You'll want to read this James Q. Wilson piece from Commentary on political divisions within the United States. It's fairly valid for Spain, too, I think, where the population has always been more strongly divided between right and left than in the US.

Arts and Letters Daily links to this article by Martha Nussbaum from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the moral rights of animals. My attitude is that animals at least have the right not to be unnecessarily mistreated. Unnecessarily mistreated includes doing frivolous experiments on them, shooting them for fun, raising them for fur, and in general killing them for no good reason.

James Taranto's Best of the Web in the Wall Street Journal, which I highly recommend, includes this gem from ABC News:

"I asked the students in my class whether they knew who their Senate representative was," said Watson, who teaches music and sociology at three colleges in Boston. "No one knew. And when I asked who was Sen. Edward Kennedy--the most activist senator in our country--the only thing most of my students could say was that he was fat and that he was drunk."

Sounds like Pasqual Maragall to me. Anyway, here's another Taranto piece comparing the American media on Vietnam and on Iraq.

Jonah Goldberg compares Hamas with other fascist movements in the National Review.

Here's a very entertaining piece classifying political scandals from the Weekly Standard. This one is also applicable to Spain.

This article from Frontpage magazine is on intolerance and intimidation in the Egyptian media, something to keep in mind during these days of radical and not-so-radical Muslims' attempting to force the West to censor itself. The real freedom-of-speech scandal is not the Patriot Act, nor even the Catalan CAC censorship board, but the fact that there is simply no freedom of speech in the Middle East outside Israel. European leftists normally do not take this lack into account when making snap judgments on international affairs.

Also from Frontpage, here's a summary of reasons why the Muslim attacks on Denmark are unacceptable and must be fought against. The piece starts off with reproductions of the twelve allegedly controversial cartoons, which are pretty tame stuff. I could be more offensive without even trying.

Check out this photo from Urban Legends Reference Pages, which certifies it as real. It's now my screensaver.