"America is a great nation. It enjoys unprecedented wealth. Its people are among the freest in the world. And, with the world's most powerful armed forces, the United States is largely the master of its own destiny.

"Yet there is an insidious threat to America's continued greatness. It gets scarce attention because its effects are not immediate, but that threat is real. It is the threat of crushing government debt...

"What difference does this make for U.S. security? The more we have to pay to service the rising debt and pay out for entitlements, the less there is for defense.

"Unless we reverse course, this means that - in our children's lifetime - the U.S. military might be unable to protect a sea lane vital to trade and military supply lines. We might be unable to suppress an enemy regime that launches a terrorist attack against us. And absent the great American economic engine, we might lack the resources to stay on the cutting edge of technology, leaving our soldiers vulnerable to being matched or even trumped on the battlefield by better-equipped foes."

"There have been a lot of bad days recently for what’s come to be known as the Mainstream Media – or MSM – but Monday was one of the worst. New circulation figures showed that big city papers had lost as much as a quarter of their circulation in the last six months. And new TV ratings showed that CNN, the cable network that prides itself on news coverage down the middle, finished dead last in prime-time against more partisan rivals like Fox News and MSNBC."

"As promised, Barack Obama is bringing change to America. He's making it more Republican. It's not that more people are actually becoming Republicans or calling themselves Republicans -- the number of voters who formally identify with the party is at its lowest point in years. But we appear to be in the early stages of a shift in which political independents, people who not too long ago were sick of Republicans, are now leaning toward GOP positions on some key issues."

"The promise of the public plan is a mirage. Its political brilliance is to use free-market rhetoric (more 'choice' and 'competition') to expand government power. But why would a plan tied to Medicare control health spending, when Medicare hasn't? From 1970 to 2007, Medicare spending per beneficiary rose 9.2 percent annually compared to the 10.4 percent of private insurers -- and the small difference partly reflects cost shifting. Congress periodically improves Medicare benefits, and there's a limit to how much squeezing reimbursement rates can check costs. Doctors and hospitals already complain that low payments limit services or discourage physicians from taking Medicare patients."

"While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they're engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. There's nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian norms."

"[T]he Obama people aren’t at war with Fox because it’s conservative. They’re angry because Fox has embarrassed them. Its correspondents ask hard questions. Its primetime hosts got Van Jones fired from the White House by exposing him as a 9/11 denier. If Keith Olbermann had done the same thing -- and don’t hold your breath -- David Axelrod might be denouncing MSNBC this week. Politics is seldom as ideological as it seems.

"Which is something the White House press corps ought to keep in mind as it stands by in silence while Fox is bullied: Your politics won’t save you. You’ll be next."

"A friend recently gave me a sense of how much a trillion is with an illustration you can also find on various Internet sites. A million seconds, he said, is 12 days, while a billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds? That's 31,688 years. In other words, a trillion is a whole, whole lot, and that's something you might keep in mind when reading that the U.S. deficit for 2009 is now projected at $1.4 trillion, which is a cool trillion more than the deficit in 2008 and the most government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product - 10 percent - since World War II."

"[The swine flu] is a pandemic in name only. When the WHO declared it one in June, it was 11 weeks into the outbreak and swine flu had killed only 144 people worldwide. Yet the mildest pandemics of the 20th century killed at least a million people worldwide. How could the agency do it? Simple. It redefined 'pandemic' in April, just days before announcing the swine-flu outbreak, so that severity is no longer even a consideration.

"The President's Council therefore simply assumed swine flu would behave as a pandemic. Likewise for the media. And if the WHO proclaimed a Ford a Ferrari, would government commissions and the media simply assume Fords could travel 200 mph?"

"As I explained on my radio show, this spectacle is bigger than I am on several levels. There is a contempt in the news business, including the sportswriter community, for conservatives that reflects the blind hatred espoused by Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson. 'Racism' is too often their sledgehammer. And it is being used to try to keep citizens who don't share the left's agenda from participating in the full array of opportunities this nation otherwise affords each of us. It was on display many years ago in an effort to smear Clarence Thomas with racist stereotypes and keep him off the Supreme Court. More recently, it was employed against patriotic citizens who attended town-hall meetings and tea-party protests.

"These intimidation tactics are working and spreading, and they are a cancer on our society."

"If only the laws of the universe didn't make it impossible to conjure something out of nothing. In a magical world free of such encumbrances, Democrats would be spared the bother of hiding the inevitable costs of Obamacare.  The latest gambit of Democrats in the Senate and perhaps in the House is to take roughly $250 billion out of health-care reform - for Medicare payments to doctors - and spend it in a separate bill. This instantly makes Obamacare appear cheaper, although its impact on the federal budget will be precisely the same. This isn't even competent three-card monte. It's the logic of the spendthrift who has maxed out on his Visa and MasterCard but thinks it's frugal to put a new $6,000 Samsung 65-inch LCD flat-screen TV on his American Express card instead."