Julian Assange has made war more—not less—likely

Anybody who has spent any time reading or watching media coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict and is in any way objective soon realizes that some notable exceptions, journalists are increasingly one-sided in their reporting. Where will this put media coverage of Israel in 2010?

One inevitable side-effect of the disastrous performance of the U.S. Republicans in recent elections, and the apparent revival of statist economics across the western world, has been a sudden proliferation of books offering theories on the decline of conservatism and prescriptions for its revival. Derbyshire, however, makes a surprisingly energetic and amusing case for why conservatives should be unrelentingly pessimistic.

Americans considering the consequences of the various health care reform proposals being proffered by President Obama and Congress would be wise to consider the Canadian experience. Canadians are ill-served by their inaccessible but expensive government-run Medicare program, whose structure is defined by the federal government.

Anti-free trade rhetoric is “in” this campaign season in the U.S. While it is a gauche trend, there is reason to hope it will be a passing fad. Cleveland, Ohio was the site of the Democratic Presidential hopefuls’ latest debate. Here anti-NAFTA posturing reached its peak with Senator Hillary Clinton declaring that if she could not “renegotiate” NAFTA, then she would “opt out” of it. Senator Barrack Obama agreed.

There are those in my gown town who believe that every political idea expressed in the Anglosphere originates in the United Kingdom. This belief draws indignation from the city’s colonial contingent, which champions the contributions of non-Britons from Rand to Kymlicka. However, we colonials are forced to admit that, particularly over the past thirty years, it has typically been in Britain where global shifts in political attitudes have first been fully expressed in political platforms.

China has proposed a bill to crack down on pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. A group of Winnipeggers originally from Hong Kong gathered Saturday to support freedom in the semi-autonomous metropolis. Shuvaloy Majumdar and Christopher Sands argue that democracy promotes peace-loving values. Canada should help people in emerging democracies master the skills and habits of democratic life.