Well, it’s bad. The internet tells us that the Fox network has just called Ohio for Barack Obama, and that pretty much ensures that the nation will have another four years of him.
There are fewer people at work than four years ago and many more on food stamps and other forms of government assistance, and it is now likely that four years hence the productive class will be smaller yet and the dependent class even larger. Our government is now $6 trillion deeper in debt than it was four years ago, and four years from now it will likely be as many trillions closer to — or already beyond — the point of financial insolvency. The west’s declared enemies now wield power in a larger section of the globe than four years ago, the entirety of the west is four years further into decline, and there is now little hope of reversal of either trend in the next four years.
Countless other calamities are now foreseeable over the next for years. Another generation of jurisprudence will decree that the constitution is no barrier to the government’s ever-expanding power. A potential energy boom wrought by new technologies will be forgone in favor of a fantastical environmentalism. Much needed educational reforms will be lost to the teachers’ unions’ preference for a failed status quo and the inevitable declining fortunes of local school boards. An absurd system of centrally-controlled medicine will be instituted.
Worse yet, the country has resigned itself to this fate. Old and crucial notions of self-reliance and freedom have been vanquished, a majority of the nation choosing dependence on the labors of others and the false security of such largesse. The nation that once celebrated individual achievement has chosen to believe that you didn’t build that.
There is still a resistant House of Representatives, a good number of states where the majority of citizens prefer their liberty to the government’s smothering embrace, and a tradition of American toughness that cannot be extinguished in one night, but Tuesday was a very bad night for the cause.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 
“Put not your trust in princes”
Standing in line to vote yesterday, contemplating.
I, as well as the other people in the line, were concerned about the outcome of the presidential election. I recalled a comment that I read recently that it is too bad that we should care so much about the person who’s going to be the next president.
In a country called America a few generations ago, the president was a guy in the White House many miles away from us who had almost no impact on our daily lives. He was in charge of the federal bureaucracy; he picked his department heads and talked with members of congress. He was an administrator, the “commander in chief” during wartime, not a “leader” in the style of the dictators of the 20th century. The president knew his place and left the people to run their lives the way they saw fit. Today we look to the president to dispense birth control pills, pass out free cell phones and decide what’s on school lunch menus. On some days he picks a name out of a stack of cards and orders drones to kill specific people around the world. And when he’s not busy doing that his appointees tells your doctor how to treat you aching joints.
All with borrowed money.
That’s when the verse from the Bible bubbled its way to the top of my head. I’m sorry that Romney lost. But it isn’t because I wanted Romney to be my leader. It’s because I reasoned that Romney would be less likely than Obama to want to run my life. I had hope that some of the tentacles of the creature called “The Presidency” would slither back and leave me alone.
I went to bed early last night because the process of watching the election returns is not something that entertains me. The only things that count are the results. This morning I found out and I am temporarily gloomy. But this mood will pass because life goes on. My parents and most of my family experienced much worse that this in Nazi occupied Europe when death surrounded them like a blanket. They survived, persevered and thrived.
There is a spirit in America that has been all but extinguished in Europe; the spirit of free men who escaped Europe, the province of kings, princes and “leaders” for centuries. It will take more than 8 years of Obama to quench that spirit as long as we remind ourselves that we should not put our trust in princes.