Terms for presidential terms

Let's concede for the moment that President George W. Bush's presidency was a disaster. After all, he left us with a $1 trillion deficit, 6.7 percent unemployment rate and an expanded federal government (creation of the Department of Homeland Security was the biggie).

Now we have a president who has virtually doubled the national deficit, unemployment has increased to 9.8 percent and he's looking to add 53 new bureaucracies with his health-care plan (which has an $829 billion price tag).

What word should we choose to describe President Barack Obama's presidency after only nine months?

-- Frank C. Overfelt, letter to Deseret News, 10/10/09

Congressman Mike Rogers on Health Care reform

This has gone way beyond fixing an obvious problem. It is about unprecedented intrusion into our lives and governmental coercion. The damage and pain inflicted by this and other initiatives of this government will continue with our children and their children. Keep praying for common sense to prevail among our elected representatives!

When asked to sacrifice

It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. -- Ayn Rand

Pour more fool on the fire!

All the problems with the American health care system come from government intervention, so naturally the Democrats' idea for fixing it is more government intervention. This is like trying to sober up by having another drink. -- Ann Coulter

Hockey Mayor - Hockey Mom -- same diff

88 years old and mayor for 11 consecutive elections! This gal inspires! Is anyone writing her biography?

Daniel Hannan MEP - Bold, plain talk

[This is a politician I can respect. Find more like this. -- KJK]

Communism Deadens

The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or in literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government. -- Milton Friedman

[Currently living most of the time in the former East German city of Dresden, I see solid confirmation every day of the fact that communism destroyed rather than enhanced the greatness of this place. -- kjk]

And much of it is pork

Politics are not the high class, marvelous thing that lots of you picture. Our whole government workings are crammed with 'baloney. -- Will Rogers

The Frugal Machiavellian

Never waste a good crisis ... Don't waste it when it can have a very positive impact on climate change and energy security. -- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

Obama of Sherwood Forest

If I say to 10 co-workers, 'We all need to chip in together to get this done,' and then say, 'So, Todd, open your wallet and give five bucks to everyone else in the room,' it would sound ridiculous. But when Obama says the same thing to 300 million Americans it's called 'leadership.' -- Jonah Goldberg

Don't Forget the Big Stick

But foreign policy is not about winning popularity contests. And woe to thepresident who imagines he needn't inspire fear among the wicked even as he embraces the adulation of the good. -- Bret Stephens, wsj.com, 2/10/09

Inebriation of Power

Barely two months into his Presidency, Obama is wreaking havoc, crippling the nation, oblivious to consequences and monumentally arrogant, believing the timbre of his voice and the manipulation of the media will win public confidence until the socialist utopia he believes in comes to fruition. Who knows how bad it will be in a year, let alone four? -- Lance Fairchok

Obama, Rush, and bipartisanship

Evidently Obama the Whiner can’t work his socialistic voodoo if Rush Limbaugh keeps free thinking and running his mouth off. D***it, Rush, you’re ruining Obama’s ability to cast his spell! . . .

Socialists like Obama . . . cannot work in an environment in which leaders and citizens do not do-si-do when he says so. Geez, the press corps can’t even toss him a question during a meet and greet without Barack getting testy. Therefore, Limbaugh, and all dissenters like him, must bow and kiss the ring or suffer vilification and marginalization for not being “bipartisan and tolerant.”

I would rather bikini wax a sensitive and livid grizzly sow than be a “tolerant bipartisan” toward the bloated government, pro-death, anti-free market, crap on traditional values, socialism squared, nanny state policies Obama has floated in the last few days. -- Doug Giles, Townhall.com, 2/3/09

Toward a well-known economic model

Note that President Obama doesn't even pay lip service to making his interventionist plans ["stimulus" bill] short-lived. . . . This is an effort to restructure our economy radically toward the type of command and control model that has accompanied tyrannical regimes throughout history. -- David Limbaugh, Townhall.com, 2/3/09

Random well-put thoughts

What we have on display is both the gargantuan ignorance of the celebrity illiterati as well as their boundless vanity. -- William B. Smith, responding to "Hollywood Celebrates Che Guevara"

Try it on Congress for two years before turning it on the public. -- Bill Druckemiller (on Obama's health care proposal)
[I LIKE it!]

If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher; as a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide. -- Abraham Lincoln, 1837

If you believe the left is tolerant, open-minded and democratic, you're in for a rude awakening. -- David Limbaugh

Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views. -- William F. Buckley Jr.

Ignoring the cowboy, we ride into the sunset

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free. -- Ronald Reagan

Harvest time approaches

From the fifth grade through the fourth year of college, our young people are being indoctrinated with a Marxist philosophy, and I am fearful of the harvest. -- Ezra Taft Benson, 1967

Gorbachev tore down but a wall only

Those who hope that we shall move away from the socialist path will be greatly disappointed. Every part of our program of perestroika is fully based on the principle of more socialism. -- Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and theWorld?1988 Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931) Secretary General Communist Party

None dare call it conspiracy

Today the path to total dictatorship in the United States can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by the Congress, the President, or the people. Outwardly, we have a Constitutional government. We have something within our government ... representing another form of government which believes our Constitution is outmoded and is sure that it is the winning side... All the strange developments in foreign policy agreements may be traced to this group who are going to make us over to suit their pleasure. -- Speech on the Senate floor, February 23, 1954 William E. Jenner (1908-1985) U.S. Senator, Indiana (R)

Painless descent into Socialism

The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism, but under the name of'liberalism,' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program until one day America will be a Socialist nation without knowing it happened. -- Campaign speech, 1948 Norman M. Thomas (1884-1968) U.S. Socialist Party Leader

A too-familiar 5-step program to slavery

From Weishaupt through Babeuf, Marx, and Lenin, the revolutionists pushed the five abolitions, namely of monarchy and all other ordered government, of national patriotism, of property and inheritance, of all religion, and of marriage and the family. -- World Revolution, the Plot Against Civilization, 1921 Nesta H. Webster (1876-1960) Historian and Author

Methodical subjugation

Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematical plan of reducing us to slavery. -- The Works of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 1, p.130

Simply Marxism 101

For the last seven years we have had the highest corporate profit ever in American history. ... But it hasn't been shared, and that's theproblem, because we have been guided by a Republican administration who believes in the simplistic notion that people who have wealth are entitled to keep it. They have an antipathy toward the means of redistributing wealth. And they may be able to sustain that for a while, but it doesn't work in the long run. --Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA)

Obama vs Economics 101

[B]y 'redistributing wealth,' as Obama wants the government to do, he's actually reducing overall wealth in the economy by taking away capital from those who can invest it efficiently in direct job creation. And the real irony is that if Obama ... succeeds in raising taxes on the top 5 percent, he's likely to collect less tax, not more, if history is a guide. -- Linda Chavez

Bush tried but was defied

[T]he Bush administration warned in the budget it issued in April 2001 that Fannie and Freddie were too large and overleveraged. Their failure "could cause strong repercussions in financial markets, affecting federally insured entities andeconomic activity" well beyond housing.

Mr. Bush wanted to limit systemic risk by raising the GSEs' [i.e."government-sponsored enterprises" like Fannie and Freddie] capital requirements, compelling preapproval of new activities, and limiting the size of their portfolios. ... Mr. Bush wanted the GSEs to be treated just like their private-sector competitors.

But the GSEs fought back [ with a massive $170,000,000 lobbying campaign!]. They didn't want to see the Bush reforms enacted, because that would level the playing field for their competitors. Congress finally did pass the Bush reforms, but in 2008, after Fannie and Freddie collapsed. ...

The housing meltdown is largely a story of greed and irresponsibility made possible by government privilege. If Democrats had granted the Bush administration the regulatory powers it sought, the housing crisis wouldn't be nearly as severe and the economy as a whole would be better off. -- Karl Rove, Wall Street Journal, 1/7/09

Ezra Taft Benson and Conspiracy Facts

After serving eight years in the Eisenhauer administration, Ezra Taft Benson knew first-hand what was going on and heard from Kruschev himself what the man's intentions really were. Read the full text of this speech, given at Brigham Young University in 1966) here: http://www.latterdayconservative.com/ezra-taft-benson/our-immediate-responsibility.html