The American Spectator

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Current Wisdom

Commonweal

Government-dictated subprime mortgages overthrow long-standing lending regulations and nudge the world into recession, and what does Commonweal’ s resident archangel behold? Well, it is the sad expiry of “unregulated free-market capitalism” and visions of Karl Marx tuning in to CNN:

Karl Marx, were he still about, would surely be interested in the report that unregulated free-market capitalism has died in a flash, by its own hand. After all, it took seventy years and a cold war to bring down the Marxist econ omy established in the Soviet Union following the Bolshevik Revolution.

(October 10, 2008)

The Progressive

Matthew Rothschild, editor of the pish posh left’s Old Faithful, enlightens us to the dismal state of race relations among his fellow progressives:

So if the conditions are so ripe for an Obama victory, why is the race so close? Because millions of white Americans, especially those who are forty-five and older, may not be able to bring themselves to vote for the black guy. It’s that simple. I got an inkling of this in the spring when I went to give a talk in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, about an hour north of Milwaukee. At the dinner beforehand, I was sitting with three elderly white women, who told me they had never voted against a Democrat in their lives. But this time they couldn’t vote for Obama.

I asked why.

One woman instantly said, “Race has nothing to do with it,” which I took to be a tell.

I asked her what was it, then. And she could not give me any coherent reason.

(October 2008)

New York Review of Books

In an era when the spread of Islam agitates even the most stout-hearted, the venerable NYRB reports an even more dire development in the geopolitical realm:

Nevertheless, serious bird-watching (or birding, to use today’s preferred term) has grown geometrically. In the Virginia town where I grew up, three of us looked for birds in the 1950s. Now thirty-five people there have formed an e-mail network where they regularly recount their birding adventures.