The Washington Times

I don’t have a new theory to add to the mix in the Plame Game, but the speculation on the Web has been immensely entertaining and interesting. The exchange between Cliff May on National Review’s Corner and David Corn of the Nation and davidcorn.com has been rich. My old friend John Podhoretz’s interventions, also at the Corner, de-centering the action from the Bush White House to the media players, have been similarly fascinating.

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The Washington Times

By the time of the stock market close in New York on July 7, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up a little, notwithstanding the bombs in London. The next day, the Dow closed at 10,449, up 144 points. The FTSE 100, the main London index, dropped 1.4 percent the day of the attack but the next day more than recovered the loss, closing at 5232, or about five points off the 52-week high.

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The Washington Times

In a speech Thursday in anticipation of this week’s G8 summit in Scotland, President Bush laid out an agenda for greater U.S. engagement in what remains the single greatest challenge to a sense of common humanity: stopping the killing, stopping the dying, and starting in earnest a process that will bring the benefits of the modernized, developed world to the people of Africa.

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The Washington Times

There’s an important election next Sunday, one that may make a significant difference not only to the prospects for consolidating a democratic transition, but also to regional peace, security and stability, and to the question of whether “Europe whole and free” still has meaning after the failure of the EU Constitutional Treaty in France and the Netherlands. It’s in Albania. That’s right, Albania.

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The Washington Times

Anyone who has spent much time around the United Nations, as I have over the past six months in conjunction with the Gingrich-Mitchell task force on U.N. reform and under the auspices of the U.S. Institute of Peace, has probably come to realize that vantage point is everything when assessing this strange and ungainly animal on Turtle Bay.

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The Washington Times

It is beginning to dawn on Democrats that the compromise in the Senate that averted the “nuclear option” over judges was not the victory they thought it was. Republicans, meanwhile, are beginning to come to terms with what it means to get not half a loaf, but I’d say three-quarters to seven-eighths, rather than the whole.

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The Washington Times

The European Constitutional Treaty, which French voters recently rejected solidly and Dutch voters overwhelmingly, is a truly unlovely document. But the project underlying it is not. And while the treaty is, in effect, a dead letter now, reports of the demise of European integration are greatly exaggerated.

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The Washington Times

The Republican Party is in political trouble as a result of the compromise on judicial nominees, but the situation is hardly beyond recovery: Democrats, too, are in some peril.

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The Washington Times

If the White House has seemed a bit adrift on domestic matters, my guess is that’s because they know something you don’t know: The entire domestic debate is about to be taken up by a battle royale over two Supreme Court nominations. Social Security may not be going anywhere, but it makes little sense to try to introduce another major initiative when in a few weeks’ time we are likely to have the mother of all partisan confrontations.

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The Washington Times

The latest compromise proposal on the question of confirming judges goes like this: A self-selecting group of six senators each from the Republican Party and the Democratic Party agree that: 1) The filibuster rule will not change; and 2) the filibuster will not be used to prevent a floor vote in which there is a Senate majority in favor of the nominee except in the most extraordinary circumstances.

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