North, to the future: Sarah Palin's Farewell Address

Following is the poetic middle section of Sarah Palin's farewell address, delivered on July 26.

"It is the best road trip in America soaring through nature's finest show. Denali, the great one, soaring under the midnight sun. And then the extremes. In the winter time it's the frozen road that is competing with the view of ice fogged frigid beauty, the cold though, doesn't it split the Cheechakos from the Sourdoughs? And then in the summertime such extreme summertime about a hundred and fifty degrees hotter than just some months ago, than just some months from now, with fireweed blooming along the frost heaves and merciless rivers that are rushing and carving and reminding us that here, Mother Nature wins. It is as throughout all Alaska that big wild good life teeming along the road that is north to the future."

To really catch Palin's spirit, I recommend watching the recitation of it by The Great Shatner. And for something completely different, here is some fantastic verse by a great American poet, Robert Frost. This is the poem that he recited at Jack Kennedy's inauguration. But I like it anyway.

The Gift Outright
by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia.
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak.
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

Clifford S. Asness: Unafraid In Greenwich Connecticut

[From the Ney York Times' Dealbook: May 5, 2009, 6:07 pm: "Hedge Fund Manager Strikes Back at Obama. Clifford S. Asness is not afraid to defend himself against attacks from the Obama administration. The outspoken managing partner of AQR Capital Management, a $20 billion hedge fund in Greenwich, Conn., has written a scathing letter striking back at President Obama for his harsh words blaming hedge funds for Chrysler’s bankruptcy. The letter is making its way around Wall Street, where it’s being met with cheers from other hedge funds managers, one of whom sent it to DealBook. Among other things, Mr. Asness said he was “aghast at the president’s comments” and called them “backwards and libelous.” I found this through Diana West's blog. While she is quite the American Zionist, I think her angry skepticism of the GOP's post-election strategy is right on. This comes the same day that I noticed Richard Posner's recent renunciation of the GOP or the rump conservative movement as any kind of home for intellectual conservatism. It seems clear to me that the various forces and players on the non-evangelical American right have the tools, the talent and the ideas to recenter the Republican Party, to rebuild from the centrist pussyfootery of the recent McCain-Palin campaign which, despite my measured enthusiasm for the governor of Alaska last fall, I readily agree as a disaster. The party needs to convince disappointed lovers, fellow travelers, moderates, people who work for small business, and all kinds of independents, professionals and other dynamists that the Grand New Party should be and will be the opposite of the waxing Obama Mussolini-style corporate state...]

Unafraid in Greenwich Connecticut
Clifford S. Asness
Managing and Founding Principal
AQR Capital Management, LLC

The President has just harshly castigated hedge fund managers for being unwilling to take his administration’s bid for their Chrysler bonds. He called them “speculators” who were “refusing to sacrifice like everyone else” and who wanted “to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout.”

The responses of hedge fund managers have been, appropriately, outrage, but generally have been anonymous for fear of going on the record against a powerful President (an exception, though still in the form of a “group letter,” was the superb note from “The Committee of Chrysler Non-TARP Lenders,” some of the points of which I echo here, and a relatively few firms, like Oppenheimer, that have publicly defended themselves). Furthermore, one by one the managers and banks are said to be caving to the President’s wishes out of justifiable fear.

I run an approximately twenty billion dollar money management firm