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 [...]
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, [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
