Republicans in Better Shape Than You Think

Michael Barone
runs the numbers,
the hard numbers from the last election. He finds that electorally,
Republicans are in good shape. Many Democrats represent districts that voted for the president last
November. And voters agree that “something” should be done about Social Security.

Parents Pushing Back on Wacko Colleges

Parents aren’t too pleased about college tuition and wacko left-wing politics. This college consultant
warns the colleges that there are
unhappy clients out there and that they had better get their act together or face the consequences.

NYT on Einstein in 1905

At its best The New York Times can be really good, as this oped recapping the annus
mirabilis of
Einstein in 1905 reminds us. In four papers, Einstein remade physics, and no more so
than in the paper that proposed that light was “stream of tiny packets or bundles of
energy that have since come to be known as photons.” It was that discovery that led twenty years
later to quantum mechanics.

Campus Bias by "Anonymous"

So you didn’t really believe all that conservative whining about liberal bias in the university, eh?
Thought that it reflected more on the paranoia of conservatives rather than the transgressions of
tenured professors? Here is the story of a
European professor
who came to teach in the United States and was shocked
by what he found on campus. It makes rather exciting reading. Of course, he could be lying, but the
telling theme is how conservative students sniffed him out and came to him just to tell their stories.
The exciting thing is the feeling that the radical left wing culture on campus is not just wrong, it
is a blunder.

Steyn: JPII, The Scourge of the Secularists

It’s odd, opines the oracular Mark Steyn, that Jim Callaghan, a former British prime minister who, held all four great political
offices in Britain—and failed at all four—should get a better send off on his death than
the remarkable John Paul II. But then, it’s not odd, is it? John Paul II
stood like a bulwark
against
the entire secular world view and all its works, like, oh, socialism and fascism, both of which, like Edward
Teller, he had experienced personally, on the receiving end, so to speak.

Of course John Paul II tried to make life difficult for the modernising elites. The
New York Times complains that
“Among liberal Catholics,
he was criticised for his strong opposition to abortion, homosexuality and
contraception.”
No doubt. In the pope’s view, when you reduce sex to an
“instrument for self-assertion and the selfish satisfaction
of personal desires and instincts,” you diminish its real meaning.
“Thus the original import of human sexuality is
distorted and falsified, and the two meanings, unitive and procreative, inherent
in the very nature of the conjugal act, are artificially separated.”
The whole point of the modern project, as understood by the liberal media and the liberal academy, is
precisely against the pope’s view.

Steyn: The Importance of a Cracked-up Name

Do you wonder what Princeton Lyman, Monteagle Stearns, and Spurgeon Keeny Jr. have to
do with Norman Lear and the Republican crack-up, then Mark Steyn is your man. He’ll
explain
it all to you. Having fun with people whose first names sound like
last names always used to be a Democratic parlor game. Now that Republicans are doing the
sneering, it has to mean something, no?

Saddam WMDs Down, But Saddam WMD Budget Up

So we didn’t find WMDs in Iraq, according to the
latest report on
WMD intelligence.
But in the years before
the Iraq War, Saddam’s budget for WMD research and development was up, big time. So what does that mean? Bush Lied? Saddam Lied?
We should fire the entire intelligence community? We should double its budget?
We should impeach Bush for acting on mistaken
intelligence? It depends on whose ox you want to gore.