Monthly Archives: August 2011

“Is Rick Perry Dumb?”

Featured image That’s the headline in Politico today. Given that Perry is a conservative, the alternative is that he is evil. For now, at least, the Left is testing the waters on “dumb.” Actually, if you read the article, it is obvious that Perry is a very focused, effective guy. On balance, it is a positive piece. Still, headlines about GOP candidates tend to be along the lines of “Is Rick Perry »

The Latest Climate Gore: You Knew This Was Coming

Featured image First Al Gore compared climate change skeptics to the 1930s appeasers of Nazism way back in his first foray into this thicket, his 1991 book, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit.  (This book really does deserve to be read, even 20 years later, for its [perhaps] unknowing full-on homage to Heideggerian existentialism, betraying Gore’s essentially authoritarian if not in fact totalitarian instincts.  The subtitle alone–“Ecology and the »

Affirmative action baby

Featured image Jack Cashill is the author of Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America’s First Postmodern President. He is a student of the literary works of Barack Obama, or of those bearing his name. Cashill argues, most notably, that Bill Ayers was Obama’s ghost for Dreams From My Father. It’s hard to believe that Obama didn’t have substantial help writing Dreams — can one find a sentence under Obama’s »

Silence of the Bams

Featured image We all know that Obamacare is in the process of being implemented and already imposing enormous costs on the economy, but we haven’t heard much about it lately. We haven’t heard much about it lately from the Obama administration in particular. Why is that? In an important article in the September issue of the American Spectator, Grace-Marie Turner — president of the Galen Institute — infers the method to the »

Germany Reconsiders

Featured image At the Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reports that the Merkel government no longer has the votes to bail out the improvident European regimes to the south and west: German Chancellor Angela Merkel no longer has enough coalition votes in the Bundestag to secure backing for Europe’s revamped rescue machinery, threatening a consitutional crisis in Germany and a fresh eruption of the euro debt saga. … If the [constitutional] court rules that »

It Was a Cat-5 . . . Media Event

Featured image While we shouldn’t make light of 4 million homes without power in the aftermath of Irene, it was much less of a storm than advertised.  I’ve seen worse damage—and had longer power interruptions (my power went out last night at 3 am for a grand total of two minutes)—from normal severe summer thunderstorms.  However, a week ago it was by no means clear that the storm would weaken as it »

Truth-Telling On the Campaign Trail

Featured image One thing about the Republican presidential race: it promises to upgrade the quality of our public discourse. GOP candidates are saying things that need to be said, but usually aren’t; not only that, they are being picked up in the press, if only to be denounced. Let’s start with Rick Perry. It has been true throughout human history that each generation invests a good share of its wealth in raising »

Keith Ellison for dummies

Featured image After he unexpectedly won the endorsement of the DFL nominating convention for Minnesota’s Fifth District congressional seat on May 6, 2006, Keith Ellison faced a serious problem. The problem was how to deal with his well-known involvement with the Nation of Islam. Had Ellison not managed to dispose of the problem, his candidacy would likely have been irreparably weakened in the competitive DFL primary field. Ellison chose to deal with »

This weekend in baseball history, part 2

Featured image A long-time reader completes his account of the late August 1961 showdown between the first-place Cincinnati Reds and the second-place Los Angeles Dodgers: The Dodgers’ ten game losing streak (August 14 through August 24) obscured the fact that Cincinnati wasn’t playing very well either. During the same stretch, the Reds had lost four of the seven games that weren’t against Los Angeles. And now, Los Angeles had won the first »

Scenes from Irene

Featured image Irene has passed Washington, D.C., which is as far west of New York as it is south, and therefore only ever saw the storm’s liminal rain and winds. (This was enough to cause blackouts for millions of homes in the suburbs–including Steven Hayward’s–but so far as I can tell, proper D.C. never once lost electricity. It must have been the President’s slick subterranean hurricane command center, its electronic eye draping »

Can We Get Rid of the Butcher of Damascus?

Featured image Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s “President,” is not a stupid man. On the contrary: he is a doctor who practiced ophthalmology in London until he was called back to Syria to assume power on the death of his brother. And he is married to the glamorous Asma al-Assad, who is much beloved by Vogue magazine. Yet Assad is a butcher. To take just one example, we wrote here about the torture killing »

How To Politicize a Hurricane

Featured image It remains to be seen whether Irene turns out to be the Comet Kohoutek of hurricanes, but President Obama is taking no chances. He posed for a photo-op today, pretending to have something to do with the potentially-severe weather event. AFP headlined: “Obama takes charge at hurricane command center.” US President Barack Obama warned the US east coast was in for a “long 72 hours” as he led his government’s »

Faith questions for Keith Ellison

Featured image Stanley Kurtz observes that “[o]utgoing New York Times editor Bill Keller has kicked up a controversy by placing on the table a series of religious questions for the Republican candidates for president.” I want to get in on the act and pose a set of questions for Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison, America’s first Muslim congressman. I summarized my research on Ellison just before he was elected to Congress »

Before the Deluge, Part 2

Featured image As of this morning it looks like—perhaps—the west side of the Beltway will be spared the worst of the winds and rain from Irene, which I suppose would make sense, since I’m uber-prepared.  I’ve even dug out my French press in case I have to make coffee without electricity tomorrow morning. But there’s one deluge we knew would be unavoidable: the nonsense from the global warming nutcases that Hurricane Irene »

This weekend in baseball history, part 1

Featured image A long-time reader sends this dispatch from the 1961 baseball season. On Friday, August 25, 1961, the Los Angeles Dodgers opened a make-or-break weekend series against the home-standing Cincinnati Reds at Crosley Field. Readers may recall that Cincinnati had supplanted the Dodgers as League leaders earlier in August by sweeping a series between the two teams in L.A.. The Dodgers went on to lose their next six games, and staggered »

Don’t They Ever Tire of Hypocrisy?

Featured image Hayward’s First Axiom of Environmental Energy holds that there is no source of energy—“clean” or otherwise—that environmentalists won’t oppose if it becomes cheap, practical, and scalable.  So for example the left once favored nuclear power.  There’s a favorable reference to nuclear power in the famous Port Huron Statement, the founding document of the Students for a Democratic Society, but of course Tom Hayden, the principal author of the Port Huron »

If Dominionists Didn’t Exist, Liberals Would Have To Invent Them

Featured image A few years ago, the Rapture was all the rage. If you listened to liberal reporters and commentators, you would think that Christians spent most of their time sitting around on front porches or in vehicles, waiting to be Raptured into space. This was an eye-opener for me, as I had been going to church since I was maybe three years old, and had never heard of the Rapture. It »