An article in yesterday’s WaPo bemoaning the impoverished knowledge of civics among American youth contained the following gem: “Only 55 percent of fourth-graders, for example, could identify an important reason for raising taxes.” Oh golly, can the end of our fair republic be far off when 45% of our precious little ones can’t come up […]

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Politics, Meet Metaphysics To paraphrase Richard Wagner, the pledge is beginning to bore me. So let’s kick out some good ol’ fashioned philosophy. Anyone else think it’s utterly strange that the generally secular left is typically hostile to the idea of a “human nature,” while the right (more often associated with religious sensibilities) makes regular […]

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Heil Flag! After blasting the unpopular 9th circuit ruling, President Bush led citizens in Virginia today in a group recitation of the pledge. He also proposed resurrecting the original extended-arm salute, and appending “heil flag! gott mit uns!” to the pledge.

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I know everyone’s sick of the pledge stuff by now, but having thought about it this much already, I decided to do an LFB column on the subject. Here we go: Under Law I couldn’t have been older than four when, minutes after arriving at the mysterious new world of pre-school, I first heard the […]

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One Reflexive Reflection, Hold the Awareness of Irony In the June issue of Liberty, Sheldon Richman says: “The worst part of the Internet is not the hate sites or the sappy family sites, but those sites maintained by the bloggers. This is a collection of pompous wannabe pundits, all across the political spectrum, who believe […]

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Sin-Tax Error So Mike Bloomberg claims that raising the price of smokes in Manhattan to a whopping seven bucks per pack is an attempt to save lives, and not just a way of milking more revenue out of a politically unpopular group. The irony is that when some libertarians argued that people’s choices shouldn’t be […]

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Pledge Part Three – Bad Objections This issue seems to have generated quite a few strong feelings. There are a few objections that seem to crop up again and again, and so instead of cluttering the comment sections of a thousand blogs, perhaps I should collect some of them here, with responses. But, nobody’s *forced* […]

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Big fun this evening at the loungerrific Chi-Cha on U Street. Various D.C. area bloggers in attendance, including portions of the BeltwayBloggers crowd, and organized by the illustrious Jen Raj. And there’s yet another happy hour tomorrow at the 18th Street Lounge, this one sponsored by the AFF. And come to think of it, Friday […]

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Un-Pledge Well praise da lawd, a federal appeals court has ruled the pledge of allegiance unconstitutional! I’m just surprised that it took this long for a court to toss this absurd little loyalty oath, which drones into children’s minds the idea that this is “one nation, under god.” That’s the kind of jurisprudence that actually […]

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Whee! I am DSL boy! Taste my joy! It almost makes me wish I hadn’t summoned the voodoo loa Zaraguin to inject leprosy and napalm into the testicles of Verizon‘s CEO. Almost. In other news, I saw Minority Report this weekend, and am glad to see Spielberg back on form. Phillip K. Dick stories tend […]

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