 It's clear we are on the precipice of an achievement that's eluded Congresses, presidents for generations -- an achievement that will touch the lives of nearly every American.
Barack Hussein Obama
Obama's Freudian Slip
The catastrophe that struck America's financial system in 2008 was not inevitable. Rather than a failure of markets, it was a failure by government to understand its proper role in markets — and the product of an unwise (and unnecessary) abandonment of a sensible system of rules and boundaries that had served American finance well for six decades. Beginning in the 1980s, and continuing over the quarter-century that followed, Washington afforded the world of big finance a terrible luxury: freedom from the fear of failure. Managers and lenders at financial companies came to understand that the larger and more complex their firms got, the more immunity from market discipline they would enjoy — since they could depend on government guarantees when necessary to protect the broader economy from their mistakes. The government thus countenanced and subsidized an untenable financial system. And it inevitably got more of what it paid for: reckless risk building up to disaster.
Nicole Gelinas
Too Big Not To Fail
You ever come across raccoons in the outdoor trash can at 11:30 or so at night? As soon as they're exposed by the beam of the flashlight . . . they turn on you with fangs and paws and let you know what follows will be a short conversation with very little talking involved. Currently, climate scientists are raccoons hip-deep in statistical garbage and you should approach them with caution because they are unarmed (with facts) and dangerous.
Dennis Miller
Swingin' Copenhagen
Americans have noticed that, judging by the words and deeds of the president and of the Congress his party controls, global warming is (a) an imminent threat to the planet but (b) not as urgent a concern as health-care reform.
George Will
Frayed Nerves, Short Tempers
This isn't just stupid: It's immoral. No American president has ever espoused such a worthless, self-absorbed non-strategy for his own political gratification.
Ralph Peters
Setting up our military to fail
In no way is the happiness of Zeus preferable or more beautiful or more worthwhile than the happiness of the sage.
Arius Didymus
Systems of the Hellenistic Age
It's not true that the only good terrorist is a dead terrorist. Even dead terrorists aren't good. But at least they're dead.
Ralph Peters
'Fighting' terror with wishful thinking
No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems-- of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.
Thomas Sowell
Solving Whose Problem?
When we consider that the theory of our institutions guarantees to every citizen the full enjoyment of all the fruits of his industry and enterprise, with only such deduction as may be his share toward the careful and economical maintenance of the Government which protects him, it is plain that the exaction of more than this is indefensible extortion and a culpable betrayal of American fairness and justice ... The public Treasury, which should only exist as a conduit conveying the people's tribute to its legitimate objects of expenditure, becomes a hoarding place for money needlessly withdrawn from trade and the people's use, thus crippling our national energies, suspending our country's development, preventing investment in productive enterprise, threatening financial disturbance, and inviting schemes of public plunder.
Grover Cleveland
Cleveland's third annual message to Congress
Indeed, some of us will always be sympathetic to Mrs. Palin if for nothing else than her enemies. The bile she extracts from her critics is almost like a dye marker, illuminating deep pockets of asininity that heretofore were either unnoticed or underappreciated.
Jonah Goldberg
Palinophobes Hate First, Ask Questions Later
We even have blacks voting against the health care bill . . . You can't vote against health care and call yourself a black man.
Jesse Jackson
At the Congressional Black Caucus
I do not say that all practitioners of woman-hating, anti-Semitic, sadomasochistic suicide immolations are themselves insane, but I do say that the teaching itself is demented.
Christopher Hitchens
Seven salient facts about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan
As a private citizen, Barack Obama has a right to make as big a jackass of himself as he wants to. But, as President of the United States, his actions not only denigrate a nation that other nations rely on for survival, but raise questions about how reliable our judgment and resolve are-- which in turn raises questions about whether those nations will consider themselves better off to make the best deal they can with our enemies.
Thomas Sowell
Bowing to "World Opinion"
Are you mixing up moral rights and legal rights?
Steve Wolfer
Is it Illegal to own gold?
Fair is not Equal
anonymous
From a banner on the wall of a Catholic school
I did not use the word "terrorism," I referred to "man-caused" disasters.
Janet Napolitano
Pete Hoekstra on Hasan Massacre: What is the Whitehouse Witholding?
If liberals are so disturbed by Congress' dictating whether abortion is a legitimate health care issue or not, it only makes sense that they should be equally troubled by government management of other health care decisions.
David Harsanyi
Freedom to Confuse
You’ll know it’s okay to start speculating about Hasan’s motives when cops find a Glenn Beck book on his bookshelf.
Allahpundit
Chris Matthews: We may never know if religion was a factor at Fort Hood at hotair.com
I want to give a shout out...
Barack Hussein Obama
before reading a scripted statement on the Malik Nidal Hasan massacre
I'm not really upset that Barack Obama won't represent me at the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall in Berlin. I'm glad I won't have to see Obama's faux-seriousness, conformist leadership, voluble nothingness, and empty presence in operation at the podium in Berlin next Monday. Better Americans—actual living, functioning grownups who aren't pretending to hate Communism—will stand for us at the celebration in Berlin.
Jack Wakeland
The Death Blow To ObamaCare And Other Leading News Stories With Commentary from TIA Daily
Then, gradually, I figured out that business, for the most part, treats consumers pretty well. The way to get rich in business is to create something good, sell it for a reasonable price, acquire a reputation for honesty and keep pleasing customers so they come back for more.
John Stossel
The Double Standard About Journalists' Bias
Don't reject pearls from swine.
Edward D. Thompson
Human Happiness: The only kind there is
“The environment” is the most ingenious cover story for Big Government ever devised. You float a rumour that George W. Bush is checking up on what library books you’re reading, and everyone goes bananas. But announce that a government monitoring device has been placed in every citizen’s trash can in the cause of “saving the planet,” and the world loves you.
Mark Steyn
Gullible eager-beaver planet savers
One may tolerate a world of demons - for the sake of an angel.
"Madame de Pompadour" as a character in Doctor Who
Season 2, Episode 4, The Girl in the Fireplace
Those who say that the Obama administration should have investigated [his czars] more thoroughly before appointing them are missing the point completely. Why should we assume that Barack Obama didn't know what such people were like, when he has been associating with precisely these kinds of people for decades before he reached the White House?
Thomas Sowell
Dismantling America
'Crime is easier than calculus.'
Fred Bartlett
(scare quotes in the original)
Belief is not a matter of choice, but of conviction.
Jedi Saying
Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Season 1 Episode 2
The “libertarians” . . . plagiarize Ayn Rand’s principle that no man may initiate the use of physical force, and treat it as a mystically revealed, out-of-context absolute . . . . In the philosophical battle for a free society, the one crucial connection to be upheld is that between capitalism and reason. The religious conservatives are seeking to tie capitalism to mysticism; the “libertarians” are tying capitalism to the whim-worshipping subjectivism and chaos of anarchy. To cooperate with either group is to betray capitalism, reason, and one’s own future.
Harry Binswanger
The Objectivist Forum, Aug. 1981, p 12.
Americans voted for change at the last election. They didn't vote for surrender.
Pat Condell
Wake Up, America
Ask the Norwegians who pick the Nobel Peace Prize recipient this question: “Which part of Europe are you from? The part whose butt we saved or the part whose butt we kicked?” They’d have to answer the former but only reluctantly because their answer would open a discussion about the ideology behind their bizarre choice of President Barack Obama as the 2009 prize winner.
Ed Hudgins
The Nobel War-is-Peace Prize
The sports media elicited comments from a handful of players, none of whom I can recall ever meeting. Among other things, at least one said he would never play for a team I was involved in given my racial views. My racial views? You mean, my belief in a colorblind society where every individual is treated as a precious human being without regard to his race? Where football players should earn as much as they can and keep as much as they can, regardless of race? Those controversial racial views?
Rush Limbaugh
The Race Card, Football and Me
In a 1968 introduction to The Fountainhead, Rand was forthright about the religious energies that pulsed through her work. She described the book's Nietzschean roots and registered both her disagreement with the German philosopher and her desire to convey his exalted sense of life in her novel. Rand argued, "Religion's monopoly in the field of ethics has made it extremely difficult to communicate the emotional meaning and connotations of a rational view of life." According to Rand, the primary emotions that religion had usurped were exaltation, worship, reverence, and a sense of the sacred. She maintained that these emotions were not supernatural in origin, but were "the entire emotional realm of man's dedication to a moral ideal." It was these emotions she wanted to stir with The Fountainhead, "without the self-abasement required by religious definitions." Rand intended her books to be a sort of scripture, and for all her emphasis on reason it is the emotional and psychological sides of her novels that make them timeless. Reports of Ayn Rand's death are greatly exaggerated. For many years to come she is likely to remain what she has always been, a fertile touchstone of the American imagination.
Jennifer Burns
Goddess of the Market, pp285-286, as quoted by Ellen Stuttle
Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends... ...when millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy, as at present over a large part of the world, and as it has often been in the past, it must be at the behest of very many good people, and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object.
Isabel Paterson
The God of the Machine
A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.
Isabel Paterson
The great body of literature and of information handed down in books actually comprises the world we have lived in, both mentally and physically. Every one who lives in this country lives in books; and that would be true even of an illiterate person. He is living in books he has never read.
Isabel Paterson
Stephen Cox, Review of Anne Heller
[W]e live in a real world, not a virtual world.
Nicolas Sarkozy
Krauthammer quotes Sarkozy at the UN criticizing Obama's feckless stance on Iranian nukes
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
U.S. Constitution
Article I, Section 10
A bill of attainder, is a legislative act which inflicts punishment without judicial trial and includes any legislative act which takes away the life, liberty or property of a particular named or easily ascertainable person or group of persons because the legislature thinks them guilty of conduct which deserves punishment.
U.S. Supreme Court
Cummings vs. Missouri, 1867
The law is a ass
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
Oliver Twist
The Objectivist movement would be much larger if its leading intellectuals and think tanks had ever heard of a man named Gutenberg.
Philip Coates
On Nathaniel Branden's The Basic Principles of Objectivism and the necessity of publishing books, not tapes
Our Obama, who art in D.C., Hallowed be thy Name. Thine Acorn come, Thy will be done, in America as it is in Venezuela. Give us this day our daily speech, And forgive us our whiteness, as we forgive those that murder our citizens, And lead us not into capitalism, But deliver us from freedom. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever
Anonymous
Well, that shining moment in politics has ended. Wilson has already started the "I'm sorry for for my uncharacteristic honesty and passion." rounds. It was a great moment though. I do wish that it had been over something a little more relevant than immigration. I guess I should just be happy BO didnt declare a state of emergency and shut down the net.
Ryan Keith Roper
You lie!
But the great mass of Americans, the big center, will, I strongly suspect, not be listening. Mr. Obama has grown boring. And it's not Solid Boring, which is fine in a president and may be good. It's sort of Faux Eloquent Boring, especially on health care. The president likely doesn't know this, and his people won't have told him because they don't know it either, but Mr. Obama always has the same sound, approach, logic, tone, modulation. He always has the same stance. There's no humor or humility in it. News is surprise, and he never makes news.
Peggy Noonan
Coruscating on Thin Ice
Everyone likes penthouses, so why not have a building in which every apartment is a penthouse?
Ann Coulter
Liberal Lies About National Healthcare
You can't make an omelet without breaking chicks.
Mark Steyn
Things only a Kennedy could get away with
The consensus appears to be that creationism — the belief in a managed process with an omniscient authority — is the only way to achieve successful outcomes. There is general agreement that the natural operation of the market is inadequate, and that a better outcome can be achieved through the wisdom and activity of governments and regulators. This creationist approach is similiar to the industrial planning which went out of fashion in other sectors in the 1970s. It failed then. It’s failing now
James Murdoch
2009 MacTaggart Lecture
As part of his campaign to rally religious support for his health-care plan, Obama reportedly told a group of rabbis, "We are God's partners in matters of life and death." God's partners? During the election campaign, Obama notoriously dodged a question on abortion by demurring that the theology of the issue was "above my pay grade." Well, apparently he's been promoted.
Robert Tracinski
There are those whose minds somehow see a value in stealing the legitimacy of an idea... even though legitimacy can't be acquired by theft. Anarchists have attempted to steal the legitimacy of the Libertarian party by twisting concepts and ignoring the realities. As if it made sense to have a party that puts up candidates for office in a government that they believe should be eliminated. They just keep insisting that they are right whether they are or not, then they can continue to pretend being as legitimate. Theirs is the primacy of words - not ideas and certainly not existence.
Steve Wolfer
Think of it as Evolution in Action
Except for the demented orphan, the living will is quite beside the point. The one time it really is essential is if you think your fractious family will be only too happy to hasten your demise to get your money. That's what the law is good at -- protecting you from murder and theft. But that is a far cry from assuring a peaceful and willed death, which is what most people imagine living wills are about.
Charles Krauthammer
The Truth About Death Counseling
Ghimmitude: A peaceful surrender to the state in exchange for health care security and benefits, based on accepting the inferiority of the individual and individual rights.
William A. Jacobson
Legal Insurrection
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