In Greed I Trust

Last week's column started off asking: "What human motivation gets the most wonderful things done?" The answer is that human greed is what gets wonderful things done. I wasn't talking about fraud, theft, dishonesty, special privileges from government or other forms of despicable behavior. I was talking about people trying to get as much as they can for themselves.

Think about greed and racial discrimination. In 1947, when the Brooklyn Dodgers hired Jackie Robinson, why did racial discrimination by major league teams begin to drop like a hot potato? It wasn't feelings of guilt by white owners, affirmative action or anti-discrimination laws. It turned out that there was a huge pool of black baseball talent in the Negro leagues. It became too costly for teams to allow the Dodgers to gain a monopoly on this talent. Black players won the National League's Most Valuable Player award for seven consecutive seasons. Had other teams not stepped in to hire black players, allowing the Dodgers to hire them, it might have given the Dodgers a virtual monopoly on world championships. Walter E. Williams - Townhall.com - Click To Read More...

Are You Feeling inadequate?

 "All those handsome, perfectly controlled, wealthy, teetotalers with their gorgeous wives—I wanted to vomit. There was something unearthly about it. Like some weird superior race on the planet Krypton." Michael Medved speaking of the "Mitt Romney Syndrome." Why people are intimidated at the displays of intimidating perfection when seeing evangelicals like the Romney clan and Tim Tebow.

Michael Medved might be on to something here. When we look at Tebow and Romney we just might feel the pain of our limitations and imperfections. It's easy to root for the hero to stumble. - DSMW

The Real 'Iron Lady'

The Real 'Iron Lady' 

The Heritage Foundation 1-15-12

This week brings the nationwide release of The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Streep referred to the challenge of portraying Lady Thatcher as "daunting and exciting," and as requiring "as much zeal, fervour and attention to detail as the real Lady Thatcher possesses." Her performance has already been widely praised by critics, but for those who respect Lady Thatcher, not all the omens are positive.

In an interview with The New York Times, Streep comparedLady Thatcher to King Lear and commented that what interested her about the role "was the part of someone who does monstrous things maybe, or misguided things. Where do they come from?" That doesn't sound good.

Conservatives are used to unfair treatment from Hollywood--in fact, we've come to expect it

Click to read more ...

The Affirmative Action President

Years from now, historians may regard the 2008 election of Barack Obama as an inscrutable and disturbing phenomenon, a baffling breed of mass hysteria akin perhaps to the witch craze of the Middle Ages. How, they will wonder, did a man so devoid of professional accomplishment beguile so many into thinking he could manage the world's largest economy, direct the world's most powerful military, execute the world's most consequential job? 
 
Imagine a future historian examining Obama's pre-presidential life: ushered into and through the Ivy League despite unremarkable grades and test scores along the way; a cushy non-job as a "community organizer"; a brief career as a state legislator devoid of legislative achievement (and in fact nearly devoid of his attention, so often did he vote "present") ; and finally an unaccomplished single term in the United States Senate, the entirety of which was devoted to his presidential ambitions. He left no academic legacy in academia, authored no signature legislation as a legislator.
 
And then there is the matter of his troubling associations: Matt Patterson - Washington Post - Click to Read More...

Well Said Angie, I guess?

“There’s so much focus on the rhetoric in a debate and who says what to who. It would be very refreshing to hear somebody say, ‘There are so many different issues that our politicians have to tackle. There are so many stories you all have to cover and nobody can be an expert on every single thing. And, so, to me, I’m always kind of wondering, well, who will you be listening to on these different issues, not necessarily this strange thing we have where we just expect one man is going to step forward — or woman — who is going to have the absolute answer to every single thing. That doesn’t actually make sense that that’s possible. That doesn’t seem rounded. I’d like to know who they will be leaning on for a very full, group discussion to get a very thorough debate going to be able to come to a final result.”. . . Angelia Jolie's take on the presidential run told to POLITICO  in an interview Tuesday.

The First Big Test Yet to Come

TAMPA – We have the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries behind us now and as a result we know, well, just about what we did before these events took place. The Republican presidential picture is hardly more sorted out than it was before we wrapped our Christmas packages.

The conventional wisdom (which is always conventional but much less often wise) remains that Mitt Romney will outlast all his opponents and will, with minimum esprit de corps, be nominated in August in Tampa. 

Lots of fine Americans live in both Iowa and New Hampshire, I want to make clear. But these are small states, very much unlike the nation at large, with some quirky voting rules. In a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal, a Michael Barone analysis of how untypical the Iowa caucuses are to what follows carries one of those headlines that are so good it makes it almost unnecessary to read the story. To wit, "As Iowa Goes, So Goes Iowa." Just so. If you don't think so, ask President Huckabee. Larry Thornberry - The American Spectator - Click To Read More...

New Year Looks No Less Dysfunctional Than The Old

Ring out the new, ring in the old. No, hang on, that should be the other way around, shouldn't it?

Not as far as 2011 was concerned. The year began with a tea-powered Republican caucus taking control of the House of Representatives and pledging to rein in spendaholic government. It ended with President Obama making a pro forma request for a mere $1.2 trillion increase in the debt ceiling. This will raise government debt to $16.4 trillion — a new world record! If only until he demands the next debt-ceiling increase in three months' time.

At the end of 2011, America, like much of the rest of the western world, has dug deeper into a cocoon of denial. Tens of millions of Americans remain unaware that this nation is broke — broker than any nation has ever been.

A few days before Christmas, we sailed across the psychological Rubicon and joined the club of nations whose government debt now exceeds their total GDP. It barely raised a murmur — and those who took the trouble to address the issue noted complacently that our 100% debt-to-GDP ratio is a mere two-thirds of Greece's. Mark Steyn - Investors.com - Click To Read More...

ObamaCare and the Limits of Government

The Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether ObamaCare is constitutional, granting certiorari in a case brought by 26 states shortly after that law was enacted in March of last year. In so doing, it will be ruling upon the very nature of our federal union.

The Constitution limits federal power by granting Congress authority in certain defined areas, such as the regulation of interstate and foreign commerce. Those powers not specifically vested in the federal government by the Constitution or, as stated in the 10th Amendment, "prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." The court will now determine whether those words still have meaning. David B. Rivkin, Jr. - Wall Street Journal - Click To Read More...

Spotify's Daniel Ek: The Most Important Man In Music

Spotify’s Daniel Ek created a free, Facebook-enabled platform that could save the recording industry from piracy–and iTunes.

It’s a typically damp, dark November afternoon in Stockholm, and Daniel Ek is ill. Over the past month the 28-year-old chief executive of Spotify has worn himself down jetting from his Swedish base to San Francisco, New York, Denmark, the Netherlands and France to visit his expanding sales force and launch his music service in one or another of the dozen countries it now operates in.

But there’s no rest for the weary. Next week he’s scheduled to return to New York to unveil Spotify’s new platform in front of his first-ever press conference. Steven Bertoni - Forbes - Click To Read More...

Margaret Thatcher knew the single currency would devastate Europe

Today, Margaret Thatcher’s autobiography, first published in 1993, reads like a prophecy. It shows how deeply and with what extraordinary wisdom she had examined Delors’ proposals for the single currency. Her overriding objection was not ill-considered or xenophobic, as subsequent critics have repeatedly claimed.

They were economic. Right back in 1990, Mrs Thatcher foresaw with painful clarity the devastation it was bound to cause. Her autobiography records how she warned John Major, her euro-friendly chancellor of the exchequer, that the single currency could not accommodate both industrial powerhouses such as Germany and smaller countries such as Greece. Germany, forecast Thatcher, would be phobic about inflation, while the euro would prove fatal to the poorer countries because it would “devastate their inefficient economies” Peter Oborne - The Telegraph - Click To Read More...