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Showing posts from April 12, 2015

Good Enough for the Founding Fathers

Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton, in the last week, both announced they are running for president. One is the junior senator from Florida, and 43 years old. The other is the former secretary of state, and 67. Some worry that Rubio is too young, and some that Hillary is too old, to be president.   But the question of age is rather redundant. Republicans seem to forget that our beloved Reagan was 71 when he became president, and the Democrats beloved Kennedy was 43. It is the ideas, not the age, that matters. Both Rubio, and the Junior Senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, who is also running, would make better presidents at 40 than Hillary would at 80. Not because they are Republicans, there are a lot of Republicans who have no business being in office of any kind, but because, on the whole, their ideas are good.   Hillary has old ideas. The ones that have been tried before, and have failed before. So while she is not herself too old to be president, her ideas sure are.   Perhaps neither Cruz no

150 Years On: The Civil War's Last Casualty

150 years ago yesterday evening, at Ford’s Theatre, in Washington DC, Abraham Lincoln was watching a play with his wife and several others, when a man who never did anything in his life except fire a bullet, John Wilkes Booth, shot our sixteenth president in the back of the head. 150 years ago this morning, the President of the United States, the man who had saved the union and won one of our bloodiest wars, was dead. To this day Lincoln remains in some places a controversial figure. With books entitled Lincoln’s Marxists, and others, smearing him for doing everything from imprisoning the grandson of Francis Scott Key to even fighting the South at all. There are still those, even today, which defend the Confederate States of America, saying they were on the right side in the Civil War, and Lincoln on the wrong one. Of course, while Lincoln was not perfect, (which president ever has been?) these critics miss the point. He saved the union. He ended one of the greatest human rights abus

Marco Rubio: Not too young

This evening, at the Freedom Tower in Miami, Marco Rubio, the 43 year old freshman senator from Florida is probably going to announce that he is running for president. He will be one of the youngest in a relatively young field, the “Tea Party Favorite” some call him; he was one of the “radicals” that rode into the 112 th congress on a wave of anger over Obamacare. Well, now we are in the 114 th congress, and Rubio is looking to ride a wave of anger over Obama in general all the way to the White House. An American born Cuban, Rubio is a man many have said was too young to run. Here are some facts. The Catholic Freshman Senator, is currently one year older than Jack Kennedy, another Catholic senator, when Jack was elected to office. Although Rubio would be 45 when he was sworn in, making him the second youngest president in history to be elected, were it to happen. Of course, in 1988, Dan Quayle compared himself to Kennedy when attacked about his lack of experience while he was running