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With Christmas shoppers out in force and the stock market surging to a two-year high, talk is spreading that the long-awaited recovery is at hand. Perhaps. But gleaning the news from Europe and Asia as U.S. cities, states and the federal government sink into debt, it is difficult to believe a worldwide financial crisis that [...]
Filed under: Economics
Jack Hunter interviewed me yesterday on the direction conservatism has taken in the past ten years. Here’s the in-studio video. (Thanks to South Carolina’s WTMA 1250 AM.) On Monday, Jack will be guest hosting the Mike Chuch show on Sirius XM. Tune in — yours truly might put in an appearance there as well, circa [...]
Filed under: Conservatism
The term “national security” has become like the word “racism.” It has been applied so liberally for so long that its overstretched usage has rendered it meaningless. Definitions necessarily require a limited and fixed meaning. If everyone is a “racist” then no one is. If everything becomes “national security” then nothing is. Former Surgeon General [...]
Filed under: liberties
The US media is reporting critically on the conviction yesterday in Moscow of Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky on charges of embezzlement and money laundering. Khodorovsky had earlier been convicted of fraud and tax evasion in 2005 and has been in jail ever since. The conviction prompted commentary from no less than Hillary Clinton who said [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized
“That speaks about who is going to be leading tomorrow.” So said Angel Gurria, secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Every three years, the Paris-based OECD holds its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests of the reading, math, and science skills of 15-year-olds in developing and developed countries. Gurria was talking [...]
Filed under: Education
In an effort to make a mountain out of a molehill, Rob Stein in the Washington Post (December 12) announces that the newly released Nixon tapes “reveal anti-Semitic, racist remarks.” What these tapes really reveal is something like those bull sessions I heard late at night as a graduate student at Yale in conversation with [...]
Filed under: History
“In May 1866, a little group of young men in the Tennessee village of Pulaski, finding their time hang heavily on their hands after the excitement of the field, so lately abandoned, formed a secret club for the mere pleasure of association, for private amusement — for anything that might break the monotony of the [...]
Filed under: Politics
It must be the season. Bibi Netanyahu will press the Obama Administration to free convicted Israeli/American spy Jonathan Pollard. My sources report that Obama has asked the Justice Department to brief him on the objections to doing so, so there is a better than even chance that Pollard will walk. An interesting aspect of the [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized
Every time I see Eliot Spitzer I think of Mark Sanford. In 2008, New York Governor Spitzer was disgraced after he was caught cheating on his wife with a prostitute. In 2009, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford was disgraced after he was caught cheating on his wife with an Argentine mistress. Today, Spitzer is the [...]
Filed under: Politics
A Democratic Congress, discharged by the voters on Nov. 2, has as one of its last official acts, imposed its San Francisco values on the armed forces of the United States. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is to be repealed. Open homosexuals are to be welcomed with open arms in all branches of the armed services. [...]
Filed under: Politics