Entries for May 2006

Here is my Creators Syndicate column on how to deal with Iran. And here is the latest offering on Iran from the invaluable Michael Ledeen, on National Review Online, with a link to Der Spiegel's interview of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Senate passed an immigration bill last week with border security, guest worker, and legalization provisions. Now the issue presumably goes to conference committee. But the initial word is that House Republicans, who passed a border security measure last December, are not inclined to go along.

Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas, who served as a top aide to Mack McLarty when McLarty was special envoy to the Americas during the Clinton administration, proposes in the Miami Herald that George W. Bush appoint his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, to a position similar to McLarty's—presumably after Jeb leaves office in Florida in January 2007.

Here's a fascinating interview by Matthew D'Ancona, former deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph and now editor of the Spectator, with Philip Bobbitt, author of the provocative and ambitious The Shield of Achilles. The interview was conducted at the top-notch British think tank Policy Exchange. Bobbitt believes that we are evolving from the nation-state to what he calls the market state, and he argues that the terrorism we are going to face may be more sophisticated and dangerous than anything al Qaeda and its sympathizers have done. Both Bobbitt and D'Ancona have first-rate minds, and this is a thought-provoking interchange. I can't do it justice here: Read the whole thing.

The Washington Post had a thoughtful editorial yesterday entitled "Official Secrets" and subtitled "Be careful what you read." The nub of the Post's argument is in this paragraph.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi deserves praise for depoliticizing the House ethics process. Yesterday Pelosi called for an ethics committee investigation of her Democratic colleague Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana, who has been accused of taking bribes.

If you want to understand the disastrous decline of the New York Times in recent years, a good place to start is this National Review Online "Media Blog" post on a commencement speech given by Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. Stephen Spruiell of "Media Blog" links to the text of Sulzberger's speech, so you can read the whole thing if you want. What struck me about the quoted excerpts was their stupidity. This does not seem to be a very smart man. Example: