• Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t

    Colby Cosh: For three years and change, the man who pledged a “more humble [American] foreign policy” has been raked over the coals for failing to adhere to that promise, despite the unusually strong reasons (e.g., the large ashen hole in the lower part of Manhattan) for a midterm course change. Now Bush has taken…

  • Being in Power Means Never Having to Admit You Were Wrong

    From Slate’s Timothy Noah: Not long ago, I spoke with a Democratic moderate about the war in Iraq. He said he considered support for the Iraq war to be a necessary prerequisite to assuming any powerful role in the party. It showed that the person in question was willing to project United States force abroad.…

  • So, Do I Need to Register Republican to Get Into Heaven?

    Via Telford Work I came across a link to something called “Worldview Weekend,” a site that promises to teach you to “live and think like a Christian.” The site even offers a “Worldview Quiz” that enables you to determine how “biblical” your worldview is. Well, much to my dismay, not only did I not score…

  • Thought for the Day

    It is only the novice in political economy who thinks it the duty of government to make its citizens happy. Government has no such office. To protect the weak and the minority from the impositions of the strong and the majority–to prevent any one from positively working to render the people unhappy, to do the…

  • Holding My Nose in November

    From Godspy: I’ve never been so close in my life to not voting in the presidential election at all—surely a cop-out and a sin for a conscientious citizen of any persuasion, religious or political. So, beyond sending a few bucks to Democrats for Life, I’m back to participating, it would appear, in that other quadrennial…

  • Mill’s Children

    If conservatives and libertarians disagree about ends, but agree (sometimes) about means, the reverse might be said of libertarians and liberals. To see why, consider that libertarians often trace their intellectual lineage to J.S. Mill’s “On Liberty.” For Mill, our proper ends are not given by religion or traditional morality. Rather, the proper end of…

  • Factory Farms and the Culture of Death

    Touchstone Magazine has recently put up an extensive archive of its articles going back to 1999. One of the gems I came across is a piece by Christopher Killheffer: “Our Food from God.” Killheffer writes: The industrial system of raising animals is not disordered because it kills chickens; it is disordered because it first, from…

  • An Unstable Fusion

    Today at Tech Central Station, Kenneth Silber tries to rekindle the romance between conservatism and libertarianism, which one could say has been on the rocks of late. Disagreements about everything from stem-cell research to the Iraq war threaten to put the final nail in the coffin of “fusionism” – the ideological glue (developed most notably…

  • That’ll Get Your Brain Going in the Morning!

    I know my day’s not complete without a dose of good and crunchy analytic philosophy of religion. The Maverick Philosopher is happy to oblige.

  • Thought for the Day

    Nothing is more sure, than that as “the Lord is loving to every man,” so “his mercy is over all his works;” all that have sense, all that are capable of pleasure or pain, of happiness or misery. In consequence of this, “He openeth his hand, and filleth all things living with plenteousness. He prepareth…