My friend and occasional Tracinski Letter contributor Jack Wakeland has been giving me a hard time because I haven’t been covering very much of the debate over new gun control measures after the Newtown massacre. He’s right, of course, so below I am copying some of Jack’s comments on the issue, and as a special [...]
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Are Objectivists Libertarians?
In my RCP newsletter, I’ve been chronicling Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s recent heroics and ascent within the Republican Party. Paul represents, not just the influence of the Tea Party, but also the growing influence of the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, which was so famously represented by his father, Ron Paul. But if the [...]
Politics Is Boring
Annual Report from The Tracinski Letter This year, I’m starting a new tradition: an end-of year “annual report” discussing what I’ve done in the past year and what’s coming for next year, both in terms of the logistics of the newsletter and in terms of its intellectual content. This has, of course, been a big [...]
The Intellectual Collapse of Environmentalism
The online magazine Slate reports on a “growing reassessment under way in the environmental community.” Reassessment is one way of referring to it. “Intellectual collapse” is more like it. In 2005, two renegade greens tried to kill off environmentalism in broad daylight. The environmental movement, they said in a provocative essay, had grown stale and [...]
Reason and Emotion in Newtown
I had prepared a full slate of other news items to cover today, but it doesn’t look like I will be able to talk about anything before addressing yesterday’s massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. The story is quite emotionally disturbing, even more so than the school shootings we’ve seen in the past because most of the [...]
Champions
My recent post-mortem on the Romney campaign is up at RealClearPolitics. But the point of this post-mortem is not to look backward. It is to enable us to look forward. After thinking about it a little more I can sum up the implication for the future in these terms: we desperately need champions for free [...]
Unions vs. Workers
As a follow-up to my recent article on the role of unions in the demise of Hostess, the venerable baker of junk-food snacks, I just came across one of the better pieces of economic reporting on this case, from the Wall Street Journal‘s Holman Jenkins. Jenkins argues that the press has been placing blame on [...]
The “Red State” I Hope Will Disappear
There were a few consolations that we could find from last week’s election, but not much in the way of actual good news. But there was one piece of election news that I found to be very heartening. I’ve been referring my readers to maps showing county-by-county election results, and I want to refer them [...]
Rogue States, International Edition
In addition to his comments on gun control, Jack Wakeland also sent me a comment on a rather more dangerous “rogue state,” North Korea, which has been outdoing its usual exaggerated and erratic threats of war. Jack brought my attention to a report that potentially sheds light on North Korea’s behavior. “Incomprehensible aggression from dictatorships [...]