America's Polarized Politics

Used to be that liberals were liberals before they were Democrats, and conservatives were conservatives
before they were Republicans. Not any more. The extinction of the Southern Democrats means that
all the conservatives live in the Republican Party, according to
Bruce Bartlett.

On top of that is the little problem for the Democrats that the middle class votes for the Republican Party.
The moderate Democrats are trying to understand what is going on, writes
Stephen Dinan.
They have found that, viewed from the
perspective of family income, the Republican Party gets a majority a mere $5,000 above the poverty line.

Among white voters, President Bush got a majority of support beginning at an income threshold of $23,300 -- about $5,000 above the poverty level for a family of four.

Only African American voters do not trend Republican as income rises to middle-class levels.

Reacting to Globalization

Tony Blankley puts the French “non” in the context of
“globalization and its reaction.” Everyone is putting their
own spin on the event, just as everyone put their spin on the results
of the presidential election last fall. But
Blankley
asks us to step back a little
and think more generally.

But globalization and its reaction are the big facts of our era. The Islamist insurgency and terror is part of that reaction. Pat Buchanan’s protectionism and America Firstism is part of that reaction. And Europe’s vote Sunday is another form of the Great Reaction to globalization. In ways either benign or malignant, peaceful or violent, conservative or radical, the peoples of the world are beginning to defend their cultures against the cold, soulless intrusion of the globalizing leviathan. The struggle is only beginning. It will, in the end, transform our ways of life.

Actually, we could paint an even broader canvas. Globalization has
been going on for the last 500 years. And everywhere it has been it has extinguished
comfortable, face-to-face society with the challenge of indirect, contractual
and market relations. Let’s see now, it all seems very familiar:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Thanks Chuck. We needed that.

Charter School Tipping Point?

Are we approaching the tipping point on charter schools? The point at which the hard up-hill slog
against powerful interests like the teachers’ unions and liberal gate-keepers suddenly breaks through
the barriers? There’s a
political storm
brewing in New York that might be the hurricane that sweeps
all before it. A New York State assemblyman has realized that there may be more political mileage
in supporting choice in education than in opposing it.

Undereducated of the World Unite!

Straight from the reading room of the Library of Congress comes this manifesto from
“Karl” Brooks.
“In the information age, in which knowledge is power and money, the class struggle is fought between the educated elite and the undereducated masses.”
Yes. How true. “The educated class has torn away from the family its sentimental veil and reduced it to a mere factory for the production of little meritocrats.”
Right On, brother!

Undereducated workers of the world, unite! Let the ruling educated class tremble! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win!

Halleluiah!

What's Wrong With Single Moms?

The Brits are having a media frenzy over a family of single moms. Julie, single mother of three girls
is now the proud grandmother of three grandchildren, one each from her daughters, who became single mothers at age 12, 14, and 16.
What’s wrong with that, asks aging feminist
Germaine Greer?

What indeed? Apart from the trifling $50,000 a year in various government benefits.

Let us leave aside the merely aesthetic and the economic, the culturally determined distate for
bastardy, and the probability that the children of “lone parents” are less likely to get a
good education and contribute to society. Let us think about safety.

Did you know, Ms Greer, that the child of a woman who is living unmarried with a man who is not the child’s
father is 33 times more likely to suffer physical harm than a child living with its married, natural
parents? You can find the numbers in James Bartholomew’s
The Welfare State We’re In, page 271. Not impressed?

Well, let us put the argument in another way. Suppose that a social scientist published a study showing that the
children of fundamentalist Christians were 33 times more likely to suffer physical abuse
during childhood than average. Who can doubt that the author of the study would be on the Today show the very next
day and that Katie Couric would be interviewing her with deeply furrowed brow? And who can doubt that
Democrats would be sponsoring legislation within days to “make our children safe?”

Yet here we have data that show that children being raised outside of marriage are significantly less
safe, and that children in a house with a man not their father face an increased risk of 3,300 percent. Yet
the liberal experts and the liberal activists and the liberal legislators and the liberal media celebrities are strangely silent. What is going on?

Hansen to US Critics: You are Boring

Fed up with PepsiCo CFO Indra Nooyi and her middle-finger insult to the US? Pissed off by the
Pakistani cricketer Imran Khan who incited the Koran riots?
Victor Davis Hanson is too. And he has advice for international elitists that scorn
the US. Shuck it off. Cleanse yourself of the $5 million job at Pepsi. Forswear the filthy western
lucre that you earn playing international cricket. Otherwise, you are like all the rest that criticise
the West but wallow in its pleasures and its freedoms.

Otherwise, you are “hypocritical,” “predictable,”
and worst of all, “boring.”

WaPo: Wow! House Rules Committee Rules

The Washington Post publishes an article that concludes that Republicans,
having won Congress and the presidency, now have more power. Yes, this is startling. But
there is more. Apparently
they now, according to reporter

Jim VandeHei, control the Rules Committee in the House of Representatives and this gives
them control of legislation in the House. Another shocker.

But here is the corker. Some Republicans think that some judges have
“deliberately decided to be in the face of the president and Congress,” and they
mean to do something about it. You mean that over the last generation the courts have been finding penumbras and emanations in the
constitution, penumbras and emanations that they use to foil the intent of the nation’s elected
legislators? No!