Monthly Archives: November 2007

Sarkozy in the saddle

It’s been clear since day one of his presidency that Nicolas Sarkozy would soon have a showdown with the powerful French unions. After all, even Sarkozy’s reactionary predecessor Jacques Chirac recognized the need to reform the staggering retirement packages that key unions have secured for their members. Chirac, though, was unwilling to fight for reform after 1995, when strikes paralyzed the country. Thus, the problem was left for Sarkozy, and »

Democrats, Party of the Prosperous

We’ve known for a long time that the Democrats are the party of the rich. What is troubling is that they are increasingly becoming the party of the prosperous. The Washington Times reports: In a state-by-state, district-by-district comparison of wealth concentrations based on Internal Revenue Service income data, Michael Franc, vice president of government relations at the Heritage Foundation, found that the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional jurisdictions were »

Who Cares About Reality?

This is a final (from me, anyway) observation on the politicization of the office of United States Attorney by the Democratic Party over the past year. As Scott has noted at length, our friend Rachel Paulose, who by any objective standard was doing a fine job in the position, was forced out by the Democrats and their press minions after she committed the “offense” of defending herself against their partisan »

A sense of entitlement

The lead story in today’s Washington Post is a breathless piece about how “immigrant paperwork” is “backed-up” at the Department of Homeland Security. The paperwork in question consists of “applications for U.S. citizenship and other benefits” filed by applicants who rushed to beat a filing fee increase that went into effect at the end of July. As a result of the flood of applications, the Post reports, it will take »

Back on the table?

In his post from earlier today, Scott examined MSM coverage of the departure of his friend Rachel Paulose from the position of United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota. That coverage included this piece in the Washington Post by Amy Goldstein. This is Scott’s beat, so I won’t comment much on the Post’s report. I was struck, however, by the claim that Scott’s “brief interview” with Paulose provoked one »

Mourning Thanksgiving

The Thanksgiving holiday is a happy time for pretty much everyone, but that will change if the Seattle public school district gets its way. The District’s “director of Equity, Race & Learning Support”–there’s a position that you can tell, just from the title, should be eliminated–sent a letter to teachers urging them to instruct their students in the “myths” of Thanksgiving. The “myths” are a means of teaching students, among »

Happy Thanksgiving to Our Readers

I hope a few of our readers have noticed that I’ve been mostly absent from the site for some weeks. I feel a little like Rip Van Winkle, getting re-immersed in the news cycle after a prolonged absence. In my case, though, I’ve been working, not sleeping. Hopefully I’ll have some observations on the news before long; in the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving from all of us to all of our »

…Is it something I said?

The coverage of the pending departure of my friend Rachel Paulose from the position of United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota, and her appointment to the high office she will fill in the Justice Department, has seemed wanting to me. One theme is the assertion that her departure and appointment were prompted by resentment in her office over Rachel’s statement in the NRO column I wrote about last »

Imagine that

Ruth Marcus is among my favorite liberal columnists and Paul Krugman is perhaps my least favorite. So it’s no surprise that I enjoyed Marcus’s takedown of Krugman’s claim that “the whole Beltway obsession with the fiscal burden of an aging population is misguided.” Marcus shows that Krugman (a) was himself obsessed with this matter early in the decade and (b) is misrepresenting the statements others have made in the debate. »

Hillary Clinton — forceful but too modest

Hillary Clinton has responded pointedly and effectively to Barack Obama’s claim that the four years he spent living overseas as a child provides him with “strong[] experience. . .in foreign relations.” Though it will seem odd to many that Obama made such a silly claim is, this sort of fuzzy thinking is in the air that liberals breathe these days. It’s part of the notion that the U.S. is too »

Is Stanford violating the Solomon Amendment, Part Three

In two prior posts ( here and here), I asked whether Stanford is violating the Solomon Act, which requires schools receiving federal funding to give access to military representatives for recruiting purposes, and to treat military recruiters in the same way they treat all other employment recruiters. Now, Larry Kramer, Stanford’s distinguished law school dean, has honored us with an email stating his position regarding this matter. In the lengthy »

Rage against the bail

This past summer Somali immigrant Rage Ibrahim was charged with the horrifying rape of a Somali woman in an apartment hallway while as many as ten bystanders (most or all of whom were Somali, if I am not mistaken) looked on. Until yesterday Rage had been conditionally released from jail pending trial. Ramsey County Judge Michael Fetsch has now reinstated bail of $50,000 as the result of Rage’s violation of »

Lawyers, guns, & Washington

Today’s New York Post publishes Glenn Reynolds’s excellent column on the Second Amendment case the Supreme Court has accepted for review. Glenn is an expert on the subject and his column is, as one would expect, illuminating. One would not necessarily expect Glenn to cite Tom Lehrer in support of one of his points, but Glenn makes a telling point with the citation. Via Instapundit. To comment on this post, »

Columbia’s latest insult to the intelligence of its alumni

I haven’t been following the story of this year’s hunger strikers at Columbia University, but it somehow makes me feel young again. The Stawberry Statement! Still in print after all these years, I read it in the summer of 1969 and I remember it well. One of author James Simon Kunen’s beefs, as I recall (and I am writing from memory), was the school’s Harlem expansion. According to the New »

CAIR appeals to Conyers

This past summer CAIR filed a motion to be stricken from the government’s designation of it as an unindicted co-coconspirator in the Holy Land Foundation prosecution. At NRO I took a look at the brief CAIR submitted in support of the motion in “Coming clean about CAIR.” In its brief, CAIR asserts that being named an unindicted co-conspirator of the Hamas-friendly Holy Land Foundation has been bad for business. CAIR »

Dartmouth’s latest insult to the intelligence of its alumni

Our friend Joe Asch provides a devastating critique of the claim by Dartmouth’s power-hungry ruling faction that its decision to dilute the power of alumni to elect trustees rationally stemmed from a »

Anomalous in Annapolis

Last July President Bush announced the regional peace conference to be chaired by Secretary Rice and attended by representatives from nations that support a two-state solution, reject violence, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and commit to all previous agreements between the parties. I thought it be an extremely small meeting. We knew the conference was to occur in Annapolis. Now a date has finally been set, and the State Department »