So here, as if on cue, it being a new day and all, came the Obama administration Monday to announce new arrangements for the way the country does business. The new big idea: Tell all those banks how much they’re going to be allowed to pay executives; let them know the gravy train leaves the...

The Homeland Security apparatus has garnered quite a bit of attention lately for a paper that identified anti-abortionists, anti-immigrationists, and war veterans as terrorist suspects. (I thought “profiling” was forbidden, but in that matter, as so often these days, it would seem that some people are more equal than others.) Some Republican politicians are playing...

“I have to admire the residents of Iroquois territory for assuming that they have a right to determine where Jews lives in Jerusalem.” Thus did Israeli government press director Daniel Seamen caustically dismiss President Obama’s opposition to Israel’s right to “natural growth” of its settlements in Arab East Jerusalem and on the West Bank. Though...

If a person lives long enough, he can watch everyone forget everything they learned. Everyone includes Federal Reserve chairmen, economists, Bank of America “strategists” and even Bloomberg.com. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke thinks he can hold down U.S. long-term interest rates by purchasing mortgage bonds and U.S. Treasuries. Sixty years ago, the Federal Reserve understood...

If Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed, the U.S. Supreme Court will consist of six Catholics, two Jews and precisely one white Anglo-Saxon Protestant in the form of Justice John Paul Stevens, who is 89 years old and boasts of two important WASP insignia: inherited wealth and a bow tie. He also thinks that Shakespeare’s plays...

One of the talk-radio stations here in Rockford bills itself as “All Local. All Day.”  It is an interesting slogan, in light of increasing reports of the impending failure of local media; it would be even more interesting if it (or a version of it) were not used by hundreds of other talk-radio stations across...

Economic news remains focused on banks and housing, while the threat mounts to the U.S. dollar from massive federal budget deficits in fiscal years 2009 and 2010. Earlier this year, the dollar’s exchange value rose against currencies, such as the euro, the British pound and Swiss franc, against which the dollar had been steadily falling....

Since September 2008 an awful lot of Americans have lost 40 to 50 percent of their net worth.  According to Bloomberg News, the federal government, during the same period, has committed $11.3 trillion in loans, guarantees, and investments to bail out the financial system.  The Obama administration believes this effort will help the overall economy...

You can do anything you like in London as long as you don’t do it in the street and don’t frighten the horses. —Mrs. Patrick Campbell There is nothing so stupid as a gallant British officer. —Wellington I am one Southerner who is not obsessed with the Civil War. I am too busy planning for...

If the U.S. Senate rejects race-based justice, Sonia Sotomayor will never sit on the Supreme Court. Because that is what Sonia is all about. As the New York Times reported Saturday, the salient cause of her career has been advancing persons of color, over whites, based on race and national origin. “Judge Sotomayor, whose parents...

When Popcorn Sutton died in mid-March at the age of 62, the national press ran obituaries.  Though he was just an old moonshiner who’d plied his trade for half a century and done nothing else of consequence, a whole bunch of folks in Tennessee and North Carolina grieved more than they would have over the...

PERSPECTIVE Immigration, Neighbors, and Enemiesby Thomas Fleming VIEWS The Economic Impact of Immigration by Peter BrimelowPaying for the Privilege. You Should Have Been Here Yesteryearby Roger D. McGrathWhen the Golden State was paradise. California Crashby John C. Seiler, Jr.The Golden State today. Mandating Failure by Edwin S. RubensteinFederal insistence on multilingualism. NEWS Bailing Out the Bucket...

When you think about it, Sonia Sotomayor is the perfect pick for the Supreme Court—in Barack Obama’s America. Like Obama, himself a beneficiary of affirmative action, she thinks “Latina women,” because of their life experience, make better judicial decisions than white men, that discrimination against white men to advance people of color is what America...

Torture is a violation of U.S. and international law. Yet, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, on the basis of legally incompetent memos prepared by Justice Department officials, gave the OK to interrogators to violate U.S. and international law. The new Obama administration shows no inclination to uphold ...

Never trust a man who reads only one book. —Arturo Perez-Reverte . . . the monarchy had become an insatiable machine for devouring taxes, while a drained populace received nothing in exchange but the political blunders and the disasters of war. —Perez-Reverte In a sense the American Civil War is a belated chapter of the...

A utility corporation that requests a DECREASE in rates Local government that REDUCES property taxes Airport screeners searching someone who actually might be a terrorist. Airport screeners not searching blonde, blue-eyed young women. A government program that requests a decrease in funding. A government poverty program that actually helps anyone who deserves help. An honest...

Your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth; with this difference; that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without and your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered ...

I was born and raised in the North. I didn’t like their Yankee culture when I was there, and I like it even less the more time I spend in the South. —Al Benson, Copperhead Chronicles There is such a thing as imperial fatigue, and servitude seems a light burden after the exhausting weight of...

Who made the Law that men should die in meadows?Who spake the word that blood should splash in lanes?Who gave it forth that gardens should be bone-yards?Who spread the hills with flesh, and blood, and brains?Who made the Law?—British Sgt. Frederick Coulson, killed on the Western Front, Oct. 7, 1916 The instinct for Power is...

A statute’s words do not tell how the law will be interpreted and applied. All laws are expansively interpreted. For example: —The Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) was directed at drug lords. Nothing in the law says anything about divorce, yet it soon was applied in divorce cases. —The 1964 Civil Rights Act explicitly...

I’ve lately been promoting a book I wrote on the plight of the mainline Christian denominations, featuring the Episcopal Church as Exhibit A in the Trainwreck Chronicles. An interviewer asked me: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of these churches? I replied: I’m too old to be pessimistic. A blog commenter ventured that...

As was evident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, it is deja vu, 1961, all over again. We have a young, cool, witty, personable president—and an adoring press corps. “I am Barack Obama,” the president introduced himself. “Most of you covered me. All of you voted for me. (Laughter and applause.) Apologies to the Fox...

The irrepressible Silvio Berlusconi is in hot water again with all left-thinking people, this time for his remarks on illegal immigrants.  After praising Libya for taking back 500 illegals from Italy, the Italian PM observed,

I stopped paying attention to Time many years ago.  My twin brother and I, already plotting our emigration to the United States, subscribed as college students in England in the 1960’s to get some sense of this world-straddling “indispensable nation”—as Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright later called it, possibly ...

On Oct. 16, 2004, President George W. Bush signed the Israel Lobby’s bill, the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act. This legislation requires the U.S. Department of State to monitor anti-Semitism worldwide. To monitor anti-Semitism, it has to be defined. What is the definition? Basically, as defined by the Israel lobby and Abe ...

Having lost both houses of Congress and the White House in two straight elections, Republicans are going through an identity crisis, its leaders holding town hall meetings to “listen” to the people. “What should we focus on? Should we drop the social issues? How do we get the young people back?” Such angst and soul-searching...

As Mexico reels from the swine flu panic, there’s fierce talk of the disastrous impact on that country of North American methods of intensive livestock production. In the eye of the storm have been the huge pig factories in the state of Veracruz, owned by Granjas Carroll, a subsidiary of Smithfield Farms, active in North...

Intelligence is international; stupidity is national; art is local. —Ezra Pound The historian in particular is a camp-follower of the successful army. —David Donald Accidents don’t happen to people who take accidents personally. —Don Vito Corleone A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within. —Will Durant We are...

All-you-can-eat restaurants The Three Stooges The new Three Stooges: George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Douglas Feith Donald Trump Talentless best-selling authors Talentless movie and music stars Great constitutional scholars like Earl Warren, Thurgood Marshall, and Warren Burger Reverse discrimination Eleanor Roosevelt Anarcho/Tyranny (though forms of this doubtless appeared earlier in history) The “Great Society”...

The President wants an empathetic jurist to replace David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. He will likely get such a one. What the country will get in that event is one more senator or cabinet member—as straw boss, head knocker, high and mighty arbiter of high and mighty matters. A sort of modern Roman...

God likes farmers.  Not gigantic corporate agribusiness, but farmers.  He made man from the dirt and for the dirt, to cultivate His Garden.  Adam means “of the red” or “of the soil.” When the children of Israel clamored for a king, so that they might rely on him to protect them from foreign invaders, the...

The American president began as Cincinnatus, a patriot called to the temporary service of his country (a republican confederation).  The president ends as Caesar, a despot of almost unlimited power, presiding over a global empire.  Like the Caesars, in some quarters the president is even worshiped as a god.  Cincinnatus was called because of his...

In 1786, John Adams wrote in his diary that a friend, “lamenting the differences of character between Virginia and New England,” welcomed from Adams a recipe for a Chesapeake makeover: “I recommended to him town meetings, training days, town schools, and ministers”; these “are the scenes where New England men were formed.”  Because Adams started...

I entirely agree with the spirit of this roundtable but not with the language of restoring “the Republic.”  The United States is not now and has never been a republic.  It is a federation of states, each of which, in Article IV of the Constitution, is guaranteed a republican form of government.  But a federation of...

Alexander Hamilton said debt is a blessing: It oils the wheels of business and enhances national power.  Jefferson said debt is a curse: It binds future generations without their consent, striking at the very heart of the Republic—the consent of the governed.  Bloomberg News reports (February 9) that the so-called financial crisis has added $9.7...

The U.S. automotive industry operates in a highly regulated environment, a fact largely overlooked in recent congressional hearings over federal loan guarantees to domestic firms.  These regulations affect more than three million American blue- and white-collar workers employed in the industry, along with shareholders and other investors, including retirees (and ...

In the most famous defense of the U.S. Supreme Court’s power to declare acts of the federal and state legislatures unconstitutional, Alexander Hamilton argued that it was the Court’s job only to implement the will of the people as expressed in the Constitution.  If the Court went beyond that—interpreting the document to include things that...

I cannot see the least possibility of recreating either an elite republican class (if, by “elite,” one means an untitled aristocracy) or the American Republic itself.  The notion of a republic is a product of classical political thinking, which is now virtually dead in the Western world, and never appeared elsewhere.  Not only has the classical...

“All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States . . . ”  Thus run the first words of Article I, Section 1, of the U.S. Constitution, clearly laying out the Framers’ understanding of the nature and the role of Congress.  Everything else enumerated in Article I—the various powers...

PERSPECTIVE Free Men of a Republicby Thomas Fleming ROUND TABLE Can the Republic Be Restored? “A Limited Presidency” by Clyde Wilson“Adams’ Federalism” by John Willson“Just One More Thing” by William J. Quirk“Is America a Republic?” by Donald Livingston“Reviewing Judicial Review” by Stephen B. Presser“The Classless Republic” by Chilton Williamson, Jr.“The United States, In Congress Assembled”...

A review of Watchmen (produced and distributed by Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures; directed by Zack Snyder; screenplay by David Hayter
and Alex Tse) and Duplicity (produced and distributed
by Universal Pictures; directed and written by Tony Gilroy) The title of Alan Moore’s 1986 comic-book series Watchmen alludes to the Roman satirist Juvenal, who asked, “Who watches...

Many of the prominent characteristics of our culture—venal politicians, callous and stupid bureaucrats and police, promiscuous and perverted clergymen, debased currency—were inherited from the Old World, where they have a long history. However, we Americans are proverbially an inventive people and we have made many innovative cultural contributions of our own to the world. Like...

You really can’t have “gay marriage,” you know, irrespective of what a court or a legislature may say. You can have something some people call gay marriage because to them the idea sounds worthy and necessary, but to say a thing is other than it is, is to stand reality on its head, hoping to...

Paul Theroux laments that the world is aging badly, that the world he knew as a young man has nearly vanished, that the decline and decay of precious things is everywhere apparent.  Theroux should know; he travels more than I do.  Also my own ventures at home and abroad depressingly confirm his impressions.  Except when...

Just as the New York Times was front-paging a supposed upsurge in atheism (God? What God?) came complementary tidings from the Pew Research Center. To wit, it’s not church spats over “gay marriage” or pedophilia that seem to be driving explicit Christians out the door. A complex of concerns causes their switch to another religion...

Even the dullest consumer has got the point that no matter how he casts his vote for president or for Congress, his interests will never be represented because the oligarchy serves only itself. . . . They are happier with the way things are, with half the electorate permanently turned off and the other half...