The Patriot Post® · Chronicle
The Foundation
“To cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise, is not among the least considerable of the expedients, by which the wealth of a nation may be promoted.” –Alexander Hamilton
Editorial Exegesis
“You’ve got to hand it to President Obama and his White House economic team. Faced with [Friday’s] dreary May jobs report, they did their best and rolled out the old ‘bump in the road’ analogy for comfort. As chief White House economist Austan Goolsbee put it, ‘there are always bumps on the road to recovery, but the overall trajectory of the economy has improved dramatically over the past two years.’ Nice try, but there’s no way to spin news that the economy in May created only 54,000 new jobs, which is about one-third the number necessary to keep up with the growth in the labor force. The jobless rate rose for the second straight month to 9.1%, which is especially depressing nearly two years after the end of a very deep recession. At this stage in the Reagan expansion, after a comparably deep 1981-82 recession, the economy was growing by 7% a year and the jobless rate was plunging. This time the economy is growing by less than 2%, and we still have 6.8 million fewer jobs than when the recession began in late 2007. … The same economists and pundits who promoted the economic policies of the last four years are now lamenting the jobs bust and demanding that Washington double down: More stimulus spending, more Federal Reserve easing, more temporary tax rebates. They can’t explain why these policies have failed to date, but we are supposed to rinse and repeat. … The economy doesn’t need more of this. It needs a return to the growth agenda that created the long post-1982 boom.” –The Wall Street Journal
Upright
“You can only expect a robust economic recovery for so long before you figure out, as Herbert Hoover eventually did, that it is not around the corner. Exogenous factors explain some part of the current economic stagnation. The earthquake and tsunami in Japan caused a slowdown in manufacturing. Horrendous tornados did not help. Nor did bad weather, though only a few still bitterly cling to the theory that it’s caused by manmade global warming. But poor public policy is surely one reason why the American economy has not rebounded from recession as it has in the past. And political posturing has also played a major role.” –political analyst Michael Barone
“Many in the GOP of today are fatally underestimating the power of today’s mainstream media and how effective they can be in helping Team Obama win a second term. A myth has taken hold in the GOP: that because of the Internet, the explosion of conservative bloggers and the still-substantial power of talk radio, that the mainstream media have been marginalized. Bull-feathers. That’s just ridiculous and is believed by those who don’t have a clue about what real Americans have to deal with every day in their real lives.” –columnist Douglas MacKinnon
“Healing is a term that has been co-opted from the emotive, liberal, psychobabble crowd and misapplied by politicians to serious situations so often that it has lost any semblance of meaning. … It is impossible to heal a community suffering from the devastation of a tornado or any other disaster. … Politicians do not have the power to remove the experience or the suffering. They only have the power to direct resources that alleviate the problem, but do not erase the problem. To think otherwise is pure hubris.” –columnist Tom Roberson
“Liberals always cater to man’s lowest base instincts. They hate standards for behavior, labeling all rebuke of bad behavior as being intolerant and judgmental. And yet, they believe without divine influence, man is capable of someday achieving universal peace. Totally absurd.” –singer, songwriter and columnist Lloyd Marcus
Insight
“Learn to say no. It will be of more use to you than to be able to read Latin.” –Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892)
“There is good news from Washington today. The Congress is deadlocked and can’t act.” –American humorist Will Rogers (1879-1935)
The Demo-gogues
Pride and hubris: “Now, my administration has a job to do as well, and that job is to get this economy back on its feet. That’s my job, and it’s a job I gladly accept. I love these folks who helped get us in this mess and then suddenly say, well, this is Obama’s economy. That’s fine. Give it to me.” –Barack Obama
If at first you don’t succeed… “The unemployment numbers are obviously disturbing. Are they an anomaly as some people suggest because of the disasters in the South and the Midwest and the rest, or is this something systemic that we have to accommodate in a different way?” –House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
The BIG Lie: “What the president has done has improved the situation from where it may have been.” –Nancy Pelosi
Let’s don’t: “Let’s allow our unions and their organizers to lift up this country’s middle class again. We can do that.” –Barack Obama
Class warfare: “What we are fighting for – and I’m a member of the Budget Committee – is the concept of shared sacrifice. No, you don’t balance the budget on the backs of the sick and the elderly and the poor and the vulnerable. You do ask the wealthiest people in this country and the large corporations – many of whom are making huge profits and paying nothing in taxes – that they’ve got to contribute to deficit reduction as well.” –Sen. Bernie Sanders (S-VT), the only admitted socialist in Congress
Over the top: “[I]f you go back to the year 2000, when we had an obvious disaster and saw that our voting process needed refinement, and we did that in the America Votes Act and made sure that we could iron out those kinks, now you have the Republicans, who want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws and literally – and very transparently – block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote Democratic candidates than Republican candidates. And it’s nothing short of that blatant.” –Rep. and DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), who needs to look up the definition of “literally”
Sticking it out: “I am deeply regretting what I have done, and I am not resigning. I am deeply sorry for the pain this has caused Huma, my wife, and my family.” –Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) on the Twitter photo scandal that has plagued him for the last two weeks
Dezinformatsia
Delusional spin: “You know better than anybody what it was like particularly in the south of this country in 1965. But I think what it shows is what the Republicans mean when they say they want to take back America. Yeah, they want to take America back to 1965, if not to 1950 before Brown v. Board of Education.” –radio talk-show host Bill Press to Al Sharpton (Conservative policy has nothing to do with racism, other than eliminating it. It has to do with restoring liberty and Rule of Law.)
“[Monday’s press conference] was a masterful performance. I thought [Anthony Weiner] was very contrite; he was very direct; he let people ask him a lot of very tough, personal questions. … It’s going to be used by crisis management trainers for businessmen who have done something wrong.” –MSNBC’s Chrystia Freeland on the Weiner Twitter scandal
False choice: “Obviously the momentum has been with the debt reduction crowd, so to speak. Is that at the expense of real huge effort on job creation? In other words, what’s more toxic, billions of dollars of stimulus, or these kind of unemployment numbers?” –ABC’s Christiane Amanpour
Sympathy for the devil: “This looks like one of those things you read about in third-world countries or in India or somewhere or Pakistan, where they get someone who’s been out of office a couple of years, get them while they’re down, hit them with some incredible charge with campaign funding that nobody’s ever heard of before and put them away for a while. It just looks like revenge against the party – against somebody that lost an election.” –MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on John Edwards
Non Compos Mentis: “In my house growing up, The [New York] Times substituted for religion. If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.” –Jill Abramson on being named editor of The New York Times come September, which she said was like “ascending to Valhalla”
Newspulper Headlines:
News You Can Use: “How Not to Be a Weiner Online” –FoxNews.com
Questions Nobody Is Asking: “What Do You Do When Darth Vader Bangs on Your Hotel Door?” –St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Puppy Saves Trooper – Now That Would Be News: “Trooper Saves Trapped Puppy” –Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette
If a Researcher Asks You to Dinner, Say No: “Eating Dirt Can Be Good for the Belly, Researchers Find” –University of Chicago Press Journals press release
Bottom Story of the Day: “Prospects for Reaching CO2 Benchmark and Curbing Global Warming Grow Dimmer” –Huffington Post
(Thanks to The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto)
Village Idiots
The spin machine: “It is not a ‘jobless recovery.’ That is an incorrect phrase. After the last recession, in this comparable period post-recession, we had lost 100,000 jobs. We have added more than 200,000 jobs. There’s a major difference between a jobless recovery and a very deep hole that were climbing out of. … We’ve come a million miles from the moment that the president took office.” –outgoing White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee
“You know what I’d rather have them do – this will make my Republican friends puke – as gas is going to go down here now, we ought to just slap a 50-cent or a dollar tax on a gallon of gas.” –General Motors CEO Dan Akerson
One trick pony: “[GOP presidential candidate Rick] Santorum today said that America was great before 1965 in his announcement. I mean, what is he talking about? Was he talking about the Voting Rights Act?” –“The Reverend” Al Sharpton, who interprets everything through the race-colored glasses
No surprise from Hollywood: “Overall, I think [Barack Obama has] done an extraordinary job. I think he’s going to go down probably as one of our great presidents. He’s been able to juggle – let’s think of all of the problems that he’s had in his presidency. You know, natural disasters, or international issues, domestic. He has found a way to change and flow to learn from every situation. … He engages on a personal level almost every day. We’re coming out of this terrible economic crisis. We’re turning the corner on terrorist situations. I think his engagement with the Chinese is starting to flower now, the strength within him is starting to emerge. I think he’s doing a terrific job.” –actor Richard Gere
The tolerant Left: “Surely it’s time for climate-change deniers to have their opinions forcibly tattooed on their bodies. … On second thoughts, maybe the tattooing along the arm is a bit Nazi-creepy. … OK, maybe the desire to see the painful, thrashing death of one’s opponents is not ideal. But, my God, these people are frustrating.” –columnist Richard Glover
Short Cuts
“Unless America gets back to buying military ships, planes and vehicles soon, the industries that provide these goods will dry up and blow away. Then, when the next war comes, we’ll be back to 1917: anxious to spend billions, but no place to spend them. Well, maybe the Chinese will sell us something.” –Heritage Foundation’s James Jay Carafano
“The House of Representatives voted not to raise the debt ceiling. But as the debt ceiling subsides – or, at any rate, stays put – we see the dreary steeple of Anthony Weiner emerging from his Twitpic crotch shot. … Confronted by his Twitpic, one is tempted to channel Mae West: Is that a debt-ceiling increase in your Fruit of the Looms or are you just pleased to see me? Alas for America, it’s both.” –columnist Mark Steyn
“The White House says that the unemployment rate is good news because it means more people are looking for jobs. More good news like that, and everyone at the White House will be looking for jobs.” –comedian Jay Leno
“U.S. Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz accused the Republicans of trying to make it a crime to be an illegal immigrant. She sees a conspiracy. First Republicans want to say that illegal aliens are illegal, then next they’re going to want to take away their voting rights.” –comedian Argus Hamilton
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
The Patriot Post Editorial Team