– they just don’t support the First Amendment. So reads my (1000th) tweet earlier today, after reading repeated complaints from the Right that the Left and the media are being hypocrites in having mocked opponents of Piss Christ, the Virgin Mary in dung, and other Great Achievements in Art, and having assiduously defended the Brooklyn Museum of Art in displaying these images, now being indifferent to the mocking of Mormons that is the whole of the Book of Mormon Broadway musical,... Read more

1.  What’s the cost? 2.  What’s the content? The background: The Tribune is now reporting that the library coming to Chicago is now a done deal; the only unanswered question is which major city park will have its acreage sliced off to become museum grounds, parking, the First Lady’s Garden, and the like. With respect to question 1, it is already apparent that, despite claims that the library will be built with private funds, there will be costs a-plenty for... Read more

I’m still mulling over Putnam’s book, especially in connection with the whole mess in Baltimore. So the whole issue of daycare and universal free all-day preschool, which progressives offer as one of their first-line solutions to poverty, just strikes me as suspect:  I’m just highly skeptical of claims that, if you don’t provide an “enriching” environment to infants, toddlers, and preschool children, with 1,000 books before kindergarten (the new initiative at my local library and, I imagine, elsewhere), a caregiver... Read more

Yes, finally, after having mentioned this book in several prior posts, I’m finally writing about this more directly! And longtime readers will know that I generally don’t write “book reviews” in any conventional sense; what I do is more a sort of note-taking with commentary. The subtitle of the book is “The American Dream in Crisis,” and the basic gist of it is that, in many ways, compared to the generation of the author’s upbringing, in the 50s (he graduated... Read more

Need I say more? How about the fact that they’re hypercritical, about my claimed lack of proper manners as a host, and my housekeeping ability, in particular, and after their last visit here they complained, not to me, but to my husband?  (He defended me, but it’s still no fun to be in his shoes.)  Oh, and, what’s more, their life experience is so narrow that they simply don’t understand that German and American manners and expectations are different. So... Read more

This is more of a question than anything else: What causes a riot? Sure, we’re hearing that, in the case of Baltimore, and in particular the part of Baltimore that’s “ground zero” for the riots, is especially impoverished, either as a result of longstanding segregation, according to Slate, the combination of corrupt city government and failed Great Society programs, according to Rich Lowry (National Review contributor writing in Politico), or Congress’s unwillingness to appropriate new sums of money for child... Read more

That’s the cost of a year of private-room nursing home care in Connecticut, according to a survey by Genworth Financial, which appeared in the paper today via an AP article.  The national median is $91,250. That’s a lot of money.  For comparison, the survey also provides the seemingly-cheaper cost of home health aide services, $45,760 at median — I say “seemingly-cheaper,” though, because that’s the amount for 44 hours/week of care, which assumes the scenario of a parent living with... Read more

So once again we have a city in chaos as originally-peaceful protests turn violent and the police seemingly turn their backs.  Here’s The Economist for a quick summary, and further coverage from Reuters and AP.  I don’t really have a sense yet of the severity of the whole thing, though we turned on CNN last night, which we don’t usually do, and my son* was most shocked by the report of someone cutting a hole in a fire hose being used... Read more