Hats off to Larry, he broke your heart Just like you broke mine when you said we must part He told you lies now it’s your turn to cry cry cry Now that Larry said goodbye to you ~Del Shannon Arlen Specter is a detestable swine. Next to Teddy Kennedy, he, for me, is the most loathsome creature ever to lurk … [Read More]

With its decision in Nordyke v. King last week, in which the recent Supreme Court Heller decision was applied to state law, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals took another step down the long road of “incorporating” the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. In doing so, it continued down the path toward completely inverting the … [Read More]

A young Romanian friend, who is translating my work into his native language, recently sent me the latest book by Romanian social thinker and University of Maryland professor of government Vladimir Tismaneanu. A thin, discursive volume, Fantasies of Salvation was produced by Princeton University Press. The same press also published my book After Liberalism but then found my later analysis of … [Read More]

In light of the Obama administration’s recent torture memo release, there is one simple moral question we all should be asking. If U.S. soldiers were sent to jail for committing torture, might not the same fate be appropriate for government officials who ordered them to do so?  [Read More]

After opening the door to a truth commission to investigate torture by the CIA of al-Qaida subjects, and leaving the door open to prosecution of higher-ups, President Obama walked the cat back. He is now opposed to a truth commission. That means it is dead. He is no longer interested in prosecutions. That means no independent counsel—for now. Sen. Harry Reid … [Read More]

After eight years of watching conservatives blow trillions of dollars and comport themselves like anti-intellectual, jingoistic blockheads, I found myself ashamed to admit that the Left seemed to have all the genuine intellectuals—people who seemed to possess real curiosity, who refused to accept whatever official line the government was shelling out, and who sought genuine understanding instead of name-calling and pointless … [Read More]

In 1914, on the very eve of the Great War, G.K. Chesterton published his humorous novel The Flying Inn. The story concerned a Turkish plot to invade England, all with the connivance of Britain’s progressive elite. At the superficial level, Chesterton’s fears of the Ottoman Empire must have seemed preposterous. Turkey had long been the “sick man of Europe,” and it … [Read More]

That is not the question.  I can’t get worked up about the current torture tempest. The two parties are exchanging fusillades over ten interrogation techniques deployed with fourteen “high value al-Qaida detainees,” three of whom endured the most controversial method of all, because they were purported to possess “credible intelligence of an imminent terrorist attack,” as well as “actionable intelligence” to … [Read More]

With much fanfare this week, Congress and the Administration began a series of actions designed to protect over-leveraged consumers from the high fees imposed by credit card lenders. As with most other initiatives devised by government, this policy will create a host of unintended consequences that will undermine the benefit the program hopes to create. Anyone who carries a credit card … [Read More]

A recent profile in a New York glossy described him as a member of Wall Street aristocracy, a man to whose parties the rich and powerful trip over themselves to attend, a networker nonpareil, in short, the greatest big hitter who has ever graced this poor earth of ours. Leave it to a celebrity-obsessed rag to get it so wrong. His … [Read More]