Author: Eric Scheie

I didn’t watch the SOTU, and I’m glad I didn’t. But even though I didn’t watch the speech, I still agree with what Roger Kimball said about it:  I am not quite ready for the 2012 campaign yet… Me neither. So I’m glad I don’t have to play this idiotic game. (Via Glenn Reynolds, who…

A writer at the Daily Caller maintains that having a gay group at CPAC will lead to the  “crack-up of conservatism,” but what fascinated me the most about the piece was to read that it is the conservative position that human sexuality is fixed and unchanging. Apparently, the acceptance of gays is causing a lot…

Via an email from a friend, I learned that a girls’ basketball team is facing severe criticism for beating the opposing team by too large of a margin:    It’s been called unsportsmanlike. It’s been called ugly. The question now is whether Christian Heritage (Utah) High, which routed West Ridge (Utah) Academy, 108-3, in a girls…

Speaking of royal proclamations, a bill has been introduced which would give the president the ability to turn off the Internet: …the point of the proposal is to assert governmental control only over those “crucial components that form our nation’s critical infrastructure.” Portions of the Lieberman-Collins bill, which was not uniformly well-received when it became…

Speaking of religious issues, according to a Breitbart report, some of the worlds’s top bug advocates, invoking the sacred UN as a planetary authority, are demanding that we learn to eat bugs: …head of entomology Marcel Dicke knows that changing Westerners’ mindset will take more than disguising a worm in chocolate. “The problem is here,”…

Not that what I think carries any legal weight, but I don’t think spanking should be a crime. This is not a judgment over the rightness or the wrongness of spanking so much as it is my opinion that whether and how parents discipline their children is one of the places where government does not…

I’ve been blogging for nearly eight years, so I like to think that I know what this medium is. It allows me to write and share whatever thoughts and opinions I have with whoever cares to read them. Whether I write about ideas, politics, culture, or mundane details from personal life — and whether I…

As I was reminded in an earlier comment that the focus of this blog really ought to be on dog blogging, and as Coco has been deeply concerned (if not actually offended in the true sense) by some of the blatant cat blogging which has been going on at her site recently, I thought it…

Anyone who wants to read the gruesome details about that Philadelphia butcher who performed unsanitary and illegal abortions which killed women and babies should check out Clayton Cramer’s post on the subject.  The following is from the Grand Jury report: This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean…

There are two things I love about Sarah Palin. One is that she’s the overall best chance that small government libertarians and constitutionalists have of getting someone of a libertarianish bent into the nation’s highest office, and the second is that I love the way she drives the left wild, and causes them to seriously…

My congressman, John Dingell, is one of the oldest and richest members of the House; he’s so old that his Washington career literally began under FDR. Now 84, Dingell intends to seek re-election, and he is taking advantage of the tragic shooting of Gabrielle Giffords by claiming he and his wife received death threats “in”…

The more I think about M. Simon’s previous post, and this Ann Althouse comment discussion, the more I am having some serious hypothetical worries about my future. The reason for my concern is the growing insistence by a large number of people that the so-called “Short Form” — the standard issue birth certificate which most…

According to a post Glenn linked, a study of action movie villains from the 1980s to today revealed that the most frequent and persistent overall characteristic of Hollywood bad guys is that they work for the government: I tracked ten of the best-loved action stars over the past 30 years: Clint Eastwood, Tom Cruise, Bruce…

For different reasons, both M. Simon and Sarah have made me want to sound off about something that has long annoyed me.  Magical thinking. Seeing things that aren’t. Making connections that are not there. In movies, the Michael Moore approach. (Bush swings golf club. Truckload of dead Iraqi babies. Voila! Connection made!)  I hate the…

CNN is trying to avoid inflammatory rhetoric: CNN’s John King: “Before we go to break, I want to make a quick point. We were having a discussion about the Chicago mayoral race. My friend Andy Shaw used the term ‘in the crosshairs’ in talking about the candidates. We’re trying, we’re trying to get away from…

My doctor in California — an internist I have been seeing since the 1970s — is a real doctor. By that I mean he has a private practice and is not beholden to some faceless institution which treats doctors like apparatchiks and their patients as little more inventory in a public policy study. His records…

According to his friends, Jared Loughner hated Bush, and he believed in the 9/11 Truther conspiracy theories. Assuming the man’s mind was capable of a political classification (a big assumption, IMO), that would have tended to place him on the left at the time. Because Bush was president and the official government position was that…

What’s up all of a sudden with certain Republicans these days?  I mean, I might have expected Democrats to be pushing gun control, but coming on the heels of Peter King’s inanity, stuff like this is getting ridiculous: Lugar pushes to renew assault weapons banSen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) this weekend called on Congress to reinstate…

While there doesn’t seem to be much in terms of earth-shaking news yet today, over at Memeorandum I found a thoughtful and amusing essay, even if it sometimes borders on the outrageous. The author “Freddie” is primarily irritated at the mainstream left for excluding genuine leftists (the sort who are honest enough to admit to…

While I am accustomed to scoldings from the left (especially on Sundays), it surprised even the jaded me to see a Sunday scolding in the form of an Associated Press news report titled “Nation ponders King in wake of Arizona shootings“: ATLANTA (AP) — The federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. has taken on…