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Recent Blog Posts |
Editorial of The New York Sun The editor of The Drudge Report reports he is being blamed for the collapse of the dollar because he's given it so much coverage. By our lights his constant coverage is proof that he has better news judgment than those who are ignoring one of the great stories of our generation. October 21, 2009 The founding chairman of Human Rights Watch has shown real courage in speaking out against the organization he brought into being — and has elicited a stunning response from its current leadership that proves the founder's point. October 18, 2009 Apart from the question of whether President Obama deserves the Nobel Prize — a matter that we’ve suggested is the purview of the Norwegians — the newspapers are starting to crackle with the question of whether the Constitution permits Mr. Obama to accept it. October 15, 2009 An email has just come in from one of our favorite newspapers, Il Foglio, seeking support for the candidacy of Tony Blair to be president of the European Council. It seems that under the Treaty of Lisbon, the presidency of the Council will changing from being a rotating musical chairs kind of thing to a position with a two-year term and slightly more power. Its power would not amount to a hill of beans in an era when there was a strong and assertive American president pressing our interests. But in a season of American retreat, and with only the Czech president now holding out against Lisbon, the issue Il Foglio is pressing is something to think about. October 11, 2009 Thomas Friedman has a marvelous column in the October 11th number of the New York Times, urging President Obama to go to Oslo and accept the Nobel Prize “on behalf of all the most important peacekeepers in the world in the last century — the men and women of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps.” We were particularly pleased with Mr. Friedman’s column, because it followed by only two days the New York Sun’s latest editorial urging that the peace prize really should go to G.I. Joe. October 10, 2009 Those of us who have been waiting for a politician to pick up on the monetary issue are perking up at Governor Palin’s demarche on the dollar. This came last week in a posting on her Facebook page, where she reacted to a report that Gulf oil producers were negotiating with Russia, China, Japan, and France to abandon the use of the dollar in pricing petroleum. October 9, 2009 The decision of the Norwegians to award the Nobel Prize for Peace to President Obama is not going to be met with sneering in these quarters. For all that we disagree with the president in respect of policy, Mr. Obama has clearly inspired not only a huge number of Americans but also a huge number of Europeans. September 21, 2009 The decision by America to drop criminal charges against General Vang Pao, whom it had accused of plotting to overthrow the communist regime in Laos, is being greeted with joy among the freedom-loving Hmong the world over — and these columns are with them. It is hard to recall a prosecution as misguided as that which was brought against the general whose army, in league with the Central Intelligence Agency, played a heroic role in the fight against the communists during the long war in Indochina. September 10, 2009 As President Obama was getting ready to address the joint meeting of Congress, we were alerted by the Drudge Report to Richard Pindar’s dispatch in the London Daily Telegraph on a new report that argues that the “cheapest way to combat climate change” is — wait for it — contraception. The report turns out to have been done for a British environmental organization called Optimum Population Trust. September 9, 2009 That was quite a warning the district attorney of New York County, Robert Morgenthau, delivered earlier this week at the Brookings Institution in Washington. A version of it appears this week on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. It is not often that the district attorney, who normally does his talking in a court room or in a press conference related to a specific case, goes public in a matter of international politics and strategy. May 19, 2009 God Bless the Supreme Court of the United States, which has just decided to hear the appeal of the press baron Conrad Black, who has for more than a year been imprisoned at a federal correctional facility at Coleman, Florida. It would be far premature to suggest that the court’s decision to hear Black’s appeal means that he will win the argument at the high court. But it certainly puts paid the idea that the courts should have, as they did, dismissed out of hand Black’s insistence that he was wrongly convicted and that serious errors were made in the trial that cast him into the penitentiary for what could be as much as 6 and ½ years. May 12, 2009 The big question following Secretary Geithner’s admission that monetary policy was in error during much of the Bush administration is whether the Congress is going to step up to its responsibilities in respect of the national currency. Mr. Geithner’s comments were made last week in response to a question from Charlie Rose about what mistakes he would see looking back. One the secretary cited was that, as he put it, “monetary policy around the world was too loose too long.” That, he said, “created this just huge boom in asset prices, money chasing risk. People trying to get a higher return.” April 28, 2009 “Cheney for President” is the headline today over the first column by the New York Times’s newest op-ed regular, Ross Douthat — a delightful debut suggesting that, as Mr. Douthat puts it, “both the Republican Party and the country would be better off today if Cheney, rather than John McCain, had been a candidate for president in 2008.”
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