Ten Most Admirable

In response to our post about President Obama titled Who Is He? in which I suggested that it would help us to know who he is at his core if we knew who the people are whom he most admires, a reader wrote to ask who I would place on my own list.

Knowing that I risk omitting someone I shouldn't, and limiting the list to ten people from the last 100 years, and excluding anyone who is still alive (and my father), I came up with the following ten men and women:

Thomas A. Edison

Winston Churchill

Raoul Wallenberg

Oscar Schindler

Irene Sendler

Richard Wurmbrand

William F. Buckley

Ronald Reagan

Mother Teresa

Richard J. Neuhaus

I'm sure there are many others who deserve to be on such a list. Indeed, I would include many of those who died or suffered for their faith or in defense of our country. However, these ten come immediately to mind. I welcome suggestions from readers as to who else might be included in such company. UPDATE: How could I have forgotten Mohandas Ghandi and Martin Luther King?

Where Has All the Money Gone?

I applaud Alan Grayson for his pursuit of the Auditor General of the Federal Reserve in this video (which must have been made before last November's election when he was defeated). The subject matter is perhaps a bit arcane but the take home message is that the Obama administration is spending trillions of dollars that we don't have, and nobody seems to know where the money is going:

After spending almost a trillion dollars in stimulus money last year Mr. Obama is asking for more in his current budget. Yet no one can say where the bulk of the last stack of money went. This has to strike anyone who watches it, even a left-wing progressive like Grayson, as insane.

What Do They Hope to Accomplish?

I really hope this guy isn't a teacher. I'm not referring to the one with the microphone, but the other one, the guy in the crowd who seems to be some sort of lobotomized wind-up toy:

Good old Ed Schultz. He can always be counted on to be a voice of calm reason amidst a sea of turmoil and strife.

Anyway, I was wondering as I read the news about the Wisconsin teachers calling in sick for a third straight day in order to attend the protest in Madison, how many sick days their contract allows them and whether there will be any repercussions for taking sick days, for which they're paid by the same taxpayers from whom they're demanding benefits that few of those same taxpayers enjoy, in order to tend to personal business. I don't see how this could possibly do their cause any good or help them to rise in the esteem of the citizens of Wisconsin.

Nor do I see how hiding in a motel somewhere at taxpayer expense in order to block the state senate from doing its work will help the electoral prospects of Wisconsin's remaining Democratic senators, but who knows?

How long do these guys think they can remain squirreled away? A month? Two months? Will they insist that the citizens of Wisconsin pay them the whole time they're in absentia? What's the point of this stunt, anyway, other than to show their constituents in the unions that they're willing to make complete fools of themselves in order to stand foursquare for the right of public employees to drive the state into bankruptcy?