Nicely Said
Last Sunday, the NYTimes ran several excerpts from graduation commencement speeches from a wide variety of sources, from Tom Hanks to Presidennt Bush to Mario Batali. But the best of the lot was this section from Barack Obama's speech to Knox College. This guy has a gift.

There are those who believe that the best idea is to give everyone one big refund on their government - divvy it up into individual portions, hand it out, and encourage everyone to use their share to go buy their own health care, their own retirement plan, their own child care, education and so forth. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it - Social Darwinism, every man and woman for him or herself. ... This isn't us. This isn't how our story ends - not in this country. America is a land of big dreamers and big hopes. ... So let's dream. Let's imagine what we can do to give every American a fighting chance in the 21st century. ... Every one of us will have to work more, read more, train more, think more. We will have to slough off bad habits - like driving gas guzzlers that weaken our economy and feed our enemies abroad. Our kids will have to turn off the TV sets and put away the video games and start hitting the books. We will have to reform institutions, like our public schools, that were designed for an earlier time. Republicans will have to recognize our collective responsibilities, even as Democrats recognize that we have to do more than just defend the old programs.