Author: Eric Scheie

Camille Paglia praises Nancy Pelosi for displaying what a lot of people would call balls if they had any. Pelosi, argues Paglia, is “sets a new standard for U.S. women politicians and is certainly well beyond anything the posturing but ineffectual Hillary Clinton has ever achieved.” And this: a basic feminist shibboleth like abortion rights…

Speaking of police accountability, check this out (from the Wiki entry for Jeffrey Dahmer): In the early morning hours of May 30, 1991, 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone (by chance, the younger brother of the boy whom Dahmer had molested) was discovered on the street, wandering naked, heavily under the influence of drugs and bleeding from his…

Videos of police incidents are helpful to the police, right? They can help solve crime because they preserve an accurate record of who did what to whom, they can help in determining whether and when a crime occurred, and they can obviously be of great assistance in identifying criminals. So it seems to be almost…

Now that the Democrats are fresh in the glow of their victory in the House of Representatives, I am seeing this new meme everywhere, a Philadelphia Inquirer writeup being typical. The headline is “Abortion threatens health bill,” but I think the subtext is to encourage a repeat of the same bait-and-switch tactics that took the…

I can’t believe it’s been twenty years since the Wall came tumbling down. The Berlin Wall that is. I was born in 1954, at the height of the Cold War, and I remember when the wall went up. I was seven, and it happened at about the same time as Nikita Khrushchev’s infamous shoe banging…

To the anti-abortion lobby, Congressman Bart Stupak is a hero right now. But to those who oppose government health care, he’s anything but a hero, because his anti-abortion amendment is what saved the day for the Pelosi bill. While at least one anti-abortion conservative blogger warned that Stupak (a supporter of government health care) was…

With the House hurdle out of the way, government health care has inched closer to being a reality than ever before. Hopefully, it will be stopped in the Senate, if the Republicans there don’t make the same mistake they made in the House and help facilitate its passage by “sweetener” amendments. As I explained in…

As I’ve said before, abortion is not “my” issue. I don’t discuss it much, perhaps because I don’t like getting into the usual hopeless, useless arguments which persuade no one and mainly inflame passions. More than almost any issue, discussion of the abortion issue is limited mainly to pro-abortion and anti-abortion activists and single issue…

When Barack Obama was campaigning against Hillary Clinton, he repeatedly promised that his health insurance plan would not be compulsory, and stated that this was one of the important differences between him and Hillary Clinton. “Watch the whole video for Obama’s impassioned criticisms of plans which mandate that people purchase health insurance under threat of…

Anyone remember the good old days when the political world was divided into wingnuts and moonbats? Whether it was a more civil world, at least it was a cleaner one. Nowadays, to get their point across, political ideologues increasingly resort to sexualized insults — the raunchier the better! At the highest levels of government, Tea…

I loved M. Simon’s quotation from Emerson. So much so that despite Emerson’s warning against quotes — a quote infamously violated by William Safire — I wanted to quote the rest of the paragraph . A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a…

From Veeshir (who has left so many helpful comments here that I treat an email from him like a homework assignment), my attention was directed to a perfect — perfectly dreadful that is — example of the contempt some of our highest elected officials have for the Constitution: James O’Connor, Burris’s communications director, later told…

Linking my earlier post about the Fort Hood shooting, M. Simon quoted what I said about the shooter’s imam: Hasan’s imam Faizul Khan is no ordinary imam. He is on the Board of Directors of the ISNA, a radical Wahhabi outfit which “enforces extremist Wahhabi theological writ in America’s mosques. Such people and their murderous…

That’s what Shepard Smith on Fox News just said about the officer who is described as the primary gunman who killed 12 people and wounded 31 in a mass shooting at Fort Hood Texas. He is described as “a convert to Islam” and a major who was about to deploy to Iraq, and who was…

Via Glenn Reynolds, my attention was drawn to an irresistibly funny comment left here: Dear Barack, Please continue to campaign for Democratic candidates in future elections. The Republicans welcome all your help. Thank you. He was quite effective, wasn’t he? Nothing wrong with giving credit where credit is due.

Two posts I read yesterday hammered home the importance of something I hate. TELEVISION. My inability to watch it occasionally places me at a disadvantage in evaluating politicians. The problem is that I’m too impatient to put up with people spouting their opinions. When people talk, I can’t skim through and “scroll down” to get…

An animal rights nut I am not. Quite the opposite, in fact. However, I do think animals have a right not to be treated cruelly, and while it might be another example of my less than perfect libertarianism, I have no problem in making it a crime for human beings to torture animals. I would…

It strikes me that running for office is an inherently bothersome (if not annoying) thing to do — both to yourself and to other people. I suspect that this is why people who want to leave people alone tend not to run for office. It also might explain why the people who are running for…

On the issue of gay marriage, I have always been skeptical about state involvement. I realize my position is hardly the conventional libertarian one, but I have long had misgivings, and I vacillate between sympathy towards those of good will on both sides and general apathy. Analyzed in terms of freedom, I could almost go…

In what seems a mini referendum on government economic policies, the Democrats lost big in Virginia, and in New Jersey Governor Corzine lost to Chris Christie, despite the personal intervention of President Barack Obama in both races. Like most people, New Jerseyans don’t seem to take kindly to personal insults, and I think it proved…