My husband and I touched down in Venice in late March, rented a Fiat 500, and drove through a rolling Italian countryside spotted with vineyards. Our destination was the medieval town of Verona. Verona has become something of a political flashpoint lately. It is the symbolic home of the Lega Nord, the now-leading conservative half...
The promoters of infanticide have a new weapon in their arsenal. “Storytelling” is the new “safe, legal, and rare” of the pro-abortion movement. See as Exhibit A the new HBO documentary, Abortion: Stories Women Tell, released a few weeks ago in select theaters. The film focuses on women in Missouri, a state where only one abortion...
Ann Coulter did not enjoy her stay in the land of Dudley Do-Right. “Since arriving in Canada,” she wrote on her website on March 24, “I’ve been accused of thought crimes, threatened with criminal prosecution for speeches I hadn’t yet given, and denounced on the floor of the Parliament (which was nice because that one...
Small-town America is dying, but not without help. According to Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas, it takes effort to leave your home, and small towns are doing a fantastic job of encouraging their best and brightest to do just that. Hollowing Out the Middle is the result of a seven-year study by Carr and Kefalas...
The scene opens with children at a playground, laughing and yelling as they swing and jump rope. The camera zooms in on a dark-haired little girl, seven or eight years old, running her finger through a dirty puddle. Suddenly, thunder tears through the sky, and a downpour sends the children screaming home. Later that night,...
When Alan Blinder first proposed the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS), commonly referred to as the Cash for Clunkers program, in a July 2008 New York Times op-ed, he foresaw benefits to the economy and the environment, and a “more equal income distribution.” The program has fallen rather short of its intended mark. Most of...
The recent decision by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) to ordain active homosexuals and adopt a more permissive attitude toward fornication has put many parish churches in the difficult position of choosing whether to remain in the ELCA. One such church is Prince of Peace Lutheran in Rockton, Illinois, a village of some...
In March, Steve Saltarelli, a junior Law, Letters, and Society major at the University of Chicago, wrote a satirical article for the student newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, entitled “Men in Power.” The subtitle read, “True equality means groups that advocate for men as well as women.” In the article, Saltarelli jokingly proposed founding an advocacy...
At 3:00 p.m. on February 14, I was sitting in the political-science graduate assistants’ office in DuSable Hall at Northern Illinois University. Ten of us were chatting, waiting for 3:30 classes. At 3:10, my friend’s cell phone rang. “Joe just called,” she said after hanging up, her face ashen and her eyes wide. “He says...
A nine-year-old boy in Phoenix earned a three-day suspension from the Abraham Lincoln Traditional School for committing a “hate crime,” reports the Arizona Republic. The boy reportedly used the phrase “brown people” while arguing with another student. He was then questioned by a detention-room officer—the mother of the offended “brown person”—who demanded to know “why...
A few nights ago, some friends and I were on our way to a small get-together. As we ambled up the sidewalk, Rachel, whom I had met at the university I used to attend, commented that the neighborhood was rather “sketchy.” I almost hugged her. “Sketchy!” I nearly shouted. “That’s a word I haven’t heard in...
My meeting with the college dean was a disillusioning experience. I had figured that it would take about ten minutes to fill out the required paperwork to transfer from this private college to a state university, but, when I emerged a half-hour later, I realized how naive I had been about higher education. I had...