Maybe he will.

Musical link

The Telegraph reports that yon wee Gordon Brown is thinking of repealing the 1701 Act of Succession, thus restoring the rights of the Jacobite heir to the royal succession, Duke Francis of Bavaria.

Jon Caruthers, at American Thinker, identifies the left’s Climate Management agenda as simply a more ambitious version of earlier human attempts at managing Nature on a smaller-scale, as in Yellowstone Park, for example, described at length in Alston Chase’s Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park.

The conceit that scientists and bureaucrats can use the power the state to manage nature has lead to disaster in the past, and will again if the global warmists keep getting their way.

When Yellowstone National Park was first created, park officials believed they had to “save” the native fauna as well as protect the visitors by killing off the native wolf population. This they did in grand form. Additionally, they noticed the yearly occurrences of wildfires which, according to the then “modern” and “progressive” thought of the day, should be stamped out at all cost.

The net result of these notions was that 110 years or so later half the park burned down. It turns out that without the wolves the ruminants ran wild and ate up the deciduous trees, leaving only the pine trees to go forth and multiply. Anyone who’s started a campfire knows what happens when you compound this with 110 years of pine needles and flotsam and jetsam — you end up with the perfect firestorm. This is nothing natural. This situation was created by us — by human intervention into a formerly pristine ecosystem that was supposedly “managed” by the federal government – and the result was that half the park burned down.

Once again, on the issue of “global warming” we’re faced with government control — in this case not of the national park system, but of the entire globe. The “progressives” and their “grand thoughts” of the age seek to “manage” the globe in the same “modern” way our ancestors “managed” Yellowstone. Like our ancestors of yore, today’s environmentalists believe the government can control the environment better than Mother Nature can. Are we to suppose that the people who give us the DMV and the IRS are going to “manage” the globe in the same efficient and benevolent manner? In the grand scheme of things are we supposed to believe that we humans are actually better than Mother Nature at “managing” the global environment? For some reason, the enviro-nazis of the age seem to believe that Mother Nature is some kind of octogenarian Alzheimer’s patient and they’re the designated colostomy bag.

Read the whole thing.

David Kahane, at National Review, has lots of fun with those Clinton tax returns.

By now we’ve all had a chance to take a gander at the Clintons’ tax returns, and all I can say is that I’m proud to be a Democrat. Not since that poor Irish immigrant, Richard “Boss” Croker,” left the humble employ of Tammany Hall and retired to his horse farm in Ireland to breed Derby winners has the Party of the Little Guy paid off so spectacularly for a lifetime of “public service.” Talk about a Little Tin Box!

In the old days — say, way back in 1989 — everybody went into full high-dudgeon mode when the Cowboy (no, not Bush; the other one) went to Asia post-presidency and made a couple of speeches for a coupla mil. From the reaction, you would have thought Reagan had just turned over national-security secrets to the Chinese or something. And then Ronnie went back to his ranch, got Alzheimer’s and died.

But the Clintons changed all that. Not only has the Big He made piles of loot for himself, the little woman, the queen of England, the pope in Rome, and their twelve best friends, he’s also kept his big red nose planted firmly in the face of the American people, carping here, criticizing there, meddling to the best of his abilities, all the while trying to get his erstwhile helpmeet elected president of the United States, of all things.

And how did he do it? By inventing something that people want to buy? By coming out of nowhere to write a bestseller or a hot spec script? By putting Microsoft out of business? No, he did it by getting himself twice elected president with less than 50 percent of the popular vote, hanging on tenaciously despite calls from across the country for his resignation during the Starr Inquisition, and basically daring Trent Lott and Chief Justice Rehnquist, in full Gilbert and Sullivan drag, to convict him after the House impeached him. That made him a celebrity, and in this day and age…just spell my name right, baby.

Not for Bubba was Harry Truman’s example, putting on his fedora and going home to Bess in Independence, Mo. Or Ike’s retiring to Gettysburg. Or even Tricky Dick, stalking the beach at San Clemente in a sweaty blue serge suit and muttering darkly about the Jews. Whether gadding about the Middle East, showboating with his buddy Ron Burkle on private jets, or barking and wagging his fingers at reporters in South Carolina, Billy Blythe, the pride of the old gangster mecca of Hot Springs, Ark., has redefined the notion of a kosher post-presidency.

Which is why, out here in post-strike Hollywood, we’re for Obama.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like we’ve changed our minds about Monicagate; if we had to do it again, we’d do it again. Because we weren’t defending Clinton, we were defending, well… us. Our right to do whatever we want whenever we want and suffer absolutely no adverse consequences. Hey — we’re the guys who hate guns and violence and make movies about serial killers and sadistic torturers, but don’t blame us if some impressionable wing-nut yahoo takes us up on our suggestions and starts hanging women from meat hooks. That’s what free speech is all about.

The thing that Clinton established was not, as his wife, Nurse Ratched, would have it, that the personal is political; it was that political is now personal. And thus none of your business: Caught with your pants down in the Oval Office? Personal! Hiring your boy toy for a state job for which he was manifestly unqualified? Personal! Making dubious wire-transfers to your hooker’s prostitution agency? Personal! Using campaign funds to squire mistresses and maybe bed them down in a classy motel on the Upper West Side?

Personal! Personal! Personal!

You can practically feel our contemptuous spittle on your nasty, bigoted, right-wing faces, can’t you?

Read the whole thing.

I was arguing last night with one of my snobbish Yale friends who, though conservative, has imbibed enough of the toxic perspective of the elect to view the Religious Right as a major problem.

I contended that coercion, these days, was typically coming from intolerant secularists determined to drive religious symbols out of public spaces, and eager to punish private individuals or groups (like the Boy Scouts) who differ with them on moral issues. My friend countered by alluding to a legislative proposal in some retarditaire fly-over state which would compel Reproductive Health clinics to notify parents before supplying birth control items to persons under 18.

My own view is that children are expensive and a lot of trouble. Their parents, not the state or Planned Parenthood, brought them into the world, fed them, housed them, clothed them, and sat up with them when they were sick. Parents have a right to bring their children up with their own values. And parents’ rights include, at least, the formal (even if only theoretical) right of deciding if Peggy Sue at age 17 can go on the pill. Practically, I expect lots of 17-year-old kids can, and do, go around their parents and make these kinds of decisions for themselves, but that’s their business. These are matters for individuals and families to decide, not for teachers or school administrators, and not for government or public interest groups.

The notion that “we know better, kids are going to have sex, and we’re going to give them the tools to have sex without consequences whether their parents like it or not” is arrogant, simplistic, and typical of the liberal elite which is universally ready, willing, and eager to intrude into everyone else’s private sphere in order to tell everyone just what’s best for him.

I’m not religious or particularly Puritanical, but even I find the story below, from Natural News (4/3/08), appalling.

A middle school in Portland, Maine is considering a proposal to provide birth control pills and patches to students as young as 11 years old. King Middle School launched a reproductive health program after five of the 135 students who visited the school’s health center in 2006 reported being sexually active. The program already provides condoms to students, but the new proposal would expand this to include prescriptions for birth control pills and patches (which would then have to be purchased at a pharmacy).

The contraceptives could be dispensed without the knowledge of parents, although written permission would be required for children to receive (unspecified) services from the health center.

The proposed program has attracted controversy, with some people accusing the schools of taking away parental power and encouraging children to have sex too early. But school officials dispute these claims.

“We do certainly sit down and speak with them about why [being sexually active] is not a good choice,” said Amanda Rowe, the school’s nurse coordinator. “But there are some who persist… and they need to be protected.”

Logan Levkoff, a sexologist and relationship expert, said that while the school may be stepping into a role that would better be filled by parents, many parents do not feel comfortable enough to do so. “Parents should be the sex educator for their children,” Levkoff said. “The problem is not every parent feels empowered [to do so].”

Parents interviewed by ABC News were split on their feelings about the proposal.

“I don’t think I would want my child in middle school to be getting birth control pills unless I had something to do with it,” one woman said.

But another woman, a mother, disagreed: “I think that education at that age is appropriate because our culture is saturated with messages about sex,” she said.

Natural News is running a story which really dates back to last Fall.

AP (10/18/07):

After an outbreak of pregnancies among middle school girls, education officials in this city have decided to allow a school health center to make birth control pills available to girls as young as 11.

Maine’s King Middle School is the first in the state to offer full range of contraceptives to 6th-8th graders.

King Middle School will become the first middle school in Maine to make a full range of contraception available, including birth control pills and patches. Condoms have been available at King’s health center since 2000.

Students need parental permission to access the school’s health center. But treatment is confidential under state law, which allows the students to decide whether to inform their parents about the services they receive.

There are no national figures on how many middle schools provide such services. Most middle schoolers range in age from 11 to 13.

“It’s very rare that middle schools do this,” said Divya Mohan, a spokeswoman for the National Assembly on School-Based Health Care.

Portland’s three middle schools reported 17 pregnancies during the last four years, not counting miscarriages or terminated pregnancies that weren’t reported to the school nurse.

The Portland School Committee approved the plan, offered by city health officials, on a 7-2 vote Wednesday night. Whether the prescriptions would be offered this school year or next wasn’t immediately clear.

King is the only one of the three schools with a health center, primarily because it has more students who get free or reduced-price lunch, said Lisa Belanger, who oversees Portland’s student health centers.

Five of the 134 students who visited King’s health center during the 2006-07 school year reported having sexual intercourse, said Amanda Rowe, lead nurse in Portland’s school health centers.

Barack Hussein Obama is a radical leftwing democrat from Chicago, a city where private ownership of handguns is banned. But the upcoming Pennsylvania primary will play a crucial role in the bitterly contested race for the democrat party’s nomination, and Obama, as the Politico reports, is not letting his record of total and complete support for gun control and gun confiscation stop him from going after the votes of Pennsylvania gun owners.

After all, Obama knows just how stupid those deer hunting hicks really are. All he has to do is make a deal to gain the endorsement of a backwoods democrat state rep from Elk County to vouch for his acceptability to sportsmen, and do a little of his personally patented fancy footwork around the issue, and he’ll get plenty of rube votes.

He’s not pro-Gun Control. Goodness gracious, mercy me, no! He’s a Constitutional Law professor, and supports the individual right to keep and bear arms (for hunting and target shooting). He’s merely for “reasonable and common sense” regulations, which you can bet will limit you to owning very limited types and calibers of firearms and ammunition, and which will allow you to own guns as long as you obtain the necessary permits and register each and every one, and then keep them locked up, inaccessible, and unusable except at the properly licensed shooting range or hunting facility at which you actually be permitted to use them under proper supervision, of course.

Barack Obama did not hunt or fish as a child. He lives in a big city. And as an Illinois state legislator and a U.S. senator, he consistently backed gun control legislation.

But he is nevertheless making a play for pro-gun voters in rural Pennsylvania.

By highlighting his background in constitutional law and downplaying his voting record, Obama is engaging in a quiet but targeted drive to win over an important constituency that on the surface might seem hostile to his views.

The need to craft a strategy aimed at pro-gun voters underscores the potency of the issue in Pennsylvania, which claims one of the nation’s highest per capita membership rates in the National Rifle Association.

It also could provide clues as to whether Obama, as one of the Senate’s more liberal members, can position himself as an acceptable choice to a conservative-minded demographic in later primary contests and in the general election.

“Guns are a cultural lens through which they view candidates,” said Jim Kessler, vice president for policy at Third Way, a progressive think tank. “If you are seen as way off on that issue, then you seem way off on everything. If you are seen as OK, if the lens is clearer, then they continue to look at you and size you up on other things.”

“For Obama, who is less known and is from Chicago, a city guy and an African American, the feeling is that he is anti-gun,” Kessler continued. “By handling the Second Amendment correctly, he starts to get a hearing among these folks.”

Obama aides would not discuss the campaign’s strategy. While the effort so far in Pennsylvania appears modest, it is noteworthy for a race that has largely avoided such direct engagement with gun owners.

The campaign has asked gun rights advocates like state Rep. Dan Surra, a Democrat from rural Elk County with an “A+” rating from the NRA, to form a coalition of supporters who can vouch for Obama.

“It is clear out there that I am for Obama, and they have reached out to me as a sportsman and a gun owner,” Surra said Thursday. “There has been an outreach to pro-gun legislators, pro-gun people who are sympathetic to Obama’s message.”

The campaign sent an e-mail this week to the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs, saying it would “appreciate all sportsmen taking time to learn the facts: Our candidate strongly supports the right and traditions of sportsmen throughout Pennsylvania and the United States of America.”

And with an endorsement last month from Sen. Bob Casey Jr., Obama got a boost within a community that the Pennsylvania Democrat has courted assiduously. As part of an initiative to move beyond his party’s traditional bases during the 2006 Senate campaign, Casey visited stock car races, demolition derbies and gun clubs. Campaign operatives to both senators are now working closely together.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton does not appear to be making the same level of effort. She has reminded audiences in the last few months that she learned to shoot a gun during childhood vacations in Scranton and bagged a duck as an adult. But neither the state Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs nor her pro-gun Democratic supporters have heard of any specific campaign outreach. …

Obama has long backed gun-control measures, including a ban on semiautomatic weapons and concealed weapons, and a limit on handgun purchases to one a month. He has declined to take a stance on the legality of the handgun prohibition in Washington, D.C., which the U.S. Supreme Court is reviewing, although Obama has voiced support for the right of state and local governments to regulate guns.

In the Senate, he and Clinton broke on one vote, in July 2006. Siding with gun-rights advocates, Obama voted to prohibit the confiscation of firearms during an emergency or natural disaster. Clinton was one of 16 senators to oppose the amendment.

A two-page white paper on Obama’s website doesn’t mention his voting record.

Instead, he introduces himself as a former constitutional law professor who “believes the Second Amendment creates an individual right, and he greatly respects the constitutional rights of Americans to bear arms.”

“He will protect the rights of hunters and other law-abiding Americans to purchase, own, transport, and use guns for the purposes of hunting and target shooting,” the paper states. “He also believes that the right is subject to reasonable and common sense regulation.”

Melody Zullinger, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs who received the Obama campaign e-mail on his gun record, said Obama sounds like he is “speaking out of both sides of his mouth.”

“I was at one of our county meetings last night and I mentioned this to [federation members],” Zullinger said Friday of the Obama outreach. “Everyone basically blew it off and weren’t buying it.”

Obama’s approach is similar to one advocated by Third Way, which issued a seven-step blueprint in 2006 to close the “gun gap” with Republicans. In a memo on its website, the group urges progressives to avoid silence on gun issues, and instead “redefine the issue in a way that appeals to gun owning voters.”

Paula Eriksson, VP Corporate Communications, V&S Absolut Spirits explains why Americans shouldn’t get bent out of shape over Absolut’s playful rearrangement in its Mexican advertising of the United States’ border with Mexico.

The In An Absolut World advertising campaign invites consumers to visualize a world that appeals to them — one they feel may be more idealized or one that may be a bit “fantastic.” As such, the campaign will elicit varying opinions and points of view. We have a variety of executions running in countries worldwide, and each is germane to that country and that population.

This particular ad, which ran in Mexico, was based upon historical perspectives and was created with a Mexican sensibility. In no way was this meant to offend or disparage, nor does it advocate an altering of borders, nor does it lend support to any anti-American sentiment, nor does it reflect immigration issues. Instead, it hearkens to a time which the population of Mexico may feel was more ideal.

As a global company, we recognize that people in different parts of the world may lend different perspectives or interpret our ads in a different way than was intended in that market. Obviously, this ad was run in Mexico, and not the US — that ad might have been very different.

Until I see the Absolut ad featuring the liberal who panders to special interest groups treated as below, I’m afraid I’m going to be purchasing Grey Goose.

Original posting.

The Nantucket-Treweryn Beagles starting the Three-Couple competition

We’ve spent much of the last two days attending the Spring Trial Pack Competitions of the National Beagle Club at the Institute in Aldie.

The Wolver Beagles returning from competing in the Three-Couple.

Karen and I follow the two packs illustrated above, who did not win.

Friday’s Three-Couple Pack competition was won by the York County, Pennsylvania’s Holly Hill Beagles, who ran a cottontail for 45 minutes and then captured the quarry, alive! People are still talking about that one.

John Borsa, Master of Beagles, holds the captive safely, Whip Amy Burke stands by his side. (Photo: Russell Wagner)

Socialized health care in Massachusetts produces strained resources. Who would have imagined that? Certainly not the New York Times.

Once they discover that she is Dr. Kate, the supplicants line up to approach at dinner parties and ballet recitals. Surely, they suggest to Dr. Katherine J. Atkinson, a family physician here, she might find a way to move them up her lengthy waiting list for new patients.

Those fortunate enough to make it soon learn they face another long wait: Dr. Atkinson’s next opening for a physical is not until early May — of 2009.

In pockets of the United States, rural and urban, a confluence of market and medical forces has been widening the gap between the supply of primary care physicians and the demand for their services. Modest pay, medical school debt, an aging population and the prevalence of chronic disease have each played a role.

Now in Massachusetts, in an unintended consequence of universal coverage, the imbalance is being exacerbated by the state’s new law requiring residents to have health insurance.

Since last year, when the landmark law took effect, about 340,000 of Massachusetts’ estimated 600,000 uninsured have gained coverage. Many are now searching for doctors and scheduling appointments for long-deferred care.

Here in western Massachusetts, Dr. Atkinson’s bustling 3,000-patient practice, which was closed to new patients for several years, has taken on 50 newcomers since she hired a part-time nurse practitioner in November. About a third were newly insured, Dr. Atkinson said. Just north of here in Athol, the doctors at North Quabbin Family Physicians are now seeing four to six new patients a day, up from one or two a year ago.

Dr. Patricia A. Sereno, state president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, said an influx of the newly insured to her practice in Malden, just north of Boston, had stretched her daily caseload to as many as 22 to 25 patients, from 18 to 20 a year ago. To fit them in, Dr. Sereno limits the number of 45-minute physicals she schedules each day, thereby doubling the wait for an exam to three months.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get the government to force those rich investment bankers and hedge fund managers to pay for your health care? Unfortunately, as the late Ayn Rand pointed out, that inevitably means then that you have to pay for health care for every unemployed wino and heroin addict yourself, and you get to stand behind them in line the next time you’re sick.

The New York Times warns of the latest occupational health peril: blogging.

They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

When Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin (who each do about five or ten times the work most of the rest of us do) start falling over, then I will begin to worry.

London Times:

The internet (as we know it currently) could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day – the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.

Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realised the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs – enough to make a stack 40 miles high.

This meant that scientists at Cern – where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 – would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.

This is because the internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.

By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.

Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”

That network, in effect a parallel internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.

When Charlton Heston was elected president of the National Rifle Association in June of 1998, he posed holding a rifle, and delivered a jab at then-President Clinton, saying, “America doesn’t trust you with our 21-year-old daughters, and we sure, Lord, don’t trust you with our guns.”

Bloomberg has a nice tribute:

Heston stood 6-feet-3-inches, and his baritone voice, iron jaw, aquiline nose and rippling muscles lent masculine strength and sex appeal to many of his roles, any number of which he played bare-chested. He gained fame as Moses in the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille epic, “The Ten Commandments” and owned the role ever after.

Heston also played Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Thomas More, John the Baptist, Cardinal Richelieu and Mark Anthony among dozens of others on stage, television and the movies. He made more than 70 films.

He was the “actor of choice for historical drama” in the 1950s and ’60s, Robert Osborne, host of Turner Classic Movies on cable television and a columnist for the Hollywood Reporter, once said of him.

“Charlton Heston looked like he came from another era,” Osborne said in a June 2006 interview. “He looked like he was kind of chiseled out of granite. He looked heroic.” …

..his conversion to conservatism began in 1964, when he saw a billboard for Republican Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. It said: “In your heart, you know he’s right.” Concluded Heston: “He IS right.”

Heston’s career surged in an era when “the difference between good and evil, and the eventual triumph of the good, the reward of the virtuous, of the heroic, was almost always recognized,” he said in a 1995 interview. “Yet, more and more, we see films made that diminish the American experience and example, and sometimes trash it completely.”

Heston saw a cultural war “raging across our land, storming our values, assaulting our freedoms, killing our self confidence,” he said in speeches.

He decried affirmative action and feminism, complained of bloated government. And he changed his mind about gun control, becoming a vehement opponent of it.

Heston became president of the National Rifle Association in 1998, holding the job until 2003 and touring the country protesting efforts to restrict gun ownership. He developed a mantra dear to NRA crowds: Raising a rifle overhead he would shout that the only way gun-control advocates could take it would be to pry it “from my cold, dead hands.”

In defiance of President Bill Clinton’s call for increased gun controls, NRA members sometimes put bumper stickers on their cars that read “Charlton Heston is My President.”

Even the Washington Post printed an admiring tribute:

He was the hawk.

He soared. In fact, everything about him soared. His shoulders soared, his cheekbones soared, his brows soared. Even his hair soared.

And for a good two decades, Charlton Heston, who died Saturday at 84, was the ultimate American movie star. In a time when method actors and ethnic faces were gradually taking over, Heston remained the last of the ramrod straight, flinty, squinty, tough-as-old-hickory movie guys.

He and his producers and directors understood his appeal, and used it for maximum effect on the big technicolor screen. Rarely a doubter, never a coward, inconceivable as a shirker, he played men of granite virtue no matter the epoch. He played commanders, Biblical prophets, Jewish heroes, tough-as-nails cowpokes, calm aviators, last survivors, quarterbacks and a president or two.

Later in his life, he took that stance into politics, becoming president of the National Rifle Association just when anti-gun attitudes were reaching their peak. Pilloried and parodied, lampooned and bullied, he never relented, he never backed down, and in time it came to seem less an old star’s trick of vanity than an act of political heroism. He endured, like Moses. He aged, like Moses. And the stone tablet he carried only had one commandment: Thou shalt be armed. It can even be said that if the Supreme Court in June finds a meaning in the Second Amendment consistent with NRA policy, that he will have died just short of the Promised Land — like Moses.

I’ve had a link to the NRA membership page with a picture of Chuck Heston on it in the right hand column, since I started this blog.

The New York Times reports that Hillary has finally released her family tax returns, and they demonstrate that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet better start worrying about their spots on the Forbes 400 List of Richest Americans should Hillary win this coming November.

The Clintons’ charitable donations have not always matched their rhetoric, typically going only to their personal foundation, but their foundation’s disbursements have dramatically increased recently for some reason.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and former President Bill Clinton released tax data Friday showing they earned $109 million over the last eight years, an ascent into the uppermost tier of American taxpayers that seemed unimaginable in 2001, when they left the White House with little money and facing millions in legal bills.

The bulk of their wealth has come from speaking and book-writing, which together account for almost $92 million, including a $15 million advance — larger than previously thought — from Mr. Clinton’s 2004 autobiography, “My Life.” The former president’s vigorous lecture schedule, where his speeches command upwards of $250,000, brought in almost $52 million.

During that time, the Clintons paid $33.8 million in federal taxes and claimed deductions for $10.2 million in charitable contributions. The contributions went to a family foundation run by the Clintons that has given away only about half of the money they put into it, and most of that was last year, after Mrs. Clinton declared her candidacy. …

Mr. Clinton has earned $29.6 million from two books, “My Life” and “Giving,” while Mrs. Clinton has collected $10.5 million from two books, “Living History” and “It Takes a Village.” She donated $1.1 million from book proceeds to charity.

Mr. Clinton last year earned $6.3 million from “Giving,” a book on philanthropy, and reported giving $1 million of that to charity. In the book, Mr. Clinton espouses his own formula for charitable donations, recommending that people give away 5 percent of their income to charitable causes. “If giving by the wealthiest Americans even approached these levels,” he wrote, “I’m convinced it would spark an enormous outpouring of contributions from Americans of more modest means.”

The pace of the Clintons’ own charitable giving, which peaked last year at $3 million, has not always kept up with their income, and by at least one measure, has sometimes fallen short of the spirit of the 5 percent goal, which is to get money into the hands of charities that do good works.

In 2002, for instance, they reported income totaling $9.5 million and $115,000 in gifts to charity. In other years, they have given much larger amounts to their family foundation, but it has yet to disburse all of the money.

The Clintons took a tax deduction in 2004 for $2.5 million in charitable gifts, $2 million of which went to their family foundation, which as a tax-exempt nonprofit is considered a charity under the tax code. That same year, the foundation gave away just $221,000 to charitable groups, according to its tax return.

A representative of the Clintons said that when they and their foundation filed their 2007 tax returns, the records would show that all of the $3 million they gave to the foundation last year had been passed on to other charities. That will account for more than half of all the charitable donations that the foundation has made since 2001, according to a review of its tax returns.