“Artists, music executives, religious leaders and politicians came out in full force Thursday for the Hip-Hop Action Network’s West Coast summit to address issues and needs facing the community,” a story in The Hollywood Reporter notes. “The mini-summit, held at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills, is a precursor to the next national summit, set for June. On hand were the event’s organizers, Def Jam Records founder Russell Simmons

Looking for a model for developing post-war Afghanistan? The Cato Institute’s David Boaz, writing in The National Review, says…

“Back in Washington, his opponents have depicted Judge Charles W. Pickering as the personification of white Mississippi’s oppressive past, a man so hostile to civil rights and black progress that he is unfit for promotion to a federal appeals court. “But here on the streets of his small and largely black hometown, far from the bitterness of partisan agendas and position papers, Charles Pickering is a widely admired figure of

From on the job! RIYADH, 17 February

Writing in The Weekly Standard, Stephen Hayes

An older link, but one worth revisiting on a casual Sunday. The pleasures of fisting, as taught to Massachusetts school kids by Massachusetts Department of Education employees and originally reported on in The Massachusetts News: Fisting [forcing one’s entire hand into another person’s rectum or vagina] often gets a bad rap….[It’s] an experience of letting somebody into your body that you want to be that close and intimate with…[and] to

Our DSL line is down (again), making posting really difficult, so new entries will be sparse for a spell (in order to post this, for instance, I had to pitch handfuls of ball bearing into the aluminum cradle of my satellite dish while simultaneously rubbing two sticks together; my wife, meanwhile, stood off to the side and fanned the phone jack with a palm frond). Balloon Juice: the more I

Channeling Victor Davis Hanson (or at least, finely imitating him) Cal State Fresno Classics Professor Bruce Thornton writes on “Europe: Axis of Arrogance” for Frontpage Mag: Once more European politicians and pundits are carping at the U.S., this time over President Bush’s identification of Iraq, North Korea, and Iran as an ‘axis of evil.’ The protest has nothing to do with the statement’s obvious accuracy, but rather with the wounded

Interesting Weekly Standard essay by Ethan Guttman on

Think Norah Vincent has a bone to pick with certain liberal advocacy flunkies? Well, check out the first few paragraphs of her Los Angeles Times piece, “Liberal Media Ignore What They Don’t Want to Hear”: Few creatures are more detestable, more verminous, than the Bruce Rolston’s (among others) shredding of his egregious civilian death “research” within hours of its release? None of which overstates the importance of bloggers, I don’t