Wow!  What a claim!  I've never heard anyone make quite such an assertion before.  Could you name, let's say, one piece each by Glass and Adams--with both of whom I'm totally unfamiliar--that you figure old man Bach would have admired?  I'll go straight to iTunes and have a listen.

You just made my day.  Muchisimas gracias.

Whether this graphic will have the same effect on anyone else, I cannot say.  But I happened to call it up while a telephone call at the office just now, and I had to excuse myself for bursting into laughter.

There's only one EJ.

(And thank goodness.)

Me too!

Quite right, Paul, and come to think of it, strictly speaking I belong to the generation between yours and James's, having gone done from Christ Church in 1981.  Clinton was long gone by then, but Brother James was still learning the alphabet.

Christ Church, as you'll have been well aware, was affectionately known as the "House."  A favorite cheer of the boat club during those halcyon days when I was in the bow position in the first XVIII:  "Give me an 'H.'  Give me an 'I.'  Give me a 'C.'  Give me an 'E.'  What's that spell?"  Whereupon we would all roar our reply in our best Bertie Wooster accent.

Ah, me.  You can see why Margaret Thatcher believed England needed to be given a good shaking up.

Mad, of course, but the pieces...do rather fit, don't they?

One correction, though, James:  Yours was the second-most brilliant generation at Oxford.  (I leave it to you to decide which generation took first place, but if you guessed the generation to which Paul Rahe and I belonged, you wouldn't be wrong.)

If Saudi Arabia reinvested 100 percent of its oil money here in the United States, Smith wouldn't have an argument--but of course Saudi Arabia does no such thing.  All Smith is saying, to put it another way, is that if we bought more oil from ourselves, then a much larger proportion our oil would indeed be here in the United States. 

Unless I misunderstand him completely, Smith's not arguing for protection--that is, for government barriers to international trade.  He's arguing for deregulation--that is, for the elimination of government barriers to the domestic production of oil.  Smith wants less government, not more.

Me too.

You missed your calling, George.  You should've been a foreign correspondent.

Gorgeous.

I know he's issued a statement, Bill, but has Fr. Jenkins spoken about the lawsuit in public?  I get the feeling he'd be perfectly happy never being captured on camera attacking the administration.  But of course such sheer haplessness will do no one, least of all Fr. Jenkins himself, any good--by now he's lost the liberals no matter how assiduously he remains hidden away in his office.

But I don't know the man--or the politics of the campus.  All I know is that Notre Dame matters.

Am I being unfair to its president?

This is true, of course, but when asked about natural gas Smith noted that the present compressed-gas and LPG technology places certain limits on the usefulness of natural gas for vehicles.  Buses can be retrofitted, because, great big objects that they are, they have room for big compressed-gas tanks. But smaller vehicles are trickier.  And although FedEx has already begun purchasing some natural-gas powered vehicles for its fleet of 90,000, FedEx--and the rest of the country--will be using a lot of oil for years to come.

Thanks for this, Molly.  Jay Cost is enjoyably--and instructively--scathing.  Ornstein, Mann, and, for that matter, Barak H. Obama--the entire liberal establishment--yesterday's men, all of them.

Steve, whom I knew a little, never, in my opinion anyway, had more than muddled ideas about politics--in our one really testy exchange, he insisted that Al Gore really deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.  But he certainly knew all about the power of  human ingenuity as expressed in free markets. 

"You know how to fix that place?" Steve asked, when our conversation happened to turn to the many woes of Mexico (I'm quoting from memory here, but from vivid memory).  "Give the whole country to Disney."  I looked at Steve, searching for some sign that he was joking.  "No, really" he said.  "If Disney ran Mexico the way they run their theme parks, they'd turn Mexico into one of the richest countries on earth."

I offer that anecdote to anyone who may have a low moment today.  To cheer yourself, just imagine how President Obama would have responded to that.

Well and truly said.  Now, if only he could paint still lifes....

Ricoteers?  I like that.  I like that a lot.

Thanks, S.P.

Thanks, Jonathan!  And it occurs to me just now that I never got around to welcoming you to Ricochet.  It's very, very good to have you with us!

Whoa.  Freddie De Cordova got his start producing for Jack Benny.  Which means that when Pat's posting here on Ricochet, all of us are just two degrees of separation from the greatest comedian in American history.