President Clinton, speaking today in Ottawa: "I spent an enormous amount of time trying to help the people in the land of my forbears in Northern Ireland get over 600 years of religious fights. And every time they make an agreement to do it, they're like a couple of drunks walking out of the bar for the last time--when they get to the swinging door they turn around and go back in and say, I just can't quite get there."

You know who Milton Friedman is, right? Forget his Nobel Prize for economics, his television shows, and his numerous books ("Capitalism and Freedom" was ranked #10 on NR's 100 best non-fiction books of the 20th century). He is "best known to the world as the former economics advisor to Augusto Pinochet, the fascist dictator of Chile."

Oh yeah, he's also a supporter of school choice--indeed, he's one of the founding intellectuals of the school-choice movement. That's why he's smeared with the Chile reference in a leaflet distributed to children at North Hill Elementary School in Rochester Hills, Mich. This propaganda wasn't meant for kiddies, of course, but their parents: Next year, Michigan voters likely will face a sweeping ballot question on school choice. This flier (which also says school choice was "a ploy to avoid desegregation" in the 1950s) shows that the education establishment has already launched its guerilla war against the initiative. (It came to our attention through the Center for Education Reform, a Washington, D.C.-based group contacted by an outraged Michigan parent.)

The National Pro-Life Democrats Committee has named Sally Winn as its chairman. "Two out of every five rank-and-file Democrats classify themselves as pro-life, yet many of us have been ostracized on the national and local levels by the leadership of the Democratic party," says Winn, who formerly coordinated the Indiana Democrats for Life. "Currently more than 30 Democrat members of Congress have strong pro-life voting records and they are joined by hundreds of pro-life Democrats in state legislatures. ... We look forward to increasing those numbers."

NR Contributing Editor Rob Long is the co-creator of a new TV sitcom premiering on CBS tonight: "Love & Money" will air Fridays at 8:30 pm. From the Washington Post review by Tom Shales: the show "stands out from the crowd of new-season losers in that it actually has some laughs in it. ... The production is smart and snappy. ... It doesn't have randy teens or very many smutty sex jokes, and while that'll be a blessed relief for many viewers, it also seems dangerously out of vogue. 'Love & Money' is one of the good guys. Maybe, just maybe, this good guy will come out on top."

Long, who wrote tonight's pilot, is the author of NR's "Letter from Al" column.

Updated By:
Ramesh Ponnuru - Senior Editor
John J. Miller - National Political Reporter
Kate Dwyer - Editorial Associate