"Is the Romney campaign depending too much on bad economic news to get their guy elected? The argument gaining traction among conservatives is that the Romneyites aren’t making a strong-enough case for his candidacy. They aren’t embracing a vision of the country and its future; they aren’t elevating the discussion; they aren’t supplying enough specifics. ... 

"True, the Romney campaign isn’t generating reams of documents from its various committees the way previous campaigns have. But campaign substance can come in many forms. Romney took a major leap forward on Wednesday with the best speech he’s ever given, before the NAACP.  

"In graceful and clear language before an audience that was hostile at best, Romney connected the need for education reform and stable family life to the disproportionate negative effect the economic troubles have had on the African-American community. It was powerful, effective and substantive."

"Most Americans don't care about whether Attorney General Eric Holder is hiding Fast and Furious documents because they don't understand the story. 

"Until someone can tell us otherwise, there is only one explanation for why President Obama's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives gave thousands of guns to Mexican drug dealers: It put guns in their hands to strengthen liberals' argument for gun control. 

"Precisely because this is such a jaw-dropping accusation -- criminality at the highest level of government to score a political point -- Republicans refuse to make it. 

"But the problem with Republican rectitude in discussing this scandal is that as soon as they start talking about subpoenas and dates and documents, TV channels change across America. They're never going to get answers unless they first explain to the American people why it matters."

"[T]he president wants to increase spending even faster than he wants to increase taxes. President Obama’s proposed tax hike would raise roughly $65 billion in 2013. At the same time, the president proposes to increase spending next year by $202 billion. The tax hike would pay for only 32 percent of the proposed new spending. Or put it another way: Over ten years, the new taxes would cover roughly half of the $1.6 trillion in new subsidies and Medicaid spending under Obamacare. 

"That means that not a penny of Obama’s proposed tax increase would, in fact, go toward reducing the budget deficit, let alone paying down the debt. Rather, every cent of the tax hike would go toward paying for increased federal spending.

"And it is that spending, and the bigger and more intrusive government it represents, that is the real burden on the economy and the American people. President Obama’s tax hike is just a symptom of the big-government disease."

"One would think, given so much practice, that the Obama White House would have been better prepared for last week’s wretched jobs report. 

"Instead, we witnessed the five stages of bad public relations. Delusion: It was a 'step in the right direction.' Dismissiveness: Don’t 'read too much into any one monthly report.' Grudging acceptance: 'It’s still tough out there.' Cliche: 'There are no quick fixes.' Self-pity: 'I suspect that most people ... would acknowledge that I’ve tried real hard.'  

"I suspect that most people ... would prefer an economic strategy that consists of something more than blame shifting and the systematic lowering of expectations."

"The only jobs plan that has any chance of passing the House and Senate before the election is a bill to cancel all tax increases in 2013. With White House support, this would fly through the House and Senate and eliminate one major antigrowth headwind, as even some Keynesian economists and the Congressional Budget Office are telling the President.

"The dilemma for the White House is that calling off next year's tax increase would undercut Mr. Obama's re-election theme of redistributing income. His liberal base has become so obsessed with the politics of envy that it is demanding higher taxes no matter the economic or political costs.

"The question for Senate Democrats is whether they want to jeopardize their personal futures, and their majority, by jumping off the same tax cliff. With the House poised to pass an extension of the tax rates for at least one year, Senate Democrats have to decide if they want to vote before Election Day to wallop an already weak economy with a giant tax increase."

“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, ...”

"Nearly lost in the frenzy of reaction to the Supreme Court’s salvaging of Obamacare last week, was the history-making vote in the U.S. House to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. 

"And that’s too bad, because the man has certainly earned this unique place in history. ... 

"There are a lot of things for which Holder should be held in contempt. Stonewalling Congress is simply the most obvious."

"Randy Barnett, the Georgetown law professor who was an intellectual spark plug for the legal arguments against Obamacare, is optimistic about the future. 'The fact that this decision was apparently political, rather than legal, completely undermines its legitimacy as a precedent,' he tells me. 'Its result can be reversed by the people in November, and its weak-tax-power holding reversed by any future Court without pause.'
 
"I won’t go that far, but I will hazard a guess that Chief Justice Roberts is more likely to see his opinion upholding Obamacare collapse, a legal sandcastle blasted and eroded by the shifting tides, than to see it endure as the solid edifice he hoped he had built."

"If there is a modicum of hope in Chief Justice John Roberts's inglorious one-man opinion Thursday, it is that Americans were reminded again that they cannot count on others to protect their liberty. Certainly judges aren't reliable. They can be turned by the pressure of the media and the whims of vanity. If Americans want to repeal ObamaCare, their only recourse is to demand it at the ballot box in November.  

"The Affordable Care Act is more unpopular now than when it passed, yet it will grind on toward implementation in a second Obama term. The President made that clear in his remarks Thursday, deploying the usual half-truths he used to jam the law through Congress. He continued to claim that no one will lose his current health insurance, though millions are sure to do so as they are dropped from business coverage and tossed into Medicaid or government exchanges. ...   

"It is now undeniable that Mr. Obama has imposed the largest tax increase in history on the middle class. ..."

"Whether ObamaCare was affirmed or overturned by the ladies and men in robes, nothing was going to change one unimpeachable fact: From day one, the Obama health-care legislation was swimming against the tides of history. It was a legislative monolith out of sync with an iPad world. In the era of the smartphone, ObamaCare was rotary-dial health reform. ... 

"The public sector of its nature will always be behind the curve. But does it have to be routinely out of it, as Washington is now? The American people await a national politician or political party whose public policies at least occupy the same universe that the electronic tablet represents -- real value that can be altered and upgraded to admit new realities.

"Over time, a health-care dinosaur like ObamaCare was likely to implode under its own weight. It was inevitable that some future Congress would be forced to allow the delivery of medicine to join the rest of us in the 21st century. With or without the Supreme Court's thoughts Thursday on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, that day lies in the future."