Unca Darrell

MAY 4 / Lapidary sentences

FROM AN ESSAY on how ripped today's male movie stars are:

It wasn't always this way. The silent-movie star Rudolph Valentino had the body of . . .

MARCH 12 / The one that got away

MAN, WAS it ever a great Unca D blog post! Too bad you can't see it.  

The Houston Chronicle came out Sunday for a higher federal minimum wage. All of you who are surprised should go stand over there. It's a very short line. 

Anyway, I wrote one of my better essays, if I do say so myself, on the entertainment value of watching leftists -- who fancy themselves as great science fanciers, in contradistinction to the likes of you and me, who are science deniers -- wrestle with . . .

MARCH 5 / Rasmussen on plain English

TO MOST Americans, maintaining spending at current levels would mean spending the same amount in 2013 as we spent in 2012. However, to those experienced in the mysterious ways of Washington, maintaining spending at current levels means . . .

FEBRUARY 28 / Progressives preach . . .

. . . more spending, more taxing, and more regulation. So does the uber-progressive Houston Chronicle.

In the last eight days, the paper -- in the voice of its editors, cartoonist, and public-affairs columnists -- has urged more spending at least six times, more regulation at least five times, and more taxes at least once. 

The paper frosted this three-layed cake with filigrees of criticism and mockery for those who would spend less, tax less, and regulate less: conservatives generally, the Tea Party in particular.

Details below.

DECEMBER 3 / Continetti on Obama, sarcasm, insult

BUSH WAS the biggest endorphin boost the Democratic Party had received in a long while. The Florida showdown in 2000 polarized the country. The left was incensed when Bush, whom they expected to behave as a caretaker president, governed along the lines he'd laid out during the campaign. His Christian faith and social conservative views repulsed liberals. . . .

NOVEMBER 14 / Style, usage, journalism

JAMES E. COURTER recalls his 25 years' teaching composition to university freshmen.

SEPTEMBER 17 / The purpose of freedom of speech is not . . .

. . . to protect Abraham Lincoln's right to give the Gettysburg Address. It's there to protect the right of idiots to spout nonsense.

Why?

SEPTEMBER 8 / Yuval Levin on "Coming Apart"

THIS VIRTUOUS [American] culture -- a highly cohesive, self-confident culture defined by strong families, faith in God, untiring industriousness and an almost instinctive law-abidingness -- is increasingly endangered today, and it is that danger than is the focus of Coming Apart. . . .

AUGUST 31 / Style, usage, journalism

The thing to read

IF YOU THINK an apostrophe was one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, you will never work for me. If you think a semicolon is a regular colon with an identity crisis, I will not hire you. . . .

AUGUST 29 / The money quotation from . . .

. . . Ann Romney's speech:

Mitt doesn't like to talk about how he has helped others because he sees it as a privilege, not a political talking point.

Here's what she should have said: