History

Kitty Wells has died. She wasn't just a singer but a pioneer and a honked-off woman who got even with a song. I love that kind of music -- Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama" takedown of Neil Young's "Southern Man" comes to mind. Wells' first and biggest hit "It wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" falls into the same category:

When authority has been abused to the point where we expect it to be arbitrary and capricious, the logical result is that we lose all respect for authority:

Maybe we should stop being so pessimistic about the prospects for coming generations:

It's not exactly a shock that Americans' confidence in television news has dropped to a new low:

Americans' confidence in television news is at a new low by one percentage point, with 21% of adults expressing a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in it. This marks a decline from 27% last year and from 46% when Gallup started tracking confidence in television news in 1993.

Wishful thinking, I'd say:

One thing we've avoided doing during the immigration debates over the past few years is consider the whole of our immigration policy, including legal immigration, which is a consuing web of quotas and restrictions. I think Jeff Jacoby is on to something here when he suggests that it's time we consider scrapping the whole thing:

A July the Fourth appreciation of the genius ofthe Declaration of Independence:

Awww, Ange:

Actor Andy Griffith, who won the hearts of 1960s TV viewers with his role as gentle Sheriff Andy Taylor in “The Andy Griffith Show,” then returned as a 1980s country lawyer in “Matlock,” died Tuesday at 86, according to WITN-TV.

From Jean Kaufman's essay on the 40th anniversary of the event captured above:

Today's reading assignment is a two-parter on the Constitution. 1. Our "imbecilic" Constitution is the problem: