Sierra Faith

Depressing read of the day: Mark Thoma gives us Joseph Stiglitz and Martin Feldstein being interviewed by Charlie Rose. I listened to it last night, and I found it so chilling that it adversely affected my sleep. . . . Both of them are keen on trying a big stimulus. Stiglitz says that everything done [...]

Imperfect but trying. A topic of interest to me recently: What they [those that withdrew from the Roman commonweal, including monastic communities] set themselves to achieve — often not recognizing fully what they were doing — was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both [...]

Rests with Arabs, not U.S., Europe — Bernard Lewis: In earlier times one would have assigned a major role to Europe, but at the present day what matters is not so much the European role in the Middle East as the Middle Eastern role in Europe. A prominent Syrian intellectual recently remarked that the most [...]

Against Jews: My fear is that the rage we see in the protesters marching in the streets is far more profound and dangerous than we would like to believe. There are a great many people in the world who, even after Auschwitz, just can’t bear the Jewish state having the same rights they so readily [...]

Terror seeps back into America: The call is to strike out against Jewish places of worship, Jewish centers, and schools, especially in the U.S.

An excellent Jerusalem Post editorial: Faced with heartrending images of blood-drenched hospital floors, and funeral processions bearing white-shrouded toddlers, who could be bothered to recall that Gaza’s Palestinians empowered Hamas knowing full well that its raison d’etre is relentless struggle against the existence of a Jewish state? Or that some of Hamas’s leadership is operating [...]

Vincent van Gogh.

David Walker: Former U.S. comptroller David Walker has long been a leading advocate of fiscal sanity, and I called him today to get his take on the latest CBO budget-deficit projections ($1.2 trillion for next year, trillion-plus deficits for years to come). “If trillion-dollar deficit numbers for several years in a row don’t wake up [...]

Via a blogger conference attended by Atlas Shrugs: He said that he has never seen the people of Israel so strong in their resolve. They are unwavering. Eitam, said the lessons of the Lebanon Hezbo war were well learned. Israel learned well from hr mistakes. And this little bit of Pamela Geller intuition: Israel is [...]

Power Line: Secretary of State Ritchie is another story. While he displayed no visible partisanship in his capacity as chairman of the Board of Canvassers, his work as Secretary of State appears to have proceeded in close collaboration with the Franken campaign. We wrote about Ritchie’s collaboration with Franken in “Minnesota’s recount goes south.” Given [...]