I’ve been writing regularly over at The New Ledger — you can find my archive of posts here. Additionally, the fine folks over at CBS News have been regularly featuring our content. They’ve seen fit to feature my latest piece, which is on Barack Obama’s JFK connection:

For all the forced comparisons to the other man from Illinois, when it comes to domestic policy, thus far there is no presidency that Barack Obama’s resembles more than John F. Kennedy’s. Kennedy won the 1960 election by a narrower margin, but was still swept into office in Washington as a history making figure beloved by the intellectual elite. Both were (and are) young, inspiring politicians, who broke political lines once thought impregnable — the one religious, the other racial — buoyed toward the White House by the adoration of the press. On Capitol Hill, both found themselves the beneficiaries of large, filibuster-proof Democratic majorities. And both, when it came to getting things done with those majorities, failed dramatically.

You can also find it at TNL, along with the rest of my work.

Over at The New Ledger, Senior Editor Francis Cianfrocca and I have been doing a daily podcast called Coffee & Markets for the past four weeks. You can listen to the latest edition here.

Francis is a brilliant venture capitalist and old Wall Street hand who’s now a tech businessman in New York, and his insights are particularly valuable in this kind of economic climate. I’m just asking questions, but I think it’s fast becoming a must-listen Podcast, and the reaction we’ve gotten from readers has been fantastic.

The RSS Feed for the Podcast is here. It goes up every morning at 9 AM, give or take a few minutes. If you prefer to subscribe to Coffee & Markets via iTunes, you can do that too.

Things are running along speedily over at The New Ledger, and I hope you’ve been reading our work. I’m very happy with where we’re at in terms of meeting our benchmarks for traffic and links – and I also wanted to be sure you saw a few of the pieces I’ve written over there. You can always find the pieces I’ve authored at TNL’s Ben Domenech archive, but here are a few of the ones published over the past month:

Our Cosmopolitan President
Do the Wrong Thing: Obama’s War on Giving
The Centrist President
Burning Down Detroit
The End of Starbucks
Don’t Stop Believing
The War on Philanthropy

Hope you enjoy these.

A few colleagues of mine got together to launch a new web publication, The New Ledger. I encourage you to check it out – it’s got a neat combination of hand-picked aggregated content, sorted Daily Reads each morning, and longer form opinion pieces from smart folks and good writers.

I have the feature today, on The Right and the Challenge of the Environment. I hope you’ll check it out – I’ll be editing the Conservation section of the site going forward.

It’s true that the free market is, oftentimes, the enemy of the environment. It’s one of the greatest forces for freedom in the world, yes – but when it comes to many of the issues, I believe the marketplace espouses a view that is focused on the short term, not the long. It often makes perfect financial sense to operate at the narrow edge of irresponsibility, to stamp your feet about government ignoring property rights and bureaucracy passing ridiculous regulations, because it’s true that such things are often fundamentally unjust. Yet the actors in the market don’t usually evaluate land or sea in terms of stewardship – they evaluate it in terms of the immediate bottom line.

But that’s only half the story. The other half is the fact that overwhelmingly, the vast number of nations that can afford to make the decisions to protect and conserve land and sea, and be good stewards of the resources and creatures within them, are those that are thriving members of the global marketplace.