First You Need A Majority

Paul Starr in The American Prospect reads Democrats the Riot Act. You can’t become a governing
majority unless you compromise
your sacred principles. It would help, of course, to have principles that the majority of the
American people could agree with.

An Invitation to Suicide

The advantage of liberalism was that it could never quite define itself, writes William Voegeli. “We’re
in favor of a lot of things and we’re against mighty few,” Lyndon Johnson assured us.
Yet, to develop a new narrative, Democrats must get off their current reflexive support
of the mothering welfare state.
Tell us where it will all end,
hectors Voegeli. Tell us when you’ll be finished nannying us and lecturing us, as if Democrats could ever do that. Don’t drink from the
cup Hamlet, just don’t do it!

Notice that conservatives have the opposite problem. Once they have
put the ownership society in place and restored a modicum of respect for the rule of law, who needs them?

Britland: New Labour Reality

RMC Chappie David Green exposes Britain’s New Labour Party
hypocrisy.
Beneath all the sweet talk
of modernizing is a crude power play to create more government employees and more recipients of “benefits.”
A great deal for the Labour Party, but it makes Britain into a nation of supplicants to the state.

Britland: School Chaos

And you thought American public schools were bad. Read how
rowdy
the kids are in British schools.
The thing to remember is we had 90 percent literacy in the US before Horace Mann and the common school movement
in the 1830s. And Britland had pretty well everyone going to school before the government started
nationalizing the schools in 1870.

Steyn: Let's Worry About the Euro Quagmire

Now that the Iraqis have decided to give the terrorists the finger, sensitive Mark
Steyn is starting to worry about the
quagmire in Europe.
These days, Iraq looks like
the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. But Eurabia? Steyn’s not so sure about them.

A Bold Tax Reform Plan

Stephen Moore proposes a startlingly
simple tax reform plan.
Enact a flat tax with maximum rate
of 20 percent (“there would be no deductions whatsoever,
except for a generous personal deduction and child deduction”)
and let people decide whether to pay according to the new tax or the old tax. That way
people with e.g. mammoth mortgage interest deducations could stay with the old system and the rest of
us could switch.

Iraq Election: Handing Out Medals

After the spectacular turnout in Sunday’s Iraq election, it’s time to name names, as they say. And
Stephen Schwartz says
there aren’t too many names that deserve any credit. Most of us lolled lazily in
the “coalition of the wrong.”