The Ames poll is being touted as a great victory by Mitt Romney and his fellow pod people, but the real victors are Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul. As this ingenious analysis by David Terr in USA Elections points out, both Huckabee and Paul are on the way up, while the others either crashed and burned or else showed no signs of breaking out of the pack. This is the true meaning of the Ames poll – which, as the first electoral test of the presidential hopefuls on the GOP side, measures momentum and projects future trends.   Terr’s fascinating statistical … 
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Gstaad -  Here, at last, is the Taki plan to save George W. Bush’s presidency from the disaster it has been turned into by his neocon advisers. Yes, the Iraq war is a failure, but pulling out now will turn it into a geopolitical catastrophe of incalculable consequences. What W needs is a great big fat win which will overshadow Iraq, hog the headlines, and catapult him in the polls. The operative word is Palestine. Let’s take it from the top: His latest call for an international conference, one that is supposed to give birth to a contiguous Palestinian state,  is … 
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The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary is one of the most cheerful feasts in the Church’s calendar. Because it comes in high summer, the Assumption is a harvest festival. Throughout Eastern Europe, peasant girls collect bouquets and bring them to the church for blessings on this day. In Polish villages parishes organize parades, each led by a carefully-vetted “virgin,” carrying flowers through the streets to the church. In England, people used to take their medicinal herbs in “Assumption bundles” to the church for a special blessing—the medieval equivalent of getting F.D.A. approval. This marked their belief in a quaint legend—that … 
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The New York Times, which raised its price by 25 percent in July, from one dollar to $1.25, narrowed its perspective by 12 percent on August 6, when it cut the width of the paper by an inch and a half to 12 inches, according to a brief, apparently truncated story that ended in the middle of a sentence in the NwYrk Times, as the paper now calls itself. The Times also revealed that it would be changing its venerable masthead slogan as well, from “All the News That’s Fit to Print” to “All the News That Fits We’ll Print.” “At … 
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To read the supposedly “libertarian” bloggers over at the Cato Institute’s “Cato@Liberty” site and Reason‘s “Hit and Run,” you’d never know there’s a war on: an unjust, horribly expensive, terrorist-creating war that tears at the conscience of the nation and is now “surging” toward an open conlict with Iran. Here it is Monday morning, and already we’ve got 5 US troops killed by Sunni guerrillas (are these the same Sunnis we’re allied with in Anbar and Diyala provinces?), an intra-Shi’ite civil war is about to break out, and the leader of the Sunnis in Parliament is accusing the Shi’ite-led government of … 
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                                  Another Historical Invention Sitting in the doctor’s office waiting to have my sore throat cultured for strep ( it turned out to be a virus), I picked up the July 9 issue of Time, which had a feature story on the shenanigans of Australian press mogul Rupert Murdoch. Although Murdoch, I discovered, supports “political moderates like Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair,” he is widely regarded as a far-out rightist because of the support he showers on FOX, the New York Post, and Weekly Standard. … 
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Ever since Al From founded the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) it has been a voice of reason within the Democratic Party. William J. Clinton was its Chairman when he won the Presidency in 1992. Clinton stated that he would be a moderate voice within the Democratic Party. The Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994; Clinton stayed true to his word. Given the Democratic context, there is no doubt that the DLC was a positive influence. Whether Social Security or national defense was discussed the DLC took a moderate path, which is why it is very troubling that no Democratic candidate … 
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My very old and good friend Sir Alistair Horne, the British historian, is now deep into writing the official biography of Henry Kissinger. Alistair is the man to do it right. He’s written the French trilogy of the post-Napoleonic period, the Harold Macmillan official bio, and the 1973 classic of the Algerian war of independence against France, A Savage War of Peace; Algeria 1954-1972. It was this opus that got Horne recently invited to the White House to meet the president, after W had brandished the book before CNN, declaring that he was reading it, and studying its lessons with benefit. … 
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In 2003, when National Review published neoconservative pundit-in-chief David Frum’s attack mistitled “Unpatriotic Conservatives”, they did not distinguish between the likes of Lew Rockwell and Pat Buchanan, which might suggest that shared opposition to the neoconservative worldview should naturally incline libertarian and paleoconservative activists to join forces in debunking their ideological foes within the American right.   Not all traditional conservatives seem convinced, however, of a shared agenda with libertarians. On the weblog of paleoconservative publication Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, several months ago one such activist responded to the call for cooperation rather dismissively, stating, “Libertarians think primarily of … 
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The myth of the “objective journalist” is so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that we wince whenever we see a headline or a news story that seems to take a side.  In other countries, however, journalists don’t feel the same constraints.  Witness this headline in the Jerusalem Post, concerning the death of the Jewish-born former archbishop of Paris, Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger: Apostate French cardinal dies at 80 Presumably, the headline editor wasn’t commenting on the quality of Cardinal Lustiger’s Catholic belief.  The unnamed author of the story (which was bylined “JPOST.COM STAFF”) quoted Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, who … 
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