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Covering The Supreme Court -- from National Review Online

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Last Entry: April 01, 2011 at 05:00:54

A Hostile Interview -- By: Kathryn Jean Lopez

Posted on September 04, 2009
Michael Walsh, who for years was the classical-music critic at Time magazine, began writing fiction in the waning days of the Cold War. His new novel, Hostile Intent, deals with issues that will be familiar to viewers of 24 -- and to all those who realize we?re at war...

Animals Before Birth -- By: Frederica Mathewes-Green

Posted on September 04, 2009
What is life like in the womb? Thanks to National Geographic, we?ve been able to refresh our memories with a beautiful book (In the Womb: Witness the Journey from Conception to Birth through Astonishing 3D Images) as well as a TV mini-series that makes use of the most advanced video technology to reveal human prenatal development...

Not So Fast -- By: Mark R. Levin

Posted on September 04, 2009
It is quite a challenge to disagree with my brother Andy McCarthy. Both the substance and length of his arguments are compelling. But let me address a few of the points in his excellent piece today. The decision to invade Iraq was not motivated exclusively or even primarily by the democracy project...

The Jobless Recovery -- By: Larry Kudlow

Posted on September 04, 2009
The jobless-recovery theme re-emerged on Friday with the arrival of a disappointing employment report. The daunting number was the unemployment rate, which jumped from 9.4 percent in July to 9.7 percent in August. This is a big-versus-small-business issue...

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An Exaggerated Death -- By: Peter Berkowitz

Posted on September 03, 2009
In contrast to progressives, who converge in believing that the top priority of politics should be more equitable government distribution of opportunities and goods, conservatives differ, sometimes sharply, about the aims of politics. While almost all conservatives in America affirm the centrality of individual freedom, social conservatives concentrate on protecting religion and morality, economic conservatives on limiting government?s scope and size in accordance with free-market tenets, and neoconservatives on preserving the principles of sound government embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution...

Health Care and Freedom -- By: Ramesh Ponnuru

Posted on September 03, 2009
Michael Cannon, a health-policy analyst for the libertarian Cato Institute and a co-author of Healthy Competition, recently agreed to answer a few questions of mine for the benefit of NRO readers.NRO: Is it fair to say that the Democratic legislation on health care amounts to a government takeover of the system? That it amounts to socialized medicine?CANNON: That?s not only fair to say -- it?s imperative to say...

A Cosby cause, &c. -- By: Jay Nordlinger

Posted on September 03, 2009
Here?s a pet theme of mine (I know, I have so many pet themes, I could fill a kennel, or zoo, or something): You should not have to sacrifice your children to some kind of educational-political ideology. You should not have to send your children to public schools, if those schools are failing -- or even if they?re not -- in order to prove your fealty to public education...

August Diary -- By: John Derbyshire

Posted on September 03, 2009
Uruguay I blogged somewhere or other about small, quiet countries you never hear about, where nothing much happens and the citizenry chug along in cheerful prosperity, enjoying as much happiness as the human condition will allow, minding their nation?s own business, and grateful for its obscurity...

The Second World War - 70 Years Later -- By: Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on September 03, 2009
Seventy years ago this week, on Sept. 1, 1939, the Second World War broke out with the German invasion of Poland. Thousands of books have been written about the war. And by now revisionist historians of revisionist historians engage in an endless cycle of disagreement over why the war started, how it ended, and what it all meant...

What's Israel Got to Do with It? -- By: Clifford D. May

Posted on September 03, 2009
Bill Gates famously called George Gilder ?very stimulating even when I disagree with him, and most of the time I agree with him.? The issues on which Gilder has staked out stimulating positions over more than 30 years as a writer and public intellectual are wide-ranging...

Thesis Statement -- By: The Editors

Posted on September 03, 2009
The revelation, if such it can be called, that the Republican candidate for Virginia wrote a socially conservative master?s thesis in 1989 brings up two questions. The less important is what it tells us about that candidate, Robert McDonnell. The thesis, in one much-cited passage, criticizes Eisenstadt v...

From Preparedness to Appeasement -- By: Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on September 02, 2009
By 1930 Verdun had been transmogrified almost into a dirty word in French schools. Throughout the late 1920s, the First World War was increasingly reinterpreted in the West as a futile bloodletting. International ?Merchants of Death? and greedy capitalists, not the Kaiser?s aggressive Prussian militarism, were now seen as the true causes of that recent horrific war...

Checkpoint to Nowhere -- By: Travis Kavulla

Posted on September 02, 2009
Over a century ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner laid out the conditions of his famous Frontier Thesis. The land in the American West could be considered ?settled,? and therefore no longer ?the frontier,? Professor Turner postulated, when it had at least two people per square mile...

The Customer Comes Where? -- By: Daniel Freedman

Posted on September 02, 2009
JERRY: Well, [he] said he was waiting about two hours. Seemed a little put out.KRAMER: Oh, was he? Was he? I guess the cable man doesn?t like to be kept waiting.In the space of seven days I received approximately 21 phone calls that changed the way I view the world...

Judging By Theses, Not Deeds -- By: Jim Geraghty

Posted on September 02, 2009
ALEXANDRIA, Va. Back in 2006, during the height of that year?s election campaign, a Virginia Republican observed that he found the Washington Post?s coverage of local politics much more infuriating than its coverage of national politics. He suspected that the average reporter or editor on the Post?s political beat -- either living in the northern Virginia suburbs, or having many friends who did -- could live with the idea of the country being represented by George W...

Global Warming and the Sun -- By: Jonah Goldberg

Posted on September 02, 2009
On the last day of August, scientists spotted a teeny-weeny sunspot, breaking a 51-day streak of blemish-free days for the sun. If it had gone just a bit longer, it would have broken a 96-year record of 53 days without any of the magnetic disruptions that cause solar flares...

A dating game, &c. -- By: Jay Nordlinger

Posted on September 02, 2009
The Associated Press tells us that, ?for the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, Egyptian fruit sellers have named their best dates of the year after President Barack Obama in a sweet tribute to the American leader for his outreach to the Muslim world.? The article further explains that, ?in Egypt, shops have created a new tradition of naming their best and worst dates to catch attention and boost sales -- giving a little reflection of the political mood...

Does Obama Take Health Costs Seriously? -- By: James K. Glassman

Posted on September 01, 2009
Revelations of an $80 billion bargain between the White House and PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) are upsetting many Democrats. ?We were never part of that deal,? said Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, one of three panels that wrote the House bill...

Yes, Harsh Interrogations Work -- By: Rich Lowry

Posted on September 01, 2009
EDITOR?S NOTE: This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact: kfsreprint@hearstsc.com, or phone 800-708-7311, ext. 246.If Dick Cheney had a fantasy scenario for how the Bush administration interrogation program worked, it might go like this: A top-level al-Qaeda operative is captured, but resists traditional interrogation...

The Bill for Truth -- By: Interview

Posted on September 01, 2009
You may recognize William Donohue as the one-man Catholic anti-defamation league, in a state of perpetual outrage. He is notorious for his sound bites and press releases, fired off in response to any insult to the Catholic Church. But in a new book, Secular Sabotage: How Liberals Are Destroying Religion and Culture in America, the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights gets in more than a few sound bites...

Suicide of the West? -- By: Thomas Sowell

Posted on September 01, 2009
Britain?s release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi -- the Libyan terrorist whose bomb blew up a plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people -- is galling enough in itself. But it is even more profoundly troubling as a sign of a larger mood that has been growing in Western democracies in our time...

'God's Partners' -- By: Mona Charen

Posted on September 01, 2009
Well, thank Heaven George W. Bush is no longer president! Gosh, all of that mixing of religion and politics darn near subverted our Constitution -- which, as all good liberals know enshrines the ?wall of separation? between church and state.What? That phrase doesn?t appear in the Constitution? No matter...

Hey Conservatives, We're Recovering -- By: Larry Kudlow

Posted on September 01, 2009
Believe it or not, sometimes good news on the economy can be bad news for stocks.It?s a distant point, but one worth considering in view of conservative pessimism over Obama?s plans to spend, tax, borrow, and control the economy. I share these worries...

De Facto Parents -- By: William C. Duncan

Posted on August 31, 2009
In his 1988 book Silent Revolution, Herbert Jacob described how one of the most significant changes to family law in the 20th century, no-fault divorce, began in California and spread through the states with very little public debate or controversy. This remarkable transformation was presented, and largely accepted, as routine policymaking in the domain of legal experts...

Marriage: What Matters -- By: Robert W. Patterson

Posted on August 31, 2009
Fifteen years ago, in his first book, Dead Right, David Frum identified several challenges facing Republicans. He cited the ?fundamental contradiction? of William Weld, at the time governor of Massachusetts, who thought he could be a fiscal conservative and a social liberal...

A Path to Fiscal Sanity -- By: Jagadeesh Gokhale

Posted on August 31, 2009
It has been known since the early 1980s that the U.S. federal budget embodies a large structural imbalance -- one that persists through the economy?s ups and downs. In 1980, Ted Kennedy referred to this during his campaign for the presidency; Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama commented on it during theirs...

Obama's Unholy Attack -- By: Kathryn Jean Lopez

Posted on August 31, 2009
EDITOR?S NOTE: This column is available exclusively through United Media. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact Carmen Puello at cpuello@unitedmedia.com. The mix of politics and religion can be an intoxicating cocktail...

Airbrushing out Mary Jo Kopechne -- By: Mark Steyn

Posted on August 29, 2009
We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation -- or, at any rate, its ?mainstream? media culture -- declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In its coverage of Sen...

Eric Holder's Hidden Agenda -- By: Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted on August 28, 2009
?This is an administration that is determined to conduct itself by the rule of law. And to the extent that we receive lawful requests from an appropriately created court, we would obviously respond to it.? It was springtime in Berlin and Eric Holder, a well-known ?rule of law? devotee, was speaking to the German press...

Britain's Disgrace -- By: The Editors

Posted on August 28, 2009
The release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi is worse than a crime, it is a mistake, from any and every point of view. The terrorist who brought down Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland is now back in his native Libya, happily ensconced with his admiring family in a most luxurious villa and treated as a national hero...

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