On Reforming U.S. Healthcare:

“Brain surgery is the most methodical, no-nonsense enterprise anyone ever saw. What's the matter with politicians who propose to slice up, without X-rays or MRI, the best health care system in the world? No brains? Or too many for their own good?”

— Bill Murchison, Author and Nationally Syndicated Dallas Morning News Senior Columnist

“Weren't we promised some methodical and deliberate governance from President Barack Obama? Where is it?

“The president claims that we must pass a government-run health insurance program — possibly the most wide-ranging and intricate government undertaking in decades — yesterday or a ‘ticking time bomb’ will explode.

“If all this terrifying talk sounds familiar, it might be because the president applies the same fear-infused vocabulary to nearly all his hard-to-defend policy positions. You'll remember the stimulus plan had to be passed without a second's delay or we would see 8.7 percent unemployment. We're almost at 10.”

— David Harsanyi, Syndicated Denver Post Columnist

“It's hard to know whether President Obama's health care ‘reform’ is naive, hypocritical or simply dishonest. Probably all three. The president keeps saying it's imperative to control runaway health spending. He's right. The trouble is that what's being promoted as health care ‘reform’ almost certainly won't suppress spending and, quite probably, will do the opposite.”

— Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek and Washington Post Contributing Editor

“Whether it's four-year waiting lines for major surgeries in Canada or four-hour wait times for emergency care in Britain, in practice, government-run health systems by and large fail the very patients they were created to protect. In these systems, access to doctors, surgeries and new lifesaving treatments are severely limited. Innovation is discouraged, and medical technologies are deficient, forcing patients to undergo more invasive and dangerous care. Patient outcomes are worse, and costs keep escalating.”

— Governor Mark Sanford (R-SC) and Dr. Scott W. Atlas, Hoover Institution Senior Fellow and Stanford University Medical Center Professor

The Editors, Investor’s Business Daily, On Waste, Fraud and Abuse and the Stimulus Package:

“A report by Deloitte Touche last week said that about $500 billion of the $787 billion in stimulus will be spent through the ‘traditional (government) procurement network.’ Using past performance as a gauge, Deloitte Touche predicted as much as $50 billion will end up being fraudulently spent — or 10% of the total.

“Similarly, the head of the Recovery Act Accountability and Transparency Board estimates $55 billion in waste, fraud and abuse.”

Ed Feulner, Heritage Foundation President, Regarding Government Ownership and Private Enterprise:

“Government ownership has never worked overseas, and it won’t work here. Washington should get out of the automotive business as swiftly as possible.

“The recent European elections show the rest of the world is edging away from statism. This is no time for America to lurch left so it can keep company with outcasts like Cuba and Venezuela.”

Michael Barone, Principal Co-Author, The Almanac of American Politics and U.S. News & World Report Senior Writer On Battlefield Miranda Warnings:

“It shouldn't come as a complete surprise that, as Stephen Hayes reported in The Weekly Standard, detainees in Afghanistan are now being advised of their Miranda rights by American interrogators — that they have a right to be silent, a right to a lawyer, a right to have that lawyer paid for, etc. This is, after all, a logical extension of Bush administration critics' insistence that such detainees — though unlawful combatants under the Geneva Conventions — must be given every jot and tittle of the rights civilian Americans enjoy on American soil.

“It's nonetheless news, if only because Barack Obama on the campaign trail said that ‘of course’ they would not get Miranda warnings. Now, ‘of course’ seems to have been subordinated to the higher principle of ‘yes, we can.’”

Thomas Sowell, Economist, Author and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Regarding Racial Bias in Supreme Court Nominees:

“Some judicial nominees have had racial bias attributed to them, despite their years of unwavering support of civil rights for all — Judge Robert Bork and Judge Charles Pickering being striking examples. But the current Supreme Court nominee is the first in decades to explicitly introduce racial differences in their own words, along with the claim that their own racial or ethnic background makes them better qualified.

“Attempts to claim that Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s words were isolated remarks — a slip of the tongue ‘taken out of context’ — have now been discredited by further information showing that she has repeatedly expressed the same ideas, in virtually the same words, at other times and in other contexts.”

Cal Thomas, Syndicated Columnist, Regarding ABC News’ Announcement of Programs to Air From Within the White House:

“In doing these programs from inside the White House, ABC has thrown its remaining credibility to the wind and becomes an appendage of their advertisers, the Obama worshippers and the Democratic Party.

“Try to imagine this happening in a Republican administration. You can't, because it would never happen.

“By the way, guess who's the new director of communications for the White House Office of Health Reform. It's former ABC News correspondent Linda Douglass, who left journalism last year to join the Obama campaign.”

Regarding the Political Unrest in Iran:

“The Iranian rebellion, though too soon to call a revolution, is turning out to be that 3 a.m. phone call for Mr. Obama. As a French President shows up the American on moral clarity, Hillary Clinton's point about his inexperience and instincts in a crisis is turning out to be prescient.”

— The Editors, The Wall Street Journal

“And shame also on our pathetic secretary of state, who said that she hoped that ‘the genuine will and desire’ of the people of Iran would be reflected in the outcome. Surely she knows that any such contingency was deliberately forestalled to begin with.”

— Christopher Hitchens, Author, Vanity Fair Columnist

“No one outside the inner precincts of Iran's power structure knows who won that country's presidential election Friday. It's possible that a majority voted to reelect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as he claims. It's also possible, as much of his opposition fervently believes, that the election was stolen. What we can say for certain is that the election was neither free nor fair. When a regime peremptorily chooses which candidates can run; shutters newspapers, Web sites and television bureaus; silences text messaging; and throws critics into prison — such a regime should not expect its pronouncements on election results to garner any respect.”

— The Editors, The Washington Post

“The media’s endlessly incorrect narrative about struggles between ‘moderates’ and ‘hard-liners’ within the Islamic Revolution of 1979 will doubtless continue, because abandoning it now would be admitting the intellectual poverty of three decades of Western reporting. It would have been easier if outsiders had from the outset understood the debate between the regime’s moderates and hard-liners this way: Hard-liners like Ahmadinejad want to continue Iran’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs and boast about ‘wiping Israel off the map.’ By contrast, the moderates want to continue Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs but remain silent, thus more effectively deluding many willing Westerners.”

— John R. Bolton, American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow and Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations