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Ashbrook Campaign Named Programs Ways to Give myAshbrook FAQ Turns Turns Home Ashbrook Home RSS Site Feed Comments by Our Readers Recommend Turns to Your Friends Turns: What’s in a Name? Turns Archive Turns Ashbrook Center The End Posted in Ashbrook Center by Peter W. Schramm We started NLT in October of 2001. I thought it was a good idea, as did many of you even back then. In fact, in my typical bragadoccio mode I warned Jonah Goldberg a few months later that we would put NRO out of business. I’m glad we didn’t do that, of course. But I am happy that we had a good run at things. In fact, I am proud of our effort and I want to thank our fine authors. Thank you very much! As you know we were one of the few serious blogs where no one was paid for writing, and yet our authors wrote and wrote, plus there were some very good conversations with readers. Thanks to all of you for that. Over a decade of writing isn’t bad. It’s an accomplishment we can be proud of. I know all our words at NLT were not birds in flight, some were, inevitably, potatoes. But all of it was thoughtful, sometimes full of flair and ardor, sometimes full of deep learning, almost always revealing a liveliness of mind found only at a few other blogs. I am grateful to all the bloggers for their work. I have learned much. We have taught one another much. We acted like citizens. We will archive it all, and it will be accessible from our new Ashbrook site that will go up in three or four weeks. It will be a fine site. I hope you will like it. I don’t have to get too soft and weepy with y’all for you to know that I amas is everyone at the Ashbrook Centervery grateful that we had this opportunity and that it lasted so long. God Bless. Our bloggers can be found at other places, including Postmodern Conservative , Liberty Law , and Power Line . CategoriesAshbrook Center 10:59 AM / May 11, 2012 Link to this entry | Trackbacks | Discuss (32) | Share | RSS Presidency Understanding Obama Posted in Presidency by Ken Thomas Forget the birther nonsense, etc. Former Intelligence Committee staffer and author Angelo Code villa establishes that Obama grew up in a world deeply influenced by the CIA, among other establishment institutions. The key here is his life in Indonesia. Did you know his mother’s supervisor was one Peter Geithner? The lead-in to this: Consistent with the Barack Obama we know, however, are his real family, his real upbringing, and his real choices of profession and associates. His mother’s parents, who raised him, seem to have been cogs in the U.S. government’s well-heeled, well-connected machine for influencing the world, whether openly ("gray influence") or covertly ("black operations"). His mother spent her life and marriages, and birthed her children, working in that machine. For paradigms of young Barack’s demeanor, proclivities, opinions, language, and attitudes one need look no further than the persons who ran the institutions that his mother and grandparents servede.g., the Ford Foundation, the United States Information Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agencyas well as his chosen mentors and colleagues. It is here, with these people and institutions, that one should begin to unravel the unknowns surrounding him. At the very least one can conclude that far from being on the outs, young Obama was always part of a segment of this country’s ruling elite. CategoriesPresidency 9:53 AM / May 10, 2012 Link to this entry | Trackbacks | Discuss (7) | Share | RSS Pop Culture Tocqueville on Julia Posted in Pop Culture by David Foster By now everyone has met Julia, the lucky woman in the unusual Obama campaign commercial who is looked after from cradle to grave by a compassionate federal government. With the help of the government, Julia is educated, gets free health care, free birth control, and subsidized student loans. When she decides to have a child (with no significant other, of course), government is there to help with health care and school programs (but no daycare?). When Julia retires, Medicare and Social Security look after her needs. And so on. This happy story made me wonder what the difference is between Julia and the people Alexis de Tocqueville calls "place-hunters" (see Democracy in America, Vol. II, Part 2, chapter 20). The place-hunter is someone whose ambition finds its primary outlet in seeking a government job, a type that Tocqueville fears will arise in modern democracies. True, Julia seems to be on her own when it comes to choosing a job (she’s a web-designer), though she does get government subsidized small business loans and tax credits to get started. But when so many of the major problems in life are solved by government, don’t you become something like a place-hunter? At the least, you rely on government almost as much as someone who does have a government job. So what’s the problem with that? Here’s our French observer, writing in the 1830’s, long before the full-blown welfare state had developed: "I shall not say that this universal and immoderate desire for public offices is a great social evil; that it destroys the spirit of independence in each citizen and spreads a venal and servile humor in the whole body of the nation; that it suffocates the virile virtues; nor shall I have it observed that an industry of this kind creates only an unproductive activity and agitates the country without making it fruitful: all that is easily understood." No, the real problem Tocqueville sees is more political. In a "people of place-hunters" (think about that awful idea!), there can never be enough government jobs to satisfy the ever growing number of people who want such a job. And this creates a permanent class of discontented people who demand change "solely out of the need to make some places vacant", or, we may add, solely to acquire more benefits. And can there ever be enough money to satisfy the ever growing demand for more government assistance? Whether out of compassion or the desire to win political support, governments try to attract partisans by giving people jobs (or healthcare, retirement and vacation benefits, etc.); but instead, Tocqueville thinks governments end up endangering themselves, as we perhaps see in places like Greece. Tocqueville concludes that it would be "more honest and more sure" for governments to teach each citizen "the art of being self-sufficient." Wouldn’t that be better than a "people...