1. I saw Paul Ryan on today’s Fox News Sunday . Ryan did a pretty good job making his proposed spending cuts and premium support Medicare policies seem like nonideological common sense He did about as well as could reasonably have been expected given the subject matter. I was really impressed . . . . Continue Reading »
Citing a shortage of swordsmen, Saudi Arabia is considering performing executions using firing squads instead of public beheadings : A joint Saudi committee composed of representatives of the ministries of interior, justice and health is mulling the replacement of beheading with firing squads for . . . . Continue Reading »
When I FLOATED the question of whether Cardinal O’Malley would be a plausible pope, I expected the objections that he’s a weak and vacillating administrator and that he was present at Kennedy’s funeral. But at this point I’ve gotten a dozen or more emails in addition to the . . . . Continue Reading »
For the small percentage they comprise of Catholics worldwide, Italians are disproportionately represented in the Roman Curia and ecclesial governance more broadly, not to mention their long history of native-born popes. And while the last memory of an Italian pope is now three decades old, . . . . Continue Reading »
This week, the papal conclave begins in Rome. Many expect it will end this week as well, with the election of Pope Benedict’s successor. But reader John McGinnis, a law professor at Northwestern and a leading expert on supermajority rules, alerts me to a recent change that may cause the . . . . Continue Reading »
As usual, the best discussion on THE FILIBUSTER is Pete’s, especially when supplemented by our most thoughtful threaders. I agree that it was A WORK OF GENIUS by a very able politician contending for the soul of the REPUBLICAN PARTY. The “neocons” from McCain to Graham to Bill . . . . Continue Reading »
From our archives, Richard John Neuhaus on the late Joseph Frank’s biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky : Frank is simply wrong when he writes that Karamazov is about “the great theme that had preoccupied [Dostoevsky] since Notes from Underground : the conflict between . . . . Continue Reading »
This post raises all sorts of interesting questions about President Obama’s proposal in his State of the Union Address to fund a project to map the human brain , a Human Neuron Project, if you will. I’ll focus on this one: If the research succeeded, it might result in better prosthetics . . . . Continue Reading »
1. Don’t cry for the Obama administration. If Bush-appointed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had made the same mistake as Eric Holder, and left the door open to the assassination of American citizen noncombatants on American soil in areas where the courts were still operating, the Democrats . . . . Continue Reading »
Timothy George argues that the next pope should be Catholic : As one involved in various church dialogues over the past thirty years, I have come to see the crucial role played by the Bishop of Rome in helping all Christians everywhere to work together for Christian unity. Far more than anything in . . . . Continue Reading »
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