I think what is most shockingly refreshing about this speech is the candid, frank way a President of the United States used to be able to speak.

Enjoy:

To put the importance of this speech in to some proper, historical perspective, here is Newt Gingrich's presentation at the American Enterprise Institute.

Here are three of the ten:

1. Impose and enforce the strongest sanctions. The U.S. should push other concerned countries to enforce targeted sanctions on the Iranian regime and its internal security organs; ban all foreign investment, loans and credits, subsidized trade, and refined petroleum exports to Iran; and deny visas to its officials.

2. Drop opposition to U.S. gasoline sanctions. Both houses of Congress voted by large bipartisan majorities to impose sanctions against firms that export refined petroleum products to Iran. Yet the White House is dragging its feet, arguing such sanctions will impede diplomatic efforts at the U.N., even though the U.N. is unlikely to approve crippling sanctions.

3. Target public diplomacy to expose the regime's human rights abuses. Such a campaign should document the abuses and aid victims, step up broadcasting and support for independent Iranian broadcasters outside the country to expose corruption of officials and the regime's aid to terrorists, and educate Iranians about genuine representative democracy.

My favorite director is Alfred Hitchcock.  No one told a story on the silver screen quite like "old Hitch."  I especially love Vertigo, North By Northwest, and Notorious.  Hitchcock mastered the psychological thriller, loved setting his stories amidst grandiose backdrops and landscapes, always paid great attention to detail, and usually crafted tales about characters who get caught up in things beyond their control.

Martin Scorsese is a legendary director in his own right, and although I am not very fond of his obsession with making ultra-violent films, his latest effort Shutter Island, is an effective homage to the greatness of Hitchcock.

As your eyes could tell you from the trailer, Leonardo DiCaprio stars in Shutter Island and does a fantastic job.

It's 1954 (the year Hitch's classic Rear Window was released), and U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leo) has been called to investigate the disappearance of an inmate at an island mental hospital for the criminally insane called Ashecliff off the coast of Massachusetts.  Teddy's got his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) along for the investigation, but upon arrival, it becomes apparent to the characters (and audience) that something is not quite right on Shutter Island.

The prison guards are abnormally fidgety, the Marshals are both asked to turn over their firearms (something no federal agent typically has to do), and there is absolutely no trace of the woman who allegedly escaped.  The man running things on Shutter Island is Dr. John Cawley, played exquisitely by Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley, who seems to be thoroughly disinterested in actually helping Teddy and Chuck piece the clues together.

Due to forces beyond their control (a hurricane-like storm that hits the island), the two detectives are stranded overnight and we begin to learn more about Teddy's back-story and what really brought him to the island.

Before becoming a Marshal, Teddy was a soldier in WWII and was personally there for the liberation of the concentration camp at Dachau.  He is plagued by the senseless death and destruction he witnessed in Europe.  To compound his own emotional health issues, Teddy is a grieving widower.  His wife, he claims, was killed in a fire that ravaged the apartment building the two of them had lived in back in Boston.

We learn Teddy requested the assignment to Shutter Island because he believes two key things:  First, that the man who started the fire that killed his wife is imprisoned somewhere on the island.  And second, that Nazi-like medical and psychological tests are being conducted on the criminally insane housed there.  He wants to both confront the killer of his beloved deceased, and gather evidence against the doctors he believes are torturing the patients.

Twists and turns in the story abound from there.

I don't want to give away much more about the plot of Shutter Island.  It's a compelling script with superb acting performances turned in by almost every major and minor character.  The music was disturbing and perfectly set the mood for the entire film (another Hitchcock special).  The psychological twists and turns absolutely keep you on your toes, and as soon as the credits role you will likely feel compelled to start your own group therapy session in hopes of figuring out what exactly just happened over the previous two hours and seventeen minutes.

Shutter Island is rated R for language and intense scenes of death (mostly from shots of concentration camp victims).  Do not take your grandma to this movie.

While not an "instant classic" or "must see", if you like great acting, Hitchcock-like storytelling and maintaining an uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach for more than two hours, go see Shutter Island (and let me know what you thought of it if you already have).

Here is Massa, in his own words, explaining the bizarre pressure the current administration (namely, Rahm Emmanuel) has been putting on him.

Last fall, Washington, D.C., schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee laid off 229 teachers. Here's what was unusual about that: She chose who would stay and who would go based on the competence of the teachers.

That's a radical departure for public education. Most schools across the country make personnel decisions largely or entirely based on seniority. Last in, first out. Illinois law requires that teacher layoffs be based on seniority unless a school district and its local union negotiate different rules. Result: seniority is the deciding factor everywhere, according to the Illinois State Board of Education. So law and custom protect older teachers — whether they're good teachers or bad teachers.

What a shock to learn that the Peoples' Republic of Illinois has such a backwards, ineffective system for hiring and firing teachers!

Many cash-strapped Illinois school districts face the prospect of layoffs in the coming months. Unless outdated rules are scrapped, the schools will have to fire some of their best teachers because they happen to be younger teachers.

They also will have to fire more teachers. Younger teachers have lower salaries, so when schools operate strictly on seniority, they have to let more teachers go to achieve a certain dollar savings.

Yes, there is value in experience. But the National Council on Teacher Quality reports that "teachers in their third year of teaching are generally about as effective as long-tenured teachers."

Seniority can be considered, but along with such factors as competence, drive, classroom performance and willingness to learn new skills. Younger teachers, for instance, may be more computer-savvy and thus more capable of teaching the tech skills children need to succeed.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that almost everyone has a teacher who impacted their life in a positive way.  We want to honor teachers, and we want the best possible teachers in our school systems.  But tax dollars aren't charity to be doled out based on a general feeling of good will towards people who enter the teaching profession.  People must earn those dollars, same as any other job.

And it is the constitutional duty of those running these bloated bureacracies at the state and federal level to do everything in their power to see that the best possible people are hired in the most efficient way.

All governments have to find ways to lure and keep the best and brightest in their work force. Where is that more important than in the classroom?

School vouchers, anyone?  Real change requires real change.   Enough talk.  If we're serious about education, then let's put our votes where our mouths are and let our elected officials know that changes like the ones the Tribune is talking about matter to us.

As an aspiring writer and commentator, I spend a great deal of time reading the books and articles and speeches of the people I feel effectively communicate the ideas I believe in better than anyone else.

Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post and Fox News Channel is one of those people.

Every night of the week, at roughly 6:40 p.m. (Eastern Time), Dr. Krauthammer is a member of the "All-Star Panel" on Special Report With Brett Baier.  (You should be watching or DVR-ing this every day).  And each Friday, his nationally syndicated column is read in newspapers all across the country.

Today he treated his reading audience to this gem on the current state of the Pelosi-Reid-Obama health care plan:

After 34 speeches, three sharp electoral rebukes (Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts) and a seven-hour seminar, the president announced Wednesday his determination to make one last push to pass his health care reform.

The final act was carefully choreographed. The rollout began a week earlier with a couple of shows of bipartisanship: a Feb. 25 Blair House "summit" with Republicans, followed five days later with a few concessions tossed the Republicans' way.

Show is the operative noun. Among the few Republican suggestions President Obama pretended to incorporate was tort reform. What did he suggest to address the plague of defensive medicine that a Massachusetts Medical Society study showed leads to about 25 percent of doctor referrals, tests and procedures being done for no medical reason? A few ridiculously insignificant demonstration projects amounting to one-half of one-hundredth of 1 percent of the cost of Obama's health care bill.

The Health Care Summit last week was a dog-and-pony show, meant to portray the Republicans as obstructionists and big old meanies.  But the president was confronted by the likes of Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), and the fact-based disagreements conservatives have with Obama's brand of "reform."  Republicans DO have ideas, and many key members of the GOP on the state and national level have been promoting them all year.

Unfortunately for Democrats, that seven-hour televised exercise had the unintended consequence of showing the Republicans to be not only highly informed on the subject, but also, as even Obama was forced to admit, possessed of principled objections -- contradicting the ubiquitous Democratic/media meme that Republican opposition was nothing but nihilistic partisanship.

Republicans did so well, in fact, that in his summation, Obama was reduced to suggesting that his health care reform was indeed popular because when you ask people about individual items (for example, eliminating exclusions for pre-existing conditions or capping individual out-of-pocket payments) they are in favor.

Yet mystifyingly they oppose the whole package. How can that be?

And now, in what can only be described as the most brilliant summation of the American peoples' opposition to Obamacare, please enjoy the wit and wisdom of Charles Krauthammer in its rarest of forms:

Allow me to demystify. Imagine a bill granting every American a free federally delivered ice cream every Sunday morning. Provision 2: steak on Monday, also home delivered. Provision 3: A dozen red roses every Tuesday. You get the idea. Would each individual provision be popular in the polls? Of course.

However (life is a vale of howevers) suppose these provisions were bundled into a bill that also spelled out how the goodies are to be paid for and managed -- say, half a trillion dollars in new taxes, half a trillion in Medicare cuts (cuts not to keep Medicare solvent but to pay for the ice cream, steak and flowers), 118 new boards and commissions to administer the bounty-giving, and government regulation dictating, for example, how your steak was to be cooked. How do you think this would poll?

Perhaps something like 3-1 against, which is what the latest CNN poll shows is the citizenry's feeling about the current Democratic health care bills.

Late last year, Democrats were marveling at how close they were to historic health care reform, noting how much agreement had been achieved among so many factions. The only remaining detail was how to pay for it.

Well, yes. That has generally been the problem with democratic governance: cost. The disagreeable absence of a free lunch.

That's it, folks.  Everything the Left promises sounds nice on an individual level, which is how they present their collectivist policies.  The problem is, of course, that all of their policies are implemented on a national level and cannot possibly succeed.  This is the heart of the debate between Right and Left: can the few rule, and provide for, the many?  Can "experts" in Washington "control" the expenses and costs of 300 million-plus liberty-loving Americans?

The good intentions of liberals are heart-warming and bone-chilling, all at the same time.

Chuck closes out his devastatingly informative column with the following:

The time for debate is over, declared the nation's seminar leader in chief. The man who vowed to undo Washington's wicked ways has directed the Congress to ram Obamacare through, by one vote if necessary, under the parliamentary device of "budget reconciliation." The man who ran as a post-partisan is determined to remake a sixth of the U.S. economy despite the absence of support from a single Republican in either house, the first time anything of this size and scope has been enacted by pure party-line vote.

Surprised? You can only be disillusioned if you were once illusioned.

In the opening to The Everlasting Man (1925), Chesterton takes aim at the type of journalist or social commentator whose fall-back position on social issues is to blame the religious population of a nation:

The clergyman appears in person and could easily be kicked as he came out of church; the journalist concelas even his name so that nobody can kick him...[Anti-religious writers] will suddenly turn round and revile the Church for not having prevented World War I, which they themselves did not want to prevent; and which nobody had ever professed to be able to prevent, except some of that very school of progressive and cosmopolitan skeptics who are the chief enemies of the Church.  It was the anti-clerical and agnostic world that was always prophesying the advent of universal peace; it is that world that was, or should have been, abashed and confounded by the advent of universal war.

As for the general view that the Church was discredited by World War I - they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood.  When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right.  The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.

But that marks this type of modern anti-religious writer's mood about the whole religious tradition: they are in a state of reaction against it.  It is well with the boy when he lives on his father's land; and it is well with him again when he is off on his own and far enough from it to look back and see it as a whole.  But these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind.  They cannot get out from under the shadow of Christianity.  They cannot be Christians and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians.

Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism.  They live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith...

The worst judge of all is the man who these days is now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard.

If you are up for an intellectual challenge (with a huge pay-off), get The Everlasting Man.

Happy Reading!

-RJM

We hear the pleas from politicians and political pundits to "Remember the children!" when almost any social, cultural, or economic issue is publicly discussed, but might it be that we're focused on the wrong things when it comes to really helping the kids?  Could it be that what children need more than Participation Award trophies, free government handouts, and Nancy Pelosi stumping for them is a good night's sleep, healthy competition in and out of school, and parents who teach them that it isn't the hand you're dealt, but the way you play the hand?

George Will thinks so, and in his nationally syndicated column today he uses the backdrop of a newly-released book, "NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children" by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, to discuss just that. Will cites the activities of a grade school in Massachusetts that has their students jump rope with no jump-rope:

Those Massachusetts children are jumping rope without ropes because of a self-esteem obsession. The assumption is that thinking highly of oneself is a prerequisite for high achievement. That is why some children's soccer teams stopped counting goals (think of the damaged psyches of children who rarely scored) and shower trophies on everyone. No child at that Massachusetts school suffers damaged self-esteem by tripping on the jump rope.

He continues:

But the theory that praise, self-esteem and accomplishment increase in tandem is false. Children incessantly praised for their intelligence (often by parents who are really praising themselves) often underrate the importance of effort. Children who open their lunchboxes and find mothers' handwritten notes telling them how amazingly bright they are tend to falter when they encounter academic difficulties. Also, Bronson and Merryman say that overpraised children are prone to cheating because they have not developed strategies for coping with failure.

It's been said many times, in many ways, but there really is no such thing as a "free lunch."  You can love your kids (or nephews, granddaughters, etc.) without propping them up for a life of failure and moral confusion.  Life is tough, and what a child wants to hear from the adults in their life isn't "You did good for being average", but "Your mother and I love you, and will always be here for you...even if and when you fail."

Will also highlights from the Bronson-Merryman book something that hits close to home for me: the need for rest (and adequate levels of it).

Only 5 percent of high school seniors get eight hours of sleep a night. Children get a hour less than they did 30 years ago, which subtracts IQ points and adds body weight. Until age 21, the circuitry of a child's brain is being completed. Bronson and Merryman report research on grade schoolers showing that "the performance gap caused by an hour's difference in sleep was bigger than the gap between a normal fourth-grader and a normal sixth-grader."

In high school there is a steep decline in sleep hours, and a striking correlation of sleep and grades. Tired children have trouble retaining learning "because neurons lose their plasticity, becoming incapable of forming the new synaptic connections necessary to encode a memory. ... The more you learned during the day, the more you need to sleep that night."

Your body is more than just the physical, but it isn't only the emotional either.  Sleep, a healthy diet (see: not my diet), and regular exercise can be the things that turn a kid's mental and emotional well-being around.

So will raising them to believe, as our Declaration of Independence proclaims, that they are uniquely-formed, Creator-endowed human beings with inherent value and worth.  Between that and your offer to always love and be there for them, your kids will absolutely have the best chance of achieving something more important than grades, sports, or getting into the "right" college: They'll become good people.

Pakistani forces have taken control of a warren of caves that served until recently as the nerve centre of the Taleban and al-Qaeda and sheltered Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second-in-command to Osama bin Laden.

“It was the main hub of militancy where al-Qaeda operatives had moved freely,” Major-General Tariq Khan, the Pakistan regional commander, said as he gave journalists a tour of Damadola yesterday.

The village, nestling among snow-capped peaks in the Bajaur region along the Afghan border, has been fought over for 16 months. It is the first time that the Pakistani Army has set foot in the village, which had long been dominated by the insurgents operating on the both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Pakistan is by no means a stable nation, but we ought to praise our allies in the War on Terror when they score a victory for our "side".  There is REAL change in the attitude of the Pakistani military in terms of their willingness to help our efforts in Afghanistan. 

Here is more on Pakistan's role from The Heritage Foundation.

So does economist Walter E. Williams.  As he points out in his latest column, the "rich", like Bill Gates, is not the person to fear or direct your ire at.  Politicians, even small-time local ones, have much more control over your life.

Bill Gates is the world's richest person, but what kind of power does he have over you? Can he force your kid to go to a school you do not want him to attend? Can he deny you the right to braid hair in your home for a living? It turns out that a local politician, who might deny us the right to earn a living and dictates which school our kid attends, has far greater power over our lives than any rich person. Rich people can gain power over us, but to do so, they must get permission from our elected representatives at the federal, state or local levels.

...

Politicians love pitting us against the rich. All by themselves, the rich have absolutely no power over us. To rip us off, they need the might of Congress to rig the economic game. It's a slick political sleight-of-hand where politicians and their allies amongst the intellectuals, talking heads and the news media get us caught up in the politics of envy as part of their agenda for greater control over our lives.

Can't say it better than that.  Read the rest of the piece here.

Dr. Williams is an equal-opportunity mis-truster of politicians: