Monthly Archives: January 2012
January 20, 2012 — Scott Johnson
I watched the whole thing live from Charleston on CNN last night. Herewith a few observations, inspired by Jonah Goldberg’s even dozen: 1. John King asked each of the four candidates to introduce himself. I wish someone — Newt? — had declined to perform as requested. Instead, everyone but Newt took the occasion to emphasize his stable married life by contrast with a mysterious someone who went unmentioned. I thought
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January 20, 2012 — Steven Hayward
James Burnham, just because I can, but also because it fills a need. Over at the Breakthrough Journal domain, I’m having a polite set-to with Mark Schmitt of the Roosevelt Institute about my argument that liberalism has no limiting principle for its welfare-state inclinations. Mark disagrees, but I think gets caught in the weeds of some of my examples. So let’s try this again from a different angle, with an
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January 20, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Just when you think, as I did for the last couple weeks, that the GOP nomination contest was effectively over, along come events that shake things up and make you think that maybe, just maybe, Romney may yet be derailed. Who would have thought, two or three months ago, that Perry and Cain would be gone by now, but that Rick Santorum would still be standing and in the hunt,
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January 19, 2012 — John Hinderaker
This is a very hard-hitting cartoon, by Michael Ramirez. Some will think it over the top, or extreme. Is being born an American in the 21st century really equivalent to being a slave? One recoils from the thought. Yet a child born today is the inheritor of a national debt that stands at $15 trillion, and counting. If Barack Obama gets his way, the debt will explode over the next
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January 19, 2012 — John Hinderaker
I watched tonight’s South Carolina debate, having skipped the last several such events. It was exceptionally interesting. There is much one might say, but two observations stand out. First, all four participants did very well. Starting in the 1980s or 1990s, voters began, for some reason, to value above all else the skills that are on display in “debates.” So it probably isn’t surprising that the four survivors of the
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January 19, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Barack Obama’s blocking of the Keystone pipeline project continues to draw criticism from nearly all quarters. At Energy Tomorrow, Mark Green writes: The fact is you can’t be for infrastructure and for jobs – and be against actual projects that create jobs. You can’t be for working men and women and then deny them and thousands of other Americans real jobs with real paychecks. Laborers’ International Union of North America
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January 19, 2012 — Steven Hayward
I can’t add much to John’s indignation about the economic illiteracy of Obama’s craven decision to block the Keystone pipeline, but I can note how it is also environmentally stupid. First, even if you’ve drunk double-shots of the climate change Kool Aid, blocking the Keystone pipeline not only won’t have any effect on greenhouse gas emissions, it will actually increase them, along with environmental risks generally. Why? Simple: Canada will
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January 19, 2012 — Steven Hayward
I’m having way too much fun re-reading James Burnham’s Suicide of the West, and can’t resist sharing a few more gems from this wonderful book. Back in the 1960s we began to speak of “limousine liberals,” the worst being those who supported forced busing to achieve racial integration but sent their own kids to exclusive and homogeneous private schools. Today we have “Gulfstream liberals” who jet between their multiple mansions
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January 19, 2012 — Scott Johnson
We took a look at the phenomenon of political fact-checkers in “Who will fact check the fact checkers?” The post drew attention to Mark Hemingway’s Weekly Standard cover story “Lies, damned lies, and ‘fact-checking.'” Hemingway traced the rage for political fact-checking back to PolitiFact: Launched in 2007, PolitiFact purports to judge the factual accuracy of statements from politicians and other prominent national figures. A statement is presented in bold type
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January 18, 2012 — John Hinderaker
ABC News has decided to sit on what apparently is an explosive interview with Newt Gingrich’s first wife. Why? ABC wants Newt to do well in Saturday’s South Carolina primary. The story will come out eventually, of course, but not before Gingrich’s attacks have weakened Mitt Romney, the eventual GOP nominee. But ABC isn’t just relying on killing news stories to subvert Romney’s campaign. Today ABC made a positive contribution
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January 18, 2012 — Steven Hayward
In response to my post this morning about Muggeridge’s “The Great Liberal Death Wish,” Power Line reader David Gray writes in to remind me of a companion book to that theme, James Burnham’s classic book from the early 1960s, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism. After a busy day of back-to-back-to-back meetings, I rushed this evening to dust off my copy. Although Suicide
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January 18, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Incredibly, President Obama today denied the application for a permit to construct the Keystone XL Pipeline. Obama’s statement tried, rather pathetically, to blame his decision on the Republicans, who ostensibly rushed him into making up his mind prematurely. Of course, the Keystone application has been pending for more than three years–how impatient can the Republicans get? We have written repeatedly about the economic benefits of the Keystone pipeline; for example
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January 18, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Today Ron Kuby responded to my post “Pardon me: An update.” Ron was a little slow on the uptake, but I wouldn’t want readers to miss what he had to say, if only for the entertainment value: Scott asks: “Does she have to be convicted of an act in order to have committed it?” In America, when a journalist or pundit specifically accuses someone of driving a getaway car as
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January 18, 2012 — Steven Hayward
On the Bill Bennett Show this morning I made a spontaneous offhand reference to Malcolm Muggeridge’s classic essay from the 1970s, “The Great Liberal Death Wish,” and was surprised that Bill was unfamiliar with it. I can only guess that he missed it those many years ago because he was still a liberal then. Anyway, Muggeridge published several versions of the essay over the years—it became sort of his blues-jazz
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January 18, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Our friends at the Volokh Conspiracy have some new competition in the legal blogspace (but being market-oriented I know they won’t mind) from our mutual liberty-loving friends at the Liberty Fund, who have started the new site LibertyLawBlog. It features as its chief contributors Michael Rappaport of the University of San Diego Law School, and my AEI colleague Michael Greve, whose new book, The Upside Down Constitution (forthcoming from Harvard
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January 18, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday Thomas Sowell released a four-part series of columns drawing on his vast research on ethnic and cultural differences. Here are links to each of the four columns and a salient quote from each: An ignored “disparity”: Gross inequalities in skills and achievements have been the rule, not the exception, on every inhabited continent and for centuries on end. Yet our laws and government policies act as if any significant
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January 18, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Last week we posted Peter Robinson’s terrific interview with Andrew Roberts. Given our format, the interview rotated off the site after a few days. We should have another installment of Uncommon Knowledge next week. In the meantime, here is the interview with Roberts, once more once, after a brief introduction. There are several outstanding one-volume histories of World War II. Martin Gilbert’s The Second World War: A Complete History is
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