Monthly Archives: June 2003

Harold Bloom’s genius

The Claremont Institute has posted the delightful essay on Harold Bloom’s new book from the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books. Bloom’s new book is Genius: A Mosaic of 100 Exemplary Creative Minds; the essay by Ricardo Quinones is “Lifting us up.” »

For the Union Dead

William Pritchard is a fine, old-fashioned critic who reads fiction and poetry for their literary qualities. Yesterday’s Times Book Review featured Pritchard’s essay on the publication of Robert Lowell’s Collected Poems: “The whole Lowell.” Speaking of Lowell’s For the Union Dead, Pritchard concludes: “[W]e hear the depressed, regretful tenor, again ‘frizzled, stale and small,’ of most of the poems in ‘For the Union Dead’; then at book’s end the title »

History repeats itself…quickly

Stefan Sharkansky’s excellent Shark Blog has named Charles Johnson’s Little Green Footballs its Blog of the Day. Shark says of LGF: “LGF is an indispensible resource for all things related to the intertwined evils of militant Islamism, Arab fascism, anti-Semitism, and their apologists in the western world. You will find far more timely news and honest information about the dangers emanating from the Middle East over at LGF than you »

Senator Dayton’s homily on Iraq

Tomorrow’s Star Tribune reports on the press conference held by Minnesota Senator Mark Dayton with local Twin Cities reporters during his visit to Iraq: “Visiting Iraq, Dayton stands by anti-war vote.” Those of you who remember Senator Dayton’s anti-war homily on the Bhagavad Gita in the St. Joan of Arc Church in Minneapolis will find his postwar reflections from Iraq familiar. Those looking for new challenges in understanding the senator »

A thought for the day from Abraham Lincoln

“I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings »

Here comes Ward Connerly

Terry Pell of the Center for Individual Rights has a good column on the response of the elite universities to the Court’s decision in Grutter: “Camouflage for quotas.” The Washington Times has a good story on what comes next: “Ruling on race likely to spur fight.” »

The second coming

The Wall Street Journal offers the best of today’s columns, Cynthia Ozick’s “Where hatred trumps bread.” The place referred to in the headline is of course Arafatistan. Ozick asks: “What has been the genius of Palestinian originality, what has been the contribution of the evolving culture of Palestinian sectarianism?” And she answers: “On the international scene: airplane hijackings and the murder of American diplomats in the 1970s, Olympic slaughterings and »

Was FDR a Fool?

I’ve always known that Roosevelt gave away the store to Stalin at Yalta, and have suspected him of being a Communist sympathizer (as his wife certainly was, to the point that the Soviets discussed approaching her to spy for them). But this Study In Intelligence by the CIA, which describes how Roosevelt allowed himself to be spied upon by Stalin both at Teheran in 1943 and Yalta in 1945, makes »

More European Sickness

Aldo Moro was the leader of the Christian Democratic Party in Italy. In 1978 he was kidnapped and eventually murdered by Communist terrorists called the Red Brigades, who were then in the midst of a terror spree that included numerous assassinations. Moro’s murder is said to have had a traumatic impact on Italy’s politics not unlike the impact the assassination of John Kennedy had in the U.S. Now, twenty-five years »

“Saddam Was Innocent!”

If you believe the folks at Democrats.com, that will be the Democrats’ rallying cry for the 2004 election. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but is it really smart to base a campaign strategy on sticking up for a sadistic fascist dictator? What’s next–Jeffrey Dahmer was framed? I think President Bush has succeeded in driving his opponents stark raving mad. »

Germany Accelerates Tax Cuts

In an effort to boost economic performance, Germany’s left-wing government is accelerating tax cuts that were slated for 2005 by a year, as the Bush administration has done here. Germany also plans to sell off government assets and cut back on subsidies to try to fuel economic growth; Germany’s economy shrank last quarter. The cuts will reduce Germany’s federal income tax brackets from 48.5% and 19.9% to 42% and 15%. »

Next Up: Pam Anderson on Chastity

From today’s New York Times Corrections section: “An article »

Previewing same-sex “marriage”

Responding to my post below regarding the Supreme Court’s Friday order vacating a Kansas criminal conviction apparently on equal protection grounds, reader Dafydd ab Hugh criticizes my distinction between the Court’s asserted due process reasoning in Lawrence and the Court’s apparent extension of the reasoning to equal protection challenges like the one in Limon regarding the Kansas statute. Among other points, Mr. ab Hugh criticizes the distinction here as “inside »

BBC on the Hot Seat

Britain’s BBC led the anti-war movement in the UK, and continues to attack Tony Blair’s government with gusto. Now Blair and his aides are fed up and determined to stop the BBC’s assault. Threats and counterthreats of lawsuits are the latest development. Basically, the row is over the BBC’s claim–apparently false–that Downing Street “sexed up” (in the BBC’s words) the government’s Iraq dossier by adding the assertion that Iraq could »

Translating Grutter

Abigail Thernostrom is the coauthor (with her husband, the Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom) of America in Black and White, an outstanding book on race in America. That book’s chapter on affirmative action provides a body of information that tells you just about all you need to know about the subject. This morning the Los Angeles Times carries Thernstrom’s column on the Michigan cases decided by the Supreme Court this past »

Celebrating racial discrimination

The New York Times reports that President Bush’s chief legal counsel appeared before the convention of Hispanic officeholders to laud the Supreme Court’s constitutionalization of politically correct racial discrimination in the Court’s Grutter decision of this past Monday: “Administration lawyer lauds affirmative action ruling.” To follow up on Rocket Man’s point below, we will know that President Bush is not serious about his previously stated views on the kind of »

Extending Lawrence

Those who are inclined to celebrate the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas holding the prohibition of homosexual sodomy to be unconstitutional on privacy grounds may want to take a look at the Supreme Court’s first application of Lawrence yesterday. The Court entered an order vacating the conviction of a then 18-year-old Kansan for oral sodomy with a 16-year-old boy under a Kansas statutory rape law. According to Linda »