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Daily Blogs for 6/2007
by Christopher Chantrill
"The Way to Stop Discrimination" | 06/29/07
It’s located right at the end of Chief Justice John Roberts decision in ...
"An Incredible Week" | 06/29/07
Let’s just pause for a moment, because for conservatives this week has been ...
Dems Who Voted Against Cloture | 06/28/07
The Senate immigration bill didn’t just fail by a whisker. The vote ...
After Blair: It's the Culture, Stupid | 06/28/07
We know now that the Third Way was the left’s backhanded admission that the Reagan and ...
Can Government Deliver on Education? | 06/27/07
Tony Blair, everyone’s darling, has resigned as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, ...
Flip-flopping: Do We Care? | 06/27/07
Apparently there’s a lot of heat about flip-floppers in the Republican presidential ...
The Fix Is In | 06/26/07
As the Senate voted 64-35 to take up the immigration bill, we the unwashed have to ...
Michael Novak on Hillarynomics | 06/26/07
We’ve already cast a jaundiced eye on Hillary Clinton’s “on your own” ...
Global Warming: 4 Legs Good; 2 Legs Bad | 06/25/07
That’s basically what the Society of Environmental Journalists believes. They ...
Single Payer Means Filthy Hospitals | 06/25/07
Before we all collapse before the tightly reasoned ideas of Michael Moore and his ...
The Incredible Shrinking New York Times | 06/22/07
The trouble with being a national institution is that when you start going down the ...
What Do These Professors Want? | 06/22/07
The Wall Street ...
Hamas Wins Gaza: What Now? | 06/21/07
With Israel surrounded by proxies of Iran, what should they give away now? And ...
The Adolescent Cult of "Getting it Right" | 06/20/07
Journalist and writer David Halberstam, tragically killed in an auto ...
Follow the Money on Immigration | 06/20/07
What are the real issues on the current immigration bill? Milton Friedman said ...
"Women with Needs" Tells It All | 06/19/07
What kind of voter would you imagine that Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) is ...
Republican Elite vs. Republican Voters | 06/19/07
Now that the Republicans are out of power in Congress and President Bush is a lame ...
Cameron Speaks, Media Underwhelmed | 06/18/07
David Cameron gave a speech in Tooting, London on Monday, ...
Democrats and Taxes. Again | 06/18/07
The Democrats plan to solve the problem of the Alternative Minimum Tax (it hurts the ...
Reid's "Incompetent" Gaffe | 06/15/07
So Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter Pace that he was ...
Hollywood and Abortion | 06/15/07
Politically, we all know that Hollywood is pro-abortion. But, with the release ...
CAFE: Bad Ideas Never Die | 06/14/07
Back in the 1970s our august Solons thought it was time to issue a ukase to the auto ...
Russia: Coming to Terms With Reality | 06/13/07
Russians want to believe that their country is great. But the trouble is that it ...
Blair Whines About Media He Helped Create | 06/12/07
It really is too bad of Tony Blair to complain about the savagery of the modern ...
A Modest Marriage Proposal | 06/12/07
In Britain the Law Commission is worried about the rights of ...
Democrat Budget & New Taxes and Spending | 06/12/07
Does nobody care what the Democrats are proposing in their budget resolution? ...
It Couldn't Happen Here. Could It? | 06/11/07
You’d think that when you have a centralized Nataional Curriculum, like the British ...
Sarkozy allies head for landslide | 06/11/07
Count me among the amazed as the French voted overwhelmingly for reform in their ...
Bush Defines G-8 on Climate Change? | 06/08/07
The advance word on the G-8 meeting in Germany was that hostess Angela Merkel and ...
What Were They Thinking?(1) | 06/08/07
It’s easy to say that after the fact. You wonder: What planet are they on? ...
Could the Immigration Issue Hurt the Democrats? | 06/07/07
The usual procedure after a big showdown like the immigration bill that was just ...
Democrats on Bush's "bumper-sticker" war | 06/07/07
Democratic presidential candidates are pretty well all agreed that the war on ...
Ted Kennedy Bridge Joke(1) | 06/06/07
You can’t do enough Ted Kennedy bridge jokes, any more than you can have enough of ...
How Do You Spell Freedom? | 06/06/07
Back in the old days childhood was different. Kids had more freedom, ...
What the MSM Won't Tell You | 06/05/07
Abortion is a political issue so reports about medical research around the subject of ...
Daring to Use the F Word | 06/05/07
It’s not that surprising that the Republican candidates haven’t trotted out the F word ...
Dem Problem: How to Get Past the Crazies | 06/04/07
At least President Bush has the guts to brush off his entire Republican base in ...
Hillary Clinton "On Her Own" | 06/01/07
We’ve already expectorated here on Sen. Clinton’s characterization of President Bush’s ...
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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