The Wrap-up

The California legislature recently voted, overwhelmingly, to allow competition into a sector—cable television—where prices have been elevated and service depressed by the most pernicious monopoly in America.

What one bank in America refuses categorically to engage in eminent domain? BBT, the nation’s ninth largest bank, with more than 1,400 branches in 11 states and in Washington, DC.

Deroy Murdock: “[I]t should not be harder to rent a political thriller at Blockbuster than to vote for president at the ballot box.” See also ACU’s action alert.

Tim Carney: “U.S. Subsidies Put Chinese Ethanol in Your Gas Tank.”

Adam Nagourney, the Times’s national political correspondent, profiles RNC chairman Ken Mehlman and his outreach to black America.

Reuel Marc Gerecht: “We might not be able to put our finger precisely on it—the problems of a radicalized British Muslim of Pakistani ancestry are not the same as a Sunni Iraqi suicide bomber who blows up Jordanian and Palestinian women and children—but we know there is something wrong within Islam’s global house, something that cannot be blamed exclusively on Western prejudice, bigotry, military actions or colonialism.”

From the Department of Unreported News from Iraq: “Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty notes that the U.S. occupation of Iraq has allowed the rectification of what the U.N. calls ‘one of the world’s greatest environmentalist disasters.’ In the 1990s, Saddam Hussein, trying to destroy the hideouts of opposition guerillas, drained 95 percent of the alluvial marshland at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This measure ruined the livelihood of the Marsh Arabs, sometimes said to be descendants of the Sumerians, and vandalized humanity’s oldest civilized habitat. An international agency called Eden Again is now reflooding the marshes; it says 45 percent of the area has been ‘robustly’ recovered, allowing the marsh dwellers to continue weaving huts and mats from reeds as they’ve been doing for three millennia.” —The Western Standard, September 25, 2006.