The Foundation

“No man can well doubt the propriety of placing a president of the United States under the most solemn obligations to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” –Joseph Story

Liberty

“We live in a Constitutional Republic. The President’s job under the Constitution is to enforce the laws made by the elected Congress. His job is not to create new laws and enforce them all by himself. His job is as magistrate under the Constitution, not as Caudillo. He is not the law. He is supposed to enforce what Congress decides. The BP behavior is reminiscent of how, immediately after assuming office, Mr. Obama, with no Congressional authority or administrative allowance, simply made a phone call to fire the head of GM. When I called the White House press office to ask under what law or regulation Mr. Obama was acting, I was told he did not need a law. If the government put a lot of money into GM, it could call the shots at GM, I was told. But under what authority, I asked. ‘None needed,’ was the final answer. … The same goes for Mr. Obama’s demand that BP pay the lost wages of oil and gas workers suspended from work because of the moratorium on Gulf of Mexico underseas drilling. There simply was no legislation allowing this kind of specific demand. Mr. Obama’s demand was in the nature of a threat, more than a Constitutional act. … [T]o create specific enactments and actions without any authority – now Mr. Obama’s specialty – is so at odds with the law of the land that it terrifies me. These are not the acts of a teacher on Constitutional law. These are the acts of a big city boss or a third world dictator.” –columnist Ben Stein

For the Record

“Were the British Empire that fought the War of 1812 still around, America might be looking at a War of 2012. Instead, a rattled BP appears willing to fork over much more money than it will owe, including money for ‘lost wages’ due to the president’s own panicky moratorium. BP obviously invited all of this through its gross incompetence, but what if the same ‘lost wages’ standard applied to the Obama administration? It, too, is busy destroying the ‘way of life’ for workers in multiple industries, but in its case that’s not even an accident; it is a deliberate plan. Which federal government office should coal and oil rig workers show up at to retrieve their lost wages once Obama’s energy laws crippling those industries pass? Obama offers these workers the consolation of a ‘clean energy’ job in the future. That’s very thoughtful of him. These workers can look forward to the prospect of a job, or at the very least a generous interview opportunity for a job, at wind farms several states away from their homes maybe a decade from now. Once again, the Obama administration illustrates that the greatest threat to the economy comes not from the environment but from environmentalists. Hurricanes and oil spills cost workers far fewer jobs than do the policies of trendy pantheism.” –columnist George Neumayr

Re: The Left

“Obama is dreamer in chief: He wants to take us to this green future ‘even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet precisely know how we’re going to get there.’ Here’s the offer: Tax carbon, spend trillions and put government in control of the energy economy – and he will take you he knows not where, by way of a road he knows not which. That’s why Tuesday’s speech was received with such consternation. It was so untethered from reality. The gulf is gushing, and the president is talking mystery roads to unknown destinations. That passes for vision, and vision is Obama’s thing. It sure beats cleaning up beaches.” –columnist Charles Krauthammer

Government

“Katrina and the Gulf oil spill prove that, at best, government can only get in the way. But at worst – like so-called global warming, lack of border security and unfunded Social Security – they are all part of the same thing: government created problems that government prevents from being solved. The resultant discourse leads to weakening the resolve of the people to resist the ‘helping’ heavy hand of government. Put another way, government has an incentive to not solve problems, the Arizona immigration law being a perfect case in point where government has really shown its hand. Problems are its fuel – fuel needed to empower itself and enslave its subjects. In the now infamous words of Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel: a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” –columnist W.R. Wansley

The Gipper

“We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity and ultimately human fulfillment, are created from the bottom up, not the government down. Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefitting from their success – only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, progressive, and free. Trust the people. This is the one irrefutable lesson of the entire postwar period contradicting the notion that rigid government controls are essential to economic development.” –Ronald Reagan

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Political Futures

“A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that only 29 percent of Americans are prepared to re-elect their incumbent representative in the US House this fall, while fully 60 percent say they are ‘inclined to look around for someone else to vote for.’ … Not surprisingly, The Post reports that ‘anti-incumbent sentiment [is] at an all-time high.’ … Don’t bet on it. According to Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, no more than 100 of the 435 US House seats on the ballot this November can by any stretch of the imagination be considered ‘competitive.’ Of them, only 24 are rated genuine toss-ups, and only 16 more are held by one party in a district that leans to the other party. Assuming Sabato is right – and granting that anything can happen between now and November – only 40 House seats are truly in play. In other words, roughly 90 percent of US House seats are safe. Sad to say, roughly 90 percent of US House seats are always safe. In the 23 congressional elections between 1964 and 2008, the re-election rate of US representatives dropped below 90 percent only five times – and only once in the last 30 years. In 2006, a Democratic surge swept Republicans from their House majority – yet 94 percent of the House was reelected. In 1994, an even larger Republican surge washed the Democrats from control – but the overall reelection rate was 90 percent nonetheless. ‘Nothing is so essential to the preservation of a republican government as a periodical rotation,’ declared Virginia statesman George Mason during the debate over ratification of the Constitution. Voters routinely say they agree, but alas, that isn’t how they vote.” –columnist Jeff Jacoby

Culture

“Consider that New York just raised its standard for passing sixth grade reading and math tests to the following: on the reading test, 20 correct answers out of 39 questions gets one a passing grade; on the sixth grade math test, 20 out of 49 does the trick. In other words, getting a grade of 51% on the reading test and 41% on the math test gets you promoted to the seventh grade. … Public school education in New York – and elsewhere – has become an overt fraud. … What are the those in charge thinking? First and foremost, about themselves. They realize that their ‘business model’ – a system which has made the genuine education of children and genuine accountability of teachers utterly meaningless – is an ongoing failure. How do you fix failure? In the real world, failure is fixed by adopting no-nonsense standards – and getting rid of employees incapable of meeting them. In the world of unionized pubic schools, failure is ‘fixed’ simply by changing the definition of the word. In other words, failure equals success because ‘we say so.’ And why do we say so? Because we are politicians beholden to the unions. … And make no mistake: this is a fraud made possible because the Democrat Party is its chief enabler. Over the last twenty years, the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teacher’s union, has given ninety-seven percent of its campaign contributions to Democratic candidates. In return, Democrats have opposed everything which threatens the unions’ status quo: school choice, ending tenure, instituting merit pay, charter schools, standardized tests and anything else which would allow Americans to clearly understand what a joke public school education has become.” –columnist Arnold Ahlert

The Last Word

“This whole oil spill mess just sort of highlights the fact that Obama has no idea what a president is supposed to do. He’s been constantly vowing to take swift action but doesn’t seem to have a clue what that action should be. … So people look at Obama and how he doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing with the oil spill, is flailing around trying to stimulate the economy, and is forcing a poorly thought out and unread health care bill on America and say he’s doing a bad job as president. But as I said, we’re being unfair to him. What was Obama before all this? He was a community organizer – pretty much a made up job with unknown responsibilities, as far as I can tell. I doubt Obama even knew what he was supposed to do in that job. And after community organizer, he was a legislator who voted yes, no, and present on things – a pretty simple job at which he reportedly was average. So what in his resume gives anyone the idea he would know how to do anything about a huge environmental disaster? What in his previous experience gives us any inkling he knows the first thing about economics? Why are we angry at him for not knowing things there was no reason to ever think he would know? … It’s like we took a fry cook from McDonald’s and decided to make him a neurosurgeon because he looked good in a surgical mask and then got mad at him when he killed his first patient. Who is really to blame here?” –humor columnist Frank J. Fleming