Doctor Dies Working to Save Others

The Arcturus Project today (warning: language):

Think you’re having a bad day? Trust me, you’re not. Try donning your armor and charging against ebola.

. . .

Doctor Sheik Umar Khan led Sierra Leone’s ebola response. He died at the front. Battling this evil. He was 39 years old.

Republicans to Take Illinois? R. Leading D. in Polls 44.5-41.5

For months, NPR has been worrying that the Democrats could lose big this November (e.g., “Poll: Young Voters Uninterested In November 2014 Elections”).  Several weeks ago, NRO’s Jim Geraghty produced a piece under the headline “With Midterms Four Months Away, Dashboard Is Blinking Red for Democrats”.

What Would You Say to the Man Who Killed Your Child?

The blogger at Keep Life Legal offers her thoughts on the occasion of the death of her abortion doctor.

“Death Is Sold Here: My Abortionist Died.”

Rolling Stone: Federal Student Loans Drive Prices Up, Drive Students into Debt Slavery

Rolling Stone magazine—not exactly a conservative publication—apparently ran a cover story last year on the college-loan bubble.  (Warning: language.  It is Rolling Stone, after all.)  While the story presents itself as non-partisan and claims to criticize both conservatives and liberals, it agrees with the (previously conservative) observation that federal student loans themselves are a big part of why tuition costs are so high and increasing so fast.  Maybe that understanding is becoming mainstream?

Band Name

I think Ephemeral Scepter would be a good name for a band.

Politically Correct Humor

Via Sense and Snarkability (“Jon Gabriel went to the Lefty gathering Netroots Nation, and discovered how humorless and boring the Left is”): Jon Gabriel has a great piece up at Ricochet.  He attended the liberal-blogger conference “Netroots” (sometimes known as “Nutroots”…) and reports on what they’re telling each other about humor and cultural engagement.

Love, Hatred, and One Woman’s Journey from the Left to the Right

Via Asylum Watch (a. k. a. Conservatives on Fire), writer and teacher Danusha Goska has a long, thoughtful piece at American Thinker on “Why I Am No Longer a Leftist”.  Be warned that it both uses rude language and frankly discusses some pretty disgusting stuff.  If you don’t mind that, I encourage you to read the whole thing; it’s very interesting.

How far left was I? . . . So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a button saying “Eat the Rich.” To me it wasn’t a metaphor.

Islamists in Iraq Tell Christians to ‘convert, pay a poll tax, leave by Saturday or die by the sword’

When even NPR says Christians are being persecuted and killed off, you know it’s true.  From All Things Considered:

Things You Hear on NPR: What Could Be Funnier than Losing Your Soul?

Over the weekend NPR played an interview between NPR’s Arun Rath and novelist Douglas Coupland (pronounced “Copeland”).  Coupland’s latest novel doesn’t exactly sound healthy for human consumption:

RATH: . . . I don’t quite know how I feel about this book—

COUPLAND: (Laughs)

RATH: —Meaning that it’s hilarious but it’s—it’s three hundred pages of vulgarity, almost without lapse.

America Has ‘Deficit-attention Disorder’

Christopher DeMuth has a good line in the current issue of National Review:

I am in the camp of the deficit hawks such as Feldstein and Kotlikoff, but I do not think the reason we are failing to address the problem is that some other smart and influential people are deficit doves.  Rather, I think that our political institutions and political leaders have accommodated themselves to deficit spending and growing debt and acquired a stake in their continuance.  Disagreements over the consequences and immediacy of the problem are always resolved in favor of borrowing more to address the problems of the moment and deferring “debt consolidation” (through some combination of higher taxes, lower spending, and higher economic growth) to a later time.  The American body politic has acquired deficit-attention disorder.

(Full article is available here.  If you don’t subscribe, you should, but if not, you can read NR articles à la carte on demand for 25¢ each.)

Liberty Island: New Web Site for Conservative Fiction?

You’ll have heard conservatives observe that the dominant culture in America is liberal.  Mark Steyn talks about the left’s “long march through the institutions” (the schools, the churches, the movies), and suggests that it’s ultimately futile for conservatives to fight on the political battleground if we give up on the fight for the deeper culture, which our politics flow out of.

Publisher Adam Bellow wants to bring the fight to the culture.  Toward that end, earlier this year he launched Liberty Island, a Web site or online literary magazine of fiction by and/or for the conservative counterculture.

Free Speech in France Decided on a Case-by-case Basis

Apparently a restaurant owner in France has successfully sued a blogger/critic for hurting his business.

I would have thought that blogging under one’s own name and from a site with a reputation to maintain, non-anonymously, would guard against some of the worst tendencies of the Internet, but in this case the blogger’s choice to use her real name and make it possible to find her is in effect being punished.  Not for the first time, I wonder whether tort law inadvertently creates some pretty perverse incentives.

Letter to Representatives: End IVF and Surrogacy

Dear {Governor Kasich},

I have been horrified to read about the heartless way our society treats some children, enabled and facilitated by new technologies.  Especially saddening is the recent case of Sherri Shepherd, who ordered the creation of a child that she now says she wants nothing to do with.  (See, e.g., http://acculturated.com/the-brave-new-world-of-ivf/ )

Things You Hear on NPR: Unselfconscious Free Advertising for Corporations and Democrats?

Last week morning NPR reported this story, apparently unironically.  Excerpts:

IKEA recently announced that starting next year, the lowest paid workers in its U.S. stores will make a bit more. . . .

NPR asked an IKEA executive,

Was it a PR move? No, he said.

Oh, OK.

Real Live Individuals Flip the Bird to the Race-obsessed?

I thought this was interesting:  You’ve heard people (not to say gleeful liberals) say that white people are on their way to being a minority of the population in the U. S., and that that is likely to correlate with increasing electoral difficulty for Republicans.  In the course of responding to this narrative, Josh Kraushaar also happens to note,

By the time Texas has enough registered Hispanic voters to make a political difference, it’s possible that many second-generation Latinos will be assimilated and less reliably Democratic than their parents. Already, researchers are finding that a sizable number of Hispanics later self-identify as white, dampening the trajectory of steady Hispanic growth into the future.

Things You Hear on NPR: We’re Pretty Sure These Cases We Didn’t Read Support Our Narrative

NPR this morning painted a picture in which Republicans twist the courts for partisan advantage:

By the same 5-4 vote, the court’s conservatives — all Republican appointees — prevailed over the court’s liberals — all Democratic appointees — on campaign finance regulations, union power and mandated contraceptive coverage for corporations under the Affordable Care Act. . . .

Happy Independence Day!

In honor of the Founding Fathers and our other forbears, consider Calvin Coolidge’s “Speech on the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence”.

Although a century and a half measured in comparison with the length of human experience is but a short time, yet measured in the life of governments and nations it ranks as a very respectable period. Certainly enough time has elapsed to demonstrate with a great deal of thoroughness the value of our institutions and their dependability as rules for the regulation of human conduct and the advancement of civilization. . . .

Supreme Court Gets One Right in Hobby Lobby, Stops HHS Mandate

On Monday, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby (opinion available from the Supreme Court’s Web site).

• The National Review editors concisely sum up what the decision means, as opposed to what its critics say it means.
  “Hobby Lobby Hysteria”