URLs du Jour

2007-07-21

  • Stephen Moore attended the Independence Institute's fifth annual "Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms" party in Kiowa, Colorado. Paragraph two hooked me:
    This year's theme was "Stop the Growth of the Nanny State"--but it might as well have been "Live Free or Die Hard." Every activity seemed designed to annoy Hillary Clinton. There was a whole lot of drinking, smoking and shooting, but thankfully not in that order. During the morning hours, we carried nine-pound rifles through the woods, shooting pellets at clay pigeons flung into the air. By 10 a.m. the park was alive with the continuous claps of gunfire and hollering.

  • As I type, Pun Daughter is devouring her copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows from Amazon delivered this morn via UPS and USPS. That's pretty boring compared to Will Collier, who got an accidental early copy and, like any good free-marketeer, turned it into a profitable opportunity by (a) selling it on eBay (to Publisher's Weekly); and (b) writing an article about the experience for National Review Online. Most amusingly, (c) under lawyerly abuse, eBay removed the listing (too late), and credited Will's account for their fees, increasing Will's take-home. Also see Will's response to the irate, and laughably ineffective, lawyer for J. K. Rowling's literary agency. Funny, funny stuff.

  • But on a much more serious note, Scott at Power Line passes along a letter concerning the upcoming HBO-produced documentary Hot House, about Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. It's reviewed in the New York Times, featuring a picture of a smiling young woman prisoner, Ahlam Tamimi. The Times says the film "recalls the day she dropped a suicide bomber off at his target, then coolly went on television to report on the resulting bombing."

    Some facts unmentioned in the review:

    She was sentenced to sixteen life sentences or 320 years which she is serving in an Israeli jail. Fifteen people were killed and more than a hundred maimed and injured by the actions of this attractive person and her associates. The background is here.
    The letter is from the parents of one of the 15 victims, Malka Chana Roth, killed by the suicide bomber "dropped off" by Ahlam Tamimi.

    Follow the links, click around, and reflect on the moral nullity at the heart of the New York Times and HBO.