"This is the 'nonpartisan' Washington narrative of the budget talks: Reasonable Obama vs. Dangerously Unhinged Republicans. The establishment is imbibing deeply of the David Plouffe spin that somehow, a reckless, unsupervised Congress spent all the money and Barack Obama was too busy golfing to notice, as if he didn't sign every spending bill. It's as if he didn't aggressively shovel Obamacare and almost a trillion dollars of 'stimulus' on top of the deficit mountain."

"It is becoming a verbal tic -- the tendency on the part of the president to tell wealthy Americans ('people like me' he's always careful to add) that they have made more than enough money and will have to cough up more of it for the government. Speaking for himself on July 11, the president offered that he had 'hundreds of thousands of dollars that I don't need.' ... 

"The president may be perfectly confident that the best use of his excess cash is to pay more taxes. Those who live in the real world may consider the government hopelessly wasteful and inefficient. If the president really wants to get the most bang for his charity buck, he'd be far better advised to donate to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America or the Wounded Warriors Fund than to the IRS."

"Tax increases are lurking just over the horizon. The White House hasn’t made spending concessions just because the president wants to campaign as a deficit cutter next year. It has made concessions because it knows that taxes are already scheduled to go up when the Bush-era tax rates expire at the end of 2012. 

"If Obama gains a second term, Congressional Republicans will have to choose between a deal that lets the top rate go back to 39 percent (a $700 billion tax increase over 10 years) or no deal at all (a $3.8 trillion tax increase). Obviously, this dilemma won’t exist if President Mitt Romney occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But Obama’s re-election is the more likely scenario, meaning that any deal struck this summer comes with a very large asterisk attached: *Includes tax increases to be named later."

"We don't need new taxes. We need new taxpayers, people that are gainfully employed, making money and paying into the tax system. Then we need a government that has the discipline to take that additional revenue and use it to pay down the debt and never grow it again."

"Why does the present administration oppose new anti-illegal-immigration laws in Arizona and Georgia that are designed to enhance existing federal law — but not so-called 'sanctuary city' statutes that in some municipalities deliberately contravene federal immigration law? 

"The old liberal ideal of a racially blind, melting-pot society where the law is applied equally across the board has descended into the new postmodern practice of enforcing many laws only selectively — and based entirely on politics, matters of race, ethnic chauvinism, and national origin. 

"In sum, yesterday’s immigration liberals have become today’s illiberals."

"On the Friday of the July 4th weekend, obviously hoping that few would notice, President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers released a report on the effects of the $800 billion-plus American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the Keynesian stimulus that the president claims saved America from a second Great Depression. 

"The CEA report concluded 'that as of the first quarter of 2011, the ARRA has raised employment relative to what it otherwise would have been by between 2.4 million and 3.6 million.' The Weekly Standard did the math and pointed out that that amounts to 'a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.' Early in the Obama administration, the CEA said that about $92,000 in government spending would create one job for one year. 

"But it's likely the real cost is far higher than the Standard reckoned. ..."

"'Don't any of you guys vote Republican,' Vice President Biden said to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters convention in Las Vegas last week. 'Let me put it this way: Don't come to me if you do. You're on your own, Jack!' 

"Biden's warning, which received virtually no coverage in the press, is part of the Obama re-election campaign's 2012 strategy for organized labor. It's a two-part plan. One, use the president's executive powers to give labor all sorts of advantages that can't be achieved through legislation. And two, when labor leaders complain that they haven't gotten everything they want, tell them they have nowhere else to go."

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ...  

"We, therefore … do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States …

“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

"For the last 235 years, on the Fourth of July, Americans have celebrated the birth of the United States, and the founding ideas that have made it the most powerful, wealthiest and freest nation in the history of civilization. ... 

"There is no rational reason why a small republican experiment in 1776 grew to dominate global culture and society -- except that America is the only nation, past or present, that put trust in the individual rather than in the state and its elite bureaucracy. Such confidence in the average free citizen made America absolutely exceptional -- something we should remember more than ever on this Fourth of July."

"The average person must wonder what the Democrats are thinking. Even the most casual observer knows that U.S. debt projections foretell disaster. With spending at 24 percent of our economy, a modern record, how can Democrats expect to avoid substantial spending cuts? The answer, of course, is that they expect that, when push comes to shove, they can raise the taxes necessary to cover the problem — specifically, that they can tax the people who don’t vote for them to pay for the programs that primarily benefit those who do. Even when the taxes inevitably dip into middle-class pockets, it will be easier to tax than to cut spending. And the rhetoric will still be about taxing the rich and made easier with a little help from the media."