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| Brief · July 25, 2011 The Foundation"Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm." --James Madison For the Record"Obama ... claimed to have a $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan. The court eunuchs of the press corps were impressed, and went off to file pieces hailing the president as 'the grown-up in the room.' There is, in fact, no plan. No plan at all. No plan whatsoever, either for a deficit reduction of $4 trillion or $4.73. As is the way in Washington, merely announcing that he had a plan absolved him of the need to have one. So the president's staff got out the extra-wide teleprompter and wrote a really large number on it, and simply by reading out the really large number the president was deemed to have produced a serious blueprint for trillions of dollars in savings. ... The only 'plan' Barack Obama has put on paper is his February budget. Were there trillions and trillions of savings in that? Er, no. It increased spending and doubled the federal debt. How about Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader? Has he got a plan? No. The Democratic Senate has shown no interest in producing a budget for two-and-a-half years. Unlike the president, Sen. Reid can't even be bothered pretending he's interested in spending reductions. But he is interested in spending, and, if that's your bag, boring things like budgets only get in the way. It seems reasonable to conclude from the planlessness and budgetlessness of the Obama/Reid Democrats that their only plan is to carry on spending without limit. Otherwise, someone somewhere would surely have written something down on a piece of paper by now. But no, apparently the Department of Writing Down Plans is the only federal expense the president is willing to cut." --columnist Mark Steyn Political Futures"[R]egardless of how things turn out with the [debt] negotiations, what we are witnessing is the rollout of the Obama re-election campaign's theme: Obama is the pragmatic voice of reason holding the ideologues at bay. So it's worth asking, before this branding campaign gels into the conventional wisdom: Who is the real ideologue here? The president, we are told, is a pragmatist for wanting a 'fair and balanced' budget deal. What that means is tax increases must accompany spending cuts. Any significant spending cuts would be way in the future. The tax increases would begin right after Obama is re-elected. ... Obama says that Republicans are rigid ideologues because they won't put 'everything on the table.' Specifically, they won't consider tax hikes. ... But Obama hasn't put everything on the table either. He's walled off 'ObamaCare' and the rest of his 'winning the future' agenda. ... Republicans won a historic election last November campaigning against spending, borrowing, tax hikes and ObamaCare. Yet Obama's position is that the Republicans are deranged dogmatists because they don't want to raise taxes or borrow more money to pay for spending they opposed. And Obama is flexible because he refuses to revisit a program that has never been popular." --columnist Jonah Goldberg Reader Comments"Mark, you are right on, as usual. In addition to the BBA, we need a Congressional Containment Amendment that would include term limits, no Congressional retirement plan, Congress obeying all laws that pertain to the public, etc. We need Statesmen (and women), not slick, career politicians." --Bill "I'm not at all sure I can support a Balanced Budget Amendment. Folks seem to assume that a constitutional amendment will limit the growth of government or some such idea because they can't just keep raising taxes to support increased spending. Many states have balanced budget amendments in their constitutions. California is one. Has the California State Government been limited in its growth? Has it been limited in its regulations or bureaucracy? The short answer is No. They just keep spending and raising taxes and fees. I can't see that the passage of a BBA will solve anything." --Pat "In response to Friday's sarcastic question about Democrats playing politics, of course the Dems would play games and allow our country to go bankrupt -- they've been working hard toward that very goal for decades. It's in THEIR interest for this country to fail, so they can step in and 'save us' by a government take over of every aspect of our lives. Welcome to the USSA!" --Dianne "It is incredible that the Democrats are putting their imagined political gain ahead of the welfare of the nation. Statements like 'worst piece of legislation,' 'the Republican Party has morphed into a cult' and the unending stream of lies from the White House through the Congress are a disgrace to the Democrats and to our nation." --P Gwynne The Gipper"[The Democratic Party leadership] tell us they have done the most that humanly could be done. They say that the United States has had its day in the sun; that our nation has passed its zenith. They expect you to tell your children that the American people no longer have the will to cope with their problems; that the future will be one of sacrifice and few opportunities. My fellow citizens, I utterly reject that view. The American people, the most generous on earth, who created the highest standard of living, are not going to accept the notion that we can only make a better world for others by moving backwards ourselves.... [T]he American people deserve better from those to whom they entrust our nation's highest offices, and we stand united in our resolve to do something about it." --Ronald Reagan Opinion in Brief"Americans, and their companies, have long benefited from their freedom to move throughout our country. In the 19th century, we moved in search of natural resources, exchanging the stony soil of New England for the rich soil of Iowa. In the 20th century, Americans were more likely to migrate in search of better political environments, like the blacks who fled the Jim Crow states of the South. The profound role that mobility has played in our country, enabling repeated reinvention, causes me to be deeply worried about the possibility that a National Labor Relations Board complaint will prevent Boeing Co. from moving plane production from Washington state to South Carolina. I am an economist, not a lawyer, and I have nothing to say about the legal issues surrounding the NLRB's complaint. I am sure the NLRB is doing what it understands to be its legal duty, preventing retaliation against union activity. Yet I also dearly hope that the judicial process will affirm the right of companies, and people, to freely choose their locations. The U.S. economy -- especially our challenged manufacturing sector -- needs more, not less, freedom to adapt and innovate." --Harvard economist Edward Glaeser Government"[G]overnment has been subsidizing higher education with low-interest college loans, Pell grants, and cheap tuitions at state colleges and universities. The predictable result is that higher education costs have risen much faster than inflation, much faster than personal incomes, much faster than the economy over the past 40 years. ... Politicians, including Barack Obama, still give lip service to the notion that everyone should go to college and can profit from it. And many college and university administrators may assume that the gravy train will go on forever. But that's what Las Vegas real estate developers and homebuilders thought in 2006. My sense is once again well intentioned public policy and greedy providers have produced a bubble that is about to burst." --political analyst Michael Barone The Right OpinionOur editorial team has evaluated and selected a roster of nationally syndicated columnists who write about subjects that are relevant to our mission -- the advancement of Liberty. While we don't agree with every position taken, we find these authors best reflect good Right Thinking. We post these essays -- without advertising or frills -- by 0800 ET each day. Want the best columnists on the Web? Visit The Right Opinion every day!
Essential Liberty"For five years now, various committees of the United Nations purport to have been drafting 'an internationally acceptable Arms Trade Treaty' that 'will make the world safer.' If the U.N.'s 'Open-Ended Working Group on an ATT' completes its 'work' on time, the treaty will be voted on next year. The Obama administration is on record supporting the measure, claiming, 'The United States is committed to actively pursuing a strong and robust treaty that contains the highest possible, legally binding standards for the international transfer of conventional weapons.' ... Freedom Alliance President Tom Kilgannon, who wrote the book on how the U.N. usurps U.S. sovereignty, 'Diplomatic Divorce,' says we shouldn't be surprised at the international forum's end run on the U.S. Constitution. 'The U.N. is a global-leftist organization that uses multilateral treaties like the ATT to enforce their will upon all humankind. It's the ultimate power play. To them, the U.S. Constitution and the sovereign rights of American citizens are irrelevant. If they have their way, they will create a vast new international bureaucracy to document, regulate, track, supervise, inspect and maintain surveillance over every firearm ever made. Such a regime ought to be completely unacceptable to every American.'" --columnist Oliver North Re: The Left"A global warmist named Heidi Cullen blooms this morning on the op-ed page of a New York newspaper to warn that if you think it's hot now, boy, just wait. The scientific proof is in the heat wave now baking big portions of America: 'Every 10 years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recalculates what it calls climate "normals," 30-year averages of temperature and precipitation for about 7,500 locations across the United States. The latest numbers, released earlier this month, show that the climate of the last 10 years was about 1.5 degrees warmer than the climate of the 1970s, and the warmest since the first decade of the last century. Temperatures were, on average, 0.5 degrees warmer from 1981 to 2010 than they were from 1971 to 2000, and the average annual temperatures for all of the lower 48 states have gone up.' Do 'climate scientists' measure global warming by looking at ten-year cycles? Maybe, but it makes you wonder about 'the first decade of the last century,' when I suppose it must have been really hot. Before things cooled down during that dust-bowl episode and those world-war events and all that napalm we used to warm the mornings of southeast Asia. We're still not back up to 1910 levels, apparently." --columnist Denis Boyles Culture"Black U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, says 'the minority community' blames racism for the Republican refusal to increase the debt limit without conditions. ... [S]he took to the House floor with the subtlety of a woodchipper: '(O)nly this president ... only this one, has received the kind of attacks and disagreements and inability to work, only this one. Read between the lines.' ... [Q]uestioning Obama's costly government takeover of health care, his failed $800 billion 'stimulus' plan and the over $4 trillion in new debt equals racism. Lee says she speaks on behalf of the 'minority community.' Would this be the minority community with 16.2 percent black unemployment, up from 12.6 percent in the two-and-a-half years of the Obama administration? In what category does Lee place black House members like Allen West, R-Fla., and Tim Scott, R-S.C., who also oppose Obama's agenda? Are they anti-black black racists -- or black anti-black racists? ... It isn't the color of [Obama's] skin -- it is the complete and total rejection of his policies." --columnist Larry Elder  The Last Word"We have often heard that the devil is in the details. But these days, I'm afraid he's in the Oval Office. Who else would have run on the promise to radically transform America? Who else would have thought that America, of all places, required a radical transformation? If a normal human being were asked which countries could use an overhaul, he wouldn't be thinking of the United States. Would he mention Russia and Venezuela? No doubt. Would he have China, Yemen and North Korea, on the short list? Absolutely. How about Saudi Arabia, Syria, Cuba and Iran? Indubitably. On the other hand, it's actually the one promise Obama has kept. But, who else but he and Satan would even suggest that a nation created by such giants as Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison and Adams, had to wait 232 years for a leftwing community organizer to fix what wasn't broken? And when this arrogant pipsqueak chastises the Republicans in Congress for doing nothing about the debt crisis when they're the ones who presented and voted for Paul Ryan's budget plan months ago while this schmuck has been off golfing and fund-raising, does he really believe we take his words seriously? Great men, it's said, speak truth to power; Obama speaks power to truth." --columnist Burt Prelutsky Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis! Patriot News Review
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