New Atlanticism on Horizon

Viola Herms Drath sees the dawn of a "New Atlanticism" on the horizon. While rather ironic in light of reports that the Bush Administration is snubbing Britain, it's an interesting argument. The dawn of a New Alanticism comes as a welcome surprise. After years of benign neglect, European leaders who are energetic and emancipated Atlanticists in Germany, France and England ...

Thompson and Other People’s Liberty

Fred Thompson recently told a stump speech crowd, "You know, you look back over our history, and it doesn't take you long to realize that our people have shed more blood for other people's liberty than any other combination of nations in the history of the world.'' An unsigned author at the Washington Post has awarded him "four Pinocchios" for ...

Animal Rights and Libertarians

Jim Henley, Julian Sanchez, and Megan McArdle debate whether one can be a libertarian and simultaneously favor laws against animal cruelty. While there are many theories and many stripes of libertarianism (as anyone reading Henley, Sanchez, and McArdle on a regular basis would soon discover) it seems to me that at the core of all of them is the Harm ...

Democrats and the Wimp Factor

Glenn Greenwald updates his post in response to my earlier post. He agrees that Democrats are willing to play aggressive politics but says he was actually making a much narrower post. When I said that conservatives are far more eager than liberals "to exploit these sorts of themes," I am referring to the gender-based personality attacks that have become a ...

Chinese Products Unsafe

I sent my wife this Reuters article about a recall on some wooden "Thomas and Friends" toys this morning because the children of some friends of our plays with them. Steven Taylor, though, noted something more within the rubric of the blog, though, deeper into the piece: The recall of toys made in China follows a series of health ...

Not Jimmy Carter Bad

London Times U.S. editor Gerard Baker assesses Jimmy Carter's claim that George W. Bush's presidency is the “the worst in history” and judges that, while it is bad, "it's not Jimmy Carter bad." For the younger reader, perhaps already infused with a nostalgia that recalls the 1970s as a time of peace and prosperity, a brief reminder of the golden ...

Jerry Falwell Dead at 73

Jerry Falwell has died. Evangelist Jerry Falwell died Tuesday after he was found unresponsive in his office, an official at Liberty University told CNN. Falwell, 73, was rushed to a Lynchburg, Virginia, hospital, where he was given CPR. Falwell founded the Moral Majority in 1979 and is a nationally known voice for conservative Christian views. (Watch Jerry Falwell's rise to ...

Can Republicans Win California Again?

Marc Ambinder has two pieces in Hotline on Call today that strike me as interrelated. This morning, he wrote about a memo from Brent Seaborn, Rudy Giuliani's strategy director, arguing that his candidate can win California in 2008, a feat no Republican has accomplished in the twenty years since George H.W. Bush beat Mike Dukakis. The memo is ...

Hitler, Mozart, and Abortion

Gerard Vanderleun laments the social cost of abortion, wondering, "Of all those babies we destroyed, how many were Einsteins, how many were Mozarts?" Harvey Olson retorts, "Statistically, about as many as there were Hitlers, Dahmers, and Chos." A debate ensues about the statistical likelihood that a given aborted fetus would mature into a genius vice a sociopath with a side ...

Netroots The Left’s New Machine

Jonathan Chait has a longish cover piece in TNR entitled, "The Left's New Machine: How the netroots became the most important mass movement in U.S. politics." What particularly struck me was this: The most significant fact of American political life over the last three decades is that there is a conservative movement and there has not been a liberal ...