In an essay in the recent book The Beholden State [pages 96-101], William Voegeli, of the Claremont Institute, writes about the scandal in the Los Angeles borough of Bell, where the city officers were found to be ridiculously overpaid. He questions […]
Obama
The Late Chaim Potok and the 2012 Election
My apologies for my long silence. I was gone for five weeks, mainly on my wife’s business, but the last portion of the trip was a journey through the north of Greece looking mostly at painted churches. I should start […]
Is Hawai’i the Bellwether for California?
California used to consider itself the leading state and the bellwether for the entire country. Now that the entrepreneurial initiative has mostly switched to Texas and other such places, and Texas’s infrastructure has pulled ahead of California’s in its quality […]
A New Federal Department of Cities?
Oh good grief. Don’t we already have a Department of Housing and Urban Development, Mr. Florida? As C. Northcote Parkinson pointed out more than 50 years ago in Parkinson’s Law, only dictatorships have a cabinet larger than approximately 20. It […]
Allergy to Antithesis, Again
Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal, declares that Obama is trying to destroy the Republican party using a Marcusean strategy of ‘liberating intolerance’. But in the previous term, Obama was trying a policy of including the Republicans and everyone […]
Why ‘entitlement’ programs aren’t really entitlements
I fully agree with Jim Huffman of Lewis and Clark Law school that the ‘entitlements’ of Social Security and Medicare are not, in any moral sense, entitlements. That does not mean that I favor eliminating them. The problem with Social […]
Marc Andreessen: For Most of Us, It Will Get Worse
Jesus said, “The master replied,`I say to you that everyone who has will be given more, but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away”.” [Luke 19:26, Common English Version] Jesus was, given His other […]
President Obama’s Difficulty with Diversity
The San Francisco Chronicle, not a right wing publication, reports on Obama’s difficulty in getting along with people of diverse opinions. Too much antithesis for him, I guess. Related: “Obama’s 2012 slogan: Can’t work with others” by Debra Saunders at […]
Obama’s Dilemma, High Speed Rail, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and Other Miscellaneous Observations
Joel Kotkin, director of one of our favorite sites, Newgeography.com, has exposed how Obama has alienated people on all sides, even though he will probably win the election. I notice, now that I think about it, that while the Occupy […]
Democrats Are 1955 Republicans
Reinforcing my earlier comment on Barack Obama’s allergy to antithesis, here is Michael Lind claiming that Obama is, for practical purposes, an Eisenhower Republican. As for the so-called social issues, Allan Carlson, in The American Way, pointed out that the […]