A few things online that caught my attention this week:
Andrew Sullivan on blogging
Fifty-four inaugural addresses and American history
From the college classroom to writing novels and teaching high school students
Is Obama the "Reagan of the Left?" And here.
An 1864 antislavery children's book
Garry Wills on the South
Rare color photos from the 1930s and 1940s
History and Obama's inaugural address
10 reasons to go to graduate school
Springsteen stomps Joel Osteen in Albany
Brantley Gasaway on the status of conservative evangelicalism
Boston 1775 on peaceful transfers of power
The founders on the founders
What is happening at Cedarville University?
Should you say yes or no?
2 comments:
Just a couple of comments on a couple of the items. I find it ludicrous to associate Obama with Reagan. Where are the "Obama Republicans"? Five, ten or more years down the road we won't be talking about some Democrat who needs to capture the "Obama Republicans".
I read the Gary Wills column last week. I found it be just another condescending column expressing the "Big Government Knows Best" mentality. Or phrased another way, "they don't even realize they're voting against their own best interests".
The funny thing in all this is that until some 50 or 60 years ago, it was the Democrat party that was skeptical about concentrating power in D.C. Now, it is DEFAULT thinking in the circles in which Wills apparently inhabits that "Government Knows Best" and those of us who hold to some semblance that the federal government was never intended to take on the extra-Consitutional roles in which it now assumes (such as education, of which it has a miserable failure of involvement...grants and loan programs out the wazzoo and yet college costs alone have spiraled up more than TWICE that of health care of the last 30 or so years. Yeah, these folks are really gonna be the "fixers" of health care. )
Coming around with handouts for Medicare or fancy trains of dubious value without full knowledge of the strings to be attached to those funds is not unwise. As the Scriptures admonish, "which of you builds a tower without first counting the cost?"
Such federal "generosity" reminds me of a quote attributed to the Roman historian Plutarch: "The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits."
I at least like to think some of us conservative/limited government types still hold to Jefferson and Madison's skepticism of centralized federal power. Of course, even the "Big Government" types in their day would have barely even measured a difference from Madison and Jefferson compared to what powers the feds claim today.
P.S. Yikes, Dr. Fea, you post a lot of stuff! Makes it hard to keep up! But I enjoy reading what I can.
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