Quote of the Day

"Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built." -- Abraham Lincoln

Quote of the Day

‎"One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results." — Milton Friedman

Quote of the Day

"I tell you, freedom & human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people into an unbearable hell and a choking life." -- Osama bin Laden on October 21, 2001.

Quote of the Day

"One of the more obvious facts that disproves the workability of liberalism is this: if none of us individually can afford everything that he wants, then all of us together can't afford everything that everybody wants." -- Kevin Orlin Johnson

Around the Nation: Job Numbers Still Bleak

Last Friday's job numbers showing that businesses created 151,000 jobs in October gave Barack Obama fodder for touting progress, but all is not as it appears. As the Heritage Foundation's Rea Hederman and James Sherk note in explaining the two surveys released by the U.S. Labor Department, "employment fell by a net 330,000 jobs ... the number of unemployed workers grew by 76,000 ... [and t]he median length of time workers stay unemployed rose from 20.4 weeks to 21.2 weeks." In fact, the only reason unemployment stayed at 9.6 percent is that "a net 462,000 Americans dropped out of the labor force and thus do not count as unemployed."

So bleak is the actual labor landscape that more than 25 percent of adult men are neither working nor looking for work, representing the highest recorded rate in post-war years. Overall, the labor force participation rate dipped to 64.5 percent, falling by 0.2 points.

According to Hederman and Sherk, at best, the job creation numbers signal only "a tepid recovery. At this rate, it will take years for the economy to recover the nearly eight million jobs lost during the recession." But not to worry. As Joe Biden says, "No doubt we're moving in the right direction."

Reposted from The Patriot Post Digest

Quote of the Day

"In other words, pushing inflation upwards means you can have your cake and eat it too. You can spend all you like and then make the bill disappear by driving down the value of the dollar -- buying with one hand the debt your reckless spending is issuing with the other. No need to cut spending, folks, just run the printing presses." -- Sarah Palin

Protectionism

"The biggest threat for sustainable growth at present is coming from protectionism in its different forms." -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel

Past Experience

"As to whether the president 'gets it' about the midterms, it doesn't matter. As Bill Kristol has observed, Obama is not in the same position as President Clinton was in 1994. Hillarycare was defeated. President Clinton was thus free to let voters know that he had gotten the message and would never try anything like that again. And he didn't." --columnist Mona Charen

Pot and Kettle

"No one nation has a monopoly on wisdom, and no nation should ever try to impose its values on another." --Barack Obama, who despite his rhetoric is always keen to impose his "values" on everybody else, no matter what

Quote of the Day

As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. -- H. L. Mencken in The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920

I think that we've reached that point.

Quote of the Day

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- CS Lewis

Quote of the Day

"In short, despite all of the flack and the arguments from a couple months ago, I am forced to conclude that the Buckley rule still seems the most sound: vote for the most conservative candidate electable. Now, I will concede that's hardly an easily applied rule of thumb like, say, 'Never try to tickle a wolverine when it's eating.' But I think reasonable people understand that electability is a perfectly valid factor to consider and not impossible to apply, either." --columnist Jonah Goldberg

She Wins the Braying Jackass Award

"Looking at what happened [Tuesday], what we heard and saw [then] is -- let's understand the message. The message was not, 'I reject the course that you are on.' The message is it didn't go fast enough to produce jobs. ... No regrets. Because we believe we did the right thing. I feel very at peace with how things have proceeded." --soon-to-be-former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

Quote of the Day

"We make a great mistake if we believe that these results are somehow an embrace of the Republican Party. What they are is a second chance, a second chance for Republicans to be what they said they were going to be not so long ago." --Senator-elect Marco Rubio (R-FL)

Quote of the Day

"Those that put equality first and freedom second will get neither. Those that put freedom first and equality second will get a higher degree of both." -- Milton Friedman

Accomplishments

"President Obama listed his accomplishments in office on Urban Radio Tuesday. No one gives him enough credit. Barack Obama took something that was in terrible shape and brought it back from the brink of disaster, and that something was the Republican Party." --comedian Argus Hamilton

Yesterday

To be clear, yesterday was not an embrace of the Republican Party. Far from it. But it was certainly a repudiation of Barack Obama, who personalized the election around his cult of personality. He even told Latinos that they should be inspired to "punish" their "enemies" on Election Day. More important, it was a rebuke of Democrats' hard push to the left with ObamaCare, cap and trade, financial regulation, looming tax increases for all Americans and massive deficit spending.

Get out the Vote!

One of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them: It is a well known fact, that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. Anyone who is capable of getting themselves into a position of power should on no account be allowed to do the job. Another problem with governing people is people. -- Douglas Adams