By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  June 22nd at 07:30 PM  | 

As a general matter, while I write a fair amount about national security strategy, I’m usually hesitant to wade into military tactics, a subject best left to the professionals. Even among those who know their stuff, military tactical decisions often involve difficult tradeoffs on which reasonable people can and do disagree, plus people who lack a military background (as I do) often make hilarious mistakes | Read More »

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  June 19th at 01:08 PM  | 

I know it’s redundant to tell people to read Charles Krauthammer – really, you are doing Friday wrong if you don’t read his column every week – but he boils down the essential stakes in Iran neatly, and reminds us that this isn’t just about Ahmadenijad vs Mousavi. Samples: [T]his incipient revolution is no longer about the election. Obama totally misses the point. The election | Read More »

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  June 18th at 01:52 PM  | 

The Obama Administration’s response to protests against the Iranian regime’s contempt for even its own thin facade of democracy has been markedly muted and tentative; even the French Government has spoken out more clearly against the fraudulence of the presidential election and the mullahs’ suppression of the Iranian people than has President Obama. One conclusion we can draw from Obama’s failure to offer support for | Read More »

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  June 15th at 05:32 PM  | 

High on the list of states where the GOP needs to rebuild its credibility and has a realistic chance to do so is Wisconsin, whose two-term Democratic Governor, Jim Doyle, is seeking a third term in 2010 (no Democrat has ever won three terms as Governor of Wisconsin). The state of Tommy Thompson’s Governorship was part of the great ferment of GOP reform in the | Read More »

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  June 13th at 10:18 PM  | 

Iran, we are told, is on the edge of, if not sliding immediately into, chaos. Both sides of the presidential election have claimed not only victory but landslide victory, and as happens in such cases in states that are not genuine democracies, the candidate who is out of power has apparently found himself under arrest, and the population is edging from restive to explosive. The | Read More »

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  June 13th at 01:08 AM  | 

In the wake of the shooting at the Holocaust Museum, there’s been something of a mad rush by left-wing bloggers to use the shooting to validate the now-infamous Department of Homeland Security report on “right-wing extremists.”. There are two noteworthy aspects of this effort. One, it continues the DHS report’s willful misidintification of people like James von Brunn, the museum shooter, as “right-wing.” And two, | Read More »

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  June 5th at 09:49 AM  | 

From the Irish Times, which captions this “Masked Palestinian Hamas militants watch the televised speech of US president Barack Obama in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, yesterday.” This picture is all the better when you consider the temperature in southern Gaza in June. Of course, I would not want to be the cameraman; look at where the guy on the left is pointing the | Read More »

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  June 4th at 07:17 PM  | 

Whether or not Republicans can ever get a meaningful mandate to significantly cut government spending, the political climate has unmistakably shifted to one in which one of the great domestic issues of the day is simply putting the brakes on runaway expansion of government and the concomitant diminution of the true private sector. Frank Luntz thinks that South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is making headway | Read More »

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  June 1st at 11:44 AM  | 

Because they usually lack the organization, training, funding, numbers and suicidal ideology of international terrorists, it can at times be difficult to distinguish domestic terrorists from ordinary psychopaths. But domestic terrorism has been a sporadic presence in the United States since at least radical Kansas abolitionist John Brown in the 1850s, running through the likes of Leon Czolgosz, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Black Panthers, Tim | Read More »

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  May 29th at 05:58 PM  | 

So Glenn Greenwald, responding to a post of mine on Twitter in his column at Salon, refers to me as a “right-wing warrior-blogger”. If I was unfamiliar with Greenwald’s work, I might think perhaps that he had confused me with one of RedState’s resident warriors, Jeff Emanuel or streiff or Caleb Howe; I’m a lawyer, not a warrior, and the closest I have been to | Read More »

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  May 28th at 09:50 PM  | 

The Wall Street Journal looks at the severe falloff in tax revenues from millionaires in Maryland after the state socked them with a new, higher tax rate for the purpose of closing a budget gap, a move hailed at the time by supposedly big-thinking liberals. Somehow, Maryland liberals were surprised that this didn’t work out: One-third of the millionaires have disappeared from Maryland tax rolls. | Read More »

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  May 28th at 07:43 PM  | 

I don’t know whether Jason Linkins at the Huffington Post is a lawyer, but from this post I have to assume not – and that he really should have talked to a lawyer before publishing it. The main thrust of Linkins’ post is his argument that Justice Scalia in his 2002 opinion in Republican Party of Minnesota v. White somehow endorsed the notion that it’s | Read More »

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  May 22nd at 05:45 PM  | 

Ah, what would we do without Joe Biden? So will Obama fulfill his vow – announced amid great fanfare in an executive order on day two of his presidency – to close the facility by January 2010? “I think so,” Biden responded, according to Newsweek’s Holly Bailey. So perhaps he will. Or perhaps not. We’ll see. Biden continued: “But, look, what the president said is | Read More »

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  May 22nd at 01:39 PM  | 

I have a lengthy think-piece essay up over at The New Ledger on conservatism’s essential element.  Click, read, return, discuss.

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  May 20th at 10:40 AM  | 

Intimidation, home invasion and the not-too-subtle threat of physical violence – by community organizers closely allied with governmental power and receiving taxpayer money. It’s not a pretty combination: Bruce Marks doesn’t bother being diplomatic. A campaigner on behalf of homeowners facing foreclosure, he was on the phone one day in March to a loan executive at Bank of America Corp. “I’m tired of borrowers being | Read More »

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  May 19th at 06:56 PM  | 

The reasons for wanting Chris Dodd gone from the Senate are too numerous to recount here; briefly speaking, Dodd has been wrong on basically every national security issue for the past three decades, he’s got ethical problems out the wazoo, and while he was in bed with anyone and everyone connected with the financial crisis, he spent a year living in Iowa on a delusional | Read More »

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  May 18th at 02:07 PM  | 

Providing an object lesson on the hazards of sharing secrets with a man who has no unexpressed thoughts, the undisclosed location is undisclosed no longer:

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  May 18th at 11:46 AM  | 

The Supreme Court this morning granted certiorari in Free Enterprise Fund and Beckstead and Watts, LLP v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, et al., No. 08-861 on the Court’s docket. The case will be briefed over the summer, heard in the Fall (after, among other things, Justice Souter’s retirement, assuming all goes on schedule) and decided some time between next December and July 2010. Given | Read More »

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  May 15th at 04:01 PM  | 

Nancy Pelosi has had a very bad stretch over the issue of what she knew, and when, about waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques.” She still seems not to have learned that it’s a bad idea to get in a public spat with people who collect secrets for a living. Her ever-shifting explanations of what she was briefed on and when, culminating in yesterday’s press | Read More »

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  May 12th at 12:54 PM  | 

Republicans are going to have a lot of challenges and a lot of opportunities in the 2010 elections. One thing the party needs to do is get our best candidates into races we can win; another is to make sure we hold the easy races and avoid bloody and ideologically divisive primaries in the tough ones; a third is to make sure we can raise | Read More »