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 October 3, 2011
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 September 26, 2011
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 September 19, 2011
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 September 12, 2011
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 September 5, 2011
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 August 29, 2011
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 August 15 - August 22, 2011
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 August 8, 2011
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 August 1, 2011
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 July 25, 2011
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 July 18, 2011
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 July 4 - July 11, 2011
This issue: October 10, 2011 (Vol. 17, No. 04)
BY WILLIAM KRISTOL
Life is, undoubtedly, bittersweet. But not America. According to President Obama, America is bittersoft.
In April 2008, candidate Obama told donors in San Francisco that small town Midwesterners “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Last Thursday, President Obama said in a TV interview, “The way I think about it is, you know, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft and, you know, we didn’t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades.”
BY MATTHEW CONTINETTI
In happier times, the firm had been celebrated as a harbinger of the future. The political connections it enjoyed were the fruit not only of ...
BY MAX BOOT
The fact remains that the Quetta Shura and the Haqqani Network operate from Pakistan with impunity. Extremist organizations ...
BY GARY SCHMITT and THOMAS DONNELLY
Among the many shortcomings of the Budget Control Act and its spawn, the “Super Committee,” is that the threat of a sequestration “nuclear option”—in which some $600 billion would be cut automatically from national ...
Texas’s college tuition policy is not the abomination Mitt Romney claims.
BY JONATHAN V. LAST
Rick Perry is not always his best defender. For the last two weeks, Mitt Romney has hammered Perry over a Texas law the governor signed which allows children of illegal immigrants to pay in-state college tuition. At the Orlando debate, for instance, Romney said sardonically, “To go to the University of Texas, if you’re an illegal alien, you get an in-state tuition discount. You know how much that is? That’s $22,000 a year. Four years of college, almost $100,000 discount if you are an illegal alien, go to the University of Texas. If you are a United States citizen from any one of the other 49 states, you have to pay $100,000 more. That doesn’t make sense to me.”
In his defense Perry dolefully concluded, “if you say that we ...
The U.S. Navy trumps a U.N. treaty.
BY MICHAEL GOLDFARB and STEVEN GROVES
The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, also known as the Law of the Sea Treaty (or LOST), presents a dilemma for some national ...
A one-of-a-kind intervention.
BY GARY SCHMITT and JAMIE M. FLY
The scene was one of jubilation, as British prime minister David Cameron and French president Nicolas Sarkozy arrived in Libya’s capital on September 15 to ...
The Obama administration’s fading commitment.
BY MARK SCHNEIDER
The Obama administration’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review adopted the goals of reduced reliance on nuclear weapons, continued nuclear weapons ...
The very different life lessons of the president and his challenger.
BY FRED BARNES
Both President Obama and Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain went to graduate school. Obama got a degree at Harvard Law School. Cain did his graduate work at Purdue and Burger King University. That doesn’t ...
Rumors of Barack Obama’s political skill have been greatly exaggerated.
BY NOEMIE EMERY
For a success, Barack Obama is a very bad politician, the worst politician to win the presidency by an electoral landslide, to never lose a major election, or to rise to the presidency from a state legislature in little more than four years. He has gone from sterling campaigner to put-upon leader; from the new FDR to the next Jimmy Carter; from being the orator who could hold millions spellbound to the man who moves no one at all. The man who promised everything is delivering nothing. Journalists who wept when he won the election now grind their teeth in despair. Maureen Dowd admits he isn’t the one for whom even he had been waiting. The gap between sizzle and steak never seemed so large or alarming, and inquiring minds want to know what went wrong.
The problem of greatness in an age of equality.
BY TOD LINDBERG
In the mid-19th century, the Scottish man of letters Thomas Carlyle coined the term “Hero-worship,” by which he meant the high regard, entirely proper in his view, that ordinary people have for the great figures of ...
When owning a newspaper was profitable — and fun.
BY RICHARD NORTON SMITH
I said a lot of things, but Cissy did them.
—Alice Roosevelt Longworth
Long before Marilyn, Jackie, or Liz, there was Cissy—more precisely, Eleanor Medill “Cissy” Patterson—the imperious, principled, dissolute, ...
The extraordinary career that ended at Auschwitz.
BY JOEL LOBENTHAL
Hamlet without one of the principal players. That is the way that accounts of European culture between the two World Wars now begin to look after René Blum & The Ballets Russes: In Search of a Lost ...
How much does ‘Moneyball’ resemble the game?
BY LEE SMITH
If there’s no crying in baseball, as Tom Hanks explained in A League of Their Own, there is plenty of weeping in baseball movies—from Bang the Drum Slowly and The Natural to the newest ...
World War II was a close-run thing.
BY AARON MACLEAN
Harry Butcher, an aide to General Eisenhower throughout his time as supreme commander in Europe, and gossipy diarist par excellence, ...
The enigmatic man behind the perennial bestseller.
BY ALASDAIR SOUSSI
In 1941, a decade after the death of Kahlil Gibran, his good friend Witter Bynner responded to a query from a student asking about the Lebanese-born ...
It’s always Morning in America in Obama’s Hollywood.
BY JOHN PODHORETZ
We are either in the third or fourth year of the great economic crisis, and Hollywood’s response has been, quite simply, to act as if there isn’t ...
Victorino Matus does nothing.
BY VICTORINO MATUS
Two weeks ago my three-year-old son was supposed to talk about our family at his preschool, so I prepped him: “What if the teacher asks what your daddy does for a living?” After a thoughtful pause, my son replied, “Nothing.” At which point I instructed him to tell the class that his father writes. “My dad writes,” he dutifully repeated, and then added, “and writing is nothing.” On the other hand, his two uncles have easily explainable, “real” jobs. One is a firefighter and the other is in construction. What my brothers-in-law do is tangible to my son, who plays with both a fire truck and an excavator. I guess I could give him Strunk & White.
The ...
The Scrapbook is not superstitious, but there was a curious, and slightly disconcerting, convergence of Deep Think last week that caught our attention. It began with a front-page story in the New York Times—“As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around the Globe” by Nicholas Kulish (Sept. 28)—which could be excused as one of the Times’s routine efforts (usually confined to the Arts pages) to rekindle the sixties spirit. Or maybe not. The article chronicled a worldwide cycle of mass protests—from India and Israel to Greece and Spain—against elected governments, reflecting “wariness, even contempt, toward traditional politicians and the democratic political process they preside over.” One young Spanish woman summed it up this way: “Our parents are grateful because they’re voting,” Marta Solanas told the Times. “We’re the first generation to say that voting is ...
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