Longing for home...

Pentimento is at her best:

'I'm still walking around in heartbroken longing for my old city and for many parts of the life I once lived there, but it occurs to me more and more that walking around in heartbroken longing has been a constant in my life at least since adolescence. And the truth is that August, far from being a month worthy of commemoration, has traditionally been for me a month of awful loss and absurd failure. This brings me back to my old dilemma: does God want us to be happy? Or does he perhaps ask those of us who are inclined to grief to suffer it for Him, offering that suffering up for others in the expectant hope that He, in the strange efficacy of His economy of mercy, will use it for their healing and their joy? I know, in spite of all the self-esteem propaganda and New Age relativism I absorbed that told me I was essentially a good person, that I am not in fact a person who deserves joy, and the individuals for whom I most often consciously choose to offer my grief are probably not either. But I think some people need joy in order to live and heal, and I pray that God will give it to them, because He loves them so much.

'As anyone who's read this blog for a time knows, I'm a pretty egregious sinner who's made some irrevocably bad decisions that have had dire consequences on the lives of others, as well as on my own. Every day upon waking, the prayer comes to my mind that God might use me for good. But how might He do this? Can the leopard change its spots? I am still that person, that egregious sinner, that, for want of a better word, raging diva. But somehow, since the moment of metanoia that changed my heart in 2002, I'm also a different person. I want to trust that God will find a way to use the raging diva that He saw fit to reform for the purpose of demonstrating His unfathomable mercy to other egregious-sinner chicks like myself. Hopefully He'll make His ways somewhat clearer to me as I walk around, heartbroken with longing in August in Appalachia.'

Click on photo to enlarge.

Statism as a perversion of the American dream

George Will wonders if the Obama administration is capable of backing away from the statism it embraces. Few American politicians ever say: "The federal government ought to take over the banks, healthcare, and big auto companies and keep them." But probably more than a few agree with Michael Moore that government-guided capital is superior to private investments. Why trust the little people who go to stores, start businesses, hire new people, buy stocks and bonds, buy cars and computers, sign mortgages, build houses, and pump their own gas when there are so many bright people in Washington, D.C. who know better than those idiots at Wal-Mart?

'Even more than the New Deal and the Great Society, Obama's agenda expresses the mentality of a class that was nascent in the 1930s but burgeoned in the 1960s and 1970s. The spirit of that class is described in Saul Bellow's 1975 novel Humboldt's Gift. In it Bellow wrote that the modern age began when a particular class of people decided, excitedly, that life had "lost the ability to arrange itself":

'"It had to be arranged. Intellectuals took this as their job. ... This arranging has been the one great gorgeous tantalizing misleading disastrous project. A man like Humboldt, inspired, shrewd, nutty, was brimming over with the discovery that the human enterprise, so grand and infinitely varied, had now to be managed by exceptional persons. He was an exceptional person, therefore he was an eligible candidate for power."'

We sure miss Milton and Rose Friedman. I studied Friedman's economics as an undergraduate when market theories were busting down Keynesianism. Jimmy Carter was president. Inflation was soaring. Unemployment was rising. Interest rates were ridiculous. Ted Kennedy, champion of the Henry Wallace wing of the Democratic Party, ran against Carter, a president of his own party, in 1980. Kennedy favored wage and price controls. Furthermore, he supported the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill.

This forgotten piece of legislation fortunately never passed. It would have mandated the federal government to create jobs through public works to employ whatever number of people were needed to drive the unemployment rate down to four percent. It might sound good if you are out of work, but such a mandate would generate waste that would make a long war seem like an efficient use of resources. Soviet agriculture: here we come!

Ronald Reagan in the meantime was promoting the radical idea that markets generally work when the politicians keep their hands off the millions of little decisions that consumers, investors, and employers make. You know I'm not a straight up libertarian by any means; I'm a fan of Wilhelm Roepke, G.K. Chesteron, and Hilaire Belloc. Nonetheless, if I had to choose between the libertarians or the statists, I'll go with the libertarians.

Ted Kennedy's speech at the 1980 Democratic Convention, eloquent as it is, is a passionate defense of statism. It is remarkable in its shift of emphasis regarding the American dream. Our founders and Mr. Kennedy's Irish ancestors believed America was the place where little people could own property, improve their lot by their own sweat, and flee west if necessary to avoid strangling governments, religion, or social customs. Mr. Kennedy defends the American dream as the belief and right in the federal government to intervene to force equality of results and to tax those who most vehemently oppose central power. At best, Progressivism is "Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends." In practice, the federal government becomes the multi-stop shop for transactions large and small. Only the hurdles are not set by price and cost and supply and demand, but by politics.

The Anchoress on Ted Kennedy

She expresses the mix of emotions most Americans feel about the family. Let's face it, if you grew up in America in the 20th century, you could not avoid the children and grandchildren of Joe and Rose. Time, Life, and People would have gone bankrupt long ago if there were no Kennedys to put on magazines covers.

Quoting C.S. Lewis, the Anchoress notes how Mr. Kennedy's death reminds us of how we need Purgatory:

'"Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, ‘It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy’? Should we not reply, ‘With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleaned first.’ ‘It may hurt, you know’ – ‘Even so, sir.’

'"I assume that the process of purification will normally involve suffering. Partly from tradition; partly because most real good that has been done me in this life has involved it. But I don’t think the suffering is the purpose of the purgation. I can well believe that people neither much worse nor much better than I will suffer less than I or more. . . . The treatment given will be the one required, whether it hurts little or much.

'"My favorite image on this matter comes from the dentist’s chair. I hope that when the tooth of life is drawn and I am ‘coming round’,’ a voice will say, ‘Rinse your mouth out with this.’ This will be Purgatory. The rinsing may take longer than I can now imagine. The taste of this may be more fiery and astringent than my present sensibility could endure. But . . . it will [not] be disgusting and unhallowed.”'

The Anchoress adds to the quotation:

'What can one do when one is likely unfit for heaven, but possesses just enough charity and love to stave off hell? Let us suffer the purgation, then. I am certain that someday I, in all my sins, will end up there, too.'

I must agree with the Anchoress that the death of America's most famous Catholic politician should cause us to reflect and pray before we criticize and condemn. Sin blinds us to many things, and his sins were more famous than mine. Thus, it is a borderline cheap shot to write a diatribe about his known sins while my own might be just as insidious in the eyes of God.

If I could almost perfectly discern when it is right to condemn a Catholic for public sin and possibly go so far as to deny him the Eucharist and when to refuse to condemn him and treat him like the prodigal son, I would be a saint and perhaps a holy bishop. That issue is now moot. He belongs to God, and God is his judge.

At the bottom of her post is a round-up of pieces about the Senator's death along a broad range of reactions. The best feature article I have ever read on Ted Kennedy is by Michael Kelly (the first reporter to die in the second Iraq war), who wrote a very thoughtful piece during the 1990s. It ponders both Kennedy's shocking boorishness and his substantive effectiveness as a legislator.

Brace yourselves: I'm linking to the Huffington Post

Ten Simple Steps to Healthcare Reform.

Not a bad piece because it is driven by common sense rather than egalitarianism.

My words exactly...

I wrote my senior thesis on John F. Kennedy as President. It did not win any awards, but I was fortunate to take my senior seminar on the American presidency with a gracious and learned man. I worked very hard at reading past the Camelot legend and also at taking the volumes of critical hyperbole with the grain of salt.

Kennedy was a moderately successful president whose tragic death transfigured his legacy of symbolism into substance. He was notable, even vital, to our history not for what he did in the White House but how and when he got there and how it ended. He is the only legendary U.S. president without a substantial record. His legend is his record. Democratic politicians since 1960, including his younger kinsmen, have been inspired more by him than by truly accomplished presidents such as Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. That in itself is amazing.

Ronald Reagan understood symbol as well as any American of the 20th century, and he had this to say about President Kennedy (in a speech drafted by Peggy Noonan):

"He loved history and approached it as both romantic and realist. He could quote Stephen Vincent Benét on Gen. Lee's army—'The aide de camp knew certain lines of Greek / and other things quite fitting for peace but not so suitable for war . . .' And he could sum up a current 'statesman' with an earthy epithet that would leave his audience weak with laughter. One sensed that he loved mankind as it was, in spite of itself, and that he had little patience with those who would perfect what was not meant to be perfect.

"As a leader, as a president, he seemed to have a good, hard, unillusioned understanding of man and his political choices. He had written a book as a very young man about why the world slept as Hitler marched on, and he understood the tension between good and evil in the history of man—understood, indeed, that much of the history of man can be seen in the constant working out of that tension.

"He was a patriot who summoned patriotism from the heart of a sated country. It is a matter of pride to me that so many young men and women who were inspired by his bracing vision and moved by his call to 'Ask not' serve now in the White House doing the business of government.

"Which is not to say I supported John Kennedy when he ran for president, because I didn't. I was for the other fellow. But you know, it's true: When the battle's over and the ground is cooled, well, it's then that you see the opposing general's valor."

The late President Kennedy's brother, host at the event of President Reagan's speech, wrote, as he was apt to do, a gracious letter of thanks. Ron and Nancy Reagan become friends with Senator Ted Kennedy, and she admitted this week that she grieves his loss. President Reagan was the man Senator Kennedy did everything in his power to stop, even delivering the greatest speech of his life to defend an activist, centralizing, federal government dedicated to economic and social results from the conservative and libertarian surge of 1980.

There will be time for opining later, but first I say to Edward Kennedy, Requiescat in pace.

Competition through interstate markets in health insurance

I have supported this idea for more than a decade. The Chicago Tribune ran this editorial.

[This post is sponsored by one insurance conglomerate which outbid several other conglomerates to buy my allegiance. Blogging is making me rich!]

The hubris of rationalists...

Jonathan Rosenblum on Isaiah Berlin:

'The anti-clericalism of the leading Enlightenment thinkers contained within it the potential for a new clericalism more authoritarian and murderous than that which it superseded, with intellectuals as its priests.

'But Berlin was not just concerned with the most extreme deformations of the Enlightenment ideals. Though he defined himself as a man of the Left, he found that a similar cast of mind underpinned much left-wing thought from the French Revolution. Belief in a unitary human nature and a fixed hierarchy of values gave rise to the confident assumption that human reason can design a society in which the parts fit together harmoniously. The society thus designed would "free" man as never before by allowing him to fully develop all his capabilities.

'The latter doctrine of "positive liberty," so admired in the young, "humanitarian" Marx, could easily end with Stalin's engineers of the soul. As Ignatieff sums up the matter: In Berlin's view, "the European Enlightenment was divided by a central contradiction between maintaining that men should be free to choose and insisting that they should be only free to choose what it would be rational to desire."

'Rationality, of course, is best determined by the experts.'


Collectivism in many forms is part of modern life: condominiums, coops, group health insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, direct taxation, zoning and land-use regulations, the VA, the TVA, and crop subsidies. Socialism is not our doctrine, but in some cases, it is our practice.

That being said, Americans in general do not despise socialism as much as we despise socialists. Democrat or Republican, Americans tend to resent and fear the few who claim superior intellect and enlightenment to rule the many. Americans, outside of a few communities, have not known hereditary aristocracy or established clergy. They know intuitively that those who say they believe in free choice but wish to limit those choices to the "rational" ones as determined by experts are not truly free and will not consent to grant freedom to anyone else.

Why Obamacare is losing traction...

Peggy Noonan writes:

'Every big idea that works is marked by simplicity, by clarity. You can understand it when you hear it, and you can explain it to people. Social Security: Retired workers receive a public pension to help them through old age. Medicare: People over 65 can receive taxpayer-funded health care. Welfare: If you have no money and cannot support yourself, we will help as you get back on your feet.

'These things are clear. I understand them. You understand them. The president's health-care plan is not clear, and I mean that not only in the sense of "he hasn't told us his plan." I mean it in terms of the voodoo phrases, this gobbledygook, this secret language of government that no one understands—"single payer," "public option," "insurance marketplace exchange." No one understands what this stuff means, nobody normal.

'And when normal people don't know what the words mean, they don't say to themselves, "I may not understand, but my trusty government surely does, and will treat me and mine with respect." They think, "I can't get what these people are talking about. They must be trying to get one past me. So I'll vote no."'


Democrats think that numbers in Congress enacted the New Deal and the Great Society by simple arithmetic. No, important and controversial legislation, good and bad, is usually forced through by very determined and able legislative engineers such as Henry Clay, Joe Cannon, Sam Rayburn, and Lyndon Johnson. The competing interests in the Congress don't fall down dead if one party gets a larger than average majority.

Great legislators rule through fear. They mobilize and energize voters and interest groups. Representatives and Senators fall in line because they fear losing influence in Congress or losing their seats altogether. President Barack Obama's Democrats have majorities in both houses of Congress, but the Blue Dog Democrats are less scared of the Democratic leadership than they are of the Republican and independent voters in their districts. My Congressman is a Blue Dog Democrat, and he is visiting my area this week promising that he won't vote for any of the bills currently in the House. Most everyone here is breathing a sigh of relief, except the Republicans who might run against him.

One of the ironies of democratic legislatures is that they fail to enact meaningful legislation unless the legislative body itself is ruled by a dictator, e.g., Sam Rayburn. In the history of Speakers of the House, for instance, Nancy Pelosi is notable more for being a woman than anything else. Her portrait will be placed on the wall somewhere in the Capitol, but nobody is going to compare her to Thomas Brackett Reed or even Carl Albert. Her notoreity, like Methuselah's, is based upon a single fact of history rather than a string of significant achievements.

I agree with Ms. Noonan that Obamacare is either dying or turning into a Pyrrhic victory at best. The Democratic leadership does not believe in the public option as anything but the means to destroy private insurance in America, but only a few of them admit it. They ask Americans not to support a big idea such as universal healthcare, but a small one: the Congressional killing of the way the majority of working Americans obtain health insurance. They ask for blind faith in Congress' promise to deliver something better. Americans don't hate the current system so much they will let Congress kill it with a million regulatory cuts.

[Photos: Top: CNN photo from Colorado; Middle: Sam Rayburn with Lyndon Johnson; Below: Thomas Brackett Reed.]

Robert Novak, requiescat in pace.

I was stuck in traffic in Cincinatti a few years ago, and Robert Novak was on a Catholic radio station telling the story of his conversion to Catholicism. Here is a little bit of it.

I will give him credit as a journalist. He afflicted the comfortable and occasionally comforted the afflicted.

Margaret Carlson wrote a nice piece this week.

A better plan to fix healthcare...

Having failed to obtain a sponsor from one of the insurance companies which are supposedly putting me and millions of Americans up to our opposition to the Congressional witches' brew in Washington, I will soldier on for a few more weeks. But if I don't get a sponsor soon, I'm going to seek a sponsor from the other side, maybe the unions, and change my tune completely.

In the meantime, Shawn Tully proposes that we:

1. Eliminate the tax break for employer health plans.
2. Deregulate the three big inflators of health-care costs.
3. Protect people with pre-existing conditions.
4. Don't forget the supply side.

He also dares to imagine what system we might have if we could start from scratch instead of inheriting this skewed system of employer-provided healthcare based upon a federal tax subsidy for employers not given to individuals.

Getting to the point...

Today's Gospel reading is:

34 But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sad'ducees, they came together.
35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, to test him.
36 "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?"
37 And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.
38 This is the great and first commandment.
39 And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
40 On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets."

There was a time when I felt as if I were closer to living a life of love than I feel now. Oddly enough, I was more narcissistic in those days. Today, life's humiliations and the gift of a wife and child have put a major crack in my narcissism. Perhaps I am becoming more loving in the eyes of God, but if so, I only see myself as a "recovering" narcissist. Jesus' affirmation that the law and the prophets are built on love remains the same daunting challenge for me and mankind that it was when Christ walked the hills of Judea.

Today's Gospel: Matthew 19

20 The young man said to him, "All these I have observed; what do I still lack?"
21 Jesus said to him, "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me."
22 When the young man heard this he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions.


I try to tell myself that the rich young ruler is someone else, but it keeps coming back to me.

Today is the Feast of the Assumption

El Greco has painted it better than I can describe it, though I've posted on it before in
2006 and 2008.

The painting can be viewed in its awesomeness at The Art Institute of Chicago.

Looking for an insurance company to sponsor this blog...

I want to cash in on the millions of dollars allegedly being funneled to opponents of Obamacare.

I will protest for food.

Les Paul, requiescat in pace.

I am not a guitar player, but everybody of my generation knows who Les Paul was. I won't try to write a tribute. The web is full of people who write beautifully about the pioneer of the electric guitar. Anyone who likes the Big Band sound of the 1940s and Rock and Roll of the 1960s knows what a transformation the electric guitar caused to popular music.

Here is a 27-second Coors commercial which shows a little of his talent and legend. Click on the link, and it will lead you to dozens of Les Paul clips on YouTube.

Insider pretending to be an outsider...

Peggy Noonan writes:

'The president seemed like a man long celebrated as being very good at politics—the swift rise, the astute reading of a varied electorate—who is finding out day by day that he isn't actually all that good at it. In this sense he does seem reminiscent of Jimmy Carter, who was brilliant at becoming president but not being president. (Actually a lot of them are like that these days.)'

Like many Americans, I don't fondly remember the Carter administration. He truly was an outsider, a Southern Baptist Sunday School teacher, an engineer, and a peanut farmer from South Georgia who asked Americans to give him a chance to fix all that was ill in our country and the world. We accepted and received double-digit inflation and repeated kicks in the teeth from the Soviets and the Iranians. We kicked Mr. Carter out of the White House as soon as we got a chance.

Barack Obama is only an outsider if you pretend the last fifty years never happened. He is no more of an outsider in America than Henry Louis Gates. Unlike the other president who adopted Illinois as his home, Mr. Obama has attended some of the finest schools in the world and, despite being from a broken family, has seldom been busted by loss and disappointment. Being the first African-American president is a big deal, but the revolution is only in the minds of those who believe that America cannot change unless an African-American (or a true believer from the left) comes to power.

I will argue that the cultural transformation has already occurred. It took place while Barack and I dug in our sandboxes, played basketball, and gazed at pretty girls at our high schools. It took place before either of us attended law school.

The dishonesty of the Obama administration began with the premise that his election would cause a revolution in American politics. His election merely showed that a revolution had already occurred. Rosa Parks got arrested for him and millions of others long before he was born. Martin Luther King, Jr. led what was in many ways a conservative movement that desegregated the South while Barack and I were growing up.

John F. Kennedy appealed to Irish-Catholic pride, but he did not pretend that his election in itself would be revolutionary. He carried swing states such as West Virginia and Texas that did not vote for Al Smith in 1928. People in swing states in both 1960 and 2008 were willing to vote for a presidential candidate, even if he was from a formerly despised minority and left of center, if he was articulate, inspiring, and moderate in temperament and manner.

Mr. Carter brought a clean slate to Washington but proved incapable of building a governing coalition. Mr. Obama would be able to sustain a governing coalition if he listened to the people who carried him to victory in states such as Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia instead of the folks who have nothing but contempt for those of us who live in the flyover region. If Mr. Obama would govern by increments instead of leaps and bounds, he might get eight years to work.

I love Europe...

I visited shortly after I finished college, and I crossed the Continent from the Channel to Attica on my Eurorail Pass. I saw our cultural origins there and much that is admirable, but I became quite conscious that I am an American. I cannot pretend to be anything else.

I wasn't a bad tourist. My parents and grandparents taught me to be polite and respectful, and for the most part we (my friend from my college years and I) were. As a result, we were generally treated with kindness and generosity.

But my ancestors would not have come here if Europe had been a perfect place. They came here because, in the way of Aeneas' Rome born of the last Trojan and a Latin princess, America had the right combination of old and new.

It might be in my DNA to question why we would want to imitate Europe's polity. If our ancestors had wanted to be dependent on the government for their cradle-to-grave security, they would not have thrown their families, belongings, dreams, and futures on to a ship and crossed the big ocean.

Victor Davis Hanson has completed a tour of Greece and Turkey, and he discusses Europe and whether we Americans would want to imitate the polity of our cousins:

'Because I have traveled a great deal in my life, often recklessly so, alone, and to weird places in search of answers to topographical questions of the ancient Mediterranean world, and first-hand observations about battles and campaigns in out of the way places for several books— I have ended up over the last 36 years in a number of socialist hospitals: E-coli poisoning in Athens from tainted strawberries; a cut tendon on my index finger from a barbed wire fence in Sparta (with reaction to live tetanus vaccination); a severed ureter due to an impacted staghorn calculus kidney stone from dehydration of excavating at Corinth; a light case of malaria at Karnak, Egypt; an out of control, strep throat that turned into something more in Izmir, Turkey; a ruptured appendix, surgery, and peritonitis in Tripolis, Libya, and so on.

'In each case, the care was terrible. A sole lonely doctor or maverick nurse in two cases saved my life, but on the average the facilities were filthy, and the employees akin to those in the government-run post office or bank. And a strange thing occurred as well: often the staff became mad at the patient: “Why did you come here with an appendix problem?”; You should have not let your strep get out of control!”; “If you don’t drink water, what do you expect!”; “See what happens when you don’t take all your quinine pills!”.

'Socialism will always blame the patient (just watch when it comes here), I suppose for drawing on collective resources, and to focus on public enemies whose weight, smoking, or lifestyle (I do not smoke or drink, but exercise and am of reasonable weight) have betrayed the public ideal. (Fat people, and smokers (except our President) will soon become as hated in the socialist mind as jet skis, those in their 80s who want a bypass, Yukons, Tahoes and investment bankers.)'

Europe always celebrated the individual but lacked room for individuals to thrive, experiment, own property, and start little republics as they saw fit. Why would Americans, who start a little republic whenever we impanel a jury, incorporate a business, or buy a piece of land big enough to subdivide, want to hand our medical care over to a centralized bureaucracy?

What is the South really like?

We are most famous for making war on the government of the United States because of the election of the first president from Illinois, but there is much more to the South and Southerners than Confederate monuments and the racist Klansman from central casting. Here is an excerpt from a nice piece by Sally Jenkins:

'The senator [George Voinovich] might be reminded that Mississippi had black suffrage (for a time) during Reconstruction when Ohio was still voting no on black suffrage.

'And that it was President Ulysses S. Grant’s fear of losing Republican votes in Ohio that allowed ex-Confederates to reverse the social gains of the Civil War in 1875-76 and write the Jim Crow laws.

'In fact, “Southerners” are uniquely positioned to remake the Republican Party, because they are their country. The South was formed by extraordinary forces of mobility, migration and immigration.

'According to demographer-economist Harry Dent in his book, The Great Depression Ahead, the states with the greatest net loss of population from 2003 to 2007 were North Dakota, Michigan, New Jersey, Indiana, and New York.

'The state with the greatest net influx? North Carolina. South Carolina is fourth. Alabama is sixth.'

Who woulda thunk it? People are leaving New York to go to Alabama!


If the South were still the place where the white folks were willing to keep themselves poor so long as they could lord their superior social position over the black folks, then migrants from all corners of the country and world would not be coming here. If you live here, you find that Southerners can be truly more progressive than self-described "progressives."

The South's history is America's history in microcosm, though sometimes in Faulknerian caricature or O'Connorian grotesqueness. But as we Southerners like to say, we are more likely to solve our problems because we know each other's first names.

[Photos of two famous Mississippians: B.B. King and William Faulkner.]

"Are liberals seceding from sanity?"

Michael Lind, a liberal writing in Salon, says that the left is crazy to insult white Southerners as a group:

'[Kevin] Drum's creepy bigotry becomes clear when other groups are substituted: "There are, needless to say, plenty of individual blacks who are wholly admirable. But taken as a whole, black culture is [redacted]. Barack Obama can pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]." Or maybe this: "There are, needless to say, plenty of individual Jews who are wholly admirable. But taken as a whole, Jewish culture is [redacted]. The late Irving Howe can pretty it up all he wants, but it's a [redacted]."

'If his Wikipedia entry is to be believed, Kevin Drum grew up in California, the same enlightened California that during his childhood and early adulthood gave our nation Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the tax-revolt politics of Howard Jarvis. More recently, California voters amended the state Constitution to outlaw gay marriage. I grew up in Texas, which gave our nation champions of the New Deal and civil rights like Maury Maverick, Ralph Yarborough, Lyndon Johnson, Henry Gonzalez, Barbara Jordan, Lloyd Doggett and Sarah Weddington, who argued Roe v. Wade. Texas is less progressive than it once was and California is less conservative than it once was, but someone from the land of Nixon and Reagan should think twice about lecturing other parts of the country. Nor are other regions bastions of political virtue. The last two governors of Illinois are in prison or on the way there, the biggest political scandal of the moment involves mayors and rabbis in New Jersey, and the world economy was recently wrecked thanks in large part to certain investment banks and hedge funds headquartered not in Mississippi but in Manhattan.'


I agree, but I am a male born south of the Ohio River and too dumb to move permanently somewhere else, despite four years in New England, five years in the Midwest, and two summers in California. I'm too dumb to know my betters.

Chuck Norris' tears can heal any wound...

Unfortunately, Chuck never cries.



But he does write about Obamacare.

While I was on vacation and not checking news of any sort...

The debate on healthcare reform heated up some more. (I don't have a Blackberry or Iphone.)

Peggy Noonan's column expresses my feelings quite well.

As John Randolph of Roanoke said, "Change is not reform."

St. Simons Island, Georgia

We visited St. Simons Island this week for the first time, and we think it's the most hospitable place we know. The people are very friendly and proudly parochial, and the food is delicious. I think just about everyone on the island has a great recipe for crab soup, crab cakes, or shrimp.

We recommend the following restaurants for dinner: Barbara Jean's, The Crab Trap, Crab Daddy's and The Black Water Grill.

Every island has a particular feel and manner, and we are very comfortable there. On the first night we sat on the beach and watched by moonlight as my daughter and niece played at the edge of the gentle surf.

For a little mood music, here's Roy Orbison singing "Blue Bayou."

Light blogging for now...

I have to give a speech.

Nixon comes back...

Peggy Noonan imagines what FDR might say to President Barack Obama and what Richard Nixon might say to today's Republicans in Congress.

Here is some of Nixon's advice. Read it aloud affecting your best Nixonian voice:

“For instance: As you know, doctors keep fees up and order expensive tests because they’re afraid of malpractice suits. They pay terrible insurance premiums. We have to reform that. Stop calling it “tort reform”; normal people think a tort is something you eat for dessert. Call it the Limiting Lawyers’ Windfalls bill. No one likes lawyers anymore, Perry Mason’s dead. And make it real when you talk. Here you can pinpoint an Obama weakness that you’re not even exploiting. He won’t go near legal reform because his biggest backers and contributors are the trial lawyer’s lobby. He talks about the common good—give me a break. As Jack Kennedy used to say, and so eloquently, here you can really stick it to him and break it off."



[Photo above: President Nixon meets the King.]