24 Tuesday May 2005
Posted in Washington Times
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.
17 Tuesday May 2005
Posted in Washington Times
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.
10 Tuesday May 2005
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
I have been wracking my brain for a while now for a good reason for Republicans in the Senate not to get rid of the filibuster in the case of judicial nominees. You know, something about the higher need for comity, respect for the traditions of the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” the need for majorities to act with restraint so that minorities do not feel oppressed, etc.
03 Tuesday May 2005
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Guess who’s in the doghouse in Europe? French President Jacques Chirac, that’s who.
19 Tuesday Apr 2005
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
George Weigel is the nation’s most important lay Catholic thinker and writer, and the author of “Witness to Hope,” the massive authorized biography of John Paul II that he is now revising to offer an account of the final years of this historic papacy. Along the way, however, Mr. Weigel has dropped off a slender and eloquent volume on a subject of keen concern to the pope in his last years: the state of Christianity in Europe and, in particular, the place for religion in the emerging European Union.
12 Tuesday Apr 2005
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Democrats want a scalp, and John Bolton’s would do splendidly. Their visceral opposition to his nomination as U.N. ambassador has its origins not in his outspokenness in defense of American prerogatives but in his role in support of George W. Bush in Florida in November and December 2000, where his was the mustache behind the magnifying glass examining the hanging chads. Let’s not forget that there were 43 Democratic votes against his confirmation for his State Department job in 2001. That was a Florida effect. And Democrats in the Senate, though fewer than in 2001, have not become less partisan in the intervening period.
05 Tuesday Apr 2005
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Near the end of “The Tempest,” which is now in production at the Shakespeare Theater in Washington, the aging Prospero, having elaborately arranged a reconciliation between various intriguing camps that will result in the marriage of his daughter to the rival king of Naples and the restoration of himself to his dukedom, says he “will retire me to my Milan, where every third thought shall be my grave.” Philip Goodwin, the actor playing Prospero in a generally splendid performance, gives the line its most common interpretive reading: He slows a bit after the comma, and pronounces “every third thought shall be my grave” with a tone of solemnity bordering on the funereal.
29 Tuesday Mar 2005
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Our subject today will be political discourse, and our purpose will be hygiene. We shall attempt to police the charge of hypocrisy as it occurs on the Op-Ed pages of major newspapers and opinion journals. We will offer this attempt in memory of Terry Schiavo. We will expect it to be just about as effective as the effort to keep her alive.
22 Tuesday Mar 2005
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
President Bush famously rewards loyalty and competent service. There is one more promotion logical for him to make in his second term: engineering the 2008 GOP presidential nomination for Dick Cheney.
15 Tuesday Mar 2005
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
For years, painstaking diplomacy was inching its way toward creation of an international criminal court for dealing with such vexing matters as war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. But by 1998, a slew of forward-leaning non-governmental organizations, working through a coalition of “like-minded nations” principally in Europe and Canada, got hold of the process and produced what sits in The Hague today as the International Criminal Court – without the United States as a party to the treaty that created it.
Tod Lindberg 