From “Brickbats,” Reason (May 2006): Italy has imposed a 25 percent tax on hard-core porn.  The law, similar to one already passed in France, applies to all films and magazines as well as merchandise sold in sex shops. At the risk of offending those social conservative readers I haven’t already chased away with a lot of potty-mouthed posts about Shannon Elizabeth’s nipples, let me argue here that these kinds of

Associate professor of political science at the University of Virginia and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Gerard Alexander, writes of “the long and growing list of things you can’t legally say” in the Old Country.  From the April 10 Weekly Standard: On February 20, an Austrian court sentenced the notorious British writer David Irving to three years in prison for denying in a 1989 speech that Auschwitz

James Taranto muses on the latest turn in the Plame affair.  From WSJ’s Best of the Web: If you’d told us earlier this week that the Valerie Plame kerfuffle was about to turn even sillier, we wouldn’t have believed you. But it has. This story appears on the front page of today’s New York Times: President Bush authorized Vice President Dick Cheney in July 2003 to permit Mr. Cheney’s chief