The story is from the Irish new service, RTE: Limerick pubs to open on Good Friday.
Limerick publicans have been granted a special exemption to open for business on Good Friday.
They had sought the exemption to accommodate over 26,000 people who will attend the Munster and Leinster rugby match at Thomond Park. Continue reading “Pubs to open for “health and safety” reasons”
Health care is absolutely the greatest political drama of the moment, and the drama of greatest moment, but at the American Spectator Jeffery Lord provides a superb summary-to-date of what is known of the events and facts related to what might well be the first major Obama “gate” scandal (he christens it “Jobsgate” — I think that the singular form, “Jobgate”, is more apt, myself).
I recommend reading his whole article, if you haven’t yet, as its implications are very weighty indeed: Specter Opens Door on White House Felonies.
That title refers to none other than Arlen Specter (and a very good riddance in November to that utterly unprincipled senator from Pennsylvania).
From the WSJ:
We have entered a political wonderland, where the rules are whatever Democrats say they are. Mrs. Pelosi and the White House are resorting to these abuses because their bill is so unpopular that a majority even of their own party doesn’t want to vote for it. Fence-sitting Members are being threatened with primary challengers, a withdrawal of union support and of course ostracism. Michigan’s Bart Stupak is being pounded nightly by MSNBC for the high crime of refusing to vote for a bill that he believes will subsidize insurance for abortions. Continue reading “Healthcare nightmare”
In the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby responds to Al Gore’s recent opinion piece in the New York Times, where he continued his warnings of “unimaginable calamity” if we don’t take drastic steps to reduce human-based sources of “global-warming pollution.” (Gore himself happens to have invested enormously in carbon-offset schemes and other “green” ventures that are likely to thrive only with the kinds of government mandates he promotes.) Continue reading “CO2: The “pollutant” that life requires”
Mosab Hassan Yousef is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a founder and leader of the terrorist group Hamas. He has recently told his story of both embracing Christianity and serving as a spy for Israel. He now lives in San Diego, California, and has been disowned by his father. He was interviewed for the Wall Street Journal by Matthew Kaminski.
Do you consider your father a fanatic? “He’s not a fanatic,” says Mr. Yousef. “He’s a very moderate, logical person. What matters is not whether my father is a fanatic or not, he’s doing the will of a fanatic God. It doesn’t matter if he’s a terrorist or a traditional Muslim. At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God. I know this is harsh to say. Most governments avoid this subject. They don’t want to admit this is an ideological war.
“The problem is not in Muslims,” he continues. “The problem is with their God. They need to be liberated from their God. He is their biggest enemy. It has been 1,400 years they have been lied to.”
Yousef has written his story in a book titled Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices.
With President Obama and the Democrats willing to use the reconciliation process in an attempt to by-pass their loss of a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, the focus is now on the House of Representatives. Despite optimistic stories in the press and Nancy Pelosi’s braggadocio, getting the House to pass the Senate bill in advance of reconciliation is going to be a steep and hopefully impossible mountain to climb. As Jeffrey Anderson writes in the Weekly Standard, nine Democrats who supposedly are considering switching their former “no” votes to “yes” have some awfully good reasons not to do so. And further:
An even bigger problem for the Democrats than somehow turning these members around is the strong likelihood that many other members are salivating at the thought of switching their votes to “no” and saving their careers. Clark Judge writes, “‘Blue Dogs want health care to come up again,'” said a long-time veteran of the House in a closed door briefing last Monday. ‘So they can vote against it.'”
Rich Lowry makes some great observations on the reaction of the American electorate to this past year of the Obama presidency and Democratic control in Washington that are not at all incompatible with my own from the other day (Rights versus “Benefits”). Lowry writes:
President Barack Obama learned from Bill Clinton’s mistakes in 1993-94. He ran, relative to Clinton, a buttoned-up transition. He sought to avoid Clinton’s tactical miscues on health care. And he steered clear of cultural land mines.
The backlash against Democrats in 1994 was famously attributed to “gays, guns and God.” Obama has mostly avoided stoking opposition around that hot-button triad, but faces a backlash almost indistinguishable in feel and intensity. Why?
Big government became a cultural issue. The level of spending, the bailouts and the intervention in the economy contemplated in health-care reform and cap-and-trade created the fear that something elemental was changing in the country — quickly, irrevocably, without notice.
Obama has run up against the country’s cultural conservatism as surely as Clinton did. But Obama is encountering its fiscal expression, the sense that America has always been defined by a more stringently limited government than other advanced countries. It’s an “American exceptionalism” backlash.
According to Miss Manners:
Family dinner is a quaint old ritual by which everybody in the same household would gather nightly at a specific time, rather than each head for the microwave when hungry; sit around a table, rather than stand in front of an open refrigerator; share the same food, rather than argue for competing standards of nutrition, taste and morality; and be entertained by one another’s conversation, rather than by that of celebrities on television. Without in the least minimizing the demands of work, homework and working out, Miss Manners nevertheless argues that the chief ritual that binds family and civilization is sacrificed at too great a personal and social cost.
Indeed.
From Judith Martin’s book, Miss Manners’ Basic Training: Eating.
A good thing of which to take note, I would think.
The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another self. My good is my good and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same. With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for us, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger. ‘To be’ means ‘ to be in competition’.
That’s C.S. Lewis (or rather, his character, Uncle Screwtape) from his remarkable book, The Screwtape Letters.
In the news from Ireland: Vomiting bug forces visitor restrictions at several hospitals.
Strict visitor restrictions are in place at a number of hospitals across the country due to outbreaks of the vomiting bug. Continue reading “Retching insects”
From an article written in 1986 by P.J. O’Rourke:
Usually, a plane ride gives me some distance on questions of dogma, the way a martini or a lungful of hashish does. We don’t call it “high” for nothing; that was slang three centuries before the Wright brothers. Whatever those microbes down there think is no concern of mine — unless I fly into the Soviet Block. Something’s wrong when harebrained ideas can be spotted from Olympian heights. On the outskirts of Warsaw, the whole countryside is scarred with the gravel pits and gray dust plumes of cement factories. Commies love concrete. Continue reading “Commies love concrete”
As the snow falls in record amounts in Washington D.C. and other parts, hearts will be warmed by a superb summation of recent “climate-change” developments by Margaret Wente in England’s Globe and Mail: The great global warming collapse.
In 2007, the most comprehensive report to date on global warming, issued by the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a shocking claim: The Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035. Continue reading “The global waning of Global Warming”
I’ll bite, on this oddly galvanizing YouTube clip. Via Hot Air.
The blurb to go with the video says, “When people who love politics, pop culture and filmmaking are asked to humanize the sentiment of the founders in writing the declaration, we sometimes get carried away.”
Subterranean.
