This week’s visit to our comrades at Pravda gives us this discussion of today’s “Live 8” concerts, including, of course, one in Moscow, which will feature a Russian cosmonaut now cloistered in the international space station. Other concerts (organized by professional do-gooder Bob Geldoff) will occur at Philadelphia, Tokyo, Paris, Johannesburg, Berlin, London and Edinburgh, and be accessible via broadcast to most of the world’s population, in an effort to lobby G-8 countries meeting later this month in Scotland to put alleviating African poverty high on their agenda. Hey, I like alleviating African poverty as much as the next guy:...

Yours truly had suggested that the 7 Democratic senators’ sell-out deal (that risked forcing the Republicans into the very unpopular “nuclear option”) would, very quickly, backfire. Today, we get to see our first opportunity for same, when, in a historic announcement, America’s first female Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, 75, announced her impending retirement from the nation’s highest court. This is most interesting, in that it quickly puts the issue of who will replace Chief Justice William Rehnquist on the back-burner, at least for the time being, unless he uses the Court’s summer break to announce his own retirement....

The President chose North Carolina’s Fort Bragg for his speech tonight, his sixth prime-team speech delivered from outside Washington, this one to extol the virtues of “staying the course” in Iraq. I certainly heard portions of it on the radio, and it took a number of minutes before it dawned on me that it was a live speech, and not a re-play of similar speeches he gave in 2002 and 2003 linking Iraq to the events of September 11th, extolling the “hard work” which would, inevitably be done by others while he derived political benefit from it. But I was...

Well, well. Amidst various irreconcileable decisions upholding the Ten Commandments at a state capitol but not in a courthouse, the Supreme Court declined to accept an appeal from two reporters challenging an order that they disclose the source (most likely Scooter Libby of Dick Cheney’s office, though this is merely “the smart money”) who disclosed to them (and Robert Novak, who went public with it) that Valerie Plame was a covert CIA operative. Frankly, I have never been all that big for reporters’ “constitutional right to protect their sources;” I tend to think it is abused far more than it...

Christopher Hitchens, who was once a great writer and champion of things decent, continues his descent to an alcoholism-addled hell with this piece in Slate involving an Iraqi t.v. program in which captured insurgents confess and allocute as to their various crimes against the Iraqi people. I concur with him that the program sounds fascinating, albeit horrific, in its juxtaposition of horrifying beheadings and other heinous acts while the subject confesses to training, rehearsing and motivating, to remove any mystique surrounding the insurgency, which consists of an awful lot of non-Iraqis. The ever-journalistic Hitchens notes that such practices couldn’t (legally)...

This week’s visit to our comrades at People’s Daily gives us this account of PRC Premier Wen Jibao’s assurances to the world that Chinese expansion of its economy has absolutely nothing to present to the world’s possible anxieties in terms of fear of world domination, or anything like that. Part of the reason I try to link to People’s Daily each week is because we live in a peculiar world where, quite frankly, the authoritarian (and PD tells us the PRC is authoritarian) regime publishes a house organ that is more straightforward than the so-called free American press. And so,...

Our visit to our comrades at Pravda gives us this alternative version of the scheduled White House meetings with Uzbek opposition leaders. The article’s suggestion is that the Uzbek opposition leaders are closely tied to islamist extremists, such as Al Qaeda. Certainly, our “war on terror” and our more recent “mass homicide in service of freedom and democracy” have been cause for us to have some strange bedfellows, such as, among others, the hard-line government in former Soviet Central Asian rebublics, such as Uzbekistan. Given our ongoing alliances with problematic regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and similar autocracies in...

Honestly, I have no idea what being a liberal means anymore. Of course, I never had a clue where Justice Anthony Kennedy stood on anything, other than, I suppose, on the wrong side of just about anything important, from Bush v. Gore, to Padilla v. Rumsfeld, and now finally, to the current outrage, ” Kelo v. City of New London, in which a 5-4 Supreme Court majority basically re-defined “public purpose” in matters of condemnation to be “anything that someone powerful enough to get state or municipal officials to do for private benefit that might increase the tax base”. Its...

Forty-one years, if necessary, and in the case of ex-Ku Klux Klan member Edgar Ray Killen, forty-one years to the day was what it took before a Mississippi jury decided to find him guilty of three counts of manslaughter for the deaths of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, 20, Michael Schwerner, 24, and James Earl Chaney, 21, who disappeared on this day, in 1964. There was some disappointment that the jury was unable to reach a verdict finding Killen guilty of murder, and while jurors questioned refused to characterize the verdict as a compromise, let’s get real: I heard reports...

Such is an implicit question asked in this candid essay constituting our visit to Beijing’s People’s Daily; the $12 trillion question is whether Americans are by and large concluding, given the rise of China and India and their ability to pick off some of our lower-skilled industrial jobs (and in the case of India, some white collar jobs too) that free trade is not nearly as good a thing for America as once thought. Certainly, this is a question perennially asked by one of the Democratic Party’s leading (and declining) sub-constituencies, industrial trade unions. They insist that all free trade...