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Free and Strong America

Friday, October 9, 2009

Random Thoughts

Economist Thomas Sowell fires off a disjointed yet highly entertaining installment of his ever popular "Random Thoughts" articles. Some of the highpoints are as follows....

  • Upon learning that the Constitution requires a president to be a natural born citizen, a college student said: "What makes a natural born citizen any more qualified than one born by C-section?"
  • When politicians propose some hugely expensive new program and are asked how the government is going to pay for it, a standard ploy over the years has been to claim that they will pay for it by eliminating "waste, fraud and abuse." At a recent town hall meeting, a citizen raised the obvious question: If you can do that, why haven't you done it already?
  • After political crusades for "affordable housing" ended up ruining the housing market and much of the economy with it, many of the same politicians are now carrying on a crusade for "affordable health care." But what you can afford has absolutely nothing to do with the cost of producing anything. Refusing to pay those costs means that you are just not going to continue getting the same quantity and quality-- regardless of what any politician says or how well he says it.
  • Want to win an easy bet? Bet someone that Babe Ruth had a lower lifetime earned run average than Cy Young, Whitey Ford or Sandy Koufax. During his early years with the Red Sox, Ruth pitched nine shutouts in a season, which is still the American League record for a left-handed pitcher. He would have made the baseball hall of fame, even if he had never hit a home run.
  • Congressman Joe Wilson got into more trouble for telling the truth than President Barack Obama got into by telling a demonstrable lie about adding millions of people to the insurance rolls without adding a dime to the deficit. As regards providing medical insurance for illegal immigrants, I doubt that the president will do that. More likely, he will legalize them first and then give them medical insurance.
  • Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Muammar Qaddafi and Vladimir Putin have all praised Barack Obama. When enemies of freedom and democracy praise your president, what are you to think? When you add to this Barack Obama's many previous years of associations and alliances with people who hate America-- Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Father Pfleger, etc.-- at what point do you stop denying the obvious and start to connect the dots?

5 comments:

J Curtis said...

I forgot to add to this entry, my favorite topic that Sowell raises above here is probably a toss-up between the Joe Wilson comment and the last one in which Sowell points out that Obama is praised by the world's dictators and other assorted crackpots.
I admit, I probably would have lost the "Babe Ruth" bet if it had been put to me that way.

feeno said...

A college kid said "what makes a natural born president more qualified then one from a C-section"? He must have went to Michigan.

Later, feeno

J Curtis said...

As opposed to being an "OSU Buckeye"? Heh.

Tracy said...

Thanks for the post; Sowell is amusing but at the same time states some hard hitting truths. The ones that really get me are that health care costs what it costs and we can't pretend it cost less, obviously adding things into the budget that is already running in deficit is going to make it run more in deficit, and let's just make everyone legal and give them health care coverage paid for by who?

The Maryland Crustacean said...

I am taken by the sanctimony and feigned outrage of Joe Wilson's showing disrespect to the POTUS, even if the POTUS was teling a demonstrable lie. I couldn't help but think of the time when the Democrats yelled "No" and otherwise murmured and heckled when POTUS Bush was warning that Social Security was well on its way to going bankrupt. To be sure, there is one major difference between the two incidents....

.... George Bush was telling the truth.