OJ's sick book could make a comeback

In an odd twist to a disturbing story, a judge ordered that the rights to OJ Simpson's pseudo-confessional book, If I Did It, be auctioned off. This means that the book that helped topple Judith Regan may indeed hit store shelves some day. (World Ahead won't be bidding.) The move comes at the request of... Fred Goldman?!

"The Goldmans were horrified as to the content, but the real horror was that Simpson was profiting," Goldman's lawyer, David Cook, said. "O.J. is now on the block. On the right hand we get to sell the book, and on the left we get the money."

Cook said Goldman did not necessarily want the book published but had determined that the rights to "If I Did It" were one of Simpson's few "visible assets." The auction could be held within 30 days, Cook said.

Republican voters upset with GOP

Before last fall's elections, I wrote that Republicans in DC had moved away from their voters' conservative principles, a shift which I predicted would surely lead to electoral disaster. Richard Viguerie confirmed this hypothesis with an informal online poll a few weeks ago. Now a national poll revisits the same theme and reveals just how disaffected Republican voters have become.

The new CBS/NYT poll reports that GOP voters are dissatisfied with the current crop of presidential candidates and feel the party of Reagan has abandoned its principles:

Republican voters aren't happy yet: A majority — 57 percent— wishes there were more choices. A significant number don't think the party's candidate will win in 2008.

And when Republicans today look at their own party, they see divisions within its ranks. Most say their party has drifted from the principles of Ronald Reagan: Seven in 10 say the GOP has gone off on a different path.

A write up about the poll in the NYT notes that "19 percent [of GOP voters surveyed] said they wanted the next president to become less conservative [than George W. Bush], and 39 percent more conservative."

As we've seen already, Democrats don't understand the simple truth that Americans want limited government. Let's just hope that the GOP wakes up and returns to what their voters want. If they get lucky, maybe they'll even do it at a time when Democrats have begun to earn voter ire by returning to their big spending ways.

WSJ review of Ike's Final Battle

Today's Wall Street Journal has a review by Fred Barnes of World Ahead's latest book, Ike's Final Battle: The Road to Little Rock and the Challenge of Equality by Kasey Pipes. Barnes writes:

To put it kindly, Eisenhower was ambivalent on civil rights. "Conservative by nature, he hoped that the advance of the civil rights movement would be gradual, allowing time for the South to change," writes Kasey S. Pipes in "Ike's Last Battle." Most of all, Eisenhower didn't want to lead a civil-rights crusade from the White House. "The only crusade he had ever wanted to lead was liberating Europe in World War II," Mr. Pipes says.

But when necessary -- or when steps toward desegregation were relatively painless -- Eisenhower acted. He broke the color barrier in the military by deploying black soldiers alongside whites to win the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and January 1945. As president, he integrated the schools and movie theaters in Washington, D.C., and federal installations around the country. Most important, he sent U.S. Army troops to Little Rock, Ark., in September 1957 to escort nine black students into Central High School after days of violent protest. It was a defeat from which segregationist forces never recovered.

"Little Rock represented something else as well: the culmination of Eisenhower's own attitude toward racial justice," Mr. Pipes writes. "Ike had enjoyed the luxury of endorsing civil rights in broad terms, knowing full well that much of segregation law was a state and local matter. Little Rock ended that."

...Mr. Pipes is not a professional historian. He is a public-relations consultant and speechwriter who worked in the Bush White House from 2002 to 2005. But he has written a highly readable and credible account of Eisenhower's struggle with race and civil rights. While sympathetic, he doesn't sugarcoat Eisenhower's qualms about desegregation or excuse his unwillingness to
move decisively before Little Rock.

Click here to read the entire WSJ review.