The debt ceiling compromise is the end of the liberal dream that the Obama presidency would do for the left what Ronald Reagan’s time in office did for the right. Stanley Greenberg, one of the best pollsters anywhere and a leading intellectual light of the Democratic party, has a must read in the NY Times […]

As Ramadan begins and the Islamic world starts its month of fasting, two historic events are pointing in the same direction: the era of Jacobin secularism in Middle Eastern government is over. The mass resignations of Turkey’s top military leaders is the good news; the murderous crackdown by Syrian forces loyal to Butcher Assad is […]

One of the things they teach you in survivor school is that the wilderness is often full of food that city dwellers either don’t recognize or are culturally conditioned to ignore.  Seeing a box turtle plodding through a forest glade, a fallen log teeming with termite grubs or a field of dandelions, the average city […]

The ghastly, shocking news from Norway has stunned the whole world.  Empathy for the young victims and their families, horror at the cold blooded and deliberate evil behind this act, and fearful wonder at the depths of madness it reveals are all joined together.  We Godbotherers will be bothering God about this, asking for his […]

The great waves of civil rights legislation and urban policy since the 1960s had successes and some failures.  The great success has been the establishment of a much larger and better educated Black middle class.  Forget the high profile achievements of the few — two of the last three Secretaries of State, the current President […]

This time of year it is worth remembering  Mein Kampf, the turgid and unreadable Bible of the Nazi movement that was published back in July of 1925.  The last time I looked, you could still buy it at the international airport newstand in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur — along with other classics of […]

We’ve been trying to solve the problems of the American inner cities for almost fifty years with the ideas, institutions and techniques of twentieth century progressive and liberal thought.  While individuals have been helped, the Black middle class has grown, and better policing has brought crime rates down out of the stratosphere, those left in […]

If the green movement hasn’t done much for the planet lately, it has given us some cool new expressions.  One of the best is “global weirding,” the trendy new way of branding the apocalypse formerly known as global warming.  It combines the virtue of ‘climate change’ (which is that anything from deep freezes and record […]

The election of the first African-American president was widely hailed as a giant step forward for American racial politics.  The future, however, may remember this administration as a giant step back for Black America during a period of  deepening alienation, anger and despair in America’s inner cities. Not since the 1960s, when scores of American […]

American drug policy may be on the verge of big changes, but the results won’t be the Stoner Utopia drug activists dream of — and the changes may not do very much for the inner city. I’ve been posting about the inner cities lately and there is one subject that can’t be avoided in dealing […]