Author: The Archive (The Archive)

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...

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...

. . . 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...

So here, as if on cue, it being a new day and all, came the Obama administration Monday to announce new arrangements for the way the country does business. The new big idea: Tell all those banks how much they’re going to be allowed to pay executives; let them know the gravy train leaves the...

The Homeland Security apparatus has garnered quite a bit of attention lately for a paper that identified anti-abortionists, anti-immigrationists, and war veterans as terrorist suspects. (I thought “profiling” was forbidden, but in that matter, as so often these days, it would seem that some people are more equal than others.) Some Republican politicians are playing...

If Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed, the U.S. Supreme Court will consist of six Catholics, two Jews and precisely one white Anglo-Saxon Protestant in the form of Justice John Paul Stevens, who is 89 years old and boasts of two important WASP insignia: inherited wealth and a bow tie. He also thinks that Shakespeare’s plays...

“I have to admire the residents of Iroquois territory for assuming that they have a right to determine where Jews lives in Jerusalem.” Thus did Israeli government press director Daniel Seamen caustically dismiss President Obama’s opposition to Israel’s right to “natural growth” of its settlements in Arab East Jerusalem and on the West Bank. Though...

If a person lives long enough, he can watch everyone forget everything they learned. Everyone includes Federal Reserve chairmen, economists, Bank of America “strategists” and even Bloomberg.com. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke thinks he can hold down U.S. long-term interest rates by purchasing mortgage bonds and U.S. Treasuries. Sixty years ago, the Federal Reserve understood...

One of the talk-radio stations here in Rockford bills itself as “All Local. All Day.”  It is an interesting slogan, in light of increasing reports of the impending failure of local media; it would be even more interesting if it (or a version of it) were not used by hundreds of other talk-radio stations across...

Economic news remains focused on banks and housing, while the threat mounts to the U.S. dollar from massive federal budget deficits in fiscal years 2009 and 2010. Earlier this year, the dollar’s exchange value rose against currencies, such as the euro, the British pound and Swiss franc, against which the dollar had been steadily falling....

Since September 2008 an awful lot of Americans have lost 40 to 50 percent of their net worth.  According to Bloomberg News, the federal government, during the same period, has committed $11.3 trillion in loans, guarantees, and investments to bail out the financial system.  The Obama administration believes this effort will help the overall economy...

You can do anything you like in London as long as you don’t do it in the street and don’t frighten the horses. —Mrs. Patrick Campbell There is nothing so stupid as a gallant British officer. —Wellington I am one Southerner who is not obsessed with the Civil War. I am too busy planning for...

If the U.S. Senate rejects race-based justice, Sonia Sotomayor will never sit on the Supreme Court. Because that is what Sonia is all about. As the New York Times reported Saturday, the salient cause of her career has been advancing persons of color, over whites, based on race and national origin. “Judge Sotomayor, whose parents...

When Popcorn Sutton died in mid-March at the age of 62, the national press ran obituaries.  Though he was just an old moonshiner who’d plied his trade for half a century and done nothing else of consequence, a whole bunch of folks in Tennessee and North Carolina grieved more than they would have over the...

PERSPECTIVE Immigration, Neighbors, and Enemiesby Thomas Fleming VIEWS The Economic Impact of Immigration by Peter BrimelowPaying for the Privilege. You Should Have Been Here Yesteryearby Roger D. McGrathWhen the Golden State was paradise. California Crashby John C. Seiler, Jr.The Golden State today. Mandating Failure by Edwin S. RubensteinFederal insistence on multilingualism. NEWS Bailing Out the Bucket...

Never trust a man who reads only one book. —Arturo Perez-Reverte . . . the monarchy had become an insatiable machine for devouring taxes, while a drained populace received nothing in exchange but the political blunders and the disasters of war. —Perez-Reverte In a sense the American Civil War is a belated chapter of the...

When you think about it, Sonia Sotomayor is the perfect pick for the Supreme Court—in Barack Obama’s America. Like Obama, himself a beneficiary of affirmative action, she thinks “Latina women,” because of their life experience, make better judicial decisions than white men, that discrimination against white men to advance people of color is what America...

A utility corporation that requests a DECREASE in rates Local government that REDUCES property taxes Airport screeners searching someone who actually might be a terrorist. Airport screeners not searching blonde, blue-eyed young women. A government program that requests a decrease in funding. A government poverty program that actually helps anyone who deserves help. An honest...

I was born and raised in the North. I didn’t like their Yankee culture when I was there, and I like it even less the more time I spend in the South. —Al Benson, Copperhead Chronicles There is such a thing as imperial fatigue, and servitude seems a light burden after the exhausting weight of...

Who made the Law that men should die in meadows?Who spake the word that blood should splash in lanes?Who gave it forth that gardens should be bone-yards?Who spread the hills with flesh, and blood, and brains?Who made the Law?—British Sgt. Frederick Coulson, killed on the Western Front, Oct. 7, 1916 The instinct for Power is...

A statute’s words do not tell how the law will be interpreted and applied. All laws are expansively interpreted. For example: —The Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) was directed at drug lords. Nothing in the law says anything about divorce, yet it soon was applied in divorce cases. —The 1964 Civil Rights Act explicitly...

I’ve lately been promoting a book I wrote on the plight of the mainline Christian denominations, featuring the Episcopal Church as Exhibit A in the Trainwreck Chronicles. An interviewer asked me: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of these churches? I replied: I’m too old to be pessimistic. A blog commenter ventured that...

As was evident at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, it is deja vu, 1961, all over again. We have a young, cool, witty, personable president—and an adoring press corps. “I am Barack Obama,” the president introduced himself. “Most of you covered me. All of you voted for me. (Laughter and applause.) Apologies to the Fox...

I stopped paying attention to Time many years ago.  My twin brother and I, already plotting our emigration to the United States, subscribed as college students in England in the 1960’s to get some sense of this world-straddling “indispensable nation”—as Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright later called it, possibly ...

As Mexico reels from the swine flu panic, there’s fierce talk of the disastrous impact on that country of North American methods of intensive livestock production. In the eye of the storm have been the huge pig factories in the state of Veracruz, owned by Granjas Carroll, a subsidiary of Smithfield Farms, active in North...

Intelligence is international; stupidity is national; art is local. —Ezra Pound The historian in particular is a camp-follower of the successful army. —David Donald Accidents don’t happen to people who take accidents personally. —Don Vito Corleone A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within. —Will Durant We are...

Having lost both houses of Congress and the White House in two straight elections, Republicans are going through an identity crisis, its leaders holding town hall meetings to “listen” to the people. “What should we focus on? Should we drop the social issues? How do we get the young people back?” Such angst and soul-searching...

All-you-can-eat restaurants The Three Stooges The new Three Stooges: George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Douglas Feith Donald Trump Talentless best-selling authors Talentless movie and music stars Great constitutional scholars like Earl Warren, Thurgood Marshall, and Warren Burger Reverse discrimination Eleanor Roosevelt Anarcho/Tyranny (though forms of this doubtless appeared earlier in history) The “Great Society”...

The President wants an empathetic jurist to replace David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. He will likely get such a one. What the country will get in that event is one more senator or cabinet member—as straw boss, head knocker, high and mighty arbiter of high and mighty matters. A sort of modern Roman...

God likes farmers.  Not gigantic corporate agribusiness, but farmers.  He made man from the dirt and for the dirt, to cultivate His Garden.  Adam means “of the red” or “of the soil.” When the children of Israel clamored for a king, so that they might rely on him to protect them from foreign invaders, the...

In 1786, John Adams wrote in his diary that a friend, “lamenting the differences of character between Virginia and New England,” welcomed from Adams a recipe for a Chesapeake makeover: “I recommended to him town meetings, training days, town schools, and ministers”; these “are the scenes where New England men were formed.”  Because Adams started...

I entirely agree with the spirit of this roundtable but not with the language of restoring “the Republic.”  The United States is not now and has never been a republic.  It is a federation of states, each of which, in Article IV of the Constitution, is guaranteed a republican form of government.  But a federation of...

Alexander Hamilton said debt is a blessing: It oils the wheels of business and enhances national power.  Jefferson said debt is a curse: It binds future generations without their consent, striking at the very heart of the Republic—the consent of the governed.  Bloomberg News reports (February 9) that the so-called financial crisis has added $9.7...

In the most famous defense of the U.S. Supreme Court’s power to declare acts of the federal and state legislatures unconstitutional, Alexander Hamilton argued that it was the Court’s job only to implement the will of the people as expressed in the Constitution.  If the Court went beyond that—interpreting the document to include things that...

I cannot see the least possibility of recreating either an elite republican class (if, by “elite,” one means an untitled aristocracy) or the American Republic itself.  The notion of a republic is a product of classical political thinking, which is now virtually dead in the Western world, and never appeared elsewhere.  Not only has the classical...