The Foundation

“Liberty is not to be enjoyed, indeed it cannot exist, without the habits of just subordination; it consists, not so much in removing all restraint from the orderly, as in imposing it on the violent.” –Fisher Ames

Essential Liberty

“America is built on the principle of ‘ordered liberty,’ which seeks to maximize both security and freedom at the same time. The art of governance, then, is to establish rules that let the good guys get the bad guys without infringing on the freedom of the people. The Constitution doesn’t give us a rule book to do that. Instead, it sets up security and freedom to fight it out with each other, constantly, like two indefatigable pit bulls. The struggle is intentional, so neither side wins out, but neither gets compromised. Freedom and security tear at each other until we get answers that reasonably address both. So, if people stop raising objections every time security might look like it’s winning out, the system will fail. … In short, neither full transparency nor just eschewing big data will work to secure both security and freedom. We don’t and shouldn’t trust government to follow its own rules on its own, but we need government to do its job right and find means to assure us it’s doing its job in compliance with the law. That is a hard task, and sadly we have an administration with a mediocre track record of getting it right.” –Heritage Foundation’s James Jay Carafano

Government

“As a senator and presidential candidate, Obama routinely tore into the Patriot Act as if it was worse than the Espionage Act of 1917. Now, not only is he using the Patriot Act to spy on, well, pretty much everyone, his Justice Department actually used the Espionage Act to label a journalist a possible co-conspirator in espionage. But after the schadenfreude wears off, the question remains: Is this bad policy? … After every terrorist attack, everyone always asks, ‘Why didn’t the government connect the dots?’ Well, what the NSA is doing is connecting dots. … I don’t have much confidence in this administration. But I don’t have an abundance of confidence in government generally. That’s one of the things I love about America: The default position is to be skeptical of government, no matter who’s in charge. … The arrival of ‘big data’ … creates opportunities for government (and corporations) that were literally unimaginable not long ago. … Just because government could, in theory, poison people doesn’t mean it shouldn’t, in practice, inoculate people. But we’re in uncharted territory, and a healthy dose of old-fashioned American skepticism seems warranted, no matter who’s in charge.” –columnist Jonah Goldberg

Political Futures

“In December, [Susan] Rice withdrew her name from consideration for secretary of state because ‘the confirmation process would be lengthy, disruptive and costly.’ … Now Obama is rewarding Rice for her fierce loyalty with an appointment to a position arguably as influential as secretary of state and one for which she will not need to be confirmed. He is also counting on her continued deference in placing his personal interests above the nation’s. … Equally troubling is Obama’s selection of Samantha Power to replace Rice. … In 2003, Power called for a ‘historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, permitted by the United States.’ In a piece in The New Republic, she advocated a ‘doctrine of the mea culpa,’ which essentially involves the United States owning up to its alleged past foreign policy abuses to put itself in a better light to the world. Is this not exactly the attitude Obama has expressed in his ongoing apology tour at home and abroad, always anxious to throw this nation under the bus and distance himself from its pre-Obama history? … Obama’s two appointments show that even as he is under heavy criticism for a smorgasbord of scandals, he is utterly undaunted. He ‘won’ the election, and he is going to impose his agenda for transformational change no matter what and militantly ignore all efforts to make him accountable.” –columnist David Limbaugh

Insight

“The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent.” –economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973)

The Gipper

“Conservatives were brought up to hate deficits, and justifiably so. We’ve long thought there are two things in Washington that are unbalanced – the budget and the liberals.” –Ronald Reagan

Opinion in Brief

“[S]ome members of Congress (mostly Republicans) have been pressing HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius to intervene on behalf of a little girl named Sarah Murnaghan, who is suffering from cystic fibrosis and awaiting a lung transplant at a Pennsylvania hospital. … It’s a terribly tragic case, and it’s impossible to contemplate the Murnaghan family’s situation without wanting to move heaven and earth to help. But what Sebelius is being asked to do would be a gross abuse of her authority, and she is right to resist it. The attempt by some to paint her as the villain here, and to tie her unwillingness to bend the rules to the logic of Obamacare or otherwise use this situation to score political points, is ugly and absurd. … The members pressing this case are asking a politically appointed official to take directly upon herself the role of making life-or-death decisions in individual cases. In an unavoidably zero-sum system like organ transplantation – where one person’s receiving an organ means another does not – there is basically no avoiding some utilitarian calculus, and … moving the decision from a relatively objective system of allocation to the discretion of a cabinet secretary is a very bad idea.” –National Review’s Yuval Levin

For the Record

“If you can muster public pressure through social media, the press and politicians, your loved one can get an advantage over others waiting for a lung or kidney or liver. Photogenic patients or those with media-savvy or even politically well-connected relatives would go to the head of line. That is exactly what conservatives ought to fear. It may well be that the rules about eligibility for lung transplants need an overhaul. But the laws of economics dictate that when a commodity is scarce, there are two ways of allocating it – by price or by rationing. Organs are scarce. As Sebelius noted in response to a congressman demanding that she change the rules, 222 people are waiting for lung transplants in Sarah’s region alone, including six children aged 10 and younger. Nationally, about 1,700 people are waiting for lung transplants, including 31 children 10 and younger.” –columnist Mona Charen

Re: The Left

“Why the 1970s struggle to ban DDT? Alexander King, founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome, wrote in a 1990 biographical essay: ‘My own doubts came when DDT was introduced for civilian use. In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time the birth rate had doubled. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.’ Dr. Charles Wurster, former chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, was once asked whether he thought a ban on DDT would result in the use of more dangerous chemicals and more malaria cases in Sri Lanka. He replied: ‘Probably. So what? People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and (malaria) is as good a way as any.’ … In 1986, Lester Brown, who had been predicting global starvation for 40 years, received a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ award, along with a stipend. The foundation also gave Dr. Paul Ehrlich, who predicted millions of Americans would die of starvation, the ‘genius’ award in 1990. … Just think: Congress listens to people like these and formulates public policy on their dire predictions that we’re running out of something.” –economist Walter E. Williams

Culture

“[I]t is the First Amendment that continues to be in real peril – and once again, the U.S. military brass is among the worst offenders. At Fox News, Todd Starnes reports that a 25-year Army veteran – an unabashed conservative and Christian who has received service commendations and performs in the Army band – is being disciplined for such offenses as reading David Limbaugh’s The Great Destroyer, Mark Levin’s Ameritopia, and books by Sean Hannity…. I’m betting that reading Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope would not have been a problem. What’s disruptive to our Defense Department is not political opinion … it’s the wrong political opinion.” –National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy

Reader Comments

“Mark, I’m a scoutmaster who is more than upset by the whole gay scout thing. You absolutely nailed it in The ‘Gay Pride’ Merit Badge. One of the issues many leaders are now struggling with is whether to continue supporting an organization that they have strongly supported for many years and is likely part of their life, or abandon it because it has ignored their opinion and has turned from its original mission. One of the issues that the national leaders seem to have failed to consider is what tent do you put the gay scout in? This is not a flippant question. There is a reason young adolescent boys and girls do not share tents and showers. As I have learned in youth protection training, it is not just adults that molest, but youth do also. Young scouts are unlikely to report this as they are embarrassed. I’m not willing to take the responsibility for what may happen if my troop has to accept gay scouts. For now, my position is to refuse to comply and to encourage others to do likewise.” –John in Houston, Texas

“Regarding The ‘Gay Pride’ Merit Badge, I am appalled that one of the finest organizations the world has known has floundered into the depths of mediocrity over the desire for more money. It’s obvious that it’s no longer about the kids but about the ‘almighty’ dollar.” –Gary in Florence

“I must say that until recently I was proud to say that I was an Eagle Scout – not any longer. I am stopping my support and will not mention my previous affiliation with the BSA.” –DTJ in Surprise, Arizona

The Last Word

“So far, the IRS inspector general has uncovered about $50 million spent on lavish conferences for IRS officials who attended events in Anaheim, Calif., and elsewhere from 2010-2012. … The IRS junket scandal may be what’s getting attention this week, but it amounts to no more than a few crystals on the iceberg of government waste, fraud and abuse. Where is the outrage when government waste amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars is built into public policy? Grilling a few arrogant IRS officials makes for good theater, but where are elected officials … when it comes to the far bigger problem of wasting taxpayers’ money on unnecessary federal health care payments, or paying more for federal construction projects than needed in order to appease unions, or encouraging people not to accept jobs by extending unemployment benefits for up to 93 weeks? … We turn our money over to the government to dispense it as our elected officials decide and then trust that the funds will be wisely spent. … The bigger government gets the more it does, and the more of our money it spends the greater the likelihood we’ll see these scandals repeated. It’s all about spending other people’s money.” –columnist Linda Chavez

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