Sound like a new sitcom? The Brokeback Bunch? No, it’s the reality for “an estimated 1.7 million to 3.4 million American women who once were or are now married to men who have sex with men,” according to a New York Times article, entombed behind the hated subscription wall.
Noli Irritare Leones, however, has an excerpt, [...]

“Only Nixon can go to China,” as the old Vulcan proverb goes. Nixon’s ruthless soulmate Henry Kissinger, that old Vulcan, somehow manages to get through this WaPo op-ed without typing “only Hamas can make peace with Israel.” But the phrase hovers over all.

The advent of Hamas brings us to a point where the peace process [...]

The storm over the Danish cartoons has been mistakenly described as a debate over the limits of free speech. One of the milder posters carried during a Londonistan anti-cartoon protest read “FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IS WESTERN TERRORISM.” The coverage in the mainstream American press has ranged from the banal to the bizarre, depicting broad-minded Danes [...]

The European commitment to freedom of speech, even offensive speech, is rather seriously undercut by this. The way to handle a Holocaust-denier is to refute his presentation thoroughly, then if he persists unchanged, write him off as a crank and ignore him. You don’t throw him in jail.
Needless to say, this has been noted in [...]

A mini-blogburst sparked by Dr. Demarche illuminates the term “world community.” He asks whether the term has any real meaning and what is the role of the United Nations and the United States in such a place. I’m afraid my modest contribution doesn’t reveal much except the disordered condition of my own thoughts about it. [...]

I live not far from Dover, the little bedroom borough in York County, Pennsylvania, where the “intelligent design” controversy played out. When the ruling came down against the school district, one of the local newspapers sub-headed its reaction story “Scientists, teachers pleased; conservatives furious.”
That’s how far “conservative” has fallen. Somehow, the name of the philosophy [...]

Sounding more presidential than many of his peers. And than he has at times in the past.

He’s come up in a few posts and comments here lately. I differ with some of my Southern friends in that I see Abraham Lincoln as a literary genius, one of the great American prose stylists and certainly the greatest ever to occupy the Presidency.
He could have written a Greek tragedy. Instead, he starred [...]

It’s flattering to find yourself thinking along the same lines as Greg at Belgravia Dispatch, one of the most thoughtful and informed bloggers out there.

I recently asked a very high level former national security player who, given that Bush has seemingly deputized the entire prosecution of the Iraq war to Rumsfeld, could be brought in [...]

The hydra-like insurgency in Iraq has drawn attention to the political conundrum faced by state authorities when facing unconventional opponents. Whether they come in the form of traditional guerillas, transnational terrorist networks and even looser ” leaderless resistance” movements that attract superempowered individuals, State actors often face the damned if you do, damned if you [...]

Andis Kaulins at Lawpundit parses some of the legal wrangling over Supreme Court nominees. The post is keyed to Miers, but most of it is as relevant to Alito as to the previous nominee.
Some of the bases Kaulins touches that are important to me include:

Supreme Court justices primarily are in the business of judging the [...]

We have to do more than turn to our nation’s elite to manage a world in flux.

Which one is a better source to examine to cull classified information? The answer may surprise you.

Those who swear that secrets are the only true intelligence, in contrast to mere “information� found through open means, would do well to consider the indistinct character of the categories of overt and covert in intelligence. Information hidden behind [...]

Peter Beinart, one of my favorite Democrats and a man who writes things that drives some other Democrats absolutely up the wall, has further thoughts on “Tough Liberalism.”

When John Kerry lost in 2004, I started in my despair reading about the late 1940s, the first years of the Cold War. That was the last time [...]

Interesting analysis of the current state of the party here. I’ll let others chew on it: It’s not my party anymore. But I will say it’s often counterintuitive and attempts a revision of a lot of conventional wisdom on all sides of things, which I always enjoy seeing done.

Tommy G. Thompson, former health and human services secretary, explains the role of American generosity as a powerful force in winning the war on terrorism.

But if we have any hope of spreading democracy and ending tyranny in every corner of the globe, it is vital that we use all of the weapons of freedom at [...]

Sasha Abramsky, whose writings appear in Mother Jones, Atlantic Monthly, and the Nation, is among the lifelong “leftwing” activists who have a feet-on-the-ground approach to the current struggle with Islamists. He recently wrote a thoughtful meditation on that situation in The Progressive, and an abridged version of the article is online at Open Democracy.
I [...]

Hurricane survivors begin to pick through the gunk that fills their homes to find what can be saved. For news junkies, we’ll spend the next few months picking through the gunk of hurricane coverage to find journalistic nuggets of September 2005 that got buried by storm stories.
Marc at American Future calls attention to one: The [...]

A father dreams of her daughter’s future.

More scenes like this, please. Oh, I know “white shoes after Labor Day,” and that dress on the poor thing on the far right just screams “Goth-slut-cum-Lawrence-Welk-singer.” But consider the obstacles. This is the “Miss Seamline” beauty pageant, underway today in the Israeli town of Gilo, near Bethlehem, on the West Bank. Both Israeli and [...]