By George Will
WASHINGTON — The louder they talked about the disadvantaged, the more money they made. And the more the financial system tottered.
Who were they? Most explanations of the financial calamity have been indecipherable to people not fluent in the language of “credit default swaps” and “collateralized debt obligations.” The calamity has lacked human faces. No more.
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On this day let us remember the words of Ronald Reagan, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”, and work to keep freedom alive.
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By Victor Davis Hanson
For the last 235 years, on the Fourth of July, Americans have celebrated the birth of the United States, and the founding ideas that have made it the most powerful, wealthiest and freest nation in the history of civilization.
But as another Fourth of July approaches, there has never been more uncertainty about the future of America — and the anxiety transcends even the dismal economy and three foreign wars. President Obama prompted such introspection in April 2009, when he suggested that the United States, as one of many nations, was not necessarily any more exceptional than others. Recently, a New Yorker magazine article sympathetically described our new foreign policy as “leading from behind.”
There is no rational reason why a small republican experiment in 1776 grew to dominate global culture and society — except that America is the only nation, past or present, that put trust in the individual rather than in the state and its elite bureaucracy. Such confidence in the average free citizen made America absolutely exceptional — something we should remember more than ever on this Fourth of July.
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By Thomas Sowell
While the convention that was writing the Constitution of the United States was still in session, a lady asked Benjamin Franklin what the delegation was creating. “A republic, madam,” he said, “if you can keep it.”
In the middle of the next century, Abraham Lincoln still posed it as a question whether “government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” Years earlier, Lincoln had warned of the dangers to a free society from its own designing power-seekers — and how only the vigilance, wisdom and dedication of the public could preserve their freedom.
But, today, few people seem to see such dangers, either internally or internationally.
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By Arnold Ahlert
Once again I will say what I have said countless times before, and I will keep saying it, until enough Americans understand it. The battle for the nation’s soul is not going in in state houses across the country, nor is it occurring in Washington, D.C. or Hollywood. It is occurring in the thousands of public schools around the nation, where the bankrupt ideology of progressivism is being foisting on impressionable children, masquerading itself as education.
It is not education. It is indoctrination. It is an indoctrination so thorough that the same high school students who can already quote chapter and verse on environmentalism, don’t know the century in which the Civil War was fought, and can’t add or subtract without a calculator. It is an indoctrination so thorough that the concept of failure has been replaced by social promotion, grade inflation and self-esteem massage. It is an indoctrination so thorough that kids can get free condoms and directions to the nearest abortion clinic from the same school nurse who isn’t allowed to offer moral guidance about either choice. It is one so thorough that 31 percent of Americans polled by the Gallup Organization think there are “too many rich people” in America.
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By Larry Elder
Here’s the real explanation. The top priority of the left isn’t “jobs, jobs, jobs.” Andy Stern, the former head of the Service Employees International Union and hero to the left, makes this clear: “Western Europe, as much as we used to make fun of it, has made different trade-offs which may have ended with a little more unemployment but a lot more equality.”
The goal of the leftist is social justice — using government to close the gap between the have and the have-nots, to secure the “right” to health care. Obama’s policies are therefore an acceptable trade-off even though they kill jobs — as long as it’s somebody else’s job that gets killed.
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Jiggs
Question is – Does TIME still matter?
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By Thomas Sowell
The media have recently been so preoccupied with a Congressman’s photograph of himself in his underwear that there has been scant attention paid to the fact that Iran continues advancing toward creating a nuclear bomb, and nobody is doing anything that is likely to stop them.
Nuclear weapons in the hands of the world’s leading sponsor of international terrorism might seem to be something that would sober up even the most giddy members of the chattering class. But that chilling prospect cannot seem to compete for attention with cheap behavior by an immature Congressman, infatuated with himself.
A society that cannot or will not focus on matters of life and death is a society whose survival as a free nation is at least questionable. Hard as it may be to conceive how the kind of world that one has been used to, and taken for granted, can come to an end, it can happen in the lifetime of today’s generation.
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Investor’s Business Daily
“Acting ATF director Kenneth Melson is apparently ready to take the fall for what may be the most morally repulsive scandal to befall the Obama administration so far. Our neighbor Mexico lies bleeding from a long, vicious war to fight seven major drug cartels at once. Some 38,000 have been left dead since 2006. Amid all this, U.S. ATF agents had orders from on high to supply U.S. weapons to cartel middlemen buying them on U.S. soil for the odd purpose of ‘tracing’ them. The news that Melson is resigning seems to be a bid by the Obama administration to paint this as simply an example of Keystone Kop-style bungling being corrected. But many things suggest the operation may have been done for political purposes, and not merely stupidity. The idea behind ‘Operation Fast and Furious’ was to let gun dealers sell weapons to cartel middlemen, who would then ship them to criminal gangs in Mexico, and damn the consequences. … Continue reading
