A reader to National Review Online says that he became a conservative because of how his fellow college students at Kent State University responded to President Reagan's shooting: I came back to my dorm to see the TV lounges filled with students fervently wishing for the president not to survive the surgery. The worst of will was being expressed toward "Ronnie Ray-gun," to use just one of the epithets. Right then, I knew that, whatever side I belonged on, it wasn't the one where people were wishing for the ... read more

Walter Breuning, the world's oldest man at 113 years, gave a pretty amazing birthday speech Monday at the Montana retirement home where he lives: Life begins each morning whether we have succeeded or failed or just muddled along. Life is a school to learn, not to unlearn. Life is the creation by God and if you would know God, be not a solver of riddles. Look about you and you shall see him playing with your children. Look into the air and you shall see him walking in the clouds, out-stretching his arms in the ... read more

Gertude Baines died yesterday at the age of 115 years and 148 days. She was the world's oldest person and the 16th oldest ever, according to a cool table prepared by longevity geeks on Wikipedia. Baines, born April 6, 1894, was the grandchild of slaves who worked as a maid at Ohio State University dorms until her retirement to a Los Angeles nursing home a decade ago. She was a non-drinker and non-smoker who once told a reporter, "I did not have a lot of fun as an adult but I enjoyed going to church every Sunday." ... read more

I'm currently reading Scott Rosenberg's Say Everything, his new history of blogging that digs deeply into the origins of the medium and why it has become so successful. Rosenberg, a founder of Salon.Com and an online acquaintance of mine for many years, has written a fascinating book that begins with chapters on early web diarists and bloggers such as Justin Hall, Jorn Barger and Joshua Marshall. The introduction to Rosenberg's book centers on how bloggers covered the 9/11 attacks, an important moment in the ... read more

Maria de Jesus of Portugal died earlier this year, relinquishing the title of world's oldest known person at 115 years and 114 days. Born Sept. 10, 1893, de Jesus was a farm worker from age 12 who never learned to read or write, ate a vegeterian diet and outlived her husband by 57 years. Perhaps the most amazing facet of her longevity was that she got to know six great-great-grandchildren. The death of de Jesus makes the oldest person Gertrude Baines, an American supercentenarian living in a Los Angeles nursing ... read more

One of the best jobs I ever had was working weekends on the state desk at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram during the late '80s. I took calls from correspondents across North Texas, wrote spot-news stories and spent the other 98 percent of my time reading everything on the news wire. That job had a lot in common with publishing the Drudge Retort today, with the notable exception that you once needed a journalism job to gorge on an all-you-can-eat buffet of wire stories. When you read news for too long, you develop ... read more

Shelley Powers wrote a blog entry yesterday in support of ACORN: ACORN is an organization focused on getting people to vote, ensuring that people equal access to housing and education, supportive of unions, and decent working conditions. Really, how awful—what do these people think this country is? ACORN and Missouri have a long history together because my state is always held up as the poster child for voter registration fraud. Governor Blunt, a man so despised after his one and only term as governor that he ... read more