The Foundation

“It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.” –Thomas Jefferson

Editorial Exegesis

“Both the White House and House Republicans are pretending that their goal is ‘reducing the deficit,’ which they suggest means making real spending choices. … Since 1974, Capitol Hill’s ‘baseline’ has automatically increased spending every year according to Congressional Budget Office projections, which means before anyone has submitted a budget or cast a single vote. Tax and spending changes are then measured off that inflated baseline, not in absolute terms. The most absurd current example is Mr. Obama’s claim that his ‘$4 trillion’ plan reduces the deficit by about $800 billion over 10 years by ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But those ‘savings,’ as he calls them, are measured against a White House budget office spending baseline that is fictional. Those wars are already being unwound and everyone knows the money will never be spent. But they are called ‘savings’ to gull the public and make the deficit reduction add up to a large-sounding $4 trillion. … In Washington, Democrats designed this system to make it easier to defend annual spending increases and to portray any reduction in the baseline as a spending ‘cut.’ Chris Wallace called Timothy Geithner on this ‘gimmick’ on ‘Fox News Sunday’ this week, only to have the Treasury Secretary insist it’s real. Republicans used to object to this game, but in recent years they seem to have given up. In an October 2010 speech at the American Enterprise Institute, House Speaker Boehner proposed that ‘we ought to start at square one’ and rewrite the 1974 budget act. But he then dropped the idea, and in the current debate the GOP is putting itself at a major disadvantage by negotiating off the phony baseline. In a press release Tuesday, his own office advertised the need for ‘spending cuts’ that aren’t even cuts. If Republicans really want to slow the growth in spending, they need to stop playing by Beltway rules and start explaining to America why Mr. Obama keeps saying he’s cutting spending even as spending and deficits keep going up and up and up.” –The Wall Street Journal

Upright

“I have several pet peeves, and one of them is the idea that when Americans get to keep their own money, it somehow ‘costs’ the government.” –columnist John J. Miller

“[T]he message coming out of Washington, especially from our leftist politicians and the news media, is that we solve our budget problems by raising taxes on the rich. If Americans were more informed, such a message would be insulting to our intelligence. There are not enough rich people to satisfy Congress’ appetite.” –economist Walter E. Williams

“When President Obama put forth his first offer on the fiscal cliff, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said, ‘You can’t be serious.’ We could say the same thing to the Speaker after his counteroffer [Monday]. In a letter signed by House Republican leadership … Boehner offered to raise taxes by $800 billion and cut spending by $1.4 trillion, with no substantive reforms to the entitlement programs that are driving U.S. spending and debt. … [T]hey said, ‘we recognize it would be counterproductive to publicly or privately propose entitlement reforms that you and the leaders of your party appear unwilling to support in the near-term.’ … [T]he leadership pointed to a plan they said was suggested by Erskine Bowles, the co-chair of President Obama’s debt commission and formerly Bill Clinton’s White House Chief of Staff. It raises taxes, but not by raising tax rates – instead, by lowering the amount or number of tax deductions or exemptions available. … Now is the time for leaders to get serious. That means serious entitlement reforms that will deliver real savings and improve the programs.” –Heritage Foundation’s Amy Payne

“[T]he most frightening aspect of the White House proposal is that it wasn’t an error. Perhaps the proposal was thoroughly calculated. This suggests a president who doesn’t care about the outcome of the cliff negotiations – who thinks that he wins politically no matter what. He’s betting that either the GOP will be far more responsible than he is and do anything to avert a crisis, or that the cliff gives him the tax hikes his partisans are demanding. Win-win, save for the enormous pain to average families across the country.” –columnist Kimberly A. Strassel

“With a chip on his shoulder larger than his margin of victory, Barack Obama is approaching his second term by replicating the mistake of his first. Then his overreaching involved health care – expanding the entitlement state at the expense of economic growth. Now he seeks another surge of statism, enlarging the portion of gross domestic product grasped by government and dispensed by politics. The occasion is the misnamed ‘fiscal cliff,’ the proper name for which is: the Democratic Party’s agenda.” –columnist George Will

Essential Liberty

“I’ve come to realize what a good test one’s attitude towards guns is about whether someone’s mind is liberty oriented. If one is okay with police having guns – whoever is designated as having authority – but panicked at the thought of their fellow man or themselves having guns, then that is someone who does not think like a free person. He places a magical aura around whoever is in charge and only thinks they can wield power. This will come up again in other areas, such as letting government make economic decisions but fearing individual people making those decisions themselves.” –columnist Frank J. Fleming

Insight

“It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law … that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.” –American journalist H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

The News You Need

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Demo-gogues

Some big “ifs”: “As I travel around the world, it’s fascinating; European leaders, Asian leaders, they all say to me, America is actually poised to be the world leader for another century – if we can fix some of this political dysfunction. … We’ve got a lot of national security challenges, but if we get our economy together, and if we can get our political system to work well, I am really confident about our future.” –Barack Obama

Charade: “I’ll go anywhere and I’ll do whatever it takes to get this done. It’s too important for Washington to screw this up. Now’s the time for us to work on what we all agree to, which is let’s keep middle-class taxes low. That’s what our economy needs. That’s what the American people deserve.” –Barack Obama

Jolly Old Saint Barack: “I’ve been keeping my own naughty and nice list for Washington.” –Barack Obama

Fools, indeed: “We would be somewhat foolish to work out something on stopping us from going over the cliff and then a month or six weeks later Republicans pull the same game they did before and say, ‘We’re not going to do anything – unless this happens, we’re not going to agree to increasing the debt ceiling.’ I agree with the president, it has to be a package deal.” –Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid

Pat on the back: “Now remember, we’ve already done more than a billion dollars worth of cuts. We’ve already done that. So we need to get some credit for that.” –Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), who neglects to mention that reduction in growth is up against $1 trillion deficits each year

The BIG Lie: “Entitlements is not [sic] the issue. And if so, cool heads can sit down and engage the American people and tell us how many seniors in nursing homes do we want to throw out in the street? … And then who wants to make a fuss about Medicare when it’s solvent until 2024? … Who wants to make a fuss about Social Security when it’s solvent – and it’s about, ‘You earned it’?” –Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) (Social Security has run a deficit for the last two years, and that won’t change without reform.)

The next BIG Lie: “Remember, we had a $5.6 trillion surplus in 2000-2001 from the Clinton administration.” –Sheila Jackson Lee (The actual “surplus” was $127 billion.)

Dezinformatsia

“Our current gun culture ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead. Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it. In the coming days, [Kansas City Chiefs linebacker] Jovan Belcher’s actions, and their possible connection to football will be analyzed. … But here is what I believe. If Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.” –Fox sports writer Jason Whitlock, quoted by NBC’s Bob Costas during “Sunday Night Football”

That’s racist: “You know, I did not go as far as I’d like to go because my thoughts on the NRA and America’s gun culture – I believe the NRA is the new KKK. And that the arming of so many black youths, uh, and loading up our community with drugs, and then just having an open shooting gallery, is the work of people who obviously don’t have our best interests [at heart].” –sportswriter Jason Whitlock, who first blamed guns for the murder/suicide committed by an NFL player last weekend

Idiocy on parade: “[America’s gun culture] demonstrates itself in the Wild West, Dirty Harry mentality of people who actually believe that if a number of people were armed in the theater in Aurora, they would have been able to take down this nutjob in body armor and military style artillery. When in fact almost every policeman in the country would tell you that that would have only increased the tragedy and added to the carnage.” –NBC’s Bob Costas

Race bait: “Will Obama Push a ‘Black Agenda’ Now?” –headline from The Root

Say what? “Black Friday, in reality, is a symptom of the plight that 30 years of Reaganomics has brought to working people in America. Right along with the frenzied rise of shoppers willing to fight each other at retail outlets across America, we’ve been steadily, for the last 30 years, watching the destruction of organized labor … of decent pay and wages and conditions for working people. … We have Black Friday today because the wealthy elite have strangled their workers for 32 years, ever since Ronald Reagan’s election.” –radio talk-show host Thom Hartmann

Newspulper Headlines:

Out on a Limb: “David Petraeus Says He ‘Screwed Up Royally’ in Letter to Old Army Buddy” –New York Post

We Blame George W. Bush: “Former CIA Director Petraeus Blames His Mistress” –Newsmax.com

Give It Up, Mitt, the Campaign Is Over: “Squirrel: It’s What’s for Dinner in Romney, W.Va.” –The Washington Post

Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control: “2012 Mayan Apocalypse Rumors Have Dark Side, NASA Warns” –Space.com

Why Not Just Go Bald With Dignity?: “Schumer Gets In Another Plug to Repair the Dome” –RollCall.com

We Blame Global Warming: “Nice Weather Here to Stay” –WBBH-TV website (Fort Myers, FL)

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

Village Idiots

Hollywood sycophants: “Michelle [Obama] is Superwoman. What can’t she do? That’s why people love her. She can be on the Supreme Court and anywhere else she wants. She can be the president. She’s history and she’ll stay history because she is so amazingly smart and together.” –actor Samuel L. Jackson

Revisionist history: “We weren’t making an argument … that Bain was bad. We were making an argument that [Mitt Romney’s] experience does not qualify you to be president of the United States or to understand the real economy. We obviously worked hard to tear that down, and they never built it back up. I never understood why.” –Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter, who basically accused Romney of being a felon during the campaign

Supporting an ally: “I’m not making excuses for the missed opportunities of the Israelis, or the lack of generosity, the lack of empathy that I think goes hand-in-hand with the suspicion. So, yes, there is more that the Israelis need to do to really demonstrate that they do understand the pain of an oppressed people in their minds, and they want to figure out, within the bounds of security and a Jewish democratic state, what can be accomplished.” –Hillary Clinton

Redemption? “You know, all of us have fallen short of our dreams in life on occasion, but it is part of the Judeo-Christian spirit to give people the opportunity to show what they can do. The most important thing, I believe, for a person when they make mistakes is what they do after they’ve made mistakes.” –former Congressman Mel Reynolds (Having resigned in disgrace 17 years ago from the Illinois 2nd Congressional District after being convicted of having sex with an underage campaign worker, Reynolds now wants to replace Jesse Jackson Jr.)

Culture of death: “I have said countless times that unless you are delivering a product and service that is really needed and unless you are doing it really well, you don’t stick around for 80 years.” –actress Ashley Judd on behalf of 80-year-old Planned Parenthood

Short Cuts

“Last year, our plucky heroine, the wholesome apple-cheeked American republic, was trapped in an express elevator hurtling out of control toward the debt ceiling. Would she crash into it? Or would she make some miraculous escape? Yes! At the very last minute of her white-knuckle thrill ride to her rendezvous with destiny, she was rescued by Congress’ decision to set up … a Super Committee! Those who can, do. Those who can’t, form a committee. Those who really can’t, form a Super Committee – and then put John Kerry on it for good measure.” –columnist Mark Steyn

“President Clinton and President Obama played a round of golf over the weekend. President Clinton asked Obama what his handicap was, and Obama said, ‘Joe Biden.’” –comedian Jay Leno

“President Obama shopped at a book store to help support Small Business Saturday. He bought fifteen books. His tax policies and his health care law have been so brutal on small businesses the only way they can survive is if he shops there personally.” –comedian Argus Hamilton

“A new report shows that, in Virginia, gun violence has fallen as the sale of firearms has soared to a new record. In other news, a recent study shows that most criminals don’t like getting shot at.” –Fred Thompson

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