Charles Krauthammer is no fan of President Obama, but he had no use for the silly (and largely misinformed) carping over the cost of the president’s recent trip to Asia. I agree with Krauthammer. It’s important for Presidents of the United States to go abroad for these diplomatic missions. The president is America’s diplomat-in-chief. When presidents take such trips, it is in everybody’s interest that he be kept safe. More substantively, I emphatically agree with Krauthammer...

Reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s outstanding book, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, roused some thoughts in me regarding the separation of Church and State, something I see as a positive good. I posted about it over on my blog. Out of respect to those who adhere to religious beliefs other than my own, I’m not posting it here. Still, I felt that Moderate Voice readers of all stripes might be interested in a discussion of the roots of this important principle for the United...

Moments matter. That’s the first of many lessons we are likely to derive from the suicide of Rutgers student Tyler Clementi this past September 22. If allegations made by local law enforcement officials are correct, Clementi’s tragic death followed the filming and webcasting of a sexual encounter involving Clementi and another person in a college dorm room. It’s alleged that two Rutgers students, Dharun Ravi, Clementi’s roommate, and Molly Wei, had a moment when they made...

I present my take from a Christian perspective on one Gainseville pastor’s plans to burn Korans, here. The perspective of the piece is overtly Christian, which is why I’m not posting it here. But I thought TMV readers might be interested.

That’s what Gallup’s poll numbers for generic Democrats and Republicans shows. But, of course, generic candidates don’t appear on the ballots in any state or congressional district. So, the poll may mean less than nothing.

That’s what historian Rick Shenkman presents here. It makes me feel good that someone as sharp as Shenkman is, nonetheless misses grammatical errors just as I do when I blog. Kidding aside, this article is worth the few minutes it’ll take you to read it: It provides some good basic economics while putting the events it chronicles in context. [This has been crossposted at my personal blog.]

The Week has an interesting rundown of varied opinions on the merits of extending the Bush tax cuts, in part, in whole, or not at all.

Mr. President, if I were you, I would head to the White House press briefing room and make something like the following statement, without notes or teleprompter. The flap caused by General McChrystal’s and his staff’s comments to Rolling Stone are consequential enough for you and the country to say something like what follows: I have relieved General Stanley McChrystal of his command in Afghanistan. He will be reassigned to the Pentagon. A replacement will be named for him in the next...

I’m a big fan of the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and just finished re-reading the first Holmes novella, A Study in Scarlet, published in 1887. In it, Holmes, with his super-human powers of deduction, determines “whodunit,” yet two bumbling Scotland Yard inspectors, Gregson and Lestrade get the credit. This outrages Holmes’ friend, Dr. Watson, even though Holmes had warned him several times that this would be the case. “I don’t see that...

that made Abraham Lincoln president. (Crossposted here.)

If you watched Judy Woodruff’s interview of Wes Moore on The PBS Evening News tonight, you may be have thought the same thing I thought: this Wes Moore will run for president some day. Check out this guy’s bio. [This has been cross-posted on my blog.]

Thomas Friedman says so. (Thanks to Jill Miller Zimon, TMV contributor, for linking to this over on Facebook.) For an eye-opening discussion of the US national debt and what it may take to dig out from under it, I recommend David M. Walker’s book, Comeback America. I watched the BBC coverage of the British elections, first online and then on CSPAN, this past Thursday evening. Commentators indicated that whoever finally heads a coalition government in the UK may, if they do their work well,...

Hey, Roman Polanski! You’re perfectly willing to use the media to present your “case.” So, decrying the possibility your being served up on a media platter if you are successfully extradited to the US doesn’t move me. You broke the law and then skipped the country. It’s time to pay the piper, man! [This was crossposted at my personal blog.]

First, Joe Lieberman was considered too conservative to be a Democrat in Connecticut. Now, Charlie Crist, amid signs that he could win as an independent in the 2010 Florida Senate race, has evidently been deemed too liberal to be a Republican in Florida. Are plausible independent runs for statewide offices a trend for the future? My guess is that it is. Fewer people these days identify firmly with either party and greater numbers express impatience with the parroted orthodoxies evident in both Republican...

Sudan’s election results confirm that in many ways, the country remains “the sick man” of Africa.

While protesters celebrate the thirty-first anniversary of their country’s Islamic revolution by taking to the streets and the country’s president declares Iran to be “nuclear,” the regime in Tehran is already feeling the heat from imminent US sanctions, according to Mark Dubowitz. [This has been crossposted at my personal blog.]

This comes from Bob Dylan’s appearance at a White House celebration of the Civil Rights movement. The use of the upright bass and the piano are exquisite. [Thanks to Ann Althouse for pointing me to this.] [I post things like this at my personal blog frequently.]

This much is certain: Had Abraham Lincoln failed at his do-or-die debut in New York, he would never have won his party’s presidential nomination three months later, not to mention election to the White House that November. Such was the impact of a triumph in the nation’s media capital. Had he stumbled, none of the challenges that roiled his presidency would ever have tested his iron will. To paraphrase his own later words, he would likely have “escaped history” altogether. Read the whole...

Here.

Here.

The US government doesn’t know primarily because the Europeans don’t seem to know, according to the BBC’s Gavin Hewitt.

The seriousness of the ongoing saga of US federal budget deficits is the topic of two interesting recent articles. First, this from The New York Times. Then, this from the BBC. My son, a seminary student with undergraduate degrees in History and Philosophy, linked to it over on Facebook. It elicited the following moderate, non-partisan rant from me.* (By the way, the Walker book to which I refer is Comeback America: Turning the Country Around and Restoring Fiscal Responsibility by David Walker.): This...

Democrats were understandably glum after Scott Brown’s win over Martha Coakley in the special election for the unexpired US Senate term of the late Edward Kennedy. Brown could make life difficult for President Obama, who has made health care a centerpiece of his presidency. But if I read Barack Obama correctly, he may just now be seeing a silver lining in Brown’s Massachusetts victory. Consider Obama’s two most recent Democratic predecessors. Jimmy Carter went to Washington with...

Two simple suggestions…and why I make them here.

That’s the question being asked in today’s online dispatch from The Week. I talked about this as a potential problem for then-Senator Obama during the 2008 campaign. Fair or not, perceptions are usually taken as reality. The perception of the President as cool and detached may not be one he wants to foster.