Even an expert must be mystified by the legal structures of the European Union Parliament and the European Commission. The EU Parliament has roughly 620 deputies, elected every five years from 15 Western European states. Voters from ElU countries have no decision over the election of other countries’ deputies to the EU Parliament. The president...
1598 search results for: Supreme+Court
Post
Wonders
Wonder Woman Produced by D.C. Entertainment Directed by Patty Jenkins Screenplay by Allen Heinberg Distributed by Warner Brothers Silence Produced by Cappa Defina Productions Directed by Martin Scorsese Screenplay by Martin Scorsese and Jay Cocks, from the novel by Shusaku Endo Distributed by Paramount Pictures Wonder Woman is the first installment of what threatens to...
Post
Where the Action Is
Between now and the turn of the century, 16 eastern and southeastern states will celebrate 200 years of statehood. Here in the hinterlands, seven more states will have their 100th birthday. Then there will be just five state centennials left, with Alaska and Hawaii as late desserts in 2059—when many East Coast states will be...
Post
When Censorship’s the Game, Despotism Is the Goal
We’re only a few months beyond the turn of the calendar and already I have a candidate for the word of the year: Censorship. Examples are proliferating at such a fast rate that it seems like a game of whac-a-mole just to keep up with all of them. A few of the most recent include:...
Post
Small Is Beautiful Versus Big Is Best
The phrase “Small is beautiful” was coined, or at least popularized, by the economist E.F. Schumacher, who chose it for the title of his ground-breaking international best-seller, published in 1973, that exploded like a beneficent bomb, demolishing, or at least throwing into serious question, many of the presumptions of laissez-faire economics. The subtitle of Schumacher’s...
Post
Defending the Family Castle, Part II
It was the invasion of property more than the taxes and confiscations themselves that annoyed the Americans and prepared them to resist the Stamp Act. It was not money per se, but the sacred rights of property that were at stake. If a man cannot be secure in his home, he cannot be comfortable in...
Post
Bait and Switch
According to pious American folklore, there was in 1787 a “Miracle at Philadelphia” in which demigod Founding Fathers gathered and gave the world the “U.S. Constitution”; thereby, as chanted by former Chief Justice Burger in a juvenile bicentennial panegyric, they changed human history forever—and got rid of the awful Articles of Confederation, which stood in...
Post
Speech for Speech’s Sake Free
One of the unfortunate after-effects of the so-called “Red Scare” of the early 50’s was the triumph of the “no limits” interpretation of the First Amendment, which has poisoned American political thought ever since. It goes something like this: the McCarthyite “reign of terror” permanently discredited the idea that you can suppress speech in a...
Post
Getting Back to Nature
“Human rights are fictions—but fictions with highly specific properties.” —Alasdair MacIntyre In 1960 John Courtney Murray, S.J., warned of the possibility that America was slipping into a new barbarism. In his best known work, We Hold These Truths, Father Murray said that barbarism “threatens when men cease to talk together according to reasonable laws.” Argument...
Post
Marines on Okinawa
Okinawa’s Governor Masahide Ota has learned what it means to be governor of a Japanese prefecture; precious little. When Mr. Ota stood up for Okinawans who no longer wish to lease their land to the American military, he was asserting an ancient Okinawan belief in private property: “It’s yours, do with it as you see...
Post
Trumpism Lives On!
Donald Trump may end up losing the 2020 election in the Electoral College, but he won the campaign that ended on Nov. 3. Democrats had been talking of a “sweep,” a “blowout,” a “blue wave” washing the Republicans out of power, capturing the Senate, and bringing in an enlarged Democratic majority in Nancy Pelosi’s House....
Post
The Doctors and the Bomb
The furor caused by the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, represented by its two leading sponsors and leaders. Dr. Bernard Lown of the United States and Dr. Yevgeny Chazov of the Soviet Union, provides a fine opportunity to review the revival of the politics of nuclear...
Post
‘Remember Us’: How to Fight Media Bombholing
A victim of media “bombholing” explains how the media drive their ratings and profits by publishing an unending series of wild, unsubstantiated stories, never stopping to correct the ones that came before.
Post
The Bishop Takes a Stand
In recent years America has seemed to lack the sort of bold churchman who is willing to put his penny-loafered foot down and say enough is enough. But according to recent press reports, the shoe has dropped. Even in these degraded times, there is a limit—a line you just can’t cross. What is that line?...
Post
Kelly Loeffler’s Missed Opportunity in the Georgia Run-off Debate
On the evening of Dec. 6, I watched the debate between Sen. Kelly Loeffler and the Reverend Raphael Warnock, who are running against each other for a U.S. Senate seat from Georgia with the runoff election scheduled for Jan. 5. As a non-leftist I am anxious to see the Georgia Senate seats now up for...
Post
The Dark, Dark Wood of Suicide
Among the many haunting and piteous images from the Inferno of Dante is this one. The travelers, in Canto XIII, enter a pathless wood. Dante, on Virgil’s coaching, snaps a twig from a thorn tree. The tree yelps in pain, and no wonder. The tree is the transmuted personage of a formerly great Florentine, Pier...
Post
Ben Shapiro’s Sloppy Mistakes Help Harris
In failing to fact check his story on Harris’s involvement in the Kavanaugh affair, Shapiro ends up pushing the liberal narrative.
Post
Estrogen Poisoning
A first-grade teacher in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., concludes that while some of her pupils suffer various degrees of parental neglect, others seem to be experiencing the opposite extreme: such pampering at home that they cannot even tie their own shoes, and must have it done for them. It takes a while before she...
Post
It’s 10 A.M. on a School Day—Do You Know Who Has Your Child?
Americans generally agree that our public schools are not what they should be, but the strongest resistance to improvement comes from the jokes some people refer to as “teachers’ unions.” Take the strange ease of a Minneapolis nonprofit corporation. Public School Incentives (PSI), which has proposed some interesting measures for public schools. PSFs founder, Ted...
Post
Books in Brief: August 2021
Becoming Elisabeth Elliot, by Ellen Vaughn (B&H Books; 320 pp., $24.99). This is the official biography of the wife of famed missionary martyr Jim Elliot, who was killed along with four other missionaries while attempting to bring the Gospel to a group of savage natives in the South American jungle during the mid-1950s. Elliot was...
Post
Pardon the Pardons
It is reported that “faithful adherence to legal principle sometimes [takes] a back seat to the more compelling demands of politics.” This appears to be a pointed assessment of a little-publicized controversy surrounding the pardon of four convicts by last year’s Acting Governor of Arkansas, dentist Jerry Jewell. As president pro tempore of the state...
Post
Mixed Signals
Rudolph Giuliani in one of his first actions as mayor of New York City, eliminated a controversial set-aside program that had been instituted in 1991 by the Dinkins administration. Considering the extent to which the use of quotas now permeates American society, any victory for the merit system is reason for celebration. The policy in...
Post
In Search of the New American Man
The evident purpose of Taming the Prince is to provide a respectable philosophical pedigree for the usurpations and abuses of power by American Presidents since FDR. (Professor Mansfield dedicates the book to his father, “constant advocate of a strong presidency from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.”) Where conservatives such as Corwin, Kendall, Burnham, and Samuel...
Post
Sam Francis Was Right
It has been seven years since Sam Francis died. But the years since his untimely death merely show the accuracy of his insights. Francis’s writing was marked not only by loyalty to the people from whom he came but by an unswerving devotion to telling the truth about the way the world really is, not...
Post
Democracy and Declarations of War
The winter Balkan lull has let Congress off the hook for rolling over and playing dead in response to President Clinton’s dispatch of troops to Bosnia. It is cruel irony that the fewer casualties American troops sustain, the more likely we are to continue permitting further such devaluations of democracy. That will accentuate the eternal...
Post
For the Children
“I figured if he was there, I’d make sure he wasn’t there [again],” Harlan Drake, a 33-year-old truck driver, told Det. Sgt. Scott Shenk of the Shiawassee County Sheriff’s Department. But on the morning of September 11, 2009, James Pouillon was there, sitting across the street from Owosso High School as he had on so...
Post
Waste of Money
Frustration Joyce Carol Oates: Mysteries of Winterthurn; E. P. Dutton; New York. When it’s literary gee-whiz time, people like Isaac Asimov — the man who produces books, stories, and essays the way that McDonald’s cranks out Big Macs, fries, and Cokes — are trotted out. In the face of Asimov, many literate persons, most of...
Post
From White House to Blockhouse
Bill Clinton is the American icon, whose face is rapidly eclipsing both the profile of the heroic young Kennedy and the simpering grin of Jimmy Carter—the presidential images that until recently symbolized victory and despair for Democrats and something else for Republicans. It was understandable if, in the early 60’s, Republicans could not appreciate the...
Post
Will Georgia Halt the Radicals’ Revolution?
“In victory, magnanimity… in defeat, defiance.” That counsel about human conflict comes from Winston Churchill. And President Donald Trump, given all he has endured for five years from those piously pleading now for a “time of healing,” cannot be faulted for his defiant resolve to unearth any and all high crimes or misdemeanors committed in the...
Post
Fake Art
The problem of forged art, always a complicated one, has been made immeasurably more complicated in this century because of two factors. One, the appreciation of tribal art in its many varieties has coincided with the gradual disappearance of tribal living worldwide; thus some of the most vexing problems of authenticity in the art world...
Post
Getting the Scoop
“All we want are the facts, ma’am.” —Sgt. Joe Friday Not long ago I was sorting through old papers for disposal. I came across a clipping saved for some forgotten reason. On the reverse was this headline: “NAACP Chief Says More Assistance Needed.” This headline might have appeared in my hometown paper today (though I...
Post
The Tribute Which Vice Pays to Virtue
Hypocrisy, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld told us, is the tribute which vice pays to virtue. Tributes of this kind have been flowing lately from the members of the United States Senate and the mainstream press who clamored for some sort of censure of President William Jefferson Clinton, or who scrambled, for a while, to...
Post
Crescent Moon Over Europe
Jean Raspail, the French novelist and explorer, now 90 and living in a suburb of Paris, must be experiencing the eerie feeling of living inside The Camp of the Saints, his most famous work, as he follows the contemporary news reports from across the Continent. The tens of thousands of Third World migrants are arriving...
Post
All Play and No Work
A kid today, if he aspires to anything other than slack itself, aspires to one of three “crafts”: acting, sports, or rock ’n’ roll. He wants either to play a part, to play a game, or to play guitar. He wants to be a player. The work ethic has been replaced by the shirk-and-perks ethic: “I’d...
Post
Archie Bunker Back Stories
Carl Reiner’s son, Rob, takes part in a grand tradition on the left of demonizing normal, religious people after being advanced, personally, by powerful relationships. On the left, it’s all relative and “all in the family.”
Post
The Candidate
She’s embarrassing and unpredictable, known as a “gadfly” and a “maverick” (among other names). She admits she’s never been a joiner. She has alienated both political parties and the Minnesota media. There are no topics on which she doesn’t have a strong opinion and no circumstances under which she would stifle any opinion. One cringes...
Post
The People Knew What Was At Stake
This is an extraordinarily great day for those of us who believe in the rule of law, separation of powers, and federalism. We in the academy, in particular, were constantly told that in the 21st century there was no place for the traditionally conservative ideas of adherence to the original understanding of the Constitution, in...
Post
Dixie Dystopia
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again. –Mark Twain Just in case you have not heard, we are in the midst of a Culture War. Death by Journalism? is a battle report from the front lines. The Last Confederate Flag and Bedford: A...
Post
The Many Reinventions of Jeffrey Sachs
“Jeff Sachs is like the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland, moving from cup to cup. He can never return to any country that he advised, since they all hate him. It happened in Latin America, in Slovenia, in Poland, a few of the Baltic States, and it was the same in Russia. They maintain...
Post
Covert Policing in Modern America
When the former communist bloc disintegrated, the opening of secret police files in several European countries demonstrated the incredibly thorough hold that the clandestine state had possessed over ordinary citizens. In East Germany, for example, State Security (Stasi) files revealed the existence of vast networks of control and surveillance in any area of life that...
Post
The Wasted Century
The Great War and its inevitable successor have been called Europe’s civil war, and there is some truth in this characterization. Divided by language, religion, and culture, the nations of Europe were nonetheless united in a common civilization that developed out of the ruins of the Christianized Roman Empire. Despite the strains brought on by...
Post
Twenty Years After the Fall, Part 2
Moscow, so the film title went, does not believe in tears, and stories of massacres by criminal gangs who control major enterprises, contract killings over business and political disputes, and savagely beat or kill journalists who don’t recognize the limits of Russian press freedom still pop up in today’s “middle class” Russia, where this sort...
Post
From El Paso to Plymouth
Last November, a delegation of citizens from the far West Texas border city of El Paso made the long journey to Plymouth, Massachusetts. The purpose of the El Pasoans’ visit was to challenge Plymouth’s long-held—and nearly universally accepted—claim that it was the site of the first Thanksgiving to be held on what is now United...
Post
None of the Above
I am running against myself in the November 5 general election. For the second time in my brief legislative tenure, I am providing constituents with “None of the Above” (NOTA) adhesive ballot stickers. Michigan election law docs not provide a NOTA option, but it does allow write-in campaigns using stickers. So I have produced NOTA...
Post
The Heart of Darkness
When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, over 58,000 Americans had lost their lives over the course of almost 20 years. Whatever one may think of the justice or prudence of the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, only the most callous of souls regards that loss of life with complete indifference. When the Northern Illinois...
Post
Busing and Its Consequences
Ten years ago, federal district judge Leonard B. Sand ordered the city of Yonkers, New York, to integrate its public schools. Sand accused the city of 40 years of discrimination by concentrating public housing projects in southwest Yonkers. To comply with Sand’s ruling, many neighborhood schools closed their doors as busing became de rigueur. Parents...
Post
Vol. 3 No. 3 March 2001
The pro-Gore bias of the American media during the five weeks of post-election legal and political wrangling was as unsurprising as it was obvious. Most foreign media were even less restrained. On December 14, BBC commentator Brian Barron told British television viewers that George W. Bush’s “mandate is all but invisible.” Radio 4 network commentator...
Post
The War Over America’s Past
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” That was the slogan of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s “1984,” where Winston Smith worked ceaselessly revising the past to conform to the latest party line of Big Brother. And so we come to the battle over history books...
Post
Who Owns the Future? Dems or GOP?
For Republicans, the returns were mixed on Nov. 3. Though he carried burdens unrivaled by a president since Herbert Hoover—a plague that has killed 230,000 Americans in eight months and crashed the economy to depths not seen since the ’30s—Donald J. Trump amassed 72 million votes, the largest total in Republican Party history. And while...
Post
The Unprotected Class
To combat anti-white discrimination is not something we should do for whites but for all Americans, because if we don’t change the course we are on, we are all going to suffer.