A power grab in the House was fought off by a dedicated minority. Unfortunately, the Senate seems to be determined to roll over.

I was never a fan of Jerry Falwell, though it’s possible that Reagan wouldn’t have been elected without him, and what a different world that would be. Other than that, about the best thing I can say about him is that he wasn’t as big an idiot as Pat Robertson. But condolences to his family and friends.

And it will be very interesting to hear what Newt has to say about him at commencement on Saturday.

[Update in the evening]

Another roundup of “thoughts” (such as they are) on Falwell’s passing. They seem pretty much in synch with hater Brian Swiderski’s comments here. Birds of a feather…

The state of Alabama thinks I’m a terrorist.

It’s not just college campuses. Military commanders on the front of the war have made their bases into gun-free zones.

And in a supposedly “conservative” administration.

I wish we’d had better choices to vote for.

Rich Lowry puts paid to the stupid notion that Tony Blair was George Bush’s lap dog:

Long before President Bush arrived in the White House, Blair championed the idea that the West should intervene to stop human-rights abuses in other countries, putting morality above respect for the borders of sovereign countries. It wasn

Speaking of immigration problems and non-assimilation, Stanley Kurtz has an interesting post on the problem of giving preference to family members:

I am not saying that anyone in the Duka family, outside the plotters themselves, was involved here. The point is, when you bring over a vast extended clan through chain migration, and when that extended family group maintains constant ties with an originating village, it becomes vastly more difficult to assimilate. For one thing, chain migration means a constant supply of new family members who don

In the context of the Fort Dix hirabis, Victor Davis Hanson has some useful thoughts on the problem of completely uncontrolled immigration:

Once the United States accepts as a permanent condition the notion that several million illegal aliens can reside in perpetuity and under immunity from the law, then a sort of insidious message is established:

We in America will ask nothing of our immigrants-not legality, not English, not rudimentary knowledge of our history and values, and not real efforts at assimilation and Americanization.

So, the wannabe jihadist, here illegally, whether as in the Fort Dix case or as was true of a few of the 9/11 murderers

Susan Katz-Keating would like a tell-all from George Tenet that really tells all:

We had insufficient intelligence. True, we had electronic surveillance; but we lacked the all-important human intelligence-gathering

A lot of ignorant morons call me a “neocon,” and I generally eschew labels in general, but here’s a new one (well, new to me) I just discovered that probably comes as close as any will for me. I’m apparently a neolibertarian.

Sweden and Finland are acting like they want to join NATO.