Palin strikes back. Photo: Sarah Palin in youth. The ingenue, the gal next door. Cute.
Sen. Pat Leahy: Liar. But he seems so grandfatherly.
The greatest American preachers
The public has cold feet about government-run medical care
6% of Americans are paranoid nuts
Guns: what are they for?
Bill O'Reilly knows no science, drinks the Kool Aid
Lots of discussion of academic tenure at Phi Beta Cons. I think the concept is obsolete.
Israel needs "serious self-reflection," but Iran doesn't?
Why Goldman loves Cap&Trade. They ain't stupid.
I think this graph from Synth makes the same point as The B's post last night:
Related - something fascinating: Vet costs have been rising in synch with human medical costs! Also related: Hugs as healthcare.
Why Maggie Matters. A quote from a Claremont review of a new book on Maggie Thatcher:
In Britain at that time, the more enterprising people despaired of its future. Britain was retreating from empire, and industrial managers no longer had the power to manage. This feebleness was not just a British disease. It was widespread throughout the Western world. John Hoskyns, one of Thatcher's advisers, observes that Thatcher was in part a trail blazer for Ronald Reagan, because under President Jimmy Carter, "America was suffering, in a less extreme form, from the same fashionable left-of-center waffle that we [in Britain] had been doing in spades, for years." One can only say (and as Berlinski recognizes) that the "waffle" still hasn't gone away. It survives in universities, bureaucracies, and large areas of the judiciary. In Britain it may currently be identified with the causes favored by the late Princess Diana.
It was Thatcher who rejected this feebleness, and her triumphant government from 1979 to 1990 was a succession of battles against what often seemed at the time like a classical hydra. Along with her Conservative colleague Keith Joseph, Thatcher espoused a Hayekian version of the free market. The result was not merely a changed policy but something like a moral revolution. She denounced socialism as an immoral system that enfeebled those who lived under it (much as Ronald Reagan declared the Soviet Union an evil empire), leading to the same sniffy disapproval in Britain that Reagan inspired in American liberals.
