“Web Notables” is a daily feature that highlights articles readers may want to see but might have missed. It is compiled by senior editor David Mills.

The Party of the Living Dead, from the website Ricochet. The Democratic party, writes Paul A. Rahe, “is bereft of fresh blood.” Rahe, who teaches history at Hillsdale College, observes that

The minority leader in the Senate is 75; the minority leader in the House is 74. Her immediate underling (Steny Hoyer) is also 74. . . . [T]he likely Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party will be 69 in January 2017 (older than Ronald Reagan was when he became President). Her likeliest rival, Joe Biden, will be 74; Jim Webb will be 70; and Elizabeth Warren . . . will be 67. As Jay Cost points out, if Hillary Clinton now anticipates no challenger, as seems to be the case, it is because the bench is empty.

The Republicans are younger but that does not necessarily give them a political advantage. “What we do not yet know, what we need to know, is whether any of the Republican candidates understand that the present discontents . . . [derive] from the propensities inherent in the administrative state itself. Most Republicans are managerial progressives. They suppose that all that is required is managerial competence.”

This Is How Normal Walking to School Used to Be, from The Atlantic‘s Citylab. A short film on the days when half of American children walked to school.

Lessons on Truth-Telling from Journalism’s Biggest Fraud, from the website Canon & Culture. Speaking of evangelicals who have been “proliferating outright falsehoods,” Samuel James asks why anyone would lie when the lie didn’t gain them anything. The reason is that

sin has no cost benefit analysis. It’s part of human nature to want to bend reality a little further, or make ourselves look just a little smarter or our work just a little more important than it might be. This temptation is compounded exponentially when we think the stakes are high. For evangelicals engaged in crucial cultural conversations, the urgent nature of the work will often seem to justify obfuscations of truth, whether through sweeping generalizations, fallacious logic, or alarmist rhetoric.

Canon & Culture is published by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

Barack Obama’s Tax Plan for Proletarian Families, from the newsletter of
the World Congress of Families. Analyzing the president’s plan for families, family scholar Allan Carlson argues that the plan will pull families out of the middle class and “leave still more Americans trapped in ‘the servile state,’ Hilaire Belloc’s apt description of propertyless households existing on a mix of wages and welfare benefits.” The plan serves “the holy grail of the social engineers, who want to see everyone doing taxable work, and so help feed the maw of the governing machine.”

Christmas Slaughter, from the Gatestone Institute. Raymond Ibrahim, author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War in Christians, offers a long list of attacks on Christians in the Islamic world, and other forms of persecution, during the month around Christmas.

And for dog-lovers:

No More Corgis for the Queen, from the Washington Post. The owner of over thirty corgis over the years, Queen Elizabeth II will not own any more, given the danger of tripping over a young active puppy. The article includes a pictorial history of the queen’s relation to her dogs.