RE: THE LEFT“Barack Obama, who informs campaign audiences that he taught constitutional law for 10 years, might be expected to weigh in on the historic Second Amendment case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices are pondering whether the 1976 District of Columbia law effectively prohibiting personal gun ownership in the nation’s capital is constitutional. But Sen. Obama has not stated his position. Obama, disagreeing with the D. C. government and gun control advocates, declares the Second Amendment’s ‘right of the people to keep and bear arms’ applies to individuals, not just the ‘well-regulated militia’ cited in the amendment. In the next breath, he asserts this constitutional guarantee does not preclude local ‘common sense’ restrictions on firearms. Does the Draconian prohibition for Washington, D. C., fit that description? My attempts to get an answer have proved unavailing. The front-running Democratic presidential candidate is doing the gun dance.” — Robert Novak
POLITICAL FUTURES“For the Democratic party, 2008 was supposed to have been an ideal year. There’s an unpopular, lame-duck Republican president presiding over an iffy economy and an unpopular war. Plus, the Democrats won big in the 2006 elections, and there’s no Republican vice president in the race to draw on the power of incumbency. No wonder that for much of 2007, the polls suggested that the only mystery would be by how much Sen. Hillary Clinton would beat former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the general election. Indeed, for Democrats not to walk into the presidency in November 2008, the conventional wisdom was that the absolute unthinkable would have to transpire. And now it almost has.” — Victor Davis Hanson
FOR THE RECORD“Drama is no match for the harsh certainties of mathematics. And the mathematics of the Democratic primaries demonstrated that it was practically impossible for Clinton to win the nomination. Go to Slate’s online delegate calculator and give her an improbable 60-40 victory in all ten remaining primaries from Pennsylvania through South Dakota, and she still comes up short. Add in an imaginary revote that gives her 60 percent of Florida’s delegates, and she still loses. Only if she were to add to all this a similarly fanciful win in an illusory do-over in Michigan would she finally overtake Obama in pledged delegates.” — Jonathan Gurwitz
SELECT READER COMMENTS(Our servers automatically delete “Reply” messages to this e-mail. To submit or to view reader comments visit our Reader Comments page. Join the debate at the Patriot Blog.)
“I need to point out discrepancy Mark Alexander’s essay, ’ANWR’s Spotted Owl.’ You said, ‘Total annual consumption of oil in the U.S. is about 7.6 billion barrels.’ Several paragraphs later you noted that ‘there’s an estimated 10 billion barrels of oil [in ANWR], and that is enough Black Gold to keep Teddy Kennedy and his constituents warm and cozy for a century.’ Ten billion barrels amounts to 16 months of usage, not the 100 years your article says. I am sure you would like to correct this mistake.” — Brentwood, Tennessee
Editor’s Reply: We had several reader comments to this effect. However, the numbers are correct. Please note that the article referred to Ted Kennedy and his constituents, not the entire U.S. Like most Americans, we don’t consider ourselves constituents of Ted Kennedy!
“I too have been to ANWR many times. I lived on the North Slope for three years and routinely went to Kaktovik for work. As was written in The Patriot, there is nothing there but a few bugs in the summer. A very few herds pass through, but the Alaska pipeline has been careful by not interfering with their migrations. What I found very interesting was that the locals, the Native Americans who live there, are invariably incredulous as to why the oil fields are not explored and developed in the area.” — Tokyo, Japan
“It’s a shame the EPA wasn’t around sooner so they could have saved the dinosaur and a few other extinct species. That way there wouldn’t have been room for Homo sapiens and nothing left to worry about.” — Cleveland, Ohio
THE LAST WORD“’When you set out to take Vienna,’ Napoleon famously advised, ‘take Vienna.’ That might be updated to: ‘If you’re going to bowl, bowl better than a 37.’ That’s what Barack Obama scored when he set out to demonstrate he was just one of the guys at a Pennsylvania bowling alley recently. He started with a gutter ball. Hillary Clinton responded with an April Fools’ Day gag about deciding the nomination with a bowl-off. ‘A bowling night. Right here in Pennsylvania,’ Clinton proposed. ‘The winner take all. I’ll even spot him two frames. It is time for his campaign to get out of the gutter and allow all the pins to be counted. I’m prepared to play this game all the way to the 10th frame. When this game is over, the American people will know that when that phone rings at 3 a.m., they’ll have a president ready to bowl on Day One.’ The saddest part is that this was, without a doubt, the absolute funniest thing Hillary Clinton has ever said (after, of course, ‘I believe you, Bill’). Unfortunately, Obama missed an opportunity to explain that he was bowling so badly because he was under sniper fire.” — Jonah Goldberg
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.)
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