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THE FOUNDATION: ARMS

“No freeman shall be debarred the use of arms.”  - Thomas Jefferson

FOR THE RECORD

“It is not hyperbole to describe [the Supreme Court’s] decision in [District of Columbia v.] Heller as the most significant opinion of this century, and likely, of the last two generations. Two particular thoughts immediately come to mind. First, the extent to which [the] decision effectively opens the door for future litigation regarding the Second Amendment to further clarify the extent of the now confirmed, but long understood, individual right to keep and bear arms. Second, this is an election year. This decision, closely divided as it is, will likely provide a rallying cry for the millions of the Americans who recognize that their Second Amendment rights came down to a single vote. In reading Justice Scalia’s opinion, there is an overwhelming theme that to interpret the Second Amendment as not protecting an individual right would gut the amendment of meaning and defy logic. It is, after all, the Second Amendment, not the two hundredth. This is not an obscure line buried among thousands of pages of text. It is inconceivable that the framers would have given it the priority they did, placing it ahead of so many other critical rights, if they only meant it to apply to militias as the dissenting justices suggest.”  - David Schenck

POLITICAL FUTURES

“The only logical argument which still might hold some sway with some... frustrated conservatives is the Supreme Court. It’s an old argument - [and] its power to persuade is less this election than in years past. The reality is that while there could well be two vacancies during the next president’s term, those vacancies are likely to be for two of the Court’s liberal members, Justices Stevens and Ginsberg. Should Obama win, he’d get to replace two liberals with two liberals. So the philosophical make-up of the court would be a wash... And many conservatives probably could have lived with that - as long as the Court didn’t hand down any outrageous new decisions this summer showing that the Court still had not moved far enough to the right... First the Court ruled, 5-4, that captured Islamic terrorists with absolutely no regard for American human life whatsoever are entitled to the same constitutional rights and privileges as a United States citizen. Then this week the Court ruled, again 5-4, that it is cruel and unusual punishment for men who rape little girls under the age of 12 to get the death penalty. Replacing even one of the five liberal justices on the wrong side of these rulings would indeed change the course of legal jurisprudence in this country for years to come. So simply maintaining the status quo isn’t looking like such an acceptable thing after all. And then there was [the] DC gun ban decision. The court got this one right - but only by a 5-4 decision. Citizens of the United States of America [darn] near lost a critical God-given legal right to self-defense by one stinking vote. ... Thanks to these three Supreme Court decisions, many conservatives may now feel compelled to return to the GOP flock, hold their noses REAL tight, and vote for John McCain in November.”  - Chuck Muth

SELECT READER COMMENTS

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“Regarding the Heller decision in which ’The People’ narrowly prevailed, 5-4, what is scary is that what should have been a 9-0 decision came within one vote of usurping our right, guaranteed in black and white and in clear English in the Constitution! This decision is not one to celebrate. We should ponder the ignorance of the American people, and worse the four Justices who voted against it, failing to understand the document that guarantees their freedoms.”  - Crestline, California

“I was extremely happy to learn of our ‘radical’ Supreme Court Justices’ latest ruling. I live in a poor Oregon county that is in danger of losing its county law enforcement because of lack of funds. I do not cling to gun ownership and belief in God because that is all that’s left to me in small town America. I cling to both to protect my life from those who would endanger it.”  - Grants Pass, Oregon

“The four Supreme Court Justices who chose not to support the individual right to bear arms should be impeached immediately. If they cannot decipher the obvious original intent of the few words of the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights, they are incompetent and do not deserve a place on the bench.”  - Rotonda West, Florida

GOVERNMENT

“Even if you agree with their bottom line, do Justice Kennedy and the justices in Kennedy v. Louisiana have a clue about how offensive it is to write this line in rationalizing why a man who has savagely raped his eight-year-old step-daughter should not be executed by the humane process of lethal objection: ‘Evolving standards of decency must embrace and express respect for the dignity of the person’... And as for their ‘proportional’ punishment argue, I think it’s silly on its face - read the almost unreadable (because it’s so excruciating) account of the rape and ask yourself whether it is really ‘disproportionate’ to administer lethal-objection execution to a man who committed this type of barbaric a sexual assault on a child. But let’s give him that one for argument’s sake. The Eighth Amendment talks about punishment that is cruel. First, punishment does not become cruel just because it’s disproportionate. And second, are we really striving here for proportionality? If a crime is cruel - as it clearly was in this case - wouldn’t a proportionate punishment also have to be cruel, and thus in violation of the Eighth Amendment?”  - Andrew McCarthy
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FAMILY

“One of the most dramatic changes in American life in the years since World War II involves the way we raise our children. We used to do it ourselves. Now, convinced we have better things to do, many of us leave the job to others. Encouraging this flight from parenthood, Sen. Barack Obama... has proposed what he calls his ‘Zero to Five’ plan. It is a collection of programs aimed at getting the government involved in the raising of your children from the moment they are born. ‘The first part of my plan focuses on providing quality affordable early childhood education to every child in America,’ Obama said... ‘As president, I will launch a Children’s First Agenda that provides care, learning and support to families with children ages zero to five.’ ‘We’ll create Early Learning Grants to help states create a system of high-quality early care and education for all young children and their families,’ he said. ‘And we’ll help more working parents find a safe, affordable place to leave their children during the day by improving the educational quality of our childcare programs and increasing the childcare tax credit.’ This week, Obama upped his ante by vowing to ‘double funding for after-school programs that help children learn and give parents relief.’ Obama, of course, will also continue to defend your ‘right’ to hire a physician to kill your child in utero so you won’t have to raise the child at all.”  - Terence Jeffrey

LIBERTY

“The speaker of the House made it clear to me and more than forty of my colleagues yesterday that a bill by Rep. Mike Pence (R.-Ind.) to outlaw the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ (which a liberal administration could use to silence Rush Limbaugh, other radio talk show hosts and much of the new alternative media) would not see the light of day in Congress during ‘08. In ruling out a vote on Pence’s proposed Broadcaster’s Freedom Act, Speaker Nancy Pelosi also signaled her strong support for revival of the ‘Fairness Doctrine’  - which would require radio station owners to provide equal time to radio commentary when it is requested. Experts say that the ‘Fairness Doctrine,’ which was ended under the Reagan administration, would put a major burden on small radio stations in providing equal time to Rush Limbaugh and other conservative broadcasters, who are a potent political force. Rather than engage in the costly practice of providing that time, the experts conclude, many stations would simply not carry Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and other talk show hosts who are likely to generate demands for equal time. ... I asked Pelosi if Pence failed to get the required signatures on a discharge petition to get his anti-Fairness Doctrine bill out of committee, would she permit the Pence measure to get a floor vote this year. ‘No,’ the Speaker replied, without hesitation... ‘Do you personally support revival of the Fairness Doctrine?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ the speaker replied, without hesitation.”  - John Gizzi

THE GIPPER

“Fellow citizens, fellow conservatives, our time has come again. This is our moment. Let us unite, shoulder to shoulder, behind one mighty banner for freedom. And let us go forward from here not with some faint hope that our cause is not yet lost; let us go forward confident that the American people share our values, and that together we will be victorious. And in those moments when we grow tired, when our struggle seems hard, remember what Eric Liddell, Scotland’s Olympic champion runner, said in Chariots of Fire: ‘So where does the power come from to see the race to its end? From within. God made me for a purpose, and I will run for His pleasure.’ If we trust in Him, keep His word, and live our lives for His pleasure, He’ll give us the power we need - power to fight the good fight, to finish the race and to keep the faith... God bless you and God bless America.”  - Ronald Reagan

CAMPAIGN WATCH

“The big political headline this week, of course, involves John McCain’s endless and humiliating attempts to placate Mitt Romney by bowing to demands he hire his operatives and pay his campaign debt. So far all he’s got is a grudging one-sentence endorsement from that rampaging rage-aholic Ann Romney. Oh wait, got confused, that’s Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The way it used to be is you ran and lost and either disappeared or pitched in. Mrs. Clinton continues making Mr. Obama look the dauphin to her embittered and domineering queen. What a hothouse of egos and drama the Democratic Party has become.”  - Peggy Noonan

OPINION IN BRIEF

“Fighting and winning always impress. Even merely fighting and persisting impress. Shortly after the fall of Soviet Communism, I had dinner with a then-recently former senior Red army general. He told me that the Soviets were astounded and impressed by the fact that we were prepared to fight and lose 50,000 men in Vietnam, when the Soviets never thought we even had a strategic interest there. They thus calculated that they’d better be careful with the United States. What might we do, they thought, if our interests really were threatened? The full effects of the vigorous martial response of President Bush to the attacks of Sept. 11 will not be known for decades. But if history is any indicator, military courage, persistence and a capacity to kill the enemy in large numbers usually work to the benefit of such nations.”  - Tony Blankley
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RE: THE LEFT

“History is a complicated thing. The traits that lead to disaster in certain circumstances are the very ones that come in handy in others. The people who seem so smart at some moments seem incredibly foolish in others. The cocksure war supporters learned this humbling lesson during the dark days of 2006. And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility. They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the [Gen. David] Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home. But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.”  - David Brooks

THE LAST WORD

“In response to skyrocketing gas prices, liberals say, practically in unison, ‘We can’t drill our way out of this crisis.’ What does that mean?... Finding more oil isn’t going to increase the supply of oil? It is the typical Democratic strategy to babble meaningless slogans, as if they have a plan... Liberals complain that - as B. Hussein Obama put it - there’s ‘no way that allowing offshore drilling would lower gas prices right now. At best you are looking at five years or more down the road.’... What was going on five years ago? Why didn’t anyone propose drilling back then? Say, you know what we need? We need a class of people paid to anticipate national crises and plan solutions in advance. It would be such an important job, the taxpayers would pay them salaries so they wouldn’t have to worry about making a living and could just sit around anticipating crises. If only we had had such a group - let’s call them ‘elected representatives’  - they could have proposed drilling five years ago! But of course we do pay people to anticipate national problems and propose solutions. Some of them - we’ll call them Republicans - did anticipate high gas prices and propose solutions. Six long years ago President Bush had the foresight to demand that Congress allow drilling in a minuscule portion of the Alaska’s barren, uninhabitable Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). In 2002, Bush, Tom DeLay and the entire Republican Party were screaming from the rooftops: Drill! Drill! Drill! We’d be gushing oil now - except the Democrats stopped us from drilling. Drilling on only 0.01 percent of ANWR’s 19 million acres was projected to produce about 10 billion barrels of oil. From all domestic sources combined, we currently produce about 1.8 billion barrels of oil per year. To a layperson like myself, 10 billion barrels seems like a lot of oil.”  - Ann Coulter

Veritas vos Liberabit - Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus, et Fidelis! Mark Alexander, Publisher, for The Patriot’s editors and staff. (Please pray for our Patriot Armed Forces standing in harm’s way around the world, and for their families - especially families of those fallen Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen, who granted their lives in defense of American liberty.)