[It’s Christmas Eve today and time for the oldest tradition at Via Meadia: our annual Yule Blog when we present the thirteen posts of Christmas running from Christmas Eve through Twelfth Night. During this holiday season in 2011-2012 there will be some light ordinary blogging as well and in January we will return to a […]

We already have 1930s style economic problems in much of Europe; is fascism next? If the current Hungarian government gets its way, maybe so.  The government of Hungary, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz Party, is pushing the country away from democracy and toward authoritarian nationalist rule with anti-Semitic undertones. A draconian […]

The Armenian genocide has become a serious sticking point between the French and Turks. As our readers probably know, Turkey refuses to officially recognize the massacre of Armenians during and after WWI as a “genocide.” Paris takes another view, and last night legislatures voted to make it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide. Readers […]

Something like eleven percent of the population still has a favorable view of Congress.  An appreciable percentage of those are probably Native Americans gloating as they contemplate the miserable mess the palefaces are making of their affairs, but except for hardcore America haters who like to watch the Congressional wrecking machine, the few people left […]

From the Chronicle of Higher Education comes a story that should make every mediocre academic in this country shudder in fear.  Mark Bauerlein has looked under the hood of the “research” that professors in English literature conduct and he has documented what many of us know but few want to think about: nobody reads much […]

5,000 people dead, including 300 children. Hundreds, perhaps thousands missing. Ongoing violence. Gun battles in the streets, aerial bombardment of cities. Welcome to Syria, where the awesome moral force of the “duty to protect” can be seen in all its majesty and might. Every day we hear more about Butcher Assad’s war on activists, protestors, […]

Like everyone who checks Instapundit on a regular basis, I come across all kinds of interesting news; yesterday Glenn offered a link to this National Review Online post by David French where one learns that young unmarried evangelicals are behaving very much like other unmarried young people.  80 percent of them are sexually active, compared to […]

“Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?” asks the voice of God from out of the whirlwind in the Book of Job (38:2). This week the answer would be Newt Gingrich, whose sloppy and misleading comment that the Palestinians are an “invented” people set off predictable reactions of outrage and mockery. Where […]

As President Obama travels to John Brown’s old stomping ground in Osawatomie, Kansas where Theodore Roosevelt made his New Nationalism speech in 1910, Newt Gingrich has announced that he is a Theodore Roosevelt Republican. If you asked Theodore Roosevelt what kind of Republican he was, he would — and did — tell you that he […]

In one of the Bush Administration’s most infamous moments, President Bush boarded an aircraft carrier under a giant “Mission Accomplished” banner just as the serious problems in Iraq were beginning to emerge. Eight years later, Vice President Biden has visited Iraq to deliver a much more subdued speech with the same message — America has […]