God Bless Barack Obama

I suppose that heading is a bit startling coming from me this fall Sunday but I mean it. In literature, deus ex machina refers to a plot device which resolves what appears to pose an intractable problem. And, as I explain, I think Obama is ours — a character who appears out of nowhere with a cast of appointees so preposterous and an agenda so irrational and offensive to Americans that he has shocked us out of our torpor, inducing millions of us out of our comfy chairs and to the barricades.

Franz Kafka and the Nightmare of Bureaucracy

Kafka took some early stabs at writing a novel, but none of them really worked out. In 1903, he started The Child and the City. He abandoned it, and the manuscripts have since disappeared. He tried to collaborate with Max Brod on a work called Richard and Samuel, but that didn’t work out either. The fragment “Wedding Preparations in the Country” was supposed to be much longer than it was, but he gave up on it. Therefore, when talking about Kafka’s novels, we always have to start with Amerika. Although like his other attempts it remains unfinished, enough of it exists for us to recognize it as a novel, and so it is here we begin.

Liberty Fund

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals. The Foundation develops, supervises, and finances its own educational activities to foster thought and encourage discourse on enduring issues pertaining to liberty.

Dude, Where’s My Obamacare Waiver?

More than one million Americans have escaped the clutches of the Democrats’ destructive federal health care law. Lucky them. Their employers and labor representatives wisely applied for Obamacare waivers earlier this fall and got out while the getting was good. Now, it’s time for Congress to create a permanent escape hatch for the rest of us. Repeal is the ultimate waiver.

Whatever happened to ‘Never Forget’?

When I was growing up, the dark miasma of the Holocaust was still so pervasive that the famous slogan “Never Forget!” seemed almost irrelevant. How could anyone forget Hitler and his murderous goose-steppers? It was hard to imagine a world where that supreme evil was not remembered as a stern and awful warning. I heard Holocaust survivors insisting that we must never forget, and I thought they were just repeating the obvious. Why did they have to keep on saying it?