Monthly Archives: January 2016

Archive of posts published in the specified Month

Confusing Populists for Republicans

Republicans Have Overestimated the Conservatism of the Base– from David French in The National Review The GOP underestimated Trump in part because it overestimated the conservatism of its own southern, rural northern, and Midwestern base. It underestimated the extent to

Read More

The Risks of Political Expediency

from the Wall Street Journal,  Ending the Filibuster Would Hand Progressives a Huge Victory by Ben Sasse Here’s the problem. Progressives believe power—that is the government—is the center of life. We don’t. They place more faith in government than we

Read More

Bi Partisan Simpletons

from Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek  The Sorry State of American Politics: I often struggle to find the best excerpt from a post.  I give up here and post the entire content, as brief as it is. Here’s a letter

Read More

Sanders’ Math Illiteracy

Powerball Meme Mathematical Illiteracy Illustrates Bernie Sanders’ Appeal by Ed Krayewski at Reason Sanders previously experienced a bit of a surge in the polls over the summer but that didn’t get him past Clinton. Nevertheless, Clinton has been tacking leftward toward Sanders even before the

Read More

‘Collapse Ready’ Mortgages

from Kevin Williamson at National Review, From Sub-Prime to Sub-Prime: But Fannie Mae, the organized-crime syndicate masquerading as a quasi-governmental entity, has other ideas. Under its new and cynically misnamed “HomeReady” program, borrowers with subprime credit don’t need to show

Read More

Progressive Indemnification

from Victor Hanson at National Review, Proper liberal credentials trump all the usual forms of identity politics. It is hard to be a progressive in a sea of capitalist lucre, or an idealist when careerism pays so much better, or

Read More

Trump’s Dangerous Trade Policy

What Trump Doesn’t Understand — It’s a Lot — about Our Trade Deficit with China by Kevin Williamson at National Review Our trade deficit with China isn’t a product of the Chinese getting rich — it’s a product of their

Read More

Gun Sociology

From Brian Doherty at Reason,  You Know Less Than You Think About Guns This is an excellent analysis of the sociology of the gun problem in America, and should be read in its entirety. It is a bit long, but

Read More

The Limits of Political Power

from Kevin Williamson at National Review, People Aren’t Widgets Though they disagree, politicians in Beijing and Washington both think they know what the renminbi should be worth. Until Thursday, Chinese authorities thought they knew how much shares on the Chinese

Read More

A Depressing Array of Metrics

From Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe, The weakest economic recovery in modern times: The Great Recession formally ended in June 2009, just five months after Obama’s inauguration. Nevertheless, polls repeatedly find that large swaths of voters believe the US economy is still

Read More

Walmart, Apple and Progressives

from Mark Perry at Carpe Diem, Why do progressives hate Walmart for low prices and its 3% profit margin but love high-priced Apple and its 24% profit margin?

Read More

The Neocon Persuation

from Jonah Goldberg from National Review, The Term ‘Neocon’ Has Run Its Course At first, neocons weren’t particularly associated with foreign policy. They were intellectuals disillusioned by the folly of the Great Society. As Irving Kristol famously put it, a

Read More

Fountain Pen Revival

from The Spectator,  The return of the fountain pen But the fountain pen should not be regarded as a historical curiosity: global sales are actually increasing. Last Christmas Eve I encountered a scene of utter mayhem in the pen department

Read More

The True Gun Violence Problem

from Sultan Knish, America Doesn’t Have a Gun Problem… Gun violence is at its worst in the cities that Obama won in 2012. Places like New Orleans, Memphis, Birmingham, St. Louis, Kansas City and Philly. The Democrats are blaming Republicans

Read More

She’ll Take the Fifth

from Townhall, Loser GOP Candidates Need To Stop Making Asterisks of Themselves by Kurt Schlichter Rick Santorum, why are you even running? Here’s a thought: Dudes kissing is not a priority when we have a gargoyle poised to seize the

Read More

The Need for Sober Choices

from The Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens’ America’s Year of Living Dangerously The U.S. has lived through dangerous years before—1968 and 1980 come to mind. Hindsight is often the great redeemer, but both years ended with the American people making

Read More

A New Vessel for Their Views

From The Daily Beast, How the P.C. Police Propelled Donald Trump by Tom Nichols The great mistake made by both liberals and their most extreme wing on the American left is to assume that ordinary people, once corrected forcefully enough, will comply

Read More

Quotes of 2015

“What makes big government dangerous is not the augmentation of something wicked but the deformation of something fragile.” William Voegeli “Progressives often voice abstract anguish to win psychological absolution and political cover for their own moral lapses and hypocrisies: The

Read More

Prerogative Lawmaking

from Charles C.W. Cooke in The National Review, Our Presidents Are Beginning to Act Like Kings The Constitution of the United States, Hamburger contends, represented a conscious attempt to banish from this country’s political structure a host of the insidious tools

Read More

When Politics is Religion

From The Weekly Standard, What Explains the Vicious Left? by David Gelernter: excerpts: It’s not just a question of civility versus rudeness—which of course is no small thing in itself. The deeper problem is that the left seems to have

Read More