Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne believes that questions of faith should be asked of Supreme Court nominee Judge John Roberts. His argument is based on the idea that politicians invoke religion only when it benefits them and for that reason, Roberts should answer questions about his faith just as any other candidate for office. […]
- Article Source

Sridhar Pappu is a masterful writer of profiles — just a few issues back in The Atlantic, he wrote an article on Geraldo Rivera that was both respectful and critical. In the September Atlantic he writes eight pages on Mitt Romney, the Latter-day Saint who serves as the governor of Massachusetts. Romney’s LDS faith is not […]
- Article Source

Just a quick update on an ongoing topic. There is an interesting essay in the Wall Street Journal about Catholicism, John Roberts, Sen. Richard Durbin and St. Thomas More — sort of in that order. Clearly this topic is going to keep coming up, as demonstrated by Jeremy with this post yesterday and Doug with […]
- Article Source

Hey, our home DSL is finally working. Time to do some catching up. Here is a little essay about Charles Colson that the New York Times ran the other day. Part of me wonders if this is part of the newspaper of record’s attempt to deal with more countercultural and “radical” segments of American life — […]
- Article Source

I am not a big Huffington Post reader, but I do pay attention to the blogging of a friend of mine named Mark Joseph, one of those journalism students who went to the dark side and works in Hollywood. MJ just shot off an interesting critique of some of the early U.S. Supreme Court coverage […]
- Article Source

Jonathan Turley is troubled, in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, by how Supreme Court nominee John Roberts answered a question by Sen. Dick Durbin. Durbin is, like Roberts, a Catholic, but one who has no trouble ignoring his church’s teachings on abortion while he serves in the Senate. Turley describes Durbin as asking Roberts […]
- Article Source

I decided to look in the Reporter’s Holy Book, by which of course I mean the AP Stylebook, to see what those gods of style have to say. The entry for abortion reads: “Use anti-abortion instead of pro-life and abortion rights instead of pro-abortion or pro-choice.” I guess only one side gets to choose their name. […]
- Article Source

One the one hand, you’ve got a minority government that’s just been caught laundering a million bucks through corrupt ad agencies back into its own coffers. On the other hand, you’ve got a weak and divided opposition; I for one am unconvinced they’d govern better. Doesn’t matter; when a government acts this badly it just has to be spanked, pour encourager les autres. Go on Stephen, Jack, and Gilles, pull the damn trigger already and let’s have an election and give the Liberals a dose of opposition. It’ll make us all feel better, and our politics are strongly enough centre-loaded that it’ll be hard for the next government to do too much damage. It’ll probably be another minority government anyhow, which is probably a good thing at this stage.

- Article Source

That would be my brother Robert Bray, who recently testified before a standing committee of the Canadian House of Commons. Canada has a parliamentary system, which means that when one party gets a majority they’re more or less an elected dictatorship; but at the moment we have a minority government, so Parliament in general and its committees in particular have considerable political oomph. Immigration is a hot issue across the rich world, and the issue of family reunification is a hot zone within the hot zone. If you care even slightly about these things, I think you’ll find Rob’s remarks worth the investment of a little time…

- Article Source