Editorial writers and economists debate the real effects of the minimum wage.

The New York Times editorial page endorses Ned Lamont, while The Washington Post and The Hartford Courant like Joe Lieberman.

Both The New York Times’s Paul Krugman and The Washington Post’s Sebastian Mallaby compare Israel’s war with Hezbollah to the U.S. war in Iraq. Krugman says both wars are based on a “fantasy,” and Mallaby [...]

Category: The Middle East, Iraq, National Security
Newsweek senior editor Michael Hirsh says American soldiers have become “unwitting recruits for the insurgency.” He writes:

Reading “Fiasco,” Thomas Ricks’s devastating new book about the Iraq war, brought back memories for me. Memories of going on night raids in Samarra in January 2004, in the heart of the [...]

Yale law professor Jack Balkin breaks down the Bush administration’s explanation for why the 1996 War Crimes Act needs to be amended. He writes at the group legal blog Balkinization:

So the Administration position, post-Hamdan, is that Congress should excuse Americans (and Administration officials) from liability for possible war crimes, either because the act is unnecessary [...]

At last, we can start blaming the French again: Writing in The Los Angeles Times, Timothy Garton Ash says that Europe has a “strong claim to be among the earliest causes” of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. He writes:

The Russian pogroms of 1881; the French mob chanting “à bas les juifs” as Capt. [...]

“Although Hezbollah may have had an interest in carrying out the latest attack as a push-back against internal Lebanese pressure to disarm, it is difficult to imagine that the group would have kidnapped two Israeli soldiers and killed several others without orders from Iran,” writes Daniel Benjamin, a member of the National Security Council [...]

Let the mighty Ashcroft soar: Ruth Marcus pines for the good ol’ days when John Ashcroft was the nation’s attorney general. “Alberto Gonzales is achieving something remarkable, even miraculous, as attorney general: He is making John Ashcroft look good,” she writes in her Washington Post column. She adds, “There is no polite way to put [...]

The Theocon Con: In the August/September issue of First Things, Ross Douthat criticizes the resurgence of an “old paranoia,” the “notion that 21st-century America is slouching toward theocracy.” In a review of Kevin Phillips’s “American Theocracy,” James Rudin’s “The Baptizing of America,” Michelle Goldberg’s “Kingdom Coming,” and Randall Balmer’s “Thy Kingdom Come,” Douthat, an associate [...]

Former daily newspaper movie critic Rod Dreher reveals his retort to critic-haters: “Every now and then I’d run into somebody who, upon finding out what I did for a living, would say, ‘If the critics loved a movie, I stay away from it, and if they hated it, I figure it’s something I’d enjoy.’ My [...]

Writing at The Corner, National Review editor Rich Lowry objects to two columns in The Washington Post last week that compared the current crisis in the Middle East to the run-up to World War I. “These columns by David Ignatius and Harold Meyerson yesterday endorsed the theory of an inexorable, unintended slide toward war in [...]

“[T]he biggest ethnic conflict in the Middle East today is not between Jews and Arabs. It is between Sunni and Shiite Muslims,” historian Niall Ferguson writes in The Los Angeles Times. He continues:

For Israel, spiraling Sunni-Shiite conflict is a dark cloud with a silver lining. The worse it gets, the harder it will be [...]

Is Andrew Sullivan a conservative? “There are no conservatives I know of who consider Andrew Sullivan a conservative,” National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru recently said of Sullivan, whose book “The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back” will be published this fall. Sullivan responded to Ponnuru with a blog post titled, “Excommunicated.” [...]

Writing at his Washington Realist blog, Nikolas K. Gvosdev, editor of The National Interest, revises his theory of the “Napoleonic conundrum” in the Middle East by comparing the military campaigns being waged by Israel and the United States to Napoleon’s campaigns in Spain. He writes:

Napoleon’s campaign in Spain bears some eerie resemblances to our current [...]

Anthony Sacramone, the managing editor of First Things, is tired of the assumption that the countryside is a more spiritual environs than a teeming metropolis. Rod Dreher, the editor of the Sunday commentary section of The Dallas Morning News and the author of “Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip [...]

On The Washington Post op-ed page, Republican Senator George Voinovich of Ohio says that if John Bolton doesn’t continue as ambassador to the United Nations, then the terrorists have won. Really: “Should the president choose to renominate him, I cannot imagine a worse message to send to the terrorists — and to other nations deciding [...]