I can only "like" this comment once  but I LOVE it, and think it bears repeating.
Who do these bozos actually represent?  My one Republican representative (my senators are Boxer and Feinstein--weep for me) has been phoning it in for years. What are they smoking indeed?

How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?Two. One to hold the giraffe, and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools.

The book sounds positively Victorian in its reluctance to acknowledge what is really going on.

No, it's actually suggesting that just because buying things that "fell off the back of a truck" saves you money, it doesn't justify the damage it does to the economy or other people, who don't seem to be very real to you.

I would love to have the opportunity to focus on higher value work. Unfortunately the value of the work I do is artificially depressed by citizens of other countries who are here in spite of our laws and are willing to work for a wage that is too little for me to live on. The US doesn't have money to continue to support the education of our military's children because of the sequester, but somehow there is money to educate the children of people who came here in defiance of our laws.

I have no objection to allowing immigration if it is structured in a way that benefits the country and is conducted legally, but it is absurd to think that people who don't respect our laws enough to enter the country legally will respect our other laws if they inconvenience them in any way. Plus it makes suckers of those of us who paid the money and jumped through the hoops to come here legally.

President Carter was a huge boost for the right. Both my husband and I were on the left, as were all of our friends, when we realized that my husband was working from January through mid-September before the government allowed him to keep any of the money he made. He retired at 45 and closed 3 businesses. The one he sold went out of business after 6 months when the new owner ran it into the ground.

We started reading The American Spectator and later National Review, and realized that our values and ideas were actually much better represented on the right.

Unfortunately our youngest son doesn't like to talk about politics but has absorbed a lot of liberal claptrap over the years and has become more of a leftist out of inertia. It is painful, but if one day he actually starts paying attention hopefully he will get over it.

Interesting that Hollywood is now mirroring our dear leader's prejudice against Britain. 

I enjoyed the movie but thought it petty that at the end they mention the date of the release of the hostages without mentioning that it was, not coincidentally, Reagan's inauguration day.

Because she is sensible and very amusing.

I am convinced he is suffering from some degree of dementia and that for political reasons people are turning a blind eye. During the State of the Union speech he was repeatedly laughing inappropriately. He has always suffered from Foot-in-Mouth disease, but the goofiness of his recent pronouncements and behavior is so extreme I suspect a medical cause.

For the first time in years I forced myself to watch our preening, arrogant president for  a whole hour. This is a brilliant and accurate distillation of his speech. Bravo!

Don't discount the effect of rationing. Any scarce resource with high demand has to be rationed in the sense of limiting consumers to those who value the commodity the highest.

It has changed because the colleges are giving more aid now, but when our two boys went to Dartmouth we crippled ourselves financially because it was worth it to us. We know richer people whose kids went to public universities although they were accepted to Ivies, because they weren't willing to change their own lives that much.

We got what was most important to us--our boys have fascinating careers with exciting, fulfilling futures, while many of their peers, just as bright and motivated, are underemployed or living at home. The other parents got what was most important to them--financial security. Everyone wins. Insert  government money and it messes up the natural rationing.

How about Ricochet posting a survey? It could be simple:

1. Do you self identify as conservative, Republican, libertarian, centrist moderate, progressive, liberal, Democrat or none of the above?

2. Have any of your positions on issues changed after reading or commenting on a Ricochet post or podcast?

I would be very interested in the responses.

btw, my husband and I went from almost socialist to conservative from reading The American Spectator in the '70's, though admittedly Jimmy Carter had primed the pump.

I learned French in Canada and have taken a lot of flak over the years from Hispanic employees and chance acquaintences for not speaking Spanish. In the past few months I've started responding in French to people who approach me and only speak Spanish. It isn't punitive, nor is it well thought out, I'm just tired of struggling to understand and taking grief for not showing enough "respect" for Spanish speakers.

Youtube has some astonishing videos of interviews with proponents and victims of FGM. It is too horrifying to go into here, but it is fascinating what extraordinary things people believe. The bottom line seems to be the belief that no man will want to marry a woman who isn't mutilated.

I thought the whole point of the story was that they were ignoring much more important religious strictures and only obeying when it suited them (i.e. the Catholic who liked her life of leisure and ignored the prohibition against homosexuality suddenly being too religious to get a divorce). I thought that was hilarious.

I worked for a man who went to mass every day, every doorway and piece of furniture had a medal of a saint attached somewhere and he talked about Catholicism as if it was a cargo cult.  He worshiped  so God would make him rich. They had a deal. He and his wife used birth control, but did it in a way they thought God wouldn't notice. It always puzzled and amused me that he thought he could fool someone who created the universe.