Chesapeake Observer

The Nord Stream Pipeline: Media and Importance

March 7, 2023 / Featured

Matthew P. Daley For nearly a full week in February, much of the American population was busy hyperventilating over images of a Chinese surveillance balloon (CB) transiting the lower 48 while collecting intelligence. A great deal of ink and airtime was devoted to the subject which, at the time, was novel and curious but without great […]... Read More

Thinking About Things: Forward to the Past with the GOP

March 7, 2023

John DeQ. Briggs Since shortly after the mid-term elections of last November, I have been ruminating about the Republican party, what it stands for, and whether it has or deserves to have a future in anything resembling its current form. But last month I stumbled across two very different reviews (one from the Wall Street Journal, […]... Read More

Worth Reading

JDQB:

Last weekend’s Wall Street Journal Interview was a highly favorable summary and review of Philip Howard’s new book Public Unions vs. The People. I had not appreciated that all presidents, even the sainted FDR, opposed public unions until JFK legislated them into existence supposedly “as a payback for union support.”. The book’s author, a lawyer, has concluded that the public union problem has become so entrenched that it cannot be solved politically, but must be attacked through the courts as an unconstitutional limitation on the executive power to terminate employees, a proposition that has strong constitutional precedent. A link is here (paywall). I was persuaded to buy the book.

I am new to Mark Halperin, who puts out a daily email called Wide World of News. On Saturday he did a short piece on Trump’s nearly two-hour stemwinder at the annual Conservative Political Action Committee CPAC conference. Then on Sunday he did an equally short piece critiquing DeSantis’ performance in his first “major” speech, which was at the Reagan Center. The former is The Trump Machine Hums at CPAC . and the latter is Is That All There Is?. Spoiler alert: he thinks Trump did way better than expected and that DeSantis did worse than expected.

WDM:

I urge readers to ignore the title and skim through the insider-only story of the Intellectual Dark Web to get to Christopher Rufo's perceptive discussion of the need for conservatives to get beyond writing polemics about CRT and gender ideology and get down to political action. One of his points, in bare bones, is that public school curricula are and always have been set by government bureaucrats, the political bodies that appoint them, and the voters that elect them. Conservatives should not therefore be deterred by accusations of "banning books" from electing their own to run the schools and revise the curricula. The other is that those who care about these issues have no choice but to work to take over the Republican party, as there is no other route to electoral success.