Sunday is just a good day for an open thread, so let us know what is on your mind. In this new day of welcoming more liberal opinion on B4V, I particularly encourage the liberals to chime in and let us know what you think of the current state of affairs. I will tell you what’s on my mind as I sit hear and listen to the brain damage emanating from the Melissa Harris Perry show on MSNBC – 1. The liberals on the show are pining for “common sense” gun control legislation, somehow oblivious to the plethora of laws already on the books. Instead of the “smart” people on the panel analyzing the laws currently in place, and questioning why that legislation might be ineffective, they continue to blame the republicans for blocking more legislation, proving once again that liberals have never met a bigger government they didn’t like. 2. On the heels of a miserable jobs report, anemic 4th quarter GDP growth, and the possibility that Obama will once again call for more tax hikes, the “smart” liberals are saying that it is just a temporary economic pause, and that those reports don’t really reflect the growing consumer confidence and an economy that is in fact turning around. It has to be difficult to be a liberal these days having to deny reality and continue to distort and spin the news in a desperate attempt to convince people that they are not completely insane. Many of us know better.

If you’re the typical liberal, you’ve missed a lot. While everyone has been busy hyperventilating over gay marriage and restricting gun rights, a lot has gone on under the radar. First on the radar screen would be the President’s call to relax lending standards again, as Bill Clinton did back in the 1990’s, which led to the ultimate crash in 2007. Liberals like to refer to this as “predatory lending” because obviously it was all the fault of greedy banks who insisted on giving mortgages to people who couldn’t afford to pay them back. So off we go to another housing bubble, how exciting.

Next up, poverty, which is reported now to be at levels not seen since the 1960’s which as most of us remember was the impetus for the Great Society and the “war on poverty”. Now you would think that after the “summer of recovery” in 2010, the 2009 stimulus, Obama’s promise of a new “green” economy in need of well paid, skilled workers, and the Keynesian economic dream model he has been chasing, that Americans would be on easy street right now, right? Well you would be wrong. The latest jobs report is well below expectations and inventories are falling, which doesn’t bode well for future employment. On a positive note, Justin Timberlake is scheduled to perform at the White House soon, so it’s good to know that the Obama’s are not suffering from the sluggish economy.

Next up, Obamacare. It was announced this week that the administration will have to delay the implementation of SHOP, a key small business provision, that was instrumental in securing some needed votes for passage. The provision was scheduled to begin in January 2014, and was to allow choices of coverage for small business at affordable rates. Now the program has been pushed back a year, to January 2015, and will only allow for one single choice for those small business’s despite nearly 4 years to put the program in place. However, anyone who believed that we could reduce health care costs by adding more layers of bureaucracy and more free riders to the system, deserve what they get.

Finally, illegitimacy, which in my opinion, is the root of our societal ills. A recent report shows that now more than half of all births to all women under 30, occur outside of marriage. 73% of all black children are born outside of marriage, while that number is 53% for Latinos and 29% for whites. These numbers are alarming. Studies show that children raised in single-family households are more prone to drop out of school, use drugs, commit crimes, and wind up in prison and/or poverty.  And personally, I BLAME MEN!! Men need to man up, so to speak and take care of their responsibilities and their children. There is zero excuse for any man to abandon their child, and as a society, we should not condone that one bit. There are plenty of choices to be made to avoid pregnancy before the act of sex, which makes abortion not an option, and again, as a society we should expect better from everyone. How can we “progress” as a society if we continue to lower the bar? Progress should mean improvement, and from the current condition of our society, I am not seeing much improvement.