The Other Half of History Daily Blog
Thoughts on modern politics from a historical perspective.
Poll Worker: “I See Dead People”
Here’s a pretty funny video. Someone with a hidden camera picked up several ballots for New Hampshire’s Democrat Presidential primary using the names of dead voters. At one point he even offered to show ID to the poll worker, but the offer was spurned. Just the latest in a long line of examples of fraud-friendly polling places.
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Whittaker Chambers on Atheism and Communism
This Easter weekend might be a good time to share some of Whittaker Chambers’ insights on the central role of atheism in the Communist Party.
Good Friday Links and Notes
Religion is in the news as we head into this Easter weekend. During speeches he gave on Tuesday and Wednesday, Senator Orrin Hatch said that he expects the Obama campaign to attack Mormonism during the upcoming Presidential race. Ann Coulter has predicted the same thing in recent weeks.
I think Hatch is completely wrong. I’ll be shocked if anyone in the Obama camp makes any kind of public statement mocking anyone’s religion. Members of the administration may talk that way privately, but they’ll never expose those attitudes to the American mainstream.
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Milton Friedman on “Social Responsibility”
A couple days ago I described how Amazon.com has come under attack from liberals at the Seattle Times and elsewhere for not spending corporate money on philanthropy. I ended the post by expressing the opinion that “There is no real moral justification for corporate executives giving away their stockholders’ money to third party.”
Today it is more or less conventional to talk about big corporations having a “social responsibility” to do all sorts of things, like philanthropy, that don’t put money in their stockholders’ pockets. Obviously many executives would argue that they are behaving in a perfectly moral way when they spend their stockholders’ money on charities and causes. Many boast about it in their advertisements and their annual reports.
To argue against such a well-entrenched (but wrong-headed) idea, I’d like to defer to someone far smarter than myself.
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Obama is No Reagan
In yesterday’s post I talked about President Obama amazingly flexible political principles. He, like all leftists, has spent a lifetime advocating judicial activism as a way to achieve liberal goals that the democratic process can’t produce, yet on Monday he had the chutzpah to demand that the Supreme Court refrain from overturning his unconstitutional Obamacare law because it would be an “unprecedented, extraordinary step” for the court to resort to “overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”
As someone pointed out in a comment to that post, the current President is no Ronald Reagan.
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