Keith Burgess-Jackson

Here is a review of a new book about women and work.

MSNBC has gone off the deep end. I used to trust Chris Matthews, but he has long since succumbed to Bush (and Cheney) Derangement Syndrome. I stopped watching him years ago. David Shuster and Keith Olbermann are propagandists, not journalists. They report what they and their progressive sycophants hope is true, not what they have reason to believe is true. Here is Ann Coulter’s column about the nuttiest network on television.

If you’ve been following the story of Amanda Marcotte, you’ll enjoy this.

The greatest of human satisfactions are those which root a person to his own time and place. It matters that objectives can be attained. It is also important that they can be shared: a purely personal pleasure can have no great depth. But attainment should not be easy; there is no real satisfaction in doing something which comes easily. The deepest satisfaction comes from those things which require hard work and the development of technique. Risk is also important; no achievement or possession is of much value unless it required risk in the attainment. Winning is of no value unless you might have lost. ‘Taking things for granted’ is perhaps the commonest mistake that people make about their own interests. They assume that what they already have is guaranteed and, therefore, trivial and become obsessed with what they lack, by the next stage in their plan for their own development. Most people, most of the time, are not satisfied with life: they pine for something extra. ‘If only I could have . . . a wife, promotion, a new car, my own house, a son . . . ’: this is the commonest way in which people think about their interests.

(Lincoln Allison, Right Principles: A Conservative Philosophy of Politics [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984], 168)

Here is a Wall Street Journal column about Hillary Clinton.

Here.

Here is a New York Times story about Mitt Romney, who is my choice for president.

To the Editor:

The Iraq war has been fought with the time, toil, money, muscle and blood of the middle and lower classes.

In contrast, the upper and ruling classes have not missed a single day at the office or a weekend at the beach during this national nightmare.

By and large, they have spilled no blood of their own or of their children. They have made obscene profits in the markets and turned them into gas-guzzling S.U.V.’s, oil-gorging McMansions and large donations to the cynical politicians who have orchestrated this bull market of a war.

And now Thomas L. Friedman is suggesting one more sacrifice for middle America that is guaranteed to have no impact on the Lincoln Navigator class: $3.50-per-gallon gasoline.

It is time for the profiteers to feel the pinch of this war. It is time for those who help shape national attitudes to use their estimable analytic skills to find solutions to this fiasco that protect and defend ordinary people.

Steven Lewis
New Paltz, N.Y., Feb. 7, 2007

I’m pleased to learn that Mitt Romney supports President Bush’s tax cuts. See here.

Here.