Mixed Bag

Some random thoughts on the passing scene from Thomas Sowell:

• If you took all the fraud out of politics, there might not be a lot left.
  


• One of the problems with successfully dealing with threats is that people start believing that there is no threat. That is where we are, seven years after 9/11, so that reminding people of terrorist dangers can be dismissed as "the politics of fear" by Barack Obama, who has a rhetorical answer for everything.
  


• There are countries in Europe that would love to have their unemployment rate fall to the 5.7 percent unemployment rate to which ours has risen. Yet those who seem to want us to imitate European economic and social policies never seem to want to consider the actual consequences of those policies. "Unacceptable" is one of the big weasel words of our time-- almost always said when the person who says it has no intention of doing anything, and so is accepting what is called "unacceptable."
  


• The recent death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn should make us recall what he said when he was awarded the Nobel Prize: "The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles." What would a Barack Obama presidency mean, other than more concessions and broader smiles, while Iran goes nuclear? (Look what's happening with Georgia today! – Jim Lynch)
  


• At one time, it was said "The truth will make you free." Today, there seem to be those who think that rhetoric and hype will make you free. It might even be called the audacity of hype.
  

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On Shooting Taggers: Why Conservatives and Liberals Differ

Dennis Prager has a great (but a little edgy) comparison of view between Conservatives and Liberals; why it's in society's best interest to shoot (to wound) "taggers" or graffiti vandals. As in so many other areas, with regard to taggers, right and left see life through opposing moral prisms. On the left, the tagger is viewed as society's victim; on the right, society is viewed as the tagger's victim.

See where you wind up on the issue……MORE

Michelle Obama? Who really was that speaking last night?

Michelle Obama did a great job at presenting the speech that was prepared for her. I really wanted to just let myself go and believe that she was speaking from her heart.....she was really that good. In fact, I'd rather vote for the person that she presented to us last night, instead of her husband. She sounded like a Republican.

But, unfortunately, the cognitive dissonance was too severe, and I couldn't suspend my cynicism. The Michelle that I remember from the past 18 months is one who had never really been proud of her country, and one who found America so difficult to live in that it's hard to go on living