"Real personal income for Americans - excluding government payouts such as Social Security - has fallen by 3.2 percent since President Obama took office in January 2009, according to the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis.

"For comparison, real personal income during the first 15 months in office for President George W. Bush, who inherited a milder recession from his predecessor, dropped 0.4 percent. Income excluding government payouts increased 12.7 percent during Mr. Bush's eight years in office.

"'This is hardly surprising,' said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist and former director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. 'Under President Obama, only federal spending is going up; jobs, business startups, and incomes are all down. It is proof that the government can't spend its way to prosperity.'"

"Obama, Pelosi, and Reid misread the 2006 and 2008 elections and embarked on an agenda of which the public heartily disapproves. The stimulus failed. Government-centric housing policy has failed. Health care became law despite public resistance. The Obama budget projects massive deficits and debt far into the future. Taxes, regulations, and interest rates are all set to rise. Absent a massive change in policy and tone on the part of Congress and the White House, it's hard to see how the Democrats avoid a very, very bad November. Of course the sluggish economy will play a role. But overall, it's the agenda, stupid."

"This administration seems to believe that by restricting retaliatory threats and by downplaying our reliance on nuclear weapons, it is discouraging proliferation.

"But the opposite is true. Since World War II, smaller countries have agreed to forgo the acquisition of deterrent forces — nuclear, biological, and chemical — precisely because they placed their trust in the firmness, power, and reliability of the American deterrent.

"Seeing America retreat, they will rethink. And some will arm. There is no greater spur to hyperproliferation than the furling of the American nuclear umbrella."

"The only new-jobs idea the philosopher kings around Mr. Obama have had is the 'green economy.'  No doubt it will create some jobs. But an idea so dependent on subsidy economics is not going to deliver strong-form employment for the best, brightest or willing and able in the next American generation. The path we're on is toward a flatter, gentler U.S. economy.

"This is not the way forward to the next version of an American economy that once created Microsoft, Intel, MCI, Oracle, Google or even Twitter. The United States needs tremendous economic forces to lift its huge work force. Since 1990, roughly 80 million Americans have been born. They can't all be organic farmers or write scripts for '30 Rock.'

"Many upscale American parents somehow think jobs like their own are part of the nation's natural order. They are not. In Europe, they have already discovered that, and many there have accepted the new small-growth, small-jobs reality. Will we?"

"Nuclear weapons are not evil. Terrifying, yes. But their horrific capabilities prevented a Third World War. It all depends on whose finger is on the button.

"Until yesterday's formal announcement of the administration's new Nuclear Posture Review, nukes also kept us safe from a range of threats short of a doomsday scenario: Our enemies risked going only so far. Nukes didn't prevent all wars -- but wars remained local.

"Yesterday, we threw away a significant part of history's most successful deterrent...

"Idealism has devolved into madness."

"Few combinations are more poisonous than race and politics. That combination has torn whole nations apart and led to the slaughters of millions in countries around the world.

"You might think we would have learned a lesson from that and stayed away from injecting race into political issues. Yet playing the race card has become an increasingly common response to growing public anger at the policies of the Obama administration and the way those policies have been imposed...

"We know — or should know — what lies at the end of the road of racial polarization. A 'race card' is not something to play, because race is a very dangerous political plaything."

"The stimulus package, Obamacare, higher taxes (when the health care plan kicks in and when the George W. Bush cuts for high earners expire), new environmental restrictions -- they're all job-killers and help to explain why a recovering economy isn't producing many new jobs. Unemployment has been at 10 percent, rounded off, for six months now. Even Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says it's not going to decline a lot any time soon.

"We've had such an economy before, in the second half of the 1930s, and Americans didn't much like it."

"It's getting harder to find areas of life the Obama administration doesn't want to place under federal control as a mountain of escalating debt grows to blot out our future.

"Texas will continue to push back against Washington's big government intrusion into individual liberty, and continue to champion the rights of states to enact measures that best protect citizens, employers and communities."

"Many Americans fear that President Obama’s new energy proposal is once again 'all talk and no real action,' this time in an effort to shore up fading support for the Democrats’ job-killing cap-and-trade (a.k.a. cap-and-tax) proposals. Behind the rhetoric lie new drilling bans and leasing delays; soon to follow are burdensome new environmental regulations.  Instead of 'drill, baby, drill,' the more you look into this the more you realize it’s 'stall, baby, stall'...

"I’ve got to call it like I see it: The administration’s sudden interest in offshore drilling is little more than political posturing designed to gain support for job-killing energy legislation soon to come down the pike.  I’m confident that GOP senators will not take the bait."

"After the health-care fight, we can expect the Obama administration to use the same template to pass 'comprehensive immigration reform.' That is a euphemism for permanently ceasing construction of the still-incomplete border fence; institutionalizing a large guest-worker program; treating illegal residents as de facto citizens in terms of receiving earned-income credits, health care, and general entitlements; and providing virtual amnesty for 11 million illegal aliens."