While it was the force of arms (under the shrewd guidance of George Washington that secure the independence we celebrate today, it is the force of ideas preserved in the document declaring that independence that endures, ideas which remain as potent today as they were 235 years ago on a humid summer’s day in Philadelphia, PA.

As we remember those powerful words which served to sever us from a King (and Parliament) who denied his American subjects the rights those inhabiting his sceptered isle had been acquiring piecemeal for centuries, we recall also how hesitant was Mr. Jefferson to write them.  He had little idea then that his words would come to define a nation and inspire men and women suffering under the lash of tyranny around the world for centuries after he was all but dragooned into writing them.

At the time, writes Joseph J. Ellis in his insightful study of the Virginian, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, ”no one . . . regarded the drafting of the Declaration as a major responsibility or honor.  [John] Adams, like [Richard Henry] Lee, would be needed to lead the debate on the floor.  That was considered the crucial arena.”  In that arena, Adams excelled, delivering a three-hour address that exceeded all expectations and moved many of his colleagues.

But, because Adams spoke extemporaneously in an era without recording equipment, his address, powerful at the time has been lost to the ages.  Without his words, Congress may never have ratified Mr. Jefferson’s.  The Virginian even called his Massachusetts colleague “the Colossus of Independence.”

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When a friend questioned why we honored the military on July 4 when the day was about “about US independence and the wonderful aspects of the American experiment,” I replied:

Well, without the military, there’s be no US independence nor any American experiment for that matter. Remember, he was General Washington before he was President Washington. It was his success on the battlefield that made him first in war so he could later become both first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen.

The martial leadership that General Washington showed, both in achieving the victories which followed the crossing depicted above and in managing the defeats his armies faced against a better equipped and trained military than his rag-tag militia not only earned him the acclaim he enjoyed among his compatriots, but also allowed our nation to fulfill the promise that Thomas Jefferson so beautifully articulated in the Declaration of Independence, the promise Mr. Jefferson’s fellows in the Continental Congress ratified 235 years ago today.

I remember this footage like it was yesterday. It is vintage Reagan, vintage 80s, and vintage America.

Happy Birthday USA!

-Bruce (GayPatriot)>

Caught this as I was checking my e-mail:

Maybe they archived the articles; my google searches came up with nothing so gushing as the HuffPo (now an AOL affiliate) piece, “we’ve rounded up a series of FLOTUS fashions that would make Betsy Ross proud.”

Seems like in buying out Mrs. Huffington’s web-page, AOL also signed up to flak for the White House.

In the days leading up to my trip to the Bay Area, I haven’t been able to blog as much as I would like and write as many “essayistic” posts as is my wont because I’ve had a lot on my mind unrelated to politics.  With some many ideas rambling through my head, I thought it would best to take it easy this weekend and watch a silly, “escapist” type movie at home tonight.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, as the case may be), I picked a flick which reminded me why I love Hollywood so much and why I moved here, eager to become part of the biz.  Having just purchased *batteries not included for under $5 while at the Target in Livermore on my way back to LA, I popped my new acquisition into my DVD player.

Sometime in the 1990s, I used to catch pieces of the film on cable. It always moved me, so I finally bought the VHS so I could watch the whole thing.

Well, last night, at first, I wondered why I had loved it so. Neighbors didn’t communicate with one another, an old building, standing alone amidst the wreckage of its former neighbors seemed a symbol of what happens to all of us when we age, isolated, alone, with younger folks waiting for us to collapse, even to accelerate the process.

No one in the building knew how to reach out to one another.  And then the miracle happens, something which brings everyone together, neighbors start talking, one silent man finds his voice, connections are made. (more…)

“Unemployment has never been so high — 9.1 percent,” Paul Wiseman writes, “this long after any recession since World War II. At the same point after the previous three recessions, unemployment averaged just 6.8 percent.”

(H/t Instapundit.)

NB:  Tweaked the title.

In his radio address today, President Obama spoke of reducing the nation’s deficit:

I ran for President because I believed in an America where ordinary folks could get ahead; where if you worked hard, you could have a better life.  That’s been my focus since I came into office, and that has to be our focus now.  It’s one of the reasons why we’re working to reduce our nation’s deficit.  Government has to start living within its means, just like families do.  We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.

(via Jim Hoft.)  This is not the first time he has spoken of living within our means.  He did so on the campaign trail and did some most notably in his budget speech on April 13.  ”We have to live within our means,” he said on that occasion. “We have to reduce our deficit, and we have to get back on a path that will allow us to pay down our debt.”

Please, Mr. President, show us the path.  He did release a budget in February, one with “record $1.6 trillion deficit,” hardly deficit reduction that.  Although he appeared to repudiate that budget with that April speech, he has yet to offer a detailed plan to realize the goals of his rhetoric.

So, Mr. President, put your money where your mouth us.  Show us your plan.  Present a budget which allows us to live within our means.  The Republicans have done so.  And you — and your fellow partisans — have attacked them for it.  Now, show the same guts they have and detail your plan for fiscal responsibility.

Whenever I catch Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod on CNN (far more often than I catch prominent Republican consultants on that “news” network), I find him little more than a bland reciter of the latest Beltway talking points.  He never seems to offer any wise observations of or profound insights into the current state of political play.

Perhaps, because unlike Karl Rove or Donna Brazile (where’d she go anyway?  I miss her insights) when they appear on air to offer political commentary, he’s working for an active campaign and has so chosen to keep his counsel.

All that said, Axelrod did run a pretty impressive presidential campaign in 2008, but then his candidate was pretty much a blank slate — and the mainstream media amazingly uninterested in Barack Obama’s record.  He could thus get away with promising vast new federal programs to appease his party’s liberal base while assuring independent voters he supported a “net spending cut.”

As 2012 approaches, with his candidate no longer a blank slate, with Americans now familiar with Obama’s record in office, will Axelrod be able to craft a winning campaign?

Via Jim Geraghty, I found Ace’s prediction of Obama’s strategy::

Remain as undefined as possible, even though this makes not a lick of sense, given that he finally has a record and a meager set of accomplishments (and a rather more lengthy accounting of failures). Make the GOP opponent, whoever that might turn out to be, the defined one. Define him, and, as Alisky said, freeze him, polarize him. Continue running as the candidate of Hope and Change, despite the fact that after four years, you’d think he’d be able to run as the candidate of Accomplishment and Deed.

For the record, both bloggers were writing about Romney’s strategy and both posts merit your attention, but Ace does consider Obama’s 2008 campaign (when the media let him get away with appearing “as both the most liberal candidate in the race (naturally), and, oddly enough, as the mostconservative candidate in the race”) and the upcoming one where, Ace believes, the Democrat “plans to demagogue the Republicans”.

Not a very clever (or original) strategy.   And one dependent on a compliant media.  With fewer people dependent on the mainstream media for their news than ever before and with most Americans aware of Obama’s record in office, I remain skeptical that this strategy could work.

And with such a campaign, Barack Obama can no longer run as the man who, in 2008, promised to end politics as we know it.  His reelection effort will not be an upbeat affair which plays to our hopes, but a scorched earth strategy which plays to our fears.

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The federal debt, Glenn Reynolds quips, “Increased More Under Geithner Than Under Any Treasury Secretary in U.S. History.” Interesting that given what Democrats still want to remind us about the immediate past president’s failure to hold the line on federal spending (bad a job as he did on that score, he still did a better one than his successor.

And if the debt did increase more under Geithner than any previous Treasury Secretary, that means that it increased more under his watch than it did under the watch of each of Ronald Reagan’s and each of George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretaries.

One of W’s Treasury Secretary’s, Geithner’s immediate predecessor, Henry Paulson, even served longer than Geithner has so far (by about a month).  Indeed, for the better part of Paulson’s tenure, Democrats had a majority in Congress, increasing federal spending at a rate far faster than than had the previous Republican Congresse

All three of Ronald Reagan’s Treasury Secretaries served in that capacity for longer than has Geithner, with the Gipper’s third, Nicholas F. Brady, continuing his service until the end of the George H.W. Bush’s term in office.

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When Michelle Bachmann makes a mistake when talking about American history, it makes national news. And the mainstream media are beside themselves. Meanwhile, many of my liberal friends rush in with Facebook posts to show what a dunce she is.

When, however, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid makes such a mistake, in apparently prepared remarks on the Senate floor no less (as opposed to Bachmann’s slip-up in an unscripted interview), well, then the media pay it no heed, attributing his error, not to ignorance, but to human imperfection.

(They do hold Republicans to higher standards now don’t they?)

Take a gander at the clip below, starting at 0:51.

Reid is claiming that congressional Democrats balanced the budget. Problem is is that the only Congresses to pass balanced budgets in the 1990s were Republicans ones.  Unlike Bachmann, Harry Reid is not just wrong about history, but about history in which he played a part.  He served in Congress in the 1990s when the Republican majority balanced the federal budget.  Mrs. Bachmann wasn’t around in the founding era.

Jim Hoft who alerted me to Reid’s attempt to rewrite history has the details.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee takes the president to task for blaming Republicans for the impasse in negotiations to raise the debt limit:

(Via Jim Geraghty.)

That reminds me, um, where’s the president’s revised budget given his repudiation of the initial plan he offered? And where’s his plan to reform Medicare to prevent its coming insolvency, given the warning of the popular program’s trustees?

Just had to repost this picture from The London Evening Standard:

Brings back fond memories.

Our guest poster returns.

Largely overlooked yesterday in the wake of the president’s latest salvo in the Global War on the MIddle Class was the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision upholding Obamacare’s individual mandate.

That this abhorrent piece of legislation is neither fully understood by anyone, nor welcomed by those with a functioning brain is distressing enough; yesterday’s majority opinion should scare the daylights out of those of us who not only understand the Constitution better than Richard Stengel, but what the Obama administration will now feel empowered to do with it’s newfound green light to regulate just about every damned choice Americans make.

Overstatement, you say? Consider this snippet, excerpted ad Hot Air:

Congress had a rational basis for concluding that, in the aggregate, the practice of self-insuring for the cost of health care substantially affects interstate commerce. Furthermore, Congress had a rational basis for concluding that the minimum coverage provision is essential to the Affordable Care Act’s larger reforms to the national markets in health care delivery and health insurance. Finally, the provision regulates active participation in the health care market, and in any case, the Constitution imposes no categorical bar on regulating inactivity. Thus, the minimum coverage provision is a valid exercise of Congress’s authority under the Commerce Clause, and the decision of the district court is AFFIRMED.

Wait a second. “ [T]he Constitution imposes no categorical bar on regulating inactivity?” Oh. My. God. Unbeknownst to me, the Commerce Clause apparently renders every other word in the Constitution irrelevant, and is the only real clause that has ever mattered. After all, it is contended, the federal government may do anything so long as, in the aggregate, it “affects interstate commerce,” which, as is often pointed out, applies to everything.

Ace sums it up nicely: (more…)