Thought for Today

"America once made the required nod to the Constitution. When We the People wanted to make some fundamental change or expand the federal government's reach, we did the right thing and amended the Constitution. ... If we once thought that we had to amend the Constitution to ban 'intoxicating liquors' and later had to again amend the Constitution to re-legalize the stuff, wouldn't we need an amendment to allow the government to intrude even more intimately into our lives? ... If Congress were to do the right thing and initiate an amendment to enshrine the 'individual mandate' in the Constitution ... it would fail miserably. If America is still America, Americans will not tolerate being told they have to buy something, especially if it's for no other reason than that they exist. ... I'm afraid Congress has not only misread the Constitution, but they've also misjudged the American people. Or maybe they just don't know what country they live in."

~~~~~ Jon N. Hall at American Thinker

Thought for Today

"Sticks and stones will break our bones, but words will break our hearts..."

~~~~~ Robert Fulghum

Thought for Today

"Human Felicity is produced not so much by great Pieces of good Fortune that seldom happen, as by little Advantages that occur every Day."

~~~~~ Benjamin Franklin

Thought for Today

"Jefferson believed that 'no man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session,' so he wisely insisted that the capital be built in malarial swampland. Consequently, the seat of the government remained empty for nearly half the year. Today, thanks in part to the unintended consequences of air conditioning, we have permanent government of career politicians, a thing the founders never intended and which sees no natural boundary to its authority."

~~~~~ Jonah Goldberg

Thought for Today

"Among the things that people complain about under the present medical care system are the costs, insurance company bureaucrats' denials of reimbursements for some treatments and the free loaders at hospital emergency rooms whose costs have to be paid by others. Will a government-run medical system make these things better or worse? This very basic question seldom seems to get asked, much less answered."

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

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

"It is, in a way, an odd thing to honor those who died in defense of our country ... in wars far away. The imagination plays a trick. We see these soldiers in our mind as old and wise. We see them as something like the Founding Fathers, grave and gray-haired. But most of them were boys when they died, and they gave up two lives – the one they were living and the one they would have lived. When they died, they gave up their chance to be husbands and fathers and grandfathers. They gave up their chance to be revered old men. They gave up everything for their country, for us. All we can do is remember."

—Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today

"History affords us many instances of the ruin of states, by the prosecution of measures ill suited to the temper and genius of their people. The ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. An equal dispensation of protection, rights, privileges, and advantages, is what every part is entitled to, and ought to enjoy."

~~~~~ Benjamin Franklin

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

"Among the most pathetic letters and e-mails I receive are those from people who ask why I don't write more 'positively' about Obama or 'give him the benefit of the doubt.' No one -- not even the President of the United States -- has an entitlement to a 'positive' response to his actions. The entitlement mentality has eroded the once common belief that you earned things, including respect, instead of being given them. As for the benefit of the doubt, no one -- especially not the President of the United States -- is entitled to that, when his actions can jeopardize the rights of 300 million Americans domestically and the security of the nation in an international jungle, where nuclear weapons may soon be in the hands of people with suicidal fanaticism. Will it take a mushroom cloud over an American city to make that clear? Was 9/11 not enough?"

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

Thought for Today

"Much of what government does is based on the premise that people can't do things for themselves. So government must do it for them. More often than not, the result is a ham-handed, bumbling, one-size-fits-all approach that leaves the intended beneficiaries worse off. Of course, this resulting failure is never blamed on the political approach -- on the contrary, failure is taken to mean the government solution was not extravagant enough."

~~~~~ John Stossel

Thought for Today

"Twenty years ago this fall, the Iron Curtain was coming down in Europe. Across the Warsaw Pact, the jailers of the Communist prison states lost their nerve, and the cell walls crumbled. Matt Welch, the editor of Reason magazine, wonders why the anniversary is going all but unobserved: Why aren't we making more of the biggest mass liberation in history? Well, because to celebrate it would involve recognizing it as a victory over Communism. And, after the left's long march through the institutions of the west, most are not willing to do that. There's the bad totalitarianism (Nazism) and the good totalitarianism (Communism), whose apologists and, indeed, fetishists can still be found everywhere, even unto the White House."

~~~~~ Mark Steyn

Thought for Today

"All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why."

~~~~~ James Thurber (1894-1961)

Thought for Today

"Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law breaker, it breeds contempt for the law."

~~~~~ Justice Louis D. Brandeis

Thought for Today

"Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm."

~~~~~ James Madison

Thought for Today

"The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it."

~~~~~ H. L. Mencken

Census Humor: "Come and Be My POSSLQ"

For the 1980 census, the bureaucrats of the U.S. Census Bureau came up with an acronym to describe the increasingly frequent arrangement of unmarried males and females living together. The acronym was "POSSLQ," which stood for "Persons of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters."

CBS's irrepressible Charles Osgood managed to find the humor in this bit of seemingly unpronounceable government gobbledygook. He decided that it could be pronounced in three syllables – as "POSS-ul-kyoo," then wrote this whimsical bit of verse around it:

Come and Be My POSSLQ

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will some new pleasures prove
Of golden sands and crystal brooks
With silken lines, and silver hooks.
There's nothing that I wouldn't do
If you would be my POSSLQ.

You live with me, and I with you,
And you will be my POSSLQ.
I'll be your friend and so much more;
That's what a POSSLQ is for.

And everything we will confess;
Yes, even to the IRS.
Some day on what we both may earn,
Perhaps we'll file a joint return.

You'll share my pad, my taxes, joint;
You'll share my life – up to a point!
And that you'll be so glad to do,
Because you'll be my POSSLQ.

Needless to add, since 1980, the phenomenon of unmarried males and females living together has become so ubiquitous that the Census Bureau discarded the POSSLQ acronym years ago. Apparently, they're now using the plain vanilla term "unmarried partners." It's difficult to find any humor in that.

Thought for Today

"President Obama scrapped the missile defense system designed to protect Poland from Russian attack Thursday on the seventieth anniversary of Russia's invasion of Poland. This explains why Obama removed the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office and sent it back to the British Embassy. He wanted one of Neville Chamberlain."

~~~~~ Argus Hamilton

Thought for Today

"Many years ago, as a small child, I was told one of those old-fashioned fables for children. It was about a dog with a bone in his mouth, who was walking on a log across a stream. The dog looked down into the water and saw his reflection. He thought it was another dog with a bone in his mouth – and it seemed to him that the other dog's bone was bigger than his. He decided that he was going to take the other dog's bone away and opened his mouth to attack. The result was that his own bone fell into the water and was lost. At the time, I didn't like that story and wished they hadn't told it to me. But the passing years and decades have made me realize how important that story was, because it was not really about dogs but about people. Today we are living in a time when the President of the United States is telling us that he is going to help us take that other dog's bone away – and the end result is likely to be very much like what it was in that children's fable. Whether we are supposed to take that bone away from the doctors, the hospitals, the pharmaceutical companies or the insurance companies, the net result is likely to be the same – most of us will end up with worse medical care than we have available today. We will have opened our mouth and dropped a very big bone into the water."

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

Thought for Today

"One of the secrets of being a glib talker is not getting hung up over whether what you are saying is true, and instead giving your full attention to what is required by the audience and the circumstances of the moment, without letting facts get in your way and cramp your style. Obama has mastered that art. Con men understand that their job is not to use facts to convince skeptics but to use words to help the gullible to believe what they want to believe. No message has been more welcomed by the gullible, in countries around the world, than the promise of something for nothing. That is the core of Barack Obama's medical care plan."

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

Thought for Today

"Doesn't anyone wonder why the NAACP does not have events celebrating the first black woman secretary of state? Why does an organization whose mission is to advance the lot of blacks not celebrate Clarence Thomas, our black Supreme Court justice?"

~~~~~ Star Parker

Thought for Today

"America was born in the midst of a great revolution sparked by oppressive taxation. There was something about the American character – open, hard-working and honest – that rebelled at the very thought of taxes that were not only heavy but unfair. ... But slowly and subtly, surrendering first to this political pressure and then to that, our system of taxation has turned into something completely foreign to our nature – something complicated, unfair and, in a fundamental sense, un-American. Well, my friends, the time has come for a second American revolution."

~~~~~ Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today

"Public confidence in the integrity of the Government is indispensable to faith in democracy; and when we lose faith in the system, we have lost faith in everything we fight and spend for."

~~~~~ Adlai E. Stevenson

Thought for Today

"Vainglorious 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

"My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous."

~~~~~ Mark Twain

Thought for Today

"One of the secrets of being a glib talker is not getting hung up over whether what you are saying is true, and instead giving your full attention to what is required by the audience and the circumstances of the moment, without letting facts get in your way and cramp your style. Obama has mastered that art. Con men understand that their job is not to use facts to convince skeptics but to use words to help the gullible to believe what they want to believe. No message has been more welcomed by the gullible, in countries around the world, than the promise of something for nothing. That is the core of Barack Obama's medical care plan."

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

Thought for Today

"We warned of things to come, of the danger inherent in unwarranted government involvement in things not its proper province. What we warned against has come to pass. And today more than two-thirds of our citizens are telling us, and each other, that social engineering by the federal government has failed. The Great Society is great only in power, in size and in cost. And so are the problems it set out to solve. Freedom has been diminished and we stand on the brink of economic ruin. 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? Our party must be the party of the individual. It must not sell out the individual to cater to the group. No greater challenge faces our society today than ensuring that each one of us can maintain his dignity and his identity in an increasingly complex, centralized society. Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, galloping inflation, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite. Our party must be based on the kind of leadership that grows and takes its strength from the people."

~~~~~ Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today

"They say the dog is man's best friend. I don't believe that. How many of your friends have you neutered?"

~~~~~ Larry Reeb