“I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system,” President Bush told CNN, defending his offer of $17 billion in loans to the Big Three “to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse.” ...
“De mortuis nil nisi bonum.” Of the dead, nothing but good. So said Dean Acheson of Sen. Joe McCarthy on his death in 1957. “Tailgunner Joe” had bedeviled the secretary of state for his lassitude toward communist penetration of State in President Truman’s time. ...
Just two months after the twin towers fell, the armies of the Northern Alliance marched into Kabul. The Taliban fled. The triumph was total in the “splendid little war” that had cost one U.S. casualty. Or so it seemed. Yet, last month, the war against the Taliban entered its eighth ...
What are Republicans thinking of, pulling the plug, at Christmas, on GM, risking swift death for the greatest manufacturing company in American history, a strategic asset and pillar of the U.S. economy. The $14 billion loan to the Big Three that Republican senators filibustered to death is just ...
“Something is rotten in the state,” says Marcellus in “Hamlet.” Well, it certainly is in the state of Illinois. Yet, on hearing U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald describe a plot by his governor to sell his Senate seat—“conduct (that) would make Lincoln roll ...
In a deepening recession, what does the reasonable man do? Seeing friends laid off, he will get rid of all but essential credit cards, dine at home more often, terminate unnecessary trips to the mall, put off buying a new car, give up the idea of borrowing on the vanishing equity in his house. ...
Having savaged each other for a year, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have now formed a rare partnership in power. Not since James Garfield chose James G. Blaine has a new president chosen his principal rival to be secretary of state. What does this tell us? First, don’t take campaign ...
Arguably the most successful act of revolutionary terror was the June 1914 assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Believing his mission to murder the heir to the Austrian throne had failed, Gavrilo Princip suddenly found himself standing a few feet away from the royal car. ...
Barack Obama and George W. Bush seem to have come away from their study of the Great Depression with similar conclusions: To wit: After the Crash of 1929, the Federal Reserve did not move fast enough to save the banks and inject cash into the economy. Second, the New Deal, far from being wastrel ...
The morning after Barack Obama’s election, the congratulatory message from Moscow was in the chilliest tradition of the Cold War. “I hope for constructive dialogue with you,” said Russia’s president, “based on trust and considering each other’s ...
