Category: Social and Political Pieces

Frankie Schaeffer evidently doesn't like some of the things some of us have been saying about Obama and patriotism: Dad and I were amongst the founders of the Religious right. In the 1970s and 1980s, while Dad and I crisscrossed America denouncing our nation's sins instead of getting in trouble we became darlings of the …

Continue reading "Frankie Schaeffer: Are We Really That Unpatriotic?"

Alan Greenspan tells us the obvious: "The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War," Greenspan said in a Financial Times commentary.     "It will end eventually when home prices stabilise and with them the value of …

Continue reading "Now Alan Greenspan Tell Us What a Mess We’re In"

Planned Parenthood assures us that the following was a mistake: Planned Parenthood of Idaho officials apologized Wednesday for what they called an employee's "serious mistake" in encouraging a donation aimed at aborting black babies. But such "eugenics" were the original intent of Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood's founder.

The more I watch Barack Obama's campaign, the more I'm coming to realise that the basic problem that his opponents have is that he is beyond the normal "rules" of American politics. Let's start with the Jeremiah Wright business: people go back and forth on his video clips as to whether they're representative of his …

Continue reading "Barack Obama: Beyond American Political Grasp"

New York Governor Elliot Spitzer is linked to a prostitution ring: Just last week, federal prosecutors arrested four people in connection with an expensive prostitution operation. Administration officials would not say that this was the ring with which the governor had become involved. But a person with knowledge of the governor’s role said that the …

Continue reading "Just When The Democrats Thought It Was Safe…"

Johnathan Chait's piece in the New Republic is correct in showing how Hillary Clinton could win the Democrat nomination: Clinton's path to the nomination, then, involves the following steps: kneecap an eloquent, inspiring, reform-minded young leader who happens to be the first serious African American presidential candidate (meanwhile cementing her own reputation for Nixonian ruthlessness) …

Continue reading "Underestimating the Clintons is a Dangerous Game"

The action by a court in the People's Republic of California threatening the end of home schooling there can be fought.  Just take a cue from the French, as I noted last month: One of the Englishmen (whom I was having dinner with) noted that one reason the US is "behind" with cameras is that …

Continue reading "Californians for Home Schooling: Take a Cue From the French"

Since the cases involving same-sex civil marriage have finally reached the California Supreme Court, it may be helpful to repeat comments on this from an earlier post: Allowing the state to dictate the terms and conditions of that institution as blithely as American Christians do is a mistake.  We’ve already seen that many of those …

Continue reading "Same Sex Civil Marriage Reaches the California Supreme Court"

The percipitous drop in American housing prices is causing a lot of the consternation in the financial markets these days.  But it's not without precedent in the U.S., or at least in Texas, where many doutbtless remember their own housing prices "going south" in the wake of the oil bust in the early 1980's. The …

Continue reading "Housing Free-Fall: They Didn’t Care When It Wasn’t Them"

Having been alive and remembering when Lyndon Johnson "nuked" Barry Goldwater with the "daisies" ad, I have to admit that her "red phone ad" is pretty powerful. One big problem: she's pitching it to the party of Dzerzhinskii’s Dilemma where it will not resonate as it could elsewhere. Below is the "archetype" of Clinton's current …

Continue reading "Hillary Clinton’s Red Phone Ad: It Works, But…"