A few brief items, and then to work.

The question before us is, Does The New York Times have any dignity at all? Since early January, The Times has employed William Kristol as a weekly columnist. Kristol is a right-winger so extreme that he teeters on the divide at...

I'd like to start by mentioning a piece that I wrote for Dissent magazine, on the influential economist Friedrich Hayek, a hero of the right. It's in the current edition, Winter 2008. I'd been wanting to write about Hayek for a while, and I was pleased with how it...

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Atlas Shrugged, the cult classic by the cult leader Ayn Rand. Like her other works of fiction and nonfiction, the book manages to be both deeply sinister and deeply ridiculous, which isn't so easy to do.

Terry Teachout has a piece...

Like any thinking person, I had mixed feelings about Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia on Monday. Not as regards the freedom of speech issue; I'd defend the right of Nazis and Stalinists to speak publicly. But there is a difference between allowing someone to speak and providing a...

Do you have a favorite right-wing spouter of nonsense? Someone who particularly appalls you? I have to admit that there's one right-wing pundit who gets to me more than most, even though he's nowhere near the worst of them. So I'd like to occasionally and recurringly take issue on these...

Last week I wrote about Michael Moore's ridiculous new film, Sicko, and some of the equally ridiculous right-wing reactions to it. Shortly thereafter, I received a challenge from Michael Cannon, a health care policy expert at the Cato Institute. Cannon highlighted some points for debate, and we agreed to...

I'd been holding off on seeing Michael Moore's new film, Sicko, because I am really more interested in the right-wing reaction to it than I am in the film itself. As the author of a book that harshly criticized Moore -- from a left-liberal point of view -- for...

So Bush will spare I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby jail time for his perjury. Could this surprise anyone? Libby, as Dick Cheney's former deputy, truly knows where the bodies are buried - and given what we know of Cheney's role in formulating the torture policies at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and...

Three items of interest today, two from the radical far-right journal The National Review, one from real life.

Over at National Review, John Derbyshire -- an occasional voice of reason at that depressing haven for social fantasy of all kinds -- observes, "The exchanges about the Senate's...

The New York Times recently ran an op-ed piece by Sam Brownback. Brownback is the Kansas senator and influential "cultural conservative" who is running for president. The background to the piece is that, at the first Republican presidential debate on May 3, the candidates were asked if any among...

Perhaps starting a blog with a comment about the Iraq war is a bit much. But this is the week after Memorial Day; we are in a war; and we're losing. Surely our soldiers deserve a public discussion of the war and the politics that fuel it that is as...