Quick picks

Burt Prelutsky explains that the hysteria about oil prices is nothing more than that — hysteria.

While the NY Times gives us a relaxed (indeed) enjoyable short little history about Sundance’s growth, Brent Bozell reminds us just how sleazy the Sundance product is.

Gay partners with children are attending workshops to learn how to communicate better with the world at large. Meanwhile, in England, just as in Boston, the Catholic Church will not be allowed to prevent gay adoptions. By the way, I don’t have too much of a dog in this fight. I think it’s better for a child to be with a loving heterosexual couple than with a loving gay couple, both because I prefer the former model of sexuality and because (as is a major concern for gay parents attending those workshops), children are cruel to other children, especially those raised differently. In other words, children of gay couples are targets, and that’s never optimal. Having said that, though, I think a stable, loving homosexual couple is much better for a child than bouncing through foster care or being in an unloving or abusive heterosexual household. I therefore just offer these news snippets, not to make some larger point about gay parenting, but because they are signs of larger social changes we’re all watching.

John Fund gives a Sandy Berger update — and that’s a good thing too, with the media all busy misreporting the Libby trial.

Confederate Yankee also has an update, this one about his attempts to get the AP to address the myriad problems with the Jamil Hussein story — and it’s looking as if the steady blogosphere drip, drip, drip is working to get AP, if not to admit it’s wrong, but at least to back off (somewhat sneakily) from its untruths and misleading statements.

Anne Bayefsky, who is the best UN watcher there is, exposes the hollowness hidden by the UN’s ostensible focus on the Holocaust, something that is especially important now, given Iran’s increasingly bold threats to annihilate Israel. Basically, as Bayefsky shows, the UN’s actual role when it comes to modern Holocausts is to ignore their buildup and then to wring its institutional hands ineffectually while the Holocausts take place. With regard to Israel, which has been the object of more malevolent UN scrutiny and censure than any other nation in the history of the UN, I ascribe more than mere institutional inertia or uselessness when it comes to stopping the ongoing threat to her existence. The UN, guided by its oil-rich Arab and Persian nations, as well as its residual Marxist factions, would be happy to see Israel terminated.

And now I really, really have some paying work to do.

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