What We Learned This Week:

Virginia does not follow federal gun laws. If gun dealers in the state of Virginia had followed federal gun laws, "the Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho should have been prohibited from buying a gun."

The best way to create a united and peaceful Iraq is to erect a 12-foot, 3-mile wall through Baghdad: The New York Times reports that the U. S. military is "building a 12-foot-high, three-mile-long wall separating a historic Sunni enclave from Shiite neighborhoods." According to the Times, the best military minds have decided that “the wall is one of the centerpieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence.” In other words, lock everybody up before they can harm someone else.

A database run by the Agricultural Department made the social security numbers of tens of thousands of citizens freely available to anyone who might want to make use of them for any purposes whatsoever over a period of many years. According to The New York Times, "Officials at the department and at the Census Bureau, which maintains the database where the personal information was listed, were evidently unaware that it contained Social Security numbers." The problem was discovered when a farmer from Illinois Googled the name of his farm. Evidently, no one in Washington is yet aware of or knows how to use the Google search engine. Why does that not surprise us?

The rich get richer, while the working class keeps making the rich even more rich than they are. The New York Times reports a spokesperson for the Obama campaign as stating,

“Americans know there is a difference between keeping taxes as low as possible on the middle class, and giving away the bank to the wealthiest Americans,” said Bill Burton, a spokesman for Mr. Obama. “If President Bush’s tax cuts are extended, the wealthiest 1 percent will save more than the bottom 80 percent combined, at a cost of $1 trillion over 10 years.”

The Bush tax cuts are set to expire in 2010.

President Bush is likely to accept Attorney General Aleberto Gonzales's resignation in the near future. We know this because the president has been highly visible in his support of the embattled AG, whose inneptitude has been frequently displayed in the past few days. Bush usually voices very strong support publicly before telling an appointee to take a hike.

More corruption connected with President Bush. The Washington Post reports that a program that is part of the notoriously ineffective "No Child Left Behind" law has been used to scam people to the tune of at least $1 million through textbook and testing sales.

Tom DeLay appeared on The Charlie Rose show this week and stated the problem Virginia Tech wasn't that the gun laws are too week but that there were gun laws at all. He argued that everyone should have a right to carry a concealed weapon and that if that were the case the teacher would have shot the murderer before he'd had the chance to shot so many people himself. That argument naturally pressumes that the teacher 1) would have been carrying a weapon, 2) would be able to respond quickly enough to stop the murderer, 3) could shoot well enough to have hit and disabled his target (most people can't hit the broad side of a barn with a hand gun), and 4) that everyone else in the classroom was not carrying a concealed weapon. Maybe they all should have been. We can see how well that works out in Baghdad.

Prize for the Best Story of the Week goes to:

Tim Grieve's "War Room" at Salon.com. You just cannot miss this must read article. Bush at his best with America's high school students.