Voter ID and Voter Ego

Last week, I got my Virginia voter registration card in the mail. My wife’s card also arrived on the same day. So did the card above, which is neither mine nor my wife’s. The address is correct, but the name (blurred intentionally in the photo) belongs to a previous owner of my house. A previous … Read more

Sandlot foreign policy

Strange business is the saga with the Obama administration and that downed drone aircraft recovered by Iran in Iranian territory. It’s bad enough that Iranian officials are using the whole thing as a publicity stunt, but now the Obama Administration is asking Iran to return the drone: U.S. President Barack Obama, in a session with … Read more

The great humanitarian scandal

The current financial crisis elicits explanations, excuses, and blame from the full breadth of the political spectrum. There are no shortages of would-be saviors to our pallid pocketbooks, and none loom as large as government–sponsored humanitarianism. It’s a view in which the gap between the rich and poor, widened by the abuse of power, must … Read more

Fast food presidents: Obama is a Five Guys guy

President Obama’s visit today to Five Guys in D.C. (a favorite of my own, when I’m in an artery-clogging kind of mood) likely made some burger-flippers happy and some Secret Service officers nervous: But I couldn’t help remembering this all-too-realistic portrayal of another fast-food president: White House food must be really bad…

What’s next, Putin on Facebook?

Looks like President Obama should give some serious consideration to missile defense, because the cold war isn’t over — the Russians have now discovered the internet: One of the Kremlin’s pet new media projects has been a site called liberty.ru. It’s been set up under the auspices of the Fund for Effective Politics, a think-tank … Read more

Introducing the 2008 Chevy Corvair

Parade of the also-rans: Ralph Nader Just when I thought the race was down to two candidates, I realized that I had left out the perennial Ralph Nader.  That’s right, get ready for lots of ballot counting, because Nader has swung into the race faster than an unsafe car to once again capture the heart … Read more

Better off in 2008

Commenting today on John McCain’s “We’re worse off than we were four years ago” ad, George Will observes that the question of being better off should be quantified in terms of more than one’s pocket book: Unfortunately, the phrase “better off” is generally understood as a reference to your salary, your bank balance, your IRA … Read more

In search of religion without a license

Karl Marx thought of religion as the opiate of the masses, but it is his offspring who have become intoxicated on the suppression of religion. Take Belarus, for example.  The former Soviet “Republic” seems anything less than a free society these days.  Its president, Alexander Lukashenko, is known in some circles as Europe’s last great … Read more