Joel Mathis

At National Review today, Dennis Prager says that the left is dangerous because it craves power instead of money—and power in the service of Big Government leads to the Holocaust, Mao, and Stalin. Sure, some big corporations may not always  "play by the rules," but they don't have the power to send you to a concentration camp. Key graph: There is yet another reason to fear big government far more than big corporations. ExxonMobil has no police force, no IRS, no ability to arrest you, no ability to shut you up, and certainly no ability to kill you. ExxonMobil can’t knock on your door in the middle of the night and legally take you away. Apple Computer cannot take your money away without your consent, and it runs no prisons. The government does all of these things. Prager's diagnosis, of course, misses the concern that most liberals have about Big Business—which is that money and power are not separate things: Money purchases power , which can give (oh hell, let&#

At National Review today , a pair of writers argue that contraception is bad for women—and what would be good for women is a return to "natural" family planning. That is: If you don't want to get pregnant, don't have sex when you're at you're most fertile. The authors try to offer a "feminist" reason for doing so: Authentic sexual equality requires that men understand with their bodies (as women do) the procreative potential of the sexual act. And this is exactly what natural methods of family planning do. By frequenting sex only during infertile times when a child is unwanted, men learn to coordinate their desires for intimacy with the natural rhythms of the female body. Feminist scholar and theologian Angela Franks notes that “[this] is unheard of in a society in which male desire appears to set the guidelines — especially in the ‘hook-up’ culture. Indeed, such a reorientation ofdesire is more revolutionary than any secular feminist project.” T

He hasn't. But Kevin Williamson's piece on the nexus of Wall Street and Washington is devastatingly reminiscent of Taibbi's Rolling Stone reportage , albeit from a right-of-center point of view. Here's a sample slice: When President Obama opined during his 2011 State of the Union speech that a corporate tax-rate cut might be just the thing for America after a year of record corporate profits, his left-wing base was shocked and dismayed. Heck, some conservatives were caught offguard, too. Perhaps they hadn’t noticed who was running the Obama administration: In large part, the same guys who plan to be running the next Republican administration. #ad#Barack Obama (Nasdaq: bho) has been a pretty good buy for Goldman Sachs et al. Sure, the Frank-Dodd financial-reform bill is going to be a sharp pain in Wall Street’s pinstriped posterior, and it’s going to cost some moneymen some money, but not enough that anybody’s going to be out a champagne saber. Mostly, Big Business h

National Review's editors aren't happy with the Obama Administration's new efforts to protect gay rights abroad : Support for human rights has a place in foreign policy, albeit a subordinate one. Among those rights, certainly, is the right of homosexuals to be free from violent attacks and other draconian punishments. As Clinton rightly notes, if there are fundamental rights at all (and the foundational premise of this republic is that there are) then they “are not conferred by the government,” but ours “because we are human.” The secretary then goes on to claim that human rights and gay rights are “one and the same,” which we suppose is true insofar as the latter collapses into the former. What we don’t understand is how Clinton’s view — that being human vests us with certain rights — entails or even is compatible with a second set of rights that one enjoys by virtue of being homosexual. When Clinton says, “It is a violation of human rights when people are beaten or kille

I wondered where National Review editor Rich Lowry was going with this . He spends the bulk of his column conceding that, yes, the American Dream is "raggedy around the edges," that if you're born poor in America, you're all too likely to stay poor, that "picking the right parents" seems to make more of a difference here than it does in (say) Finland for your future economic prospects. So, God bless Lowry for providing some conservative reality-based pushback to Paul Ryan's fantasy of an economically mobile society. But Lowry arrives at the end of his column—just two paragraphs to go!—and concludes that despite all this, one shouldn't blame America's economic structure—really, the poor have only themselves to blame: This stagnation is less a statement about the structure of America’s economy than about its culture. As Ronald Haskins, also of the Brookings Institution, wrote in an essay for National Affairs, “economic mobility is constrained

At National Review today, Robert Verbruggen urges the federal government to save (admittedly minimal) money by tightening standards for the food stamp program. Spending on the program, he says, has quadrupled during the last 10 years and standards are too loose: This has created some truly ridiculous situations — such as the case of a Michigan man who won $2 million in the lottery, tied it up in investments, and received so little income from them that he was still eligible for food stamps. Until a recent policy change, food-stamp eligibility in the state was based solely on income, with no consideration of savings accounts, investments, or other assets. Though the policy was set at the state level, federal taxpayers picked up the tab. But how many millionaires are gaming the system to get food stamps? I'm guessing maybe ... this guy. Maybe there are a few others out there. But I'll pull a number out of my posterior and guess that 99.99 percent of all food stamp recipients ar

Believe it or not, there's a lot to recommend about John Derbyshire's column today at National Review. It's ostensibly about how Obama Administration policies are drying up the number of unpaid summer internships for teenagers, but it drifts into a meditation on how -- even in these recession days -- American elites don't seem to value manual labor the way they once did. The whole thing should be read, even if you don't agree with everything. But some of Derbyshire's anecdotes rang true for me. I have noticed that if, among 30-something colleagues, I mention one of my own school or college summer jobs — factory or construction work, dishwashing, retail sales, bartending — my colleagues will look amused, and a bit baffled. How come a guy as well-educated as Derb was shoveling concrete? Boy, he’s a real eccentric! No, I’m not. Those experiences were perfectly normal for a person of my generation. They’re just not normal any more, not for children of the America

National Review's Victor Davis Hanson reports his frustration with a business-owning friend who won't buy equipment or expand his business. It deserves quoting at length: I asked a businessman two weeks ago why he said that he was neither hiring nor buying new equipment. He started in on “rising taxes.” “But wait,” I interrupted. I pointed out that income-tax hikes haven’t taken effect. The old FICA income caps are also still applicable. Health-care surcharges haven’t hit us yet. He countered with “regulations” and “bailouts.” I said, “Come on, get specific.” He offered up “cap and trade” and “the Chrysler creditors.” I parried with more demands that he tell me exactly how the federal government has suddenly curbed his profit margins, or how his electric bill had gone up since January 2009, or whether he had lost money on any investment because the government had violated a contract. Exasperated, he talked now instead of more cosmic issues — the astronomical borrowing,

National Review blasts last week's federal court ruling knocking down part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act. The editors offer up -- once again -- a familiar argument for traditional marriage that, while much-debated the last few years, always is very bracing to me. The actual motive for having governments recognize the union of a man and a woman (and only such a union) as a marriage is to encourage, in a gentle and non-coercive way, the formation and maintenance of a stable environment in which children can naturally come to be. If heterosexual coupling did not regularly produce children there would be no reason for the institution of marriage to exist, let alone for governments to recognize it. What a depressingly -- implausibly -- narrow view of marriage. No doubt, children are a common byproduct of heterosexual marriage. That's certainly been the case in my marriage, and I'm glad of it. But the pairing instinct -- one that predated any government recognition

Here's how Andy McCarthy begins a National Review column that, ostensibly, about lambasting Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan : I wonder if Elena Kagan knows about Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani. Ms. Ashtiani is about to be stoned. That’s where they bury you up to your chest and hurl rocks at you until you die. The rocks can’t be too big. You see, this is real torture, religion-of-peace torture. It’s the kind that happens every day but that Democrats prefer not to talk about. First: The last sentence. Huffington Post is promoting a petition to save Ashtiani's life . Feminist blogs like Shakesville are raising a ruckus. There's lots more examples of this. Ten seconds perusing Google could tell you that Andy McCarthy is wrong. And probably lying. But maybe he's as dumb as a rock But let's focus on the "real torture" part of McCarthy's statement -- with its implication that American treatment of Gitmo prisoners was relatively benign. Because here'

Over at The Corner, Shannen Coffin -- Dick Cheney's lawyer during the Bush Presidency -- goes after the New York Times for its apparent hand-wringing over the "unauthorized disclosure" of the so-called " Climategate " e-mails. The post is called "Propriety in Newsgathering" and it deserves to be fisked a little bit. Let's start at the beginning: Since at least the Pentagon Papers case (and surely before even then), the New York Times has made many a nickel on unauthorized leaks of sensitive national security information. It's true the New York Times is a for-profit concern, but I think it's unseemly to suggest the Times tries to profit from -- as Coffin is going to get around to implying -- killing American soldiers. Most newspapers operate with two missions: A) to turn a profit and B) to serve the public. At their best, for-profit media has offered defenders of capitalism a success story: Doing well by doing good. Sometimes, "d

I think Seth Leibsohn has this absolutely wrong: If the press had unified, as they do on so many other political and policy issues, and stood up to the ever-growing radical Islamist speech veto in the West, we could be well on our way toward a cultural victory in the war. Instead, we continue to cave. The last place I thought I'd see such caving was at Comedy Central — a channel dedicated to the iconoclasm of almost everything religious and everyone political. Now, even chief iconoclast Jon Stewart is defending the veto, or censorship, on his network. Interestingly, Leibsohn links to this New York Times blog pos t titled: "Jon Stewart Takes On Comedy Central’s Censorship of ‘South Park’." That doesn't sound like a defense. And here's the video the NYT post is about: The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c South Park Death Threats www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party To me, it's clear that Stewart'

At National Review , Rich Lowr y is grumpy: Over at PowerLine, John Hinderaker makes a great catch: CNN describes the Arizona immigration law as "polarizing." John asks why the health-care bill was never described that way, even though it too brought protestors into the streets and was actually, in contrast to the Arizona bill, opposed by most people? To ask the question is to answer it. I sent Mr. Lowry a note: A Google search for "health care bill polarizing" gets 476,000 results . A GoogleNews search for the same term gets more than 600 results . You say that "to ask the question is to answer it," but trying to answer it might've provided you a different result.