Donald B. Hawthorne
During the Chafee-Laffey campaign, this blog site was highly critical of the heavy-handed tactics of the National Republican Senate Committee. Now the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee deserves its own public spanking for their actions described in Democrats set to air ads in bid to derail Steele: Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele’s assertive campaign for…
The comments sections of Part I: The Difference Between Religious Freedom and Religious Tolerance Part II: Are We Hostile Toward or Encouraging Religious Belief? Part III: Consequences of Excluding Religion from the Public Square of this Theocrats, Moral Relativism & the Myth of Religious Tolerance series, plus Justin’s Favoring the Non-Participatory posting, offer up many…
George Will recently gave the keynote speech at the dinner for the 2006 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, which was given to former Estonian prime minister Mart Laar. A hard-copy version of the speech was published in the Summer 2006 edition of Cato’s Letter; it is available online only via the Cato Institute’s Audio…
Part I in this series discussed how there is an important distinction between “tolerance” and “freedom.” Justin, in a subsequent email to me, described it this way: Tolerance asserts authority; freedom implies autonomy, perhaps even precedence. Part II in this series noted how both the role of religion in the public square of our society…
As I head off this morning to New York City for the day, it is hard not to reflect on what happened there five years ago today. In I Just Called to Say I Love You: The sounds of 9/11, beyond the metallic roar, Peggy Noonan reflects on what we learned about the human spirit…
In a comment to the Part I posting, Joe Mahn writes: …From my simple perspective and I think in the context of the actual events of the time religious freedom meant that no State in the Union under the Constitution could force, by law, any citizen to participate in, confess, or otherwise practice any particular…
Do we believe in reason and the ability to distinguish between right and wrong? Do we believe in and teach the uniqueness of our Western Civilization tradition? Or, has the relativism of multiculturalism dumbed it all down to where there are no standards of excellence or truth discoverable by some combination of reason or faith?…
In the July 2006 issue of Hillsdale College’s Imprimis, Larry Arnn interviews Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman on a number of topics. Here are his thoughts on economic issues: LARRY ARNN: In Free to Choose, in the chapter on “The Tyranny of Controls,” you argue that protectionism and government intervention in general breed conflict and that…
Four recent postings by Justin and Andrew (here, here, here, and here) have brought us back to the important education policy debate. Many reader comments on their postings have raised a number of issues related to education in Rhode Island and beyond, including: teacher salaries, automatic salary step increases, merit pay, accountability, union contract terms,…
In celebration of America’s birthday, here are excerpted gems from previous postings about our beloved country – brought together in one posting: President Calvin Coolidge gave a powerful speech in 1926 on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. If you want to rediscover some of the majesty of the principles underlying our Founding,…
