WITHIN MINUTES after the Oklahoma disaster, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse indecently blamed Republicans and, to my ear, conservative southerners.
When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn't just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas. It hits Rhode Island with floods and storms. It hits Oregon with acidified seas. It hits Montana with dying forests.
With equally unseemly dispatch -- and for the same goal -- the Houston Chronicle also rushed to capitalize on the human suffering. That goal: to defend and promote . . .
THE MAY 14 report of the Treasury Inspector General . . . explicitly stated that the [Exempt Office's] actions were "not politically biased," but were attributable solely to the confusions of lower staff members, who somehow for nearly three years never quite understood their jobs assignments. Don't believe a word of that whitewash. All the nitpicking questions and pointless delays, such as those experienced by the Ohio Tea Party, were calibrated to . . .
THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE did right by the IRS scandal in an editorial last Thursday. The targeting of conservative groups was Orwellian, the editorial said.
We think we speak for most Americans when we say . . .
THE ENTERPRISE formerly known as ACORN once ran the election-fraud division of the progressive project, the ultimate goal of which is to fundamentally transform America. In different iterations, it still does.
The crudest forms of election fraud -- such as signing up fictional voters, then casting their ballots by mail -- are sometimes found out. Whereupon the organization wrings its hands, declares that it never authorized such a despicable thing, and fires someone.
Next election, the same players do the same thing.
. . . a delightful stint in Sicily, following my dad's footsteps through one of the eleven countries he visited in World War II. His tour guide was George S. Patton, Jr., who permitted little time for sightseeing. Lady Di and I have made up for it. Pictures are being posted here, with many more to come.
WHY ARE the opinion pages of big-city American newspapers almost universally liberal? This question inspired a round of journalistic navel-gazing at reason.com (libertarian) and thedailybeast.com (the zombie that once was Newsweek). Our own Houston Chronicle, which seemingly prefers death to the dishonor of having even one genuine traditionalist and conservative on the local opinion payroll, popped up as . . .
PROVIDING A CUP of clean water in Jesus' name. What could be better?
Last year the Houston-based charity started started paying local coordinators to continue the work of LWI after American volunteers drill a well and move on. A December fundraising letter from Mike Mantel, president, tells this story:
Erica Greider supplies a fresh view of the nation's second most populous sate in "Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn From the Strange Genius of Texas." An editor at Texas Monthly, the author explains the state's much-heralded record of economic growth and does her best to strip away some of . . .
UNIVERSITIES, [Donald Kagan] proposed, are failing students and hurting American democracy. Curricula are "individualized, unfocused and scattered." On campus, he said, "I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance . . .
OUR OLD PAL Nick Anderson, like all progressives, is a gun-control absolutist. His latest contribution appears today. The point he makes is predictable and, in its essence, wrong. But it is done with good craft, effectively, and within the rules of the cartooning game, fairly and squarely.
His headline, though, is a sad bit of work. It opens a window to the sarcastic-to-the-point-of-hateful progressive attitude toward our sweet land. "Welcome . . .
. . . that's what they were talking about, way back then.
The fact was that in this country, we had gone very much further toward socialism than most democratic countries in Europe -- in the extent of the public sector, with the nationalized industries, and the amount of control, and to some extent the attitudes. We had to turn back. In other words, the center is always the midway between two points, and the whole of the political debate had gone to the left. . .
. . . a family project. I may post occasionally over the next couple of months, but you're excused from checking back until early or mid-June. Meanwhile, a couple of parting shots:
HOUSTON CHRONICLE cartoonist Nick Anderson today celebrates the death of Margaret Thatcher with an image of her as a particularly ugly harridan, berating God at a desk in heaven. "What kind of socialist dystopia are you running here, kind sir?"
God, miserable, head in hands, hides under the desk: "I think I've died and gone to hell."
