Obama looking to avoid Waldorf hotel in New York after Chinese purchase

Every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has stayed in the presidential suite on the 35th floor of the Waldorf Astoria New York in Manhattan. The accommodations run $4,000-$6,000 per night, hotel officials say, and feature souvenirs collected from past commanders in chief and security measures like bulletproof glass windows. Current and former White House officials have long considered the hotel and its staff as the best in the world at hosting the most powerful man in the world.

That may all be about to change. President Barack Obama is on track to skip the Waldorf this fall when he heads to New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly, several officials told Yahoo News.

While the officials would not say so explicitly, they strongly indicated that the decision to reevaluate the historic relationship with the Waldorf was tied to the hotel’s sale to China’s Anbang Insurance Group, approved by U.S. regulators earlier this year. While Hilton will continue to operate the property for 100 years, one U.S. official linked the American decision to relocate the president to worries about Chinese espionage and to the announcement of an upcoming “major renovation” at the hotel that could provide an opportunity to install surveillance gear. The recent theft of millions of federal workers’ personal information, pinned on China, has fed the sense of alarm in Washington. China denies responsibility for the breach.

Read the rest here.

A sad, but probably necessary decision.

The State of the Union

For the love of God... STOP IT! It has slowly devolved from solemn state occasion to political theater to little more than a circus that is beneath the dignity of the Presidency and the Congress. We now have no less than four(!) responses coming from the opposition party. Every other member of Congress is giving seats in the gallery to politically charged "guests." Enough already. We need to go back to the old way and send the message up in writing. On which note, the modern custom is yet another legacy of President Wilson, the worst of the 43 men who have occupied the office.

Joyce Carol Oates depicts 'highly bigoted' Woodrow Wilson in new novel

Acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates explains why she has portrayed former US President Woodrow Wilson as 'highly bigoted and contemptuous of women’s suffrage' in her upcoming novel The Accursed.

Read the rest here.

For my take on Wilson see here.

Time to Kill the Turkey Pardon?

Of all the indignities a president must endure, officiating at the annual turkey pardon is perhaps the most unbecoming. Being mocked by late-night comedians or spit up on by a baby or called a liar by a member of Congress? Those things happen. But they pale next to this bizarre spectacle — sort of the turkey population’s version of the “Hunger Games” — in which the leader of the world stays the execution of two overweight birds while another 45 million or so shuffle off to the chopping block.

Every year in late November, the disbelieving eyes of the world turn to Washington to watch the White House’s current occupant exercise this presidential prerogative. And on Wednesday they weren’t disappointed as President Obama gamely feigned interest in the fate of the fowl in front of him.

Read the rest here.

Waaaay overdue.

In Defense of Ulysses S. Grant

RONALD REAGAN deserves posterity’s honor, and so it makes sense that the capital’s airport and a major building there are named for him. But the proposal to substitute his image for that of Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill is a travesty that would dishonor the nation’s bedrock principles of union, freedom and equality — and damage its historical identity. Although slandered since his death, Grant, as general and as president, stood second only to Abraham Lincoln as the vindicator of those principles in the Civil War era.

Born to humble circumstances, Grant endured personal setbacks and terrible poverty to become the indispensable general of the Union Army. Although not himself an abolitionist, he recognized from the very start that the Civil War would cause, as he wrote, “the doom of slavery.” Above all, he despised the Southern secessionists as traitors who would destroy democratic republican government, of which, Lincoln said in his first inaugural, there was no “better or equal hope in the world.”

Read the rest here.

The author makes some interesting points. But it seems he also downplays the rampant corruption in the Grant Administration. I have hitherto ranked Grant higher than many historians. (See my rankings here.) However I am not sold on his belonging in the same pantheon as the truly "Great" presidents.

Political Principals

Below are two short audio clips from a great American speaking on general political principals and discussing government and taxation. Anyone want to guess the identity of the speaker?

Political Principals

On Government Spending and Taxation

With grateful acknowledgment of the Vincent Voice Library at Michigan State University for their preservation of these and other gems of our national heritage.