Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Are Spanish-Language Skills Genetic?
"Speed skater Jennifer Rodriguez said after yanking herself upright. 'I feel so stupid. I'm the Cuban American girl, and I have horrible Spanish.'"
"U.S. Speedskater Rodriguez Isn't Spinning Her Wheels," Washington Post, April 26, 2005.
|posted by Jim on 7:07 PM|
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Too Frank Franks
Thomas Franks, author of What's the Matter with Kansas, revisits the topic of his book in the New York Review of Books, "What's the Matter with Liberals?"
Franks' thesis is that Republicans are confusing people about their true agenda by intentionally misleading voters. "National Security" is for Franks not the name of a essential condition for America which both parties should seek but a political tactic no more worthy than any other:
What makes national security such a winner for Republicans is that is dramatizes the same negative qualities of liberalism that we see in the so-called "values" issues, only much more forcefully. War casts in sharp relief the inauthenticity of the liberals, the insincerity of their patriotism, and their intellectual distance (always trying to "understand" the terrorists' motives) from the raw emotions felt by ordinary Americans?each quality an expression of the deracinated upper-classness that is thought to be the defining characteristic of liberalism.
It is precisely because of this attitude that many people, both Republicans and Democrats, had genuine fears regarding the foreign policy of a President John Kerry.
Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and John Wayne taught the American people that wars, once entered, are to be won. Kerry Democrats were suspected as treating the war against terrorism as merely another excuse to raise taxes at home and increase foreign aid abroad:
[B]y raising foreign aid by just one-tenth of one percent of GNP - a move that would yield about $10 billion - the US would "start having an adequate strategy for fighting terrorism at its roots."
What hindered candidate John Kerry in the 2004 election was not the words he used, but the actual policies he espoused.
|posted by Jim on 6:45 PM|
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Monday, April 25, 2005
Nine More Reasons to Reject the "Nuclear Option"
For the last month, official Washington has been consumed by something called the "nuclear option."
While it sounds like a defense bill, the nuclear option is actually a proposal by Senate Republicans to bypass Senate rules which have slowed the confirmation of federal judges.
Even though English First is proudly on the record in support of Judge William Pryor for a permanent seat on the Court of Appeals, we reject the nuclear option.
In the hope of dissuading other conservatives from supporting it, I issued a memo describing how easy it would be for Senate Democrats to retaliate. Matthew Yglesias of the liberal American Prospect agreed.
Now we have Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid's list of legislation he will force onto the Senate floor should Republicans invoke the nuclear option. Lots of good government-sounding titles meant to camouflage lots of red meat for the left.
The nuclear option is bad policy and worse politics.
|posted by Jim on 8:56 PM|
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Monday, April 04, 2005
The Papal Election's Language Problem
is real says George Weigel:
This unprecedented diversity will not only make the conclave more complex logistically; it will make it more complex linguistically. The cardinal-electors don’t share a common language (one after-effect of the decline of Latin in the Church) – and the results of that, for the pre-conclave discussion of issues and the conclave itself, remain to be seen.
|posted by Jim on 4:08 PM|
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