The Raven
Since Oct 3, 1998

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...the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.
- Milton Friedman on the Phil Donahue show

"...What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven"
-F.A. Hayek - The Road to Serfdom

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.
-James Madison in Federalist paper #45

Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of our century. It was a dream offering the prospect of a society of perfect unity, in which all human aspirations would be fulfilled and all values reconciled. . . Almost all the prophecies of Marx and his followers have already proved to be false, but this does not disturb the spiritual certainty of the faithful, any more than it did in the case of chiliastic sects: for it is a certainty not based on any empirical premises or supposed historical laws, but simply on the psychological need for certainty. In this sense, Marxism performs the function of a religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character.
-Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism.

On every question of construction carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.
-Thomas Jefferson, 1823

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so
-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

America is the only country ever founded on an idea. The only country that is not founded on race or even common history. It's founded on an idea and the idea is liberty. That is probably the rarest phenomena in the political history of the world; this has never happened before. And not only has it happened, but it's worked. We are the most flourishing, the most powerful, most influential country on Earth with this system, invented by the greatest political geniuses probably in human history
-Charles Krauthammer

For Mr. Sanders' followers, the realities of 20th-century socialism have apparently been lost down the memory hole. What remains is the delusion, long embraced by theorists, that socialism is a morally superior system of governance, which fosters equality and compassion by transferring wealth from the rich to the poor Robin Hood government. The reality has been tested by many millions, and found to be detestable. Government ownership destroys production.
-George Melloan

The society that puts equality before freedom will get little of either. The society that puts freedom before equality will get a great measure of both
-Milton Friedman

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
-Calvin Coolidge on Independence Day

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
-Thomas Sowell

What we are facing is the onset of nihilism in the United States. The three most important points are that nihilists are almost entirely drawn from the educated, even upper classes. They are extremely idealistic, seeing themselves as agents of the purest charity. They are violent in the most extreme ways. . . Nihilist movements typically have led to political regimes of the most oppressive and reactionary qualities. . .I know there is an authoritarian Left in this country, and I fear it.
-Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 1969

More Quoths

On Socialism, Big Government, Multiculturalism, Globalists, Politicians, Modern Liberalism, Woke Warriors, etc, etc

Everything is policed except crime.
- Mark Steyn on modern Britain.

There’s a lesson for informants (and politicians) everywhere in the Alexander Smirnov story: If you are going to lie to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, make sure it’s a lie the FBI wants to hear.
-Kimberley A. Strassel, Sifting the FBI’s Garbage , Wall St. Journal, Feb 23, 2024.

When accused of having a flawed memory, Mr. Biden shifts into high dudgeon. How, he demands, could someone with an enfeebled memory have accomplished all the historically significant improvements his administration has made? Let pass that recent polls show large majorities of Americans think otherwise, both about his mind and about his accomplishments.
But, then, who knows? In his befogged mental condition, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. may be absolutely convinced that he has been among American history’s great presidents.
- Joseph Epstein, Biden’s Memory Problems, and Mine, Wall St. Journal OpEd, Feb 14, 2024.

There are many signs and portents that signal the guttering of the rule of law and its replacement: rule by law. It is an autumnal sign—a sign of civilization at the end of its tether.
-Roger Kimball, American Greatness, February 4, 2024.

This abomination of a bill legalizes the invasion of 2 million illegals every year, pays for their lawyers, and gives Ukraine another $60 billion.
Your government hates you and wants to replace you, but until that happens, it’s going to steal every last dime from you it can.
-Sean Davis Xeet on proposed Senate Bill on immigration. Feb 4, 2024.

There’s a new strategy in town: If American voters don’t like what you are offering, import better voters.
- Michael Lind, Our Open Border Policy Is Not an Accident, Tablet, Jan 2024.

Never embrace the ideals of socialism. Never allow yourselves to be seduced by the siren song of social justice. . . At the same time, we have to raise awareness among the business sector, that the masses are necessary—Milton Friedman used to say that the social role of an entrepreneur is to make money. But that’s not enough. Part of their investment must include investing in those who defend the ideals of freedom, so socialists can make no further advances. And if they don’t do it, they [the socialists] will get into the State, and use the State to impose a long term agenda that will destroy everything it touches. So we need a commitment from all of those who create wealth, to fight against socialism, to fight against statism, and to understand that if they fail to do so, the socialists will keep coming.
Argentina’s President Javier Milei, Tucker Carlson interview (hat tip S. Hayward)

Correction: Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source. Trump did not tell the investigator to “find the fraud” or say she would be “a national hero” if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find “dishonesty” there. He also told her that she had “the most important job in the country right now.” A story about the recording can be found here. The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump.
Washington Post, Mar 11, 2021.

Following are comments after the Colorado Supreme Court held, in a Per Curiam opinion, with three justices dissenting, that Donald Trump is an “insurrectionist” who is barred by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment from running for the presidency.

This country is a powder keg and this court is just throwing matches at it. This is hands down the most anti-democratic opinions I’ve seen in my lifetime.
- Law Professor Jonathan Turley

Never before have we confronted a situation when one political party, that controls a particular state or its highest court, has tried to prevent a candidate of the opposing party from running for president. One cannot overstate what a watershed moment this is. The Democratic Party has staked a claim to permanent control of our federal government, regardless of the will of the American people. This has never happened before in our nation’s history.
-John Hinderaker, Powerlineblog.com

REMINDER – President Donald Trump was not charged with “insurrection,” is not accused of “insurrection,” does not fit the complaint under the definitions of “insurrection,” and has never been found guilty of insurrection.
- Sundance, Conservative Tree House.

Seeing what happened in Colorado makes me think — except we believe in democracy in Texas — maybe we should take Joe Biden off the ballot in Texas for allowing 8 million people to cross the border since he’s been president, disrupting our state far more than anything anyone else has done in recent history.
- Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

Media Matters is an evil propaganda machine… we will pursue, not just that organisation, but anyone funding that organisation…Media Matters can go to hell, and I hope they do.
-Elon Musk, Dec. 2023.

What makes the Harvard / Penn presidents claiming their schools' deep, unshakable commitment to free expression even more hilariously pathetic: they are literally the bottom 2 in FIRE's campus free speech ratings of 248 universities
- David Burge Xeet after the two presidents skated around allowing pro-genocide/pro-Palestinian speech.

Our ruling class mostly believes Israel is an “apartheid state” committing “genocide” — it’s not, and it’s not — capitalism produces poverty (rather the reverse, actually), “Western colonialism” is responsible for the ills of the Third World (nope) and whether one is male or female is purely a matter of social construction (also nope).
It thinks the only way to defeat racism is by being racist and the way to end urban violence is to disarm people in the suburbs.
-Prof. Glenn Reynolds, Disinformation starts at the top — with America’s elites, NY Post, Dec 2023.

You know, a good example would be like the summer of 2020. We lit the country on fire, looted a lot of stores and canceled Aunt Jemima in the name of some type of racial progress. But what do we ultimately have to show for that? The streets aren't safe, the schools aren't better.
-Jimmy Failla, author of Cancel Culture Dictionary: An A to Z Guide to Winning the War On Fun."

America faces a formidable range of calamities: crime out of control, borders in chaos by design, children poorly educated while sexualized and politicized against parental opposition, unconstitutional censorship, a press that does government PR rather than oversight, our institutions and corporations debased in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”—and more. To these has been added an outbreak of virulent antisemitism.
Every one of these degradations can be traced wholly or in large part to a single source: the corruption of higher education by radical political activists.
-John Ellis, OpEd in the WSJ, Dec 5, 2023.

Corporate media have gotten every single major story of the last decade wrong, in big and little ways. Whether it’s the 2016 election, the Russia-collusion scam, the threats posed by Covid and response to the same, the effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s life and family, accurate discussion of the Biden family business, immigration, abortion, crime, racism, guns, hate crime hoaxes, the economy, inflation, education, the relationship between the sexes, the radical trans agenda, or a thousand other stories, the media haven’t just been bad. They have been absolutely irredeemably awful.
- Molly Hemingway, The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi Shows Why ‘Professional’ Journalism Can’t Be Salvaged, The Federalist, Nov 23, 2023.

It’s not me they’re after—it’s you. I’m just in the way
- Donald Trump.

Everything about the case in New York City against the Trump organization business operations is ridiculous. There are no victims. There was no fraud. All of the lenders did their own due diligence. All of the loans were paid back without issue and the statement of financial condition was factual and accurate.
Additionally, the statute being used as the predicate for the case is a consumer fraud statute, intended to protect borrowers from predatory lenders. In the four corners of this case, Trump was the borrower, and the banks were the lenders. New York is flipping the statute to claim the borrower defrauded the lenders, despite the lenders denying there was any fraud and there was no harm. The entire case is ridiculous.
- Sundance, Nov. 3, 2023.

...it was stolen by a massive amount of election fraud
- Amazon Alexa when asked about fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Wash. Post, Oct 2023.

Babylon Bee Headline:
CNN Blames Fog Of War For Errant Reporting On Gaza Bombing, Russian Collusion, Jussie Smollett, Covington Catholic, Hunter’s Laptop, The Steele Dossier, Kyle Rittenhouse, Origins Of Covid, Trump calling Charlottesville neo-nazis "fine people," COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness, Bubba Wallace garage noose, Trump telling people to inject themselves with bleach, BLM riots being "mostly peaceful," Border Patrol agents whipping migrants, Trump commandeering his own limo, Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot, Jan 6 "insurrection," Duke University lacrosse team rape allegations, critical race theory not being taught in public schools, the weather, the Los Angeles Dodgers having any chance of winning the World Series, how much money Michael Bloomberg could give every American, the effectiveness of wearing masks, "two weeks to flatten the curve," Joe Rogan and Ivermectin, Bidenflation, Jeffrey Epstein, no irregularities in the 2020 election, right-wing extremists planning to attack all 50 state capitals, Don Lemon being described as a journalist, RT hacking C-SPAN, Dewey defeating Truman, the McRib being made from actual meat, only 10 years left to stop climate change, Trump will start World War III, Joe Biden had no involvement in Hunter's international business dealings, Trump encouraged his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol, Hillary Clinton had a 91% chance of winning the 2016 election, Rings of Power was a critically acclaimed show, and claiming to be "Most Trusted Name in News."

The Biden administration, with help from blue states, has effectively rewritten–or, more accurately, repealed–the nation’s immigration laws. They had no legal power to do this. Congress never voted to abolish our immigration laws, nor would it. The acceptance of illegal immigration is opposed by an overwhelming majority of Americans, but we never had a chance to vote on it.
This is perhaps the clearest indication of the fact that the cabal that controls America has zero regard for democracy, for democratic processes, or for the views of most Americans.
- John Hinderaker, Powerline, Oct 2023.

Rather than a moral panic, we should consider it a dysfunctional part of how Americans battle for power, status, and dominance. Cancel culture is just one symptom of a much larger problem: the use of cheap rhetorical tactics to “win” arguments without actually winning arguments. After all, why bother refuting your opponents when you can just take away their platform or career?
- Intro to the book The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All―But There Is a Solution by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott.

You should assume that everyone claiming to be a ‘disinformation expert’ is a fraud and censorship advocate.
- Glenn Greenwald commenting on the fraudulent "disinformation industry."

If Donald Trump were president, the vaccine would never have been mandatory. If Donald Trump were president, Putin would not have invaded Donbas. If Donald Trump were president, inflation would be 1.4%. If Donald Trump were president, Iran would not be funding Palestine’s suicidal assault on Israel.
- Don Surber, Oct 11, 2023.

Trump cut off funds to the Palestinians, unleashed unprecedented peace initiatives in the Abraham Accords, killed the Iran deal, was starving the Iranian regime of resources with crushing sanctions, and Biden not only reversed it all, including funding the Palestinians and Iran, but undermined Netanyahu at every turn, refused to meet with him, demanded that Israel make more concessions to the Palestinians. Appeasement and worse has consequences.
-Mark Levin, Oct 8, 2023.

Black families survived slavery. We survived poll taxes and literacy tests. We survived discrimination being woven into the laws of our country. What was hard to survive was [President Lyndon] Johnson’s Great Society, where they decided to put money—where they decided to take the black father out of the household to get a check in the mail.
And you can now measure that in unemployment, in crime, in devastation. If you want to restore hope, you’ve got to restore the family, restore capitalism and put Americans back at work together as one American family.
- - Sen. Tim Scott, Second GOP presidential debate, Sept, 2023.

Immigration is akin to the vast unchecked influxes of the late Roman Empire across the Danube and Rhine that helped to finish off a millennium-old civilization that had lost all confidence in its culture and thus had no need for borders.
In other words, the revolution is not so much political as anarchist. Nothing escapes it—not ceiling fans, not natural gas cooktops, not parents at school board meetings, not Christian bakeries, not champion female swimmers, not dutiful policemen, not hard-working oil drillers, not privates and corporals in the armed forces, not teens applying on their merits to college, not anyone, anywhere, anytime.
-Victoer David Hanson, What the Left Did to Our Country, Am. Greatness, Sept, 2023.

The Democrats and the media run a constant clown show, but the Republicans play along as useless puppets, willfully participating in a system designed to destroy them. The Republican party is allowing itself to be rigged by playing by the rules of an old system that no longer exists. The Democrats, bureaucracy, and media are vicious apparatchiks. They are a dirty and obvious enemy who clearly need to be fought. The Republicans are worse because they don’t see their own participation in the Big Lie. They would rather step over Trump’s dead political body than save the republic. In so doing, they will never have power again, even if they regain it. They will be vassals of the state apparatus, nothing more … or else.
-MELISSA MACKENZIE, An Inconvenient Trump: Republicans Are Living an Enormous Lie, Am. Spectator, August 25, 2023.

What’s happening is they have trashed every ethical rule that exists and they have created a state police. It is a Biden state prosecutor and a Biden state police.
- Rudy Giuliani, after it was revealed that the White House counsel’s office met with a top aide to Special Counsel Jack Smith just weeks before he brought charges against former President Trump, Aug, 2023.

In what has now become emblematic of the moral and societal implosion of the United States of America at the hands of the radical Leftists running the Establishment, former President and front-running presidential candidate Donald J. Trump has turned himself in and been arraigned at the Fulton County jail in Atlanta.
In a fairer time, drastic measures such as politicized hate impeachments, raiding former presidents’ private residences, and abusing governmental powers to maliciously prosecute one’s front-running political opponents were frowned upon. Sadly, today’s far-left Democrats are so militant and radical that no norm is too venerable for them to wipe their backsides with.
- Athena Thorne, PJ Media, Aug, 2023.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the man who cleaned up New York City, removed the crime syndicate from power and held the prayerful hands of our nation during 9/11/01, is brought before a corrupt judicial system in Fulton County, Georgia, treated like a common criminal and targeted because of his politics.
This is shameful beyond words.
- Blogger Sundance, Aug, 2023

Democrats Say It’ll Take A Lot More Than Eyewitness Testimony, Bank Records, Audio, Video, Complete Confessions For Them To Believe Biden Did Anything Wrong
- Headline - Babylon Bee, Aug 11, 2023.

When the truth collides with a legend, print the legend.
-Bryant Gumbel replying to news revealing Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s adultery. [1989]

The Department of Justice should be honest and call itself Biden Campaign Headquarters. As a fearsome whiff of East Germany wafts through its windows, this cabinet agency persecutes Donald J. Trump, the president's chief political rival, and keeps the heat off of the Bidens. Special Counsel Jack Smith's four-count indictment ... aims to jail Trump for using First Amendment-protected free speech to challenge the validity of the 2020 election. Never mind that Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Chuck Schumer, and countless other Democrats challenged the validity of the 2016 election. They called Trump illegitimate and, for three years, screamed the knowingly false claim that he won only with Vladimir Putin's help.
- Deroy Murdock, Jewish World Review, Aug, 2023.

Because she was a liar. She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.
-Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, when asked why he fired Hillary Clinton from her job as a staff attorney for the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate investigations.

Thanks to the Twitter files, we know that multiple divisions of the state security apparatus pressured social media companies to suppress or completely lie about critical information like the Hunter Biden laptop story in order to manipulate the outcome of the 2020 election. Time magazine even had the unimaginable hubris to print a victory lap article about the secret shadowy cabal that saved the 2020 election. We do not need to speculate about burst water pipes and magical ballot drops at 3 a.m.; progressive elites have been more than happy to brag about how they subverted the mechanics of the election through mail-in voting, media manipulation, and the direct interference of federal agencies.
Americans may be subjected to endless propaganda about how a corrupt dementia patient won the most votes ever in the most free and fair election in the nation’s history, but the average person is not buying it. An election so free and so fair that anyone who questions it is censored. An election so free and so fair that those who protest it are indefinitely detained. An election so free and so fair that the political opposition must be federally charged and face years in prison.
The last bits of regime legitimacy are being shredded by those who can no longer be bothered to maintain the clown show that has stood in for the rule of law. Our elites are playing recklessly with the most fundamental myths of the nation: the rituals that grant their power validity in the first place. And once those spiritual ties between the rulers and the ruled are broken, things can get ugly fast.
-AURON MACINTYRE.Trump’s indictment threatens to shatter our founding myths,Blaze Media, Aug 3, 2023

Congress did not create the Supreme Court—the Constitution did. No provision in the Constitution gives [Congress] the authority to regulate the Supreme Court—period.
- Justice Alito on Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s Supreme Court Ethics, Recusal and Transparency Act, which purports to impose on the justices and their clerks regulations “at least as rigorous as the House and Senate disclosure rules.”

Given the s— show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibly distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content to ascribing it to natural processes.
-Andrew Rambaut of Edinburgh University giving an excuse to his co-conspirators on why they should cover up the Wuhan lab leak (from WSJ's OpEd The Covid Lab-Leak Deception, By Matt Ridley and Alina Chan July 27, 2023.

At approximately 1:30 p.m., we received word that our filing was removed from the docket. We promptly contacted the Clerk’s office, and we were advised that someone contacted the Court representing that they worked with my office and that they were asking the Court to remove this from the docket
- House Ways and Means Committee’s top lawyer, Theodore Kittila on Hunter Biden attorney Jessica Bengels identifying herself as working for Kittila so she could delete their court filing.

The Left has weaponized the Justice Department to go after its political enemies for eight years under Obama and now under Joe Biden. We need to have the same stomach to do the same. Small government ethos regarding these matters were nice dinner table conversations until federal agents under Democratic attorneys general started raiding private homes. It’s time to take the gloves off, and if people have a problem with a president enhancing powers to get rid of annoying, lefty officials who can’t understand their side lost in an election, as we saw in 2016, then that’s their problem. I’m willing to take this plan out for a spin to see if we can’t bring some accountability to the intelligence community. The other side isn’t playing by the rules, and equal protection under the law isn’t guaranteed when Democrats are in charge.
-Matt Vespa, Townhall, July, 2023.

I think it is ridiculous how much money they pumped in for the Capitol Police. This was not an insurrection. These were people that were there to attend a rally and protest. It devolved into a riot, but the idea that this was a plan to somehow overthrow the government of the United States is not true and it is something the media has spun up to try to get mileage out of it and use it for partisan and political aims. I know there were a lot of people there who were just there, and they didn't have any designs on doing anything.
We just have to be honest about it. If somebody is honestly doing an insurrection against the U.S. government, then prove that is the case and I'll be happy to accept it. But all you're showing me is there were a lot of protesters there and it ended up devolving in ways that were unfortunate of course, but to say they were seditionists is just wrong.
-Gov. Ron DeSantis in an interview with Russell Brand, July 2023.

Every time I think I should educate myself on the details of new charges against Trump, I remind myself it isn't about the facts or the law. It is election rigging. No details needed.
-Scott Adams Tweet, July 2023.

Beyond its falsity, there is no current idea so destructive as the fiction that America is systemically racist. It harms black Americans by shrinking their horizons and stoking their resentment; it has fueled crime and disorder in our cities; and by replacing our national faith in the unique excellence of our self-governing republic with a sense of its pervasive injustice and oppression, it makes us more vulnerable in a dangerous world.
-Myron Magnet, The Antiracist Racket, Claremont Review of Books,July, 2023.

The Left engineers disruption after disruption to longstanding social practices, each more sweeping than the last. And as soon as those changes are in place, they become the norm, treated as having existed from time immemorial. Questioning that new default is painted as churlish and radical. The Left never has to meet a burden of proof to implement its changes; the burden falls exclusively on conservatives seeking to restore a once-uncontroversial tradition. Though conservatives are portrayed as the aggressors, in reality they are always on the defensive, fighting a rearguard action.
- Heather Mac Donald, A Battle for Cultural Survival, City Journal, July 2023.

But the fact that you allowed that [Clinesmith] plea to occur. Right, and then the punishment was insufficient. The fact that you didn’t, you didn’t charge Andrew McCabe, you didn’t convict lying Democrats or the lying Russians. You didn’t investigate Mifsud or the Mueller probe, even though as we sit here today and black letter, that was your charge.
- Matt Gaetz questioning Durham during a House Judiciary Committee hearing and accusing the Trump-era prosecutor of being part of the “cover-up.

A 2012 study of 253 people incarcerated for gun crimes found that about 40 percent were previously prohibited from having them. Those participants only occasionally got their guns from stores or pawn shops, and none reported using gun shows. Most were obtained from friends, family and dealers on the street — and were usually purchased or borrowed instead of stolen.
-Bangor Daily News

What happened in China is they went 8 to 10 hours south of Wuhan, 2 to 300 feet deep into a cave, found viruses and took them back to a city of 15 million
-Sen. Rand Paul on the dangers of viral research labs in China.

Let us not forget we are a land of opportunity, not a land of oppression. Democrats deny our progress to protect their power. The left wants you to believe faith in America is a fraud and progress in our nation is a myth.
The truth of MY life disproves the lies of the radical left. We live in a country where little Black and brown boys and girls can be president of the United States. The truth is – we’ve had one and the good news is – we will have another.
- Sen. Tim Scott responding to Obama's divisive identity campaign.

President Trump declassified documents that show how the institutions within the U.S. government targeted him. However, the institutions that illegally targeted President Trump are the same institutions who control the specific evidence of their unlawful targeting.
The risk to the fabric of the U.S. government is why we see lawyers and pundits so confused as they try to figure out the disproportionate response from the DOJ and FBI, toward “simple records”, held by President Trump in Mar-a-Lago. Very few people can comprehend what has been done since January 2009, and the current state of corruption as it now exists amid all of the agencies and institutions of government.
President Donald Trump declassified the material then took the evidence to Mar-a-Lago. The people currently in charge of managing the corrupt system, like Merrick Garland, Lisa Monaco, Chris Wray and the Senate allies, are going bananas. From their DC perspective, Donald Trump is an existential threat.
Given the nature of their opposition, and the underlying motives for their conduct, there is almost nothing they will not do to protect themselves. However, if you peel away all the layers of lies, manipulations and corruption, what you find at the heart of their conduct is fear. The need for control is a reaction to fear.
- Blogger Sundance, June, 2023.

That is a dangerous, offensive, disgusting message to send to our young people today that the only way to succeed is by being the exception.
- Presidential candidate Sen Tim Scott on The View when asked to define systemic racism.

The current catchwords diversity, compassion, empowerment, entitlement—express the wistful hope that deep divisions in American society can be bridged by goodwill and sanitized speech. We are called on to recognize that all minorities are entitled to respect not by virtue of their achievements but by virtue of their sufferings in the past. Compassionate attention, we are told, will somehow raise their opinion of themselves; banning racial epithets and other forms of hateful speech will do wonders for their morale. In our preoccupation with words, we have lost sight of the tough realities that cannot be softened simply by flattering people’s self-image. What does it profit the residents of the South Bronx to enforce speech codes at elite universities?”
Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, 1994

Republican Donald Trump and others on his team got smeared in a vicious probe while Democrat Hillary Clinton and her team got free passes on several issues that potentially involved criminal conduct.
That’s the bottom line and everything else is detail.
- NY Post's Michael Goodwin's short summary of the Durham report, May, 2023

Once a ballot enters a machine and is counted, it’s all over. It may have been cast illegally by a non-citizen, a felon, someone who already voted in a different state or precinct, and so on. But that ballot can never be identified and pulled out after the fact. Election integrity can be assured only before the fact, not after the election. Which is why Democrats bitterly oppose every measure intended to ensure election integrity.
- John Hinderaker, Powerline, May, 2023.

The Russia collusion hoax, propagated by the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the FBI, the CIA and others, is first on the disinformation list. The false claim that documentary evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption was Russian disinformation is also on the list. As is the campaign of disinformation that surrounded the origins of the covid virus and the purported benefits of shutdowns of businesses, churches and schools. And one day before long, climate hysteria will be recognized as the biggest disinformation campaign of the last century. But the journalists who promoted these massively destructive instances of disinformation didn’t have to worry about being shot or arrested. They were given Pulitzer Prizes .
-John Hinderaker, Powerline, Apr 2023.

Progressivism consists in presenting Communist arguments as though they emanated spontaneously from independent speculation.
- French liberal Raymond Aron, writing in 1950:

Any parent or doctor who sterilizes a child before they are a consenting adult should go to prison for life
-Elon Musk, Apr, 2023 Tweet.

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.
- US humorist Will Rogers

Alvin Bragg alleges that Donald Trump defrauded voters into electing him president on November 8, 2016.
Alvin Bragg also alleges that the first crime Donald Trump committed occurred on February 14, 2017.
Are you seeing the problem here?
- Andrew McCarthy, April 5, 2023

The moment offers a reminder of what was lost when Republican Lee Zeldin came up short in his spirited race against Gov. Hochul. Recall that Zeldin vowed to fire Bragg on Day One on the grounds that the prosecutor was refusing to do his job of enforcing the criminal codes.
- Michael Goodwin, NY Post on the Trump indictment. Apr 2, 2023.

The difficulty with many career officials in government is that they regard themselves as the men who really make policy and run the government. They look upon the elected officials as just temporary occupants. Every President in our history has been faced with this problem: how to prevent career men from circumventing presidential policy….Some Presidents have handled this situation by setting up what amounted to a little State Department of their own. President Roosevelt did this and carried on direct communications with Churchill and Stalin.
- Pres. Harry Truman.

The truth of the matter is that If Mister Rogers ran as an unapologetic conservative today, he’d be treated with the same level of disdain as Trump. That’s a point that cannot be emphasized often enough. Anyone who thinks that these types of attacks will go away once Trump does is delusional.
The left has now perfected its plans and strategies for multi-year, wide-ranging, never-ending attacks on the political opposition. It won’t ever stop until it is made to stop.
-Issues & Insights Editorial, Trump Isn’t A Special Case, He’s A Test Case, April 2, 2023.

"This is communist-level s***. This is stuff that would make Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, it would make them blush. It's so flagrant, it's so crazed."
- Don Jr.

The Democrats have launched a sort of blitzkrieg against our traditions, our Constitution, our culture, and every form of restraint that makes civil society possible. They have unleashed a wind, and seem serenely confident that they will never face a whirlwind. I don’t know, maybe they are right. I do know that after today, our country will never be the same again.
But I do know that today is an evil day in America’s history. The Democrats are behaving like a party from a pre-Enlightenment, pre-constitutional era. Seeing themselves in the driver’s seat, they are making a naked grab for totalitarian power across a broad range of issues and institutions. Indicting a former president on frivolous grounds is shocking, but it is of a piece with the strategies Democrats are following in Washington and across the country.
- John Hinderaker, Powerline Mar 31, 2023.

A Trump indictment would be a disgusting abuse of power. The DA should be put in jail.
- Sen. Rand Paul Tweet reacting to DA Alvin Bragg's pursuing Trump.

... LGBTQ activists looking to discredit the reality of two biological sexes are pushing utter nonsense -- there are two sexes, and that’s all there is to it
- Atheist and Darwinian biologist Richard Dawkins during a recent interview with British journalist Piers Morgan, Mar, 2023.

We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA. For every government agency scanning Twitter, there were perhaps 20 quasi-private entities doing the same, including Stanford’s Election Integrity Project, Newsguard, the Global Disinformation Index, and others, many taxpayer-funded.
- Journalist Matt Taibbi’s Statement to Congress, Mar 2023.

The press has published one conspiracy theory after another about this noisy protest for two years. My favorite wacky theory was Newsweek’s claim that “when security declined to bring Trump to the Capitol, the former president allegedly grabbed at the steering wheel of the vehicle transporting him.”
That is a physical impossibility because the vehicle is designed in a way the president could not get in the front seat — unless he could push through five inches of armor like Superman, in which case he would simply fly to the Capitol.
- Don Surber on the Jan 6 protest, Mar. 2023.

We can call these people incompetent, they are. But does incompetency matter? No. Because they’re here to serve the party. … And if they’re incompetent, that’s even better.” It makes them easier to control.
-Candice Owens on Biden, Fetterman, and the Democrats, March 2023.

The left’s answer to the problem of “malaise” is today’s malice of identity politics and an open hatred of the white working class.
Powerline's Prof. Haywood commenting on Peggy Noonan's Op Ed on Jimmy Carter's "Malaise Speech"

As bad as so much of the Trump Era reporting was, what took place with the Hunter Biden laptop story and the New York Post censorship at the end of his presidency was perhaps the most egregious and obvious example of the elite censorship collusion racket between tech companies, government forces and the national media that we’ve ever seen.
- Steve Krakauer, Media censorship of Hunter Biden laptop story was horrible and then it got even worse, Op Ed on Foxnews.com

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity.
- Angelo Codevilla, America’s Ruling Class, The American Spectator, July 2010.

Our ruling class is particularly vulnerable to mind "viruses" for several reasons. First, it is a monoculture, so that what is persuasive to one member is likely to be persuasive to many. Second, it suffers from deep and widespread status anxiety – not least because most of its members have status, but few real accomplishments to rely on – and thus requires constant reassurance in the form of peer acceptance, reassurance that is generally achieved by repeating whatever the popular people are saying already. And third, it has few real deeply held values, which might otherwise provide guard rails of a sort against believing crazy things.
- Glenn Reynolds on the ruling class, Instapundit sub stack, Feb, 2023

When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.
- G.K. Chestertons

Mankind isn’t capable of reducing emissions enough to keep temperatures from rising unacceptably.
-- Nathan Myhrvold, advocating geoengineering techniques to counter global warming.

I think every kid, in every zip code, in every state should have access to every education opportunity possible.
- Pres. Biden unknowingly advocating school choice.

Rihanna gave, without question, the single worst Halftime Show in Super Bowl history — This after insulting far more than half of our Nation, which is already in serious DECLINE, with her foul and insulting language. Also, so much for her “Stylist!”
- Donlad Trump after the 2023 Super Bowl.

Unlike Gerth, I don’t attribute much of this to journalists’ incompetence or getting too far out over their skis because the bogus Trump-Russia tale was too good to check. If I were a journalist by training or for life, maybe I’d want to see it that way.
Instead, I believe these are mostly very smart people who are essentially political activists, and they knew exactly what they were doing.
-Andrew McCarthy commenting to Powerline on the investigative reporter Jeff Gerth's coverage of the award-winning journalism supporting the Russia hoax. Feb, 2023

A 2021 Pew poll showed Republicans who have “some trust in national news organizations” halved since 2016, from 70% to 35%. Among all adults, that number dropped from 76% to 58%.
That’s not a coincidence: 2016 was when these outlets gave up on trying to be remotely fair — something they’d rarely achieved in the first place — and began to openly discuss how to “handle” Trump. They settled on “Everything is a Russian-disinformation plot” and pretended an enemy country controlled the president. When that was all found to be a lie, they simply moved on.
Unable to run that playbook on DeSantis, they’re trying a new tack. He’s an authoritarian!
-Karol Markowicz, NY Post, Feb 2023

Our instincts have been honed by decades of this kind of three-card monty from progressives and their media allies. Reason clearly is not among either group, which is one reason it’s so valuable — even for non-libertarians.
- Editors of the website HotAir on the left's new obsession with banning natural gas cooking.

There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that incites men to want all to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the small to the rank of the great; but one also encounters a depraved taste for equality in the human heart that brings the weak to want to draw the strong to their level and that reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.
- Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Well, that makes one of us
-Response to President Biden's Tweet that he had "never been more optimistic" about serving another two years in the White House.

There is only one thing we can do in this country to stop climate change and that is to make scientific and technological breakthroughs that will create the clean energy that is not only clean but also cheap. The only thing wokeness has to offer in exchange is to brainwash bright young minds like you to believe that you are victims, to believe that you have no agency, to believe that what you must do to improve the world is to complain, is to protest, is to throw soup on paintings.
-British comedian and podcaster Konstantin Kisin

... social trends have coalesced into a new pro-immigration orthodoxy that makes solving our immigration crisis near impossible. These include the need of some corporations for cheap labor, the need of Democrats for cheap votes, the need of the media for new narratives of American bigotry, and increasingly dominant victimhood and diversity narratives.
- Casey Chalk on a John O’Sullivan piece in 2007, ‘The American Conservative’ Tried To Warn Us, The Federalist, Jan 2023.

When the government declares war on poverty, everyone wants to be poor. Individuals driven to their interest dependencies try to find shelter in their weakness, both as individuals too weak to receive the equal treatment their government is handing out to everyone but themselves and as groups too weak to reform the system.
-Harvey Mansfield, writing in 1986 (in America’s Constitutional Soul) about the ill-effects of official government and ideological sanction for dependency. [hat tip - Powerline]

The current Democratic Party and NeverTrump “conservatives” assumed that Trump was and remains so obviously toxic that they do not have to define exactly what his evil entails.
Accordingly, they believe that any means necessary are justified to stop him. And furthermore, these zealots, when out of power, insist such extraordinary measures should not be emulated and institutionalized by their opponents, much less ever boomeranged back upon their creators.
-Victor David Hanson on the "ends justify the means" of the left, Jewish World Review, Jan 12, 2023

How could this possibly happen? How anyone could be that irresponsible?
-Joe Biden on the classified documents in Trump's Mar-a-Largo residence - before very sensitive classified documents turned up at Biden's private office in Washington.

Assuming Jim Jordan and Thomas Massive have some grasp of the scale and scope of the opposition they are about to face; and assuming they have a fully prepared staff to support them – willing to take on the most consequential investigation in our lifetimes; then we begin by first defining who will oppose any effort to investigate the “weaponization of government“. Which is to say everyone!
The entire apparatus of the DC political system will do everything in their power, individually and with collective assistance, to ensure this committee fails. The stakes are basically for all the marbles. DC politics is a system of compartmentalized silos. A collection of weaponized institutions that view their common enemy as the American people not within them.
-Blogger Sundance, on the “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.”

When the history books are written, we will not look wise or kind for insisting that kids and toddlers wear masks for hours on end, year after year, without ever testing this policy with controlled trials. We will look ignorant, cruel, fearful, and cowardly. We might even look worse than our primitive ancestors who, when faced with great plagues, engaged in all sorts of bizarre, superstitious behavior—but which rarely included making kids suffer most.
- V. Prasad on the insanity of kids wearing masks, The Cult of Masked Schoolchildren, Tablet, Dec 27, 2022.

Breaths were held as “soon” they swore. Pearls were clutched as ticks were tocked. ‘Any moment now’, the masses began to shout. Busses and trains stopped. Swarms of people rushed home to watch television. Flights were being cancelled as the moment drew near. The economy came to a halt as thrills were pronounced to be running up legs.
The world’s most investigated human in all humanity was on the cusp of the abyss. The moment had finally arrived. The culmination of years of baited anticipation. This was THE moment; this was THEIR moment….
Boxes were spotted passing through the halls of congress. “That’s them,” people muttered clamoring for a glimpse. MSNBC finally, after years of anticipation, triggered the countdown clock – as a visibly climaxing Rachel Maddow could no longer contain the spontaneous ecstasy.
And then…
Nothing.
-Blogger Sundance on the Democrat's OCD with Trump's tax returns. Dec 2022

Never has Washington contemplated such a monstrosity. If a satirist set out to describe a once-admirable institution in decline, its members cheerfully passing off their laziness, secrecy, cowardliness and graft as “success,” it’d be hard to compete with this week’s Senate show. The omnibus is everything that is broken in D.C., dumped in one steaming pile.
-WSJ's Kimberley A. Strassel on the $1.8 trillion-plus omnibus the Senate passed. Dec 23, 2022.

There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism – by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.
— Ayn Rand

“Hitler didn’t snub me, my president did!”
-Jesse Owens after being excluded from an FDR invite of the athletes who competed for the U.S. to the White House.

So inspiring to see the newfound love of freedom of speech by the press
- Elon Musk after the left's hypocritical criticism of his silencing lefties DOXing him.

There is no doubt that free and open immigration is the right policy in a libertarian state, but in a welfare state it is a different story: the supply of immigrants will become infinite.
--You can have free immigration to jobs but you can't have free immigration to welfare.
- Milton Friedman

Our Country is SICK inside, very much like a person dying of Cancer. The Crooked FBI, the so-called Department of ‘Justice,’ and ‘Intelligence,’ all parts of the Democrat Party and System, is the Cancer. These Weaponized Thugs and Tyrants must be dealt with, or our once great and beautiful Country will die!!!
-Donald Trump Truth Social post, Dec 2022.

The liberal media had “destabilized US democracy” more than Russia ever could, by feeding left-leaning Americans a constant, false narrative that their president was a sleeper agent. ... it should disturb you that political opponents and bureaucrats who hated him could so easily weaponize the press to undermine the government from within.
This Pulitzer Prize makes a mockery of the idea that journalism speaks truth to power, as it shows how the press was manipulated by the powerful.
-NY Post editorial asking the Pulitzer Prize board to rescind the award (on the fake news of Russian collusion) to the NY Times and Wash Post, Feb 2020.

... it was always an exaggeration that there was no proof of fraud. But even if that was true, it misses an important point: most of the procedural changes prior to recent elections ensured that many of the means for proving fraud were deliberately erased. The absence of reliable chain-of-custody records; sending mail-in ballots to every registered voter; allowing third-party ballot harvesting; setting up unsupervised locations for collecting ballots; allowing mail-in ballots with no signatures; closing off the ballot-counting process from public view—all of these measures have allowed forms of manipulation that would be very hard to exhaustively prove.
- Adam Ellwanger, The Conservative Case for Compulsory Voting, The American Mind, Dec, 2022.

Our ruling class is an ideological monoculture, credentialed in the same schools, imbibing the same attitudes and catchphrases and concerned more than anything else with remaining in good standing with its peers
-Glenn Reynolds, NY Post, Dec 2022.

It’s all pretty weird. Could it be that while the rest of us imagined that Twitter was a social media site … could it be that Twitter was actually, maybe primarily, a propaganda tool and intelligence gathering apparatus for a variety of intel agencies?
~ Tucker Carlson, Dec 2022.

In a functioning republic he’d be in jail, except that in a functioning republic, he’d never have held the jobs he’s held.
And I’m getting very tired of the “have you no decency?” routine coming from people who have made very clear that they possess no decency whatsoever.
-Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds on former CIA head, John Brennan, Dec, 2022.

It is possible that the Trump phenomenon cannot be understood merely by trying to make sense of Trump himself. Rather, it is the seriousness of the need for Trump that must be understood in order to make sense of his candidacy. Those most likely to be receptive of Trump are those who believe America is in the midst of a great crisis in terms of its economy, its chaotic civil society, its political corruption, and its inability to defend any kind of tradition—or a way of life derived from any kind of tradition—because of the transformation of its culture by the intellectual elites. This sweeping cultural transformation occurred almost completely outside the political process of mobilizing public opinion and political majorities. The American people themselves did not participate or consent to the wholesale undermining of their way of life, which government and the bureaucracy helped to facilitate by undermining those institutions of civil society that were dependent upon a public defense of the old morality. This great crisis has created the need for a Trump, or someone like Trump, and only those who recognize it as a crisis can be receptive to his candidacy.
- John Marini, 2016. (Hat tip Steve Hayward, Powerline).

They have adopted in their news coverage a utilitarian view that noble progressive ends justify almost any unethical means to obtain them. The media is unapologetically fused with the Democratic Party, the bicoastal liberal elite, and the progressive agenda.
The result is that the public cannot trust that the news it hears or reads is either accurate or true. The news as presented by these outlets has been carefully filtered to suppress narratives deemed inconvenient or antithetical to the political objectives of these entities, while inflating themes deemed useful.
This bias now accompanies increasing (and increasingly obvious) journalistic incompetence. Lax standards reflect weaponized journalism schools and woke ideology that short prior basic requisites of writing and ethical protocols of quoting and sourcing. In sum, a corrupt media that is ignorant, arrogant, and ideological explains why few now trust what it delivers.
- Victor David Hanson, How Corrupt is a Corrupt Media?, Am. Greatness, Dec 2022.

...we can say with absolute certainty the unholy collusion has three legs: the government, Big Tech and Big Media.
the concentrated power of this collusion is unlike anything ever seen in our nation. The alliance leaders have become the purveyors of the only acceptable opinions and enforcers against dissenters. Their domain ranges from print to broadcast to social media and they aim to dictate what 300 million Americans can say and do on everything from COVID to race to the environment. Their criticism rattles board rooms, scholars and even athletes.
When they take a united position on a matter, it can be difficult to find or hear an alternative. When they block news of an event or limit its spread, it is almost as if the event didn’t happen.
NY Post's Michael Goodwin on the left's election interference through propaganda and censorship. Dec 5, 2022.

Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a 1st amendment violation, but acting under orders from the government to suppress free speech, with no judicial review, is.
-Elon Musk tweet referring to the Biden Government directing ideologically friendly Twitter to stop tweets of the Hunter Biden laptop.

I grew up in the press. My father was a reporter. My stepmother was a reporter. My godparents were reporters. Every adult I knew growing up seemed to be in media. I love the news business. It’s in my bones. But I mourn for it. It’s destroyed itself.
-veteran reporter Matt Taibbi in opening remarks of a Munk Debate on whether to trust the media.

Call it the “audience-optimization” model: instead of starting with a story and following the facts, you start with what pleases your audience, and work backward to the story. In this system, the overwhelming majority of national media organizations cater to one “side” or the other. … This is not journalism. It’s political entertainment, and therefore unreliable.
-Matt Taibbi, Opening Munk debate comments for Be it Resolved: Don't Trust Mainstream Media, Nov 30, 2022

President Biden has developed a new energy policy and it is this: Instead of producing at a cheaper cost our own oil and gas in America, we're going to buy oil from foreign countries that hate us — in this case Venezuela — so those foreign countries will have more money to buy weapons to try to kill us. It's a moronathon.
-Louisiana Sen. Kennedy making up a word to describe Biden and his party's energy policy.

... many of our institutions — particularly our universities and the press — are particularly prone to turning out people who regard the great mass of Americans as, at best, dangerous boobs to be managed and at worst as an active threat to their own hopes and dreams.
Autocracies ultimately never deliver the wealth, peace and security they promise. But they do make some people feel powerful and important. And that, unfortunately, is enough to make autocracy a constant threat. Even here.
- Law Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds, Anti-Xi protests should end American left’s China envy, NY Post, Nov 2022.

The funny thing is that outside the sole exception of the Biden family, large payments to the children of powerful government officials by those with interests potentially affected by those officials’ actions are universally understood to be corrupt efforts to influence the officials. In cases involving people other than the Bidens, whether the official/parent “personally benefited” from the payments or “knew details” of the transactions are considered completely irrelevant.
-Francis Menton, Let's Talk About Biden Corruption, manhattancontrarian.com, Nov 29, 2022.

The mainstream media barely covered this event, which began with an attempt to overthrow and dispose of the president of the United States. Best to start with what we learned. Durham established what FBI Director James Comey likely knew from near day one: the Steele dossier was politically driven nonsense created by the Clinton campaign. The FBI knowingly ran with its false information to begin a legal process against American citizens, to include Donald Trump as a candidate and as president. The FBI’s goal was to destroy candidate Trump—and, when that failed, destroy President Trump—by tagging him as a Russian agent.
-Peter Van Buren on the prosecution of Igor Danchenko, The Questions John Durham Didn't Ask, The American Conservative, Nov 29, 2022.

It is hard to overstate how manic, primal and unhinged is the reaction of corporate media employees to the mere prospect that new Twitter owner Elon Musk may restore a modicum of greater free speech to that platform. It was easy to predict — back when Musk was merely toying with the idea of buying Twitter and loosening some of its censorship restrictions — that there would be an all-out attack from Western power centers if he tried. Online censorship has become one of the most potent propaganda weapons they possess, and there is no way they will allow anyone to dilute it even mildly without attempting to destroy them. Even with that expectation in place of what was to come, the liberal sector of the corporate media (by far the most dominant media sector) really outdid itself when it came to group-think panic, rhetorical excess, and reckless and shrill accusations.
-Glenn Greenwald, The Media's Deranged Hysteria Over Elon Musk's Promised Restoration of Free Speech, Nov 2022.

The most dangerous person in the world is Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call. If you ask, “Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?” It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids. . . .
If our kids don’t grow up understanding America is an exceptional nation, we’re done. If they think it’s an oppressor class and an oppressed class, if they think the 1619 Project, and we were founded on a racist idea—if those are the things people entered the seventh grade deeply embedded in their understanding of America, it’s difficult to understand how Xi Jinping’s claim that America is in decline won’t prove true.
-Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in an interview with Semafor.com, Nov. 21, 2022.

... the amazing fact is that when actual scientific sources are consulted about climate change, the story about an “existential threat”—let alone a military threat—completely falls apart. Yes, climate change is occurring, but the science says there is no evidence that it poses current dangers to mankind today or in the foreseeable future.
Indeed, the discrepancy between the claims about climate change and the actual facts is so shocking that it suggests the “climate crisis” is largely a media creation, built on sensationalistic headlines and useful solely to advancing the political agenda of the left.
-Peter J. Wallison in Law & Liberty book reviews of Climate Change, Nov. 2022.

Electoral fraud should bring the death penalty, for a first offense. Repeat offenders, we’ll be more lenient with./s
-Instapundit blogger Sarah Hoyt, Nov 17, 2022.

It’s not our job as political professionals to coronate leaders from the top down, and if we didn’t learn that in 2016, we never will.
Emily Jashinsky, Trump Won’t Be Defeated By Media, Conservative Or Otherwise, The Federalist, Nov 16, 2022.

... it’s now evident the FBI infiltrated these two “militia” groups well in advance of January 6. So, only one of two explanations is possible: either the FBI hired lousy informants, all of whom failed to tell their handling agents that the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys planned to overthrow the government that day or, more likely, the FBI replicated the Whitmer fednapping—informants worked with supervising agents and FBI hierarchy to concoct another “domestic terror” attack to bolster Wray’s unsubstantiated warnings about domestic violent extremists for political reasons. In other words, they wanted to sabotage Donald Trump.
In either case, where is the outrage among January 6 propagandists that the FBI, contrary to Wray’s public assertions, had plenty of resources devoted to collecting intelligence about the Capitol protest? Why did Wray’s surveillance operation fail so spectacularly? Who are the handling agents responsible for such widespread failure?
- Julie Kelly, Feds Had Informants In Proud Boys and Oath Keepers for J6, American Greatness, Nov 16, 2022

One possibility is that the Proud Boys weren’t planning an insurrection and that conservatives who have called it a spontaneous event have been right all along. That would nuke all the deranged attempts to suggest that Republicans, including Donald Trump, somehow orchestrated the entry into the Capitol Building. The other possibility is that the FBI knew a riot was going to take place and did nothing to stop it, instead letting it play out for political reasons.
-Bonchie, after the FBI admitted to having at least 8 agents imbedded in the Jan 6 crowd. In Completely Unforeseeable Twist, January 6th 'Conspiracy Theory' Turns out to Be True, Nov. 14, 2022.

The new left holds that “words are violence”—that people have no more right to say nasty things than to give someone a black eye. Suzanne Nossel, author of the book “Dare to Speak,” takes exception to this stance. Recognizing that the harms of free speech “must not mean equating speech with violence,” she writes. “Doing so legitimizes violent reactions to speech, and can convert reasoned debates into physical altercations.”
-Gabrielle Bauer, How the GOP Won Over a Liberal Canadian, WSJ, Nov 12, 2022.

As the political discussion centers on the 2022 wins and losses from the midterm election, one thing that stands out in similarity to the 2020 general election is the difference between ballots and votes. It appears in some states this is the ‘new normal.’
Where votes were the focus, the Biden administration suffered losses. Where ballots were the focus, the Biden administration won.
Since the advent of ballot centric focus through mail-in and collection drop-off processes, votes have become increasingly less valuable amid the organizers who wish to control election outcomes. As a direct and specific result, ballot collection has become the key to Democrat party success.
The effort to attain votes for candidates is less important than the strategy of collecting ballots.
It should be emphasized; these are two distinctly different election systems.
The system of ballot distribution and collection is far more susceptible to control than the traditional system of votes cast at precincts.
- Blogger Sundance, The Last Refuge, Nov 9, 2022.

Way back in March of 2019, I proposed the idea that, similar to the BLAXIT movement, American Jews needed to remove themselves from the Democratic Party, which no longer exemplifies Jewish values, no longer supports Israel, and is controlled by leftist extremists who are anti-Semitic. Although slower than hoped for, it looks like this might finally be happening.
A recent poll after the midterms demonstrates this optimistic change. Thirty-three percent of Jews voted Republican in the primaries, up from 30% in 2020 and 24% in 2016. This new voting bloc proves two things: Jews are starting to wake up to political realities and letting go of their indoctrinated belief that Democrats are the “Jewish party”; and the rise has nothing to do with and is not tied to Donald Trump and his pro-Israel positions.
-Rabbi Michael Barclay, Nov. 2022.

Everything I have been saying about democracy was vindicated last night. The fact that such a massive number of people voted for more of the same after two years of horrific mismanagement shows that it is unfit to choose its own leaders.
- Tweet by "The Mallard Reborn" after the 2022 midterms.

There are days when it feels as if there is nothing that the country can agree on—days when those of either political party have to live with the idea that no circumstance can persuade the other side to pledge its cooperation. To do so would be seen not as an act of good-willed compromise but as a sign of weakness, of election-season vulnerability.
The last such exception to that occurred not so long ago, although it seems like forever. On the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, more than 100 members of Congress gathered on the east front steps of the Capitol. Earlier in the day they had been evacuated from the building during the terror attacks on the nation. As evening fell, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, stood shoulder to shoulder and, seemingly spontaneously, in one voice sang “God Bless America.”
-Bob Greene, in WSJ OpEd‘All of Nation Rallies to Johnson’s Support’.

Think of the absolute assertions by the Biden administration and their media flunkies: The border is secure. Covid vaccines prevent infection. There is no CRT in high schools. The lab-leak theory and Hunter Biden’s corruption were disinformation. There is no medical debate about fast-track, affirmation-only, sex changes for minors. Inflation is caused by corporate greed. Women in college always tell the truth; and men always lie. A president can forgive student loans by fiat. Debt doesn’t matter. A woman can have a penis. The people who attack Asian-Americans are all white supremacists. The idea of individual merit is racist.
- Andrew Sullivan

Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake.
- Joe Biden telling coal miners to learn to code.

In return for centrists’ and moderates’ support, Biden effectively told us to get lost. He championed the entire far-left agenda: the biggest expansion in government since LBJ; a massive stimulus that, in a period of supply constraints, fueled durable inflation; a second welfare stimulus was also planned — which would have made inflation even worse; record rates of mass migration, and no end in sight; a policy of almost no legal restrictions on abortion (with public funding as well!); the replacement of biological sex with postmodern “genders”; the imposition of critical race theory in high schools and critical queer theory in kindergarten; an attack on welfare reform; “equity” hiring across the federal government; plans to regulate media “disinformation”; fast-track sex-changes for minors; next-to-no due process in college sex-harassment proceedings; and on and on it went. Even the policy most popular with the center — the infrastructure bill — was instantly conditioned on an attempt to massively expand the welfare state.
-Andrew Sullivan, Substack, Nov. ,2022.

At this point what social scientists call “pattern recognition”—an updated version of Occam’s Razor—is kicking in. We’ve now had three Democratic presidents in a row— stretching back to Clinton in 1992, then Obama in 2008, and Biden in 2020—who all campaigned as moderates, but lurched sharply left once in office. In other words, Democratic presidential candidates lie to us, over and over again, and then voters issue a restraining order at the first opportunity. It’s as though voters need reminding every other decade how bad Democrats in power can be.
-Steven Hayward, blogging on Powerline, Nov 7, 2022.

They oppose his takeover of Twitter for the simple reason that they want to silence conservative views.
-Wall St. Journal's Allysia Finley in Democrats Develop Elon Musk Derangement Syndrome

The Biden Administration will be known to history for many things: an open border and its deadly consequences, the abandonment of Afghanistan, weakness that led to catastrophe in Europe, skyrocketing inflation, and the use of federal law enforcement to target political opponents.
Above all, though, this administration may be remembered for its duplicity — its continual, shameless “gaslighting” of the American people.
-Augustus Howard, NY Post, Nov, 2022.

UNFORTUNATELY Y’ALL ARE FORGETTING THE MASSIVE FRAUD HEADING OUR WAY
-Sarah Hoyt about a prediction for the Novemeber 2022 elections that the election will be a “bloodbath” for the Democratic Party.”

“[T]he depressing but undeniable fact [is] that the gravest danger to our republican government is that too many idiots vote. . .
“Such idiots, to be sure, range across the political spectrum, and are of all colors, creeds, nations of origin and, yes, political orientations. Yet in America today, only one of the dominant parties—guess which one—is actually dependent on the idiot vote for its very survival. Ignoramuses are the Democrats’ core constituency. Can’t name your congressman or a single Supreme Court justice? Have vaguely heard of Gettysburg, but can’t quite place the war? Get your idea of news from People and Us or Comedy Central? You’re a single-issue voter and the single issue is more-more-more and who-cares-how-it -gets-paid-for? The Dems not only want you to vote, they will hunt you down, fill out the registration form for you and show up on election day and drag you to the polls. And if you can’t make it, they’ll send someone else and say you did. And all the while, proudly cast themselves as defenders of democracy, because the right to vote is, you know, like sacrosanct.”
—Harry Stein, The Idiot Vote: The Democrats’ Core Constituency

Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden's leadership.
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) Tweet, November 1, 2022 (Biden's staff trying to sidestep his responsibility for the historic inflation to which the COLA increase is tied by law).

This is fake – I did *not* tweet out a link to The New York Times!
-Elon Musk Tweet after the Times ran a headlined story on Musk sharing a link to a Pelosi story on a news site known to publish false news.

My concern is that I feel like socialists are taking over. They're marching through the institutions. They're taking everything over and taking over education. It looks like they've taken over a lot of the corporations. It looks like they've taken over the military. And it's just continuing. I'm so deeply concerned about it. I believe in liberty and capitalism. Those are my twin values.
- Retiring Whole Foods' CEO John Mackey, Oct 2022.

There’s something really weird about this Paul Pelosi attack story. Nothing is adding up. But one thing we do know is that the so-called “intruder” is some hippy-dippy dude from Berkeley who sells hemp bracelets and used to belong to a nudist colony. So, they’ll be really hard-pressed to blame this on a Trump supporter.
- Mack Cogburn, October 29, 2022

Ballot brokers typically work up to a year in advance. Ballot brokers visit individuals in their residences and assists the individual with filling out a request for a mail-in ballot. After the mail-in ballot arrives, the voter is instructed to wait for the ballot broker returns to the individuals residence. They are asked to not seal the certificate envelope.
In rare circumstances, if the voter has filled out the ballot and sealed the envelope certificate, the ballot broker will take the ballot and then steam open the sealed envelope, the ballot broker will either correct any votes, if necessary, that were not voted according to their wishes or just throw them out.
- From a sworn affidavit by Democrat whistleblower Cynthia Harris (and former Orange County Commissioner candidate) filed with the Secretary of State’s office alleging that illegal operations to collect third-party ballots have been going on for years in the Orlando area where voting activists are paid $10 for each ballot they collect. Aug, 2022.

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. It’s always and everywhere, a result of too much money, of a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output. Moreover, in the modern era, the important next step is to recognize that today, governments control the quantity of money. So that as a result, inflation in the United States is made in Washington and nowhere else.
-Milton Friedman.

Here’s a stat for you, as of January of this year. At the end of last year, overall, fossil fuels represented 81 percent of overall energy consumption. Ten years ago, they were at 82. So though, all of that investment in renewables, you’re talking about $3.8 trillion, let me repeat that $3.8 trillion of investment in renewables moved fossil fuel consumption from 82 to 81 percent, of the overall energy consumption. But you know, given the recent events and what’s happened with the loss of gas and replacing it with coal, that number is likely above 82.
-Jeff Currie, Global Head of Commodities Research for Goldman Sachs, on the utter futility of “green” energy, Oct 2022.

A month ago Fetterman could have dropped out and the Pennsylvania Democratic party could have put up a different candidate for his office — like Rep. Conor Lamb, who lost to Fetterman in the primary. It’s an act of political and ideological malpractice because he and his team have left Democratic voters with no option other than to close their eyes to what they saw and vote for someone who should not be in the Senate — or to vote for his rival. Or not to vote at all.
It’s an act of personal malpractice on the part of those who encouraged him to continue because this singularly upsetting performance is not the way any person on this earth — and particularly not someone who suffered a calamitous brain shock — should become famous or notorious or be remembered.
- John Podhoretz, ohn Fetterman debate was painful and shameful — he is physically incapable of being a Senator, NY Post, Oct 26, 2022.

... the FBI deliberately targeted 2016 presidential candidate and later President Donald Trump with claims it already knew at the time to be false.
-Carlson and Mahncke, after an eMail disclosed in the Durham investigation clearly showed FBI disception New Email Reveals Answer to Establishment’s Efforts to Oust Trump, The Epoch Times, Oct 26, 2022.

Does Biden really not remember that loan forgiveness didn’t pass the Congress–it never could have–and that he himself circumvented Congress, and the law, by signing an executive order? Apparently not.
But that raises a more basic question: did Biden ever understand that he signed such an order? Charitably, one might imagine that Biden knew what he was doing at the time, but then forgot. But why should we assume that? Based on the evidence of our eyes, it seems equally likely, if not more so, that there was never a time when Biden understood that loan forgiveness couldn’t pass Congress; that it was deemed helpful to Democrats’ election chances; and that he therefore should sign an (illegal) executive order.
Who carried out that analysis? Who came up with a legal justification, to the extent there was one? Who prepared the executive order? Who told Joe Biden to sign it? Was Biden in the loop at all? Does Biden know anything about the order, other than what he may have read off a teleprompter at the time? Who, in short, is acting as president?
- John HInderaker, Powerline, after Biden claimed wrongly that he signed a bill for student loan forgiveness that Congress passed by a couple of votes. Oct, 2022.

You don’t have to agree with Washington Democrats to acknowledge they are putting on a clinic in how to use power to reward their friends and punish their enemies. From canceling student debt to freeing federal pot prisoners to restricting oil and gas production to getting arch-nemesis Steve Bannon locked up, they are ending their two-year run with a bang.
Their conclusion came last week when the partisan Jan. 6 committee issued a subpoena to former President Donald Trump. The timing was impeccable.
-Michael Goodwin, NY Post, Oct 23, 2022.

Though this has been called an “insurrection,” it was closer to a campus mob occupying the dean’s office than a coup d’etat.
-Glenn H. Reynolds on the "Jan 6" Congressional investigation, Oct 22, 2022.

In 1970 I believed that Tocqueville’s soft despotism was the aim of the bureaucratizers. However today we cannot be so optimistic as was possible in 1970. Today’s bureaucratizers are not soft despots at all. The political use of criminal law, such as began during the Watergate scandals and has begun to be regularized during the Reagan administration, is characteristic of tyranny—not Tocqueville’s ‘new,’ ‘soft’ one, but a harsh one. . . To the carrot—spending unlimited by law—the legislature has now added the stick—the penalties of the criminal law.
-John Adams Wettergreen (d. 1989), writing in 1988 (hat tip Steven Hayward, Powerline)

One of the political cartoons after our legislative session had a person snorting cocaine out of a mountain of white. It said, ‘Which of these is illegal in Oregon?’ And the answer was the plastic straw.
-Nike co-founder Phil Knight telling the NY Times why he doesn't like the Democrat Gov. candidate in Oregon.

Despite very poor television ratings, the Unselect Committee has perpetuated a show trial the likes of which this country has never seen before. There is no due process, no cross-examination, no “real” Republican members, and no legitimacy since you do not talk about Election Fraud or not calling up the troops. It is a witch hunt of the highest level, a continuation of what has been going on for years. You have not gone after the people that created the fraud, but rather great American Patriots who questioned it, as is their Constitutional right. These people have had their lives ruined as your Committee sits back and basks in the glow. The people of this Country will not stand for unequal justice under the law, or Liberty and Justice for some. Election Day is coming. We demand answers on the Crime of the Century.
-Donald Trump letter to Jan 6 Committee after being subpoenaed

FBI OFFERED BRIBE TO BRING DOWN TRUMP
- Powerline headline in an article by John Hinderaker after the transcript in Durham's trial of Danchenko revealed the FBI offered one million dollars to Christopher Steele for information backing up his allegations in the dossier. Mr Hinderaker concludes with this:
Until now, I have thought that the FBI could be reformed. But this is too much. The rot goes too deep, and the FBI’s violation of the public trust is too comprehensive. The bureau should be shut down, the J. Edgar Hoover building should be razed to the ground, every FBI employee should be retired, and a brand new federal law enforcement agency, with new personnel and with far stronger controls to prevent meddling in domestic politics, should be established.

Progressivism reconstructed American liberalism by dismantling the free market of classical liberalism and erecting in its place the welfare state of modern liberalism. The new liberalism discarded economic liberties as archaic impediments to necessary improvements to society’s health, welfare, and morals.
But the original progressives’ illiberal turn did not stop at property and contract rights. They assaulted political and civil liberties, too, trampling on individual rights to person, to free movement, to free expression, to to marriage and to reproduction. The progressives denied millions these basic freedoms, on grounds that their inferiority threatened America’s economic and hereditary security. They were wrong on both counts. That did not stop them, nor has it stopped those who, unaware of the history, repeat the same false claims today.
—Thomas C. Leonard, historian, Princeton University, in Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era

Govt/BigTech are formulating ways in which they can ultimately control whether you can have a job, buy food, pay for a home, drive a car, get a loan, use a credit card... If you don't think the right way, they can cut you off. Is that American?
- Sharyl Attkisson Tweet, Oct 7, 2022.

As the Democratic Party claims “Science” to be the basis for the host of campaigns small and large, dictated by shifts within and among its “intersectional” constituencies—including abrupt reversal of directives from a few months earlier—and demands that the professoriate join in support and in ostracizing whomever among them dissents, it places burdens on these associates such as even the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Germany’s National Socialist Party never placed on their academics. The Soviets’ worst abuse of science, requiring silence about or support for Trofim Lysenko’s crackpot theory of transmissibility of acquired traits, was not as onerous as the contemporary American practice of requiring professions of faith in the subjectivity of human sexuality. Nor did Soviet apparatchiks ever punish doctors for their medical decisions, as Democrats have done by ostracizing doctors who dissent from their ever-changing political protocols regarding COVID.
—Angelo Codevilla, in Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order.

Students should be mindful that they will face diminished opportunities if they go to Yale. I have no confidence that they’re being taught anything.
-Judge Aaron Sibarium tweet (In addition to Fifth Circuit judge James Ho, who announced on Thursday that he would no longer hire law clerks from the nation’s top-ranked law school, 12 federal judges—both circuit and district court jurists announced they would not hire woke Elis).

Can you buy Twitter and then delete it, please!? xx
- Elon Musk's ex wife Riley … wrote in a 2022 text dated March 23.

Can you name a single Democrat who has expressed regret at the perpetration of the fraud? I can’t. Have the main organs that propagated the hoax–the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and the FBI and CIA–apologized, or done anything to bring about an accounting and make amends? No: the firing of Peter Strzok and one or two others by the FBI comes closest. And polls indicate that a great many Democrats still believe in the hoax.
-John Hinderaker, Powerline, on the Russian Collusion Hoax.

If you find yourself mad as hell and you don’t want to take it anymore—for the sake of what you hold dear, stand down. You should be suspicious of anyone calling for kinetic action. There is good reason to think that that person is an FBI agent. Big Tech and the FBI are watching, waiting, and enabling. They want a super-sized Ruby Ridge. Don’t give it to them.
- Liberal Guy, Don’t Take the Bait, American Mind, Sept 2022.

I can't stress this enough: at its core, Democratic politics is about criminalizing opposition to their party and ideology.
Dissenting ideas are "disinformation" and must be censored by Big Tech. Trump voters are inherently criminal ("insurrectionists") and should be imprisoned.
-Journalist Glenn Greenwald tweet - Sept 24, 2022.

The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes that redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of income from richer to poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.
—Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Ethics of Redistribution

We invested an additional $12 billion into community banks, because we know community banks are in the community, and understand the needs and desires of that community as well as the talent and capacity of community
- Word salad from VP Kamala Harris when asked how the Biden administration has invested in community banks.

Because there are three countries that are — never have — there are fewer — fewer immigrants coming from Central America and from Mexico. This is a totally different circumstance.
What’s on my watch now is Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua. And the ability to send them back to those states is not rational. You could send them back and have them — we’re working with Mexico and other countries to see if we can stop the flow. But that’s the difference.
- Word Salad from Pres. Biden when asked why he opened the Southern border.

It’s a sort of a disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.
-George Soros showing off his sanctimony.

One of the first things I teach students on the first day of energy policy classes I have taught is how energy density works, and how a battery is a device to store energy at high densities. But at a certain point, when you increase the energy density enough, we don’t call it a battery any more. We call it a bomb.
-Powerline's Prof. Steven Haywood.

In urging such sweeping relief, the platforms offer a rather odd inversion of the First Amendment. That Amendment, of course, protects every person’s right to “the freedom of speech.” But the platforms argue that buried somewhere in the person’s enumerated right to free speech lies a corporation’s unenumerated right to muzzle speech.
The implications of the platforms’ argument are staggering. On the platforms’ view, email providers, mobile phone companies, and banks could cancel the accounts of anyone who sends an email, makes a phone call, or spends money in support of a disfavored political party, candidate, or business.
- Judge Andrew Oldham's opinion in NetChoice v. Paxton, in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upholding Texas’s new law banning viewpoint discrimination by the major social media platforms.

That would be the height of irony because the same White House has for months secretly shipped tens of thousands of migrants around the country, often in the middle of the night with no notice to local officials. No Dems complained then, so where did their love go?
-Michael Goodwin NY Post op-ed on the White House threats to assign Attorney General Merrick Garland, to stop Republican Governors from sending illegal aliens to Democrat sancturary cities. Sept 18, 2022.

There is a thin line in society, between food and anarchy, freedom and repression, liberty and tyranny, safety and street violence. It’s thinner than we want to admit, and it’s being pushed to its limits on purpose by ideologies that want to deconstruct our society. Tearing down society is a dangerous game.
-William A. Jacobson, Legal Insurrection, September 11, 2022.

Any group whose past has not provided them with as many heroes, cultural contributions, or other glories as some other group’s past now has a grievance against those who write history. Apparently a past to your liking has become an entitlement.
-Thomas Sowell.

The raid on Mar-a-Lago found nothing just like the Mueller witch hunt found nothing just like the first impeachment and second impeachment found nothing.
-Don Surber, Sept 11, 2022.

Anyone who still thinks climate change is a greater threat than climate policy to financial stability deserves to be exiled to a peat-burning yurt in the wilderness.
- Wall St. Journal Ed. Joseph C. Sternberg, The Coming Global Crisis of Climate Policy, Sept 9, 2022

If there are fascists in America these days, they are apt to be found among the tribes of the left. They are Mr. Biden and his people (including the lion’s share of the media), whose opinions have, since Jan. 6, 2021, hardened into absolute faith that any party or political belief system except their own is illegitimate—impermissible, inhuman, monstrous and (a nice touch) a threat to democracy. The evolution of their overprivileged emotions—their sentimentality gone fanatic—has led them, in 2022, to embrace Mussolini’s formula: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Or against the party. (People forget, if they ever knew it, that both Hitler and Mussolini began as socialists). The state and the Democratic Party must speak and act as one, suppressing all dissent. America must conform to the orthodoxy—to the Chinese finger-traps of diversity-or-else and open borders—and rejoice in mandatory drag shows and all such theater of “gender.” Meantime, their man in the White House invokes emergency powers to forgive student debt and their thinkers wonder whether the Constitution and the separation of powers are all they’re cracked up to be.
-Lance Morrow’s Wall Street Journal column Biden’s speech had it all backwards commenting on President Biden’s “Triumph of the shill” speech and other recent musings on “fascism”

Bad and bankrupt ideas, protocols, and ideologies—like McCarthyism, communism, various cults, or fascism—resurface not because of their intrinsic or lasting value or record of success, but because civilizations become less vigilant and allow human vanities, ignorance, arrogance, and evil to reassert themselves.
Our Tail Gunner Joe (of semi-truck driving expertise and brilliant legal training fame) in a single week smeared roughly half the country as un-American “semi-fascists.” Then in one of the creepiest speeches and background sets in American political history, Joe Biden railed that “Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country.” Franklin Roosevelt declared war on Japan in careful, sober, and exacting presidential tones; Joe Biden all but declared war against half his own people like a raving lunatic. ... ...
Will Biden now recall FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith to alter more government documents, or hire another informant such as Clinton lackey Christopher Steele, or round up 50 more intelligence “experts” to swear that Hunter’s next lost laptop is proof of Russian-Trump collusion?
-Victor David Hanson, American Greatness, Sept 6, 2022.

I sometimes wonder which policy of President Biden's has been or will be the most destructive of them all. There are so many possibilities.
The American Rescue Plan of 2021 contributed to the record inflation of the past year. Biden's reversal of the Migration Protection Protocols, safe third country agreements, and other immigration policies enacted by the previous administration resulted in historic numbers of illegal entries along the southern border. The withdrawal from Afghanistan abandoned a nation of 39 million people to a murderous, medieval, terrorist-aligned mafia. Biden has pursued a renewed nuclear agreement with Iran despite that regime's support for militias that fire on U.S. troops, plots to kill U.S. officials on U.S. soil, and ultimate responsibility for the assault on Salman Rushdie. Just the other day, Biden announced a complex, unconstitutional, regressive, and inflationary scheme to forgive student debt. The words "moral hazard" are not in his vocabulary.
Like I said: There are plenty of options for which Biden policy is the worst. Yet his biggest folly may turn out to be his green thumb. The manic Progressive quest to eliminate fossil fuels and preside over a "green energy transition" will make America dependent, unstable, poorer, needier, and weaker.
-Matthew Continetti The Green Surrender, The Washington Free Beacon, September 2, 2022

Naturally Biden resorted to our “democracy” over and again as if it were a convention that should be worshipped. He said it well beyond the point of where it became sickening. And it’s another lie. The U.S. is not a democracy. Never has been. Why do the Democrats and their media cheerleaders continue to identify our style of government in the same terms a grade-schooler would?
The U.S. is a representative republic, or democratic republic. (And Biden and his party are its biggest internal threat.) Democracy is mob rule, which is exactly what the Democrats want – as long as it’s their mob ruling. Think of the George Floyd riots, Antifa violence, destruction, looting – they support anything that wrecks order and helps set them up to take on more political power.
- Issues and Insights editorial, Sep 1 2022 after the Biden hate speech.

It was history’s only armed insurrection to which not a single person remembered to bring a weapon.
- Powerline's John Hinderaker on Jan 6th.

... Low IQ animals often think they’re looking at someone else, when looking in a mirror
-Instapundent blogger Sara Hoyt after Joe Biden demonized Trump supporters in an unhinged prime time hate-filled diatribe.

The point is this: There is plenty of deficit reduction to pay for the programs — cumulative deficit reduction — to pay for the programs many times over.
-Joe Biden with a whopper on who will pay for the $1 trillion student loan buy out.

After a fair and transparent criminal trial, he deserves what all people guilty of manslaughter – at the very least – deserve. For he is the most dishonestly evil public figure in American history. He is America’s Mengele. And unless the emotional and psychological hold he still has on too many in this nation is quickly sent to the bottom of the sea, all of us will continue to suffer – with whatever lives we have left to live – at the whims of the all-powerful bio-medical fascist state.
This goes well beyond COVID. It has every bit as much to do now with whether or not we prefer being gaslit to knowing the truth as long as it allows our idols to survive – especially the government ones. We have gone from “resistance to tyranny is obedience to God” to “trust unelected government bureaucrats no matter how wrong and dishonest they are” in less than 250 years.
-Steve Deace, on Anthony Fauci, Conservative Review, Aug 2022.

BAH, THE FRAUD DENIERS CALL US ELECTION DENIERS, BUT WE’RE NOT THE ONES REFUSING INVESTIGATIONS: Republican “election denial” versus Democrat and NeverTrumper “election denial“.
-Sarah Hoyt, Instapundit, Aug, 2022.

The NeverTrumpers never accept that Hillary Clinton's refusal to admit that she lost, fair and square -- and her subsequent enlistment of the entirety of the leadership of the government intelligence services and law enforcement in what is in fact an attempt at an illegal coup -- is itself "election denial" and something far worse, with far greater constitutional consequences, than anything Trump did.
Did Trump enlist the CIA and FBI into his "insurrection"?
NeverTrump never admits any of this.
And why?
Well, for a simple reason: Because NeverTrump is and remains Russiagate Truthers. They remain committed to the idea that somehow, in some foggy way they can't quite explain, Russiagate is still TRUE.
-Blogger Ace, Aug 26, 2022

That doesn’t answer the people who say it’s still completely unfair to not have looked at the laptop in a timely way and to have shut down the New York Post Twitter account; that’s a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump’. Absolutely it was, absolutely. But I think it was warranted.”
- Sam Harris (liberal atheist public intellectual from LA ) admitting the motive for the takedown of the Post was an end justifies the means conspiracy.

Meanwhile, Trump has hinted he will run for the White House again.
The left just can’t have that. Merrick Garland sent his FBI to raid the home of one of the two patriots most likely to run as the Republican candidate in 2024. I don’t have a crystal ball, but I’m guessing he did it for at least one of two reasons: 1) eventually arrest Trump to try to keep him from running, winning, and purging the federal government of the toilet people in the deep state, or 2) retrieve info about Russia-gate and Hillary’s involvement in it. Either way, it’s unprecedented and unacceptable — and I believe it’s just the tip of the Democrats’ apparatchik iceberg.
- Kevin Downey Jr. Aug 16, 2022.

“Whataboutism” is a new word for an old idea. There’s a 19th-century Yiddish expression: “a for-instance is not an argument.” Yet sometimes it is. If a pattern of nonenforcement can be demonstrated—as with the Logan Act, under which nobody has been prosecuted since 1852—it will be difficult to prove equal justice if it is suddenly and selectively invoked to target a political enemy. If, on the other hand, violation of the Classification or Records Acts were routinely prosecuted and alleged violators subject to a search warrant, then the case for equal application of the law will have been made.
- Alan Dershowitz, Aug 15, 2022.

They should have gone with the aliens angle. I said earlier today after watching the frozen-faced, nervous teleprompter reading from AG Merrick Garland, that Main Justice and the FBI had completely embarrassed themselves and likely came up empty in their raid on Mar-a-Lago.
The reason is simple, when you put a tribe of rabid leftists together in a room long enough, they will collectively concoct the goofiest plans in an effort to advance their quests. The DOJ and FBI lawfare tribe are no different. The Washington Post is now claiming the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago was connected to some “nuclear information” in Donald Trump’s possession.
-Blogger Sundance, Watch for Falling Anvils, The Washington Post Claims FBI Raid Was Looking for Super-Secret Nuclear Intel in Mar-a-Lago. August 11, 2022.

They even broke into my safe. What is the difference between this and Watergate, where operatives broke into the Democrat National Committee? Here, in reverse, Democrats broke into the home of the 45th President of the United States.
- Donald Trump after the FBI executed a search warrant on his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.

When the FBI raided Donald Trump’s home on Monday, a key aspect of what made the United States of America great and free has been lost, and likely cannot be recovered. … [B]itter political opponents throughout the history of the republic have never before used the government’s own mechanisms of justice to do injustice to their foes. Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and their henchmen have brought America to a new phase of its history, and it is not likely to be one that is marked by respect for the rule of law or defense of the rights of individual citizens. Instead, we are entering an ugly age of authoritarianism, in which the brute force of the state is used to bend the people to the will of the tyrant.
The FBI that was heavily involved in trying to frame and destroy Trump in the Russian Collusion hoax is now trying once again to destroy him, apparently by claiming that he improperly took classified material from the White House. They never cared when Hillary Clinton misused classified material on a grand scale; what is the difference? …
Merrick Garland recently signaled that something like this was in the offing, when he emphasized that no one was above the law and anyone could be prosecuted. No one is above that law, that is, except Hillary Clinton, and Hunter Biden, and all the FBI officials who have been implicated in the Russian Collusion hoax, and all the other Leftists who have escaped and will continue to escape prosecution because they hold what the elites consider to be acceptable political opinions.
The lesson is clear: in America today, in the corrupt kleptocracy of Joe Biden, you have to have the right opinions. Then all doors will open for you and you can even break laws with impunity, and have no fear of prosecution. But if you dare to dissent from the opinions of the elites, prepare to be hounded by the new super-IRS and the weaponized FBI, and you’ll face raids, and prison, and who knows what else is coming.
- Michael Finch, End of the Republic, Aug 9, 2022.

I've seen enough. The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization. When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned. Attorney General Garland, preserve your documents and clear your calendar.
- House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy vowing to investigate the Department of Justice following the FBI raid on Mar a Lago.

If you still have respect for the DOJ and the FBI at this point, particularly the FBI, you are not paying attention.
-Harmeet Dhillon on the raid on President Trump’s home. Aug 8, 2022.

The raid is supposed to be a last resort. But this administration has used the weaponization of the justice system against its political enemies. It has arrested people, denied them bail, put them in handcuffs – used all kinds of techniques that are not usually applied to American citizens.
-Alan Dershowitz, Aug 8, 2022.

President Barack Obama’s former campaign manager David Plouffe famously said of Donald Trump’s entry into politics:  “It is not enough to simply beat Trump.  He must be destroyed thoroughly.  His kind must not rise again.”  What was it that Washington DC and President Obama’s team feared so much about Donald J Trump? The answer to that question is why the FBI, DOJ and CIA targeted Trump in 2016; and why they continued the targeting in 2017 with the Mueller investigation; and why they continued the targeting through two attempts at impeachment in 2019 and 2020; and why they still keep targeting Donald Trump with the J6 committee and a DOJ investigation two years after he is no longer in office. Donald J Trump is the existential threat.
-Blogger Sundance, The Last Refuge, July 2022.

A majority of blacks tell pollsters that they support school choice and voter ID requirements and that they oppose racial preferences. Media outlets typically turn to social activists, far-left academics, liberal journalists and progressive politicians for comment on such matters, but the viewpoints of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones are often at odds with those of the average black person.
-Jason Riley, WSJ OpEd, July, 2022.

Yeah, but which way does "Fraud" lean?
- Instapundit's Sarah Hoyt after the Cook Report Moved the 2022 Georgia Governor Race to ‘Lean Republican’.

57% of Democratic voters agree it “is a document rooted in racism,” and 64% think the Constitution ”is a sexist document that gives men advantages over women.” Nearly half (49%) of Democrats believe the Constitution “should be mostly or completely rewritten.”
-Rasmussen poll of likely US voters - quoted by J Hinderaker in the Powerline post MORE EVIDENCE THAT DEMOCRATS HATE AMERICA

It’s been my lifelong observation that liberals are a mostly conflicted, tormented group suffering from mass psychosis. They wrap themselves up in do-good, virtue-signaling knots and then attempt to rationalize positions even they know are indefensible by putting forth the most tortured, illogical explanations imaginable. Merely calling those positions “lies” doesn’t go anywhere near far enough. Liberals have mastered the art of wanting to believe in a false reality, constructing a Bizarro Universe, while at the same time, excusing themselves for committing the very same transgressions against society and nature that they accuse others of doing.
- Steve Feinstein, American Thinker, July, 2022.

For too long, members of the left have been heralded as liberators, as progressives, as open-minded, tolerant, and peaceful. It’s all hogwash and always has been. How much longer can the public ignore this reality?
We say, no more. It’s time to abort the left’s moral preening and sell the remains to researchers for further study.
- Editorial The Left Aborts Its Right To Be Called Tolerant … Or Intelligent, Issues and Insights, June 29, 2022.

"A natural reading suggest the Clauses have ‘complementary’ purposes, not warring ones.” ... the school punished Mr. Kennedy under “a mistaken view that it had a duty to ferret out and suppress religious observances."
- Justice Neil Gorsuch, on the First Amendment's religious freedom guarantee in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, after Justice Sotomayor in dissent says the majority fails to respect the tension between the Constitution’s ban on religious establishment and its guarantee of religious free exercise.

Most liberals no doubt understand that they now will have to take their case to the voters, and that when the dust settles, American abortion laws will look pretty much like Europe’s. And some states will be extremely permissive–New York, for one, may legalize infanticide, which the states are perfectly free to do. So, once again–why the hysteria?
I think several elements are at work here, but the most basic is that liberals (Democrats) do not want to take the issue of abortion to the voters. They do not want to have to make their case. They do not want to have to argue and persuade. Rather, they want all views opposed to their own to be banned and unheard. Delegitimized.
This is perhaps the dominant fact of 21st Century politics. Liberals don’t want to debate, they don’t want to persuade. They want to censor. They want some higher authority, whether the Supreme Court, Twitter, or corporate America, to declare all views but theirs out of bounds. They don’t want to participate in democratic politics, they want to rule by fiat. For all their wailing about “our democracy,” the last thing liberals want is the actual give and take of a democracy, which usually entails compromise.
I think that is the key reason for the Left’s hysteria over Dobbs.

-Powerline's John Hinderaker attempting to explain liberal hysteria after the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision.

The Constitution Is My Gun Permit
- Townhall's Kurt Schlichter

When Chloe was 12 years old, she decided she was transgender. At 13, she came out to her parents. That same year, she was put on puberty blockers and prescribed testosterone. At 15, she underwent a double mastectomy. Less than a year later, she realized she’d made a mistake — all by the time she was 16 years old. Now 17, Chloe is one of a growing cohort called “detransitioners” — those who seek to reverse a gender transition.
-NY Post Journalist Rikki Schlott on Chloe Cole, who wants her organs back.

I think what we need to understand is that these legacy D.C. and New York outlets - we don’t care what you think anymore. We know you peddle narratives. We know you lie. We know you don’t care about the facts. And so you can try to smear me or anyone in my administration all you want to. All that’s going to do is embolden us to continue moving forward for the people in Florida,
- Gov. Ron DeSantis after the Washington Post's hit piece on his press ssecretary.

Every girl is bi. You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.
- A joke on twitter retweeted by Washington Post's David Weigel (who was later suspended a month without pay for his tweet)

Despite previously claiming it “has a standing process for reviewing questions about past awards, under the guidelines of which complaints are considered by an appointed committee,” the Pulitzer Prize Board won’t say if it is still reviewing the awards it granted to corporate media outlets guilty of promoting the Russia collusion hoax.
- Jordon Boyd, The Federalist, June, 2022.

Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-chief executive, had a read-my-lips moment in 2015 when he vowed, “No advertising coming onto Netflix. Period.” Now that Netflix has lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of this year, advertising suddenly seems like a revolutionary idea.
-Peter Funt, June, 2022.

Would a serious country so completely lose perspective on its own past that it would entertain the idea that the nation was founded on slavery, rather than on the ideals that have made it a beacon to the rest of the world? And would a serious country think it appropriate to teach its children that the nation’s past is best understood as a parade of horrors, to which the most appropriate response is not pride but lacerating shame? . . .
-Wilfred M. McClay, 2022 Bradley Prize winner, May 17, 2022.

Hillary Gave the Greenlight to Gaslight.
-Law Professor Jonathan Turley succinctly summarizing the first week of the Sussman trial.

Unsubstantiated, shrill, partisan, self-serving, apocalyptic warnings are ALWAYS wrong
-HSBC executive Stuart Kirk slide in a presentation at an investor conference taking banking regulators to task for overbaking the financial risk of climate change. He later lost his job. WSJ Ed. May, 2022.

Of the 86 countries where we have identified mass public shootings, the US ranks 56th per capita in its rate of attacks and 61st in mass public shooting murder rate. Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Russia all have at least 45 percent higher rates of murder from mass public shootings than the United States.
-John Lott and Michael Weisser, America doesn’t actually lead the world in mass shootings, NY Post, Aug, 2018.

It insists on control, to the point of systematically eliminating or co-opting anything that might serve as an independent power center. And it insists on not merely spreading BS, but on requiring people to repeat and endorse its BS as a sign of submission.

NY Post's Glenn H. Reynolds on two reasons the left hates Elon Musk.

If it had been Republicans doing it to a Democrat, the press would be losing its mind. Problem is, most media bought the Clinton-commissioned lies: The Washington Post and New York Times split a Pulitzer for their obsessive “news reporting” that repeated the lies to the world.
It was the most successful disinformation campaign in living memory, and the liberal media were at best willing dupes in that success. Maybe it’s not such a surprise they don’t much care to cover the trial that’s beginning to bring it all to light.
-NY Post editorial, May 2022 on the Durham trial of Sussman and the Democrat/media collusion for the Russia hoax.

In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party.
But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.
-Elon Musk, May 2022.

I will absolutely leave the Court when I do my job as poorly as you do yours.
-Justice Thomas responding to to media critics asking him to step down.

Joe Biden's new catchphrase 'ultra-MAGA' was dreamt up by a woke think-tank who spent six months coining the phrase - despite claims the president himself came up with it.
-Alex Hammer, Dailymail.com, May, 2022.

I wonder how long we're going to have these institutions at the rate we're undermining them, and then I wonder when they're gone or destabilized what we will have as a country and I don't think the prospects are good if we continue to lose them.
When you lose that trust, especially in the institution that I'm in, it changes the institution fundamentally. You begin to look over your shoulder. It's like kind of an infidelity – that you can explain it but you can't undo it.
-Justice Clarance Thomas after the Alito opinion leak.

… unless you’re a coward like 90% of the media and 100% of the foreign-policy class in Washington, you realize now the furor that consumed the country for three years did not originate with Donald Trump or even Russia, but with a Clinton-sponsored hoax.
From day one, had reporters focused on the one thing they knew to be indubitably true after talking to Mr. Steele, they would have found the real story: A paid foreign agent was circulating scurrilous tales whose truth he wouldn’t vouch for, whose sources he wouldn’t reveal, without any documentation, in a bet that some Washington journalist could be gulled into reporting them.
- Wall St. Journal’s  Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., May 13, 2022.

took my 13 yo daughter to a new doctor, knew something was off. doc spoke in infantilizing tone, "out of respect, what pronouns do you use?" I told her this appt is over, you have no right to push that ideology on my child, you are not charging me for this appt, and we left.
Tweet from JustaFewMoms, May, 2022.

Has it finally happened? Has Hillary Clinton at long last actually said something honest and accurate? In an interview with PBS Friday, the once and possibly future presidential candidate warned that the 2022 elections were shaping up to be a showdown between “authoritarianism” and “democracy,” and for the first time in Hillary Clinton’s long and distinguished political career, she is actually quite likely to be correct. As you might expect, however, she is only right by accident, and in a way that is diametrically opposite to what she intended.
-Robert Spencer, Frontpage Mag, May 2022

So what’s a good lefty to do? Ask Facebook and Twitter to deplatform the sky? Fact check the winter? Denounce the disinformation on the slopes? Ask the UN to condemn the snowpack?
-David Greenfield, commenting on the record snowfalls and low temperatures in Colorado Global Warming Was Going to Destroy Skiing, Then the Snow Fell, Frontpage Mag, May 2022.

I just saw 2000Mules. It’s a clear presentation of voter fraud, ballot harvesting, illegal participation in our election by non-profits. The proof is indisputable. Truthful and fact driven. 100% verified. Four million minutes of government video, geo-locations, pings. Best documentary explaining how we were denied the real President of the United Stated and the Dems pushed a fake, demented, puppet on the American people.
-Blogger America the Beautiful, May, 2022.

Investigators used geo-tracking from cellphones to identify tens of thousands of ballot traffickers in the 2020 battleground states. The ballot traffickers identified all stopped at Democrat affiliated offices during the routes — Stacey Abrams may want to find new work.
- Jim Hoft, Gateway Pundit, on one of the conclusions from the documentary 2000 Mules.

… whenever the left feels they have lost control of an institution, they try to destroy it.
- John Daniel Davidson, The Federalist

After careful and cautious consideration, I can now say Elon Musk is the closest thing to John Galt in our lifetime.
-Conservative Tree House, Blogger Sundance, May, 2022.

This was collusion led by 51 former pillars in the intelligence community and backed by words and actions of a politically motivated DOJ and FBI. I want this lawsuit to reveal that collusion and more importantly, who gave the marching orders.
- Computer repairman, Mac Isaac, who blew the whistle on Hunter Biden’s laptop — after filing a multi-million-dollar defamation suit Tuesday against Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, CNN, The Daily Beast and Politico, saying they falsely accused him of peddling Russian disinformation. The former shop owner decided to fight back after losing his business and being harassed for 18 months by Big Tech, the media and Delaware locals in President Biden’s home state [adapted from NY Post, May, 2022].

Roe has had a negative impact on both the Supreme Court and on American politics. It set the precedent for regarding the Constitution not a a document, but as a distillation of liberal opinion. Thus we have seen a series of bogus “constitutional rights” created out of whole cloth, and the Court has come to be regarded as a political body, a kind of super-legislature.
-John Hinderaker, Powerline, May 3, 2022.

The alleged leak of the opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is nothing short of breathtaking. It would constitute one of the greatest breaches of security in the history of the Court.
-Jonathon Turley, May 3, 2022.

It shattered centuries of tradition. It violated every possible ethical rule. And yet at that moment, the president of the United States could not bring himself to stand against this mob. It's not just that you have a collapse of leadership. It's that we are unmoored as a nation from these foundational principles that are supposed to guide us.
-Jonathan Turley. May 2022.

Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.
- from the leak of Justice Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs (overturning Roe), May 3, 2022.

If a news report on the children’s books in elementary school libraries has to blur out some of the images as too graphic to air, they should not be in elementary school libraries. If adult school board members are offended when they hear explicit passages from these books read aloud to them, these materials should not be read to kindergartners in the classroom. If you cannot walk up to a five-year-old in a public park and show them “cartoons” from or read passages of public school books depicting children their age engaging in oral sex, you cannot “teach” about it in the classroom. Kiddie porn is kiddie porn. And it has no place in the K-3rd grade classroom (or any classroom, for that matter).
-Blogger "Fuzzy Slippers (Legal Insurrection .com)," on Disney being upset that Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a law banning the age-inappropriate teaching—in the public school classroom—of things like gay oral sex to five- to nine-year-olds.

I truly don’t have words for how much I abhor this utterly loathsome dinner and the vast majority of its participants.
- Mollie Hemmingway tweet during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (love fest for Democrat White House press corps), May 2022.

The Democrats have become a party of perpetually miserable people.
-Eddie Scarry, NY Post, Apr 2022.

There’s only so much you can sweep under the rug, and even if you cover it, the stench of the crap fills the room. It’s unavoidable. Joe Biden and his son did dirty deals. The emails shine a light on this web of deceit and corruption. Recently, we learned that Modest Joe is rolling in it with $5.2 million in undisclosed income. So many questions will rope in Hunter Biden and eventually lead once again to the emails on his laptop and the deals that were reportedly hashed out. You can’t keep this game up forever, guys.
-Matt Vespa, Townhall, Apr, 2022.

You can just call me the Mary Poppins of disinformation
- President Joe Biden’s new disinformation chief Nina Jankowicz sealing Biden's place as the worst President ever, Apr, 2022.

Has there been a judicial ruling that yielded so much rejoicing nationwide as Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle’s on Monday vacating the federal mask mandate in public transportation? It wasn’t the end of Prohibition, but we’ll bet there was some drinking in more than a few places.
- WS Journal Editorial, April 20, 2022.

I guess it is no surprise that liberals are unconcerned about federal agencies issuing orders that infringe on the liberties of millions of Americans without either 1) having express statutory authority from Congress, or 2) following proper statutory procedures. The idea that government agencies should be able to simply issue orders and rules that liberals think represent good ideas, without constraint, is perhaps the essence of modern liberalism.
- Powerline's John Hinderaker after a federal judge ruled the CDC has no authority to force a mask mandate on the public, Apr 2022.

We have a 79-year-old in the White House who, on any given day, thinks that his VP is his wife, or that his wife is his sister and his sister is the First Lady, or that Michelle Obama is the vice president or that Barack Obama is Donald Trump and vice versa.
- New York Post's Maureen Callahan

... progressivism is a criminal mentality. By progressivism, I mean every political philosophy that regards itself as “revolutionary,” or “transformative,” that describes itself as socialist, communist, fascist or jihadist – or that believes “the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice.” The belief that history is marching towards justice is a cult ideology refuted by the mass genocides of the modern era, which were carried out by Marxists and Nazis. The belief that the world is marching towards justice, that progressives are “on the right side of history” is a delusion that will justify any atrocity and already has.
-David Horowitz

In the vast library of socialist books, there’s not a single volume on how to create wealth, only how to take and “redistribute” it.
-David Horowitz

The calls for the impeachment of Justice Thomas are ludicrous but there is nothing laughable about the impeachment addiction fueling this frenzy. People of good faith can disagree on the need of Thomas to recuse himself from certain Commission-related cases. However, impeaching Thomas based on these grounds would expose all justices to the threat of politically motivated impeachments as majorities shift in Congress. That is precisely what the Framers sought to avoid under our Constitution.
-Jonathan Turley

Joe Biden’s most genius political move in 2020, after deciding to “campaign” from his basement to conceal the obvious, was naming Kamala Harris as a running mate. Even Slow Joe could figure out that with Harris a heartbeat away from the presidency, everyone would think three times before trying to remove him from office.
Steve Hayward, Powerline, Mar, 2022.

Every group that wants to pack the court, that believes this court is a bunch of right-wing nuts who are going to destroy America, that considered the Constitution trash, all wanted you picked
-Sen. Lindsey Graham to Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson during Senate confirmation hearings. Mar, 2022.

Never forget that the mainstream media is full of s**t.
They lie, perpetually, about everything. They work for the State and their job is to advance the goal the State wants at that exact moment in time.
-Candace Owens, on the NY Times.

This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents, and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. . . . The participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream—a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.
Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.
-Molly Ball’s infamous Time magazine essay, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.”

... in the central Illinois town of Decatur, for 74 years starting in 1900 the beloved minor-league baseball team was known as the Commies. The name was emblazoned across the front of their jerseys, and that’s how the local newspapers and fans referred to them.
-Bob Greene op ed commenting on the nickname for the now defunct minor league baseball team "The Commodores" (Decatur was named in honor of Commodore Stephen Decatur, an early U.S. Navy hero) in preparation for the Washington Commodore football team inevitable problems.

Biden’s policies are the polar opposite of Trump’s policies both conceptually and substantively. Biden’s policies represent a reinstatement and escalation of Barack Obama’s policies for Iran and the wider Middle East. In contrast to Trump, Obama, Biden and their advisors believe that the U.S.’s Middle Eastern allies – Israel and the Sunni Arab Gulf states – maliciously worked for decades to entangle the United States in the wars of the Middle East. To disentangle America from the region and its pernicious “allies” the Obama-Biden doctrine posits the U.S. must realign itself away from its allies and weaken them, and towards Iran, which it must empower.
- Caroline Glick, Mar 2022.

... in the face of [DuckDuckGo CEO] Weinberg’s middle finger to his base it seems obvious that we all need to abandon the search engine in favor of others. I personally use Brave Browser.
-Hailey Sanibel, March 10, 2022 after DuckDuckGo announced via their CEO’s Twitter feed that the company would begin engaging in the censorship of articles or sites that promote skepticism at the corporate media’s approved narrative.

First it was transitory, then ‘inflation is good.’ Then we went to ‘corporate greed.’ Now we’re at Putin.”
- Rick Santelli on the Biden administration’s ever-evolving excuses on inflation., Mar 2022.

...are you guys just going to start blaming Putin for everything until the midterms?
-Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy question to White House press secretary Jen Psaki, Mar 2022.

Jussie Smollett Will Be Forced To Share A Jail Cell With His Attacker
-Babylon Bee humor after Smollett sentence to jail time.

... there’s one key minority group that disagrees – and that’s the leftists who are currently running the federal government and the blue states.
-Blogger Neo after Rasmussen found that on one key election reform issue, voter identification, support remains high and that requiring photo ID to vote is a reasonable measure to protect the integrity of elections. despite complaints from some Democrats, including the president, that reforms like ID requirements are racist, even majorities of minorities don’t think so.

Covid metrics are, from a blue-state perspective, depressingly low when even the New York Times has given up on frontpage crisis-mongering. For weeks, the Times has buried its Covid stories deep in the paper, if it prints them at all, because there is only good news to report. There are 25 people per day hospitalized with or from Covid in New York City, out of a pre-pandemic population of 8.5 million. That is essentially zero risk. Deaths with or from Covid are too negligible to mention.
-Heather Mac Donald, City Journal, Mar 2022.

Vladimir Putin was counting on being able to split up the United States. Look, how would you feel if you saw crowds storm and break down the doors of the British Parliament and kill five cops, injure 145 — or the German Bundestag or the Italian Parliament?”
— President Biden, March 2, 2022, blaming the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the peaceful protests of the 2020 election steal on Jan 6 (and no cops were killed)

Supposing you had been watching the last game of the season on your wall-sized 4K TV. As the U.S. White Oppressors straggled off the field after a disastrous 0 and 10 season what would you think about Coach Biden?
You would groan: this guy is as dumb as a post.
But obviously, it's not just Biden. It was the Dem hierarchs that flipped the switch for Biden in March 2020 when it looked like Bernie Sanders might win the nomination; it was Chuck and Nancy that decided to give the far-left agenda a run in Congress in 2021.
Christopher Chantrill on Biden's State of the Union Address, American Thinker, Mar 2022.

Two top FDA officials, including the agency’s vaccine-center head, quit over White House pressure to authorize boosters for the young.
But after the FDA and CDC rammed through the recommendation, they made sure the public wouldn’t see the real-world data. Despite repeated pleas to release all its data, the CDC only posted stats on boosters in people over age 50.
What have they been hiding?
-Dr. Marty Makary, NY Post, Feb 28, 2022

If you want to know what power looks like, watch a man safely, even smugly, do interviews for decades, without ever worrying whether he will be asked the questions he doesn’t want to answer.
- Monica Lewinsky, talking about Bill Clinton, in 2018.

Guest 1:The upper class should be for you and the lower classes should be against you. But it is the upper class that is most violent against you. How do you explain that?"
Guest 2:You don't understand the class structure of American society, or you would not ask such a question. In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists.
Whittaker Chambers quoting house guests - from Witness, 1952

I need ammunition, not a ride
-Ukrainian President Zelensky declining a US evacuation offer

Vladimir Putin doesn’t want me to be President. He doesn’t want me to be our nominee. If you’re wondering why — it’s because I’m the only person in this field who’s ever gone toe-to-toe with him.
- Joe Biden BS 2 years before Russia invaded Ukraine.

If you move against Ukraine while I’m president,” Trump told the Russian leader, “I will hit Moscow.” Putin scoffed, “No way,” leading Trump to say, “All those beautiful golden turrets will be blown up.”
- NY Post source on how Trump kept Russia quiet.

I’d rather die on my feet, than live on my knees.
-Patrick Davis, formerly operations manager for CNN for 25 years, now the Executive Producer for Project Veritas when a friend asked why he would leave the “comforts” of retirement to align himself with Project Veritas. Feb, 2022.

If you took the worst five presidencies together, it would not be equal to what’s happening to this country.
- Donald Trump on Biden, Feb 2022.

One critic of this naïve statement went so far as to suggest a new flavor for the occasion: "Appease Mint."
-Jonathan Schanzer and Richard Goldberg commenting on Ben & Jerry's Tweet urging Biden not to send troops to eastern Europe to deter a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Feb, 2022.

This is somewhat like sending a kid with a squirt gun to try to extinguish a burning building, only perhaps more futile.
-Powerline's John Hinderaker, after Joe Biden has dispatched Kamala Harris to deal with the Ukraine crisis. Feb 22, 2022.

This Pulitzer Prize makes a mockery of the idea that journalism speaks truth to power, as it shows how the press was manipulated by the powerful. “Our republic and its press will rise or fall together,” Joseph Pulitzer once said. For the sake of both, rescind this award given in his name.
-NY Post Editorial on the Russiagate’ Pulitzer of the NY Times and Washington Post, Feb 2022.

SO WE KNOW WHO DONATED TO THE CANADIAN TRUCKERS, BUT NOT WHO GHISLAINE MAXWELL’S CUSTOMERS WERE.
Just saying.
-Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit.com, Feb, 2022

But this is not a fake scandal. Durham has potentially uncovered the most destructive political assassination attempt since Kennedy.
-Peter Van Buren, on the Russian hoax.

At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.
― P.J. O'Rourke, 2017

if you’re right that no illegal aliens will get $$ under this bill...WHY ARE YOU AND EVERY DEM OPPOSING MY AMENDMENT TO DO JUST THAT?”
- Ted Cruz after Sen. Dick Durban and Rep AOC accused Cruz of lying as the Dems claimed no illegals got stimulus checks. The Dems were lying of course.

...the details emerging in the case are filling in gaps on how the Clinton Campaign’s funded and directed the development of the now debunked narrative of a conspiracy between Russian and the Trump campaign. What is also notable in the filing is the extent to which the Clinton campaign used lawyers to carry out this work, including hiding its funding while denying connections to the work of figures like Christopher Steele.
There is no way t[for the media] cover this story without many admitting that it facilitated a false narrative created by the Clinton campaign, including attacking those who suggested that the Clinton campaign would ever engage in such disreputable conduct.
-Criminal Law Professor, Jonathon Turley on the Durham investigation. Feb 2022.

These tired and stale talking points are just noise that caused normal people to either shrug, change channels, or simply take some Advil and move on with their day.
-Mike Vespa, Townhall, on the Democrats calling ballot integrity and voter ID racist or Jim Crow 2.0. Feb, 2022.

History teaches us that if Dr. Fauci tells us something is getting better–, we’re screwed. You may remember that on January 21, 2020, Fauci told the press, “I think the risk is very low right now for the United States.” Fauci explained that we had “14 days to slow the spread less than two months later.” On 2/17/22, we are 703 days later, America is still trying to slow the spread? . Remember how he’s flip-flopped on masks? When he said no masks, then masks, two masks, and then wear masks again? This guy flip-flops daily —he doesn’t follow the science. He follows who will put him on television.
- Jeff Dunetz, The Lid, Feb, 2022

... in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2, the CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here. A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other virus.
Although the double CGG is suppressed naturally, the opposite is true in laboratory work. The insertion sequence of choice is the double CGG. That’s because it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it. An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.
...
The presence of the double CGG sequence is strong evidence of gene splicing, and the absence of diversity in the public outbreak suggests gain-of-function acceleration. The scientific evidence points to the conclusion that the virus was developed in a laboratory.
- Steven Quay and Richard Muller, The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak, WSJ Opinion, June 6, 2021.

Many of the things that we thought of as misinformation just a short while ago are now accepted as fact. ... If you said, 'I don't think cloth masks work,' you would be banned from social media. Now that's openly and repeatedly stated on CNN. If you said, 'I think it's possible that COVID-19 came from a lab,' you'd be banned from many social media platforms. Now that's on the cover of Newsweek.
-Joe Rogan, Feb 2022.

The Media Research Center found that ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts alone spent a whopping 2,634 minutes covering the investigations into alleged Russia collusion through July 20, 2019. "That’s nearly one-fifth (19.5%) of all of these broadcasts’ Trump coverage, a huge shadow on his presidency,"
-Brian Flood , Joseph A. Wulfsohn, Fox News quoting analyst Rich Noyes

I mean, you will forgive me if I want to say more than just an emphatic 'No' to that answer, because I find that totally absurd
- Jake Sullivan, senior adviser to Clinton's 2016 campaign likely perjuring himself when asked "Are you aware of any collusion, coordination, or conspiracy by yourself or by any other members of the campaign that you were working with to procure fake Russian information to harm Donald Trump?" in sworn testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, Dec '17.

So there you have it.
Russiagate, the collective delusion that Donald Trump was secretly a Russian agent aided and abetted by the Kremlin, the topic of uncountable inches of Washington Post and New York Times copy and the entire prime-time lineup of MSNBC, was a dirty trick by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Not just part of it. All of it. One of the most diabolical, successful misinformation campaigns ever concocted.
-NY Post editorial, Feb 14, 2022.

How is John Durham going to reveal everything that is possible about the deep state Trump targeting operation, and simultaneously handle the involvement of Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann and the Special Counsel team who were specifically appointed to cover it up?
-Blogger Sundance.

The latest pleading from Special Counsel Robert Durham provides indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia. This is a scandal far greater in scope and magnitude than Watergate and those who were involved in and knew about this spying operation should be subject to criminal prosecution. In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death. In addition, reparations should be paid to those in our country who have been damaged by this.
-Pres. Donald Trump, Feb 12, 2022.

Medical science didn’t change, the political science did’
-Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis after some Democrat Governors lifted School mask mandates.

Avenatti: Didn’t you tell the New York Times that watching me work was like watching the Sistine Chapel painted?

Stormy Daniels: That’s what you told me to say.

Knee slapper testimony in the trial of Michael Avenatti, later convicted on charges of embezzling $300,000 of the advance paid to his client Stormy Daniels for her 2018 memoir Full Disclosure.

Coercing people into publicly stating their pronouns in the name of “inclusion” is a Trojan horse that empowers gender ideology and expands its reach. It is the thin end of the gender activists’ wedge designed to normalize their worldview. Participating in pronoun rituals makes you complicit in gender ideology’s regressive belief system, thereby legitimizing it. Far from an innocuous act signaling support for inclusion, it serves as an implicit endorsement of gender ideology and all of its radical tenets.
The only proper response to the question “What are your pronouns?” is to reject the premise and refuse to answer.
-Colin Wright

Seems like we're on a path where we're going to have two of everything, depending on one's political ideology: segregated websites, financial systems, even charitable giving, the result of systematically banning non-liberals. Seems like that leads to a bad and dark place.
-Glenn Greenwald tweet on GoFundMe shutting down the Canadian Trucker protest account. Feb 4, 2022.

The statement is utter bullsh** down to its core. GoFundMe is doing this because all of the big tech companies are acting as arms of progressive administrations to enforce their whims. We see it on YouTube, Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, everywhere. The Freedom Convoy is embarrassing Trudeau and shaking things up in Canadian politics. That makes them a threat. There is neither violence nor credible threats of violence associated with the Freedom Convoy, but we can’t have mere proles standing up to a fascist darling, can we?
I suppose we should have anticipated this. After all, GoFundMe deactivated the account, raising money for Kyle Rittenhouse’s legal defense while leaving in place the funding effort to bail out BLM rioters. They have an active fundraising page for Gaige “Lefty” Grosskreutz, a felon who brandished a firearm at Rittenhouse. Don’t use these people. Ever. Don’t contribute to fundraisers on their site and let the organizers know why.
- Red State blogger, streiff on GoFundMe shutting down the Canadian Trucker protest account, Feb 2022.

To understand the political con that is the Democrats’ “voting rights” push, look at the bait-and-switch that preceded it. Eric Holder this week cemented his party’s ruthless and partisan gerrymandering victory over Republicans—all in the name of “democracy.”
The left is at full pitch on its voting “reform” campaign—accusing Republican states of “rigging” elections with laws to suppress the minority vote. They insist Democrats’ proposed federal takeover of state elections is the only thing that will save the country, the Constitution, justice and the cosmos. They claim the stakes are so high that it is necessary to blow up the Senate filibuster and strip all 50 states of their longtime power to set election rules. They also declare anyone who isn’t on board a racist.
-Kim Strassel, Wall St Journal Op Ed, Feb, 2022.

A working-class revolution led by the working class is the left’s worst nightmare because the working class doesn’t want what the left wants. The working class wants jobs, a stable economy, safe streets, low inflation, schools that teach things and a conservative, non-adventurous foreign policy that won’t get a lot of working-class people killed. It’s not excited about gender fluidity, critical race theory, “modern monetary theory,” foreign adventures and defunding police.
Worse yet, a huge part of the lefty self-image revolves around feeling superior to the working class and openly expressing disdain for it. One need spend only a few minutes tuning into left media like NPR, CNN or MSNBC to hear the disdain for working-class Americans, inhabitants of “flyover country,” people who live in the middle of nowhere”
- Glenn Reynolds, New York Post, Feb, 2022.

Democrats have become a parody of themselves, just making rules to make rules because it makes you feel like you’re a better person. The Party of FDR and JFK is Turning Into the Party of LOL and WTF.
Members of Congress tweeting things like cancel rent, cancel mortgage, and no more policing or incarceration. Declaring that capitalism is slavery, canceling Lincoln and Dr. Seuss. Teaching children they’re oppressors, and math is racist. Making Mr. Potato head gender-neutral, and now an emoji for pregnant men. Really. I’m not making it up. California just passed a law, requiring large retailers to have a non-gendered toy section. A non-gendered toy section? Isn’t Ken enough? We need a law for that? You have to inject yourselves into everything? From where you can throw a Frisbee to who can braid hair?
-Bill Maher

The migrants would be put into towns such as Block Island, Rhode Island; Greenwich, Connecticut; Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts; Governors Island, New York; Rehoboth Beach, Delaware; Nantucket, Massachusetts; Newport, Rhode Island; Scarsdale, New York; Palo Alto, California; Yountville, California; St. Helena, California; or North Hero, Vermont.
- TN State Rep. Bruce Griffey selling his bill to counter the Biden administration quietly moving thousands of illegals to various states, including Tennessee, by putting them on planes and buses and transporting them in the middle of the night.

The leftist mania for mask and vaccine mandates is rooted ultimately in the paternalistic zero-risk mentality the left has been promoting relentlessly for 50 years or more, on everything from nuclear power to food additives. These kind of people will accept nothing less than a zero-risk policy from the government, which means masks and mandates forever. This means the Biden Administration can’t risk declaring COVID to be over enough to return to normal life—they would risk angering a large portion of the Democratic Party base.
- Prof. Steven Hayward, Powerlineblog.com

The wolves are gonna find out that they're now sheep, and they're the ones who—in fact, I think—face a real risk of jail for the kind of laws they're breaking.
- former Speaker Newt Gingrich on what will happen to the January 6 committee if Republicans take control of Congress in 2022.

We are well past the emergency phase of this pandemic, and it should be well-known by now that wearing cloth face coverings or surgical masks, universal or otherwise, has a very minor role to play. . . . It is time to stop overselling their efficacy and unrealistic expectations about their ability to end the pandemic.”
- Michael Osterholm, University of Minnesota researcher.

There's always this wisdom of crowds that works up to a certain point and then transitions into a madness of crowds
-Peter Thiel

‘If there is risk, there must be choice.’
- Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of mRNA technology used in COVID vaccines, speaking to an anti-vax protest gathering at the Lincoln Memorial, Jan, 2022.

90% of everything is crap, 90% of music is crap.” The same is true of “paintings, writing, TV shows and movies ... we have a very small number of people who know what to do. And we have a much larger number of people typically laboring under some set of delusions—generating crap.
- Marc Andreessen, general partner of Andreessen Horowitz explaining why "Sturgeon’s law" applies to venture funds and start-ups.

An age of magical thinking persuades itself to embrace many inversions of the truth—one of them being the idea that the criminal is the victim.
- Lance Morrow, on the Soros prosecutors in Democrat-ruled cities across the country refusing to prosecute minority criminals—almost no matter their crime - from his Wall Street Journal opinion piece, “How Minnesota Went from Tom Sawyer to Huck Finn

All of a sudden Dems are totally cool with questioning the 2022 election
-Dan Bongino, Fox News, Jan 2022.

Wuhan
-Tweet in response to Delta Airlines question, "Name a city which has changed your life."

Wearing face coverings may have physical side effects and impair face identification, verbal and non-verbal communication between teacher and learner. This means there are downsides to face coverings for pupils and students, including detrimental impacts on communication in the classroom.
-From a U.K. government commissioned report on the efficacy of masks in school settings, which failed to identify any clear evidence in favor of this practice.

The Biden administration’s strategy is to raise the cost of fossil fuels high enough to justify the high cost of green energy. Thus the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline and drilling rights on public lands.
-Vern Zander letter to the Wall St Journal editor on the left's hidden agenda.

... we find ourselves coming back to the same results with the Los Angeles County criminal justice system. Criminals are caught and arrested, turned over to local authorities for booking, arraigned before the local courts, charges are reduced to a misdemeanor or petty offense, and the criminal is released after paying a nominal fine. These individuals are generally caught and released back onto the streets in less than twenty-four hours. Even with all the arrests made, the no-cash bail policy and extended timeframe for suspects to appear in court is causing re-victimization to UP by these same criminals. In fact, criminals boast to our officers that charges will be pled down to simple trespassing - which bears no serious consequence. Without any judicial deterrence or consequence, it is no surprise that over the past year UP has witnessed the significant increase in criminal rail theft described above.
Union Pacific railroad complaining directly and bluntly to LA’s soft-on-crime district attorney George Gascon, who does nothing about of widespread thievery from freight trains.

Biden came to office through concerted, non-stop electoral legerdemain. Everyone knows this, and more and more people are coming to admit it. There are still scattered Twitter dwarfs, like Japanese soldiers decades after 1945, skirling about the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. But what’s gradually coming into focus is the awful truth that the real “Big Lie” was that Joe Biden won the election fair and square. That narrative is unraveling strand by strand. The outstanding question is whether the country will be able to survive three more years of a deep state conspiracy presided over by an angry, incompetent, and increasingly senile puppet.
- Roger Kimball, Am. Greatness, Jan 2022.

Twelve months ago, this president called on Americans to “join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature.” Yesterday, he shouted that if you disagree with him, you’re George Wallace. If you don’t pass the laws he wants, you’re Bull Connor. And if you oppose giving Democrats untrammeled one-party control of the country, well, you’re Jefferson Davis.
How profoundly unpresidential.
I have known, liked and personally respected Joe Biden for many years. I did not recognize the man at that podium yesterday.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) delivered these remarks Wednesday on the Senate floor on President Biden’s Tuesday speech in Georgia (the worst speech by a President in history). Jan 2022.

It is time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day. Every day it is time for us to do agree, that there are things and tools that are available to us to slow this thing down.
- VP Kamala Harris when asked if it is time for the Biden team to consider a new COVID strategy. According to blogger Sundance, Harris appears to be training herself to challenge Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. No one can defeat him in linguistic battles using random words. and he holds the modern record for circle talking gibberish and concentric word assemblies to nothingness.

Dear Bureau of Prisons: Please get Jeffrey Epstein to a super Max prison pronto, or the people who want him dead will make sure we never know the truth. ACT NOW!
-Ann Coulter Tweet on July 25, 2019 (Epstein found dead in his cell on Aug. 10, 2019)

Biden asked, “Do you want to be the side of the side of Dr. King or George Wallace?”
History does not record that Dr. King was an advocate for voter fraud, and it is Biden, not any Republican now serving in office, who was on the side of fellow Democrat George Wallace.
-Powerline's John Hinderaker commenting on Biden's becoming a “woke” warrior who tries to portray himself as a civil rights activist in order to pass federal voter fraud legislation.

We’ve seen the footage of Capitol Police officers just stepping aside and allowing the protesters into the building, the question is, why? There’s no legitimate reason for such a security breach. It’s unthinkable that a similar breach would ever happen at the White House, and if it did there would be outrage from the left; and rightfully so. Therefore, why is there such a lack of attention on the failures of the Capitol Police, and more importantly, those who control them?
It’s hard to imagine that the failed security on 1/6 wasn’t at least somewhat intentional. The ease with which the protesters entered, and the ensuing narrative that ignored those failures, makes it fairly obvious: Certain people in power wanted 1/6 to happen for political purposes, and in fact helped facilitate the security failure.
-PF Whalen and Parker Beauregard of The Blue State Conservative on Jan 6 events.

If you cheapen the value of voting, and you have people losing faith in the process, you’ll lose people on Election Day.
-New Hampshire (Democrat) Sec. of State Bill Gardner on his party's push to federalize election law allowing late mail-in ballots and no checks on citizenship.

Freddie deBoer, the self-proclaimed Marxist author and blogger, recently described the practice of writers warning “so lustily” and “so vividly” about a dreaded outcome that “it’s abundantly clear that a deep part of them wants it to happen.” .... he mentions liberals who once constantly imagined that President Trump “was about to dissolve Congress and declare himself emperor.”
In the cavalcade of Jan. 6 remembrances-cum-worry porn, NPR’s “Morning Edition” took the trophy, being the first out of the gate with a lengthy report on experts who outbid each other in predicting Donald Trump’s election “big lie” will lead to a civil war or coup d’état in 2024. This formula you now have seen everywhere, including in the speech of Joe Biden.
- Wall St. Journal’s Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. , Jan 7, 2022

Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for zyklon b, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental missiles , military space platforms and nuclear weapons? If memory serves it was not the Vatican.
- David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions

The answer to the question of why the entire system of institutions and agencies need to eliminate Donald Trump is actually answered by first standing back and remembering where things were before Trump.   The time when political subjects were not the all-consuming part of everyday discussion.
Before Donald Trump stepped into the political arena, the same institutions and agencies who attack him now were successfully able to manipulate public perceptions.  It was all a grand pantomime, a ruse, a Potemkin village filled with jesters, distractions and carefully coordinated illusions of false choice.
When Donald Trump stepped into politics his platform was true, simple, pragmatic and pure.  He never hid the objective; there was no attempt to pretend to be something or hold some opinion/outlook.
- Blogger Sundance, Jan 6, 2022

Most of the claims for deaths being filed are not classified as COVID-19 deaths
- Insurance company OneAmerica CEO Scott Davison on the US death rates up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people.

Why can’t young men find suitable brides?
You know why. Fifty years of feminism has had its way with two generations of American women, with predictable results. Throw in the eager pharmaceutical market, social celebration of “sex work,” the pornification of entertainment, successful destruction of “devoted wife” and “loving mother” as attractive careers for girls, and finally, the dismantling of “human female” as a real and separate gender—and well, here we are.
-Peachy Kennan, Operation: Marriage Material, The American Mind, Oct 2021.

If I had to pick one word to describe 2021 and the epidemic, it would be disappointing. We all hoped and expected to be done with this by now. It isn’t the vaccines that are the most disappointing aspect, they actually are performing better than I might have anticipated. It is the persistent stupidity and terrorism of so many political and health leaders. Engaging in the same dumb and futile efforts to suppress a respiratory virus–-masking, distancing, closing schools and businesses, telling people to stay home, test incessantly to no real purpose and continuing the same despicable terror tactics to cow the population into submission. … Two Democrat governors have said very clearly that mask mandates are worthless and masks do nothing to stop the spread. I am shocked that they were not instantly struck down with lightening bolts for such heretical apostasy to the mask religion.
-Kevin Roche, healthy-skeptic.com, Dec 31, 2021

"END OF AN ERROR"
- NY Post front page on Bill de Blasio's last day as New York City mayor, December 31, 2021. (Accompanied with OpEd advice to his successor, Eric Adams: " ... In the face of almost any problem or decision, try to imagine what Mayor Putz would do and then do the opposite).

I will pay more taxes than any American in history ($11 billion this year). Don't spend it all at once ... oh wait you did already.
-Time Magazine's 2021 Person of the Year Elon Musk responding to Elizabeth Warren's taunt after she complained that Musk should "pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else."

Biden campaigning before the election:
" Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should not remain as President of the United States of America."
....and later ...
"I will shut down the virus, not the country."

Biden after the election and with deaths exceeding the Trump Administration:

" ... There is no federal solution. This gets solved at the state level.”
... and then days later...
"Last week, I rolled out a federal plan to tackle Omicron by adding vaccination and booster capacity, hospital equipment, staff, and more."

Frankly, one of them is our democracy. There is,​ I think, no question in the minds of people who are foreign policy experts that the year 2021 is not the year 2000​
-Vice President Kamala Harris' head shaking response to CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” host Margaret Brennan's question of what national security threat that keeps her up at night worrying. ​

Global warming? Who knows? Not me, for sure. But what I do know is that climate science is and has been in the hands of intellectual mediocrities and pious charlatans.
-David Belinski, Ricochet post, Aug, 2013.

...the first drink from the cup of science makes you an atheist, but at the bottom of the cup, God awaits
-Werner Heisenberg author of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

It’s not too harsh a judgment to say that this is a man who has risen to the top of American public life without a trace of accomplishment. When you’ve been in national politics for almost 50 years, you ought to have achieved something, if only by accident. But this journeyman politician, when he wasn’t getting almost all the big issues wrong, was largely a bystander. He is now a husk of a leader, a dangerously debilitated figure, who oscillates between displays of vacuous incoherence and weird, angry outbursts, like a confused old man at the wrong bus stop.
Meanwhile, a heartbeat and a spine-chilling cackle away from the presidency, is another living rebuke to the idea that government is virtuous and wise. Vice President Kamala Harris has demonstrated, evidently to the alarm of much of her own staff, that she is simply another of Mr. Biden’s many mistakes—perhaps the biggest one yet. It is a dismaying state of affairs that we must all pray nightly for the continued health of an inept president to avert the calamity of a worse one.
-WSJ's Gerald Baker, Dec. 2021.

Masks Are The Democrats' MAGA Hat
- Joe Rogan, Dec, 2021

Their tactics—whether used against politicians or average people—include relentless moral condescension, the messianism of mass protests, physical intimidation, social ostracism and demands that you simply shut up and give in.
People wondered what the White House thought it gained by putting out a statement Sunday afternoon that Mr. Manchin’s words were “at odds” with what he told President Biden days earlier, essentially calling the senator a liar. Impolitic as it might strike anyone in normal politics ... this ad hominem hammer is the way the left does politics. It’s the only thing they know how to do.
- Daniel Henninger, Wall St Journal after Sen Joe Manchin stayed firm and said no to the left's agenda, essentially killing it.

Congress doesn’t hide elephants in mouseholes
- Supreme Court Justice Scalia on statutory interpretations that constitute a significant policy change.

What Joe Manchin, who represents a population smaller than Brooklyn, has done to the rest of America, who wants to move forward, not backward, like his state, is horrible. He sold us out. He wants us all to be just like his state, West Virginia. Poor, illiterate and strung out.
- Bette Middler tweet after Sen. Manchin announced a no vote on Biden's "Build Back Better."

It’s hard to understand DOJ’s decision other than it was influenced by political considerations
- - Understatement of the year by Lee Gelernt, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union after Biden’s Justice Department withdrew from settlement negotiations to pay illegals $450,000 each for separation anxiety.

When you call your white donors, tell them to apologize for their racism, tell your white donors that because of the color of their skin they’re inherently racist and there’s no way to avoid being racist — I mean, this is a horrible thing. It’s a false thing. It’s a toxic allegation.
-Liz Wheeler on the Salvation Army losing donors after going Woke.

First of all, it’s not true. It’s also crazy. Why would they lie about weapons of mass destruction? If they were lying, they knew they would be exposed a week after our troops got in. So what was the sense of it? Nobody was lying. Seventeen intelligence agencies, something like that, thought Saddam was hiding them.
-Neoconservative Norman Podhoretz in a Wall St Journal interview on the claim that the Bush administration “lied” to justify an invasion of Iraq.

As Time magazine reported shortly after the 2020 election, a “cabal” — Time’s word — of “left-wing activists and business titans” worked to get rid of Trump. It pushed mail-in voting. It moved to block election-fraud suits brought by Trump and supporters. It employed social-media censorship to mute pro-Trump arguments and amplify anti-Trump arguments. It sponsored protests.
-Glenn Reynolds, Dec 2021

I’m 43, which I realize makes me very old to many of you. But not so long from now, you’ll wake up and be 43 yourselves. And when I look back on my life thus far, it occurs to me that the decisions of which I am most proud—the ones that strike like an unexpected kiss—are not the times when I obeyed the algorithm. They’re the times when I defied it and felt, for a moment, the magic and power of being alive. When I felt, even for an instant, the exquisite joy of not being anyone’s subject. When I had the unmistakable sense that I’ve existed for a purpose, that I stood the chance of leaving the world better than I found it. You don’t get any of that through lock-step career achievement and you certainly don’t get that by being the Left’s star pupil.
You feel that frisson when you choose a person to commit yourself to knowing full well that any marriage may fail; when you bring children into a world where there are no guarantees of their safety or success. When you summon the courage to fashion a life, something that will remain after you are gone. When you speak the truth publicly—with care and lucidity. And when you say to the world: you cannot buy me with flattery. Purchase my colleagues or classmates at bulk rate. I am not for sale.
-Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage (journalistic investigation into why so many teen girls are identifying as transgender altering their bodies) speaking to Princeton students about being a target of hate.

Government is simply the biggest corporation, with the sole monopoly on violence.
-Tesla's Elon Musk, Dec. 2021

To understand the modern world, perhaps the most important rule one needs to know is this: Everything the Left touches it ruins.
-Dennis Prager, Nov. 2021.

The Fake News Media cannot stand the fact that so many people in our Country know the truth, that the 2020 Election was rigged and stolen, yet almost every article written contains the words the “Big Lie” or “unsubstantiated facts,” etc., always trying to demean the real results. I am willing to challenge the heads of the various papers or even far left politicians, who have perpetuated the Real Big Lie, which is voter irregularities and fraud on a massive and determinative scale. This includes members of the highly partisan Unselect Committee of Democrats who refuse to delve into what caused the January 6th protest—it was the Fake Election results! While I am willing to do it, they will never agree because they cannot argue that facts in states including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, New Hampshire, and others such as New Mexico, where the Democrat Secretary of State changed the voting laws without legislative approval just prior to the Election, making it virtually impossible for the Republican presidential candidate to win. If anyone would like a public debate on the facts, not the fiction, please let me know. It will be a ratings bonanza for television!
-former President Donald Trump, Nov. 2021.

More Americans have died from COVID in 2021 than died in 2020, before there was a shot. There were 362,000 deaths from COVID last year. So far this year, there have been 414,000 deaths. Overall, the United States has the highest number of COVID deaths of any country on the planet by far. So we gave up everything to fight COVID – we gave up our economy, our culture, our health. We literally stopped educating our own children. We did all of this in order to lower COVID deaths. And yet COVID deaths went up anyway, and they went up dramatically.
So the obvious question is, how is this working? On the basis of the most simple numbers, it's not. In fact, it looks like the greatest public policy failure of all time.
-Tucker Carlson, Nov, 2021

To leftists and the prosecutors who did their bidding, Kyle Rittenhouse’s offense wasn’t any of the things he was charged with. He clearly had an unassailable defense to all of the charges against him. But that didn’t matter because Rittenhouse was guilty of something else — showing up armed at a leftist riot or, as the left called it, “vigilantism.” As the left and the prosecution see it, Rittenhouse never should have gone to Kenosha. Once there, he shouldn’t have defended property from the rioters. And having done that, he certainly shouldn’t have left the property and entered the street. Finally, Rittenhouse shouldn’t have been armed, of course. But America is still a free country. Rittenhouse had every right to come to Kenosha. He had the right to help protect property there from the mob, as well as to leave the property and enter street. The mob had no right to restrict his access. And finally Rittenhouse had the right to be armed. Indeed, the gun charge against him was so weak it never got to the jury.
- Paul Mirengoff, Powerline, after the jury acquittal, Nov, 2021.

There are only two trades where you can be wrong all the time and still keep your job: economics professor and newspaper columnist.
Krugman is both.
- Don Surber blogging about The NY Times economist Paul Krugman after he wrongly predicted a stock market crash when Trump was elected and Biden's inflation subsiding.

In this game, we can be confident, bordering on certain, that the Clinton Machine knows exactly “how far to go without going too far.” They don’t care about “the appearance of impropriety” any more than they care about impropriety itself. They’re happy to wipe their homebrew email servers with an industrial-strength data protection utility and then joke about doing it “with a cloth” when taxed with the tort, just so long as they stay one step ahead of the law. It all depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is, don’t you know, and what difference at this point does it make?
-Roger Kimball on the Russian hoax. As he says " ' the real fraud'-- is the collusion between the Hillary campaign and the FBI and our so-called intelligence sources, the assiduous circulation of lies, the withholding of exculpatory evidence in order to gain access to the inner workings of the Trump administration"

CNN and some of the other TV stations have become vigilantes. They’re the vigilantes, not Rittenhouse. They’re the ones who want to put not the thumb, but the elbow on the scale of justice. They want to influence the outcome of this case, and there are others who are threatening violence if there is anything but convictions in this case, as they threatened violence in previous cases and will in subsequent cases unless something is done about it.
He should be acquitted. The jury should not even be able to consider the attempted murder of the guy who would admitted on the witness stand he pointed a gun at him before was shot in the shoulder. That is a clear case of self-defense — no doubt about it — and it should never go to the jury.
-Prof. Alan Dershowitz, on the Kyle Rittenhouse trial after left wing threats to the judge and jury. Nov. 2021.

We begin any outline of the Durham investigation with the following disclaimer: How is John Durham going to reveal everything that is possible about the deep state Trump targeting operation, and simultaneously handle the involvement of Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann and the Special Counsel team who were specifically appointed to cover it up.
- Blogger Sundance of the Conservative Tree House.

The goal of the left is to create an environment in which its people are encouraged to be violent without consequences, while their victims are denied the right to respond.
-Law Professor and pundit, Glenn Reynolds on the Kyle Rittenhouse trial in progress.

I can find no record of President Obama or President Bill Clinton lending direct credence to the Russia collusion narrative and I doubt that’s because Messrs. Clinton and Obama are admirers of Donald Trump. But ex-presidents value their reputations. They may enjoy seeing Mr. Trump tripped up over false allegations but they leave it to their lickspittles to do the tripping.
We have a few still-reputable elites and functioning agencies of government as well: Robert Mueller and his team, whatever their disdain for Mr. Trump, did not fabricate evidence of collusion. Michael Horowitz, the Obama-appointed inspector general, has been unsparing in exposing the misdeeds of the Obama FBI. Tens of millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent to find the truths of 2016, and voters of both parties have cause to be angry: Mr. Trump’s because the FBI sought to destroy his presidency; Mrs. Clinton’s because FBI actions may have cost her the election.
But we still don’t have information about the Russian intelligence that may underlie it all, still locked up in the one inspector general’s report to be designated highly classified and hidden from the public, and about which our decadent press remains weirdly incurious.
- Wall St. Journal's Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. on the probable Russian intelligence on the Democrat Party which initiated the Russian hoax.

TV news used to be about informing people. Now it’s about manipulating us. Now it’s about socially engineering us to make us more green. Now its ambition is to be a ‘powerful tool of persuasion’ in order to transform viewers from the polluting pests we currently are into the eco-switched-on citizens of the future.
- Brendan O'Neil, Spiked, on broadcasters' Big Brother-style crusade to change the ‘attitudes and behaviours of citizens’, and reorder the minds of the TV-viewing masses documented in Sky's The Power of TV: Nudging Viewers to Decarbonise their Lifestyles.

He’s 78 years old and you can see it. You don’t need to be a physician to look at him and to look at his behavior and some of the other stuff, just the way he shuffles away, stares off into space.
I know what that job entails, both physically and mentally, and how demanding it is. And I can tell you right now, I’m 100% sure that Joe Biden is incapable of doing that job.
-Dr. Ronny Jackson, a former White House physician who served under former Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, on President Joe Biden's “age-related cognitive decline.” Nov 2021.

If 10 FBI agents showed up at dawn at the home of a NY Times reporter, handcuffed them, and confiscated iphones full of notes and source material, it would rightfully generate national outrage. But since it happened to James O'Keefe, we get crickets.
-Tom Bevan, Real Clear Politics on the predawn raid of Project Veritas' O'Keefe after the announced Department of Justice policy not “to obtain information from journalists about their sources.

They can't stand the censoriousness, they can't stand the diversity statements. They can't stand pretending to believe something that not only do they not believe, they just know it is false, but they can't do anything about it lest they receive accusations of bigotry or discrimination. They're desperate to get out. They can't stand the illiberalism. One fellow even said ‘I’m caught in an insane asylum, everybody’s gone crazy, I will work for half.
-former Portland State University professor, Peter Boghossian - founder of The University of Austin – committed to freedom of inquiry, freedom of conscience, and civil discourse on the hundreds of college professors pleading to join the new university just hours after it was announced Nov, 2021

Not true. ...when you vote, you are a citizen yourself. And there is not a situation where the voting rolls somehow are transferred over and people start investigating, etc. The sanctity of the vote is strictly confidential.
- President Obama encouraging illegals to vote......when posed the question if I vote - will Immigration know where I live? Will they come for my family and deport us? Nov. 2016

He’s smooth but pure demagogue
-Ronald Reagan on Joe Biden on hearing Biden's criticism of Reagan's "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech. June 15 1987, in his diaries.

It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so.
-Ronald Reagan

The Clinton dossier should go down as one of the biggest scandals in U.S. political history. Not just for the breadth of the con, but for the time it has taken to expose it.
-Wall St. Journal's Kimberley A. Strassel commenting after Durham arrested Igor Danchenko, exposing more of the hoax, Nov, 2021.

The primary reason the United States finds itself in its current predicament is the vast number of credulous and miseducated Americans who, over the past two decades, have blindly pledged their undying allegiance to the current iteration of the Democrat party. They do so because they have been willingly duped into believing that the political opposition, conservatives, and Republicans, are the personification of evil who are hellbent on transforming the nation into a dystopian nightmare.
The philosophical underpinnings of the Democrat party or the falsehoods its elected members regurgitate are immaterial to their voters, as long as this dire threat, as personified by Donald Trump in 2020, is vanquished by any and all means possible, including unconstrained voter fraud and manipulation.
-Steve McCann, American Thinker, Nov, 2021

The need for control is a reaction to fear. Anger is a very visible response from the leftists whenever their policies are rejected. The modern political left do not view rejection as a rebuke of their ideology, instead they view rejection as a need to push harder. From their perspective they need to reeducate their target; to force a change in thinking from incorrect thoughts to correct thoughts; and the only acceptable path is to push harder.
...
This approach is based on a cognitive inability to reflect or contemplate that their ideology is flawed. Because they put the emotion of their views as the motive for their effort, they are incapable of changing direction. From the perspective of the modern political left, if they were to change direction, they would be rejecting the foundation of their own personal value. They cannot do that. It’s not them that are wrong -ever- it’s you.
-Blogger Sundance at The Last Refuge after the Democrats took a beating in the 2021 local elections and instead of reversing course will double down. Nov. 2021

Way back in 2020, the media could bully Republicans into denouncing their own supporters. But this time Republicans won’t do it. Media scolds are baffled. Their powers no longer work. They try again.”
That’s why the media ignores the unconstitutional lockup of hundreds of Capitol protesters. That’s why the media never challenged the FBI clearing Hillary or Obama spying on Donald Trump. Public officials in America live in a gated community guarded by the media. The vulgar masses are at the gate. Mocking them. Baiting them.
-Don Surber, Nov, 2021 on why the media fears "Let’s Go Brandon..“

Democrats want a police state, but they don’t want police. It’s awkward.
-Instapundent's Glenn Reynolds, Oct, 2021.

That's not history, that's psychiatry.
- New York Mayor Ed Koch on rewriting history to make people feel good

Well, you know, when you have the chief reporter on the beat of COVID for “The New York Times” talking about how questioning or pursuing the question of the lab leak is racist, the world has gone mad. When you’re not able to say out loud and in public that there are differences between men and women, the world has gone mad. When we’re not allowed to acknowledge that rioting is rioting, and it is bad, and that silence is not violence, but violence is violence, the world has gone mad. When we’re not able to say that Hunter Biden’s laptop is a story worth pursuing, the world has gone mad. When in the name of progress, young school children, as young as kindergarten, are being separated in public schools because of their race, and that is called progress rather than segregation, the world has gone mad.
- Bari Weiss, (the former New York Times editor who resigned from her job at the NYTimes after not willing to be woke) after CNN's Brian Stelter asked her why she thinks the world is mad.

But you and I both know, and it would be delusional to claim otherwise, that touching your finger to an increasing number of subjects that have been deemed third-rail by the mainstream institutions and increasingly by some of the tech companies will lead to reputational damage. Perhaps you losing your job, your children sometimes being demonized as well, and so what happens is a kind of internal self-censorship. This is something that I saw over and over again when I was at The New York Times.
-Also Bari Weiss when Stelter calle Weiss provocative and said people can cover whatever they want.

Modern leftists and communist ideologues spend so much time inside their own tribal echo-chamber, they do not know what to do when confronted by intellectual arguments and truth. ... If you have strong skills at framing your arguments; and if you are a quick thinker that is able to see the false premise as it is being narrated; you can chew up these progressive communists in real time. They don’t talk about it, but they know that. This is also why the White House press corps is so carefully filtered. If you put on the armor of truth and confront pundits, spokespeople and leftist engineers with factual assertions – they stutter, stammer and stumble.
-Blogger Sundance, The Last Refuge, Oct, 2021.

Did we not include our pronouns because we are hateful and transphobic, scheming away at how to “oppress” a tiny group of people we rarely encounter? No. For me, it’s because I won’t be told what to do, especially by a microcosm of our society that is backed by communist thugs calling themselves Antifa. I also don’t believe in changing society for a tiny group of people, especially people who a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins claims have a mental illness. I’d prefer we, as a country, help them get treatment, especially knowing that up to half of trans people will attempt suicide.
- Kevin Downey, Jr. Oct 2021

Joe Biden’s illegal vaccine mandate a work! Suddenly, we’re short on pilots & air traffic controllers.
-Sen. Ted Cruz tweet.

I will happily share my Nobel Peace Prize to anyone who can slip “Let’s go Brandon” into President Biden’s teleprompter, because you know he’d read it.
-Steven Hayward, Powerline, Oct 2021.

Sesame Street for Democrats
- Late night's Greg Gutfeld on CBS’ Stephen Colbert show.

I have a new theory of the intolerance of the left: the academic left in particular are deeply insecure people—often professionally insecure, despite the fortifications of tenure, but also intellectually insecure, which is why leftists mostly refuse to debate anyone any more. In some cases it may be that the nihilism at the heart of the modern leftist outlook bursts through in personally demoralizing ways, as it ought to. It is also the case that when you reduce everything to a question of power, and your will-to-power doesn’t have much effect off campus (until recently), you increasingly become intolerant, vindictive, and censorious to any dissent. And the demonization and intimidation the left uses is a feature, not a bug. Naturally the left calls this “justice."
-Steven Hayward, Powerline, Oct., 2021.

"With this FBI thing, it just made me realize – what else are we supposed to do? Standing up to these people doesn't seem to matter. I mean, we have – all of us – we've been at these school board meetings, we've been voicing our opinions, we're writing articles, we're emailing teachers – we're doing all that stuff. And they don't care. I'm like the only thing left to do is to just peace out. ...it has to be us doing it together ... really send the message that you do not have the right to indoctrinate our children
-Florida mom, Quishia King speaking to a standing ovation after Attorney General Merrick Garland's memo that the FBI would investigate potential violence at school board meetings as a form of "domestic terrorism

Generalized anxiety disorder in particular, which is characterized by pervasive worry about nearly everything, has been considered one of the purest clinical manifestations of neuroticism. Hence, it is not surprising that since people with liberal views tend to be higher in neuroticism and lower in conscientiousness than conservatives, they would also be at more risk of mental problems, including anxiety disorders such as generalized anxiety disorder.
Scott A. McGreal MSc., "The Unexpected Relationship Between Ideology and Anxiety," Psychology Today, Oct, 2021.

Nellie Ohr (Ham Radio) went to work for Fusion-GPS in November of 2015 to build the Trump oppo-research file. Clinton, through Perkins Coie, hired Fusion-GPS in April 2016 to use the Trump oppo-research file. Fusion-GPS then contracted U.K. intelligence operative Chris Steele (May 2016). The Trump file was laundered through Christopher Steele into the FBI via Nellie Ohr’s husband in the DOJ National Security Division, Bruce Ohr. The FBI, via Peter Strzok, then used the Nellie/Steele Trump file, now called the “Steele Dossier” to get the October 2016 FISA surveillance warrant and justify the pre-existing investigation which was triggered to assist the Clinton political operatives. Trump unexpectedly won the election in November 2016, and everyone freaked out. That’s why they needed two things: (1) maintenance of the Trump/Russia collusion conspiracy; and (2) Robert Mueller/Andrew Weissmann (May 2017), to cover their tracks.
-Sundance, Conservative Tree House, summarizing the Russian Hoax on Trump

He is alcoholic, drug addict – kicked [out] of U.S. Army for cocaine, chasing low-class hookers, constantly needs money-liquidity problems and many more headaches”
- Uncovered eMail between Democrat donors on the negatives of giving money to Hunter Biden

I'll say it straight out loud. I do not think that Joe Biden "won the election." I don't think it is a question of "widespread fraud." I think the way the system works with the Electoral College, you only need actually to spread fraud in six key cities in six key states.
-Mark Steyn, Sept, 2021

The moral climate has been degraded as the left has taken over every single one of the powerful institutions in the country and is actively pushing people to lead a life of godlessness, barrenness, selfishness, gluttony, and addiction to outrage and dopamine.
All of a sudden, the conservative project is not a conservative one, so much as a counter-revolutionary one.
Unfortunately, anyone who dares take on the broken and corrupt political and media complex is teed up for absolute destruction. As lesser men cower in the face of the risk, the cost of standing up to the system becomes steeper and steeper. While you will not be locked up for saying the truth, yet, you will be demonized, stigmatized, deplatformed.
-Molly Hemingway, Sept, 2021.

Our world is truly turned on its Woodstein head when the press is part of the coverup, but here we are.
- Wall St. Journal Ed. on the media doing the Clinton campaign in perpetrating fake news on the Trump collusion myth.

then-candidate Joe Biden said he was “absolutely convinced” the military would oust Trump from the White House should he lose the election but refuse to concede.
This narrative, that Trump was planning to ‘steal the election’, was used by Democrats to organize a "well-funded cabal of powerful people" involved in “an extraordinary shadow effort” to “fortify” the 2020 election – according to the famous February 2021 feature in TIME magazine, penned by Pelosi’s biographer who was in on the effort.
-Nebojsa Malic, senior writer at RT, Sept 2021.

I blame the new owners of Rolling Stone, the Duke lacrosse team
- Iowahalk tweet after Rolling Stone had it's second major fake news story - to the effect that large numbers of Oklahomans were overdosing on Ivermectin.

Conservatives must finally recognize something that’s very depressing and very important: the conservative intellectual movement in America didn’t just fail. It aided and abetted the Left for money. The Left bought off the Right’s leading conservative intellectuals. And its think tanks. And its “flagship” magazines. This is not hyperbole or conjecture. I’ve got the receipts. Until conservatives understand the depth and breadth of that betrayal, they won’t have any chance of rebuilding that movement out of the ashes any time soon.
- Emerald Robinson

I advocate the overthrow of the current president of the f**king United States of America . . . I firmly support the Communist cause and its people.
-Sirhan Sirhan diary entry in 1968.

Is it really more plausible that the media are acting separately but identically or that they are colluding among themselves and with the Democrats and the Deep State? That their simultaneous and identical takes on everything are just due to similar viewpoints and not highly coordinated messages of the day?
- Tom Mayer, Am. Thinker, Aug 2021

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.
-Stein’s Law, named for economist Herbert Stein

What the Biden foreign-policy record shows, I think, is a man who behaves as if he knows much more than he does, who has far too much confidence in his own judgment in the face of contrary advice from experts. (My hunch is he’s overcompensating for an intellectual inferiority complex, which has manifested itself in his history of plagiarism, lying about his academic achievements, and other embellishments.)
- Peter Wahner, The Atlantic after the Afghanistan pull out

The Los Angeles Times reported last year that it cost $531,000 on average to build a single unit of housing for a homeless person.
-WS Journal editorial on the cost of housing crisis in California.

... the Black Lives Matter movement started gaining a lot of traction. That’s when the depression took over. You hear on the news every day that you’re not wanted. You love your country, but it hurts even more to see that the country they want you to support is trying to kill you.”
- American Olympian bronze metal winner sprinter Noah Lyles in an interview on NBC with Lester Holt

Biden pretended that he is being criticized for withdrawing from Afghanistan. This is a bad joke. I, for one, wrote years ago that we should wind up our involvement in that country. I did not suggest, however, that we should pull out precipitously, without evacuating civilians first, and suddenly deprive Afghan forces of air cover so that it would be difficult or impossible for them to fight effectively. Nor did I write that we should abandon our bases without even bothering to secure or at least destroy materiel that has now fallen into the hands of the Taliban. I did not advocate that we pull out our military personnel first and only worry about civilians later, nor did I suggest that we wait until the Taliban have encircled the Kabul airport before trying to get either Americans or friendly Afghans onto airplanes.
-Powerline's John Hinderaker, on Biden's speech following the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal.

I would recommend we melt down the voting machines and use them as prison bars.
- My Pillow owner Mike Lindell

Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.
― Joseph Stalin

‘We can’t tell you and we won’t tell you why we can’t tell you. My emails! And the message was clear: ‘We can do whatever we want. We can read your personal texts, we can read your personal emails, we can send veiled threats your way to brush you back if we don’t like your politics. We can do anything. We’re our own country, and there’s literally nothing you can do about it. We’re in charge, you are not.’ Orwellian does not begin to describe the experience.”
-Tucker Carlson, Jun 2021 after a heated telephone conversation with NSA officials following the NSA secretly reading Carlson's eMails.

Suddenly the world’s greatest power is in the hands of a slightly dazed-looking fellow who seems like he is always just waking up from heavy anesthesia.
-Columnist Kyle Smith, on Biden - June, 2021

Now that graduation season has ended and we won't be spoiling anyone's big day, let's talk about what higher education in America really is: a racket that sells you a very expensive ticket to the upper-middle class
-Bill Maher, taking a shot at the left's obsession with "free" education Jun 2021.

Obvious to all is that Biden is cognitively challenged, not the “sharp” alternative to the mad-tweeting Donald Trump. Biden needs a whisperer, someone to guide him through his foggy moments. He’s ended up though with someone who has taken him by the hand away from the middle and down the road to progressive disaster. Whether it’s Klain, First Lady Jill, or someone still unnamed is irrelevant. The point is the Biden presidency, if not his election, too, is a fraud, an exercise in stagecraft. Someone has his or her hand in his back and is projecting their voice so it will sound like his.
-Issues and Insights editorial, Jun 2021.

Here’s the deal: Trumpism isn’t a set of specific policies, but a willingness to fight, a refusal to accept the terms of political debate set by the Democrats and the media, and a realignment of the party toward blue-collar workers.
- Christian Whiton

The left’s narrative now rules the land in the form of “critical race theory,” “antiracism” and invidious variations. Feelings of rage and indignation have coalesced as dogma and settled science, embedded in the house rules of almost every institution in the country. One questions them on pain of expulsion, excommunication. The Age of Information is the era of hysterical story lines. Twenty-first-century technology supercharges feelings, not thoughts, and registers them instantaneously on hundreds of millions of screens and minds.
Such narratives serve neither history nor justice. The New York Times’s “1619 Project,” now taught in schools all over the country, is, in its essence, racist propaganda. Its story lines are instruments for the consolidation of political power. Marxists discovered long ago that class doesn’t work as a great divider in America. But race does work.
Race is the McGuffin—the pretext. Our moral generals are fighting the last war. The struggle to which Americans, of whatever race, should be paying attention is the one that has to do with freedom. It has to do with privacy, mind control, individual liberties—with totalitarian systems of surveillance and manipulation perfecting themselves in an alliance of big tech, big government, global corporations and artificial intelligence. Wokeness—a politics that manages to be both prissy and vicious, a totalitarian social design that flies the flag of everything good and nice—fronts for the real problem of the 21st century: a sinister autocracy just around the corner.
- Lance Morrow, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

The woke Left seeks a top-down erasure of America, engineered by the likes of LeBron James from his $40 million estate talking revolution to Oprah at her $90 million castle, as Mark Zuckerberg throws in $500 million here, and his colleagues $400 million there, and as the top executives of Coke, Target, and Delta Airlines believe their $17 million-a-year salaries make them experts on the crimes of non-diversity, exclusion, and inequity. Anytime revolutionaries at the outset of their enterprises seek exemption from the consequences of their own ideology, we know their plans will end badly for everyone else.
-Victor David Hanson, May, 2021

In the U.S. the Left must take power by deception. . . What else is socialism but Communism with the claws retracted?
-Whittaker Chambers, in 1954.

Block after block, you’ll see thousands of people who are barely alive. Some are alone; others are piled on top of one another, running into traffic, or standing slumped over, unconscious. They’ll be injecting or smoking heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamine in front of you, unaware or unfazed by your presence. Scabs cover their faces and bodies, limbs are swollen red and blue, often bloody and oozing pus. You’ll notice the garbage, rotting food, discarded drug detritus, and feces surrounding them. A shocking number are mere teenagers, but many are old or have aged well before their time.
-Erica Sandberg, City Journal, Apr 2021 on San Francisco.

“You think someone 80 is hopeless because they can’t use an iPhone? Maybe the one who is hopeless is the one who can’t stop using it.”
-Bill Maher, HBO

How will future historians explain this? From 2001 to 2014, majorities of Americans, including supermajorities of blacks and non-Hispanic whites, told Gallup pollsters that "race relations" were either very or somewhat good. Then, after the election and reelection of the first American president of African descent, each case with majorities of the popular vote and electoral votes, perceptions suddenly plunged.
-Michael Barone

... democracy does not reflect the will of the citizenry, it reflects the will of an activist class, which is not representative of the general population. Populists, in order to bring institutions more in line with what the majority of the people want, need to rely on a more centralized and heavy-handed government. The strongman is liberation from elites, who aren’t the best citizens, but those with the most desire to control people’s lives, often to enforce their idiosyncratic belief system on the rest of the public, and also a liberation from having to become like elites in order to fight them, so conservatives don’t have to give up on things like hobbies and starting families and devote their lives to activism.
- Richard Hanania, Apr 2021

We have two parties in America: one that wants free, fair and honest elections, with only legal voters casting ballots, and doing so only once, and one that wants ballot harvesting, unverified mail-in voting, unattended drop boxes into which anyone can drop any number of ballots of unknown provenance, and so on. It isn’t hard to see which party has confidence in the power of its ideas to gain the support of most Americans, as long as only actual, living and legal voters cast ballots, and they only vote once.
-John Hinderaker, Powerline, Apr, 2021.

What were the execs of these mighty companies thinking — these knights of the boardroom, these capitalist geniuses, these moral nonpareils — when they cancelled Atlanta’s turn to host the midsummer All-star Game to “protest” Georgia’s passage of a law that requires voter ID? Surely that they were striking a righteous blow against systemic racism. And then, the rest of the world realized — almost immediately — that Major League Baseball requires online ticket buyers to show ID when they pick up their tickets at any stadium…and that Delta Airlines requires passengers to show ID (duh) before being allowed to fly in one of their airplanes…and that various other corporations snookered into this latest hustle such as Nike, Coca-Cola, and Calvin Klein support forced labor in the Asian nations that manufacture their products.
-James Kunstler, Peak Woke, Apr 2021

They kept it up for four years, using every device in the bureaucracy to drive Mr. Trump from office while deliberately gaslighting, hoaxing, misdirecting, and bamboozling the public. In the process, the Democratic Party became hostage to the worst elements among its supporters and foot-soldiers: the race hustlers, the gender-deranged, the criminal sociopaths, the limousine Marxists, the Wall Street swindlers, the Silicon Valley megalomaniacs, and even America’s foreign adversaries — as evidenced by the Biden Family’s lucrative dealings with the party that runs China.
-James Kunstler, on the Democrats "woke" fad, Peak Woke, Apr 2021

Call the mob out for what it is: a bunch of bad people trying to pretend they stand for something moral. Going after people for their political views this way isn’t an act of morality. It’s an attempt at political terrorism, and it’s un-American.
-Glenn Reynolds on how to respond to the woke mob, NY Post, Mar 2021

In the span of a decade or so, essentially all professional media not explicitly branded as conservative has been taken over by a school of politics that emerged from humanities departments at elite universities and began colonizing the college educated through social media. Those politics are obscure, they are confusing, they are socially and culturally extreme, they are expressed in a bizarre vocabulary, they are deeply alienating to many, and they are very unpopular by any definition. The vast majority of the country is not woke, including the vast majority of women and people of color. How could it possibly be healthy for the entire media industry to be captured by any single niche political movement, let alone one that nobody likes? Why does no one in media seem willing to have an honest, uncomfortable conversation about the near-total takeover of their industry by a fringe ideology?
And the bizarre assumption of almost everyone in media seems to have been that they could adopt this brand of extreme niche politics, in mass, as an industry, and treat those politics as a crusade that trumps every other journalistic value, with no professional or economic consequences. They seem to have thought that Americans were just going to swallow it; they seem to have thought they could paint most of the country as vicious bigots and that their audiences would just come along for the ride.
- far-left writer Freddie deBoer, who is a most often for the uber-socialist magazine Jacobin. [hat tip S Hayward]

Dr. Fauci has not just been flat-out wrong on the science of COVID—in his assessments of the origins and possible dangers of COVID-19, of when we can get back to normal, of when the vaccinations would appear, and of which particular governors have been doing the most or least effective management of the disease. He has also, by his own admission, deliberately lied.
That is, Fauci has rejected science, as he knew it, to mislead the public.
- Victor Davis Hanson, Mar 2021

... freedom begins inside you. If you are afraid to speak publicly about your views, you’re not a free person.”
-former Gulag prisoner Natan Sharansky

Who Had 'Dr. Seuss Is Racist' On Their Cancel Bingo Cards?
- Stephen Kruiser Column Title in PJ Media after the cancel culture found something wrong with Dr Seuss books

Name ONE time in human history when the group fighting to ban books and censor speech were the good guys.
- Businessman Vivek Ramaswamy tweet chiding the cancel culture on the left.

My position? What do you mean, my position? It’s illegal!
-The late Sonny Bono when running for Congress was asked his position on illegal immigration.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
- Saul Bellow

Listen, what has to happen ... The media has to start telling the right story in this country. The media is trying to divide this country. You are bloodthirsty for ratings!… I can’t believe that you would ask me question indicating that it’s alright just to doctor a little bit of evidence. There’s more stuff that we uncovered that they doctored to be frank with you. And perhaps that will come out one day. But we won this case… And someone should look at the conduct of these House managers. It’s unconscionable!… Your coverage is so slanted it’s got to stop!
-Trump attorney Michael Van Der Veen went off as he blasted the media for their disgusting coverage of President Donald Trump during the second impeachment hearing to CBS News reporter Lana Zak

If you get in the way they will punish you — they already are punishing you. Your right to say and think what you want; to read and watch what you want, threatens them above all. Why? Because if you have access to information, you can form your own judgments that are independent of theirs. A free Internet is their enemy. The moment the Democrats took power, they began a kind of counter-reformation against the Internet. They started the most sweeping mass censorship campaign in the history of this country — and it’s accelerating even now. They will not rest until there is not a single human being remaining in all American media who questions any of the platitudes spouted by leaders on the left
- Tucker Carson, Feb, 2021

Never once did Raskin explain the context of "fight like hell." Trump used those words figuratively, not literally…as nearly all politicians do.  In fact, Raskin himself has used the same rhetoric.  In 2017, he told a Maryland crowd to "fight like hell" for liberal and progressive ideas.  In a 2019 interview with The Atlantic, Raskin vowed to "fight like hell" for the Constitution.  In 2020, he said he would "fight like hell" against Trump’s Supreme Court nomination.  No one accused Raskin of inciting violence.   
-Gregg Jarrett - Fox News commenting on how Trump's defense team video destroyed the Democrat's main argument - that Trump said "fight like hell". The damning video showed each and every House manager voicing the identical words (and in the same context) that Trump had used — as a political metaphor.

The median price for a home in California is more than $700,000 … the state has four of the nation’s five most expensive housing markets and a quarter of the nation’s homeless residents. California is dominated by Democrats, but many of the people Democrats claim to care about most can’t afford to live there. . .
-Ezra Klein in the New York Times

I was my old battalion commander’s assistant operations officer and I was riding with him in his HUMVEE driving through Los Angeles as it burned in April 1992.
That was a riot. What happened on Capitol Hill was a few dudes dressed like Conan the Fauxbarian acting like fools and occasionally fighting with the cops while a few hundred other dudes took selfies in the Rotunda.
- Kurt Schlichter, Townhall, on the Jan 6 Capitol Hill charge

These politicians (both sides) and the media are particularly angry because, as narcissists, moral or otherwise, they have a great need of fans—people to admire them constantly and make them feel alive.
Trump ruined that to a great extent by unmasking them as phonies. Rage and vengeance were and are the natural responses.
- Roger Simon, Moral Narcissism and the Show Trial of Donald Trump, Feb, 2021.

The academic establishment and progressive press want you to know two things: First, conservative claims of social-media bias are bogus. As Silicon Valley firms police content, their decisions are, miraculously, wholly uninfluenced by ideological preference. Second, there is an urgent need for a much wider crackdown on political speech, perhaps led by the Biden Administration and requiring the creation of new government agencies. In other words, all that conservative suppression that’s, er, not happening? We need more of it.
Intellectuals don’t merely want the Biden Administration to promote progressive policies. Flush with power, they’re now suggesting that government should police the flow of ideas and assume the authority to define reality itself. So bring on the truth commissions. And if any political minority group complains that the Ministry of Truth is biased, worry not—the reality czar can make quick work of such disinformation.
- WSJ Editorial, Liberalism’s Ministry of Truth, Feb 4, 2021

“I have this strange notion, we are a democracy … if you can’t get the votes … you can’t [legislate] by executive order unless you’re a dictator. We’re a democracy. We need consensus."
-Joe Biden before the November 2020 elections. Later he would set the record for executive orders in his first weeks in office.

Being unable to impose the full breadth of Section 230’s censorship, Congress protects the companies so they can do it.
Some Southern sheriffs, long ago, used to assure Klansmen that they would face no repercussions for suppressing the speech of civil-rights marchers. Under the Constitution, government cannot immunize powerful private parties in the hope that they will voluntarily carry out unconstitutional policy.
-Phil Hamburger on Facebook and Twitter censors.

It is hard to imagine a leader saying something more destructive and more reckless than that on television in a moment as fraught as the one we are in. It's terrifying in its stupidity.
- Tucker Carlson on John Brennan's label of tens of millions of American citizens have a firearm at home and didn't vote for Joe Biden as terrorists - saying 'They are the threat, and we need to hunt them like we hunted Al Qaeda'.

Glenn Kessler is the “fact checker” at the Washington Post. That means that for the last four years, whenever President Trump said something, Kessler would parrot the Democratic Party line in opposition to it, and allege that Trump was “lying.” That practice will cease, of course, now that we have a Democratic president:
-John Hinderaker, Powerline, Jan 2021

... the Founders were wise not to put too much faith in democracy, because people are inherently selfish, narrow-minded, and impulsive.
- from Sen. Tom Cotton's Harvard Senior thesis

The most regrettable part of this class failure is that, with rare exceptions, the experts themselves acknowledge no error. Nothing about the Trump years has occasioned soul-searching or self-criticism on their part. But today’s experts will eventually retire and pass from the scene. A newer, fresher generation of pollsters, academics, think-tank scholars and journalists will care more about the truth than they do about aligning with today’s consensus. They will feel no need to disguise their ignorance by signaling hatred of Donald Trump. And they will not fail to note that their most accomplished and revered forerunners were, at crucial moments, idiots.
- Barton Swaim, Wall ST. Journal editorial writer.

[The New York Times] entailed a wrenching pivot from a journalism of fact to a “post-journalism” of opinion—a term coined, in his book of that title, by media scholar Andrey Mir. Rather than news, the paper began to sell what was, in effect, a creed, an agenda, to a congregation of like-minded souls. Post-journalism “mixes open ideological intentions with a hidden business necessity required for the media to survive,” Mir observes. The new business model required a new style of reporting. Its language aimed to commodify polarization and threat: journalists had to “scare the audience to make it donate.” At stake was survival in the digital storm.
-Martin Gurri, City Journal.

We have bigger things to worry about.
- Biden's Press Secretary, when asked why Biden was filmed on federal grounds not wearing a mask, along with various member of his family after he signed an executive orders requiring mask wearing on federal grounds

... a party that tosses aside traditional and established limits, as well as its conscience, and does whatever it wishes to do. No, that wouldn’t be the Republican Party, at least nominally the party of the Constitution and limited government. That would be the Democratic Party, which wants to pack the Supreme Court so that its legislative agenda will have no constitutional limits, and to rule – not govern in a system of checks and balances – in perpetuity as the only political party in the country.
- Issues and Insights editorial, Jan, 2021

“We are now living in a country where four or five companies, unelected, unaccountable, have the monopoly power to decide, we’re gonna wipe people out, we’re going to erase them from any digital platform.”
-Sen Marco Rubio, Jan, 2021.

Democrats call for violent riots and the media calls them peaceful protests
Trump calls for peaceful protests and the media says he called for violent riots
-DC Lawyer Rogan O’Handley Tweet after the Capitol Hill riots.

Not all leftwingers in the US are as frankly religious as Hillary Clinton, and many don't even realise that the ideas that they champion have deep religious roots. But even for these people, being leftwing has itself become a sort of religion, with those who disagree viewed as sinister, almost demonic forces, rather than simply as individuals holding different views.
The language of righteousness and sin, if not that of redemption and grace, remains a hallmark of the purportedly secular left ...
-Glenn Reynolds, Univ. of TN Law Professor

"Democrats should fight dirty, play dirty, beg, borrow, steal, do whatever it takes. 'When they go low, we go high' doesn’t work. Playing nice got us to this point with President Trump."
-NY Times Opinion Tweet, Feb 18, 2018

At this point, I think it would be better if all public K-12 education in America were canceled, and all tax revenues supporting public schools were returned to parents to do with as they see fit. The result could only be a massive improvement in our children’s education.
-John Hinderaker, Powerline Dec. 2020.

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
― Theodore Dalrymple

The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.
-Thomas Sowell

Instead of asking where was the fraud? The real question is where was there NO fraud?
-Jim Holt, Gateway Pundit.

To put this another way, if the greatest democracy in world history cannot conduct a free and fair election, and if much of the mainstream media of this country won’t even fully investigate what is becoming a growing mountain of evidence calling into question the election result, there is little chance that our democracy and this Republic will survive as we know it.
-White House Senior Advisor Peter Navarro

“My father told me when I was a child: people in authority lie. If we are going to continue to live in a democracy we need to understand that people in authority lie. People in authority will abuse every power that we relinquish to them and right now we are giving them the power to micro-manage every bit of our lives, 24 hours a day.
-Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

For a damaging story about a Democrat to be true, DNA must be found on a blue dress. There must be Blue Dress Proof™. It’s not enough to have a witness and a victim. It’s not enough to have a computer, a cache of validated emails, thousands of affidavits signed under the threat of perjury. There must be actual DNA, videotaped evidence. If the bad guy is a Democrat, there must be Blue Dress Proof.
For a damaging story about a Republican to be true, nothing has to be true at all. Third-hand hearsay about hookers and pee, a smile on a face, or a sarcastic tweet or phrase taken out of context can make even the most absurd conclusion be portrayed as fact and conveyed as truth in perpetuity. If the bad guy is a Republican, no proof is needed.
-Melissa Mackenzie, Publisher of The American Spectator

The courts taking the cases and allowing for an examination of the evidence. The fact that cases keep getting dismissed on “standing” issues, and/or delayed indefinitely, and that social media has banned any mention of fraud? It only makes absolutely sure we have no doubts at all that there was massive fraud. Because no honest system would behave the way the left and its surrogates are behaving. Every time they ban mention of something? It’s because it’s a truth they’re trying to hide.
-Sarah Hoyt after the 2020 election.

While Communism had been vanquished, outside the lands of the Iron Curtain—and particularly in America—there was no triumphant dancing on Communism’s grave, and no mea culpa by its progressive allies. In America and Western Europe, a renascent Left explained away the atrocities and catastrophes it had supported by saying that what took place in Russia wasn’t “real socialism.” Real socialism hadn’t been tried, and therefore hadn’t failed. Nothing could capture the invincible arrogance of leftists so clearly as this pathetic sophistry to cover up their crimes.
- From the preface in David Horowitz’s memoir Radical Son

Add more lights please and make a sign that you’re doing this for the people who can’t afford the lights and those who do celebrate Christmas.
-Tweet by "PeaNahButta" after a MN resident received an anonymous letter chastising them for their Christmas light display and called it a reminder of "systemic biases against our neighbors who don't celebrate Christmas or can't afford to put up lights of their own."

You’re not special, Representative. To magnanimously think you’re set aside deserving a seat of judgment SOLELY bc you temporarily slung shots proves that condescending woe-is-me entitlement thinking is what happens when every kid gets a trophy.
-Sarah Palin responding to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calling R's lazy

I was a loyal Soviet citizen until the age of 20. What it meant to be a loyal citizen is to say what you are supposed to say, to read what you are permitted to read, to vote the way you are told to vote and, at the same time, to know that all this is a lie.
- Soviet dissident and human rights activist, Natan Sharansky 2013

...this election was stolen by the socialists engaging in extraordinary voter fraud and election theft measures
- Ala. Sen. Mo Brooks

... if we are right about the fraud, Joe Biden can't be president. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of votes. We're talking about numbers like nobody has ever seen before.
- Pres. Trump - Dec 2, 2020.

Bernie Sanders may have made socialism mainstream, but John Mackey isn’t buying. Recently the Whole Foods CEO characterized socialism as “trickle up poverty”—while defending capitalism as the “greatest thing humanity’s ever done.”
- from a Wall St. Journal editorial, Dec 2020.

The outrage perpetrated on General Michael Flynn should go down in the hall of shame along with the Dreyfus affair. The Flynn outrage revealed the rotten core of the Obama administration and the multidimensional corruption of our most trusted institutions. The Flynn outrage should live in infamy,
- Powerline's Scott Johnson

Frankly, the entire FBI and Dept. of Justice need to be hosed out with Clorox and Firehoses!
-Atty Sydney Powell when addressing voter fraud in 2020.

If you can't control your own emotions, you're forced to control other people's behavior. That's why the touchiest, most oversensitive and easily upset must not set the standard for the rest of us.
- Comedian John Cleese said of the hordes of "woke" Twitter users who've attacked J.K. Rowling and demanded that she shut up.

We remain in the last gasps of Never Trump world, where people of power told themselves it was OK to break rules, norms, standards—even the law—in their quest to take the president down. To dismiss the Flynn case would have been to acknowledge that this behavior was wrong. And that would have been too painful, too embarrassing, too galling for the haters.
-WSJ's Kim Strassel after the pardon of Gen Flynn.

My feeling is there is interstate criminal traffic being paid for across states lines. They flew here on a plane, they all got fresh new clothes, and they were paid to be here. It is a crime to do that and it needs to be traced.
- Sen. Rand Paul after being attacked by protesters (later the Wash. DC Atty. Gen. refused to investigate)

Violence hasn’t declined since 2016, and homicides were up 40% in October from a year earlier. Homelessness increased three-fold from 2017 to 2019.
- Wall St Journal Editorial on the results of Mayor Tubbs' progressive policy in Stockton, CA of guaranteeing low-income folks $500 in cash a month and paying violent offenders not to commit crimes. Tubbs lost his reelection bid.

Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people; it tends to attract the sort who can’t understand that an economic system that cannot feed its own population reliably has failed at the game of Life. Literally.
-blogger Moe Lane

.. the beauty of ballot harvesting is that it is nearly impossible to prove fraud. How many harvesters offered to deliver votes, only to throw away inconvenient ones? How many voters were pushed or cajoled, or even paid—or had a ballot filled and returned for them without their knowledge? And this is before questions of what other mischief went on amid millions of mailed ballots (which went to wrong addresses or deceased people) and reduced voter verification rules. As the Heritage Foundation’s election expert Hans von Spakovsky has explained, mail-in voting is the “single worst form of election possible” because “it moves the entire election beyond the oversight of election officials.”
-Kimberley A. Strassel, Nov, 2020

Democrats kept saying in the campaign, 'You can't possibly think Trump is preferable to what we're selling,' and many voters keep saying, 'Yes, we can. In fact, our primary reason voting for him is to create a bulwark against you because your side thinks silence is violence and looting is not. Because you're the party of chasing speakers off college campuses and making everyone walk on eggshells and replacing let's not see color with, let's see it always and everywhere, formerly the position of the Ku Klux Klan. ... Democrats too often don't come across as having common sense to a huge swath of Americans.
-Bill Maher, Nov 2020

The belief in one’s own moral superiority eventually erases the conscience. After all, if one is morally superior to others, then no conscience is needed. All actions and behaviors are acceptable because they’re done in an effort to make the world a better place.
Issues & Insights Editorial Board, November 9, 2020

Why does the media hate Donald Trump so much? There are all kinds of theories, but only one really makes sense: We are a country at odds over the most fundamental principles of ideology, economics, religion, race, culture, morality—even our own history. The media is on one side of that metaphorical war, and President Trump calls it out.
-Frank Pavone, WSJ op ed, Nov, 2020.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
-C.S. Lewis from God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics

There’s a stubborn human craving for egalitarianism, and our politics allows the indulgence of envy. In a free society the vote says if enough of you want to take money from somebody else to give to yourself, you can do it. All you have to do is vote for those politicians who say we will do it.
-PBS Producer Bob Chitester

They don’t serve you: They insult you. When they say “nobody cares” what they really mean to say is that the only people who count, who deserve any say in our political process are those who agree with them. Everyone else is a nobody.
-Instapundit's Charles Glasser on the media after their Biden media coverup.

Even if Donald Trump had lost the 2016 election, instead of won it in a surprise, the media’s coverage of his campaign and supporters would have been a horrific failure. They presented that race as unwinnable for Trump and as if his support was inexplicable.
Their response to their 2016 failures has been not to improve their journalism in any way, shape, or form, but to decide that they didn’t do enough to bias that election in their preferred direction. Their nearly four-year temper tantrum has resulted in far worse 2020 campaign coverage than even the depths of their 2016 coverage.
-Molly Hemmingway, Oct, 2020

Journalists claim they can’t cover the New York Post’s Hunter Biden email scoop because the underlying evidence has yet to been verified. Also, they won’t look for any verifying evidence because there isn’t enough evidence.
-David Harsanyi, Nat'l Review

Mr. Dorsey, who the hell elected you and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report, and what the American people are allowed to hear?” he thundered. “Why do you persist in behaving as a Democratic super PAC, silencing views to the contrary of your political beliefs?”
- Sen. Ted Cruz to Twitter’s CEO after he used strong-arm tactics to censor the NY Post reporting on Hunter Biden’s e-mails.

According to a recent study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 70 percent of the people who tested positive for COVID-19 wore masks regularly. By contrast, under 4 percent of those testing positive never wore masks.
Auguste Meyrat, October 24, 2020.

Plausible deniability
- Jim Biden after Tony Bobulinski spent two hours listening to stories about the Biden family Chinese business dealings and asked Biden if the family isn’t concerned if Joe will run for president in 2020..

Power is really something we have to factor into our thinking…The desire of humans to tell other humans what to do—when you couple that with equality, boy, you've got a recipe for constant problems in defending a classical liberal society."
- Producer of the iconic "Free to Choose" series on PBS comment on what analysis needs adding to the 40 yr old production

Yes, the less you read the more you know. The fewer facts you know, the less history you know, the more certain your view is correct. That's exactly what we bloggers believe after reading Noonan and Galston. That's the wonderful part of life today, not having to know anything to expound your views in perfect certainty that you are totally correct, that somehow, all the electrolytes in your brain have magically become perfectly aligned in a world view without reading anything more than the label on your Schlitz beverage. If you are wondering why politics is so bizarre today, you have given me the answer, and I celebrate you for it.
- M. Lowery responding to an online WS Journal editorial poster who canceled his subscription without reading the editorial

There was once a social contract out there that we all thought we all signed on to. You know the outlines of the implicit deal. We agreed to give up certain prerogatives and to provide prestige and prosperity to those people – who became the Establishment – who would run our institutions for us. For example, we outsourced our right to avenge ourselves to the justice system and (except for immediate self-defense) to keep order to the police. We would respect and trust the objective, neutral truthtellers, called “journalists,” who would gather and disseminate the news and information we needed to be active citizens. And, in a formal way under our Constitution, we agreed to give government officials enumerated powers and to be bound by the rules implemented via due process and limited by the Bill of Rights. It was imperfect, as all human endeavors are, but on the whole it worked. Until now.
-Kurt Schlichter, Townhall, Oct, 2020.

I interpret the Constitution as a law. That I interpret its text as text. And I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. So that meaning doesn’t change over time, and it isn’t up to me to update or infuse my own policy views into it.
-Judge Amy Coney Barrett answering her first question in the Senate confirmation hearings

The Republicans, they don't play the tough game. If this were the other side you would have had 25 people in jail for the rest of their lives with what they found.
- President Trump on the delays in the Durham investigation.

The U.S. is in a constitutional crisis. It began on the day of President Trump’s election, when unelected bureaucrats mobilized against his presidency. This is a crisis in the executive branch, perpetrated by subordinate officials who don’t see themselves as answerable to the president. They have effectively established a fourth branch of government—a permanent, unaccountable bureaucracy.
- Sen Ron Johnson, Oct, 2020.

When asked to name the single greatest defect of the left, I usually answer quite narrowly: an inability to think in terms of tradeoffs. This is why liberals, owing to a Kantian-inspired disposition that favors intentions above consequences, tend always to utopianism, to the view that we if we just have good will and another tax increase, we can have the best yearbook ever!
-Steven Hayward, Powerline

The administration had to be destroyed because Mueller and his people didn’t like it, so it was necessary to find a legal excuse for doing so. That this is fundamentally unjust, contrary to all professed American legal traditions, and a constitutional outrage, never seems to register in the thoughts of the author
-Conrad Black reviewing Andrew Weissmann’s book Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation

Say the administration sends up Bork, and, after our investigation, he looks a lot like another Scalia. I’d have to vote for him, and if the groups tear me apart, that’s the medicine I’ll have to take. I’m not Ted Kennedy.
-Joe Biden before pressure from left wing groups to stage a shameful show trial of Bork.

If RBG wanted to be a lawmaker, she should have run for Congress.
- Kevin D. Williamson, Ruth Bader Ginsburg Didn’t Understand Her Job, Natl Review, Sep, 2020

"It’s estimated that 200 million people will die, probably by the time I finish this talk."
-Biden, 2020

It is my view that if the President goes the way of Presidents Fillmore and Johnson and presses an election-year nomination, the Senate Judiciary Committee should seriously consider not scheduling confirmation hearings on the nomination until after the political campaign season is over.
-Biden, 1992 (The Biden Rule").

I made it absolutely clear that I would go forward with the confirmation process as chairman, even a few months before the presidential elections, if the nominee were chosen with the advice and not just the consent of the Senate, as the Constitution requires,
– Biden, Mar 24, 2016 (revised Biden Rule) after the Scalia death under Obama.

“Cause if you could take care, if you were a quartermaster, you can sure in hell take care runnin’ a, you know, a department store uh, thing, you know, where, in the second floor of the ladies department or whatever, you know what I mean?”
- Prediential candidate, Joe Biden, Sept 2020.

You’d think these people could come up with a more believable excuse for hiding evidence.”
- Devin Nunes after Judicial Watch reported that senior members of Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office repeatedly and “accidentally” wiped phones assigned to them.

Following the Civil War, the Democratic Party was "the force behind decades of segregation, violating the voting rights of minorities with poll taxes and literacy tests, and Jim Crow ... It had no problems fighting every single Civil Rights Act that's ever been offered and now, of course, it uses the very same people it used to abuse to continue and try and gain power. The left describes themselves as "Democratic Socialists" or "Progressives," but in actual fact, "they're Marxists, an American form of Marxism, but they're Marxist, and they will do whatever they have to do for power. "It's 'Party First.'"
-Mark Levin

How can the Democrat Party ask to lead our country when it spends so much time tearing down our country?
- Donald Trump, RNC acceptance speech, Aug 2020.

It is “peaceful protest”
-President Trump responding to a member of the press pool complaining that the room is not following NJ rules on social distancing (alluring to BLM protests getting a pass).

"Apple needs to answer for why they're instigating this kind of hate in America."
- GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, after finding when Apple's Siri is asked to define 'demon' it answers 'a police officer.'

... do you suppose they moved heaven and earth, surreptitiously plotted in the Oval Office, wrote CYA memos to cover their tracks, and laboriously sculpted FBI reports because they were hoping to nail . . . George Papadopoulos?
- Andrew McCarthy after documents released showed the Obama Administration targeted Trump and not his campaign.

... there are three reasons to be optimistic about the future of education. First, many parents will be more prepared to home-school their kids than they were in the spring. They or their hired teachers will do a better job of educating children, in many cases, than the public schools.
Second, once the pandemic ends, many parents, perhaps millions, will have a new appreciation of how mediocre a job the public schools were doing. They will continue home-schooling, switch to a private school, or push hard to end restrictions on the growth of charter schools. Third, as schools sit empty and homebound teachers draw their regular salaries for less effective work, there will be more opposition to more funding for public schools, which, in turn, will make local school boards amenable to lower-cost options such as charter schools.
-David R. Henderson, on the threatened safety strikes by the American Federation of Teachers if reopening plans aren’t to its liking. OpEd, WSJ, July, 2020

In any age, the so-called progressives treat politics as their religion. Their holy mission is to use the coercive power of the state to remake man and society in their own image, according to an abstract ideal of perfection. Whatever means they use are therefore justified because, by definition, they are a virtuous people pursing a deific end. They are willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage in achieving their end, regardless of collateral consequences and the systemic implications. They never ask whether the actions they take could be justified as a general rule of conduct, equally applicable to all sides.
-Atty General Bill Barr, The Role of the Executive, Barbara Olson Memorial Lecture, Fall, 2019.

“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs”
-Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s man in Moscow on Stalin's deliberate policy of starvation in the Ukraine - killing four million "eggs".

I’ve always said that the 1619 Project is not a history. It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and, therefore, the national memory. The project has always been as much about the present as it is the past.
-Nicole Hannah-Jones in a de facto admission from the impresario of the New York Times‘s egregious “1619 Project,”, that in fact it is a purely political propaganda effort.

Today, a Puritan-inspired witch-hunt mentality is ablaze all around us, bent on destroying the reputations and livelihoods of those who show the slightest hesitation to profess true doctrine. “Bigot and hater” are the new “witch and wizard,”
- Katherine Kersten, on wokeness.

America’s colleges, media, and cultural institutions are being swept by the ideology of “anti-racism.” It openly advocates racial discrimination against white people, and promotes bigoted, lower expectations for black people.
“Rationality” and “hard work” are vestiges of racism, declared the “anti-racism” web site of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. It claimed that virtues like “hard work,” “self-reliance,” being “polite,” and being on time are all a product of the “white dominant culture.” So, too, are normal grammar, the scientific method, and its emphasis on “objective, rational linear thinking,” according to a chart the Smithsonian posted.
-Hans Bader, Liberty Unyielding: “‘Anti-racism’ is racism in disguise.”

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He knew that for any nation to survive, it must have a moral and religious glue to bind it together, or it will die for lack of definition.
-John Adams.

One of the sad signs of out times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonize those who complain.
-Thomas Sowell

Your teacher unions and many of their members march in solidarity with Marxists while they malign capitalism. They defend the destruction of Antifa. They applaud the divisiveness of BLM. They wave their rainbow banners while disparaging our country’s flag. They deny the science of X and Y chromosomes while calling you a science denier. They extol socialism while condemning free enterprise. They teach the racism of critical race theory. They tout the intolerance of intersectionality. They demand the privilege of denouncing your privilege. They use your sons and daughters as pawns in their ugly game of power and politics. They proudly boast of judging people by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.
- Everett Piper, Wash. Times, Jul '20.

“Gossipy, catty, insular, cliquey, stressful, immature, cowardly, moody, underhanded, spiteful — the New York Times gives new meaning to the term ‘hostile workplace.’
- Matthew Continetti after Jill Abramson was fired.

We are a capitalist society with a socialist educational system.
-Roger Simon, Jul 2020.

What I see is if the election goes to Biden then there is a good chance that the Democrats will then control all two branches of Congress and the White House, and considering the kinds of things that they are proposing, that can well mean the point of no return for this country.”
-Thomas Sowell, Jul 2020

“[The fact] that this movement has taken root in corporate America the way it has with all the sickening political correctness that’s coming out of there about supporting Black Lives Matter and all the rest of it, it really is stomach-turning and it amounts to supposedly serious people falling for a fraud.”
-Brit Hume, July, 2020

The unhappy but inevitable truth is that Americans will have to learn to cope with the virus, which means trial and error and more individual responsibility.
-Wall St. Journal opining on a second lockdown after the Covid19 virus reopening sparked hot spots of new infections.

When exactly will the Democratic Party -- which defended slavery, the Confederacy, and, most recently, segregation -- be removing itself from the Capitol?
-Bronson Stocking, Townhall, commenting on Pelosi removing portraits of racist former Democrat House Speakers from the U.S. Capitol.

The not-so-hidden intention of the white progressive left (the metastasized social justice warriors in the media, politics, virtually everywhere) is to shame other whites and thus control them.
-Roger Simon on the BLM movement.

Okay, so what is the 2020 elections, with the rioting, vandalism, violence and occupations? ... They want to convince us we are powerless, that everyone else supports their commie agenda, that we cannot win.
-Kurt Schlichter, Townhall, Jun 2020.

... have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today?
-Thomas Sowell on the BLM riots. Jun 2020.

The Democrats know they can’t match Republicans’ eagerness to go to the polls, so they have come up with an alternative–no one goes to the polls. Instead, we have a mail-in vote system in which many millions of ballots are mailed to people who have died, moved or are ineligible to vote. Those ballots will fall into a wide variety of hands, but the Democrats know that law-abiding Republicans won’t fill them out and fraudulently send them back. Many Democrats will.
-John Hinderaker, Powerline. Jun 2020.

Why is it that so many of our citizens believe that America is racist to its core? Because this lie has been preached by our universities and media like the Gospel for a generation. From there it has traveled throughout society, particularly among the elite. Even most leaders on the Right are unwilling to refute this destructive untruth. In failing to do so, they promote the falsehood, the riots that it has engendered, and ultimately America’s destruction. This is to say, the riots are the handiwork of the elite. A country that has been taught it is ignoble will not defend itself against its enemies, domestic or foreign.
Thomas D. Klingenstein, Ryan P. Williams, Claremont Inst. Jun 2020

When Democrats won the White House in ’92 Republicans helped the transition.
When Democrats lost the White House in ’00 they created chaos. They destroyed the telephones and computers, punched holes in the walls, spray painted and cut the furniture, and the Clinton’s even stole the furnishings down to the dishes.
When Democrats won the White House in ’08 Republicans helped the transition.
When Democrats lost the White House in ’16 they weaponized the intelligence apparatus to destroy the incoming administration. Leaked intelligence to the media; and unmasked incoming officials to create chaos and fabricate lies.
- Sundance, Conservative Tree House, June 2020.

This is the end for you guys. Firing someone for allowing different opinions in your paper means you are no longer a real news paper. It’s been fun. You had a good run. The best in fact. R.I.P.
-Musician Sean Ono Lennon Tweet after the NY Times fired James Bennet, Editorial Page Editor following the Tom Cotton editorial.

The gradual metamorphosis of the Times from a great newspaper into a leftist propaganda sheet is complete.
-NY Post's Michael Goodwin, on the revolt of NYTimes’s newsroom over the publication of Sen. Tom Cotton’s op-ed followed by the craven surrender of management.

Yep. The public health experts had one shot, and they blew it. If deaths do result, they should be specifically blamed — and named — as grandma-killers. If deaths don’t result, they should be specifically blamed — and named — as business-killers. And they can’t hide behind neutral science because they abandoned neutral science for politics and preening within their own social circles
Which is a sub-case of why so many of our institutions, from the New York Times to NYC government to higher education and even sports, are failing: The people running them care more about mugging for their peers than about the welfare of the institutions they are entrusted. That’s a species of corruption, and a highly destructive one.
-Glenn Reynolds on social distancing after the George Floyd protests.

What happens when the press becomes an interest group whose interest isn’t the truth?
-Holman Jenkins in a May, 2020 WSJ OpEd Media Cowardice and the Collusion Hoax.

The conduct of the FBI, certain members of the DOJ, the Special Counsel Operation, and those in the House, Senate and elsewhere who have obstructed the release of the truth have all obstructed justice and put this man, his family, and the entire country through three years of hell—for their LIES and deceit. There are no words sufficient to convey our disgust and disdain for all those responsible in any way for this baseless and purely evil persecution.
- Sydney Powell, on the illegal, baseless prosecution of Gen Flynn by the Obama Administration.

" ... what happened to the president in the 2016 election; and throughout the first two years of his administration was abhorrent. It was a grave injustice and it was unprecedented in American history. The law enforcement and intelligence apparatus of this country were involved in advancing a false and utterly baseless Russian-collusion narrative against the president. The proper investigative and prosecutive standards of the Dept of Justice were abused, in my view, in order to reach a particular result.”
~ (AG Barr, May 18, 2020)

Neil Ferguson’s Imperial model could be the most devastating software mistake of all time”
-article in London's Daily Telegraph by David Richards and Konstantin Boudnik on the model death predictions which initiated world-wide shutdowns of the economies.

Mask wearing has become a form of virtue signaling. Do they do any good? Who knows? But wearing one shows that you are a slavish adherent to authority. Not wearing one suggests that you might be a rebel.
-Powerline's John Hinderaker, May, 2020

It is highly irregular for government officials on the political side of the national-security realm to seek the unmasking of Americans. It is eye-opening to learn that Vice President Biden and President Obama’s chief-of-staff (McDonough) unmasked the incoming Trump administration’s national security advisor. It is downright scandalous that Samantha Power, Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, who had little reason to seek unmasking, reportedly requested 260 unmaskings . . . and then told Congress that she did not make the vast majority of requests attributed to her — though it remains unclear, years later, who did make them
- Andrew McCarthy, Natioal Review, May, 2020.

It is impossible to overstate the intensity of the Trump Derangement Syndrome that gripped Obama and his aides — a hatred that led to an extraordinary level of entitlement. Out of nothing more than political spite, they were determined to use the transition to get a political adversary (Gen Flynn) fired and prosecuted.

Their gross presumption rested entirely upon the undemocratic conceits of an elite that fools itself into thinking that the “rule of law” is synonymous with its will and appetite for power. The media exists to make the railroadings of the ruling class look respectable, but in truth they are no different than those of third-world autocrats. Sober historians will look back at the political espionage of the Obama administration against the incoming Trump administration as the stuff of banana republics.


-George Neumayr, May 14, 2020

They weren’t getting any Russia “collusion” charges. That was clear by the spring of 2017, and former FBI Director James Comey knew it would soon emerge that his bureau had made egregious errors. So he leaked his memo of conversations with Mr. Trump with the specific goal of getting a special counsel appointed. The Mueller probe—led by the very people who’d made those errors—then spent more than two years “investigating” bogus or derivative claims, keeping secrets, and giving the escapade a fiction of legitimacy.
-Kimberley Strassel

We knew then what the liberal Democrat leaders just couldn't figure out....I heard those speakers at that other convention saying "we won the Cold War" -- and I couldn't help wondering, just who exactly do they mean by "we"? And to top it off, they even tried to portray themselves as sharing the same fundamental values of our party! What they truly don't understand is the principle so eloquently stated by Abraham Lincoln: "You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves." If we ever hear the Democrats quoting that passage by Lincoln and acting like they mean it, then, my friends, we will know that the opposition has really changed. Until then, we see all that rhetorical smoke, billowing out from the Democrats, well ladies and gentlemen, I'd follow the example of their nominee. Don't inhale.
-Ronald Reagan, 1992 Republican Convention Speech

As I was taking deep breaths and preparing myself to make my case to the crowd, I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze. “Why is the vice-president of the United States touching me?” I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. I thought to myself, “I didn’t wash my hair today and the vice-president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual fuck? Why is the vice-president of the United States smelling my hair?” He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back f my head. My brain couldn’t process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused. There is a Spanish saying, “tragame tierra,” it means, “earth, swallow me whole.” I couldn’t move and I couldn’t say anything. I wanted nothing more than to get Biden away from me. My name was called and I was never happier to get on stage in front of an audience.
-Nevada Democrat Lucy Flores, 2019 recalling her run for Lt. Governor

The crisis instead is that they are now almost always wrong, and predictably wrong because they are lazy and biased—and they deny it to the point of self-delusion. The result is that, for all practical purposes, journalists no longer exist for the general public as sources of news.
-Victor Davis Hanson • May 3, 2020

What is most amazing is that, if the Chinese allowed this virus to escape and then arrested doctors raising the alarm over the spread, it would be one of the greatest stories of our lifetime: a world pandemic caused by human error. Millions have been infected and thousands have died. If the cause was negligence by a totalitarian nation (that ignored warnings and punished doctors), this would be a story of the century.
- Jonathan Turley on the media suppression of the Wuhan Virus originating in the Wuhan lab, April, 2020

I think what happened to [Trump] was one of the greatest travesties in American history.
- Atty General Barr on the Democrat's attempted coup on the President

It’s hard to take liberals’ interest in climate seriously, since if they actually believed what they claim about the planet’s coming inundation, they would support the immediate expansion of zero-emission nuclear power. Very few of them do, for reasons that are negligible next to the threat of extinction. Climate change is chiefly something to fulminate against.
- Barton Swaim op ed in the WSJ, APR 2020

If I had known what was to happen, I would not have cared about the reprimand, I would have f**king talked about it to whoever, wherever I could
- Last words of Ai Fen Chinese physician who was head of the emergency department at Wuhan Central Hospital, in an interview in March and disappearing after that.

Jim Acosta's interruption of Dr. Birx is an example of how CNN's echo-journalism model is destroying the media's credibility. Every question from Acosta is an effort to score points rather than elicit information. It is a press pandemic that continues to rage without relief.
-Jonathan Turley commenting on Acosta's uber anti-Trumpism finger pointing in the middle of the pandemic.

It’s not a pandemic folks, it’s a Dem Panic!
– Blogger Silence DoGood

Many years ago I coined the term “virtucrat” for people who derive their grand sense of themselves from the virtuousness of their opinions, especially their political opinions. Had I known about her then, I would have added, in parentheses, “See Warren, Elizabeth.”
-Author Joseph Epstein, Mar 2020

“OK, Bernie, let’s grant that the Iraq War was a catastrophe, and that you were right in opposing it. But when it came to the most important foreign policy issue of the second half of the 20th century—the attempt to enslave humanity by totalitarian communist dictatorships—you were, at best, a passive observer, but more accurately a fellow traveler.”
-James Kirchick with a suggested foreign policy debate question to Bernie Sanders.

Totalitarian regimes, by definition, falsify information. Or silence it. They present the outside a smooth, polished, best-case-scenario image. That’s the good side. The bad side is that what is actually going on inside is not known, either to the outside world, or to the inside. If you put any curtailments on the First, you’re giving tyrants and people who would like to be tyrants the ability to stop information they don’t like. … having worked in industries dominated by the left, it’s like a mini totalitarian regime. You constantly watch what you say and even your facial expressions, because any sign of dissent will be punished.  This means when people get up there and make blatantly political speeches you disagree with at a political banquet, you try to keep your face absolutely impassive.
- Sarah Hoyt

Think of the Democratic Party as it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.
- Michael Walsh

You don’t remove a president for initially listening to bad advisors but eventually taking counsel from better advisors—which is precisely what happened here.
-Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse after the Senate vote on aquittal.

Here the party that waxes sanctimonious about election security couldn’t secure its own election from itself. Here the party that has spent three years questioning the legitimacy of the 2016 election will see the legitimacy of its own custom-designed process questioned. Here the party that promises technocratic management of American health care, energy and finance proved less able to tally votes even than the ancient Athenians.
-WSJ Editorial on the bungled Iowa Caucus, Feb 2020.

“America is the place where anything can happen! America is the place where anyone can rise. And here, on this land, on this soil, on this continent, the most incredible dreams come true! “This Nation is our canvas, and this country is our masterpiece. We look at tomorrow and see unlimited frontiers just waiting to be explored. “Our brightest discoveries are not yet known. Our most thrilling stories are not yet told. Our grandest journeys are not yet made. “The American Age, the American Epic, the American Adventure, has only just begun! “Our spirit is still young; the sun is still rising; God’s grace is still shining; and my fellow Americans, the best is yet to come!
- Pres. Trump's closing remarks - State of the Union, Feb, 2020.

Perhaps the best thing about this ridiculous kabuki act was how it forced the unwoke Republicans to stop pretending that these antics are legitimate, that we need to treat this crap seriously, and that we need to act like these games are not just another bogus ploy designed to disenfranchise us and re-empower the sorry pack of weirdos, losers, and mutations that make up the Democratic Party.
-Kurt Schlichter on the impeachment, Townhall, Feb, 2020

At some point, the difference between the competent and highly skilled attorneys on the White House team and the bumbling and somewhat mediocre team of House managers was so pronounced it was almost embarrassing. It was as if one side belonged in front of the Supreme Court and the other failed to make the finals at a middle school debate tournament.
- Mollie Hemingway on one reason the Democrats failed their impeachment Seante trial efforts.

The House managers don’t assert that any specific action by President Trump was an abuse of power or a violation of law. They don’t deny he can delay aid to a foreign country or ask a foreign leader to investigate corruption. Presidents do that all the time. Instead they assert in their first impeachment article that Mr. Trump is guilty of “abuse of power” because he committed those acts for “corrupt purposes.”
- Wall St. Journal Editorial, Jan 2020 on the "thought crime".

“If you have the facts, you bang the facts. If you have the law, you bang the law. If you don’t have either, you bang the table. Today, we’ve seen a whole lot of table banging...”
-Ted Cruz on the House Manager's (Demorcat's) oral arguments for impeachment.

While truth is a conservative value and a liberal value, it has never been a left-wing value....the left's primary response to those with whom it differs is to smear.
- Dennis Prager

“I’ll be straight up with you. You have folks who served in the previous administration who are telling the Iranian leaders today, ‘Just hang on. President Trump will lose in the election in November and we’ll go back to appeasement. America will write you a big check, we’ll underwrite your terror campaign around the world, we’ll give you a clear pathway to a nuclear weapon system. Just wait until the Trump administration is finished.’”
- Sec State Mike Pompeo after the targeted assassination of Iran’s terrorist mastermind Qassem Soleimani

Both of the articles of impeachment passed by the Democrats in the House are unprecedented in that they charge “thought crimes” against a president. They are based on the dubious legal theory that doing something that is legal in and of itself but with a supposedly improper mental attitude turns an otherwise legal act into an impeachable offense.
- E Donald Elliott, Against Impeachment for Thought Crimes, Am. Spectator. Dec 2019.

Most guys would’ve crawled in a corner with their thumb in their mouth. Okay? Saying “Mommy take me home.” I found it to be an incredible challenge. What shocked me was the level of corruption. They really did try to take away an election
- President Trump on the attempted Democrat coup.

Everything we are witnessing is the culmination of 8 years of the Obama administration: #Russia, #Ukraine, #Impeachment, Comey, Brennen, Clapper, Hillary, Biden, Rice, Schiff, Pelosi, Nadler & their underlings. They were counting on another 8 years and got caught flatfooted.
-Kathy Grimes Tweet after the Trump Impeachment announcement

The D’s “Karlan catastrophe” is not that it was mean, undignified or a display of boiling rage. It was all that...and more. It was thoroughly authentic, revealing in a split second the venom infusing the hearings and underscoring how little they have to do w/ other than #TDS
- Tweet by Hugh Hewit after biases Stanford professor Pamela Karlan testified in the Trump Impeachment hearings

BEFORE Pelosi announced the impeachment inquiry on 9/24...
BEFORE the phone call between President Trump and President Zelensky on 7/25...
BEFORE the Mueller hearing in Judiciary on 7/24...
16 Dem members of the Judiciary Committee voted to move forward with impeachment.
-Tweet by Rep. Jim Jorden

...today’s students are the most unaware, naïve—and unwoke—generation in our nation’s history. They pose as all-knowing and all-caring. But in the end, they are proving unwoken to the full dimensions of those who have channeled them into a decade or more of crushing debt, left them with unmarketable degrees, nourished both their ignorance of the world, past and present, and their political arrogance—and called it all success.
- Victor Davis Hanson, Dec 2019.

I was a very reluctant Trump voter. But watching your sham- wow-impeachment (It’s Russia, it’s Ukraine, it’s taxes, it’s mean tweets against the squad, it’s the fact that orange man bad), your attempt to reverse elections you don’t like, and silence people who don’t agree with you, has me spitting mad, furious, not even sure what to do with all this anger. And I’m not alone. You have no idea of the anger stalking this land. (And if you say “you sound angry” guess what “Damn skippy. You have no idea how angry.” The only ones not angry aren’t paying attention.)
- Blogger Sara Hoyt warning to the left

You get all our oconus [operation outside the continental United States] lures approved? ;).
- FBI lawyer Lisa Page text to her boyfriend, FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok, December 2015 referring to Halper, Mifsud, et al.

Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.
- Thomas Sowell

The press’s failure to hold left-wingers accountable for bad behavior merely encourages the left’s bad behavior to the point that its candidates are repellent to ordinary Americans.
- The “Taranto Principle,” attributed to The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto

... they don’t care about the damage they do. It’s rule or ruin. Because they’re horrible people, who in a healthy republic would be ostracized and marginalized and mocked by everyone.
- Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit on the Democrats and impeachment.

Let me put it in nice simple terms so that the Swamp Beings will understand: The President sets and conducts foreign policy, not State, not the NSC, not the DOD, not any other alphabet agency. He does not have to go through State or NSC to conduct said policy; he does not have to consult with Kent or Taylor or anybody else on Ukraine or any other aspect of foreign policy.
- blogger Diplomad

When a party spends three years baselessly accusing a president of everything from being a Russian mole to obstructing justice, from profiting off the presidency to abusing security clearances and cheating on his taxes, that party loses the credibility to say: Really, this time, we mean it. Democrats didn’t lose the war for hearts and minds on Wednesday. They lost it three years ago.
-Kimberly Strassel after the start of the House Impeachment public hearing. Nov, 2019.

Great! Thank you, @Hillary Clinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain.
- Tulsi Gabbard, D-HI responding to Hillary's low ball tactic...calling Tulsi a Russian asset.

So the reaction to growing illegitimacy is not sexual responsibility, but abortion. The reaction to drug addiction is safe injection sites. The solution to the breakdown of the family is for the state to set itself up as an ersatz husband for the single mother and an ersatz father for the children. The call comes for more and more social programs to deal with this wreckage—and while we think we’re solving problems, we are underwriting them.
- Atty Gen. Bill Barr at Notre Dame, Oct. 2019 - on government and secularism's answer to social pathologies.

Americans have long celebrated the orderly transfer of power that is unique to our form of government. The Democrats, however, have abandoned that tradition by refusing to accept the outcome of the 2016 election.
- David Catron, The Am. Spectator, Oct '19

I’m black, and I work in and around the entertainment business. Every day, everywhere I go people freely and gleefully throw their progressive politics at me. They’re not lecturing. They’re just…assuming. They’re looking at my skin and assuming I’m a liberal, assuming I need a safe space from Big Orange Bad Man, assuming I agree with their every liberal notion on everything from homelessness to public education. They unflinchingly disparage people who didn’t vote for who they think we all should have voted for. They insult flyover country conservatives, Trump supporters, or just anyone who doesn’t loudly and proudly toe the far-left progressive line.
- Kira Davis

We all know why impeachment is really happening – and when I say all, I include especially the Democrats and their devoted media allies/leaders. They know because they live in fear of what they wrought and desperately want to hide it or bury it (under impeachment) before it is laid out before the public.
I refer, of course, to the imminent exposure–at least we hope it is coming–of the predicates of the Russia Probe, easily the most despicable and seditious attempt to unseat a president in American history. This attempt to impeach or, at that point, to interdict began on or not long after June 16, 2015, the day Donald Trump announced his candidacy.
What is happening now is merely a continuation of a process that started then. Trump was the first president to be “impeached” before he was elected–a neat trick if there ever was one. In a manner of speaking, the group or groups behind the Russia Probe wanted to pre-impeach him. And they never gave up, not even for a minute, even after the Mueller collusion investigation came up empty after two years and multiple millions spent.
-Roger SImon, PJ Media

What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you use it? To whom are you accountable? And finally, how do we get rid of you?
British politician Tony Benn's questions to anyone in power.

It is not necessary, strictly speaking, for sensitive foreign communications to be maintained in a secure and confidential manner. There is an alternative: Trump could have hired some random IT person to set up a server in the bathroom of his house.
- John Hinderraker, Powerline. Sept 29, 2019

Someone should tell Beto who did the killing at Kent State.
- Reason Magazine's Eric Boehm, after Beto argued at a Kent State rally that only the government can be trusted with guns.

Many young people are sensing they have been cheated by the adults that have taught them, for example, to pursue self-esteem rather than self-control -- a "rule" guaranteed to lead to moral and professional failure.
- Dennis Prager

... the deeper reason for his neglect was a quality of the socialist or communist or revolutionary sensibility that is too little remarked. I mean its ingrained, indeed its programmatic, lack of curiosity about other people.
- Roger Kimball on why Bernie Sanders never availed himself of the opportunity to visit Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Vermont.

What's the point of calling yourself a liberal if you don't allow anyone else to have a different view? This snowflake culture that we now operate in, the victimhood culture, the everyone has to think in a certain way, behave a certain way. Everyone has to have a bleeding heart and tell you 20 things that are wrong with them. I just think it is all completely skewed to an environment where everyone is offended by everything and no one is allowed to say a joke.
-Piers Morgan, 2019

… Mr. Trump rarely uses racial categories in his speech or his tweets. It is the media and Democratic leaders who routinely characterize individuals and groups by race and issue race-based denunciations of large parts of the American polity.
- Heather Mac Donald, fellow at the Manhattan Institute

If the Left were a person, it would be in a locked ward by now on twenty milligrams of haloperidol QID.
- James Kunstler

There are two rules for illiberal democracy. The first rule is that during an emergency certain illiberal and anti-democratic measures are necessary to ensure public safety, national security, and the practice of democracy itself.
The second rule is that there is always an emergency.
- Kevin D. Williamson

That’s interesting, because in America among Scandinavians, we have no poverty either.
- Milton Friedman after a Scandinavian economist told Milton Friedman, “In Scandinavia we have no poverty"

It’s a revolt of the mediocre many against the excellent few. And it is being undertaken for the sake of a radical egalitarianism in which all are included, all are equal, all are special.
-NY Times' Bret Stevens on the college student activists

“It’s become kind of… a medieval established religion. There’s an inquisition, there’s an index of forbidden books and forbidden thoughts which you’re not supposed to read or think. There is a strict moral patrol to make sure that you are not caught thinking things you shouldn’t be thinking or saying things you shouldn’t say. And it’s the antithesis of freedom.”
- Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, on the Democrat Party phenomenon of “political correctness”

" ...liberal democracy tends to develop the qualities that were characteristic of communism: pervasive politicization, ideological zeal, aggressive social engineering, vulgarity, a belief in inevitability of progress, destruction of family, the omnipresent rule of ideological correctness, severe restriction of intellectual inquiry, etc. "
- Prof. Ryszard Legutko describing what's in his book, The Demon in Democracy, after was abruptly disinvited from a speaking engagement at Middlebury College (and called in his words "a homophobe (“f*cking homophobe”, as they put it on Facebook), a misogynist, a racist, a sexist and practically everything an ideological sinner can be today")

Liberalism shares with communism a powerful faith in rational minds finding solutions which translates into a drive to improve the citizen, modernize him, and mold him into a superior being. ... Accordingly, both ideologies politicize, and thereby debase, every aspect of life, including sexuality, the family, religion, sports, entertainment, and the arts.
-Dan Pipes paraphrasing Ryszard Legutko, Polish professor of philosophy - author of, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies

A liberal is intolerant of other views. He wants to control your thoughts and actions. You know the difference between cannibals and liberals? Cannibals eat only their enemies.
- President Lyndon Johnson

It’s a wonder Democratic presidential candidates can face the day. To listen to them debate, they live in an America saddled with historic wealth inequality, governed by rapacious monopolies, burdened with dirty air and water. This alternate America has human-rights violations and treats women as second-class citizens. Mitch McConnell is the Most Powerful Man on the Planet.
- WSJ's, Kimberley A. Strassel, Jun '19

potus wants to know everything we're doing
- Peter Strzok's text to Lisa Page documenting Obama's role in FBI's war on Trump.

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages
-Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or it they try, they will shortly be out of office.
- Milton Friedman

Spygate is the first American scandal in which the government wants the facts published transparently but the media want to cover them up.
- British journalist John O'Sullivan:

How do you impeach a Republican President for a crime that was committed by the Democrats?
- Pres. Donald Trump, June 2019.

… is it an accident that you get violence and genocide under socialism? Or is it an inevitability, is it inherent to socialism?” “Really, is violence inherent to socialism? And I think the answer is absolutely yes.
- Senator Rand Paul

There is no serious person out there who would suggest that you could even rig America’s elections
- Obama before the 2016 election.

Facebook's news feeds are censored and crafted to reflect the political leanings of Facebook's utopian socialists while remaining vulnerable to misinformation campaigns designed to stir up violence and prejudice
- Crossfit - explaining why it quit Facebook.

San Francisco is the nation’s leader in property crime. Burglary, larceny, shoplifting, and vandalism are included under this ugly umbrella. In 2017 over 30,000 reports of car break-ins were filed, and the current average is 51 per day.
- City Journal, May 2019.

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg on Thursday unveiled 27 new policy proposals grouped under 3 categories: ‘Freedom,’ ‘Security’ and ‘Democracy,’” all of which are designed to expand the government and reduce freedom, security, and democracy.
- Ed Driscoll, Instapundit (May '19)

There is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even rig America’s elections, there’s no evidence that that has happened in the past or that it will happen this time, and so I’d invite Mr. Trump to stop whining and make his case to get votes.”
- Obama before the 2016 elections

(American) culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.
- Univ. of Penn professor Amy Wax sparking a petition signed by 4,000 people calling for her dismissal.

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.”
- P.J. O’Rourke,

President Trump has every right to feel liberated. What the [Mueller] report shows is that he endured a special-counsel probe that was relentlessly, at times farcically, obsessed with taking him out. What stands out is just how diligently and creatively the special counsel’s legal minds worked to implicate someone in Trump World on something Russia- or obstruction-of-justice-related. And how—even with all its overweening power and aggressive tactics—it still struck out.
- Kimberly Strassel, WSJ Apr 2019.

Bernie Sanders is a kind of child abuser, injecting his meretricious swill into our all-too-gullible youth who have nowhere near the education to analyze it.
– Roger Simon

In order to advance their objectives, modern progressives, ie. ideological leftists, need to pretend not to know things; for it is only by pretense that leftists can avoid the inherent hypocrisy within their position.
-David Mamet.

What did socialists use before candles? Electricity.
-Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit Mar 2019.

We can deal with Red China. We can deal with Russia. We can deal with Iran. We can deal with North Korea. The problem is, when you have a cancer from within — and that’s what the Democrat party has become — that’s quite a different story. So many of the great men in our history made the point that if this country is to be destroyed, it’s going to be destroyed from within.
-Mark Levin, Mar, 2019

" ... nobody appears to have kept receipts; the subways and street corners are still overrun with crazy people, and nobody in charge knows what’s to happen next."
-NY Post's Bob McManus reporting that the NYC Council discovered that Bill de Blasio's wife Chirlane McCray had secretly spent a whopping $1.8 billion on a pet project for mental illness.

Just before July fourth, for example, Facebook automatically blocked a post from a Texas newspaper that it claimed contained hate speech. Facebook then asked the paper to 'review the contents of its page and remove anything that does not comply with Facebook’s policies.' The text at issue was the Declaration of Independence.
-- Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.)

Randomized, controlled experiments conducted with more than 10,000 people from 39 countries suggest that one company alone — Google LLC, which controls about 90 percent of online search in most countries — has likely been determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the national elections in the world for several years now, with increasing impact each year as Internet penetration has grown.
– Robert Epstein

Just admit you committed one of the greatest Kinsley Gaffes in decades: Your office obviously released what you actually think. And now you’re scrambling to pretend something else happened. It’s dishonest and speaks to the immaturity of you, your staff and your ideas.
- Jonah Goldberg tweet after Ocasio-Cortez tried to deny her Green Resolution was hers - after it became a laughing stock.

Once upon a time, leading Democrats, such as Bill Clinton, wanted abortion to be "safe, legal, and rare."  .. The latest push from Democrats, perhaps emboldened by winning the House last November, is to make abortion "unsafe, repugnant, and common."
- Brian Joondeph, Am. Thinker, Feb, 2019

More FBI agents arrested [Roger] Stone than SEALs sent to kill bin Laden
- Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, FOX News

It just beggars belief that the same liberals who fret about 'micro-aggressions' for 20-somethings were able to see 16-year-olds absorbing the worst racist garbage from religious bigots, and then express the desire to punch the kids in the face.
-Andrew Sullivan, Jan 2019 on the Covington kids beat down by liberals.

If Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., were a conservative, all anyone would be talking about is how uninformed she is. She would be facing trick questions from reporters designed to expose her lack of knowledge, and brutal sketches on "Saturday Night Live" mocking her intelligence and fitness for office.
- Marc A. Thiessen , Jewish World Review, Jan, 2019

Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; Liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.
- Bookworm

It would be a miracle if the democratic political process were ever to renounce the use of the envy-motive. Its usefulness derives, if for no other reason, from the fact that all that is needed, in principle, is to promise the envious the destruction or the confiscation of assets enjoyed by the others; beyond that there is no need to promise anything more constructive. The negativism of envy permits even the weakest of candidates to sound reasonably plausible, since anybody, once in office, can confiscate or destroy. To enlarge the country’s capital assets, to create employment etc., requires a more precise programme. Candidates will naturally try to make some positive proposals, but it is often all too apparent that envy looms large in their calculations. The more precarious the nation’s economy at election time, the stronger the temptations for politicians to make ‘redistribution’ their main plank, even when they know how little margin is left for redistributive measures, and, worse still, how likely they are to retard economic growth.
- Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior. (hat tip Steven Hayward)

" ... there are few things uglier than a righteous leftist mob."
- Wall St Journal Editorial on the left lashing out on the Covington Catholic High School students (white, male, Christian, attendees at the annual March for Life in Washington, and wearers of MAGA hats)

the FBI initiated an investigation in May of 2017 into whether President Donald Trump was serving as a covert Russian agent. The accusation itself was ludicrous on its face. But from a legal standpoint, the FBI's probe constituted an egregious abuse of power. The Bureau had no probable cause, no evidence, and no reasonable suspicions. They investigated Trump because they could. They defied the law, ignored or perverted facts, and debased the integrity of a heretofore-respected law enforcement agency.
- Gregg Jarrett, Jan, 2019, FOX News

“Illegal Immigration is wrong, plain and simple. Until the American people are convinced we will stop future flows of illegal immigration, we will make no progress.” -Senator Chuck Schumer, 2009
“We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented and unchecked” -Barack Obama, 2005
“I voted numerous times… to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in. And I do think you have to control your borders.” -Hillary Clinton, 2008
- Predictable response ("dehumanizing,” “problematic,” “jingoist.”, hate speech) when above quotes used by Campus Reform's Cabot Phillips asking students if they agreed with President Donald Trump's statements on immigration and the border wall [the quotes the students were given were not actually from Trump but by the Democrats listed].

Progressive Americans [have an] inherently insatiable desire to exercise their superiority over those they deem inferior … [they] deplore the “deplorables” not to improve them, but to feel good about themselves. Hating people for what they are and because it feels good to hate them, is hate in its unalloyed form.
-Angelo Codevilla, Our Revolution’s Logic, The American Mind, Jan, 2019

Kakistocracy is a badly underused word which needs to make a major comeback this year, as it is perfectly descriptive of the cabal of loons, clowns, demagogues, crooks and halfwits who are now in charge of the House of Representatives.
-Scott McCay, American Spectator, Jan 4, 2019

The Democrats have staked their future on importing voters in violation of the law, since the voters they already have mostly prefer not to have many children. Republicans, in turn, have staked their future on preserving the rule of law, and on preserving an America more or less like the one we know. It comes down, ultimately, to a contest between preserving America vs. preserving the Democratic Party.
- John Hinderaker, Powerline, commenting on open borders.

While virtually anyone could name a list of medical, scientific or technological things that have made the lives of today's generation better than that of people in the past, including people just one generation ago, it would be a challenge for even a highly informed person to name three ways in which our lives today are better as a result of the ideas of sociologists or deconstructionists.
-Thomas Sowell

… the solution to public policy on poverty is to invite all the experts to a big conference on an island—and to keep them there for a few decades. When they are allowed to return home, they'd be very impressed with their work.
- Thomas Sowell

Their professors have told them lies against “systemic injustice” and the internal colonization of men and women who reject socialism. So they actually think they’re redressing a wrong. Kind of like fake but accurate. Until they get over their brain washing they’re awful citizens and tainted officers. WE CAN FACE THIS NOW, OR IT CAN EXPLODE IN OUR FACES LATER. THE LEFT HAS STOPPED RESPECTING OUR ELECTION PROCESS
- Sara Hoyt on the Democrat cheating in the 2018 midterms.

When some at the top levels of our government intelligence and law enforcement agencies are accused of malfeasance or crimes, they have the power to choose not to investigate or prosecute themselves. They can launch investigations into their political enemies and claim obstruction if the enemies try to stop them, and they can withhold key information from the elected body that has oversight power over them: Congress.
-Sharyl Attkisson

History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.’
- English essayist Walter Bagehot

There is only one kind of democracy that socialists can create, and that is an illiberal one, where the "majority"—I suspect some kind of vanguard in reality—engages, yet once again, in massive experiments in social engineering in an attempt purge people of their nasty habits.
- Matthew Harwood, Reason.com

Despite Democrat claims that it is practically non-existent, the reality is that in every election there have been numerous irregularities reported, the overwhelming majority of which favor Democrats. Despite there being numerous incidents every election cycle, Democrats are correct that prosecutions for voter fraud are rare. In large part, this only is because Democrats have purposefully set up a system which deliberately turns a blind eye and prevents any form of detection or screening.
- Matt C. Pinsker, adjunct professor of criminal justice at Virginia Commonwealth University.

I reject the elite’s fussy paradigm of Things That We Must Pretend Matter. I will stubbornly exercise my right not to get exercised over yet another outrage ginned up by people who are determined to manipulate me. It just ain’t happening.
-  Kurt Schlichter’s shameless wrong thinking

The logic that drives each turn of our revolutionary spiral is Progressive Americans’ inherently insatiable desire to exercise their superiority over those they deem inferior. With Newtonian necessity, each such exercise causes a corresponding and opposite reaction. The logic’s force comes not from the substance of the Progressives’ demands. If that were the case, acquiescing to or compromising with them could cut it short. Rather, it comes from that which moves, changes, and multiplies their demands without end. That is the Progressives’ affirmation of superior worth, to be pursued by exercising dominance: superior identity affirmed via the inferior’s humiliation. It is an inherently endless pursuit.
- Angelo Codevilla

It’s alarming enough that the FBI felt free to open a counterintelligence investigation into an active presidential campaign. That it also felt free to gather information for that probe from the opposing campaign is mind-boggling. Team Clinton had the most powerful position on earth to gain from Mr. Trump’s downfall. No conflict there, right?
-Kimberley A. Strassel, WSJ

All of the evidence points in one transparently obvious direction; toward a 2015 and 2016 collaborative effort structured to use a counterintelligence operation to conduct wiretaps and surveillance on the presidential campaign of candidate Donald Trump.
- Sundance

‘I consider you a part of the Democrat Party’
- Trump to the White House Press

“No witnesses, no corroboration, no evidence. That’s the pattern,”
- Mark Levin on the sexual assault allegations raised against Judge Brett Kavanaugh

“It is rather ironic: as editor of the New York Review of Books I published a theme issue about #MeToo-offenders who had not been convicted in a court of law but by social media. And now I myself am publicly pilloried.”
- Ian Buruma, editor of the reliably left-of-center New York Review of Books -  was insufficiently woke to appreciate the rage of current progressive identity politics and published an article by an author #MeToo didn’t like.

The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant, it’s that they know so much that isn’t so.
-Ronald Reagan

The primary target isn’t really the President. Mueller and his apologists know Trump is the voice of a nationwide rebellion against their authority, and realize that the threat can’t be neutralized until he is silenced. The end game is to crush what they see as a peasant’s revolt. Mueller’s function is to provide a legal pretext for removing the President from office. The role of the media is to misrepresent everything he does in order to trick independent voters into giving the Democrats a majority in the House.
-David Catron Aug, 2018

What needs to be kept in mind at every stage is that this whole investigation is not about Russian meddling. Everyone agrees that they did it and it was wrong. No one needs a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of that. This is part of an effort by the Democrats and their collaborators to overturn a presidential election that they thought they would win. No crime of which either [Paul Manafort or Michael Cohen] was pronounced guilty today is as foul as the campaign underway to foil the decision of the American people.
- NY Sun editorial, Aug, 2018

Socialism is a hate crime, a doctrine of tyranny, mass murder, and human suffering on a vast scale
- James Piereson, New Criterion

Schumpeter gave one answer. He said that a free enterprise society, by its success, creates a large number of intellectuals who, by their nature, feel they don’t have the power they are entitled to. They become frustrated and repressed, and thus dissatisfied with the existing system. I think there is a good deal of truth to that. But, of course, that doesn’t argue that intellectuals are collectivists. It only argues that they would be against the status quo; that they would be free enterprisers in a collectivist world and collectivists in a free enterprise world.
-Milton Friedman when asked why intellectuals favor socialism.

Democratic Socialism is simply slavery re-branded
- S.G. Cheah, Democratic Socialism is Totalitarian Slavery, Medium.com 2018.

I believe in a free, strong media with diverse views — I’ll defend it with all I’ve got.
- NYC Mayor, Bill de Blasio shortly before his security hauled off a reporter who asked a question he didn't like.'

Hypothesis: the progressive intellectual class dominates by self-entrenchment and self-replication, but these very advantages are also an Achilles’ heel. Surrounded by the affirmation of the like-minded, their judgments face no testing or reality constraint and become fantastic.
- Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule Tweet

You can call it a soft-coup, or you can call it politicization of the DOJ and FBI, but the end result is the same – the intentional effort to manipulate, influence, and ultimately subvert an election for the presidency of the United States.
-Blogger Sundance, The Conservative Treehouse.

The fact is, having a group of people scream at you and denigrate you is exactly what it feels like to be in America — if you don't happen to be a coastal elite. It has felt this way for the last twenty years at least. Every television show you watch, every movie, every woman's magazine, every comedian, and, yes, every news program tells you you suck. Your country sucks. Your culture sucks. Your religion and your morals suck. And you personally are one of those dumb-ass racists who clings to his Bible and talks funny.
-Andrew Klavan, PJ Media, responding to Jim Acosta who after hearing "CNN sucks" reported it didn't feel like America anymore."

The bigger picture is that in a lot of the bad and problematic countries that Intelligence Committee members investigate, this is what they do there. There is a political party that controls the intelligence agencies, controls the media, all to ensure that party stays in power. If we get to that here, we no longer have a functioning republic. We can't let that happen.
- Devin Nunes on the Democrat controlled Deep State

Now, thanks to the partial release of documents submitted by the Justice Department to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2016 and 2017, we know that Page is far from a villain: He was framed by Democratic Party operatives (with their own ties to Russia); had his constitutional rights stripped away by the government; was forced to testify before Congress, and to submit to questioning from the FBI and perhaps a special counsel; and endured painful, humiliating public scrutiny while most of the media ignored—even cheered—his plight.”
- Julie Kelly, Am. Greatness, July 25th, 2018

One of the consequences of such notions as ‘entitlements’ is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence.
-Thomas Sowell

" ... the leaders of the socialist movement are perfectly well aware that the inevitable result of socialism is tyranny and mass poverty. But for them, this isn’t a bug, it is a feature. In fact, it is the whole point. Socialism is now, and always has been, a pretext under which power-mad psychopaths seize power and terrorize their fellow humans."
-John Hinderaker, Powerline, July, 2018

Progressives will consider the case of Venezuela or North Korea (the American Left’s longstanding admiration of Castro’s Cuba, and its celebration of Hugo Chàvez only a few years ago, has been memory-holed) and say that the problem with those countries is not socialism but a lack of democracy, political violence and instability, etc. But repression on the Venezuelan model is not extraneous to socialism — it is baked into the socialist cake. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro (and Castro!), Chàvez, Maduro, Honecker, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, the Kim dynasty, Shining Path: No ideology is that unlucky. Violence and oppression is not something that just happens to accompany efforts to impose political regimentation on the economy — which is to say, on private life — but is an inescapable accompaniment to it.
-Kevin Williamson, Nat. Review.

The ability to agree to disagree is dead, murdered by leftists who demand absolute adherence to their political will or they declare you an enemy of the people and seek to destroy you
-Derek Hunter, Townhall June, 2018

Rather than the Democrat party responding to the will of the people, the Democrat party has decided to change the people so they respond to the will of the Democrat party. And many, many Republicans are on board, because they buy into this notion that it’s humane — compassionate — to destroy your own country.
-Mark Levin on immigration.

" ... they are the party of no borders, no sovereignty, no country"
- John Hinderraker on the Democrats. June, 2018

They are demanding that witnesses turn in their phones. If I advised them to follow Hillary Clinton’s lead — delete all your emails, and then acid wash the emails and hard drives on the phones, then take your phones and bash them with a hammer into little itsy bitsy pieces, use bleach bit, remove the sim cards, and then take the pieces and hand it over to Robert Mueller.
- Sean Hannity advice to those targeted by Robert Mueller

There are two reasons the left labels most conservatives and all Trump supporters “white supremacists,” “neo-Nazis” and “racists.” One is to defeat conservatives without having to defeat conservative ideas. The other is to instill fear: Speak out and you will suffer the consequences.
– Dennis Prager

How long before a federal judge in Hawaii orders the Korean War must continue
- Jack Posobiec, Author of Citizens for Trump on the news that North and South Korea were possibly ending the Korean War.

Looking back at the mass murderers of all time, Stalin, Chavez, Pol Pot, Lenin, Hitler, Castro, Kim, & Mao – you don’t find any small government conservatives. You also don’t find free market principal unleashing a blazing economy. You do find tyranny, socialism, famine, gun confiscation, poverty, and heros of the Democrat party. The choice between right and left couldn't be clearer.
- Your's truly

” … Trump’s election — or, more specifically, the reaction thereto — revealed that we have been ruled by moral and intellectual failures for some time. But what they lack in competence, humility, and integrity, they make up for in self-importance and entitlement.”
– Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit

“I don’t do sneaky things. I don’t leak. I don’t do weasel moves.”
- James Comey - from the Comey memos

What is perhaps most troubling about the Department’s position in this case, however, is the conceit of unlimited agency power that lies behind it. The power of a federal agency is no more than worldly. The Department should tend to what is Caesar’s, and leave the rest alone. ... you tell people they’re part of the alt-right when they’re not, and treat them as such no matter how much of a lie that is
- Ben Shapiro tweet on the left

None of my liberal friends invite me to dinner anymore. Thanks to Donald Trump, I’ve lost seven pounds. I call it the Donald Trump diet.
- Alan Dershowitz on his social ostracization by the left for his sometimes agreeing with Trump

it’s not that the policy didn’t work; it’s that we need more of it! — the 2016 election seems to have proven to liberals not that their shift in principles was wrong, but that they didn’t shift enough, because they didn’t realize just how powerful the hateful, mystical forces arrayed against them really were.”
-Oliver Traldi

Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves ‘progressive’ really hate progress.
- Steve Pinker.

" ... self-serious, self-righteous, angry-faced harridans who want to destroy you for disagreeing with them. They call you names, they shout you down, they riot if you try to speak, they try to get you fired or run you out of business"
- Andrew Klaven, PJ Media, on the modern Democrat Party.

Common sense can be more readily expected when writing for the general public than when writing for the intelligentsia.
-Thomas Sowell

When we start relying totally on the government for not just our primary education but for college education as well, we give the government our tacit agreement to let it tell us what we should study and what our career field should be
-Sarah Hoyt

There is no serious person out there who would suggest that you could even rig America's elections, in part because they are so decentralized. There is no evidence that that has happened in the past, or that there are instances that that could happen this time
- Barack Obama on the 2016 election

It provides evidence that Steele was getting information from the Clinton team itself! Via the State Department! So now, not only do we have a dossier based on unnamed shady Russians, but on Sidney Blumenthal. How much of this was engineered by the Clinton campaign from start?
-Kim Strassel Tweet after the Grassley memo release, Feb 2018

The danger is that the media is largely controlled by people who are so committed to a dead statist ideology that they are willing to ignore objective facts and contradict themselves on a day-to-day basis in order to participate in what amounts to a coup attempt against a duly elected President.
-David Catron, Am Spect., Feb, 2018

I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director!
-Pres. Donald Trump Tweet - Jun '17

[Liberalism was supposed to] foster greater equality, defend a pluralistic tapestry of different cultures and beliefs, protect human dignity, and, of course, expand liberty [but it actually] generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation, and undermines freedom.”
- Patrick Deneem, Why Liberalism Failed,

It is amazing how many of the intelligentsia call it 'greed' to want to keep what you have earned, but not greed to want to take away what somebody else has earned, and let politicians use it to buy votes.
-Thomas Sowell

On numerous occasions the [Obama] intelligence community incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition. Details about U.S. persons associated with the incoming administration; details with little or no apparent foreign intelligence value were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting. I want to be clear; none of this surveillance was related to Russia, or the investigation of Russian activities.
- Rep. Nunes, March '17

One reason many Americans don’t trust the media is because they treat every Donald Trump outburst as a Defcon 1 level threat to the survival of the republic.
- Wall St. Journal Ed., Jan '18.

We’ve reached a point at which senators are threatening to understaff the executive if the executive doesn’t decline to enforce the laws over which senators have control.
- Charles Cooke commenting on Rep. Sen Cory Gardner threatening to hold DOJ nominees until Attorney General Sessions backs off on federal marijuana law enforcement.

But most ideas are probably bad; certainly 90% of ideas aren’t in the top 10%.
-Glenn Reynolds

... if a sitting president used the instruments of state, including the intelligence community, to disseminate and legitimize a piece of paid opposition research in order to first obtain warrants to spy on the other party’s campaign, and then to de-legitimize the results of an election once the other party’s candidate won, we’re looking at a scandal that dwarfs Watergate—a story not about a bad man in the White House, but about the subversion of key security institutions that are charged with protecting core elements of our democratic process while operating largely in the shadows.
-Lee Smith, Tablet Mag. on the GPS Fusion dossier

If Trump likes something, Rubin doesn’t. If he does something, she opposes it. If his agenda flits into alignment with hers—as anyone’s is wont to do from time to time, she either ignores it, or finds a way to downplay i t. The result is farcical and sad; a comprehensive and self-inflicted airbrushing of the mind.
- Charles Cooke taking down the Washington Post’s "conservative" blogger, Jennifer Rubin for intellectual dishonesty.

If you cannot achieve equality of performance among people born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, how realistic is it to expect to achieve it across broader and deeper social divisions?
-Thomas Sowell

Well, it starts in the home. If the father is not in the home, the boy will find a father in the streets. I saw it in my generation and every generation before me and every one since. If the streets raise you, then the judge becomes your mother and prison becomes your home.
– Denzel Washington when asked about the plight of the black community.

Today’s identity politics . . . teaches the exact opposite of what we think a liberal arts education should be. When I was at Yale in the 1980s, I was given so many tools for understanding the world. By the time I graduated, I could think about things as a utilitarian or as a Kantian, as a Freudian or a behaviorist, as a computer scientist or as a humanist. I was given many lenses to apply to any given question or problem.

But what do we do now? Many students are given just one lens—power. Here’s your lens, kid. Look at everything through this lens. Everything is about power. Every situation is analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people. This is not an education. This is induction into a cult. It’s a fundamentalist religion. It’s a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety and intellectual impotence. . . .

Jonathan Haidt, The Age of Outrage: What It’s Doing to Our Universities, and Our Country.

… asking lefties to be grateful is humiliating and degrading … The left is a movement built on resentment. And resentment and gratitude are opposing emotions.
Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage, on why the left hates Thanksgiving.

“Every day, it is a joy to awaken, unlike Hillary Clinton, without a hangover. Oh yes, and also to awaken knowing that Felonia von Pantsuit is not, and will never be, our president. Can you imagine if she were? She is as vindictive as she is stupid.”
- KURT SCHLICHTER, Nov, 2017

... what they did instead — turning their party into an accessory to Clinton’s appetites, shamelessly abandoning feminist principle, smearing victims and blithely ignoring his most credible accuser, all because Republicans funded the investigations and they’re prudes and it’s all just Sexual McCarthyism — feels in the cold clarity of hindsight like a great act of partisan deformation.
- Ross Douthat, On the Democrat acceptance of Clinton behavior. Nov. , 2017 NY Times

Wear socks depicting police officers as pigs; wear Fidel Castro as a fashion statement IN MIAMI; sue NFL for collusion when gf compares owners to slave owners… Win Citizen of the Year, -- “Serve in the US Military…nothing. What a joke, GQ.
- former ESPN reporter Britt McHenry tweeting when GQ magazine released its special issue naming former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick “Citizen of the Year.”

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the ‘in’ language — serves as a badge of identity.
- Angelo Codevilla, The Ruling Class

A friend likens The New York Times to a 1960s adolescent who refuses to grow up.  In a perpetual state of outrage, it is a newspaper of college snowflakes who embrace all forms of diversity except thought. … It sees its liberal politics not as a point of view, but as received wisdom that cannot be legitimately disputed.
- NY Post's Michael Goodwin

Two of the more repugnant Americans today are the moral narcissist judges from Maryland (Theodore Chuang) and Hawaii (Derrick Watson) who tried to upend Donald Trump's travel ban. The fact is the travel ban is insufficient, not illegal
- R Simon, PJ Media, Nov 1, 2017

"Everyone is colluding with Russia except Trump!"
- Mark Steyn

… religious beliefs need not be acceptable, logical, consistent, or comprehensible to others in order to merit First Amendment protection”
– Supreme Court, Thomas v. Review Board

That our progressive friends often are so pristinely ignorant of the moral order underpinning the American founding is one of their great intellectual failures. They do not understand the American idea, and, as a result, they do not really understand their own ideas, either.
- KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON, Our 21st-Century Second Amendment

I, for one, am not super inclined to give up my ability to defend myself in response to demands by people who eagerly tell me they want me enslaved or dead. Literally dead.
- Kurt Schlichter, Townhall, 2017 on liberal gun control demands

if Republicans didn’t have Democrats to run against, they’d lose every time.
-Bill Whittle

There is absolutely nothing that so defines Leftism as anger... Converse or correspond with anyone on the Left long enough and it becomes obvious that they are just plan mad, especially at people who do not agree that they just know better than you do. So their commentary is, “smug, predictable, dismissive,” with all of the subtlety, wit, and artistry of a sledgehammer.” You either agree with them altogether or you are painted as a racist, homophobic, neo-Nazi, fundamentalist Christian, white supremacist, misogynist child of darkness. Who hates the government except in hurricanes.
-Ed Morrisey, Hot Air

Capitalism is revolutionary. Communism and socialism isn’t revolutionary. It’s just another form of autocracy of centralized government control over the individual
- Mark Levin, Aug 2017

Democrats hate Voter ID. It’s one of their biggest issues. But that’s ridiculous. Voter ID is a no-brainer. You need an ID to do most anything: cash a check, buy cigarettes or alcohol, get food stamps, or get any government benefits. You even need ID to get into government buildings!
So why are Democrats so intense and passionate about such a minor issue? Me thinks thou protesteth too much. This is a much bigger issue than meets the naked eye. Democrats are losing their minds over Voter ID because they know they can’t win elections without fraud.
- Wayne Allyn Root, 2014

The Resistance so far has been less a call to rebuild Washington than the scream of someone having his leg amputated without anesthesia.
- Richard Fernadez, PJ Media on the left's reaction to Trump. July, 2017

The two major enemies of a free society are businesses and intellectuals. Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everyone else but want special privileges for himself and every academic is in favor of freedom for himself but wants to control everybody else.
- Milton Friedman

No matter who you are or what you do, there are always tens of millions of liberals who believe they have a better idea of what you should be thinking, feeling and spending your money on. Of course, that sense of smug superiority coupled with the disastrous results of liberal policies would almost be comical, except for the destruction in real people’s lives that is left in the wake of liberal policies.
- John Hawkins

“The presumed irrationality of the public is a pattern running through many, if not most or all, of the great crusades of (liberals) in the twentieth century–regardless of the subject matter of the crusade or the field in which it arises. Whether the issue has been ‘overpopulation,’ Keynesian economics, criminal justice, or natural resource exhaustion, a key assumption has been that the public is so irrational that the superior wisdom of (liberals) must be imposed, in order to avert disaster. The (liberals) do not simply ‘happen’ to have a disdain for the public. Such disdain is an integral part of their vision, for the central feature of that vision is preemption of the decisions of others.”
-Thomas Sowell

Civilization has been aptly called a ‘thin crust over a volcano.’ (Liberals) are constantly picking at that crust.
- Thomas Sowell

The problem is power. The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom.
– R.J. Rummel’s solution to mega murders by governments.

“Marginalized” students perversely pursue “equality” by pulling groups perceived as privileged down. “Privileged” students are chastised for committing “microaggressions” against their marginalized peers, while marginalized students are free to commit blatant acts of racial or gender bias against those they deem privileged.
-Steven Glick, editor-in-chief of the student newspaper Claremont Independent commenting on the PC crowd

The problem wasn’t mismanagement of Venezuela’s economy, it was management of the economy by the Chavez and Maduro regimes. Anyone who thinks a government can manage an economy is a fool. There is hardly any difference between management and mismanagement; the most brilliant managers would have performed only marginally better than Chavez and Maduro, if they were socialists or anything similar.
- John Hinderaker, Powerline

Democrats are completely focused on placating their frothing, left-wing, anti-Trump base — and the American heartland thinks these people are insane. They see women marching in anti-Trump rallies wearing “pussy” hats (and placing them on the heads of young children). They see left-wing mobs attacking Charles Murray at Middlebury College and trying to stop Ann Coulter from speaking at the University of California at Berkeley. They see “Bill Nye the Liberal Guy” — honorary co-chair of the March for Science — raising a question about whether people should be punished for having “extra kids.” (Which of their kids, they wonder, is the “extra” one?) They see a horrible feedback loop of left-wing intolerance for their beliefs and way of life.
And they see Democrats in Washington pandering to these people.

- Marc Thiessen, The past 100 days have been a disaster — for Democrats. WAPO, May, 2017

This farrago of nonsense and garbage is a disgrace to the person who wrote it, the editors and publishers who produced it, and the ideological fools who endorsed it. The only reason to discuss it at any length is to expose its mendacity as an antidote to anyone who has the misfortune to read it.
- Harvey Klehr, the Mellon professor of politics at Emory University, concluding a book review of Alger Hiss Framed: A New Look at the Case That Made Nixon Famous

He can lead a protest. I’m leading a country. –Theresa May in the House of Commons squashing the anti-Trump Corbyn (Labour Party)

... the inhabitants of “the swamp” are in what one commentator referred to as an existential struggle. Their jobs are at risk. ... what Donald J. Trump is up against: [is] a bureaucratic machine that fully intends to catch him in its cogs and grind him to political death. Its denizens will stop at nothing, because for them, to lose this battle is worse than death; it is to be exposed as the irrelevant, purposeless creatures they have become.
- Robert Arvay, Jan 2017

There is a presumption…that heartlessness and bigotry are somehow endemic to conservatism, that the rigors of freedom and capitalism literally require exploitation and inequality—this despite the fact that so many liberal policies since the 1960s have only worsened the inequalities they sought to overcome
-Shelby Steele

The conceit behind this hectoring is that Progressives are free to talk down to others, but non-Progressives don’t possess the same right.
-Richard Samuelson on the cast of Hamilton talking down to Mike Pence

How symbolic! What could be more fitting, given the broken down nature of the antique Cuban state produced by Castro?
- Powerline's Paul Mirengoff after the hearse carrying Fidel Castro’s remains during his funeral parade broke down and soldiers had to push it through the streets. Dec, 2016

All progressives, Communists included, claim to be about creating new human realities, they are perpetually at war against nature’s laws and limits. But since reality does not yield, progressives end up pretending that they themselves embody those new realities. Hence, any progressive movement’s nominal goal eventually ends up being subordinated to the urgent, all-important question of the movement’s own power. Because that power is insecure as long as others are able to question the truth of what the progressives say about themselves and the world, progressive movements end up struggling not so much to create the promised new realities as to force people to speak and act as if these were real: as if what is correct politically -- i.e., what thoughts serve the party’s interest -- were correct factually.
- Angelo Codevilla

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them. ... The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
- Former slave Frederick Douglass

It’s no exaggeration to say that this double standard amounts to a profound moral rot in our politics. I don’t need to cite chapter and verse about how the profoundly peaceful and law-abiding Tea Party movement was treated as a proto-fascist army of vigilantes while the Occupy movement was seen as a heartwarming expression of authentic people power. Never mind that violence was far more endemic to the Occupy movement. Left-wing youth, particularly minority youth, who threaten and intimidate people and destroy property, are seen as expressing their righteous passion. Right-wing youth who do likewise are terrifying harbingers of fascism and authoritarianism.
-Jonah Goldberg after left wing mob violence aat a Trump rally

The Democrats have their own super PAC, it's called the mainstream media.
-Marco Rubio in the Oct 2015 Republican debate

... Socialism is founded on a doctrine of human society which is bounded by time and takes no account of any objective other than that of material well-being. Since, therefore, it proposes a form of social organization which aims solely at production; it places too severe a restraint on human liberty, at the same time flouting the true notion of social authority.
- Pope John XXIII , Radio message to the Katholikentag of Vienna, September 14, 1952 in Discorsi e Radiomessaggi, Vol. XIV, p. 314

Libby was in an Orwellian position of being accused of a crime that may not have existed. But if it had, it was more likely committed by someone else.
- Victor Davis Hanson, on Scooter Libby's run in with the Justice Dept's special prosecutor

There are no rational means of predicting the ‘future of humanity’ over a long period or foretelling the nature of ‘social formations’ in ages to come. The idea that we can make such forecasts ‘scientifically,’ and that without doing so we cannot understand the past, is inherent in the Marxist theory of ‘social formations;’ it is one reason why the theory is a fantasy, and also why it is politically effective. The influence that Marxism has achieved, for from being the result or proof of its scientific character, is almost entirely due to its prophetic, fantastic, and irrational elements. Marxism is a doctrine of blind confidence that a paradise of universal satisfaction is awaiting us just around the corner.
-Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism

... a normalization of sexual experimentation, a devaluation of marriage (especially as the key to successful child rearing) and a destigmatization of illegitimacy, a fad for drugs and for dropping out of the workaday world, a disdain for authority, a belief that black criminality was a natural rebellion against racism and exclusion, and that, in reparation for 300 years of racial injustice, welfare payments ought to be raised and handed out freely, without any hint of disapproval—all these changes in morals, manners, and beliefs quickly filtered down to the inner-city poor and produced an explosion in drug use, crime, nonwork, welfare dependency, and illegitimacy.
-Myron Magnate, Aug, 2015 on the result of the left's policies in the 70's

There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income.
-Milton Friedman

Which Killed More Black People: Confederate Flag or Planned Parenthood?
-Sarah Palin

The Roberts Doctrine facilitates what has been for a century progressivism's central objective, which is the overthrow of the Constitution's architecture.
-George Will, 2015, on the Supreme Courts ruling on Obamacare

Above (an innumerable crowd of similar and equal men) arises an immense and tutelary power that alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyment and of looking after their fate. It works willingly for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent for it and the sole arbiter; it attends to their security, provides for their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, settles their estates, divides their inheritances, how can it not remove entirely from them the trouble to think and the difficulty of living?”
- Alexis De Tocqueville

Phil Donahue: When you see around the globe the maldistribution of wealth, the desperate plight of millions of people in underdeveloped countries, when you see so few haves and so many have-nots, when you see the greed and the concentration of power, did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greed’s a good idea to run on?

Milton Friedman: Well, first of all, tell me, is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy. It’s only the other fellow who’s greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about, the only cases in recorded history are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.

Donahue: But it seems to reward not virtue as much as ability to manipulate the system.

Friedman: And what does reward virtue? . . . I think you’re taking a lot of things for granted. Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us.

- From an interview with economist Milton Friedman by television talk-show host Phil Donahue in 1979

How has liberal guilt shaped stories that he has written and delivered on the economy; on taxes; on wages; on corporate profits; on fiscal policy; on race relations; on affirmative action; and on many other subjects NBC News has addressed over the years?
-Powerline's John Hinderaker on Brian Williams after the anchor recanted his fabricated story of his helicopter being downed by RPG in Iraq

“Did you know he was grazed by the very same bullet that struck Pope John Paul II in 1981 in Vatican Square?”
- Michelle Malkin tweet when Brian Williams returned to TV covering Pope Francis' US visit.

These stories about the killings of African-American men by police officers (or by a “neighborhood watch captain,” in Trayvon Martin’s case) are all what my long-time radio and podcast partner Brian Ward calls “stories of choice.” They are plucked from a nearly endless supply of sad events that occur daily in a nation of 315 million, and are promoted because they further a political narrative. An unholy alliance of activists and newspaper reporters and editors tries to distort our perception of reality by giving undue emphasis to them. Then, of course, reality begins to catch up with perception, and we have riots, murders of police officers, and so on. But understand that the decision to promote these stories, in preference to others that are equally or more newsworthy, is a choice that is consciously made by people with a political agenda.
-John Hinderaker, Powerline Dec 2014.

The guilt that is always part of the liberal syndrome swells painfully when liberals gain power and find that the world’s sorrows show no tendency to vanish at their sovereign touch
-James Burnham in Suicide of the West

[Socialism is ] a state in which a person who has not committed any crime sits at home waiting for the police, in which there are more spies than nurses and more people in prisons than in hospitals, in which one is forced to resort to lies...in which a person who does not think at all lives better -- and which wants all citizens to have the same opinions in philosophy, economics, literature, and ethics, in which the philosopher and writers always say the same thing as the generals and ministers, but always after them, in which one must each day refute what one affirmed the day before and always believe it to be the same.
-Prof Leszek Kolakowski, in one of his essays entitled "What is Socialism?"

How did our national government grow from a servant with sharply limited powers into a master with virtually unlimited power?
— Senator Barry Goldwater writing in The Conscience of a Conservative (1960)

College was once about preparing boys and girls to become men and women, not least through a process of desensitization to discomfiting ideas. Now it's just a $240,000 extension of kindergarten.
Wall St. Journal's Bret Stephens column in a faux commencement address to the Class of 2014 discussing “trigger warnings” - May, 2014

Taxing the rich to redistribute did not produce growth. On the contrary, growth reduced the share earned by the highest earners.
-Allan Meltzer, of the Hoover Institute commenting on Obama and the liberals having it backwards.

He just looked at me.
- Walter Williams on the reaction of a Food and Drug Administration official after asking him if he would accept grossly dishonest statistical techniques as were used by the EPA to determine secondhand smoke conclusions.

[D]oes income generally grow faster for people in the lowest fifth of the population or people in the highest? It's the lowest, because many of those people are young, low-paid people just starting out on their careers, while many of the richest fifth are older people at the peak of their pay, about to retire. That is to say, the category "poorest fifth" may not seem to show much change, but the people in it do. Income mobility is far from dead: 80 per cent of people born in households below the poverty line escape poverty when they reach adulthood.

None of this is meant to imply that people are wrong to resent inequality in income or wealth, or be bothered about the winner-take-all features of executive pay in recent decades. Indeed, my point is rather the reverse: to try to understand why it is that people mind so much today, when in many ways inequality is so much less acute, and absolute poverty so much less prevalent, than it was in, say, 1900 or 1950. Now that starvation and squalor are mostly avoidable, so what if somebody else has a yacht?


-Matt Ridley writing in the Times of London, Feb. 6, 2014

To be a conservative is first to understand that there is no solution to the dilemmas of the human condition. Second, it is to understand that to escape these dilemmas, human beings will inevitably embark on desperate quests for redemptions in this life. These redemptions, in turn, will require holy wars to purge the world of demons—of those who do not share their faith, and who stand in their way. In this regard, totalitarian Islam is really no different in its heart from totalitarian socialism or progressivism, even though the latter are secular and the former is pursued in the name of a vengeful and malignant God. Both seek to cleanse mankind of its irreparable imperfections.

To remain free beings, we are continually forced to defend ourselves and our breathing space, against the efforts of the redeemers to perfect us—against the armies of the saints who are determined to make the world a better place than it can ever be. That is how I see the political wars we face, and why they will never end.


-David Horowitz:in the "The Black Book of the American Left" (2013)

It should win the contest both because of its purity -- no contaminating speck of truth -- and because of how many people have repeated it over the years, without any evidence being asked for or given.
-Thomas Sowell assigning top contender status for the biggest lie in politics (in this case from NY Mayor de Blasio)

None of the usual political language applies here. Alexis, who killed twelve people, did not buy a weapon “from a friend” or “over the Internet” or in the “parking lot of a gun show”; he did not have a “high capacity” magazine from which to “spray” bullets around; he did not buy a “military style” “assault weapon” — nor even use one; he did not deploy “armor-piercing bullets.” Instead, he bought a shotgun, which almost nobody is openly suggesting should be banned or controlled. Politicians and public figures who call for new laws in the wake of this shooting will thus need nailing to the wall with a simple and reliable question: “What exactly do you propose doing, and how specifically would it have changed what happened at the Navy Yard?” When I have asked this question of non-journalists on Twitter, I have received a common — refreshingly honest — answer: “A gun ban.”
- C Cooke on the 2013 Navy Yard shootings by A Alexis

while documenting the destruction after a night of rioting in the Stockholm suburb of Alby, a reporter from Fria Tider observed a parking enforcement officer writing a ticket for a burnt-out Ford. When questioned, the officer explained that the ticket was issued because the vehicle lacked a tag showing its time of arrival.

- From an artilce by Tom Burns of NewsBusters referring to how police stood passively by in Muslim rioting so as to not get stoned, while some services (parking tickets) went on as usual.

In Britain in the Seventies, everything that could be nationalized had been nationalized, into a phalanx of lumpen government monopolies all flying the moth-eaten flag: British Steel, British Coal, British Airways, British Rail . . . The government owned every industry — or, if you prefer, “the British people” owned every industry. And, as a consequence, the unions owned the British people. The top income-tax rate was 83 percent, and on investment income 98 percent. No electorally viable politician now thinks the government should run airlines and car plants and that workers should live their entire lives in government housing. But what seems obvious to all in 2013 was the bipartisan consensus four decades ago, and it required an extraordinary political will for one woman to drag her own party, then the nation, and subsequently much of the rest of the world back from the cliff edge.
-National Review's Mark Steyn on Margeret Thatcher after her passing.

I do not believe that the preferential option for the poor means a preferential option for big government
- Rep. Paul Ryan, 2012

A repressive regime lies, and suppresses voices telling the truth. Hearing only its own propaganda, the regime starts believing it. When its policies fail in the real world or at the ballot box, it blames the dissidents and other “enemies of the people,” and attempts to ramp up the repressions. With each cycle, the beliefs of the regime move further away from reality, suspicions of conspiracy grow stronger, and the desire to repress the real or imaginary opposition overrides any remnants of common sense. This happened in the former Soviet Union. to the Western institutions which had fallen victims to the New Left. The former Democratic Party seems to have become one of these institutions.
- Art Halperin, Am. Thinker, July 2017

Beneath the allegedly young idealism [of Occupy Wall Street] are very cobwebbed assumptions about societal permanence. The agitators for "American Autumn" think that such demands are reasonable for no other reason than that they happen to have been born in America, and expectations that no other society in human history has ever expected are just part of their birthright. But a society can live on the accumulated capital of a glorious inheritance only for so long. And, in that sense, this bloodless, insipid revolution is just a somewhat smellier front for the sclerotic status quo.

Middle-class America is dying before our eyes: The job market is flat-lined, college fees soar ever upward, the property market is underwater, and ObamaCare is already making medical provision both more expensive and more restrictive. That doesn't leave much else—although no doubt, as soon as they find something else, the statists will fix that, too. As more and more middle Americans are beginning to notice, they lead more precarious and vulnerable lives than did their blue-collar parents and grandparents without the benefit of college "education" and health "benefits." For poorer Americans, the prospects are even glummer, augmented by ever-grimmer statistics on obesity, childhood diabetes and much else. Potentially, this is not decline, but a swift devastating downward slide, far beyond what post-war Britain and Europe saw and closer to Peronist Argentina on a Roman scale.

It would be heartening if more presidential candidates understood the urgency. But there is a strange lack of boldness in most of their proposals. They, too, seem victims of that 1950 moment, and assumptions of its permanence.
-Mark Steyn in the Orange County Register, Oct. 14, 2011

... conservative presidents may be derided as stupid, but somehow they keep having successful presidencies. Liberal presidents, on the other hand, may be praised as brilliant, but somehow they keep failing. The explanation, of course, is simple: conservative policies work, and liberal policies don’t.
-John Hinderaker in Conservatism

"It's not your store! Why do you care?"
Shouts from a crowd with some onlookers threatening the AutoZone staffers for daring to run down and tackle a shoplifter - NY Post, Aug 2011

Indeed, one of the reasons the Tea Parties are so "outrageously" intransigent and uncompromising is that they've seen what compromise has gotten in the past
-Jonah Goldberg, Jul 2011

It’s a liberal town, and the essence of liberalism as I understand it, in its aspect of being a religion, is that you have to protect the lie.
Liberal turned Conservative Playwrite David Mamet on Hollywood

...his own behavior was so in tune with the ethos of the institution. Here is a place where power can be exercised without electoral accountability, privileges can be enjoyed without scrutiny, salaries can be claimed without taxes, and other people's money can be spent with abandon.
-Wall St. Journal Ed. on Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the IMF

They often claim to be morally superior to others because they do not believe they are morally superior to others.
Columnist Mike Adams on tolerant libs, May '11

"....the most predictable crisis in the history of our country"
Rep Paul Ryan on the future unsustainable Federal spending.

... there is one person in government whom I despise so utterly that mere mention of his name makes me spew all over the page. My poor reasonable readers all scurry for cover in fear of getting acid burns from my invective.....This man does for Judaism what Harry Reid does for Mormonism: portray it as the province of selfish, grasping, conniving leeches who are willing to bulldoze the moral edifice the Founders built... he is the Bernie Madoff of moral capital. He got all the Orthodox Jews to invest their moral capital with him and he cleaned them out....Until he leaves public office, I will never be fully able to accept the model of government as a force for good.
Columnist Jay D. Homnick on Sen. Chuck Shumer

To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make.
- George Will on the liberals' fascination with trains, Feb 2011

Meticulous attention should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government….The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. ... [a] strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied. Such action looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it is unthinkable and intolerable.
- liberal icon FDR in 1937

For today's left, the main goal of politics is not to respond to public opinion. The goal is to impose the dream of an egalitarian entitlement state whether the public likes it or not. Sooner or later, they figure, the anger will subside and Americans will come to like the cozy confines of the cradle-to-grave welfare state
-Wall St Jurnal Editorial on the work of the 111th Congress, Dec 31, 2010.

Although the Founders provided a method to amend the nation's governing document, activists preferred to take a judicial short-cut. Judges liked the idea of making law and began treating the constitutional text as advisory. This turned the Supreme Court into a sort of continuing constitutional convention, with new amendments routinely enacted with just five votes.
-Cato Institute's Doug Bandow, Dec 2010.

There are better solutions than giving up your freedom. You can't get that back
-Virginia Attorney General Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, who brought and won the case against Obamacare, Dec 2010.

Let me help you pack
- NJ Gov. Chris Christie told one of the state’s top administrators when that administrator commented publicly that he could leave New Jersey and go to another state if his $242,000 total compensation were to be capped under the governor’s proposed rule, Nov 2010

These ideas, are almost exclusively about how other people should live their lives. These are ideas about how one group of people (the politically successful) should engineer everyone else's contracts, social relations, diets, habits, and even moral sentiments. These are ideas about replacing an unimaginably large multitude of diverse and competing ideas . . . with a relatively paltry set of 'Big Ideas' that are politically selected, centrally imposed, and enforced by government, not by the natural give, take and compromise of the everyday interactions of millions of people.
-Don Boudreaux, economist at George Mason University, on liberalism

In California, the people can pass a ballot proposition, but a single activist judge overrules them. In Arizona, the people’s representatives vote to uphold the people’s laws, but a pliant judge strikes them down at Washington’s behest. It is surely only a matter of time before some federal judge finds the constitution unconstitutional.
-Mark Steyn, Nov 2010

On Feb. 7, 2009, the cover of Newsweek magazine proclaimed, "We Are All Socialists Now." Since then, much has transpired, including the sale of Newsweek to the highest bidder for $1. Now, 1 1/2 years later, a more poignant cover story might be "We Are All Tea Partiers Now."
-By Doug Mainwaring, The Washington Times Oct 2010

Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without.
-Milton Friedman

"... a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery."
-Winston Churchill on socialism

The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation where the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.
—James Madison

“The substance of the eminent Socialist gentleman's speech is that making a profit is a sin, but it is my belief that the real sin is taking a loss”
--Winston Churchill

"For a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle."
--Winston Churchill

"How a politician stands on the Second Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual... as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of."
-- Suzanna Hupp

"Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations."
--James Madison to the Virginia Convention, 1788

"Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasure. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefit from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a dictatorship, and then a monarchy."
--Alexander Tytler

"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand."
--Milton Friedman "Some of you in this room support higher taxes. I welcome your enthusiasm and am glad to report that the IRS takes both money orders and checks. "
--George W Bush

"The siren song of redistribution of wealth by centralized government never ceases for those who seek irreversible and unusurpable control over the lives and liberties of private citizens."
--Josh Jones

"Anyone who robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul."
--George Bernard Shaw

Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.
-Thomas Sowell

There is only one guaranteed way to get fired from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Falsifying records won't do it. Prescribing obsolete drugs won't do it. Cutting all manner of corners on health and safety is, at worst, going to get you a reprimand. No, the only sure-fire way to get canned at the VA is to report any of these matters to authorities who might do something about it.
- Jonah Goldberg, Sept 2015.

Liberals don't care what you do so long as it's compulsory
-William F. Buckley

You all know the one product that since Soviet times has become more affordable: It's vodka. This is why the only thing that is guaranteed to all of us is degradation and drinking ourselves to death.
-Alexei Navalny, the leader of Russia's opposition to Vladimir Putin.

From a conservative perspective, telling people how to run their lives when not absolutely necessary is an abuse of power. For liberals, telling people how to run their lives is one of the really fun perks of working for the government.
-Jonah Goldberg, Nov 2013

Perhaps, at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle or religion, would restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from usurping on the industrious; but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least, in sharing it equally with its present possessors. Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavily on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a downright equal division of everything be demanded, and voted. What would be the consequence of this? The idle, the vicious, the intemperate would rush into the utmost extravagance of debauchery, sell and spend their share, and then demand a new division of those who purchased from them.
-John Adams

Lennon's utopia is our dystopia. A world without God to give people some certitude that all their suffering is not meaningless is a nightmare. A world without religion means a world without any systematic way of ennobling people. A world without countries is a world without the United States of America, and it is a world governed by the morally imbecilic United Nations, where mass murderers sit on its "human rights" councils. A world without heaven or hell is a world without any ultimate justice, where torturers and their victims have identical fates -- oblivion. A world without possessions is a world in which some enormous state possesses everything, and the individual is reduced to the status of a serf.
-Dennis Prager on John Lennon's song, "Imagine"

Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us. . . . Some may forgive these intrusions because they are so well intentioned. Who would defend prejudice, debt, or excessive drinking? The point, however, is that our rulers have no business telling us how to live. . . . We might perhaps be more tolerant of rulers turning preachers if they were moral giants. But what citizen looks at the government today thinking how wise and virtuous it is?
-Kenneth Minogue in the June 2010 issue of The New Criterion

The emerging Tea Party nation understands that the media has focused on the manufactured racial schism while intentionally ignoring the schism between free market thinkers and government expansionists, that the latter of which is brazen in its desire to transform America into a European-model welfare state with a healthy dose of socialism.
-Andrew Breitbar's intro when presenting a tape of USDA's Shirley Sherrod's racist remarks to the NAACP.

When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.
-Ben Franklin

Just saying the magic word "change" does not justify judges grabbing the power to make whatever changes they please in the law. There are, after all, two other branches of the federal government, specifically charged with legislative and executive responsibilities and powers, not to mention the Constitutional Amendment process
-Thomas Sowell on Supreme Court Justice Stevens' view that the society is evolving and therefore the interpretation of the Constitution must evolve with it. May, 2010.

You might think that being a Supreme Court justice would be the top of the line job for someone in the legal profession. But, many Supreme Court decisions suggest that too many justices are not satisfied with their role, and seek more sweeping powers as supreme policy-makers, grand second-guessers or philosopher-kings.
-Thomas Sowell, 2010

...more takers than makers
- Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan on Greece

... one has to wonder: Is the objection to the law that it won't work, or that it will?
-Jonah Goldberg on the left's criticism of Arizona's 2010 immigration law.

The Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals ... it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government ... it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizen's protection against the government.
-Ayn Rand

Resentments and hostility toward people with higher achievements are one of the most widespread of human failings...In our own times, especially, this is not just a spontaneous reaction. Many of our educators, our intelligentsia and our media -- not to mention our politicians-- promote an attitude that other people's achievements are grievances, rather than examples.
-T Sowell, 2010

...the phenomenon of a federal government that seemed less and less competent attempting to do more and more by passing bigger and bigger laws...Add to this states on the verge of bankruptcy, the looming debt crisis of the federal government, and the likelihood of ever-rising taxes. Shake it all together, and you have the makings of the big alienation. Alienation is often followed by full-blown antagonism, and antagonism by breakage.
-Peggy Noonan, 2010.

The Obama/Clinton/media left are comfortable with the unrest in our society today. It allows them to blame and demonize their opponents (doctors, insurance companies, Wall Street, talk radio, Fox News) in order to portray their regime as the great healer of all our ills, thus expanding their power and control over our society
-Rush Limbaugh, Apr 2010

Democrats, controlled by unions, want Latinos to vote but not work. Republicans, controlled by agribusiness interests, want them to work but not to vote ... It reflects the unimaginative politics of confrontation that jeopardize race relations and elect demagogues like Barack Obama
- Dick Morris, May, 2010

"If Socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialists."
- Friedrich Von Hayek

I don't like the way liberals of any income group assume that they have a monopoly on morality and that the only conscionable position on issues is their position. A sanctimoniousness runs in the liberal mind which is a direct descendant of the Calvinist assuredness of moral superiority. Liberals assume that any challenge to their position comes from impure motives, often motivations having to do with "profit and loss" instead of the "human" factors that liberals allegedly consider. I resent the assumption of liberals that only they truly understand human needs and suffering.
-Ben Stein, 1976

Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
French economist Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)

Once you have said that the various economic, educational and other "gaps" and "disparities" of lagging groups are not due to either genes or cultures, what is left but the sins of other people? .... Multiculturalism enshrines the sins and grievances approach-- and paints the poor into a corner, where they can nurse their resentments, instead of advancing their skills and their prospects. The beneficiaries are politicians and race hustlers.
-Thomas Sowell, Apr 2010

Less than 75 years after it officially began, the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won
- Socialist Robert Heilbroner in the New Yorker 1989 essay The Triumph of Capitalism.

What's ailing America? Progressivism. Progressivism is the cancer of America and it's eating away at our Constitution. It was designed to do that.
Glenn Beck, 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference

..our women are beautiful, we speak in complete sentences and our notion of freedom doesn’t consist of snorting cocaine, which is certainly one thing that separates us from Barack Obama.
- under 30 conservative author, Jason Mattera at the Feb 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference (which he dubbed “our Woodstock”)

I’m back for the Second American Revolution, my weapons this time will be the Constitution, the Internet, and my talk-radio ads.
-A man dressed as Gearge Washington at a Tea Party Rally- from Ben McGrath' The Movement in the New Yorker (Jan 30, 2010)

Europe is to be islamized. Democracy, Christianity, European culture and Europeans are to be driven out of Europe. Fifty million North Africans from Muslim countries are to be imported into the EU
- Human rights group Stop the Islamization of Europe commenting on the 2010 Euro-Mediterranean partnership pact.

"We the people..." Those three words were a slap in the face to those who thought themselves entitled to rule, and who regarded the people as if they were simply human livestock, destined to be herded and shepherded by their betters. Indeed, to this very day, elites who think that way -- and that includes many among the intelligentsia, as well as political messiahs -- find the Constitution of the United States a real pain because it stands in the way of their imposing their will and their presumptions on the rest of us.
-Thomas Sowell, 2011

Part of the genius of Marxism, and a reason for its enduring appeal, is that it fed man's neurotic fear of social catastrophe while providing an avenue for moral transcendence. It's just the same with global warming...
-BRET STEPHENS, Wall St. Journal

...health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture
-Mark Steyn Aug, 2009.

While the elites of the media, academia and the managerial class can’t seem to absorb this fundamental reality, the American people know it.
-Robert W. Merry on why "nobody can govern America from the left, because the country doesn’t want to go there, and because whenever it has been tried in recent decades, it has failed - National Interest, after the all Republican Nov 2014 mid term elections.

..it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal
-Henry Kissinger

Liberals love to think of themselves as sophisticated, nuanced intellectuals, but the truth is they have a kindergartner’s view of the world. If it has been defined as "nice" to people they like, they're for it. If it has been defined as "mean" to people they like, they’re against it -- and that is about as deep as it gets. Unfortunately, that lack of adult perspective isn't so cute in political leaders who are making life and death decisions that may still have ramifications fifty years from now.
- columnist John Hawkins, May 2009

The state's crisis has been caused by "moderation," understood as splitting the difference between extreme liberalism and hyperliberalism, a "reasonableness" that merely moderates the speed at which the ever-expanding public sector suffocates the private sector.
-George Will on California. May, 2009

... 50 years ago, its citizens’ average income was under $700 per year. Today, it’s $43,800. Hong Kong got rich because Hong Kong’s rulers, stuffy British bureaucrats, practiced what I’ll call “benign neglect”: they enforced rule of law—kept people from stealing from each other, or killing each other--- but then sat around and drank tea. They left people alone, and free people, left alone, created prosperity.
-John Stossel on free markets and free people, Dec 2009.

... the Cold War's most dangerous legacy remains the bundle of radioactive lies that poisoned so many lands and deformed so many minds. The Soviets fueled national-socialist movements around the globe, telling the poor that if they embraced violent revolution and systematically purged capitalism, tradition and religion from their societies, they would hasten their ascent to the sunny uplands of history. The reverse was true: Whole generations were either slaughtered or left to live as dehumanized industrial cogs, or to labor as serfs tending crops amidst the bleached bones of their fellow countrymen.
-Jonah Goldberg, Apr 2009

Then why not use spoons?”
Milton Friedman after being told a government-run canal-building project in Asia, that the workers were using shovels and wheelbarrows instead of bulldozers and earth-moving equipment because it meant more jobs for the workers

"...for the past four decades, American politics has consisted of Republicans controlling Washington ... thus allowing Americans to forget what it was they didn't like about Democrats
- Ann Coulter

Government can't tax things like businesses or corporations, it can only tax people. When it says it's going to 'make business pay,' it is really saying it is going to make business help it collect taxes."
-The Gipper

Mr. Obama is proving that one can be elected president without knowing how to behave presidentially. His servile gesture was fully fitting with the tone of his humility tour of Europe.
- Washinton Times editorial [Apr 8, 2009] commenting on Obama's bow to Saudi King Abdullah at the Group of 20 summit in London

One of the things that I'm trying to break is a pattern in Washington where everybody is always looking for somebody else to blame.
-Barack Obama, apparantly momentarily forgetting to blame Bush or the Republicans [also trying to quit smoking]

The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves. A truth's initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn't the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn't flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.
-author Dresden James

One way or another, we're going to try to figure out how to get these resources back.
-Sen. Chris Dodd (D- CT), who only a month ago made sure that these particular bonuses were exempt from regulation in the stimulus bill (Dodd is also the recipient of the most campaign cash from AIG) [HYPOCRITE OF THE YEAR AWARD]

By abandoning principle for efficiency, the neo-Statist...is no more bound to the Constitution than the Statist. He marches more slowly … but he marches with him nonetheless.
- Mark Levin in Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto

Now, where do some of these attacks originate? They're coming from the very people whose past policies, all done in the name of compassion, brought us the current recession. Their policies drove up inflation and interest rates, and their policies stifled incentive, creativity and halted the movement of the poor up the economic ladder. Some of their criticism is perfectly sincere. But let's also understand that some of their criticism comes from those who have a vested interest in a permanent welfare constituency and in government programs that reinforce the dependency of our people. Well, I would suggest that no one should have a vested interest in poverty or dependency, that these tragedies must never be looked at as a source of votes for politicians or paychecks for bureaucrats. They are blights on our society that we must work to eliminate, not institutionalize.
-Ronald Reagan

People who don’t regularly communicate with the Democratic Party have no idea what a cesspool of hatred that organization is. It has one means, and one means only, of rallying its supporters to contribute money and to vote: that is to personalize every issue, and to demonize every opponent with smears that would make an honest man or woman blush
-John Hinderaker, Powerline Blog

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
-Edmund Burke

If a man were to do that to a woman today, he would likely be charged with sexual assault, found guilty, be ordered to pay a serious sum of money to the woman, be sent to prison, be civilly sued and be labeled a sex offender — effectively ruining much of his life.
–Dennis Prager on Alfred Eisenstaedt’s picture of an American sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square in New York City.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.em
This is known as “bad luck.”
- Robert Heinlein

[T]he candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.
-Abraham Lincoln- 1861 Inaugural Address

It’s tough to know sometimes whether we are supposed to stand and fight in a place where we are surrounded by those who seek to destroy us by destroying what we believe. Or whether we should surround ourselves with like-minded individuals who will tell us what we want to hear. But there’s no real chance of destroying what we believe. - Mike Adams, Sept 2009

"...democracies are vulnerable to proliferating parochial interests that use government to claim an ever larger share of private wealth. Slow but clear decline follows once narrow interests take the wider polity hostage"
-Wall St Journal paraphrasing a phenomena shown by late economist Mancur Olson starting with "The Logic of Collective Action" (1965)

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling," wrote Oscar Wilde, and I would like to suggest that the same can be said for bad politics. . . .
- Irving Kristol, 1972

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.
- Margaret Thatcher

Marxists claim that workers are oppressed in capitalist societies. Workers in communist societies always try to sneak out into capitalist societies. No one in South Korea is trying to sneak into North Korea. The Berlin Wall was not built to keep West Germans from sneaking into East Germany's collective farms. Cubans in Florida do not steal boats to seek asylum in Cuban collective farms.
-Steven Plaut in the American Thinker, Mar 2009

All slave owners need to keep their slaves healthy and ensure that they have the skills to perform their tasks.
-Cuban exile and Yale historian Carlos Eire on Cuba's health care.

Liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, but it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.
-William F Buckley from his obituary in The TImes (28 February 2008)

Repressive tolerance — in other words, intolerance in the name of leftism — comes into play when colleges fail to provide students with exposure to advocates whose doctrines they reject or feel uncomfortable with. This occurs if such activists are not invited onto campus in the ordinary course of affairs (as opposed to at commencement) or if they are invited but not protected.
-Paul Mirangoff on Brandeis’ disinvitation to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Powerline, Apr 2014.

Even if the stimulus is a magnificent success, the money still has to be paid back. The plan of record apparently is that we keep borrowing, spending and stimulating, faster and faster, until suddenly, on some signal from heaven or Timothy Geithner, we all stop spending and start saving in recordbreaking amounts. Oh sure, that will work.

There is another way. If it's not the actual, secret plan, it will be an overwhelming temptation: Don't pay the money back. So far, even as one piggy bank after another astounds us with its emptiness, there have been only the faintest whispers about the possibility of an actual default by the U.S. government. Somewhat louder whispers can be heard, though, about the gradual default known as inflation. Just three or four years of currency erosion at, say, 10 percent a year would slice the real value of our debt -- public and private, U.S. bonds and jumbo mortgages -- in half.

Anyone who regards the prospect of double-digit inflation with insouciance is either too young to have lived through it the last time (the late 1970s) or too old to remember. Among other problems, inflation works only as a surprise or betrayal. It can never be part of any public, official plan. Plan for 10 percent inflation, and you'll get 20. Plan for 20 and you'll need a wheelbarrow to pay for your morning Starbucks. But if that's not the plan, what is?
-Liberal columnist Michael Kinsley, writing in the Washington Post, on the hidden dangers of deficit spending. Feb 2009

How can we retain the secular/progressive view of human nature, which is needed to justify secular/progressive policies, in light of a wealth of evidence to the contrary?
-NC Prof. Mike Adams on how liberal professors solve problems

What's particularly odious about Obama's scare tactics is that he's using them for the mother of all bait- and-switches. He justifiably scares people about the magnitude of the financial crisis, but uses that fear not to sell them on a solution to the crisis but to trick them into signing up for a new Great Society
-Jonah Goldberg , Feb 2009.

f you’re one of those leftists, unable to sort out how the world works nowadays and unable to win an honest debate with your political and intellectual opponents, it makes you very angry, and you lash out at them with a violence that often surprises observers who are less engaged in the political or intellectual wars. The left has died as an intellectual force worth taking seriously. Its mission belongs to another time.
-Michael Ledeen, PJ Media Aug 2012

This growth is a lovely thought, but how? The only impetus for growth in this budget comes from the government spending more money that it is taking out of the job-producing private economy. With $1 trillion of new entitlements, $1.4 trillion in new taxes, and $5 trillion in new debt, America's entrepreneurs aren't getting any help soon from Washington.
-Feb 27, 2009 Wall St Journal Editorial on the first Obama budget.

Americans are only beginning to understand the magnitude of Mr. Obama's ambitions, and how much of their own income will be required to fulfill them. Republicans have an obligation to insist on a long and considerable debate on all of this, lest Americans discover in a year or two that they live in a very different country. .
- Feb 27, 2009 Wall St Journal Editorial on the first Obama budget

Most people on the left are not opposed to freedom. They are just in favor of all sorts of things that are incompatible with freedom.
-Thomas Sowell 2008

There is an old Russian fable, with different versions in other countries, about two poor peasants, Ivan and Boris. The only difference between them was that Boris had a goat and Ivan didn't. One day, Ivan came upon a strange-looking lamp and, when he rubbed it, a genie appeared. She told him that she could grant him just one wish, but it could be anything in the world.
Ivan said, "I want Boris' goat to die."
-Thomas Sowell

"The truth is ... that there is no 'fairness' whatever in the 'fairness' doctrine. On the contrary, it is a chilling federal attempt to compel some undefined 'balance' of what ideas radio and television new programs are to include. ... The 'fairness doctrine' undercuts free, independent, sound and responsive journalism -- substituting governmental dictates. That is deceptive, dangerous and, in a democracy, repulsive."
-Washington Post editorial, June 24, 1987

According to the Medicare trustees, the program's excess costs over the next 75 years -- that is, the difference between expected outlays and revenues -- is more than $36 trillion, which even they acknowledge is several trillion too low given current trends. Even if Congress doubled all individual and corporate tax rates, it still wouldn't raise enough revenue to pay for Medicare and Medicaid. The Obama- Baucus solution to this slow-motion catastrophe is to add tens of millions more people to the federal balance sheet.
- Wall St Journal Editorial - Nov 2008

...the ignorance of Ph.D.s is still ignorance and high-IQ groupthink is still groupthink, which is the antithesis of real thinking
Tom Sowell on intellectuals

“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,”
Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger tipping the cards in a letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble on Dec., 10, 1939

“If we are to develop in America a new race with a racial soul, we must keep the birth rate within the scope of our ability to understand as well as to educate. We must not encourage reproduction beyond our capacity to assimilate our numbers so as to make the coming generation into such physically fit, mentally capable, socially alert individuals as are the ideal of a democracy”
Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger tipping cards again in “Woman and the New Race,” 1920, Chapter 3: The Materials of the New Race

The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles
-A Solzhenitsyn in his acceptance speech for the 1970 Nobel literature prize

You can’t be for big government, big taxes, and big bureaucracy and still be for the little guy
—Ronald Reagan

What this plan seems to amount to in practice are the Government's rights to refuse treatment, and the patient's responsibilities to live up to what the state decides are model standards.
-The Telegraph on Gordon Brown's rights and responsibilities of the English health system (" ... people who have unhealthy habits such as smoking, heart sufferers who are obese or those who fall ill because of failure to take regular exercise might be refused medical care") - 2008

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

Much of what government does is based on the premise that people can't do things for themselves. So government must do it for them. More often than not, the result is a ham-handed, bumbling, one-size-fits-all approach that leaves the intended beneficiaries worse off. Of course, this resulting failure is never blamed on the political approach -- on the contrary, failure is taken to mean the government solution was not extravagant enough.
-John Stossel, Oct 2009

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
-Baltimore's political satirist, the late H.L. Mencken

Just because the Clintons say something doesn't mean it's untrue.
-Jonah Goldberg

It's truly amazing that Americans who are dissatisfied with the current level of socialized medicine in the U.S. are asking for more of what created the problem in the first place.
- Walter Williams Oct 2008

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. ... We have never made good on our promises. ... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... and an enormous debt to boot!
- from FDR's Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau's diary

Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk.
-Michael Crichton, in 1993, predicting the fall of the American media

What I do know is my level of confidence in mainstream media of all stripes has been shaken to the core over the past 10 or 15 years. My level of trust in what I read, hear or see is somewhere close to zero and my suspicion continues to grow that television networks, newspaper groups and radio empires are advancing agendas that do not include honest, accurate and unbiased reports.
-Journalist Bill McIntyre on media bias

There are good reasons to begin with a presumption against government action. As coercive monopolies that spend other people's money taken by force, governments are uniquely unqualified to solve problems. They are riddled by ignorance, perverse incentives, incompetence and self-serving
-John Stossel

Though we may have speeded up a little the conquest of want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness, we may in the future do even worse in that struggle when the chief dangers will come from inflation, paralyzing taxation, coercive labor unions, and ever increasing dominance of government in education, and a social service bureaucracy with far-reaching arbitrary powers - dangers from which the individual cannot escape by his own efforts and which the momentum of the overextended machinery of government is likely to increase rather than mitigate.
- F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty

We have to remember, before it is too late, that this nation was founded not to furnish glamorous offices for politicians, or to produce goods and services, or handouts of easy money, but to produce free men.
- Dos Passos

If there is one thing that mankind should have learned from the agonies of the last four decades it is that it’s never safe to do evil that good may come of it. The good gets lost and the evil goes on.
- Dos Passos

New Jersey does not have a tax problem; New Jersey has a spending and size of government problem.
-New Jersey Governor Chris Christie after vetoing a Democrat bill increasing the top tax rate to 10.75%, May, 2010.

To many who have watched the transition from socialism to fascism at close quarters the connection between the two systems has become increasingly obvious, but in the (Western) democracies the majority of people still believe that socialism and freedom can be combined. They do not realize that democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something utterly different - the very destruction of freedom itself. As has been aptly said: ‘What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.'
- F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

Liberalism's bullying tendencies are never more on display than when its denizens are at war with the speech rights of its opponents.
-Wall Street Journal Editorial Jan 23, '10 after the Supreme Court struct down most of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance laws

... we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.
- former liberal David Mamet

No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session
- Nineteenth Century New York Judge Gideon Tucker

Liberals sell the welfare state one brick at a time, deflecting inquiries about the size and cost of the palace they’re building
-William Voegeli author of “The Trouble with Limited Government" “

I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that ‘all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people.’ To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, not longer susceptible of any definition.”
—Thomas Jefferson

The subject of politics, Aristotle noted, is “the good life for man.” What constitutes the good life? Aron cannily reminds us that the more extravagant answers to this question are often the most malevolent. They promise everything. They tend to deliver misery and impoverishment.
Roger Kimball, on Aron’s Opium for the Intellectuals, PJ Media, Nov 2011

When Hollywood portrayed glandular instincts as the new moral compass of the secular age, conservatives waxed nostalgic over the lost decency of the "studio system." When the education industry shelved the great books in favor of hugs, conservatives lamented the demise of the three Rs and the "closing of the American mind." When the left became enamored with a "riot ideology" that mistook lawlessness for political protest, conservatives invoked "law and order." Name a front in the political and culture wars, and conservatives defended the authority of authority and the tradition of tradition, while liberals and leftists defended sticking it to the man
-Jonah Goldberg, Jul 2010

We came unarmed (this time)
- Sign spotted in the Sept 12, 2009 Tea Party March on Washington

Many on the political left are so entranced by the beauty of their vision that they cannot see the ugly reality they are creating in the real world.
-Thomas Sowell

To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
- Thomas Jefferson

Hayek concluded that the private-property rights that come with the rule of law, freedom of contract, and freedom of association is still the one mechanism design that mobilizes and utilizes the dispersed information in an economy
-Wall Street Journal Editorial, Oct 16, 2007.

In political life today, you are considered compassionate if you demand that government impose your preferences on others.
- John Stossel 2007

In their assessment of what is going on in the world, they seem to start off with a default assumption that we are in the wrong. The "we" can take different forms: the United States government, the vast mass of middle-class Americans, white people, affluent people, churchgoing people or the advanced English- speaking countries. Such people are seen as privileged and selfish, greedy and bigoted, rash and violent. If something bad happens, the default assumption is that it's their fault. They always blame America -- or the parts of America they don't like -- first.
-Michael Barone, U.S. News & World Report

Republicans have too eclectic a collection of beliefs to beat the Democrats on a purely ideological basis. Moreover, the liberal vision is a more attractive vision because it assumes away many of the painful and even brutal aspects of human life, especially the fatal dangers of relying on words when dealing with people who only respect force that is backed up by a willingness to use it..... Facts are the only real antidote to a seductive vision.
-Thomas Sowell after the 2006 mid-term elections

Wonderful theory. Wrong species.
- Edward O. Wilson, the world's foremost expert on ants, on Marxism

The republic was not established by cowards, and cowards will not preserve it.
—Elmer Davis

Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
-George Washington

They are going out of fashion where they are needed most and coming into fashion where they are needed least.
-Wall St Journal's Bret Stevens on Nukes

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!
We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around.
-Ronald Reagan

I think Clinton’s candidacy — like Trump’s candidacy, in its own, very different way — points to the fatal weakness of the political parties. Decades of “good government” reforms have systematically stripped the power that parties once had: to control money, to control committee assignments, to control how much pork politicians get to brag about to the voters back home. What’s left is a hollow shell that cannot effectively respond to either grassroots insurgencies or to outsize figures who effectively turn the party apparatus to their own ends. If you think, as I do, that parties play a vital role in organizing political action toward coherent goals and long-term accountability, that’s something that should worry you.
-Megan McArdle, Bloomberg, July 2016

I did very little. All I did was to try to prevent some of the things that might undo it.
-John James Cowperthwaite - on his refusal to collect economic statistics about Hong Kong during his tenure as Financial Secretary, lest they produce an impulse toward central planning among the bureaucrats

"...the main wealth-acquiring activity practised by the French today is waiting for one’s parents to die."
-David Goldman, Standpoint Magazine, May, 2016

Perhaps, one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business
-President Calvin Coolidge

...in order to be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but has to be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand
-Eric Hoffer in "The True Believer"

Only people not being able to find comfort in their own mind seek to silence others.
- Per Bylund

"...the smaller the society, the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression"
-James Madison in the Federalist Papers warning that local government is especially prone to tyranny

"The country is behind you 50 percent."
-Bob Hope joking to the troops in Vietnam

"Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences; education, knowledge, well-being."
—Lord Acton

...the best this Administration offers—a dull, adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us.
-Paul Ryan, 2012 Acceptance Speach

"Most of the work of government does not need to be done. And, if you can remember that, if we could all remember that, this country would be better off."
—Lyn Nofziger

There is no such thing as life imprisonment without the possibility of a liberal president being elected and issuing a pardon or an amnesty.
- Thomas Sowell on the Zacarias Moussaoui trial

Civilizations die from suicide, not murder
-Arnold Toynbee

I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.
- Michael Crichton, 2003

... family dissolution in the modern world leads to “a welfare state to take care of the women and children and a police state to handle the teenaged boys
-George Gilder

The Senate voted yesterday to allow illegal aliens to collect Social Security benefits based on past illegal employment
- Washington Times, May 20, 2006

...this was in the Soviet Union. Soviet engineers couldn’t make Jell -O. They’d show up at the World’s Fair and stare at a flush toilet like it was a rocket ship.
-Ann Coulter

Some argue that we should encourage democratic change in right-wing dictatorships, but not in communist regimes. Well, to accept this preposterous notion -- as some well-meaning people have -- is to invite the argument that once countries achieve a nuclear capability, they should be allowed an undisturbed reign of terror over their own citizens. We reject this course.''
- Ronald Reagan - June 1982 speech to the British Parliament

"I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil. ...
- Ronald Reagan - Speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, March 1983.

"I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written.''
-- Ronald Reagan - Speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, March 1983.

The poor are the very lifeblood of the left, attracting activists, support among the intelligentsia, and -- perhaps most important -- allowing the left to indulge in self-congratulation as people who "care."
-Tom Sowell 2006

The beauty of being a liberal is that history always begins this morning.
- Ann Coulter 2004

I for one hope that the next time a nation experimenting with socialism or communism fails, which will happen the next time a nation experiments with socialism or communism, Ken Galbraith will feel the need to explain what happened. It's great fun to read. It helps, of course, to suppress wistful thought about those who endured, or died trying, the passage toward collective living to which Professor Galbraith has beckoned us for over 40 years.
- William F. Buckley in his review of liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith's last book, "The Culture of Contentment."

"A republic -- if you can keep it."
- Benjamin Franklin's response at the close of the 1787 Constitutional Convention to the question "What the Founders had given us?"

"The left takes its vision seriously -- more seriously than it takes the rights of other people. They want to be our shepherds. But that requires us to be sheep." -- Thomas Sowell

"No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words 'no' and 'not' employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights."
- Edmund A. Opitz

Finally, we might decide that civilization itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population -- weighing the value of scientists and musicians against that of politicians, for example
- Dr. Sue Blackmore looking on the bright side in Britain's Guardian- 2006

"...The Iron Curtain that scarred a continent is gone, as is the Evil Empire responsible for it. The feeling of foreboding -- the sense of shrunken possibilities -- that afflicted Americans 20 years ago has been banished by a new birth of the American belief in perpetually expanding horizons.
Reagan was the last president for whom the Depression -- the years when America stopped working -- was a formative experience. Remarkably, the 1930s formed in him a talent for happiness. It was urgently needed in the 1980s, when the pessimism of the intelligentsia was infecting people with the idea that America had passed its apogee and was ungovernable.
- George Will in memory of Ronald Reagan - June 6, 2004

I've always wondered why Republicans insist on acting like Democrats in hopes of retaining political power, while Democrats act like us in order to win.
-Dick Armey, after the 2006 midterm elections

They will not improve your healthcare. They will take your healthcare and sell it to someone else for a mere vote.
- The Raven, Sept 2009

The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.
- Adolf Hitler

It's like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end
-George Mason University economist Russell Roberts on the 2008 "Economic Stimulus"

"...As an aide to President Carter, I smelled trouble. We weren't running against a Republican: we were running against the republic.
"Can anyone look at the record of this administration and say, Well done?" he asked the Republican National Convention which had just nominated him for President. Or at the state of our economy when the Carter administration took office with where we are today and say, "Keep up the good work!"
- Chris Matthews in memory of Ronald Reagan - June 6, 2004

"Collectivism, as an intellectual power and a moral ideal, is dead. But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism, have not yet been discovered."
- Ayn Rand

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm -- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves
-T.S. Eliot

Another current catch-phrase is the complaint that the nations of the world are divided into 'haves' and the 'have-nots.' Observe that the 'haves' are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the 'have-nots' have not."
-- Ayn Rand

I can hardly imagine any laws so bad, to which I would not rather be subject than to the caprice of a man
- John Stuart Mill

A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in thier deaths."
- James Madison.

Capitalism is founded on freedom, with the brakes applied to it only a little, so that it does not run out of control downhill. On the other hand, communism-turned-socialism in the US is founded on control and restriction, with a little of the brakes released, so that it does not do more than crawl downhill.
- Jim Arlandson 2005

Isn't it somewhat remarkable that we can go back a a few hundred years and find no shortage of quotations from our founding fathers warning us against the dangers of democracy, yet today teachers and politicians use thword as if it were an offering of gold."
"Our founding fathers detested the idea of a democracy and labored long to prevent America becoming one. Once again -- the word 'democracy' does not appear in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, or the constitution of any of the fifty states. Not once. Furthermore, take a look at State of the Union speeches. You won't find the 'D' word uttered once until the Wilson years."
"I can’t think of anything that would do more toward putting us back on the road to liberty and personal responsibility than for the average American, and for the news media, to come to the understanding that we are not a democracy, nor were we supposed to be."
- Neal Boortz

Liberals love to boast that they are not “religious,” which is what one would expect to hear from the state-sanctioned religion. Of course liberalism is a religion. It has its own cosmology, its own miracles, its own beliefs in the supernatural, its own churches, its own high priests, its own saints, its own total worldview, and its own explanation of the existence of the universe. In other words, liberalism contains all the attributes of what is generally known as “religion.”
-Ann Coulter 2006

"'Democracy' does not mean freedom."
- Mark Da Cunha

"Democracy is four wolves and a sheep voting on dinner."
-- Robert A. Heinlein

The case has been made that the Palestinian choice of government undermines the logic of the Bush Administration's democracy agenda. But democracy always involves the risk that the bad guys might come to power: Look at Germany in 1933. By contrast, failing to promote democracy only guarantees that the bad guys -- the Gadhafis, the Assads, the Husseins -- will stay in power.
- Wall Street Journal Editorial - 2006

I feel so much more confident that the TSA's nude photos of airline passengers will never be released now that I know the government couldn't even prevent half a million classified national security documents from being posted on WikiLeaks.
-Ann COulter Dec 2010

Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous
Attempts to redistribute wealth repeatedly led to the redistribution of poverty.
Nowhere have people been willing to work as well for the common good as they do for their own benefit.
Any system which allows some people to exercise unbridled power over other people is an open invitation to abuse.
- Thomas Sowell, 2002

"The liberalism of the liberal crack-up is what is "extremist." Even a sensible idea or a fine principle is exaggerated to the point that it becomes preposterous and untenable"
- Emmett Tyrrell

Let us lay to rest, once and for all, the myth of a small group of ideological purists trying to capture a majority. Replace it with the reality of a majority trying to assert its rights against the tyranny of powerful academics, fashionable left-revolutionaries, some economic illiterates who happen to hold elective office and the social engineers who dominate the dialogue and set the format in political and social affairs. If there is any ideological fanaticism in American political life, it is to be found among the enemies of freedom on the left or right — those who would sacrifice principle to theory, those who worship only the god of political, social and economic abstractions, ignoring the realities of everyday life. They are not conservatives.
- Ronald Reagan

Those who want to take our money and gain power over us have discovered the magic formula: Get us envious or angry at others and we will surrender, in installments, not only our money but our freedom. The most successful dictators of the 20th century -- Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao -- all used this formula and now class warfare politicians here are doing the same.
- Thomas Sowell, 2004

"People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one- tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together. In this situation, for the intelligentsia to impose their notions on ordinary people is essentially to impose ignorance on knowledge."
-Thomas Sowell

To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects
If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing
- Margaret Thatcher

"Don't forget that pure democracy is a form of collectivism -- it readily sacrifices individual rights to majority wishes. Since it involves no constitutional bill of rights, or at least, no working and effective one, the majority-of-the-moment can and does vote away the rights of the minority-of-the-moment, even of a single individual. This has been called 'mob rule,' the 'tyranny of the majority' and many other pejorative names. It is one of the greatest threats to liberty, the reason why America's founding fathers wrote so much so disparagingly of pure democracy."
- Bert Rand

Rather than serving as a cleansing force, science has in some instances been seduced by the more ancient lures of politics and publicity.
-Michael Crichton

"Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to "society," to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force -- and statism has always been the poltical corollary of collectivism."
-Ayn Rand

The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather "What can I and my compatriots do through government" to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom? And he will accompany this question with another: How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect?

Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.


Milton Friedman on JFK's 'Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.' in "Capitalism and Freedom" (1962):

The typical liberal politician is soft on criminals, weak on defense, and ready to tax the daylights out of those who produce, in order to dispense largesse to parasites, rich and poor alike. The public isn't buying it. Indeed, liberal politicians aren't trying to sell it very much.
- Thomas Sowell, 2003

"I have wondered at times about what the Ten Commandment's would have looked like if Moses had run them through the U.S. Congress"
"I've laid down the law, though, to everyone from now on about anything that happens: no matter what time it is, wake me, even if it's in the middle of a Cabinet meeting"
-Ronald Reagan

"Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature." Hype, moral melodrama, and sweeping visions are the way that intellectuals approached the problems of the world. "Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America."
- Eric Hoffer , Thomas Sowell, 2003

-When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself.
-To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything
- F. A. Hayek

A careful definition of words would destroy half the agenda of the political left and scrutinizing evidence would destroy the other half.
- Thomas Sowell, 2003

That’s the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: you can choose which side of the war you want to fight on. When the draft card arrives, just tick “home team” or “enemy,” according to taste.
-Mark Steyn 2006

"..Evolution has conditioned us to believe the worst." In Darwinian natural selection, pessimism, wariness, suspicion and discontent may be survival traits. Perhaps our relaxed and cheerful progenitors were eaten by saber-toothed tigers. Only the anxiety-prone gene pool prospered.
- George Will on Easterbrook's Book, "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse," 2004

"You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and incentive. And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they should do for themselves."
-Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele - GOP Convention 2004

"Collectivism is the real-world manifestation of the subjective, emotion-based feral animal origins of humanity, like some recurring echo emanating from the primitive reptile brain that physically exists in all of us. It is the antithesis of rational objectivity, something that no amount of fancy verbiage from Marx or Chomsky or Himmler or Plato or Rousseau can disguise in their respective paeans to force and unity over intellect and evolution. Collectivism is a fancy word for tribalism. It is a hold over, an atavistic throw back ..."
- Perry de Havilland

How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti- Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
-Ronald Reagan - 1987

When America frees ordinary people from the domination of their betters, and prevents them for being used as guinea pigs for the vision of the anointed, the more America insults the very presumptions that enable the anointed to think of themselves as special, as one-up on the rest of us.
-Thomas Sowell; July 2, 2004

[Liberals] live in a different reality from that of the rest of us. Psychologically, they do not see what you see. They see the present and the past through a special lens. What is overwhelmingly clear to them is an imagined future collectivist utopia where antagonisms of class and race have been eliminated, the economic and social inequalities that have driven people to crime have been removed, poverty does not exist and social justice reigns, world brotherhood has replaced war and international strife, and an economy planned by people like them has produced economic abundance without pollution or waste. Coupled with this vision of the future is loathing of the real present which falls woefully short of these goals and hatred for anyone or anything that stands in the way of their illusion of the radiant future.
-John Earl Haynes, 2003

"Most modern intellectuals congratulate themselves for having achieved the allegedly momentus insight that capitalism and altruism are ultimately incompatible. Yet they're still too damned ignorant to realize, or too damned stubborn to acknowledge, that altruism is definitely NOT the only moral code available to mankind; it is, in fact, the bloodiest and most regressive one of all. Such stunted thinking on the part of the intelligentsia has resulted in their committing the intellectual atrocity of rejecting the capitalism and freedom instead of the altruism and coercion."
- Rick Gaber

Those who are unable to produce their own wealth aim to confiscate the wealth of others
- Per Bylund

People in government--people in a huge, sprawling government--often get carried away. And they don't always even mean to. But they are little tiny parts of a large and overwhelming thing. If government is a steamroller, and that is in good part how I see it, the individuals who work in it are the atoms in the steel. The force of forward motion carries them along. There is inevitably an unaccountability, and in time often an indifference about what the steamroller rolls over. All the busy little atoms are watching each other, competing with each other, winning one for their little cluster. And no one is looking out and being protective of what the steamroller is rolling over--traditions, shared beliefs, individual rights, old assumptions, whatever is being rolled over today.
-Peggy Noonan - 2006

They have accepted an understanding of political life that is all about the competition for power, the deal making that divides up the public pie so that more voters slop up the goodies at your trough than at the other guy's. Though skilled at building coalitions, they have become utterly incompetent at the work of building, serving and preserving a community.
- Alan Keyes on today's politicians, 2006

Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it
- Ronald Reagan

What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin
- Mark Twain

Knowledge is one of the few things that can be given to others without reducing the amount you have left.
- Thomas Sowell - 2005

We have now been through at least two generations of constant denigration of American society, two generations in which cheap glory could be gained by flouting rules and mocking values.
- Thomas Sowell, 2006

For half a century, liberals have corrupted the courts by turning them into an instrument of radical social change on questions -- school prayer, abortion, busing, death penalty -- that properly belong to the elected branches of government.
-Charles Krauthammer

Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone
-Frederic Bastiat

[Democrats] have managed to pioneer an even more egregious abuse of the American political system: the manipulation of ignorance ... they have been reduced to a state of unshakable hysteria, beginning with the conviction that George W. Bush is the most vicious, evil, conniving president in American history.
-Tony Snow

It continues to defy explanation why liberals, who theoretically love liberty, equality, tolerance and moderation, should find so much to despise in their own country, which represents the fullest expression of those virtues anywhere on the globe."
--Mona Charen

The only way Congress can give one American something is to first, through the use of intimidation, threats and coercion, take it from another American. So-called rights to medical care, food and decent housing impose an obligation on some other American who, through the tax code, must be denied his right to his earnings.
- Walter Williams

"Some ideas seem so plausible that they can fail nine times in a row and still be believed the tenth time. Other ideas seem so implausible that they can succeed nine times in a row and still not be believed the tenth time. Government controls in the economy are among the first kinds of ideas and the operation of a free market is among the second kinds of ideas."
--Thomas Sowell 2005

When conservative judges strike down laws, it's because of what's in the Constitution. When liberal judges strike down laws (or impose new laws, such as tax increases), it's because of what's in The New York Times.
- Ann Coulter 2005

"...professors require their students to repeat back to them on test papers and in theses what the professors believe. Unless students hate Republicans, revile George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, renounce God, support abortion and gay rights, they can sometimes expect a lower, even a failing grade.
-Cal Thomas, Sept '09

Modern liberalism: "made in much the same way as a sausage -- it's a blend of fascist, Communist, and socialist ideologies from twentieth century Europe, with a pinch of Nazism, all ground together, yet retaining the flavor of its various parts"
- Michael Savage, Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder

Democracy and capitalism seem to have triumphed. But, appearances can be deceiving. Instead of celebrating capitalism's virtues, we offer it grudging acceptance, contemptuous tolerance but only for its capacity to feed the insatiable maw of socialism. We do not conclude that socialism suffers from a fundamental and profound flaw. We conclude instead that its ends are worthy of any sacrifice — including our freedom. Revel notes that Marxism has been "shamed and ridiculed everywhere except American universities" but only after totalitarian systems "reached the limits of their wickedness."
- Janice Rogers Brown, Associate Justice, California Supreme Court, Apr 2000

If the Supreme Court is to be invariably and inescapably political you realize we have rendered the Constitution useless
- Justice Scalia 2005

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm -- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
- T. S. Elliot

What is one to say about these media--Democratic spokesmen for contemporary American liberalism? That they have embarrassed and discredited themselves. That they cannot be taken seriously as critics. It would be good to have a responsible opposition party in the United States today. It would be good to have a serious mainstream media. Too bad we have neither.
-William Kristol 2006

"...most liberals experience their differences with the rest of society as a sign of their advanced intelligence and consciousness. At best, they are perplexed at how long it is taking everyone else to catch-up with their enlightened state of understanding.
-Thomas Lifson 2005

The Federalists drafted the greatest political philosophy ever written by man and created the first constitutional republic. The anti-Federalists -- or "pre-Democrats, as I call them -- were formed to oppose the Constitution, which, to a great extent, remains their position today.
-Ann Coulter

What is a moderate interpretation [of the Constitution]? Halfway between what it says and halfway between what you want it to say?
- Anthony Scalia noting that the left uses code words "mainstream" or "moderate" to describe their judges. [2006]

Anarchy plus a constable
-19th century Victorian essayist Thomas Carlyle, unflatteringly but accurately describing classical liberalism (free market economies)

The Obamanation

Something is terribly wrong when dozens of IGs found wrongdoing, only to object that their efforts were being thwarted by an Obama administration that had appointed most of them -- and claimed to be scandal-free.
- Victor David Hanson on Obama silencing his Inspector Generals after they found scandals

Barack Obama doesn’t speak a foreign language or play a musical instrument, exhibits no sign that any great book has left a mark upon his mind, has never, so far as the printed word can document, uttered an original thought or put forth an interesting idea.
-Kevin Williamson

[T]he deepest truth about Obama is that there is no depth. He’s smart without being wise. He’s glib without being eloquent. He’s a celebrity without being interesting. He’s callow.
-Rich Lowry

Sometimes -- maybe almost always -- the world seems to run on Freudian projection. One of the salient recent examples is Barack Obama's supporters -- and Obama himself, literally and by implication -- calling Donald Trump "authoritarian."
But in non-projected reality, during his administration, Obama is the one who imposed what we might deem -- in appropriately Maoist parlance -- the "Three Authoritarianisms." They were the Paris climate accord, the Iran deal, and US intelligence agencies being used to surveil American citizens.
All three of these "authoritarianisms" were entirely ex-Constitutional.
- Roger Simon, May 2017

- This is more than just the usual standard lie, because when you suggest rigging or fraud without a shred of evidence, when last night, at the debate, Trump becomes the first major party nominee in American history to suggest that he will not concede despite losing the vote and then says today that he will accept the results if he wins — that is not a joking matter. I want everybody to pay attention here. That is dangerous, because when you try to sow the seeds of doubt in people's minds about the legitimacy of our elections, that undermines our democracy. Then you’re doing the work of our adversaries for them. Because our democracy depends on people knowing that their vote matters, that those who occupy the seats of power were chosen by the people. - Obama speaking at a rally for Hillary Clinton in Miami.

As soon as Obama won, he apparently thought his job was done. No presidential candidate had ever promised more than he had – he'd all but vowed to change heaven and earth – and surely no candidate had ever raised expectations as high. Obama, in the eyes of his fervent admirers, was virtually unsullied – not a politician but a savior just waiting to be seated on his throne. Millions who had cast their votes for him felt they'd hitched their wagons to a shining star. But Obama himself didn't seem to care. He didn't seem remotely interested in delivering.
- Bruce Bawer reflecting back on Obama (who he voted for)

... as bad a president as Obama has been, imagine how much more damage he could have done if not for his laziness.
- Bruce Bawer reflecting back on Obama

Central to this worldview is that the American people are naive and easily manipulated, and thus need to be brought up to speed by a paternal administration that knows what is best for its vulnerable and clueless citizenry. Such condescension is also why the administration never believes it has done anything wrong by hiding the facts of these controversies. Its players believe that because they did it all for us, the ensuing distasteful means will be forgotten once we finally progress enough to appreciate their enlightened ends.
- V D Hanson on Obama's use of deception for political means

“The Emerging Democratic Majority”—[is] now available in hardcover from Amazon for 1 cent plus shipping
– Wall St. Journal’s James Taranto on the 2002 book which put forth the argument that demographic change made Democratic ascendancy inevitable. Nov, 2016.

The old blue-collar middle class was bewildered by the leftwing social agenda in which gay marriage, women in combat units, and transgendered restrooms went from possible to mandatory party positions in an eye blink. In a party in which “white privilege” was pro forma disparagement, those who were both white and without it grew furious that the elites with such privilege massaged the allegation to provide cover for their own entitlement.
- Victor David Hanson after the Trump win.


Melania Trump used a few lines from a Michelle Obama speech last night. Obama was revealed to have lied about the Iran deal such that the outlaw state will have nuclear weapons a lot faster than he claimed. Can you guess which news is dominating today’s headlines? Go on. Guess.
-Andrew Klavan, Ricochet July, 2016

In Detroit, 96 percent of eighth graders are not proficient in math. Ninety-three percent are not proficient in reading. In Baltimore, 91 percent of the students fail the math exam. In Chicago, 77 percent of students fall below standards in achievement. In 17 of our 50 largest cities, fewer than half of all students graduate from high school. ...And yet, what issue of injustice in schools has focused the attention, passion, and power of the liberal elites? Guaranteeing every child the right to use the bathroom of his or her (zis or xyr) choosing.
- Newt Gingrich

... here it is on the very verge of 2016, President Obama's last full year in office, and he has not figured out that there is more to the job than giving speeches.
-Kevin Williamson, National Review.

America's first black president hasn't arisen yet. Obama's not America's first black president, he's America's first mixed-race president.
- Morgan Freeman

I don’t know about that
– Jeremiah Wright when asked if he converted Obama from being a Muslim into a Christian

Before ObamaCare, it would've been hard to find a health plan that combined a huge $6,000 deductible, few in-network doctors, and sky-high premiums. Today, thanks to ObamaCare, it's hard not to.
- Investors Business Daily editorial, July 18, 2015

Ukraine has lost Crimea; Russia has lost Ukraine; the U.S. has lost Russia; the world has lost stability.
-Henry Kissinger on Obama's foreign policy 2015

“… Let me say this to you Mr Obama, you may have a pen and you may have a phone, … but we have the constitution of the United States. And we, not you, we own that constitution, we own this country, and you Mr Obama do not have any legitimate authority to fundamentally transform what does not belong to you.”
-Mark Levin, CPAC 2015

Obama delivered a farewell speech in New Delhi, wrapping up his trip to India. The speech was only 33 minutes long, and yet…Barack managed to work in references to himself no fewer than 118 times.
-JOHN HINDERAKER, Jan, 2015

Ignoring reality is part of the job description of being a progressive.
-George Will critiquing President Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address

It’s easy to despise Barack Hussein Obama, perhaps the least qualified man ever to accede to the Oval Office. The empty resume, the imaginary biographies, the laziness, the arrogance, the profligacy with the public treasury, the weakness, the cowardice and the cringing servility when dealing with America’s enemies abroad: his six years as president of the United States — a presidency we will all look back upon someday with wonder, shame and national embarrassment .... The man is a disgrace.
-Michael Walsh, PJ Media, Jan 2015

I just took an action to change the law
-The Emperor of the United States, in Chicago, Nov. 2014

...he has issued an imperial order to dissolve America’s borders. Millions more will enter and demand the same amnesty benefits as those who came before. The entire moral foundation and consistency of our laws will have been eviscerated. Law enforcement officials have repeatedly warned that the president’s new amnesty will unleash a “tidal wave” of illegal immigration. The impact on our jobs, wages, hospitals, schools, police departments and neighborhoods will be crushing.
-Sen. Jeff Sessions in USA Today on Obama's immigration executive order.

This is liberalism that meets no challenge, fixes no problem. The causal oomph that drives the process is the benefits that flow to those directly involved. Congressmen can’t extract donations from the auto industry or telecom industry or health insurers if costly, consequential rules affecting those industries aren’t being drafted. ... The needs of the liberal machine are being met, the full-time retinue of fixers, lobbyists and activists who extract rents by controlling things.
-WSJ's Holman Jenkins claiming Obama's internet regulation is only proposed to grab Google, Netflix, Comcast, Amazon deep pockets while they mold the law......not to solve any problem. Nov 2014

Now that two of the last three Democratic presidencies have been emphatically judged to have been failures, the world’s oldest political party — the primary architect of this nation’s administrative state — has some thinking to do.
-George Will after the 2014 mid-terms elections.

The defeat — “a massacre,” the Economist called it — marks the final collapse of Obamaism, a species of left liberalism so intrusive, so incompetently executed and ultimately so unpopular that it will be seen as a parenthesis in American political history.
-Charles Krauthammer commenting on the 2014 mid term election results.

I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I’ll hire to do it
I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters
I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors
And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director
-Obama

I hate that man Obama more than any man I’ve ever met, more than any man who ever lived
-Bill Clinton during the 2008 campaign after Obama called him a racist.

Nobody believes you.
-Paul Ryan to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen after a long dialog on why they lost Lois Lerner's emails

As we peer into society’s future, we—you and I and our government — must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage
-President Eisenhower in his farewell address to Congress with advice to Obama

... President Obama’s VA scandal is the most serious and damaging of his presidency. It is the Obama administration in sum and in miniature: incompetent management of a health system, defended by crude media manipulation.
- WAPO's Michael Gerson , May, 2014

What better way to "attrition out" the stubborn bitter clingers? So that they could be replaced by the indoctrinated, imported and indentured.
- Blogger cfbleachers responding to Roger Simon's The Veterans Scandal: Socialized Medicine on Trial, May, 2014

It’s not simply that Mr. Obama has fallen short of what he promised; it’s that he has been, in so many respects, a failure. Choose your metrics. Better yet, choose Mr. Obama’s metrics: Job creation. Economic growth. Improving our health-care system. Reducing the debt. Reducing poverty. Reducing income inequality. Slowing the rise of the oceans. Healing the planet. Repairing the world. The Russian “reset.” Peace in the Middle East. Red lines in Syria. Renewed focus on Afghanistan. A new beginning with the Arab world. Better relations with our allies. Depolarizing our politics. Putting an end to the type of politics that “breeds division and conflict and cynicism.” Working with the other party. Transparency. No lobbyists working in his administration. His commitment to seek public financing in the general election. The list goes on and on.
By now, nearly five and a half years into the Obama presidency, objective people can draw reasonable conclusions, among which are these: Barack Obama was among the least prepared men to ever serve as presidency. It shows. He has been overmatched by events right from the start. He is an excellent campaigner but unusually inept when it comes to governing.
-Peter Wehner. Commentary Apr 2014

Our liberal friends have left us with a pile of dung the size of the Horsehead Nebula.
-Roger Simon on the aftermath of the complete failure of Obama’s foreign and domestic policies ; PJ Media, Apr 2014.

I just want to be absolutely clear, alright. So I don’t want any misunderstanding. When ya’ll go home and you’re talking to your buddies, and they say, “Ah, he wants to take my gun away,” you’ve heard it here — I’m on television so everybody knows it – I believe in the Second Amendment. I believe in people’s lawful right to bear arms. I will not take your shotgun away. I will not take your rifle away. I won’t take your handgun away. … So, there are some common-sense gun safety laws that I believe in. But I am not going to take your guns away. So if you want to find an excuse not to vote for me, don’t use that one. Cause that just ain’t true.
-Obama, Sept. 9, 2008

Obama ordered an intensification of our effort in Afghanistan, while admitting privately that he expected it to fail. Approximately 80% of the fatalities our military has suffered in Afghanistan have taken place on Obama’s watch, not because he was pursuing a strategy that he sincerely believed to be in America’s interest, but because he cynically calculated that sending Americans to die in a useless campaign (as he assessed it) would benefit him politically. This is a scandal approximately a billion times more newsworthy than the Christie administration’s closing a lane on a bridge.
-John Hinderraker, Powerline, Jan 2014

Now the persona is evaporating, under the impact of laughter on the one hand and sheer horror at the results of Obama's incompetence (in health care today, in foreign policy next week) And that's a good thing. Because nothing was being done, and nothing was ever going to be done. There's a certain value in knowing how bad things actually are.
JR Dunn, American Thinker, Dec 2013

He can blame Republicans in Congress all he likes and get away with it because congressional Republicans are the worst. But the fact remains that I have spent the majority of this man's presidency watching bad things happen, then hearing a thoughtful speech about how we gotta make sure the bad things never happen again, and then watching as nothing gets done. Next time there's an election, I want Nate Silver to analyze the data and tell me who to vote for so that I don't end up casting my ballot for a very eloquent hat stand.
-GQ after placing Zero 17th on its list of least influential people, behind Anthony Weiner and Jodi Arias

It was always about power — gaining it and keeping it for the Democratic party and the central government. It was based on lies about the preceding system and sold on lies about its consequences.
-Mona Charen, on Obamacare, 2013

I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president I actually respect the Constitution.
-B Obama

I wouldn’t be surprised if President Obama learned Osama bin Laden had been killed when he saw himself announce it on television.
-- Jon Stewart

Simple formula: Delay, stonewall and wait for a supine and protective press to turn spectacularly incurious.
-C Krauthammer, nov 2013

No matter how we reform healthcare, we will keep this promise…. if you like your healthcare plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.”
-Obama 2009

We were working in a very very nimble hyper-consumer-focused way, all fused in this kind of maelstrom of pizza, Mountain Dew, and all-nighters . . . and, you know, idealism. That kind of led to the magic that was produced.
- from Mark Steyn’s column quoting from August 2010 , Todd Park, the chief technology officer of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and TechCrunch’s with his delirious preview of Obamacare’s Healthcare.gov disastrous website

“Your policy doesn’t include maternity care”.
-Answer from his agent after a 61 yr old male Powerline reader in good health asked why his cancelled health insurance was not compliant with Obamacare and being discontinued.

They have a problem and they won't level about it. One suspects that they will get it fixed, more or less. It is just technology, after all. But the imperious attitude … that is in their DNA. They can't fix it. Don't want to. Don't believe it needs fixing.
-G Norman, Weekly Std. on the rollout of ObamaCare in Oct 2013

The world knows a lot about us, and in ways removed from specific military actions. Their elites come here, and increasingly their middle class. They know our unemployment problem—it's not a secret. They take the train from New York to Washington and see the abandoned factories. They know about our budget problems, they know who holds our bonds. They read about the kids who are bored so they killed the visiting Australian baseball player, and the kids so bored they killed a World War II veteran. They read about the state legislator who became a hero for defending late-term abortions—they see the fawning interviews. They go home with the story of the guy who spent his time watching violent videos and then, amazingly, acted out his visions of violence at the Washington Navy Yard. They notice our mass killings are no more than two-day stories.
And of course it isn't only "the world" that sees this—Americans see it. And they are worried about their country. Deep down they, too, wonder if we are still a great nation or will be able to remain one. They think our economy is in a shambles and our government incapable, at the moment, of creating the conditions that will allow it to come back. They fear our culture is rotting our children's heads.
-Peggy Noonan on Obama's America 9/2013

The content of Monday’s hyperpartisan speech was par for your hyperpartisan presidency, but the timing marked a new low. Let me be clear: Have you neither decency nor shame?
-NY Post's Michael Goodwin on Obama's speech after a gunman had opened fire at the Washington Navy Yard he denounced Republicans'

Go away. Just Go Away.
If that is asking too much, then please, please be quiet!
For America and for decency.
- NY Post's Michael Goodwin on Obama's speech after a gunman had opened fire at the Washington Navy Yard he denounced Republicans'

[H]e has damaged his presidency and weakened the nation’s standing in the world. It has been one of the more stunning and inexplicable displays of presidential incompetence that I’ve ever witnessed. The failure cuts straight to the heart of a perpetual criticism of the Obama White House: that the President thinks he can do foreign policy all by his lonesome. This has been the most closely held American foreign-policy-making process since Nixon and Kissinger, only there’s no Kissinger. There is no éminence grise—think of someone like Brent Scowcroft—who can say to Obama with real power and credibility, Mr. President, you’re doing the wrong thing here.[H]e has done himself, and the nation, great and unnecessary harm. The road back to credibility and respect will be extremely difficult.
-liberal Joe Klein, Time Mag. after Obama's Syrian policy failure

“...the correct answer would be, ‘No, we stayed within our lane and I’m assuring you we did not spy on members of Congress.’”
-Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois after hearing the answer to his question to Attorney General Holder if he’s spying on members of Congress and thereby giving the executive branch leverage over the legislative branch. Eric Holder had answered:“With all due respect, senator, I don’t think this is an appropriate setting for me to discuss that issue.”

This administration’s management of the Obama Internal Revenue Service scandal so far consists of a slow-walking, rolling disclosure of facts; equal parts equivocation, amnesia and indignation from IRS witnesses; deer-in-the-headlights non-responses by the White House press secretary; parsed, lawyerly statements from the president himself; and now one of the central key players is taking the Fifth. And all this comes from what the president claimed would be the “most transparent administration ever…”
– Ed Rogers, Wash Post, May 2013

Under the Permanent Campaign Shimmy, the president identifies a problem. Then he declines to come up with a proposal to address the problem. Then he comes up with a vague-but-politically-convenient concept that doesn’t address the problem (let’s raise taxes on the rich). Then he goes around the country blasting the opposition for not having as politically popular a concept. Then he returns to Washington and congratulates himself for being the only serious and substantive person in town.
-New York Times columnist David Brooks, Feb 2013

To put fine point on the matter, our president terrifies me, even though during most of my life I have been a liberal Democrat and voted for him in his first election.
If viewed honestly his first term has been an unmitigated disaster. The national debt is at an historic high. So is unemployment. Despite these sad, undeniable facts, he was elected to another term. That of course is typical of his history for much of his life. He is a master politician of the Chicago school and yet a disaster as a manager and practical leader.
-Arnold S. Trebach, writing in the American Spectator, Jan. 2013

President Obama told the nation in his June 14 economic policy address in Cleveland that his economic policy plans for a second term would "create strong sustained growth;…pay down our long term debt; and most of all…generate good, middle-class jobs…." He then spent almost an hour describing policies that would do just the opposite.
-Peter Ferrara, American Spectator, June, 2012

He lies to us constantly about who he is. Not in the way most politicians lie, spinning and shading events with self-serving half-truths. He lies with the arrogant bravado of a con man messiah. My grandfather was tortured by the British. My parents met because of the march in Selma. My white girlfriend wanted to be black. These aren’t lies that were forced out of him in a rough moment to defend himself from controversy — like the lie about terrorist William Ayers being just a guy in the neighborhood, or the one about never having heard the hate-mongering of Jeremiah Wright — these are intentionally crafted falsehoods. They were meant to do exactly what they did: to recreate Obama in the image of the black savior leftists had been waiting for, the man who would relieve them of the disfiguring guilt arising from their dreadful history of racism and justify the disastrous havoc their policies have wreaked on African-Americans.
-Andrew Klavan, PJ Media, June 2012.

Are you better off today than you were $4 trillion ago?
-former presidential candidate Gov. Rick Perry

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said the Obama administration is “not claiming victory” in Iraq. That’s good, because the administration had nothing to do with it.
-Wash Times Ed., Dec 2011.

“Well, then, what the hell are we paying you for?
-NJ Gov. Chris Christy after Obama said he knew the Congressional super committee was doomed for failure, so he didn’t get involved

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.
-Obama 2006

He is the Man Who Won't Listen to Anybody, so why should anybody listen to him?
New York Post's Michael Goodwin after turning off the TV during an Obama speech.

Americans are desperately seeking an answer to a simple question: why does President Obama appear to be so un-American? The term un-American here is not synonymous with anti-American (though Obama has been that on occasion); instead, it merely signifies that President Obama is unconcerned with typical American principles and traditions. He sees capitalism as selfish and evil, religion as dangerous and oppressive; he sees the Constitution as antiquated and entrepreneurialism as exploitative. He is the representative of the Fareed Zakaria ideology at work, celebrating the post-American world."
Benjamin Shapiro on why the new book by Jerome Corsi (Where’s the Birth Certificate? ) tops Amazon's best seller list week after week

Imagine that the government decided they were going to take care of every starving person on the street once and for all. To do this, the government officials go to the CEO of a popular chain restaurant that has locations across the US. The official tells the CEO that pretty soon, every homeless/hungry person will be coming in to his/her restaurant for a free meal. The government helpfully says they will foot the bill for this meal, of course via everyone’s tax dollars. The CEO feels like maybe this is a good idea to help feed the hungry and responds in kind, saying “Great! To cover our costs, that meal will be $10.” Here’s where things start to get ugly. The government official says, “We don’t really care what your costs are. We’ll pay you $7 for that meal, and you’ll have to figure out how to make up the rest.”
Blogger kevindujan01 posting at Hillbuzz relating his Doctor's analogy on Obamacare

The moral code, the moral compass of the state-controlled media is something to behold. Now, some of you may not know the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner hosted a state dinner last night for Hu Jintao of China. Hu Jintao is holding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner in prison in China. Not making it up. The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner hosted a dinner for the guy holding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner in prison, and the media does not get the irony of this at all. They're too busy running around chasing Sarah Palin and radio talk show hosts over "civility."

Rush Limbaugh on his radio show, Jan. 20, 2011.

The notion that somehow me saying maybe you should be taxed more like your secretary when you're pulling home a billion dollars...I don't think is me being extremist or me being antibusiness
- Obama in need of a grammar lesson

For some inexplicable reason, Mr. Obama welcomes the decline of America's role on the international stage. It is his most notable accomplishment.
-Wash Times Ed. Nov 2010

If you voted for Obama, please turn around and leave! You have proven that you are not responsible enough to own a firearm!
sign posted on door of The Southwest Shooting Authority in Pinetop, Ariz.

Occam's razor suggests that Obama is a mere conformist--someone who absorbed every left-wing platitude he encountered in college and never seems to have seriously questioned any of them
-WSJ's James Taranto

When I see the media and the entire establishment on the left lay down and become cult-like and not examine who he is, what he's done, and not really examine what he says, but just praise him because of how he says it, my antenna go up.

If we're going to convince the American people what's about to happen to them is as disastrous as anything in their lives in peacetime, we're going to have to discuss philosophy with them. We are going to have to talk about principles

-Rush Limbaugh on Obama

Nothing wakened their instincts more than the administration's insistence on its health-care bill—its whiff of totalitarian will, its secretiveness, its display of cold assurance that the new president's social agenda trumped everything.

But it was about far more than health-care reform, or joblessness, or the great ideological divide between the president and the rest of the country. It was about an accumulation of facts quietly taken in that told Americans that the man they had sent to the White House had neither the character or the capacity to lead the country.

-Dorothy Rabinowitz

In the Nineties, the “culture wars” were over “God, guns and gays”. The overreach of the statists has added a fourth G: Government itself is now a front in the culture war, and a battle of the most primal kind. Is the United States a republic of limited government with a presumption in favor of individual liberty? Or is it just like any other western nation in which a permanent political class knows what’s best for its subjects?
-Mark Syeyn on the 2010 Midterm Elections

If the book is accurate … it is some of the most cold-blooded, cynical, grotesquely political manipulation of national security that I think we’ve ever seen....The notion that a President would say that in that kind of callous and just utterly robotic way, I think is yet further indication that Obama is simply not qualified to be Commander-in-Chief
-John Bolton on Foxnews when asked to comment on Woodward's book, Obama's Wars

Strange but true: President Obama told NASA administrator Charles Bolden that his highest priority should be "to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering."

... the real roots of Mr. Obama's economic problems are intellectual and political. The Administration rejected marginal-rate tax cuts that worked in the 1960s and 1980s because they would have helped the rich, in favor of a Keynesian spending binge that has stimulated little except government. More broadly, Democrats purposely used the recession as a political opening to redistribute income, reverse the free-market reforms of the Reagan era, and put government at the commanding heights of economic decision-making.
- Wall St Journal Editorial on Obama's failed economic policies

How they see the world.....

-- Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.
-- Disgust and alarm with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.
-- Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.
-- Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.
-Charles Krauthammer, Aug 2010

For the first time in American history, we have a man in the White House who consciously and brazenly disregards his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution. That's why I say the greatest threat to our Constitution, our safety and our liberties, is internal. Our president is an enemy of our Constitution, and, as such, he is a danger to our safety, our security and our personal freedoms.
- Wash. Times' Tom Tancredo, July 2010

He is Mr. Mass Destruction. I mean he is a human destroyer. This guy has spent his way into oblivion and we don't have a budget. He is surrounded by a bunch of complete incompetents, led by himself.
-Rant by Howard Davidowitz

The State of the Union could have been written by a computer program. All the now familiar Obama furniture was in the room: the mock outrage at “them,” the psychodramatic first-person boasting (as in, “I will oppose..,” “I will not work with…,” “I will decline…,” “I will not stand by …,” I will not cede…,” “I will not walk away…,” “I will not back down…,” “I will not go back…”); the now customary rear-view-mirror jab at his fading predecessor; the monotonous promising that something is so bad that we must have a new program for it (each year the same threat, the same solution, the same failure); and the silence about the Obama legacy of stimulus, debt, and ObamaCare.
Victor Davis Hanson, PJ Media, Jan 2011

Despite the fact that he has some of the lowest approval ratings among recent presidents, history will see Barack Obama as the source of America ‘s resurrection. Barack Obama has plunged the country into levels of debt that we could not have previously imagined; his efforts to nationalize health care have been met with fierce resistance nationwide; TARP bailouts and stimulus spending have shown little positive effect on the national economy; unemployment is unacceptably high and looks to remain that way for most of a decade; legacy entitlement programs have ballooned to unsustainable levels, and there is a seething anger in the populace.

That’s why Barack Obama is such a good thing for America .

Obama is the symbol of a creeping liberalism that has infected our society like a cancer for the last 100 years. Just as Hitler is the face of fascism, Obama will go down in history as the face of unchecked liberalism. The cancer metastasized to the point where it could no longer be ignored.

Literally millions of Americans have had enough. They’re organizing, they’re studying the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, they’re reading history and case law, they’re showing up at rallies and meetings, and a slew of conservative candidates are throwing their hats into the ring. Is there a revolution brewing? Yes, in the sense that there is a keen awareness that our priorities and sensibilities must be radically re-structured. Will it be a violent revolution? No. It will be done through the interpretation of the original document that has guided us for 220 years - the Constitution. Just as the pendulum swung to embrace political correctness and liberalism, there will be a backlash, a complete repudiation of a hundred years of nonsense. A hundred years from now, history will perceive the year 2010 as the time when America got back on the right track. And for that, we can thank Barack Hussein Obama.

-Gary Hubbell, Aspen Times Weekly February 2010

In recent months, a lot of Americans have said to me that they had no idea the new president would feel so "weird." But, in fact, he's not weird. True, he's not, even in Democratic terms, a political figure – as, say, Clinton or Biden are. Instead, he's the product of the broader culture: There are millions of people like Barack Obama, the eternal students of a vast lethargic transnational campus for whom global compassion and the multicultural pose are merely the modish gloss on a cult of radical grandiose narcissism. As someone once said, "We are the ones we've been waiting for." When you've spent that long waiting in line for yourself, it's bound to be a disappointment.
Mark Steyn, Jun 2010.

"Don't make excuses. Take responsibility not just for your successes; take responsibility where you fall short as well." As many immediately noted, this was odd advice from a man who would put the blame for the hitch in his golf swing on eight years of George W. Bush.
-Jonah Goldberg commenting on an Obama speech to high school students

From the earliest days of the campaign, the Obama “movement” contained two political time bombs: First, the curse of absurdly high expectations (”first we’re going to change Iowa! Then we’re going to change America! Then we’re going to change the world!”) And second, electing to office a president with no governing or leadership experience. . . And now the chickens are also coming home to roost on the leadership and competency question. The White House is continually slow-off-the-mark, reactive, defensive, and unsure of its footing, i.e., it appears in over its head. ...It will be difficult (if not impossible) to re-build the Obama “brand,” because it never really existed as a tangible thing in the first place.
-Stuart Gottlieb of Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs

Barack Obama's remarkable powers of oratory are well known: In support of Chicago's Olympic bid, he flew into Copenhagen to give a heartwarming speech about himself, and they gave the games to Rio. He flew into Boston to support Martha Coakley's bid for the U.S. Senate, and Massachusetts voters gave Ted Kennedy's seat to a Republican. In the first year of his presidency, he gave a gazillion speeches on health care "reform" and drove support for his proposals to basement level, leaving Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to ram it down the throats of the American people through sheer parliamentary muscle.
Mark Steyn, May 2010

.. I hereby declare that I would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama
-Conservative Norman B. Podhoretz, Mar, 2010

With the House's climactic vote on ObamaCare tomorrow, Democrats are on the cusp of a profound and historic mistake, comparable in our view to the Smoot-Hawley tariff and FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act.
-Wall St. Journal Editorial Mar 20, 2010

You break it, you own it.
-Wall St. Journal Editorial Mar 22, 2010

It revealed his primary weakness in speaking of health care, which is a tendency to dodge, obfuscate and mislead. He grows testy when challenged. It revealed what the president doesn't want revealed, which is that he doesn't want to reveal much about his plan
-Peggy Noonan on Obama's interview on Fox News Channel's "Special Report With Bret Baier," Mar 2010

The Founding Fathers, far from being ideologues, were not even politicians. They were an assortment of businessmen, writers, teachers, planters; men, in short, who knew something of the world, which is to say, of Human Nature. Their struggle to draft a set of rules acceptable to each other was based on the assumption that we human beings, in the mass, are no damned good—that we are biddable, easily confused, and that we may easily be motivated by a Politician, which is to say, a huckster, mounting a soapbox and inflaming our passions.
David Mamet, Jan 2013

He is our first post-American president
-John Bolton, WSJ Mar 2010

The good news is that he recognizes his mistakes and is going to try again.
White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer explaining that Obama got all the policies right but just didn't explain them well.

The central contradiction in modern liberal politics is that Otto von Bismarck's entitlement state for cradle to grave financial security is no longer affordable. The model has reached the limit of its ability to tax private income and still allow enough economic growth to finance its transfer payments. ... You can see this in bankrupt Greece, where government spends 52% of GDP; or in California and New York, where the government-employee unions have pushed tax rates to punishing levels and the states still can't pay their bills. Americans can see that this is where Mr. Obama's agenda is also taking Washington, and this is why they are rejecting it.
-Wall St Journal editorializing the "liberal crack-up" punctuated by the sudden departure of Democrat Sen. Evan Bayh, Feb 2010

For those people, it may take a political catastrophe of biblical proportions before they get it.
-Retiring Sen. Evan Bayh's view on the unnamed left wing of his party Feb 2010

... they still plan to try to land this Pelosian triple-handspring-quadruple pole vault to passage
-Wall St Journal editorial on the latest underhanded strategy to force health care on the nation - reconcilliation

The Obama administration resembles nothing so much as a big house in the suburbs where the parents are away for the weekend.
-Greg Lewis, American Thinker

The palpable whiff given off by the White House inner circle is that they're the last people on the planet still besotted by Barack Obama, and that they're having such a cool time starring in their own reality-show remake of "The West Wing" they can only conceive of the public – and, indeed, the world as crowd-scene extras in "The Barack Obama Show." They expect you to cheer and wave flags when the floor manager tells you to, but the notion that, in return, he should be able to persuade you of the merits of his policies seems entirely to have eluded them
- Mark Steyn, Feb 5, 2010

Obama says he's not a Bolshevik, and he says he's not an ideologue. That leaves one other possibility, he's an idiot, a full-fledged idiot..
-Rush Limbaugh, Feb 4, 2010

The president has a reality problem. He's crafted a fantasy universe where he and his friends can live unperturbed by our center-right country, comforted by just-so stories. The rest of us can only, like Justice Alito, crinkle our noses and mutter, "Not true."
-Rich Lowry, Salt Lake City Tribune Jan '10 after Obama's first state-of-the-union

Obama's leitmotif is: Washington is disappointing, Washington is annoying, Washington is dysfunctional, Washington is corrupt, verily Washington is toxic -- yet Washington should conscript a substantially larger share of GDP, and Washington should exercise vast new controls over health care, energy, K-12 education, etc.
-George Will after Obama's first state-of-the-union address

There's usually a reason for a presidency lasting a single term, as Mr. Obama's slow-motion train wreck is demonstrating
-Wash. Times editorial on the eve of Obama's first state-of-the-union address

You know, this is an amazing week. Massachusetts goes Republican, health care dies and the Supreme Court unshackles the First Amendment. It's the best week I've had since spring break in medical school -- and I don't even remember it [laughter from other panelists].
- Charles Krauthammer on Fox's Special Report with Bret Baier, Jan 22 2010.

You want a competent chief executive with a deep and shrewd sense of the people. Americans want him to be on the same page as they are. But he's on a different page, and he may in fact be reading a different book.
- Peggy Noonan

The system worked !!!
Secretary of homeland security Janet Napolitano after a would be suicide bomber's failed detonater and passenger heroics saved a Christmas '09 Northwest flight. The jihadist paid cash, bought a one-way ticket, had no passport, checked no luggage on a transoceanic flight, and his father had warned U.S. authorities about his son. He was nonetheless allowed to fly.

On the Nobel Peace Prize

The most popular headline at the Real Clear Politics Web site the other day was: "Is Obama Becoming A Joke?" With brilliant comedic timing, the very next morning the Norwegians gave him the Nobel Peace Prize.
-Mark Steyn

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has embarrassed itself and cheapened a great award that had real meaning. ...
The members of the committee have also put the young American president in a terrible place. They make it look like all the talk of "The One," the heartthrob of the European elite, the darling of the international left, is true. They make him look prefabricated and inauthentic, an empty structure held up by essentially silly people.
-Peggy Noonan

He is an American president queasy about the projection of American power. He is an American president who rejects the notion of American exceptionalism. He is an American president eagerly in pursuit of legitimacy to be granted him not by those who voted for him but by those who do not cast a vote and who chafe at American leadership. It is his devout wish that America become one of many nations, influencing the world indirectly or not influencing it at all, rather than "the indispensable nation," as Madeleine Albright characterized it. He is the encapsulation, the representative, the wish fulfillment, the very embodiment, of the multilateralist impulse. He is, almost literally, a dream come true for the sorts of people who treasure and value the Nobel Peace Prize.
- John Podhoretz

George Bush liberates 50 million Muslims. Ronald Reagan liberates hundreds of millions of Europeans, saves parts of Latin America. Any awards? No. Just derision. Obama gives speeches trashing his own country and he gets a prize for it.
-Rush Limbaugh

The award of this year’s Nobel peace prize to President Obama will be met with widespread incredulity, consternation in many capitals and probably deep embarrassment by the President himself. ,,, Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. ...Instead, the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace. ... The pretext for the prize was Mr Obama's decision to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples”.
-Michael Binyon, London Times

"..like Obama getting the Nobel Prize."
-David Beckham's coach, Fabio Capello after Beckman was named "man of the match" in England's World Cup qualifying soccer game this week despite playing for just 30 minutes.

Obama has proved his powers of observation and logical deduction are not even up to the level of an average, open minded, skeptical thinker. Instead, Barack is what Eric Hoffer termed a True Believer,that is—a radical zealot of permanently fixed bias. In other words, his contemplations are so bereft of intellectual rigor or logical structure that he doesn't really rate as a thinker”at all. Instead, his leftist declarations are merely belched up bromides redounding of the staccato cackle of a high-profile parrot. He dramatically trumpets a fistful of progressive bumper stickers every time he pontificates. To sum up, Obama unthinkingly regurgitates bygone leftist notions so thoroughly discredited that only a pseudo-spiritual affiliation can possibly explain his unthinking adherence to a fact-blind ideology. Obama’s religious affiliation is a secular, leftist humanism best described as Marxism. Since he has no ability for self-derived thought and cannot deviate from this primitive, materialist world-view, he is perhaps the most dangerous president ever foisted upon the American people.
- Kelly O'Connell, Canada Free Press, December, 2009

School dismissal time in Chicago triggers a massive mobilization of security forces across the South and West Sides, to try to keep students from shooting one another or being shot by older gang members. Police officers in bulletproof vests ring the most violence-prone schools, and the Chicago Transit Authority rejiggers its bus schedules to try to make sure that students don’t have to walk even half a block before boarding a bus.
-H MacDonald in an article commenting on Community Organizer Obama's home turf

Public approval ratings of Barack Obama may be falling quickly right now—but his rating of the American public is probably falling even faster.
-Arthur C. Brooks, Wall St. Journal, Aug 2009

Obama doesn't lie. He implies, he misdirects, he misleads -- so fluidly and incessantly that he risks transmuting eloquence into mere slickness.
Slickness wasn't fatal to "Slick Willie" Clinton because he possessed a winning, near irresistible charm. Obama's persona is more cool, distant, imperial. The charming scoundrel can get away with endless deception; the righteous redeemer cannot.
- Charles Krauthammer, Sept 2009

Barack Obama's quest for historic health-care legislation has turned into a parody of leadership. We usually associate presidential leadership with the pursuit of goals that, though initially unpopular, serve America's long-term interests. Obama has reversed this. He's championing increasingly unpopular legislation that threatens the country's long-term interests.
-Robert Samuelson, Washington Post, Dec 21, 2009.

he's a phony, knows nothing about economics, is historically illiterate, and woefully small minded for the size of the task
-Geoffrey P. Hunt, American Thinker, Aug 2009

"...the one unifying theme of his presidency so far has been Obama's relentless campaigning for a job he already has.
-Jonah Goldberg, July 2009.

The worst thing that could happen, from the standpoint of those seeking more government power over the economy, would be for the economy to begin recovering on its own while months were being spent debating the need for a "stimulus" bill.
-Thomas Sowell, Sept 2009

"...by a 2-1 margin, voters believe that no matter how bad things are Congress can always make matters worse"
- Scott Rasmussen after polling on Obamacare in Aug 2009

The mainstream perception that conservatives are close-minded and dogmatic while liberals are open-minded and free- thinking has it almost exactly backward. Liberal dogma is settled: The government should do good, where it can, whenever it can. That is President Obama's idea of pragmatism and bipartisanship: He's open to all ideas, from either side of the aisle, about how best to expand government and get the state more involved in our lives.
-Jonah Goldberg, May, 2009.

Remarkably, there are still four justices on the Supreme Court …[who] would have taken the radical step of prohibiting the advertising and satellite television showing of a documentary movie about a political candidate simply because a corporation had a role in financing its production or distribution. Name me a movie or book that doesn’t receive such corporate support. This is a truly radical position, and Justice Kagan has now joined them.
-Bradley Smith, National Review Online, June, 2012

America is on an unsustainable fiscal path that threatens our future. ...The consequences of all this will not be benign. A world saturated with U.S. currency will eventually look elsewhere to invest, causing the dollar's value to drop; foreign creditors, their confidence shaken by our fiscal profligacy, will demand higher payments to keep holding our debt. The net effect will be "stagflation," that pernicious combination of slower growth, higher inflation and interest rates, and lower living standards Americans suffered through in the 1970s.
Evan Bayh Dem Sen Indiana, Sep 2009

Conservatives are taking too much solace in the precipitous drop in Barack Obama's approval ratings, and too many of us are overconfident that his administration is merely a replay of the hapless presidency of Jimmy Carter that was easily swept out in a landslide election ... Today's situation is far different, far more conducive to our political adversary's political power, than that which faced Carter. And Obama is an entirely different breed of cat. He's more ruthless, more tactically savvy, and has far more dangerous objectives.
- Quin Hillyer, Sept 2009

...do they have an aspiration that they dare not speak? Do they hope state capitalism will be irreversible -- that wherever government has asserted the primacy of politics, the primacy will be permanent?
-George Will, Aug 2009.

The superficiality, the unseriousness, the hubris, the obliviousness to post-9/11 realities: They were trademarks of the Obama campaign, and they are the tattoos on his governance
- Michelle Malkin on the White House-engineered photo-op of low-flying Air Force aircraft that caused terror in New York City

Orwellian NEWSPEAK from "The Party"

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. ... We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"
-- [O'Brien speaking to Winston] George Orwell, "1984"

"...the progress report reveals that the website is functioning more than 90% of the time—excluding periods when it is shut down for maintenance. "
-WSJ quoting an Obamacare metric of the Obama Administration

"I think it's fair to say that during the course of my Presidency I have bent over backwards to work with the Republican Party, and have purposely kept my rhetoric down. I think I'm pretty well known for being a calm guy. Sometimes people think I'm too calm."
-Obama-after the government shutdown in October, 2013

“Raising the debt ceiling, which has been done over a hundred times, does not increase our debt
-Obama, Sept 2013

… the law prohibiting the disclosure of confidential tax returns also prevents disclosure of information about who disclosed them
- National Organization for Marriage chairman, John Eastman on the "Orwellian" response he got from the IRS to his request for who leaked their confidential tax information to liberal groups.- from Peggy Noonan's WSJ column, June 2013

We have to pass the [health care] bill so that you can find out what is in it.
-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, March, 2010.

Turnabout fair play?

it is a "fundamental strategic mistake" to believe "there is any possibility in the lifetime of anyone here of having the Iraqis get together, have a unity government in Baghdad that pulls the country together. That will not happen..."
- Joe Biden 2007 bashing Bush.

"one of the great achievements of this administration" may well be a democratic Iraq. "You're going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government. . . . I've been impressed how they have been deciding to use the political process rather than guns to settle their differences."
-Joe Biden Feb. 2010 [now taking credit for Bush's achievments]

"..the era of Big Government is over."
- Bill Clinton's 1996 State of the Union address

"There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there. Since we can't keep track of all of them here at the White House, we're asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov."
-Big Brother

New Transparancy, Obama style !!

"As administrator, I will ensure EPA's efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and program, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency." - Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, Lisa Jackson

"...the days of science taking a backseat to ideology are over." - Obama

-KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL - on the silencing of man-made global warming critic Alan Carlin, a 35-year Environmental Protection Agency veteran.

; Although I did not use the word 'terrorism,' I referred to 'man-caused' disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.
-Janet Napolitano when asked why the word "terrorism" never passed her lips during her first Congressional testimony as Secretary

The Administration [ie The Party] has stopped using the phrase, and I think that speaks for itself. I have not heard it used. I have not gotten any directive about using it or not using it. It is just not being used.
- Hillary Clinton on the the phrase "war on terrorism" [now an "overseas contingency operations"]

The Obama administration is removing terms such as "jihad" and "Islamic extremism" from the U.S. National Security Strategy in an attempt to convince Muslim countries that America doesn't view them solely through the lens of counterterrorism
-Washington Times, Apr 2010

The Constitution enumerates three requirements of those who would be president (they must be natural-born citizens, at least 35 and a resident within the country for 14 years) and now the government's thrashing about in the economy imposes a fourth: Presidents must be able to speak pluperfect nonsense with a straight face, lest the country understand what the government is doing.
- George Will on Obama, Apr 2009

Liberals never, ever drop a heinous idea; they just change the name. "Abortion" becomes "choice," "communist" becomes "progressive," "communist dictatorship" becomes "people's democratic republic"
-Ann Coulter

So, the next time you hear the phrase, 'social justice', take time to question the one who is using it.... chances are they have no idea that the vision of justice that has taken their hearts captive was perpetrated by a terrorist who is using their good will to spread his hatred and to bring forth a more authoritative government where the individual is held captive to a few elitists with ultimate power.
-Rebecca Hagelin, Heritage Foundation

Environmental Movements

It is deeply ironic that the propagation of one wrong prediction after another is glorified as “science,” while those who point out objective and verifiable facts are demonized as “deniers.
-John Hinderaker, after Christopher Monckton points out that there has been no warming trend in the UAH global mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies for 8 years 5 months and counting. Feb, 2023

... an electrical grid powered mostly by intermittent generators like wind and sun requires full backup from some source; and if that source is to be stored energy, the amounts of storage required are truly staggering. When you do the simple arithmetic to calculate the storage requirements and the likely costs, it becomes obvious that the entire project is completely impractical and unaffordable. The activists and politicians pushing us toward this new energy system of wind/solar/storage are either being intentionally deceptive or totally incompetent

- Francis Melton, THE ENERGY STORAGE CONUNDRUM, Dec 2022. The New Pause has lengthened by a further month, from 6 years 8 months to 6 years 9 months. As usual, it is calculated as the longest period, up to the most recent month for which data are available, during which the trend on the UAH global mean lower-troposphere temperature dataset is zero.
-Web site "What's up With That?," Oct 2021 on the satellite measurements indicating that the Earth has not warmed in nearly seven years.

According to ElectricityMap, wind bottomed out at 9:22 am yesterday, utilizing just 0.16 percent of its installed capacity at that time. This means the wind turbines installed throughout the entire 13-state footprint of the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator (MISO) were 99.84 percent useless at this time.
-Isaac Orr, Center of the American Experiment, Jan, 2020

… part of understanding science is understanding where the complexities lie, and not getting browbeaten, especially by people who aren't scientists or won't admit science is complex, into believing it’s so simple a child can explain it with a crayon.
- William van Wijngaarden at Department of Physics and Astronomy, York University, Canada musing on climate change physics.

I guess the cold water from Alaska skips most of the Atlantic Ocean and just heads to Africa. I hope everyone understands and has no questions. I can imagine the other personalities at NBC, ABC, MSNBC, CNN nodding in agreement with Roker and being amazed at his brilliance.
-Jack Hellner after Al Roker claimed melting ice in the artic cooled water off Africa and prevented hurricane formation.

...the EPA projects that this proposed rule will result in negligible CO2 emission changes, quantified benefits, and costs by 2022.
- WSJ Ed. on EPA's rule on new coal fired power plants effectively banning coal from their choice of fuels.

This is, in my view, the biggest scandal in the history of science. I can’t think of any competitor that could even come close.
John Hinderaker of Powerline.com on the discovery that researchers are cooking the data-- consistently altering past temperature records to make the present look warmer by comparison.

How much should we spend on climate change in order to have no effect on climate change?
-Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins

This is as good a way to get rid of them as any.
- Charles Wurster, chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, after being told that banning DDT would probably result in millions of deaths

We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we'll be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.
-Former Colorado Sen. Tim Wirth

A religion is what the faith in catastrophic man-made global warming has become. It is now a tissue of assertions impervious to evidence, assertions which everything, including a historic blizzard, supposedly confirms and nothing, not even the absence of warming, can falsify. - George Will, Feb 2010.

We cannot allow unelected bureaucrats with political agendas to use falsified data to regulate American industry and drive our economy into the ground.
-Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli in a petition to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider "finding" that carbon dioxide creates an endangerment for human health. Feb 2010.

The response to this among the defenders of Mr. Mann and his circle has been that even if they did disparage doubters and exclude contrary points of view, theirs is still the best climate science we've got. The proof for this is circular. It's the best, we're told, because it's the most-published and most-cited—in that same peer-reviewed literature.

Even so, by rigging the rules, they've made it impossible to know how good it really is. And then, one is left to wonder why they felt the need to rig the game in the first place, if their science is as robust as they claim. If there's an innocent explanation for that, we'd love to hear it.


-Wall St. Journal editorial on Climategate

Global warming was an academic Ponzi scheme. Its leading proponents were mini-Madoffs, peddling a vision of global catastrophe to gullible activists, bureaucrats and policymakers. The vision was so vast, the fear it inspired so pervasive, that it seized popular imagination, aided ably by hucksters like former Vice President Al Gore and his science-fiction feature film "An Inconvenient Truth." But like any Ponzi scheme, global warming only worked if everyone kept investing and no one looked at the books. Once the truth came out - of manipulated findings, phony data, rigged peer-review processes and intimidation of skeptics - the scheme began to collapse.

Yet even as the edifice comes down, the adherents of the orthodoxy say that there is nothing to see, that this is all a distraction from the business at hand, that there is still no time to lose, full steam (or solar power) ahead. But it is far too late for that. The veil has been pierced, the myth revealed, the scales have fallen from the people's eyes. The pagan priests are fleeing the temple, their sacred idols are being pulled down, their holy works renounced. Their god, finally, is dead


-Washington Times editorial on Climategate - Dec 4, 2009

What separates a scientific claim from mere opinion is its ability to be tested by experiment. No true scientist objects to having his theories verified; the charlatan is the one with something to hide. Not surprisingly, purveyors of global warming have proved anything but open.... ...Many of those involved in purported climate science seem more preoccupied with advancing a leftist, anti-business legislative agenda than respecting the integrity of the scientific method. It's obvious why. Their cataclysmic scare stories are unable to withstand scrutiny. By deleting e-mails and using tricks to hide the inconvenient decline in global temperatures, the climate alarmists prove to be not men of science, but ordinary frauds.
-Washington Times editorial Jul 2010

... never in peacetime history has the government-media-academic complex been in such sustained propagandistic lockstep about any subject.
- George Will, Dec 2009.

On climate, the public has been misinformed and not informed ... the foundation of a democracy is an informed public, which obviously means an honestly informed public.
- NASA's Global Warming alarmist Hansen , June 2006. [Although at the time we all thought Hansen was referring to his theories, but later, Hansen's NASA announced that October 2008 was the hottest October on record, in fact he used data recorded in Siberia during September–and then tried to cover their error with even absurd excuses that reveal further just how far their studies depart from accepted scientific inquiry. Since NASA is subject to Freedom of Information queries, he may have been left out of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) emails.

Over the coming few years, as the costs of global warming policies mount and the evidence of a crisis continues to collapse, perhaps it will become socially permissible for people to start thinking for themselves again
- Ross McKitrick, Professor of Environmental Economics commenting on the faked graph showing a "hockey stick" shaped temperature rise in modern times.

Do scientists use data to test theories, or do they use theories to test data? Scientists will claim the former, but here we have scientists who cling to the theory so tightly that they reject the data. That’s not science; it’s religious belief
-Hotair.com on Climategate (British Scientists fudging climate data to suit the theory)

President Obama is calling the climate bill that the House passed last week an "extraordinary" achievement, and so it is. The 1,200-page wonder manages the supreme feat of being both hugely expensive while doing almost nothing to reduce carbon emissions
-Wall St Journal Editorial - July 3, 2009

Here they go again -- our faithful representatives in Washington, that is. They're about to pass, without reading its 1,200-plus pages, an incredibly expensive and destructive cap and trade bill, which has little prayer of accomplishing what it sets out to accomplish but satisfies their urgent need to pay homage to their liberal ideology and secular humanist worldview.
-David Limbaugh, June 2009 on Congress' Global Warming initiative

For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming?
- Geologist Dr. David Gee, Uppsala University in Sweden.

The only predictions that have been made are apocalyptic, so the hypothesis has to be accepted before it can be tested.
-James Kerian, a mechanical engineer opining on man-made global warming in the Wall St. Journal - July 2008

...as a practical matter, would be the aim of global warming policy? Our political system permits only one answer: to please the special interests that even now are gathering at the trough for subsidies in the name of climate change.
- Wall St. Journal's Holman W. Jenkins, Jr

I suppose, fundamentally, it's the fact that someone is speaking about a science that I have been very heavily involved with and have labored so hard in, and been humiliated by, in the sense that the climate is so difficult to understand, Mother Nature is so complex, and so the uncertainties are great, and then to hear someone speak with such certainty and such confidence about what the climate is going to do is -- well, I suppose I could be kind and say, it's annoying to me.
-John Christy of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize) - on Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth"

My concern is that we may be moving away from an irrational lack of concern about climate change to an equally irrational panic about it.....Many of my colleagues ask, "What's the problem? Hasn't it been a good thing to raise public concern?" The problem is that in this panic we are going to spend our money unwisely, we will take actions that are counterproductive, and we will fail to do many of those things that will benefit the environment and ourselves.
-Daniel B. Botkin, president of the Center for the Study of the Environment

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.
Web site Greenie Watch - http://antigreen.blogspot.com/

When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works.
-Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientists

"Between the year A.D. 1 and the year 1850, volcanos and fluctuations in the heat from the sun were responsible for temperature changes, but these changes were much less pronounced than the warming caused by man-made pollution in the years since the mid-19th century. This gets to the point of the hysteria. Scientific Man in all his manufactured glory can't bear the thought that he might not, after all, be as powerful as a volcano or a solar flare. How many learned degrees does a volcano have, after all? The idea that forces of the universe greater even than Scientific Man may be responsible for the cyclical changes is unbearable. Hence 'global warming' has become the religion—the opiate, you might say—of Scientific Man, a doctrine supported by quackery, supposition and speculation, and as closely held and as ferociously defended as the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection at a gathering of devout Christians. You could ask the Rt. Rev. Al Gore, the presiding archbishop of the First Church of the Boiling Globe. The bishops and monsignors of the church treat dissent harshly, though not yet at the stake."
—Wesley Pruden

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject - Winston Churchill

The truth is, no country is going to cut its growth or consumption substantially in the light of a long-term environmental problem
-British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Kyoto - 2005

There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically....The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality
- Newsweek - April 28, 1975 - on the conviction that politicians would fail to prevent global COOLING and the coming Ice Age.

Terrorism

I mean, look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.
- Juan Williams' on FOX O'Reily Factor which got him fired by pseudo-humans at NPR.

Meanwhile, is it really the case that Hamas is objectively "good" at public relations? Or Hezbollah? Or Iran? Really? I just don't see it. To me, these PR operations are less "Wag the Dog" and more Baghdad Bob (the Monty Pythonesque spokesman for Saddam Hussein's regime). But instead of everyone laughing at the lies and idiocy, millions of people nod their heads in agreement.
North Korea recently sank a South Korean ship. The international reaction has been muted and sober. Turkey -- the Palestinians' new champion -- has been treating Kurdish nationalists harshly for generations; no one cares. The Russians crush Chechens, the Chinese trample Uighurs. Real genocides unfold regularly in Africa. Iran is pursuing a nuclear bomb. Hamas is openly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. So is Iran.
And yet the only villain as far as much of the world is concerned is Israel. Always Israel.
-Jonah Goldberg commenting on the world reaction to Israel's botched raid of six "humanitarian" ships bound for Gaza [June 2010]

....in dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them.
- A Sen. Scott Brown's stump speech during Massachusetts special election to fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat

Lowering the price to be paid by aggressors virtually guarantees more aggression.
- Thomas Sowell

---

And what changed policy was September the 11th. That changed policy. But actually, before September the 11th, this global movement with a global ideology was already in being. September the 11th was the culmination of what they wanted to do.

But actually, you know -- and this is probably where the policymakers such as myself were truly in error -- is that even before September the 11th this was happening in all sorts of different ways in different countries.

I mean, in Algeria for example, tens and tens of thousands of people lost their lives.

This movement has grown. It is there. It will latch onto any cause that it possibly can and give it a dimension of terrorism and hatred.

You can see this. You can see it in Kashmir, for example. You can see it in Chechnya, you know? You can see it in Palestine.

Now, what is its purpose?

Its purpose is to promote its ideology based on a perversion of Islam and to use any methods at all, but particularly terrorism, to do that. Because they know that the value of terrorism to them is -- as I was saying a moment or two ago -- it's not simply the act of terror, it's the chain reaction that terror brings with it.

Terrorism brings the reprisal; the reprisal brings the additional hatred; the additional hatred breeds the additional terrorism, and so on.

In a small way, we lived through that in Northern Ireland over many, many decades.

Now, what happened after September the 11th -- and this explains, I think, the president's policy but also the reason why I have taken the view and still take the view that Britain and America should remain strong allies, shoulder to shoulder, in fighting this battle, is that we are never going to succeed unless we understand they are going to fight hard.

The reason why they are doing what they are doing in Iraq at the moment -- and, yes, it's really tough as a result of it -- is because they know that if right in the center of the Middle East, in an Arab Muslim country, you've got a nonsectarian democracy -- in other words people weren't governed either by religious fanatics or secular dictators -- you've got a genuine democracy of the people: How does their ideology flourish in such circumstances?

So they have imported the terrorism into that country, preyed on whatever reactionary elements there are to boost it. And that's why we have the issue there.

That's why the Taliban are trying to come back in Afghanistan. That is why the moment it looked as if you could get progress in Israel and Palestine, it had to be stopped.

That's the moment when, as they say there was a problem in Gaza, so they realized: Well, there's a possibility now we can set Lebanon against Israel.

Now, it's a global movement. It's a global ideology.

And if there's any mistake that's ever made in these circumstances, it's if people are surprised that it's tough to fight, because you're up against an ideology that's prepared to us any means at all, including killing any number of wholly innocent people.

And I don't dispute part of the implication of your question at all in the sense that you look at what is happening in the Middle East, and what is happening in Iraq and Lebanon and Palestine, and of course there's a sense of shock and frustration and anger at what is happening, and grief at the loss of innocent lives.

But it is not a reason for walking away. It's a reason for staying the course and staying it no matter how tough it is: because the alternative is actually letting this ideology grip larger and larger numbers of people.

And it is going to be difficult. Look, we've got a problem even in our own Muslim communities in Europe who will half buy into some of the propaganda that's pushed at it -- the purpose of America is to suppress Islam; you know, Britain's joined with America in the suppression of Islam.

And one of the things we've got to stop doing is stop apologizing for our own positions. Muslims in America, as far as I'm aware of, are free to worship.


- Tony Blair - July 2006

Tell them I will do whatever they want.
Libya's Col Gadhafi message to the White House through Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi

His vote against the first Gulf War was, he says, a sign of his support for the first Gulf War. Whereas his vote in favor of the Iraq war was a sign of his opposition to the Iraq war. And his vote against funding America's troops in Iraq is a sign of his support for America's men and women in uniform. On the same principle, I think the best way voters this November can demonstrate their support for John Kerry is by voting against him.'
- Mark Steyn, 2004

There is a myth that though we love freedom, others don't; that our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture; that freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law are American values or Western values; that Afghan women were content under the lash of the Taliban; that Saddam was somehow beloved by his people; that Milosevic was Serbia's savior. Members of Congress, ours are not Western values. They are the universal values of the human spirit, and anywhere--anywhere, anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.
- Tony Blair 2003

Then September 11 happened. And bizarrely the reaction of just about every prominent western leader was to visit a mosque: President Bush did, the Prince of Wales did, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom did, the Prime Minister of Canada did… . The Premier of Ontario didn’t, and so twenty Muslim community leaders had a big summit to denounce him for failing to visit a mosque
-Mark Steyn 2006

Apparently due to the success of George Bush at keeping the United States secure, he, not Osama bin Laden, can now more often be the target of a relieved Left — deserving of assassination in an Alfred Knopf novel, an overseer of Nazi policies according to a U.S. senator, a buffoon, and rogue in the award-winning film of Michael Moore. Yes, because we did so well against the real enemies, we soon had the leisure to invent new imaginary ones in Bush/Cheney, Halliburton, the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft, and Scooter Libby.
-Victor Davis Hanson - 2006

Hillary

Because she was a liar, she was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.
- Lifelong Democrat, Jerry Zeifman, on why he fired Hillary Clinton from the House Judiciary Committee investigating Watergate (her first job out of school)

She hasn't run a corner store, she hasn't run a state, she hasn't run a city... and the idea that she could learn to be president...as an internship, just doesn't make any sense
-Mitt Romney

The only way to make a difference is to acquire power"
-Hillary Clinton to a friend before starting law school

We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society
-Hillary as first lady.

We just can't trust the American people to make those types of choices.... Government has to make those choices for people
-Hillary to Rep. Dennis Hastert in 1993 discussing her health care plan.

...a power-hungry utopian socialist who believes that political elites (i.e., she) should decide how the rest of us live
- American Spectator's Steven M. Warshawsky on Hillary

Humor and such

President Coolidge, a spare and serious man, was so famously silent, the story goes, that when a woman at a dinner told him she'd made a bet she could get him to string three words together, he smiled and said, "You lose."
-Peggy Noonan Feb 2011

no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
-P. J. O'Rourke

If we had known we were going to win control of the Senate, we'd have run better candidates.
- then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, R-Kan, commenting on the enormously vulnerable class of freshman GOP senators who had been elected in 1980 and had to face voters again in 1986.

Pacifism Is A Luxury Paid For By Warriors
- USMC Bumper Sticker

Liberals are certainly capable of intelligence. They may be adept at their careers and hobbies. But the problem is that their naïveté and a delusional way of looking at the world impedes common sense and street smarts ... Further, when liberals take the time to tune in, they get their "information" from progressive propaganda. And they don't question the Left's authority. ... That's the biggest problem -- not questioning the party line even though there are obvious gaps and gaffes. A big reason for this is fear. Aside from intellectual laziness, the Fear Factor makes otherwise intelligent liberals stupidly fall into line. Liberals can scare easily. .. Unarmed with either weapons or the basic facts, they have no way to defend themselves.
-Robin of Berkeley, American Thinker May 2010.

Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player. It's staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.
- NY Yankee Coach Casey Stengel

Standing next to somebody who says: 'What was that?'
Edward Teller when asked the best place to be if an H -bomb goes off

Freepers

Political web sites tend to attract those who have never accomplished much of anything. They suck up to a supervisor they hate. The do work they dislike doing and take orders from people they see as powerful. They see themselves as impotent pawns. But in the anonymous world of web sites they can lash out at those they fear.
-Common Tator (Free Republic) - 2005

Education

Parents are voting with their feet. ... As kids continue leaving the system, we will lose teachers. Our very survival depends on having kids in D.C. schools so we'll have teachers to represent.
- George Parker, head of the Washington, D.C., teachers union, commenting on the DC voucher program

The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.
—G. K. Chesterton

Fraudulent grades exacerbate other problems. When a black kid has all A's and B's and makes the dean's list, what will he and his parents blame for his failure to get a decent SAT score, get into college or get a job? They're going to blame it on racial discrimination. All they'll see is that white kids with A's and B's do well and their kids with the same grades do not.
- Walter Williams, 2004

On the 2008 Election

What really eats at me is that I'm constantly put in the position of not voting for or against a candidate but for or against the Constitution. For or against giving up more power and rights. For or against the road to serfdom.
-Yours truly [The Raven] - Oct 30, 2008

Voters need to remember on Nov. 4 that when Marx's books are selling well and communists are happy, we are headed for trouble
- INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY editorial October 16, 2008

When the Communist Party USA approvingly says Obama would "advance progressive politics for the long term" -- run.
-Larry Elder

The sequence is always the same. High- tax, big-spending policies force the economy to lose momentum. Then growth in government spending outstrips revenues. Fiscal and trade deficits soar. Public debt, excessive taxation and unemployment follow. The central bank tries to solve the problem by printing money. International competitiveness is lost and the currency depreciates. The system stagnates. And then a frightened electorate returns conservatives to power.
Adam Lerrick, professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University - two weeks before the 2008 elections.

It may seem hardly worthwhile going to the polls to vote this election year, since ACORN and the media have already decided that Barack Obama is to be the next President of the United States.
-Thomas Sowell Oct 2008

Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, they are not in danger of going under. They're not the best investments these days from the long-term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward."
- Chairman of the House Finance - Barney Frank [D ] three months before Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed and he blamed the Republicans

"Like a lot of my Democratic colleagues I was too slow to appreciate the recklessness of Fannie and Freddie. I defended their efforts to encourage affordable homeownership when in retrospect I should have heeded the concerns raised by their regulator in 2004. Frankly, I wish my Democratic colleagues would admit when it comes to Fannie and Freddie, we were wrong." - Representative Artur Davis [D] of Alabama on the mortgage/financial crisis of 2008

"[H]as there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements? "
- Charles Krauthammer

We suspect that Mr. Obama will discover that when you put "tax fairness" ahead of economic progress, you produce neither.
-Arthur Laffer

"There are two questions we will never have to ask ourselves, 'Who is this man?' and 'Can we trust this man with the presidency?'"
- Fred Thompson - Republican Convention on John McCain, Sept. 2.

"Listening to [Obama] speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform - not even in the state senate … This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word "victory" except when he's talking about his own campaign. But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed ... when the roar of the crowd fades away ... when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot - what exactly is our opponent's plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he's done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to make government bigger ... take more of your money ... give you more orders from Washington ... and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world. America needs more energy ... our opponent is against producing it. Victory in Iraq is finally in sight ... he wants to forfeit."
-Sarah Pain, in her acceptance speech, Sept 2008

The [strategic oil] reserve should only be used in the event of an emergency, [and not] to provide a small, short-term decrease in gas prices
-B Obama

White house hopeful Barack Obama called on Monday for tapping the nation's strategic oil reserve in an effort to drop soaring gas prices
- News item Aug 2008

For the first few months of the campaign, the question about Obama was: Who is he? The question now is: Who does he think he is?
-Charles Krauthammer, 2008

-------------------------------------------------------

Recommended reading for the aspiring progressive:

On evolution - a bunch of books & videos lately on the failure of Darwin's natural selection and survival of the fittest to explain the beginnings.

The Deniable Darwin, David Berlinski, David Klinghoffer
Darwin's Dilemma, Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson, Jonathan Wells, Douglas Axe, Lad Allen, et al.
Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe, Stephen C. Meyer
Debating Darwin's Doubt: A Scientific Controversy That Can No Longer Be Denied, David Klinghoffer
Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution, M.J. Behe
Mathematical Challenges to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution - You Tube Video -- Peter Robinson discusses Darwin Math with David Berlinski, David Gelernter, and Stephen Meyer
Amazing Flagellum : Michael Behe and the Revolution of Intelligent Design - You Tube video on bacteria flagellum
Secrets of the Cell with Michael Behe- You Tube video series on Darwin and irreducible complexity.

The Great Debate,' by Yuval Levin - Left (Paine) v. Right (Burke) origins in the French Revolution

The Tyranny of Cliches, Jonah Goldberg - Good rainy day read.

The Liberty Amendments, Mark Levin - Path forward and around the left.

Liberty & Tyranny, Mark Levin - Definition of the problem - leads into Ameritopia and the Liberty Amendments

Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State,; William J. Voegeli - The problem with the left is they never define what portion of the wealth of a nation is adequate. Tomorrow's government needs to be bigger than today.

Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty, Randy E. Barnett - Excellent work focusing on the ninth amendment and putting teeth into the Constitution by preserving our natural-rights

A Citizen's Guide to the Constitution, Seth Lipsky ["It provides an education most citizens did not receive the last time they read the document back in high school or college, and one they need now" - R Richman, Am Thinker]

Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg [Can't happen here? It already did and the Democrats did it. - But they run the schools so you'll need to read about it here]

A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, Thomas Sowell [origins of Democrat's thought process - and the opposite & correct thought process]

Basic Economics: A Citizens Guide to the Economy, Thomas Sowell [excellent voter's guide]

Why Government Is the Problem, Milton Friedman

The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism and The Constitution of Liberty, Friedrich A. Hayek [primers for the socialists]

Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism - Joshua Muravchik [Everywhere socialism has been tried has ended in disaster and millions murdered for what?]

Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First - Mona Charen [great read - the title says it all]

In Denial: Historians, Communism, & Espionage - John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr [The liberal dream didn't work - but they don't want you to know]

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature - Steven Pinker [Liberals always have a theory for why humans do bad things...here's why they're wrong]

The Road to Serfdom - Friedrich A. Hayek [Wonderful reading. Written a while back, but still true]

Free to Choose - Milton Friedman [Liberals always have a theory for why capitalism is bad...here's why they're wrong]

Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies-M. Stanton Evans [Simply unbelievable what the left's propaganda machine can do]

The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World -Bjorn Lomborg [the only voice on the other side of environmentalism]

Dependent on DC: The Rise of Federal Control over the Lives of Ordinary Americans - Charlotte Twight [How we got where we are....big government and incrementalism]

Men in Black - Mark Levin [The Great One is on target with the Supremes]

The New Thought Police - Tammy Bruce [ A little insight in how the libs operate the propaganda machine

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith [Murder mystery in the USSR under Stalin with harsh details of day-to-day life in the dictatorship]

The Best Recipe - Editors of Cook's Illustrated Magazine [The authors use trial and error to optimize favorite meals.....right down to the hamburgers and spaghetti sauce...absolutely wonderful results]

Road to Surrender, by Evan Thomas, a book written about three key men involved in the end of WWII who had kept detailed diaries.