Thought for Today

"That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly."

~~~~~ Thomas Paine

Thought for Today

"To prejudge other men's notions before we have looked into them is not to show their darkness but to put out our own eyes."

~~~~~ John Locke

Thought for Today

"It is wise to direct your anger towards problems – not people; to focus your energies on answers – not excuses."

~~~~~ William Arthur Ward

Thought for Today

"If you are not egotistical, you will welcome the opportunity to learn more."

~~~~~ John Templeton

Thought for Today

"Wall Street people learn nothing and forget everything."

~~~~~ Benjamin Graham

Thought for Today

"When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that."

~~~~~ William Kingdon Clifford

Thought for Today

"Next to a circus there ain't nothing that packs up and tears out faster than the Christmas spirit."

~~~~~ Kin Hubbard

Thought for Today

"There is overwhelming evidence that the higher the level of self-esteem, the more likely one will be to treat others with respect, kindness, and generosity."

~~~~~ Nathaniel Branden

Thought for Today

"What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long."

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

Thought for Today

"Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party."

~~~~~ James Fenimore Cooper

Heirloom Jam Cake Recipe

Here in Lebanon, TN, one of the most respected members of our community is JB Leftwich. He is retired from a long and successful career as teacher, journalist, and businessman. Although he is now 91 years old, he still writes a regular weekly column, "Second Thoughts," for The Lebanon Democrat, our local daily newspaper.

In his latest column, Mr. Leftwich mentions a special cake which was one of his mother's specialties, and which his wife still bakes for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. He was kind enough to furnish the recipe. Here it is, exactly as he wrote it:

Grandma's Jam Cake

3 1/2 c. flour
6 whole eggs
1 1/2 c. buttermilk
2 c. sugar
1 c. butter
2 c. seedless blackberry jam
2 c. walnuts
1 c. candied orange peel
1 box raisins
2 tsp soda
2 tsp cloves
2 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp allspice

Directions: Cook in a large stem pan greased and sprinkled with flour and at 250 to 300 degrees for about three hours. While cooking, place pan of water in oven under cake.

Enhance the flavor by placing the baked cake in a closed container with slices of apples scattered about. An ounce of Bourbon in a small open bottle or flask adds another dimension.

Source: JB Leftwich, "Second Thoughts," The Lebanon Democrat, 11/27/09 (republished 12/17/10)

Thought for Today

"You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips."

~~~~~ Oliver Goldsmith

Thought for Today

"America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!"

~~~~~ Israel Zangwill

Thought for Today

"The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind."

~~~~~ James Truslow Adams

Thought for Today

"Never ask of money spent
Where the spender thinks it went.
Nobody was ever meant
To remember or invent
What he did with every cent."

~~~~~ Robert Frost

Thought for Today

"There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare."

~~~~~ Sun Tzu

Thought for Today

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty."

~~~~~ John Adams

Thought for Today

“His career delivers this message: It can be wiser to follow than to lead. Let the innovators hit the beaches and take the losses; if you hold back and follow, you can clean up in peace and quiet.”

~~~~~ David Gelernter

Thought for Today

"If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error."

~~~~~ John Kenneth Galbraith

Thought for Today

"Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?"

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

Thought for Today

'When walking through the "valley of shadows," remember, a shadow is cast by a Light."

~~~~~ Austin O'Malley

Thought for Today

"When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves."

~~~~~ Viktor E. Frankl

Thought for Today

"Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing."

~~~~~ Thomas A. Edison

Thought for Today

"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding."

~~~~~ Louis D. Brandeis

Thought for Today

"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the expense of everyone."

~~~~~ Frederic Bastiat

Thought for Today

"If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see."

~~~~~ Henry David Thoreau

Thought for Today

"Political tags – such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth – are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire."

~~~~~ Robert A. Heinlein

Thought for Today

"An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory."

~~~~~ Franklin P. Jones

Thought for Today

"My experience has been in a short 77 years that in the end when you fight for a desperate cause and have good reasons to fight, you usually win."

~~~~~ Edward Teller

Thought for Today

"The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth."

~~~~~ Frederick Law Olmsted

Thought for Today

"The income tax created more criminals than any other single act of government."

~~~~~ Barry Goldwater

Thought for Today

"As a small businessperson, you have no greater leverage than the truth."

~~~~~ John Greenleaf Whittier

Thought for Today

"When your outgo exceeds your income, the upshot may be your downfall."

~~~~~ Paul Harvey

Thought for Today

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."

~~~~~ Peter Drucker

Thought for Today

"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive."

~~~~~ Thomas Jefferson

Thought for Today

"You can't legislate intelligence and common sense into people."

~~~~~ Will Rogers

Thought for Today

"Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you."

~~~~~ Carl Sandburg

Thought for Today

"We need more of the Office Desk and less of the Show Window in politics. Let men in office substitute the midnight oil for the limelight."

~~~~~ President Calvin Coolidge

Thought for Today

"What is done with joy is always better done."

~~~~~ H. L. Mencken

Thought for Today

"The public, more often than not, will forgive mistakes, but it will not forgive trying to wriggle and weasel out of one."

~~~~~ Lewis Grizzard

Thought for Today

"People in their handlings of affairs often fail when they are about to succeed. If one remains as careful at the end as he was at the beginning, there will be no failure."

~~~~~ Lao Tzu

Thought for Today

"A half truth, like half a brick, is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries better."

~~~~~ Stephen Leacock

Thought for Today

"The federal deficit is outrageous. For years I've asked that we stop pushing onto our children the excesses of our government. And what the Congress finally needs to do is pass a constitutional amendment that mandates a balanced budget – and forces government to live within its means. States, cities, and the families of America balance their budgets. Why can't we?"

~~~~~ Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today

"There is a secret pride in every human heart that revolts at tyranny. You may order and drive an individual, but you cannot make him respect you."

~~~~~ William Hazlitt

Thought for Today

"The character of a people may be ruined by charity."

~~~~~ Theodor Herzl

Thought for Today

"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."

~~~~~ Winston Churchill

Thought for Today

"I would rather die than do something which I know to be a sin, or to be against God's will."

~~~~~ Joan of Arc

Thought for Today

"The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself."

~~~~~ Thomas Szasz

Thought for Today

"An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life."

~~~~~ Robert A. Heinlein

Thought for Today

"What is a moderate interpretation of the text? Halfway between what it really means and what you'd like it to mean?"

~~~~~ Antonin Scalia

Thought for Today

"Bravery is the capacity to perform properly even when scared half to death."

~~~~~ Omar N. Bradley

Thought for Today

"Controversy is only dreaded by the advocates of error."

~~~~~ Dr. Benjamin Rush

Thought for Today

"The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion."

~~~~~ Edmund Burke

Thought for Today

"In the days ahead we need to systematically redevelop our approach to this [terrorism] problem, recognizing that the worst outcome of all is one in which terrorists succeed in transforming an open democracy into a closed fortress."

~~~~~ Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today

"From the beginning of our history the country has been afflicted with compromise. It is by compromise that human rights have been abandoned."

~~~~~ Charles Sumner

Thought for Today

"We live in a world of guns, bombs and terror. To conquer hate seems a nigh-impossible task."

~~~~~ Theodore Bikel

Thought for Today

"No man can purchase his virtue too dear, for it is the only thing whose value must ever increase with the price it has cost us. Our integrity is never worth so much as when we have parted with our all to keep it."

~~~~~ Ovid

Thought for Today

"No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people."

~~~~~ William Howard Taft

Thought for Today

"If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance."

~~~~~ Orville Wright

Thought for Today

"Victory is sweetest when you've known defeat."

~~~~~ Malcolm Forbes

Thought for Today

"What people fail to appreciate is that the currency of corruption in elective office is, not money, but votes."

~~~~~ James L. Buckley

Thought for Today

"One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty in finding someone to blame your troubles on. And when you do find someone, it's remarkable how often their picture turns up on your driver's license."

~~~~~ P.J. O'Rourke

Thought for Today

"Habit with him was all the test of truth; It must be right: I've done it from my youth."

~~~~~ George Crabbe

Thought for Today

"If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, and that is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are."

~~~~~ Charles de Montesquieu

Thought for Today

"Prosperity is the surest breeder of insolence I know."

~~~~~ Mark Twain

Thought for Today

"The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults."

~~~~~ Alexis de Tocqueville

Thought for Today

"It is defeat that turns bone to flint; it is defeat that turns gristle to muscle; it is defeat that makes men invincible."

~~~~~ Henry Ward Beecher

Thought for Today

"This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer."

~~~~~ Will Rogers

Thought for Today

"Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks."

~~~~~ Warren Buffett

Thought for Today

"Like its politicians and its war, society has the teenagers it deserves."

~~~~~ Joseph Priestley

Cowardly Liberal Journalists

The Juan Williams firing has been thoroughly dissected and debated from every conceivable angle – except for one.

Maybe I've missed it, but I haven't seen anyone describe how all of Juan Williams' courageous liberal colleagues at NPR rose as one and resigned in mass protest at his unconscionable treatment. Oh, that's right – no one has described it because it never happened. In fact, not one of Juan's fellow NPR journalists, friends and colleagues who worked with him for a decade, has uttered so much as a peep in his defense.

To me, their silence is deafening. Acquiescence in evil equals tacit approval of evil.

The so-called professional journalists at NPR – every man and woman of them – ought to be hanging their heads in shame. They have proven beyond any doubt that they are exactly what we on the right have always suspected: hot air balloons – gasbags devoid of any real substance who go wherever the prevailing leftist doctrinal winds carry them, then collapse in a heap once they run out of (OPM) fuel.

If nothing else, Juan Williams has learned who his real friends are.

Thought for Today

"To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals – this alone is worth the struggle."

~~~~~ William Osler

Thought for Today

"The genius of the American system is that through freedom we have created extraordinary results from plain old ordinary people."

~~~~~ Sen. Phil Gramm

Thought for Today

"No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation."

~~~~~ Gen. Douglas MacArthur

Thought for Today

"The principle of maximum diversity operates both at the physical and at the mental level. It says that the laws of nature and the initial conditions are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Always when things are dull, something new turns up to challenge us and to stop us from settling into a rut. Examples of things which make life difficult are all around us: comet impacts, ice ages, weapons, plagues, nuclear fission, computers, sex, sin and death. Not all challenges can be overcome, and so we have tragedy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth."

~~~~~ Freeman Dyson

Thought for Today

"If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize than it is to get permission."

~~~~~ Rear Admiral Grace Hopper

Thought for Today

"A Roman divorced from his wife, being highly blamed by his friends, who demanded, 'Was she not chaste? Was she not fair? Was she not fruitful?'

Holding out his shoe, asked them whether it was not new and well made. Yet, added he, none of you can tell where it pinches me.

~~~~~ Plutarch

Thought for Today

"Any idiot can face a crisis – it's day to day living that wears you out."

~~~~~ Anton Chekhov

Thought for Today

"You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength."

~~~~~ Marcus Aurelius

Thought for Today

"I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago."

~~~~~ Edgar Allan Poe

Thought for Today

"Yes, there's such a thing as luck in trial law but it only comes at 3 o'clock in the morning. You'll still find me in the library looking for luck at 3 o'clock in the morning."

~~~~~ Louis Nizer

Thought for Today

"People can be divided into two classes: those who go ahead and do something, and those who sit still and inquire, 'Why wasn't it done the other way?'"

~~~~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

Thought for Today

"The Government of the absolute majority instead of the Government of the people is but the Government of the strongest interests; and when not efficiently checked, it is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised."

~~~~~ John C. Calhoun

Thought for Today

"One of life's best coping mechanisms is to know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire – then you've got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat and a lump in the breast are not the same kind of lump. One needs to learn the difference."

~~~~~ Robert Fulghum

Thought for Today

"All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than an existence of mediocrity."

~~~~~ James Fenimore Cooper

Thought for Today

"Hold fast to the Bible. To the influence of this Book we are indebted for all the progress made in true civilization and to this we must look as our guide in the future."

~~~~~ Ulysses S. Grant

Thought for Today

"If you are poor, though you dwell in the busy marketplace, no one will inquire about you; if you are rich, though you dwell in the heart of the mountains, you will have distant relatives."

~~~~~ Chinese proverb

Thought for Today

"No power in society, no hardship in your condition can depress you, keep you down, in knowledge, power, virtue, influence, but by your own consent."

~~~~~ William Ellery Channing

Thought for Today

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

~~~~~ Elie Wiesel

Thought for Today

"When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts."

~~~~~ Larry Ellison

Thought for Today

"The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm."

~~~~~ Aldous Huxley

Thought for Today

"The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer."

~~~~~ Charles F. Kettering

Thought for Today

"What light is to the eyes – what air is to the lungs – what love is to the heart, liberty is to the soul of man."

~~~~~ Robert Green Ingersoll

Thought for Today

"There are two ways of meeting difficulties: You alter the difficulties or you alter yourself to meet them."

~~~~~ Phyllis Bottome

Thought for Today

"Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort."

~~~~~ John Ruskin

Thought for Today

"Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame and danger that their acts would otherwise involve... But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to the other persons to whom it doesn't belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish that law without delay ... No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic."

~~~~~ Frederic Bastiat

Thought for Today

"The pleasure we derive from doing favors is partly in the feeling it gives us that we are not altogether worthless. It is a pleasant surprise to ourselves."

~~~~~ Eric Hoffer

Thought for Today

"Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear."

~~~~~ Thomas Babington Macaulay

Thought for Today

"The safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death."

~~~~~ Voltaire

Thought for Today

"A hero is one who knows how to hang on one minute longer."

~~~~~ Novalis

Thought for Today

"If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters."

~~~~~ Alan K. Simpson

Thought for Today

"There is, in fact, no recognized principle by which the propriety or impropriety of government interference is customarily tested. People decide according to their personal preferences."

~~~~~ John Stuart Mill

Thought for Today

"The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth; that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one."

~~~~~ H. L. Mencken

Thought for Today

"For how many things, which for our own sake we should never do, do we perform for the sake of our friends."

~~~~~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Thought for Today

"What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed?"

~~~~~ James Madison

Thought for Today

"A few years' experience will convince us that those things which at the time they happened we regarded as our greatest misfortunes have proved our greatest blessings."

~~~~~ George Mason

Thought for Today

"Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care."

~~~~~ William Safire

Thought for Today

"A half truth, like half a brick, is always more forcible as an argument than a whole one. It carries better."

~~~~~ Stephen Leacock

Thought for Today

"It is immoral from almost any point of view to refuse to defend yourself and others from very grave and terrible threats, even as there are limits to the means that can be used in such defense."

~~~~~ Herman Kahn

Thought for Today

"Liberty is the condition of duty, the guardian of conscience. It grows as conscience grows. The domains of both grow together. Liberty is safety from all hindrances, even sin. So that Liberty ends by being Free Will."

~~~~~ John Acton

Thought for Today

"My father was the son of immigrants, and he grew up bilingual, but English is what my father taught me and what he spoke to me. America's strength is not our diversity; it is our ability to unite around common principles even when we come from different backgrounds."

~~~~~ Ernest Istook

Thought for Today

"Fortunate people often have very favorable beginnings and very tragic endings. What matters isn't being applauded when you arrive – for that is common – but being missed when you leave."

~~~~~ Baltasar Gracian

Thought for Today

"I am certain that I speak on behalf of my entire nation when I say: September 11th we are all Americans – in grief, as in defiance."

~~~~~ Benjamin Netanyahu

Thought for Today

"The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations."

~~~~~ John Adams

Thought for Today

"Freedom is a lonely battle, but if the United States doesn't lead it – sometimes imperfectly, but mostly with honor – who will?"

~~~~~ Cal Thomas

Thought for Today

"Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in bad company."

~~~~~ Booker T. Washington

Thought for Today

"When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him."

~~~~~ Jonathan Swift

Thought for Today

"The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows."

~~~~~ Gaston Bachelard

Thought for Today

"The American Constitution is the greatest governing document, and at some 7,000 words, just about the shortest."

~~~~~ Stephen Ambrose

Thought for Today

"There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves."

~~~~~ Jane Austen

Thought for Today

"A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks."

~~~~~ John C. Calhoun (speech – May 27, 1836)

Thought for Today

"It seems to be a law of nature, inflexible and inexorable, that those who will not risk cannot win."

~~~~~ John Paul Jones

Thought for Today

"Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency."

~~~~~ H.L. Mencken

Thought for Today

"Between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force."

~~~~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

Thought for Today

"There is nothing so fatal to character as half finished tasks."

~~~~~ David Lloyd George

Thought for Today

"The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power."

~~~~~ Daniel Webster

Thought for Today

"The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults."

~~~~~ Alexis de Tocqueville

Thought for Today

"If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience."

~~~~~ Robert Fulghum

Thought for Today

"The strength and power of a country depends absolutely on the quantity of good men and women in it."

~~~~~ John Ruskin

Thought for Today

"The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries."

~~~~~ James Madison

Thought for Today

"It is immoral from almost any point of view to refuse to defend yourself and others from very grave and terrible threats, even as there are limits to the means that can be used in such defense."

~~~~~ Herman Kahn

Thought for Today

"As a result of America's efforts to realize the ideals of equality and freedom, blacks in America are now the freest and richest black people anywhere on the face of the earth including all of the nations that are ruled by blacks."

~~~~~ David Horowitz

Thought for Today

"The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes."

~~~~~ Aristotle

Thought for Today

"There's no particular relationship between spending and educational results. Most education spending is actually on salaries, and that's allocated according to political muscle."

~~~~~ Peter Brimelow

Thought for Today

"People shop for a bathing suit with more care than they do a husband or wife. The rules are the same. Look for something you'll feel comfortable wearing. Allow for room to grow."

~~~~~ Erma Bombeck

Thought for Today

"The public, more often than not, will forgive mistakes, but it will not forgive trying to wriggle and weasel out of one."

~~~~~ Lewis Grizzard

Thought for Today

"One extends one's limits only by exceeding them."

~~~~~ M. Scott Peck

Thought for Today

"We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already."

~~~~~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

Thought for Today

"How would it be possible if salvation were ready to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare."

~~~~~ Baruch Spinoza

Thought for Today

"Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences."

~~~~~ Freeman Dyson

Thought for Today

"I know of no higher fortitude than stubborness in the face of overwhelming odds."

~~~~~ Louis Nizer

Thought for Today

"The people are hungry: It is because those in authority eat up too much in taxes."

~~~~~ Lao Tzu

Thought for Today

"Here the skeptic finds chaos and the believer further evidence that the hand that made us is divine."

~~~~~ Robert Moses

Thought for Today

"Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday."

~~~~~ John Wayne

Thought for Today

"Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn't."

~~~~~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Thought for Today

"Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot."

~~~~~ Clarence Thomas

Thought for Today

"In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution."

~~~~~ Alexander Hamilton

Thought for Today

"Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what it may."

~~~~~ Daniel Webster

Thought for Today

"A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while, he knows something."

~~~~~ Wilson Mizner

Thought for Today

"And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning."

~~~~~ Isaac Asimov

Thought for Today

"There is no better proof of a man's being truly good than his desiring to be constantly under the observation of good men."

~~~~~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Thought for Today

"I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed."

~~~~~ Booker T. Washington

Thought for Today

"When you can't have what you choose, you just choose what you have."

~~~~~ Owen Wister

Thought for Today

"Fighting terrorism is not unlike fighting a deadly cancer. It can't be treated just where it's visible – every diseased cell in the body must be destroyed."

~~~~~ Col. David Hackworth

Thought for Today

"The easiest thing to be in the world is you. The most difficult thing to be is what other people want you to be. Don't let them put you in that position."

~~~~~ Leo Buscaglia

Thought for Today

"God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless."

~~~~~ Chester W. Nimitz

Thought for Today

"Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five."

~~~~~ John Updike

Thought for Today

"Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message."

~~~~~ Malcolm Muggeridge

Thought for Today

"The real scientist is ready to bear privation and, if need be, starvation rather than let anyone dictate to him which direction his work must take."

~~~~~ Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Thought for Today

"The capacity of man himself is only revealed when, under stress and responsibility, he breaks through his educational shell, and he may then be a splendid surprise to himself no less than to his teachers."

~~~~~ Dr. Harvey Cushing

Thought for Today

"The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves; most things, in fact, are better in the morning."

~~~~~ Lewis Thomas

Thought for Today

"It is inevitable that some defeat will enter even the most victorious life. The human spirit is never finished when it is defeated... it is finished when it surrenders."

~~~~~ Ben Stein

Thought for Today

"If you are the master be sometimes blind, if you are the servant be sometimes deaf."

~~~~~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Thought for Today

"Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified."

~~~~~ Samuel Johnson

Thought for Today

"Anti-Semitism is a noxious weed that should be cut out. It has no place in America."

~~~~~ William Howard Taft

Thought for Today

"You're a sovereign as a citizen. If you're not involved in your government, you're not doing your job. In the long run that's very bad for the Republic."

~~~~~ Michael Novak

Thought for Today

"Not to be cheered by praise, not to be grieved by blame, but to know thoroughly one's own virtues or powers are the characteristics of an excellent man."

~~~~~ Satchel Paige

Thought for Today

"I have struck a city – a real city – and they call it Chicago... I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages."

~~~~~ Rudyard Kipling

Thought for Today

"An evil person is like a dirty window, they never let the light shine through."

~~~~~ William Makepeace Thackeray

Thought for Today

"When you get too big a majority, you're immediately in trouble."

~~~~~ Sam Rayburn

Thought for Today

"In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened."

~~~~~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Thought for Today

"The question of who is right and who is wrong has seemed to me always too small to be worth a moment's thought, while the question of what is right and what is wrong has seemed all-important."

~~~~~ Albert Jay Nock

Thought for Today

"Vain-glorious men are the scorn of the wise, the admiration of fools, the idols of paradise, and the slaves of their own vaunts."

~~~~~ Francis Bacon

Thought for Today

"The greatest humiliation in life, is to work hard on something from which you expect great appreciation, and then fail to get it."

~~~~~ Edgar Watson Howe

Thought for Today

"Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, and riches take wings. Only one thing endures and that is character."

~~~~~ Horace Greeley

Thought for Today

"A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says 'I was beaten,' he does not say 'My men were beaten'."

~~~~~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

That, in a nutshell, is why Obama is not, never was, and never will be a leader.

Thought for Today

"When the heroes go off the stage, the clowns come on."

~~~~~ Heinrich Heine

Thought for Today

"Incumbent, n.: Person of liveliest interest to the outcumbents."

~~~~~ Ambrose Bierce

Thought for Today

"Surely the best way to meet the enemy is head on in the field and not wait till they plunder our very homes."

~~~~~ Oliver Goldsmith

Thought for Today

"We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind of self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."

~~~~~ James Madison

Thought for Today

"A political career brings out the basest qualities in human nature."

~~~~~ Lord Bryce

Thought for Today

"Thought takes man out of servitude, into freedom."

~~~~~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Thought for Today

"The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it."

~~~~~ Elbert Hubbard

Thought for Today

"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

~~~~~ Theodore Roosevelt

Thought for Today

"Don't fall in love with politicians, they're all a disappointment. They can't help it, they just are."

~~~~~ Peggy Noonan

Thought for Today

"Piety requries us to honor truth above friends."

~~~~~ Aristotle

Thought for Today

"A professional is a person who can do his best at a time when he doesn't particularly feel like it."

~~~~~ Alistaire Cooke

Thought for Today

"I know I am not only the bad conscience of the Nazis. I am also the bad conscience of the Jews. Because what I have taken up as my duty was everybody's duty."

~~~~~ Simon Wiesenthal

Thought for Today

"Don't measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability."

~~~~~ John Wooden

Thought for Today

"For the American people are a very generous people and will forgive almost any weakness, with the possible exception of stupidity."

~~~~~ Will Rogers

Thought for Today

"President Barack Obama doesn't deserve the reputation he's had for his style and temperament and for being gracious, civil, bipartisan and post-racial. He is often ungracious, uncivil, hyper-partisan, race-oriented and vindictive. He mocks and ridicules almost for sport. More than any president in my memory, he often does not comport himself presidentially. Why does this matter? Well – if I even have to answer that – he is the face of America. ... He came into office with a reputation for being sophisticated, gentlemanly, above the political fray and open-minded. But it was a facade, facilitated by good looks, a seemingly pleasant demeanor and an extraordinarily fawning – and forgiving – media. He has been getting a pass on his unseemly conduct for way too long, which partially explains the disconnect between his personal likability and the unpopularity of his socialist agenda. ... [H]e is exactly the opposite of who he billed himself to be: 'I will bring a new type of politics to Washington.' As a committed liberal ideologue, he is neither a uniter nor one willing to consider both sides of an issue. But it's not just his extremist views that are divisive. He is also often personally divisive, petty and mean-spirited."

~~~~~ David Limbaugh

Thought for Today

"Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety."

~~~~~ Ben Hecht

Thought for Today

"If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, and that is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are."

~~~~~ Charles de Montesquieu

Thought for Today

"Governing a great nation is like cooking a small fish - too much handling will spoil it."

~~~~~ Lao Tzu

Thought for Today

"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these."

~~~~~ George Washington Carver

Thought for Today

"I would rather be able to appreciate things I cannot have than to have things I am not able to appreciate."

~~~~~ Elbert Hubbard

Thought for Today

"That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false."

~~~~~ Paul Valery

Open Letter to Carol Burger

On Wednesday, June 9, 2010, The Lebanon Democrat published a strongly anti-Israel column, the fifth since May, 2008, by Carol Burger. I submitted a rebuttal, which the Managing Editor was gracious enough to run in yesterday's paper.

The original column is not available online, so if you'd like to read it, I have scanned it (PDF) for your convenience. Here is my rebuttal:

Dear Ms. Burger:

While you are certainly entitled to express your opinions as an editorial columnist, your recent piece on the Gaza Flotilla ("Time for Israel to stand alone for their actions") goes a step further by inventing your own facts, too. Oddly enough, your facts are identical to Hamas talking points. Indeed, it seems that you believe that regardless of all evidence to the contrary, Hamas invariably speaks the truth, while Israel always lies.

Let's consider what actually happened.

In 2005, in response to international pressure, Israel, along with all Jewish residents, evacuated the Gaza strip. Governing responsibility was turned over to the Palestinian Authority (PA). At that time, there was no blockade. Indeed, thousands of Gazans commuted back and forth to jobs in Israel, bringing home badly needed wages with which to support their families.

However, the PA government was so inefficient and corrupt that in 2007, it was voted out of office and replaced with a Hamas-led government. Hamas is, of course, a radical Islamist group which is uncompromisingly dedicated to the eradication of the State of Israel and the extermination of all the Jews. Accordingly, as soon as it took power, Hamas began to fire thousands of Qassam rockets – actually, a total of over 10,000 – into populated areas of Israel, primarily the cities of Sderot and Ashkelon.

Such a situation was obviously intolerable. Every country has a duty to protect the safety of its citizens, and Israel is no exception. So, after repeated warnings were ignored, it set up a blockade, then finally had to launch Operation Cast Lead in order to stop the attacks.

Under international law, codified in the San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea of 12 June 1994, such a blockade against an adversary is perfectly legal. Thus, any claim that Israel was acting illegally in enforcing its blockade is demonstrably false.

It is important to note that Israel's blockade is targeted only against weapons, explosives, and building materials which could be used to construct bunkers. Shipments of such items as food, medical supplies, and consumer goods pass freely into Gaza after inspection to insure that they do not include contraband.

For example, were you aware that according to the report of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, a total of 7,233 truckloads of Humanitarian aid from the international community passed from Israel to Gaza in 2009, amounting to some 15,000 tons per week? Did you know that during 2009, Israel accepted 10,544 patients, along with their companions, for medical treatment in Israel? Or that through UNRWA, summer camps were supplied with swimming pools, ice cream machines, musical instruments, and sports equipment?

No, there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The purpose of the Gaza Flotilla was not to supply Gaza with expired medicines and broken-down old wheelchairs, but to break the blockade. You see, its sponsors were fully aware, even if you were not, that the same international law which makes blockades legal also requires that they be enforced effectively and impartially. If Israel had failed to stop the flotilla, or had even consented to allow it to proceed to Gaza without inspection, the blockade would have automatically been null and void.

With one conspicuous exception, all of the flotilla's vessels were boarded and diverted peaceably to the Israeli port of Ashdod, where their cargoes were offloaded, inspected, and transported overland to the Gaza border crossing – where they still sit because Hamas refused to accept this "sorely needed humanitarian aid."

The exception was the Mavi Marmara, which was carrying a gang of about 30 violent jihadists along with its peace activist passengers. These jihadists' intentions were anything but peaceful. Wearing bulletproof vests, they met the Israeli boarding party armed with iron pipes, steel bars, chains, and knives, then tried their best to lynch the Israeli commandos, who were unfortunately dropped unawares into this well-prepared trap armed with paintball guns.

Once the commandos determined that their lives were in danger, they defended themselves quite effectively, killing nine of their attackers. Six of the Israeli commandos were very seriously injured, including one who somehow managed to escape the clutches of the jihadis by jumping into the Mediterranean and swimming to a nearby Israeli ship while his intestines were hanging out through a gaping abdominal wound and trailing in the water behind him.

Once the Mavi Marmara was finally inspected, it was found to be carrying no humanitarian aid whatsoever -- only peace activists and jihadis.

Natan Sharansky has proposed that we can differentiate anti-Semitism from legitimate criticism of Israel by the "3 Ds" – demonization, double standards, and delegitimization. In other words, if an article demonizes Israel with over-the-top rhetoric such as comparing Israelis with Nazis or Gaza with Auschwitz; if it applies impossibly strict standards to Israel, but to no other countries in the world; if it denies Israel's legitimate claim to its homeland, falsely insisting that Israel is occupying Palestinian land and must be eradicated – then that article represents anti-Semitism. Ms. Burger, I must reluctantly conclude that your article qualifies under all three criteria.

"Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism" (PDF), a 2008 report issued by the U.S. State Department, states it well:

"May every conscience remember that anti-Semitism is always wrong and is always dangerous, may every voice speak out against anti-Semitism, and may all of us have the civic courage to take action against anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance whenever and wherever they arise."

Do you disagree, Ms. Burger?

Respectfully,
Morton A. Goldberg, DVM

If you wish to comment to The Lebanon Democrat about Ms. Burger's column or my rebuttal, please contact Managing Editor Amelia Morrison Hipps at ameliahipps AT lebanondemocrat.com or at 615-444-3952 ext. 13.

Thought for Today

"Bear in mind, if you are going to amount to anything, that your success does not depend upon the brilliancy and the impetuosity with which you take hold, but upon the ever lasting and sanctified bulldoggedness with which you hang on after you have taken hold."

~~~~~ Dr. A. B. Meldrum

Thought for Today

"Life is a journey that must be traveled no matter how bad the roads and accommodations."

~~~~~ Oliver Goldsmith

Thought for Today

"It is passing strange for federal officials, including the president, to accuse Arizona of irresponsibility while the federal government is refusing to fulfill its responsibility to control the nation's borders. Such control is an essential attribute of national sovereignty. America is the only developed nation that has a 2,000-mile border with a developing nation, and the government's refusal to control that border is why there are an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona and why the nation, sensibly insisting on first things first, resists 'comprehensive' immigration reform."

~~~~~ George Will

Thought for Today

"We need more of the Office Desk and less of the Show Window in politics. Let men in office substitute the midnight oil for the limelight."

~~~~~ Calvin Coolidge

Thought for Today

"As surgeons keep their instruments and knives always at hand for cases requiring immediate treatment, so shouldst thou have thy thoughts ready to understand things divine and human, remembering in thy every act, even the smallest, how close is the bond that unites the two."

~~~~~ Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

Thought for Today

"To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."

~~~~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thought for Today

"Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense."

~~~~~ Viscount Bolingbroke

Thought for Today

"Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top."

~~~~~ Ed Abbey

Thought for Today

"Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces up, snow is exhilarating; there is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather."

~~~~~ John Ruskin

Thought for Today

"The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment."

~~~~~ George Washington

Thought for Today

"The wonderful arrangement and harmony of the cosmos would only originate in the plan of an Almighty omniscient being. This is and remains my greatest comprehension."

~~~~~ Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727)

Thought for Today

"The developing world has been told that it's necessary to give up freedom in order to achieve progress. Nothing could be further from the truth. Freedom and economic advance go hand in hand; they are two sides of the same coin. The mainspring of human progress is found not in controlling and harnessing human energy but in setting it free. The most valuable resource is not oil or precious metals or even territory; it's the infinite richness of human potential. The creative genius and diligence unleashed when people are free and working to improve their lot and that of their families is the greatest force for good on this planet."

~~~~~ Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today

"Whoever kindles the flames of intolerance in America is lighting a fire underneath his own home."

~~~~~ Harold E. Stassen

Thought for Today

"Barack Obama isn't leading. Instead, events are leading the president – and I don't mean stage-managed summits, puppet press conferences or White House dinners, but the international events that matter, the ones paid for in blood. Iran and North Korea are immediate cases where rogue regimes seeking nuclear weapons follow calculated strategies that harm American interests and allies. ... From its inception, the Obama administration has talked and talked a great deal about the way it wants the world to be. Rhetorical theatrics, to include sermons promoting visions, and emotionally charged media spectaculars hold pre-eminent and almost holy positions among administration elites. This is understandable, for these are the tools of domestic politics in a free, secure nation of laws – the terrain where American community organizers operate. Obama believes that if he can chitchat long enough and with sufficient eloquence, the world will align with his words -- his rhetorical 'oughtta be' becomes the way it is. It worked in Chicago. But talk does not stop mass-murdering dictatorships. Events – especially unexpected, game-changing events – demand action."

~~~~~ Austin Bay

Thought for Today

"There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."

~~~~~ James Madison

Thought for Today

"Liberals who like [Justice] Stevens' rulings insist he understands the plight of the downtrodden, despite the fact that the nearly 90-year-old justice was born rich and has served on the court for almost 35 years, becoming more liberal as he has become more distant from life as lived by the little guys. Meanwhile, Clarence Thomas was born dirt poor and black in rural Georgia and spends his vacations exploring America in an RV. But those same liberals insist he doesn't understand poverty and race the way Stevens does. How do they know? Because they don't like his rulings."

~~~~~ Jonah Goldberg

Thought for Today

"What is a Communist?
One who hath yearnings
For equal division of unequal earnings.
Idler or bungler, or both, he is willing
To fork out his copper and pocket a shilling."

~~~~~ Ebenezer Elliott

Thought for Today

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."

~~~~~ Henry Brooks Adams

Thought for Today

"To persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs."

~~~~~ Euripides

Thought for Today

"The prospect of universal destruction will deter only if it is convincing. If a potential aggressor is assured he will be spared nuclear retaliation should he employ 'only' biological or chemical weapons, then the incentive to use them will increase. The old concept of a balance of power, as Churchill pointed out in his Iron Curtain speech just after the dawn of the atomic age, is no longer sound. For the strategic objective must be to amass such an aggregation of power on the side of peace and stability, including nuclear power, that it will deter the forces of aggression. Peace through strength, in short. For that kind of deterrence to be convincing, strategic ambiguity must be preserved, not lessened. There is nothing wrong with talking about America's nuclear forces – so long as nothing very specific is said about how they would or would not be employed. Let aggressors have to guess. There's a reason for that old Irish toast, 'Confusion to our enemies!'"

~~~~~ Paul Greenberg

Thought for Today

"Tea partiers must be racist, Democrats imply, because why else would anyone oppose Barack Obama's agenda? But Mr. Obama's skin color was well known in 2008, when he was elected president by a comfortable margin, and at his inauguration, when he began his presidency with the highest approval rating (68 percent) since John F. Kennedy. What wasn't known by most then was that Mr. Obama is a left wing radical who is spending us into bankruptcy."

~~~~~ Jack Kelly

Thought for Today

"I didn't know before I got there and they told me all this – that Rome had Senators. Now I know why it declined."

~~~~~ Will Rogers

Thought for Today

"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."

~~~~~ Louis D. Brandeis

Thought for Today

"The example of changing a constitution by assembling the wise men of the state, instead of assembling armies, will be worth as much to the world as the former examples we had give them. The constitution, too, which was the result of our deliberation, is unquestionably the wisest ever yet presented to men."

~~~~~ Thomas Jefferson

Thought for Today

"Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic."

~~~~~ William E. Gladstone

Thought for Today

"With every deed you are sowing a seed, though the harvest you may not see."

~~~~~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Thought for Today

"There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking."

~~~~~ Thomas Alva Edison

Thought for Today

"History will remember how often and adamantly President Barack Obama insisted that the socialized medicine law he signed last week would reduce the federal deficit. It will be his defining lie."

~~~~~ Terence Jeffrey

Thought for Today

"When we build, let us think that we build forever."

~~~~~ John Ruskin

Thought for Today

"The leftists in the media would do well to remember that their liberty to be a free press comes from the same constitutional amendment as the tea party crowd's liberty to gather together. And our elected leaders would do well to remember that the First Amendment exists to protect average people from the government, not the other way around."

~~~~~ Ken Blackwell

Thought for Today

"One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It's very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. ... Now, the American people, if you put it to them about socialized medicine and gave them a chance to choose, would unhesitatingly vote against it."

~~~~~ Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today

"As the night follows the day, the VAT cometh. With the passage of Obamacare, creating a vast new middle-class entitlement, a national sales tax of the kind near-universal in Europe is inevitable. ... As Obama has repeatedly insisted, the real money is in health care costs -- which are now locked in place by the new Obamacare mandates. That's where the value-added tax comes in. For the politician, it has the virtue of expediency: People are used to sales taxes, and this one produces a river of revenue. Every 1 percent of VAT would yield up to $1 trillion a decade (depending on what you exclude -- if you exempt food, for example, the yield would be more like $900 billion). It's the ultimate cash cow. Obama will need it. By introducing universal health care, he has pulled off the largest expansion of the welfare state in four decades. And the most expensive. Which is why all of the European Union has the VAT. Huge VATs. Germany: 19 percent. France and Italy: 20 percent. Most of Scandinavia: 25 percent. American liberals have long complained that ours is the only advanced industrial country without universal health care. Well, now we shall have it. And as we approach European levels of entitlements, we will need European levels of taxation."

~~~~~ Charles Krauthammer

Thought for Today

"Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness which inevitably awaits them if we basely entail hereditary bondage on them."

~~~~~ Thomas Jefferson

Thought for Today

"No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear."

~~~~~ Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

Thought for Today

"I prefer the wicked rather than the foolish. The wicked sometimes rest."

~~~~~~ Alexandre Dumas pere (1802-1870)

Thought for Today

"The function of the true state is to impose the minimum restrictions and safeguard the maximum liberties of the people, and it never regards the person as a thing."

~~~~~ Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Thought for Today

"If there is anything good to say about Democrat control of the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, it's that their extraordinarily brazen, heavy-handed acts have aroused a level of constitutional interest among the American people that has been dormant for far too long."

~~~~~ Walter E. Williams

Thought for Today

"I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of 'Admin.' The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps.In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."

~~~~~~ C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Thought for Today

"Human beings will generally exercise power when they can get it, and they will exercise it most undoubtedly in popular governments under pretense of public safety."

~~~~~ Daniel Webster

Thought for Today

"Welfare is another of our major problems. We are a humane and generous people and we accept without reservation our obligation to help the aged, disabled, and those unfortunates who, through no fault of their own, must depend on their fellow man. But we are not going to perpetuate poverty by substituting a permanent dole for a paycheck. There is no humanity or charity in destroying self-reliance, dignity, and self-respect ... the very substance of moral fiber."

~~~~~ Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today

"The more we come to rely on government, the fewer freedoms we will enjoy. Government will start dictating what we can own, eat and drive, how much of our money they will let us keep, how we run our businesses, how many – if any – guns we can own, and what we may and may not say. Oh, wait! They are already doing that. To preserve freedom we must fight for it."

~~~~~ Cal Thomas

Thought for Today

"Nothing is more essential to the establishment of manners in a State than that all persons employed in places of power and trust must be men of unexceptionable characters."

~~~~~ Samuel Adams

Thought for Today

"Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost."

~~~~~ Jean Jacques Rousseau

Thought for Today

"If I had my way, any man guilty of golf would be ineligible for
any office of trust in the United States."

~~~~~ H.L. Mencken

Thought for Today

"While Barack Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care 'summit,' thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen - because they're part of the same story. It's just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They're at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided, instead, that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe."

~~~~~ Mark Steyn

Thought for Today

"We are repeatedly being told that we need to have a government-controlled medical care system, because other countries have it – as if our policies on something as serious as medical care should be based on the principle of monkey see, monkey do."

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

Thought for Today

"Personal responsibility is a real problem for those who want to collectivize society and take away our power to make our own decisions, transferring that power to third parties like themselves, who imagine themselves to be so much wiser and nobler than the rest of us. Aimless apologies are just one of the incidental symptoms of an increasing loss of a sense of personal responsibility -- without which a whole society is in jeopardy. The police cannot possibly maintain law and order by themselves. Millions of people can monitor their own behavior better than any third parties can. Cops can cope with that segment of society who have no sense of personal responsibility, but not if that segment becomes a large part of the whole population. Yet increasing numbers of educators and the intelligentsia seem to have devoted themselves to undermining or destroying a sense of personal responsibility and making 'society' responsible instead."

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

Thought for Today

"Perhaps you and I have lived with this miracle too long to be properly appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again. Knowing this, it is hard to explain those who even today would question the people's capacity for self-rule. Will they answer this: if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?"

~~~~~ Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today

"He who wants to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything. Life is made up of little things. True greatness consists in being great in little things."

~~~~~ Charles Simmons

Thought for Today

"Some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases."

~~~~~ James Bryant Conant

Thought for Today

"The Constitution, which at any time exists 'till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole People, is sacredly obligatory upon all."

~~~~~ George Washington

Thought for Today

"The state tends to expand in proportion to its means of existence and to live beyond its means, and these are, in the last analysis, nothing but the substance of the people. Woe to the people that cannot limit the sphere of action of the state! Freedom, private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity, all vanish."

~~~~~ Frederic Bastiat

Thought for Today

"Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force."

~~~~~ Thomas Jefferson

Thought for Today

"Right reason is stronger than force."

~~~~~ President James A. Garfield

Thought for Today

"It isn't to evil dictators with a lust for power that Americans have been slowly surrendering their autonomy. It is to well-intentioned authorities who believe sincerely that our freedoms must be circumscribed for our own good. ... First Lady Michelle Obama announced what The New York Times called 'a sweeping initiative ... aimed at revamping the way American children eat and play – reshaping school lunches, playgrounds, and even medical checkups – with the goal of eliminating childhood obesity.' Nothing in the Constitution authorizes the federal government to take charge of 'revamping the way American children eat and play.' It is only our passivity that makes such an encroachment possible. This used to be the land of the free. Is it still?"

~~~~~ Jeff Jacoby

Thought for Today

"There is no more dangerous experiment than that of undertaking to be one thing before a man's face and another behind his back."

~~~~~ General Robert E. Lee (1807-1872)

Thought for Today

"Commit yourself to a dream. Nobody who tries to do something great but fails is a total failure. Why? Because he can always rest assured that he succeeded in life's most important battle – he defeated the fear of trying."

~~~~~ Robert H. Schuller

Thought for Today

"By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation."

~~~~~ Edmund Burke

Thought for Today

Advice from Ben Franklin to our PEPOTUS (Poor Excuse for a President Of The United States):

"They that are on their guard and appear ready to receive their adversaries, are in much less danger of being attacked than the supine, secure and negligent."

~~~~~ Benjamin Franklin

Thought for Today

"People wish to live and prosper at the expense of others. This is no rash accusation. Nor does it come from a gloomy and uncharitable spirit. The annals of history bear witness to the truth of it: the incessant wars, mass migrations, religious persecutions, universal slavery, dishonesty in commerce, and monopolies. This fatal desire has its origin in the very nature of man – in that primitive, universal, and insuppressible instinct that impels him to satisfy his desires with the least possible pain."

~~~~~ Frederic Bastiat (1802-1850)

Thought for Today

"Time, whose tooth gnaws away at everything else, is powerless against truth."

~~~~~ Thomas Henry Huxley

Thought for Today

"No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his well-being, to risk his body, to risk his life, in a great cause."

~~~~~ Theodore Roosevelt

Thought for Today

"The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamt."

~~~~~ Henry George

Thought for Today

"The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency. It proceeds from not knowing what is going on in other people's minds."

~~~~~ Walter Bagehot (1826-1877)

Thought for Today

"Conservatism is the antithesis of the kind of ideological fanaticism that has brought so much horror and destruction to the world. The common sense and common decency of ordinary men and women, working out their own lives in their own way – this is the heart of American conservatism today. Conservative wisdom and principles are derived from willingness to learn, not just from what is going on now, but from what has happened before."

~~~~~ Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today

"Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt."

~~~~~ Samuel Adams, essay in "The Public Advertiser," 1749

Thought for Today

"There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability."

~~~~~ Elbert Hubbard

Thought for Today

"Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm."

~~~~~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Thought for Today

"The President could wait months before deciding to give a general the troops he asked for to fight the war in Afghanistan but there was never to be enough time for the health care bill to be exposed in the light of day to the usual Congressional hearings and debate. Moreover, despite all the haste, the health care program would not actually go into effect until after the 2012 presidential election. In other words, the public was not supposed to find out whether the government's takeover of medical care actually made things better or worse until after it was too late."

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

Thought for Today

"The problem is not the 'crises' Obama inherited. It's the ones he's creating. He has lived in such a socialist policy shell all his life that he doesn't have a clue that he's on a different planet than most of us. If he were just slightly less narcissistic, he might be able to figure this out. But ... no matter what adjustments he promises to make following the Boston Massacre, he still intends to govern like a socialist. He only wants to do a better job of figuring out how to do it less visibly, hoping we won't 'get it' before it's too late."

~~~~~ David Limbaugh

Thought for Today

"The bigger a state becomes the more liberty diminishes."

~~~~~ Jean Jacques Rousseau

Thought for Today

"The Democrats have no natural majority because they have no fundamental principles – at least none that they are willing to state out loud. They are like a drunken vagrant who emerges from the alley to cause havoc every few years. They are the perpetual toothache of American politics. To be sure, the fact that 52 percent of Massachusetts voters are racist, sexist tea-baggers – i.e., voted for a Republican – means only that the Democrats just went from having the largest congressional majority in a generation to the second largest. But this was 'Teddy Kennedy's seat.' And it was in Massachusetts. Now, no Democrat is safe. But the country just got a lot safer."

~~~~~ Ann Coulter

Thought for Today

"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be to-morrow."

~~~~~ Federalist No. 62

Thought for Today

"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered, yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly."

~~~~~ Thomas Paine

Thought for Today

"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."

~~~~~ Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Ludlow, 1824

What would Thomas Jefferson think of our situation in the year 2010?

Thought for Today

"Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others."

~~~~~ William Allen White

Thought for Today

"Increasing numbers of Americans are saying that they are having trouble recognizing the country in which they were born and grew up. They will have even more trouble recognizing America if the Washington juggernaut does not lose a substantial part of its power in this year's elections."

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

Thought for Today

"The people know their rights, and they are never slow to assert and maintain them, when they are invaded."

~~~~~ Abraham Lincoln

Thought for Today

"You may think that the Constitution is your security – it is nothing but a piece of paper. You may think that the statutes are your security – they are nothing but words in a book. You may think that elaborate mechanism of government is your security – it is nothing at all unless you have sound and uncorrupted public opinion to give life to your Constitution, to give vitality to your statutes, to make efficient your machinery."

~~~~~ Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes

Thought for Today

"The word 'capitalism' is used in two contradictory ways. Sometimes it's used to mean the free market, or laissez faire. Other times it's used to mean today's government-guided economy. Logically, 'capitalism' can't be both things. Either markets are free or government controls them. We can't have it both ways. The truth is that we don't have a free market -- government regulation and management are pervasive -- so it's misleading to say that 'capitalism' caused today's problems. The free market is innocent. But it's fair to say that crony capitalism created the economic mess. ... What is crony capitalism? It's the economic system in which the marketplace is substantially shaped by a cozy relationship among government, big business and big labor. Under crony capitalism, government bestows a variety of privileges that are simply unattainable in the free market, including import restrictions, bailouts, subsidies and loan guarantees. ... Crony capitalism, better known as government bailouts, saved General Motors and Chrysler from extinction, with Barack Obama cronies the United Auto Workers getting preferential treatment over other creditors and generous stock holdings (especially outrageous considering that the union helped bankrupt the companies in the first place with fat pensions and wasteful work rules). Banks and insurance companies (like AIG) are bailed out because they are deemed too big to fail. Favored farmers get crop subsidies. If free-market capitalism is a private profit-and-loss system, crony capitalism is a private-profit and public-loss system. Companies keep their profits when they succeed but use government to stick the taxpayer with the losses when they fail. Nice work if you can get it. ... It's time we acknowledged the difference between the free market, which is based on freedom and competition, and crony capitalism, which is based on privilege."

~~~~~ John Stossel

Thought for Today

"It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good disposition."

~~~~~ Thomas Jefferson

Thought for Today

"Nothing is more essential to the establishment of manners in a State than that all persons employed in places of power and trust must be men of unexceptionable characters."

~~~~~ Samuel Adams

Thought for Today

"The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity and until they do (and find the cure) all ideal plans will fall into quicksand."

~~~~~ Richard P. Feynman

Thought for Today

"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and the one was of the contrary, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."

~~~~~ John Stuart Mill

Thought for Today

"Party is the madness of many, for the gains of a few."

~~~~~ Alexander Pope

Thought for Today

"I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed."

~~~~~ Jonathan Swift

Thought for Today

"The special deals and payoffs are incidental to the [health care] bill in one sense; if they were all removed it would still be a bad bill. But in another sense, they reveal something essential about a government takeover of health care: it is all about looting, about how one group of people can tax and regulate others in an attempt to get something for nothing. All statist programs are rife with this kind of scheming, and they have to be, because whenever wealth is seized by force, there is a battle among the looters over how to divide the spoils."

~~~~~ Robert Tracinski

Thought for Today

"The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just."

~~~~~ Abraham Lincoln

Thought for Today

"The public cannot be too curious concerning the characters of public men."

~~~~~ Samuel Adams

Thought for Today

"It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do."

~~~~~ Edmund Burke

Thought for Today

"You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream – the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order – or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, 'The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.'"

~~~~~ Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today

"When the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, ... who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually, by totally disusing and neglecting the militia."

~~~~~ George Mason, speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1788

Thought for Today

"A Fatal Tendency of Mankind. Self-preservation and self-development are common aspirations among all people. And if everyone enjoyed the unrestricted use of his faculties and the free disposition of the fruits of his labor, social progress would be ceaseless, uninterrupted, and unfailing. But there is also another tendency that is common among people. When they can, they wish to live and prosper at the expense of others. ... This fatal desire has its origin in the very nature of man – in that primitive, universal, and insuppressible instinct that impels him to satisfy his desires with the least possible pain."

~~~~~ Frederic Bastiat

Thought for Today

"Government is about coercion. Limiting government is the single most important instrument for guaranteeing liberty. We're working on the third generation which has had little in the way of education about what our Constitution means and why it was written. Thus, we've fallen easy prey to charlatans, quacks and hustlers."

~~~~~ Dr. Walter Williams
             George Mason University
             Fairfax, VA

Thought for Today

"Communism possesses a language which every people can understand – its elements are hunger, envy, and death."

~~~~~ Heinrich Heine

Thought for Today

"Authoritarian socialism has failed almost everywhere, but you will not find a single Marxist who will say it has failed because it was wrong or impractical. He will say it has failed because nobody went far enough with it. So failure never proves that a myth is wrong."

~~~~~ Jean-Francois Revel

Thought for Today

"One way or another, any government which remains in power is a representative government. If your city government is a crooked machine, then it is because you and your neighbors prefer it that way. Hitler's government was a popular government; the Germans preferred the rule of gangsters to the effort of thinking and doing for themselves. They abdicated their franchise."

~~~~~ Robert A. Heinlein

Sarah Palin: With a Stiff Spine America Must Stand Against Obamacare

12:24 PM CST Sunday, March 24, 2010 —

If Senator Reid, Speaker Pelosi, and President Obama get their way, soon our country will be changed forever. Using every partisan parliamentary trick in the book (including some they invented just last week), Washington’s Left intends to ram through their takeover of our health care system regardless of the consequences.

The latest twists and turns in the Obamacare drama seem almost surreal. One minute the Democrat leadership is trying to amend a bill before the president has even signed it into law, and the next minute they’re trying to draft a new rule that will allow the House to “deem” a bill passed without actually voting on it! They’re determined to use the Senate reconciliation process as a parliamentary trick to bypass the regular voting procedure (and by the way, to add insult to injury, they’re now going to ram through federalization of America’s student loan industry with this same reconciliation vote). Is there any other wildly unpopular legislation they’d also like to sneak in? Perhaps the anti-energy-independence policy “Cap and Tax” (aka Cap and Trade) is next?

And make no mistake, the Obamacare bill is wildly unpopular. The Democrats’ own pollsters warn of an “unmitigated disaster” for them in November if they don’t abandon their plan and start over with real incremental health care reform. Incredibly, at this point, they don’t seem to care. Speaker Pelosi thinks Congress must pass the bill so that the American people can then “find out what’s in it.” We know what’s in it. We don’t want it. The Democrats will take short-term electoral losses in exchange for long-term radical change of the United States of America. They assume we’ll come to accept this new intrusion of government once we’re stuck with it. That’s why we can’t concede this battle. Americans must stiffen our spines and stand against this action that violates the will of the people with centralized government mandates and crippling costs.

Republicans in Congress are holding the line, and some Democrats are standing with them. Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) said he won’t vote for the Senate bill if federal funding of abortion is included. Last Friday, he told National Review Online that some Democrats have told him that if abortions aren’t covered in Obamacare then “more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more…Money is their hang-up. Is this how we now value life in America?” As I wrote in my first post on this topic, human rights and human dignity must be at the center of any health care discussion. Government health care will not reduce the cost of medical care; it will simply refuse to pay it. And who will get left behind when they have to ration care to save money?

Please ask yourself: who will be left behind? And who will decide – what kind of panel will decide – who receives the health care that government will obviously have to ration?

There’s a great deal of pressure being put on Stupak’s pro-life Democrats. They’re already dwindling in number. Their party is threatening them, and so are powerful SEIU labor union bosses. The Democrats respecting the sanctity of life have every incentive to buckle under the pressure, so they need to know that we’ll support them if they do the right thing and vote no on Obamacare.

Please take the time to get involved in the debate this week. There are many grassroots efforts under way. There will be a march on Washington on Tuesday, March 16th (see here for details). Rep. Michele Bachmann has a “Kill the Bill” online petition that you can sign here. Most importantly, contact members of Congress and offer your support if they do the right thing.

We know we’ll beat them at the ballot box, but we have to kill this bill before November. This is the final push. We must stand up and stand together one last time to insist on true market-oriented, patient-centered health care reform that reflects America’s values and the will of the people.

– Sarah Palin

Thought for Today

"Right now, if you don't like the local grade school, you move to the next town. If you're sick of Massachusetts taxes, you move to New Hampshire. Where do you move to if you don't like 'global governance'? What polling station do you go to to vote it out?"

~~~~~ Mark Steyn

Thought for Today

"From now on, when you hear Obama speak, try replacing 'let me be clear' with 'let me lie to you,' and see if it makes more sense."

~~~~~ Jacob Sullum

Thought for Today

"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives."

~~~~~ Leo Tolstoy

Thought for Today

"One of the ways the country is going in the wrong direction is not simply with huge government spending but with huge government period. Ordinary Americans are uneasy about trusting their fate to huge government. They know that government services are inefficient, expensive, and occasionally repressive and subject to corruption. More than that, huge government is unreliable. The healthcare debate has got to be reminding ordinary Americans of their unease over government promises. Think about it. The same big government Democrats who are promising government-secured healthcare are promising 'healthcare savings' that are clearly the denial of Medicare services to the elderly. That is to say, Medicare services that were once promised to seniors by Medicare's advocates are being taken from them under the false claim that they are savings. Face the facts: the Democrats' healthcare savings are actually healthcare denials to those who have been counting on those services for years. Government does not keep its promises. Yet government is the Democrats' solution to practically all our current problems. ... Once again government cannot be trusted. What government gives to us, government can take away."

~~~~~ R. Emmett Tyrrell

Thought for Today

"When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us."

~~~~~ Alexander Graham Bell

Thought for Today

"You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered."

~~~~~ Lyndon Johnson

Thought for Today

"Here is a math problem for you: Assume that the legislation establishing government control of medical care is passed and that it 'brings down the cost of medical care.' You pay $500 a year less for your medical care, but the new costs put on employers is passed on to consumers, so that you pay $300 a year more for groceries and $200 a year more for gasoline, while the new mandates put on insurance companies raise your premiums by $300 a year, how much money have you saved?"

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

Thought for Today

"A liberal mistrusts lessons bought with experience. For him, theory is all. He's the only man who would sit down on a red-hot stove twice. That makes well-meaning Democrats marks for shysters selling health-care 'reform,' global warming and appeasement of radical Islamists."

~~~~~ Wesley Pruden

Thought for Today

"When you knowingly pay someone to lie to you, we call the deceiver an illusionist or a magician. When you unwittingly pay someone to do the same thing, I call him a politician. President Obama insists that health care 'reform' not 'add a dime' to the budget deficit, which daily grows to ever more frightening levels. So the House-passed bill and the one the Senate now deliberates both claim to cost less than $900 billion. Somehow '$900 billion over 10 years' has been decreed to be a magical figure that will not increase the deficit. It's amazing how precise government gets when estimating the cost of 10 years of subsidized medical care. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's bill was scored not at $850 billion, but $849 billion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said her bill would cost $871 billion. How do they do that? The key to magic is misdirection, fooling the audience into looking in the wrong direction. I happily suspend disbelief when a magician says he'll saw a woman in half. That's entertainment. But when Harry Reid says he'll give 30 million additional people health coverage while cutting the deficit, improving health care and reducing its cost, it's not entertaining. It's incredible."

~~~~~ John Stossel

Thought for Today

"Tragically, this administration seems hell-bent to avoid seeing acts of terrorism against the United States as acts of war. The very phrase 'war on terrorism' is avoided, as if that will stop the terrorists' war on us. The mindset of the left behind such thinking was spelled out in an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle, which said that 'Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, will be tried the right way -- the American way, in a federal courtroom where the world will see both his guilt and the nation's adherence to the rule of law.' This is not the rule of law but the application of laws to situations for which they were not designed. How many Americans may pay with their lives for the intelligence secrets and methods that can forced to be disclosed to Al Qaeda was not mentioned. Nor was there mention of how many foreign nations and individuals whose cooperation with us in the war on terror have been involved in countering Al Qaeda -- nor how many foreign nations and individuals will have to think twice now, before cooperating with us again, when their role can be revealed in court to our enemies, who can exact revenge on them."

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

Thought for Today

"Our task now is not to sell a philosophy, but to make the majority of Americans, who already share that philosophy, see that modern conservatism offers them a political home. We are not a cult; we are members of a majority. Let's act and talk like it. The job is ours and the job must be done. If not by us, who? If not now, when?"

~~~~~ Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today

“The United States of America – five percent of the world’s population – leads the world economically, militarily, scientifically, and culturally – and by a spectacular margin. Any one of these achievements, taken alone, would be cause for enormous pride. To dominate as we do in all four arenas has no historical precedent. That we have achieved so much in so many areas is due – due entirely – to the structure of our society as outlined in the Constitution of the United States.”

~~~~~ Bill Whittle

Thought for Today

"When Barack Obama was campaigning – not that he's ever stopped – back in 2008, he made a number of promises. As we all know, like a cad on the make, he was only trying to get us in the sack. Once he had his way with us, he barely remembered our name, let alone his various vows."

~~~~~ Burt Prelutsky

Thought for Today

"They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare.... Giving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please."

~~~~~ Thomas Jefferson