Category: Web

  A new Associated Press-GfK poll that shows Americans evenly divided on the Obamacare repeal is getting big play as the House opens debate on precisely that course of action. Won’t it be amazing to hear Democrats argue—in view of this spectacular turn in public opinion—that House Republicans should now back off? Nope. To Obamacare’s...

  Last week, President Obama named William Daley as White House Chief of Staff and Gene Sperling as the chief White House economic adviser. Last fall, he named Austan Goolsbee as the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. These appointments are significant in part because all three men share a strong commitment to free...

  The second half of the Aeneid has rarely delighted readers to the same extent as the first half, but the poet tells us explicitly that in bringing Aeneas to Italy he has embarked upon a greater theme.  It would be a mistake, then, to underrate books 7-12, though it is probably a good idea to read...

  The murder of 21 Christians in a New Year’s Day bomb attack in Alexandria will accelerate the ongoing exodus of the Coptic community from Egypt. Its members know that they are second-class citizens. After some three-dozen attacks over the past three decades, resulting in three hundred Christian deaths, they know that the government is both unable and unwilling...

  “Conservative Tycoon … Dies at 95,” said the New York Times headline on New Year’s Eve about the death of Roger Milliken. Clearly, the headline writer did not know the man. For Roger Milliken exemplified the finest in American free enterprise. He cared about his workers. He cared about his industry. He cared about his community....

  The battle smoke lifts, the noise of past political combat dies away, and we envision at last the right role model for John Boehner as he assumes the speakership. Who else, I ask, but Nancy Pelosi? The Rose of San Francisco will not go down in speakership annals standing beside the honored likes of...

  With Christmas shoppers out in force and the stock market surging to a two-year high, talk is spreading that the long-awaited recovery is at hand. Perhaps. But gleaning the news from Europe and Asia as U.S. cities, states and the federal government sink into debt, it is difficult to believe a worldwide financial crisis...

  I would like to wish all Chronicles readers a Very Merry and Blessed Christmas. And, as a Christmas present, here is a link to a piece I wrote two Christmases ago for Takimag, about some of the things I like about Christmas, including Polish Christmas carols. Since the piece is two years old, most of the videos...

  Alexander Lukashenko has won the fourth presidential election in Belarus, taking 79 percent of votes cast in the turnout of over 90 percent, according to official figures. The opposition staged a protest rally in the central square in Minsk after polling stations had closed on Sunday, claiming that the election was stolen. Some protestors...

  A Democratic Congress, discharged by the voters on Nov. 2, has as one of its last official acts, imposed its San Francisco values on the armed forces of the United States. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is to be repealed. Open homosexuals are to be welcomed with open arms in all branches of the armed...

  The details of an elaborate KLA-run human organ harvesting ring, broadly known for years, have been confirmed by a Council of Europe report published on January 15. The report, “Inhuman treatment of people and illicit trafficking of human organs in Kosovo” identifies the province’s recently re-elected “prime minister” Hashim Thaçi as the boss of a “mafia-like” Albanian group specialized in smuggling weapons,...

  A few hours before Richard Holbrooke’s death last Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a group of America’s top diplomats gathered at the State Department for a Christmas party that he was “practically synonymous with American foreign policy.” Her assessment is correct: Richard Holbrooke’s career embodies some of the least attractive traits of...

  Sixty-six years ago, a small plane took off from southern England for Paris. It never made it. On board was a 40 year old Army Air Force major, who before the war had been the most popular musician in America. His music is still listened to and enjoyed today, even though popular music has...

  On his deathbed in Washington, Richard Holbrooke allegedly told his Pakistani surgeon, “You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”  Perhaps the story is true.  After all, Holbrooke, though one of the greatest liars in public life, must have told the truth occasionally and his words may even have been delivered accurately by the...

  WikiLeaks documents reveal that Russian operatives may have been tracking the assassins of rogue intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko well before he was poisoned in London in November 2006. The agents apparently wanted to prevent his murder not because they cared for him, which they did not, but because they knew that Moscow would be blamed for the deed....

  An interesting batch of WikiLeaks documents—probably the most disquieting to date—was published by the Guardian earlier this week. Some concern the decision, made by NATO’s Military Committee less than a year ago, “to expand the NATO Contingency Plan for Poland, Eagle Guardian, to include the defense and reinforcement of the Baltic States.” Others indicate that the Administration...

  What in the name of Gilbert Stuart is going on at the National Portrait Gallery? A week ago, CNSNews’ Penny Starr reignited the culture war with an arresting story about the staid old museum that began thus: The federally funded National Portrait Gallery, one of the museums of the Smithsonian Institution, is currently showing...

  The motive behind the proposed repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is, hmmm … what, exactly? A stronger military? Better projection of American might in tight corners like Afghanistan and South Korea? Well, not precisely any of that. The whole idea of opening military enlistment to professed gays is the furtherance...

  Over two thousand four hundred American sailors, soldiers and airmen were killed in Pearl Harbor 69 years ago today. Had we had an equivalent of WikiLeaks back in 1941, however, the course of history could have been very different. FDR would have found it much more difficult to maneuvre the country into being attacked...

  Nearly everyone in his right mind complains about cell phones going off in church or the people who shout into their phones in airports or on the plane, but those Jerks are for the most part anonymous strangers whom we shall never see again.  Any attempt to correct them might backfire.  But what about...

  Occupying some two thirds of the old czarist province of Bessarabia, with the rivers Dniester to the east and Prut to the west, the Republic of Moldova is a small, poor, landlocked state. Its parliamentary election, held on November 28, should have been irrelevant to anyone except the faraway country’s three and a half million people, of whom we know...

  When communism collapsed in Moscow, Prague and Belgrade at the end of the Cold War, ethnic nationalism surged to the surface in all three nations and tore them apart into 24 countries. Economic nationalism is now resurgent across Europe. And it is hard to see how a transnational institution like the European Union, run...

  As life in the 21st century gets loopier and loopier, the truly deranged come out of the woodwork, passing themselves off as benefactors of mankind, candidates for sainthood, etc. Maybe—who knows—candidates for another Pulitzer Prize: something The New York Times hardly needs, but self-inflicted moral grandeur can do odd things to you. The New York Times‘...

  The USA regime will soon recover from the embarrassments created by the massive release of diplomatic documents onto the Internet.  There will be investigations and prosecutions.  There will be ironic attempts by Madame Clinton and her colleagues to pretend that personal attacks on heads of state and foreign diplomats are de rigueur in the...

  The full title should be: Jerks, How to Spot them and How to Deal with them without becoming one of them yourself. The Jerk is the defining character of postmodern America.  What the Man of Faith and the Man of the Sword were to the Middle Ages, the Jerk is to our own age....

  Thanksgiving is the time of year when Americans are supposed to take stock and give thanks.  The mere  fact that we can take stock should make us grateful to be alive and conscious.  This Thanksgiving, I am particularly thankful that I don’t have to go anywhere by plane.   Over the past three or...

  North Korea’s artillery attack on a South Korean island on Tuesday was the latest in a series of Pyongyang’s aggressive moves over the past year and a half. They started with ballistic missile tests in April of last year, soon followed by a nuclear test in May. Kim Jong Il, who may be mad,...

  Before Republican senators vote down the strategic arms reduction treaty negotiated by the Obama administration, they should think long and hard about the consequences. In substance, New START has none of the historic significance of Richard Nixon’s SALT I or ABM treaty, or Jimmy Carter’s SALT II, or Ronald Reagan’s INF treaty removing all...

  Sarah Palin is the best thing that’s happened lately to the right and the left, both at the same time. Much of the right pays her obeisance for mobilizing the troops and smart-alecking the left—which in turn loves her for splitting (so the left hopes) the right over her personality and track record. The...

  On November 21 Ireland formally applied for a rescue package worth $90 billion, having failed to control its financial crisis with austerity measures and strict budgetary planning. European Union officials quickly agreed to the request, which follows an agreement negotiated last week in Dublin by a joint EU and IMF team. They hope that the Irish rescue will...

  Missiles fired from the Chinese mainland could destroy five of the six major U.S. air bases in the Far East. So states a new report of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, adding: “Saturation missile strikes could destroy U.S. air defenses, runways, parked aircraft, and fuel and maintenance facilities. Complicating this scenario is...

  Alarming newspaper headlines greeted me at London’s Heathrow Airport on my arrival from the Balkans yesterday. The Daily Mail led with the EU President’s warning that “Ireland’s debt crisis could kill the European Union stone-dead.” The Independent’s front page (“Ghost estates and broken lives: the human cost of the Irish crash”) was accompanied by a photo that could have...

  The flap over whether to extend present tax rates for the rich finds its center in a cultural proposition: Liberals, including rich liberals, either don’t like the rich or feel obliged to pretend they don’t. The argument official Washington will have this month over tax rates—Republicans on one side, President Obama on the other...

  Sunday, on the eve of All Saints’ Day, Nov. 1, 2010, the faithful gathered at the Assyrian Catholic Church of Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad. As Father Wassim Sabih finished the mass, eight al-Qaida stormed in, began shooting and forced him to the floor. As the priest pleaded that his parishioners be spared,...

  According to a seasoned observer of Moscow’s political scene, the Russian political class cringed last Wednesday morning on learning that Obama had suffered a humiliating political defeat. The Russian leaders don’t think much of Obama personally, but they are worried over what the Republican control of the House might mean for the fledgling “reset”...

  Barack Obama’s dream of being a transformational president who alters the course of his country died 48 hours ago. The message America sent Obama and the men and women America sent to Congress to replace his allies impel one to ask: Why would he want a second term? Why would the most liberal president...

  “In the twentieth century you could not see the ground for clever men….And all these clever men were at work giving accounts of what would happen in the next age.”  The discussion of prophetic literature with which Chesterton begins The Napoleon of Notting Hill is itself an accurate piece of prophecy.   As Chesterton points out,...

  This is politics in America. Item One:  NBC’s Matt Lauer asks the the California gubernatorial candidates if they will stop negative ads, and when Meg Whitman declines, she is booed by women.  This is supposed to mean something, when feminists and lesbians boo a Republican woman.  But feminists hate women and to the extent...

  Last night, on the recommendation of friends, my wife and I went to see Secretariat. We both thoroughly enjoyed this wholesome, well-made movie, that manages to be suspenseful even though most moviegoers already know that Secretariat won the Triple Crown in 1973. I should have realized that any movie I enjoyed would make someone else...

  Excerpts from a speech to the H.L. Mencken Club, Baltimore, October 23, 2010 Two weeks ago the first “gay pride parade” was staged in Belgrade. Serbia’s “pro-European” government had been promoting the event as yet another proof that Serbia is fit to join the European Union, that is has overcome the legacy of its...

  Before the Tea Party philosophy is ever even tested in America, it will have succeeded, or it will have failed, in Great Britain. For in David Cameron the Brits have a prime minister who can fairly be described as a Tea Party Tory. Casting aside the guidance of Lord Keynes—government-induced deficits are the right...

  It is a feminist truism that women have always worked.  By work is not meant so much the routine tasks of the household—the storage and preparation of food, the making and cleaning of clothing, and the household chores of sweeping, cleaning, and tending children—but the degraded and degrading concept of work as a job for...

  Excerpts from a speech at Providence College given on Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010. Two sets of fallacies have dominated the mainstream debate about the Ground Zero mosque—and before we go any further, let’s get this straight: it is a mosque, frantic insistence by the Qusling elite to use one euphemistic misnomer or another notwithstanding....

  Is Europe’s adventure in international living about to end? At Potsdam, Germany, this weekend, Chancellor Angela Merkel told the young conservatives of her Christian Democratic Union that Germany’s attempt to create a multicultural society where people “live side by side and enjoy each other” has “failed, utterly failed.” Backing up her rueful admission are...

  The news just in that Dutch prosecutors have changed their mind about prosecuting Geert Wilders for the Orwellian crime of “discriminating against Muslims” and “inciting hatred” is prima facie a victory for free speech and all that. In fact it is not nearly as good as it may seem. The establishment is scared of continuing to hound the...

  After receiving a number of kind messages, imploring me to continue this discussion, I have decided to ransack some old essays for more material on the question of women. If I do not respond to every writeback, it is because of lack of time. It is a feminist truism that women have always worked. ...

  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton started her two-day Balkan tour in Sarajevo on Tuesday by issuing a fresh call for Bosnia’s centralization. She urged “reforms that would improve key services, attract more foreign investment, and make the government more functional and accountable.” Hatreds have eased, she went on, “but nationalism persists. Meanwhile the promise of...

  In the last week of September the House of Representatives passed legislation aimed at imposing trade sanctions against China unless it lets its currency appreciate, thereby reducing its export advantage. In a subsequent speech clearly aimed at China, Japan and Brazil, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner attacked currency policies likely to result in “short-term distortions...

  On October 2, 2010, the Wall Street Journal ran an article detailing the results of the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. The article was entitled “Americans Sour on Trade,” but what Americans are really souring on is free trade: 53% of Americans now say that free trade agreements have hurt the United States, with less than...