The Foundation

“In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasoning must depend.” –Alexander Hamilton

Looking for Value

So what is The Patriot Post‘s Brief anyway? It’s possibly the most useful thing you could read on Monday.

Our team of contributors puts together Monday’s Brief by sifting through dozens of opinion articles by leading conservative thinkers each week looking for the best analysis of the issues facing America. You’ll find the latest on the Left’s proposed takeover of the health care system, updates on so-called global warming, timeless advice from “The Gipper,” comments from our readers and much more!

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Thank you and God bless!

Nate Jackson
Managing Editor

Reader Comments

“Thank you so much for the opportunity to support your tireless efforts and outstanding work. The Patriot Post is a refreshing departure from the mainstream media’s constant attempt to brainwash me into believing their thinly veiled attempt to socialize the country. Their constant gushing and slobbering all over themselves about President Obama is enough to make me ill. All I can say is I’m disgusted by the Left’s antics but at the same time heartened by your efforts to thwart them. Thanks again.” –Capt. USAF (Ret.), Balad, Iraq

“Aside from bending my knee daily before God in thankfulness, I must thank you for encouraging us. Fifty-two years ago I was led to these shores after escaping from East Germany, via Berlin. Having served my adopted country in the U.S.A.F. and accepting gratefully citizenship in the U.S., I feel so blessed to be here to express my gratitude for your labor. In my limited capacity, I am mirroring your admonitions to people around me as much as I am able. I am here to tell you to 'Keep her headed straight into the wind.’ And STAND! With appreciation,” –Uli

The Gipper

“It’s always a struggle for those of us in political life to take the long view and to brave decisions without regard to personal political cost. There are times when we fail in the struggle and times when we succeed. And I suspect the next few years will test us more than usual, but I know we’re up to it. … We’ll have our battles ahead of us, but they’re good battles, and they’re worth fighting for. … I hope the loyal opposition realizes exactly how committed I am and you are to changing the status quo and improving our national life. We won’t be resting on our laurels, even if we were so inclined, which we’re not. History wouldn’t allow it. We’ve been handed great opportunities and great challenges, and we intend to meet them together.” –Ronald Reagan

Opinion in Brief

“This is how I see health care reform working: If you are a doctor who has spent a lot of money and time becoming a responsible and caring physician, the government will tell you how much to charge your patients and, in fact, whether you will be allowed to treat them at all. Bureaucrats, having given themselves the power of God, will decide whether a patient is worth the cost of treatment, thereby deciding who lives and who dies. Despite the Stupak-Pitts Amendment, somewhere down the line taxpayers will be forced to underwrite abortions in violation of the consciences and faith of the majority. This is the triumph of the humanistic, atheistic worldview. We are all to be regarded as products of evolution in which the fit and the powerful will decide our survival and worth. … The new breast and ovarian cancer screening guidelines may soon become mandatory as health care rationing kicks in. The unwanted, the inconvenient and the ‘burdensome’ could soon be dispatched with a pill, or through neglect. Great horrors don’t begin in gas chambers, killing fields, or forced famines. They begin when there is a philosophical shift in a nation’s leadership about the value of human life. … In our day, the consequences of government seizure of one-sixth of our economy and government’s ability to decide how we run our lives (it won’t stop with health care) are foreseen. They are just being ignored in our continued pursuit of personal peace, affluence and political power. … Welcome to the U.S.S.A., the United Socialist States of America.” –columnist Cal Thomas

Government

“When you knowingly pay someone to lie to you, we call the deceiver an illusionist or a magician. When you unwittingly pay someone to do the same thing, I call him a politician. President Obama insists that health care ‘reform’ not ‘add a dime’ to the budget deficit, which daily grows to ever more frightening levels. So the House-passed bill and the one the Senate now deliberates both claim to cost less than $900 billion. Somehow ‘$900 billion over 10 years’ has been decreed to be a magical figure that will not increase the deficit. It’s amazing how precise government gets when estimating the cost of 10 years of subsidized medical care. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s bill was scored not at $850 billion, but $849 billion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said her bill would cost $871 billion. How do they do that? The key to magic is misdirection, fooling the audience into looking in the wrong direction. I happily suspend disbelief when a magician says he’ll saw a woman in half. That’s entertainment. But when Harry Reid says he’ll give 30 million additional people health coverage while cutting the deficit, improving health care and reducing its cost, it’s not entertaining. It’s incredible.” –columnist John Stossel

Political Futures

“It’s got to be about the oldest dodge in the book: When a politician casts a momentous vote on a major issue, and doesn’t want to take responsibility for it, the pol minimizes its importance. The folks back home are told it was just a little ol’ procedural vote, and they needn’t worry their pretty little heads about it. Blanche Lincoln, the senior senator from Arkansas, has got this routine down pat. When the showdown on the health-care bill came [last] Saturday night, she cast the deciding 60th vote to cut off debate on whether to let this huge hodgepodge of a bill advance to the floor of the Senate. It could prove the most significant vote of her otherwise unremarkable political career. Once debate on whether to proceed with this ever-morphing blob of a bill is cut off, as it now has been, the Democratic majority in the Senate won’t necessarily need a super-majority of 60 votes to pass it. A bare majority of 51 would suffice, although another procedural hurdle could quite likely require the Democrats to muster another 60 votes in the Senate to make the most radical change in the nation’s health-care system in decades. And it will be Blanche Lincoln’s vote that made it all possible. Much as she might try to deny it. The senator says she’s against a public option — that is, a government-run insurance scheme with all its dangers to private insurers, and to workers who could be dumped into it by employers unwilling to go on paying their employees’ insurance. Yet it may be Blanche Lincoln’s vote that opens the way for just such a drastic change. … Whatever the ramifications of the new health-care system that finally emerges from all this confusion, Blanche Lincoln and her fellow Democratic ‘moderates’ are going to be responsible for its passage. And no amount of talk about how they cast only a ‘procedural’ vote is going to hide the fact that their votes let this thing get to the floor of the Senate.” –Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editor Paul Greenberg

For the Record

“[T]here is an array of taxes on the horizon – increased federal income tax rates; promised hikes in health-care surcharge taxes; and even rumors of value-added federal sales taxes. These increases are said to be aimed at the proverbial wealthy. But that could change – given that the top 5 percent of households already provide 60 percent of the nation’s income-tax revenue. And many are already paying 50 percent to 60 percent of their incomes in combined local, state, federal and payroll taxes. Just consider. The price of gas will soon likely increase. The cost of servicing our profligate borrowing will, too. One more terrorist attack like at Fort Hood, or nightly sermons from a grandstanding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or a new Taliban offensive, and the momentum could shift to radical Islam in their decades-long war against the United States. Next year’s tax hikes will be real and large – and no longer just this year’s idle talk. As these storm clouds gather, Congress bickers on Saturday nights about borrowing even more money for health-care reform, yet another federal entitlement. If you thought things have been rough so far, hang on, ‘cause you ain’t seen nothing yet.” –historian Victor Davis Hanson

Faith & Family

“Peter Vidala was being harassed at work-subjected, over and over again, to views he found offensive. When he finally spoke up, he was fired. It’s an illustration of the double standard that often prevails when it comes to same-sex 'marriage.’ Vidala was a deputy manager at a Brookstone store in Boston’s Logan Airport. Last August, a manager visiting from another store told Vidala she was planning to ‘marry’ her female partner. Vidala said he ‘quickly changed the subject.’ As a Christian, he considered homosexual behavior immoral, and same-sex ‘marriage’ an ‘oxymoron.’ The woman’s comments made him uncomfortable. But the visiting manager didn’t get the message-or maybe she did. She talked about her wedding plans over and over. Vidala later told Fox new she was goading him into commenting on her relationship. Vidala said, ‘By the fourth time she mentioned it, I felt God wanted me to express how I felt about the matter. So I did.’ He told her, ‘Regarding your homosexuality, I think that’s bad stuff.’ He also reported that he had intended to tell her he would prefer she not bring up the subject at work, but she just started laughing. And then she told him, ‘Get over it … keep your opinions to yourself.’ She then complained to human resources, and Vidala was fired. Why? Because by ‘imposing’ his beliefs on her, it constituted ‘harassment.’ So pummeling a junior-level Christian employee with endless comments he finds offensive is OK. But making a single critical comment to a lesbian senior-level employee is a firing offense. Even more disturbing is the reason Brookstone gave to back up its decision. In Massachusetts, same-sex ‘marriage’ is legal. So a lesbian employee can prattle on about her wedding plans without harassing anyone. The implications of this are frightening. If same-sex ‘marriage’ is foisted upon other states, then expressing disagreement with it-or even criticizing the homosexual lifestyle-could become a firing offense for everyone. If employers had taken this attitude 90 years ago, people could have lost their jobs for disagreeing with laws forbidding women from voting! This is how far the gay agenda has come in this country. Any disagreement is portrayed as hatred and harassment. And the victim-as in this case-is often a Christian. Peter Vidala’s firing will have one beneficial effect, at least. It will help the rest of us understand why same-sex ‘marriage’ laws are like no other. Oppose them beforehand or speak out afterward, and you will be punished.” –author Chuck Colson

Re: The Left

“Of somewhat more import was the news last week that a bunch of climate scientists – in fact THE bunch of climate scientists – who have been at the center of the global warming movement were found to have cooked the books to make the ‘Earth-is-warming’ numbers work. According to … Dr. William Hamilton’s weekly ‘Central View’ column, emails which were hacked and released, ‘reveal that climatologists at Penn State, Amherst, the University of Arizona and England’s East Anglia University have been engaged in a conspiracy to: hide data that the planet is cooling, apply pressure to scientific journals to exclude studies casting doubt on their theories of global warming, hide data being requested under the Freedom of Information Act that would discredit global warming, and, delete any data in their files that would support the existence of global cooling.’ Yikes. The very people who 10 days ago were laughing and pointing at global warming skeptics for hanging on to their position notwithstanding the evidence in support of the man-induced effect on the Earth’s climate, are now very quiet. A lot of people have a lot invested in the business of global warming, and the concept of their scientific beards having cheated on the numbers, coerced their opponents, covered-up the data and shredded potential evidence is impossible for them to accept. Notwithstanding the evidence.” –political analyst Rich Galen

The Last Word

“As Air Force One heads to Copenhagen for the climate summit Dec. 9, it will presumably not make a U-turn while flying over the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at University of East Anglia near Norwich, England. But perhaps it should. The 61 megabytes of CRU e-mails and documents made public by a hacker cast serious doubt on the ballyhooed consensus on manmade global warming that the Copenhagen summit was called to address. The CRU has been a major source of data on global temperatures, relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the e-mails suggest that CRU scientists have been suppressing and misstating data and working to prevent the publication of conflicting views in peer-reviewed science periodicals. … For those of us who have long suspected that constructing scientific models of climate and weather is an enormously complex undertaking quite possibly beyond the capacity of current computer technology, the CRU e-mails are not so surprising. Do we really suppose that anyone can construct a database of weather observations for the entire planet and its atmosphere adequate to make confident predictions of weather and climate 60 years from now? Predictions in which we have enough confidence to impose enormous costs on the American and world economies? … The more interesting question going forward is whether European and American governmental, academic and corporate elites, having embraced global warming alarmism with religious fervor, will be shaken by the scandalous CRU e-mails. They should be.” –political analyst Michael Barone