Archive for March, 2011

Teachers and Parents

Our national weeping and wailing over education spending cuts, public employee unions, and such like cause minds of a certain vintage to stop still and wonder. When were the divorce proceedings between home and classroom filed anyway? And who filed them, and why? It can be argued that the current traumas of education proceed from that divorce: further testimony to the general understanding that it’s the kids who get hurt worst in divorce.

Lying in a Good Cause

James O’Keefe scored another victory recently, when his group tricked Ron Schilling, an NPR fundraiser into making statements that were soft on militant Islam and expressed contempt for Middle American conservatives. As much as I detest NPR and all its works, the attack on the fundraisers is either naive or disingenuous. Schilling may well have really believed everything he said, but some level of exaggeration and acquiescence is part of his job.

The King Hearings: Necessary in Principle, Unlikely To Provide Answers in Practice

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, started his congressional hearing on Islamic radicalization Thursday amidst accusations of “Islamophobia” from the Sharia activists and expressions of distaste from most Democrats.

Spencer for Hire

Robert Spencer is making something of a nuisance of himself these days. I don’t know much about Spencer. I do not spend a lot of time looking at websites and hardly ever visit Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch. It is not that I particularly disagree with him on the Muslim threat; it is only that he is a bit of a Johnny One-Note, and that note is not always sounded properly.

Blowback: “Kosovars” Strike Again

The jihadist murder of two American servicemen by a “Kosovar”-Albanian Muslim at Frankfurt Airport on March 2 combines the fruits of the United States’ criminally misguided Balkan policy over the past two decades and of Europe’s suicidal immigration policy since the 1960’s.

Robert Gates, Neo-Isolationist?

the “neo-isolationists” who opposed invading Iraq and a “long war” in Afghanistan were right, in Gates’ eyes. Quite an admission from a defense secretary who presided over the surge in Iraq and the surge in Afghanistan.

Organized Coercion

The more it changes, the more it’s the same, hmmm? In this present instance, meaning our country’s seemingly fresh-scented wrangle over union power. The scent isn’t fresh at all, nor is the wrangle. The arguments are old, the question at stake is old: namely, when is the public interest served by giving organized coercion its way?

Tocqueville’s Ancien Régime Book III

In the third book of his Ancien Régime, Alexis de Tocqueville takes up the intellectual origins of the French Revolution. AT notes the at first sight strange phenomenon, that in absolutist France intellectuals were free to challenge the most fundamental political, social, and religious institutions and beliefs. While each “philosopher” had his own system and [...]

Free Speech or Federal Tyranny?

Today’s Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Westboro Baptist Church has encouraged many decent conservatives to think that the United States will not so quickly go down the garden path of political correctness as Canada and the EU. I think this view is seriously mistaken.