Reid to Bolivia, grim milestones, and other items

Reid to Bolivia
Elephants in Academia emailed with this news, Sen. Harry Reid Traveling to Bolivia This Week

Incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will join a bipartisan delegation on a trip that includes stops in Bolivia and Ecuador, two members of Latin America's recently emerging left. International trade and anti-drug efforts are among the topics on the senators' agenda.

As Academic Elephant said,

I'm sure Amauris Sanmartino is top on their agenda.

Amauris Sanmartino's the Cuban dissident critical of President Evo Morales' ties to Havana. Even when he's a permanent resident in Bolivia, he was arrested and will be deported to Cuba. Babalu has where to contact Harry Reid on behalf of Dr. Sanmartino. (Update: Dr Sanmartino's going to Gitmo)

Harry will miss the funeral

Grim milestones
Barcepundit says, WHAT A MORONIC REPORT. Go read about it.

Moral exhibitionism
Dr. Sowell writes,

Progressives are in the business of complaining and denouncing -- as a prelude to seeking sweeping powers to control other people's lives, in the name of curing the ills of society. The last thing they want is to discover and discuss how millions of people rose out of poverty by entirely different methods, often by freeing economies from the control of people with sweeping power over other people's lives. Poverty and economic disparities are the raw materials from which the political left manufactures a sense of moral superiority, self-importance and political power. Against that background, it is understandable how they strive to keep poverty alive as an issue, even as they claim to want to end poverty, by playing lady bountiful to the poor. Even as they define deviancy downward, many of the progressive intelligentsia define poverty upward, so that people with amenities that even the middle class could only strive for, two generations ago, are still called "the poor" or the "have-nots." Except for people who can't work or won't work, there is very little real poverty in the United States today, except among people who come from poverty-stricken countries and bring their poverty with them. Talk about "the working poor" still resonates in politics, but most of the people in the bottom 20 percent of American households are not working full-time and year-round. There are more heads of household who work year-round and full-time among the top 5 percent of American heads of households than among the bottom 20 percent. The left has striven mightily to make working no longer necessary for having a claim to a share of what others have produced -- whether a share of "the nation's" wealth or "the world's" wealth. They have also striven mightily to inflate the number of people who look poor by counting young people with entry-level jobs, who are passing through lower income brackets at the beginning of their careers, among "the poor," even though most of these young people have incomes above the national average when they are older. The real obsession of the left is in gaining power or, at the very least, engaging in moral exhibitionism.

Peace Prize, you ask?
Via Larwyn, Arafat's Orchestration of 1973 Murders Acknowledged by State Department

How much different would the history of the Middle East be if the world had been forced to face the reality of Arafat's involvement in the murder of American diplomats over 30 years ago?

Update Doug Ross has The Friends of Terror Scrapbook

Two podcasts
Louisiana Conservative interviewed Wild Bill. You can listen to the podcast here

If you haven't listened to it yet, go to Eternity Road and listen to Francis Porretto's wonderful tale fo the Census taker

Last, but not least
a truly beautiful post.

Update
Edwards Enters Race