Washington Post

Just in time for Christmas, Pat Buchanan has come along to alert us to the shifting alliances in the conflict between tradition and modernity. While Buchanan’s pugnacity in the culture wars has long since ceased to be news, his latest entry is jaw-dropping nonetheless. Writing last week on a right-wing Web site , he announced he’d found a new star in the paleoconservative firmament: Vladimir Putin.

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It’s shaping up to be one fat Christmas for executives and major shareholders at Boeing. The nation’s leading civilian aircraft manufacturer announced this week that it would increase its dividends by 50 percent and devote a further $10 billion over the next two years to buying back its stock — a move that drives up the value of the remaining outstanding shares.

For Boeing employees, Christmas is looking distinctly leaner. The company’s contract offer last month to the more than 30,000 unionized workers at its plants outside Seattle demanded that they swap out their defined-benefit pensions for 401(k) plans and imposed lower pay on new hires. By a 2-to-1 margin, the workers rejected the offer. Now that they know the company plans to devote $10 billion to purchasing its own stock, I doubt their feelings toward Boeing have grown any fonder.

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Two cheers for the comeback of American manufacturing. Or maybe just one.

The manufacturing sector has experienced a modest renaissance since it hit bottom during the Great Recession. The number of manufacturing jobs is set to rise this year, as it has every year since 2010. Profits are soaring — in 2012, after-tax profits of manufacturing firms hit a record high of $289 billion. Share values have soared with them. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Industrials Index has risen 59 percent more than the overall 500-stock index since 2009, Bloomberg reported last month.

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If you thought this “corporations are people” business was getting out of hand, brace yourself. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court accepted two cases that will determine whether a corporation can deny contraceptive coverage to its female employees because of its religious beliefs.

The cases concern two of the most politically charged issues of recent years: who is exempted from the requirements of the Affordable Care Act, and whether application of the First Amendment’s free speech protections to corporations, established by the court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United, means that the First Amendment’s protections of religious beliefs must also be extended to corporations.

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Better bring some identification — and not just any identification, official though it may be — if you plan to vote in Republican-controlled states. However, if you contribute tens of millions of dollars to sway an election on Republicans’ behalf, the party will fight to keep your identity a secret.

Consider, for instance, what happened to some attempting to participate in this month’s elections in Texas. The New York Times reported that “Judge Sandra Watts was stopped while trying to vote because the name on her photo ID, the same one she had used for voter registration and identification of 52 years, did not exactly match her name in the official voter rolls.”

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Senate Republicans say that the cosmic order may soon be torn asunder. In response to the GOP’s recent filibustering of two Obama nominees — particularly, that of Patricia Ann Millett to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit — Democrats have threatened to diminish the power of a minority of senators to block confirmations by changing the filibuster rules. Republicans counter that this would, in the words of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), “destroy the very fabric of the United States Senate.”

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