Last week, gubernatorial candidate Mitch Daniels unveiled his economic plan. What caught my eye, however, was not the plan itself, but the final sentence in the press announcement. After promising to populate the government with "new ideas and new people," Mitch reportedly concluded with the following sentence: "The what is not as important as the who." In other words, good people are more important than good programs or ideas.
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Author Archives: Sheila
Follow the Money
In today’s political environment, a smart politician quickly learns that using the right language is more important than doing the right thing. In most cases, the electorate won’t know the difference, because the real business of government is done through that most boring, least-understood, least reported-on mechanism—the budget. If we really want to know what is going on, we have to follow the money.
What Do We Owe Our Children?
It is not an exaggeration to suggest that the measure of a society can be taken by looking at the policies that affect its children and youth. How children are nurtured and socialized reveals more about a society?s priorities and values than all of its public pronouncements or civic rhetoric.
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Dark Ages
In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argued that free expression is necessary in order to find truth; that only by contending with the strongest position of one’s opponent can we perfect our own argument. The method of the counter-Enlightenment neo-cons, on the other hand, is to prevent the opposition from speaking at all.
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Talk Radio
Conservative commentators are having great fun with a report that, in the wake of the mid-term elections, Democrats are looking for liberals who might host radio call-in shows and counter the perceived influence of Rush Limbaugh and his clones. They are right to laugh, even if it is for the wrong reasons.
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