Author: admin

Yesterday I wrote of the arguments to be made on behalf of David Frum’s view that Obamacare is now substantially in place forever and impossible of repeal. As Daniel Finkelstein pointed out, those who opposed the bill on behalf (more or less) of the status quo are now confounded because it has become the status…

Nobody really knows at this point whether or not David Frum was right to have written that the passage of Obamacare on Sunday meant “conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.” My immediate reaction, like that of most conservatives, was to think the contention preposterous. Is not the bill, now…

In his column in today’s Wall Street Journal, Thomas Frank has looked at the Texas textbook controversy that I wrote about here and here and found that, among the conservative Texan textbook revisers, “outrage against the conspiracy of intellectuals seemed to lurk just below the surface.” Yes, so what’s his point? I guess it must be that any…

Goodness! How touchy are the devotees of fantasy lit, how quick to assume that they and their joy have been disrespected. One such is Daniel Crandall who has taken exception to a piece that I wrote about Avatar for the forthcoming number of The New Atlantis and that has already been posted on the magazine’s website….

Further to my last post about the Texas textbooks, I find this morning’s New York Times returning to the subject with renewed sneers by the same author, James C. McKinley, Jr., as he announces that the forces of “conservatism” have won their battle to force young Texans to learn (of all things) “the superiority of American capitalism,”…

Those darn Texans are at it again, according to The New York Times. Or, to be precise, it’s those darn “Texas Conservatives” who are said to “Seek Deeper Stamp on Texts.” Perhaps they should consider embossing them? But it turns out that James C. McKinley, Jr., is writing about the Texans’ penchant for tampering with…

Toby Young has a great piece about the imminent British elections in the Daily Telegraph blogs titled: “Does Cameron have what it takes to be a leading man? The Hollywood take on the general election campaign.” In it he handicaps the election based on the cinematic prospects of the two rival “narratives” of it, one with…

Normally, if you have no other claim to fame than your military career, you have to have been of four-star rank or higher or to have won the Congressional Medal of Honor to get an obituary in The New York Times. But that is not invariably true. You can also be a Tuskegee airman or…

At last my conjecture has been proved right. Beginning with what must surely go down in history as the oddest presidential election campaign to date in 2004 — it was arguably surpassed in 2008 by the contest between the war hero and the pop cultural celebrity — I and others noticed with dismay how during…