URLs Du Jour (10/26/2005)

  • John Podhoretz has a clarifying column discussing the real reasons behind the dung-flinging between Judith Miller and everyone else at the New York Times (Free registration, but it's worth it.)

    OF course, none of this Miller character assassination has anything to do with the Valerie Plame story. Rather, it has to do with the war in Iraq, weapons of mass destruction—and the peculiar solipsism of both the staff of The New York Times and the paper's liberal readership.

    Convincing, certainly more so that Andrew Sullivan declaring the sliming to be "impressively honest and appropriately self-critical."

  • Many "Blaine Amendments" in state constitutions prohibiting government aid to students in non-government schools were couched in the anti-Catholic bigotry of the late 19th century. This is part of the "secret history" of modern dogmas of church-state separation: born in less-than-noble impulses that its admirers neither admit nor (probably) know about.

    Alex Tabarrok similarly points out the "secret history" behind minimum wage laws:

    Progressives, including Richard Ely, Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, the Webbs in England etc., were interested not in protecting women but in protecting men and the race. Their goal was to get women back into the home, where they belonged, instead of abandoning their eugenic duties and competing with men for work.

  • If (for some reason), you are not in total despair with the fiscal profligacy of the Republican-controlled Congress, Glenn Reynolds might push you over the edge with his Tech Central Station column about the proposed 3 Gigabuck subsidy proposed for owners of analog TVs not served by cable providers. Promoting this is Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). Glenn comments:

    I suppose that there are worse ways to waste the taxpayers' money -- I can't actually think of any at the moment, but given Congress's ingenuity I suppose that Ted Stevens and his colleagues probably could -- but this strikes me as pretty pathetic, especially when the government is laying off scientists for lack of money. Subsidizing TV and starving science seems like a recipe for something short of national greatness.
  • Via Galley Slaves: Father Neuhaus takes on major point of religious strife between two of his parishoners. If Father Neuhaus were the priest at our local church, I might convert.

Last Modified 2012-10-26 6:02 AM EDT