Found Words – Washington Times

This is the type of thing that makes me cynical about politics. Not necessarily that the current administration is giving out more — but the fact that 30% of diplomatic jobs are kickbacks, everyone knows it, and the only way it becomes an issue is if the unwritten rule is broken:

“The White House, unaware of historic norms, had been on track to give more than the usual 30 percent of ambassadorial jobs to political appointees until objections from career diplomats forced it to reconsider, administration officials say.”

Found Words – Pete Wehner

I always enjoy Pete as a writer:

President Obama — in an inspired move — named Dr. Francis Collins head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Collins is one of the world’s leading scientists. He is a physician-geneticist known in part for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and for his leadership of the Human Genome Project. (Collins served as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH from 1993-2008.)

The New York Times reports, however, that a couple of objections have been raised to the choice of Dr. Collins. According to the Times:

The first is his very public embrace of religion. Dr. Collins, who was not raised with any religious training, wrote a book called “The Language of God,” and he has given many talks and interviews in which he has described his conversion to Christianity as a 27-year-old medical school intern. “I came at this from a position of ignorance,” he said. “I came at it from an intellectual point of view.” Religion and genetic research have long had a fraught relationship, and some in the field are uneasy about what they see as Dr. Collins’s evangelism.

Found Words – Lincoln

A little Lincoln poetry for the morning (via Kaplan):

You are young, and I am older;
  You are hopeful, I am not–
Enjoy life, ere it grow colder—
  Pluck the roses ere they rot.

Teach your beau to heed the lay–
  That sunshine soon is lost in shade–
That now’s as good as any day–
  To take thee, Rosa, ere she fade.

Found Words – John Ziegler

I’ve had a heck of a time figuring out what I think about Sarah Palin. Honest, talented women with common sense? Typical talented politician who calculates her every move? Diva who wants attention? The latest with her resignation could be spun in all of those ways. This article makes the case for the first one:

“not every person who has a shot at being President must live their lives to pursue that end no matter the costs to the public good, their family and their personal sanity. The Sarah Palin I know is at least one person in that position who is sufficiently well-grounded and secure enough in themselves and their values to not succumb to this illness of hyper-ambition. She is more than capable of putting something else above her own selfish, short-term political self-interest. You would think that a just society might reward that kind of person and not crucify them, but it has been long since clear that we don’t live in that kind of place.  

The bottom line is that Sarah Palin resigned simply because she was no longer allowed to do her job in a way that benefited her state and family. She saw that if she stayed on as Governor it would cost the state millions of dollars in wasted time and resources and doom it to gridlock. She knew that it would also continue to cost her family hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend against false and maliciously filed ethics complaints. And she had simply had enough of her children being fodder for inappropriate public attacks. 

That’s it. Those are the facts and I’m positive there’s nothing else. There is ABSOLUTELY no hidden scandal (or as CNN’s hack Rick Sanchez “reported,” an unplanned pregnancy) and this was NOT a poorly executed ploy to ignite a 2012 Presidential run. Sarah Palin simply came to the “remarkable” conclusion that stepping down was the right thing to do for the greater good.”

Found Words – VersaEmerge

“these lights are only here to lead us in the wrong direction”

– The Authors 

Found Words – Kaplan

What I’m reading now. Kaplan on Lincoln:

“Since LIncoln was unable to conceive of political discourse as separate from the written word, his compositional energy was directed mostly by political ideas and exigencies.”

“His prospects were never far from his own mind. What better consolation fro his 1858 defeat and what more satisfying a triumph over Douglas than to be elected president.”

Wrestling with Honest Abe v. Abe the Politician.

Written Words – (park bench)

“Emerson that made me think of a park bench.”

Found Words – Emerson

More complete quote:

“There are men, who, by their sympathetic attractions, carry nations with them, and lead the activity of the human race. And if there be such a tie, that, wherever the mind of man goes, nature will accompany him, perhaps there are men whose magnetisms are of that force to draw material and elemental powers, and where they appear, immense instrumentalities organize around them. Life is a search after power; and this is an element with which the world is so satureated,–there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged,–that no honest seeking goes unrewarded.”

Found Words – Emerson

What Lincoln read of Emerson, via Kaplan:

“men whose magnetisms are of that force to draw material and elemental powers, an, where they appear, immense instrumentalities organize around them.”

“It is natural to believe in great men. Nature seems to exist for the excellent. The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome.”

“a man is a center for anture, running out threads of relation through every thing, fluid and solid, material and elemental. The earth rolls’ every clod and stone comes to the meridian: so every organ, function, acid, crystal, grain of dust, has its relation to the brain. It waits long, but its turn comes.”

Found Words – Kaplan

Fred Kaplan on Lincoln:

“From his little position, he worked in his mind on the big things, catalyzed by the mental exercise of his ambition.”