On Wednesday’s WSJ Opinion Page Wednesday, Pete Du Pont argues persuasively against steel tariffs supported by the US steel industry, the US-ITC, and President Bush: Let’s be plain: Steel tariffs are a bad idea–bad for the steel industry; bad for governments that use steel in bridges and other public infrastructure projects (not to mention all the steel used by the military); bad for consumers, who will have to pay more

Nelson Mandela has — inexplicably, so far as I can tell — repudiated his earlier statement indicting Usama for the 9/11 terror attacks. Mandela said he regrets if “the manner in which we stated our position gave any offence to Muslims in South Africa and throughout the world.” Talk about backing the wrong (Arabian…?) horse…

From the WSJ Opinion Journal’s “Best of the Web”: The Lebanon Daily Star reports that at French insistence, the European Union did not include the anti-Israel terror group Hezbollah on its list of terror organizations. ‘Sources said the EU’s de facto defense of Hizbullah was a significant achievement in Lebanon’s effort to position itself well in the campaign against international terrorism,’ the Star reports. ‘But the sources declined to make

The National Review’s Rich Lowry calls for the breakup of OPEC, which he suggests might be a blow against terrorism itself: An increase in the price of oil from, say, $10 a barrel to $30 transfers tens of billions annually from the American economy to oil sheiks. The sheiks, in turn, spend the money both on their lavish corruption, thus indirectly fostering resentment and Islamic radicalism, and on buying off

In “Judicial Speech Codes,” George Will writes about restrictions on political speech in Minnestota’s judicial elections: The justices of the state Supreme Court have created a speech code that controls the conduct of candidates for that court. Does that not trouble Minnesota’s fine-tuners of ‘appearances’? When the dust settles from the terrorism crisis, attention should be paid to the perversely selective concern some people have shown these past few months

The mayor of Rio has threatened to jail a local weatherman for forecasting heavy rains — and being wrong about it. The mayor says that, given Rio’s recent spate of flooding — a result of heavy rains — the weatherman’s forecast could have caused a general panic among the Rio populace. South America Daily reports about weatherman Luiz Carlos Austin: Alberto Guimaraes Jr., the city’s acting chief prosecutor, said he

A paucity of posts today, I realize — my wife was tinkering around with the site’s html (you can now choose to open a post’s links in a separate window by ticking a li’l box, and she’s started working on setting up a semi-useful search engine, to boot!), so I used the down time to prepare my syllabi and to gather together secondary readings for this quarter’s courses, which begin

CNN picks up this touching AP story: In the years since Madalenna Lai boarded a wooden boat and fled communist-led Vietnam, she has wanted to say ‘thank you’ to the Americans who helped her build a new life in the United States. On New Year’s Day, she will get her wish in one of the country’s most-watched events, the Tournament of Roses Parade. It has taken eight years, and she

Jonah Goldberg’s latest NRO column picks at the fraying edges of some libby well-worns: September 11, and its aftermath, shattered any number of myths and clich

A coupla’ cool blogs I stumbled over recently on one of my daily walks through cyberville (in one instance badly scraping both my knees and tearing the velvet elbow patch off of tweed blazer o’ mine — my fault, I was drunk on cider) are Gregory Hlatky’s A Dog’s Life, and Shannon Okey’s Bitter-Girl. Both have a sneer hiding in their woodsheds — well worth checkin’ out. Not that anyone