When is a free market a bad thing?  Well, I’m not sure.  But this might mark one of those occasions: The International Herald Tribune newspaper has defended its acceptance of an advertisement seeking bids for two large scale nuclear reactors in Iran. The ad appeared on April 20, including in the edition of the IHT distributed with the English version of the Haaretz daily. Inviting bidders to help in the

Neither does Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, writing in Reason.  In fact, he found just the opposite to be the case, though in a version far more watered down than Moscow would have liked: The studio system, in which projects were closely supervised, made the insertion of [Communist] propaganda difficult if not impossible. Hollywood did not become a bastion of Stalinist propaganda, except as part of the war effort, when Russia was

protein wisdom summary: Wait, Tommy Thompson is running?  And what was Ron Paul doing there?  Did Nick Gillespie cancel the Thursday night poker game or something? Okay, actually, I didn’t bother to watch the thing.  “CSI” was channeling the “X-Files,” and for those of us who follow our charts, we know better than to get anywhere near a blue suit on nights like that.  But for you hardcore debate junkies,

From the Herald Tribune, “Many potential Padilla jurors unsure of 9/11 attacks blame”: A significant number of potential jurors in the Jose Padilla terrorism support case say they aren’t sure who is responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, many because they don’t trust the news media or U.S. government pronouncements. “There are too many ifs, too many things going on,” one male juror said. “I don’t know the

No word on what stay-at-home father’s work is worth (I blame for this oversight the institutionalized sexism that has no doubt “inscribed” Reuters’ Ellen Wulfhorst), but if you believe what the establishment feminists tell you, the work I’m doing as a man is probably worth, say, $164K. And while I find that calculus flattering, the way the final number is determined (based on potential earnings for analogous jobs not subject

Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center, the documentary PBS finds, alternately, too long, too alarmist, too one-sided, and too devoid of scenes depicting the heroism of Latinos and American Indians to air, is reviewed at Ace’s place by commenter spongeworthy, a friend of the filmmakers who attended a New York premiere. The review answers the PBS justifications for not airing the documentary (the final cut was 52 minutes),

Dan Riehl has the story of some Virginia legislators who are putting pressure on four Virginia radio stations to drop libertarian talk-show host Neal Boortz’s show over comments he made in the wake of the VT shootings (Boortz attributed the fact that students didn’t fight back to the “wussification of America,” which he blamed on the left-wing nannystate). The radio stations reported that they received very little in the way

“Rice meets with Syrian counterpart”: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met Syria’s foreign minister Thursday in the first high-level talks between the two countries in years, hours after the chief military spokesman in Iraq said Syria had moved to reduce “the flow of foreign fighters” across its border. The Bush administration has shunned Syria, which it considers a state supporter of terrorism, and last month President Bush assailed House Speaker

Ms. Baez calls the snub “strange irony”—which leads me to conclude that she defines “strange irony” differently than most of us.  Say, as “completely predictable.” From the Washington Post: Folk singer and anti-war activist Joan Baez says she doesn’t know why she was not allowed to perform for recovering soldiers recently at Walter Reed Army Medical Center as she planned. In a letter to The Washington Post published Wednesday, she

Funny, I seem to recall a lot of Democrats supporting his appointment.  Which I guess was just so that they could cut off his funding, deny the truth of his accounts about who we’re fighting in Iraq, and in essence, paint the military as part of the great neocon conspiracy to keep us fighting in Iraq on behalf of Halliburton and the monied Jews. Petraeus?  An administration automaton—a political mouthpiece