The Foundation

“I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” –Thomas Jefferson

Editorial Exegesis

“We may never know how many deaths, kidnappings and other criminal activities were facilitated by more than 2,000 weapons that were allowed to ‘walk’ into Mexico under the Obama administration’s Fast and Furious program, but a Univision special aired Sunday exposes more of the carnage. The special, put together by Univision’s investigative unit and aired as a special edition of Univision’s ‘Aqui y Ahora’ (‘Here and Now’) identified massacres committed using guns from the ATF operation…. In addition to fueling increased gun violence in Mexico, guns from Fast and Furious previously unreported by congressional investigators found their way into the hands of drug traffickers across Latin America in countries such as Honduras and Colombia, as well as the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Kudos to Univision, which regrettably will not have a reporter at Wednesday’s presidential debate to ask the tough questions the administration’s media sycophants will not, for pursuing the truth on Fast and Furious with more vigor than most American media outlets. … Univision found 57 Fast and Furious weapons in addition to 122 specifically mentioned in a congressional report. They included weapons used in the massacre at a party just one year after President Obama’s inauguration and less than a year before Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in December 2010 at the hands of an illegal immigrant working for the Sinaloa Cartel just 10 miles from the Mexican border near Nogales, Ariz. … The report also reveals the botched operation may have played a role in a 2009 massacre, where 18 young men were killed at a rehabilitation center also in Juarez. The massacre was reportedly ordered and carried out by Mexican hit men. Current estimates put the number of Mexican nationals murdered by Fast and Furious weapons at 300. More such evidence will be found and the Fast and Furious body count will rise, ignored by the administration and its media protectors.” –Investor’s Business Daily

Upright

“[A]BC, CBS and NBC have yet to report the Spanish-language network’s findings. … The blackout on ABC’s broadcasts is particularly confounding since they have an excerpt from Univision’s September 30 report on ABC’s official Web site. The refusal by ABC, CBS or NBC to report the findings is remarkable since the Univision report not only contains politically explosive information to a sitting administration at the height of the election season but also compelling human tragedy. … The lack of coverage by the Big Three … networks continues their trend of mostly ignoring major events in the scandal that has led to calls for Attorney General Eric Holder’s resignation.” –Newsbuster’s Geoffrey Dickens

“Some media outlets are painting [Tuesday’s] Pennsylvania court decision on the state’s new voter-ID law as a win for opponents of the legislation, including the NAACP and the League of Women Voters. … Indeed, once again, most of the law was upheld. The judge ordered that voters without ID still be allowed to vote in the upcoming election because, from the evidence it reviewed, it didn’t look like the new ID requirement could be fully implemented before the election. … But the court issued no permanent injunction. Today’s preliminary injunction, the judge specified, ‘is limited to the upcoming election.’ … So, yes, [Tuesday’s] ruling was a temporary victory for the NAACP and the League of Women Voters, in the context of this election. But they completely failed in their main goal of getting a permanent injunction that would declare the voter-ID law unconstitutional.” –Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakosky

“Mitt Romney’s main advantage in his first debate with President Obama on Wednesday may be that the president will be speaking without a teleprompter. His second advantage is the president’s record and how he has failed to fulfill many of his promises. While the president will probably recycle his class warfare themes, Romney should focus on the president’s domestic failures and on Republican initiatives that have worked in the past. We Americans didn’t just crawl out of a cave. There is history. … True patriotism flows from liberty, not government dependency. We the people are America. Government isn’t America. … How important are these debates? The country’s survival rides on them.” –columnist Cal Thomas

“Mitt Romney must use the debates to spotlight President Obama’s disastrous record – with no mercy. … Romney mustn’t dare understate his case; he cannot pull any punches in describing the gravity of our national predicament and in drawing the sharpest contrast between his agenda and Obama’s record and plans for the next four years. I am convinced that for a number of reasons, far too many Americans don’t realize how damaging Obama’s policies have been and how dangerous his continued presidency would be for the future of this nation. Romney must not let Obama get away with claiming that he and other Republicans don’t care about minorities or the poor – and explain that his pro-growth message is for all Americans, irrespective of race, gender or one’s income level.” –columnist David Limbaugh

Essential Liberty

“The writings of America’s Founding Fathers made it clear that they viewed religious freedom as occupying the highest rung of civil liberty protections. For example, George Washington wrote that ‘the establishment of Civil and Religious Liberty was the Motive that induced me to the field of battle.’ … [T]he historical foundation for a strong commitment to protecting religious liberty cannot be debated. … [H]owever, current government entities and actors often treat religious freedom and expression as obstacles to be overcome rather than as important values to protect. … The apparent unpopularity of the expression of religious values through actions or words brings to mind Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s observation that ‘we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death’ and the Supreme Court’s more recent reminder that ‘[t]he First Amendment protects expression, be it of the popular variety or not.’ … The erosion of one constitutional right – especially one as fundamental as religious liberty and the freedom of speech – may serve as a precedent for the erosion of other rights to the detriment of all Americans.” –Jay Alan Sekulow, Chief Counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice

Insight

“All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.” –American novelist Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945)

“I don’t know who started the idea that a president must be a politician instead of a business man. A politician can’t run any other kind of business. So there is no reason why he can run the U.S. That’s the biggest single business in the world.” –American humorist Will Rogers (1879-1935)

Demo-gogues

Joe’s a little confused: “[T]he middle class has been buried the last four years. How in [the] Lord’s name can [Republicans] justify raising their taxes with these tax cuts?” –Joe Biden, who seems to forget both who has been president the last four years, and that Romney doesn’t plan to raise taxes, but rather as even Biden slipped, plans to cut them

Lowering expectations: “Governor Romney, he’s a good debater. I’m just okay.” –Barack Obama

“[B]asically they’re keeping me indoors all the time. It’s a drag. They’re making me do my homework.” –Barack Obama on his preparation for tonight’s debate

Class warfare: “Top-down economics never works. The country doesn’t succeed when only the rich get richer. We succeed when the middle-class gets bigger; when more people have a chance to get ahead; [when] more people have a chance to live up to their God-given potential. Look, I don’t believe we can get very far with leaders who write off half the nation as a bunch of victims who never take responsibility for their own lives.” –Barack Obama

The BIG Lie: “How did we get this debt? Ladies and gentlemen, [Republicans] put two wars on a credit card. … Two, they voted for a new entitlement program without paying one penny for it, and that was clear. Number 3, they added another trillion dollars in the tax cut for the very wealthy, so what’s the result? … The result was by the time the reins got turned back over to Barack and me, they had doubled the national debt in eight years” –Joe Biden repeating his boss’s lies

Selective offense: “I know the Obama campaign is ready to act on this. But I realized that there are two important federal laws, the Voting Rights Act, passed in the 60s, [and] the Voter Registration Act passed in the 90s, that have criminal and civil penalties for people who try to intimidate a voter. … [A]nyone in this country who feels they’re being intimidated can call their nearest FBI office because it is a federal offense to harass someone, to intimidate someone. Think about all the people that worked so hard and struggled and went to prison and put their life on the line for the right to vote.” –Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) who we don’t recall making a peep when the Black Panthers intimidated Philadelphia voters and the Justice Department swept it under the rug

Dezinformatsia

Victimitis: “Voter suppression efforts continue to impact transgender Americans. They don’t look like what their photo IDs are. So if they are self-presenting in front of an election official and they have an ID that says male or female and they’re sort of gender self-presenting in a non-conforming way, of course you end up with the possibility of shame or embarrassment or not being believed to be who you are.” –MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry

Race bait: “If you were to somehow beat the first African-American president, what would you say to the black community to assure them that you would be their president also?” –CNN’S Jim Acosta to Romney

“Will Romney Reach out to Racists in Debates?” –article in The Root, a publication owned by The Washington Post

Nothing to see here: “[O]n the issue of Libya, actually, I’m not sure that who said what, when, and when the intelligence came out, as, you know, David Plouffe was – kept talking about the intelligence community and what they knew about Libya, I’m not sure that that’s going to be a huge issue for voters in the course of this election. It feels to me like, you know, a short-term issue in terms of American voters.” –BBC’s Katty Kay pitifully covering for the White House’s bungling of the embassy attacks and murders

No bias here: “Many Republicans see bias lurking in every live shot, but the growing hegemony of conservative voices makes manufacturing a partisan conspiracy a practical impossibility. … It’s hard to picture conservatives as disenfranchised in the fight for attention from the news media, not after a campaign season in which the audition for the Republican nomination seemed to include some combination of hosting and making guest appearances on Fox News.” –New York Times columnist David Carr

Newspulper Headlines:

Out on a Limb: “Obama, Romney Differ on U.S. Exceptionalism” –The Washington Post

The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations: “Romney Must Prove He Is No John Kerry” –Financial Times website

What Would We Do Without Experts?: “Experts: Alcohol Enemas ‘Extremely Dangerous’” –CNN.com

Answers to Questions Nobody Is Asking: “No, Bill Clinton Can’t Become President of France” –Slate.com

Too Much Information: “Bill Clinton Announces Contraception Deal” –News24.com (South Africa)

Bottom Story of the Day: “Obama Focuses on Campaigning, Fundraising” –The Washington Times

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

Village Idiots

The updated lie: “In fact, we’re taking credit for the 5.1 million private-sector jobs that have been created over the past four years despite being handed the worst economy since the Great Depression. We’re taking credit for the million jobs that were protected under the president’s efforts to save the auto industry and the increase in manufacturing jobs for the first time in decades. We’re not blaming our predecessor by any means, but we don’t think we should return to the same policies that crashed the economy.” –Obama campaign aid Stephanie Cutter, who in August was bogusly bragging about 4.5 million jobs created – we didn’t know September was so epic!

Repeat a lie often enough: “We know that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan unapologetically support an extreme budget plan that would end Medicare as we know it and turn it into a voucher program, shred the health care safety net that exists for our seniors and increase their premiums, your premiums, by more than $6,300 a year. That is unacceptable.” –DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL) again making a debunked claim

Endorsements you don’t want: “I hope this doesn’t harm Obama, but if I was from the United States, I’d vote for Obama. Obama is a good guy. … I think that if Obama was from Barlovento or some Caracas neighborhood, he’d vote for Chavez.” –Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who once called President George W. Bush the “devil” and a “drunk”

Tolerance and civility: “[E]very dead gay kid is a victory for the Family Research Council. … Tony Perkins sits on a pile of dead gay kids every day when he goes to work – and he calls himself a Christian. I don’t understand how real Christians let that little f–ker get away with that.” –homosexual activist Dan Savage

Short Cuts

“[It’s] [e]asy to see how Bush would be caught off-guard by the 9-11-01 attack. But what kind of maroon gets caught off-guard by 9-11-12 attacks?” –columnist Ann Coulter

“Barack Obama wakes up every morning and thinks about Barack Obama.” –former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich

“Mitt Romney was accused by Democrats of upping his tax payments by not subtracting all his charity deductions. Imagine the opposition’s fury. Democrats say Mitt gave four million dollars to charity last year and all that money could have gone to helping the needy.” –comedian Argus Hamilton

“In Florida, school officials in Marion County are considering bringing the practice of paddling back. If that’s not effective, they could always threaten to let Michelle Obama write their lunch menu.” –Fred Thompson

“A new survey out today shows how much time we waste every day in our lives. For example, we waste seven minutes in line every time we go to get coffee, 28 minutes getting through airport security, four years waiting for Obama to do something about the economy.” –comedian Jay Leno

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