Current Affairs

This surprise anybody?

Forty-eight states allow citizens to carry guns under some circumstances. The legislature in Illinois, one of the holdouts (Wisconsin is the other one), may vote to allow licensed individuals to carry concealed handguns, and the gun-control advocates are trotting out their usual horror stories. The trouble is, none of the claims they've made in the past have actually come to pass:

We should declare a truce in the war on paper:

However, the World Wildlife Fund has taken this to the extreme with a new nonprintable electronic document. Patterned after the highly successful PDF (Portable Document Format) that has revolutionized electronic document sharing and storage, the WWF format takes the decision away from you.

OK, Alanis, this is irony:

President Obama finally and quietly accepted his “transparency” award from the open government community this week — in a closed, undisclosed meeting at the White House on Monday.

One estimate says the Illinois smoking ban has cost the state $800 million in casino-tax revenues. So the sanctimonious numbskulls who keep going on and on about how they're doing everything for our good health are prposing a change:

Wow. Some common sense from the Washington Post, in an editorial about a proposal in the U.S. House to re-establish a voucher program for D.C. schools, a proposal strongly opposed by the Obama administration:

Europe seems about to go off the deep end, but people will have to walk those last few miles to take the plunge:

The Associated Press fact checks President Obama's speech on Libya and is surprisingly skeptical. This is especially interesting because it gets to the heart of the difference between Obama the candidate and Obama the chief executive:

One small point about nuclear energy:

Okay, I hate to take issue with my own peeps at National Review and elsewhere, but the latest issue of the magazine perpetuates a basic confusion about energy. The second item of “The Week” in the April 4 issue, discussing the hysteria about Japan's nuclear situation, has everything right until the last sentence, which reads: “The United States should continue to pursue nuclear power as an alternative to Qaddafi oil.”

So now President Obama shows us what happens when we choose someone with theoretical knowledge but no real experience. He must rely on formulas that lead to the easy and most obvious answers, failing to take into account the probability of unintended consequences and unexpected deviations from the pattern.