Patriot Post

Charles Murray, whose book Losing Ground redefined the debate about welfare and the underclass thirty years ago, has a new book, Coming Apart. The book is about the increasingly cultural divide among white Americans.

Coming Apart is controversial and has many critics, both on the left and on the right. But it has ignited a long-overdue discussion about the link between cultural decline and the American Dream.

National Review: "While dismantling the presuppositions of the political media is surely a skill a conservative president would do well to acquire, it does not rank with the ability to clearly and persuasively articulate a conservative policy vision for solving America's most pressing problems, or with the ability to display fiscal sobriety, strategic acumen, and strong instincts toward liberty when presented with new challenges, foreign and domestic. These abilities -- and not the ability to cleverly parry liberal inanities -- are what the primary debates are meant to test."

Plus UK health care is being partially privatized, Obama lowers economic expectations and the Leftmedia credit George Washington with Obama Care -- all that and more.

After 13 hours of overnight talks ending Tuesday morning at 5 a.m., euro zone finance ministers put together the latest rescue package for Greece. "We have reached a far-reaching agreement on Greece's new program and private sector involvement that would lead to a significant debt reduction for Greece...to secure Greece's future in the euro area," said Jean-Claude Juncker, who chairs the euro-group of finance ministers. It is a future emblazoned by one over-arching reality: the relinquishment of national sovereignty is the ultimate price that must be paid by any EU nation that cannot meet its debt obligations.

Another tremendously talented American who had riches and fame beyond most people's dreams has killed herself with drugs. Whitney Houston's life was wrecked and cut tragically short at 48 because she became mired in the self-destructive hell of drug use.

In the late 1970s my birth brother was living in L.A. and working as a writer on "Laverne & Shirley," the number one-rated TV show in the country. It was pretty heady stuff for a 21-year-old kid from Ohio.

Imagine this family budget:

Last year, you earned $24,700. But you spent $37,900, incurring $13,300 in debt, and you were already $153,500 in debt.

So you say, "I promise I'll spend $300 less this year!"

Anyone can see that your cutback is pathetic and that you need to spend much less.

Yet if you add eight zeroes, that's America's budget.

"If we could just take a little bit from each of them."

I've lost track of how many people I have heard say some version of this in the last couple of months. The "each of them" refers to the final four combatants for the Republican nomination.

You could take Newt Gingrich's verbal dexterity, encyclopedic grasp of politics and techno-optimism. Add in Rick Santorum's authenticity and religious conviction. Combine that with the essence of Ron Paul's principled passion for liberty and limited government. Stir vigorously and then pour into the handsome, squeaky-clean vessel of Mitt Romney (while keeping his business acumen and analytical skill). And voila, you'd have the perfect candidate.

A month ago, the Obama administration said religious organizations will have to pay for health insurance policies that cover contraception and sterilization, even if they consider those practices immoral.

Two weeks ago, responding to widespread complaints that its edict violated freedom of conscience, the administration unveiled a "new policy," under which religious organizations will have to pay for health insurance policies that cover contraception and sterilization, even if they consider those practices immoral.

When two schools meet in a basketball game, the winner is indisputable. One team outscores the other.

The same is true in certain types of academic competition. When students take standardized national tests, students from some schools outscore students from others.

In the most recent round of National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, which are administered by the U.S. Department of Education, the winners were indeed indisputable. Catholic schools thrashed public schools.

During a recent Fox News Channel debate about the Obama administration's tax policies, Democrat Bob Beckel raised the issue of "fairness."

He pointed out that a child born to a poor woman in the Bronx enters the world with far worse prospects than a child born to an affluent couple in Connecticut.

No one can deny that. The relevant question, however, is: How does allowing politicians to take more money in taxes from successful people, to squander in ways that will improve their own reelection prospects, make anything more "fair" for others?

My longtime friend Chris Matthews was at Ford's Theater in Washington recently. He appeared to have maligned his own Catholic Church by saying that many of the new converts to Catholicism are motivated by anti-gay bigotry. But he went further, alleging that conservatives have a "Southern Strategy."

Chris is struggling with the truth. He is determined to jam his size 11 foot into the glass slipper of liberal orthodoxy. And it just won't fit.

Rick Santorum is right. Pushing back against Democrats' attempts to frame him as a religious menace, the GOP presidential candidate forcefully turned the tables on the White House: "When it comes to the management of the Earth, they are the anti-science ones."

Scrutiny of the White House anti-science brigade couldn't come at a better time (which is why Santorum's detractors prefer to froth at the mouth about comments he made four years ago on the existence of Satan). It's not just big-ticket scandals like the stimulus-subsidized Solyndra bankruptcy or the Keystone pipeline debacle bedeviling America. In every corner of the Obama administration, the radical green machinery is hard at work -- destroying jobs, shredding truth and sacrificing our economic well-being at the altar of environmentalism.

Oh, have we got problems as a country and as a people -- not all of them connected with Iranian nuclear ambitions, the eurozone crisis and Mitt Romney's inner feelings about family dogs on the family station wagon roof.

News that the U.S. illegitimacy rate is 51 percent for births to women aged 20 to 30 stuns less by means of the trend's sheer novelty than through the implications -- none desirable -- for a whole lot of things.

Bill Press has a new book out called "The Obama Hate Machine." To read the blurbs, you might wonder if Press thinks no one should be allowed to criticize the president. Here's Nancy Pelosi touting the book: "In a poisoned political climate, negative personal attacks on President Obama must have no place in our public discourse."

What's next? A mandate forbidding inappropriate free speech? These tolerant liberals are out of control.

If one manages to graduate from high school without the rudiments of algebra, geometry and trigonometry, there are certain relatively high-paying careers probably off-limits for life -- such as careers in architecture, chemistry, computer programming, engineering, medicine and certain technical fields. For example, one might meet all of the physical requirements to be a fighter pilot, but he's grounded if he doesn't have enough math to understand physics, aerodynamics and navigation. Mathematical ability helps provide the disciplined structure that helps people to think, speak and write more clearly. In general, mathematics is an excellent foundation and prerequisite for study in all areas of science and engineering. So where do U.S. youngsters stand in math?

"It has long, however, been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression ... that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal Judiciary; an irresponsible body, (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one."

–Thomas Jefferson, letter to Charles Hammond, 1821