The Foundation

“There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism.” –Alexander Hamilton

Opinion in Brief

“Americans cherish their independence. One interesting aspect of the spontaneous tea party movement is the constant invocation of the Founders and the prominence of the ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flag. … Americans tend to see themselves as independent doers, not dependent victims. They don’t like to be told, especially by those with fancy academic pedigrees, that they are helpless and in need of government aid. That’s why the politically popular American big government programs – Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ benefits, student loans – all make a connection between effort and reward. You get a benefit because you’ve worked for it. In contrast, Americans have loathed and rejected big government programs with no nexus between effort and reward. Welfare was begun in the 1930s to help widows with children, whose plight, as Russell Baker’s memoir ‘Growing Up’ showed, was often dismal. But when welfare became a mass program to subsidize mothers who didn’t work and to excuse fathers from responsibility for their actions, it became wildly unpopular. Bill Clinton recognized this when he signed welfare reform in 1996. … Barack Obama, who has chosen to live his adult life in university precincts, sees … Americans generally as victims who need his help, people who would be better off dependent on government than on their own. Most American voters don’t want to see themselves that way and resent this condescension.” –political analyst Michael Barone

Political Futures

“When Republicans regain a majority in the House and Senate – either this fall, as seems increasingly likely, or in the election following – they must learn from their previous mistakes when they last held power. In addition to focusing on overturning whatever health insurance ‘reform’ proposal this Congress eventually passes (by a veto override, or a lawsuit challenging the measure’s constitutionality), a Republican congressional majority must help large numbers of the public unlearn the factual errors they have been taught to accept. From ‘climate change,’ to the notion that government is a guarantor through ‘entitlement’ programs of a minimal outcome in life, to the forgotten idea given to us by the Founders that Liberty is the most precious gift there is, the country needs a history lesson based on truth, experience and provable facts. … A Republican majority should turn the nation’s attention away from Washington. A Republican majority must teach us again that ‘you can do it,’ like so many of our fathers did when the training wheels came off and we learned we could fly down the sidewalk without assistance. America doesn’t need restructuring. It needs revival; revival of the principles that made us strong and great; revival of the moral foundation that proved to be our real strength and allowed us to conquer our demons and become independent, not dependent on government. This is the message most Americans want to hear and need to hear. Will the Republicans deliver it?” –columnist Cal Thomas

The Gipper

“Perhaps you and I have lived with this miracle too long to be properly appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again. Knowing this, it is hard to explain those who even today would question the people’s capacity for self-rule. Will they answer this: if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?” –Ronald Reagan

Re: The Left

“The reason massive Democratic majorities in Congress aren’t enough to pass socialist health care is AMERICANS DON’T WANT SOCIALIZED MEDICINE! In fact, you might say that the nation is in a boiling cauldron of rage against it. Consequently, a lot of Democrats are suddenly having second thoughts about vast new government commissions regulating every aspect of Americans’ medical care. Obama isn’t stupid – he’s not seriously trying to get a health care bill passed. The whole purpose of this public ‘summit’ with the minority party is to muddy up the Republicans before the November elections. You know, the elections Democrats are going to lose because of this whole health care thing. Right now, Americans are hopping mad, swinging a stick and hoping to hit anyone who so much as thinks about nationalizing health care. If they could, Americans would cut the power to the Capitol, throw everyone out and try to deport them. … But the Democrats think it’s a good strategy to call the Republicans ‘The Party of No.’ When it comes to Obamacare, Americans don’t want a party of ‘No,’ they want a party of ‘Hell, No!’ or, as Rahm Emanuel might say, ‘*&^%$#@ No!’ … Complaining that Republicans are ‘obstructionists’ is not a damaging charge when most Americans are dying to obstruct the Democrats with a 2-by-4. While you’re at it, Democrats, why not call the GOP the ‘Party of Brave Patriots’?” –columnist Ann Coulter

Government

“Filibusters are devices for registering intensity rather than mere numbers. Besides, has a filibuster ever prevented eventual enactment of anything significant that an American majority has desired, strongly and protractedly? Liberals say filibusters confuse and frustrate the public. But most ideas incubated in the political cauldron of grasping factions are deplorable. Therefore, serving the public involves – mostly involves – saying ‘No.’ The Bill of Rights effectively pronounces the lovely word ‘no’ regarding many possible government undertakings – establishment of religion, unreasonable searches and seizures, etc. The fiction that government is ‘paralyzed’ by partisanship is regularly refuted. … Liberals are deeply disappointed with the public, which fails to fathom the excellence of their agenda. But their real complaint is with the government’s structure. And with the nature of the politics this structure presupposes in a continental nation wary of government and replete with rival factions.” –columnist George Will

For the Record

“For those not versed in the arcane rules of the U.S. Senate, reconciliation is not what a divorced couple attempts when they visit Dr. Phil. It is a mechanism for avoiding filibusters on certain budgetary issues. If Democrats can find a way to apply it to health care reform, they could pass a bill with just 51 votes, negating the election of Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown and the loss of the 60-seat supermajority. Reconciliation was established in 1974 to make it easier for Congress to adjust taxes and spending in order to ‘reconcile’ actual revenues and expenditures with a previously approved budget resolution. Thus, at the end of the year, if Congress found that it was running a budget deficit higher than previously projected, it could quickly raise taxes or cut spending to bring the budget back into line. Debate on such measures was abbreviated to just 20 hours (an eyeblink in Senate terms), and there could be no filibuster. As Robert Byrd, (D-W.V.), one of the original authors of the reconciliation rule, explained, ‘Reconciliation was intended to adjust revenue and spending levels in order to reduce deficits … [I]t was not designed to … restructure the entire health care system.’ He warns that using reconciliation for health care would ‘violate the intent and spirit of the budget process, and do serious injury to the Constitutional role of the Senate.’ In fact, in 1985, the Senate adopted the ‘Byrd rule,’ which prohibits the use of reconciliation for any ‘extraneous issue’ that does not directly change revenues or expenditures. Clearly, large portions of the health care bill, ranging from mandates to insurance regulation to establishing ‘exchanges,’ do not meet that requirement.” –Cato Institute senior fellow Michael D. Tanner

Faith & Family

“One of the major differences between the right and the left concerns the question of authority: To whom do we owe obedience and who is the ultimate moral authority? For the right, the primary moral authority is God (or, for secular conservatives, Judeo-Christian values), followed by parents. Of course, government must also play a role, but it is ultimately accountable to God and it should do nothing to undermine parental authority. For the left, the state and its government are the supreme authorities, while parental and divine authority are seen as impediments to state authority. … In a nutshell, the left wants to have ever-expanding authority over people’s lives through ever-expanding governmental powers. It does so because it regards itself as more enlightened than others. Others are either enemies (the right) or unenlightened masses. It is elected by demonizing its enemies and doling out money and jobs to the masses.” –radio talk-show host Dennis Prager

Culture

“Personal responsibility is a real problem for those who want to collectivize society and take away our power to make our own decisions, transferring that power to third parties like themselves, who imagine themselves to be so much wiser and nobler than the rest of us. Aimless apologies are just one of the incidental symptoms of an increasing loss of a sense of personal responsibility – without which a whole society is in jeopardy. The police cannot possibly maintain law and order by themselves. Millions of people can monitor their own behavior better than any third parties can. Cops can cope with that segment of society who have no sense of personal responsibility, but not if that segment becomes a large part of the whole population. Yet increasing numbers of educators and the intelligentsia seem to have devoted themselves to undermining or destroying a sense of personal responsibility and making ‘society’ responsible instead.” –economist Thomas Sowell

Reader Comments

“If the message in Mark Alexander’s essay, ‘The First Statement of Conservative Principles’, is that the Tea Party should link up with the Republican GOP, then count me out. I am about to switch from being a registered Republican to that of an Independent. The GOP keeps throwing rocks at the Obama liberals, as they should, but they need to clean their own house as well.” –TroutLakeTom

Editor’s Reply: Mr. Alexander’s message was precisely that no such link between the Tea Party and the GOP should be formalized.

“In Friday’s Digest, you quoted the nation’s leader as having stated, ‘Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, I am an ardent believer in the free market.’ This is accurate and, I believe, sincere. Remember, it has been said by many that the Devil is a believer in God. His agenda is completely contrary to the Lord’s, but he certainly believes in Him…” –Capt., USN

“In reference to Friday’s ‘And Last’ item and Rep. Louis Slaughter, as a practicing dentist for 32 years, I am telling you there is no way that this woman could wear her deceased sisters dentures nor anyone else’s. Aside from the ‘gross’ factor, the dentures would not function properly to enable the woman to fit them into her mouth, let alone chew anything. That’s the reason that dentures aren’t sold in small, medium and large sizes at Walmart.” –Dr. Young

The Last Word

“[W]ho are regular, run-of-the-mill, tax-paying Americans to question Obama? He’s brilliant, after all. … [I]f Obama is so brilliant, why does he parrot the words and thoughts of a bunch of schmucks like Karl Marx, Saul Alinsky, Al Gore and Michael Moore? Why does he insist that the trouble with the Constitution and the Civil Rights movement is that they didn’t focus on the redistribution of wealth? Why would he hand over the federal budget to a couple of morons like Pelosi and Reid? And why on earth would he put Henry Waxman in charge of his energy program? A brilliant person wouldn’t trust Waxman to bring baked beans to a picnic. When someone decides to model a health care plan after such dismal failures as England, Canada and Cuba, while exhuming the failed economic policies of FDR, why would anyone suggest he is anything but a left-wing ignoramus? This is an American president, for heaven’s sake, who has more in common with Noam Chomsky, Hugo Chavez and some Berkeley hippie than he has with Washington, Jefferson and Adams. Except that he is now 30 years older, Obama seems to think exactly the same way he was thinking back in college, when he was a pot-smoking idiot who sought out students who were self-professed revolutionaries and professors who were communists. If we have come to a point where the ability to read scripted lines off a teleprompter is considered a sign of brilliance, no matter how fatuous the actual words may be, we are in even worse shape than I imagined.” –columnist Burt Prelutsky