Blogs for 2008 - Road to the Middle Class

NOW THAT Sen. Barack has “courageously” thrown his pastor under the bus, after telling us for months that Reverend Wright was his inspiration, What next?

It’s pretty obvious.

MoveOn there folks, nothing to see here.

While Reverend Wright remains in the news ordinary Americans might tumble to the truth about race relations in this country. They might start to resent the double standard on race. They might start to wonder why it is OK for black Reverend Wright to have cheap, shoddy opinions on racial unfold

Defining Obama for America

by Christopher Chantrill

THE FIRST rule of politics, they say, is to define yourself and your opponent before he gets to define himself and define you.

Right now, you can’t be too happy if you are a Democrat.

Day after day, Barack Obama is being defined as a liberal, elitist, corrupt, racist-hugging radical. Bitterquiddick, Reskorama, Wrightology. It just goes on and on.

And what is John McCain doing? According to Jennifer Rubin at New York Observer unfold

Those Aborted Black Babies

by Christopher Chantrill

ONE OF THE whackier aspects of Reverend Wright’s sophisticated worldview is the unthinking acceptance of liberal doctrine on abortion.

In his celebrated “Government Lies!” rants he came out four-square against undoing Roe v. Wade.

As a confirmed racist he seems to have got confused. Why would a black racist approve of a policy that reduces the number of black babies? Reverend Wright unfold

You Can't Say That

by Christopher Chantrill

OUR LEFTY friends call it “controlling the narrative.” In plain English it means controlling what people are allowed to say.

Whatever nonsense people talk about the First Amendment it remains patently clear that you are not allowed to say certain things. The name of the game in politics is to be the guys to control what is allowed to be said, who get to say: “I can’t believe what I just heard!”

In the aftermath of his month from hell, Senator Obama doesn’t want us to talk about character and the unfold

The Company You Keep

by Christopher Chantrill

REMEMBER the old saying? You can tell a man by the company he keeps.

On the other hand, you can say that you can’t judge a book by its cover.

So the question facing US voters this Fall is whether it matters that Barack Obama counts among his supporters Sixties radical terrorists like Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dorhn.

Maybe it wouldn’t matter if Ayres and Dohrn had renounced their radical follies, but they haven’t. As unfold

What Price Education?

by Christopher Chantrill

WHEN YOU subsidize sometehing then you get more of it.

If you subsidize mortgages you get a housing boom.

If you subsidize college you get a ton of colleges.

And other things don’t get made or built or done. The simple rule is that subsidy is a net waste of resources, because resources are scarce. If you overuse them, becuase someone is handing them out for free, then you abuse them.

Conservative Thomas Sowell makes this point rather clear in his three part article on unfold

Liberals Against the Tide

by Christopher Chantrill

LAST WEEK the US Supreme Court decided a Kentucky death penalty case. It ruled that a three-drug sequence for execution by lethal injection was not cruel and unusual punishment. But a day later, to the delight of the New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse, Justice John Paul Stevens “renounced the death unfold

Obama's Three Unforced Errors

by Christopher Chantrill

GOVERNMENT is always the rule of the few over the many. Always.

You may think that is obvious, but a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to convince us otherwise. Politicians, for example.

But if government is always the rule of the few, then politicians are always elitists. That puts politicians in a bit of a box because the royal road to winning elections is to convince the voters that “s/he cares about people like me.”

That is why Senator Obama’s three recent unforced errors could be so unfold

The Way to Rise in America

by Christopher Chantrill

TODAY AMERICA’S thoughtful Mom, Peggy Noonan, muses over the Obama setback, the end of the honeymoon and the revelation of Senator Obama as a normal politician.

The problem is his obvious inexperience, a problem for older voters. “They are not hostile to his race, they are skeptical of his inexperience.”

But then she writes a little about the charge of elitism, which is obviously particularly grating for Michelle Obama, unfold

Dems Get Tough Questions

by Christopher Chantrill

DEMOCRATIC partisans are outraged today after ABC’s Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos asked tough questions at the Dem debate the previous night in Philadelphia.

Tom Shales in the Washington Post.

It was another step downward for network news — in particular ABC News, which hosted the debate from Philadelphia and whose usually dependable anchors, Charlie Gibson and George unfold

McCain: Dem Tax Increase is "Change"

by Christopher Chantrill

WE KNUCKLE-DRAGGING bitter-end conservative Republicans have been worried about John McCain. And for good reason. He opposed just about every sensible economic policy that President Bush put forward. He opposed the recession-fighting tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. Just what planet was he on?

Yes, of course. Beltway, Third Rock from the Sun.

But now that he’s the presumptive Republican nominee for president he’s coming home to the logical, epistemological, and moral reality of being a Republican candidate for unfold

Theocracy Here We Come!

by Christopher Chantrill

LIBERALS have been worrying for six years about the looming theocracy. Well, it’s obvious. Bush is a Christian. Jesus is his favorite philosopher. And he went on a Crusade in Iraq.

Now he’s the first president ever to greet a pope on his landfall in the United States. “Bush Cozies Up to Pope.” That’s the subhead of an ABC News article about the pope’s arrival and Bush’s decision to go out to Andrews Aif Force Base to unfold

Liberals' and Obama's God Problem

by Christopher Chantrill

A LIBERAL friend confided the other day that Democrats were having a problem communicating with the American people about God.

I replied: Well of course. Liberals champion the Enlightenment. Their political party, the Democratic Party, is the secular party.

That is essentially what Senator Obama confirmed to a group of well-heeled San Francisco liberals when he excused the “bitterness” of working-class voters in Pennsylvania and the rust belt.

It’s not surprising that they get bitter, they cling unfold

Politics is Politics, But...

by Christopher Chantrill

ARE YOU becoming as offended as I am by the Democrats’ unilateralist approach to foreign policy?

I thought that Democrats were all supposed to be noble multilateralists and concerned about America’s good name in the world.

Obviously, Democrats are deeply concerned that the world think well of us when it comes to dealing with global Islamic extremism. But it’s obvious that they don’t give a damn when it comes to trade.

Here’s news item from unfold

Is Google Smart or What?

by Christopher Chantrill

EARLIER this week a new website went up. It is usgovernmentrevenue.com. It uses the technology developed for usgovernmentspending.com and applies to it government taxes and revenue.

Announcing usgovernmentrevenue.com!

Now you can go to usgovernmentrevenue.com and get the scoop on government receipts for all governments, federal, unfold

Are We Safe, Mr. President?

by Christopher Chantrill

SENATE MAJORITY Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) tells it like it is. Yesterday, he told his colleagues on the Senate floor:

“Is the war in Iraq making America safer? By all accounts, the answer…is ‘no.’”

He’s right, of course, but for the wrong reason. Of course the Iraq War isn’t making us safer, not in the sense that seatbelts make us safer.

But it is pretty certain that a pullout from Iraq, as unfold

The Real Meaning of Honor

by Christopher Chantrill

HONOR IS a much abused word.

Mostly it is abused by people who say: How dare you question my honor?

Honor, according to James Bowman in Honor: A History, is bravery in men and chastity in women. If you think that’s all baloney, then try telling a man he’s a wimp and a woman she’s a whore and see where it gets you.

The point is this. Honor in men is the absolute commitment not to break and run when standing shoulder to shoulder with his fellow soldiers in the unfold

More People Entering Work Force

by Christopher Chantrill

THE UNEMPLOYMENT rate was out today, up to 5.1 percent. As usual the headline “80,000 Jobs Slashed” was not the important story.

If you look at the Labor Department’s press release (archived) you will see that the interesting number is in the Household Data. It shows that the Civilian labor force increased by 410,000 last month and that the number of people “not in labor force” declined by 225,000.

What does unfold

Who's The Fighter?

by Christopher Chantrill

ACADEMICS and government employees like Barack Obama for president, writes Michael Barone, because they are peacable souls who don’t like conflict.

Academics and public employees (and of course many, perhaps most, academics in the United States are public employees) love the arts of peace and hate the demands of war.

Of course there is more than sentiment here. War competes for public-sector unfold

Dem Divide: It Really Isn't Funny

by Christopher Chantrill

IT’S easy for Republicans to snigger at the problems the Democrats are having in nominating a candidate for president.

After all, they deserve it. For forty years since the civil rights era they have sat at the political table and played race card after race card.

Har, har, they would say to the white-faced players at the table as they cleaned up, and not just money, but power and the love of beautiful women.

But now it is looking as if their race politics is forcing the Democrats to nominate a very unfold

Education vs. Family

by Christopher Chantrill

IN THE SLEEPER movie hit “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” the heroine Toula breaks away from her imprisonment in the family Greek restaurant by getting some computer classes at the local college.

That’s a common pattern, a liberal friend told me. Children who don’t get an education are stuck in the ghetto of their family and don’t “get on.”

But for me, a light went off. For if the mission of the university is to break children unfold

TAGS

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Racial Discrimination

[T]he way �to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,� Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300�301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District

Physics, Religion, and Psychology

Paul Dirac: �When I was talking with Lema�tre about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. However [Georges] Lema�tre [Catholic priest, physicist, and inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.�
John Farrell, �The Creation Myth�

mysql close 0