TNR’s “Notebook” has a nice little item on the Ken Lay Senate hearings, “American Grandstand.” The gist: It takes special people to prompt feelings of sympathy for Ken Lay, but the members of the Senate Commerce Committee, it turns out, are pretty darn special. When the disgraced former Enron CEO appeared before the committee this week and, as expected, took the Fifth Amendment, the 21 senators practically crawled over one

Writing in The National Review, John Miller reports on the California state board of education’s attempts to (potentially, at least) circumvent Prop. 227: Under current law, kids can get out of English-language classes only if their parents sign waivers. The state board, however, would give teachers the same authority. It would also delete the provision requiring that children spend the first month of each school year in English classrooms. In

“The state of Florida is squaring off in court with psychic pitchwoman Miss Cleo, trying to force her to prove she

Headline: Jetliner Lust Attracts F-16s. “A randy, drug-fueled romp in a New York-bound jet’s rest room sparked a midair terror scare that sent a pair of F-16 fighter jets scrambling, authorities revealed yesterday. But the red alert aboard American Airlines Flight 101 from London on Friday gave way to red faces when authorities discovered all the fuss was over two amorous British men. Police said the passengers, whose names were

“A British-born Muslim militant admitted Thursday to kidnapping Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl and said he believed the journalist is dead,” The Washington Post reports. “Officials dismissed the militant’s claim, and the Journal said it remained confident Pearl is alive.” ‘As far as I understand, he’s dead,’ Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh said in a courthouse in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi, where Pearl disappeared on Jan. 23 while

Richard Bennett offers these great observations (over the course of several posts) by way of entry into the blogosphere porn wars: Radical feminist Diana Russell has tried to connect porn with rape by doing retrospective studies of rapists, claiming that they nearly all have big porn collections, but she’s never published this stuff in a reputable journal. Part of the problem is that retrospective studies almost always confirm the researcher’s

Capitalism Magazine’s Walter Williams writes that diversity is doublespeak for ideological confirmity: Diversity is simply the old racism in a new guise, spiced up with a touch of sexism. Diversity is a call for race-conscious decisions in hiring, promotion and college admittance policy. Diversity management success is measured by the numbers: How many minorities or women are employed, promoted or enrolled? Wrong numbers invite the wrath of the state. At

“Orchestras might be forced by European law to play music more quietly, according to a leading British musicians body. “The Association of British Orchestras (ABO) is fighting to be exempted from a European directive under consideration that would place limits on noise in the workplace,” the BBC reports. The directive has already been agreed by Britain and other EU member states and will receive a second reading in parliament later

Cathy Young has an outstanding Reason column on the “Deadbeat Dads” phenomenon: […] men who father children they can’t support are irresponsible – as are the women who have those children. But no conservative has ever bashed welfare moms as viciously as conservatives and liberals bash ‘deadbeat dads.’ Most welfare opponents stress that women on public assistance want to be self-sufficient but are trapped by a bad system; ‘deadbeat dad’