Tom Brady “More than this…”

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Great article below that mentions Woodhand’s faith:

A Big Talent in a Small Package

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: February 1, 2012

INDIANAPOLIS — With the New England Patriots, “Rudy” doesn’t beg to get in the game.

Built for another position, cornerback or place-kicker, Danny Woodhead takes handoffs from Tom Brady, catches passes out of the backfield, returns kickoffs and allows Coach Bill Belichick yet another snicker at the expense of Rex Ryan.

Remember when Ryan and the Jets waived the 5-foot-maybe-8-inch, possibly 200-pound Woodhead in September 2010, after signing him as an undrafted free agent out of little Chadron State College two years earlier? It was then speculated that Belichick, master of reconnaissance, was merely interested in pumping Woodhead for information for that week’s showdown against the Jets.

Inactive that week, Woodhead proceeded to gain 926 yards in 14 games for the 2010 Patriots, was re-signed to a two-year contract and sat down for an interview Wednesday at the Patriots’ Super Bowl hotel to insist that he never once considered himself to be Belichick’s tool of subterfuge.

No more, at least, than he ever succumbed to the notion that his dream of a career in football was actually more of a fantasy.

Woodhead said he did not think that when he wasn’t offered a scholarship to play football for his beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers or from any other major program, or when he went undrafted after smashing N.C.A.A. rushing records, or when Ryan and the Jets cut him loose after 15 carries and 8 receptions during the 2009 season.

“People always ask me, ‘If you could change anything, what would it be?’ ” Woodhead said, his shaggy hair poking free from his wool hat. “I always say: ‘I wouldn’t change anything. It’s all been part of my journey.’ ”

Woodhead will not be the only undrafted player in Sunday’s Super Bowl rematch between the Patriots and the Giants. He will be far from the most accomplished, considering the breakout season that Victor Cruz has had for the Giants and the fact that Woodhead plays behind BenJarvus Green-Ellis in the New England backfield.

But every Super Bowl brings with it a name or two with a college next to it that makes us think, “He played where?” In Woodhead’s case, it was Chadron State, a small-town school of about 2,800 students in the northwestern corner of Nebraska.

“We got a lot of rural kids, off the ranch,” said Brad Smith, the athletic director at Chadron State, who recruited Woodhead out of North Platte (Neb.) High School, made him the program’s first full scholarship player and coached him in his freshman season.

Here is one place where the “Rudy” (of Notre Dame screen lore) simile fails to hold up: Woodhead may have been too small for major-college recruiters — much less N.F.L. scouts — but he was a superior athlete, a track and basketball star in high school, with enough hops to throw down a dunk.

“Went to one of his high school basketball games when I was recruiting him and if he scored 28 or 29 points, 20 of them were penetrating to the basket because the guys guarding him just couldn’t keep up,” Smith said in a telephone interview. “He was just too fast.”

However disappointed that Nebraska contacted him once and never called back, Woodhead chose Division II Chadron State not so much as a consolation prize but as an opportunity to reunite with his older brother, Ben, a wide receiver. In his first game, Woodhead ran for a 16-yard, fourth-quarter touchdown. He moved past two upperclassmen into the starting lineup by the following week.

“I didn’t even have to say anything to them, they approached me and said, ‘Coach, you’ve got to play this kid,’ ” Smith said. “That’s how obvious it was.”

Woodhead spent four years chewing up yardage in the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference against the likes of Western New Mexico, Colorado School of Mines and Chadron’s intrastate rival, Nebraska-Kearney. There were few star perks, no glamorous bowl games and a lot of 10- to 12-hour bus rides. At least there was a pathway to the pros, walked by Don Beebe as a third-round pick (82nd over all) by the Buffalo Bills in 1989.

Beebe went on to play in six Super Bowls, winning one with Green Bay. Back in Chadron, they named the small football stadium after him. He, in turn, reached out when Woodhead was a senior, telling him, “I did it, so can you.”

“I don’t know if playing at a smaller school has motivated me more,” said Woodhead, who often cities his faith and the ability not to look back as he runs forward. “It was just the fact that I wanted to be the best I could be, big school or smaller school. Who knows what would have happened if I had gone to a bigger school?”

He might have had to beg some dismissive coach for a spare minute. If there was one true “Rudy” moment for Woodhead on the way to his first Super Bowl, it was early last season during a practice when Ivan Fears, the Patriots’ running backs coach, wanted to see what he was made of.

“We had the linebackers blitzing, and you could see he wanted to light them up, wanted the contact,” Fears said. “He’s a little guy with a big heart. If you say to him, ‘You can’t,’ he’s going to tell you, ‘How do you know?’ ”

Chances are, Belichick will know enough not to risk Woodhead’s having to protect Brady on obvious passing downs against the Giants’ oppressive rush, but he may well be of value in the Patriots’ hurry-up offense given his ability to catch and run.

First things first: Woodhead got a call from Smith in Chadron on Tuesday night, and his old mentor offered this advice.

“Look around this week, take it all in and keep it there,” he said. “You made it to the Super Bowl.”

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In the first post I included the liberal case against Steve Jobs concerning the “sweat shop” he used. Here I am just going to show the conservative view.  It is best done by this 9 minute video clip and transcript.

“FREE TO CHOOSE” 1: The Power of the Market (Milton Friedman)
Free to Choose ^ | 1980 | Milton Friedman

Posted on Monday, July 17, 2006 4:20:46 PM by Choose Ye This Day

FREE TO CHOOSE: The Power of the Market

Friedman: Once all of this was a swamp, covered with forest. The Canarce Indians who lived here traded the 22 square miles of soggy Manhattan Island to the Dutch for $24.00 worth of cloth and trinkets. The newcomers founded a city, New Amsterdam at the edge of an empty continent. In the years that followed, it proved a magnet for millions of people from across the Atlantic; people who were driven by fear and poverty; who were attracted by the promise of freedom and plenty. They fanned out over the continent and built a new nation with their sweat, their enterprise and their vision of a better future.

For the first time in their lives, many were truly free to pursue their own objectives. That freedom released the human energies which created the United States. For the immigrants who were welcomed by this statue, America was truly a land of opportunity.

They poured ashore in their best clothes, eager and expectant, carrying what little they owned. They were poor, but they all had a great deal of hope. Once they arrived, they found, as my parents did, not an easy life, but a very hard life. But for many there were friends and relatives to help them get started __ to help them make a home, get a job, settle down in the new country. There were many rewards for hard work, enterprise and ability. Life was hard, but opportunity was real. There were few government programs to turn to and nobody expected them. But also, there were few rules and regulations. There were no licenses, no permits, no red tape to restrict them. They found in fact, a free market, and most of them thrived on it.

Many people still come to the United States driven by the same pressures and attracted by the same promise. You can find them in places like this. It’s China Town in New York, one of the centers of the garment industry __ a place where hundreds of thousands of newcomers have had their first taste of life in the new country. The people who live and work here are like the early settlers. They want to better their lot and they are prepared to work hard to do so.

Although I haven’t often been in factories like this, it’s all very familiar to me because this is exactly the same kind of a factory that my mother worked in when she came to this country for the first time at the age of 14, almost 90 years ago. And if there had not been factories like this here then at which she could have started to work and earn a little money, she wouldn’t have been able to come. And if I existed at all, I’d be a Russian or Hungarian today, instead of an American. Of course she didn’t stay here a long time, she stayed here while she learned the language, while she developed some feeling for the country, and gradually she was able to make a better life for herself.

Similarly, the people who are here now, they are like my mother. Most of the immigrants from the distant countries __ they came here because they liked it here better and had more opportunities. A place like this gives them a chance to get started. They are not going to stay here very long or forever. On the contrary, they and their children will make a better life for themselves as they take advantage of the opportunities that a free market provides to them.

The irony is that this place violates many of the standards that we now regard as every worker’s right. It is poorly ventilated, it is overcrowded, the workers accept less than union rate __ it breaks every rule in the book. But if it were closed down, who would benefit? Certainly not the people here. Their life may seem pretty tough compared to our own, but that is only because our parents or grandparents went through that stage for us. We have been able to start at a higher point.

Frank Visalli’s father was 12 years old when he arrived all alone in the United States. He had come from Sicily. That was 53 years ago. Frank is a successful dentist with a wife and family. They live in Lexington, Massachusetts. There is no doubt in Frank’s mind what freedom combined with opportunity meant to his father and then to him, or what his Italian grandparents would think if they could see how he lives now.

Frank Visalli: They would not believe what they would see __ that a person could immigrate from a small island and make such success out of their life because to them they were mostly related to the fields, working in the field as a peasant. My father came over, he made something for himself and then he tried to build a family structure. Whatever he did was for his family. It was for a better life for his family. And I can always remember him telling me that the number one thing in life is that you should get an education to become a professional person.

Friedman: The Visalli family, like all of us who live in the United States today, owe much to the climate of freedom we inherited from the founders of our country. The climate that gave full scope to the poor from other lands who came here and were able to make better lives for themselves and their children.

But in the past 50 years, we’ve been squandering that inheritance by allowing government to control more and more of our lives, instead of relying on ourselves. We need to rediscover the old truths that the immigrants knew in their bones; what economic freedom is and the role it plays in preserving personal freedom.

That’s why I came here to the South China Sea. It’s a place where there is an almost laboratory experiment in what happens when government is limited to its proper function and leaves people free to pursue their own objectives. If you want to see how the free market really works this is the place to come. Hong Kong, a place with hardly any natural resources. About the only one you can name is a great harbor, yet the absence of natural resources hasn’t prevented rapid economic development. Ships from all nations come here to trade because there are no duties, no tariffs on imports or exports. The power of the free market has enabled the industrious people of Hong Kong to transform what was once barren rock into one of the most thriving and successful places in Asia.

Another great article from Hillsdale College. Today we look at the Dept of Education. This is a three part series from Charles Murray. Here is part two:

January 2012

Charles Murray
American Enterprise Institute

Do We Need the Department of Education?

Charles Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He received his B.A. in history at Harvard University and his Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has written for numerous newspapers and journals, including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, and National Review. His books include Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, What It Means to Be a Libertarian, and Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality. His new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, will be published at the end of January.

The following is adapted from a speech delivered in Atlanta, Georgia, on October 28, 2011, at a conference on “Markets, Government, and the Common Good,” sponsored by Hillsdale College’s Center for the Study of Monetary Systems and Free Enterprise.

THE CASE FOR the Department of Education could rest on one or more of three legs: its constitutional appropriateness, the existence of serious problems in education that could be solved only at the federal level, and/or its track record since it came into being. Let us consider these in order.

(Last time I covered part 1)

(2) Are there serious problems in education that can be solved only at the federal level?

The first major federal spending on education was triggered by the launch of the first space satellite, Sputnik, in the fall of 1957, which created a perception that the United States had fallen behind the Soviet Union in science and technology. The legislation was specifically designed to encourage more students to go into math and science, and its motivation is indicated by its title: The National Defense Education Act of 1958. But what really ensnared the federal government in education in the 1960s had its origins elsewhere—in civil rights. The Supreme Court declared segregation of the schools unconstitutional in 1954, but—notwithstanding a few highly publicized episodes such as the integration of Central High School in Little Rock and James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi—the pace of change in the next decade was glacial.

Was it necessary for the federal government to act? There is a strong argument for “yes,” especially in the case of K-12 education. Southern resistance to desegregation proved to be both stubborn and effective in the years following Brown v. Board of Education. Segregation of the schools had been declared unconstitutional, and constitutional rights were being violated on a massive scale. But the question at hand is whether we need a Department of Education now, and we have seen a typical evolution of policy. What could have been justified as a one-time, forceful effort to end violations of constitutional rights, lasting until the constitutional wrongs had been righted, was transmuted into a permanent government establishment. Subsequently, this establishment became more and more deeply involved in American education for purposes that have nothing to do with constitutional rights, but instead with a broader goal of improving education.

The reason this came about is also intimately related to the civil rights movement. Over the same years that school segregation became a national issue, the disparities between black and white educational attainment and test scores came to public attention. When the push for President Johnson’s Great Society programs began in the mid-1960s, it was inevitable that the federal government would attempt to reduce black-white disparities, and it did so in 1965 with the passage of two landmark bills—the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Higher Education Act. The Department of Education didn’t come into being until 1980, but large-scale involvement of the federal government in education dates from 1965.