There's a bizarre connection between the recent Illinois campus rampage and last year's massacre at Virginia Tech. The Illinois shooter bought his guns from the same source, according to CNN:

DEKALB, Illinois (CNN) -- A firearms dealer in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Friday confirmed a bizarre link between the graduate student accused of killing five people at Northern Illinois University and the gunman in last year's deadly shootings at Virginia Tech.

A Web site used to buy gun accessories by Steven Kazmierczak is owned by the same company that operates a site patronized by Seung-Hui Cho, the company said.

Kazmierczak ordered two 9 mm Glock magazines and a holster for a Glock handgun from the Web site February 4, said a statement released by TGSCOM Inc.

He received them February 12, two days before the NIU shootings, it said.

"TGSCOM Inc. also operates the Web site used by Seung-Hui [Cho] to purchase a firearm used in the Virginia Tech shootings last April," the statement said.

Cho killed 32 people before turning a gun on himself in that incident.

I doubt that this is some hideous coincidence. My personal hypothesis is that he bought them from that source on purpose and planned the attack as a copycat. With the way the media gave everything the Virginia Tech shooter wanted in fame and attention, it's no shock that someone would repeat a similar massacre.

According to Business Week, many economists are second guessing free trade:

Many ordinary Americans have long been suspicious of free trade, seeing it as a destroyer of good-paying jobs. American economists, though, have told a different story. For them, free trade has been the great unmitigated good, the force that drives a country to shed unproductive industries, focus on what it does best, and create new, higher-skilled jobs that offer better pay than those that are lost. This support of free trade by the academic Establishment is a big reason why Presidents, be they Democrat or Republican, have for years pursued a free-trade agenda. The experts they consult have always told them that free trade was the best route to ever higher living standards.

But something momentous is happening inside the church of free trade: Doubts are creeping in. We're not talking wholesale, dramatic repudiation of the theory. Economists are, however, noting that their ideas can't explain the disturbing stagnation in income that much of the middle class is experiencing. They also fear a protectionist backlash unless more is done to help those who are losing out. "Previously, you just had extremists making extravagant claims against trade," says Gary C. Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "Now there are broader questions being raised that would not have been asked 10 or 15 years ago."

I'm thinking this may be a regular occurence during the next few months of campaigning: Strange pictures of John McCain. Since the campaigning will likely be style over substance, this will hurt McCain if he's running against a sleak, young and good looking Barack Obama.

This portrait of McCain reminding me a bit of the talking pictures that have been a regular feature on Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

Am I the only one who thinks John McCain looks a little sinister in this victory shot?

This post was cross posted at my Blogspot blog.

Marvel Editor in Chief Joe Quesada showed up on the Colbert Report to discuss the return of Captain America in the form of Cap's old sidekick, Bucky Barnes. It's a pretty entertaining clip, and it's nice to see that Quesada is fast enough to keep up with a professional satirist.

Another classic from the humorists at the Onion. I won't spoil it for you, but I will say that the Great Lawyer came and he was....silky.


Mysterious Traveler Entrances Town With Utopian Vision Of The Future

The music industry is hurting. This isn't a shocker for anyone who has paid attention for the last 8 years, a period by which we have seen the evolution of music from being pushed in $18.99 compact disc units to being available on 30  GB iPods. The music industry never had to face anything like this before, and the entire business model that had been used for artists from Elvis Presley to Eminem is now being shaken.

I'm not a businessperson by any means, and my experience in such matters is still being built. However, from my humble perspective, it seems to me that the entire entertainment industry should say goodbye to the days of one monolithic means of distribution. Like the publishing industry, where magazines can be free online with advertisements, viewable online by membership or not online at all apart from a website with information on how to subscribe, where books can be found in the traditional format, on audiobooks on CD or through services like iTunes and Audible or through a .pdf file, the music industry should embrace the fact that we live in an age where there are as many choices for ways of obtaining information as there is information to obtain.

So far the online models for legal distribution of music files have been sites like iTunes, which sells music directly, or Rhapsody, which allows access to a library of music for a subscribtion fee. This have been successful, but not nearly as well used as torrent sites or peer-to-peer programs like Frostwire. This could change with the addition of the program QTRAX, which provides users with free, P2P music legally by obtaining money through advertisements, in the same way an online magazine such as Slate or, yes, Townhall pays for itself.

I never thought of this, but when I heard it seemed like common sense and a win-all formula for all involved. People do not seem to mind advertisements, as evidenced by the success of everything from cable TV to online magazines. If there were a public antipathy towards ads, PBS would be the highest-rated network on cable. With the formula adopted by QTRAX, musicians would still make money, but more in the way a writer like Christopher Hitchens makes money through his Slate column.

I want good music to continue, and I don't want the musicians who make it to be homeless. If a method of distribution doesn't come to pass that allows them to get make a profit from their hard work, they'll always be able to rely on concerts and T-shirts.

William Kristol's newest column for the New York Times took Bill Clinton to task for his comments implying that Barack Obama was a Jesse Jackson-like candidate a time when many Clinton-era Democrats are supporting him;

Right now, Hillary Clinton is ahead in the polls in almost all the big states voting. She is a tough and capable campaigner, and she may be able to hold on to those leads. But it is now clear that putting her in the White House brings a hyperactive Bill back in with her. Who needs it? Liberals and Democrats can get basically the same policies without the Clinton baggage, and in choosing Obama, they can nominate a more electable candidate.

So Hillary’s advantage in the polls will, I suspect, erode. The erosion could be hastened by the expected endorsement of Obama by Ted Kennedy on Monday. It could be helped further along if Al Gore hops aboard the Obama bandwagon later in the week. Meanwhile, Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader during most of the Clinton presidency, is actively supporting Obama. Talk to Democrats in D.C., and it’s amazing how many who know the Clintons well — many of whom worked in the Clinton administration — are eager that they not return to the White House.

This week, the Clinton team will dump every bit of opposition research it has on Obama. We’ll see how Obama responds.

Mark Hemingway at National Review is saying he may:

After skipping the event last year, I just heard that McCain purchased a booth at CPAC, the annual conservative gathering in Washington coming up two weeks from now. CPAC attendees are pretty hard core conservatives — not exactly McCain's base. Romney won the straw poll there last year, and at one point, McCain was actually booed by the crowd when they announced the poll results. Then again, CPAC is a few days after Super Tuesday, so it's possible McCain could have locked up the nomination by then. It'll be interesting to see how much of an olive branch to conservatives this is perceived to be.

It could potentially look bad for McCain if he shows up at the event and Ann Coulter or someone else repeats the Faggot Gaffe of last year, but subtracting that there are alot of benefits for McCain in making nice with conservatives.

Just use the Dowd-O-Tron and you'll have your own New York Times column.

From Reuters:

"We cannot ignore the recent improvements both in the security and political situation in Iraq," Staffan de Mistura, head of the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), said in a address to the Security Council.

Indeed, according to the article, one of the dominant factors behind increased progress in Iraq is that the surge has been working;

Reasons for the reduced level of violence include the increased presence of U.S. and other troops, a ceasefire declared by Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army militia and increased cooperation with Iraq's neighbors, he said.

I couldn't do what Jonah Goldberg does in the following video. I'm just not that talented verbally or patient enough to go up against a studio audience and a host who have no interest at all in contemplating my argument. If you want to hear Goldberg make his case much more calmly and less chopped up, you can hear his recent appearance on Dennis Prager's radio show.

Apparently I'm in the Townhall.com Magazine! My copy is in Seattle, a couple hundred or so miles away, and as such I haven't seen it. I would like to welcome warmly any visitors that have come to this blog for the first time after reading my article.

Hopefully I won't scare you away (and if I don't do it, Scatbug is sure to make you think twice about Townhall).

Thanks for reading!

Hitchens' recent column in the Wall Street Journal is similiar to his Slate piece on Barack Obama and race but is more all-incomposing, bringing in Rudy Giuliani's Italianism and the fact that his name ends in a vowel as well as Hillary Clinton's gender in order to illustrate how nonsensical the entire notion of identity politics is.

Take away paragraphs:

What are we trying to "get over" here? We are trying to get over the hideous legacy of slavery and segregation. But Mr. Obama is not a part of this legacy. His father was a citizen of Kenya, an independent African country, and his mother was a "white" American. He is as distant from the real "plantation" as I am. How -- unless one thinks obsessively about color while affecting not to do so -- does this make him "black"?

Far from taking us forward, this sort of discussion actually keeps us anchored in the past. The enormous advances in genome studies have effectively discredited the whole idea of "race" as a means of categorizing humans. And however ethnicity may be defined or subdivided, it is utterly unscientific and retrograde to confuse it with color. The number of subjective definitions of "racist" is almost infinite but the only objective definition of the word is "one who believes that there are human races."

Hitchens really is brilliant.

I've found a rather bizarre paradox present since moving to California from Washington. The government as well as businesses in California seem to be absolutely obsessed with global warming, and just about every new product that is marketed is marketed as somehow fighting the phantom menace of global warming.

Unfortunately, it appears that this conscientious attitude isn't being shared when it comes to other humans. Many outlying areas, such as in parts of Oakland and Fruitvale, are filled with sketchy neighborhoods that look like they've been abandoned by the rest of the population. There are homeless throughout the entire Bay Area, to a degree much more depressing than in Seattle. Whereas alot of homeless in Seattle were talking to themselves and looked like they were a little crazy, many of the homeless in SF seem disturbingly normal.

Global warming to me still seems like another menacing call of destruction by the mainstream media, and none of it has affected me. I find it much more concerning that alot of people in such a proudly liberal and progressive area are living in filth.