To hear the Obamaites, those raucous crowds pouring into town hall meetings are “mobs” of “thugs” whose rage has been “manufactured” by K Street lobbyists and right-wing Republican operatives. Press secretary Robert Gibbs compares them to the Young Republicans of the “Brooks Brothers riot” during the Florida recount. But is it wise for the White...

Our friends at Takimag have posted an excellent column by John Derbyshire on the sins of Wikipedia. Derbyshire tried to correct his own entry, posted by someone obviously out to get him.  He sums up the entire fraud in the sentence:

This is a brief note to introduce the next formal Booklog, which will be a discussion of Euripides’ Orestes, a rather strange play that pits the claims of family not only against each other but against those of friendship.  I hope that it can be used to highlight certain older ideas about kinship and friendship...

PERSPECTIVE Johnny Rocco’s Worldby Thomas Fleming VIEWS “Vampire-Loving Barmaid Hits Jackpot”by James O. TateThe commodification of culture. Unpalatable Valuesby Andrei NavrozovCulture as gastronomy. Watching the Moneyby George McCartneyBrought to you by NokiaTM . NEWS The $15 Trillion End Runby William J. QuirkAn “oligarchy of interests.” REVIEWS Decline and Fallby Tom Piatak Theodore Dalrymple: Not With...

The conservative press lost no time in converting the Henry Louis Gates affair into a morality play that pitted a loose-lipped race-baiting President against a squeaky clean policeman with an excellent record in what is politely termed

You can't make this stuff up. First, the name of the program—Cash for Clunkers. Then the origin, the fountainhead—to wit, the U.S. Congress. Then the results: unexpected demand for participation, unanticipated shortages of cash, bureaucratic unresponsiveness, public and congressional consternation. Many of the politicians who designed Cash for Clunkers want now ...

With “controlling costs” a primary goal of Obamacare, and half of all medical costs coming in the last six months of life, “rationed care” takes on a new meaning for us all. London’s Telegraph reported Sunday that the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence, known by its Orwellian acronym NICE, intends to slash by...

“ . . . and bank-notes will become as plentiful as oak leaves.” —Thomas Jefferson “They [the people], and not the rich are our dependence for continued freedom.  And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.  We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion...

To American readers the name A.A. Gill may mean nothing, but in England the restaurant and television critic of the Sunday Times is a cultural force to be reckoned with.  A witty autodidact, with plenty of disdain for the pieties of the moment, to easily deafened ears he is a Jeremiah of the petit-four and...

Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, who is wired into the cabinet of “Bibi” Netanyahu, warns that if Iran’s nuclear program is not aborted by December, Israel will strike to obliterate it. Defense Secretary Gates’ mission to Israel this week, says Bolton, to relay Obama’s red light, was listened to attentively, but will not be decisive....

The day before Thomas Fleming offered his reflections on the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, I offered mine at Takimag.  My focus was different from Dr. Fleming’s.  I used the anniversary to reflect on how and why America had declined since Neil Armstrong took that famous step onto the moon, and wished that “we could...

Last week on NPR, a professor in the Sloan School of Management at MIT explained that what is really at stake in the health-care bill is the U.S. government’s ability to borrow. In other words, the bill is about cutting health-care costs, not about providing hard-pressed Americans with health care. The professor said that if...

“The sound alone was worth the $24 billion!” So said fellow Nixon speechwriter Ray Price as the mighty Saturn V rocket lifted Apollo 11 and Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins off the launch pad, three miles away, on the start of their voyage to the moon. It was a splendid moment in that first year of...

You should not drink and bake at the same time. —Arnold Schwarzenegger . . . the great cities grow like a creeping paralysis over freedom . . . —Owen Wister His best companions, innocence and health,And his best riches, ignorance of wealth. —Oliver Goldsmith Perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the...

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Japan did not spend years preparing her public case and demonstrating her deployment of forces for the attack. Japan did not make a world issue out of her view that the United States was denying Japan her role in the Pacific by hindering Japan’s access to raw materials and energy....

Not that the secular world walks the floor at night worrying over the Episcopal Church and its waning influence over the minds of all decent and honorable Americans. The secular world lost this decent and honorable habit years ago and likely won't get it back, especially with Episcopalians themselves acting ...

When Republicans were warned not to give Sonia Sotomayor the drubbing Democrats gave Robert Bork and Sam Alito—lest they be perceived as sexist and racist by women and Hispanics—the threat was credible, for it underscored a new reality in American politics. The Supreme Court, far from being the last redoubt of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant...

Despite our high expectations, Vice President Joe Biden’s first months in office were disappointing. This, remember, is the man who opened the more recent of his two futile runs for the presidency by saying of Obama that he was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I...

After half a century of fighting encroachments upon freedom in America, journalist Garet Garrett published The People's Pottage.  A year later, in 1954, he died. The People's Pottage opens thus:

There is no economy left to recover. The U.S. manufacturing economy was lost to offshoring and free-trade ideology. It was replaced by a mythical “New Economy.” The “New Economy” was based on services. Its artificial life was fed by the Federal Reserve’s artificially low interest rates, which produced a real-estate bubble, and by “free market”...

The Soviet Union in 1964 was about the last place on earth where anyone could find respect for traditional ways and reverence for ancestors.  For the most part, the thuggish bureaucracy controlling that unlamented establishment exuded an almost eager desire for drabness that was downright studied in its gleeful love ...

The overarching flaw of the neocons is arrogance.  It was arrogance that led them to believe that we could remake the Mideast when we invaded Iraq.  It was arrogance that led Catholic neocons to lecture John Paul II on Catholic just-war teaching as they lobbied the Vatican to endorse our disastrous invasion of Iraq.  And...

The Rockford Institute’s 12th Annual Summer School, “The American West,” is under way at Chronicles headquarters in Rockford, Illinois.  The first lecture, delivered on Tuesday evening, July 7, was by Thomas Fleming: “Print the Legend: Clantons Versus Earps in Myth, History, and Film.” Here is a portion of Dr. Fleming’s talk, in which he addresses...

“Naval Academy Professor Challenges Rising Diversity,” ran the headline in the Washington Post. The impression left was that some sorehead was griping because black and Hispanic kids were finally being admitted. The Post‘s opening paragraphs reinforced the impression. “Of the 1,230 plebes who took the oath of office at the Naval Academy in Annapolis this...

Last Saturday, Honduran soldiers marched into the presidential palace, bundled up President Manuel Zelaya and put him on a plane for Costa Rica. The ouster had been ordered by the Supreme Court and approved by the Congress, as Zelaya was attempting an illegal referendum to change the Honduran constitution so he could run for another...

On June 30, the government of Israel committed an act of piracy when the Israeli Navy in international waters illegally boarded the Spirit of Humanity, kidnapped its 21-person crew from 11 countries, including former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney and Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire, and confiscated the cargo of medical ...

III. A social order, being a natural expression of human sociability, should not be undermined, overturned, or rejected on frivolous grounds. A.  Man is not a purely natural creature and he never lived in a  state of nature.  Thus, since there is no such things as universal human rights ...

Some years or decades ago, I researched and reported on the Sullivan Act, one of America's first gun-control laws. New York state Sen. Timothy Sullivan, a corrupt Tammany Hall politician, represented New York's Red Hook district. Commercial travelers passing through the district would be relieved of their valuables by ...

The only time before his presidency when Abraham Lincoln held national office was a single term (1847-49) in the U.S. House of Representatives.  During that time, while debating the Mexican-American War, Lincoln zealously defended the constitutional prerogative of Congress to declare war and enact legislation against a perceived usurpation of ...

There was symmetry in the news that barraged us one day last week—Michael Jackson, not to mention Farrah Fawcett, had died, and the governor of South Carolina had made a nitwit and a creep out of himself over a woman in Argentina. Politics, entertainment—you can’t tell where one leaves off and the other takes up....

PERSPECTIVE The Good Life by Thomas Fleming VIEWS Another Reason Why the Agrarians Lost by Tom Landess Or did they? What

A meddling Yankee is God’s worst creation; he cannot run his own affairs correctly, but is constantly interfering in the affairs of others, and he is always ready to repent of everyone’s sin, but his own. —North Carolina newspaper, 1854 Powerful ornary stock, George, powerful ornary. —”Sut Lovingood” on the Puritan Yankee If a person lives...

PALM SPRINGS, Calif.—In just a few weeks time, California hits the wall. And Americans should take a good, long look at the fiscal and social wreck of the Golden Land, because California is at a place to which all of America is heading. In May, when five fund-raising proposals were put on the ballot, Gov....

It is said, and it is very true, that the moment when vice becomes the custom marks the death of a republic, for the dissolute persons cease to be regarded as loathsome, and all baseness becomes normal. —Arturo Perez-Reverte “Hell” ain’t cussin’, it’s geography. —Harry Carey, Jr. in Wagon Master History has the cruel reality of...

According to the Constitution, Congress must declare war. However, the President is authorized to initiate an Overseas Contingency Operation whenever he chooses. It is said that a man is just as good as his word. That tells us everything we need to know about our politicians. An establishment “conservative” complains that Obama is “the first...

On June 11, Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia introduced his bill to set up a bipartisan National Criminal Justice Commission. “We find ourselves as a nation,” Webb declared, “in the midst of a profound, deeply corrosive crisis,” vis., “the national disgrace of our present criminal justice system” and “the disintegration of this system, day by...

Stephen Kinzer's book, All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, tells the story of the overthrow of Iran's democratically elected leader, Muhammad Mosaddeq, by the CIA and the British MI6 in 1953. The CIA bribed Iranian government officials, businessmen and reporters, and paid ...

On Dec. 14, 1825, following the death of Alexander I—who had seen off Napoleon—his brother, the grand duke, who had just taken the oath as Czar Nicholas I, was confronted by mutinous troops and rebels in Senate Square before the Winter Palace. For hours, the czar stood at the end of ...

It’s only money, we like to say, when we know we shouldn’t be pulling out our wallets, but … The ‘but’ is a big one when it comes to health care reform: huge, immense, Himalayan. So big we’re not going to do it, I’ll bet you money. Not this year we’re not, because we’ve barely...

How much attention do elections in Japan, India, Argentina or any other country, get from the U.S. media? How many Americans and American journalists even know who is in political office in other countries besides England, France and Germany? Who can name the political leaders of Switzerland, Holland, Brazil, Japan ...

. . . We interrupt this broadcast to celebrate(!) a Lutheran-Catholic lovefest . . . Recently, there has been a blogosphere brouhaha over questions pertaining to the murder of late-term abortionist scoundrel George Tiller. Our executive editor Scott P. Richert has made compelling arguments against Tiller’s murder at his Catholicism GuideSite on About.com. And yet...

“Among some Muslims,” Obama declared in Cairo, “there is a disturbing tendency to measure one’s own faith by the rejection of another’s. The richness of religious diversity must be upheld … Freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together.” This came at the end of a week in which the...

Having lost the Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008, Republicans are looking to redefine themselves for a nation that still leans conservative but is less Republican that it has been in decades. The nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court presents just such an opportunity. For, even if the...

Have we no shame? (No.) —Fred Reed Stimulus: $250 each for Social Security recipients; $250,000,000(?) each for bankers and stock speculators. Sounds like business as usual. With affirmative action and bailouts, the U.S. government has almost succeeded in severing the link between performance and reward. Honest Abe. Fair and Balanced. Compassionate Conservatism. Notice a pattern...

What are people for? —Wendell Berry We shouldn’t care a bit who occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Who musters a majority on Capitol Hill (it is, after all, merely a “hill”), nor who warms the benches of the Supreme Court. If we concern ourselves with what happens in Washington, we give credence to their fatuous claim...

The power of irrational fear in the United States is extraordinary. It ranks up there with the Israel lobby, the military-security complex and the financial gangsters. Indeed, fear might be the most powerful force in America. Americans are at ease with their country’s aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, which has resulted in a million...