THE FOUNDATION

“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it.” –Thomas Jefferson

OPINION IN BRIEF

“‘Rate hikes and late fee traps have to end. No more fine print, no more confusing terms and conditions,’ said President Obama last week when advocating another big-government solution – this time to evils committed by credit-card companies. Credit cards are a demagogue’s dream come true. What better way to win public affection than to rail against banks for their harsh terms? In the politicians’ morality play, creditors are the villains and debtors their helpless victims. A little context first: No one has a natural right to a credit card. Someone has to be willing to undertake the risk in issuing it. Banks issue cards in their quest for profits. Nothing wrong with that. Think about what a credit card is. It’s convenient access to unsecured loans, permitting consumers to buy things large and small – not to mention emergency services – without cash. Pay the bill promptly, and you enjoy a fantastic service for virtually nothing. If circumstances prevent you from paying the bill in full, you can set your own payment schedule, realizing there is a minimum payment and that you will be charged interest on the unpaid balance. No surprise there. To appreciate credit cards, it is worth recalling that before they came along, people got personal loans from banks, finance companies, pawnshops and loan sharks. Such loans were less convenient, and repayment was less flexible. Some people bought things on layaway, which meant they didn’t take the goods home until they were paid for. Loan sharks sometimes broke people’s legs. Credit cards didn’t create consumer debt – they are merely a superior alternative to older methods. As President Obama and other politicians demagogue this issue, keep two things in mind: Life would be more difficult without credit cards, and banks don’t have to keep issuing them. Be careful what you ask for.” –ABC “20/20” co-anchor John Stossel

RE: THE LEFT

“When President Barack Obama gave a primetime press conference on March 19, he used the terms ‘invest’ and ‘investment’ 18 times to describe the deficit spending he wants the federal government to pursue under his budget plan. In another primetime press conference last night, Obama again used the term ‘investment’ three times to describe the deficit spending while almost in the same breath decrying ‘overleveraged banks’ and those who ‘maxed-out on credit cards.’ Merriam-Websters Online Dictionary defines ‘investment’ as ‘the outlay of money usually for income or profit.’ It defines ‘invest’ as committing money ‘in order to earn a financial return.’ Investing is something private individuals or companies do with their own money. What President Obama is talking about is borrowing money and having the government spend it now while relying on taxpayers to pay the interest on what amounts to the ‘maxed-out’ credit card held by Uncle Sam.” –CNS News editor in chief Terence Jeffrey

GOVERNMENT

“The labor unions’ drive for the full card check bill seems to have foundered. [Arlen] Specter enters a Democratic caucus where a half-dozen or more senators have made it clear, publicly or privately, that they will not vote for card check. … But the unions may have a fallback position: Forget about the secret ballot, and try to pass a bill with mandatory federal arbitration. This might be easier to defend. Every American knows what the secret ballot is; few Americans know what mandatory arbitration means. Mandatory arbitration would be a major, massive change in American labor law. Currently, unions are free to strike, but employers are free to resist their demands as long as they want. The card check bill would require, after only 120 days of bargaining, a federal arbitrator to step in and impose a settlement. A centralized bureaucrat, not responsible to shareholders (or to union leaders), would determine wages, fringe benefits and working conditions. There would evidently be no appeal. No one knows exactly what this would mean in practice. But the negative consequences are easy to imagine. Arbitrators might very well impose terms and conditions similar to those in existing union-negotiated contracts. Those might include not only wages that would reduce a business’ profits, but also generous fringe benefits and thousands of pages of detailed work rules. Private employers might be forced into funding union pension plans with their massive long-term liabilities. Detailed work rules would mean adversarial negotiations between company foremen and union shop stewards over even the most minor changes in work procedures. How would this affect the economy? We have a test case before us, highlighted by recent headlines, which gives us some answers: the auto industry.” –columnist Michael Barone

INSIGHT

“How did it happen? How did our national government grow from a servant with sharply limited powers into a master with virtually unlimited power? In part, we were swindled. There are occasions when we have elevated men and political parties to power that promised to restore limited government and then proceeded, after their election, to expand the activities of government. But let us be honest with ourselves. Broken promises are not the major causes of our trouble. Kept promises are. All too often we have put men in office who have suggested spending a little more on this, a little more on that, who have proposed a new welfare program, who have thought of another variety of ‘security.’ We have taken the bait, preferring to put off to another day the recapture of freedom and the restoration of our constitutional system. We have gone the way of many a democratic society that has lost its freedom by persuading itself that if ‘the people’ rule, all is well.” –former Arizona senator Barry Goldwater (1909-1998)

CULTURE

“A civilized society’s first line of defense is not the law, police and courts but customs, traditions and moral values. Behavioral norms, mostly transmitted by example, word of mouth and religious teachings, represent a body of wisdom distilled over the ages through experience and trial and error. They include important thou-shalt-nots such as shalt not murder, shalt not steal, shalt not lie and cheat, but they also include all those courtesies one might call ladylike and gentlemanly conduct. The failure to fully transmit values and traditions to subsequent generations represents one of the failings of the so-called greatest generation. … Policemen and laws can never replace customs, traditions and moral values as a means for regulating human behavior. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we’ve become.” –George Mason University economics professor Walter E. Williams

LIBERTY

“It used to be said that self-preservation is the first law of nature. But much of what has been happening in recent times in the United States, and in Western civilization in general, suggests that survival is taking a back seat to the shibboleths of political correctness. We have already turned loose dozens of captured terrorists, who have resumed their terrorism. Why? Because they have been given ‘rights’ that exist neither in our laws nor under international law. These are not criminals in our society, entitled to the protection of the Constitution of the United States. They are not prisoners of war entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. There was a time when people who violated the rules of war were not entitled to turn around and claim the protection of those rules. … Bending over backward is a very bad position from which to try to defend yourself. Nobody in those days confused bending over backward with ‘the rule of law,’ as Barack Obama did recently. Bending over backward is the antithesis of the rule of law. It is depriving the people of the protection of their laws, in order to pander to mushy notions among the elite. Even under the Geneva Convention, enemy soldiers have no right to be turned loose before the war is over. Terrorists – ‘militants’ or ‘insurgents’ for those of you who are squeamish – have declared open-ended war against America. It is open-ended in time and open-ended in methods, including beheadings of innocent civilians. President Obama can ban the phrase ‘war on terror’ but he cannot ban the terrorists’ war on us. That war continues, so there is no reason to turn terrorists loose before it ends. They chose to make it that kind of war. We don’t need to risk American lives to prove that we are nicer than they are.” –Hoover Institution economist Thomas Sowell

THE GIPPER

“[L]iberty can be measured by how much freedom Americans have to make their own decisions, even their own mistakes. Government must step in when one’s liberties impinge on one’s neighbor’s. Government must protect constitutional rights, deal with other governments, protect citizens from aggressors, assure equal opportunity, and be compassionate in caring for those citizens who are unable to care for themselves. Our federal system of local-state-national government is designed to sort out on what level these actions should be taken. Those concerns of a national character – such as air and water pollution that do not respect state boundaries, or the national transportation system, or efforts to safeguard your civil liberties – must, of course, be handled on the national level. As a general rule, however, we believe that government action should be taken first by the government that resides as close to you as possible.” –Ronald Reagan

POLITICAL FUTURES

“The argument over the Republican party now always devolves into the question: Should it be less conservative? I say devolves because it is Democrats and the left who frame the question that way, and they do so because whatever the answer, yes or no, it will damage Republicans. … All the metaphors here are tired, so let’s stick with the big tent. A big tent is held up by tent poles. No poles, no tent. No poles, all you have is a big collapsed canvas. The poles that keep up the tent are the party’s essential beliefs. Republicans over the next few years should define what each of their tent poles stands for – a strong defense being an obvious pole, a less demanding and intrusive government being another, a natural affection and respect for tradition and for life being a third – and how many poles there are. But also, the people inside can’t always be kicking people out of the tent. A great party cannot live by constantly subtracting, by removing or shunning those who are not faithful to every aspect of its beliefs, or who don’t accept every pole, or who are just barely fitting under the tent. Room should be made for them. … The other day Sen. Jim DeMint said he’d rather have 30 good and reliable conservative senators than 60 unreliable Republicans. Really? Good luck stopping an agenda you call socialist with 30 hardy votes. ‘Shrink to win’: I’ve never heard of that as a political slogan.” –columnist Peggy Noonan

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

(To submit reader comments visit our Letters to the Editor page.)

“Being a Patriot subscriber (and supporter), I advised a peer in California to read The Patriot. He has subscribed. In a recent e-mail from him, however, he writes in part: "And it’s waaaay over the top when The Patriot Post … calls on the 65 million gun-owning Americans to protect and defend the Constitution against domestic enemies, i.e. the president. That’s a not-so-thinly-veiled call for armed insurrection or political assassination. It’s one thing for the Right to be nutty and paranoid; it’s another to be treasonous.‘ You must know the source of this comment resides in the Bay Area. However, would you please respond to this terrible accusation?” –Lawrenceville, Georgia

Editor’s Reply: It is our fervent prayer that the thinly veiled revolution already underway in Washington, DC, “the fundamental transformation of the United States of America” in Obama’s words, can be defeated peacefully. Every Patriot staff member is a parent. However, we all subscribe to these words from Thomas Paine, (December 19, 1776): “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.” And it was Thomas Jefferson who asserted, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

THE LAST WORD

“Why is the left so susceptible to violence and the right largely immune from it? We believe in the Constitution and the rule of law, they don’t – witness their efforts to save Bill Clinton, who was manifestly guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors (including perjury). They believe in flaunting the law when it suits their purposes – ergo their support for illegal immigration and an activist judiciary that’s usurped legislative powers. We believe in the First Amendment, they don’t. Besides the campus storm troopers practicing Marcusian repressive tolerance, Obama and his allies are determined to put conservative talk radio out of business by resurrecting the Fairness Doctrine. We love America, including the principles on which it was conceived: liberty, tolerance, equality before the law and Judeo-Christian morality. For them, the Founding Fathers are dead, white males and the American saga consists of slavery, Wounded Knee, lynchings, the exploitation of immigrant labor, World War II internment of Japanese-Americans, McCarthyism, and 'imperialism.' We’re patriots.” –columnist Don Feder