The Foundation

“Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote that … he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country.” –Samuel Adams

Editorial Exegesis

“The administration showed its true appreciation for military service when, on July 17, the Obama for America Campaign, the Democratic National Committee and the Ohio Democratic Party filed suit in that swing state to strike down part of the state’s law governing voting by members of the military that gives them extra time to cast their ballots. … While Democratic groups say the military exemption is ‘arbitrary’ with ‘no discernible rational basis,’ military groups say federal and state law in fact recognizes the need to give military personnel extra time to vote. Considering that Ohio voters can cast early ballots up to 35 days before an election, the military extension imposes no undue hardship on other voters. The National Defense Committee, a veterans organization, notes that ‘for each of the last three years, the Department of Defense’s Federal Voting Assistance Program has reported to the President and the Congress that the number one reason for military voter disenfranchisement is inadequate time to successfully vote.’ An administration that constantly talks about voter disenfranchisement appears unconcerned that a study by the nonpartisan Military Voters Protection Project found that in 2008 less than 20% of 2.5 million military voters successfully voted by absentee ballot. In 2010, participation shrank to a scandalous 5%. … Supporters of the suit claim the Democrats aren’t really trying to suppress the military vote, just give others the same access to polls that would be open anyway. … The problem is the Obama administration has shown a disregard for military voters who, studies show, tend to vote Republican. … Of course, this reluctance to promote and support military voting – while dead voters are allowed to remain on the rolls and cast ballots, and while the right of felons to vote is championed – has nothing to do with the fact that John McCain won 54% of the military vote in 2008 or that a May 2012 Gallup poll showed Mitt Romney pulling 58% to President Obama’s paltry 34%.” –Investor’s Business Daily

Upright

“Often as not, the qualification for receiving stimulus funds is the absence of work or income—such as banks and companies that fail, solar energy companies that can’t make it on their own, unemployment benefits and the like. Quite simply, government taxing people more who work and then giving more money to people who don’t work is a surefire recipe for less work, less output and more unemployment. Yet the notion that additional spending is a ‘stimulus’ and less spending is ‘austerity’ is the norm just about everywhere.” –economist Arthur Laffer

“Senator Harry Reid called attention to himself last week, accusing Mitt Romney of not having paid taxes for 10 years. … If Harry wants to look at someone who’s in violation of the law, the nearest mirror should do the trick. Americans need to ask themselves which is more important, Mitt Romney’s missing tax returns – or the Senate’s missing budget? The Senate Majority Leader has refused to pass one in more than three years, abandoning his primary responsibility as a leader, and violating the Constitution in the process. … In other words, it’s still all about the economy, no matter how hard weasels like Harry – along with his fellow weasels in mainstream media – try to divert our attention.” –columnist Arnold Ahlert

“Whether it’s the academic community, the media elite, stalwarts of the Democratic Party or organizations such as the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Green for All, the Sierra Club and the Children’s Defense Fund, there is a great tolerance for the ideas of socialism – a system that has caused more deaths and human misery than all other systems combined. Today’s leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from those of Nazi, Soviet and Maoist mass murderers. One does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one has to believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights.” –economist Walter E. Williams

“Liberals are always eager to ban guns, but even after the Oklahoma City bombing, you didn’t hear them talk about banning fertilizer. That’s probably just as well because sane people would have then been forced to point out that manure doesn’t kill people; people kill people. One of the creepy things about liberals is that they only wish to discuss actions and inevitable consequences when the actions can be traced to conservatives. You never hear them reprimand parole boards, which are nearly always comprised of social workers, psychologists and other college degreed morons, when one of the felons they release murders or rapes another victim. You never hear liberals blaming people like Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Ted Kennedy and Barack Obama, for bringing on the financial meltdown by insisting that home loans be given to people who couldn’t come up with a down payment, all because they knew that the votes of those new homeowners could be so easily bought and paid for with the tax dollars of the solvent.” –columnist Burt Prelutsky

Insight

“[T]he burden of government is not measured by how much it taxes, but by how much it spends.” –economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006)

“Self defence is a part of the law of nature; nor can it be denied the community, even against the king himself.” –English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704)

The Demo-gogues

The record says otherwise: “I want all Americans to have opportunity. I’m not the president of black America. I’m the president of the United States of America, but the programs that we have put in place have been directed at those folks who are least able to get financing through conventional means, who have been in the past locked out of opportunities that were available to everybody. So, I’ll put my track record up against anybody in terms of us putting in place broad-based programs that ultimately had a huge benefit for African-American businesses.” –Barack Obama

Fairy tales: “It’s like Robin Hood in reverse. It’s Romney Hood.” –Barack Obama on Mitt Romney’s tax plan, which would cut taxes by 20 percent across the board

The BIG Lie: “In order to afford just one $250,000 tax cut for somebody like Mr. Romney, 125 families like yours would have to pay another $2,000 in taxes each and every year.” –Obama

Progress? “[Friday’s] jobs report is small step in the right direction. But more needs to be done.” –House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)

Doubling down: “Harry Reid made a statement that is true. Somebody told him. It is a fact.” –Nancy Pelosi, defending Reid’s unsubstantiated charge that Mitt Romney hasn’t paid taxes

Just bizarre: “Because of the Citizens United decision, Karl Rove and the Republicans are looking forward to a breakfast the day after the election. They are going to assemble 17 angry old white men for breakfast, some of them will slobber in their food, some will have scrambled eggs, some will have oatmeal, their teeth are gone. But these 17 angry old white men will say, ‘Hey, we just bought America. Wasn’t so bad. We still have a whole lot of money left.’” –Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)

Just bizarre II: “Bless their hearts, [Republicans] act upon their beliefs. It’s an ideology – we shouldn’t have a government role. So, reduce the police, the firemen, the teachers. Reduce the role. Give tax cuts to the high end, that will stimulate the economy, everything will be good. And I say to them, do you have children who breathe air? Do you have grandchildren who drink water? … As a mom, I was vigilant about food safety, right moms? I mean, if you could depend on the government for one thing it was that you had to be able to trust the water that our kids drank and the food that they ate. But this is the E. coli club. They do not want to spend money to do that.” –Nancy Pelosi

Dezinformatsia

Patriotism stinks: “When that TV screen flashes the list of athletes and we inevitably profile the competitors by nation, we do so not just because we experience natural feelings of solidarity with fellow countrymen. We likely do so also because of that deeper desire to publicly showcase American preeminence – a desire we’ve been programmed to haughtily express since the end of the Cold War…. [I]‘ve outgrown the lust for an overpowering victory that has us, medal-count-wise, leaving everyone else in the dust. I’ve outgrown it because while I know our athletes deserve our support and respect, I also know that the same respect is due all the competitors from all the nations at the games.” –Salon’s David Sirota in his article “Don’t chant U.S.A.!”

Lemmings: “Do you think that Mitt Romney, the challenges he faced in [the] 2002 [Olympics] in Salt Lake City, compared at all to what you faced here in London?” –NBC’s Matt Lauer to British Prime Minster David Cameron

Sometimes they get it right: “Isn’t this kind of like Joe McCarthy back in the era when he said, 'I have here in my hand the names of 400 people in the State Department who are communist?’ It turned out he didn’t, and he was saying the way to prove that they’re not is for them to come forward here.” –CBS’s Bob Schieffer on Harry Reid’s accusation about Mitt Romney’s taxes

Hot air: “Before 1980, excessively hot summers were practically non-existent.” –Discovery News’ Emily Sohn

Village Idiots

There, we fixed it: “The household survey showed that the unemployment rate ticked up to 8.3% in July (or, more precisely, the rate rose from 8.217% in June to 8.254% in July).” –Alan Krueger, chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, quibbling over one-one-hundredth of a percent

“While there is more work that remains to be done, [Friday’s] employment report provides further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to recover from the worst downturn since the Great Depression. … [I]t is important not to read too much into any one monthly report and it is informative to consider each report in the context of other data that are becoming available.” –Alen Krueger (That would be 42 months of employment over 8 percent.)

Drool on the chin: “I think Nancy Pelosi is the greatest person ever. She is strong. She’s tough. She’s smart. She gets beat up in the press and nobody sticks up for her and says, ‘Hold on a second, everything you don’t like about the Democrats – you think the Democrats are too weak – would be a thousand times worse if we didn’t have Nancy Pelosi, who’s been the backbone throughout this whole last couple of years.’ I desperately want her to get that speaker’s gavel back.” –former Obama “green jobs” czar Van Jones

Totally backwards: “[The entire Republican party] want Obama fired so they don’t care how many Americans are in economic pain. The more Americans, in fact, [that] are in economic pain, the more they see for themselves political gain. And so that’s why you’ve seen not just the Tea Party but the entire Republican party refuse to step up to the plate on common sense stuff like tax cuts for small businesses, tax help for veterans.” –Van Jones

Laughable: “I think [Obama] was surprised that the right wing would actually let this country fall apart just to get the black guy out of office. … White people are cool with black people at work, living in the neighborhood and having a few as friends. But let someone black marry their daughter or let a black man run the free world and you see the real feelings. … He believed that people are basically patriotic. They are until there’s a black head of state.” –“comedian” D.L. Hughley

Hot air II: “We now know that the chances these extreme weather events would have happened naturally – without climate change – is negligible.” –NASA climate hack James Hansen

Short Cuts

“Here’s a question for Dingy Harry. As majority leader he is paid $193,000 a year. How did he get to be worth $10 million?” –radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh

“Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel criticized Chick-fil-A, saying it didn’t have ‘Chicago values.’ I guess because they stuff chicken boxes instead of ballot boxes.” –Fred Thompson

“The White House denied that Barack Obama returned Churchill’s bust to the British Embassy when he took office. You know the defense. Obama says he didn’t do that, the bust traveled back to the British Embassy over roads and bridges built by somebody else.” –comedian Argus Hamilton

“Nothing is more idiotic than rich, moron actors who earn millions to pretend to be useful people whining about the rich having all this money they didn’t earn. Here’s my own super logical idea for actors and their pay: An actor should always earn less than someone who actually does the occupation he’s pretending to do. Since people who do things are superior to people who pretend to do things, this just seems fair. So if an actor plays a teacher, he has to get less than the average teacher’s pay. And if he plays a soldier, he gets less than the average soldier’s pay. Of course, I bet the consequence of this would be that all the big name actors will only accept roles where they play CEOs or a Romney-type investor, but, hey, this is all about fairness.” –humorist Frank J. Fleming

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