Serving proudly since 1873 as the beautiful Nebraska Panhandle's first newspaper
Serving proudly since 1873 as the beautiful Nebraska Panhandle's first newspaper
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“Personal charm may be Obama’s last best hope” headlined the Washington Post on Monday. That charm was on ample display at the annual vanity fest called the White House Correspondents Association dinner over the weekend. The dinner always features two comedians — one professional, and the other, the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Skilled joke writers contribute the one-liners, but delivery counts, too, and President Obama has clearly improved over the course of four years. In 2009, some of his jokes were in bad taste. He said Dick Cheney...
The Republican National Committee is out with a 100-page analysis of how the party can revive its sagging fortunes. Doubtless many of the recommendations are good ones — more outreach to minority and women voters, better candidate recruitment, fewer debates during the primaries, openness to immigration reform, competing with Democrats in absentee and early voting and much more. Some of these things may help, or at least, as my grandmother would have said about chicken soup for a cold, they can’t hurt. Others sound a little desperate, such as...
If there’s one sure way to capture the attention of the usual suspects in the press, it’s to highlight the problems of women with high-powered careers, as billionaire Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has done. In her Ted talk three years ago and now in a book that has received lavish attention, Sandberg laments that women “are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world. The numbers tell the story ... 190 heads of state — nine are women. Of all the people in parliaments in the world, 13 percent are women. In the corpora...
There are two major parties in the United States: the party that wishes to govern and the party that wants only to campaign. It’s to their credit that Republicans are obsessed with getting the government to address its unconscionable and unmanageable debt, freeing up the productive private sector to create economic growth and maintaining the nation’s military preeminence. But there’s something almost pathetic about the way leading Republicans complain that the president doesn’t negotiate in good faith. Of course he doesn’t. He’s not interes...
“People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses” —Juvenal Isn’t it grand that we have such a cool couple in the White House? Hollywood would never have deigned to invite any other First Lady to present the award for best picture at its annual self-worshipping soporific. Mrs. Obama knew just how to flatter the nearly inexhaustible vanity of people who sell tickets to shows. “I am so honored to ... help celebrate t...
Seized by some peculiar muse (clearly one with a sense of humor), I have undertaken to learn the cello in middle age. To the amazement of my teacher, my family and myself, I’ve made incredibly rapid progress. Displaying a fluidity and musicianship that cannot be taught, I burned through the early books and went straight to repertoire that is usually the province of advanced players. Well, no actually, except for the part about trying to learn the cello. It’s been 18 months now, and I’m plugging away, attempting to force my hands, arms, body,...
The lesson from the State of the Union address is this: Barack Obama has no second term agenda. Oh, sure, he campaigned furiously for the job, starting in about January of 2011. But his campaign almost never outlined his plans for a second term, focusing instead on interest group payoffs and demonization of his rival. Late in October of 2012, as if recognizing that they’d forgotten to attend to it, the Obama campaign released a 20-page glossy handout called a “blueprint for America’s future.” It featured splashy photos of the president on near...
I wasn’t able to pilfer an advance copy of the president’s State of the Union address, but I hereby offer some guesses as to what he said. The president will assert, against the evidence, that the state of our union is strong. He will boast that during his first term, we averted another great depression, achieved history-making reforms of health care and banking, saved the auto industry and began to conclude two wars. He will caution though, that we face great challenges. Obama will acknowledge that our economy is not as vibrant as it cou...
Democratic Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey is having a bad month. He recently wrote a check to a large donor for nearly $60,000 reimbursing him for the generous gift of trips on a private jet. The paperwork had “fallen through the cracks,” an aide explained. Under investigation by the FBI regarding allegations that he engaged underage prostitutes during visits to the Dominican Republic (the destination of those jet trips), the senator was also recently embarrassed when it emerged that an 18-year-old intern on his staff who was hel...
I stand out among my conservative friends in disliking guns. I favor reasonable restrictions on the Second Amendment, such as bans on fully automatic weapons, background checks for purchases and forbidding the sale of guns to those with histories of mental illness or criminality. Yet I cannot agree with liberals that more gun control will lead to fewer gun crimes. President Obama’s choice for defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, actually illuminated one of the weaknesses of the gun control case. Hagel had been closely associated with Global Zero (...
In the days since the second Obama inauguration, I’ve been thinking about Kelly Clarkson and Beyonce. No, not the great lip-synching controversy, but the choice of popular entertainment for a solemn national rite. That Beyonce apparently lip-synched her beautiful rendition of the national anthem is a triviality. It’s cold on the steps of the Capitol and even the greatest singer might have trouble sounding good in those conditions. Kelly Clarkson apparently sang live (and perhaps paid a price in quality). Four years ago, at Obama’s first inaugur...
It isn’t often that you get reading suggestions from a United States senator, but that’s what happened this past weekend for those who attended the National Review Institute’s summit meeting in Washington, D.C. The three-day conclave, part election post-mortem and part revival meeting (that is, reviving conservatism and America), featured a bracing dose of conservative intellectuals along with activists, campaign professionals and office holders. Newly minted Senator Ted Cruz of Texas spoke in his characteristic fashion — fluidly without...
The Republican Party is picking up the pieces. Speaking of the ticket’s loss for the first time since the election, Rep. Paul Ryan noted that many voters “don’t think or know that we have good ideas” on fighting poverty and “helping people move up the ladder of life.” It’s not surprising that Ryan, who got his start working for Jack Kemp and William Bennett at Empower America, sees the world this way. Though it’s a total secret to members of the press and the Democratic Party, conservative intellectuals have been grappling with the problems of...
He swore his oath of office on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible. He has asked to give the State of the Union address on Lincoln’s birthday. He rode to Washington in 2009 on a train route similar to Lincoln’s in 1861. He has compared his critics to Lincoln’s critics. He confides to admirers that he likes to read the handwritten Gettysburg Address that hangs in the Lincoln Bedroom. Barack Obama is inviting the world to compare him not just to good presidents but to the greatest in American history. There can be majesty in invoking past presidents and the...
Now the other shoes begin to drop. Voters knew in November that many of the promises Obama made in 2008 had been broken. The economy had not revived as he had promised it would (“or we’ll be talking about a one-term proposition”). He has not “changed the tone in Washington” – except for the worse. He didn’t prevent lobbyists from holding positions in his administration. He didn’t cut the deficit in half; he increased it radically. But voters apparently decided that the president deserved credit for good intentions. How long will that indul...
Just a few days after Hurricane Sandy devastated parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, the New York Times’ Paul Krugman crowed triumphantly about the federal government’s response to the disaster. “[A]fter Katrina the government seemed to have no idea what it was doing; this time it did. And that’s no accident: the federal government’s ability to respond effectively to disaster always collapses when antigovernment Republicans hold the White House, and always recovers when Democrats take it back.” What a fairy tale. Mature adults unde...
