The Daily Caller stepped in it today.  In a fairly innocuous piece about Sarah Palin’s TLC reality show, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” they reported on a story already in the news, here and here, about the state tax subsidies the show’s producers received for filming in Alaska.  From today’s DC:

…in a political age where it’s controversial in many circles to defend public funding of National Public Radio, critics panned Palin for supporting a measure that forced taxpayers to foot the bill for a private media project after many statements from the former governor in support of a government that only plays a limited role in the economy.

A young friend just out of college (he played football, which is good news, but for Yale, which is bad news for everyone but Rob) writes that he’s been giving some thought to immigration policy. “As a second generation American and the grandson of a poor Bavarian immigrant,” he says, he found compelling “this article from First Things.”

[M]y immigration policy is simple. Let ‘em all in. That, I cheerfully admit, likely makes for poor public policy. Nonetheless, it is my instinct, based on my collection of immigrant stories. I’m pretty forward when I hear an accent. I want to know about it so I ask. The stories come easily. Almost everyone is eager to tell me how they got to America, and why. The why is simple: freedom, opportunity, a dream they wanted fulfilled. How they got here is always different. Stories do not make for good public policy either, but they are nice to hear:

On the podcast tomorrow, Rob and I will be talking tomorrow with Bing West, a soldier’s soldier and a journalist’s journalist.  A Marine, Col. West served in Vietnam, writing a book about his experiences, The Village, that remains on the commandant’s list of recommended books four decades later.  An assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration, Col. West has reported extensively on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, always writing from the point of the view of the man who does the fighting, the American grunt.

On the podcast we’ll be discussing Col. West’s latest book, The Wrong War:  Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan.  The book is fascinating–Col. West traveled to Afghanistan eight times–but I was struck by a single sentence.  Just one.  A simple, declarative statement that seems obvious the moment you read, but that says–well, in a way it says everything.