Download Full Content – Printable Pickings
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.