Immigration

Some reminders are more tangible than others. This week the Navy revealed that a workboat dredging Pearl Harbor had brought up a human skull, probably from one of the Japanese bomber pilots who fell into the harbor with his plane. Twenty-nine Japanese planes were shot down and 55 pilots killed on the day that President Roosevelt called "a date which will live in infamy."

The Navy's announcement followed by a day an unusual tea ceremony at the memorial that sits astride the remains of the USS Arizona, now a watery tomb whose outline is clearly visible beneath the waves. Political correctness ran amok, as misplaced sentiment will.

Caylee Anthony, who would have been 3 next month, was the picture of perfect innocence, her unlived life taken away by a villain unmoved by the decencies and instincts that guide the rest of us -- rich, poor, male, female, bright, slow-witted and everyone else. Most of the abuse is aimed at the Florida jury. How could 12 good men and true (plus women, too) have been so dense, so unfeeling, so indifferent to "justice for little Caylee"?

The jury could have made a dreadful mistake. Juries sometimes do that. Only God (and maybe a few ambitious prosecutors) knows how many innocent men have gone to the gallows, the firing squad or the electric chair, or have ridden the poisoned needle to eternity. But it's possible, if not probable, that such outrage is misplaced. If those who feed such public outrage -- prosecutors, lawyers, reporters and above all those charged with editing news accounts in newspapers and television broadcasts -- would do a better job of educating as well as commentating, the public could be more selective, and thus more effective, with its outrage.

Anthony Weiner, who entertained us through the merry month of May with what he thought were lady-killing moves, was actually nothing more than a teenager playing a version of the pre-pubescent game of "I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours."

DSK, as Dominique Strauss-Kahn wants to be known (he thinks it makes him sound dangerously thrilling to the ladies as only a porky little fat man can thrill), is actually more runt than roue. He illustrates the proposition that Don Juan didn't make his reputation with truck-stop waitresses. (No offense intended to truck stops or waitresses.)

Gay Pride Day and the parade on Sunday was a big hit, with the usual complement of flags, floats, papier-mache penises held proudly aloft and naked men marching resolutely down the avenue. But now the city’s serious work, as Baghdad by the Bay measures work and defines serious, begins in earnest.

There’s a referendum in November to determine whether circumcision of male infants should be prohibited by law, punishable by thousand-dollar fines and misdemeanor sentences of a year in jail, with no religious exemptions.

Who among us, certainly who among the "progressives" (as the liberals now call themselves) can think ill of a man in therapy? We cheerfully assist drunks, junkies and perverts. It's not yet clear whether his rehabilitation is about photography -- correct f-stops and shutter speeds -- or about something else. He could use a little work on focusing. Digital cameras can pretty much take care of everything else.

Maybe his therapists should teach him not how to get sharper focus but how to avoid taking photographs at all. Good judgment has not yet been digitized. Nearly a dozen senior Democrats, including the maladroit chairlady of the Democratic National Committee, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Nancy Pelosi have counseled Mr. Weiner to leave the House, but so far the score is Weiner 1, Senior Democrats 0.

The Great Washington Weiner Roast continues into early summer, to the chagrin of Democrats and the glee of Republicans. Scandals, if not gentle rain, droppeth like manna for the purveyors of columny. Ah, tweet mythtery of life in the randy lane.

The fretful leaders of the Democrats, terrified of scandal running on forever, continue to pressure Anthony Weiner to disappear, to drop dead, to get lost, to return to his abused wife's side to occupy himself with midnight runs to the all-night supermarket for pickles and tutti-fruiti ice cream, she being in the family way -- or, as one of the irreverent Gotham tabloids put it, with "A little Weiner in the oven."

The long line of holiday visitors moved reverently down the lanes through rows of white marble headstones, with only the low chatter of conversation breaking the stillness on the hill where Robert E. Lee's mansion gave the graveyard its name.

Most of the markers are carved with only modest biography: names, dates, ranks and names of the states from whence men answered their country's call to arms. Memorial Day is still observed at Arlington as it was meant to be observed.

Nevertheless, even a politician is innocent until proved guilty. Politicians' wives, on the other hand, do not necessarily hold to this uniquely American standard. Dominique Strauss-Kahn was probably not a flight risk.

The judge's decision to keep him in a spare, dark jail cell, considerably less luxurious than his $3,000-a-night digs at a French hotel in Manhattan, probably reflects an excess of caution. Why would Mr. Strauss-Kahn, or "DSK", as the Paris papers call him, flee the protection of the American courts, even if the cuisine runs to pinto beans and Wonder Bread, to fly into the embrace of an angry wife?

The week included the economists' declaration that the end of the "Age of America" is at hand, but the president was finally freed to make jokes about the birth certificate he kept to himself for all these years. It's still not clear why he fed the mystery for so long. He could have released the long-form birth certificate at the nominating convention in Denver, when the buzz started, and spared himself and the rest of us the long harangue. The controversy may not be on its way to the graveyard yet, but it's probably safe to laugh about it.

The president is on a let's-get-serious kick about the other things he has botched and bungled (he doesn't put it quite that way), so he will exhaust the birth-certificate jokes soon and we can get back to serious things -- the imminent Chinese assumption of economic leadership and domination of the world, and what he and Congress can do about it, assuming he thinks something should be done about it. The International Monetary Fund says the "Age of America" goes onto the ash heap of history five years hence, in 2016, and the "Age of China" begins. That's when the annual size of the Chinese economy will surpass $19 trillion, worth billions more than ours.

That's when the value of the Chinese economy will reach $19 trillion annually, shading ours by a few billion in petty cash. A decade ago, the Chinese economy was only a fraction of the size of America's. That was before we shipped our factories to China and the Democrats and Republicans in Washington discovered they could borrow money with abandon from the Chinese to finance FDR's famous formula of "spend and spend, elect and elect."

This news of imminent Chinese economic superiority -- the triumph of Adam Smith over Karl Marx -- should arm the old men in Beijing with the confidence to tolerate the growth of religious faith in their midst. But on Easter Sunday, the government turned the observance of Easter into the Chinese fire drill of yore and lore.