The Foundation

“To model our political system upon speculations of lasting tranquility, is to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character.” –Alexander Hamilton

Editorial Exegesis

“Rep. Peter King, New York Republican and chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, will hold hearings this week on Muslim extremism in the United States. The Obama administration and other pro-Islamic activists argue that because the vast majority of American Muslims aren’t violent extremists, Congress has no business examining the growing numbers who are. This redirection is tantamount to saying that because most people are law-abiding, the police should ignore the study of criminal psychology. Mr. King’s planned hearings will shine a bright light on a challenge the Obama administration has studiously ignored, with fatal results. Overlooking the motives of Muslim terrorists has become an O Force obsession. … The Obama administration persistently has stricken the concept of Islamic extremism – whether foreign or domestic – from U.S. public policy. In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security drafted a Domestic Extremist Lexicon that listed Jewish extremism as a threat and described various strands of purportedly dangerous Christian extremism but made no mention of any form of Muslim extremism. This document was pulled along with other questionable Homeland Security publications once their contents became public. The February 2010 Quadrennial Homeland Security Review discussed terrorism and violent extremism but didn’t refer to radical Islam in any context. Likewise, the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review avoids any terminology related to Islam. Mr. King’s hearings are a useful step toward opening up the debate on the pressing problem of domestic Islamic extremism. Mr. Obama’s inexplicable tendency to turn aside from the question has harmed the ability of the United States to deal with this threat.” –The Washington Times

Upright

“In the context of federal spending that will total something like $3.8 trillion this year, $61 billion is a rounding error. Yet the Democrats resisting that amount in House-approved cuts say it will wreck the economy while leaving children unschooled, taking food from the mouths of the elderly and casting disabled people into the streets. … The cuts represent less than 2 percent of the total budget, less than 4 percent of the deficit and less than 5 percent of discretionary spending, which rose in real terms by 75 percent from 2000 to 2010 and by about 9 percent in each of the last two fiscal years. If the House-approved reductions would be ‘the largest one-year cuts in history,’ as the folks at Every Child Matters say, that is a sad commentary not on Republican cold-heartedness but on the fiscal incontinence of both parties.” –columnist Jacob Sullum

“That ‘clean energy’ is code for ‘anti-warming’ is obvious, given that even Environmental Protection Agency numbers show that virtually all emissions have dropped dramatically in recent decades – except for greenhouse gases. … Global warming is a dying cause because the costs of the favored ‘fixes’ for the problem vastly outweigh the supposed benefits – and China and India aren’t going to stop industrializing, and stay poor, simply to please Western elites. Republicans should wake up and not let Obama use the guise of clean energy to keep the anti-warming crusade alive.” –Reason Foundation Senior Fellow Shikha Dalmia

“Today, we take universal literacy for granted. But literacy has not been universal, across all segments of the American population during all of the 20th century. Illiteracy was the norm in Albania as recently as the 1920s and in India in the second half of the 20th century. Bare literacy is just one of the things needed to make democracy viable. Without a sense of responsible citizenship, voters can elect leaders who are not merely incompetent or corrupt, but even leaders with contempt for the Constitutional limitations on government power that preserve the people’s freedom. We already have such a leader in the White House – and a succession of such leaders may demonstrate that the viability of freedom and democracy can by no means be taken for granted here.” –economist Thomas Sowell

“In truth, President Obama couldn’t send a proper naval display to Tripoli or Benghazi even if he could borrow enough courage from the typing pool to order it. The big warships have been diverted elsewhere; the carrier Enterprise is cruising somewhere in the Indian Ocean, far from Libya. Only after the European Union said it was safe to go near the water the president agreed to send ‘air and naval units’ to join the fighting Europeans. … President Obama made a point of instructing Hillary Clinton to say American ‘naval and air units’ might need to rescue someone at sea.” –columnist Wesley Pruden

Dezinformatsia

False premise: “Up next, Washington’s answer to the job crisis. Will the deep budget cuts on the table stick a fork in the recovery?” –ABC’s Christiane Amanpour

“I’m curious about whether Republicans realize that – it doesn’t seem to me that message is resonating. That is, if we don’t deal with our fiscal problem, we have uncertainty, and therefore the economy can’t grow. That’s the line that they’re drawing through it. And you see from our polling, people want that focus on immediate job creation, and that gets the president’s point, which is you’ve got to get the balance right. You can’t grow if you keep cutting so much.” –NBC’s David Gregory

Caught on tape: “[Tea Party people aren’t] just Islamaphobic, but really xenophobic, I mean basically they are, they believe in sort of white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it’s scary. They’re seriously racist, racist people.” –NPR fundraising executive Ron Schiller, who resigned after these remarks were made public

Gut buster: “[W]e get a tremendous amount of criticism for being too conservative.” –NPR president and CEO Vivian Schiller, who also resigned this week

Gouging: “I think that there’s one thing we should finally be doing is using this opportunity to have a credible energy policy that begins to reduce our addiction to oil. Gasoline is almost $4 a gallon. We know that’s a red line where people really start to change their behavior. At a minimum, I’d be talking about a tax that basically says we’re going to keep it at $4. If it goes below we’ll true it up, if it goes above that we’re not going to touch it. Maybe say we’re not going to implement it until 2012.” –New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman

Pointing fingers: “Well, I think it’s [jihadist terrorism] not our biggest domestic terror threat. I think that pretty clearly comes from the radical Right in this country, although I would certainly not minimize the threat of jihadist terrorism in this country.” –CNN’s Mark Potok

Newspulper Headlines:

We Blame Global Warming: “As Storm Nears and Temps Rise, Obama Hits Golf Course for First Time This Year” –TheHill.com

Police Suspect Fowl Play: “Man Arrested With Chicken in His Pants” –Atlanta Business Chronicle

So Much for the War on Drugs: “Student Groups Take Hit” –Kaimin (University of Montana)

We’ll Drink to That!: “Bottoms Up Antarctic Ice Growth Discovered” –Associated Press

Questions Nobody Is Asking: “Has Anyone Seen Jimmy Carter Lately?” –Reason.com

Bottom Stories of the Day: “Saudi Arabia: Demonstrations Won’t Be Tolerated” –Associated Press

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

The Demo-gogues

This week’s “Gratuitous Nazi Reference” Award: “As a nation, I look back in history and some of the worst governments we’ve ever had, you know one of the the first things they did? They went after the trade unions. Hitler didn’t want unions, Stalin didn’t want unions. [Former Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak didn’t want independent unions. I’m not comparing what’s happening to the workers in Wisconsin to Hitler and Stalin but I am saying that history is teaching us that unions are a very positive force in society that creates a middle class and protects our freedom. We’ve seen a real play on fear. They’re trying to pit the private-sector workers against the public-sector workers. That is the most base Karl Rove-type politics to turn working-class people one against another.” –Sen. Sherrod Brown (D'OH)

Opposite day: “Why can’t they work on things that help the economy? Why do they have to work on things that hurt the economy? Why would they want to eliminate a program like that? Just because it came from the White House? This is hard for me to understand why they’re so fixated on destroying our government, our economy.” –Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) on Republican plans to terminate the Home Affordable Modification Program

Victimitis: “To say we’re going to investigate a religious minority, and a particular one, I think is the wrong course of action to take. I don’t want them to be able to stand up and claim, you know, see, we told you, America is at war with Islam. That’s one of their main recruiting arguments.” –Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), the first Muslim elected to the House

Over the top: “Climate change is an environmental issue, it’s an economic issue, but it’s also fundamentally a moral issue. We have an opportunity to act now to forestall great harm to our nation and to the world. We had that kind of issue at other times in our history, we had it during the civil rights debate. If we don’t act on this challenge we will not meet our moral ability to shape our future. We will not meet our moral obligation to our children and future generations.” –Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA)

Village Idiots

Not saying much for American media: “Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it’s real news. You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners.” –Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who no doubt was attacking Fox News

Redistribute that wealth: “Right now the Earth is shaking and the ground is shifting under the feet of those who are in charge. America is not broke … Wisconsin is not broke. The only thing that’s broke is the moral compass of the rulers. … You are not alone. America is with you. … The country is awash in wealth and cash. … It has been transferred in the greatest heist in history from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich. [Despite Wall Street bailouts shortly after the recession began in 2008] millions lost their jobs anyway, and millions lost their homes. But there was no revolt … until now. On Wisconsin!” –filmmaker Michael Moore

The BIG Lie: “With regard to the border, there’s a difference between the border being sealed and the border being secure: There has never been a higher number of Border Patrol agents, a higher number of ICE agents, a higher number of ICE removals along the border. The border is as secure as I’ve ever seen it in 20 years in law enforcement.” –Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director John Morton

Eco-guilt: “I’m angry because we don’t take care of the planet. That makes me upset. You know, I don’t go around beating my head against the wall because we’re not taking care of the planet. But I think about it every day. I wish there was something that I could do. I try to do things that make some kind of example. And I realize how hypocritical I am, because I’m part of the problem just like I’m trying to be part of the solution. … Well, I fly around. I do all these things in jets and go everywhere, you know.” –singer-songwriter Neil Young

Short Cuts

“When you live about 3,000 miles west of the Potomac, it’s impossible not to feel as if you’re watching the antics of people who should be wearing big floppy shoes and big red noses on the job. The upside is that 20 of them could use a single jalopy in order to carpool to work.” –columnist Burt Prelutsky

“Michael Moore said [last week] the nation’s wealth belongs to everybody. He thinks if you divide up all our wealth you could feed all the world’s hungry people. That’s not going to happen, but if you divided up Michael Moore you could feed at least five hundred of them.” –comedian Argus Hamilton

“A federal watchdog agency says that overlapping and duplicate programs waste billions of dollars each year. Congress is taking this study so seriously that they’re ordering a second study to look into it.” –comedian Jay Leno