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« on: April 23, 2012, 03:32:40 PM » |
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The Patriot Post Brief 4-23-2012
From The Federalist Patriot
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The Foundation
"A good moral character is the first essential in a man, and that the habits contracted at your age are generally indelible, and your conduct here may stamp your character through life. It is therefore highly important that you should endeavor not only to be learned but virtuous." --George Washington
Faith & Family
"Evangelical Christianity lost one of its most eloquent and influential voices [Saturday] with the death of Charles W. 'Chuck' Colson. The Prison Fellowship and Colson Center for Christian Worldview founder died at 3:12 p.m. on Saturday from complications resulting from a brain hemorrhage. Colson was 80. A Watergate figure who emerged from the country's worst political scandal, a vocal Christian leader and a champion for prison ministry, Colson spent the last years of his life in the dual role of leading Prison Fellowship, the world's largest outreach to prisoners, ex-prisoners and their families, and the Colson Center, a teaching and training center focused on Christian worldview thought and application. Colson was speaking at a Colson Center conference when he was overcome by dizziness. ... At times, Chuck showed encouraging indicators of a possible recovery, but his health took a decided turn, and he went to be with the Lord. ... Colson maintained that the greatest joy in life for him was to see those 'living monuments' to God's grace: Prisoners transformed by the love of Jesus Christ. And thanks to the work of Colson and Prison Fellowship volunteers across the country, there are thousands of those living monuments among us today." --ChuckColson.org1
Editor's Note: We at The Patriot Post are grateful to Chuck Colson for his support over the years. He offered a significant vote of confidence as one of our earliest endorsers. We will keep his family in our prayers and would add, well done, good and faithful servant.
Government
"I don't know how many times I've seen liberal commentators look back with nostalgia to the days when a young man fresh out of high school or military service could get a well-paying job on an assembly line at a unionized auto factory that could carry him through to a comfortable retirement. As it happens, I grew up in Detroit and for a time lived next door to factory workers. And I know something that has eluded the liberal nostalgiacs. Which is that people hated those jobs. ... The liberal nostalgiacs would like to see an economy that gives low-skill high school graduates similar opportunities. That's what Barack Obama seems to be envisioning when he talks about hundreds of thousands of 'green jobs.' But those 'green jobs' have not come into existence despite massive government subsidies and crony capitalism. ... Today's young people can't expect to join large organizations and in effect ride escalators for the rest of their careers. The new companies emerging as winners in high tech -- think Apple or Google -- just don't employ that many people, at least in the United States. Similarly, today's manufacturing firms produce about as large a share of the gross national product as they used to with a much smaller percentage of the labor force. ... What we can be sure of is that creating your own career will produce a stronger sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. Young people who do so won't hate their work the way those autoworkers hated those assembly line jobs." --columnist Michael Barone2
For the Record
"Between 1787 and 1930, our nation suffered both mild and severe economic downturns. There was no intervention to stimulate the economy, but the economy always recovered. During the 1930s, there were massive interventions, starting with President Herbert Hoover and later with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Their actions turned what would have been a sharp three- or four-year economic downturn into a 10-year affair. In 1930, when Hoover began to 'fix' the economy, unemployment was 6 percent. FDR did even more to 'fix' the economy. As a result, unemployment remained in double digits throughout the decade and reached 20 percent in 1939. President Roosevelt blamed the high unemployment on his predecessor. ... Americans have been miseducated into thinking that Roosevelt's New Deal saved our economy. That miseducation extends to most academics, including economists, at our universities, who are arrogant enough to believe that it's possible for a few people in Washington to have the information and knowledge necessary to manage the economic lives of 313 million people." --economist Walter E. Williams3
Culture
"Some Americans are old enough to remember when going on the dole was something one did only when every other option became untenable. And even then, a certain degree of lingering shame accompanied that choice, along with an equal amount of determination to change course and return to being productive as quickly as possible. How quaint such ideas must seem to current generations of Americans, many of whom have been steeped in the idea that someone owes them something -- for nothing, no less. ... It is remarkable how many Americans have become thoroughly convinced that there are more than enough workers -- who will go on working no matter how onerous it becomes, no less -- to underwrite all of the slackers, and ever-growing number of fence-sitters moving to their side of the ledger. It is far less remarkable that we have a president who would exploit such selfishness and ignorance by taking an American virtue ... and turn it into a vice, which is what Mr. Obama is doing when [he] labels the alternative to his socialist/Marxist vision as an 'on your own' society. This is nothing less than a full-frontal assault on our national character. Or what used to be our national character until progressives convinced substantial numbers of Americans that success is something that should elicit feelings of envy, rather than admiration and a sense of aspiration." --columnist Arnold Ahlert4
Insight
"There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means as De Tocqueville describes it, 'a new form of servitude.'" --economist Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992)
Re: The Left
"'I saw many signs in this campaign,' said Richard Nixon the day after he was elected president in 1968. 'But the one that touched me the most was one that I saw in Deshler, Ohio, at the end of a long day of whistle-stopping.... A teenager held up a sign, "Bring Us Together." And that will be the great objective of this administration at the outset: to bring the American people together.' ... The desire to see an incoming president as a unifier, a healer of the national breach, is an old American tradition, especially in times of acrimony and political conflict. But Nixon, needless to say, didn't heal the breach. ... Time and again, Obama promised what Nixon promised: to bring Americans together. That pledge ... went to the essence of his candidacy. And on the night of his election, before a vast crowd in Chicago's Grant Park, he underscored it: 'Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.' Yet far from resisting that temptation, Obama has rarely bypassed any chance to indulge it. The would-be uniter whips up envy and resentment, demonizing those who disagree with him, and aggravating the nation's racial, class, and party tensions." --columnist Jeff Jacoby5 |
