Category: Web

  This Friday, September 7, 2012, we’ll begin the show with some economic and business questions.  Both parties say they are courting the “middle class,” but what does that mean?  I know rich doctors making $1 million a year who say they are middle class, as does everyone who has dug a ditch for the...

Fourteen centuries of Islam have fatally undermined Christianity in the land of its birth. The decline of the Christian remnant in the Middle East has been accelerated in recent decades, and accompanied by the indifference of the post-Christian West to its impending demise. Once-thriving Christian communities are now tiny minorities, and in most countries of...

  Both the 20th and 21st centuries have seen failed presidencies. William Howard Taft lost in 1912, though he might have retained office had not his old friend and former leader Theodore Roosevelt run as a third party Bull Moose candidate and won more votes than Taft. Herbert Hoover failed through no fault of his...

  Poor Clint Eastwood.  Like most film actors, the man is a fool, and like most entertainment celebrities, he has no idea how foolish he is.  I suppose few of us could resist the temptation to believe the praise that is lavished on our every grunt or belch, and it is no reflection, personally, on...

  The latest scandal among the British royals will doubtless reenergize the long-running argument over the usefulness of monarchy in these times. Surprisingly often, here and in other fora, one encounters Americans so affronted by the manifest defects of “democracy,” that they declare themselves to be “monarchists.”  This has always seemed a little strange to...

  I’d be the last one to suggest that the Republican National Convention should be a bastion of Christian orthodoxy, and I’m sure no one goes there for the liturgy.  But still.  The schedule ought to tell us something about the “values” of the GOP, don’t you think?  I mean priorities, what sort of face you want to...

  Marine General John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, says one possible explanation for a spike in killings of American troops by their Afghan partners is the strain of fasting during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ended on August 18. He said that while the reasons for the killings are not fully understood,...

  After his great victory in Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush went before the United Nations to declare the coming of a New World Order. The Cold War was yesterday. Communism was in its death throes. The Soviet Empire had crumbled. The Soviet Union was disintegrating. Francis Fukuyama was writing of “The End of History.”...

Derek Thompson of The Atlantic has an interesting post arguing that globalization is the single most important factor in the decline of the American middle class.  Among other facts, Thompson notes that 97% of the jobs being created in America are in sectors of the economy not subject to foreign competition.    It’s good that at least some in the...

  Sometimes I don’t know why I bother.  What, after all, is the point to entering into any public discussion of controversial matters?  Each side of the question has made up its mind before the facts are in, and the respective champions of the issue or debate are, depending on who has washed your brain,...

  Venues in which a person’s fidelity to Catholic teaching is generally viewed as a negative are suddenly voicing concern about Paul Ryan’s adherence to Catholic social teaching.  It’s not, of course, that Daily Kos or the Daily Beast have suddenly embraced Catholicism.  It’s that they’re worried that Ryan might help Romney win Catholic votes and the election, thus depriving Barack Obama of the...

  Today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer has an article analyzing a revealing ad the Obama campaign is running here in Ohio.  In it, two women talk about Mitt Romney’s opposition to the HHS contraception/abortifacient mandate.  One of the women tells the other, “It’s about a woman being able to make decisions.”  The ad then informs the viewer that Romney...

  Ah, Italian politics . . . This scene reminds me of my native Serbia: corruption, sleaze, scandals, cushy jobs for the boys, and dramatis personæ that changes but little from one decade to another. There’s also the same resentment at various dictates coming from the German-dominated European Union—of which Italy (unlike Serbia) is a member, but...

  This morning, Mitt Romney chose the backdrop of the USS Wisconsin, one of four members of the mighty Iowa class and a magnificent symbol of American power, to introduce Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate.  If Ryan becomes vice president, he will be the first member of the House of Representatives elected vice president...

  Almost a year has passed since we last took note of Turkey’s increasing clout in three key areas of neo-Ottoman expansion: the Balkans, the Arab world, and the predominantly Muslim regions of the former Soviet Union. Each has played a significant part in reshaping the geopolitics of the Greater Middle East over the past decade. This...

  The shooting of  Sikhs at a temple in Milwaukee is generating the usual blather about senseless violence, the paranoid racialist right, and the patriotism of Sikh immigrants.  I finally heard, this morning, the inevitable, “Today, we are  all Sikhs.” Excuse me, but no, I am not now and shall never be a Sikh. Sikhs,...

  The long wait is over, and President Obama can start packing his bags.  Clint Eastwood has endorsed Governor Romney, and that, as they say, is that.   Since the 2012 Superbowl, there had been speculation that the actor famous for playing Dirty Harry and The Man With No Name might actually come out for...

  “Apart from political maps of mankind, there are natural maps of mankind. … One of the first laws of political stability is to draw your political boundaries along the lines of the natural map of mankind.” So wrote H.G. Wells in What Is Coming: A Forecast of Things to Come After the War in the year...

  The Syrian scenario, as concocted in Washington with some help from London and Paris, is proceeding with almost comical predictability. Amnesty International has just issued a report accusing government forces of “crimes against humanity” and calling on the UN Security Council to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court. The report, “All-Out Repression: Purging Dissent in...

  The Obama Administration’s Middle Eastern policy is irrational and detrimental to American interests in the region. The decision to support the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Egypt is the strategic equivalent of Emperor Nicholas I Romanov’s support for the Habsburgs in suppressing the Hungarian revolution in 1849. The cost of that geopolitical blunder was...

  Years ago, during the First Gulf War, I asked one of our editors whether he objected to the protestors who burned American flags.  He replied, “It’s not my flag, it’s not my country.”   I respected his opinion, though I wondered at the time if it was not a bit extreme.  But every day...

  “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” Mitt Romney fell on this Obama quote like an NFL lineman on an end zone fumble during the Super Bowl. And understandably so. For this was no gaffe, said Romney, this is what Obama believes. This is straight out of...

  Among the least remembered poets of World War I was Edmund Blunden, who lived to a miraculously ripe old age, spending some of it in Japan teaching English literature.  His verse is quiet, patient, descriptive, often taking a side look at what might have been the cause of terror and grief.  Here’s a poem...

  The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things—bread and circuses. —Juvenal, Satires Except that instead of circuses we call them football games—a term linked indissolubly with the mess at Penn State: NCAA fines and penalties, disappearing statues of head coaches...

  Having traveled all over Bosnia and Herzegovina recently, including Sarajevo, Banja Luka, Tuzla, Doboj, Zvornik and Visegrad, I can testify that—almost 17 years after the end of the war—this former Yugoslav republic is not a “country” but a deeply divided international protectorate. As the Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik said on July 20, it...

Today we are planning to talk about the Aurora shootings.  If you don’t have time read my offensive screed on the Daily Mail, you can listen to the show.  We may also–and this is not at all an unrelated topic–discuss the significance of the campaign rhetoric being used by both sides.  Meanwhile, the DOD has made...

  The first criterion in choosing a vice president, it is said, is that he or she must be qualified to be president.   Yet there is another yardstick by which candidates measure running mates. Do they bring something to the table? Can they help with a critical voting bloc? Can they bring a crucial...

This month the Census Bureau reported that the inflation adjusted median income for male workers was $32,127 in 2010, less than the $32,844 such workers earned in 1968.  There are, of course, many reasons for this prolonged wage stagnation, but chief among them are mass immigration, which began with the Immigration Act of 1965, and free trade, which...

  Anyone claiming that international bankers, multinational company executives, members of the Bilderberg Group, elite academics, senior judges, United Nations officials and European Union strategists are working together to undermine the remnants of sovereignty and identity of old Christian nations through mass Third World immigration would be dismissed by our bien pensants as a conspiracy theorist. A...

  Yesterday brought the news of Andy Griffith’s death at 86.  Unfortunately, the type of television exemplified by The Andy Griffiith Show died long before its star did.  Long gone are the days when the networks aired prime time series that parents could safely allow their children to watch, much less a prime time in which such...

  For John Roberts, it is Palm Sunday. Out of relief and gratitude for his having saved Obamacare, he is being compared to John Marshall and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Liberal commentators are burbling that his act of statesmanship has shown us the way to the sunny uplands of a new consensus. If only Republicans will...

  Despite the slow news week, Chronicles Unbound, the best show on radio, will still air live today, 3-5 PM CDT.  Tune in online by clicking here, or download the podcast on Monday at this page.  If you are in Northern Illinois or Southern Wisconsin, tune in on your terrestrial radio device at 100.5 FM. Chronicles editors @Thomas Fleming...

  In 1948, Arthur Schlesinger Sr. wrote for Life magazine a controversial article on a subject that has been the cause of spirited and acrimonious debate ever since. He listed the consensus of our academic elite as to which American presidents had been Great, Near Great, Average, Below Average and Failures. Leading the list were Abraham Lincoln,...

  Over the past two decades the decisionmakers in Washington have acquired and internalized a bias in Balkan affairs that falls outside the parameters of rational debate. As Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute has noted, such policy is not as inconsistent as it seems: “Time after time the U.S. policy makers would ask what...

  I certainly understand Mr. Oliver’s point, but I’m afraid he has misunderstood mine. Do I think that John Roberts has a burning desire to impose a “radical social agenda” on the country? No. But his unprecedented expansion of Congress’s power “to lay and collect Taxes” has given Congress a new tool to do just that....

  I see by my mild defense of Roberts, I’ve made myself a friendly target and in bringing up the inevitable Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage, I’ve distracted from the implications of the Obamacare ruling.   That was not my intent, but here we are.   To Mr. Kirkwood: I think your characterization of Roberts...

  In light of the Obamacare ruling today from the Supreme Court, in his post below Mr. Richert not only compares Chief Justice Roberts to Chief Justice Warren but compares Warren favorably to Roberts! I have no doubt Warren would have joined in Justice Ginsburg’s concurring/dissenting opinion and held that Obamacare passes Constitutional muster under any of...

  Putting together the Court’s two most notable recent decisions, the Arizona immigration decision and the Obamacare decision, leads to this unsettling conclusion:  there is virtually nothing the states can do on their own, and there is virtually nothing the federal government cannot do.  If that is what the Founders intended, I’m a unicorn. We also now have...

I hate to disagree with Rick Oliver, but I think he is too optimistic about John Roberts.  What Roberts’ decision today tells us is that he is unlikely to ever cast a decisive vote against the consensus of the Washington elite.  This means that the Roberts court will never overturn Roe v. Wade, because such a...

Thank God for Republican presidents who appoint strict constructionists to the U.S. Supreme Court. Otherwise, the Court today might have upheld ObamaCare.

  Chief Justice John Roberts was initially nominated by President George W. Bush to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the country’s high court. So, in the wake of today’s ObamaCare decision, authored by Roberts, it’s no surprise that many who wanted to see the Court drive a stake through the heart of the most overreaching piece...

  In Earl Warren Rides Again, I wrote: Roberts portrays his decision as a check on federal power—if the Court had upheld the individual mandate under the Commerce Clause, it “would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority.” But it’s unclear whom he thinks he is fooling. Silly me. I should have known...

  On Monday, the Supreme Court in Arizona v. United States struck down three of four challenged provisions of Arizona’s S.B. 1070, eliminating the law’s penalties and therefore leaving a shell of the former law in place. Not satisfied with this overwhelming victory, the Justice Department has helpfully set up a hotline for Arizona citizens who feel their “civil...

  Barack Obama’s recent concern over sending American jobs overseas is as phony as his broken promise, made during the Ohio Democratic primary in 2008, to renegotiate NAFTA, but there is little doubt that his attack on Mitt Romney’s record of outsourcing American jobs during Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital is politically potent.   The elites who favor free trade...

  I have nothing personal against Nora Ephron, but I do not understand why all the news outlets are pretending that her death is in any way significant.  A sometimes amusing satirist–though the frequent comparison with Dorothy Parker is ludicrous–and a writer of really terrible fiction and screenplays, Ephron may have been best known for...

  Sixteen months after the United States abandoned its loyal satrap of 30 years, President Hosni Mubarak, to champion democracy in Egypt, the returns are in. Mohammed Morsi, candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, is president of Egypt, while the military has dissolved the elected parliament that was dominated by the Brotherhood, and curbed his powers....

Lackland Air Force Base is embroiled in a scandal.  At the Air Force’s one boot camp, male instructors have been preying on their female recruits.  The events are only a scandal to Americans who have not been observing the licentiousness of the American Armed Forces for decades.  As Brian Mitchell observed in Chronicles many years ago, the...

  There are some real stunners in today’s convoluted ruling from the Supremes regarding Arizona v. United States.  Here are some of my favorites: “As a general rule, it is not a crime for a removable alien to remain in the United States.” “Federal governance is extensive and complex.” “Removal is a civil matter, . . . ” . ....

  The intro to Justice Scalia’s partial dissent in Arizona v. United States is a perfect demonstration of today’s self-contradictory “conservatism.”  It takes with one hand, then pretends to give back with the other (emphasis mine): “The United States is an indivisible ‘Union of sovereign States.’ Hinderlider v. La Plata River & Cherry Creek Ditch Co., 304 U. S. 92, 104 (1938). Today’s opinion,...

  He denounced both the Blair and Brown governments for not limiting immigration from new EU members after 2004, and stressed that those who criticized immigration could not be dismissed as “bigots” – a cutting criticism of his former boss Gordon Brown, notoriously recorded referring to a lifelong Labour voter in those endearing terms. He...