Mario Loyola makes a cogent argument against adding more troops to secure Baghdad. He raises some good points, but ultimately I think that the political solution we need can’t come about in the current circumstances. Our biggest mistake in this war was not establishing a monopoly of violence earlier. We backed off from Fallujah in [...]
Captain Ed rightly takes Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) to task for criticizing a federal judge nominee for being present at a Massachusetts “commitment ceremony.” Senator Brownback apparently takes an issue with a federal judge being at such a ceremony. Judge Neff did nothing illegal. She attended a private function for the daughter of a longtime [...]
The Chicago Sun-Times has a scathing editorial on the decision by the French government to pull its Special Forces troops from Afghanistan just as the Taliban seem to be on the offensive. As they say, quelle surprise…
President Bush’s former speechwriter, Michael Gerson, has a attack against small government conservatism in Newsweek. Gerson’s attack is rather blistering, and it shows that the conservatives who have accused the Bush Administration of abandoning bedrock conservative principles may have been all too right. For instance, Gerson argues: As antigovernment conservatives seek to purify the Republican [...]
John Fund thinks that Barack Obama will sit out the 2008 race. I’m inclined to agree: In 2004, when Mr. Obama ran for the U.S. Senate, he had the good luck of seeing both Blair Hull, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, and Jack Ryan, the GOP nominee, self-destruct in sex scandals. Mr. Obama’s eventual [...]
The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting op-ed written by a fellow at the libertarian Goldwater Institute on how states that lowered taxes between 1990-2000 reduced their poverty levels: Using data from the Census Bureau, the report found that states with the lowest tax rates enjoyed sizable decreases in poverty. For example, the 10 states [...]
I was quite shocked to learn today that I’d been named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. However, I would like to thank Time for such a great honor. After all, I did beat out such notables (both famous and infamous) as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jung Il, George W. Bush, Kofi Annan, as well as [...]