Right Wing News emailed more than 240 right-of-center bloggers and asked them to answer 8 questions. The results below were based on 63 responses.

We here at NYM were not invited to participate, but we won’t let that stop us.

1) Do you think the surge should go forward?

Yes (61) — 97%
No (2) — 3%

Yes

2) Do you think that a majority of Democrats in Congress would like to see us lose in Iraq for political reasons?

Yes (53)– 84%
No (10) — 16%

Yes

3) Do you believe that the wall on the border will ever actually be completed?

Yes (6) — 10%
No (56) — 90%

No

4) Do you think mankind is the primary cause of global warming?

Yes (0) — 0%
No (59) — 100%

No

On the following four questions, bloggers were asked to select one of the options presented (because some bloggers skipped particular questions, gave answers that weren’t listed, or gave answers that were difficult to categorize, there are not 63 responses to every question.)

5) Illegal Immigration.

A) Would you prefer an illegal immigration bill that tackled border security and enforcement issues only? (46) — 77%

B) Would you prefer a comprehensive bill that tackled border security and enforcement issues, created a legal status for the people who are here illegally, created a guest worker program, and increased the number of foreigners allowed to become American citizens? (14) — 23%

B – I disagree with much of the Right on illegal immigration. I think the problem is with the fact that we have immigration laws and policies which conflict with our labor needs, so we don’t really want to enforce them. We want cheap labor which is not available domestically, but we also don’t want to let those foreigners in. It’s just the usual American “wanting it both ways” problem.

6) Which of the following Democratic candidates do you think would be the toughest opponent for a Republican candidate in 2008?

A) Hillary Clinton (38) — 63%

B) John Edwards (9) — 15%

C) Barack Obama (13) — 22%

A – Not that I think Hillary is all that tough to beat, if we only had a worthwhile candidate ourselves.

7) If you were grading George Bush on his foreign policy for his presidency so far, would you give him an:

A or B (35) — 56%
C (18) — 29%
D, E, or F (10) — 16%

D – Did not invade Syria or Iran. Failed to democratize Iraq properly by a serious occupation over a significant period of time before granting any form of home rule. Has not invaded Venezuela or Cuba.

8 ) If you were grading George Bush on his domestic policy for his presidency so far, would you give him an:

A or B (17) — 27%
C (26) — 41%
D, E, or F (20) — 32%

C- – His tax cuts were good but not great, but he certainly did manage to turn the economy around very quickly. He is guilty, however, of the devastatingly disastrous failure to put the country on a wartime footing, and to prosecute domestic activities undermining National Security, the war effort, and American morale, thus losing public support.

Norman Podhoretz is unkind enough to give Arthur Schlesinger the obituary he deserves.

There are three things to say about the work of Arthur Schlesinger, who has just died at the age of eighty-nine: (1) He was an exceptionally good writer, commanding a lucid, vivid, and often elegant prose style. (2) He was an exceptionally bad historian: incapable of doing justice to any idea with which he disagreed, and so tendentious that he invariably denigrated and/or vilified anyone who had ever espoused any such idea. Like the so-called “Whig interpretation of history” in England, Schlesinger’s voluminous work as a historian amounts to the proposition that the story of freedom in America is the story of the Democratic party, and specifically of its never-ending struggle against the sinister bastions of privilege, oppression, and ignorance represented by the Republicans of the modern era and their forebears. (3) This unshakable conviction not only made his wonderfully readable accounts of the past unreliable and in many cases even worthless; it also warped his political judgment in the present, leading him in the last forty years of his life to support the forces that were pushing the Democratic party to the Left. In becoming an apologist for these forces, he betrayed the liberalism that he himself, in The Vital Center, had earlier espoused and whose banishment from the Democratic party has been, and will continue to be, a calamity for this country.

A dead accurate summation, I’d say.

says Gerard Baker in the London Times, who also echoes the Jonah Goldberg thesis that it would serve the democrats right to win in 2008. The theory that the burden of responsibility would sober the democrat leadership is an interesting one, I think, but it is obviously not necessarily right.

Somewhere, deep down, tucked away underneath their loathing for George Bush, in a secret place where the lights of smart dinner-party conversation and clever debating-society repartee never shine, the growing hordes of America-bashers must dread the moment he leaves office.

When President Bush goes into the Texas sunset, and especially if he is replaced by an enlightened, world-embracing Democrat, their one excuse, their sole explanation for all human suffering in the world will disappear too. And they may just find that the world is not as simple as they thought it was.

It’s been a great ride for the past six years, hasn’t it? George Bush and Dick Cheney and all those pantomime villains that succour him — the gay-bashing foot soldiers of the religious Right, the forktailed neoconservatives with their devotion to Israel, the dark titans of American corporate boardrooms spewing their carbon emissions above the pristine European skies. Having those guys around for so long provided a comfortable substitute for thinking hard about global challenges, a kind of intellectual escapism.

When one group of Muslims explodes bombs underneath the school buses of another group of Muslims in Baghdad or cuts the heads off humanitarian workers in Anbar, blame George Bush. When Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, denounces an imbalanced world and growls about the unpleasantness of democracy in eastern Europe, blame George Bush. When the Earth’s atmosphere gets a little more clogged with the output of power plants in China, India and elsewhere, blame George Bush.

Some day soon, though, this escapism will run into the dead end of reality. In fact, the most compelling case for the American people to elect a Democrat as president next year is that, in the US, leadership in a time of war requires the inclusion of both political parties, and in the rest of the world, people will have to start thinking about what is really the cause of all our woes.

The LA Times has a strange and amusing story of guile and voodoo used to repossess a mortgage-defaulted freighter berthed in Haiti.

John Derbyshire has some words of wisdom for would-be Republican nominees. But they obviously come much too late for Giuliani.

As the Zumbo case illustrates, the point of maximum friction is between hunters and the rest. There is a lurking suspicion among non-hunting gun sportsmen that the hunters will sell them down the river, if some clever politician can clinch the deal:

A problem with the duck hunter crowd is that politicians try to take away our handguns or my black rifles, but insist they’ll never go after your over-under. The duck hunters nod and let the confiscation proceed, and before long all that’s left are the duck hunters, who have no support as their shotguns are confiscated…

What the Zumbo case shows is that these minor differences will be brushed aside when gun enthusiasts sense a threat to their rights. Hunting-outdoor sportsmen piled on with the rest — though in general, like Steve Bodio, with a bit more regard for civility. As I started out by saying, for all the magnificent achievements of the NRA in keeping gun rights secure, gun hobbyists and sportsmen live in a state of mild, if permanent, insecurity, and our natural posture is defensive.

The political lesson to be taken by any contender for the Republican nomination who is seriously short of creds on gun rights issues — no names, no pack drill — is that Second Amendment enthusiasts stand head and shoulders above other conservative groups in their passion and solidarity on behalf of their constitutional rights. You will need to work very hard and tread v–e–r–y carefully if you want the support of this large and well-organized constituency. Set a foot wrong and you could find yourself being zumboed!

* in Glenn Reynolds‘ felicitous phrase.

EARLIER POSTING

Rethinking Schools reports breathlessly:

As they watched their elementary-age students playing with Legos, Ann Pelo and Kendra Pelojoaquin saw some disturbing trends.

In the current issue they describe how some kids hoarded the “best” pieces, denied their classmates any access at all to the pretend town they were building, and displayed other undesirable behavior surrounding ownership and the social power it conveys.

So the teachers banned Legos, and worked with the kids to surface the issues raised by the ways they had been using the popular building blocks.

I notice they want $5 from me, or a $39.95 annual subscription, to read the article though. Is that social justice, I ask you?

TCS Daily is less enthusiastic:

Some Seattle school children are being told to be skeptical of private property rights. This lesson is being taught by banning Legos.

A ban was initiated at the Hilltop Children’s Center in Seattle. According to an article in the winter 2006-07 issue of “Rethinking Schools” magazine, the teachers at the private school wanted their students to learn that private property ownership is evil.

According to the article, the students had been building an elaborate “Legotown,” but it was accidentally demolished. The teachers decided its destruction was an opportunity to explore “the inequities of private ownership.” According to the teachers, “Our intention was to promote a contrasting set of values: collectivity, collaboration, resource-sharing, and full democratic participation.”

The children were allegedly incorporating into Legotown “their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys.” These assumptions “mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society — a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive.”

They claimed as their role shaping the children’s “social and political understandings of ownership and economic equity … from a perspective of social justice.”

So they first explored with the children the issue of ownership. Not all of the students shared the teachers’ anathema to private property ownership. “If I buy it, I own it,” one child is quoted saying. The teachers then explored with the students concepts of fairness, equity, power, and other issues over a period of several months.

At the end of that time, Legos returned to the classroom after the children agreed to several guiding principles framed by the teachers, including that “All structures are public structures” and “All structures will be standard sizes.” The teachers quote the children:

“A house is good because it is a community house.”

“We should have equal houses. They should be standard sizes.”

“It’s important to have the same amount of power as other people over your building.”

The Blog links are out of order at the moment, as technical modifications are underway this morning.

The Boston Bomb Squad was back in action, blowing up a suspicious object found chained to a lamppost in the Financial district. The object turned out to be a traffic counter.

MyFox

Homeland Stupidity

Previous Cartoon Promotion incident