Reflections
Tue, May 14, 2013
Government Drops Ball in Castro Case
Unless you're a regular at sadomaso parties,it's unlikely that you'll ever see a
poor soul being led around naked on a leash.
Unlikely, that is, unless you ...
Mon, May 06, 2013
Thatcher's Revolution
Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, energy scholar and economics researcher, wrote recently that the passing of Margaret Thatcher provides "a timely reason to ask: What was the ...
Wed, April 24, 2013
Thatcher's Revolution
Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize winning American author, energy scholar and economic researcher, wrote recently that the passing of Margaret Thatcher provides "a timely reason to ask: What was the ...
Tue, April 16, 2013
Baloney vs. Stark Reality
It was nearly three years ago, June 2010, that the Obama administration billed the coming season as "Recovery Summer."
To pump up the administration's hot-air ...
Sun, March 31, 2013
Washington Then, Washington Now
We've dropped a long way in 224 years, from Washington then to Washington now, from George Washington to Washington, D.C.
Born into a Virginia farming family, Commander in Chief of the ...
Sun, March 17, 2013
Squirrell Robots and Closed Control Towers
Right when America's school kids are looking forward to a Spring tour of the
White House, the Obama administration cancelled all public tours, blaming budget
cuts and Republican pig ...
Mon, March 11, 2013
A Mad Hatter Government
Just when you think it can't get any crazier, the Washington politicians go another step higher on the lunacy scale.
With the automatic spending cuts, known as the sequester, cutting only ...
Wed, March 06, 2013
Government Hostile to Job Creation
The vast majority of America's small business owners, the key job creators in the economy, say that Washington's policies are hostile to job creation and antagonistic toward free enterprise, and that ...
Tue, February 26, 2013
To Each According to His Needs
The government's goal is to "narrow the growing gap between the rich and the poor" by way of confiscating "more of the profits" of companies in order "to pay for ambitious welfare programs," the Wall ...
Tue, February 12, 2013
An Anti-Jobs, Anti-Growth Agenda
Even with average wages, adjusted for inflation, dropping for 21 of the last 23 months, higher rates of poverty, 23 million Americans unable to find regular work, ongoing $1 trillion deficits, ...
Tue, January 29, 2013
Red Ink and Welfare's Failure
A slideshow presented by Pennsylvania's Secretary of Public Welfare, Gary Alexander, "Welfare's Failure and the Solution," graphically illustrates the cost and unsustainability of the state's ...
Tue, January 15, 2013
Debt Crisis and Candy Cigarettes
It could be worse. And it will be.
But there's also good news, and I'll get there in a few minutes after a short update on the financial shenanigans of the D.C. ...
Mon, January 07, 2013
Cliff Deal: Growing Government
So we didn't go over the fiscal cliff and instead got a deal that delivers no cuts in government spending, raises taxes on "the rich" (the definition of which consistently changes), expands the size ...
Tue, January 01, 2013
Good Intentions and Bad Results
"If there is any lesson in the history of ideas, it is that good intentions tell you nothing about the actual consequences," stated Thomas Sowell, economist at the Hoover Institution, Stanford ...
Tue, December 18, 2012
Taxes, 'the Rich,' and 'Fairness'
"Why so much fighting about economics?," asked a friend recently. "Economics is just logic."
Well, not exactly. The basics are logical, as in reasonable or to be ...
Mon, December 10, 2012
Obama: Fudging the Numbers
A week after his re-election, President Obama held a news conference to push for a spending and tax agreement — and to talk about small business.
He began by saying "our top priority has ...
Mon, December 03, 2012
MSNBC's Tag Team of Redistributionists
It's not hard if you have a show on MSNBC.
There's a mantra and all you do is repeat it, like a fourth grade math teachergoing over the same fractions year after ...
Sat, November 24, 2012
Obama's Switcheroo Economics
Here's President Obama in August 2009 regarding the link between tax
increases,recessions, and business growth: "The last thing you want to do is raise taxes in the middle of a recession because ...
Thu, November 08, 2012
Demography as Destiny
Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle ...
Thu, November 01, 2012
'The Liar Won!'
"Well, the liar won!" That's what half the country will be saying the night of the election or the morning after, no matter who wins, given the current level of political polarization, anger and ...
Mon, October 29, 2012
Bad Lunches Cooked Up by Central Planners
The big news out of Sweden is that lunch lady Annika Eriksson has been shut down.
Eriksson was an exceptionally creative and hardworking head cook at a school in ...
Wed, October 24, 2012
Back When Democrats Knew Economics
Eleven months before he was assassinated as he rode with his wife in the back seat of an open convertible in a motorcade through downtown Dallas, President John F. Kennedy delivered a major address ...
Mon, October 15, 2012
Mud Pies from the Labor Department
The funny thing about the Labor Department's monthly unemployment report isthat the number-crunching bureaucrats act like they're delivering high caratdiamonds when the real worth of what ...
Mon, October 08, 2012
Central Planners' Projected Crackup
The way the federal government runs things is already bad enough, but it's officially projected to get only worse, much worse, in the years ahead according to the government's own number ...
Mon, October 01, 2012
Opposite Solutions from Obama and Romney
Romney and Obama don't disagree about everything when it comes to talking about the big things that are wrong.
Both say the economy is in sorry shape, and they're ...
Mon, September 17, 2012
A Recovery in Reverse
They say the economy is moving in the right direction, that we should stay the course, be patient, that it takes time to pull out of the recession that began in late 2007.
Tue, September 04, 2012
Obamacare's Central Planning
Central planning is tricky. Castro decided that individualism was an obstacle to economic development and nearly half of Cuba's 7,000 doctors fled to the United States.
Mon, August 27, 2012
Socializing Incomes by Demonizing Success
Therewas nothing new in President Obama's admonishment that "if you've got
abusiness, you didn't build that --somebody else made that happen."
Tenmonths ...
Mon, August 20, 2012
Obama's Outstanding Non Recovery
Where are the jobs? That's the first question we should be asking in what's now become the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression —or, more precisely, the longest non-recovery ...
Mon, August 13, 2012
'You Didn't Build That' Collectivism
I got an e-mail last week from a former student who graduated 18 years ago. He was reacting to President Obama's comment in Roanoke, Va., on July 13: "Look, if you've been successful, you didn't get ...
Fri, July 27, 2012
'You Didn't Build That' And Income Redistribution
President Obama's "you didn't build that" comment has become a top campaign issue.
The uproar began when Obama, speaking on July 13 in Roanoke, Virginia, emphasized ...
Thu, July 19, 2012
Obama's Anti-Jobs, Anti-Business Tax Agenda
"The last thing you want to do is to raise taxes in the middle of a recession, because that would just suck up, take more demand out of the economy and put businesses in a further hole."
Fri, July 13, 2012
Obama's Anti-Jobs, Anti-Tax Agenda
"The last thing you want to do is to raise taxes in the middle of a recession, because that would just suck up, take more demand out of the economy and put businesses in a further hole."
That ...
Tue, July 10, 2012
Is Fairness Equality?
There's a good reminder in April's issue of The American Spectator about the warning Kurt Vonnegut delivered in his 1961 short story "Harrison Bergeron."
The ...
Tue, July 03, 2012
Obama: Off Base About the Private Sector
There’s a political ad that’s hard to miss. It shows President Obama at a recent news conference saying “the private sector is doing fine.”
Wed, June 27, 2012
'The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind'?
SEA ISLE, N.J. --- During this polarized time, it wasn't a surprise that there was a dust-up on Ocean City's boardwalk about politics.
What kicked off the battle ...
Tue, June 19, 2012
A Summer Warning About Offshore Killers
SEA ISLE, N.J. – Sunday morning started off as a nice and uneventful day at the
shore, just a little windy. The big story on the front page of The Press of Atlantic City was about which ...
Tue, June 12, 2012
Independence, Pragmatism Normalcy
The new Franklin and Marshall College Poll released on June 6 contains a number of interesting nuggets about where things stand in the Keystone State today. Items from this survey receiving the most ...
Tue, June 12, 2012
Jobs and 'The Rich'
SEAISLE, N.J. ---How many pretzels does it take to build a castle in the sand?
Howmany cans of jalapeno dip does it take to build a $30 million mansion on theocean so huge that it makes the ...
Fri, May 25, 2012
Occupying for a Failed Ideology
"I think the disruption added to the excitement of the evening," said a fellow attendee at the recent Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty Award Dinner as we were leaving the International ...
Mon, May 21, 2012
Deadbeat Economics
Greece, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, and Italy (and California). In each case, the promise of more bailouts and a steady flow of cheap money only produced more reckless behavior, excessive levels of ...
Tue, May 08, 2012
Bunnies, Jobs and Better Security
It would be funny if we weren't paying for it.
Now they want us to buy chaperones for our live wire Secret Service guys.
Per year, we already spend $1.7 ...
Fri, April 27, 2012
Class Envy Via Bad Numbers
With economic "fairness" the central theme of his re-election campaign, President Obama recently pitched his "Buffett Rule" tax hike to a student audience at Florida Atlantic University in Boca ...
Tue, April 17, 2012
Divisive Politics, Bad Economics
Campaigning to make economic fairness the central theme of his reelection campaign, President Obama on April 10 pitched his Buffet Rule tax hike to a student audience at Florida Atlantic ...
Tue, April 10, 2012
Media Unreliability in Zimmerman-Martin Case
"A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar," said Mark Twain.
Last week, NBC News became truthful, at least partially, when it issued an ...
Thu, April 05, 2012
Hey! Mullahs! Leave Them Emos Alone!
No posse of morality cops ever smashed Bob Dylan's skull with concrete blocks when he changed America's music from "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore" to " Yes, I wish ...
Wed, March 28, 2012
A Slice of Life on the Wackier Side
Every week, I think it can't get any crazier -- and then it does.
The other night I saw two grown men on TV getting thrown out of Rick Santorum's
rally at the Christian Liberty Academy in ...
Mon, March 19, 2012
Phones, Jobs Folly
I wasn't surprised by the latest report from the Commerce Department that shows the U.S. trade deficit, the excess of imports over exports, had jumped in January to the biggest imbalance in more than ...
Mon, March 12, 2012
Pie-in-the-Sky Energy Planning
"Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels of Europe," said Dr. Steven Chu, Director of the Lawrence National Laboratory, in an interview with The Wall Street ...
Tue, March 06, 2012
Anti-Business PA is the 'worst'
Here's a headline that's sure not to boost investment and job creation in
Pennsylvania: "Wyoming First, Pennsylvania Worst In Business Taxes."
Unfortunately, it's a headline that's easy to ...
Mon, February 27, 2012
Hikes in Gas Prices Eclipse Payroll Tax Cut
The Washington politicians were in full self-congratulatory form recently when the Republicans and Democrats in Congress finally displayed a moment of bipartisanship and passed the payroll tax cut ...
Mon, February 20, 2012
An Anti-Jobs, Anti-Growth Budget
The Washington crowd can't be bothered with budgets anymore -- at least not in the dictionary sense of the word, as in (a) something cheap, i.e., a budget coat, or (a) attempting to balance expenses ...
Mon, February 13, 2012
Obama on Capital Gains: No Winners
"If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes," asserted President Obama in his State of the Union speech.
For those ...
Tue, February 07, 2012
Cage Fighting on the Campaign Trail
You wonder why anyone would want to run for President of the United States.
Why, especially, would someone who has it made in the shade like Mitt Romney, with a ...
Mon, January 30, 2012
Money, Money and Trump
PALM BEACH, Fla. --- The guy might have a bad comb-over and goofy TV show, but
Donald Trump is no slouch when it comes to hitting the jackpot.
A case in point is Mar-a-Lago, the biggest and ...
Tue, January 10, 2012
Obama is Wrong on Economics
Kicking his re-election message into high gear, President Obama declared last month that a "You're on your own" economic system "doesn't work."
Mon, January 02, 2012
Obama's Tax Tune: A one-Hit Wonder?
The Macarena was ranked "The #1 Greatest One-Hit Wonder of All Time" by VH1. The
Spanish dance song by Los del Rio became a big international hit in 1995 and 1996.
Tue, December 27, 2011
Obama's Off-Base Blame Game
President Obama started off his speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, on December 6 with a positive nod to free market economics.
Referring to Theodore Roosevelt's economic ...
Tue, December 20, 2011
Cuba's Baby Steps Toward Liberty
Millions of economic transactions take place every hour in the United States, too many for any central committee inWashington to handle or even Understand, even if they all graduated with honors from ...
Mon, December 12, 2011
Counterproductive Policies, FDR to Obama
Pushing his agenda for higher taxes on "the rich," President Obama kicked off his December 6 speech in Kansas by saying his Kansas grandparents "shared the optimism of a nation that ...
Mon, December 05, 2011
Crony Communism
It's not like the old days in China when the top guys in the Communist Party at least pretended to be pro-equality.
Back then, "poor peasants" were ...
Mon, November 28, 2011
Not So Super 'Super Committee'
Even if Congress' supercommittee had agreed on how to cut the national debt by $1.2 trillion over the next decade, it would still have been a total failure, an
inconsequential bit of political ...
Mon, November 21, 2011
The Banality of Detachment
Why did it take 17 years?
Here's the timeline in the Jerry Sandusky case:
1994: A boy "about the age of 10," identified ...
Mon, November 14, 2011
Collectivized Train Wreck
"Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder," said British historian Arnold
Toynbee.
We're seeing exactly that today in Greece, Italy, Portugal ...
Mon, November 07, 2011
Blaming the Jews
"I think that the Zionist Jews who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve, which is not run by the federal government — they need to be run out of this country," declared Patricia ...
Mon, October 31, 2011
The Public's Distrust
The good news is that Americans' distrust of government is at its highest level ever.
It's good news because it shows the public recognizes how poorly we're being ...
Fri, October 28, 2011
'Occupy Pittsburgh' Encounters
Rapper Kanye West and hip-hop kingpin Russell Simmons added some celebrity glitz to the Occupy Wall Street protest in New York when they stopped by.
With an estimated net worth of $340 million, ...
Tue, October 18, 2011
Visible Projects, Hidden Destruction
Today's crop of central planners and big spending politicians could learn a thing or two about economics from Henry Hazlitt's classic bestseller, Economics in One Lesson, published in 1946. Common ...
Wed, October 12, 2011
First Cigarettes, Now Bacon Eggs
You knew it was coming.
First they came for the cigarettes, then Hank Williams Jr. got knocked off Monday Night Football for being politically incorrect, and now ...
Mon, September 26, 2011
Wrong Medicine for a Sick Economy
"Middle-class families shouldn't pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires," repeatedly proclaims President Obama, arguing for his proposed $1.5 trillion tax increase over the ...
Mon, September 19, 2011
An Anti-Jobs Jobs Bill
"Pass this bill now," demanded President Barack Obama, referring to his American Jobs Act.
There's nothing new in it, just more government spending -- ...
Mon, September 12, 2011
Economic Incompetence at the Top
On August 31, with job creation grinding to a complete halt, U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis was asked this question: "Why do you think there have been so many jobs created in the last decade ...
Wed, September 07, 2011
Zero Job Growth Common Sense Economics
Politicians seem to have little trouble understanding how the basic Law of Demand works when it comes to things they want to discourage, like cigarettes -- or when it comes to things they want to ...
Tue, August 30, 2011
It's the Stupid Spending!
President Obama's constant refrain about the government's unprecedented levels of red ink points to "millionaires and billionaires" as the problem, not the massive amounts of waste, fraud ...
Mon, August 22, 2011
What Obama Needs to Say: I Was Wrong
Only 26 percent of the public approves of President Obama's handling of the economy in the latest Gallup poll, conducted Aug. 11-14, while a whopping 71 percent said they disapproved.
Tue, August 16, 2011
Reiland Returned to Sender
I don't want to sound like Lansberry, the legendary Pittsburgher who walked around town for decades with a protest sign saying that the government was withholding his mail, but I'm missing about 300 ...
Mon, August 08, 2011
Killing Jobs Via ObamaCare
Now that the politicians have delivered an anti-debt deal that adds an estimated $8 trillion to the current $14.5 trillion federal debt over the next 10 years, President Obama is getting ready to ...
Wed, August 03, 2011
An Amy Winehouse Government
It feels like we're dealing with an Amy Winehouse form of governing.
"These overdoses happen because these guys drink 20 beers and then reach for their ...
Wed, July 27, 2011
Consequences of a Bankrupt Philosophy
In her essay "For the New Intellectual," Ayn Rand warned that the United States
would go bankrupt -- financially and morally -- if we allowed intellectuals and
political leaders ...
Thu, July 21, 2011
Blueberry Economics
SEA ISLE, N.J. – I should be worrying about how the politicians are killing the nation financially, but that's on the back burner today because the 25th annual Red, White and Blueberry Festival ...
Tue, July 12, 2011
New Jersey as Auschwitz?
SEA ISLE, N.J. --- Public-sector employees here now are regularly referring to Gov. Chris Christie as "Adolf Christie."
Things got especially ugly when ...
Wed, July 06, 2011
Reparations via Crazy Horse Slots
Sea Isle, N.J. --- James Fenimore Cooper's historical novel "The Last of
the Mohicans" concludes with Tamenund (1628-98), the tribal leader of an
Indian clan in the Delaware Valley, ...
Tue, June 28, 2011
Miracle-Gro Economics
Under the pretext of 'equalizing burdens' and preventing 'salary
discrimination,' Obamacare mandates that insurance premiums must be based on the policyholder's income level -- forget the ...
Mon, June 20, 2011
Economic Advice for Obama
For Mr. Obama to avoid being a one-term president, he should start operating more like Ronald Reagan and forget about seeking economic advice in the editorial pages of The New York Times.
Mon, June 13, 2011
Undercounting the Jobless
The U.S. job growth in May — or, more accurately, the lack of job growth — indicates that the economic "recovery" is coming undone.
With 13.9 ...
Tue, June 07, 2011
Fame and Infamy in Chicago
We're stuck here in Chicago as I'm writing this, stranded for a few extra days because the CNN weather map yesterday projected some scary red tornado splotches scattered along the Capitol Limited ...
Tue, May 31, 2011
Murder, Tulips Taxes
Last Tuesday, we took the midnight train to Chicago.
It's an easy ride, with a bedroom both ways -- except I get the top bunk, which feels like I'm stuffed in a ...
Mon, May 23, 2011
Obamacare: Survival of the Well Connected?
Remember when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi got all wound up in March 2010 about the passage of Obamacare and told the assembled conventioneers at the National
Association of Counties that the ...
Mon, May 16, 2011
Swimming in Taxpayers' Cash
I always thought lifeguard jobs were for cool guys in their twenties. Develop your abs, get tan, pick up chicks in the bars at night and hope for rain the next morning.
Mon, May 09, 2011
Government vs. Production
Impose the world's highest corporate income tax rate, and we can expect the result will be too few corporations and too much government.
"The United States may ...
Sun, May 01, 2011
Democrats' Red Ink and Upward Redistribution
After doing nothing during his first two years in office to deal with the debt
tsunami that's clearly visible on the horizon and heading our way, President Obama delivered a 2012 budget plan ...
Mon, April 25, 2011
Two Fries Shy of a Happy Meal
Who would you guess is more likely to sue you, all other things being equal: Monet Parham-Lee or Margie Moore?
Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it gets more shaky and ...
Mon, April 18, 2011
Obama's Taxing Deficit
"The rich can pay for it all. That is Obama's tax policy."
That was the morning-after analysis last Thursday by Clive Crook of the "deficit-reduction" speech that President Obama ...
Tue, April 12, 2011
Date Night for Capitalism
Individualists and money grubbers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your servility and confiscatory tax rates.
After all these increasingly ...
Mon, April 04, 2011
Bankrupt Buses, Pricey Beer and Bad Wars
It's not hard to see how we're bankrupting ourselves. Not even a rich country can make it through this level of incompetency and corruption.
Locally, I drive home from work here in ...
Mon, March 28, 2011
Wrecking the Nation: Oil Dependency
Here's how the economic and political system of a nation is destroyed.
Every price increase of just a dime per gallon of gasoline at the pump extracts approximately $5 billion from the ...
Mon, March 21, 2011
Dark Weddings and Purposeful Mice
PALM BEACH, Fla. "Red Navels and Hot Nuts" read a big handwritten sign by a roadside stand out in the middle of nowhere on a lonely stretch of a two-lane road in central Florida. ...
Tue, March 15, 2011
Noisy Nights in Paradise
PALM BEACH, Fla. Each night, dozens of little green parrots come home to the pine trees right outside our bedroom window to spend the night by the ocean.
We're at the legendary Breakers ...
Tue, March 08, 2011
Narrow Minds, Ugly Signs
A guy I never saw before walked up to me a few years ago on the sidewalk in Pittsburgh out front of Heinz Hall and said, right out of the blue, "God hates fags."
Across the ...
Tue, March 01, 2011
Too Crazy, Too Sexy
"Everything is funny, as long as it's happening to somebody else," quipped Will Rogers.
It's been that way lately.
With a crazed look on his ...
Mon, February 21, 2011
Unsustainable: Do the Math
"So be it."
Those three words, uttered by House Speaker John Boehner last week about the prospect of federal work force layoffs, generated a firestorm of ...
Mon, February 14, 2011
Obama's Two Bit Nod to Capitalism
Attempting to patch things up a bit with the business sector, President Obama began his February 7th speech at the U. S. Chamber of Commerce sounding more like Milton Friedman than Saul Alinsky. ...
Wed, February 09, 2011
Dreambusters: The Fuel that Ignites Riots
On Egypt, Glenn Beck, a guy who normally gets it right when it comes to recognizing the anti-business activities of government, got it all wrong this time in connecting the dots.
It was a ...
Mon, January 31, 2011
Congress, Barristers, Pits and Sugar
Appearing to embrace the new civility and bipartisanship that's the currently appropriate stance for politicians following the Tucson shooting, President Obama in his State of the Union address ...
Mon, January 24, 2011
When the Sane Are Crazy Too
"On any given day in the U.S., the number of people with severe mental illness in prisons is estimated to be three times higher than the number in hospitals, according to a new report from the ...
Mon, January 17, 2011
Red Flags and Jared Loughner
"Bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath," said President Obama in his recent remarks at the memorial service in Tucson.
Tue, January 11, 2011
Obama Care's Horror Show
The "death panels" in ObamaCare remind me Jason in those "Friday the 13th" slasher movies.
In the first scene, the end-of-life panels pop up out of nowhere, like ...
Mon, January 03, 2011
Another Genius Idea from Central Planning
Just when it looked like employers were getting less fearful about what President Obama might do next to worsen the business climate, the National Labor Relations Board (now with its first Democratic ...
Mon, January 03, 2011
The Keystone State: Wither We Go in 2011
In 2010, Pennsylvania elected a new governor, unelected an old senator, and moved decisively toward installing the GOP as the dominant political party. Now, as the new year gets underway, it's a good ...
Thu, December 23, 2010
Chinese Christmas Light and Murder Lists
Funny things happen at Christmas. And things not so funny.
One of the best stories at our house is about the year we unloaded a ceiling-high Christmas tree from ...
Mon, December 20, 2010
Expensive Ineptitude
"Washington, D.C.'s workers enjoy the highest salaries of any U.S. city, with a median household income of $85,198," recently reported CNNMoney.
It's ...
Tue, December 14, 2010
A Special Place
It wasn't the flavor of her lasagna or the shabby section of town where her restaurant was located that made Elaine Kaufman into a legendary celebrity.
What Elaine Edna Kaufman from the Bronx ...
Mon, December 06, 2010
Continuing Madness of Centralized Economics
The holiday message from the D.C. politicians to millions of unemployed workers is that they'll be kicked off the rolls for jobless benefits by Christmas. As they say, have yourself a merry little ...
Tue, November 30, 2010
Getting the Right Grope
I got an e-mail the other day from a transgendered group about their special problems with the new naked pictures and federal groping at the airports.
"You have the right to have manual search ...
Mon, November 15, 2010
Obama: Overinflated, Bound to Burst
Inflated self-esteem can be decidedly counterproductive.
American students, for example, took first place in self-judged mathematical ability in a comparative study ...
Mon, November 01, 2010
Today: A Time for Patriotism
Here's a thought regarding today's voting, from Samuel Adams (1722-1803), a leader in the movements that became the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution, a signer of the Declaration of ...
Mon, October 25, 2010
Centralized Hot Air vs. Economic Reality
Here's a short multiple-choice quiz.
Who said the following? "Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want ...
Mon, October 18, 2010
Obama: Too Foreign, Too Anti-Business
What's very weird, even a bit "foreign," not unlike how self-declared communist leader Hugo Chavez in Venezuela regularly demonizes the business sector, is how President Obama seems to have ...
Mon, October 11, 2010
Torments Ending In Tragedy
"Forty-four percent of boys say they've seen sexual images of girls in their school, and about 15 percent of them are disseminating those images when they break up with the girls," explained Internet ...
Mon, October 04, 2010
Obama on Jobs: Flying Blind
The rhetoric at the White House radically changed on September 27. The event was the signing by President Obama of the Small Business Jobs Act.
Until the afternoon ...
Thu, September 30, 2010
The Backfiring of Obama's Economics of 'Fairness'
We raise taxes on things we want to discourage, like cigarettes, and we lower taxes on things we want to encourage, like education.
The idea is to manipulate ...
Mon, September 20, 2010
Castro, Obama Irrationality of Statism
At least for a few moments last week, we had the strange spectacle of President Obama sounding more like a collectivist than Fidel Castro.
With the federal payroll ...
Mon, September 13, 2010
Obama's Rich-Bashing and Economic Ignorance
With 15 million workers unemployed and another 11 million underemployed, President Obama recently decided that the answer was to hit the road and throw some anti-rich red meat to some friendly ...
Mon, September 06, 2010
Back-to-School Advice
My first recommendation is very basic. Don't cut. As Woody Allen stated, "Eighty percent of success is just showing up."
And it's best to show up on time. Remember ...
Tue, August 31, 2010
Clingin' in Pittsburgh
Clingin' in Pittsburgh
By Ralph R. Reiland
It took only a few seconds the other day to see how candidate Obama got the idea that we have a propensity in ...
Mon, August 16, 2010
Monkeying Around
Remember those stories about Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burned?
Actually, if he was really playing, it was probably a lyre, a small harp-like
stringed instrument. Fiddles weren't ...
Wed, August 11, 2010
Take Our Issue Back!
For more than 12 years I have been a Conservative acvtivist in Washington County working on everything from the Bush, McCain, Toomey, Russell and Luksic campaigns to, too many others to keep track ...
Tue, August 10, 2010
Robbin' the Rich
Democrats in Congress, frightened by what voters are likely to do in November, have been given their marching orders by the Obama administration.
We're to be told ...
Tue, August 03, 2010
Slippin' and a-slidin'
I don't write a self-help column, or about household hints, but here's a warning about how I flew out the bathtub a few days ago.
It started with eczema, some dry ...
Tue, July 27, 2010
Big Benefits, Hot Air, Scarce Jobs
Pushing for more billions in deficit spending to extend jobless benefits to a record 99 weeks, or nearly two years, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently declared that more red ink and more dependency ...
Mon, July 19, 2010
I Won't Die for a $9 Pie
"As I tell my kids, dessert is not a right," declared Michelle Obama recently, promoting her anti-obesity agenda while addressing the annual NAACP convention.
I'd say the same thing ...
Tue, July 13, 2010
Obamanomics Out of Synch with Reality
With job creation in the private sector basically dead and a growing number of jobless workers ceasing to even look for work any longer, the number of people officially counted as part of the U.S. ...
Wed, July 07, 2010
Fish Tales and Casino Woes
SEA ISLE, N.J. --- The big news here on the beach is about sharks, whales, stripers (stripers, the fish, not strippers), and Atlantic City's casino revenues being down for the 21st month in a row, ...
Tue, June 29, 2010
Obamanomics Hillarynomics: Dumb and Dumber
With job creation in the U.S. basically at a standstill aside from some government hiring of temporary Census workers, even after a trillion-plus in stimulus spending, Hillary Clinton's answer for ...
Mon, June 21, 2010
A Short Running Magic Show
How quickly the magic and arrogance has turned into mismanagement and excuses.
Cinching his party's nomination on the night of June 3, 2008, a pumped up Barack Obama concluded his triumphal St. ...
Mon, June 14, 2010
Beach News
Sea Isle, N.J. --- I don't want to sound like Burt Lancaster in the Louis Malle 1980 film "Atlantic City," but the news here today is that Busch's, the granddaddy of the big seafood restaurants on ...
Mon, June 07, 2010
Obama's 'Single Dime' Hot Air
SEA ISLE, N.J.
We're sitting here on our beach chairs looking for tar balls. So far, everything's pristine. The gulls are still white, not yet looking like crows.
Tue, June 01, 2010
God, Like John Lennon, is Against Borders?
Cardinal Roger Mahony had a simple and supportive message for the tens of thousands of demonstrators in Los Angeles who were protesting against Arizona's attempt to crackdown on illegal immigrants: ...
Tue, May 25, 2010
Mi Casa es en Pakistan
Answering a student's question at a recent town hall meeting at Indian Hills
Community College in Iowa, here's how President Obama characterized the Arizona law that's designed to crack down on ...
Mon, May 17, 2010
Politically Correct Stupidity
The award this week for the craziest utterance goes to New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
Quoted below is his exchange with CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric ...
Mon, May 10, 2010
Obama: Stuck on Begrudge
Off the teleprompter for a few seconds while stumping for financial reform recently in Illinois, President Obama had this to say about money, incomes and success: "Now, what we're doing, I want to ...
Mon, May 03, 2010
Government Hurts Small Business
As the owner of a small restaurant, it felt good the other morning to open the newspaper and read this sentence: "Be proud, small-business owners! You're now the most trusted group in America. ...
Mon, April 26, 2010
Scary TEA Parties?
The Pulitzers for top-notch journalism aren't what they used to be.
Here's the way Pulitzer winner Eugene Robinson, an associate editor and columnist for the ...
Tue, April 20, 2010
Plucking the Fortunate Chickens
Here's the news from The New York Times on the day before tax day: "Forty-seven percent. That's the portion of American households that owe no income tax for 2009. The number is up from 38 ...
Mon, April 12, 2010
Dr. Galt
He's the Florida doctor who told his patients to go elsewhere for treatment if they voted for Obama. The message posted on his office door: "If you voted for Obama, seek urological care ...
Fri, April 02, 2010
Obamacare vs Jobs
Now that ObamaCare has been enacted, we definitely won't be knocking any new
archways through the wall at our restaurant and expanding into the empty storefront next door.
With a ...
Mon, March 22, 2010
Obama's Health Care Deceptions
What became quickly obvious while watching President Obama's recent interview about health care reform with Bret Baier on FOX is that we're still not getting straight answers about the proposed ...
Mon, March 15, 2010
Obama: Perfect Formula for Self-Destruction
It's not difficult to understand the fall of Obama --- the largest presidential drop in Gallup's approval ratings in half a century. Just start with Obama's overly-cocky notion that he's exceptional ...
Mon, March 08, 2010
Losing Faith in the Feds
"The majority of Americans say the government poses an immediate threat to individual rights and freedoms," stated CNN, summarizing the results of a recent CNN/Opinion Research Corporation ...
Mon, March 01, 2010
American Collectivism: A Record of Failure
The hype is always better than the real thing.
Boston's Big Dig sounded like a half-decent project in the beginning. Approved in 1982 with a price tag $2.6 billion, ...
Tue, February 23, 2010
Krugman Cracks Up Over Obama's 'Lemon Socialism'
Paul Krugman, a top columnist and liberal opinion-maker at The New York Times, sounded last week like he was tied to the tracks and saw a train coming around the bend.
Mon, February 15, 2010
Obama's Anti-Business Prejudice
Whatever happened to the Constitutional concept of equal protection under the law?
Whatever happened to the recognition that it's overwhelmingly the nation's ...
Mon, January 25, 2010
Racist Codes and Naked Threats
I didn't know that trucks were racist.
Here's the exchange between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Newsweek's Howard Fineman on election night as they watched the ...
Tue, January 19, 2010
On the Rails
I'm writing this somewhere in a swamp in Georgia, chugging northward on the Auto Train, the world's longest passenger train.
At full capacity, the train carries 650 ...
Wed, January 13, 2010
From Florida: Cold Oranges, Hot Commies
PALM BEACH, FLORIDA --- The column headline here in this morning's newspaper: "So where's my global warming, dude?"
"Dude" could be Al Gore, the doomster Dracula ...
Mon, January 04, 2010
Crotch Bombers, Caulking and Now Health Care?
So Umar Farouk Abdullmutallab got within an inch of having several hundred airline passengers fall from the sky over Detroit on Christmas day, thanks to the ongoing holes in government-run ...
Mon, December 28, 2009
The Fully Inept Tackle Health Care
As I'm writing this, they're in a panic in Congress, voting in the wee hours, bribing reluctant senators with millions in slush funds for their respective states, all to ram through a health reform ...
Mon, December 21, 2009
Greenies Gone Nuts for the Holidays
This is a tough time of year for eco-friendly global planners.
In Copenhagen they tried to put together a deal to save the world's forests while we rode around with millions of Christmas ...
Wed, December 16, 2009
Alarmists, Running Hot and Cold
Our dreadful destiny was that we were either going to starve to death or be buried by advancing glaciers in a new Ice Age.
The alleged villain was global cooling, ...
Mon, November 30, 2009
Official Hot Air
There's a new picture of Obama that's sticking in my mind, like a song that keeps playing in your head (the one that keeps playing for me this week is "Empire State of Mind," especially ...
Mon, November 23, 2009
Imperial Hypocrisy
You can't say we weren't warned ahead of time about Obama's globalist and controlling tendencies.
As candidate Obama explained in a campaign speech in Portland on ...
Tue, November 17, 2009
Scary Porches, Scarier Doctors
In news from the world of universal health care, Mark Wattson, 35, collapsed in pain in the street in Swindon, England, a month after he had his appendix removed.
Mon, November 09, 2009
Obamanomics: A 'Stimulus' for Backlash, Not Jobs
What the Democrats should have learned from their losses last Tuesday is that the advice given by political strategist James Carville to candidate Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential campaign is ...
Mon, November 02, 2009
Gang Green Going to the Dogs
The sky-is-falling greenies are getting progressively batty.
It's not enough that we shut down our oil, gas and coal industries, bike to work, switch our light bulbs, take cloth bags to the ...
Mon, October 26, 2009
From Central Planning: We Are Going to Let You Die
I saw two stories last week that had diametrically opposed messages.
The first was pro-life in the broadest sense of the word, a breakthrough against cancer via a new tumor-targeted genetic ...
Mon, October 19, 2009
Clunker Cars, Clunker Nukes?
I don't want to sound negative, but is anyone else getting the idea that we're starting to live in Clunker Nation?
Start with the actual clunker deal where we ...
Mon, October 12, 2009
Obama's Job Killing Agenda
You ain't seen nothin' yet" was Ronald Reagan's standard rally-ending line during his 1984 reelection campaign. He won 49 states, losing only his opponent's home state, Minnesota, 49.7 percent to ...
Mon, October 05, 2009
Atlas is Shrugging
The headline in Investor's Business Daily, September 16, 2009: "45% of Doctors Would Consider Quitting If Congress Passes Health Care Overhaul."
The headline in The ...
Mon, September 28, 2009
Obama Care's 'Shovel Ready Cure'
I thought we were supposed to think that Sarah Palin was nuts for bringing up "death panels."
Now a few weeks later the cover of Newsweek has a giant plug ...
Mon, September 21, 2009
All the News That's Fit to Bury
On the morning after, there wasn't much surprise in the lobby of our D.C. hotel about the coverage in the New York Times about the previous day's Taxpayer March on Washington, a massive rally that ...
Tue, September 15, 2009
Van Jones' Green Ruse
You can't grasp the full craziness of Van Jones, Obama's now-resigned "green jobs czar" (actual job title: "Special Advisor on Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation for the White House Council on ...
Tue, September 08, 2009
Surgeons Cut Into Obamacare
President Obama's flip comments about surgeons maximizing their incomes through
unnecessary foot amputations and needless tonsillectomies have produced a biting response from the American ...
Mon, August 31, 2009
Obama's Strategy of Demonizing to Gain Control
I guess we're supposed to look at hospitals now and see nothing but gigantic butcher shops, filled with greedy doctors who are unnecessarily sawing off our feet and taking out our kids' tonsils in ...
Mon, August 24, 2009
The Deflating of Obama's Hot Air Balloon
What we're seeing with Obama's plummeting poll numbers is a quick case of buyer's remorse.
More broadly, Gallup reports that conservatives now outnumber liberals in ...
Tue, August 18, 2009
Things Getting 'Sospechoso" at White House
Like good and obedient informants for the government, we're supposed to contact Obama's snitch line to report anything "fishy" that's being said about the administration's flawed plan for ...
Tue, August 11, 2009
Redistribution via Obamacare
You'd think the central planners at the White House would go outside their small group of relatives for some top-notch expertise when they're trying to revamp something as big and complex as ...
Tue, August 04, 2009
Defund the Pork, Pay for Health Care
Here's how to get the money for health care reform, and it can be done without Congress passing another trillion in spending, without putting more job-killing mandates and taxes on business, without ...
Mon, July 27, 2009
Barack, Meet Friedrich
"This isn't about me," President Barack Obama asserted recently, maintaining that his manic push for a vote on health care reform is all about us.
In fact, the big ...
Mon, July 20, 2009
A Nation of One-Eyes Sycophants?
President Obama got it right for a minute during his recent stop in Africa. "No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top," he told the ...
Mon, July 13, 2009
Barack Obama: Rush to Failure
"No more talk," said President Barack Obama in his weekly address on July 4th. "No more talk. No more delay."
He was referring to health care reform and telling us ...
Mon, July 06, 2009
A Reluctant Champ and Struggling Terrapins
SEA ISLE, N.J. --- I felt like JonBenet's mother (during the good years) last week at the dog show up on the boardwalk. Simba, our golden retriever, repeated his prize-winning performance from the ...
Wed, July 01, 2009
Beach Neurons and DC Craziness
SEA ISLE, N.J. --- After the age of 20, they say we lose about 50,000 brain cells a day. That means you'll probably lose a couple hundred just during the few minutes it takes to read this ...
Tue, June 23, 2009
Goldens Bearing Gifts
SEA ISLE, N.J. --- The big news here is that Simba, our 1 1/2-year-old golden retriever, just won "Best of Show" in this year's dog show on the boardwalk.
"Paws ...
Mon, June 15, 2009
Class Warfare at the Beach
Sea Isle, N.J. --- I met Elaine Scattergood for breakfast last week in a little coffee shop on Dune Drive in Avalon, just a few blocks from where Utz potato chip magnate Michael Rice is putting the ...
Mon, June 08, 2009
From the Dock of the Bay
SEA ISLE, N. J. --- An article I read somewhere said that Eskimos have 100 words for snow and that Sherlock Holmes could distinguish 140 types of tobacco by their ashes.
Mon, June 01, 2009
Sunset Thoughts at the Beach
SEA ISLE, N.J. --- They had a contest here last week in The Press of Atlantic City that asked readers in 25 words or less to submit answers to this question: "Where do you want to spend the ...
Tue, May 26, 2009
Unintelligent Government 'Intelligence'
The New York Times recently reviewed "Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan," a book by Doug Stanton about how small units of ...
Tue, May 19, 2009
Socialism: Faith Trumps Reality
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman got it right about a lot of things, but he was overly optimistic when he wrote in 1990 that socialism was dead.
Tue, May 12, 2009
Students' Confusion About Capitalism
"Only 53 percent of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism," according to an April survey by Rasmussen.
Age made a large difference in how Americans ...
Mon, May 04, 2009
Fixing GM Via Collectivism?
I don't want to sound like an old geezer, but I remember the days when General Motors had no trouble creating plenty of excitement and glamour each fall with its annual model changes.
Tue, April 28, 2009
Crazy Word Games, from Team Obama
It looks like the "intelligence" in the Obama administration isn't too intellectual.
Instead of using the word "terrorism" to describe things ...
Mon, April 20, 2009
Obama's Message: He's Better Than America
Barack Obama likes to pat himself on the back regarding his ability to see both sides of an issue. It's through this willingness to listen to both sides, he says, that he comes up with the smartest ...
Mon, April 13, 2009
Creating Monsters
Creating Monsters
By Ralph R. Reiland
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster, wrote Friedrich ...
Mon, April 06, 2009
Nuts to the Brown-Eyed Visionaries
I'm boycotting Brazil nuts.
The top nut in Brazil, Brazil's president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silvamade (big enough to be known simply as Lula, like Beyonce or Madonna) told British Prime ...
Mon, March 30, 2009
Hope, or Hopelessly Naive?
It didn't take long for Iran to brush aside President Obama's holiday video.
In his video message to Iran, complete with Farsi subtitles and timed to coincide with the celebration of the ...
Mon, March 16, 2009
Obama's Irrational Economics
Newsweek's Howard Fineman wrote in his "A Turning Tide?" column last week that "the establishment is beginning to mumble that the president may not have what it takes."
Mon, March 09, 2009
Obamanomics: Ideology over Common Sense?
"So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can," Barack Obama said during a January 2008 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. "It's just that it will bankrupt ...
Mon, March 02, 2009
Of Mice and Pork
Lucky for a certain mouse, he resides in Nancy Pelosi's district and has a good shot at getting some of the recently passed $787 billion stimulus bill.
The rodent on the way to hitting the ...
Mon, February 23, 2009
Socialism's 'Fatal Conceit]
The appeal of socialism, wrote Nobel-winning economist F. A. Hayek, "depends on the instinctual appeal of promised consequences The problem, argued Hayek, is that socialism cannot possibly do ...
Mon, February 16, 2009
Obama's Economics: Exactly the Wrong Prescription
Repeatedly talking down the American economy, Barack Obama, pushing the so-called "stimulus" package, incessantly claimed that we're "going through the worst economic crisis since the ...
Tue, February 10, 2009
King of Hope Falls Flat at Starting Gate
"Well, That Certainly Didn't Take Long" was the headline one of Maureen Dowd's recent columns in The New York Times.
Dowd, unswervingly a Bush-basher and ...
Tue, February 03, 2009
Groups vs. Individualism
The biodegradable celebratory balloons at the parties marking the election of the nation's first black (or half-black) president weren't even half-deflated before Robert Reich, economic adviser to ...
Mon, January 26, 2009
Cuba at 50: Scarce Freedom, Scarce Fish
I was in Hollywood, Florida, on January 8, the 50th anniversary of Fidel Castro's triumphant arrival in Havana after shooting his way to power and ousting the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio ...
Tue, January 20, 2009
Trouble in Paradise
Given what's being called the biggest case of financial fraud ever committed by one person in American history, I figured that things would be different this year during our annual Winter Break trek ...
Wed, January 14, 2009
UAW Unionized Insecurity
General Motors lost $10.6 billion in 2006. The company lost another $38.7 billion in 2007, the largest annual loss in automotive history. Through the third quarter of 2008, GM lost another $21.2 ...
Thu, January 08, 2009
The Times' Gas Pains
Unhappy that we're no longer paying $80 for a fill-up, The New York Times wants to get the price back up to $4 or $5 a gallon by way of a hefty hike in federal taxes.
Tue, December 30, 2008
Obama's 'Rubin Constellation'
Where's the "Change we can believe in"?
On both Wall Street and in Congress, the same old crooks and party hacks who succeeded in producing the greatest ...
Mon, December 22, 2008
A U.N. Approved Christmas Dinner
The year-end news isn't pretty. The dictatorship-dominated United Nations has its eye on our Christmas hams as a key source of allegedly man-made global warming and planetary suicide.
Wed, December 17, 2008
Progressive Dissatisfaction
Expressing disillusionment with Obama's top appointments in a December 7 article in The Washington Post entitled "This Wasn't Quite the Change We Pictured," David Corn, Washington bureau ...
Mon, December 01, 2008
Big Three Out of Gas
Things didn't go so well on November 20 when the CEOs of the Big Three automakers came to Congress, tin cups in hand, to make a pitch for another $25 billion.
The ...
Tue, November 25, 2008
Felons on the Loose
I intended to write today about why workers making $18 an hour (the median wage of the nation's 107 million full-time wage and salary workers in the third quarter of 2008, according the latest report ...
Mon, November 17, 2008
A Vote for Change?
Now that the facts are in, it's clear that the pro-Obama mainstream media continued to get it wrong right through election night.
Watching Wolf Blitzer add up the numbers on election night, ...
Thu, November 13, 2008
Alternative Schooling Emerges
Major institutions, such as the public schools, do not change without external ideas and pressure, and anyone who tries to implement substantive change can expect to be attacked.
Jackie ...
Mon, November 10, 2008
The Failure of Big Government Conservatism
How did the Republicans fall so fast, so completely?
In an article published on the morning of election day, "Will GOP Learn from This?," Michael D. ...
Mon, November 03, 2008
Obama vs. Jobs
I interviewed two plumbing company owners in Pittsburgh over the weekend about Barack Obama's economic proposals for small business. One has 15 employees and 12 trucks. The other has 52 employees and ...
Tue, October 14, 2008
Obama vs. Business and Jobs
Even The New York Times now says that Barack Obama's unswerving call for tax increases -- to impose more "fairness" -- is the wrong prescription during the current instability in the U.S. ...
Mon, October 06, 2008
Nice Words, Killer Friends
In March, Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia on race was inspiring and knowledgeable.
Attempting to put the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy behind him, Obama ...
Mon, September 29, 2008
Bad Mix: Mortgages, Liberals and Community Organizers
The roots of today's mortgage-based financial crisis can be traced back to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which Jimmy Carter signed in 1977. Seeking to address complaints from anti-poverty ...
Mon, September 22, 2008
Obama and the Times Flunk Economics 101
Watching three of Wall Street's top-five investment banks — Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch — vanishing as independent entities, Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf ...
Tue, September 16, 2008
Government vs. Small Business
The Eggs Benedict on a thick slice of Italian toast with a side of German potato pancakes at the Dor-Stop Restaurant in Pittsburgh is one of the best breakfasts in town.
Wed, September 10, 2008
Barack's Failed Euro-nomics
The top concern of voters this year is the economy, with 40 percent of respondents in a recent New York Times/CBS News poll rating the "economy and jobs" as their primary issue in the ...
