But now newer and much broader evidence has emerged that looks like it will break that scandal wide open. Pundits have already named it "Climategate."

A hacker-or...]]> Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Tuesday is election day, a nice, sleepy little off-year election, with just a few state governor's races and a special election to fill a House seat. It would be nothing special and little noted by anyone outside those states or districts--in any other year.

Instead, tomorrow is the first electoral measure of the popular reaction to the policies of the Obama administration--and, perhaps more important, the first electoral measure of the strength of the "tea party" rebellion against big government.

Surprisingly, the real fireworks are not in the Virginia or New Jersey races, but in the smallest, most obscure contest: NY-23, New York's upstate 23rd congressional district. It...]]> Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Remember the whole controversy over "death panels"-the idea, as President Obama dismissively put it, that greater government control over medicine would cause bureaucrats to "pull the plug on grandma"?

Well, for weeks now Britain's newspapers have been filled with articles about the National Health Service pulling the plug on grandma.

The latest is the story of a woman who had to fight her doctors for weeks after they withdrew care from her 80-year-old mother. According to the London Times:

Hazel Fenton, from East Sussex, is alive nine months after...]]> Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 So can we all stop taking the Nobel Peace Prize seriously now?

The news announcement came over my cell phone this morning-I thought it was a joke at first, a headline from The Onion instead of the New York Times-that the recipient of this year's Nobel Peace Prize is Barack Obama.

For what? What has Obama ever accomplished for the cause of world peace?

The Nobel Committee says that prize is "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." Which Obama has accomplished by-what exactly? Giving a speech at the UN?

Are they giving Obama the...]]> Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 On Tuesday, the Senate Finance Committee voted-twice-to reject the "public option," a government-run health-insurance plan that would "compete" with private insurance.

This vote may have some symbolic significance as a measure of the public's rejection of government-run health care. But in practical terms, it doesn't much matter. The creation of public health insurance was never the real heart of Obamacare. The real essence of Obama's agenda is the destruction of private health insurance.

Obama has launched a war on private health insurance, and the Baucus bill...]]> Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Well, it's official. The Obama phenomenon is over. Permanently.

It's not just that Obama's favorite weapon, the Big Speech, no longer moves public opinion. (Last Wednesday's health-care speech produced a slight "bounce" in public support for the health-care bill, but it disappeared in less than a week.)

What really ends the era of Obama is this: a major part of Obama's appeal was his symbolism as the first black president, which was supposed to give Americans an opportunity to put the whole ugly...]]> Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 We had our warning during the campaign, we really did.

Remember Barack Obama's famous speech on race, back in March of 2008? Obama had spent 20 years listening to the sermons of Jeremiah Wright, full of venomous anti-Americanism and attacks on "white America." Yet when the reverend's rants were revealed to the public, Obama tried to convince us that he just happened to be missing from the pews on any well-documented Sunday, and that the Jeremiah Wright we saw and heard was not the Jeremiah Wright he knew.

It was a giant, implausible lie. Yet the speech was smoothly delivered and well-turned, perfectly balanced to seem to empathize both with the grievances of blacks and with...]]> Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The goal of the Democrats' plan for health-care reform is coming more and more out into the open: they want to eliminate health insurance.

This has turned out to be the most passionate source of public opposition to the Obama health-care bill. People are terrified that they will be deprived of any choice or any control over their own health care if their only option is to depend on the government to pay their medical bills.

Astoundingly, the Democrats' answer to this has not been to reassure people that they will be allowed to keep their existing coverage—since this lie has proven too transparent to maintain—but instead to vilify the health-insurance companies....]]> Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The trademark political tactic of the Obama administration is speed: ramming legislation through Congress as fast as possible—too fast for anyone to subject the bills to scrutiny, search for objectionable provisions, or develop effective counter-arguments in a public debate. They push the bills through so fast that even President Obama and his allies in Congress don't have time to read them and don't know what's in them.

That's why we should be relieved that Obama's health-care bill did not get pushed through before the August congressional...]]> Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 As Judge Sotomayor is scheduled to begin her confirmation hearings for a spot on the Supreme Court, firefighter Frank Ricci-the lead plaintiff she ruled against in a reverse discrimination case-is also scheduled to testify.

So naturally, Ricci has become the target of a leftist smear campaign, which has already produced at least one result: a Ricci hit piece in Slate.

This kind of argument by character assassination is part of contemporary politics, and particularly the politics of the left-just ask Joe the Plumber. But on the eve of...]]> Wed, 13 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The breadth of President Obama's assault on capitalism is breathtaking: from seeking to regulate fine details like credit card fees, to exerting control over major banks, restructuring the auto industry from the Oval Office, seeking to nationalize the entire health care industry, and proposing a national cap on fossil fuel consumption and a thinly disguised system of energy rationing.

But that kind of sweeping control over the economy is not compatible with a system of government designed to protect individual liberty. America's traditional legal system is all about laws and rights and contracts-a fine web of...]]> Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 A few days ago, I happened to meet a doctor in our area who has an unusual background. He emigrated to America from Russia, and I heard from one of the nurses in his practice that he had to go back through medical school and earn a new degree in order to get his medical license in the United States. This, I thought, is a man who has uprooted his life to an extraordinary degree, all so that he can live and work in America. So when I had the opportunity to talk to him, I asked him why he did it.

He is a very quiet-spoken and reserved man, so much so that I felt sheepish asking him a personal question, and I did not expect much in return. Instead, I got an answer more thorough and...]]> Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 As for the right, I detect in their recent interest in women's rights a quest for a kind of payback against the left. Having been vilified for decades as a bunch of a male chauvinist pigs who are opposed to the rights of women (which they have been, when it comes to abortion and some forms of contraception), the right has been eager to proclaim, in the context of the battle against Islam, that they are more in favor of women's rights than the feminists.

Yet the political right does deserve credit for taking up this cause, because they are onto something important when they regard the treatment of women as especially emblematic of the evil of radical Islam. It is an issue that is...]]> Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 This is also an assault on the entire structure of representative government. Controls on emissions of carbon dioxide will reach into every nook and cranny of the economy, creating a fine network of restrictions on economic activity that will make the recent regime of bailouts, salary caps, and business seizures look like laissez-faire by comparison. But it will all be done--in effect, it has just been done--by the decree of executive agency bureaucrats, without an opportunity for public debate or a legislative vote. Sure, Congress will be invited to "participate" in drafting carbon dioxide controls, but it will do so under the threat that the EPA can simply create those controls on its...]]> Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 For example, he would boast of "bold and persistent experimentation" in a way that would make the general public think of him as a vigorous, enterprising man with a "can-do" spirit. But what that would actually mean is an administration that lurched in panic from one statist scheme to another, creating so much fear and uncertainty in the markets that capital went on strike and withdrew its productive power from the economy.

That is precisely the kind of pattern we saw in Obama's address to Congress last night. There was a lot of soaring, all-we-have-to-fear-is-fear-itself kind of...]]> Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 I had expected Obama to crib from Lincoln or Roosevelt. Instead he cribbed from Dorothy Fields: "Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America." Or take this deathless line: "Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter." Is there any phrase more painfully overused in Washington than "our children's children"?

There is a great irony in the respective reputations of Bush and Obama when it comes to giving speeches. Bush is viewed as an...]]> Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 But the obvious question is: why are private investors scarce? Maybe it has something to do with the terms of the "stimulus" aimed at them. The Times story contains only one hint at this:

Mr. Obama's economic team is planning a broad overhaul of the program to impose more accountability and more restrictions on executives at companies that receive government money.

"More accountability" means more government management of the banks; more restrictions means more measures designed to reduce the profitability of the banking industry and drive out the best talent.

For an example of what all of this "accountability" means, consider the...]]> Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 The danger of Barack Obama's presidency is not that he will act openly on the old dogmas of the left. Indeed, during his transition he has largely attempted to meld into the Washington woodwork by hiring only the most conventional Beltway insiders. Instead, the danger is that he has been so steeped in leftist dogma for his entire life that he will accept the left's attitudes implicitly and automatically, without even realizing it.

Consider just the first paragraph of Thursday's speech.

Throughout America's history, there have been some years that simply rolled into...]]> Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0600 Can anyone really be saying this in the 21st century? If so, it is because they have failed 20th-Century History 101. For those in need of a quick refresher, the satirical website The People's Cube has posted a helpful overview of the product line once offered by the East Bloc's centrally planned auto industry. My favorite line is an old joke about the Yugo: "Every car came with a rear defroster to keep your hands warm as you pushed it."

But central planning has not just been discredited by a mass of empirical evidence. It has been thoroughly refuted in theory, too. Legions of pro-free-market economists,...]]> Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0600 By the end of the 20th century, the failure of all of these policies had caused the Old Left to splinter into two groups. The New Left hippies rejected industrial socialism in favor of anti-industrial socialism, adopting environmentalism and holding up a neo-primitive lifestyle as the ideal, while the New Democrat centrists sought a "Third Way" compromise between capitalism and socialism.

But now the discredited Old Left seems to be making a roaring comeback. We can see the signs all around us.

Consider Barack Obama's plan for up to $700 billion...]]> Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0600 Obama is backing a plan to pump $50 billion into the big American automakers, while also establishing "a czar or board to oversee the companies"--call it Gosplan--which will supervise "a restructuring of the auto industry." That's exactly what Detroit needs to recover: the benefit of government central planning.

In essence, this is a plan for nationalization of the American auto industry under a new government-appointed board of directors who will supposedly tell the Big Three how to make a profit again.

But of course Detroit will never recover under this plan, because its whole purpose is to avoid the one step actually necessary to make the automakers profitable: breaking...]]> Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0600 Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 The Senate is supposed to serve, in James Madison's analogy, as the "cooling saucer" for the hot tea served up by the House--but in this case, it is the House that has remained cool and refused to panic. That's because the hysterical demand for a bailout didn't come up from the people; it came down from the elites in Washington and Manhattan. The House is reflecting the sensible skepticism coming up from the folks on Main Street who don't want to pay the bills for bailing out Hank Paulson's former colleagues on Wall Street.

Some cold, realistic scrutiny of the bailout is desperately needed because this plan is not just an attack on the free market. It is an attack on...]]> Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500 This fact does reveal a profoundly faith-driven outlook, because it illuminates Palin's implicit attitude toward reason and the intellect. The joy of having a child is watching it grow and develop on its way to becoming an independent adult capable of enjoying a full human life. This is why parents rejoice in every new discovery the child makes along the way--his first steps, his first words, the first time he figures out how to open up and rifle through your filing cabinets while you're trying to work (but I digress). The tragedy of giving birth to a mentally disabled child is that he will never complete this journey. He will never become an independent adult or develop a full...]]> Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500 So if Sarah Palin is potentially the future of the Republican Party, it is vitally important to ask: who is Sarah Palin? What does she stand for? In what direction will she take her party?

This is the real reason why we should be concerned about Sarah Palin's lack of Washington experience. The importance of experience is not just about whether the candidate is prepared to exercise the duties of his office; it is about whether we are prepared to elect him to that office. A candidate with experience on the national stage has sponsored legislation, made decisions, talked extensively with the national press, and done all of the other things that make his character and ideas a "known...]]> Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Here's an example that is small but revealing. Obama led with the best sales pitch he has to offer: that he is not George Bush. But of course, Obama is running against John McCain, not Bush. So he attempted to justify the substitution by claiming that "John McCain has voted with George Bush ninety percent of the time." This statistic has been used throughout the Democratic convention, but it makes no sense. Bush is not a member of Congress and casts no votes there--so how can you compare his voting record to that of McCain?

But don't examine this folly; ask only what it accomplishes. It allows Obama to run against an unpopular president who will not defend himself because he is not...]]> Sat, 23 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500 The more subtle goad has been observing the reaction of many Western commentators to Russia's invasion of Georgia. What has struck me is the ease and complacency with which many pundits, particularly those on the center-left, have declared that there is not much the US can do to stop Russia or support Georgia--and then just left it at that. What this reaction really indicates is that these pundits don't really regard the issue as important and can't be bothered to think too hard about the things that we actually can do for Georgia.

If an issue really has important consequences, you don't just shrug your shoulders and say, as Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly said to the leaders of...]]> Sun, 20 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500 The speech has two purposes. One is to artfully evade Obama's massive misjudgment of the "surge," which he unequivocally opposed. Thus, while he half-acknowledges the enormous turnaround in Iraq, here is how he describes its cause:

As I have said many times, our troops have performed brilliantly in lowering the level of violence. General Petraeus has used new tactics to protect the Iraqi population. We have talked directly to Sunni tribes that used to be hostile to America, and supported their fight against al Qaeda. Shiite militias have generally respected a cease-fire. Those are the facts, and all Americans welcome them.

Here's a tip. When Obama...]]> Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500