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The Foundation

“[T]he present Constitution is the standard to which we are to cling. Under its banners, bona fide must we combat our political foes.” –Alexander Hamilton

Editorial Exegesis

“A study to be published in June in the New York University Law Review finds that our Constitution ‘appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere.’ ‘Among the world’s democracies,’ writes David Law of Washington University in St. Louis and Mila Versteeg of the University of Virginia, ‘constitutional similarity to the United States has clearly gone into free fall. Over the 1960s and 1970s, democratic constitutions as a whole became more similar to the U.S. Constitution, only to reverse course in the 1980s and 1990s.’ The New York Times’ coverage of this study finds ‘lots of possible reasons’ for the decline. ‘The U.S. Constitution,’ it says, ‘is terse and old’ and ‘guarantees relatively few rights.’ … The Constitution doesn’t seem to be of much use to Barack Obama, either. The president … recently lamented that the Founders ‘designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change than I would like sometimes.’ … A lack of respect for the Constitution isn’t peculiar to Obama. It’s shared among Democrats, in particular, even Democrat-appointed Supreme Court jurists. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Clinton appointee, said last week on Egyptian television that if she were drafting a constitution in the year 2012, she wouldn’t look to ours. She reportedly recommended the South African Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the European Convention on Human Rights. … We’re not ashamed to declare the U.S. Constitution a magnificent document that, along with the Declaration of Independence, forms the greatest national charter in human history. No other document has ever guarded freedom the way it has, and no other contract has provided such a foundation for prosperity. It’s not perfect, but it’s as close to perfect as man has come.” –Investor’s Business Daily

How can the U.S. follow its own Constitution?

Upright

“Last night when discussing the trends in the three non-binding Republican contests, I tweeted that Rick Santorum’s win in Missouri was only surprising in gaining a majority, but that a win in Minnesota would be surprising – and a win in Colorado would be shocking. … Santorum shocked the Republican race with a clean sweep of Tuesday’s caucuses and primary, and may have pushed himself into serious consideration as the long-sought conservative consolidation alternative to Mitt Romney.” –blogger Ed Morrissey

“Republicans are worried sick that the Democrats will be able to use all the nasty sound bites from the GOP debates in the general election. I’m not too concerned for a number of reasons, but the main one is that the GOP will merely have to produce ads in which we show Barack Obama saying, ‘I’m pledging to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office’ and ‘If I don’t get the unemployment rate under 7%, I deserve to be a one-term president.’ For good measure, I would produce another ad in which I showed Obama and jobs czar Jeffrey Immelt giggling as the president says, ‘I guess shovel-ready jobs weren’t quite as shovel-ready as we thought.’ The viewer would be reminded that this came a long time after Obama, Pelosi and Reid, shoved through a trillion dollar stimulus that they promised would turn around the economy.” –columnist Burt Prelutsky

“As in Chicago, Obama seems to live in a cocoon in which Republicans are largely absent, offscreen actors that no one pays any attention to. … Two decisions in particular seem tilted toward rich liberals. One was the disapproval of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, even after it survived two environmental impact statements. … The other astonishing decision was the decree requiring Catholic hospitals and charities’ health insurance policies to include coverage for abortion and birth control. Here Obama was spitting in the eyes of millions of Americans and threatening the existence of charitable programs that help millions of people of all faiths. … Who’s on the other side? The designer-clad ladies Obama encounters at every fundraiser. They want to impose their views on abortion on everyone else.” –political analyst Michael Barone

“The majority of the American people, but in particular those who identify themselves as conservative, are overwhelmingly aware of the true nature of the nation’s problems and the crossroad the country is facing in 2012. The grassroots rebellion that is the Tea Party movement was the first manifestation of this awareness. Despite the success of the Tea Party working within the Republican Party in the 2010 mid-term elections, most of the Republican elites downplayed their success and fell in with the mainstream media and the Democrats in their well-worn and gratuitous aspersions against those in fly-over country.” –columnist Steve McCann

Essential Liberty

“In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson called the pursuit of happiness an unalienable right. This was a radical idea. For most of history, most people didn’t think much about pursuing happiness. They were too busy just trying to survive. Then came the liberal revolution based on the idea of individual freedom. Only then did they start thinking that happiness might be possible on earth. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, the right to pursue happiness has been perverted into a government-backed entitlement to happiness.” –columnist John Stossel

Insight

“Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace.” –German pastor and member of the German resistance movement Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)

“Scouting is nothing less than applied Christianity.” –Sir Robert Baden-Powell, Founder of the Boy Scouts, on this day in 1910. (Click here to read more.)

The Demo-gogues

Qualifications: “I deserve a second term, but we’re not done. When you and I sat down, we were losing 750,000 jobs a month … now we’re creating 250,000 jobs. We’ve made progress. The key now is to make sure we don’t start turning in the wrong direction.” –Barack Obama

Blaming the Constitution instead of following it: “What’s frustrated people is that I’ve not been able to implement every aspect of what I said in 2008. Well, it turns out our Founders designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change than I would like sometimes. But what we have been able to do is move in the right direction. And you know what? One of the things about being president is you get better as time goes on.” –Barack Obama

Prosperity, but… “I do think the vast majority of the American people understand … we want everyone to be successful, and nobody begrudges people who have been successful because they’re making things, creating new products and services, that’s the American way – but what people also want to see is that everybody is doing their fair share, that we’re all pulling together, that we’re creating ladders of opportunity for all Americans. Whoever the Republican nominee is, I fundamentally disagree with the formula that would go back to the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place.” –Barack Obama

Dereliction of duty: “We do not need to bring a budget to the floor this year – it’s done, we don’t need to do it.” –Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)

Race bait: “[T]he government doesn’t have the racism and discrimination that the private sector enjoys.” –Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY)

Broken record: “You’d think that if a congresswoman got shot in the head, that would have changed Congress’ views [on guns]. I can tell you how to change it, just get Congress to come with me to the hospital when I’ve gotta tell somebody that their son or daughter, their spouse, their parent is not gonna come home ever again. … I don’t know who has to get killed for people to start saying, ‘Wait a second, this is enough.’” –New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, shamelessly using Gabrielle Giffords to argue for more gun control

Dezinformatsia

Speaking truth to power: “In 2010, we averaged about a million jobs. Okay? A million jobs that were created. In 2011, it was 1.8 million jobs. Now, in 2012, we are average 200,000 jobs a month that are being created. So [Obama] can run on his record. The jobs are coming up. And he’s done so much in the past four years I can’t even tell you.” –CNBC’s Suze Orman

The government programs keeping them poor: “What programs for the poor? [Republicans] keep acting as if poor people have all of these things that are helping them.” –MSNBC’s Al Sharpton

The BIG Lie: “[B]arack Obama has not put anyone on food stamps.” –The Huffington Post’s Barbra Streisand

Distortions: “Will voters hold Republicans accountable for trying to kill the American auto industry?” –MSNBC’s Ed Schultz (Not bailing them out doesn’t equal “trying to kill” them.)

Revisionist history: “[George Washington] began the political tradition that produced a Union victory in the Civil War, the Federal Reserve Board, Social Security, Medicare, and most recently, Obamacare. He had no patience in his own time with a states’ rights interpretation of the Constitution and would have found the conservative agenda of the modern Republican Party and its Tea Party allies a repudiation of all he stood for.” –professor and historian Joseph J. Ellis in Time magazine

Newspulper Headlines:

Breaking News From Luke 18:11-12: “Obama Says His Religious Values Underpin His Policies” –Miami Herald

Answers to Questions Nobody Is Asking: “What We Need Is More Apathy in This Country” –PJMedia.com

The Lonely Lives of Scientists: “Scientists Coax Shy Microorganisms to Stand Out in a Crowd” –University of Washington press release

Bottom Story of the Day: “Obama Won’t Come Close on Pledge to Halve Deficit, CBO Says” –USA Today

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

Village Idiots

No wonder there’s a problem: “You should certainly be aided by all the constitution-writing that has gone on since the end of World War II. I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012. … Yes, why not take advantage of what there is elsewhere in the world?” –U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who doesn’t bother looking to the U.S. Constitution either when ruling from the bench

Chutzpah: “It took me a month, or less than a month, [to say] that gun-walking was inappropriate. It came to my attention, [and it was a] fairly rapid response, to say don’t do that.” –Attorney General Eric Holder wanting credit for his “quick” response to ending gun-walking operations in Fast and Furious

Wrong values: “We’re here because our families worked hard to make sure that we had the opportunities that everyone should have. Barack and I are both motivated by a desire to pay those blessings forward. Your president lives by the principle that to whom much is given, much is expected. … We are blessed to have someone not just of his intellectual caliber but with such a strong grounding of values that all of us identify with – these basic American values that have made our country great and will continue to make us the strongest country in the world.” –Michelle Obama

Making children of adults: “And when our kids get older and they graduate from school, we all know how hard it is for them to find jobs, let alone jobs with insurance. And that’s why, as part of health reform, kids can now stay on their parents’ insurance until they’re 26 years old. So will we take that insurance away from our kids?” –Michelle Obama

Short Cuts

“If you needed more proof of liberal media bias, just look at the orgasms created by Friday’s announcement that unemployment in January dropped to 8.3 percent. By contrast, these same folks were practically suicidal as the jobless rate dropped to 5.6 percent when George W. Bush was President in January 2004.” –Newsbusters’ Noel Sheppard

“Last week the left was in an uproar when the Susan G. Komen Cancer Research Foundation indicated it may withhold funds from Planned Parenthood – which proves once and for all that liberals support abortion more than cancer research.” –NewsBusted’s Jodi Miller

“It may be halftime in America, but China’s got the ball and we’re down by $15 trillion!” –comedian Jay Leno

“Kodak had to ask that its name be taken off the Hollywood theater that hosts Oscar night due to Kodak’s bankruptcy. There’s a lesson here for the Democrats. After twelve years of being associated with the biggest names in Hollywood, Kodak has lost everything.” –comedian Argus Hamilton

“Obama says he’s getting better at being president and deserves a second term. Well, for the first claim, maybe he is getting better. He had the advantage of starting so poorly, it was hard for him to do any worse. As for the second part, it’s more a question of whether we as a country deserve him. And since we haven’t genocided anyone recently, I’m going to say ‘No.’” –humorist Frank J. Fleming

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