Tag Archives: history

Random Thoughts

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | AUG 1, 2024

I find famous quotations therapeutic. Some make you smile. Some become an aha moment. Some make you wish you had said that. A couple of examples with more later.

Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. — James Bovard, Libertarian author, lecturer

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free! — P. J. O’Rourke, author and political satirist

It’s good to have a little comic relief now and then, particularly now. There’s not much to smile about when it comes to the national debt crisis just around the corner. Continue reading →

The Fall of the Motor City

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Eminem is the best thing to come out of Detroit in the last twenty years. That, and the Clint Eastwood Chrysler commercial.

Detroit filed for bankruptcy yesterday.

No surprise there. Kind of like Whitney Houston dying. You can only dance on death’s door for so long before the door opens and lets you in.

It was a bunch of French Canadians who first saw Detroit’s immense promise. Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac joined with 51 others and founded a place they called Fort Ponchartrain du Détroit, which provided a wonderful gateway to the Great Lakes and the Great White North, better known as Canada. Continue reading →

The Incredible Shrinking Presidency

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Rare Opening SIDEBAR:

After it was reported that President Obama said in Africa, “I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker,” I Tweeted: “Hell, he didn’t even scramble jets to save a U.S. Ambassador.”

That was re-Tweeted 204 times as of 9 o’clock last night which counts as “Trending” at Mullings Central. If you’re not already, you should follow me on Twitter at @richgalen.

End Rare Opening SIDEBAR

The President is in Africa on a perfectly meaningless goodwill trip to somewhere and somewhere else while back here in our nation’s capital it was one of the most important weeks in the history of the Republic. Continue reading →

The Thin Veneer of Civilization

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Originally published on October 16, 2002, 13 months after the 9/11 attacks.

The Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary defines the word “civilization” thus: An ideal state of human culture characterized by complete absence of barbarism and non-rational behavior.

In the United States, we pretend to live our entire lives in a constant “State of Positive Assumptions.” The central assumption is we DO live in a country “characterized by complete absence of barbarism and non-rational behavior.” Continue reading →

Senate Madness Tournament

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Chuck Todd and his crack team of political smart guys have put together a very useful Final Four tournament of the greatest Senators in history.

I love the concept. I think is a great way to look at the history of the Upper Chamber and to review for people how great men (and they were all men but one in the First Read tournament) impact history.

Todd’s team organized it chronologically and came up with a final eight of Lyndon Johnson, former longtime Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, Continue reading →

Is It Still Good to Be Boss?

BY TONY BLANKLEY

Reprinted from The Washington Times

Since the end of World War II, in both the United States and Western Europe, the best way to win a national election has been to be the incumbent political party. But that 3-generation-old predisposition in Western democracies may be coming to an end.

We may well be entering a political epoch in which the best way to win a national election in the West is not to be the party in power.

For the past 65 years, the world economic order has been vastly favorable to the West’s middle-class citizens and voters with their incomes going up steadily or at least flattening at a predictable and comfortable material level. Moreover, the middle-class fears of economic hardship was virtually eliminated by the existence of the welfare safety net. Continue reading →