I’m not sure why I’ve been exposed to this talking point so often in the last few days, but once again I’m hearing and reading people calling Obama voters pro-abortion voters. ?Some leave the sentence enthymemic, but others go ahead and finish, saying that a vote for McCain would have been an anti-abortion vote.
I have [...]
I’ll admit that, at this point, nothing about cable-news-era American partisan shenanigans should surprise me.? I’ve seen push polls and astroturf organizing, free speech zones and major party convention speeches involving the word “spitballs.”? And I’ll also admit that, since I started my new job, I haven’t dedicated any significant time to watching or even [...]
Arm the Senate! from E.J. Dionne
I have to admit a bit of fondness for polemics like this.? There’s not all that much sophisticated thinking to it, just the direct application of strange thinking to commonplace situations.? It’s the simple ones that work this nicely.
I’ve heard about but haven’t had much time to think about the recent murder of abortion doctor George Tiller. I know that “Pro-Life” personalities were quick to get in front of television cameras and denounce the crime, and something struck me as odd about that move, just as it always has. Halden Doerge, [...]
The Real Life Ticking Bomb Scenario.
Tom Tomorrow put this up a couple weeks ago, but it deserves a look if you’ve not looked yet.
ISI Civic Literacy Quiz 2009
This little quiz took me about ten minutes to finish, and when the quiz revealed the two questions that I missed, I realized I had been gaming the quiz on one of them (answering how I figured ISI would have wanted rather than what I thought was right) and that I [...]
This is a heck of a speech.
David Brooks – The Long Voyage Home
Unlike Brooks, I’m not rooting for the rising-again of the GOP so much as I dread what politics might look like should the Libertarians become the foil of the DNC.? I think that’s what Brooks has in mind when he calls on his fellow Republicans to pull out of [...]
The ultimate reaping of what one sows: right-wing edition – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.
I have to admit laughing out loud when I read this.? I know that four-year amnesia is common among the noisy class, but these complaints about the Department of Homeland Security and about the surveillance state in general really do blow my [...]
The Future! (Comics).
It looks like the liberal Internet has deemed this meta-critique week, with Greenwald’s piece that I wrote about yesterday leaving the partisan battlefield to comment on journalism as a profession and this Tom Tomorrow cartoon noting the obvious problem with all of the triumphalism of blog-writers.? I’ve long maintained that Tom Tomorrow is [...]
The Corruption of the Cocoon
Like Binx Bolling in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, one of my hobbies is to read both conservative and liberal texts.? (Because he’s a mid-twentieth-century novel character, he doesn’t do so on the Internet as I do–I hate to think how little would happen in the novel if he had ISI podcasts [...]
How Radio Wrecks the Right
As many of my readers no doubt know, I was for the period of a year and a half or so simultaneously a contributing writer for the blogs Christian Feminism and Conservative Reformed Mafia.? (The former still exists formally, but my post last August has been the last one that I’m [...]
U.S. Congressman Phil Gingrey Kowtows to AM Radio Hosts
Someone asked me recently if I’d heard about this incident, and I hadn’t.? So I read up on it.? And I wanted to laugh, and I wanted to cry.
Apparently at some point around January 20, U.S. Congressman Phil Gingrey, from a district not far from mine in [...]
Comp class yesterday was quite fun. ?We started out digging into the text of the Declaration of Independence, a document that, for good reasons and bad, has become a sort of canonical document in America, good for quoting and waving as a talisman but not often good for reading. ?My students immediately picked up on [...]
Impasse at MLA
Folks who have read my material over at the Conservative Reformed Mafia know that I agreed to participate in an experiment with J. Wizzle (a screen name, of course) in which we both reviewed David Horowitz’s Indoctrination U, he from the perspective of an undergraduate student and I from the perspective of a [...]
The same political faction that was clamoring to preserve the part of a financial sector bailout package that keeps CEO salaries as high as CEO’s can manage, unhindered by the will of the plebs, mere months ago, is now blocking an auto industry bailout because they don’t want union workers making any more money than [...]
SC Priest: No communion for Obama Supporters
I have to admit that I’m more conflicted about this story than some of my liberal friends would likely want me to be.? But I do think that the Eucharist is serious enough that the Church should be cautious rather than reckless in administering it.? After all, I’m very [...]
It appears I jumped too early on the “Changing my Name to Fannie Mae” thing.? If I’d just waited about a week, I could have just posted about auto makers again.
Privatize the profits, socialize the losses.? And people wonder why people get as suspicious of Big Business as they do of Big Government–we can see [...]
From 52 to 48 with Love
Someone mentioned this at work the other day, and I checked it out.? I don’t know that still photos, no matter how clever, can compete with twelve hours (in some areas) of AM radio every day, but it’s a nice gesture nonetheless.? I like the fact that both “fifty-twos” and [...]
I know I’m weird for all sorts of reasons, and the most recent is that, after retreating into my paper-grading and preparing for my guest lecture at Emmanuel College the full week before the presidential election, I picked up a piece of polemical federal electoral non-fiction (a political book, if you’re not an Aristotelian) the [...]
The Christian Humanist Podcast