"Don't expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong."
"I have never been hurt by anything I didn't say."
"Never go out to meet trouble. If you will just sit still, nine cases out of ten, someone will intercept it before it reaches you."
"Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped."
-Calvin Coolidge
Obama should heed the first quote, Biden the second, I personally struggle with the third, and the whole country would benefit from taking the fourth to heart...
I've acquired an admiration for our thirtieth president, Calvin Coolidge, the poster boy for limited government and parsimonious behavior...I'm hereby instituting a daily tribute to that paragon of "masterful inactivity" in The White House...here is the first installment of Coolidgeisms...maxims and morsels of insight from the president who napped two to three hours a day...
"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; Nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb; Education will not; The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."
-Calvin Coolidge
It pains me to say this, but I'm not sure that I can continue to support Jon Stewart's career any further...The other night on "The Daily Show" he said that Harry Truman was a war criminal for dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
I've tried to square it with a somewhat analogous situation...Spike Lee periodically blasphemes Larry Bird, but he frequently makes good movies ("Inside Man"), so I'll cut him a modest amount of slack...but lumping Truman in with Hermann Goering is a different order of magnitude...
"Since time immemorial, the policy rap on the Democratic Party has been that their solutions amount to stuffing cannons with money and aiming them at amorphous, and occasionally invented, social ills. Since Obama entered the White House in January, the cannonades have been nearly unending. The government has spent money at astonishing rates with little reassurance that the efforts will pay off."
-Mark Hemingway, today's National Review
The basketball equivalent of The Western Front in 1916...sluggish, ugly, grim...
My dad, retired engineer turned swimming instructor, runs lifeguarding classes for 15-17 year old would-be lifeguards.
At the end of training for lifeguardianship, the students are asked to address an envelope to themselves so that their lifeguard certification can be mailed to them.
My dad reports that the vast majority of these kids cannot address an envelope to themselves...Don't know where to write what on the envelope, which side of the envelope, etc.
Being charitable, he ascribes this illiteracy to the advent of the Internet...I, on the other hand, see Revelations fulfilled...
Canned goods and bottled water people...stock up now...
The most shameless act of opportunism this year...The senior senator from the Keystone State has demonstrated that his overriding ideology is Re-Election Uber Alles...
