The Patriot Post Vol 09-10

[nChrist]

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The Patriot Post Vol 09-10
From The Federalist Patriot
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THE FOUNDATION

"Government can do something for the people only in proportion as it can do something to the people." -- Thomas Jefferson

INSIGHT

"That tyrannical government power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?" --French historian Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

Are we the lobsters?

LIBERTY

"Most of us imagine the transformation of a free society to a tyrannical state in Hollywood terms, as a melodramatic act of violence like a military coup or an armed insurrection. Alexis de Tocqueville knows better. He foresees a slow death of freedom. The power of the centralized government will gradually expand, meddling in every area of our lives until, like a lobster in a slowly heated pot, we are cooked without ever realizing what has happened. The ultimate horror of Tocqueville's vision is that we will welcome it, and even convince ourselves that we control it. There is no single dramatic event in Tocqueville's scenario, no storming of the Bastille, no assault on the Winter Palace, no March on Rome, no Kristallnacht. We are to be immobilized, Gulliver-like, by myriad rules and regulations, annoying little restrictions that become more and more binding until they eventually paralyze us. ... Permitting the central government to assume our proper responsibilities is not merely a transfer of power from us to them; it does grave damage to our spirit. It subverts our national character. In Tocqueville's elegant construction, it 'renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself.' Once we go over the edge toward the pursuit of material wealth, our energies uncoil, and we become meek, quiescent and flaccid in the defense of freedom." --author Michael Ledeen

THE GIPPER

"This is the real task before us: to reassert our commitment as a nation to a law higher than our own, to renew our spiritual strength. Only by building a wall of such spiritual resolve can we, as a free people, hope to protect our own heritage and make it someday the birthright of all men." --Ronald Reagan

CULTURE

"The 'conscience' regulations that HHS finalized the day that President Bush left office -- and that the Obama administration has indicated it wants to repeal -- do not create any new restrictions on what hospitals and other health-care providers that receive HHS funds may or may not do in dealing with people who will or will not perform abortions. What the regulations do say is that health-care providers receiving HHS funds must now certify in writing that they are complying with three federal 'conscience' laws. ... Pro-lifers like me believe the new regulation is good because it will increase awareness of the laws prohibiting discrimination against pro-life health-care professionals and help enforce those laws. But debate over this regulation should also increase awareness of something that is not good. We have already accepted the notion that government funding of health care should be pervasive in our society, and that with government cash comes government dictation of standards -- up to and including whether a health-care institution should be allowed to discriminate against an abortionist. If government ends up funding everyone's health care, government will dictate the standards of everyone's care. And for more than 30 years, the government has protected doctors who kill babies." --CNS News editor in chief Terence Jeffrey

OPINION IN BRIEF

"Been paying your mortgage for the last 15 months -- or 15 years? Stupid. Your taxes are going to go to help pay for the guy who can't, or doesn't want to, pay his. Why should you live in a house free of fear of foreclosure if your neighbor down the block can't? By the way, as I understand it, nothing in the housing plan deals with second or third or fourth mortgages which are part and parcel of this mess. People used their house as a piggy bank and mortgage brokers kept refinancing to build the new pool, the playroom, or the home theater because the overall value of the house kept going up. What about leaving the value of your house IN your house? Nah. If you wanted a new car you redid the second on your house, used that money to buy a new Mercedes and you could drop your kids off at school in style. ... Now the repo guys have come for your car and the bank is coming for your house and Obama wants me to give up what I've earned, to pay for something you haven't, but want to keep. This is the world view of the Community Organizer: There are poor people in this neighborhood who have less than they want. There are rich people in the next neighborhood who have more than they need. If you are a Community Organizer you try and even things out. If you are the Community Organizer-in-Chief you get to do this on a national scale and that is exactly what Barack Obama is planning to do. Who is John Galt?" --political analyst Rich Galen

GOVERNMENT

"In Washington, one person's waste is another person's pork. Every dime spent by the federal government has well-connected advocates who swear the money is vital to the national interest. ... It's not that people in government aren't as good or competent as those in the private sector (though that may be true). The difference lies in the incentives and feedback they face. Bureaucracies have little check on what they do, no bottom line, no market prices for their 'output.' What they do have is an incentive to spend all the money budgeted or risk getting less next year. As Milton Friedman used to say, no one spends other people's money as carefully as he spends his own. It is absurd to think the humongous constellation of federal bureaucracies is going to identify and root out 'waste' in any significant way. It's just not in the nature of the beast." --ABC's "20/20" co-anchor John Stossel

[nChrist]

____________________________
The Patriot Post Vol 09-10
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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FOR THE RECORD

"It's Dec. 8, 2008, 11:11 a.m., and a young Marine pilot takes off from an aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, on a routine training flight. The carrier is maybe 90 miles southwest of San Diego. Lt. Dan Neubauer is flying an F/A-18 Hornet. Minutes into the flight, he notices low oil pressure in one of the two engines. He shuts it down. Then the light shows low fuel for the other engine. He's talking to air traffic control and given options and suggestions on where to make an emergency landing. He can go to the naval air station at North Island, the route to which takes him over San Diego Bay, or he can go to the Marine air station at Miramar, with which he is more familiar, but which takes him over heavily populated land. He goes for Miramar. The second engine flames out. About three miles from the runway, the electrical system dies. Lt. Neubauer tries to aim the jet toward a canyon, and ejects at what all seem to agree is the last possible moment. The jet crashed nose down in the University City neighborhood of San Diego, hitting two homes and damaging three. Four people, all members of a Korean immigrant family, were killed -- 36-year-old Youngmi Lee; her daughters, Grace, 15 months, and Rachel, 2 months, and her 60-year-old mother, Seokim Kim. Lee's husband, a grocer named Dong Yun Yoon, was at work. The day after he'd lost his family, he humbled and awed San Diego by publicly forgiving the pilot -- 'I know he did everything he could' -- and speaking of his faith -- 'I know God is taking care of my family.' ... The Marines launched an investigation -- of themselves. Last Wednesday the results were announced. They could not have been tougher, or more damning. The crash, said Maj. Gen. Randolph Alles, the assistant wing commander for the Third Marine Aircraft Wing, was 'clearly avoidable,' the result of 'a chain of wrong decisions.' ... Twelve Marines were disciplined; four senior officers, including the squadron commander, were removed from duty. Their military careers are, essentially, over. The pilot is grounded while a board reviews his future. ... A young Naval aviator who also flies the F-18 said the Marine investigation 'kept me up last night' because of how it contrasted with 'the buck-passing we see' in the government and on Wall Street. By contrast, he says, when the economy came crashing down, 'nowhere did we see a board come out and say: "This is what happened, these are the decisions these particular people made, and this was the result. They are no longer a part of our organization." There was no timeline of events or laymen's explanation of how a credit derivative was actually derived. We did not see congressmen get on television with charts and eviscerate their organization and say, "These were the men who in 2003 allowed Freddie and Fannie unlimited rein over mortgage securities." Instead we saw ... everybody against everybody else with no one stepping forth and saying, "We screwed up."' There is no one in national leadership who could convincingly 'assign blame,' and no one 'who could or would accept it.'" --columnist Peggy Noonan

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

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

"Thomas Jefferson asserted, 'The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.' I am in complete agreement with that statement, and agree with my fellow Patriots around the country who sense that the time for 'refreshment' may be drawing near. However, I am a family man with small children who depend on me to provide for them. My heart is torn in that its says it would gladly give itself in mind and body to the causes which may unfold, but at the same time my heart says it must be there to provide for my children until they are old enough to make choices and provide for themselves. That said, if it meant that my children would live as wards of the State with me at their side, or as a free people with me as a loving memory in their hearts and minds, I would gladly take the latter, for if it were former I could not bear to look them in the eye and say that I did nothing." --San Diego, California

Editor's Reply: It is our fervent prayer that the thinly veiled revolution already underway in Washington, DC, "the fundamental transformation of the United States of America" in Obama's words, can be defeated peacefully. Every Patriot staff member is a parent. However, we all subscribe to these words from Thomas Paine, (December 19, 1776): "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace."

"While I enjoy The Patriot and generally agree with you, I feel that you are off base about Justice Benjamin here in West Virginia. It is true that the CEO of Massey spent $3 million on the campaign, but he did not specifically run ads for Benjamin. He ran the ads showing the record of then justice Warren McGraw who was so anti business that he did not even pretend to be neutral. In fact, since he got onto the court, justice Benjamin has ruled against Massey 86 percent of the time. Keep up the good work, I just wanted to express my opinion on this." --Dailey-Scott Depot, West Virginia

Editor's Reply: Thanks for your viewpoint. Our sources, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, were, we thought, fair in their coverage of this case. The Digest item was by no means a comprehensive review of the story, so we couldn't include every detail -- for example, the percentage of cases that Judge Brent Benjamin ruled against Massey Coal, which neither source reported in any case. We should have better made the distinction that Massey CEO Don Blankenship spend $3 million in independent campaign advertising, not on direct contributions to Benjamin's campaign -- same result, but different means. That said, our conclusion was perhaps a bit too harsh. As the Supreme Court hears the case, they will consider whether Benjamin should have recused himself.

THE LAST WORD

"British prime minister Gordon Brown thought long and hard about what gift to bring on his visit to the White House last week. Barack Obama is the first African-American president, so the prime minister gave him an ornamental desk-pen holder hewn from the timbers of one of the Royal Navy's anti-slaving ships of the 19th century, HMS Gannet. Even more appropriate, in 1909 the Gannet was renamed HMS President. The president's guest also presented him with the framed commission for HMS Resolute, the lost British ship retrieved from the Arctic and returned by America to London, and whose timbers were used for a thank-you gift Queen Victoria sent to Rutherford Hayes: the handsome desk that now sits in the Oval Office.And, just to round things out, as a little stocking stuffer, Gordon Brown gave President Obama a first edition of Sir Martin Gilbert's seven-volume biography of Winston Churchill. In return, America's head of state gave the prime minister 25 DVDs of 'classic American movies.' Evidently, the White House gift shop was all out of 'MY GOVERNMENT DELEGATION WENT TO WASHINGTON AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT' T-shirts. Still, the 'classic American movies' set is a pretty good substitute, and it can set you back as much as $38.99 at Wal-Mart." --columnist Mark Steyn

*****

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.)