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7:15 am –read inspirational quote “Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them”. –Shakespeare (Twelfth Night) 1:15pm –Start revising downward Be not afraid of mediocrity; some are born mediocre; some achieve mediocrity and some have mediocrity thrust upon them. 5:45pm Begin suspecting… Be not afraid of failure; some are born failures; some try but always fail and some have failure thrust upon them.
A lot of people hate going to the dentist, even for just a regular teeth cleaning every six months. It’s that time again for me this week and although it’s a hassle, it’s important, and I can’t say I dread going–but admit that it could be a more upbeat experience. I think it’s because dentists, as a group, aren’t great sales people. And could learn a thing or two from Valvoline. I’m also getting my oil changed this week at Valvoline. And what a contrast to my dental visits. I’ve never seen so much enthusiasm and activity over something so trivial. When you pull into Valvoline for an oil change, you feel like you are about to get some sort of transformative car treatment –possibly one that could improve your overall quality of life. You feel that somethng important and mysterious is taking place in the bowels of the service station where oil is being changed out for newer, clearner oil. There is clapping and shouting that is part military protocal and part circus troupe act. I do love the enthusiasm and theatrics. And it’s good sales strategy. But I think Valvoline over does it. And I wish they’d just charge, say, $2 for the show rather than to fold in the performance price by trying to convince me every visit I need a new air filter. My dentist, by contrast, is an uneventful visit. The dental hygenists don’t clap or bark orders back and forth in rapid fire style. It makes me wonder sometimes if they received as good training as the people at Valvoline. And they don’t create the sense that something urgent and profound is happening to me. Mostly I just feel like I’m getting my teeth cleaned. And that’s it. And now that I’m adult, I don’t even get a free toothbrush when I leave. Sometimes I wish my dentist were more of a showman and I felt like getting my teeth cleaned was going to be as memorable and as inspiring an experience as, say, getting an oil change. And if it were I may not even mind having to buy an unneeded air filter at the end of my appointment Contributing RP Jeff Smith hit the national radio airwaves yesterday to talk about the advice he’s given to Rod Blagojevitch on his first day in prison. Click here to listen to the NPR interview. Click here to read his essay.
The GOP establishment hasn’t helped Gingrich in his race, and its calls for him to sacrifice for party unity are likely to fall on deaf ears. The amount of pressure these Republicans can put on Gingrich is marginal, since they are neither endorsing nor funding him. Also, the idea that somehow Newt will lose his dignity if he stays in the race beyond his natural shelf-life…is, well, a bit absurd given who Newt Gingrich is and how he comports himself.
It’s the same argument that suggests that Ralph Nader was responsible for Al Gore’s loss in 2000 and not Gore’s anemic campaigning that brought the race to the margin of error. This same argument falls flat with Santorum. Santorum is gaining ground, strength, and momentum from the way he is running his campaign. Facts on the ground may conspire to make Newt largely irrelevant, as voters line up behind either Santorum or Romney. However, if Santorum loses to Romney, it’s his own fault. Not Newt Gingrich’s. Read the rest of… As former Illinois Rod Balgojevich spends his first full day behind bars, contributing RP Jeff Smith offers him a few educated tips:
1. As your grandma probably taught you, God gave you two ears, two eyes and one mouth — use them in proportion. • When you get to prison, listen, watch and learn. You’ll have a hundred questions on your first day and in one month you will know the answer to 90 of them without having to ask and risk looking stupid.
•Don’t talk about how you got railroaded. So did everyone else. •Don’t ask anything about anyone’s family; it will be a sore subject with many, especially those who have not seen or heard from their children or ex-wives in years. •Don’t ever talk about how much time you have. Someone else has more. Read the rest of…
When I was about eight or nine years old I tried tricking my mom into giving me money I could spend at Thornbury’s Toys. I told her I was curious about how checks worked and wondered if she could teach me. My mom was impressed with my curiosity and desire to learn and that I took the initiative to ask. She happily pulled out her check book and started going over each line and how it needed to be filled in. “So, for example, let’s say it is going to be for $10. Where would you write that?” I asked. My mom showed me where on the check that went and wrote in the amount in numbers and then in her beautiful cursive longhand. Next I pointed to “Pay to the order of” line and suggested, “Let’s say it’s for, I dunno, like, Thornbury’s Toys. Is that where you’d write out ‘Thornbury’s Toys’?” “Yes! Exactly!” My mom replied, excited to see I was really paying attention and understanding this lesson….and gladly filled out that line “Thornbury’s Toys.” I asked her to please finish filling it out and asked if I could keep the check to study and memorize. She proudly signed her name, wrote “Toys’ in the “For” line and handed over my homework assignment for me to “study,” as I requested. Well, you see where this is going. I proudly took the check and went back to my bedroom to try to now figure out how I could get a ride to Thornbury’s—and not from my mom. But something awful and unexpected happened. Guilt slowly crept in. A loyalty to my mother and to honesty began to displace the excitement I was feeling about the possibility of buying a new toy. And the sense of cleverness started to feel heavy and burdensome like something I should be more ashamed about than proud of. In fact, the feelings were so horrible, without understanding what was happening to me, I immediately tore the check into tiny little pieces and threw the pieces away behind my clothes drawer–where no one would find it. Several years later when we moved to a new house—and the clothes drawer was being moved–I was standing there to pick up those little shreds of paper, which signified the still alive little shreds of guilt. I hadn’t forgotten them…or the lesson I had learned. March has opened cruelly for conservatives. One of their icons, Andrew Breitbart, died prematurely; another, Rush Limbaugh, lives on, and valuable time is spent apologizing or distancing from his choice to punch down at a young woman. Between the recollections of Breitbart, and both the real and canned outrage over Limbaugh, the pugnacious, caustic side of the political Right is in full public view. In the normal course of the ideological firefight, one favored tactic is to minimize antagonists as irrelevant and undeserving of attention. The critics of Breitbart and Limbaugh are actually just as quick to dramatize their importance as their defenders. For the left, the ferocity of both men helps prove their case that the Right is an intolerant, mean-spirited crusade that bullies its detractors. For much of the right, the two epitomize a conviction activism that has been indispensable in outwitting and outlasting the mainstream media and its liberal biases. It’s worth examining each claim for signs of inflation. Breitbart first: to the extent the general public was aware of Breitbart, it was largely based on three episodes, one of which reflects poorly on him. On the plus side, he drove the exposure of ACORN as a loopy, madcap farce that was living off the public dime and an unmerited reputation for good works. On the neutral side, he outed Anthony Weiner as the kind of guy who milked his mini celebrity to bait attractive twenty-somethings, and who thought his best features are the kind that require public covering. It all seemed seedy, but small and trivial then, and looks even smaller and more trivial now. On the inexcusable side, his expose of Shirley Sherrod as a racist avenger didn’t survive the light of day: Breitbart may have been a white guy lost in interpreting colloquial black to black banter, but his confusion seemed willful and strategic. Read the rest of…
For centuries, commentators have debated whether Shakespeare really wrote Shakespeare’s literary works. The recently released movie, Anonymous, which I saw last week, examines the evidence in depth and comes to some interesting conclusions. Perhaps it was Christopher Marlowe. Perhaps it was someone else. But I’ve decided there is an even a bigger and more profound way of asking the question: “Should it even matter if Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare since most individuals who claim to have read Shakespeare, really haven’t read Shakespeare— and are only pretended to?” When I was asked in college what Shakespeare plays I had read, I answered Macbeth, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and Othello. But that wasn’t true. I had seen the movies for those plays with the exception of King Lear, which I read. But even with Lear much of my reading was done by relying on Cliff Notes. So, until we get to the bottom of whether people who claim they have read Shakespeare are real people who have actually read Shakespeare (and aren’t just pretending to), we should hold off investigating the authorship question altogether. And remember, “To thine own self be true.” I love that quote from Cliff Notes.
Fair when Gore was off by $50 or so in relating the price of his mother-in-law’s meds, and got castigated for it – even as Bush’s mostly unexamined references to his proposed tax cuts understated its size by $900 billion? Of course not. Politics, like life, isn’t fair. The media – aided substantially by opposing campaigns – looks for a stylized fact that fits a developing narrative, and creates a caricature.
Point is, it’s not going away. Pet lovers vote – and even non pet-lovers find the story alarming. So I suspect you’ll see Dem-driven “protests” by dogs at Romney events throughout the summer and fall. And I suspect that they will overpower the concerted effort Romney and his family have been making for months to “humanize” Mitt via the contrived retelling of “warm, fuzzy Mitt” stories. (Cross-posted, with permission of the author, from Politico’s Arena) Our own contributing RP, Jason Atkinson, has decided to take a sabbatical from politics, announcing they he would not run for a second term. Here’s the story from The Oregonian:
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