Play On!

• My beautiful wife and I together make a perfectly complete team: she’s the looks and brains, and I bring along the important things.

• The wondrous beauty of liberal logic: A young girl may procure an abortion without the permission of even her parents, but if Obama’s crowd gets its way, an overweight girl may be required to confine her food intake according to a government-mandated diet.

• President Barack Obama in his presidential campaign spoke out strongly in favor of abortion rights, including even “late-term cases.”

• My beautiful wife and I spent Sunday afternoon after Christmas watching TV — splitting our time between a brilliant program of Baroque music from Lincoln Center and a football game between the Jaguars and the Redskins. Who says you can’t be “a compleat angler”?

•“Nothing is easier for politicians than to play Santa Claus by promising benefits, without mentioning the costs — or lying about the costs and leaving it to future governments to figure out what to do when the money runs out. In the U.S., the biggest and longest-running scam of this sort is Social Security. Fulfilling all the promises that were made, as commitments in the law, would cost more money than Social Security has ever had. … All the incentives are for politicians to do what they have done, namely to promise benefits without raising enough taxes to pay for them. That way, it looks like you are getting something for nothing. When crunch time comes and politicians are either going to have to tell people the truth or raise taxes, the almost inevitable choice is to raise taxes. If the people think they are already taxed too much, then the taxes can be raised only for people designated as ‘the rich.’ If ‘the rich’ object, then demagogues can denounce them for their selfishness and ‘greed’ for objecting to turning over to politicians ever-growing amounts of what they have earned. … The scams inherent in welfare states are not only economically counterproductive, they turn group against group, straining the ties that hold a society together.” — Economist Thomas Sowell

• The American people living only in the world of the present are as ignorant of our past as though it never happened. And they have bargained away the future in unpayable debt, which they frantically use to embellish the present. It’s questionable if California’s out-of-sight debt will be assumed in a rescue mission by the federal government. If that unwise rescue is proffered, how many other states knee-deep in red ink will soon follow? It seems more politicians are concerned with raising the debt ceiling than they are in paying off the debt. Our laws are being written by presidential “czars” and bureaucrats while Congress is left out in the cold. Death panels are already being considered to tell us how long the government will allow our Earthly lives to be. Anyone who is optimistic about the U.S.’s fiscal future is in “la-la land.” Reduction in spending, and using the money saved to pay off debt, is the only hope for spendthrifts who dare to envisage any future, however bleak. In coming years, shouldn’t we be ready for changes that might seem incredible to us now?