Author: Ron Coleman

“Asking for Coffee Not Grounds for Sex Harassment Suit”: [Judge Berle M. ] Schiller found that plaintiff Tamara Klopfenstein failed to allege even a prima facie case of sex discrimination because she cannot show that she was treated differently from any “similarly situated” male employees since there was only one receptionist in the office and […]

On the eve of the Beijing Olympics — which is nothing if not a branding, merchandising and licensing bonanza to which athletes are invited — a nervous Chinese government official writes in the Wall Street Journal that that the era of Chinese counterfeiting is about to end, actually, and here’s why: How will we do […]

The Associated Press is getting the vapors, and says it’s all “spinning out of control”: Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition and health care border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage in Iraq, Afghanistan and against terrorism. Horatio Alger, twist in […]

Bill Clinton still has the reflexes: Bill Clinton on Tuesday canceled a commencement speech at the University of California, Los Angeles, because of a lingering labor dispute. . . . “Due to the ongoing labor dispute, he regrets that he will be unable to participate in commencement this year and he wishes the UCLA graduates […]

My friend Pamela Geller offers, in somewhat more polemic language than I would use, a nonetheless compelling antidote to the largely unexamined conception — to some extent uncritically passed along by me — that Barack Obama has serious intellectual achievements of which he can rightly boast. I very much appreciate the point. It’s one I […]

The Iron Lady: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton quickly apologized Friday after citing the June 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in defending her decision to keep running for the Democratic presidential nomination despite increasingly long odds. “I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation and in particular the Kennedy […]

Steve Boriss on the Associated Press: Marshall Field III, grandson of the founder of the department store of the same name, also challenged the AP monopoly with mixed results. He tried to launch the Chicago Sun in 1941, but struggled because AP member Chicago Tribune blocked his membership, freezing him out of the ultra low-cost […]

Michael Young at Reason Magazine is shocked, shocked at all that “strange new respect” being directed to Hezbollah by “the writer and academic Norman Finkelstein.” (Via Goldberg, via Instapundit.) “Writer and academic”? Yeah, wasn’t Joseph Goebbels one of those, too? Then, as a topper — Noam Chomsky! Sympathetic to Arab mass murderers, those guys? Really? […]

Lexington Green: [P]utting aside the bogus and irresponsible notion of “unipolarity”, I suppose it is fair to say, in a taxonomic rather than invidious way, that America is the global hegemon. It is the primary provider of security, it is the primary determiner of the rules of the international game, etc. So let’s be charitable […]

ABC News reports that former President Jimmy Carter will not be endorsing any Democratic candidate soon. “The only thing I know is that, I have not made an endorsement, and don’t intend to, until the time of the convention,” said America’s most contemptible living former President. The charming thing is that this news story seems […]

Slate is different from you and me. Slate can publish idiotic stuff like this essay by Daniel Gross, coyly pretending to describe the real “problem class” in America — the “dysfunctional overclass,” i.e., the super rich: There are important differences between the underclass and the overclass, notes Susan Mayer, dean of the University of Chicago’s […]

Shannon Love: Obama’s close association with Rev. Wright may have destroyed his political ambitions by undermining the perception that he is a new kind of African-American politician, who does not see white Americans as evil. It called into question the sincerity of his views about the majority of Americans and American institutions. How can he […]

Glenn Reynolds writes: NETWORK SOLUTIONS SHUTS DOWN A WEBSITE under Islamist pressure. I’m guessing they wouldn’t respond to complaints from Baptists quite so readily. UPDATE: Reader Antoinette Aubert emails: “Baptists don’t blow people up for disagreeing with them. Heck Baptists don’t even sue you for disagreeing with them. Thus does multi-culturalism make cowards of us […]

Instapundit links to this headline: ABC NEWS: Buried in Eloquence, Obama Contradictions About Pastor. It is rather ironic how the definition of eloquence has devolved. It once meant a talent for powerfully, persuasively and elegantly communicating ideas. Now it is used to describe the use of pretty language to obscure meaning. There are other words […]

In the New York Times: The $1.6 million Templeton Prize, the richest award made to an individual by a philanthropic organization, was given Wednesday to Michael Heller, 72, a Roman Catholic priest, cosmologist and philosopher who has spent his life asking, and perhaps more impressively answering, questions like “Does the universe need to have a […]

Since blogging this story about the murder in the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva in Jerusalem on Thursday, I haven’t been too inclined toward political, humor or clever blogging. I left that story at the top of my blog, therefore, and with this I will make my final points on the matter for now, though, and… “move […]

Politico.com reports on Michelle Obama’s Princeton senior thesis: “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before,” the future Mrs. Obama wrote in her thesis introduction. “I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be […]

Instapundit: ELEANOR CLIFT: “Al Gore on the second ballot: A scenario that a few weeks ago seemed preposterous is beginning to look plausible to some nervous Democrats looking for a way out of the deadlock between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.” This seems more like a pundit’s dream than anything that’s likely to happen. But […]

The nomination is all but sealed up. There will be some interest about the VP pick. Then Republicans with any brains will line up — as they did for George H. W. Bush, for example, who we forget made quite a contrasting figure when compared to his boss — and work together to keep two […]

Millions, that is. There’s lots of juicy Dem-side speculation here about where that money came from, where it didn’t, and whether it was necessary at all. I just find it so extraordinary that no one really finds it all that extraordinary that Senator Clinton has this kind of gelt lying around. Emily Yoffe comes up […]

What is it about conservatives that makes us so eager to lose? I wrote this yesterday (excerpt): Here’s something … conservatives must understand if they don’t want to relegated to a fringe: The electorate is not all that conservative. We will not win the Presidency with a strong conservative candidate. You can’t deduce anything from […]

Caroline Kennedy endorses Senator Obama, saying America needs a President like her father: My reasons are patriotic, political and personal, and the three are intertwined. All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives, that they got involved in public service or politics because he asked them to. And the generation […]

If only it were this easy: A mailer from a congressional candidate’s campaign contains a photo of his head attached to an image of a different body that makes him look thinner. The photo is presented as a true image of Dean Hrbacek, a Republican former mayor of Sugar Land. In reality, it is a […]

Mark R. Levin: Huckabee continues to use his faith as a weapon against those who question not his faith, but his political populism — much of which he shares with secular progressives. And he is clearly hoping to stir up resentment among Evangelical Christians against the other elements of the conservative movement and Republican Party […]

The definitive voice on the inevitable Bush / Cheney impeachment must be that of George McGovern, who writes “Why I Believe Bush Must Go” in the Washington Post. Via The Corner. Does being the worst-ever-loser in a Presidential election give you a free spot in the Post for life? McGovern adds nothing new here, not […]

I have reprinted, at my blog Likelihood of Success, a few “best of” posts these last couple of weeks of the year. Best of me, says me, kind of thing. Now that J. K. Rowling may upend not only whatever degree of artistic resolution she achieved with the seventh book but my title as well, […]

Gallup reports — utterly buried in an article about how Hillary Clinton is America’s most admired woman (not the subject of this post) — that none other than President George W. Bush is America’s most admired man. (Via Instapundit.) That is the same George W. Bush who lives on Pennsylvania Avenue. Not his father, the […]

Maureen Dowd (via I/P): Certainly Bill wants to repay Hill for those traumatic times when he had to hide behind her skirt. And certainly he feels that his legacy is tied to her. He suggests to Matt Bai in today’s Times Magazine that she can be F.D.R. to his Teddy Roosevelt, getting through the ideas […]

From the New York Times: Former President Bill Clinton made an unusually direct attack Friday night on Senator Barack Obama, one of his wife’s leading rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, suggesting that voters who would support someone with Mr. Obama’s experience were willing to “roll the dice” on the presidency.Appearing on “The Charlie Rose […]

This post is a couple of years old, but it is timeless, and no one who reads this blog has read it — believe me. Toby Katz explains some harsh truths about the “Jewish Christmas”: With Chanuka coming in a few days we can be sure that along with the Chanuka tree and the Chanuka […]