Theodore Roosevelt

Ben Stiller: Replace Teddy Roosevelt Statue With One of Robin Williams

The woke panic gripping the nation now includes the board of New York City’s American Museum of Natural History. The museum and city are set to remove the iconic 14-foot statue of former president Theodore Roosevelt that’s sat outside the museum entrance for the past 80 years. And actor-director Ben Stiller has declared it be replaced with a statue of actor Robin Williams.

DreamWorks via IMDB

Virgil: Mark Cuban Provides Roadmap for Trustbusting the Tech Lords of Silicon Valley

Mark Cuban is another brash billionaire with a popular reality-TV show, an active Twitter feed (7.6 million followers), a habit of giving punchy quotes to journalists, and, yes, national political ambitions. And now the anti-Trump billionaire has become an inadvertent ally of the Trump administration’s populist crusade by providing a roadmap for antitrust action against Silicon Valley.

The Associated Press

Virgil: Google Tracks You, Uber Hacks You

At some point, the American people are going to conclude, for the sake of their privacy and security, that we can’t let this much power be concentrated into the hands of a few arrogant, irresponsible, and, frankly, neglectful, individuals and their companies. This isn’t just corporate malfeasance causing harm to individuals; this is malfeasance that jeopardize our economic and even national security.

In this photo illustration, A woman is silhouetted against a projection of a password log-

Virgil — Teddy Roosevelt’s Hammer: How the ‘Great Trust Buster’ Built the American Dream

In his famous “New Nationalism” speech in 1910, the “Great Trust Buster” Teddy Roosevelt described “the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will.” A century ago, that was how one “drained the swamp.” TR knew that the struggle to reform, and thereby secure the full blessings of citizenship, must always be new because in any era, if the struggle for reform ever grows old and tired, then we will lose those blessings. Today, it’s not Standard Oil and the railroads we have to worry about, but rather Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

Theodore Roosevelt campaigns for the Presidency in 1904. (AP Photo)

The AT&T-Time Warner Deal: Perspective from the Great Trustbuster, Part III — Theodore Roosevelt Explains Why Size Doesn’t Always Matter

In Part One of our series, we considered the curious partisan political inversion around the proposed AT&T-Time Warner deal, as Donald Trump has come out noisily in opposition, while Hillary Clinton seems quietly supportive. In Part Two, we introduced our guest-expert, the Great Trustbuster himself, Theodore Roosevelt, who explained that the history of the Republican Party’s antitrust policy is more complex than most people realize. Now, in Part Three, we will press Roosevelt for a specific opinion on the AT&T-Time Warner deal, and he will expand on his quantity-vs.-quality theory of regulation.

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The AT&T-Time Warner Deal: Perspective from the Great Trustbuster, Part II — Theodore Roosevelt Spells Out the Two Republican Traditions

Skepticism about big corporations and their doings is not quite so unorthodox for Republicans as you might think. The Republican Party got its start among the farmers, free laborers, and merchants of the Midwest, not on Wall Street. The GOP was the little-guy party, at a time when the Democratic Party—which had its own populist tradition, going back to Andrew Jackson—had been taken over by the Southern plantation slaveowners. But as the 19th century moved along, Main Street Republicanism became one strand of the Grand Old Party. Another strand was Big Business and Wall Street Republicanism.

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Lions Are People Too

Cecil, a socially-conscious king of the jungle, presumably eschewed the parched-grassland delicacies of antelope, zebra, and giraffe in favor of vegan fare. This would explain why his apostles trashed Walter Palmer’s vacation home and St. Sharon Osbourne, married to a known predator of smaller flying creatures, dubbed the hunter “Satan” and called for his head mounted to a wall. Such a beautiful creature would never stoop to the level of a beastly dentist.

Cowardly Lion