The Heart of Blago
By Rich LowryWhen Franklin Roosevelt was pounding on the evils of business at the height of the New Deal, the great economist John Maynard Keynes tried to pull him back: "It is a mistake to think businessmen are more immoral than politicians."
At a time when the titans of American finance have become synonymous in the public mind with recklessness and greed, here comes Illinois governor Rod (F***ing) Blagojevich to confirm Keynes' long-ago wisdom. His contribution to the contemporary political lexicon is to have made the unnamed, numerated potential U.S. Senate appointees in the complaint against him sound as dirty as the unnamed johns in the Eliot Spitzer case -- is it worse to be Senate Candidate 5 or Client 9? Read more...
Short & Sweet History's Little Wake Up Calls
Excerpts From Hillsdale: (Imprimuis)
"...One imagines that there is plenty of greed on Wall Street. Greed is a moral vice, a failure of justice involving taking more than one's due. To eliminate greed would surely be a fine thing, as would the elimination of any vice. It would also be an astonishing achievement...."
"...I mention the art of constitutional government. I mean simply the art that provides good laws directed to encouraging free people to govern themselves. The national defense, secured so well as human contrivance can secure it, has a high place in this art. So too does the provision of a stable currency. So too does the protection of property and contracts. So too does the maintenance of a tax burden that does not stifle labor, savings, and investment...."
"...The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place." In other words, we must build our political institutions to operate around the problem of human vice, to mitigate that problem by discouraging vice, but also to place our interests in alignment with the public interest. "Liberty," writes Madison, "is to faction what air is to fire."..." Read more...
From Smart Girl Politics
"...Is it really that surprising that a crooked politician from a crooked political town was arrested today for corruption. It does not shock me that Governor Blagojevich was arrested. It shocks me that people were shocked by the news. .." Read more...
From Extreme Wisdom : "Obama “jumping the shark” on Global Warming"
"...The collapsing case for “man made global warming” ought to make Saint Obama think twice about using the word “denial.”..." Read more...
From Radarsite : Blagoyevich-Why was the case terminated?
"...First of all, rest assured that US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald did not act unilaterally in deciding to indict Blagoyevich when he did. Nor did he act unilaterally in his decision to authorize an application for a Title 3 (phone intercept) on the Governor. In sensitive cases involving prominent political figures, the US Attorney's Office must coordinate with Main Justice in Washington. This case, with all its obvious implications, would surely have fit into this category...." Read more...
From the BBC : Blair explains Catholicism move
"...Christian values
Mr Blair argued some people would have found it comforting to think the person leading them had some sense of "spiritual value".
He said: "It's sad in a way that people feel you can't talk about something that is important to who you are...." Read more...
And although I read it yesterday in e-mail format, lets not escape this one from Snooper's "Take Our Country Back" - The Liberal Pathology
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