…the unthinking left will brand any minority conservative who opposes government race and gender preferences a hypocrite if he/she may have benefited from private diversity hiring considerations. Nothing will persuade them otherwise. I will tell you this: Your skin color doesn’t get up every morning and sit at the keyboard. Your chromosomes don’t meet deadlines. Your ethnicity doesn’t sniff out good tips. In the end, you live or die by the quality, newsworthiness, reliability, and strength of your work–not by the box you checked on your job application.

The only time my ethnic heritage has mattered in the blogosphere is when critics bring it up to smear me as a sellout to my race/ethnicity or to make bigoted comments about my maiden name and my appearance.

Malkin’s blog is a great daily read that pulls no punches. I highly recommend her books, In Defense of Internment and Invasion.

An overview in this Washington Post story, a CNN piece

Isn’t that special. That’s right, if some local muckity-mucks decide they want a new Target store or casino right smack dab where your property sits, they can sieze it, given that they pay you something more or less reasonable for it (of course, governments being what they are, I suspect it will tend towards the less reasonable).

Read detailed analysis at Stones Cry Out. He asks the frightening question “Does anyone know what impact, if any, this decision may have on protections afforded under the Religious and Institutionalized Persons Land Use Protection Act? Can a City now condemn a church to make way for a WalMart?” Can the government simply doze whatever they don’t want to make way for what they do want?

Institute for Justice information on Private Property rights and specifically the Kelo v. New London.

Professor Bainbridge rounds it up here.

Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds takes it on here.

Michelle Malkin opines at her blog.

Wouldn’t you love to abolish the IRS . . . Keep all the money in your paycheck . . . Pay taxes on what you spend, not what you earn . . . And eliminate all the fraud, hassle, and waste of our current system?

Then the FairTax is for you. In the face of the outlandish American tax burden, talk-radio firebrand Neal Boortz and Congressman John Linder are leading the charge to phase out our current, unfair system and enact the FairTax Plan — replacing the federal income tax and withholding system with a simple 23 percent retail sales tax. This dramatic revision of the current system, which would eliminate the reviled IRS, has already caught fire in the American heartland, with more than 600,000 taxpayers signing on in support of the plan.

As Boortz and Linder reveal in this first book on the FairTax, this radical but eminently sensible plan would end the annual national nightmare of filing income tax returns, while at the same time enlarging the federal tax base by collecting sales tax from every retail consumer in the country. The FairTax, they argue, would transform the fearsome bureaucracy of the IRS into a more transparent, accountable — and equitable — tax collection system. Endorsed by scores of leading economists — and supported by a huge and growing grassroots movement — the Fair Tax Plan could revolutionize the way America pays for itself.

The United States tax system is out of control. The FairTax is one workable solution to the nightmare of dealing with April 15th in this country.

Buy at Amazon or Books-a-Million.

More online resources at Americans for Fair Tax, Rep. Linder’s FairTax information here and here, the actual bill summary and status, and the April 15, 2005 entry at Nealz Nuze.

At the very least he should be forced to resign, or better yet tried for sedition. He (a United State Senator) is comparing the mild interrogation techniques we use to obtain information from detained terrorists and enemy combatants to the horrific practices employed by the Nazis in 1940’s deathcamps, those of the Soviets in their gulags, and the Khmer Rouge in the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Quoting from Durbin

“On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.”

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime–Pol Pot or others–that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

More on this silliness:

The Washington Times’ Rowan Scarborough points out that while many millions died in Nazi deathcamps, the Soviet Gulag system, and at the hands of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, not one detainee in the care of the US military has died at Gitmo. Mark Steyn has a great take.

Michelle Malkin is, of course, all over it.

PowerLine blog’s got it here and here.

The LA Times has a superb piece (I know, I know) about the perils of lackluster history education.

Bob Parsons, the founder of GoDaddy has an interesting and thoughtful piece on Gitmo. Hmmm… I think I’ll register a domain (at GoDaddy.com).

Joining Voinovich and Democrat obstructionists blocking the Bolton nomination is John Thune (yes, that John Thune), who calls this payback for the Pentagon recommending that Ellsworth Air Force Base be closed. Payback? I’m deeply saddened, John.

Republicans end up allowing the Democrats to run the show (for what it’s worth), when they should simply tell them to put a sock in it and sit down so we can get some work done.

Scrappleface reports that Dems Block Bolton, Citing ‘Sesame Street Memo’.

Michelle Malkin’s got it here and here.

More and more, Republican voters are thinking Not One Dime should go to RINOs.