Monthly Archives: May 2007

(She gave us) Fever

Today is the anniversary of the birth of Peggy Lee. Lee had an improbably winding path to success from her hometown of Jamestown, North Dakota, to Fargo (where she took on her show business name), to Minneapolis and St. Louis, and to Chicago, where she was discovered by Benny Goodman at the moment he needed a replacement for Helen Forrest. In between St. Louis and Chicago were a couple of »

American honor

Peter Collier has a great column in today’s Wall Street Journal on the occasion of Memorial Day. The column is “American honor” (subscribers only — I’m sure the Journal will make it freely accessible on Sunday or Monday). Among many other excellent books, Collier is the author most recently of Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty, on the living Medal of Honor recipients among us. »

Not news, news

I learn from reading Little Green Footballs that the Muslim American Society is holdiing its fourth annual MAS Minnesota convention in Minneapolis this weekend and that Minnesota Fifth District Rep. (who is) Keith Ellison is the featured speaker of the MAS conference. The Star Tribune hasn’t gotten around to covering (or should I say celebrating) the conference yet. As we noted in “A fatwa made in Minnesota,” the Star Tribune’s »

An Economics Lesson from the Star Tribune

This morning’s Minneapolis Star Tribune ponders those inscrutable laws of economics in the context of the prospective increase in the federal minimum wage. As though it were news, the Strib observes that the increase will affect very few Minnesota workers: Dustin Yewell is trying to save money for college by working at Javalive, a coffee shop and bakery in Faribault, Minn., where the 19-year-old gets $6.25 an hour plus tips. »

Conservatives demonized by unlikely source

The White House communications operation is in overdrive promoting its immigration reform proposal. I’m getting three or more emails per day on the subject. I feel frustrated that the White House failed, in my view, to push this hard for initiatives I favor, or when it came to defending itself on Iraq. I’m also frustrated that the White House fails to treat seriously the concerns conservatives have about its immigration »

Ages Or Angels?

I’ve been working too hard to post as much as usual lately, but one of my favorite bloggers did a post on Abraham Lincoln earlier today that I thought was worth passing on. Here it is: Adam Gopnik has a really interesting essay in this week’s New Yorker on Abraham Lincoln (which is, shockingly, available on-line). He begins with the question of whether Edwin Stanton said, at Lincoln’s deathbed, “Now »

A campaign role reversal

Bill Kristol’s new Time column seems to me to nail the state of both the Democratic and Republican nomination races. Writing a bit esoterically, however, Bill buries the lead in the penultimate paragraph of his column: [T]he G.O.P. race features real differences among the candidates on important and salient issues. Giuliani is pro-choice »

What’s past is prologue

Hillary Clinton made news today without doing much more than following Barack Obama’s vote against the Iraq war funding bill yesterday. Kenneth Bazinet of the New York Daily News provides the oddest angle on Ms. Hillary’s vote. In other news, Senator Clinton apparently did not read the classified version of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate before casting her vote on the war, raising the question who did. The Washington »

McCain Scores Off Obama

A lot of harsh words have been exchanged between Republican and Democratic Senators (and Presidential candidates) since the Senate voted to continue funding the Iraq war. Barack Obama put out this press release: This country is united in our support for our troops, but we also owe them a plan to relieve them of the burden of policing someone else’s civil war. Governor Romney and Senator McCain clearly believe the »

Seeking a title but not “vindication”

The Baltimore Sun’s story on this weekend’s lacrosse final four round is called “Year later, Devils seek first title, vindication.” That may be the story the Sun wanted to write, but is it the real story? Duke’s coach, John Danowski doesn’t think so. His theme has been “You play lacrosse because you love to play, because you love each other, you love the university and that’s it.” He told the »

Duke vs. Cornell, a preview

Tomorrow, the Duke lacrosse team will take on Cornell in a semi-final match of the NCAA tournament. The game would actually make a worthy final — Duke is the number one seed in the tournament and Cornell had an undefeated season that included a victory over Duke in Durham. (Duke played that match on short rest, having just defeated North Carolina, while Cornell hadn’t played in ten days). On paper, »

DCU to Gang of 88: “We’re listening”

The students of the Duke Conservative Union have placed a full page advertisement in the Duke Chronicle taking the “Gang of 88” radical professors to task for their shameful actions and public comments regarding the Duke lacrosse case. At Duke New Sense, the DCU explains: These radical professors exploited a tragic time in Duke’s history for the advancement of their own political and social agenda, as seen in the “Social »

Timeline of defeat

I passed the pop quiz in the New York Sun editorial “Timeline of defeat,” only because a guilty conscience has heightened my memory of the 1974-75 era. It’s the editorial of the week, concluding as follows: What was it about the Communists that the Democrats wanted to give them Indochina, a region with as many persons as Eastern Europe? And what is it about our Islamist enemies that makes the »

Fred Thompson goes nutmeg

Ryan Sager reports on Fred Thompson’s speech last night to the Connecticut Republican Party for its annual Prescott Bush awards dinner. It sounds like Thompson’s entry into the race will come in a matter of weeks, not months, as the State Department used to say in another context. Sager quotes Thompson playing with the audience: “All right, let’s get the announcement out of the way,” Mr. Thompson said to open. »

A word from Jos

Jos »

A word from Jos

Jos »

It takes one to know one

It isn’t exactly news that John Edwards is a phony, but I suppose it’s news that John Kerry considers him one. According to Michael Crowley of the New Republic, Bob Shrum, Kerry’s campaign manager, will report in a forthcoming book that Kerry had qualms about choosing Edwards as his presidential running mate in 2004, and became “even queasier” after Edwards said he was going to share a story with Kerry »