As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve spent a lot more time lately talking about the GOP primary than the Democratic primary. Mostly this is because the Democratic primary has been pretty uninteresting lately. Clinton is obviously the front-runner, Obama the contender, and Edwards the dark horse. The differences between the candidates largely come [...]

In his New York Times editorial today, David Brooks argues that American society has become increasingly splintered along racial and ethnic lines. The bulk of his evidence comes from the world of music. He notes that the artists and audience for rock bands is increasingly white-only, and that as a result modern rock [...]

It’s shockingly easy to motivate racial hatred. Remind people what their problems are: unemployment, taxes, wars, crime, drugs, etc. Tell them that those problems result from a competition for scarce resources. Whatever your problems are, they result from a lack of enough money, jobs, women, etc. to go around. Tell people [...]

Fred Thompson officially entered the presidential race.  More importantly, he now has an official campaign website that has actual policy information on it.  The caveat, of course, is that there isn’t a whole lot of information on his site yet.  Basically he discusses two issues at length: federalism and immigration reform.

A federal district court ruled yesterday that the city of Hazelton, PA has no right to pass anti-illegal immigration ordinances.  At issue were two laws.  One would have fined landlords who did not require proof of citizenship or visa when renting to immigrants.  The other made English the official language of the city, even to [...]

One of the great ironies of the Scooter Libby trial was that the same conservatives who have for years fought for high mandatory minimum sentences–and against allowing judicial discretion to reduce those sentences–ended up complaining that the sentence given to Mr. Libby based on those sentencing guidelines was too harsh.  Now we have the second [...]

The Bush Administration has always had an expansive view of executive authority.  This is old news.  So when I read this article in today’s Boston Globe, I wasn’t horribly surprised.  The GAO found that the Bush Administration had ignored six out of the nineteen randomly chosen laws about which the president had issued signing statements.  [...]

I’ve been pretty harsh on Jeff Jacoby, conservative Globe columnist, here in the past.  But to give credit where credit is due, his op-ed yesterday on illegal immigration was exactly right.  Jacoby argues that anti-immigration opponents have demonized illegal immigrants as law breakers and vagrants, and have been trying to argue that we shouldn’t reward [...]

The absurdity of the American political system is simply amazing.  Last spring, President Bush pushed for an immigration compromise.  The Republican controlled House passed an extremely punitive bill that did nothing to address the status of the millions of illegal immigrants and potential immigrants.  The Senate passed a compromise bill that was really quite moderate, [...]

This new immigration compromise bill is quite the monstrous piece of legislation. I’ve been trying to get a good grasp on it for awhile now, and I still have no idea what all of its provisions are, or if it will be on balance a good or bad thing. My gut reaction is [...]