The Foundation

“They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” –Benjamin Franklin

Liberty

“When it comes to protecting against terrorism, this is how things usually go: A danger presents itself; the federal government responds with new rules that erode privacy, treat innocent people as suspicious and blur the distinction between life in a free society and life in a correctional facility…. Americans have long resented the hassles that go with air travel ever since 9/11 – long security lines, limits on liquids, forced removal of footwear and so on. But if the Transportation Security Administration has its way, we will look back to 2009 as the good old days. The agency is rolling out new full-body scanners, which eventually will replace metal detectors at all checkpoints. These machines replicate the experience of taking off your clothes, but without the fun. They enable agents to get a view of your body that leaves nothing to the imagination. … For the camera-shy, TSA will offer an alternative: ‘enhanced’ pat-downs. This is not the gentle frisking you may have experienced at the airport in the past. It requires agents to probe aggressively in intimate zones – breasts, buttocks, crotches. If you enjoyed your last mammography or prostate exam, you’ll love the enhanced pat-down. And you’ll get a chance to have an interesting conversation with your children about being touched by strangers. … The new policy is being challenged in court by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which says it violates the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches. But don’t expect judges to save us. Says Stanford University law professor Robert Weisberg, with resignation in his voice, ‘Airports are pretty much a Fourth Amendment-free zone.’ … The good news is that last year, the House of Representatives voted to bar the use of whole-body scanners for routine screening. But only a sustained public outcry will force a change. We will soon find out if there is a limit to the sacrifices of personal freedom that Americans will endure in the name of fighting terrorism. If we don’t say no when they want to inspect and handle our private parts, when will we?” –columnist Steve Chapman

Government

“In the spirit of bipartisanship and sanity, I propose that the first thing on the chopping block should be an ineffective organization that wastes money, violates our rights, and encourages us to make decisions that imperil our safety. I’m talking about the Transportation Security Administration. Bipartisan support should be immediate. For fiscal conservatives, it’s hard to come up with a more wasteful agency than the TSA. For privacy advocates, eliminating an organization that requires you to choose between a nude body scan or genital groping in order to board a plane should be a no-brainer. But won’t that compromise safety? I doubt it. The airlines have enormous sums of money riding on passenger safety, and the notion that a government bureaucracy has better incentives to provide safe travels than airlines with billions of dollars worth of capital and goodwill on the line strains credibility. … Over the next few years, we’re headed for a bitter, partisan clash over legislative priorities. Before the battle starts, let’s reach for that low-hanging, bipartisan fruit. Let’s abolish the TSA.” –columnist Art Carden

The Gipper

“Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today’s world do not have. It is a weapon that we as Americans do have. Let that be understood by those who practice terrorism and prey upon their neighbors.” –Ronald Reagan

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Political Futures

“[Incoming House Speaker John] Boehner has promised to do things differently, and the freshmen – who make up one-third of Republican members – will surely hold him to it. The size of his majority will strengthen his hand against the appropriators. Boehner and incoming Majority Leader Eric Cantor also sound grimly determined to cut government spending, and they have an able ally in incoming Budget Chairman Paul Ryan. And they don’t seem to be backing off their promise to do whatever they can to repeal and hobble Obamacare. That won’t be easy, with Barack Obama’s veto pen poised to strike. But Obamacare is not a self-propelling vehicle. It needs fuel and funding and fiddling from Congress. … Boehner seems likely to prevail, in the lame duck session or as speaker next year, on extension of all the George W. Bush tax cuts, including those for high earners. Pelosi lacked the votes to let the latter expire before the election, and Obama seemed to be conceding the issue in his post-election press conference. But Boehner will have his headaches when he has to rally votes to raise the national debt ceiling early next year. Freshmen don’t want to vote for that, but it’s irresponsible to let the government go without funding. Boehner is not likely to become as prominent a figure as Gingrich or Pelosi. But he’ll start off with a larger majority than either of them did.” –political analyst Michael Barone

For the Record

“The voters just spoke. They think they want no more gargantuan deficits, massive public spending and exponential growth in government – or the specter of higher taxes to pay for all of it. No wonder: We are on pace to soon owe 100 percent of our annual gross domestic product in national debt, while compiling the largest annual peacetime deficits in our history. So cutting the borrowing and spending is inevitable if America is to avoid a Greece-like implosion. … What can the public do? Americans should laud any politician of either party who has the courage to balance budgets, and they should hold accountable any who do not. Budget cutting may be depressing, but not as depressing as bankruptcy (ask the French and Greeks). Do not forget that just as households become upbeat when mortgages and credit cards are paid off, so too will Americans collectively recover their optimism and sense of pride when we are admired abroad for our fiscal sobriety rather than ridiculed for our spending addiction. And look at it this way: In terms of our collective health and national security, a budget surplus is probably worth more than an expanded federal health-care entitlement, another Social Security cost-of-living increase, or a new aircraft carrier.” –historian Victor Davis Hanson

Re: The Left

“E.L. Godkin, the Irish-born editor of The Nation, observed in 1867 that the lack of a class-based system, the existence of an open frontier and an optimism that comes with political and economic liberty marked the U.S. as a very different land than Britain, never mind the European continent. In 1906, German sociologist Werner Sombart released his book, ‘Why is There No Socialism in America?,’ in which he pointed to similar factors. Ever since, left-leaning intellectuals have been taking dead aim at American exceptionalism. The notion that America has its own way of doing things separate and distinct from Europe has been one of the greatest impediments to Europeanizing America’s political and economic institutions. Now that Europe has turned its back – at least temporarily – on lavish Keynesian spending, folks like [Peter] Beinart must turn to developing countries such as China and Brazil for inspiration. Countries that pay millions of workers pennies a day are not normally role models for the left. But, hey, if it makes Republicans appear backward, they’ll give it a shot. Ultimately, it’s not that liberals don’t believe in American exceptionalism so much as they believe it is holding America back, which might explain why they’re lashing out at the people who want to keep it exceptional.” –columnist Jonah Goldberg

Culture

“While we are constantly being schooled in how insensitive we are to Muslims and how we should be bowing to the idea of a Ground Zero mega-mosque, or are being admonished for not embracing the Sharia, the state of wartime siege continues unabated. The Muslim world is under no such mandate to reach out or reciprocate. They only have to demand, and the West apologizes. … We live in a constant state of low-grade war. And with each new Muslim attack, we lose a right. We lose a freedom. We have to adhere to some new restriction or loss of privacy. … The general silence from the mainstream media and our governing officials on last weekend’s wholesale slaughter of Christians praying in a Church is indicative of how decayed, empty, and morally inverted our leaders and media have become. The slaughter of the churchgoers in Baghdad was a crime against humanity. And there are thousands of stories of Islamic slaughter, but the lambs remain silent. Have we become so inured to Islamic jihad that human life is cheap to us as well?” –columnist Pamela Geller

The Last Word

“It is mainly liberals who are the simpletons who took up global warming as a cause and made a god of Al Gore, ignoring the fact that Gore was making millions of dollars off the hoax. You would think that left-wingers, especially the many atheists in their ranks, would question a god who not only made a fortune out of his holy mission, but refused to debate the issue and only spoke to true believers. And how is it that the same people who so eagerly point out the big homes, the fancy jewelry and all the other signs of religious hypocrisy for which televangelists are noted, aren’t the least bit skeptical of Mr. Gore? Apparently if a televangelist like Gore talks about the weather, instead of the hereafter, liberals not only don’t denounce him as a fraud, they give him the left-wing trifecta: an Emmy, an Oscar and the Nobel Peace Prize. Liberals pay no attention to the fact that when a few people actually noticed that the earth and the oceans were cooling, Gore and his pet ‘scientists’ quickly began referring to ‘climate change’ and eventually to ‘global climate disruption.’ It didn’t matter to them if things were heating up or cooling down; all that really mattered was that they had a cause and could use it as a way to butt their way into everybody’s business. Now we have those lousy light bulbs to contend with.” –columnist Burt Prelutsky