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Thingish Things

What’s the Plan, Mr, President?

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Jan• 15•13

O’Reilly: What’s the plan, Mr. President?

January 15, 2013 by WILLIAM F. B. O’REILLY

Barack Obama is an infuriating man.

He is at times larger than life and at others embarrassingly small-minded.

He can console a nation when its children are gunned down, yet he is utterly careless when spending money belonging to the children who live on.

Our president is physically graceful, but he lacks grace entirely when victorious. Then, he is a bully and a braggart.

He can be lovable or deeply unlikable, depending on his mood.

Negotiating withRepublicans seems to trigger Obama’s unflattering side, and that side has been on full display during the discussions leading up to the February debt ceiling vote.

On Monday, the president suggested that Republicans are “deadbeats” for wanting spending cuts commensurate with the amount of new borrowing they are being asked to rubber stamp.

“We are not a deadbeat nation,” the president sniffed. “And so there’s a very simple solution to this: Congress authorizes us to pay our bills.”

Republicans “have two choices here,” continued the man who is spending the nation into bankruptcy. “They can act responsibly and pay America’s bills, or they can act irresponsibly and put America through another economic crisis. But they will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy.”

That ransom, presumably, would be reductions in the amount of money we are stealing from our children each and every day.

The audacity of those tea party Republicans!

One wonders if Obama ever meant what he said about changing the tone in Washington. The way he is acting now suggests he did not.

Nothing is more maddening about this president, though, than his propensity to evade responsibility on the fundamental issue of our times — the gargantuan federal debt — and then seek to humiliate those earnestly trying to address it.

Actually there is one thing — his evident glee in knowing that hisRepublican opponents will dash themselves against the rocks in an effort to slow the growth of spending. Indeed, how doRepublicans win a rhetorical battle when the president of the United States, with all the trappings of his office, is willing to say things like: “If congressional Republicans refuse to pay America’s bills on time, Social Security checks and veterans benefits will be delayed” — as though there is no other option.

These are tactics unbecoming of a Chicago alderman, much less the POTUS. Obama would rather terrify 56 million Americans receiving Social Security benefits and retired U.S. military veterans than negotiate a single spending cut — at a time when we are borrowing about a third of what we spend.

That’s unconscionable, and beneath a man as blessed as this president.

President Obama has now made it clear that he intends to do nothing during his presidency about the debt, other than to double it from just over $10 trillion at the end of 2008 to just over $20 trillion in 2016, according to current estimates by theSenate Budget Committee minority.

And heaven help anyone in Washington who stands in the way of this president’s spending. Those poor unfortunates will feel the full weight of his office, if not the weight of the bills we are accumulating. It’s our kids who will feel those.

The president is bullying his way to a win with the debt ceilingvote, but he is diminishing his stature as a leader in the process.

 This piece was originally published by Newsday

State of the State speech reveals the great liberal lie

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Jan• 11•13

O’Reilly: Andrew Cuomo’s State of the State speech reveals the great liberal lie

January 11, 2013 by WILLIAM F. B. O’REILLY

Republicans are already calling it his Hugo Chavez Speech.

Indeed, Governor Cuomo’s State of the State Address Wednesday was remarkable as much for its stridency as for its content.

Unfortunately, the whole thing was based on a lie.

For an hour and a quarter, Mr. Cuomo hammered away at today’s liberal touchpoints — a minimum-wage increase, public campaign financing, gender pay equity, gun control — in order to shore up his credentials with the political left.

“It’s her body; it’s her choice!,” he thundered three times consecutively — to a legislative body that legalized abortion three years before Roe v. Wade.

The governor anointed New York “the progressive capital” of America. (Folks in San Francisco will surely have something to say about that). He promised a billion dollars in new spending on affordable housing and billions more in infrastructure improvements. Our subways will be floodproofed; our harbors storm-surge-proofed and our gas stations blackout-proofed. Schmittscasino.com research reports that there will be casinos and tax-free zones to revitalize the upstate economy.

Everything New York and national Democrats wanted to hear was crammed into 78 minutes of pure political goo.

But nowhere in his speech did the governor mention the difficult but essential things that have to be done in order to save New York from its downward spiral. Not a word was spoken about the state mandates squeezing counties and local governments to death, or the exorbitant state pension costs gobbling up dollars that used to go to services.

He spoke about those things when he first came into office, but not on Tuesday.

In November, I wrote nice things about Cuomo here in Newsday, but warned that ambition might prove to be his Achilles’ heel. That has borne out faster than I feared.

“Standing between him and the nomination,” I wrote, “are public employee union leaders who can make or break Democratic presidential aspirants — the same union bosses who have been trying to stall the governor’s Albany reform agenda for the past two years. They have the money, troops and organizational ability to turn the tide in huge primary states like Florida, Illinois,MichiganNevada and California. They are no doubt reminding the governor’s political team of that daily.”

Those union leaders must have been top of mind when the governor and his handlers conspicuously omitted in his speech any mention of the fiscal reforms that he pledged to pursue just 24 months ago.

Here’s the rub: If pension and mandate reform isn’t delivered in New York, the very social safety net that New York Democratslove so much is going to be severely compromised going forward. It’s already happening, and that’s where the lie of Gov. Cuomo’s speech becomes apparent.

With each passing budget, school districts are feeling the squeeze of Cuomo’s 2 percent property tax cap, which was passed sans mandate relief. That means fewer school programs for struggling districts. Not-for-profits that relied on local government funding are being gutted, too, and if you look at New York’s pension actuarial charts, the pain is only beginning.

The tax cap was a great idea, but only if Albany stopped forcing counties, municipalities and school districts to pay for state programs that Albany won’t fund. The governor promised that mandate relief was coming next when he signed the tax cap into law, but now he seems to have walked away from that.

He’s also apparently walked away from meaningful pension reform. These are the costs that are bleeding New York dry. AsMayor Mike Bloomberg has repeatedly pointed out, we are now paying more for trash picked up years ago through pension payments than for trash picked up today. Those public employee pensions are guaranteed, so when the money runs low, it’s the social safety net programs that get the ax.

California pension adviser David Crane spelled it out perfectly a couple of years back. “I have a special word for my fellowDemocrats,” he wrote. “One cannot both be a progressive and be opposed to pension reform. The math is irrefutable that the losers from excessive and unfunded pensions are precisely the programs progressive Democrats tend to applaud.”

Cuomo’s speech Wednesday signaled an abrupt, but not unexpected, end to his promise as a fiscal reformer. It marked the day he chose his own political career over the best interests of his state.

This piece was originally published by Newsday

Let the Freshman Negotiate

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Jan• 08•13

O’Reilly: Let the freshmen negotiate in Congress

January 8, 2013 by WILLIAM F. B. O’REILLY

LaGuardia Airport, early Sunday morning.

Two young men, identical twins in smart tortoise shell glasses, directly face me at an open counter, each deeply absorbed in aniPad.

“Stop kicking your leg,” the one to my right mutters, without so much as looking up from his device.

“I’m not kicking,” the one on my left snaps back, zipping through his Web pages as he does. “You’re always kicking,” his brother says.

The exchange went on from there, with neither raising his eyes once from his reading, or, seemingly, thinking anything of the volley. The petty complaints and retorts were automatic, part of an exchange that may very well have begun in the womb.

The scene made me recall a half-baked proposal I read about in the late 1990s as a possible fix to the enduring conflict inNorthern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants.

Hong Kong was about to be reabsorbed by the mainland Chinese government under a treaty with Britain. Tens of thousands of Hong Kong Chinese were alarmed and seeking to emigrate somewhere, anywhere.

An inventive British minister proposed that England grant 50,000 visas to Hong Kong Chinese willing to relocate to Northern Ireland. The theory was that it would inject money into Northern Ireland and dilute the hatred between the Irish sects living there.

“You don’t understand Northern Ireland,” someone quipped in response. “In 10 years you’ll have 25,000 Hong Kong Chinese lined up with the Protestants and 25,000 with the Catholics.”

Resentments left to fester can consume nations.

If you ask anyone in Washington — or Albany or any state capital — why some obvious need cannot be met, they will usually say one of two things: “It’s not that simple,” or “It’s a lot more complicated than that.”

I’m sure that’s exactly what my neighbors at LaGuardia would say.

But is it really? Or is half the problem in Washington that the players have annoyed the living bejeezus out of one another over a period of years and now hate to concede anything?

The challenges facing governments today are enormous, but let’s get real; they’re not complicated. The average apolitical American almost certainly could chart a course, within days, to lower our national debt burden better than the one we’re on now. (Are we on one now?) America is borrowing more than 40 cents of every dollar it spends. Let’s stop doing that, the rational person might say. And if tweaking entitlement programs, closing tax loopholes and pulling some troops out of Europe will get our budgets in balance, then let’s do that, too.

If familiarity is half the problem, then the special interest machine is the other half. Members are hamstrung by pledges and candidate questionnaires from unions and other interest groups locking them into positions. They are left no room for nuance or compromise. Those interest groups come with lobbyists, PR teams and lots of advertising dollars. God help you if you cross them.

Long-term elected officials have become so entangled in relationships with special interests and their lobbyists that nothing will ever be simple for them again. Just look at the lard stuffed into the so-called fiscal cliff deal. Somehow rum producers in the U.S. Virgin Islands got involved in it, getting a generous tax break in the final arrangement.

Rum producers?

Maybe the problem in Washington is that the decision-makers have been around too long. Maybe for the debt ceiling talks we should let the newly elected freshman put a plan on the table. Things may not be so complicated for them.

This column was originally published in Newsday. 

Republicans Need a New PR Plan

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Jan• 04•13

O’Reilly: The Republicans need a new PR plan

 January 4, 2013 by WILLIAM F. B. O’REILLY /

The Republican Party may be the only entity worse at public relations than the Israeli government.

Israel can be shelled daily for a year by its neighbors without notice or concern from the outside world, but as soon as she retaliates, it’s an international outrage.

The GOP can hold a winning poker hand, only to learn after the final round of betting that the game has been changed to pinochle. Such was the case in 2011’s debt-ceiling negotiations and in the recent “fiscal cliff” deal, where Republicans capitulated on tax increases without getting any meaningful spending cuts in return. The GOP thought the debate was to be about debt, when it was really about greedy millionaires.

Who knew?

Republicans were correct on the merits in both cases. The real problem in this country is overspending, not undertaxing, and no amount of taxing can fill the hole we’ve dug. But the GOP was made to look like a pack of asses by members of a party whose mascot is a donkey, a neat trick on the Democrats‘ part.

It’s never been easy selling Republican messages. Democrats promise voters shiny objects; Republicans typically don’t — yet fail to properly explain why they don’t.

Built in public relations challenges for the GOP can be daunting, but there can be no excuse for bad press year after year. A major political party must learn how to communicate its messages to voters no matter what. If it can’t, it won’t remain major for long.

The central message Republicans should be communicating today is the need for urgent action on the national debt. But the party’s leaders are reticent to go full bore on the issue for fear of being chewed up by a Democratic PR machine, expert at portraying Republicans as heartless and greedy whenever they propose spending less money.

Mitt Romney ducked the debt issue almost entirely, muzzling his fiscally prudent running mate, Paul Ryan, for the final month of the 2012 presidential campaign.

But the Republican Party is right about the debt. How right?

A friend and former client, Rye Town Supervisor Joe Carvin, puts it this way: “The Republican Party hasn’t been so right on an issue, and the Democrats so wrong, since slavery.”

That’s an audacious statement, but one that’s probably correct. The GOP’s attempts to spare future generations from fiscal ruin is downright virtuous, right up there with its unwavering anti-communist stance, which helped free millions from totalitarianism.

So why can’t the GOP get over the hump on debt? Why do Republicans always end up looking like they want to push grandma from the train?

I’m no public relations genius. I’ve lost more than my share of fights over the years. But one thing I’ve learned in politics is that you rarely win a battle from a defensive posture. A winning party is a party on offense, and I can’t remember the last time the Republicans controlled the national dialogue.

If the Republican Party is to convince the American public that debt poses an existential crisis to the country, it needs to indict Democrats in a publicly engaging way for recklessly stealing from our children. It needs to convince voters of all generations — even liberal voters who cherish the social safety net — that theDemocratic Party in America today is leading us to ruin. The social safety net will, in fact, collapse if we keep doing what we’re doing.

Most importantly, the Republican Party must be willing to lose in the short term in order to survive in the long term as a party true to its convictions — and to its duty to the American public.

This piece originally appeared in Newsday

Magnitude of U.S. Debt Swamps Even Alaska

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Dec• 31•12

O’Reilly: Magnitude of U.S. debt even swamps Alaska

December 31, 2012 by WILLIAM F. B. O’REILLY

Sell Alaska to reduce U.S. debt.
What an inspired idea — the best one to come out of Washington in years.
It didn’t come from the president or Congress; it came from Washington Post energy correspondent Steven Mufson. He should win a public relations prize for the effort, the same one the Taco Bell public-relations folks should have gotten in 2001 for promising a free taco to everyone on Earth if the falling Russian Mir space station hit a floating target in the South Pacific. The 40-foot-square Taco Bell float featured a giant bullseye over the words “FREE TACO HERE.”

Utter brilliance.

We’re not going to sell Alaska, of course. At least not yet. But Mufson’s proposal hammers home a point so many in Washington seem to be missing: America is deep in debt. Russian Winter deep.
Mufson is a smart guy, and he actually estimates the value of what Alaska would fetch on the open market today. This massive mineral goldmine, well over twice the size ofTexas and four times the size of California, would conservatively bring in about $2.5 trillion.
I don’t know what your reaction to that number is, but mine, when I first learned it, was, “That’s it? $2.5 trillion? For Alaska!?”
And that’s where Mufson earns his prize.
Fiscal conservatives have struggled and failed for a decade to qualify the extent of the growing federal debt to the American public in a way that can be easily understood. Mufson just did it.
The debt is so big that selling Alaska wouldn’t even dent it.
Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman noted in a column this week that if private-sector accounting standards were used by the federal government, U.S. taxpayers would be on the hook not for the $16 trillion seen on public “debt clocks,” but for $87 trillion. That number reflects hard federal debt (state debt is another worry), plus unfunded liabilities for Social Security, Medicare and federal employee pension benefits — obligations we have promised to pay without having a penny in the bank to do so. Those liabilities are growing by almost $8 trillion every year, even at these rock-bottom interest rates.
Think about that.
If Alaska is worth around $2.5 trillion, some analysts say we’re adding three times that amount of debt to our balance sheet every year. And all the while, members of Congress are bragging to constituents at home about their efforts to “protect” entitlement programs from change.
Show of hands: How many of you got a piece of campaign literature in 2012 depicting a senior citizen saying something like, “Hands off my Medicare!”
My wife and I got about five.
How many got pieces from candidates promising to fundamentally restructure our entitlement programs to save the Republic?
Anyone?
So why aren’t we taking the debt crisis seriously? Why do we all go about our business day after day, arguing red herring issues, with nary a thought of the debt we are amassing?
Is this the slow-boiling frog that foolishly fails to leap from the water as it gradually warms? Or is it the illusion of numerical invulnerability that beguiled army after army heading into Russian winters?
Soldiers in Napoleon’s grand army thought it impossible that they could freeze to death en masse as they invaded Moscow in 1812. And yet thousands and thousands did. Are Americans two centuries later demonstrating that same arrogance?
A lot of smart people believe we are.
If talk of selling Alaska or Hawaii or, heck, California, is what it takes to wake us up to the realities of our overspending, then I say let’s have the conversation.
Someone should put a bill on the floor of Congress to that effect with the same devilish grin that the Taco Bell people surely wore while floating a target out over the South Pacific.

This piece originally appeared in Newsday

Staying Ahead of Big Data

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Dec• 27•12

O’Reilly: Staying ahead of big data

December 27, 2012 by WILLIAM F. B. O’REILLY

A college classmate of my brother published a futuristic novel in the early 1980s in which every American was issued a bar code by the government for easy tracking and management. The book’s protagonist had a singular challenge plaguing his existence: His bar code number had been inadvertently switched with a one meant for a can of peas.
I don’t know if the book sold well — I can find no reference to it today — but what an entertaining and frightening premise for a mind bender.
It’s now 30 years later and we still don’t have bar codes assigned to us, as far as I know, but we may as well with the way we are tracked by political entities and the private sector. It’s only a matter of time before government catches up.

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Instead of issuing bar codes for each of us — how passe! — we are assigned data points, without our knowledge, that are crunched and squeezed by supercomputers to note our every want and whim, and, more important, to predict our future ones. Indeed, each of us has become a data point in his or her own right, based on what we purchase, how we register to vote, what we read, where we live, what cars we drive, and how much money we make, among a thousand other things. We are a nation of data points.
This system of tracking and managing Americans works. It was the foundation of President Barack Obama‘s successful turn-out-the-vote operation that befuddled Republican pundits, including this one, and it will no doubt be used as efficiently by the GOP in the next presidential cycle.
The technology is being used at all political levels. In the race for State Senate in 37th District in Westchester County this year, people predicted to vote for the eventual winner, George Latimer (I worked for his opponent), were sent score cards by an independent expenditure group — with individualized charts — showing how their past voting participation in elections stacked up against that of their unidentified neighbors. It was a way of shaming voters into turning out.
How scary, how brilliant — although it’s impossible to know just how much the ploy affected the race’s outcome.
Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned an America in which we would be judged not by the color of our skin but by the content our character. King unfortunately failed to anticipate the coming digital age. One’s race is a chief data point among marketers today, especially political marketers, and one’s character can’t be measured as easily as one’s purchases or activities.
Instead of becoming a single people, Americans are being sliced and diced by their individual traits for placement into new, ever-increasing categories for marketers to manipulate. We are being collated by habit, rather than drawn together by commonpurpose.
As helpful as this can be — I like online advertisements tailored to me — there is something creepy and dehumanizing about the direction in which we are inexorably headed. It conjures Mao Zedong’s aborted plan during his calamitous Cultural Revolution to exchange names for numbers in China.
Every New Year’s I swear to eat less, exercise more and go to church regularly, only to end up hating myself for my failures by February. This year, I’m going to try something different, something fun, and maybe even patriotic.
My New Year’s resolution is to confound the data collectors. I invite others to join me.
Beginning Tuesday, I will lie to marketers and pollsters at every opportunity. I’m going to visit websites that specialize in things of no interest, like underwater basket weaving and sixth century cartography. I’m going to search Amazon.com for gerbil food (I don’t have a gerbil) and lefthanded scissors (I’m a righty). The next marketer who asks my ethnicity will be told I am Swazi and that my religion is Eckankar.
This will, of course, do nothing to slow the steady herding of Americans toward this or that thought, candidate, product or activity, but it will make this one American feel deviously freer in the coming year.
I wonder how long it will take before the marketers figure out I’m just “one of those” people prone to rebellion. They probably won’t even have to create a category.

This piece originally appeared in Newsday. 

Uncle Sam Scrooges the Farmer

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Dec• 22•12

Bog-Hollow-FarmEvery year at Christmastime my family makes it a point to visit a local farm to cut down our own tree. The trees don’t look or smell any different from the ones we could get at Home Depot, but there’s something magical about walking along rows of pines, firs and spruces with your children in crisp December air. Even when we end up squabbling — “She got to pick the tree last year!” — we come away from the experience with an unshakable case of the warm fuzzies.

We go to a place in Yorktown Heights called Wilkens Fruit and Fir Farm that is already an important part of our children’s Christmas memories.

I pray those memories last a lifetime, because if the new federal estate tax rates kick in as scheduled next month, memories are probably all that will remain of our December excursions, not the tree cutting tradition itself. Such would be the recklessness of this federal government.

When the Wilkens family first began plowing the farm’s soil, the grand debate in this nation was whether our boys should go “over there,” as in Europe, where nation after nation was being drawn into a war over nothing.

It was 1916 and, as you walk Wilkens’ 180 acres today, it’s easy to imagine what the place must have looked like back then (pretty much the same as it does now) and to guess what its earliest workers might have been discussing while planting its first apple trees: America’s involvement in that European debacle and, the following year, the Bolshevik class war breaking out in Russia.

A walk onto Wilkens is a visit to a vanishing America. One’s cheeks get rosy simply by stepping foot on the place. After a tractor ride to spot and harvest “the best tree yet,” there’s a visit to the small wood-frame store for hot apple cider, warm doughnuts and maple sugar candy. You have to be careful not to trip over Norman Rockwell at his easel on the way out, or at least it feels that way.

The estate tax, or death tax as Republicans call it, may very well kill off these last vestiges of our American farming heritage. The tax is a family farm eradicator. The reason is the value of land in suburban and exurban communities.

Beginning in January, everything of value a person owns over $1 million at the time of death will be taxed at a rate that begins at 37 percent and reaches 55 percent for value over $5 million. That includes houses, cars, bank accounts, comic book collections … and land. It doesn’t matter that you paid income and sales tax on your possessions while you were alive, Uncle Sam will be coming for 55 percent of everything you accumulated, over a certain value, once you’re gone.

Proponents of the estate tax say it’s intended to hit those fat-cat millionaires and billionaires our president is so fond of demonizing. But the super-rich can afford to pay for intricate tax shelters. Its family farms like Wilkens that get devastated.

Perched on a rise overlooking the rambling hills of northern Westchester, Wilkens is worth millions — on paper. Land developers would snap it up in a minute. But Randy Pratt and his wife, a Wilkens descendant, want to keep it a farm. They don’t want to see it turned into another condominium complex.

The rest of this column is available at Newsday and Newsday Westchester.  Thanks for reading! 

The Newtown Children Deserve Action

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Dec• 18•12
 The Flagpole in Newtown
The Flagpole in Newtown

Our flag stands at half mast, from American Samoa to Maine. It will remain there until sunset Tuesday under orders from the president.

Then, at first light Wednesday, Old Glory will be raised in school yards across America again, and the business of the nation will begin anew.

It seems wrong.

All stories come and go. All news cycles end. But the bewilderment that must have been on the faces of those little children in Newtown last Friday morning demands that we fight to keep this tragedy alive, however painful.

The nation can’t move on until it decides to do something about Newtown. If it doesn’t, it’s not the country we know anymore. We are a land of good people, of good parents. We often disagree with one another. Sometimes fiercely. But we all care about children. They are our common bond, and the fight over gun laws in America now involves them.

If the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary had been carried out by terrorists — as happened at a grammar school in Russia in 2004 — we would be drawing up war plans. I bet a million Americans would volunteer to hunt down the perpetrators.This isn’t so easy. The perpetrators are our own.

The rest of this column is available at Newsday.com. Thanks for reading!


Will We Ever Understand Sandy Hook?

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Dec• 15•12

Newsday_logoWould anyone harboring thoughts of shooting up an elementary school or otherwise hurting children please, please, please identify yourselves now.

In your next moment of clarity, knock on the door of your local police station, ring up a psychiatrist — put an email or Facebook blast out to friends and relatives before you can change your mind exclaiming, “I need help and I need it now.”

We promise not to judge you too harshly. We will thank you for your honesty and get you the help you need.

Just please don’t go through with what you’re thinking. We cannot bear it.

If you can’t find the strength to turn yourself in, and you’re definitely going to do something terrible, handcuff yourself to the nearest post and throw away the key. We will sincerely appreciate it. What one man and several guns did at a Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday was as terrible an act as anything we’ve ever seen, meaner even than 9/11 in some sense.

To murder bright, beautiful kindergarten children in cold blood — 6-year-olds — is the purest of evil. It was an incomprehensibly wicked deed that will mar the collective consciousness of this country for years to come.

I don’t know how the parents of the children taken in Sandy Hook — in the middle of Hanukkah and 11 days before Christmas — ever get over this. How can they ever make sense of it? How will the families of the teachers killed Friday recover?

The only sensible words that come to mind were those spoken by Robert F. Kennedy in Indianapolis the night of April 4, 1968, when news of Martin Luther King Jr.‘s assassination came in. Kennedy consoled grieving Americans by speaking of the pain he felt losing his brother, former President John F. Kennedy, to a gunman. “My favorite poet was Aeschylus,” Kennedy said. “He once wrote: ‘Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’ “

All we can do as Americans today and tomorrow is pray that the grace and wisdom comes to those who need it as soon and as completely as possible.

These massacres are now commonplace. And like with Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Binghamton, and the Oregon shopping mall this week, we are left to ask why.

Why?

Why are shooting rampages occurring more and more often and with increasing cruelty? How can we not see the true nature of these latent killers in advance? Were there some warning signs we could have recognized? Or is this just inevitable with the number of guns out there? Is it television and video game violence; the loss of spirituality and organized religion among young people — is it psychotropic drugs? The worst part is that there are no answers. There never have been in instances like these. Only heartache and suffering on one of the saddest days in American history.

This article is available at Newsday Westchester and Newsday.  

Is New York Going to Pot?

Written By: William F. B. O'Reilly - Dec• 11•12

I’m confused. And a little bit hurt, in all candor.

I thought government loved me.

I was under the impression that the state, at every level, is there to save me from myself.

That’s what I’ve been led to believe. I mean how else could I have interpreted its coddling all these years?

If I don’t wear a seat belt in New York, I am reminded to do so with a $50 ticket for a first offense, and an $85 surcharge. I’m persuaded not to smoke cigarettes with terrifying warning labels and $15 per pack prices, courtesy of federal, state and local taxes.

New York City restaurants are verboten from cooking with delicious trans fats, so precious are my arteries, and my children must be helmeted just to walk outdoors on weekends.

OK, I exaggerate. But their vitamin gummy bears do come with calorie counts.

So why is talk of casino gambling and marijuana legalization the new rage in New York? Can either be construed as somehow good for us?

The rest of this column is available at Newsday and Newsday Westchester.  Thanks for reading.