America in pain

The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us.

... But it isn't pessimism, really, it's a kind of tough knowingness, combined, in most cases, with a daily, personal commitment to keep plugging.

... When the adults of a great nation feel long-term pessimism, it only makes matters worse when those in authority take actions that reveal their detachment from the concerns — even from the essential nature — of their fellow citizens. And it makes those citizens feel powerless.

Inner pessimism and powerlessness: That is a dangerous combination.

-- Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal, 8/6/10

Change? Audacity? You got that right!

During his entire first term, Carter's record doesn't touch the Obama administration's record in its first year and a half. Obama has already tacitly OK'd the Iranian nuclear program and derided Israel's nuclear program. He has allowed Iranian protestors to be slaughtered in the streets without so much as a peep for days on end. Obama has allowed the Russians to sponsor an uprising in Kyrgyzstan that resulted in the removal of a U.S. airbase. He has lent legitimacy to an Islamist Turkish government and sold American debt to a communist Chinese government that supports North Korea. He has presided over the largest oil spill in world history in the Gulf of Mexico and spent his efforts blaming everyone but himself.

He's poised to raise our taxes at the end of the year. He's pushing for comprehensive "immigration reform" that will really act as an amnesty for illegal immigrants. He has denigrated Arizona before Mexico, bowed before the king of Saudi Arabia and the Chinese president and the Japanese emperor, hugged a Venezuelan quasi-dictator, and undermined a constitutional uprising in Honduras. He has pushed carbon taxes and gas taxes and estate taxes. He has propped up unfit mortgage borrowers and penalized those who pay their mortgage on time. He has bailed out his buddies in the banking industry and nationalized the auto and health industries for the benefit of his union friends.

He has insulted the Cambridge police and defended Muslim terrorists like Maj. Nidal Hassan. He has utilized advisers who are Marxists (former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones), anti-Semites (foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, special adviser Samantha Power, National Security Adviser Adm. James Jones), racists (Attorney General Eric Holder), sycophantic pro-Islamists (Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism John Brennan), kooks (Director of White House Office of Science and Technology John Holdren), perverts (Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings), and paid thugs (Rahm Emanuel).

When Obama took office, the national debt was just under $10 trillion. Now it is $12 trillion, and by 2015, it will be at least $19.6 trillion. Unemployment under Obama increased to 9.7 percent, up from 7.6 percent when Bush left office. The inflation rate has yet to explode, but most economists believe it will have to unless Obama drastically raises taxes, destroying the economy even further.

Carter can't touch this guy.

-- Ben Shapiro, townhall.com, 6/16/10

Shared sovereignty isn't sovereignty

Now, for Americans, sovereignty is not an abstract concept. ... We understand very well that under our constitution, sovereignty is vested in us, in America. It's not the government that's sovereign. It's the people who are sovereign. So when you hear people say, "Well, you know, problems today are really global in nature and therefore, you need global solutions and what we need to do is to share sovereignty or to pool sovereignty," what they are saying indirectly to Americans is, "You have too much control over your own government and you need to give some of it up to Germans and Chinese and South Africans and all the other members of the United Nations."

I think since most Americans think we don't have enough control over our own government, the last thing we want to do is give what we have up in whole or in part. And I think it's important, as you look at a range of issues that are being discussed, some in Congress, some in international organizations covering a huge diversity of subjects, from the idea of international fees and taxes for banks that would fund international regulatory activities to the Law of the Sea Treaty, which the administration is trying yet again to get through Congress that would fund an international authority from revenues, royalties of deep-sea mining, to any of a variety of other things, including issues like gun control, the death penalty, family issues, that the tendency to put more and more of these issues into international negotiations is a tendency that we should resist because it is ultimately destructive of our liberties. -- John Bolton, The First Post-American President and American Sovereignty, 5/18/10

ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzz

If you lose Massachusetts and that's not a wake-up call, there's no hope of waking up. -- Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN)

Dot-to-dot

Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Muammar Qaddafi and Vladimir Putin have all praised Barack Obama. When enemies of freedom and democracy praise your president, what are you to think? When you add to this Barack Obama's many previous years of associations and alliances with people who hate America-- Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Father Pfleger, etc.-- at what point do you stop denying the obvious and start to connect the dots? -- Thomas Sowell, 10/7/09

The right to pay for mistakes or not

In reality, what is called "the market" consists of human beings making their own choices at their own cost. What is called "social justice" is government imposition of the notions of third parties, who pay no price for being wrong. -- Thomas Sowell, 10/7/09

Laughless

The left does not understand humor. -- Don Wade

By any other name

Today's leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from Nazism. However, there's little or no distinction between Nazism and socialism. Even the word Nazi is short for National Socialist German Workers Party. The origins of the unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism did not begin in the '20s, '30s and '40s. Those horrors were simply the end result of long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for "social justice."It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans, like many of today's Americans, who would have cringed at the thought of genocide, who built the Trojan horse for Hitler to take over. -- Walter E. Williams, 10/7/09

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