Victor Davis Hanson:

Listening to all of these bailouts, new subsidies, debt forgiveness plans, and novel spending ideas reminds one of the various wannabe emperors in the age of Pertinax at Rome, each on the dais bidding against each other with ever larger subsidies for the Praetorian Guard.

Lawrence Henry:

Bit by bit, two weeks by two weeks, my transplant gets further and further away. I have ceased to believe in physical redemption. I have lost my spiritual connections. . . .

ALONGSIDE MY DESK, I have a set of shelves filled with mementoes. Always, my eye falls on the same photo: My son Bud, age two, standing on Green Street in Charlestown in the sunshine, his hand resting on a sign post, watching the Bunker Hill Day parade. He's still baby blond, has a little smile on his face, he's still a little chubby. It tears at my heart to know how much I love him. . . .

Is this what life is about, to love so much and then to lose it all, bit by painful bit?

Later: Henry posted a regretful follow-up at AmSpec Blog yesterday:

I’ll be busy this week with a couple of minor surgeries – switching over from peritoneal to hemo dialysis. Your loving responses have humbled me with gratitude, and also made me realize what a complete horse’s ass I made of myself, popping off the way I did. “Writers write,” yes indeed, but more writers, myself included, ought to pay attention to Bill Wilson’s dictum, “Nothing pays off like restraint of tongue and pen.”

. . . I will pick up writing in two weeks, and I hope by that time I will write about something a lot more interesting than myself.

From Michael Rubin, who knows the subject.

Or, why Congress deserves its low approval rating.

Not long before the Senate passed the bailout package, Rich Lowry posted a list of non-bailout-related items likely to appear in the bill, among them one addressing "Wooden Arrows designed for use by children."

A few hours later Lowry posted an email from "an attorney at the U.S. Department of the Interior" explaining, "The purpose of the wooden arrow exclusion is to exempt toys from what is otherwise a hunting excise tax."

Mark Steyn (isn't it good to have him back?) responded that the attorney's explanation was

all well and good, but it misses the point. Whatever the merits or not of tax relief on kids' bows and arrows, it's got nothing to do with a Super-Duper-Mega-Ultra-Urgent Act-Now-Or-Else Save-The-Global-Economy Bailout Bill. No reasonable person would expect to find the urgent issue of toy arrows addressed in such a bill.

A few minutes later, Lowry posted an email from "[a] friend [of Lowry's] on Capitol Hill" noting that the wooden-arrow provision had "been included in every version of the tax relief extenders bill considered by the Senate, including the version that recently passed the Senate 93-2."

Steyn's reply:

Rich, your Capitol Hill pals should give it up. That last justification ("We have to stick it into this bloated 450-page bill that's got nothing to do with wooden arrows because we're correcting an error from the previous 450-page bill that had nothing to do with wooden arrows") only makes my point - that responsible government is impossible under this system. How many Senators read the bill they voted for or against?

Had I not read it (here) or heard it, I'd likely never have realized that "Torchwood" and "Doctor Who" are anagrams.

Thanks to an aside in a post by Mark Steyn, I learned today that Doctor Who is extremely popular among Britain's gays. And the sheer gorgeousness of John Barrowman (I'm straight, not blind) reminds me of a line from a comedian who wondered why so many great-looking men are gay: "Do they look in a mirror one day and say, 'This face is just too beautiful for women'?"

To benefit the BBC charity Children in Need, the network has produced two short episodes of Doctor Who that fit snugly into the storyline, and aired them during fundraising telethons. This one's from 2005, this one from 2007. They're up to the quality of the series, i.e., they're good.

Melanie Phillips on the growing popularity of "racist, anti-foreigner, anti-Muslim, anti-Jew and sometimes, indeed, neo-Nazi" parties in Europe:

The rise of these noxious groups is entirely due to the abandonment by social democratic parties of the defence of the nation and the right of individual peoples to their own cultures and self-government. . . .

The awful thing is that, as the far-right advances and social disorder increases – as it will -- muddled liberals and malign leftists will blame these political and social calamities on ‘the far right’. As a result, the steady encroachment of Islamism will proceed apace -- and anyone who objects will also be demonised as ‘the far right’. The rise of the neo-Nazis will thus turn the defence of democracy toxic. There is therefore a danger that the only people who will be fighting the Islamic fascists and in defence of the nation against the supranational supremacists will be the fascists.

If Quin Hillyer's right about the Senate bill, then he's right in his recommendation:

The Senate tomorrow will attach the Wall Street bailout to a "must pass" tax extender bill. This is dirty pool. When you are talking about the single most significant growth of government power EVER, you should let it sink or swim on its own. You don't attach it to a goodie basket and dare the other chamber to vote against it. To do so is a cheap, despicable tactic. It is the tactic of people without the courage of their convictions -- the tactic of cowards. Yes, cowards. I am utterly disgusted with McConnell and the entire Senate leadership. This is not the way to handle legislations as serious as this is. If the House GOP had any guts, then if the Senate sends the House the bill in this form -- thus also making a mockery, via legerdemain, of the requirement that such financial bills should start in the House -- MORE of the House GOP than before should vote against it, in protest against this sort of hardball pressure.