In place of James Taranto's regular "Best of the Web Today" column, today Opinion Journal posted instead a free sample of its "Political Diary", and I'm not much impressed with its contents.
First off, John Fund disingenuously conflates immigration and illegal immigration. We all know the Wall Street Journal-ists are in favor of open borders, but they do themselves a disservice when they mischaracterize their conservative friends in this manner. The vast majority of us who want to stop illegal immigration have absolutely nothing whatsoever against legal immigration.
Anti-immigration activists are touting the 14% showing of Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, in a special election to fill the House seat of Chris Cox, the Californian who resigned to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. Gilchrist, who ran under the banner of the American Independent Party, will now face GOP State Senator John Campbell, a leader of anti-tax forces in the state, in a December runoff. Mr. Campbell won 46%, just shy of the majority needed to avoid a runoff.
Jim Gilchrist and the Minutemen are not "anti-immigration", they're anti-illegal-immigration.
In another slip, further down the page Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., echos a common misunderstanding of evolution.
Without counting heads, it's safe to say that among beltway types now sounding the alarm about avian flu are advocates of intelligent design. What they're fretting about is the workings of evolution, also known as natural selection.
The concepts of evolution and natural selection are not at all the same thing. "Evolution", as generally used, is merely the change and differentiation of species over time; as the Columbia University Press Encyclopedia puts it, the "concept that embodies the belief that existing animals and plants developed by a process of gradual, continuous change from previously existing forms." Although some less scientific definitions of evolution bind it to the process of natural selection, the two are actually distinct. Natural selection is one mechanism that many believe causes evolution, but there are other proffered mechanisms as well, such as genetic drift. It's important to distinguish between evolution itself and the mechanism that may cause it; few people deny that natural selection is a real phenomena, but many people are skeptical that natural selection or genetic drift are sufficient to cause evolution.
You failed to note another disingenuous conflation here. There is evolution, the change and differentiation of species over time and there is Evolution, the theory that all life originated by random chemical processes and evolved from simple organisms into the complexity that we see today through purely mechanical evolution.
People who believe in intelligent design usually believe in evolution but not in Evolution. That comment implies that they don't believe in evolution.
DR: what you call "Evolution" is better named "materialism".