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

Government

“President Obama enter[ed] this Labor Day weekend with a serious problem on his hands. For all intents and purposes, the economy appears to be stuck in neutral, with news out [Friday] that the U.S. economy created a grand total of zero jobs in August. This followed two months of near zero growth. Not surprisingly then, the unemployment rate in August remained at 9.1 percent, virtually unchanged since April. In fact, it was completely unchanged, and for the first time since 1945, no new jobs were created – Zero. America now has the weakest labor market in a generation, and the American people know it. … [W]hile the U.S. economy is creating no net new jobs, President Obama is offering no new ideas to fix the problem. In a speech to a joint session of Congress [on] Thursday, the President is expected to rehash the same expensive, ineffective policies he has tried since his presidency began. And it’s an economic philosophy that America has come to know all too well. The President hopes that through the sheer force of spending taxpayer dollars, he can turn the economy around. It isn’t working – and neither are nearly 14 million Americans. … The two-and-a-half-year Keynesian experiment of flooding the economy with taxpayer dollars has failed, yet the President and his union allies continue to peddle the myth that the only way to save the economy is to spend more.” –Heritage Foundation’s Mike Brownfield

For the Record

“Will Barack Obama become the first president in the post-World War II era during whose term real gross domestic product never grew in any quarter at an annual rate greater than 4 percent? With less than optimistic recent forecasts from the Federal Reserve System’s Federal Open Market Committee and the Congressional Budget Office, it now seems like a very real possibility. Having been inaugurated in January 2009, Obama has served as president in 10 quarters. … In three of the quarters of 2008, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, real GDP grew at a negative annualized rate, dropping as low as -8.9 percent in the fourth quarter of that year. At the beginning of Obama’s term, real GDP remained negative in the first two quarters, hitting -6.7 percent in the first quarter of 2009 and -0.7 percent in the second quarter. But two full years have passed since then. During that time, real GDP peaked in the first quarter of 2010, hitting an annualized rate of 3.9 percent. Since that modest peak a year and a half ago, the economy has been on a generally downward trend, with growth of real GDP hitting a dismal 0.4 percent in the first quarter of this year and a nearly as dismal 1 percent in the second quarter. Now both the FOMC and the CBO are indicating they do not expect vigorous economic growth to resume any time soon.” –columnist Terence Jeffrey

Opinion in Brief

“The biggest star in the Obama firmament of green-jobs companies has just imploded. Solyndra, a California-based firm that produced solar panels, declared bankruptcy [last] week, putting more than a thousand additional workers on the unemployment line. The Solyndra story tells you all you need to know about President Obama’s ability to ‘create’ jobs – green or otherwise. … The company received over half a billion dollars in federal loan guarantees for the project. But U.S. taxpayers will likely never see a dime repaid now that the company has gone into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. … Solyndra is one of three major solar companies to declare bankruptcy this summer alone. No matter how many speeches the president gives, he can’t turn an economically unsustainable enterprise into a profitable one, even if he siphons from the U.S. treasury to do so. … If Solyndra’s technology, which rested on a new design for solar panels, was as promising as the Obama administration seemed to think, investors willing to risk their own money should have been plentiful. Where were Warren Buffet and the president’s other billionaire supporters? … What doesn’t work is commandeering other people’s money in a crapshoot where there are more losers than winners.” –columnist Linda Chavez

Insight

“I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty.” –President Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)

Essential Liberty

“America seems to be facing a pivotal moment: Do we move ahead by advancing or by receding – by reaffirming the values that made us exceptional or by letting go of those values, so that a creeping mediocrity begins to spare us the burdens of greatness? As a president, Barack Obama has been a force for mediocrity. He has banked more on the hopeless interventions of government than on the exceptionalism of the people. His greatest weakness as a president is a limp confidence in his countrymen. He is afraid to ask difficult things of them. Like me, he is black, and it was the government that in part saved us from the ignorances of the people. So the concept of the exceptionalism – the genius for freedom – of the American people may still be a stretch for him. But in fact he was elected to make that stretch. It should be held against him that he has failed to do so.” –Hoover Institution’s Shelby Steele

The Gipper

“Only when the human spirit is allowed to invent and create, only when individuals are given a personal stake in deciding economic policies and benefiting from their success – only then can societies remain economically alive, dynamic, prosperous, progressive and free.” –Ronald Reagan

Re: The Left

“On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced it was shuffling Kenneth Melson, acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, out of his job. The disclosure comes amid continued GOP investigations into the administration’s fatally botched straw gun purchase racket at the border and spreading outrage over legal obstructionism and whistleblower retaliation by DOJ brass. … Internal documents earlier showed that Melson was intimately involved in overseeing the program and screened undercover videos of thousands of straw purchases of AK-47s and other high-powered rifles – many of which ended up in the hands of Mexican drug cartel thugs, including those who murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry last December. Fast and Furious weapons have been tied to at least a dozen violent crimes in America and untold bloody havoc in Mexico. … Melson has been kicked back to DOJ’s main office in a flabbergasting new slot as ‘senior adviser on forensic science in the department’s Office of Legal Policy.’ … DOJ is run by Eric Holder, the Beltway swamp creature who won bipartisan approval for his nomination – even after putting political interests ahead of security interests at the Clinton Justice Department in both the Marc Rich pardon scandal and the Puerto Rican FALN terrorist debacle. Remember: Holder won over the Senate by arguing that his poor judgment made him more qualified for the job. Screw up, move up, cover up: It’s the Holder way, the Obama way, the Washington way. And innocent Americans pay.” –columnist Michelle Malkin

Political Futures

“Regardless of the public image they may convey, Barack Obama and his wife never fail to take full advantage of a lifestyle that would be the envy of any modern-day monarch while the bulk of the American populace struggles to afford life’s necessities. He is but another in a long line of those who promote socialism and proclaim to be ‘of the people’ with only the interests of the citizens at heart – as they duplicitously pursue a personal agenda. … [Obama’s] sense of entitlement stems not only from a deep-seated belief in socialist theory and an overweening sense of superiority, but also as a man obsessed with his skin color and payback for his perception of Western colonialism (as detailed in his autobiography Dreams from My Father). … He is much too busy enjoying the trappings of royalty, despite his oft-declared disdain for that class, to be bothered about the dismal future of the United States.” –columnist Steve McCann

Faith & Family

“The New York Times’ executive editor, Bill Keller, in a piece in The New York Times Magazine, argues that presidential candidates should be asked tough questions about their faith. Keller wants to know whether a candidate will place ‘fealty to the Bible, the Book of Mormon … or some other authority higher than the Constitution and laws of this country’ and ‘whether a president respects serious science and verifiable history.’ He wants to make sure ‘religious doctrine’ does not become ‘an excuse to exclude my fellow citizens from the rights and protections our country promises.’ … [K]eller’s concern isn’t with the religious beliefs of all candidates, only Christians, and not all Christians, just those who take the Bible seriously. … The reality is that throughout our history, the halls of American government have teemed with Bible-believing Christians, and they’ve never pushed for theocracy. Ironically, it is leftists who are far likelier to use the power of government to selectively suppress political and religious liberties.” –columnist David Limbaugh

Culture

“[T]he Left considers itself the undisputed champion of ‘science,’ but there are scads of issues where they take un-scientific points of view. Sure they can cite dissident scientists – just as conservatives can – on this or that issue. But everyone knows that when the science directly threatens the Left’s pieties, it’s the science that must bend – or break. During the Larry Summers fiasco at Harvard, comments delivered in the classic spirit of open inquiry and debate cost Summers his job. Actual scientists got the vapors because he violated the principles not of science but of liberalism. During the Gulf oil spill, the Obama administration dishonestly claimed that its independent experts supported a drilling moratorium. They emphatically did not. The president who campaigned on basing his policies on ‘sound science’ ignored his own hand picked experts. … His support for wind and solar energy … isn’t based on science but on faith. And that faith has failed him dramatically. The idea that conservatives are anti-science is self-evident and self-pleasing liberal hogwash. I see no reason why conservatives should even argue the issue on their terms when it’s so clearly offered in bad faith in the first place.” –columnist Jonah Goldberg

Reader Comments

“Regarding Mark Alexander’s essay, The Essential Question in Any Political Debate, an oath is only as good as the person’s integrity/character taking the oath. Unfortunately our elected officials, for the most part, take the oath because it is a part of the process in which they can finally get into the game. They feel no obligation to honor the oath like they feel no obligation to be honest.” –TxnByBrth

“To our generation (born shortly after WWII) an oath is a sacred promise. I grew up in an era when a man’s word was his bond and people would not deal willingly with a man who would dishonor his word. In a few days I will have been married 45 years and I honor that bond and I expect when an elected official swears to uphold, protect and defend the Constitution, he or she should do so as well.” –Harlan

“I will readily admit that when I raised my right hand to swear to protect and defend the Constitution all those years ago upon entry into the military, I did not understand an ‘oath’ as I do now. Recently, when I watched my son take the same oath, I was moved by its simple, unequivocal content. Oaths are declarations of intent. You should not speak it unless you mean to live by it. Period. Oaths are not just platitudes to be mouthed for political expediency.” –JWG

“Once again Mark Alexander has penned an excellent essay and posed some very timely questions. To your question, can we keep this Republic? I believe we can but we face a tremendous tsunami of opposition in the process. When you can’t even talk about a reduction in the increase of a program without getting slaughtered by the left and in the press it becomes very apparent that we face a nearly impossible task. It will take a huge effort of educating the masses and The Patriot Post is exactly the kind of tool we need to begin to accomplish that. The light may be dim, but it’s not out!” –Warren

On Friday, we asked if our readers will watch Barack Obama’s upcoming speech to a joint session of Congress. The answer was a resounding “No!” In fact, quite a few of you mentioned root canals as being preferable.

“I find the president’s presentations are no longer even laughable. I think he actually believes HE is the answer to all of our nation’s problems and that is bad for the Republic.” –Michael

“I have forced myself to watch most of his speeches so that I would be able to interpret his words ‘first hand.’ Sadly, I can no longer tolerate his deceptive rhetoric. I’ll watch ‘misdirection’ on the football field – where it belongs.” –Allan

The Last Word

“FEMA has started to use the term ‘federal family.’ I never thought of the federal government as family, but I guess it is in the way you get to choose your friends, but you don’t get to choose your family. I mean, technically, we’re supposed to be able to choose our federal government, but it just doesn’t seem that way. It’s like if one of my close friends was a murderous psycho with a knife – but not because I wanted to be friends with him but because I was forced to choose a murderous psycho as a friend and he was the best one I could get. I sure hope he doesn’t stab me. But the federal government will be the federal government, and there’s not much I can do about it because it’s family.” –humorist Frank J. Fleming

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team