Go Figure

A new study, “Freedom in the 50 States,” done by George Mason University supposedly measures economic and personal freedoms and found North Dakota to be our freest state.

Um, tell that to someone who wants the personal freedom to have an abortion.

The next freest were South Dakota, Tennessee, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma.

The least free were New York, California, New Jersey, Hawaii, and Rhode Island.  I’ve been in California for the past thirty years and have always felt quite free here, thank you very much.

Anybody think lots of people are about to flee the oppression of Hawaii for balmy North Dakota?  Me either.

For more, see “Americans Are Migrating to More Free Republican States,” John Merline, Investors Business Daily

Can’t We Do Better, People?

The big headline this morning on Drudge is “Rampage,” and I thought it was about the protests across Egypt over President Morsi’s assumption of even more power.

But nooooooo, the story is about us Americans behaving badly at the Black Friday sales.

So you’ve got some folks fighting for freedom while we’re fighting for flat-screen TV’s.

Crocodile Tears Over Our Lost “Freedom”

Peggy Noonan’s latest column — “Obama Has a Good Day (But liberty has a bad one)” — complains that “The ruling strikes me as very bad for the atmosphere of freedom in our country.”

You know, that wonderful freedom to choose not to have health insurance, crash your motorcycle into a truck, and stick your fellow Americans with hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills for your care.  I’m sure that’s what the Founding Fathers saw as the essence of freedom, a God-given right to be a burden and a free-loader.

The GOP’s betrayal of the individual mandate they loved for two decades is worthy of John Edwards.

If the individual mandate had become law under President Bush or a President McCain, we all know Noonan would have been cheer-leading in a column that read “The ruling strikes me as very good for the atmosphere of personal responsibility in our country.”

Steve Jobs and Sarah Palin

Two significant deaths today — Steve Jobs’ physical death and Sarah Palin’s political death.  They are bookends, he representing the best of America, with its boundless opportunity for the talented to make our society better, she representing the worst of America, with its concomitant opportunity for the untalented to make our society worse.  They are the light and dark sides of our freedom.

RIP, Mr. Jobs.  Good riddance, Ms. Palin.