The American Civil Liberties Union caused some double takes last Sunday with a tweet blaming racism and "anti-Blackness" for the presence of the Second Amendment in the Constitution. It was jarring to see the ACLU, once an indomitable champion of the Bill of Rights, endorse the revisionist view that one of its core components, the right to keep and bear arms, exists for malevolent racial reasons.

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WHEN THE Washington Post reported in 2007 that Bill Clinton had pocketed nearly $40 million in speaking fees since leaving the White House six years earlier, I wrote a column regretting that yet another former chief executive had proved so eager "to leverage the prestige of the presidency for big bucks."

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A Department of the Arts? These artists said no

In my recent column on proposals to elevate culture and the arts to a Cabinet-level department (see ICYMI below), I quoted the unvarnished opinion of the American painter John Sloan. "Sure, it would be fine to have a Ministry of the Fine Arts in this country," Sloan said of an earlier scheme to create a federal bureau of fine arts. "Then we'd know where the enemy is."

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On Aug. 18, 1787, at the constitutional convention in Philadelphia, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina proposed nearly a dozen powers with which he thought the new federal government should be invested. Among them: the authority "to establish seminaries for the promotion of literature and the arts and sciences."

Pinckney's list was referred to the Committee on Detail, and some of his suggestions, such as federal responsibility for patents and copyright, were incorporated into the Constitution. But his idea of empowering Congress to promote the arts was ignored.

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WHEN THOUSANDS of Cuban citizens surged peacefully into the streets last week in spontaneous protests against their wretched living conditions, decrepit health care, and endless food shortages, they must have known how the government would respond. Within a day, the communist regime deployed its paramilitary Black Berets to attack the protesters and haul many of them to jail. Cubalex, a non-governmental organization that promotes human rights in Cuba, created a spreadsheet to keep track of individuals who have since been detained or disappeared. As of Tuesday, it showed more than 530 names.

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