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Matt Yglesias wrote a good article for the The American Prospect warning leftists that Obama Administration’s ambitious agenda in these bad economic times cannot survive unless more tax revenue is brought in. Indeed, one would have to see an almost miraculous turnaround in the economy by the end of the year and well into 2010 [...]
Filed under: Economics
Yesterday’s Vanity Fair audience with Tony Blair is just too annoying to ignore. It’s the maddeningly unctuous atmosphere of the event that really grates. Look at this Q & A session. Watch Sir Christopher Hitchens, radical-turned-establishment-toady, ask: “Why don’t you tell people what the Chicago speech was?” (You have to like the “why don’t you [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized
One of the few seemingly legit small-government, non-hawk conservatives wrecks his career with a disappearing act and a flight to Argentina to canoodle with his mistress. (Here, for what it’s worth, is Michael Brendan Dougherty’s profile of this very odd man.)
Filed under: Politics
A recent op-ed for the National Post offers interesting insights into how young Quebecois view Canadian Federalism. Adam Daifallah writes that [t]he francophone students I encountered at law school were generally confident, proud people who, while firmly attached to Quebec, were not strongly motivated by the sovereignist cause. It would be inaccurate to say they [...]
Filed under: Politics
President Obama’s response to this Huffington Post question about Iran seems sensible enough. Shame it’s marred by such a cringe-inducing and back-slapping set-up: BO: “Since we are on Iran, I know that Nico Pitney is here from Huffington Post. Nico, I know that you – and all across the Internet – we’ve been seeing a [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized
Amitai Etzioni, a leader of the so-called communitarian movement, has a thoughtful essay over at The New Republic on connections between consumerism and the economic crisis. A culture in which the urge to consume dominates the psychology of citizens is a culture in which people will do most anything to acquire the means to consume—working [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized
Many pundits, particularly those of an atheistic persuasion, will be delighted that Nicolas Sarkozy has declared that the burqa and the niqab should not be seen in France. Sarko is not only, as Neil Clark suggests, satisfying the liberal-Left by saying that such garb represents an insult to women’s rights. He is also giving visceral [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized
Given its monopoly of guns, bet on the Iranian regime. But, in the long run, the ayatollahs have to see the handwriting on the wall. Let us assume what they insist upon — that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the June 12 election; that, even if fraud occurred, it did not decide the outcome. As Ayatollah Khamenei [...]
Filed under: World
The current crisis in Iran is not Fourth Generation war. It is a struggle for control of a state, not an attempt to replace the state with something else. However, it could prove a harbinger of 4GW in Iran, because what is at stake is the legitimacy of current Iranian political system. In a manner [...]
Filed under: World
It shouldn’t be surprising that just a few months after hearing that the Obama Administration might not be able to fulfill its hopes for a “civilian surge” in Afghanistan due to a lack of interested/experienced American personnel, we now hear of Drug Enforcement Agency pilots being coerced — some say forcibly and illegally — into [...]
Filed under: Economics, Foreign policy, Iraq, War