There are interesting exchanges at the Weekly Standard's letters page. Thomas E. Woods, Jr., and Max Boot play"I am more conservative than thou." Let's be clear: the NYT's review of Woods' book got it wrong. Woods is a paleo-conservative. Paleo-s and neo-s don't see eye to eye on many things, including our history. J. Tucker Martin repudiates Stephen Schwartz's harsh obituary in the Standard for Hunter Thompson,"The End of the Counter-Culture." Are P. J. O'Rourke, Martin, and I the only Republican fans of Thompson?

The Denver Post reports that University of Colorado officials are considering the possibility of offering a buyout of Ward Churchill's tenured faculty position.

In a interview with the Telegraph, former Secretary of State Colin Powell has spoken publicly of tensions within the Bush administration over plans for the invasion of Iraq. Troop levels were sufficient to win the war, he said, but insufficient to secure the peace."Mr Powell said he had warned President George W Bush over dinner in August 2002 that the problem with Iraq was not going to be the invasion but what followed," according to the news account."He told him: ‘This place will crack like a goblet and it will be a problem to pick up the bits. It was on this basis that he decided to let me see if we could find a United Nations solution to this.'"

If you missed it, the 3rd History Carnival is up over at Detrimental Postulation. Thanks to Rob Priest for putting it together. Another Damned Medievalist at Blogenspiel will host the 4th History Carnival in mid-March.

The deadline for the Bad History Carnival, on the other hand, is this Tuesday. archy puts it this way:

If you want to correct a bad historical parallel that some talking head pulls out to support their position, send it in. If you have a pet peeve about historical movies, send it in. If you've been doing battle with holocaust deniers, internment apologists, or slavery romanticizers, definitely send it in. If you want to debunk a favorite conspiracy theory, send it in. If you just want to bash on The DaVinci Code, send that in too.

Send your nominations to archymarquis AT aol DOT com. Oh, and by the way, if you don't know about archy and mehitabel, you should. archy was the cockroach with the soul of a poet; and mehitabel was the alley cat who claimed to have been Cleopatra in a prior life. Any resemblance between mehitabel and Cliopatria is purrly her imagination, but as she famously said:"There's a dance in the old dame yet."

Finally, farewell to Nathan Wright, Jr., Episcopal priest, scholar, and spokesman for black power. Wright was one of 16 men who took the Journey of Reconciliation in 1947 to challenge racial segregation in inter-state transportation. Yet, he thought integrationism was"an insult on its face." As chairman of the National Conference on Black Power in Newark in 1967, he was one of black autonomy's leading spokesmen. He was also in many ways a conservative – a life-long Republican and advocate of black capitalism. He was there, in the struggle, early and always.

Farewell, also, to Peter Benenson, the founder of Amnesty International. As a teenager at Eton, he aided Republican refugees of the Spanish Civil War and Jewish refugees from Hitler's Germany. In 1961, he founded Amnesty International, which has subsequently become the world's largest human rights organization.