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Santorum is the biggest joke  ... Times-Picayune columnist James Gill and Washington bureau reporter Jonathan Tilove talk about Saturday's Louisiana primary and its impact on the Republican presidential race.  Louisiana primary March 24. In this climate, it is hard to predict success for the campaign to repeal the creationism law in the state legislative session that has just begun. The wall of separation was conceived to prevent government intrusion in matters of conscience, and we owe it in large measure to Roger Williams, subject of John Barry's latest absorbing book. When Williams, exiled from Massachusetts in the 1630s, found refuge in what was to become Rhode Island, he acknowledged the hand of God by naming his settlement Providence. The faithful who now chafe at the Establishment Clause cannot be more devout than its progenitor. And chafe they do, none more than Santorum, who has just announced that JFK's celebrated 1960 speech on the "absol...

The Jenner and Block report on Lehman just keeps on giving. Today I am going to focus on FRBNY's culpability in the apparent Lehman fraud - that is, the role that FRBNY (and thus Tim Geithner) played in keeping an insolvent institution afloat through the use of fraudulent artifices. We must look first to what the PDCF, or "primary dealer credit facility" was created to be. The report does this for us: Under the PDCF, the FRBNY would make collateralized loans to broker ‐ dealers, such as LBI, and in effect, act as a repo counterparty. Unlike a typical counterparty, though, with the creation of the PDCF, the FRBNY was generally understood by market participants to be the “lender of last resort to the broker ‐ dealers.” 5332 Reflecting the fact that broker ‐ dealer liquidity had become increasingly dependent on overnight repos to obtain short ‐ term secured financing, 5333 the PDCF was structured as an overnight facility. Pursuant to the F...

The bawdy Fox cartoon "Family Guy" features a mentally disabled girl whose mother is governor of Alaska, and Palin, naturally, responds : People are asking me to comment on yesterday’s Fox show that felt like another kick in the gut. Bristol was one who asked what I thought of the show that mocked her baby brother, Trig (and/or others with special needs), in an episode yesterday. Instead of answering, I asked her what she thought. Here is her conscientious reply, which is a much more restrained and gracious statement than I want to make about an issue that begs the question, “when is enough enough?”: “When you’re the son or daughter of a public figure, you have to develop thick skin. My siblings and I all have that, but insults directed at our youngest brother hurt too much for us to remain silent. People with special needs face challenges that many of us will never confront, and yet they are some of the kindest and most loving people you’ll ever meet. Their live...

It is pretty rich when the voice of modern U.S. progressivism senses "foreboding" in the land because a new conservative leader proclaims the need for society to "recover the capacity for nonconformism." Rich, for it was progressivism that metastasized from a newly radicalized late 19th Century Europe to successfully challenge traditional American beliefs and institutions in a way not achieved by any other foreign ideology or movement. Progressivism replaced the traditional Judeo-Christian morality at the center of a diverse American social life with a new vision of scientific progress, cultural relativism and material prosperity that now dominates public morality. It transformed a vigorous local community-oriented society into one driven by abstract rules set by gigantic and remote metro-county, state and national bureaucracies. Its ideal of citizen representation was replaced by rule by government experts. This revolution that to a great degree successfully overro...

Those of you that read and follow my perspective on current events will understand what I am about to say. If you don’t agree with the following or do agree please let me know. I believe that what happened at Fort Hood can be blamed on this administration, in part, because of all of this political correctness crap. What kind of military do we have now and society do we have that promotes and permits anti-American activities to be the norm? This is a direct result of “political correctness” that is pushed on all segments of our society.