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December 17, 2024
Penny is a Hero; Bragg is a BullyWhen the jury declared Daniel Penny not guilty of the reckless homicide of Jordan Neely, the activists from Black Lives Matter were outraged and staged a mostly peaceful protest. Obviously, the Jordan Neely death has been made political on both sides...
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December 10, 2024
Should We Walk Away from the U.S. Empire?What are we to think about Tucker Carlson’s two trips to Moscow? On Visit One he interviewed President Vladimir Putin. On Visit Two he interviewed Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. All the best people condemned the first visit even though it feat...
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December 2, 2024
Academia’s Real Blind SpotOver at Quillette our friend Heather Mac Donald is having fun with academic David W. Blight of Yale and his piece in the New York Times: Academia must grapple with its blind spots, he argues, in order to understand why blue-collar workers voted ...
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November 26, 2024
Anticipating Populist Nationalism in Russia and ChinaAt this moment, when we can hope that the era of our U.S. educated class has been consigned to the dustbin of history, it’s time to get nostalgic. Remember the WWII Vera Lynn song? When the lefty hate is gone, all over the world And the w...
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November 19, 2024
Repairing the World with DisruptionWe Americans have three political tendencies. First, there is “struggle.” Just before the election Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said: If Donald Trump is elected, the struggle against climate change is over. Interesting how, in Ber...
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November 12, 2024
Dear Liberals: Learn from the EnemyAs you liberals shelter nervously in your mental health spaces I have a suggestion to help pass the time: Learn from the Enemy. The Nazis, to be specific. They will tell you where you went wrong, dear liberals. First there is Nazi jurist Carl Schm...
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November 5, 2024
A Brief History of Political GarbageLast week the world-renowned political scholar Joseph Biden reminded us of the danger to democracy down the ages from political garbage. Said he, after years of careful research and deep philosophical reflection: The only garbage I see floa...
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October 30, 2024
Literally Hitler: What’s Their Problem?Although experts agree that the current Literally Hitler frenzy is about getting progressives to the polls, our Democrat friends have been playing the Hitler card in every presidential election since 1948, when the headline at the New York Times...
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October 23, 2024
Leadership Seminar on Trump and HarrisWhen we talk about “leadership” what do we mean? The answer is obvious. The leader is the hero who leads his band of brothers into the fight of life or death. He is the “Man in the Arena,” in the words of Theodore Roosevelt. ...
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October 15, 2024
Dear Ruling Class: Learn about the Science of ReformOur Canadian friends are concerned about their universal government monopoly health-care system. Most Canadians think reform is needed. However, Attempts at reform have been routinely punished by anti-private care activists shouting warnings of ...
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October 8, 2024
Floods at the End of a DynastyThis morning I noticed a link at Instapundit linking the Appalachian floods and the Mandate of Heaven. Of course! Experts agree that Yellow River floods have frequently marked the end of a dynasty in China because the flood showed that the emperor wh...
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September 30, 2024
Our Liberal Friends Can Tell That Something is WrongAll the right people are responding to the “vibe” of the Harris campaign. But I tend to look for a different “vibe”: what is the subliminal message from our liberal friends? For instance, Oliver Wiseman at the Free Press wo...
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September 24, 2024
It’s So Hard for the Ruling Class These DaysThere’s a piece at The Free Press about how Wikipedia maintains its lefty slant. In addition to its lefty editors, there’s a Wikimedia: Reliable Sources/Perennial Sources page dividing media into “Generally reliable,”...
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September 16, 2024
From Cats and Geese to Kissinger’s ‘World Order’I’m all confused. Is it true that Kamala Harris’s earrings at the debate were clip-on earbuds? Probably not, but it would be fun if they were. Imagine if they were programmed by the CCP to spy on the councils of the blob. And whatabout...
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September 10, 2024
Public Intellectuals Unite to Shame Darryl CooperBy now everybody knows that Tucker blew up the internet with his shocking interview of podcaster Darryl Cooper. Cooper did two Bad Things: he suggested that Winston Churchill ignored numerous peace offers from Hitler, and that the Holocaust didn...
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September 3, 2024
After ‘Mechanistic’ Mass FormationMatthias Desmet is the Dutch psychologist that got into trouble pushing against the Narrative on COVID. La Wik: Desmet became known for his negative assessment of the corona measures… He also made a number of statements that were consider...
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August 27, 2024
Which is Worse: Conspiracy Theory or Hive Mind?It’s good to know that the daughter of two academics, one a Tamil Brahmin and the other a Marxist economist, is just Middle-Class Kamala. But now the last echo of the Kennedy mystique, RFK Jr., has plumped for Trump, after releasing a screed...
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August 19, 2024
Who is Gaslighting Whom?I have a question. Does Vice-President Harris’s proposed policy of a “ban on grocery store price gouging” constitute “gaslighting” as defined by the experts at Psychology Today? Gaslighting is an insidious form of m...
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August 12, 2024
Analysis: Shadows and Appearances and Lions and FoxesThe two most notable philosophical notions in the western canon are Plato’s Cave and Kant’s Appearances. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave we are asked to imagine that we humans are sitting in chains watching shadows on a wall. It...
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August 6, 2024
Why Do Democrats Wreck the Economy?Remember the Sixties? Our Democrat friends gave us guns and butter: a war in Vietnam to stop a domino falling in the Cold War and LBJ’s Great Society eye-watering spending on welfare, Medicare, and Medicaid. In 1968 Americans had had enough and...
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July 30, 2024
Timeout from the Wall-to-wall Celebration of Kamala HarrisWhile our Democrat friends congratulate each other every hour on the hour about the wonders of presidential candidate Kamala Harris we might as well take a break from developing our critical theory of the ongoing undemocratic process of Defendin...
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July 23, 2024
Who’s in Charge: Pelosi, Obama, or the Clintons?Frankly, as the ladies say, I am “exhausted” after a week of assassination attempts, Secret Service blame dodging, and Donald Trump infuriating the noblesse by ad-libbing his acceptance speech. But it all comes down to this. If we elec...
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July 16, 2024
America After Butler, PAOne thing that our liberal friends know is that they are the good guys. Because Change. Because Justice. Because fighting white racism. Because equality. One fine day our liberal friends are going to wake up and realize that they are the bad guys....
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July 9, 2024
How Should the Populists Govern?Let’s jump the gun on far-white populist nationalism and ask the big question. How should the rising populists, from Hungary to the U.S. to Britain to France, govern? The question becomes urgent now that our Democratic friends are sounding t...
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July 2, 2024
Biden, the Democrats, and God: at the End of the DynastySuppose the Biden meltdown in last week’s presidential debate was a message from God, telling our Democrat friends that their progressive movement and the Progressive Dynasty it has spawned has reached its end? Suppose God is saying, ...
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June 24, 2024
The March of Dimes Syndrome and BeyondI used to think that Eric Hoffer had the last word on the natural cycle of political mass movements. And I first wrote about it in 2010. Pat Buchanan hauls out a quote from Eric Hoffer today. “Every great movement begins as a cause, eventu...
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June 17, 2024
Pushing Back Against Lefty Pejoratives and Race CardsLast week was the “far right” week of weeks in Europe, what with the far-right neo-fascist populist white nationalists in Europe voting in battalion strength for the far right neo-fascist populist nationalist Literally Hitler parties in t...
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June 11, 2024
Liberals are Not So Smart. Part XVII’m sitting here thinking about our liberal friends, and wondering: are they smart, or not so smart? They must be smart-ish, else they would not have been the ruling class in America for the last century and more. They are good at handing out t...
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June 4, 2024
‘Getting Trump’ Doesn’t Solve AnythingThe New York Times reports Hillary Clinton saying that if Trump wins the 2024 election “we may never see another actual election.” Nancy Pelosi tweets: “This moment is a somber one for America. Trial by a jury of peers is a funda...
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May 27, 2024
On Memorial Day, Remember Those Who Died for NothingMonday May 27, 2024 is Memorial Day, when we remember the soldiers that gave their lives in America’s wars. But it is well to remember that, despite the skepticism of Wikipedia, Memorial Day began as Decoration Day, organized by the women of th...
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May 21, 2024
The Wokey World of Politics, Enemy, and PowerIsn’t it special how Harvard has been negotiating with the peaceful protestors camping in Harvard Yard and has agreed to look into a Center for Palestine Studies at Harvard? Let us imagine, for a moment, anti-abortion activists standing sile...
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May 13, 2024
Nancy Pelosi Wows ‘Em at the Oxford UnionOn April 25, 2024 the Oxford Union held a debate on the motion that "This House Believes Populism is a Threat to Democracy." And who better to argue the case than former House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)? The only disappointment was th...
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May 7, 2024
Thoughts on the Protest Industrial ComplexWho can forget the wise words of President Eisenhower: In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the protest-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous...
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April 30, 2024
Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty?If you are Deroy Murdoch you see Speaker Mike Johnson as a “squish” for caving on the Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan foreign aid bill. Johnson has mastered McConnell’s art of giving Democrats what they want while getting nothing in re...
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April 23, 2024
Can ‘Get Trump’ Beat Failing Bidenomics?Let us suppose that the best and brightest setting up the Biden regime in 2021 all confidently knew that by the spring of 2024 everything would be copacetic and Bidenomics would prompt a blowout election in 2024 that would consign Trump and Trumpism ...
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April 16, 2024
Learning from COVID with Tucker and NaomiMy big takeaway during the late COVID unpleasantness was how everyone got with the program, right now, from lockdowns to masks to vaxxes. Especially women. Most especially liberal women. I thought to myself: this is what humans do in a genuine crisis...
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April 8, 2024
The Challenge of Explaining Trump and Biden to an ArgentinianAn Argentine friend in Canada challenged me about the absurdity of Trump vs. Biden. Really, he said. Can’t you Americans come up with anyone better? He got me thinking. How come we, the last best hope of mankind on Earth, are oppressed with ...
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April 1, 2024
The Melting of the Liberal IcecapsWe are all, of course, deeply worried about the melting arctic icecaps, because of the devastating effect of a gas that amounts to a crucial 0.041 percent of the atmosphere. But you can tell that what really worries our liberal friends is the melting...
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March 25, 2024
The Commoner World After Conservatism 3.0What on Earth is going on? We have GOP congressmen quitting early. Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) resigned last week, and Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) resigned the week before. Then there is MTG trying to blow up the House of Representatives with a motion to vac...
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February 26, 2024
The Day They Turned the Spies on UsMike Benz, a former State Department official, argues that over the decades since World War II the U.S. has developed a huge intelligence system to spy and spread propaganda and influence elections in foreign countries. In about 2016 the U.S. governm...
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February 20, 2024
Today’s Politics of WeaknessIt was some years ago that my grandson eagerly showed me a video of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher opining on the leadership of the European Union. They're a weak lot, some of them in Europe, you know. Weak. Feeble. And that was almos...
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February 12, 2024
Wars and Putin, Lies and BidenIn a three-part piece arguing against the various U.S. populist and isolationist movements of the past century, starting with the movement to stay out of World War I, and continuing to World War II, Cold War, Middle East, etc., Thaddeus G. McCo...
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February 6, 2024
The Curious Case of DisinformationSince the American Godzilla came down the escalator in 2015 our liberal friends have been obsessed with disinformation coming from the Far Right. Did you know that “disinformation” was originally dezinformatsiya as practiced by the Sov...
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January 30, 2024
Fearless Forecasting at the OMBAs you know, I am the sole proprietor of the most comprehensive and mandatory website on government spending in the United States. Even though Google Search downrated my site back in 2019. We are talking about usgovernmentspending.com. The scienti...
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January 23, 2024
Stay in Your Lane, EveryoneJoel Kotkin reports from Davos that things are not well with Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum. Says he: The growing irrelevance of what Adrian Wooldridge has labelled “the progressive aristocracy” can even be seen in the les...
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January 16, 2024
Whither the Economy, this Election Year?I think that we would all really, really, like to know what will happen to the economy over the next year. Will the economy drop into a recession as a result of sharply higher interest rates and an inverse yield curve? Will moderate inflation a...
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January 8, 2024
Administrative Bureaucracy: Lessons from ChinaWe MAGA Americans hate that we have lived under the yoke of an administrative state for over 100 years. We long to smash the administrative state to smithereens. But our Chinese friends have been ruled by a bureaucracy for about 2,000 years of admini...
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January 1, 2024
How to Understand the Woke Colonization ProjectOne of the ways in which our liberal friends advertise their virtue is their support of the global "decolonization" movement. And their students have learned their lessons well. Read what "Dr. Ijeoma Opara… a double-board certif...
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December 26, 2023
The AI Axe Will Fall First on Bureaucrats and JournalistsI was reading a piece about EA -- Effective Altruism -- its intellectual godfather the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, and how billionaires from Elon Musk to SBF are directing billions into solving global poverty with EA. Then all of a sudden t...
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December 19, 2023
What Kissinger Thought About LeadershipA couple of weeks ago I did a Kissinger piece on China and realism in foreign policy. But now, despite our present plagiarism pickle, I have just finished his Last Word before death at the age of 100, and I have more to say about this great American....
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December 11, 2023
The Ladies Auxiliary of the Knights of MarcuseI really felt sorry for the three diverse presidents of the Ivy League, when jumped-up congress-critter Elise Stefanik (R-NY) humiliated them before the whole world for simply doing their jobs and reciting Sacred Narrative from the Book of Woke about...
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December 5, 2023
Henry Kissinger: Realism in Foreign PolicyHenry A. Kissinger died on Wednesday, November 29, 2023. And I bought my fourth Kissinger book, Diplomacy, at Half Price Books just the day before. I started buying Kissinger books in the middle of 2022 with the purchase of On China, according to ...
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November 28, 2023
Dear Liberals: The Question of ColonizationDear liberal friends: let's talk about colonization and colonizers, that everyone agrees is the worst thing in the world. That is why all the devoted activists of the world are presently engaged in mostly peaceful protests in support of the Ha...
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November 21, 2023
The Anatomy of TerrorWhat is this thing called Terror? What is the point of a group like Hamas that lives for shooting rockets at Israeli civilians and raping and killing Israeli women? Closer to home, what was Menachem Begin doing with Irgun in the last days of the B...
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November 14, 2023
Behind Our Politics is the Existential Fight for the Middle ClassI was eating dinner with family over the weekend and everyone -- educated conservatives every one -- was for Nikki Haley. Then they asked me what I thought. I told them I thought that the existential political fact of our time is that the ordinary...
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November 6, 2023
Who Gets to Name Whom?In a time when Jewish university students are hiding in the library attic from pro-Hamas mobs and N4 insurrectionists are battering at the gates of the White House our noble rulers are worrying about Islamophobia. Can you spell anti-Semitism, dear li...
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October 30, 2023
Let's Close All the Government SchoolsA couple of days ago I got from a friend a video featuring Gazan pre-pubescent boys telling the camera how they want to go kill Israelis. Here are some of the quotes: "They teach us in school that Jews are fickle, bad people." "I am re...
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October 24, 2023
The Bankruptcy of the Victim IdeologyAfter our educated lords and rulers rose to power through the revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries the great question was: how should they rule? The answer, that crystallized in the century between 1850 and 1950, was that our rulers would fi...
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October 17, 2023
Hamas Provides a Clarifying MomentDo you think that things have clarified somewhat over the last week since the Hamas massacres in Israel? I get the feeling that our beloved leaders are caught, just a little, between a rock and a hard place. They would like to equivocate on the Pa...
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October 10, 2023
They Don't Give Us No RespectAs all of you know, last week Hillary Clinton finally couldn't take the transgender madness any more. Said she to Christiane Amanpour: Because at some point, you know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members, but s...
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October 3, 2023
In the Long Term, We Are All DeadI happened to see an article about Brit Prime Minister Rishi Sunak "watering down" the UK's pedal-to-the-metal Charge of the Light Brigade towards Net Zero. So far so good. But the picture with the article had Sunak standing behind a po...
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September 26, 2023
Hanania on How to Drive a Stake into WokeI ordered Richard Hanania's The Origins of Woke back on August 9 when the far-left Huff Post was trying to cancel him for being far-right Richard Hoste twenty years ago. Hey Broadside Books at HarperCollins! Thanks for not canceling Hanania...
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September 19, 2023
Our Rulers: Wrong in Theory, Incompetent in PracticeThe big takeaway from the western ruling class's war on the rising populist movement is ruling-class failure. Rulers typically don't feel the need to take out the opposition unless they have fluffed it. Or muffed it: I'm not sure which ap...
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September 12, 2023
Know What? Criminal Justice is Just Plain UglyI'm reading Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Black attorney Bryan Stevenson. It was lent to us by a very liberal friend, and I can see why. The book tells us that the old South of racists and Confederates and a justice system that...
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September 5, 2023
Hanson Serves Up a Secret Sauce on ImperialismBack in the day, conservative political philosopher Leo Strauss adapted the esoteric/exoteric distinction to politics. He argued that, down the ages, if you wished to challenge The Narrative you needed to do it in an indirect, esoteric way that didn...
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August 29, 2023
Do We Have a ‘Neurotic’ Politics?Glenn Reynolds reckons "Looking around at our politics, it’s hard not to feel that there’s an increasingly neurotic strain to them," what with COVID and "safetyism" and the single women voting Democrat epidemic. Now...
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August 22, 2023
To Spy or Not to SpyAccording to Shaomin Li in the American Spectator, the CCP spy agency has sent out a social media warning: China's State Security Ministry issued a public social mobilization order on Aug. 1 through the Chinese social media platform WeChat e...
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August 8, 2023
Tucker Shows Us Devon Archer's WorldGood old Tucker Carlson. He's really giving us a look behind the curtain in his conversation with Hunter Biden pal Devon Archer. And he really gave us a look at how the world works Way Up High. See, Devon Archer, after a year working at a Big ...
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August 1, 2023
When Icons, Myths, and Fairy Tales Get a Woke MakeoverThis week we conservatives are worried about moms taking their daughters to see the fairy tale of Barbie as a wokey feminist. Why, they'll learn to hate the patriarchy for the rest of their lives! Maybe. But wasn't the original Barbie doll a ...
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July 26, 2023
The Two Kinds of Censorship. Well, Actually SixDid you ever notice that there are two kinds of censorship? There is stuff you are not allowed to hear (or read), and there is stuff you are not allowed to say (or write). Of course. And, no doubt, there is censorship of what you see, or touch, or sm...
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July 18, 2023
Sitting on a Deck-Chair on an Iceberg-Adjacent ShipA week or two ago Republicans in Congress got the Democrats to agree to some minor spending tweaks in order to punch through the debt ceiling. Last week Republicans passed a defense authorization bill that NPR called "The politicization of the N...
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July 11, 2023
Populism: Divining the FutureI just read a charming piece at Quillette about the sacred calling of Russia, featuring Ivan the Terrible, who ended 200 years of the lamentation of Russian women under the Mongol horde. The idea is that after the fall of Constantinople in 1453,...
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July 4, 2023
The Supreme Court's Pride WeekOkay, liberals, after the Supreme Court's racist-sexist-homophobic Pride Week, the world is still standing. Obviously, experts agree, the Harvard/UNC decision is the most racist of all time, and the 303 Creative web designer decision is the most ...
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June 28, 2023
A New America: Only After Liberals Break EverythingAll of a sudden, I am reading a bunch of attacks on the administrative state. From American Greatness, Theo Wold on "A Century of Impotency: Conservative Failure and the Administrative State." From the Daily Skeptic, Eugyppius on...
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June 20, 2023
Soros and Garland: Because They Really BelieveThis week we got two useful pieces of information on the politics front. First, George Soros is handing over his fortune to his younger son Alex. Alex will use control of the fortune to "broaden his father’s famously woke interests to i...
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June 12, 2023
Trump Indictment: I Don't Like ItNeedless to say, I don't like the indictment of Donald Trump for mishandling classified documents. Oh, I get it. The very idea that the middle class should nominate for president a guy that actually proposes to rule in the interest of the middle ...
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June 6, 2023
Next Up: The Age of the BuilderYou all know Dominic Cummings. He's the naughty boy that ran the 2016 Vote Leave campaign to take Britain out of the EU. Then he was an aide to Prime Minister Boris Johnson until he wasn't. I just got an email from his Substack, in which he m...
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May 30, 2023
Dealing with the Upcoming Climate Failure Blame GameWhat do we do about the climate madness? That's the issue that Lord Frost addressed in a recent speech to the Global Warming Policy Foundation in Britain. Short answer: not much, not yet. But there is hope. Frost reckons that the governments i...
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May 23, 2023
Of Course, the FBI Supports the Regime. But…Remember when our liberal friends hated the FBI and its cross-dressing Director J. Edgar Hoover? I know: imagine today's liberals as transphobes; it's easy if you try. But now there's nothing for liberals to see at the FBI. The New Yor...
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May 15, 2023
Questions About the Next DemocracyOver the last couple of months, I've been reading Francis Fukuyama's two books on political order, The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay. He wrote these books after his bombshell article on "The End of Hi...
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May 9, 2023
How to Understand the Transdgenders -- and All Liberal ActivismWhat are we to think as we try to make sense of these crazy times? Now that the latest Thing is transgender "activists" staging armed insurrections in state legislatures. If a bunch of Proud Boys making silly comments on social media amo...
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May 2, 2023
Now Progressives are Sneering at EconomicsWho knew? Progressive economists are now attacking economics. According to Burton Abrams "progressives in the Democrat Party, backed… by left-wing sociologists and political scientists": deny basic economic principles and ...
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April 25, 2023
Five-Year Plans: Climatistas Think Three's the CharmLast week I descanted on the Obama-Biden enemies game, and how it leads to terrors, purges, and culture wars. But this week let us remember the other side of the rule of the educated: the repeated illusion that a few educated geniuses can transform t...
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April 18, 2023
Obama Bad; Biden WorseBarack Obama was a bad president, but Biden is even worse, writes Christopher Roach at American Greatness. Let's face it, as America's First Black President, Barack Obama had the opportunity of the ages to put racial animosity to bed, and ...
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April 10, 2023
NPR is Racist! Now Let's Tear Up the Race CardSo they are calling the Tennessee Republicans racists because they expelled from the state legislature two Democrats that led a bull-horn armed insurrection. Of course they are, because both Rep. Justin Jones and Rep. Justin Pearson are Black. It...
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April 4, 2023
Liberals: Burn the Place Down!It is usual, among our liberal friends, to use the phrase "burn the place down" to characterize brave activists conducting mostly peaceful protests in the face of the all-powerful racist-sexist-homophobe patriarchy and its assault weapons. ...
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March 28, 2023
Saving the Climate in Portugal, and MoreI've been in Portugal for the last week, visiting Lisbon, Porto, going to listen to Fado music -- made world-famous by Fado singer Amália Rodrigues -- and visiting the Douro port-wine growing region. Thank goodness I am a racist-sexist-...
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March 21, 2023
What Does it Mean that Our Rulers Didn't Learn from 2008?If you go by this Bailout Meter, from FRED courtesy of Breitbart Business, we are already in 2008 Meltdown Range. Back in 2008 the problem was Lehman Brothers and the financial system sitting around with 30-year real-estate liar loans as the real-...
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March 13, 2023
Biden Budget: The COVID Ratchet is PermanentAs all the world knows, the Biden administration finally got the federal budget out last week. Sorta. If you went to the govinfo budget page on Thursday it just showed the president's Budget Message and the Public Budget Database. That's o...
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March 6, 2023
Equality: the Lefty FantasyFor years now, I have been "primed" to think about equality. That's because a lefty homeowner on my morning walk exhibits a hand-painted BLM yard sign for all the world to see that reads "Equality Never Hurt Anyone." The sign ...
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February 28, 2023
Biden Unites the Feds with DEIHow are we to understand the Biden administration's executive order to go full DEI for the whole federal government? I mean, if we need to purge the federal government from stem to stern of systemic racism and enforce diversity, equity, and inclu...
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February 21, 2023
The Dead End of ReparationsI don't know about you, but I am about ready to take the ruling-class enthusiasm for "reparations" and put it where the sun don't shine. The current push for reparations, I assume, has occurred because Nikole Hannah-Jones' 16...
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February 14, 2023
Suppose The Four Twits Aren't the Only TwitsWatching the four former Twitter executives testifying before Congress last week I wasn't sure whether they were trying out for the part of Sgt. Schultz in a woke redo of Hogan's Heroes or whether they were doing an out-of-town tryout for the...
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February 7, 2023
Recession, Inflation, and Yield CurvesAfter the Fed's latest inflation-fighting interest rate increase, it's time for a Real Simple analysis of Federal Reserve policy: When the Fed is fighting recession, the federal yield curve is positive; when the Fed is fighting inflation...
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February 1, 2023
No End to the Victim NarrativeIf anyone thought that the culture of the black victim was reaching its sell-by date -- after Rodney King, after Trayvon Martin, after Michael Brown, after Philando Castile, after George Floyd -- well, obviously we were wrong. Because in the beati...
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January 25, 2023
Our Liberal Friends Have Learned NothingThe New York Times is anxious for us to believe that the classified documents scandals attached to Presidents Trump and Biden are Not The Same, Hey, Chuck: are we up to "six ways from Sunday" on the classified documents front yet? Lefty ...
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January 17, 2023
Women Expect: To Have Gas StovesOne of the most important things I know is a fundamental mistake of Sigmund Freud. Siggie asked: "What do women want?" Everybody knows that Siggie was asking the wrong question. It is not what women want, it is what they "expect....
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January 10, 2023
McCarthy-ship: A Tour d'HorizonI gotta say, Speaker Kevin McCarthy's acceptance speech hit all the right notes for me. He spoke as the champion of ordinary Americans, promising to legislate for ordinary Americans as ordinary Americans. And death to the 87,000 IRS leeches! But ...
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January 3, 2023
Is There an Economic Bomb Cyclone Ahead?First of all, nobody knows what will happen next with the economy. On the one hand our Democratic friends seem to think that their supercalifragilisticexpialidocious omnibus spending bill and glorious Inflation Reduction Act are already steering us t...
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December 26, 2022
Could It Be That Our Rulers are ‘Blithering Idiots?’Back when I was a young-un growing up in Limeyland in the 1950s, there was a Thing called "a blithering idiot." You readers, having been socialized to "lived experience" America, may shy away from such direct talk, such violation ...
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December 20, 2022
Fukuyama, Discontents, and Humpty DumptyMy apologies: I just caught up with Francis Fukuyama's 2022 book, Liberalism and Its Discontents. So I spent the week blogging about it. The book was mentioned in a Quillette piece celebrating "Fukuyama's Victory." And I realized th...
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December 13, 2022
Twitter Files: Yet It's Still a 50/50 CountryWhat's comforting about the Twitter Files is the satisfaction of knowing the exact connections between the wokey useful idiots at Twitter and their Deep State masters. It's easy to think of the social-media big boys as cunning and malevole...
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December 5, 2022
Experiencing ‘Human Rights’ as a Liberal GriftI was reading about J.K. Rowling pushing back against trans rights last week, sending a case of champagne to a feminist activist. I thought to myself that, for a feminist like Rowling, there is nothing wrong with "rights" except that transg...
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November 28, 2022
Dreaming of America's FutureAfter the indecisive midterm election, it is time for everyone to be doing thumbsucker pieces. Former President Trump had a couple of thinkers over to Mar-a-Lago -- Ye West and Nick Fuentes -- for a chat. Nick Fuentes? But he's a faaar-right cons...
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November 22, 2022
After Nancy Pelosi: Now What?I don't know about you, but I just feel relieved that Nancy Pelosi has stepped down from leadership of the House Democrats. But is it true that "Nancy Pelosi Lacked the Most Basic Skill of Great Legislators"? Or that "Nancy Pelo...
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November 15, 2022
There Was No Cheating, Peasant!Let's get one thing out of the way. There was no cheating by Democrats in 2020 and 2022. No Siree, and if you suggest such a thing, you are nothing but an extreme right-wing conspiracy theorist. And watch it, because FBI informants… know-w...
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November 8, 2022
Increasingly Grave Threats to the Nation’s Ruling ClassI usually get Andrew Sullivan's Substack Weekly Dish emailed to me. And last week, just before the Nov 8 midterms, he was agonizing over the Biden disaster: "Will Biden and the Dems Finally Get It? In return for centrists’ and mod...
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November 1, 2022
Twitter, Safety, and Counter-RevolutionSo, the second thing that Elon Musk did with Twitter -- after appointing himself "Chief Twit" -- was to arrive at Twitter HQ with a "let that sink in" troll. And then a couple of folks pretended they were being laid off with a LIG...
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October 25, 2022
The Student Loan Giveaway Already Has Been SpentThe Feds released the numbers on federal finances for FY 2022 on Friday. The numbers are in the Monthly Treasury Statement. No doubt you are gasping for the results of Year Two of the Biden Interregnum. Of course, I have published all the numbers on ...
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October 18, 2022
The Liberal Conceit of Indigenous Land AcknowledgmentI went to the Seattle Symphony Friday evening for a Pops concert of "Latin Fire," conducted by Mexican-born Enrico Lopez-Yañez. It was great fun, with lots of trumpeting from Costa Rican José Sibaja, ending with a suite f...
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October 11, 2022
Liberals Have Learned Nothing and They Know NothingI don't know if inflation is transitory or if recession is baked into the cake for 2023. But it doesn't take too much brainpower to imagine a staggering mess this winter on the energy front. "Inflation" and "recession" are...
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October 4, 2022
‘Lender of Last Resort’ Passes It OnRight now, at the beginning of October, with the stock markets down in bear market territory, all voices are wondering if we are heading for a recession. But President Biden is jawboning the oil companies not to raise gasoline prices. “...
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September 27, 2022
The Poisonous Politics of PejorativeRemember back in the good old days, when our Democratic friends used to obsess about fundamentalists and the Christian Right? How they hated Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority! Obviously their concern must have eased up a bit by the time that pr...
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September 20, 2022
Green Energy Transition Hits the WallI think that we fossil-fuel fans can see light at the end of the tunnel as the global government green energy transition experiences a head-on collision with reality. I wish it didn't have to be this way, but really, it's the only way to t...
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September 13, 2022
The Queen is Dead. Long Live the KingTo me, as an ex-Brit, now a proud 'Murican, the death of Queen Elizabeth II forces me to think about the whole question of royalty in 2022. In my mind monarchs are supposed to be fearless warriors defending the border against fearsome enemies. No...
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September 6, 2022
Money Trouble at the FedI know that I should be doing a proctological examination of Joe Biden's "Soul of America" speech of September 1, 2022. But I think that Ron DeSantis and an army of highly qualified commentators are doing a much better job than I could ...
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August 30, 2022
Expect More Democrat Hail MarysIt's pretty obvious to me that the Biden Student Loan Handout is a midterm Hail Mary. With a 40 percent approval rating, why wouldn't the president throw some free stuff at the gender studies graduate vote? What has he got to lose? Notice ...
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August 23, 2022
Never Forget that We are AmericaEveryone's having a grand old time celebrating the end of the Bush-Cheney dynasty. Then, we all ask, what comes next? Most people dive into the details of the next politics here and here. I've done the same here. But I think we need to thi...
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August 16, 2022
Our Rulers and their GroupthinkThe question that keeps us Benighted folks awake at night is whether the campaign against Donald Trump is run out of some secret office deep in the intelligence community, or whether it is a kind of Keystone Kops operation, a bunch of bureaucrats and...
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August 9, 2022
When Rulers' Lies Come in BattalionsSays Theodore Roosevelt Malloch at American Greatness: The Left… now controls all the centers of power and the commanding heights of the world economy... You can’t disagree with it or you are a kook or insurrectionist. It would...
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August 2, 2022
First, We Establish a Moral AscendancyOkay, so the "transitory inflation" wasn't really transitory and the current mild recession isn't really a recession. Yes sir, Mr. Ruling Class. Still, the Fed raised interest rates twice in the last two months and the stock mark...
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July 26, 2022
Bidenflation: A ‘Special Heartbreak’ for BlacksYou've probably read the sad tale recited by Van Jones on CNN about the "special heartbreak" in the black community over the current Bidenflation. "The rising gas prices, food prices -- it has really walloped the black communi...
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July 19, 2022
What Planet are Biden Democrats From?Let's "fisk" an article by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine on "The Democrats' Failure is Complete." Chait begins with Joe Biden once dreamed of an FDR-size domestic-reform agenda. Really? With a 50-50 Senate ...
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July 12, 2022
Can You Smell the Whiff of Panic?It was interesting to read last week that our Democrat friends are criticizing President Biden for doing nothing. Or rather, they are clamoring for him to Do Something to save their political necks -- on the days when they are not avoiding him l...
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July 5, 2022
The ‘Ultra-MAGA’ Supreme Court: What Next?As I was leaving the grocery store on Saturday morning, I noticed a NY Times headline: "Court's Term Was Its Most Conservative Since 1931." Well, NY Times, I'd say that after 91 years of rather middling educated liberal rule from yo...
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June 28, 2022
The Rapid Onset Ruling-Class Disorder CrisisHey ruling class! How yer doin', pal? Do you feel, after a black man dared to reaffirm the Second Amendment and Roe v. Wade got overturned, that the world is spinning out of control? I think you may want to consult a mental-health expert and a...
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June 21, 2022
Disinformation, Sgt. Schultz, and Central BankingWouldn't you know, the august central bankers at the Bank of England just admitted that they "underestimated" inflation, as inflation in the UK heads north of 11 percent. Just like our own august central bankers at the Federal Reserv...
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June 14, 2022
Are Our Rulers Losing the Mandate of Heaven?We racist-sexist-homophobe Americans are pleased to see that Hispanics are trending strongly away from Democrats in the current Bidenflation. And even blacks seem less than enthusiastic about Joe Biden. But whatabout the real core Democrat support...
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June 7, 2022
The Week of Sussmann and NavarroLast week we ordinary Americans took a couple of punches in the gut. First, lawyer Michael Sussmann was acquitted by a jury of lying to the FBI about who was employing him to dish dirt on Candidate Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Said the j...
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May 31, 2022
America Today: Liberals Did ItWhen anything goes wrong in America, our liberal friends are first on the hustings to assign the blame to corporations or right-wing extremists. If it’s soaring prices, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is the first to blame it on “corporate g...
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May 24, 2022
Let’s Talk Red Meat instead of Word SaladI’ve been wading through a lot of political word salad lately. Here’s conservative Glenn Ellmers kale-ing about Bill Voegeli being a meany-jelly-beanie. It has something to do with the nobility of the Founding against the crudity of Trump...
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May 17, 2022
Hey Liberals: Let’s Talk about Biden’s LiesBack in the day our liberal and Democratic friends were utterly appalled by President Trump’s lies. According to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, “Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years.” But ...
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May 10, 2022
Dox away, Libs, But Whatabout Inflation Equity?Thank goodness the U.S. Supreme Court seems to be ready to reverse Roe v. Wade. Because now, for the first time since January 6, 2021, it’s okay to protest again. And it’s okay to dox the home addresses of Supreme Court justices. And it...
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May 3, 2022
‘Ministry of Truth’ Reveals Ruling Class WeaknessAll we white supremacists and armed insurrectionists and ordinary deplorables are outraged this week by the creation of the “Disinformation Governance Board.” But it’s probably not the end of the world. Even Politico’s Jack...
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April 26, 2022
Vanity Fair: The Deep Right is CoolAll you fashionistas better take notice. Vanity Fair says that Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance and Curtis Yarvin & Co. are not extreme far-right armed insurrectionists, but really kinda cool. That’s what James Pogue is saying in “Inside the N...
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April 19, 2022
Earth to Prognosticators: Cool Your JetsThere is only one true “prognosticator of prognosticators” in this world, and that is Phil the Groundhog in Groundhog Day. Because Phil, like The Secret Garden’s Susan Sowerby, knows. He knows that wishing and hoping and tears and p...
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April 12, 2022
Fascism and Tribalism: The Horror!Let’s face it: “fascism” and “tribalism” are two scare words that our modern ruling classes like to use when it’s time to lock down the peasants. Over at the American Spectator, they at least have the decency to...
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April 5, 2022
How to Beat the ‘Intransigent Minority’No doubt, after the glorious victory in November 2022, a new Republican Congress will start to enact an America First agenda that, while honoring the needs of all Americans, will focus on the needs of ordinary middle-class Americans: the kind that ob...
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March 29, 2022
We Must Make America Our OwnBack in 2020 Joe Biden said he was running to save the world from Climate Change and Systemic Racism. How’s that coming along Joey? What? Can’t hear you down in the basement! What? You’re too busy saving the world from Putin? O-Kay....
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March 22, 2022
Do Impeachments Really Make a Difference?In my adult lifetime it has been my honor to witness three attempted presidential defenestrations. The first, of course, was Richard Nixon for the unspeakable crime of… yes, just what was it that he did? Anyway, the day came when the senior Re...
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March 16, 2022
Imagining Regime Change Without TearsThe problem with being a normie right now, that wants to drive a truck without a boatload of mandates, or buy gas to go shopping, or live in peace with your neighbors, is that the global educated elite has other plans for you, and you are not allowed...
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March 9, 2022
Vlad: Are You as Smart as Bismarck?Dear Vlad: I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your scholarly piece "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians" published back in July 2021. I particularly appreciate your feeling that the wall that has emerged in ...
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March 1, 2022
The State of the Union is: DumbI was reading a Breitbart piece about the State of the Union, all about President Biden "plunging both America and the world into chaos." And I thought, yeah, the State of the Union is "Dumb." I mean, ask yourself. Supposing...
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February 21, 2022
Ottawa: The Charge of the Woke BrigadeRemember President Clinton? I remember that, after he left office, he regretted that he'd never be ranked among the top presidents because he didn't have a war on his watch. Kosovo need not apply. There's a "tell" here, of co...
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February 15, 2022
An Inflation Primer for Modern InsurrectionistsLast week I sent friendly letters to my three congresscritters: Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, and the irrepressible Rep. Pramila Jayapal. Jayapal is a high-caste Hindu and her Nayar caste were “advisors to the king on financial affa...
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February 8, 2022
What to Call Our Ruling ClassOne of my readers recently wrote that he objected to my use of the term “educated ruling class.” Said he: Every Jill Biden with a Ph.D. in kiddie literature considers themselves ruling class. They are decidedly uneducated. Of co...
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February 1, 2022
From COVID to Liberal ‘Groundhog Day’Dear liberals: are you wondering right now that the walls are closing in? First, it was Trump: bought and paid for by the Russians. Then it was the open and fair election of 2020 that armed insurrectionists, inspired by the defeated President Tr...
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January 25, 2022
Dear Liberals: Stop The ‘Enemies’ ThingOne helpful thing about our liberal friends is that they always signal to us who their enemies are. January 6 rioters? They are “armed insurrectionists.” Parents opposed to Critical Race Theory in schools? They are “domestic terr...
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January 18, 2022
Joey 2022: The Worse the BetterIs it possible that deep inside the Joe Biden administration there is a conspiracy of cunning manipulators at the very center of the Deep State determined to completely discredit our current ruling class in every aspect of its ideology and political ...
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January 11, 2022
How High Could Budget Outlays on Interest Go?Everybody is wondering what is coming up in the near future as the Federal Reserve Board starts to respond to the current “temporary” surge in inflation. My pal Curtis Yarvin has a nearly incomprehensible piece on “Stagflation and n...
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January 4, 2022
Get Yer New Year Prophecy Here!It’s that time of the year, when everyone is forecasting the future. But the whole business of forecasting is useless because the future is a combination of same-old-same-old and the unexpected. That is why humans have invented prophecy, examin...
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December 28, 2021
Just What is Education For?Late last week I wrote a nice moderate blog post on education, that included a roster of all the brilliant minds that have held forth on education from Aristotle to Mr. “Common School” Horace Mann to our own beloved Bill Gates. The very n...
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December 21, 2021
Hey Dems: It’s Ten Minutes to Midnight!If you want to know the pickle the Democrats are in as they scuttle their Build Back Better bill and pivot to the real red meat, the H.R.1 bill that imposes vote-by-mail nationwide, read this piece from the NY Sun about Ronald Reagan in 1981-82....
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December 14, 2021
In Politics, You Can Never Admit You Were WrongIt was pretty cute: all of George Soros’ prosecutors had a get-together to celebrate their abolition of bail. But the media asked a few embarrassing questions. In a year when killings are up, especially in Democrat-run cities. What are these...
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December 7, 2021
Let’s Build a National White Trash Museum. Not.Last week I spent a couple of days visiting monuments and art museums in our nation’s capital. Perhaps the most arresting spectacle is that every parking garage of a governmental nature has a tilt-up vehicle crash barrier. Apparently, they all ...
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November 30, 2021
Modern American Jury SuggestificationBack in the old days, America had jury nullification, which meant that juries sometimes went against the evidence and the ruling class narrative. Because they were Americans. But today, the plebs wouldn’t dare. Things are different. In th...
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November 23, 2021
Kyle Rittenhouse and our Liberal FriendsIt is probable that Mark Twain did not say that “it’s not the things you know, but the things you know that ain’t so.” But this First Annual Rittenhouse Week sure gave us a bunch of doozies on the Fake News Front. I think I en...
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November 16, 2021
Would a New Conservative 'Fusionism' Help?What with middle-class Americans starting to reject the woke rule of the educated and credentialed class, does that mean America is ready for a new “fusionism” -- a combination of traditionalism and capitalism of the kind put together by ...
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November 10, 2021
My Fearless Predictions on What Happens NextOver a weekend of discussing politics with like-minded family, we of course discussed Trump and the mean tweets. Women don’t like mean tweets. Especially from their president. Because? Never mind. Remember Ronald Reagan? Back when Ronald Rea...
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November 1, 2021
Justice for Tiki Torches!I wonder what the folks organizing the tiki torch parade next to Glen Youngkin’s campaign bus thought they were doing? Because, obviously, to do the thing right you would need to hire genuine Southern crackers, white trash from the Appalachian ...
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October 19, 2021
Fake Victims in the Autumn of a Ruling ClassIn his Autumn of the Middle Ages, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga described the “exaggerated formality and romanticism of late medieval court society [as] a defense mechanism against the constantly increasing violence and brutality of genera...
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October 12, 2021
Surveilling the Dems for ‘Tells’Okay, I don’t know nothing about poker, except that there is this “tell” thing, that an inexperienced player will signal his hand with unintentional visual cues. That is why every poker player needs to go to “poker face”...
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October 5, 2021
Democrats at the CrossroadsOur progressive friends in the House were congratulating themselves for a famous victory at the end of last week. But then we read that Democratic senators were really mad at Majority Leader Schumer’s secret deal with Joe Manchin (D-WA). And th...
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September 28, 2021
Learning from Angelo CodevillaOn learning of the death of Angelo Codevilla last week I went and reread his prophetic America’s Ruling Class from 2010. I’d say it holds up pretty well. My only problem is the division of America into two classes, the one-third as Rul...
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September 21, 2021
Liberals: Try Reading Nazi Carl Schmitt!Back in early 2018, when Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life was a global sensation, he was interviewed by North London luvvie Helen Lewis for GQ. In that interview she complained to Peterson about Nietzsche(1:24:44): You write in your boo...
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September 14, 2021
The 9/11 Bookends: Autumn of the U.S. EmpireTwenty years ago, the U.S. Empire was humiliated by the 9/11 attacks. This 9/11 we are humiliated by the Afghan rout. So much for the U.S. Empire. The whole point of the 9/11 Heroes and the Thirteen that died recently in Afghanistan is that they d...
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September 7, 2021
Critical Theory for GrownupsHere’s a line to amuse your liberal pals: When gubmint bureaucrats deploy Critical Theory it ain’t Critical Theory. Which is to say that when gubmint teachers teach your kids Critical Race Theory, it ain’t Critical Theory; it is ...
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August 31, 2021
'Long-held Doubts about Biden’s Ability'In National Review Saturday morning, the great and the good are affirming their “long-held doubts about Biden’s ability.” The question that Biden’s media allies and the Washington establishment are now privately wondering...
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August 24, 2021
Hey Dems: What Price Your Deep State Pals Now?It really was tremendous fun back in the Trump era when all you media mavens were acting as the willing accomplices of the Deep State in undermining and dispatching that notorious mean tweeter to Outer Slobbovia. Or at least to Mar-a-Lago. How are...
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August 17, 2021
The Mess is on Your Watch, Joey BoyHey, Joey, it doesn’t matter whose fault it is. If things go wrong on your watch, then you are the guy that gets the blame. In other words, when illegal immigrants storm the border on Joey’s watch, it’s Joey’s fault. When i...
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August 10, 2021
Is Our Ruling Class Smart, Dumb, or Really Dumb?The question that keeps occurring to a confirmed regime opponent like myself in this First Year of the Great Biden Era is this: What is really going on? Is the ruling class executing a brilliant strategy to transform the political landscape for the n...
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August 3, 2021
Stress and Mental Health at the Woke OlympicsAll the usual suspects were rounded up when star gymnast Simone Biles did her Bartleby thing and decided she would rather not. Some of the usual suspects criticized her for not being tough enough; other suspects sympathized with her stress and tha...
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July 26, 2021
The unbearable whiteness of IOCingI watched the Tokyo Olympics Opening Ceremony, what was left of it. And I was shocked — not so much at the empty stadium, or the universal mask-wearing. I was shocked at the Whiteness of it all. But first a confession. ...
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July 21, 2021
Socialism is Loot and Plunder by a Ruling CliqueThe news out of Cuba and South Africa has been pretty gruesome this last week, what with anti-regime riots in Cuba and general looting in the ANC’s South Africa. But Communist Cuba has been for over half a century the darling of our socialis...
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July 13, 2021
It Cannot Be That Liberals Are Wrong About EverythingI took a look at my recent AT articles and I apologize. I have been dancing around the elephant in the room. The only thing that matters in America right now is that liberals got everything wrong. And they can’t believe it. They won’t bel...
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July 6, 2021
President Xi Celebrates 100 Years of WhitenessI expect you all have read President Xi’s speech on the hundredth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. I have, and I was shocked. Not because of the Commie stuff, but the Whiteness. Said President Xi Jingping: China is a great natio...
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June 30, 2021
The Fifty-Year War on America’s SoulSome of us remember the good old days of pigskins and leather helmets, when White folks called “Come On Team!” in educated tones from the sidelines. This “Go Team” culture filtered downstream into politics. We have, for ...
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June 22, 2021
Facing Reality, or Teaching Liberals a LessonIf God had decided to teach liberals a lesson about Charles Murray’s latest book Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America published June 15, He might, after review, say this: Dear liberals: racial groups really do differ in intellige...
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June 15, 2021
Social Mobility is a Lot Less Mobile Than We ThoughtInequality is the worst thing in the world. Even my racist neighbor at the top of the hill with his BLM “Equality Hurts No one” yard sign knows that. And we have gubmint programs to the tune of 36 percent of GDP per annum working like mad...
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June 8, 2021
Counter the Left’s Race War with a Class WarI’ve always felt that the Civil Rights Acts were a Good Thing, but that the rot set in with the first executive orders mandating quotas and affirmative action. Now comes Richard Hanania (H/T John Derbyshire) who writes that “Woke Insti...
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May 31, 2021
Biden's FY22 budget: My nickel says...The federal government's budget is normally due out in early February so the president can sell its brilliant new spending in his State of the Union speech. But when there's a new administration, it's later. This year, the...
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May 25, 2021
After Biden: It’s Up to UsIn a laudatory piece on the Biden economic policy #NeverTrumper Michael Gerson cautions, between the lines, that Biden must not only propose solutions but also make them work. Oh sure, writes Reagan administration alum Donald Devine; like anyone i...
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May 18, 2021
Googling in the House of CancelIt is my solemn duty to report to you all a disturbing eruption of Cancel Culture. On my poor innocent blog, “An American Manifesto.” Somebody -- obviously someone well-versed in the tactics of “Action Civics” -- used Blogg...
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May 11, 2021
Government Equals Piracy Equals Loot and PlunderIf you want to understand the folks in politics and activism, you can’t do better than listen to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. “It is, it is a glorious thing, to be a pirate king.” And now there’s...
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May 4, 2021
Let's invent an anti–Critical Race TheoryWay back at the dawn of the Woke Age, I started writing about "Activism Culture." I first mentioned "activism culture" as a thing in June 2015, by asking how the next Republican president could beat the liberal act...
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April 27, 2021
Black Rage: It’s All About the HumiliationAsk yourself: suppose you belonged to a social group that led the world in drugged-out losers resisting arrest and teenage knife fighters? How would it make you feel? The answer is obvious. You would feel humiliated. Now you understand what Ame...
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April 20, 2021
The America of Snobs, Schmucks, and ScumIn the latest racist killing of an innocent Black man the evil racist white supremacist cop in question made a mistake, and drew and fired her gun when she had meant to draw and fire her taser. How racist of her. But I wonder why our municipal ...
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April 13, 2021
How the Obama Crew Makes Things WorseThe question confronting us Neanderthals during the present leftward lurch is: who exactly is the man behind the curtain pulling the levers of the Biden operation? Sundance thinks it’s the Obama crew: Barack Obama and his ideologues (who t...
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April 6, 2021
Woke Wars: Say the Magic Word!Do you think that last week was Peak Woke? What with Delta’s genius CEO Ed Bastian falling into line to criticize Georgia’s new election laws, What with MLB pulling the all-star game from Democratic Atlanta, What with Amazon joining in th...
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March 30, 2021
Bottom Line: Democrats are Afraid of YouI’m having a problem deciding whether the Biden administration is stupid or evil or just flat-out afraid of us Commoners. And then I realized that it’s all three. Here’s why. Our liberal friends never imagined that a Trump cou...
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March 23, 2021
Maybe Mass Shootings Mean White Guys Have Given UpAs we dodge the hail of bullets you may remember back in November 2008 that America elected its First Black President. Thus the moral arc of history that began with the Civil War had finally bent towards justice. “Isn’t it wonderful,...
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March 15, 2021
Figuring Out the Jordan Peterson PhenomenonI’d say that the heart of Jordan B. Peterson’s latest Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life is “Rule XI: Do Not Allow Yourself to Become Resentful, Deceitful, or Arrogant.” It contains the Sleeping Beauty story that you can rea...
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March 9, 2021
Biden’s Border Brouhaha is Just the StartI tell you what really frosts me about the Biden administration. It is that, one way or another, I am going to have to pay for its terminal stupidity. And I ain’t responsible. Illegal immigration? Wow, who could have foreseen that the illega...
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March 2, 2021
Why Are Dems Nuking GOP Voters’ No. 1 Issue?You’ve probably seen the poll about the top concerns of GOP voters and Democratic voters; it’s been all over conservative media. The top three concerns of Republican voters are: Illegal immigration Lack of support for the police ...
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February 24, 2021
Let’s Have a Dialogue about ‘Hate’I was blessed to have a half-hour phone chat with my Seattle City Councilman last week and I started by asking him about defunding the police. He responded with a long monologue about police use of excessive force, in particular pepper spray and tear...
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February 16, 2021
What Were They Thinking?I have a question, now that President Trump has not been removed from office in the Senate. Oh gosh, he had already removed himself January 20. What were the Democrats thinking? What possible advantage could be obtained by kicking Donald Trump in ...
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February 9, 2021
A Short Course in 'Fake Tribalism' for MAGAsAfter the fiasco of January 6 and the semi-fiasco of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), some people like Jackie Gingrich Cushman are calling for moderation. Even Robert Stacy McCain is wondering “Why is tribalism in America now asserting itsel...
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February 2, 2021
The ‘Tells’ of the Deep State Poker PlayersI’ve never been much of a poker player, but I understand that expert players can read the “tell” on their opponents’ faces. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think the “tell” on the actions of our Democratic friends inf...
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January 26, 2021
CJ Roberts and the Courage of Roger ScrutonWe conservatives are pretty pissed off at John Roberts, Chief Justice. We remember the cartoon of a week or so ago when the United States Supreme Court was represented as three donkeys, four chickens, and, on the end of the row, two Americans: Justic...
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January 19, 2021
Causes of the Great Rejection by CommonersSo it was for this that our betters hounded President Trump for four years and then Did Not Fix the election of the political hack Joe Biden: a standard issue stimulus package, with all Democratic interests squared, and a $15-an-hour minimum wage. Wi...
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January 12, 2021
Last Week’s ‘Coup de Main’At the beginning of last week, President Trump was valiantly fighting against the Deep State, but in a few hours of Wednesday January 6, 2021, the ruling class executed a coup de main, and it was all over. You could tell by the way that congressio...
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January 5, 2021
The Future: It Ain’t Gonna Be PrettyOne of the common memes in our racist-sexist-homophobe world is that Conservatism Inc. betrayed us. They never stood their ground, always caving to the libs, whether on race, on spending, on deficits, and now on election fraud, Chief Justice John Rob...
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December 28, 2020
Ruling Class Gotta Have a War -- But What About Us?A couple of weeks ago I noted how your average ruling class “gotta have a war.” And I was right. But, now I am thinking: “how do we play that game?” “We” means everyone from ordinary deplorables to the charming ...
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December 22, 2020
Systemic Chaos in Liberal Education LandIt’s hard to decide whether to laugh or cry at the education chaos in Liberal Land. There’s Dalton, the swank private school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, whose staff has just issued a 24-point anti-racist manifesto demanding, amo...
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December 15, 2020
Ruling Class Gotta Have a WarAll of a sudden Elon Musk has become the second richest man in the world. How did he do it? With Tesla, the electric car company, whose stock has risen 650% this year. How come I always miss out on these deals? It’s not as if Tesla is a secr...
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December 8, 2020
The Human Rubble Problem: Past, Present, and FutureI’m reading along with Curtis Yarvin’s latest effort on Substack, Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince, and his latest Chapter #5 is all about actual governance after his prince takes over. Mostly, it’s about how to govern yeomen, mea...
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November 30, 2020
When the Ruling Class Needs to Steal ElectionsI think that a common theme among my conservative correspondents is: “is this the end of free elections?” Will our Democratic friends be fixing all the presidential elections from here on out? Will I have to bow to the liberal mob if I wa...
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November 24, 2020
‘Great Reset:’ Global Conspiracy or Hive Mind?Like everybody else on the “far right” I have been interested for the last week in “The Great Reset” that has been hyped by the Magic Mountain set at the World Economic Forum. But at the New York Times we are not amused. A cab...
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November 17, 2020
Trying to Think AheadOf course, I believe that Donald Trump won the November 3rd election fair and square and he should use every legal means to prove it. But, it seems to me that we are not going to get out of the present cold civil war until the American people teac...
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November 10, 2020
Hey Joe: You Gotta Deal in the Middle ClassIn the first flush of AP victory on Friday Joe Biden said that the American people had “given us a mandate for action on COVID, the economy, climate change, systemic racism.” Well, I don’t think that any “action” is n...
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November 3, 2020
Donald Trump, the Sacrificial HeroBack in 2016, when Donald J. Trump won the presidency with a majority of the Electoral College and a minority of the popular vote, his big electoral problem was the suburban white women who couldn’t vote for a man who boasted about wo...
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October 27, 2020
Experiencing Debates as Regime OrthodoxyI don’t usually watch presidential debates, preferring to get my take on the cheap from the on-line hot-takes at PJMedia.com and Breitbart.com. But last week I decided to watch. And here is my take. First, a shout-out to our far-right ...
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October 20, 2020
The Tech Lords are Fools and KnavesIt’s easy, after the notorious censorship of the New York Post’s investigative piece on Joe Biden’s corruption, to blame Big Tech for being evil. But I think the problem is deeper than that. I think the problem is what you might cal...
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October 13, 2020
Hey Wokies! What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Stronger!I was going to substitute “Trump” for “me” in the title. But then I thought that “kill” and “Trump” might offend the idiot hate-speech algorithms scything through the web undergrowth at Google. Once ...
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October 6, 2020
Mr. President! Don’t Leave Us!The news that President Trump has tested positive for WuFlu certainly reminds us racist-sexist-homophobe-white-supremacist-systemic-racists what is at stake in America. It is that, without President Trump, we non-wokies are naked before our enemie...
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September 29, 2020
A Moral Narrative to Foil Our Wokey TormentorsIf you like to be frightened out of your wits, you can’t do better than spend an hour or two with Rod Dreher on “Joe Rogan World vs. NPR World” and Angelo Codevilla’s “Revolution 2020.” Ron Dreher argues th...
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September 22, 2020
FY 2020 Deficit: Not Quite $3 trillion!Like every patriotic American, I have been setting up the bleachers for the Great Announcement of the Deficit 2020 which will occur on the 8th business day of October and will be published on usgovernmentspending.com the same day. But then I thoug...
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September 15, 2020
Hey Democrats: What’s the Strategy?One of the things I like to analyze in political events is evidence of strategy. For instance, when Nancy Pelosi says the California wildfires mean that “Mother Earth is angry,” I think that is just reactive -- and primitive, because Moth...
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September 8, 2020
Hey BLM/AntiFa: What About the Workers?Notice something about the BLM/AntiFa rioting? Nobody seems to be very concerned about the workers. And yet, here we are at Labor Day, when all good progressive souls, for whom Kindness Is Everything, ought to be thinking of nothing else. Yeah, I ...
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September 1, 2020
The Democrat Lurch Back to the PrimitiveBack in 2018 I started writing that the left was best understood as a reaction against the modern Double Revolution in science and the modern economy. I coined the idea that the left was a Great Reaction back to the past. At the time I thought I w...
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August 24, 2020
Biden Sorta Pretends to be a NationalistThe telling thing about Joe Biden’s acceptance speech for the Democratic presidential nomination last week was what it wasn’t. It wasn’t a ringing call to fight systemic racism and advance the Oriflamme of wokism. It was, instead, m...
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August 18, 2020
Think of Biden/Harris as Dickensian CaricaturesNow that we see the Democrats’ presidential ticket for 2020 in full, we can see how underwhelming it is. To me, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are political caricatures, gargoyles, in the grand old tradition of Charles Dickens. It is fashionabl...
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August 12, 2020
It's Time to Civilize Lefty 'Peaceful Protestors'Back in the good old days the primary job of men was to defend the border. Just like male chimpanzees. And during the Middle Ages? In the heyday of the Franks, in 500 A.D., “the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, preda...
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August 4, 2020
Cancel Culture as a ReligionWhat with Good Liberals like Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan getting disfellowshipped from the Church of Big Media over the last week, it gives me an excuse to descant on the whole question of the religion of the Church of Woke America. Even the wo...
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July 28, 2020
Hello Liberals: Your Politics Will Not Get You to JusticeBack in June our beloved Seattle City Council passed Ordinance 119805 that forbad the Seattle Police Department from using pepper spray on mostly peaceful protesters as of July 26, 2020. So the Chief of Police put out a letter to business owners and ...
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July 21, 2020
Why Does Nancy Care about Portland?In poker they call it a “tell” when someone inadvertently signals their hand. So what do you call it when all the usual Democratic suspects pile on when Trump’s G-men take on the Antifa regime thugs in Portland? And why Nancy Pel...
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July 14, 2020
Why Do We Have Police, Anyway?In a way, I can see the cunning Marxist logic of defunding the police. If your 911 call gets forwarded to a social worker for all nonviolent crises, what’s not to like? The social workers will all be non-cis-gendered women with “studies...
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July 7, 2020
Trump’s Last Call for the Middle ClassThere are only two things an American politician really needs to know. Thing One is that the American people are the greatest people in the world. Thing Two is that the United States of America is the greatest country in the world. That, of course...
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June 30, 2020
End Cancel Culture with One Simple TrickI was reading a long think piece on the Brit UnHerd.com about Scott Alexander shuttering his “Slate Star Codex” blog because he was afraid of being outed by the New York Times. Then I had an idea. Here’s how to stop the Cancel...
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June 23, 2020
Let’s Have a National Forgiveness DayI have an idea. All those lefty heavyweights that have worn blackface in their foolish youth. Let’s forgive them their trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that modern woke ...
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June 16, 2020
If ‘The Left Controls Every Major Institution,’ Then...Finally, this week, I stumbled into the question for my answer, that my Great Reaction and Activism Culture topics completely explain the left’s crimes and misdemeanors. I found the question at PowerLine’s “The Week in Pictures: Sys...
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June 10, 2020
Defund the Police? That Would Mean...So, now the Soros-backed lefties are all agreed to “defund the police.” Do you lefties really understand what that means? It means, to coin a phrase, A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the r...
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June 2, 2020
George Floyd: Let’s Blame the LiberalsWhy is it that when middle-class white deplorables decide to petition the government for a redress of grievances they gather together in friendly demonstrations like the Tea Party? And why is it that when African-Americans and educated white AntiFa C...
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May 26, 2020
The Obama People Turned the Whole Philosophy of the American Founding Upside Down. Not Because They're Evil, but Because They're Idiots.I think it is pretty clear now to all but the most klueless, given the bombshells and walls closing in of the past week, that the whole Trump Russia thing was a put-up job, that the Obama people, whether prompted by the Clinton campaign or President ...
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May 19, 2020
The Shutdown/Reopen Wars and the New KKKAccording to Tom Bevan, the shutdown wars are politics as usual, for “88% of Democrats believe the top priority of America is to “stay home, slow virus spread.”...Sixty-two percent of Republicans, on the other hand, favored getting ...
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May 12, 2020
Nixon’s Shenanigans vs. Obama’s ShenanigansAs we discover the depths to which the Obama operatives and holdovers went to skewer the Trump campaign/administration from 2016-20, I find myself wondering just what the Nixon operatives were up to, back in the bad old Watergate 1970s. Back in th...
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May 5, 2020
Liberals and the One True Answer of ExpertsAn acquaintance with a moderate Twitter following has observed in these CCP Virus times, that On my Twitter feed it’s the liberals (without a single exception) who are the most absolutist about quarantine behavior. Golly Gee Willikins...
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April 29, 2020
Nobody Don’t Know Nothin’We are now at the inflection point in the Wu Flu phenomenon, where some fearless prognosticators are prophesying that the economy will never come back and others are prophesying that the economy will come back in a flash. I dare say that the proph...
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April 21, 2020
When Will Democrats Cry Uncle?A couple of weeks ago I predicted correctly that President Trump would reopen the economy midway between the point where the Democrats would blame him for doing it too early and the point where the Democrats would blame him for opening the economy to...
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April 15, 2020
Our Primitive Friends of the LeftI was going to write about the staggering amounts of money the Feds are spending on fighting the Wu Flu War. But when the numbers for March came out on the Treasury MTS on Friday the result was bupkis. See for yourself at my new Coronavirus COVID-19 ...
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April 7, 2020
When Should Trump Restart the Economy?As the world shudders into Easter and the death toll on the China virus continues to rise, the question is: should we quarantine or should we restart the economy before the shutdown kills us? Or, more exactly, when should President Trump brave the...
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March 31, 2020
Post-Virus, When are We Going to Start Thinking?My primary conceit, if I have one, is that I have actually read a book. In consequence, I believe, I can think about the world from more than one perspective. Can we actually think about the Wu Flu yet? ‘Cos right now most everyone seems ...
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March 24, 2020
‘You Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste’It’s telling, isn’t it? The one thing that our betters are fixated on in this Chinese virus scare is to chase down the racists and the xenophobes. Because, as the wokerati discovered 27 minutes ago, it is racist to call the COVID-19 thing...
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March 17, 2020
The President’s Job is to Protect UsOne of my Maxims is that “the only warrant for government power is existential peril.” The problem is that most of the time there isn’t any existential peril, and so, if you are interested in power, you have to make it up. Thus, ...
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March 10, 2020
Sen. Warren, What Planet Are You On?Last week we had President Trump explaining to a FoxNews Town Hall that “we have to hit back.” And we had Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) complaining about her treatment by Bernie Bros. In other words, as I keep insisting, men have a Cult...
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March 3, 2020
Lions and Tigers and Literacy Programs, Oh, My!Here’s my favorite moment from last week. Remember back on February 5, when Chuck the Schmuck accused President Trump of doing too much on the coronavirus, like, ooh! banning flights from China? Now he and Our Nance are accusing the president o...
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February 25, 2020
Bernie Wins Nevada! Now What?So, Bernie wins the Nevada caucuses going away, featuring young people and Hispanics. Oh dear. And we thought Hispanics were sensible moderates. So they are, writes Steve Sailer, but they tend to be kind of poorly informed and not that intereste...
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February 18, 2020
Old Left Bernie or New Left Pete: Bring It OnWe all know who Bernie Sanders is: an unreconstructed Jewish lefty from Brooklyn. Think he’s crazy to still believe all that stuff after a century of lefty horrors with over 100 million dead? Don’t. Most people stick with the faith of the...
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February 11, 2020
Yo! Victims! Trump Wants You to become Commoners!It was right after Thanksgiving that I stumbled on Curtis Yarvin’s “Clear Pill” series at American Mind. I found it was just what the doctor ordered. According to Yarvin, there are three class layers in America: Gentry, Commoners, a...
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February 4, 2020
After Impeachment: Our New NarrativeI don’t know about you, but I’d say that Speaker Lucy’s got some ’splainin’ to do. Hey, Lucy -- Nancy, that is -- what exactly is the point of staging an impeachment when the other party actually has a majority in the Se...
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January 28, 2020
The Democrats and Their Prophetic Failure. Again.It was only last October that I diagnosed the Democrats as suffering from “prophetic failure.” That’s what happens when the prophecies of a religious cult fail to turn up on cue. And why most politicians are sensible enough to say ...
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January 21, 2020
The Crisis in the Left’s Two Totalitarian FaithsSitting in the bleachers watching the Democratic presidential campaign I get the feeling that there are two religions at work among the Democratic faithful. The first is the straight Commie religion of Bernie Sanders, that progressive dialectical ...
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January 15, 2020
Everyone in Politics Needs an EnemyEvery human seems to need some cardboard villain to blame for all the sorrows of the world. Zman makes the point that, in the dystopias imagined by George Orwell, it is not just enough to have an enemy, but a possibly unconquerable supernatural...
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January 7, 2020
Foreign Poetry Readers vs. US CommonersIf you were a little surprised that the MSM seemed to regard the late Qassam Soleimani as a “revered” figure and poetry reader, and were shocked, shocked that President Trump would Do Something about an Iran-backed attack on the U.S. emba...
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December 31, 2019
It’s America for the Commoners! Get Used to It, Wokies!I noticed Jonah Goldberg last week checking the altimeter in his spiral dive as he wondered why everyone is so angry if we’ve been having a “Super-Decade.” Maybe you don’t know what’s going on, Jonah, but James Deling...
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December 26, 2019
The Plague of the Gentry’s Fake VictimsI was going to write a measured piece about how the failure of Nancy Pelosi to send the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate. But really, who cares about impeachment any more? Then I accidentally found out that my AT piece of two weeks ago on ...
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December 17, 2019
After Trump and Boris Wins: Rectification of NamesRemember back when Trump and the Russians won the 2016 US election? They won with the votes of the white working class in the Democratic Rust Belt, that used to be the industrial powerhouse of the U.S. Now Boris Johnson has won a “stonking...
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December 10, 2019
Women, the Public Square, and Cancel CultureA few years ago I read about German sociologist Georg Simmel. He wrote a century ago about women and the public square. The public square, he argued, had been created by men for men. But with women coming into the public square, they would transfo...
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December 3, 2019
A Word to Democrats About Democratic PrinciplesNow that you Democrats have got back from Thanksgiving and have finished telling your #MAGA uncle he is a racist-sexist-homophobe, I would like a word before you chaps plunge into full-on impeachment in the House. The most important political expe...
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November 26, 2019
Impeachment Democrats Really Don’t Understand What They Are DoingAfter reading about the shabby effort to advance the impeachment of President Trump over the last two weeks I think it is time for a civics lesson. Maybe that is necessary because they don’t teach civics in the schools and universities anymo...
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November 19, 2019
After Impeachment by the Hollow Men, Then What?As everyone knows, the poet T.S. Eliot ended “The Hollow Men” poem with the following stanza: This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but with a bureaucrat At least that is what I thought about Rep. Adam Schiff’s (...
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November 12, 2019
Ban Cousin Marriage, Get White SupremacyThe intellectual explanation for white supremacy, that I learned about through HBD Chick, is now settled science, according to Steve Sailer in “HBD Chick Vindicated.” According to the settled scientists, populations characterized ...
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November 5, 2019
Don’t Let the Deep State Divide UsToday we like to rail against the fake conservatives that are funded and directed by the contributor class and that cheerlead their contributors’ agenda. But what about our liberal friends? There’s the notion, from Jeff Reynolds, that ...
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October 29, 2019
Budget Fun and Games for HalloweenWhat is the funnest thing in America, after Halloween? You got it: the Federal Budget. And just in time for Halloween the Feds issued their report for the just completed FY 2019 with their Monthly Treasury Statement (MTS) for September 2019...
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October 22, 2019
Trump’s Insults: The Male and the Female of ItPresident Trump’s insults are exercising our opinion makers again this week. Lars Walker thinks Trump’s like Charlie Allnut, the Humphrey Bogart character in African Queen, useful guy to have around when you’re in trouble, but only ...
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October 15, 2019
All the World’s a Stage for Left-wing ActivismWhy doesn’t someone do something about left-wing activism? I’d always comfortably assumed that, despite the clamor of LGBT activists, there were really very few gays and transgenders. But the Audacious Epigone says that studies show th...
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October 8, 2019
Impeachment: The Politics of FutilityDo you remember when? When liberals were extolling “whistleblowers” as disgruntled nobodies that deserved protection against retaliation for exposing corruption in government offices? Disgruntled? Today’s heroic Ukraine whistlebl...
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October 1, 2019
Democrat Dilemma: The Failure of ProphecyLast week I took apart an NRO critique of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “limitless ideology” on my American Manifesto blog. I said that it is not enough to critique the constant ideological expansion of government. You have to have an alt...
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September 24, 2019
Trump Battle Prep: Things We KnowIn some ways, President Trump has been going quiet in recent weeks. I wonder if that is because his people are ranging the heavy artillery wheel-to-wheel a couple of miles behind the front lines before the Big Push starts for next year’s presid...
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September 17, 2019
Hey, Dean Baquet: I Demand an '1871 Project'The dispiriting thing about the leaked New York Times town hall meeting is that, clearly, everyone at the NYT is on board with the “1619 Project,” the fantastical notion that the whole history of the United States should be understood in ...
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September 10, 2019
We Need a Theory of InjusticeBack in the day, liberal professor John Rawls impressed all the chin-waggers with his A Theory of Justice. The idea was to justify left-liberal politics on the basis of the “veil of ignorance.” When we liberal professors all sit around de...
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September 3, 2019
The Return of the Tea-Party-is-Racist SmearOur friends at the New York Times did a retrospective piece August 28, 2019 on the tenth anniversary of the Tea Party that emerged in 2009 after the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s First Black President. But, according to Tyler O’N...
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August 27, 2019
As the Fed TurnsI was flying to the UK on Friday so I missed the second 3 percent drop in the stock market in three weeks. When I landed I discovered that Everyone is agreed that President Trump is to blame because of his tweets jawboning the Fed to lower interest r...
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August 20, 2019
Hey, Pichai! Here's My Advice for GoogleIf I were Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, I’d be worrying that I was batting on a bit of a sticky wicket. As a native of the greatest cricketing nation in the world, I’m sure he understands. Even if he feels offended by the racist sexist ho...
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August 14, 2019
Of Course, There’s a White' Nationalist Terrorist Threat'!Back on August 4, 2019 our editorial friends at the New York Times declared that “We Have a White Nationalist Terrorist Problem.” (H/T C.J. Hopkins) Of course they think that. Bless their hearts. Just imagine how things look from th...
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August 6, 2019
Mass Shootings: Is This Ghost Shirt Time?Here we go again. Two mass shootings in 13 hours. Who is to blame? How many gun bans should we enact? How much is President Trump to blame for it all? Here’s another thought. When the young men in a culture feel hopeless they expend themselv...
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July 30, 2019
Don’t Expect Spending Cuts Until Dems Cry UncleMost of us know that U.S. government spending is too high. And the deficit and the debt are going to get us one day. So why doesn’t someone do something? And why has President Trump done a “$320 billion budget deal” with Speaker ...
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July 24, 2019
The Liberal Version of 'Send Them Home'A few years ago, while visiting Australia as a Yank, I tried to get the natives to rag on the “whingeing Poms.” That’s because the funnest example of xenophobia I know is this stand-up item: Brit: “Blimey, it’s blee...
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July 16, 2019
Is This the Moment Where the Revolution Eats Its Own?When we racist, sexist homophobes use the word "catfight," we are merely observing — as you are not allowed to observe — that women fight each other differently from how men fight. It seems to us deplorables that women fight ...
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July 9, 2019
America's Dueling Narratives on the Fourth of JulyLast Thursday, President Trump gave an hour-long speech celebrating the United States of America. If you talked to the ordinary Americans in the crowd attending the speech, they liked it. They liked it, in particular, because it celebrated America, a...
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July 2, 2019
Who Will Tell the Movement Activists to Go Home?Back in the day, I remember reading, the Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat had a problem. What to do to cool off all his guerrilla fighters once they were ensconced in a camp in Lebanon? The answer: get them wives. He was facing the problem with al...
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June 25, 2019
Slavery and Reparations and Concentration Camps, Oh MyThe problem with our lefty friends is that they don't really want to have what they call a "conversation." Their idea of conversation is for highly trained activists to ram their morality down our throats and then demand we say thank-yo...
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June 18, 2019
Conservatism Deplatforming: Crisis or Opportunity?Obviously, the word has gone out to the school of lefty fishes that all conservative speech is hate speech and that the moral revolution of the last ten years is irreversible. And so YouTube and Pinterest and the rest are chucking ordinary cons...
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June 11, 2019
Conservatives Are Waking Up at LastI know I shouldn’t say this, but my mind turns to it after all the D-Day celebration last week. What if the Mueller probe was the deep state’s last desperate effort to stop the populist steamroller from looting and plundering its burea...
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June 4, 2019
Getting the Word Out on our Failed Ruling ClassI finally got to watch 56-Up, the latest in the Brit Up Series that has followed the lives of 14 Brits born in 1956, starting with Seven Up broadcast on ITV in 1964. The cunning plan of the lefties at Granada TV was to pitch three seven-year-old s...
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May 28, 2019
'Villainous': Nancy's Missed ChanceNancy Pelosi: you made my day. First, it was Candidate Obama, who told San Francisco Democrats what they wanted to hear, when he told a fundraiser in 2008 about “bitter clingers” and their guns and God. How we have loved to laugh at th...
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May 21, 2019
Is Abortion Politics Going Crazy?Thus far in 2019 we have seen some liberal states pass laws to make abortion legal up to the point of birth and maybe later. And we have seen conservative states make abortion a crime almost from the moment of conception -- for the abortion doctor. ...
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May 14, 2019
Are Impeachment Democrats Geniuses or Idiots?Now that we know that there never was any Trump Russia collusion, and now that we know that the Democrats aren’t going to let that hinder their lust for impeachment, the question in all minds is whether the Democrats have a Bismarck cunning str...
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May 7, 2019
How Do We Push Back Against the Twitter Mob?Over at American Greatness Alaina Toledo tells conservatives to get out on the front lines of Twitter and let ‘em have it. [U]ntil the Right can be bothered to match the Left in its passion, we will continue to lose ground in the culture w...
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April 30, 2019
Let's Deep-Six Touchy Joe's Anti-WhitismThere was a clunkiness about Touchy Joe’s invocation of Charlottesville on his presidential announcement day. For Joe, it seems, the hordes of hooded white nationalists are about to debouch out of the Appalachians and do whatever it is that peo...
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April 23, 2019
Old Conspiracy Theories Never DieNow that the whole Russia Collusion conspiracy theory gussied up by the deep state/Clinton campaign/fake media communities has proved to have been much ado about nothing, there is the question about what comes next? What do all the believers do now t...
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April 16, 2019
Deep State: Idiots and Knaves and Crazy-CakesThe providential thing about the deep state effort to spy on the Trump campaign and then to take down a duly-elected president is that the deep-staters are fools and knaves. They don’t have the chops to be real Chekists or real revolutionaries....
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April 9, 2019
The College Admissions Scandal: You Did It, LiberalsI didn’t know. I really didn’t know! According to Caitlin Flanagan at The Atlantic, when prep-school college counsellor Katie would tell rich liberal parents that their kid -- on whom they had spent a ton of private-school tuition -- prob...
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April 2, 2019
The Baloney of 'Unchecked Nationalism'Guess what. Jonah Goldberg is worried about the “Dangers of Unchecked Nationalism.” Well, yes, I suppose it could get to be a problem. It could get to be a problem if our ruling class bankrupts the country by funking the urgent task of...
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March 25, 2019
After Mueller: Now Back to the Culture WarI do feel for our liberal friends, I really do after their weekend from hell. To be disappointed by Mueller, and humiliated by Trump, when everything seemed to be going so swimmingly! The shame of it! It’s the ingratitude! Don’t those ...
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March 19, 2019
The NZ Attack? I Blame Lefty IntellectualsIn the aftermath of the evil mosque attacks in New Zealand, everyone is having a grand old time blaming their favorite scapegoat. In the New York Times, a chap called Wajahat Ali blamed Donald Trump and Breitbart News. Another Muslim activist blamed ...
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March 12, 2019
The Plague of the Good Little Girls in CongressThere seems to be an emerging conventional wisdom that the freshmen Democratic women in Congress really don’t know what they are saying, poor little things, so we shouldn’t really take their anti-Semitic statements seriously. Note to a...
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March 5, 2019
Dear Black Americans: Forget the Race IssueI don't know why, but I am inspired this week to write an epistle to my fellow Americans that are black. I suppose this happened because in the week that a foolish black American actor cooked up a foolish hate crime hoax, I had positiv...
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February 26, 2019
When a Lefty Declared the Death of NarrativeI happened to pick up a book at Ophelia’s Books in the People’s Republic of Fremont, in Seattle, this week. Written by a grand old leftie academic, J.H. Plumb, The Death of the Past proposed, in 1968, that we are too sophisticated and sci...
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February 19, 2019
Borders and Babies vs. the Priests of ActivismPresident Trump made it pretty clear in his State of the Union speech, and the government funding bill that the president signed that is full of cunning poison pills to bollix up border control confirms it. The president will be running for reelectio...
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February 12, 2019
Are Liberals Going Mad, or Are They Out of Ideas?Everybody has been having a grand old time critiquing the mad plans of Sandy O and her Green New Deal, and the plan to turn the U.S. economy upside down to fight the existential peril of climate change and carbon pollution. Sandy O and her white-robe...
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February 5, 2019
Blackface-KKK: I Can’t Believe He Did ThatWell, well, well… Who woulda thunk it. The Democratic governor of Virginia dressed himself up in blackface or a KKK hood when he was in medical school. I Can’t Believe He Did That! Yay! Auto-da-fé! À la lanterne! To...
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January 29, 2019
It's the Season of StupidI guess I must be living in a dream world. I thought the science was pretty well settled on big government programs and the administrative state. The programs don’t work because they can’t compute prices, and the thousands of administrato...
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January 22, 2019
How Many Elephants in the Room?What do you think? I’d say that -- with the Mueller dump on Buzzfeed’s “bombshell,” the Friday night NYT piece telling us that the FBI had no evidence when it decided to investigate President Trump after he fired James Comey, ...
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January 15, 2019
Shutdown: Who Is the Voice of the People?One of the conceits of our liberal and lefty friends is that they are the Voice of the People, the voice of the marginalized who, but for the political activism of the left, would never be heard. This conceit was probably closest to the truth when...
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January 8, 2019
Mitt Still Does Not Get ItI was in India last week, researching India's Big Problem, which is that whenever young men feel cold in the morning, they start an open wood fire, right there in the street, right there in the city. No wonder that Google reports weath...
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January 1, 2019
The Only Privilege in America is Liberal PrivilegeAs lefty online dictionaries showcasing their lefty words of the year to review 2018 -- such as the “toxic” in toxic masculinity, toxic culture, and toxic environment -- I redeclare the following from 2015, without fear of contradic...
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December 25, 2018
What Should Come After Trump?There have been a spate of pieces lately about what comes after Trump -- as though President Trump were already half-way gone. Really? You think the Mueller whisperers are going to get him after all? But I would say that the question is: what k...
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December 18, 2018
The Harvest of Free StuffThe problem that governments across the western world are facing these days is how to prune the dense thicket of free stuff that has grown up unchecked in the age of the welfare state. Make no mistake. This is the common factor between the Trump e...
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December 11, 2018
What About Welfare in Mumbai?Okay. The fact is that there is very little welfare in Mumbai, where Lady Marjorie and I recently landed for a tour of western India, and for good reason. You don’t want to encourage the poor to move to the city and join the 20 million already ...
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December 4, 2018
Jordanetics: Understanding Vox Day’s ProblemThe experts on debates say that the first thing you want to do with your opponent’s ideas, before you demolish them, is to state them in the best possible light, even correcting a couple of mistakes to put a better shine on his whole system. Or...
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November 26, 2018
Yay Yellow-Vest Frenchies! Now What?Who would have thought it? French citizens, “mostly peacefully protesting” on the Champs Elysées over gas taxes intended to save the planet from climate change. Imagine! The Frenchies are so docile that it took gas at $7.06 per gal...
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November 20, 2018
Bannon Prophesies a Populist Age. Is He Right?In a Munk debate on November 2, 2018, Steve Bannon squared off against David Frum on the question of The Rise of Populism. Bannon argued that the permanent political class brought the country to its knees in the Crash of 2008, and that “the par...
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November 13, 2018
Armistice Day: The Wages of StupidIn evaluating the causes of the Great War my lefty pal Michael Mann in his multi-volume The Sources of Social Power blames the warrior culture of the Central Powers emperors. Making war was all they knew and so that is what they did. But I beg to ...
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November 6, 2018
Jordan Peterson Meets Cathy Newman CloneIf Jordan Peterson can turn the tables on Cathy Newman, why not the deputy editor of the New Statesman? One North London media luvvie is much like another. So I watched Jordan Peterson taking on NPC lefty Helen Lewis, and he actually got to say ho...
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October 31, 2018
Don't Like Tribalism? Sorry, You Missed the BusIn the week of Bombgate and now Synagoguegate, Jonah Goldberg wrings his hands over the temptations of tribalism, while Angelo Codevilla says, more or less, that we are in a revolution, sports fans, so get used to it. Look, I get Jo...
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October 23, 2018
How the Left Colonizes EducationI was with a bunch of lefties over the weekend, and would you believe, the big problem in education is the colonialist curriculum. So after the lefties had all tut-tutted about how even now in Africa the educational curriculum was still painfully col...
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October 16, 2018
Leftism: The Art of the MobThe last week has seen the usual suspects getting miffed when people called out the anti-Kavanaugh "peaceful protesters" as mobs. Oh, come now, lefty friends. You chaps are as bad as the First Apostle, whom the Son of God famo...
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October 9, 2018
Justice Kavanaugh: Thank You for Your CourageI just sent off this letter to Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh: Your Honor: I write today to thank you for the extraordinary courage you displayed during the harrowing experience of the last few months as a nominee to be associate justice o...
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October 2, 2018
The Eternal Privilege of Ruling-Class WomenEvery few months, whether I need it or not, I go up the hill, past all the #WeBelieve yard-signs and the #HateHasNoHomeHere yard-signs, to Rudy’s Barbershop to get my hair cut by the pierced and tattooed working-class white women up there. A...
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September 24, 2018
Kavanaugh: Feminism is Just Another Lefty TribalismThe way to think about the political riptides of Kavanaugh Witch Hunt is through the lens of anthropology. Imagine that we are bug-hunters observing the Noble Savages of a heretofore undiscovered tribe in the Amazon rainforest. This is what human ...
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September 18, 2018
Hello, Liberals: Can You Spell F-A-S-C-I-S-M?Remember back in the day, liberals, when you were shocked, shocked at the way the business sector in the Reich just went along with the H-word? Oh, the outrage! It just showed that businessmen were really crypto-fascists and sho...
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September 12, 2018
Our Lefty Friends' 'Spartacus Illusion'For the last three years I have been developing a theory about the left’s “activism” culture. But I have failed miserably to come up with a catchy title for the whole thing. Thank you, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ). You are a champ! ...
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September 4, 2018
Patriotism vs. Nationalism: Both Are Fake TribalismI was to the local Safeway on the Saturday morning of the Labor Day weekend, and I noticed a number of red, white, and blue "patriotic bouquets" in the floral department. But what would it mean if instead Safeway had advertised t...
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August 28, 2018
Burying Us Won't Work, LiberalsRemember when Nikita Khrushchev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, said "we will bury you" to the Western ambassadors in Moscow? Me, neither. I was ten at the time. Here is the fu...
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August 21, 2018
Boo to the Hate Speech InquisitionIf you were like me, you went to bed on Friday all riled up about the Facebook suspension of PragerU for hate speech. But then you woke up on Saturday to find out it was all a mistake! So that’s all right. But are the social media megacorpor...
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August 14, 2018
Defend Conservatism by Going on the AttackNever mind that the conservative movement is dead, writes Michael Walsh, because conservatism isn't a movement anyway; its job is to "conserve." So a movement with political goals is beside the point. Instead,...
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August 7, 2018
Teaching Good Little Girls to Hate and to FearGolly, just when we deplorables had finished digesting the incomparable Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, along comes another tasty dish: the New York Times' pet racist and sexist, Sarah Jeong. AOC's claim to fame is...
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July 31, 2018
The Enlightened Superstitions of Steven PinkerA couple of weeks ago, I realized that I ought to read Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. I had read a review in National Review Online that reported on Pinker...
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July 24, 2018
Sorrows of a Young Gen ZerOkay. So the fabled Carter Page FISA warrant was all about the Deep State wanting to keep tabs on the Trumpsters. And a pretty lame effort it was, too. Now let us talk about something important. It's ...
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July 18, 2018
Of Course, 'Activists' Are ThugsSeveral conservative writers, such as Andrew Klavan, have remarked, with regret, that the folks kicking conservatives out of restaurants and movie theaters are thugs. I'd say this was almost right. I'd just add that the imp...
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July 10, 2018
Bari and Jordan, Oh My!Did you know that Bari Weiss, of the New York Times, interviewed Jordan B. Peterson, of lobster hierarchy, at the recent Aspen Ideas Festival? Nor did I until it popped up after I had watched a YouTube video of the very white Oxbridge chappies of Mon...
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July 3, 2018
The Supreme Court Pick Is Just the BeginningAll across the land, normals are still celebrating the miracle of President Trump’s 2016 win. With a President Clinton we’d be under the jackboot of a 6-3 liberal Supreme Court mandating transgender bathrooms in our churches. (Hey, Not...
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June 26, 2018
They Protest Because They BelieveWhat is going on? Is the left going bonkers? Mostly peaceful protesters blocked the ICE office in Portland, Oregon. Protesters drove Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen out of a D.C. restauran...
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June 19, 2018
Hello, Investigative Double StandardsRemember back in the day how liberals were ragging us about The Double Standard? I think it had something to do with women being judged more harshly about sex. But now we have liberals driving a coach and horses, or at least a brigade of electric ...
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June 11, 2018
What is Trump-talk for striped-pants boys?I know that it is very naughty of me, but I could just barely contain my glee when President Trump busted up the G-7 meeting on Friday. Suggesting that they ought to invite bad boy Vladimir Putin along! "Unprecedented!...
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June 5, 2018
Waiting for the Next ReligionWhat is to be done about the political injustice of Barack’s Spygate? Or the cultural injustice of bumping Roseanne off ABC for a drug-addled racist tweet while celebrities “in the family” get to skate? For some folks like David ...
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May 22, 2018
Collusion: Thank Goodness the Deep-Staters Are IdiotsOne of my articles of faith is that there are no conspiracies, only stupid efforts to cover things up. Hello, Intelligence Community! In the last week or so, we have seen the unraveling of the Russia collusion narrative, the notion that the Tru...
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May 15, 2018
Jonah's 'Suicide': There Is a Better WayOne of the common themes you encounter in the comments section of conservative online media is the notion that conservatives are rational and liberals are emotional. Dennis Prager does a bit of that here, and Jonah Goldberg makes the ...
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May 8, 2018
Karl Marx: Talking Points for DeplorablesSo here we are at the bicentennial of the birth of Karl Marx in Trier, an ancient city that was once the capital of the Franks. Chuck was another of your Cinco de Mayo babies. Let us celebrate the man who was fated to outdo Helen of Troy, the...
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May 1, 2018
Can the Internet Teach Us to Love the Market?My Big Idea is that the one thing we modern humans need for our socialization is to accept in our hearts the divine law of the market economy: first, find some way to serve your fellow man, then get paid. Unfortunately, we moderns mostly still thi...
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April 24, 2018
Let's Cross Enoch Powell with the Philly StarbucksTo me, the iconic image of last week was the shot of the black activist yelling through a bullhorn at a pajama-boy Starbucks barista in center city Philadelphia. There's your white privilege in a nutshell, pal. But I am worried for our blac...
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April 17, 2018
Why Don't We Turn Populist?There are two types of populism, writes Victor Davis Hanson, that go back to classical times. There's the populism of the mob, which wants redistribution and to tax the rich. Then there is the populism of the small prop...
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April 10, 2018
Whatever Happened to the Feminists' 'Hear Me Roar'?Remember when "Berlin would hear about" the Rosie the Riveter who so pluckily built tens of thousands of airplanes in World War II? Now it is Susie the Scrivener: "Hear me roar," she says. Except that reality is The ...
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April 3, 2018
What Should We Call Secular Ideologies like Marxism and Social Justice?As we celebrated Easter, the season when the Christians celebrate the Son of God who rose from the dead, there remained a big question for our age. What do we call the secular movements that are such a feature of our age? I am talking a...
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March 27, 2018
'I Can't Believe He Signed That Omnibus Bill!'Come on, you conservatives and Trumpists. Stop behaving like special snowflakes! Because when you complain, "I can't believe that President Trump signed that horrible omnibus bill!," you are descending into what I ...
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March 20, 2018
Let's Call Liberal Activists 'Regime Hate Squads'Remember the good old days of the Latin American "death squads"? Every liberal chanted with one voice to end these extrajudicial paramilitaries used by right-wing Latin American dictators to do the dirty work that they didn't...
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March 13, 2018
Real Inclusion Means Everyone Feels IncludedUp in Canada, some lefties are holding an "It's Okay to Be (against) White(ness)" event, and they seemed shocked that anyone should find this problematic. Lindsay Yates, an event organizer, had this to say: This event is...
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March 6, 2018
Pity a Poor Liberal ActivistIf you haven't noticed in the last week or so, our liberal friends seem to have taught just about every young head full of mush how to do "protest." In the liberal universe, activism and protest are the highest forms of human...
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February 27, 2018
The Left Is Going for Broke This Year. Good.Just up the street, my liberal neighbors still have their #WeBelieve yard signs out front from a year ago that declare that "Kindness is Everything." And the lesbians at the top of the hill still have their "Hate Has No Home...
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February 20, 2018
The Russian Collusion Investigation as TherapyNow that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller has indicted the Russians for meddling in "our election," let us think about what it all means. The answer is obvious. This is neo-McCarthyism, straight up. After all, when was the l...
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February 13, 2018
Forget Balancing the Budget – Let's Think BigOkay, so our pal Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has done a budget deal with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) that does not do a thing about moderating spending, let alone balancing the federal budget. And this, we understand, is a Very Bad Thing. But ...
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February 6, 2018
The Usual Idiots that Gave Us the FISA MessOkay, so now the Nunes FISA Memo is out and it shows that the Justice Department and the FBI were used to wiretap the Trump campaign on behalf of the Democratic Party. I doubt that this game of using the FBI and the DOJ and the FISA court to assis...
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January 30, 2018
The Idiots That Don’t Concede ElectionsBack when I was a young man I had a Greek-American friend that taught me Rule One about democratic politics. This was back in the mid-1970s when the Greek colonels had just conceded power back to the center-right party in Greece. What was needed n...
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January 23, 2018
#SchumerShutdown: Is This Trump's Decisive Battle?In the very German study of war and strategery, there is the concept of the "decisive battle." It means, more or less, the confrontation after which the losing side just loses the will to continue. Maybe the #SchumerShutdown i...
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January 16, 2018
Someone Needs to Sort Out the Tech Idiots on CensorshipIf you are a conservative, it is easy to believe that the tech giants have it in for conservatives. But what if that isn't true? What if the "Googlers" and the Facebookers and the Twittites are just idiots and don...
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January 9, 2018
How Does the GOP Win Back Blue States?My man Kevin D. Williamson is worried that the Republican Party has nothing to say to blue states like California and New York and that the party feels pretty good about it. But such an approach leads to disaster, he says: W...
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January 2, 2018
NYT Women Demand Return to PatriarchySince time immemorial, men have wondered What Women Want. But we ask the wrong question. The question is not what women want; it is what they expect. The fundamental thing about women is that they expect to be protected. They ...
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December 26, 2017
Gentlemen, Start Your Engines for 2018 MidtermsDemocrats seem to be over the moon about their 2018 midterm prospects. They seem to think that they will clear the tables and get themselves a Trump impeachment. And maybe they are right. There is another possibility. By November the Mueller inves...
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December 19, 2017
Next Up: Make Marriage Great AgainThere’s a chin-stroker piece up at American Greatness by John Fonte asking whether conservatives should be a nice well-behaved opposition, as proposed by Yuval Levin, or a revolutionary vanguard, as proposed by Victor Davis Hanson. Fonte remind...
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December 12, 2017
Dear Jonah Still Doesn't Get ItI feel for Jonah Goldberg and the rest of the #NeverTrumpers at Conservatism Inc. The awful truth is that their Resistance to the leftward ratchet has failed, and the world has moved on. So last week Jonah’s G-File is “Against One-Thin...
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December 5, 2017
Let's Apply the Precautionary Principle to Liberal Gender-Bending!A thoughtful reader sent me an important Spiked article about “We Are More Than Gender.” Author Joanna Williams rotates through the ritual liberal positions on sex and gender that takes for granted all the gender-bending dialectics ...
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November 28, 2017
After Harvey and Al and Charlie, the Left Still Does Not Get ItThere’s a lot of people wagging their fingers just now at the 1990s. If you want to understand the 2010s and HarveyFrankengate, they say, it all started with Bill Clinton’s One Free Grope. How do we solve the problem? Let’s do an...
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November 21, 2017
The Bankruptcy of One Free Grope PoliticsAs the Moore vs. Franken Trash Olympics continues, liberals like Howard Fineman are going back to the future and renewing the One Free Grope indulgence that once got Bill Clinton out of purgatory, because Al Franken is a “lifelong champion of w...
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November 14, 2017
How to Teach the Young about 'Change'I was talking to a young skull full of mush last week, opining on how I felt we were in a time of confusion. Then he uttered the word “Change.” That’s when I made my mistake. I should have drawn him out on his understanding of th...
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November 7, 2017
Democrats: Caught between Arugula and Bubba BaitIf you believe in my notion that politics is division, the art of dividing a people by uniting 51 percent of them to your banner, then you understand identity politics as merely a tactic, one way of bidding for political power by uniting a fraction o...
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October 31, 2017
As Usual, Patty Murray Doesn't Get ItBack in the dreadful days of the patriarchy and plantation slavery, Dr. Johnson famously said that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel. But what do you say about Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) arguing that the ruling class should use its First...
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October 24, 2017
Steve Bannon: It's a Conspiracy!I don’t believe in conspiracy, except where Hollywood and HW and the Democratic Party are concerned. And anyway, it wasn’t a real conspiracy: everybody knew, except us rubes. But I am interested in something that comes closer to a cons...
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October 17, 2017
On Tax Cuts, Dear Establishment, We Don't CareI was going to write about Steve Bannon today. Or maybe Harvey Weinstein. But I see that the usual suspects are writing about the fact that tax cuts won’t pay for themselves and won’t cut the deficit. So here goes. First, My Man Kevin ...
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October 10, 2017
You Won't Believe These Income Tax Facts!They tell me that our wise leaders are presently working on a tax reform or cut, or something. So I thought I’d add a new Income Tax Analysis page to my usgovernmentrevenue.com site. The page has a chart showing the federal individual income ta...
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October 3, 2017
Hey Irwin! How About Politics Lessons for Liberals?In the New York Daily News, liberal warhorse and law school dean Irwin Chemerinksy teams with Howard Gillman to plead with fellow liberals in “First Amendment lessons for liberals” not to fall for the right-wing’s cunning plan to tr...
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September 26, 2017
'Fake Protest' is When Regime Supporters Do ItI suppose a part of me died a week ago when Nancy Pelosi’s speech was interrupted by activist Dreamers. Oh wait! Wrong Narrative! Instead, I had an epiphany. This protest, I realized, with a Good Little Girl leading a well-rehearsed chant...
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September 19, 2017
What? No Emerging Democratic Majority?Back in the Oughts, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira hit the big time with The Emerging Democratic Majority. They told liberals exactly what they wanted to hear: that women, minorities, educated, and young people were voting Democratic, and there would...
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September 12, 2017
Hillary Clinton and What Happened to the Nature of WomanThe title of Hillary Clinton’s post-deplorable book tells it all: What Happened. Notice the lack of agency. But wait! I thought that the whole point of feminism and women’s liberation was that finally, after the age-old oppression ...
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September 5, 2017
Education and the $330,000 KidA month ago our liberal friends at Vox published a piece by Andrew Granato, a middle-class kid who got to go to private high school and college on $330,000 in financial aid and scholarships. Granato allowed as how this privilege had vaulted him in...
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August 29, 2017
I Don't Like Living in Interesting TimesOne of my favorite quotes is the coward Falstaff cringing to Prince Hal before the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403. I would ‘twere bedtime, Hal, and all well. If you are a conservative or dissident rightist -- or any kind of person, left...
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August 22, 2017
Suppose BLM and Antifa Are Just Democratic 'Muscle' like the Old KKKSteve Bannon is saying that the real Trump administration, of populist nationalism, is over. And I suppose it is, given that Bannon is no longer on the inside bashing heads. Bannon said, as he walked out the door, that he commends the Democrats fo...
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August 15, 2017
From Goolag to CharlottesvilleI was having lots of fun on my blog with the Goolag Archipelago story last week. What could be more important to the world than whether Suzy Snowflake was working at Google and talking to her friends about how it feels to be working for a tech firm a...
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August 8, 2017
This Mueller Thing Will End in Tears (for Liberals)If you are liberal and a faithful reader of The New York Times, you think that the Watergate campaign to take out President Nixon was America at its best. Imagine! A president covering up the criminal misdeeds of his underlings! But the liberal k...
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August 1, 2017
Russia and North Korea through the Lens of GDPOne of the ways in which the Trump-Russia Collusion Narrative doesn’t pass the smell test is when you sniff at Russia’s GDP. In 2014, it was north of $2 trillion. But by 2016 it was down 40 percent to $1.3 trillion. Wonder why? You kno...
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July 25, 2017
Thinking Pre-revolution at the Museum of the American RevolutionLast week I was in Philadelphia as Lady Marjorie’s mom was laid to rest alongside her beloved husband and her beloved son. But afterwards, on the way to the airport, we dropped in on the new Museum of the American Revolution, and it got me to t...
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July 18, 2017
Why Is the Left So Anti-Baby?Last week we learned that the Danes are working hard to reduce baby production in Africa. No doubt, because sub-Saharan African women are powering a baby boom that will make Africa into the Ground Zero of the Population Problem later in the century. ...
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July 11, 2017
The Pretensions of the Left, Then and NowLast week a bunch of celebrities were beclowning themselves over President Trump’s meeting with Russia’s President Putin. You see, they actually believe the cooked-up "Russia Collusion" narrative and so naturally assumed that a ...
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July 4, 2017
Give the GOP a Break: Draining the Swamp Is HardI seem to read articles all the time about how President Trump and/or the Republican Congress is stupid, or incompetent, or dead in the water. And not just from the usual lefty Democratic operatives with bylines in the fake news media. Now there...
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June 27, 2017
Of Course, Millions Must Die When Republicans Reform Health CareLast week the Republican Senate leadership released the text of their Obamacare replacement, and naturally the Tapers and Tadpoles of Democrat Nation immediately demanded to know “what is our cry?” The answer was not slow in coming. The u...
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June 20, 2017
No, Jonah: Politics Is Not 'Debate and Disagreement'In his latest Goldberg File -- which sadly lacked any credible update on the Goldberg canines -- Jonah takes after Dennis Prager’s notion that we are in a civil war here in the USA. Jonah’s main argument is that Democracy isn’t...
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June 12, 2017
The Pied Pipers of the MillennialsA couple of weeks ago, John O’Sullivan was confidently writing about the British Conservative Party finally getting it all together, and uniting the three strands of Toryism -- the economic freedom and enterprise of Thatcher, the nationalism of...
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June 6, 2017
After Paris Accord: Doesn't the Ruling Class Have Something Better to Do?With all the wailing and the gnashing of teeth, can President Trump’s exit from Paris be anything less than the Fall and the expulsion from the Garden of Climate? Anyone would think that Steve Bannon had tempted Melania with an apple from the T...
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May 30, 2017
Dear Mrs. Clinton: Please Concede the Election, NowLast week Hillary Clinton reprised her notorious Wellesley graduation speech with another graceless graduation day speech at her alma mater. In her latest effort, the losing candidate in the 2016 presidential election continued her Sore Loser narrati...
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May 23, 2017
Trump: The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?A week is a long time in politics. That’s what British politician Harold Wilson probably said. But there is no doubt about the length of last week of Donald Trump’s presidency. And all about what? Siccing the IRS on the ACLU? Lying ab...
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May 16, 2017
Forget Comey: Just Look at the Great Enrichment!I don’t know what you think about the Comey firing. It’s amazing to me how much people seem to have invested in it. Does it show that Trump is totally undisciplined and flopping around out of control? Or does it show that he’s just ...
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May 9, 2017
The Meaning of Kinda-Sorta Obamacare Repeal and ReplaceOkay, so the House passed a “repeal and replace” ObamaCare bill. And it doesn’t really repeal ObamaCare and doesn’t really replace it. Is that good or bad? Is that a win for Trump or a loss? If you read Newt Gingrich, it is...
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May 2, 2017
This 100 Days Thing Is RubbishHere we are all discussing President Trump and his first 100 days. As if it matters, yet. Politics combines two impossible dreams. Some people want to use government and politics to return to the golden age of the past; other people want to use go...
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April 25, 2017
Liberals 'Don’t Understand What’s Happening in the Country'In the bonfire of the vanities that is the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s campaign of 2016 one quote from Shattered, the book of the week, stands supreme. [C]lueless Hillary Clinton... to a close friend, “I don’t understand wha...
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April 18, 2017
My ‘In This School of Life, We Learn’ Yard SignI don’t know if you have been lucky enough to see one of those liberal “In This House, We Believe” virtue-signalling yard signs. In my rich-bitch Seattle neighborhood they are spreading like crabgrass. But then I thought: I can p...
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April 11, 2017
Syria: the President as a Man of ActionI suppose it would be going too far to call President Trump a Man of Steel. But he certainly qualifies as a Man of Action in his quick and decisive response to the use of nerve gas in Syria. But what does that make Trump’s predecessor, Barac...
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April 4, 2017
Now Feminists Want to Force Moms Out to WorkI just love it when the dull liberal partisans miss the point. This week we conservatives are having a grand old time with an Aussie feminist Sarrah Le Marquand who argued “It Should Be Illegal to be a Stay-at-home Mom.” Rather than ...
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March 27, 2017
Last Week’s Reality Check About Liberalism and EntitlementsLast week Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced he would oppose Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, and probably invoke the filibuster. Interesting how the filibuster used to be a Democratic tactic to defend Jim Crow, and now ...
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March 21, 2017
How Bad Is the Left’s Politics of Humiliation?I suppose that the ritual of humiliation is a very big part of being human. Think of school bullies and high school mean girls. Think of Mrs. Norris dealing it out to country cousin Fanny Price in Mansfield Park. Think of show trials and the necessar...
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March 14, 2017
The Liberal Testament of Lies Says ‘Science Is Real’Over the last few weeks yard signs have been cropping up like crocuses in my very liberal north Seattle neighborhood. The one I am talking about spouts every liberal catchphrase you can imagine. It is almost like Moses coming down from Mount Sinai an...
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March 7, 2017
Charles Murray’s Crime: Telling Liberals They Are Making Things WorseDo you know the higher education version of the dog-ate-my-homework excuse? It is: “outside agitators.” We heard it from Berkeley at the beginning of February, and now we just got it from the president of Middlebury College, who has writt...
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February 28, 2017
It’s Official: Liberals Care Only About Illegals and MuslimsA couple of weeks ago I penned a comprehensive and mandatory piece that I modestly titled “A General Theory of Leftist Politics.” I argued that leftist politics has always been about representing the unrepresented, the people outside the ...
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February 21, 2017
Michael Novak, RIP: His Big IdeaMichael Novak, adviser to popes, who died February 17, 2017, had the biggest idea of the 20th century. Since the obits out there, NRO and WSJ and WaPo and (finally) the NYT, don’t seem to really grasp this, I will tell you all about it. Nova...
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February 13, 2017
The ruling class is the liberal 'resistance'The liberal push-back through the judiciary against the controversial Trump immigration executive order tells us a lot about our liberal friends. For instance, the Seattle liberal judge who stopped the E.O.'s implementation was concerned about...
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February 8, 2017
A General Theory of Leftist PoliticsWhat are we to think of what Sarah Hoyt has called the Antifada, the lefty riots against free speech at “The Home of Free Speech” at the University of California at Berkeley? And why does the anti-Trump movement have the conceit to style ...
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February 1, 2017
Trump Means the End of Liberal Small-Ball GovernanceAfter a week of President Trump, one thing is clear. We are not playing small ball in America anymore. The whole point of small ball, from basketball to baseball to poker to politics, is that you don’t do big plays and risky things. You aim ...
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January 24, 2017
Lefty 'Activism' Means More Power to the PowerfulJust imagine if a coalition of Second Amendment groups had barracked a pre-inauguration gala at the second Obama inauguration. Yet even FoxNews radio soothingly reported the Inauguration Day protests against President Trump by a coalition of lefti...
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January 17, 2017
Dear Liberals: Here Is Some Magnanimous AdviceAt the end of this week, liberals, your worst nightmare will be inaugurated as President of the United States, and the bust of Winston Churchill will be restored to the White House. So let us all honor the spirit of Churchill. For liberals everywh...
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January 10, 2017
Hey Liberals, Let’s Have a Teach-In on LyingIn case you haven’t noticed, liberals are all a-quiver over Trump’s “lies.” It´s got to the point that the kids at the Murdoch blog have had to weigh in with a ponderous piece by Gerard Baker on “Trump, ‘Lies...
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January 3, 2017
I Want a President Who Loves America: Pre-Inaugural EditionTwo years ago in this space I wrote that “I Want a President Who Loves America.” I started out by telling how I fell in love with America 51 years ago on my first trip to the U.S. over Christmas 1965. I went on to assert the obvious: n...
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December 26, 2016
Transition: Sauce for Obama is Sauce for TrumpOver at the Murdoch kids’ blog the bribed apologists of the ruling class are in a tizzy over Trump’s foreign policy “forays” during the presidential transition. President-elect Donald Trump is upending the modern convention...
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December 20, 2016
Trump Heard the Cry of the UnprotectedI got to talk to a retired special forces guy last week, and he said that president-elect Trump won by appealing to voters that have long felt “unprotected.” Now, everywhere I look, I see the word “protector,” as in a woman...
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December 13, 2016
Do You Know or Have You Ever Known a White Supremacist?I get what the peerless Jen Palmieri was getting at a week ago. She was doing the liberal thing, hurling a liberal pejorative at Kellyanne Conway, breaker of the glass ceiling. She was playing the liberal race card. And if “raaaciss” does...
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December 6, 2016
I Want a President Who Tells Us His Sense of the WorldWhy is the U.S. in Syria? Why is the U.S. in Yemen? What was the point of dumping Khadafi in Libya? Do you have a clue what is going on? I don’t have a clue about any of that either. And that’s the story of the Obama administration. He...
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November 29, 2016
Hello Democrats, I’m Here to HelpIn the last week, as the magnitude of the Trump and Republican victory has started to sink into the group mind of the ruling class, various thoughtful people have stepped in to help our Democratic friends to get back on track. For instance, Ted V...
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November 21, 2016
We Must Push Back Against the Borkers of BannonLast week the left tried to Bork Steve Bannon, a key Trump campaign aide and proposed “chief White House strategist and senior counselor” and until August executive chairman of Breitbart News, by linking him to the alt-right. The Trumpist...
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November 15, 2016
After Political Correctness Comes TrumpidorI take as revealed truth that to get voters to reach 90% on any issue, you have to scare the pants off them. That is why blacks voted 88% and LGBTs voted 78% for Clinton in the CNN exit polls. On that view it makes complete sense that the Clinton ...
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November 8, 2016
If There Were No Partisan Divide, We Would Have to Invent ItI have to laugh at our liberal friends getting all worried at the deepening partisan divide. Golly, what did they think would happen after a century and a half of Marxist class warfare and a half-century of Frankfurt School identity politics? The who...
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November 1, 2016
I Want a President Who Loves America, Part TroisBack in January of 2015 I wrote my first piece in the “I Want a President” series and the title was simply “I Want a President Who Loves America.” I wrote simply about my love for America and how, in the Obama years, I longed ...
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October 25, 2016
2016: Mean Girl Culture Takes Over the NationI don’t know about you, but I am a profound sexist, and I believe that men and women are different. For instance, men will engage in a direct debate on the issues man to man, while women will only talk about people not present. Men will argu...
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October 18, 2016
Hey Kids! The Deficit Was $587 Billion Last Year!While you chaps are processing salacious tales of gropings and collapsings on the presidential trail, the Bureau of the Fiscal Service has faithfully discharged its obligation to publish the actuals for the federal government for fiscal year 2016 end...
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October 11, 2016
The Political ‘Education Divide’ and MeAll of a sudden the experts are bellowing that the educated are voting for Clinton and the uneducated are voting for Trump. Here’s Tim Alberta in National Review, and here is David Runciman in The Guardian to tell you all about it. Call it the ...
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October 4, 2016
I Want a President Who Will End VictimismGreat news! The Obama administration is proposing a new race category. It’s for people of Middle Eastern and North African descent -- MENA for those in the know. Why? It’s obvious when you go to USA Today and read the blather about how th...
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September 27, 2016
Globalism, Soros, and Charlotte: Now I Get ItFor the last few months I’ve had a question in my mind: Just what is George Soros up to? Because I could not understand why a great capitalist speculator, a financial operator who makes the Koch Brothers look like altar boys, would be intereste...
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September 20, 2016
Les Déplorables: Make America Fun AgainThey say that Rule One in politics is that you don’t insult the voters. Okay, so Hillary Clinton failed on that one, but everyone makes mistakes. I am now starting to think that her Deplorables remark is going to end up being one for the age...
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September 13, 2016
Hillary’s ‘Deplorable’ Ain’t the Half of ItI was going to write a lighthearted piece about the Deplorables, but Hillary Clinton’s 9/11 collapse makes that inoperable. Somehow, her “basket of deplorables” just isn’t a laughing matter anymore. But then I started think...
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September 6, 2016
I Want a President to Lift Government Off the Brow of LaborBack in the 19th century William Jennings Bryan spoke for working men everywhere when he declared: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold! With the splendid ti...
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August 30, 2016
Vast Right, Alt-Right, Dead Right?I was sitting at the bar at Morton’s in West Palm Beach when I saw them reporting Hillary Clinton’s “alt-right” speech. I knew, from the faces of the CNN operatives with bylines and the chyron on the bottom of the screen, that...
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August 23, 2016
Obama’s Biggest MistakeThis week the conservative media is noticing that even the president’s cheering section at the New York Times is wising up to Obama’s mistakes in Syria, Libya, Iran, and more. But I think that the disaster of the president’s fore...
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August 16, 2016
The US Won’t Be Fixed by BedtimeAt the beginning of the battle in King Henry IV Part One the cowardly drunk Falstaff whines to Prince Hal: “I would ‘twere bedtime, Hal, and all well.” Don’t we all. A year ago we could all imagine that the American people ...
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August 9, 2016
I Will Tell You Why a 'Leftist Trump' Is ImpossibleMichael Tomasky at The Daily Beast writes that a leftist Trump is impossible, meaning that The idea that the Democrats would nominate Sean Penn or, I don’t know, Alan Grayson... or Charlie Sheen or Susan Sarandon or whomever is totally ins...
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August 2, 2016
I Want a President That Won’t Stiff the OppositionSo Hillary Clinton has been nominated as the candidate for President of the United States, the first woman ever so nominated by a major party. But let’s talk about something more important. It’s the reason that the era of gentlemanly c...
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July 26, 2016
All I Know Is That Gentlemanly Conservatism is DeadLook, I don’t know if the Republican National Convention was a shambles or a cunning trick. I don’t know if Ted Cruz is a genius or a cad. I don’t know if Trump’s speech was dark and dismal or if it said exactly what the avera...
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July 19, 2016
The Muslims Aren’t the Only Ones with a Fervent IdeologyIn the wake of the Nice terror attack Hillary Clinton had this to say: Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatever to do with terrorism. Yes. Let’s be clear. Cli...
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July 12, 2016
Forgive the Liberals: They Know Not What They DoWhen a white racist thug kills a bunch of black Charleston church ladies we are supposed to go into the Cringe. But when a black racist thug kills a bunch of Dallas policemen we are supposed, even by conservative writers, to get out of our partisan f...
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July 5, 2016
I Want a President Born on the Fourth of July. Really.Elections are generally about particulars -- what the economy is doing at the time, that latest terrorist attack, and so on. But there are times when we need to step back and take a good long look at the grand picture. It seems that the 2016 election...
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June 28, 2016
House Sit-in: Dems Jump the SharkIn a way, I feel sorry for our Democratic friends. As Rush Limbaugh has been saying for 20 years, they are playing out of a 30-year-old playbook, just running the same old plays because that’s what Ted Kennedy did. But conducting a sit-in on...
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June 21, 2016
Cut the Cringe: Because It’s Appeasement All the Way DownYou all know what I mean by The Cringe. It’s the reflex of every conservative and Republican notable when the media catches them making a WrongThink statement. When Donald Trump raises the question of a Hispanic-American judge belonging to an o...
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June 13, 2016
Orlando: Why it Means WarWhen an Islamic terrorist gunned down defenseless US servicemen at Fort Hood in 2009 we were told it was workplace violence. When Islamic terrorists gunned down local government employees at a picnic in San Bernardino in 2015 we were told to withhold...
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June 7, 2016
I Want a President Who Can Tame America’s Lefty RiotersThere they go again. In San Jose last week, lefty demonstrators rioted against typical Americans leaving a Donald Trump rally, and the mayor of San Jose blamed Donald Trump for the violence. In the 21st century, in a democratic republic where “...
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May 31, 2016
Attention, Deirdre McCloskey: Here’s the Big Thing about the BourgeoisieFive years after Bourgeois Dignity the third and last volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Trilogy, all 787 pages, has hit the UPS truck. Unfortunately, it doesn’t say anything that McCloskey hasn’t already said. The new book ...
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May 24, 2016
Mark Zuckerberg: Let’s Talk about Liberal Crimes Against HumanityLast week a bunch of conservatives got to air their gripes to programming prodigy and liberal Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg. A lot of good it will do them, because culturally, Zuckerberg knows what is good for him, and that is making the prope...
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May 17, 2016
Get a Clue, Navel Gazers. It’s Thermidor TimeI tell you what the problem is. The world has changed. All the old verities are going out of business, marked down for quick sale. And everyone is stumbling around, gazing at the price tags, and their navels, in shock. It is like all the tradition...
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May 10, 2016
With Gender Bender Bathrooms, Liberals Jump the SharkFor conservatives the sudden urgency of accommodating the transgendered in the nation’s bathrooms is incomprehensible. Where could such madness come from? I’m glad you asked, because my Three Peoples theory explains the whole procedure...
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May 4, 2016
I Want a President Who Can Teach Us to Accept CapitalismIn last week’s foreign policy speech Donald Trump had this to say about jobs: NAFTA, as an example, has been a total disaster for the U.S. and has emptied our states of our manufacturing and our jobs. Never again. Only the reverse will hap...
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April 27, 2016
Isn’t It Grand: Three Anti-Capitalist Candidates for the USAI just got my copy of Deirdre McCloskey’s new Bourgeois Equality which completes her three-volume hymn to the middle class. The first thing that jumps out, in the introductory “Exordium” that tells the story so far, is this: Fo...
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April 19, 2016
The Day after Tax Day, Let’s Talk About Spending and Free StuffFor some reason April 15, Tax Day, is a peak day for my government spending site, usgovernmentspending.com. I would have thought that people would be looking at the site in the weeks before filing their tax returns. The site has a similar experien...
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April 12, 2016
The Problem with Liberal Activism CultureHere’s Maggie Gallagher worrying about social conservatives losing the culture war because we don’t do activism. What do we do when more than 100 corporations are attacking North Carolina over a bill protecting women from having to s...
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April 5, 2016
I Want a President to Teach Liberals a LessonThe eternal frustration of every conservative is the way the public square is skewed in favor of liberals. “Right-wing extremism” is said to be a problem, but left-wing street riots are nothing but “peaceful protest.” We are t...
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March 29, 2016
Stop Subsidizing TerroristsIt is telling that the Muslim terrorist and unemployed electrician, Ibrahim Abdeslam, arrested just prior to the Brussels bombing, was struggling by with his wife on just 1,000 euros a month from welfare. I raise that question because, to me, there i...
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March 22, 2016
The Primal Scream of the Policy PeopleI was talking with a friend, and he said that his son would probably go get a PhD because he wants to do “policy” in education. I replied that, for me, “policy” is the problem in education. Government does not learn (Kevin ...
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March 15, 2016
The White Working Class is the Designated Scapegoat of the Ruling ElitesWatching the Chicago street theater on Fox News as leftist groups shut down a Trump rally, I got to thinking that even Fox follows the liberal rules. They interviewed a lefty grandma outraged about fascism; they interviewed a middle-aged African Amer...
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March 9, 2016
Can Conservatives Deal with a Bigger GOP Tent?I can’t quite decide how to describe the Trump impact on the conservative movement. Is it the blousy town girls showing up at a sorority poetry reading and showing a bit too much cleavage? Or is it the oil-field workers showing up at the wine b...
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March 2, 2016
I Want a President Who is My Kind of Con-manMany conservative pundits and principled Republicans are recoiling from Donald Trump on the grounds that he is a con-man, a confidence trickster. To which my retort is: So? Is not all politics a confidence trick? Is not Bernie Sanders a confidence...
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February 23, 2016
What Do the Trump Voters Want?Now that Donald Trump has won the South Carolina primary and Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are very definitely second fiddles, we are all asking the old question allegedly asked by Freud about women. What do the Trump voters want? Perhaps the answer...
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February 16, 2016
Scalia Vacancy: A Hill to Die OnMy first reaction to the death of conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on February 13 was fear. Was it the fear that Obama would get a liberal replacement on the Court? Or the fear that the political fight over the vacancy would hurt ...
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February 9, 2016
Bernie and Hillary Both Wrong About Evil BankersEverybody hates bankers and Wall Street, and so politicians hate them too. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has made much of Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street connections. “I don’t know any progressive who has a super PAC and takes $15 mil...
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February 2, 2016
I Want a President for Americans who Follow the Rules, Go to Work, and Obey the LawIt’s true! The pundits have just discovered that Republicans and Democrats really are different, after all. First, there’s the Kaiser Family Foundation poll that shows that Democrats want specifics from politicians and Republicans want pr...
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January 26, 2016
Don’t Get Mad, Get… Happy!Here we are, with gas prices going through the floor and the budgets of Russia and Saudi Arabia in free fall, and Trump is up and Clinton is down and Obama is a busted flush and everyone is… Mad as hell and they are not going to take it anymor...
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January 19, 2016
‘New York Values’: Cruz’s Strategic Play Against TrumpAfter the GOP debate last Thursday night the big issue was “New York Values” and the next day it looked like New Yorker Donald Trump had dealt with the issue by invoking the shades of the fallen 9/11 heroes. But now it all comes clear ...
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January 12, 2016
Cologne Gets Us One Step Closer to Solving the Muslim ProblemObviously we are all supposed to be horrified by the New Year’s Eve atrocities in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. I get it. But, as usual, I am serenely encouraged. In my book, each new Muslim atrocity gets us closer to the point where our ...
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January 6, 2016
I Want a President Who Loves America. AgainIt was just a year ago that I floated my dearest political wish upon the waters: “I Want a President Who Loves America.” It really wasn’t asking much. Since then, I’ve written again and again about what I want in a president. ...
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December 29, 2015
Stop Sucking Your Thumbs, Liberals, and Get a ClueIt must be the holidays, because a lot of liberal media types are publishing end-of-year thumbsuckers on democracy. In the Atlantic, Peter Beinart writes that Americans are becoming more liberal; in the New Republic, David Dayen says no, they are not...
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December 22, 2015
The Liberal Christmas from HellIn our conservative world we mildly judge President Obama the Worst President Ever. But the administration scribes over at Vox think differently. President Obama takes the long view, writes Andrew Prokop. Criminal justice reform? Think in decades. IS...
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December 15, 2015
Muslims! Don't Become the Little Darlings of the Liberals!I know that all respectable people are supposed to be outraged at the racist, sexist, bigoted statement of Donald Trump on Muslims. Here is what he said, a week ago. Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims enterin...
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December 8, 2015
I Want a President Who Understands the Value of the American <em>Nation</em>President Obama’s Oval Office address on Sunday night was par for the course: steady as she goes, and don’t let’s be beastly to the Muslims. I understand his hesitation. The last thing he and the ruling class he represents would ...
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December 1, 2015
What Do Yale, Missou, Alinksy, Cloward-Piven and Obama's Organizing for Action Add Up To?Ever since we learned about President Obama’s marination in the ideas of Saul Alinsky we’ve been frightening ourselves with a future defined by Obama’s fundamental transformation through community organizing. And we have seen the fr...
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November 26, 2015
After Paris I Understand Winston Churchill's ReliefWhen everyone was emoting about the Paris massacres last week, I am afraid I did not join in. This is war, after all: what do people expect? When you have a war and one side is militarily weak, it tends to use terror as a weapon, because it’s t...
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November 17, 2015
Ted Cruz's Simple Flat Tax Isn't All That SimpleTed Cruz has unveiled his Simple Flat Tax plan that includes a single low, low personal income tax with a single rate of 10%. He also wants to eliminate the federal corporate income tax and the employee payroll tax, and replace them with a 16% Busine...
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November 10, 2015
The White Working Class is in TroubleBack in the Sixties a couple of lefty BBC TV guys thought up a cool idea. They would do a documentary about a group of British seven-year-olds from all walks of life. And then see what happened to them. The result was Seven Up, produced in 1964,...
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November 3, 2015
I Want a President Who Demonstrates Strategic VisionNow that President Obama has put boots on the ground into Syria, the question is: What’s the strategy? We know the president’s strategy on domestic policy; he wants to expand government-by-experts to the utter limit. And he wants to keep ...
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October 27, 2015
People of the Lie: It's Not Just the ClintonsIt’s déjà vu all over again. A Clinton has lied in public and the Democrats have celebrated with a public show of approval. Remember when Al Gore led the cheers at the White House after Ol’ Bill lied to the American people? ...
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October 20, 2015
Five Reasons Why 'Civil-rights Republicanism' is a BustHere’s the latest effort to get Republicans to reach out to African Americans: Civil-Rights Republicanism by Theodore R. Johnson, published in National Review. Oh dear, where to begin? I know, let’s just rehearse all the argumen...
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October 13, 2015
The Speaker Crisis and the Rape of the 'Typical American'For the last week our Democratic friends, from the president's press spokesman down to the usual suspects in the media, have been sneering at the Republican House Speaker election. I get why Democrats would find it comical to see democracy bre...
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October 7, 2015
I Want a President Who's 'Unteachable' (But Not Like Obama)Back in the glorious days of the Reagan administration, Democratic wise man Clark Clifford opined that Reagan was an “amiable dunce.” That is Eighties-speak for today’s complaint that President Obama is “unteachable.” ...
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October 1, 2015
One Weird Chart That Explains the Great RecessionEverybody knows that “greedy bankers” were to blame for the Crash of 2008. The Democrats and their willing accomplices told us that years ago and they are sticking to their story. But there is another suspect that ought to be right in ...
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September 22, 2015
It's Not Just the GOP Where the Paradigms are ShiftingEverything is going wrong at once. On the economy, the Federal Reserve’s economic models have been overpredicting economic growth ever since the Great Recession. On climate, the IPCC’s climate models have been overpredicting global warmin...
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September 16, 2015
Elite Fail: How Could This Happen?Ding! Ding! That’s the Noonan Conventional Wisdom Alarm going off again, as Peggy writes her weekly WSJ piece about how the migrant crisis in Europe exposes the gulf between the elite and the people, between the safe and the not-so-safe. And...
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September 8, 2015
I Want a President who is a 'Strong Leader'. Not!Last week, as I was practicing my French with DuoLingo, I heard Rush Limbaugh making a penetrating point about the 2016 election. It's like 2008, he said, only this time it is conservatives that are investing all their hopes in an untried candida...
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September 1, 2015
Fighting Back Against the SJWsSocial justice warriors (SJWs) are like the weather. Everybody complains about them, but nobody does anything about them, except for controversialist Vox Day who has just released an ebook on how to fight back against the SJWs, SJWs Always Lie: Takin...
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August 25, 2015
Yes, Take a Look at Yourself, Ruling ClassThey've finally dragged old political warhorse Jeff Greenfield out of the pasture and saddled him up to warn Democrats of their “Democratic Blues.” Nobody knows what President Obama's policy legacy will be, writes Jeff, but his po...
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August 19, 2015
The Dem Problem. They Don't Do Mojo Any MoreIf you look back on recent presidential campaigns you can see that there was always a bigger question than just “the economy” or “four more years” or “time for a change.” In 2008, it was the magic of electing Am...
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August 11, 2015
Schumer Iran Flap: What Is Wrong With These People?I guess that I'm too old to understand the modern world. I would have thought that for the White House to set the lefty dogs on Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for opposing the president's Iran deal would be a bad idea. I would have thought that Se...
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August 4, 2015
I Want a President Who Will Encourage the MillennialsIf there's one group in America that's hurting worse than the African Americans in Prince George's County looking at $300,000 mortgages on their $150,000 homes, it's got to be the Millennials. They are the first generation to be co...
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July 28, 2015
Medicare Advantage is Taking Over the WorldEveryone knows that Medicare is going to eat the budget. But last week the Medicare Trustees issued their annual Medicare Trustees Report and they said that costs are increasing slower than expected. They have a point. Medicare has been chugging alon...
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July 21, 2015
Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is in the Same Game as the Chattanooga ShooterI first heard about Ta-Nehisi Coates' new book Between the World and Me last week. I suppose I'd have heard of it earlier if I were a faithful follower of the New York Times and NPR and had succeeded to a stall in the Cathedral. But I...
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July 14, 2015
The WHINOs and the RINOs Should Be FriendsLast week the Ace of Spades guy declared a plague on both their houses where the Republican Party is concerned. He sees a class war going on in the Republican Party between the Working/Middle Class house and the Professional (or Comfortable) Class. A...
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July 7, 2015
I Want a President Born on the Fourth of JulyJust in time for the fireworks, Gallup reports that the share of Americans that are “extremely proud” of America is down to 54%. It was 58% when America elected its First Black President (H/T PJMedia). So what went wrong? Really, what...
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June 30, 2015
It Isn't Roberts's Problem: It's OursWhen Chief Justice Roberts voted in Obamacare in 2012 I wrote that: [T]he only way to make liberals accept a repeal of ObamaCare is by the brute force of political power, the mandate of the voters expressed at the ballot box. Now Roberts ha...
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June 23, 2015
Why is the Democratic Party So Disciplined?For years I've been marveling at the extraordinary discipline of the Democratic Party. For me it started with the Clinton impeachment in 1998. Right through the 2000s it was amazing to experience the Democrats uniformly reciting their talking poi...
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June 16, 2015
The Only Privilege in America is Liberal PrivilegeThe usual suspects talk a lot about privilege in America: white privilege or male privilege. It makes for a good catchphrase for their community organizers and social justice warriors. They can accuse anyone of anything they like, because male or whi...
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June 9, 2015
Please! Let's Lose This 'Independent for President' RubbishJames Glassman's a good guy, but he's ankle-biting when he complains that an independent candidate has a snowball's chance in hell of getting into the presidential debates in 2016. His inspiration is a poll-gazing piece by the Wall Street...
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June 2, 2015
I Want a President Who Cares About People Like MeIt is, I think, scandalous that Barack Obama won the “cares about people like me” sweepstakes over Mitt Romney by 81% - 18% in 2012. The New York Post reported that it wasn't an accident: The entire Obama campaign was designed to...
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May 26, 2015
Pulling Aside the Curtain on Stupid GovernmentIf anyone deserves a lifetime achievement award in the liberal virtue of “speaking truth to power” it would have to be Charles Murray. Back in the 1980s he wrote Losing Ground to tell the truth that liberals knew, by the mid-1970s, that t...
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May 19, 2015
The Progressives' Thug AgendaIf you think that government is force, you probably don't think much of President Obama's deceptive line about government being the name for things we do together. “Government is the name of things we do by force,” you retort. ...
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May 12, 2015
What Do 21st Century Mothers Want?Sigmund Freud asked the question over a century ago: “What Does a Woman Want?” Even though he'd spent “thirty years in research into the feminine soul,” in particular that mystery within a mystery, feminine hysteria. We...
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May 5, 2015
I Want a President Who 'Gets' the EconomyOh well, another day, another dollar, as the Obama economy continues to disappoint with a 0.2 percent growth rate for GDP in the first quarter for 2015. I'm sure that President Obama and his administration are just as frustrated as you and me....
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April 28, 2015
Dems Reach Out to White Working ClassAccording to liberal foot-soldier Doyle McManus in the LA Times, the Democrats are going to do a special reach-out to white working-class men in 2016. It's easy to see why: Democrats were once the party of the white working man -- but that w...
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April 21, 2015
Is Hillary Clinton Ready for the Real Story of the Patriarchy?Back when Barack Obama was first elected President of the United States a liberal woman friend told me how excited she was to have elected the First Black President. I should have replied: Oh really? Isn't the idea of a First Black President stra...
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April 14, 2015
Is 'Social Justice Warrior' a Pejorative?I was reading a post-mortem on the delicious Sad Puppies/Hugo nominations imbroglio last week when an interesting point came up. George R.R. Martin, the "Game of Thrones" chappie, wrote on his Not a Blog that Sad Puppies commenters on his b...
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April 7, 2015
Liberals and their Social Justice Warrior Thugs Celebrate Holy WeekLast week we saw our exquisitely politically correct liberals and their special forces, the social justice warriors, indulging in a little bit of satisfying mob action. Now, of course liberals are evolved and educated, and they are practiced at pu...
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March 31, 2015
I Want a President Who Plays by the RulesIf you are a politician, why bother to play by the rules? Or if you are a citizen, why should you care whether the political leaders on your team play by the rules? (It goes without saying that we all care when the Other Guys break the rules.) Thi...
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March 24, 2015
Let's Talk about the Clueless Financial RegulatorsI had an email from a fan last week quoting the tariff plank from the 1928 Republican Party platform. That was the year before the Republicans walked the plank on the Smoot-Hawley tariff in one giant step for a generation of Democratic rule. For a ce...
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March 17, 2015
'Our Kids' are 'Coming Apart' Because LiberalsBack in 2012 Charles Murray came out with Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010. He argued that in Obama's America the top 20 percent was doing fine. Top 20 percenters get educated, get careers, get married, stay married; they live i...
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March 10, 2015
The Democrats' ThugocracyThere are a couple things about the Obama years that have registered “does not compute” for me. The first was the complete powder taken by the media. Yes, I know that they are all ruling-class liberals that believe in all the received lib...
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March 3, 2015
I Want a President Who'll Dump the Stupid FCCIt was the Progressive Era that invented independent regulatory agencies. We needed an Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate those railroads. The noble idea was that we needed independent experts to protect the helpless farmer from the greed of ...
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February 28, 2015
Why Don't Liberals Care About Black-on-Black Killing?The good thing about a book like Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America is that it's real reportage about murder in the African American ghetto; it's not just narrative from the usual social justice warriors. And when author Jill Le...
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February 20, 2015
Everything Liberals Touch Turns to InjusticeLast week Erick Erickson of RedState did a piece on the mopping up operations after the victory of gay marriage in what Steve Sailer calls “World War G.” In Oregon, Aaron and Melissa Klein and their five children are losing their hom...
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February 10, 2015
The 2016 Budget: They've Gone About as Far as They Can GoBudget Day, February 2, 2015, was a busy day for me, as I downloaded the budget data from the Historical Tables and then uploaded the data to usgovernmentspending.com. But I found the media atmospherics about free community college and taxes on the r...
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February 3, 2015
Will Political Correctness Backfire?It's been tremendous fun watching white upper-middle-class-liberal Jonathan Chait telling us that SJW mau-mauing just ain't fair when he's on the receiving end. A platoon of eager beavers showed up immediately to remind him how he's l...
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January 27, 2015
Okay, Liberals: Let's Talk InequalityI shouldn't have done it, but this week I read a piece by Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post, titled “Democrats' New Faith.” He's delighted that President Obama is finally doing something about inequality. You know the ...
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January 20, 2015
Hey Jihadis, Get with the Real Program!This year we are celebrating Martin Luther King's Birthday with an orgy of offense-taking and race-baiting, in the flap over the movie Selma, and who was on first with civil rights in the 1960s, and who gets to clean up with the Oscars. Even Maur...
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January 13, 2015
Let's Just Call It 'The Muslim Question'Last week Islamic terrorism in Paris hit the ruling class where it lives, in the media. It's tempting to think of the Islamist threat and its terrorist outrages as special and unique and unprecedented. But suppose we just call it “The Mu...
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January 6, 2015
'Okay Google -- What Went Wrong With Liberalism?'When liberals decided in the mid-2000s that they were becoming an Emerging Democratic Majority on the strength of minorities, women, the educated, and the youth, I believed them. And when President Obama was elected in 2008 I could see how, with a...
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December 30, 2014
I Want a President Who Loves AmericaI first fell in love with America 49 years ago. I flew from the UK to Denver visit my parents in Christmas 1965, and it was love at first sight. I fell in love with America, the land; I fell in love with America, the people. And I fell in love with t...
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December 23, 2014
Do Women Want to be Responsible Individuals?I have a question, what with all the wars on women and rape cultures and Jackiegates and all. Do women want to be responsible individuals and live in the culture of responsible individualism that occupies the center ground of our modern culture? B...
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December 16, 2014
Dems Can't Stop Sneering at the White Working ClassWhat happened to the white working class? It finally figured out that Democrats didn't even want to be LBGFs. It's hard for them, because the Democrats used to love the working stiff. Nobody really intended it, but the bottom line on liber...
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December 9, 2014
It's the Liberal Oppression, StupidWhat is the single thread that winds through Ferguson, Staten Island, and the UVA “rape” case? I will tell you. It is not police racial profiling or police brutality. It is not a “rape culture.” It is liberals. Now, I am no...
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December 2, 2014
After Ferguson: Yeah, Let's Have a Conversation Mr. PresidentThe liberal ladies at Thanksgiving dinner were muttering about a new “conversation” about race. Bless them; their 30 million liberal hearts beat as one with President Obama's post-Ferguson remarks: “We’ve seen young...
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November 25, 2014
Five Reasons Why Obama Did ItTo the conservative mind, President Obama's executive order on immigration is unexplainable. For us, the whole point of the modern political experiment is to stick to the rules. Why would anyone think differently, especially after the disasters o...
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November 18, 2014
Is This the End Game for Liberal Racism?If anyone symbolizes the American Dream, it is Condoleezza Rice. Child of a teacher and a preacher in the Jim Crow South, she rose to become Provost at Stanford, and then National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in the Bush Administration. ...
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November 11, 2014
Divided Democrats on the RunIsn't it nice that our rulers tell us everything -- eventually? First thing out of the gate after the midterm was Harry Reid's chief of staff briefing the media on how the defeat was all the White House's fault. The president promis...
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November 4, 2014
How Will Democrats Divide Us Next?In a sign that the “Republican War on Women” meme is past its sell-by date, Democrats – i.e., the New York Times -- are now proposing that it was Republicans that came up with the catchphrase! Democrats counter that Republicans...
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October 28, 2014
Why Are Democrats So Afraid?If you want to understand race politics a good place to start is with Frederick Douglass and his memoir of his life as a slave. He tells about how he was rented out to a couple in Baltimore. Things went well; the mistress of the house was kind toward...
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October 21, 2014
This is What You Get When You Reduce Everything to 'Activism'Suppose you were the President Obama, in the Oval Office, or more likely at the golf course, wondering how to save the Obola administration before Ebola flushes it down the toilet. You would think: I need someone who is a cool head in a bad situation...
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October 14, 2014
40 Years of Nobelity: What Hayek Means to MeIn this year's Nobel season we are celebrating the 40th anniversary of Friedrich Hayek's Nobel Prize for Economics. So it's a good time, in the dog days of the Worst President Ever, to think about what Hayek means to us. That's bey...
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October 7, 2014
Trust in Government is PathologicalThis last weekend the Sunday shows had a “trust in government” theme. Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press" asked Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer why the government of the email-losing IRS, of no strategy on ISIS, of border mayhem could be ...
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September 30, 2014
Rectification of Names: Let's Call Obama Era What It IsConservative author Jonah Goldberg has come up with a great idea for his next book. It's the Confucian idea of “The Rectification of the Names.” He illustrates his epiphany with a long Confucian quote: A superior man, in regard t...
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September 23, 2014
It's Not 'Unwisdom', Peggy. It's HubrisHere we go again. Peggy Noonan just expressed concern about “The Unwisdom of Barack Obama.” She writes of the president: His essential problem is that he has very poor judgment. When Aunt Peggy says it then attention must ...
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September 16, 2014
The Primal Scream of the Tribal MindSee what a couple of beheadings will do? It looks like the soccer moms of 1996 that became the security moms of 2004 that became the Walmart moms of 2012 have confirmed the Duke of Mantua's complaint: “La donna è mobile.” The f...
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September 9, 2014
Why Do Peacenik Liberals Make War on Business?Last week, I wrote a brilliant piece arguing that we should stop mewing kids up in government child-custodial facilities, and let them go out to work. But there's a problem. Who is going to want to pay kids minimum wage? Is a 13-year-old...
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September 2, 2014
Child Labor DayThere is no more settled principle than the virtue of the laborer. And no greater self-congratulation than we have ended child labor. So when we celebrate Labor Day we congratulate ourselves on the wonderful things we have done to protect working peo...
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August 26, 2014
Ferguson: Life in the Promised LandThe final problem for all political and religious movements is what to do after you get to the Promised Land. You've defeated the enemy, you've conquered the land flowing with milk and honey. What next? What's next is that the soldiers...
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August 19, 2014
Let's Fight for the Nation StateEveryone that has half a brain understands that the foundations are shaking. Richard Fernandez is wondering what comes next. Can the nation state survive today's modern identity politics where supposed Brits and Norwegians go to the Middle East t...
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August 12, 2014
'As President, I Will Defend Americans Against the Moral Bullies'Back when Al Gore was running for president in 2000 he had a line about “fighting for the people against the powerful.” It's the standard line of the activist. No doubt it's what the marginalized and dependent classes are looking ...
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August 5, 2014
Aunt Peggy Frowns at the Obama BoysEvery remembers a formidable aunt who could cool the jets of the rambunctious neighborhood boys with a glance. The U.S. has Peggy Noonan for that, and last week Aunt Peggy frowned at the Obama boys. The president shouldn't be using a fateful...
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July 29, 2014
Do Corporations Rule America?I suppose it's natural that the average American believes that the Crash of 2008 was caused by greedy bankers and that the problem with health insurance is insurance company profits. After all, most Americans work for big companies, and they k...
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July 22, 2014
The Ordeal of Post-Obama ChangeWant to get a new angle on Obama's Hope and Change mantra? Longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote the book about it before Obama was even born: The Ordeal of Change. [E]very radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem... It needs in...
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July 15, 2014
The Rich Get Richer, and Everyone's ConfusedThe results are in. Baby-boomer geezers like me are cleaning up with the Fed's asset bubble economy, while the working middle class is getting screwed, via regulation, student debt, and the welfare state's subsidization of idleness. ...
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July 8, 2014
Let's Hang the Kaiser Around Obama's CollarQuick! Which American president is most like the blustery, shallow Kaiser Wilhelm II who blundered Germany into World War I one hundred years ago? I'm ashamed to say the connection hadn't occurred to me until I picked up David Blackbo...
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July 1, 2014
Admit It: We Wackos are the ProblemI've been thinking over the Cantor loss and the Cochran win and the whole question of the Republican Party divided between its Beltway establishment and its Tea Party insurgency. And last week I read James V. DeLong's excellent piece about...
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June 24, 2014
Dems End Up Believing their Own LiesI'm trying to listen through the rhetoric of the Democrats waving aside the IRS scandal and continuing to worry about “dark money.” Surely those Dems don't really believe that the IRS are the good guys in this. But it all...
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June 17, 2014
No, Obama Isn't 'Worse Than We Thought'When I voted for Barack Obama in 2008 along with all the kiddies that swarmed into my polling place, I did not do it because I had any confidence in him. I voted for Obama because I wanted Democrats to be in charge of U.S. foreign policy so that they...
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June 10, 2014
The Flaw in Obama's Phone and Pen GovernanceFor conservatives and Republicans, President Obama's insouciant approach to government, that he can do anything he wants using his phone and his pen, is maddening. One week his EPA is enveloping coal plants in a tangle of new regulation; nex...
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June 3, 2014
You've Been Living in a VA Dreamworld, LiberalsIf you're a conservative you look at the VA scandal and ask, what else is new? A bureaucracy faking waiting lists? Knocking off work at 3:00 pm? Covering up so that the bosses don't know what is going on? For conservatives that is j...
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May 27, 2014
Anti-Piketty: It's the Great SubtractionWhen you finally get to the end of Thomas Piketty's Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century you get what it's all about: We Need More Money. Of course “we” do. It's Little Shop of Horrors on the Left Bank. “Feed me!...
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May 20, 2014
Piketty Doesn't Understand CapitalismYears ago I drove from London to Edinburgh in Scotland with stops to visit family on the way. I had a commission from a guy in Spokane to go to a particular store in Edinburgh and buy some single-malt Scotch whisky. The closer I got to Scot...
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May 13, 2014
10 Questions for a Liberal after Mothers DayLady Marjorie and I went to lunch on Mothers Day with an older liberal couple. You don't want to have a political dogfight on Mother's Day, but I thought to myself about the questions I would like to ask my liberal friends five years into the...
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May 6, 2014
Picking on PickettyOn Sunday I saw a student production of Vaclav Havel's adaptation of The Beggar's Opera at the University of Washington. And guess what one of the whores was reading? Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, of co...
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April 29, 2014
Finishing School for Tomorrow's Ruling ClassIt's really nice that the U.S. Supreme Court is slowly but surely backing away from racist university admissions. As Justice Sotomayor writes, race matters. It matters that the government, in a crude return to pre-modern cultural practice, h...
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April 22, 2014
Liberals Digging Their Political GravesDo liberals understand what they are doing? I don't think they do. I think that they are blinkered by their one-dimensional view of politics: it reduces to the struggle for social justice. In 2010 after the midterm the Obamis de...
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April 15, 2014
Carry on Cutting, says BrandeisIt's easy to see why our lefty friends would want to defenestrate poor Brandon Eich, just like they did in the Thirty Years War, for the heresy of contributing money to hate and the exclusionary idea of man-woman marriage. Everybody knows t...
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April 8, 2014
'Socially Liberal, Economically Conservative' Is So OverThe genius of teaching the educated professional class to be “socially liberal, economically conservative” for the last 20 years was that the economically conservative part came for free during the Great Boom from 1983-2007. When th...
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April 2, 2014
Hester Koch's Scarlet LetterWe all remember the good old days when playwright Arthur Miller told us that salesmen were really dying inside, and that neo-Puritans were hunting Commies just like Puritans hunted witches in Salem, Massachusetts Bay. And naturally in those good o...
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March 25, 2014
Agreed, Holy Father, that Human Dignity Needs Work. Then What?The Holy Father visited an Italian steelworks last week and declared that human dignity requires a job. In the current mess the unemployed risk being marginalized, “victims of social exclusion,” he said. What does “the very ...
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March 18, 2014
Beyond Young Men and MayhemSo now it looks like the disappearing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 was hijacked or diverted, maybe by young Muslim extremists, and all the world is in a tizzy. What is wrong with these young men that seem to want to tear the world down? ...
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March 11, 2014
Liberals! You Are to Blame!I've been reading a history of the British Glorious Revolution for the last month, and one thing comes through pretty clearly. There weren't any liberals around back then. They hadn't been invented. The new coffee-houses we...
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March 5, 2014
Liberals Have Got What They Asked ForIf you want to know why everything is going wrong for Obama and the Democrats, from Obamacare to Ukraine, the answer is simple. Liberals got everything they asked for, from stimulus to “reset.” I know: Crimea River. But we ...
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February 25, 2014
After the Great DisappointmentIn the latest Weekly Standard James Ceasar likened the Obama adherents to the members of a failed religious cult. How will they react to their Great Disappointment, he wondered? Would it be "acceptance, denial, [or] deflection?" But I think that it i...
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February 18, 2014
Hey, Coke and Pepsi! I've Got Your Back!It was only last week here in Panama that I was talking to a Pepsi truck driver from Philadelphia. They'll be coming for you sugar guys next, I said. It's already started, he retorted. In Philadelphia recently, the un...
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February 11, 2014
Having Your Cake and Eating It: Panama and UsPANAMA CITY -- Here in Panama City the world is coming to an end as work stops on the Canal de Panama expansion. There's an argument over $1.6 billion to complete the job. According to Dan Molinski in the Wall Street Journal, the problem is that the ...
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February 4, 2014
ObamaCare Casts White Working Class Out in the ColdProbably everyone to the right of President Obama's liberal billionaire contributors has seen the pathetic local news video from WTAE Pittsburgh, the one showing the white working class getting the bad news on ObamaCare. Yep, ordinary blue-collar wor...
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January 28, 2014
The Dark Enlightenment Hits Stage TwoOK, I admit it. I hadn't really heard anything above a whisper about the Dark Enlightenment until several putdowns appeared recently here here and here. Huh? I wondered. What are the Daily Telegraph and the American Spectator getting all...
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January 21, 2014
Many Liberals are Naifs and InnocentsWe conservatives, crouching in the trenches of the political wars, experience liberals as haters and culture warriors. When we think of liberals we think of the Kos Kidz over at DailyKos and the execrable hosts on MSNBC. We think of the liberal journ...
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January 14, 2014
What is Going On With Jobs?Everyone agrees that the employment report last Friday was very bad. Unemployment went down to 6.7 percent, but that was because the Household Survey showed that 347,000 people left the labor force in December while only 144,000 found jobs. In a heal...
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January 7, 2014
Liberals Double Down on InequalityIt was on December 4, 2013 that President Obama opened the Year of Inequality with his speech on economic mobility. A month later liberal hounds are baying for extended unemployment benefits and higher minimum wage, and conservatives are drawing up l...
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December 31, 2013
The Four Freedoms: 75 Years of Liberal BetrayalIn the second half of the 2000s liberals did a fine job of blaming Bush for everything that went wrong in the US. His "neo-con" supporters, they asserted, were just as bad. Now that President Obama and his signature legislation are a twin disaster th...
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December 24, 2013
Megastate Fail: Do You Hear Me Now, Liberals?So now President Obama has started to repeal ObamaCare by delaying the individual mandate, as a courtesy to six Democratic senators mostly running for reelection in red states. The pro-repeal six are Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Angus King (D-ME), Ma...
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December 17, 2013
How the Grinch Stole Health CareYou know what I am talking about. This is the year that the Democrats "have blown up the American health-care system." The quote is from Peggy Noonan's qualified approval of the Ryan-Murray copout. You see, back in the golden age of George W. Bush, D...
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December 10, 2013
Battling Inequality with the PresidentIn his speech on "economic mobility" on December 4, 2013, the president used the word "inequality" 26 times and "growth" only 9 times. So you can see where he's coming from. President Obama did his usual government-is-good recitation: Lincoln did lan...
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December 3, 2013
Barack Obama: One-Dimensional ManA couple of things have come over the transom lately to remind us how cramped and limited is the man President Obama. The first is his asinine remark that he's not that ideological. Good grief, man. If you don't understand that a politician calling f...
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November 26, 2013
The People of the LieWe all know why kids lie. It's a weaselly effort to escape punishment. We also know why businessmen start to lie. We saw that in the crash of 2000 when the masters of the universe at the Enrons and the WorldComs tried to hide the shame of their losse...
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November 19, 2013
The True Face of CollectivismMost politicians are crafty. They hide the mailed fist of political power in a velvet glove of caring and compassion, and they conjure up an appealing picture of competence to hide the reality of blundering ineptitude. But not Barack Obama. He believ...
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November 12, 2013
Give the President a BreakEveryone seems to be piling on the president about the lie that killed a million health plans. But I feel sorry for the president; really, he is a victim. What would you expect from the son of a naïve young liberal co-ed who selected a father for her...
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November 5, 2013
Liberals Getting the Politics WrongThe troubles of ObamaCare serves all those liberals right. But you can still feel for CNN's kid now in medical school who voted with enthusiasm for Obama and now wonders what went wrong. But if the kid still thinks that the Affordable Care Act is a "...
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October 29, 2013
Obama vs. the WomenConservatives are all shouting delighted fiascos at the pathetic debut of Obamacare. Like the chaps at La Scala we take equal delight in an utter fiasco as in a glorious trionfo. But I do not feel any lift from the disaster. It is, after all, ordina...
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October 22, 2013
I Ache for a President Who Loves AmericaIf there's one thing that bugs me about the Obama years it is the palpable fact that Obama doesn't love America. The last two weeks has intensified that feeling. We know why he doesn't love America. It's because he identifies with his Kenyan father's...
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October 15, 2013
It's Not Just Failed ObamaCareObamaCare rolled out last week in utter chaos. The ruling class conceit that anyone could stitch together a national system of health insurance exchanges went up in a billowing cloud of failure. Who could have seen that coming? So what went wrong? Le...
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October 8, 2013
Obama's Shutdown and Public Choice TheoryMore and more, as we Americans trudge through the mire of the Obama years, we have to ask if the president is just plain ignorant. He doesn't seem to have bothered to study the political classics that tell a political leader why he should avoid divid...
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October 1, 2013
'There Has to be a System'Some years ago I was discussing conservative health care ideas with a liberal ex-pat Brit. This was when Obamacare was just a gleam in Obama's eye. Her comeback was that "there has to be a system." I mentioned that to Lady Marjorie, who is blasting i...
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September 24, 2013
Who Rules: Politicians or Wall Street?Want to get the voters riled up for the next election? Blame the banksters. The politicians had a grand old time blaming the greedy bankers for the Crash of 2008, and President Obama was still at it last week with his Five Year Anniversary Speech. Yo...
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September 17, 2013
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs and Ronald CoaseWhile President Obama is floundering in Syria, Americans are thinking about jobs, writes Salena Zito from a farmers market in rural Pennsylvania. People are learning about canning vegetables while they worry about jobs and the economy. "We keep wait...
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September 10, 2013
Discredit Liberalism UtterlyConservatives have a Hamlet question this week. Whether to 'tis nobler in the mind to back President Obama as commander-in-chief, right or wrong. Or to take arm against a sea of troubles and defeat the president on his Syria war resolutio...
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September 3, 2013
Return to Economic SanityI went down to the Jersey Shore last weekend, and I got to talk to a small businessman trying to make it in the Obama economy. You big dogs sitting in your bunkers along the commanding heights might like to lend an ear. We might all learn something f...
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August 27, 2013
Douthat Can't Say It, But I CanIt would be easy to critique Ross Douthat's column "A Different Kind of Division" as lily-livered RINOism. He is gently, ever so gently telling his liberal audience that, fifty years after Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech, today's Obama r...
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August 21, 2013
Next Up: Privacy MomsPolitics always seems to be about women. First it was soccer moms that swooned over midnight basketball. Then it was security moms that wanted the president to keep us safe. Then, in a less kinder, gentler era, it was the Republican war to make Sandr...
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August 13, 2013
The American Dream: Not This WayThe maddening thing about being a conservative these days is watching our liberal ruling class, rotten to the core, prancing around the public stage acting all pure and innocent -- and getting away with it. I suppose that's why God invented divine ju...
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August 6, 2013
Obama's Streetcar Named DesireYou tell me. Is President Obama best understood as liberalism's Stanley Kowalski, battle-hardened WWII GI that demolishes the Old South relict Blanche DuBois with his domestic violence and ethnic Polish aggression? Or is the president Blanche ...
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July 30, 2013
GOP's Outreach BluesAll the wise heads are telling the GOP that it needs to reach out: to Hispanics, to blacks. Last week it was Michael Medved's turn to deliver avuncular reach-out advice. And then there are the missing white voters of 2012. Sean Trende h...
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July 23, 2013
We're Done, Mr. PresidentIt's pure coincidence, but in the week that the president's speechwriters were beavering away on his "35 years ago" soliloquy, Lady Marjorie and I watched a couple of DVDs with a racial subtext. The better of the two was the Satyajit Ray movie Mahana...
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July 16, 2013
No More Mr. Nice GuyThe theme of the 2008 presidential election, you will remember, was post-partisan, post-racial. It was a meme started by young Senate candidate Barack Obama in 2004 in the lull between the publication of his primary opponent's divorce records and his...
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July 10, 2013
Liberals to the Law: Get Lost!After eight years of listening to liberals hyperventilating about the illegalities of President George W. Bush, it is really annoying for conservatives to watch the utter disregard for the law coming from the Obama administration. The jewel in the c...
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July 2, 2013
Egypt Runs Out of Other Peoples' MoneyI don't know too much about Islam and the Prophet. But I do know this: governments tend to fall when they run out of other peoples' money. So it doesn't matter whether the government in Egypt is run by Gamal Abdel Nasser or Hosni Mubarak or Mohamed M...
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June 25, 2013
Ruling Class Without a ClueWhat are we to think about the market falling out of bed after Gentle Ben Bernanke's hint last week that he might start tapering off the money printing operation at the Fed? Was it because the Fed is, in fact, following a dangerous deflationary polic...
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June 17, 2013
The Consequences of LiberalismHere we are at the midpoint of the Obama years, assailed on every side by looming consequences of liberal hubris and liberal corruption. But the Obama Scandals don't get me all riled up with partisan outrage. What's the surprise? If liberals in th...
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June 11, 2013
The Enemy is UsIt's great for President Obama to grandly assure the world that "This war, like all wars, must end." That's what liberals have been wanting to do since about ten minutes after 9/11. But the president wants to hedge his bet. For political reasons, if ...
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June 4, 2013
Conservatives and the IndividualLast week Ross Douthat helpfully introduced the New York Times faithful to the notion of "reform conservatism." Someone had to do it. He did, I think, rather shortchange the reformers when he asserted that "the crucial idea that conservatism ought to...
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May 29, 2013
Riots and LiberalsAfter a few nights of "youth" riots in Sweden, the ordinary Swedes had had enough. So they took to the streets to protect their property. Fortunately the police knew just what to do. They attacked the "vigilantes." You can see the logic of that for o...
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May 22, 2013
Liberal Barnacles Show How Not To Do ItWith the IRS scandal, the Benghazi scandal, and the AP scandal, it is almost time for educated, intelligent people to start wondering just what President Obama meant when he promised in 2008 to heal the nation's partisan divide. Everybody knows that...
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May 14, 2013
Austerity: Krugman's False MessageAusterity is failing, crowed Paul Krugman last week in "The Chutzpah Caucus." By austerity, he means the policy of "slashing" government spending. The case is clear, he writes. Claims that spending cuts would actually boost employment by promoting c...
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May 7, 2013
Entitlements: What Difference Does it Make?Last week they announced the results of the second year of the Oregon experiment, asking the important question: what difference does Medicaid make? The answer, as Megan McArdle reports, is not much, at least not in measurable health outcomes. In thi...
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April 30, 2013
Politics Isn't Just TacticsMany of the commenters on my article last week on "Democrats: End of the Big Push" took me to task for underestimating the ruthlessness of the Democrats. Maybe I do underestimate them. But here is something to back up my point. A well-known Democrati...
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April 24, 2013
Democrats: End of the Big PushLast week, the pundits told us, was one of the worst in President Obama's presidency. They could be right. He lost on gun control in the Senate. Ninety percent of Americans, apparently, want more gun control, but the president couldn't push it over t...
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April 15, 2013
Why They Hated ThatcherMany years ago I met on an airplane flight a young woman that demonstrated maturity beyond her years. It turned out that she had been working in her mother's business since her early teens. She had not, in other words, been confined 24-7 in so...
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April 9, 2013
America's Locust YearsPresident Post-partisan is submitting a bait-and-switch budget to Congress this week: more taxes, more spending, and it's only two months after the legal deadline. So that's another year for the locusts. Scott Johnson at Powerline was already talking...
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April 2, 2013
How Liberals Corrode SocietyIn the girl section of the Wall Street Journal last weekend Matt Ridley had an article on nice vs. nasty, cooperation vs. competition. Researchers have found, he writes, that families that stay together cooperate better than families that are far apa...
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March 26, 2013
We Can Do Better Than ThisThe Cypriots, according to news stories, are outraged about the German idea of taking a hit on their banking accounts in order to recapitalize the island's failing banks. Maybe they don't know when they are ahead, writes Peter Schiff. "Rank and file ...
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March 19, 2013
Looking Beyond the Budget DuelFor the past two years, usgovernmentspending.com has featured the budget resolutions authored by the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), so U.S. citizens and others could compare the GOP vision of the future with the presid...
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March 12, 2013
If I Were a Lefty StrongmanWell, well, Mr. President. it looks like "another fine mess you've got us into" with the sequester squib. Not that I'm complaining, not a bit. Your government by phony crisis does wonders for the revenue at my usgovernmentspending.com. But now your c...
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March 5, 2013
Yahoo's Marissa Mayer Wants to DominateWhile we are waiting for the hammer of God to fall on the sequester, let us note the fluttering of the dovecotes over Marissa Mayer. The CEO of Yahoo has just decreed an end to telecommuting. Obviously this is heresy, because you are not allo...
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February 27, 2013
Liberals Should Have KnownOne of the favorite parlor games of our liberal friends is "The Germans Should Have Known" -- about the Final Solution, about the war crimes, about the slave labor. Part Two of the game is to blame everyone from Nietzsche to Hegel to Herder...
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February 19, 2013
Dr. Ben Carson and the Responsible SelfConservatives were electrified the other week by Dr. Ben Carson's appearance at the National Prayer Breakfast. Partly it was because he was taking it to The Man. But partly we were all thrilling to Dr. Carson because he is a living breath...
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February 13, 2013
The Liberal Bubble of Self-DeceitBack in 2008, I decided to vote for Barack Obama because I wanted the Democrats in charge of foreign policy. I never thought that they would do a good job, but I felt that they needed to own U.S. foreign policy for a while. For eight year...
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February 7, 2013
Why Liberals Hate InequalityLast week, Jonah Goldberg wondered why Republicans are doing so well at the local and state level but striking out at the federal level of politics. His answer to the question is simple: state and local government is about nuts and bolts; the f...
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January 29, 2013
Conservatism is More Than Growth and OpportunityPresident Obama either signed conservatism's death warrant last week, with his second inaugural's theme of entitlements forever, climate wars forever, and equality forever, or he sent the liberal Army Group A heading for the Caucasus. But don't...
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January 15, 2013
Liberals: The Necessary DelusionNormally, I can't get interested in the daily liberal partisan output, but when I saw RealClearPolitics' link to Andy Kroll of Mother Jones on "Revealed: The Massive New Liberal Plan to Remake American Politics" I decided to make an exception. ...
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January 10, 2013
President Obama and the Prisoner's DilemmaThe word about negotiations is that Speaker Boehner has vowed not to negotiate one-on-one with President Obama anymore. Not after being stiffed twice by the president -- first in the 2011 debt ceiling negotiations, and second in the fiscal clif...
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January 1, 2013
President Obama Will Never Have a PlanNow I get it. I get the bone-deep mendacity of President Obama's politics. Here is the money quote from from President Obama's Meet the Press interview on Sunday. GREGORY: "Would you commit to that first year of your second term gettin...
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December 24, 2012
The Scrooge in MeWhen I was a child, I liked presents, and I notice that children have not changed in this respect. My eldest grandson, who was born in France, knew all about "cadeaux" from an early age, and the children of Spanish-speaking friends know all abo...
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December 18, 2012
The Strategic Concentration of Modern ChildrenBack in the good old days, when a few million humans were evenly distributed across the planet, every young man was a rampage killer. In the dawn raid, the idea was to kill all the men in the neighboring village and grab a few women. Reme...
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December 11, 2012
You Think the GOP Has Problems?While everyone gathers around the water cooler Monday-morning quarterbacking Speaker Boehner on the execution of his game plan for the Cliff Bowl before it is even played, let us spare a thought for the hapless Democrats. After all, who would w...
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December 4, 2012
Obama Wants a WarConservatives seem to be nonplussed about President Obama sending Treasury Secretary Geithner to Capitol Hill without a proposal for a grand bargain on entitlements. But why? Worrying about debt and default and entitlements is for the res...
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November 27, 2012
It Will Take a Moral Movement, GirlsAfter the election, conservatives are still full of foreboding -- and also a pessimistic hope. Want to know how to spell "default"? asks Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. It goes like this: "entitlement reform." Or this from Randall DeSoto: it...
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November 20, 2012
The End of Twinkies' Union LabelA couple of months ago, during the Chicago teachers' strike, I mildly suggested that the trouble with unions is that they are all on a journey that can end only in tears. If employees declare war on their employer, then the war can end only in ...
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November 16, 2012
The Age of the Welfare State SmashupIt took a day after the election for me to realize what had happened. It is simply this: the old order has ended. We have now moved into a new era. Responsible Republican Reform is dead. The new age of the welfare state smashu...
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November 6, 2012
America's Real ChoiceWe all remember the last time that liberals were telling us that stagnation was the new normal. It was back in 1980, the year that Ronald Reagan stepped up and taught a generation of liberals what to do with their pessimism and their declinism....
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October 30, 2012
Obama and the Liberal ConceitsWhen Peggy Noonan writes in her weekly sense-of-the-sensible-people column that President Obama is "a president who is at once over his head, out of his depth and wholly unaware of the fact," you know that the world has changed. But really, President...
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October 23, 2012
Liberal Says It's the End of an EraNobody knows how the election will come out, pollsters least of all. But we know one thing. Liberals are in retreat. I have a liberal friend, a member of the Greatest Generation, who says simply that we are coming to the end of an a...
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October 15, 2012
Watching Joe Biden play Willy LomanI've always had a bit of anger about Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, the 1951 play about the emptiness of the success culture. What's the point about success, says lefty Miller, when Willy Loman's life as a salesman ends in failure?...
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October 9, 2012
October Political Reality CheckAfter the president's meltdown in Denver last week, liberals were furious that he didn't fling the celebrated 47 percent gaffe in Romney's face. And maybe they are right, as Mitt Romney has since said he was "completely wrong" about the 47 perc...
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October 1, 2012
Pundits Worry about Conservatism. Again.Apart from the chorus of people telling Mitt Romney how to run his campaign, last week spawned a lot of "What is Conservatism" musings. There is David Brooks mourning the good old days of his youth when conservatism included not just economic, but al...
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September 25, 2012
How Liberals Screw the 47 PercentEveryone's getting their knickers in a twist about the 47 percent that Mitt Romney figures are going to vote for Barack Obama, no matter what. But do you know why they will vote for Barack? Wyatt Emmerich did the math back in 2010 for The Cleve...
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September 18, 2012
Two Cheers for the Chicago Teachers' UnionWell, well, well. So the mighty Rahmbo has met his match in the sweet-talking president of the Chicago Teachers Union, Karen Lewis. All that bravado, the stabbing of knives, the mailing of dead fishes, none of that seems to scare the unio...
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September 11, 2012
Obama's Speech at the End of the UniverseIn his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, President Obama came across like a preacher. Of course. When real preachers prayed at this year's party conventions, the Republicans lowered thei...
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September 4, 2012
'Mittens' or Monster?You tell me what happened last week. Did Governor Romney and Rep. Ryan fail the test of audacity by playing it safe, as the Wall Street Journal complained? If they can't confidently and aggressively win the argument for tax reform and spending...
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August 29, 2012
2016: Obama's America or Romney'sThere were two big takeaways for me on 2016: Obama's America. One was the united front that Barry and his mom formed against stepfather Lolo Soetero's capitalist career working for an evil oil company in Indonesia. The other was Dinesh D'...
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August 22, 2012
Break the Chains, Says JoeThere was something almost charming about Vice President Joe Biden (D) playing the race card last week, singing the "They'll put y'all in chains" number with a great big stage wink. After all, when you play the race card, you are supposed to in...
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August 15, 2012
Americans are Anti-Intellectual Because...Just before the selection of can-do politician Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to be Mitt Romney's running mate, I finally stumbled over the answer to a question that had been troubling me for years. A liberal friend had asked me, as her conservative go-...
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August 8, 2012
Let's Talk about Inequality, LiberalsOur liberal friends like to talk about inequality, and we know why. Liberals are deeply concerned about the increase of economic inequality since 1980. There's even a book about it: The Great Divergence, by Timothy Noah, adapted from a te...
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July 31, 2012
Obama's 1.5 Percent ProblemWhat is wrong with the economy? Something is wrong when the GDP expands by only 1.5 percent a year as it did in the second quarter. The problem is that nobody knows. Everyone thinks they know, but F.A. Hayek long ago put that fatal concei...
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July 24, 2012
Obama, the Great EducatorBack in the day, our liberal friends were eagerly telling each other what a great orator President Obama was. Today, not so much. But I think that all the talk about oratory was missing the point. President Obama is not that great an orat...
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July 17, 2012
The Folly of Obama's PoliticsWho cares if President Obama and his acolytes want to spend $100 million in TV ads to paint Mitt Romney as the scowling Moloch of Wall Street, chewing up the jobs of helpless American workers for sport? It's politics, and politics ain't beanbag...
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July 11, 2012
Hard Days Ahead for ObamaCareDon't bet on ObamaCare. It's not going to turn into a political winner like Social Security and Medicare. So writes the excellent Jay Cost. Because Social Security and Medicare do not discriminate between citizens, there has yet b...
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July 2, 2012
Roberts Hands a Poisoned Chalice to the PresidentWhat in the world was Chief Justice Roberts trying to do by voting with the liberals on ObamaCare? Conservative opinion is all over the map, but conservative talk show hosts were clear, as I drove south from liberal Seattle to liberal Ashland, ...
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June 26, 2012
The Ghosts of Liberal PietiesThese last few months I've been working on the idea that there are two modern worldviews. There's the Invisible Hand worldview that things will work out because humans are social animals and must be social to achieve their selfish ends. Then th...
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June 19, 2012
Obama's TogethernessIn his learned excursus on American history in Cleveland last week, President Obama made a big deal about the things we Americans have done "together:" railroads and highways, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. We got where we are today "not ...
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June 12, 2012
A Pre-Revolutionary SituationOnce upon a time, there was a nation that had trouble paying its bills. The people were restless. So the king called for his advisors, and they advised a little inflation to stimulate trade. A few months passed, and the people were ...
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June 5, 2012
Smashing the Tyranny of the Democrats' ClichésPolitics is civil war by other means. So when Mitt Romney showed up at Solyndra and the Romney HQ troops showed up to heckle David Axelrod last week, conservatives found themselves writing about the thrill up their legs. It really makes a...
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May 29, 2012
What Conservatives Really Think About Community, Mr. DionneIn the Year of Julia, liberals sometimes say the darnedest things. Last week, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne told his liberal readers that "Conservatives used to care about community. What happened?" Next week, perhaps he'll ...
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May 22, 2012
Welcome to the Democrats' Julia Crow EraWhen I watch the Democratic attacks on Bain Capital, I wonder: just how do Democrats think the economy is supposed to work? Take the Kansas City steel plant that Bain took private in 1993 and reassembled as GST Steel. Here we had a falter...
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May 16, 2012
Liberals Ruin EverythingWhen friends suggest that the election in November will be close, I half-agree, with a twinkle. Because I don't think it will be close. That's because this lot, as the Brits say, don't have it sorted -- unlike Bill Clinton in the 1990s, w...
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May 8, 2012
Women of the Welfare StateI just hope the Obamis are as stupid as we conservatives imagine. Because it would be too bad if the "Life of Julia" turned out to be a cunning Chicago buffalo jump, stampeding conservatives into jumping to red ruin in November. That's wh...
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May 6, 2012
If Conservatives Are Social Darwinists, Then...That President Obama certainly has a way with words. The other day he called Paul Ryan's House-passed budget "thinly veiled social Darwinism." Does he mean that Ryan's budget is wearing a burqa? Anyway, he prompted Catholic Rep. Rya...
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April 24, 2012
2012: The Art of IntimidationWhat a joy it was to watch the Romney campaign executing on the Hilary Rosen flap, launching Ann Romney on Twitter in a heartbeat. And then the Romney war room followed up with the dog-meat play. Liberals thought that the dog-on-the-roof ...
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April 17, 2012
Mr. President, It's All of the AboveEven MSNBC reckons that the president had a bad week. The bad-hair week, according to Chuck Todd, included the "tax-fairness issue" over the weekend, the stock market loss on Monday, the rallying round Romney after the Santorum exit, the Rosen ...
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April 10, 2012
Helping Women Get What They WantAs the Republican nomination contest slogs through a messy endgame, President Obama's re-elect numbers are soaring, especially among women. So what is the Republican problem with women, and what do women want? NRO asked this question and ...
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April 4, 2012
Can Liberals Handle Adversity?Liberals just had a bad week watching the Supreme Court munching on ObamaCare and spitting out the pits. They thought it was rather bad manners. It seems that each week this year raises the stakes, making 2012 a year which will live...either in...
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March 28, 2012
The Science of Half-Baked IdeasThe more we learn about climate science, the more we learn what a shabby, back-of-the-envelope business it is. Dr. Michael Mann, the climate science poster boy who simplified the global climate of the last millennium into a hockey stick, just c...
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March 20, 2012
The Optics of Obama's FailuresPeople are starting to worry that President Obama might be wobbling on his visionary "all of the above" program to bring on the green energy millennium, what with $5.00 gas in the Northeast states. But don't worry. Even though the adminis...
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March 13, 2012
The GOP and the Upscale VoteGood news! The upscale vote is moving towards Mitt Romney, according to Michael Barone. Says he: One constant factor in the 14 contests with exit polls is that Mitt Romney has tended to run best among high-income and high-education voter...
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March 11, 2012
Freedom vs. the Secular SeminaryLittle did I know, when contrasting conservative freedom and liberal liberation, that a poster-girl for liberation was presenting herself at the Altar of the Victim, the remarkable Sandra Fluke, the toast of our Democratic friends. For Ms. Fluk...
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February 29, 2012
Culture Wars: Conservative Freedom vs. Liberal LiberationThe recent skirmish over compelling Catholic organizations to offer contraception and abortifacient services to their employees reminds us of the big issue between conservatives and liberals in the culture wars. It bears repeating: conservative...
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February 20, 2012
A Budget Rear-View MirrorNow that Obama's last budget -- we hope -- is out, a mere week after the statutory deadline, the nation's budget experts are out in judgment. But few of them look in the rear-view mirror. How did the federal government's budget estimates ...
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February 14, 2012
Liberals Forced to Bare Their TeethLiberals were a sorry spectacle this month, when they were forced to bare their teeth on the Planned Parenthood/Komen caper. A real hegemonic ruling class at the peak of its power doesn't need to make threats. Its natives don't even think...
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February 8, 2012
Let's Stop Obama-ing ApartJust a quick word here to Mitt Romney: would you please take a week out from campaigning, get together with your messaging people, and all read Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 together? The book contains jus...
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January 31, 2012
President Obama's Civilian SoldiersEverybody is outraged and disgusted by our divisive politics, from Jewish bubbies in Florida to AT's own Rick Moran. The rest of us just think that President Obama is incompetent. "Obama doesn't have the experience, character, or personal...
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January 24, 2012
Newt Gingrich Is ShamelessWhen the Democrats surfaced George W. Bush's 1976 DUI the week before the 2000 presidential election, it nearly tipped the election. A week before the revelation, Bush was comfortably ahead in the polls. It was obvious, reading about Bush as he...
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January 17, 2012
2012: It's Bain Capital vs. Obama CapitalI've been worrying for months about Romney and the Bain Capital problem. How was Romney, if nominated for President of the United States, going to deal with Democrats trying to hang Bain Capital layoffs round his neck? Paul Kengor goes in...
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January 11, 2012
The Bad News on UnemploymentConservatives are anxious to see bad news in the drop in the headline unemployment rate to 8.5 percent. Yes, it's fabulous that employment is finally turning upwards, but the labor force isn't expanding as it should in a healthy recovery. ...
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January 3, 2012
Why the Decline of Violence?For years I've been saying that people are very sensitive to "incoming rounds." When a mortar round, real or metaphorical, lands in your fire-base, it spreads death and destruction. But outgoing rounds are different. You fire a shot...
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December 27, 2011
Obama's Sterilized SocietyChalk one up to President Obama. He's got a 2-month extension of payroll tax cuts in the teeth of opposition from those wascally Wepublicans, so that two months from now we can have the fight all over again. I suppose that the president's chief...
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December 20, 2011
Obama's Freeloader EconomyIf you want to understand the deep political philosophy underneath the Obama administration's random-walk economic policy, it is this: freeloading. When you really try to cudgel your brain in a good-faith effort to understand liberals, and try to u...
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December 13, 2011
Liberal History from Osawatomie BamIt is still a couple of months until Groundhog Day, but in Kansas, Osawatomie Bam recently popped up to take a look at the economic weather. Folks say that if he sees his shadow, it means another two years of economic headwinds. But the Bamster...
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December 10, 2011
Andy Stern, AuthoritarianYou have to wonder what kind of cheese the Wall Street Journal used to bait the mousetrap for Andy Stern, former head of the Service Employees International Union and friend of Obama. We need to abandon our fundamentalist capitalist ways, wrote the l...
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November 29, 2011
Occupy: History Repeats as Reality ShowMarx famously wrote that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. He was pointing out the difference between Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of France and scourge of Europe, defeated at the battle of Waterloo, and his less impressiv...
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November 23, 2011
Liberals and 'Austerity'When I was a lad in 1950s Britain, the adults used to talk about "austerity." This, I learned, was the period right after World War II. But what did it mean? I could never quite grasp what was so austere about those years. The...
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November 15, 2011
Whither the White Working Class?There's plenty of fight left in the white working class. In Ohio last week it decisively defeated the Republican plan to curb government union power. Pity it doesn't make any difference. Pity the policemen and the firemen and the te...
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November 8, 2011
The Great Recession Is Now the Great RestructuringIt's no longer just the Great Recession. Now the experts are talking about the "Great Restructuring" of the economy. Here's how the narrative goes. Back in the Great Depression, the big problem was not just the depression; it was a ...
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November 2, 2011
Capitalism in Crisis? Surely You Jest!British conservative Charles Moore visited the Occupy chaps at St. Paul's Cathedral in London and came away a bit bemused. The protesters seem to imagine that, without their tented witness to the wickedness of the rich, no one would have noticed tha...
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October 24, 2011
Carry On Borking, Say LibsWhat do our liberal friends really think about the infamous nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, that went down 58 to 42 in the United States Senate 24 years ago on October 23, 1987? If you have ever wondered, wonder no more. J...
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October 20, 2011
Subsidies Have ConsequencesThe trouble with the ruling class is that it doesn't have a clue about business. To an Obami like Jay Carney, White House press secretary, the failure of corporate crony Solyndra is "just the way business works." You win some, you lose so...
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October 11, 2011
How Conservatives Occupy Wall StreetJust about everyone right of center has been sniggering at the rather sorry products of our education system currently "occupying" Wall Street. It confirms why Nancy Pelosi could be so confident that the Tea Party was "astroturf." Everyth...
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October 4, 2011
All Politics Is ResentmentWe've all been having a grand old time in the last couple of weeks railing at President Obama and his new class warfare campaign. We happily drag out his post-partisan speeches from 2008 and 2004 and beat him upside the head with his old TelePr...
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September 27, 2011
What Are Democrats Thinking?At this moment in the political cycle Republicans are wondering if they are about to demolish the Democrats. And the Democrats are waking up to the possibility that President Obama might be leading them off a cliff. So what are Democrats ...
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September 24, 2011
Is America Ready for a Christian President?Leave it to a RINO. Now Gov. Mitt Romney is doing the Democrats' work for them by worrying that Rick Perry is too extreme to be electable. That's not the way that Democrats talk about their candidates. They go straight for the guilt trip,...
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September 13, 2011
What Third Rail?Nancy Pelosi has three words for the Democrats' campaign in 2012: Medicare, Medicare, Medicare. We've already seen a sneak preview of this strategy in the delicately crafted YouTube video of Rep. Ryan trundling grannie off a cliff. Republ...
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September 7, 2011
Invisible Hand vs. Clenched FistThe advance word on President Obama's Thursday jobs speech is: nothing new. According to George Stephanopoulos, it will contain tax cuts for corporations, an infrastructure bank, and the usual pabulum of job training for the unemployed. T...
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August 29, 2011
Warren Buffett Shelters from Hurricane ObamaSee also: Warren Buffet: Financial Savior or Angel of Doom? The hype over Hurricane Irene may have been overdone, but those few obedient souls who followed orders and sought shelter from the storm may have gotten a shock. For down there h...
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August 23, 2011
Remember 'No New Taxes'?It was interesting to watch Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) talkin' to the folks in Oakland last week. I found myself transfixed by her sophisticated blend of hand gestures, ranging from the one-finger point, the two-finger jab, and the full-hand chop...
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August 20, 2011
Riots and Civil SocietyPeggy Noonon asks the critical question in the aftermath of the London riots and the Philadelphia flash mobs. When the riot begins or the flash mob arrives, the best the government can do is control the streets, enforce the law, maintain the peace. ...
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August 9, 2011
Obama as the Dying GodNo doubt the White House is busy coming up with action plans for getting the president back on track for reelection. Hey, fellas, how about an infrastructure bank? The staffers are just doing their job, keeping up morale after the debt-ceiling ...
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August 2, 2011
The Dirty Little Secret of EconomicsNever mind about the debt ceiling. Here's a more important question for you. How come after 235 years of modern economics we are stuck in a lackluster economic recovery from the worst business recession since the 1930s? On Friday th...
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July 26, 2011
We're Not in 1995 Any MoreThe fear in the back of every Republican mind is that the American people will blame John Boehner and Republicans for shutting down the government. Just like they blamed Newt Gingrich in 1995 when President Clinton shut down the government in a...
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July 19, 2011
Obama and the Coming DemocalypsePresident Obama is evidently feeling the pressure from the current shenanigans over a routine hike in the debt ceiling. But really, what president does not have to push through congressional attempts to embarrass him at debt-ceiling time? ...
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July 12, 2011
Where Obamanomics Went WrongSuppose you are a liberal and you are wondering, after the truly dismal June jobs report, what went wrong. All right, you don't wonder. If you are Jonathan Cohn, you merely parrot Paul Krugman about the insanity of trying to balance the b...
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July 6, 2011
Democrats Heading for the CliffLet's give the president and his base the benefit of the doubt. President Obama honestly thought that his smash-mouth press conference on Wednesday June 29th and his obsession over the Obama-Reid-Pelosi corporate jet stimulus tax credit was not...
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June 28, 2011
When It's OK for Liberals to Demonize the 'Other'In its feature piece on presidential candidate and Tea Party darling Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), The Weekly Standard makes the obvious point: there is something about Bachmann and Sarah Palin that sends liberals crazy. What unites Bachmann and Pal...
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June 21, 2011
Mixing up Mamet, Hayek, Hitchens, and SowellI was trotting along the other day, reading The Secret Knowledge by newly conservatized playwright David Mamet, when something pulled me up short. Mamet was explaining his "revelation upon reading Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. ... He w...
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June 14, 2011
Economics for BabiesEconomics is too hard for liberals and many others. Who can tell from deficits and multipliers, after all? So it is time to dumb economics down, and make it simple enough for a baby to understand. "Economics for Babies." This ...
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June 9, 2011
The Twilight of the Educated GodsLook out, wails First Norn Paul Krugman, looking in horror at the thread of Fate. We are in danger of repeating the mistake of 1937, when the Fed put on the brakes and pitched us into the recession-within-a-depression of 1937-38. D...
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May 31, 2011
Palin and the White Working ClassSunday May 29 and Rolling Thunder marked Sarah Palin's first incursion into "enemy territory" since 2008, according to Politico's Molly Ball. The US Northeast is the region that's "least friendly" to the Tea Party favorite.M...
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May 25, 2011
No Dog in That Fight, Mr President?Scott Johnson at Powerline, like many others, was unimpressed with President Obama's May 29 Mideast speech. The president fails "to distinguish properly between friends and enemies," he wrote. Let us drive a little deeper and as...
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May 21, 2011
Elitist, Lead ThyselfAlthough I never got the official proclamation, last week seems to have been Blame the Elite Week. Of course, for conservatives, it is always Blame the Elite Week, but it was still gratifying to read Paul Krugman on "The Unwisdom of Elites...
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May 10, 2011
A Sluggish Recovery for President ObamaThe mainstream media did a heroic job of making the mixed jobs numbers on Friday look good. Then the experts pointed out that the 244,000 new jobs in the Bureau of Labor Statistics Establishment Survey were mostly a statistical artifact.If you ...
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May 7, 2011
Do The Math, Mr. PresidentPresident Obama is selling his FY12 Budget 2.0 that isn't a budget that emerged from his April 13 speech. His budget isn't really a budget because he hasn't actually got any numbers to back up his rhetoric.So let's do the numbers for him. ...
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April 26, 2011
Who Will Mediscare the Dems?Some conservatives are getting nervous about the polls on Medicare. Apparently about 80 percent of Americans are opposed to cuts in Medicare. Mona Charen, for one, is steeling herself for the inevitable Mediscare campaign from the Democra...
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April 20, 2011
What's the Matter With Norma Rae?Back in the evil Bush era, you'll remember, Thomas Frank rode his liberal lament What's the Matter With Kansas? to a weekly column at The Wall Street Journal.Frank echoed the feelings of many liberals: how could the traditional working stiff in Kansa...
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April 13, 2011
The End of Medicare As We Know ItAs usual, Mark Steyn has comically grasped the essence of the budget problem. Democrats are right, he admits, when they say that the Ryan Budget Plan means the end of Medicare as we know it. But let's be honest about the alternative.The D...
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April 6, 2011
Unaccountable AmericaI'm often shocked by the children of liberal acquaintances. One has a daughter with depression. Another has an ADHD son. Yet another has a bipolar son. All in their twenties. Of course this is the season of the man-child...
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March 31, 2011
The Liberal Addiction to BureaucracyThese days we do not judge people on the basis of good and evil. Instead of saying that something is evil, we say it is unhealthy. If someone is a drunk, we say he has an alcohol addiction. In the old days you purged the evil in you...
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March 23, 2011
What Would Sherman Say?I'm concerned that conservatives are expecting too much too soon from their Republican heroes. Radio hosts like Hugh Hewitt are flogging the House Republicans to stop ninnying around with continuing resolutions. People are starting to com...
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March 19, 2011
Social Security Isn't Broken?Columnist Charles Krauthammer is right, of course. Social Security is a disgusting fraud. Yet of all the entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, "Social Security is the most solvable." So it's a scandal that...
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March 6, 2011
The Liberal Culture of CompulsionIf you listen to your liberal friend, she will tell, perhaps, of a wonderful program at the local community college that is helping in the fight for literacy in adult women. Probably she heard about it on NPR.It is a wonderful thing to ha...
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February 23, 2011
Radical Suits and Their SuckersBack in the 1970s my daughters used to say: "Let's play princesses!" and a grand old time they had. I imagine that in progressive families, the cry was different. "Let's play community organizers!" No doubt a gra...
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February 15, 2011
Trillions and TrillionsPresident Obama's Director of the Office of Management and Budget trailed the FY12 federal budget for the media the day before the budget was sent up to Congress, yesterday. Reported Reuters:President Barack Obama's proposed budget for fiscal 2...
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February 12, 2011
Jobs and RevolutionSince I know nothing about Egypt beyond what I read in the papers, I won't comment on the Egyptian revolution. All I can say is that I agree with the pundits. When you have an autocratic regime then you get rigidities in the economy and s...
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February 5, 2011
The Backs of Our Most Vulnerable CitizensWhat do you reply when your liberal friend says: "No one should have to go without health care!" My reply, the other day, was the standard conservative line that "nobody in the U.S. goes without health care." Afterward...
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January 25, 2011
That Disdain for PalinNow that the left's McCarthyite attack on Sarah Palin has subsided, she merely has to suffer the disdain of the intellectual elite. Even James Taranto, admitted high-school dropout, damns her with faint praise.This is nothing new. The nos...
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January 18, 2011
Mobs, Lynchings, and PsychosYou tell me: is the attempted killing of a member of Congress for the first time in thirty years a reflection of the violence of our political rhetoric or a reminder of the remarkable peacefulness of modern life? Our liberal friends like to thi...
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January 16, 2011
Liberals and Political KitschThe link at RealClearPolitics said "Eliminating Inequality is Good for the Soul." But at the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof's article a week ago was more bland: "Equality, a True Soul Food."Kristof was boosting The Spirit ...
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January 4, 2011
Playing the Violence CardOur lefty friends have just come off a pretty a good century playing the blame game on conservatives for "violence." Whether it was corporate goons whacking union organizers at the Battle of the Overpass or racist Southern cops turnin...
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December 21, 2010
Off-the-Books AmericaWe are becoming two Americas -- not the familiar complaint about the rich and the poor, but rather the regulated and the off-the-books Americas.Last week, Victor Davis Hanson wrote about the hollowed-out society in the Central Valley around his nativ...
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December 14, 2010
Income Taxes, Millionaires, and BillionairesSenator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is reported to be "irked" that President Obama didn't take his advice and use the tax bill to "corner Republicans into defending millionaires and billionaires." In fact, Schumer's not just irked ...
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December 7, 2010
Warren Buffett, Robber Baron?I know that we are all supposed to love Warren Buffett as the Sage of Omaha, businessman and all-around good guy, but I keep reading stories that make me wonder. Here's a story about Warren Buffett, the estate tax, and the life insurance industry.Did...
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December 3, 2010
Dems Fume over Wall Street TrillionsAll of a sudden, liberal pundits are getting worked up about the influence of Wall Street. From the concern expressed, one would think that the contributions from Goldman Sachs have suddenly dried up now that the Republicans have taken over the House...
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November 24, 2010
Giving Thanks for ObamaHave you heard the one about the guy from the lefty "reality-based community?" He could discern reality only when it knocked him upside the head. And that's the story of the Obama administration thus far.It's not easy to admit it, but in 20...
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November 16, 2010
Obama's Nixon Gambit Will FailBarack Obama will soon discover that printing money to stimulate the economy won't work for him as well it did for Richard Nixon, with disastrous results for America and his reelection chances. There are two reasons for the Federal Reserve's decision...
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November 9, 2010
Yes We Can RepealLast week, the MSM Tingle Brigade all of a sudden discovered, in President Obama's post-election news conference, that Obama just didn't get it, didn't understand the message from the voters. "That Tin Ear," wrote the London Economist.What ...
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November 3, 2010
Obama's Grand Strategic ErrorSo President Obama really is a socialist after all. According to Stanley Kurtz in Radical-in-Chief, the young Obama went to socialist conferences in the 1980s and then became a participant in the extensive socialist community in Chicago.In the afterm...
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October 26, 2010
At the End of the Liberal DynastyYou really have to feel sorry for our liberal friends. With each passing day, they are coming to resemble the old WASP elite they sneered at for a century. Good liberal journalists should visit only those inscribed in the Liberal Social Register. And...
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October 23, 2010
Fun, Frolic, and MidtermsWhen your team looks to do well in the playoffs, it's time to head down to the big-box store to buy a big-screen HDTV. But what do you do when your party looks to wipe the floor in the midterms?The question is: When the results start rolling, how wil...
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October 17, 2010
Why We FightNovember 2, 2010 will go down as the biggest repudiation of liberalism in our lifetime. As many as eighty Democrats may go down to defeat in the House of Representatives. But for what?None of this will be due to the brilliance of conservative ideas. ...
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October 12, 2010
Pay Checks vs. Food StampsThe mark of a good politician is an instinct for the dividing line. We are talking about the line drawn in the sand that gets you to 51 percent of the vote and leaves your opponent with the rest.Say what you like about Newt Gingrich, but his new divi...
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September 28, 2010
About that River in EgyptOur liberal friends are wondering where it all went wrong. Their generals, the elected politicians, are all running for election either by ignoring ObamaCare or by running against it. But the word hasn't gotten down to the mustachioed officers in the...
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September 23, 2010
Power or Principle?Tea Party favorite Christine O'Donnell's victory over Washington establishment favorite Mike Castle raised an interesting question. Do we want just political power and 51 seats in the U.S. Senate? Or do we want to build a movement? That's what moveme...
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September 14, 2010
November Is Just the BeginningIt's beginning to look like the Republicans will win both Houses of Congress this fall. But a Republican Congress won't be enough repeal the disaster of ObamaCare. President Obama will be able to veto any repeal effort at least through 2012. And even...
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September 8, 2010
Barack's Cunning Plan?Some of you may know and love the British "Blackadder" TV series. It featured Rowan Atkinson as an upper-class twit and Tony Robinson as Baldrick, his crafty lower-class servant/sidekick. A recurring theme was "Baldrick's cunning plan...
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August 30, 2010
Nobody Here but Us 400,000 ChickensFor years and years, the national moralists have been telling conservatives to reach out to minorities and women. But how? Minorities and women, at least of the professional variety, believe in big government and politics-with-everything. Conservativ...
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August 24, 2010
What Liberals Should Have KnownRep. Barney Frank (D-MA), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, has changed his mind about Fannie and Freddie, the government-sponsored home mortgage giants. According to Larry Kudlow, Rep. Frank is ready to send Fannie to a death panel...
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August 17, 2010
How's That 'Spread the Wealth Around' Going?Conservatives' favorite moment in the 2008 campaign was the altercation between the Anointed One and Joe the Plumber.Back then, Joe Wurzelbacher was worried that Obama's plan to raise taxes on the wealthy, those making more than $250,000 per year, wo...
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August 10, 2010
A Liberal Judge Lights a FuseLast week, when Judge Walker's decision in Perry v. Schwarzenegger came out, I felt a dreadful fear.My fear was not about what gay marriage would do to the institution of traditional marriage. I reckon that marriage is not as fragile as conservatives...
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August 3, 2010
The Obama AristocracyIt's the summer of John Kerry's $7-million yacht and Chelsea Clinton's fairy-tale $2-million wedding at a faux-Versailles estate in New York. Throw in the First Family's royal progress from one tony vacation spot to another, and even the Boston Globe...
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July 27, 2010
Nobody Can Fire Andrew BreitbartAs the mainstream media synchronized their watches over the Shirley Sherrod affair, the object of their little trench raid was clear. Demonize Andrew Breitbart for the unethical publication of a video featuring Ms. Sherrod uttering racist remarks at ...
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July 22, 2010
Of Course Obama's a SocialistThomas Frank, the Wall Street Journal's quota liberal, is shocked that people are calling President Obama a socialist. Last week, a poll announced that 55 percent of people think he's just that. Not at all, retorts Frank:If the president were actuall...
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July 17, 2010
Free at Last: Endgame of Liberal RacismBack when they were asking us if we were ready for a black president, we all know what Americans were thinking. If we elect a black president, could we do a deal? Could we stop calling everyone racists?It was easy back then to indulge in a hope for c...
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July 9, 2010
After Obama: Forgiveness?The great religious movements of the 20th century, Communism and Fascism, liked to think that they toiled in the wilderness against a corrupt political and religious establishment. In fact, of course, they always obtained support from young fashionab...
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June 29, 2010
Keynes: The End of a Bad IdeaThe dream of spending our way out of recession got a step closer to death at the Toronto Summit of G8 and G20 leaders. Things just aren't what they were.Every bad idea seems to have its Wordsworthian moment:Bliss was it in that dawn to be aliveBut to...
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June 22, 2010
A Bridge Too Far?According to Fred Barnes at The Weekly Standard, the Obamis are planning a lame-duck session of Congress, "filled with defeated and retired senators and House members," to pass a VAT (value-added tax).Liberals know that they get a chance to...
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June 15, 2010
Mr. President, You're Stuck on StupidIt is true that liberalism is cruel, corrupt, wasteful, and unjust. But one should never forget its delusion. The delusion is a simple one. It is a belief that government can be made rational and efficient. This delusion leads our liberal friends int...
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June 8, 2010
The Rand Paul Gaffe and Liberal InjusticeA political gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. So when GOP Senate candidate Rand Paul discussed with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow "his belief in a limited government that should not force private businesses to abide by civil ri...
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June 5, 2010
Big Government's KatrinaThe mess in the Gulf of Mexico is not just Obama's Katrina. It is Big Government's Katrina.Thank goodness it happened on the Democrats' watch. When George W. Bush was president, the lackadaisical performance of the federal government could be set dow...
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May 29, 2010
The Liberal TrilemmaMany people are looking for the reason to explain the Greek/Euro mess. Edmund Conway in the London Daily Telegraph has as good a reason as any. The current crisis, he writes, puts politicians face-to-face with the Rodrik Trilemma, conceived by Dani R...
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May 22, 2010
Can Women Return Us to Beauty?If anyone wants to know why theater is dead in the United States, the reason is simple. It is trapped in a time warp of liberal pieties. When the Oregon Shakespeare Festival sent out a call for plays celebrating "American Revolutions," it d...
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May 12, 2010
Greek Crisis Nothing NewLast week, government workers in Greece were marching through the streets chanting "thieves, thieves" to the industrialists and politicians that have robbed their nation blind. These workers would be experts on that, with their 13th- and 14...
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May 5, 2010
Pity the British ToriesThe British voters are voting tomorrow (May 6) in a general election after thirteen years of "New Labour" rule. Thirteen years ago, Tony Blair promised Britons "joined-up government" that was "tough on crime, tough on t...
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April 27, 2010
The Fed Did It, Says Bob MundellWho really was to blame for the bank meltdown in 2008? Nobel laureate and economist Robert Mundell, supply-sider-in-chief and China's new Confucius, is unequivocal.In a speech at the Heritage Foundation on April 16, 2010, he blamed the U.S. Federal R...
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April 24, 2010
Taxes Aren't the ProblemThe Tax Day tea parties were a start. Taxes are too high, we all agree. You can see how high at usgovernmentrevenue.com. But taxes aren't the problem. Nor indeed is government spending the problem, although you can take a look at the century of stead...
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April 16, 2010
Obama's World without GivingLast week we learned what happens to health care when you impose ObamaCare upon it. For we learned how the prototype ObamaCare health plan is wrecking health care in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.Gov. Deval Patrick (D) just rejected 90 percent of...
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April 7, 2010
Change the Conversation on EducationIt's time for conservatives to go Alinsky on education. It's time for a fresh line of attack.Diane Ravitch has given up on school choice. Her latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining ...
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March 30, 2010
Whom Do You Trust?Everyone seems to need a narrative of good against evil -- even people who don't believe in God or in Satan. Take Noam Chomsky, scourge of U.S. imperialism. In the lefty mockumentary The Corporation, he delicately compares corporations to slaveowners...
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March 23, 2010
In Defeat, DefianceA liberal acquaintance of mine likes to say that "taxes are the price we pay for civilization." He would, for he's a retired professor from a government university. He didn't think this up on his own, of course. His soundbite is a quote fro...
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March 16, 2010
Why the Rules MatterBack in the Bush era, it was Republicans who got fed up with the rules. Democrats in the U.S. Senate were filibustering conservative judge nominees, and Republicans had had enough of it. So they planned to change the rules in the Senate with the ...
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March 9, 2010
Defeat vs. RepealThe big question for Americans is whether they are better off defeating the monstrosity of Obamacare now or whether it is best to let the Democrats pass it and then work to repeal it, whether it takes a day or a decade.The short answer is: Defeat it....
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March 2, 2010
Science's Big ProblemSee also Science and the Toxic Scare Machine - editorLast week, Dr. Judith Curry, climate scientist from Georgia Institute of Technology, admitted on Watt's Up With That that climate scientists needed to do a better job of communication in order to r...
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February 23, 2010
How to Cut the BudgetThis week the Tea Party conservatives launched their "Contract from America." And a group of conservative luminaries released the "Mount Vernon Statement." The former proposes to cut excessive spending, but doesn't say what, and t...
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February 16, 2010
Liberals Say U.S. Is Ungovernable. Again.Liberals are at it again. They are worrying that the U.S. is "ungovernable." Political scientist Jay Cost has the details:Ezra Klein argued that it was time to reform the filibuster because the government cannot function with it intact anym...
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February 9, 2010
Liberal ConceitWe all know liberal condescension. "Why are Americans so anti-intellectual?" your liberal friend might ask. But Gerard Alexander has written about it -- in the Washington Post. "Why are liberals so condescending?" he asks. W...
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February 2, 2010
Budget Fun with Fannie and FreddieRemember when your liberal friends used to writhe on the floor in a foaming rage? They were outraged because the Iraq War never got into the federal budget, but got slipped in through the back door with "supplemental appropriations." ...
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February 1, 2010
Budget funNormal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 ...
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January 27, 2010
You Ain't Seen Nothing YetIsn't it great to have a Republican senator from Massachusetts? It's also good to have the First Amendment reaffirmed by the United States Supreme Court -- even if our liberal friends are shocked and appalled at the notion of corporations sticking up...
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January 18, 2010
The Content of Obama's CharacterOn the holiday celebrating Martin Luther King's birthday, we celebrate also the first year of America's first black president, Barack Obama. It's telling that 47 years ago, when Reverend King made his great speech on the Washington Mall, he did...
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January 12, 2010
Obama's Jobs HoleThe Bureau of Labor Statistics released the December employment report on January 8, and the mainstream media reported that 85,000 jobs were lost. The big story, as usual, was in the Household Survey. There was no mild leakage of 85,000 jobs there, b...
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January 6, 2010
Repeal the Health BillSooner or later, the American people must rise up and do more than complain about the latest wizard wheeze of the progressive educated class. We must take one of their gigantic government takeover bills and flat-out repeal it.Otherwise, they will ret...
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December 29, 2009
The Government Still Hasn't a ClueThomas Frank, the Wall Street Journal's tame liberal columnist, experienced the Noughties (2000-2009) as a "low, dishonest decade." It was all corporate scandals, slack regulation, and unnecessary wars.Allow me, Mr. Frank, to propose ...
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December 23, 2009
A Christmas Insult? Or Just a Lump of Coal?Some people think that Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) is insulting Christians with his plan to make the United States Senate work right up to Christmas Eve on his health reform bill.Maybe so. But it seems more likely that he just wants to make sure tha...
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December 15, 2009
Health Care: The Poisoned ChaliceIf only everyone would be sensible and stop fighting with liberals over health care, then we could all get along. There he is -- poor Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), facing a brutal reelection bid next November, mercilessly diverted into trying to make...
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December 8, 2009
Climategate's Bullyboy ScientistsThe biggest thing to take a pounding in the last two weeks of Climategate is the fantasy PR image that scientists have maintained for so long. Of course scientists fake results. Of course they bully other scientists. Of course they toady up to politi...
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December 1, 2009
Palin and the FutureA generation ago, liberals taught me to believe that Ronald Reagan was an extremist and a lightweight. Then I went to a Republican caucus in 1980 as a Bush supporter and met the Reagan supporters. I realized that they were the little people: mechanic...
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November 25, 2009
ObamaCare's Hot Water TreatmentModern conservatism is the essence of moderation. Conservatives want to persuade the world to chart a course between two extremes. They join with the modernists in breaking the absolute power that family and tribe once had over people's lives. While ...
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November 17, 2009
The Liberals' 'Other' ProblemWhen a white redneck American blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, President Clinton blamed right-wing talk radio. But when a Muslim-American blew away thirteen American citizens at Fort Hood in 2009, the president was carefu...
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November 10, 2009
The Purpose of BureaucracyLast week, the House Republicans helpfully pointed out that the Pelosi/ObamaCare bill would create "111 new bureaucracies." No fair, said a Democrat spokesman. Most of the new bureaucracies would only be "demonstration programs."A...
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November 3, 2009
A Liberal Whiff of PanicPeggy Noonan thinks that the American people are disheartened. Recently she talked to a mid-level man in Big Pharma. In the old days, it seems, people were confident; they could see a way through the nation's problems.Now they don't. The most sophist...
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October 29, 2009
Life in the United Scapegoats of AmericaOh, good. At last, the feds are going to crack down on those evil bankers and their greedy bonuses. Or is it greedy bankers and evil bonuses? Auto da fe next Tuesday.Now we can get back to the important work of scapegoating insurance companies and th...
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October 20, 2009
Who will rid me of that troublesome Rush?Don't be tempted to believe in an organized conspiracy to race-bait Rush Limbaugh. That's not how things work in politics.To understand how DeMaurice Smith, head of the NFL players' union and politically connected Obamite, could be the center o...
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October 15, 2009
Chicago and the natural ecology of human conflictPresident Obama's Nobel Peace Prize celebrates his supposed commitment to a world without war. Meanwhile some people have noticed that all is not peace-process and diplomacy back at the president's adopted home town of Chicago. Gang violence ha...
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October 10, 2009
Woman-led ConservatismI admit it. I was wrong. When I wrote about the importance of "woman-centered" conservatism back in 2007, here, in 2008, here, and this year, here, I was thinking about a continuing of the old conservatism, but centered on the i...
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September 29, 2009
The Perils of a 'Policy' PresidentThe last three Democratic presidents are similar. They are policy presidents: they all believe in the rational, systemic approach to governance. That's what David S. Broder, dean of the Washington press corps, has noticed. And he re...
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September 22, 2009
Irving Kristol and Conservatism's FutureThey called him the godfather. That's because in the 1970s Irving Kristol, who died September 18, 2009 aged 89, seemed to be the conservative at the center of the "family," pulling the strings.But he wasn't making people offers they c...
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September 19, 2009
Single Payer and the 'Slacker Liberals'Many conservatives may not understand the logic of President Obama's preference for the "public option" that leads to "single payer" government health care for all.So let me tell you about some Democratic neighbors of mine. ...
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September 9, 2009
Obama's Wasted YearIt's about a year since Barack Obama has been at the center of US national politics, but it's probably not too early to say that his first year was wasted.It is also probably too harsh to blame the president for all of the waste. He heads a par...
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September 2, 2009
The Kennedy TestNow that the last Kennedy brother has lost his fight with brain cancer, you can say say this about the Kennedys: they always seemed to know what Democrats wanted. Elder brother Joe died a hero's death in World War II, at a time when liberals we...
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September 1, 2009
No Dead Parrots HereIt must have all looked so appealing back in the winter. Why not publish The Death of Conservatism by New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus on September 1? The book is, the Economist reviewer says, "an appeal for unilateral...
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August 21, 2009
Obama and the Upchuck FactorAmong the most powerful psephological tools available to political strategists and commentators is the well-known Upchuck Factor. Never heard of it? I'm surprised.The Upchuck Factor is, quite simply, the length of time it takes the US vot...
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August 15, 2009
Healthcare and the Resourceful PoorEvil political wizard Karl Rove seems to be tasting blood. His analyzes the president's stuff for Obamacare in the Wall Street Journal and concludes that the pitcher is in a jam.There are no polling data or focus groups on earth that can help M...
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August 4, 2009
The Myth of the ExpertLast week Steve McIntyre of the Climate Audit website cracked the walls of the fortress at Britain's Climatic Research Unit. A "mole" sent him a sample of global temperature data that CRU Director Dr. Phil Jones had refused to share w...
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August 2, 2009
Fixing Government's Health Care Mess With Our MoneyLast week the president's health care reform ran off into the ditch. This week, in a flurry of flashing lights, the Beltway wrecker will doubtless try to haul it back up on the legislative highway. The mainstream media will take a l...
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July 23, 2009
Who's Out of Touch?In the Canadian Ottawa Citizen David Warren reckons that US liberals are out of touch. He says it all got started long ago when the afternoon newspapers started to fail and their predictably conservative views no longer balanced the liberal mor...
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July 18, 2009
Private Schools for the PoorWhen President Obama visited Ghana last week, he went to teach. Africans could harness education "to create new wealth," said the president. "Yes you can."But what if Africa has something to teach the president about educati...
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July 7, 2009
Liberals: Learning Nothing and Forgetting NothingA liberal acquaintance couldn't understand why conservatives are impatient with Obama. Didn't conservatives get enough of a chance with 30 years of Reagan and Bush, he asked?OK, it's true that conservatives did get some tax-rate cuts. And...
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July 4, 2009
US Patriotism vs. Liberal SolidarityJust as we conservatives get ready to celebrate our patriotism on the Fourth of July, a liberal from a prominent family has been accused of spying for Cuba. Write Mary Beth Sheridan and Del Quentin Wilber in The Washington Post about a retired ...
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June 27, 2009
Brits Melt Down over Naughty MPsIn these latter days parents no longer talk about children having tantrums. They talk about meltdowns, as in nuclear plants. In my day, of course, children didn't indulge in nuclear explosions. I still remember the shock of reading ...
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June 18, 2009
Witness to Liberals as They Really ArePeople are wondering what to do about the Sotomayor nomination. Should conservatives robustly oppose this Affirmative Action baby to the utmost? Or should conservative senators witness to her identity liberalism, asking her questions that...
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June 11, 2009
The Liberal Housing CrashThe American people are pretty well convinced that the mortgage meltdown was the fault of greedy bankers, stupid borrowers, and the odd Friend of Angelo Mozilo like Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT). That's hardly surprising, since the mainstream me...
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June 2, 2009
Don't Cry for MiltonWhere's the next Milton Friedman coming from? That's what Club for Growth founder Stephen Moore wants to know. With the ongong "assault against global capitalism" coming out of Washington,I become more nostalgic for one missing ...
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May 29, 2009
The Palin Seminar on Moderate WomenSarah Palin's speech to the folks at Vanderburgh County Right to Life last month didn't seem to get on the national political radar. But if you get a chance to review the YouTube video, it's worth it.Governor Palin (R-AK) may have been giving a...
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May 27, 2009
And They Said Bush Was CluelessThe President mentioned the Rule of Law in a speech last week. At the National Archives about his policies on terrorism, he said:From Europe to the Pacific, we've been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the...
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May 14, 2009
Liberalism: Cruel, Corrupt, Unjust, Wasteful, DeludedIn the battle for the soul of the Republican Party the usual suspects want to make the brand more bland. We should avoid dividing people with divisive social issues.But the Milquetoasts forget that democratic politics is a combination of Our Gl...
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May 10, 2009
Margaret Thatcher's Victory: Then and NowIf you like counting "firsts," here's one for you. It was just 30 years ago when the British first elected a grocer's daughter to be Prime Minister. Yes, for thousands of years the oppressive British political system had denied ...
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April 21, 2009
The Difference Between Them and UsAs I walked through the tea party-goers in Seattle's Westlake Park last on Wednesday, April 15, I couldn't help noticing the difference between the people there assembled and the people you see on TV.We are talking about the kind of people you see on...
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April 15, 2009
Listen Up You Party AnimalsEveryone is infuriated by the huge budget deficits and the gigantic bailouts. Whatever happened to freedom, we ask? Whatever happened to limited government? Let's have a Tea Party on tax day, today, April 15!Here in liberal Seattle,...
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March 24, 2009
The Instinct of the CluelessPresident Obama has got it all wrong. The problem with the economy is not greedy bankers trousering their multi-million dollar bonuses. So his plan to fix the banks and tighten up on financial regulation misses the point.The problem with ...
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March 19, 2009
Take Me To Your LeaderPresident Obama and his enforcers are right. Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the Republican Party. And now that Bill Buckley's gone, he's the leader of the conservative movement too.Technically, of course, you could say that the Republican...
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March 12, 2009
Obama and the Liberal Freeloader CultureMany conservatives experience President Obama's budget as a radical lurch to the left. Obviously, they conclude, President Obama is a radical lefty.Unfortunately it's worse than that. President Obama is not leading from the left of his pa...
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March 7, 2009
Who is the Smartest of Them All?You all remember the old German folk tale of Snow White and the Seven Conservatives. Every morning the liberal policy wonk gets up and looks at The New York Times online.Mirror, Mirror on the wall;Who is the smartest of them all?And The N...
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February 28, 2009
The Difference Between Change and ReformDid you notice that when Gov. Sarah Palin was campaigning for vice-president she talked about "reform?" Candidate Obama campaigned on a different theme, "Change We Can Believe In." In case you weren't paying attention,...
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February 22, 2009
Pity a Poor BankerOur noble solons recently lined up a bunch of bank CEOs and proceeded to lash themselves into a lather. All hands aft to witness punishment, as they say in naval fiction. I'm sorry, Mr. Congressman. I don't get it. I thought t...
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February 12, 2009
The Emerging Liberal OligarchyAnyone can make a mistake. But when a parade of Obama administration cabinet picks -- Richardson, Daschle, Killefer, and Lynn -- turn out to have ethics or tax problems, and are actual lobbyists or lobbyists by any other name, you start to wond...
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February 5, 2009
Obama's First FumbleLast week America blew a raspberry at the House "stimulus" bill. The Wall Street Journal edit page reckoned it out at about 12 percent stimulus. What about the other 88 percent? It was mostly the usual liberal special-interest s...
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January 28, 2009
Women Want SafetyThe biggest problem we remaining conservatives have to consider is the Woman Problem. We have to confront the fact that one of the reasons that we live in an age of Big Government is that ever since they first got the vote, women have used thei...
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January 11, 2009
Democracy and the 'Shock Doctrine'In her best-selling book The Shock Doctrine, lefty Naomi Klein complains that evil conservatives have figured out how to trick people all over the world into accepting conservative economic policy.All the recent outrages we've seen: outsourcing the w...
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December 31, 2008
A Conservative NarrativeAs the old year wanes, let us not dwell on its disappointments. Let us celebrate the New Year and hope for a swift recovery in the economy.Let us wish our liberal friends well, their new Congress and our new President Barack Obama. OK, go...
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December 27, 2008
The Conservative Elevator StorySometimes you have to admit it. There is nothing new under the sun. Chicago politicians are still as venal and corrupt as they always were, and it is thoughtful of Gov. Blagojevich (D-IL) to remind us. It is also salutary to read th...
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December 21, 2008
A Conservative Vision StatementFor the next few weeks our Democratic friends will be focusing on the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States. It's a good opportunity for conservatives to have an "off-site."You all know what that is. You take ...
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December 8, 2008
India, China, and the Disciplinary SocietyThe world is entering a serious recession. Most likely in the developed world the hardships will be anesthetized by unemployment and welfare benefits. But not in India and China.In our American notion, propagated by the elite media, Asian...
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November 25, 2008
The Sweating of BusinessBack in the 19th century, we are told, Americans worked in sweatshops for long hours at low pay. There were no benefits, no weekends, no vacations. Every worker suffered under the most rigid industrial discipline and knew he could be fire...
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November 24, 2008
Warmist 'hockey stick' smashed upThey smashed up the "hockey stick" at Climate Audit on Sunday. The "hockey stick" is a chart developed by Michael Mann et al. ten years ago that showed that global temperatures were pretty constant until about 100 years ago w...
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November 21, 2008
The Weight of GovernmentIn the chaos of defeat Republicans and conservatives feel most ashamed about the profligate spending. How was it that the conservative President Bush and the Republican Congress of 2001-2006 could have so increased the weight of government on t...
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November 5, 2008
Hope and Change in the Real WorldI'm not expecting Sen. Obama to deliver on hope and change, let alone on "transforming the world." You can't deliver on hope and change when you have a vast government apparatus eating up 35 percent of gross domestic product and your ...
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October 12, 2008
It's Common Sense: The Experts are to BlameIt's pretty obvious by now, at least to conservatives, that the current financial maelstrom is a product of liberal government programs. The best analysis so far has to be Dennis Sewell's "Clinton Democrats Are To Blame For The Credit Crun...
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October 2, 2008
Fannie/Freddie and the Stealth Welfare StateBack in the good old days the US used to spend big money on secret defense projects. And no wonder, for in 1960 defense and the military industrial complex ate up 10 percent of GDP. It was easy to find money for the odd U-2 spy plane or the gra...
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September 23, 2008
Is This The Turn?On Thursday the Dow Industrials staged a robust recovery, soaring 5.4 percent from an intraday low of 10459.77 on news that the Feds intended to create a new Resolution Trust Corporation. The new RTC, similar to the agency that cleaned up the a...
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September 9, 2008
The Mom and the OneWe know now that the Palin phenomenon is for real. We can tell because our lefty friends have come up with a new pejorative: "Caribou Barbie." It joins "neoconservative," invented in the 1960s to describe New York Jewi...
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September 3, 2008
The Day America Stopped Poncing AroundAfter a week of watching the Democrats ponce around in the Denver Temple of O, Republicans couldn't believe it when John McCain-who's done his share of poncing around over the years-delivered up Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK) as his running mate. ...
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August 26, 2008
Obama Lacks an Economic NarrativeThe good friends of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) at The New York Times Magazine have written a long thumb-sucker about Obama's proposed economic policy. What will "Obamanomics" look like, they wonder?"In some fundamental ways, the Am...
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August 21, 2008
Another Cohort of Kids Failed by Government SchoolsPublic schooling in too much of America has run down to mediocrity and worse. It's almost inevitable, and worse in some places than others.At a Greenwich, Conn. elementary school recently the principal was suspended for a little juggle-ology with the...
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August 12, 2008
Another Bipartisan BetrayalIn the week that the last of the climate-change "hockey stick" finally disappeared into Steve McIntyre's wood-chipper, it makes complete sense that a gang of five Republican United States Senators would form a cabal with five Democratic sen...
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August 9, 2008
The Politics of the Social Safety NetI participated recently in a voter roundtable on Social Safety Nets at KPLU, a local Puget Sound NPR affiliate. Reporter Paula Wissel played us some audio clips from presidential speeches on Social Security, Medicare, and welfare, and then we g...
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July 30, 2008
'Obama Doesn't Really Think This Way'This last week conservatives spent a lot of time in the vomitorium. Everything that Candidate Barack Obama has done has seemed like a n an invitation to upchuck.We are talking about the kumbaya speech at the Siegessäule in Berlin, the culm...
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July 18, 2008
Beyond The Blame GameIn politics the game always goes to the politician who can stick the blame on the other guy. Sometimes, like New York Senator Charles Schumer, you can even nudge a bank into receivership. Loose lips sink ships, Senator!When things go wron...
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July 12, 2008
New Hope for Global Warming DeniersWhy would anyone be a global warming denier? What's the point? You earn the scorn of Al Gore and maybe Dr. James Hansen, NASA's pre-eminent climate scientist will call for you to be put in jail. Of fossil fuel company CEOs, Hansen r...
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July 3, 2008
The Coming Hard ChoicesWe talk a lot about "choices" in the United States, but what do we mean? Usually, we are talking about "rights," as the the right to an abortion, or the right to choose a school for your child.But real choice is about making...
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June 30, 2008
Those Mean-Spirited LiberalsEvery now and again our learned scholars in the liberal university come up with a study, financed by taxpayers' money, that concludes what every liberal already knows. Conservatives are rigid and not very intelligent. In fact, as one stud...
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June 19, 2008
War and Its Moral EquivalentLast week, in a decision that everyone except conservatives agreed was a defeat for the Bush administration, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the inmates of Guantanamo Bay could sue in federal courts to challenge their imprisonment. F...
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June 16, 2008
The Big OLike Peggy Lee in "Is That All There Is," conservatives keep wondering if they are missing something about the Democratic presumptive presidential nominee, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL). Meanwhile, we hum to ourselves, in a rich contralto,...
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June 8, 2008
Are Conservatives Dead or Resting?The first boss I ever had, in 1968, was a Nixon-hater. A Democrat from upstate New York, he kept a coffee mug emblazoned with a Nixon $3 bill, and he could recite the litany of Nixon's red-baiting campaigns. First there was Jerry Voorhe...
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May 26, 2008
Remember the FallenUnlike our British cousins we Americans honor the veterans of our armed forces twice a year. On Veterans Day we honor the service of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and coast guard. But on Memorial Day we honor the Fallen. In...
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May 25, 2008
US Can't Pass English 101Most Americans can't write a decent college paper. It's not exactly news. Half a century ago Bernard Malamud, smart Jewish kid from Brooklyn, taught English at Oregon State University. He found the experience so grueling that he wro...
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May 7, 2008
At the Turn of The CycleIn climate, as in politics, ther are natural cycles. We may be seeing some new ones starting these days in both spheres. For those of you worried about the start of solar Cycle 24, good news. A small sunspot recently appeared in the sun's south...
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April 29, 2008
America, You Have Been HadLiberals are right about the "Right-wing Noise Machine." It really is a wonder to behold, and last week it was performing like a well-tuned NASCAR race car. They say that liberals are all prepared for the inevitable "swift-...
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April 23, 2008
The Pope's Challenge to ConservativesThe mainstream media seem to think that the pope's visit to the United States was all about the delicious priestly sex-abuse scandal and liberal agenda issues like abortion and women priests.Even some conservatives wonder about Benedict XVI. La...
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April 15, 2008
A Century of TaxesI was talking with a liberal friend recently over some convivial post-theater refreshment and the question of privacy came up.What do you mean, I asked? What privacy? I just sent in my Federal Income Tax return for 2007 and I reckon that ...
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April 8, 2008
Looking 'Round the CornerWhat do you think? Is the mortgage meltdown over? Predicting the future is like trying to look round the corner. If only you could take a quick look without getting your head blown off. If only.Let's take a look at the faces o...
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April 1, 2008
Doing Something About the Financial MessThe Bush administration launched another plan Monday to Do Something about the mortgage mess. In a major speech Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson proposed a Blueprint for a Modernized Financial Regulatory Structure.This is Part Three of the Bush ...
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March 25, 2008
Anger, Forgiveness, and ObamaFor months and months the suspense has been palpable. Here was Barack Obama, the first African American candidate for President of the United States with a chance to win, promising to heal an angry and fractured nation with nothing less than Ho...
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March 14, 2008
Everyone Makes MistakesNow we know what Change-You-Can-Believe-In means. It's a code-word for the loose change that Tony Resko dealt out to the young Barack Obama when the young state senator was looking for a house in a ritzy part of Chicago. That sort of chang...
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February 27, 2008
The Home Equity PartnershipLet us suppose that the mortgage meltdown has about finished melting and that some sort of recovery will shortly begin. The Federal Reserve Board has aggressively reduced interest rates from the 5.25 to 3.0 percent. And the seized-u...
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February 20, 2008
Reviewing Obama's Blueprint for ChangeLast week several conservative columnists, with one voice, declared presidential candidate Barack Obama an empty suit. At least, they reckoned that his speechifying demonstrated an astonishing lack of content. Charles Krauthammer complaine...
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February 12, 2008
A Budget ValentineOK, conservatives, now that the race for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party is all over bar shouting, as my grandfather used to say, let's get back to more serious topics.Let's talk about the federal budget.What's that? You hav...
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January 29, 2008
The Liberals' Mommy FascismAt the end of the Bush administration conservatives need to clear their heads and think about the future. It's time to do some serious political philosophy. Jonah Goldberg believes that the way to start is to understand how ubiquitous fascist i...
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January 24, 2008
So's Your Old ManConservatives have long understood that socialism and fascism are two sides of the same coin. They are both reactionary movements attempting to roll back the modern era to a simpler, less corrupt age driven by something higher than money, money...
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January 17, 2008
Does Big Government Help Women?When the first woman to be a major party candidate for president wins her first presidential primary by playing the gender card it tells you something. The Romantics were right and the rationalists were wrong. Life really is all about fee...
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January 11, 2008
Liberal Fascism Over the RainbowA poem inspired by Jonah Goldberg's important new book, Liberal Fascism.Somewhere over the rainbowWay up highThere's a land that I heard ofOnce in a lullaby Somewhere over the rainbowStates aren't blueAnd the dreams that you dare to dream Really do c...
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December 31, 2007
Man of the Year: President BushThink about this for a moment. Who is the one individual who has made the biggest difference in the world in the last year?That's the main criterion that Time magazine uses when selecting its "Person" every year. To quote, Time ...
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December 19, 2007
After Clinton/Obama, Woman-friendly ConservatismWhich of the two Democratic frontrunners would Republicans prefer to run against? That was what Hugh Hewitt asked his listeners last week as the Democratic race began to tighten.But he was asking the wrong question. The right question is:...
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December 11, 2007
The Wages of AppeasementFor conservatives the story of the recent National Intelligence Estimate is unbelievable. What would possess the analysts in the federal intelligence bureaucracy to issue a finding that Iran has abandoned its military nuclear weapons program?...
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December 4, 2007
Things You Are Not Allowed to SayThe good thing about living in the modern era is that we have freedom of speech and dissent is celebrated as the highest form of patriotism.So when a Nobel laureate like James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, opines that maybe the reason that Africa is ...
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November 23, 2007
Liberals Aren't All AlikeConservatives tend to talk about liberals as if they were all the same. This is wrong. Liberals are not all alike. They are all alike in some respects. They all believe in universal health care, a polite way of suggesting that other...
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November 15, 2007
Let's Steal Some Ideas from the LeftI hold the following truth to be self evident. When solving some intractable political problem, chances are that someone has already solved it. The main thing is to keep your eyes open because sooner than you think, you will run into the ...
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November 6, 2007
Sacrifice and S-CHIPIn the month that has elapsed since President Bush vetoed the extension of S-CHIP into the middle class, we have all had a chance to think about the deep philosophical issues involved. Now the Democrats want to bring the issue up for another confront...
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October 31, 2007
The End of Socialized Medicine?Michael Moore's SiCKO is opening in Britain this week, but the British are not amused. Anyone can extol the virtues of universal government-furnished health care, they say, when they have never had to use it. Writes Minette Marrin in the ...
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October 24, 2007
Should Conservatives Show That 'We Care?'Last week President Bush successfully stopped the expansion of S-CHIP into the liberal slacker classes. So the creative children of well-to-do parents who would rather buy fancy cars than pay for health insurance will have to pause for a moment. For ...
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October 16, 2007
Fear is the Missing Ingredient in Government SchoolsEveryone is properly shocked and outraged at the latest school shooting rampage. They are rounding up the usual suspects and demanding that something should be done. But why be surprised? When we hesitate to exclude "special...
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October 10, 2007
Let's TalkLong term victory for conservative ideas means changing the culture. The Democrats will get back into power sooner or later. We want an America in which Democrats no longer want to create huge once-size-fits-all government programs that create widesp...
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October 2, 2007
Clintons, Baby Bonds, and DropoutsNever say that Hillary Clinton doesn't listen. Back in April 2001, just before the election, the British New Labour government under Tony Blair proposed a "baby bond" of up to $1,600 for every mother's son or daughter. It seemed...
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September 19, 2007
That Bush 'Strategery'It's a long time since we all joked about President Bush's "strategery." Things have gotten a lot more serious since those days in the early 2000s.But after a week in which Gen. Petraeus' report to Congress rocked the Democrats back o...
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September 13, 2007
Women are Fickle, You Say?Listen to the ladies in Iowa.Stephen Spruiell did, and what he heard isn't good news for Republicans. Stephanie Frederick, who's "always been a Rush Limbaugh listener," says of Sen. Barack Obama: "A lot of what he had to say real...
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September 4, 2007
Labor and LeisureThey are having a problem in the old manufacturing city of Milwaukee these days, writes Patrick McIlheran of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "Once studded with factories, it's now lined with old, empty buildings along rail lines."Don't worr...
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August 28, 2007
Failing SchoolsFor six generations, writes the military historian Victor Davis Hanson, the government has been educating his family in his hometown in California. But things are not going well on the hometown education front any more. "[A]fter a haircut,...
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August 21, 2007
After Rove There's Work to Be DoneThe people who run political campaigns are a special breed. It is a measure of their importance that they become political lightning rods. The Clinton-haters of the 1990s wouldn't have pursued PresidentClinton so much if he hadn't be...
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August 12, 2007
The World of 'They're Just Kids'Our liberal friends divide humanity into groups with different levels of moral responsibility for their actions, infantilizing some to one degree or another. Last week a liberal mother called into the Hugh Hewitt show and guest host Dean Barnett...
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July 31, 2007
The Real Long WarA faction within America always denigrates our country, seeing our enemies through rose colored lenses and finding only oppression at home. The Long War we face with Radical Islam is matched by the long war against this bloc.Color me cynical, but I t...
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July 25, 2007
The Rising Tide of Education SubsidyA rising tide lifts all boats. That's what President Kennedy said in a happier time when he lowered tax rates. But what about the rising tide of education subsidies? Last week the House of Representatives passed the College Cost Reduction...
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July 17, 2007
The Fairness Doctrine Engine StarterCould we all hit Pause on the outrage remote just a moment? I know it is the most delicious fun to roll tape on our conservative outrage when Democrats propose to think about a proposal to study an investigation to reinstate the FCC Fairness Do...
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July 12, 2007
Earth to Michael Moore: Government is ForceThe important thing to know about left-wing agitator Michael Moore is that he just doesn't get it.Recently, John Stossel interviewed Michael Moore on the ABC program 20/20, and found that Moore has curious ideas on government and force."'But gov...
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July 2, 2007
Victory in the Senate. Now Fix the Broken SocietyIt was comforting last week to cold-cock the comprehensive immigration bill. It was exhilarating to watch the young guns sticking it to the pompous old bulls in the very stockyard of bovine pomposity, the United States Senate.As Stephen Dinan wrote i...
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June 28, 2007
Conservative NextGenTo understand the basic problem of the conservative movement you have only to read the Washington Times piece by Ralph Z. Hollow on the recent "third force" conservative summit summoned by conservative activist Paul M .Weyrich."'We wan...
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June 20, 2007
How to Accomplish Education ReformEveryone is talking about education reform when they're not talking about immigration. Jonah Goldberg wonders why we bother to have public education, given how screwed up it is.Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) wants to fix the "fatal flaws in our e...
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June 14, 2007
Should Have Known?The average American may wonder, after the failure of the immigration bill in the United States Senate last week, how such a gigantic blunder is possible. We look at our own lives, at our jobs, our families, and say: How is it possible to get a...
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June 5, 2007
Who's Alone, Senator Clinton?Conservatives have responded with outrage at Hillary Clinton's denunciation of American society (under Republicans) as one where you are "on-your-own" in a speech last week.And well they might, for she tells a narrative about an Americ...
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May 29, 2007
Immigration: Mend It Not Rend ItThe immigration bill currently before the United States Senate is the usual farrago of band-aids and special interest goodies, trying to patch up the failure of 1986. It is, writes Peggy Noonan in unusually strong language, "a big dir...
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May 21, 2007
The Legacy of Jerry FalwellIf the United States is a divided nation then it was probably Jerry Falwell who divided it.Before the rise of Jerry Falwell, Governor Ronald Reagan signed a law legalizing abortion for the state of California and nobody thought anything about it....
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May 17, 2007
After Blair: Tories Mumble about Welfare State ReformOn the day after British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced his retirement, they retired the "new" in "New Labour." The British Labour Party removed the logo "New Labour, New Britain" from its web site and substituted j...
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May 8, 2007
Seizing the Moral High Ground for ReformLast week Mitt Romney cracked jokes with Jay Leno and mildly corrected Chris Matthews about the propriety of a Mormon advising Catholic bishops on church doctrine. But he got his Three Strongs message in:Strengthen America's military; strengthe...
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May 3, 2007
Scarred for LifeAlec Baldwin's 11-year-old daughter may be scarred for life by his much publicized telephone rage, many commentators agree. At least he has apologized. But perhaps Baldwin is the one who will be scarred for life-from his divorce from actress Ki...
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April 26, 2007
Democrats and the Politics of FearEver since the 1960s the Democrats have won about ninety percent of the black vote in presidential elections. Sometimes it's less, when John Kerry got 88 percent of the black vote in 2004. Sometimes it's right on the button, when Al...
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April 24, 2007
The Adolescent SocietySome people think that we have extended adolescence way too far into adulthood.In rural society there is no such thing as adolescence. One day you are a child. The next day they conduct a coming-of-age ceremony and you are a man or a woma...
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April 10, 2007
The Supreme Court Turns the RatchetConservatives are properly aghast at the United States Supreme Court's April 2, 2007 decision. It ruled that the United States Environmental Protection Agency can, if it wants, regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, whatever the law may say.Bu...
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April 4, 2007
Pity A Poor DemocratDon't think it's easy being a Democratic officeholder. Here she is, after solemnly assuring the voters that she'll support our troops as patriotically as any Republican, now recklessly using the lives of our fighting men and women as poker chip...
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March 27, 2007
Young Democrats Just Don't Get ItOur young liberal friends seem to divide into two camps. There is the camp of enlightened progressives like Jacob Aronson that is dedicated to "Conserving and Consolidating the Progressive Liberal Tradition" and reforming govern...
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March 18, 2007
The Sub-Prime Blame GameThank goodness the Plame Game is over and Scooter Libby safely convicted for-what exactly was it? Now we can concentrate on the next Big Thing: the meltdown in the sub-prime mortgage market. As a broker acquaintance commented: "Anyone coul...
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March 7, 2007
Democrats Say We're too Patriotic!Among the numerous issues on which Democrats are hypersensitive to criticism -- or as you and I might say, critique -- is patriotism. Do not dare question a Democrat's patriotism, at least not like Vice-President Cheney:"I think if w...
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February 28, 2007
The Fight Against SprawlEveryone "knows" our American cities are blighted by "sprawl." In the old days, cities were built with a certain regard for aesthetic qualities and the human scale-as anyone knows who has visited the cities of Europe.In the ...
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February 14, 2007
Manufacturing FailureIt was twenty years ago that we learned of "A Nation at Risk." The problems in our education system were imperiling our national future, wrote the National Commission on Excellence in Education.Since then nothing much has happened....
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February 6, 2007
Renewing the Conservative NarrativeWhat a difference there is between a Republican defeat and a Democratic defeat. After 1994 and 2000 and 2004 the Democrats were apoplectic. They're coming for the children, they roared after 1994. We wuz robbed, they spat after 2000....
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February 1, 2007
Public Education and the Liberal Way of ConflictOur public schools, liberals teach us, are a foundation of democracy. Without a socialization in which every child partakes of the democratic culture of the public schools we would divide into warring classes and subcultures. That is the liberal line...
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January 26, 2007
Reality TV Conducts a Seminar on RacismIn this age of situational ethics and values clarification how do you know when you cross the line?(I am assuming that you are a member of a traditionally marginalized "community." For conservatives, of course the answer is: "Don...
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January 9, 2007
The 100 Hours of Democratic SuperstitionHow do you spell superstition? The professional atheists have been busy spelling it out lately, especially Richard Dawkins with The God Delusion and Sam Harris with The End of Faith. There is almost certainly no God, according to Dawkins.The at...
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January 5, 2007
The Heedless People Who Didn't Care About Michael OherHeedlessness has a history in the United States, one that has seen it migrate across social lines. Back in the 1920s rich writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald used to write novels about the heedless rich. They went on their heedless way, ...
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December 28, 2006
Yet Another Report on the Education CrisisIt is nearly a quarter century now since the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued its somber warning about the nation's education system: "A Nation at Risk."Luckily it was at that moment in 1983 that the US economy struggle...
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December 19, 2006
God Rest Ye Merry BureaucratsHow does the old carol go? Something like this?God rest ye merry, bureaucrats,At this time of good cheer we ought not to forget bureaucrats. This is the age of the bureaucrat, after all. We build vast temple complexes to honor bureaucracy...
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December 5, 2006
What Did Senator-elect Jim Webb Mean?What exactly did United States Senator-elect Jim Webb mean when he wrote in The Wall Street Journal that "the most important--and unfortunately the least debated--issue in politics today is our society's steady drift toward a class-based syst...
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November 28, 2006
It's Not the Spending, StupidAccording to the exit polls at the November election the American people think that the Democrats are more likely than Republicans to limit government spending. Can this really be true?In reality, we should be encouraged. The opinion poll...
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November 15, 2006
It Ain't Gonna Be "Neat and Tidy"The problem with government education, according to James Tooley in Reclaiming Education, is its addiction to "neat—and—tidy" solutions. The government experts and bureaucrats, not to mention the voters, all want things neatly tied down w...
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October 29, 2006
Euro-Humanity Upon the WanePeople have needs. When your liberal friend tells you that, he imagines that he's justified the whole panoply of liberal social programs. Stop being selfish and pay up. But after a century of paying up, you get something like modern Europ...
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October 16, 2006
The Synergy of Harry ReidThe people of Nevada have a problem. About 90 percent of the land in the state is owned by the federal government. This makes it difficult for them to develop land for homes, schools, offices, and strip malls, the infrastructure they need...
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October 9, 2006
The Foley Flap and the Honor WarsIn the aftermath of the Foley resignation, conservatives have spent a lot of energy complaining about the very different outcome of the Eighties sex scandals. Representative Barney Frank skated after disclosure that his sexual partner had run a...
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September 19, 2006
The Pope Battles DhimmitudeWe have all enjoyed tut—tutting about the Muslim cultural practice of dhimmitude, the notion that under Islam the infidel is a second—class citizen and must defer to the faithful at all times. No eating and drinking in front of the f...
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September 12, 2006
Return Engagement: Clinton Spin Away from Party RootsThe flap over ABC's mini—series The Path to 9/11 is a beautiful thing to behold. It reminds us of the glory years of the Clinton Spin Ballet, Balanchine—like in its exquisite choreography. The principals, Clinton and Clin...
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September 5, 2006
The Travails of Labor and EducationOver two hundred years ago, in The Wealth of Nations (now available on Google Book Search), Adam Smith applauded the general increase in prosperity in eighteenth century England. Its day—laborers and their wives could all afford to wear l...
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August 29, 2006
It's Not the Dependency Ratio, StupidBack in the late 1940s, The New Yorker wants us to know, Richard Gosser, president of a United Auto Workers local in Toledo, Ohio, wanted to set up a union pension plan for the workers. Ten cents an hour was all it would cost to give the workers a de...
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August 22, 2006
Which Gas-guzzling Dinosaurs?A lot of car guys don't appreciate New York Times foreign policy columnist Thomas Friedman setting up as an expert on the auto industry. He allowed as how he thought Toyota should take over the bankrupt General Motors. It would be in...
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August 15, 2006
Storm Signals Mean Political ChangeThe good thing about 8/10 is that it was an inconvenience. When the terror plot was foiled in London on August 10, 2006 many flights were canceled. Tens of thousands stood in line to submit to new security procedures. People missed ...
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August 8, 2006
Smell That Whiff of Panic?Smell the whiff of panic? Iraq has/may/will soon collapse into civil war! Israel may not be able to fully dismantle Hezbollah! Like Falstaff before battle we whine to Prince Hal that we "would 'twere bed—time, Hal, and all wel...
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July 31, 2006
Seattle's Culture of Victimology and the Shooting of JewsHow could it happen? In Seattle, of all places, a city of moderation and diversity? On Friday, July 28, a man barged into the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle. It is alleged that, armed with two handguns, Naveed A...
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July 24, 2006
Wal-Mart Wins a Battle, but the War ContinuesOn July 19 a federal court judge struck down Maryland's "Wal—Mart Law." That's the law cooked up by the nation's labor unions to force Wal—Mart to pay 8 percent of payroll into employee health benefits or be taxed for the difference...
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July 17, 2006
It's a War, StupidThe cycle of violence folks are out again. They are worried about the escalation of violence in the Middle East, that is to say, the current skirmish in the ongoing war between the people of Israel and the Iran—backed forces like Hisbolla...
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July 10, 2006
Who's Dysfunctional?How would you define a dysfunctional family? Probably, like Wikipedia, you would say "a family in which conflict, misbehaviour and even abuse on the part of individual members of the family occur continually, leading other members to acco...
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July 3, 2006
Liberals and Babies and Trust CuesNicholas Wade's new book Before the Dawn offers a fascinating review of recent science in human prehistory. Genetic analysis of human remains can now tell us a lot about how humans spread across the world, starting about 50,000 years ago....
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June 27, 2006
Speak Progressive, But Win Conservative ReformsWhether we like it or not, "we live in a progressive world," writes Jonah Goldberg in National Review. He means that when conservatives go into the public square they must use the language of progressivism. In debates on public policy, "The g...
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June 19, 2006
The Democrats' Drive-by Politics for 2006What a surprise. The Democrats' New Direction for America pdf, their blueprint for capturing control of Congress this Fall, turns out not to be the call to arms, the Democratic Contract with America we were promised, but a bland reass...
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June 12, 2006
Is It Bush We Are Testing to Destruction?The good thing about the reelection of President Bush in 2004, according to Matthew Parris this week in the London Times, is that it gave a chance for the neoconservative project to be tested to destruction. He refers back to a May2004 piece in...
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June 5, 2006
A Case of the Economic ShiversThe financial markets gave a convulsive shiver a month ago when the Fed raised its Fed Funds rate to 5 percent and allowed as how it might well pause in its monthly quarter—point increase action. 'Oh no you don't!' came the unmistakable r...
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May 15, 2006
"You Must Suggest an Alternative"It's one thing to complain about the problems of the welfare state. But what are you going to do about it? That is what author and journalist James Bartholomew confronted on May 10 when he presented a copy of his book The Welfare St...
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May 8, 2006
But Does Freud Matter to Conservatives?To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sigmund Freud, the Wall Street Journal on Friday hauled out Harold Bloom to explain to us all "Why Freud Matters." Bloom told us that Freud was not so much a scientist but a "moral essayist" like Mon...
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May 1, 2006
Gaseous Hypocrisy and Political ShameThere's a difference between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. The Democrats are completely shameless, but the Republicans are only mostly shameless. So the pandering to angry American gas guzzlers over the past week committed by s...
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April 24, 2006
Three Dollar Gasoline: an Opportunity, Not a Crisis,Some observers think that President Bush's dismal job approval rating is not about the mess in Iraq. It is not about the shocking corruption of the Republican Congress. It is not even about President Bush's failure to prevent Hurricane Ka...
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April 4, 2006
Eco-Sacrifice is Closer Than You ThinkWe westerners have been properly horrified in recent weeks as the Afghan courts have prosecuted the Christian convert Abdul Rahman and imams of the religion of peace have called for the apostate's death. "Philistine hypocrisy," writes Spengler in Asi...
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March 27, 2006
Competence vs. ManlinessSo now the Democrats' theme is "dangerous incompetence." This is the soaring vision they offer the American people, as the nation records the 53rd month of growth since the end of the last recession in November 2001; as the S&P 500 is up 60...
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March 20, 2006
This Spring Do It for the ChildrenIt is the first week of spring, the season of rebirth. But in Europe people can't be bothered. The average number of children per woman in Spain is 1.15, in Germany 1.15, and in the United Kingdom 1.60, according to the Economist Pocket W...
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March 14, 2006
With Us or Against UsSo, the Dubai port deal is off. The firestorm is over. What began, according to Newsday, at the moment Chuck Schumer fielded a call from an Associated Press reporter asking New York's senior senator to comment on an obscure plan to...
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March 6, 2006
Stop the 22nd Amendment ChatterWe are at that stage in the political cycle when the supporters of the president, like Pejman Yousefzadeh, or even critics—with—a—book—out like Bruce Bartlett, start mourning that the 22nd Amendment—the one that lim...
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February 27, 2006
The Wal-Mart ShakedownLook at Wal—Mart. It has revolutionized retailing with relentless cost reduction and process improvement. It helps keep the United States at No. 1 in wealth and productivity. When it opens a store in ordinary America, about 4,...
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February 24, 2006
Cultural Colonialism and the LeftIt's all very well for Europeans to reduce the Cartoon Wars to a matter of the freedom of speech, writes Martin Jacques in Britain's lefty Guardian. But what about respect? 'Respect for others, especially in an increasingly interdepende...
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February 14, 2006
Torino: Europe's Last Hurrah?On Friday night in Torino Luciano Pavarotti, close to the last gasp of his career, sang the last gasp of grand opera, Puccini's glorious Nessun Dorma. You have to wonder: Will this Winter Olympics prove to be the last gasp of Europe, the big bl...
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February 6, 2006
Who Was Betty Friedan?The 1963 bestseller The Feminine Mystique is credited with starting the Second Wave of feminism that transformed the relations between men and women in the second half of the twentieth century. On Saturday February 4, her 85th birthday, its auth...
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January 31, 2006
Thank You, Mr. PresidentAs you deliver your State of the Union speech tonight, Mr. President, and enter the sixth year of your presidency there is something I want to say. It is 'Thank you, Mr. President.' You have achieved three important things in the last five years, Mr....
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January 26, 2006
Minimum Wage Hits $9.50 in Santa FeThis month, in the liberal bastion of Santa Fe, New Mexico, they are raising the minimum wage in the city to $9.50 per hour. The measure applies to all businesses with 25 or more employees. The driving force behind this decision was Acorn, the '...
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January 10, 2006
Supreme Court Hearings: Law vs. RightsHere we go again, as the Senate conducts hearings upon the nomination of Samuel A. Alito for a seat on the United States Supreme Court. Four months ago John Roberts testified to the United States Senate Judiciary Committee about his understanding of ...
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January 4, 2006
Americans and LiteracyThe federal government just released its decennial literacy survey, 'A First Look at the Literacy of America's Adults in the 21st Century,' and the results are not good. About 13 percent of adult Americans are 'below basic' in literacy and...
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December 29, 2005
Liberals and privacyWe all know what the NSA surveillance case is about. It is about liberals living in a bubble. Liberals think that the issue is government spying and the Bush administration's overall hostility towards civil liberties, but they are wrong. ...
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December 12, 2005
David Cameron Breathes Life into Britain's ConservativesOn Tuesday December 6, David Cameron was elected leader of the British Conservative Party. He's the fourth leader since 1997 when John Major was defeated by Tony Blair and his New Labour Party. Can he breathe life into the party, unlike h...
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December 5, 2005
Wal-Mart: America's Economic Secret WeaponSo now we know. About 56 percent of Americans supposedly 'believe that Wal—Mart is bad for America,' according to a Zogby poll conducted on behalf of wakeupwalmart.com, an activist group that is 'working to change Wal—Mart.' ...
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November 29, 2005
The Year of the LooterWhat a year! First of all we got to see New Orleans looters calmly pushing shopping carts full of plasma TVs and expensive athletic shoes down the flooded streets of the Big Easy. Then we saw the rioters of the Paris banlieus calmly torch...
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November 14, 2005
After Schwarzenegger: try incremental reformGovernor Schwarzenegger learned an important lesson last week when his four voter initiatives to reform California state government went down to defeat. If you try to take out the government employees in a massive World War I style offensive you won...
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November 7, 2005
Will rioters burn the French social model?Last week Paris was burning. Now it is the little town of Evreux where 50 cars were torched on Saturday night by Muslim teenagers. No problem? Evreux is 25 miles from Giverny, the home of Monet's garden and its famous Japanese bridge....
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November 1, 2005
President Bush and the Mandate of HeavenLast Friday, after a week in which the combat deaths in Iraq reached 2,000, the Harriet Miers nomination collapsed, and Vice—President Cheney's chief of staff was indicted, could anyone have doubted that the Bush administration lost the Mandate...
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October 24, 2005
Democrats and 'The Politics of Polarization'To Democrats, the decline of the Democratic Party over the past generation must seem inconceivable. How could the 'amiable dunce' Ronald Reagan have won the presidency? How could the bombastic Newt Gingrich have brought forty years of Dem...
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October 12, 2005
Change the legal cultureThe flap over the nomination of Harriet Miers to be an Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court raises an important question. What is the best way to change the jurisprudence of the Court away from its culture of legislating from the benc...
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October 3, 2005
Big Ed fights backIt's back—to—school time so it must be time to view with alarm the shocking state of our nation's colleges. The established higher education industry, Big Ed, is also alarmed — by the rise of for—profit competitiors. The left ...
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September 26, 2005
I Gotta Right to My IllusionsA fellow at work recently told how his relative was planning to sue her former employer, a well—known national retailer. Suffering from a particular affliction, she frequently absented herself from work up to, and sometimes over, the limi...
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September 20, 2005
The power of liberal taboosThe president's mother, Barbara Bush, got into trouble recently for saying on NPR that the underprivileged African American refugees from hurricane Katrina were doing fine in Texas. 'What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary,' she said on NPR, '...
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September 12, 2005
Disaster: When you want solutionsThere is no doubt that the Bush administration made a big blunder in its planning for hurricane Katrina. It had planned for hurricane relief in which FEMA assisted the state and local governments in getting help where it was most needed, based ...
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August 29, 2005
What is education for?Here we are at back—to—school time, and all across the nation colleges are prodding our children into freshman orientation. Today, of course, that means catechizing the young into the religion of 'anti—racism.' And instead of ...
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August 22, 2005
It's Official: Leftist-Islamist Alliance against the WestSo the hard left and the Islamists have established a coordinating committee, according to Douglas Davis of the London Spectator. In Britain the steering committee of the Marxist—Islamist alliance consists of 33 members — 18 f...
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August 15, 2005
The Trouble with UnionsThe American labor union movement has split again. Led by Andy Stern, the leader of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a rump of private sector unions has split off from the AFL—CIO, the convocation of all American unions....
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August 8, 2005
Prince William and the Two NationsAfter all the tragedy and heartache in London over 7/7, at least there is some good news. Now that Prince William has got his degree at St. Andrews University, he's moving back to London and will set up house with his constant companion Kate Mi...
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August 2, 2005
Liberal prof gets conservative over Supreme CourtThere was a time, and it wasn't so long ago, when liberals exuded confidence and panache. They proposed sweeping legislation and their pals on the U.S. Supreme Court confidently used the research results of social scientists to justify sweeping...
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July 25, 2005
Rules change in the U.K.Who can fail to be shocked by last week's story of London police pursuing a terror suspect into a subway train and shooting him dead? Eyewitness Mark Whitby was sitting in the train: 'I heard people shouting `get down, get down.' An Asia...
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July 5, 2005
The Supreme Court and Little Lord FauntleroyBack in the nineteenth century they used to write books about plucky young American lads—often working to support their widowed mothers—and how they showed up rich kids as liars and lowlifes. In Horatio Alger's Struggling Upward, yo...
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June 28, 2005
A tactical play on Social SecurityFor a moment last week it looked as though the Republicans were going to give away the store on Social Security reform. Britain's Guardian reported rumors that the Republicans in Congress were going to draft a bill 'stripped of President Bush's...
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June 20, 2005
Dick Durbin and our post-patriotic eliteHow wrong can you be?а No, we are not talking about the analogical genius, Senator Dick Durbin (D. al—Inois).а We are talking about the greatаMark Steyn, a genuine genius columnistаwho calls Dick Durbin unpatriotic.а Come now, Mr. Steyn.а Dick ...
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June 15, 2005
Fathers keep society safeFor the last couple of weeks, lefties in Britain have been leaping to the defense of the three teenaged sisters, aged 16, 14, and 12, who have each recently brought a little bundle of joy into the world. These brand—new single parent...
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June 6, 2005
Euro-Paradise LostIn the wake of the French 'Non!' and Dutch 'Nee!' to the EU constitution, every scribbler is beside himself. It's the end of the European project, the end of the Euro, and the end of the 'social model.' It's the end of Europe itself!...
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May 30, 2005
A very American heroEight years ago, on March 20,1997, American hero John R. Boyd was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery. He was 70. John Boyd was an Air Force fighter jock who learned physics and thermodynamics so he could translate his hunch about...
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May 23, 2005
Ruthless vs. RelentlessA couple of weeks ago the left—wing blogger Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos told us what the Angry Left is all about. We will be quick, ruthless, and diligent. We won't show mercy, because we haven't gotten any. We will play their game, and p...
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May 16, 2005
Bush's battlefield position trumps the DemocratsThe critics of the President in the mainstream media are shocked to discover that, after the first 100 days of his second administration, he is stuck in a "quagmire." They note his languishing popularity, the so—far losing fight over...
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May 2, 2005
A whiff of panicLast week in NRO the eminent theologian and political philosopher Michael Novak gently chided the emotional Andrew Sullivan for his over—the—top criticism of the Catholic Church. It is not true, he wrote, that the papacy of Joh...
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April 25, 2005
The Soros noise machineOver the April 16/17 weekend, according to The Hill, George Soros led his progressive billionaire friends in an important strategy meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona. The idea was to lay out the strategy for funding a progressive policy machine to ...
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April 18, 2005
The Pity of FeminismThere is something achingly sad about the life of Andrea Dworkin, 58, the feminist firebrand who died April 9 of undisclosed causes. Daughter to a 'committed socialist' Jewish postal worker, she went to progressive schools and lived as an activ...
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April 11, 2005
Unsolicited advice for the ChurchEver since the death of John Paul II, people have been generously offering to help plan the future of the Catholic Church. They recognize that the Church occupies a unique position in the world, and they want it to succeed. [Snort, cough, giggl...
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April 4, 2005
What conservative crack-up?With Terri Schiavo dead and Social Security reform in the balance, the pundits are suddenly (again) calling for a 'conservative crack—up.' Yet sales of The Purpose—driven Life have tripled in the last two weeks, according to the Wal...
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March 29, 2005
Stop whining, start thinkingDuring Easter Week, conservatives took a blow to the solar plexus. We thought that all we had to do was pass a law asking the federal courts to take a de novo look at the Terri Schiavo case, and presto, Terri would have another two years t...
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March 24, 2005
Beyond the judicial filibusterOn March 17, the Senate Judiciary Committee sent for consideration by the entire Senate the nomination of William G. Myers III to a seat on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Democrats have threatened to filibuster. Republicans have threat...
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March 15, 2005
Trust us, we care: The Democrats' postmodernist narrativeRemember the stolen gubernatorial election of November 2004 in Washington State? Seattle blogger Stephan Sharkansky got a look last week at some poll books in Democratic King County. At the Denny Terrace polling station (a public housing ...
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March 9, 2005
The race to unimportanceEverybody now knows that President Larry Summers of Harvard, leader of an institution devoted both to truth and phonics (VE—RI—TAS, it says on the Harvard crest), is in serious trouble for pursuing truth. It is a situation beyond pa...
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March 1, 2005
Social Security grand strategyIn the current campaign for Social Security reform, we should not lose sight of the forest for the trees. All the talk about trust funds, caps, IOUs, actuarial scoring, and bankruptcy is mere ritual, the rich symbolic pageantry of the nati...
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February 16, 2005
Ward Churchill is right. Partly.No sooner had Prof. Nancy Hopkins of MIT bounced up from her fainting couch, upon the prospect of yet another task force to investigate gender inequity in the darkly menacing groves of Larry Summers' Harvard, than conservatives started swooning over ...
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February 9, 2005
Conservatives and the creative impulseWhat a difference a year makes! A year ago Americans were digesting the rude, crude Super Bowl 'wardrobe malfunction' of Janet Jackson. This year, twenty—something guys are sniggering over the Go Daddy Girl's troublesome bra—s...
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January 31, 2005
Iraq's election: a teachable momentToday the Iraq election is over and Senator John Kerry is wisely advising that: No one in the United States should try to over—hype this election... This election is a sort of demarcation point, and what really counts now is the effort to...
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January 24, 2005
Boomers on Social Security?'All my life I have wanted a pension,' said the retired naval clerk John Dickens to his son Charles in a BBC biopic that ran years ago on PBS. And many Americans agree with him. You put in your 40 years, or 30 years—or even a mere 2...
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January 18, 2005
The Real Charlotte SimmonsTwenty years ago, writing The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe worried that his novel about Masters of the Universe bond traders and race hustling reverends in New York City would be received as too over—the—top. Instead, he was r...
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January 14, 2005
The global future of contract and trustIf a global society forms during the Twenty—first Century, will it necessarily be a contract society, built upon reciprocal trade and agreement, as many people think? Or could it be constructed upon other principles, for instance the left...
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January 3, 2005
Liberals, less is more!After spending Christmas Day in a liberal home I can report that this was not a happy holiday for liberals. There was at least one thing to celebrate, though: the courage of San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom in standing up to the bigots and allo...
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December 28, 2004
Know when to fold 'emThe Duke of Wellington once defined the best test of a leader. His idea might be helpful to an organization presently needing a bit of help from a wise old head: the Democratic Party. The best test of a general, he wrote, was 'to know when to r...