Being just weeks away from reaching our debt ceiling and with frightening talk about a fiscal cliff, there’s much sympathy in Washington for tax increases. Even conservatives are wavering.

While modern society prides itself on being unbiased, it’s no exception to the rule that every age has its fashionable prejudices — and unfashionable people. Among the latter today are white men, and the closer they are to “dead white male” status, to use a favored leftist descriptive, the greater the disdain in which they’re held.

A day originated for the purpose of giving thanks for what we have is now followed by one devoted to aggressively seeking what we do not. And while it’s fashionable to bemoan the commercialization of holidays, we ought to wonder how we got to this point. Because it didn’t happen overnight.

There are endless “anecdotes” from the last election “that prove nothing about vote fraud,” as the critics put it. And one that would be comical, were this not a tragic topic, involves reports of dozens of black voters showing up to cast ballots in small Maine towns.

Christianity teaches that since we’re all sinners, we actually deserve damnation. Yet its message is also that we won’t get what we deserve because God sacrificed for our sins and is merciful. And there is that greatest gift of all He offers: salvation.

In striking down the Michigan affirmative-action ban, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is engaging in judicial activism, which is born of the same mentality that gives us Barack Obama’s flouting of the law. Obama circumvents the people’s will as expressed through their representatives by ruling through executive fiat; the judges circumvent it through judicial fiat. Obama trumps marketplace competition by picking winners and losers; the judges trump marketplace-of-ideas competition by picking winners and losers. And the real loser is freedom.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, there has been much talk about price gouging. New Jersey is prosecuting some who engaged in it, and pundit Bill O’Reilly has threatened to put offending gas stations in his fearsome Factor pillory. But is this prudent?

What does it mean when a candidate gets 99 percent of the vote? It means you're either in 1930s Germany, a banana republic, or some neighborhoods in the United States of America.

If we focus on whether a given candidate is bent on doing what we consider evil, others, knowing the truth that people virtually always intend to do “good,” may dismiss it as radicalism. So a better question often is: What is the person’s conception of good?

This brings us to Obama. Like the average American, his goals are directed toward what he considers good. But on what is considered good is where he parts company — quite drastically — with the average American.

How can we characterize government disaster aid? Well, we now complain about a crony capitalism through which Uncle Sam “picks winners and losers,” but what do the feds do through disaster relief? They pick winners and losers.