THE FOUNDATION

“Without religion, I believe that learning does real mischief to the morals and principles of mankind.” –Benjamin Rush

INSIGHT

“A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands – even for beneficial purposes – will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished.” –John Stuart Mill

ICTUS IMPRIMIS

“The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the dower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.” –Albert Einstein

FAMILY

“As parents, we’ve become increasingly aware that protecting our children from an X-rated world is all but impossible. This was made perfectly clear after Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling overturning a ban on ‘virtual’ child pornography because it would suppress images of ‘legitimate political expression’ in addition to those that harm children. It’s a curious irony, however, that the same Court who takes pains to protect children from the ‘adverse effects’ of prayer and religion in schools wasn’t compelled to protect them from pornography and sexual predators. Under the guise of ‘artistry’ and ‘academia’ America has excused countless immoral pursuits….” –Ken Connor

CULTURE

“If there is one article of faith that stands above all others in the creed of the new American establishment, it is that of ‘Tolerance.’ It is the universal and paramount virtue, so embraced by the institutions of politics, the corporate world, the info-entertainment industry and the academy as to be unchallengeable. We are all tolerant now; IBM is tolerant; the Republican Party is tolerant. We are so tolerant that, increasingly, we cannot tolerate any views that challenge our tolerance.” –Michael Kelly

LIBERTY

“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight on the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. … Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will say, ‘This was their finest hour’.” –Winston Churchill

THE GIPPER

“We’ve been blessed with the opportunity to stand for something – for liberty and freedom and fairness. And these are things worth fighting for, worth devoting our lives to.” –Ronald Reagan

OPINION IN BRIEF

“Experts and the educated elite have…replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It’s high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.” –Walter Willaims

EDITORIAL EXEGESIS

“Even the few defenders of the administration’s Mideast zigzag admit that it looks like an incoherent response to each day’s events. And it’s not just abroad that the Bush administration appears to be adrift. …He has signed a campaign-finance bill that he once (accurately) described as an affront to the Constitution. He has lost a confirmation battle over one of his judicial nominees, Charles Pickering, after engaging in the battle too late. His first initiative this year was an expansion of AmeriCorps. …It would not be surprising if Democratic versions of a prescription-drug bill and a patient’s bill of rights passed this year. The president looks prepared to acquiesce in a bill on faith-based charities that fails to protect their freedom to hire in accordance with their consciences, a point on which the administration had previously insisted. Part of the problem is that Bush is being reactive. His recent missteps have been reactions to campaigns by the media, domestic interest groups, the Arabs, and others. To arrest the drift, he needs to take control of his agenda. He also needs to be willing to issue vetoes. President Bush’s father, by this point in his term, had already compiled a string of impressive vetoes. Eventually he even vetoed a campaign-finance bill he thought unconstitutional. But George W. Bush, though more conservative than his father, has vetoed nothing, and it is reducing his leverage on Capitol Hill. Last year, he was able to score a tactical victory on a patient’s bill of rights by threatening a veto – over the opposition of some of his top advisers. This year, he will have to veto a bill, not just threaten a veto, to be credible. …But if he continues to drift, and especially if the war on terrorism appears to be stalled, conservatives may not turn out to vote in the midterm elections in the numbers Bush needs. And he will not make the mark on policy that he wants and deserves to make.” –National Review

WORTH REPEATING

Testimony of Darrell Scott (father of Columbine High School victim Rachel Scott) before the House Judiciary Committee, May 27,1999. (This past weekend was the third anniversary of that tragic day.)

“Since the dawn of creation there has been both good and evil in the heart of men and of women. We all contain the seeds of kindness or the seeds of violence. The death of my wonderful daughter Rachel Joy Scott, and the deaths of that heroic teacher and the other children who died must not be in vain. Their blood cries out for answers. The first recorded act of violence was when Cain slew his brother Abel out in the field. The villain was not the club he used. … The true killer was Cain and the reason for the murder could only be found in Cain’s heart.

"In the days that followed the Columbine tragedy, I was amazed at how quickly fingers began to be pointed at groups such as the NRA. I am not a member of the NRA. I am not a hunter. I do not even own a gun. I am not here to represent or defend the NRA – because I don’t believe that they are responsible for my daughter’s death. Therefore I do not believe that they need to be defended. If I believed they had anything to do with Rachel’s murder, I would be their strongest opponent.

"I am here today to declare that Columbine was not just a tragedy – it was a spiritual event that should be forcing us to look at where the real blame lies! Much of that blame lies here in this room. Much of that blame lies behind the pointing fingers of the accusers themselves….

"Men and women are three part beings. We all consist of body, soul, and spirit. When we refuse to acknowledge a third part of our makeup, we create a void that allows evil, prejudice, and hatred to rush in and wreak havoc. Spiritual influences were present within our educational systems for most of our nation’s history. Many of our major colleges began as theological seminaries. This is a historic fact. What has happened to us as a nation? We have refused to honor God and in doing so, we open the doors to hatred and violence.

"And when something as terrible as Columbine’s tragedy occurs – politicians immediately look for a scapegoat such as the NRA. They immediately seek to pass more restrictive laws that continue to erode away our personal and private liberties. We do not need more restrictive laws. Eric and Dylan would not have been stopped by metal detectors. No amount of gun laws can stop someone who spends months planning this type of massacre. The real villain lies within our OWN hearts. Political posturing and restrictive legislation are not the answers. The young people of our nation hold the key. There is a spiritual awakening taking place that will not be squelched! We do not need more religion. We do not need more gaudy television evangelists spewing out verbal religious garbage. We do not need more million dollar church buildings built while people with basic needs are being ignored.

"We do need a change of heart and an humble acknowledgment that this nation was founded on the principle of simple trust in God. As my son Craig lay under that table in the school library and saw his two friends murdered before his very eyes, he did not hesitate to pray in school. I defy any law or politician to deny him that right! I challenge every young person in America and around the world to realize that on April 20, 1999 at Columbine High School prayer was brought back to our schools. Do not let the many prayers offered by those students be in vain. … My daughter’s death will not be in vain. The young people of this country will not allow that to happen.”

GOVERNMENT

“When Congress first convened in 1789, members received $6 a day for their trouble. Just a scant 15 years ago, the salary of a United States Congressman was $77,400 while today that salary has risen to $141,300. So where once public service was an avocation, today it is a career and a lucrative one at that. Name another job that features the ability to self-appoint raises at will.” –C.T. Rossi

RE: THE LEFT

“The name Charles Pickering should not be allowed to fade away in our memories. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s 10-9 partisan defeat of President Bush’s nomination of this fine judge contains lasting lessons for Republicans, conservatives, and all those who want to stop judicial activism and limit the imperial judiciary to its constitutional role. What happened to Pickering will happen again, and again, and again, unless the Bush administration and Senate Republicans realize that the Democrats play hardball to win, and they will win unless Republicans engage them in battle. Bipartisanship is a dead-end road for Republicans…. The fact is that liberals do their homework in their determination to keep conservatives out of public office. …The liberals spend money, hire investigators, go over the appointee’s background with a fine tooth comb, dig up all the old skeletons in the closet, examine every statement he made in his life, and make the best case they possibly can to prevent a conservative from being appointed, or confirmed, or elected….” –Phyllis Schlafly

POLITICAL FUTURES

“Lately, the Palestinians have compared their struggle with the U.S. in 1776. But in what way are the two comparable? Only insofar as they both were/are asymmetrical wars. But in moral terms, they are radically different. The goals of the infant country in 1776 were never to eliminate Britain or to slaughter the wives and children of British soldiers. The Founding Fathers structured the political regime to be self-governing, answerable to its citizens, and predicated on the idea of finding a way to go from bullets to ballots in political succession. No such self-restraint, or check and balance against corruption, is in evidence by the current Palestinian leadership or its terrorists.” –Mark T. Clark

FOR THE RECORD

“Throughout most of American history, taxes were levied principally on consumption, rather than income. Except during the Civil War, the federal government was financed almost entirely by import duties and excise taxes until 1913, when our current income tax was imposed. The Founding Fathers favored consumption taxes in part because they are harder to raise to confiscatory levels than incomes taxes. …Experience shows that general sales tax rates much above 10 percent are very hard to collect. They encourage smuggling, black markets, evasion, production for personal use, substitution for untaxed commodities and other activities that erode the tax base. Thus, confining taxation to a form that is inherently hard to raise to excessive levels meant that the size of government would be severely limited.” –Bruce Bartlett

SELECT READER COMMENTS

“Monday was Patriots Day in Massachusetts. (The real day is April 19, but the great unwashed want a three-day weekend.) It was also income tax day. Instead of reenacting the events at Lexington and Concord, it would have been much more fitting to throw a couple of IRS agents into Boston Harbor. The citizens of Massachusetts are now stuck with the likes of Kennedy, who would be right at home with Gov. Gage. Samuel & John Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, etc., must be turning over in their graves.”

“I enclose a miniscule part of the Internal Revenue Code which I to read periodically to keep my contempt fresh. Contemplate for a moment the minds that could draft this language…. ‘For purposes of paragraph (3), an organization described in paragraph (2) shall be deemed to include an organization described in section 501©(4), (5) or (6) which would be described in paragraph (2) if it were an organization described in section 501©(3).’ –Internal Revenue Code 26 U.S.C. § 509(a).”

“I just checked my copy of the Constitution, I can find no mention of suicide, drugs or doctors. The Tenth Amendment is clear, the power to regulate suicide, drugs and doctors is a power of the individual sovereign states.”
Editor’s Reply: We disagree with your assertion that the Constitution provides the several states latitude to authorize an individual to contract with others for the termination of his or her own death. (Leave aside the question of an individual’s right to terminate their own life for this discussion.) We do not believe that the Tenth Amendment assigns power to the states to revoke or reassign the inalienable right to life, which we believe remains vested in perpetuity with individual citizens as persons. The Constitution is subordinate to the Founding Document of our country, the Declaration of Independence, which makes plain the right to life is an inalienable right borne in perpetuity and irrevocably by individual persons, and that the Ninth Amendment and the final clause of the Tenth Amendment touch on this right indirectly.

“The Ant and the Grasshopper (Modern Version): How could the author have neglected the part where Jesse Jackson shows up with some cameras to protest the wealth of the ants and their oppression of the grasshopper, then leaves his Mafia behind to extort money from local ant businesses? What about the subsequent attempts by the NAACP to shut down tourism to the local ant farm by harassing visitors at the rest stops and ant capital? P.S. The second question supposes that these are South Carolina ants.”

“I am an Army intelligence officer. I have traveled all over the world and virtually everywhere I went prior to last September one of the proudest things about America I always saw in foreign countries were that they had their soldiers in their streets, in their airports, and at their public buildings. As a soldier, I was proud that the people for whom I served very rarely saw me in a uniform with a weapon (unless they lived right near a base). Today, we have our soldiers in airports and apparently so many places in New York that they are now being portrayed on ‘Law & Order’ as background fodder on the city’s court steps. I am pained to see that America has lost its innocence and such a large degree of freedom. Alas, I think it is not lost necessarily from the attacks on Sept. 11th, but rather lost by our politicians who again hyper-react and have taken us closer to what is quickly becoming a police state. Police on our corners and in our airports do not make us a police state, federal troops – even the best intentioned ones – do.”

THE LAST WORD

“Fifty million Frenchmen can be wrong, and never more so than when they’re teamed with EU mouthpiece Chris Patten, UN human rights poseur Mary Robinson, the European Parliament (which has demanded sanctions against Israel), the German government (which has announced an arms embargo against Israel), the brand new International Criminal Court (which – in its very first 24 hours! – started mulling the question of ‘Israeli war crimes’), the Norwegian Parliament (which had a visitor thrown out of the building for wearing a provocative Star of David on his lapel), never mind the members of Calgary’s ‘Palestinian community’ who marched through the streets carrying placards emblazoned ‘Death To The Jews,’ a timeless slogan but not hitherto a burning issue on the prairies.” –Mark Steyn