Album sales experienced their worst week ever in August. The music industry blames their customers. Their customers blame the music industry. As I write @ the American Spectator, years of pushing horrible music on the public has resulted in terrible consequences for the recording industry.

Saul Alinsky's methods have impressed Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and, strangest of all, numerous tea party activists. Nearly four decades after his death, the community organizer is hotter than ever--despite the fact that nobody really knows what a community organizer does. Read my column @ Human Events to discover why the Rules for Radicals author didn't follow any rules.

For Democrats up for reelection this fall, there's no time like the past. Don't talk about Barack Obama. Talk about George Bush. Don't address concerns about building a mosque at Ground Zero. Dismiss the objections as "McCarthyism." Opponents of gay marriage? They're the same people who unleashed dogs and fire hoses upon black people in the South. That's the Hot Tub Time Machine School of American Politics, which I dissect in my column @ Human Events.

When Ray Bradbury was a boy, a magician informed him that he would live forever. This Sunday America's most popular and prolific short story writer turns 90--old by human standards, just getting started by the standards of immortals. When Bradbury was young, he cared too much about what critics thought of him, seeking to erase the pulp origins of his stories, running from the sci-fi label, and writing a few tales that flattered the political leanings of the literati. Now that he is an old man (by mortal standards), he could not care any less what anyone thinks of him. Read my celebration of Bradbury's birthday @ the American Spectator.

I didn't need a massive FBI file to convince me that Howard Zinn was a Communist. The massive tome he wrote was fairly persuasive on that point. For those who remain unconvinced, why would numerous unconnected people tell the FBI that Howard Zinn, then an unknown, was a member of the Communist Party? Read my piece @ City Journal that posits that like Zinn's A People's History of the United States, his '50s responses to questions from the FBI just don't add up.

The 1980s had a good 1990s and a better 2000s. More than two decades after its demise, the 1980s are more popular than ever. The decade lives in that Madness song on your iPod, during incessant cable-television airings of Sixteen Candles, and on eBay through a constant auction Atari 2600s. And it lives in Rob Sheffield's "Talking to Girls about Duran Duran: One Man's Quest for True Love and a Cooler Haircut." Read my review @ The American Spectator.

Calling the president "Hitler" used to be a beloved avocation for the American Left. But the rules have changed now that a Democrat is president. Read my column @ Human Events that explains how yesterday's Bush Haters have hilariously become today's O-bots lecturing the rest of us on the proper rhetorical decorum when addressing Mr. President.

The internet stimulates our brains but anesthetizes our minds. A combination of psychology, pop culture, technology, education, and myriad other fields, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains is an important book about a timely subject. Read it. But before you do, read my review of it @ the American Spectator.

True believers did not stop insisting that former State Department official Alger Hiss and journalist I.F. Stone were completely innocent of being Soviet spies once the evidence piled to Everest levels. Howard Zinn's FBI file, then, is not going to convince the Left that the "people's historian" was really the Kremlin's historian. Read my column @ Human Events that demonstrates that the Left is too heavily invested in the group lie on postwar domestic subversion to bail out now.

From honoring Van Jones with an Image Award to hosting Leonard Jeffries at a "unity summit," the NAACP has compiled an embarrassing track record of extremism in recent years. So why does anybody take seriously a group that has hosted Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan as keynote speakers when it lectures the Tea Parties about its extremists? Read my top-10 list of NAACP extremism @ Human Events.

"A racist is somebody who is winning an argument with a liberal," or so goes a popular bumpersticker slogan. The Tea Partiers and the backers of Arizona's new law curtailing illegal immigration can attest to the wisdom inherent within that bumpersticker philosophy. But as I explain in my column @ Human Events, the liberal tic of crying "racism" is backfiring on issue after issue.

The NAACP has so promiscuously hurled charges of racism at political opponents, like the Tea Partiers, that it has devalued the term. But decades ago, when the NAACP really stood for fighting discrimination and not merely for pushing a political agenda, it had to purge its sole African American founder for many of the sins it currently ascribes to the Tea Partiers. Read that ironic story @ Human Events.

Remember when Newsweek lambasted skeptics of man-made global warming as "the denial machine" in an infamous cover story that even their own writers ridiculed as propaganda? Well, just three summers later, the weekly has changed its tune. And as my column @ Human Events explains, this isn't the first time Newsweek has had an about-face on climate change. The golden age of the greens has faded to black.

The more connected we are through technology the less connected we are to other human beings. So argues William Powers in Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age. Read my review @ City Journal.

For anyone who understands the history of the Black Panthers, New Black Panthers getting away with thuggish tactics does not surprise. Their forebears regularly got rewarded, rather than punished, for their criminal enterprises. But, as I detail in my column @ Human Events, in contrast to allegations of mere voter intimidation, the "old" Black Panthers were getting away with rape and murder.

Robert Byrd served in the Ku Klux Klan and filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So why are leading Democrats eulogizing him as a great American? Read my inaugural "Decoding the Left" column in Human Events to discover why being a Democrat means never having to say you're sorry. The dirty secret of the Democrats is that the party of Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson was once the party of George Wallace, Theodore Bilbo, and Bull Connor.

When Hugh Hefner, a man who has been stuck in an adolescent male fantasy for more than five decades, heralds something as an advance for women, people might want to take his praise with a grain of salt. Fifty years ago, the FDA gave its imprimatur to The Pill. A half-century later, Hefner, Gloria Steinem, Hillary Swank, and others have celebrated The Pill's birthday as a crucial step in the liberation of women. But, as I write in my article @ the American Spectator, The Pill counter-intuitively opened the floodgates of abortion and illegitimacy--which, a study by the Pew Research Center demonstrates, has skyrocketed since The Pill's initial availability.

The Manson Family, Heaven's Gate's Hale Boppers, and Leopold and Loeb all lack academic defenders. But not Jim Jones' Peoples Temple. Rebecca Moore has made a career as an apologist for the political cult whose 1978 act of "revolutionary suicide" resulted in the deaths of more than 900 people. My article @ City Journal exposes the San Francisco politicians who fawned over Peoples Temple--and the academic who follows in their footsteps more than three decades later.

The federal government has already allocated almost $40 million to fund an Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate in Boston. Massachusetts representatives seek about $30 million more in the next budget. Read my piece @ the American Spectator, which asks why, with all of the money the Kennedys have and all of the money the Kennedys can rave, must the votaries of the late senator take from the taxpayer.

There are trendy movements and there are transformational movements. Two new books, Jason Mattera's Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation and Michael Graham's That's No Angry Mob, That's My Mom: Team Obama's Assault on Tea-Party, Talk-Radio Americans, discuss the potentially transformational, and certainly conflicting, major mass-movements of our times. Read my review @ the American Spectator.

In the late 1970s, the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart was the domain of Donna Summer, the Bee Gees, and Chic. Then The Knack's "My Sharona" came along and became the top song of 1979. It conquered disco and rescued rock 'n' roll. Doug Fieger, the man who co-wrote and sang "My Sharona," died earlier this week. Read my piece @ the American Spectator on the rise, fall, and curious contemporary relevance of The Knack's "My Sharona."

Patrick Kennedy has labeled the man who now sits in the senate seat his father held for 47 years a "joke." Does not that designation fit the eight-term Congressman better than it does Scott Brown? Read my piece @ the American Spectator and discover why Rhode Islanders don't find the joke of sending a mentally-ill recovering drug addict to Congress very funny anymore.

Scott Brown didn't just beat Martha Coakley. He erased Ted Kennedy's imprint on the Bay State, used the bluest state to flash a red light at ObamaCare, embarrassed the president of the United States, and sent Democrats running scared around the country. If Democrats aren't safe in Massachusetts, they aren't safe anywhere. Republicans winning in Massachusetts is the political equivalent of "When a Stranger Calls": "Yeah, Mr. President. We've traced the call. It's coming from inside of your house." Read my article @ City Journal explaining why Republican victory in Massachusetts will either serve as harbinger or alarm bell for Democrats. Wake up, or get a rude awakening in November.

Tomorrow, the History Channel airs "The People Speak," a series based on Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." Today, Big Hollywood features Howard Zinn, Intellectual Moron, an evisceration of said book based on my longer piece in "Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas." Read the piece here.

Do not adjust your television set. The teams gracing your big screen this weekend sporting odd color schemes and unfamiliar uniforms are NFL franchises, not high school clubs. The first time I watched teams play with throwback uniforms I thought it was cool. By the time the experience had reached the triple digits, the novelty had worn off. Read my article @ the American Spectator explaining that, while nine times out of ten a throwback conjures up tradition, the NFL's marketing gimmick undermines it.

Ayn Rand's detractors saw horns emerging from her head. Her acolytes saw a halo. Titles aside, two new biographies--Anne C. Heller's "Ayn Rand and the World She Made" and Jennifer Burns's "Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right"--depict a mere mortal whose life was more complex than an angel or devil. Read my book review @ City Journal that demonstrates why readers of this pair of biographies can be grateful that Ayn Rand was more human than the characters she created.

Twenty years ago this Monday, the greatest political development of my lifetime occurred: the opening (which precipitated the closing) of the Berlin Wall. For Westerners, the Berlin Wall served as the symbol of Communist oppression. In the Communist Bloc, the Berlin Wall functioned effectively as the survival mechanism of the German Democratic Republic. Twenty percent of the East German populace--more than three million people--had escaped in the decade or so preceding the Wall's construction. Had the rate of exodus continued, East Germany would have ceased to exist by about 1989. Read my contribution to City Journal's symposium celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, alongside remembrances by Claire Berlinski, Judith Miller, Roger Scruton, and Guy Sorman.

Since the issue of gay marriage arose in the 1990s, the Senate voted 85-14, and the House voted 342-67, for the Defense of Marriage Act that President Bill Clinton signed into law. Gay marriage has been before the voters in 31 states and 31 states have rejected it. Strangely, proponents of same-sex marriage, who have yet to win a single popular vote on the matter, insist that opposition to gay marriage is a losing position. Read my piece @ the American Spectator that explains why gay marriage isn't divisive but rather the most unifying major issue in American politics.

Twenty-eight-years ago, I saw Captain Lou Albano along with the Moondogs wrestle Tony Garea, Rick Martel, and Pedro Morales in a half-empty Boston Garden. A few years later, Albano teamed up with Cyndi Lauper and Vince McMahon to defeat wrestling's pop-culture reputation as a vestige of 19th-century carnival barkers and travelling sideshows. The "Rock and Wrestling Connection," the bizarre pop-culture cross-pollination that still leaves me scratching my head, strangely catapulted, rather than killed, the careers of those involved. Read my piece @ the American Spectator celebrating Captain Lou Albano, who died yesterday, and remembering professional wrestling, which died for me a long time ago.

A choked-up Nancy Pelosi suggested that Joe Wilson's interruption of the president is the type of rhetoric that may lead to violence because she saw such rhetoric lead to violence in San Francisco in the 1970s. But it wasn't conservative rhetoric fueling the violence of Jim Jones, the Black Panthers, Sara Jane Moore, and the multitude of political thugs who unleashed chaos upon the Bay Area in the 1970s. Read my piece @ the American Spectator to get the history that Nancy Pelosi leaves out.

Eighty years ago, Will Durant started writing The Story of Civilization. About 65 years later, I started reading it. This seemed right. If a man could devote 45 years of his life to writing the history of the world, I could devote two years of my life to reading it. More than a decade after finishing the eleven-volume Story of Civilization, I have finally gotten around to writing about it. The October 5, 2009 issue of National Review, available now to those with a digital subscription, features my lengthy article on Will and Ariel Durant, the apostate historians. Read it here @ National Review if you have a digital subscription. Get with the program, or just buy it at your local newstand, if you aren't digitally subscribed.

When Massachusetts public opinion drifted left, Ted Kennedy followed--on the Vietnam War, taxes, abortion, and a whole host of issues. Where Ted Kennedy walked, Democrats followed. What ensured Ted Kennedy's political longevity in Massachusetts undermined the Democrats' ambitions as a national party. Read my piece @ City Journal the Democratic Party's long, strange trip tagging along with Ted Kennedy.

"I used her, she used me, but neither one cared," Bob Seger sang in Night Moves. His lyric could also describe the awkward convergence of Catholicism and Ted Kennedy on display this weekend. Once synonymous with the Church, the Kennedys--through personal scandal and the embrace of political issues such as abortion--have transformed themselves into the first family of the Church of Liberalism. Read my article @ the American Spectator on why the Church's role in Ted Kennedy's funeral has liberal and conservative Catholics crying foul for very different reasons.

Why was Ted Kennedy so long the man conservatives loved to hate? Because the rules didn't apply to Ted Kennedy. He got Cs and gained admission to Harvard. He never bothered, save for his brief time in the Army, to get a proper job before he won election to the Senate. He feverishly attempted to cover up drunk driving a woman to her death, and his dronish followers sought to make him president. Read my piece @ the American Spectator to discover why the late Massachusetts senator "need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life."

Towering political figures are remembered in one line. George Washington was the father of his country. Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot. Ted Kennedy? Read my piece @ Human Events to discover how America's third-longest-serving senator should be remembered.

Guess who trades on his famous name to make millions from interests with business before his father's powerful senate committee? Ted Kennedy Jr.'s "consulting" businesses have pocketed almost $400,000 from Bristol Myers Squibb--and millions more from other health-care and union interests. Ted Kennedy, Sr. is the chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Ask not what you can do for your name; ask what your name can do for you. Read my piece in the City Journal about the power of a last name.

Ted Kennedy helped engineer a change in Massachusetts law that stripped the governor of the power to fill senate vacancies. That was five years ago, when a Republican served as governor. Now that a Democrat is governor, Kennedy wants a redo--lest a Republican win election to the seat that he wishes to bequeath to one of his Kennedy heirs--just as it got left to him by his brother Jack. Read my piece @ the American Spectator, detailing how Kennedy's drive to empower Governor Deval Patrick to name his successor is just the lastest unprincipled about-face by the Bay State's senior senator.

Ted Kennedy's face is on the cover of Newsweek, his words propel the HBO documentary "Teddy: In His Own Words," and his name is on the lips of every Democrat seeking to enact a state-run health care plan. The senior senator from Massachusetts is seemingly everywhere--everywhere but the United States Senate. Read my piece in the American Spectator explaining how absentee senator Ted Kennedy risks undermining his political legacy by treating his senate seat as a family legacy.

Thirty years ago, Western intellectuals, inebriated by the anti-Americanism of the revolutionaries, looked upon the Iranian Revolution and saw themselves. When something quite different from responsive democracy, oil socialism, and commitment to peace materialized in Iran, the cognoscenti emerged with egg on their faces. Read my article @ City Journal to understand why those aghast at the anti-Americanism of the Persian theocracy risk making the same mistake by projecting their values upon today's revolutionaries rebelling against the Iranian old guard.

Mark Rudd led the 1968 takeover of Columbia University, rioted at 1969's Days of Rage in Chicago, participated in a bombing campaign that took the life of his best friend in 1970, and spent the better part of the '70s evading the FBI. Then he grew up. Read my review @ First Principles of Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen, which details Mark Rudd's 1960s and the hangover that followed.

The feds indicted the Speaker of Massachusetts's not-so Great and General Court earlier this week on corruption charges. Following Speaker Felony Tax Evasion and Speaker Obstruction of Justice, Speaker Kickbacks is the third speaker in a row of Massachusetts's house of representatives indicted by the feds. Read my article @ the American Spectator demonstrating that Massachusetts's corruption problem has much to do with Massachusetts's competitive elections problem.

Slain San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk abused his political office by aiding and abetting Jim Jones's kidnapping, and subsequent murder, of a six-year-old boy. He purportedly staged a hate crime to enhance his victim status in the eyes of San Francisco voters. He routinely called political opponents "Nazis." So why has the California senate passed a bill seeking to name today as "Harvey Milk Day" in the Golden State? My article @ City Journal juxtaposes Sean Penn's Academy Award-winning portrayal with history's Harvey Milk, finding the celluloid hero quite different than the real-life goat.

Five years to the week that it forced gay marriage upon the Bay State, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court heard arguments in a case that could be as much the bane to economic conservatives as Goodrich has been to social conservatives. Town Fair Tire v. Massachusetts, if upheld, will nullify the commerce clause--the Constitution's provision making the United States a giant free-trade zone--and throw prosperity out the window. Read my article @ the American Spectator demonstrating how the greedy tentacles of Taxachusetts have reached across state lines for taxdollars.

Think legalizing marijuana will make America more free? Not quite, as proposals before state legislatures aim to double the price of marijuana through onerous taxes, create a bud bureaucracy, burden dealers and growers with paperwork and exorbitant licensing fees, and threaten unlicensed dealers with excessive jail time. Read my article at TakiMag that points out that decriminalization, that happy limbo where stoners need fear neither lawmen nor taxmen, is the best that marijuana enthusiasts can realistically hope for.

The late anchorman Peter Jennings eulogized I.F. Stone as "a journalist's journalist" upon his 1989 passing. From Harvard to Berkeley, journalism programs have named fellowships and awards for I.F. Stone. This week's revelation from scholars Alexander Vassiliev, John Earl Haynes, and Harvey Klehr that the archives of Soviet intelligence (atop past incriminating evidence from a KGB general and the Venona intercepts) identify this "journalist's journalist" as an agent of the Soviet Union puts Stone, and his fan club, in another light. Read my piece @ the American Spectator to learn why the exposure of liberal icon Izzy Stone as a Communist agent tarnishes not only Izzy Stone, but his media admirers as well.

Massachusetts has become its Taxachusetts caricature in the Town Fair Tire case. The case revolves around the state's presumptuous presentation of a $108,947 tax bill to three Town Fair Tire stores in New Hampshire for failing to collect and remit sales taxes on its Massachusetts customers. The brash move violates the Constitution's equal protection and commerce clauses, not to mention Massachusetts statutes. But it will put a lot of money in Massachusetts's coffers, which, I suppose, is why the frustrated Bay State politicos have gone after merchants in sales-tax-free New Hampshire. Read my article on this absolutely jaw-dropping case at Forbes.com (or in the Spring issue of City Journal).

It is difficult to discern what Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books objects to most about the Great Books: the rejection of relativism that deems some books truly great, or the marketing of great books to mediocre minds. In a smug, condescending book that often sneers but rarely speaks, Alex Beam looks down on autodidact Mort Adler, University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins, and Encyclopedia Britannica publisher William Benton from below. Read my review at ISI's First Principles.

Ayn Rand's been dead for more than a quarter century, but her books are more alive than ever. Whether one judges by the booming sales of Atlas Shrugged, libertarian weird beards "gulching" to avoid taxation, or corporations relocating to the real-life Galt's Gulch of Zug, Switzerland, the Russian-born novelist's ideas have proven amazingly resilient. Five years after dubbing Rand an "intellectual moron," I, alongside the likes of Joseph Bottum and Burt Folsom, explore the relevance of Ayn Rand in the age of Obama in a symposium @ NRO.

For David Frum, it's not the failed president he dubbed "the right man," or the far-fetched utopian military crusades he advocated as "an end to evil," but Rush Limbaugh who is to blame for the Republican Party's sorry state. Read my article @ the American Spectator detailing how the Robespierre who once attempted to drive "Unpatriotic Conservatives" (read: Iraq war opponents) out of the conservative movement now laments conservative intolerance of "squishes" (read: him).

Lemon, Furman, Roe, and other legal bizarreries caught conservatives off guard in the early '70s. Then the Right organized. Read how it happened in my review in First Principles of Steven M. Teles's The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement.

You can be a rock star. You can be a world saver. You can't be both, as Bono proves on U2's latest underwhelming effort No Line on the Horizon. Read my piece at the American Spectator detailing how the release of U2's much-hyped No Line on the Horizon confirms the Irish foursome's jump from relevant it band to greatest hits act.

Last week, the Washington Post revealed that Lyndon Johnson instructed the FBI to investigate aide Jack Valenti's sex life. It's just that they didn't spin it that way. Read my American Spectator piece to understand why, from Woodrow Wilson to Harry Truman to John Kennedy, you can't blame liberal presidents for civil liberties abuses. The devil made them do it.

Conservatives aren't as skilled at reading books out loud as their liberal counterparts. Don't believe me? Just ask the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, or better yet, read my article at the American Spectator noting that before Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth won a Grammy on Sunday, Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Franken, Christopher Reeve, and Jane Fonda took home "spoken word" Grammys, too.

Fifty years ago today, paperboy Don McLean delivered "bad news on the door step." Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa on February 3, 1959. It would never be the same again. Before Jimi Hendrix, or Sid Vicious, or Kurt Cobain, '50s teenagers experienced it first with Buddy Holly. Read my article @ the American Spectator that explores the history and meaning of this giant cultural demarcation point.

The New Deal didn't end the Great Depression. It exacerbated it. Only a masochist would want to repeat the New Deal. Yet, that's just what a chorus of liberal journalists sing for--a 'new' New Deal. Roosevelt couldn't spend America out of the doldrums in the 1930s. Obama won't be able to do so today. Read my article at TakiMag that compares the Hoover-Roosevelt New Deal to the Bush-Obama 'new' New Deal, bolstering the maxim that everything old is eventually new again.

Governor David Paterson has made his choice. Now he has to live with it--and the Kennedys. For four generations, the political dynasty has refused to play nice with fellow Democrats who don't do their bidding. From experiencing primary challenges to discovering secret support of their Republican opponents, Democrats can attest best the vengeful nature of the first family of Massachusetts politics. Read my article at The American Spectator to find out what awaits the New York governor who dared bypass Caroline Kennedy.

Dynastic politics at its worst? Check. Inarticulateness that makes Britney Spears sound like Winston Churchill in comparison? Check. Voting-booth apathy by a wannabe senator? Check. Like Uncle, Like Niece, my piece at CityJournalOnline, explores the eery similarities between Ted Kennedy's rookie run for the Senate in 1962 and Caroline Kennedy's neophyte bid for a Senate seat in 2009. Read it, and weep.

For Kennedys, working your way to the top is the route for suckers; starting at the top, that is more like it--the Kennedy Way. The Kennedy Way allowed Ted Kennedy to avoid gainful employment, save for a stint in the U.S. Army, before becoming a U.S. senator. Now it pushes Caroline Kennedy to cut the line of public servants in her power grab to become a U.S. senator from New York. Read my article at the American Spectator on why a hereditary claim to a political office in New York should offend democratic sensibilities as much as a monetary claim to a political office in Illinois.

Funding Fathers: The Unsung Heroes of the Conservative Movement, a book by Ron Robinson and Nicole Hoplin, is a story of how lone men with big wallets can change the world. Books chronicling the history of the conservative movement focus on academics, activists, and men of action. Here, for the first time, is a history of the money behind The Consience of a Conservative, Ronald Reagan, Regnery Books, the Heritage Foundation, and other iconic institutions, books, and leaders of the conservative movement. Read my City Journal review here.

Axl Rose, you had me at "I see your sister in her Sunday dress." Then you had to go ahead and ruin it with piano ballads, dictatorial purges, lavish videos, and delays, delays, delays. Read my Paradise City Lost at the American Spectator to understand why to love Guns N' Roses is to hate it in its present form.

FlynnFiles is generating much buzz this week, particularly regarding my piece on the Jonestown cultists whose devotion to fantasy and contept for reality was so great that they killed themselves rather than their socialist ideas. Later today, in the third hour I am told, I will appear on The Savage Nation to discuss intellectual morons and other assorted poseurs. Tune in if you don't already. The Corner, MichaelSavage.com, and TakiMag linked to the Jonestown piece, Glenn Beck seized on it for a monologue, and the article appeared in full at FrontPageMag.com (read it here).

Barack Obama holds his victory celebration in Grant Park tonight. Two of his earliest political supporters held a celebration of violence and nihilism in Grant Park thirty-nine-years ago. Read my special Election Day article in City Journal on the long, strange trip of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who have gone from children of privilege in the 1950s, to Weatherman rioters in Grant Park in 1969, to Grant Park celebrants of their friend's winning of the highest office in the land in 2008. Even in victory Obama can't escape his loser friends who have dogged him the whole campaign.

Bay State voters decide this November whether to retire the "Taxachusetts" moniker permanently through Question 1, a ballot initiative that abolishes--not cuts, or tweaks, or trims, but abolishes--the state's income tax. My piece at Forbes.com notes the singular direction of taxes in Massachusetts over the last century, arguing that with the introduction of an income tax, gasoline tax, sales tax, lottery, and cigarette sin-tax to add to the ancient property tax, it's time for Bay Staters to go in the opposite direction and vote goodbye to just one of its many onerous taxes.

From Nevada to Michigan to Ohio to Missouri to points beyond, Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) workers are running afoul of the law by registering phony voters. This year, Barack Obama's campaign funded the number one force for electoral fraud to the tune of more than $800,000. In the 1990s, Obama ran ACORN's Project Vote outfit in Illinois. In the U.S. Senate, he's been the mighty oak which grew from ACORN, remembering his roots by championing ACORN's agenda. Read my City Journal review of John Fund's timely Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, which details how some activists want to count every vote--again, and again, and again.

Forty years ago this week, Tom Hayden implored activists outside of the Democratic National Convention: "Make sure that if blood is going to flow, it will flow all over this city." It did. Yesterday, during another Democratic National Convention, Hayden's mouth once again inadvertantly aided Republicans. "I have met and like John McCain, but he bombed, and presumably killed, many people in a war I opposed," Hayden offered. "If I can set all that aside, I would hope that Americans will accept" that Obama's Weatherman friend Bill Ayers has changed, too. Outside of the 2008 Democratic National Convention activists hope to "Recreate 68." That's the last thing Barack Obama wants. Read my City Journal article wondering why anyone, particularly left-wing activists, would want to "Recreate 68."

When did the Constitution start saying that the president got to declare war? Where does the commerce clause give all three branches of the federal government the power to regulate interstate commerce, let alone intrastate commerce? Why did federal judges read specific legal prohibitions on busing as empowering them to command busing? Such questions are tackled in Thomas Woods and Kevin R.C. Gutzman's Who Killed the Constitution? The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush, which I review today at the American Spectator.

Once an African American secured a major party's presidential nomination, did you think religion and not race would dominate the national conversation? From Reverend Wright to a "What He Believes" Newsweek cover to crude rumors of a Muslim upbringing to an upcoming appearance with John McCain at Rick Warren's megachurch, Barack Obama's run for the presidency has been chased by religion at every turn. I'm a believer, Obama professes. But a believer in what? In my article featured on TakiMag (read it: articles > blog posts), I show how the presumptive Democratic nominee's belief in the social gospel, federalizing local charitable initiatives, and, yes, immanentizing the eschaton makes his faith as much a political as a religious creed.

In 1968, the New Left cost the Democrats the presidency by rioting at their convention and urging young people to shun voting. In 2008, the not-so-new Left may cost Barack Obama the presidency by their vocal support. Read my piece in City Journal online about the '68 rioters, Communist schismatics, and Weatherman terrorists who give Barack Obama the the type of support every candidate wishes for their opponent.

The racism of the American past that the Left uncourageously crusades against from the present is the Left's history as well. Robert Owen's New Harmony commune that effectively launched the American Left banned African Americans. The Communist Party ejected Japanese Americans from its rolls after Pearl Harbor. The Democratic Party countenanced the Theodore Bilbos and John Rankins, but just one black member of Congress before World War II. In my National Review Online article on the Left, racism, and the historic Barack Obama campaign (click and read), I tackle the Left's version of American Exceptionalism that posits that leftists have always held superior attitudes on race vis-a-vis their fellow countrymen.

Republicans appointed six of the seven judges that found in California's constitution a right to same-sex marriage. Roe, Kelo, and so many other outrageous U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the last forty years were authored by Republican appointees. Read my article in TakiMag that wonders if automatically rewarding the GOP with votes to curb the judicial activism of the courts they have shaped does not in fact invite such courthouse affronts against the people and the constitution.

I wrote A Conservative History of the American Left in part to conserve the history the Left would rather discard. With that in mind, I produced for FrontPageMag.com the Top Ten Skeletons in the Left's Closet. From the assassination of three U.S. presidents by communists to leading Democrats fawning over the pre-Jonestown Jim Jones, the list details the history that the American Left wants you to forget.

Jack Reed and Louise Bryant passionately argued for free love. Their diseased genitals offered a convincing rebuttal. In the American Spectator Online, I break a story more than ninety years in the making--how historians and Hollywood whitewashed the consequences of two left-wing icons practicing the liberal principles that they preached. Eighty-eight years ago, the Bolsheviks buried Jack Reed in the shadows of the Kremlin. For nearly that long, American admirers of Reed's have buried evidence--open to the world at Harvard University's Houghton Library--that demonstrates not only the pitfalls of free love, but the mendacity of one of the most nominated films in the history of the Academy Awards.

In 1964, Carl Oglesby was married with children, living in what he calls a "see-Spot-run" neighborhood, and working a white-collar job in the defense industry. In 1965, he was the president of Students for a Democratic Society, trading bourgeois tranquility for a life of protesting the Vietnam War, bedding movement sex symbols, cutting folk albums, and quixotically trying to forge an alliance between the New Left and the Old Right. Read my review of Carl Oglesby's Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Antiwar Movement in the City Journal's online edition.

Senator Joseph McCarthy did not correctly finger a single Communist, but a multitude of them, writes Stan Evans in his explosive book about the most controversial senator in the history of that august body. Read my review of M. Stanton Evans's Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies on ISI's new web journal, First Principles, and discover why Cold Warriors who took on domestic subversives in fact instead of in books fare poorly in the books written about the period.

Barack Obama's "Change We Can Believe In" is a euphemism for more of the same--the same big government, identity politics, paternalism, and anti-Americanism that the Left has been pushing for more than a century. Read my lengthy article on TakiMag, which explores the paralells between the biography of the man who would be president and the history of the movement that he represents. To perpetuate the man and the movement, much forgetting is in order.

Three years after its advisory vote to bar military recruiters from the city's public schools and colleges, San Francisco has finally come around to honoring the military--Stalin's, not America's. Last weekend, the city unveiled a monument venerating the so-called Abraham Lincoln Brigade who shipped out in the 1930s to inflict Communism on the Spanish. Read my piece at The American Spectator's website detailing the American Left's continued obsession with honoring the dishonorables who served Stalin.

When Congressmen David Bonior, Mike Thompson, and Jim McDermott travelled to Iraq in 2002, Saddam Hussein's intelligence operatives picked up the tab, the federal government alleges. Read my piece on National Review Online on how the trio's ideological tourism carried on a shameful tradition of junkets to totalitarian nations by leftists willing to excuse the misdeeds of America's enemies.

Thirty-eight years ago, Cathy Wilkerson and her friends plotted to blow up soldiers at a dance at Fort Dix. Instead of killing servicemen and their dates, the Weathermen blew up Wilkerson's father's Greenwich Village townhouse. How did the sons and daughters of privilege become amateur revolutionaries? Read my review of Cathy Wilkerson's memoir Flying to Close to the Sun at First Principles, ISI's new webzine.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 of my interview with Howard Phillips are now online. The Conservative Caucus chairman discusses Republican misses on the Supreme Court, the state of the conservative movement, the sharp left turn of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, pulling Fidel Castro's beard, the George W. Bush presidency, schooldays at Boston Latin and Harvard, and much, much more. Read the entire can't-miss interview with this principled conservative here.

David Horowitz’s The End of Time is a beautiful book about death. My review of the latest work of this unlikeliest of senior citizens can be read at TownHall.com.

What contemporary history of America highlights that just seven percent of Africans brought to the New World were enslaved in the United States? Or that as Standard Oil’s prices dropped their market share rose to a monopoly level? Or that Joseph McCarthy underestimated the scope of Soviet infiltration of the U.S. government? None that I know of, other than Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen's A Patriot's History of the United States, which I review on FrontPageMag.com.

Employees at each of U.S. News and World Report's top twenty-five national universities overwhelmingly favored John Kerry over George W. Bush in the 2004 election cycle. Giving ratios of employees at selected schools totaled 9-1 at Duke, 20-1 at Yale, 43-1 at MIT, 302-1 at Princeton, and infinity at Dartmouth, where not a single employee appeared on Federal Election Commission reports as donating to the Bush campaign. I've just completed a major study called Deep Blue Campuses (read it here) for the Leadership Institute's Campus Leadership Program. On campus, the talk is diversity. The reality is conformity.

W.E.B. Du Bois declared in 1920, "Absolutely segregate the races and sections of the world." Thirteen years later, the NAACP would eject him from the organization he helped found because of such statements as "I fight Segregation with Segregation." After traveling to Nazi Germany in 1937, he returned to America with largely glowing reports, penning an article called "The German Case Against the Jews" that excused anti-Semitism in the Third Reich by labeling it "a reasoned prejudice." At mid-century Du Bois propagandized that North Korea was attacked to launch the Korean War, that "Harry Truman ranks with Adolf Hitler as one of the greatest killers of our day," and that Stalin was a "great" and "courageous" man. In the early 1960s, Du Bois renounced his American citizenship and formally joined the Communist Party, declaring communism "the only way of human life." Why, in 2005, would John Kerry push the United States Senate to honor this man? Read my Human Events article that broke this story today to learn more about the extremist John Kerry seeks to honor.

Did William Rehnquist swear in the wrong man on Inauguration Day? That's what many protesting the start of George W. Bush's second term believe. Pre-election taunts of "accidental president" and "re-defeat Bush" allowed Bush-haters to benefit from the illusion that they represented the majority. November 2, one might think, would have shattered that illusion. It didn’t. In my piece on National Review Online, I discuss the Left's dismissal of the painful truth in favor of a comforting myth.

In the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse argued that true tolerance meant censoring the Right, while Noam Chomsky preached that to engage in debate with the Right on certain issues was to lose one's humanity. Ideas have consequences. The post-sixties Left currently dominating the campuses has put the words of these intellectual morons into action in a recent round of newspaper thefts and acts of intimidation. Read about the current state of free speech in academia, and what can be done to defend against campus assaults on free speech, in my article on NewsMax today.

The military is one of the most popular institutions in America but one of the least popular on campus. This is a direct consequence of stacking faculties with people politically alienated from the society that surrounds them. If the campus repulsion to the armed forces seems so foreign to us it is because we are so foreign to the people teaching at these institutions. Read my NewsMax article detailing how two of the institutions most corrupted by the Left--academia and the courts--have combined to kick military recruiters off of law school campuses.

Hamilton College has hired Susan Rosenberg, an advocate of "collective violence" against the U.S. government, to teach a writing class next semester. Caught with several hundred pounds of explosives in 1984, Rosenberg was serving a fifty-eight year prison sentence until President Clinton pardoned her on his last day in office. The hiring of the unrepentant Rosenberg, unfortunately, is not an isolated example of a college bringing on board a faculty member largely because of the faculty member's criminal past. My NewsMax article explains why setting off bombs, aiding terrorists, kidnapping, and even murder are no obstacle to steady employment at a number of U.S. academic institutions.

The biopic Kinsey fails both as biography and motion picture. Against a backdrop of strawmen and stereotypes, Bill Condon's Kinsey emerges to slay ignorance. The real Kinsey did more to perpetuate sexual ignorance than any other figure of the past century. Perhaps in tribute, this fawning movie adopts Alfred Kinsey's dishonesty in telling the Indiana University professor's story. "Artistic license" whitewashes Kinsey's extreme masochism, tolerance of pedophilia, and stacking his sample group with prison inmates and homosexuals, but it fails to make the movie interesting or entertaining. Read what the film starring Liam Neeson leaves out in my review of Kinsey on Accuracy in Media's site.

The U.S. map is red but America's campuses are deep blue. I examined Federal Election Commission records and found donations to John Kerry wildly outpaced donations to George W. Bush. My amateur inspection found that Harvard employees gave 32 times more money to Kerry than to Bush. The disparity was 270-1 at Princeton, 32-1 at Cornell, 22-1 at Penn, 11-1 at Yale, 7-1 at Brown, and 5-1 at Columbia. Get this: because I could find no Dartmouth employee that had donated to President Bush's reelection efforts, John Kerry received an infinite amount more from the faculty and administrators at the Hanover, New Hampshire school than his opponent. I detail my findings, and why a politically alienated academia is bad for education, on NewsMax.com.

Alfred Kinsey circumcised himself with a pocketknife, compulsively pierced his genitals, and partook in peculiar activities involving a noose and his groin. But the Indiana University professor's unsettling personal behavior is not why his mid-century reports on human sexuality are so controversial today. My piece on TownHall.com explains why Kinsey's dishonest scholarship, rather than the bedroom behavior that motivated that scholarship, serves as the primary basis for objecting to Kinsey and the hagiographic film by the same name that hits theaters across the nation on Friday.

On 9/11, nineteen young men sharing the same Islamic faith and Arab heritage hijacked four planes and killed nearly 3,000 people. To prevent future hijackings, the federal government demands that its airport security forget past hijackings. Specifically, government rules dictate that airport screeners treat elderly black women the same as twenty-five year old Muslim men. My review of Michael Smerconish's Flying Blind wonders if the government's indulgence of political correctness in favor of some passengers' convenience comes at the expense of other passengers' safety.

If there's one thing that short-circuits the mental wiring of leftists, it is the name George W. Bush. For the last four year's, George W. Bush's enemies, by their immoderation, have succeeded driving Americans into the president's arms. On November 2, the Bush-haters have the opportunity to turn passion into votes. My article on TownHall.com explores the strange world of the Bush-haters, wondering if the president could have been handed a better set of enemies had he the opportunity to invent his opposition.

English animal-rights leaders have given their imprimatur to protests targeting the children of biomedical scientists. Where did they get such ideas? One inspiration for animal-rights extremism, my article on TownHall explains, is Princeton University Professor Peter Singer, who gives his okay to parents killing their newborns but objects to schoolchildren lunching on turkey sandwiches.

The most dangerous delusion is the idea that man is perfectible. The goal is unattainable, but the crimes committed to achieve it are very real. The belief in heaven on earth led to the horrors of the gas chamber, the gulag, and the killing fields. Today, it leads to theocratic screwballs randomly beheading Westerners in hopes of creating Allah's earthly kingdom. If you really believe that the ideology you follow will bring utopia, I write today on TownHall, then all is justified in its advancement. That's scary.

Communism is dead in Bucharest, Phnom Penh, and Managua. It lives in Madison, Berkeley, and Chapel Hill. My article at NewsMax.com explains how American colleges and universities are honoring prominent Communists by naming scholarships, academic chairs, and buildings in their honor.

Are pedophiles a persecuted group deserving society's tolerance and protection? A small, but growing, number of college professors say yes. Pro-pedophile academics are attempting to give their vile beliefs a scientific air by invoking famed researcher Alfred Kinsey as the source of their "scholarship." But as I discuss in my article on NewsMax, Kinsey, like his present-day admirers, is a frightening example of how much harm intellectual morons can unleash with a lie.

Dan Rather still doesn't believe the Texas Air National Guard documents disparaging President Bush that he broadcast are forgeries. So why, and to whom, did he apologize? Rather's lame act of contrition Monday night didn't kill the Rathergate story. My NewsMax article shows that it's only just begun.

Employees of America's oldest college, Harvard, have given 97 percent of their donations this presidential election cycle to the Kerry campaign and about three percent to the reelection effort of George W. Bush. At America's second oldest college, William & Mary, employees have given 100 percent of their donations to John Kerry. The uniform support of John Kerry by college professors and administrators, as my article on NewsMax demonstrates, evokes the lopsided vote tallies in Castro's Cuba or Hussein's Iraq. Folks, where's the diversity?

When scientist Stephen Hawking was confronted with proof that his theory was wrong, he sided with truth over self-interest. When the facts went against the assertions of environmentalist Paul Ehrlich, leftist guru Noam Chomsky, and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, they simply ignored the facts. TownHall.com features my article comparing a real scholar with numerous pseudo-scholars.

Dan Rather is giving Dans a bad name. I'm fighting back to redeem the pride of Dans everywhere. Read my take on the Rathergate affair on TownHall.com.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 of my ultimate interview of the Ultimate Warrior is now online. Read Warrior's behind-the-scenes take on Hulk Hogan, Sting, Vince McMahon, and other wrestling heavyweights. Plus, Warrior talks politics, gives one of the best definitions of conservatism I've read ("preserving those things that have worked throughout time"), and dishes out weight-training advice.

Lady Margaret Thatcher, Vice President Richard Cheney, and over 800 dignitaries paid tribute to President Reagan at a state funeral inside the Capitol. Outside, a twenty-one gun salute, formations of jets screeching above, and companies of marching soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines honored the 40th U.S. President. Perhaps Reagan's greatest adulation came from the everyday Americans lining the route of his funeral procession. Read my article at FrontPageMag.

The nation mourns President Reagan's death. The hardcore Left cheers. On the day of Ronald Reagan's passing, activists at an International ANSWER rally outside the White House celebrated the death of America's 40th President. Read the article at National Review Online.

My take on the Million Mom March appears on National Review Online today. Click here to read the article.

Howard Dean had the organization, the passion, the volunteers, key endorsements, saturation media coverage and even the money. Yet he still lost Monday's Iowa caucuses. Why? Full article published at Newsmax.com.

A review of The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values by Tammy Bruce. Originally published in the American Enterprise online.

Who is the most influential historian among young people? Filmmaker Ken Burns? Could it be the Democrats’ court historian, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.? Biographer David McCullough? How about the late Stephen Ambrose, whose triumphant view of American history has brought alive such colorful characters as Meriwether Lewis, Crazy Horse, and George Custer? Full article published at FrontPageMag.

The 2002 Republican sweep was historic. For the first time since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, a first-term president’s party increased its numbers in Congress during an off-year election.

Why did the Democrats fare so poorly? Full article published on Newsmax.com.

Despite the intellectual pretensions of those who practice it, anti-Americanism is reflexive and mindless. Patriotism, despite its bad reputation amongst the intelligentsia, is a rational sentiment for an American to hold. This is the thesis I prove in my new book, Why the Left Hates America. Full article published in Front Page Mag.

Roughly 100,000 people crammed 20 city blocks in New York City this Saturday. Bearing signs proclaiming "Bush Is a Terrorist," "Oil Is Murder," and "Change Regimes in the U.S.," demonstrators blocks away from the base of the rally strained to listen to the amplified remarks of Susan Sarandon, Danny Glover, Harry Belafonte, and other familiar activist luminaries.

While this demonstration and hundreds of others garnered page-one coverage across the globe, the attitudes and beliefs of the actual protestors received scant attention. Full article published at Newsmax.com.

DAVID HOROWITZ’S INSTINCTS were right in attempting to take out an ad in the Daily Californian. If you’re a conservative, paying for your right to speak is just about the only way for your ideas to reach a large audience on a campus as inhospitable to free thought as the University of California-Berkeley. Conservative views, after all, are scarcely to be found amongst the faculty, officially invited guest lecturers, or on the op-ed page of the Daily Cal. When conservatives do speak out at Berkeley, they are shouted down and threatened. Full article published on Front Page Mag.

WHAT HAPPENED to David Horowitz at Berkeley was an aberration. No, the censoring of his ideas was not out of the ordinary. As evidenced by last semester's student-mob action to prevent Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking in the city of Berkeley and the shouting down of a talk given by this writer and the subsequent book-burning of a booklet that I had authored, censorship is quite common at Berkeley. Full article published at Front Page Mag.

One of the more controversial, and powerful, figures of the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt was Harry Hopkins. FDR Biographer Robert Sherwood noted that even partisans of the President "disliked Hopkins intensely and resented the extraordinary position of influence and authority which he held...According to Herb Romerstein and Eric Breindel, authors of The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors...Hopkins, arguably the man with the greatest sway over our 32nd President, was an agent of the Soviet Union. Full article published in Accuracy in Academia's Campus Report.

On Saturday, April 29, more than 500 people converged upon the sleepy town of Yellow Springs, Ohio. Their purpose was to protest Antioch College, which was honoring convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal at its commencement. Full article published on National Review Online.

When searching for examples of state-sponsored barbarities, intellectuals are quick to point to the Spanish Inquisition or its Protestant imitation, the Witchhunt. How could anyone, modern academics wonder, persecute another for their beliefs? These same intellectuals, ironically, are often the very people who served as cheerleaders for political persecution and mass murder on a scale unmatched in human history. Full article originally published in Accuracy in Academia's Campus Report.

Intellectuals are often hesitant to provide a truthful presentation of society, people, or events becuase doing so often undermines their preconceived ideological notions about how the world works. Because of this, elites often shy away from presenting their ideas in a non-fiction format. Instead, they opt for the stage, the silver screen, television, or novels. The Leftist worldview that fails miserably in practice works remarkably well on Broadway and in Hollywood. Full article originally published in Campus Watch.