Ralph R. Reiland
Mon, September 06, 2010
Back-to-School Advice
My first recommendation is very basic. Don't cut. As Woody Allen stated, "Eighty percent of success is just showing up."
And it's best to show up on ...
Tue, August 31, 2010
Clingin' in Pittsburgh
Clingin' in Pittsburgh
By Ralph R. Reiland
It took only a few seconds the other day to see how candidate Obama got the idea that we have a propensity in ...
Mon, August 16, 2010
Monkeying Around
Remember those stories about Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burned?
Actually, if he was really playing, it was probably a lyre, a small harp-like
stringed instrument. Fiddles weren't ...
Tue, August 10, 2010
Robbin' the Rich
Democrats in Congress, frightened by what voters are likely to do in November, have been given their marching orders by the Obama administration.
We're to be told ...
Tue, August 03, 2010
Slippin' and a-slidin'
I don't write a self-help column, or about household hints, but here's a warning about how I flew out the bathtub a few days ago.
It started with eczema, some dry ...
Tue, July 27, 2010
Big Benefits, Hot Air, Scarce Jobs
Pushing for more billions in deficit spending to extend jobless benefits to a record 99 weeks, or nearly two years, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently declared that more red ink and more dependency ...
Mon, July 19, 2010
I Won't Die for a $9 Pie
"As I tell my kids, dessert is not a right," declared Michelle Obama recently, promoting her anti-obesity agenda while addressing the annual NAACP convention.
I'd say the same thing ...
Tue, July 13, 2010
Obamanomics Out of Synch with Reality
With job creation in the private sector basically dead and a growing number of jobless workers ceasing to even look for work any longer, the number of people officially counted as part of the U.S. ...
Wed, July 07, 2010
Fish Tales and Casino Woes
SEA ISLE, N.J. --- The big news here on the beach is about sharks, whales, stripers (stripers, the fish, not strippers), and Atlantic City's casino revenues being down for the 21st month in a row, ...
Tue, June 29, 2010
Obamanomics & Hillarynomics: Dumb and Dumber
With job creation in the U.S. basically at a standstill aside from some government hiring of temporary Census workers, even after a trillion-plus in stimulus spending, Hillary Clinton's answer for ...
Mon, June 21, 2010
A Short Running Magic Show
How quickly the magic and arrogance has turned into mismanagement and excuses.
Cinching his party's nomination on the night of June 3, 2008, a pumped up Barack Obama concluded his triumphal St. ...
Mon, June 14, 2010
Beach News
Sea Isle, N.J. --- I don't want to sound like Burt Lancaster in the Louis Malle 1980 film "Atlantic City," but the news here today is that Busch's, the granddaddy of the big seafood ...
Mon, June 07, 2010
Obama's 'Single Dime' Hot Air
SEA ISLE, N.J.
We're sitting here on our beach chairs looking for tar balls. So far, everything's pristine. The gulls are still white, not yet looking like crows.
Tue, June 01, 2010
God, Like John Lennon, is Against Borders?
Cardinal Roger Mahony had a simple and supportive message for the tens of thousands of demonstrators in Los Angeles who were protesting against Arizona's attempt to crackdown on illegal immigrants: ...
Tue, May 25, 2010
Mi Casa es en Pakistan
Answering a student's question at a recent town hall meeting at Indian Hills
Community College in Iowa, here's how President Obama characterized the Arizona law that's designed to crack down on ...
Mon, May 17, 2010
Politically Correct Stupidity
The award this week for the craziest utterance goes to New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
Quoted below is his exchange with CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric ...
Mon, May 10, 2010
Obama: Stuck on Begrudge
Off the teleprompter for a few seconds while stumping for financial reform recently in Illinois, President Obama had this to say about money, incomes and success: "Now, what we're doing, I ...
Mon, May 03, 2010
Government Hurts Small Business
As the owner of a small restaurant, it felt good the other morning to open the newspaper and read this sentence: "Be proud, small-business owners! You're now the most trusted group in America. ...
Mon, April 26, 2010
Scary TEA Parties?
The Pulitzers for top-notch journalism aren't what they used to be.
Here's the way Pulitzer winner Eugene Robinson, an associate editor and columnist for the ...
Tue, April 20, 2010
Plucking the Fortunate Chickens
Here's the news from The New York Times on the day before tax day: "Forty-seven percent. That's the portion of American households that owe no income tax for 2009. The number is up from 38 ...
Mon, April 12, 2010
Dr. Galt
He's the Florida doctor who told his patients to go elsewhere for treatment if they voted for Obama. The message posted on his office door: "If you voted for Obama, seek urological care ...
Fri, April 02, 2010
Obamacare vs Jobs
Now that ObamaCare has been enacted, we definitely won't be knocking any new
archways through the wall at our restaurant and expanding into the empty storefront next door.
With a ...
Mon, March 22, 2010
Obama's Health Care Deceptions
What became quickly obvious while watching President Obama's recent interview about health care reform with Bret Baier on FOX is that we're still not getting straight answers about the proposed ...
Mon, March 15, 2010
Obama: Perfect Formula for Self-Destruction
It's not difficult to understand the fall of Obama --- the largest presidential drop in Gallup's approval ratings in half a century. Just start with Obama's overly-cocky notion that he's exceptional ...
Mon, March 08, 2010
Losing Faith in the Feds
"The majority of Americans say the government poses an immediate threat to individual rights and freedoms," stated CNN, summarizing the results of a recent CNN/Opinion Research Corporation ...
Mon, March 01, 2010
American Collectivism: A Record of Failure
The hype is always better than the real thing.
Boston's Big Dig sounded like a half-decent project in the beginning. Approved in 1982 with a price tag $2.6 billion, ...
Tue, February 23, 2010
Krugman Cracks Up Over Obama's 'Lemon Socialism'
Paul Krugman, a top columnist and liberal opinion-maker at The New York Times, sounded last week like he was tied to the tracks and saw a train coming around the bend.
Mon, February 15, 2010
Obama's Anti-Business Prejudice
Whatever happened to the Constitutional concept of equal protection under the law?
Whatever happened to the recognition that it's overwhelmingly the nation's ...
Mon, January 25, 2010
Racist Codes and Naked Threats
I didn't know that trucks were racist.
Here's the exchange between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Newsweek's Howard Fineman on election night as they watched the ...
Tue, January 19, 2010
On the Rails
I'm writing this somewhere in a swamp in Georgia, chugging northward on the Auto Train, the world's longest passenger train.
At full capacity, the train carries 650 ...
Wed, January 13, 2010
From Florida: Cold Oranges, Hot Commies
PALM BEACH, FLORIDA --- The column headline here in this morning's newspaper: "So where's my global warming, dude?"
"Dude" could be Al Gore, ...
Mon, January 04, 2010
Crotch Bombers, Caulking and Now Health Care?
So Umar Farouk Abdullmutallab got within an inch of having several hundred airline passengers fall from the sky over Detroit on Christmas day, thanks to the ongoing holes in government-run ...
Mon, December 28, 2009
The Fully Inept Tackle Health Care
As I'm writing this, they're in a panic in Congress, voting in the wee hours, bribing reluctant senators with millions in slush funds for their respective states, all to ram through a health reform ...
Mon, December 21, 2009
Greenies Gone Nuts for the Holidays
This is a tough time of year for eco-friendly global planners.
In Copenhagen they tried to put together a deal to save the world's forests while we rode around with millions of Christmas ...
Wed, December 16, 2009
Alarmists, Running Hot and Cold
Our dreadful destiny was that we were either going to starve to death or be buried by advancing glaciers in a new Ice Age.
The alleged villain was global cooling, ...
Mon, November 30, 2009
Official Hot Air
There's a new picture of Obama that's sticking in my mind, like a song that keeps playing in your head (the one that keeps playing for me this week is "Empire State of Mind," especially ...
Mon, November 23, 2009
Imperial Hypocrisy
You can't say we weren't warned ahead of time about Obama's globalist and controlling tendencies.
As candidate Obama explained in a campaign speech in Portland on ...
Tue, November 17, 2009
Scary Porches, Scarier Doctors
In news from the world of universal health care, Mark Wattson, 35, collapsed in pain in the street in Swindon, England, a month after he had his appendix removed.
Mon, November 09, 2009
Obamanomics: A 'Stimulus' for Backlash, Not Jobs
What the Democrats should have learned from their losses last Tuesday is that the advice given by political strategist James Carville to candidate Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential campaign is ...
Mon, November 02, 2009
Gang Green Going to the Dogs
The sky-is-falling greenies are getting progressively batty.
It's not enough that we shut down our oil, gas and coal industries, bike to work, switch our light bulbs, take cloth bags to the ...
Mon, October 26, 2009
From Central Planning: We Are Going to Let You Die
I saw two stories last week that had diametrically opposed messages.
The first was pro-life in the broadest sense of the word, a breakthrough against cancer via a new tumor-targeted genetic ...
Mon, October 19, 2009
Clunker Cars, Clunker Nukes?
I don't want to sound negative, but is anyone else getting the idea that we're starting to live in Clunker Nation?
Start with the actual clunker deal where we ...
Mon, October 12, 2009
Obama's Job Killing Agenda
You ain't seen nothin' yet" was Ronald Reagan's standard rally-ending line during his 1984 reelection campaign. He won 49 states, losing only his opponent's home state, Minnesota, 49.7 percent ...
Mon, October 05, 2009
Atlas is Shrugging
The headline in Investor's Business Daily, September 16, 2009: "45% of Doctors Would Consider Quitting If Congress Passes Health Care Overhaul."
The ...
Mon, September 28, 2009
Obama Care's 'Shovel Ready Cure'
I thought we were supposed to think that Sarah Palin was nuts for bringing up "death panels."
Now a few weeks later the cover of Newsweek has a giant plug ...
Mon, September 21, 2009
All the News That's Fit to Bury
On the morning after, there wasn't much surprise in the lobby of our D.C. hotel about the coverage in the New York Times about the previous day's Taxpayer March on Washington, a massive rally that ...
Tue, September 15, 2009
Van Jones' Green Ruse
You can't grasp the full craziness of Van Jones, Obama's now-resigned "green jobs czar" (actual job title: "Special Advisor on Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation for the White House ...
Tue, September 08, 2009
Surgeons Cut Into Obamacare
President Obama's flip comments about surgeons maximizing their incomes through
unnecessary foot amputations and needless tonsillectomies have produced a biting response from the American ...
Mon, August 31, 2009
Obama's Strategy of Demonizing to Gain Control
I guess we're supposed to look at hospitals now and see nothing but gigantic butcher shops, filled with greedy doctors who are unnecessarily sawing off our feet and taking out our kids' tonsils in ...
Mon, August 24, 2009
The Deflating of Obama's Hot Air Balloon
What we're seeing with Obama's plummeting poll numbers is a quick case of buyer's remorse.
More broadly, Gallup reports that conservatives now outnumber liberals in ...
Tue, August 18, 2009
Things Getting 'Sospechoso" at White House
Like good and obedient informants for the government, we're supposed to contact Obama's snitch line to report anything "fishy" that's being said about the administration's flawed plan for ...
Tue, August 11, 2009
Redistribution via Obamacare
You'd think the central planners at the White House would go outside their small group of relatives for some top-notch expertise when they're trying to revamp something as big and complex as ...
Tue, August 04, 2009
Defund the Pork, Pay for Health Care
Here's how to get the money for health care reform, and it can be done without Congress passing another trillion in spending, without putting more job-killing mandates and taxes on business, without ...
Mon, July 27, 2009
Barack, Meet Friedrich
"This isn't about me," President Barack Obama asserted recently, maintaining that his manic push for a vote on health care reform is all about us.
In ...
Mon, July 20, 2009
A Nation of One-Eyes Sycophants?
President Obama got it right for a minute during his recent stop in Africa. "No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top," he told the ...
Mon, July 13, 2009
Barack Obama: Rush to Failure
"No more talk," said President Barack Obama in his weekly address on July 4th. "No more talk. No more delay."
He was referring to health care reform and telling us ...
Mon, July 06, 2009
A Reluctant Champ and Struggling Terrapins
SEA ISLE, N.J. --- I felt like JonBenet's mother (during the good years) last week at the dog show up on the boardwalk. Simba, our golden retriever, repeated his prize-winning performance from the ...
Wed, July 01, 2009
Beach Neurons and DC Craziness
SEA ISLE, N.J. --- After the age of 20, they say we lose about 50,000 brain cells a day. That means you'll probably lose a couple hundred just during the few minutes it takes to read this ...
Tue, June 23, 2009
Goldens Bearing Gifts
SEA ISLE, N.J. --- The big news here is that Simba, our 1 1/2-year-old golden retriever, just won "Best of Show" in this year's dog show on the boardwalk.
Mon, June 15, 2009
Class Warfare at the Beach
Sea Isle, N.J. --- I met Elaine Scattergood for breakfast last week in a little coffee shop on Dune Drive in Avalon, just a few blocks from where Utz potato chip magnate Michael Rice is putting the ...
Mon, June 08, 2009
From the Dock of the Bay
SEA ISLE, N. J. --- An article I read somewhere said that Eskimos have 100 words for snow and that Sherlock Holmes could distinguish 140 types of tobacco by their ashes.
Mon, June 01, 2009
Sunset Thoughts at the Beach
SEA ISLE, N.J. --- They had a contest here last week in The Press of Atlantic City that asked readers in 25 words or less to submit answers to this question: "Where do you want to spend the ...
Tue, May 26, 2009
Unintelligent Government 'Intelligence'
The New York Times recently reviewed "Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan," a book by Doug Stanton about how small units of ...
Tue, May 19, 2009
Socialism: Faith Trumps Reality
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman got it right about a lot of things, but he was overly optimistic when he wrote in 1990 that socialism was dead.
Tue, May 12, 2009
Students' Confusion About Capitalism
"Only 53 percent of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism," according to an April survey by Rasmussen.
Age made a large difference in how Americans ...
Mon, May 04, 2009
Fixing GM Via Collectivism?
I don't want to sound like an old geezer, but I remember the days when General Motors had no trouble creating plenty of excitement and glamour each fall with its annual model changes.
Tue, April 28, 2009
Crazy Word Games, from Team Obama
It looks like the "intelligence" in the Obama administration isn't too intellectual.
Instead of using the word "terrorism" to describe things ...
Mon, April 20, 2009
Obama's Message: He's Better Than America
Barack Obama likes to pat himself on the back regarding his ability to see both sides of an issue. It's through this willingness to listen to both sides, he says, that he comes up with the smartest ...
Mon, April 13, 2009
Creating Monsters
Creating Monsters
By Ralph R. Reiland
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster, wrote Friedrich ...
Mon, April 06, 2009
Nuts to the Brown-Eyed Visionaries
I'm boycotting Brazil nuts.
The top nut in Brazil, Brazil's president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silvamade (big enough to be known simply as Lula, like Beyonce or Madonna) told British Prime ...
Mon, March 30, 2009
Hope, or Hopelessly Naive?
It didn't take long for Iran to brush aside President Obama's holiday video.
In his video message to Iran, complete with Farsi subtitles and timed to coincide with the celebration of the ...
Mon, March 16, 2009
Obama's Irrational Economics
Newsweek's Howard Fineman wrote in his "A Turning Tide?" column last week that "the establishment is beginning to mumble that the president may not have what it takes."
Mon, March 09, 2009
Obamanomics: Ideology over Common Sense?
"So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can," Barack Obama said during a January 2008 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. "It's just that it will bankrupt ...
Mon, March 02, 2009
Of Mice and Pork
Lucky for a certain mouse, he resides in Nancy Pelosi's district and has a good shot at getting some of the recently passed $787 billion stimulus bill.
The rodent on the way to hitting the ...
Mon, February 23, 2009
Socialism's 'Fatal Conceit]
The appeal of socialism, wrote Nobel-winning economist F. A. Hayek, "depends on the instinctual appeal of promised consequences The problem, argued Hayek, is that socialism cannot possibly do ...
Mon, February 16, 2009
Obama's Economics: Exactly the Wrong Prescription
Repeatedly talking down the American economy, Barack Obama, pushing the so-called "stimulus" package, incessantly claimed that we're "going through the worst economic crisis since the ...
Tue, February 10, 2009
King of Hope Falls Flat at Starting Gate
"Well, That Certainly Didn't Take Long" was the headline one of Maureen Dowd's recent columns in The New York Times.
Dowd, unswervingly a Bush-basher and ...
Tue, February 03, 2009
Groups vs. Individualism
The biodegradable celebratory balloons at the parties marking the election of the nation's first black (or half-black) president weren't even half-deflated before Robert Reich, economic adviser to ...
Mon, January 26, 2009
Cuba at 50: Scarce Freedom, Scarce Fish
I was in Hollywood, Florida, on January 8, the 50th anniversary of Fidel Castro's triumphant arrival in Havana after shooting his way to power and ousting the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio ...
Tue, January 20, 2009
Trouble in Paradise
Given what's being called the biggest case of financial fraud ever committed by one person in American history, I figured that things would be different this year during our annual Winter Break trek ...
Wed, January 14, 2009
UAW Unionized Insecurity
General Motors lost $10.6 billion in 2006. The company lost another $38.7 billion in 2007, the largest annual loss in automotive history. Through the third quarter of 2008, GM lost another $21.2 ...
Thu, January 08, 2009
The Times' Gas Pains
Unhappy that we're no longer paying $80 for a fill-up, The New York Times wants to get the price back up to $4 or $5 a gallon by way of a hefty hike in federal taxes.
Tue, December 30, 2008
Obama's 'Rubin Constellation'
Where's the "Change we can believe in"?
On both Wall Street and in Congress, the same old crooks and party hacks who succeeded in producing the greatest ...
Mon, December 22, 2008
A U.N. Approved Christmas Dinner
The year-end news isn't pretty. The dictatorship-dominated United Nations has its eye on our Christmas hams as a key source of allegedly man-made global warming and planetary suicide.
Wed, December 17, 2008
Progressive Dissatisfaction
Expressing disillusionment with Obama's top appointments in a December 7 article in The Washington Post entitled "This Wasn't Quite the Change We Pictured," David Corn, Washington bureau ...
Tue, December 09, 2008
Big 3, Big Mismanagement
It was a dead heat. General Motors sold 9.37 million vehicles worldwide in 2007 and lost $38.7 billion. Toyota sold 9.37 million vehicles in 2007 and made $17.1 billion.
Mon, December 01, 2008
Big Three Out of Gas
Things didn't go so well on November 20 when the CEOs of the Big Three automakers came to Congress, tin cups in hand, to make a pitch for another $25 billion.
The ...
Tue, November 25, 2008
Felons on the Loose
I intended to write today about why workers making $18 an hour (the median wage of the nation's 107 million full-time wage and salary workers in the third quarter of 2008, according the latest report ...
Mon, November 17, 2008
A Vote for Change?
Now that the facts are in, it's clear that the pro-Obama mainstream media continued to get it wrong right through election night.
Watching Wolf Blitzer add up the numbers on election night, ...
Mon, November 10, 2008
The Failure of Big Government Conservatism
How did the Republicans fall so fast, so completely?
In an article published on the morning of election day, "Will GOP Learn from This?," Michael D. ...
Mon, November 03, 2008
Obama vs. Jobs
I interviewed two plumbing company owners in Pittsburgh over the weekend about Barack Obama's economic proposals for small business. One has 15 employees and 12 trucks. The other has 52 employees and ...
Tue, October 14, 2008
Obama vs. Business and Jobs
Even The New York Times now says that Barack Obama's unswerving call for tax increases -- to impose more "fairness" -- is the wrong prescription during the current instability in the U.S. ...
Mon, October 06, 2008
Nice Words, Killer Friends
In March, Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia on race was inspiring and knowledgeable.
Attempting to put the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy behind him, Obama ...
Mon, September 29, 2008
Bad Mix: Mortgages, Liberals and Community Organizers
The roots of today's mortgage-based financial crisis can be traced back to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which Jimmy Carter signed in 1977. Seeking to address complaints from anti-poverty ...
Mon, September 22, 2008
Obama and the Times Flunk Economics 101
Watching three of Wall Street's top-five investment banks – Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch – vanishing as independent entities, Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf recently warned ...
Tue, September 16, 2008
Government vs. Small Business
The Eggs Benedict on a thick slice of Italian toast with a side of German potato pancakes at the Dor-Stop Restaurant in Pittsburgh is one of the best breakfasts in town.
Wed, September 10, 2008
Barack's Failed Euro-nomics
The top concern of voters this year is the economy, with 40 percent of respondents in a recent New York Times/CBS News poll rating the "economy and jobs" as their primary issue in the ...
