Click on WORD or PDF for full content
At the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, Michael Barone reviews Reagan’s life.
…Another way up was college. Only 6 percent of Americans graduated from college in the late 1920s, and Reagan’s parents had not even attended high school. But at 17 Reagan made the remarkable decision to attend Eureka College, 95 miles from Dixon, financing his education with his earnings as a lifeguard, an athletic half-scholarship he talked his way into, and a job washing dishes. Every so often his mother would send him 50 cents for expenses, and by the end of his college days he was sending money home — and bringing Moon to Eureka with him.
…When he graduated from college in June 1932, unemployment stood at 24 percent, just about the highest rate in American history. He hitchhiked to Chicago and applied for jobs as a radio announcer. He was told that Chicago was the big time and that he should get some seasoning at a small station in “the sticks.” He hitchhiked home, borrowed the Oldsmobile his father could not afford to buy gas for, and drove to Davenport, Iowa, the home of WOC, owned by the Palmer Chiropractic School (the station’s call letters stood for world of chiropractic). Told that there was no opening, he talked the station manager into letting him audition by announcing an imaginary football game between Eureka and Western Illinois. He got the job: $5 and round-trip bus fare to broadcast a University of Iowa football game.
That break surely fortified an innate optimism. In 1933 Reagan moved to another Palmer station, WHO in Des Moines, where as a sports announcer he did what he had heard Chicago announcers do in the 1920s — narrate games from a pitch-by-pitch account received by telegraph (with lots of foul tips when the telegraph broke down). He became something of a local celebrity and a frequent speaker to civic groups, and sent one-third of his paycheck home to his family. He also did political commentaries with future Republican Rep. H.R. Gross. He got raises and made $75 a week (more than $1,200 in today’s dollars), twice what his father had ever made. …
In WaPo, Kevin Huffman reports on what may be the tipping point in the school choice movement. The title is ‘A Rosa Parks moment for education.’
Last week, 40-year-old Ohio mother Kelley Williams-Bolar was released after serving nine days in jail on a felony conviction for tampering with records. Williams-Bolar’s offense? Lying about her address so her two daughters, zoned to the lousy Akron city schools, could attend better schools in the neighboring Copley-Fairlawn district.
…conservatives view the case as evidence of the need for broader school choice. What does it say when parents’ options are so limited that they commit felonies to avoid terrible schools? Commentator Kyle Olson and others across the political spectrum have called this “a Rosa Parks moment for education.”
…The intellectual argument against school choice is thin and generally propagated by people with myriad options. …
…But kids are getting hurt right now, every day, in ways that take years to play out but limit their life prospects as surgically as many segregation-era laws. We can debate whether lying on school paperwork is the same as refusing to move to the back of the bus, but the harsh reality is this: We may have done away with Jim Crow laws, but we have a Jim Crow public education system. …
We’re sorry to see that Newt Gingrich has gone to the dark side: standing up for ethanol subsidies. The WSJ editors take him to task.
…The former Speaker blew through Des Moines last Tuesday for the Renewable Fuels Association summit, and his keynote speech to the ethanol lobby was as pious a tribute to the fuel made from corn and tax dollars as we’ve ever heard. Mr. Gingrich explained that “the big-city attacks” on ethanol subsidies are really attempts to deny prosperity to rural America, adding that “Obviously big urban newspapers want to kill it because it’s working, and you wonder, ‘What are their values?’” …
…Yet today this now-mature industry enjoys far more than cash handouts, including tariffs on foreign competitors and a mandate to buy its product. Supporters are always inventing new reasons for these dispensations, like carbon benefits (nonexistent, according to the greens and most scientific evidence) and replacing foreign oil (imports are up). An historian of Mr. Gingrich’s distinction surely knows all that.
…Now Republicans have another chance to reform government, and a limited window of opportunity in which to do it. The temptation will be to allow their first principles to be as elastic as many voters suspect they are, especially as Mr. Obama appropriates the language of “investments” and “incentives” to transfer capital to politically favored companies. Many Republicans have their own industry favorites, and such parochial interests could undercut their opposition to Mr. Obama’s wider agenda.
…Some pandering is inevitable in presidential politics, but, befitting a college professor, Mr. Gingrich insists on portraying his low vote-buying as high “intellectual” policy. This doesn’t bode well for his judgment as a president. Even Al Gore now admits that the only reason he supported ethanol in 2000 was to goose his presidential prospects, and the only difference now between Al and Newt is that Al admits he was wrong.
In the NYTimes, Landon Thomas gives us a look at the laws and government culture in Greece that hold entrepreneurs back. You will like the picture of a modern day Sisyphus.
…MR. POLITOPOULOS says his problems began when distributors refused to take Vergina and the other brands that he produced. Then, he would contend in a complaint letter he filed with the European Union in 2006, things became worse: his car tires were slashed, threatening calls were received at the brewery, employees were offered money to resign, and trucks carrying his beer were tampered with.
…In 2007, Mr. Politopoulos agreed to drop his complaint and to let the competition commission in Greece — which already had an open investigation into the local beer market — take the lead on the matter.
The Greek competition authority has been investigating antibusiness practices in the beer market since 2002, and a spokesman for the commission said that a decision should be forthcoming within the year. …
…Still, there has been some improvement lately, in the view of Achilles V. Constantakopoulos, a shipping industry scion. He is in the process of investing 1.5 billion euros in a series of high-end tourist resorts on the underdeveloped coastline of the southwest Peloponnese region. But this plan was first conceived a good 25 years ago by Mr. Constantakopoulos’s father and founder of the family fortune, Vasilis, who died last week. The plan has suffered numerous legal setbacks. Only recently did Mr. Constantakopoulos complete the first of four planned resorts, Navarino Dunes.
“There is a problem in Greece,” he said. “In order to do something it has to be provided for in law,” and that can take decades.
But he says he believes that things are changing — and that he expects that the fast-track law for large investments will benefit not only his family’s project, but others as well. “The laws that are in place encourage investment,” he said in his office in Athens, as he nibbled from a plate of figs and nuts. “These days it is easier to get things done.”
Nonetheless, the grinding work of scrapping old laws and creating an open, commercial climate that attracts foreign investors cannot be completed overnight. …
The Country Store points out some revealing quotes from the president’s retainers.
Even when John Heilemann tries to write an Obama puff piece at New York magazine he can’t help revealing some mighty dirty laundry…
…’The president’s friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett sometimes pointed out that not only had he never managed an operation, he’d never really had a nine-to-five job in his life. Obama didn’t know what he didn’t know, yet his self-confidence was so stratospheric that once, in the context of thinking about Emanuel’s replacement, he remarked in all seriousness, “You know, I’d make a good chief of staff.”
Those overhearing the comment somehow managed to suppress their laughter. ‘
Barack Obama is a legend in his own mind.