More worthy than Justice John Paul Stevens's long-winded rant dissenting from Parents v. Seattle School District was Chief Justice John Roberts's one-sentence aphorism: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." In the name of Brown v. Board of Education, which eliminated a government-devised racial formula for schools, Stevens endorses the idea of government-devised racial formulas for schools. There and then, in Topeka, Kansas in 1954, the formula was black children go here, white children go there. In Seattle in 2007, the formula is more complex than Topeka's in 1954, but it still obsesses over race to produce a desired outcome for a classroom's racial make-up.

"The Court has changed significantly since it decided School Comm. of Boston in 1968," John Paul Stevens whined in his dissent in yesterday's Parents v. Seattle School District. "It was then more faithful to Brown and more respectful of our precedent than it is today. It is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision." Thank God it's 2007 and not 1975. It's called progress.

The "Jason," the "Freddy Krueger," the "Michael Myers" of bills is finally dead. Senate backers of the legislation to reward law-breaking immigrants with citizenship (and to make suckers out of law-abiding immigrants) failed to muster sixty votes in the Senate to invoke cloture. Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, noting the public's disgust with the bill and Congress's repeated attempts to revive it, quipped: "What part of 'no' don’t we understand?" Like Jason, Freddy, and hockey-masked Mike, amnesty proponents don't understand defeat. Like the Terminator, they'll be back. But, until the sequel at least, they're toast.

I'm going to the rock n roll show this evening, which excuses me, the blog gods decree, from blogging for the rest of the day. For $45, I get to see Wilco live. If you don't know Wilco, they are most famous for is being the least famous band to have an acclaimed major motion picture about them. They started out as an alt-country band, morphed into an alternative rock act, and then changed again by adding effects and loops and all sorts of Pink Floydish stuff. As a way of musical introduction, here is a song from each of their six studio albums that I am hoping to hear tonight at the rock n roll show:

* On and On and On (2007)
* The Late Greats (2005)
* Poor Places (2002)
* Shot in the Arm (1999)
* The Lonely One (1996)
* Dash 7 (1995)

Hello, Cleveland!

Wrestling is Vince McMahon's business, which makes it his business whether he tests for drugs or not. But after all the deaths, and now after a pair of murders and a suicide, it's bad business to tolerate drug use in wrestling. That includes steroids, a substance that helped make the WWF in the 1980s but nearly brought it down in the 1990s.

Painkillers help wrestlers endure 300-day annual travel schedules. Steroids help them create superhero facades, pictures of health which mask the ill-health beneath. Other chemicals help them cope with the instant fame, familial separation, and other job stresses. But their use by so many high-profile wrestlers who have committed suicide, overdosed, suffered life-ending heart attacks, and now murdered, makes it important for Vince McMahon to institute a strict drug-testing policy. Why he--the guy who boldly admitted wrestling to be a work to make it mainstream entertainment--hasn't done this already is confusing.

I don't blame drugs for the murders-suicide. I blame Chris Benoit. Millions of people use drugs, after all, without murdering their wives and children. And before widespread drug use, sober--chemically speaking--people occasionally murdered their families. But with steroids found in Benoit's house, and the utter weirdness of the three killings, staggered as they were over a weekend, the suspicion of chemicals influencing judgment is strong. Drug use makes such murderous rages more prevalent. Drugs, even more so, methinks, than the easy availability of handguns, contributes to violent crime.

On the other hand, Benoit was coherent enough to send text messages that seemed a plea for help or at least a cry for investigation. The WWE defensively, but with some justification, maintains, "The physical findings announced by authorities indicate deliberation, not rage." The rest of the statement comes across as callously self-serving. It's damage-control mode, particularly with the suggestions that wrestling is connected with drugs, and that drugs were connected with these murders.

Drugs and alcohol give people a Mulligan. How many times have you heard, "It was the alcohol talking"? And it was. But it was the talker's decision to flow twelve beers into his mouth before flowing hateful speech out. Someone, and not an inanimate object, is responsible. But it is so much easier, particularly when an athletic "hero" is involved, to blame the gun, the coke, the circumstances, and not the actor.

Should chemicals be found in Chris Benoit's system, no doubt his fans will blame roid rage, Oxycontin, cocaine, or whatever. And it will perhaps have acted as a catalyst, or at least an integral part of the potent mix. But Chris Benoit, and not the drugs he chose to take, killed his wife and son.

Hey, Republicans: Are you willing to sacrifice conservative judges, tax cuts, and every other conservative cause for the president's big-government, nation-building, utopian dream of democratizing Iraq through occupation? A CNN/Opinion Research poll finds just 30 percent of Americans supporting the war in Iraq. This is the biggest issue facing America today, and Republicans are on the wrong side of it. They were on the wrong side of it when two-thirds of the country supported them, and they're on the wrong side of it now that two-thirds of the country is against them.

"For mine own good,
All causes shall give way: I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er."
--William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 160?

The alleged murder-suicide involving former WWF champion Chris Benoit, his wife, a former wrestler who went by the name Woman and had been married to wrestler Kevin Sullivan, and their son Daniel, should make wrestling promoters get serious about drug testing. If there's a "sport" in dire need of strict drug testing, it's sports-entertainment, wrestling. I use the qualifier "strict" because my sense is that the drug testing in wrestling is "sports entertainment" drug testing. It's all for show. Eddie Guerrero, Rick Rude, Miss Elizabeth, Curt Hennig, and Bam Bam Bigelow are a few of the casualties of the drug culture prevalent in professional wrestling. Take the deadly overdose totals of professional athletes in the four major sports, and it doesn't even equal overdose deaths in wrestling. When wrestlers merely killed themselves with drugs, some just chalked it up to the grimier side of the business--the road, separation from family, constant physical pain. Now that a wrestler has allegedly murdered his family--and I have to think that drugs were involved--it will be impossible to brush this under the rug. The "babyfaces" in wrestling storylines sometimes play "heels" outside the ring. WWE's Monday night tribute to Benoit aside, murdering your wife and child makes you a heel of the lowest order.

The most hoped-for and discussed reunions in rock is apparently a go. Led Zeppelin will reunite for a tribute concert to recently departed Atlantic Records boss Ahmet Ertegen, and then reportedly hit the road for a megatour. Alas, Robert Plant's voice has not, understandably (Think: Immigrant Song), aged well and John Bonham is twenty-seven years gone. But who cares about all that? This is Led Zeppelin! Son Jason, featured as a drum-playing tyke in The Song Remains the Same, is all grown up and will assume his dad's throne. Purists undoubtedly will say it isn't Led Zeppelin without John Bonham, but if Smashing Pumpkins and Wilco can tour with just two original members, and Guns n Roses with just one, then a Led Zeppelin tour with John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and John Bonham's son--Does he get his own cool Led Zep insignia like the other members?--should be immune from such charges. Is there any reason why such a tour, should it really take place, would not be the top-grossing concerts in history? I'm psyched--but in an I'll-believe-it-when-I-see-it way. Should the band be taking requests, these are the ten songs that I want to hear live.

One of the positive legacies of the Reagan Administration was its scuttling of the Fairness Doctrine. The law gave federal bureaucrats the power to determine whether broadcast media outlets met subjective criteria such as fairness and equal time. Alas, Diane Feinstein's conception of fairness is a lot different than mine. The senator added her voice Sunday to the growing number of legislators interested in reviving this bad law.

"I think there ought to be an opportunity to present the other side," Senator Diane Feinstein stated on Fox News. "And unfortunately, talk radio is overwhelmingly one way." Indeed, it is. But so is network news. So are the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and New York Times. So is, most outrageously, the government-supported National Public Radio.

Private entities are entitled to be unfair. It bothers me that the Boston Globe maintains the pretense of objectivity when it pursues a radical social agenda. My solution isn't to muzzle the Globe through legislation. Liberals face a similar problem in talk radio, but it's not the same. In contrast to print reporters and news anchors, talk radio hosts don't shield their political views. They are open. They tell everyone how conservative they are, even ones that are not very conservative at all do so. In contrast to the sometimes counterproductive but essentially benign complaints about the media from conservatives, liberals wish to illiberally shut up those who disagree with them.

Talk radio is overwhelmingly conservative because conservatives are overwhelmingly underrepresented in national magazines, major newspapers, and on television news. It's popular because it fills a vacuum. It caters to an audience that other mediums insult. It's also the case that the United States is a conservative country, a reality that liberals, especially ones living in the deep-blue urban reservations and college towns, are loathe to admit. The market determines success or failure in talk radio. Audiences just don't care for liberal talk radio.

Why have liberals failed so miserably in talk radio? My sense is that this relates to liberal embarrassment at the term "liberal," stubborn contentions that they're not liberals but centrists, and penchant for nuance when black-and-white does the trick. Talk-radio listeners like hosts loud and proud. Talk-radio listeners think middle-of-the-road is for rotting animal carcasses. Talk-radio listeners want it straight, not circuitous.

"Talk radio tends to be one-sided," Feinstein complains. "It also tends to be dwelling in hyperbole. It's explosive. It pushes people to, I think, extreme views without a lot of information." The Fairness Doctrine violates the First Amendment of the Constitution. How did Feinstein arrive at her "extreme view"?

William F. Buckley famously quipped that he'd rather be governed by the first few thousand names in the Boston phonebook than by the faculty of Harvard University. I'd take the constitutional wisdom of any random group of 535 talk-radio listeners over Feinstein and company in the Congress.

I was just talking the other day about the double standards of sports radio. Callers and hosts can rip Jason Giambi, Pacman Jones, Alex Rodriguez, and Kobe Bryant in the most vicious manner. But dare say something mildly critical of a host's colleague in broadcasting and you'll be cut off, lectured on what an awful person you are, and screamed at before the host hangs up. The same thing is at work among journalists covering current events. Investigate them and you are immediately anathema. That's why Bill Dedman's a brave man for publishing the political contributions of his colleagues in journalism on MSNBC.com.

If you recall, I produced a similar report on the political giving of employees at the top national universities in the lead-up to the 2004 election. At each of the twenty-five schools examined, donations to Kerry exceeded donations to Bush. The disparity was 302-1 at Princeton, 43-1 at MIT, and 9-1 at Duke. Diversity? Anyone? Anyone? Bill Dedman finds that among journalists, political diversity is not much better. Donations to liberals/Democrats exceeded donations to conservatives/Republicans among media types by a 9-1 ratio. Aside from appropriate questions of balance, the survey raises questions about the propriety of journalists demonstrating a rooting interest in candidates and causes that they cover. Don't they have rules against this? They should, but I'm glad that they don't, or that the rules in place aren't followed. The paper trail of donations gives media consumers a more accurate picture of the biases of the guardians of information.

Should we be shocked that the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, a former Carter speechwriter and '60s radical, gave $2000 to John Kerry? Is anyone surprised that all of the employees of Mayor Bloomberg's lucrative financial news service who made Dedman's list gave to Democrats? Or that MTV News alums Serena Altschul and Gideon Yago gave exclusively to liberals?

Yago's defensive response to MSNBC is classic. "I don't understand. Things that I do as a private citizen?," the former MTV star wonders. "I mean, what the f---, man?" What the chuck, indeed. Journalists highlight the political giving of businessmen, actors, and other "private citizens." Why not expose the political interests of the journalists who expose the political interests of everyone else?

Should restaurant owners decide if smoking is allowed on their properties, or should the government? New Hampshire, sadly, has decided the government paternalism should trump choice and property rights. If people truly did not want smoking in bars and restaurants, then proprietors would cater to that market demand rather than go under. People who want a smoke-free environment can already patronize restaurants that prohibit smoking. But busybodies can't stop there. They want every restaurant and bar to be the same. It's your health, but they know best.

New Hampshire's neighbors in Maine, inspired by local busybodies to the south in Massachusetts, enacted the first statewide prohibition on alcohol in 1851. Those Yankee busybodies are the political ancestors to the anti-smoking fanatics who seek to ban not alcohol from bars, but smoking. Neal Dow lives! He moved to New Hampshire, assumed a new name, and switched crusades.

The Granite State used to stand solid against the surrounding storm that is New England. The liberal winds coming from Massachusetts and Vermont couldn't move it an inch. Tax refugees from Massachusetts used to move there, providing the southern part of the state with a built-in conservative voting bloc. Bay Staters who didn't necessarily wish to move to New Hampshire registered their cars there, shopped there to avoid sales taxes, and bought booze there on Sundays to avoid the old blue laws.

Do they make conservatives like Bob Smith and Gordon Humphrey anymore? Do they make editors like William Loeb outside New Hampshire? Do any of the states in the northeast have the guts to outlaw the income tax, let alone the income tax and the sales tax? New Hampshire has a rich political tradition. I wish its future were worthy of its past.

New Hampshire is assimilating into New England. Gay marriage and anti-smoking laws today. An income tax and motorcycle-helmet laws tomorrow? What happened to the Free State Project? Live free or die? My hypothesis is when that Old Man of the Mountain came crashing down, so too did New Hampshire's cranky libertarian spirit.

Michael Bloomberg pulled a John Lindsay. He left the Republican party Tuesday after never really subscribing to the party's stated principles. Bloomberg supports gay marriage, abortion, open borders, gun control, fascistic smoking laws, and a host of other ideas popular among Democrats. Funny, none of the people who tried to ride Ron Paul--the guy who wants to abolish the IRS--out of the Republican Party last month engineered campaigns to eject Bloomberg. Nor should they have. Parties are political entities, not religious faiths. It's just interesting to note what's excommunicatable in the Church of Republicanism and what's not.

"It's Wrong to Vote on Rights," read the signs of opponents of allowing the citizens of Massachusetts to determine the law on gay marriage. On the contrary, it's right to vote on rights. Even though rights pre-exist government, voting--by citizens or their representatives--is how rights are made legal. Saying it's wrong to vote on rights betrays an ignorance of constitutional law, and, worse, reflects an authoritarian spirit that is too common on the Left.

All rights are voted on. The Bill of Rights, for instance, didn't fall from the heavens. Delegates, and then the states themselves, voted on it. Should we grow tired of the Second Amendment, the Tenth Amendment, or--gasp!--the First Amendment, we, the people, can abolish them. That would be unwise, but voters aren't forbidden from doing unwise things.

It's true that repealing or instituting rights should require extraordinary support, such as super-majorities in legislatures. Rights that can be made or unmade by a fifty-percent-plus-one vote aren't rights. They're laws. Rights are something greater than mere laws. The democratic hurdles rights have to clear before codification grants them their status as rights. When four judges decide something is a right, it lacks the moral force of a vast majority of a community coming to agreement. That's what is so illegitimate about four judges ordering the Massachusetts legislature to legalize gay marriage, and the subsequent decision by the legislature last week that the people will have no say in the gay marriage law that hovers over them. Though gay marriage never passed a single hurdle all other rights had to get over, they now possess the protection from attempts at repeal that real rights possess. In other words, it's hard to put the toothpaste back into the tube.

The libertarian mask worn by anti-vote proponents covers an authoritarian face, but not so much that a discerning individual can't spot the truth. Any homosexual couple can walk into any Unitarian church and get "married." They are free to do this just as everyone else is free to celebrate or deride or ignore their union. What the judge-made gay marriage law in Massachusetts is about is getting everyone else--the people gay activists won't let vote on the issue--to grant their imprimatur, and subsidy, to homosexual unions. This is an issue about force, not freedom. Gay activists want the surrounding community to endorse their same-sex unions. That this endorsement takes the form of tax breaks, work benefits, and various financial perks provided by the polis makes the issue that of one community, homosexuals, forcing its values on the rest of the community.

And hasn't this been the rallying cry of the gay Left: don't force your values on me. Perhaps it's still a principle that holds weight on the gay Left, a group intolerant of outsiders forcing morality upon them but tolerant of forcing their own morality on outsiders.

That bandits sacked the home of Yasser Arafat, who for years used his position of authority to loot funds designated for the Palestinian people, is fitting. It is also fitting that the masked terrorists stole Arafat's Nobel Peace Prize medal. Terrorism, not peace, is Arafat's real legacy.

Judges dictated the Massachusetts law redefining marriage to include same-sex unions. The people of Massachusetts, who affixed their signatures in record numbers to review the question, will not have the opportunity to vote on the legal definition of marriage in their state. This is because the state legislature, which has traditionally acted as a rubber stamp to any ballot initiative that meets legal muster, killed the ballot question which would have allowed the people to determine a law that governs them. Note that voting "yea" or "nay" was not to endorse or oppose gay marriage. It was just to say the people have a right to decide this controversial question. Liberals trust unelected judges. They fear the people.

"The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us," Vaclav Klaus writes in the Financial Times. He knows of what he speaks. He lived through communism. Now, he's making a comparison between it and the mania surrounding global warming. "As someone who lived under communism for most of his life," the Czech leader writes, "I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning."

If a car salesman were making a pitch, and frantically told you that you have to buy it right now or else, you might think the seller a con man. But when environmentalists sell their political program, they use these exact tactics. Buy it now or a catastrophe will befall us. Like the shady car salesman's modus operandi, this method is a way to induce an absence of well-considered thought. We act under threat, not thought, when we succumb to these methods.

Appeals to "everyone believes this" or "this is science" operate on about the same anti-intellectual, intimidatory plane. Klaus wisely counsels, "Let us resist the politicisation of science and oppose the term 'scientific consensus,' which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority."

Remember those socially awkward kids in the smart-kid classes who all wore black Joy Division t-shirts as if they were the school uniform? You do if you went to high school in the late 1980s. Well, now they have a movie about their hero.

Have you ever heard Joy Division's 1980 classic "Love Will Tear Us Apart"? It is one of the best songs ever recorded. Sonically and attitudinally it is the primordial ooze from which '80s alternative comes. One hears the lead bass, the occasional snare crash amidst the drummer constantly riding the high-hat, and atmospheric keyboards. It's been copied, and copied, and copied. It's The Cure. It's Echo and the Bunnymen. It's Morrissey. They've all taken bits and pieces from Joy Division. Hearing the haunting vocal for the first time made me wonder how its author avoided killing himself thus far. And then I heard of Ian Curtis's fate.

In 1980, on the eve of Joy Division's first American tour and a month before the release of "Love Will Tear Us Apart," Ian Curtis hung himself. Like Kurt Cobain, Curtis had the cry-for-help overdose before committing suicide. And like Cobain's mate Dave Grohl, who went on to success as/with the Foo Fighters, Curtis's mates carried on as New Order. That New Order enjoyed more mainstream success than Joy Division only makes Curtis's legend, amidst fans who savor being part of the underground, larger.

Now, Anton Corbijn, the acclaimed photographer and director of such music videos as U2's One, Coldplay's Talk and Joy Division's Atmosphere, has made a movie about Ian Curtis. It's called Control. And it debuted to acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. It won't enjoy widespread distribution to the fall, but, despite the many, many bad movies about rock musicians, I anxiously await a viewing. How wonderful it is that more than a quarter century after his death, Ian Curtis is remembered. How much better it would have been had he never killed himself. Alas, critics and fans alike prefer their rock geniuses to have left a youthful corpse.

"Surveying the scene, some people are provoked by the absence of order and coherence which appears to them to be its dominant feature: its wastefulness, its frustration, its dissipation of human energy, its lack not merely of a premeditated destination but even of any discernible direction of movement. It provides an excitement similar to that of a stock-car race; but it has none of the satisfaction of a well-conducted business enterprise. Such people are apt to exaggerate the curent disorder; the absence of plan is so conspicuous that the small adjustments, which restrain the chaos seem to them nugatory; they have no feeling for the warmth of untidiness but only for its inconvenience. But what is significant is not the limitations of their powers of observation, but the turn of their thoughts. They feel that there ought to be something that ought to be done to convert this so-called chaos into order, for this is no way for rational human beings to be spending their lives. Like Apollo when he saw Daphne with her hair hung carelessly about her neck, they sigh and say to themselves, 'What if it were properly arranged.'"
--Michael Oakeshott, On Being Conservative, 1956

Twenty years ago, Ronald Reagan uttered the most dramatic words of any president in my lifetime. "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Gorbachev declined. The people of Berlin, two-and-a-half years after Ronald Reagan called for the removal of the Berlin Wall, tore it down. Soviet imperialism left all sorts of monuments to its evil around Eastern Europe--the Brandenburg Gate, a mass grave in the Katyn Forest, the Stalin Monument once in Prague. Ronald Reagan left few monuments, but one rich legacy: freedom.

Need evidence of Republican dissatisfaction with Rudy McRomney? So unimpressed are the party faithful with the media-appointed frontrunners for the GOP nomination that Fred Thompson, an unannounced candidate who hasn't participated in any of the debates and has done little campaigning, polls a close second to Rudy in the LA Times/Bloomberg poll released today. McRomney trailed. The message to Rudy McRomney? To know you isn't to love you.

Three weeks ago I sensed another Harriet Miers moment coming on. A Harriet Miers moment is that I'm-mad-as-hell-and-I'm-not-gonna-take-it feeling, when conservatives yell out the window so loud that every one in Washington hears them. This phenomenon quashed the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court and now it has defeated President Bush's proposed liberalization of immigration law. The bill providing amnesty to illegal aliens outraged so many conservatives so deeply (and quite a few Americans who aren't conservatives) that this sure-thing has been derailed. Wouldn't it have been nice if conservatives had Harriet Miers moments on the prescription-drug plan, No Child Left Behind, Iraqi nation-building, McCain-Feingold restrictions on free speech, nationalization of airport security, and a hundred other missteps by this administration? Better late than never, I guess.

Will you indulge me while I defend left-wing bloggers? Joe Klein, of Primary Colors and Time magazine fame, defames them en masse in a recent column linked by DrudgeReport. "Beware the Bloggers' Bile," the headline warns. But evidence therein supporting the headline's claim is scant. Klein had reported that Rep. Jane Harman had voted for the bill to fund the Iraq war, printing a quote she had canned prior to her vote explaining why she had casted a "yea." The problem for Klein is that Harman, as is the prerogative of women, changed her mind. She actually voted against the measure.

"The next day," Klein notes, "I was blasted by a number of left-wing bloggers: Klein screwed up!" (He did.) He terms their response "free-range lunacy." But there is nothing insane about correcting a mistake. It's easy to believe that some of the responses to Klein were crazy (Welcome to the Internet, where anonymity brings the id out). But he doesn't offer examples that suggest this, leaving readers to wonder if it's Klein, rather than his critics, who has issues. "A reasonable reader might ask," Klein contends, "Why are the left-wing bloggers attacking you? Aren't you pretty tough on the Bush Administration? Didn't you write a few months ago that George W. Bush would be remembered as one of the worst Presidents in history?" What relevance does this have with his lazy reporting of an event before it occurred? Should the ideological good will accrued provide him a mulligan when he stumbles? This suggestion that Klein makes should be abhorrent to anyone who values truth, which is supposed to be his business. An error is no less an error no matter how many times you praise Barack Obama or damn George Bush.

If Klein's persecution complex weren't enough, he projects his critics' faults upon a group seemingly distant from this controversy: the right wing. I know. I know. The right wing, and not a lone Communist, killed President Kennedy. And a vast right-wing conspiracy, and not President Clinton's libido, was responsible for the Monica Lewinsky affair. But, in this case, blaming the Right for the Left's sins (which weren't really sins anyhow), is as bizarre as blaming right-wingers for Kennedy's death or Clinton's amours. Klein writes, "the left-liberals in the blogosphere are merely aping the odious, disdainful—and politically successful—tone that right-wing radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh pioneered.... Fury begets fury." Please.

Beware of the Bloggers' Bile? A better headline might have read, "Beware of Joe Klein's Thin Skin."

"To split or decentralize power is necessarily to reduce the absolute amount of power, and the competitive system is the only system designed to minimize by decentralization the power exercised by man over man."
--F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 1944

A coup can be made against the people running a government, or one can be made against the forms of the government itself. After failing at the first type of coup, Hugo Chavez has succeeded at the latter type. Hugo Chavez's government has seized people's land, shot demonstrators protesting it, and closed down a five-decade-old television station for insufficient support for it. Are socialism and democracy incompatible? Journalist W.H. Chamberlin, after investigating Stalin's Russia, felt his illusions shatter. He wrote, "socialism is certain to prove, in the beginning at least, the road NOT to freedom, but to dictatorship and counter-dictatorships, to civil war of the fiercest kind. Socialism achieved and maintained by democratic means seems definitely to belong to the world of utopias." Hugo Chavez, the military leader who attempted to seize power by coup in 1992 and bitterly complained when military leaders tried to do the same thing to him ten years later, is certainly shattering the illusions of many of his U.S. supporters. Either that, or they're rethinking their support of a free press to maintain the Chavez illusion.

This weekend, a plot to blow up JFK airport, and some surrounding neighborhoods, by igniting an underground jet-fuel line, was broken up through aggressive law-enforcement tactics. Ditto for the foiled plot to kill soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. In both instances, the use of informants was crucial in upsetting the plans of would-be terrorists. Since 9/11, there hasn't been a major attack within the United States by Islamic terrorists. This has not been the case for lack of effort. There have been many plots. But not one of the conspiracies got beyond the planning stages. Does not the Bush administration, amidst the frequent denunciations of its bone-headed war of choice in Iraq, deserve some credit for this?

It was forty years ago today that Sgt. Pepper struck up the band to play. That's right, The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band came out this day in 1967 (at least in the UK it did).

The album is the most celebrated Beatles album, but it's not their best. Enlightened critics tend to prefer Revolver. I like Abbey Road. Both, I think, are superior to Sgt. Pepper's. But only in a musical sense.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was a pop-culture phenomenon. Boxer Sonny Liston, hall-of-fame druggie William Borroughs, and satanist Aleister Crowley are among the figures who grace its arresting jacket. The LP art probably makes it the greatest album cover in rock history, which, when relating this to the album's popularity, shows the value of marketing. The Rolling Stones, if you remember, released Their Satanic Majesty's Request later that year, the cover of which is a total rip-off of Sgt. Pepper's. Two days after Sgt. Pepper's hit stores, Jimi Hendrix covered the title track live. With its June 1 release, the album served as the soundtrack to the Summer of Love.

Even the trivia surrounding the album has taken on a life of its own. Did you see that Paul, who died and had been replaced by the replacement Paul, had his back turned in a picture? And what about George's thumb pointing toward's the lyric "five o'clock," the time of real Paul's death? Do you know that actor Leo Gorcey had to be removed from the cover because he demanded payment?

What's amazing about Beatle albums, which hits home especially on Sgt. Pepper's, is the exclusion of singles. Albums were albums, and singles weren't welcome. The Beatles viewed it as a ripoff to release albums with songs already available on 45s. So, the Beatle songs from '67 that are most famous--Strawberry Fields Forever and All You Need Is Love--aren't on Sgt. Pepper's, even though many casual fans mistakenly believe that they are. So what's on Sgt. Pepper's? Ringo shines on With a Little Help from My Friends. The deep cut She's Leaving Home is one of the most underrated Lennon-McCartney collaborations. A Day in the Life is regarded by many to be the greatest song ever recorded, right down to its stubborn last note. Paul envisioned the album as a concept album, but beyond a few cuts nothing holds together. Paul, apparently, was the only Beatle interested in pursuing this.

Another amazing thing about the album is the quality of production. The crisp, clear sounds hit the ear better than anything today. Ringo's drums sound like, gasp, drums rather than a drum machine. Listen to the effects on "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" or the countdown on "A Day in the Life." It's awesome. So is the decision to delete the customary gaps between songs. Everything flows. George Martin rules.

Sgt. Pepper's is remembered so fondly because it marks the high-point of The Beatles. Though Lennon-McCartney continued to appear on the song credits, John and Paul rarely collaborated after Sgt. Pepper (and even A Day in the Life is just two songs strung together). John, though he contributed some great tracks to the white album, seems to lose interest in the Beatles thereafter. Paul tries for a repeat in Magical Mystery Tour, but it doesn't work so well, and its accompanying movie bombs--a new experience for the band with the golden touch. George grows, but his older Beatle brothers never really allow him a fair share of songs (so much so that he releases a triple album in 1970). The band continues to do great stuff, but the albums come yearly, and not every few months. The tours had stopped by '66. Songs, like "I Me Mine" and "You Never Give Me Your Money," come across as a soundtrack to a band breaking up. A few cuts on Let It Be sound like demos; several others on the white album would not have made the cut on earlier Beatles albums. But Sgt. Pepper's is The Beatles at the top of the world.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is its longevity. How many people in 1967 were still listening to music from 1927? Today, millions of people around the world will listen to an album older than me. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band has staying power like its last song's final note.