Warren Buffett speaking [ht WSJ.com’s Political Diary]:
[T]he Republicans have an obligation to regard this as an economic war and to realize you need one leader and, in general, support of that. But I think that the Democrats when they’re calling for unity on a question this important, they should not use it to roll the Republicans. . . . You can’t expect people to unite behind you if you’re trying to jam a whole bunch of things down their throat.
* More: One way for small towns to save money is to merge, to realize economies of scale, reports WSJ. However,
Despite the popularity of merging, it’s rarely easy. Neighboring cities often have different property values, tax rates and levels of government service. People with higher property values often worry that sharing with less-expensive districts will lead to worse schools and fewer government services. More broadly, communities with healthy finances often aren’t eager to bail out neighboring cities in trouble.
So if you were looking for an Oak Park-River Forest to go with the longstanding OPRF High School, don’t — any more than for a River Forest High School. There was briefly the latter, 1946 to 1949, when 330 or so RF students attended the school as guests of River Forest Community High School District 223, which paid their way.
D-223 lost its cachet, however, and in 1949 was created District 200. This brought things back to what had been normal since 1899. At this time no man mentions a separate school without becoming an island or merely a flapper of gums.
* Yet more: The author writes “with clarity and pace, unfettered by historiography,” says J.P.D. Cooper in Times Lit Supplement 2/27/09, reviewing Stephen Alford’s Burghley: William Cecil at the court of Elizabeth I, a life of the man who ran things for QE1. The clarity and pace part sounds good, and I can do without superfluous historiography; so it looks like a good one, at least if you can stomach his persecution of Catholics and execution of Mary Queen of Scots.
As Cooper says, commending Burghley/Cecil for statesmanship,
Elizabeth had hoped that a quiet assassination might remove the need for a public trial. Burghley’s instinct was sounder, that justice had to be seen to be done.
Those were the days. Cooper also notes Burghley’s “conformity to Catholicism under Mary when so many Protestants went into exile.” Fast on his feet, that fellow.
* Yet more: A more savory account is that of Margaret Roper, daughter of Thomas More, the English chancellor who did anything but get ahead by going along, being beheaded by Henry VIII in a matter of conscience. He was the man for all seasons, but behind the man was the daughter, learned and accomplished and encouraging of him to the end, working past soldiers to give him a final hug in the Tower.
Author John Guy, in his A Daughter’s Love: Thomas and Margaret More, “perhaps goes too far when he suggests that Margaret might have been able to avert the Reformation,” says TLS reviewer Miranda Kaufmann (2/27/09). She was “the one person in England . . . who could match Tyndale as a translator and stylist, and could be relied on to conform to Catholic teaching and doctrine . . . But . . . she was a woman, so it never entered [church authorities’] heads,” Guy wrote.
She was able enough to correct an edition of the letters of St. Cyprian by their family’s friend and major creator of the Renaissance, Erasmus — at sixteen! Her father, no slouch as we know, his Utopia (the Happy Republic, a Philosophical Romance) an apt case in point, had home-schooled her and her siblings, teaching them Latin and Greek.
His friend Erasmus, by the way, ruled himself out of Thomas More-style heroism, writing in 1521, 14 years before More’s beheading, “Mine was never the spirit to risk my life for the truth.” He feared he would “behave like Peter” when trouble came — the Peter who produced the triple denial of Jesus. “When popes and emperors make the right decisions, I follow, which is godly; if they decide wrongly, I tolerate them, which is safe.”
Blithe Spirit 