For the entire week, the front page of my hometown newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, has been devoted to two major stories: Gov. Arnold Schwarzennegger’s special election initiatives and the opening of the European front in the war between the West and militant Islam. The Chronicle reporters haven’t yet referred to the growing insurrection in [...]
It’s weeks like these that make one wonder if Arnold Schwarzenegger wished he stuck to movie stardom and real estate barony rather than trying to save California from itself, wishing instead that he were perhaps lounging on the French Riviera with fellow Europhiles like Johnny Depp and Gweneth Paltrow in salons where the conversations inevitably [...]
Country Joe Mac Donald penned that 1960s memorable musical refrain—So it’s one, two, three, what’re we fightin’ for?/Don’t give a damn, next stop is Viet Nam. He was also one of the warm up acts for the Welcome Home Cindy Sheehan event held last week at the Grand Lake Theater here in Oakland. Not one [...]
Part One: Break the Gerrymander or Bust In the 1830s, Alexis de Toqueville, coined an immortal phrase, the tyranny of the majority. While touring our young country, the French journalist and aristocrat became an enthusiast for the American experiment, yet he presciently warned that, like republics of antiquity, universal suffrage leads to the ‘public treasury [...]
On a September morning in 490 B.C., 9,000 free citizen soldiers from Athens watched the 26,000 Persians, disembarking their ships that were beached beside the plain of Marathon. On the bluffs above, the Athenian general, Militiades, saw that the Persians were not fully prepared. Their archers, who could flood the sky with arrows, were not [...]
With the reelection of George Bush, the world has been put on notice that his doctrine of preemption will stay in place and that the U.S., in waging war on terror, will stay on offense. If new theaters are opened and the conflict widens or worsens, it’s apparent the country’s mettle and resolve will be [...]
For those of us in California who fear we may be losing the culture that was handed down to us from the Enlightenment of Hobbes, Locke, and Smith and of course, our founders, men such as Jefferson and Madison, the rise of Cruz Bustamante may bear some alarming parallels to the career of the fifth [...]
It’s pretty clear that, Victor Davis Hanson, is on a roll. Just as communist sympathizers and apologists of the 60s and 70s, together with their press patrons, were successful in making it worse to call someone a communist than it was to be one (never mind the murder of millions), it seems that it has [...]
Trulock’s Code Name Kindred Spirit Poses the Question: Who Stole the Bullets? The recent indictment of Katrina Leung, a millionaire socialite who assisted U.S. intelligence efforts as a federal informant and now faces 50 years in prison if found guilty of being a double agent for the Chinese government, underscores the extent to which the [...]
