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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. …