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Miliband on migration

  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...

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Mitt Romney Promises to Expand Immigration

  President Obama’s announcement of a de facto amnesty for illegal immigrants by administrative fiat offered a chance for Mitt Romney to appeal to the majority of Americans who consistently tell pollsters that they want to see immigration reduced.  Instead,  Romney told a gathering of Hispanic politicians that he will increase immigration, by raising the caps for...

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Now Korea Is Cleaning Our Clock

  “The entry into force of the U.S.-Korea trade agreement on March 15, 2012, means countless new opportunities for U.S. exporters to sell more made-in-America goods, services and agricultural products to Korean customers—and to support more good jobs here at home.” Thus did the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative rhapsodize about the potential of...

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Syria Gets Complicated

  Once some powerful people in Washington decide that they want a war, they do not give up until they get it. The proponents of an American-led NATO intervention in Syria were on the defensive in April, when government forces were winning on the ground and the political balance inside the Beltway seemed to be favoring...

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Barack in Wonderland

  When Congress, split seven ways from Sunday on the question, squelched legislation granting resident status for those formerly called “illegal aliens,” President Obama said, in effect, so what?—we’ll do it anyway. And so he did it anyway, announcing last Friday the birth of a new immigration policy affecting an estimated 800,000 illegals. These illegals—according...

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Arab Spring in Red-Hot Rockford Summer

  You’da thought Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was Barack Obama, the way Rockford’s local news media fawned over him on Sunday.  Yes, Captain Hijab made a super-secret stop in Chronicles‘ hometown early Sunday morning, on his way to the G20 Summit in Cabo.  Said Rockford Airport Director Mike Dunn, “The entire delegation were just very very friendly...

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Poems of the Week–A.E. Housman

  A.E. Housman was one of the finest Latin scholars of the 20th century and one of the most distinguished classicists of the Anglo-American world.  He is better known, however, as a poet.  He had suffered disappointments in life, and his response was the melancholy stoicism that permeates so much of his work.  His poems...

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Turmoil in Egypt

  Last Thursday’s decision by the Supreme Constitutional Court in Cairo that Egypt’s parliament was elected unconstitutionally and should be disbanded is a direct challenge to the Islamists who dominate the legislature. The scene is set for a new political crisis in the Arab world’s most populous nation. It is obvious that the Supreme Council...

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Freedom or the Church?

Check out Chris Check’s review of For Greater Glory, at the Crisis website.  Was the Cristeros War about religious liberty, or preserving the Catholic Faith?  Find out from someone who knows a thing or two about the conflict.

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Ad majorem Dei gloriam

  I want to bring your attention to a new film, one that attempts to convey some genuine truths about religious faith and secular governance.  My full review won’t appear until Chronicles’ August issue and, by that time, For Greater Glory may have left the theaters.  As this is a film that should be seen—as they say—on the big...

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The Bell Tolls for the Government Unions

  In 1919, after Boston police went on strike to protest the city’s refusal to recognize their new union, Gov. Calvin Coolidge ordered the National Guard into the streets. Sam Gompers, the legendary father of American labor, wrote the governor that the Boston police had been denied their rights. Coolidge’s terse reply put him in...

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Ray Bradbury, R.I.P.

  America has lost one of her best novelists and writers of short stories, and perhaps the last chronicler of a world that can no longer be found: the early 20th-century Midwest, a world of small towns and small farms, of hot summer days and bitter winter nights, of swimming holes and traveling shows, of...

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Poems of the Week–More Marvell

  An Epitaph Enough: and leave the rest to Fame. ‘Tis to commend her but to name. Courtship, which living she declin’d, When dead to offer were unkind… Where never any could speak ill, Who would officious Praises spill? Nor can the truest Wit or Friend, Without Detracting, her commend. To say she liv’d a Virgin chast,...

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Insulting Poland, Cont.

  It turns out that Barack Obama had managed to insult Poland before he ever talked about a “Polish death camp.”  The Polish Government had asked that Lech Walesa be allowed to receive the posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom being bestowed on Jan Karski.  The Obama White House said no, claiming that Walesa was “too political.” ...

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Ann Romney Asks the Right Question

  When Hillary Rosen said that Ann Romney had “never worked a day in her life,” it was among the better days of the Romney campaign. For Rosen—present whereabouts unknown—both revealed the feminist mindset about women who choose to become wives and mothers and brought Ann Romney center stage. Before a Connecticut audience recently, Mrs....

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Bullseye!

  [The Hunger Games ? Produced and distributed by Lionsgate ? Directed by Gary Ross ? Written by Suzanne Collins and Gary Ross] Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games is the first volume of a trilogy set in a not-too-distant future.  An unspecified apocalyptic event has destroyed much of North America, and a new state named Panem has arisen to replace the...

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Barack Obama, Culture Warrior

  One of the sillier stories told to garner support for Barack Obama in 2008 was that he would help bring Americans together by peacefully ending the culture war, a culture war most Americans found tiresome.   There was never any reason to believe that Obama would unite Americans, since Obama has always been far to the left...

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Insulting Poland

  American presidents seem to have a habit of insulting Poland.  Gerald Ford probably lost the 1976 election when he maintained in a presidential debate that Poland was not dominated by the Soviets and never would be under a Ford Administration.  (The Poles, who were in fact dominated by the Soviets, weren’t able to register...

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Half a Cheer–or Less

Scott, the only question about Facebook is not whether or not it is evil–it most certainly is–but whether or not it is an unmitigated evil like video poker and kiddie porn or a mitigated evil like the automobile.  Overall, the automobile does enormously more harm than good but it has become, for most Americans, an...

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The Wizard’s Medal

At last night’s gala ceremony, President Obama handed out the Presidential Medal of Freedom to what is inevitably described as a diverse group, though most of the winners run to a predictable type:  Toni Morrison, an incompetent and dirty writer of anti-American fictions, Madeline Albright an incompetent and brutally savage statesgirl, John Glenn the showboating...

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Two Cheers for Facebook

  I learned of the death of my friend and schoolmate Ellen Middlebrook Herron the way I increasingly learn of all such milestones on life’s journey: through Facebook. The first notice I saw was posted by one of my oldest friends, Steve Miller; how he learned of Ellen’s death, I do not know, but it...

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Re: Facebook

  Scott, I think you we are talking about two different things.  I admit the possibility, though I have not seen any proof, that Facebook might  be used as a helpful tool to survive in an increasingly inhuman world, despite the obvious reality that it is, by its very nature, diminishing the users’ grasp on...

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Re: Half a Cheer—Or Less

  “All these things are a lot like TV.” Well, yes and no. The damage done by TV was rather total. The older neighborhoods of Rockford have many front porches; very few of them are ever used today, even on evenings that are as beautiful as today’s is likely to be. Instead of enjoying conversation...

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How Bill Kristol Purged the Arabists

  After taping John Stossel’s show on May 16 in New York, the Mrs. and I took the 10 a.m. Acela back to Washington. Once we had boarded the train, who should come waddling up the aisle but Bill Kristol. The Weekly Standard editor seemed cheerful, and we chatted about the surge in Mitt Romney’s popularity...

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Memorial Day

  Memorial Day has always been my favorite secular holiday, in part because it is the most Catholic of all U.S. holidays. It is the only day of the year in which significant numbers of Americans (of all religious backgrounds) visit cemeteries to honor the dead, though their numbers (the honorers, not the honorees) are dwindling...

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Re: Scotland’s Soul

  Derek, I have a silly but not irrelevant question.  Is the SNP and its allies seeking total independence or merely separation?  In other words, is one possibility that Scotland could revert to it status before the Act of Union?  In which case Sir Sean would have be entitled to a knighthood granted by Elizabeth...

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Charity v. Welfare

  Before our prudent webmaster carried out our long ago agreed upon plan to disable comments on this section, I received an insightful message from W.C. Taquiya.  Old friends and some regular commenters are being invited to contribute to this section, and, in the future, if I wish to stimulate debate it will be in...

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The struggle for Scotland’s soul

  Today a cinema in Edinburgh was the bathetic setting for the launch of the Scottish National Party’s bid for Scottish independence. The SNP desires a yes/no referendum (possibly with an increased devolution alternative) to be held in October 2014, 700 years after Bannockburn. Although the SNP is the main mover behind Yes Scotland it is nominally...

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Re: Fraud

  I posted a response from one Robert–not our friend Robert–and replied to it, but despite the manifest silliness, I’l put it and my reply so that our intentions are not misunderstood. It is a good example of the incompatibility of Christianity and Marxism. “Good grief. Do you not know any poor people? Have none...

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What If Zimmerman Walks Free?

  Three months ago, George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Fla., shot and killed Trayvon Martin. Handcuffed, taken in and interrogated, Zimmerman told police Trayvon had been acting suspiciously that dark and rainy night, that he had followed Trayvon, been knocked down and battered on the ground, and, fearing for his life, pulled...

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Re: Fraud Upon Fraud, Jobs We Won’t Do

  Allen Wilson writes in a comment that “We should give them a week’s worth of food and transportation to the orchards and farms of those states where there are complaints that new immigration laws are scaring off Mexican workers.” This really cuts to the heart of things.  The very existence of food-stamp programs and...

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Re: Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame

  Tom, I’m pretty optimistic about the lawsuit filed by Notre Dame and 42 other Catholic organizations. Filing essentially the same case in multiple federal district courts increases the possibility of getting the right result out of at least one, and getting mixed results will kick this issue up to the Supreme Court. So it seems likely...

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Fraud Upon Fraud

  To add insult upon injury–and injury upon insult–the Feds are once again threatening to crack down on Foodstamp fraud. Wait a minute.  Foodstamps are by their very nature fraud, a way of stealing the wealth of working people and giving it to non-workers who use their stamps and cards and allowances to buy luxury...

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Re: Re: Fraud

  There is another way of applying Aaron’s argument that welfare is a job’s program.  Once, not long after we had moved to Rockford, I was taking my family to the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago.  We had to drive through some interesting neighborhoods.  We looked at block after block of neglected houses,...

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Re: iDocile

Aaron actually got it right.  While Latin docilis was used in a special sense  by St. Thomas, the word has always been used far more broadly to mean trainable or teachable.  Ovid even applies it to hair.  In English we are most likely to think of animals, like horses, subject to control by their masters, and I...

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None Dare Call

I’ve just posted a Daily Mail piece on the treason of the Pakistani physician who collaborated with the CIA.  While I strongly encourage anyone who has anything to say to post a comment over there–it can only improve my standing there–we can also have a different sort of discussion here.  I do urge everyone, if...

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For Greater Glory

  The story of the Mexican Left’s murderous persecution of the Church is not well known, even though it inspired one of the great novels of the 20th century, The Power and the Glory.  The story of the Cristero uprising intended to end that persecution is even less well known.  But that uprising has now inspired a...

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iDocile

  On my way to TRI Towers from my country estate this morning, I took a different route into the city. I started noticing something different in my peripheral vision, so I began looking more intently. Street corner after street corner had teenagers in ratty shorts and T-shirts waiting for a Rockford school bus. That...

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Serbian Election

  Toma Nikolic’s victory in the Serbian presidential election has panicked the boys of the press.  The Washington Post has  particularly hysterical account, typical of the Post’s purely ideological coverage of foreign affairs.   Both the headline and the lead sentence get in the key-word “ultra-nationalist,” while Nikolic’s moderate strategy is described as “claims to have transformed himself into...

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Re: Facebook

Scott, yes, I anticipated the flop for exactly the same reason.  What appears not to bother anyone is the obvious fact that Zuckerberg and his friends have flimflammed a lot of people.  It seems to me that one of the more obvious ways in which the new Facebook world is significant is that it allows...

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Poems of the Week: Marvell

    Andrew Marvell wrote masterpieces in several genres of verse, from satire to love poems to the most ambitious ode in the language.  While it is foolish to use words like “the greatest” of any one poet, the worth of this libidinous Puritan is beyond question.  Some of Marvell’s satires are quite amusing, particularly...

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Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame

  Just three days after Georgetown University had Kathleen Sebelius on campus to address an awards ceremony during commencement week, another prominent Catholic university found a better way of dealing with Sebelius:  the University of Notre Dame filed suit against Sebelius in federal court, asking the court to enjoin and then vacate the Obama Administration’s mandate requiring...

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Serbian Election II: The End of the Beginning

  Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning, quipped Churchill in November 1942, following Montgomery’s modest success at El Alamein. The same applies to Tomislav Nikolic’s victory in the second round of Serbia’s presidential election last Sunday. The...

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Education Nightmares Revisited

  With the threat of a second, unfettered term for President BHO looming, one begins to wonder what sort of legacy he would try to cobble together.  Well, smack in the middle of that second term would be the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.  A drumbeat from the left has been growing over the last...

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Re: It’s All Over/Facebook IPO

  Tom, the Facebook IPO went about how I predicted it would. I’d been trying to figure out how to short Facebook out of the gate, because it simply seemed obvious that Facebook’s business model cannot, in the long run, support even the $38 opening price (and perhaps not even in the short run). Zuckerberg...

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Re: It’s All Over

  Try not to be so negative, Clyde, and look on  the bright side.  Increased diversity enriches our lives.  If you want really authentic Chinese food, go to Bangkok, where a Chinese from Taiwan was arrested for his exotic taste in food and religion.  He had roasted six unborn babies and covered them with gold...

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Zimmerman & Martin Lawyers Gouge Eyes on TV

  The news media love you and have a wonderful plan for your life, to borrow a phrase.  And that plan is to ramp up your feelings of hate, which will fuel obsession over sensational news stories, which means better ratings. In evidence today is one Bianca Prieto, who writes the following first paragraph on the...

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It’s All Over

Yesterday was not a good day. I got the word about the new birth ratio and realised that the local Chinese restaurants are now advertising in Spanish.

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Georgetown Needs An Exorcist

  Today brings news that Georgetown alumnus and author of The Exorcist William Peter Blatty intends to pursue a canon law lawsuit against his alma mater that may possibly result in Georgetown’s not being able to call itself a Catholic university any longer.  Not coincidentally, today also marked the appearance at Georgetown of Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius,...

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Has the Bell Begun to Toll for the GOP?

  Among the more controversial chapters in Suicide of a Superpower, my book published last fall, was the one titled, “The End of White America.” It dealt with the demographic decline of the white majority and what it portends for education, the U.S. economy, politics and national unity. That book and chapter proved the proximate cause...