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THE FOUNDATION

"Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition." --Thomas Jefferson

INSIGHT

"One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary." --Ayn Rand

LIBERTY

"In January, Stephen Moore caused a stir by arguing, in the Wall Street Journal, that the current crisis is turning Atlas Shrugged 'from fiction to fact.' And those who are warning that increased government restrictions will cause the nation's most productive workers to withdraw their talents have taken to calling this the 'John Galt Effect,' a reference to the hero -- and the main plotline -- of Atlas Shrugged. It is no coincidence that the strongest resistance to a government takeover of the economy is coming from people influenced by Ayn Rand. She has long functioned as a stiffener of resolve and as the fountainhead of pro-free-market ideas. ...Ayn Rand's contribution to the philosophical defense of capitalism can be summed up in one central idea: individualism. Ayn Rand demonstrated that the ultimate source of all wealth -- everything from steel mills to microchips -- is the individual reasoning mind. Thus, a society that wants to prosper has to ask what is required by its thinkers and producers, the 'prime movers' who originate and implement new ideas. And the first thing that is required for these thinkers to function is that they be free from coercive interference by bureaucrats, by blowhard legislators, or by federal 'czars.' ... Ayn Rand's ideas are the mostly unnamed fuel giving fire and confidence to people like CNBC financial analyst Rick Santelli. ... If we're going to have an ideological Boston Tea Party, a declaration of independence from the whole theory behind state management of our lives and wealth, then Ayn Rand is the ideal philosophical hostess." --editor of The Intellectual Activist and TIADaily.com Robert Tracinski

CULTURE

"Public expenditure can't buy virtue. It may even crowd it out. To preserve the American middle class, Obama and the Democrats want to transfer the burden of responsibility from the individual to the government. They want to raise taxes and finance expanded federal government intervention in education, health care, pensions, and the workforce. ... The stimulus bill captures the ethos of this new liberalism perfectly. The dramatic expansion of government's share of the economy is geared toward specifically liberal ends. ... It's also a huge miscalculation. Increased dependence on the state is not a solution to our lack of personal accountability. It will only encourage more of it. ... The American ethos is one of self-reliance. This is not the same as autonomous hedonism and greed. A self-reliant individual is responsible for himself and his family. He is accountable for his actions. He has to be. The welfare state, by contrast, promotes dependence. As government expands its sphere of involvement in everyday life, the number of supplicants for government assistance increases. Rather than encouraging the individual to take responsibility for his actions, the new liberals have embarked on policies that will encourage the individual to turn to government instead." --Weekly Standard editor Matthew Continetti

GOVERNMENT

"Who believes government needs more of our money, when it already wastes so much of it? Do we want to replace this great country with all the opportunities it affords to people who play by the rules, work hard and make right decisions, with a country that doesn't care what rules you live by because government will take care of you? And what does this say about people who have played by the rules? They have paid the bank, but now see people who did not getting a handout from government for their mortgages, as if paying and not paying are morally equivalent. Each generation must renew the principles delivered by the preceding one. I fear this generation may be dropping the baton, seduced by the flattering words of politicians who promise not to let us fail, or suffer, or even feel bad. That is a fool's bargain because it is through failure (or the threat of it) and suffering that we grow stronger as individuals and become more self-reliant. ... We face a future of ever-bigger and intrusive government and the punishing of achievement unless this generation realizes it has dropped the baton it was handed and returns to pick it up." --columnist Cal Thomas

THE GIPPER

"Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, frustrated minorities and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-anointed elite." --Ronald Reagan

FAITH AND FAMILY

"The bottom line is that the civil rights struggle is over and it is won. At one time black Americans didn't share the constitutional guarantees shared by whites; today we do. That does not mean that there are not major problems that confront a large segment of the black community, but they are not civil rights problems nor can they be solved through a 'conversation on race.' Black illegitimacy stands at 70 percent; nearly 50 percent of black students drop out of high school; and only 30 percent of black youngsters reside in two-parent families. In 2005, while 13 percent of the population, blacks committed over 52 percent of the nation's homicides and were 46 percent of the homicide victims. Ninety-four percent of black homicide victims had a black person as their murderer. Such pathology, I think much of it precipitated by family breakdown, is entirely new among blacks. In 1940, black illegitimacy was 19 percent; in 1950, only 18 percent of black households were female-headed compared with today's 70 percent. Both during slavery and as late as 1920, a teenage girl raising a child without a man present was rare among blacks. If black people continue to accept the corrupt blame game agenda of liberal whites, black politicians and assorted hustlers, as opposed to accepting personal responsibility, the future for many black Americans will remain bleak." --George Mason University economics professor Walter E. Williams

OPINION IN BRIEF

"President Obama, whose whole campaign was about hope over fear, has been scaring the dickens out of people lately. He has certainly terrified the stock market. He's warned of 'catastrophe' and economic 'disaster' from which we may never recover. What's particularly odious about Obama's scare tactics is that he's using them for the mother of all bait-and-switches. He justifiably scares people about the magnitude of the financial crisis, but uses that fear not to sell them on a solution to the crisis but to trick them into signing up for a new Great Society. It's like convincing someone he's got cancer and then telling him that's why he needs to buy a new car." --National Review editor Jonah Goldberg

RE: THE LEFT

"President Obama, in his pursuit of liberal big-government spending, has totally neglected the role of the president of the United States in reversing global panic. To the contrary, his every remark and the constant preoccupation of his Cabinet is to heighten the sense of crisis and to escalate the predictions of doom if we do not do as they tell us and raise spending now and taxes later. Instead of being a firewall, reassuring Main Street even as Wall Street crashed, he has become a conduit of panic, spreading the mood of desperation from the stock exchange floor to kitchen tables across the world. ... In addressing this panic, the president of the United States must truly be the leader of the world -- showing the way back to confidence. Instead, Obama has been instrumental in purveying fear and spreading doubt. It is his pronouncements, reinforced by the developments they kindle and catalyze, that are destroying good businesses, bankrupting responsible people and wiping out even conservative financial institutions. Every time he speaks, he sends the markets down and stocks crashing." --columnist Dick Morris

POLITICAL FUTURES

"What if the economy is still in bad shape a year or two from now? Will we get apologies from Obama and the stimulus advocates in Congress? Not a chance. Their excuse is already prepared: The stimulus was too small. On the day Obama signed the bill, his aides put out the word that another may be needed. The blame will not be put on the folly of stimulus, only on the meagerness of the spending. Heads -- big government wins. Tails -- free people lose. I don't want to play that game. ... If, through your perseverance, things begin looking up, credit belongs not to President Obama and Congress. It belongs to you." --ABC's "20/20" co-anchor John Stossel

FOR THE RECORD

"President Barack Obama unveiled his budget for next year (the Federal government's next fiscal year begins on October 1, 2009) and it comes out to about $3.6 TRILLION dollars. If we pretend there are 360 days in a year, that works out to Ten Billion Dollars a day, $417 Million an hour. $6.9 Million per minute. $115,000 per second. Every second. Starting at one second after Midnight on October 1, 2009." --political analyst Rich Galen

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

(To submit reader comments visit our Letters to the Editor page.)

"The 800-pound gorilla that Mark Alexander mentions in 'ObamaNation -- The USSA' is of grave concern to every working person I talk to. Standing by and watching our government run out of control in spending and confiscation of working citizens' wealth is gut wrenching to watch. Nowhere in the Constitution does it authorize the government to do this. It is a disgrace to the sacrifice of our Founding Fathers. Our political leaders all take an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution yet at the same time they are stomping on it as if it were on fire and must be extinguished so that the new USSA can come to be. There are millions of patriotic Americans anxious to rally around a John Adams of our day. May God give us a contemporary leader cut from the same cloth as our remarkable founders." --Franklin, Wisconsin

"Obama is tearing down the fabric of this country making our future security very bleak. There is more than just a whisper from the 60 million patriots in this country that goes well beyond another tea party. Obama is a Manchurian candidate that has an agenda to subvert this country. It may be time of another Lexington and Concord." --Olympia, Washington

"I writing to thank you for the great job you are doing at The Patriot Post. I am 15 years old and am currently a freshman at high school. My community is migrant, very liberal, and completely blind to what is going on in Washington. We have barely gotten over Obamamania with his election, but ask anyone to explain why they are so supportive of Messiah and they give you a dumbfounded look. I am a regular reader and read every chance I get. The analysis I read on this site keeps me informed and on the straight and narrow. I have grown up in a Christian, conservative, family values home. And as much as I hate to imagine it, I can only say that I am getting closer and closer to believing that only armed insurrection is the only way to save our country. I hope it never comes to that, but it is my belief that it is my solemn duty when the time comes. God Bless America!" --Floresville, Texas

THE LAST WORD

"As with the Clintons, Obama so earnestly believes in public school education that he sends his girls to ... an expensive private school. He demands that taxpayers support the very public schoolteachers he won't trust with his own children. It is one thing to tell voters that school choice is wrong, because, you know, the public schools won't get better unless Americans sacrifice their children to the teachers' union's maw. But it is quite another for Democrats to feed their own kids to the union incinerator. Consequently, no Democrat since Jimmy Carter has been stupid enough to send his own children to a public school. And yet the stimulus bill expressly prohibits money earmarked for 'education' to be spent on financial aid at private or parochial schools. Private schools might use it for some nefarious purpose like actually teaching their students, rather than indoctrinating them in anti-American propaganda. The stimulus bill includes about $100 billion to education. By 'education,' Democrats don't mean anything a normal person would think of as education, such as learning how to talk good. 'Education' means creating lots of useless bureaucratic jobs, mostly in Washington, having nothing to do with teaching. Apparently, nothing irritates public schoolteachers more than being asked to teach. While 80 percent of the employees of private schools are teachers, only half the employees of public schools are. The rest are 'coordinating,' 'facilitating' or 'empowering' something or other. The Department of Education alone provides more than 4,000 jobs that haven't the faintest connection with teaching. And now the stimulus bill will double the Education Department's funding. (For those of you who went to a public school, that means it will become twice as big.) We've come a long way from Ronald Reagan promising to eliminate the Education Department, which itself was a Jimmy Carter sop to the teachers' unions. Federal meddling in education has been an abject failure, so the Democrats' plan is to keep doing more of the same." --columnist 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.)