Chronicle
The Foundation
"If the federal government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify." --Alexander Hamilton
Editorial Exegesis
"Re-electing President Obama is really important to President Obama, which isn't news. What is news are the out-of-liberal-character acts that his Administration is committing to serve this political goal. ... ObamaCare slashes about $145 billion from Medicare Advantage, the program that allows one of four seniors to escape the traditional entitlement and choose commercial plans. ... Medicare's budget counters estimate that ObamaCare's cuts in the Advantage program will result in enrollment falling by half. The cuts were scheduled to begin this year. ... So in November 2010 Mr. Obama's Medicare team announced a nationwide Medicare Advantage 'demonstration project' that would test if paying insurers bonus subsidies would improve quality over the next two years. Lo and behold, according to a new investigation by the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, the $8.35 billion pilot program is just enough to reverse 71% of the Advantage cuts that would have hit seniors in the run-up to November. And behold again, the demonstration project turns into a pumpkin in 2013. ... [M]r. Obama's Health and Human Services Department is allowed to spend unlimited taxpayer dollars as long it claims the money is going to 'demonstration projects' to fine-tune Medicare Advantage. The real game here is purely political -- to give a program that is popular with seniors a temporary reprieve past Election Day. ... Given the pre-election timing of this short-term Medicare Advantage pardon, the Federal Election Commission should bill HHS for giving Mr. Obama's campaign what amounts to an $8.35 billion re-election contribution." --The Wall Street Journal
Upright
"If Obama can cobble together disaffected young people, greens, women, minorities and the poor ... Then massive debt and deficits, high unemployment, sluggish growth and spiraling gas prices won't decide the election. Lots of presidential candidates have run by identifying such enemies of the people, rather than debating the general state of the nation -- sometimes successfully, sometimes not. But the problem with an us/them strategy is not just winning an election, but trying to put back together what was torn asunder." --historian Victor Davis Hanson
"The Pew Hispanic Center has a new report out finding that the growth in the Mexican immigrant population has stopped, and the total number has even declined a little. This was caused by the number of new arrivals (mostly illegal) in 2005-2010 dropping by half to about 1.4 million, while the number going home doubled, to just under 1.4 million. ... [M]ost Mexicans who've left have done so on their own. What's more, Pew estimates that those returnees took 100,000 American-born children with them. In other words, attrition works. But if illegal immigrants are going home on their own, why do we need an amnesty?" --columnist Mark Krikorian
"The 2012 Pulitzer Prizes looked less like an excellence-in-media competition and more like an exercise in leftist self-affirmation. No prize established this more strongly than the coveted National Reporting prize going to ... The Huffington Post. ... The prizewinner, 'senior military correspondent' David Wood, has been at The Huffington Post for about a year. He won the Pulitzer by reporting on the struggles of veterans and their families. It's a worthy subject but also something pretty much every other media outlet has tried to cover over the last 10 years. There's nothing here worthy of a National Reporting prize. What the Pulitzer Prize judges are doing is exactly what the Obama White House did right from the start -- mainstreaming the Huffington Post. ... A Pulitzer seals the liberal deal." --columnist L. Brent Bozell
Insight
"The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it." --American writer H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"The more the state 'plans' the more difficult planning becomes for the individual." --economist Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992)
The Demo-gogues
Double down: "I want clean energy to happen here in the United States. I want advanced batteries made here in the Unites States. I want electric cars made here in the United States. I want solar and wind power made here in the United States. We've been subsidizing oil companies with taxpayer giveaways for about a hundred years now. It's time to double down on clean energy that's never been more promising." --Barack Obama
Begging: "I gotta say to the women out there, whether you're a Republican, a Democrat or Independent, if you're a self-respecting human being, please vote for President Obama. And to the men who care about women, do the same thing." --Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA)
Pot and kettle: "[Republicans] continue to go down a path of asking middle income and lower income people to pay the price for the fiscal irresponsibility that was pursued in the last decade under the Bush administration, where much was spent and little was paid for." --House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD)
Poor Obama: "The fact is this president has been so respectful of the Republicans in Congress. He has given them every opportunity for the executive and the legislative branch to work together, to have a solution that has bi-partisan support. He's been criticized by some for taking the time that it takes to find out that they're never going to give him a break, which is a compromise." --House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
Blame game: "The Republicans have fully embraced extremism and they have brought in two years almost no jobs legislation to this floor and not worked with the president on any legislation to help make sure that we can move the economy forward because their number one goal is political and that's to defeat Barack Obama." --DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) (Republicans brought at least 15 "jobs" bills to the floor.)
And boy is change ugly: "When you decide to support a candidate named Barack Hussein Obama, you know the odds are not necessarily in your favor. ... We knew it wasn't going to be easy. We knew the changes that we believed in wouldn't necessarily come quickly, but we understood that if we were determined that we could overcome any obstacle, that we could beat any challenge. And in just three years, because of what you did in 2008, we've begun to see what change looks like. We've begun to see it." --Barack Obama
Village Idiots
Non Compos Mentis: "[W]e do know that the country has been swinging, you know, in terms of the polarization on the Right to incredible kind of fundamentalist situation where you have people like -- we talked about Rick Santorum -- where, where actually they are virtually contradicting all the constitutional principles in their rhetoric. And so you say, 'Well look, okay, you can believe that, but you cannot equate that with this Constitution. That's not an interpretation issue. It means that you did not read the Constitution, and indeed you are anti-American.' I am very pro-American in the sense of a constitutional America, and I'm very pro-American in terms of a diverse America and one where we do reach out and understand that to be too mono-cultural is to limit ourselves and create the insecurity that we're currently facing." --actor Sean Penn
Explanations: "[The Tea Party] understood that people were sitting on a white hot stove out there, and if Democrats weren't gonna point at the financial elites, they were gonna point at the government elites. Somebody gotta get blamed [sic], and part of the problem with the president was by being so bipartisan and trying to not -- trying to be one country about everything, he let his opponents set him up." --Occupy Wall Street spokesperson Van Jones
Comparisons: "A lot of Republicans in Congress want to cooperate [on immigration reform], know better, but they are in the thralls of this reign of terror from the far right that has dragged this party to the right." --Obama senior adviser David Axelrod apparently comparing the Tea Party to French Reign of Terror figure Maximilien Robespierre
Free speech: "There's a difference between free speech and a campaign to deny the climate science with the goal of undermining international action on climate change. However, there's also responsibility that goes with freedom of speech -- which is based around honesty and transparency. Freedom of speech does not apply to misinformation and propaganda." --Ec0-group Greenpeace.org, seeking to deny free speech to "deniers"
Left-theology: "'Mother Earth' as a common cultural expression is supposed to mean the way in which the biosphere is the giver and sustainer of life. But, calling the earth by a female metaphor reveals how much the earth is subject to actions and policies that exploit rather than protect. There's a kind of 'war on women' that applies to the planet too." --leftists 'theologian' Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite
Tolerance: "We know who the active denialists are -- not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let's start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let's make them pay. Let's let their houses burn. Let's swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let's force them to bear the cost of rising food prices. They broke the climate." --climate alarmist Steve Zwick
Short Cuts
"CBS News reports that Greg Stokes, one of the agents fired in the Colombia prostitution scandal, 'was recently listed on the internet as the supervisor of the Canine Training Section of the Secret Service.' We hear they once asked Stokes to double as the president's food taster, but he had to turn down the assignment because it would be a conflict of interest." --Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto
"President Obama reacted angrily when asked about the Secret Service hotel scandal on Thursday. It presents him with a political problem. When his own bodyguards are refusing to pay their hookers how can he accuse the Republicans of waging war on women?" --comedian Argus Hamilton
"President Obama is gearing up for his presidential campaign. He's creating a new series of ads. The first ad boasts 'just last week my Secret Service created jobs for 11 Colombian women.'" --comedian Conan O'Brien
"During a campaign speech in Ohio, President Obama said, 'I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth.' So to be fair, he wants to take your silverware and spread it around." --Fred Thompson
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