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Daily Blogs for 3/2007
by Christopher Chantrill
Jet Jockey Travolta On Global Warming | 03/30/07
What’s not to like about John Travolta. He urges his fans to “do their ...
Dueling Realities on Health Coverage | 03/30/07
What does our nation need on health care? Or rather, what should we force other ...
Business Boring? Please! | 03/30/07
The chap at the BBC explained why they don’t put much business on TV. “It’s seen as ...
The War Will Go On | 03/29/07
In a sense, military ...
Housing Bust: Minorities Hardest Hit | 03/29/07
Unfortunately there’s a lot of truth in the old joke about the final news item ...
How Do You Spell C-r-e-d-i-t-C-r-u-n-c-h? | 03/28/07
It’s always a mystery how the economy swings from easy credit—when lenders are ...
Go For It: usgovernmentspending.com! | 03/28/07
It’s a great story of rags to riches. First it was an idea. Then ...
UAW Says It's Full of Fight | 03/27/07
You’ve gotta hand it to the UAW. They’re not ready to roll over and play ...
Politics Has Always Been Risky Business | 03/27/07
The recent Scooter Libby case moves ...
Barone on Gore's Secular Faith | 03/26/07
It’s an inexhaustible topic, the solipsism of the baby-boom generation, the idea that ...
Welcome to usgovernmentspending.com! | 03/24/07
Here at the Road to the Middle Class we are frequently ...
Britain's Labour Proposes Tax Cuts | 03/23/07
In Britain this week they had a Nixon Goes to China Moment. The Labour Party ...
Plain Old Patronage: A Theory of Government | 03/22/07
In the excellent ...
Good Old-fashioned Democratic Politics | 03/22/07
If you are a Republican the worst fear about Democrats taking over Congress was that ...
Globalizing Health Care | 03/21/07
Here at the Road to the Middle ...
Forget Racial Profiling, Now It's Political Profiling! | 03/21/07
Who was not outraged by the shocking practice of law enforcement officials ...
President Bush Draws a Line | 03/20/07
Republicans are fit to be tied about pusillanimous Republicans that won’t fight back ...
Who Do You Believe? | 03/20/07
Who do you believe in the recent Atlanta shooting? A National Guard soldier, ...
The Other "Creationism" | 03/19/07
One of the great tasks to which our liberal friends are called is to champion ...
Tom DeLay on Rush | 03/19/07
Everyone has forgotten about Tom DeLay, who was “gotcha-ed” last year by the ...
The Ancien Regime of the Good Old USA | 03/16/07
OK I admit it. When I read Jacob Aronson’s article ...
When Multiculturalism Hits the Wall | 03/15/07
We should all avoid ethnocentrism and phallocentrism and logocentrism. ...
Now There's an Inconvenient Truth About Africa(1) | 03/15/07
Who would have thunk it? The government of Canada has issued a report on ...
Michael Novak on President Bush | 03/14/07
The two hits on President Bus, writes RMC Chappie ...
Earning the MSM's Trust | 03/14/07
The mainstream media may be liberal, but you can still get a fair shake from ...
Gross? As $300 million? | 03/13/07
We red-blooded American males have been suffering for years. Denied our ...
Romney bets on tax cuts to win | 03/13/07
What will it take to win the Republican nomination for president in 2008? Mitt ...
The New "Time": Big and Brawny? | 03/12/07
For many of us, it is years since we subscribed to Time magazine. ...
Japanese Day Traders Try "Carry" Trade | 03/12/07
Remember 1999-2000? That was the heyday of the day traders, amateurs ...
The Case of Hillary and the Vanity Mirror | 03/09/07
Now we know why our Democratic friends hate Karl Rove with a passion. ...
At the Center of the Health Care Mess | 03/09/07
Everyone agrees that the health care system is a mess. But that is ...
School Choice--On the Front Lines | 03/08/07
What do you think about this 16 year old kid, Rontrell Matthews, in Johns ...
Bush: Chavez's Economic Model Leads to Poverty | 03/08/07
It shouldn’t need to be said, of course. It ought to be the common knowledge of ...
How About An Apology For "Fraudulent Education?" | 03/07/07
The two legislative chambers of the Commonwealth of Virginia have recently ...
Newt's Ideas at Cooper Union | 03/07/07
Years ago in the 1990s a political cartoonist drew a memorable line of filing ...
Michael Novak on the Recent Atheist Books | 03/06/07
What are we to think about the recent apologia for atheism? We mean ...
Democrats and Social Security -- And Americans(1) | 03/06/07
Speaker Pelosi made much of her grandchildren at the opening of the new Congress: ...
MSM Soft-pedals ACLU Child Porn Suspect | 03/05/07
Child porn is a pretty disgusting subject. It involves the depiction of ...
New Hope for Climate Deniers | 03/05/07
We holocaust, er sorry, global warming deniers are having a rough time these ...
Lefty Lifestyles of the Rich and Cheap | 03/02/07
You assume that lefty writer Barbara Ehrenreich is, what the Forsytes would ...
Giuliani The Details Man | 03/02/07
Funny how things work. We’ve had months of fainting and gushing by the ...
The Virtue of Debates | 03/01/07
Newt Gingrish and Mario Cuomo met recently to give speeches at Cooper Union in ...
Aiming for Hegemon | 03/01/07
Wonder what the Chicoms are doing and why? It’s not to hard to figure out, ...
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 Lemaître 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] Lemaître [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”
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