by Leo Morris My reading habits have taken a strange turn lately, but it’s not really my fault. My Kindle has been bossing me around. It started when I discovered and downloaded a mystery novel about a small- college librarian named Charlie who solves murders when not walking his Maine Coon cat around town on a leash. Then there was a whole series of books about Charlie and his cat. The Kindle algorithm, armed with…

Eric Schansberg November 11th (11/11) at 11:00 a.m. is the 100th anniversary of the armistice with Germany that ended World War I. At the time, it was considered “the war to end all wars.. It was soon replaced in the public imagination by an even larger war. Still, World War I was important both for what happened in the war and what came from it. Like most people, I know little about it. But I have…

Listening to the acceptance speeches after a harrowing midterm election, was it clear what the winners thought had been won? Some seemed to have counted the votes in their heads and concluded that the number represented fellow citizens who had astutely assessed character, intelligence and experience and had chosen him or her specifically to be their “leader,” whatever they imagine that to mean in a democracy-driven constitutional republic. The political economist Jude Wanniski deflated such…

by Mark Franke I’m not a veteran, and therein lies a story. I was in college during the height of the Vietnam War and all the protests that were de rigueur on college campuses in those days. I was getting sick of going to school and since I was a a card-carrying member of Young Americans for Freedom, I decided it was my duty to do something more constructive than just debating left-wingers in the…

by Leo Morris This is a quiet, unassuming little state, isn’t it? While scandals from Washington bubble and froth in the social media septic tank, accusations of sexual malpractice against two of the most powerful Indiana GOP politicians drip like slow leaks too inconsequential to bother with. We can only conclude that our journalists are too lazy to go out and dig up the juicy rumors with which to flesh out the tantalizing innuendos or…

by Mark Franke One of the strengths of American representative democracy is the requirement in most states for the voters to approve amendments to their state constitutions. This election cycle alone can boast of 37 states with 167 amendments and other initiatives, those in Florida and North Carolina getting the most press coverage and producing the most political fireworks. A lot of money is being spent for and against these initiatives, with California (of course…

by Leo Morris We’ve all heard that if we can’t remember the past, we are condemned to repeat it. But the truth is that even when we remember it, we repeat it anyway. We can’t help ourselves. As Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote in a 1930 letter: “It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another — it’s one damn thing over and over.” Like many other weary voters, I can’t wait for…

by T. Norman Van Cott, Ph.D. In discussions of international trade, the pervasive mindset is that exports are a positive entry in a country’s “economic well-being” ledger, while imports are a negative entry in the ledger. In other words, exports are intrinsically “good” and imports intrinsically “bad.” Who hasn’t heard that imports “destroy” jobs while exports “create” jobs? Likewise for imports being “dumped” on Americans. Ditto for imports being likened to “invading foreign armies.” In…

by Leo Morris Earlier this month, I came across this Tweet from a liberalish Lafayette attorney whose blog I have followed for a few years: “I didn’t watch the Senate debate. I do know that Trump is an incessant liar with bad ideas. Joe Donnelly will vote against him sometimes & Mike Braun never will. No need to get into the weeds on this one.” That sounds curiously similar to my reasoning in the presidential…

by John F. Gaski, Ph.D. “There’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear . . .” — Buffalo Springfield, 1967  Or maybe it is clear. The Buffalo Springfield observation may not be so applicable half a century later.  Every major leftist movement the world has ever seen has been brutally totalitarian by nature. Occasionally this degree of extremism arises elsewhere along the ideological spectrum, such as the current phenomenon of Islamo-fascism, but…