National Politics
From Senator Tom Coburn (R, OK): Becoming Republicans again will require us to come to grips with what has ailed our party – namely, the triumph of big-government Republicanism and failed experiments like the K Street Project and “compassionate conservatism.” If the goal of the K Street Project was to earmark and fund raise our…
My dispositional inclination is to agree with the ProJo’s Bob Whitcomb: Sen. Barack Obama visited the Capitol in his glory the other week, with other, lesser politicians crowding around to be photographed — testifying to his charm and to the tendency to suck up to the winner. It recalls how we pay far too much…
Moving beyond the world of over-reactions and political drama, has anyone actually read President Bush’s speech to the Israeli Knesset? …We gather to mark a momentous occasion. Sixty years ago in Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel’s independence, founded on the “natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate.” What…
Mark Steyn’s astute observation is applicable to much more than foreign affairs: Increasingly, the Western world has attitudes rather than policies. It’s one thing to talk as a means to an end. But these days, for most midlevel powers, talks are the end, talks without end. Because that’s what civilized nations like doing — chit-chatting,…
Historian Dale Light offers an interesting summary of how the candidates and their supporters view the country. One benefit of this interminable Democrat nomination process is that fundamental issues do get discussed — no I’m not talking about health care, or foreign policy, or the war, or any of those other transitory things; I’m talking…
From Time (h/t): The Middle American’s faith is not merely grounded upon nostalgia and emotion. He believes in a system that did work and in large measure still does; a brilliant, highly adaptable system, heir to the Enlightenment and classic democracy, with innumerable, ingenious, local accretions. But the country has become too complex and the…
Not unlike other wealthy faux-populists who wish to manipulate poor and working class citizens for their own aggrandizement, Barack Obama apparently thinks that the change that will bring unity will entail an optimistic lunge past some of those wicked security blankets… you know, like religion: You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania,…
When things go wrong for people, society ought at least to weight the costs of helping, even when the problems are wrapped up in the esoteric complexities of modern finance, but when I read news like this, I can’t help but wonder from where the money’s coming: The legislation is likely to draw on elements…
The following passage from Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism struck me as relevant to the (thankfully abated) speculation of Barack Obama’s assassination: On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. As if on cue, Dallas was christened “the city of hate.” A young TV reporter named Dan Rather heard a rumor that…
Well, the memo’s gone out. The You Tube videos are in production. The party line: McCain’s got a temper! Watch the video over on RIFuture. Watch as the Senator rips a chair right out of the floor of the bus like Sam Kinison and pins the reporter’s note-taking hand in the overhead storage compartment. Actually,…