Saturday, April 14, 2007

Yesterday's Daily Dose


Michael Isikoff goes behind the scenes of the AG's murder boards for his do-or-die congressional testimony next week.

In case you missed the season premiere last Sunday, Slate is running its perennial discussion about the Sopranos. As one contributor puts it, "[N]o show I've seen [better] captures the resentments, regrets, joys, and utter irrationalities of American family life." The speculation about how the show should, and will, end is delicious.

Radley Balko documents the bad kind of American exceptionalism: the United States has the highest drinking age in the world (a title it shares with Indonesia, Mongolia, Palau). The vast majority of the rest of the world sets the minimum age at 17 or 16 or has no minimum age at all.

Fred Thompson continues to feed the hype, this time with a WSJ op-ed showing that tax relief increases the federal coffers. (I prefer the plainspoken justification: that you can spend your money better than the government can. Or, as Milton Friedman liked to say, "I never met a tax cut I didn't like."

Coming soon to a computer near you: Google your tax dollars. It's your money, shouldn't you know how it's being spent? A new coalition of four taxpayer-friendly groups have launched a Web site to do just that. Show Me the Spending.org seeks to replicate, at the state level, last year's Coburn-Obama bill creating a user-friendly search engine for federal contracts and grants.