Thought for Today

"When a thing is done, it's done. Don't look back. Look forward to your next objective."

~~~~~ George C. Marshall

CAUTION: GLARY HOME PAGE HIJACKER

Glary Utilities has a new version, 2.41.0.1358. When I updated from the previous version, it hijacked my home pages on both my versions of Firefox (Beta [10] and Aurora [11]) and on Internet Explorer 8. It changed the home page to a Glary search page (which appeared to be a customized version of Google) and changed my default search engine from DuckDuckGo to Google. This was despite, during the installation procedure, my unchecking the boxes for the Ask toolbar and for changing my default search engine to Ask. This was something else entirely different – and it most definitely did not "Ask"!

It attempted to do the same thing to Google Chrome, but Chrome intercepted it and warned me – popped up an alert box saying something like "Arrr – something is trying to change your home page and your default search engine! Should I allow it?" and giving me a choice of 2 buttons to click – leave it alone or change it. It did not affect Opera or Safari, probably because those have so few users that Glary didn't think it was worth their while.

Bottom line: As far as I'm concerned, Glary has just thrown away its excellent reputation and proven that it cannot be trusted. Caveat utilitor (Let the user beware)!!!

If you elect to use Glary Utilities, here's how to defeat the Home Page hijacker:

Read each screen carefully. First, be sure to uncheck both boxes (bottom one first) on the Ask Toolbar screen. Then, a few screens later -- the one I didn't see -- watch for a screen that says "Select the additional tasks you would like Setup to perform while installing Glary Utilities, then click Next."

Under it you'll see three checkboxes, all checked by default!" First and second say "Create a desktop/Quick Launch icon," so you can safely leave them selected. However, the third one says "Set Glary Search as my home page" -- in other words, "You hereby have my permission to hijack my browser."

Yes, that makes it legal -- but IMHO, it doesn't make it right. Therefore, I can no longer trust Glary the way I used to, because by this act, they have proven to be unworthy of my trust.

Thought for Today

"And that is called paying the Dane-geld; but we've proved it again and again, that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld you never get rid of the Dane."

~~~~ Rudyard Kipling

Thought for Today

"The child must know that he is a miracle, that since the beginning of the world there hasn't been, and until the end of the world there will not be, another child like him."

~~~~~ Pablo Casals

Thought for Today

"Oh leave the Wise our measures to collate.
One thing at least is certain, light has weight.
One thing is certain and the rest debate.
Light rays, when near the Sun, do not go straight."

~~~~~ Arthur Eddington

Thought for Today

"Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity."

~~~~~ Louis Pasteur

Thought for Today

"The public character of every public servant is legitimate subject of discussion, and his fitness or unfitness for office may be fairly canvassed by any person."

~~~~~ Charles Babbage

Thought for Today

"We build too many walls and not enough bridges."

~~~~~ Isaac Newton

Thought for Today

"Liberty without virtue would be no blessing to us.

~~~~~ Dr. Benjamin Rush

Thought for Today

"The battle of life is, in most cases, fought uphill; and to win it without a struggle were perhaps to win it without honor. If there were no difficulties there would be no success; if there were nothing to struggle for, there would be nothing to be achieved."

~~~~~ Samuel Smiles

Thought for Today

"One who works for his own profit is likely to work hard. One who works for the use of others, without profit to himself, is likely not to work any harder than he must."

~~~~~ B. Carroll Reece

Thought for Today

"There is no act of treachery or meanness of which a political party is not capable; for in politics there is no honour."

~~~~~ Benjamin Disraeli

Thought for Today

"When evil acts in the world it always manages to find instruments who believe that what they do is not evil but honorable."

~~~~~ Max Lerner

Thought for Today

"One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant."

~~~~~ John Locke

Thought for Today

"There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves."

~~~~~ Will Rogers

Thought for Today

"Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience."

~~~~~ Ludwig van Beethoven

Thought for Today

"The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale."

~~~~~ Arthur C. Clarke

Thought for Today

"Going to work for a large company is like getting on a train. Are you going sixty miles an hour or is the train going sixty miles an hour and you're just sitting still?"

~~~~~ J. Paul Getty

Thought for Today

"Failure is the key to success; each mistake teaches us something."

~~~~~ Morihei Ueshiba

Thought for Today

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

~~~~~ Heinrich Heine

Thought for Today

"The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments."

~~~~~ Gustave Flaubert

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

"It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellow men."

~~~~~ George MacDonald

Thought for Today

"There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave."

~~~~~ Louis Kronenberger

Thought for Today

"A moral lesson is better expressed in short sayings than in long discourse."

~~~~~ Johann Georg Zimmermann

Thought for Today

"Procrastination is opportunity's assassin."

~~~~~ Victor Kiam

Thought for Today

"Never forget that the key to the situation lies in the will and not in the imagination."

~~~~~ Evelyn Underhill

Thought for Today

"The need for Government is the need for force; where force is unnecessary, there is no need for Government."

~~~~~ Rose Wilder Lane

Thought for Today

"The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too."

~~~~~ Samuel Butler

Thought for Today

"He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense."

~~~~ Joseph Conrad

Thought for Today

"Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately, while the echoes of wonder, the claims of triumph and the signs of horror are still in the air."

~~~~~ Henry Anatole Grunwald

Thought for Today

"There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up."

~~~~ Rex Stout

Thought for Today

"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery."

~~~~~ Winston Churchill

Thought for Today

"We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive."

~~~~~ C. S. Lewis

Thought for Today

"It would be foolhardy to count on the conscience of the world."

~~~~~ Stefan Zweig

Thought for Today

"All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars."

~~~~~ Charles A. Beard

Thought for Today

"This nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle – among others – that honest men may honestly disagree; that if they all say what they think, a majority of the people will be able to distinguish truth from error."

~~~~~ Elmer Davis

Thought for Today

"People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents."

~~~~~ Andrew Carnegie

Thought for Today

"To give thanks in solitude is enough. Thanksgiving has wings and goes where it must go. Your prayer knows much more about it than you do."

~~~~~ Victor Hugo

Thought for Today

"When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set."

~~~~~ Lin Yutang

Thought for Today

"It is because nations tend towards stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all."

~~~~~ George Gissing

Thought for Today

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

~~~~~ Voltaire

Thought for Today

"Admitting Error clears the Score,
And proves you Wiser than before."

~~~~~ Arthur Guiterman

Thought for Today

"The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable."

~~~~~ James A. Garfield

Thought for Today

"Experience shows that success is due less to ability than to zeal."

~~~~ Charles Buxton

Thought for Today

"Discipline strengthens the mind so that it becomes impervious to the corroding influence of fear."

~~~~~ Bernard Law Montgomery

Thought for Today

"It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a scam. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming."

~~~~ John Coleman

Thought for Today

"The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time."

~~~~ Franklin P. Adams

Thought for Today

"The world is not going to be saved by legislation."

~~~~~ William Howard Taft

Thought for Today

"A liar begins with making falsehood appear like truth, and ends with making truth itself appear like falsehood."

~~~~~ William Shenstone

Thought for Today

"Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell."

~~~~~ Karl Popper

Thought for Today

"If there is no God, everything is permitted."

~~~~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

Thought for Today

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

~~~~~ Oliver Goldsmith

Thought for Today

"Presumption should never make us neglect that which appears easy to us, nor despair make us lose courage at the sight of difficulties."

~~~~~ Benjamin Banneker

Thought for Today

"Seize the moment of excited curiosity on any subject to solve your doubts; for if you let it pass, the desire may never return, and you may remain in ignorance."

~~~~ William Wirt

Thought for Today

"Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing."

~~~~~ Konrad Lorenz

Thought for Today

"Governmental aid is a drawback rather than an assistance, as, although it may facilitate in the routine of artistic production, it is an impediment to the development of true artistic genius."

~~~~~ John Philip Sousa

Thought for Today

"You may choose your words like a connoisseur, And polish it up with art, But the word that sways, and stirs, and stays, Is the word that comes from the heart."

~~~~~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

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

"As a vessel is known by the sound, whether it be cracked or not; so men are proved, by their speeches, whether they be wise or foolish."

~~~~~ Demosthenes

Thought for Today

"Hate is able to provoke disorders, to ruin a social organization, to cast a country into a period of bloody revolutions; but it produces nothing."

~~~~~ Georges Sorel

Thought for Today

"Depend upon yourself. Make your judgment trustworthy by trusting it. You can develop good judgment as you do the muscles of your body – by judicious, daily exercise. To be known as a man of sound judgment will be much in your favor."

~~~~~ Grantland Rice

Thought for Today

"Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual."

~~~~~ Natalie Clifford Barney

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

"Do we believe that the goal of government is to promote equal opportunity for all Americans to make the most of their lives? Or, do we now believe that government's role is to equalize the results of peoples lives?"

~~~~ Paul Ryan

Thought for Today

"There is no such thing as a person that nothing has happened to, and each person's story is as different as his fingertips."

~~~~~ Elsa Lanchester

Thought for Today

"In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas."

~~~~~ Alfred Whitney Griswold

Thought for Today

"If you keep thinking about what you want to do or what you hope will happen, you don't do it, and it won't happen."

~~~~~ Desiderius Erasmus

Thought for Today

"Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self."

~~~~~ Max Stirner

Thought for Today

"There is a point at which the law becomes immoral and unethical. That point is reached when it becomes a cloak for the cowardice that dares not stand up against blatant violations of justice."

~~~~~ Kurt Huber

"Democracy means that anyone can grow up to be president, and anyone who doesn't grow up can be vice president."

~~~~~ Johnny Carson

Prophetic words!

Thought for Today

"Beware of missing chances; otherwise it may be altogether too late some day."

~~~~~ Franz Liszt

Thought for Today

"If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied."

~~~~ Alfred Nobel

Thought for Today

"He never wants anything but what's right and fair; only when you come to settle what's right and fair, it's everything that he wants and nothing that you want."

~~~~~ Thomas Hughes

Thought for Today

"A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind."

~~~~~ Lewis Mumford

Thought for Today

"One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation."

~~~~~ Thomas Reed

Thought for Today

"Unhappy, let alone angry, religious people provide more persuasive arguments for atheism and secularism than do all the arguments of atheists."

~~~~ Dennis Prager

Thought for Today

"All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible."

~~~~ Noah Webster

Thought for Today

"The state of Israel must, from time to time, prove clearly that it is strong, and able and willing to use force, in a devastating and highly effective way. If it does not prove this, it will be swallowed up, and perhaps wiped off the face of the earth."

~~~~~ Moshe Sharett

Thought for Today

"The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office."

~~~~~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Thought for Today

"To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects."

~~~~~ Margaret Thatcher

Thought for Today

"I wonder how often in the past I may have missed the good in people because I pre-judged, based on the differences?"

~~~~~ Anne Perry

Thought for Today

"Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality."

~~~~~ Harlan Stone

Thought for Today

"The search for the truth is the most important work in the whole world, and the most dangerous."

~~~~~ James Clavell

Thought for Today

"Don't try to tear down other people's religion about their ears, Build up your own perfect structure of truth, and invite your listeners to enter in and enjoy its glories."

~~~~~ Brigham Young

Thought for Today

"If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual."

~~~~ Frank Herbert

Thought for Today

"He knows not his own strength who hath not met adversity."

~~~~~ William Samuel Johnson

Thought for Today

"If someday they say of me that in my work I have contributed something to the welfare and happiness of my fellow man, I shall be satisfied."

~~~~~ George Westinghouse

Thought for Today

"The extravagant expenditure of public money is an evil not to be measured by the value of that money to the people who are taxed for it."

~~~~~ Chester A. Arthur

(A DEMOCRAT! How times have changed!)

Thought for Today

"Let every man, every corporation, and especially let every village, town, and city, every county and State, get out of debt and keep out of debt. It is the debtor that is ruined by hard times."

~~~~~ President Rutherford B. Hayes

Thought for Today

"Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds."

~~~~~ John Perry Barlow

Thought for Today

"The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated."

~~~~~ Mohandas Gandhi

Thought for Today

"A quick glance at the American left reveals a movement in the midst of a nervous breakdown, displaying behavior that goes beyond inconsistency into the realm of bipolar moods and multiple personality disorders."

~~~~~ Michael Medved

Thought for Today

"No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them."

~~~~~ Elie Wiesel

Thought for Today

"The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments."

~~~~~ Ludwig von Mises

Thought for Today

"Truth, like the burgeoning of a bulb under the soil, however deeply sown, will make its way to the light."

~~~~~ Ellis Peters

Thought for Today

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds."

~~~~ Samuel Adams

Thought for Today

"The Nobel is a ticket to one's own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it."

~~~~~ T. S. Eliot

(It appears that Obama is no exception.)

Thought for Today

"It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work."

~~~~~ William Faulkner

Thought for Today

"To listen well is as powerful a means of communication and influence as to talk well."

~~~~~ John Marshall

Thought for Today

"In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs."

~~~~~ Walter Lippmann

Thought for Today

"The politician is an acrobat. He keeps his balance by saying the opposite of what he does."

~~~~~ Maurice Barres

Thought for Today

"Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them."

~~~~ Joseph Story

Thought for Today

"What makes a child gifted and talented may not always be good grades in school, but a different way of looking at the world and learning."

~~~~~ Sen. Chuck Grassley

Thought for Today

"Most people who succeed in the face of seemingly impossible conditions are people who simply don't know how to quit."

~~~~~ Robert H. Schuller

Thought for Today

"Whenever the government of the United States shall break up, it will probably be in consequence of a false direction having been given to public opinion."

~~~~~ James Fenimore Cooper

Thought for Today

"There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative."

~~~~~ Allan Bloom

Minnesota Majority: Obama TRAPPED in Keynesian Twilight Zone

Thought for Today

"I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning."

~~~~~ J. B. Priestley

Thought for Today

"Between a fellow who is stupid and honest and one who is smart and crooked, I will take the first. I won't get much out of him, but with that other guy I can't keep what I've got."

~~~~~ Lewis B. Hershey

Respect: The Budweiser Clydesdale Salute to 9/11

Thought for Today

"Tragedy is like strong acid – it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth."

~~~~~ David Herbert Lawrence

Thought for Today

"The most rewarding things you do in life are often the ones that look like they cannot be done."

~~~~~ Arnold Palmer

Thought for Today

"Ultimately, there is no compromise. Westerners will either retain their civilization, including the right to insult and blaspheme, or not."

~~~~~ Daniel Pipes

Thought for Today

"If more politicians in this country were thinking about the next generation instead of the next election, it might be better for the United States and the world."

~~~~~ Claude Pepper

Thought for Today

"Remember, half the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their class."

~~~~~ Al McGuire

Thought for Today

"I like animals because they are not consciously cruel and don't betray each other."

~~~~~ Taylor Caldwell

Thought for Today

"Too oft is transient pleasure the source of long woes."

~~~~ Christoph Martin Wieland

Thought for Today

"Courage and conviction are powerful weapons against an enemy who depends only on fists or guns. Animals know when you are afraid; a coward knows when you are not."

~~~~~ David Seabury

The Real Reason?

Turns out that the bust of Churchill that Obama so disdainfully returned to the British was sculptured by Sir Jacob Epstein – a Jew. So perhaps there was more to the Putz-in-Chief's actions than sympathy with his Mau-Mau grandfather who was arrested and interrogated by the British.

Suggestion: whichever Republican candidate wins the Presidency should ask the Brits if he (or she) could please borrow the bust for the length of his term so that it could be restored to its place of honor in the Oval Office. Each successor President should then renew the request before taking office.

Thought for Today

"The reality is that zero defects in products plus zero pollution plus zero risk on the job is equivalent to maximum growth of government plus zero economic growth plus runaway inflation."

~~~~~ Dixie Lee Ray

Thought for Today

"He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it."

~~~~~ Henry George

Thought for Today

"I have always felt that a man's religion was his personal and private affair."

~~~~ Leverett Saltonstall

Thought for Today

"One small cat changes coming home to an empty house to coming home."

~~~~~ Pam Brown

Thought for Today

"It is difficult to obtain the friendship of a cat. It is a philosophical animal... one that does not place its affections thoughtlessly."

~~~~~ Theophile Gautier

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

"Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons."

~~~~~ Robertson Davies

Thought for Today

"Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it."

~~~~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Thought for Today

"The republic was not established by cowards, and cowards will not preserve it."

~~~~~ Elmer Davis

Thought for Today

"We can easily manage if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed to it. But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday's burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it."

~~~~~ John Newton

Thought for Today

"Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken."

~~~~~ Orson Scott Card

Thought for Today

"Science progresses best when observations force us to alter our preconceptions."

~~~~ Vera Rubin

Thought for Today

"Do what is right, not what you think the high headquarters wants or what you think will make you look good."

~~~~~ Norman Schwarzkopf

Thought for Today

"Perhaps the surest test of an individual's integrity is his refusal to do or say anything that would damage his self-respect."

~~~~~ Thomas S. Monson

Thought for Today

"Cruelty towards others is always also cruelty towards ourselves."

~~~~~ Paul Tillich

Thought for Today

"Some people think that our planet is suffering from a fever. Now scientists are telling us that Mars is experiencing its own planetary warming: Martian warming. This has led some people, not necessarily scientists, to wonder if Mars and Jupiter, non signatories to the Kyoto Treaty, are actually inhabited by alien SUV-driving industrialists."

~~~~~ Fred Thompson

Thought for Today

"I think women are too valuable to be in combat."

~~~~ Caspar Weinberger

Thought for Today

"No person who is enthusiastic about his work has anything to fear from life."

~~~~~ Samuel Goldwyn

Thought for Today

"Eagles come in all shapes and sizes, but you will recognize them chiefly by their attitudes."

~~~~~ E. F. Schumacher

Thought for Today

"Men should stop treating feminists like ladies, and instead treat them like the men they say they want to be."

~~~~~ Phyllis Schlafly

Thought for Today

"Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity, there is no parent left to tell them."

~~~~~ Russell Baker

Thought for Today

"An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it."

~~~~ William Bernbach

Thought for Today

"I never saw a lawyer yet who would admit he was making money."

~~~~ Mary Roberts Rinehart

Thought for Today

"Leaders get out in front and stay there by raising the standards by which they judge themselves – and by which they are willing to be judged."

~~~~ Frederick W. Smith

Thought for Today

"Prosperity cannot be restored by raids upon the public Treasury."

~~~~~ Herbert Hoover

Thought for Today

"Do your best when no one is looking. If you do that, then you can be successful in anything that you put your mind to."

~~~~ Bob Cousy

Thought for Today

"Then, like an old-time orator impressively he rose; I make the most of all that comes and the least of all that goes."

~~~~ Sara Teasdale

Thought for Today

"We must take away the government's credit card. With limits on both tax revenue and borrowing, the Federal government would finally be forced to get serious about spending cuts."

~~~~~ Alan Keyes

Thought for Today

"I have been trying to point out that in our lives chance may have an astonishing influence and, if I may offer advice to the young laboratory worker, it would be this – never to neglect an extraordinary appearance or happening."

~~~~ Alexander Fleming (discoverer of penicillin)

Thought for Today

"When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home."

~~~~~ Winston Churchill

Thought for Today

"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them."

~~~~ Louis Armstrong

Thought for Today

"Judgment comes from experience – and experience comes from bad judgment."

~~~~~ Walter Wriston

Thought for Today

"If your religion doesn't teach you the difference between good and evil, your religion is worse than useless."

~~~~~ Dennis Prager

Thought for Today

"One of the great problems with Americans is that – being a decent people – they assume that everyone else is equally decent."

~~~~~ Meir Kahane

Thought for Today

"The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem."

~~~~~ Milton Friedman

Thought for Today

"The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever rising tax rates to cover ever rising spending."

~~~~~ Thomas Sowell

Thought for Today

"The trouble with the public is that there is too much of it; what we need in public is less quantity and more quality."

~~~~ Don Marquis

Thought for Today

"When things are bad, we take comfort in the thought that they could always get worse. And when they are, we find hope in the thought that things are so bad they have to get better."

~~~~~ Malcolm Forbes

Thought for Today

"One cannot legislate problems out of existence. It has been tried."

~~~~~ Norman Ralph Augustine

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

"Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster. Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open eyes into their misfortune?"

~~~~~ Elias Canetti

Thought for Today

"A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it."

~~~~ Alexandre Dumas

Thought for Today

"Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it."

~~~~~ Raymond Chandler

Thought for Today

"The American dream is not that every man must be level with every other man. The American dream is that every man must be free to become whatever God intends he should become."

~~~~~ Ronald Reagan

Thought for Today

"Mozart's music is like an X-ray of your soul – it shows what is there, and what isn't."

~~~~ Isaac Stern

Thought for Today

"No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other."

~~~~~ Thomas Berger

Thought for Today

"The excitement of learning separates youth from old age. As long as you're learning you're not old."

~~~~ Rosalyn S. Yalow

Thought for Today

"Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, I have failed three times, and what happens when he says, I am a failure."

~~~~~ S. I. Hayakawa

Thought for Today

"Sometimes I'm asked by kids why I condemn marijuana when I haven't tried it. The greatest obstetricians in the world have never been pregnant."

~~~~~ Art Linkletter

Thought for Today

"The accomplice to the crime of corruption is frequently our own indifference."

~~~~~ Bess Myerson

Thought for Today

"Journalism: A profession whose business is to explain to others what it personally does not understand."

~~~~~ Lord Northcliffe

Thought for Today

"There is great treasure there behind our skull and this is true about all of us. This little treasure has great, great powers, and I would say we only have learnt a very, very small part of what it can do."

~~~~~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

Thought for Today

"There is a kind of victory in good work, no matter how humble."

~~~~ Jack Kemp

Thought for Today

"Racism is a refuge for the ignorant. It seeks to divide and to destroy. It is the enemy of freedom, and deserves to be met head-on and stamped out."

~~~~~ Pierre Berton

Thought for Today

"Nothing comes merely by thinking about it."

~~~~~ John Wanamaker

Thought for Today

"No enactment of man can be considered law unless it conforms to the law of God."

~~~~~ William Blackstone

Thought for Today

"There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe."

~~~~ Don Herold

Thought for Today

"Government is not the generator of economic growth; working people are."

~~~~~ Phil Gramm

Thought for Today

"Three groups spend other people's money: children, thieves, politicians. All three need supervision."

~~~~~ Dick Armey

Thought for Today

"I do not believe in abortion at will. I do not believe that if a woman just wants to have an abortion she should... I do believe if you have an abortion you are committing murder."

~~~~ Nancy Reagan

Thought for Today

"Whatever you do, do it with all your might. Work at it, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now."

~~~~~ P. T. Barnum

Thought for Today

"Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."

~~~~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Thought for Today

"Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable."

~~~~~ Franz Kafka

Thought for Today

"It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself."

~~~~~ Wislawa Szymborska

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

"It is always brave to say what everyone thinks."

~~~~~ Georges Duhamel

Thought for Today

"Cultivate solitude and quiet and a few sincere friends, rather than mob merriment, noise and thousands of nodding acquaintances."

~~~~~ William Powell

Thought for Today

"Marxists are people whose insides are torn up day after day because they want to rule the world and no one will even publish their letter to the editor."

~~~~~ Mark Helprin

Thought for Today

"We may have found a cure for most evils; but we have found no remedy for the worst of them all, the apathy of human beings."

~~~~~ Helen Keller

Thought for Today

"The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain."

~~~~~ Colin Wilson

Thought for Today

"A tree growing out of the ground is as wonderful today as it ever was. It does not need to adopt new and startling methods."

~~~~~ Robert Henri

Thought for Today

"The man who voyages strange seas must of necessity be a little unsure of himself. It is the man with the flashy air of knowing everything, who is always with it, that we should beware of."

~~~~~ Fred Hoyle

Thought for Today

"A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy."

~~~~~ Edward P. Morgan

Thought for Today

"A fellow doesn't last long on what he has done. He has to keep on delivering."

~~~~~ Carl Hubbell

Thought for Today

"It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities."

~~~~~ Josiah Stamp

Thought for Today

"I like people who refuse to speak until they are ready to speak."

~~~~~ Lillian Hellman

Thought for Today

"The only foes that threaten America are the enemies at home, and these are ignorance, superstition and incompetence."

~~~~ Elbert Hubbard

Thought for Today

"A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever."

~~~~~ Jessamyn West

GUEST POST: Schechter Sez – An Open Letter to My Fellow Jews and to All Americans

An Open Letter to My Fellow Jews and to All Americans

by Harvey B. Schechter

05/27/2011 11:20 PM 

During my 41-year career as a member of the Anti-Defamation League's professional staff and from the day I retired in 1993 to this very moment, I operated on a simple, fundamental principle, namely, if anywhere in the world a Jew is persecuted solely becase he or she is a Jew, it automatically becomes my personal problem because there but for the grace of God go I.

To the best of my knowledge, none of my relatives were victims of the Holocaust, but I am the beneficiary of decisions made by my grandparents in the 1890's to flee Eastern Europe and come to the United States.

This issue of SSEZ is directed not so much at President Barack Obama from whom I never expected anything good, particularly with respect to the Nation of Israel and the five-and-a-half million Jews who live there, it is directed primarily at America's Jews, an estimated seventy-eight percent of whom voted for Obama in 2008.  I also firmly believe Obama will get the lion's share of votes Jews will cast in the 2012 presidential election.  Maybe not 78%, but more than 50%.

There's an old political saying that Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.  This saying has an East Coast flavor and would now be stated as "...vote like Latinos and African-Americans," given the changes in the American political profile.  This attachment to the Democratic Party traces back to the passionate love America's Jews developed for President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 because of the liberal things he said and did during the Great Depression and his vigorous opposition to Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and  Imperial Japan.  Before 1932, large numbers of Jews voted Socialist and even Republican, the party of Abraham Lincoln, because in New York where more than a million Jews lived, the Democrats were under the control of corrupt Tammany Hall.  That changed with Roosevelt's victory in 1932.

Right now there is great turmoil in the American Jewish community and especially in Israel because of the speech President Obama delivered at the State Department a few days ago when he made reference to the 1967 borders as the starting point for land swaps between Israel and the Palestinians.   As Rabbi Shmuley Boteach just wrote, ". . . the president's claims to naivete are ridiculous.  To his detractors Obama is many things, but he is no fool.  He knew full well that to publicly call for a return to the '67 lines was a bomb waiting to detonate.  Obama knew the demand to return to the pre-Six Day War borders spoke directly to the Palestinian narrative."  I agree completely with Rabbi Boteach.

Come back with me to election night, 2008.  As the results poured in from around the nation clearly indicating the Democrats would win the White House and both Houses of Congress, I spoke with a long time personal friend, a very important and influential Congressman who was smiling with each new vote posting.  I told him his smiles would turn to tears when Obama shafts Israel. (I was more blunt than "shafts.")  He asked, "what if you are wrong?"  I said I would apologize in writing, but I knew I would not be wrong.

When Obama did his 1967 shtick, Mort Zuckerman, publisher of U.S. News & World Report, angrily accused Obama of "betraying Israel." Former Democratic Congressman and famous New York City former Mayor  Ed Koch said he will not vote for Obama in 2012.  Of course, November 2012 is almost eighteen months away and anything can happen.

If you watched Obama's face and body language when Israel's Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu spoke at the White House when Obama had to listen to a lecture about the realities in the Middle East, he was obviously boiling mad as Netanyahu in essence told him he didn't know what he is talking about.  As I watched Obama, it seemed to me that Obama was thinking about how he could get back at Netanyahu and at Israel for having had to suffer before the entire nation like a school boy being lectured to by his teacher.

Several liberal commentators and columnists were outraged and said that Netanyahu was ungracious and inappropriate for delivering those comments in a public setting.  It must also have been very painful for Obama even though he was in England to hear about the brilliant, passionate, and informative speech Netanyahu delivered to a joint meeting of the Congress to genuine thunderous applause and getting about twenty-five standing ovations from Democrats and Republicans alike.

And good old Hillary Clinton, our esteemed Secretary of State, looks like an absolute fool have said a week or so ago that Bashar Assad, the murdering, brutal dictator of Syra is a "reformer."  Yes, she called Assad a "reformer."  How can anyone ever believe them?

When Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid spoke to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), he was magnificent.  I never thought I would say this about Senator Reid, but he was outstanding in his understanding of what is at stake in the Middle East between Israel and her Arab Neighbors, and he said it forcefully and convincingly.  Maybe the man in the White House ought to sit down with his Senate Majority Leader and have him explain the situation between Israel and the Arabs.

Again and again, we Jews are asked to explain the devotion of so many Jews to the Democratic Party which has paid and still pays homage to the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who in my opinion are enemies of the Jewish people and of Israel.  Would they be so tolerant of the equivalent of Jackson and Sharpton in the Republican party?  Of course not. Our Liberalism came to us with our mother's milk.  For most American Jews, their synagoguee is the Democratic party;  their faith is Liberalism;  and their Moses is Obama.

TO MY FELLOW AMERICANS:  Please know that the hatred of Israel in the Arab world is equaled only by their hatred of you and of America.  The Jews may be their first target, but all of us are on their hit list.  The 9/11 attack was an attack on America!

For the record, Israel gave up land for peace.  It gave back the Sinai Peninsula.  Now there is the possibility of serious threats from the Sinai.  What did Egypt's President Anwar Sadat get for signing a peace treaty with Israel?  He got back the Sinai Peninsula, a Nobel Prize for Peace, and deadly bullets from members of his own army.

Israel gave Gaza to the Palestinians.  What did it get in return?  Thousands of deadly rockets raining down on its citizens.  If President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority repudiates his alliance with Hamas, he knows he will suffer Sadat's fate – a hail of bullets.

Israel also gave back territory in Southern Lebanon.  What did it get in return?  Thousands of deadly rockets fired by Hezbollah on Israel.

Dear Friends:  How long would we sit quietly while thousands of rockets poured down on us from Mexico and from Canada? Now you know what Israel is living with.

A friend sent me a marvelous cartoon of Obama meeting with the Queen of England who says to him, "I believe the borders of Britain and the U.S. should be based on the pre-1776 lines with mutually agreed swaps."  One picture is sure worth a thousand words.

                          Remember:  Be Well Because All Else Is Bubkiss

                Harvey B Schechter, 433 No. Palm Drive, #304, Beverly Hills, CA 90210

                PH:(310) 550-7332; FAX (310) 550-7364; harvespie@sbcglobal.net

Thought for Today

"Learning starts with failure; the first failure is the beginning of education."

~~~~~ John Hersey

Thought for Today

"I have come to terms with a lot of things, because, when all's said and done, there's really very little one can do about a lot of things. You just accept them. The point is you just have to keep on working and you just have to keep on living."

~~~~~ Jim Dine

Thought for Today

"People don't ever seem to realize that doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune."

~~~~~ William McFee

Thought for Today

"For as Jews, the problem happens to be more urgent and vital than for others; because the destruction of religion in America will involve the destruction also of the religious training of freedom; and with that our civil liberties."

~~~~ Rabbi Louis Finkelstein

Thought for Today

"As I grow older and older,
And totter toward the tomb,
I find that I care less and less,
Who goes to bed with whom."

~~~~~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Thought for Today

"More people need to understand the games secular liberals play. Here's one rule-of-thumb: No matter how bad a story sounds – particularly if it sounds bad – recognize the pattern of defamation."

~~~~~ Marvin Olasky

Thought for Today

"The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor."

~~~~~ Vince Lombardi

Thought for Today

"Sometimes a concept is baffling not because it is profound but because it is wrong."

~~~~~ E. O. Wilson

Weiner – A Simple Explanation

51% of Anthony Weiner's New York constituents think that he should not resign – but after all, what would you expect from people who pronounce "pawn shop" and "porn shop" exactly the same?

Thought for Today

"Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it."

~~~~~ Bertha von Suttner

Thought for Today

"Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words and suffer noble sorrows."

~~~~~ Charles Reade

Thought for Today

"When I was a youngster, a popular putdown was 'If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?' But when people like Michael Moore, Michael Bloomberg and George Soros, say so many really dumb things, it seems a more appropriate question would be, 'If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?'"

~~~~~ Burt Prelutsky

Thought for Today

"The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds."

~~~~~ Isaiah Berlin

Thought for Today

"The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens."

~~~~~ John Maynard Keynes

They've told us exactly what they're about, yet here we sit watching them do it like sheep awaiting the shearing.

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

"If a psychiatric and scientific inquiry were to be made upon our rulers, mankind would be appalled at the disclosures."

~~~~~ Alfred Korzybski

Thought for Today

"It is my duty to leave nothing undone that I may lawfully do, to pull down this administration... They who, from indifference, or with their eyes open, persist in hugging the traitor to their bosom, deserve to be insulted... deserve to be slaves, with no other music to soothe them but the clank of the chains which they have put on themselves and given to their offspring."

~~~~~ John Randolph (in reference to President John Quincy Adams [1826])

Thought for Today

"The Constitution is not a panacea for every blot upon the public welfare. Nor should this Court, ordained as a judicial body, be thought of as a general haven for reform movements."

~~~~~ John Marshall Harlan

Thought for Today

"Sometimes if you want to see a change for the better, you have to take things into your own hands."

~~~~ Clint Eastwood

Thought for Today

"One way or the other, if you want to find reasons why you shouldn't keep on, you'll find 'em. The obstacles are all there; there are a million of 'em."

~~~~~ Benny Goodman

Thought for Today

"The only thing chicken about Israel is their soup."

~~~~~ Bob Hope

Thought for Today

"Every scientific truth goes through three states: first, people say it conflicts with the Bible; next, they say it has been discovered before; lastly, they say they always believed it."

~~~~~ Louis Agassiz

Thought for Today

"Give to us clear vision that we may know where to stand and what to stand for – because unless we stand for something, we shall fall for anything."

~~~~~ Peter Marshall

Thought for Today

"No nation ever yet found any inconvenience from too close an inspection into the conduct of its officers, but many have been brought to ruin and reduced to slavery by suffering gradual impositions and abuses."

~~~~~ Edward Livingston

Thought for Today

"Gross ignorance is 144 times worse than ordinary ignorance."

~~~~~ Bennett Cerf

Thought for Today

"In the end, the only people who fail are those who do not try."

~~~~~ David Viscott

Thought for Today

"Bedside manners are no substitute for the right diagnosis."

~~~~~ Alfred P. Sloan

Thought for Today

"Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it."

~~~~~ M. Scott Peck

Thought for Today

"Try and live your life the way you wish other people would live theirs."

~~~~~ Raymond Burr

Thought for Today

"Let us not be afraid to see the hatred that consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sit around us and wait for the moment when their hands will be able to reach our blood."

~~~~~ Moshe Dayan

Thought for Today

"I am not here concerned with intent, but with scientific standards, especially the ability to tell the difference between a fact, an opinion, a hypothesis, and a hole in the ground."

~~~~~ Serge Lang

Thought for Today

"We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought."

~~~~~ Bertrand Russell

Thought for Today

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

~~~~~ Alan Kay

Thought for Today

"A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a lot of ignorance is just as bad."

~~~~~ Bob Edwards

Thought for Today

"A man with convictions finds an answer for everything. Convictions are the best form of protection against the living truth."

~~~~~ Max Frisch

Thought for Today

"Truth is the greatest of all national possessions. A state, a people, a system which suppresses the truth or fears to publish it, deserves to collapse."

~~~~~ Kurt Eisner

Thought for Today

"Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind."

~~~~~ Daphne du Maurier

Thought for Today

"Strong, generous, and confident, she has nobly served mankind. Beware how you trifle with your marvelous inheritance, this great land of ordered liberty, for if we stumble and fall freedom and civilization everywhere will go down in ruin."

~~~~~ Henry Cabot Lodge

Thought for Today

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."

~~~~~ Richard P. Feynman

Thought for Today

"The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any."

~~~~~ Fred Astaire

Thought for Today

"Problems are only opportunities in work clothes."

~~~~~ Henry J. Kaiser

Thought for Today

"My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference."

~~~~~ Harry S. Truman

Thought for Today

"Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love the truth."

~~~~~ Joseph Joubert

Thought for Today

"The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy."

~~~~~ Theodore White

Thought for Today

"No amount of study or learning will make a man a leader unless he has the natural qualities of one."

~~~~~ Archibald Wavell

Thought for Today

"Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen."

~~~~~ Horace Mann

Thought for Today

"When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it."

~~~~~ Jacob Riis

Thought for Today

"On wrongs swift vengeance waits."

~~~~~ Alexander Pope

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

"No one has a greater asset for his business than a man's pride in his work."

~~~~~ Hosea Ballou

How Will Our Kids Pay?

Here's a brilliant new video from Heritage Action for America. Let's make it go viral!

Thought for Today

"Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house."

~~~~~ Henri Poincare

Thought for Today

"Beyond this day, no thinking person could fail to see what would happen."

~~~~~ Oskar Schindler

Thought for Today

"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools."

~~~~~ Herbert Spencer

Thought for Today

"There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go – if there are no doors or windows he walks through a wall."

~~~~~ Bernard Malamud

Thought for Today

"The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."

~~~~~ Sir Edward Grey, 3rd Bt., 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon, British Foreign Secretary from 1905 to 1916

Thought for Today

"Never think that you're not good enough. A man should never think that. People will take you very much at your own reckoning."

~~~~~ Anthony Trollope

Thought for Today

"A good action is never lost; it is a treasure laid up and guarded for the doer's need."

~~~~~ Edwin Markham

Thought for Today

"Laziness has become the chief characteristic of journalism, displacing incompetence."

~~~~~ Kingsley Amis

Thought for Today

"I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior."

~~~~~ Hippolyte Taine

Thought for Today

"Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind."

~~~~~ Lionel Hampton

Thought for Today

"No one ever became, or can become truly eloquent without being a reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language."

~~~~~ Fisher Ames

Thought for Today

"The presidency is not an entry-level electoral job."

~~~~~ John Podhoretz

Thought for Today

"Providence has nothing good or high in store for one who does not resolutely aim at something high or good. A purpose is the eternal condition of success."

~~~~~ Thornton Wilder

Thought for Today

"Intelligent or not, we all make mistakes and perhaps the intelligent mistakes are the worst, because so much careful thought has gone into them."

~~~~~ Peter Ustinov

Thought for Today

"Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength."

~~~~~ Corrie Ten Boom

Thought for Today

"The government must pursue a course of complete neutrality toward religion.*"

~~~~~ John Paul Stevens

(*Note that Justice Stevens wrote "religion," not "religion with the sole exception of Islam." Its adherents have the exact same rights and privileges as those of all other religions – no more; no less.)

Thought for Today

"We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country."

~~~~~ Thomas Jefferson

Thought for Today

"There are some people so addicted to exaggeration that they can't tell the truth without lying."

~~~~~ Josh Billings

Thought for Today

"A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company."

~~~~~ Charles Evans Hughes

Thought for Today

"The profession of a prostitute is the only career in which the maximum income is paid to the newest apprentice."

~~~~~ William Booth

Thought for Today

"Do not underestimate the determination of a quiet man."

~~~~~ Iain Duncan Smith

Thought for Today

"If you have made mistakes, there is always another chance for you. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down."

~~~~~ Mary Pickford

Thought for Today

"The best way to get along is never to forgive an enemy or forget a friend."

~~~~~ Walter Winchell

Thought for Today

"The principal purpose of the Democratic Party is to use the force of government to take property away from the people who earn it and give it to people who do not."

~~~~~ Neal Boortz

Thought for Today

"I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think."

~~~~~ Anne Sullivan

Thought for Today

"Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of facts within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity."

~~~~~ Calvin Coolidge

Thought for Today

"'Do you pray for the senators, Dr. Hale?' No, I look at the senators and I pray for the country."

~~~~~ Edward Everett Hale

Thought for Today

"I feel sorry for the person who can't get genuinely excited about his work. Not only will he never be satisfied, but he will never achieve anything worthwhile."

~~~~~ Walter Chrysler

Thought for Today

"When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn't the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice."

~~~~~ Otto von Bismarck

Thought for Today

"A portion of mankind take pride in their vices and pursue their purpose; many more waver between doing what is right and complying with what is wrong."

~~~~~ Horace

Thought for Today

"Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to make the world a better place."

~~~~~ Molière

Thought for Today

"Every so often, we pass laws repealing human nature."

~~~~~ Howard Lindsay

GUEST POST: Thoughts on the Liberal Thought Process

This FreedomTorch blog post by my friend Jill Clayton is so outstanding that I'm reprinting it here. I wouldn't want those readers who are not yet FreedomTorch members to miss it. ~~~~~ MAG

Thoughts on the Liberal Thought Process

by Jill Clayton

March 26, 2011

For the last couple of days I've been wandering about in liberal haunts on the web, dropping a little conservative thought here and there, just to stir things up a little and make people think. I've gotten a lot of crap flung right back at me, called a "Teabagger" and "redneck trash," etc., but there have been a few people who engaged me in conversation after I told them I used to be a registered Democrat. They naturally asked me why I "changed." And I told them. Some continued to question, and I see that as a good thing. When these questions come at me, I usually begin with ObamaCare. Because I'm a cancer survivor who was caught out in 2010 with no health insurance, my story serves as a way to prop open the doors of liberal minds just long enough for me to toss in a few seeds of doubt. If I encounter resistance there, I try the subject of the Race Card. Either way, I'm pretty confident that I'm being heard for a few seconds before the doors slam shut again. But then, that might be all it takes.

Since last year when Obamacare was passed, the Tea Party has risen out of nowhere and has become a real force to be reckoned with by swinging elections all over the country, booting out incumbent dinosaurs and generally flushing the Congressional toilet. Because of the Tea Party's apparent power in the voting booth, the mainstream media has also spent the last year going out of its way to brand this loosely gathered group as a racist movement aimed at shoving the United States back to 1956. Last time I checked, blaming the majority for the actions of a few was called "Prejudice." Why does this matter? Because liberal hypocrisy is one of the most frustrating things about trying to talk to liberals. It flies in the face of Common Sense, leading one to conclude that liberals are either stupid or brainwashed. But in all reality, they're not stupid. They're just misled - and have been for years and years.

Today's Democratic Party is a study in hypocrisy. Race-baiting and the flagrant disregard for the U.S. Constitution by the Democrats has now gotten so commonplace that even average Americans who don't normally pay attention to politics have now noticed it -- and it's starting to anger them. I know a few middle-of-the road Democrats and even they are now questioning Obama and the mainstream media. It finally took Obama declaring a military action in Libya without even consulting Congress and the American people beforehand to make them ask, "WTF?" What is really getting to the moderate Left is the fact that not only did Obama attack Libya, he did so while on vacation. Even my oh-so-liberal California and Seattle family members are questioning this. But then, it always takes something really huge to make people shake off their complacency and take notice of what's going on, doesn't it? I think that what's going on with my liberal friends and family members is a slower version of the same thing that "converted" me about three years ago. Here's a summary of sorts about how I, a longtime Democrat, changed my mind and in 2008, left the Democratic party forever.

Evolution of a Liberal-turned-Conservative

As a child who was born in union-controlled Detroit and later moved to southern California, I went through a very liberal public school system and was raised by a staunch feminist radical - my mother. She also influenced my brothers as well - both of whom are liberal to this day. My mother wasn't a stay-at-home, baking cookies type of Mom. Instead, Mom was at every NOW meeting in our area, or always off at some women's gathering. She was gone so often that I began cooking for my family at the age of ten and cleaning house. I changed both my brothers' diapers and babysat them from the age of thirteen and on. My father was a "closet Republican" who never dared to speak his point of view lest he draw the Wrath of Mom. I remember one fight they had where Mom actually said to him, "People just don't like you because you still support Tricky Dick!" (Nixon). Fortunately, my dad divorced her eight years later. However, like my mother, I began to get involved in feminist and liberal causes when I was barely in the seventh grade. I wore "Reagan is the Anti-Christ" T-shirts, and talked loudly and often about how the Republicans were "raping" the country and screwing the Poor. I was "Pro-Choice" because Mom said I should be, even when I didn't one hundred percent understand what that meant. Because I was indoctrinated at such a young age, I believed this wholeheartedly.

But, there were some things I began to disagree with my mother on, and this caused a great deal of tension between her and I when I reached my mid-teens. The internal questioning of Mom's ideals began the year that I turned fifteen and Mom declared that we could have Santa decorations around the house for Christmas, but no "Jesus-stuff." This contradiction confused me right away. I was raised a Lutheran, and Mom took us to church every now and then, but she would remain in her seat throughout the service, making a show of not praying or singing. It began to draw stares from others in the congregation - so much so that it embarrassed me. After a while, I began to get flak from other kids and their parents about my mother's odd behavior in church. Then, one day, Mom just stopped going.

To this day Mom has never answered me directly about why she did this, or why she took us to church or continued to allow my brothers and me to go if she really didn't believe in it. I can only conclude that she took us because my father, a Catholic who later became a Methodist, insisted. But despite this religion-confusion, I kept attending church even when the rest of the family stopped going. I loved singing in the choir and despite my mother's rantings, I believed in God. I grew up questioning the Bible and everything about religion, and for a while, I even stopped attending when I reached my twenties. However, I could never bring myself to let go of God completely. No matter how confused I was, God remained in the back of my mind, guiding me throughout my troubled years and getting me back on an even keel by the time I reached my mid-thirties and my own kids were questioning me about religion and government.

In grade-school, I was taught some things that proved to be universal truths. These included that the N-word was a very, very bad thing to say, (as was any disgusting euphemism) and I was also taught to think of people as people - to disregard their skin color. I still hold these values to this day. However, as the late 70s gave way to the 80s, I noticed a profound change in school curriculum, and along with the fights I had with my mother over church, and I began to question the school system as well.

Why was there an African-American club and a Hispanic Club? How come it was suddenly not okay to talk about Christ at school anymore? Why am I supposed to feel guilty because I happen to look white? In English class, I was taught political correctness and that there are certain terms and phrases you cannot say because we might offend someone if we do say them. I agreed with it, believed in it and thus PC became an integral part of my verbal lexicon. By 1981, the Progressives were already injecting their doctrines of Socialism and Communism into our education system, and I bought it all. I fervently believed in everything the current Democratic party stood for, until I grew up and went to college. That's when I began to realize just how warped the liberal mindset truly is when it comes to the economy. What I couldn't get past, however (and wouldn't for many years) is that I still believed that all conservatives were inherently racist.

I have my opinions on the Mexico/US border dilemma, which I've already expressed in a number of posts & commentaries all over the web, so I won't go into a spiel on that now. I know that I got in trouble when I came out in support of it and was accused of being a racist. Even before that, the questions lingered. Suffice it to say that during the presidential primaries, it finally hit me that Democrats themselves were racist. It wasn't overt, like you'd find in Aryan groups and such, but it's the kind that's just swimming around below the surface like a copperhead snake, striking only when it's necessary and convenient for them to do so. I saw how Team Obama slapped Hillary Clinton and all the other candidates with the race card. It shocked me so much that I began to read up on this "thing" called Multiculturalism, as well as the Cult of Personality while trying to figure out how Obama could get away with this rhetoric and no one - NO ONE - in the Democratic Party or the media was questioning him about it.

Trust me when I tell you that most average Liberals (Progressives, Socialists, and so on) truly do not see themselves and what they are doing as "racist" or hypocritical. They honestly believe that multiculturalism is a celebration of diversity and to speak out against it is tantamount to putting on a KKK hood and burning crosses on people's front lawns. They believe that conservatives are stupid because we just don't "get it." But having seen this kind of dogma being spoon-fed to kids in public schools and then reinforced later on in college, I can also tell you that the intellectual Progressives like my mother know exactly what they're doing. They know it's hypocritical. They simply do not care what this kind of thinking does to the American Public because they have an agenda, which is to realize their Socialist utopia in this country, whatever that might be. To accomplish these things, I finally realized, they had to divide and conquer the minds of the American people. The masses. I also realized with quite a bit of horror that this has been going on right under our noses in one form or another in our public schools since the 1960s.

What are kids being taught? In order for the socialist agenda to be furthered in this day and age, you have to maintain the illusion that there is Oppressed and their Oppressor. Kind of like God Vs. Satan. There always has to be a "bad guy," and for the last 30 years, the "bad guy" just so happened to be all conservatives and all White People in general. In the average Progressive's mind, the Tea Party is actually seen as the last dregs of this supposed Oppressor/Aryan Nation mindset gathering together for one final stand before the evil conservative capitalists are wiped out completely. They believe this without question.

This hypocritical close-mindedness is inherent in every liberal. I had to consciously question every thing I saw to even begin to grasp it on my own. It took an accidental viewing of the Glenn Beck show in August of '08 to get me to understand the big picture. The problem, as I see it, is that most liberals don't bother to question anything coming from the media. They're comfortable with their mindset and see no reason to look at it any closer. The intellectual elite feeding this mindset know this and will not tolerate anyone who decides to ask a few too many questions.

These Progressive intellectuals, who supposedly know what's "best for us," knowingly use the ideals of Multiculturalism to get people to divide themselves into racial groups. Since these Progressive elites are very familiar with the social dynamics of certain racial groups (taught in every high school and college as "Humanities" courses), they know the right things to say to inflame these groups whenever it's called-for. The anti-SB1070 hype in Arizona is a prime example. The sad thing is that once divided by race, people simply close their minds and will not listen to any dissenting opinion or reasoning. These people are being played, and they either don't know or simply don't care. They have become ensnared in the trap of Multiculturalism completely and it will take nothing short of the lifting of bedrock Progressive principles to show people the ugly stuff squirming beneath to even begin to make them change their minds. Even at fifteen, something about political correctness and dividing people and labeling with race-hyphens stuck in my craw. But again, it took me years upon years of questioning the status quo to make me realize exactly what was going on. "Labeling" people is what Progressives do, and it has a very ugly and nefarious purpose, despite its outward humanitarian appearance.

Multiculturalism is nothing more than the 1950s ideal of "Separate but Equal," but it's been repackaged into a more sleek and modern design that is palatable for the general population. The underlying message became "Let's celebrate diversity with diversification!" It took me until 2008 to realize just how insidious and pervasive this mind-set was. Liberals of all stripes believe in it without question. When you challenge the idea of multiculturalism with an average liberal, be prepared for blow-back. You have to remember that you're fighting two generations of public school & college-level Progressive indoctrination. The idea of true equality and a "color blind" mode of thought is an alien concept to them because they think they're already doing it by championing diversity. This is the great fallacy of Multiculturalism.

In recent months, I am heartened by the growing number of black and Hispanic conservatives standing up and speaking out. I am glad that these communities are finally now beginning to see that true equality can only happen when we stop considering someone's race when we judge them as a person. People should be judged first and foremost by their motives and actions. My dad always used to tell me, "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then chances are pretty damned good that you're looking at a duck."

So, if you want to open the eyes of liberals, and by this I mean the average man-on-the-street liberal, you have to get them to begin by pointing out the hypocrisy in THEIR TERMS, thus allowing them to come to their own conclusions. This transition, I suppose, was easier for me because I've always harbored unanswered questions about liberal thought, which were finally answered for me when I went to work in the media and saw the Democrats' bully tactics in the last presidential primaries. But what about the rest of the libs out there?

In recent weeks, the subject has come up in public discourse that Planned Parenthood has been silently and deliberately exterminating blacks and Hispanics over the years via abortion clinics being placed in poor neighborhoods. This truth is finally resonating with these communities. Their ears are perked and they're growing more and more willing to listen to conservative opinion. What's also resonating is the message that is only just now getting out there that minorities have been "enslaved" by the Welfare system for many years now, blunting the minds of the young and stifling all but the brightest of those who want a better life. Many eyes are in the process of being opened, slowly but surely, especially by terrific people like Allen West, Herman Cain and others like them who get out in these communities and keep hammering away on this subject.

Unless a liberal can be led to question their own belief system, it is very hard to get them to change their minds. I've printed out reams of articles proving to my mother that Margaret Sanger was supportive of the idea of the extinction of black people. Regardless of this proof, Mom refuses to see it. Sanger was one of her heroes. Some minds, you just can't change. One can only hope that if we keep putting honest and truthful information out there that is contrary to what the liberal establishment has come to accept, maybe it will happen in time to save this country.

The main battle against Progressive ideals is already being waged within in our public schools. Progressives and union Socialists have a strangle-hold on our schools. As parents and grandparents, we need to start influencing our school boards to take up a more conservative-based curriculum. Teach kids the ugly yet honest truth about American history and world history, letting them draw their own conclusions. Even if Progressivism is finally rooted out of our schools one fine day, sooner or later, someone will discover Karl Marx again and think it's a smashing idea that everyone else should know about. I think Marxist materials should be used in schools but only as examples of what we SHOULD NOT DO, accompanied with comprehensive explanations as to WHY.

I think Rudyard Kipling said it best in "Gods of the Copybook Headings" (which I read many years before I ever heard of Glenn Beck, by the way):

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

 by Rudyard Kipling

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

------------------------------
Have a nice day!
Jill

Thought for Today

"Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have – life itself."

~~~~~ Walter Anderson

Thought for Today

"There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them."

~~~~~ George Orwell

Thought for Today

"The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism."

~~~~~ Robert Frost

Thought for Today

"Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history."

~~~~~ Norman Borlaug

Thought for Today

"People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to."

~~~~~ Malcolm Muggeridge

Thought for Today

"Evil is knowing better, but willingly doing worse."

~~~~~ Philip Zimbardo

Thought for Today

"There is far too much law for those who can afford it and far too little for those who cannot."

~~~~~ Derek Bok

Thought for Today

"When blithe to argument I come,
Though armed with facts, and merry,
May Providence protect me from
The fool as adversary,
Whose mind to him a kingdom is
Where reason lacks dominion,
Who calls conviction prejudice
And prejudice opinion."

~~~~~ Phyllis McGinley

Thought for Today

"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers."

~~~~~ Charles William Eliot

Thought for Today

"To be one's self, and unafraid whether right or wrong, is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity."

~~~~~ Irving Wallace

Thought for Today

"A leader is one who, out of madness or goodness, volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people. There are few men so foolish, hence the erratic quality of leadership in the world."

~~~~~ John Updike

Thought for Today

"The best way to convince a fool that he is wrong is to let him have his own way."

~~~~~ Josh Billings

Thought for Today

"Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is."

~~~~~ Maxim Gorky

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

"Life improves slowly and goes wrong fast, and only catastrophe is clearly visible."

~~~~~ Edward Teller

The Fogel Family

The Fogel Family by Pana Nichuirc

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS MEMORIAL ALBUM TO THE FOGEL FAMILY CONTAINS VERY GRAPHIC & DISTURBING IMAGES ..... DO NOT LOOK INSIDE UNLESS YOU ARE PREPARED FOR THAT!

Five members of the Fogel family in Itamar Udi (father age 36) Ruth (mother age 35), Yoav (age 11), Elad (age 4) and Hadas (age 3 months) were murdered in their home in Itamar in Shomron by terrorists who infiltrated the Jewish community by jumping over the town's security fence. The five were stabbed to death. Their 12 year old daughter Tamar was first to find the bodies about an hour after the attack when she returned home from local youth movement activity. She found her two additional brothers sleeping in a room the terrorist had overlooked (thank G-d).

The funeral for the five family members will be held tomorrow, Sunday March 13, 2011 at Har Hamenuchot cemetery in Jerusalem.

As news tragedy reached residents of the Shomron spontaneous demonstration where held at many locations throughout the region.

Shomron Regional Council Head Gershon Mesika said that Defence Minister Ehud Barak was to blame for removing check points in the areas between Palestinian Authority in Shechem (Nabulus) and the Jewish communities in the area.

David Ha'ivri director of the Shomron Liaison Office called on Defence Minister Barak to take responsibility for his grave mistake and to resign from his position. Nothing less would be accepted in a country with accountability in government. The Israel authorities must apprehend all those involved in this cowardly massacre and bring them to justice.

Donations for the family and for the security of the community of Itamar can be made via
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=BEQ6J35KY7YY

It is important for people to understand what was done here, to understand the utter barbarity and depravity that is "Palestinian" society. Its crucial to understand what Jewish Pioneers are dealing with as they obey Torah & claim Eretz Yisrael!

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE FAMILY HAVE ASKED THAT THESE PICTURES BE PUBLISHED TO SHOW THE HORROR OF THE MASSACRE ~ MAY THEIR BLOOD BE AVENGED!

The Fogel Family by Pana Nichuirc

Thought for Today

"As we read the school reports on our children, we realize a sense of relief that can rise to delight that thank Heaven nobody is reporting in this fashion on us."

~~~~~ Joseph Priestley

Thought for Today

"A great attitude does much more than turn on the lights in our worlds; it seems to magically connect us to all sorts of serendipitous opportunities that were somehow absent before the change."

~~~~~ Earl Nightingale

Thought for Today

"In motivating people, you've got to engage their minds and their hearts. I motivate people, I hope, by example – and perhaps by excitement, by having productive ideas to make others feel involved."

~~~~~ Rupert Murdoch

Thought for Today

"In general President Obama's policies have been very, very skewed and very, very extreme. Like on healthcare for example, I don't think that trying to ram healthcare through was a smart idea politically, because he wasted a lot of capital and now he doesn't have any of that same capital with even his own party that he used to have."

~~~~~ Jonathan Krohn

Thought for Today

"I am persuaded that in the case of elected officials, the overwhelming temptation is to conclude that it is more important for your constituents that you be reelected than that you deal honestly with them."

~~~~~ James L. Buckley

Thought for Today

"Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it."

~~~~~ William Penn

Thought for Today

"Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind."

~~~~~ Lewis Thomas

Thought for Today

"There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism."

~~~~~ Alexander Hamilton

Thought for Today

"No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself."

~~~~~ Anthony Trollope

The Damage Obama Has Done

A few hours ago, a friend emailed me this chart summarizing the damage Obama has done through February 2011. As anyone who buys gas has noticed, since the end of February the oil and gas metrics have rapidly worsened.

(Click chart to enlarge.)

For a printable copy of the chart in PDF format, click here.

Thought for Today

"A great attitude does much more than turn on the lights in our worlds; it seems to magically connect us to all sorts of serendipitous opportunities that were somehow absent before the change."

~~~~~ Earl Nightingale

Thought for Today

"Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs."

~~~~~ John Ruskin

Thought for Today

"Expecting something for nothing is the most popular form of hope."

~~~~~ Arnold H. Glasow

Thought for Today

"A society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable."

~~~~~ Robert Bork

Thought for Today

"Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."

~~~~~ Berthold Auerbach

Thought for Today

"To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects."

~~~~~ Margaret Thatcher

Thought for Today

"How well I have learned that there is no fence to sit on between heaven and hell. There is a deep, wide gulf, a chasm, and in that chasm is no place for any man."

~~~~~ Johnny Cash

Thought for Today

"We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth's creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take in the idea of dying, unable to sit still."

~~~~~ Lewis Thomas