The Patriot Post Chronicle 6-30-2010

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The Patriot Post Chronicle 6-30-2010
From The Federalist Patriot
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The Foundation

""The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered as the palladium of the liberties of a republic." --Justice Joseph Story

Supreme Court Upholds Second Amendment Rights

The United States Supreme Court issued a 5-4 ruling Monday that the Second Amendment does, in fact, mean what it says -- even in Chicago -- and guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms. The case at hand was McDonald v. City of Chicago, in which the plaintiff sought to overturn Chicago's blanket ban on handguns.

The Amendment reads, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." The Chicago ban clearly infringed on that right.

Don't miss The Patriot's analysis here.

Editorial Exegesis

"In the 'living Constitution' era, the Supreme Court rediscovers original intent and rightly rules that the right to bear arms applies to all Americans just as the rest of the Bill of Rights does. It's hard to conceive how the justices could have decided otherwise. But by the narrowest of margins -- 5-4 -- they have reaffirmed that keeping and bearing arms is an inalienable and individual right like speech and religion, and that it applies to all individuals as the Founding Fathers intended. Why anyone thinks the Second Amendment does not apply to all Americans is a mystery to us. Governments have powers; individuals have rights. The Bill of Rights was an enumeration of those individual rights -- from freedom of speech to freedom of religion to the right to bear arms -- that are to be protected from the intrusion of an oppressive government. Now the Supreme Court agrees. ... Both the Constitution and 'we the people' are safer today." --Investor's Business Daily

Upright

"The [Supreme] Court found that if the Second Amendment indeed protects an individual right to own a gun, the notion that the government can't ban all handguns is the minimum protection the Constitution can offer." --economist John R. Lott Jr.

"Strict gun-control policies have failed to deliver on their essential promise: that denying law-abiding citizens access to the means of self-defense will somehow make them safer. This should come as no surprise, since gun control has always been about control, not guns." --Cato Institute policy analyst David Rittgers

"Now that the Supreme Court of the United States has decided that the Second Amendment to the Constitution means that individual Americans have a right to bear arms, what can we expect? Those who have no confidence in ordinary Americans may expect a bloodbath, as the benighted masses start shooting each other, now that they can no longer be denied guns by their betters. People who think we shouldn't be allowed to make our own medical decisions, or decisions about which schools our children attend, certainly are not likely to be happy with the idea that we can make our own decisions about how to defend ourselves." --economist Thomas Sowell

"[Elena] Kagan has less real legal experience of any nominee in at least 50 years, and it's not just that the nominee has not been a judge. She has barely practiced law, and not with the intensity and duration from which I think a real legal understanding occurs. Her actions [as Dean at Harvard] punished the military, and demeaned our soldiers as they were courageously fighting for our country in two wars overseas. Ms. Kagan has associated herself with well-known activist judges who have used their power to re-define the meaning of words of our Constitution and laws in ways that, not surprisingly, have the result of advancing that judge's preferred social policies and agendas." --Alabama Republican Senator Jeff Sessions

"Recently, the secretary of labor, Hilda Solis, produced a video advising workers to contact her office should they feel that they have been shorted wages by their employers. Fair enough. But then she goes on to explicitly include workers who are not documented and to promise them confidentiality, i.e., de facto federal protection for their illegality: 'Every worker has a right to be paid fairly, whether documented or not.' 'Undocumented' is part of the current circumlocution for breaking federal law and residing here illegally. In short, although Solis is a federal executive sworn to uphold existing federal law, she has decided which laws suit her and which do not. She rightly promises to pursue lawbreaking employers, but quite wrongly not to pursue lawbreaking employees. Yet when we become unequal before the law, the entire notion of a lawful society starts to erode." --historian Victor Davis Hanson

Insight

"The loss of candor is grievous, and in my opinion it may yet prove to be mortal, because if we cannot discuss our problems in plain speech that describes reality, it is unlikely that we will be able to solve them." --former Secretary of State Alexander Haig (1924-2010)

"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites." --British statesman Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

"They say hot air rises. And I guess it does. An airplane flying over the Capitol the other day caught fire from outside sources." --American humorist Will Rogers (1879-1935)

Dezinformatsia

Stuck on stupid: "Some Republicans paid a heavy price for being tough with Anita Hill when she came to testify in the Clarence Thomas hearings. Have we gotten past that era of sensitivity about a bunch of guys going after a single woman here just bashing her? ... Can these guys like Jeff Sessions just go at her like this without any fear of rebuke? ... They've turned this nominee into a voodoo doll, and they keep putting pins in her, as a way of getting at President Obama." --MSNBC's Chris Matthews

Bankrupt but still haven't spent enough: "We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost -- to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs -- will nonetheless be immense. And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world -- most recently at last weekend's deeply discouraging G-20 meeting -- governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending." --New York Times columnist Paul Krugman

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The Patriot Post Chronicle 6-30-2010
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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From the sycophants: "Like the Constitution and the Bible, Robert Byrd will be a permanent fixture of the Senate." --ABC's Cokie Roberts

Tolerance of the Left: "Cheney's in the hospital. Ah, the first good news all day. ... I'm not going to feel anything but intense gratitude that this miserable bastard has stepped off this earthly coil! Really! ... Cheney is a murderer. He's a killer. He's a torturer. He is evil personified! He is a walking mass of horror and when he's gone, this planet will be cleaner!" --liberal talk radio host Mike Malloy on Dick Cheney's hospitalization

Who needs marriage? "Once upon a time, marriage made sense. It was how women ensured their financial security, got the fathers of their children to stick around, and gained access to a host of legal rights. But 40 years after the feminist movement established our rights in the workplace, a generation after the divorce rate peaked, and a decade after Sex and the City made singledom chic, marriage is -- from a legal and practical standpoint, anyway -- no longer necessary." --Jessica Bennett and Jesse Ellison in a Newsweek article trashing marriage

Newspulper Headlines:

News of the Tautological: "US Supreme Court Nominee Faces Senate Confirmation Hearing" --Voice of America website

News You Can Use: "Extreme DIY: Building a Homemade Nuclear Reactor in NYC" --BBC website

Questions Nobody Is Asking: "Jeb Bush, 2016?" --Washington Examiner website

Bottom Stories of the Day: "Trash Truck Driver Put on Different Route" --El Paso Times

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

The Demo-gogues

Hey big spender: "Somehow people say, 'Why are you doing that? I'm not sure that's good politics.' I'm doing it because I said I was going to do it and I think it's the right thing to do. People should learn that lesson about me because next year when I start presenting some very difficult choices to the country, I hope some of these folks who are hollering about deficits and debt step-up because I'm calling their bluff. We'll see how much of that, how much of the political arguments that they're making right now are real and how much of it was just politics." --Barack Obama, talking tough about fiscal responsibility

Knocking America down a peg: "A strong and durable recovery also requires countries not having an undue advantage." --Barack Obama at the G20 summit in Canada

Chutzpah: "What did middle-class families ever do to Republicans in the Senate that they would snuff out every opportunity for job creation that has been sent to them?" --House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who seeks to let tax cuts on those middle-class families expire at year's end

What a swell guy: "Why don't you say something nice instead of being a smart-ass all the time? Say something nice." --Vice President Joe "BFD" Biden to a Wisconsin custard shop manager, who made a joke about lowering their taxes

What's good for the goose... "I believe the fair-minded people will find [Elena Kagan's] philosophy well within the legal mainstream. I welcome questions but urge senators on both sides to be fair. No one should presume that this intelligent woman who has excelled during every part of her varied and distinguished career, lacks independence." --Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) (For context, Kagan thinks Robert Bork had a "fair" hearing: "I loved what happened in the Bork hearings.... The Bork hearings were great, the Bork hearings were educational, the Bork hearings were the best thing that ever happened to Constitutional democracy.")

Asking the tough questions: "Please tell us why you want to serve on the Supreme Court and what excites you about the job." --Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI) to Elena Kagan

Oh please: "Our borders are quite secure, thank you." --Rep. Pete Snark (D-CA)

Village Idiots

Why bother: "It's a big border. It's 1,960 miles across that Southwest border. It's some of the roughest, toughest geographical terrain in the world across that border. And so, the notion that you're going to seal that border somehow is something that anybody who's been involved in the actual doing of law enforcement ... would say, 'You're never going to totally seal that border.'" --Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano (So is that a preemptive excuse, or a reason to not even bother trying? Either way, it's a straw man.)

Non Compos Mentis: "If this was Texas, which is a state that is directly on the border with Mexico, and they were calling for a measure like this, saying that they have a major issue with, you know, undocumented people flooding their borders, I would say, I would have to look twice at this, but this is a state that's a ways removed from the border..." --Milwaukee County Board Supervisor Peggy West on Arizona's immigration law

Gun grabbers: "As a city we must continue to stand up ... and fight for a ban on assault weapons ... as well as a crackdown on gun shops. We are a country of laws not a nation of guns." --Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, remaining defiant after the SCOTUS decision (So only Chicago's excess of criminals -- political and otherwise -- will have guns. Beautiful.)

The BIG Lie: "People will die because of this decision. It is a victory only for the gun lobby and America's fading firearms industry." --Kristen Rand, legislative director of the Violence Policy Center, on the Supreme Court's ruling in McDonald v. City of Chicago (Perhaps she hasn't noticed that the industry is, in fact, booming.)

The Fool on the Hill: "Some people don't believe in climate warming -- like those who don't believe there was a Holocaust." --singer Paul McCartney

Short Cuts

"With each failure of gun control, the rejoinder was to do it again, this time with feeling." --David Rittgers

"President Obama insisted ... that General McChrystal's departure signals a change in personnel but not in policy. It's a policy the president can call his own. Our purpose remains not to kill the Taliban but to register them to vote in Chicago." --comedian Argus Hamilton

"Here are some questions it would be fun to ask a New York liberal like Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan at her hearings [this] week: -- Roughly one-third of Americans are Evangelical Christians. Do you personally know any Evangelical Christians? Name two. -- In 1972, Richard Nixon was elected president with more than 60 percent of the vote, winning every state except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. How many people do you know who voted for Nixon? -- Appropriate or inappropriate: Schools passing out condoms to seventh-graders? Schools passing out cigarettes to seventh-graders? -- Who is a greater threat to America, Sarah Palin or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?" --columnist Ann Coulter

(Please pray for our 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.)