Blogs for 2006 - Road to the Middle Class

Surely it wasn’t just so that Senator Kerry could remind us that he was very importantly attending a very important World Economic Forum in Davos? Surely it wasn’t just so that Senator Kennedy could make another stemwinder on the floor of the United States Senate so that he could remind us that he is not exactly the liberal lion of his prime?

Presumably the idea was to throw a bone to the Kossites unfold

God is Love says German Pope

by Christopher Chantrill

FIRST WE HAD a Polish pope who told the people of Eastern Europe “Be Not Afraid.” Now we have a German pope, and the first words out of his mouth, in a papal encyclical, is “Deus Caritas Est” or God is Love.

And it is telling that the first thing he does, as he renews the Christian message for a new generation, is deal with the challenge of Nietzsche, the German philosopher who accused Christianity of having unfold

Mozarts Geburtstag: Amateurs Playing Mozart

by Christopher Chantrill

EVERYONE IS doing their Mozart piece today, the 250th anniversary of his birth. The American philsopher Lee Harris wrote about Mozart’s music, epitomized by The Marriage of Figaro as the one thing we would want to save when aliens are about to vaporize the Earth.

As Harris imagines it, after watching him listen to his CD of Figaro the aliens ask him:

“Tell us about this world of Figaro you have been visiting?”

“It is, strange to say, unfold

Chicago to Wal-Mart: We Dont Need Your Stinkin' Jobs

by Christopher Chantrill

EVERYONE AGREES that Democrats are on the side of the little guy. Without Democrats and their programs, why, people would starve, children would not go to school, and old people would lack health care.

That’s why the Chicago City Council voted against giving Wal-Mart a zoning change so they could build a store on the South Side. The local alderman, Howard Brookins Jr., tried.

Eighteen months ago, Brookins negotiated with Wal-Mart for a store at 83rd and Stewart, former site of the Ryerson steel plant. His plan fell apart unfold

Peggy Noonan Worries About the Short Term

by Christopher Chantrill

IN HER REGULAR Thursday column, Peggy Noonan reviews Bush’s speech at Kansas State University. She approves of his strategic, even romantic vision, but worries about the short term.

We want our president to love democracy and hold it high. But I would feel better if his preoccupations, and his public statements, had more to do with safety, homeland security and a heightened sense of the need for preparedness. I would like him to find unfold

Boys and Books and Marriage and Abuse

by Christopher Chantrill

IN THE PAST week we’ve seen The New Republic worry about Boys and Books, how boys just aren’t doing well in school, and how colleges are conducting an informal affirmative action program to favor unqualified boys because otherwise their male student percentage would go below 40 percent.

Then we have City Journal’s Kay S. Hymowitz observing how the only women who are sticking to marriage unfold

Joel Stein Doesn't Get It

by Christopher Chantrill

EVERYBODY IS having a grand old time with young Joel Stein’s foolish oped in the LA Times. “I don’t support our troops,” he writes. Still, when the troops come home, of course, he wants them to have the full use of the welfare state:

All I’m asking is that we give our returning soldiers what they need: hospitals, pensions, mental health and a safe, immediate return.

But please, no parades.

But Joel, you unfold

Not Your Father's Economy

by Christopher Chantrill

WHAT IS GOING on with the nation’s economy? Now that the era of motors and steel is going away, what does a healthy economy look like?

This question has been nagging away since about 1980 when it looked like smokestack America was finished, and the future was bleak. Instead, as we know, the economy thrived. But what was it thriving on? For the past generation we have been subjected to a neverending MSM drumbeat of layoffs and downsizings, but the economy is better than ever. We read that the median hourly wage hasn’t budged since 1973 unfold

NYT: Bush Reads Books! But...

by Christopher Chantrill

WE ALL KNOW that President Bush is an ignoramus. So when it is reported that the First Lady gave him a copy of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s Mao: The Untold Story and that the president actually read it, what are we to think?

Have no fear, The New York Times’ own Elizabeth Bumiller is there to help us out.

Apparently, when Unions-bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel was visiting the White House conversation included reference to Chang and Halliday’s unfold

Did Hillary Blunder on Race?

by Christopher Chantrill

HILLARY CLINTON made a great gift to the nation when her absurd Hillarycare went down in flames in 1994 and helped elect a Republican Congress. Is she trying to do it again?

Shelby Steele thinks that maybe her “plantation” speech in Harlem on Martin Luther King Day could rank right up there in the blunder department. He writes that pandering is not just a question of going to a black church and playing the race card. It requires a certain finesse, of the unfold

Hybrid Tax Cuts for Rich Liberals

by Christopher Chantrill

IT ISN’T ENOUGH that liberals make out like bandits working for the government earning 40 percent more than ordinary working stiffs earn in the private sector.

They also make out like bandits when it comes to buying cars.

When the Seattle liberal buys a new Toyota Prius hybrid, the federal government will kick in with $3,400 in tax credits.

Nothing quite like tax cuts for the rich, eh? According to Richard Burr,

The unfold

Do Not Expect School Choice, Ever, From Left

by Christopher Chantrill

THE MOVEMENT to roll back the government education monopoly has received a check recently with the decision of the Florida State Supreme Court, reported by Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters, that voucher programs are unconstitutional because they violate the requirement that the state provide

by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality unfold

The Next Generation of Fatherless Boys

by Christopher Chantrill

IT ISN’T MUCH fun, but someone has to report on the pestilence unleashed by the culture war, the plague of fatherless boys. So here’s a report from England by Shaun Bailey, a youth worker in London.

Bailey lives and works in a neighborhood where a lawyer, Thomas ap Rhys Price, was recently robbed and then brutally murdered. unfold

The Index of Economic Freedom 2006

by Christopher Chantrill

WHAT’S THE best way to turn a poor nation into a rich nation? Richard W. Rahn asks this rhetorical question. Is it:

(A) Insist the world’s rich nations transfer substantial wealth though massive foreign aid to the poor nations?

(B) Insist all nations adopt policies that would make them as economically free as the top 10 freest economies today?

We sexist, racist, classist, homophobic conservatives know the answer to that. The answer unfold

Birgit Nilsson Dies: End of an Era

by Christopher Chantrill

SHE DIED ON Christmas Day 2005, aged 87, in the village in southern Sweden where she was born in 1918. And it appears that the Swedes had her memorialized and put into the earth before the rest of the world knew what had happened.

Birgit Nilsson was the biggest star singer in the bright star-studded age of singers: the years after World War II when the world had Flagstad, Callas, and Nilsson all singing at once. And that was just the dramatic sopranos.

She wasn’t a very good actress, and she wasn’t a particularly expressive singer, unfold

Abused Girl Doesn't Make Good: Government Child Protective Services AWOL

by Christopher Chantrill

SORRY ABOUT that, old chap. Could have happened to anyone. Not our fault. That seems to be the attitude of the government’s child protective services after Nixzmary Brown was beaten to death in New York City by her stepfather.

Of course, the signs were all out there in the wind for anyone that cared. The government had a case file on the girl. The officials at the government school had attempted to get intervention to happen. Conservative columnist John unfold

Abused Girl Makes Good Despite Failure of Child Protective Services

by Christopher Chantrill

BRITISH BARRISTER Constance Briscoe is a poster child for the meritocratic society. Daughter of Jamaican immigrants to Britain in the 1950s she went to college and became a barrister, a Queen’s Counsel, a level in the British legal hierarchy that poor old Rumpole of the Bailey could never quite rise to.

Only there is a little more to her story than that. One of six children, she was brutally abused by her mother, who did everything she could to abort her desire for education and advancement. The story is told by Briscoe in unfold

The End of the Bork Era

by Christopher Chantrill

NINETEEN YEARS ago, Senator Edward Kennedy rushed onto the floor of the United States Senate and opened the Bork era. He said:

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would have to sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police would break down citizen’s doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of unfold

Democrats Smear Alito: What's the Point?

by Christopher Chantrill

WHY DO THEY do it? Why are national politicians like Senators Kennedy and Schumer descending to cheap attacks and witness baiting in the hearings to confirm Judge Samuel A. Alito to a seat on the United States Supreme Court? Are they crazy?

It is common in political controversy to represent the other side as idiots. Private people often call politicians they disagree with as fools.

But this is a mistake. Politicians are not fools, even if they often act like unfold

The Global Problem of the Natural Resource States

by Christopher Chantrill

THERE IS A difference between a state like the United States and a state like Saudi Arabia. In the United States, the people are a resource. In Saudi Arabia, the people are a cost.

In other words, the leaders of the United States need us, the American people. Our energy, our wealth-producing activities, our knowledge, our patriotism are the foundation upon which the power of the political leaders is built.

But the same is not true of a state like Saudi Arabia, where national income and wealth comes from pumping oil out of the unfold

Lefty Professors Don't Get It

by Christopher Chantrill

WHILE THE pontificators are pontificating for the cameras at the Alito nomination hearings, David Horowitz and others are testifying to a select committee of the Pennsylvania state legislature about academic freedom. The legislature is taking up Horowitz’s Academic Bill of Rights that protects students from abuse from their teachers, particularly one-sided presentation of controversial subject matter. As Horowitz says: how can students get an education if they only get half of the story?

And of course to back him up unfold

Sam Alito: Independent Jurist or Conservative Extremist?

by Christopher Chantrill

IT IS MONDAY morning, and the Democrats are threatening filibuster, according to Charles Hurt. Says Senator Charles Schumer about Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito:

"If he continuously, given his previous record, refused to answer questions and hid behind ’I can’t answer this because it might come before me,’ it would increase the chances of a filibuster."

Notice the use of the passive voice here.

On the other hand, Alito supporter unfold

Naomi Wolf: She admits she was wrong

by Christopher Chantrill

GOD BLESS Naomi Wolf. After a fine career of best-selling feminist titles like The Beauty Myth and the daring Promiscuities Naomi has decided at the grand old age of 40 that the patriarchy, in the person of her poet father Leonard Wolf, was right after all.

And now she has written a book about it, The unfold

What is Our Mideast Strategy?

by Christopher Chantrill

DEMOCRATS HAVE been complaining for years that the US went into Iraq without a plan for peace. Sure, we overran the country in three weeks, but then what? Chaos and mistakes, that’s what. They have been suggesting that the Bush administration didn’t have a strategy.

Their criticism was damaging because the Bush administration couldn’t exactly say “we do too” and then spell out our plans exactly for the benefit of friends and foe. So when the administration released its unfold

NYT Brides Stay Home with Babies

by Christopher Chantrill

WHAT DO WOMEN want? It’s a question that men have puzzled over since the dawn of time. But we still worry about it because—well, you know why. What is utterly incomprehensible is to understand what feminist women want.

Fortunately, there’s an article by Linda Hirshman in The American Prospect all about women in the workplace. Kate O’Beirne provides a quick unfold

Evangelicals are Different: They Give More Money

by Christopher Chantrill

ONE OF THE reasons that Americans give so much to charity compared to others is that a lot of Americans go to church and the ones that do give to their churches. The same thing applies in Britain. American evangelicals give away about 10 percent of their income, but British evangelicals are even more generous. They give away 12 percent of their income, according to Ruth Gledhill and Joanna Sugden. They give “nine times as much to charity as the average householder” in unfold

Success in 2005: an Iranian View

by Christopher Chantrill

WHETHER OR not Iran (the name means land of the Aryans) and the Iranian people are the eye of the hurricane we call the War on Terror, you always want to keep an eye on Iranian writer Amir Taheri. He probably represents the voice of the suffering city people of Iran, the ones who want to come into the world, the democratic capitalist world that we Anglospherists have spread across the planet. Only they live under a regime that is at war with the democratic unfold

A New Year: Why We Fight

by Christopher Chantrill

WHY NOT START out the new year with a good dose of Why We Fight from Roger Kimball at The New Criterion. In his article, he returns to the theme of James Burnham and his 1964 book The Suicide of the West.

Suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization.

Our modern Cassandra is the brilliant Mark Steyn. He has pointed out that Europe is on a path to suicide with its population crash. unfold