The Foundation

“Have you something to do to-morrow; do it to-day.” –Benjamin Franklin

Editorial Exegesis

“Before a 9.0 axis-shifting earthquake damaged the nuclear reactors at Fukushima, Japan, legislation was introduced in the House of Representatives endorsing the construction of 200 nuclear power reactors in the U.S. by 2040, tripling current megawatt generating capacity. H.R. 909, co-sponsored by 64 Republicans, also endorsed the completion of the spent fuel storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. That facility, which was supposed to open 12 years ago, has been taken off the table by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., Energy Secretary Steven Chu and the White House as unsafe. After Fukushima, we say: compared to what? … Regardless of whether we build another nuclear [reactor], we now have 104 in use generating about 20% of our electricity. Spent fuel rods are stored on-site at these facilities, and the rods will continue to pile up unless we move them as intended to a completed facility at Yucca Mountain. … The real danger at Fukushima lay in the spent fuel rods housed in large, water-filled pools in the reactor buildings outside the concrete-and-steel fortresses that surround the reactor cores. It’s the on-site storage of spent fuel rods, not the reactors, that has caused most of the radiation detected and remains the greatest danger. Yucca Mountain was our attempt to solve this problem. The Energy Department spent two decades studying Yucca and found the site to be safe and geologically stable. The spent rods, stored 1,000 feet under a mountain, are unlikely to be disturbed by 9.0 quakes or 40-foot tsunamis. … We need the energy and jobs that nuclear power can provide. The Energy Information Agency projects that by 2030 U.S. electricity demand will increase by 45%. Since nuclear power now supplies 20%, America will need 35 additional nuclear power plants just to meet future demand. We also need to store the spent fuel we’ve generated and will continue to generate safely and away from major population centers. Without Yucca Mountain it won’t happen.” –Investor’s Business Daily

Upright

“[The kinetic military action in Libya] is just the foreign policy outworking of Obama’s campaign to fundamentally transform America. Notice the common thread. He is using domestic policies to effectuate ‘economic justice’ at home, trying to cut ‘wealthy’ Americans down to size. Now he is using foreign policy to diminish America’s role and stature in the international community to cut wealthy, imperialistic America down to size.” –columnist David Limbaugh

“In last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-MA) wrote that what is taking place in the Middle East ‘could be the most important geostrategic shift since the fall of the Berlin Wall.’ That’s the wrong analogy. When the Berlin Wall fell, people were liberated. What is happening in the Middle East could be the most important geostrategic shift since communists came to power in Russia and China, oppressing and killing millions. This is just the beginning. Saudi Arabia is next and already the fault lines in that creaking monarchy are visible. The hand of Iran is behind much of this turmoil and behind Iran is al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden’s vision for the toppling of every regime in the region, each to be replaced by the most religiously fundamentalist and politically repressive of leaders.” –columnist Cal Thomas

“The real warriors … all say the same thing: spend my life if you must, but don’t waste it. A bond of trust based on that contract must exist between a president and the troops. If the president is willing to risk their lives in the absence of a compelling need to defeat a threat to America, that trust is violated. President Obama violated that trust by entering the Libyan civil war in the absence of any compelling and urgent American interest. He risks the future of our all-volunteer military by, without good cause, risking the lives of U.S. pilots and those who support them in combat.” –columnist Jed Babbin

“Leftists like to think of themselves as clear-thinking realists who are sensitive to nuance and irony. In reality, they are like little children who regard fairy tales as non-fiction. For instance, they champion socialism even though the past hundred years have proven time and again that it doesn’t work in practice the way it does in theory. On the contrary, in every country where it has existed, it has inevitably led to loss of liberty, widespread poverty and mass murder on a scale that has no parallel in human history. Point out this obvious fact to a liberal, and once he gets done calling you a greedy, heartless, bloodthirsty reactionary, he’ll insist that we haven’t yet seen true socialism. Actually, we have, though. We’ve seen it in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, in China, Cambodia, North Korea and Cuba.” –columnist Burt Prelutsky

Insight

“The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions.” –American statesman and senator Daniel Webster (1782-1852)

“A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.” –French philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903-1987)

The Demo-gogues

Grasping for answers: “In the past, we have seen [Moammar Gadhafi] hang civilians in the streets, and kill over a thousand people in a single day. Now we saw regime forces on the outskirts of the city. We knew that if we wanted – if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world. It was not in our national interest to let that happen. I refused to let that happen.” –Barack Obama (How can our “interest” be threatened when we don’t even know what they are? Even Def Sec Robert Gates admits we don’t have a “vital national interest” in Libya.)

Nothing to see here: “And so nine days ago, after consulting the bipartisan leadership of Congress, I authorized military action to stop the killing and enforce UN Security Council Resolution 1973. … And tonight, I can report that we have stopped Gadhafi’s deadly advance.” –Barack Obama, who neglected to mention Gadhafi’s renewed advance just before the speech

More income redistribution? “We will safeguard the more than $33 billion that was frozen from the Gadhafi regime so that it’s available to rebuild Libya. After all, the money doesn’t belong to Gadhafi or to us – it belongs to the Libyan people. And we’ll make sure they receive it.” –Barack Obama

Gross exaggerations: “I voted against H.R.1 [the GOP budget-cutting bill]. I thought it was a simply a meat-axe approach without any consideration of priorities.” –Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) (The bill would have cut $61 billion from a $3.7 trillion budget. That’s a “meat axe”?)

Where do constitutional freedoms come from? Democrats! “The Tea Party Republicans in Washington claim they’re concerned about the budget balance. But it’s a disguise! It’s not true! It’s a lie! That’s not [what] they want. They want to – they want other people not to be able to have their opinions. They don’t deserve the freedoms that are in the Constitution, but we’ll give them to them anyway.” –Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ)

Dezinformatsia

Speaking truth to power: “With his speech [Monday], President Obama placed himself in a great tradition of American presidents who have understood America’s special role in the world. … This was a Kennedy-esque speech.” –Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan

“All Obama is saying is give war a chance.” –Foreign Policy’s Tom Ricks

“So nobody’s calling this a war – I mean, it’s called military intervention, it’s called military strikes, it’s called United Nations Security Council enforcement – but they’re not calling it a war. Are there other cases in history where you’ve had Congress throwing such a fit over the UN Security Council making a resolution, the United States supporting that resolution, and our lawmakers going ‘Now wait a minute, you have to come and ask us about this’?” –MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer

Thoughtless analysis: “Many Americans find themselves scratching their heads about America’s military intervention in Libya, and part of the reason, they say, can be summed up in one word: overload. … Or maybe it is compassion fatigue.” –The New York Times’ Kirk Johnson

Extreme political correctness: “A bomb planted in a bag exploded near a bus stop in a Jewish district of Jerusalem on Wednesday, killing a woman and injuring at least 30 people. … Police said it was a ‘terrorist attack’ – Israel’s term for a Palestinian strike.” –Reuters “news service” (We’re surprised the byline wasn’t Helen Thomas.)

Newspulper Headlines:

Out on a Limb: “Littwin: To Put It Bluntly, Libya Isn’t Iraq – Unless it Is” –Denver Post

News You Can Use: “Make Love, Not Time-Limited, Scope-Limited Military Actions” –ABCNews.com

Questions Nobody Is Asking: “What Will Sarah Palin Whine About, if Not the ‘Liberal Press’?” –Vanity Fair website

We Blame Global Warming: “Hot Women Don’t Want to Pay for Dinner” –CNBC.com

Have They Checked the Golf Course?: “Cal State East Bay Loses President” –Oakland Tribune

Breaking News From 2013: “President Barack Obama Gets Locked Out of White House” –WEWS-TV website (Cleveland)

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

Village Idiots

The BIG Lie: “We want to hear what they [Congress] think, and if they have suggestions for what we should be doing, obviously the president wants to hear that.” –White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on the kinetic military action in Libya

Get a clue: “The president has argued our interests and our values cannot be separated. These values have caused the people of Libya to risk their lives on the street.” –White House aide Samantha Power

Cat out of the bag: “If I was head of DNC, I would be quietly rooting for [shutting down the national government]. I know who’s going to get blamed – we’ve been down this road before. … From a partisan point of view, I think it would be the best thing in the world to have a shutdown.” –former DNC chief Howard Dean

Gag reflex kicking in: “More than ten years after leaving the Oval Office, no one on either side of the aisle denies that Bill Clinton continues to shape the world we live in. His leadership stresses unity over division, policy over party, and hope over fear. He raised the bar for what it means to be a public servant and set new benchmarks for what a private citizen can accomplish to make the world a better place. … I am inspired by the example that he sets for all of us…. Simply put … the world is a better place because President Bill Clinton is in it.” –Barbra Streisand

Short Cuts

“Hillary Clinton revealed Wednesday she will step down as Secretary of State after the first term ends. She said the job requires her to spend all her time away from home. That prompted Bill Clinton to call the president and volunteer to take her place.” –comedian Argus Hamilton

“When you have Islamic jihadists going toe-to-toe with a mass-murdering thug and his followers, humanitarianism is in dangerously short supply. So, apparently, is sanity. If Colonel Cuckoo wins, we have the makings of a terrorist-led pariah state that hates the West in general, and the United States in particular. If the rebels win, we have the makings of a terrorist-led pariah state which hates the West in general, and the United States in particular. Is there clarity in redundancy?” –columnist Arnold Ahlert

“Moammar Gadhafi says of the no-fly zone, ‘In the short term we will beat them, and in the long term we will beat them.’ Which is Libyan for ‘Bring it. Winning. Bring it. Winning.’” –comedian Jay Leno

“President Obama’s speech on Monday night was, at best, OK. It got tongues wagging about the ‘Obama Doctrine’ which appears to be: ‘If it won’t drag Iran into the fight we’ll take a look.’ To use a hated football metaphor, it was a speech which should have been given in the locker room before the combatants ran out onto the field (remember this is a metaphor). … Obama’s speech was the equivalent of calling time-out in the middle of the first quarter and telling the troops to get in there and fight, fight, FIGHT!” –political analyst Rich Galen