Charles Dodson was busy yesterday. He has commentary on Bush’s Lincoln speach, the 2002 stats on worldwide terrorist attacks (down 30%, maybe), and yet another Iraq conspiracy theory: just why did the Republican Guard disappear? These posts appear one after the other in sequence so you get just the top link.
The Talking Dog thinks the country would be in better health if W put in as many hours working as he does training.
The NY Times reports today that the Justice Department used secret warrants a record 1,228 times in 2002. The good news: while this is up 30% from 2001 it seems low.
The other news: the Foreign Intelligence surveillance Act (FISA) Court did not turn down a single request for a secret warrant. This could be good or bad: the justies either carefully screened and prepared their requests or FISA is just a rubber stamp.
The more disturbing news: the Bush folk want to let the CIA and Pentagon also use FISA to process secret warrants.
You might want to go read this and then think about whether you want this FISA to even exist.
UPDATE: Liquid List’s Tarek provides some more discussion on secret warrants.
Along with the new month come some new folks on the blog roll to the left: Moorish Girl, Ampersand, Matthew Yglesias, Nathan Oman, Cowboy Kahlil, Orcinus, Daily Kos and Samizdata. A few, unnamed, have been removed.
Some folks are talking about this article by Anatole Kaletsky.
Right Thinking uses the article to seque into a look at the origin of Mayday.
Curveball thinks the article is right on.
au currant(who does not seem to have permalinks so page down to the next to last may 1 post) tells us that
Shopkeepers all over London were boarding up their windows and doors yesterday in anticipation of soapdodgers throwing a temper tantrum against The Man today
And Instapundit tells us “He’s right, of course,” when Kaletsky says
For if there is one social principle on which all economists, historians and politicians must now surely agree, it is that capitalism has done more than any other human construct to benefit working people around the world.
I kind of doubt that all those folks will agree with him on this. But they should. And the world might want to head on a straight line to capitalism and get rid of this statist cronyism that continues to be mislabeled as capitalism. Then the working people around the world will begin to see real benefits.