If you receive this and you hate it and you don’t want to ever read it no matter what...that is fine; email me back and you will be deleted from my list.

I attempt to post a new issue each Sunday by 5 or 6 pm central standard time (I sometimes fail at this attempt).

I try to include factual material only, along with my opinions (it should be clear which is which). I make an attempt to include as much of this week’s news as I possibly can. The first set of columns are intentionally designed for a quick read.

I do not accept any advertising nor do I charge for this publication. I write this principally to blow off steam in a nation where its people seemed have collectively lost their minds.

And if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, always remember: We do not struggle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Eph. 6:12). If you do not believe in Jesus Christ, let me encourage you to do so: Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life; no man comes to the Father but through Me.” “Believe in Me and you will have eternal life. Believe not, and the wrath of God will abide on you.” (John 14:6 3:16).

Correction: It is possible that Jim Holmes, the Colorado mass murderer, is not a registered Democrat. One is claiming that his face matches an Occupy Wall Street person, another says that he was on hardcore pharmaceutical drugs, and the most researched approach told us very little about Holmes. For the record, there are about 7 people named Jim Holmes who live in Aurora, not counting those who live in neighboring suburbs and cities.

An item I missed last week: although Colorado is a concealed-carry state, the theater chain in which the Colorado massacre took place was a no-gun zone.

Newsweek, the 79-year-old magazine, will eventually transition to an online-only publication, according to owner IAC/InterActiveCorp. For some reason, printing slanted news for several decades does not get you a loyal following?

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has refused to tied recent droughts to climate change. Speaking before the White House press corps, Vilsack refused to answer questions by Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times and Bill Plante of CBS News about the connections between climate change and the current drought. In part, he says he is not a scientist; and, in part, because we have had much great droughts in the past. Liberals have been going ballistic over this, and have online petitions requiring Vilsack to make this connection.

Here is a pleasant surprise: the Mitt Romney campaign is giving serious consideration to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi as the VP pick.

The President spent one night this week at a $35,800/plate fundraiser along with two key men in the Solyndra scandal.

The Australian foreign minister has privately warned Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney that foreign leaders see "America in decline."

President Obama's budget director predicted a $1.2 trillion budget deficit for 2012 today, which has coterminously occurred with an Obama campaign ad that promises to "pay down the debt."

Wish the president a happy 51^st birthday...and when you click on sign the card, surprise, you can then determine how much money to give him.

The Olympics are supposed to be a time when nations put aside their differences, no matter how large, and square off on the playing field for some intense yet friendly competition. Despite an Iranian assertion on Monday that its athletes would compete against Israeli Olympians at the 2012 Games, the Iranian team departed for London hours earlier, leaving behind one athlete to face an Israeli opponent. However, this past Sunday, Iranian authorities announced that this athlete, Javad Mahjoob, a judo champion, is suffering from a "critical digestive system infection," forcing him to take antibiotics and that he will have to cancel plans for the Games, which begin Friday.

The President met with his cabinet for the first time since January. At the beginning of his presidency, he did not meet with 6 of his cabinet members for the first two years.

File this under, you don’t get to have it both ways: the Obama administration has, for the time being, blocked the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring a boatload of oil from Canada into the United States to be processed. However, China's state-run oil company CNOOC stands poised to cut a $15.1 billion deal. Well, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) don’t like this, even though, when they lobbied against the Keystone XL pipeline, nearly everyone knew this was Canada’s #2 option.

You have heard that the Obama administration was not being tough on children of illegal aliens. Apparently, those in custody only need to claim that they are high school graduates or GED holders. Border agents say DHS tells them to release illegals after violent crimes are committed.

President Barack Obama is backing a controversial campaign by progressives to regulate schools' disciplinary actions so that members of major racial and ethnic groups are penalized at equal rates, regardless of individuals' behavior. This is exactly what we need; the federal government looking over each individual school’s shoulder when it comes to student discipline.

The Department of Homeland Security has ordered masses of riot gear equipment to prepare for potential significant domestic riots at the Republican National Convention, Democratic National Convention and next year's presidential inauguration.

In New York City, new mothers would be give sort of a gift pack, which would include some formula milk for their babies. However, apparently the authorities in NYC believe that to be anathema, so formula will be kept under lock and key and have to be asked for specifically. The new theme is “latch on, NYC.” Really.

Those wondering why the Department of Justice has refused to go after Jon Corzine for the disappearance of $1.6 billion in MF Global client funds may not be surprised to know that documents uncovered by the Government Accountability Institute that reveal that the now-defunct MF Global was a client of Attorney General Eric Holder and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer's former law firm, Covington & Burling.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee released a report today on the Energy Department's decision to subordinate taxpayers to private investors in the ill-fated Solyndra project. That is, the taxpayers would have to wait in line behind the private investors and let them recoup all of their losses first. Only after that could taxpayers could get any money back - assuming there would be any money to recoup at this point. In this case, that would be a reported $328 million of the $335 million federal loan guarantee to Solyndra. This is significant because the plain language of the department's own rules for loan guarantees states that taxpayers must not be subordinate and instead must come first.

City Leaders in Steubenville, Ohio have decided to change their official logo after the Freedom From Religion Foundation threatened to sue because the emblem included a silhouette of a cross atop the Franciscan University chapel.

Chicago Alderman Joe Moreno says that he will allow a new Chick-fil-A restaurant to open in his 1st ward, as long as they drop their support for any groups with a political agenda, including those with an anti-gay marriage stance. Moreno says if he gets an explicit guarantee from the franchise owner he will consider granting zoning rights to a new Chick-fil-A in Logan Square.

While Chicago focuses on the eternal issue, Chick-fil-A or no Chick-fil-A, another 7 die in the city streets.

The Justice Department last week presented the Newland family of Colorado--who own Hercules Industries, a heating, ventilation and air-conditioning business--with what amounted to an ultimatum: Give up your religion or your business.

Soon after, U.S. District Court Judge John Kane issued a preliminary injunction keeping the government from penalizing Hercules Industries for its health plan while the company's lawsuit proceeds. Kane notes that his order doesn't keep the government from enforcing the mandate against anyone else.

About one in 10 employers plans to drop workers' health insurance as the new healthcare law takes effect, according to a new study. At this point, many of the currently uninsured will be forced by law to get insurance; and a huge number of people will lose their job health insurance.

There are liberal groups on two university campuses in Kansas which want to ban Chick-fil-A on their campuses over the outrageous position that President Dan Cathy has taken, a clear support for traditional marriage.

There are Charleston, S.C. students who also want to shut down Chick-fil-A on their campus.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick just signed into law a provision which bans welfare purchases at places like nail salons, jewelry stores, liquor stores and casinos, as well as for things like tattoos, pornography and guns. I realize that you and I had no idea that this was where some of the citizens’ tax dollars were going to.

Yay, California! California parents use 'trigger law' to take over failing school

The NYC Metropolitan Transportation Authority is considering adding on a `green fee' on each new MetroCard to encourage riders to recycle their cards.

Rather than restrict access to pornography on its computers, the San Francisco Public Library has installed plastic privacy screens so visitors can view pornography more discreetly. Just as long as they don’t look at photos of Chick-fil-A sandwiches.

The Department of Justice is investigating whether Pennsylvania's new voter ID law is discriminatory.

For the third time this month and the fifth time overall, the Obama administration has overridden the decision of a state to revoke taxpayer funding for the Planned Parenthood abortion business. The Obama administration has gone against the decision by the North Carolina legislature to withdraw taxpayer funds from the abortion giant. They have usurped the will of the North Carolina legislature by awarding $426,000 in federal grants directly to Planned Parenthood affiliates in the state.

The Obama administration will open public lands in six Western states to more solar projects as part of a solar energy road map.

One of five occupiers charged with plotting to bomb a highway bridge in Ohio has pleaded guilty and will testify against his co-defendants.

The Lebanese judo team at the 2012 London Olympics refused to practice next to the Israeli one on Friday afternoon, and a makeshift barrier was erected to split their gym into two halves.

A Jordanian man was charged on Wednesday with killing his divorced sister after stabbing her and driving his truck over her body several times because of her alleged "suspicious behavior."

Iran's U.N. envoy accused Israel on Wednesday of plotting and carrying out a suicide bomb attack on a bus in Bulgaria a week ago in which five Israeli tourists were killed.

Syrian rebels are engaging in ethnic cleansing of Christians, despite their attempts to remain neutral in this conflict.

Pakistan: rumor of torn Koran sends thousands of Muslim into the streets rioting.

The European Union still will not designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization as there is not enough tangible evidence yet.

The militant organization that was once the scourge of the U.S. military campaign in Iraq and probably is responsible for more than 100 deaths in the country over the last few days has set its sights on launching attacks in the United States, intelligence officials said.

There are now at least six Jihadist groups actively engaged in the Syrian civil war.

Iran's nuclear facilities seem to have been hit again by a bizarre attack forcing nuclear plant workstations to pump the song Thunderstruck by heavy metal band AC/DC through the speakers at full volume.

President Obama's campaign today released a video praising the president for ending the war in Iraq. It turns out that today has proven to be the deadliest day of the year in that country. A wave of attacks throughout Iraq - IEDs, explosions, and gunmen - has resulted in more than 100 people killed and more than 200 wounded from attacks in 15 cities.

Michelle Obama, to the Olympic audience: “We love you, but we want you to take care of yourselves, help your family, turn off the TV, eat some vegetables—yeah, that’s part of it.”

President Obama: “I believe that the only way to create an economy built to last is to strengthen the middle class, asking the wealthy to pay a little more so that we can pay down our debt in a balanced way.” The additional amount of revenue potentially generated by tax increases on the wealthy will pay for somewhere between 3 and 8 days. If all the money made this past year was taken from the wealthy, Obama could very nearly balance the budget.

President Obama: "And I confess the progress didn't come quickly, and it did not come easily. Sometimes it didn't come at all. There were times where I thought about giving up and moving on. But what...has sustained [me] is the belief that in America, change is always possible. That our union may not be perfect, but it is perfectible...yes, we can form that more perfect union.”

President Obama: "Because we're leading around the world, people have a new attitude toward America. There's more confidence in our leadership. We see it everywhere we go,"

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz in a fund-raising email: “Republicans in Congress would obstruct President Obama from having cereal for breakfast if they could.” Really, it said that.

Vice President Joe Biden: "I had to ask my wife to marry me five times before she said yes."

White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest, via email: "The embargo will allow journalists to hear the entirety of the Vice President's remarks and get the benefit of having their questions answered -- before trying to condense a 30-minute conference call about a 20-page NEC report into a 140 characters." What was happening was, Biden would say something goofy, and reporters would quickly tweet that. So, no more tweeting Biden remarks.

President Obama: “For the first time ever, we've made military families and veterans a top priority not just at DOD, not just at the VA, but across the government.”

President Obama: “So let's stop playing politics with our military. Let's get serious and reduce our deficit and keep our military strong.”

President Obama: “We tried our plan and it worked! That’s the difference.”

President Obama: "[A strong economy] was built because we invested in great schools and great universities, and we put rules of the road in place to make sure that everybody was being treated fairly. Let me just point out that the approach that I'm talking about has also been tested. Just like their [Republican] theories have been tested and didn't work, my theories have been tested. The last time they were tried was by a guy named Bill Clinton. And we created 23 million new jobs, went from deficits to surplus, and we created a lot of millionaires to boot."

President Obama’s off-teleprompter remarks of two weeks ago: “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.

There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Senior campaign adviser David Axelrod: "I was concerned when I saw the initial ad that it might be impactful. I've concluded that it's not all that impactful. But the ad that we did in response got a very good response in the testing that we did. Because it pushes our message forward."

However, after being pounded away at for nearly two weeks, the President put out an ad: "Those ads taking my words about small business out of context; they're flat out wrong. Of course Americans build their own business. Everyday hard-working people sacrifice to meet a payroll, create jobs, and make our economy run. And what I said was that we need to stand behind them as America always has. By investing in education, training, roads and bridges, research and technology. I'm Barack Obama and I approve this message because I believe we're all in this together."

President Obama complained that, "Governor Romney knowingly twisting my words around to suggest that I don't value small businesses."

Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter: “[Romney] blatantly twists President Obama's words on small business owners and entrepreneurs."

Obama: "I have to tell you, I generally have patience with what the other side says about me, that's a requirement of this job. And if you don't like folks talking about you, you probably shouldn't run for president. The one thing I do have no patience for is this argument that somehow what I'm criticizing is success. I want to promote success."

Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren: "Of course I stand by those remarks."

Warren on a 2011 video: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there, good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory.”

Mayor Bloomberg: "I want to congratulate Vietnam for officially going smoke-free. Last week, Vietnam adopted a comprehensive tobacco control law which makes virtually all public places 100% smoke-free and requires vivid health warnings on all tobacco packages.” And their position on pot smoking?

Boston Mayor Thomas Menino in a statement to Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy: "I was angry to learn on the heels of your prejudiced statements about your search for a site to locate in Boston. There is no place for discrimination on Boston's Freedom Trail and no place for your company alongside it." This was a statement rather than a prepared speech because a spoken Menino would not have the same effect, as Menino is virtually unintelligible. He later said: "I can't do that. That would be interference to his rights to go there...I make mistakes all the time. That's a Menino-ism."

Chicago Alderman Joe Moreno: "If they're [Chick-fil-A] serious about that [guaranteeing they will stop giving money to “Focus on the Family”], and they're willing to put that in writing and they're willing to adopt that. I think those are the grounds where we can move forward." Translation, “You do what I tell you to do, and I will let you bring your business into my territory.”

Joe Moreno: "Same sex marriage, same-sex couples - that's the civil rights fight of our time. To have those discriminatory policies from the top down is just not something that we're open to...We want responsible businesses."

Edwin Lee, mayor of S.F., tweet: Closest #ChickFilA to San Francisco is 40 miles away & I strongly recommend that they not try to come any closer.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a leading mayoral contender in 2013, in a two page letter to the president of the New York University: "I urge you to sever your relationship with the Chick-fil-A establishment that exists on your campus. This establishment should be replaced with an establishment where the ownership does not denigrate a portion of our population."

Mayor Rahm Emanuel: "Chick-fil-A's values are not Chicago values. They're not respectful of our residents, our neighbors and our family members. And if you're gonna be part of the Chicago community, you should reflect Chicago values...Gay couples are our neighbors, our families, members of our own families, they're our residents- those are our values. And we don't want to have any policy that discriminates against people that are essential members and members who contribute to the value of our city. That's who we are." That’s got to be tough when a Chicago politician says that your morals aren’t quite up to his.

Emanuel press secretary Tarrah Cooper later “clarified” Emanuel’s statement: "If they meet all the requirements, they're welcome to open a restaurant here."

D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray: "Given my long standing strong support for LGBT rights and marriage equality, I would not support #hatechicken,"

Statement from Muppets’ chieftain: “The Jim Henson Company has celebrated and embraced diversity and inclusiveness for over fifty years and we have notified Chick-Fil-A that we do not wish to partner with them on any future endeavors. ”

Democratic candidate in Maine's Senate race Cynthia Dill, in a fund-raising email: "How many murdered children does it take? My opponents. both agree it was OK for the Aurora killer to be able to legally purchase a 100-round magazine of ammunition, and I don't. That's the difference. Can you chip in $100 today? ...[I am] sick and tired of the bloodbath...[and of] seeing mothers weeping over the bodies of innocent children slaughtered."

Advertisement by a gun-control group headed by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg: "Another mass shooting in America. Another moment of silence. But will the moment ever end? What will the next president do to stop it? So far, neither candidate has been willing to address the issue head on. We cannot allow their moment of silence to turn into months and years. We can honor the lost by working together to take simple steps that protect the Second Amendment and protect the lives of innocent people."

ABC’s Kerry Smith: “As you know, during live breaking news coverage, our correspondent Brian Ross said, ‘There’s a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado page on the Colorado TEA party as well, talking about him joining the TEA party last year. We don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes.’ Later that morning, after our producers had determined that the suspect in custody was not that Jim Holmes, Mr. Ross made that clear both on air and on our abcnews.com website.”

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg: "I don't understand why the police officers across this country don't stand up collectively and say we're going to go on strike."

Apparently someone spoke to Bloomberg about the illegality of police going on strike and the silliness of a mayor calling for them to go on strike, so he later said: "I didn't mean literally go on strike. In fact, in New York, they can't go on strike. There's a law against it."

President Obama: "Mr. Romney wants to get rid of funding for Planned Parenthood. I think that's a bad idea. I've got two daughters. I want them to control their own health care choices." Concern for Obama granddaughters? No so much.

DCCC field director Brynne Craig: "Pennsylvania's new `voter I.D.' law could literally decide the fate of President Obama's re-election. It's not the first time that Republicans have tried to suppress the vote - but in an election this close, it could be the tipping point that delivers the Presidency to Mitt Romney."

Nancy Pelosi, in a fund-raising email: “In 2004, an Illinois State Senator named Barack Obama stepped onto the stage at the Democratic National Convention and gave a speech that spoke to the heart of what it means to be an American. In 2008, his words inspired a nation to choose a new path forward. In 2012, you could be there.” And what’s the catchphrase? “If you contribute $3 or more today, you will be automatically entered to win...”

Representative Maxine Waters: “We have seen politicians at present attacking the Muslim faith...across the country, these people exploit fear and try to convince state legislatures that the state adoption of sharia tenets is a...strategy to transform the United States into an Islamic country. The scare tactics are working. In at least 13 states, lawmakers are now considering adoption of legislation forbidding sharia...Newt Gingrich has called for federal law that says sharia law cannot be recognized by any court in the United States....this is contrary to American values and actually threatens national security.”

Joe Biden to a group of firefighters: "Part of the problem is, I don't think he [Mitt Romney] just gets you, I don't think he really understands. I mean this sincerely-I don't think he understands what you're all about, what makes you tick."

President Obama: "I want to thank someone who put so much work into this event, Terry Bean. Give Terry a big round of applause." Terry Bean is, according to the New York Post, a "gay-porn kingpin."

Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter: "Apart from the flagrant hypocrisy, these attack ads make you wonder - does he [Romney] even understand how our economy works?"

President Obama: "So if anyone tries to tell you that our greatness has passed, that America is in decline, you tell them this: Just like the 20th century, the 21st is going to be another great American Century," Obama said. "For we are Americans, blessed with the greatest form of government ever devised by man, a democracy dedicated to freedom and committed to the ideals that still light the world. We will never apologize for our way of life; we will never waver in its defense." Link is to Obama’s Top Ten apologies.

Christopher L. Broach, a Democratic inspector of elections in the tiny borough of Colwyn on asking for ID from voters: "To ask me to enforce something that violates civil rights is ludicrous and absolutely something I am not willing to do."

Democrat Jean Yetter, 65, of East Stroudsburg:"If I get turned away from the polling place. I will never vote again." Okay, deal.

MSNBC's Toure: “I think comes down to, `Let's make sure law abiding white people have access to guns and make sure that black criminals are not.’ "

Cher tweet: If u dont know my politics,U do now! I must fight against these T-Baggies ! Michele Bachman & Sarah these r the best they got ! Bring it !

Cher tweet: U R LUV'D & WELCOME! Mitts A Spineless Racist ! 2Words "British Olympics" @Suzannehaley: I GOP Pls don't make fun of me,showing my luv 4 u !

Cher tweet: I hav been alive 4. 12 Pres.Not ONE WAS CALLED TAR BABY COMMUNIST SOCIALIST FASCIST MUSLIM AFRICAN NOT ANGLO SAXON Muslim bros.hood fk em

Actor Jason Alexander: “These people [TEA party types] believe that the US government is eventually going to go street by street and enslave our citizens. Now as long as that is only happening to liberals, homosexuals and democrats - no problem. But if they try it with anyone else - it's going to be arms-ageddon and these committed, God-fearing, brave souls will then use their military-esque arsenal to show the forces of our corrupt government whats-what. ”

Actress Roseanna, demonstrating liberal tolerance: "Anyone who eats s___ Fil-A deserves to get the cancer that is sure to come from eating antibiotic filled tortured chickens...” She has since backed off on this remark with “I shouldn't have used the word deserves in my tweet and I apologize."

Filmmaker Michael Moore about gun control: "I refuse to live in a country like this, [but] I'm not leaving."

Michael Moore tweet: 44 million functional illiterates in the USA! It's easy to manipulate ppl w/ fear if u can keep them stupid thru "schools", media, religion.

CNN’s Randi Kaye, Anchor: “Sarah Palin is apparently hungry for chicken and controversy. She posted this on Twitter and Facebook: ‘Stopped by Chick-fil-A in the Woodlands to support a great business.’ ” Sounds pretty fair, right? Except, this segment was introduced with Pink’s Stupid Girls.

CBS’s Bob Schieffer to Deborah Wasserman-Schultz: “You know, I'm going to ask you about this new edition of Newsweek. They have on the cover Mitt Romney and it says The Wimp Factor. Now this is reminiscent of a sort of an infamous Newsweek cover back when the first George Bush was running for, running and it said -- they put out a cover that said Fighting the `Wimp Factor.' Is Mitt Romney a wimp?”

Washington Post political reporter Chris Cillizza: "Someone should have told Mitt Romney that they still speak English in England."

Cillizza also awarded Romney the "Worst Week In Washington" for laying out security concerns to NBC before the London Olympics -- concerns the networks themselves reported beforehand.

NY Times columnist Paul Krugman: “But lies about what I've done or said aren't going to be published on my blog - and I'm going to ban not only specific comments with those lies, but commenters who routinely spew them.”

Washington Post’s Nia-Malika Henderson: “I think in some ways, the way race might play a role, and I think you [co-panelist Kathleen Parker] are right: people who don't like Barack Obama because he's black or because he's "the other", they're not going to support him. And I think if Super PACs, if Fox News, if they sort of hint at that sort of language, I think it's going to turn independents off from Republicans. I think that's the danger that Republicans and people from the far-right playing [the race card]—“

PBS’s Bill Moyers: “The killer in Colorado waited only for an opportunity, and there you have it - the arsenal of democracy transformed into the arsenal of death and the NRA - the NRA is the enabler of death - paranoid, delusional, and as venomous as a scorpion. With the weak-kneed acquiescence of our politicians, the National Rifle Association has turned the Second Amendment of the Constitution into a cruel hoax, a cruel and deadly hoax.”

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell: “Without getting into the argument as to whether he is taking the President out of context over the build it business, he is still using the term "foreign" and I'm telling you, this is happening every day, it is a dog whistle [racist comment].”

MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts: “If you like marriage equality and you’re for marriage equality and you go there [to Chicken-fil-A] that day [August 1^st], you’re a chicken-eating Judas.”

The Washington Post reporter Philip Rucker first quotes a Guardian story: [headline] "Mitt Romney's Olympics blunder stuns No. 10 and hands gift to Obama" [text] "Mitt Romney is perhaps the only politician who could start a trip that was supposed to be a charm offensive by being utterly devoid of charm and mildly offensive." He also points out that, the headline on the inside page was "Britons chafe at Romney Olympics remark."

Current TV’s Bill Press regarding Colorado: "I think the NRA has blood on its hands and they should be called murder incorporated."

Howard Fineman on MSNBC: “...Mitt Romney...is playing to- and has from the beginning of the campaign- played to the kind of nativist base of the Tea Party. And by nativist, I mean people who are, in essence, afraid of the world.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America. Work must be found for able-bodied but destitute workers. The Federal Government must and shall quit this business of relief.”

June 8^th: “The truth of the matter is that, as I said, we created 4.3 million jobs over the last 27 months, over 800,000 just this year alone. The private sector is doing fine.”

July 13^th: “If you've got a business - you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

July 24^th: “Just like we've tried their plan, we tried our plan - and it worked.”

At the National Urban League, in New Orleans, the president was back on teleprompter again.

Bristol Palin is apparently going to be on Dancing with the Stars. I wonder how liberals might respond to this news?

Aaron Michael Kline tweet: Bristol Palin on DWTS All Stars? Maybe she'll suffer a horrible injury. That'll be the only way she'd be entertaining.

Frank Conniff tweet: Bristol Palin is returning to TV this fall in "Dancing WIth The Homophobic Stars."

Paco tweet: @ Bristol Palin Just another attention whore!!!! Like mother attention whore!!!! ??????????????

Joel Walton tweet: just a huge FYI to anyone who wants to talk to me ever again..if you watch DWTS and support that evil bitch bristol palin, #wearedone.

roger harrell tweet: @WendyWilliams Bristol Palin? Give it up you stupid whore! Surprised by this pathetic choice!

this_isbollocks tweet: Why is Bristol Palin still around? Can't she just fade back into obscurity like the rest of her white trash family?

"Tytalus" at the Daily Kos, in his article titled "Doughy Pantload vents his violent impulses.": “So why is the just penalty death? Is it eye for an eye? Do we not trust the prisons to keep us safe from James Holmes, and if not, why not? Is there some impulse toward revenge? I wonder, if Holmes' own murderous impulses sprang from the same place. And if the desire to execute him posthaste is just another symptom of the disease. Goldberg and Holmes, like two warts on the ass of society.” This was about Jonah Goldberg discussing the idea of capital punishment for James Holmes.

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on the mass murderer in Colorado: "You know, I've seen, I'm a movie buff, like everybody knows, I hope everybody remains a movie buff, to be quite blunt about this, because I love them, the experience of going to a theater. But here is the question. I saw a movie called Minority Report. Tom Cruise was it, sci-fi movie that said you can catch people ahead of time. You can find their projection into the future. I know that's the sci-fi part. Is there any way in real life to figure out a guy like this ahead of time?"

Badi', in a weekly sermon: "Every Muslim must act to save Jerusalem from the usurpers and to [liberate] Palestine from the claws of occupation. This is a personal duty for all Muslims. They must participate in jihad by [donating] money or [sacrificing] their life, in order to save [Palestine] and the men and women imprisoned [in Israeli jails], as well as [Jerusalem], the destination of the Prophet's Night Journey and the first Qibla [direction of prayer] in [Islam], and in order to enable all those who were expelled to return to their homeland, their homes and their property."

Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post: “[The issue is becoming] how big should government be? How much of government -- how much resources should be devoted to government? How much we celebrate and protect individual accomplishment and merit? This is what a campaign should be about. ”

Salon.com’s Gleen Greenwald: “If you support what [Chicago Mayor] Emanuel is doing here, then you should be equally supportive of a Mayor in Texas or a Governor in Idaho who blocks businesses from opening if they are run by those who support same-sex marriage - or who oppose American wars, or who support reproductive rights, or who favor single-payer health care, or which donates to LGBT groups and Planned Parenthood, on the ground that such views are offensive to Christian or conservative residents. You can't cheer when political officials punish the expression of views you dislike and then expect to be taken seriously when you wrap yourself in the banner of free speech in order to protest state punishment of views you like and share. Free speech rights means that government officials are barred from creating lists of approved and disapproved political ideas and then using the power of the state to enforce those preferences.”

Mayor Bloomberg said the idea of blocking Chick-fil-A establishments in the city, "a bad idea and it's not going to happen."

DCCC email: Monday's Wall Street Journal had it right: "Unless fundraising picks up, the Obama campaign may enter the season's final stretch.pulling out of swing states." Romney has outraised President Obama two months running, and now they're polling neck and neck.

Sharyl Attkisson @SharylAttkisson tweet: Expecting some potential #FastandFurious news this coming week, but am travelling. Will try to get to it all.

[Kukis: Insofar as I know, Sharyl is the only mainstream media person who is actually following and investigating this story. Other mainstream types will do 10 or 15 seconds on it when they feel their backs against the wall.]

The Catholic bishops in a unanimous statement: “[Sebelius's healthcare regulations have created a class of Americans] with no conscience protection at all: individuals who, in their daily lives, strive constantly to act in accordance with their faith and moral values. They, too, face a government mandate to aid in providing `services' contrary to those values-whether in their sponsoring of, and payment for, insurance as employers; their payment of insurance premiums as employees; or as insurers themselves-without even the semblance of an exemption."

CBS’s Mark Knoller tweet: Today at the WH, Pres Obama convenes a Cabinet meeting - 18th of his presidency, first one since Jan 31^st.

Veteran Kelly Kjelstrom, was refused service when he tried to buy a soda from a Californian Chevron gas station; the cashier noticed his military identification when he went to pay: "The person told me that they don't like my kind, and I didn't belong in their country."

The Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Carol Aichele: "As we work to ensure that Pennsylvanians have the identification they need to vote this fall, this new card will provide another photo ID option for voters. Everyone who needs ID to vote will be able to get it months before the election."

Reporter: “My question is, is [President Obama] running on the Clinton economy or the Obama economy?”

WH press secretary Jay Carney: “He is running on his record. He is running on a vision for the future and an economic plan that has as one component a fundamental principle that everyone ought to play by the same set of rules and everybody ought to get a fair shot and everyone ought to pay their fair share. Part of paying their fair share is simply suggesting that the highest income Americans; those making over $250,000; the top 2%, including millionaires and billionaires, can afford to, and should, pay income taxes at the marginal rate that was in place in the 1990s when we had one of the strongest economies in American history and when we created 24 million jobs. An economic record that occurred despite all the predictions of a bubble in those years.”

Reporter: “With unemployment over 8%, GDP slowing down now, the worst in a year, you'd rather talk about those years than.”

Carney: “We're not talking. We're talking about an economic policy. His plan, which we talk about all the time, which involves a balanced approach, including the expiration of the high-end Bush tax cuts. And as a rebuttal to the assertions from Republicans that this is terrible economic policy, he points to the facts, which are that, are that under President Clinton, marginal rates at that level were in place when we saw this substantial economic growth and job creation. But, lets be clear. I saw recently it suggested by a leading republican that the next President, whether it is President Obama in his second term or his opponent in his first, that his policies should be judged after six or nine months after they come into office, and after that period its a fair grace after which you can judge whether those policies are having an impact.”

Paul Krugman: “Well, I mean, it's a game of chicken, and I actually think that if Obama's reelected, I think that there's a quite good chance that for a month or two we actually will go off the cliff - which doesn't do that much harm because it's brief - because I think Obama if he is reelected he has to say, ‘Government by blackmail is not an acceptable way to run this country. So I'm going to call your guys' bluff and let the people who are paying for your campaigns come running and demanding that you compromise with me.’ So I actually, I would put, you know, pretty substantial odds that we will in fact at least temporarily see those rates go up, and then, then it's a different game.

Noel Shepard: “So Krugman is advocating no resolution to this fiscal and economic nightmare before the end of the year so that the President can then pressure Republicans to do what he wants or let the economy suffer. Isn't that government by blackmail?”

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough: “One of the numbers that really jump out at all of us around the table was the question on who was the more negative, who's running the more negative campaign , and almost by a two-to-one margin, the respondents said the obama campaign is running the more negative campaign than the romney campaign.”

David Axelrod: “Partly, joe , that's because the romney campaign and their -- and their friends in the super pac world have just spent tens of millions of dollars specifically on spots accusing obama of running a negative campaign . so i'm not surprised to see those numbers jump a little.”

Scarborough (laughing): “So it's not your negative ads, it's their negative ads accusing you of being negative that has caused -- “

James Carville in a fund-raising email: “I want to tell you that President Obama has a second term in the bag. I want to tell you that the Koch Brothers are giving up their plot to buy the election. But here's where things really stand: We're gonna have to go through hell and high-water to win this damn thing. It's gonna be hard. Every big-oil billionaire and Republican Super PAC is throwing the kitchen sink at President Obama.”

Weasel Zippers comments: “When the DCCC needs more crazy, who do they call? Gollum.”

House Minority Speaker Nancy Pelosi: "I think that [Obama] he will [get the Jewish vote]...You know, as many of the Republicans are using Israel as an excuse, what they really want are tax cuts for the wealthy. So Israel, that can be one reason they put forth."

Interviewer: "That's why some of the Republican Jewish supporters are really active."

Pelosi: "Well, that's how they're being exploited. And they're smart people. They follow these issues. But they have to know the facts. And the fact is that President Obama has been the strongest person in terms of sanctions on Iran, which is important to Israel.”

FoxNews’ Ed Henry: “You flatly said that no one in the White House was involved, can you today say that no one in the White House was involved?”

Jay Carney: “Involved in which particular case are you talking about? The President takes this very seriously, we all take this very seriously, it is again an insult and preposterous to suggest that this White House would leak information for political gain, classified information for political gain, that did not happen and would not happen under this President.”

Chris Matthews: “Let me finish tonight with this. I think all great events have great impacts. This country has never gotten over the Kennedy assassination. I haven't. And for younger Americans, especially them, 9/11 still haunts. Well, this horror in Aurora, Colorado, continues to penetrate our country's feelings. I think its had a stronger impact on this country than all the words thrown back and forth in this presidential election this campaign and this summer. I think people feel for each other in ways that don't come across in the political back and forth. They care about each other in ways that don't get displayed when we talk about red states and blue states. I think we need to hold on to those moments of national unity, like this one, that keep them in our minds and hearts when the debate heatens [sic] up and heightens. We need to remember that we don't despise each other, but we do despise, maybe, the arguments that are thrown up by the other side. I know that sounds odd coming from me. I freely admit that there are people who really get to me, but I also know that if I found them lying in a ditch somewhere, say after say a traffic accident, I'd do everything I could do care for them. I know this. And you know this about yourself. We are all God's children. And that is a fact, one that we need to remind ourselves of. One that comes back to remind us in times of we take a hit, suffering a horror together like we've done ever since the day that Aurora, Colorado, flashed across the headlines and ventured into our hearts. That's Hardball for now. Thanks for being with us.”

Chris Matthews in 2009: “You guys see Live and Let Die, the great Bond film with Yaphet Kotto as the bad guy, Mr. Big? In the end they jam a big CO2 pellet in his face and he blew up. I have to tell you, Rush Limbaugh is looking more and more like Mr. Big, and at some point somebody's going to jam a CO₂ pellet into his head and he's going to explode like a giant blimp. That day may come. Not yet. But we'll be there to watch. I think he's Mr. Big, I think Yaphet Kotto. Are you watching, Rush?”

NBC's Brian Williams: "So here's a Republican official familiar with your campaign selection process, told the folks at Politico you are looking for a, quote, 'incredibly boring white guy' for your vice presidential nominee. Can you confirm or deny?"

Mark Shields, PBS:” Why is it that after Katrina, we say, "We have to do something about the levees?" After 9/11, we agreed we have to do something about security and terrorism. But something like Columbine, something like Aurora, something like Virginia Tech, ‘No, no, we are helpless, we're helpless, pitiable giants. We can't do anything because the NRA is all-powerful.’ ”

Charles Krauthammer: “The reason that we can't do it is not because of a lobby but because of the cowardice of the Democrats. We don't have a debate on gun control in the country. We have it on talk shows, but there's none in Congress. If you have a debate, you have one party on one side and the other on the other. The Democrats will not speak up. A Democrat would not even give his name in Nina's quotation here. The fact is that if you want to blame it on a lobby, you are barking up the wrong tree. A lobby, for instance in the sugar quotas it's a minority that the majority would oppose if they cared or knew about it. Hear, it is not NRA representing a minority. The reason it speaks and everybody listens is because obviously Democrats and Republicans have the idea the majority of Americans agree with them. So it's not a lobby, it's a reflection of public opinion, and that is why there is no debate on.”

Bill Moyers, PBS host: “The killer in Colorado waited only for an opportunity. And there you have it. The arsenal of democracy transformed into the arsenal of death. And the NRA -- the NRA is the enabler of death. Paranoid, delusional, and as venomous as a scorpion.”

Bill O'Reilly: “Moyers has no clue, no clue at all. He apparently believes that federal and state governments can actually control gun crimes. That's so dumb it hurts. Chicago has banned handguns in public. How is that working out, Bill? So far this year... 1,136 shootings. How about your state, Bill? New York? Well, it has a fourth toughest gun law in the country, it sounds good doesn't it? Ready 2011, nearly 4,000 guns were confiscated by New York City cops. Just in the city... 4,000 guns. Yes, those tough gun laws, they're working great, aren't they? ...You're a genius, Bill. PBS is very lucky to have you.”

Harvard economics professor Ken Rogoff to Keynesian Paul Krugman: "By the way, Paul, what would you think of the idea of appointing you Federal Reserve Chairman as a credible signal?"

Paul Krugman: "People have been saying that Ben Bernanke should go around wearing a Hawaiian shirt so that he wouldn't be seen credibly. And the fact of the matter is he actually does have a taste for Hawaiian shirts, but it would be better to appoint me. Sure. That would help drive down the dollar, it would help drive up inflation expectations. The one thing is, as long as somebody else does the actual work of running the place because you don't want me doing that." Krugman believes that the problem with the $800 billion stimulus is that, it wasn’t enough.

A brother of one of the shooting victims: “Here's the thing. We can try to politicize this and make some sort of polarizing debate and make this a tenet of the election. That's not what we're here to do right now. We're here to celebrate the lives of the victims that have been lost. If somebody wants to do harm to somebody, they're gonna find a way to do it, whether it be with a weapon such as a rifle or whether it be with any sort of means. We should actually start to think about why people are doing this, and the reason people are doing this is they want their names out there."

Mitt Romney, on the Olympics: “It's hard to know just how well it will turn out . . . There are a few things that were disconcerting.”

British Reporter: “This time, it's proving to be about more than sport as well, particularly for some American politicians, perhaps their wives, so how do you think the preparations have gone so far?”

Michelle Obamna: “Oh my goodness, you know, the United Kingdom, they've had a phenomenal year, I mean, they've pulled off a major wedding, a diamond jubilee, and now the Olympics. They know what they're doing.”

Democratic State Sen. Louise Lucas, one of President Obama's official "Truth Team" surrogates in Virginia: What I am saying to you is Mitt Romney, he's speaking to a segment of the population, who does not like to see people other than a White man in a White House or any other elected position.

Let's be real clear about it. let's be real clear Mitt Romney is speaking to a group of people out there who don't like folks like Barack Obama in any elected or leadership position. We know what's going on here and some people may be afraid to say it but I am not. I am not afraid to say it.

He's speaking to that fringe out there who do not want to see anybody other than a white person in a leadership position. Senator Miller said it before she died and I agreed with her. They don't want President Barack Obama in office as President and for all the reasons that you and I and alot of other people understand.

Lucas: I absolutely believe it's all about race and for the first time I've convinced my children finally that racism is alive and well.

Lucas: In Virginia how about all across this nation. And especially in Virginia!

Lucas: We need to have this discussion because it has not become addressed appropriately. And we do need to have that discussion. And I know that there are people who are cringing in their seats because they don't want to hear it but it's time that we face the reality that we need to have a national discussion on racial issues.

George Will: “ The speech was that if you build it, you didn't really build it. That kind of statement of the progressive vision, that, in fact, we're all social creatures in society. We're all involved in asserting propositions that no one denies. But it detonated Mitt Romney, who came out and suddenly -- you know, the greatest columnist America ever produced was Murray Kempton. He once said, the difference, the similarity between professional wrestling and American politics is the absence of honest passion. We had honest passion on the part of the president and on the part of Mitt Romney.”

Jonah Goldberg: “ We don't know whether or not he's mentally ill, but odds are he isn't. Indeed, criminologists and psychiatrists will tell you that most mass murderers aren't insane. But the public debate is already caught up in a familiar tautology. What Holmes did was an act of madness, therefore he must be a madman. And if he's a madman, we can't execute him because he's not responsible for his actions. And if he's not responsible, then "society" must be. And we can't execute a man for society's sins...If the death penalty is always wrong, let us have an argument about James Holmes, a man many Americans are aware of, informed about and interested in. Let us hear why the inequities of the criminal justice system require his life be spared. Fight the death-penalty battle on this battlefield. That won't happen. It won't happen in part because nobody on the Sunday talk shows wants to debate the death penalty when the case for it is strong. They like cases that "raise troubling questions about the legitimacy of the death penalty," not cases that affirm the legitimacy of the death penalty.”

Mitt Romney: "I am an unapologetic believer in the greatness of this country. I am not ashamed of American power. I take pride that throughout history our power has brought justice where there was tyranny, peace where there was conflict, and hope where there was affliction and despair. I do not view America as just one more point on the strategic map, one more power to be balanced. I believe our country is the greatest force for good the world has ever known, and that our influence is needed as much now as ever. And I am guided by one overwhelming conviction and passion: This century must be an American Century. If we do not have the strength or vision to lead, then other powers will take our place, pulling history in a very different direction. A just and peaceful world depends on a strong and confident America. I pledge to you that if I become commander-in-chief, the United States of America will fulfill its duty, and its destiny."

Mitt Romney on the Obama foreign policy: "In dealing with other nations, he has given trust where it is not earned, insult where it was not deserved and apology where it was not due."

Rep. Mike Kelly: "It only took 1,100 pages for the government to determine whether you're a qualified borrower. Are you kidding me?"

George Will: “We're told that the president is the brightest president since Madison, the best educated president since John Quincy Adams, and the most articulate president -- politician since Pericles. Why does he spend so much time explaining what he actually meant?”

Dinesh D'Souza, director of "2016 - Obama's America": "Well the idea of the film here is not sort of a `Don't vote for Obama' film. It's really more of a `Who is the real Obama?' film. It's a film that sort of raises the curtain on this mysterious man in the White House, a man who is sort of different than other presidents we've had before."

Dinesh D'Souza: "Obama does get it. He knows what Assad believes. He knows what the Mullahs in Iran stand for. He knows what the Muslim Brotherhood is all about. He is not trying to get X and accidentally getting Y. He wants to get Y! He intends the results he is getting. He works really hard to get those results and he is amazingly successful in achieving his agenda. He may not be successful in achieving our agenda, but he doesn't intend to achieve our agenda."

George Will about crafting a new law to stop theater shootings: “No, conservative has, I think, a tragic view of life, which is that however clever the experts are going to assemble, and we heard a call earlier in the show for bringing in the experts, and how ever meticulously you draft whatever statute you wind up passing, the world is going to remain a broken place and things like this are going to happen. ”

Paula Priesse fb posting: July 24th - 3 things gun control advocates might consider: 1) Crime rates rise sharply in cities passing strict gun control laws. The murder rate in Chicago is off the charts. In DC, the murder rate went up 73% during its handgun ban. 2) As for "assault rifles," in the Columbine & VA Tech shootings no such weapons were used. But both were places where firearm possession was prohibited & the victims defenseless. & 3) On April 22nd, also in Aurora CO, Kiarron Parker shot and killed the pastor's mother outside the New Destiny Church. Parker then tried to enter the church when Antonio Milow killed Parker before any further harm. As an off-duty cop, Milow legally had a gun. If only Milow had been in the theater that night. P

Paula Priesse fb posting: July 29th - Unemployment over 8% for 41 straight months. GDP growth at 1.5%. Trillion dollar plus deficits. Poverty at the highest level in 50 years. Now imagine if a republican president had said, "We tried our plan and it worked." The media would go bonkers! O uttered these exact same words last Monday. But nary a peep from ABC, NBC, CBS & CNN. In 1980, more than 50 million Americans watched network news. That figure today is barely over 20 million. CNN's ratings are the lowest since 1991. This is O's last election. Be nice if it was the last election for the corrupt media as well. P

Fox business guy Charles Payne: “I can’t believe how few Obama bumper stickers I see when I’m in traffic. I remember 4 years ago, every car had ‘Obama’ on it.”

Michelle Malkin to Tamara Holder: "Let me put the pause button on you and let me put a pause button this entire madness. Michael Bloomberg, an elected government official, essentially endorse endorsed anarchy. He called on police officers who are paid and who are employed by the government to protect and to serve, to go on strike."

Rick Lowry on the idea that the TEA party could have any connection to the Colorado massacre (as reported on ABC news): “This is not a major plank of the TEA party ideology—massacres in movie theaters.”

Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy, as an example of what a businessman should never say: "We are very much supportive of the family - the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that. We know that it might not be popular with everyone, but thank the Lord, we live in a country where we can share our values and operate on biblical principles."

U.S. Rep. Bobby Schilling: "I stand with Chick-Fil-A. The smear campaign against their brand, against the right to free speech, and against traditional values is shameful and wrong."

John Nolte: “The problem with CNN, though, isn't CNN or its President. The problem is the news media -- and it's an institutional problem that won't be solved until a new way of thinking emerges that doesn't revolve around the selling of the soul to get Barack Obama reelected while pretending that's not exactly what they're doing.”

Mr. Curmudgeon: “Sexual harassment on the job may lead to a swift termination of employment, but same-sex sexual harassment of society at large is a sacrament of the new-age religion.”

Newsbusted: "The English soccer team, Manchester United, tops the Forbes list of the world's most valuable sports franchises, and the LEAST valuable team?... President Obama's economic advisors!"

Rush: "We are in this mess because a particular ideology has taken us in this direction and delivered us here -- with the assistance of Republicans by not stopping it, by not even trying to stop it in some cases."

Rush: "You have to love the irony. Here is Rahm Emanuel saying that Chick-Fil-A doesn't represent the values of Chicago. What are the values of

Chicago? Chicago leads the country in political corruption. I don't know if the murder rate in any other city is what it is in Chicago these days."

Rush: "The left has always had it in for the suburbs. The left believes that the suburbs is everything that's wrong with America."

Rush: "I've seen drumsticks, and I've seen a penis, and, believe me: I know the difference -- particularly when I'm looking at 'em in an Astro van driving on I-95."

Rush: "Let's turn this around. What if I were to say, 'All of you people that work in nursing homes, you are meaningless, you are worthless. What makes you feel so special?' That's what Obama's doing here to people in the business community. That's what he wants you to think about people who have been successful in business."

Rush: "This isn't about roads and bridges. Obama and the Democrats are engaged in what I would call 'a determined philosophical takedown of the individual,' at the expense of the total empowerment of the state."

Rush: "There is discrimination being practiced by Obama at the highest levels of government against people who succeed."

Rush: "Obama wants to socialize profit and wages. The premise being that it wouldn'ta happened without government. Government owns it all."

Rush: "The founders, John Locke, believed that there could be no real liberty unless there is property that the government cannot take from you. And Obama is trying to erase that. Obama is trying to wipe that off the books."

Rush: "What Obama is saying about business is actually true about government. The government has nothing on its own. The government does nothing on its own. It can't. It has no money. Everything the government does comes from us."

Rush: "An intellectual deals with theories and ideas, but in the real world where your fingernails and hands get dirty, they haven't the slightest idea what to do."

Rush: "Blaming guns for murder is like blaming forks for obesity. Someone misused a gun; therefore no one's allowed to have one. This is what passes for logic among the left."

I'm positive the Founding Fathers would be a million times more horrified by seeing what the left has done to this country.

Thomas Sowell: “The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”

Thomas Sowell: “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

Thomas Sowell: “Elections should be held on April 16th-the day after we pay our income taxes. That is one of the few things that might discourage politicians from being big spenders.”

Thomas Sowell: “You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.”

F.A. Hayek: “Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom.”

Walter E. Williams: “Tariff policy beneficiaries are always visible, but its victims are mostly invisible. Politicians love this. The reason is simple: The beneficiaries know for whom to cast their ballots, and the victims don't know whom to blame for their calamity.”

Frederic Bastiat: “Legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways, hence, there are an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, bonuses, subsidies, incentives, the progressive income tax, free education, the right to employment, the right to profit, the right to wages, the right to relief, the right to the tools of production, interest free credit, etc., etc. And it is the aggregate of all these plans, in respect to what they have in common, legal plunder, that goes under the name of socialism.”

Ronald Reagan: “Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

I keep forgetting to mention Stossel’s shows on Fox, but they have been great, and they are often replayed 3 or 4 times over the weekend. This week’s:

President Obama’s words have been the best ally of conservatives this election cycle.

US-funded Palestinian TV depicts Jews as monsters bayoneting and eating children.

Jon Stewart does a pretty good bit on Brian Ross’s idiotic blame a TEA party member for the mass killing in Colorado.

MSNBC rushes to help Obama and his difficulty with expressing himself. Maybe 10 or more examples?

Liberal Papers Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times Slam Their Mayors for Bullying Chick-fil-A

1) Maybe this insanity about the Chick-fil-A restaurants is to take the spotlight off Obama and his goofy “You didn’t build that” remarks.

2) Back when Treasury Secretary Paulson wanted $800 billion to bail out the banks, I expressed some concerns that this could be the most incredible theft in history. Well, it is now possible that this sort of theft is happening every single year, as politicians and their friends take more and more money “out of the treasury.” If our country fails, who do you think might still be rich?

President Obama's health care law raises taxes by $1 trillion, according to a new report from the Congressional Budget Office.

(as a rule of thumb, 2–2.5% is treading water; anything above that is usually growth; below that is really a loss)

Government spending on means-tested welfare is about $940 billion/year. The federal share is about $695 billion (74%) while state spending is around $250 billion (26%).

Record number of Americans took Social Security Disability payments in July: 8,733,461. This exceeds the combined population of 39 of our 50 states. Once unemployment runs out, people have figured out that disability is even a better deal.

More than 200,000 small businesses vanished between early 2008 and 2010 - a period covering the Great Recession and its immediate aftermath - taking with them in excess of 3 million jobs, according to Census figures which illustrate the depth of the country's economic hole.

GM's stock has plummeted in recent months after stagnant development in overseas markets, hitting a new low this week, falling to $18.80, a 52 percent drop from its January 2011 high of $38.90. It is estimated that they still owe taxpayers $42 billion. The President has been touting this as one of the many successes of his administration.

According to one source, which said that this came from Moody’s Analytics: “The top 10% of wage earners pay over 70% of all federal income taxes. The top 5% are responsible for over 40% of all consumer spending. The top 10% are responsible for 50% of all consumer spending.” I also heard similar figures on FoxNews. However, in verifying this, I came across at least two websites which quoted some of these figures, and then added some figures which could not have been true (they were internally contradictory). However, the original statement does not seem too far out of line. What this means is, if you take $1 out of the hands of someone in the top 10%, then you are, in reality, taking $5 out of the economy.

Will stricter gun control laws increase violent crime, decrease violent crime or have no impact on violent crime?

72% "believe small business owners [are] primarily responsible for success of their business," while only 13% disagree.

The survey also found 51 percent of Americans believe the U.S. does not need stricter gun control laws.

By a 63%-29% margin, those surveyed say Romney's background in business, including his tenure at the private equity firm Bain Capital, would cause him to make good decisions, not bad ones, in dealing with the nation's economic problems over the next four years.

66% believe paltry job growth and slow economic recovery is the result of bad policy.

53% of voters say Obama has taken the wrong actions and has slowed the economy down.

NBC/WSJ released their latest poll on the presidential contest. They "find" that Obama is leading Romney by 6-points, 49%-43%. They use this finding to opine a great deal about the current state of the presidential campaign. What they don't report, however, is that their poll sample is way overweighted for Democrats. Their sample is D+11, 46% Democrat, 35% Republican-a level that hasn’t been seen in the electorate since the post-Watergate GOP meltdown.

ABC News Senior Vice President Kerry Smith today reiterated that the network was taking full responsibility for last week's inaccurate report suggesting a possible link between the Colorado theater shooting and the Tea Party. First step in taking responsibility was a little “oops” tweet by Brian Ross. After getting a lot of response, they have prepared a statement which stated that they were sorry. This is the 4^th or 5^th time people in the high-profile media have blamed the TEA party for violence that the TEA party has had nothing to do with.

After Obama softball questions on CBS earlier in the week, CBS's Charlie Rose pounds Eric Cantor with questions on GOP intolerance of gays, Muslims.

ABC's World News, which had time to champion how First Lady Michelle Obama brought her "Let's Move" campaign to London where she "indulged in some Olympic daydreaming," didn't consider newsworthy to mention the very weak 1.5% quarter growth, which is very bad news for President Obama.

Networks That Hyped 'Fiasco' at the Olympics Now Mock 'Mitt the Twit' for Saying Same Thing

Did you notice how all of the Sunday talk shows had segments on gun control and discussions about gun control, as was found on all networks and cable news stations. Did you notice was pertinent conservative issue was ignored? Capital punishment.

By the way, long before it happened, I told you that Sarah Palin would be spoofed by Tina Fey? How will Mitt Romney and Pam Bondi be attacked? Two ways: as an out of touch and very stupid “Ken and Barbi” on SNL; with strong insinuations of an affair on the other.

If Obamacare remains law, look for it to be tied up in the courts for at least a decade to come. How do you have an unpopular 2000+ page bill with any other sort of outcome?

We have, more or less, a consensus of three; Neil Cavuto just said, “Whoever wins, it won’t be close at all.” Rush has been saying that; and I tend to agree.

We’re not quite there yet, but I said that Iraq and Afghanistan would be failed projects because we have not established missionaries or churches there. Groups in Iraq are now threatening attacks on U.S. soil.

All too often, Americans look at business owners and simply see a desk in some air conditioned office, but that is not where it started. It started with a courageous decision, backed by mountains of market research, and the full realization that, statistically speaking, they are more likely to fail than succeed. Despite this knowledge, the small business owner sweeps the floors, and works until grease, perspiration, and dirt reach her or his elbows; and then works some more.

If it fails, what do these people do? Those gifted with the entrepreneurial spirit find themselves dreaming about the next venture, learning from past mistakes, ready to start again. This is how great things are built.

So, when Barack Obama decided to inform small business owners that they didn't `build that', the insult drove a knife deep into our backs.

It was like whispering in the ear of a great artist looking upon his or her masterpiece, `You didn't paint that.' It was like telling the parents of a responsible, good child, `You didn't raise this child, someone else did it for you.' Yet, the President wonders why we felt utterly insulted. Your leader, the President, just turned up his nose at your life's work .all for political gain.

How did, perhaps, the most iconic conservative President in the last century feel about the subject? Ronald Reagan understood much about entrepreneurs:

“The explorers of the modern era are the entrepreneurs, men with vision, with the courage to take risks and faith enough to brave the unknown. These entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States. They are the prime movers of the technological revolution. In fact, one of the largest personal computer firms in the United States was started by two college students, no older than you, in the garage behind their home.

Some people, even in my own country, look at the riot of experiment that is the free market and see only waste. What of all the entrepreneurs that fail? Well, many do, particularly the successful ones; often several times. And if you ask them the secret of their success, they'll tell you it's all that they learned in their struggles along the way; yes, it's what they learned from failing. Like an athlete in competition or a scholar in pursuit of the truth, experience is the greatest teacher."

Reagan also had words for men like Barack Obama, as he stated later in the speech at Moscow State University in 1988:

Barack Obama has very little experience in the private sector, where the Invisible Hand of economic laws govern success - not the pen of a bureaucrat. In fact, the vast majority of his time was spent living off the successes of small business owners, rather than understanding the hazards of succeeding with a firm grip on his own bootstraps.

Perhaps the reason why Barack Obama feels as if we didn't build our success is because he has not built his own. Ronald Reagan was able to look past the forest of the public sector and see the trees. Barack Obama lives in the land of those who produce nothing, `succeeding' from those who produce everything.

I've asked this question to a number of people and most of them respond as if I were crazy. They tell me that this is America, land of the free, and that there will always be elections. I tell them that we are no longer the land of the free and that if Obama gets re-elected in 2012 that this just may be America's last election.

In the past three years, the Obama administration has been very carefully crafting the nation for a political take over by his Marxist regime and this isn't just my opinion.

Popular radio talk show host (of the Savage Nation on the Talk Radio Network), Michael Savage, is the son of Russian immigrants and is very familiar with Soviet and European history. Savage warned his listeners this week saying, "I have to tell you that if this man, God forbid, is the next president of the United States, we're going to be living in something along the lines of - people say - Europe. I don't believe it's going to be like Europe - I think it will be closer to Chavez's South American dictatorship.

"This is the most corrupt, incompetent, dangerous tyrannical administration in American history. It's not politics as usual. It's not just Democrats versus Republicans. Obama has a long history of being at odds with American values and with America itself and the core principles of this country. They don't want government-sponsored opinions. They only want government-sponsored 'Pravda.' That's exactly what the government-media complex tells you on a daily basis - nothing but the government-media complex party line.

Former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum told a small group of people in an Iowa coffee house that "Barack Obama is not incompetent, ladies and gentleman. He knows exactly what he's doing and why he's doing it. He sees America differently than you see America."

Obama has gone out of his way to divide this country in a way I haven't seen since the Great Depression when Franklin Roosevelt went around to divide his country. That's his hero. What makes America great [in Obama's mind] is that the government takes money from somebody and gives it to somebody else.

"With his control over the Executive and Judicial branches of the government, the stage is set for a complete takeover of the government.

Since taking office, instead of helping the economy, Obama has purposely escalated the economic crisis by plunging the country into unprecedented debt. He has a number of programs that are designed to go into effect in January 2013, just in time for his second term of office. The economic burden and increased taxes on everyone will be enough to cause the final economic collapse of the country.

As soon as that happens, Obama declares Martial Law and assumes dictatorial control of the nation.

The Department of Justice has already been subverting federal laws to strip us of a number of freedoms.

The Supreme Court and many of the other federal courts have been seeded with socialistic liberal judges that will rule in Obama's favor on virtually anything, thus ending constitutional rule and law.

Allowing homosexuals to openly serve along with changing the retirement program is causing many conservative military leaders to resign commissions and leave the military.

Some Pentagon officials are also noting that an increase in the enlistment of radical Muslims into the US military where they get all the training they need on weapons and defense systems.

We have no idea how many of them there are in the armed forces or in what positions they may hold.

Obama has been wielding executive powers this past year as if he were already a dictator. When Congress is not doing his bidding, he simply bypasses them and uses an executive order to accomplish it anyway. This has set the stage for his disbandment of Congress.

He would not be the first world leader to take control of a nation and disband the legislative branch of government.

He has been effectively using the media to anesthetize the public to the dangers he poses. Like a patient being prepped for surgery, people are numb to the changes and won't have a clue what took place until they wake up in recovery and realize that free America has been removed and replaced with a regime that may parallel those of Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Chavez and Castro.

For the sake of our children and grandchildren, I earnestly pray that we are spared from what seems a certain future and that Obama is overwhelmingly defeated in 2012.

This inconsistency is very telling. The forces of "tolerance" and "diversity" are ever more intolerant of anything less than total ideological homogeneity. Earlier this year, the Susan G. Komen Foundation - the group that gave us those pink "awareness raising" ribbons for breast cancer - decided to end its funding of Planned Parenthood on the grounds that, whatever its other charms, Planned Parenthood has nothing to do with curing breast cancer. Within hours, the Komen Foundation's Nancy Brinker had been jumped by her fellow liberals, and was strapped to a chair under a light bulb in the basement with her head clamped between two mammogram plates until she recanted. A few weeks back, Mark Regnerus, a sociology professor who "says he's never voted for a Republican presidential candidate," published a paper in the journal Social Science Research whose findings, alas, did not conform to the party line on gay parenting. Immediately, the party of science set about ending his career, demanding that he be investigated for "scientific misconduct" and calling on mainstream TV and radio networks to ban him from their airwaves.

As an exercise in sheer political muscle, it's impressive. But, if you're a feminist or a gay or any of the other house pets in the Democrat menagerie, you might want to look at Rahm Emanuel's pirouette, and Menino's coziness with Islamic homophobia. These guys are about power, and right now your cause happens to coincide with their political advantage. But political winds shift. Once upon a time, Massachusetts burned witches. Now it grills chicken-sandwich homophobes. One day it'll be something else. Already in Europe, in previously gay-friendly cities like Amsterdam, demographically surging Muslim populations have muted leftie politicians' commitment to gay rights, feminism, and much else. It's easy to cheer on the thugs when they're thuggish in your name. What happens when Emanuel's political needs change?

Americans talk more about liberty than citizens of other Western nations, but, underneath the rhetorical swagger, liberty bleeds. When Mayor Menino and Alderman Moreno openly threaten to deny business licenses because of ideological apostasy, they're declaring their unfitness for public office. It's not about marriage, it's not about gays, it's about a basic understanding that a free society requires a decent respect for a wide range of opinion without penalty by the state. In Menino's Boston, the Freedom Trail is heavy on the Trail, way too light on the Freedom.

They're ever more intolerant of anything less than total ideological homogeneity.

To modify Lord Acton, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, but aldermanic power corrupts all der more manically. Proco "Joe" Moreno is alderman of the First Ward of Chicago, and last week, in a city with an Aurora-sized body count every weekend, his priority was to take the municipal tire-iron to the owners of a chain of fast-food restaurants. "Because of this man's ignorance," said Alderman Moreno, "I will now be denying Chick-fil-A's permit to open a restaurant in the First Ward."

"This man's ignorance"? You mean, of the City of Chicago permit process? Zoning regulations? Health and safety ordinances? No, Alderman Moreno means "this man's ignorance" of the approved position on same-sex marriage. "This man" is Dan Cathy, president of Chick-fil-A, and a few days earlier he had remarked that "we are very much supportive of the family - the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives" - which last part suggests he is as antipathetic to no-fault divorce and other heterosexual assaults on matrimony as he is to more recent novelties such as gay marriage. But no matter. Alderman Moreno does not allege that Chick-fil-A discriminates in its hiring practices or in its customer service. Nor does he argue that business owners should not be entitled to hold opinions: The Muppets, for example, have reacted to Mr. Cathy's observations by announcing that they're severing all ties with Chick-fil-A. Did you know that the Muppet Corporation has a position on gay marriage? Well, they do. But Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef would be permitted to open a business in the First Ward of Chicago because their opinion on gay marriage happens to coincide with Alderman Moreno's. It's his ward, you just live in it. When it comes to lunch options, he's the chicken supremo and don't you forget it.

The city's mayor, Rahm Emanuel, agrees with the alderman: Chick-fil-A does not represent "Chicago values" - which is true if by "Chicago values" you mean machine politics, AIDS-conspiracy-peddling pastors, and industrial-scale black youth homicide rates. But, before he was mayor, Rahm Emanuel was President Obama's chief of staff. Until the president's recent "evolution," the Obama administration held the same position on gay marriage as Chick-fil-A. Would Alderman Moreno have denied Barack Obama the right to open a chicken restaurant in the First Ward? Did Rahm Emanuel quit the Obama administration on principle? Don't be ridiculous. Mayor Emanuel is a former ballet dancer, and when it's politically necessary he can twirl on a dime.

Meanwhile, fellow mayor Tom Menino announced that Chick-fil-A would not be opening in his burg anytime soon. "If they need licenses in the city, it will be very difficult," said His Honor. If you've just wandered in in the middle of the column, this guy Menino isn't the mayor of Soviet Novosibirsk or Kampong Cham under the Khmer Rouge, but of Boston, Massachusetts. Nevertheless, he shares the commissars' view that in order to operate even a modest and politically inconsequential business it is necessary to demonstrate that one is in full ideological compliance with party orthodoxy. "There is no place for discrimination on Boston's Freedom Trail," Mayor Menino thundered in his letter to Mr. Cathy, "and no place for your company alongside it." No, sir. On Boston's Freedom Trail, you're free to march in ideological lockstep with the city authorities - or else. Hard as it is to believe, there was a time when Massachusetts was a beacon of liberty: the shot heard round the world, and all that. Now it fires Bureau of Compliance permit-rejection letters round the world.

Mayor Menino subsequently backed down and claimed the severed rooster's head left in Mr. Cathy's bed was all just a misunderstanding. Yet, when it comes to fighting homophobia on Boston's Freedom Trail, His Honor is highly selective. As the Boston Herald's Michael Graham pointed out, Menino is happy to hand out municipal licenses to groups whose most prominent figures call for gays to be put to death. The mayor couldn't have been more accommodating (including giving them $1.8 million of municipal land) of the new mosque of the Islamic Society of Boston, whose IRS returns listed as one of their seven trustees Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Like President Obama, Imam Qaradawi's position on gays is in a state of "evolution": He can't decide whether to burn them or toss 'em off a cliff. "Some say we should throw them from a high place," he told Al Jazeera. "Some say we should burn them, and so on. There is disagreement. . . . The important thing is to treat this act as a crime." Unlike the deplorable Mr. Cathy, Imam Qaradawi is admirably open-minded: There are so many ways to kill homosexuals, why restrict yourself to just one? In Mayor Menino's Boston, if you take the same view of marriage as President Obama did from 2009 to 2012, he'll run your homophobic ass out of town. But, if you want to toss those godless sodomites off the John Hancock Tower, he'll officiate at your ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Embarrassing: Obama Spokes-hacks Spike Football Over Bin Laden Hit, Beclowning Themselves and the Administration (From Doug Ross). The short and clear timeline from Bush policies and actions to the killing of Bin Laden.

South Carolina Paper Whacks Gov. Nikki Haley Over 14-Year-Old Daughter's Gift-Shop Job

RUSH: Now, a friend of mine sent me some interesting stuff here. It's a good way to understand what happened in Aurora, Colorado, and the anti-gun reaction. It's an interesting timeline of things. Let me run through it fairly quickly here.

The time since the introduction of relatively useful long-barreled weapons is approximately 600 years. Six hundred years the rifle has been around -- 600 years, give or take. The time since the introduction of pistols using more than one bullet: At least 150 years. The time since the enactment of the Second Amendment: 221 years. And that's an important number to remember, because since the effort to blame this on the Tea Party failed, now it's time to go for the Second Amendment.

So it's been 221 years since the enactment of the Second Amendment; 600 years since the introduction of the rifle, a long-barreled weapon; and 150 years of pistols able to use more than one bullet. The time since Tim Burton took a charming, funny, and wholesome 1960s kids' show...? I was thinking about this over the weekend. I remember watching Batman on television, and it was a cartoon show with human characters. Adam West was the guy who played Batman.

And every time Batman punched somebody, the word "POW!" in a comic book bubble came up. Burgess Meredith played the Penguin. I forget who was the Joker. Cesar Romero was the Joker. It was a comedy show. It was a cartoon show. It was a charming, funny, wholesome 1960s kids' show that was on at 7:30 ET. But how long has it been since Hollywood metastasized that show with sick, dystopian, and occasionally anti-American worldviews? Do you know what "dystopian" means?

For those of you in Rio Linda, it's the opposite of utopia. "Utopia" is perfection on earth. "Dystopia" is utter, total failure and chaos. Dark, dank, colorless, finished. It's over. So Batman in the sixties on TV metastasizes to a sick dystopian, hyper-violent Batman movie in 23 years. Twenty-three years since Batman on TV to the first Batman movie. And the birth of the modern Batman series of films with which the killer in Aurora explicitly identified, by his own admission...

But on the television, I'm talking about the television show, popular media. It was a kids' show. It was harmless, family oriented fun. You laughed at that show. Batman in the comics was not so much. It was still a comic book thing. Anyway, in 23 years since the Batman TV show, it's become what this guy explicitly identified with. And then you can bring up Oliver Stone, if you want to. He made a movie called Natural Born Killers. It was a "love story." Woody Harrelson was in it. It was a love story about mass murder.

That took 18 years. (They also kind of dug the Matrix movies.) The time in which the revalence of spectacular, multiple murders for no obvious point other than celebrity has accelerated is approximately the past 20 years. We've had long-barreled rifles for 600 years. We've had multi-bullet pistols over 150 years. We've had the Second Amendment for 221 years. We have had spectacular multiple murders for no obvious point other than celebrity accelerated like crazy in the past 20 years.

My point is, how do you blame the Second Amendment? How do you blame the guns for this? The guns to do this kind of thing have been around for all kinds of time, but you can peg other elements in our culture that have been around a lot less time and have much more influence (if you want to start arguing influence). I didn't bring this up. I'm simply reacting to it like I always do. You want to start blaming the Second Amendment? You want to start blaming guns? Then let's talk about it.

I'm not blaming anybody. I'm reacting. I'm not blaming anybody. The guy who did this is who gets the blame. Look, I'm just not gonna sit here and listen to the Constitution of this country be blamed for this. I'm not gonna let that go. Pure and simple. They start the game; I'm gonna finish the game. I'm Mr. Moneybags in Monopoly, and I'm winning the cash in the middle of the board with the roll of snake eyes.

RUSH: If there's any political lesson to be learned -- and I, frankly, shy away from trying to politicize things like this in Aurora, Colorado -- folks, it's undeniable that our culture is sending messages, a lot of terrible messages to really weak, I don't want to say dumb, but maybe mentally impaired people. Most people are able to handle it, compartmentalize it and deal with it as what it is. It's entertainment. It's over there and it's self-contained and it's not real. Other people aren't able to make those distinctions. Jared Loughner, Gabby Giffords shooting, was one who wasn't able to.

You note that nobody's calling for the banning of violent Hollywood movies or rap music. They're two heavily invested in the Democrat Party. Nobody's gonna call for the banning of comic books. But they will call and use this crisis to call for more gun control even though Colorado, after the Columbine shootings a few years ago, Colorado already has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation. And the truth of the matter is that criminals and lunatics never have any problems breaking the law. They never have any problem findings guns or explosives. The laws only stop other people from being able to defend themselves. Law only stops the law-abiding, by definition.

I remember being in the fashionable salons of Fifth Avenue early on in my broadcast career in New York, when I was essentially being vetted for membership in these salons. These elite types would invite me over for dinner. I would be the circus act, and they'd start in with their traditional beliefs. For some of the smartest people around, by reputation, they'd start railing, for example, on an issue, and one night it was gun control. We're right on Fifth Avenue, Central Park is across the street. I said, "Look, if you can guarantee me that after you take everybody else's guns, people across the street in the park are not gonna have their guns, then maybe we can talk. If you can tell me that your plan will take guns out of the hands of criminals, then I'll listen to you. But if you can't guarantee --" and of course they shut up. There was no way that they could make that claim.

Blaming guns for murder is like blaming forks for obesity. Someone misused a gun; therefore no one's allowed to have one. This is what passes for logic among the left. I think the mayor out there, or the governor, said this guy would have found ways to do what he did in that theater whether he coulda gotten guns or not. A Democrat, local political official, said as much, and he's right.

RUSH: Two Fridays ago, Barack Hussein Obama was in Roanoke, Virginia. I want you to grab audio sound bite number 17. This is hilarious, by the way, folks, what's coming up here. You've heard Obama, it's what's coming up after Obama. I just want to repeat this, Barack Obama, Roanoke, Virginia, on July 13th, explaining to people that if they started a business, that they really didn't, that everybody else did it for 'em.

OBAMA: You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think, well, it must be 'cause I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something. There are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, that -- you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

RUSH: Right, right, right. That created all kinds of problems for the president, and it led to a number of defenders. But you heard the attitude. He says that with -- frankly, he's just being mean. The guy has an animus against people who are self-reliant. And he's hell-bent on telling them that they didn't do anything on their own. And what he means is that everybody who's successful ended up stealing the labor of other people, or actually stealing their money or tricked them out of their money, or cheated them in business, or what have you. He doesn't believe in it. He believes the state ought to pick winners and losers.

So then the defenders came along, and said, "Well, you're taking him out of context. He was really talking about the roads and bridges, and not businesses, when he said business owners didn't build that, you didn't do that." This roads and bridges garbage is also indicative of who these people are. Roads and bridges, infrastructure, roads and bridges. There's a road in front of everything. If having a road in front of a business meant that it was successful, there would be nothing but successful businesses. And if all you had to do to have a successful business is have a bridge nearby, then there'd never be a business that was a failure.

Well, the hits kept on coming and people kept pounding. And it took its toll. So last Friday in Jacksonville Obama was interviewed by WCTV Eyeball News correspondent Andy Alcock, and Andy Alcock of eyewitnesses in Florida said, "I want to talk to you about comments you make in Virginia the other day that caused a little bit of a stir, and I want to quote you exactly. Part of what you said, 'If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.' On Tuesday, Governor Romney responded and said, 'To say something like that is not only foolishness, it's insulting to every entrepreneur and every innovator.' What is your response, Mr. President?"

OBAMA: Well, the problem is you left out the sentence that I made before. So what I said was, uh, together we build roads and we build bridges. And so if you've got a business, you didn't build that, meaning the roads and the bridges, not your business. And anybody who actually watched the tape knows that's what I was referring to. That's a point I've made millions of times and that's a point Mr. Romney has made as well. So this is just a bogus issue.

RUSH: Right. Roads and bridges. The fact is, they did build the roads and bridges. It was their taxes who built the roads and bridges. He doesn't have terra firma on which to stand. But, anyway, this has caused, ladies and gentlemen, sheer panic in Obamaville. And three days ago in the Washington Post there was a piece by a guy named Dylan Matthews. I'm almost reluctant to mention his name because it's incomprehensible. It is a piece on the Washington Post Wonk Blog entitled, "The Philosophy of 'You Didn't Build That.'" It essentially is a dissertation on the philosophy of Obama's horrible speech on small business. What we have here is an intellectual trying to explain that Obama is so smart, he's so much smarter than we are that we cannot hope to keep up with him. We don't have a chance of truly understanding what he means. He is so above us, we are so beneath him.

"By now you've surely heard about Barack Obama's 'you didn't build that' line. In case you haven't, here's the full quote." He gives the full quote. "The Romney campaign immediately seized on the moment for a campaign ad." But as has been noted, "Obama's speech is murky in terms of what values it expresses. Descriptively, it's clear what Obama means: No one has even built a road on their own, and if they had, it wouldn't be good enough to drive on." Who says that somebody couldn't build a road? I don't want to get sidetracked here.

"But let's suppose you did build a road entirely on your own..." Keep in mind now, this piece is to defend Obama and what he said. "But let's suppose you did build a road entirely on your own, and you charge tolls and you make a lot of money off it. Do you deserve that money? After all, you did all the work yourself. Then again, maybe you only know how to build a road because you had good parents who paid for good schools where you learned about civil engineering. And even if they hadn't, maybe you're only capable of understanding the concepts needed to build a road because you inherited DNA that gave you a brain that can understand those concepts. Maybe you wouldn't even have had gotten into civil engineering unless an aunt had given you a book on it as a present, and if she had chosen to give you a book on rocketry instead you would have pursued that career. Do you still deserve that money?"

"Political philosophers are sharply divided on these questions. Many do not like the idea that people 'deserve' things at all. For one thing, most people think that to deserve something, a person must have done something to deserve it. That implies that there are actions that for which certain people are responsible. Seem obvious? A lot of metaphysicians don't think so. For one thing, that claim presupposes the existence of free will. Some philosophers are what is called 'hard determinists,' who deny that anything that could be called free will exists. Others, called compatibilists or 'soft determinists,' believe that it is both true that free will exists and that every action is determined. They reason that free will exists if people can act according to their own motives without interference. Those motives are determined by factors outside those people, compatibilists argue, but they still have free will."

This is Dylan Matthews attempting to explain what Obama meant. "But if hard or soft determinism is true, how can people be responsible for their actions, and thus deserve things because of them? The philosopher Harry Frankfurt of Princeton tried to explain how this could be so. In the 1969 paper, 'Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,' he argued that there are many cases where we would hold somebody responsible for an action even when the person could not have acted otherwise.

"Suppose you are going to get a burrito for lunch and can either go to Chipotle or Qdoba. Suppose also that I have implanted a chip in your brain such that if you decide to go to Qdoba, chemicals are released into your brain that change your mind and you instead decide to go to Chipotle. Suppose finally that you get up, decide to go to Chipotle, and eat your burrito in peace without my chip ever being activated. You are clearly responsible for going to Chipotle," (interruption) Chip-polt-ay, fine, "but you could not have done otherwise."

(interruption) Chip-polt-lay? Say it with one voice. (interruption) It's spelled c-h-i-p-o-t-l-e. Chip-polt-lay, that's it? You're telling me it's Ship-pole-tay? Well, I'm gonna call it "Chip-pote-il" because I've never heard the word pronounced that way, and it doesn't matter! (interruption) Chip-polt-ay? Okay, I'm gonna read the paragraph again 'cause you have distracted everybody now from the point. This is... (groans) Aw, jeez! This is a piece written by an intellectual (pseudo-intellectual) attempting to explain why Obama was right when he said: "You didn't build that."

"The problem is that you are not morally responsible for going to Chipotle if you were originally planning to go to Qdoba and the chip does fire. And if causal determinism is true, your DNA and brain chemistry are more or less equivalent to that chip. In both cases, something you have no control over is manipulating your brain and making you do things. So it's possible [that the philosopher Harry] Frankfurt is wrong, and we cannot deserve things if free will is false.

"Some political philosophers think desert is possible even if determinism means individual moral responsibility is impossible." Again, I'm reading to you word-for-word from a piece in the Washington Post Wonk Blog attempting to explain what Obama meant when he said, "You didn't build that. You didn't do that on your own." Quote: "Some political philosophers..." You're still trying to figure out why you went to Chipotle and figure out that chip in your brain. You're still trying to figure out, "What the hell is Limbaugh talking about?

"What chip in my brain that didn't fire or did fire? What's that got do with free will and whether or not I wanted a freakin' burrito?" But we're moving on while you're still trying to figure that out. Remember, now, you can't keep up with Obama. You are just too beneath him. "Some political philosophers think desert is possible..." And it's not "dessert" because there's only one S. Do you want to argue with me about this? It doesn't make sense either way, so don't get caught up in that.

"Some political philosophers think desert is possible even if determinism means individual moral responsibility is impossible. John Rawls, in his book A Theory of Justice, endorsed what he called 'institutional desert.' There are certain institutions, he reasons, that a just society must have. People deserve whatever benefits or treatment these just institutions would provide them. But they do not deserve this treatment because of things they have done.

"They deserve them because justice demands institutions that provide this kind of treatment. Most Rawlsians and other 'high liberals' who support an institutional notion of justice, such as my old thesis advisor Tim Scanlon," oh yeah, Old Tim, "lean to the left in real political terms, believing that just institutions would provide considerable economic and social support to citizens. Utilitarians and other consequentialists -- who think that the moral action is about promoting good outcomes like happiness -- usually reject the idea of desert.

"Some, like J.J.C. Smart of Monash University, also believe that determinism is true and precludes moral responsibility, and take this as a reason to believe that we should just maximize good things whether or not that results in people getting the goods they 'deserve.' Others concede that free will could exist but insist that even in that case, what matters is promoting good outcomes, not giving people what they deserve due to their actions.

"Utilitarians are in some way even more left-leaning than Rawlsians, as the theory implies, according to Peter Singer and many others, that residents of rich countries should give almost all their money away to the poor. What's more, it doesn't particularly matter to utilitarians whether people give the money away voluntarily or if the government takes it from them, as utilitarians do not believe that people have inalienable rights, such as a right against excessive taxation.

"NYU's Sam Scheffler, whose view combined elements of 'high liberalism' and consequentialism, has expressed concern that the unpopularity of desert among liberals in political philosophy disconnects the discipline from real political debates about welfare, crime and other issues, where responsibility and desert matter a great deal." All of this, folks (I'm not halfway through), is to defend Obama. Remember the headline to this piece: "The Philosophy of 'You Didn't Build That.'"

"Funnily enough, the main proponents of a robust idea of desert within academic political philosophy are luck egalitarians, who are arguably the most left-wing contingent in real world political terms, seeing as they support eliminating inequalities in wealth due to differences in intelligence. This school, which includes the late G.A. Cohen of Oxford and UC San Diego's Richard Arneson, argues that it is morally imperative to minimize the degree to which people's life outcomes are attributable to luck."

I have to take a break here, folks, but I just want to share this with you because how they defend Obama in the Washington Post. It's pure, utter nonsense. Gobbledygook.

RUSH: All right, now, folks, this thing I just read to you is real. Dylan Matthews, it turns out, is a senior at Harvard (with, apparently, a lot of free time on his hands). What's happened here is that the Washington Post has trotted out a student, still in college, to try to defend Obama on this (impression), "You didn't build that! You didn't make that happen! You didn't do that on your own. And everybody knows it." So here's the way the guy concludes his piece:

"So let's say you built that bridge. Do you deserve the toll money? It all depends on whether you can deserve anything, and on whether or not it even matters, ethically, that you get what you deserve." Do any of us get what we deserve? That's a matter of philosophical ethics. "In short, the answer a lot of philosophers give to 'You didn't build that!' is, 'All right, so what?'" So this guy spends thousands of words telling us that what he's just written doesn't matter.

"In short, the answer a lot of philosophers give to 'You didn't build that!' is, 'All right, so what?' Which is perhaps why," he writes, "in general, politicians don't spend a lot of time listening to philosophers." This is where we are. Obama's so much above us, so much smarter, that we can't hope to keep up. They have to trot this thing out to try to explain it to us and at the end of it say: By the way, the philosophers would say it doesn't matter, 'cause everybody knows what Obama meant.

RUSH: Let me synthesize this for you, because with all this intellectual speak out there, this justification for whether somebody deserves what they have or not is nothing more than misdirection. What's happening right before your eyes -- and what Obama meant to say, what he was saying in Roanoke, Virginia -- is very simple. It can be boiled down in a couple of sentences. What he is doing is socializing private sector profits.

If he can claim that the government owns private sector profit because the profit wouldn't have happened without government, then it strengthens his claim on those profits (and on wages, by the way). It makes his claim stronger. It gives him the right to raise taxes on what is rightfully government's, because government created it. When he's out there telling small-business people, "You didn't make that, you didn't create that, you didn't make that happen," he is not talking about roads and bridges.

In his view, what he's attempting to do is tell as many Americans as he can make believe it that it's true. And believe me, there are a lot more people that don't own businesses than there are people who do. So he's targeting the people that don't own businesses. That's the bigger number. And the more of those people he can convince that the business owner (the boss, the successful person) doesn't deserve it because he couldn'ta done what he did without the government or those other people making it possible by paying taxes for the stupid roads and stupid bridges, then he strengthens his claim on that money with those people.

So when he says, "We need to raise taxes on the rich and on the 1%," these other people are supposed to say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah! Because it's not even yours anyway!" He knows exactly what he's doing. He's saying exactly what he means to say. Now, in this case he didn't mean to say it now. He went off prompter, and he gave us a glimpse of the guy behind the mask. He told us who he really is. That's the big mistake. That's what the left has to cover up.

That's why we got all this gobbledygook on philosophy and what he really meant and how we're not smart enough to keep up with him. But he's making a claim on every dollar of profit in this country by saying that it wasn't possible without somebody else intervening or granting permission or setting the stage for it to happen. And in his world, that entity that does that is government. So he's trying to wipe out this whole notion of hard work, the whole notion of what someone deserves and why.

But because the government is filled with mean Republicans and stuff, they've picked the rich as their friends, and they've chosen the rich to be the winners in these decisions of who gets what! All money is Obama's. All money is government's. What you have is what they have decided you get to end up with. And Obama's argument is that the Republicans have decided that the wrong people get the money. And he and the Democrats are riding to the rescue.

And they're gonna make sure that from now on the rightful owners of that profit, the rightful owners of that business, they get it. Or at least it's gonna be taken away from the people who have it because they don't deserve it. That's what he's saying. There's nothing complicated about it. It's hideous; it's pathetic. But it's precisely what he's doing because it's precisely what he thinks. Because he's never done anything.

He hasn't accomplished diddly-squat in the private sector. He wouldn't know a payroll if he looked at it. He wouldn't have the slightest idea how to meet one. He wouldn't know how to start a business. And yet he thinks he's got all the answers for all this. Because he deals in theory. He doesn't deal in reality. It's what an intellectual does. An intellectual deals with theories and ideas, but in the real world where your fingernails and hands get dirty, they haven't the slightest idea what to do.

But since they're intellectuals, they're smarter than everybody else. And why are they smarter than everybody else? Because they work with words; they work with ideas. They work with communicating in words, primarily written words. The more "letters" a man is of -- the more articles, the more thing he writes and the more brilliantly he writes them -- the more intellectual he is. And, by the way, this takes me back to why intellectuals hate capitalism. It's another one of these columns.

The piece that explains this is about 2,000 words, and I can do it in one sentence: Intellectuals hate capitalism because intellectuals are egomaniacs; they think they're smarter than everybody else. And if capitalism were just, they would be the ones who are rich, because they're the ones who smarter. And because they're the ones who are smarter than everybody else, they're the ones that deserve it! But capitalism hasn't seen fit to reward college professors and academics with billionaire status.

It's pure ego, folks. Nothing more than that. It's not hard to understand. Intellectuals don't like capitalism, and they don't like America, because they resent it. They're the smartest people in the world, and yet capitalism doesn't take care of them -- and that's why it's gotta be changed. That's Obama; that's his professors; that's the people who've mentored him. That's who they are. Hard work doesn't count for squat. It's how smart you are. In fact, in their world the smarter you are, the less hard you have to work. And that ought to be rewarded. It's a neat perversion of so many American traditions and ethics.

RUSH: Before we head back to the phones, I want to go back to Obama and "You didn't do that. You didn't make that happen." 'Cause I think this is extremely important, what Obama is setting up here, what he's saying attempting to socialize private sector profits because it makes his claim on those profits and, in fact, wages stronger. Because what Obama is in effect saying -- and this is why there was so much justified outrage about it. He's saying, you didn't earn it. You don't have any claim on anything you have. You didn't earn it. Others made it possible for you. And you either cheated 'em, or you didn't pay 'em, or you stole from them, or what have you. And he's the agent that's gonna come in and equalize all this and make it fair.

Now, what Obama is saying about business is actually true about government. The government has nothing on its own. The government does nothing on its own. It can't. It has no money. Everything the government does comes from us. Now, they can print it, and they can borrow it, but it's important as a distinction to make that they do not produce it. There is no correlating service or product or good or anything that comes with the printing of or the borrowing of money at the government level. So what he's saying about business, "You didn't earn it," it's the government that doesn't earn it. It's the government that's the big sponge. It's the government that just sits around, clips coupons, doesn't have to do anything all day and gets 30% of everything.

You can look at it in one way as a really successful organized crime operation, complete with money laundering and everything else. In a nutshell, and this is why the left is beside themselves here to try to defend this and to tell us that we're taking Obama out of context. He's saying, you didn't earn it. Every one of you started a business, have business, running a business, you didn't earn it; and, therefore, you have no claim on anything you have. Now, the reason this is huge, the reason that this is really, really big, John Locke, the founders of this country, believed that private property was the bedrock of our liberty. It's a point that I, El Rushbo, have made since the founding of this program in 1988. Private property is as important as the right to free speech.

The founders, John Locke, believed that there could be no real liberty unless there is property that the government cannot take from you. And Obama is trying to erase that. Obama is trying to wipe that off the books. There is a fundamental resentment that the underpinning of all of this, and it is really no more complicated than they are intellectuals, they use words, the written word primarily, to mobilize opinion, shape opinion, they're smarter, they are the elites. And, as such, since they are the self-appointed smartest, the self-appointed elites, they don't like capitalism.

Capitalism should be rewarding the smartest people. They ought to be the wealthiest, simply by virtue of their brains, nothing more, no achievement necessary, no accomplishment, simply their brain power. And since capitalism doesn't work that way, they resent it. They also hate it because capitalism does not need them, as we are seeing. All they do is screw it up.

No Joke: The Regime Replicates the Policy That Created the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

RUSH: Folks, do you remember that the banks wouldn't lend to blacks and Hispanics 'cause they were racist? And then do you remember how Jimmy Carter and then Clinton and then, after that, Clinton came along and they passed something called the Community Reinvestment Act. And you remember what that did? The federal government forced banks to lend money to people who had no prayer of ever paying it back. Janet El Reno, the attorney general for Clinton, even threatened the big banks all over the country with investigations if they didn't do this.

The Reverend Jackson was running around complaining about redlining, that people of color were not being given loans because of the racist policies of the banks. The American dream was defined as everybody should have a house, and the Democrats came along and said it's not fair some people have houses and other people don't. Well, we gotta put the people that don't have houses in houses. Well, how do we do that if they can't afford it? It's simple. We make the banks loan them money at low-interest rates, and then the dirty little secret is they can't pay it back, so it's up to the banks. The banks are gonna eat it. That was the philosophy. The banks owed this because the banks had been screwing people for so long.

Remember all this? You remember then that Wall Street banks -- after doing this under threat of investigation and threat of the use of force under the intimidation of federal government -- then made these loans. And then what they did is they pooled them together. Worthless pieces of paper. Worthless mortgage after worthless mortgage. The banks pooled these things together in consort with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

And they went out and they gave these new pooled mortgages names, "derivatives" and so forth, and then they sold them to unsuspecting people. And they said, "Look at this income stream we've got for you! We have put together 25,000 mortgages here. Yeah, look at the income stream you've got. AAA rating on these loans! AAA rating on these mortgages." The banks were stuck with worthless paper that the government made them issue. The government made them make these loans.

So the banks said, "Okay, how can we get the money back? We gotta get rid of this." They package all the stuff together and they sell them to unsuspecting investors who think they're buying a phenomenal income stream. And all of this is backed up by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And remember, they kept selling these things down the line. As one group of buyers discovered they had been taken, they quietly repackaged what was worthless and sold it again.

And this kept happening until finally there were no suckers left to buy this stuff. And what happened was, people were unable to pay these mortgages. The banks all over this country were left holding the bag. All five of the Wall Street investment houses either went under or had to be bailed out by the federal government. Lehman Brothers went south. (Get the movie Margin Call. It's fabulous.) And then, after it was all over, after that happened? Guess what we were told?

We were told that the banks... This is the subprime mortgage crisis. We were told that the banks had engaged in predatory lending, that they had forced these unsuspecting, unwitting, unqualified, poor people of color to take these loans. I mean, these people were walking along the street. They walked past the front door of the bank. And some evil banker went out there and grabbed 'em and pulled 'em in and intimidated 'em and said, "You are going to buy that house, and you're gonna do it with this mortgage!"

They were forced. This was the story. You remember how all of this led to the financial crisis. It's still the foundation of what's plaguing this country to this day because all of this cost the government a trillion dollars. It destroyed the housing market because it put a bunch of people into it who had no ability to be there. So equity went south, home prices went south, and they're still going south. Home values are still plummeting, and home sales, too.

This subprime mortgage thing was a government creation, brought to us by liberals under the guise of compassion. "It's unfair that some people should have homes and others shouldn't." All of this cost at least a trillion dollars. It put the government in a gigantic hole that we are still in. We still have not dug ourselves out of it! You've heard me tell this story how many times? Then we had the investors jumping in. Interest-only loans! No documentation loans!

We've had people call here telling us that they went to seminars put on by the government on how to get people with no credit rating a AAA credit rating. How to do all of this. Well, you might be saying, "Rush, we know all this. What's the point?" Well, according to William Tucker of the American Spectator, the federal government is about to start the whole process again. "[B]elieve it or not, the federal government is now starting another initiative to force banks to lend to low-credit-rated blacks and Hispanics -- not just anybody but specifically blacks and Hispanics -- and is threatening -- and already imposing -- huge punitive fines if they don't.

"Moreover, this time they're going even further. They're going to take over the credit rating agencies and force them to change their standards to accommodate blacks and Hispanics so that nobody will have any idea who is a bad credit risk and who is not. In so many words, the government is about impose its will on the whole home-lending market and force another round of bad loans so that the banks are going to be looted once again so that even the federal government may not be able to bail them out this time."

RUSH: Snerdley wants to know if he qualifies for this, 'cause he's black. Well, let's find out. "The principle instrument" in the new round of subprime mortgages (I guess that's what we're gonna call this) "is not the Justice Department, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as it was last time, but the brand-new Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, designed by" Elizabeth Warren. Elizabeth Warren is administering this. I think that's part of Dodd-Frank, if I'm not mistaken. Am I right about that?

"As reported in last Sunday's New York Post by Hoover Institution Media Fellow Paul Sperry, the CFPB has just announced that it is adopting a 20-page 'Policy Statement on Discrimination in Lending' issues by the Interagency Task force on Fair Lending in 1994 that kicked off Attorney General Janet Reno's draconic enforcement of the Community Renewal Act." They're apparently readopting that. They're going way back to the Clinton years and are just gonna duplicate this.

"Part of the policy statement reads, 'Applying different lending standards or offering different levels of assistance to applicants who are members of a protected [i.e., minority] class is permissible in some circumstances. Providing different treatment to applicants to address past discrimination would be permissible if done in response to a court order.'" Do you know what they're doing now? You know what this is?

Now they're just doing it. It's open and shut. (We have people that have been discriminated against. They ought to be in houses, but they're not in houses 'cause the banks are racist. And we have this new part of Dodd-Frank that allows us to go ahead and do this so they're just redoing it all over again.) "Just two weeks ago Wells Fargo caved to a Justice Department offensive and paid $175 million for alleged past discriminating against minority borrowers."

RUSH: I don't know if you've seen it or not, but Eric Holder has already been shaking down the banks on this. Folks, they're reinstituting this. They're doing it all over again, this time under the auspices of Dodd-Frank. They're replicating it, under the guise... This time they're being open and up front about it. The first subprime mortgage fiasco, there was never any of this, "We're gonna make sure that we got people that can't pay back the loan." There was none of that.

Now they're being up front and admitting that that's what they're doing. Here are the last two paragraphs of William Tucker's story in the American Spectator: "With the current administration in power, the perception is growing among minorities that everything in the economy can be had for free and that President Obama and his administration are going to provide it for them." That's exactly right. That's what Obama out there saying (impression), "You didn't build that! You didn't make that happen."

Obama is essentially trying to tell minorities (and I think everybody who's in economic straits) that they've been screwed since the founding of this country. This country has been run by the 1% ever since the days of the founding. The current incarnation of the 1% are the Republicans and Mitt Romney and the Wall Street guys. And they got rich unjustly, unfairly, immorally. They didn't pay you for what they took from you. They didn't pay you for the work you did.

That's exactly what Obama's doing. That's his whole campaign. And Tucker says that the perception is growing among minorities that everything's rigged against them (of course, they've always believed that) and that Obama and his administration are going to solve everything for them. "For instance, there is a scam going on around the country right now where con artists call up homeowners and tell them that President Obama has a new program where he is going to pay their electrical bills."

We told you about that. Remember that? This is a scam. It happened during the power outage in the great capital of this country, Washington, DC, and Maryland. And at the time people started calling up and saying, "Obama wants to pay your electric bill! This is gonna make sure that the power company continues to have power, so there won't be any more power outages." Tucker: "All the homeowner has to do is provide his Social Security number and other personal information."

"The con game started in Michigan among minority populations in depressed cities such as Flint and Grand Rapids. It has now spread as far as far as Florida and Mississippi. More than 2,300 people in Michigan were bilked out of $1 million,"

and they were told specifically that Obama was going to pay their electric bills. Not "the government." Obama. And they believed it. And you know full well that there are a number of minorities who thought that that's what Obama's election meant.

Now, as Tucker points out, "What is amazing is that all these people actually believe that President Obama is ready to pay their electrical bills. It is symptomatic of a rising tide of dependency and the growing sense that nobody has to be responsible for anything anymore and we can all live off 'the rich.' If we don't get these people out of office soon, there isn't going to be much left to pick over in the American economy." By design, it's exactly what's happening.

RUSH: I checked the e-mail during the break, and people -- some of them -- don't believe the story about the subprime thing being repeated. Some questions are, "How can they get away with it? Why are they doing it?" The "why" is what's interesting, folks. I want you to listen to me here, because this is why they're doing it. If you've noticed -- I'm sure you have -- there's a massive run on the Treasury now. This regime is spending like crazy. Obama is violating the Constitution with these executive orders granting amnesty, essentially, to a million "children" of Hispanic parents. There's the subprime thing.

There's any number of examples. The potential bailout of the student loan program. There's a massive run on the Treasury, and I think it's all an insurance policy in case they lose. It's just raid the Treasury now for all it has in the future. With health care, put as much claim on as much future federal money as you can. It's the same thing as getting judges throughout the judicial system. You lose elections? Big deal. You've got the courts -- and if Congress writes "bad laws," the judges strike 'em out.

Activist judges just write new laws. So they populate the bureaucracy with career appointees. I shudder to think how big the bureaucracy's gotten, and how many appointees Obama's put in there that are gonna stay after he's gone. You remember when Bush 43 was inaugurated? In another Republican show of good faith, he didn't get rid of the US attorneys like Clinton did. He didn't get rid of any of the career appointees and replace them with his own people. He did this as a means of bringing the country together.

You'll recall we were so ridden with strife over Clinton and Lewinsky, and George W. Bush wanted to be seen as the great unifier. So, yeah, leave the Democrats and the liberals in positions of power in the bureaucracy! We always do this. We're always out trying to show these people we're nice. Really, why do we care whether Rahm Emanuel thinks we're a nice guy? All he's gonna do is take advantage of us! Why do we care whether mayor of Boston thinks we're nice people?

What is this constantly having to demonstrate that anyway? That's Inside the Beltwayitis. That's just years and years and decades of being pummeled by the Democrats and the media: "Racist! Sexist! Bigot! Homophobe!" "No, we're not! No, we're not! Here, look." And we make all these silly concessions. And they laugh at us. And we think we're making 'em like us. It's just an utter waste of energy and an utter waste time. So this subprime thing is a raid on the Treasury, and it's making the banks create a new wave of dependency.

They're simply ordering the banks to make another bunch of loans to people who can't pay 'em back. They're creating a new bunch of dependent people to which the Democrats can point in a few years and say, "We did that for you!" Even if they win this election, folks, they look at government in ways we don't. They know that they're not gonna win every election. They know they're not gonna control the Treasury forever. So they're trying to put in place as many irreversible policies, spending policies, as they can. It's the same thing: Spending as much as possible, as soon as possible, on Obamacare to make it harder to repeal.

RUSH: I just saw a story quickly. I scanned it because I didn't have a chance to print it out, but it's about people literally abandoning public schools. They're just leaving them. Enrollment in public schools nationwide -- I think the number I saw was down 10% and it's increasing. In big cities, which means that's inner city kids. We're not talking whites. Schools are decaying and Obama, the Democrats, are keeping those schools open in fealty to the teachers unions and for a whole bunch of other reasons. I have people ask me, and I've asked myself all the time, too, although I must say I have the answers. So my questions to myself are rhetorical. People say, "I don't understand how African-Americans just keep voting Democrat."

You make a mistake if you try to answer that policy-wise or intellectual-wise. It's not about that. There's no reason for anybody who cherishes success, liberty, and freedom, to be voting for Obama, but a lot of people are going to. I talked about this within the past month, and I hate to say it comes down to something like this, but it is one of many relevant factors, and it boils down to cool, and in a sense marketing. In fact, let me illustrate it this way. I'm reading some of the highbrow intellectuals on some of the so-called (they think) highbrowed blogs. And they're highbrow analyzing the election, and the highbrows have got a theme going on some of these discussions. The theme is this.

Is the decay of the country, is the status of the economy and the worsening of everybody's standard of living, is that enough to get rid of Obama, or is Romney gonna have to do something other than just be Romney? Because there is a comfort in knowing who you've got. People are actually speculating and suggesting that people might, in the midst of all this decay, nevertheless choose to stay with Obama because the other guy might be worse. This is what the highbrows are postulating out there. I think that's a crock. Now, I do think that Romney's gonna have to do more than talk about the economy, and I do think when he talks about the economy he's gonna have to get specific, and it wouldn't be hard.

Mitt, tell us what your economic policies are gonna be and what they're gonna mean. Tell us. All you gotta do is articulate conservatism. Tell us how you're gonna make the economy grow. Tell us. Give us your policy. And that's not hard, folks. Conservatism takes care of that. Free market economic policy, takes care of that. It will happen. It's been proven. But in the midst of this decay, the schools are being abandoned, and that's just one example. There are countless others. People think their country's falling apart. Scares the heck out of 'em. And yet, when you specifically talk about blacks. How can they still vote for Democrats after what the Democrat Party has done.

All the Democrat Party's plans, I mean for 50 years, the race hustlers, the Jacksons, the Sharptons have been complaining and moaning and whining about the same stuff for 50 years. None of it's getting better. And yet they keep voting for the people who have assured them, "We're gonna take care of you. We're the ones that are gonna protect you from the racism and from the discrimination, from all the other stuff, all those horrors that await you out there. We aren't racist, and we don't discriminate, and we're gonna protect you." And yet their lives don't get better. They're relying on these people, not themselves, they're relying on these people to make their lives better. The Democrat Party isn't happening, and yet they keep voting for 'em.

And I don't think it's that they're voting for 'em. I think it rather has to do with what the image of Republicans is, or the image of conservatives is. In some cases it could be said, ah, they're just not cool. Obama's cool. Romney's not cool. He's stale white bread, not cool. Hollywood, that's cool. You don't see any Republicans there. You don't see conservatives where the cool stuff is. Cool stuff happens on Entertainment Tonight or MTV or Comedy Central. You don't see conservatives. You don't see conservatives anywhere where cool is, do you? In fact, it's such that if a conservative is someplace where it's cool the conservative looks like a guy from Mars portrayed as something that really doesn't belong where cool is. That's what I think a lot of this is wrapped up in.

It's no individual's fault. It's not that Romney isn't cool, for example, or it's not that George W. Bush wasn't cool, any of that. It's just the power of pop culture media for decade after decade shaping people's minds. But I think you go nuts if you intellectually try to explain or policy-wise, even, try to explain why people would stick with losers. Why do they stick with people and policies that are harming them. Then you realize, that's not what they think they're doing. They don't think they're voting for people that harm them. They don't think they're voting for people that are responsible for the decay in their neighborhood or in the country. They don't see it that way.

They see it getting bad out there, and these guys trying to stop it, the Democrats trying to make it better, but they really are afraid what the Republicans would do if they got back in power, because of all the lies and distortions that have been told about Republicans that haven't been properly refuted. Hell, hadn't even been attempted to be refuted in many ways. August 1st is our 24th year, and for each of these 24 years, I've had phone calls from African-Americans, "Rush, it's changing. More and more blacks are tired of the Democrat Party. It's changing." And it never does. Twenty-four years. The Democrats still get 92, 93% of the black vote, no matter what. And these people do call and they do offer these testimonials. And yet, the percentage of the vote doesn't change. If it did change by 5%, it'd be huge. If, for example, Obama were to get 88% of the black vote, or 85%, that would be an earthquake, if the others voted for the Republican.

And every year I've been hearing a transformation's taking place, and yet the percentages stay the same. And I've looked at it

intellectually, 50 years, the 24 that I've been doing the program, chronicle the decay, the destruction, the breakup of the black family, and it's all brought about by big government policies. It's all brought about by the Democrat Party, and yet they keep getting the votes. (interruption) The last Republican to get a big percentage of the black vote? You mean presidential candidate? I can't name one. Oh, well, wait a minute, now. You misled me with the question. I thought you meant a majority. Nixon got 30% of the black vote. But that was because Sammy Davis Jr. endorsed him down there in Miami. Well, it was a factor. It was a factor.

Conservative Review
Issue #237	Kukis Digests and Opines on this Week’s News and Views	July 29, 2012