I thought it amusing that Fiji’s military chief, Frank Bainimarama, gave the prime minister a deadline to conform to the military’s demands before he would set a coup in motion. “I think I’ll schedule the coup for Friday…mmm…sometime after lunch.”
The demands include the nixing of new laws, one of which would forgive participants in the [...]
Wednesday, December 6, 2006, the Independent Institute will be hosting the Thomas Szasz Awards and “Liberty and Leviathan: An Evening with Robert Higgs.”
Gala reception and book signing at 6:30 p.m., program at 7:00 p.m.
Originator of the term, “ratchet effect,” to describe increases in State power, Higgs is the author of Crisis and Leviathan, Against Leviathan, [...]
“If named the Liberal Party’s leader this weekend, Michael Ignatieff would be a candidate to become [Canada's] next prime minister.” Read all about it over at the Christian Science Monitor, if you like. Why should you care? Well, this is the same Michael Ignatieff who wrote, in 2004:
To defeat evil, we may have to traffic [...]
Another Russian “dissident” gets sick, and guess who is blamed. As I said in my column the other day, Russia is getting the same treatment these days as Syria, a bona fide member of the “axis of evil.” A Lebanese taxi driver put it this way:
“‘It’s very clear,’ said the Beirut taxi driver, a Sunni [...]
Via Daniel McCarthy, an excerpt from The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft, by Russell Kirk and James McClellan (1967):
War, Taft perceived, was the enemy of constitution, liberty, economic security, and the cake of custom. His natural conservatism made him a man of peace. He never had served in the army himself, and he did [...]
“If it’s newsworthy, it gets on the air, whether it’s Bush or bin Laden.”
So began the first few days of Al-Jazeera’s English language news channel, a stream of glitzy slogans and swirling views of the Doha newsroom, punctuated by the occasional ad for a Qatari development corporation or Gulf state-based airline.
The news reports show [...]
[O]ur leaders may be so demoralized that we could just surrender in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the realists and the antisemites desire.
That’s Michael Ledeen over at The Corner. Now, using the standard neocon definition of anti-Semite (anyone, Gentile or Jew, who doesn’t carry around wallet-sized photos of Bibi), this means that to oppose the ongoing [...]
A remarkable article in tonight’s Haaretz, remarkable not so much in that it talks of a ceasefire between the Israelis and the Palestinians, because those are certainly common enough, but remarkable in how succinctly it illustrates just how close the two sides are.
An Islamic Jihad leader is quoted as saying (and claiming that Hamas [...]
Jonathan Schwarz examines the sunny side of Iraq-Vietnam analogies, and Leon Hadar measures Israel’s window of opportunity for attacking Iran.
Several people have written to inform me that Charlie Rangel’s draft proposal is merely a ploy to make war supporters squirm. Well, if it’s a ploy, then Rangel is playing with fire, because there are plenty of liberals out there who have rushed to defend his proposal on egalitarian grounds – and there are plenty [...]
Charlie Rangel and other liberals want a return to the draft on the basis of some ahistorical notion that it will prevent future wars. (See here for some background on all the wars conscription hasn’t prevented.) For one thing, as Scott points out below, no draft would ever be imposed without all sorts of loopholes [...]
Charles Rangel thinks that having a society where human beings own each other is perfectly okay as long as the slaves are destroying lives and property for the state rather than producing things for private plantation owners.
From USA Today:
“Americans would have to sign up for a new military draft after turning 18 if the incoming [...]
