Daniel Wiseman

The Country Must Stop “Letting Itself Go”

My grandmother had an expression, more a worldview, the way in which she separated the winners from the losers in life. If she really wanted to insult someone she would say: “I don’t understand why that person has let himself go.”

At year’s end, try improving instead of changing

“I can change.” Every lying, cheating son-of-a-gun begging for another chance, not usually even a second chance or third or even a fourth or fifth chance, has used that line.

NCAA and Penn State: The Dance Continues

Disingenuous. The quality of being less than genuine or honest. How else can one describe the NCAA’s penalizing its member school, Pennsylvania State University, for allegedly failing to stop the activities of a career pedophile on the football team’s coaching staff? For college football will this be the straw that breaks the proverbial camel’s back?

John Roberts’ “Gold Lining” Moment

Before everyone becomes too apoplectic and apocalyptic about the horrendous Supreme Court ruling upholding the Health Care Affordability Act of 2010, let’s pause to find the silver lining behind this veritable cloud.

Getting Used to the Good Life in New Jersey

Stepping outside onto the terrace of an apartment building in northern New Jersey brings the realization that the state is one large forest with towns and roads carved amidst it. That’s, of course, excluding the swamps across the Hudson River from New York City and the farmland to the west and south. One thing is for sure: It is no mystery why New Jersey is called the Garden State. New Jersey is verdant to a fault with mega-pollen outbreaks to confound allergy sufferers and mosquitoes to buzz the ears all night long ruining sleep patterns the entire summer.

Homosexuals and the elite private school sex scandal

The sex scandal is ever with us: Catholic priests; Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker; Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky; Coach Sandusky and Penn State. The list could and does go on and on. In America, sex sells beer, cars, deodorant, and everything else. We have become a highly-sexualized society compared to our Puritan and Pilgrim roots.

Obama, Congress, and “Disappointment Was My Closest Friend”

Disappointment seems to me to be a particular poison pill of our times. Rarely though do we hear of it mentioned as compared to other feelings. Disappointment is a “fine whine” of a feeling, cultivated, nurtured for years, and buried within the confines of one’s own heart or soul. However, when one looks under the anger, or the rage, or the addiction, or the rationalization or the self-justification, one finds almost always that that is where disappointment lives.

Tea Party People Shone Like Beacon in Wisconsin

Now that the country has been saved to live and fight another day, isn’t it time that all of us stop and salute and say “Thank Heaven for the Tea Party!” That’s right, the June 5 Wisconsin recall election has come and gone with Gov. Scott Walker winning a stunning 54 percent of the vote and sending a stinging rebuke to those who believe in government instead of liberty and freedom.

Barack Obama’s perverse world without the perversity

Remarkably, in today’s highly sexualized world, the only thing President Obama is not perverse about is perversity.

49 Days of Life’s Lessons

On the Jewish calendar, this time of year commemorates the 49 days between the Exodus from Egypt and the Jewish people receiving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, 3000-plus years ago. Jewish tradition asserts that each of these 49 days represents a step from impurity to purity. Each day has its significance and import and is numbered and counted to inculcate fully that "today is the day" and it cannot be lived again and therefore one is obligated to focus upon that day, and to use it and to live it well.

“We can’t go back to Obama’s failed policies of the past”

There’s a scene from the BBC Comedy Series “Blackadder” that’s highly informative considering Barack Obama’s demented “Forward” campaign theme.

Government pandering in time of elections

In Hollywood, there’s no business like show business. In politics, there’s no pandering like pandering to young adults.

Earth to Peggy Noonan – We have a Problem

More than three years into the Obama presidency, Wall Street Journal newspaper columnist Peggy Noonan amazingly notices for the first time that there’s a problem.

Honest Mistakes: The Government’s Workbench

People do stupid things. Elite baseball players make errors. The best doctors can’t bat a thousand. Everyone could be more careful, thoughtful, and thorough when it comes to picking a career or even matters of personal conduct. Nobody is immune from screw ups. In war, troops get killed by friendly fire. We’re never going to rise above fallible human beings.

Bad Amendments of the 20th Century

At the dawn of the 20th Century, the U.S. Constitution had been unchanged for more than 40 years since the amendments of 1865-1870 that prohibited slavery. But then the country panicked. Fearful of the shift from an agrarian to industrialized society and the movement of people from the country to the city, the United States 100 years ago experienced a crisis of confidence that led to something called progressivism. Progressivism was the belief that the government could and should mandate something called the public good as opposed to traditional values of limited government and individual responsibility.

The Presidential Election: Let’s Party Like It’s 1856?

The presidential election was unusually heated. The Republican Party standard-bearer campaigned on a contentious social issue. The Democrats warned that the Republicans were extremists and their victory would lead to disaster for the country. Talk of a third-party candidacy was everywhere. The Democratic Party had been badly wounded having suffered devastating losses in the most recent mid-term elections two years previously. The Democrats had sponsored and passed a federal piece of legislation that divided the nation. The Republicans were still involved in crony capitalism.

Toulouse Murders Show France’s True Colors

Back in 2004, authors John J. Miller and Mark Molesky wrote in “Our Oldest Enemy” that the cherished idea of French friendship with the United States has little basis in reality. The French have always been the United States’ rivals, they stated, and have harmed and obstructed U.S.interests more often than not. The authors assert that France’s support to the American Revolution was minimal, although it appears that the Major General, the Marquis de Lafayette, was a devoted aide to George Washington during the 18th Century American struggle against the British.

Walking Clueless in the Big Apple

Bump, Excuse me. Sorry about that. It’s a fact of life in New York City that body contact, the bumping into another person, is going to happen. Not to be confused with bumping into an old acquaintance on the street. I’m talking about shoulder to shoulder stuff or accidentally stepping on someone else’s foot.

Can the Republicans become an anti-Statist Party?

Others have said it, but the problem “trying our political souls,” is Statism. The United States has had more than 150 years of a “progressive” agglomeration of power in the hands of an ever expanding State apparatus.

Linsanity: New York’s Flavor of the Moment

I rub my fingers together in a gesture indicating an indescribable essence, what the French call, je nais se quoi, that intangible magic that makes something distinctive or attractive.