Category: Access

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

24 Jul, 2017

Waiting for Godot–and the Republicans’ Tax Cuts

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What’s With Republicans and Taxes? By John Seiler Why haven’t Republicans cut our taxes? It’s their signature issue. And now that they control both Congress and the White House for only the third time in a century, why haven’t they enacted their signature issue? Their past actions in this situation aren’t all that good, either. In the 1920s, the Harding-Coolidge Administration and Republican congresses certainly cut taxes, putting the roar into the Roaring Twenties. But that’s it. Nothing during times when Republicans controlled both the Oval Office and the Capitol Dome. Only split government has brought decent tax reform. Republicans...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

18 Jul, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: An Unwritten Letter

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Last week a sympathetic soul had written to me from London, urging me to pitch a book, or at the very least a proposal for one, to a publisher in his circle of acquaintance.  I was grateful for the attention and did not want to be uncivil, so I muttered some generalities of a philosophical sort by way of reply and left it at that.  In hindsight, however, it occurs to me that my response could have run along the following lines. Me, pitch?  No, my dear fellow, let them pitch. Because the question is not – and I’m now...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

12 Jul, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: Poking Right Through

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Last November (“An Awl in Sackcloth”), and again in January (“More Awls in Sackcloth”), I regaled the reader with tales of intellectual misadventure suggested by the preposterous figure of Russia’s omnipotent culture tsar, Vladimir Medinsky.  I cannot resist adding an orchestral coda, a dramatic postscript, a final malediction. The denouement of the tragic farce takes us to a town called Belgorod, a place we may be excused for knowing little about because it is a provincial hellhole just this side of the Russian border with Ukraine. The town, however, boasts an “institution of higher learning,”  Belgorod State University, which in...

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On the House

11 Jul, 2017

Don Meets Vlad (Free to Everyone Signed UP)

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  It’s too bad President Trump didn’t say of the G20 Summit in Hamburg, “Putin admitted to me he interfered in our election by working with the Democratic National Committee to torpedo Bernie Sanders’ campaign and nominate the party’s worst possible candidate, Hillary.” But that might have been a joke too far even for Trump. As it was, Trump asked Putin about the supposed interference, and Putin denied it. This is part of Trump’s Deflection Strategy, which has included blaming President Obama for not taking action last year against the Russian interference. As Fleming Foundation readers know, last December I...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

4 Jul, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: Hitler on the Roof

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It may be that the name of Astrid Lindgren is utterly unfamiliar to the gentle reader.  In this possibility, perhaps more than in anything else, he differs from the inhabitant of Russia, whether in its Soviet or in its present totalitarian incarnation.  For every Russian of whatever age now living has read and can quote from Karlsson-on-the-Roof– a cross between Le Petit Prince and Mary Poppins–with the consequence that Lindgren is more famous in Russia than Marx, Lenin, or for that matter St. John the Evangelist. Born in 1907 in Sweden, Lindgren was a writer of children’s books.  Globally, I...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

28 Jun, 2017

Russia Hoax Finally Dying

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Events are confirming what I wrote on this site six months ago, that there’s no way the Russians could have rigged our election because it’s just too complex. It would involve not just putting up anti-Hillary, pro-Trump stuff on social media, but knowing what to put up, and when to do it. Elections are more about intuition than anything else. Trump intuited he would win if he campaigned for working-class voters in October in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Hillary’s bad tuition sent her to Silicon Valley to collect bucks from the digital oligarchs. The latest developments: This past week, former...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

28 Jun, 2017

Wednesday’s Child: Letter from Malaga

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Well, from Marbella, actually, but it occurred to me that having a posh name in the title would look like I was putting on airs and that the name of Spain’s great tourist hub – Malaga Costa del Sol Airport, whence 17 million oafs, badly hungover and savagely sunburnt, return every year to the satanic mills of Great Britain – might better suit the persona I cultivate and reveal here. Yet cavernous is the abyss of snobbery.  While I was dousing myself with pink champagne on the lawn of a friend’s villa, a madam I used to know in London...

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All Paid Subscribers / Feature / Seiler

22 Jun, 2017

When Will Trump Strike Back?

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Granted, the presidency is one tough job. Even eight years isn’t long enough to master it. The job includes the ability to launch 7,000 nuclear weapons and wield the world’s largest conventional military. Then there’s the economy, which if it crashes mean you’re not going to be re-elected. It also includes the ability to use presidential powers to achieve policy and personal ends. As Bill Clinton once put it in typical fashion while in the White House, “I reward my friends and (expletive) my enemies.” Trump is a proud man. And one of the more entertaining parts of last year’s...

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Fleming / Free Content

21 Jun, 2017

Rome, the Long Way Round, Part II

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Part II The several days we spent at Ulivello vibrate in the memory like an hallucination.  Our friend Navrozov has written a beautiful piece about his visit to Ulivello.  The reality was a bit grittier and decayed than he described it—less the odor of jasmine than of hay and manure—but no less magical.  The food was almost a revelation:  pasta, of course, but followed by farm-raised pork, roasted with apples and served with potatoes deep-fried in olive oil. Ulivello had been a sort of farm, worked by share-croppers, and when the Italian government ended share-cropping, the former croppers stayed on...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Feature / Wednesday's Child

21 Jun, 2017

  Wednesday’s Child: The Rubber Burka

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The burkini, in case the gentle reader doubts that I know how to use Wikipedia, is a “modesty swimsuit for women,” covering the whole body like a diving suit, with only the wearer’s face, hands, and feet exposed to the omniscient eye of Allah – one of whose Quranic epithets, incidentally, is “Al-Musawwir,” meaning shaper or designer.  The burkini was trademarked in 2007 by a Muslim lady called Aheda Zanetti, but I note that a garment of exactly the same description made a public appearance over fifty years ago – in the television series The Avengers, worn by Diana Rigg...