Dr. Helen: Why are liberals unable to sympathize with conservatives? I offer three possibilities. First, I often wonder if this “blind spot” for conservatives is similar to the psychopath who cannot comprehend the morality of those who are “normal.” At the present time, there is no known cure for treating the psychopath. Trying to get someone on the left to see where a conservative is coming from may be as

Jonah Goldberg, on “Liberals and Eugenics”: When reading the literature on the subjects of eugenics and race, one commonly finds academics blaming eugenics on “conservative” tendencies within the scientific, economic, or larger progressive communities. Why? Because according to liberals, racism is objectively conservative. Anti-Semitism is conservative. Hostility to the poor (that is, social Darwinism) is conservative. Therefore, whenever a liberal is racist or fond of eugenics, he is magically transformed

Have I mentioned I have a pair of Macs? Because I do. Plus, for tea? Vanilla Chai. Which, if they ever figure out a way to package that shit in recycled tea bags, count me in!

NRO’s Campaign Spot: Two revealing comments from Aetna CEO Ron Williams in an interview with BusinessWeek out now: Will insurance premiums go up? The answer is yes, and some of the things that will drive those premiums are significant additional taxes the industry will ultimately have to pay in the first year. The President said that this bill would not have any impact on people who already had coverage, that

[Saturdays tend to be good days for discussion, so I thought I’d bring back this post, originally published here in 2002 (many of the links probably won’t work, but that shouldn’t affect your ability to piece together the various staked positions under review). The person I’m answering here has, since this piece, decided (as many others from the earlier days of the blogosphere have) that I am reprehensible and worthy

Dan Collins is experiencing what many of us these days are experiencing, namely, the shock of the surreal supplanting the actual, and doing so in plain sight, with hardly so much as a second thought: The House voted to censure Joe Wilson when he shouted “You lie!” after Obama claimed that illegal immigrants wouldn’t be covered by his legislation. They then had to spend the night making their counter-claims true.

This will be an especially personal post, but as it brings into sharp relief many of the ideas I’ve spent years writing about here, I figured it’s worth sharing. As many of you know, a few evenings ago I received the following email from one of my old creative writing professors:

The most transparent, post-partisan administration ever! Barack Obama has threatened to give Craig Becker, the labor union lawyer apologist, not the curmudgeon Ted Danson character, a recess appointment. It could come as early as next week. You might remember that last month, the Senate failed to come up with enough votes to bring Becker’s nomination for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to the floor in a bi-partisan rejection of