Monthly Archives: May 2010

Bill Clinton in the limelight, Part Two

Bill Clinton is now in the middle of the controversy over promises that may have been made by the Obama administration to Rep. Joe Sestak if he would stay in the House and decline to run against Sen. Arlen Specter. Sestak said last year that the White House promised him an important job if he would abstain from the Pennsylvania Senate race. Sestak decided instead to run against Specter, of »

Bill Clinton in the limelight, Part One

Bill Clinton is back in the limelight. Today, he led a rally for embattled Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln. Clinton made an impassioned plea to Democratic voters in his former home state not to let “outside forces” make an example of Lincoln for her failure to toe the party line (by which he surely meant the leftist line). “This is about using you and manipulating your votes to terrify members of »

Why Would Anyone Have Expected Competence?

Peggy Noonan’s column in the Wall Street Journal, “He Was Supposed to be Competent,” has gotten quite a bit of attention. Noonan renders a harsh verdict on President Obama: I don’t see how the president’s position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by »

This day in baseball history

On May 28, 1960, the Chicago Cubs beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 4-3 in 14 innings. Sandy Koufax, starting on four days rest after his one-hitter against Pittsburgh, pitched all the way into the 14th and took the loss. In his 13 plus innings of work, Koufax gave up only 3 hits and struck out 15. However, he also allowed 9 walks. In all, Koufax faced 49 hitters, 24 of »

“Kagan pursued two paths on ‘don’t ask’ at Harvard”

That’s the title of the Washington Post’s front-page story about Elena Kagan’s treatment of the military at Harvard. My reaction is, of course she did. Ambitious leftists with legal training always pursue at least two paths. They vote “present” on tough bills; they are “for it before they were against it;” and they would have voted with the majority if it was close, but thought the minority had the better »

Rich Enough To Be Stupid

There is a scene in The Friends of Eddie Coyle where an FBI agent says to Coyle, “It’s a hard life, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.” No doubt that is a central lesson of human history, but Mark Steyn argues in what may be his greatest column ever–certainly one of his most important–that there was a brief postwar moment in which Western societies were rich enough to be dumb. »

Don’t leave it to Cleaver: Last call

McClatchy News was responsible for the single worst story reporting the allegations of Reps. Andre Carson, John Lewis. Emanuel Cleaver and James Clyburn that Tea Party protesters abused black congressmen with racial epithets while demonstrating against Obamacare on Capitol Hill on March 20. The story is “Tea party protesters scream ‘nigger’ at black congressmen.” We believe that the congressmen’s story was a fabrication intended to defame the Tea Party movement »

Obama Revises History

President Obama gave his first press conference in a long time today, and the questions were almost all about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Obama’s answers were disingenuous in several ways. First, he couldn’t resist the temptation to blame the Bush administration for the spill. Is this getting a little old, or what? Obama said: [I]n this instance, the oil industry’s cozy and sometimes corrupt relationship with government regulators meant »

Arizona on the aegean

My friend Ray Hartwell has written a column for the Washington Times called “Europe’s Arizona.” That would be Greece, which has an enormous problem with illegal immigrants — mostly Albanians and, to a lesser extent, Turks. As in Arizona, it is estimated that roughly 10 percent of the population in Greece is there illegally. And many of the problems that the illegals bring with them are quite similar. Illegal immigration »

The ultimate stealth candidate

It looks like Carly Fiorina has moved into the lead in the race to be the Republican nominee for the Senate in California. What’s less clear is whether, from a conservative point of view, her nomination would be desirable. Fiorina would be the ultimate stealth nominee. Not only has she never held public office, but until fairly recently, she failed even to vote in most elections. These days, when it’s »

Late to the party and bringing only leftovers

Peter Beinart is the author of an article in the New York Review of Books that attacks the Israeli government and the American Jews who support its policies. Noah Pollak is the author of a brilliant takedown of Beinart’s argument, which he characterizes this way: [L]arge numbers of Israelis are racists and authoritarians who never really wanted peace, and their political leaders are fanatics manipulating guileless Americans and Palestinians while »

A thug too far, part 5

When Nina Easton found a mob of union thugs demonstrating at her neighbor’s Chevy Chase house last week, she used her professional skills to ascertain what all the fuss was about. She filed an illuminating report. The mainstream media have avoided the story. Important elements of the story remain mysterious. The protest occurred in Chevy Chase, Maryland, yet the D.C. police escorted (or “monitored” or “shadowed”) fourteen buses that carried »

The meaning of the tea party

William Voegeli is the author of Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State and a student of welfare state liberalism. As Fred Siegel notes in his review, Voegeli’s book was written just before Obama’s outsize liberal aspirations provoked the Tea Parties to emerge. Voegeli’s book mentions neither Obama’s current fall from political grace nor the corresponding rise of the Tea Party movement. Yet Voegeli’s book provides “far and away the most »

Ask, don’t wait for the military to tell

I have no problem with allowing gays openly to serve in the military, provided that this change in policy would not reduce the military’s effectiveness. As to whether the change would, in fact, have such an impact, it is folks in the military who have the best sense of this. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to get that sense, and the difficulties run both ways. Some in the military might baselessly »

Law School Deans Aren’t Popular? Who Knew?

Senate Republicans shouldn’t be intimidated when it comes time to question Elena Kagan and vote on her nomination to the Supreme Court. The public can’t possibly know much about her, but already its verdict has turned negative. No doubt some people know about her history with military recruiters, but that must be a small minority at this point. So my guess is that voters’ negative reactions are based mostly on »

Why Bother?

The government has clarified the role of the 1,200 National Guard troops it is sending to the Mexican border: they will not be enforcing the immigration laws. US National Guard troops being sent to the Mexican border will be used to stem the flow of guns and drugs across the frontier and not to enforce US immigration laws, the State Department said Wednesday. The clarification came after the Mexican government »

What Price Christie? Part 2

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is the new hero of conservatives everywhere. Earlier today, he showed why when he conducted a town hall meeting in Bergen County. In the video below (via Cassy Fiano) he responds to a teacher who thinks she is underpaid, and someone who is outraged that state funding for the local library is slated to be cut: »