Blog of Note

John Stossel now blogs, and he is very very good at it.

"The life we've led since 1945 in the Western world is very rare in human history. ..."

Our children are unlikely to enjoy anything so placid and may well spend their adult years in an ugly and savage world unless we decide that who and what we are is worth defending.

Mark Steyn, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It

Tyranny and Folly

Bonhoeffer:

Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil. One can protest against evil; it can be unmasked and, if need be, prevented by force. Evil always carries the seeds of its own destruction, as it makes people, at the least, uncomfortable. Against folly we have no defence. Neither protests nor force can touch it; reasoning is no use; facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied;...

Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

Can anyone doubt that the tyranny of the busybody is a tyranny born of folly?

Going for a Run...

... about 20 years ago.

He Is Not Coming

This occurred to me today and has occurred to me before, but today it occurred to me with greater force and, for the first time, it truly took hold.

He is not coming.

Who will be the next Reagan? Who will be our Thatcher? Who will show encroaching statism for the tyranny it is and turn the tide against it? Nevermind that Reagan and Thatcher, while they did make great gains, did not turn that tide permanently. We expect some even greater personage. The minute a promising face appears we ask, "Could it be? Is this the one?"

I tell you it isn't.

He is not coming.

We don't even bother to ask who our next Jefferson or Washington or Adams or Lincoln will be. We seem to have accepted that we have not produced one of these. Yet, that is what it would take, isn't it? At the very least anyway. Even then, who knows? Even that might not be enough.

He is not coming. And he is not coming because we have not produced him. From whence would he come? We are an ignorant people. Our best and brightest, outside of the hard sciences, are a sorry lot by historical standards. Intelligence, we have. Wit, we have in surplus. But knowledge? Real, discriminating knowledge, where is it? Our standards for knowledge are now so low. Now we are only required to sound as if we know. We are masters of rhetorical style, but of wisdom there is a dearth.

He is not coming. How many of us know Latin? How many Greek? How many are familiar with the great works of our civilization? Some will laugh at the suggestion that students should be troubled with Latin and Greek, but the fact is that it is impossible to be educated in our great works without these languages. When our nation was founded it was assumed that an educated person would be familiar with classical languages. Now they have been discarded.

He is not coming. What do we do with our brightest minds? How do we educate them? We polish them up, teach them to write prettily, and indoctrinate them into the idea that the highest form of wisdom is total ignorance. What I mean by that is that we teach them to value non-discrimination above all else. Total refusal to discriminate between ideas on their merits is now the mark of the sage. Any civilization is just one of many. Any idea is just one of many. Any religion is just one of many. Any philosophy is just one of many. Everything is relative and everything is deserving of respect. (Unless, of course, it is successful like Christianity or capitalism.)

He is not coming, and he is not coming because he can never come from that lie. The heart of relativism is a void of tyrannical ignorance. What is worth knowing if everything is, at heart, the same? Liberty is tyranny. Freedom is statism. We throw our greatest minds into that abyss.

He is not coming because, though they are total aberrations historically, we believe liberty and comfort inevitable. They are not. We are comfortable because by liberty success is found by merit. As ideas and things and people succeed by merit, we become more comfortable. But when you replace merit as the means of success, you will, by and by, find yourself less comfortable. When statism encroaches on liberty and planning and pull replace merit, tyranny and misery are not far behind. There will always be men who love power and seek to consolidate it, and mostly, they are not benevolent. To think that a state can have great power and yet be free of malice is to be naive at best and willfully foolish at worst. To believe that mere men, no matter how great, are capable of knowing all means and seeing all ends and can, therefore, plan for all is the very same folly.

He is not coming because we are lazy. We desire virtue, but we are too distracted to practice it, and so we outsource it to the state. Help him who needs it!... But not by me; let the bureaucrats handle that. We are like children depending on our parents to take care of the hard realities of life. He can never come out of that because he cannot be a child.

He is not coming. He will not speak for us. He does not exist, and nothing will be set aright until we produce him.

It remains to be seen whether or not we will.

Is That Really a Picture of Springdale?

I live here, and I suppose I must never have looked in that direction.

Free Foreign Service Institute Language Programs

Welcome to fsi-language-courses.com, the home for language courses developed by the Foreign Service Institute. These courses were developed by the United States government and are in the public domain.

Everything from French and Spanish to Kituba and Igbo. The reviews I've read about this program have said that while it is rather boring, it does work.

I've used Pimsleur in the past, but I'm going to give an FSI course a try.

Helpful Link for Arkansas Homeschoolers

This. Perhaps everyone else already knew about this, but I didn't, so I'll add it to the sidebar.

Also, for Catholic homeschoolers in Northwest Arkansas, I've heard great things about this group. I found the other link while looking for information on how to join.

When Was That Written? Now?

And good literature is the natural result of that sane outlook which only comes from a share in the active life of humanity and a living conviction of the significance of daily toil, of words and deeds and human relationships, and, above all, of the beauty of the world, and from a living faith too in God, and the triumph of Good over Evil. As soon as men cease themselves to live, and only write, the effect is evident in a certain lack of virility in their outlook. Feeling degenerates into sentimentality.

No. But it could have been. This part, "As soon as men cease themselves to live, and only write, the effect is evident in a certain lack of virility in their outlook," reminds me of most modern writing. And as for this, "Feeling degenerates into sentimentality," she left off that sentimentality often degenerates into irony which often then degenerates into flippancy.

School Envy

I've wondered about this before: what sorts of things trigger homeschool kids to envy their public and private school counterparts? Wonder no more. (I especially like the kid who wanted to go to school so that he could eat out of a lunch box.) Good tips for handling these short bouts of envy as well.

True story: When I was four years old, I wanted to be an apple picker because I saw something that depicted apple pickers as riding bikes and carrying ladders at the same time. Bikes and ladders! At the same time! What could be better than that?

I Always Loved Geometry

My geometry teacher's name was Ms. Burke, and she was excellent. I think she has a different name now.

I used to sit in her class and imagine all the lines on the board extending out into infinity. (If they didn't extend out into infinity, we learned, they wouldn't be lines; they'd be segments.) I'd imagine where different ones would meet. If I drew a line on my paper, I'd imagine it continuing out into the room. I could turn the paper and the ghost line would turn too. I'd imagine all the lines everyone else was drawing at their desks, as though we were all sitting in a web. And what if all the line segments that made up the chairs and binders and all the other objects in the room extended out into infinite lines? Lines everywhere, up and down, side to side, diagonally in every possible way (But would it really be every possible way? Certainly not, I thought.) and moving as our doings moved them. And planes, they were infinite too. The counters, the desks, the books, the overhead projector, what if they all extended out into infinity? You could imagine them moving around like gigantic transparencies that pierced the walls and the ceiling and the floor.

Maybe everything did extend out like that in true reality, in the reality of Platonic forms, and we just saw the limited physical representations. Could we affect those forms? I could erase an arrow, the indication of a line extending out forever, in my geometry notes and replace it with a point. That was a full stop. If I stopped the line at a certain point, then it was stopped. Now it was a ray. But somehow it was still infinite. Wouldn't it have to be half as long as a line? And how odd that you could place a point anywhere on a line, and it would be the center. You could place one point and then travel along the line ten million miles out into space to place another point, and as far as the length of the line was concerned, it was as though those ten million miles were nothing at all, and both points were the center. And what happened to the lines as they went on forever? Was forever really forever or would the space curve back in on itself. Would the two ends go on so far that they would run into each other and made a loop?

We didn't study that, so I don't know.

The 179th Carnival of Homeschooling...

... is up.

Blog Worth a Bookmark

This looks like a relatively new blog. Here's a representative post titled Literature Curricula for Preschoolers.

I'm impressed. Few people are comprehensive without rambling, and this appears to be one such person.

Cheap Montessori Materials

We've started using some traditional Montessori materials at home. I guess you could call it home preschooling.

I've seen plenty of people in forums wondering what online stores have decent and inexpensive materials. I've ordered from these two, and I was happy with both places:

Kid Advance: I got sandpaper letters and numbers from this store and thought the quality was excellent. I'd seen what seemed to be identical letters and numbers elsewhere, but for higher prices. I think Kid Advance may be the actual manufacturer.

Adena Montessori: I got a variety of materials from this store including cylinder blocks, a geometric cabinet, a small movable alphabet, golden beads, color tablets, and small number rods. Again, I was pleased. Adena may also be a manufacturer.

Of course, you don't necessarily have to buy materials. There are quite a few that can be made at home. There are directions for making many traditional materials in this book.

I've never really done any crafting, but I'm attempting to make something from that book: cards with numbers on them. Heh. Well, you have to start somewhere, right?

ADDED: I forgot to mention Hobby Lobby. If you have one of these in your area, it is a wonderland of useful items for preschool. Plus, if you do want to make Montessori materials on your own, you can find pretty much everything you need in this store.

George Tiller Is Dead

Shot this morning.

Homeschooling Still on the Rise

In USA Today:

As of spring 2007, an estimated 1.5 million, or 2.9% of all school-age children in the USA, were home-schooled, up from 1.7% in 1999.

And this is interesting:

6.8% of college-educated parents home-school, up from 4.9% in 1999.

And this:

The new figures come from the U.S. Department of Education, which found that 36% of parents said their most important reason for home schooling was to provide "religious or moral instruction"; 21% cited concerns about school environment. Only 17% cited "dissatisfaction with academic instruction."

You can lump me in with that 17%, though I sympathize with the majority reason as well.

Via Gifted Exchange.

Bringing Out the Best in Any Toddler

Note: I have an old blog elsewhere that I'm planning to delete. It only has a few posts, but some of them are worth saving by posting here. This is a post from that old blog.

I found Paula Spencer's "Is Your Child Gifted?" while reading Help! My Kids Are Smarter Than Me! Contrary to what the title might suggest, it is not an article about how to identify a gifted child. In fact, it assures parents that their children probably aren't gifted:

"Gifted" has become one of the most tossed-about words in the parenting lexicon. Unfortunately -- sorry, but let's get this out of the way right up front -- it's also one of the most misused. The vast majority of children are not gifted. Only 2 to 5 percent of kids fit the bill, by various estimates. Of those, only one in 100 is considered highly gifted. Prodigies (those wunderkinds who read at 2 and go to college at 10) are rarer still -- like one to two in a million.

The real premise of the article is this:

Whether young children are truly advanced or happily average (where they have lots of company), in the early years they need pretty much the same things.

Of course, as always the devil is in the details, and the pertinent detail in this case is the phrase "pretty much." (I created this blog due to the needs and challenges that arise outside the realm of "pretty much.") However, the domain of "pretty much," those areas where advanced and average kids need the same things, is very large indeed, and for that, the article provides great reminders.

...all babies, toddlers, and preschoolers will thrive as long as they are:

• Provided a predictable life with a reasonably ordered environment
• Held and touched often
• Talked to (or sung to) often
• Read to frequently
• Exposed to interesting experiences
• Given many opportunities to learn through play.

Sure, those are things we all know, but it can be helpful to have certain things repeated in print. Ordered environment, huh? Hmmmm, maybe I'd better tidy up the living room.

There are also some good ideas:

Make Question Books. Scatter three or four notebooks around the house. If your child asks a question you either don't know the answer to or are too busy to answer, say, "Let's write it down." Later, you can explore the question together -- find a book, go online, visit the library or a museum.

Read the rest of it. You might also want to check out the original blog post where I found the article for a pointer to Dr. Sears endorsement of gifted preschool homeschooling.

On the Subject of Subjects

Subject of email advertisement received this morning:

How to Get the Smoothest Legs in the World

First, be the only person to read this email...

Best Books for Babies -- Children Under One

I have strong opinions about children's books, even babies' and toddlers' books. Sure, you read everywhere that it doesn't matter what you read to a baby or toddler as long as you read. That's true to a point. But if you're already planning to buy books, why not buy good books? Why settle for often insipid impulse buys when you could select books that go toward the development of literary and aesthetic taste? And when not focusing on those qualities, why not provide information about the real world? A person could argue that all books provide real world information to some extent, but I would counter that some do it far more effectively than others.

Note that for this age, I always buy the board book format if it is available. A baby can turn the pages of a board book, and picking the sturdier format allows the books to be played with. You'll end up with chewed corners, but that's no big deal and a small price to pay for having books become your child's favorite playthings. Many of these books are available under Amazon's 4-for-3 promotions, so it's a good idea to buy strategically in groups of four for the best discount.

With all of that said, these are my favorites for the zero to twelve months crowd, organized by author or type:

Byron Barton: Barton's books are particularly good for this age group because the illustrations are bold and precise, perfect for the youngest eyes, and the writing is terse and clear, making it easier to decode the language. There are lots of brightly-colored books out there with simple pictures and text, but Barton's books are, in my opinion, the most refined of this type. Of Barton's books, these are my favorites:

My Car: If you buy one Barton book, let it be this one.
Machines at Work: If you buy two, let the other one be this one.

All of his vehicle books are excellent.
Trucks
Planes
Trains
Boats

Barton's renditions of these classic tales are the best available for this age group.
The Little Red Hen
The Three Bears

Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs: Your child will like dinosaurs. It is some sort of child law. This book is excellent because it introduces dinosaurs using activities and feelings familiar to the youngest child.

Margaret Wise Brown: Brown is something like the uncontested queen of prose for the youngest child. Her writing for this audience has no parallel. If you are only getting a few books for your baby, go with some of hers and some of Barton's.

Big Red Barn: If I could have only one board book in the house, this would be it. The text is perfect, and the illustrations are friendly and engaging. Plus, this book introduces a great number of animals in a story, rather than picture and label, format.
Goodnight Moon: Almost goes without saying. This classic is a must for any home library.
My World: Some of the reviewers on Amazon knock this book, but it looks like most of them are either not clicking into the intended rhythm of the language or introducing it to older children. This was one of my son's favorite books, and he had plenty to choose from.

She has other good titles, but they'll show up in a future list for best books for one to two year olds.

Touch and Feel Books: Babies like to touch, and these books focus on tactile stimulation.

Pat the Bunny: This one is a classic for good reason. It's engaging, and there is a pretty wide variety of direct, tactile experience offered in this one little book. Much better than its spin offs: Pat the Puppy and Pat the Cat , which rely more on pop-up book type interactions like pulltabs and turn wheels.
Roger Priddy Cloth Books: Simple text and lots of different material.  You don't have to worry about these being damaged; they're made for babies to throw around and chew.
Peter Rabbit Touch and Feel: My son has always had a special affinity for this book.  The textures are more subtle, and the illustrations are more detailed, making this book different from your usual touch and feel book.  It can be a welcome change from the others.

Photographs: Sometimes you need photos.  I have lots of recommendations for ages one to two in this category, but I have two favorites for the under one crowd.

Baby Faces:  There's a reason this book has five stars on Amazon.  Large pictures of babies' faces, each depicting a different emotion or other description.  Children under one are generally fascinated by this.
Daddy and Me:  Out of print but available used very cheap.  Pictures of dads having fun with their kids with one word descriptors.  

Visual Stimulation: A baby's vision is blurry, but he can distinguish subtler contrasts than you might think.  Still, most babies enjoy looking at high contrast images.  For that, black and white board books are available.

What are your favorite books for the under one crowd?

Bloglift

Time to update the blog template.  Will be upgrading to new layout system.  Will be updating blogroll.  If you come here, and things look weird, that's why.  I'll post again when I'm done.  No, that won't be today.  And probably not tomorrow.

ADDED 5/29/09: Well, I was wrong.  I'm pretty much done now.  The sidebar will evolve, but this will be the basic layout and color scheme.  My favorite color is red.  Can you tell?

So, why the update?  I did like the Scribe design, but I was using the old Blogger template system and wanted to upgrade to the new layout system.  The Scribe design under the layout system looks the same but has a quirk I don't like.  Instead of allowing content to override layout, the layout overrides the content.

What does that mean?  A few posts below, there is a widescreen video about government spending.  In my old layout, the video extended outside the post text column.  It looked a little goofy, but I was fine with that.  It was more important that readers could see the whole video frame rather than keep the layout looking perfectly neat.  The new Scribe layout cut off the video frame where it crossed the right side of the post text column.  That was a big chunk.  And the width of that column was fixed.  I probably could have edited the graphics for that layout and changed the coding to make a wider Scribe, but I didn't want to devote that much time to it.  

So, red it is.

Goose Bay Deployment -- January 1952

From my Gran'Dad via email. It is worth clicking into the pictures.

From Goose Bay we were to fly a profile mission to release a blivet on a bombing range off the northwest coast of Puerto Rico, then return to Carswell. The deployment to Goose went well and I got some very good photos. Here's our number one navigator, Cliff Bilek, guiding us in:

 

And on final:

 

And what has happened to that C124?

 

Here's a couple of crew photos of Crew R22(?), George Burch A/C

L-R George Burch (A/C), Cliff Bilek (1st nav), Chester Skelton (pilot) and Wray Jolley (2nd nav)

Same group: Jolley, Dick Vaughn (Radar), Burch and Bilek

 

And for us from Fort Worth, the flight line at Goose was quite different:

 

All went well. EXCEPT, our radar was out by the time we reached the Puerto Rico area. Dick Vaughn did an optical offset release, dropping our blivet somewhere near, we hoped, the target. Turning back toward the US we ran into very strong westerlys and could make it no farther toward Carswell than MacDill. In spite of it being in the wee hours, US Customs came out of somewhere to inspect for any Canadian whisky that exceeded our allowance.  

 

Wray Jolley

A Little Perspective

Act now. Speak up.

"The Dr. William Sears-inspired attachment parenting crowd will soon assail her in the blogosphere."

Sure, we will. But I won't be doing it for the reason you think.

Enough with the neuroticism. Very few mothers breastfeed exclusively to six months. Given how low the rate is, how can you argue that there's overwhelming pressure on mothers? It seems like the real beef is that some people exist who don't approve. Who cares if they don't approve? They may be annoying, but why so much angst over them? I think that the greatest benefit from breastfeeding probably is the close contact between mother and baby. For that, no pump required. (Though if you accept that premise, you have to accept that a mother's work schedule matters, and that it might be worthwhile to make sacrifices in that area.)

I write all of that as a committed Sears-type attachment parent who never pumped, did breastfeed exclusively for six months, continued breastfeeding until her son was a week shy of two years, and would have used formula during the day if she'd gone back to work.

Ethan Arrived!

On March 27th. Another. Best. Day. Ever. (The first.)

"Stimulus," Slavery, and War

Extracted from my comments elsewhere in the blogosphere:

I've asked before, but I'll ask again: At what point will a younger generation rise up and refuse to pay off the debts of their parents? This spending bill is basically a gargantuan political handout to special interests. Think our kids are going to be okay with paying for that? I don't. Pretty vile that we're even considering dropping $1 trillion of debt on them over this, a bill that will almost certainly make the economy worse.

...

Are other people feeling more and more like we're at the mercy of tyrants who feel entitled to confiscate whatever they want from us and spend it as they please? Tyrants who also feel entitled to nanny into every minute aspect of our lives? Tyrants we're supposed to be able to vote out but who have so protected themselves and co-opted the press that it's nearly impossible? This is not good.

...

Currently, I think we're dooming our future generations to eventual war with whatever countries own most of the debt. There will come a point when the debt is a crushing burden, and people aren't going to like paying for a bunch of contracts that they never even agreed to. People aren't always going to stand for the explanation that, "Well, your parents made these deals, so you have to pay."

And what right do we have to sell future generations into slavery anyway? That's what it is, isn't it? We want all this stuff now, so we'll put the debt off on you people who will be forced to work it off for us. Abominable.

Ice Storm in Northwest Arkansas

Yesterday I posted a few pics on Twitter as the trees fell apart, but then we lost power, so I couldn't do updates anymore. We still don't have power, so I'm posting this from a hotel.

This was the view from the bedroom window this morning:


Looking up and down the street in front of the house:



Across the street:


The backyard:




Macro of the grass to show how the ice was adding so much weight to the trees and tearing them apart:


The whole town looks like that. Nothing will look the same for decades. So it goes.

Good Movies for Six to Seven Year Olds

Inspired by a fellow Twitter-er, this the FreeHusband's off the cuff, five minute list:

1. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
2. The Iron Giant
3. Castle in the Sky
4. The Wizard of Oz
5. The Sound of Music
7. Yankee Doodle Dandy
8. Back to the Future
9. Star Wars: A NEW HOPE(not the horrid new trilogy stuff)
10. The Princess Bride
11. Mary Poppins
12. Toy Story
13. Spy Kids(only part 1)
14. Superman(1978)
15. The Adventures of Robin Hood(Errol Flynn)
16. Singin' in the Rain
17. My Neighbor Totoro
18. The Incredibles
19. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
20. The Parent Trap(1961 only!)

Stunningly Effective

Gregarious Llama

 

Things My Son Made Recently

 

 

 

 

With an exception: I set up the yellow arch at the bottom of the block tower.

The possibility of stacking books against the wall would not have occurred to me. Four days later, and I notice that I forgot to post the books picture. Que sera sera. Next time.

Entering a Technology I Formerly Shunned: Twitter

You can now follow me on Twitter.

Notice the total lack of posts of the holidays. I often find links or have thoughts that I'd like to post about but never get around to blogging. Often the things I want to share are so short that I don't even want them on the blog.

Enter Twitter. I'll try this for a while. There will probably be more activity over there. Longer, more developed things will still appear over here. And no, my Twitter feed will not give you a play by play of my day.

My favorite thing about Twitter:

Twitter = terse

I like terse.

So, if you'd like, follow me.

Simple Toys...

... that I would add to this list (via Instapundit) based on personal experience:

• The Original Rollercoaster by Anatex
• Fisher-Price: Doodle Pro
• Djeco Puzzles - We have the wooden panda and the wooden cat. Both have been big hits.
• Schleich Animals - No other animal figures that I know of are as detailed and durable.
• Haba Blocks - These wooden blocks cost more than others, but if your kid likes to build tall, these are ideal because the surfaces are perfectly flat and the angles are dead on. Some other blocks will give you leaning towers after a certain height.
• Colorforms

ADDED: I almost forgot about this:

• Little Tikes Push & Ride Racer - One of the most beloved of toys. This one is great because our son prefers it to all the other, more expensive, toys of this type.

And here's what I mean by building tall:

You can't do that with blocks that aren't cut just right because they'll fall over before you ever get that high.

Shocker!

Meat comes from animals! Who knew?

I'm amused that this video is getting so much play. Were people unaware that turkeys have to be killed before making it to the Thanksgiving Day table?

I think that the reality in the background makes the pardon more meaningful. "And now by the authority vested in me, from this fate you are spared!"

Poverty Chic

Getting trendy. There are some amusing anecdotes. This was my favorite:

Harry Slatkin, the founder of Slatkin & Co., a home fragrances company, said he and his wife, Laura, recently canceled a 50th birthday party for her at the Pool Room at the Four Seasons. Instead, they plan to have a party at home, with defrosted White Castle cheeseburgers served on silver trays. “It’s not time to have splashy birthday parties,” Mr. Slatkin said. “It’s a time to stay home, spend time with friends and connect.”

Poor people don't eat White Castle for special occasions! And why do they have to be defrosted? You froze them?! No one freezes fast food burgers. In a supposed attempt to be sensitive to the poor, you've parodied them.

Sales Tax Map

From The Tax Foundation (via Club for Growth.)

I live in one of the fifteen highest sales tax rate states, and the local tax rate here is much higher than my state's average. Because the voters in my state also overwhelmingly decided that a great way to raise tax revenue would be to prey on the poor (read: lottery), I think we can expect that sales tax rate to rise.

Why You'll Never Catch Me Supporting Huckabee

Wrapped up in a single paragraph:

In a chapter titled “Faux-Cons: Worse than Liberalism,” Huckabee identifies what he calls the “real threat” to the Republican Party: “libertarianism masked as conservatism.” He is not so much concerned with the libertarian candidate Ron Paul’s Republican supporters as he is with a strain of mainstream fiscal conservative thought that demands ideological purity, seeing any tax increase as apostasy and leaving little room for government-driven solutions to people’s problems.

Well, yes. That's what conservatism is. Conservatism sees "little room for government-driven solutions to people's problems" because they are generallly unfair and only make the problems worse.

What is Huckabee's definition of conservatism? Religious populism?

If you go to the full article, you'll see what may be The Club for Growth's best endorsement yet:

Among his targets is the Club for Growth, a group that tarred Huckabee as insufficiently conservative in the primaries and ran television ads with funding from one of Huckabee's longtime Arkansas political foes, Jackson T. Stephens Jr.

The Huck is a nice guy on a personal level, but he's not someone I would want having power over my life.

UPDATE: In the comments at Hot Air, commenter rockmom writes:

Huckabee is the Jesse Jackson of the right.

Heh.

Of course, that's not entirely fair to Jackson given what he was up to forty or so years ago.

Everyone's Gone Shopping

No kidding. I had to run into Target yesterday and found myself parking farther away than I'd ever had to before.