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THE FOUNDATION: COMMERCE

“Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue, or in any manner affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change and can trace its consequences; a harvest reared not by themselves but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow citizens.”  - Federalist No. 62, likely James Madison

FOR THE RECORD

“The House of Representatives approved a bill to allow offshore oil drilling, but nearly all the Republicans voted against it... It isn’t a drilling bill, it’s an anti-drilling bill. If it becomes law, nearly all the oil and gas in the Outer Continental Shelf would be off-limits forever... This bill permanently bans all drilling within 50 miles of the US coast, which just happens to be where most of the recoverable oil and gas reserves are. It permits drilling between 50 and 100 miles out only if the adjoining states agree - which they won’t, since the bill denies them any share in the royalties the oil companies would have to pay, thereby eliminating any financial incentive for a state to say yes. Virtually all the oil off the California coast and beneath the Eastern Gulf of Mexico would be locked up for good. Don’t be fooled: The only offshore drilling this bill really opens the door to would have to be 100 miles or more out to sea, where the oil companies have no infrastructure... According to the Interior Department, the offshore areas where drilling is restricted contain more than 19 billion barrels - that’s equal to 30 years of current imports from Saudi Arabia. The bill would deny Americans access to as much as nine-tenths of that oil. A good deal? I don’t think so.”  - Jeff Jacoby

LIBERTY

“The configuration of the financial hurricane will become clear soon enough. The sad thing is that the free market will likely get a disproportionate share of the blame, finding its wrists more tightly shackled if the bloodthirsty critics of free enterprise gain enough power in Washington. Whenever markets mess up, control freaks blame it on too much freedom, on undue latitude for plungers and gamblers and similar riff-raff, when the blame properly rests with the gambling instinct itself, which is a part of human nature. If it weren’t, and thanks goodness it is, the first man to peek outside the cave and see the possibilities of a home on the hillside would never have tried it. ‘Too much risk!’ he would have muttered (in caveman-ese). Nothing ever gets done without risk. Risk entails the possibility of failure, but also of growth and gain. If you don’t want growth, you shun risk. Fortunately, capitalists and entrepreneurs constantly seek growth. They gamble. They stick out their necks, sometimes fatally.”  - William Murchison

GOVERNMENT

“With freedom comes responsibility. Those who would have self-government must, by definition, govern themselves. Self-government only works when people act responsibly and fulfill their obligations. When people abuse these freedoms to enrich themselves at the expense of others, then the public will demand the government to step in. That is how government grows, and how freedom is diminished. The prospect of government intervention should be terrifying to corporate leaders. For too long many of them viewed it as a safety net. ...[A]fter the recent federal bailouts, some corporate officers are likely considering seeking the same bailout. As my grandmother was fond of saying, if you reward bad behavior all you are going to get is more bad behavior. Reckless and irresponsible individuals like those at the companies mentioned above give decent corporate managers a bad name. When financial meltdowns occur, the public’s outrage drives government to take over part of the private sector. When the government does so, it replaces irresponsible executives with unaccountable bureaucrats. That takes us out of the frying pan and into the fire.”  - Ken Blackwell

RE: THE LEFT

“One has to wonder just how much more Democrats will milk class-warfare politics before people wake up to their deception. No matter what economic problems we face, Democrats always find a way to blame them on the ‘rich’ and the Bush tax cuts. Why? Because it rallies their base and - they hope - will alienate enough others against evil Bush Republicans to give Democrats a prohibitive advantage on domestic issues. Joe Biden even blamed the current mortgage crisis on the Bush tax cuts. He said: ‘We should try to correct the problems that caused this... [which are] the profligate tax cuts to the very, very wealthy that John [McCain] wants to continue.’ Never mind that low- and middle-income earners received greater tax rate reductions than the highest-income earners; that doesn’t fit within the Democrats’ class-envy template. Forget the reckless legislation forcing financial institutions to lend money to people who probably couldn’t pay it back - to satisfy the liberals’ obsession with looking compassionate and pandering to minorities. Forget that Obama was the second-highest recipient of campaign cash from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (according to the Center for Responsive Politics), cash aimed at keeping congressional regulators off their backs... Despite the Democrats’ destructive practice of blaming every economic woe - from Enron to rising oil prices - on the Bush tax cuts, the tax cuts had nothing to do with those problems, including the mortgage crisis.”  - David Limbaugh
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POLITICAL FUTURES

“The overarching political question: In a time of heightened anxiety, will people inevitably lean toward the older congressional vet, the guy who’s been around forever? Why take a chance on the new, young man at a time of crisis? Wouldn’t that be akin to injecting an unstable element into an unstable environment? There’s a lot at stake. Or will people have the opposite reaction? I’ve had it, the system has been allowed to corrode and collapse under seven years of Republican stewardship. Throw the bums out. We need change. Obama may not be experienced, but that may help him cut through. He’s not compromised. The election, still close, still unknowable, may well hinge on whether people conclude A or B. A mere hunch in a passing moment: In a time of crisis, confusion and fear, Americans just might, in their practicality, turn back to the old tradition of divided government. They know the Congress will be Democratic. They assume it will soon be more Democratic. Therefore the president they choose may well be of the other party.”  - Peggy Noonan

CAMPAIGN WATCH

“Like it or not, the perception is growing that Team Obama is focusing on [Sarah] Palin as a clueless hockey mom from way up north and on [John] McCain as an old fogy. But that emphasis on sex and age doesn’t become a moralist, especially given Obama’s own siren warnings that his opponents might resort to racial attacks against him. Then there were Obama’s once-lofty progressive principles. Yet no Northern Democratic liberal like Obama has won the presidency in a half-century. So everyone knew that Obama sooner or later had to move to the center in the general election to win over independents. For the hope-and-change candidate, those natural readjustments now appear insincere and opportunistic - especially given that he had to move so far from the left to get to the middle. On campaign-finance reform, FISA, NAFTA, abortion, capital punishment, guns, Iran, Iraq, the surge, and drilling offshore, Obama has fudged on his earlier positions in the normal way of savvy pragmatists - but not in a manner befitting angelic idealists. The new Obama probably will recover from his temporary setback in the polls. But right now his problem is that disappointed independent voters are catching on that this saintly savior is all too human.”  - Victor Davis Hanson

CULTURE

“During decades of researching racial and ethnic groups in countries around the world - with special attention to those who began in poverty and then rose to prosperity - I have yet to find one so preoccupied with tribalistic identity as to want to maintain solidarity with all members of their group, regardless of what they do or how they do it. Any group that rises has to have norms, and that means repudiating those who violate those norms, if you are serious. Blind tribalism means letting the lowest common denominator determine the norms and the fate of the whole group. There was a time when most blacks, like most of the Irish or the Jews, understood this common sense. But that was before the romanticizing of identity took over, beginning in the 1960s... The unanswered question is why an approach with a proven track record, not only in American society but in various other countries around the world, has been superseded by a philosophy of tribal identity overriding issues of behavior and performance. Part of the problem is the ‘multicultural’ ideology that says all cultures are equally valid. It is hard even to know what that means, much less take it seriously as a guide to living in the real world.”  - Thomas Sowell

THE GIPPER

“The character that takes command in moments of crucial choices has already been determined by a thousand other choices made earlier in seemingly unimportant moments. It has been determined by all the ‘little’ choices of years past - by all those times when the voice of conscience was at war with the voice of temptation, [which was] whispering the lie that ‘it really doesn’t matter.’ It has been determined by all the day-to-day decisions made when life seemed easy and crises seemed far away - the decision that, piece by piece, bit by bit, developed habits of discipline or of laziness; habits of self-sacrifice or self-indulgence; habits of duty and honor and integrity - or dishonor and shame.”  - Ronald Reagan
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SELECT READER COMMENTS

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“Thank you for your article on John McCain’s faith. He is a true inspiration and I have always admired him. I appreciate his integrity great valor. Let us pray that he will be elected to the presidency.” - Snyder, Texas

“I’ve often disagreed politically with John McCain, but since I read his book, Faith of My Fathers, I’ve never doubted his personal integrity, his grit, his patriotism, or his faith in God. I believe millions of Americans who are still not convinced of his worth will become so in the weeks before the election. God bless John McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin.” - Litchfield Park, Arizona

“Wow, this story on McCain needs to be circulated more. His words reflect more than just words, obviously they are from the heart. I haven’t heard anything of this type from Osama Obama.” - Azle, Texas

“I wasn’t aware of Senator McCain’s deep faith until I started looking at his candidacy and wondering who he was. I had some knowledge of his independent streak and some of his legislation that he helped pass (which I didn’t always agree with), but after the events of the last few weeks I am ready to support him any way I can. I don’t see anyone else on the national scene that could be better able to get our country out of the morass that we now find ourselves. And I think that he couldn’t have found a better running mate than Sarah Palin.” - Excelsior, Minnesota

THE LAST WORD

“Liberals have indignantly claimed that [Alaska Gov. Sarah] Palin thinks the Founding fathers wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, which is Olbermannic in the sense that (a) if it were true, it’s trivial, and (b) it’s not true. Their claim is based on a questionnaire Palin filled out when she was running for governor of Alaska in 2006, which asked the candidates if they were ‘offended by the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.’ Palin answered: ‘Not on your life. If it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, it’s good enough for me, and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.’ As anyone can see, Palin was not suggesting that the Founding Fathers ‘wrote’ the Pledge of Allegiance: She said the Founding Fathers believed this was a country ‘under God.’ Which, um, it is. For the benefit of MSNBC viewers who aren’t watching it as a joke, the whole point of the Declaration of Independence was to lay out the founders’ breathtaking new argument that rights came not from the king, but from God or, as the Declaration said, ‘Nature’s God,’ the ‘Creator.’... There is no disputing that a nation ‘under God’ was ‘good enough’ for the Founding Fathers, exactly as Palin said.” - 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.)