The Foundation

“Remember, that Time is Money.” –Benjamin Franklin

Editorial Exegesis

“As travelers nationwide are learning, the White House has decided to express its dislike of the sequester – otherwise known as modestly smaller government – by choosing to cut basic air traffic control services. … Start with the Federal Aviation Administration, better known as the Postal Service without the modern technology. Flyers directly fund two-thirds of the FAA’s budget through 17 airline taxes and fees – about 20% of the cost of a $300 domestic ticket, up from 7% in the 1970s. Yet now the White House wants to make this agency that can’t deliver what passengers are supposedly paying for even more dysfunctional. Ponder this logic, if that’s the right word: The sequester cuts about $637 million from the FAA, which is less than 4% of its $15.9 billion 2012 budget, and it limits the agency to what it spent in 2010. The White House decided to translate this 4% cut that it has the legal discretion to avoid into a 10% cut for air traffic controllers. Though controllers will be furloughed for one of every 10 working days, four of every 10 flights won’t arrive on time. The FAA projects the delays will rob one out of every three travelers of up to four hours of their lives waiting at the major hubs. Congress passed a law in 2009 that makes such delays illegal, at least if they are the responsibility of an airline. Under President Obama’s ‘passenger bill of rights,’ the carriers are fined millions of dollars per plane that sits on the tarmac for more than three hours. … This is a political pose to make the sequester more disruptive. … It is actively creating even more delays, cancellations and missed connections in order to incite a public outcry on behalf of bigger government. … For all of its rough edges, the sequester is proving to be educational. It is showing Americans how broken so much of government is, and it is revealing how our politicians refuse to distinguish between essential services and needless waste.” –The Wall Street Journal

Insight

“We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.” –economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006)

“It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.” –British statesman Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

Upright

“The Boston Herald has broken the story … that ‘Tamerlan Tsarnaev was living on taxpayer-funded state welfare benefits even as he was delving deep into the world of radical anti-American Islamism.’ A responsible national establishment press would treat this as an important story, because, as the Herald’s Chris Cassidy noted in the understatement of the day, it ‘raises questions over whether Tsarnaev financed his radicalization on taxpayer money.’ … It’s pretty obvious that the family’s dependence should be a national story at AP, the New York Times, and on the broadcast and cable TV networks, as it also raises the question of how many others might be living on taxpayer money while plotting to do us harm. Will it be? Don’t hold your breath.” –Newsbusters’ Tom Blumer

“Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the oldest of the two Boston bomber suspects, is now the fifth suspected terrorist to be questioned by the FBI before they attempted their acts of terror. … Yet we not only persist with political correctness, we now go so far as to actually arm our enemies. The Obama administration persists in giving F-16s and advanced tanks to Egypt, even after the Muslim Brotherhood … took power. The United States just pledged $500 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority, a government that is even now unifying with Hamas, one of the world’s worst terror organizations. While we revise stylebooks and debate the power of movies and music over the power of jihad, our enemies laugh – and plan future attacks. Political correctness kills.” –Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice

“‘They failed because the people of Boston refused to be intimidated,’ the president said referring to the brothers Tsarnaev. ‘They failed because, as Americans, we refused to be terrorized.’ That statement in and of itself is curious. First, the people of Boston were terrorized, even if it was a short-lived emotion. Furthermore, if three people killed and more than 170 wounded, several of whom have had limbs completely blown off, is considered a ‘failure,’ one can only imagine what this president considers a ‘success.’ … [T]here is no chance that the Obama administration is willing to admit something that would completely shatter the carefully crafted illusion under which they continue to operate: just like every other part of the world, the United States of America is also the ‘field of battle’ – in the war against Islamic terror.” –columnist Arnold Ahlert

“According to Dana Priest and William M. Arkin of The Washington Post, ‘Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. … An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.’ … Despite a domestic army of federal, state and local forces, the suspects managed to evade capture for days…. Osama bin Laden’s announced intention was to conduct a ‘war of a thousand cuts’ against America to harm our economy and permanently change our way of life. If he can see from Hell, he must be pleased about the way things are going.” –columnist Cal Thomas

Demo-gogues

Gun grabbers don’t quit: “[T]his [gun control] effort is not over. I want to make it clear to the American people we can still bring about meaningful changes that reduce gun violence, so long as the American people don’t give up on it. Even without Congress, my administration will keep doing everything it can to protect more of our communities. … And if this Congress refuses to listen to the American people and pass common-sense gun legislation, then the real impact is going to have to come from the voters.” –Barack Obama

Throwing stones in glass houses: “Before I get to the [immigration] bill, I’d like to ask that all of us not jump to conclusions regarding the events in Boston, or try to conflate those events with this legislation.” –Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY)

“In this age of instant reporting and tweets and blogs, there’s a temptation to latch on to any bit of information, sometimes to jump to conclusions.” –Barack Obama

Dump the Constitution: “The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry. But we live in a complex word where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.” –New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg


Hot air: “One gets the sense that this is more reflective of the, quote, unquote, new normal, if you will. So much of society is changing so rapidly, we talk about a new normal when it comes to climate change and adjusting to a change in the weather patterns. New normal when it comes to public security in a post-9/11 world where these random acts of violence, which at one time were implausible, now seem all too frequent.” –New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo

Dezinformatsia

This Week’s ‘Non Compos Mentis’ Award: “Being in Watertown right now, the streets are empty. It’s erie. It’s as though a bomb had dropped somewhere.” –CNN’s star reporter Susan Candiotti on the scene during the man-hunt for the Boston bomber

Alpha Jackass: “The NRA’s efforts to guarantee that American mass murderers are the best-equipped mass murders in the world is not limited to murderers who use assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. The NRA is also in the business of helping bombers get away with their crimes.” –MSNBC’s Lawrence O'Donnell

Now that he was proven wrong, he doesn’t care: “I mean, what difference does it make why they did it if they did it?” –MSNBC’s Chris Matthews

Denial: “The Boston event, obviously a serious tragedy. But, I don’t know whether it’s going to go down in the history books. The question – it is not necessarily that big an event. … And what we know about the Boston case now it seems … that this was not organized, that this is not some ideology.” –The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward

“[G]iven that they’re Chechen, given that they are literally Caucasian, our very sense of connection to them is this framed-up notion of, like, Islam making them into something that is non-normal.” –MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry

“I don’t want to politicize an act of terrorism, but it’s, it is worth remarking upon … in that within a week’s time a very, very, very weak gun control bill gets defeated, in effect defeated in the Senate, we see yet another act which might have been a hell of a lot more difficult to pull off with effective gun control. Not for nothing.” –The New Yorker’s David Remnick

Non Sequitur of the Week: “We need to redouble our efforts to make America stronger and healthier so it remains a vibrant counterexample to whatever bigoted ideology may have gripped these young men. … We need a more ‘radical center’ – one much more willing to suggest radically new ideas to raise revenues, not the split-the-difference-between-the-same-old-options center. And the best place to start is with a carbon tax.” –The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman

Newspulper Headlines:

We Blame George W. Bush: “Boston Bombings: Don’t Blame Boxing” –Los Angeles Times

Questions Nobody Is Asking: “The Boston Bombers Were Muslim: So?” –TheAtlantic.com

Bottom Story of the Day: “NBC Nightly News Ignores Boston Bombers Ties To Islam” –NewsBusters.org

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

Village Idiots

Coexist? “Look, it’s not like people who are Muslim who do wacky things have a monopoly on it. We have hypocrites across faiths, Jewish, Christian who say they’re out for God and end up doing not so nice things.” –Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism (Even anti-Christian lefty Bill Maher called this what it is: BS.)

Blame America: “The American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.” – Richard Falk, the UN’s “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.” Faulk is also a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, who called the police action in Boston a “hysterical dragnet,” and said that Boston’s dead were “canaries” that “have to die” because of America’s “fantasy of global domination.”

Fretting over terrorists: “[T]he mortuary pictures of the older brother of the two are extremely disturbing, raising questions as to whether the Boston Police Department captured him with too much force. … While terrorism is about causing fear … we do have to account for our conduct in these extreme times when adrenaline is running high.” –City University of New York Professor Ruth O'Brien

From the guy who signed DOMA: “I was forced to confront the fact that people who oppose equal rights for gays in the marriage sphere are basically acting out of concerns for their own identity not out of respect for anyone else.” –Bill Clinton accepting a GLAAD award

Definitions: “If we are going in this room to say a baby is born alive because it moves one time without any other movement, that is ludicrous.” –Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s defense attorney Jack McMahon

Blaming the “Republican Sequester”: “We made it clear that there would be these kinds of negative effects [flight delays] if Congress failed to take reasonable action to avert the sequester. The fact is Congress had an opportunity, but Republicans made a choice, and this is a result of a choice they made to embrace sequester, as – and I’m quoting Republicans – a victory for the Tea Party and a home run.” –White House Press Secretary Jay Carney

Short Cuts

“A new Gallup poll shows that 55% of Americans say their income taxes are ‘fair.’ I’m guessing that’d be the 47% who pay none, plus a few Obama cabinet appointees.” –Fred Thompson

“President Obama paid taxes on six hundred grand in income. He made eight hundred grand last year and a million-seven the year before. While other politicians just talk about economic decline under President Obama, President Obama leads by example.” –comedian Argus Hamilton

“So, I guess you have to have a license to have a gun in Massachusetts, but the two loser brothers who did the Boston Marathon bombing did not have a license for the guns they used on their shootout with cops. They were running around shooting at people with guns that Massachusetts very clearly said was illegal for them to have. It’s like, come on, guys we’re a nation of laws; if you’re going to be murderous criminals, at least legally posses your guns first, you know. What’s wrong with you?” –humorist Frank J. Fleming

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