Reflections on God … Man … Life
Opinions on contemporary political happenings and the workings of civil government.
When we celebrated our one-year-old grandson’s birthday in Tucson on December 29, I went to the nearest grocery store to buy the ice cream. It was a Safeway store located in a shopping center on the corner of Ina and Oracle. On Saturday, that very store was in the news as the scene for a most horrific shooting. As I have watched the coverage the past couple of days, I can visualize from my own experience the very spot where… Read more »
Now that the House is Republican, probably no radical legislation is going to succeed. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that there are other ways an administration can try to achieve its agenda. We have to be alert to those possibilities: Last week, some alert observers noticed that the end-of-life provision [a.k.a., death panels] that had to be excised from Obamacare because of the uproar created over the government determining whether or not someone would be allowed to… Read more »
I remember standing in the freezing rain outside the Capitol on inaugural day 2001, watching George W. Bush replace Bill Clinton as president. It’s hard to describe the relief that swept through the crowd once he took the oath of office. Eight years of one of the sleaziest episodes in American presidential history had mercifully come to an end. I wasn’t present on Wednesday when the Republicans once again took control of the House of Representatives, but something similar to… Read more »
Over Christmas, I took the opportunity to read former President Bush’s new book Decision Points. I did so for two reasons: first, I really wanted to “hear” what he had to say; second, as an American historian, I need to be up to speed on how this former president defends his actions. Let me begin with what I consider to be its strengths. The first strength is Bush’s informal writing style. You get the impression this is exactly how he… Read more »
On this first day of a new year, I’m not going to say too much. Instead, I’m just going to let Ronald Reagan encourage and challenge you. I believe standing up for America also means standing up for the God who has so blessed this land. We’ve strayed so far, it may be later than we think. There’s a hunger in our land to see traditional values reflected in public policy again. To those who cite the first amendment as… Read more »
As we close the book on 2010, and as we consider the challenges that loom, some select quotes from Ronald Reagan may help us focus on our responsibilities. There are some quotes from Reagan with which many people are familiar, but I’ve chosen to pull out some that are less well known, yet just as insightful. Just two months into his presidency, right before the assassination attempt, he spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference dinner: We’ve heard in our… Read more »
More wisdom from Whittaker Chambers today. Reflecting on the sad state of society in 1925 with respect to its grasp of the dangers it was facing, he penned these poignant words: The dying world of 1925 was without faith, hope, character, understanding of its malady or will to overcome it. It was dying but it laughed. And this laughter was not the defiance of a vigor that refuses to know when it is whipped. It was the loss, by the… Read more »