All That Is Necessary

Category: Uncategorized

  • AOL to Acquire Maplewood. Sort Of.

    (Welcome, New York Times readers.) Comes today the news that AOL is acquiring Patch.com, the owner of Maplewood Patch, a stalwart member of the Maplewood BlogolopolisTM. (I’ll have you know I taught myself how to hand-code that superscript in HTML.)  Maplewood Patch, by way of disclosure, has seen fit to publish some articles I have […]

  • A Religion of Peace? Only With Careful Editing

    I’m a fan of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies — an organization I was predisposed to love as soon as I heard their name. Their weekly FDD Update newsletter provides an extremely comprehensive review of  each week’s developments in the defining struggle of our age — the war against Islamic fascism. There’s a large […]

  • Wanna Buy GM Stock? Better Hurry, the Price is Rising!

    As you may have heard, General Motors, once the world’s largest company by market capitalization,  is bankrupt. You and I, along with 300 million of our closest friends, are going to end up owning about 70% of a much-smaller General Motors.  Congratulations. In this morning’s Washington Post, George Will has a good column worrying about […]

  • No, “Work-at-Home” Pimps, I Won’t Write Blog Posts for $5

    This post is dedicated to my friend (and competitor, I suppose, but whatever) Lori Widmer at Words on the Page, who is the force of nature behind Writers Worth Day.  The video features science fiction novelist and screenwriter Harlan Ellison ranting about being asked to contribute his work for free. (Warning: includes undeleted expletives.) For […]

  • One of These Things Is Not Like the Others

    Think of this chart (from Donald Marron, via Greg Mankiw) the next time you hear someone say that we are in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.  Based on GDP, it appears we’re in the worst downturn since 1958 — and since I was born that year, I reject the idea that it […]

  • American Ideals in Bush’s Third Term

    President Obama sometimes sounds a lot like President Bush — and I mean that in the nicest possible way. Barack Hussein Obama, Cairo University, June 4, 2009: But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things:  the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are […]

  • Going Back to Old Nassau

    Today I had the high privilege and distinct honor of fighting the wind with the parade banner for the Princeton Class of 1980, leading a hardy band of quintagenerians in an off-year reunion march at the “Best Damn Place of All,” in the words of the song. When asked which side of the banner I […]

  • For Obama, Empathy Trumps the Rule of Law

    Sonia Sotomayor likely will become a reliably liberal vote on the Supreme Court, replacing the reliably liberal David Souter.  Despite my distaste for identity politics and legislation from the bench, I don’t see this as a disaster — nor do many of the conservative columnists I’ve read. After describing one of Sotomayor’s decisions, James Taranto […]

  • Sotomayor: Identity Politics and Legislation from the Bench

    I’m generally opposed to the idea of judges legislating from the bench — but I’m not an absolutist about it.  Brown v. Board of Education could be described as legislating from the bench, but I think the ruling was necessary and appropriate, and in fact a proud moment in American history.  Over the following decades, […]

  • Obama’s National Security Policy Looks Like Bush’s Third Term. Thank Goodness.

    Krauthammer today: The genius of democracy is that the rotation of power forces the opposition to come to its senses when it takes over. When the new guys, brought to power by popular will, then adopt the policies of the old guys, a national consensus is forged and a new legitimacy established. Exactly right.  I […]