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Liberty and Power

  • Jun 10, 2004

    I'll Miss You, Brother Ray

    by Liberty and Power

    Just yesterday, while watching the Capitol Rotunda Memorial Service for Ronald Reagan, I was very touched by a stirring rendition of"America the Beautiful" by the Air Force's Singing Sergeants. I remembered being touched like this before upon hearing a very different and deeply soulful rendition by the great Ray Charles.

    Another day, another passing. Ray Charles, 73, an American institution, a vocalist and instrumentalist who

  • Jun 10, 2004

    Harding

    by Liberty and Power

    Harding does get a bad rap from the historians, as do most of the presidents who don't"do anything," i.e., start wars or vast new social programs. A few years back, Harding made the list in Nathan Miller's book Star-Spangled Men: America's Ten Worst Presidents. Here's an excerpt from my review :of that book in the Freeman:

    Warren G. Harding receives the most undeservedly rough treatment of any president examined. From a classical libera

  • Jun 10, 2004

    Neuroscience Is Blind

    by Liberty and Power

    Researchers in England claim they are beginning to understand why love is “blind,” that is, why people tend not to see faults in their romantic partners and children. The answer, according to British psychiatrist Raj Persaud’s report on the research, is that, for evolutionary r
  • Jun 9, 2004

    Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery They Say

    by Liberty and Power

    Courtesy of Andrew Sullivan, I found this story on a group of fundamentalist Christians who are trying to get 12,000 followers to move to South Carolina in order to change the political face of the state and eventually secede, creating their own little Christian country.  (Do they have enough literary sense, and too little sense of irony, to name it

  • Jun 8, 2004

    Ronald Reagan, Protectionist

    by Liberty and Power

    Jeff Tucker found another article, this one specifically on Reagan’s protectionism.

    A longer paper on the subject, published by Cato, is here.

    While I'm at it, here’s my Cato paper analyzing Reagan's intervention in the Iran-Iraq War. This is when the U.S. alliance with Saddam Hussein really picked up steam.

  • Jun 8, 2004

    R.I.P. R.R.

    by Liberty and Power

    I know that Reagan left government bigger than he found it, but still, he was the only president of my lifetime that I actually liked. He had grace, charm, class, and most of the right enemies. I don't have anything to add to all the eulogizing going on, except the following cool story about the twentysomething RR from Edmund Morris's much maligned, but flakily interesting Dutch:

    "Paul was tal

  • Jun 8, 2004

    A Look at Reagan in 1988

    by Liberty and Power

    Jeff Tucker of the Mises Institute was entrepreneurial enough to dig up this 1988 article of mine on the Reagan years. It may be of interest.

    Thanks, Jeff.

  • Jun 8, 2004

    Are Historians Shunning the Founders?

    by Liberty and Power

    Michael Barone asks:

    "Are our great universities abandoning the study of the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers? It looks like they are. Two of the leaders in colonial- and revolutionary-era scholarship, Bernard Bailyn at Harvard and Gordon Wood at Brown are being replaced by historians with no apparent interest in the Revolution and the founding." Read the rest here.

    I am not sure about the extent of this tr

  • Jun 8, 2004

    Reagan's Greatest Achievement

    by Liberty and Power

    Several years ago my wife, Karol, was in the graduate history program at the University of Georgia. She served as a teaching assistant for a large-section freshman class on American history. The text for the class was David Shi’s and George Tindall’s America: A Narrative History.

    I recall perusing this text and reading in it that one of the benefits that Ronald Reagan enjoyed during his first term as president – a benefit that eluded Jimmy Carter – was that the gasoline shortages that ma

  • Jun 7, 2004

    Reagan and the People

    by Liberty and Power

    Although Ronald Reagan had a very destructive blind spot when came to the war on people who use certain kinds of drugs, I would still rate him as by far the best president of my lifetime. This is because he was the first president since Calvin Coolidge to understand the central tenet guiding the Founding Father’s vision of what America should be. Reagan knew that it was not about him; it was about us, the people. I do not think you can say the same of George Bush.
  • Jun 7, 2004

    A Government of Monsters

    by Liberty and Power

    We have officially passed into extraordinarily dangerous waters. The government expended a great deal of time and money (your money) to make certain it could engage in torture, and that no one would suffer any legal consequences whatsoever:

    Bush administration lawyers contended last year that the president wasn't bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture p
  • Jun 7, 2004

    Is This One of Those "Known Unknowns," or What?

    by Liberty and Power

    Sometimes the truth comes from the damnedest sources:

    SINGAPORE -- The United States and its allies are winning some battles in the terrorism war but may be losing the broader struggle against Islamic extremism that is terrorism's source, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Saturday.

    The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed"zealots and despots" bent on destroying

  • Jun 7, 2004

    Why I'm Not Retired

    by Liberty and Power

    For the thousands of blog readers out there who bet their life savings on Rock Hard Ten this weekend my sincere apologies. For what it's worth I lost both a win bet and an exacta.
  • Jun 6, 2004

    Hatchet Job

    by Liberty and Power

    Like most of my" co-blogers" my view of Ronald Reagan was and is decidedly mixed. I was in college when he was elected to a second term, and opposed to much of what he did in Latin America and social policy. However you have to admire the way he changed the public dialogue and drove liberals bananas. I send out my best wishes and prayers to his family.

    However I did want to point out that the extended Reagan bio in the