He owes his escape from poverty to the work ethic and the values his mom drummed into him -- and to Chic-fil-A french fries, Tim Scott says. His single parent mother often worked 16 hour days as a nurses assistant "cleaning up other people's feces," so Tim and his brothers would have food in their bellies and clothes on their backs. As a freshman in high school in North Charleston, Tim Scott couldn't afford to buy a sandwich at Chic-fil-A.  But he'd often make a meal of the fries at a restaurant near the movie theater where he worked part time.  One day the restaurant's owner struck up a conversation.  John Moniz became Tim Scott's mentor. "My mother taught me how to shoot for the stars, but he taught me how to think it through," Mr. Scott said. "It's about thinking your way out of poverty."  Having a job is good, John Moniz told Tim.  But creating jobs is better.  After college, Tim Scott started his own insurance agency. 

Welcome to the shortest day of the year here in the Northern Hemisphere - or, as it's also known this year, Moron Day.  Today, anyone with a three-digit IQ gets to make fun of morons and retards - in particular, all the morons who panicked over Mayan Calendar Idiocy, and all the morons to whom TIME Magazine credits for re-electing Zero. Actually, though, the End of the World didn't happen today because that already happened on November 6th.  At least for America.... Yet there are some House Pubs who aren't whimpering.  Yesterday, 13 of them pushed Speaker Boehner's Plan B off a cliff.  This turned even the folks at Fox into Nervous Nellies, blaring Fiscal Crisis Nears As Plan B Fails.  This is a real two-fer.  First, the quicker we go over this dreaded "fiscal cliff" thing, the better. Second, this vote damages Boehner's speakership hopefully beyond repair.  All it takes is 17 of the 234 House Pubs to Just Say No to Boehner on January 3rd, and he's out.  John Boehner is a nice, amicable, and competent guy.  But he's the wrong guy now to be in charge of the only chance we have for fiscal sanity and reigning in Emperor Zero.  There's a scene in Godfather I that every House Pub should be thinking of now.

"Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed." This statement by Michelle Obama on Feb. 18, 2008, at an appearance at UCLA, initially struck me as supremely arrogant and frightening... because it is supremely arrogant and frightening; and it is an honest expression -except for the putting-down-divisions part - of what Obama has tried to do as President. It is an expression of progressive presumptuousness: trying to make people better; thinking the right leaders can mold us into the kind of people that the progressives think that we should be. But let's look at it from a different angle; perhaps we should be thanking Michelle Obama for her challenge that we start living up to and acting upon the principles of America's founding.

In times past, political leaders would lay out their domestic and foreign policies in clear, coherent terms. President Obama talks about getting our fiscal house in order but fails to propose any meaningful spending cuts. His proposals to increase the tax rate on the top 2 percent of taxpayers would fund the government for eight days - assuming no behavioral change by those whose feathers are being plucked. In the real world, we know people will spend a great deal of time and effort to avoid paying high marginal tax rates. In high tax states such as California and New York, high earners will be expected to pay marginal tax rates well over 50 percent. We only need to look at what happened in Britain after the former Labor government of Gordon Brown increased the top rate to 50 percent. In the tax year 2009-10, more than 16,000 people declared an annual income of more than 1 million British pounds. This number fell to 6,000 after the tax rate was increased, partially because two-thirds of those who earned 1 million pounds or more left Britain to avoid the top rate. George Osborne, the current finance minister, just announced that the Conservative government will reduce the rate in order to obtain more revenue.  Why can't -- or won't -- Mr. Obama figure this out?

It was, said the business correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, "akin to pot-smoking pagans driving the Mormons out of Utah." Rick Newman was referring to the votes last Tuesday (12/10) which made Michigan -- birthplace of the United Auto Workers and the Teamsters -- the 24th right to work state. Organized labor wouldn't have suffered this stunning defeat if union bosses hadn't tried to amend Michigan's constitution to forbid any restrictions on their power.  Their hubris led to their downfall -- a fate the ancient Greeks would instantly recognize -- and a huge win for the people of Michigan.

Most of us learn -- eventually -- from experience.  That's the hard way.  We'd avoid a lot of pain if we learned more from the experience of others. To learn from the experience of others is the reason why we study history.  But history isn't taught much any more in our public schools, or in our colleges and universities.  It shows. History doesn't ever repeat itself, exactly.  But as Mark Twain noted, it rhymes.  History rhymes because people the world over are more like than unlike each other, and because people haven't changed all that much over the millennia.  We have the same virtues and the same vices as the ancient Greeks and Romans.  The same passions motivate us.  So we make essentially the same mistakes, over and over again. In an earlier column, I mentioned a favorite poem, "The Gods of the Copybook Headings," by my favorite poet, Rudyard Kipling.  To those who don't study history, it must seem eerie how, writing in 1919, Kipling captured the essence of the Obama administration.

If you want to have your strongest and most positive impact on your culture, the way to do it is to live with integrity - meaning that you know your principles, and you live by them and speak from them. There are solitary creatures like pandas and bumblebees; there are social animals like wolves and wildebeests; but we are the only living creatures on earth who have culture. Culture is created when your knowledge, wisdom, and innovations can be transmitted and have an impact over time and space, beyond your immediate influence. With culture, when a problem is solved by one person, it has the possibility of being solved forever, and throughout the entire culture; which means that the culture can change in significant ways over time. Let's talk about how you can have an impact on it.