...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

Perhaps the weirdest, and by far the most unjust, thing about former President Donald Trump’s trial in New York is that we do not know precisely what crime Trump is charged with committing. We’re in the middle of the trial, with Trump facing a maximum of more than 100 years in prison, and we don’t even know what the charges are! It’s a surreal situation.
- Byron York, The Washington Examiner, May, 2024.

Which begs a final question: How could this group of elite scientists have gotten this paramount question so horribly wrong?
The inevitable answer is: they didn’t. They weren’t wrong. They were lying.
- Jeff M. Smith, on the deception and collusion of scientists on the natural origin of Covid, The Lie of the Century: The Origin of COVID-19 , Real Clear World, May 2024.

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
- From leaked email of Prof. Phil Jones, the director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia referenceing Michael Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” graph.

Imagine you’re the New York Times. Donald Trump might return to the presidency so you report, as the paper did on April 12, on the “distrust” that exists between him and the U.S. intelligence agencies. But you leave out the part about top Obama intelligence officers going on national TV to call Mr. Trump a Russian agent. You leave out the part about FBI counterintelligence leaders knowingly trafficking in fabricated evidence about him. You leave out the part about 51 former intelligence officials lying to voters to influence an election and help his opponent.
- Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., Opinion Columnist, Business World, The Wall Street Journal.

In order to charge Trump, District Attorney Alvin Bragg had to allege that the false documents were filed in order to cover up another crime. That would make it a felony. But what is that other crime? Bragg has been coy about it. In truth, there was no other crime, and Bragg’s prosecution is election interference on behalf of the Democratic Party, plain and simple.
But if you want to talk about a “conspiracy to undermine the integrity of a presidential election,” one is unfolding before our eyes in a Manhattan courtroom.
- John Hinderaker, Powerline, Apr 2024.

But by far the most powerful tome I perused this year is a privately published 640-page Report on the Biden Laptop, authoritatively compiled by Garrett Ziegler and available on the web from his 501c3, "Marco Polo." It's a transfixing window into the entire Biden family, and the scale of human depravity it relentlessly details is unforgettably disgusting.
- Dave Garrow on one of three book recommendations, Spectator World Books of the Year 2023, The Spectator, December 2023, pp. 44-45

She’s a vegetarian. She hates cars. And white men flying on planes. She supports race-based reparations, rioting, and the Black Lives Matter movement. She believes “America is addicted to white supremacy.”
She doesn’t want to become a mother because “the planet is literally burning.” She uses phrases such as “CIS white mobility privilege” unironically. She admits to growing up “feeling superior … because I was from New England and my part of the country didn’t have slaves.”
-Conn Carroll at the Washington Examiner describing NPR's CEO Katherine Maher, Apr 2024.

Unchecked illegal border crossings, fading churches, disintegrating families, proliferating diversity deans, and worthless degrees will all help ensure that the American future will be largely miserable—and that the people who will inherit that future will be Democrats
- Michale Lind, Blue Morning, Tablet, Apr 15, 2024. >

1. They are delusional and think their socialist and globalist agendas are working and will save us.
2. They are raging nihilists who do not like the U.S. and deliberately want it destroyed as a service to the world. A ruined U.S. is preferable to a strong America.
3. They are Jacobin revolutionaries who are intentionally erasing the old United States as a prerequisite for creating an entirely new America that will arise from the ashes with no trace or even memory of its past.
-Victor Davis Hanson on why those who control the president are destroying the USA? , 11 ways Biden and his handlers are hell-bent on destroying America, Fox News, Apr 7, 2024.

Two of the most interesting things ever to happen in American politics happened in the past few years. A Democratic presidential campaign, representing the incumbent party, fabricated evidence that its Republican opponent and the eventual president-elect was a Russian agent, and the in-power party’s FBI legitimated the evidence in the eyes of the media so it would be widely reported and believed by the public.
To make sure it was believed, top intelligence officials of the outgoing administration went on cable television to call the new president a Russian mole and Vladimir Putin his case officer.
When the formerly incumbent party’s candidate was seeking to reclaim the White House four years later, the same former officials concocted a new lie to cover up embarrassing information about the candidate’s family. These highly connected former officials had five days to check things out before claiming Hunter Biden’s laptop had “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
- Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., Wall St Journal OpEd, April 5, 2024.

... he engaged in excesses that were suicidal in character. Plus also, he aroused in his critics reserves of odium and exaggeration.
It’s impossible to defend McCarthy, and it’s super-impossible to defend his critics.
- William F Buckley on Sen. Joe McCarthy, 1999.

At the New York Post, we had a little fraction of the truth, which was that [President Biden] was involved in this corrupt, influence-peddling operation with his family. We had a glimpse of that through Hunter Biden’s laptop. We published it, and I think if the story had not been censored by social media, by Big Tech, by the FBI pre-bunking our story, by the CIA’s 51 intelligence officials, we now know including serving CIA officers, had not lied about the story and said it was Russian disinformation, I think the outcome of the election might have been quite different.
-Miranda Devine, NY Post, Mar, 2024.

We added more to the national debt than any president in his term in all of history!
- Joe Biden shouting a truth while his handlers gasped. Mar 2024.

As a lifelong Democrat from a politically active Chicago family, I can no longer recognize the party from my youth. We once stood for something other than the next election or hating others.
- Jonathan Turley, the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and a practicing criminal defense attorney.

" ...investigators have "identified no legitimate value or document or even one single hour of work that the Bidens have provided their business partners." and have "found no credible evidence of the Bidens providing any work "What is apparent, after over a year of investigation, is that the Bidens do not work in any traditional sense of the word. They do not work as consultants. Or lawyers. Or advisors. The Bidens don’t sell a product or a service or a set of skills," Comer will say, according to excerpts of his opening statement obtained by Fox News Digital. "The Bidens sell Joe Biden.
-House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer opening statement - impeachment hearings Mar 20, 2024.

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

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.

The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink
- by William Inboden, Ronald Reagan defies advice and goes with his gut.