Online Journal of Politics and Foreign Affairs
William Voegeli notes that, despite railing against big government for more than a quarter century, conservatives have done nothing to stop it. Some excerpts from an unusually long WSJ op-ed: A quarter century ago president Ronald Reagan declared in his first inaugural address: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; [...]
The U.S. has quietly acknowledged that Israel did in fact bomb Syrian territory last week — apparently to take out suspected nuclear weapons installations. After days of silence from the Israeli government, American officials confirmed Tuesday that Israeli warplanes launched airstrikes inside Syria last week, the first such attack since 2003. A Defense Department official [...]
German and U.S. authorities have thwarted what a massive Islamist terrorist plot against about to be launched against American targets in Germany. FT‘s Hugh Williamson: German security forces have prevented a terror attack in Germany that could have been more deadly than the Madrid and London bombings, top security officials said on Wednesday. Police on [...]
William Shawcross begins an op-ed in The Australian thusly: NOT everybody would regard it as a badge of honour to be cited favourably by President George W. Bush in a speech about Iraq, but I was pleased it happened to me last week when he warned that the consequences of leaving Iraq precipitously could be [...]
WaPo fronts an obviously dubious story claiming that, “The U.S. military’s soaring demand for small-arms ammunition, fueled by two wars abroad, has left domestic police agencies less able to quickly replenish their supplies, leading some to conserve rounds by cutting back on weapons training, police officials said.” Because, you know, the military uses so much [...]
The Swamp: Rebounding George Allen, rising Fred Thompson Former Sen. George Allen, who made “macaca” a household word and upset his once-promising political career, already shows signs of preparing for a possible comeback. His new Web site, www.georgeallen.com, touts his travels around Virginia, mostly in Republican-friendly territory. A press account posted on his site of [...]
A liberal blogger charges that Fred Thompson is breaking the law by raising so much money and still not formally declaring himself a candidate. Lane Hudson, a left-wing blogger, filed a complaint against former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) on Monday, accusing the likely presidential candidate of breaking the law by violating the Federal Election Commission’s [...]
WSJ’s Christopher Cooper reports on what appears to be serious hypocrisy on John Edwards’ part: As a presidential candidate, Democrat John Edwards has regularly attacked subprime lenders, particularly those that have filed foreclosure suits against victims of Hurricane Katrina. But as an investor, Mr. Edwards has ties to lenders foreclosing on Katrina victims. The Wall [...]
Mitt Romney has given what may be the dumbest answer ever by a presidential candidate. Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney on Wednesday defended his five sons’ decision not to enlist in the military, saying they’re showing their support for the country by “helping me get elected.” Romney, who did not serve in Vietnam due to [...]
Senator Hillary Clinton, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been asking the Pentagon for months to brief her on the status of planning for a withdrawal of forces from Iraq. Her requests had been ignored until now but they were met by a stern rebuke yesterday from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy [...]
Cross-posted from PoliBlog: Writes Charles Krauthammer in today’s WaPo: Beware legislative behemoths. Beware “comprehensive immigration reform.” Any bill that is 380 pages long is bound to have nooks and crannies reflecting private deals, quiet paybacks and ad hoc arrangements that you often don’t learn about until it’s too late. Krauthammer then goes on to pick [...]
Andrew Sullivan quotes, approvingly, from a reader email: What American ‘conservatism’ has become fits closely within the definition of fascism: an intensely nationalist movement intent on defining membership in the ‘nation’ on linguistic, religious, and (increasingly) ethnic/racial criteria, accompanied by an unquestioning loyalty to (male) authority, enshrined in family leaders, business leaders, religious leaders, and [...]
Quick links from around the Blogosphere: Juliette Ochieng ponders Christopher Hitchens’ brand of anti-theism. John Hawkins ranks Republican presidential contenders Mark Hasty‘s “Search Engine Answer Guy” returns after a long absence. Jonathan Last examines the latest in sexy comic book dolls. Terry Oglesby had four Quotes of the Day yesterday, stretching the concept somewhat. To [...]
Salon is reporting that elements of al-Qaeda have reorganized and are growing in strength. The news is alarming. U.S. and French intelligence agencies are convinced that terrorist network al-Qaida has reorganized and, what’s more, developed new training camps in both Afghanistan and the remote tribal regions of northern Pakistan. They believe that a new generation [...]
Marshall Manson and Jim Geraghty believe that Fred Thompson’s public announcement on Neil Cavuto’s show that he has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is a sure sign that he’s running for president. The logic strikes me as sound. If he’s not running, it’s nobody’s business. Plus, he was diagnosed years ago and is only now mentioning. Marshall’s right, [...]
Glen Bolger of Public Opinion Strategies* has announced the results of a telephone survey conducted for the Republican National Committee of 800 registered voters from March 25-27, 2007. They found a majority opposed to the provisions of the Iraq War Supplemental Spending bill that just passed both Houses of Congress but faces an almost certain [...]
The latest development in the ongoing U.S. Attorney firing scandal is evidence that AG Alberto Gonzales signed off on the decision despite having said that he was not involved. David Johnston and Eric Lipton for the NYT: Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senior advisers discussed the plan to remove seven United States attorneys at [...]
Scooter Libby juror Denis Collins explains the thought process of the jury. It confirms and expands on some quotes highlighted yesterday at the Drudge Report. Jurors in I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s perjury trial were certain of the former vice presidential aide’s guilt, but they also harbored sympathy for him as a “fall guy,” one of [...]
In response to an ongoing controversy about the use of vulgar language on blogs, InstaPunk issued a challenge which NewsBuckit‘s Patrick Ishmael took up: search the top blogs on each side of the aisle for instances of George Carlin’s infamous “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” The results: Steven Taylor notes some methodological [...]
Bruce McQuain compiles a list of quotes from Democratic Senators on their ever-evolving views on whether Congress has any business interfering with the President in the conduct of ongoing military action. He concludes, shockingly, that “perhaps the real difference is nothing more complex than who’s running the war.” Of course, I’m sure one could compile [...]
An audit by the Department of Justice Inspector General found that all but two of DOJ’s 26 sets of statistics about terrorism prosecutions are inaccurate. UPI’s Shaun Waterman: [Glen] Fine’s office examined the accuracy of 26 sets of terrorism-related statistics produced by the FBI, the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, and its Executive Office for United [...]
Public Opinion Strategies* has released a survey [PDF file here] of likely voters’ attitudes toward the Iraq War that finds that most voters think the country is going in the wrong direction (67%) and President Bush is doing a poor job (60%), and that Iraq will never be a stable democracy (60%). No real surprises [...]
Greg Mankiw has two quotes that highlights the differences on inquality between the “Right” and the “Left”, [T]he challenge for policy is not to eliminate inequality per se but rather to spread economic opportunity as widely as possible.–Ben Bernanke An unequal society cannot help but be an unjust society.–Brad DeLong Mankiw then goes on to [...]
I posed a question in an update to a previous post but, failing to get an answer, thought it deserved elevation to its own. There has been a running controversy about some statements Amanda Marcotte, John Edwards’ blogatrix, made on her personal site, Pandagon. Those statements have been well documented. Over the last couple of [...]
The saga of John Edwards’ bloggers continues to unfold, having now passed into the realm of the absurd. Edwards has apparently decided to humiliate them but keep them on staff. He has posted a Statement on Campaign Bloggers: The tone and the sentiment of some of Amanda Marcotte’s and Melissa McEwan’s posts personally offended me. [...]
After several days of criticism from the right side of the blogosphere, John Edwards’ blog outreach team is now coming under fire from the Catholic League, which is demanding that Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan be fired for anti-Catholic comments written on their blogs, Pandagon and Shakespeare’s Sister. Bill Donohue issued a statement saying, “John [...]
At 11:22, after a lengthy dispute over documents, the prosecution called Cathie Martin, a 1993 Harvard Law graduate who became a senior public affairs official in the Office of the Vice President from 2001 to 2004. She’s now Deputy Communications Director in the White House. Live blog below the fold.
Charles Mahtesian thinks the amount of exposure Larry Sabato gets is ridiculous. Governing magazine’s Josh Goodman has an interesting blog item about the media’s over-reliance on political scientist Larry Sabato, the University of Virginia’s Quotemeister General. Goodman counted the number of states where reporters cited Sabato in 2006 and found that the pundit-professor had been [...]
Saddam Hussein is dead. Some Arab media, including state-run Iraqiya television, Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya and the U.S.-financed Al-Hurra, reported about an hour before daylight Saturday (about 10 p.m. EST Friday) that Saddam had been executed. There was no confirmation from the Iraqi government. A U.S. judge on Friday refused to stop Saddam’s execution, rejecting a last-minute [...]
Jim Henley applauds the Iraq Study Group for pointing out our incredible dearth of Arab speakers but observes, “It’s too late. The time to start to instill competency in the language and culture of the society you’re trying to scare-quotes transform is not more than four years after deciding to take the place over.” Agreed, [...]
NPR’s story by Daniel Zwerdling on the Army’s treatment of soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder is getting quite a bit of play in the blogosphere. The crux of the story is that while “Army studies show that at least 20 percent to 25 percent of the soldiers who have served in Iraq display symptoms of [...]
My thanks to James for inviting me to guest blog here while my home site (ProfessorBainbridge.com) is undergoing construction. After three years of nearly daily blogging, I was ready for a break, but now that my hiatus has gone more than a month, I’m ready to be back. Steven Taylor’s post below on the “quotes [...]
Yesterday, James noted some quotes from Hugh Hewitt and Rush Limbaugh which appear to promote the notion that they both were cheerleaders for the GOP prior to the election loss to the point that they defended Republicans who didn’t deserve defending, but did so anyway to promote a Republican victory on Tuesday. Both quotes suggest [...]
Senator George Allen has issued a press release detailing lurid, strange, and otherwise lame scenes from the novels of his Democratic opponent, former Navy Secretary James Webb. WEBB’S WEIRD WORLD The Author’s Disturbing Writings Show a Continued Pattern of Demeaning Women · Some of Webb’s writings are very disturbing for a candidate hoping to represent [...]
Fred Kagan argues that the Bush administration is laying the groundwork to wash its hands of the Iraqi counterinsurgency effort and to shift the blame for failure onto the Iraqi government. It’s been coming for a long time: the idea that fixing Iraq is the Iraqis’ problem, not ours — that we’ve done all we [...]
That’s the message of a new RNC ad entitled “The Stakes.” Here’s the video: Breitbart: The Republican Party will begin airing a hard-hitting ad this weekend that warns of more cataclysmic terror attacks against the U.S. homeland. The ad portrays Osama bin Laden and quotes his threats against America dating to February 1998. “These are [...]
Via Michael Demmons, I see that Gerry Studds’ “widower” will be denied death benefits. Gerry Studds, the nation’s first openly gay congressman, pushed the country to another landmark development when he died Saturday: the federal government for the first time will deny death benefits to a congressman’s gay spouse. The federal government does not recognize [...]
One thing I’ve heard recently from some is that Bush never really ran as a “small government conservative” (link, link). The problem is I think Bush did try to portray himself as a small government, or at least, a smaller government conservative. Take for example Bush’s acceptance speech at the 2000 Republican convention. The last [...]
Over at Cato Unbound Markos Moulitsas attempts to make the case as to why Libertarians should vote for Democrat Candidates next month. The reason I say he attempts to make this case is because he basically wants people who have a strong libertarian streak to think that up is down and black is white. Moulitsas [...]
According to Real Clear Politics, Brent Scowcroft is claiming that there are quotes attributed to him in Woodward’s latest book State of Denial that he never made and that he did not agree to an interview with Woodward. The statement Scowcroft released today, “I have spoken to Bob Woodward a number of times about a [...]
Robert Kagan has a withering critique of recent media reports based on leaks from a National Intelligence Estimation saying that the war in Iraq has created more terrorists. He observes that in both the NYT and WaPo stories, “there were no quotations from the NIE itself, so all we have are journalists’ characterizations of anonymous [...]
Don Boudreaux has an interesting comparison of Paul Krugman’s thinking with that of Frederic Bastiat’s when it comes to competition, freedom and the ability to make one’s own decisions. Boudreaux quotes Krugman, is giving individuals responsibility for their own health spending really the answer to rising costs? No. ….it’s neither fair nor realistic to expect [...]
Salon quotes three former teammates saying George Allen used the word “nigger” frequently in the early 1970s. Three former college football teammates of Sen. George Allen say that the Virginia Republican repeatedly used an inflammatory racial epithet and demonstrated racist attitudes toward blacks during the early 1970s. “Allen said he came to Virginia because he [...]
A friend of mine emailed an MSNBC reprint of an AP story reporting that Don Rumsfeld today likened critics of the Iraq War to those who tried to appease Hitler in the 1930s. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday accused critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq and counterterrorism policies of trying to appease “a [...]
America’s Muslims Aren’t as Assimilated as You Think Geneive Abdo If only the Muslims in Europe — with their hearts focused on the Islamic world and their carry-on liquids poised for destruction in the West — could behave like the well-educated, secular and Americanizing Muslims in the United States, no one would have to worry. [...]