Eight years ago, an atrocity against civilization was committed. The events of that day were not merely attacks against the United States, or Western culture, or any of the other fashionable excuses. They were attacks against civilization itself, examples of an ideology steeped in barbarism.
Eight years later, and we have [...]
Law prof Richard A. Epstein has a withering look at the “Cash for Clunkers” program that gave car buyers a $4500 check to trade in an old car for a new one. As with any government program, the intentions of the program and the reality of the program were [...]
President Obama made a major mistake this week by attacking the police officer that arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. It was a mistake that could cost him significantly.
The President got elected largely on his ability to transcend the racial politics of the past. He presented himself as [...]
Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, culminating in the first human footsteps on the Moon.
Charles Krauthammer has a deeply thoughtful piece on the Moon we left behind:
But look up from your BlackBerry one night. That is the moon. On it are exactly 12 sets [...]
Carlos Watson argues that the solution to our fiscal problems is to tax the living daylights out of the “rich” in the hopes of making up for a $5 trillion hole in our national finances.
That solution will not work.
For one, there aren’t enough “rich” people to make up for [...]
Ross Douthat has the best take on the Sarah Palin brouhaha out there:
Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any [...]
As the media fixates on the death of Michael Jackson, Congress stands ready to enact the largest and most regressive tax hike in history in the guise of “cap-and-trade.” Jim Lindgren explains why this bill is so dangerous:
The cap-and-trade bill, if passed by the Senate and actually implemented over [...]
Sheldon Alberts has a good editorial on ABC’s decision to become a propaganda organ for the White House tonight:
At the president’s invitation, ABC News anchors Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer will host a prime time town hall-style meeting from the White House during which Obama – and Obama alone [...]
David Ignatius has an excellent column on why the revolution in Iran is so important, and why President Obama should stand up and show solidarity with the Iranian people:
President Obama was right to speak carefully about the events in Iran during the first week of protest. But it’s time [...]
Will Collier notes that Obama is acting like Jimmy Carter in 1979:
Rather than offering any crumbs of support to the Iranians who are literally putting their lives on the line for their own freedom, Barack Obama could only manage “deep concerns.” In Obamaland, it’s not as important to offer [...]
Right now, the people of Iran are engaged in a struggle against tyranny. The Ahmadinejad regime, flagrantly stealing an election, is now on the razor’s edge as hundreds of thousands take the streets to protest the regime and call for democratic reform.
Michael J. Totten, already a veteran observer of Middle [...]
Stuart Rothenberg, one of the nation’s preeminent pollsters has a scathing indictment of the current state of TV political coverage. Rather than providing an opportunity for viewers to get a wide range of opinions, TV political coverage is now largely about attracting the most rabid partisans:
Chris Matthews is a [...]
President Obama has picked Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the Second Circuit as his nominee to replace David Souter as Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Judge Sotomayor was considered the front-runner for the spot, along with Judge Diane Wood, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and Solicitor General [...]
Charles Krauthammer has a typically great column on the ongoing debate over “torture” after Nancy Pelosi’s denial that she knew anything about waterboarding. Pelosi, assuming that the liberal press would cover for her, has now gotten caught up in a web of her own lies. So much so that [...]
Daniel Larison, of the paleo-con American Conservative takes a look at the woes of the GOP and the conservative movement and puts the blame on national-security conservatives.
It wasn’t that the Bush Administration went on an orgy of spending that made a mockery of conservative principles, or that social conservatives [...]
Robert Samuelson has a great piece on President Obama’s counterproductive bias against domestic oil and gas production in favor of unrealistic “green” jobs:
In 2007, wind and solar generated less than 1 percent of U.S. electricity. Even a tenfold expansion will leave their contribution small. By contrast, oil and natural [...]
The New York Times has a look at the ideological battle within the Republican Party as the GOP deals with their drubbings in 2006 and 2008 and the Spector defection. Meanwhile, David Frum offers his own suggestions on rebuilding the party.
Everyone looks at the GOP’s problems through the [...]
Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania is now officially becoming a Democrat. There isn’t much of a shock to this—Specter has always been an erstwhile Republican, and he would have lost in the Pennsylvania GOP primary to Pat Toomey. Specter’s argument that somehow the GOP has moved too far to [...]
Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) has been arrested in Washington D.C. for disorderly conduct after a protest in front of the Sudanese Embassy. Rep. Ellison was protesting the Sudanese government’s decision to expel aid groups from the Darfur region. Rep. Ellison was arrested along with 4 other members of Congress [...]
In the Financial Times, Clive Crook wonders why President Obama is so keen on going after the Bush Administration on the “torture” issue:
Common sense may tell you waterboarding is torture, but the law is less clear-cut. Congress should make waterboarding a crime, for the reasons I have stated, and [...]
Bill Maher flaunts his ignorance once again over the issue of the Tea Party protests. Like many who live in a comfortable cocoon of left-wing orthodoxy, Maher fails to understand that the reaction to the Obama Administration is about matters of substance. Maher rants:
t’s been a week now, and [...]
In The New York Times, John Tierney has an excellent column about why getting rich is the best way to improve the environment:
As their wealth grows, people consume more energy, but they move to more efficient and cleaner sources — from wood to coal and oil, and then to [...]
In The Spectator, Fraser Nelson has a searching piece on the myth that laissez-faire conservatives led to the current economic troubles:
So while it’s a statement of the obvious, the obvious can’t be stated enough at a time when we’re fighting (or should be) for the future of capitalism and [...]
Law professor Paul Campos takes a critical look at the Iowa Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding gay marriage. (The Court’s opinion is available here.) Campos finds that the legal reasoning behind the decision was lacking:
Stripped of its verbiage, the court’s opinion comes down to the following claims: First, [...]
Next Big Future reports on a joint Chinese-South African project to advance pebble bed reactor technology. Pebble bed reactors are an advanced type of nuclear reactor design that promises to be significantly safer than conventional designs, for more details see here.
One of the reasons I’ve said that the [...]
The United States of America is now a de facto socialist nation.
That may seem like hyperbole, but there’s more than enough evidence to suggest that it’s true. Look at the definition of socialism from that font of all knowledge: Wikipedia:
Socialism refers to a broad set of economic theories of [...]
E.J. Dionne does what Democrats love to do, except when running for public office: call for a massive increase in American taxes. Again, he demonstrates the fundamental flaws in the Democratic understanding of basic economics:
He’s right that a large share of any increase should hit those who enjoyed the [...]
Foreign Policy has two perspectives on Fareed Zakaria’s latest piece in Newsweek. Both are interesting critiques of both Zakaria and the Obama foreign policy.
First, Christian Brose finds Zakaria’s thinking too reflective of the “Washington establishment”:
We’ve been hearing a lot about the Obama administration’s plans to talk to adversaries [...]
ABC News finds that Iraqis are more secure and more supportive of democracy. Security is a necessary prerequisite to any kind of political reconciliation, and it’s now looking like the Iraqi people really do feel more secure. For example, the poll found:
While deep difficulties remain, the advances are remarkable. [...]
This weekend, I managed to catch Zach Snyder’s adaptation of the “unfilmable” comic bookgraphic novel Watchmen. I didn’t read the book until after the movie had been announced, and while it is unquestionably a good story, it is more than a little dated. This review will avoid spoilers except in [...]
Bloomberg has a deeply critical piece written by Kevin Hassett arguing that Obama has declared “war” on American business. This may seem like hyperbole, but the evidence bears it out:
Imagine that some hypothetical enemy state spent years preparing a “Manchurian Candidate” to destroy the U.S. economy once elected. What [...]
Carl J. Schramm has a great piece on why the real focus on stimulating the economy should be on growing the entrepreneurial class:
Only private enterprise — in particular high-growth start-ups — will create the jobs and the wealth to right America’s listing economy. That is, if we let them.
What [...]
Sometimes, a concept can be so obvious that even David Brooks sees it. Brooks, the New York Times’ wishy-washy man of the Right no wakes up to the obvious and that Barack Obama is not a moderate at all and that he and the Democratic Party are engaged in [...]
For those who want to know what our future will look like, here’s a brief preview. F.A. Hayek’s brilliant The Road to Serfdom in a short illustrated form.
I’ve never been more bleak about the future of this country. The road to serfdom isn’t obvious. Nobody intentionally elects a dictator [...]
Bob Herbert writes in The New York Times that that what America needs to recover from the recession are more jobs. On that point, he’s absolutely right. The problem is that the jobs he would choose to create won’t do anything to help the economy. Like a good Times [...]
Yuval Levin has why “partisanship” is a healthy thing in a democracy:
Our deepest disagreements coalesce into two broad views of human nature that define the public life of every free society. In a crude and general way our political parties give expression to these views, and allow the roughly [...]
Francis Cianfrocca has an interesting critical look at why Paul Krugman’s call for a massive Keynesian stimulus is the wrong policy. His thesis is right: Krugman and many other economists are stuck in a world of rigid mathematical models that have little bearing on the way the world actually [...]
Andrew Sullivan went from being an astute conservative columnist to a frothing partisan hack somewhere around the 2004 elections. His latest column in The Sunday Times amply demonstrates his fall into hackery. Now, because the Republicans have the sheer audacity to defy the Leader and go against a budget-busting [...]
Michael Totten has an amazing dispatch from the besieged Israeli city of Sderot, the most common target of Hamas rockets. He notes what it’s like for the residents of Hamas’ war zone:
Fewer than twenty Israelis have been killed by rocket fire from Gaza since Hamas and Islamic Jihad adopted [...]
The U.S. economy shed 598,000 jobs in January, the worst job loss since 1974. There is no doubt that the U.S. economy is in a state of crisis. Our government is only making it worse.
It is more than mere coincidence that this huge job loss occurred in the same [...]
Popular Mechanics has a great piece on the myth of “shovel ready” infrastructure projects:
The programs that would meet the bill’s 90-day restriction are, for the most part, an unappealing mix of projects that were either shelved after being fully designed and engineered, and have since become outmoded or irrelevant, [...]
Marc Ambinder has a perceptive take on the election of Michael Steele, the first black Chairman of the Republican Party:
Did Republicans choose Steele as a token? Some RNC members will think so, as will many skeptical Democrats. But Steele won this thing by himself. The RNC is a fractious, [...]
Minesota has the second-highest business property tax rate in the United States. In a time when the retail sector is already taking a pounding, this additional burden is forcing retailers to abandon the state. World Market, one of my favorite stores, is one of the retailers pulling out of the [...]
Hardvard economist Edward L. Glaeser has a fascinating and provocative piece on what he calls “small government egalitarianism”:
In the 20th century, President Woodrow Wilson campaigned on a “New Freedom,” opposing Teddy Roosevelt’s big-government Progressivism. While Roosevelt wanted the government to manage monopolies, Wilson wanted trust-busting and less protectionism. Wilson [...]
Jim Geraghty notes a curious provision in the stimulus bill directed at the State of Illinois:
None of the funds provided by this Act may be made available to the State of Illinois, or any agency of the State, unless (1) the use of such funds by the State is [...]
Former Clinton-era Secretary of Labor Robert Reich argues in the TPMCafe that the bailout culture is “lemon socialism”:
America has embraced Lemon Socialism.
The federal government — that is, you and I and every other taxpayer — has taken ownership of giant home mortgagors Fannie and Freddie, which are by now [...]
David Harsanyi asks whether dissent is still patriotic in the Age of Obama. The answer, I suspect, is no. Instead, watch for any opposition to President Obama, whether measured or not, to be labeled as “divisiveness” and cast aside. As Harsanyi puts it:
Some of you must still believe that [...]
Congratulations to Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States.
There will be a time to get into the rough-and-tumble of politics, but that time is later. Today is a time to celebrate the peaceful transitions of power that signal a healthy democratic republic. We tend to take these things [...]
Tomorrow, George W. Bush rides off into history. The left is breathing a sigh of relief, their Emmanuel Goldstein is gone (although soon they will find another). Bush leaves an unpopular President—but so did Harry S. Truman. In many ways, Bush and Truman have had similar trajectories. Both began their [...]
Every year, I put up my list of predictions for the coming year. Sometimes they come close to the mark, most of the time they do not. Regardless, it’s fun to stare into the crystal ball and make a few predictions about the coming year. Without further ado, here are [...]
Every year I do my annual round-up of predictions for the coming year, some of which come true, many of which, well, do not. Last year’s predictions turned out to be less than accurate—let’s see how I did.
Politics/NationalThe Asia Times has an interesting, if disturbing look at how the world’s “intellectual capital” is making an unprecedented shift to the East:
Chinese parents are selling plasma-screen TVs to America, and saving their wages to buy their kids pianos - making American kids stupider and Chinese kids smarter. Watch [...]
President-Elect Obama has chosen to embrace some of the worst economic thinking in his recently announced economic recovery plan. The buzzword he’s following is “infrastructure”—and it’s a strategy that is doomed to fail.
Reason’s Nick Gillespie sarcastically looks at the plan:
When the history of this awful moment of bailout [...]
President-Elect Obama has unveiled his national security team, and it’s hardly what his supporters would have suspected. Hillary Clinton gets the thankless job of Secretary of State, ensuring that she’ll never be President and keeping her well away from Washington. Robert Gates remains as Secretary of Defense, meaning that [...]
Sen. Ted Stevens, perennial embarrassment and convicted felon, has narrowly lost his Senate seat. Had the GOP been sensible, they would have asked him to resign—and it was that lack of sense that has contributed to the waning fortunes of the GOP over the past few years.
There is no [...]
Via the incomparable James Lileks comes a map that should send chills down the spine of every Republican:
A county-by-county map of the 2008 election results.
Even though this election was relatively [...]
In the aftermath of the defeat of the McCain campaign, Republicans are trying to figure out not only what went wrong, but what to do in the future. This is a conversation that is a long time coming. From 2000 on, the GOP was unified around George W. Bush. From [...]
It looks like Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States. All partisanship aside, this is unquestionably a historic moment for this nation.
Let’s hope that he makes the best of it.
[...]CNN has called Ohio for Obama.
[...]Still based on exit polls, but if it holds, that’s not good for Team McCain.
[...]I have had neither the time nor the inclination to do my usual election-time prognostication, but I’ll give it a go for old time’s sake:
Minnesota CD 2: John Kline will do what he always does: kick ass and take names. Steve Sarvi will lose in a blowout.
Minnesota Senate: Norm Coleman [...]
Already there are exit poll “leaks,” and they are all over the map. This could, and likely will be a late night.
Obama’s GOTV will be huge, which is why every Republican needs to turn out before the polls close. Don’t let the media convince you that this night is over, [...]
Today is Election Day. For weeks we’ve heard how Barack Obama is going to be the next President of the United States. Now is the time for every good man and woman in this country to take their stand. John McCain is a man of honor, wisdom, and patriotism. He [...]
David Harsanyi has an astute piece on Obama’s collectivist tendencies:
Now, I’m not suggesting Obama intends to transform this nation into 1950s-era Soviet tyranny or that he will possess the power to do so. I’m suggesting Obama is praising and mainstreaming an economic philosophy that has failed to produce a [...]
While every election of the last few cycles seem to be called “the most important of our time,” the 2008 election may very well be a critical election for the future of this great nation. We have two candidates: one an eloquent speaker with scant experience and the other with [...]
Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama, although not unforeseen, is the big political story of the day. The Editors of National Review have a well reasoned response to the Powell endorsement that is well worth reading.
Contrary to Gen. Powell, Obama will be another divisive and polarizing political figure…The problem with [...]
The final Presidential Debate of 2008 is tonight. I won’t be liveblogging it, but may chime in with reactions at some point.
This is McCain’s last real chance to pull it out. The polls are against him, and if Virginia swings to Obama he has almost no hope of winning. He [...]
There’s a brouhaha over Christopher Buckley leaving National Review after his endorsement of Barack Obama. Buckley, like his father, is a brilliant and witty writer, but it seems hardly surprising that he’s getting such a reaction from conservatives. Buckley’s sin isn’t heresy, it’s shallowness. His endorsement of Obama [...]
Now you can show your undying devotion to Dear Leader with your very own Barack-O’Latern!
Sometimes the thing that disturbs me the most about Obama is less the man himself, but his followers. There is something deeply undemocratic about the cult of personality that surrounds Sen. Obama. Supporting your chosen [...]
Glenn Reynolds has a letter from a Republican who isn’t about to give an Obama Administration the benefit of the doubt on anything:
I consider myself a libertarian/conservative. Like many people of that bent, I was uncomfortable with Bush when he was nominated. But Al Gore’s increasingly-erratic behavior during the [...]
My take on this debate: McCain was strong and substantive. If he were ahead, he would have done fine. But he’s not ahead, and what he had to do is strongly take down Obama. He played it safe, which is not what he needed to do. Objectively, McCain won. In [...]
In just a few minutes, Barack Obama and John McCain will debate in Nashville for the second Presidential debate of 2008. I won’t be liveblogging, but I’ll chime in with reactions as they come. After the debate, expect the usual spin.
This is make-or-break time for McCain. He’s down in the [...]
If you believe the latest Star-Tribune poll, Al Franken leads Norm Coleman by over 10%.
If you believe that, I also have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
At PowerLine, Scott Johnson takes a sharp look at the poll and a contemporaneous SurveyUSA poll showing Coleman with a modest [...]
Joe Biden is losing this thing for Obama. He is coming off as a pretentious jerk.
Palin is not at all as polished as Biden, but she’s coming off as authentic. She doesn’t have full command of the debate, but she’s not just making things up like Biden has been all [...]
The financial services bailout bill just failed to pass the House with a bipartisan rejection
The bailout bill was a turd sandwich, but it was a necessary one to keep the markets from going into an absolute freefall. Which, coincidentally, is what’s going to happen now that the bailout is [...]
Here’s my take: in the economic section, Obama very narrowly won. On the foreign policy section, McCain won. In the end, the dynamics of this race won’t change. McCain didn’t do what he needed to do to take Obama out, but Obama didn’t do anything to take down McCain either. [...]
I will be doing my customary liveblogging of tonight’s Presidential debate in Oxford, Mississippi. This will be a major event in the campaign, and while the subject is ostensibly to be foreign policy, expect that the debate will be predominantly about the state of the economy. As always, analysis and [...]
John McCain will attend tonight’s Presidential debate in Oxford, Mississippi.
McCain has an opportunity to take Obama out, and it looks like he is going to go for it. The way he can do this is to run against the “politics as usual” in Washington. His dangerous political gambit this [...]
When I heard of McCain’s decision to “suspend” his campaign and go to D.C. to work on the bailout, I had two reactions:
Apparently Sen. Biden’s knowledge of American history is a bit shaky.
Of course, had Gov. Palin said something like this, the media would be making all sort of accusations about her competency. But given the way that the media covers for anyone with a D next to their name, most [...]
I am at the Twin Cities McCain/Palin rally. Lines are huge — big turnout. More later.
The hangar is packed, which is a good sign. Minnesota appears to be in play in this election. Could it go McCain? It seems unlikely, but a turnout like this is nothing to sneeze at. [...]
The Fed is going to bail out AIG.
Scratch pretty much everything I’ve written—apparently the price of failure is now a nice government bailout. This is a phenomenally bad precedent, even if it saves the markets some short-term pain.
UPDATE: Jim Cramer was pushing for an AIG bailout tonight. If AIG [...]
BloggingStocks congratulates Ben Bernanke for not lowering the Fed prime rate today. He deserves it. It would have been easy to cut rates and hope that a shot of liquidity would help the markets.
It wouldn’t. Instead, it would have created an even bigger inflationary threat than we have now. [...]
Megan McArdle has an excellent piece on how the current financial crisis developed, going beyond the spin to get to the real issues that precipitated yesterday’s sell-off. The sort of regulation that would have prevented the subprime meltdown—regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac like private companies—were never seriously considered. [...]
As the situation on Wall Street develops and worries grow about the economy, Sen. McCain already has an effective ad out discussing the issue:
Now, I’m not sure that this problem will be solvable with more regulation—the market is already doing enough to punish those firms that engaged in the trade [...]
Tiny Fey’s impersonation of Palin is so good, it’s almost eerie…
[...]The Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Minnesota Poll is infamous for overstating Democratic performance. Whether it is by sampling bias or methodology, the poll has consistently tended to overstate the performance of Democratic candidates in Minnesota.
Which is why, for the Obama campaign, having the Minnesota Poll showing Minnesota dead even should be [...]
It’s difficult to believe that seven years have passed since the terrible events of September 11, 2001. In the past seven years, we have not been visited by more attacks of that magnitude. What seemed inevitable seven years ago thankfully never materialized. Al-Qaeda is severely disrupted. Their leadership is scattered, [...]
It seems as though everyone has seized on Barack Obama’s comment about “putting lipstick on a pig” yesterday&mash;and Glenn Reynolds has the links to prove it.
At first, I figured that there was no way that Obama could have been that stupid—he would never be dumb enough to make that [...]
A recent poll in Michigan shows Obama with the slenderest of leads, and many undecided independent voters. If Michigan goes to McCain, Obama is going to have a very difficult time making up for its electoral votes. If Michigan and Pennsylvania swing to McCain, it’s over for Obama. That [...]
The first batch of post-RNC polls are out, and they contain good news for John McCain.. In the Gallup Tracking poll, McCain is up 3% against Obama. In the Rassmussen Tracking poll, McCain is tied 48% to 48%.
These polls show that McCain did get a bounce from the RNC, [...]
This is surprising to me, but it appears that the preliminary TV ratings for McCain’s speech last night were higher than Obama’s. Granted, the numbers could change, but I didn’t think the numbers would even be close.
Gov. Palin’s speech had less than one million fewer viewers than Obama’s speech, [...]
John McCain will never be a great orator. He’s no Obama, neither is he a Sarah Palin. But last night’s speech wasn’t about lofty rhetoric: it was about John McCain being John McCain. There was no attempt to gild the lily: instead McCain had the wisdom to realize that the [...]
We just saw the first female President of the United States give the first major speech of her national career.
Sarah Palin is the most natural political talent I’ve ever seen. Tonight, she very well may have won this election. She was strong, engaging, powerful, and unafraid. She went after Obama [...]
Megan McArdle has an eminently sensible take on the whole Sarah Palin “scandal”. Needless to say, when someone like Ms. McArdle—who is an Obama supporter—is so disgusted with the left’s rhetoric, it signals that these juvenile and disgusting attacks are likely to backfire. As she puts it:
Sorry, I must [...]
Fred Thompson just gave one of the best political speeches I’ve ever heard. He not only knows how to twist the knife, but his telling of McCain’s story was emotionally powerful.
Had he done this well in his campaign, he’d be the main attraction of this campaign.
One of my favorite parts?
Now [...]
Historian Daniel J. Boorstin coined the term “pseudo-event” for an event designed solely to attract the media and not for any other real value. The current brouhaha over Bristol Palin is an ideal example of just such a pseudo-event. Here in the Twin Cities, the Palin news is being met [...]
The RealClearPolitics polling average shows a typical 6–8% convention bounce for Barack Obama. These polls may be right, but note that all of them are polls conducted over a weekend—and there is anecdotal evidence that weekend polls favor Democrats. Even though the evidence is far from conclusive, Obama’s [...]
In other Sarah Palin-related news, ABC reports that the Palin pick has greatly energized GOP voters and caused McCain to have his best fundraising month yet. The Palin pick gave McCain an estimated $10 million in new contributions.
The Democrats were counting on a big enthusiasm gap, but the Palin [...]
