The cancellation of Miami Vice may have given a break to our overworked ears, but think of the other tragedy:  my entire wardrobe of pastel muscle shirts  and white pants immediately became obsolete.

This is a fact that the leftist mind seems unable to grasp.  Those government jobs they have are funded by taxes paid by businesses like yours that struggled and made it, or the little lefties are now working for you, resenting your success, but don't ask them to stay five minutes longer.

Here's a relatively modern invention that has had a profound positive effect on mankind: eyeglasses.  At about age 15, I had to get glasses for nearsightedness.  I'm now of a certain age and have bifocals.

Were it not for these inventions, I would have viewed life for over forty years as though I were in fog.  They seem so simple, but they've dramatically improved people's lives.

Ditto to both.  My parents always called it Decoration Day.  We still visit four different cemeteries.

I own a Kindle and use it, but--if we're talking about a book that's more than just mind candy--I like real books.  Kindles are good when you travel (so you don't have to take your whole library).

Real courage takes place all the time in houses on your street. We don't know about it because courageous people don't complain.

I've said this many times on Ricochet, but my Dad spent 64 years with a shattered arm caused by German shrapnel.  Not once did he ever complain. When I hear myself whining about something, my Dad's image often crosses my mind, and I usually stop, feeling a bit of shame.

Mrs. Tabula is a Mary Ann kind of person:  loves kids and grandkids; she's pretty, but unpretentious; she's the adult in the room; and, best of all, she puts up with me.

They're very, very good.  Second the motion.

The symphonies of the American composer Howard Hanson, a native of Wahoo, Iowa.  He bucked the trend to atonal music.  You can hum his tunes--they're beautiful.

I have a great love for anything by the British composer Ralph (pronounced "Rafe") Vaughan-Williams.  He's not an unknown, but his whole range of works (symphonies, chorale pieces, operas, ballets) deserve a much wider audience.

My favorite bureaucracy quotes:

“The younger generation of today has grown up in a world in which in school and press the spirit of commercial enterprise has been represented as disreputable and the making of profit immoral, where to employ a hundred people is represented as exploitation but to command the same number as honorable.”  [Friedrich  Hayek]

"These corrupt bureaucracies are contemptuous of the people, in whose name they so piously speak." [Richard Weaver] 

 “Where administration is light and bureaucracy small, bureaucratic honesty is an incomparable virtue; but where these are heavy and large, as in all European states, . . . they burden and obstruct the inventive and energetic.  Where bureaucrats are honest, no one can cut through their Laocoonian coils:  their procedures, no matter how onerous, antiquated, or bloody-minded, must be endured patiently.  Such bureaucrats can neither be hurried in their deliberations nor made to see common sense.  Indeed, the very absurdity or pedantry of these deliberations is for them the guarantee of their own fairmindedness, impartiality, and disinterest.  To treat all people with equal contempt and indifference is the bureaucrat’s idea of equity.”  [Theodore Dalrymple]

A good reason to store corn cobs.  Be prepared for the rare market failure.

A good reason to store corn cobs.  Be prepared for the rare market failure.

These relationships among highly professional people would never cause a problem:  each knows that his or her highest duty is to shill for Obama.  And they do it well. 

I thought his middle name was Hussein.  

The other 932 were excellent too.

My wife and I are friends with a couple.  She is a rabid liberal who deeply loves Obama.  I suspect he's actually a conservative but is unwilling to face her wrath, so he says little.

I don't talk politics with her (on other subjects, she's perfectly normal), except that whenever I see her name on the Caller ID of the family phone, I answer "Dick Cheney residence. Dick speaking." After she splutters for 10-20 seconds, I go get Mrs. Tabula.

When Obama was elected, she made her husband take her to Washington for Obama's inauguration.  After she came back she insisted on telling us at length just how deeply spiritual the experience was for her. (I think it was just the cold).  Her description of him is roughly equivalent to how I could imagine myself describing the Second Coming.  She saw (and still sees) Obama as god-like.  

It was this description of her rapture that taught me that this whole "cult of personality" thing is very real for some people.  It was very, very creepy.  And kind of crazy.

I'm a Reagan fan, but he wasn't a god.

Classic.