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Europe has made itself an afterthought

In the contention over the U.S. peace plan for Ukraine, the Europeans are in their accustomed role — carping from the sidelines. Not only can the once-great European powers no longer dictate the fate of far-flung parts of the world, they can’t even dictate the end of a war involving a European country whose fate they deem crucial to their own future. We’re a long way from the British controlling about a quarter of the globe’s territory in the early 20th century; a long way from British and French diplomats, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot respectively, drawing the ...

American industrial policy is just bad economics

American industry has been getting a lot of hands-on direction from Democrats and Republicans for quite some time now. Every few years, someone looks at the underwhelming results of this economic maneuvering and insists that real “industrial policy” has never been tried. The truth is that the Left’s call for a “mission-oriented” state and the right’s yearning for a nationalist industrial revival may sound different, but they share the same conceit: that their own intentions can finally succeed where decades of intervention have failed. The latest person to revive this ...

Leaked ‘wish list’ hardly ‘America First’

Last week, a 28-point “peace plan” for the Russia-Ukraine war surfaced. It was apparently fleshed out in Miami over cocktails by President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Witkoff’s Russian counterpart Kirill Dmitriev. Many critics immediately derided it as a “Russian wish-list.” In a closed-door session with senators, Secretary of State Marco Rubio even described it as a “wish-list for the Russians” and “not the administration’s plan.” On his way to Geneva for peace talks, Rubio scrambled to deny he ever said that. ...

What Founders feared crept into US

“The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.” – James Madison (1751-1836) America today would terrify the Founding Fathers. Armed troops roam the streets of major cities, masked government agents arrest people without probable cause and disrupt the public speech that the president hates and fears, and the president kills foreigners on the high seas whom he says might commit crimes should their small speedboats miraculously make it 1,500 miles to the United States. Here is the backstory. Shortly after the Constitution was ...

Beware housing bills with socialist goals

The Democrats’ lurch to the extreme left is accelerating at warp speed – and Connecticut is the latest victim. The state legislature’s Democratic supermajority last week rammed through a bill, HB 8002, that’s a thinly disguised socialist wishlist. Cynically couched as a remedy for the affordable housing crisis, its real purpose is ideological: forcing Connecticut’s 169 towns to achieve what the bill calls “economic diversity.” Translation: If you’ve worked hard to own a home in a leafy suburb with quiet streets, you can’t live there unless everybody can – ...

How to get rid of ‘Citizens United’

Several of you responded to my “Sunday thought” by saying that the first step out of the mess we’re in is to get rid of the Supreme Court’s bonkers Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision of 2010, which held that corporations are people – entitled to the same First Amendment protection as the rest of us. Corporate political spending was growing before Citizens United, but the decision opened the floodgates to the unlimited super PAC spending and undisclosed dark money we suffer from today. Between 2008 and 2024, reported “independent” expenditures by ...