Download Full Content – Printable Pickings
Nat Hentoff makes the case for getting out of the UN.
Mark Steyn was hanging out at the Western Standard where he’s covering another trial. Seems an immigrant to Canada takes offense at swearing allegiance to the crown, and he has some novel legal theories. You get where this is going? You think our legal system can be tedious, get a load of this.
… Mr. Roach is an immigrant to this country, a legal resident but not yet a citizen. And the reason he’s not a citizen is because he’s disinclined to take his oath of allegiance. And the reason he won’t take his oath is because he doesn’t want to swear allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen. And the reason he doesn’t want to swear allegiance to the Queen is because he and his fellow blacks “were colonized as a people by the British throne, and we were enslaved as a people by the British throne and, to me, taking an oath to the monarch of Great Britain, without any disrespect to the Queen herself as a person, is like asking a Holocaust survivor to take an oath to a descendant of Hitler.”
No doubt. But how many Holocaust survivors would voluntarily emigrate to a state ruled by Adolf Hitler Jr.? …
Jeff Jacoby’s been watching the debates. So, we don’t have to. Is This A Great County Or What? He says there are differences between the two major parties.
… On topics large and small — gays in the military, making English the official US language, using nuclear weapons to keep Iran from getting the bomb, even the proper role for former presidents — the differences between the parties came through, stark and unmistakable. If this week’s debates are a preview of coming attractions, the 2008 campaign will be very divisive, and deeply consequential.
Bob Novak says John Edwards is getting unpopular with the dem professionals.
The dynamic performance by John Edwards in last Sunday’s Democratic presidential debate, assailing his competitors for the nomination, got high marks from political reporters, Republican politicians and left-wing activists. But not from the Democratic establishment. Once their great hope for the future, Edwards now is massively unpopular among party regulars who neither like nor trust him.
Number nine in the IBD editorial series on Jimmy Carter.
Of all the errors Jimmy Carter committed, none has earned him more well-justified scorn than his handling of the 1970s energy crisis. True enough, he didn’t cause it. But he did make it much, much worse.
It might come as a surprise, but we agree with those who say it’s unfair to tar former President Carter with having caused the 1970s oil crisis. He didn’t.
Marty Peretz comments on Jimmy’s fund raising at Harvard.
Al Gore’s new faith.
Samizdata with a couple of good posts.
Episode 86 of the Sopranos is Sunday night. David Remnick’s New Yorker piece celebrates the last of the series.
The same snail shells used as jewelry and/or money, have shown up in 70,000 to 80,000 year old sites in South Africa. Morocco, and Israel. The Economist has the story.
… The shells are peculiar because they seem to have been fashioned into beads. They bear traces of red ochre, a pigment. They have been purposefully perforated, presumably to be strung together. And friction marks indicated that they did, indeed, once form part of a necklace or bracelet. …