Boyd

Part 1



Part 2



Part 3



Part 4

Simmons:

In John Clayton's column this week, Jay Cutler explained the progress of Broncos tight end Tony Scheffler by saying, "I roomed with Tony during the preseason and he has great hands." Don't you love when athletes get quoted out of context? Poor Cutler sounded like he's about 20 years away from hanging Tony's game-worn jersey on his closet door along with a picture of a mountain.

I hereby declare that Brokeback jokes will never get old.

Man law.

Klein:

If Edwards wants to be president, he better try running in the other America.

Brother John has been doing most excellent work on the Duke criminal false accusations case. The latest from Bob Wilson, former Herald-Sun editorial page editor:

Newspaper editors and reporters cannot be cozy with the people and organizations they cover. It just doesn't work.

Most blogs may suck, but the good ones are helping to increase the accountability of institutions.

MacDonald:

Dr. Ana Sanchez delivers babies at St. Joseph’s Hospital in the city of Orange, California, many of them to Hispanic teenagers. To her dismay, they view having a child at their age as normal. A recent patient just had her second baby at age 17; the baby’s father is in jail. But what is “most alarming,” Sanchez says, is that the “teens’ parents view having babies outside of marriage as normal, too. A lot of the grandmothers are single as well; they never married, or they had successive partners. So the mom sends the message to her daughter that it’s okay to have children out of wedlock.”

Sowell:

Progressives are in the business of complaining and denouncing — as a prelude to seeking sweeping powers to control other people’s lives, in the name of curing the ills of society.

Read this book.

Antle:

...apparently we have lost sight of the conservative, as opposed to purely libertarian, reasons for limiting government. It is exactly because the welfare state cannot replicate the benefits of organic institutions like families, neighborhoods, and congregations; it can only make it easier for atomized individuals to live without these vital institutions. Welfarism tends to crowd out civil society just as surely as public spending crowds out private investment.

The purely libertarian reasons are enough for me, however he's on to something. It's impossible to replace mothers and fathers - even if you have a seemingly infinite supply of government bureaucrats.

Update: Prudie:

I suggested that she stop fretting about her parents and instead concentrate more on her impending parenthood—and that marrying her boyfriend would be a good first step. The vehemence with which readers denounced my coupling marriage and children made it easy to understand the recent government statistics, which show that nearly 40 percent of children in this country are born to unwed mothers.

Rago:

The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful.

It's undeniable.

However, they are democratic for the most part which means that most of us are low-quality and pretty awful too. Of course the elites knew this already.

Dickerson:

I'm glad (and unsurprised) that they were evicted. Relieved. And sadly sure that, absent concerted and sustained intervention, they are doomed to go on living as they always have — like perpetual evacuees, dependent on the largesse of others, defeated by America's cutthroat capitalism and blind to its well-disguised avenues of escape.

Heartbreaking story. The capitalism remark is obviously bred out of frustration. The children in the family described have been the beneficiary of plenty of government programmes and have not participated in any form of 'cutthroat capitalism.' (One of the older ones can't or won't mow a lawn for more than an hour before quitting and leaving his tools behind.) And even if the 'avenues of escape' had bright neon signs pointing to their on-ramps, these kids would still get ran over.

Yasinskas:

"We are going to change things up as far as what we're doing and who we're doing it with," coach John Fox said.

Disgraceful. I'm glad I don't care anymore and spent the day outside playing ball with the kids.

Best revenge you can have on multi-million dollar athletes who mail it in? Ignore them.

Hogberg on Timothy Carney's new book:

Carney smashes the conventional wisdom that big business is inherently pro-free market and anti-government. In fact, business is all too willing to use government to tax and regulate its competition out of existence. But it goes beyond using government to erect barriers to market access. Carney also recounts the role of big business in using eminent domain to violate the property rights of small landowners.

The more efficient folks get at manipulating government power, the less efficient markets become.

Update: What, you thought do-gooder liberal types ended up with the power?

Only a soulless individual could hate folk rock.

Heffernan:

Like a teenager, she seems exaggeratedly puzzled by whatever’s at hand; she’s too cool for almost everything, and good for her.

This is the way you do it, boys and girls. Be first. Be fresh. Be enthusiastic.

Update: Oh, yeah. Be pretty.

Bray:

Maine has a trade deficit with California. What of it?

Update: Come to think of it, I have a trade deficit with Biscuitville. What of that?

TSG:

6. Baltimore

Very good defense, crummy offense. We've been here before. We'll be here again.

Speaking of Baltimore, after watching the season finale of "The Wire" this week, I wrote up an extended rant about the show and how much it means to me -- both as a writer and a human being -- and how I believe it's the most important show of my lifetime, how I can't remember being more attached to four TV characters than the four school kids from Season 4, how I simply can't fathom why more people wouldn't give it a chance ... but it ended up sounding too preachy, so I'm just going to say that it's my favorite TV show of all-time and leave it at that. Name another show that could peak during a season in which its best character (McNulty) basically disappeared for 12 of the 13 episodes? How is that possible? What a show. I miss it already.

(One more "Wire" note: I have a friend named Brad who's famously crusty, a grizzled Giants fan who blurts out whatever he thinks and refuses to edit himself. He's also the biggest "Wire" fan alive. So we're watching football with the boys one Sunday and somebody in the room mentioned how they weren't watching "The Wire." Uh-oh. Brad turns to the guy with complete contempt and says, "If you aren't watching 'The Wire,' the government should be forced to come to your house and repossess your television. END OF STORY!" They should use that quote on the posters for Season 5.)

I can't write about it either because I can't do it justice. But, if you're not watching, I know where you're coming from. I didn't watch until this year. I just assumed it was some lame cop show. So wrong, so wrong. To call it my all time favorite TV show sells it short. It's one of my fave works of art of all time.

Since Season 4 is almost over, I bought Season 1 DVDs last week and am about halfway through. Anyone who wants can borrow them. Hell, I'll give them to you if you think you can appreciate this show and pass them along when you're done.

Josey:

Dudley's rate fell 39 percentage points, with district officials estimating 48.3 percent of freshmen who started school in August 2002 graduated in June.

On the other hand, Grimsley saw the largest increase of district schools: 86.4 percent, compared to 57.5 percent last year.

and...

Dudley's graduation rate wavered in the 55 percent to 61 percent range for three years. The rate rocketed to 87.6 percent in 2005.

It's fairly obvious we're not comparing apples to apples here. Perhaps Grier could hire one of the large mass of newly minted Grimsley grads to analyze the data and learn what changed since no one in Guilford administration seems to have the time or inclination to figure it out.

30 point swings should be fairly easy to explain. The likely real drop of 7 to 12 points at Dudley may be a bit tougher.

Update: Perhaps I'm being unfair with that 'time and inclination' quip. I'm actually quite sure that the executives in charge know what caused these anomalies. They're just not ready to share.

Spears:

...thank God for Victoria's Secrets' new underwear line!

Maybe Victoria's real secret is a liberal use of apostrophes.

Trey Parker:

I’ve been fascinated with the Mormons for a long time. They are the nicest people in the world. If a religion’s going to take over the world, and the one that really believes “just be super nice to everyone” takes over, that’s all right with me. Even if it’s all bullshit, that’s OK.

McCarthy:

We are staying in Iraq until we win. Great. But what is winning? What is the “victory” we are seeking?

On this, there is no consensus. That is why Americans have soured on Iraq. History proves that the American people have plenty of stomach for a hard fight, however long it takes, if they understand and believe in what we are fighting for. And this, consequently, is where history will condemn the Bush administration.

The victory was supposed to be the eradication of WMD - an achievable and quantifiable goal. Now we're stuck waiting on the Iraqis to learn to love one another.

Update: I'm as guilty as any other advocate of the war, but the next time we want to liberate someone, let's make sure they want liberating.

Update II: Perhaps we did right by the Kurds.

An examination of the remains of hundreds of Kurdish men, women and children discovered in three mass graves show they were lined up, gunned down and buried where they fell almost two decades ago, an American forensic expert testified Thursday in the genocide trial of Saddam Hussein.

Michael Trimble described several of the recovered bodies - a pregnant woman shot through her belly, killing the fetus; a young girl wearing little green boots whose leg had been shattered by bullets; an infant apparently smothered under the body of his mother.

Tabin:

...classical liberalism (or libertarianism) and modern liberalism (or progressivism, or egalitarian liberalism) are fundamentally at odds philosophically. The crux of the split is the difference between negative and positive liberty...

Today is a good day to revisit this post.

Here.

Fund:

Other stock markets are doing all they can to avoid emulating U.S.-style regulation.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

The Prowler:

Roberts is expected to face a stiff re-election battle in Kansas, a state where the Democrat Party has been making some inroads, and where the national party apparently is emboldened to neutralize them. "An Appropriations seat helps Pat on the homefront with constituents," says the Senate leadership aide.

WSJ:

In recent decades environmentalists have been wrong about almost every other apocalyptic claim they've made: global famine, overpopulation, natural resource exhaustion, the evils of pesticides, global cooling, and so on. Perhaps it's useful to have a few folks outside the "consensus" asking questions before we commit several trillion dollars to any problem.

O'Rourke:

Slate: If you had to sum up what The Wire is about, what would it be?

Simon: Thematically, it's about the very simple idea that, in this Postmodern world of ours, human beings—all of us—are worth less. We're worth less every day, despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more. It's the triumph of capitalism.

Very interesting idea. However, I'd go beyond capitalism. It's the triumph of every conceivable need being met without a great deal of effort. What shall we do with all this time and all these resources? We, human beings, are no longer the resources. We are the masters of resources. Completely different animal.