Michelle Malkin’s “gorilla warfare” Vent video at Hot Air is a rout.

I can’t imagine how the WSJ thought it would be helping its cause by showing video of individual Editorial Board members going after immigration bill opponents with gems like these:

• “The right isn’t even rational about this any more.”
• “The nativists at the National Review are just foaming at the mouth on this.”
• “Their objection is fundamentally cultural ….. and they can’t say that ….. It’s the biggest unspoken truth at the center of this debate.”
• “They don’t even want legal immigration” ….. “and when we call ‘em on that, they go crazy.”

But I’m glad they did it. It will probably be replayed, and regretted at WSJ, for years.

Also: Those who want to read the Journal’s full July 3, 1984 “There Shall Be Open Borders” editorial referred to in Hot Air’s vid can go here (actually entitled “In Defense of Huddled Masses”; scroll down a bit at the link; provided for fair use and discussion purposes).

Dayton Mayor Rhine McLin is not happy about losing a battle (link may require free registration) to force City of Dayton employees to live in the city (bold is mine):

Thursday, June 07, 2007

DAYTON — The City Commission lost a court battle Wednesday to require that all city employees reside in the city, but Mayor Rhine McLin said the war over residency is not over.

“We will appeal,” McLin said.

The city had sued the state, claiming a new law curtailing residency requirements violated the city’s home rule provision. The city sought to have it ruled unconstitutional by the courts.

….. An impassioned McLin spoke out. “City employees do not move. You move at your own risk,” she said. “We are going to fight residency in support of our city.”

While the law prohibits political subdivisions from requiring employees to live in the same jurisdiction, it does allow jurisdictions to restrict workers to live within the same or contiguous counties.

Translation of McLinese: Don’t you dare leave the plantation.

Nancy Salvato had a great post on this a few years ago at Intellectual Conservative on a similar rule affecting most (but, interestingly enough, not all) teachers:

Recently Chicago newspapers reported that Mayor Daley was going to enforce the residency requirement for Chicago school teachers. Something is inherently wrong with this decision because it seems to me as if by signing a teaching contract, teachers literally have signed over their lives. It reminds me of company towns from an era gone by.

….. Perhaps teachers are considered not more than 3/5 citizens, not subject to the same rights and privileges as the rest of the population.

What a teacher does outside of the school is not of concern to others unless it is in some way illegal. This obviously includes where teachers choose to live.

….. More reasonable people understand that the goal of any administration is to hire the “best teachers” for the job, regardless of where they live.

….. Where a teacher decides to live is an issue of privacy. Teachers are not chattel. If there was ever an express purpose for a union, the defense of the teachers against this indefensible practice would merit their operation. But of course, the unions are too busy pushing their partisan political agenda to look out for the teachers!

In contrast to the Chicago situation, it appears that Dayton’s unions are against the residency requirement.

Mayor McLin needs to get a grip, and give it up.

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OOPS: Thanks to Matt at WoMD, who caught the gender error in the title, which has been fixed.

Brian Wesbury on the economy (last para at link):

We remain optimistic that the economy has moved through the worst of the housing correction, and forecast a real GDP growth rate of 3.5% in the second quarter, and 3%+ for the second half of 2007 and into 2008.

The Business Roundtable is predicting 2.6% for the year, which after figuring in the 0.6% first quarter (before final revision) is about the same as Wesbury.

I think the possible inventory bounce-back alluded to here (see “Worth Asking, Not Answerable” at link) may move those growth figures a bit higher.

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I find little to cheer in the news (HT Techdirt) that The Associated Press “will subscribe to a service developed by Attributor Corp. to track how its stories are distributed across thousands of Web sites. The monitoring tools eventually will be expanded so the news cooperative will be able to keep tabs on the use of its photos and videos on the Internet, too.”

Given the fact that The AP has the following at the end of its reports, they clearly have never accepted the concept of fair use:

The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.

The h*ll it can’t.

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More evidence that the press doesn’t “get” fair use (HT Techdirt):

From ROGER MOORE: While I applaud Neil Henry’s column on the need for Google and other web news aggregators taking a hard look at what they’re doing to American democracy by taking news content and providing it for free without paying for it, I have to say it doesn’t go far enough. We can’t hope that they will have this discussion without some prodding. Lawyerly prodding.

Mike Masnick at Techdirt has to belabor the obvious to make a valid point:

(That) is flat out false. Google isn’t taking news and it isn’t providing it for free. It’s driving more traffic to the news that newspapers already provide for free. Google giving them traffic benefits those newspaper sites by giving them more traffic to monetize. To claim that somehow this takes away from those sites isn’t just incorrect, it’s strategically backwards.

This guy is in the clueless club like Mr. Moore above:

….. the time has come for corporations such as Google to accept more responsibility for the future of American journalism, in recognition of the threat “computer science” poses to journalism’s place in a democratic society.

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A Chinese tax lesson we should take to heart:

Chinese stocks fell again on Tuesday, continuing heavy losses since the government tripled its tax on share trading last week.

Any direct tax on capital such as this will lower valuations by a large multiple of the amount of the tax.

It’s a story with some similarities to this one from April.

From Cincinnati:

Last Updated: 5:03 pm | Thursday, May 31, 2007

After 62 years of waiting William “Ray” Howcroft, 82, finally received the credit he deserved.

Howcroft, a veteran of World War II, was awarded with the Bronze Star and several other military medals on Wednesday, May 30, at his home in Finneytown.

“Its nice to get something you should have had 60 years ago,” said Howcroft.

A month after Howcroft first approached U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot (R-1st District) about receiving the medals he earned in the war, Chabot arranged for Howcroft to receive the seven military medals, including the Bronze Star, the fourth-highest combat award.

Howcroft earned the Bronze Star for his efforts in the landing at Anzio (Italy) helping to bring a fellow soldier to safety. The soldier was wounded and Howcroft crawled under machine gun fire to administer first aid.

Go here for the rest of the story.