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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
Civil Society
“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Liberal Coercion
[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State
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
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