For what is probably my second favorite takedown of The Huffington Post, after last year’s TNR cover story by Isaac Chotiner. (The Atlantic’s Ray Gustini calls Mayer’s tirade “less than cogent,” but surely his facility with extended metaphor makes up for that.) But now let me say a word in HuffPo’s defense. Unlike Mayer, I believe that a … Read more
One non-bigoted case against the erroneously-named “Ground Zero mosque” seems to go something like this: “Religious freedom is legitimate and important, and the promoters of the planned community center have a constitutional right to build the complex in Lower Manhattan. But still, the community center should be built somewhere else, out of sensitivity to earnestly … Read more
I’m starting to think that Ross Douthat may have a split personality disorder. As I wrote a few weeks ago, Douthat has “a wonderful way of casually saying things that you don’t hear many conservatives say.” Today’s column is no different: he begins by explaining that the usual conservative arguments against gay marriage have “lost … Read more
The manufactured controversy over what has ludicrously come to be called the “Ground Zero Mosque” has a lot of depressing aspects. But easily the most surprising and, for me, upsetting development is that the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish human rights organization, has sided with Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and the other opportunistic GOP pols who … Read more
From the Economist via Bloomberg, the most worrisome news I read today. The gist of the story: China’s banking regulator told lenders last month to conduct a new round of stress tests to gauge the impact of residential property prices falling as much as 60 percent in the hardest-hit markets, a person with knowledge of … Read more
The Harvard Political Review has joined with other college political publications to form the Alliance of Collegiate Editors (ACE), hoping to generate cross-campus dialogue on political issues. The first topic we will discuss is class-based affirmative action. Class-based affirmative action is an issue on which unorthodox liberals and unorthodox conservatives seem to have found common … Read more