This is the PDF version of our recent issue of On Principle, devoted entirely to Abraham Lincoln. There are ten pretty good essays by people you know and the artwork is by our own Chris Burkett. You can also access the individual essays at our main site. I hope you like it.

And here’s another one near and dear to my heart . . . a proposed ban from the LA city council on a whole variety of new and modern billboards. Because it’s always a good idea, in a down economy, to make it really, really difficult for people to advertise and sell things. (Full disclosure: Dad makes and sells billboards . . . good ones too!)

Money quote: "By comparison, the Carter administration is starting to look like a model of manly strength, courage and patriotism." Ouch!

Now, if I was in a conspiratorial frame of mind, and thought Obama was an evil genius, I’d wonder whether the murky TARP II provision that allowed the AIG bonuses was deliberately calculated to provoke outrage in order to justify greater government control over executive salaries across the board, as indeed Barney Frank has intimated is his desire. Nah. Can’t be that clever, can they?

Perhaps Clinton was excluded because of his stance on abortion. As retiring Notre Dame professor Ralph McInerny and WSJ columnist William McGurn note, Obama's position on life issues ("safe, legal, and government funded"?) has certainly not disqualified him.

The University promises a dialogue, to engage him. The President likes dialogues, but only when others are open to being persuaded by him. Certainly the most prominent lectern in American Catholic higher education is a bully pulpit, so to speak. I predict that his approach will not be much different from that of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, speaking at Boston College, who gave lip service to the diversity of American higher education but ultimately urged subordination to national goals, quoting Woodrow Wilson to this effect:

"It is not learning," said President Wilson, "but the spirit of service that will give a college place in the public annals of the Nation." "It is indispensable," he said, "if it is to do its right service, that the air of affairs should be admitted to all its classrooms... the air of the world's transactions, the consciousness of the solidarity of the race, the sense of the duty of man toward man . . . the promise and the hope that shine in the face of all knowledge .... The days of glad expansion are gone, our life grows tense and difficult; our resource for the future lies in careful thought, providence, and a wise economy; and the school must be of the Nation."

As The President has reminded us in other contexts, he wants all hands on deck...so long as he's the one steering the ship.

Sad as it is, this last reminds me of the famous study in which little girls were given toy trucks to play with in lieu of dolls. The researchers found that the vast majority of the girls would play with the trucks as if they were dolls . . . bathing them, putting them to "bed" and, in general, nurturing them. And we all know about the propensity of boys to turn any available item into a weapon. What mother with children of both sexes hasn't been "shot" by a Barbie-doll gun? Have we really come to the point when women, unable to find men who are both masculine and chivalrous (or, perhaps, unable to recognize him when she does) must now resort to contorting themselves into the objects of their own desire? And what happens when the so-called "husband" or "butch" in these situations begins to awaken the needs that remain unfulfilled for her in the relationship?

The trouble with nurturing a truck is that no matter how amazing the powers of your imagination may be, it remains a truck. This may be fine when the question is child's play. At some point, however, we all long to put away childish things.

And then there's my review of this book by Francis Beckwith.

And while I'm at it, let me mention a couple of other books that I am reading or will read soon. There's The Soul of a Leader, written by a guy I have a hard time calling Waller R. Newell. And there's this eagerly awaited hardy quadrennial.

It seems to me that something also to be noted--if one has serious compassion for one's homosexual friends and relations--is that if Gallagher is right and the nature and purpose of marriage could be so fundamentally altered, the civilizing effects of both marriage and these unions would be cheapened, coarsened and diminished by this change. When marriages are fully categorized by law and in "polite society" as being nothing better or different or more trans-formative than are the sexual unions of homosexual couples, there will be no civilizing idea or example to which either kind of couple can look for an example. That is to say, one reason homosexual couples today may find the idea of marriage so appealing is likely the good marriage does for society and the changes it induces in its participants. If homosexual couples find that their own "non-marriage" unions do not quite measure up by way of comparison, is it any wonder that they look to something outside of the nature of the thing itself for a cause? What happens when they find that a rose by another name does not smell as sweet? What happens when there is no longer any rose-tinted glasses through which to view their situation? Sweet little lies on a personal level may serve some good purpose and I've really no problem with encouraging them in those whose personal situation demands them if they encourage a better public comportment. But when we try to pass off these little lies onto the rest of the world on a grand scale, this goes well beyond what Mark Twain might call a stretcher.

A second, related, point. People on the Left in America like to frame the issue by saying "health care must be a right, not a privilege, in America." Is that phrase helpful? In a free country, the government does not have the right to say you can’t go to the doctor. The only reason why the governmnet would deny that right to people is if it rations health care-something that would be done, ironically, in the name of making health care a "right." Under Britain’s national health service, people over 57 don’t have the right to have hip replacements.

Andrew Busch has a nice short article on the question of the right to health care in the latest Claremont Review of Books.