July 3, 2009
By Mike Brunker

EDINBURGH, Ind.—
The return of the Elkhart-based Indiana National Guard’s 1538th Transportation Company from Iraq this week was a joyous occasion. About 400 friends and family members lustily cheered and applauded the unit’s 182 citizen-soldiers as they marched in formation into a hangar at Stout Field in Indianapolis.
The gathering might have been [...]

In appreciation of our country’s founders and its greatest living historian.
July 3, 2009
By Peggy Noonan
Monday, July 1, was heavy and hot, and a full-scale summer storm passed through the city late in the morning. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania rose to speak. He knew he was endangering the respect in which he was broadly held, his [...]

Zero money down, not subprime loans, led to the mortgage meltdown.
July 3, 2009
By STAN LIEBOWITZ
What is really behind the mushrooming rate of mortgage foreclosures since 2007? The evidence from a huge national database containing millions of individual loans strongly suggests that the single most important factor is whether the homeowner has negative equity in a [...]

The professional penalty for offering a contrary view to elites like Al Gore is a smear campaign.
July 3, 2009
By Kimberly A. Strassel
Wherever Jim Hansen is right now — whatever speech the “censored” NASA scientist is giving — perhaps he’ll find time to mention the plight of Alan Carlin. Though don’t count on it.
Mr. Hansen, as [...]

The ’stimulus’ promised a jobless peak of 8%; it’s now 9.5%.
July 6, 2009
About the best we can say about yesterday’s June jobs report is that employment is usually a lagging economic indicator. At least we hope it is, because the loss of 467,000 jobs for the month is one more sign that the economy still [...]

Orszag nails it: The ‘largest corporate welfare program’ ever.
July 3, 2009
President Obama is calling the climate bill that the House passed last week an “extraordinary” achievement, and so it is. The 1,200-page wonder manages the supreme feat of being both hugely expensive while doing almost nothing to reduce carbon emissions.
The Washington press corps is playing [...]

The Founding Fathers agreed that the First Amendment protected ’symbolic expression.’
July 3, 2009
By EUGENE VOLOKH
Congress is once again considering a constitutional amendment to ban the desecration of the American flag. The proposal, introduced this spring in the Senate by David Vitter (R., La.), and cosponsored by 20 other Republicans and Democrat Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, [...]

July Fourth is much more than just an American holiday.
July 3, 2009
By WILLIAM J. BENNETT and JOHN CRIBB
‘I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” This statement from Abraham Lincoln in Philadelphia in 1861 was no staff-manufactured line. It was an expression from [...]

July 03, 2009

 
by Burt Prelutsky

On more than one occasion, I have asked myself how it is that in a country where twice as many people call themselves conservatives, liberals are able to control the media, the schools, the courts and are able to put a radical leftist like Barack Obama in the White House. I [...]

July 3, 2009
By Micheal Gerson
WASHINGTON — It may seem strange to Americans, so close to our independence celebration, that Iraqis should break out the fireworks when our troops withdraw. We are not accustomed to being cast in the British role. In Iraq, nearly every achievement seems colored by ambiguity. But we are seeing achievement nonetheless.
The [...]