Open Letter to Cleveland Cavs Fans

This a pretty fantastic letter from Cleveland Cavaliers' owner Dan Gilbert:

Open Letter to Fans from Cavaliers Majority Owner Dan Gilbert

Dear Cleveland, All Of Northeast Ohio and Cleveland Cavaliers Supporters Wherever You May Be Tonight;

As you now know, our former hero, who grew up in the very region that he deserted this evening, is no longer a Cleveland Cavalier.

This was announced with a several day, narcissistic, self-promotional build-up culminating with a national TV special of his "decision" unlike anything ever "witnessed" in the history of sports and probably the history of entertainment.

Clearly, this is bitterly disappointing to all of us.

The good news is that the ownership team and the rest of the hard-working, loyal, and driven staff over here at your hometown Cavaliers have not betrayed you nor NEVER will betray you.

There is so much more to tell you about the events of the recent past and our more than exciting future. Over the next several days and weeks, we will be communicating much of that to you.

You simply don't deserve this kind of cowardly betrayal.

You have given so much and deserve so much more.

In the meantime, I want to make one statement to you tonight:

"I PERSONALLY GUARANTEE THAT THE CLEVELAND CAVALIERS WILL WIN AN NBA CHAMPIONSHIP BEFORE THE SELF-TITLED FORMER ‘KING’ WINS ONE"

You can take it to the bank.

If you thought we were motivated before tonight to bring the hardware to Cleveland, I can tell you that this shameful display of selfishness and betrayal by one of our very own has shifted our "motivation" to previously unknown and previously never experienced levels.

Some people think they should go to heaven but NOT have to die to get there.

Sorry, but that's simply not how it works.

This shocking act of disloyalty from our home grown "chosen one" sends the exact opposite lesson of what we would want our children to learn. And "who" we would want them to grow-up to become.

But the good news is that this heartless and callous action can only serve as the antidote to the so-called "curse" on Cleveland, Ohio.

The self-declared former "King" will be taking the "curse" with him down south. And until he does "right" by Cleveland and Ohio, James (and the town where he plays) will unfortunately own this dreaded spell and bad karma.

Just watch.

Sleep well, Cleveland.

Tomorrow is a new and much brighter day....

I PROMISE you that our energy, focus, capital, knowledge and experience will be directed at one thing and one thing only:

DELIVERING YOU the championship you have long deserved and is long overdue....



Dan Gilbert
Majority Owner
Cleveland Cavaliers

Sign of the Apocalypse

From Burt Fulsom:

....The Siena College presidential poll–a ranking of 44 presidents by 200 historians–put Franklin Roosevelt in first place. In other words, the man who, during his first two terms, gave us nonstop double digit unemployment–and 20 percent unemployment toward the end of his second term, is ranked ahead of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and all other American presidents.

And that may not be the worst indiscretion. These historians also ranked Barack Obama ahead of Ronald Reagan. In other words, if you start your presidency with 8 percent unemployment and run it to 10 percent (all the while going further in debt by more than $1,000,000,000,000) you are greater than the president who sharply reduced unemployment and inflation during his first term and then ended the Cold War in his second term.

Most Americans are repelled by the judgment of Siena College’s historians. Most Americans believe in more limited government and they are skeptical of concentrating power in the hands of one leader, or a small group of leaders. Most Americans instinctively smile when they read these words from James Madison: “The great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. . . . Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

Kagan - No Limit to Fed. Govt. Powers in Her Eyes

A friend sent me the video below from Elena Kagan's confirmation hearing and my blood literally boiled after watching it.

It should literally make every single, solitary American citizen sick to their stomachs to hear silence and stuttering from a woman who is going to be confirmed to the UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT when asked the question "Do we have the power to tell people what they have to eat every day."

Let's see what James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, had to say about the original intention of the Commerce Clause that so many liberals are hiding behind to mask their unquenchable desire to expand the role of the federal government:

"Yet it is very certain that it grew out of the abuse of the power by the importing States in taxing the nonimporting, and was intended as a negative and preventive provision against injustice among the States themselves, rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the General Government, in which alone, however, the remedial power could be lodged." - Letter to Cabell, February 13, 1829.

We are literally handing away liberty each and every day in this country, and I am scared to death that we all are going to wake up in the very near future and simply mutter "How did we let this happen."

Theodore Roosevelt on Success

"Only a very limited amount of the success of life comes to persons possessing genius. The average man who is successful----the average statesman, the average public servant, the average solider, who wins what we call great success----is not a genius. He is a man who has merely the ordinary qualities that he shares with his fellows, but who has developed those ordinary qualities to a more than ordinary degree." Theodore Roosevelt

And I Thought My Neighborhood Pool Was Busy This Summer

Residents crowd in a swimming pool to escape the summer heat during a hot weather spell in Daying county of Suining, Sichuan province July 4, 2010.

Warburg - Old School Banker

A great read from Niall Ferguson on one of the 20th Century's greatest bankers Siegmund Warburg:

......The distinction between transactions banking and relationship banking was already well understood in the 1960s. Warburg defined the former as “channelling big sums of money from certain quarters which had a surplus to certain other quarters where there was a scarcity of funds ... trading in money and of moving funds”. Relationship banking, by contrast, meant knowing the client in deep psychological detail. It was not about piling the securities high and selling them dear, it was about advising owners and managers.

The striking thing about this formulation is that Warburg regarded transactions banking as a thing of the past. From his perspective, looking back to his early career in Hamburg, New York and Berlin in the 1920s, transactions banking – the preference for quantity over quality – had been one of the root causes of the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression. The lesson of history, in his eyes, was that bankers should engage in advising firms they got to know intimately, rather than in speculation.

.......Beginning with his triumph in the hostile takeover of British Aluminium in 1958-1959, Warburg was renowned for his skill in boardroom battles, the key to which was his keen psychological understanding of both his own clients and the other side. Yet the basis for all that Warburg did was a set of five haute banque (elite banking) principles that he referred to in a 1953 memorandum directed at the US investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co (which he believed was deficient in all five). He wrote that “the important elements of a first-class private banking business” were:

1. Moral standing

2. Reputation for efficiency and high quality brain work

3. Connections

4. Capital funds

5. Personnel and organisation

.......Relationships were not just with clients. There were also “connections” to be cultivated. “Most of the substantial transactions which have been done by us are the result of the cultivation of contacts over very many years,” Warburg reminded his fellow directors in a typically admonitory memorandum from 1964. “It is, of course, important that the technical details of a transaction are dealt with in the most thorough and painstaking manner possible, but this should not make us forget that ... this would be fruitless without human contact with the client in question ... In our kind of business, the continuity of valuable connections overrides in importance the conclusion of any specific transactions.” It would be hard to find a better expression of the theory of relationship banking.

Relationships, then, were at the core of the haute banque style. “Our ambition should not be ... to do quantity-wise as much or even more business than our chief competitors,” wrote Warburg in 1968. “On the contrary, our emphasis should be on making SGW & Co an elite house, excelling in the service it gives to its industrial clients rather than on doing business on a mass-production basis.”

Amazing Grace

This morning at church, we had the pleasure of having Amazing Grace played by on the bagpipes.

It literally moved me to tears.

Paul Ryan - 4th of July Column

From today's Chicago Tribune:

America's first debt crisis

Honoring our founders' wisdom

By Paul Ryan

July 4, 2010

The Declaration of Independence, 234 years ago today, proclaimed that self-government exists in order to secure the rights of the people. As we celebrate America's birthday, it's easy to forget that this experiment in freedom nearly collapsed in its first decade because of a massive debt crisis.

The wave of debt now bearing down on the U.S. poses no less a threat to our way of life than our first debt crisis did. Can we learn anything from the financial upheavals of the 1780s that might guide us today?

Following the Revolutionary War, the U.S. found itself under a mountain of mostly foreign debts. Financial collapse wrecked the new American economy and foreign trade, brought civil violence, set states against each other and endangered our nation's moral character. Every state acted like a separate nation. The national government, under the Articles of Confederation, was practically moribund.

Some printed huge quantities of paper money with no guaranteed value, resulting in uncontrolled inflation. Creditors rejected this unsecured paper. Without real money, commerce ground to a halt. Farmers were especially hard hit. Some states enacted laws preventing debt collections, causing credit to disappear completely.

Massachusetts rejected these debtor laws. In 1786, gangs of farmers, led by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays, terrorized the western region. To stop foreclosures, they shut down the courts. The reign of violence peaked when upward of 2,000 men tried to capture the national arsenal in Springfield but were driven off by state militia.

In December 1787, two ringleaders of the Shays Rebellion were hanged. The U.S. was on the verge of dissolution. Self-government had become a mockery. Soon, the Old World powers would recolonize the states, perhaps invited by Americans themselves to restore order.

Earlier that year, a few public-spirited leaders who desperately wanted America's experiment in freedom to succeed met in Philadelphia. Rising above personal and partisan rancors, they drafted a new Constitution with the powers necessary to address the debt crisis and economic collapse.

The new government, led by President George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, his treasury secretary, resolved to assume, fund and pay off all foreign, private and state debts.

In 1791, the national debt equaled about 40 percent of the gross domestic product. With its interdict on paper money and its stable dollar guarantee, the Constitution combined with the financial instruments Hamilton created to fund the debt provided an incredibly powerful stimulus to economic growth. National and foreign trade reopened. Federal revenues grew rapidly from sales of western lands and the tariff. Old taxes were cut, and the Jefferson and Madison administrations imposed new limits on federal spending. By 1836, 45 years after Hamilton initiated his audacious debt plan, the U.S. government paid off the entire debt.

From this history, we see that a debt crisis dissolves social bonds, weakening economic, personal, social, moral and political relationships. As government monetizes the debt to meet rising interest rates, inflation is unleashed and the currency devalued. Money whose future value is unpredictable cannot serve its most important purpose, to provide a common rule to equate goods, services and work effort. When social transactions are undermined, people lose trust in one another.

A society without trust cannot long remain free. A paralyzed democratic government, unwilling to act against a predictable threat, such as a growing debt crisis, invites popular contempt and resistance. Frightened citizens whose representatives will not protect their private property or the public treasury may not only give up on their representatives but dismiss constitutional self-government as weak, inadequate, servile and ignorant.

Recent polls show a near majority believe their government has now become the chief danger to their rights.

America's looming debt crisis challenges this experiment in democracy. Political leaders should meet this crisis with the same seriousness and determination they would bring against an invading army. There are no Madisons, Hamiltons and Washingtons to save us from our folly, nor do we need a new Constitution. Yet the courage, imagination, wisdom and public spirit that provided the founders with the plan to end America's first debt crisis can also supply our needs. We only need leaders who will rise above narrow partisanship to confront our debt challenge and save our exceptional country.

Republican U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan represents the 1st Congressional District of Wisconsin.

The Most Interesting Man in the World

I can't get enough of these ads:

Inside of the Mind of Saints Coach Sean Payton

Some great stuff for football fans:

Saints video: Coach Sean Payton's first quarter, Super Bowl XLIV