Monthly Archive: April 2016

Of course polling data is not sacrosanct, and ambiguous perceptions like “favorable” and “unfavorable” tend to wobble around even more than voter preference. But by any standard the CBS/New York Times poll published three weeks ago was remarkable. It sort of blew through the news cycle and then out again, like an indigestible fast-food meal: more weird and crazy numbers in a weird and crazy year. But just take a whiff, and tell me it doesn’t smell like democracy dying on the vine. Donald Trump was viewed favorably by just 24 percent of the voters surveyed, and unfavorably by 57 percent, making him by far the least-liked major-party frontrunner since CBS began asking this question in 1984.

Who’s in second place, in this historic sweepstakes of hate? Hillary Clinton, in the same poll: She was viewed favorably by 31 percent and unfavorably by a mere 52 percent. I see you in the back of the room waving your slide rules, eager-beaver Democrats. And yes, you’re right: Every national survey so far, including that one, shows Clinton beating Trump easily. Math was never my strong suit, but 31 percent is more than 24 percent, as I understand it. But are you guys really going to act like that’s a cause for high-fives and #WeGotThis retweets and celebratory glasses of Sonoma Chardonnay? If that’s a silver lining, it’s made out of aluminum foil from the bottom of the cat box. We’ve got the second least-popular candidate ever — that’s what time it is! Winner-winner chicken dinner!

From: Two despised frontrunners, two dying parties and a deeply broken system: How did we get here? – Salon.com

On Tuesday, Daily News editor-in-chief Jim Rich told CNNMoney that the editor in question had “made a series of egregious and inexplicable errors,” and on at least three occasions “deleted attribution that made it...

Buckley changed things when he founded National Review in 1955. He introduced the philosophers to the populists. He published the traditionalists, the libertarians, the Cold Warriors in the same pages. Not only did he aspire to fuse free markets with traditional values, he wanted to be taken seriously by the New York media and cultural elite. Dismissed in embarrassing fashion by Dwight Macdonald in the pages of COMMENTARY in 1956, National Review was unquestionably the tribune of an engaged, informed, and rising American conservatism by the time Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California a decade later.

Why the transformation? Part of the reason is that Buckley and his editors spent an enormous amount of time and energy during the early years of the magazine disassociating their conservatism from its atavistic and gnostic forebears. National Review is a great example of media gatekeeping theory: By exiling anti-Semites, Birchers, and anti-American reactionaries from its pages, the magazine and its editor determined which conservative arguments were legitimate and which were not. By denying a platform to quacks and haters, they broadened their potential audience.

And Buckley did more than exorcise demons. He welcomed converts. When a group of anti-Communist liberals began to drift from the Democratic Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Buckley and company lowered the drawbridge and welcomed the neoconservatives to the castle. “Come on in,” National Review editorialized, “the water’s fine.” The editors of the American Mercury never would have published writers with the surnames Podhoretz and Kristol. The editors of National Review did. The result was a conservatism infused with empiricism, with the densely reasoned argumentative style of the New York intellectuals. The Reagan administration would reap the benefits.

Source: The Coming Conservative Dark Age | commentary

But I didn’t stop at “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.” I read the entire “Chronicles of Narnia” series, and learned lessons I suspect would have given my evangelical Sunday school teachers pause. Lewis’s theology is more expansive than that of my upbringing, and there are hints of universalism in his writing. Given that I have non-Christian relatives (see above), I found this alternative to the “they’re all going to hell, sad to say” point of view very appealing.

I loved those books. I love them still. And yet…

There are none-too-subtle traces of anti-Arab sentiment in a couple of them. The fictional Calormenes, despite the Scheherazade-like splendor with which they are described, are depicted with orientalist disdain. At one point toward the conclusion of the series they are taunted with the slur “darkies,” and it is not clear if the author is entirely unsympathetic to the speaker.

From: Hauling away the pedestal – Blinded Trials II

When Bentley was first elected in 2010, he was a popular, soft-spoken dermatologist, a devout Baptist deacon, a father of four and grandfather of eight, and married for a half-century. He said he wouldn’t...

What won’t you give up — not just for Lent, but not for anything?