Feb. 8, 2013 Rabbi Berel Wein: Lofty ideals must be followed with grounded applications Clifford D. May: Letter from the West Bank Steve Rothaus: Judge OKs plan for gay man, lesbian couple to be on girl's birth certificate Gloria Goodale: States consider drone bans: Overreaction or crucial for privacy rights? Environmental Nutrition Editors: Don't buy the aloe vera juice hype Michael Craig Miller, M.D.: Harvard Experts: Regular exercise pumps up memory, too Erik Lacitis: Vanity plates: Some take too much license The Kosher Gourmet by Susie Middleton: Broccoflower, Carrot and Leek Ragout with Thyme, Orange and Tapenade is a delightful and satisfying melange of veggies, herbs and aromatics Feb. 6, 2013 Nara Schoenberg: The other in-law problem Frank J. Gaffney Jr. : A see-no-jihadist for the CIA Kristen Chick: Ahmadinejad visits Cairo: How sect tempers Islamist ties between Egypt, Iran Roger Simon: Ed Koch's lucky corner Heron Marquez Estrada: Robot-building sports on a roll Patrick G. Dean, M.D.: Mayo Clinic Medical Edge: How to restore body's ability to secrete insulin Sharon Palmer, R.D.: 3 prostate-protecting diet tips The Kosher Gourmet by Emma Christensen 7 principles for to help you make the best soup ever in a slow cooker Feb. 4, 2013 Jonathan Tobin: Can Jewish Groups Speak Out on Hagel? David Wren: Findings of government study, released 3 days before Newtown shooting, at odds with gun-control crusaders Kristen Chick: Tahrir becomes terrifying, tainted Curtis Tate and Greg Gordon: US keeps building new highways while letting old ones crumble David G. Savage: Supreme Court to hear case on arrests, DNA Harvard Health Letters: Neck and shoulder pain? Know what it means and what to do Andrea N. Giancoli, M.P.H., R.D.: Eat your way to preventing age-related muscle loss The Kosher Gourmet by Diane Rossen Worthington Baked Pears in Red Wine and Port Wine Glaze: A festive winter dessert Feb. 1, 2013 Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb: Redemption Clifford D. May Home, bloody, home Christa Case Bryant andNicholas Blanford Why despite Syria's allies warning of retaliation for Israeli airstrikes, the threats are likely hollow Rick Armon, Ed Meyer and Phil Trexler Ex-police captain cleared by DNA test is freed after nearly 15 years Harvard Health Letters: Could it by your thyroid? Sharon Palmer, R.D.: When 'healthy food' isn't Sue Zeidler: Coke ad racist? Arab-American groups want to yank Super Bowl ad (INCLUDES VIDEO) The Kosher Gourmet by Nealey Dozier The secret of this soup is the garnish January 30, 2013 Allan Chernoff: Celebrating 'Back from the Dead Day' America isn't a religious country? Don't tell Superbowl fans! Mark Clayton Cybercrime takedown! Germany remembers Hitler rise to power Israel salutes U. N. --- with the one finger salute Sharon Palmer, R.D.: Get cookin' with heart-healthy fats Ballot riles Guinness World Records The Kosher Gourmet by Elizabeth Passarella Potato, Squash and Goat Cheese Gratin January 28, 2013 Nancy Youssef: And Democracy for all? Two years on, Egypt remains in state of chaos Fred Weir: Putin: West is fomenting jihadi 'blowback' Meredith Cohn: Implantable pain disk may help those with cancer Michael Craig Miller, M.D. : Ask the Harvard Experts: Are there drugs to help control binge eating? David Ovalle Use of controversial 'brain mapping' technology stymied Jane Stancill: Professor's logic class has 180,000 friends David Clark Scott Lego Racism? The Kosher Gourmet by Mario Batali The celebrated chef introduces us to PANZEROTTI PUGLIESI, cheese-stuffed pastry from Italy's south

Jewish World Review Sept. 22, 2009 / 4 Tishrei 5770 Irreplaceable Irving By Mona Charen http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Irving Kristol, who passed away last week at the age of 89, was like everyone's favorite uncle — if the uncle were a transformative intellectual of empyrean stature. He was both a warm and approachable human being and a penetrating social critic. He was, in a very American way, a practical man, and his approach to ideas was always firmly and refreshingly reality-based. Irving Kristol was born in New York in 1920, so it was inevitable that he would become, for a short time at least, a socialist. But even as a young socialist, Kristol was skeptical about the principal animating sentiment of the left: a belief in man's perfectibility. As early as 1944, Kristol wrote of his preference for "moral realism," which "foresees no new virtues" and is "interested in human beings as it finds them, content with the possibilities and limitations that are always with us." It was a Madisonian frame of mind and it would take him by degrees to the right. Though the term "neoconservative" has come to be associated with a muscular foreign policy (when it is not a thinly veiled codeword for Jew), it began in the 1960s as a disparaging term for those liberals, led by Kristol and a few others, who were bent on doing something that made other liberals acutely uncomfortable: test whether their theories worked in the real world. Through his quarterly journal, The Public Interest , as well as his indispensable column in the Wall Street Journal, Kristol turned his analytical attention to the programs of the Great Society. Did urban redevelopment really improve the lot of the poor? Did deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill work? Did welfare programs have unintended consequences? If these questions now seem obvious, it is because Kristol offered an early and perspicacious critique that has since become conventional wisdom. "The problem with our current welfare programs," he wrote decades ago, "is not that they are costly — which they are — but that they have such perverse consequences for the people they are supposed to benefit." In issue after issue, The Public Interest catalogued the failure of Great Society programs to achieve their goals and itemized the programs' unintended and often baleful consequences. Empiricists who read Kristol tended to become neoconservatives and eventually unprefixed conservatives. Ideologues were of course unmoved, and some of Kristol's most trenchant commentary concerned them. In 1972, Kristol wrote: "'All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling,' wrote Oscar Wilde, and I would like to suggest that the same can be said for bad politics . … It seems to me that the politics of liberal reform, in recent years, shows many of the same characteristics as amateur poetry. It has been more concerned with the kind of symbolic action that gratifies the passions of the reformer rather than with the efficacy of the reforms themselves. Indeed, the outstanding characteristic of what we call 'the New Politics' is precisely its insistence on the overwhelming importance of revealing, in the public realm, one's intense feelings — we must 'care,' we must 'be concerned,' we must be 'committed.' Unsurprisingly, this goes along with an immense indifference to consequences, to positive results or the lack thereof." Because he actually did care about ordinary people and their welfare, Kristol became one of capitalism's great apologists. Capitalism had eased more misery and engendered more comfort than any other system in world history, he pointed out (and he knew his world history). But starting in the 1960s, Kristol became something else that discomfited liberals even more than a capitalist — a cultural conservative. As he wrote in "My Cold War," a 1993 recap of his intellectual journey from left to right: "But what began to concern me more and more were the clear signs of rot and decadence germinating within American society — a rot and decadence that was no longer the consequence of liberalism but was the actual agenda of contemporary liberalism. And the more contemporary, the more candid and radical was this agenda." While he believed, as he said on another occasion, that "This cultural nihilism will have, in the short term, only a limited political effect — short of a massive, enduring economic crisis. The reason … is that a bourgeois, property-owning democracy tends to breed its own antibodies. These antibodies immunize it, in large degree, against the lunacies of its intellectuals and artists." Nevertheless, he warned, combating the cultural decay — a war on spiritual poverty — was even more important than winning the other Cold War. Irving Kristol often praised the common sense of ordinary people and disdained the vanity and foolishness of intellectuals. He was that rarest of blends: a sparkling intellectual who was grounded in common sense and experience. It was a world-shaking combination. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. Comment on JWR contributor Mona Charen's column by clicking here. Mona Charen Archives © 2006, Creators Syndicate

Arnold Ahlert  Mitch Albom  Jay Ambrose  Michael Barone  Barrywood  Lori Borgman  Stratfor Briefing  Mona Charen  Linda Chavez  Richard Z. Chesnoff  Ann Coulter  Greg Crosby  Alan Douglas  Larry Elder  Suzanne Fields  Christine Flowers  Frank J. Gaffney  Bernie Goldberg  Jonah Goldberg  Julia Gorin  Jonathan Gurwitz  Paul Greenberg  Argus Hamilton  Victor Davis Hanson  Betsy Hart  Ron Hart  Nat Hentoff  Marybeth Hicks  A. Barton Hinkle  Jeff Jacoby  Paul Johnson  Jack Kelly  Ch. Krauthammer  David Limbaugh  Kathryn Lopez  Rich Lowry  Michelle Malkin  Jackie Mason  Ann McFeatters  Dale McFeatters  Dana Milbank  Jeanne Moos  Dick Morris  Jim Mullen  Deroy Murdock  Judge A. Napolitano  Bill O'Reilly  Kathleen Parker  Star Parker  Dennis Prager  Wesley Pruden  Tom Purcell  Sharon Randall  Robert Robb  Cokie & Steve Roberts  Heather Robinson  Debra J. Saunders  Martin Schram  Culture Shlock  David Shribman  Roger Simon  Michael Smerconish  Thomas Sowell  Ben Stein  Mark Steyn  John Stossel  Cal Thomas  Dan Thomasson  Bob Tyrrell  Diana West  Dave Weinbaum  George Will  Walter Williams  Byron York  ZeitGeist  Mort Zuckerman  Robert Arial  Chuck Asay  Baloo   Lisa Benson  Chip Bok  Dry Bones  John Branch  John Cole  J. D. Crowe  Matt Davies  John Deering  Brian Duffy  Everything's Relative  Mallard Fillmore  Glenn Foden  Jake Fuller  Bob Gorrel  Walt Handelsman  Joe Heller  David Hitch  Jerry Holbert  David Horsey  Lee Judge  Steve Kelley  Jeff Koterba  Dick Locher  Chan Lowe  Jimmy Margulies  Jack Ohman  Michael Ramirez  Rob Rogers  Drew Sheneman  Kevin Siers  Jeff Stahler  Scott Stantis  Danna Summers  Gary Varvel  Kirk Walters   Dan Wasserman  Mr. Know-It-All  Ask Doctor K  Richard Lederer  Frugal Living  On Nutrition  Bookmark These  Bruce Williams