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Excellent article by Peter S. Goodman in last Sunday’s “Week in Review” section of The New York Times. Goodman has been crisscrossing the country over the last three years reporting on the impact of the recession on all kinds of people.  Things are pretty bad when former stockbrokers blame illegal immigrants for blocking their access [...]

I just happened to watching MSNBC this afternoon when Tom Brokaw interrupted the regular programming to announce the passing of Tim Russert, NBC News’ Washington bureau chief and moderator of Meet the Press. He was at work at the bureau when he collapsed suddenly. Attempts to revive him failed. He was 58 years old. I [...]

William F. Buckley died today at the age of 82. When I was an undergraduate, I read “God & Man at Yale,” his first treatise on the role of the university in shaping public discourse, morality and conscience. The book was published in 1951, little more than a year after his graduation from Yale. It [...]

You may argue with his marshalling of the facts and cringe at the thought of what he’s proposing, but Michael Moore’s Sicko is one exceptional piece of documentary filmmaking. In Sicko, Moore turns his attention to the state of America’s healthcare system. Unsurprisingly, he finds it dominated by greedy HMO’s and insurance companies. Even less [...]

A few months ago, I read that The New Republic was coming under new ownership. It was said at the time that the liberal graylady would be retooled to appeal to a more aggressive left as well as readers accustomed to blogs and a 24/7 news cycle. I also understood that Martin Peretz, the Harvard [...]

Since my wife is visiting her mother in the south of England this week, I’m naturally attuned to the news of Tony Blair’s planned resignation as head of the Labour Party, and consequently as Prime Minister of Great Britain, effective June 27. In his ten years at No. 10 – he actually lived next door [...]

In today’s New York Times, both Nicholas Kristof and John Tierney argue against possible indictments by Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame case. In Kristof’s view, the investigation now resembles Kenneth Starr’s crusade against Bill Clinton. To quote Tierney’s money line: “No one deserves to be indicted on conspiracy charges for belonging [...]

Once again, the perfidy of administration officials has been transformed into a tempest about the media itself. On Sunday, The New York Times carried two accounts of the story of Judith Miller’s jailing for her refusal to identify a source in the investigation of the Valerie Plame case. In “The Miller Case”, Don Van Natta, [...]

You really have to feel sorry for Harriet Meiers, caught as she is in the crossfire between the President and his conservative critics. No, she’s probably not qualified to serve on the Supreme Court but she isn’t the first non-jurist to be appointed, either. It’s fun to watch people like David Frum, Charles Krauthammer, Ann [...]

Newsweek reported this week that some conservative Christian groups have privately signaled the White House that their support for the war might evaporate if Islam is enshrined in the Iraqi constitution. This from the people who want to enshrine the Ten Commandments as the law of the land.