The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has announced a “Fortnight of Freedom” to last from June 21 to July 4. The event, based on the presupposition that religious freedom is endangered in this country, is planned as a very visible demonstration. The “Fortnight” not only ends with the celebration of the major patriotic holiday, […]

Editor’s note: The recent Supreme Court decision about Arizona’s controversial immigration control law has brought the issue of immigration back into the spotlight of American politics, and has done so in an election year. Before the Supreme Court’s ruling, which upheld the law’s most debated aspect but struck down several others, immigration issues simmered just […]

The academic world has been in a tizzy over the (possibly soon to be reversed) ouster of University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan by the Board of Visitors earlier this month. Much of the controversy has stemmed from the fact that the reasons for her ouster are less than clear; Sullivan was almost universally well-regarded […]

The biggest scam going in American financial life may be the collusive effort by Wall Street, the political class, and public sector unions to use union retirement money to prop up Wall Street speculation.Step One: state politicians promise big pension and health care benefits to their unionized work forces, but don’t set aside enough money […]

All the newspapers reported the Syrian downing of a Turkish military jet yesterday off the Syrian coast. And all the papers as well as the electronic media have reported the joint Syrian–Turkish effort to locate the pilots, and the various statements of the two sides about what happened and who is to blame for it.There […]

Jim Hoagland’s commentary on Kofi Annan and his Syria peace mission is worth a brief remark. Hoagland defends Annan’s tactics, which he associates with the “Yemeni variant” method of getting rid of Bashir al-Assad. The key, Hoagland contends, is not persuading Assad himself, because everyone knows, Annan included, that that isn’t going to work. The […]

In my last post, I mentioned finding relatively few nits to pick with the Times and Post coverage of Egypt last weekend. That wasn’t the case, however, with one of yesterday’s op-eds, the one by David Ignatius discussing the nature of national security leaks. Ignatius’s topic is the new book by David Sanger of the […]

I had planned to spend most of yesterday, Sunday, working in the garden, particularly harvesting and culling our plums. I have three trees: two standard purple, and one golden blush Japanese hybrid. But it got hot, I got most of the work done, and I couldn’t help but read the Sunday papers. And doing so, […]

Fault Line For an overview of exceptionalism in the Middle East, I turned to David Welch, a career Foreign Service Officer. He served in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and as the U.S. Ambasador to Egypt from 2001 to 2005. He also held the title of Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs […]

In response to my most recent post, one of my loyal readers (my only loyal reader, for all I know) asked me to expound on the U.S. policy implications of what is going on in Egypt. I was going to do so in that earlier post, but I try to keep these things relatively short, […]