Free Republic

Bush’s legacy keeps getting worse By Eugene Robinson, Published: April 25 In retrospect, George W. Bush’s legacy doesn’t look as bad as it did when he left office. It looks worse. I join the nation in congratulating Bush on the opening of his presidential library in Dallas. Like many people, I find it much easier to honor, respect and even like the man — now that he’s no longer in the White House. But anyone tempted to get sentimental should remember the actual record of the man who called himself The Decider. Begin with the indelible stain that one of...

I SAW “Argo” with Jerry Rafshoon, who was a top aide to President Carter during the Iranian hostage crisis, when six Americans escaped and were given sanctuary for three months by courageous Canadian diplomats. We were watching a scene where a C.I.A. guy can’t get through to Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s chief of staff, to sign off on plane tickets for the escaping hostages, so he pretends to be calling from the school where Jordan’s kids go. “Hamilton wasn’t married then and didn’t have any kids,” Jerry whispered, inflaming my pet peeve about filmmakers who make up facts in stories about...

If Columbia Business School Dean Glenn Hubbard were to advise his McKinsey-bound son on where to get his MBA, Hubbard says there are only four or five programs that he would recommend. He declines to mention the schools by name, but you can rest assured that Columbia would be on the list along with Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton. That leaves a lot of very good schools off the list. Hubbard is an economist by training. He joined Columbia in 1988, after beginning his teaching career at Northwestern. He was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George Bush...

Like many students, Steve Vonderweidt hoped that a master's degree in business administration would open doors to a new job with a higher paycheck. But now, about eight months after receiving his M.B.A. from the University of Louisville, Mr. Vonderweidt, 36 years old, hasn't been able to find a job in the private sector, and continues to work as an administrator at a social-service agency that helps Louisville residents obtain food stamps, health care and other assistance. He is saddled with about $75,000 in student-loan debt—much of it from graduate school. "It was a really great program," says Mr. Vonderweidt....

Want to get into business school? Be employable. As schools focus more attention on their job-placement numbers, several M.B.A. programs are now bringing in career-services staff to evaluate candidates for admission and set expectations for prospective students on what the school can, and can't, do in an uncertain job market. Business schools have long considered applicants' career goals, though admissions staff rarely sought input from the career office on whether a particular candidate's aims were realistic. But when the financial crisis upended the banking sector and sure-thing jobs on Wall Street disappeared, schools began formally tying input (applicants) to output...

The admissions department at Harvard Business School asked me to write a reflection on my first semester for the Class of 2015 pre-matriculation blog. Here’s what I sent in. I hope it gives an insight into what I’ve experienced the last four months. In summary, I’m loving every moment. Come visit me in the Spring semester if you’d like to see HBS for yourself! A Letter to the HBS Class of 2015 A Review of the First Semester of Harvard Business School By Ryan Allis, Class of 2014, Section F ____________________________ December 17, 2012 Dear Future Friend, Congratulations on getting...

Stanford's Graduate School of Business has leapfrogged the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and Columbia Business School to become the most expensive two-year MBA program in the world, according to an analysis by Poets&Quants. This year, Stanford is telling applicants that estimated cost of its two-year, full-time MBA program is a whopping $185,054, a new record. That is some $18,242 more than Stanford said it would cost an MBA student only two years ago, when Columbia was the school with the most expensive MBA program in the world. At that time, Columbia estimated that the cost to attend its MBA...

As he tries to engineer a comeback in this week's presidential debate, President Barack Obama needs to recognize two things. First, when it comes to politics, Mitt Romney treats himself as a product, not a person. Second, Republicans cannot defend their proposals in terms that are acceptable to a majority of voters. Romney, Ryan and the entire right know that their most deeply held belief – the one on which they won't compromise – is rejected by the vast majority of Americans. That's their faith that every problem in the economy and in society can be solved by throwing more...

Justice Antonin Scalia needs to resign from the Supreme Court. He’d have a lot of things to do. He’s a fine public speaker and teacher. He’d be a heck of a columnist and blogger. But he really seems to aspire to being a politician — and that’s the problem. So often, Scalia has chosen to ignore the obligation of a Supreme Court justice to be, and appear to be, impartial. He’s turned “judicial restraint” into an oxymoronic phrase. But what he did this week, when the court announced its decision on the Arizona immigration law, should be the end of...

B-school grad Joe Mihalic went on an extreme financial diet to pay down over $90,000 in debt in just seven months and charted his story through an anonymous blogging project. When he graduated from the Harvard Business School three years ago this month, the economy was a wreck. Nearly one in four of his classmates didn't have a job at graduation in May 2009. Yet, Joe Mihalic, then 26, was able to land a job with Dell (DELL) in Austin, Texas, at twice as much as the $52,000 a year he made before earning his MBA. But there was some...

It's understandable if unfortunate that the controversy surrounding the killing of Trayvon Martin has polarized the country along both racial and ideological lines. But there is one issue that should not have any racial connotations: the urgency of repealing "Stand Your Ground" laws. And leave it to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to speak the blunt truth about why these laws are dangerous -- and why the National Rifle Association keeps pushing them anyway. "In reality," Bloomberg said in a speech before the National Press Club last week, "the NRA's leaders weren't interested in public safety. They were interested in...

Maureen Dowd is a woman of many talents. She is, of course, a New York Times featured columnist, a Pulitzer Prize winning commentator, and the liberals acknowledged Queen of Snark. Ms. Dowd has also completely blown a gasket, if her column of last week (April 5th) is any indication of her psychological-emotional state. In her column of last week entitled, Men In Black, Maureen employs language and phraseology that her fellow liberals would quickly label “hate speech” if it were uttered by their foes. Ms. Dowd assails the Supreme Court in the most personal and vitriolic terms for their...

WASHINGTON — How dare President Barack Obama brush back the Supreme Court like that? Has this former constitutional law instructor no respect for our venerable system of checks and balances? Nah. And why should he? This court, cosseted behind white marble pillars, out of reach of TV, accountable to no one once they give the last word, is well on its way to becoming one of the most divisive in modern U.S. history. It has squandered even the semi-illusion that it is the unbiased, honest guardian of the Constitution. It is run by hacks dressed up in black robes. All...

Go ahead, call it shooting fish in a barrel. As soon as Ed Schultz mentioned at the top of his MSNBC show this evening that Alan Grayson would be a guest, you knew the former Dem congressman from Florida would say something outrageous. Sure enough, the guy who was roundly defeated last time around—but is giving it another go—delivered, claiming that Newt Gingrich is running "the most overtly racist campaign" since George Wallace. Grayson also managed to work in a reference to the Ten Commandment's prohibition of adultery. View the video here.

In many ways, Newt is the perfect man. He knows how to buy good jewelry. He puts his wife ahead of his campaign. He’s so in touch with his feelings that he would rather close the entire federal government than keep his emotions bottled up. He’s confident enough to include a steamy sex scene in a novel. He understands that Paul Revere was warning about the British. Mitt Romney is a phony with gobs of hair gel. Newt Gingrich is a phony with gobs of historical grandiosity. The 68-year-old has compared himself to Charles de Gaulle. He has noted nonchalantly:...

Woe to you, oh modern card-carrying homophobe. For it can't be easy to be you right now, what with all the terrifying changes taking place, all the dramatic sexual upheavals and flagrant displays of "unnatural" love being hurled like exotic sushi in your plain hamburger face these days. Oh, you poor dear. I see you there, glumly sipping your Starbucks gingerbread latte while Googling Swedish fetish porn in between checking the latest news on NASCAR.com in your lightly stained Dockers and beat-up Nikes, Cartoon Network blaring in the background, tattered copy of Shooters Monthly on the bedside. I see you...

Professional schools have had better years. Facing a brutal job market, underemployed graduates have begun to speak up, some even suing their former institutions, claiming they were duped into acquiring massive debt loads based on the promise of a secure, six-figure-salary job. That promise is particularly critical at business schools, where graduates expect a quick financial payoff as well as an education. At these programs, the standards for reporting employment statistics, in true B-school fashion, are rigorous and involve accountants (a system some law schools are considering). But even those career statistics can have their flaws. Prospective students take heed:...

MBA grads are shouldering record levels of debt as tuition rates head skyward, making the degree a risky investment that's not often approached with caution or restraint. In 2008, Brian Jenkins moved to Malibu, Calif., to start his MBA at Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business and Management. He had big ambitions for B-school, expecting the degree to help him land a six-figure-salary job in human resources at a top company. Pepperdine seemed poised to deliver. When he was a mere applicant, the admissions director gave him a personal tour of the business school, which commands a stunning perch overlooking...

To some, a MBA is a yardstick of business acumen or a launch pad for great accomplishments. While graduate students are expected to exercise increased independent and critical thought, the amount of leftist indoctrination that goes unchallenged is startling. In nearly every department, the MBA curriculum has got it wrong. Keynesianism: MBA programs teach that government spending and expansive monetary policy stimulates GDP expansion. Keynesian formulas suggest that recessions can be cured by stimulus spending and money supply growth. Stimulus ‘primes the pump’ of the economy. Well, no, stimulus has never worked, but MBA professors fail to mention this, as...

Bob Lutz, the former Vice Chairman of General Motors, is the most famous also-ran in the auto business. In the course of his 47-year rampage through the industry, he's been within swiping range of the brass ring at Ford, BMW, Chrysler and, most recently, GM, but he's never landed the top gig. It's because he "made the cars too well," he says. It might also have something to do with the fact that Maximum Bob, who could double as a character on Mad Men, is less an éminence grise than a pithy self-promoter who has a tendency to go off...