Learning from history... and experience...

”The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.” — Cicero, 55 BC

Found at Bits and Pieces.

Addendum: I posted the above yesterday, but as noted in the Comments section, the quotation by Cicero is a fabrication that has cascaded through the internet. The original quote was "The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and assistance to foreign hands should be curtailed, lest Rome fall."

The person who found the error asked whether Minnesotastan admits to editorial errors. Absolutely. We agree with the view of blogging expressed by Andrew Sullivan:

No columnist or reporter or novelist will have his minute shifts or constant small contradictions exposed as mercilessly as a blogger’s are. A columnist can ignore or duck a subject less noticeably than a blogger committing thoughts to pixels several times a day. A reporter can wait—must wait—until every source has confirmed. A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

Writing (or assembling material) in this fashion, one is "often wrong, but never in doubt." It's risky to accept at face value anything found on the 'net, but expediency generally overrules careful research. One admits one's mistakes and moves on. I did even more - I notified my friends at HuffPo, and they have made it a front page story:

And if you believe that screencap is real, then you've missed the point of this entire post...