The Patriot Post Chronicle 4-27-2011

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The Patriot Post Chronicle 4-27-2011
From The Federalist Patriot
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The Foundation

"It is very imprudent to deprive America of any of her privileges. If her commerce and friendship are of any importance to you, they are to be had on no other terms than leaving her in the full enjoyment of her rights." --Benjamin Franklin

Editor's Note

We are experiencing extreme weather today in east Tennessee and are doing our best to stay up and running, but there may be disruptions in our publishing cycle, including possibly no essay from Mark Alexander tomorrow. Stay tuned and please keep us and our neighbors in your prayers as we clean up from the storms -- some of which are yet to come.

Editorial Exegesis

"Pump prices keep climbing, so what do those mainly responsible for the run-up do? Try to pin it on someone else, of course. In his radio address last Saturday, President Obama bragged that his attorney general had just two days earlier 'launched a task force with just one job: rooting out cases of fraud or manipulation in the oil markets that might affect gas prices, including any illegal activity by traders and speculators. We're going to make sure that no one is taking advantage of the American people for their own short-term gain.' Last month, the president promised that his administration was 'taking various measures to deal with oil prices, and (is) watching out for price-gouging.' This is the sort of rhetoric that beleaguered consumers, aching from soaring fuel prices, are vulnerable to. Obama is giving them a straw man on which they can vent their frustrations. But their focus should be on the presidential candidate who said while campaigning in 2008 that under his environmentalist regime, 'electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.' On the day Obama took office, gasoline was $1.83 a gallon. On Tuesday, according to the American Automobile Association's Daily Fuel Gauge Report, the national average was $3.87. While electricity prices haven't yet necessarily skyrocketed, gasoline prices sure have. Obama could have prevented this. But he's done nothing to push crude supplies up and thereby bring gasoline prices down. In fact, it appears that his goal is to reduce domestic supply. ... Despite its denials, the administration has also increased gasoline prices through its promotion of a weak dollar. Because oil is traded in U.S. dollars, those who sell it on the open market demand more dollars for the same amount of crude because those dollars are worth less. This administration includes an energy secretary who has pined for European -- meaning $8-a-gallon -- gas prices. But the White House would rather the public remain ignorant of its role in driving prices higher. So it cynically kicks off probes of investors and oil industry executives that will turn up absolutely nothing." --Investor's Business Daily1

Upright

"The [Paul] Ryan budget has been criticized as heartless and cruel. But its purpose is to address the rising U.S. debt problem without tanking the U.S. economy, and to do so before a truly heartless and cruel credit downgrade of the sort S&P gave Japan in January. Mr. Obama's response was simply to mock the GOP proposal. The ratings agencies are hardly the last word on U.S. economic health. But the S&P outlook is a warning to the White House that financial markets have noticed that this President seems to have decided that his path to re-election lies in demonizing his opponents rather than seeing to the nation's fiscal well-being." --Wall Street Journal

"President Barack Obama, one of the most insane spenders in Washington, has a 12-year plan. After hearing the president's plan, Standard & Poor's downgraded the U.S. Sovereign debt outlook to 'negative.' ... At the world's first 'Presidential Facebook town hall meeting' [last] Wednesday, even Obama had a hard time taking his 'plan' seriously. Sometimes he referred to it as a 12-year plan, sometimes 10 years, sometimes saving four trillion, sometimes saving two trillion. So will the Obama plan save four trillion over 12 years or two trillion over 10?" --columnist Mark Steyn

"Already [Obama's] campaign's messaging is all about recapturing the feeling of insurgency from the first time around. Finish the mission. Complete the work. Remember the feeling. That's why he's running his re-election campaign out of Chicago, as if people won't notice he's the incumbent. Obama has never run on a record. He's always run almost literally on a hope and a prayer. Now he must defend what he has done -- and what he has failed to do. If that makes him cranky, that's just too bad." --columnist Jonah Goldberg

"Two college professors just released a study of national protests between 2007 and 2009. What did they find? … 'After January 2007, the attendance at antiwar rallies [measured in] roughly the tens of thousands, or thousands, through the end of 2008. … After the election of Barack Obama as president, the order of magnitude of antiwar protests dropped [...] Organizers were hard pressed to stage a rally with participation in the thousands, or even in the hundreds. For example, we counted exactly 107 participants at a Chicago rally on October 7, 2009.' Amazing. Especially because the war in Afghanistan ramped up after Obama was elected. American fatalities shot up in 2009 and 2010. The protesters have remained silent over Libya." --columnist John Stossel

Insight

"As the national income grows, the federal government will ultimately end up with more revenues. Prosperity is the real way to balance our budget. By lowering tax rates, by increasing jobs and income, we can expand tax revenues and finally bring our budget into balance." --President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

"A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment ... is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule." --author and philosopher Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

The Demo-gogues

The beater clingers: "First of all, $4-a-gallon gas really hurts a lot of people around this country. It's not because they're wasteful, but if you're driving 50 miles to work and that's the only job you can find, and you can't afford some hybrid so you're stuck with the old beater that you're driving around that gets eight miles a gallon, these gas prices are killing you right now." --Barack Obama feigning sympathy for the little guy

Witch hunt: "I asked my attorney general to look into any cases of price gouging so he can make sure nobody's being taken advantage of at the pump. Today I'm gonna go a step further. The attorney general's putting together a team whose job it is to root out any cases of fraud or manipulation in the oil markets that might affect gas prices, and that includes the role of traders and speculators. We're gonna make sure that nobody's taking advantage of American consumers for their own short-term gain." --Barack Obama

Class warfare: "I believe that we can't ask everybody to sacrifice and then tell the wealthiest among us, well, you can just relax and go count your money, and don't worry about it. We're not going to ask anything of you." --Barack Obama