Archive | Uncategorized

For a slight change of pace, I thought I’d start offering up a song lyric or two each Sunday. For today, I settled on something by one of America’s greatest songwriters of all time, Hank Williams Sr. Although he never saw his 30th birthday, Williams left an astounding musical legacy. He was much more than […]

When Lieberman is asked how his faith would affect his politics, he paraphrases a now-famous Kennedy line, telling voters, “I am a presidential candidate who happens to be Jewish, not the other way around.”So Lieberman is not “a Jewish who happens to be a presidential candidate?” The quote would work if Lieberman would say “to […]

Dressing up like an Orthodox Jew and giving a Nazi salute while shouting “Heil Israel” is contemptible; but prosecuting that individual for violating “hate crimes” laws [link found on Little Green Footballs] is authoritarian and unworthy of the free society France purports to be. France’s record in combatting anti-Semitic violence was weak until recently, but […]

The Dalek Conspiracy. The Moloch Conspiracy. (See also here.) The Pollock Conspiracy. The Bullock Conspiracy. The Bolick Conspiracy.

Are you moving to Cambridge? I’m looking to sell my apartment and move out by June. Two bedrooms (one of them large, and a study that can work as a third bedroom), two bathrooms, two working fireplaces, building with historic charm, many new fixtures. On Mass. Ave.; two minutes’ walk from Harvard Yard, five minutes […]

Shmata is the Greek plural of Sh’ma. Also, my father asks whether, if Lieberman gets some pro-Jewish law passed that benefits his district, it’s correct to call it pork.

It’s the weekend so people seem freer to share their recollections about the topic, so here goes one more round. I suspect it will be the last installment, but who knows? I hope readers find what other readers have to say as interesting as I do. Let me add two of my many college encounters […]

Then there is the following response, typical in my experience of one sort of blogosphere reaction whenever either “liberals” or “the left” are criticized. I interject my comments: Randy I’m eager to move on from the recent flood of posts beating up liberals for not apologizing sufficiently for the reds amongst them. People are reporting […]

Randy and Sasha’s posts on the alleged soft-spot some liberals had for the Soviet Union during the Cold War brings to mind the closing line of Irving Kristol’s 1952 Commentary essay on civil liberties and Communism. While noting Joseph McCarthy was a “vulgar demagogue,” Kristol argued that there was reason to suspect more than a […]

Jack Shafer’s article in Slate on media reporting of the Senate Judiciary Committee memo scandal, highlighted by Eugene below, is definitely worth a read. He points out how much of the coverage, especially that in the Boston Globe, has been way overblown. Shafer’s bottom-line: The Senate staffers’ actions may have been wrong, and perhaps even […]

Remember my previous post about Latin. Now, Hanah links to a nice Economist article about the modern-day popularity (such as it is) of Latin. Finally, on Latin, remember that the plural of me is us, and that the plural of us is I. So a double plural is a singular, but you go from the […]

This new initiative seems worth taking seriously, especially because it undercuts the deal-breaking Palestinian demand for a “right of return” to Israel. As an opening offer, it’s a good one; I can’t imagine that if the Arab states are serious about this, they would ultimately object to minor border modifications to allow Israel to absorb […]

See the FURTHER UPDATE to this post.

The other day, I said, briefly: Another note on defending the USSR: Let me put in a note about another aspect of the fall of Communism. Many people on “my side” have suggested that the fall of Communism tells us something meaningful about the feasibility of American-style leftism or Western European-style social democracy — either […]

My posts on liberal sympathies for communist regimes seems to have struck a nerve. While a few still deny it or continue to offer apologies, most write to tell their own similar experiences–including some very recent. Here are some excerpts. (BTW, I never post the names of correspondents unless given permission to do so.) I […]