Tag: Quote of the Day

Supporters of the sexting law say it’s necessary so that teenagers will not be prosecuted as sexual offenders and have their lives ruined. There is some validity to that, as dopey kids do dopey things. However, the sane solution would be to categorize sexting as a misdemeanor breach of the peace, thus sending a message that it is unacceptable for kids to send other kids sexual images.

But secular-progressives are loathe to make that judgment. Remember, these are the same people who believe a girl has the right to an abortion without telling her parents. So if a kid can undergo a major life altering operation (especially for the fetus), why should it be a big deal to do a little sexting?

With a liberal federal government and media, there is little opposition being voiced to what is happening in Vermont and other secular-progressive enclaves. Culture war issues have been forced to the back room by the awful economy, and the S-P’s are taking full advantage. If American children are legally allowed to send explicit pictures of themselves to other kids, then say goodbye to traditional boundaries of behavior.

The slippery slope is here.

“It seems that what we are seeing in the return of the Churchill bust is less a personal vendetta against Churchill the man and more an open breach in the Western continuum out of which a new orientation toward the Third World will become increasingly apparent. Having achieved a Washington-like apotheosis in the American imagination, Churchill serves not only as the preeminent symbol of resolve, courage and faith against the enemies of Western civilization. He serves as a symbol of Western civilization, period.”

The return of the Churchill bronze confirmed the suspicion that Obama was anti-Occident. The habit of giving inappropriate, thoughtless presents? as he and his family are deluged with wild effusions of love and lavish gifts? this shows Obama to be, well, a bit of a pig.

George Will once wrote that “manners are the practice of a virtue. The virtue is called civility, a word related—as a foundation is related to a house—to the word civilization.”

The ability to mind one’s manners in dealing with others is a reflection of the mettle of a man. Or a woman.

While NATO provides Europe with a security blanket, it provides America with what she cannot live without: a mission, a cause, a meaning to life.

Were the United States, in exasperation, to tell Europe, “We are pulling out of NATO, shutting down our bases and bringing our troops home because we are weary of doing all the heavy lifting, all the fighting and dying for freedom,” what would we do after we  had departed and come home?

What would our foreign policy be?

What would be the need for our vaunted military-industrial complex, all those carriers, subs, tanks, and thousands of fighter planes and scores of bombers? What would happen to all the transatlantic conferences on NATO, all the think tanks here and in Europe devoted  to allied security issues?

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the withdrawal of the Red Army from Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union, NATO’s  mission was accomplished. As Sen. Richard Lugar said, NATO must “go out of area or out of business.”

NATO desperately did not want to go out of business. So, NATO went out of area, into Afghanistan. Now, with victory nowhere in sight, NATO is heading home. Will it go out of business?

Not likely. Too many rice bowls depend on keeping NATO alive.

In future years, when they regain political power, conservatives will likely face the difficult task of reforming entitlements while minimizing the social fallout of the citizens who have come to view them as acquired rights. All the more reason to take Western Europe’s lessons on public spending growth seriously: at the moment, it seems that even with plentiful European evidence of the dangers of too much public spending, American policy makers are unwilling to change course, willing to repeat the mistakes of Western European countries while the leaders of these very countries argue in favor of a different course.

When they refer to themselves as “progressives,” radicals express their own basic truth: Their method of operation is always to move steadily forward, seeking a progressive series of victories, each new gain exploited to lay the groundwork for the next advance, as the opposition progressively yields terrain. Such is the remorseless aggression of radicalism that conservatives forever find themselves contemplating the latest “progressive” demand and asking, “Is this a hill worth dying on?”

The “forgotten depression” of 1920-21 was caused by a huge increase in the money supply for President Wilson’s war. When the Fed started to tighten at war’s end, production fell 20 percent from mid-1920 to mid-1921, far more than today.

Why did we not read about that depression?

Because the much-maligned Warren Harding refused to intervene. He let businesses and banks fail and prices fall. Hence, the fever quickly broke, and we were off into “the Roaring Twenties.”

But, the Fed reverted, expanding the money supply by 55 percent, an average of 7.3 percent a year, not through an expansion of the currency, but through loans to businesses.

Thus, when the Fed tightened in the overheated economy, the Crash came, as the stock market bubble the Fed had created burst.

Herbert Hoover, contrary to the myth that he was a small-government conservative, renounced laissez-faire, raised taxes, launched public works projects, extended emergency loans to failing businesses and lent money to the states for relief programs.

Hoover did what Obama is doing.

It is a simple unquestionable truth that no public official or other public person in the U.S. today could meet the minimal ethical standards of the founding generation of Americans. If the founding generation is the measure of wisdom, integrity, and patriotism, then present-day leaders don’t even make the farm team.

Gibbsy, Rahm and I have a little drinking game for that one. We all took surreptitious shots after the Big O said it toward the end of the the press conference. Woo, that Jagr burns doing down, but it made my big LCD just a bit brighter.

Really, plenty of problems reach the Big Guy’s desk that are easy. Like hiring TATUS’s undersecretaries, and hitting the “Reset” button on the State Department, and the Potbelly’s menu he was asking for. The one problem that we’ve kept off his desk – and perhaps the biggest one – Michelle’s Bloomies credit bill for February. Ouch. That’ll make the Netanyahu thing seem like a kerfluffle.

Obama, a moderate with far too much respect for the globalized financial class, is surely the unleft, unradical president. Which makes you wonder why left and right find common cause in saying otherwise.

“The tactics of the Israel lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and
indecency and include character assassination, selective
misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication
of falsehoods and an utter disregard for the truth.”

“A lobby,” Steve Rosen confided in an AIPAC internal memo, “is like
a night flower; it thrives in the dark and dies in the sun.”

Yes, and long ago, Al Smith addressed the age-old problem of the
Rosens within: “The best way to kill anything un-American is to
drag it out into the open, because anything un-American cannot live
in the sunlight.”

Well done, Ambassador Freeman.

Frum‘s attack on Limbaugh should surprise no one at NR. Frum has a long history of seeking to advance himself by smearing others, from his 1991 American Spectator cover story attacking Pat Buchanan as an antisemite to his 2003 National Review cover story denouncing Buchanan, Tom Fleming, and Sam Francis as “unpatriotic” for opposing a war that turned out to be as disastrous for America as they predicted it would be. If National Review is sincerely repentent over having provided journalistic cover to Frum for years, it might, in the spirit of Lent, announce that it regrets publishing Frum’s 2003 attack and apologize to the “unpatriotic conservatives.” But I’m not holding my breath.

He has ordered 17,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan, as the situation deteriorates and the NATO allies pull out. He has no exit strategy. He has read a repudiation of George Bush as a mandate for a government seizure of wealth and power that exceeds anything attempted in the Great Society.

Fully half of the $3.55 trillion in spending Obama will preside over this year will not be covered by tax revenue but by red ink. The money will have to be borrowed from abroad or printed by the Fed.

Not only is Barack running a deficit four times as large as Bush’s largest, he has called for $1 trillion in new taxes on America’s most successful, who have already seen their savings and pensions ravaged.

He wants a cap-and-trade system to deal with a global-warming or climate-change crisis many scientists believe is a hoax. He is going to provide health care for all, including immigrants, millions of whom arrive uninsured every year. He is going to plunge scores of billions more into education, though education has eaten up the wealth of an empire, as SAT scores sink further and further below the apogee of 1964, before LBJ and the feds barged in. He is going to ask Congress for authority to spend another $750 billion rescuing the banks.

He is going to find the cure for cancer. He is going to ensure every kid gets a college education. He is going to drop half of all wage-earners off the tax rolls, while the top 2 percent, who already pay 40 percent of all income taxes, are forced to cough up more.

Obama is misreading the election returns. When America voted to cancel the White House lease of Mr. Bush, it did not vote Barack Obama a blank check.

By misinterpreting his mandate, Obama has accomplished something John McCain could not – unite the Republican Party and instill in it a new esprit de corps. For the Obama budget is an insult to the core belief of the party – that free people, not coercive government, should shape the character of society.

By daring Republicans to fight on the issue of a $1.75 trillion deficit, Obama has liberated the GOP from any obligation to him. He has come out of the closet as a radical liberal spoiling for a fight over an agenda of radical change.

Sooner than any might have thought, we have clarity.

Will President Bush put his Lord and Savior above his office and lay it on the line to stop once and for all the wholesale slaughter of unborn children or will he simply make token efforts before the TV camera to perpetuate a pro-life image? Will he be the “living sacrifice” that the apostle Paul called us to be in Romans 12:1 and risk his own presidency to put an end to the socialist brainwashing programs at work in the public school system or will he just remodel and repackage them under a new name? Will he take an uncompromising stand against the enemies of Christ and their new-age quest for a one-world government and religion or will he merely try to strengthen our position and influence at the United Nations? Will he seek justice for the hundreds who suffered and died at the hands of the previous administration or will he befriend its leader in the name of tolerance, diversity and unity?

Will he protect our young from pedophiles within the homosexual community whose mission in life is to have sex with our children without fear of prosecution or will he choose to protect the predators instead by tolerating their abominable agenda of indoctrination disguised as healthy, normal and educational? Will he obey the Constitution and keep the federal government out of the church’s business as described in the 1st amendment or allow it to corrupt, control and silence the church’s gospel message of repentance and faith in Christ by promoting church/state partnerships?

Sure I’m thrilled to no longer see Clinton and Gore in the news every day. Nonetheless, the powers that brought them to the White House and kept them there for almost a decade are the same powers that brought us George W. Bush. If you doubt that, just sit back and watch the choices he makes over the next four years. Forget what he said on the campaign trail and watch what he does. If all we see out of him is more defense spending, a few minor tax cuts and a lot of ecumenical talk then you’ll know I was right when I said: “Socialism needs two legs on which to stand; a right and a left. While appearing to be in complete opposition to one another, they both march in the same direction.”