Time to make space on the bookshelf

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's "The First Circle" is being published uncut in 2009. The book has only been available in English translation with nine chapters missing.

Dear Comandante, have I got a deal for you

Remember the good old days, the 1980s, when Chris Dodd was one of the Sandinistas' favorite Yankee suck-ups? The days when Chris Dodd was one of Central American Communism's best friends?

Now he's just another politician sponging off the capitalists, getting special favors because of his status as a US Senator. How the mighty have fallen. I wonder if he can even look his former friends in the face?

Red rag bytes dust

Saturday* was the last day for the regularly printed version of the Capital Times. From here on out Madison's Progressive newspaper will be pixels and bytes. Ed Garvey will miss it. After all, they gave him a lifetime achievement award. Ann Althouse will not, having been the target of its tolerance of low-minded conspiracy theorists.

I miss the loss of almost any newspaper, and so I guess I'm sorry to see Madison reduced to one daily liberal newspaper. Perhaps if the company that ran both newspapers hadn't let the Wisconsin State Journal drift leftward there would have been room for two newspapers. But when the choices are left and left-er, something's gotta give, especially in an era of declining newspaper readership.

As the French Communists discovered in coalition with Francois Mitterrand, it sucks to be at the extreme end.

* Yep, I was two days behind, too.

I guess dissenting Chinese and Tibetans don't count

Former President Jimmy Carter explains why he would not support a boycott of the Beijing Olympics:

As president, Carter led the boycott of the Moscow Olympics in protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. "That was a totally different experience in 1980, when the Soviet Union had brutally invaded and killed thousands and thousands of people," he said, rejecting the idea of boycotting the Beijing games to protest China's crackdown in Tibet. He did not address whether just the opening ceremonies should be boycotted.

So you see, because the Communists don't have to invade to continue to be repressive towards their own people and the Tibetans, not too mention other Asian ethnic minorities within their borders, it doesn't really count.

Paul Soglin embracing another Wisconsin tradition

McCarthyism.

This Fraley, borrowing from the worst of the Communists, under the guise of freedom, allows the accused of making choices, choices from his limited world view.

Butler's loss to Gableman has certainly caused some strange results on the Left.