Written By : John Hawkins
December 21, 2012

The president will have a decision to make. He can call on the Senate Democrats to pass our bill, or he can be responsible for the largest tax increase in American history. — John Boehner

ADVERTISEMENT

---

---

I’m not leaving here to be an advocate for the Republican party. — Jim DeMint

I’m not suggesting by any stretch that if we had prayer in schools regularly as we once did that this wouldn’t have happened. But, we’ve created an atmosphere in this country where they only time you want to invoke God’s name is after the tragedy. — Mike Huckabee

If so, Greece will have plenty of company. Fertility rates are falling everywhere. The median age in many countries is already over 40, well above the prime childbearing years. In some places, plummeting fertility can be attributed to dictatorial coercion: To enforce its “one-child” policy, China has employed methods ranging from steep fines and loss of employment to compulsory sterilization and abortions. The results have been brutal: Hundreds of millions of births have been prevented, China’s median age is at 36 and rising, and the Chinese fertility rate is now 1.54 — well below the rate of 2.1 needed to maintain a steady population. In surveys taken from the 1940s to the 1980s, fewer than half of Americans said they owned a pet. Today America’s 300 million humans own 360 million pets. Last puts that in perspective: “American pets now outnumber American children by more than four to one. — Jeff Jacoby

It is hard to overstate the demographic and social transformation this represents. It wasn’t that long ago that getting married and having children were life goals shared by nearly every American. For most of the 20th century, well over 90 percent of US adults married at some point in their lives — at one point the percentage went as high as 98.3 percent. Now, according to Pew, barely half of all adults in the United States — a record low — are married, and nearly 4 in 10 Americans say marriage is becoming obsolete.

And as more people choose not to marry, more of them retreat from childrearing. For decades Gallup has asked Americans what they consider the “ideal family size.” From the 1940s to the 1960s, roughly 70 percent said that three or more children would be best. But beginning in the late 1960s, the American “ideal” fell sharply. Today only 33 percent of Americans regard three or more kids as desirable. And in practice, one in five American women now have no children at all.

What happens to a society that increasingly turns its back on marriage and babies? In which singlehood becomes standard, and pets outnumber kids by four to one? Ready or not, America is going to find out. — Jeff Jacoby

I hate to say it, but killing is our way. We began America w/ genocide, then built it w/ slaves. The shootings will continue-it’s who we are. — Michael Moore

These incidents, these horrible, horrible incidents … are happening more and more frequently. And they will continue to happen more and more frequently until someone with the bully pulpit, and that means the president, takes leadership and pushes Congress. I think we will be there if the president exploits it, and otherwise we’ll go on to the next. — Jarrold Nadler

Secondly, no Coleman Young machine. No Kwame Kilpatrick machine. There is no Dave Bing machine. There’s no machine to go to the pool halls and the barbershops and put those people on buses, and then bus them from precinct to precinct where they vote multiple times. And there’s no machine to get ‘em to stop playing pool and drinking beer in the pool hall. And it does make a difference. — Ron Weiser

0

Comments are closed.