"New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg charges that opponents of Imam Rauf's mosque 'should be ashamed of themselves' and are bigots.

"Me, too, Mr. Mayor?

"If you want to join Speaker Pelosi in investigating me, your honor, I'd be glad to oblige. I'm just doing my job as a reporter. I wish more reporters had gone beneath the shouting on both sides. There's another part of the First Amendment in addition to the free exercise of religion: The press is free to investigate the reasons for Imam Rauf's fixation on the 9/11 location of his mosque.

"And why does this location make Hamas glow?"

"Mr. Obama's credibility is crumbling, and for good reason: He and his people are saying things people don't believe. At the start of his summer of recovery road show, the president flatly asserted that last year's massive stimulus package had 'worked.'  Vice President Joe Biden, not to be outdone, promised monthly job gains of up to 500,000 and insisted that the recovery's pace 'continues to increase, not decrease' as stimulus spending was 'moving into its highest gear.' 

"It's slightly surreal. 'Who are you going to believe,' as Groucho Marx once said, 'me or your own eyes?'"

"The 'Summer of Recovery' is looking more and more like the Beltway Chainsaw Massacre for America's workers. As President Obama lolls on Martha’s Vineyard with his well-heeled Chicago pals, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows that 72 percent of people are very worried about joblessness and 67 percent are very concerned about massive government spending. 

"After a nearly $1 trillion in fiscal stimulus and several multi-billion-dollar corporate and union bailouts, unemployment remains stuck near 10 percent nationwide; jobless claims rose again last week. One shudders to think how many more jobs will be on the chopping block after the vacationing president finishes 'recharging his batteries.'"

"Just a few months ago, Obama issued a very public challenge to opponents who seek to dump Obamacare. 'For those Republicans and folks who are on the 'repeal' platform, my attitude is, go for it,' the president told a cheering crowd at a Democratic fundraiser in Florida April 15. 'I'll have that fight. We'll have that argument.' 

"Well, the time to fight, the time to argue, has arrived. But with everything on the line, the president's party is trying to run away." 

"On Thursday the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) announced the federal budget deficit for 2010 will exceed $1.3 trillion. This is already on the heels of a 2009 budget deficit of $1.2 trillion and on top of a national debt of some $13.3 trillion. The word ‘trillion’ seems to have, almost overnight, crept into our standard economic parlance and by the looks of it is here to stay. And with the CBO’s forecast of more than $6 trillion in federal budget deficits accruing over the next nine years from 2010 to 2019, many are logically wondering if the United States has effectively crossed, or is fast approaching, a virtual economic point of no return — an economic Rubicon if you will.

"The comments coming out of Washington have also placed the public in a state of wonderment as to when the deficit spending will be stemmed and at what cost."

"Radical Islam is not, by any means, a majority of Islam. But with its financiers, clerics, propagandists, trainers, leaders, operatives, and sympathizers — according to a conservative estimate, it commands the allegiance of 7 percent of Muslims, i.e., over 80 million souls — it is a very powerful strain within Islam. It has changed the course of nations and affected the lives of millions. It is the reason every airport in the West is an armed camp and every land is on constant alert.

"Ground Zero is the site of the most lethal attack of that worldwide movement, which consists entirely of Muslims, acts in the name of Islam, and is deeply embedded within the Islamic world. These are regrettable facts, but facts they are. And that is why putting up a monument to Islam in this place is not just insensitive but provocative.

"Just as the people of Japan today would not think of planting their flag at Pearl Harbor, despite the fact that no Japanese under the age of 85 has any possible responsibility for that infamy, representatives of contemporary Islam — the overwhelming majority of whose adherents are equally innocent of the infamy committed on 9/11 in their name — should exercise comparable respect for what even Obama calls hallowed ground."

"During Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's July visit to Washington, Barack Obama praised him as 'willing to take risks for peace.'...

"The creation of Israel did not involve the destruction of a Palestinian state, there having been no such state since the Romans arrived. And if the Jewish percentage of the world's population were today what it was when the Romans ruled Palestine, there would be 200 million Jews. After a uniquely hazardous passage through two millennia without a homeland, there are 13 million Jews.

"In the 62 years since this homeland was founded on one-sixth of 1 percent of the land of what is carelessly and inaccurately called "the Arab world," Israelis have never known an hour of real peace. Patronizing American lectures on the reality of risks and the desirableness of peace, which once were merely fatuous, are now obscene."

"Almost every action the president has taken has deepened and lengthened the downturn. The private sector has retreated, frightened by his agenda and paralyzed by the uncertainty, lack of predictability, and outright hostility he has engendered.

"His policies are anti-investment, anti-jobs, and anti-growth. Raising taxes — with a 15 percent hike on certain small business corporations, new taxes to pay for ObamaCare, and an increase on the dividend tax from 15 percent to nearly 40 percent — depresses new investment throughout the economy. Promoting an open-ended cap-and-trade tax dissuades expansion by employers in the energy sector. Bowing to the demands of unions to tilt the table in their favor — with proposals for card check and mandatory arbitration as well as the installation of a labor stooge at the National Labor Relations Board — chills new hiring.

"Hostility toward foreign trade — by delaying agreements with Colombia and South Korea and by threatening punitive taxes on US businesses that compete abroad — stalls opportunities for new jobs at home. The so-called stimulus that focused on government spending and bailing out states and unions has boosted GDP only modestly and temporarily; the latest stimulus reincarnation will likely do no better. All the while, the president’s failure to address the looming deficits, national debt, unfunded entitlement liabilities, ballooning Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae liabilities, and incalculable government pension obligations causes employers and investors to ask whether the dollar will be worth very much in the future, and thus, they hold back. The policies of the president and congressional Democrats are job killers."

"It would be hard to think how Obama could have done a worse job on the Ground Zero mosque controversy. He took a position objectionable to the vast majority of Americans, within 24 hours chickened out, and then sent his press minions forward to assure his base and the Muslim World and its American community (over which he fawns incessantly) that he really does think we must accept a mosque that will produce nothing but pain for his countrymen and a sense of vindication to those who incinerated 3,000 Americans. It’s bad policy, bad politics, and bad execution, with a side order of political cowardice."

"A leader of the Hamas terror group yesterday jumped into the emotional debate on the plan to construct a mosque near Ground Zero -- insisting Muslims 'have to build' it there.

"'We have to build everywhere,' said Mahmoud al-Zahar, a co-founder of Hamas and the organization's chief on the Gaza Strip."