Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
It's conventional wisdom that we are a deeply divided nation these days. And the conventional wisdom, for once, is right: we are. Where things diverge is the explanation for same. Although day-to-day politics are one thing, the divides we experience these days run deeper that "go along to get along" or the horse-trading of patronage …
Continue reading "It's Hard to Explain the Desire for Freedom to People Who Have Never Had It"
A few days back I commented on Elizabeth Warren's claim that she's Native American. Since then we've had the piece at Breitbart which shows that a) her claimed Native American ancestor wasn't and b) another ancestor helped round up the Cherokees for their sad journey to Oklahoma. This has thrown her campaign into a tizzy. …
Continue reading "The Elizabeth Warren Saga Keeps Getting Stupider"
This business about Massachusetts senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren's Cherokee heritage is getting out of hand: Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, fending off questions about whether she used her Native American heritage to advance her career, said today she enrolled herself as a minority in law school directories for nearly a decade because she hoped to …
Nobody--yet--is thinking about this as things develop: In an article in the current National Journal called "The Post Al Qaida Era," I write that the Obama administration is taking a new view of Islamist radicalism. The president realizes he has no choice but to cultivate the Muslim Brotherhood and other relatively "moderate" Islamist groups emerging …
Continue reading "The Only Freedom That Matters is Sacrified to Foreign Policy Considerations"
Oh, yes he should have: Clashes between supporters of two prominent Shi'ite clerics in Iraq have spread from Nasiriya in the southern province of Dhi Kar to other parts of the country, as Baghdad struggles to calm tensions between them. The trouble began on February 17, when a recently-opened office of Shi'ite cleric Mahmoud al-Hasani …
Continue reading "Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani Should Have Quit While He Was Ahead"
It's been an active week at this blog, so it's time to catch up on the "mailbag" so to speak. Did the NAE Really Ruin the Church of God? It's been a long time since a piece I've written has gone so viral as this one. Based on the response I've been able to see, …
Continue reading "The Blowback: The NAE and the Church of God, the Baptists, and the Constitution"
That's what the President basically said in his grim speech to the newspaper editors: As he often does, the president chose to deal with gritty political issues -- what to do about the deficit, spending, taxes and entitlements such as Medicare -- by widening the lens. This election, he said, will be nothing less than …
Continue reading "Social Darwinism: The Republicans Can't Win on Evolution"
Our government wants to play both sides of the street in this issue, but is having a hard time doing so: Throughout the two-year history of the health care litigation, judges have mocked the Obama administration’s have-your-cake approach to the central question debated at the Supreme Court on Monday: whether the constitutional challenge is even …
Continue reading "The Tax Issue is the Central One for the Health Care Mandate"
Maureen Dowd expresses shock that there are Southern doves: “We are spending $10 billion a month that we can’t even pay for,” said Congressman Walter Jones, that rarest of birds, a Southern Republican dove. “The Chinese — Uncle Chang is lending us the money to pay that we are spending in Afghanistan.” On Tuesday morning, …
Continue reading "When You're Doing All of the Fighting, It Eventually Gets Old"
David French at NRO thinks so: During my years in the pews, I’ve witnessed a moral collapse — and a corresponding collapse in positive influence over the real lives not just of our fellow congregants but also of our fellow citizens in need. Of course it’s difficult to present a compelling witness when our own …
Continue reading "Is Evangelicals' Cultural Influence Collapsing?"
