My whole life, I’ve tried to be for Michelle and my girls what my father wasn’t for my mother and me. I want to break that cycle — where a father’s not at home, where a father’s not helping to raise that son and daughter. I want to be a better father, a better husband, a better man. . . .

Growing up, I made quite a few [bad choices] myself. Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down. I had a tendency to make excuses for me not doing the right thing.

We’ve got no time for excuses.

In today’s hyper-connected, hyper-competitive world, with millions of young people from China and India and Brazil, many of whom started with a whole lot less than all of you did, all of them entering the global workforce alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything you haven’t earned. Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination.

Moreover, you have to remember that whatever you’ve gone through, it pales in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured — and if they overcame them, you can overcome them, too.

Morehouse College is a historically black, all-male college in Atlanta.

Related articles

• Obama gets personal about race and manhood in Morehouse speech (washingtonpost.com)

“He’s a joker, he’s a smoker, he’s a midnight toker,” Obama added.

President Barack Obama’s speeches have a familiar ring these days — no matter if it’s guns, immigration or the budget.

Tout what he’s already done. Say the public’s in his corner. Demand Congress do something. Lament Washington dysfunction. Lay out his own plan. Avoid details. Urge voters to keep up the pressure. Warn it won’t be easy. Bask in the applause.

It’s the fill-in-the-blank approach to selling a presidential agenda: same template, just adjusted for the topic.

— President Obama’s fill-in-the-blank sales pitch – Carrie Budoff Brown – POLITICO.com

Health insurance companies across the country are seeking and winning double-digit increases in premiums for some customers, even though one of the biggest objectives of the Obama administration’s health care law was to stem the rapid rise in insurance costs for consumers.

— Despite New Health Law, Some See Sharp Rise in Premiums – NYTimes.com

That headline should not read “DESPITE new health law,” it should read “BECAUSE OF new health law.”

But we were going to get things for free! We were promised better things at a lower cost!

In my day, most of the citizens were farmers or merchants or tradesmen. They lived by their hands and their wits. They had horse sense and they knew when they were being sold a bill of goods.

Of course, that was before television.

Americans today are unfortunately rather stupid. Most of them don’t know anything about economics, science, history, government . . . as George Carlin says, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” George is here in heaven now. He breaks me up, he really does.

Your president and Congress have decreed that every American will have health insurance whether they want it or not. They have further decreed that a lot of Americans will not have to pay for their own health insurance, which means that the cost of their health insurance has to be paid by the rest of you. That’s one reason why your health insurance premium is going up.

Another reason your premium is going up is the “guaranteed issue” provision. “Guaranteed issue” means that no one can be denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions.

Funny story: My friend Paul Epps, his wife has an insurance agency in Southern California. It’s an area that’s susceptible to wildfires in the summer months. When a fire breaks out, people who live near the fire actually call this woman wanting to buy a homeowners policy.

Of course, she doesn’t sell it to them. Insurance companies are a little bit smarter than that.

Buying a homeowners policy when your house is already on fire is analogous to “guaranteed issue” health insurance: Hello, I’d like to buy some health insurance. Oh by the way, I have cancer, but the doctors think that with lengthy and expensive treatment, I have a chance to pull through.

This is not even insurance anymore. Insurance is something you pay for now to protect against the risk of having to pay a lot more later. In these cases, there IS no risk. The bad news has already happened. It’s a dead loss for the insurance company and they have to spread the cost of that loss to other policyholders. That’s another reason your premium is going up.

This isn’t even economics, folks, it’s just common sense.

According to a new survey, just over 10 percent of Berkeley High ninth and 11th graders reported carrying a weapon onto school property, while about 35 percent of 11th graders reported attending class drunk or high.

If I had a kid at Berkeley High, I’d be moving out of town yesterday, but I’m reading in the Daily Californian that this news has been “met with surprise and joy from administrators,” the reason being that a similar survey two years ago reported about 17 percent of ninth graders and 16 percent of 11th graders carrying weapons onto campus, and 48 percent of 11th graders attending class drunk or high.

Progress!

“We’re very pleased with the survey results all around,” said Director of Student Services Susan Craig, “and at the same time we’re not at all complacent.”

If by “pleased” she means “horrified,” I couldn’t agree more.

In other news, Barack Obama got more than 90 percent of the Berkeley vote in the recent presidential election, while Mitt Romney got 4.6 percent and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, got 3.2 percent.

The liberal voter looks to government to solve problems that many people prefer to take on themselves, like raising their children.

(Photo credit: ironypoisoning)

Final election counts are in for Berkeley, CA, the most liberal city in America. Let’s start with the presidential election, where Mitt Romney was able to edge out Jill Stein for second place:

• Barack Obama, Democrat – 90.3%
• Mitt Romney, Republican – 4.6%
• Jill Stein, Green Party – 3.2%

California ballot proposition results included:

• Proposition 30, a measure to increase state income tax rates for the wealthy – 90.7% Yes (passed statewide at 54.6%)
• Proposition 34, to abolish the death penalty in California – 86% Yes (lost statewide 52% to 48%)
• Proposition 37, requiring labeling of genetically engineered food – 92.4% Yes (lost statewide 52% to 48%)

“Maybe peace would have broken out with a different kind of White House, one less committed to waging a perpetual campaign–a White House that would see a 51-48 victory as a call to humility and compromise rather than an irrefutable mandate.”

Yeah, well, shut up, you Republican losers. Obama won, which means a majority of Americans support his policies. Stop being obstructionist and get with the program.

Oh wait, sorry. That quote wasn’t from a Republican but from a recently elected Democrat. It was referring not to Obama but to George W. Bush after the 2004 election. The author: Barack Obama, junior senator from Illinois. The book: The Audacity of Hope.

— James Taranto, Best of the Web Today

My fellow Americans –

The first headline I saw this morning was Obama Victory Speech Urges Unity in Facing Challenges.

In case you haven’t seen it, here’s an ad run by President Obama in Ohio in the closing days of the campaign:

A few days ago, it was Us vs. Them, whoever you imagine Us and Them to be. Now it’s Obama Urges Unity.

“Not one of us” is an ugly sentiment in itself, but coming from a man who not long ago promised us Hope and Change and Inclusiveness, it betrays a complete absence of character.

Four years ago, I said what I thought I needed to say to get elected, and I’m doing the same thing now, even though what I’m saying now is the exact opposite of what I said then.

Obama has been nothing if not divisive. On class and income, he speaks contemptuously of “millionaires” and glowingly of “spreading the wealth around.”

Obamacare, his signature “accomplishment,” allows — encourages, in fact — free riders to take advantage of others who’ll be forced to pay double and triple fares.

On race, he gratuitously inserts himself into cases involving black victims — Henry Louis Gates, Trayvon Martin, who “would look like my son if I had one.”

In cases where black boys beat a white man almost to death because they were bored, or black boys killed a white girl for bike parts, he has nothing to say — nothing about hate crimes, social disintegration or the resemblance of the perpetrators to his own hypothetical offspring.

Now that the election is over and won, he takes a few minutes for the obligatory call for unity before another four years of division.

I, for one, am tired of the bullshit.

Ross Perot endorses Mitt Romney. Honey Boo Boo endorses Obama.

Typical Romney supporter:

“Five million jobs doesn’t even keep up woth [sic] our population growth.”–Romney. Obama’s solution: free contraceptives! #2012

Typical Obama supporter:

IF ROMNEY GETS ELECTED AND TAKES AWAY MY FOOD STAMPS IMA SEND SOMEONE TO MURDER HIS ASS

What we saw last night was the real Obama–a bright but incurious and inexperienced man who four years ago was promoted well beyond his level of competency. The Obama that guys like [Chris] Matthews and [Andrew] Sullivan expected instead was a character in a fairy tale–a fairy tale written by guys like Matthews and Sullivan.

— James Taranto

Almost everything appertaining to the circumstances of a nation, has been absorbed and confounded under the general and mysterious word government. Though it avoids taking to its account the errors it commits, and the mischiefs it occasions, it fails not to arrogate to itself whatever has the appearance of prosperity. It robs industry of its honours, by pedantically making itself the cause of its effects; and purloins from the general character of man, the merits that appertain to him as a social being.

— Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (1792)

My fellow Americans –

I’m hearing in the pre-debate analysis that voters are looking for the candidate who’ll help them have a better life.

Speaking as someone who was there at the beginning, I can tell you that helping you have a better life was not America’s original value proposition. Everyone was welcome to come here and try to make a better life for himself and his family — unless he was from Africa or Asia, of course — but there wasn’t what we now call a “safety net.”

If you tried to make it and failed — and a lot of people did — you had to go back where you came from. No guarantees! You tried, you failed, let the next man have a chance.

I still believe that the majority of Americans want a government that gives them the freedom to succeed or fail or their own merits, and not a government that “helps them have a better life.” I don’t believe it’s a large majority, but I still believe it’s a majority.

Politicians over the last 200 years or so have doen a masterful job of convicing Americans that all of the good things in life come from government. As my friend Tom Paine says in the quote above: government takes the credit for everything and the blame for nothing.

If business is booming during my term of office, the credit goes to me and my policies.

If business is bad, it’s because my policies haven’t had a chance to work yet. Or because my opponents obstructed me. Or because the last guy in the job screwed things up so bad that nobody can fix them.

Anyone who thinks about this notion that government is making good things happen sees what a fallacy it is . . .

If President Obama could “create jobs,” give me one good reason why he hasn’t done it. Do you think he wants to run on a record of increased unemployment, increased poverty, increased debt, plummeting net worth . . .?

Please don’t tell me that Republicans in Congress are preventing him from doing it. How would that work? I want to hire a man and a Repubican congressman shows up and stops me from doing it?!

BULLSHIT!

If politicians could “create” jobs, they’d be doing it all the time.

Randy Newman has a new song and video out — “I’m Dreaming” — about a voter who casts his ballot solely based on skin color.

I listened to it . . . it’s great, like every other Newman song I can think of, but didn’t this train leave the station in 2008? We already have a black president. (Yes, his mother was white, but “mixed-race” doesn’t get you 12 percent of the electorate.)

Will some people not vote for Obama because he’s black? Yes.

Will some people only vote for Obama because he’s black? Yes.

As Geraldine Ferraro said in 2008, “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is.”

Naturally, she was denounced as a racist by the Obama campaign.

Let’s move on already . . .

David Henderson says — accurately, I think — that Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks can be paraphrased as “People who are dependent on government will vote for the candidate who credibly (to them, at least) promises to keep the programs that have created that dependence.”

Do you think President Obama disagrees with that? He doesn’t.

If you think he does, please see The Life of Julia on the president’s web site. It lays out a “typical” woman’s cradle-to-grave dependence on government assistance and describes how Obama will keep those programs going while Mitt Romney won’t.

The most insulting thing about it is that as you read about Obama funding this and Obama funding that, it sounds like he’s doing it all out of his own goddamn pocket. What a prince!

There’s no acknowledgement that Obama is taking from some and giving to others, and that all of Julia’s “free” stuff is paid for by me and people like me out of money earned by our own labor.

And we are struggling. We’re putting a kid through college, my wife has had an expensive medical condition, our home equity has plummeted, the roof leaks, my car is long overdue for new tires . . . there are unplanned expenses . . . next month, something else will break. That’s life.

As part of our middle-class existence, we pay a five-figure annual federal income tax bill. We pay for Julia’s babysitters, education, health care, etc., and Obama takes the credit. Not even a “thank you.” If we could keep even a fraction of that money, maybe we could afford to pay our own education and health care costs.

How about acknowledging that for every Life of Julia there’s a Life of Paul and presenting their stories in juxtaposition to show how, as with any policy, some people are better off and some people worse.

You see the idea? Let’s try another one . . .

The money being used to buy the votes of millions of Julias out there is not coming exclusively or even primarily from unnamed “millionaires” on “Wall Street” . . . it’s coming from “middle class” “hard-working Americans” on “Main Street” who are struggling.

And through it all, there is no presidential leadership. He’s too busy raising money to run ads so he can tell us what a great leader he is.

Everywhere we see, in ruins, Obama’s plans for our country. His foreign policy has encouraged revolutions that have brought our worst enemies to power in the Middle East . . . His education reforms have no teeth and he sits by passively as they are challenged by his own local teachers union.

Credit much of the quick end to his bounce to Romney’s ads which, right off the bat after the Democratic Convention closed, rapped Obama for trying to convince us that we are better off than we were four years ago. Obama’s campaign essentially poses the question: What will you believe — your own eyes or my speeches?

— Dick Morris

Almost everything appertaining to the circumstances of a nation, has been absorbed and confounded under the general and mysterious word government. Though it avoids taking to its account the errors it commits, and the mischiefs it occasions, it fails not to arrogate to itself whatever has the appearance of prosperity. It robs industry of its honours, by pedantically making itself the cause of its effects; and purloins from the general character of man, the merits that appertain to him as a social being.

— Thomas Paine, Rights of Man (1792)

My fellow Americans –

You see how my friend Tom Paine, 220 years ago, perfectly anticipated — and rejected — your President Obama’s “You didn’t build that” quote.

Oh yes, we were aware of the “progressive” philosophy — that everything good comes from government — even then and we wanted no part of it.

By the way, I notice that liberals are now calling themselves “progressives.”

That’s good. The word “liberal” has lost its true meaning. Classical liberalism was based on “liberty” — from kings, churches and aristocracies.

Did you know that the great economist Milton Friedman did not call himself a conservative or a libertarian? He called himself a liberal, in the original sense of that word.

Progressives don’t believe in liberty. They believe in government as the new church and politicians as the new aristocracy.

I’ve always said if I were ever in trouble and if I were guilty, especially if I were guilty, I would want Bill Clinton there to defend me. Nobody does it better. He’s the most talented politician I ever covered and the most charming man I’ve ever met. And no one in my view can mount an argument more effectively than he can.

— Brit Hume

This morning I heard President Obama call for universities to lower their tuition rates so that “everybody in America can go to college.”

I am virtually certain that the President is not stupid enough to think that if tuition rates fell to zero, there would magically be enough room in the colleges for everybody in America. So I’ve got to believe that he’s purposely saying stupid things in order to appeal to stupid voters — the sort of voters, in other words, who probably don’t belong in college.

— Steven Landsburg