Monthly Archives: April 2006

Wrecking Ball

Yesterday Neil Young’s publicist wrote us to inquire whether we’d be interested in posting free streams to “Living With War,” Young’s new Bush-bashing compact disc. Answer: Yes. I figured that the price was right, that a few readers would be interested and that they could make up their own minds on the merits of the recording. Here is our link to the recording (if I have understood the instructions correctly »

The Mainstream Media Are Breathlessly Awaiting…

…the nationwide strikes and demonstrations in support of illegal immigration that are scheduled for Monday, May 1. We have readers scheduled to attend demonstrations in various locations to film whatever happens. I have no idea what story or stories will emerge, but I expect that whatever happens, or doesn’t happen, will be interesting. This time, we have lined up a professional filmmaker to supervise the production process. So if you »

Back on the Radio, Too

I’ve missed our weekly radio show for the past two weeks because I’ve been traveling for various reasons, but I’ll be back on the Northern Alliance Radio Network, with the Fraters guys as usual, tomorrow from 11 to 1 central time. We’ll present our “Loon of the Week” and “The Week In Gatekeeping” awards. And podcasting will resume, too, as soon as I can get the files posted tomorrow or »

Round Two

The terrorists launched another attack against Hosting Matters tonight, and for a while a number of conservative sites, including this one, were down. (Have the terrorists ever attacked liberal sites? Just wondering.) We’re back for now, but the attack could easily be renewed in the coming days, so please bear with us if the jihadists manage to bring us (and others) down temporarily. »

The Democrats Never Did Understand Economics

Yesterday I expressed my disappointment at the Republican Senators’ mostly-silly “Gas Price Relief and Rebate Act” in a post titled Wasn’t There A Time When Republicans Knew Something About Economics?. One thing about the Democrats, though, is that they can always make the Republicans look good by comparison. The latest Democratic proposal is for a “windfall profits tax,” whereby they would steal the oil companies’ money and create a windfall »

We’re Back

As most readers no doubt know, our site has been down for most of the day due to a denial of service attack on our hosting service, Hosting Matters. The attack apparently was carried out by jihadists in Saudi Arabia. We’re not sure who the target of the attack was, but I think it was an Israeli web site; we were down longer than most HM clients, I believe, because »

Stephen Walt speaks…to Robert Fisk

I turned to Melanie Phillips’s Diary for her note on the comments on Israel by former Prime Minister Aznar. (Thanks to reader Joel Goldberg.) At the top of Phillips’s diary, however, I found her account of the interview of Kennedy School Professor Stephen Walt by Robert Fisk in today’s Independent: “The stars and spites.” The heading of Fisk’s column on Walt is “The United States of Israel.” The column is »

About that dark night

John recently quoted the observation that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and landing in Europe, and wondered if the author of the observation was Mark Steyn. Several readers have written to point out that the observation is Tom Wolfe’s. This past February Eugene Volokh tracked down the quote and noted the extended passage in which it occurs in a post at The Volokh »

Bernard Lewis turns 90

Eli Lake anticipates the party this coming Monday in honor of the ninetieth birthday of Bernard Lewis: “Bernard Lewis marking 90 at grand fete.” The article is interesting in its entirety, but those of us looking for the secret of his longevity as well as the highlights of his vast schoarship might be most struck by Lake’s reference to Professor Lewis’s “girlfriend” (Buntzie Ellis Churchill.) Ms. Churchill appears to have »

Harper Lee turns 80

Today is the birthday of Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird. Born in 1926, she turns 80 today. David Robinson notes Lee’s birthday in the Scotsman: “The one and only.” I wrote about To Kill a Mockingbird here a while back and thought I might take the occasion to rework my comments this morning. Abraham Lincoln is certainly the greatest lawyer America has ever produced, but his career »

Behind blue eyes

Yale senior James Kirchick has written many outstanding columns for the Yale Daily News in the past four years, several of which we have noted here. Yesterday’s column is his last for the YDN, and Mr. Kirchick goes out with both barrels blazing under the cover of a bland headline: “Under media glare, politics can quickly become public.” The subject of the column is Rhodes scholar Chesa Boudin, Yale ’03, »

Trouble With the Base. Lots of Trouble.

One of my best and oldest friends, one of the smartest guys I know and a lifelong conservative–which makes him smarter than me!–copied me on an email he sent to RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman this morning. I’m reproducing it in full, with his permission, because I think it conveys as well as anything I’ve seen the depth of the anger, frustration and sense of betrayal that many dyed-in-the-wool Republicans feel »

From Pakistan to Guantanamo Bay, Via Mexico

The best piece of original reporting on the web today is by Blog of the Week Thomas Joscelyn: “Guantanamo Detainee Caught At The Border.” Tom has put together reporting and documents that are in the public record, along with thousands of pages of transcribed Guantanamo Bay hearing testimony that were released in March, to assemble a fascinating story about one of the detainees, a Pakistani, who set out from Pakistan »

Wasn’t There a Time When Republicans Knew Something About Economics?

Senate Republicans have unveiled their “Gas Price Relief and Rebate Act of 2006,” and it’s not pretty. Let’s just go through its components, one by one. 1) Gas Tax Holiday Rebate: everyone gets a check for $100. Taxes are a large part of the cost of gasoline. How about if we cut them? 2) Consumer Anti-Price Gouging Protection: Authorizes the FTC and others to “bring enforcement actions against any supplier »

Spinning in a circle

Jonah Goldberg is right on the money in his take-down of the left’s response to the appointment of Tony Snow. On the one hand, the Bush-haters at John Podesta’s think tank couldn’t resist digging up every negative comment Snow has ever made about the Bush administration. Not only did this help establish Snow’s credibility and integrity, as Goldberg notes, but it also signaled to the conservative base that this is »

A good re-start

Hugh Hewitt reports that the ice is breaking with respect to some of the president’s stalled court of appeals nominees. Hugh links to this account of a briefing on the issue by the Senate Majority Leader’s office. The plan apparently is get the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh (D.C. Circuit) reported out of the Judiciary Committee within two weeks, and then go for a floor vote. In addition, Randy Smith (9th »

A disease too deadly to leave to the bureaucrats

Last November, I linked to a piece by Phillip Coticelli and Richard Tren in which they described how a combination of environmentalists, United Nations agencies, and big business interests has undermined the fight against malaria in Africa by standing in the way of the use of DDT there. Today in NRO, Coticelli (along with Justin Schwab) focuses on the culpability of the World Bank when it comes to combatting this »