Monthly Archives: April 2005

Millennium bomber clams up

The Los Angeles Times reports on the information received by the government from “milliennium bomber” Ahmed Ressam who was apprehended by an alert American customs agent when the bomber tried to enter the United States: “Records show man in LAX plot gave U.S. key terrorist details.” The article also reports that Ressam has apparently stopped talking. The information reported in the Times story has become available in connection with the »

Exceeding the bounds at UST

Undergraduate students at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul had the temerity to invite Ann Coulter to speak on campus last week. Coulter was the guest of the St. Thomas chapter of the College Republicans and the Standard, the new campus conservative publication. The local papers didn’t actually cover Coulter’s St. Thomas speech, although the Star Tribune’s fatuous columnist wrote a characteristically fatuous column on her talk in »

Mob rule at SIU

In his great 1838 Lyceum speech “The perpetuation of our political institutions,” Abraham Lincoln decried the dangers of mob rule represented by recent lynchings in Mississippi and St. Louis. Foremost on his mind, however, seems to have been the lynching at Alton, Illinois on November 7, 1837 of the abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy. Recent events at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois have picked up where they left off in »

Not ready for prime time

Although I’ve been skeptical, it really is starting to look like the French voters will reject the EU Constitution. At least that’s how the Weekly Standard’s Christopher Caldwell sees it. Since the EU is an essentially French creation, and its proposed constitution a quintessentially French document (it contains 448 articles compared to seven in the U.S. Constitution), its defeat at the hands of French voters would be monumental, though not »

Demagoguery Unleashed

The Democrats put on a sad spectacle at the Capitol today, rallying their armies of the ignorant to oppose any reform in the Social Security system: This really is demagoguery at its worst. Federal employees already have a private contribution plan. No member of Congress relies on Social Security for his or her retirement. I doubt whether any Democratic member of Congress really believes that Social Security reform would be »

Some revolt

E.J. Dionne writes about the “revolt of the middle.” He’s referring to the alleged turning away by moderate voters from President Bush as the result of Bush’s alleged decision to interpret the 2004 election as a mandate to implement immoderate policies. There are a few problems with this theory. One is the author himself, a liberal Democrat known more for wishful thinking than for being in-tune with moderate America. The »

John Bolton and his Enemies, Part 2

Last night I did a post about the latest attack on John Bolton, by a former State Department official named Frederick Vreeland. Vreeland embodies the failed anti-American and anti-Israel ideology that infected the State Department for a generation, but which, happily, is now in retreat as a result of the efforts of people like Bolton. A Google search this morning reveals that dozens if not hundreds of news outlets have »

More Bad Poll Data

This morning’s ABC News/Washington Post poll is getting a lot of press, with its apparently bad news for Republicans. The Post itself headlines its story “Filibuster Rule Change Opposed,” and begins its coverage of the poll with that issue: As the Senate moves toward a major confrontation over judicial appointments, a strong majority of Americans oppose changing the rules to make it easier for Republican leaders to win confirmation of »

False security and cynical idealism

Today’s Wall Street Journal carries an excellent essay from the spring issue of the Claremont Review of Books that we’ve been featuring here. The essay by Claremont Institute Research Fellow William Voegeli is one of the issue’s highlights: “FDR’s card trick.” »

Jonah G. is coming to town…tonight

Aaron Solem writes: I’m president of the Campus Organization of Bloggers (C-MOB, for short) and Vice-President of CFACT at the University of Minnesota. I’m contacting you guys to let you know that CFACT, which is a conservative environmental group, is bringing National Review writer Jonah Goldberg to campus to speak on ANWR and the failures of the environmental movement, today, April 26 at 7PM. The event is being held in »

South Park Conservatives: The interview (2)

Brian Anderson is the managing editor of City Journal magazine, the quarterly publication of the Manhattan Instititute, and the author of the new book South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias. In the first part of the interview yesterday, Brian discussed the phenomenon of liberal media bias, the rise of conservative talk radio, and the impact of FOX News. Here we conclude the interview with Brian’s discussion of »

John Bolton and His Enemies

Tonight the Associated Press reports that a “former colleague” of John Bolton, Frederick Vreeland, sent an email to Senator Joe Biden that was critical of Bolton. The email was then leaked to the press, either by Vreeland or by Senator Biden’s office. The AP says: A former colleague of John R. Bolton says President Bush’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations “has none of the qualities needed for »

Did Columbia have help?

Several weeks ago, in The Daily Standard, I commented on the report of the ad hoc committee investigating faculty intimidation of students at Columbia University. The intimidation, which the report mostly whitewashed, was directed at students who attempted to question the rabidly anti-Israeli teachings the University’s radical Middle Eastern studies professors. I argued that report should be understood as “a directive to Columbia students to take without protest the poisonous »

No Cat-Blogging For Us

I’ve written occasionally about the fact that my suburban neighborhood, like many others, has become a haven for wildlife–an occasional eagle, ubiquitous hawks and owls, wild turkeys, deer, foxes, opossum, coyotes–which have caused some of our neighbors to keep their small-animal pets indoors–and others. Of all our local fauna, the only one that scares me is the snapping turtle. We live on a pond, and every spring, big snapping turtles »

1994 Was So Long Ago…

Yesterday, the editorial board of the Minneapolis Star Tribune came down squarely on the side of the filibuster in an editorial titled: “Nuking the filibuster/GOP arguments fail smell test.” In the Strib’s view, the filibuster is the Senate’s great contribution to democracy: As the Republicans in the U.S. Senate consider invoking the “nuclear option” of prohibiting filibusters on judicial candidates, a bit of Senate history might be in order. It »

Chris Dodd’s long-term memory is better than his mid-term memory

Robert Novak (via Real Clear Politics) on the “Bolton fiasco.” Novak notes that, although Voinovich’s expression of doubt prevented Bolton from getting out of committee last week, it won’t necessarily be enough to assuage the Ohio Senator’s doubts — fellow committee members Chafee and Hagel must now be brought back into the fold, as well. Accordingly, Novak sees the prospects for confirming Bolton as “grim.” He blames the fiasco with »

South Park Conservatives: The Interview (1)

Brian Anderson is the managing editor of City Journal magazine, the quarterly publication of the Manhattan Instititute, and the author of the new book South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias. The book is instructive, entertaining, and heartening. Power Line is a small part of the story that Brian has to tell in the book. We asked Brian if he would consent to give us a thematic tour »