The American Spectator

May 2011

Note From the Publisher

• The Best Is Yet to Come

  Alfred S. Regnery

Freedom Watch

• Fighting Off Power Grabs

  FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is threatening to intervene in the maintenance of the very architecture of the Internet.

  Marsha Blackburn

The Continuing Crisis

• The Continuing Crisis

Features

• The Arab World and Its Discontents

  The bitter harvest that came from having too much money. 

  Andrew B. Wilson

• Achieving the Impossible

  Toward a coherent policy on Middle East unrest. 

  Jonathan Schanzer

• The True Story of the Financial Crisis

  Its origins are in the federal government.

  Peter J. Wallison

• Is America in Decline?

  A preliminary inquiry. Contributions by W. James Antle III, John Bolton, Midge Decter, Stefan Halper, Matt Latimer, Seth Lipsky, David Malpass, William McGurn, and Jeremy Rabkin.

  TAS Symposium Contributors

The Congressional Spectator

• Class War

  The Republican freshmen try to keep the House majority on track.

  W. James Antle, III

The Pursuit of Knowledge

• The Ring of Truth

  Wrestling with the awesomeness and beauty of Richard Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung.

  Roger Scruton

With the Tea Partiers

• The War of the Flea

  Tea partiers are proving feisty in opposing public employee behemoths.

  Ned Ryun

Eminentoes

• Randi's Tangled Vine Garden

  As teachers unions come under fire, the AFT's combative Randi Weingarten is happy to play triangulation to stay in the game.

  RiShawn Biddle

Capitol Ideas

• Enchanted by Charter Schools

  A hope that probably won't fulfill its promise.

  Tom Bethell

Presswatch

• 'Civility' Was Always Dead

  James Taranto

The Nation's Pulse

• Freedom and Speech and American Decline

  William Murchison

Politics

• Opportunity Can't Wait

  John H. Fund

High Spirits

• Working One's Faith

  Championing the idea that it is possible to be just as influential a Christian leader in the workplace as in the pulpit.

  Jonathan Aitken

Ben Stein's Diary

• Life Outside the Meeting Room

  It included a stop in a high desert town called Calimesa -- where it can snow.

  Ben Stein

Conservative Tastes

• Trash Collection

  From comics to 3-D, pretty much everything is trash now.

  James Bowman

Books in Review

• All Those Gin Joints

  Ward Farnsworth, author of Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric, is on a scholarly rescue mission.

  John R. Coyne, Jr.

• Empire of Liberty

  Liberty's Exile: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World.

  By Maya Jasanoff

  F. H. Buckley

• An American Tragedy

  Chessboard genius Bobby Fischer's remarkable rise and fall.

  Daniel Johnson

• America's Slowdown

  Tyler Cowen has given us a provocative and highly controversial assessment of the U.S. economy -- and it's an e-book.

  James Piereson

The Slaughterhouse

• Monkeying With Gibbon's

  America's decline and fall -- exclusively under center-right Republican administrations.

  Aram Bakshian, Jr.

Current Wisdom

• Current Wisdom

  Assorted Jackasses

Last Call

• Advice for Eulogists

  What to say? What mood to strike?

  Paul Beston