The Other Half of History Daily Blog
Thoughts on modern politics from a historical perspective.
Friday Links and Notes June 8
It looks like the news bombshell of the week is that President Obama joined a socialist political party in Illinois in 1996, then lied about it in 2008. The full story is supposed to come out in the June 25 issue of National Review.
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Obama Channels FDR on Employing Columbia Grads
This is the sixth post in my series on the similarities between the Obama and Franklin Roosevelt presidencies. Today’s topic is Columbia University, where both men went to law school. Both of them have hired Columbia alumni in remarkable numbers to fill key positions in their administrations.
It’s common knowledge that the culture on most of our college campuses is left-of-center, but most people don’t know that Columbia is so radically leftist that it makes other universities look like Tea Party rallies.
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Obama Channels FDR’s Indecisiveness
This is the fifth post in continuing series comparing President Obama with Franklin Roosevelt. To anyone who has studied FDR’s presidency, Barack Obama looks like a pretty good argument for a belief in reincarnation.
Today’s topic is the tendency, shown by both Presidents, to dither during a crisis. We saw President Obama display this character flaw in April, May, and June of 2010; while oil was gushing into the Gulf of Mexico from a damaged oil rig. The administration not only dragged its feet on any kind of meaningful action to mitigate the damage, it repeatedly blocked BP and the State of Louisiana from taking action.
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Bureaucrats are Democrats
All eyes will be on Wisconsin Tuesday as voters take to the polls for the state’s Governor-vs-government special election. The crux of the issue, as anyone who’s been paying attention knows, is that the state’s public employees are trying to use a recall election to replace a Republican Governor with a Democrat.
The Wisconsin recall effort underscores a little-understood fact about American politics. While elected public officials can be Republicans or Democrats, the overwhelming majority of civilian government employees everywhere, including virtually all the public school teachers, are loyal Democrats. America’s two party system of government applies only to the politicians, not to the bureaucrats.
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Obama Channels FDR on Contracts
This is the fourth post in a continuing series on the parallels between Presidents Obama and Roosevelt, two Columbia University educated radicals who both came to the White House intending to abuse their power with abandon.
Today’s topic is the contempt both men have shown for the sacredness of contracts.
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