History

A few items from the benevolent news front: Helen Collins, an “80-year-old woman with no flying experience,” safely landed a plane as it was running out of gas after the pilot died. An airport official said, "She was remarkable on the radio... She kept her composure and sounded like she…

Noteworthy news and views from the week ending May 5, 2012 The Real Life of Julia Barack Obama’s campaign recently launched a web page titled, “The Life of Julia.” We are supposed to “look at how President Obama's policies help one woman over her lifetime.” David Harsanyi sensibly asks, “Who…

The Israeli Freedom Movement (aka the New Liberal Movement), led a counter protest against leftist organizations celebrating May Day. Boaz Arad a founder of the IFM, was quoted in Israel National News, saying, “We came here to commemorate more than 100 million victims of the socialistic agenda in the 20th century.…

MSNBC recently featured a favorable discussion of the ideas of Karl Marx in the context of a proposed May Day “general strike.” To put this in context: MSNBC would never do the same with respect to the ideas of Adolf Hitler, yet Marxists slaughtered many millions more people than the…

Marxism is “good in theory but not in practice,” many claim. Or, it was “misapplied” by the murderous regimes that slaughtered some 100 million people, others say. Neither claim is correct, argues historian C. Bradley Thompson in a recent talk delivered at the Foundation for Economic Education. Rather, Thompson shows,…

One perversity of modern American culture is the propensity of some to treat totalitarian mass murderers as “cool” kitsch. Consider, for example, the love affair of many leftist college students with the totalitarian and mass-murderer Che Guevara. Recently, when I attended the conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education,…

 Commenting on the Supreme Court session regarding Obamacare, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr. wrote: And in arguing for restraint, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked what was wrong with leaving as much discretion as possible “in the hands of the people who should be fixing this, not us.” It was nice…

Two U.S. senators a few weeks ago went to Cuba to discuss the release of jailed American, Alan Gross, with Cuban dictator Raul Castro. Gross “is serving a 15-year jail term for spiriting satellite and other communications equipment onto the island while on a USAID-funded democracy-building program. Cuba considers the…

In a brief video, constitutional law professor Elizabeth Price Foley discusses the Institute for Justice’s amicus brief, which she co-authored, on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) for the U.S. Supreme Court. Here’s an excerpt: It’s always been the case under Anglo-American law that contracts have to be…

The greatest monument we can offer to George Washington is to preserve and expand the Blessings of Liberty for which he so valiantly fought.