The decay of American political parties continues as the real money and power in politics shifts inexorably away from party organizations to informal and ad hoc groups.  The combination of citizen grassroots movements, decentralized party structures and the vast sums of money short-circuiting the official party structures is changing the way politics works.  As this […]

I have taken up space in the electronic ether twice before on the general subject of Libya: once on March 22, just days after President Obama ordered a cruise missile attack on Tripoli, and again on August 16, when I raised the prospect of revenge killings on a large scale and what that might portend […]

The cross has been the foremost symbol of Christianity for so long that we easily forget that it was an instrument of execution. Subjects of the Roman Empire at the time could hardly forget this, and the spectacle of a religion using this symbol must have been shocking indeed, if not downright obscene. To achieve […]

If we want things to stay as they are, some things will still have to change. City government is one of those things.  While at the level of rhetoric, Democrats continue to embrace the blue social model and liberal urban Democrats in particular sing the praises of public sector unions and bureaucratic government structures, reality […]

Rhode Island is looking more and more like Greece, and not in a good way.  That is one message of this important piece by Mary Williams Walsh in the New York Times.  Years of blue social policy have wrecked local and state government finance in the country’s smallest state, and now the bills are coming […]

Africa’s King of Kings, the Sword of Islam, the Guide of the People and the Great Loon of Libya is gone.  The crowds kicked his lifeless body through the streets of his hometown.  Those who trusted in him and who aided and abetted his crimes, are scattered to the four winds — the lucky ones.  […]

Will the European Union survive the weekend?  President Nicolas Sarkozy seems concerned that it won’t and, if it doesn’t, it will be terrible news for France.  The FT reports on France’s growing angst: As Moody’s, the US rating agency, warned that France could see its credit outlook cut as a result of the growing sovereign […]

The Protestant Academy in Bad Boll is an influential think-tank located near Stuttgart, in southwest Germany. I worked there for a year in my youth, an experience which greatly influenced my thinking about the role of the church in a modern democracy—an issue of great urgency in the formative years of the Federal Republic. The […]

The news that 175 people were arrested over the weekend in a Chicago OWS protest started me thinking about the ritualized nature of left demonstrations.  The drums, the chants, the defiance, the arrests — and, sometimes, the glass smashing and the fire setting:  it all unfolds according to a predictable pattern that in its modern […]

“It is not just a dangerous escalation. This is part of a pattern of dangerous and reckless behavior by the Iranian government”, said President Barack Obama recently. Visibly angry and frustrated, Obama pledged that his Administration would take steps to ensure that Iran “pays a price.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton branded the most recent […]