Monthly Archives: April 2008

Jews all over the world are observing Passover tonight, celebrating the liberation from slavery in ancient Egypt. Pope Benedit XVI’s historic visit to a New York synagogue yesterday lends a special resonance to this year’s observance of the holiday. Jimmy Carter’s meetings with the head of Hamas and his deputy this weekend highlight the contemporary threats to the Jewish people, on both ends of that particular phenomenon. The Jerusalem Post »

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In his third debate with Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln quoted a resolution from 1850 in which the principles of the Ordinance of 1787 received “the sanction of Thomas Jefferson, who is acknowledged by all to be the great oracle and expounder of our faith.” Jefferson’s authority derived from the fact that, as Lincoln observed in his 1859 letter to Henry Pierce, he was “the man who, in the concrete pressure »

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One of the big fights of the year is tomorrow night: Bernard Hopkins vs. Joe Calzaghe at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas. Hopkins is one of the greatest fighters of our time. A street criminal in his youth, Hopkins went to prison at age 17. He discovered boxing in prison and never looked back once he was released at age 22. He became the undisputed middleweight champion of the world–no »

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Tonight is the 233rd anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride. I’ve always liked the beginning of Longfellow’s poem: Listen my children and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five; Hardly a man is now alive Who remembers that famous day and year. A few years ago we were in Boston and got snowed in. We paid a wonderful visit to Old »

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Barack Obama performed poorly in Wednesday’s debate, so his supporters are up in arms because the moderators asked him some tough questions. Howard Kurtz collects the vitriol that liberals have leveled against ABC, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos (!). It’s over the top: “asinine,” “despicable,” “disgraceful.” Basically, Obama’s supporters are demanding kid glove treatment for their guy. Well, why not? He’s gotten it up until now, and they’ve come to »

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We wrote here about 60 Minutes’ disgraceful hit-job on Karl Rove, in which the program accused Rove of masterminding the criminal prosecution of an Alabama politician. The program was based entirely on wild and uncorroborated claims of a widespread conspiracy by an evidently unbalanced Alabama woman, who said–with no supporting evidence whatsoever–that she had been Rove’s secret agent in Alabama. We followed up here and here. Subsequently, MSNBC repeated CBS’s »

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Hamas endorsed Barack Obama for President on Sunday. Yesterday, after Hamas’s endorsement was reported here and elsewhere, his campaign tried to distance Obama from the terrorist group: “Senator Obama has repeatedly rejected and denounced the actions of Hamas, a terrorist organization responsible for the deaths of many innocents, that is dedicated to Israel’s destruction,” Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor said. Left unaddressed by the campaign was what it is about »

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Michael Brodkorb has been following the story of Minnesota DFL Senate candidate Al Franken’s “forfeited” California corporation at Minnesota Democrats Exposed. In the latest update, Brodkorb tracks the shifting stories regarding the California issue and compares a letter produced from a Franken accountant to the state of California on the current issue with one produced earlier from a Franken accountant to the state of New York regarding Franken’s failure to »

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Reuters has been a prime purveyor of the propaganda and lies emanating from the terrorist organizations of the Middle East. In Israel’s 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, for example, Reuters was caught disseminating doctored propaganda photos that came to be dubbed fauxtography. Fauxtography includes staged and falsely captioned photographs, both of which Reuters has also perpetrated on behalf of terrorist organizations in the Middle East. Gaza in particular has »

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Austin Bay explores some of the reasons why. One fundamental issue, maybe the most important one, is that most governments can’t resist meddling in the farm economy. Ethanol is also a big part of the problem. Whatever you think of ethanol–and lots of people here in the Midwest think it’s terrific, especially for the local economy–it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we picked a bad time to start burning »

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Philip Klein reports the Obama campaign’s response to the endorsement of Obama by Hamas official Ahmed Yousef, a senior adviser to Ismail Haniyeh. Klein read Yousef’s endorsement to Obama campaign manager David Axelrod last night: I told him that the words were spoken by Ahmed Yousef, and offered to read him the quote, which I proceeded to do from my Blackberry: “We like Mr. Obama. We hope he will (win) »

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Scott noted this morning that the New York Times has responded to our inquiries by correcting the egregious error that I pointed out here. The paper’s correction withdraws the false claim that John McCain made the “embarrassing mistake” of saying that Iran was training al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq. Instead, the Times now says that McCain “briefly referred to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as a Shiite group, rather than a »

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Today the New York Times has published a correction to this article about John McCain by Elisabeth Bumiller and Larry Rohter. John Hinderaker first pointed the error out and called on the Times to correct it in this post. But I don’t think this is what John had in mind: Because of an editing error, an article last Thursday about foreign policy advisers to Senator John McCain referred incorrectly to »

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We wrote here yesterday about the Palestinian Authority media reports that the PA leadership was to make awards to two female terrorists (including the Sbarro bomber) imprisoned in Israel. Today the Jerusalem Post reports that the Israelis have talked peace partner Mahmoud Abbas out of making the awards to the two terrorists. The awards have therefore been “revoked.” Apparently, for today, at any rate, Abbas is more afraid of the »

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I watched last night’s candidate forum in Philadelphia with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on ABC. The New York Times has posted a good transcript of the debate. Although the focus was not on policy questions, I thought it was nevertheless a useful and revealing discussion. Most striking to me was Obama’s dour attitude. The man is not a happy warrior. Obama was unhappiest when questioned by George Stephanopoulos about »

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Our younger readers can hardly imagine what a sensation Brigitte Bardot was in the early 1960s. It is said that she was the first foreign-language actress to become a major star in America. Her breakthrough movie was And God Created Woman, directed by Roger Vadim, whom she married–as Jane Fonda did, years later, when she was directed by Vadim in Barbarella. By the early 1970s Bardot, who had, I believe, »

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…not big-time former comedians like Al Franken. Franken has already been embarrassed by the fact that his company violated the law by failing to buy worker’s compensation insurance for its employees in New York. Franken ignored the problem for years, and finally paid a $25,000 fine to the State of New York. Now another problem has surfaced: Franken’s personal corporation broke California’s law by not filing corporate tax returns from »

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