Southern Flavored Notes

Both Andrew Sullivan and Eric Muller say you really ought to watch Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner (Part II, Part III). Perhaps the major press or television accounts of the dinner ignored it because Colbert is unrelenting on them, as well as the Bush administration, but a webite says it all: thankyoustephencolbert.*
*What's Southern about Colbert? He's a native of Charleston, from one of those old South Carolina Huguenot families, if I'm not mistaken.

I didn't join in the demonstrations for immigration reform yesterday, because I had to take my wife to Emory University Hospital's emergency admissions. She fell last week and fractured a hip. She'll be fine, thanks, but I was enormously grateful to the very kind Afro-Hispanic man who admitted her -- so appreciative that it wouldn't have occurred to me to ask if he were here legally and so grateful that he didn't take the day off from work to protest.

When Radley Balko took up the cause of Cory Maye, who is on death row in Mississippi, he aimed first to arouse libertarian and conservative support. As an employee of the Cato Institute and columnist for Fox News, Balko appealed to his natural constituency. There were, moreover, facts about his case that tend to squirm a liberal.* After all, what responsible father would have, much less use, a gun in the same room with his sleeping infant daughter? My own,"An Open Letter to Governor Haley Barbour," went nowhere. But Paul Jacob's"Maybe, or Maybe Not," Townhall, 30 April, takes up the case anew. It's one that non-libertarians and non-conservatives ought to join. Thanks to KC Johnson for the tip.
*I'm thinking about taking out a copywrite on that last phrase.

Finally, farewell to Grady McWhiney, the neo-confederates' intellectual progenitor. Michael Johnson of Johns Hopkins gets the last word: too bad there's no entry in the index of McWhiney's book for"malarkey."