All TOC, All the Time

In the past few months, the public-advocacy work of TOC has expanded dramatically, led by the efforts of Ed Hudgins, director of the center's Washington office. On May 22, the center's executive director, David Kelley, joined Hudgins in Chicago to discuss the causes and consequences of 9/11 with approximately three dozen members from the Midwest.

One week earlier, Hudgins had been on KHOU-TV in Houston, Texas, to advocate the privatization of space exploration. On May 20, National Review Online published an article by Hudgins that pointed out the flawed political thinking articulated in the new Star Wars movie. (His article was also circulated as an op-ed.) On June 11, Hudgins was heard on KUOV radio in Seattle, Washington, responding to recent attempts to bring to America the sort of government-mandated vacations that are common in Europe. His answer, in brief, was that it's none of the government's business how much vacation a person takes or a company offers. On June 17, Hudgins was on Radio America's "Nolan at Night" to advocate the privatization of Amtrak, and on June 21, he was on "A Touch of Grey," a nationally syndicated radio program, to advocate deregulation as a general political strategy.

Those wielding a pen for TOC in recent weeks have included David Kelley, who wrote an op-ed supporting Lou Dobbs's assertion that America is not in fact at war with terrorism of every sort but specifically with Islamist terrorism; and Tal Ben-Shahar, a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard, who authored an op-ed condemning a commencement address at his university that tried to whitewash the Islamists' call for jihad. In addition, TOC's manager of current affairs, Patrick Stephens, was quoted in a UPI story about the morality of cloning.