Stepping Up Big Time

Robert Caro makes the case, indeed a strong one, that for seven weeks Lyndon Baines Johnson was one of the best U.S. Presidents ever.  In those seven weeks, LBJ brought to the Oval Office a rarely matched blend of vision, humility, acumen, sense of urgency, and composure under stress.  After that, it was back to the same old vanities and insecurities.  But during the difficult time following the JFK assassination, LBJ was The Man.

Lyndon B. Johnson, U.S. President (1963-69)

Caro may have missed the mark in his account of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.  Slate magazine's Fred Kaplan explains who the real hero was.

Quote for the Week, June 24-30, 2012

When the entitled elect themselves, the party accelerates, and the brutal hangover is inevitable.
--Dr. Michael Burry

Not all commencement speeches are the same.

Quote for the Week, June 17-23

I can't decide whether I want to spend my next life as a little alpine bird or as a marmot.  We should be careful before concluding that either of these would be stepping down.
--Randy Morgenson

Quote for the Week, June 10-16, 2012

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.

--Mark Twain

Iron Lady's Precognition

"What we should grasp, however, from the lessons of European history is that, first, there is nothing necessarily benevolent about programmes of European integration; second, the desire to achieve grand utopian plans often poses a grave threat to freedom; and third, European unity has been tried before, and the outcome was far from happy...
The European single currency is bound to fail, economically, politically and indeed socially...That such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European superstate was ever embarked upon will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era."

--former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft (2002)

Quote for the Week, June 3-9, 2012

The only thing worse than a knee-jerk liberal is a knee-pad conservative.
--Edward Abbey