The week's best in the Fray.

Air is not a special interest. Nor is strengthening the justice system. These are national concerns. One may not think they are important concerns, but they are not pork, which financially benefits specific industries. Pork is funding logging roads for Boise Cascade. Pork is increasing the already outrageous tax breaks for the wildly profitable oil exploration industry. Pork is $800 toilet seats and useless star wars missiles.

…Enacting stronger gay rights and gun rights provisions are relatively comparable although neither should be classified as special interest. Also, increasing funding for federal courts and giving prosecutors more tools to convict drug dealers are also comparable. These respective liberal and conservative issues are not "special interests" or pork. Those above efforts are simply not analogous with efforts by large corporations … to tear down the regulatory system and rule of law system that protects all Americans…

—De-Soto, here, on what defines a special interest.

…It is okay for us to feel sorry for England. In many ways, she is a victim. She was victimized by superiors who placed her in a difficult situation for which she had little practical training. She was victimized by her immediate superiors who failed to adequately supervise first her errant peers and ultimately herself. She was victimized by an overcrowded, poorly run, and extremely hostile environment. She was victimized by peer pressure from her fellow guards. She was victimized by a romantic attachment to a person with an apparent streak of true cruelty. And she was victimized, in no small part, by her own incredibly poor judgement in dealing with all of this.

The one mistake we cannot afford to make in feeling sorry for her – or for ourselves – is to cast her – or ourselves – in the role of innocent. If Lyndie England makes us feel a little bad about ourselves and what is happening in Iraq today, then that is the last little piece of good to come out of this and the final way in which England has honorably served her country. Not because Iraq is an unjust war but because, in justly removing a tyrant, we sometimes engaged in unjust, and even monstrous, actions. So did the other side. That is what war is. We can justify it. However, we would do well to engage in extreme circumspection before forgiving ourselves and then forgetting about it…

—The_Bell, here, on Lyndie England as victim.

The big problem with Wikipedia is that no matter how many times I tell my students (undergrads at a major midwestern university) what a reliable source for an academic article is and is not, they still insist on using Wikipedia. While it may be an interesting source of information, it's not rigorous enough to be a source for a scholarly essay. Presenting itself as any sort of an encyclopedia makes it tempting for students who are too lazy to go to the library and actually DO research. Also an interesting fact: I'd say 7 out of 10 times that I catch someone plagiarizing in my classes, their lifted information comes from Wikipedia…

—MidwestEmily, here, maintaining that cyber-outlet, Wikipedia,  is not quite ready for prime time academia.

To praise Selig's handling of the steroid scandal is to praise a man who was asleep at the wheel while it happened, and who only acted when Congress decided that baseball's steroid problem was the most important issue facing the country outside of Terry Schiavo's feeding tube. Selig, exhibiting his usual mixture of flopsweat and incompetence, appeared not to have read baseball's own report on the subject. Now that he's calling for draconian punishments and hooking minnows in drug tests, he's suddenly a visionary. Please. Once a used-car salesman, always a used-car salesman.

—Utek1, here, responding—like many fraysters—with a "wha?" to Nicholas Thompson's applause for baseball commissioner Bud Selig.

…is there anything, anything at all, in this world more inbred and ridiculous than the sight of two media critics media-criticizing each for media-irrelevance and media-inaccuracy within the format of their own media-based media-analysis columns? Anything?

No. -- No, I don't think there is (unless it's me criticizing the media critics on the media-bulletin-board).

Now, kids, stop fighting, or mommy's going to take away the media outlets.

—Gem101, here, to Jack Shafer and Michael Wolff.