Mr. Obama used his weekend address to try and refocus attention away from disastrous foreign policy news and to something that can motivate his base.  Even Democrats are attacking his “hands  off” approach, with Senator Dianne Feinstein calling him “too cautious.”  So its only natural that Mr. Obama would like to change the subject.    […]

“No beast is more savage than man, when possessed of power equal to his passion.” Josiah Quincey, Jr. (American revolutionary writer, 1770s) This captures the essence of human nature, apart from the grace of God, and operating in the political sphere.

“the passion for economic equality…is…a passion for getting as much as those above us in the economic scale already get rather than a passion for giving those below us as much as we ourselves already get.”              –Henry Hazlitt

Breaking financial news today is Warren Buffett’s financing of Burger King’s buyout of the Tim Horton restaurant chain.  As part of this transaction, Burger King will move its corporate HQ to Canada, known as a Tax Inversion.  Tax Inversions are increasingly popular with U.S. based companies, while being increasingly unpopular with U.S. politicians, since the […]

President Barack Obama’s golf habits have garnered significant media attention recently. Politico ran a long story on the politics of presidential golf, and Chris Cillizza, in the Washington Post, argues that Obama’s disconnectedness, symbolized by his proclivities for short pants and long drivers, threatens the Democrats’ chances in the upcoming mid-term elections. Even Jimmy Fallon, […]

Any rational person should wade into the waters surrounding Ferguson, MO very cautiously. Why? We have no idea what happened to touch off the events. We know that a young, unarmed man is dead at the hands of a police officer. We know he was shot six times. We know very little about the event […]

John Cochrane is a tremendously talented economist and professor of finance @ Chicago’s Booth School of Business.  He’s probably forgotten more arcane financial reasoning than I know; but that doesn’t stop us from critically examining his thinking.  In today’s WSJ, Mr. Cochrane cheers the Fed’s balance sheet expansion as a good thing for the economy. […]

In the previous blog on Islamic ideology I focused on the historical development of the religion of Islam and of the terrorist groups that arose later.  But Islam is also a religion in its own right and is based on a written source—the Quran—which is subject to various interpretations.  It is true that for a […]

Cronyism and Sports Sometimes I feel as if I am just trying to “stir the pot” as it were and make my sports-loving friends angry.  So let me say before I continue that I love sports of many kinds—college football and basketball, cross country, track, bicycling, and a few others to a lesser extent.  But […]

Bereans Blog One of our Bereans colleagues e-mailed to say he wished one of us would blog on the situation in the Middle East and on Islamic radical ideology.  He had watched a Heritage Foundation event on the subject, which I had seen a part of as well.  Well, I will take up the challenge, […]