The Patriot Post Chronicle 2-8-2012

________________________________________
The Patriot Post Chronicle 2-8-2012
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
________________________________________

The Foundation

"The present Constitution is the standard to which we are to cling. Under its banners, bona fide must we combat our political foes." --Alexander Hamilton

Editorial Exegesis

"A study to be published in June in the New York University Law Review finds that our Constitution 'appears to be losing its appeal as a model for constitutional drafters elsewhere.' 'Among the world's democracies,' writes David Law of Washington University in St. Louis and Mila Versteeg of the University of Virginia, 'constitutional similarity to the United States has clearly gone into free fall. Over the 1960s and 1970s, democratic constitutions as a whole became more similar to the U.S. Constitution, only to reverse course in the 1980s and 1990s.' The New York Times' coverage of this study finds 'lots of possible reasons' for the decline. 'The U.S. Constitution,' it says, 'is terse and old' and 'guarantees relatively few rights.' ... The Constitution doesn't seem to be of much use to Barack Obama, either. The president ... recently lamented that the Founders 'designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change than I would like sometimes.' ... A lack of respect for the Constitution isn't peculiar to Obama. It's shared among Democrats, in particular, even Democrat-appointed Supreme Court jurists. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Clinton appointee, said last week on Egyptian television that if she were drafting a constitution in the year 2012, she wouldn't look to ours. She reportedly recommended the South African Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the European Convention on Human Rights. ... We're not ashamed to declare the U.S. Constitution a magnificent document that, along with the Declaration of Independence, forms the greatest national charter in human history. No other document has ever guarded freedom the way it has, and no other contract has provided such a foundation for prosperity. It's not perfect, but it's as close to perfect as man has come." --Investor's Business Daily1

How can the U.S. follow its own Constitution?2

Upright

"Last night when discussing the trends in the three non-binding Republican contests, I tweeted that Rick Santorum's win in Missouri was only surprising in gaining a majority, but that a win in Minnesota would be surprising -- and a win in Colorado would be shocking. ... Santorum shocked the Republican race with a clean sweep of Tuesday's caucuses and primary, and may have pushed himself into serious consideration as the long-sought conservative consolidation alternative to Mitt Romney." --blogger Ed Morrissey

"Republicans are worried sick that the Democrats will be able to use all the nasty sound bites from the GOP debates in the general election. I'm not too concerned for a number of reasons, but the main one is that the GOP will merely have to produce ads in which we show Barack Obama saying, 'I'm pledging to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office' and 'If I don't get the unemployment rate under 7%, I deserve to be a one-term president.' For good measure, I would produce another ad in which I showed Obama and jobs czar Jeffrey Immelt giggling as the president says, 'I guess shovel-ready jobs weren't quite as shovel-ready as we thought.' The viewer would be reminded that this came a long time after Obama, Pelosi and Reid, shoved through a trillion dollar stimulus that they promised would turn around the economy." --columnist Burt Prelutsky

"As in Chicago, Obama seems to live in a cocoon in which Republicans are largely absent, offscreen actors that no one pays any attention to. ... Two decisions in particular seem tilted toward rich liberals. One was the disapproval of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, even after it survived two environmental impact statements. ... The other astonishing decision was the decree requiring Catholic hospitals and charities' health insurance policies to include coverage for abortion and birth control. Here Obama was spitting in the eyes of millions of Americans and threatening the existence of charitable programs that help millions of people of all faiths. ... Who's on the other side? The designer-clad ladies Obama encounters at every fundraiser. They want to impose their views on abortion on everyone else." --political analyst Michael Barone

"The majority of the American people, but in particular those who identify themselves as conservative, are overwhelmingly aware of the true nature of the nation's problems and the crossroad the country is facing in 2012. The grassroots rebellion that is the Tea Party movement was the first manifestation of this awareness. Despite the success of the Tea Party working within the Republican Party in the 2010 mid-term elections, most of the Republican elites downplayed their success and fell in with the mainstream media and the Democrats in their well-worn and gratuitous aspersions against those in fly-over country." --columnist Steve McCann

Essential Liberty

"In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson called the pursuit of happiness an unalienable right. This was a radical idea. For most of history, most people didn't think much about pursuing happiness. They were too busy just trying to survive. Then came the liberal revolution based on the idea of individual freedom. Only then did they start thinking that happiness might be possible on earth. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, the right to pursue happiness has been perverted into a government-backed entitlement to happiness." --columnist John Stossel

Insight

"Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace." --German pastor and member of the German resistance movement Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945)

"Scouting is nothing less than applied Christianity." --Sir Robert Baden-Powell, Founder of the Boy Scouts, on this day in 1910. (Click here3 to read more.)

The Demo-gogues

Qualifications: "I deserve a second term, but we're not done. When you and I sat down, we were losing 750,000 jobs a month ... now we're creating 250,000 jobs. We've made progress. The key now is to make sure we don't start turning in the wrong direction." --Barack Obama

Blaming the Constitution instead of following it: "What's frustrated people is that I've not been able to implement every aspect of what I said in 2008. Well, it turns out our Founders designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change than I would like sometimes. But what we have been able to do is move in the right direction. And you know what? One of the things about being president is you get better as time goes on." --Barack Obama

Prosperity, but... "I do think the vast majority of the American people understand ... we want everyone to be successful, and nobody begrudges people who have been successful because they're making things, creating new products and services, that's the American way -- but what people also want to see is that everybody is doing their fair share, that we're all pulling together, that we're creating ladders of opportunity for all Americans. Whoever the Republican nominee is, I fundamentally disagree with the formula that would go back to the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place." --Barack Obama

Dereliction of duty: "We do not need to bring a budget to the floor this year -- it's done, we don't need to do it." --Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)

Race bait: "The government doesn't have the racism and discrimination that the private sector enjoys." --Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY)

Broken record: "You'd think that if a congresswoman got shot in the head, that would have changed Congress' views [on guns]. I can tell you how to change it, just get Congress to come with me to the hospital when I've gotta somebody that their son or daughter, their spouse, their parent is not gonna come home ever again. ... I don't know who has to get killed for people to start saying, 'Wait a second, this is enough.'" --New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, shamelessly using Gabrielle Giffords to argue for more gun control