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Easter Sunday a 74 year old man died in Zimbabwe. Times, UK with the story. See if you agree with Pickerhead that if Bill Gates wants to help Africa, he should divert some funds to create the ultimate NGO*, an army that will remove leaders like Mugabe. (*NonGovernmental Organization)

… When I arrived that afternoon, Hilton was dead. Inside his filthy bedroom, his body lay under an ancient furred brown blanket on the mattress where he and Winfildah had slept. She crouched on the floor beside the bed, her blind eyes lit with tears.

Next door in the slum dwelling’s only other room, the family sat fretting over what to do. Tendai, Hilton’s son, had just returned from the undertaker where he went to plead for time to pay the Z$300 million it would cost to take his father’s body to the mortuary.

He returned with not only a refusal but worse news yet. In three days the price had risen threefold to Z$1 billion, a mere £12 at black-market rates.

“It’s the fuel increase,” he said in despair. Their father’s body would stay where it was.

Hilton Takundwa had cheated the odds to live until yesterday, stretching his life out for a full 74 years, exactly twice the average life expectancy for a Zimbabwean male.

But as the years stretched on so the price of death rose until his family could no longer afford to send him with dignity to his grave.

This is Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe on the eve of this weekend’s historic elections; a land of empty shelves and broken hearts where annual inflation runs at 100,000 per cent, turning life into a struggle to survive and death a struggle to afford. …

The Austrian Economist posts a couple of times on the notion Wal-Mart deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. Makes more sense than giving it to a PowerPoint Ranger.

… As you have probably seen on TV and elsewhere, in September 2006, Wal-Mart launched its $4 prescription program. Now, 18 months later, it reports that it has saved consumers over $1 billion (yes, billion) as a result of that program. That’s $1 billion that poorer consumers have to spend elsewhere on the things they need (or that is reducing insurance costs and premiums), not to mention they can now buy prescriptions they might not have been able to afford before or not have to cut pills in half to save money. Moreover, that program prompted Wal-Mart’s competition to create similar programs, the benefits of which can be placed on top of that $1 billion. For some strange reason, the major media didn’t cover this story when Wal-Mart’s press release went out last Friday. …

Common sense won a battle in Philly, but struggles in the war. John Fund has details.

… The Battle of the Cheesesteak Sign may be over, but the larger war over the use of English in this country rages on. Last year, California’s Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, himself an immigrant, urged Hispanics to assimilate and said the way ahead in this country is “to turn off the Spanish TV set. It’s that simple. You’ve got to learn English.”

Statistics back him up. TV Azteca, Mexico’s second-largest network, has launched a 60-hour series of English classes on all its U.S. affiliates. It recognizes that learning English empowers Latinos. “If you live in this country, you to speak as everybody else,” Jose Martin Samano, Azteca’s U.S. anchor, told Fox News. “Immigrants here in the U.S. can make up to 50% or 60% more if they speak both English and Spanish. This is something we have to do for our own people.”

But there are powerful forces trying to make assimilation a dirty word. Consider just how much resistance Sen. Lamar Alexander is getting over his attempt to bar the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from launching “frivolous lawsuits” like the ones it filed last year against the Salvation Army and 125 other businesses for requiring workers to speak English on the job. …

While we’re in Philadelphia, how about some great background on Jeremiah Wright via Marty Peretz. Turns out Obama was not the only one slumming and earning “street cred” at the southside Chicago church. Pastor Wright was too. They both sold out to our country’s black grievance culture.

… It happens that, as a Philadelphian, I attended Central High School – the same public school Jeremiah Wright attended from 1955 to 1959. He could have gone to an integrated neighborhood school, but he chose to go to Central, a virtually all-white school. Central is the second oldest public high school in the country, which attracts the most serious academic students in the city. The school then was about 80% Jewish and 95% white. The African-American students, like all the others, were there on merit. Generally speaking, we came from lower/middle class backgrounds. Many of our parents had not received a formal education and we tended to live in row houses. In short, economically, we were roughly on par.

I attended Central a few years after Rev. Wright, so I did not know him personally. But I knew of him and I know where he used to live – in a tree-lined neighborhood of large stone houses in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. This is a lovely neighborhood to this day. Moreover, Rev. Wright’s father was a prominent pastor and his mother was a teacher and later vice-principal and disciplinarian of the Philadelphia High School for Girls, also a distinguished academic high school. Two of my acquaintances remember her as an intimidating and strict disciplinarian and excellent math teacher. In short, Rev. Wright had a comfortable upper-middle class upbringing. It was hardly the scene of poverty and indignity suggested by Senator Obama to explain what he calls Wright’s anger and what I describe as his hatred. …

It is possible to have an intelligent discussion on some of these problems. A Protestant evangelical, who is also a Harvard law prof, has more valuable things to say about race, and the things we should work to overcome, than Barack or his pastor.

… While white fears of black crime are more reasonable than Obama admits, black rage at a discriminatory justice system is more justified than most whites understand. According to the best available data, blacks are 20% more likely than whites to use illegal drugs. But blacks are an incredible thirteen times more likely to be imprisoned for drug crime. (Data source here). In effect, Americans live under two sets of drug laws: the forgiving set of rules that mostly white suburbanites know, and the unfathomably severe rules that govern urban blacks.

If drug crime is overpunished in black neighborhoods, violent crime is underpunished. Nationwide, police clear nearly 60% of violent crimes (meaning, they arrest the likely offender) in nearly all-white small towns and rural areas. In large cities, police clear fewer than one-third of violent crimes. (Data source here). Race-specific data are unavailable, but it’s a very good bet that black neighborhoods in every major city have clearance rates far below one-third, and most white neighborhoods see rates that are much higher. The bottom line is as simple as it is awful: When whites are robbed, raped, beaten, and killed, their victimizers are usually punished. When the same crimes happen to blacks, the usual result is: nothing. No arrest, no prosecution, no conviction. That is one reason why black neighborhoods are so much more violent than white ones. …

And Bill Kristol says the last thing we need is a conversation about race because we are doing pretty well on our own without the government coming in and screwing things up.

… Racial progress has in fact continued in America. A new national conversation about race isn’t necessary to end what Obama calls the “racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years” — because we’re not stuck in such a stalemate. In fact, as Obama himself suggests in the same speech, younger Americans aren’t stalemated. They come far closer than their grandparents and parents to routinely obeying Martin Luther King’s injunction to judge one another by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.

Over the last several decades, we’ve done pretty well in overcoming racial barriers and prejudice. Problems remain. But we won’t make progress if we now have to endure a din of race talk that will do more to divide us than to unite us, and more to confuse than to clarify.

Luckily, Obama isn’t really interested in getting enmeshed in a national conversation on race. He had avoided race talk before the Reverend Wright controversy erupted. And despite the speech’s catnip of a promised conversation on race tossed to eager commentators, it’s clear he’s more than willing to avoid it from now on.

This is all for the best. With respect to having a national conversation on race, my recommendation is: Let’s not, and say we did.

Abe Greenwald notices John Kerry’s slip is showing.

ABC News’ Jake Tapper just reported on a startling interview given by Senator John Kerry:

Kerry said that a President Obama would help the US, in relations with Muslim countries, “in some cases go around their dictator leaders to the people and inspire the people in ways that we can’t otherwise.”

“He has the ability to help us bridge the divide of religious extremism,” Kerry said. “To maybe even give power to moderate Islam to be able to stand up against this radical misinterpretation of a legitimate religion.”

Kerry was asked what gives Obama that credibility.

“Because he’s African-American. Because he’s a black man. Who has come from a place of oppression and repression through the years in our own country.”

Where to begin! Have notable Democrats become so intellectually sloppy as to draw some baffling equivalence between blacks and Muslims? The last I checked, Arab Muslims were none too happy with their black countrymen in northern Africa.

Also, where is this “place of oppression and repression” in which Obama has suffered “through the years”? Hawaii? Harvard? The Senate? We should find out immediately and do something about this horrific crisis. …

Marty Peretz sees the same thing.

Don’t leave until you finish Dave Barry.

I got to thinking about the Florida primary election mess the other night when I was watching TV with my wife. Actually, she was reading a book, because she hates the way I watch TV. I follow Standard Guy Remote Control Procedure (SGRCP), which requires you go to the next channel the instant that the current channel commits one of the Deadly Channel Sins, such as showing a commercial, or people redecorating a house, or Howie Mandel.

Anyway, I was whipping through the broadcast spectrum at the rate of about four channels per second, when I came across Lewis Black, who’s a very funny man. So I stopped.

Black has a new show called Lewis Black’s Root of All Evil, which tackles issues that, quite frankly, need to be tackled. When I tuned in, the issue was: which is more evil, Donald Trump or Viagra? This is not as simple as it sounds. Yes, Donald Trump is a hideously repellent human wearing what appears to be a radioactive hamster on his head. But Viagra is responsible for a TV commercial — …

New snow fall record in Ann Arbor. At least since 1880. Way to go Al Gore!

Kathryn Lopez in The Corner came up with a photo of W with an Easter Bunny and she decided to troll for captions.