Thanks, Barbara--but please, call me "Peter,"--and, no, common, alas.  We drove up through Vermont, but we'll be driving back down through New Hampshire and Connecticut.

Now to finish packing and hit the road.

And we also post each show both on the Hoover website and on YouTube.  You'll be able to find 'em, every one of 'em.  Promise.

Say it ain't so!  Raycon and Lindacon, you've been members of Ricochet more or less from the very get-go, and if I ever did anything to leave the two of you out it'd be a sign of sheer negligence.  

Re Amity, we just recorded the show with her about a week ago--and later that day we recorded a show with Victor Davis Hanson.  (We shoot these things on a budget, and it saves on the crew and studio to tape more than one show at a time.)  The Blue Yeti makes all the decisions on timing, but I'm virtually certain the show with Amity will appear online by July.  

Re feeling left out, don't--please don't!  The Wall Street Journal places our interviews on the opinion page of its website, a page that's free--that is, in front of the paywall.  And we also post...

Oh, Dave, Dave!  I can't think when I've enjoyed a piece of writing more--even a piece of your writing.  Which places me in an odd position.  While everyone else is urging you to take care of yourself, I'm hoping you get another "hand unload" assignment sometime real soon.  

Perverse, I know.  But good prose is hard to find.

Magnficent.  Thanks, Pejman.

I came across the hymn in Magnificat, too, notmarx.  And you're right:  All three stanzas are beautiful, so, on your fine advice, I went ahead and added the final two.

Sorry I couldn't make it, darn it, Clark--the more so after reading this lovely report.  Matthews, praising Reagan, and the implicit expense of Obama.  Had I but known, I'd have rearranged my schedule here in California to be with you.  

Your analysis strikes me as just devastating, John--and one that, in all the commentary on Obama's speech this afternoon, I've seen nowhere else.

John Yoo, speaking truth to power.  (Are your taxes in good order, John?)

Perfectly horrifying.  

Now to watch the response of British officialdom.  Mayor of London Boris Johnson is off to a wobbly start.  ("Too early to draw conclusions?"  After two Muslims attempted to behead a British soldier?  That is not the comment Winston Churchill or Margaret Thatcher would have offered.)

Yes!  I'd read that same passage a couple of months ago, Clark, and been struck, just as you were struck, at Ike's warning.  What he's talking about here is exactly what has happened at one major research university after another:  During the Cold War, universities became as dependent on federal funding as defense contractors.  The big difference?  Universities are still dependent on Uncle Sam.  The relationship between research and federal dollars has proven deeply corrupting, just as Ike knew it would.

Well done, Clark, for pointing this out.  Now shall we go chain ourselves to the statue of John Harvard by way of protest?

Yes, there's a lot in what you say.  The causation, I'm sure, runs both ways.  And more's the woe.

Well-spotted, Fredo:  The photo of Lenin is indeed post-stroke.  At the same time, though, we know that, although weakened and partially paralyzed, Lenin remained lucid, if that's the word for a murderous tyrant, until the end.

iWcThe thing I love about this song is that he puts on blackface to "blend in." The joke is that the song, words and music, is from the yiddish theater. So the Jazz Singer features a Jew impersonating a black man by singing Jewish music.Only in America, iWc. Only in America.

Thanks for spotting this, Judith.  (I'll glance over the print edition of the New Yorker every so often, hoping for something by John McPhee or Richard Preston.  But read the New Yorker website?  I long ago lost the stomach for it.)  And you're quite right:  This is a very, very big domino.

2).

I don't know that, of course.  But my sense is that the White House--meaning the president himself and those closest to him--was at the very center of the decision-making in all this.

Come to think of it, an experience of clairvoyance--or something like it--just came to mind:

When my mother and her sister got home from the hospital to tell their father that their mother had just died, he already knew.  According to my mother, who found the experience reassuring, somehow, her father said simply, "She was just here.  She came to me to say goodbye."  He hadn't seen or or spoken with her--he had not, in other words, experienced a vision.  But he had had a sudden, firm sense of her presence...and the she was gone.

Does that count, Paules?