Monthly Archives: June 2007

The Star Tribune clams up

A major Minnesota company has apparently committed serious corporate misconduct. It has hired senior management in violation of management’s agreements with its former employer, the Minnesota’s company’s most significant local competitor. (Management contends that the agreements in issue were orally waived.) It has taken advantage of confidential information covertly removed by senior management from management’s former employer. The information taken appears to include that of the kind the antitrust laws »

John Updike remembers his father

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal published a column by Amity Shlaes summarizing her findings in The Forgotten Man, her revisionist history of the New Deal. AEI has made the column available under the heading “The real deal.” I’ve argued here that The Forgotten Man is an important book challenging the received understanding of the 1930’s. Charles Kesler observed in his review of Steven Hayward’s Age of Reagan: For all its defense »

Party Harty

In today’s Washington Times Joel Mowbray ([email protected]) explains how the government has managed to turn passport processing into a fiasco: “Maura Harty’s folly.” »

Rising to the occasion, Part Two

Today, the Washington Post renders the second installment in its series on Vice President Cheney. This one covers Cheney’s alleged role in determining policy regarding the interrogation of terrorist detainees. In the print edition, the piece is called “The Unseen Path To Cruelty.” Perhaps the original title was “The Unseen Path To Torture,” with “cruelty” being an editorial “tone down.” The internet title — “Pushing The Envelope On Power” — »

Bill Bennett for the defense

Bill Bennett’s Morning in America producer Seth Leibsohn writes: Talk radio has been getting a bad rap by a lot of folks lately, in the immigration debate, in the fairness doctrine debate. Today, Bill spent some time in defending talk radio–and you and the blogosphere. Thought you might like it. I like it — here it is. JOHN adds: Better yet, here it is! »

Fred Thompson, Lobbyist?

The Democrats’ have already put out several hit pieces on Fred Thompson; one of the points they emphasize is that he worked as a Washington lobbyist before and after his service in the Senate. Today, the Associated Press took up the theme in an article titled Looking at Thompson’s Lobbying Past: Republican Fred Thompson, who likes to cast himself in the role of Washington outsider, has a long history as »

A Small But Possibly Seminal Victory for Free Speech

This morning, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Federal Election Comm »

Reporting from Baqubah

Don’t miss Michael Yon’s latest dispatch from Baqubah, where Operation Arrowhead Ripper is ongoing. In brief, Yon says the battle has gone well and is starting to subside, although there are al Qaeda enclaves yet to be cleared. Some of the Iraqi units have fought well, although the police continue to disappoint. Most significantly, the operation has benefited from widespread cooperation by locals who are incensed at al Qaeda. I »

A footnote on the Star Tribune’s mysterious error

A reader familiar with the Star Tribune’s online operation writes regarding “A mysterious error at the Star Tribune.” He provides the following background supplementing John’s spadework at the end of the linked post: We push wire stories to all our affiliates and customers, so this AP photo must have originated from our “newsroom.” At 06/16/07 17:41:54 the picture came through with the default caption set to: Palestinians run as they »

Tehran calling

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Joshua Muravchik does a good job of depicting the elements of the gathering storm: “Winds of war.” Muravchik concludes: It is not hard to imagine scenarios in which a single match–say a terrible terror attack from Gaza–could ignite a chain reaction. Israel could handle Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria, albeit with painful losses all around, but if Iran intervened rather than see its regional assets eliminated, »

Helplessly hoping

We went to what was advertised as An Evening with Stephen Stills at the Pantages Theater downtown Minneapolis on Saturday evening. The show was divided into two halves, the first with Stills alone accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, the second with a small backing band. I had hoped that Stills might omit his current political reflections at this stage of his career. Stills did in fact keep the politics to »

The conspiracy to improve Dartmouth

The current issue of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine features a story by Matthew Mosk ’92 about the series of recent trustee elections and related battles at the college over the role of the alumni in college governance. Mosk, a reporter for the Washington Post, wanted to find out whether the election of four independent petition candidates — T.J. Rogers, Peter Robinson, Todd Zywicki, and Stephen Smith — is part of »

We’ve Been Pretty Quiet Today…

…but it’s never quiet at the Forum. Any time of the day or night, you can get your fill of politics, today’s news, culture and more. In the Candidates’ Forum, the Giuliani campaign has posted a memo on the state of the Presidential race by the campaign’s strategy director, Brent Seaborn. Seaborn says he likes Giuliani’s position; among other things, 53% of respondents in a recent poll say Giuliani has »

Rising to the occasion

The Washington Post kicks off a series on Vice President Cheney’s role in the Bush adminstration with a report on the influence Cheney was able to exert during the period immediately following 9/11. It’s impressive stuff. According to the report, before the end of the very day on which we were attacked, Cheney had put together a legal team consisting of David Addington (Cheney’s counsel), Alberto Gonzales, Tim Flanagan (Deputy »

When second best is good enough

For me, the best result in soccer is “Everton defeats Liverpool.” The second best is “the U.S. defeats Mexico.” The latter was the result of today’s thrilling Gold Cup final (the North American championhip) in Chicago. Mexico outplayed the U.S. in the first half, with Guardado rampant on the left flank. Late in the half, Mexico took a deserved lead when its right-winger skinned his defender and crossed for Guardado »

The Fred Factor, part 5

Each of the top three Republican presidential candidates is a man of stature and accomplishment. Yet each seems to me to have weaknesses that at least roughly offset his strengths as the potential nominee. What about Fred Thompson? Below John expresses his view that he finds “the whole Fred Thompson boom rather annoying.” I think the “Fred Thompson boom” is easily explainable by my assessment of the top three Republican »

A mysterious error at the Star Tribune

Kate Parry is the Star Tribune “reader’s representative.” I almost always find her to be writing from inside the perspective of the Star Tribune’s reporters and editors, and therefore operating more as a “reporter’s enabler” or “public relations spokesman” than a “reader’s representative.” The Star Tribune’s perspective on the Arab/Israeli conflict has traditionally skewed strongly against Israel. Today in her weekly column, Parry describes a mysterious error that appeared in »