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Cool Cal

Posted: April 19, 2022 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

As the 100th anniversary nears of his ascendency to the presidency, Calvin Coolidge is becoming cool.

Coolidge became the 30th president when Warren Harding died in 1923 and held the post until 1929, when he decided not to run. He promoted a mixture of lowering taxes, cutting the federal budget, removing the federal deficit after World War I, promoting racial harmony, and embracing America’s small-town heritage.

Coolidge is finally getting his due as a good president in a 2013 biography by Amity Shlaes and a more recent series of essays and a book about conservatives from Matthew Continetti, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Shlaes, a former journalist who heads the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation in his hometown of Plymouth, Vermont, carefully dispels many of the myths about Coolidge in her book.

Both Shlaes and Continetti want to give “Cool” Cal his due. “Cool” Cal seems a lot better than the liberals’ description of Coolidge as “Silent” Cal. 

Moreover, the misconstrued moniker fails to acknowledge Coolidge’s activities on the radio—long before FDR—and his fascination with modern technology, such as air travel. 

Although historians have placed Coolidge in the lower half of presidential accomplishments, Shlaes argues that that’s mainly because he was a conservative.

Her recalibration of Coolidge’s accomplishments argues that he’s worthy of a much higher place in presidential rankings.

Coolidge carefully steered the country through the disastrous aftermath of Woodrow Wilson’s calamitous post-World War I antics and illness and the scandals left by Warren Harding.

Continetti pushes Coolidge’s reputation into the upheavals of the 21st century, comparing Cal and Donald Trump.

“Both Coolidge and Mr. Trump staked their presidencies on voter satisfaction with broadly shared prosperity. Both supported restricting immigration into the United States. Both wanted to protect American industry from foreign competition. Both sought to avoid overseas entanglements,” Continetti wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal. “Trump’s views now dominate the Republican Party. For anyone who grew up with the GOP of Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes, and John McCain, this can be strange and bewildering. But in many respects, it’s a return to the principles of the 1920s of Coolidge.” 

Coolidge presided over a prosperous nation at peace. He preached America First—as did Trump. 

When I started my deep drive into presidential biographies about three months ago, I didn’t expect to find such an underrated president as Coolidge. 

I’d move him into my top tier of George Washington, James Monroe, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, Grover Cleveland, and Harry Truman. 

I finally found an expert about Russia and Ukraine!

Posted: April 12, 2022 by chrisharper in Uncategorized

By Christopher Harper

Although I have spent a lot of time in Russia and Eastern Europe, I don’t consider myself an “expert’–unlike many of those talking heads on network television who have spent far less time than I have in situ.

Remember top U.S. military experts saying the Russians would roll over the Ukrainians? Simply put, they’ve been wrong about almost everything.

Nevertheless, I finally found someone who knows his stuff. William Browder is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management. As such, he managed the largest foreign portfolio investor in Russia during the 1990s and 2000s.

Browder has since run afoul of Vlad and his minions. So much so that Putin has tried to arrest him and put him in prison. One of his colleagues, Sergei Magnitsky, was arrested and died in prison.

In a recent interview with Andrew Sorkin, the co-anchor of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Browder pitched his analysis from a new book on Russia. See https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Freezing-Order/Bill-Browder/9781982153281

Here is an edited version of that interview:

Sorkin: What do you think Mr. Putin’s endgame is at this point?

Browder: Putin is a dictator. One of the great benefits of dictatorship is that he can steal as much money as he chooses. And he chooses to steal a lot.

After a while, in a country where people sort of think they’re in a democracy, they start to see that they’re hungry and not being cared for in hospitals, and their children aren’t being educated. They start getting angry, and they get angry at the guy in charge. And so, every once in a while, the guy in charge has to do something to make people less angry at him.

The purpose of these wars is that he was afraid of being overthrown. And so the best way to do that is to get everyone to rally around the leader. And so, when you’re talking about an endgame, there is no endgame. This is just him staying in power.

Sorkin: As a longtime target of Mr. Putin’s — and someone who I imagine has tried to better understand what motivates him — what do you think he is thinking?

Browder: The problem is that there’s some psychological features that feed into this whole thing, which make it a particularly toxic brew. The world that he lives in is like a prison yard. This is a world where everybody is sort of eyeing each other up aggressively, and everybody has to show strength to each other. You know the most powerful person in a yard has to be the most vicious person in order to keep their power.

And so his idea was to just destroy Ukraine and then thump his chest and show everybody how powerful he is. But his misjudgment in how effectively the Ukrainians are fighting back has made him look stupid. And for a prison yard type of person, that’s the worst thing that could ever happen.

Sorkin: Do you think he understands that?

Browder: Of course.

Sorkin: Do you think everyone around him is a yes man?

Browder: It’s not just the people around him. It’s also the people in the West. The Ukrainians have shown him huge disrespect by successfully fighting back. And so, for example, the war crimes that have been committed are not by accident. This is part of his thing.

He’s got to show that he and his people and everybody around him are so vicious. They’ll just keep on escalating and upping the ante, and they don’t care what people think about them. In fact, they want people to think this bad stuff about them because that makes them look more brutal.

Sorkin: Given what you’re saying, what is a reasonable way to think about the endgame?

Browder: There is no reasonable way for this thing to end. There’s only an unreasonable way.

It’s either he ends up taking over Ukraine and then moving his way toward the Baltic countries to challenge us at NATO — or for him to be defeated by Ukraine and then having the Russian people overthrow him because he was the weak guy who couldn’t beat Ukraine.

Sorkin: How do you handicap those two options?

Browder: I think each of those options has a 15 percent probability.

Sorkin: What’s the remaining 70 percent probability?

Browder: That he and the Ukrainians and all of us are stuck in this low simmer. It’s not going to be at the same level of awfulness that it is right now, but at this low simmering conflict that just goes on and on and on for years.

The wusses of journalism

Posted: April 5, 2022 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

Temple University has determined that its journalism graduates are having a tough time.

In an announcement, the administration said: “[W]e are seeing an increase in our journalism graduates go into their first jobs and leave before their first contracts are up. Some of our alumni are telling us they just weren’t prepared for the stress and the challenges they are facing.

“We all know it’s always been difficult to adjust to those first years in the field, but between the pandemic and a growing number of people who think journalists are ‘fake news,’ in addition to many other new challenges, we are losing some of our best potential journalists.”

I am admittedly old school. But I’m amazed at how journalism graduates and current practitioners have become wusses.

In my first few years in journalism, I covered demonstrations, terrorist attacks, a civil war, and mass murder.

I am not alone in my amazement. New York Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg called his younger colleagues “little dweebs” and “f—ing bitches” for “going on about their trauma” from the events on January 6, 2021.

In a hidden-camera video, Rosenberg called the mainstream media’s reaction to the events “over the top.”

He joked, “I know, I’m supposed to be traumatized.”

During much of my career in training journalists, I assigned students to some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the city to find stories that demonstrated the true nature of the locales.

My colleague Linn Washington, a longtime Philadelphia journalist, and I created Philadelphia Neighborhoods, an award-winning news organization.

From 2007 to 2013, our students told the stories of poor neighborhoods throughout the city, providing a much subtler view of how people—whatever their income and education—just wanted to have safe streets, a future for their children, and a way to make a good living.

The experience also toughened up student journalists who had rarely strayed outside of their comfort zone.

I’m not entirely sure what happened in the past decade, but I am saddened that some journalism students at Temple, which has a motto of “Temple Tough,” have gotten soft.

But what has happened at Temple is indicative of what has happened in much of the news media.

Bye, bye, Philly!

Posted: March 29, 2022 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
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By Christopher Harper

Philadelphia lost more than 25,000 residents from 2020 to 2021, the largest exodus from the city since 1975.

While politicians and social scientists scratch their heads over the decline, I find it appalling that it took a pandemic for people to realize how bad Philadelphia has become.

Democrat Mayor Jim Kinney locked the city for nearly two years, bankrupting businesses both small and large. Hospitals became almost solely the home for those dying of COVID while many patients couldn’t get essential surgeries, which meant more people died last year in the city than were born.

He actually hired a police chief named Outlaw—Danielle Outlaw. She has managed to oversee the largest number of officers retiring from the force because she doesn’t have their backs.

The city elected Larry Krasner, a card-carrying member of George Soros’s leftist vision, as district attorney.

As a result of this triumvirate, more people have been murdered in Philadelphia so far this year than last year, which ended with a record 562 homicides.

My wife and I joined the exodus a year ago after Black Lives Matter demonstrators frolicked through our neighborhood, forcing affluent businesses in our upscale neighborhood to erect plywood and extra security to confront the threat of theft and damage.

In a neck-snapping analysis in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the news organization determined that the flight was caused by several factors: a desire to flee crowded urban centers, a movement of young people back to their parent’s homes, and a need for more green space.

It’s clear that the news organization hadn’t paid attention to its own reporting. People were afraid to go out on the streets for fear they would be mugged or murdered.

After a high-profile murder near Temple University, parents hired private protection for their kiddies because they thought the university police force, the second largest in the state, couldn’t keep their loved ones safe.

Philadelphia is not alone. New York lost nearly 400,000 residents. Los Angeles saw more than 200,000 people leave. Washington stood at a net loss of more than 60,000.

What do these cities all have in common? Democrats run them!

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