The Patriot Post Chronicle 10-26-2011

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The Patriot Post Chronicle 10-26-2011
From The Federalist Patriot
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The Foundation

"Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions." --James Madison

Editorial Exegesis

"The president's barren jobs program has also forced him to go back to the drawing board on his mortgage program. His latest anti-foreclosure tonic merely doubles-down on failure. Stubbornly high unemployment has made it harder for people to pay their mortgages, adding to the already record number of foreclosures plaguing the economy. The housing overhang, coupled with weak demand, has depressed home values further. And now even more borrowers owe more on their mortgage than their home is worth. Obama's answer is to open up his disappointing Home Affordable Refinance Program to all underwater borrowers, a growing class of debtors who, alarmingly, now account for nearly a quarter of the nation's homeowners. HARP had been limited to those owing up to 25% above their home's value. But once people started the application process for a HARP refinance, they found out they owed more than 125% of the value of their home and couldn't qualify. Of the 11 million homes underwater, fewer than 900,000 borrowers have opted to go through HARP since the program was rolled out in 2009. Now the sky's the limit. And the administration thinks the broader plan will help the average underwater family save a couple hundred bucks each month on their mortgage payments. ... Say a borrower going through HARP decides that a few hundred bucks in monthly savings don't outweigh the tens of thousands of dollars owed beyond the value of the house. He walks on it anyway. Guess who takes the loss? Taxpayer-backed Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, that's who. Under Obama's plan, only loans guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie are eligible. The failed mortgage giants have already cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, and the price tag just keeps climbing higher. In effect, Obama is trying to keep people in homes they can't afford at the expense of homeowners who borrowed responsibly." --Investor's Business Daily1

Upright

"The President now says that 'we can't wait' for Congress to act. What he's missing, though, is that Congress isn't acting because the American people don't want their representatives in Washington to go along with Obama's spend-more-tax-more scheme. It seems that the only audience that might be receptive to the President's message is the protesters who are camping out in solid opposition to the capitalist system, advocating for the government to bail them out, just like it bailed out the banks and the automakers. ... One thing is certain: Regardless of the answer, America cannot wait for President Obama to stop circumventing Congress." --Heritage Foundation's Mike Brownfield

"President Obama couldn't have chosen a more fitting slogan than 'We can't wait' to promote his latest legislative elixir for our ailing economy. ... Audacious is no longer an adequate word to describe this president. He forced through his first stimulus through crisis-leveraged fear-mongering and then never really used but a fraction of that money for so-called stimulus purposes. Why would anyone still believe a thing he says? Who is he to tell us 'we can't wait' on the proper constitutional safeguards against such precipitous executive action? He is not America's king. The Framers deliberately placed safeguards in our system to prevent such capricious executive action. ... He doesn't believe he needs authority, only 'noble' intentions." --columnist David Limbaugh

"For all the blood-for-oil nonsense, if America wanted Iraq's oil it could have saved a lot of blood and simply bought it. Saddam Hussein would have been happy to cut a deal if we only lifted our sanctions. ... We never levied taxes in Iraq either. Indeed, we're left holding the tab for the liberation. And we most certainly are not in political control of Iraq. If we were, we wouldn't have acquiesced to the Iraqi government's desire for us to leave. ... Some partisans will undoubtedly say that the key difference is that Barack H. Obama, and not George W. Bush, is president. But this lame objection leaves out the fact that Obama acceded to a timeline drafted by the Bush administration. Moreover, Obama has moved closer to Bush than anybody could have predicted." --columnist Jonah Goldberg

Insight

"Virtually everything is under federal control nowadays except the federal budget." --politician Herman E. Talmadge (1913-2002)

"The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself." --British writer Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953)

Essential Liberty

"The Communists rewrite history all the time, with grand flourishes and straight faces. And many American liberals do too. ... In Massachusetts, however, it's real history that's being shoved into the closet. A Somerville, Massachusetts public school principal, for instance, has banned the celebration of Columbus Day and Thanksgiving, calling them American 'atrocities' parading under the guise of historical holidays. Her decision, motivated by a desire to spare students and school personnel the pain of feeling insulted by the celebrations, further distorts history at the expense of ever-growing victim groups. ... Now more than ever, parents need to keep tabs on the history their children are learning in school. First, check to see if your children, especially middle schoolers and high schoolers, ever have the opportunity to read original sources, like the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. ... Read historical fiction and biographies to your children, highlighting the self-sacrificing commitment to freedom shown by America's greatest leaders and heroes. ... And finally, remember that your educational choices extend far beyond one public school or an agenda-driven principal. If -- when -- the liberal indoctrination gets out of control, investigate charter schools, religious schools, private schools, homeschooling -- and consider running for your local school board." --columnist Rebecca Hagelin

The Demo-gogues

Straw men: "The one thing that we absolutely know for sure is that if we don't work even harder than we did in 2008, then we're going to have a government that tells the American people, 'you are on your own.' If you get sick, you're on your own. If you can't afford college, you're on your own. If you don't like that some corporation is polluting your air or the air that your child breathes, then you're on your own. That's not the America I believe in. It's not the America you believe in." --Barack Obama

Math challenged: "Last week, we had a separate vote on a part of the jobs bill that would put 400,000 teachers, firefighters and police officers back on the job, paid for by asking people who make more than $1 million to pay one-half of 1 percent in additional taxes. For somebody making $1.1 million a year, that's an extra $500. Five hundred bucks. And with that, we could have saved 400,000 jobs. Most people making more than $1 million, if you talk to them, they'll say, I'm willing to pay $500 extra to help the country. They're patriots. They believe we're all in this thing together. But all the Republicans in the Senate said no." --Barack Obama, questioning the patriotism of pretty much everyone

Cheerleading: "This is going to be a tough election. The country has inherited very difficult political and economic times. Why wouldn't it be tough? Elections should be tough. They're tough choices. I think we're going to win." --Joe Biden

Excuses: "Nobody can look you in the eye and tell you that the Recovery Act ... did not create jobs and did not do very good things for the economy. The problem was, in the beginning, the economists said that in fact we wouldn't go above 8 percent, because they didn't know until this last quarter that the economy shrunk in the last term of the Bush administration almost 9 percent. Everybody thought it was more like 5.5 percent. And so the point was, we were all operating off of what the blue chips were looking at, and the numbers were wrong." --Joe Biden

"We turned the economy around. When you see 23, 24 months of consecutive job growth in our private sector and you see the president standing up today saying, look, it's not a bailout to help police officers and teachers and help people stay in their homes. These are not bailouts. These are Americans." --Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-PA)

Spiking the football: "We led from the front [in Libya]. We introduced the resolution in the United Nations that allowed us to protect civilians in Libya when Gadhafi was threatening to slaughter them." --Barack Obama