It shows that conservatives have a lot of compassion.

Not sure people who want more gov are doing it because of generosity. I think politicians are cynical and having more people dependent to the state and most likely the Democratic party is a market share issue as well.

I look after them ostensibly to teach my s compassion; that one emotion that can most easily be confused with pity. Pity is a short term emotion – a gut level response that can be sated by either walking away or immediately fixing their most pressing problem.

Compassion – now that’s different. I can help you, but I can’t do it for you. I can empathize with your plight, but I can’t stop the great creator from taking you. I will make you comfortable during that time.

That’s my story to anyone who challenges me on why I have 2 dogs and three cats.

But the truth is – I actually like them. And I do cry when they die or they go away. I can’t do anything about it of course, but I know that they had it good while they were part of my life.

What a great story about Howie. You and Dana are a class act. Thanks.

That’s a wise cantaloupe you’ve got there, Bill.

“What I have learned from Howie is that we are bleeding freedoms not because people want to enslave us but because they genuinely want to help and protect us.”

I don’t think this gets said enough: freedom and helping others needn’t be mutually exclusive.

Big government socialists like to set up a false dichotomy, implying that citizens must be forced to sacrifice liberty for the sake of compassion. The federal budget and supporting tax code reek of this misguided approach.

True generosity proves the lie.

I often wonder whether this false dichotomy is the result of a calculated political ploy to seize power, or simply reflects a mind to which cheerful giving is so foreign that it completely escapes consideration. I’d guess its a bit of both.

Hang around left-wing and Democratic websites long enough and you’ll see that there is an alternative viewpoint motivating many of the proponents of the direction we are going in.

It’s based on a denial of your statement above. They believe that there is a class of people in this country that is NOT capable of feeding and clothing themselves. They believe that the reason such people are in that state is because our society is run by white men who deliberately arrange the laws and capitalism to subjugate people who are non-white, poor, etc., etc. They think that our society’s stucture blocks anyone who is non-white and born to a poor family from advancing their economic status and progressing as their ambition and abilities would otherwise permit. They think that American society is so racist, etc., that the only way that such people can overcome that is for the government to give preferential treatment to them and to take large sums of money from white people who have it – which in any case the people who have it have gotten only because of exercise of privilege that this society illegitimately grants white men.