When president-elect Barack Obama chose evangelical leader Rick Warren to lead a prayer at his inauguration the cultural Left threw the predictable fits. Said Democratic political consultant Chad Griffith “Rick Warren needs to realize that he is further dividing us at a time when the country needs to come together.” In light of the Rick Warren controversy, such “coming together” rhetoric, … [Read More]

A recent profile on Leonard Bernstein in a New York magazine brought back memories. The Bernstein piece was obviously a hagiography, written by someone who certainly knows his music but who allowed “Lenny’s” celebrity to overshadow his common sense. Bernstein was certainly musical, but he was shallow as a composer, vain in his conducting, a terrible show off when it came … [Read More]

  “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system,” President Bush told CNN, defending his offer of $17 billion in loans to the Big Three “to make sure the economy doesn’t collapse.”         Thus did Bush concede that protectionism, if a critical U.S. industry is in peril, must trump free-trade ideology. For in offering the bailout to … [Read More]

2008 was like herpes, very hard to get rid of.  2009 will be worse, trust me, as Bernie Madoff used to tell the suckers. This one, incidentally, is not over. The greatest scam ever perpetrated will go on and on. Madoff was not alone, and if the crooks in the SEC who turned a blind eye to his Ponzi scheme are … [Read More]

Having just watched John Gibson on FOX-news discuss The War On Christmas, his commentary on trouble-making atheists, which is a theme that Bill O’Reilly has also worked for profit, it seems Gibson has a skewed view about our cultural wars. In his view, our country is fine, save for those particularly obsessive atheists who hang around the ACLU. This group is … [Read More]

People say that the best cure for a hangover is a hair of the dog that bit you. The people who say that are typically alcoholics. They’re using the logic of an addict, whose reason has been fried by a short-circuit in the pleasure-centers of the brain. Such people think it’s funny when they fall down at a parish Christmas party … [Read More]

When I was young, there was much talk of “the Christmas spirit,” and I’ve always been fortunate enough to begin experiencing the joy appropriate for this time of year sometime before the big day.  This year, that happened this past Sunday.  Going to church in the morning helped put me in the mood, as I knew that the next hymn I … [Read More]

“De mortuis nil nisi bonum.” Of the dead, nothing but good. So said Dean Acheson of Sen. Joe McCarthy on his death in 1957. “Tailgunner Joe” had bedeviled the secretary of state for his lassitude toward communist penetration of State in President Truman’s time. But the passing of Mark Felt, associate director of the FBI in the later Nixon years, lately … [Read More]

I went to Bath & Body Works at the mall one morning just before the Christmas shopping season. There I was, an adult with a good job and a career, and I was scrounging for sales and coupons so that I could spend $10 and get items worth $33. In the checkout line there was a woman and her daughter—the girl … [Read More]

In his 40 years as a libertarian gadfly, Walter Block is still best known for his 1977 book Defending the Undefendable, in which he defends pimps, drug dealers, blackmailers, corrupt cops, and loan sharks as economic heroes. Surely the economics Department at Loyola Maryland was aware of his heterodox scholarship and expected controversial remarks when they invited him to speak to … [Read More]