Keith Burgess-Jackson

If you read nothing else today, read this.

The United States Supreme Court is poised to interpret the Second Amendment. I have served as the faculty adviser of UTA’s chapter of Students for the Second Amendment.

How many of you would vote for Jack Bauer for president?

Here.

To the Editor:

David Brooks (“History and Calumny,” column, Nov. 9) takes unnamed liberal commentators to task for willfully misrepresenting as evidence of the G.O.P.’s racist platform Ronald Reagan’s 1980 speech in Philadelphia, Miss., in which Mr. Reagan uttered the now famous—or should we say “infamous”—claim “I believe in states’ rights.”

However sincere Mr. Reagan may have been in his approach to the economic problems of black America, there can be no doubt that “states’ rights” is a racist doctrine, and one that the G.O.P. continues to embrace.

With all the major G.O.P. presidential hopefuls clinging both to Ronald Reagan’s legacy and the old Southern strategy of Richard M. Nixon, the issue is as real and cogent today as when Mr. Reagan and the nascent neoconservative sect of the G.O.P. tried to woo black voters by repackaging racism as “states’ rights.”

Cynically, the righteously indignant advocates of states’ rights today try to turn the discussion away from the fundamental question of civil rights into a cheap accusation of calumny. As the Marx Brothers said, “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

Craig Hanoch
Highland Park, N.J. Nov. 9, 2007

Note from KBJ: If states’ rights is “a racist doctrine,” then our Constitution is racist. The letter writer’s modus ponens is my modus tollens.

If this isn’t the best album ever made, then Al Gore is president.

This story about a “marriage broker” appeared in yesterday’s Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The following answer to the reporter’s question is interesting:

What exactly are most of your American male customers looking for in a woman?

About 70 percent of my clients admit that they are looking for a traditional woman, and they mean another Donna Reed or June Cleaver. And here’s what they don’t want in a woman, and what they say they find in a lot of American women: They don’t want a woman who seems hyper-concerned about her own career, or who wants to know how much money they make, how much their house costs and how many cars they own. Foreign women don’t ask those questions. What they also don’t like is the way American women seem to use sex as a tool: If they can’t get their way or aren’t happy about something, they just stop having sex. My clients are just tired of women holding out, living with sex once or twice a year. Meanwhile, a Russian woman—and this has been passed down from one generation to the next—has learned to do whatever it takes to get a man and keep him pleased.

Comments?

Here.