When you think about it, throughout history the United States has struck some pretty good deals with foreign adversaries. In fact, some great ones. Seward’s Folly On March 30, 1867, “U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward sign(ed) a treaty with Russia for the purchase of Alaska for $7 million. Despite the bargain price of […]
‘They keep turning left and smashing into walls’. So goes an old joke about liberals from conservatives. However, let’s face the truth of the matter: ‘If the country of Greece was a NASCAR entry, it would have already been smashed to smithereens in the past 10 races and disqualified from ever running again under current […]
The Bureau of Labor Statistics came out this week with their latest jobs report. President Obama hailed the drop in the official unemployment rate and wants to celebrate it with fireworks. Conservatives looked at the same data and concluded it was a massive dud or worse, the entire fireworks assembly to be fired on the […]
Hate to say it, but we told you so. We grew up in the days of $300 billion annual budget deficits in the early 1980’s. That doesn’t sound like a lot in these days where $1 trillion deficits were yawned at by the Obama Administration for 4 years after the fiscal crisis was over. They […]
We were driving around town at the beginning of Memorial Day weekend and started to notice how few American flags we saw on the front porches of homes in the various neighborhoods. So we immediately went to Ace Hardware to buy a new bracket for our flag and went home to put it up about […]
We had the occasion recently to catch up with a recent college graduate friend of ours (we have trained hundreds now in The Institute for the Public Trust) who is now in the last year of his Ph.D program in statistical economics, whatever that is. He is a gifted advanced mathematics person with a great […]
Former Democrat US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York used to punctuate his speech with the following quote as he debated the finer points of welfare reform, entitlement reform and budget sanity: ‘You Are Entitled to Your Own Opinion. You Are Not Entitled to Your Own Set of Facts’ If the Democrat Party ever […]
Being in the chief of staff chair in both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate in Washington, you hear a lot of things. Some things you don’t want to repeat in polite company. Some things were so confidential you couldn’t believe the virtual stranger told you such things. The first thing you […]
Much ado has been made about the ‘attack on academic freedom’ with the recent closing of the Center on Poverty by the UNC Board of Governors (BOG). As far as we can tell, life goes on at every campus in the UNC System as it did before the announcement of the closing of the Poverty […]
How were Dean Smith and Wallace Wade most alike? ‘They saw themselves as ‘teachers’ first and foremost’. ‘What’s that you say? 2 of the most successful collegiate coaches in the history of college sports in America thought of themselves as ‘teachers’ first and ‘coaches’ second? Are you kidding me?’ It’s true. Of course, it helped […]
