EDITOR'S NOTE: “Window on The Week” acts as our weekly, quick-and-punchy, "between-the-issues" survey of the hot topics of the day. “Window on The Week” gives you a sense of what “The Week”—a popular feature that appears fortnightly in National Review—looks like.

Leftist political organizers arranged a Day without (Illegal) Immigrants. Why can’t our border enforcement do the same?

Rush Limbaugh has emerged unbowed from a Kafkaesque journey through Florida’s justice system. While addressing painful medical conditions, Rush became addicted to painkillers. He faced the problem, sought treatment, and has been clean for nearly three years. That should have been the end of the story. Instead, an ambitious state prosecutor from Palm Beach County, a Democrat, saw an opportunity to make hay by persecuting a conservative icon. Public resources budgeted for corralling real offenders were instead lavished on this shabby investigation. Rush’s private medical records were seized and shamefully leaked to the media, although they proved no crimes. The investigation became an innuendo spigot, spewing rumors of rampant drug trafficking, money laundering, etc. There was only one constant: Rush insisted that he was innocent, and rebuffed browbeating efforts to force a guilty plea. Finally, last November, the state’s attorney handling the case made the astounding concession that, after three years of combing through Rush’s personal life, the prosecution had no proof of any violations of law. The “case” had collapsed. Even under the just-reached settlement, the stench of selective prosecution lingers. The prosecutor filed a single “doctor shopping” count—a charge almost never used, and unearthed just for this matter. Rush, however, maintains his innocence, and the matter will be dropped in 18 months—with Rush in exactly the position he’d have been in if he’d taken the matter to trial and won. A victory for sure, but a frightening display of awesome power put in the service of crude politics.

The Senate simply can’t stop itself from spending our money irresponsibly. On Thursday, it approved a $109 billion emergency-spending bill by a vote of 78 to 20, even though President Bush said he would veto any bill exceeding $94.5 billion. Bush asked for the money to pay for Iraq and Gulf Coast reconstruction, but senators took advantage of the bill’s “must pass” status to load it with pork, including: $4 billion in farm subsidies beyond the $25 billion farmers are already set to receive this year; $700 million for the “Railroad to Nowhere,” a proposed relocation of a Mississippi rail line that just underwent a $250 million repair; and $500 million to compensate Northrop Grumman for “disruption costs” related to Katrina, even though the company had a 7.1 percent operating margin in 2005. Pork-busters Tom Coburn and John McCain took aim at these indefensible targets but were successful in shooting down just one: a $15 million “seafood promotion strategy” that McCain shamed the Senate into removing. “Let me save the American taxpayers $15 million right now by telling all Americans now to eat seafood,” he said. “Eat seafood. It’s good for you.” There is still a chance that the bill will emerge from the conference committee close to the House’s $92 billion version. If not, President Bush should make good on his veto threat. If he doesn’t intervene, conservative voters will—by staying home this November.

Remember judicial filibusters? When Democratic senators blocked an entire slate of President Bush’s nominees? It could happen again. The deal made last year by the so-called “Gang of 14” won the confirmation of hot-button nominees like William Pryor, Janice Rogers Brown, and Priscilla Owen. But it left uncertain the fate of others, like Brett Kavanaugh and Terrence Boyle. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist now wants to get moving on them, starting with Kavanaugh, who was nominated three years ago and has already had a confirmation hearing before the Judiciary Committee. But Democrats, angry that Kavanaugh once worked for independent counsel Kenneth Starr, demanded another hearing, and committee chairman Arlen Specter, in an inexplicable act of accommodation, has decided to give them one. In the end, Kavanaugh will likely win committee approval by a party-line vote, and then his nomination will move to the Senate, where we will find out if Minority Leader Harry Reid really wants to re-start the war over judges. If he does, and if there is a filibuster, Frist will have to decide whether to use the “nuclear option.” It is not a step to be taken lightly, and Democrats should be given plenty of chances to make their case. But in the end, if they block another lineup of nominees, Republicans will have to act.

Ken Blackwell’s victory over Jim Petro in Ohio’s GOP gubernatorial primary on Tuesday is a small triumph for conservatives—not because there’s anything especially wrong with Petro, but because Blackwell is so impressive. He’s a pro-growth and pro-life Republican with a history of winning statewide elections; if he prevails over his Democratic opponent, Rep. Ted Strickland, he will vault into the ranks of the GOP’s top governors. Liberals understand this and would love to stop him. They will surely seize on the fact that the Ohio GOP is reeling from scandal: Gov. Bob Taft’s cozy relationship with lobbyists led to four misdemeanor convictions last year, and Rep. Bob Ney continues to fight charges that he was too close to the disgraced influence-peddler Jack Abramoff. Blackwell had nothing to do with any of this, but Democrats nevertheless will try to paint him as guilty by association. While it’s far too early to predict who will win the election, conservatives can feel assured that they are fielding a strong and principled candidate.

After complications during surgery at a hospital in Austin, Tex., Andrea Clark ended up on a respirator and needed kidney dialysis. She was not brain dead, but she had lost consciousness, partly owing to the pain medication she had been given. Her doctor decided it would be futile to continue caring for her. Her family disagreed. There is a law in Texas that, in such a situation, an “ethics or medical committee” will decide whether to continue “life-sustaining treatment.” On April 19, a committee decided to cease such treatment. Clarke’s family had ten days to find another physician. Fortunately, they found one last Monday; it was far from certain that they would. The decision whether to use extraordinary care to keep an unconscious patient alive should be up to his family, not an “ethics committee.” Yet this is not only a matter of extraordinary care. According to the Texas law, “life-sustaining treatment” includes artificial hydration and nutrition. Providing nourishment is not a form of extraordinary medical treatment, and death from starvation is not death from a sickness. An ethics committee should never be allowed to make such a decision against the wishes of an unconscious patient’s family. This law denigrates the value of both freedom and life.

The controversy over Steven Colbert’s appearance at the White House Correspondents Dinner boils down to whether his performance was funny or not. Normally such questions are settled by taking stock of whether people in the audience laughed. The people in the ballroom that night didn’t—not much, anyway. Yet a chorus of left-wing bloggers cackled with glee, and has been at pains to explain why the assembled eminences of the press corps missed the jokes. One theory is that the correspondents like Bush too much. Now that is funny. Another is that they are too deferential to the president. But the idea that they choked back their guffaws out of reverence for Bush strikes us as slightly daft. We think Colbert is a funny man. But he was decidedly less than uproarious at the dinner. He crossed that invisible line from biting to bilious. He insulted his host with something less than good cheer. Whether you loved it or hated it, his performance violated a sacred rule of comedy: Know your audience. Colbert didn’t.

You can’t get away from the topic of immigration nowadays. Here comes aging falsetto folk-rock singer Neil Young with a ditty in which he urges us to impeach President Bush. Sample: “Let’s impeach the president for lying, / And leading our country into war; / Abusing all the power that we gave him, / And shipping all our money out the door . . .” You get the idea. What’s this got to do with immigration? Well, Neil Young is not a U.S. citizen. He’s Canadian. He can’t even vote. He’s been in America for 40 years, and has never bothered to take out citizenship. And this interloper from the land of moose and Mounties is telling us to impeach our president! For goodness’ sake. If it’s not Mexican fence-jumpers trying to dictate legislation to us, it’s fur trappers from the wilds of Ontario insulting our head of state. America’s business is everyone’s business, it seems. Here, perhaps, at last, is useful work for some enterprising American leftist to do: record a song calling for the impeachment of Neil Young’s head of state, which would be Her Britannic Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second. Britain is fighting in Iraq too, after all.

Jean-François Revel was France’s most prominent intellectual, earning the right to a place along with the great French writers of the past. Whether writing about philosophy, politics, international affairs, literature, or art, he was always a free spirit. And what skill and wit he showed, what a polemical punch he packed, when he dealt with the closed minds around him. Communism was a lie, and his analysis of how and why so many people could believe the lie was the basis of several of his most telling books. He feared that there was some general disposition to surrender to what he called “the totalitarian temptation.” A civilization, he emphasized, has to have the energy and will to defend itself. Many Frenchmen were shocked that he found this energy and will in the United States, and much admired it, while at the same time fearing that the countries of Europe, including his own, were decadent. With French presidents from de Gaulle onward, he was merciless. To tell the truth as he saw it was all that mattered, and he left his critics to go jump in the Atlantic. The world is a grimmer, grayer place without him. R.I.P.