The Continuing Crisis

According to CBS News's Miss Sheila MacVicar, one of Saudi Arabia's most wanted terrorists, Mr. Abdullah Asieri, managed to blow himself up along with a goodly number of Saudi security personnel by having one pound of explosives and a detonator inserted into his rectum, which brings to mind the old joke from the Borscht Belt: wrecked 'em? [...] Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi may have a new means of transport up and down the busy halls of the Capitol.

On the Prowl

According to other Pentagon sources, the recent video conference was initially supposed to be a small gathering of Obama, McChrystal, and other senior military and national security advisers, but quickly devolved into nothing more than a photo-op. According to RNCC sources, the decision to put the liberal Scozzafava on the ballot over conservative Doug Hoffman, who is now running only on the Conservative Party line, was made after the RNCC was shown a poll pulled together by district New Yor...

What a Difference a Year Makes

The good news is that the country is not buying it. Since the 1950s conservatives have known that we were in this battle for the long term, and knew that the culture, the institutions, ideas, and the attitudes of Americans were what affected politics, not the other way around.

Obama's Foreign Policy: Our Problems, Personified

While confessing the sins of domestic opponents passes for cleverness in Obama's circles, it is dysfunctional because it leaves no doubt in foreigners' minds that he represents only one part of his country, and advertises that he is playing a partisan hand domestic support for which can only weaken. Because professionals in international affairs note that Obama's chief interest lies in marshaling foreign support in domestic quarrels, they discount whatever pressures he pretends to bring to b...

The Right of Conscience in the Age of Obama

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit research organization affiliated with Planned Parenthood, 46 states also allow some health care providers to refuse involvement in abortion. According to Donna Harrison, MD, president of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the ACOG-ABOG policy would drive all pro-life ob/gyns out of practice.

Joe Being Joe

Biden's task force for developing policies that benefit the middle class pointedly publishes its schedule and meeting attendees on a website- unlike, the Wall Street Journal noted, "Mr. Cheney's energy task force, which he fought to keep secret in court." While Obama benefited from the enthusiasm of antiwar primary voters, Biden had voted to authorize the Iraq war and fit comfortably within the neoliberal-to -neoconservative foreignpolicy consensus (though he did occasionally pal around with...

Obama's Vision Through History

With Congress in Republican hands, Harding, Coolidge, and Mellon began to implement their free market plans piece by piece. [...] the 1920s budgets showed surpluses every year, and income tax rates were chopped across the board, leaving the wealthiest Americans paying at a 25 percent marginal rate. [...] spending was the most reckless and extravagant past that I have been able to discover in the statistical record of any peacetime Government, anywhere, any time.\n When the WPA received $4.8...

Sucking Up to Libya

The very fact that the "deal" with the Libyan government involved Megrahi's release gave the lie to this deception. [...] the official hero's welcome that Megrahi received was entirely to be expected: he had not, in Libyan eyes, committed a crime, but acted under orders and been captured by the enemy. Since his release he has been paraded before a meeting of the Organization for African Unity, a group of unelected "members of parliament" representing tin-pot dicta- torships around Africa wh...

Tex Mess

[...] there's no need. [...] the Democrats sure hope so. Obamacare, climate control, government management of the auto industry (hence threats to the pickup truck), abortion, euthanasia, patriotism, the development of existing energy resources- one needn't be a Texan to sense chill winds blowing across the land.

Michael Ledeen On Iran and Democracy

TB: Since I saw you last week, there has been one more uprising in Iran. Because Obama wants to make a deal with the regime. All the people who have been saying be nice to Iran, don't criticize Iran, avoid conflict with Iran, are making a military war more likely. Because if in the end Iran has the bomb, we are left with the Sarkozy Option:

'Call Fox'

In the early evening of Friday, September 11, the network sent an e-mail alert: "Census Bureau severs all ties with ACORN after hiddencamera videos expose 4 of group's workers advising 'pimp,' 'prostitute' on subverting the law." The video depicts a man and a scantily dressed female partner visiting the Charles Village office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, where they appear to ask two employees about how to shield their work from state and federal tax requireme...

When the Party Was Over

The level of implacable frivolity can be measured by the casual note in the Paris Herald as German troops closed in on the city in late May 1940: "Owing to unsettled conditions, the racing card scheduled for this afternoon at Longchamps has been called off." When an angry Wehrmacht officer threatened to confiscate the shop because she spunkily refused to sell him her last copy of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, she closed it permanently and hid all the books in a friend's apartment before he c...

Losing It

[...] one of the back-stories behind the Olympics bid is the extent to which the Daley machine was counting on the games to enable Chicago to clear out "undesirable" neighborhoods on the city's South Side and allow developers to extend the city's fabled Gold Coast southward- all in the name of urban renewal. Taxes are crippling (the city has the highest sales tax in the nation); capital assets from the Chicago Skyway Toll Bridge to the parking meters on every street in the city have been sol...

Advent Is Coming

In the absence of the miraculous creation of a large numbered account in a Swiss bank (plus the second miracle of it being a bank that has not been pressured by the IRS into disclosing the identities of its customers), what should those of us hoping for a sign do in Advent-the season of waiting? [...] keep awake- for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly.

Breaking Fast with Bill Safire

[...] I was driving along Kanan Dume Road, a lovely mountain road to Malibu, thinking about how much I wished I could be back at the Safires for breaking the fast. [...] this truth was "proved" by a book by a legal commentator for CNN, a very bright fellow named Jeffrey Toobin. [...] it was sad talking about my dear pal, the great, great Bill Safire, in the past tense.

An American Tragedy

Nor did she disappoint with her performance in Phèdre, which was terrific. [...] it had the effect of raising the level of the whole production, directed by Nicholas Hytner. Since the play was, like most 17th-century French tragedy, all about honor, and as I have written a book to explain why our contemporaries in America and other Western countries have very little idea of what honor is anymore, I suppose I should not have been surprised.

Feeding the Beast

"[...] the welfare state is not going away, and it will be paid for one way or another," he concludes his book. During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama pledged to give tax cuts to 95 percent of Americans, while he ran ads blasting John McCain's health care proposal as a tax increase.

The Podhoretz Method

The question arises, he writes, "of why the Jews who joined the radical camp were not put off by the egregious anti-Semitism of Marx or that of several other major figures of the socialist movement, including Charles Fourier (to whom the Jews were the 'the leprosy and the run of the body politic') and Pierre- Joseph Proudhon (to whom the Jews were 'the race which poisons everything [and] the enemy of the human race')." [...] if there is a political component to this, Podhoretz points out a p...

Barney and Friends

[...] he denied taxpayers were on the hook, saying he was making no explicit or implicit guarantee that the government would bail out the mortgage giants. According to the latest National Delinquency Survey, the percentage of mortgages seriously delinquent (more than 90 days late on payments or in foreclosure) in Nevada, Florida, and California was 15.6 percent, 17.1 percent, and 10.8 percent, respectively.

Freedom From Foreign Oil

Boone's Pickens Plan, inaugurated a year ago for energy independence, advocates all forms of energy production including wind and solar, but the alternative to oil that he now stresses most is natural gas. [...] we have 2,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves, mostly in Appalachia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas- more than twice the amount of Saudi oil, enough to last us 100 years. What we see is congressional legislation that cannot fail to improve national security and...

Listening to Newt

Possibly Newt has been chastened by experience and is ready to lead soberly and steadily Steadiness was a problem for him in the 1990s. [...] we have superb talent in the House of Representatives with the likes of Eric Cantor, Thaddeus McCotter, Mike Pence, and Paul Ryan. Speaking out on behalf of the flat tax, immigration reform, a forceful foreign policy, limited government, and market-oriented health care reform, he has solutions to the problems facing us today.

Current Wisdom

[...] far more important than the ideas themselves was the intellectual infrastructure - the think tanks, the magazines, the op-ed pages and the conferences - that Kristol helped build to provide support for arguments that otherwise would have been considered banal, dangerous or both. Twelve. 532 pages, $35 From the Archives Timeless Tosh from Current Wisdoms Past (November 1989) Cat Fancy Into the purring pages of a right-of-center cat-owners' review, the screech of social conscience is hea...

Two Weddings and a Demerol

Thanks to the awful events of that day eight years ago, air travel has become far less forgiving of time shavers and stragglers- as I've learned from painful personal experience. A combination of meetings and last-minute work and uncooperative taxi drivers delayed my arrival at the airport that Friday until just after cutoff.

No Freedom Left Behind