Gettysburg Anniversary Lessons to Relearn

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

The 150^th Anniversary of one of the most important events in American history and arguably in world history slipped past the public consciousness July 3, without much attention or appreciation.

The event was the Battle of Gettysburg, actually a series of the most bloody battles of the Civil War that occurred just outside Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, beginning with Picket’s Charge up Cemetery Ridge on the afternoon of July 1, 1863, and ending with the retreat of the Confederate Army under the command of General Robert E. Lee in the early morning hours of Independence Day, July 4.

Continue reading →

One Year Delay

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Just imagine if George III had told the colonists that he would delay for one whole year the implementation of the Stamp Act, the tax that Parliament imposed on the colonies to pay for its worldwide war against the French.

Do you think the colonists would have decided to pack it in and not break away from England?

In many ways, the Obama Administration is trying to do just that with its suspension of an Obamacare mandate on the business community.

The White House is giving employers a year reprieve, as if a year is going to make much of difference for most business operations.

Continue reading →

Oh for 20

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

America’s Traitor, Edward Snowden has allegedly applied for asylum in 20 countries.

None have granted it.

But late yesterday afternoon, there was suspicion that Snowden had boarded the aircraft carrying the President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, from Moscow to Bolivia. Those suspicions were so strong that, according to the International Herald Tribune: “Bolivia’s foreign minister told news outlets that France and Portugal had both blocked airspace access to the Bolivian presidential plane on suspicion that Mr. Snowden might been on board.” Continue reading →

Leaders and Followers

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

At my gym, they put little inspirational quotes up on the wall to get you to work out harder (that’s the theory, at least).

“Lead, follow, or get out of the way,” was last Tuesday’s quote, attributed to the Marine’s handbook, which was a revelation to me. I always thought that Lee Iacocca was the man who first said that memorable phrase when he was trying to fix Chrysler.

This quote must haunt Congressional Republicans on both sides of the Capitol dome.

In the House, the followers aren’t following the Leaders. In the Senate, the Leaders aren’t following the followers. Continue reading →

Arab Summer: Egypt

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

An American teacher guilty of nothing more than wanting to help school children in Egypt learn English was stabbed to death while watching a demonstration against Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi.

According to CNN International: Andrew Pochter of Chevy Chase, Maryland, was stabbed Friday in the port city of Alexandria. He was in the country teaching English to elementary school children. “As we understand it, he was witnessing the protest as a bystander and was stabbed by a protester,” his family said in a statement. “He went to Egypt because he cared profoundly about the Middle East, and he planned to live and work there in the pursuit of peace and understanding.” Continue reading →

Four Score and Seven Years Ago

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. Continue reading →

How Much Would You Pay?

BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from TelemachusLeaps.com

$20.

That is all it takes to get a person to do something different when it comes to health care cost containment.

We found out yesterday from a veteran of medical billing services that everyone ‘says’ they want their own doctor, their own prescriptions from their local pharmacy, their own local hospital….until they can find the same level of service somewhere else for $20 less.

So much for ‘loyalty’ in the medical field, huh? Continue reading →

Conservative Movement in Crisis

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Conservatives are getting their butts kicked and if they don’t start changing their tactics and their approach to issues, liberalism will dominate the mainstream for years to come.

On gay marriage, abortion, immigration reform, the Farm bill, simple governance, the left-wing has momentum and a plan.

Look what is happening to George Zimmerman. He is being railroaded by an all too eager media.

Look at the response to the Gay marriage decision. You would think that we had just won the Second World War. This wasn’t V-J Day though. With V-Gay Day. And conservatives could only shake their heads and wonder what happened to American society. 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 →

A Civil Conversation

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

George Zimmerman. Paula Deen. The Supreme Court. Immigration Reform. Can we have a healthy discussion about race and ethnicity in this country?

We are about to find out.

The media loves this stuff. It loves to pick at the scabs of racial animosity because that helps to sell newspapers, boost ratings, and drive web traffic. MSNBC will have wall-to-wall coverage of the Zimmerman trial. It is a constant feature in their daily and nightly shows.

The facts of the case are fairly routine. There was a scuffle and somebody got shot. It happens every day in America, usually multiple times a day.

Continue reading →

The United States of…France

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

It’s now official. America is the France of the 21st century.

France was a big power in the 18th and 19th centuries. The French were pretty much in a constant state of war what with everything from the Seven Years’ War, to the French and Indian Wars, to the American Revolution, to the Napoleonic Wars.

Then came the 20th Century when World War I was mostly fought on French soil leading to their preemptive surrender in World War II. Since then the French still pretend to be a full-fledged member of the Planetary Cool Kids Table, but they have to sit on the end and fetch extra pints of milk for the real members. Continue reading →

In Defense of Marco Rubio

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Originally printed in The Hill

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is trying to save the conservative movement from itself. The question today is: Will it let itself be saved?

As an upstart outsider, Rubio ran against the Washington establishment and the conventional wisdom to take on a seemingly invincible Florida governor in a heated race for an open Senate seat.

But it turned out that Charlie Crist was a paper tiger, and his campaign collapsed in the heat of the Florida summer, leaving Rubio as the conquering Tea Party hero.

Almost immediately, the new Florida senator and Republican star hinted that he wasn’t entirely comfortable merely being a product of the Tea Party. He wasn’t an isolationist, and he believed in a muscled American foreign policy, a departure from the newly dominant Ron Paul wing of the Tea Party. As a former Speaker of the Florida House of Continue reading →

Common Core

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

In the workout world, the “core” is what you do to make your lower back pain-free. You work your abs, you work your legs, you do sit-ups and push-ups, you stretch, you work with the medicine ball, etc. etc.

If you get your core in shape, the rest of the body will follow. It’s really not that much different than getting your “core” education right.

There is a debate going on in the world of politics about common core standards. Several states have adopted common “core” curriculum standards to help guide teachers and school administrators about what kids should be learning on the different subjects. Continue reading →

Summitry

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Heads of state – presidents, prime ministers, dictators, whatever – cannot know all the details of what is going on in their country much less in the other person’s country. That’s why before a modern “summit” between or among heads of state, battalions of high- mid- and low-level staffers go through every conceivable subject and produce forests of briefing papers to prepare the principal.

According to the late William Safire writing in the New York Times, the word “summit” to describe a meeting of heads of state was coined by (no surprise) Winston Churchill in 1950 when he called for a “parley on the summit” of a few heads of state to chart the post-war world rather than, as Churchill put it, “‘hordes of experts and officials drawn up in a vast cumbrous array.'” Continue reading →

Language Matters

BY B. JAY COOPER
Reprinted from BJayCooper.com

I’ve been involved with writing of one sort or another for more than 45 years – I was a reporter, in press work in politics, and a public relations consultant. I have been involved with hiring folks who need to write (from speechwriters to op-ed writers to just people who can send an understandable email to others) for almost as many years.

I came to the conclusion long ago that writing is becoming, unfortunately, a lost art/craft. Finding good writers is very hard. I’ve always thought it’s because our schools don’t focus anymore on the three R’s (readin’, ritin’, ‘rithmetic) like when I was a kid. There’s a piece in the New York Times today written by someone who’s been a college professor and laments, in the article, the loss of humanities majors as young folks focus on majors more likely to pay off quickly in a job to pay their bills and make their parents proud (both excellent goals). Continue reading →

Can The Farm Bill Come Back?

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

One of the reasons Denny Hastert followed the “majority of the majority” rule was pretty simple: He couldn’t trust the Democrats.

The nature of the House of Representatives is to allow the Majority to eventually get its ways. Rules are put in place to protect the minority’s rights, but in the House, unlike in the Senate, the Majority rules.

Sometimes finding out what the majority really stands for is difficult, and through much of the 20th century, constructing a majority coalition transcended party membership. Continue reading →

When Spies Were Spies, and Skunks, Skunks

BY JAY BRYANT

Back in the Stone Age, when I was a kid, even a pre-teen in the backwoods of Maine was aware of a man named Allen Dulles, who had spent the War (you know, the War) in Switzerland spying on the Nazis, and then was chosen to head up our new American espionage agency, the CIA. Dulles, whose brother, John Foster Dulles, was Secretary of State at the time, was the very template for the caricature of the tweedy, pipe-smoking superspy.

Even little kids like me knew that he knew stuff nobody else knew, and we knew we were glad he did. We felt safer knowing there were real, live spies fighting the Cold War with the USSR and making sure it didn’t become a Hot War. Continue reading →

The Right Bet on the Future

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

The Congressional Budget Office used dynamic scoring to predict how the immigration bill, now winding its way through Congress, would impact the deficit.

That must really piss off conservatives who have long demanded that the CBO use that scoring method (which looks beyond numbers and tries to predict future behavioral changes) to predict how tax cuts would actually bring in more revenue.

The Heritage Foundation, which has long been on the forefront of demanding that the CBO use dynamic scoring, released its own analysis a few weeks ago that came up with far different conclusions. Continue reading →

Headwinds for Obama

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

There is almost no good news for President Barack Obama in the CNN/ORC poll that was released earlier this week.

As the President giggled and played rock, paper, scissors with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-8 Conference in Ireland, the bloom appears to have begun to come off the Obaman Rose as far as the American people are concerned.

This is one poll taken last week (Tuesday through Thursday) so it might not signal a trend, but it certainly won’t generate confidence in the West Wing. Continue reading →