Reward me because I’m successful!

"’I'm not ashamed to say I was successful,’ Mr. Romney says. No one is asking him to be ashamed of his success. What he should be ashamed of is his complacency. It seems absurd to say so, but maybe it will take losing the presidency to teach him a little humility. If he wins, he'll be really insufferable.”

                     --Michael Kinsley, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (April 21, 2012)

We love a vigilante until we meet one

“When we celebrate the vigilante on our screens, we tell ourselves it's because of our healthy mistrust of corrupt structures, or because we're genuinely vulnerable -- not because of our more shameful tendency to stereotype others based on fear or hatred.

“….It's easy to understand the enduring appeal of the vigilante archetype, whose hard-charging moral certainty jibes perfectly with this country's sense of exceptionalism, not to mention the narrative constraints of a 90-minute action movie. It's far more difficult to reconcile complicated reality with the simplistic, comforting fictions we crave.”

                  -- Ann Hornaday, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (April 15, 2012)

Americans must face reality!

"Like most people pretty much everywhere and pretty much always, Americans want government services but don't want to pay for them. Unlike most governments in the world these days, however, ours gives the people what they want." -- Paul Solman

People not guns kill people?

“Please spare me the ‘It's not guns that kill people; it's people who kill people’ argument, too. The implication is that someone with a knife or baseball bat can kill just as easily as someone with a firearm. To see how silly that argument is, imagine a person with a knife chasing a bunch of college students around a cafeteria trying to kill them.” – Dan Simpson in It's time to end the gun nuttery, PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE, April 18, 2012