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THE FOUNDATION

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." --Thomas Jefferson

INSIGHT

"The government of the absolute majority is but the government of the strongest interests; and when not effectively checked, is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised... [To read the Constitution is to realize that] no free system was ever farther removed from the principle that the absolute majority, without check or limitation, ought to govern." --American statesman John C. Calhoun (1782-1850)

"Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it." --Jewish philosopher Maimonides (1135-1204)

"There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly." --American author and poet Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Have you driven a Ford lately?

EDITORIAL EXEGESIS

"Give President Obama credit -- he at least made the proverbial offer Chrysler's secured creditors couldn't refuse. The way Obama strong-armed creditors who rightfully expected to be treated justly under the law was right out of Juan Peron's playbook. Like the Argentinian strong man, Obama muscled the owners and creditors out of a productive private company and gave it to union leaders, who will then fill his campaign coffers in gratitude for his generosity. The Examiner's Michael Barone -- who has forgotten more about American government and politics than most Washington political experts know -- was correct to dub Obama's Chrysler heist 'an episode of Gangster Government.' Forget what anybody in the White House or what is left of the Chrysler executive corps claims to the contrary because the UAW effectively owns the company now, holding 55 percent of its stock. True, the union doesn't get an explicit controlling majority of the board of directors, but who needs that when you've got the White House guaranteeing your work and the U.S. Treasury Department making sure you never have to worry about the bottom line. ... Contrasting mightily with the Pennsylvania Avenue Gang's thuggery is the quiet confidence of Ford Motor Company's president and CEO, Allan Mullaly. He had the foresight three years ago to strengthen his firm's cash and credit reserves in anticipation of the inevitable decline of auto sales. ... When GM and Chrysler headed hats-in-hand to Washington last fall, Mullaly said Ford didn't want a bailout and then watched quietly as his two cross-town rivals committed corporate suicide. Now Ford is positioned strongly to be the last great American car company. With a guy like that at the helm, it's enough to make people who love American free enterprise go out and buy a new Ford." --The Washington Examiner

UPRIGHT

"The rule of law, not of men -- an ideal tracing back to the ancient Greeks and well-known to our Founding Fathers -- is the animating principle of the American experiment. While the rest of the world in 1787 was governed by the whims of kings and dukes, the U.S. Constitution was established to circumscribe arbitrary government power. It would do so by establishing clear rules, equally applied to the powerful and the weak. Fleecing lenders to pay off politically powerful interests, or governmental threats to reputation and business from a failure to toe a political line? We might expect this behavior from a Hugo Chávez. But it would never happen here, right? Until Chrysler." --George Mason University law professor Todd Zywicki

"Ford has about $26 billion in automotive debt -- about the same as GM's $27 billion. Ford's debt is secured by its assets. And secured lenders must be repaid -- unless they happen to be Chrysler lenders and get clipped by a company bankruptcy plan that's backed by President Obama. So Ford is like a homeowner who planned prudently and can pay his mortgage, while his spendthrift neighbors get their mortgage reduced by some new federal program." --Wall Street Journal Detroit bureau chief Paul Ingrassia

"Proponents of today's world-turned-upside-down economic policies say the policies might seem wrong but really are boldly modern in their rejection of markets in favor of pervasive government intervention in economic life. Hence New York, which until eight months ago was the financial capital of the world, is no longer even the financial capital of the United States. Washington is." --columnist George Will

"If you attack President Barack Obama's policies, are you attacking America? According to today's left, the answer is yes: Barack Obama is America. And opposition to Barack Obama or any of his policies is therefore, by definition, anti-American." --columnist Ben Shapiro

"Conservatism is the political belief that best mirrors human nature across time and space; but because its precepts are sometimes tragic and demand responsibility rather than ever-expanding rights, it requires adept communicators -- not triangulators and appeasers whose pleasure is only for the moment." --columnist Victor Davis Hanson

DEZINFORMATSIA

Wrong on so many levels: "Republicans actually have plenty of ideas. That's the problem. The party's ideas -- about economic issues, social issues and just about everything else -- are not popular ideas. They are extremely conservative ideas tarred by association with the extremely unpopular George W. Bush, who helped downsize the party to its extremely conservative base. ... A hard-right agenda of slashing taxes for the investor class, protecting marriage from gays, blocking universal health insurance and extolling the glories of waterboarding produces terrific ratings for Rush Limbaugh, but it's not a majority agenda." --Time magazine's Michael Grunwald

Wrong again: "If they lost their heart in the 1980s, and they lost their mind in the 1990s, what we've seen in the 2000s is Republicans losing their image, and they lost it on national security." --Newsweek's Richard Wolffe

Indeed, imagine what America would be without: "Americans can be thankful for two humanitarian presidents whose legacies stand as emblems of caring values that enrich us as a nation. President Franklin D. Roosevelt won passage of the Social Security Act in 1935 and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Medicare legislation in 1965. Social Security and Medicare work beautifully and provide security and medical care to millions of American families, especially now in hard economic times. Imagine what America would be without. President Barack Obama should follow the formula of his two predecessors and support a 'single payer' health plan, assuring universal health care in this country." --"journalist" Helen Thomas

Look out: "Health care is ... the Obama administration's number one priority for the rest of the year. They believe now the decks are cleared on coming back to the taxpayers for money from the banks. They will be able to make a real push for health care this summer. And they are going to drive to get it done before October. And they think the stars are aligning." --ABC's George Stephanopoulos

Objective reporting: "The U.S. Senate seat from Minnesota that could give President Barack Obama's Democrats the margin to pass legislation without Republican interference remains unfilled six months after the votes were cast." --Reuters

Non Compos Mentis: "To call something an 'enhanced interrogation technique' doesn't alter the fact that we thought it was torture.... It's almost the moral equivalent of saying that rape is an enhanced seduction technique." --ABC News anchor Ted Koppel

Newspulper Headlines:

It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's a Bus!: "White House Aide Louis Caldera Loses Job Over Manhattan Flyover Fiasco Involving Air Force One" --Daily News (New York)

We Blame Global Warming: "Icy Winds Threaten U.S.-Russia Thaw" --Financial Times

Breaking News From 1933: "Germans Pessimistic, Demand Strong Leadership" --Baltic Times (Riga, Latvia)

An Inauspicious Start: "Trial Begins in Shooting Death of Defense Attorney" --Arizona Republic

News You Can Use: "Work-Life Balance a Challenge, Says Michelle Obama, but Having White House Staff Helps" --Washington Post Web site

Bottom Stories of the Day: "Study Shows Government Web Sites Lag Behind Private Sector" --FoxNews.com

(Thanks to The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto)

THE DEMO-GOGUES

Obama's presidency in a nutshell: "It is past time for rules that are fair and transparent. That is why I have called for a set of new principles to reform our credit card industry. Instead of an 'anything goes' approach, we need strong and reliable protections for consumers. Instead of fine print that hides the truth, we need credit card forms and statements that have plain language in plain sight, and we need to give people the tools they need to find a credit card that meets their needs. And instead of abuse that goes unpunished, we need to strengthen monitoring, enforcement, and penalties for credit card companies that take advantage of ordinary Americans." --President Barack Obama **What about a fair and transparent (and constitutional) government that doesn't use an "anything goes" approach full of abuse that goes unpunished?

The ceaseless Limbaugh obsession: "The Republican Party does not qualify for a bailout. Rush Limbaugh does not count as a troubled asset. I'm sorry." --Barack Obama

On preventing an economic boom: "The president is committed and is working with the leaders of Congress on very comprehensive broad-based financial reform to put in place new rules of the game, more constraints on risk-taking to prevent a crisis like this from happening again. ...These things are about preventing the next boom." --Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner

Give us a break: "President Obama won the election. He beat me in a primary in which he put forth a different approach. And he is now our president and we all want our president, no matter of which party, to succeed." --Secretary of State Hillary Clinton **"No matter of which party," huh?

From the gun grabbers: "There is no rational reason to oppose closing the [gun show] loophole. The reason it's still not closed is simple: the continuing power of the special interest gun lobby in Washington." --Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), who, along with Jack Reed (D-RI) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) will introduce legislation to eliminate the private transfers of firearms and close the nation's "gun show loophole"

VILLAGE IDIOTS

Confessions: "I think we had quite enough capitalism in the last eight years and I think we need some regulation now." --former Vermont Governor, DNC chief and now CNBC contributor Howard Dean

In what do we trust?: "We are not asking people to trust us, we are asking people to trust government."--Karen Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans, urging government hyper-regulation of private medical insurance

This week's "Braying Jenny" Award: "Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails, so you're saying, 'I hope America fails', you're, like, 'I don't care about people losing their homes, their jobs, our soldiers in Iraq.' He just wants the country to fail. To me, that's treason. He's not saying anything differently than what Osama bin Laden is saying. You know, you might want to look into this, sir, because I think Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker. But he was just so strung out on OxyContin he missed his flight. ... Rush Limbaugh, I hope the country fails -- I hope his kidneys fail, how about that? He needs a good waterboarding, that's what he needs." --"comedienne" Wanda Sykes at the White House Correspondents dinner, where Obama laughed at her "jokes"

Profiles in bad humor: "It's not because he's black and it's not because we're afraid. It's just that he's, just so far, just a little too d*** competent and we ain't used to that." --"Late Show" writer Bill Scheft on why writers aren't coming up with many jokes about Obama

Woman of the people: "It's great to have a nice home. It's great to have nice homes! It's great to have a nice home that just escaped the fire in Santa Barbara. It's great to have a private jet. Anyone that tells you that having your own private jet isn't great is lying to you." --Oprah Winfrey

SHORT CUTS

"Government is the organized crime of healthcare." --pediatric otolaryngologist John Donaldson

"As the general [Colin Powell] sees it, the Republican Party ought to be a 'big tent': Right now, the tent is empty, with only a few 'mean-spirited' and 'divisive' talk-radio hosts chewing the limbs off live kittens while gibbering to themselves. By comparison, over in the Democrat tent, they've got blacks, gays, unions, professors, Ben Affleck: diversity on parade." --columnist Mark Steyn

"The Earth stood still, the seas parted and a member of the U.S. political class admitted last week that the Federal Reserve helped to cause the financial meltdown. OK, only the last of those happened, but it's a welcome miracle nonetheless. The revelation came from Timothy Geithner...." --The Wall Street Journal

"I'm not even a Christian, but I find it bizarre that people who pooh-pooh the idea that Christ raised the dead or walked on water are totally convinced that a guy who's tossing trillions of dollars into the air is a financial miracle worker. Talk about blind faith! It makes me wonder if these same people, were they facing personal bankruptcy, would think that the answer to their own financial difficulties would be to give their wife an American Express card and drop her off at Tiffany's." --columnist Burt Prelutsky

Jay Leno:

President Obama [did] not have a prayer service for National Prayer Day. I understand that -- between the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright he hasn't had the best of luck with prayer services.

Government bureaucrats in China have been ordered to smoke more locally produced cigarettes in order to set an example for citizens and stimulate the Chinese cigarette industry. And health officials are worried that smoking could become the number one cause of death now because of this government mandate. But do you know what the number one cause of death is in China now? Disobeying a government mandate. So, you're kind of stuck.

The price of a postage stamp has gone up to 44 cents. The government says they had to raise the price because fewer people are using the mail these days. That's government thinking for you. "Hey nobody's buying our products -- let's raise the price!"

*****

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.)