Unca Darrell

SEPTEMBER 28 / Stuff to read . . .

. . . about Texas, from Tim Blair, "Australian diary," spectator.co.uk, September 20, 2015 (my emphasis).

Texas is like Australia with . . .

SEPTEMBER 25 / The problem with Congress is . . .

. . . not personal; it's structural.

By "personal" I mean that the problem is not that House Members and Senators are less than perfectly competent, intelligent principled, or honest or anything like that. To a greater lesser extent, depending on the person, they are all less than perfect. Always have been; always will be. That's the only kind of Congress it is possible to have, given the unavoidable necessity of selecting members from among our fellow human beings. (Ditto for the White House and Supreme Court.) Our Founders understood this and set up the House and Senate to function in ways designed to aggregate members' wisdom and reduce their room for mischief.

The real problem is . . .

SEPTEMBER 24 / Now that Walker is out, which GOP candidate . . .

. . . will get Unca D's good wishes and massive campaign dollars?

SEPTEMBER 24 / Now that Walker is out, which GOP candidate . . .

. . . will get Unca D's massive monthly campaign contributions?  

SEPTEMBER 24 / Stuff to read

IS PRESIDENT OBAMA's foreign policy a success or failure? The answer, according to two intriguing essays in the current Foreign Affairs, is . . .

SEPTEMBER 23 / Scott Walker would have made a fine, possibly . . .

. . . great, president. He was good on policy and, in his state, on politics. He had the smarts and the courage to offer hope that he could repair some of the destruction of progressives' fundamental transformation. Now, alas, he has pulled out of the race. His political support faded and, with it, his campaign money. I send a small check every month and would have continued to do so. Now, though, it is time to look for a new candidate. That's the system. Long live the system.

Why did his campaign implode? The best analysis I have seen comes from . . .

SEPTEMBER 23 / Stuff to read

THERE ARE STILL intelligent, well-informed, and, most importantly, honest left intellectuals. Not many, but some. Possibly the best is Fred Hiatt, editorial-page editor of The Washington Post. His specialty is foreign affairs, on which he is a Democrat internationalist, a once-robust tribe, now small and scattered, now largely ignored by those in power. He is also a sober man. He chooses his words carefully. On most issues, he is sympathetic to the president and to Democrats. So when Fred Hiatt says that in Syria and Iraq, Mr. Obama has "presided over a humanitarian and cultural disaster of epochal proportions," he deserves special attention.

He said this in the first sentence of "Obama Syria Achievement," washingtonpost.com, September 6, 2015, set out (with Unca D's commentary) below. Worse than the epochal disaster, he says, is that the president has anesthetized the American people. We are no longer appalled by appalling things, and Mr. Obama is responsible for this.    

SEPTEMBER 22 / Stuff to read

THE WORLD's Most Valuable Sports Teams, according to Forbes:

1. Real Madrid, Soccer, $3.26 billion, with an asterisk (see below)

2. Dallas Cowboys, Football, $3.20 billion, with the same asterisk

SEPTEMBER 21 / Stuff to read

Q. How many wives have you had?

A. I've been married four times.

Q. How does this wife that shot you . . .

SEPTEMBER 18 / Stuff to read . . .

. . . and why context matters:

If Katy [Perry] were approached by a male that impressed her with his courtship colors and bobbing, swaying dance, she might submit . . .