Hugh Hewitt

The October Horse

When the Republican National Committee adopted a new primary calendar in January, few people fully thought through the impact. Successfully and necessarily fighting the last war, Chairman Reince Priebus led the RNC to adopt reforms to end the mindless chewing-up of would-be nominees by more than a…

Seventy years ago today, Winston Churchill received an honorary degree from Harvard University and addressed its faculty and students in the university’s largest room, Sanders Theater.

New York

ON TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, the New Orleans Times-Picayune published a report from staff writer Brian Thevenot that began this way:

THE AFTERMATH OF KATRINA obscured many stories from public view. One of them concerned same-sex marriage. It deserves much more attention, particularly from national politicians.

IT IS TEMPTING to speculate about how the new Supreme Court will differ from the old (Senator McConnell might want to find another complaint to file against McCain-Feingold), but that debate will rage for months into the future, and the blogosphere has had a very interesting two weeks responding to…

YESTERDAY America's emergency relief effort went into high gear and is likely to stay there for weeks, as all across the country citizens open their wallets to help out their fellow countrymen.

IN MAY OF THIS YEAR, John McCain teamed with Ted Kennedy to propose a new bill to "solve" the illegal immigration problem. The McCain-Kennedy bill was DOA with Republicans in the House and the Senate.

IT IS TIME to rescue The Great Raid.

DEAN BARNETT of Soxblog has penned a couple of crucial essays on the effects of lefty blogs on the Democratic party that remain must-reads (here and here). Barnett is expanding on a theme sounded by Michael Barone in a February column in U.S. News & World Report where Barone asked and answered his…

WHAT DID AL FRANKEN KNOW, and when did he know it?

JUDGE JOHN ROBERTS IS CURSED: with a sense of humor.

JUDGE JOHN ROBERTS was a member of the ill-fated White House basketball team in the 1986 City of Alexandria Men's Division D. I know, as I was the player-coach on a squad that went 1-9, and which depended on speechwriters Peter Robinson and Josh Gilder to work the boards and Roberts to hit 20…

THERE IS A STRANGE PAIRING of positions on the left.

AMONG THE MOST ENTHUSIASTIC people in Washington when news of Justice O'Connor's retirement surfaced had to have been North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole. Senator Dole is chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and she is following two blockbuster cycles for the committee under the…

ON MONDAY, it was argued here that Senator Richard Durbin ought to be censured for his remarks last week, and not just those in which he made the outrageous comparison between interrogation tactics at Guantanamo and the practices of the Nazi, Soviet, and Khmer Rouge regime. On Tuesday, Durbin took…

SENATE MAJORITY LEADER BILL FRIST and Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter should move this week to initiate a censure resolution of Illinois Senator Dick Durbin for his remarks on the Senate's floor on June 14, 2005. Not only did Durbin's remarks injure America's position in the world, provide an…

THE LOS ANGELES WEEKLY'S "The New Blacklist" is author Douglas Ireland's attempt to equate consumer boycotts of gay-themed entertainment sponsors with McCarthyism.

THERE ARE THREE MEDIA ANALYSTS who command wide readership and deserve their influence--Jay Rosen of NYU, who writes PressThink, Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine and now the New York Times, and Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post.

SO, what books to buy to take to the beach? Two suggestions, both thrillers, and both with great additional merit beyond their page turning plots.

MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND begins the high season at Main Beach in California's Laguna Beach. Two-player beach volleyball is never gone completely from the beach, but during the summer it is always in play during daylight.

TERRY MORAN has been ABC's Chief White House correspondent since September, 1999. On Tuesday, Moran challenged White House spokesman Scott McClellan on the appropriateness of the call from the White House for Newsweek to do more to repair the damage from the Isikoff report. The New York Times's…

WHEN THE WORD "IMPEACHMENT" was uttered in March and April as an option for dealing with renegade judges, the guardians of conventional wisdom were quick to denounce "ideologues," who, in the words of the New York Times editorialists, "are trying to bully judges into following their political…

Barry Lynn is the top guy at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and a cartoonish presence on talking head television, ever-ready to declare the imminent threat of theocracy in the land. It should come as no surprise to anyone, then, that the organization Lynn leads last week…

A SPEECH I HOPE a Republican senator from the classes of 2002 or 2004 makes at the next gathering of the GOP Senate caucus:

THE MOST IMPORTANT STATEMENT Pope Benedict XVI may ever make was the one delivered before he was elected the successor to John Paul II. Just before he and his 114 colleagues entered the conclave, then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger addressed the entire College of Cardinals, the whole Roman Catholic…

IN RECENT DAYS I interviewed Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, and Ralph Neas, executive director of People for the American Way. Together these two are the architects of the policy of unyielding obstruction by Democrats of George Bush's judicial nominees. It is difficult to…

ON THE EVE of the funeral of one of history's greatest popes, the American media is struggling to absorb the immensity of John Paul II's pontificate. Around every turn is another story, another dramatic trip, another chapter from his prolific writings. The ingrained impulse among much our media…

THE TERRI SCHIAVO TRAGEDY has been seized on by long-time critics of the "religious right" to launch attack after attack on the legitimacy of political action on the basis of religious belief. This attack has ignored the inconvenient participation in the debate--on the side of resuming water and…

NOBODY NEEDS another opinion on whether hydration and nutrition should be restored to Terri Schiavo. Hundreds of commentators have written thousands of column inches on her parents' drive to see that she is fairly represented before the courts.

LET ME BE THE FIRST to congratulate Claudia Rosett on the receipt of her 2005 Pulitzer Prize. I am uncertain in which category she will win the honor (there are at least six--public service, investigative reporting, breaking news, national reporting, international reporting, and commentary for…

A FRONT PAGE STORY in the March 1, 2005 Los Angeles Times was headlined "North Korea, Without the Rancor." The author, Barbara Demick, met with a North Korean businessman in a North Korean-owned karaoke bar in Beijing. The article presented this "businessman's" view of the world. His views were…

WHEN DEMOCRATIC SENATOR ROBERT BYRD rose on the floor Tuesday to compare the tactics of his Republican colleagues in the battles over judicial nominees to those employed by Hitler in building the Reich, you knew two things.

A REMARKABLE LETTER was issued from Pope John Paul last month. The "Apostolic Letter of the Holy Father John Paul II to Those Responsible for Communications," is titled The Rapid Development. Since my work is communication, I think it was addressed to me, and to every other reporter, editor,…

EAGER TO DIVERT ATTENTION from the incredible incompetence displayed in the handling of Eason Jordan's remarks before the Davos audience (and Jordan's November 2004 accusation that the U.S. military was torturing journalists), a number of voices within the mainstream media have argued that the…

"CHRIS MATTHEWS looked at you like you were Grover Norquist," a very senior Democratic operative commented on my appearance at Matthews' weekend show. During the segment where Matthews asks his panel to tell them something he doesn't know, I predicted a breakout this week into mainstream media of…

BECAUSE I HAD TO FILE this column before President Bush gave his State of the Union address, I can only hope he called Democrats on their indifference to the medium- and long-term threats to Social Security. The decision by Democrats and their friends in media and blogosphere to downplay the…

SITTING ACROSS from the very pleasant Soledad O'Brien, I got the impression that she had been well briefed and may even have dipped in my new book Blog, but I was certain by interview's end that she was not an enthusiast of the blogosphere. I'd had the same feeling upon completion of a four way…

To: Les Moonves, President, CBS

LARGE AND POWERFUL INSTITUTIONS do not react well to internal scandal, especially when that scandal threatens to erode a central pillar of the institution's authority. The first reaction will almost inevitably be denial, followed by various efforts to isolate and minimize the scandal, to protect…

IF YOU'RE GETTING OVER being steamed at Norwegian U.N. apparatchik Jan Egeland, who a week ago thought the U.S. response to the tsunami "stingy," then you need to check in at The Diplomad, a tremendous blog run by a State Department careerist serving abroad and which has done more for the…

IF OLD MEDIA--the "legacy media" of the big papers and old networks plus the newsweeklies--was a city and not simply a set of gasping institutions, it would look like Stalingrad circa 1944. Parts of most of the virtual buildings are still standing, but the devastation is pretty complete.

EVEN BEFORE THE DOCTORS had completed their evacuation of the wounded to Germany in the aftermath of the attack on the Mosul dining hall, and certainly before all the next of kin of the dead had been notified, New York Times reporter Richard Stevenson had sat down at his word processor to…

NEWSWEEK put Christmas on the cover of its December 13th issue, and the reaction among orthodox Christians was widespread and emphatic. Once again a leading member of the legacy media had produced a hit piece on Christian belief, employing many deceits, including the use of false dilemmas, the…

NOT SINCE 1952 has a presidential election lacked a sitting president or vice president as a contestant, and Ike was about as close as one could get to non-official incumbent. Before that, it was the 1928 race, and there, too, Herbert Hoover was, like Ike, a figure of towering popularity. In other…

WHEN NEWS of the Groningen Protocol surfaced in October, it was reported in the Grand Forks Herald,though I didn't read of it, nor apparently did many others. The Groningen Protocol could have been the stuff of a fine presidential debate question, or a series of questions, but I doubt if any of the…

ON THE CUSP of the season of Thanksgiving, Hanukah, and Christmas--the days of generosity--there are two great passages from Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol which deserve rereading, especially by the executives of Target Corporation:

THE ALWAYS PROVOCATIVE Andrew Sullivan blogged on Tuesday about the Time magazine's "Man of the Year" process:

FROM ALMOST THE MOMENT he was appointed to the United States Senate, Georgia Democrat Zell Miller began to warn his party from the floor and via op-ed that it was allowing its ideology to cripple its appeal. Miller warned Terry McAuliffe and he warned Hillary Clinton. Eventually wrote a book that…

THE SIXTIES ended on September 11, 2001, but they were interred on the morning of November 3, 2004, when a senator from Massachusetts played the reverse role of another senator from Massachusetts 44 years earlier.

JOHN KERRY now closes his presidential campaign exactly as he opened his political life: Attacking the United States military.

I UNDERSTAND moms don't read websites. Moms don't blog either (except for, say, MommyPundit or 200 other momblogs) or read newspapers or magazines. They probably don't even vote.

IT IS HARD TO IMAGINE how Bob Schieffer could have been more pro-Kerry in last night's debate--short of actually wearing a Kerry-Edwards button.

IF A GAFFE falls in a forest, and nobody hears it, is it still a gaffe?

IT STARTED on the Late, Late Show Monday night. Drudge posted a link to a picture of John Kerry's suddenly orange face on Tuesday, and Blogs for Bush, Blogs of War, and Best of the Web started an Oompa Loompa meme Tuesday afternoon. I played the Oompa Loompa song a few times during the afternoon…

ON TUESDAY, CBS president Les Moonves told the Los Angeles Times that it was "clear that something went seriously wrong with the process" that produced DanScam. That's like The Zepplin Company announcing that the Hindenburg had a little trouble landing in New Jersey.

INSIDE THE BUNKER AT CBS, Dan Rather must be finally feeling some sympathy for Richard Nixon. Rather is caught in a cover-up begun during a presidential campaign, the cover-up is unraveling, and a baying pack of critics greets his every utterance with disdain, as mockery begins to replace analysis.…

IN THE SPRING of 1985 Ronald Reagan struggled with a Democrat-dominated Congress for authority to ship aid to the Nicaraguan Contras fighting the spreading grip of the Sandinistas on their Central American country. There was quite a lot of heated rhetoric and over-the-top theater. The Sandinistas…

"THEY COME because their hearts say to them, as mine did, 'If only I can get to America.'"

JOHN KERRY is still in hiding--and still sinking--but if he ever does surface for an on-camera meeting with the press, it will no doubt be dominated by Christmas-not-in-Cambodia and magic hats from CIA men. I hope a second press conference can immediately be scheduled to catch up on all the other…

"KERRY WENT into Cambodian waters three or four times in January and February 1969 on clandestine missions," historian Douglas Brinkley told the London Telegraph last week. "He had a run dropping off U.S. Navy Seals, Green Berets, and CIA guys. . . . He was a ferry master, a drop-off guy, but it…

ONE OF THE GREAT DISAPPOINTMENTS to the GOP in the election of 2000 was the disappearance of more than 4 million evangelical Christians in the final turn-out numbers. In this cycle, evangelical leaders have launched ivotevalues.org to encourage registration and turn-out, and to educate pastors and…

Boston

HERE ARE the two key sentence from yesterdays Washington Post: "[Sandy] Berger returned two of the after-action drafts within days, according to his attorneys. Other drafts of the after-action document, they said, were apparently discarded."

FOUR CRUCIAL FACTS came into the public's view these past few days:

WHAT DOES South Dakota think of Michael Moore and his slanders on American troops and lies about American motives? We will find out in November, because South Dakota's Senator Tom Daschle has embraced Moore--literally.

CAMPAIGN '04 will spend a lot of time focusing on the war in Iraq, and its cost in American and coalition lives--as well as the billions of dollars it has taken to wage the war, and the billions more that will be required to secure the peace.

WHEN WILL George Smiley and Karla begin to blog?

"RONALD REAGAN was great because Ronald Reagan was right." So declared Gipper speechwriter Peter Robinson, author of How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life, on my radio program Monday. Robinson's right, too, of course. There have been many gifted orators whose cause was evil; many "communicators" who…

BUFFALO'S PALACE BURLESQUE THEATER entertained the men of that town for 60 years, and tempted the teenagers for just as long. A young Tim Russert and some of his pals from Canisius High School summoned the courage to try and bluff their way in one day in the mid-'60s, only to be asked their age and…

ON MONDAY, Ted Kennedy took to the floor of the United States Senate and made this statement: "Shamefully we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management." Kennedy, of course, is the alter ego of John Kerry, and is his principal backer and original sherpa…

WHEN JOHN KERRY took a spill from his bike this past weekend, it triggered thoughts of Jimmy Carter's collapse in a road race, Gerald Ford's much-mocked stumbles, and of Kerry's own misadventures on the ski slopes earlier this year. But it wasn't until the pictures of Kerry on his bike appeared…

AFTER TRAIN WRECKS on Meet the Press and Good Morning America, John Kerry took his tattered credibility to the friendly confines of Hardball, where a sympathetic and compliant Chris Matthews did his very best to help Kerry make it through at least one interview without wandering into bizarre…

OVER AT JohnKerry.com's campaign blog, they're referring to Kerry's appearance on Meet the Press as a "home run." If that was a home run, I'd hate to see Kerry strike out. On question after question, Kerry managed to turn under-armed softballs into high and tight strikes, and the damage from his…

RICHARD BEN-VENISTE threw a knife at John Ashcroft and hit Jamie Gorelick between the shoulders. Thus did the most irresponsible member of an increasingly irresponsible commission finally draw some blood, even though his victim was unintended.

JOHN KERRY reminds you of someone, but you can't put your finger on it, right?

THE WASHINGTON POST opened its Wednesday coverage of Tuesday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on an amendment to the United States Constitution concerning marriage with the hardly neutral declaration that "[d]espite indications that a bill to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriages has…

JOHN KERRY presented President Bush with a St. Patrick's Day gift via the Wednesday morning New York Times. Responding to a new Bush ad reminding voters that Kerry had voted against last year's $87 billion dollar appropriation to support the troops deployed in Iraq, Kerry responded: "I actually did…

AS THE WAR enters a phase where most of the fighting is far removed from the networks' cameras, it gets harder and harder to find reliable news on the conflict's many fronts.

JOHN EDWARDS had one thing right: There are two Americas. But he botched the description of the line dividing these Americas--not surprising given that, after all these months and all that trial lawyer cash, he managed only to win the Democratic primary in South Carolina, which is like a Republican…

THERE ARE A COUPLE of key pieces of conventional wisdom floating downstream from Washington these days. The first is that a Bush-Kerry race will be very, very close. Bush-Gore close.

IT TOOK A LOT OF DIGGING, but my producer Duane was able to find the audio from John Kerry's 1971 appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I played the entire 19 minutes for my radio audience on February 17, and the reaction via the phones and email was uniform: Disliking John…

WITH LESS THAN 38 WEEKS until the November 2nd vote, radio hosts have got to sharpen the message. That's less than 200 broadcast days, and even with 15 segments per three hour show, that's only 3,000 opportunities to present a four- to twelve-minute segment that focuses on some aspect of John…

WITH JOHN KERRY far ahead of the pack and almost certainly the nominee, the digging into his record has begun. Kerry hasn't made it difficult to unearth troubling stances when it comes to his positions on national security matters.

"A VOTE for the Liberals is a vote for the Boers!"

HOWARD DEAN'S BELLOWING the roll call of the states on Monday night may capture the weird sweepstakes this election season, but Wesley Clark can't be counted out just yet. Most of the cameras were in Iowa while the general tromped around the Granite State, but the record he left is promising when…

IN THE NEW EDITION of Rolling Stone, cover boy Howard Dean puts George W. Bush on the couch: "This president is not interested in being a good president. He's interested in some complicated psychological situation that he has with his father."

NANCY PELOSI was upset after the federal appeals court upheld the new congressional districting map for the Lone Star State Tuesday: "This is just the latest attempt by President Bush, Tom Delay, and other Republicans to dismantle the Voting Rights Act. The Texas redistricting plan shows once again…

HOWARD DEAN has survived a bad month. Saddam Hussein was captured. The Democratic party appears to understand that Dean isn't electable. Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman and Congressman Richard Gephardt all have warned that Dean means certain electoral doom. They aren't exaggerating. Even the…

HOWARD DEAN may have jumped the shark with his declaration that "the capture of Saddam has not made America safer," but don't tell that to the online world that the Dean campaign has built for itself.

THE WORLD is full of interesting theories.

CATHOLIC BISHOPS have been making noises about disciplining Catholic politicians who advocate for policies opposed to Church teaching. If you are an observant Catholic, don't get your hopes up.

HOWARD DEAN wants Osama bin Laden to get 30 years to life. No hanging by the neck until dead. No firing squad. Not even a lethal injection for being the mastermind behind the deaths of more than 3,000 Americans.

SOME BOOKS should be read in tandem. One pair for parallel reading: William Manchester's second volume in his life of Churchill, "Alone," and Rich Lowry's fine new effort: "Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years." Manchester's book chronicles the wilderness years of the greatest man of the…

"JOHN MARSHALL has made his decision," Andrew Jackson is said to have remarked in the aftermath of a Supreme Court decision he disliked, "now let him enforce it." Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney would be well advised to ponder that line long and hard over the Thanksgiving holidays.

SEAN HANNITY'S big scoop is not generating the headlines it ought to. The memo Hannity obtained and made public that details the plans by Democratic staff on the Senate Intelligence Committee to politicize the committee's investigations in the service of partisan politics far overshadows in…

THE VERY BEST ASPECT of the decision by CBS to cancel its network showing of the Reagan miniseries was the first paragraph of CBS's statement explaining its decision: CBS will not broadcast "The Reagans" on November 16 and 18. This decision is based solely on our reaction to the final film, not the…

THE STEPHEN'S KANGAROO RAT was listed as "endangered" by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on October 31, 1988. This little-noticed action launched a revolution in land use in southern California that has culminated in the fires that have now claimed at least 17 lives, destroyed close to 2,000…

WHO IS WILLIAM ARKIN? For starters, he is the scribbler who launched the assault on Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin a week ago by providing NBC with tapes of Boykin speaking in churches, and then followed with a Los Angeles Times op-ed that accused the general of being "an intolerant extremist" and a man…

LIKE MOST CALIFORNIANS, I am sick of discussing the Los Angeles Times. I had intended to write this week about the sudden crystallization of the Democratic party around the campaign theme "Higher Taxes, Lower Defenses." This combination of Mondale economics with McGovernite foreign policy is…

WITHIN MINUTES of the release of exit polls from California last night, Democrats had wheeled as one and began the hopeless attempt to spin the disastrous verdict. Senator Dianne Feinstein led the charge, but the refrain echoed throughout the party: This was a verdict on Davis's handling of the…

THIS IS THE PART in the movie when the battering rams smash through the besieged town's much-reinforced-but-nevertheless-crumbling wooden gates, and the outsiders pour through the breach and then over the walls to loot and pillage at will. Arnold and his forces are at Sacramento's gates. Think…

SUDDENLY Tuesday's election is more than a recall. It has also become a referendum on the Los Angeles Times. In an astonishing story from page A34 of Sunday's Times, Readers Angry at The Times for Schwarzenegger Stories, the paper struggles to report the damage done to its reputation over the past…

DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES for the White House, Senate, and House face a huge difficulty in 2004: They are on the wrong side of the national security gap. The public doesn't trust their party's collective judgment on the key issues of war and terrorism. The 2002 elections underscored the vulnerability…

THERE ARE EDITORS and there are editors. After a quarter century of punditry, I have come to appreciate the best of editors and to refuse to work with the second team. The second team seems intent on substituting their ideas for yours and dulling the sharpest points. The first team polishes and…

THERE IS A GREAT DEAL of analysis on the California recall court case, with some of the best available at the blogs of Loyola law prof Rick Hasen, University of Iowa law prof Tung Yin, and the SoCalLawBlog . These sites don't mince words when it comes to the reputation and record of the 9th…

TAMMANY HALL had its house organ, the Leader. Gray Davis and Cruz Bustamante have an even better tool for communicating: the Los Angeles Times. To wit: In November of 2000, California voters approved Proposition 34--a campaign finance reform initiative. They were urged not to do so by the Los…

AS THE RECALL rocks along, reporters continue to ignore the underlying causes of widespread voter disgust, including Gray Davis' the tripling of the car tax this past summer, and the tidal wave of special interest legislation that ranges from workplace protection for cross-dressing employees to the…

HOW MUCH would you spend to protect and expand a business with $5 billion in annual revenues and no significant local competition? Is that protection worth 2 percent of one year's income? Or 5 percent? Maybe even 10 percent? Whether California's Indian tribes spend $100 million, $250 million, or…

WATCHING THE EAST COAST MEDIA attempt to cover the California recall is like watching Tim McCarver call a Dodgers game while Vin Scully looks on without a mike. It doesn't have to be this way. In fact, the recall is such a big story during such a slow news time that "Nightline" could relocate for…

CHARLES CHAPUT, the Archbishop of Denver, issued a stinging rebuke to Catholic senator Richard Durbin and concluded that "a new kind of religious discrimination is very welcome at the Capitol, even among elected officials who claim to be Catholic," and the national news media barely took note. A…

THE ARCHBISHOP OF DENVER, Charles Chaput, has rebuked the Senate Democrats who have blocked the nomination of Alabama attorney general William Pryor in stark terms: "[A] new kind of religious discrimination is very welcome at the Capitol, even among elected officials who claim to be Catholic."…

GEORGE GORTON, Ken Khachigian, and Sal Russo are the three best Republican political consultants that California has produced over the past quarter century. Today they work for Arnold Schwarzenegger, Darrell Issa, and Bill Simon, respectively. All three have played the part of key strategist to one…

Memo To: Editors and Editorial Page Editors

WHEN GENERAL TOMMY FRANKS addressed his retirement ceremony audience on Monday, he didn't mince words. The news accounts focused on his striking endorsement of the president's "bring 'em on" challenge to Fedayeen terrorists attacking U.S. forces in Iraq, but equally important was his prediction of…

THIRTEEN MONTHS AGO, Senator Hillary Clinton rose on the Senate floor to demand answers to questions about what President Bush knew about the September 11 attacks before those attacks occurred. Dick Gephardt (then minority leader in the House) echoed the demand, asking "what the president and what…

NEWSWEEK'S media reporter Seth Mnookin handicapped the race for the job of New York Times executive editor last week, putting Los Angeles Times managing editor Dean Baquet as the 2-1 favorite, Bill Keller (runner-up to Howell Raines in the last go-round) in the second position at 3-1, and Boston…

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO Alexander Solzhenitsyn delivered the address at Harvard University's commencement ceremonies. This year Ernesto Zedillo, past President of Mexico, provided the featured address at Harvard's 352nd commencement. Except he didn't. Zedillo did indeed deliver a speech: a…

JOSHUA MICAH MARSHALL is frustrated. He's the young-Blumenthal-in-training of partisan punditry, but in recent days his favorite story line can't get any traction. "It's amazing what it takes to start a feeding frenzy these days," he lamented at TalkingPointsMemo, his web log, last week. Marshall…

LAST FALL California Governor Gray Davis vetoed a bill the legislature had presented him--S.B. 1828. The bill would have transferred a large amount of authority over "sacred sites" to the California tribes. The definition of sacred site was broad; so too was the power that was to be transferred to…

LAST WEEK in this space I described the Los Angeles Times's slide into mediocrity and agenda journalism. Some objected. The Nation's always reliable Eric Alterman condemned the column as "nonsensical," and then quoted one of my objections--that "columnists who deal regularly with politics outside…

THE STRANGEST SEASON in California's long, strange political trip has begun with a declaration of candidacy for a governorship that isn't vacant, a withdrawal from a Senate campaign that hasn't really begun, and a rumor mill spinning out of control. The declaration of candidacy came from…

THOSE PROFESSING SURPRISE at the public collapse of credibility at the New York Times haven't been paying attention to Mickey Kaus or Andrew Sullivan. They haven't been reading the descent into fevers of Paul Krugman or the bitter stridency of Maureen Dowd. The deep sickness at the Times had many…

Our political drama begins in the conference room of the AFL-CIO headquarters on 16th Street in Washington, D.C. President John Sweeney, in his eighth year of leading the 65-member union organization, is slumped in a chair, staring at the huge portrait of the AFL-CIO's first president, George…

I JUMPED AT the chance to replace my old Visa card with a Cleveland Browns Visa card. Who wouldn't want to telegraph appreciation for the Super Bowl-bound Browns with every purchase of gas? That was my first clue. "Affinity" credit cards, like specialized California license plates promoting…

ACTOR EDWARD NORTON attacked President Bush as possessing a "low quality mind" this week, and thus joined a long list of stars, pundits, and professors who have elected to stand opposite three-quarters of American public opinion. Others who have done so--including Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon,…

THE LEFT EDGE of the Senate Democratic caucus has taken control of the judicial-nomination process and has forced the entire Senate into what is, at best, an extra-constitutional swamp. With their filibuster of D.C. Circuit Court nominee Miguel Estrada, their threatened filibusters of Fifth Circuit…

JIM SLEEPER is a lecturer in political science at Yale, and an author and former columnist at the New York Daily News. He wrote a column for the Yale Daily News on April 14. We can assume he knows about the need to choose words carefully, and we can assume he chose his words below carefully. Eliana…

Last Friday, CNN's Eason Jordan published an op-ed in the New York Times that contained some admissions that cannot be considered as anything other than astonishing. CNN's "chief news executive" confessed that, among other things, Saddam's crazy son Uday had told Eason in 1995 that he, Uday,…

THE APRIL 7, 2003 ISSUE of the New Yorker contains an article by Seymour Hersh that will be taught in journalism classes for decades to come: "Offense and Defense: The Battle between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon." Hersh's opening sentences read: "As the ground campaign against Saddam Hussein…

THE ATTEMPT by France to protect Saddam, even at the cost of a crack-up of NATO and the United Nations, has confused many Americans who had long believed that France was an ally. So speculation abounds: Is Chirac on the take? Is it about the oil contracts? Are French munitions going to show up in…

HAVING MADE the mistake of agreeing to "debate" the war before a college campus audience, I ought not to have expected much beyond emotional appeals from the antiwar participants. But I did, and of course, I was disappointed.

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, often called the Lost Angeles Times or the Left Angeles Times, escapes the sort of scrutiny that Andrew Sullivan and others apply to the New York Times because the "West Coast's leading newspaper" simply doesn't matter much on the East Coast (and increasingly not so much in…

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA Law School Professor Erwin Chemerinsky has been my colleague in the commentary business for a decade, and for the past three years a weekly guest, along with Chapman Law School Professor John Eastman, on my radio program. Together we try to make the issues of…

SINGERS WITH ENOUGH TALENT can overcome their politics, and Judy Collins has enough talent. So on Oscar night, the wife and I dragooned a younger couple, like the time my parents dragged us to hear Perry Como, and off we went to an auditorium on the campus of Claremont College to hear Judy and…

SENATOR TOM DASCHLE'S attack on President Bush on Monday was unprecedented for the leader of the opposition party in Congress, but high-profile Americans have a long history of getting it wrong on matters of war and peace. Most famous among these is Charles Lindbergh, who help found the America…

THE HARVARD COLLEGE CLASS OF 1978 meets in Cambridge in three months to celebrate its 25th reunion. Among the events, lunches, panels, and dances, I hope time has been allocated to remember the most significant event of the 1978 ceremonies: a commencement address by Nobel Laureate Alexander I.…

FROM THE MOMENT listeners realized that terrorism had come to America, callers to my radio program have wanted to discuss various terrorism scenarios. Invariably the conversation begins, "If I was a terrorist, here's how I'd paralyze the country . . ."

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM puts California's 55 electoral votes out of the reach of President Bush in 2004. Bush-Cheney didn't just get beat in the Golden State in 2000, they got hammered. Al Gore pulled 5,861,203 votes to George Bush's 4,567,429--a 53 percent to 42 percent drubbing.

A RECENT COVER STORY for Christianity Today named Rick Warren "America's Most Influential Pastor." That's a big title, but it still understates Warren's influence in the nation and the world. Warren's church, Saddleback Valley Community Church in Lake Forest, California, draws more than 16,000…

EUGENE VOLOKH AND JOHN EASTMAN are not household names. Both teach constitutional law, Volokh at UCLA and Eastman at Chapman University. Both arrived in the classroom after clerking for big names in the courts--Volokh for Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day…

BOYCOTTS don't always work, but they usually annoy. Maybe it's time to annoy Vermont and its two senators, Patrick Leahy and James Jeffords, to get across how little the obstruction of judicial confirmations is appreciated. Senator Leahy holds the chairmanship of the Senate's Judiciary Committee, a…

EACH OF OUR MAJOR POLITICAL PARTIES is really three smaller parties stacked in a pyramid. The chart below is a handy reference guide. The critical challenge for each party's elite is to attend to its base. These days, the base of the Republican pyramid is cracked.