The Foundation

“[I]n this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” –Benjamin Franklin

Editorial Exegesis

“‘Next year when I start presenting some very difficult choices to the country, I hope some of these folks who are hollering about deficits step up. Because I’m calling their bluff.’ That was President Barack Obama, the heretofore unknown deficit hawk, all but announcing the other day the tax trap that he’s been laying for Republicans. From what we hear about intra-GOP debates, more than a few will be happy to walk right into it. You don’t need a Mensa IQ to figure this one out. Mr. Obama’s plan has been to increase spending to new, and what he hopes will be permanent, heights. Then as the public and financial markets begin to fret about deficits and debt, he’ll claim that the debt is ‘unsustainable’ and that the only ‘responsible’ policy is to raise taxes. … We think the last thing the U.S. economy needs at the moment – and the worst policy for the deficit – is the big tax increase that will hit on January 1 with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. … Under Congress’s perverse budget rules, extending those tax cuts will ‘cost’ the Treasury revenue, even though extending those tax rates would only prevent a tax increase. And because Congress still uses static revenue scoring – meaning no change in economic behavior from tax changes – the Joint Tax Committee thinks it will raise nearly $1 trillion over 10 years from the higher tax rates on incomes, dividends and capital gains. That’s highly improbable. After those tax rates were cut in 2003, total federal tax revenue increased by 44%, or $743 billion, from 2003-2007. In other words, Democrats have rigged the rules so that merely stopping a tax increase will be scored to increase the deficit. These are the same Democrats who haven’t ‘paid for’ trillions of spending in the last four years, but watch them soon denounce Republicans as fiscally irresponsible merely for trying to stop a tax increase. Orwell would love modern Washington.” –The Wall Street Journal

Upright

“The federal government wants more and more to tell us, by law and by bureaucratic regulation, what’s good for us – what to eat, what to spend our own money on, to whether and where to smoke a cigarette or eat a burger. When a senator asked Elena Kagan, the president’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, whether she believed Congress had the power ‘to tell people what to eat every day,’ she was stumped for an answer. The personal has become the political. The Founding Fathers are spinning.” –columnist Suzanne Fields

“In the past few days, we’ve … heard from former Justice Department attorney J. Christian Adams, who has confirmed – from the belly of the beast – our worst suspicions about Obama and Eric Holder’s Justice Department’s dismissing a slam-dunk case for voter intimidation against New Black Panther Party members for racial reasons. This is an egregious trampling on the rule of law, an outrage that would subject any Republican president to charges of high crimes and misdemeanors, a scandal of the first order for which this administration isn’t even bothering to develop ‘plausible deniability.’” –columnist David Limbaugh

“As I’ve noted many times over the years when debating both Democrats and Republicans who fall back on empty phrases to justify putting the amnesty cart before the enforcement horse, we are not a ‘nation of immigrants.’ This is both a factual error and a warm-and-fuzzy non sequitur. Eighty-five percent of the residents currently in the United States were born here. Yes, we are almost all descendants of immigrants. But we are not a ‘nation of immigrants.’ (And the politically correct president certainly wouldn’t argue that Native American Indians, Native Alaskans, Native Hawaiians and descendants of black slaves ‘immigrated’ here in any common sense of the word, would he?)” –columnist Michelle Malkin

“President Obama’s National Security Strategy insists on calling the enemy – how else do you define those seeking your destruction? – ‘a loose network of violent extremists.’ But this is utterly meaningless. This is not an anger-management therapy group gone rogue. These are people professing a powerful ideology rooted in a radical interpretation of Islam, in whose name they propagandize, proselytize, terrorize and kill. Why is this important? Because the first rule of war is to know your enemy. If you don’t, you wander into intellectual cul-de-sacs and ignore the real causes that might allow you to prevent recurrences.” –columnist Charles Krauthammer

Dezinformatsia

That’s the spirit: “It’s July 4th, my least favorite holiday. … You see, I don’t believe in patriotism. You can call me unpatriotic if you’d like, but really I’m anti-patriotic. I’ve been studying fascism lately, and there is one inescapable fact about it: Nationalism is the egg that hatches fascism. And patriotism is but the father of nationalism. Patriotism is not something to play with. It’s highly toxic. When ingested, it corrodes the rational faculties.” –Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive

Not exactly: “I think most economists would say the stimulus did work in the sense it would have been a lot worse if there hadn’t been one.” –Bloomberg’s Al Hunt

Cruelty it’s not: “We’re facing a coalition of the heartless, the clueless and the confused.” –New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on Republicans unwilling to extend unemployment benefits

What jobs? “Many members of Congress especially those in tough re-election campaigns are home right now, trying to figure out the spending issue: Will voters support more stimulus spending if it directly leads to jobs, or has deficit spending itself become political Kryptonite?” –CBS’s Wyatt Andrews

Getting it right: “You know the United States has gone way, way down the path to unsustainable debt when governments in Europe – spendaholic Europe – lecture the administration on fiscal restraint and ultimately carry the day.” –Chicago Tribune

What’s really important: “The almost unknown, practically under the radar, the Supreme Court nominee, Elena Kagan, before committees this week being funny. She was downright funny.” –CBS’s Harry Smith

“So, apart from the fact that she has got a sense of humor, what did we really learn today about Elena Kagan?” –CNN’s Campbell Brown

Newspulper Headlines:

Stop Wasting Your Breath: “Boehner Tells Obama to Stop Whining” –RollCall.com

Change You Can Believe In: “Gulf Oil Spill: Minerals Management Service Gets a Name Change” –Press-Register (Mobile, AL)

We Blame George W. Bush: “Western Slope Woman Blames Vampire for Car Crash” –KDVR-TV website (Denver)

Help Wanted: “Police Seek Mischief Maker Dressed as Leprechaun” –Associated Press

Bottom Stories of the Day: “Kagan Declines to Take Sides on ‘Twilight’ Debate” –Associated Press

(Thanks to The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto)

The Demo-gogues

The BIG Lie: “I’ve never believed that government has all the answers…. Government can’t and should not replace businesses as the engines of growth and job creation in our economy.” –Barack Obama

Depends on what you mean by “right”: “We are headed in the right direction. We’re not headed there fast enough for a lot of Americans. We’re not headed there fast enough for me, either.” –Barack Obama, leading us down the road to serfdom as fast as he can

The glass is half full: “Unemployment is still at 9.6 [percent]. Yes, but it’s not 12 or 13 – or 15.” –Barack Obama, the guy who promised to keep it below 8 percent

Don’t know much about economics: “[Giving unemployment benefits] injects demand into the economy. It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name.” –House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

Thin skin and cynicism: “Before I was even inaugurated, there were leaders on the other side of the aisle who got together and they made the calculation that if Obama fails, then we win. That was the basic theory. They figured if we just keep on saying ‘no’ to everything and nothing gets done, then somehow people will forget who got us into this mess in the first place and we’ll get more votes in November. That will make people pretty cynical about politics.” –BO

Class warfare: “One of the problems in societies around the world today is that too much of the productivity of the economies are going to too few. Too few people, the political and economic elite, are realizing the vast majority of benefits from economic activity. It’s true in my own country where, unfortunately, economic inequality is increasing. And it’s true in Ukraine. It’s true in Europe and Asia and Africa and South America. So part of the challenge of economic growth and prosperity is to make sure it gets down and equally spread among people.” –Hillary Clinton in the Ukraine trashing America

Village Idiots

“Living constitution”: “[Parts of the Constitution] were meant to be interpreted over time, to be applied to new situations and new factual contexts.” –Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan

Excuses: “[Newspapers] mention that [Robert Byrd] once had a fleeting association with the Ku Klux Klan, and what does that mean? I’ll tell you what it means. He was a country boy from the hills and hollows of West Virginia. He was trying to get elected. And maybe he did something he shouldn’t have done, and he spent the rest of his life making it up. And that’s what a good person does. There are no perfect people. There certainly are no perfect politicians.” –Bill Clinton, speaking at Byrd’s funeral in Charleston

Non Compos Mentis: “Keep in mind, again, federal candidates: [Afghanistan] was a war of Obama’s choosing. This was not something that the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in. … [If Obama] is such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that’s the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan?” –Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele

Space Age or Stone Age? “When I became the NASA administrator – or before I became the NASA administrator – [Obama] charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering.” –NASA Administrator Charles Bolden

Short Cuts

“President Obama likes to say ‘if we could put a man on the moon’ we can do anything, from socializing medicine to abandoning fossil fuels. That’s nonsense on stilts for a host of reasons. But it’s also ironic, given that we can’t even put a man on the moon anymore. Not when NASA’s foremost priority is boosting the self-esteem of children and Muslims.” –columnist Jonah Goldberg

“It’s time to call Obama what he is: The Great Jobs Killer. With his massive spending and tax hikes – rewarding big government and big unions, while punishing taxpayers and business owners – Obama has killed jobs, he has killed motivation to create new jobs, he has killed the motivation to invest in new businesses, or expand old ones. With all this killing, Obama should be given the top spot on the FBI’s Most Wanted List.” –columnist Wayne Allyn Root

“But this [G-8/G-20] summit was noteworthy in that for the first time ever, nobody else paid much attention to the president of the United States. Reuters published a list of ‘winners and losers’ at the G-20. There were just two losers, according to the British news service. One was Brazil, because its president didn’t show up. The other was America, whose president did.” –columnist Jack Kelly

“The U.S. Mint released a new depiction of Abe Lincoln on the U.S. penny Monday. It shows Abe as a boy sitting on a log and studying a textbook. The Teachers Union is furious at the U.S. mint for advertising that you can get a better education without them.” –comedian Argus Hamilton

“I loved America more when Supreme Court justices were expected to be experts when it came to the U.S. Constitution, not a bunch of bleeding hearts who could moonlight as social workers or, God forbid, community organizers.” –columnist Burt Prelutsky