Quotes from around the internet

Liberals are now rightly accusing Bush of grabbing power, but unfortunately nobody is listening. After all, we’re used to overweening presidents by now, thanks in large part to those same liberals who have celebrated the “strong” presidencies of Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, and others. It was only during the Nixon years that they discovered the dangers of the “imperial presidency"... Liberals have been paving the way for a president like this for a long time, and they’ve finally gotten the “conservative” they deserve. They’ve done their best to make the Constitution so malleable as to be meaningless, without stopping to think that two can play that game. Now it’s the Republicans’ turn. Joseph Sobran, "The Lawless State"

Jockey Paul O'Neill apologized Tuesday for head-butting his horse at a race last weekend. AP, Fox Sports

Anyone with half a brain who looks at how international trade has gone since the creation of the WTO would realize its real purpose is not to liberalize trade but to provide bickering grounds as cover for keeping it as restrained as it already was, while loking like they care. You don’t cut subsidies to humble american family farms corporatized agribusiness by having “talks” or trying to wrench concessions out of people who don’t have the luxury of leisure, you do it by cutting the f$@%ing subsidies. b psycho, "No Suprises in Geneva"

Chinese restaurant owners are arming themselves with increasingly dangerous weaponry these days. Saw a story the other day where some guy was murdered with the steamy filling of a hot crab rangoon. Radley Balko, "Fish Raid"

Besides, why should we expect business people to favor laissez faire and to abhor government intervention? Few people outside of business do so. Why would people in business be different? As Albert Jay Nock noted long ago, people tend to favor the path of least exertion. If a business owner can increase his profits with a tax, regulation, or import quota on his domestic or foreign competitors, why not go for it? You and I may expect his ethical governor to stop him. But what if he, like most other people, doesn't equate government action with plunder? In that case he won't see himself as a hooligan once removed. Rather, he'll seem himself as a citizen in a democracy petitioning his government for badly needed relief, which, as it happens, will also serve the general welfare. Sheldon Richman, "The Tariff is the Mother of Trusts"