This issue: July 4 - July 11, 2011 (Vol. 16, No. 40)

Don’t Come Home, America

BY ROBERT KAGAN

"America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home.” This was the core sound bite in President Obama’s speech announcing the drawdown of forces in Afghanistan, and it was an extraordinary statement. Of course, such sentiments have been uttered many times over the years. George McGovern’s “Come Home America” campaign theme in 1972 comes to mind, and we’re sure Patrick Buchanan, Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, and George Will have said either exactly that or something similar at one time or another.

Not since the 1930s has an American president struck such an isolationist theme in a speech to the American people, however. By juxtaposing the winding down of the war in Afghanistan with the need ...

America’s Labor Party

Is there anything Obama won’t do for unions?

BY FRED BARNES

How far will President Obama go to advance the interests of organized labor? Awfully far. We know this not only from the effort to keep Boeing from building a plane in a right-to-work state, South Carolina, but also from the way Delta Airlines is being railroaded into recognizing unions its employees have repeatedly rejected.

In June alone, the Obama administration adopted rules likely to discourage employers from hiring law firms that specialize in thwarting union organizing drives, and moved to shorten union certification campaigns, long a goal of organized labor.

Broken Families, Broken Economy

The real obstacle to growth

BY MITCH PEARLSTEIN

Don’t look now, but the fiscal mountain blocking our path is rockier than usually advertised. Why? Because even if House Budget chairman Paul Ryan prevails on every contentious detail of his long-term plan for prosperity, family fragmentation​—​more severe in the United States than in any other industrialized nation​—​will make it more difficult than generally assumed to balance our books. 

Very high rates of family breakdown, as it used to be known, are subtracting from what many American students learn in school and so holding them back economically. That harms the country by making millions of citizens less competitive than they should be in the ...

God and Man and Politics

A Christian perspective on the public square.

BY PETER BERKOWITZ

The City of Man

Religion and Politics in a New Era

by Michael Gerson & Peter Wehner

Moody, 144 pp., $19.99

It is commonly supposed that liberal democracy gives rise to a dangerous and insuperable ...

AC for D.C.

BY PHILIP TERZIAN

Returning home the other evening to an empty house from a three-day trip, I checked the thermostat in the darkened vestibule and noticed that the temperature was a few degrees higher than the setting. My alluring wife, who is more cost-conscious than I about such things, had left the air conditioner on at a responsible setting before leaving on her own (separate) trip. The house was comfortable, if perceptibly less cool than usual; but I was intent on unpacking and surveying the tokens and souvenirs I had accumulated during a sojourn in the Hudson Valley.

So it took awhile for the grim reality to sink in: At some calamitous instant between my wife’s departure from the homestead for New York City ...

Enough Already, Honor in Beirut, & more

Enough Already

Having reached a certain age, The Scrapbook finds itself taking more interest in probate news than we used to. And while we concede that it’s not exactly the stuff of Perry Mason or a juicy episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, the little dramas of probate law teach us something about human nature.

When, for example, the reclusive, 104-year-old heiress Huguette Clark died in Manhattan six weeks ago, her lifelong desire for seclusion and anonymity was treated in the media as freakish, clear ...