This is in reference to this.

Steve Miller and Bones at the Secane Station Tavern. My print column is up.

UPDATE: Though the reaction to this column was generally positive there was this email:

Dear Gil:

Although that story is meant to be heartwarming, I think it conveys a cycle of disrespect for that animal.  How willingly he was ready to give it to anyone that called about it and then to a drunk couple in a bar. Then he made sure he got a good’s night sleep even though he knew there were problems when the dog got to the couple’s home. Yes, indeed. I can see he has the best interests of the animal in mind.

If you want to write a story of animal rescue, write about the animal rescue groups that work tirelessly to save and place these animals in loving homes. There is a process to animal adoption and ownership, a process to introducing pets into a home . We need to talk about responsibility to pets and not recycling them back into potentially unfit homes.

Karen Ditomo

I say: Nah, it's always a better story when the dog goes to the bar. But thanks anyway, Karen, for the advice. 

The best part about this is that it's real

Oberlin College in Ohio has nothing on our very own Swarthmore College when it comes to concern about hate crimes on campus, real or imagined. My print column is up.

UPDATE: Michele Malkin is also on the story and has even bigger doubts about it than I do. She has good reason.

The truth is that Oberlin has been a hotbed of dubious hate crime claims, dating back to the late 1980s and 1990s, when I was a student on campus. In 1988, giant signs reading "White Supremacy Rules (Kill All Niggers)" and "White Supremacy Rules, (F**k (slashed out and replaced with 'Kill') All Minorities)" were hung anonymously at the Student Union building. It has long been suspected that minority students themselves were responsible.

In 1993, a memorial arch on campus dedicated to Oberlin missionaries who died in the Boxer Rebellion was defaced with anti-Asian graffiti. The venomous messages -- "Death to Chinks Memorial" and "Dead chinks, good chinks" -- led to a paroxysm of protests, administration self-flagellation and sanctimonious resolutions condemning bigotry. But the hate crime was concocted by an Asian-American Oberlin student engaged in the twisted pursuit of raising awareness about hate by faking it, Tawana Brawley-style.

And so it goes...

Here's a preview of tomorrow's print column on the sequester and the federal budget.

UPDATE: Happy Sequester Day. Here's my print column

In coming Treasury Sec. Jack Lew impresses Rich Lowry with his ability to "get paid."

Some guys have it, and some don’t. I’m referring to that special quality that makes powerful institutions want to throw fistfuls of dollars at them in senseless acts of high-priced beneficence.

Jack Lew has it like nobody’s business. You might think the bespectacled treasury-secretary nominee is just another brainy budget wonk and miss the animal magnetism that makes his employers lose all sense of financial proportion around him, paying him astronomical sums, forgiving his loans, and granting him generous golden parachutes.

Yes, Jack Lew is a rare talent — at the art of getting paid. 

Good stuff. Read it all.

Barack Obama is losing Bob Woodward...

Obama Is Showing 'A Kind Of Madness I Haven't Seen In A Long Time'

Which begs the question: When was the last time he saw this kind of madness from a sitting president. Nixon? Carter?

 

Terry Silva, the former solicitor for the Chichester School District, is back in the news. A renowned dog lover, she is charged with the inhumane treatment of 28 German shepherds which she kept locked up in her law office building.

The building is now closed to human habitation.

My print column is up.

* h/t DT editor Joe Hart

UPDATE: Special added bonus... Sunday's print column on how a concealed carry permit helped an innocent man beat a bad rap.

Governing is not about blaming. It's about choosing. Phil Gramm on the coming sequester.

While Mr. Obama may choose to make the cuts ordered by the sequester in the most painful way possible, the best alternative—which is practiced every year to some extent—is allowing federal agencies to transfer funds among individual programs with congressional approval or by rearranging priorities as part of the March 27 resolution to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year.

That doesn't sound like a herculean task to Americans who make hard choices every day. Their choices have become harder and more frequent because the country's political leaders seem unwilling to do the same in Washington.

What is this man so happy about? Apparently, he's delighted to be under arrest for killing two Bernese Mountain dogs that were family pets.

Well, they were allegedly trying to herd his sheep. 

George Will on the torture of solitary confinement.

“Zero Dark Thirty,” a nominee for Sunday’s Oscar for Best Picture, reignited debate about whether the waterboarding of terrorism suspects was torture. This practice, which ended in 2003, was used on only three suspects. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of American prison inmates are kept in protracted solitary confinement that arguably constitutes torture and probably violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishments...”

... Supermax prisons isolate inmates from social contact. Often prisoners are in their cells, sometimes smaller than 8 by 12 feet, 23 hours a day, released only for a shower or exercise in a small fenced-in outdoor space. Isolation changes the way the brain works, often making individuals moreimpulsive, less able to control themselves. The mental pain of solitary confinement is crippling: Brain studies reveal durable impairments and abnormalities in individuals denied social interaction. Plainly put, prisoners often lose their minds.

 Read it all.

Ed Rendell says America isn't great anymore because politicians aren't spending enough. How wrong is our former governor? Let me count the ways.