The prospect of the deliberate extinction of some harmful species is getting closer.  Be in no doubt - it would be an unambiguously good thing.

Smallpox was eradicated outside laboratories in 1977, when Ali Maow Maalin recovered from the disease in Merca, Somalia (he died last year of malaria).  The last case of smallpox was the death of Janet Parker, a medical photographer, in Birmingham in 1978, who caught it from a laboratory.

If you had predicted in 1978 that 36 years later we would have extinguished no more diseases (apart from rinderpest, a cattle disease), you would have been thought a dire pessimist. Yet smallpox turned out to be uniquely vulnerable to eradication because its short incubation period, lack of an animal reservoir and its obvious symptoms allowed rapid vaccination responses to contain outbreaks.

Polio was expected to follow it to the viral grave soon afterwards, but that dream has been repeatedly postponed. Indeed, this year polio is resurgent, with 82 cases so far, compared with 34 by this date last year.

Most of them are in Pakistan, a country where polio vaccinators are sometimes murdered by the Taliban on the suspicion that they are US or Israeli agents spreading Aids or sterilizing girls.

The widespread belief is that the American constitutional republic, if not actually broken, is in a state of disrepair. In his new, best-selling book (currently #1 on Amazon), "The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic," Mark R. Levin, president of the Landmark Legal Foundation and nationally syndicated talk-show host, proposes a number of amendments to the Constitution as a fix.

Mr. Levin argues that amendments are needed because the nation has entered an age of "post-constitutional soft tyranny" -- as defined by the great 19th-century French historian and philosopher, Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote in "Democracy in America":

"It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people, ‘till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."

A number of perceptive folks on Capitol Hill have noticed some very odd things about OBL's latest audio tape.  The principal eyebrow-raiser was his call to take the Jihad against the Crusader-Zionists away from Iraq and into Darfur, Sudan.

Normally it takes at least some time for the CIA to claim an OBL audio tape is authentic.  This time it was almost immediate:  "Yep, it's him, no doubt about it."

Putting the weirdness about Darfur-focus (aren't there a lot more "Crusader-Zionists" in Iraq than in the central Sahara Desert?) and Langley's over-eagerness to authenticate together, and you get the latest Capitol Hill buzz:

The voice on the tape wasn't Osama but an Arabic-speaking CIA impersonator.  Agents slipped the faked tape to al-Jazeera which cooperatively broadcast it, then the CIA authenticated its own tape.

The St. Petersburg International Economic Forum is the annual showpiece of Vladimir Putin, who began his political career as deputy mayor of St Petersburg. 

In its opening session today (5/22), the most senior Western politician attending told Russia's leaders in the bluntest terms that their country will be frozen out of the global financial system and face slow economic breakdown unless the Kremlin steps back from confrontation with the West.

Peter Mandelson, Member of the British House of Lords, former Deputy Prime Minister and EU Trade Commissioner, informed them:

"A sense of Russia-risk is crystallizing around the events in Ukraine. The great danger is that this negative sentiment will set in concrete around Russia.  It is the markets that are leading the way, not governments, and they are quickening the pace. This is the looming nightmare for the Russian economy and it will have to be dealt with very boldly by the Russian government. To be cut off from global capital markets is not a good idea."

Why does the Obama administration claim it wants you to pay less for your airline ticket, but more for the shrimp you buy?  One reason the economy keeps stumbling along is that businessmen, consumers and taxpayers are having a hard time planning because of endlessly inconsistent and often lawless policy directives from the Obama White House.

On the same day last week, the administration announced that it was seeking to block the proposed American Airlines-US Airways merger, allegedly to protect consumers against higher prices - and that it might impose higher duties (taxes) on shrimp from foreign competitors to protect U.S. shrimpers, meaning that all who eat shrimp will have to pay more.

The Justice Department, under the leadership of ethically and intellectually challenged Eric H. Holder Jr., came up with a study that concluded that airline ticket prices would be higher and service worse if American Airlines and US Airways merged. The conclusion was immediately challenged by affected parties (the companies and the unions) and many transportation economists.

I do not know, as a frequent flier, whether I will be better or worse off with the proposed merger. I do know, however, that the folks at the Justice Department also do not know - but trying to block the merger massages their egos and their lust for power.