Archive for 2011

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: Christmas with blended families. It still works pretty much the same way with us a decade later, though we’ve lost some folks, sadly, but picked up some new ones, gladly.

It’s not as easy for everyone.

MERRY CHRISTMAS:

HAPPY 10TH ANNIVERSARY to Bill Quick’s DailyPundit. How many of us blogging back in 2001 thought we’d still be doing it ten years later?

CHRISTMAS, 1981. “Things sure have changed in the past 30 years…”

CALIFORNIA ATHEISTS BLOCK OUT NATIVITY SCENES: You know, atheism would be more popular if atheists weren’t such schmucks.

OBAMA ON SIGNING STATEMENTS, then and now. “I agree with the Obama of 2008. Just because presidents are incompetent and can’t get what they want from congress doesn’t mean they can run off and decide which laws to enforce and which to ignore. ‘Gridlock’ is not an excuse.”

MERRY CHRISTMAS:

ROSS DOUTHAT: THE CRATCHIT TAX CREDIT: “In 21st-century America, the well-off and well-educated have the best odds of enjoying the domestic stability that the Yuletide stories celebrate, while the very people who most need resilient families — the Cratchits and Baileys, the working poor and the hard-pressed middle class — are less and less likely to have them. . . . There is no government program that can guarantee a happy childhood or a devoted spouse. (If you replaced Clarence from “It’s a Wonderful Life” or the Angel Gabriel of the Gospels with a Health and Human Services bureaucrat, those stories would probably have a much grimmer ending.)” Just remember, people respond to incentives, even perverse ones.