Memorial Day

To mark Memorial Day, Mark Steyn reflects on the interesting history of the Civil War song “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”.  (Note that link will expire.)

And somehow this combination — an improvised camp-meeting chorus with an in-joke verse about a Boston Scotsman — became the most popular marching song of the Union forces, the one bellowed out as Sherman’s men marched through Georgia in 1864.

Wikipedia has the lyrics.

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

Abolish the IRS

As Mark Levin and others have observed, the recent IRS abuses are not unique to the Obama administration.  (See 5/20/13 broadcast, elsewhere.)  As L. Gordon Crovitz says,

There is a long history of presidents using the IRS against political enemies. FDR went after newspapers that opposed the New Deal. JFK had his Ideological Organizations Audit Project target conservative groups like the American Enterprise Institute. Richard Nixon used the IRS to harass people on his enemies list.

Jon Stewart: IRS Abuses Almost Imply that Government Is Incompetent at Doing Good but Pretty Good at Doing Evil

Via Eternity Matters: Even liberal Jon Stewart finds it troubling that the federal government targeted Tea Party groups because of their political views (warning: language):

Things You Hear on NPR: Democrat Whistleblower Some Kind of Partisan Republican Ploy

Actually, if you only listen to NPR and other liberal media (which you shouldn’t), you might never know that whistleblowers like Gregory Hicks—a formerly high-ranking official of the Obama State Department and a “registered Democrat who voted for both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama”—have been testifying about how the administration failed to protect our diplomats in Libya and then tried to cover it up.

IRS Fights Tea Party on the Beaches, in the Hills

This seems pretty thuggish:  Apparently in recent years the IRS has targeted Tea Party groups for additional “scrutiny”.

This has been covered everywhere, from local Tea Party groups to National Review Online:

• Cincinnati East Tea Party, “IRS Apologizes for Unfair Tea Party Scrutiny”

• NRO, Kevin Williamson, “The IRS’s Tea-Party Targeting: An apology, but no explanation”

. . . groups with the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their names were improperly targeted for additional levels of tax-status review by the agency. Those actions, she said, were “wrong” and “inappropriate,” but she denied that they were the result of political bias against tea-party groups. When asked how the IRS determined that the actions were not the result of political bias, Ms. Lerner could only say, “That is not how we do things.”

More Bullying from the ‘Anti-bullying’ ‘Liberal’ Culture

Jonah Goldberg has an interesting discussion in the Corner about Niall Ferguson and John Maynard Keynes.  Apparently the trend toward more and more militant “acceptance” of homosexuality has made at least one previously mainstream academic discussion now a potentially career-ending third rail.

Incidentally, did you know that Keynes was homosexual?

. . . [Keynes] himself described the Bloomsbury mindset as a rejection of all standards: