World

Like Time’s Jay Newton-Small, I’ve never quite understood why so many Washington pundits have assumed Sarah Palin has no interest in running for President. Sure, she’s not been playing the game according to the Beltway Playbook but that’s exactly the point. As Jay reminds us, Mrs Palin has previous on this: In many ways, Palin’s moves mirror her run for governor. She came from the outside, taking down the GOP establishment, including the formidable Governor Frank Murkowski. She stayed on the outside for months, not bothering to build a campaign but delivering key speeches across the state attacking “the old boys club” that raised speculation she’d potentially run. And, finally,

By sacking General McChrystal for humiliating the presidential team in a rock magazine, Barack Obama reasserted the American Founding Fathers’ principle: ‘The President shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy.’ Quite right too: the military must be subservient to (civilian) state control. By sacking General McChrystal for humiliating the presidential team in a rock magazine, Barack Obama reasserted the American Founding Fathers’ principle: ‘The President shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy.’ Quite right too: the military must be subservient to (civilian) state control. The Roman republic collapsed in the 1st century bc because this principle was compromised. That the political top dogs also led the armies raised

I suspect Rod Liddle’s analysis of the BBC and, more especially still, the mentality of its top brass is acute and persuasive: My suspicion is that it will become increasingly difficult to justify a license fee when the balance of the BBC’s output is tilted so far in favour of populism and ratings chasing. This is the point I made to Alan; that times have changed, the market has changed and that no matter how fine a “product” Radio Five, say, or Strictly might be, they can easily be done elsewhere. You would have thought I’d suggested rogering his grandmother; there was an immediate bristling and a refusal to engage

Like Satan, Sodomy and Socialism, Soccer begins with an S. Obviously, then, it’s un-American and likely to corrupt these great United States. Hats off to Marc Thiessen for scrawling the most absurd anti-soccer nonsense of the World Cup. At long last we have a winner: The world is crazy for soccer, but most Americans don’t give a hoot about the sport. Why? Many years ago, my former White House colleague Bill McGurn pointed out to me the real reason soccer hasn’t caught on in the good old U.S.A. It’s simple, really: Soccer is a socialist sport. Think about it. Soccer is the only sport in the world where you cannot

A shout-out to Canadian friends and readers on this, your national day. Another year passed: another year of peace and prosperity in the northland. Here’s my friend Will Wilkinson writing about how he became an accidental Canadian: As the clock struck midnight on April 17, 2009, the Canadian citizenship of my Saskatchewan-born but subsequently naturalized American father was restored. And thus, thanks to Bill C-37, an amendment to the Canadian Citizenship Act, so was mine. Under its terms, all Canadians who had lost their citizenship when they took on a new nationality—i.e., Canadians like my dad, who became an American in June 1965—regained it, as did their first generation of

Tom Switzer knows much more about Australian politics than I ever will, so I commend his post on Kevin Rudd’s downfall to you. (For an alternative take see John McTernan here.) What I would say, mind you, is that it’s a bad idea for a Prime Minister to abandon his signature issue simply because the going gets a little bit tough. That’s what Rudd did on climate change legislation* however and, frankly, even from a distance of many thousands of miles, one can see why his stock would struggle to recover from that debacle. Anyway, let’s talk about journalism and political terminology. Reading the accounts of Australia’s latest political shenanigans