Political analysis is not our strong suit here at VI, but what’s a blog for if not for offering amateurish, half-baked opinions? Tally ho, then! I didn’t see the debate last night (my wife and I watched the truly wonderful Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind instead), but I perused the transcript this morning as…

From Virginia Postrel: Weirdest Line of the Night “I’m going to get it right for those soldiers, because it’s important to Israel, it’s important to America, it’s important to the world, it’s important to the fight on terror.” I actually replayed this on Tivo to make sure I heard right. Because it’s important to Israel?????…

Huzzah! The father of our country turned his prodigious talents to, among other things, whiskey-making after his retirement: When Washington left the presidency and returned to Mount Vernon in 1797, his plantation manager, a Scotsman named James Anderson, suggested that his boss use the farm’s excess grain to make whiskey for the local market. Washington…

From Terry Mattingly: 1 – Have only one television set in the home. Media critic Neil Postman has said that people have always had castles in the air and imaginary lives, but that it was not until television that people actually tried (perhaps statistically speaking) to live in them. … 3 – Children should never…

This is just wrong. (via Eve Tushnet)

…maybe all this hand-wringing is pointless since your vote won’t count anyway.

Two blogs of note added to the ol’ blogroll: Mere Comments is the blog associated with Touchstone Magazine: A Journal of Mere Christianity. One of the editors of the New Pantagruel, another fine publication, blogs at The Japery.

Scandal of Particularity has a good discussion on whether Christians ought to vote. The post links to a forum on the Ekklesia project where the issue is debated vigorously, as well as an essay by evangelical scholar Mark Noll on why he will not be voting for president. There are two arguments at work here,…

The London Spectator interviews conservative philosopher Roger Scruton: Two issues stand out. ‘Europe — our legal autonomy, our right to govern ourselves’, and ‘immigration — our right to control our own borders, and to demand cultural assimilation of people who settle here. If the Conservative party were to make those its central policies, it would…

I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal. — C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock