The week’s stories from RR

• Robert Gates: US doesn’t plan policing role in Haiti. Obama: US is not taking over. Call me sceptical.
• FBI illegally collected phone records.
• NYT considers return to failed ‘pay wall’ model. As I’m in a 1962ish career in this old-school business (if this were then, I wouldn’t mind being upstate editing the Shamokin Republican or something, with the presses making a racket on the ground floor in the back of the building) if I knew how to save it by making money off the Internet of course I would.
• Texans protest abortion super-centre.
• Iraq set to launch Blackwater class-action suit.
• Japan’s 50 years as a postwar US protectorate. They got rich literally at your expense. Enough.
• Decriminalise it. I don’t toke but don’t mind if you do. Hawaii and New Jersey. And 8 in 10 support medical marijuana.
• Agca freed. Why not? He was just a low-level operative for a force that arguably no longer exists. I have no idea is he really is mad or just pretending.
• In Haiti control becomes a priority.
• Favre, Leno and responsibility.
• Hurting people for a living. Make-believe cops. Hawk’s good moral code is like Mike Torello’s.
• Turning King’s dream into a nightmare. Unlike Washington and Lincoln he’s in living memory. Again I really want to know what he’d think of his birthday being turned into white kids having support-the-troops rallies and helping homeless pets.
• The missing discomfort in mourning for Haiti.
• The new paternalism.

Labels: Iraq, libertarianism, politics, the Internet