The United States is the most revolutionary power in the history of the world, but after more than 200 years of a brilliant revolutionary career we are still not very good at understanding or responding to the revolutions our example, our ideas, our economy and our technology do so much to create.The Arab spring is […]

In my last post, I wrote about “Fanniegate“, the scandalous goings on by well connected Democrats that trashed the nation’s financial system.  It was not that Republicans didn’t join the fun or that Republican malefactors of great wealth weren’t abusing the public trust in other ways.  The moral and intellectual meltdown of the American elite […]

Democrats, watch out.The Republican Party and especially its Tea Party wing have just acquired a new weapon of mass destruction — and it has nothing to do with any of Congressman Wiener’s rogue body parts.  If they deploy this weapon effectively in the next election cycle — a big if — then they have the […]

In one of the great American classic musicals “Little Shop of Horrors,” Audrey sings a paean to the American Dream of the twentieth century: “Somewhere That’s Green.”  Living in Skid Row, she dreams of escape to life as it ought to be lived:A matchbox of our own A fence of real chain link, A grill […]

The news from the housing market this week is bad.  Really bad.  House prices today are lower in most of the country than they were in the dismal month of April 2009; we are now in the second dip of the double dip housing downturn. This doesn’t just mean that President Obama’s re-election is in […]

How to commemorate those who have laid down their lives for their country?  Memorial Day wasn’t much of an issue in my childhood.  100 years after the Civil War, most white Southerners still considered this a Yankee holiday.  Robert E. Lee’s birthday, a state holiday across much of the South, got more press.  White folks […]

The controversial US Supreme Court decision (pdf) that could ultimately force California to release tens of thousands of prison inmates is more than a shockingly broad exercise of judicial power.  It is also an official declaration by the highest constitutional authority in the land that California meets the strict test of state failure: it can […]

I had never thought there were many similarities between the pleasure-loving Charles II of England and the more upright Barack Obama until this week.  Listening to his speeches on the Middle East at the State Department, US-Israel relations at the AIPAC annual meeting and most recently his address to the British Parliament the comparison becomes […]

The illusions, delusions and fantasies surrounding events in the Middle East never cease to amaze. The controversy over President Obama’s Middle East speech the latest bizarre development, with Prime Minister Netanyahu and commentators like Dore Gold and Tim Pawlenty denouncing the President’s statement that the 1967 borders (which were actually the ceasefire lines dating back […]

President Obama’s speech to State Department employees today was billed as a major address on recasting American foreign policy in the Middle East. It lived up to its billing.  President Obama has deep-sixed the ‘realism’ that marked the first two years of his approach to the Middle East.  He has returned to the foreign policy […]