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Can Obama Stimulate Republicans?
by Christopher Chantrill
AFTER THE thunder of the Wall Street Journal conservative edit-page folks, now we get the opinion of the liberal news side (don’t ask why the Journal has two opinion pages). Today the Journal’s Gerald F. Seib wonders whether President Obama will be able to sweeten the stimulus pot enough to attract some Republican votes. President Obama’s heart is in the right place, but the stimulus package creates a conflict between the need unfold
| 01/30/09 10:21 am ETThat Stimulus Sickness
by Christopher Chantrill
EVERYBODY now knows what happens when the government decides to give everyone “affordable housing.” It takes a while, but eventually it takes down the whole financial system. That’s because, Virginia, when worthy Democratic voters that don’t pay their bills get mortgages, banks and Fannies and Freddies end up with toxic assets and nobody knows if they are worth anything.. So now our Democratic friends are proposing to stimulate the economy with a spending bill that, wait for this, increases the subsidies for unfold
| 01/29/09 10:12 am ETStimulating Democratic Voters
by Christopher Chantrill
HERE’S a thought for you eternal optimists. Maybe the Democratic stimulus bill is so egregious that it will give stimulus a bad name. Any Republican that wanted an excuse to oppose it now surely has enough ammunition. You could get all the ammo you needed just from today’s Wall Street Journal. First, there is the top editorial. The Journal edit page folks point out that there isn’t much unfold
| 01/28/09 9:56 am ETWhen in "Doubt"
by Christopher Chantrill
WHEN I SAW a trailer for the Meryl Streep movie “Doubt” I was turned off. You could just tell what a movie about accusations of sexual misconduct at a Catholic school would be all about. But then, reading reviews, I started to wonder. Maybe it was doable, after all. After seeing it last night, I can say that the movie is a miracle. No, the miracle is not the acting of Streep as the Catholic high school principal nun or Philip Seymour Hoffman as the priest that the nuns suspect is abusing a young high-school boy. unfold
| 01/27/09 10:05 am ETLiberal Law Takes Freedom Away
by Christopher Chantrill
IT’S amazing how many people look at the current sue-mad society and wonder what’s the problem. It isn’t that hard. The problem is fairly simple. It is the tangle introduced into the law by powerful government. Today we have the notion of law as the balancing of interests competing with the liberal law of “rights” all gummed up with the forest of adminstrative law that arises out of the enormous reach of government. President Obama has called for a new era of responsibility, writes
| 01/26/09 11:48 am ETRove Sets Out Bush Legacy
by Christopher Chantrill
PEOPLE HAVEN’T been obsessing about Bush’s legacy the way they obsessed over the Clinton legacy eight years ago. What was that Clinton legacy, anyway, and does anyone care? But Karl Rove knows his duty, and so he’s set forth his list of has boss’s achievements.
| 01/23/09 12:05 pm ETThe Liberal Tipping Point
by Christopher Chantrill
I SENT THIS to some liberal friends on January 20: I think we should remember the generation before mine that did the heavy lifting on civil rights and that made today possible.
| 01/22/09 2:29 pm ETAfter the Bailout
by Christopher Chantrill
MANY CONSERVATIVES are skeptical about the bank bailout last fall. All that money thrown at Wall Street fat cats and what do we have to show for it, we grumble. It is annoying, but the simple fact is that the government cannot let the credit system collapse. Period. And anyway, the banks are not really true private sector institutions. They are GSEs like Fannie and Freddie, only not quite as government-sponsored. Only a little bit pregnant. No doubt, as
| 01/21/09 11:22 am ETGodspeed President Obama
by Christopher Chantrill
PRESIDENT Obama issued a strong call to service in his inaugural speech today. Recognizing the crisis he spoke firmly about the need for all Americans to participate in the effort of recovery. First he spoke about the problems: Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard unfold
| 01/20/09 1:19 pm ETMLK Vision Fulfilled, say Blacks
by Christopher Chantrill
ON THE FIRST Martin Luther King holiday since Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, most blacks say the King vision is fulfilled, according to a CNN Poll. The poll found 69 percent of blacks said King’s vision has been fulfilled in the more than 45 years since his 1963 "I have a dream" speech — roughly double the 34 percent who agreed with that assessment in a similar poll taken last March. So, you can say that the election of unfold
| 01/19/09 11:35 am ETBush Farewell Address
by Christopher Chantrill
LAST NIGHT President Bush, with one weekend left of his term as President of the United States, addressed the nation in a final speech.
It was, as you would expect, almost all about the war on terror. As the president said: As the years passed [since 9/11], most Americans were able to return to life much as it had been before 9/11. But I never did. Every morning, I received a briefing on the threats to our nation. I vowed to do everything in unfold
| 01/16/09 11:11 am ETChina's Cultural Wrench
by Christopher Chantrill
IF YOU ARE willing to read just one thing on China, try China’s Massive Wrench by Francesco Sisci over at Asia Times. It is the best thing I have seen that tells just how massive the change is, day to day, in China. First of all there is the simple notion that China is changing in 30 years, from rural agricultural to urban industrial, what took 200 years in Europe and the US. But China has been undergoing a parallel unfold
| 01/15/09 12:27 pm ETMuslims Return to Sacrifice
by Christopher Chantrill
WHAT IS the meaning of sacrifice? Frederick Turner defines it this way.
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. But sacrifice, like anything else, can be abused. In particular, rulers have a way of making their people sacrifice for their own acts of impurity. In the story of Iphigenia in Tauris the king of Tauris (in the Crimea), agonized by his crimes, decides to sacrifice to unfold
| 01/14/09 11:32 am ETWattsUp, Pharyngula and Robbers Cave
by Christopher Chantrill
IT’S a nip and tuck battle today between Watts Up With That, run by independent businessman Anthony Watts and Pharyngula, run by P.Z. Myers. They are finalists in the 2008 Weblogs Awards for Best Science Blog that ends today. But it looks as though WUWT will win. There’s a big difference between the two blogs. Let Pharyngula proprietor
| 01/13/09 4:38 pm ETJoe the Plumber Asks a Question
by Christopher Chantrill
JOE THE Plumber goes to Israel and insists to a flock of media that he is not the story. Ask this chap (pointing to his handler), if you want a story, says he, as the Pajamas Media camera rolls. Then Joe the Plumber asks a Reuters guy whether he thinks that Israel has a right to defend itself. The reporter responds, yes. “Have you unfold
| 01/12/09 8:20 am ETPelosi's Politics
by Christopher Chantrill
I OFTEN like to say that the Democrats have learned nothing from the last 30 years of Reagan/Bush economic policies. But I have to admit that, privately, I don’t believe it. Surely they must have learned a thing or two about the economy, and twigged onto the 140 year old notion of marginal value that was invented in the single year of 1870 by about three different economists in three different countries. But when you read Nancy Pelosi in the Washington Post saying, according to
| 01/09/09 4:16 pm ETRU Sophisticated?
by Christopher Chantrill
TIME WAS, Paul Johnson writes, when “sophisticated” was a pejorative—as in “sophist” and “sophistry.” But now it means that you are the cat’s pajamas. Given that we all now want to be “sophisticated” how do we know if we are? Not to worry. Doctor Johnson is in, and he will advise you. Here is his ten-point test. Passing grade is 7 out of 10.
| 01/08/09 4:13 pm ETIf Ann Coulter Didn't Exist...
by Christopher Chantrill
EXACTLY. We’d have to invent her. And if liberals didn’t have such pompous thin skins, Ann Coulter wouldn’t have a job. The flap over Ann Coulter and her new book, Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America is par for the course. Liberals cannot help getting all riled up when Coulter comes into the room. Did NBC “ban” Coulter from its airwaves? Or did they put her off for a day because of the important Gaza conflict? Who knows; who unfold
| 01/07/09 3:59 pm ETWhy the Culture War Matters
by Christopher Chantrill
WHY IS IT that performers at cultural events seem to think it is ok to make politicized comments, as Jay Nordlinger notes? The indefatigable Mark Steyn takes a stab at it. Liberalism is the default mode of the culture — to the point where the left-of-center position is so pervasive it’s no longer a position at all, but unfold
| 01/06/09 4:05 pm ETA Good Year for Climate "Deniers"
by Christopher Chantrill
THE WHOLE point about being a conservative is to stand against liberal group-think. Who knows? Liberals may end up being right on everything. But why do they all have to act like the Japanese under their emperor Hirohito: A hundred million hearts beating as one? The science is in. The earth is dangerously overheating. We must act now. All that liberal group-think on climate just sticks in a conservative’s craw.
And now it is beginning to look as though something is changing in the earth’s climate. Temperatures unfold
| 01/05/09 4:02 pm ETVoters Think Dems are "Center Right"
by Christopher Chantrill
YOU GOTTA give President-elect Obama credit. He managed to get the voters to think that the Democrats are a center-right party. That’s some achievement. And voters think that the Republican Party is a hard-right party. That’s according to a poll by Target Point Consulting discussed Wednesday by Stephen Moore. [S]ays [pollster Alex] Lundry. "Democrats are seen as a center-right party, while Republicans are seen as dominated by the unfold
| 01/02/09 4:50 pm ET
Faith & Purpose
“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
Education
“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State
Living Under Law
Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
Knowledge
Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its
characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then,
once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities
Chappies
“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”
—Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
Democratic Capitalism
I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all.
In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Action
The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness...
But to make a man act [he must have]
the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove
or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Conversion
“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
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