It was Ronald Reagan’s 91st birthday yesterday. Here’s the column I wrote last year to mark the day.
NPR AND STEVE EMERSON: This Jeff Jacoby column is a must-read on publicly financed media bias.
STONE THE CROWS: The evils of the free market can be found everywhere. Take this report of concern about the preponderance of crows in Minneapolis in the Star-Tribune:
A woman named Lynne said she initially welcomed crows moving into her neighborhood. “I think them to be handsome, forthright, yet mysterious,” she wrote. “They have an arrogance that I really quite like in a bird. . . .But my pleasure in their huge and raucous lobbying of my back yard was disturbed when I read somewhere recently that crows take over a neighborhood from other birds. They are, in the aviary world, like gangsters… Like Capitalists.”
You think they might even vote Republican?
NOAH’S DEFENSE: Tim Noah argues in the Washington Post today that publishing a private email is ok as long as the information is already in the public domain. He claims that David Frum’s alleged authorship of the phrase “axis of evil” had already appeared in Canada’s National Post. But hold on. I thought Tim’s original argument was that he published the email because it was newsworthy. Now he says he published it because it was not newsworthy. That surely makes printing the details of a private email even more gratuitous. I think he probably ran it because it was great gossip and he didn’t really think before he pressed the publish button. Hey, we’re all human. We’ve all done that in this wonderful new tech-world of instant self-publishing. I don’t think Tim is a bad person. I just still don’t think what he did was right.
The Dish 