioned by the U.N. gets no support from the U.N., a member of the EU is left hanging in the interest of EU trade, a NATO member finds no NATO allies, other than the U.S., to offer support. So what is the purpose of these alphabetic organizations? …

And what is the UN Human Rights Council up to?

The Council also adopted, over the objections and abstentions of nearly half of its members, an Islamic Group-sponsored resolution against “defamation of religions,” an attempt to suppress perceived offenses against Islam and even to justify violent reactions thereto.

And if all of that is not enough, how ’bout The Trouble with Islam from WSJ?

John Fund looks at the money figures and provides a history lesson suggesting they don’t show everything.

Ask Howard Dean. Only days before the Iowa caucuses in 2004, Mr. Dean was anointed the almost certain Democratic nominee by 42 of the 50 Democratic Party insiders surveyed by National Journal. His inevitability was traced to the fact that he had raised a record $15 million in a single quarter of fundraising. Days later his candidacy crashed to earth literally accompanied by a scream.

Bob Novak says Fred Thompson is for real.

Slate tells why Passover’s no pushover.

And, just what is a Seder? The Passover Seder is the second-most-observed holiday ritual among Jewish-Americans. Sixty-seven percent reported that they attend the Seder—the feast held on the first night of Passover, during which the story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt is retold.

Good posts from Carpe Diem and Club for Growth.